IF U SEEK: The Business Side of UX Design

Welcome to IF U SEEK, a podcast by Useberry! If you are seeking to listen to captivating UX discussions, this will be your new must-listen podcast! Each episode merges curiosity with exciting UX trends and insights across business, design, and research. In our first episode, our guest is Sergei Golubev.

Sergei is a seasoned UX designer from Estonia. Although he is busy making waves in London, he stopped by to share his wealth of experience, spanning over 15 years with us. From working with tech giants like Microsoft and British Gas to founding the School of UX, Sergei brings a unique blend of technical prowess and problem-solving passion.

You can find If U Seek on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google podcasts

Preview

In this episode, we explore the business side of UX design, touching on key topics such as:

• The importance of side projects and diverse industry experience in honing UX skills.
• Balancing creative design with technical feasibility and business objectives.
• The critical role of failure in the learning process and career development.
• Practical strategies for UX designers to work effectively with developers and business stakeholders.
• Measuring and communicating the business impact of UX design decisions.

If you liked what you read so far, don’t miss out on the discussion! You can listen to the full episode on Spotify. Also, follow along with the transcript below if you would like:

Transcript

Layshi: If you seek to shape the future, listen to those who design it. Welcome to “If U Seek” by Useberry, where expert voices guide us to UX wisdom. Layshi Curbelo here, your host of the journey of If U Seek. If you are seeking a different way to learn and understand users, this is the podcast for you.

Maybe you are questioning, why If U Seek? Picture it as an open door to curiosity. In every episode, we will strive to explore and gain deep insights from experts shaping their domains. We want you to feel enlightened, educated, or even inspired after each episode. The idea is to foster connections within the UX industry.

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Today’s guest speaker, Sergei Golubev. A charismatic UX designer from Estonia. And currently making noise in London’s UX scene. With over 15 years of experience, Sergei has left his design mark on giants like Microsoft, Heathrow, and British Gas. As the founder of the School of UX, he brings a unique perspective to the podcast, blending technical skills with a passion for problem solving and a touch of Nordic charm. Get ready for a podcast filled with insights about the business side of the UX. Let’s start with the show.

Layshi: Hello, everybody. This is a new episode of If U Seek. Here’s your host, Layshi Curbelo. I’m super happy to have a new guest speaker here on the podcast with me today. It’s Sergei. How are you, Sergei?

Sergei: Hi, Layshi. Thanks for inviting me. I’m good, you?

Layshi: I’m great, I’m taking my coffee this morning. I mean, it’s a morning for me. I don’t know about you.

Sergei: It’s already lunchtime.

Layshi: It’s already lunchtime. So, I’m from Puerto Rico and you are recording from?

Sergei: London,

Layshi: London, nice, nice, you know, every just casual international podcast recording. So happy to have you the opportunity to learn from you in this episode of the business side of UX design. So I see that you are quite active in the UX community. How do your background and experience contribute to shaping your career currently?

Sergei: I think what helped me a lot in my career is all those site projects I’ve been working on whilst doing freelancing. Overall, I think I’ve done about 20 site projects from online marketplace for art to platform for activities for seniors over 55s. And I think this is where I learned that the full product design process is much more than just UX, your whole planning, designing, launching, finding product market fit, admin, legal, support, business development. I was wearing so many hats and that’s what helped me to develop my UX design skills further. I failed, having said that I failed so many times, I have, have made a mistake of coding things right away for one of the projects and not invested enough into user research and marketing.

So when people talk about this overnight success, it’s a myth and you will never really learn without a failure and the, yeah, I’ve been in freelancing for, for quite a while and I would always recommend try to diversify your, your industries where you work. I’ve been just thinking, remember all the projects I’ve done in education, housing, accounting, motorcycling, childcare, food, healthcare, art, it really broadens outlook and helps you stay sharp compared to if you just niche out in one industry and for a long time and probably you’re going to stagnate.

I’m not saying you will, but yeah. And I think the third thing which, which helped me in my career would be that my colleagues call me deviner, this concoction term they come up for mix of designer-developer. And this is where I’ve learned different types of programming languages, HTML, CSS, C-sharp JavaScript. And knowing this and how technology works helps with understanding technical feasibility. It’s like no matter how pretty our wireframes look, if developers cannot implement them, they are useless. Like if you look at Dribble or, or, Behance portfolios of designers full of design mockups style of this, you know, minority, minority report with Tom Cruise. Full of gimmicks which you’ll never really see on a real website or up in the real world because they don’t bring much value a and, or it was difficult to, to develop.

