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Smashing Podcast Episode 62 With Slava Shestopalov: What Is Design Management?

In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we ask what is a design manager? What does it take and how does it relate to the role of Designer? Vitaly talks to Slava Shestopalov to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly: He’s a design leader, lecturer and design educator. He has seen it all working as a graphic designer in his early years and then, moving to digital products, UX, accessibility and design management. Most recently, he has worked as a lead designer and design manager in a software development company, Alex, and then, later, Bolt, the all-in-one mobility app. Now, he’s very keen on building bridges between various areas of knowledge rather than specializing in one single thing, and we’ll talk about that as well. He also loves to write, he has a passion for medieval style UX design myths. Who doesn’t? And is passionate about street and architecture photos. Originally from Cherkasy, Ukraine, he now lives in Berlin with his wonderful wife, Aksano. So we know that he’s an experienced designer and design manager, but did you know that he also loves biking, waking up at 5:00 AM to explore cities and can probably talk for hours about every single water tower in your city. My Smashing friends, please welcome Slava Shestopalov. Hello Slava. How are you doing today?

Slava: I am Smashing.

Vitaly: Oh yes, always.

Slava: Or at least I was told to say that.

Vitaly: Okay, so that’s a fair assessment in this case. It’s always a pleasure to meet you and to see you. I know so many things about you. I know that you’re very pragmatic. I know that you always stay true to your words. I know that you care about the quality of your work. But it’s always a pleasure to hear a personal story from somebody who’s kind of explaining where they’re coming from, how they ended up where they are today. So maybe I could ask you first to kind of share your story. How did you arrive kind of where you are today? Where you coming from or where you’re going? That’s very philosophical, but let’s start there.

Slava: That’s quite weird. I mean, my story is quite weird because I’m a journalist by education and I never thought of being a designer at school or the university. During my study years, I dreamt about something else. Maybe I didn’t really have a good idea of my future profession rather about the feeling that it should bring, that it should be something interesting, adventurous, something connected with helping other people. I dreamt about being a historian, geographer, maybe traveling in the pursuit of new adventures or inventions, but ended up being a journalist.

Slava: My parents recommended me choose this path because they thought I was quite talkative person and it would’ve been a great application for such a skill. And since I didn’t have any better ideas, I started studying at the university, studying journalism. And then, on the third year studying, during our practice, and by the way, I met my wife there, under the university, we are together since the first day of studying, we were in the same academic group, not only on the same faculty, and we were passing our journalistic practice at the Press Department of the local section of the Ministry of Emergencies, meaning that we were writing articles about various accidents happening in the Cherkasy region, taking photos of, sometimes, not very funny things. And accidentally, there I tried CorelDRAW, there is the whole generation of designers who don’t even know what those words mean.

Vitaly: Well, you don’t use CorelDRAW anymore, do you?

Slava: Not anymore. I don’t even know whether this software is still available. So I accidentally tried that in our editorial office where, as our practices, was not even real work. And somehow, it was more or less okay. I created the first layout. Of course, now I am scared to look at it. I don’t even have it saved somewhere on my computer. That’s an abomination, not design. But back then, it worked out and I started developing this skill as a secondary skill. I’m a self-taught designer, so never had any systematic way of learning design, rather learning based on my own mistakes, trying something new, producing a lot of work that I’m not proud of.

Vitaly: But also, I’m sure work that you are proud of.

Slava: Yeah. But then, later, I joined first small design studios and I’m forever thankful to my, back then, art director who once came to my desk, looked at the layout on my screen and told me, "Slava, please don’t get offense, but there is a book that you have to read." And he hand me handed me the book Design for Non-Designers. That’s an amazing book, I learned a lot from it, the basics of composition, contrast, alignment, the visual basics. And I started applying it to my work, it got better. Then of course, I read many more books for designers, but also, books on design, on business and management and other topics. And gradually, by participating in more and more complex projects, I got to the position where I am right now.

Vitaly: So it’s interesting for me because actually I remember my days coming also without any formal education as a designer, I actually ended up just playing with boxes on page. And I actually came to design through the lens of HTML, CSS back in the day, really, through frontend development. And then, this is why I exclusive design accessibility lies way, it’s close to my heart. And it’s the thing that many people actually really like that kind of moving into design and then, starting just getting better at design.

Vitaly: But you decided to go even further than that. I think in 2019, you transitioned from the role of a lead designer, if I’m not mistaken, to design manager. Was it something that you envisioned, that you just felt like this is a time to do that? Because again, there are two kinds of people that I encounter. Some people really go into management thinking that this is just a natural progression of their career, you cannot be just a designer, and this is in quotation marks, "forever," so you’re going to go into the managerial role. And some people feel like, let me try that and see if it’s for me and if not, I can always go back to design or maybe to another company product team and whatnot. What was it like for you? Why did you decide to take this route?

Slava: The reason was curiosity. I wouldn’t say that I was the real manager because design management is slightly different, probably even other types of management like product management and your engineering management, it’s not completely management because what is required there, if you look at the [inaudible 00:07:01], you will notice that the domain knowledge, the hard skills are essential and you’ll be checked whether you have those skills as well apart from the managerial competence. So I wouldn’t say that this kind of management is 100% true, complete management as we can imagine it in the classical meaning, it’s the combination of what you’ve been doing before with management and the higher the percentage of management is, the higher in the hierarchy you go.

Slava: In my situation, switching from the lead designer to design manager was not that crucial. I would say more critical thing that I experienced was switching from a senior designer to lead designer because this is the point where I got my first team whom I had to lead. And that was the turning point when you realize that the area of your responsibility is not only yourself and your project, but also someone else. And in modern world, we don’t have feudalism and we cannot directly tell people what to do, we are not influencing their choices directly. That’s why it’s getting harder to manage without having the real power. And we are in the civilized world, authoritarian style is not working anymore, and that’s great, but we should get inventive to work with people using gentle, mild methods, taking into account what they want as personalities, but at the same time reaching the business goals of the company and KPIs of the team.

Vitaly: Right. But then also, speaking about the gentle way of managing, I remember the talk that you have given about the thing that you have learned and some of the important things that you consider to be important in a design manager position. So I’m curious if you could share some bits of knowledge of things that you discovered maybe the hard way, which were a little bit surprising to you as you were in that role, for example, also in Bolt. What were some things that you feel many designers maybe who might be listening at this point and thinking, "Oh, actually, I was always thinking about design manager, maybe I should go there," what was some things that were surprising to you and something that were really difficult?

Slava: Something that was surprising both for me and for other people with whom I talk about design management is that we perceive management in the wrong way. We have expectations pretty far from reality. There are some managerial activities that are quite typical for designers, for the design community in general, something that we encounter so often that we tend to think that this is actually management. Maybe there is something else but not much else that we don’t see at the moment, not much is hidden of that management. And that’s why when we jump into management, we discover a lot of unknown things that this type of work includes.

Slava: For example, as a Ukrainian, I know that, in our country, many designers are self-taught designers because the profession develops much faster than the higher education. And that’s why people organize themselves into communities and pass knowledge to each other much faster and easier. And there are so many private schools and private initiatives that spread the knowledge and do that more efficiently so that after couple of months of studying, you get something. Of course, there might be many complaints about the quality of that education, but the sooner you get to the first project, the sooner you make your first mistakes, the better you learn the profession and then, you won’t repeat them again. That’s why I know the power of this community. And mentorship, knowledge-sharing is something extremely familiar to Ukrainian designers.

Slava: And then, generally, I observe the same tendency in the Western Europe that knowledge-sharing, mentorship is the usual thing that many designers do, that many designers practice. And we think that when we switch to management, we will simply scale this kind of activity. In reality, it’s just not even the largest part of management. And when people are officially promoted to managers, to leaders, they discover a lot of other areas like hiring people then being responsible for the hires because it’s not enough just to participate in a technical interview and check the hard skills of a candidate, but also then live with this decision because you cannot easily fire a person, and sometimes, it’s even wrong because as a manager you are supposed to work with this person and develop them and help them grow or help them onboard better and pass this period of adaptation. By the way, adaptation and onboarding, another thing than retention cases, resolving problems when your employees are not satisfied with what they have right now, including you as a manager and many other things like salary, compensation, bonuses, team building trust and relationship in the team, performance management, knowledge assessments.

Vitaly: Right. But then, is there even at all any time then to be designing as you’re a design manager? I know that in some teams, in some companies you have this kind of roles where, well, you’re a design manager, sometimes it would be called just... Yeah, well, [inaudible 00:12:54]. Sometimes design leads are actually also managers, depending if it’s like a small company or a larger company. And then, would you say that given the scope that is really changing when you’re kind of moving to management, should you have hopes that you will still have time to play with designs in Figma?

Slava: It depends on how far you go and on the org structure of the particular company. In some cases, you still have plenty of time to design because management doesn’t occupy that much time, you don’t have many subordinates or the company so small that the processes are not very formalized. In that case, yep, you can still design maybe 50% of your time, maybe even 70% of your time and manage during the rest of the time. But there are large companies where management occupies more and more time and then, yeah, probably you won’t be designing or at least designing the same way as it used to be before.

Slava: There are multiple levels of design, multiple levels of obstruction. For example, when you’re moving pixels in Figma in order to create a well-balanced button, that’s design. But when you’re creating a customer journey map or mapping a service blueprint together with stakeholders from other departments of your company, that’s design as well, but on the higher level of obstruction. You are building a bit larger picture of the product service or the whole experience throughout products and multiple services of the company. So I would say that there is always space for design, but this design might get less digital and more connected with organizational design, interaction between different departments and other stuff like that.

Vitaly: Right. So maybe if we go back a little bit into team building or specifically the culture and the way teams are built, obviously, we kind of moved, I don’t know when it was, but we kind of moved to this idea that T-shaped employees is a good thing. So you basically specialize in one thing and then, you have a pretty general understanding about what’s going on in the rest of the organization, the rest of the product and so on. It’s quite shallow, but then, in one thing, you specialize. At the same time, you see a lot of people who call themselves generalists, they kind of know a lot about different things but never really specialized deeply into one thing. And so, you also have this, this is probably considered to be not necessarily just the I shape, where you kind of get very deep in one thing, but really, this is it, you just specialized so deep that you have pretty much no solid understanding about what’s happening around.

Vitaly: And then, one thing that has been kind of discussed recently, I’ve seen at least a few articles about that is a V-shape, where you kind of have a lot of depth in one thing. You also have a pretty okay, solid, general understanding about what’s going on. But then, you also have enough skills or enough information about the adjacent knowledge within the product that you’re working on. So I’m wondering at this point, let’s say if you build a team of designers, what kind of skills or what kind of shape if you like, do we need to still remain quite, I would say, interesting to companies small and large? What kind of shape would that be? If that makes sense.

Slava: Yeah, so you want me to give you a silver bullet, right, for-

Vitaly: Yes.

Slava: ... a company?

Vitaly: Ideally, yes.

Slava: Doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. On the one hand, I think that’s a good discussion, discussions about the skill sets of designers, but on the other hand, we are talking a lot about ourselves, maybe, more than representatives of all the other professions about what we should call our profession, what shapes, skillset should we have, what frameworks and tools should we use? It’s extremely designer-centered. And here, of course, I can talk for hours and participate in holy wars about what’s the best name for this, all that, but essentially, at the end of the day, I realize that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make sense at all. Okay, whatever we decide, if you are whatever shape designer, but you are not useful in this world, you cannot reach the goal and you cannot find your niche and make users happy and business happy, then it doesn’t matter what’s written on your resume.

Vitaly: Right. So-

Slava: But then, the one hand, yeah, of course, logically, when I think about it, I do support the T-shaped concept. But again, depends on how you understand it, whether those horizontal bar of the T is about shallow knowledge or good enough knowledge or decent knowledge. You see how thick it is? And that’s why we have another concept with this We shape designer, which is essentially another representation of the T-shaped format. The idea is the same that as a human being, of course, you want to specialize in something that’s passion, that you maybe love design for and maybe that’s why you came into the profession. But at the same time, you are obliged to know to a certain minimally required extent, the whole entirety of your profession.

Slava: Ask any other professional, a surgeon, police person, whoever, financial expert, of course, they have their favorite topics, but at the same time, there is a certain requirement to you as a specialist to obtain certain amount of knowledge and skills.

Slava: The same about designers, I don’t see how we are different from other professions. It’s why it’s quite fair to have this expectation that the person would know something about UX research. They are not obliged to be as professional and advanced as specialized UX researchers, but that’s fine for a designer to know about UX research, to do some UX research. The same about UX researchers, it never hurts to know the basics of design in order to understand what your colleagues are doing and then, you collaborate better together.

Vitaly: Which brings me, of course, to the question that I think you brought up in an article, I think maybe five or six years ago. You had a lot of comments on that article. I remember that article very vividly because you argued about all the different ways of how we define design, UX, CX and all the different wordings and abbreviations, service designer, CX designer, UX designer, and so many other things.

Vitaly: I mean, it’s really interesting to me because when I look back, I realize now that we’ve been working very professionally in this industry, in whatever you want to call design industry, UX industry, digital design industry for like... What? ... three decades now, maybe even more than that, really trying to be very professional. But when we look around, actually, and this is just a funny story because just as we started trying to record this session, we spent 14 minutes trying to figure out how to do that in the application here. So what went wrong, Slava? I mean, 30 years is a long time to get some things right and I think that we have done a lot of things. But frankly, too often, when you think about general experience that people would get, be it working with public services, working with insurance companies, working with something that’s maybe less exciting than the landing page or a fancy product or SaaS, very often it’s just not good. What went wrong, Slava? Tell us.

Slava: Nothing went wrong. Everything is fine. The world is getting more and more complex over time, but something never changed, and it’s people, or we didn’t change. Our brain is more or less the same as it was thousand years ago, maybe a couple of thousand years ago and that’s the reason. We are people, we are not perfect. Technology might be amazing, it even feels magical, but we are the same. We are not perfect. We’re not always driven by rational intention to do something well. There are many people who are not very excited about their jobs, that’s why they provide not so good service. There are periods when a good person does bad job and they will improve later, but the task that they deliver today because of many reasons will be at this lower quality.

Slava: Then decision making, we are emotional beings and even if you use a hundred of frameworks about decision making and prioritizing, it doesn’t deny our nature. There are even people who learned to manipulate all the modern techniques, who learned about design thinking and workshops and try to use it to their own advantage. Like, "Oh, okay, I cannot persuade my team, so let’s do this fancy exercise with colored sticky notes and try to-

Vitaly: Well, who doesn’t like colored sticky notes, Slava, come on.

Slava: Digital colored sticky note, they’re still colored and look like sticky notes, right? And those people just want to push their own ideas through workshops. But workshops were designed for something else. The same with business, there are unethical business models still flourishing, there are dark patterns just because some people don’t care. So the reason is that we are the same, we are not perfect.

Vitaly: Right. Well-

Slava: We create design for humans, but we are humans as well.

Vitaly: But sometimes I feel like we are designing for humans, but then, at the same time, I feel that we are spending more and more time designing with AI sometimes for AI, this is how it feels to me. I don’t know about you, every now and again I still get a feeling that, okay, this message that was written by somebody and sent to me, it has a little bit of sense or feel or I don’t know, taste of ChatGPT on it. Just I can tell sometimes that this is kind of for humans, but it’s in a way appears to me as if it was written for AI. So do you have this feeling sometimes that you get that email or you get that message, it’s a little bit too AI-ish? Do you have this experience?

Slava: Sometimes I have this experience, but the reason is that it’s a hot topic right now. You may have already forgotten about another trendy topic, NFT, blockchain, everything was in blockchain, everything was NFT. But over time, people realize where the use cases are really strong and deserve our efforts and where it just doesn’t fit. It’s like with every new technology, it passes the same stages. There is even a nice diagram, the cycle of adoption of any new technology when there is a peak of excitement first when we are trying to apply it everywhere. But then, there is this drop in excitement and disillusionment after which we finally get onto the plateau of enlightenment, finding the best application for this technology.

Slava: I remember the same in the area of design methodology when design sprint just appeared, people tried applying it everywhere, even in many places where it just didn’t fit or the problem was too large or the team culture wasn’t consistent with the trust and openness implied by such a methodology as a design sprint. But over time, it found its application and now, used not that often, but only by those people who need it.

