Designing for the Worst Day of Your Customer’s Life
Design often assumes ideal conditions: users are calm, connected, and focused. But in reality, many of our products show up during people’s most vulnerable moments. What does it take to design for those moments - when the user is overwhelmed, the system is breaking down, and the stakes are high?
In this talk, Ford designer Sarika Goel shares the hard-earned, behind-the-scenes process of turning fragile safety features into robust, life-supporting systems.
The work wasn’t clean or linear. It involved tough calls - like using dark patterns to nudge users toward life-saving opt-ins - and even tougher lessons, like watching a stranded customer try 69 times to restart their car from a failed app. Through iteration, cross-functional alignment, and real-world simulation, Sarika and her team transformed their approach.
This journey led to a 5-part framework for crisis-ready design:
- Design for distress, by addressing the real cognitive and emotional state of users under pressure.
- Elevate the edge case, by advocating for scenarios that are unlikely to ever happen but likely to cause serious damage.
- Build for breakdown, by designing fallbacks and failsafes across every dependency, from multitasking users to poor network connection.
- Prototype for real behaviour, not just ideal flows or assumed logic.
- Test in chaos, not calm, by simulating stress and failure in research, not just usability.
Join to walk away not only with this framework, but with practical ways to apply it in your own organisations – from updating tools and documentation, to influencing roadmap decisions, to pushing for deeper, more inclusive testing.
Because even if you're not designing emergency systems, your product might still be used during someone’s most vulnerable moment – and your design must meet them there.
