Finding the friction people have learned to work around.
An experience or a product can work without working well. VX Flow finds the hidden friction, the places where people search, repeat, hesitate or give up, and shows you what to change.
People finish the journey. They find, choose, use and complete, while still having to search, interpret, remember, second guess, ask and repeat. The organisation sees a working process. The person lives the workaround.
What we do
Two ways we work
One method, applied to two kinds of problem.
Experience and Systems Design
Finding and fixing the hidden friction in how people move through an experience, across digital, physical and organisational touchpoints.
Websites, navigation, forms and online journeys
Visitor journeys, wayfinding and on site experiences
Communication, processes and internal handoffs
Proven with real client work
Product Design
Designing products around the people who use them, the context they are used in, and the systems around them, from research through to a production ready design.
User research, problem definition and requirements
Concept, form, ergonomics and interaction
Prototyping, usability testing and production readiness
Grounded in formal design training
How we work
From friction to action
Start with one experience. Expand only where the evidence shows it is needed.
A toolkit for decisions, not a report for the shelf
01
Experience or product map
A shared view of what people actually move through.
02
Friction analysis
Where effort, confusion, repetition or delay appears.
03
Root cause
What is really creating the visible problem.
04
Priority opportunities
What is worth addressing first, and why.
05
Recommendations
What could change, grounded in the evidence.
06
Roadmap
What can happen now, next and later.
About
The expertise behind VX Flow
VX Flow is led by Kavya Vasavada, a strategic designer who looks at how people, services and systems actually work, and where they create friction that people quietly work around.
The practice pairs design research with a diagnostic method. It looks at what people actually do before proposing what should change, so recommendations sit on evidence rather than assumption.
Design foundationBachelor of Design and a Master's in Design Innovation Management
ApproachHuman centred, systems oriented, evidence led
Works acrossDigital, physical, organisational and product
Get in touch
Start with one journey.
One experience or product. One problem. One question. What is making this harder than it needs to be?
Behavioural research · Service design · Systems thinking | Observation, interviews, service blueprinting, signage audit
Overview
This project looks at how fragmented wayfinding and inconsistent visitor communication reduce engagement and create confusion across London Zoo's physical and digital touch points. The redesign proposes one navigation system that lines up signage, maps, staff communication and pre visit information.
The goal was not to make things prettier. It was to build a navigation system that scales, reads clearly in space, and helps people make better decisions at the points that matter.
Signage observed across the site. Each sign was reasonable on its own, yet the set did not share one logic.
The problem
Large public places often fail visitors not because of one bad sign, but because separate systems run without any shared logic. At London Zoo the physical signage, the digital maps and the staff each followed different rules. Visitors were left to reconcile those contradictions in real time, usually without realising they were doing it.
The central finding
Every visitor surveyed felt disoriented at some point during the visit. Every visitor also described the signage as clear. That gap, between how confident people felt and how they behaved, became the real design problem.
People were not aware they were navigating badly. They kept compensating: backtracking, rechecking maps, stopping staff, guessing. They rarely complained. The friction showed up instead as hesitation, tiredness and missed exhibits. This was not limited to certain kinds of visitor. It was structural.
Research approach
The work was built to capture behaviour, not just opinion. Observation sessions across busy days mapped where visitors hesitated, backtracked or gave up on a planned route. Seven points of high friction came up, decision spots where the system kept failing to give clear guidance.
A separate audit put the digital maps next to the physical signage. The two spoke in different spatial hierarchies, different colour logic and different route priorities. Someone who planned online arrived with a mental picture that the real place immediately contradicted.
Auditing the digital journey. The website carried its own hierarchy that the site itself then contradicted.Site visits mapped onto the visitor map. Circles mark bottlenecks, unclear exits and points where people looped back by mistake.
What the system was doing
The Zoo's navigation was not one broken thing. It was several systems working on their own, each reasonable in isolation, incoherent together.
Physical signage
Inconsistent hierarchy across zones
Digital maps
Different route logic to the onsite experience
Colour system
No consistent behavioural meaning
Staff guidance
Absorbing systemic navigation failures
The design response
One navigation framework built on three ideas. Put hierarchy first, so clear route sequencing cuts the number of decisions a visitor has to make. Keep it consistent across channels, so digital maps, physical signs and colour follow the same spatial rules and preparation gets confirmed at the gate rather than contradicted. Zone around behaviour, so clusters reflect how visitors actually move rather than how maps are usually drawn.