Vitaly: Right. Talking actually about team culture, maybe just to switch the topic a little bit, maybe you could bring a few red flags that you always try to watch out for. Because of course, when you are working with a diverse team and you have people who have very different backgrounds and also have very different expectations and very different skill sets, inevitably, you will face situations where team culture clashes. So I’m wondering, what do you think would be the early warning signs that the manager needs to watch out for to prevent things from exploding down the line?

Slava: That’s a good question. I would turn it into slightly different direction because I think of that kind of paradigm. I would try to prevent this from happening. The best way to deal with it is not to deal with it, to avoid dealing with it. So embracing the culture, understanding it and building it is important because then you won’t need to face the consequence. I wouldn’t say that there are real red flags because culture is like user experience, it’s like gravity, like any other physical force, it just exists. And whether you want it or not, if it’s described in a fancy culture brand guideline or not, it exists anyway. The thing is to be sincere about culture, to embrace the existing culture and to broadcast it to the outside honestly.

Slava: The problem is when the communication about the culture is different from the actual culture. There are various cultures, there are even harsh cultures that someone would find extremely uncomfortable, but for example, for other people it can be a great environment for growth, for rapid growth. Maybe they will change their environment later, but during a certain period of life, it might be important.

Slava: I remember some of my previous companies with pretty harsh cultures, but they helped me to grow and to get where I am right now. Yeah, I wasn’t stressed, but I knew about it. I expected it to happen and I had my inner readiness to resist and to learn my lessons out of that. But the problem is when the company communicates its culture externally as the paradise of wellbeing and mindfulness, but in reality they have deadlines for tomorrow and never ending flow of tasks and crazy stakeholders who demand it from you immediately and give you contradicting requirements. So that’s the problem.

Slava: Of course, yeah, there are some extreme cases when the culture is really toxic, when these are insane, inhuman conditions, I don’t deny that. But in many cases, something that we simply perceive as uncomfortable for ourselves is not necessarily evil, sometimes it is, but not always. And my message is that cultures should be honest. And for that purpose, people should be honest with themselves.

Slava: Manager should look at their company and try to formulate in simple way what type of a community this is. For example, in, again, one of my previous jobs, we realized that our team is like a university for people come to us and are hired because they want to grow rapidly, they want to grow faster than anywhere else, that’s why they join our company. They don’t get many perks and bonuses, the office is not very fancy and we are not those hipster designers who are always using trendy things. But at the same time, you get a lot of practice and you can earn the trust of a client, you can take things you want to be responsible for yourself. You are not given task, but you can take the task you find important.

Slava: And when we realized that, we included it into our value proposition because as a company you’re not even interested in attracting people who will feel unsatisfied here. If you are working this way, but your external messaging is different and you attract those people who are searching for something different and then, when they come in they’re highly disappointed and you have to separate with them in a month or a year or they will bring the elements of this culture to your culture and there is a clash of cultures.

Slava: So the point here, I’m just trying to formulate the same idea but in different ways, it’s to be honest about the culture, it’s extremely important. But also, awareness about your culture. It’s not written, it exists. And sometimes, the company principles are quite misleading, they’re not often true because the real culture is seen at the office, it’s in the Slack chat, it’s in the way how people interact, what they discuss at the coffee machine.

Vitaly: Yeah. And there are, of course, also, I think I read this really nice article maybe a couple of years ago, the idea of different subcultures and how they evolve over time and how they can actually mingle and even merge with, as you might have very different teams working on different side of the world, which then find each other and bring and merge culture. So you kind of have this moving bits and moving parts.

Vitaly: Kind of on the way to one of the conference, I went to Iceland. And there was a really nice friendly guy there who was guiding us through Iceland. And he was telling all this story about nothing ever stops, everything is moving, everything is changing, glaciers are changing, the earth’s changing, everything is changing, everything is moving. And people are pretty much like that. People always find... I mean, maybe people don’t change that much, but they’re still finding ways of collaborating better and finding ways to create something that hopefully works better within the organization. How do you encourage that though?

Vitaly: Very often I encounter situations where it feels like there are people just looking at the clock to finish on time and then, go home. And then, there are people who just want to do everything and they’re very vocal and they will have this incredible amount of enthusiasm everywhere and they will have all the GIFs in Slack and so on and so forth. But then, sometimes I feel like, again, talking about culture, their enthusiasm is clashed against this coldness that is coming from some people. And then, you have camps building. How do you deal with situations like that? You cannot just make people more similar, you just have to deal with very different people who just happen to have very different interests and priorities. How would you manage that?

Slava: That’s an amazing question, and you know why? Because there is no definite answer to it.

Vitaly: I like those kind of questions.

Slava: Yeah. It’s not easy and I struggled a lot with that. I know perfectly, based on my experience, what you’re asking about. One of the solutions might be to hire people who have similar culture or at least consistent with the existing culture. Because if your whole team or the core team, the majority in the team who set this spirit and this atmosphere, they are proactive, you shouldn’t hire people who are highly inconsistent with this kind of culture. Yeah, they might be more passive, more attentive to their schedule, but they should not be resisted at least. They can support it maybe in a more calm way, but you don’t need someone critically opposing that state of things, and vice the versa. Over time, I understood that.

Slava: Sometime ago, I thought that all designers should be proactive, rock stars, super skilled, taking responsibility about everything. But you know what? That’s quite one-sided point of view. Even if I belong to this kind of designers, it’s important to embrace other types of professionals because the downside of being such a designer is that you are driven forward by your passion, but only when you have this passion and motivation. But if it disappears, you can hardly make yourself do the simplest task. And that’s the problem because this fuel doesn’t feed you anymore.

Slava: On the other hand, those people who are more attentive to their balance between work and relaxation, people who are more attentive to their schedule and are less energetic at work and may be less passionate about what they do, they are more persistent and they can much easier survive such a situation when everything around is falling apart and many people lose motivation just because motivation is not such a strong driver for them. So over time, I understood that there are multiple types of designers and they’re all fine. The thing is to find your niche and to be in the place where you belong.

Vitaly: Right. Interesting. Because on top of that, I do have to ask a question. We could do this forever, we could keep this conversation going forever. I want to be respectful of your time as well. Just from your experience... There are so many people, the people who I’ve been speaking to over this last couple of years, but also here on the podcast, everybody has different opinions about how teams should be led and how the culture should be defined in terms of how people are working, specifically all-remote, a hundred percent remote or all on site, a hundred percent on site or hybrid with one day overlap, two days overlap, three days overlap, four days overlap.

Vitaly: What do you think works? I mean, of course, it’s a matter of the company where people allocated. And obviously, if everybody is from different parts of the world, being on site all the time, moving from, let’s say, fully remote to fully on site is just really difficult. So what would you say is really critical in any of those environments? Can hybrid work really well? Can remote work really well? Can onsite work really well? And there’s truly no best option, but I’m just wondering what should we keep in mind for each of those?

Slava: The culture. So look, culture is everything and it influences the way how people work efficiently. If is networking is really active in the team, if people communicate a lot apart from their work and tasks and everything, and if it’s normal for the team, if it’s part of the reasons why people are here in this company, then offline work is preferable. If people are more autonomous and they like it and everyone works like that in the company, then there is nothing bad in being hybrid or remote. So you see, it depends on the attitude to work and general culture, the spirit, how people feel comfortable.

Vitaly: All right. But are you saying that if you have, let’s say, a mix of people who really prefer on site and then, really prefer remote, then you kind of get an issue because how do you merge both of those intentions?

Slava: But how do you get into that situation in the first place?

Vitaly: Well, good question.

Slava: Why have you attracted so different people to your company?

Vitaly: But for the rest [inaudible 00:37:39] with HR?

Slava: Yes, I read processes.

Vitaly: But there might be different teams and then, eventually those teams get merged and then, eventually, some people come, some people leave and people are rotating from one team to another. And then, eventually, before you know it, you end up in a situation where you’re working on a new product with a new team and then, part are remote, part are on site and part don’t even want to be there.

Slava: That’s why large companies have processes. The thing that you are describing is quite typical for huge companies because you cannot keep similar work culture forever. As you scale, it’s becoming more awake and hard to match all the time. There is an amazing diagram that I saw in LinkedIn, it was created by Julie Zhuo, who also wrote a great book on management. And this diagram shows how people are hiring, like this, A hires, B hires, C hires, D, and there is a slight difference in their cultures. And if you imagine it as the line of overlapping circles, when A hires B, B hires C, C hires D and so on, then you notice how far A is from let’s say H or G, they’re very far away because this line of hiring brought certain distortion, certain mutation into the culture understanding with each step.

Slava: It’s like evolution is working. With every century or thousands of years, certain species changes one tiny trait, but in a million of years, you won’t even recognize that. The same with huge companies, you cannot control everything and micromanage it. So naturally, they’re extremely diverse. And many companies even are proud of being diverse and inclusive, which is another aspect, which is great, but in order to manage it all, they have to introduce processes and be more strictly regulated just to keep it working.

Vitaly: Right. Right. Well, I mean, we could speak about this for hours, I think. But maybe just two more questions before we wrap up. One thing that’s really important to me and really dear to me is that I know that you’ve been mentoring and you’ve been participating in kind of educating about design also specifically for designers who are in Ukraine. And I mean, at this point, we probably have many more connections and many more insights about how design is actually working from Ukraine right now when the war is going on. I’m just wondering, do you see... Because we had a Smashing meet a couple of months ago now. And there was an incredible talk by one of the people from set up team in Ukraine, in Kyiv, and they were speaking about just incredible way of how they changed the way the company works, how they adapted in any way to accommodate for everything. Like some people working from bomb shelters. This is just incredible.

Vitaly: Those kind of stories really make me cry. So this is just unbelievable. And I always have this very, I don’t even know how to describe it, like incredible sense of the strength that everybody who I’m interacting with who is coming through [inaudible 00:41:00] keep after all this time. It’s been now, what? It’s like one and a half years, right, well, much more than that, actually looking at 2014. So the question, I guess, that I’m trying to ask here is that strength and that kind of obsession with quality, with good work, with learning, with educating, how did it come to be and how is it now? I don’t know if it makes sense the question, but just maybe your general feelings about what designers are feeling and how are they working at this point in May 2023?

Slava: That’s a good question. Unfortunately, I might not be the best person to answer because I’ve been living in Berlin for three years and fortunately, I never experienced working from a bomb shelter, although, many of my friends and acquaintances did. But what I know for sure is that Ukrainian design community is quite peculiar and it’s an insurance trait. It’s not something that we are taught, but something that just our characteristic. I know that unlike many other people from other countries, Ukrainian designers are really hungry for knowledge and new skills. And the level of self-organization is quite high because we are not used to getting it off the shelf, we are not used to receiving it, I don’t know, from educational institutions, from the government, from whoever else.

Slava: In Ukraine, or at least definitely my generation, millennials, we understand that if we don’t do anything, we will fail in life, that’s why we try to build our career early, we think about our future work during the last years of school and at the university, already planning where we going to work, how much we going to earn and how to find your niche, your place in life.

Slava: And the same in design, we are not waiting until our universities update their programs in order to teach us digital design, we are doing it ourselves, partnering with universities, participating in different courses, contributing to those programs. And I think that this feature, this trait of Ukrainian designers is extremely helpful right now in crisis times. Maybe it didn’t get us that much by surprise, it was still unexpected. But Ukrainian designers and other professionals in other professions, they just try to always have plan B and plan C and maybe even plan D.

Vitaly: Yeah, that’s probably also explains... I mean, I have to ask this question, I really do. Why medieval themes in your UX memes? Oh, even rhymes, it must be true.

Slava: First of all, it’s beautiful and funny. The first time I used medieval art-based memes was several years ago when I worked at EPAM Systems and prepared an internal presentation for one of our internal team meetups. And it was hilarious, everyone was laughing. And since then, I just started doing it all the time. It’s not like-

Vitaly: And you have like 50 of them now or even more?

Slava: More. Many more. It’s just something original. I haven’t seen many medieval memes, especially in the educational and other materials about design and UX. So it’s just, I like to bring positive emotions to my audience. So if it’s hilarious and makes them laugh and if it’s something new that others are not doing or at least that intensively, then why not? And I simply enjoy medieval art, including architecture, gothic style, Romanesque architecture, it’s something from fairy tales or legends, but then, you realize, it was real.

Vitaly: Yeah, so I guess, dear friends listening to this, if you ever want to give or find a nice gift for Slava, lookout for medieval art and any books related to that, I think that Slava will sincerely appreciated. Now, as we’re wrapping up, and I think that you mentioned already the future at this point, I’m curious, this is a question I like asking at the end of every episode. Slava, do you have a dream project that you’d love to work on one day, a magical brand or a particularly interesting project of any industry, of any scope of any sites with any team? Do you have something in mind, what you would love to do one day? Maybe somebody from that team, from that project, from that company, from that brand is now listening.

Slava: Great question, and maybe I don’t have an amazing answer to it because it doesn’t matter. I’m dreaming about bringing value, creating something significant, but I never limited myself to a particular area or a particular company or brand, it just doesn’t matter. If it’s valuable, then it’s a success.

Vitaly: All right, well, if you, dear listener would like to hear more from Slava, you can find him on LinkedIn where he’s... Guess what? ... Slava Shestopalov, but also on Medium where he writes a lot of stuff around UX, and of course, don’t forget medieval-themed UX memes, and also, on his 5:00 AM travel blog. Slava will also be speaking in Freiburg at SmashingConf, I’m very looking forward to see you there, and maybe even tomorrow, we’ll see about that. So please, dear friends, if you have the time, please drop in at SmashingConf, Freiburg, September 2023. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today, Slava. Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you would like to send out to the people who might be listening to this 20 years from now? Who knows?

Slava: Oh, wisdom, I’m not that wise yet, but something that I discovered recently is that we should more care about people. Technology is advancing so fast, so the thing which is left is the human factor. Maybe AI will take part of our job and that’s great because there are many routine tasks no one is fond of doing, but people, we are extremely complex and understanding who we are and how we designers as humans can serve other humans is essential. So that’s where I personally put my effort into recently, and I think that’s a great direction of research for everyone working in design, UX and related areas.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 58 With Debbie Levitt: What Is CX Design?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask what is Customer Experience design, and how does it differ from User Experience design? Vitaly Friedman talks to expert Debbie Levitt to find out.

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Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a Customer Experience and User Experience Strategist, Researcher, Designer, and Trainer. She spends most of her time helping companies of all sizes, big and small and large, medium, transform towards a customer-centric approach. Now she’s been teaching how to improve customer satisfaction, predict and mitigate business risk, and increase ROI by investing in, of course, great customer experiences. Now she lives east of Olbia-Sardinia, what an incredible city that is in Italy, out in the countryside.

Vitaly: Also, she has recorded over 175 episodes of her livestream podcast on YouTube and has over 600 hours of videos on the wonderful Delta CX YouTube channel and has just published a wonderful book, Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies To Better Understand, Attract and Retain Customers. So we know she’s a great design strategist with a keen eye for customer satisfaction. But did you know that Debbie is often called the Mary Poppins of CX and UX? Why? Well, because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs every now and again, and flies away to her next adventure. While, in fact, a set of clients started calling her just that.

Vitaly: My Smashing friends. Please welcome Debbie Levitt. Hello, Debbie. How are you today?

Debbie: Hey, thank you so much for having me. And I’m almost Smashing. I’m unfortunately getting over Covid, so some people might hear that in my voice. Luckily it’s been mild, and I have to apologize, I accidentally sent you that I live east of Olbia. East of Olbia would be the Mediterranean Sea. I live west of Olbia. Totally my fault. Oh my gosh. I promise I live on land.

Vitaly: That’s okay. But you do not live in the sea, right? It’s not like fish are your neighbours, or?

Debbie: No, I’ve evolved and I live on land, and so I’m sorry about that. That’s what happens when you are multitasking. So thank you for putting up with me, but...

Vitaly: That’s okay. Well, I didn’t check where it is because... Actually I was in Olbia and-

Debbie: Oh wow.

Vitaly: ... I was waiting for a bus four times in Olbia and it never came.

Debbie: I’m so sorry. Don’t do it. No, you must rent a car if you’re here.

Vitaly: Well, we will speak about that for sure in our future seasons as well.

Debbie: Come on back and stay with us.

Vitaly: Yes, that might be very reasonable. But when I look at all the wonderful things that you’ve been producing and you’re always there and you’re always advocating for the humans, right? It seems like you’re really care about people, don’t you?

