UX Design to WIN in Business

Nils: 00:01

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Niels. I'm Zip. Hey, everyone.

Nils: 00:59

Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Niels. I'm cofounder and head of interaction design at Dinghy. I have 10 years plus experience in building digital products, being a lead designer, working on websites in general, coding front end. And I'm here to tell you in this brand new podcast about how you can apply user experience to actually win in business.

Nils: 01:33

The first episode I used to to intro to you a couple of to intro a couple of topics to you, where that triggered me to start at this podcast. So usually user experience is, is talked about in a way as if it were like a like a design discipline. Like UI design. So you've probably seen posts like UI slash UX design and stuff like this. And, today in this episode, I wanna tell you how, how dinghy came to be and how we actually came to this point in the podcast that I feel the need to talk to the public, about user experience and why it's not a designer thing.

Nils: 02:27

Like it's it's not a designer thing. It's not something that you do to be nice to your users or anything. It's, it's a topic as big as branding, which is and branding is yeah. Which is equally misunderstood often. So the same way as branding is not only your colors and your logo and your font, UX design is not only another word for UI design.

Nils: 02:57

And my what I would like to transport to you in this podcast is how UX design is not something that you pay for to be nice to your users, but it's something that if you understand how like, what it is and how to actually apply it in your business, will propel your business forward. So imagine you have any sort of digital product, then user experience is the thing that will 5 x your business. If you apply it in all the areas, if it's done correctly. In the first episode, I talked about stuff like reducing customer support requests, increasing user retention on your app, about happier users, about how you can actually spend your internal r and d budget on research and development and not in hot fixing stuff that people are complaining about in your app store ratings. So but to to backpedal a little bit and to give you an idea who's talking to you, I wanted to use this episode to to come up with like a little intro to and that will hopefully not only be our boring history, but especially it's, it's meant to tell you how to approach user experience.

Nils: 04:30

And maybe if you follow along in this short story, I'll try to keep it short, you can understand better where we're coming from when we wanna talk about user experience in this way. So I'm a cofounder at Dinghy, and so are Adam and Daniel, my 2 other co founders. We we were all freelancing before. Like, my career actually started back in Berlin. Dan and Adam both studied communication design in in Cologne.

Nils: 05:06

And we met in Frankfurt. And so our lives always were it was always hard to settle on one location. And I met Adam back at Frankfurt when we were working in the same co working space. But from a skill perspective, so we are all designers. Daniel and I, are also front end developers.

Nils: 05:31

Like we I'm thinking a little bit just because we're kinda self taught. Like I actually studied computer science at some point. Before, my communication design studies. But that didn't really have anything to do with the web and how we work on it today. So, yeah, Daniel and I are are both advocates for the free and open web.

Nils: 05:58

And we like working on the web platform, not just to make money because but because we believe in the concept of humanity having this amazing network to talk to each other. And and Adam always had a strong focus on user experience. Like, he, I don't even exactly know where he picked it up. But I think since I met him, he didn't talk about UI design as much. But he talked about how humans interact with digital devices and how it's our job to design this experience.

Nils: 06:39

And that is not only is the button in the lower right corner or is the app green? Or is it this and that? But it's it's even more about it's it's about the entire company who provides this app. Like every digital touch point that you have in there. And that's has been his angle all along.

Nils: 07:00

And our 1st years working together, we were just like a a loose couple of freelancers. And before that, we even had our individual careers. So, Adam was working for for Vodafone for a while and and was working on on their app design back then when it was about you know when smart homes came up and about that was like a a huge thing that he did. And Dan didn't even really work in in, you know, in web and app design in that sense back then. But his first big job after university was to if you're in Germany, you might know that guy, but he worked, on designing the technical aspects of of the 3 d rendered TV show backgrounds that you saw back then when you when you watched shows, featuring Stephan Rapp.

Nils: 08:05

Like, that was, that was a big thing back then. I think he's very famous still. And, and Dan kind of turned down the world of of TV just because he was more interested in in a broader stroke. And the and the web was this vehicle that would enable him to to work on something much bigger than TV. And, and my intro to web and and tech and all of that sort of stuff, was the startup scene in Berlin.

