Making technology
feel like someone
thought of you.

Generative AI photo editing didn't exist on any smartphone. The challenge wasn't just building a feature — it was defining what this category should feel like on a phone. How do you make a complex AI capability feel effortless in a tool people use every day?

Part of the core team that shipped Photo Assist. My focus was on usability research, prompt structuring, and iterating on the interaction model to ensure AI outputs felt controllable and trustworthy. Worked directly with the Seoul tech team to translate model constraints into design decisions.

Also developed a cross-cultural design framework for AI face features — addressing global facial markers and cultural sensitivity — adopted by Samsung Seoul as standard protocol for all AI face-related features.

2024 — Photo Assist launches on Galaxy Z Flip6 & Fold7 with Portrait Studio, AI Erase, Outpaint, and Sketch-to-Image. The first commercial generative photo-editing experience on any smartphone.

2025 — Instruction-Based Editing ships on Galaxy S26. Users describe edits in natural language — "add water and fish in the bubbles" — and the AI generates it. A leap from button-driven to language-driven interaction.

2026 and beyond — Remaining features from the editing roadmap extend to Fold8, establishing a multi-cycle product shaped from the ground up.

First of its kind — launched as the first commercial generative photo-editing experience on any smartphone.

Employee of the Year — awarded Samsung SRIB's highest individual recognition.

Established the playbook — interaction patterns from Photo Assist became the foundation for every subsequent AI editing feature at Samsung.

Style transfer that doesn't destroy what makes a face recognisable. Then: extending that same precision to pets. Then: applying it to entire photos. Each step raised the bar — and when AI became powerful enough to generate any style, the real design challenge became curation, not capability.

With 50+ styles technically possible, the question became: which ones resonate universally? We ran extensive secondary research and floated global surveys to understand cultural preferences, aesthetic expectations, and what "beautiful" means across different markets.

The research narrowed 50+ candidate styles down to 10 that shipped — styles that worked across demographics, skin tones, and cultural contexts. This wasn't a technical filtering exercise; it was a design decision about taste, sensitivity, and inclusivity at scale.

Lead Product Designer — designed the prompt systems for People Portrait, scaling across visual styles while preserving facial identity. Extended the system to Pet Portraits and full-photo stylization. Selected as one of a small number of Bengaluru designers for an on-site residency at Samsung UX HQ in Seoul to co-develop the feature with the research team.

People AI Portrait — First mobile feature to retain facial identity during style transfer. Comic, 3D cartoon, watercolor, sketch — each preserving the person.

Pet AI Portrait — Extended the system to pets. Different challenge: animal features require different landmark detection and style mapping than human faces.

Entire Photo Stylization — Full-frame style transfer. Oil painting, studio, fisheye lens, and more — applied to the entire photo, not just the subject.

Embedding a third-party experience (Snapchat Lenses) inside Samsung's native camera without it feeling foreign. The A-series audience skews younger — the experience had to feel native to Samsung while leveraging Snapchat's creative engine.

Designed the integration UX and established safe-zone guidelines for lens qualification. Proposed two features — Favoriting Lenses and Personalised Lenses — both adopted into the next release cycle.

Surpassed 2 billion cumulative interactions. The two proposed features shipped in the subsequent release, proving the design thinking extended beyond the initial launch.

Samsung Camera ships across S-series, Fold, Flip, Triple Fold, and Tablets — each with different screens, aspect ratios, and hardware. Maintaining a coherent, high-quality camera UI across all of them, over five OS generations, is an exercise in systems thinking.

Owned the full production pipeline: visual specs, GUI/UI documentation, design system guides for A & M-series, testing, and offshore dev handoffs with China. In parallel, redesigned the Magnifier accessibility app across all six form factors.

Defined the Expert Raw Sky Guide design system — a visual language for Samsung's pro photography app covering planets, stars and constellations, recognised across pro photography communities.

Three innovation explorations: an AI video editing suite, an AI photo editing pipeline that predated Photo Assist, and a Creator's Camera mode for content creators.

None shipped as conceived — but they weren't failures. The photo editing pipeline directly informed Photo Assist. The Creator's Camera shaped Samsung's understanding of their pro-sumer audience. The video work built AI interaction patterns the team still draws on.