HumanRobot

ROBOT MODE

Every page of rook.design as one document: sitemap, profile, all three case studies in full, the teaching write-up, and a JSON dump. No scripts, no images required.

Name
Faruk Shuaibu
Role
Product Designer
Location
Tallinn, Estonia
Contact
[email protected]
Canonical
https://rook.design
Generated
2026-07-18

01Contents

02Sitemap

URLTitleSummary
/HomeIntroduction and selected work.
/#aboutAboutBackground, skills, current activities and design values.
/#playPlayExperiments: a 3D self-portrait, animation and motion studies.
/case-studies/tarbi.htmlTarbi TargaltEmotional redesign of an Estonian grocery price-comparison app.
/case-studies/zip-zap.htmlZipzapProduct and brand design for domain-specific AI agents.
/case-studies/remedi.htmlRemediBrand and product design for a pharmacy inventory system.
/teaching/TeachingA twenty-minute micro-teaching session, documented.
/privacy.htmlPrivacyWhat the site collects and how to opt out.
/robot.htmlRobot modeThis page: every page's content in one machine-readable document.
/llms.txtllms.txtShort machine summary of the site.
/sitemap.xmlsitemap.xmlXML sitemap.

03Profile

Product designer building elegant, scalable things at the intersection of craft and strategy.

Skills

I work across product strategy, systems design, and prototyping, grounded in user research and extended into design leadership and mentorship.

Currently

Design values

Excellence as a generative tension
My practice is anchored in a restless pursuit of excellence, not as a fixed destination, but as a disciplined ethic of continuous refinement. It can never be fully achieved, yet the commitment to closing the gap between intention and outcome sharpens judgment, deepens craft, and keeps the work honest.
Constraints as catalysts
Growing up in Northern Nigeria, whenever resources were limited, making became an exercise in ingenuity and restraint. I draw from India's Jugaad ethos, improvised problem-solving that reframes constraints as creative catalysts. In practice: pragmatic prototyping, careful material choices, and systems that scale without waste.
Kodawari x Lagom
A dialogue between kodawari, the uncompromising spirit of meticulous craft, and lagom, the Swedish sense of just right. Kodawari keeps me attentive to micro-interactions, pacing, and affordances; lagom reminds me that elegance often emerges from restraint. Together they guide how I shape the invisible details that make products feel trustworthy and humane.

04Positioning

How the work is framed for different readers.

Recruiters
I design strategic, user-centered products that turn complex business challenges into elegant, scalable solutions.
Start-up founders
I turn early stage ideas into minimum lovable products, then evolve them into scalable, market ready experiences.
Designers
I've mentored globally, and shaped design culture in Northern Nigeria. Let's connect and grow the design community together.
Engineers
I design and build production-ready interfaces with deep technical understanding, making our collaboration seamless.

05Case study — Tarbi Targalt

Tarbi Targalt

An emotional redesign of an Estonian grocery price-comparison app, for international students working out how to shop in a new city.

URL: https://rook.design/case-studies/tarbi.html

Duration
5 weeks
Theme
Emotional Design · Mobile UX
Output
High-fidelity interactive prototype
Tools
Figma · Figma Make · Claude Code · Weavy

Prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/aqry5fBvcYoQzf0cOP7zbc/Tarbi-Targalt---Emotional-Design--Main-?node-id=1-2&p=f&t=Fodtu5SJt1FYAfBA-1&scaling=scale-down&content-scaling=fixed&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=1%3A2&show-proto-sidebar=1

Project Overview

What Tarbi Targalt is, and what needed fixing

The app already worked. The job was to make its value feel clearer and warmer for students still settling into a new city.

Tarbi Targalt means roughly 'consume wisely'. It's an Estonian grocery price-comparison app: you scan barcodes, build shopping lists, and compare prices across Tallinn supermarkets. It also tracks price history and lets you pick between a single-store run and a split-shopping trip.

Existing Product
Live app, around 10,000 downloads, and a good public rating.
Core Task
Scan, compare, and plan the cheapest grocery trip across the city.
Project Scope
An emotional redesign of onboarding and the main shopping flow.
Why redesign a product that already worked?
It was useful but cold. That matters most for a first-time user who is already anxious about money and does not know the city yet.
What was in scope for the sprint?
Five weeks, so I picked the moments that decide whether someone comes back: onboarding, what the trial promises, and the scan / compare / shop loop.
  • /resource/tarbi/before_1.png — Original Tarbi Targalt interface before redesign
  • /resource/tarbi/before_2.png — Ratings and feedback from existing Tarbi Targalt customers

Design Target

Designing for the international student in Tallinn

I designed for one person: a student who needs to save real money, and who needs the app to feel trustworthy while they are still learning where to shop.

They are an international student living in Tallinn on a tight budget. They want to scan and log products fast, compare stores without second-guessing, and see where the savings actually come from, all without adding another chore to a week that is already full.

