For a few days, I was on top of the world. Everything went well, and life was beautiful. Then the shitstorm kicked in and suddenly I felt everything collapse. All the things I’d built fell apart. This is the frightening roller-coaster ride of being a tech CEO. Only we know what it feels like when ups and downs are coming with high intensity, sometimes even multiple times a week.
Living in the present, I often forget how fast the world is changing around us. While we spent our time playing Pokémon Go and kept dreaming about self-driving cars, plenty of other solutions started to unfold around us to change our lives for good. Taking the first steps into the new year, I collected all the tech trends that keep us steamed up and can’t wait to see how they effect our work as designers.
It all started 3,5 years ago when I became an entrepreneur. In half a year I had a team of 3, and we have doubled in size every year since then. And soon I realized, it’s all about people. Teammates, clients and the end users we design the products for.
I pushed it hard, we really did make great designs, but I started getting weird feedback from different sources. “You are a nice guy, but I would have handled that differently” or “Next time please be more ….”
I always thought I’m a social person, but from these kinds of feedback, I started to think I might in fact be an insensitive robot instead.
So what can a robot do when a noisy and messy world sends strange signals all the time? Well, I started to learn like a machine. And I started with the hardest challenge, firing someone.
Startups are not primarily about making money or creating stuff. Startups exist in order to learn how to build a sustainable business. Sustainability is the key for successful growth. How do we reach that? By applying build-measure-learn cycles and accelerating feedback loops. This learning can be validated scientifically, by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision.
Big day today. After introducing transparent salaries and finances a few months ago, from today, finally I’m not the 100% owner of UX studio.
A 7-month long project with our legal and accountant experts has finished and my team members got their well-deserved shares onto their accounts. We invented a new equity sharing structure, that is more suitable for a service businesses than a start-up, and also fits to our unique community. It’s a dynamic system where everyone get more and more shares as they spend more time in the company. Everyone get dividends at the end of the year and in case we sell the company everyone will get a fare share from the price too. Read More »
Self-driving cars will hit the roads in a few years. One day we will wake up and these new machines will be everywhere around us. Solving the technical challenges is one thing. But how will we deal with the human side? Will we feel safe surrounded with robo-cars?
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The days of manual car driving are numbered. And many people believe we won’t even own cars in the future. Uber is ordering 100000 self-driving cars from Mercedes to provide an on-demand autonomous car service. Even BMW is planning to start an “Airbnb for cars” business. Our latest lab project at UX studio was about self-driving cars too. In our new video you can taste the experience of an Uber-like autonomous car service.
So the thing is that we have some newly opened designer jobs here. And I’m totally sorry to say this, but we won’t hire you. Here is why.
Will your users love you right from the beginning? You have to test your interfaces to get the answer for that question. Our design at UX studio is heavily based on research, so we need a ton of test participants to do user testing. Sometimes there are no specific requirements for the participants. In other cases the project needs special prerequisites even for basic user testing. For example it’s hard to test a site for avid video game players without actual gamer experience. All in all you need a system to make sure that you get users for your test and you get the right ones.
Every once in a while a new company enters the scene, and suddenly all the other players look very old and dumb. They tried hard to innovate and stay ahead of everyone else, but still, the new upcoming star eats their business. How can these small startups without serious industry experience and with much less resources win? They usually use a different, lean product development method. It can help them to solve real people’s real problems faster, and gain traction in scale. Let me tell you how it works.
We never had people managers at UX studio. As creative workers, freedom is very important for us. The biggest fear our teammates had according to growth is having less impact on the company as an individual. We like hierarchy when we talk about visual hierarchy, but not when we talk about organizations. We always wanted to build an autonomous, self-managing and self-organizing team.
Six months ago our team at UX studio switched to transparent finances. We are not as cool as the Buffer guys, so our finances are not open to the public yet, but anyone in our team can see all the numbers and contracts we have. Yes, everyone sees how much the other team-mates earn, how much we get from our clients, how much we have in the bank, and where the money goes. No secrets at all, there’s no taboo topics anymore.
If you ask someone in our team if he/she is a good designer, the answer will probably be “I want to be a good one”. Not because they are not good enough (honestly, they are the best I know), but because learning and continuous professional and personal development is in the core of our DNA. No one wants to settle, everyone wants to take the next step forward. Here are 9 things we do to help our team evolve.
The essence of lean UX is to learn as fast as possible – at uxstudioteam.com we use tons of methods to test ideas and solutions long before they were implemented or even designed. Magically, we can test ideas before the designer drew a single line. In this article we show how – with an example.
On our company hackathon, our little team was brainstorming on methods for improving an average school day. A bunch of our ideas: rooms where individual as well as group work can be done; context board for easier memorization; ‘what’s up’ board to ease the job of the teacher.
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Many of our clients tell us how hard they found it to work with designers in the past. Hence, we’ve collected a list containing the 11 characteristics of a good designer. Read More »
Even the smallest thing can make the central message of our website incomprehensible. Here is an example how the legend of a graph misled the user and how we resolved the problem while the site not only remained aesthetic, but also became understandable.
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One of the first design elements users meet with in an application is the so-called “empty state”. When we first open a CRM software, the list of our customers is yet empty. When we open a new document for editing, the document is plain. Traditionally, in case of a desktop/offline application, blankness is an indicator that content can be filled in there.
The most popular applications are able to generate an instinct for opening it multiple times a day. If you find yourself hanging on Facebook for ten minutes already, you know what I’m talking about. In his brilliant book, Nir Eyal collected psychological methods being able to generate the same effect. The most important thing you need is an application that people find essential. If this is given, you might wish to follow the steps below.
This example of a personal finance site teaches us that assumptions are sometimes wrong. Not that they are plain wrong …but rather they are oversimplifications of reality. A little UX research can elaborate assumptions and get them right.
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