We are welcoming Deeksha Bhushan with their talk: "Extra Hot Takes: Lessons on chaos, customers, and better systems from a chicken restaurant" at FFConf 2026.

We wanted to also thank Deeksha for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know them a little bit more before Friday 13th November.

About Deeksha and their talk

• Title: Extra Hot Takes: Lessons on chaos, customers, and better systems from a chicken restaurant

• About the talk: The best insights about users and systems come from unexpected places. Two years supervising a chicken restaurant taught me more about building better experiences than any classroom ever could.

• Deeksha's origin story: I've been my family's unofficial IT department since I was a child. From broken TV remotes to vanished music libraries, everything was game. I now live on a different continent to most of them, and they still video call me instead of asking my brother, who's often in the room with them. Turns out translating "it's not working" into what someone actually needs is the job I've been doing all along.

The warm up questions

A chicken restaurant is an interesting place to find life lessons! What's the first image that comes to mind when you think back to it?

The first image isn't a moment. It's the people. The people I worked with, the people I worked for, and most importantly, the people I served. Everyone who walked through that door had their own story, and every one of those stories turned into a lesson. Not just UX lessons, either, life lessons too.

And some were just...cooking lessons disguised as complaints. Could you believe that someone once said, "my chicken isn't burnt enough," and they were dead serious. That was another lesson about feedback right there on the grill.

If this talk arrived as a takeaway order, what's in the box?

Well, in my opinion, reading about the contents of a takeaway box isn't nearly as fun as actually digging in.

But if I had to offer a sneak peek, I'd offer this: your mains include chaos on a busy Friday night, a griller squinting at the order screen, and variety in the form of a different customer with a different problem every time you blink.

Your very important sides include the RICE method, which I promise is a framework I'm proposing and not just an excuse to talk about my favourite side of spicy rice, and a lesson from a manager that shaped how I saw my job, and then quietly turned that perception on its head.

All of this will hopefully come together to satiate the listeners' hunger for how to apply user-focused thinking to improve any work that they do.

About the work and the talk

Your talk description says the best insights come from unexpected places. When did it click that the restaurant was quietly teaching you something?

It clicked because of an offhand comment actually. One of the grillers turned to me one day and I don't even know if they were joking, but they said something like, "wouldn't it be cool if you could use your actual degree and training to sort this screen out?".

On the screen that the grillers used to cook orders, the font was tiny, way too far from where anyone was standing, and people were squinting to read their orders.

I hadn't really connected my UX brain to my restaurant job until that moment. Eventually, someone at the central office did get the font size and contrast changed, and almost overnight, mistakes reduced, service sped up, everyone was just...happier. And I remember thinking that that's not a kitchen fix. That's UX.

What's one thing the restaurant work taught you that you wish everyone in tech knew?

The main thing really is that it's the people.

People just want to be seen and heard.

Your staff want to be listened to so they can have some say in what makes their day easier.

Your customers want a good experience, definitely, but a lot of the time, they just want to have a moan and feel like someone's actually taken it on board. And when you get that right, on both sides, that's when things actually work.

It's exactly the same in tech. You can throw the fanciest tools at something, design for whichever stakeholder shouts loudest, chase whatever shiny thing is trending that month, but if you're not actually thinking about the person using the thing, none of it matters. The design just won't do its job.

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Find out more about Deeksha online at LinkedIn.

Join us in November to see Niels's talk: 2026.ffconf.org