Debbie: I do, yes. Thank you for noticing. I certainly do.

Vitaly: Yes, I think you do. But one thing that’s really struck me,.. I spent quite a bit of time in organizations, also large and small, and every now and again, I have to explain what CX means, what is different between UX and CX and so. Because there are many kind of ways of we can do that, and I think you also mentioned in your book as well. Some people see it as something that marketing does. Some people see it like customer support or customer success. Sometimes it’s like this magical overlap between business and customer experience. And what is it, Debbie, tell us what is it in the first place?

Debbie: Well, the way that I see CX is that it is end-to-end customer experience. It’s that everything our company can possibly do or offer touches our customers. And so we have to be considering all of that. They could be products, they could be services, they could be experiences, they could be digital, they could be all of these things. Very often when people think of UX, they’re thinking, well, that’s just screens, that’s just digital design or research for something that’s going to be digital. But when we think about CX, for whatever reason, CX is generally understood to mean that full customer experience. And so to me, I believe that when we’re doing CX and UX right, they’re the same thing because many people who work in UX don’t want to just think about the screens. They do want to think about the full and holistic journey that the customer has. They want to think about where the customer interfaces with the bank branch or the customer support or the hotel desk people. We do want to think about those.

Debbie: I remember when I was a contractor at Macy’s, we were fighting to be involved in the stores and they said, "No, you’re just the people who make the screens" and they wouldn’t let us. And we really wanted there to be that holistic tie between the digital experiences, website, mobile web and app, and the in-store experiences. And so again, I believe that when you’re doing them well, they kind of are the same thing and they can be the same thing. And we still use some different names for them, but I don’t want to fight too much over that today. I’m dying on other hills, as we say.

Vitaly: So what I hear is that basically CXs ideally would be also a wonderful world of beautiful, beautiful UX and the other way around. But I’m wondering actually still at this point, and maybe you can enlighten me at this point, Debbie as well, when I see companies thinking about how they should work, how they should operate, that often feels like it’s still a feature factory... So you just, let’s deliver that feature for that release and let’s deliver that feature for that cycle and then keep going, keep going. And it’s interesting to me because I think that we’ve been doing this now what for 15, 20 years, this UX, CX, whatever, that kind of thing, did we fail in communicating to companies the right way of running business? Or why is it that we are now by 2023 are still in the position where we kind of have to almost fight for the role of CX — or even UX actually at this point — in a company small and large. So why is that?

Debbie: To me it tends to be two things. I think that in many companies, the question is what’s the least we can do that we can pretend is good enough? And I think some of that comes from what I call “fake agile” because if you look at original Agile and the Agile manifesto, it cares about customer satisfaction. It cares about good design. But the idea of agility was ultimately to make engineering teams faster and more efficient. So we got into this way of thinking, how fast can we go? Can we go faster? Can we go faster? Can we release more? And I say, well, congratulations on going faster and releasing more, but if you’re not attracting customers, making them happy, keeping them, let’s not congratulate ourselves on whatever that agility was.

Debbie: Same for Lean. Many people are working from a definition of Lean that runs against Lean. Lean is supposed to be about finding defects and risks and waste early, mitigating them, proving your efficiency, not because the weapon, and you made people try to go faster, but because you were driven more by quality, and you were more likely to put out how great things that you didn’t have to cycle back and fix later. So think part of what we battle in most of our companies is really mediocrity because everybody who we work with knows that they hate every company that chips crap. You hate those apps, you hate those websites, you hate those hotels, you hate those airplanes, you hate those whatevers. You hate it. And then you show up to your job and you go, "That’s probably good enough. Just get it out there." And it’s like people have really lost their sense of what customers define as quality and value. So I think part of it is that mediocrity of ads good enough.

Debbie: Let’s just say we’re fast and keep going. And this is going to be a little bit spicy, but part of it to me is UX leaders. I think in some cases, not everybody, we have some weak UX leaders. We have some people who are over-focused on making the stakeholder happy. They’re over-focused on the visual design. They’re over-focused on, "Look, we can pretend we’re agile and Lean too. We’ll just slice UX down to the least we could do, we’ll research for a day. We’ll run a survey, uh.. we’ll design for two seconds. Yes sir. Yes ma’am." And I think that our UX leaders have done us a disservice and in many ways continue to when they are not fighting for quality, they’re dying on the wrong hills.

Debbie: They’re coming in and they’re saying, "Don’t you understand my job? These are artists, these are not artists." And I say, stop dying on that hill. Talk to people about how great CX and UX work, mitigates risk, saves companies time and money, increases customer satisfaction, is more likely to increase that loyalty. You’re dying on the wrong hills and you’re saying yes to ridiculously short timeframes, UX work being badly done by a circus of everybody just to say, we got more done. And again, it’s all speed over quality. So I think this has not yet sunk in for companies because we’ve been selling the wrong things. We’ve been trying to sell the value of my job instead of selling the value of the outcome. Hey, remember that crappy project we did where we ended up having to go back and figure out what we did wrong and fix it and redo it? And our customer service had to give people some free coupons to apologize and remember the multidimensional disaster that was? Well, that would’ve gone better if we had done this research, this design, this testing.

Debbie: If we had spent three more weeks, three more weeks would’ve saved all of this wild expense and marketing problems and voice of the customer issues and customer support usage. We are not doing a good job showing the math of how much carnage and waste and money we can save if we just fought for, what sometimes is a few weeks, maybe it’s a little bit longer in some cases, but we’re not demanding generative research. We’re claiming we can work from assumptions and guesses. And I say no one wants that, Agile’s against that, Lean’s against that, Scrum is against that, Nielsen Norman group is against that. Nobody wants to see that. And yet I’m fighting some dude on LinkedIn last week who says, "Assumption-based methodologies are valid." And I say, well, there’s a Grand Canyon between valid and a freaking good idea. You can work from guesses and assumptions, but this is where they’re landing us. We all see what this is like. We mostly hate our jobs. We need our leaders to be fighting more and differently.

Vitaly: Well, that’s interesting because I think in many ways I do find myself really in these positions where I still wonder sometimes, why do we even bother this position of I can over here or the side of the I can matters, but I mean the position and we went on the left, we test that with A/B testing testing and then we see if this works better or not. But then I always think this always goes into this notion of speed. I think this is very much the core of it really as well, because it seems like we are rushing all the time. We need to deliver, we want to deliver good quality, but in the end, we just want to deliver — be it features or anything else. And one thing that I find quite weird is that we ended up in this situations where we want MVP to validate a product. So MVP is important. We don’t want to spend too much time building and designing and all, but shouldn’t we be designing, I don’t know, the minimal first-class user experience kind of VP or something? I don’t know. What is your take on MVPs in general? Is it just me seeing it wrongly?

Debbie: No, I’ve been fighting MVP and Lean Startup for some time, and then I’m mostly fought back by a lot of white guys who want to comment on my Medium articles. It’s a very narrow audience there wants to fight me on that. But I think we do have to take a second look at MVPs and some of these, again, Lean Startup or other ideas. A lot of these things came from books from over 10 years ago and there’s nothing wrong with 10 years, but they haven’t been updated. And they come from these books that were really aimed at startups. The Lean Startup was for startups. It wasn’t for Oracle or Fang or whoever they are now. It was for startups. And it said, "Hey, if you want to go really fast" — and we have to remember where we all were in the late 2000s and 2010, one of the biggest problems with startups, and you’ll remember this because there was vaporware, there were people who were promising technologies and features and systems and they were never even built.

Debbie: So the Lean startup made sense as an answer to that, "Hey, stop waiting and waiting and waiting and never putting out your mysterious vaporware. Really something early. Just get it out there, give it a try." And I think that advice can make sense for startups in 2010, but they really don’t make sense for our company and the size of projects we have, the amount of customers we have, the reliance we have on retaining those customers and making them happy. It’s not the same as two bros in Silicon Valley in 2010 who are going to rush some early version out.

Debbie:And the other thing I remind people is that the MVP can be reframed. There’s no reason why a solid realistic UX prototype can’t be your MVP. And in fact, in my book, I think in chapter 21 where we interview Steve Johnson, a product manager, he says, "Eric Rees admitted that he made a mistake." He meant minimum viable prototype. He didn’t mean minimum viable product. He didn’t imagine that this early pseudo beta, almost beta early version was something that you would sell, something that you would expect people to pay for. He really expected that it was almost like an early prototype. But of course we have that in user-centered design and human-centered design. I don’t need engineering to build it for me to see if it’s going in the right direction. I’m a big fan of Axure (hashtag not sponsored), and I want to make sure that I’m making a highly realistic prototype, but not realistic from the perspective of visual design, from the perspective of usability flow —

Vitaly: User experience.

Debbie: Yes, process. Can you type in a field? Yes, you should be able to type in the field. And then I can bring that to usability and other testing and be able to say, aha, we are solving the real problem well or we’re solving the real problem, but we’re not there yet. Or wow, we’re way off. We are really not solving the real problem well or at all. And that’s what we should be doing early on and in cycles. But the problem is that people read Lean Startup and they saw a couple of things that said Agile, and they now think you can’t know if you’re going in the right direction without having engineering spend sprints, weeks, months, building it, testing it, merging it, releasing it, and then sitting around waiting for customer support complaints or an A/B test, which is often quite flawed or some sort of feedback.

Debbie: And then what do we do? We go, it’s probably good enough and we put it in the backlog or the ice box. So we have a lot of problems with our processes, we have problems with our standards. We have much lower standards internally than our customers have for us. So I think that the MVP is our problem, but I think it can be reframed. Ultimately the minimum viable product or prototype is an early UX prototype that can help us test a concept or one of its many endlessly, many executions.

Vitaly: Well, I think also when it comes to customers, standards are different, expectations are much different now as well. So it’s just a very, very different world. And coming back to your book, I rarely read one single chapter in which is so packed that I feel like, wow, there is so much stuff in it. And I usually don’t do that to be honest, I actually printed out chapter 18.

Debbie: Oh, thank you.

Vitaly: Just because I wanted to underline first because the reason I do it is like I read and then I underline and then I was so tired of underlining. I just said, I’m just going to put it next to me. So maybe just to make it a bit more tangible, I would say to all your listeners, so let’s imagine you’re working for a company that is just a regular conservative company, very much legacy ridden, a lot of good old processes in place, not really a culture of sustainability or interest in user-centric or ethical design or anything of that sort maybe.

Vitaly: But there is a strong need and there is a strong will to move there. But of course when it comes to little exercises like that, it’s a big shift. It’s a culture shift. It’s a shift of how people are working, what they believe in, how they embed their values and the way they’re working into the product, how the metrics are going to be working for that, namely specifically, how do we even choose metrics that fit? How do we track them? How often do we track them? What do we track and all that.

Vitaly: Maybe you could just give us a little bit of insight in that kind of scenario if you wanted, let’s say, to support in some way, some sort of a shift like that. I would say what is absolutely required for this to be successful? That would be question maybe number one. Question number two, how to get there? Because you are Mary Poppins, right? So you just come in, you fly in, you solve problems, you fly away. So what would be your magic dust that you would sprinkle all over all departments in the organization?

Debbie: I would say the first way to help yourself get there is to shift to the language that the business cares about. The business doesn’t care about delight, the business doesn’t care about empathy. The business cares about the usual stuff. Find more customers. We hope they’re happy because we want them to stay. That’s it. Attraction or adoption satisfaction and some sort of loyalty or retention. That’s it. Talk about those things. Talk about risk, talk about wasted time and money. Look up Six Sigmas, cost of poor quality. It’s a wonderful model that I go into early in the book. I think in chapter two, it’s a whole list of things that your company is wasting time and money on because you didn’t build something better for the user. So forget about some of the words we tend to use in UX and design because they make sense to each other.

Debbie: Makes sense when you and I talk about it, empathy, delight. But somebody who is just counting beans as they say, or looking at numbers and budgets and bottom lines, they don’t care. They just don’t. They want to know how do we make more people join and stay and we hope they give us some good satisfaction scores in the middle. So we have to start there and we have to make sure that’s our common ground. And that’s where I focus. I focus on how can we find ways to bring more customers in, make them happier so that they’ll stay. Focus there. And then the question is, what can CX or UX work do that augments that, supports that? How do we use early generative research to bring us customer intelligence we don’t have now? Because sure, we have endless analytics, we have surveys, we have, what do you want?

Debbie: We have AB tests, we’ve got lots of things that are mostly quantitative, but we don’t know a lot of the why. We don’t know a lot of the how. We get an NPS score that says negative 30 and we don’t really know why, but everyone will get together in a brainstorming session, guess why, and then guess how to fix it. And they’re surprised when that doesn’t work. So I drive people towards customer intelligence. Now some people think that’s just more market research. Let’s just find people who demographically fit into our sweet spot and throw more darts at them and give them $10 off and advertise more heavily to them. But I say, look, you can do that. That’s the adoption piece. But if you’re not building the better product, service or experience, you won’t have the satisfaction and you won’t have the retention and the loyalty.

Debbie: So all of these things are that longer arc. So I’m making it sound over simple, "Hey, you just have to speak the business’ language." But it’s a huge shift that a lot of people in UX and design are not always doing. They’re still focused on we have to delight the user. Someone asked me, "How do you build a usability test to prove that people are delighted?" And I said, "I don’t think I would do that. I’m not usability testing for delight. I’m usability testing that we’ve solved the correct problem with a good execution of a good concept." So we get hung up on some of these buzzwords. And so I say to people, forget the buzzwords. Take that MBA approach. That’s why I went and got an MBA. I could have gone out and gotten a master’s in UX HCI. Human factors.

Debbie: I went for the MBA because when I come in, I want companies to know that I care about how the business works, I care about how the business runs. I care about the business making money. Yes, I want it to be done ethically. Yes, I want it to be done with customers in mind, with DEI, with accessibility, but I am dedicated to good, solid, long-term, not quick shortcuts, ethical ways to attract those customers, genuinely make them happy, not fool them into some sort of weird high score or pay them for a good rating. And then loyalty because we’ve built something great. The example I use is I am a super wacky wild fan of Monday.com (hashtag not sponsored). I just paid them for another year. They pay me nothing. They have no idea who I am. Can you think of a system that you freaking love that much that you are going to tell people this thing is the bomb?

Debbie: You couldn’t pull me away. When I left my previous project management system for Monday, the CEO contacted me, "You’ve been with us for 10 years. What can I do to keep you?" I said, "Nothing. I wouldn’t stay if it were free, I wouldn’t stay if you paid me." Monday is a better match to my needs and tasks. I will be more productive there. Those are my standards. So we have to be using better research, earlier research, generative qualitative research to know our customers so that we can say we really built that thing. Was it 20 years ago, we talked about the killer app. We don’t seem to care about that anymore. We don’t seem to care about if we’re really building what customers need. We seem to care about checking stakeholders ideas off a list.

Vitaly: That’s right. I think I also read an article about the boring designer or boring products that we actually got. So in the past, as you were saying, we got so excited about building just that cool thing that’s going to take off and take over the world. But now I think that many of us have discovered the sympathy and I guess also interest in just boring product that help us sleep better. I always go in a medium and your collective and so on. And I read all these articles and I would love to see more things about, I don’t know, healthcare or enterprise, B2B, CX, UX, I don’t know, anything like that. Those kind of case studies. They’re not necessarily most exciting applications to some people, but they’re also so important. It’s so interesting to solve.

Vitaly: And maybe one thing I wanted to dive in a little bit deeper with you here as well is, so if you encounter a situation where you are in that legacy environment and corporate environment and enterprise environment and whatnot, the question is for me at least in my work, is to always prove that what I’m doing is moving in the right direction, kind of moving the needle in the right direction. So again, what you’re saying is just music to my ears, speaking business terms to people on who are your managers. I think this is an incredibly important skill for designers to have rather than having the design, I don’t know, design dish, I guess, which many people might not understand.

Vitaly: So I’m wondering though, how do you convert the needs that the company has in terms of business into something that’s necessarily customer-centric? Because at least this was my experience, it cannot not necessarily go hand in hand. Sometimes we end up with some business goals, which are we need to be aggressive on the market, we need to take over, we need to be better than every competitor. We need to be, I don’t know, newsletters all over the place. We need to be as prominent as possible. How do you balance it out with something that’s more, because it’s more like short term, long term? Because usually in my experience, you need a strategy for both.

