Product Designer with 8+ years experience building 0→1, enterprise AI, payment solutions, and edtech.

Strong in mentorship, team building, design systems, and turning ambiguous briefs into shipped products.

Currently shipping AI assessment & video role play at Udemy.

Featured Projects

AI Role Play: reframing scoring into a structurally distinct assessment mode for learners and organizations

Web + Mobile

D2C

AI-Powered Product

EdTech

Background

Udemy's Role Play let learners practice soft skills with audio-only AI personas. But soft skills like negotiation and leadership depend on non-verbal cues, and audio alone made practice feel disconnected from real conversations.

What I did

Led design end to end, learner and instructor sides. Added real-time video avatars, replaced push-to-speak with voice-activated turn-taking, and designed the mode switch between audio, video, and chat so learners could move between them without losing context. Ran vendor evaluations, Beta research, and iteration cycles with engineering, research, and learning science.

Improving client conversion with an AI-powered call assistant

Web

Staff Experience

Client Onboarding

Artificial Intelligence

Background

Toptal's ops team was spending close to an hour before every client call just piecing together context: past notes, account history, what was already said. With 4+ calls a day, this ate into their time and still left room for repeated questions or mixed messaging.

What I did

I led the design of an AI assistant that helps staff prep for calls and review them afterward, from research through visual design and usability testing. I focused on fitting the tool into how staff already worked instead of adding another separate step.

  • Reduced call preparation time

  • Improved staff adoption in the first beta phase

  • Increased conversion across Sales → Job Posting → Hire stages

Increasing number of clients with One-Click Checkout at Careem

Web

Mobile App (iOS & Android)

Checkout

Ecommerce

Design System

Company

Careem's e-commerce merchants were stitched together across disconnected payment systems, which made checkout slow and inconsistent for end users, and made it harder to bring new merchants on board.

Overview

I directed the design of a unified checkout that let users pay with saved cards and addresses in one step. I ran research, built the prototypes, and worked closely with engineering and PM, reporting weekly straight to the CEO given how visible the project was.

  • Replaced multiple disconnected payment systems with a unified checkout solution

  • Increased the number of onboarded merchants

  • Reduced conversion time for merchants

Creating a scalable and customizable design system for FineDine

Web

Mobile App (iOS & Android)

Design System

User Research

Background

As founding designer, I inherited a product with 29 colors in use, inconsistent layouts, and no shared design language. Restaurant owners, waiters, and diners were all hitting different usability walls.

What I did

I went through over 600 support tickets and ran workshops with all three user groups to find where things broke down: onboarding, accessibility, customization. From there I built a design system with a 3-color model, new accessibility patterns, and flexible templates that could flex across very different restaurant types.

  • Increased customer base from 700 → 1,000 in three months after launch

  • Reduced menu setup time and onboarding friction for new restaurants

  • Established FineDine’s first company-wide design system, improving design-dev velocity

Other Things I’m Proud of

Instructor and learner experience at Udemy

As the sole designer on the Instructor Experience team, I led initiatives to help instructors better understand and grow their teaching impact. I proposed and prototyped new dashboards, programs, and AI-assisted tools to improve instructor engagement and content quality.

  • Designed a new Instructor Dashboard with actionable insights

  • Participated in Product Designer hiring to help grow the team

  • Mentored a design intern during her internship

Improving feedback culture in design meetings

In our distributed design team, feedback sessions often felt quiet and unstructured. I organized a workshop where designers reflected on both roles; presenter and audience.

From those insights, I introduced two presentation frameworks to clarify the purpose of each session. This small change increased participation, improved psychological safety, and made feedback discussions more focused and productive across the design org.

Working on the team communication in a remote workplace

Following the success of the feedback workshop, I proposed a new practice to make our remote culture feel more connected. Each week, team members shared short personal or work updates at the start of our all-hands meetings, helping everyone feel more present and human in a fully remote setup.

Over time, these updates evolved into an open document for sharing wins, challenges, and kudos asynchronously, fostering a stronger sense of belonging within the product design team.

Systemising Careem’s email communication

As different verticals joined Careem, the email communication for the user activities on the app got out of hand. I mapped out all our app emails for the seven verticals at Careem including ride hailing, food, and groceries. Creating a component library for emails was quite complex because of the limitations on HTML.

I created a scalable, HTML-friendly, and dark-mode compatible for different use cases of our verticals including payment failure, ride completion, order summary, etc.

Words from the people I’ve worked with

  • Dinem is a very strong advocate for the user and never satisfied with a sub-par solution. She is particularly strong in taking action on work that she identifies as a need to consistently improve our products.

    Ole Lütjens

    VP of Design

    Dinem goes above and beyond helping the product team significantly in very busy times. She has really sharp and structured thinking to quickly grasp what needs to be done, aligns on next steps, and also takes initiative to help with the product definition when it's not clear. Really appreciate this partnership!

