Working on something complex? I'd love to hear about it. Get in touch
UX consultancy · complex & regulated products
NN/g UX Master Certified Research · Design · Management

The UX partner for products that cannot afford to fail.

Nineteen years designing and leading UX inside some of the world's most complex engineering tools. I work alongside teams in EDA, government and healthcare to turn expert-grade complexity into products people trust — including the AI inside them.

Hana Abdelaziz
Credentials 19 years in EDA at Siemens NN/g UX Master Certified Harvard Organizational Leadership

Selected work

Anonymised where confidential · concept-led where exploratory
EDA / Semiconductor Concepts Services
Featured · AI/ML × EDA

Verification management, moved to the web

Questa One Verification IQ — Siemens' AI-powered verification management platform. I led UX from founding the division's first UX group to shipped product: coverage analytics, project dashboards, and ML-assisted regression triage engineers can inspect and overrule.

Interaction model · data visualisation · trust & explainability
In the press: Siemens release · Product page
RoleUX Architect
PlatformWeb · cloud-enabled
AI/MLPredictive analytics
UsersVerification engineers
Rebrand & integration

Questa One — rebranding a verification portfolio

Unifying decades of tools under one brand and one experience, desktop and web, without breaking expert muscle memory.

Product integration · Visual language · Change management
Accessibility & design systems

Making expert engineering tools accessible

A WCAG AA program across desktop, web and mobile products — accessibility encoded in the pattern library and the definition of done.

Audit · Accessible components · Team training · Governance

Concept explorations

Where I'm taking this practice next — self-directed work across a variety of areas I want to consult in.

Dalil app screens
Government · UAE Full case study

Dalil — AI-first government services

One multilingual assistant that answers with official sources and completes transactions across entities — designed against the UAE National AI Strategy 2031.

Service design · Conversational UX · AI trust patterns · Multilingual, Arabic-first
Read the case study →
KSA visa redesign screens
Government · Saudi Arabia Full case study

Removing friction from a national visa journey

An independent UX audit and conceptual redesign of a national visa platform — mobile teardown, journey maps, personas, full heuristic evaluation with severities.

Heuristic evaluation · Journey mapping · Personas · Mobile redesign
Read the case study →
Dopamine Boost marketing site
Consumer & SaaS · Egypt Full case study

Dopamine — a retention engine for MENA gyms

Four surfaces designed end to end — member app, gym partner portal, trainer portal and marketing site — from interviews and competitive analysis through personas, flows and UI.

User research · Personas · User flows · Design system · Bilingual UX
Read the case study →
Vaxera AI card scanning screen
Healthcare · Egypt & Africa Full case study

Vaxera — a digital vaccination passport

AI reads a paper vaccination card and turns decades of handwritten records into a verifiable, bilingual history — designed from survey research through product to business model.

Survey research · AI trust patterns · Multi-audience product · Business model
Read the case study →

Ways to work together

These are the roles organisations usually bring me in for. Have a look for the one that matches where you are — and if none of them quite fits, let's talk it through.

UX consultant

Product UX audit & strategy

You have a product in market and a sense the experience is holding it back, but no shared account of why. We build that account together — heuristic and accessibility review, prioritised by user impact and effort, in language your leadership and your engineers can both act on.

What I do
Expert review · accessibility assessment · prioritised roadmap · executive readout
Right fit when
A launch is underway, adoption has stalled, or a redesign needs an evidence base before budget is committed.
Principal / lead designer

Hands-on design of a complex product

You need senior design capacity on something genuinely hard — expert tools, dense data, regulated workflows, AI features that have to earn trust. I join your team and do the work with them: research with real users, interaction model, prototypes, and validation with the people who'll use it.

What I do
User research · information architecture & interaction model · prototypes · usability testing · AI trust patterns
Right fit when
The problem is specialised enough that generalist design support hasn't quite landed.
Head of design systems

Design system & accessibility programme

Products drift apart, accessibility keeps reappearing as an audit finding, and every team rebuilds the same component. We build the system and the governance around it — owned jointly by design and engineering, with WCAG AA in the definition of done rather than a retrofit.

What I do
Component library · design tokens · accessibility programme · governance model · team training
Right fit when
Multiple products, multiple teams, and a library that either doesn't exist yet or has outgrown its owner.
Fractional Head of UX

Embedded UX leadership

You need UX leadership before you can justify a permanent executive hire — or you need one while you recruit. I step in and run the practice with you: hiring and mentoring, process, stakeholder alignment, and an AI-assisted way of working that keeps going after I leave.

What I do
Practice design · hiring & mentoring · process integration with agile · AI adoption & governance · roadmap
Right fit when
An engineering-led organisation, UX without a clear owner, or a design team that could use a senior voice at the table.
UX trainer & coach

Training & team coaching

Your team has the tools and the titles, and now wants the practice to match. I teach it — grounded in NN/g's research, design and management curricula, and built around your domain rather than delivered as generic slides.

Right fit when
Designers want to work more from research, or design decisions are being made by default rather than on purpose.
What I do
Workshops · curriculum design · 1:1 mentoring · design critique facilitation · portfolio coaching
See the courses →
Not sure which of these you need?

That's a good place to start a conversation. Tell me about the product and where the friction is, and we'll work out together which engagement fits — or whether you need one at all.