Goal
Stay within budget while settling into a new city.
Need
Clear savings guidance, with nothing hidden.
Desired Feeling
In control of their money while they shop.
What emotional tensions shaped the work?
Price data alone was not enough. They also needed to know where they were in the flow, and to feel the app was helping rather than working them. So trust and delight became the two things I designed against.
  • /resource/tarbi/international.png — Figuring out eating on a budget in Tallinn

Audit Findings

What the audit revealed

Nothing was missing. The problems were structural: the app spent trust early, promised one thing and did another, and broke shopping into disconnected pieces.

I ran an OOUX audit across onboarding, authentication, and the scan / compare flow. Seen together, the problems stopped looking like separate UI annoyances and started looking like one system problem.

Friction Too Early
The product asked for permissions before proving value.
Trial Mismatch
The 'Try' path still blocked the core scan action behind account creation.
List Risk
Users could accidentally delete shopping lists mid-session.
Flow Fragmentation
Scanning, comparing and shopping did not feel like one activity.
Why did the first screen matter so much?
A system notification appeared before you had seen anything the app could do. It spent trust before earning any.
What made the trial flow feel dishonest?
The interface offered a low-commitment try mode, then asked for an account before you could scan anything. That gap cost more credibility than simply asking for a sign-up would have.
How was the list problem validated?
It turned up in App Store reviews, and I hit it myself using the app daily for several months. Not a theoretical edge case.
  • /resource/tarbi/OOUX1.png — OOUX audit for onboarding and auth
  • /resource/tarbi/OOUX2.png — OOUX for scanning and price
  • /resource/tarbi/feedback.png — Feedback from the App Store

Embodied Research

Studying delight and trust outside the app

Rather than define delight on a whiteboard, I went and handled things that already had it.

The point was to turn a vague quality into ingredients I could build with: timing, tactility, warmth, and visible signs of life.

Surprise
'What the Duck?' showed me how a surprise can land as playful instead of gimmicky.
Tactility
On the Instax Mini Evo, the act of using it is the reward.
Personality
A UGreen battery pack puts a tiny face on a dull object, and the object comes alive.
What changed after this research?
I stopped thinking about delight as styling. It gets built out of pacing, feedback, texture, and the tone of the interaction.
  • /resource/tarbi/moodboard.png — Moodboard from embodied research sessions
  • /resource/tarbi/what_the_duck.png — What the Duck ice cream reference for surprise and delight
  • /resource/tarbi/instax.mp4 — Instax Mini Evo reference for tactility and satisfaction
  • /resource/tarbi/ugreen.png — UGreen power bank reference for personality in a utilitarian object

Design Direction

One question, four principles

Everything after this point had to answer one question and hold to four principles.

How might we make saving money with Tarbi Targalt feel more delightful for international students, so they look forward to using it regularly?

Sweat the Details
Small moments add up. Polish them.
Simplicity at the Core
Fix the structure before the surface.
Signs of Life
Use motion and illustration to make the product feel alive.
Make Savings Feel Real
Turn abstract savings into something you can feel.

Redesign

Onboarding as an honest invitation

Onboarding now shows what you get before it asks for anything, and it is honest about the difference between trying and signing up.

It opens on a Tallinn skyline and a promise: save 10 to 20 euros a trip. Then Scan, Share, Shop and Save, one idea per screen, with warmer illustration and tighter copy.

Value First
The redesign leads with savings, not permissions or setup.
One Idea Per Screen
One idea per screen is easier to remember.
Honest Choice
Try It and Sign In / Sign Up are clearly separated at the end.
What changed in the final CTA?
The old flow implied a free trial and then blocked you. Now the difference between looking around and committing is clear from the start.
  • /resource/tarbi/Onboarding 1.png — Welcome screen with Tallinn skyline and value proposition
  • /resource/tarbi/Onboarding 2.png — Feature highlight screen for Scan
  • /resource/tarbi/Onboarding 3.png — Feature highlight screen for Share
  • /resource/tarbi/Onboarding 4.png — Feature highlight screen for Shop
  • /resource/tarbi/Onboarding 5.png — Feature highlight screen for Save
  • /resource/tarbi/First.png — First-use screen after onboarding

First-Time Experience

Giving first-time users somewhere to start

The first home screen gives you something to start from instead of a blank page.

Community starter packs, like 'Tallinn Starter Pack' and 'Taltech Starter Pack', mean a new user has a usable list before they have added anything.

Starter Packs
You do not have to begin from zero.
Guided Empty State
The screen always suggests a next action.
Persistent Scan
Scan is reachable from anywhere.
Why was this important for new students?
A newcomer does not know what the local staples are, let alone which ones are worth comparing. A starter pack answers that for them, and the app gets to prove itself on day one.

Core Flow

Home, list view, and shopping modes in one system

Home, lists and comparison now behave like one flow instead of three.

Home leads with a savings dashboard. Item List, Single Shop and Split Shop sit under it as three clear modes.

Savings Dashboard
You can see what the app has already saved you.
Three Clear Modes
List, single-store and split-store planning, all in one place.
Cheapest Option Surfaced
The cheapest option is surfaced, not buried.
What was improved structurally?
Comparing and shopping are the same task in two states, so I stopped treating them as separate screens. Less of a jump between planning and doing.
  • /resource/tarbi/Main.png — Home screen with savings dashboard
  • /resource/tarbi/Overview.png — Item list overview showing the maximum possible savings
  • /resource/tarbi/Single Shop.png — Single-shop mode
  • /resource/tarbi/Split Shop.png — Split-shop mode

In-Store Use

Designing the in-store moment and the ending

In the shop the app is calmer. You can see how far along you are, and the trip ends on purpose rather than just stopping.

