UX Design to WIN in Business

Nils (00:00)
All right, here we go. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Nils I'm co -founder and head of interaction design at Dinghy and have a ton of experience working in the field So this is the main focus of our agency. And this is the third episode of the podcast. We started this to talk about how to apply user experience.

to your business to not as a nice to have, not as an extra design discipline or whatever, but to in fact, make you more money, be more profitable, your business faster. Like I wanna make the transition from designer world to business world. And to do that, I ended the last episode by promising to bring...

concrete examples of cases that we encountered in the last couple years in our agency setting. And so one of my favorite examples has to do with usability testing. So usability testing is one of the many activities that lead to great user experience. And I want to tell you a little bit.

about this story and how this all rolled out. somewhere last year, around this time actually, pretty much one year ago, by now a very good customer of ours approached me and said, Nils, need a new website and we need it fast.

And we not only need a new website, we also we're kind of fed up with the way that our brand, at least the visual part of our brand is presented on that website. And we also don't like how it just talks about the company and not about the products. And also, Cristina said, and also we need it by September. All of this.

And I sat back and was like, all right, Cristina, what are we going to do now? How can we, how can we in effectively like three months achieve all of this? Like redesign the visual part of your brand, start to talk about your actual products and not just about your company and make everyone understand.

like looking at this website, have people understand what you actually want to communicate. So that client is called Relayr and they work in industrial IoT. So their field is pretty specific. It's obviously B2B market. The ideal customer profile for people visiting this website.

are at least management, like actually business owners, CEOs of companies who run some sort of industrial plant and have heavy rotating machinery going on. Because the solution that Relay builds, or like a product that helps to run your plant, is like tiny sensors that get installed onto your...

onto your rotating equipment that talk to the internet. And basically, like they can sense vibration in the machine transmit the data that they perceive through the sensor, transmit that through whatever, like a 5G modem or like anyway, like they transport all of this information back to the service.

then they apply machine learning and fancy AI stuff to understand, like to find patterns in the data that they receive from which it's possible to predict when the machine, like how far out the next failure might occur and when the machine is gonna need maintenance. So what you get from that is,

You don't just wait till the machine breaks and then run around in panic to find the next mechanic. Pun not intended, but you get predictability and you can plan your stuff and so on. But so this product has a very specific niche and we were tasked to build a website for exactly this sort of people.

What we did to be successful in this, because obviously, like neither of us at Dinghy, we're not industrial IoT experts. And that is something that we encounter often in our agency life, of course, that we, it's basically like business consulting in some ways, I imagine at least without being a business consultant, but like you get dropped into a topic that you probably never have heard of before.

And now you need to understand what's happening and how you can talk about this, how you can build an app for it or a website. Okay. So what we did was what we do often to hopefully arrive at the ideal outcome. And that is that we started with wireframing and wireframing is this activity.

where you can roughly plan. I wouldn't even call it layout, but you kind of, you know, like you chunk up your page into the individual sections and plan out which content is gonna go there. And you can go super high level and just draw a box and say, hero section. Or you can actually put the actual headline in there and say, this and that is our product. This is why you want it. Click this button to go this and that place.

And so we did that and we learned a lot from the product team at Relayr, of course. And they were actually very amazing. Like they were one of our most supportive customers during this process that I ever Like they were just spot on, available 24 -7 basically. And they introed us to the topic, to the field of industrial IoT.

And we came up with a bunch of assumptions. One of the assumptions being, and I think I can go ahead at this point a little bit, to say that this website, as many websites you've run for your business, are not because you like having pretty websites. This was, of course, meant to sell the product.

And in that case, they had a very specific goal to reach a certain number of sales until the end of the year, which also explained why it was crucial that we get online with this website by September at least, so they would have a chance to ramp up the marketing. But that also meant that not only we were in a tight spot to build that website and we kind of had to nail it, because marketing was hinging on us.

to deliver a website that could then convert leads into customers. And so because all of this was the case and because everything was tight, I wanted to make sure that we land on the right messaging that would resonate with this very specific ideal customer profile. And so...