So yeah, I would say side projects, freelance in different industries and, and knowing how to code and technical feasibility were the three aspects, which I would say helped me a lot in my career.

Layshi: So I love what, I love your answer. And another thing that you mentioned that I think is super, super important about like failures, right? Like you can see your screen and you are designing something great. And you notice that something is not working. You spend so many hours doing that draw or doing that specific design that it’s so bad to just throw it away. But if you start doing it in a paper and you see that in paper, it doesn’t work, throwing a paper is not so bad that throwing a Figma file after five hours, you know, so failures are important in order to start learning. And depend on how much time you spend on your failures, it’s, it’s the time that sometimes it will take you to actually understand it.

Sergei: Totally. Totally. I play chess a lot online and usually, including myself, when people lose the game, they never go and do analysis of the game, but when they win the game, they do what they look through, what they’ve done But guys, deep dive into what moves you made wrong in the games which you lost, which is important

Layshi: And you mentioned something at the final that I love it. This concept about designer and developer, by the way, sometimes I feel that I can be like product, event production / podcast audio something and designer, but I never have the time to correct combination. So I will have that task for later.

Sergei: I think, listen, I’m, I, there’s been a lot of shitstorm on, on, on LinkedIn and social media about the unicorns. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re a product designer, UX designer, UI designer, if you’re happy to do all of this that’s fine. Just Make sure you don’t burn out. So I burned out some time ago. Unfortunately couldn’t work for a couple of years. So health is more important. Screw UX if health is on the line, but yeah, I think unicorns are fine. Don’t bash us.

Layshi: The thing that I like is like this is the really near to the to the concept about T shape, right? You have a general understanding of all the things that are important in the industry, but also you have a sort of type of specialization on something and talking about this, how your experience as both as developer and designer shape your approach to solving business challenges like specifically balancing creative design that is super important for designers but also technical requirements that that’s a little bit of the side of the business right and keep it that really on track with the business objectives.

Sergei: I always emphasize be good friends with developers, software developers. They’re the ones going to be implementing your UI in the end. I know that deadline is always yesterday and it’s always difficult to kind of a make both the business and users happy. It’s like an acrobat walking on a tightrope in circus. A lot of times we forget that even our prototypes in Figma are throwaway prototypes, right?

We can reuse, of course, certain things. But if you can, and deadline is yesterday, you should be working directly with developers and maybe prototyping in code straight away, right? So we can get the prototype out there and, and test it. There’s nothing wrong with that compared to just keeping, keep designing stacks of Figma wireframes, which developers won’t anyways have time to look at. But yeah, there’s, there’s this challenge of kind of satisfying users, satisfying business. You may call these business decisions dark UX or deceptive UX. I call it making profit, just get over it really, because if there’s no, if business not making profit, it’s going to be game over for you as a designer end of the day because there’s no salary to pay.

So yeah, I would say have good relationship with business stakeholders, have good relationships with developers and stakeholders. Yes, they can be a lot of opinionated ones. A lot of those, it’s my way or highway cowboys, I think sometimes you just need to plow on and with things which are uncomfortable you will be shoveling in this politics on your own. If you don’t make friends with project leads and business analysts, yeah, I would say being a UX designer is less glamorous than all those Tiktokers, TikTok influencers portrayed really, you know. And I would say, you know, that with UX, you won’t please everyone and that’s okay.

Business might see UX design or UX designers and UX teams as disruptive taking parts of their budget, obstacles in making decisions. Because before UX designers, they just made a decision. It was developed by developers already. Right. But now it’s like, oh, there’s bloody UX designers. Before I, before I make any decision, I need to run research on this, you know. Sometimes not everything needs to be validated. Gut feeling is fine. And at the same time, you can have users who hate you because I don’t want to sound too philosophical, but as UX designers, we’re industry of making other people redundant.

For example, I worked on a piece of software for a call center and when I did user interviews with those workers there and asking them, “Hey, what do you think of the new design I’m planning to propose” which will reduce the time it takes for those workers to on a call and they hated the whole idea because in the end it means well hang on so it’s less time required from us which means we’re going to be be fired in the end so probably, we’re not going to tell Sergei that this is a great piece of software you’re suggesting. And yeah, I think, I think, kind of feels, as a designer, to see the bigger picture, what value your design is bringing. Nobody really cares whether your corner radius of a button is 7 or 8 pixels. Customers really won’t notice difference.

