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Hello, I’m Zainab Kabira. A –
If my life was a song
Six years across architecture and product design, designing what’s next – from India’s first carbon-positive modular home to shipping AI experiences with gskinner, brought to the world at Google I/O ’26 and MWC Barcelona ’25.
I believe every great design forms the basis for an even greater story and I’m here to keep writing mine.
TESTIMONIALS
Zainab is a detailed and analytical designer with a true eagerness to learn and discover new opportunities. Her core strengths lie in her exceptional technical skills and ability to embrace new technologies for building great products. Zainab is a proactive and reliable collaborator who excels at communicating with developers, stakeholders, and her fellow designers. Zainab has been a fantastic member of our team, and I am certain she has a bright future ahead as she continues her professional journey.
Jared Bell
Zainab is a very good designer to work with on daily basis. She has a deep care for human-centered design, which makes her design easier for end users to understand. While working with us she made sure, she took care of complex interactions and state management, which helped us to scale the projects very well.
Roopam Mishra
Her work truly speaks for itself: it’s research backed, resilient against edge cases, and built with a beautiful aesthetic that is delightful to interact with. Zainab’s confidence and attention to detail make even the most complex challenges feel manageable. Whether vibe-coding or constructing 3D environments, she’s natural at tackling new tools and concepts with total fearlessness – an asset to any team!
Anna Groat
With 6+ years spanning architecture and product design, I bring something most designers don’t: a structural way of thinking. I’ve spent 4+ years crafting zero-to-one products, scaling design systems, and designing AI-powered experiences – most recently for a genUI powered app showcased at Google I/O 2026.
From founder-led startups to globally recognised brands in sports, tech, and entertainment, I bring rigour, range, and an eye for detail to every build.
Professional Experience
Product designer and design lead across AI, sports-tech, and consumer products for clients including Google and the PGA Tour. Work spanned end-to-end product design, design systems, and shipped engineering contributions.
Each vignette is a small study in material, light, and movement, and a few grew into showcase work for FlutterFlow and Flutter Animate.
Designing for GenUI
Earlier this year, the Flutter team released GenUI: an SDK that enables AI to compose UIs based on your design system at runtime.
To help Google present it at Google I/O and Google Cloud Next, gskinner was challenged to conceptualize, design, and build Hatcha: an open-source event-planning app where a host plans an event through a conversational interview with AI, and GenUI generates dynamic, themed, and interactive invites. I was the collaborative lead for the design, and ended up rethinking what it means to be a designer.
We chose event planning because no two events are alike. Every event comes with its own goals, constraints, and moving parts. Making it the perfect environment for GenUI to demonstrate its ability to adapt.
Design a wedding planner and you get one set of flows. A corporate retreat, another. A kid’s birthday, a potluck, each different. Pre-designing for every scenario meant the product felt like a generic form with extra steps, and still couldn’t cover the unique edge cases.
“The screen wasn't the unit of design anymore. The goal was. Once I made that shift, everything else followed.”
Early on I was still designing screens: host interview flow, dashboard flow, guest response flow. That’s what designers do. But the more we worked with GenUI, the more obvious it became: the screen wasn’t the unit of design. The goal was.
Users shouldn’t have to relearn the interface for every event. The shell remains fixed, creating predictable navigation and actions, while GenUI customizes everything inside to match the event’s context and intent.
GenUI is only as good as the components it can reach for and the rules that govern them. Before AI could compose interfaces, it needed a design system that balanced flexibility with consistency, and a large part of the work wasn’t designing components but teaching GenUI when and how to use them.
As a host answers the interview, GenUI generates a themed invite, with no palette and no background image drawn in advance. My job was to design the rules that make every generated result feel intentional.
I designed a four-role colour system. The prompt I authored tells the AI how to select a palette using that grading system as the constraint. A children’s birthday and a corporate dinner will never share a palette, but both will always be internally coherent.
I also defined how background images are generated, from mood and composition to visual character, based on insights gathered from the host.
“Less flow-charting. More system thinking. The designer's job didn't disappear – it moved upstream.”
Demonstrated live to a developer audience as the showcase for Flutter’s GenUI SDK. One of the first design systems built on the alpha, the component criteria we wrote contributed to how the Flutter team thought about GenUI’s design guidance.
The work didn’t disappear. It moved. From drawing every screen to curating a system the AI composes from. From mapping flows to mapping goals. From predicting every scenario to defining the rules of every scenario.
AI-first telecom experience
Reimagining the telecom experience with Gemini, designing Google Flutter's MWC 2025 showcase app to showcase the future of AI-powered customer interactions.
The app worked, but its most compelling feature was invisible. The Gemini chat sat buried below the fold, usage data was hard to scan, and nothing signalled that this was an AI product.
The redesign started with a simple question: would this stop someone walking past the booth? To answer that, we restructured the content hierarchy by bringing the most important data forward and creating a clearer path from curiosity to understanding.
Carrier apps are light and predictable. Breaking from that made the AI feel like the point – not an add-on. Three principles guided every screen.
The experience was designed with flexible theme variants, allowing telecom providers to seamlessly adapt the interface to their own brand identity while maintaining a consistent AI experience.
A bold usage gauge replaces the wall of text. The Gemini entry point sits high and stays visible – no scrolling to find the smartest part of the app.
The chat's polish lives in its motion. Pre-prompts lower the barrier to the first message; responsive animation makes Gemini feel present and quick.
A full redesign in 3.5 weeks, production-ready and demoed live as Google Cloud's telecom AI showcase – and it opened up new telecom use cases afterward.
The redesign leaned into contrast, a dark, AI-forward feel over the familiar carrier look, and let small motions carry the sense that this was something new. That's what made it land on the world stage.
Turn Time Into Transformation
A time-intelligence app for Rob Dyrdek's venture-backed startup, built with gskinner. It allows you to fully account for all dimensions of your time and turn that data into actionable insights, helping you identify trends and optimize overall quality of life.
Existence is still unreleased, so this is the shape of the work rather than the screens. On a team of four designers and four engineers at gskinner, my contribution ran from a core feature to the quality bar for the whole app.
Existence enters 2026 with a beta already in people's hands, and the Time Block is central to how the product delivers on its promise.
Existence is still under wraps before launch, so there's only so much I can show here. Get in touch and I'll walk you through the deeper work.
A jump lab on your ankle
Jumpable turns the Apple Watch into a portable jump lab.
Strap it on and jump to instantly capture height, speed, velocity, and explosive force. Built for volleyball, basketball, and track athletes, Jumpable translates raw biometric data into clear benchmarks, helping them measure vertical gains, track progress, and navigate injury recovery with confidence.
Jumpable launched with a functional core but lacked refined design. With athletes actively using the live app, a full overhaul was not feasible. I partnered with the founder on a phased redesign strategy: prioritising high-impact touchpoints, shipping iteratively, and creating a roadmap to leverage real-time user feedback that guides every update.
Two focused phases, shipped to a product already in athletes' hands. The engine stayed the same. The experience around it got clearer.
Sign-up dropped athletes straight into the app with no context. I created a lean, watch-first onboarding experience with concise microcopy and clear guidance, making the first interaction intuitive and confidence-building.
Post-jump, every metric previously competed for attention with equal visual weight, burying key insights. I restructured the Apple Watch interface around a single focal point, placing the primary jump metric front and centre using a dedicated hero accent colour, while tucking secondary stats into a natural scroll. This clear visual hierarchy allows athletes to instantly scan their core results on a high-motion ankle display.
Jumpable could always measure the jump. My work made it something athletes actually understand, trust, and rely on, from their very first launch to a split-second glance after a rep.
