The Situation Room: Practice Navigating Real UX situations

A training simulator for digital product designers. Practice responding to stakeholder challenges on humane AI decisions under time pressure.
About the tool…
Designers often face pushback on ethical and thoughtful design decisions: "This slows us down," "Competitors don't do this," "Users won't notice." I wanted to create a safe space to practice these difficult conversations. Using game mechanics and realistic scenarios, I built a simulator that:
→ Presents real stakeholder challenges across different roles
→ Derives responses from designers under time pressure (mimicking real meetings)
→ Scores responses on business acumen, humane principles, and pragmatism
→ Shows expert-level responses for comparison
→ Builds muscle memory for advocating under pressure
As a design teacher…
1. Confidence comes from repetition, not just knowing principles
2. Time pressure reveals whether you truly understand your position
3. Different stakeholders require different framing of the same idea
4. Scoring mechanics make practice feel less intimidating
5. Seeing "optimal approaches" helps calibrate what good advocacy sounds like
Made me wonder…
What if this became a collaborative tool for design teams? Could this help onboard new designers to company values? What if scenarios could be customized per organization? Could this work for other difficult conversations beyond humane AI?