Brain
DEX
BEHIND THE DESIGNINTERVIEW SERIES
001
INTERVIEW•1 FEB 2024•53 MIN 22 SEC
Founders of By Beyond, Creative Studio focussing on Brand Identity.
9 9
RoniDagan®
9 9
RoniDagan®
The Map Was Wrong
Before we get into the design work itself — can you tell me a little about the project? What was brain.space, who were you working with, and how did this thing come to exist in the first place?
So yea, brain.space started as a fairly focused idea: build a platform that lets research labs collect and manage neural data. EEG signals, cognitive task results, physiological measurements. The kind of data that previously lived in spreadsheets, local hard drives, proprietary lab software that hadn't been updated since 2009. The founding team saw a real gap — neuroscience research was becoming more sophisticated, but the infrastructure researchers were using to manage data hadn't kept up.By the time I joined, the product had a working structure. Projects contained Flows — experimental protocols that defined which cognitive tasks a participant would go through, in what order, with what timing. Flows contained Runs, which were individual executions of the protocol with a specific participant. Runs contained Sessions, which were the granular recordings. The dashboard showed you aggregate metrics: completion rates, signal quality, hardware status. It was genuinely useful. There were labs using it across Europe.The team was small. My closest collaborator was the product manager — we built the information architecture together, though he owned it. I remember arguing with him for days about whether Runs needed to be a separate entity from Flows. He was right that they did. That kind of negotiation defined how the product got built.The clinical side came in later. Labs weren't the only ones interested — neurologists running experimental treatment protocols saw the platform as a way to track patients over time. That's when things got complicated, because a researcher and a clinician use the same data in completely different ways. And management, to their credit, didn't want to close the door on either market. They needed both. That pressure is where the design problem I want to talk about really began.On the surface it was exactly that. The product had a clear structure — you'd create a Project, build a Flow inside it that defined the experimental protocol, run that flow with participants, and collect Sessions of neural data. The dashboard showed you aggregate metrics: how many sessions completed, average signal quality, hardware status. It was genuinely useful. There were labs using it across Europe, researchers tracking EEG responses to cognitive tasks, clinicians running treatment protocols.The complication was that the two types of users — researchers and clinicians — were using the same platform for fundamentally different purposes. And as long as each was operating inside their own project, that tension was invisible. It only became visible when they needed to move across the data. When they needed to find something.That's when it broke down.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.
What does "breaking down" look like in a research platform?
It looks like people ignoring the product you built and doing something else entirely.I had a twenty-five hundred dollar budget for user research — I had to fight for that, by the way — and I refused to run it on Figma mockups. Static screens tell you what people think they'll do. I wanted to see what they actually did. So I built a working prototype in Lovable: real data, real interactions, the whole thing live.The first session was with Gil, a neuroscientist in Zurich studying the connection between pain and neurology. I shared my screen on Zoom, he took control, and I waited for him to navigate — click into a project, work his way down the hierarchy. He didn't. He went straight to the search bar, typed three characters, and found what he needed in about four seconds. The entire Project-Flow-Run-Session structure I'd spent months on — he didn't look at it.Same with the clinician in Cyprus. She typed a participant ID. She skipped every level of navigation we'd built.They both treated the hierarchy like furniture in a room they were walking through. They didn't navigate it. They cut across it.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.
What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.
"I went into the research thinking it would force a decision. What it did was stranger — it showed me that the decision I was asking management to make was the wrong decision entirely."
STRAN EM BERG
hat forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or
What forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or establish a universal chronology. Instead, individual stories, personal statements and subjective images are like multiple facets contributing their part to the bigger picture. Their function is exemplary rather than special – appearing as if selected by chance, dredged to the surface or washed upon the shore. What about the bigger picture they evoke, the Heitere Fahne– is it a place, a location, a building, or a shared idea?
What forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or establish a universal chronology. Instead, individual stories, personal statements and subjective images are like multiple facets contributing their part to the bigger picture. Their function is exemplary rather than special – appearing as if selected by chance, dredged to the surface or washed upon the shore. What about the bigger picture they evoke, the Heitere Fahne– is it a place, a location, a building, or a shared idea?
What forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or establish a universal chronology. Instead, individual stories, personal statements and subjective images are like multiple facets contributing their part to the bigger picture. Their function is exemplary rather than special – appearing as if selected by chance, dredged to the surface or washed upon the shore. What about the bigger picture they evoke, the Heitere Fahne– is it a place, a location, a building, or a shared idea?
What forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or establish a universal chronology. Instead, individual stories, personal statements and subjective images are like multiple facets contributing their part to the bigger picture. Their function is exemplary rather than special – appearing as if selected by chance, dredged to the surface or washed upon the shore. What about the bigger picture they evoke, the Heitere Fahne– is it a place, a location, a building, or a shared idea?
What forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or establish a universal chronology. Instead, individual stories, personal statements and subjective images are like multiple facets contributing their part to the bigger picture. Their function is exemplary rather than special – appearing as if selected by chance, dredged to the surface or washed upon the shore. What about the bigger picture they evoke, the Heitere Fahne– is it a place, a location, a building, or a shared idea?
What forms of narrative and documentation can do justice to a project characterized by constant change? It is impossible to survey the whole, draw a representative map or establish a universal chronology. Instead, individual stories, personal statements and subjective images are like multiple facets contributing their part to the bigger picture. Their function is exemplary rather than special – appearing as if selected by chance, dredged to the surface or washed upon the shore. What about the bigger picture they evoke, the Heitere Fahne– is it a place, a location, a building, or a shared idea?
That's a confronting thing to watch. What did you do with it?
I sat with it for a while before I trusted what I was seeing. Because it meant that something I'd built carefully — and that my product manager had built carefully, we'd argued about the schema for weeks — wasn't the main thing. Not wrong. But not the main thing.The research didn't make management choose between the two user types, which is what I'd hoped it would do. Instead it changed the question entirely. Not "which persona do we serve" but "what is this product, actually." Because if both personas go straight to search, if they both cut across the hierarchy rather than navigate it, then the product isn't really about projects and flows and runs. It's about queries. The hierarchy is scaffolding. The query is what people actually use.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.
Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. But I also had to understand why the two users were cutting across the data in such different ways.
When I designed Direction Five, I wasn't dismantling my PM's work. I was adding a layer that let different users approach the same data from different directions. He built the house. I stopped treating it as the only entrance."
"I insisted on research to make them pick one persona. They didn't. But the research did something I didn't expect — it changed the question."
You've described the researcher and the clinician as operating in fundamentally different modes. What do you mean by that?
Gil is building a dataset from scratch. There's no prior research on the pain-neurology connection he's investigating — he's generating the evidence. When he opens the system, he wants to slice: give me everything where the paradigm is Stroop, the participant's age is between 25 and 45, signal quality is acceptable. He doesn't know what he's looking for yet. That's the point. The slicing is the research.The clinician in Cyprus is tracking individual patients through an experimental treatment protocol. Each patient comes in every few weeks. She wants to know: is this person improving? Is the P300 amplitude going up session by session? She wants one person's story — deep and chronological, not wide and conditional.The same platform. The same data underneath. But completely different modes of time. The researcher takes a horizontal cut — one slice across thousands of sessions. The clinician takes a vertical cut — one person followed through time. The researcher sees a catalog. The clinician sees a narrative.What mattered to me was that they were doing the same underlying action: slicing the data. Just along different axes. That's a designable problem. "Which persona matters more" is not.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind.
"The hierarchy didn't go anywhere. It just stopped being the only way in."
You went through six design iterations before landing on a solution. What did the process reveal?
