Blog Post · 2024
I Interviewed 100 Strangers Before I Opened Figma
On research, backpackers, bad ideas, and what it actually means to design for someone.
Mwangi Oscar Kamau · UX Research & Design · Bangkok, Thailand
The Glass and the Ghost
There is a distinct lie we tell ourselves the moment we open a blank canvas in Figma. It’s the illusion of control. We draw a perfect rectangle, round the corners by exactly eight pixels, drop a clean, neutral typeface inside it, and call it a button. On the screen, it is pristine. It exists in an academic vacuum of pure logic, untouched by the messiness of the thermodynamic universe.
But the moment that button leaves your laptop and enters the wild, it meets the ghost in the machine: the user’s reality.
When a person stares at that glowing piece of glass, they aren't looking at your design system. They are looking through the lens of whatever kind of day they are having. Maybe their hands are shaking because they’re rushing to catch a late-night bus in a city where they don’t speak the language. Maybe their screen is cracked, or the midday Bangkok sun is washing out your meticulously chosen hex codes. More importantly, they bring their history.
We talk about "user friction" as if it’s a technical glitch, a drop-down menu that takes too many clicks or a form that lacks auto-fill. But the most profound friction is emotional. It is the anxiety of inputting a credit card number when you aren't sure if you have enough to cover rent next Tuesday. It is the subtle sting of pride when an app forces you to explicitly signal to your friends that you cannot afford the upscale restaurant they just pinned on the map.
A wireframe can map a click event, but it cannot map human dignity. When we ignore the invisible baggage our users carry, we aren’t designing solutions; we are just building beautiful digital walls for people to run into.
And yet, when a corporate giant drops a pristine, abstract directive onto your desk, the temptation to stay safe inside that digital illusion is almost overwhelming.
The Sentence That Sent Us Outside
That temptation arrived for us in a single, clinical sentence from Lonely Planet: Design a native travel companion app for Gen Z backpackers.
It was a classic corporate monolith of a brief. It came with a massive, cold checklist of ecosystem expectations: pre-trip planning, in-journey activities, and post-travel sharing. It demanded features for accommodation tracking, restaurant recommendations, and localized community social networking. On paper, it looked like a solvable mathematical equation.
Inside the quiet safety of the university corridor, our first instinct, the comfortable, muscle-memorized reflex of four UX students was to succumb to that exact illusion of control. Open Figma immediately. Start creating components. Pick a trending color palette. Move gray rectangles across a white grid.
It is a deeply intoxicating process because it makes you feel incredibly productive. You’re generating assets, closing tabs, and structuring data. But it’s a trap. If you don't break out of that echo chamber, you end up designing a mirror for yourself a beautiful, sterile interface built for an idealized user who thinks exactly like a designer sitting in an
air-conditioned room. You remain completely blind to the ghost in the machine.
We realized that if we stayed at our desks, we’d build something logically flawless and utterly useless. If we were going to design for the fluid, unpredictable chaos on the other side of the glass, we had to leave the whiteboard behind. We had to go where the rules of normal society drop away, where budgets are thin, and where community is built on the fly out of sheer survival.
We shut our laptops, walked past the university gates, and headed straight into the neon-lit belly of Khaosan Road.
The 100-Stranger Crucible
Khaosan Road at 5:00 PM is a sensory overload of humidity, cheap laundry detergent, and the clinking of Chang beer bottles. We split up, tasked with interviewing 25 travelers each, 100 conversations in total.
We timed it deliberately for the golden hour: that fleeting window after they’ve recovered from an overnight bus but before they’re three buckets deep into the night. We sat at sticky laminated tables in hostel restaurants under ceiling fans spinning for dear life, trying to look like we were casually texting when we were actually typing furious research notes on our phones.
We went looking for the technical answers: How do they split costs? How do they navigate a new city? How do they handle safety with people they met 48 hours ago?
What we found was a beautiful, contradictory mess that no design textbook prepares you for. We watched a real-life version of what we’d call "Penny Jenny a traveler quietly running out of money, and an entire group executing a silent, protective social contract to split bills unevenly without ever mentioning it out loud, just to save her dignity. We met a solo traveler tracking expenses across eight countries in a chaotic mental spreadsheet, desperately looking for validation that his broken system was fine.
They didn’t need a faster calculator. They needed a way to navigate the fragile social stakes of being vulnerable with strangers.