While you shop, progress is visible. When you finish, the app celebrates what you saved.

Progress Visible
A progress bar shows how much of the trip is left.
Scan Feedback
Found-product screens stay tied to the price comparison.
Peak-End Moment
The last screen makes the saving memorable.
How does the ending create delight?
Peak-end rule: the trip ends on its best moment. Savings get translated into something familiar, like coffees, so the number means something.
  • /resource/tarbi/Shop Mode.png — Active shopping screen with progress indicator
  • /resource/tarbi/Shopping Done.png — End-of-shop celebration screen showing total saved
  • /resource/tarbi/Scanning.png — In-store scanning screen
  • /resource/tarbi/Scan Item.png — Scan item result screen
  • /resource/tarbi/Scan Item-1.png — Product-found screen with price comparison

Emotional Layer

Designing delight at visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels

Three layers: how it feels at a glance, how useful it is in the moment, and what it comes to mean over months.

I used Norman's three levels of emotional design as the structure.

Visceral
Illustration, animation and haptics set the immediate tone.
Behavioral
Widgets and notifications make the product more useful in daily life.
Reflective
Tarbi-Wrapped turns shopping data into memory and identity.
What is Tarbi-Wrapped doing strategically?
It turns a chore into a story about your habits and what you saved. It sits to one side of the app's real job, so it deepens attachment without getting in the way.
How was accessibility considered?
Motion respects reduced-motion settings, and drops back further on low battery. Delight should not cost you comfort or charge.
  • /resource/tarbi/cheapest_badge.png — Cheapest badge reveal graphic
  • /resource/tarbi/Illustration_detail.png — Illustration detail for sharing and emotional warmth
  • /resource/tarbi/Notification_widget.png — Tarbi notification center concept
  • /resource/tarbi/Small Widget.png — Small Tarbi home screen widget
  • /resource/tarbi/Medium Widget.png — Medium Tarbi home screen widget
  • /resource/tarbi/Wrapped 5.png — Tarbi-Wrapped year-in-review screen
  • /resource/tarbi/Wrapped 6.png — Tarbi-Wrapped shopping personality screen
  • /resource/tarbi/Wrapped 7.png — Tarbi-Wrapped staple products summary screen

Wrap-Up

Prototype and next steps

What came out is a high-fidelity prototype of the whole journey, plus a list of what I would do next.

It covers the full journey: the first introduction, the shop itself, and the reflective features afterwards.

Deliverable
A high-fidelity interactive prototype of the redesigned experience.
Future Extension
The concept can expand into discovery moments outside the app.
Next Steps
Online shopping, transport-aware split shopping, and more polish.
What future vision was explored?
Earlier concepts went outside the app, including a billboard at Tallinn Airport aimed at students who had just landed.
What would be the next practical improvements?
Next: bring online shopping into the same system, factor transport cost into split-shop decisions, and keep pushing the principles down into smaller details.

06Case study — Zipzap

Zipzap

Product and brand design for a set of AI agents, each pre-trained on one professional field.

URL: https://rook.design/case-studies/zip-zap.html

Discipline
UI/UX · Brand Design
Services
Product Design · Strategy · Brand Design
Stack
Figma · Adobe CC · Blender
Timeline
6 weeks

Making expertise easier to reach

Zipzap gives you access to professional expertise through AI agents trained on legal, HR and finance work. The aim was to make that kind of advice cheaper and easier to get hold of.

Web and desktop are one system rather than two products. It is built around the specialized agents, help with prompting them, and somewhere to keep what comes back.

What was actually wrong

I worked with the client asynchronously, read up on the industry, and talked to the people the product was for.

Four problems came out of that. Professional advice is expensive and getting more so. Prompting an LLM well is genuinely hard. With no standard method, everyone's output comes back in a different shape. And paying for several tools, then training people on all of them, costs more than anyone budgets for.

  • /resource/zip-zap/wireframe.png — Early wireframes, working out the first structure.
  • /resource/zip-zap/Authentication.png — Authentication and onboarding explorations.

What we built

A web and desktop app. Teams get the specialized agents, prompt templates they can reuse, and a way to hold knowledge across many threads at once.

The agents cover legal, HR and finance. Each one arrives pre-trained on its field, checks its own work against compliance rules, and returns answers in a standard shape. Prompts live in one shared library instead of in people's heads.

  • /resource/zip-zap/home.png — The main app surfaces.
  • /resource/zip-zap/chat.png — Chat flows, with prompting help built in.
  • /resource/zip-zap/chat_2.png — Conversation states for multi-threaded work.

Branding the agents and the system

I did the visual language as well as the product: the logo, the brand tokens, and the imagery for the agents. The agents needed to look approachable and to be told apart at a glance, since you pick one before you start.

  • /resource/zip-zap/Main_logo.png — Primary Zipzap logo development.
  • /resource/zip-zap/brand_tokens.png — Brand tokens: color, form, rhythm.
  • /resource/zip-zap/agent_avatars.png — Agent avatars, one per field.

