The Future of Experience Design

Anja Saabye at UXDX Community: UX with Robots and Product Discovery. Video: https://youtu.be/qkzfyPfFldw

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introducing Universal Robots

[00:00:02] Thanks for the introduction. Here I'm going to talk about the future of experience design. First of all, my name is Anja. I'm head of UX and product design at Universal Robots. I've been with Universal Robots for about two years now. I have a background in e-commerce, advertising and consulting, and I have 20-plus years in leadership. At home here I have three kids, [?] and Elias, and I love to ski. I love water sports, running, architecture and of course Danish design, and I live in Denmark.

[00:00:31] You might be sitting out there thinking: who is Universal Robots? Why is it interesting to talk about robots? Universal Robots is a robot company in Denmark. We actually have one product, and that's the one that you see here with the blue caps on. It's one product, one cobot arm, and the cobot arm is super interesting because it can fit into many environments, and that's also due to our name, Universal Robots.

[00:00:58] The company was founded in 2005 in Denmark. We have 40 to 50 percent of the cobot market. We have 1,100 partners in our UR ecosystem, and we are more than 900 employees here in Denmark. We have over 50,000 cobots sold all over the world. We have 20-plus offices all over the world, and we are of course part of Teradyne. And you can see here our revenue trend is really, really positive.

[00:01:27] That's a little bit about our company, but the interesting thing is of course our products, and how we discover products and how we develop products in our company. This is actually part of my family, this is part of the Universal Robots family. The products that you see here are the products that we have on the market. Of course you can see that they have different sizes, but they also have different names. Their names belong very much to how much payload they can actually lift. You can see the smallest one is three kilos, and the biggest one, which is also the newest one, is 20 kilos. That's our UR20.

[00:02:02] If you look very, very closely at the picture here, you can see that we have a lot of baby blue, and that's our brand color. But you can also see that there is a development in the products from what they were before, when they were really rounded and they had those blue prints on, and now you can see the new product that we have here. The design is much more smooth in the way that it looks. The cobot here is about the same height as a person, so about 170, and it actually weighs 64 kilos, so it's quite a big cobot that you have to work next to.

[00:02:39] Together with the product there is also a teach pendant. It's like a tablet, which you can see to the right, and in that we have an interface that you use to control the cobot. That's also part of the team that I'm working with; we also have the responsibility to design the interface here. And then you can see the control box down underneath, which is also part of our product. It's not a beautiful one, but it's needed to connect the cobot, of course.

[00:03:06] Besides that, we also have responsibility for the website of the company. We have a lot of services, we have a lot of service and support, we have service and support sites, et cetera, et cetera, and all of that goes into our team at Universal Robots. So UX and product design at Universal Robots is actually supporting all our value streams and all our product teams in the different products that they are actually working with.

Working with robots, not like robots

[00:03:34] At Universal Robots we have a purpose: we want to create a world where people work with robots, not like robots. We can ask ourselves, what does it actually mean? It means that we have to optimize all repetitive tasks that are dirty, dull and dangerous. What does that mean? It means that our product fits into production areas, fits into making coffee, all of the things that you can do over and over again, where it is not needed that you do it, because it doesn't need anything that is interesting. It doesn't need you to be creative, it doesn't need you to be innovative to do that. It's just something that can be done over and over again.

[00:04:13] The thing that we actually want to do with our purpose is that we want people to spend less time on simple tasks that can be automated, and more time on being creative, thinking of new ideas, solving challenges and of course collaborating. That's super interesting, and that's what we think can actually make a big difference in the world, if we can come to that point.

[00:04:34] Why is that interesting to look at? I think it is interesting to look at because if we look at the future work generations, we can see how it's actually developing out here. We can see that there is a change in the population from 2021 to 2050, which means that there's a huge change in the user behaviors as well. I've just taken some of the countries out here, and maybe you are in a different country, but at least I think it's very, very interesting to look at the USA and China when it comes to people of 85 years plus. There's a huge development there, meaning that we will have more elderly people there.

[00:05:12] I also think that it's interesting to look at, for instance, Japan, where you can see that people between 65 and 85 years are actually decreasing, only by one percent of course, but it still is a huge problem when the people over 85 are actually increasing by 61 percent. This means a lot to the way that we are working, and of course our cobot, our robot, fits into a working environment, and that's why it's interesting to look at this. It means that we will all live longer and we'll have to work longer as well. There will be more old people, and the old people that we are talking about are of course ourselves here. So it requires that we can work smarter and not harder in the future, and that's why we think it's a really, really good idea to automate.

