What Does It Really Mean To Be A Design-Centric Company?

My name is Chris Grant, I am senior director at Lingo Kids. I can't believe I get to work with a product like this every single day - look how cute this is! We will get to Lingo Kids in a minute, but first, it's a bit nippy out today, isn't it, in Dublin? Did you notice this? I came in from Barcelona, this is cold. I see some nods there, it's cold.
So let's warm ourselves with a little story. Let's imagine we've got a virtual fire here, and I'm going to tell you the story of how I went from my very first UX conference back in 2007 - I believe I have a picture. I was going through a real Steve Jobs phase back then. Go ahead, you can laugh, it's all right. I put the picture up on purpose, I'm not mad - all the way to 2024 UXDX. That's quite a long time, it's a good story, and we'll get to it, but it actually starts much earlier.

The Beginning: Psychology Background

It starts when I was a kid. My dad was a child psychologist, and I thought my dad had the coolest job ever. Not only did I get to see him playing basketball with a bunch of kids - because kids, you know, they don't really take to this whole therapy, let's sit on the couch, you know, hear the Kleenex - he played games, he played basketball with them, but he got to help them deal with their problems.
I thought that's really nice - he made a good living helping little kids. You know, somebody loses their dad, they go talk to my dad, and then they feel better. I thought, "You know what? I want to do something like that when I grow up. I want to have a sense of purpose."

The Reality of Healthcare

But I got older and I learned about a lovely thing. I love my home country, but there are certain things that we do too well, and one of them is make money. How many of you here - I don't know how many people we have from the states here - but how many of you have heard of the term "managed care"?
Managed Care is just a fancy way of saying "let's make sure to give people as little as possible and make as much money as possible." I have a couple slides to back that up. This is the percentage growth in physicians versus administrators - what the hell is an administrator in this case? I don't know if they provide healthcare exactly - over the rise of Managed Care in the United States in the 90s.
This didn't only affect physical health, this also affected mental health. This is a chart that shows the growth of prescriptions for ADHD medicine. My dad would often give talks - he even spoke in my high school once in our introductory psychology class - and he said, "I am just under so much pressure to cut these kids a prescription instead of actually talking to them." Why? Because it's cheaper to do that. Talking to a therapist might work, but it takes a long time.

The Path to UX

So armed with that idea, Young Chris of the UX world thought, "Huh, maybe I'm not going to do this psychology thing, this sounds like a pain in the ass." Well, I know what I can do - I like computers a lot, I know HTML. I'll do something related to that, and when I discovered user-centered design, I thought "here we go - I get to have a nice career, I get to make things for people, I get to make their lives better."
And you know what? It was pretty great. I got to run my UX boot camps. By the way, raise your hand if you show pictures from the things you do like this conference to people that have normal jobs and they're like "what the hell do you do all day?" Talk about privilege! Look at this, look at these happy people. We're at a video game company, we're having a blast here.
I even got to talk about my UX saga at King a couple jobs ago to like a lot of people. So it was a pretty sweet gig, and the best part? No insurance companies to deal with whatsoever. Zero! I really don't like insurance companies - I apologize if you're from the insurance industry, but my dad's words echoed in my brain.

The Evolution and Challenges

So things are good, right? I'm on the path, I'm UXing the hell out of it, feeling good, finding those user needs, solving those user problems. Let's flash forward some UX years later - I told you I'd tell you the story from the young ingenue to today. What happened along the way?
Well, yeah, we did focus on user experience, but boy, we spent a lot of time on user monetization. Spent a lot of time trying to get as much value - you know what? It started to remind me a little bit of that Managed Care situation where we're not giving as much value as we used to. What we're doing is we're trying to take as much value as we can.
Eventually that led to this wonderful thing called the techlash. Poor Zuck - he's going to be in a couple of these slides. Zuck, if you're watching this, I'm sorry - I couldn't find any pictures from your rebrand with the curly hair and the puka shells. It's very cool, it's very cool. Hey, I like curly hair, buddy.
Things even got weirder when we started to have to work remotely - no more boot camps, no more smiling people at boot camps, no, no, no. And then we had layoffs. Sorry, Zuck. And then we even started talking about unions - unions in UX! What the hell's going on? We don't need unions, we have boot camps, we have so much fun! We have look at these lights, we don't need any of this stuff!
Oh, and yeah, I probably forgot to mention AI, which if you haven't used ChatGPT in your design process, try it tonight. It's a very powerful tool right now that you can lead - who knows where it's going to take us in the future? I'm not sure how valuable we're going to continue to be at some point.