How it ran

Develop: personas and empathy maps first, then wireframes for authentication, onboarding and chat. A light style guide. The 3D imagery for the agents. And a lot of back and forth with the developers about what was actually buildable.

Deliver: handoff in Figma, testing alongside the build, then watching Hotjar sessions from the beta and turning what I saw into the next round of work.

  • /resource/zip-zap/components_1.png — Early component and layout explorations.
  • /resource/zip-zap/components_2.png — Refined components, ready for handoff.

Where the project stands

Zipzap is in beta, and what people do with it is already changing the plan.

The next cycle runs on that data. Both the agent experience and the knowledge workflows around it are still moving.

07Case study — Remedi

Remedi

Brand and product design for an inventory system built for pharmacists.

URL: https://rook.design/case-studies/remedi.html

Discipline
Brand Design · UI/UX
Services
Branding · Product Design · Graphics Design
Stack
Figma · Adobe CC
Timeline
6 weeks

What Remedi is for

Remedi is an inventory system for pharmacists. It had to make essential medicines easier to track, cut waste, and take some weight off the day-to-day running of a pharmacy.

What pharmacies were stuck with

The tools already out there were either too expensive or too generic to fit how a pharmacy actually runs.

Setup and upkeep cost more than a small pharmacy can carry. They connect poorly to POS systems and e-prescriptions. They have no real support for the things a pharmacy has to track, like expiry dates and controlled substances. And reporting and reordering tend to be an afterthought.

  • /resource/remedi/persona_stats.png — Early research, and what pharmacists said they needed.
  • /resource/remedi/persona_image.png — The persona the product was shaped around.

What I designed

An inventory system built for pharmacies, around three things: tracing medication, wasting less of it, and knowing what is actually going on.

It connects to POS, e-prescription and supplier systems. It handles expiration dates, lot numbers and controlled substances. Reporting is real time, reordering is automatic, and the workflows know what compliance asks for.

  • /resource/remedi/homepage.png — The Remedi dashboard showing weekly sales and inventory counts
  • /resource/remedi/Inventory.png — The inventory page, built for precise stock tracking.
  • /resource/remedi/reports.png — Reports, shaped around the decisions that come out of them.
  • /resource/remedi/onboarding.png — The onboarding flow.

Making the brand look trustworthy

I designed the brand for Remedi and StockRX alongside the product: logo construction, iconography, color direction, and enough of a style guide that handoff would not be a guessing game.

  • /resource/remedi/logo_1.gif — The Remedi logo mark animating
  • /resource/remedi/logo_2.gif — The StockRX logo mark animating
  • /resource/remedi/main_logo.png — Primary Remedi logo direction.
  • /resource/remedi/logo_grid.png — Logo construction and proportional system.
  • /resource/remedi/logo_on_shirt.png — The brand, applied.

From research into delivery

Research and design: interviews, JTBD, personas, the brand, and a variable-based style guide in Figma.

Delivery: handoff to the developers, testing internally while they built, and reworking the design system wherever it did not survive contact with the implementation.

  • /resource/remedi/design_tokens.png — Style guide and design tokens.
  • /resource/remedi/color.png — Color explorations inside the style guide.
  • /resource/remedi/iconography.png — The iconography built for the interface.

Where the project lands

Tracking stock takes less time, there are fewer manual errors to chase, and staying compliant is less precarious, which matters when the penalties are expensive.

Next is measuring it properly: efficiency, waste, and whether the people using it are happier. Then keep refining from what that shows.

08Teaching

URL: https://rook.design/teaching/

Designing an AI workshop for teachers, and prototyping it live.

Enhancing Learning Experiences with AI is a one- to two-day workshop for teachers who are curious about AI but would not call themselves technical. This page is how it was designed, and how I tested it: the context map and learning outcomes that came first, the study that redirected the brief halfway through, the twenty-minute prototype I ran in front of a room, and what came back.

In the room. EKA · Spring 2026

Six pieces of thinking that came before the room.

Long before the twenty-minute session, the work was already underway. I had mapped the course context, written its aim and intended learning outcomes, and drafted a course canvas. The micro-teaching slot was where all of that had to condense into something performable: the part of the course I could actually stand up and do.

Somewhere in the middle, I read an article about how studio-art teachers in higher education actually assess student work, and recorded a short voice reflection about it. That reflection became the hinge: it changed what I thought a twenty-minute teaching slot was for.

The context map made the constraints visible.

Lanarès, Laperrouza & Sylvestre, Course Design: A Visual and Modular Approach: four contextual fields, students, curriculum, resources, instructor.

Plus a critical pedagogical layer drawn from Paulo Freire, asking where dialogue is possible and where teaching risks becoming one-directional.

The course I am designing is a one to two day workshop for teachers who are curious about AI but do not see themselves as technical experts. Before I could plan a twenty-minute taste of it, I had to map the situation: a small group of five to eight participants from mixed institutions, with AI experience ranging from never used to daily, attitudes ranging from curious to skeptical, and each one returning to a different institutional culture afterwards.

