The false choice everyone talks about
In design communities, there is this endless debate: should you be research-driven or intuition-driven? It is framed as a choice you have to make, like picking a political party. This is the wrong question. Every experienced designer I know uses both. The real skill is knowing when to use which one.
Research is not a ritual you perform to feel legitimate. It is a tool you reach for when you are genuinely uncertain. If I am designing a checkout flow for a market I do not understand — say, elderly users in rural India — I will test every assumption. But if I am designing the fourth iteration of a settings page for enterprise software, and I have done this 20 times before, running a full research study is theatre, not insight.
When skipping research worked — and when it did not
Early in my career, at an agency, I designed a mobile app dashboard purely from intuition. No user interviews, no testing, just me and Figma at 2 AM. The client loved it. The users? They found it confusing. The colour-coded charts I thought were intuitive required a legend that nobody read. I learned: my intuition was calibrated for me, not for them.
Years later, on the Hala App project, I had the opposite experience. We did extensive research with users who spoke Arabic and English. We learned that bilingual UI was not just a translation problem — it was a layout problem. Arabic is right-to-left. English is left-to-right. The same component needed to behave differently. No amount of intuition would have told me that. I had to see users struggle before I understood.
But then there was the Voyacher project. The core idea — a voucher-first travel booking platform — came from a half-hour conversation with the founder, not from a research report. I had travelled enough to know the pain of refunds and cancellations. The insight was personal. We validated it with data later, but the original spark came from lived experience, not a survey.
My rule of thumb
After all these years, I have settled on a simple rule: if the user is a version of me — similar context, similar tech comfort, similar goals — I trust my intuition and validate quickly. If the user is different from me in any significant way — culture, language, domain expertise, physical environment — I do not touch Figma until I have watched them work.
This is not a scientific rule. It is just pattern recognition from 11 years of making mistakes. But it has saved me from the two extremes: designing in a bubble and researching endlessly without shipping.
The best design process is the one that fits the project, not the one that fits a blog post. Do not let anyone make you feel guilty for trusting your gut, and do not let anyone convince you that research is always optional. Both are tools. Use the right one.