From Art and Craft to Strategic Design

Growing up, Nisal Tharanga was the kind of child who could not leave things as they were. Art and craft were constants. He would build things with electronic components and then make sure they looked good too—not merely functional, but finished. He won competitions for his work at school, although at the time it felt more like play than anything connected to a future career.

After completing his A-Levels, he entered the field of Computer Science. A lecturer changed the direction of his journey. Rather than pushing him towards conventional software development, the lecturer recognised his creative ability and encouraged him to do something with it. Nisal began learning web design alongside his engineering studies.

Web design connected with him in a way that desktop application development had not. There was visible output and room to create something that felt considered. As the internet grew and web applications became the norm, his role developed into one that combined both sides of the process: designing interfaces and building them, rather than handing the visual work to someone else.

Along the way, something became clear that he had not yet learned to name. He was not simply interested in making things look good. He genuinely cared about whether people could use what he was building. When a user became confused or abandoned a task, it bothered him more than a broken function did.

That instinct—what he now describes as natural empathy for the person on the other side of the screen—became the real attraction of the work. When “UX” emerged as the recognised term for this discipline, it felt less like discovering something new and more like finding the right name for something he had already been doing.

What He Is Working on Now

That work eventually took Nisal across the consumer, fintech, banking and finance, and software-as-a-service sectors, where he helped deliver products used by real customers at reputed global brands. Throughout those experiences, the central question remained unchanged: is this genuinely working for the person using it?

Today, Nisal works as a strategic design leader contracted by an AI-powered product startup. His responsibilities have expanded from designing individual screens to shaping product and experience strategy as a whole.

Outside his core professional work, he writes extensively. His articles for national publications and his own platform explore product design, UX strategy and the ways in which user behaviour connects to business outcomes. He also conducts workshops at universities and private institutions, helping designers develop practical skills and a clearer understanding of what the profession truly demands.

His work has received international recognition. A recent win at a business and technology competition in the United States, followed by a personal invitation to serve as a jury member for one of the world’s most prestigious digital awards, placed him among a global group of industry leaders evaluating excellence in digital products.

He is also writing a book based on a practical observation: many designers are capable, but few know how to earn influence in the rooms where product decisions are made. Drawing on his own experience, the book combines actionable steps with the stakeholder-management skills that design schools rarely teach—the skills that often separate capable designers from those who are genuinely heard.

Challenges Along the Way

Not every stage of the journey came easily. Early in Nisal’s career, design decisions were often measured primarily by how quickly they could be built. Whether a design made life easier for the person using it was rarely the first question.

Nisal cared about fundamentals that did not always appear in project briefs: consistency, contrast and layout. Making the case for those principles at a time when speed was the dominant measure required patience.

Pushback from stakeholders became another recurring challenge. He discovered that the problem was not that non-designers were incapable of understanding design. More often, they could not clearly explain what was troubling them.

His response was to stop defending his work immediately and start listening. He would ask why and continue asking until the real concern emerged. Some concerns proved valid and changed the design. Others failed to hold up once examined. The process worked because it shifted the discussion from opinion to evidence.

A more difficult and continuing challenge was joining organisations where UX was understood to mean only wireframes. The expectation was that a UX designer produced sketches, handed them over and considered the work complete. Calls for user research, testing and meaningful stakeholder involvement often encountered resistance.

His solution was not to push harder. It was to understand where the organisation stood in its design maturity and begin there. Introduce one practice, demonstrate its value and build enough trust to introduce the next. The objective was never to overhaul a culture overnight. It was to move it forward one step at a time.

Where He Is Headed

When discussing the future, Nisal repeatedly returns to one central idea. AI has made it genuinely faster to build products. That much is real. What it has not changed is the need to determine whether the right problem is being solved in the first place. That still requires someone who is paying close attention to real people.

One of the assumptions he sees most often among product leaders and sponsors is that faster development automatically produces better results. He believes this is wrong and intends to spend a significant part of his career challenging it.

His workshops, articles, book and growing involvement in Sri Lanka’s AI and product ecosystem through advisory and jury roles all point towards the same objective: encourage more teams to ask the right questions before they begin building.

Advice for Those Starting Out

When asked what he would tell someone beginning a career in design, Nisal does not start with inspiration. He starts with tools.

• Lead with evidence. Opinion invites debate. Evidence ends it—or at least changes the nature of the discussion. A designer who supports decisions with user testing, behavioural data or documented research becomes far harder to dismiss.
• Be patient with organisations. A designer who enters a company expecting to change everything from the first day is likely to lose support. Understand where the team is, demonstrate value within that environment and then pull the organisation forward.
• Treat design as a business skill. Designers who connect their decisions to outcomes such as retention, conversion and customer effort move from being people who execute tasks to people who help shape direction.

In the current climate, with AI accelerating what is technically possible, the most important skill is not simply knowing how to operate the latest tools. It is understanding the person on the other side of the screen: what they need, why they are there and what would make the experience valuable enough to return to.

That kind of judgement is what AI cannot replace. It is also what will define the designers who matter over the next decade.

Life Motto

When asked to define his journey in a single sentence, Nisal does not hesitate.

In an industry increasingly driven by speed, the statement reads less like a personal motto and more like a quiet correction: the future of design will not belong merely to those who can build faster, but to those who understand more deeply.