The map made one thing clear: the workshop must hold space for both the enthusiasts and the resisters, and it cannot pretend to deliver mastery in two days. What it can deliver is one good prototype each, plus the confidence to keep going.

Three things I wanted the session to do.

A micro-teaching session is a strange object. It is too short to teach anything in depth, and too long to be merely a demonstration. I decided to treat it as a condensed prototype of the workshop itself: a small, complete arc that participants could walk into curious and walk out of having seen, felt, and tried something. The session needed to do three things at once.

Halfway through, a study about studio teachers redirected the brief.

A qualitative multi-case study of fifteen North American studio-art instructors and how they actually assess student work in painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and multimedia.

The argument that lodged with me: most studio teachers hold MFAs, have almost no formal pedagogical training, and largely learned to teach by copying or reacting against how they themselves were taught.

Teaching feels clear and enjoyable. Grading feels confusing and anxiety-inducing.

I recorded the reflection as a voice memo rather than a written note, because I wanted to catch the unfinished thinking: the moment something shifts before it has become an argument. What surfaced was that the article was not really telling me about AI. It was telling me about who is in the room.

The study describes a specific kind of professional. They are accomplished in their practice. They were trained to make work, not to teach it. They inherit a vocabulary, rubrics, intended learning outcomes, criteria, that often feels borrowed from elsewhere. And underneath the inherited vocabulary, what most of them actually use to judge a student's work is intuition: a gestalt formed through years of making and looking. The article is honest about this. It also notes that there is rarely a departmental conversation in which this can be said out loud.

That reframed the workshop for me. Its job is to make a small, well-supported space where teachers can talk about teaching at all, with AI as the pretext and the playground. The session should not perform mastery. It should make room for the same ambiguity, experiment and failure-tolerance that studio teachers already work inside, and treat AI as another tool that produces ambiguous, sometimes useful, sometimes irrational output: a creative partner in the same mode as the practice itself.

No slides. One live web app, one room.

Instead of slides, the session ran inside a single Next.js app deployed to Vercel. Participants scanned a QR code on their phones to vote and submit; the host screen showed the live aggregation, the generated ideas, and the final build. The full session is embedded below.

Inside the session.

The session did what it tried to do.

  • Structure was visible. Slides had timeframes, roles were clarified at the start, the arc was readable.
  • Voting created a fast read of the room. The opening sentiment vote turned twenty strangers into a measurable group in under two minutes.
  • The mid-session storytelling pivot. Leaning back from the laptop and speaking freely changed the pace and gave the room permission to listen rather than do.
  • The emotions wheel found a new context. A familiar tool used in an unfamiliar way reframed it for a colleague in the room.
  • The live build landed. The prototype assembled in time. The room saw a working artefact emerge from a teacher's one-sentence brief.

Where the next iteration should put its weight.

  • Designed questions, not improvised ones. When time allows, prepare specific whole-class and small-group prompts in advance, to manage timing while still leaving room for spontaneous threads.
  • The EKA GPT for ILOs. The lecturer's letter pointed out that EKA has a GPT tool that goes from course description to ILOs. My demo went in the reverse direction. Worth connecting the two.
  • Posture as pedagogy. The lecturer noticed the moment I stepped back from the screen. I want to make that shift in posture and pace a deliberate move, not an accident.
  • A graceful fallback path. The Lovable build worked. Next time I want a pre-baked fallback ready, so a technical hiccup costs five seconds, not five minutes.
  • Closing the loop more slowly. The final two minutes were tight. The closing comparison deserves room to breathe.

Two voices, two registers.

After the session I received feedback in two different forms. A peer took live notes during the session, capturing the moment-to-moment observations as they happened. The lecturer sent a structured letter afterwards, written in the describing, interpreting, relating form we have been practicing in class. I have kept both in their original shape. The difference in register is the interesting part: the same twenty minutes, read from two very different places in the room.

Read live, not later.

The note is short and made on the fly: a few numbered observations under the heading Faruk Shuaibu › the feedback. What I read in it is a particular way of looking. The observer was tracking the choreography of the session, posture, sequencing, the use of waiting time, more than any single argument I was trying to make. The form of the session, then, was doing visible work.

The note also flags two open prompts (2. ...the course has, 3. ...that the actual knowledge in my class might be weak) that read like questions held in the air rather than conclusions. I value them precisely because they are not resolved.

  • Posture and pace. Sitting, then diving into the task directly. Active tasks. "Body is moving, my input matters."
  • The tool, named. Lovable.dev as a design tool, an AI tool that lets you build apps through chatting with AI.
  • Use of time. Moving between tasks well, when one thing is loading, explaining the next.
  • The ethical question landed. Bringing in ethics as the question, and the possible negative side, was noted as important.
  • An unfinished prompt. "...the course has —" a question left open about what the workshop carries with it.
  • A self-directed worry. "...that the actual knowledge in my class might be weak" — an observation the peer was reflecting back onto their own practice, not mine.

Dear Faruk,

I'm sending my feedback on the micro-teaching session. It loosely follows the same structure we used in class: describing, interpreting, and then relating it back to myself. If anything is unclear or if you'd like me to expand on something, just let me know, I'd be happy to.

