UX Design to WIN in Business

Nils Borgböhmer (02:25.346)
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Nils. I'm co -founder at Dinghy, a strategic experience design agency. And today I want to talk to you about simplicity, creativity, innovative or creative problem solving. So for listeners of this podcast, you know that I would like to talk about user experience and how

I think that it is the fundamental building block to running a successful digital business, but actually any business really. and I want to untangle this a little bit today because I had a couple of very interesting conversations with stakeholders at our customers' organizations.

but also outside of our current realm of customers, that I think will impact how we're going forward with our mission at DINGY. So we'll stay on the same topic, of course, like user experience and a good user experience will always be our goal. But I want to transform the way that I speak about this.

a little bit more and bring it a little bit closer to the target audience of this podcast, which of course I welcome all of the designers on the planet and all the programmers and all everyone who's deep in the trenches of actually doing the product work. But in this podcast, I also want to speak to the decision makers, to the business owners, to the

strategic product people who actually have the task in their role to lead their organization and to lead the organization to specific goal that they're following, which in the wake of doing this, you will have to take a myriad of decisions that lead to the success of reaching this goal.

Nils Borgböhmer (04:49.644)
You know that, this is exactly what you're doing all day long. And I wanna talk about how you're probably feeling in this role. And what I perceive from our latest, we can almost call it discovery research. So in the last two episodes, Nosepo and I talked about personas, like the concept of a buying persona, marketing persona.

And like generally this concept of learning a whole bunch about your target audience and putting it together in this abstract avatar that should help you take decisions when developing your digital product, when running your marketing, when in fact doing anything about your business, to direct all of your decisions.

to the benefit of this persona. so personas are not a new concept. We talked about those, the issues with personas and how to improve them a whole bunch in the last two episodes. So if you're interested in that topic, please feel free to listen to those episodes. I think there's a couple of very excellent points in there, especially for people who...

maybe already have a set of personas and are not happy with the implementation or the adoption of those personas. But so I think personas, user research, discovery research, all these different activities serve the purpose of understanding where your organization should be going. Like what's

the goal of the whole thing that you're doing. And our job at Dengue is to help you take away the complexity of all of the nuance. Let me explain what I mean with this.

Nils Borgböhmer (07:01.15)
I nobody actually wants a website. That's a strong statement for someone who's building websites his entire career. But I really believe from what I've seen over the last years, that nobody actually wants a website. Nobody wants to, you know, implement SAP. Nobody wants to have these tools.

What everybody wants, of course, is for those tools to be the vehicle to bring them closer to their goals. In the case of a website, just because it's so nice and simple, a website, of course, is your digital representation on the web. It's sort of your business card. the, it has many jobs. has like, you know, if you had a conversation with someone, they will go look up your website.

If they like what they see, it will have a positive additional impact on your previous conversation. If they don't like what they see, they will maybe think in a different way. And so a website has the job to positively underline your brand mission, you're telling people, what your business is doing. It has...

the job to acquire leads. has the job to inform people about career choices so that you can successfully hire talent. And you know all of these things, but you also know that successfully running a website is actually very complicated. Like even these days where there's a whole lot of really great website builders that do package much of the nuance.

into a digestible package. But it's still very nuanced. And maybe you're not the type of company that actually wants to run on framer .com or Squarespace, but you're having a custom website and you actually need that level of flexibility. And so in this case, you're all on your own. And I'm speaking about things like running ad campaigns, having the website always be

Nils Borgböhmer (09:24.29)
Fast, performant, work on all the mobile devices, search engine optimization, search engine advertising, like all of the technical things that at some point you or someone at your organization has to take a decision about. Like all of these things are necessary, but not interesting. I think this is an important realization that nobody

really wants to do these things. It's at least not on a decision maker or product level. Like what you want is to go into a website and say we have a certain topic that we would like to highlight and to improve our lead acquisition alongside of this topic. And you want to think creatively about the solution. About if you're running

a campaign for your digital transformation business, then you want to know how can I set up an interesting landing page with appealing content for my target group. And so in the spirit of UX Design to Win in Business, my mission today is to tell you

that there are people like us at Dinghy whose job it is to take away the nuance from you. And that I think that it's important to invest in this sort of setup to actually free you as the one who's supposed to make a decision into this direction or another direction, that there's people who help to come to an informed decision on...

which direction to take and to take away all of the boring nuance that is connected with these topics. Because in the last projects that we've been running at bigger organizations, I think the theme is always the same. Like as soon as a team consists of more than 50 people or 100 or 500, then you can't expect everyone to be in the know about everything all the time.