Debbie: Oh, there are a lot of questions rolled into there. I’m trying to figure out where I start. I think that companies are looking very much at the short term a lot of times. So you have to have a short and a long term strategy. But a lot of people don’t even have a strategy. As you said, they’re just saying, "More newsletters, more content, just more things. And then we’ll throw those darts and see what happens." And I think that companies have to get a little bit more focused. And a lot of that goes back to customer intelligence.

Debbie: If you don’t really understand who Debbie is and why she comes to your site or uses your product or is still at the trial version and hasn’t paid. If you are guessing or making things up about me or trying to assume something about me because I’m a 50-year-old white woman, then you don’t really have good customer intelligence. You are probably going to be guided mostly by guesses, assumptions, and copying your competitors. And you can do that. But let’s not pretend you’re innovative. Do not sing the song of we’re innovative if you’re just going to copy your competitors.

Debbie: But I think that one of the biggest key steps that a lot of companies need to take that they haven’t taken is they need at least a few customer-centric metrics. Very often when we look at a company’s KPIs, not only are they business-centric, but as you said, very often they’re the opposite of what people want to do. When I see a KPI in a company or even a North star metric of how many people did we get to apply to jobs? And I go, well, that’s funny because we know that people want to apply to as few jobs as possible.

Debbie: So you’re going to try to make people apply more in a world where people want to apply less, there is a mismatch here. And what often happens is because we are feature factories and because we tend to be very stakeholder driven, the stakeholder says, "Look, we just want to see these numbers go up. We want to see more people applying to jobs." And I say, what about the long term mark of their success or happiness? "It doesn’t matter. We just want to see more people applying to jobs." And then they’ll do whatever it takes. And we see this reflected in traditional impact maps, which in my chapter 18, I blow impact maps out of the water and I give you a different version of them that’s more customer focused. But you see these impact maps that are like, "Hey, what do you want to make happen? You want to make people click on a button more? Well, cool, as you said, more newsletters, more discounts, more whatever, you more content, more emails." Hands up who wants more emails?

Debbie: So I think we have to start with always looking at both, how does this create something the business wants? And we have the metrics to measure that and how do we make sure this is something that’s going to produce in our customers what they would want for themselves. We want them to be loyal, but we can’t trick people into being loyal. We can’t force them into being loyal, that’s a short-term win. It’s not going to be a long-term win. So we have to start with some of these metrics and being able to have some tough conversations around crappy metrics. How many page views did someone see? I have an example in the book where when I tried to log into an online stock investing account, I saw six pages before I could get into the account.

Debbie: Now we all know that that could be done in one screen. It absolutely can be done in one screen. Hey, what’s your username and password? Hey, we sent you a text to make sure it’s really you. Hey, it’s really you. Thanks for chopping by. You’re in. That could be one screen. This was six separately loading pages. And I swear one page was just a giant screen that said, "We’re going to text you a code." Continue. And that’s how I know someone has a metric of more page views. Congratulations on achieving your more page views metric. That’s a vanity metric. It’s meaningless. It doesn’t improve the customer experience. So we have to start looking at both of these in terms of each other.

Debbie: Which is hard for companies. They’re going to need consultants, they’re going to need specialists. They’re going to need new people because the same old people that are there are probably used to tap dancing along with the way we do things and following and not making waves and not challenging the status quo. You’re going to need a few new leaders or a couple of consultants to come in and shake that up and say, "Look, it’s great that you’ve been successful thus far. You’re doing many right things, but there’s room for improvement. And you have to be open to that change."

Vitaly: Yes, I think one of the funny things is that I often find so much passion, I would say around things like time on site as well, but what does it mean time on site? Does it mean that people like what they see? Does it mean that they don’t find what they need? Does that mean that they’re just totally frustrated and annoyed just try to find it all over the place because search is not working well? What does it even mean? All those things are not really reflecting in any way the customer experience at all. So that’s very much aligns to my experience I guess as well. There is one thing that’s really is probably to me the most problematic, and that’s the shift of culture in a company like that. So the problem is that very often, very different departments have their own set of KPIs and they track trying to improve their own KPIs and very much they’re not really aligned.

Vitaly:So maybe one department just wants to publish more just to be out there. The other department will be looking at traffic and other things and the other, what is our velocity in terms of their deployment or features that we have and things like that. But then we need to really change the culture so that we have this customer centricity as again, our north star. And so that defines what is going to happen in all these different departments, but that requires a lot of movement in organization, which is really slow and a lot of time as well. Now, fortunately, we have wonderful people like you who come in and just hoof and get it all done.

Debbie: Well, not quite. But yes, I try to push as many boats out and as many needles as I can. I usually can’t get all the changes on my list done. Sometimes I’m lucky if I can get half, but I can go into a place and I can affect change. But obviously that company has to want to change, but then you also have to have that change management hat on because that company’s afraid to change. They feel they’ve been really successful thus far doing it this way. Why should we care about that? Why should we prioritize? I remember having a conversation, I think I put it in the book where I said to someone, almost all of our app ratings in the last X months are one in two stars, and I’ve confirmed that the complaints are valid, we really are broken. And I said, what are we doing about that?

Debbie: And the person said, "Well, we have a 4.6 rating out of five overall on the Apple Store. So what’s the problem?" And so again, like you said, if you’re watching the wrong metrics, you can tell yourself any story you want. I can tell myself any... I recently lost 10 pounds. I thought I looked amazing until the pictures came back. And then I said, I’ve got more change to make. So you can see numbers and you can tell yourself any story you want. The better company with that better future is going to tell itself some more honest stories about that, which is, isn’t it great we’ve got a 4.6 rating in the Apple Store that’s probably going to help us get download a little bit more than if our rating was lower? But we probably should prioritize all of these complaints coming in, especially since we found that these aren’t just complainers.

Debbie: These are valid complaints. So what I have found in companies, what tends to block this is usually in some cases, a very toxic leader, a narcissist, a malignant narcissist, a person who the only way to do it is my way. A person who will make up fake facts and fake stories. A person who creates fear in people under them. A person who loves to put people on performance review plans or performance improvement plans when you speak up against the status quo or question something or want to try something different. So first of all, to me, there are a few toxic leaders. And the wacky thing is every company I go into has them and every company knows who they are. And I always say, you know who this is. And they stand out from other people, which means you’ve done a good job hiring.

Debbie: If they fit in and everyone’s like that, then this needs an atomic bomb to fix. But these people are different because they’re that bad. Why aren’t we removing them? Or why aren’t we shifting what they do? Why aren’t we demoting them? Why aren’t we putting them on a performance improvement plan? Why do we allow them to continue to create such negativity and carnage? And in some cases, attrition, people quit. They can’t stand to deal with that person anymore. So we have to do something about those toxic people and we have to work with corporate strategists on how they measure success. How do we measure success internally? If it’s making people click the button that nobody wants to click, that’s just going to come down the line. And especially in companies where CX and UX have no voice, then you just have the engineering team pushing for faster delivery and you have the product team pushing for I am unfortunately an order taking puppet who’s just going to do what the stakeholder says and not really push back and stuff like that.

Debbie: We need people. We claim we have empowered teams, we claim we want empowered teams. We don’t. We’re not even close. And somebody with some watts has to start saying out loud, we’re not empowered. We’re not empowered. We’re not living up to our company values. I saw a company last year who was not living up to their company values, changed their company values, and they changed them to the most watered down, meaningless things I’d ever seen in my life. You can do that. You can make your company values more meaningless if you’re having trouble adhering to them, but that also sends a message. So you’re right, it’s a complicated thing. There’s a lot of gears locked into each other and I can’t say, here’s that one thing that everybody needs to do that’s going to really help. It’s mostly speaking up against the status quo.

Debbie: Does it mean that your job could be on the line or you could receive some badness from saying those things out loud? Sure. At an unhealthy company, there could be that retaliation. There isn’t supposed to be, but there could be. So you take that chance. A lot of people don’t want to take that chance. And that’s why I say bring in the outside consultants. I will come in, I will say everything that needs to be said, and you know in six months I’m gone anyway. I have no horse in the race. I just want to tell the truth. But a lot of people working there can’t tell the truth anymore. And that’s a bigger culture problem, as you said. So I don’t have the one magic bullet. If I had the one magic bullet, my book would be 10 pages long. Three pages of introducing the magic bullet, five pages about the magic bullet and two pages thanking everybody for reading.

Debbie: But my books tend to be on the long side because I am trying to walk people through a lot of different instances and scenarios that they will run into at their jobs as consultants and say, here’s some things you can try to just chip away at that piece. Because if you try to look at the whole mountain of overwhelming BS at our companies, you just give up. You go, how am I ever going to change that monolith? But we have to look at some of the smaller pieces and how we can make small changes there just to start and just to show the company it’s worth it.

Vitaly: Debbie, we could be speaking for hours of course and have so many questions prepared, which I know didn’t get to, but I do have to ask one question that has been bothering me for a very long time, and I still haven’t found the proper answer to that. So can you make this shift? Like transition to customer centricity in an organization without a proper commitment from the top?

Debbie: Oh, definitely not. Because what I found is that everything comes from the top. You can certainly have a bottom up swell of support for this. It can be a bottom up person who goes to their manager and says, "Why aren’t we saying more about this?" And that person goes to their manager and says, "Look, we know this sucks. Why aren’t we saying more about this?" So there can be some bottom up support and action, but the change and everything else comes from the top. That’s it. Now, we may not have to impress the C level executive, they may be too high up. They may not care as much about some of the day-to-day. Sometimes it’s those mid or high level leaders, maybe the directors or heads or whatever it might be in a particular country or business’ hierarchy. Those are the people. The people looking at budgets, the people looking at outcomes, the people checking on the KPIs.

Debbie: It’s not always the C level. It’s probably somebody below them and they just report up. So it’s those people that we have to affect. Could be VPs. Those are the people that we have to go to and say, "Look, we know you want more adoption, satisfaction and retention. How’s that going right now?" "Not so well." "Oh, why not?" "I don’t know." That’s our first problem. Why don’t we know? They usually don’t know why. Or they’ve made something up. People are disloyal, they’re tire kickers, they’re broke, they’re whatever, echo. Cool, bro, you made that up. You don’t really know. That’s probably only true for a certain percentage of your customers. Let’s not work from guesses. Let’s not work from assumptions. Let’s use guesses and assumptions as an opportunity to dive deeply into customer intelligence. You think a survey’s going to answer that? Go ahead. Start with a survey.

Debbie: When the survey comes back, I’m going to ask you again, what do we know and what don’t we know? Is that survey enough to take action and do we know what action to take? If we’re guessing again and going into another brainstorming workshop to guess again, we still don’t know. And so I want to make sure that we are not creating these strategies or making these decisions or pushing these KPIs without better knowing some stuff, knowing some stuff internally about ourselves, knowing some stuff externally about users, customers, partners. Obviously this ends up falling into service design, which to me can also be CX and UX. These all float in the same ocean. But that’s what I tried to tell people is you don’t even know. You don’t even know why sales is losing people. They picked a competitor. That’s not the full answer. That’s the surface level answer.

Debbie: Oh, our NPS is low. Do you know why? We can’t seem to retain people. Sales even offered them 10 bucks. Do you know why? I just keep pushing for why don’t we know why? Shouldn’t we know why? Can you give me four to six weeks to start learning why? And some companies will go, "Oh, it’s only four to six weeks? I thought it was months." It doesn’t have to be months. I can get you some preliminary data from generative observational or interview research in four to six weeks. Can we start there? Yes. Then you make sure you collect their-

Vitaly: That’s probably going to be very difficult to say no to that.

Debbie: Well, look, and especially as a consultant, I then put a number on that, and I don’t overcharge as a consultant, I’m very fairly priced. I hear, I’m under-priced. I say, "Hey, a six-week project, let’s just call it five figures." It’s 60, 80, whatever, thousand dollars. Maybe I have to throw more people on it to make it go faster. It’s a hundred something thousand dollars. Hey, how much money are we losing right now in customer loyalty? How much money are we losing because sales couldn’t get those people to stay? Isn’t $150,000 worth it and six weeks for us to be able to answer all these questions of why and to replace these guesses and assumptions with knowledge? We don’t have to work from guesses and assumptions. We can work from really good knowledge that goes beyond our market research, that goes beyond demographics to look at behaviors and perspectives and tasks. I am task-oriented person 100%.

Vitaly: Well. I think also there are so many different other stories and companies that you also mentioned in your book of course. So this brings me to an important of probably the last question for today. Given the fact that you’ve been working again with small and large companies all over the place, what were some of the most interesting lessons you learned? What would say some patterns which emerge, you would say, if this is that kind of company, I have to do this. Or if that’s kind of company, I’m going to do that. If this, oh, no, I’m running away. This is not, no, no, no, I’m not going through that. So would you say are some of the most important notable lessons that you’ve learned? Just maybe a few personal stories. It’s always interesting to hear.

Debbie: Yes, sure. One of the things that I mentioned in my book and in the workshop version of the book, I talk about making sure... A lot of change management courses say, find your allies. But I say also identify your detractors. There are going to be those toxic leaders who want you to fail. They don’t want that change because even if that change brings something good, people might wonder why they didn’t make that change. It accidentally shines a negative spotlight on them. So you’ve got detractors, you’ve got toxic people who are probably going to work against what you are there to do. It’s important to identify them and to manage them. And I won’t have time to go into how, some of that’s in the book, but you’ve got to manage those detractors. You can’t just focus on who are my allies or who is excited about this or who’s buying in.

Debbie: You have to look at who might sabotage this or me. That’s definitely one of the things that I would warn people about. And another reason why I remind people, this may be an area where you do want to bring in consultants because that person can sabotage the hell out of me and undercut me as much as they want and make themselves look foolish, and then I’m gone. But if you work in a company and you try to do some of this stuff and that person sabotages, you could lose your job. You could be demoted. I’ve seen this. And so that’s a place where you want to put me in front of the target instead of yourself. Save yourself. That’s one thing. Another thing is you have to look for the company’s compelling reason to change. You have to figure out why should they change?

Debbie: Because again, many companies, even those who claim they want to change, they claim they want to be customer-centric, they claim they want more customer journey maps. Even when companies claim this, a lot of times they really don’t want to change. They’ve been profitable. They’ve been making money, they’ve been growing stock prices, doing okay, whatever ways that they measure themselves, they’re usually pretty happy. And so the question is, now, do you want to run away from that and say, these people don’t want to change, I’m not going to bother? Or can you find either that compelling narrative or that reason for them to make some sort of change or find the area in which they are willing to change? And that’s hard. Last year I was working with a 1 billion dollar European company that competes against Indeed there, therefore job posting and applying to jobs.

Debbie: And when you’re a $1 billion company and you’re the market leader of Germany, why change? Is it going so badly? Can we just say, this is going pretty well? And so that’s hard. So I had to find some places and some allies where we could get people to say, you know what? This part of things isn’t going as well as it could. And oh yes, our UX team doesn’t really have a voice, isn’t really treated well, are treated as order takers. What can we do to improve that? How do we elevate our user experience work and workers? So I think it’s a matter of, and I know that we’re supposed to stop saying things like, pick your battles because it’s violence based language. And I’m still bad at that, I apologize. But we really have to take a look at where can I make change?

Debbie: Where will they let me make change? That’s why when I do the Mary Poppins thing, I say, hey, look, I fly in, fix as much as I can, as they’ll let me, and then I fly away. So you have to find the places where that door is open or where you can create that compelling narrative. Has the company lost a lot of money in a certain area lately? Have they burned customer trust and now they’re over-utilizing customer support? And it would be great if people weren’t so unhappy in calling in so much that saves companies money. You have to start looking for all of that. And so one of the exercises in chapter 18, which I’ve been doing on my YouTube show on some Mondays, is the Delta CX version of an impact map. Where we start not with what the company wants to do, we start with the customer’s problem, and then we look at what’s the root causes of that, and then what’s the impact on the business?

Debbie: What’s happening in the business, what money, time, resources, environmental damage, what’s happening because we have this customer problem and these root causes we haven’t addressed. If you can start building something like the Delta CX impact map version, you now have that built in argument. We need to make this better for our customers because here’s all the stuff. Here’s all the waste and risk and lost time and money that our company is dealing with, and that’s what we’re going to save. These are the arguments that we need to start making on all levels. Could a junior make that argument? They could try. Why not? They’ll have access to some of that information, but it’s probably more for our managers and leaders. You got to find that small open door.

