Anahita Dasgupta, Employee Experience Researcher, United Airlines

ID alum Anahita (Ana) Dasgupta (MDes 2023), Employee Experience Researcher at United Airlines, shared her job-seeking and career experience with current students in an alumni panel on April 30, 2026, and in an interview following the session. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

At United Airlines’ innovation lab, a small team studies technologies that may not reach the company for another five to ten years—and asks how they’ll fit into the working lives of the people on the front lines. Anahita Dasgupta (MDes 2023) is one of two UX researchers on that team, an Employee Experience Researcher whose job is to keep the human element in view as new tools take shape. She spoke with ID about her path from engineering to design research, what she’s learning inside a large organization, and where she hopes to make an impact.

What are you doing professionally today?

I’m an employee user experience researcher for United Airlines, and I specifically work for our innovation lab. The emerging technology we focus on might get implemented five to ten years down the line. As we’re understanding how these technologies work and finding opportunities where they could be helpful for United, my job is to make sure the human interaction elements are in place. My end users are always the employees: How does this technology fit into the ways our employees currently work? How could it fit into the ways they work ten years down the line?

Our innovation lab itself is maybe 10 to 12 people, and only two of us are UX researchers. Everybody else is project managers, technical experts, engineers, leadership. But the employee experience group at United works as a larger pool of about 50 researchers and designers who get drafted onto different product teams. So I’m anchored in this smaller team but connected to a much bigger design network.

You came to ID from an engineering background. How did you find your way here?

I went into engineering thinking it would have more design elements. My thought was: I want to learn how to design products, and also know how to make them. But the fields are fairly siloed. I was at UC San Diego pursuing an engineering degree and trying to find every design class I could to accompany it. Their design program had a human-centered design foundation, but most classes were very interaction and UI focused, and I was someone who got excited about physical products. I wanted to expand my human-centered design approach outside of just the digital realm.

I knew I wanted to pursue more education in design, and I was looking for a program that would let me explore rather than pick a lane. All the other programs I looked at wanted me to brand myself already, like healthcare designer or interaction designer. I didn’t want to do that yet. ID felt like it would give me the opportunity I needed to explore.

How did you land at United Airlines? What has surprised you?

It actually grew out of an ID connection. United’s innovation lab is a recurring client with Jeremy Alexis‘s class, Innovation Methods. I didn’t know much about the design culture at United until my friends who took that client project talked so highly about the team. The glowing reviews got me excited to hear from United when they came to recruit at ID, and I reached out to network with them afterward. That helped me get where I am now.

What’s surprised me most is how much of the work is about communication and translation. For example, a service blueprint is a well-known UX tool for connecting the backstage and front stage components of a service, but showing that framework to anyone who isn’t familiar with it is a challenge. It can be confusing to read and hard to connect with. I’ve been exploring alternative ways to communicate the same idea: creating mini storyboards, sketching out scenes, acting through it. People care less about which framework I use or how I’m using it. They need to connect with my research and insights.

How are you thinking about AI in your work?

With AI, it’s a really interesting moment. Every business is excited to see how it can impact them. My own stance tends to be more skeptical, but it doesn’t help me to be overly skeptical. If I can be part of the conversations to help shape when it’s actually worth our time to explore versus when it’s not, that’s a more valuable use of my skepticism. It’s better to be in the conversation than not at all.

So I’ve been trying to be proactive and take a more positive spin on it. I experiment with it on my own, in small creative processes, using it more as a thought partner than as something that generates a brand-new idea. If I have a first draft and I ask, ‘Where might this go wrong?’ that helps, as opposed to ‘Here’s my problem, you solve it for me.’ If we’re talking about an airline, we are a 24/7 operation dealing with the safety of our customers and employees globally. We have to know our technologies well and know when it’s appropriate to use something new.

What do you most value about your ID experience?

I very much grew up as a “STEM student,” and STEM education tends to have a right or wrong answer. As much as I appreciate my engineering background for my analytical & detail-oriented brain, ID is a lot more about critical thinking: knowing when your assumption needs to be challenged, knowing when to adapt and how. As much as I thought I was a critical thinker before coming to ID, I’m much more skilled at it now. It unlocked a part of my brain I hadn’t been using enough.

The frameworks are part of that. They’re tools to help you start rather than starting from scratch, like a template instead of a blank page. But they’re really in service of knowing how to bring new perspectives into a conversation and think critically about your brief. A lot of what’s stayed with me is systems-level thinking and visual communication. For example, I use a lot of sketching and diagramming to explain something new or complex, and I didn’t expect to use those skills from Tomoko Ichikawa‘s classes as much as I do now.

What’s the bigger goal driving your work?

Corporations have a lot of capital and speed to innovate and create new products. My goal is to learn how corporate decision-makers talk about strategy and innovation— where they choose to build things and put their money—so that I can eventually help shift that thinking to be more human-centered. If I can move the lever just a little, so that decisions prioritize people first, I’d be very excited about that kind of impact.

Right now my starting point is just understanding how people do this: How do you talk about strategy? How do you convince anybody to come along with an idea? The innovation lab is great for that, because we work on ideas that don’t have an immediate need yet. Learning to be good at that strategic dot-connecting feels like the first stepping stone.

What would you tell designers navigating the job search?

I was excited about absolutely everything at ID, so choosing what lane to sit in was hard. I didn’t even know when I graduated that I wanted to be a UX researcher. I knew which classes I liked and what I liked about them, and then I went looking for roles that fit that. UX research at one company was totally different from UX research at another, so I talked to a lot of teams to understand the difference.

I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn going back through generations of ID alumni: ‘I see you’re working at this place, I’m interested in what your team does—can we chat?’ That was always easier than leading with ‘I want a job here.’ It was just curiosity: is this even something I’m interested in? A couple of those conversations later turned into ‘We actually have an opening, would you want to apply?’ Having those connections first, and taking the time to understand how different teams define their work, made all the difference.

I’d also tell people to take the break. My search took about five months, and I felt guilty any time I wasn’t applying. But when I finally took a trip I’d been invited on, I came back so much clearer and with a better attitude toward the search. How you show up matters, and people can tell when you’re burnt out.

Anahita Dasgupta came to ID wanting room to explore, and left with a way of thinking she now brings into one of the world’s largest airlines. Learn more about the Master of Design (MDes) program at the Institute of Design.