The OCL Design Ethos

For us at OCL, design is deeply intertwined with impact. It’s about creating tools that help cities function better, enable more equitable service delivery, and empower city residents with data-driven insights. Our design team continuously refines their work through collaboration, iteration, and a strong focus on real-world usability. We sat down with Senior UX Designer Benjine Gerber, UI & Graphic Designer Lerato Mosehle, and Design Lead Paul Figueira to discuss their approach, the challenges they navigate, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

Tackling Real-World Challenges from Complexity to Simplicity

Across the board, the team finds the most reward in building tools that genuinely improve lives. Everyone has their favourite pieces of work, but the common thread is creating solutions that make complex systems easier to navigate and more equitable for everyone.

What has been your most rewarding project at OCL so far, and why?

Benjine: The Council Resolution work has been the most rewarding. Though it presented significant technical challenges, the driving force was always the positive impact on our users. Helping them transition from a cumbersome manual process to a more efficient digital solution was incredibly motivating. Knowing we were making their work lives easier made our hard work worthwhile.

Lerato: It’s difficult to pinpoint just one, but MyCandidate stands out. For the South African version, we focused on visualising how the voting system works. In Sierra Leone, we expanded the scope to not only present candidate information but also their manifestos. This project is a powerful tool for empowering citizens across Africa, enabling them to make well-informed decisions during elections.

Co-Design: Listening, Iterating, and Evolving

Co-design is at the core of the design team’s ethos. While the team brings expertise in design, users are experts in their own experiences, making collaboration essential. By prioritising deep listening and integrating user feedback throughout the process, the team ensures that every product genuinely serves its users.

How does co-design with users and stakeholders shape your approach to design?

Benjine: I believe that truly effective problem-solving in UX design starts with deep listening. I prioritise co-design, carefully considering the needs and perspectives of users and all stakeholders. This collaborative approach often reveals the core of the problem and sparks creative solutions.

Lerato: Collaboration is fundamental to my process. At OCL, I work closely with a variety of stakeholders. From city departments, researchers, journalists (for the Africa Data Hub), and city residents. I ensure that user feedback is integrated at every stage, from early concept discussions to usability testing, workshops, and iterative prototyping. This ensures that the tools we create are grounded in real-world needs and perspectives of the people they are designed for.

Paul: It’s virtually all we do. We are good at design and delivery, but the specific “thing” we are working on sits within someone else’s field of expertise. Although empathy is a crucial skill, we don’t believe we can empathise our way to an answer. This is why co-design is central to our process. We work closely with our partners to identify what works in their system and amplify those aspects while realistically addressing challenges in a way that doesn’t completely disrupt their world.

Designing for Accessibility and Scalability

The team prioritises early and continuous user engagement to ensure accessibility and usability. By collaborating with community-based organisations, adhering to universal design principles, and testing with both city representatives and city residents, they create digital tools that are intuitive, inclusive, and effective. Scalability and adaptability are central to OCL’s design philosophy - products are built as flexible, modular systems that can evolve with changing datasets, user needs, and emerging technologies, ensuring long-term relevance and impact.

How do you ensure that your UI designs remain user-centered and accessible?

Lerato: I always begin by applying universal design principles, ensuring that the designs comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards for colour contrast, readability, and screen-reader compatibility. I take care to conduct user testing not just with city representatives but also the actual city residents to ensure that the design is intuitive, inclusive, and effective for all types of users.

Paul: Wherever possible, we try to engage and test early with potential users. Historically, this has sometimes been a challenge, but recently we’ve begun working with community-based engagement organisations that can represent us while sensitively engaging stakeholders on their teams. In terms of accessibility, we design low-data usage websites and use a range of accessibility-checking tools to ensure inclusivity.

Given the challenges of working with evolving systems and data structures, how do you ensure scalability and adaptability in your designs?

Benjine: Early in my career, while building an intranet, I experienced firsthand how a system can become unwieldy and difficult to extend. This led me to explore object-oriented design principles, which have been invaluable ever since. Designing with modularity and extensibility in mind is crucial for long-term success.

Lerato: Scalability is critical when designing for complex and evolving urban systems. I prioritise flexibility in my designs, ensuring that they can easily adapt to changing datasets, user needs, and emerging technologies. This approach allows our platforms to grow and evolve over time, accommodating new data sources and expanding user needs without disrupting the user experience.

Paul: We often work in use-case examples while building tools and services, but these almost alway relate back to a base product. Our base products have a wide set of features, and specific use cases cherry-pick the appropriate features. While use cases can be quite specific, their nuances often apply broadly. By ensuring feature updates happen at a product level, we pass learnings and improvements onto all outputs.

Making Data Intuitive and Actionable

The team takes a multi-layered approach to making urban data more accessible. By designing platforms that cater to different proficiency levels - offering raw data for advanced users, dashboards for mid-level users, and guided data stories for beginners - they ensure that data empowers rather than overwhelms. Clear visualisations and accessible tools like CKAN allow users to engage with information at their own pace, making complex data more intuitive and actionable.

Urban data can be complex. How do you create designs that make such data more intuitive and actionable?

Lerato: We simplify urban data by using clear and intuitive dashboards paired with data stories that cater to users with varying levels of data proficiency. These dashboards provide high-level trend insights and contextual explanations to make the information easily digestible. For users who want to explore the data further, we incorporate advanced data management systems like CKAN, enabling them to dive deeper and interact with the raw data. This approach is particularly evident in our work on Open Data Portals, where we create an accessible entry point for everyone while empowering more advanced users with the tools to conduct in-depth exploration.

Paul: It’s incredibly complex. We aim to balance showing data in a way that meets users where they are (skill-wise) without being patronising. Some of our products must recognise that our user base is broad, so we present data in multiple ways based on the user’s level of proficiency. For example, the EDGE portal shares the same information in three different ways:

Raw data for highly proficient users who want to pull data into their own business intelligence tools.
Dashboards for medium-proficiency users who can read charts but don’t necessarily want to build them.
Data Stories for lower-proficiency users, offering a guided journey of data visualisations linked with narrative and conclusions.

The Biggest Lesson: Never Skip Usability Testing

‍Continuous learning and iteration are at the core of OCL’s design culture. The team embraces an iterative process, recognising that designs are never truly ‘done’ and that flexibility is key to progress. Scalability ensures solutions evolve alongside users’ needs, while rigorous usability testing uncovers real-world challenges that might otherwise go unnoticed. Together, these principles shape a design ethos that is thoughtful, adaptable, and user-driven.

What’s one design lesson you’ve learned at OCL that has transformed the way you work?

Benjine: The learning never stops in UX design! I've learned countless lessons, many related to working smarter, and I'm sure I'll continue to learn. One key lesson that stands out is the importance of designing for scalability.

Lerato: Usability testing is absolutely non-negotiable. Regardless of experience, real users will always interact with a product in ways we don’t expect. The best designs aren’t static; they evolve through continuous iteration, feedback, and real-world testing. No matter how well we think we understand the user, the only way to truly refine a design is by observing and testing with real users, ensuring that our solutions are aligned with their needs and behaviours.

Paul: Perfect is the enemy of good, and we are never done. At OCL, we work with partners over long periods, favouring continuous integration over monolithic builds. This means products are always evolving. Being overly precious about your design or idea can get in the way of real solutions. Co-design is powerful because it keeps the process open to as many stakeholders as possible, ensuring improvement through iteration and adaptation.