Curious by nature: Roudy Farrane on problem-solving, systems thinking, and a career that never went to plan

Roudy Farrane will tell you that curiosity is not a soft skill. It is the whole job.

It is what pulled him from computer science into architectural lighting. What kept him going through seven years on some of the most technically demanding building projects in the region. What made him spend a year in Paris during a pandemic exploring what else he could do, and eventually land in UX. And what led him, years later, to spend two weeks doing nothing but figuring out how Figma variables worked because he thought there had to be a better way to handle bilingual design systems.

He is now a Senior UX Designer at Digital of Things. The path here was not straight. But the instinct running through it was consistent.

"I've always been curious about things. People would come to me with their problems, whether personal, technical, or at work, whatever it is. I've always been like that. And I think that curiosity is what gives me a different edge."

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Seven years of light

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Before UX, Roudy spent the better part of a decade as an architectural lighting consultant, working across projects that ranged from cultural institutions in Lebanon (like the National Museum of Beirut) to World Cup stadiums in Qatar. He joined the firm on the back of his computer science degree, initially helping with servers and infrastructure. The principal architect liked how he thought. Roudy liked the work. One conversation led to another, and suddenly he was learning an entirely different craft.

"My colleagues had been in the industry for ten years before I joined. We worked very closely together, and I learned a lot from them. But because I had a tech background, I was always more drawn to the technical aspects. And at the same time, very creative."

The lighting years gave him something that would later prove more useful than he expected: the ability to visualise systems. In architectural lighting, you are not just placing fixtures. You are thinking about how light moves through a space, how people feel when they enter a place (related to UX), how one decision affects another, how the whole thing holds together. It is, in a way, systems thinking before he had that language for it.

When he decided to step back from work in 2019 and travel, it was not a crisis of purpose. It was just a pause. Then COVID closed the borders mid-trip, his brother drove from Paris to Rotterdam to pick him up, and what was meant to be a short break turned into a year in France.

That year is where UX began.

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Learning the field from the outside in

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A friend in Paris was studying UX through a well-known programme run in collaboration with Google. She told Roudy about it. He was intrigued. He took the Google Coursera course, started asking questions, and was eventually introduced to a design studio founder through another friend already working in the field.

The studio worked across Dubai, London, and Beirut. The founder's approach to hiring was direct: he did not care about formal credentials. He cared about problem-solving. He gave Roudy a test.

"He was like, I know you won't get this, but let's see how good you are. And he was actually surprised."

The test involved understanding relational databases and how a CMS architecture can create relationships between different components. For most candidates new to the field, it was unfamiliar territory. For Roudy, it mapped naturally onto what he already understood from years of linking technical and creative systems together in lighting work. He got it. He joined.

He started as a consultant, became a partner, and spent the next few years working across government platforms, financial products, and digital infrastructure projects throughout the region. He was doing end-to-end work: research, testing, design systems, UI, and handoff. And he was doing most of it in both English and Arabic.

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Assumptions are the first thing to test

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Roudy is direct about what most designers get wrong. The gap between what you assume and what you actually validate.

"They believe their assumptions before validating them. I mean, sometimes it works. But a lot of the time, even something simple does not work the way you think."

He tells a story from his own work. He was designing a prototype for a SaaS product. The users he was testing with were people who already used CMSs regularly. He assumed that because they were familiar with how similar tools worked, they would naturally understand his interface. Specifically, he assumed they would expect a slide-out panel when clicking a table row, because that is how most CMSs behave.

They did not. They expected the row to open a full page.

"I was like, but you do it this way in the other tool, why not here? And they were like, no, here we have a different understanding of what that click means."

It is a small thing. A click, a panel, an interaction pattern. But it is the kind of small thing that, if you had trusted your assumption and not tested it, would have quietly undermined an otherwise solid design. The users were right. The assumption was wrong.

At DOT, this is the kind of moment we design the research process around. Not to catch every possible mistake, but to create enough contact with real users that you stop confusing your mental model for theirs.

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Thinking in systems

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The way Roudy describes his design approach is precise. He calls himself a systems thinker, and the distinction matters to him.

"I try to find a solution, but sometimes even though a solution works, I'm not satisfied. Because I'm always thinking about optimising. How do you scale this? If the product grows, how do other things attach to it?"

He gives the example of a design system he built for a major bank in the region. The brief was to unify all digital assets across the organisation, starting with the mobile app. He could have approached it as a screen-by-screen design exercise. Instead, he built a component library that handled both English and Arabic in a single system, using Figma variables so that switching between languages required one click rather than duplicating every screen.

"It saved the team something like 50% of their time on the Arabic version. Because it was already there. All they had to do was put the content in."

The Arabic work is something Roudy talks about with particular care. Designing in Arabic in this region is not just a translation exercise. There are genuine open questions about standardisation: how numbers are written, where currency symbols sit, and how typography behaves when letters connect differently than they do in Latin scripts. He has worked on bilingual products throughout his career and understands the complexity at a practical level that most designers here are still working out.

"Between choosing one Arabic typeface and another, there is a huge difference. You do not have the same spacing. The letters connect. You cannot just apply what works in English and expect it to hold."

Arabic fluency is not a requirement for senior UX work in this region, he says. But it is a genuine edge, and one that more and more clients are actively looking for.

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Building on something

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Roudy joined DOT in January this year. After years of consulting work, moving project to project, he was ready for something more consistent. Not less varied, but more cumulative. A place where what you learn on one project carries into the next, where the team has a shared way of thinking, and you can build on it rather than starting fresh each time.

DOT offered that. A team that expects people to contribute beyond their immediate brief, to share what they know, to stay curious about the work happening around them. For someone who had spent years doing exactly that on his own, it was a natural fit.

His advice to designers aiming for senior roles is not about methods or tools.

"Be as curious as possible. And do not stop when you have an answer. Keep going, because there might be a better solution even when you think you have found one."

At DOT, that kind of restlessness is exactly what we are looking for. Designers who keep asking why, even when the answer is already good enough.

You can explore more of Roudy's work and thinking here.

Curious about how DOT approaches UX design and research in the MENA region? Get in touch and let's talk.

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