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Ngawang Chojey Rai

Product and design at Xceed Studio, Thimphu, Bhutan.

It doesn’t matter how good a product is if nobody can use it.

Working and usable are not the same thing. If the experience is bad, whatever the product does counts for nothing, because the person in front of it gives up before they find out.

Ngawang Chojey Rai, shoulder to the camera with his head turned back to the lens, in a white shirt against a plain ground.

Introduction

Product work is mostly saying no. Every feature has someone who wants it, and the easy thing is to fit them all in. The hard thing is deciding what the product is for and cutting the rest.

I watch people use what we build. It’s uncomfortable and it’s the only reliable way to find out where something fails. What people say they want and what they do are different.

Simple isn’t a smaller product. It’s a product where the complexity has been absorbed by us instead of handed to the person using it. That’s more work, and none of it shows.

The same goes for the parts nobody opens. I’d rather get those right even when no one is checking.

If someone uses it without thinking about it, that’s the job done. Nothing else really counts.

What I do

  • Product and project management

    Scope, sequence, and keeping the team pointed the same way.

  • User experience

    Flows, states, and what happens when it goes wrong.

  • Design

    Interfaces, brand, and the mark at the top of this page.

  • Engineering

    Full-stack and AI. A degree for the foundation, client projects for the rest.

Writing

Nothing published yet. The first posts are being written.

Work

Xceed Studio (opens in a new tab)

I started it in July 2023, at 20, in my second year of college. Brand and product work, incorporated in Bhutan and Singapore.

It’s where all of this gets built, with a team I no longer try to do the work for.

Thimphu valley under snow and low cloud, Tashichho Dzong in the foreground.