The Case for Beauty

So what's left to believe in? I'm painting a pretty dire case right now, right? People are mad at our industry in general, our industry's not as happy, we're micro-optimizing, we're pulling more value out of the market. What's left for us to think about? And maybe, you know, how can we polish that tarnished image that started to emerge?
I'm going to make a bold statement here - what about beauty? This is the part where you gasp. Thank you, very good. Good, good. You're good gaspers.
So on the fly, I'm going to change the title of my talk. It's not going to be "What Does It Really Mean to Be a Design-Centric Company?" it's going to be "What is the Beauty Beyond UX?"

Early UX Principles

If you've been doing this for a while, I probably can guess what you're thinking. I'm gonna use my psychic powers now. You're thinking "Beauty?" You're saying like, "That sounds like a lot." You're probably imagining this and you're like "Hey, UX is more than just skin deep, right?"
Like we have our gurus that told us that. This is - I hate to admit this - I went to see Jakob Nielsen like 2004 in London. Again, code for old. This is when he was on the "Blue Links Must Be Underlined" phase - this is his blue period.
So UX was a big deal, and I remember talking about this - this is the Coca-Cola website from the year 2000. Now there's a really nice detail in here if you watch - can you see the effervescence? And you see the little shine on the bottle cap, can you see that? How much time do you think it took in 2000 to get that right? Meanwhile, we have these amazing links to "About the Company," "Investor Relations," "News at Coca-Cola Store." Can you see the links?

The UX Framework

So yeah, maybe we needed this. Maybe we needed the gospel of usability once upon a time, and maybe we needed Jared to tell us that UX goes deep. UX is not just a one-time thing, it's a journey. It's a journey that we go on.
UX goes deep - so deep, in fact, that I personally, I don't know about all of you, but like I had a very hard time - my mom's here today and I remember the first time I told her I work in UX and she's like "What?" I know "user experience" - she's like "What?"
So I had to find a definition, and I stole this one from Paul Fu. This is a mouthful, and so what I discovered over time is like just pull out the word utility, usability, desirability. I even created a framework at one point where I talked about utility - it all starts with utility.
Why will users want to use the feature or product? Will it solve problems? Achieve goals? Will it make them feel something? Then we get into usability - will they be able to do it? Will they get better over time? Are they able to start right away? How will it feel? Will it feel according to what they think? Like if it's supposed to be secure, will it feel secure? And finally, yeah, had this thing about desirability. I often skipped over that.

The Luggage Metaphor

I found this hard to explain, this three thing, so I actually came up with an example that I'll show you really quickly. So imagine you're going on a trip, right? Most of the time, 99% of time, we take clothes with us when we go on a trip. I'm not judging anyone - you're allowed to go to clothing-optional places.
So you got to go on a trip, and if you got to go on a trip, you got to get there somehow. Oh, I forgot I put Ryanair - I'm sorry if I'm triggering anyone. I flew Ryan here so I definitely know what this feels like.
So you got to go on a trip - look at speaking of which, look at these happy people! They are thrilled to be getting on that plane, just like our UX boot campers. So you got to go on a trip, you've got a clear need - a garbage bag would solve that need, right? Throw your clothes in a garbage bag, you're good to go. I have to admit, one time in college, was in a hurry, I had 25 minutes to catch a plane - that's how I packed my bag.
Put some wheels on it, gets a little bit more usable. Be careful if it's on Ryanair - if it doesn't fit, they're going to hit you. And then finally we get to desirability. Now desirability - I like to use these examples of a smart bag. It does more than one thing, right? Solves more than one problem, and I like this idea of the scooter.
The smart bags seem to have fallen out of fashion. I think it's like - are you even allowed to take them on planes anymore? The amount of time they spend saying like "if you got a smart bag, you got to tell us right now, it's going to burn a hole in the fuselage."
So I was stuck with this scooter thing. Now seriously, I need a poll here - how many of you saw somebody just happily scooting along today or on your way here? Any hands? Nobody. I even had the audacity to - I almost said balls but - I even had the audacity to say this is great because this takes advantage of this desirable thing we did as kids. Like at least in the US, we all had these shopping carts and we used to do this all the time.
So I was like, this is brilliant, this is pure desire. The problem is nobody does this because you look like a [expletive], which comes down to the fact - what about how it looks? How it looks doesn't need to be a dirty word. It doesn't need to be scary.

