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

10 Oct9:50 am – 10:25 amStage: Vision StageTalk
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This session is designed to make the case for and a new focus on design-centricity that goes beyond user-centered practice. Using practical examples of results achieved at Preply and Lingokids, Chris will walk us through the essence of being design-centric, where craft meets creativity and innovation emerges from deep customer insights.Key highlights of the talk include:

  • Making the case for the need to prioritize beauty and delight in customer experiences, especially in a world where much of the promise of "tech" has never materialized
  • Elevating Craft Excellence: Demonstrating how designing to make each user interaction deeply engaging and on-brand, ensures a high-quality experience
  • Pioneering Customer-Centric Innovation: Highlighting how Preply and Lingokids identify and address user needs with innovative solutions, driven by creativity and a deep understanding of user challenges and aspirations, pushing beyond the limits of current technologies and market standards.

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

Chris Grant at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/4MNFi2AT_Jw

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.

A story that starts with my dad, a child psychologist

[00:00:07] My name is Chris Grant. I am senior director at Lingokids. 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 Lingokids 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.

[00:00:29] 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. It starts when I was a kid.

[00:01:01] 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 don't really take to this whole therapy, let's sit on the couch, here are the Kleenex. He played games, he played basketball with them, but he got to help them deal with their problems. And I thought that's really nice. He made a good living helping little kids. Somebody loses their dad, they go talk to my dad and then they feel better. And I thought, you know what, I want to do something like that when I grow up. I want to have a sense of purpose.

[00:01:36] 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? Okay, so 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 of slides to back that up.

[00:02:08] This is the percentage growth in physicians versus administrators. What the hell is an administrator in this case? I don't know. I don't know if they provide healthcare exactly. Over the rise of managed care in the United States in the 90s. And 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.

Finding user centered design, and what happened to the industry along the way

[00:02:55] 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. This is going to be really, really cool.

[00:03:22] 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 a video game company, we're having a blast here. I even got to talk about my UX saga at King, a couple of jobs ago, to a lot of people. So it was a pretty sweet gig.

[00:03:55] 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. So things are good. I'm on the path. I'm UXing the hell out of it. I'm feeling good, finding those user needs, solving those user problems.

[00:04:18] 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.

[00:04:50] 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. 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.

[00:05:22] And then we even started to talk about unions. Unions in UX? What the hell's going on? We don't need you, we have boot camps, we have so much fun, 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.

What's left to believe in: beauty beyond UX

[00:05:57] So what's left to believe in? I'm painting a pretty dire case right now. People are mad at our industry in general. They're 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 how can we polish that tarnished image that started to emerge? And I'm going to make a bold statement here. What about beauty? This is the part where you gasp. Thank you, very good. You're good gaspers.

[00:06:28] 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. All right, so if you've been doing this for a while, I probably can guess what you're thinking. I'm going to use my psychic powers now. You're thinking, beauty? That sounds like a lot of... You're probably imagining this and you're like, hey, UX is more than just skin deep. We have our gurus that told us that.

[00:07:01] I hate to admit this, I went to see Jakob Nielsen in 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 Coke, Coca-Cola store. Can you see the links?

[00:07:48] All right, 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.

Utility, usability, desirability: the luggage example

[00:08:10] So UX goes deep. So deep, in fact, that I personally, I don't know about all of you, but 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? 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 what I discovered over time is just pull out the words utility, usability, desirability.

[00:08:34] 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 be to solve problems, achieve goals, will it be to 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, I had this thing about desirability. I often skipped over that. For a long time we were stuck in utility. So many products that made no sense, so much software that people didn't want. And then usability, oh, so much software that was hard to use.

[00:09:11] I found this hard to explain, this three thing, so I actually came up with an example that I'll show you really quickly. Imagine you're going on a trip. Most of the time, 99% of the 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've got to go on a trip, and if you've got to go on a trip you've got to get there somehow. Oh, I forgot, I put a Ryanair in. I'm sorry if I'm triggering anyone. I flew Ryanair here, so I definitely know what this feels like. Speaking of which, look at these happy people. They are thrilled to be getting on that plane, just like our UX boot campers.

[00:09:49] So you've got to go on a trip. You've got a clear need. A garbage bag would solve that need. Throw your clothes in a garbage bag, you're good to go. I have to admit, one time in college I was in a hurry, I had 25 minutes to catch a plane. That's how I packed my bag. Put some wheels on it, 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.

[00:10:10] 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, solves more than one problem. And I like this idea of the scooter. The smart bags seem to have fallen out of fashion. Are you even allowed to take them on planes anymore? The amount of time they spend saying, if you've got a smart bag you've got to tell us right now, it's going to burn a hole in the fuselage. So I was stuck with this scooter thing.

