Im a designer through and through my names Mohamed but my friends and family call me Murt or Murtadha! Feel free to pick and choose what you want to address me as! I grew up in a sudanese family in Texas and Abu Dhabi and consider both of those my home!
Id say that I like to summarize my work style in three words. Curious, Compassionate, and Competitive. The first part of my style refers to how I love creating options when designing, exploring new possible avenues of what the product can provide to its users and owners.
Being compassionate speaks to my work with my team, and users as I love communicating working with my team to really strive to meet a singular goal. This in turn helps us serve the users better considering their problems as ours and solving them.
The final part is the sportsman in me but when I speak about my competitive nature Im not talking about our normal aggression but a desire to work hard and provide the best experience possible, to look at our competitors and figure out ways to excel in a competitive marketplace.
It was a mix of starting to draw at a young age and being interested in commanding people's attention. With stints as a graphic designer and illustrator, I found my skills perfectly aligning with UX design. Surely enough, combining these two passions made me the human-centered designer I am today!
When I was around 4 years old my dad asked me what I wanted to do with my life. Initially I always wanted to be a doctor. When I told that to my dad he said it didn't matter what you are as long as your making a positive impact to society. As my journey unfolded I found that in UX im always working towards making a positive impact on my users, and with my work in healthcare I really feel like im making a positive impact on society!
I love making art (mostly sketches), trying new tech, and playing soccer! I have an ever growing collection of art that I collect in the form of books and pictures that I take at different museums and on the streets of whichever city I visit!
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I was born in Baltimore and moved to the UAE for the first 4 years of my life. As a young child, I was interested in two things: red cars and drawing. The latter would stick with me for the rest of my life. I was quite curious about things and would often draw cars because I loved creating art that felt technical. These skills would come back later when I began sketching logo's and wireframes.
After attending elementary and middle school in Dallas Texas, I moved back to the UAE for high school. I was surrounded by many cultures spending most of my time playing soccer or going to pc cafes. By doing this I was always working with other people one way or the other whether it was on the pitch or in a game. Something that always intrigued me was predicting peoples patterns where they would pass the ball or make their next move. This curiosity turned into a skill of mine that I use regularly in my design thinking sessions.
I attended the American International School of Abu Dhabi where I earned an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, a Swiss college-credit program designed for advanced students at International schools. This experience exposed me to volunteer opportunities and rigorous coursework where I had to work with my classmates in order to get through the program.
Always enjoyed drawing technical machines and diagrams from a young age.
My hobbies helped me learn how to predict human actions
I learned teamwork was the only way to solve difficult problems.
Thanks to my hard work, I got into the Ohio State University. At first I studied biochemistry but there was a disconnect i nthat there was very little creativity and so I wanted to focus on something that was just as analytical but could be applied creatively and so I switched majors to social psychology and studio art as I wanted to be involved in advertising at the time. It was here where my knack for user research and creativity flourished creating a perfect combination of courses for me.
It was here where I started to pursue graphic design I would create digital art in photoshop and eventually tried creating logo's in illustrator. This curiosity earned me a digital design internship at Knomadix which is an educational game company. I helped the team there design advertising material, designed a monster market system to encourage users to keep playing the game, and edited characters creating color variations with stories.
I also made sure to try different activities like signing up for the student engagement program where I would volunteer to plant trees or host environmental research symposiums. I even tried my hand at creating videos and 3D artwork to stretch my imagination. However my greatest achievement was my final social psychology project where I worked with a team of other researchers to determine the efficacy of different color combinations with viewers moods and emotions.
Explored many opportunities and never shied away from learning new technology.
A self taught startup attitude gave me the skills to progress and gain more and more opportunities in the design space.
Combining my social psychology studies with design tools helped me fall in love with human centered design practices.
At the end of my time at university COVID had put the world on lockdown. This lead me down untraditional paths of honing my design skills. One such path was when I worked as an editor and illustrator for the children's book The Journey of Ama Kitwa.
After this project, I evaluated my passions and decided I wanted to make functional and interactive designs. Luckily this interest coincided with my roommate from college starting a company and so he came to me and asked me to design it's brand and website. The company is called Electriculture and as the Cheif Brand designer I designed all logo and marketing assets eventually creating a website. While I was designing the website I conducted market research and learned more about web design which inevitably exposed me to UX design.
After electriculture was complete I worked towards becoming a UX designer. I took projects completing wireframes for a company called Fringe 22 aswell as helping my old company knomadix create their backpack app by making wireframes of the PM's ideas. As I was designing I knew I wanted more as an official UX designer working within a team to solve problems itratively, and so I decided to continue my studies in UX!
Continued to explore new opportunities including illustration, brand design and eventually UX design.
Helped launch a solar panel company as well as publish a childrens book.
After learning about UX I know I wanted to work within a team to solve users problems.
When considering how I wanted to continue my UX education I considered what would help me most in the long term, weighing the costs and benefits of a masters program. Eventually I knew that pushing myself harder through a master's program will help me years down the line. I also knew that Northwestern's Information design and strategy would be the perfect combination of UX, communication, design and statistics courses to curate my knowledge.
Each course taught me more and more about the human centered design practice. I took courses from information architecture to user research and data vizualisation. These courses while outside the scope of UX design have helped me think more as a product designer learning all there is about launching a product into the market.
As I was completing my masters I also wanted to accelerate my education and get into an internship and so I completed four curated projects as part of a design bootcamp in tandem with my studies. This taught me how to make design systems and got me the opportunity for my internship.
Commited myself to design for the long term by conducting a masters degree.
Completed projects ranging from statistical analysis, to data visualization, and information architecture diagrams.
Continued to seek out new opportunities eventually creating four curated design projects as part of a bootcamp.
In March of 2023, my friend from college reached out me to join her firm as a UX project consultant. Three months later, I graduated from Northwestern with a Master's of Science and a GPA of 3.96. Using my education and experience, I work with Milan Global and Megillion to provide quality design services, websites, and user experience consultations.
I work hard to provide my team with the best support possible, using my skills in research, design and user experience to solve the problem with the least amount of development and cost.