Nils: 08:41

Like I worked for Rocket Internet Ventures back then. And my last station before before launching into my freelance career, was to be the lead designer at SumUp. Like, that's that's 10 years ago now, but this is where we started. Like, I I was able to gain experience on a in in, like, a really fast moving startup with, with managing designers and front end developers, and it was an absolutely amazing job. I we still have a great connection to this day, Samap and I.

Nils: 09:20

And but I felt like I had to to do something on my own. And so during our freelancing careers, our paths kinda crossed at some point. And we did together what we what we brought in. Like, we kinda worked on the clients that we brought in, and we did what we were doing naturally anyway. So, Dan and I were designing and building websites, and Adam was designing the user experience for for apps and and this sort of stuff.

Nils: 09:55

And we kinda went from one project to the next. And and we also we always before user experience got this very defined term as we feel about it today, I think we we kinda accidentally worked on on all the necessary parts to make a great user experience. And so we were set up for like the 3 of us were already set up pretty well. So we had a dedicated UI designer. We, we could make apps and websites ourselves.

Nils: 10:34

All of the 3 of us were designers, and some of us had more of a focus on typography and a good feel for brand, and the others more for design systems and all of this sort of stuff. But what really brought us into thinking about user experience in a broader term was when CFO came on. So after, like, the one of the bigger website projects we we created for one of our customers, we've we kinda noticed this repeating pattern in in project management. And that was that we were hired to to create the the design and the architecture of the website and to implement it then. Sometimes we were also hired to create the content and the visuals and the copy text and all that sort of stuff.

Nils: 11:40

And we of course had one opinion to approach the whole thing. And the customer had an opinion. So opinion in this case, I guess, is just another word for for vision or for an idea of what the result should look like in the end. And to talk about something like a website or an app is, as many of you probably know, is very complicated. Like, it feels so easy in the beginning.

Nils: 12:11

You imagine this website or this app, and well, it has like 10 pages that are different from each other. And how hard can it be to make this thing? But it involves many disciplines. And and kinda there's, like, many, many gaps between the disciplines that need to be bridged. So we always had this point in a project where to make it super simple, like oversimplification, we said you can only have one sentence of copy text in this section.

Nils: 12:49

And the customer said, well, but we really have to explain our product much better and in more detail than in one sentence. So we actually require, like 3 to 4 paragraphs of text here, and then like a bullet list here. And then we came along and said, well, you know, but in this order, it doesn't really even make sense since nobody's gonna read all of that content, you know. And so we always felt had, you know, like I don't know. Like, 2 2 cowboys in a shootout.

Nils: 13:21

Like, who's who's gonna who's gonna win in the end with their opinion? And then we somehow, you know, we came to some sort of compromise. And the project went online, and then we started to get feedback, and then we started to iterate on the product, and to make it better according to the feedback. And at some point we thought there has to be a better way. And, we met Nasifo on LinkedIn, and she came in as a dedicated user experience researcher.

Nils: 14:00

That was that is her job title. That's what she's striving for. And she came in with a mission to to represent a broader, like, a a more inclusive spectrum of humanity in user experience research. And so she wanted like, she thrives on finding out what people like how they experience a product and how it can be how it can be made better in the end. And that's when it really clicked for us.

Nils: 14:37

And then, what we did was instead of coming up with a design and for a website or an app. And then to show it to the whoever is the stakeholder of the project internally, maybe even the CEO, showing it to them. And then they started to say, like, we have to move the section down. Instead of doing this, we started to ask the customer of our customers. So to ask the users how do you perceive this design?

Nils: 15:11

Like how does this work for you? And we started to do this more and more and more. And whenever we came a lot around with the presentation, so we showed, a design that was iterated on for a couple times after we did a couple of rounds of, usability testing with real users. We came around with a design and a presentation that suggested why we took a decision like this. And we walked the customer through the process of, of how we interviewed the the the users and what the feedback was.