[00:10:40] 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? Okay, nobody. I even had the audacity, I almost said balls, but my mom's here, I even had the audacity to say this is great, because this takes advantage of this desirable thing we did as kids. 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...

How it looks doesn't need to be a dirty word

[00:11:18] 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. I have since updated my idea, and I love these bags from Kodachi [?]. Does anybody know this brand, Kodachi [?]? Anybody at all? There we go, a couple of people. 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.

[00:11:50] Of course 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.

[00:12:07] So Kodachi [?], 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 relatively a commodity at this point, suitcases and luggage, this is all fashiony. Aha, don't speak so soon. These small details are beginning to creep in everywhere. TransferWise 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.

[00:12:53] 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. 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 lot of time working on details of things that have been around forever? You've been able to share your contacts via Bluetooth, but now the haptics, the animations, this NameDrop feature. By the way, what a name. NameDrop is very cool.

[00:13:36] And if you don't believe me, the next teenager that you're around that has an iPhone, 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. Let's go one step deeper. Airbnb is actually creating experiences that are designed around just the concept. You can actually sleep in Charles Xavier's mansion and be one of the X-Men. So beauty and joy are more powerful things than we've ever thought.

Betting big on beauty at Preply

[00:14:12] Now, that's all great. Airbnb, I don't know how many people from Airbnb and Apple are here today. These are the crème de la crème, easy to push back on it. But at Preply, the company I was at right before Lingokids, 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. And 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.

[00:14:44] 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. And 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.

[00:15:22] 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. 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 normal thinking person, which is you've probably never hired a teacher in your entire life. Almost every teacher you've had has been given to you, from school on.

[00:15:57] It's weird to ask you to choose a teacher. 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. And so we used this moment, we used this classic user centered design practice, to create not only a bold solution, which was, instead of having a search based paradigm, taking people by the hand and asking them a bunch of questions, and then it looked like this. And people found it cool and refreshing, and we saw improved performance. We had this in the old look and feel as well, but when we updated to the new look and feel it was huge.

Lingokids: designing for users who can't read

[00:16:37] All right, so today I get to work at Lingokids, 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. 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.

[00:17:10] 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, I can't read this. They can't read, and they'll just tap on anything.

[00:17:39] What do we do? Especially since a lot of them go through the onboarding on their own at first. 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: 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 a kid. We have to be more creative than we probably would have been in the past.

[00:18:16] 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. They love to do it. They might even do the half finger, that's my favorite, the "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.

Rebooting the framework: innovation, craft, operations, beauty

[00:18:45] 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 evangelizing this for years. But then there needs to be something else. There needs to be excellent craft behind it. Yeah, you can applaud, go ahead. Thank you, guy next to the column, you're getting a Guinness tonight. Not a plant at all.

[00:19:19] Craft needs to be important. Stop, enough with the Post-it notes already. All right, 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.

[00:19:42] User centric innovation: identify and solve user problems with ambition and creativity. Ambition is very important. 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, a little jiujitsu, the constraints become the powerful thing.

[00:20:08] Then we need 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.

[00:20:30] And then finally, 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 is individually great, but we have to be able to scale this. And finally, if we're lucky, we're going to make it to beauty. I'm neither philosopher nor poet, this is my guy on a stage definition, but we have to unlock a deeper essence that reflects truth, authenticity and produces pleasure.

[00:21:01] 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

[00:21:29] Host: Absolutely incredible, Chris. To go from those levels of humor to bringing in UX jiujitsu all the way up to a fin. Should we do a quick demonstration?

[00:21:40] Chris: That's absolutely fine. I've got my post, I haven't done it for years, so there we go.

[00:21:44] Host: We have a couple of minutes for questions at this point. So, Chris, starting us off: clients who are focused on functionality and cost, we've all been there, instead of this idea of branding. They're not on the market. How do we sell to these people? How do we get beauty across as a point?

[00:22:04] Chris: 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. That user might be an end user, that user might be an internal user inside a company, but when they're not using 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.

[00:22:39] And people, it's like a joke. If you didn't find these, 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 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.

[00:23:18] Host: I love that. That's almost a Field of Dreams level, build it and they will come.

[00:23:23] Chris: Build it and they will come. Seeing, we actually said this all the time at Preply, and now we're saying it at Lingokids: seeing is believing. It really is true. I know I'm American here and so you're going to think I'm going to sell you something, but seeing is believing is a real thing. You can't get away from it.

[00:23:39] Host: I love it, it's great. Our next question, brilliant one here. 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?

[00:23:55] Chris: Well, first off, I'm thrilled we're still talking about this 10 years later. Okay, we're still on the lean thing. Okay, so the problem with MVPs, and I had a great designer named Seri [?] 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. You don't experiment on people and then expect that to be it. You do an experiment, learn something, you take that learning. If you're insisting on MVPs, at least make it clear.

