The Onyx journal.

UX

The Blueprint of Digital Transformation: Moving from Legacy Systems to Modern UX

June 4, 2026 4 min read

This article outlines a strategic blueprint for digital transformation, addressing how corporations can successfully migrate complex legacy software into modern, user-centric interfaces. Entrenched system inertia often generates operational friction and high maintenance costs, which businesses can mitigate through a design-first methodology. By executing a data-driven discovery phase, organisations can map existing workflows and validate insights empirically. Utilizing advanced design systems, low-fidelity wireframes, and interactive prototypes ensures functional clarity before engineering begins. Ultimately, the framework delivers secure, scalable backend architectures that integrate seamlessly with legacy data, driving long-term corporate agility and institutional adoption.

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UX

Minimising Cart Abandonment: A Frictionless Approach to E-Commerce Checkout Design

June 2, 2026 4 min read

To reduce cart abandonment, e-commerce platforms must transform the checkout sequence into a frictionless, user-centric pipeline. Because every unnecessary form field increases cognitive load, minimizing inputs and leveraging address autocomplete are vital to prevent interaction fatigue. Forcing account registration disrupts purchase momentum; offering a prominent guest checkout option preserves it. Visually, interfaces should adopt a clean, single-column architecture supported by inline error validation and linear progress indicators to guide users predictably. Finally, hidden fees destroy consumer trust. Surfacing all shipping and tax costs upfront eliminates price shock, effectively converting initial shopping intent into completed sales.

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UX

11 of 12 AI Wireframes Were Bad — Here’s Why

May 31, 2026 4 min read

This morning I generated 12 wireframe variants for a UAE wealth-management app. Start to finish: 47 minutes. Here’s the part nobody puts in the AI demos: 11 of…

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UX

Hourly Billing Is Dead — Charge for Judgement

May 31, 2026 4 min read

A hot take to end the week, and I mean every word of it: if your studio is still charging by the hour in 2026, you’re charging for…

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UX

A Translation Is Not a Localisation

May 31, 2026 5 min read

Why a Saudi banking app needs more than a flipped layout Picture two people opening their banking app on a Tuesday morning. One is in Chicago. One is…

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Strategy

The New Economics of Product Design: Disrupting the Agency Retainer Model in 2026

2026 LinkedIn (Onyx)

AI is reshaping how design agencies price, scope, and deliver. The retainer model that ruled the last decade is breaking. This piece explains why per-hour billing is dead, what replaces it, and how product-led startups should structure design partnerships now.

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Cro

The Architecture of Social Proof: Maximising the Impact of User Reviews

2026 LinkedIn (Onyx)

Reviews are the single highest-leverage trust signal on a product page — yet most brands display them poorly. This article unpacks the architecture of effective social proof: placement, density, recency, response patterns, and the psychology of why some review walls convert and others don't.

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Trust

The Architecture of Digital Trust: Strategic UX as a Catalyst for Business Growth

2026 LinkedIn (Onyx)

Trust isn't a marketing slogan — it's an architectural property of a digital product. This piece breaks down the layers that compound digital trust: visual integrity, content credibility, transactional clarity, and post-purchase honesty — and how strategic UX wires all four into a competitive moat.

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Retention

The Strategic Necessity of Instant Context: Optimising User Retention

2026 LinkedIn (Onyx)

Users decide within seconds whether a product respects their time. Instant context — knowing where they are, what's possible, and why it matters — is the new retention lever. This article shows how onboarding, navigation, and microcopy collaborate to deliver instant context at scale.

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Ethical Ux

White Hat UX in E-Commerce: A Practical Guide for CXOs to Build Ethical, Trust-Driven Digital Experiences

2025 LinkedIn

The opposite of dark patterns. A CXO-level playbook for designing e-commerce experiences that win on trust rather than tricks. Covers transparent pricing, honest urgency, real social proof, and clean checkout flows — and why ethical UX outperforms manipulative UX over a 12-month horizon.

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Psychology

Designing Intrinsic Motivation: How Great UX Engages Users

2025 LinkedIn

Extrinsic rewards (points, badges, streaks) work — until they don't. Intrinsic motivation runs deeper and lasts longer. This piece explores autonomy, mastery, and purpose as design substrates, and shows how the best products engineer intrinsic engagement without ever feeling gamified.

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Ai-First

Evolution of UX: From Photoshop Templates to AI-Driven Design

2025 LinkedIn

A first-person walk through 23 years of UX tooling — from Photoshop comps in 2002 to Figma collaboration to AI-assisted design in 2025. The lesson isn't that tools changed; it's that judgment didn't. Senior designers using AI ship faster without sacrificing taste.

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Innovation

Why Every Product-Based Company Needs to Innovate — A Critical Look

2025 LinkedIn

Innovation theatre vs real innovation. This article calls out the gap between companies that talk innovation and those that ship it — and explains why product-led organisations cannot survive a 5-year horizon without committing to genuine UX-driven product evolution.