[00:06:00] Just to say that it's not only to promote our product here, I also wanted to share some of these slides that I have from Trend Hunter's Jeremy Gutsche. He talks about what will happen post-pandemic. The post-pandemic trends, if you look here in the first picture, are that in business there will be automation of labor. And then if you look at the same time at life, the things that he sees in the future are that we want to make up for lost time, because we lost some time during the pandemic, and we want to have a better output going forward.

[00:06:40] So how to actually prepare? In business, we could automate everything. That is really, really positive in my company, because that's actually what we want to do, but we want to do it in a good way. But in life, what is it that we have to do? We have to create an experience. So imagine if we could take those two things and put them together: automate and create great experiences. Then we can actually make a difference in people's lives. That's very much back to our purpose as well.

[00:07:09] I think it's also interesting to look here at the tensions of robotization [?], where you can see that in business it's robots versus people, and in life it's products versus experience. Experience and products are not necessarily linked together, but they can be linked together. That's an opportunity as well. As UXers we have to think a lot about how we can actually link those two things together, so that we can make a difference out there.

Future generations and the fastest solution

[00:07:37] When we look at future generations and how they will work, it's also super interesting to look, for instance, at their learning style. Some of the things that they have in their learning style are of course interactive, multimodal, and virtual as well. I think it's also interesting to look at Generation Y, Generation Z and Generation Alpha, and what they would actually like of music devices. The first generation has the iPod, of course, from 2001. Then we have Spotify from 2008, and then we have the smart speakers for Generation Alpha. What does it actually mean? It means that of course when Generation Alpha comes out, they have an expectation that everything is controlled by voice, that you can have voice recognition and all of those things built into your products as well. That's something I think is very, very interesting when we talk about the future user experience. How can we actually help that?

[00:08:33] What we have to do as designers and UXers is to design products that don't only cover a functional need but also provide a unique user experience. If we can meld those two things together, I think that we can really form a cool product and a cool future for all of us.

[00:08:52] So how do we do that? Yes, of course we have to include the user in the product discovery, and I think actually [?] just talked a lot about that and how to do that going forward. I have one example that I love so much, and I want to share it here today as well. That is from when the Bell System was actually founded, back in the 1960s. When they found out how to do this, they sat down and they took a lot of good people, a lot of good engineers, and said, okay, can you please look at what the phone should look like going forward? You already know this from looking at your phone and also from growing up and having different phones.

[00:09:33] Then they did a lot of testing here. They put a lot of things down, and you can see, if you look at the buttons here, there is one that they actually preferred, and that is the one where the numbers go from one to five and from eight to nine [?], and then zero at the end. If people have to push in, for instance, an eight-digit number, it's the one that they prefer, because it's very, very obvious to see the numbers. It's very easy to see the numbers, so that's of course a good user experience.

[00:09:59] But then on the other hand, what they did was they said, okay, if you have to put in those numbers, and they gave them tasks where they had to put in different numbers, then they could look at how fast they could actually solve the task. And then they could see that there was one that was actually better, and that's the one that you have in the middle, from one to three, four to six and seven to nine, and then zero at the bottom. That's much faster when you have to put in a number. That's of course interesting, because a fun fact here is that this push-button telephone set has been used over 40 trillion times, and by choosing the fast solution instead of the preferred solution, the world has saved one billion man-years. I think that's just brilliant, and I think that's something that we have to keep in mind when we work with design and UX. How can we actually optimize our products and our solutions, so we're not only the preferred solution but we're also the fastest solution?

[00:10:57] My next question is: imagine what a huge difference Universal Robots can make in the world with the right UX. If we can nail it, if we can make a great UX on our products and we can actually help to get things automated, imagine all the people that we can set free and all the good brain power that we can actually help release.

Vision, mission and design philosophy

[00:11:18] But we have to remember that the user does not always know their future needs, so we need to help them here. I want to tell you a little bit about how we work with that at Universal Robots, and let you into our little family here. In UX and product design at Universal Robots we have a vision: we want to make everybody fall in love with our brand, our company, our products and solutions. And then we have three examples of that, which are pretty common, I think. We want to create amazing design like Apple, who doesn't? We want to give the unique user experience like Tesla. And then we want to be universal like Universal Robots.