The signage hierarchy introduced three levels: primary anchors at major decision points, secondary signs along routes, and confirmation markers at destinations. Each level followed consistent rules for type, icon, colour and direction.
The proposed signage system, worked out level by level for directional, interactive and informative signs.The redesigned visitor map. Routes are organised around behavioural priority rather than a geographic listing.
The redesigned map reduces visual density by 37 percent and organises routes around behavioural priority rather than a geographic listing.
A stripped back sign placement view. Colour codes sign type and decision level, placed by observed friction rather than even distribution.
Users do not always report friction. Sometimes their behaviour reveals it.
Reflection
This project shaped how I think about briefs. The instinct in most navigation work is to improve the signs. The more useful question is what the system is asking people to do, and whether that is reasonable. This kind of hidden behavioural friction is the direction I want to keep working in.
iGEM Indian League: A Communication System Built From Nothing
Systems thinking · Brand and communication · Information design
Overview
iGEM Indian League was created to bring synthetic biology education to Indian students, from middle school to university. When the India chapter started it had no structure, no visual identity, no communication system and no clear way to reach students.
It needed a system that stayed aligned with the global iGEM identity, made synthetic biology feel approachable and exciting for Indian students, and built enough legitimacy to grow a community from nothing to a visible, trusted presence.
Interest in a STEM career among surveyed students. The interest is high, yet far fewer go on to science streams, especially girls.
The problem
iGEM is one of the most respected synthetic biology organisations in the world. It wanted to expand into India and make STEM research reachable for school and college students. But the Indian League was launching from scratch. There were no structures, no recognisable branding, no communication framework, and no pathway for students to understand or trust what the League offered.
The real challenge was not "make a logo". It was how to build a communication system that could launch a whole scientific league in a new country while staying true to the global organisation.
What we found
There was zero foundational infrastructure: no branding, no content system, no onboarding, no communication hierarchy, no awareness channels. The subject itself was unfamiliar, since most students had never heard of synthetic biology. And there was a trust gap. For a science that sounded advanced, students needed legitimacy, clarity, safety and proof that iGEM India lined up with the global organisation. On top of that, the identity had to speak to middle school, high school, undergraduates, teachers and parents at once.
How VX Flow shaped it
The League did not need branding first. It needed clarity, structure and trust. Before any visuals, we fixed the flow of understanding. We built the information architecture: what students see first, what they should understand next, what removes confusion, what builds trust, and what triggers action.
We reframed the subject with a simple progression, from familiar to understandable to aspirational to actionable. Then we localised the global identity without breaking it, keeping it recognisably iGEM while giving it more warmth, guidance and approachability.
The communication system, organised as a loop from awareness to understanding to trust to action, with the content types that sit under each.
The identity
The mark came from two roots. A biological root, the rhythm of the DNA double helix, used as the main structural element. And a cultural root, the radial symmetry and taper found in peacock feathers, used for geometry rather than as a literal feather. Together the DNA geometry and peacock curvature made a pattern that felt scientific, fluid and clearly Indian.
The two roots of the mark: the rhythm of DNA replication and the geometry of a peacock feather.The final iGEM Indian League identity. It fits inside the global iGEM ecosystem while still reading as India.
Impact
The system created a clear information pathway for first time learners and built trust across students, parents, schools and the global iGEM organisation. From no audience at all, it grew to more than a thousand organic followers in the first three to four months, with steady student enquiries and growing recognition among schools and universities. Each collaboration with the global team brought a clear jump in followers and interest.
Follower growth over the first year. Sharp early growth from workshops and outreach, then a steady organic climb.
During the first outreach cycle more than five hundred schools were contacted and over a hundred expressed interest. The modular template and colour system let rotating student volunteers keep publishing without diluting the identity, which turned branding into a repeatable content engine rather than a one time exercise.
The first year in numbers.
When many people build one experience, consistency has to come from the system, not from individual memory.
RDA Charlton Park: Communication That Does Not Depend on One Person
Service design · Systems diagnostic · Design governance | Independent consultant: diagnostic, system design and delivery
Context
RDA Charlton Park delivers free horse riding sessions for disabled children and adults. It runs on a small number of horses, strict safeguarding requirements, and volunteers. Because sessions are free, the charity depends entirely on visibility, volunteer capacity and donations to survive.