Modern Examples of Beauty

I have since updated my idea and I love these bags from Kabachi. Does anybody know this brand Kabachi? Anybody at all? There we go, a couple people. So what they do is they not only have incredibly colorful bags that are designed to be showstoppers and eye-catchers, but you can go on any given day and buy a color combination that will never be available again. That's pretty cool.
Of course they still have features, they still have to compete on features - it has to be able to fit things, but how it looks and how it makes you feel is really, really important. By the way, do not pack your shoes like that ever. That's the grossest thing I've seen in a long time.
So Kabachi, very cool, but you might be saying "Very clever, my friend, very clever. What you're doing is you're twisting it - you're talking about something that's like relatively like a commodity at this point, suitcases and luggage, like this is all fashiony." Aha! Don't speak so soon.
These small details are beginning to creep in everywhere. So Transfer Wise became Wise, and then they rebranded and they hired a fabulous agency called Koto, which we actually got to work with at Preply. I'll talk about that in a minute, and they started to add in these wonderful little moments, these little moments of delight that leveraged their brand.
Does it make you super happy to be using a banking app? No, but it feels better and it feels kind of cool. And just so you don't think it's all about visual polish, they have these micro copies. It is a drill to have to authenticate with the four-number code - it's perfect. You know the drill. These things are starting to come in now.

Apple and Innovation

No UX talk would be complete without a reference to Apple, but is it me, or does it seem like they're spending an awfully, awfully lot of time working on details of things that have been around forever? Like you've been able to share your contacts via Bluetooth, but like now - now the haptics, the animations, this name drop feature - by the way, what a name! Name drop is very cool.
And if you don't believe me, the next person that you - like the next teenager that you're around that has an iPhone, do like share a photo over AirDrop, share your contact details. Kids love this stuff - they're digital natives, they're not jaded about these things the way that we are.

Beyond Traditional UX

Let's go one step deeper. Airbnb is actually creating experiences that are designed around just the concept. I mean, you can actually sleep in Charles Xavier's mansion and be one of the X-Men!
So beauty and joy are more powerful things we've ever thought. Now that's all great - Airbnb, I don't know how many people from Airbnb and Apple are here today - like these are the crème de la crème, easy to push back on it.

The Preply Experience

But at Preply, the company I was at right before Lingo Kids, we decided that we wanted to bet on beauty, and we wanted to bet big on beauty. And so what we decided was we'd hire Koto, that agency, and we'd do a complete rebrand.
I'm not going to lie to you - my inner Jared Spool Jakob Nielsen UX guy was like "Ah, brand, I don't know," but then I saw it and I saw how cool it was. And then we brought in this guy Diego Martins, our principal product designer, and he created our new design language based on that brand.
And only a product designer could do that - we actually worked with the agency and we thought "Ah, they can do some of this heavy lifting." They couldn't. You have to understand how to make a product to do this, but you have to have great tools as well.
Thanks to this work, we were able to take screens that looked like this and make them look like this. And the messages are all basically the same, but the fact that it's so beautiful, the fact that it's so on-trend really helps get the message across.
I told you that I'm a disciple of Jared, and so I do believe in customer journey maps. The first thing I did when I joined Preply was ask the research team to create a customer journey map - deliberately zoomed out so you can't get too much information about it.
And what we found was that there was this specific moment when people - Preply is a language learning platform where you find a teacher. What we discovered was - and this makes complete sense if you take a moment back and you engage your inner like normal thinking person - which is you've never hired, you probably never hired a teacher in your entire life. Almost every teacher you've had has been given to you, right? From school on.
It's weird to ask you to choose a teacher, right? Like what the hell do you know? You're the student. In the end, you're probably choosing based on personality, so we should change that and actually ask you a lot of questions.

