UX Design to WIN in Business

Nils (00:02)
UX Design to Win in Business. My name is Nils. I'm a UX designer and the co -founder of Dinghy. And today we're going to talk about auditing user experiences and how to go about it, how to know if something's up with your user experience of your digital product in general. And to do that, I brought today for the very first time my co -founder Daniel. Daniel.

Please say hi to everyone and maybe tell us a little bit about your background.

Daniel (00:38)
Yeah, hi, happy to be here. I'm co -founder of Dinghy together with Niels. I'm a designer too. I started programming back in the day when I did motion graphics and started to build more interactive experiences using motion graphics and from there transitioned into becoming a programmer of sorts, I guess. And I'm doing a lot of

Nils (01:04)
Mmm.

Daniel (01:07)
the programming work at Dinky nowadays, but I'm still involved in the design process, of course, and also in the user experience part of it, because that's what we're doing. So yeah, that's why I'm and what I work on.

Nils (01:19)
Yeah.

Cool, I think that is actually maybe a good opportunity to talk about how, like I did this episode of intro -ing, how we came to...

talk about user experience so much and DINGY and how we actually ended up where we are today. And now what you mentioned that you kind of turned into a developer from after actually studying design in university. I think that's very interesting because Dan and I always doubled in this job. Like we kind of met up and found each other as a sparring partner in this discipline.

because we come out of, well, building websites a lot for people, right? Like we build a ton of websites, we designed them along the way. And Dan and I built a whole bunch of websites together of any scale, actually. But Dan, before you turned into a web developer per se, I remember there were also like a couple of...

of art related programming gigs and stuff like that.

Daniel (02:35)
Yeah, so I actually started with animation. I used Macromedia Flash before it was bought by Adobe. And I pretty much started using ActionScript 1 .0, using Macromedia Flash to build interactive vector -based motion graphics.

Nils (02:45)
yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Daniel (03:03)
And that landed me a couple of jobs for basically vet agencies, new media agencies to build websites. So I've been building websites a lot, not only using Flash, that was just my entry into developing things. That was, yeah, I mean, I actually enjoyed writing action script 2 .0, 3 .0.

Nils (03:20)
That was that phase, right?

Daniel (03:31)
And there was still a lot of stuff where I applied this, but I know how it has been problematic for the web and knew back then. Yeah. And from there, I started to fiddle with generative graphics and generative art, so to say. And this is what I've been doing for quite some time that also allowed me to work in television for a short amount of time.

Nils (03:37)
Hmm.

Daniel (04:01)
I did like 3D animations, 3D project planning, 3D stage building or studio designing before circling back to the interactive part. Because for the motion graphics, it was mostly static after I finished it and rendered it. And I actually like the user input a lot. And I liked working with whatever input we could get to make this more dynamic and also.

Nils (04:19)
Hmm.

Daniel (04:30)
more interesting to me. And from there, I transitioned back into web development and building websites with the goal to build like fancy websites that could do fancy animated stuff and so on.

Nils (04:31)
Yeah.

right on. And I mean, by now, I think that's a very interesting journey, because like I didn't end up so much in animation. And actually did study computer science at some time, like ages ago now. But it's so I think that we ended up building websites that were not necessarily driven by the by the desire to be

animated in a fancy way, but actually transport information to people, I guess, is that what we could say about it. I think that is sort of interesting to me. Also looking at the current landscape of where the web is today, I suppose. Do you have any idea of...

Daniel (05:15)
much.

Nils (05:34)
when you transitioned over from, you know, fancy pants graphics and animation into what we do today.

Daniel (05:43)
I don't actually know, but I think, with time, I realized that there's a lot of issues with all these like custom made websites and a lot of like animation heavy websites were also starting the fans and people's notebooks. and that just isn't a great experience. And I realized that when I showed people around and I could see.

their frustration with whatever they had at hand and loading screens and exactly. And yeah, also with the studies in design, I knew about certain conventions and how things are supposed to look like or work like. And not that I'm necessarily a fan of always adhering to it, but

Nils (06:15)
Loading screens, computers becoming hot.