That makes communication an operational necessity, not a marketing nice to have. If a flyer takes an hour to make, that hour comes out of volunteer time. If external messaging looks inconsistent, schools and donors hesitate.
The problem
The charity's communication worked, but only because individuals worked hard. Every flyer and post was rebuilt from scratch. Every piece of external communication needed approval from one person, the Head Coach, so publishing simply stopped when she was unavailable. Volunteers did not feel confident to act without asking.
The organisation did not have a quality problem. It had a structure problem. All the decision making lived in people's heads instead of in shared rules.
Diagnostic
I ran a communication systems diagnostic across three layers: assets, decisions, and distribution.
Asset inventory. I audited every communication asset the charity produced, from flyers, event posts, captions and hashtags to email and outreach letters, and scored each on whether rules existed for it and whether it was recreated from scratch every time. The pattern was stark. Assets existed on every channel, but almost nothing had a rule governing its creation, approval or reuse.
Bottleneck analysis. Three structural friction points emerged.
Decision bottleneck
Single person approval for all external communication. When approval is based on a person instead of a rule, output pauses whenever that person is busy.
Execution bottleneck
Every asset rebuilt from zero, at roughly an hour per post. When execution requires fresh thinking each time, execution slows down.
Trust bottleneck
External audiences misunderstood the charity's scope because nothing visually signalled officialness or consistency. Trust is built through predictable signals, not repeated explanation.
I scored the system across five dimensions: asset clarity, decision independence, repeatability, speed and scalability. The overall friction score was 9 out of 10, a near total reliance on individual effort rather than structural support.
The intervention
I designed a rule based communication system that moves decisions out of individuals and into shared artifacts.
Approval logic. Instead of everything needing sign off, assets were classified. Safeguarding, policy and external partnership content stays approval gated. Routine content, such as event promotion, volunteer highlights and impact stories, follows pre agreed rules and publishes on its own. A monthly posting calendar is approved once, then volunteers execute without asking.
Template system. Five core templates, for an event flyer, an announcement, a volunteer highlight, an impact story and an educational post, each with fixed layout, colour and tone rules. Design became a repeatable operation instead of a creative task, which matters enormously when the design team is rotating volunteers.
Phased rollout. The system was introduced in four stages, from definition to template build to soft adoption to a monthly stabilisation review, specifically to avoid volunteer overwhelm, which is the biggest adoption risk in a charity context. Safeguarding content deliberately stayed human approved throughout.
Outcomes
Production time
Time to make a piece dropped from about an hour to a few minutes using templates.
No single point of failure
Single person approval was removed for routine content, so publishing no longer pauses when one person is away.
Legitimacy
Consistent external output now signals credibility to schools, families and donors.
Resilient to turnover
Volunteers can run the system without design skills, so it survives people coming and going.
The best system is the one the least available, least trained person can still operate correctly.
What this project taught me
Working with a safeguarding constrained, volunteer led charity forced a discipline I now apply everywhere. Governance is not bureaucracy. Done well, it is what lets small organisations act with the consistency of large ones without the headcount.
Getting People Back to Themselves: Home Rehab After Knee Replacement
Experience & systems design · Product design · Self initiated research
Overview
This was a self initiated project. The brief I set myself was broad: improve the home rehabilitation experience for someone recovering from lower limb surgery. My first real decision was where to focus. I chose adults aged sixty and over who are recovering at home after a total knee replacement. That group carries most of the problem, and I picked it from the evidence rather than because it was convenient. Deciding where to look, before designing anything, is where the method begins.
Where it started. Mapping knee surgery rehabilitation, the barriers around it, and who most needed the help.
The problem
Two failures explained almost everything I later saw. The first is the drop off in the second week. People begin their home programme with real determination and then quietly stop. Only about a third finish the full programme. The decline tends to follow the same sequence. Pain rises, so they skip a day. Skipping makes them feel guilty. The guilt makes them avoid it. Avoidance slowly becomes the normal state, and recovery stalls.
The second failure is about timing. All the guidance is handed over at once, at discharge, on a printed sheet, while the person is drowsy, sore and frightened. Three days later, alone and halfway through an exercise at seven in the morning, the thing they need to know is not in front of them. The information exists. It simply arrives at the wrong time and is absent when it actually matters.
Recovery rarely fails because someone lacks willpower. It fails in the second week, when confidence drops and the guidance shows up at the wrong moment.
