What Navigating Unfamiliar Systems Taught Me About Designing for Everyone
By Hakan Karaaytu, AU Assistant Professor & UX Researcher
When you move to a new country, you start noticing things that locals stopped seeing years ago. How forms are written. How systems flow. How institutions expect you to already know the rules that nobody actually explains. You become acutely aware of the gap between what is assumed and what is actually clear — between what feels obvious if you grew up inside a system and what feels like navigating in the dark if you did not.
That experience changed how I practice research. And I have come to believe that this kind of outsider vision — the capacity to see the invisible assumptions embedded in systems — is one of the most undervalued assets a UX researcher can bring to a team.
Confusion Is Not a Lack of Intelligence. It Is a Lack of Context.
Early in my time in the United States, I encountered a campus form with a field asking for my "permanent address." Simple question, right? Except I did not have a permanent address in the US yet. Did they mean my home country address? My temporary accommodation? My intended address once I found housing? The form did not say — because for someone who grew up here, "permanent address" carries an obvious, unambiguous meaning. For me, in that moment, it was genuinely unclear.
I remember sitting with that form, wondering if I was overthinking it. Wondering if everyone else simply knew what this meant and I was the only one who did not. That specific feeling — am I missing something obvious? — I have carried into every research project since. Because that is precisely what users experience when they encounter interfaces built on assumptions they do not share.
The insight sounds simple, but its implications are significant: confusion is not a user failure. It is a design failure — specifically, a failure to account for the full range of people who will encounter the system. Once you understand that distinction in your bones, you cannot unsee it.
I started noticing the pattern everywhere. Job application portals formatted around very American conventions. Banking interfaces that assumed fluency with credit scores and routing numbers. Forms asking about "extracurricular activities" that encoded a specific model of what schooling looks like — one that did not match my own experience. None of these were designed to exclude. But they were not designed with me in mind, either. And that gap is where enormous amounts of user friction silently accumulate.
Empathy as Method, Not Just Mindset
What my background as an immigrant gave me is not simply greater empathy as a personality trait. It is a direct, embodied reference point for what it feels like to be confused by something that was not designed for you. That experiential knowledge functions as a methodological tool — it sharpens what I notice during research.
In a usability study conducted in one of my UX research classes, students were testing a travel booking interface. One field asked users to select their "home airport." Most participants moved through it without hesitation. But one international student — someone who had recently relocated for graduate school — paused. "Home airport... do they mean where I live now? Or where I'm originally from?"
That question opened an entire design conversation. Because "home" is not a simple geographic reference when you have moved across the world. It is a term that carries cultural weight and situational ambiguity. I understood the confusion immediately — I had lived a version of it. And because I understood it, I could help the team see it not as an edge case to be dismissed but as a design assumption worth examining. Renaming the field "Departure airport" resolved the ambiguity entirely, for every user, not just those for whom "home" is complicated.
This is what inclusive research practice looks like in action. Not a checklist item, not a diversity audit — but a researcher who brings a different vantage point into the room and uses it to catch what the rest of the team, through no fault of their own, has learned to overlook.
Systems Are Never Neutral
Every system encodes assumptions about who its default user is. This is not a cynical observation — it is a structural one. Design decisions are made by people with particular experiences, working within particular constraints, imagining particular users. The result is that systems flow smoothly for people who match those assumptions and create friction for everyone else.
Inclusive design begins with making that dynamic visible. In practice, this means asking a set of questions that do not come naturally when a team is deep in the work: Who is excluded by this design — not intentionally, but by default? When we say this interface is "intuitive," intuitive for whom? When we say this language is "clear," clear to someone reading it in their second language?
I push students on this regularly. We will be reviewing a prototype and someone will describe it as "really straightforward." My response is always: straightforward for you, in this room, with your background? Or straightforward for someone encountering this kind of interface for the first time, or navigating it on a slow connection, or reading it without the cultural context we are all unconsciously carrying?
In one student project, a campus resource app included a section on financial aid that assumed users understood the American financial aid system — FAFSA, Pell Grants, subsidized versus unsubsidized loans. An international student on the team pointed out that this language was functionally opaque for a significant portion of the user base. The team reworked the section, adding clearer definitions, separating information by student type, and reducing assumed knowledge. The result was better for international students — and also for first-generation students, transfer students, and anyone else approaching the university system without prior context.
This is the central argument for inclusive design that often goes unmade: designing for the margins consistently improves the experience for the center. When you build for users who are not already fluent in your system's assumptions, you build something that works better for everyone.
The View From Outside the Frame
There is a version of UX research that centers a default user — usually someone who is relatively similar to the people who built the product — and optimizes relentlessly for that person's experience. It produces results that are efficient and locally valid, but systematically blind to everyone who falls outside that center.
The alternative is research that treats diversity of experience not as a complication but as an epistemological resource. Researchers who have had to decode systems that were not built for them — who have personally experienced what it feels like to encounter a form, an interface, or an institution and realize it was designed with someone else in mind — carry that knowledge into their work. They notice the invisible assumptions. They ask the questions that do not occur to people for whom the default assumptions have always held.
My journey from Turkey to the United States, from journalism to academia to UX research, has been a sustained lesson in what it means to stand slightly outside the frame. That position has made me a more careful researcher. It has sharpened my attention to language, to friction, to the moments when a design quietly says this is obvious — when what it really means is this is obvious if you are like us.
If you are building a research practice, this is the case for methodological diversity that goes beyond representation as an ethical value. Researchers who have navigated different systems, lived different challenges, and questioned assumptions that others have never had to question will catch things a homogeneous team never would. They will ask better questions. They will notice gaps before those gaps become crises. And they will build products that genuinely work for more people.
The best insights in research often come from outsiders who notice what insiders have learned to ignore. That outsider vision is not a liability. It is exactly what the work requires.
Hakan Karaaytu is an Assistant Professor and UX researcher working at the intersection of journalism, academic inquiry, and human-centered design. He can be reached at hakanhakan@hakankaraaytu.com
The ideas explored in this post were inspired by The Research Room , a podcast about how research shapes design, education, and everyday life.
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