But then business and developers, you’re wasting their time on something that doesn’t bring value. So yeah, work with developers more, work with business more. Otherwise most of the times we end up with pretty wires and UX and crutches. And yeah, I would say this is important to have everyone on your as your friend, but not always everyone’s going to like you. And that’s okay. And that’s okay.

Layshi: Yeah. You remember me a good experience that I was having on a previous job. You mentioned that you need your it’s more than a friend. I think it’s an ally, right? It’s it’s a person that actually is in the same boat with you and want to actually help you to move the boat.

I remember one time that I was in a company and every time they say talk about your talk with your developers, talk with your project managers, but I was having some friends and other departments and I’d spend lunch. I’d spend a little bit of time here, there in the breakfast. And I remember having a friend on the customer service department. And he always told me like, what are you doing on that department? That, the calls are spiking. Like last week it was too much work. And I was like, really? We changed our dashboard and he was like, I hate it. Every time that you guys do something and start having a conversation with him in the mornings, actually show me the implications of my designs on his workload.

And it was like, Oh, maybe I need to talk more with him about like, what are the needs, what are the problems that they have? Actually, when I moved just a pixel for the CTA for him, it was like a backlog of Three to four hours. So I start working with him more closely and we start actually putting like the numbers really high but it was because we have this kind of relationship of okay I think I will do this because I have a hypothesis about it. What do you think about? Of course, he doesn’t understand some of the technicals, like wording or the aspect. But he’s like, maybe if you change that button, people start like, just, I don’t know, getting nuts.

So it was super nice having this kind of conversation and it’s not only customer service in our cases. It’s, it’s also like talking to sales, talking to marketing, talking to even accounting, like understanding the entire business and how our designs actually make an impact in different part of the business.

Sergei: Correct. Correct. And sometimes it will be very painful conversations because yes, business is trying to save money and replace customer service with, with AI chatbot. But then you can see that you’re designing software to do that, to help do that. And, and, and, and your actual users hate you is difficult. Again, there’s no glamour in the UX world.

Layshi: There is no glamour. Yep. I agree. Now, many sources discuss the benefit of user experience in business. That’s, that’s, that’s one of the most things that people cover in terms of creating content. But do we really comprehend and understand the advantages of understanding UX?

Like sometimes I talk with designers and they say like, UX is important. Why? And even us, it’s hard to answer that question. I don’t know about you and, and we will get there. I have a question for you, but I’ve been in situations, even talking with my grandma, what are the things that you do? And then I start talking about how important is designing her life. And then it’s like, okay, she don’t get it. I think I don’t explain it well. Maybe I really don’t know what it is about. So taking advantage of the opportunity to discuss this with you, I would like to ask you, what are the key business benefits of investing in a strong UX design?

Sergei: You can throw eggs at me but only organic and free range, please. I think, I think UX design is overhyped. I think there’s much more to a successful project product service website app than just a strong UX. You have marketing, you have business development, you have sales. You may have fantastic UX design of your website or app or service and great customer service, but then your competitor with less fancy website but cheaper pricing is somehow getting all the customers.

For example, Ryanair and Norwegian Airlines, who apparently won awards for most accessible website. Which one people select when flying? Ryanair. Okay. Yes. Website is crap. Experience on a flight is awful, but it’s cheap. Cheap and not necessarily cheerful. Fine. Words about UX, I don’t know. So, but you know, having said that, I think strong, accessible UX opens doors to many more users. And I would say when your customers are recommending you to others without you having to go and splurge money on advertising, which is very expensive these days, that’s when UX dividends pay off.

Or another example could be national railway or even train, different train companies, websites in UK and train line. So whenever I used to to travel across the UK for work or for leisure I used to go on a specific train line website. And book tickets through there. It was painful. There were a lot of errors. Whenever I make a choice and tickets run out, I have to start a whole journey from scratch. And then the rail cards didn’t work and so on and so forth. And I thought, Oh my goodness, I’m spending so much on that because tickets cost hundreds of pounds and this is painful. And then there is a train line website and app trainline.com, I believe. And there, you have to pay 1 pound 50 as a booking fee, but they aggregate all the train lines in one application. You can so much easily book, even, even quickly rebook tickets, and the tickets are already on your phone. But you pay 1.50 for that. And you know what, sometimes I go, I’m not gonna go individual train websites. I’m gonna go on trainline and pay 1.50. I don’t wanna have this miserable experience again and waste all that time. So yeah, that’s another one. I would say.