Daniel (06:41)
I think there's a value in it. And in the web, there is always value in transmitting the information that you actually want the people to know about. And the heavy animation stuff often is in the way, not always. I think there is a place for it, but realizing that there are certain conventions and common issues around custom built websites. I actually...

Nils (06:54)
Yes.

Daniel (07:10)
found my interest in understanding what made people click with the website or fall in love with it or like actually like what they're seeing and being able to browse it to whatever means they had like whatever end they had for it. And that's a lot of fun about the job we have right now that we can look at something and realize, hey, this is probably not how it's supposed to be because nobody will find the information they're looking for.

Nils (07:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Daniel (07:39)
if it's laid out in this way or that way.

Nils (07:41)
Amazing. Yeah, I think this is a super interesting way of approaching the state of the web today, I suppose, and how we think about user experience. Because in the super nutshell, when Dan and I were teenagers, the web was suddenly around with modems and a handful of websites that could do nothing.

but transport text in maybe a MIA layout, like putting stuff next to each other was a challenge. Then Macromedia went ahead and built this amazing thing that totally spearheaded animations for the web, I would say. I think that is probably, that's the way I think about it at least. Like then the web platform came along and said, all right, people apparently need more animation capabilities.

Plus Steve Jobs made an iPhone that didn't support flash. So a nail in that coffin, I guess. And of course, that was also the advent of different screen sizes, right? Like we all were used to having just the one computer at home sitting on your desktop. And now fast forward to today, there's no discernible screen size limit to anything.

right, like we go straight from watch all the way to the TV on the wall, into Vision Pro, into, you know, so really, a friend of mine just bought a fridge that has like a portrait style, full HD touchscreen in it. So, also right, like this notion to even discern touch interfaces based on the screen size, that's just all...

out, out the window. Like there's no way you can rely on that anymore. And, and this is what we have today. Plus, we currently have all of this, generative AI stuff going on. And so where we are at Dengue and, how we think about user experience is I think driven by the fact that digital experience are just everywhere.

Like there's basically no way that you're not somehow interacting with something on the web on a daily basis. And other than 20 years ago, there's so much content now that we're of course, that this whole ratio flipped over from you just go on the web and click your favorite bookmark, that it's more of a, there's an

an absolute ocean of information, especially the last year has shown how the ocean can even increase in size in such a massive way that what we're trying to do and what we want to talk about today, like to kick off this topic of how to actually judge if something is a...

a good experience, a good digital experience in that sense, is to even pick something that spikes out of this ocean of everything. People have to make the choice of which part of this gigantic landscape they want to interact with. And so the way we did, like what we did the last couple of years of

to try to build the best websites for our customers. That is just one part now, I would say, right? Like having a website, of course you're gonna have a website as a business. It's absolutely and probably still your centerpiece, but it's just one part of the puzzle. And it's most certainly not your whole experience that you have, right? Like we think about experiences in a very connected way that

Every touch point you have with your customer counts towards your user experience. So, but today we want to pick like one part out of getting to a good user experience. And that is something that we, a service that we do for our customers, especially it happens that we do this often when we get on with a new customer. And we call that the UX audit.

Dan, can you maybe intro us a little bit to the topic of what is a UX audit? Why on earth? What? What is it?

Daniel (12:35)
Sure. So you mentioned we're doing this for new customers oftentimes. And I think what we started doing is we, so whenever we started work with a, or kicked off work with a new client, we looked into what they have, because that's just what we need to know when we start working with them. And we need to know where they're at and what they're doing and what they're trying to do.

how this works or how it doesn't work. And so this has been something that we've been doing most every time. And for us, it was a way to show the customers and also mirror our customers, like what did we learn? So they could jump in and tell us, no, it's actually different from what you grasped and like...

there's certain nuances to it and so on. And what we did was we, so we've started this a while back before this like name of the UX audit became very common, I guess. And what we started doing was to apply a certain framework of always the same questions and the same categories to look at a digital experience or a digital.

for us, A, to make it easier and B, for us to be able to come up with advice very quickly. Like, so if we know what's wrong and we've seen this before, we probably know what to do. This was the reason behind it. So we collected a couple of like areas of expertise that we're working in. We collected a couple of questions or things to look at.

