How ‘Red Teaming’ Helps Us Design Better Digital Experiences
Red teaming is a powerful planning concept that our founders first encountered while serving in elite units of the British military. It is a structured practice for challenging assumptions, stress-testing plans, and identifying vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
The method involves assigning a dedicated group, the “red team”, to think like an adversary or competitor. Their role is to probe for weaknesses, ask difficult questions, and reveal blind spots in a plan. Although it began in defence and intelligence, red teaming has been adopted in fields such as cybersecurity, corporate strategy, and more recently, the creative industries.
At Hiatus, we have adapted the concept for the world of websites and digital products. Creativity often benefits from pressure, and sometimes the best way to strengthen a design is to try to break it.
Red teaming in design: a different lens
Conventional web design usually follows a set pattern: stakeholder goals, discovery, prototyping, building, and rounds of feedback. While effective, this can miss a critical element: real-world friction.
By introducing red teaming into our workflow, we approach projects from the perspective of the toughest user, the most sceptical customer, or the most resourceful competitor.
In practice, this can include:
Asking, “How might a competitor exploit this feature?”
Simulating a distracted user with poor connectivity attempting a key task
Questioning our own assumptions about accessibility, speed, or clarity
Trying to disrupt the user journey with unexpected or extreme scenarios
The result is a product that is not only visually appealing in a mock-up but also resilient in real-world conditions.
Building resilience, not just polish
We believe that beautiful design must also be robust. Red teaming helps us create digital experiences that are harder to confuse, easier to trust, and more inclusive from the outset.
It changes our perspective. Instead of asking “Does this work?”, we ask “Where does this fail?”. This simple shift leads to more intelligent, precise, and human-centred outcomes.
How it works in practice
When developing an e-commerce platform for a client, we tasked a red team with testing the checkout process under challenging scenarios: a user with visual impairments, repeated payment failures, and multiple incorrect clicks. This process revealed improvements that might otherwise have been overlooked, resulting in a more inclusive and reliable system.
In another project, we fed a website corrupted data and unpredictable inputs. The results were messy, but the exercise highlighted the need for better error messages, stronger safeguards, and clearer feedback loops.
The future is pressure-tested
Red teaming is not about negativity. It is about thoroughness. In a digital environment where users are impatient and competition is intense, the most successful websites are those that can withstand setbacks and keep performing.
When we say we design websites that land danger close, we mean they are built to perform under pressure, not just in ideal circumstances. Red teaming is one of the key tools that allows us to deliver on that promise.
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