Succeeding in UX today – Kayla Heffernan’s take

Designing in the Unknown: Insights from Harness Mentor Kayla Heffernan

Ambiguity is the natural state of UX. The problems are rarely well-defined, the users don’t always behave as expected, and business priorities can change overnight. Great designers don’t avoid that uncertainty — they learn to navigate it. Few illustrate this better than Kayla Heffernan, one of the industry leaders mentoring at Harness Projects.

Kayla’s approach to design has been shaped in places where the stakes are high and the path is rarely clear. She’s worked on employment platforms where a single design tweak could influence thousands of job applications and hiring decisions. She’s designed digital health tools tested in clinical trials, where trust and patient safety mattered as much as usability. She’s co-designed with clinicians and patients inside large public health systems. And she’s led UX in organisations just beginning their digital journey, where part of the job was explaining what design even is.

What ties all of these experiences together isn’t the industry or the product — it’s the uncertainty. How do you reduce friction in hiring when millions of people are involved? How do you design a patient journey that’s not only efficient but ethical? How do you convince a traditional organisation to embrace new ways of working?

These are the questions that have defined Kayla’s career, and they’re the kinds of questions she helps learners lean into rather than shy away from.

“A lot of design starts before you even open a design tool,” Kayla says. “It’s about uncovering what really matters to users and finding clarity in situations where nobody has the full picture yet.”

Her perspective reflects a wider industry truth. A Nielsen Norman Group study found that more than half of UX professionals spend more time clarifying problems than designing solutions. And as fellow Harness mentor Warner Wong has observed, AI may remove the friction in getting ideas onto the page, but it doesn’t remove the ambiguity: “Designers are still the ones who have to ask the right questions.”

These aren’t the kinds of challenges AI will ever “solve.” They’re about psychology, belonging, and trust. And that’s the point: the designer’s job isn’t to avoid ambiguity, but to work inside it — to listen, test, and make choices that turn uncertainty into experiences people value.

When Kayla spoke with Harness learners, she emphasised that empathy is the starting point. “Sometimes it’s just sitting with people long enough to really hear them,” she said. Those conversations often reveal the truths stakeholders overlook — the small frictions, the workarounds, the emotions beneath the task. “Those are the moments that change your design, because they’re real.”

She also warned against treating research as a checkbox. Even simple usability testing, she explained, can reframe an entire project. “When you watch someone struggle with a flow you thought was obvious, it humbles you. It reminds you that clarity isn’t what you think it is — it’s what the user experiences.”

For Kayla, ambiguity also extends to leading teams and working with organisations that are new to UX. She spoke about the need to translate design into language non-designers understand: “I use analogies a lot. If you can make UX relatable to people with no tech background, you bring them with you. That’s part of the work.”

And she’s clear-eyed about the frustrations. Stakeholders often want certainty at the start when certainty simply isn’t possible. Her advice: reframe it. “We don’t always know the answer upfront. But the process — research, iteration, testing — is how we get there.”

That’s the philosophy learners experience in her mentorship. It’s not about making one specific homepage or events page “better” — it’s about building the habits every designer needs: the confidence to sit with ambiguity, the discipline to extract insight from users, and the empathy to design solutions people trust.

A Community of Mentors

Kayla is part of a much larger network of Harness mentors who bring experience from right across the UX industry. Collectively, they’ve worked in global tech companies, fast-moving startups, financial institutions, healthcare systems, non-profits, and government organisations. Some come from design research backgrounds, others from product or creative direction, and many have led teams in environments where the design challenges were as much cultural as they were technical.

Together, they expose learners to the full breadth of modern UX — from highly regulated industries to consumer platforms at scale, from AI-driven tools to community-focused products. The settings may differ, but the lesson is consistent: ambiguity is the designer’s raw material.

Final Word

For anyone starting out in UX, Kayla’s story offers reassurance and direction. Success doesn’t come from knowing all the answers upfront — it comes from the process of uncovering them. Her career proves that great design isn’t about certainty, it’s about the ability to listen, adapt, and build clarity where none existed before.

To discuss: – let’s explore if this program is the right fit for your UX journey.

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