Layshi: Interesting and and I think you almost almost answer my my next question, but I think I will answer first because I want to like a little bit more of you on that. Sometimes as designers, we, we think that everything needs to look gorgeous and we don’t take advantage of the strategy behind the UX. And I remember one of my clients. And he always asked me the horrible ideas on the world. Like he asked me, like, can you put this CTA like round corners, but like orange, but with comic sans or something super horrible. Like, why? Because users really like uncomfortable things. And I was like, no, that is not the thing. And it was super funny because it was like a conversation. Well, sometimes it was more almost like a fight, but it was like a conversation and an agreement in terms of a strategies besides like taste and how good needs to be the user experience in terms of how it looks versus the actual strategy and the, this, the strategy that are behind and, and the outline and, and, and all the different psychological concept behind user experience.

So I’m want to ask you, what are some of the common misconceptions about the business value of the UX design? Because for me, I think people think that design needs to be pretty and we solve problems and sometimes we solve problems in a creative way, but not necessarily in the most beautiful ways.

Sergei: Good question. Misconceptions, business value of UX design. I would say, you shouldn’t expect immediate results. You should expect, you should set expectations to your clients and business’s management that whenever I gonna do UX design improvements on your site or web or app or service or product, it’s not going to immediately bring in a flick of a finger results. It is going to be small incremental improvements. Everyone believes that all is going to be successful from the first time. Nothing will be successful from this time. And, and, and again, yes, you can put this UI design sprinkles and micro interactions, but you shouldn’t neglect business side of things. And I always ask designers and emphasize that guys see a bigger picture.

If I pay you as a UX designer, let’s say 50,000 pounds a year. How can I get your, my money back with at least the same amount, which, which I’ve invested. So you, okay. You can make you can spend a one year in, in designing dark mode for my UI. Okay. What they promise you that make. Right. So, yeah, I would say main misconception is that it immediately, immediate results and it should pay more attention to the business side of things.

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Layshi: I remember some clients saying to me, Oh, we changed the design and it has been one week. What is going on with the conversion rate?

Sergei: Correct. Correct.

Layshi: It’s not just like a click, okay? You need to wait and be patient.

Sergei: Correct. Exactly. And it should be working. I think for a lot of designers, The UX design work ends when they just chucked a bunch of wireframes and prototypes to a business or developers.

No, you should be working with developers, you should be working with business, iterating on design, seeing what works, what doesn’t. It doesn’t mean you’re experimenting, well, you might, but, like, you never know. There’s no such template which you can apply in every e-commerce store, in every healthcare dashboard, where a lot of people, a lot of designers are looking for this sort of, oh, what’s a common pattern for this? It can be unique to each business

Layshi: Because of that magic recipe that we are talking about, right? That there is not such as a recipe for each industry. I know that this next question, it will be a little bit hard. So sorry, Sergei, how can business measure return of investment on their UX design efforts? Because like every industry is different. Every company is different, but we know that, we have like a sort type of minimums or sort type of also like like concepts that we can use to actually measure return of investment. What is your opinion on that?

Sergei: It’s difficult. And there is no such reports. You can go and download and say how much money the UX saved I’ve made. I would say one check on Google Analytics. Or whatever analytics you use and see conversions after that specific date when the UX improvement or new feature was implemented. Check the number of maybe work with support team, check the number of tickets supporting has been raised by customers. So maybe. Is it, are they moaning less, compared to before? Right? Check reviews on app store, Google play store, whatever store or whatever store you, you are selling or publishing your app through, check your trust pilot reviews.

Actually I would say those review websites can be, can be a good base for even research to see what most problems people have within your service, a product, the website. And support team, of course, because imagine like usually people go to support him when there’s something really bad happened, right? And I keep bashing and bashing bashing. Nobody called support. So hey, I just want to say your website is great. Your app is great. Nobody does this, right? So and then they go and take, you know, the take all negative energy out on the review websites. And you know what? I mean, yeah, it’s quite negative, but read through it. And make notes, take actionable insights, hopefully out of that. I would say don’t check social media comments. They’re full of trolls, unless your customer base is trolls. You don’t know. Check the bank account. Oh yeah. I would say.