[00:11:55] Our mission for this is that we want to lower the barrier to automation, so it's actually more simple to automate. We want to do that by focusing on the user in our design, in every touchpoint in our UR experience, in the use of our products and services, by designing for, with and to the user. I will come back during my talk to how we actually work with that, and what I see as some of the really interesting things in working with this: how you can form some basics and some fundamentals that the product managers and the people who actually have to develop the products can work together with, so design can be a much more integrated part of product discovery.

[00:12:38] At Universal Robots we have also built a design philosophy, and the design philosophy is our story. It tells a little bit about where we came from and where we are now. It tells a lot about the design values in our company. It's also about aesthetics and materials that we would like to use in our products, and what we would like people to feel when they are using our products, the feelings that they have, the structure that they can feel in their hands and so on. Everything like that is described in there.

[00:13:09] And then it says a lot about how we want to be approachable and we want to be innovative, because one of the things about working with robots is that it's often something that people are very, very scared of. So of course we want to take an approachable touch here and say, okay, we have to make something that is actually interesting to get close to. That's also why we chose the baby blue color for our products, because blue is like the sky. Blue makes you feel free, and blue is also something that people can relate to. It's not dangerous in any way. So that is something that is very important to us as well. And then of course it's a foundation for all the design that we have to do at Universal Robots as well.

[00:13:51] Along with our design philosophy, we also have an experience philosophy. The experience philosophy tells a little bit about what the user should experience when they are in contact with Universal Robots. So in every touchpoint we have with our users, what experience is it that we would actually like them to have? I'll come back to that a little bit later, but it's because we use it very, very much when we talk about our customer journey. In the customer journey we want to remove friction, but we also want to keep some friction there, because we want to keep some good touchpoints with our users and some possibilities to actually have a connection to our users going forward. So that's why an experience philosophy can also help you.

[00:14:35] The best thing in creating the next-level unique user experience is that it cannot be copied by anyone. Of course it's individual, and of course it's something you have to sit down and form yourself: what is important for your company? But if you do that very, very well, I believe that everybody can create a unique user experience. And when you have a unique user experience, you put yourself into a very, very good position in the market, because it cannot be copied, and that means that you are actually setting your own direction. You can actually take a lead here, and that's pretty unique.

Areas of expertise and future trends

[00:15:10] I have decided to also talk a little bit about areas of expertise here. I will go through a little bit about the future trends that we see. I will talk a little bit about our design research and how we work with that, our interaction design and how we work with that, and our visual design and how we work with that. These are the three areas that I think UX and product design actually stand on. If we have those things covered, then we are actually able to make great design. We are able to interact with the user, we are able to look at the user, and we are able to communicate all of this to the full organization, so that everybody has a possibility to actually develop products.

[00:15:53] Then of course the future trends are also super, super important for us to look into, especially when it comes to future technologies and so on. It's super important that we also understand what they are and what the possibilities there are. So that's also interesting when we talk about UX and great product design.

[00:16:13] Coming to the future trends, I've just taken a few trends here, because I think there are tons of things out there, and I think everybody can talk about this for hours, so I won't spend much time here. But I'll just say that the future trends that I think are super interesting to look into right now are, for instance, sustainability. I think it's super important that we actually try to make a clear picture, with transparency, about our sustainability aspects. What is it actually that we are doing with our products? It's our responsibility, right from when the product is born until the product is not used anymore and actually has to be taken away again. We need to make sure that we have a good sustainability footprint in that, and that we actually understand that.

[00:16:54] Then I heard this one the other day: go beyond compliance and add sustainability to innovation. I think it's a really, really good way of saying it, because it sets the bar higher for the people working with UX and product design. It's not just something where we have to say, okay, everybody else is doing this, so we will also do something on sustainability. No, we have to add it in, and we have to think of it in a new and very, very innovative way, so that we know that we can set the new standards going forward. I think that's inspiring.

