Ila Bharadwaj: Senior UX Designer

From the jeweller’s bench to Webex Calling.
Same instinct, different material.

Years experience

Years in UX

Industries

Fortune 500 orgs

I’m a Senior UX Designer at Cisco working on Webex Calling, with ten years in design. But I didn’t start in software. I started in physical product: jewellery, home decor, manufactured goods. Objects you tool, cast, and ship, with no undo button.

I’ve come to feel the fundamentals of design carry over more than we sometimes assume between the physical and the digital. Affordance, constraint, systems, craft, consequence. That’s the shared grammar, and only the medium and the vocabulary differ. And I’ve watched that grammar play out the same way twice.

On a jewellery line called Zinarya, I used parametric, algorithmic modelling to generate mathematical forms as jewellery. What a team of 40 CAD designers produced in a month, the algorithm produced ten times over in the same window. But most of it was noise. The output was only worth anything once a trained eye decided which forms would actually work as objects: which would sit right on the body, manufacture cleanly, sell. The generation got cheap. The judgment became the whole job.

I’m watching the identical shift in digital design now, with AI. It produces screens at a pace no team can match, and just as before, plenty of it doesn’t work. Garbage in, garbage out. The scarce skill stops being production and becomes discernment: which of the fifty options is right, what breaks three steps downstream, how the pieces cohere into a system that holds. That’s the judgment a craft with no undo button trains into you, and it’s exactly what the highest-stakes digital surfaces demand, the admin tools and calling systems where one wrong decision has a real blast radius.

I find this genuinely exciting rather than threatening. I’ve already lived through one version of it, at the bench. The tools change, but the discipline of knowing what’s worth shipping doesn’t, and that’s the part I most want to be doing as the field moves into its next era.

Reach me on LinkedIn

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Experience

Leading UX for Webex Calling portals, Control Hub device configuration, and AI-powered calling features. Owned the Slido integration into Control Hub end-to-end, from stakeholder presentations through delivery signoff.

Embedded across six product teams designing HR management, benefits, and insurance administration experiences for 50,000+ HR administrators across the US and Canada. Owned concurrent workstreams spanning enrolment flows, plan configuration, and admin portals working directly with six product managers across the full product lifecycle.

Designed low-code developer tools focused on rapid prototyping, micro-interactions, and cross-platform integrations. Achieved 100% positive feedback in customer satisfaction surveys and was awarded Best New Joiner of the Quarter.

Designed UX and UI for a fully virtual dispute resolution platform, balancing stakeholder requirements with technical constraints. Also created animation videos, brochures, and illustration assets for marketing.

Led a team producing 3D-printed jewellery collections for national and international clients including Joy Alukkas. Managed end-to-end design from concept and parametric modelling through packaging and client presentations.

Selected Projects

Cisco Webex · Admin Experience

Admins shouldn’t have to remember which platform holds which setting.

Every DECT fault used to mean a site visit. That isn’t serviceability.

Helping HR teams manage plans and guide informed enrolment choices.

Letting financial teams ship cross-platform apps without the boilerplate.

A brand and website for a K-12 space built on holistic learning.

Help people grow their own food, or skip the wait and order it ready.

Where mathematical concepts and natural forms become wearable design.