Current Work at LingoKids

Today I get to work at Lingo Kids, which is an app for kids to learn everything from language to math. And you might say, "Wow, okay, this beauty thing is really easy for you now to promote, right? I work in fintech - how the hell am I supposed to do this?" You get to design stuff for kids.
And it's true, we have amazing intellectual property. These characters are adorable. I did my product exercise to join where I had to go through the onboarding experience, and about the fifth video in, I was like "You got me - I'm in love with these characters, they're so adorable."
But you know what? We still have normal things. We have tabs, we still have to fight with categorization, we have to figure out how to surface the right content, how to help people find what they want. We have menus and we have profiles, and on top of this, we have users that can't read.
And this isn't like "I don't have my glasses" like me now - like "I can't read this." Like they can't read, and they'll just tap on anything. What do we do, especially since a lot of them go through the onboarding on their own at first, right? It's installed and we need to know what their age is in order to tailor content for them. It's quite different, the content for a seven-year-old than for a two-year-old or three-year-old.
So normally, old school UX which like, you know, find do some usability testing, find the best age picker you can - well, that's not an option for us. We can't explain this stuff. So we have to engage these muscles I've been talking about. We have to think like kids, we have to be more creative than we probably would have been in the past.
So kids can't read, but if you ask a kid "How old are you?" you're going to get the fingers. They always do this, right? They love to do it. They might even do the half finger - that's my favorite, the like "No, I'm five and a half."
So what we're working on right now is something that's actually extremely kid-friendly. It's beautiful because it's in our look and feel, it's exciting, but it also speaks to kids on their level.

The New Framework

So maybe based on all the stuff I talked about, it's time to do a reboot of this lovely framework. It's time for an upgrade. User-centered innovation, user-centric innovation still needs to be at the core, but we know how to do that now. We've been we've been pro - we've been evangelizing this for years.
But then there needs to be something else. There needs to be excellent craft behind it. And I think too - yeah, you can applaud, go ahead. Thank you, guy next to the column - you're getting a Guinness tonight. Not a plant at all.
Craft needs to be important. Stop enough with the Post-it notes already, alright? Post-it notes are great, boxes are great, but we need excellent craft in order to deliver on this. We need operational excellence, and finally, if we're lucky, we can reach beauty.
I know y'all like to take pictures - I'm seeing some pictures now, so I got the definitions here for you:

