Human error in serious systems hurts real people: wrong medications, failed safety checks, serious accidents. Hence, it is imperative to design systems where humans make fewer dangerous mistakes.
Animesh Tripathi, our next pathbreaker, Product Designer at Avenue Code (San Francisco), works on design of software for high-consequence professional environments where system complexity is high, stakes are real, and design decisions need to hold up under scrutiny.
Animesh talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about how his degree in psychology and human factors exposed him to the concept of designing to minimize human errors.
For students, whether you become an engineer, doctor, or designer, the people who understand why humans behave the way they do are rare and valuable in every field.
Animesh, Your background?
Looking back, the thread that connects my childhood to my career is curiosity about why people struggle with things. I grew up with computers at a time when few people had them, so I often ended up teaching others who didn’t know how to use them. This exposure gave me the opportunity to notice I was always more interested in why someone found a gadget confusing than in the gadget itself.
Creativity was my other strength. I was the designer for events in school and college, and I did theater and art at a serious level. So even early on, my two ingredients were there: understanding people, and making things.
What did you do for graduation / post-graduation?
I earned my Bachelor’s in Psychology from Delhi University and went straight into a Master’s in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (Delhi University) which is a field that studies how people think and behave at work.
After a year of working, I had the opportunity to move to the US for a second Master’s: an M.S. in Human Factors Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction at San Jose State University in California. Human Factors is the science of designing machines, software, and workplaces around how humans actually think and behave, rather than forcing people to adapt to badly designed systems.
What made you pursue such an offbeat, unconventional and unusual career in Human Factors Design?
Here is the simple version of my thought process. When a person makes a mistake using a machine or an app, say a nurse gives a wrong dose or a pilot presses the wrong switch, most people blame the person. Human Factors taught me to ask a different question: what about the design which made that mistake easy to make? Once you see the world that way, you cannot unsee it. Every confusing form and every badly labeled button becomes a puzzle you want to fix.
Through my research I discovered Edwin Hutchins, the scientist behind the theory of socially distributed cognition. In simple words, it is the idea that thinking does not happen only inside one person’s head. It happens across people, tools, and systems working together. That idea shaped how I design to this day.
A large part of my journey has honestly been lonely, and I am okay with that. In some ways I am even thankful, because it taught me to find my own answers.
As early as 2016, I was writing essays about how humans behave inside virtual reality. I was obsessed with the human side of technology before it became my job.
My first job at Apple showed me that the world’s best products are built by studying humans scientifically, not by guessing.
How did you plan the steps to get into the career you wanted?
I knew from the start that good design means deeply understanding how people think and act in the real world, which is exactly what psychology studies. So, my education was planned step by step: psychology, then research, then the GRE, and then Human Factors in the US.
For jobs, my approach had one rule: whatever my job title said, I kept practicing my core skill, human factors, inside it. The job market will not always offer you your dream title. You have to adapt, have grit, and stay determined about the goal you have in life. So instead of waiting for the perfect job, I took roles that were near my field and quietly did human factors work inside each one. Each job added one new layer of skill.
My 1st job was at Apple where I helped run studies where we watched real people try new technology.
Lesson:
How to observe people carefully, and that every small detail matters when you want to make something great.
Apple, User Studies Facilitator: I worked alongside specialists who relied on meticulous user data to confirm that consumer technologies had been tested extensively under realistic conditions. A large part of the job was running usability studies putting products in real users’ hands, asking them to use them naturally without training, and observing where ordinary human behavior caused the product to fall short. Much of the work was inventing novel test conditions, in collaboration with other human factors researchers, that would surface those failures before customers ever met them.
Lesson: How to observe people carefully, and that every small detail matters when you want to make something great.
Apple, Designer: I moved into Apple’s internal enterprise technology organization, the group that builds the software Apple’s own business runs on. My users were the internal teams handling sales, finance, and business operations: people working with large volumes of data, approvals, and reporting, where an error is not a customer complaint but a bad number in a system other people then rely on. I designed the interfaces for that work.
Lesson: Good design stops mistakes before they happen. In business systems, the cost of a confusing screen is not frustration, it is a wrong figure that quietly propagates through a dozen of decisions.