And we went through a digital product. We basically did a walkthrough to most of the like core screens, sometimes all of the app or all of the website and collected whatever we had with screenshots and annotations and sticky notes all over the place. And then we put together a matrix of findings and talked our clients through it. And along with these findings, we could give recommendations of

Nils (14:44)
Mm -hmm.

Daniel (14:55)
what they should be tackling next to improve their product. And we also graded this in terms of like feasibility, speed, whatever method most to them. Like there were times where we looked at what is the most impactful change we can do, what is the easiest thing to get started with and so on. Or what's the cheapest or most expensive thing to do.

Nils (15:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and I think you mentioned a couple of very interesting things. First of all, that we do this in different areas. I think there were also times where the customer already told us...

please don't look so much at the visual design because whatever we have a rebranding in the making or something like that and focus more on a specific whatever the sign up funnel or something like this so we were able to

cut that area out in the UX audit. But you also mentioned that we come up with the matrix of how to present these results, right? And what I always told our customers too is that the outcome of this UX audit, it can be very quick. Like usually we do this in...

you know, in just a matter of a couple of days, maybe even just one day, depending on what we're focusing on. And oftentimes the deliverable of this UX audit doesn't necessarily even have to be like a whole bunch of PowerPoint slides or whatever. I mean, also for...

For all the business people on this podcast, I hope you're listening because this is not for designers. What we're saying is we want to, we do this also.

to get out of this mode of having like a gigantic market research that you then have to plow through after this has been going on for three months or whatever. So what we're trying to do is to assess whatever digital product you have.

in the quickest way possible. And oftentimes that even means that we, that the results, so Daniel also mentioned, we take a bunch of screenshots of, for example, a website or an app, and then we literally stick different colored sticky notes onto those screenshots.

So it really looks like a digital whiteboard. Like imagine in print world, you just print it out like a whole wallpaper of your website, stuck it on the wall and then have people put different color post -its on it saying, this button is not discernible from the other one. Like this headline doesn't really tell anyone what the section is about. Like on this level, and if that's sort of, if that's sort of,

deliverable, like a whole bunch of different color post -its, is enough for your design team to work on the next iteration, awesome. Then we don't even bother in creating a bunch of slides because that's sort of a waste of time. Oftentimes, we actually do this because creating these slides and conducting this sort of summary of what we found in the UX audit is very helpful for internal stakeholder communications.

Right? So if we think about our last customer at the beginning of the year, that was actually the sole purpose of the entire job. Right? Like how we put together these slides, because they came around and said, we need to just shake people awake a little bit. Like they had a project going on for two, three years and came to us saying, look,

Can you go through our assortment of platforms that we have by now and surface to our stakeholders what we need to be working on? And then, Dan, you mentioned we have this rating from what's easy to implement and what's impactful to implement. And I think that is a very interesting thing. Maybe you could expand on that a little bit.

Daniel (19:21)
Yeah, sure. I can do that. For us, when we're onboarded into a new project, it's a good way or a good opportunity for us to look at what we can actually understand without our clients telling us a lot about what they're doing or what they're trying to do. And we have the pair of fresh eyes to look at stuff.

Nils (19:45)
Yeah.

Daniel (19:50)
this is basically a situation that, say a website visitor or the visitor of a web portal is in, right? They don't exactly know what's going on. They know what their goal is. They know what they want to get out of it. but there's nobody telling them, Hey, this is what we were thinking about when we designed this or when we wrote this copy, stuff like that, or built this, this, navigation menu.

Nils (20:15)
Yes, exactly.

Daniel (20:19)
and so on. And so when we look at stuff, we have the opportunity to see where things are unclear. And sometimes it's just that some wording is off or that there's just too much text for somebody to read through and that it's basically really easy to tell people what a page is all about.

what a certain view in a web portal is all about. And this can be really like a minor change where you look at one single piece of content, change it and be done with it. And that can have a lot of impact and it can be quick and easy and there's not all too much about it. Most of the time there's other things in play too and there's like a long -term...