Layshi: I love when you mentioned the bank account, I think it was, that was, I was not expecting that one, but it’s one of the best ones. No, definitely. I think when you mentioned Google analytics, I think some, some UX designers sometimes are thrown off about like checking data analytics in like in general. It’s hard to see that you actually build a Lego and that Lego fall in parts, but it’s needed. Super, super needed. And when you see actually the numbers of your things is the moment that you can start learning. Right. So yeah, I love those, those recommendations.

So we talk about a little bit of how people from the business sides can actually learn from UX and the things that they need to start making like a more attention into UX. But in the other hand, I mean in a positive way, right? When companies recognize the value of UX, however, what happens when we as designers become so focused on users, that we forget sometimes working on company’s business side, right?

Like I can be hours just on my Figma file and checking like my designs, my colors, my interactions, the prototype, how we can improve our approach to do the balance, right? In terms of both perspectives. So, my question for you, how UX designers commonly navigate the challenges of balancing user satisfaction with business requirements, including practical constraints as timelines, budgets, and all of the things that we don’t like.

Sergei: Yeah. Like I mentioned before work with product leads, work with business analysts work with project managers and they are the ones who will help you to shovel those unfortunate politics. Understand what business people actually need compared to what they say they want. I think you should be comfortable with spreadsheets to track performance. And literally write down the conversion rates.

And for the business side of things, show the chart, how it’s going up or down or hopefully up. And yeah, you also need to convince the business in the value of UX design. So I would say run the show and tell open days, let’s say book a meeting room. Like you have the conferences you can run a mini conference in within your company and say, hey, today’s a UX open day, come to meeting room seven, and we’re going to show you what we have designed in the past quarter. What things we found out about our customers and a) is going to drum up business for you r UX team B) is going to show your business stakeholders how progress is being made in UX and what value adds and shows transparency to to the business.

You can even invite them to his ability testing sessions. Really, that’s where you can actually make them an observer, when you’re doing usability testing session, and they will see there is a customer.. their own costumer in front of us. And you see how you are taking the insights from interview with them and applying on a design, and they can follow up with their with their questions afterwards, too.

So, yeah. And of course, with users, you know, the more you listen to them, the better. So we can also organize the paid ideally usability testing sessions because, you know, the last thing I want to do is when what was it? Heathrow airport sent me a invite to take part in the user research, don’t worry, it’s just going to take 45 minutes. Okay. So am I working for you? Are you going to pay for that, compared to, guys, let’s say in Eventbrite. Sergei, we are looking for your help to improve our Eventbrite platform. Here is X amount of money we’re going to pay to you for one hour with us. Okay. It makes sense. And yeah. Pass ideas through your customers get insights, get the feedback.

Layshi: And no, no, I just love your, your advice about like inviting people to see your UX process. I was talking with one of my colleagues about visibility and how hard it’s to be visible on a company that has like a lot of different employees in different departments and how you can actually show your work. And as you mentioned, it’s so simple, but sometimes we are so shy that we don’t have the courage to say, hey, look at my work, just sit down and see what I’m doing and sit down and see how we can actually make the company better. Like, give me your ideas, bring me your feedback. It’s so simple just to like get together, but sometimes we forget that we can do those simple things.

It’s just like having a UX day. It’s, it’s just an amazing advice. Like really, really like it, Sergei. Really like it. You mentioned, you tried to explain what you do to your family. A lot of departments within your office probably don’t know what the hell is UX, some some of us are UX designers. Okay, so it means that you know, there’s a lot to learn and great fine there’s a chance to explain and maybe they’re gonna become client of your service within the company.

What you can do just print out starting from your user journey, right? And so this this user journey before is only after look at conversion rates. You can print out screenshots of your, of your mockups and maybe put a stash of post-It notes for people to leave feedback what they think. You can even do things like in supermarkets you do this little plastic coins. You drop in a basket for which charity you want supermarket to donate to, and you can do A/B testing, like put two of this, of this, all this bin with with coins and say, Hey, which design you prefer? This one or this one? And people put coins in there, kind of, it’s interactive. It brings people into to your UX area. And yeah, you kind of again, advertising what you do and then showing the value and put on a screen, even video recordings of when you run is usability testing sessions you know with, with, with actually recording of customers.

Layshi: It’s just so good. I hope the audience have an notepad and taking notes of this. So, one of the other things that I want to actually talk to you and learn from you. It’s like, we have a lot of people there that.. They think that they don’t talk the same language of the stakeholders. And happened to me one time when I, when I was starting the UX career, it was like, okay, so I know how I can talk about interactions.