What I found
The usual assumption is that older people lose motivation and struggle with technology. The evidence points the other way. After the first week, this age group tends to stay engaged more consistently than younger patients, who are often the first to fall away. So the real issue was never age or willpower. It was the loss of confidence in the early weeks, and guidance that appeared at the wrong time.
That changed what the design had to do. The job was not to invent motivation tricks. It was to build confidence and to put the right guidance in front of the person at the moment they needed it.
The emotional curve of home recovery. It holds steady in the first week, falls to its lowest point in the second, then climbs. Every part of the concept is aimed at that lowest point.Working through the person and the system: behaviour, flow, cognition, information, connections and conditions. This is where the second week dip came into focus.
From causes to requirements
Before choosing a solution, I turned each problem into a requirement, so that every later decision could be traced back to a cause instead of to personal taste. The product had to confirm, in the moment, that a movement was being done correctly, because the real barrier was fear rather than laziness. It had to give guidance at the place and time the action was happening, in a form that could be read at a glance. It had to show progress in language the person actually cared about, not clinical terms. A missed day could never be treated as a failure. Support had to be concentrated in the first few weeks. Reassurance had to come without making the person lean on their family. And a light line of contact with the physiotherapist had to stay open.
It also had to suit an older body recovering from surgery. Easy to put on with one hand, easy to clean, easy to store, and not bulky. It had to stay on the right side of the medical line too. Any safe limit or target belongs to the clinician. The product only carries that advice into the moment. It never decides for itself what counts as safe.
Turning each cause into a design requirement, alongside the first sketch of what the product had to do.
The concept
Almost none of the requirements pointed towards a large machine. They pointed towards information, feedback, confidence and timing. That moved the concept away from bulky equipment. It also ruled out a phone app, since someone in the middle of a movement cannot look at a screen.
What the requirements described was a soft knee wrap. Sensors sit in the fabric and read how far the knee is bending. When the person reaches the angle the clinician has set, the wrap gives one gentle buzz to say that this was the right amount and that it is enough. A display with large, high contrast, colour coded type shows the current state at a glance, and the whole thing can be managed with one hand. It tells the person when a session should start and when it is done.
The features that matter most are the ones tied to confidence. The buzz quietly answers the question that frightens people, which is whether they are damaging the knee. The clear display closes the gap where information used to be missing.
The concept on paper. A soft knee wrap with sensors in the fabric, a gentle buzz at the target angle, and a simple colour coded display.
The product in use
I wrote out the hardest moment as a short story. A woman skips a day because it hurt. The next morning she expects to be told off. Instead there is no scolding and no reminder that she is behind. The wrap simply offers the smallest honest step for the day. She does it. Quietly, in the background, her physiotherapist is told she wobbled, and a short, warm message arrives later that afternoon, at the moment it helps rather than as a lecture. She keeps going.
Storyboarding the hardest moment. The skip, the doing, and the reprieve the morning after a missed day.
Where it fits
A concept means little until you understand what already exists, so I looked at the field honestly. The pattern was consistent. Existing products treat the patient as a source of data for the clinician. None of them treat the patient as the person who needs feedback then and there, without a screen, in words they understand. And none of them is built around the second week, which is when people actually give up.
Smart sensor braces
Track movement and stream data, but they are built around the clinician's dashboard rather than the patient's confidence, and they rarely give simple feedback during the exercise itself.
Passive motion machines
Move the joint for you. They are bulky and stationary, and they build no confidence in moving on your own.
App based programmes
Give good guidance, but it sits behind a screen you cannot watch while balancing in the middle of a movement.
Pain relief devices
Manage a symptom rather than movement or confidence, so the real problem stays untouched.
My user is the frightened person at seven in the morning, not the physiotherapist at their desk.
People do not stop because they are weak. They stop the morning after a missed day. A warning would crush them. A little reassurance keeps them going.
What comes next
The project has a full spine now, from research through to a concept that is grounded in evidence and honest about its limits. The next step is not more design. It is real conversations, with a physiotherapist, with a family carer, and with someone who has actually had the surgery. After that comes measurement with real bodies, a prototype good enough to put in someone's hands, and testing that is allowed to change the design.
One question sits right at the centre, and only real people can answer it. To a frightened person, does a buzz feel like reassurance that they did it right, or like an alarm telling them to stop? The meaning of touch is not obvious, and that is exactly what testing is for.
Find the friction first. Then design what needs to change.
