Katdesign Studio Blog

Long before ChatGPT and Claude started completing our thoughts, the world of film was already sketching out the architecture of our digital tomorrow. These cinematic entries aren't merely disjointed prophecies; they represent a persistent chronicle of how humans and machines evolve together, a decades-long journey that investigated our emotional vulnerabilities well before it questioned our very existence.

For years, the design world has championed a singular focus: desirability. We have been trained to obsess over the user, map their journeys, and create frictionless, delightful experiences. But as design has claimed its rightful seat at the executive table, a harsh reality has emerged: desirability alone is not enough. If a product is beautiful and usable but drains the company's resources, it lacks viability, and a business without financial sustainability simply cannot survive.

Walk into any product organisation today and you'll find Agile rituals running on autopilot. Stand-ups at 9:15. Sprint planning every other Tuesday. A retro at the end. Burn-down charts pinned to a wall someone walks past on the way to the coffee machine. The mechanics are there. The roles are filled. The Jira board moves. And somehow, the team still ships things that don't quite work, blames each other when they don't, and quietly resents the process that was supposed to fix exactly that.

Ever feel like your product roadmap is a beautifully timed train that constantly gets derailed by the "design bottleneck"? It’s a classic tech trap: features get the go-ahead, timelines get published, but an un-scoped design phase leads to rushed decisions, shifting mid-build requirements, and a staggering 26% of engineering time wasted on predictable rework. The truth is, your designers aren't slow, your planning process is just missing a shared baseline. Here is how a lightweight, structured Design Phase Delivery Framework can align your product, design, and engineering teams, stop late-stage scope creep, and finally protect your delivery timelines from going up in flames.

The numbers behind starting a tech company have always been terrifying: 4 out of 5 startups fail. Founders accept those odds because the payoff for surviving the gauntlet—sacrificing years of market-rate salary, working 80-hour weeks, and risking personal financial ruin—is the chance to build generational wealth. With the 2026 Federal Budget, the government just fundamentally disrupted that risk-reward equation.

Why consistent across devices is the wrong goal in industrial software, and what to aim for instead. A practitioner's take on building one design system that holds its shape across CAD desktop tools, web dashboards, and ruggedised field HMIs, where colour is a safety artefact and a Stop button has to mean Stop whether it's clicked with a mouse or jabbed with a gloved hand.

Presenting "Get your hands dirty: Gaining the trust of hard to reach users" at Design Research 2021, Orica's Katrina Ryl and Roland Wimbush join the UX Australia podcast to chat their experiences working with the mining and construction industry.

Most of the industry is dancing around this conversation. After 25 years designing complex systems, from mining control rooms to enterprise software, I'm going to say it plainly.

This presentation is a crash course presented to the wider business to help embed the uer experience practise. top take aways are; What qualitative user research is and why you should do it How to fit user research into your own processes Understand what a usability test is, what are user interviews, contextual inquiry, and user observations

Have you ever tried to research a user group, but struggled to get in front of them using standard methods? Maybe they live somewhere with low connectivity. Maybe they're not digital natives. Maybe they're hostile to outsiders. Whatever the reason, they just aren't talking. In this webinar, we talk to two UXers who take contextual inquiry far beyond the local Woolies. They will share their war stories, their tips, and their tricks so that you can begin to mine for those hard to reach insights.

Have you ever tried to research a user group, but struggled to get in front of them using standard methods? Maybe they live somewhere with low connectivity. Maybe they're not digital natives. Maybe they're hostile to outsiders. Whatever the reason, they just aren't talking. Presented at UX Australia Design Research Conference 2021. Co-presented with Roland Wimbush