by Janus Boye
“Nothing today is designed for old people”
For our final member conference call of 2021, we heard the story about how Anja Saabye is building a UX and Design team at Universal Robots. Universal Robots is based in Odense, Denmark and works with industrial automation. They are known for producing a robotic arm that is characterized by being extremely versatile and easy to use in day-to-day production.
Anja Saabye joined as Head of UX in late 2020 and has since rapidly grown her team. She joined with an agency background, including almost 6 years at Hesehus and firmly believes that designers are the most important people in any company.
What will happen in UX in the next 30 years?
To set the stage for her work, and why Anja is so focused on building the UX and Design practice, she looked towards 2050.
She opened with the unsurprising prediction that the robots are coming, but then took us back 30 years to better understand how quickly things are changing. In the early 1990’s, just 30 years ago, very few had their own personal computer, fewer had mobile phones and internet connectivity was slow, at best, and we used CD-ROMs as a distribution media.
She then moved onto the important change in demographics, in particular with the predicted changes in population age during the next 30 years. As shown in the table below, there’s a substantial increase in people aged 65-84 years with a 100% growth in China and 37% growth in the US. The age group with people 85+ years is growing even faster though, with an expected 147 increase in Germany, 186% increase in the US and 401% in China.
As Anja advised:
Design for OLD people, not young people and "early adopters"
What a huge difference design can make
She also looked further at trends and how to prepare by referencing the famous New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning innovation expert Jeremy Gutsche. Specifically, she highlighted these important trends:
Post-pandemic trends:
Business -> Automation of labor
Life -> Making up for lost time
How to prepare
Business -> Automate everything
Life -> Create experience
Tensions of reprioritization
Business: Robots vs. people
Life: Products vs. experience
She used these trends to make the point, which Jeremy has also made in his keynotes, that the current period of crisis will lead to both chaos and opportunity. As Anja said:
There’s a big responsibility on designers
More than ever, we need good user experiences.
How to create good user experiences
Anja stressed the importance of observation and by using the documented design case study of the pushbutton telephone. She made the point that by choosing the fast solution instead of the preferred one, the world has saved 1 billion man years and made us think about design can truly make a difference.
Slide provided via Jakob Nielsen, NN Group
As she moved moving forward in time, she told how she sees user experience as a multidimensional role. She also stated their ambitious and memorable vision:
“Create an amazing design like Apple, give the unique experience like Tesla and be Universal like Universal Robots”
Being at a company that designs physical robots, there’s design work in everything. From the actual robot interface, to the website and perhaps most daunting in enabling the integration to the robots.
She also shared their UX maturity model which is included below.
What is a unique user experience?
Moving onto why it is so important to change the game using design, Anja pointed to Tesla with some key figures from Forbes based on Tesla owners:
80% will buy a Tesla as their next car
96% will recommend Tesla to friends or family
90% overall satisfaction rating - the most loyal among all car companies
She also used this quote from a Tesla owner in the Tesla forum to show how far it goes:
“To buy a Tesla is more than a buying experience - it is an innovative lifechanging experience”
So what might we learn from Tesla in terms of creating a unique experience? A few bullets according to Anja:
Create a movement
Chase friction and remove it
Stay close to the customers
Be honest and transparent
Be disruptive
To quote Anja:
The best thing in creating a next level user experience, is that it cannot be copied by anyone
In closing, she briefly also shared their design system, research system and behavioural archetypes, which enables her team to be more efficient and design better solutions.
Learn more about design leadership
We do have a design leadership peer group that meets regularly. We’ve also written more about the topic - check out these popular posts:
and we’ve profiled three design leaders as our experts of the month:
Emily Corace when she was at GLG
Kristina Larsen at VIA University College
Mads Norlyk when he was at Jyske Bank
Finally, you can also download the slides from the call (PDF).