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Industry

Transforming Air Travel: How Boeing & Competitors Are Shaping the Future

2025 LinkedIn

An outsider's UX perspective on the aviation industry. Looks at how Boeing, Airbus, and emerging competitors are rethinking passenger experience, cockpit UX, and ground operations — and what consumer-app designers can learn from systems where errors cost lives, not just conversions.

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Case Study

Durian E-Commerce Redesign — Overview

May 2024 Medium

A complete redesign of Durian, India's leading furniture retailer. Walks through the brief, user research, IA decisions, visual rework, and the 5× sales-growth outcome that resulted from applying the SUCCESS Centered Design (UX + TAPE) framework end-to-end.

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Case Study

UX Project Case Study: GrowBiz by MyDukan

May 2024 Medium

How Onyx redesigned MyDukan's GrowBiz platform — a B2B SaaS for India's small-business owners. Covers user persona segmentation across tier-2 and tier-3 cities, vernacular UX considerations, and the simplified onboarding flow that improved registration completion rates significantly.

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Fintech Ux

Corporate Banking & Usability

Jul 2022 Medium

Corporate banking apps face a unique UX challenge: dense data, regulated workflows, and millennial users who expect consumer-grade clarity. This piece examines how AI and intuitive UX are reshaping enterprise banking — and which apps (Shine, Revolut Business) are winning at it.

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Behavioural Ux

Hyperbolic Discounting

Jun 2022 Medium

Why users grab a smaller reward today over a bigger reward tomorrow — and what that means for product design. Hyperbolic discounting explains free trials, BNPL adoption, and 'pay later' conversion patterns. A cognitive bias that, designed for, becomes a conversion engine.

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Behavioural Ux

Extrinsic Reward in UX Design

Jun 2022 Medium

Points, badges, streaks, and tiered rewards — when extrinsic motivation works in product UX, when it backfires, and when it dilutes intrinsic engagement. Includes a framework for layering extrinsic rewards onto interfaces without turning them into gambling-like loops.

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Behavioural Ux

Paradox of Choice

May 2022 Medium

More choice doesn't mean more conversion — it often means decision paralysis. This article explores Schwartz's paradox of choice in e-commerce contexts, and shows how curation, defaults, and progressive disclosure beat sprawling 'show everything' product catalogues.

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Ux Process

Discovery — The Preliminary UX Phase

May 2022 Medium

Discovery is where most UX projects either succeed or quietly fail. This piece breaks down the research, stakeholder interviews, and competitive audits that constitute a real discovery phase — and the warning signs of an agency skipping it to save time.

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Behavioural Ux

Conditioning in UX Design

May 2022 Medium

Classical and operant conditioning aren't just lab psychology — they're the engine behind UPI rewards, social media notifications, and habit-forming apps. This article maps both kinds of conditioning onto practical UX patterns, with examples and ethical guardrails.

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Ux Fundamentals

UXCriteria for Good Design

May 2022 Medium

Aesthetic, yes. But also functional, accessible, performant, and trustworthy. This piece codifies the criteria Onyx applies when auditing whether a design is genuinely 'good' — beyond visual polish — and how teams can self-assess their interfaces against the same checklist.

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Tape Framework

How Emotional Design Captures User Interest

May 2022 Medium

The 'E' in TAPE. Emotion isn't a side effect of good design — it's the channel through which users decide if they trust a product. This article explores aesthetic-emotional triggers, microcopy, motion, and tone-of-voice as deliberate emotional levers.

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Tape Framework

Consumer Loyalty Building, the TAPE Way

May 2022 Medium

The pillar piece introducing TAPE — Trust, Attachment, Persuasion, Emotion — as Onyx's proprietary framework for designing consumer loyalty. Shows how each parameter compounds the others, and why TAPE outperforms classic usability-only design across e-commerce, FinTech, and SaaS.

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Trust

Commitment in Design

May 2022 Medium

Designs make implicit promises to users. Commitment is the discipline of keeping those promises. This piece walks through clear terms, transparent pricing, consistent UI patterns, and seamless transactions — the small reliability signals that compound into long-term brand loyalty.

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Cro

A / B Testing for Business Conversions

May 2022 Medium

A practical guide to A/B testing as a continuous design discipline. Covers what to test (CTAs, layouts, colour, copy), what NOT to test (everything at once), how to size samples, and why most teams over-test minor elements while leaving conversion-critical decisions to gut feel.

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Visual Ux

The Contrast Principle

May 2022 Medium

Contrast is the most under-leveraged tool in the UX kit. This piece examines how line, shape, colour, and white space create hierarchy that guides the eye — and why minimalist designs often win precisely because they lean hard into contrast rather than decoration.

