Experience strategist based in London, working across physical and digital experience.
I help teams turn research into decisions they can build from.
Twelve years connecting discovery, foresight and design, so the thing that gets built is grounded in people’s needs.
Start a conversationA career spent moving between research and design, for teams shaping what comes next.
I’m Ala, an experience strategist and designer based in London. Over the past twelve years I’ve shaped strategy, collaborated with and led project teams for Gensler, Doblin, Ford, IDEO, Lululemon, and a mix of corporate clients and design-led start-ups.
Most of my work happens in the gap between “what we learned” and “what to do about it”, taking discovery, foresight and stakeholder input and turning it into a direction design, brand or product teams can build on.
I started out as a visual communicator, focused on brand, which taught me to design for authenticity. Start-ups taught me to build dialogue with communities. Consulting is where I’ve brought those two together. That mix sits on a multidisciplinary academic foundation, which keeps me as comfortable with data and systems as I am with intuition and craft.
How I work
Discovery & insight research
Combining interviews, co-creation, secondary research and stakeholder perspectives to uncover the needs, behaviours and tensions, and use them as springboards for designing the future.
Experience strategy
Turning insight into a point of view. Vision-setting, foresight and experience principles that give physical, digital and connected experiences a direction.
Concept development & prototyping
Making strategy tangible is where I feel most comfortable. Sacrificial concepts and prototypes give teams something concrete to test, challenge and align around.
Stakeholder alignment & client engagement
Bringing different perspectives into the room and moving a group towards shared understanding and actionable decisions. I believe in bringing clients along the entire journey, building ownership of the work they’ll be building on.
Retail, lifestyle and connected products.
Gensler
Experience strategy, vision setting and foresight for retail and lifestyle environments, working across architecture, interiors, brand and landscape. Projects spanned toys and games, mobility, property development and financial services.
IDEO
Research, concept development and strategic prototyping across financial services, automotive, mobility, hospitality, fashion and home. I worked with multidisciplinary teams to turn emerging insights into concepts, experiences and decisions — supported by vision setting and stakeholder alignment.
Lululemon Studio
Discovery research, concept testing and strategic prototyping for next-generation digital products, content and marketing opportunities across fitness, wellness and connected tech. Research and workshops helped establish a shared insight base for the team to build from.
Selected clients
A few words from people I’ve worked with.
“Ala’s research is quite literally the nutrients we need to inform our innovations.”
“The work we did together has definitely changed and shaped the way we think about our customers. I find myself often thinking or referring back to some of the interviews I conducted last summer with Ala’s support and advice.”
“Nobody has pulled so many strands together and combined the strategy with the physical design and experiences.”
Contact
Tell me what you’re working on.
A line or two on the project and what’s prompting the conversation is plenty to start.
Studio emailala@onthelookoutstudio.com
Connect on LinkedIn
Read the Substack