Vitaly: Well, if you the listener would like to hear more from Mary Poppins or also called Debbie, you can find her on LinkedIn where she’s, guess what? Debbie Levitt, but also on her website, Delta CX. And of course, get her wonderful book: Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies To Better Understand and Track and Retain Customers, well, whenever you get your books. Now, thank you so much for joining us today, Debbie. Should I call you Mary? No, probably not.

Debbie: No, I’m definitely Debbie. Mary Poppins is somebody else. And I also want to mention we’re putting up a website at customercentricity.com, which will have even more information because guess who owns that domain? And you can also grab my book at DeltaCX.media, which is where I’ve got information about our books and workshops, and we’ve got the digital version up for as little as $1. So if anybody is from a country or area or life situation where buying a book right now doesn’t feel affordable, we do have the $1 version to try to make it more available.

Vitaly: That’s wonderful, Debbie, wonderful. Well, as we often do in the end though. Well, imagine somebody listening to this 20 years from now thinking, oh, they had problems in 2023 mean, but by now, like 2043, we have solved CX issues for good. So is there anything you’d like to send out to the future or any parting words of wisdom you’d like the future generations to follow along? Like I don’t know, maybe aliens 200 years from now thinking, how do we improve CX of our ships?

Debbie: Yes, that’s a hard one. I can certainly hope for the future. I can certainly hope that in the future we’ve made more ethical choices, we’ve made more customer-centric choices. We’ve realized that we have no business, no staff, no money if we aren’t making customers happy. I don’t know. I wonder what our problems, I think in, I want to say 2043, but it really feels like it’s going to be 2025 where we’re battling for what should we let a machine learning machine do, and what should we let a person do? I think that’s going to be our first challenge. I can’t even think out to 2043 right now. I have to admit. I really think that the, we’re already seeing the question of what do we really need Debbie Levitt to do, and what can we ask a bot to do? And what I’ve noticed is a bot can rehash stuff that’s out there.

Debbie: For example, if you go to Google right now and you say, how do I be more customer-centric? See a load of great sounding things that aren’t actionable at all, you’ll see, “Care about your customer. Build empathy. Brainstorm and be innovative.” None of those are actionable. You’ve no idea what to do and what not to do. So I think if we can just talk about the nearer future instead of the distant future when it’s the robot uprising, I think that our more immediate challenge in the coming years will be how do we keep critical thinking about what the bots are feeding us or returning to us to make sure that even if we do find a place for what I’m calling bots to assist us in our work or be part of our adventures. How do we make sure we’re still critically thinking about what we’ve put into them and what we’re getting out of them? Because I see a lot of stuff that people are very excited about that just looks like crappy rehashed articles you can find anywhere on Google or Medium and blog posts that just say, “Yeah, have more empathy and make a customer journey map and be more customer-centric.” That doesn’t help you at all. And that may be where our AI is for some time because it’s not yet a thinking robot. It doesn’t have my ability to be strategic. So that’s my wish for the immediate future because I can’t even think about 2043. Hope you don’t mind the answer.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 56 With Veerle Pieters: How Has The Design Industry Changed?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast we ask how has the design industry changed? Is technology making our work easier? Vitaly Friedman talks to veteran designer Veerle Pieters to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a graphic and web designer who founded a graphic and web design studio with her wonderful, wonderful partner, Geert. She was born on the Belgian coast near Bruges — oh, I would love to go back to Bruges — and now lives in Deinze, a city in London with 45,000 inhabitants. From an early age, she immersed herself into drawing and love of illustration has kept her going for more than three decades now. And she’s been designing logos, stationary, brochures, books, websites, and applications since then. She has worked with Facebook, Google, Greenpeace, Adobe, the Library of Congress, and so many other small and large companies and organizations. Most importantly, she chooses her project based on how well she connects with the company, all people working there.

Vitaly: She’s also a firm believer in the power of sharing, which is exactly what she has been doing in her wonderful tutorials, articles, and inspiration feed since 2003. Now, when not designing, she loves listening to soulful deep house music and present her bicycle, and there are plenty of photos proving that this is indeed true. So, we know she’s a wonderful designer and illustrator, but did you know that being a Belgian, she, of course, loves Belgian chocolate, but also Swiss typography and Swiss graphic design. My smashing friends, please welcome Veerle Pieters. Hello Veerle. How are you doing today?

Veerle: Hi, Vitaly. I’m doing smashingly good.

Vitaly: That’s wonderful to hear. I mean, I know you... I don’t know, I remember vividly this moment, I don’t know, it feels like maybe 15 years ago or so when you were posting a lot of articles on your blog about CSS and design and CSS tutorials and all these things.

Veerle: Yeah.

Vitaly: I need to hear your story. I need to know-

Veerle: Where’s the time?

Vitaly: Yes. I mean, I know that you always had a lot of interest in art and drawings and design, but I’m wondering, how did you then come to this workplace? And what excited you about it back then? Why?

Veerle: So, not sure. I should maybe start at the very beginning. I started as a freelance designer, so that was still the early nineties back then, so no internet yet. But the first five years, I tried to make my way in designing for small agencies, ad agencies, doing print work and trying... Yeah, it was right from school actually, which was hard. But then in ’97... So the first five years, I really struggled. And I actually didn’t make any money, but I didn’t give up. I was at the point, should I look for a full-time job or not? But I kind of stick to it. I met Geert then, and actually, when the web was coming, we were kind of interested in it because I remember with my Macintosh back then, I had trouble. And not that I had always trouble, but there was a moment that I had trouble with my printer. And the guy, the technician came and he said, “I’m going to look for if there’s an update and the driver from the print driver.” And he was always mentioning, “Yeah, we can download it from the internet.”

I was like, huh, on the internet, that’s interesting. Because afterwards, I saw the invoice and I was like, it cost me a lot. If I have trouble again, I should look into having an internet subscription. So, that’s how I started looking into what’s the internet? And then it was still text and not graphic. But then all of a sudden, things evolved. There was Netscape coming out, and all of a sudden you could have images in webpages and they became more and more graphically, the pages. So, I was interested in how do they create such page. So, I was looking at... There were basic tools. I remember Bare Bones BBEdit. That was one of the-

Vitaly: Yeah. Wow, this brings back memories, I have to say.

Veerle: Yeah. And there was another little tool I was thinking. Was it from... It was visually. Page. It’s something with page.

Vitaly: Oh, I don’t remember anymore, but I know exactly the kind of tool that you’re talking about.

Veerle: If it’s from Adobe, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I looked into how a page was created, and I remember that it motivated me. Maybe this is the future. If it becomes more graphically, it can become your job.

Vitaly: Right. But you never abandoned print, right? You never really said, okay, I’m not going to do print anymore. I’m just going all web. So, you were doing mixture of both, so you might have some project which you can kind of-

Veerle: Always.

Vitaly: ... partly print and partly digital?

Veerle: Yes. Yes. And also, at that time, I remember there was... Well, a bit later, you had Flash from Macromedia Flash. That was becoming popular. And actually, a little bit before that, you have Macromedia director to create CD-ROMs. I’ve had a couple of projects in that direction as well, which were really big challenges because it needed a lot of testing, Mac and Windows. It was rather technical. I remember we worked also with a freelancer back then, a very good freelancer who knew the scripting a lot of, because it was a lot of coding work as well to create such a CD-ROMs. And with Flash, we also made, not purely for the web actually, but a lot of presentations for ad agencies. Flash-

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: ... a bit of the new... Back then, it was the more graphical PowerPoint thing, but more really, well, presentations. We did that as well.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: So, it was always a mixture of everything together, interactive and print. Meanwhile, we also did logo design and brochures.

Vitaly: I mean, I think when I look at your portfolio, I think you’ve done everything, everything, everything.

Veerle: I remember the app now. PageMill.

Vitaly: Oh, I don’t know-

Veerle: The visual editor. Do you know?

Vitaly: No. So, I got on the web somewhere like 1999, right? And actually, it’s funny that we’re saying that because we just had a conversation with with a friend, and there was this notion that came up that I remember the time before the internet existed, and some of the new generations, they just don’t know that time before the internet existed, right? So, I’m wondering, do you remember that moment when you actually saw the web for the first time or anything that... Maybe not for the first time, but where you were actually understanding what you’re seeing? What is this?

Veerle: At the first time... Yeah, the first time was text, and I wasn’t making the connection with my profession at all.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: But then I think once... I try to remember the exact moment of... I think things changed when GoLive. Do you remember micro-

Vitaly: Yeah, GoLive was-

Veerle: Was it Macromedia?

Vitaly: Macromedia GoLive. Yeah. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah. That’s really the trick for me. Yeah. And then it was evolving fast to design webpages basically.

Vitaly: One thing I learned about you as well, because I was just curious, just researching a little bit. So, you’re actually left-handed, but then you taught yourself how to write right so you become right handed.

Veerle: Not myself.

Vitaly: Not yourself.

Veerle: It was in school. I mean, first... Let me say here in English. When you’re six years old and you start to learn to write and-

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: Well, as a little kid, I say toddler-

Vitaly: Yeah. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah, when you are four or five years old, the teacher is trying to teach you to write your name. So, they write your name on the board.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: And for me, it was like drawing my name. I didn’t understand letters at that age. I was drawing them mirrorly, in mirror. I don’t know how or why something in my brain is, yeah, wrongly wired, I guess.

Vitaly: Right, but-

Veerle: I saw it, and I didn’t understand. My mom was always saying, “Look, Veerle has written her name.” And she was holding it in front of the mirror, so everybody saw them correctly, my name correctly. Then I didn’t understand why they’re already making such a fuss. I didn’t get it. I was too little to understand.

Vitaly: But how does this work? Does it mean that you can actually write with both left hand and right hand, your name, everything?

Veerle: I can, actually.

Vitaly: So, this is your magical power. Have you been using the magical power? So, what would be... So your mouse, is it then in the left hand or in the right hand, or you’re using a trackpad?

Veerle: Right, my right hand. Yeah, that’s why also I have sometimes trouble with those drawing Wacoms.

Vitaly: Wacom tablets.

Veerle: Tablets. Tablets. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. It’s like I’m used to use my right hand for the mouse, but then drawing is with my left hand. So, I was always like, I don’t know, in some kind of dilemma.

Vitaly: Right. Right.

Veerle: Should I use my left hand? Should I use my right hand? So, it was always a mix up and a struggle to use it properly.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: On one hand, it was a good thing because I could use my right hand for the things I’m used to with the mouse, and then switch to left for when I want to draw, but it was confusing me, and also a bit frustrating me because it was always which hands to use. That’s why I like drawing on the iPad, because then I have the pencil in my hand and I’m just drawing, and the rest I can do with my finger or... It’s less confusing or-

Vitaly: Sure. So, then also speaking about the tools that you’re using, I’m curious. So, you’re using an iPad. What tools do you use to get these ideas out into this world? Do you still sketch in the sketchbook first, and then you go into an iPad? Or what tools do you use to bring your ideas to life?

Veerle: I still use pencil and paper a lot. I don’t know why, because on an iPad, you can do it actually as good, as fast as possible. But somehow, I don’t know. I like having my sketchbook in my hands and draw on paper. Maybe it’s just that old fashioned maybe.

Vitaly: Yeah, I can imagine you going in the garden, and then you sit down maybe. And you say, okay, now I’m going to come up with all these wonderful ideas and then bring it into world, right?

Veerle: Yeah, sometimes, if weather permits and time permits. Sometimes I don’t have enough time to do it actually, sketch and... Sometimes it’s directly an illustrator. It’s weird to say that. But let’s say I have this client and I’m doing a lot of icon designs now for them, and they want an icon. I’m not saying that my deadline is three hours, but they is expected to have it done the same day. So, I’m often googling. It’s not very common icons, like hamburger menu or a home icon. It’s more very technical and specific. So, I enter some keywords in Google and see what comes up. And I usually end up with icon at the end or illustration icon. And I browse through the ideas, the concepts that I see, like I don’t know, a basket or a-

Vitaly: Sure.

Veerle: ... I don’t know, a pencil or something. And I say, okay, I can use that, or a house icon.

Vitaly: Yeah. But also after all these projects that you must have heard over all these years, do you feel like, I don’t know, whenever my client comes to you with a particular issue, particular problem, particular project, you’re like, “Okay, I’ve done this before. I think I’m pretty comfortable just going in, and just I can start right away in Illustrator?” Do you feel like you always need this kind of ideation phase, brainstorming phase beforehand to just get in? Or do you feel like... Because this is something that happens to me sometimes.

Whenever I have to write about anything, sometimes you give me any topic, I think I can start comfortably, and with any topic, I mean not necessarily about law, let’s say, or about physics, right? But anything design, I think I can start all the time. I need to do research and come up with all the points and all that, but I can start easily. And I think that the most difficult part sometimes for me to reach, just start, to kind of have a place where I want to go from. And then I kind of explore when to go. Is it similar for you? Would you say that every single project requires you to sit down to research, to try to understand what is it exactly that the needs are, and then design from scratch every time?

Veerle: It depends. Usually, I need some time to have do some rich research, instead of starting just right away from scratch. But I have a couple of clients where I do a lot of work for them, and I know their style and I immediately know the direction, and then I don’t have to do that. But that’s usually layout things that need a bit less of actual new design work. Sometimes I can then recuperate things already created and I’m making a variation of it and built further on that same concept because it needs to be in the same line, in the same direction. But if it’s a new project, a new client, then no. I don’t think I can do, okay, jump directly and Illustrator, or in InDesign or whatever, and start straight away. I always have to browse around for ideas and do some sketching, do some research before. Yeah.

Vitaly: Do you have collage books that we used to have in the day where you would have all the different topics kind of put together, and whenever we have a projects related to healthcare, you have your healthcare folder with all the projects related to healthcare or anything like that.. or something like that?

Veerle: No. What I sometimes do is also... I don’t know if the app, Milanote?

Vitaly: It sounds very familiar, yes.

Veerle: It is an app that I like to use to gather all the things that I like that I come across and I found relevant to the project. It can either be a design style, a color palette, sometimes even sometimes that is not really related to the project, but an element in there that I like, a composition or mood boarding.

Vitaly: Yeah, mood boarding. I mean, actually talking about that, your inspiration stream has been going now for I don’t know how many decades, I think. Because I remember vividly for projects that I had, because I also do with the consultancy every now and again, right? And then we’re speaking with designers about, okay, what would be the style that we would be pursuing here? Would it be going that direction? More playful, less playful, more formal, less formal.” I’ll say, “Oh no, you just go to Veerle. Just go to Veerle.” This is like a-

Veerle: Thank you.

Vitaly: ... a showcase or a gallery of all the different styles. But this is really interesting for me, because I tried to explain.. I was telling to my partner that I’m going to interview you for the podcast and we’re going to have a little session. And she asked me, “Oh, she’s a illustrator. Oh, that’s great,” because we also Belgium a lot. And she asked me, “So, what kind of style is it? What kind of illustration style?” And I almost stuck. I couldn’t tell, because the only thing I could say is that it’s vibrant, it’s playful, it’s colorful, it’s living. This is what I came up with. So, I’m wondering how would you describe your style, or do you have many?

Veerle: Yeah, I think I have many. It’s a bit... I think I try to adapt to what a client wants, because a project that I’ve been working on the past month is a book for a client, one of a long-term client that I love working with. And every page is an illustration. And at first, I remember that I tried to set a style for those illustrations and it’s with people. And I thought like, okay, I’m going to keep them very simple, and I gave them a blue skin, very fantasy. I thought if I use blue, it’s also colorless. All kind of people can be that. It can be visualized or represented by blue figures. But she didn’t like it.

And then she showed me, I like this and that style, because I presented also to her, in which direction should I go? And she picked a couple of pictures, of images that I presented to her. And so I had to change my style a little bit. So, that’s why I always think if people ask me, “What is your design style?” I don’t have a very specific style, but I think the way you describe it could work. I mean, colorful for sure.

Vitaly: Yeah, it’s colorful, for sure.

Veerle: It’s always try to include it to make it a bit playful, depending on the project. But there’re usually the restrictions.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: The client of course, wants this and it’s not like I’m a pure illustrator that has this style and the client comes to me because of this style, and I stick to very strictly... How do you say it? This style.