1. User-Centric Innovation: Identify and solve user problems with ambition and creativity. Ambition is very important - ambition creativity without ambition is lame. And you have to do it despite the constraints of business, technology, and human, and often what you'll find is if you can flip it - little jiujitsu - the constraints become the powerful thing.
2. Craft: We have to provide an experience where every surface is well crafted, emotionally engaging, on brand, and consistent. I know that nobody ever said back in those early days that this wasn't important, but we also didn't really say it was important. I think we've reached the time that we can say it's important.
3. Operations: We have to be able to deliver this at scale via excellent management, systemization. I believe we're going to have some talks about Design Systems today and resource allocation. So this individually great, right? On a scale, but we have to be able to scale this.
4. Beauty: And finally, if we're lucky, we're going to make it to beauty. And I'm not - I'm neither philosopher nor poet, this is my like kind of like guy on a stage definition, but we have to unlock a deeper essence that reflects truth, authenticity, and produces pleasure.
   And guess what? I wrote this and I thought, you know what? Truth, beauty - I feel like I've read that somewhere before. And I did: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know."
   So that's it, that's my case for beauty. Thank you very much.
   [Q&A Section]
   Q: Clients who are focused on functionality and cost - we've all been there - instead of this idea of branding, they're not on board. How do we sell to these people? How do we get beauty across as a point?
   A: That could be several more talks, so I'm not going to try to completely answer that. I think there's a reason why we call it user experience because in the end, there's always a user, and that user might be an end user, that user might be an internal user inside a company. But like when they're not using their - your software, they're normal people, and people like beauty.
   This is the reason why we've been doing this for a long time. I'm not going to say that you can convince every client about this, but I will tell you that one of the superpowers that we have, especially in design, is the ability to visualize things. And people - it's like a joke, right? Like if you all didn't find these - and any - well, some of you didn't find them funny, but if you don't find a joke funny, you don't laugh. But if you do, you laugh - it's a natural reaction.
   So try your best to start baking these things in. People will respond - you'll be surprised. You get to judge if you want to underline what you're trying to do or you just want to kind of let it slide. That depends on you. I will not tell you how to interact with your customers, but if you watch closely and you use the same muscles that you do when you're designing for the end user for the person who makes the decisions about what you're doing, you'll see when their pupils dilate a little bit. You'll see when they turn on, when they lean forward - pull on that thread.
   Q: That's almost a Field of Dreams level - like "build it and they will come."
   A: Build it and they will come. We actually said this all the time at Preply and now we're saying it at Lingo Kids - seeing is believing. It really is true. It's not like - we're not going to - I know I'm American here and so you're going to think we're going to - I'm going to sell you something, but seeing is believing is - it's a real thing. Like you can't get away from it.
   Q: Beauty - we obviously think of beauty as something that is well-formed and is well put together. We live in an age where product development tells us MVP, quick to market. How do we sell beauty in the age of MVP?
   A: Well, first off, I'm thrilled we're still talking about this like 10 years later. Like okay, we're still on this lean thing, okay. So the problem with MVPs - and I had a great designer named Siri who worked with me back at King, and he called them MVEs. He's like "Rebrand them as MVEs - minimum viable experiments" because an experiment is never meant to go live, right?
   Like you don't - you don't experiment on people and then expect that to be - like you do an experiment, learn something. You take that learning. If you're insisting on MVPs, at least make it clear. I use a lot of analogies - that's why this talk's easy for me. I say like, look, we're digging for oil, we're trying to find - we're trying to figure out if there's oil here or something of value or gold or whatever. And when we figure that out, then we have to build the whole mine and all the infrastructure, and that infrastructure includes an excellent well-crafted experience.
   Before that, that's fine. I try to hold people to their word. I say like, look, what are we going to do if this MVP works? How are we going to double down on this? And again with the seeing is believing idea, if you've got good product designers in your - or like you can just go ahead and visualize what you would imagine you do with that beforehand and get people like "Hey, let's run the fast experiment, but if it works, we're going for this because this is what good looks like, this is what's going to help set us apart."
   Q: How do you measure beauty?
   A: Honestly, you can't test or measure this perfectly, and this is a scary thing because we used UX and we used MVPs and we used user testing to democratize a lot of things, that take a lot of power out of like the hippos in the room - the highest paid people's opinions - and we got autonomy.
   But guess what? It's not enough. We actually have to have leaders that aren't just about organizing us - they have to have a vision. We have to believe in that vision, and they have to have criteria. And if they don't have it, they better find somebody that they can pay to have that criteria.
   Our CEO at Preply, brilliant guy - like cognitive horsepower, my goodness - not a designer. We hired an agency and then we had a lot of conversation about the work they did and a lot of push back, but eventually we got there.
   So first things first is you're gonna have to have like gut instincts and you're gonna have to trust the people at the top. How do you measure? I find that it's the classic argument - you will get a lot of spontaneous feedback when something is beautiful and when something is pleasurable. Do not necessarily mean that more people are going to end up signing up for an account or you know, like the onboarding experience going to work better, but you're going to hear people say like "that was delightful" or "you know, the finger thing was so cute."
   Q: B2B - I used to work in B2B. We used to just make things efficient.
   A: It's the same exact - the same answer. Like B2B is not B2B, it's people to people, and I'm going to tell you a secret: everybody wants to work less, everyone wants their job to be better, less of a pain in the ass. So whatever software you're making, if you're doing it well, you're making people's jobs easier or you're making them shine in front of their bosses.
   These are natural human emotions - find those, find out what that is, and then go for it. And guess what? They'll be even more interested because you don't have to sell them on the utility - they have to use this stuff.
   That's an incredible moment to finish - it's not business to business, it's not business to consumer, it is people to people.