The first three options I considered were standard patterns — a command palette, a persistent search bar leading to a dedicated results page, a sidebar panel with search and preview. Each one is used by products I respect. Linear, GitHub, VS Code. Each one is valid in its context.But they all shared the same hidden assumption: that search is a component within a product. Something you add on top of a hierarchy. They disagreed on where to put it — overlay, top bar, sidebar panel — but they all agreed it was an extra. A feature. A convenience layer over the real navigation.I spent two days with those three options and felt increasingly uneasy. It was like I was being asked to choose the color of the wall when the real question was where to build the house.The shift happened on the fifth sketch. I stopped showing search results as a separate screen and just showed the existing Sessions table, filtered by chips at the top. The query and the answer became the same screen. There was no results page. The chips were the question. The table was the answer.That sounds like a small UI decision. It wasn't. It meant the conditions were the product — not a shortcut to the product, not a search layer over the product. The product itself.Gil is building a dataset from scratch. There's no prior research on the pain-neurology connection he's investigating — he's generating the evidence. When he opens the system, he wants to slice: give me everything where the paradigm is Stroop, the participant's age is between 25 and 45, signal quality is acceptable. He doesn't know what he's looking for yet. That's the point. The slicing is the research.The clinician in Cyprus is tracking individual patients through an experimental treatment protocol.
The solution you landed on — Direction 5 — introduces a workspace switcher that separates "building" from "exploring." What were you trying to protect?
There's a third user I almost forgot about. The student in Cyprus — the one who actually runs the equipment in the lab. She's not a researcher and she's not a clinician. She opens a new run, picks a protocol, enters a participant ID. Linear workflow. Step by step.If I went all the way with the conditions-first approach, I'd fix Gil and the clinician and break her entirely. That's not acceptable.So I borrowed a pattern from Slack — the workspace switcher. Not to switch between organizations, but to switch between ways of working inside the same one. Build mode is the existing system: hierarchical navigation, creation, execution. Explore mode is the conditions shell: chip strip, saved views, three different ways to render the same data.Each patient comes in every few weeks. She wants to know: is this person improving? Is the P300 amplitude going up session by session? She wants one person's story — deep and chronological, not wide and conditional.The same platform. The same data underneath. But completely different modes of time. The researcher takes a horizontal cut — one slice across thousands of sessions. The clinician takes a vertical cut — one person followed through time. The researcher sees a catalog. The clinician sees a narrative.What mattered to me was that they were doing the same underlying action: slicing the data. Just along different axes. That's a designable problem. "Which persona matters more" is not.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that.
You've said that the most useful thing you learned from this project is something about listening. What do you mean by that?
Designers say they listen to users. Mostly we don't. We listen to the loudest stakeholders, to deadlines, to our own assumptions about what we already know how to solve.Real listening is watching someone use the thing you built and letting yourself be surprised by what they do. Gil opened that prototype on Zoom, went straight to search, and showed me in four seconds that I'd been designing the wrong thing. I could have defended the hierarchy — told myself he was using it wrong. I didn't.The best design decisions I've made all came after I was wrong about something. The worst ones came when I was sure.Each patient comes in every few weeks. She wants to know: is this person improving? Is the P300 amplitude going up session by session? She wants one person's story — deep and chronological, not wide and conditional.The same platform. The same data underneath. But completely different modes of time. The researcher takes a horizontal cut — one slice across thousands of sessions. The clinician takes a vertical cut — one person followed through time. The researcher sees a catalog. The clinician sees a narrative.What mattered to me was that they were doing the same underlying action: slicing the data. Just along different axes. That's a designable problem. "Which persona matters more" is not.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind.
You recently started a video tutorial series. Could you take us through the decision behind that and how it's coming along?
What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.
What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative process?”, “How do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.What I was thinking about, maybe six months ago, is the fact that although many of the people who follow me are people who might be interested in my services (like brand identity or web design), a lot of the people on there are actually individuals who are trying to learn about design, trying to develop their own careers, and gain an understanding of how this industry works.I get a lot of DMs and enquiries where people ask me “What's your creative procw do you acquire clients?” and things like that. So I really wanted to help those people and I thought the best and easiest way to do that was by releasing a tutorial of some kind. I have a lot in the works that will hopefully be able to help those individuals, such as communities, coaching, and that kind of stuff.Ultimately, I think that sort of idea came from feeling like there was a little bit of a lack of transparency in the industry between this kind of higher level and the bottom. I suppose I just want to, in whatever way I can, bridge that gap, because I know I would have really benefited from that when I was coming up.