[00:17:29] Social responsibility: do not build mechanisms to make the user stay longer. I know that many companies would like to do that, because that will probably make it possible for them to earn even more money if they can make the user stay longer. But if the user does not get any profit from this, or doesn't earn anything from this, I think it's not a good responsibility that you're taking. I think it's not social responsibility. When I see people being addicted to looking into their phones and so on, I'm thinking: do they actually have a good life? Do they actually get what they want here? Can we help them to actually get a better life? I think that's also interesting from a UX design perspective: how do we deal with that going forward from here? Make sure not to misuse our users' time and effort for the good of the product stakeholders.

[00:18:18] And then of course AI is always super, super interesting. I think there are so many good talks out there about AI right now. What is it that we want? I think the most important thing is the right content here, that we make sure that we can gather the right content when you talk to a chatbot, when you use AI to create pictures and all of that. So help it the best we can. We also have a responsibility there as UX and product designers.

Design system, research system and archetypes

[00:18:42] One of the fundamentals that we have at Universal Robots is of course our design system. I think our design system is very, very unique, and I have a really, really cool team of designers behind me working with this every day, and they are really, really strong in setting up the design system. The way that we like to look at the design system is like a bunch of Lego blocks. You can say, okay, you can build different stuff from those Lego blocks. You can sort the Lego blocks, and then it will actually make it easier for you to build different things.

[00:19:18] That's kind of the same way that we look at our design system. Everybody can build a cool design, but if we try to make a structure around it, then you can make it even better, and you can probably form it into even more different things. We have the design language, which is a color palette, type scale and all of those things, and we try to organize that so that people can easily build from it. And that's the same thing with the UI components and the guidelines and patterns. A structure to this makes it easier for everybody in the organization to actually build the right products, and it makes it a lot easier for us to actually keep the holistic overview, because everything is developed from the same thing. So that's super important as well.

[00:19:59] Then we have the research system in our organization as well, and that's of course going out and asking the users what it is that they want and how they validate our products. We are collecting information here, we are understanding information and we are communicating information, and in order to do that the correct way, we have some tools that we are using in the different areas. I think it's super, super important to remember that the user does not always know what they want, but you can ask them any question and you can get very, very good directions when working with this.

[00:20:32] We have a set of researchers working at Universal Robots working with this, and we have some insights people who are actually looking at what the findings are here, trying to cluster them and generating insights from that, so we know exactly what it is that our customers want. That also leads us to some behavioral archetypes that we have tried to describe. I will come back to that in a second. But it also means that we can actually draw a customer journey map for our users, because we understand our users. We have a really good picture of what it is that they are doing.

[00:21:04] The behavioral archetypes can be described like this. This is the way that we have tried to describe it: who does what, and why do they actually do that? You can see here that we actually have five different archetypes that we have tried to describe. When we have done this, we can tailor our business goals towards them, and we can have a better understanding of the different momentum models. We can actually consider all archetypes when designing a solution. So when we are going to form a product, we can actually say, okay, how does it relate to this archetype, how does it relate to this archetype, and how will this archetype probably relate to it? That gives us an opportunity to form different products for different users, but also to look at our products from different angles when we have to discuss if it's a good product or not.

Customer journeys and keeping some touchpoints

[00:21:58] Then I just wanted to talk a little bit about the customer journey. I think it's very, very obvious that it's a good idea to sit down and draw a customer journey. When you do that, you can have just a very, very simple illustration like I have here on top, where you have different phases where you can put in what your customer journey looks like. When you do that, I think it's super important to say, okay, in awareness, for instance, what is the friction here? What are the problems that our users are actually facing? And then try to smooth the customer experience: create a great experience, try to make it even better, try to see what it is that will actually help the user the most.

[00:22:36] When you do that, some people can have a tendency to say, okay, I remove all friction, I just make it frictionless, and it's just something that people can do online or something like that. I don't need any kind of contact; that's our goal. It can be that to some extent, but you have to retain some touchpoints in your user journey as well, because a touchpoint is also a possibility of giving a better user experience in the future, and it's also a possibility of actually selling more to the user. So if we push the user so far that we remove all friction and all touchpoints, then we don't have an opportunity to be in contact with the users. I think that's one of the problems that Tesla actually has out there.

[00:23:19] So I would actually recommend that everybody draws a customer journey like that and tries to understand it, and also maybe tries to understand it for the different archetypes, because the customer journey can look different for the different archetypes. Understanding it from that perspective as well will also give you a better possibility of creating better products for your users, because you actually have an understanding of where they are and how they are actually reacting in the customer journey.

