About

We started because an alarm’s volume lived one screen further than a tired person would go

Control Vertex Hub is a three-person practice in Petaling Garden. We only study how people handle the controls inside utility apps — the nest behind a torch, a weather tile, a file list, an alarm.

Origin

Amira Hassan spent an evening in her mother’s kitchen in Petaling Jaya watching a familiar scene: the alarm had gone off too loud, the volume control was not on the ringing screen, and the settings list used the word “media” for a sound that was waking the house. The app did one job well. The control that would have ended the evening sat two taps behind a mark nobody wanted to open at 5:40 a.m.

She began taking notes on other utilities the family actually used — a flashlight that strobed after a long press, a weather tile that arrived in Fahrenheit after every update. Friends who published small apps asked to sit in. The notes became a practice with a room on Jalan 5/65 and a rule: we study settings interaction, not the whole product, and we do not pretend a screenshot review is the same as watching someone hunt.

How we work

Intake is a conversation, not a questionnaire with forty boxes. We need a build, a list of controls that already cause trouble, and honesty about whether staff have been the only testers. If the answer is yes, we still run the study; we simply do not use those staff as the sample.

We stay inside utility apps because that is where a single misplaced toggle has outsized consequences: a strobe in a car park, a unit nobody in Selangor asked for, hidden files that contain a person’s own letters. Broader products have other rooms for that work. This one is narrow on purpose.

Malaysia is not a “test market” we fly into. The testers live here. The languages in the room are the languages of Petaling Jaya. When a label is only in English, we write down who waited and who guessed.

People

Who you will hear from

Three people run the studies. We do not farm facilitation to a rotating bench.

Amira Hassan

Study lead

Amira designs the tasks testers attempt and decides which controls are in scope. She came to this work after years of sitting with relatives in Petaling Jaya who could use a utility’s main screen and still not find a unit switch.

Wei Liang Tan

Session facilitator

Wei Liang runs the live sessions in English and Mandarin. He keeps the room quiet, resists the urge to point at the gear mark, and writes the tap-by-tap notes that later become the memo.

Priya Nair

Findings writer

Priya turns session notes into a memo grouped by control, not by personality. She also writes the control maps for reviews that do not include live testers.

What we value in the room

Silence is part of the method. If a facilitator fills the pause, we never learn where the person would have looked next. We also value a mild disagreement in the debrief: a publisher who defends a label is more useful than one who nods at every quote. The memo is written so that argument has something specific to hold onto — a path, a word, a missing reverse control — rather than a mood.

We are not a studio that ships apps, and we are not a classroom. If you need someone to redraw the settings tree, we can tell you which branches people never reached; the drawing is yours, or a designer you already trust.

Write to the Petaling Garden room