Nov 17, 2025
Wednesday evening, Bengaluru.
Traffic was its usual self, dense, defiant, almost alive. By the time our Uber dropped us at the entrance of this vast tech village, the driver said, “You’ve reached.”
We hadn’t.
The Flipkart block was still a good 1.5 kilometers away. So we walked. Past a line of cafés, people on calls, and that faint smell of rain on concrete that always hangs in Bengaluru evenings. I got my steps in, but more importantly, I got time to switch gears, from designing for users to actually meeting them. Something that hadn’t happened in person in the last couple of years, after the pandemic and work-from-home.
The rooms where work happens
We had two conversations lined up. One with a team rethinking how brands could manage creative production at scale, and another exploring what generative AI could unlock in video creation.
I won’t go into the specifics, but what stood out wasn’t the tech or the feature wishlist. It was the language.
No one spoke in UX terms. There were no flows, patterns, or component libraries.
Instead, people spoke in the language of time, friction, trust, and brand safety.
The first realization was that users don’t describe problems the way we model them.
As designers, we build systems of logic. We name buttons, define states, and wire outcomes. But when you meet users in their world, that logic dissolves. They’re not thinking about your UI; they’re thinking about their workday.
The out-of-body moment
Somewhere in the middle of the first meeting, I had this strange out-of-body experience, like watching myself from above.
All those months of PRDs, prototypes, and stand-ups suddenly felt distant. In their place was a very human scene: people trying to do something better, faster, simpler.
And for a moment, it was disorienting because everything I had carefully structured in my head, every assumption about the problem space, began to blur.
The artifacts we hold sacred as designers - wireframes, workflows, user journeys, suddenly felt like maps of a place I was visiting for the first time.
In that moment, design stopped being about craft and started being about context.
You start to notice small things: the words people use, what they skip over, what frustrates them quietly but never gets logged. Those micro-moments hold more truth than any usability test.
I realized that what we call edge cases in design are often the main cases in someone else’s reality. What we dismiss as friction may actually be a safety mechanism.
And what we optimize for speed, elegance and efficiency may not always align with what people value most: clarity, control, confidence.
That gap between what we imagine and what they experience is where true product insight lives. That’s where design starts being less about what we make and more about what we enable.
What the visit taught me about designing for reality
The biggest takeaway wasn’t about a feature or a workflow. It was about proximity, the simple act of sitting in the same room as the people you design for.
We spend so much time designing for patterns that we forget to design for people. Patterns are clean; people are messy. But that mess is where the meaning is.
Meeting users resets that balance. It reminds you that:
Data gives you the “what,” but stories give you the “why.”
Dashboards can tell you where friction exists, but only people can tell you why it matters. The best design decisions come from marrying both.Empathy is not an exercise; it’s exposure.
You can’t empathize in theory. You have to go there, listen without interrupting, observe without bias, absorb without agenda.Design maturity isn’t about frameworks; it’s about being porous enough to unlearn.
Every time you meet a user, some part of your process should get challenged. If not, you’re not listening deeply enough.
And the biggest revelation of all:
When you listen closely, users rarely ask for new features. They ask for freedom from friction. They want to do their work without resistance. And that’s a much harder, more interesting design problem to solve.
The walk back
By the time we stepped out, the sky had turned indigo. The lights from the tech park reflected off puddles, and we started the long walk back to the gate.
I remember feeling both exhausted and re-energized, the kind of tired that comes with learning.
Back at my desk the next morning, prototyping felt different. Those grey boxes on the screen weren’t frames anymore; they were conversations, workarounds, and aspirations from the people I had just met.
Design doesn’t live inside tools; it lives in the spaces where people use them.
The visit reminded me of why I wanted to be a designer in the first place. Good design isn’t about creating delightful interfaces; it’s about creating invisible ease in someone’s daily work.
And that starts by walking the kilometre and a half toward your users, both literally and metaphorically.
Three takeaways for designers
Proximity beats process.
No workshop or journey map can substitute for sitting in the same room as your users. Go see the work where it happens; it will change how you define problems.Design for context, not control.
Products live in ecosystems far bigger than our interfaces. The more you understand the context, tools, pressures, goals, then the smarter your design trade-offs become.Empathy isn’t soft; it’s strategic.
When you understand the real human and business motivations behind behavior, your design decisions get sharper, not fuzzier. Empathy isn’t about feeling nice; it’s about seeing clearly.
Next time, I’ll carry fewer assumptions, more curiosity, and walk-proof sneakers.
