#1 Designing Travel Experiences with Tales Ebner
Our first design interview is with Tales who joined the Kiwi.com Experience Design team in January 2018. He has been a designer for 19 years and previously worked in São Paulo, Brazil. Find out where he gets his inspiration from, what he’s working on and if he sees any difference between being a designer in Brazil and in the Czech Republic.
Hi Tales, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Let’s jump right into the interview.
How did you get started in design?
I have been drawing since I was 3 years old. So it was natural to seek a career in which I could put my illustration skills into practice. I considered fine arts, but it was in my first job, making prints and visual communication for a fashion brand, that I realised that design would be my life’s profession. For me, Mondays are just the beginning of joy.
Wow, that is a great start to a career. How did you get into UX specifically?
My concern with users started at Telefónica in 2005. We needed to fit our desktop elements into tiny mobile screens (at the time we were working with 240x320 pixels or less). This made me start thinking for the first time about how to make the user experience better.
Afterwards at Terra Networks, I worked closely with UX, but it was at BNP Paribas Cardif when I first performed the role of UX Designer.
Please, can we see some of your illustrations?
Yes, sure!
What was the biggest lesson of your career?
Be as close as possible to the best professionals. You will learn a lot from them, and they will be glad to teach you.
Do you have someone in mind? For example from a previous job?
Yes, Filipe Fedalto who’s still a great friend of mine to this day. He is not a designer, but I learned how to become a better professional from him and also how to think about the company’s side of things.
One designer I’d like to mention is Tatiana Yamada, with whom I had the pleasure of working with at Itaú Unibanco. She is one of the best professionals in the design area that I’ve ever met. She was one of the people responsible for redesigning the Itaú app from scratch and has an impressive eye for strategic design.
Can you mention 3 people who inspire you and why? (designers, entrepreneurs, artists…)
- Leonardo da Vinci — He was centuries ahead of his generation. He created innovative objects, studied the human body and was curious from birth. He did things in ways that had never been done before and he was pure genius!
- Aloísio Magalhães — He was the pioneer of modern design in Brazil and created some of the most iconic logos for a wide variety of companies. Without him, I would not be a designer.
- Steve Jobs — 9 out of 10 designers cite Steve Jobs as their inspiration (no research made). And here’s why: he created one of the largest companies in the world, was fired from it and came back to put it on top again. He did this by creating different forms of interaction with already known objects and customers as their number one priority.
What are you currently working on at Kiwi.com?
Can I say it here? Is it not confidential? 😆
I am working on three projects:
- KAPla (Kiwi.com Affiliate Platform) — an external system to help our affiliate partners generate and manage reports for our widgets, allowing them to check their performance. We are putting it on steroids to make the most out of it by connecting some new services.
- Refer a Friend — we are improving our current referral program with new cool features to engage users and increase conversions. We will change a lot of things in the entire journey, including making it easier!
- Future of Ancillaries — Kiwi.com is so cheap that sometimes we do not earn any money from some bookings. That is why ancillaries are so important: they allow us to make some profit on these bookings. We are already working on a solution for today, but we also want to make it future-proof.
Do you see a cultural difference of UX thinking between the Czech Republic and Brazil?
Not really. With few exceptions, companies are learning to deal with customer-driven business and it translates into different levels of maturity. In a globalised world, you cannot make money without the customer; so, the user experience is gaining in strength, whether in Brazil, the Czech Republic or Dingleton.
Are you working on any side projects?
At the moment I am entirely focused on my work at Kiwi.com. But I have a side project inside the company. It is a comic strip series dedicated to funny day-to-day situations.
Did you do any interesting side projects in the past?
One project that I really enjoyed was a mobile poker game I made. I’d never done anything like this before and was really proud of myself afterwards. I was responsible for the layouts and some studies of the interface button placement.
Where can people follow your work & life?
tales.ebner@kiwi.com
linkedin.com/in/talesebner
behance.net/talesebner
facebook.com/tales.ebner
twitter.com/talesebner
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