Nils: 15:54

And to our to our surprise, like we hoped that this would help the situation, but what actually happened is these meetings that are like, like this face off where either one has an opinion, they were knocked out of the water entirely. The only thing the customer wanted, of course, was a website that worked for their customers. Because that's why you have a website. That's why you have an app. That's why you run any sort of digital product to get ahead with your business.

Nils: 16:33

Like it's a tool, it's a sales channel, it's your product. The only thing you want as a business owner is to make it better, to make you more profit, to reach more users, To be more effective. To whatever your goal is, you do that through a digital product because that's your business. And user experience is it sounds like a fancy design term, but it actually means make the product work for your customer. And that's exactly how all of these different disciplines come together to to work for for your customer.

Nils: 17:18

And this is what this podcast is about. Like I wanna bridge the gap of designers to business, of developers to business, of marketeers to business, of even maybe salespeople to business. Like, there are so many, different job descriptions that have contribute to make, like, one great digital product. And at Dinghy, we we think about this as areas of expertise. And so, we discussed this at length before we get into like before we kind of fully immersed ourselves in in taking this angle in our business to to talk about user experience.

Nils: 18:06

And so our skill set, as I already talked about a little bit in the beginning, is we're front end developers. We're also researchers by now. We're UI designers. We're people who do branding, who write copy text, who animate stuff, if the purpose requires it. And so we have all of these different skills.

Nils: 18:34

And instead of talking about the individual skills, we're tying them together to talk to you about user experience. And that's, I think that is that is the gist of the entire thing. And that's why this is also so personal for us and for me. Like I whenever I have conversations with our customers or with friends or with family, and we always come back to this topic that user experience is not a nice to have. It's not even just one discipline.

Nils: 19:15

It's it's a combination of all of the individual efforts it takes to not just make an app or just not to make a website, but to run a company that has that sells digital products. And then it's also not only about the one product. You probably have a bunch of products. You probably have customer support. You probably have, social media channels.

Nils: 19:46

You have ads. You have all sorts of digital touch points. And to design a great user experience means to look at all these touch points and to find out if each of those work individually for your customers. Not for you. Not for us.

Nils: 20:08

Nobody cares about us or about you as the CEO of the company. The customer cares if they use a music streaming service, if they can get to their music super quickly, and if it can suggest relevant music to them to discover more, or to have all of their favorite music always with them. They don't care, like, really about the business model or whatever. Like, they wanna get their job done. If you have, like, if you're HubSpot and you're running, like, a huge CRM system, then the only thing your customer cares about, if they can have all of their leads in a pipeline, if they can effectively, plan and send marketing campaigns through multiple channels, And that they have the tools in place to get in touch with their leads, in an effective way.

Nils: 21:05

And that's the only thing that matters, and that is user experience. It doesn't matter if their buttons are orange, or if the sidebar is necessarily on the left or on the top. Sure. That's an aspect of user experience, and that probably has been tested very dedicatedly at some point, where the navigation was on the top and now it moved to the left. That was probably like a huge design design decision.

Nils: 21:33

But it's just one part of user experience. And to think about user experience as a whole, you have to understand how user experience is made up, and that it's not just one design thing. And in the coming episodes, we're gonna look into these individual aspects just as I promised in the first episode. We're gonna come look at concrete examples. I'm gonna bring examples from our from our agency work that we tackled in the last 2 or 3 years, that are the basis of how I arrived at feeling the urge of having a podcast.

Nils: 22:18

And because there were so many pivotal moments for us, that made the concept of user experience really click for me, and I hope that I can transport the same click effect to you through those examples. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. If you already have anything, in mind that you always really wanted, feel free to contact me in any way. Drop it in the comments.

Nils: 22:51

I'm on all the channels. Let me know what you are interested in. Other than that, I'm gonna get into where design, and development and all of these different disciplines, where they cross over. That's always been my role. I've always been a front end developer and a designer and a business owner.

Nils: 23:15

And so if I know anything to be true in life, then that the real the hard problems always lie on the intersection and not in the individual discipline. So, I hope this is interesting to you. If it is, join me on this journey to to unravel user experience. Thanks for watching. See you in the next one.