    Christos Stamatelos

    Director of Product

  • Working with Dinem has been an overwhelmingly positive experience and she possesses a collaborative spirit that truly stands out. She eagerly discusses various ideas and takes the initiative in showcasing and brainstorming necessary designs, which has been invaluable in refining the design needs of our project.

    Dinem doesn't simply react to changes, she proactively adjusts and adapts to meet our immediate requirements. She shows an impressive level of flexibility, especially when there are sudden changes in the project's scope or direction. This ability to pivot quickly has made her invaluable to our work.

    Daniel Jianu

    Senior Front-end Engineer Coach

  • Dinem consistently approaches problems by questioning not just the solution but also the underlying problem statement and how it connects to the broader vision. This mindset has been invaluable in shaping high-quality, goal-aligned outcomes. Her collaborative, open style makes working together effortless and productive.

    Her design work stands out for being intuitive and accessible, instructors repeatedly mention how easy and enjoyable it is to use her designs. Even with extremely complex projects like course variations, she simplified the instructor experience in a way that will drive higher adoption. Similarly, instructor-led bundles achieved impressive engagement, over 8,000  bundles created within just 2.5 months, a direct reflection of her thoughtful, user-first design.

    Seda Duman

    Project Manager

  • I collaborated with Dinem on a couple products as a product manager and it worked out very well. Her deliverables were of the highest quality and in full accordance with established at the company brand guidelines and the respective design system. She efficiently and proactively operated on an initiative even at the times when requirements weren't clearly defined on the side of product management and stakeholders - for that she dived deep into all the respective business aspects, enquiring all the necessary information from the other parties until she got a clear picture, which in addition to driving the initiative forward allowed her to instantly come up with a number of worthwhile product improvement ideas.

    Yury Trofimenko

    Senior Technical Product Manager

  • She brings a wealth of experience and has a strong ability to translate product requirements into clear, thoughtful user designs. This clarity consistently helped the team develop a shared understanding of the problem space. Her designs are not only highly user-friendly, but also engineering-friendly. Our engineers—including myself—had no issues turning her designs into working implementations, as she has been deeply familiar with our design system since day one.

    Gökhan Akca

    Engineering Manager

  • Dinem is doing a truly exceptional job. We worked on a project has no PM, specification is a bit messy and still she is able to understand everything and even suggest new features which work great with what we had in mind.

    The quality of her work is amazing, you can really feel how it's all going to work; walking though Figma is like using a real app.

    Lastly, the communication works really good - she is proactive, she reaches out to me, to dev team, makes sure that we move forward and there are no blockers.

    It's pure pleasure to work with her on this project. She really brings it to the next level

    Piotr Imbierowicz

    Engineering Manager

  • Dinem is a passionate designer who likes to research and come up with options. She also is quick at taking feedback from fellow designers. Her sincerity and hardwork have led to an amazing 1-click checkout design.

    Snegdha Gupta

    Project Manager

    She is a humble, down-to-earth and positive person. Strong soft skills revolved around empathy as well as impressive foundations on user journeys. She’s experienced with autonomous working as well as working in a team. As a developer, working with Dinem’s designs was always a pleasure. I’m 100% sure that she’ll elevate every job, team, and company she works for.

    Serdar Sayın

    Front-end Engineer

  • Dinem is not only motivated to do the best work possible, she is also supportive and inspiring, which impact the team's work. She is showing an example of how to be proactive, structured and high-skilled.

    When talking about execution, Dinem is confidentally dealing with large-scale projects, as well as with many smaller projects at the same time, keeping the execution level very high, well-structured and pixel-perfect.

    Katya Spiridonova

    Senior Product Designer

More About Me ✨

I know it's a classic, but I love traveling. My most vivid memories are from my travels around the world. The pic above is from one of my favorite trips − Tbilisi, Georgia.

The picture above is from my first volunteering experience in Sicily, where me and my other volunteer friends hiked on Etna.

I love cats but I am unfortunately very allergic to them. I try to foster kittens when I have a chance until they find their forever home as kittens don't cause allergy as much as the adult cats. I've fostered four of them so far!

I'm a designer by heart, this is a doll that I made when I was eight. A teacher in our neighborhood loved it so much that she asked me organize doll making workshop for the kids of the neighborhood. It was my first design workshop!

I'm a designer by heart. I've led my first design workshop after making the doll above when I was eight. The teacher in my neighborhood organized an event to teach the other kids.

I love art history so much. I even worked on a #100dayproject to reinterpret my favorite paintings in my own way.

You can find me listening First Aid Kit almost every day, along with Travis.

I designed a book cover for one of the top publishers of Turkey. I feel so proud to randomly see my work in bookshops.

I make illustrations on my free time and share it on my Instagram.

I own an Etsy shop where I used to sell my handcrafted silversmith jewelry and illustrations to over 27 counties.

I love art history so much that I took the course at college twice. I even worked on a #100dayproject to reinterpret my favorite paintings in my own way.

Dinem Kursun, 2026. All rights reserved ©

Dinem Kursun, 2026. All rights reserved ©

Dinem Kursun, 2026. All rights reserved ©