I know how I can talk about user journey, but when I sit down with a CEO, they don’t care, they want to understand how these actually make money. And even is the same language as English. It’s hard to communicate with them and talk in their language in terms of numbers, in terms of the things that they make, that they feel are important. So I would like to understand if you have a little bit of advice, or how can UX designers measure and communicate the business impact of their design decisions to non design stakeholders?

Business people are extremely likely to be friends with Excel and reports and charts and graphs. So I guess to get your PowerPoint across, set up analytics, track conversions, and not only number of visits, because whenever designers look into analytics, they only think about number of visits and events which not necessarily conversions, subscription, purchases, customer retentions, referrals of or repost and so forth.

So it’s meaningful conversions, which are going to bring money to the business. And this is when, if you only keep talking about number of visits to the website, to a business stakeholder and not actually, telling how much money has been made on that or conversions being made. It’s pointless. It’s the same as speaking about, Oh, look, we have a responsive website now responsive. What does it mean? You’re talking about, Oh, we now use ems instead of a pixels for, for font sizes. Okay. Good for you. But how does, how does it make me more money? Right. So yeah. Conversions, learn how to set them up, work with marketing team, work with developers on that with website or app and learn how analyze that data. Because otherwise, if you’re just looking at number of views on your website and apps, it’s like, what’s his joke about about Silicon Valley, 1 million people walk into Silicon Valley bar, nobody buys a drink, but the bar is declared a success. It’s like, well, who have one million people, but nobody bought anything, but Silicon Valley standards, you know, it’s great. That’s the thing, no conversion like what’s the point. So yeah. And if, and you will have this very opinionated business stakeholders, non design, no design background, and that’s fine. You speak this like business language with them. You explain to them conversions, which happened and what, and why, and why not.

And probably you can also listen to what they suggest the solution could be and run A/B test, right? So instead of arguing, instead of fighting, how about we set up A/B test within the same couple of weeks, we run two variations of design. What business stakeholder suggested, what you suggested and see which one is winning, because it’s not always designers who create winning designs really, make everyone involved really.

Layshi: I have another, I don’t know if you can say advice but this is a strategy that always worked with for me and, and I will, I will give you a little bit of context and then I will give you the questions. But for me has been humanized my designs.

Like, I have to explain my designs, but sometimes when I have the actual data, I just put quotes, quotes from my user research from the things that, that my user says about a specific interaction. And when stakeholders see that it’s like, okay, not only work, people really like it and they think this about this and humanize the design also make a huge impact of the company because they are star actually seeing the pro as solving a problem for their customers or clients. So I think storytelling help a lot, but I want to actually ask you what role those storytelling play in communicating the business rationale behind UX design decision to diverse stakeholders.

Sergei: I think you can present this charts and diagrams and graphs, they’re quite insightful, but quite dry. You can present them user flow with a step by step actions. It’s also dry, but then you can show the storyboard with illustrations of how a customer used their their app or website or product or service and that tells a kind of a contextual story.

For example, imagine we’re designing an insurance company checkout page and you have to report on how UX changes you implemented have improved conversions, for example, you could have said “Hey boss, look, our conversion rates for this insurance add on has dropped by 3.5 percent due to UX writing implementation of a new legal copy” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe you could have paraphrased and say, listen, quite a few people stopped buying insurance addon on our, when they subscribe to our service, because they, we’ve removed the legal disclaimer saying that the 14-day cancellation period is out there. So yeah, as I say, humanizing paraphrasing the lingo, really.

Layshi: I love the dry part. Your designs can feel a little bit dry. You need to know, put a little bit of spark there.

Sergei: Correct. Correct. And I always emphasize don’t be scared to ask business person, what business problem they have. A lot of times we start designing something without really understanding the business problem behind it. So it’s a both way communication. Not necessarily only they asking you questions, but you ask them like, Hey, what, what challenges your business has got? How can I help you? Instead of jumping straight away into your design tools

Layshi: This is the best way to end this, this amazing episode, understanding that design needs to be a collaborative process, not only just sit down and make this beautiful design. So I know we are getting to the end of the episode, but before we go, I want to thank you, Sergei, for sharing your knowledge with all our audience of If U Seek. I’ve been passing a great time with you. I hope that you too.

Sergei: Oh, I have indeed. Thanks so much for inviting me. I, I love all of this UX, UX banters.

Layshi: Well, thank you so much and we’ll be to the next episode of If U Seek.

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