About

Huruy Kidanemariam

Senior UX Designer and Builder with 8+ years crafting accessible, human-centered products for enterprise SaaS, compliance, AI, and social impact. Currently a Senior UX Designer at Capital Group; before that, payroll compliance and HR platforms at Asure Software. I'm drawn to products where good design removes a barrier, whether that's enterprise software that stops punishing its users or a tool that helps people find food with dignity. I design in code when a working prototype settles an argument a deck can't.

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Experience

Mar 2026 – Present

Senior UX Designer

Capital Group (via Luxoft) | Los Angeles, CA

Designed Scout, a conversational AI assistant that helps teams with their research, in a regulated industry, partnering with product, engineering, and compliance stakeholders.
Contribute to shared design systems and interaction patterns used across product teams.

2024 – Present

Founder, Product Designer & Developer

Appfinity Labs (Independent) | Los Angeles, CA

Designed and built a HIPAA-compliant doula care and Medi-Cal billing portal for a Bay Area birth-justice nonprofit, with 56 accounts across 5 community birth organizations (Sept 2026): visit logging against Medi-Cal caps, CMS-1500 claims, five roles enforced with row-level security, two-factor sign-in and audit logs.
Designed, built and shipped EBT Finder, a SNAP/EBT store locator on the App Store and web: 264,000+ locations across 53 states and territories and about 1,500 US users a month; 9 of 10 test participants found hot food in under 15 seconds.
Designed, built and shipped Beles, a dating and community app for the Tigrayan diaspora, now on the App Store; usability testing raised understanding of its traditional matchmaking feature from 5 of 8 testers to 7 of 8.
Build production React, Supabase and Capacitor apps, including LLM features with guardrails and human-in-the-loop review.

Apr 2023 – Mar 2026

UX Designer

Asure Software | Austin, TX

As the sole designer embedded onsite, re-architected the configuration model behind 9,000+ tax agencies; after launch the team saw fewer configuration errors and faster onboarding of new agencies.
Led research and information architecture for OneAsure, consolidating four HR portals and logins into one product across 16 interviews and 24 usability tests; support tickets went down after launch.
Designed the persona and conversational scripts for Luna, an enterprise AI chatbot integrated across HR, payroll, and benefits.
Authored WCAG-compliant design system guidelines that set accessibility standards across web and mobile products.

Jan 2020 – Feb 2023

UX Designer

IMMERSE | Los Angeles, CA

Designed onboarding flows for VR-based English language learning experiences.
Created Immerse's first content and design framework, reusable guidelines that instructional designers built lessons from.
Ran usability tests to find where learners stumbled on language, then rewrote the prompt sequences around those points.
Partnered with instructional designers and engineers so UI copy followed pedagogical best practices.

Jan 2016 – Jan 2020

Product Designer

Datable | Oakland, CA

Designed and wrote UX for multiple concurrent SaaS client projects across industries.
Built a modular Figma design system with standard copy patterns for error states, empty states, and CTAs.
Refined CTA copy with stakeholders against business KPIs and conversion data.

Leadership & Community

2020 – Present

Communications Team Lead

HPN4Tigray | Portland, OR

Lead storytelling and advocacy campaigns for a diaspora humanitarian network, and built the reusable design templates the team uses to launch campaigns.

How I Work

The questions a senior interview asks, answered up front

These are the habits behind every case study on this site. They're also what I'd want to know before hiring a senior designer.

I find the real problem before the brief's problem

Twice now the brief was "redesign the screens" and the real problem was structural: a missing entity map at Asure, four products pretending to be one at OneAsure. I spend the first weeks with users and engineers, and I'll push back on a brief when the evidence says to, with the evidence in hand.

How I run design reviews

One decision per review, the options I rejected shown next to the one I'm proposing, and the user evidence for each. Engineers and compliance are in the room from the first prototype, not at sign-off. Silence is not agreement; I ask each discipline what would make them say no.

When I disagree with engineering

I start by assuming the constraint is real and asking to see it. If it is, I redesign. If it's a preference, I make the case with a working prototype and the user cost of the alternative. At Asure that meant arguing for more UI states than engineering wanted; the compliance team made the case with me, and we shipped it.

How I mentor and hand off

I pair on real work rather than reviewing finished files: the junior designer runs the session or the review, I take notes and debrief after. I write specs engineers can build from without a meeting, and I'd rather leave behind a pattern in the design system than a screen only I understand.

Beyond the Project

Work that outlived the brief

What happened after the deliverables: patterns other teams took on, and decisions that changed because of the research.

Adopted: The four-state revision lifecycle I designed for Asure's compliance engine (draft, in review, locked, released) became the standard for the engine's other configuration modules.
Changed a decision: My OneAsure interview findings moved the project from a visual refresh to a consolidation of four portals into one, and pushed the visual work to a second phase.
Still in use: The entity map from the Dallas whiteboard sessions became the shared reference engineering, product and compliance used for how the engine's parts depend on each other.