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Tape Framework

Attachment in Design — Built to Last

May 2022 Medium

The 'A' in TAPE. Attachment is what brings users back tomorrow — usefulness, reliability, accountability, and the small touches that make a product feel cared for. This article unpacks how brands like Apple and Pepperfry engineer attachment without resorting to lock-in.

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Tape Framework

Persuasion Is a Key to Driving Business Conversions

May 2022 Medium

The 'P' in TAPE. Persuasion in UX isn't manipulation — it's the disciplined use of social proof, scarcity, and authority cues that nudge undecided users toward action. This piece examines ethical persuasion, the line where it becomes manipulation, and how to stay on the right side.

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Ux Process

Mind Mapping User Experience

May 2020 LinkedIn

The human brain processes images 60,000× faster than text. Mind mapping leverages this to make UX research, IA, and personas more memorable and shareable. This article applies Tony Buzan's mind-map technique to UX work and shows how visual thinking accelerates team alignment.

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Ux Process

UX Research — Why Is It Necessary?

2020 LinkedIn

Designers building from client briefs without research produce run-of-the-mill products. This piece argues that UX research is the single highest-ROI investment in any project — and walks through lean research, guerrilla testing, heuristic evaluation, and persona-building methods that fit any budget.

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Nui

Natural User Experiences: Touch, Voice, Gesture & More

2020 LinkedIn

Natural User Interfaces extend UX beyond clicks. This article explores how touch, voice, and gesture interfaces are converging — Google Maps, self-driving cars, Alexa — and what designers must understand about sensory cognition to design for the next generation of interfaces.

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Ethical Ux

Dark Patterns in UX — Is It Ethical?

2020 LinkedIn

The original piece — published well before regulators caught up. This article exposes the most common dark patterns in e-commerce, hotel booking, and subscription services: false scarcity, hidden costs, manipulative defaults — and why short-term conversion gains destroy long-term trust.

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Remote Work

The Unexplored Culture of Work From Home at the Time of Pandemic

Apr 2020 LinkedIn

Written in the first days of the COVID lockdown — before WFH became normalised. The piece predicts the rise of remote-first design teams, makes the case for distributed UX studios, and outlines how small startups can save 60-66% on design costs by hiring remote teams over in-house seniors.

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Tape Framework

TAPE in EdTech

Feb 2022 Onyx Blog

How the TAPE framework applies to EdTech specifically — where the design challenge is replacing a classroom teacher with a screen. Covers engagement mechanics, assessment UX, parent-teacher dashboards, and the specific Trust signals that pre-pay-for-course parents need before clicking buy.

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Psychology

UX Psychology Principles

Sep 2020 Digital First Magazine

Featured piece in Digital First Magazine. A primer on the psychological principles every UX designer should internalise: Hick's Law, Fitts's Law, Miller's Rule, the Peak-End Rule, and the cognitive biases that shape user decisions on every product screen.

Read on Digital First Magazine ↗

Behavioural Ux

How Users Get Motivated Towards Using Some Apps Due to the Disastrous Situation

Jun 2020 CXO Outlook

Featured piece in CXO Outlook, written during early COVID. Examines which apps surged in the lockdown — Zoom, Aarogya Setu, grocery delivery — and what their adoption tells us about user motivation under stress: convenience, safety, social connection, and reduced friction win.

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Fintech Case Study

UpWards Mobile App — Quickest Loan Application UX

Sep 2019 Medium

A case study on Upwards, India's quickest personal-loan provider. Walks through the user research with millennials seeking short-term loans, persona development across software testers and entrepreneurs, and the UX flow that reduced application time from minutes to under 60 seconds.

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Case Study

WorkMarshal Mobile App — Task Management UX

Aug 2019 Medium

Designing the mobile app for WorkMarshal, a fresh task-management system. Walks through the brief, the user research conducted with team leaders and individual contributors, and the visual language Onyx developed to differentiate WorkMarshal from incumbent task tools.

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Automation

Robotic Process Automation

Pre-2020 LinkedIn

An early piece on RPA — what it is, where it fits, and why every enterprise UX team should care. Walks through use cases in banking, insurance, and back-office operations where bot-driven automation reduces task time by 70-80% while freeing humans for higher-judgement work.

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Industry

Improving Economic Stability in the Construction Industry

Pre-2020 LinkedIn

An industry-specific look at how digital tools and UX-led product design can stabilise the construction sector — historically one of the slowest-to-digitise industries. Covers field-app design, payroll automation, and the stakeholder-management challenges unique to construction tech.

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Niche Ux

Designing for Kids

Pre-2020 LinkedIn

Designing digital products for children isn't a smaller version of designing for adults — it's a different discipline. This article covers age-appropriate interaction patterns, parental-control UX, attention-span budgets, and the safeguarding obligations that any kid-targeted product carries.

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