In May 2021, I took a service and UX re-design consultancy project for a small but growing cryptocurrency exchange with a US MSB license. After a series of co-design workshops with the team aimed at understanding the ecosystem and business goals, I embarked on a user research journey aimed at…

Duolingo is a global language learning app that uses gamification to make language learning accessible and fun for millions of people across the world. It offers multiple languages to choose from and start learning. The app has both paid and free options. In terms of the content, the two…

Debunking the essence of blockchain technology and discussing practical examples of its use cases across different service sectors. — Blockchain might be one of the most notable technological innovations of the last decade. It has recently gained immense popularity in innovator communities, as it can solve some fundamental challenges recurring in many industries. …

Context and Challenge Supportiv is an online peer-to-peer mental health support service founded in 2018. It matches people with similar mental health struggles in online chatrooms. The chatrooms are moderated by trained human moderators to keep them troll free. The matching is done by a smart system that uses natural language processing. The…

Context The city of Milan was facing a problem with public housing. First, there were a lot of underutilized spaces in and around the social housing complexes (e.g., basements, abandoned parks, etc.). Second, even though most of these housing complexes were located in relatively central and functional areas of the city…

Prototyping is an experimental process where designers implement ideas into tangible forms of varying degrees of fidelity to capture design concepts and test them with users. Prototypes allow designers to refine and validate designs quickly and without the huge investment costs associated with development of entire solutions. Most importantly, prototypes…

Context 90% of the world’s goods transportation is seaborne and the share is projected to grow until 2030. This fact has lead to a rise in terms of container throughput. On the other hand, the shipping industry has always been focusing on ports and it has always been strictly reactive to…

Context In November 2019, during a design fiction workshop conducted at Politecnico Di Milano, our cohort of graduate service design students got challenged to save the future of our humanity from a catastrophe. We were given a fictional story called the “Milano Blackout.” The story was about a mysterious series of…

Sometimes, traditional research methods, such as surveys, focus groups, web analytics, diary studies, task analyses, etc. are not enough for product and service designers to understand the “Why’s” behind the users’ decisions and to get creative insights from the users to inform the design alternatives. Frequently, traditional methods don’t uncover…