Interaction design for environments that break the rules
Thesis
A research-led set of principles for XR in industrial settings — where gloves, noise, and physical load make most interface assumptions wrong.
Good afternoon, I’m
Harri Halonen
I design complex digital products that make business operations, data, and decision-making easier to understand and scale.
I work from discovery into UX architecture: mapping the messy parts, shaping flows, turning repeated UI decisions into design-system patterns, and checking accessibility early. I stay close to engineers, product teams, and stakeholders so AI and data workflows become interfaces people can understand, use, and maintain — watching design quality as it gets built.
Areas I work across
- Product discovery
- B2B & internal tools
- Design systems
- AI & data-heavy workflows
- UX architecture
- Implementation support
- Accessibility
- Design QA
- Stakeholder alignment
Work
From ambiguity to buildable output
The same loop on most projects, end to end — I stay past the handoff, through the build, design QA, and back into the system.
Discovery
Sit in the real workflow: interviews, support threads, and the spreadsheet someone quietly runs everything from.
What this produces: A map of how the work really happens — not how the org thinks it does.
Framing
Name the actual problem and what we are deliberately not solving, so scope stops sliding mid-project.
What this produces: One sentence everyone agrees on: the problem, and the non-goals around it.
Concept models
Map the objects, states, and relationships underneath before drawing a single screen.
What this produces: An object model the whole team can point at and reason about.
Prototypes
Put clickable flows in front of real data and real users to find where the idea breaks.
What this produces: Evidence — where the flow holds, and where it quietly falls apart.
Design specs
Hand over buildable detail: every state, empty view, error, and edge case engineers will hit.
What this produces: A spec engineers can build from without guessing.
Implementation support
Stay in the build, answer the questions Figma cannot, and adjust as real constraints surface.
What this produces: Decisions made in the moment, in context — not weeks later in a thread.
Design QA
Check the built UI against intent and catch spacing, state, and behavior drift before users do.
What this produces: A build that matches intent, down to the empty and error states.
Measurement
Watch it in use and ask the honest question: did this make the work easier, or just different?
What this produces: An honest read on whether the work actually got easier.
System contribution
Fold the patterns that held up back into the design system so the next team starts ahead.
What this produces: Patterns, hardened and handed forward for the next team.