zain
Draft: Zain's voice pass pending. Adapted from a LinkedIn post; he reviews before this publishes.
DesignUp, Episode 6. Imagine driving at 100 km/h and the brakes fail. Heart stops, vision tunnels, time freezes. In that second you don't care about delightful animation. You want to survive. Sarika Goel didn't open with features. She opened with fear.
Silicon Valley's mantra is "move fast and break things." In Sarika's world, designing for Ford's Safety & Security team, breaking things breaks people. An 85% success rate is fine in most industries. In hers, it means 15% may not make it home.
What crisis does to the mind
- Cognitive tunneling. The world shrinks to a single focus point; carefully crafted UI gets ignored.
- Time distortion. Seconds feel like minutes.
- Regression to instinct. People revert to deeply ingrained habits and won't learn a new pattern mid-crisis.
The Crisis Readiness Equation
She introduced it through a fuel-tank analogy: a system needs these tanks full to survive a crisis:
(C + H + E) × (R + T) − (O + S) = Crisis Readiness
- C · Context: where, when, and under what constraints will failure strike?
- H · Human capacity: who is your most vulnerable user, in their worst moment?
- E · Edge cases: which unlikely events deserve investment now?
- R · Robustness: what still works when the system fails?
- T · Trust: will users actually trust the backup?
- O · Organizational drag: policy, budget, and compliance friction that slows response.
- S · Shiny object noise: features that demo well but trade clarity for novelty.
Full tanks, lives saved. Empty tanks, systems fail.
What it means at Porter
A bad design at Porter won't cause a car crash. But it's not a victimless metric either. For me it's a design I care about; for our delivery partners, it's their livelihood. A confusing payout flow or a buggy reward system isn't a UX nitpick. It's disrupting how lakhs of people feed their families, instantly. Frameworks like Sarika's aren't just for safety teams. They're a reason to tread carefully everywhere.