What Is ‘Red Teaming’ and How Does It Help Us Design Better Websites?
A powerful planning concept our founders learned whilst serving in elite units of the British military, red teaming is a practice used to challenge assumptions, stress-test plans, and uncover vulnerabilities before they’re exploited.
It involves appointing a dedicated team, the “red team”, to think like your enemy or competitor Their job is to poke holes, ask hard questions, and expose blind spots in your plan. Originally developed for defence and intelligence, red teaming has since made its way into cybersecurity, corporate strategy, and now, even creative industries like digital design.
At Hiatus, we’ve taken this idea and reimagined it for the world of websites and digital products. Because creativity thrives under pressure.
And sometimes, the best way to strengthen a design is to try and break it.
Red teaming in design: A new perspective
Traditional web design often follows a safe, predictable path, stakeholder goals, discovery phase, prototypes, the build phase and rounds of feedback. But this process can miss something critical: real-world friction.
By introducing red teaming into our workflow, we force ourselves to think like the toughest user, the most sceptical customer, or the most determined competitor.
That might look like:
Asking, “How would a competitor exploit this feature?”
Simulating a distracted user trying to complete a key task with poor connectivity.
Challenging our own assumptions about accessibility, speed, or clarity.
Trying to ‘break’ the UX flow by throwing edge cases at it.
The results are websites that don’t just look good in a mock-up image, but hold up under pressure in the real world.
Testing for resilience, not just polish
At Hiatus, we believe beautiful design should also be robust.
Red teaming helps us create digital experiences that are harder to confuse, easier to trust, and more inclusive by design. It challenges the default path and forces us to think outside the box.
More importantly, it shifts our mindset. Instead of asking “Does this work?”, we ask, “Where does this fail?”. That subtle change leads to smarter, sharper, more human-centred outcomes.
Practical examples
When building a client’s e-commerce platform, we assigned a red team to navigate the checkout process with assumptions like: What if the user has visual impairments? What if their payment fails? What if they click the wrong button three times in a row? That friction helped us uncover key improvements we might have otherwise missed—making the final product more resilient and inclusive.
Another time, we stress-tested a website by deliberately feeding it corrupted data and erratic inputs. It wasn’t pretty. But it helped us redesign the interface with better error states, clearer feedback loops, and smarter safeguards.
The future is pressure-tested
Red teaming isn’t about being negative, it’s about being thorough. In a digital world where users are impatient and competition is fierce, the websites that win are the ones that can take a hit and keep moving.
So when we say we design websites that land danger close, we mean it. They’re built to hold up under fire, not just under ideal conditions. Red teaming is just one way we make that happen.
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