Nils (20:49)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Daniel (21:12)
vision we build where we know what should change along the way. And we can then rate the changes from this is impactful and easy to do, or this is a lot of effort, but still impactful, or this is stuff that we can ignore for now. And we give advice on when to tackle what kind of issue in terms of like client budget, timeframes, and so on.

But mostly in terms of what can we change easily right now to improve a product that has issues.

Nils (21:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, I remember this one example that we were tasked to do a UX audit of an ordering flow for your electricity contract. And there were like one or two, like the things that you see on your first impression where you immediately have question marks that nobody on the internal product team sees anymore because they are so submerged.

in the daily work and know the product, of course, very well. And I think these opportunities, especially in the beginning, are so interesting to me because usually they're very easy to fix and nobody sees them anymore. You know, so we came in and you had three choices for an electricity contract. And one of them was highlighted on the homepage to be the one

sourced from 100 % renewable energies and like two of them had a yellow background and one had a green background. And that was, I think that is something that of course easily stands out, right? Like in today's landscape, you usually, you already have this idea of when you see something that has this icon on it and maybe a green whatever that it's probably about something eco -friendly. And then you click on that.

and you end up on the page that describes this electricity contract and the terms of it. And then it suddenly has a yellow background. And it's just very weird. You know, like this is a super easy thing and nobody at the company internally noticed this sort of stuff anymore. And we can see that right off the bat. And I think there's really, before you go in, and I think that's an important message I wanna get across today.

is also that user experience, it has this idea, or I think this preconception often, that it's hard to describe how to design a good user experience in a sentence. And because of this, it of course has...

Also this preconception of that it's very hard to do this. Like it's very hard to get into great user experience design and you have to have a design team like Apple to do it. And you know, so, and for the business owners out there, what we're trying to tell you here is of course, like running your entire company towards a great user experience is...

Probably like even a pivotal change in your strategy, but to get there like the first steps Don't have to be hard like there's so much on the surface that can be changed easily and how Dan pointed out in the beginning There's rules for this stuff like this is not Made up, you know unicornies things there's like rule books for these things. There's certain

certain laws even how humans perceive different things in visual perception and along these things we can already improve so much, right? So maybe going forward from this, from how we describe the UX audit today, there's, I think we have bigger ambitions in this.

And maybe, Dan, you can foreshadow a little bit. We're not going to talk about it today, but to leave our listeners with something for the future. Maybe you can describe a little bit where we're heading with all of this measuring user experience.

Daniel (25:50)
Maybe one quick step back, because I think it's important to mention that a great user experience, there's rules and conventions and there's certain things that we learned about and everybody learned how certain things in digital products work like. And it's fairly easy if you look at these conventions and so on, but it's very hard to transform your product in a way that adheres to all these.

And that works with all these conventions. And I think there's no product out there that actually does this on a complete scale. There's like no hundred percent because there's always other things in play. And I think that's really important to have in mind that we're not pushing towards the a hundred percent conformity with whatever. It's more like incremental steps that you need to start taking now to work towards.

Nils (26:41)
Hmm.

Daniel (26:47)
good user experience because this is also changing. So there's always some couple of minor things that you can tweak that will improve the user experience a lot. And I think this is what we're trying with the UX audit to tell you, hey, these are a couple of things that you can start working on now that will improve the user experience. And if that's done, we'll take it from there. And yeah, that's important to mention, I think.

Nils (26:57)
Hmm.

