In September of 2018 something weird happened in the Vend Slack. Our Chief Engineering Officer followed up his request for folks to submit their engagement survey with an offer of a 5% pay bump to all engineers who submitted their survey. Hang on? What. Something was up—this was obviously not…

Over the last few years I’ve been thinking a lot about reviewing design work. Here’s why: During a round of 360s with my team, we picked up an undercurrent of “Hey, glad you can tell us how to improve—could you also tell us what we’re doing well?” On Twitter, I…

I’m looking for somebody to join my team. Our team has been growing steadily since I started at Vend four and a half years ago. From a few embedded, but isolated designers, we pulled back into a centralised Product Design team. Then we tidied up and consolidated our design language…

I’ve just come out of a quick meeting with our design team, the agenda: Styles or Symbols? We’ve thus far been using nested Symbols for things like “easily change the background colour for a button” or “easily switch which corner the tether is for a popover.” For some of those…

Product companies always want to do more. And then some more. And are ultimately frustrated when they can’t get to do everything they want. Even when they hire and grow. And this gets worse over time. Why does this happen? And how do we fix it? High School Economics Is Our Analogy In high school I…

Recently a company called “Bodega” has hit the headlines. Their aim was to use technology (fancy vending machines) to destroy bodegas and mom ‘n pop shops (dairies, for New Zealanders) across America. This is another tech company who is completely missing humanity in their vision for the future. Apple get…

I make very hard-line rules with my design team and expect them to have a very good argument for breaking them—and then we probably re-assess the entire rule. This is to protect our users, from our egos. Or our whims. (Btw, we’re hiring, if this sounds fun!) I’ve become well-known…

Last time I wrote here, I introduced two big things and explained how in 2017, as a Product Design Team, we were tackling the second big thing. I also alluded to the fact that as a company we had made great strides in the first big thing. Let’s recap. The…

My name is Ludwig and I started at Vend almost 18 months ago. I stepped into a new role called “Director of UX”. The first thing I did was spend some time interviewing everyone who worked in (or with) the Product Design group to help see what the lay of…