Meet the team — Kevin
Hi! I’m Kevin and I’m a designer and partner at DUX. As a designer I’m involved with a couple long term projects, but I’m also happy to work on smaller projects with which we try to push ourselves to create something with a bigger visual impact. As a creative/design lead I’m involved with kicking off projects’ visual design process and reviewing the work before it goes to the client.
What is UX/UI design for you?
Well it all comes down to being just design, right? Everything you do as a designer should take into account the user’s experience. Otherwise you’re not designing, you’re just producing something.
UX/UI, in our context of digital interfaces, is also not something easily taken apart from each other. The border is extremely blurry, because they affect each other in every way possible. It depends a bit on where you draw the line as well: you can be a UX designer who’s actually more a UX researcher. And you can be a UI designer who’s more a visual designer. That’s why I’m generally speaking not a huge fan of the term, but you know, everything needs a label. We keep it simple and we just say we design interfaces.
…Anyway, before I get sucked into my own created black hole of role definitions. Ideally what UX/UI design should do is make any and all interactions with the user clear and easy, but also delight if possible. At its best it’s invisible to the user because that just means everything worked as they expected. At it’s worst your design just lost your client their client.
Favourite part of the design process
Definitely one of my favourite parts nowadays is the time you can spend talking to the client and — ideally — the users of the product you’re helping design. To be able to have a sit-down with the people behind the product, at any time during the design process, is incredibly valuable. And it takes us away from the screen as well, which is a nice bonus.
Despite saying that however, I also do really still enjoy being hands-on when it comes to the UI design. This can be at any point, whether it’s concept ideation, wireframing, static visual design or animation. Sometimes it can feel really great when you’re tweaking the interface to get things just right.
Additionally, although it’s not really part of our professional design process I enjoy being a guest tutor in the Estonian Art Academy’s Interaction Design Masters program. We have a tendency of hiring promising designers from the program and help them grow as designers in a professional setting.
What’s a design myth you want to abolish?
That design is limited to visualisation. Design starts with the asking of questions, defining problems and finding solutions to those problems. The visualisation of the solutions is only a small part of the entire design process but since it is the easiest to show, it often gets credited a higher importance. It is the first contact point for a lot of people, but the underlying mechanics are often overlooked. People usually only see the final result, not the hours of research, work and iteration that lead to that result.
Spotlight projects
We generally categorise our projects in long term and short term cooperations. The long term ones are usually heavy on processes with complex user flows and involve a lot of analysing, mapping and wireframing followed by several iteration rounds–before and/or after the launch. The short terms ones have more of a visual emphasis. I will mention a couple per category.
Citizen OS
An online decision making platform, it enables participative discussion and voting for groups, where getting everyone together into the same room or online at the same time is not an option. For example an old lady who is not so quick on her feet anymore, can still have her voice heard on Citizen OS.
It’s a project I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with for 5 years already now, so we can really iterate and improve on it as we get more user feedback on experiences. It’s also a platform that hopefully at one point can improve a lot of existing bureaucratic processes. Designers should help make the world a better place and I know this is a very idealistic viewpoint, but with Citizen OS I feel that we’re kind of heading in that direction.
Ridango Ticketing System
Another long term cooperation as we’re heading into our 3rd year in 2019. Ridango creates ticketing systems for public transport. They have clients in Scandinavia and the Baltics and DUX is their UX/UI partner. So far we have helped with designing platforms for Elron, Movingo and Klaipeda and currently we’re working on a design system to improve reusability and consistency throughout the different clients’ platforms. The services range from websites to mobile apps and self-service POS.
Iglucraft
An e-commerce website where the emphasis was on visual storytelling, Iglucraft has had a bit of a roller coaster ride since it was launched. Thanks to the amazing marketing efforts of the client the website reached A-list celebrities like Guy Ritchie and David Beckham. It also won the Awwwards User’s Choice E-commerce Site Of The Year.
