About · Shad Abbaslou · Product Design Lead

Understand the people, then design the interface

The first principle, drawn: the line my taste would draw, and how nineteen sessions bent it, one at a time. A diagram of the idea, not data. Hold a session.

Understanding comes first. I don’t trust my own taste until I have watched someone contradict it. On Safe Space that meant nineteen interviews across all three corners of the service, teenagers, parents and clinicians, before anything was drawn.

The experience is a set of decisions. Who sees what, when, and at what cost to whom. The hardest call on that service was not a screen but a privacy default: what a teenager shares stays theirs until they choose otherwise.

The interface is where it either reads or it does not. A mood graph labelled “Wellbeing Score over 4 weeks” left two clinicians unsure whether higher was better; “Mood (1 = low, 10 = high)” did not. Systems before screens: tokens, rules and naming survive handoff, polished mocks do not.

Code is a design material. I hand over the thing, not a picture of the thing.

How that work was led across the files, the decisions other people lived with, where it rubbed and how a change gets into a system, is its own page, and three of the arguments the files make are written up as essays. For a panel, 001 and 003 are also a forty-minute deck, twenty slides, every line read from the files.

Abbaslou, S.006

Understand the people, then design the interface

LinkedIn is the direct route

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