Apple, Senior Designer: I designed tools for engineers doing complicated work.
This is the part people usually find surprising. My users were not the customers who buy the phone, and they were not the industrial designers who shape it either. My users were the internal teams responsible for actually producing the product at scale, the engineers and technicians running the operation that turns a design into millions of physical units.
That operation runs on internal software. People have to record measurements, follow procedures in a fixed sequence, log results, flag anomalies, and make judgment calls, often at speed and at enormous volume. My job was to design those internal applications.
Why that matters: at that scale, a small design flaw is never small. If a screen makes it easy to log a value in the wrong field, or lets someone skip a step without noticing, or buries the one number a technician needs to make a decision on, that error does not stay inside the building. It multiplies across the production run and travels into the product in your hand.
So I was working one layer behind the product. I never designed the iPhone. I designed the software used by the people who make it, so that the act of making it correctly was easier than making it incorrectly.
The benefit to you as an end user is indirect but real. You never see my work. What you see is a device that came out right, because the people producing it had tools that made careless errors difficult and the correct action obvious. In my field we say good design is invisible. Mine work is often invisible twice over.
Dr. Reddy’s (Hyderabad): I moved into healthcare and led the design of an app where patients could talk to doctors and order medicines.
Lesson:
How to lead a team, and design for many different kinds of people at once.
Today (San Francisco): I design software for serious work where mistakes are costly. Every lesson from every past job comes together here. Each job gave me one tool, and now I carry the whole toolbox.
My degrees gave me scientific knowledge, the jobs gave me the craft, and my professional certification made my expertise officially verifiable.
Honestly, the people you work with become the network that opens future doors.
How did you get your first break?
My first break was a user-studies job at Apple in 2017, through a staffing agency. Cracking it was a combination of labor and luck.
The labor came first, by the time I applied, I had extensive training in experiment design and in both quantitative and qualitative research methods. More importantly, I had helped set up San Jose State University’s first human factors research lab. I supported my professor in running it and helped other graduate students run their experiments. That is unglamorous work, but it meant I had genuinely run studies, not just read about them.
The mapping was more direct than people assume. Apple was not hiring “a psychologist.” They were hiring someone who could design a rigorous study of human behavior and execute it carefully. That is exactly what an I-O psychology Master’s and a human factors program train you to do. The degree name did not match the job title, but the underlying skill matched almost perfectly.
The luck was in the timing the right recruiter happened to see my profile on Indeed. That got me an interview, nothing more.
The interview is where the labor paid off. I was interviewed by Apple’s human factors engineers, and they asked me about research design: how you construct an experiment when user experience is the thing you are measuring. Because that was both my academic training and my active weekly work at the lab, I could answer from experience rather than theory. It also helped that San Jose State’s program already had a reputation in the Bay Area, the people interviewing me knew the university and knew how rigorous the program was.
Here is the honest lesson. It was not a glamorous title, and it was a contract role, not a permanent one. But I treated it as a foot in the door of one of the best product companies in the world. I learned how Apple studies real humans, worked alongside their engineers, and turned a modest entry role into three years of increasingly senior work there. A small first job in a great learning environment beats a big title at a place where you learn nothing.
What were some of the challenges you faced? How did you address them?
Challenge 1: In India, almost nobody knows my field. When people asked what I do, there was no ready-made answer that they could recognize, like “doctor” or “engineer” .
How I addressed it: I made peace with it by being very clear to myself about what I do, why I do it, and how it makes people’s lives better. If you choose an unusual path, that inner clarity is what keeps you steady when nobody around you understands your work.
Challenge 2: There is a saying in my field: good design is invisible, because it just works. That means when you do your job perfectly, nobody notices you. But if you make a mistake, it can have very serious effects on real people. So, you get little credit when things go right and real responsibility when things go wrong.
How I addressed it: I learned to shoulder that responsibility and to find my reward in the work itself, not in applause. If you need constant recognition, this field will frustrate you. If you care about people quietly being safer and happier, it is deeply satisfying.
Challenge 3: Communication is harder than it looks. Early on I thought communicating meant talking more and explaining better. It does not.
How I addressed it: I learned that good communication is mostly listening. Listening deeply to users and teammates tells you what your product truly needs, long before anyone says it directly.
