hello, I’m Maryam ✿

I turn what people need into things they can actually use.

HCI researcher and designer. Research, Figma prototypes and front-end builds, from tablet games to web apps.

  • Education
  • Autism & ADHD
  • Children’s wellbeing
  • Urdu-first design
STUDIED
BS Computer Science, LUMS
HONOURS
Dean’s Honour List, 2nd semester & final year
EXCHANGE
GIST, South Korea · Spring 2025
BASED IN
Riyadh · in person or remote

Selected work

Research I went into the field for, and the things I built from it.

Dus Pattay gameplay: a character racing through a glowing forest tunnel
Final year project · Team lead · Unity · 2025–26

Dus Pattay: screening for ADHD through play

A twenty-minute tablet game for children aged 8–12, shaped with eight psychologists and psychiatrists, with the fun deliberately switched off whenever it needs to measure.

Read the case study →
Gul: A Digital Garden title screen with a row of smiling sunflowers
HCI course project · UX research · Figma, React · 2026

Gul: a flower that asks children about their day

Socio-emotional learning for children in orphanage care. Seven orphanages, thirty ideas, one talking flower, and a usability test that proved icons, not words, carry the interface.

Read the case study →
GIST, South Korea · Multi-agent AI · 2025

AI Wellness Assistant: three agents that know who to ask

An orchestrator that works out what you need and hands it to a symptom checker or a lifestyle coach, built on Google’s Agent2Agent protocol.

Read the case study →
Linkiln LUMS home page: handwritten hero line, search bar, illustrated story strip and category filters
UI design · Front-end · Illustration · Live

Linkiln LUMS: every student group, one search away

Six hand-built pages and nineteen illustrations for a directory with one job: find a group and join it in under thirty seconds.

also built —
  • Real-time multiplayer Ludo · React, Socket.IO
  • Hospital management system · SQL Server, C#
  • Urdu news classifier · Machine learning
  • Networking from scratch · Python

How I work

  1. listenInterviews, focus groups, contextual inquiry, and drawing alongside children when a formal setting makes them go quiet.
  2. readResearch papers and clinical literature, so the design stands on more than a hunch.
  3. makePaper first, then Figma, then working code people can hold: React for the web, Unity for play.
  4. testWith real children, caregivers and clinicians. The assumption that breaks is the finding.
“One girl, told to click the button neechay (below), searched the bottom of the laptop, not the screen.”
What usability testing on Gul taught me about designing for children

About me

creative first, coder second

I’ve always made things: paintings, crochet, pottery. At LUMS I took the coding and theory courses, and then, in my final-year project, I found HCI: reading research papers, doing primary research, designing in Figma. I gave it everything. The next semester I took the HCI course and did it all again.

Education runs through all of it. I took six education courses alongside computer science, including one on inclusion for autism and intellectual disability, and I want to design for autistic and ADHD students, the children classrooms are least built for.

I loved my semester in South Korea and I’d go back tomorrow. These days I’m in Riyadh, open to work in person or remotely.

  • English · fluent
  • Urdu · fluent
  • Arabic · reads & writes
  • Punjabi · understands

Experience

  1. 2025Research Intern, Machine Learning & Computer Vision Lab, GIST. Cleaned and annotated a multi-camera dataset of 88,000+ objects for person tracking.
  2. 2024Teaching Assistant, LUMS. Introduction to Programming (CS 100) and Discrete Mathematics (CS 210).
  3. 2024AI Intern, Masterworks, Riyadh. Computer vision with PyTorch and OpenCV.
  4. 2023Orientation & Logistics Coordinator, LUMS Orientation Week. Awarded “Best Deputy”.
  5. 2020–2023Curriculum & Digital Media Team, Children of Islam, Kuwait. Designed animated lessons and interactive learning modules, and wrote and voiced educational videos.

Off-screen

Where the colours and the patience come from.

Building something for real people? Let’s talk.

Open to UI design, UX research and front-end roles and projects, in Riyadh or remote.