Vitaly: Yeah. But I mean-

Veerle: It’s a bit broader.

Vitaly: Yeah, but it’s very difficult for me to imagine you working on one of those corporate dry booklets. I mean, maybe you have, of course, but I just cannot imagine that. Maybe I should be diving a bit more into your inspiration stream.

Veerle: Well, the inspiration stream is, of course, not mine.

Vitaly: Yeah, yeah, sure. But I mean, it’s also collected by you, by yourself.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: So, there are all these different styles, but I cannot spot any dry — super dry — corporate style there.

Veerle: No. No.

Vitaly: That’s probably not-

Veerle: That doesn’t speak to me usually. Yes. True. So, that reflects to my own style of design.

Vitaly: I’m wondering, that’s probably also something that many people might be wondering. So, because you’ve been in the industry for quite a long time, when do you think you had this moment when you realize, okay, I can now work with the Facebooks and the Googles and the big companies? How did this happen? When did you experience this kind of, I wouldn’t say breakthrough, but it’s more like a position where you felt like, oh wow, I feel very comfortable now with this space, speed, design in general, and I’m working now with big clients. Because normally... I think that many people listening to this now, maybe starting out as designers, they might be wondering, how do you even get there? It seems like such a remote, distant dream to be working with this clients. So, what would you tell them? And how was it for you?

Veerle: Yeah, for me, it was, of course, due to the block that I got a breakthrough, become popular within the world of web design and everything. So, due to conferences and... I don’t know.

Vitaly: So, you kind of started getting more visible, is that... So, basically-

Veerle: Yeah.

Vitaly: ... how did it work for you? So, for the blog, did you have a schedule, like, okay, I’m going to write at least once a week or month or anything like that?

Veerle: No, it was more like when I had time. And back in that day, around I’m talking like 2004, 2008, that period was most that I spent weekends and everything, hours writing for the blog. And yeah, I just made time. I didn’t go biking either back then.

Vitaly: Well, now you can have the luxury of going biking, right?

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. But still, it’s not like I can, how you say, take a holiday or sit on my lazy As and do nothing. I have to work hard still to make living-

Vitaly: Yeah, of course.

Veerle: ... unfortunately. But back then, I got more visibility, I think, and that’s how they reached out to me for work. Before, just when the internet was... Before I started blogging... And so I had declined the Library of Congress. That was also because of my knowledge of director, Macromedia director, because you could also do interactive gaming things online with that app. And I remember that the site got nominated by Macromedia back then I was site of the day and site of the week. And so that’s how they got in contact with me. And for Google and Facebook, that was actually just the same because I was then in the CSS gallery from here and there, galleries and awards and stuff. And that’s how I ended up working for Facebook on a project. I never had it in my portfolio, unfortunately. It’s something that never got launched. I did do a nice creative job for them, but it was earlier.

Vitaly: Yeah. I think also for me, it’s always been about two things, I think. I always felt like there is a very, very strong need to be present, to share. And I mean, this is also something that has been very close to your heart because you’ve been sharing, and you are still sharing a lot. So, this sharing has always been a very important part of me. And I think that this is through sharing, where you actually not only get to meet wonderful people who like your work, who talk to you about your work, and maybe they share with you their work, but this is also how you kind of spread the word about yourself.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: So, that has been always a kind of very, very-

Veerle: That’s actually the most important part. That’s how I got into the CSS galleries. Yeah. Actually, a most important part that I left out there.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think so as well.

Veerle: Yeah. Because I started that tutorial. There was one tutorial that I shared towards designers who wanted to learn a little bit of coding. How can I code a homepage? And I explained in different parts, here’s how you create a header, here’s how you create the page itself, header, content, footer. Now, I’m explaining it very, very short but... And I explained it going from actually designing it in Photoshop, and then cutting it in parts and-

Vitaly: There a slicing and everything.

Veerle: ... explain how CCS work, very, very basic steps, and then very rudimentary language, very simple so that everyone could understand it. And that got so popular and picked up by so many sites who were way, way bigger than me. But that elevated me up there amongst all the others, and I got an invited for speaking at conference.

Vitaly: That’s right.

Veerle: So, that’s how the ball got rolling it. And then the blog was redesigned and it got an award again, and it never stopped.

Vitaly: Yeah. Are you planning on the fifth redesign at some point?

Veerle: At the moment, I’m actually doing a little... It’s not a redesign, but I’m fiddling with the colors and things a little bit

Vitaly: Like you always are, so I didn’t expect anything else. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah. It’s always harder for yourself, doing-

Vitaly: Yes.

Veerle: ... improvements on work, and also finding the time.

Vitaly: Absolutely.

Veerle: I thought I would’ve launched it by now, the things that I’ve done, I worked a little bit over the Christmas period, but I’m still in the middle of it.

Vitaly: Yeah, of course. I’m also speaking with a lot of junior designers, and very often what I hear is that they have a hard time kind of putting the word out there. So, I feel like maybe back then, for me, it was quite straightforward because there was not much. I mean, there were maybe what handful of people, maybe 30, 40 people who are writing and blogging and being very public about this and sharing.

Veerle: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: Now, I feel like everybody’s posting. And now, you can generate a perfect SEO optimized, shared ChatGPT powered article about design and so on. Do you think that you would be doing the same today if you were in this position, let’s say, not 20 years ago, but today? Would you be trying to be visible on TikTok and Instagram or LinkedIn? I don’t know what would be-

Veerle: I think I probably would. I’m not sure. It’s hard. It’s a whole different period. For us, it was all so very new. I remember Twitter. I remember Jeremy Kieth told me like, “Hey, there’s this Twitter thing. You should check it out.” I was like, huh, Twitter, what’s that? And he explained, and I was like, okay, I’m going to check it out. That’s how I got on Twitter back then.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: Because we were all on... I don’t know if you were too on Pownce?

Vitaly: Oh yes, I remember that. I know for sure that I registered an account. I registered an account on Pownce, and then I think I never posted anything. I mean, there were a couple of apps or a couple of sites, social media sites back then. But I think... I don’t know, for me, I always liked... I liked to write. It was all about writing for me. Because when I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer. Well, that didn’t happen, but I really wanted to write. But it’s not about me. I mean, this podcast, of course, is not about me.

Veerle: But I think I would do TikTok and Instagram. Now, I’ve been using my Instagram always for just photos and everything, but I think I would more try to be visible with my work via Instagram and TikTok and stuff like that.

Vitaly: I think so. I mean, I also remember that one thing that’s really excited me back then, I think it’s still the same, I mean, every single day, I happened to meet, even without being kind of proactive about it, but I happen to stumble upon work people just accidentally, either by searching or by going through some feeds or LinkedIn on... I tend to use Twitter less these days. I always find interesting people. And this is something that’s really keeps motivating me as well. I feel like I always learn somebody who is doing something absolutely incredible. And so this is something that I can also then take and learn from. And I always try to take that step to reach out to that person and just talk to them or exchange thoughts or work or whatever. That’s really, really... I mean, that’s that kind of growth of networking I saw. That’s really, really, really important.

Veerle: Yeah, that’s what I tried actually also, reaching out to people that you admire.

Vitaly: And they reply back. It’s not like they’re in the castle somewhere. Very often, they would reply back. And those emails from those people who do reply back, I remember them forever. I mean, sometimes I’d think, well, why bother sending a message to somebody who has been, I don’t know, designing a famous typeface or something. They reply, and then this thing really keeps me kind of fueling and motivating me.

Veerle: Yeah, me too.

Vitaly: Maybe turning the kind of direction of the conversation a little bit, I’m also curious to know maybe some of the really challenging projects you worked on. What would we say, looking back now, what was some of the most difficult design projects or illustration projects that you were involved with, as long as you can speak about it?

Veerle: I think the most challenging one was actually in the time before internet, the CD-ROM thing. We did... Well, Geert and I did a project for Ernst & Young and a CD-ROM project called Oscan. It was a bit corporate, but it was a lot of creativity. At first, we actually had to win it because it was between us and another agency. So, we got the job eventually, but it was from A to Z, from production, packaging. It was actually a browser hand. The packaging, it was a big browser hand that you could open, and the CD-ROM was sitting in the browser hand. It was in five languages. There was a lot of design work, and it was a lot of technicalities also with testing on windows. That was actually the most challenging, because it was first, to get the job. And then I think we worked on it for more than a year to get it finished. Also with voiceover. It was with voiceover and was very graphically.

Vitaly: So, I assume that must have taken quite a bit of time, quite a bit of time.

Veerle: It was. Like I said, we worked more than a year on it. The other one was for a screensaver.

Vitaly: A screensaver?

Veerle: Yes. It was called Caveman, and it was with a caveman. And it was like with volcanoes, and it was very fun. But I remember how the result was still like... Now, you would look at it, it was like from the dark ages, the pixels and the stuff. Yeah, it was early nineties, but it was so fun.

Vitaly: Oh, I can imagine. So, would you say that coming back and looking back, do you find that doing design work now is easier or more difficult?

Veerle: That’s hard to say.

Vitaly: I mean, of course, we have much better technology and tooling and all of that.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. So, I would say in that respect, it’s easier, but it’s also difficult in a way that there’s so much apps, so to learn. On the other hand, back then it was also a lot to learn. The creative challenges, of course, the same. The tools are easier. Because I remember in the early days when I used Illustrator... Now, I can do stuff in two clicks to say it simple. And back then, it was like it would take me more than two hours to do the same.

Vitaly: Yeah. So, you’ve also done quite a bit of illustration work. I’m curious... So at some point, you just knew that, okay, so you’ve been drawing and you’ve been designing, you’ve been this, and from everything from packaging to stationary and everything, right? Did you want to just say something like, “Okay, I’m done with this. I want to explore fonts. I want to design fonts now, or “I’m done with this. I’m going to go for music. I’m going to create music now?” Did you have this moments where you said, “Okay, I want to explore something entirely different?” Or maybe it was just a different style illustration that you would be experimenting. Because for me... The reason why I’m asking is because I have this problem that I always feel like I’m jumping in with both feet in some topic. And then I realize, oh, I’m done with it now. I want to do something and tiredly different.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: And then I jumped from UX to design, to front end, to performance accessibility. That’s been like the path for my entire journey so far. What is it like for you.

Veerle: I think because my jobs, and I mean the projects that we work on are so diverse, that I always feel like there’s something different. Tomorrow, I work on, this could be illustration work. And the week after, I work on print. Then I work again on some website, then again on some apps, app design. Because of this constant mixture, I don’t have the urge to do something entirely different because it’s always something different. In a way, I can see what you say. That has been on my mind actually, to design a farm. This has always something like, oh, that would be so great to do, design a font. On the other hand, I think there are so many... How do you say? It’s such a specialty that I think maybe I won’t be good at it. Because to design a font, it’s not simple. So, it’s a good font, I mean, really good font. If it’s a script font and from the, you know—

Vitaly: Handwritten font, or so...

Veerle: And even that... Yeah, you can say, okay. But if it’s a sans or sans serif, there’s so many things to take into account, like the letter O needs to be a little bit bigger because it’s round. And then you have all these little things that you have to keep in mind. And then there is the tracking and the kerning and everything.

Vitaly: Sure. Sure. That’s a science for itself, of course.

Veerle: I think I gave up the idea because of it. I actually did design a font belt, not font font, but there was once a project from a guy. I think it’s the guy who founded Skillshare, actually. He had a book project way back before he founded Skillshare, grab back book or something. And he asked many creative people to do something totally out of their comfort zone, totally different. And for me, my task was create a font. So, others had another task, like create a poster or... So, that was the only time. I actually designed a font, but it was not like a font with font files and everything. It was pure on design and it got printed in a book. So, it never got further than that.

Vitaly: Maybe it’s not even necessary anymore, because of course, we have wonderful power of artificial intelligence coming our way. And I’m really had to ask this question, of course. And we could just ask, I don’t know, AI to just design a font of our dreams.

Veerle: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: But I am wondering-

Veerle: It’s easy.

Vitaly: I am wondering at this point, how do you see... I mean, we have all these tools from Midjourney to, I mean DALL-E And so many others, all these AI tools that allow you to generate an image or support you in some way, assist you in some way to get that perfect photo, that perfect illustration, to that perfect landscape, that perfect whatever. How do you see that? Do you actually in some way use or think about using AI for your work, or do you feel like this cannot-

Veerle: So far, I haven’t used it. No. In a way, I kind of see it... It’s back in the days when Photoshop introduced effects and we’re all like, “Whoa, yes, let’s try it out.” And it’s like something new and everybody’s jumping at it. Like we say in Dutch, fly on a shit... I find it a little bit, I don’t know, artificial, too artificial, like the word says. It’s probably going to serve us as help, and in a way, as a tool. Yeah. But on the other hand, I have so many questions about it. I don’t know if you heard... And I was already asking that same question in my head, what about copyrights, the photos that is in there, that they’re using? And I, not so long ago, I think a couple of days ago, I read something about Getty Images asking the question like, “Hey, you guys are using pictures, images of our Getty Images collection.” So, I think they’re going, they’re going to be trouble here and there as well. It’s not that easy—

Vitaly: Yeah. This is actually still a big question that is, to be honest, that seems to be, I wouldn’t say dismissed, but it is not taken seriously often. But you still see some issues where many of the applications that are generating those images, they actually have, in the terms and conditions, a very clear statement that this only for personal use and so on and so forth. But in general, of course, whenever we think about this, one big question that comes in my way is that obviously whenever artificial intelligence is generating those images, these images have a copyrighted designed by humans. So if there were no humans, there wouldn’t be any design work done by AI, right? And then the question is, there is no credit, there is no compensation. Of course, there is mining, data mining.

And this, of course, brings up questions. I mean, when I was looking and playing with DALL-E and Midjourney, and there are so many tools at this point, I was very impressed with results. I mean, I was seriously impressed with the results. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an actual photo or that kind of artwork... Maybe it looked a little bit too perfect at times, and sometimes it had these really strange things where everything looks perfect, but then a person has six fingers instead of five.

Veerle: Yes, I saw something similar.

Vitaly: Yeah, those things happen every now and again. But if you just focus on the face, let’s say, then this problem doesn’t occur. But then there is kind of something almost magical where you can... I mean, at this point, I think also in Figma, you have these options to say, dear Figma, I need a photo of a barista in front of tiled, I don’t know, tiled bakery, whatever in Portugal, and the picture, the result is incredible. I mean, I have to say that this is absolutely stunning. The question of course that I’m asking myself and that many of my colleagues are wondering about is, what does it mean? So, would we, as designers or researchers, use it, or would we be trying to fight the war against the windmill? Because there are so many of those tools. But that’s a question that hasn’t been answered yet. And again, it has raises a lot of ethical concerns as well.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Especially the last thing you mentioned, ethical concerns. And I don’t know, in a way, I can see its purpose, but then on the other hand, I don’t know if it goes that far that it’s overtakes our entire job. I mean, I don’t know what’s-

Vitaly: Yeah, it’s hard to say, because I was this case, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it or not, where there was a project, where an administrator was working on a project. And then I think three or four months in project, he was fired. And what the owners of the company then said, “Well, you’ve designed 15 administration. We can now design the rest with AI.”

Veerle: Okay.

Vitaly: So, we can mine your style and maybe a few more images, or millions of images around the world, and we can replicate your style. So, we don’t necessarily need you to be on this project. I was like, wow. So, those things happened.

Veerle: Wow. And that happened and he didn’t... Did he say, “Okay, here are the royalties?”

Vitaly: I mean, he did the work, and the first, I think 15 images or so, they were paid for, but the rest was kind of canceled, because you can produce the results with a handful of images, and obviously a lot of other data around. So that, again, raises some questions and concerns.

Veerle: Yes.

Vitaly: So, I’m not quite sure-

Veerle: That’s true.

Vitaly: ... what we’re getting with this.

Veerle: Then we have to put a copyrighting in our estimate before taking on the job, like, here’s the copyright.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think in the end-

Veerle: Because otherwise, no. I mean-

Vitaly: I think in some way, this will become probably something that we will be including in our contract or that we’ll be dealing with as terms and conditions. But I’m very hopeful.

Veerle: Yes, terms and conditions...