Where do you work now? What problems do you solve?
I am a Product Designer at Avenue Code, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Avenue Code is a technology consulting firm. Companies bring in consultancies like ours when they need to build or rebuild software but do not have the specialist teams in-house so we supply designers, engineers, and researchers who embed within the client’s own team and build alongside them. Their client base spans a broad range of industries: automotive, e-commerce and apparel, wellness brands, and others. I am not at liberty to name specific clients.
My own work sits in software for high-consequence professional environments the kind where someone reviews information and makes a decision that carries legal, financial, or safety weight, and where the rules governing that decision are strict and externally enforced.
Let me use a well-known example from my field to make it concrete, since I cannot describe my actual client. Air traffic control is the textbook case. Air Traffic Controllers are highly trained, but they are watching many aircrafts, holding several instructions in their head at once, and being interrupted constantly. If the display shows two aircrafts with similar call signs in similar-looking text, right next to each other, the controller will eventually confuse them. Not because they are careless, but because human memory and vision work a particular way and the screen was built without accounting for it. Once you redesign the display, that class of error largely disappears.
The work I do belongs to that family. My users are trained professionals reviewing large volumes of complex records and approving or rejecting each one, under rules they are legally required to follow. They are skilled, but they are also tired, interrupted, working at volume, and under time pressure. Everything that makes them human works against accuracy.
So my job is to make the right action the easy action. A small example of what that means in practice: if “approve” and “reject” sit side by side as two identical grey buttons, and one of them cannot be undone, then sooner or later someone tired at the end of a long shift will click the wrong one. The fix is not to tell people to be more careful that never works. The fix is to make the irreversible action look and behave differently from the reversible one, and to show the person what will happen before it happens.
More broadly, that means reducing the mental load the screen imposes, putting the information needed for a decision right where the decision is made rather than three clicks away, and designing the flow so the compliant path is also the fastest path. If following the rules is slower than breaking them, people will break them not out of malice, but because the design made the shortcut attractive. Good design removes that tension.
What skills are needed? How did you acquire them?
Three buckets:
psychology (how attention, memory, and errors affect work, academic learning),
design craft (turning research into screens, learned on the job across eight years),
and research methods (watching real users work, interviewing them, and analyzing where they struggle).
Recently I have added a fourth: coding with AI assistance, so I can build my own designs into real, working software.
What is a typical day like?
A mix: watching how real users work with the system and noting where they slow down or slip, sketching and refining designs, meeting with engineers and business teams to argue for the user’s point of view, and sometimes building tools myself.
What do you love about it?
That moment when a task that causes people’s daily frustrations and errors becomes a source of calm and obvious, and the users cannot even explain why it feels easier now. Invisible good design is the best kind.
How does your work benefit society?
Human error in serious systems hurts real people: wrong medications, failed safety checks, lost records. My whole career is about designing systems where humans make fewer dangerous mistakes.
At Dr. Reddy’s, that meant safer medication and correct prescription flows for patients. Today, it means fewer errors in high-consequence work. You will never see my name on it, but every error that did not happen because the design caught it, that is the benefit.
A specific memorable work that is close to you?
At Dr. Reddy’s, our scientists produced lots of valuable research, but it sat in long documents nobody had time to read. So, I asked: what format do people actually consume effortlessly? Short videos, like Reels and TikTok. So, I designed the company’s internal research library as short, swipeable cards, like Instagram Reels but for science. Suddenly people were absorbing research findings in the gaps between meetings, instead of “planning to read it later” forever. It is memorable to me because the insight was not technical at all, it was human: do not fight how people behave, design for how they actually are. That is my whole field in one project.
Your advice to students?
1. Study humans, whatever you build. Whether you become an engineer, doctor, or designer, the people who understand why humans behave the way they do are rare and valuable in every field.
2. Your first job’s title matters less than what you learn there. I started as a study facilitator. What you learn keeps growing over the years. A title does not.
3. Blame the design, not the person. In life, when someone makes a mistake, ask what made the mistake easy to make. This mindset will make you a better engineer, teammate, and human.
Future plans?
I’d like to keep deepening my work in human-centered design, eventually taking on larger-scale problems and, at some point, helping others entering the field find their footing.