Very good point. And I mean, that is also, I think the business opportunity in this because every step you take towards this immediately has an impact on one or more of the KPIs that you're probably running your business towards, right? That is how many customers can I have depending on the size of my customer support team? Like how...

how many people can actually happily use my product before they churn. Like what's the, you know, like what's the customer lifetime of one lead that I originally onboarded and converted into a customer, all of this sort of stuff. A big impact, a big part of this is the experience that people will have. And if they understand better what you're trying to tell them, then the chances are also much bigger that they will hold on to

onto your product coming out of your organization because they have a good association with it. I mean, this is the part where we sort of bleed over into brand design and all that sort of stuff. But if we circle back to the massive expanse of the web today, if you have someone, better make them happy because to get them back will be very hard.

or impossible. Right? Yeah. So, yeah. For the next episode, I think we're working on something exciting. Can you tell us a little bit more?

Daniel (28:48)
Yeah. So, I can tell you a little bit about it. we're still in the process, but, basically what we realized after working for a year, like we've been conducting UX audits for years now on mobile apps, on web apps, on, progressive web apps, on web portals, on marketing websites. And we realized there's a lot of, overlap between all these different kinds of.

Nils (28:52)
It does a little bit more.

Mm -hmm.

Daniel (29:17)
digital products in what makes a good user experience. At least in the cases that we looked at. And I think what we always did was a very customized UX audit where we looked at a marketing website, for example, and went through it from front to back and wrote up a lot of recommendations of what could change. It was based on a set.

of questions that we had, but we always explored some more. And sometimes we figured out there's a lot of stuff that we didn't consider in previous UX audits. And so what we did is we started to build a catalog of all the questions that we always ask ourselves when browsing through a digital product and collected these in a like comprehensive list, try to make them as different and

Nils (30:04)
Hmm.

Daniel (30:15)
distinguished as possible while keeping the list short to work to it in an easy way. And we also put a lot of thought into how do we grade certain aspects of an app, like from good to bad. Is it just like a check mark where you say, hey, this is fulfilled or this is not fulfilled or is there like a scale to it? And you put a lot of thought into that.

Nils (30:42)
Mm -hmm.

Daniel (30:44)
to have like a base set that of stuff to take into account when working on a UX audit. Yeah, that's basically what we're working on right now. And I think it's interesting because this allows us to also collect a certain set of recommendations per aspect that we look at and make this more streamlined, not for us, but for our clients because

when we do the customized thing, it's always hard to come up with a description of what we did, what we looked at and what we are trying to tell them because the UX designer developer language is just so different from what a lot of our clients talk about. And so we can write up things that we know works for them to understand what we're looking at and what we're trying to tell them what can be improved. And.

Nils (31:28)
Yes.

Daniel (31:40)
Yeah, that's basically it. What we're working on.

Nils (31:42)
Very cool. I think I'm so excited about this because that actually goes exactly towards the topic of this podcast. We want to talk about the business impact of user experience going forward. And this is, I think, audits are a known thing in many industries. And to have this as repeatable and

you know, also in a way almost calculatable as possible that will increase our bandwidth to help more people. That is of course where it came from, but it will also, as you said, it will just translate better into other universes than our interesting design universe that we burn for, of course, but like people want to know how they can improve their business. And that is a tool.

to know exactly this. And so we're definitely gonna talk about the progress of that in the upcoming episodes at some point. So stay tuned for that one. And until then, thank you, Dan, for coming on, for demystifying this whole topic a little bit further with me. And I really realize also from the feedback that we're getting for the podcast that this is still...

There's such a backlog to talk about here. There's such a backlog and such a disconnect of how important good user experience is for your business today, how to approach it. It feels like this gigantic, gigantic cloud that you can't really see through. And from our perspective, it really doesn't have to be like this. So we're going to continue on this mission.

motivated as never before. And maybe we can see Dan in an upcoming episode again when we get to this topic. Any last words from you for our audience, Dan?

Daniel (33:50)
No, not really. I think making what we're talking about more actionable to our clients is what this is all about. And I think like the, the effort with the UX audits. And I think that's basically what we're trying to get at right now.

Nils (34:06)
Awesome, cool. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you everybody for listening. See you on the next episode. We have the month of July is dedicated to the topic of UX audit. So you're gonna hear more about it in the upcoming episodes. And I can also already say we have interesting guests coming up. See you on the next one. Bye.

Daniel (34:33)
Yeah.