User Centered Design

Experiment, iterate, repeat … and remember your purpose️ — I am a coffee gearhead. I think of the coffee nook in my kitchen as an art installation; making a pour-over is performance art. I’ve watched plenty of James Hoffmann videos and spent more than too much money on equipment. So, it made sense when my cousin asked me for…

1. People-centered: Focus on people and their context in order to create things that are appropriate for them. . . . 2. Understand and solve the right problems — the root problems: Understand and solve the right problem, the root causes, and the underlying fundamental issues. The symptoms will just keep coming back if we don’t! . . . 3. Everything is a system: Think of everything as a system of interconnected parts.

Designing a machine learning product to close the user-feedback loop — Imagine this “hypothetical” scenario: a new model was developed to replace the existing production model, due to detected low accuracies for some “important” classes. The new model’s metrics were much better, hence it was deployed to replace the current model. Turns out, the new model actually made the user experience…

27th June — 29th July This is my second month-ish notes. I’m still aiming to keep them up and regularly make time to reflect. Publishing these is my way of committing to working transparently, with intent, and vulnerability. I have found this blog post by Cassie Robinson really helpful in…

I’ve been feeling a bit flat and lacking in motivation recently. I think that’s been partly to do with the projects I’ve been working on lacking collaboration. …

With all the hype surrounding the product-led growth strategy, people are confusing terminologies. By focusing too much on the product, we are losing our users. Here is how I see it from a designer’s perspective. — What is product-led growth? Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that optimises for users doing everything on their own in the product. From the customer’s perspective, this is a type of self-service experience. This is opposed to a sales-led growth strategy in which a company hires salespeople to proactively sell their product to the…

Recently, the team at Oxford Insights has been thinking about what makes for well-designed public services in different international contexts. When we talk about ‘well-designed’ government services, we mean that public services should be designed with a deep understanding of people’s varying needs. We wrote another blog about the elements…

A 5-step approach to collectively define the problems to solve and focus on your end users — One of the most critical parts of any product development project is to agree as a team on the problems to solve, yet getting everyone on the same page can seem like an impossible task. That’s because product development is a people business. And like people, the teams that develop…

Four Practices for Designing Student-Centered Courses — As a user-centered approach to design work, participatory design offers great entry points and practices for instructors interested in making their courses more student-centered. In this article, I explain and reframe participatory design principles for the classroom by providing four practices for student-centered, participatory course design. …