Your teaching session had a very clear structure, with the introductory interactive activity at the beginning, followed by the main content, and later a conclusion with a short reflective task. You used digital tools (instead of paper and pen) to engage participants, which made it possible to quickly gather and see the group's overall attitudes toward the topic. The slides had a timeframe, which helped us understand how long and how deeply we were expected to engage with the topic.

You explained what we were going to do and clarified your role. Since participants had to write down the objectives of their own course, this activity also helped us step into our own roles. The task about our attitudes and writing the ILOs gave us time to transition from the previous topic and focus on the current one. Overall I believe you balanced the technical and more serious aspects of the topic very well with a fun and interactive activity, allowing space for both.

I noticed a shift in your behaviour in the middle of the session when you were explaining how AI tools can be useful in large lecture settings. The situation made me think of storytelling. You leaned back a little from the computer and spoke freely, which signaled that we can listen and focus our attention on you. It changed the pace and made your micro-teaching session more dynamic.

We also had an open and critical discussion, which you helped to further develop and connected back to the industry for a broader context. In the future when you have more time, you could think about what kinds of questions, either for the whole class or as a smaller group task, could help generate this kind of discussion. A small group task allows you to manage time more precisely, while a whole-group discussion works well in a setting where participants feel safe and can spontaneously bring in new ideas.

When you showed how the ILOs we wrote could be used to generate learning activities, it made me think about how EKA has a GPT tool for teaching staff to help formulate ILOs from course descriptions, and why it might be useful to also approach this the other way around.

The way you used the emotions wheel made me reflect on myself as a teacher that I've used it before in another context, but it hadn't occurred to me that the wheel could be used in this way. Thank you for showing me this possibility.

Best regards.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for taking the time to write such detailed and thoughtful feedback. I really appreciate how you structured it and connected it back to your own teaching practice.

I'm glad the overall structure of the session and the use of digital tools came through clearly. Your observation about the moment I stepped back from the computer and moved into more of a storytelling mode was particularly useful. It helps me see, more consciously, how changes in posture and pacing can signal a shift in attention and make the session feel more dynamic. I will keep developing that deliberately.

Your comments about structuring open and critical discussions were also helpful. I like the idea of designing specific whole-class and small-group questions in advance, to manage time more precisely while still leaving room for spontaneous contributions when the group feels safe.

It was especially interesting to read that the way I used the emotions wheel gave you a new perspective on that tool. That means a lot to me. I am very interested in the emotional aspects of learning and I am happy it resonated with your own experience.

I was also intrigued by your note about the EKA GPT tool for helping formulate ILOs from course descriptions. I hadn't connected it directly with the reverse direction I showed in the session, and I would be very interested to learn more about how teachers are using it in practice.

Thank you again for the encouraging feedback and for the concrete suggestions I can build on.

The micro-teaching session is a rehearsal, not the workshop. What it gave me is harder to put on a slide: a felt sense of how the workshop wants to move, where it slows down, where it asks for hands, where it asks for silence.

The next pass at this course will not start from the slides. It will start from this twenty minutes, asking which parts deserve to grow, and which were honest only because they were short.

Designed and delivered solo. Documented as part of the EKA Learning & Teaching in University course portfolio, May 2026.

09Play

3D self-portrait
An interactive halftone GLB model. /portfolio/play/rook6.glb
Experiment
An animation study. /portfolio/play/experiment.webm
Tarbi Targalt motion
A motion study of the end-of-shop screen. /portfolio/play/rook.mp4
Fintech app screens
A selection of 16 screens from 45 designed for a card and crypto wallet app, covering the whole account lifecycle: onboarding, identity checks, the funded dashboard, card creation and management, and deposits. Shown as one drifting row of phone frames. /portfolio/play/fintech/
Onsell
A landing page for a self-initiated concept: an agent that answers Instagram DMs and closes orders for independent sellers. Five languages — English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Estonian. Switching to Arabic mirrors the layout right to left, and the currency and buyer names change with it. Built in Next.js and Tailwind. The Play page carries a recording of the whole page, scrolled through and then switched into Arabic; the site is live at https://regal-fudge-a54cb9.netlify.app/. /portfolio/play/onsell/

10Contact

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/farukshuaibu/
X
https://x.com/726f6f6b
Layers
https://layers.to/rook
ADPlist
https://adplist.org/mentors/faruk-shuaibu
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@726f6f6b
Email
mailto:[email protected]
Book a meeting
https://calendar.app.google/7papAKNU6MW9ud9BA
Resume (PDF)
https://rook.design/portfolio/Faruk_Shuaibu_Resume_2026.pdf

11Structured data

The same content as JSON, for readers that would rather not parse markup.

