Design Thinking

Many, many times, especially early in my career, I'd build a deck for a pitch, a client presentation, or a design review that I was genuinely proud of. I'd done the research, covered the data, crafted a clean narrative arc, beautifully designed the slides, a slide near the end that laid out the ROI so plainly a spreadsheet could have wept with joy. I would walk in convinced the logic alone would carry the room, certain I'd be walking out with a yes. But more often than not, I

I'll be honest with you. I am genuinely, embarrassingly excited about the 2026 World Cup. Not necessarily all of England's squad choices. We won't get into that. But come June, I will be glued to every match, probably shouting at a screen somewhere and pretending I knew Tuchel's tactics all along. So when I started seeing articles about the eye-watering costs fans are facing, and then watched a BBC News report on New York essentially suing FIFA over the whole thing, I couldn'

Nobody sits you down at the start of a design career and gives you the honest version. You get the technical stuff, the software tutorials, the design principles, the portfolio advice. What you don't get is someone pulling you aside and saying, look, here's what this actually feels like, and here's what to do about it. So consider this that conversation. I'm writing this for two groups of people. Those just starting out, finding their feet in their first studio or agency role

Let's start with a number: somewhere between 15 and 20% of the global population is neurodivergent. That's not a niche. That's not an edge case. That's roughly one in six people sitting in your user research sessions, abandoning your checkout flows, quietly giving up on your app and going somewhere else because the experience was just too much to deal with. I'm writing this as a parent of a neurodivergent little monkey, and, now due to that little monkey and her struggles, I

Most of us have used a product and thought, "who on earth designed this?" A button you can't find, a checkout process that takes seventeen steps, an app that feels like it was built for a very specific type of robot and nobody else. It's maddening. And yet, teams pour months into building these things. The culprit, more often than not, is designing for features instead of people. This is where design thinking comes in. Not as some mystical creative discipline reserved for peo

Let's be honest. Case studies have a reputation problem. They tend to read like a corporate brochure wrote itself: vague metrics, suspiciously round numbers, and a client quote so polished it could only have been drafted by a PR team. You know the type. These aren't those. What follows are genuine stories from global clients who had a real problem, invested in getting the UX right, and came out the other side with measurable results. Some of the outcomes are impressive. Some