Start a conversation

How an engagement runs

1

Frame

We agree what success looks like — for your users and your business — before any design happens.

2

Learn

Research with your real users — including the expert ones it's hard to get time with.

3

Design & test

Concepts, prototypes and validation in short loops, with engineering in the room from the start.

4

Hand over

Patterns, documentation and coaching, so your team carries the quality forward after I leave.

AI, both directions

Designing the experience of AI products — and using AI to make a design practice faster without making it careless.

UX for AI products

Designing AI that experts will actually trust

Explainability, confidence cues, evidence trails and a graceful way to disagree with the machine — the patterns that decide whether a careful professional adopts an AI feature or quietly routes around it.

Increasingly these are also legal obligations. The EU AI Act requires disclosure that a user is interacting with AI, meaningful human oversight of high-risk systems, and explanations a person can actually act on — alongside GDPR's right to an explanation for automated decisions. I prefer to design those obligations into the interface itself, rather than bolting on a disclaimer.

Confidence & uncertainty Source grounding Human approval points Conversational UX Agentic workflows EU AI Act & GDPR
AI in the design practice

Faster process, same rigour

Research synthesis in hours, working prototypes in a day, audit agents watching accessibility and design-system conformance on every build — with the decisions still made by people.

Research synthesis Rapid prototyping Audit agents in CI Data governance Team adoption

Patent pending on coverage-pattern visualisation · published work on VR/AR data analysis and Scrum with UX. The same scepticism I designed for is how I judge AI inside a design team.

Read the full approach →

Courses

Five programmes, from a first exposure at eleven to design leaders running a function. Delivered in-house or online — in English or Arabic.

Ages 13–17

Designing for People

Ten sessions from "apps just exist" to a designed, tested and presented product of their own. Teenagers learn to tell how something works apart from how it looks, build real screens in Figma, interview actual users — and use AI as a first draft they are responsible for judging.

They leave with
A named product · a portfolio-ready case study · working Figma skills · AI judgment they can evidence
Format
10 sessions × 2 hours · in person or online · no prior experience · English or Arabic
See the syllabus →
Students & early career

UX foundations

The full process once, properly — research, synthesis, information architecture, prototyping, usability testing and accessibility — built around a single project that becomes a real case study rather than a set of dribbble shots.

They leave with
One end-to-end case study · a portfolio and narrative that survives an interview · a working critique habit
Format
In-house or online · cohort or university module · project-based · portfolio review
See the syllabus →
Practising designers & engineers

UX for specialised domains

Consumer UX advice breaks down on expert tools. This course covers what replaces it: designing for density, respecting muscle memory, researching with users who are busier and more knowledgeable than you, and accessibility where the standard playbook runs out.

They leave with
Domain research techniques · design critique and teardown analysis · patterns for dense data and visualisation · an accessibility approach that fits professional software
Format
In-house or online · product teams in engineering, healthcare, government, fintech
See the syllabus →
Design & product teams

AI with UX

Both directions in one course: designing AI features people trust — confidence, grounding, human oversight, EU AI Act obligations — and using AI in your own process without letting generated plausibility replace evidence.

They leave with
A pattern library for AI interfaces · a compliance-aware design checklist · an agreed team workflow for AI-assisted research and prototyping
Format
In-house or online workshop series · designers, PMs and engineers together
See the syllabus →
Design leaders & heads of product

Running a UX organisation

The part nobody teaches designers before they are promoted: how to structure a UX function so it produces good work reliably. Design standards and systems, the tool stack, job families and levelling, hiring and career paths, and how UX actually fits into agile delivery without becoming a ticket queue.

They leave with
A design standard · a levelling and job-family draft · a UX-in-agile operating model · a maturity assessment of their own org
Covers
Design standards & systems governance · tool stack & handoff · UX job structure, levelling and hiring · UX in agile and dual-track delivery · measuring UX and reporting up · budgeting and vendor management
Format
In-house or online · leadership cohort or 1:1 coaching
See the syllabus →

Every course runs in-house or online, adapted to the audience's domain, in English or Arabic. Tell me who the learners are and what they should be able to do afterwards, and we'll shape it from there.

Discuss a course

Articles

Written for the people making these decisions — design leaders, product owners and the engineers who live with the result.

Practice · 9 min
Putting AI and agentic tools into a corporate UX practice

Stage by stage: what AI drafts, what the designer keeps — plus the four reasons enterprise adoption stalls and what it takes to make it stick.

Read the article →
In progress
Earning trust from experts who know the domain better than you

What nineteen years in engineering tools taught me about density, muscle memory and earning the right to change an expert's workflow.

Coming soon
In progress
Accessibility in dense professional interfaces

Why the standard WCAG playbook runs out on waveforms, coverage maps and hierarchy trees — and what to do instead.

Coming soon

About

I've sat on both sides of the table — engineering and design — so translating between them comes naturally, and I enjoy the part where that unlocks the conversation.

Roles
Division UX Lead & Senior Engineering Manager — Siemens EDA Founded the division's first UX group 19 years, from C++ engineer to UX leadership
Learning
UX Master Certified — Nielsen Norman Group
Specialties: Research · Interaction Design · Management
Agile with UX — certified
Integrating research and design into dual-track delivery
Organizational Leadership — Harvard Business School BSc Computer Engineering — Cairo University