[00:24:28] I use a lot of analogies, that's why this talk's easy for me. I say, look, we're digging for oil. 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, 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 org, you can just go ahead and visualize what you would imagine you'd 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.

[00:25:12] Host: Amazing. MVP is not final, everyone, always worth remembering. This is thorny. You've got five minutes to probably answer it, but Chris, how do you measure beauty?

[00:25:23] Chris: Are you sure we have five minutes? I think we're done. Oh, we're done? Okay, that's fine. Five full minutes on this topic. I feel like the debates recently, "honestly, they're eating the beauty." Thank you for that. First things first, 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, to take a lot of power out of 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.

[00:26:12] Our CEO at Preply, brilliant guy, 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 going to have to have gut instincts, and you're going to have to trust the people at the top.

[00:26:32] 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. It does not necessarily mean that more people are going to end up signing up for an account, or the onboarding experience is going to work better, but you're going to hear people say, that was delightful, oh, the finger thing was so cute. And that will start internally. I'm here to make a case for dogfooding again. We all know that term, of actually becoming experts.

[00:27:05] I loved when, I think it was back in 2015, the founder and at that time CEO of WhatsApp put on his LinkedIn profile "head of QA," because he's like, all I do is just use this product all the time. If we dogfood, if we all use our products, we should also have a sense of beauty, which can help balance a little bit that giving too much power to the top that I talked about. So look for reactions, look for spontaneous feedback.

[00:27:32] Host: Reality, reaction, spontaneous feedback. I love it. A slightly more tangible one here. UXR with kids, how are you managing that?

[00:27:40] Chris: Well, first, UXDX people, you can invite our researchers back next year if people are interested in that. They're lovely. And second, I'm going to, sorry, but very, very carefully. And that's all I'm going to say.

[00:27:52] Host: That was beautifully dodged, almost like it wasn't dodged. I love it.

[00:27:57] Chris: I've been in Spain for a while. I know how to.

[00:28:00] Host: Okay. What would you recommend for products that have a very wide user base, so telecommunication industries, different products, lots of different target personas, for overall brand consistency?

[00:28:13] Chris: They are putting you through your paces. Is this part getting recorded? Yeah? All right, well, this is everybody marking this on your calendars, this is where I got cancelled. I used to work for a telco. I worked for a company called Tuenti, which was like the Facebook in Spain before Facebook arrived. Some American founders came along with some really cool Spanish entrepreneurs, and they basically got a social network up and running for Spain, and it was huge. 96% of 14 to 25 year olds had an account on this thing. You could literally tell when school was let out, because the servers started to spin up. This is all pre-mobile. Mobile happened during it. And they were purchased by Telefónica, at the time the largest telco in the world.

[00:28:56] I'm going to tell you the truth, we made a lot of jokes about Telefónica, that their branding was sunsets and people walking on the beach and these poetic lines that didn't mean anything, like "the communication will unite us all in the pursuit of what is uniting." What does that mean? And we'd say, where are their features? Where's the stuff that they do? I want to point to the fact that I said really clearly in the definition that beauty was about unlocking the truth of that product, and that's why I ended with the quote, because beauty and truth go hand in hand. So if you're just adding a layer of brand on top, it's not going to work.

[00:29:34] And even for a telco, I would argue that there's some essentially human thing that you do that makes you more valuable, and if you're not doing that, maybe you should look into doing that. That can be how you go brand first, but it has to start with the truth. And I know all this stuff is scary, because these ideas, it feels like we're back in literature class, the truth, the theme, what are we talking about? But these things are essential. We have to understand what it is that's valuable about our product. They try to do that with the sunsets and stuff. The problem is that it's just kind of vagaries. So yeah, good luck.

[00:30:09] Host: I love it. Look for the truth, not a facade of brand. Brand has to come from truth. I love it. I really want to know the answer to the next question, but we only have 25 seconds left.

[00:30:18] Chris: I can do 25.

[00:30:20] Host: We are, I think, going to sadly have to be done, but someone come and ask Chris this later and I will linger around and listen to the answer. You reckon we've got... Oh, I thought this was wrapped up. Ah, that's you. When Rory does this it usually means leave. We're not going to commercial, we're going for it. Chris, great. Come on, we're going to do one more question. Chris, B2B. I used to work in B2B, we used to just make things efficient.

[00:30:45] Chris: It's the same. It's the exact same answer. 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.

[00:31:12] Host: That's an incredible moment to finish. It's not business to business, it's not business to consumer, it is people to people. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Grant, everyone. Thank you.

Speaker

Chris Grant

Chris Grant

Senior Design Director

Lingokids