{
  "person": {
    "name": "Faruk Shuaibu",
    "role": "Product Designer",
    "location": "Tallinn, Estonia",
    "tagline": "Product designer building elegant, scalable things at the intersection of craft and strategy."
  },
  "links": {
    "LinkedIn": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/farukshuaibu/",
    "X": "https://x.com/726f6f6b",
    "Layers": "https://layers.to/rook",
    "ADPlist": "https://adplist.org/mentors/faruk-shuaibu",
    "YouTube": "https://www.youtube.com/@726f6f6b",
    "Email": "mailto:[email protected]",
    "Book a meeting": "https://calendar.app.google/7papAKNU6MW9ud9BA",
    "Resume (PDF)": "https://rook.design/portfolio/Faruk_Shuaibu_Resume_2026.pdf"
  },
  "pages": [
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/",
      "title": "Home",
      "summary": "Introduction and selected work."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/#about",
      "title": "About",
      "summary": "Background, skills, current activities and design values."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/#play",
      "title": "Play",
      "summary": "Experiments: a 3D self-portrait, animation and motion studies."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/case-studies/tarbi.html",
      "title": "Tarbi Targalt",
      "summary": "Emotional redesign of an Estonian grocery price-comparison app."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/case-studies/zip-zap.html",
      "title": "Zipzap",
      "summary": "Product and brand design for domain-specific AI agents."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/case-studies/remedi.html",
      "title": "Remedi",
      "summary": "Brand and product design for a pharmacy inventory system."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/teaching/",
      "title": "Teaching",
      "summary": "A twenty-minute micro-teaching session, documented."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/privacy.html",
      "title": "Privacy",
      "summary": "What the site collects and how to opt out."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/robot.html",
      "title": "Robot mode",
      "summary": "This page: every page's content in one machine-readable document."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/llms.txt",
      "title": "llms.txt",
      "summary": "Short machine summary of the site."
    },
    {
      "url": "https://rook.design/sitemap.xml",
      "title": "sitemap.xml",
      "summary": "XML sitemap."
    }
  ],
  "caseStudies": [
    {
      "title": "Tarbi Targalt",
      "url": "https://rook.design/case-studies/tarbi.html",
      "summary": "An emotional redesign of an Estonian grocery price-comparison app, for international students working out how to shop in a new city.",
      "details": {
        "Duration": "5 weeks",
        "Theme": "Emotional Design · Mobile UX",
        "Output": "High-fidelity interactive prototype",
        "Tools": "Figma · Figma Make · Claude Code · Weavy"
      },
      "sections": [
        {
          "id": "overview",
          "heading": "What Tarbi Targalt is, and what needed fixing",
          "summary": "The app already worked. The job was to make its value feel clearer and warmer for students still settling into a new city.",
          "body": "Tarbi Targalt means roughly 'consume wisely'. It's an Estonian grocery price-comparison app: you scan barcodes, build shopping lists, and compare prices across Tallinn supermarkets. It also tracks price history and lets you pick between a single-store run and a split-shopping trip."
        },
        {
          "id": "persona",
          "heading": "Designing for the international student in Tallinn",
          "summary": "I designed for one person: a student who needs to save real money, and who needs the app to feel trustworthy while they are still learning where to shop.",
          "body": "They are an international student living in Tallinn on a tight budget. They want to scan and log products fast, compare stores without second-guessing, and see where the savings actually come from, all without adding another chore to a week that is already full."
        },
        {
          "id": "research",
          "heading": "What the audit revealed",
          "summary": "Nothing was missing. The problems were structural: the app spent trust early, promised one thing and did another, and broke shopping into disconnected pieces.",
          "body": "I ran an OOUX audit across onboarding, authentication, and the scan / compare flow. Seen together, the problems stopped looking like separate UI annoyances and started looking like one system problem."
        },
        {
          "id": "embodied",
          "heading": "Studying delight and trust outside the app",
          "summary": "Rather than define delight on a whiteboard, I went and handled things that already had it.",
          "body": "The point was to turn a vague quality into ingredients I could build with: timing, tactility, warmth, and visible signs of life."
        },
        {
          "id": "principles",
          "heading": "One question, four principles",
          "summary": "Everything after this point had to answer one question and hold to four principles.",
          "body": "How might we make saving money with Tarbi Targalt feel more delightful for international students, so they look forward to using it regularly?"
        },
        {
          "id": "onboarding",
          "heading": "Onboarding as an honest invitation",
          "summary": "Onboarding now shows what you get before it asks for anything, and it is honest about the difference between trying and signing up.",
          "body": "It opens on a Tallinn skyline and a promise: save 10 to 20 euros a trip. Then Scan, Share, Shop and Save, one idea per screen, with warmer illustration and tighter copy."
        },
        {
          "id": "home",
          "heading": "Giving first-time users somewhere to start",
          "summary": "The first home screen gives you something to start from instead of a blank page.",
          "body": "Community starter packs, like 'Tallinn Starter Pack' and 'Taltech Starter Pack', mean a new user has a usable list before they have added anything."
        },
        {
          "id": "modes",
          "heading": "Home, list view, and shopping modes in one system",
          "summary": "Home, lists and comparison now behave like one flow instead of three.",
          "body": "Home leads with a savings dashboard. Item List, Single Shop and Split Shop sit under it as three clear modes."
        },
        {
          "id": "shopping",
          "heading": "Designing the in-store moment and the ending",
          "summary": "In the shop the app is calmer. You can see how far along you are, and the trip ends on purpose rather than just stopping.",
          "body": "While you shop, progress is visible. When you finish, the app celebrates what you saved."
        },
        {
          "id": "delight",
