At the risk of repeating my name entirely too many times on one page, I'm Mahfuz; a product designer with almost a decade in the industry.

Although I am happily a designer now, I didn't always want to do this.

I initially wanted to be a fireman-astronaut-midfield-ninja-F1 Driver, but my parents told me that's not realistic 😓

So I settled with becoming a developer, and studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at University. It was while there that my eyes opened (and jaw dropped) to the idea of design as a career. 

Specifically, October in my 3rd year.

We had a module on HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and the recommended reading was The Design of Everyday Things (too cliché?)

Initially I found the book a bit boring, but the more I forced myself to read - the more I found myself getting hooked.

One of the concepts that really got me, was the understanding of expected behaviours, and how we connected more to things that acted like things we knew, or like related them to - further research led me to:

Suddenly I started to see interaction design principles in everything – and the rest is history.

Intuition and working towards intuition is the most important, from a user perspective. I always use the analogy that the end goal should be that you can give your product to someone (or something 👽), and beyond the consideration of a basic understanding of technology, the app or software should feel like they've been using it their entire lives, even if it's only been 20 minutes.

Always try to sneak in little bits of joy, or delight, into an otherwise functional world. Most of what we do is goal-oriented - I wouldn't use my microwave if there was an even more convenient way to warm up my food. So the aim here is to take the functional and convenient task and find a way to add a little bit of joy into it, through the app or product - how this is accomplished depends entirely on the product itself and the users. This step is unique to the problem, "Joy can't be quantified."

Most interactions can be thought of through the lens of "eating a cake". There's almost no type of cake that isn't made better with icing or some filling. The perfect Victoria sponge can be made even more perfect with a delectable strawberry and cream filling. But fillings should be used sparingly or they too become unenjoyable. The same applies to design; iconography or animations (or drop shadows 👀). Just as no one likes a dry brick with their tea, I doubt many people above the age of 6 would love a kilogram of icing. Always aim to strike a balance between function and embellishments; when used sparingly, we can elevate almost anything beyond "perfect", but if abused, you'll have cavities.

I designed a portal for the FA which will allow all match officials within UK football to digitise their entire clerical process. As one interviewee noted; the referee portal would give him back his weekend - no more spending weekend evenings writing up essays, he can get it done in an hour and spend the rest of the time with his wife and children.

When working at Bridebook, I pushed to bring a degree of personalisation to the app - by using the users' names more in the app and allowing everyone to upload an image banner for their in-app homepage. It's great to have a wedding planner on your phone, but who wouldn't want to open their planner and think "I'm getting married!" every time? My work saw the app get nominated for Apple App Store recognition multiple times.

At BitOasis, I brought the same level of personalisation, but through more functional features. Features like having the app suggest remembering payment methods and suggest actions based on users' behaviour - these features were so influential within the region that many apps are still being inspired by them today.