Nils Borgböhmer (11:52.202)
Of course, because then we'd be the Borg with the shared consciousness like in Star Trek. But we're not. And knowledge transfer and common understanding with the person on the other side of the table is, as we believe at DINGY, one of the hardest problems to overcome. Most of the solutions and creative solutions that we invent as humanity, I believe,

are in fact made to help the other side understand of what you want and where you want to go with something. And to enable you to give you the feeling of simplicity, creativity and innovation to give those things back to you, we need to remove all of the nuance.

We need to remove all of the discussions about tag managers and search consoles and page speeds and all of those technical things that are all very valid and all very important to take care of. But all of this, you need to have a feeling of that this stuff is being taken care of, that it's in good hands, that...

whatever decision you take, the effect will be that those nuances will be sorted out for you. Because otherwise you're so swamped in the millions of requirements that you have in actually implementing the solution to your challenge that I believe you're taking away from the path of clarity.

to even come to this decision. And this is something that is like, I think everything we've been doing at Dengue up till now has sort of led to this moment, to the realization that people don't want to fiddle with tools. They want to come closer to their solution and to their goal. And they want to be able to take an informed decision about

Nils Borgböhmer (14:17.442)
how to reach that goal. Only that the technical landscape is, as we all know, course, ever -increasing, ever -becoming more complicated and more nuanced. And that makes sense, of course, because the more powerful the tools become, as we can see with AI, for example, the more powerful they become, the more nuanced and the more complex.

the technical implementation below the surface actually has to be. Of course, it's not magic after, at the end, it's not magic that AI can do what it can. Like if you listen to Mark Zuckerberg or anyone who is recently in the process of making AI even more successful and even more...

complex in the challenges that it can handle will tell you that the underlying chaos that has to be managed, the underlying resources, the investment bets that you have to make to set up all of the hardware to run these gigantic AI models, all of that is in the making right now. And I think a general

rule in life, I will go this far, is that something can be good, but then the chances are that it's also complex. It can be simple, but then the chances are also that it's stupid, simple and stupid. And as soon as something is simple and good, simple.

and comprehensive at the same time. Then, and only then, there was a gigantic amount of problem solving involved to come to this, to cook it down to this ease of a solution. And I think this is what everybody wants. Simple and good. Nobody wants a million buttons. Everybody wants just one button, but they want the right button. Of course, like that is

Nils Borgböhmer (16:46.69)
The Google search interface is cliche that has been discussed for the last 20 years of our lives. How only Apple and Google managed to make something complex, simple. And as we all know, they are huge organizations and invest a ridiculous amount of resources into this, into making something good and simple at the same time. And

Our mission at Dinghy is to help you achieve exactly this. We want to take away all of the nuance that keeps you from taking the right decisions towards your goals. This is exactly what our mission is. This is what we believe the mission for the next 10 years in tech will be. The last 10 years were all about trying out what is theoretically possible. And we know now

that basically everything is possible. And now the challenge for the next 10 years will with absolute certainty be to sort out all of the noise and all of the over complexity and all of this things that keep you from taking a clear informed decision towards your goals. And that is the same for you.

And that is the same for your customers as well. Your customers want to be certain that they take the right decision for their organization by hiring you for your services or buying your products. And the only way that they can take this informed decision is the same problem that I'm describing to you right now. If you make it simple and good at the same time.

then you have a good chance. And if you're just another organization that chucks on a couple AI features to their product, then you're probably going to miss the goal. And the next couple of episodes on this podcast will go around how to get there, how to do exactly all of this. And I think it will be super exciting.

Nils Borgböhmer (19:11.37)
I have a couple of great guests going to come on from user experience researchers to stakeholders in the industry. And I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for listening. See you in the next one.