[00:23:47] Okay, the last thing that I want to say is that I believe that in the future world, where basic needs are covered and people buy experiences, they will prioritize great customer experiences over greed for satisfying different shareholders. I think that's super, super important, and I think it's where we can all make the biggest difference. We all have a big responsibility, because we can advocate for the users and we can design for, with and to the users in a sustainable way. If we can all agree on that, I think we can actually change the world as UXers. So I think we are in the most exciting period of time. I think it's very, very interesting to work with this subject, and I hope you enjoyed it. I wrote here as well that you are more than welcome to connect on LinkedIn, and you are more than welcome to ask me questions on LinkedIn as well, and I hope that some of you will take advantage of doing that. So I think I will end here.

Q&A

[00:24:45] Host: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for that detailed overview of how Universal Robots works. Thanks for sharing that. If anybody has any questions, just post them on whatever platform you're using. I did have one. You mentioned early on that if you do a good experience, it can't be copied. Whereas I could analyze how you're doing something and copy it. So what do you really mean by it can't be copied?

[00:25:19] Anja: I mean that if you are the first one who does it, then even if people are copying it, it's still unique for you. That's what I actually mean. Then you actually take ownership there, and you have a possibility to be the ones that gave the user that experience. No matter who tries to copy it afterwards, the user will still remember: okay, I got this experience with this company first. I think that's super, super interesting. If you think about cars and so on, I think Tesla have done something really, really interesting in the way that they have developed their user experience. No matter what will happen in the future, and no matter what company I get into contact with, I will still remember: okay, this is the experience I got here. But it's because they did something that is unique. So that's the saying there, and I think that's super interesting. So trying to get to that point where you're different from everybody else, that's a goal as well.

[00:26:19] Host: Excellent. No, it's a good one. It's always that eternal challenge in business: do you get the first-mover advantage, or do you try to just be a fast follower?

[00:26:32] Another question, just touching on automation and that trend. I just love the stat of a billion years saved. That is phenomenal. But one thing in the last year that really surprised me, and I think a lot of other people, was that AI came along and it leaped from where we thought it was going to go. Instead of doing our cooking or things like that, it went straight into the creative jobs and started writing and drawing images. So bringing it back to the physical robot, the vision of having your butler in your house who's going to do your laundry and cook your meals and things like that: is that realistic, is that something that's going to happen, or are we stuck for the next while with more factory-style machines and robots?

[00:27:23] Anja: I think you have to define the line here about when we are stuck with different things, but I think definitely it's going to come. I think it's super interesting that it actually went into something intelligent as well, so I think you're totally right when you say that AI went into something intelligent. But I think it's still up to the user to use the AI correctly here, and that's the same thing with the cobot. Cobots will replace a lot of people and will replace a lot of different jobs, but it doesn't mean that they will take away the jobs from the people. It means that people will be able to do something else, and I think that's the interesting development to look into, because that's really the new world, that's what is happening. I think a lot of changes have happened like that in the past as well, but we will see it, and hopefully it will come very, very soon, because it will open up tons of opportunities as well.

[00:28:15] When I've worked with cobots, many times I have people asking me: don't you think that cobots will take away jobs for young people and so on, because they will not be able to do these repetitive jobs? What are they actually going to do if they don't have an education and so on? And I'd just like to say that I don't think that anybody has a dream about moving stuff from here to here, or doing something like that. I think everybody has ambitions of something higher. So I think that's the level that we can actually help lift people up to, and I think AI and cobots and everything that is coming with the new technologies is also going to help with that. So it's a totally new way of working, and that's super, super interesting to look into.

[00:28:55] Host: Yeah. To me there are parallels with when schools started coming about, because people weren't sure what to do with the people when steam was replacing a lot of work with automation in factories and stuff, so you had to educate people. It's an area I'm quite interested in: how can we actually make schools right for the future, instead of training kids just to learn things by rote?

[00:29:19] Anja: Yeah, exactly.

[00:29:23] Host: Excellent. Well, I am just getting some praise in from Laura saying awesome presentation, just as I anticipated, so that's brilliant. But that brings us to time. Thank you very much for your presentation. I really enjoyed it, and I always love future gazing as well. It excites me, because I'm an eternal optimist.

[00:29:41] Anja: Of course. Thank you very much, and have a great evening, and see you soon.