Vitaly: I think the future looks bright, so we shouldn’t be... I mean, obviously we need to be very careful about what we’re doing there and how we’re managing all that, but I’m hopeful that the community is better off with AI. We shouldn’t be fighting AI too much.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think it’ll have its place, but I don’t think it’ll be that far, like it overtakes our job. I don’t know. I don’t think that. I don’t believe that. I mean, we’re all still human. I mean, needs the human emotional touch and everything. But I see it as... I hope we can use it as a tool and not that it doesn’t overtake us.

Vitaly: Yeah. So, do you think, Veerle, that maybe four years, three, four, five years from now, you’ll be writing a nice article on your blog about how to use AI to speed up your creative process?

Veerle: Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: Maybe.

Veerle: Or it will, I don’t know, get a very bad taste and a very bad, I don’t know, thing, reputation. But I don’t know if it go will go that far, and it’ll not survive. I don’t think it’ll probably survive.

Vitaly: Well, maybe there is something good around that as well. Because while the AI is busy doing the design work, you can go on biking, which is why I have to ask you about, as we are wrapping up here, maybe you could share us with some of the most memorable destinations that you actually have traveled to on your bike. What were some of the highlights in your journey? And what was the longest trip you ever taken?

Veerle: I think the longest trip or the longest ride was 207 kilometers.

Vitaly: 207. Wow.

Veerle: Yeah. But it was in Belgium. I think-

Vitaly: It was all around Belgium still?

Veerle: Yeah, I sometimes go towards direction of France and the Netherlands over the border, but it’s not that I have biked in some destination far away. So, the Balearic Islands, that’s the forest where I’ve rode my bike. It’s more in my own country that I bike. But there’s so many little roads here. I’m still amazed by how many roads there are. And then that I still ride roads that I haven’t ridden. And they’re like, I don’t know, 15 kilometers from here, or 10 kilometers from here. And I say like, huh, didn’t discover that one. I’m always thinking I should... I put my bike rides on Strava, and I think you can look up a heat map. And if I do Flanders, the heat map of Flanders, it’s really dense. I’ve ridden over and over and over. If I see the total kilometers that I’ve ridden, I’ve ridden a couple of times around the world.

Vitaly: Oh wow.

Veerle: The kilometers.

Vitaly: That could be. But I think-

Veerle: Like whoa, that’s mind blowing.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: I ride my bike more than I drive my car.

Vitaly: Oh wow.

Veerle: It’s like double the kilometers in a year.

Vitaly: Yeah. But maybe we should import you into Black Forest, and I’d be very curious how far you go there.

Veerle: It is one of the locations I would really love to go. My local bakery that I go every weekend, he’s like a fan of that area. He’s also a mountain biker. And every year, his holiday is always the Black Forest, and he’s always bragging about it. “If you want some rights from there, I can share you some, and just let me know when you go.”

Vitaly: Well, I think maybe that’s a sign for you to keep in the loop. Please let us know question when you happen to be there. Maybe as a final question here to wrap up, I always ask this question because it always gives me kind of a clue about the motivation, the dreams that guests like to have. Do you have a particular dream project that you ever wished you could work with? So, if somebody from any company could listen to this now or in the future think maybe Veerle wants to work on this incredible project, we should reach out. So, if you had a dream project or if you have a dream project, what would you desperately want to work on one day?

Veerle: Oh man. Well, actually dream project would be if the client says that would’ve really already make it, that would already make me very happy, if I have a lot of time to work on a project, like if they say-

Vitaly: A year.

Veerle: ... you do your thing. I love to have boundaries, but if you can go to your full potential of your creativity and there’s like no deadline... Usually, they clients want things done too fast. And usually, you always end up, like hmm, if I had a little bit more time, I would made this better and better. The things that end up in my portfolio, the things that I’m happy with, that I like, there’s so many work, it’s like 10% of all the work I’ve done, because a lot of projects are like that it has to go so fast, or they put it online, but they have implemented it wrongly, stuff like that. There’s always something. So, my dream project would be if there’s a project from A to Z, it’s like perfect done, a lot of creativity. It can be anything really. I’ve always dreamt in school that I would end up in packaging design. I haven’t done much packaging design, but if I could do, create a brand logo, and then the whole packaging of the interior of, if it’s a shop, an interior, the building, whatever.

Vitaly: But you already did design a logo for an airline, isn’t that right?

Veerle: Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it was actually... It was not a big project. It sounds like because it’s for an airline, it’s like big. It was actually like, we want an icon on the plane, and our logo has this colors, but we want an icon. And so I kind of designed a star shape, I think. And that was like... Yeah, I was proud of it because it was on a plane.

Vitaly: Did you fly the plane with your icon?

Veerle: No. No.

Vitaly: No?

Veerle: No.

Vitaly: Oh, maybe that... So if anybody listening to this owns an airline or a train or a bike or anything and is willing to maybe put an icon... That would be nice to have a bike with your work on it. That’d be nice.

Veerle: Yeah. Yea.

Vitaly: Yes. So, please get in touch with Veerle. I’m sure she would appreciate that. All right.

Veerle: Thank you.

Vitaly: So, we’ve been learning quite a bit about illustration and design and workflow, and AI even a little bit in here, but what have you been learning about lately, Veerle? Anything that you’ve learned, or maybe outside of the scope of design altogether, anything that you felt like, oh wow, I didn’t know that earlier, so here we go, now I know it?

Veerle: Well, actually I’m currently working with Figma, and I didn’t know it. It’s because of the project with the client, the developer is also using Figma and other designers in the team are using Figma. And otherwise, I would jump in with my Adobe XD and I thought like, okay, it’s to speed up the process, and also to work together on something and share. It’s not that you can’t do it with Adobe XD, but they’re already using Figma. So, I’m learning Figma. It’s the first steps, but yeah, it’s been fun, actually. I’m liking it. You can also copy paste from Illustrate, for me is very important.

Vitaly: Yeah, I can imagine.

Veerle: I’m doing most of icon design work. It’s for webpages and a web app. And so it’s handy that I can copy paste. And I’m also using... I’m also trying out Affinity Designer. I’ve been working in it a couple of times now. It’s also very early phase. So, I think I’ve spent, if it’s an hour already. So, it’s really short time, but yeah, I’m liking it so far. So, I’m stepping out of the Adobe environment a little bit to learn a little bit more. Yeah. And then I think on my iPad, I’m doing a lot of water coloring-

Vitaly: Oh, that’s nice.

Veerle: ... coloring digitally, trying out a couple of brushes. And so that’s also a bit new.

Vitaly: Never stop learning then.

Veerle: Yeah, never stop learning.

Vitaly: So maybe now, if you, at some point in the future, will find a nice Figma tutorial on Veerle’s blog, you know what direction-

Veerle: Who knows?

Vitaly: ... she ended up going. Well, if you, the listener, would like to hear more from Veerle, you can find her on Twitter where she’s @vpieters, and also in home homepage, of course, which is veerle.duoh.com, veerle.duoh.com.

Veerle: I’m actually not much on Twitter anymore-

Vitaly: Not much on Twitter.

Veerle: ... to be honest.

Vitaly: So, is it now... What is cool at this point?

Veerle: Actually not-

Vitaly: So, what-

Veerle: Mastodon.

Vitaly: Mastodon. So, are you on Mastodon a lot?

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I’m going... You asked me, you are redesigning my blog. I’m actually also going to do a lot of writing on my blog. Little short post that I tend to do before on Twitter. I’m moving it a bit to my blog.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: It’s called Side Notes. I’m going to call it Side Notes, but it’s still in the making. I’ll try to make good progress that it’s will be online very soon to replace the whole Twitter feed. But up until now, I’m posting the things on Mastodon.

Vitaly: That sounds-

Veerle: It’s actually what I did before Twitter was here. So, I’m picking up from way back.

Vitaly: Sure. But we’ll be following along for sure. So with this in mind, thank you so much for joining us today, Veerle. Do you have any parting words of wisdom? Imagine somebody listening to this 20 years from now and thinking, how did they design things back in the day? Do you have a message to the future or share-

Veerle: Message to the future.

Vitaly: ... I don’t know, words of wisdom to people out there?

Veerle: I think always keep on learning, I think. And open your eyes, try to soak in inspiration from everywhere, even just go outside, find inspiration in nature. Look around, open your eyes. If you are walking in the streets, look at the signs, signs of shops and everything. Yeah, try to keep an open vision, I think, and never stop learning. These are my words.

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Counting Down To Bundles Of Smashing Joy And Workshops In 2021

This year has been quite a ride — all the more reason to look forward to a new year with new beginnings, right? Well, we’ll never really know what awaits us in the next months to come, but what I do know is that everyone on this planet can do only so much and really just the best they can to pull through. It’s certainly been a year of less ups and more downs for so many people around the world, and we hope that with everything we’ve been doing at Smashing has helped make life at least a lil’ bit easier.

Plan Your Year Ahead With Online Workshops

Have you attended one of our workshops yet? The Smashing Events team is thrilled each and every time they run a workshop with all of the wonderful attendees from all over the world coming together to learn together. So many ideas have been brought to life thanks to the live design and coding sessions, and there are many folks that have found new friends, too!

It gets even better: We now have workshop bundles from which you can choose three, five or even ten workshop tickets for the workshops of your choice — ongoing, upcoming or the ones happening in the future!


Jan. 5 – Jan. 19 Build, Ship and Extend GraphQL APIs from Scratch Christian Nwamba Dev
Jan. 19 – Jan. 27 Form Design Masterclass Adam Silver Dev
Jan. 21 – Feb. 5 New Adventures In Front-End, 2021 Edition Vitaly Friedman Design & UX
Feb. 2 – Feb. 10 Building Modern HTML Emails Rémi Parmentier Dev
Feb. 11 – Feb. 26 The SVG Animation Masterclass Cassie Evans Dev
Feb. 16 – Feb. 17 The CSS Layout Masterclass Rachel Andrew Dev
Feb. 23 – Mar. 9 Successful Design Systems Brad Frost Dev
Mar. 4 – Mar. 12 Psychology For UX and Product Design Joe Leech Design & UX
Mar. 16 – Mar. 24 Finding Clients Masterclass Paul Boag Design & UX
Mar. 18 – Apr. 1 Behavioral Design Susan & Guthrie Weinschenk Design & UX
Mar. 30 – Mar. 31 Designing The Perfect Navigation Vitaly Friedman Design & UX

We hope you’ll find at least one workshop in the list above that fits your projects and career path, and if not, please do get in touch with us on Twitter and we promise to do our best to make it happen. Also, feel free to subscribe here if you’d like to be one of the first folks to be notified when new workshops come up, and get access to early-bird prices as well — we’ll have lots of goodies coming your way very soon!

Members Get Access To Videos And More

We’re proud to have a steadily growing Membership family who love good content, appreciate friendly discounts, and are an active part of our lovely web community. If you’re not involved yet, we’d love for you to join in and become a member, too! There are constant discounts on printed books, job postings, conference tickets, and your support really helps us pay the bills. ❤️

Smashing Podcast: Tune In And Get Inspired

This year, we’ve published a new Smashing Podcast episode every two weeks, and the feedback has been awesome! With over 56k downloads (just over a thousand per week, and growing!), we’ve had 34 guests on the podcast with different backgrounds and so much to share!

If you don’t see a topic you’d like to hear and learn more about, please don’t hesitate to reach out to host Drew McLellan or get in touch via Twitter anytime — we’d love to hear from you!

1. What Is Art Direction? 2. What’s So Great About Freelancing?
3. What Are Design Tokens? 4. What Are Inclusive Components?
5. What Are Variable Fonts? 6. What Are Micro-Frontends?
7. What Is A Government Design System? 8. What’s New In Microsoft Edge?
9. How Can I Work With UI Frameworks? 10. What Is Ethical Design?
11. What Is Sourcebit? 12. What Is Conversion Optimization?
13. What Is Online Privacy? 14. How Can I Run Online Workshops?
15. How Can I Build An App In 10 Days? 16. How Can I Optimize My Home Workspace?
17. What’s New In Drupal 9? 18. How Can I Learn React?
19. What Is CUBE CSS? 20. What Is Gatsby?
21. Are Modern Best Practices Bad For The Web? 22. What Is Serverless?
23. What Is Next.js? 24. What Is SVG Animation?
25. What Is RedwoodJS? 26. What’s New In Vue 3.0?
27. What Is TypeScript? 28. What Is Eleventy?
29. How Does Netlify Dogfood The Jamstack? 30. What Is Product Design?
31. What Is GraphQL? 32. Coming up on December 29

Stay tuned for the next episode coming out very soon!

Smashing Newsletter: Best Picks

With our weekly newsletter, we aim to bring you useful content and share all the cool things that folks are working on in the web industry. There are so many talented folks out there working on brilliant projects, and we’d appreciate it if you could help spread the word and give them the credit they deserve!

Also, by subscribing, there are no third-party mailings or hidden advertising involved, and your support really helps us pay the bills. ❤️

Interested in sponsoring? Feel free to check out our partnership options and get in touch with the team anytime — they’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as they can.

Preventing Layout Shifts With CSS Grid

It’s no news that CSS Grid is a fantastic tool to build complex layouts. But did you know that it can help you prevent layout shifts, too? When Hubert Sablonnière discovered a layout shift problem with a toggling state on a UI component he worked on, he came up with a solution: the “Anti Layout Shift Grid Stacking Technique”.

Compared to solving the layout shift with absolute positioning, Hubert’s Grid-based technique supports complex situations that require more than two panels. Another benefit: You don’t need to assume which panel should guide the size of the whole component. If you want to dive in deeper, Hubert wrote up everything you need to know to prevent both vertical and horizontal shifts in a practical blog post. (cm)

Fixing Headers And Jump Links

Jump links in combination with fixed headers can cause quite some frustration. Maybe you’ve run into the same issue before: When clicked, your jump link takes you to the desired element, but a fixed header is hiding it. In the past, wild hacks were required to solve the issue. Luckily, there’s now a straightforward and well-supported CSS solution.

The trick: scroll-margin-top. Assign it to your headers, and the position: fixed header won’t get into their way anymore when you navigate to them with a jump link. A short line of code that makes a huge difference. (cm)

Fluid Typography With clamp()

When it comes to fluid scaling, CSS has some exciting new features: clamp(), min(), and max(). They cap and scale values as the browser grows and shrinks. min() and max() return the respective minimum and maximum values at any given time while clamp lets you you pass in both a minimum and maximum plus a preferred size for the browser to use.

As Trys Mudford points out, clamp() comes in particularly handy when you want broadly fluid typography without being 100% specific about the relationship between the varying sizes. In his in-depth article about the new feature, he shares valuable hands-on tips for using clamp() effectively. (cm)

Open-Source Screen Recorder And Annotation Tool

If you’ve been looking for a free and easy-to-use tool to record your screen, it might be hard to find something more powerful than Alyssa X’s open-source screen recorder Screenity.

No matter if you want to give contextual feedback on a project, provide detailed explanations, or showcase your product to potential customers, Screenity offers a number of practical features to capture, annotate, and edit your recordings — without any time limit. You can draw on the screen and add text and arrows, for example, highlight clicks and focus on the mouse, push to talk, and much more. Screenity is available for Chrome. (cm)

A Human-Friendly Date Picker

Date pickers can be hard to get right. A beautiful example of a human-friendly and fully accessible date picker comes from Tommy Feldt.

Thanks to Chrono.js, it supports natural language inputs, so that a user can type something like “tomorrow”, “December 2”, or “in 5 days” to select a date. Shortcut buttons also help to select the most common dates. The date picker is fully accessible with the keyboard and screen readers (there’s even an on-demand help feature for screen reader and keyboard users) and degrades gracefully when JavaScript or CSS aren’t available. A very inspiring proof of concept. (cm)

Become A Jamstack Explorer

The Jamstack is still unexplored territory for you? Jamstack Explorers helps change that. Its mission: teaching you about building for the web with modern tools and techniques.

You can choose from three courses, track your progress, and earn rewards as you proceed through the Jamstack universe. Tara Z. Manicsic leads you through the wilds of Angular, Phil Hawksworth teaches you how to serve and track multiple versions of your site with Netlify, and Cassidy Williams guides you through all the essentials of Next.js. Once you’ve completed the three missions, there’s not only a certificate waiting, but you can call yourself a Jamstack Explorer, ready to use the newest tools to build experiences that are robust, performant, and secure. (cm)

Making Remote Design Work

Design reviews, sprints, feedback — design is a collaborative effort that brings along quite some challenges when doing it remotely. The folks at InVision put together a collection of handy resources to help you and your team master these challenges.