          "heading": "Designing delight at visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels",
          "summary": "Three layers: how it feels at a glance, how useful it is in the moment, and what it comes to mean over months.",
          "body": "I used Norman's three levels of emotional design as the structure."
        },
        {
          "id": "outcome",
          "heading": "Prototype and next steps",
          "summary": "What came out is a high-fidelity prototype of the whole journey, plus a list of what I would do next.",
          "body": "It covers the full journey: the first introduction, the shop itself, and the reflective features afterwards."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "title": "Zipzap",
      "url": "https://rook.design/case-studies/zip-zap.html",
      "summary": "Product and brand design for a set of AI agents, each pre-trained on one professional field.",
      "details": {
        "Discipline": "UI/UX · Brand Design",
        "Services": "Product Design · Strategy · Brand Design",
        "Stack": "Figma · Adobe CC · Blender",
        "Timeline": "6 weeks"
      },
      "sections": [
        {
          "id": "overview",
          "heading": "Making expertise easier to reach",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "Zipzap gives you access to professional expertise through AI agents trained on legal, HR and finance work. The aim was to make that kind of advice cheaper and easier to get hold of.\n\nWeb and desktop are one system rather than two products. It is built around the specialized agents, help with prompting them, and somewhere to keep what comes back."
        },
        {
          "id": "problem",
          "heading": "What was actually wrong",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "I worked with the client asynchronously, read up on the industry, and talked to the people the product was for.\n\nFour problems came out of that. Professional advice is expensive and getting more so. Prompting an LLM well is genuinely hard. With no standard method, everyone's output comes back in a different shape. And paying for several tools, then training people on all of them, costs more than anyone budgets for."
        },
        {
          "id": "solution",
          "heading": "What we built",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "A web and desktop app. Teams get the specialized agents, prompt templates they can reuse, and a way to hold knowledge across many threads at once.\n\nThe agents cover legal, HR and finance. Each one arrives pre-trained on its field, checks its own work against compliance rules, and returns answers in a standard shape. Prompts live in one shared library instead of in people's heads."
        },
        {
          "id": "brand",
          "heading": "Branding the agents and the system",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "I did the visual language as well as the product: the logo, the brand tokens, and the imagery for the agents. The agents needed to look approachable and to be told apart at a glance, since you pick one before you start."
        },
        {
          "id": "process",
          "heading": "How it ran",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "Develop: personas and empathy maps first, then wireframes for authentication, onboarding and chat. A light style guide. The 3D imagery for the agents. And a lot of back and forth with the developers about what was actually buildable.\n\nDeliver: handoff in Figma, testing alongside the build, then watching Hotjar sessions from the beta and turning what I saw into the next round of work."
        },
        {
          "id": "outcome",
          "heading": "Where the project stands",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "Zipzap is in beta, and what people do with it is already changing the plan.\n\nThe next cycle runs on that data. Both the agent experience and the knowledge workflows around it are still moving."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "title": "Remedi",
      "url": "https://rook.design/case-studies/remedi.html",
      "summary": "Brand and product design for an inventory system built for pharmacists.",
      "details": {
        "Discipline": "Brand Design · UI/UX",
        "Services": "Branding · Product Design · Graphics Design",
        "Stack": "Figma · Adobe CC",
        "Timeline": "6 weeks"
      },
      "sections": [
        {
          "id": "overview",
          "heading": "What Remedi is for",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "Remedi is an inventory system for pharmacists. It had to make essential medicines easier to track, cut waste, and take some weight off the day-to-day running of a pharmacy."
        },
        {
          "id": "problem",
          "heading": "What pharmacies were stuck with",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "The tools already out there were either too expensive or too generic to fit how a pharmacy actually runs.\n\nSetup and upkeep cost more than a small pharmacy can carry. They connect poorly to POS systems and e-prescriptions. They have no real support for the things a pharmacy has to track, like expiry dates and controlled substances. And reporting and reordering tend to be an afterthought."
        },
        {
          "id": "solution",
          "heading": "What I designed",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "An inventory system built for pharmacies, around three things: tracing medication, wasting less of it, and knowing what is actually going on.\n\nIt connects to POS, e-prescription and supplier systems. It handles expiration dates, lot numbers and controlled substances. Reporting is real time, reordering is automatic, and the workflows know what compliance asks for."
        },
        {
          "id": "brand",
          "heading": "Making the brand look trustworthy",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "I designed the brand for Remedi and StockRX alongside the product: logo construction, iconography, color direction, and enough of a style guide that handoff would not be a guessing game."
        },
        {
          "id": "process",
          "heading": "From research into delivery",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "Research and design: interviews, JTBD, personas, the brand, and a variable-based style guide in Figma.\n\nDelivery: handoff to the developers, testing internally while they built, and reworking the design system wherever it did not survive contact with the implementation."
        },
        {
          "id": "outcome",
          "heading": "Where the project lands",
          "summary": "",
          "body": "Tracking stock takes less time, there are fewer manual errors to chase, and staying compliant is less precarious, which matters when the penalties are expensive.\n\nNext is measuring it properly: efficiency, waste, and whether the people using it are happier. Then keep refining from what that shows."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}