We came up with these wireframes and we had this one idea basically that we also didn't really, you know, we're not the first ones to invent a return on invest calculator, of course, but we looked at the competition of Relayr and what they were doing in different markets that they were in. And many of them were hinging on the messaging of, look,

we're absolutely sure that you can get like 10 X return on investment after half a year, after the first 12 months of implementing our solution. All right. And so we figured coming out of the field of, websites and apps that had to work for, for tech startups, you know, and, coming out of this field.

where websites has to be short and concise and people scan them and they kind of want to get the idea quickly and then just talk to someone or sign up. And so we thought this return on invest calculator was a good idea. And we mocked it up and we drew like a little wire frame and said, like, you can play with calculator sort of thing. Like you can enter this number and that number and then it will spit out how many X like,

how much we will multiply your return and invest based on whatever you entered. this was also the idea that marketing was going to pick up as the campaign and Relayr actually had a considerable ad budget set aside that was going to support this campaign. Right on. Then...

We came around and I said, Cristina, I think we should test. We should test this premise. Like we should test this idea if it will actually resonate with these people. And thankfully she agreed and reached out to her network to find these very specific people because usability testing of course can only be so good as the candidates that you get. If you ask the wrong people, they will tell you something entirely different than.

the CEO of an industrial company that is actually interested in the solution. And so we had the opportunity to talk to three to four and only, like I'm saying three to four, but only three to four high profile people from this field. And that was absolutely enough because to make a long story short, none of them,

Not one single person loved this idea of the ROI calculator. Like they all in saying it in different ways, but they all came back to us and said, look, I run an industry business here can absolutely calculate my own return on invest, you know.

And what I really want to know is how this product works. So please show me details about how this product works, what it costs, how long it takes to install. How does it actually send this information over the internet? Like all of this sort of stuff they wanted to know and didn't care about our I calculator. So we came back and we're a little bit stunned by that feedback, updated our wireframes, talked to them again. They said,

Yes, thank you. This is a much, much better solution for me because now I feel like you're not hiding the stuff. Like in these short, in these websites that are really short and concise, and that's what all of your competitors are doing, I always feel like I'm not getting all of the information and I will only get it when I talk to someone. And so they really appreciated this thing. And...

I, Cristina was nice enough to talk to me about their project specifically. There's an interview on this YouTube channel. And I remember her describing how surprised she was by this turn of events. And I'm telling you all of this sort of stuff because the only thing we did to probably save

a huge chunk of money on ad budget because if we didn't do the usability testing, which was a super quick exercise, course we had to find these people. And I'm glad that Cristina went the extra mile to do so. But we talked to them for half an hour each. And then, you know, like in the second round for another 15 minutes, just to validate that we went into the right direction. And that didn't take a lot of effort.

But we still did it and we did it at the very beginning of the design process in Wireframe land. So we were able to update everything in an hour. And so with a day or two, we saved them like six figure ad budget, I suppose, for the remainder of the year. Because marketing was going to pick up the same messaging concept, of course. And so...

This sort of stuff is a part of user experience because in this case, the business owners and CEOs and these high profile people who are the customer group of this, who this website is going to talk to, they are the users in this case, right? Like user experience doesn't mean app. Like it's not only the UI of Instagram.

or whatever, the user experience is whoever is using your digital product. And in Relayr's case, the user group who has an experience with their entire company are these sort of people. And the first touch point might as well be the website. this very specific part of user experience that I picked out

I really like this example because even, you know, in this isolated way to just look at the usability testing of wireframes for these very specific people, that's like a very tiny piece of the entire user experience. But I want to pick this apart in individual pieces, so to be as concrete as possible. And this was one example,

going to come around with another example next week. And I really hope that going from one aspect of user experience to the other with concrete examples like will help to understand what it really takes to build a digital product and to nail the experience that your users are going to have with it.

together and this is again, this is not a, this is not only your, UI designer's work. This is a joint effort of basically everyone in the company, same as it is with brand. Like.

If you give people a shitty experience, then that will reflect on your brand. brand is always what people remember about the interaction with your product and your company. And so these two topics are very closely tied together. Even if they're made up of different individual pieces. And so this is where I'm going to end this episode. I hope...

was an enjoyable story and I'm looking forward to continuing the series. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to hit me up on any of the channels and see you next Monday. Bye.