The content covers three of the most trickiest aspects of working remotely: fostering creativity, aiding collaboration, and staying focused. For more best practices for running a remote design team, InVision also published a free eBook drawing from their own experience of working remotely with 700 employees spread across 30 countries and no single office. (cm)

Full-Screen Countdown Timer To Stay On Track

Sticking to the schedule can be tricky when you are running a long video call or are giving a talk or workshop. To help you make sure the session stays on track, Koos Looijesteijn built Big Timer.

The bold yet minimalist timer counts down the remaining minutes right in your browser window — and even if you accidentally close the browser tab or need to restart your device, it will take the disruption into account. Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to adjust the duration and pause or stop the countdown. One for the bookmarks. (cm)

Sounds And Music To Help You Focus

Are you the type of person who can’t focus when it’s quiet around them? Then one of the following tools might help you become more productive. If you’re missing the familiar office sounds when working from home, I Miss The Office brings some office atmosphere into your home office — with virtual colleagues who produce typical sounds like typing, squeaking chairs, or the occasional bubbling of the watercooler.

Office sounds have always distracted you more than helped you focus? Then Noizio could be for you. The app lets you mix nature and city sounds to create your personal ambient sound. Another approach to increasing focus with sound comes from Brain.fm. Their team of scientists, musicians, and developers designs functional music that affects the brain to achieve the desired mental state. Last but not least, Focus@Will is also based on neuroscience and helps increase focus by changing the characteristics of music at the right time intervals. Promising alternatives to your usual playlist. (cm)

The Web Almanac 2020

Looking back at 2020, what’s the state of the web this year? The yearly Web Almanac gives in-depth answers to this question, combining the raw stats and trends of the HTTP Archive with the expertise of the web community. The results are backed up by real data taken from more than 7.5 million websites and trusted web experts.

22 chapters make up this years’ almanac. They are divided into four parts — content, experience, publishing, distribution —, and each one of them is explored from different angles. An insightful look into the state of performance is included, too, of course. (cm)

Generate A Request Map Of Your Site

Where do all the transmitted bytes on your site come from? Analyzing third-party components in detail is a time-consuming task, but it’s already a good start to know which third parties are on your site — and how they got there.

Simon Hearne’s request map generator tool visualizes a node map of all the requests on a page for any given URL. The size of the nodes on the map is proportional to the percentage of total bytes, and, when you hover over a node, you’ll get information on its size, response and load times. No more bad surprises. (cm)

Let’s Tweak Our JavaScript Bundles!

Chances are high that with your JavaScript code being around for a while, your JavaScript bundles are a little bit outdated. You might have some outdated polyfills, or you might be using a slightly outdated JavaScript syntax. But now there is a little tool that helps you identify those bottlenecks and fix them for good.

EStimator calculates the size and performance improvement a site could achieve by switching to modern JavaScript syntax. It shows which bundles could be improved, and what impact this change would have on your overall performance. The source code is also available on GitHub. (vf)

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A Book Release For Click! And A Chance To Rethink Our Routines

A Book Release For Click! And A Chance To Rethink Our Routines

A Book Release For Click! And A Chance To Rethink Our Routines

Ari Stiles

Paul Boag has written three books in the Smashing Library, and Click! How to Encourage Clicks Without Shady Tricks is just the most recent one. Paul wrote some articles for Smashing Magazine in addition to appearing on the Smashing Podcast and SmashingTV to promote the book and talk about some of its themes. Click! finally started shipping in June, and our beloved preorder customers found a surprise in those packages.

This Time, It’s Personal

Paul signed 500 postcards—designed by our own Ricardo Gimenez — and our first 500 buyers each received one of the signed postcards along with their copy of Click!

It was fun to watch the reactions pop up on social media:

Paul’s an experienced author, and we also had a very experienced illustrator for the cover and interior templates—Veerle Pieters! She has contributed artwork to Paul’s other books for Smashing, but she also designed the cover for our first Smashing Magazine Print edition. The illustrations and templates she provided for Click! helped make the book an inspiration to read, too.

A sneak peek into the Click book
Photo by Drew McLellan

Working with an experienced author and a seasoned illustrator is always inspiring. There were even a few pleasant surprises along the way:

Creativity In Quarantine

For a lot of us, quarantine has had a profound effect on our productivity levels. Feelings of being overwhelmed might be slowing you down, OR maybe your work is a welcome distraction, and you are getting a lot done right now.

One thing that has changed for most of us is our routines, though. This inevitably leads to some problem solving, which requires some creativity.

Click! comes along at a time when many of us need a creative “nudge.” The book inspires us to think differently about our routines for building online sites and services—what works, and what doesn’t.

“People are under enormous pressure to improve their conversion rates. Marketers have got targets they’ve got to meet, designers are under pressure ... people are inevitably turning to dark patterns. Not because they want to, but because they’re under pressure to. They’re under pressure to bring about results.

So the premise of this book is, first of all, to explain why dark patterns are a bad idea. I talk about it from a purely business point of view, that these are the business reasons why dark patterns are ultimately damaging. And then that inevitably leads to the question of, well, if dark patterns aren’t the answer, then what is?

The majority of the book is exploring what you can do to improve your conversion rate without resorting to these kinds of more manipulative techniques.”

— Paul Boag, Smashing Podcast Episode 12
The Ethical Design Handbook

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

Plenty Of Inspiration

We want to help you stay inspired! You might like

And, have you looked at Smashing Membership lately? Members have free access to our eBooks, job board, partner offers, SmashingTV webinars, and discounts on just about everything else Smashing has to offer.

More Smashing Books

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing.

In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Trine, Alla and Adam are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?

Ethical Design Handbook

Ethical Design Handbook

A practical guide on ethical design for digital products.

Add to cart $39

Design Systems

Design Systems

A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products.

Add to cart $39

Form Design Patterns

Form Design Patterns

A practical guide to designing and coding simple and inclusive forms.

Add to cart $39

Smashing Editorial (ra, il)
Posted on

How To Create A Compelling Landing Page

How To Create A Compelling Landing Page

How To Create A Compelling Landing Page

Paul Boag

If you want more leads or increased sales, you need compelling landing pages. According to Hubspot, those companies with over 30 landing pages, will generate seven times more leads than those with fewer than 10.

A landing page is a standalone webpage created to support a specific marketing campaign or targeting a particular search term. They are where users "land" when they click a link in search results, email or an ad.

Typically they encourage users to complete a specific call to action such as making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter or getting in touch.

So how do we create landing pages that encourage users to act, without resorting to manipulative techniques or dark patterns? The answer lies in a combination of a clear focus, compelling copy, considered design and relentless testing.

It is tempting to leap straight into creating your landing page. However, before we begin, we must have a clear focus, and that starts with defining our value proposition.

Define Your Value Proposition

When a user arrives on your landing page, you have less than eight seconds to grab their attention. That means the first step in creating any compelling landing page is to understand what it is that the page will offer and how you can express that compellingly and concisely. That is typically known as a value proposition.

Start by writing a single sentence that communicates what it is you are offering to the user. This sentence should consist of two parts; what problem you are solving or benefit you provide, and how you achieve that.

For example, Skype’s value proposition is:

“Skype makes it easy to stay in touch. Talk. Chat. Collaborate.”

The first part outlines what benefit it provides, while the second explains how it delivers.

Skype’s value proposition outlines both the benefit they offer and how they deliver that. (Large preview)

However, be careful. It is easy for your value proposition to become meaningless. For example, talking about "best-in-class" or "friendly and approachable" is the kind of thing any company could, and does, say.

To avoid becoming too generic, ask yourself whether the opposite of what you have written would still be a valid option. For example, if your value statement reads:

“We offer high-quality products at an affordable price.”

The opposite would be ridiculous:

“We offer terrible quality products at an astronomic markup.”

So effectively, your value statement is stating the obvious!

However, by contrast, if you wrote:

“We offer handcrafted products for a discerning buyer.”

The opposite would be equally valid:

“We offer factory-produced products for the mass market.”

Not that your value proposition isn’t just limited to this one sentence. Make a list of all the benefits you provide to customers and then any features of your offering that allow you to deliver those benefits.

Pipedrive does a good job at backing up its benefits with a list of features. (Large preview)

With that done, you can turn your attention to your calls to action.

Identify Your Calls To Action

Every landing page needs obvious calls to action. That means you need to ask yourself, what is it you want users to do?

To keep your landing page focused and improve your chance of users acting, resist the urge to add too many calls to action. Asking people to follow you on social media, for example, is just going to distract them from completing your primary call to action.

That said, it is often wise to have a secondary call to action. If you have done your job right, your landing page will have convinced many users to take action. Nevertheless, others will not be ready.

Instead of just giving up on these users, it is often worth offering them a secondary call to action, that requires less of a commitment.

For example, if your primary call to action is to get in touch or make a purchase, your secondary call to action could ask people to signup for a newsletter.

To avoid this secondary call to action distracting, ensure it is not too prominent. That might mean showing it lower on the page or even as an exit-intent overlay. That said, be careful. Some audiences react extremely negatively to popups. They should, therefore, be used sparingly.

Exit-Intent Overlay Example
Although popups can be annoying, there is a case for showing a secondary call to action on exit-intent. (Large preview)

Finally, consider ways of incentivising people to complete the call to action. Perhaps you could offer a free ebook if people subscribe to your mailing list or a discount if they buy via your landing page. Sometimes, something this small can be a nudge that encourages people to take action now rather than put it off to another day.

Of course, a gift is not going to make any difference if other elements put people off. To address that you need to understand what the issues are and find a way to deal with them. That is known as objection handling.

Understand User Objections

What are the reasons that might stop somebody acting on your landing page? Is there a delivery charge or might they be worried about privacy? Do you seem expensive compared to the competition?

If you cannot easily write a list of objections that users might have then you need to do some user research to find out.

Don’t worry that it will be time consuming or expensive. A one-question survey on your landing page is all you need. If people go to leave your site without acting, you can ask them a single question:

“If you decided not to act today, it would be useful to know why.”

You can then show them a list of possible options for them to choose between or they can add their own.

Example One Question Survey
A simple one question survey can uncover why users are not taking action. (Large preview)

Once you understand the reasons why people are not acting, you can then start to address them.

Ideally, that means eradicating the obstacle, such as offering free delivery or money-back guarantee. But failing that, you need to reassure people the best you can in your landing page copy. It is always better to address an objection than it is to ignore it.

For example, McDonald’s knows that many people claim their chicken comes from the less favorable parts of a bird. Instead of ignoring these concerns, they address them directly on their site.

McDonald's FAQs
McDonald’s are not afraid to address users concerns directly. (Large preview)

There is, however, one more consideration to take into account when dealing with user’s concerns. You need to make sure you address them at the right time and in the right way.

An excellent example of this is privacy and security. People don’t worry about these things when reading a privacy policy. They worry about it as they are about to submit their email address. That is why it is so important to address data protection and privacy while users are completing a form. Users are not going to search your site for the answers; they will simply assume the worst.

Newsletter sign up form with with privacy statement
Closely associating reassurances regarding privacy with a newsletter sign up form often increases conversion. (Large preview)

With our offering laid out and objections addressed, we have done the hard work of appealing to people’s logical minds. Now it is time to give them that positive feeling.

Shape Your Personality

Much of our decision to act happens on a subconscious level. In fact, according to research published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology, people form an initial impression about a site in 50 milliseconds. They go on to say that due to the halo effect these initial impressions last.

In other words, the branding and aesthetics of a site shape our impressions of the actual offering, despite there being no causal relationship between the two.

So what does all of this mean in practical terms? For a start, it goes to show how much aesthetics matter. However, more importantly, it means we need a clear picture of what first impressions we wish to convey and then be confident that our design does precisely that.

Decide On What You Want To Convey

A good starting point is to create a shortlist of words that convey the impressions you want users to have upon seeing your site.

There will be some words that will be universal. For example, you will probably want your landing page to convey "trustworthiness". However, many of the terms will depend on your audience and offering.

Once you have your list of words and the designer has produced a design that they hope convey those words, the next step is to test.

Testing Your Design Aesthetics

If the designer has produced multiple approaches, then a simple preference test works well. For example, you can ask the user which of your designs do they consider to be more "approachable".

Example Preference Test
A simple preference test is often the best way to find the best design aesthetic. (Large preview)

When there is only one design, you can run a semantic differential survey, in which you ask users to rate a website against your keywords. For example, is a design more "approachable" or "unapproachable"?

Example Semantic Differential Survey
A survey can be used to ascertain whether a design is creating the right feeling in users. (Large preview)

Of course, aesthetics is not the only consideration when it comes to design. You also need to make sure your visual hierarchy is right too.

Create Your Visual Hierarchy

Establishing a strong visual hierarchy for your landing page will ensure that users see the right information at the right time and won’t be distracted by irrelevant or secondary content.

Answer The Right Questions At The Right Time

The first step is to ensure you are presenting the right information to the user are the right point on the page. To do that you need to understand the thought process that goes through people’s minds as they view your landing page.

Of course, we cannot be sure of that, as everybody is different. Even usability testing can only give us an indication. However, we can make an educated generalization.

Typically, a user subconsciously asks a series of questions when viewing a landing page. These are, in order:

  • What is this page offering? (Value Proposition)
  • How will that help me? (Benefits)
  • How does the offering work? (Features)
  • Why should I trust this page? (Social Proof)
  • What should I do next? (Call to Action)

It is, therefore, essential that any visual hierarchy for a page reflects the order a user asks these questions, at least to some degree.

For example, a typical landing page hierarchy might look something like this:

Wireframe of landing page structure
A landing page should combine your value proposition, benefits, features and social proof. (Large preview)

Getting the flow of your content on the page right is only half of the battle when it comes to creating a strong visual hierarchy. The second challenge is ensuring that users see the most critical screen elements.

We can draw attention to essential screen elements in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to:

  • Positioning
  • Colour
  • Size
  • Imagery
  • Animation
  • Negative space

However, probably the most effective technique is to minimize other distractions on a page.

Simplify Your Interface

To achieve this, consider adopting a three-step approach, where you systematically review every element on your landing page from the logo to the privacy policy link.

For each element, you will ask three questions in turn.

Illustration showing the three steps of simplification
Have a robust process for simplifying your landing page. (Large preview)

Start by asking could I remove this element? If I removed it, what would the consequences be? Would those consequences be more damaging than the increase in cognitive load that additional screen elements create? If not, you are better removing it.

If you feel that the content is too valuable to the user or aids in conversion, the next question you need to ask is could I hide this element? Could I put it on a sub-page, under a tab or in an accordion?

Vibecast Homepage
Vibecast hide secondary content under an accordion. (Large preview)

This approach works well for secondary content, that although useful to some users who want more detail, is not something the majority of people will be interested in.

Finally, if you cannot hide content, because all users must know it, ask can I shrink this element? For example, people may well want to know about your return policy, but that isn’t as important as the features or benefits your product offers. It, therefore, makes sense to visually deemphasis it, so it is less prominent.

That simple approach together with other design techniques should enable you to create a page with a strong visual hierarchy that draws the user’s attention to the most crucial screen elements, such as calls to action. However, to be sure you should test.

Test Your Visual Hierarchy

Fortunately, there is a quick and inexpensive way of testing whether users see the essential screen elements. It is called a five-second test.

As the name implies, this test involves showing the users your design for five-seconds before taking it away. You then ask the user to recall what elements they remember.

Usability Hub Website
Usability Hub makes running five-second tests easy. (Large preview)

By paying attention to what the user remembers and the order in which they recall elements, you will gain a better understanding of how effective your page hierarchy is in drawing attention to items that matter the most.

Indeed, when it comes to designing a great landing page, testing will be crucial, even once you launch.

Monitor, Iterate And Test

No team will create the optimal landing page on their first attempt. There is always room for improvement, which is why post-launch testing is such an essential part of shaping the most effective landing page possible.

Once you launch your new landing page, you must monitor it carefully using a session recorder like Hotjar or Fullstory. These tools allow you to watch user behaviour on your page, that should suggest ideas for improvements.

You can test smaller improvements to copy, imagery and color using A/B testing, while more significant changes can be prototyped and tested through usability testing.

Whatever approach you adopt, ultimately it will be a cycle of monitoring, iterating and testing that will ensure the long-term success of any landing page.

Smashing Editorial (ra, il)