Experience Designer Andrew Fung

A conversation about experience design, agency work that transforms businesses and the power of bedtime stories

Andrew came to Domain7 earlier this year as one of the design minds behind Vancouver startup Bench where he helped redefine what an accounting service can be. Since then, he has worked his magic on our team and with our clients, helping us build human-centred products, services and organizations. It’s something he is truly passionate about.

Another one of Andrew’s passions is his adorable Malchi puppy Barry. Barry loves to make guest appearance on team calls when Andrew is working from home and busy multitasking between researching and designing thoughtful experiences, while keeping Barry from eating his earphones. Or the furniture. Or his own tail. Despite Barry’s protest—and fervent attempts to get Andrew’s attention—Andrew sat down with us to chat about experience design, the benefits of agency work that transforms businesses from the ground up, and a bedtime story that still defines what gives him purpose today.

What do you do at Domain7?

I’m an experience designer, so my job is to design experiences for users, clients, employees and executives. That includes both product and service design. Depending on the project, I might step into the role of a product designer or if the project focuses on consulting, I take on the role of service designer.

What are some principles that guide your work?

People first, business second, technology third. It’s a bit like rings on a tree. The innermost ring is people, and the next one is business organizations — understanding a company and its constraints. The third one is technology, because technology facilitates interactions between people and organizations.

Why do you believe in a human-centered approach when working with organizations?

It think it’s the right approach, because at the core of it, no one wants a website, a product, an app, or even strategy. People don’t buy that. They buy outcomes.

There’s that quote from the Jobs-to-be-Done theory: People don’t want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole, so they can stick a nail in it and hang a picture. Hanging the picture is the outcome. The drill is just a means to an end. A marketing website is just the means to an outcome: business growth — a higher conversion rate and more sales, and brand awareness.

You could even go one layer deeper: For example, when you buy headphones, you buy them to listen to music. Why do you do that? Because you want to relax. Because you want to enjoy yourself.

As a designer and as a strategist, my job is to dig into those layers and identify the outcomes and goals that matter. And those goals are always tied to people’s motivation and needs, so it makes perfect sense to put people first if you want to create a site or a product that’s going to be successful.

If there is such a thing as a universal mandate for designers, strategists, technologists, it should be to serve others.

Throughout a project, do you usually wear different hats?

Yes. Definitely. At the beginning, I usually begin in a strategist role before putting any pixels or words on a screen, and I do a lot of research to understand: Who are we serving through this product or website? Who is involved in which capacity? What does success mean?

After that I shift into design mode. And then I usually loop back to research or strategy, as needed. I mean, throughout most of the process you are to some degree wearing all three of these hats — strategist, researcher, designer. It’s just a matter of which one you are focusing most on, given the situation.

What is one thing that most people don’t know about you?

I have this ritual that I do every morning, where I slowly brew my coffee, pour-over-style. It’s such a small thing, but staying in touch with every step of the process — the water temperature, the grind, the type of coffee — sets the tone for the rest of the day. It reminds me to bring that thoughtfulness and intention to my work.

What gives you purpose in your work?

At a fundamental level, I want to serve people. And when I say I want to serve them, I mean I want to look at people’s intentions, goals, desires and behavior and find the best path forward to make their life better — systematically better.

I’m particularly interested in tackling challenges in areas where people usually don’t have a choice: areas like senior care, insurance, healthcare, financial services. Those areas especially deserve our attention, because we all have to engage with these systems, whether we like it or not. And they have a huge impact on our wellbeing and quality of life. Why shouldn’t these systems and interactions be thoughtfully designed? It’s not even an option in my mind. If there is such a thing as a universal mandate for designers, strategists, technologists, it should be to serve others.

Can you speak a bit more to that? That mandate to serve others?

I’m a huge comic book enthusiast, so I’m going to quote Marvel. And I’m totally aware that this might make me sound ridiculous, but do you remember the original Spider-Man movies? With great power comes great responsibility. It’s the idea that if you’re given the ability to impact the behaviors of thousands, hundred thousands, millions of people, are you going to use it to drive more revenue for the sake of growth? Or are you going to use that ability to genuinely help people connect and care for each other?

I really believe that this whole idea of hyper-growth startups is misguided. The pursuit for hyper growth with no purpose is meaningless. Growing your business shouldn’t be a goal, but a means to helping the people your business serves. It’s really important that organizations don’t lose sight of that.

It’s important to make decisions based on outcomes that truly serve people, as opposed to data, metrics or KPIs.

When you look towards the future, what are you excited about?

In the traditional agency model, you are sometimes pigeonholed into just building a piece of technology for the client that might not be what that particular client actually needs. It might not even serve their organization’s vision and purpose.

I think more and more agencies are moving closer to a strategic perspective, actually transforming how organizations operate. That’s definitely Domain7’s approach, so I’m really excited about working here in an environment that focuses on collaboration, on co-designing with the client, and relationship building in general.

I am also excited about people genuinely starting to take empathy in business seriously. It’s being rigorously debated right now and that gives me hope that empathy is going to be a fundamental part of building an organization — something that’s embedded as an irreplaceable value. Seeing large, financially successful organizations like Airbnb champion it is really exciting to me.

Empathy is a big buzzword in the world of design right now. What does empathy in design mean to you?

Empathy is a deep understanding of how and why people behave in a certain way so that the decisions made in a business-, product- or service-context are grounded in people’s needs, as opposed to their desires and wants.

To me, the idea of empathy in a design-context is closely connected to the idea of bias. We have to accept that all our decisions are biased. There is no such thing as completely objective decisions. Even if your decision-making process is data-driven. Behind those data points is someone who decides what to measure and that person is biased, too. So, it kind of goes back to what I said earlier: It’s important to make decisions based on outcomes that truly serve people, as opposed to data, metrics or KPIs.

How can we achieve that?

A lot of it comes down to leadership in an organization. I don’t think this is something that can purely be done from the bottom up. Leadership has to be on board or else empathy at a grassroots level is going to be drowned out in the face of traditional business mentality.

On a more practical, project-based level, I think we can’t emphasize the importance of research enough. Research often gets a bad rep and it’s typically associated with academic research, but research in a design-context is more about understanding and defining the problem better, which is really crucial to sound decision-making — both at the product level and at the organization level.

Be ready for your assumptions to turn out one-sided and to learn that the truth is something completely different than what you thought.

What is something you’ve learned throughout your career — a key insight you weren’t necessarily aware of when you started out?

Be ready to be proven wrong. Be ready for your assumptions to turn out one-sided and to learn that the truth is something completely different than what you thought. Only when you’re able to take in different perspectives, you’ll get to a place where you’ve “dismantled” your bias and moved towards something much closer to the truth.

Can you tell me a childhood story of yours that still characterizes who you are today?

When I was a kid, I really liked giant robots, so my mom made up this story about this family with a kid, and this kid also really liked giant robots. In my mom’s story, the family sent their kid out of town to get a good education. So he leaves, gets educated, and in the end he’s able to build robots that serve people. He builds this magnificent robot that teaches languages to people, and he brings it back to his village.

It was only a bedtime story, but I think the essence of this story has to some degree shaped me into who I am today. Yes, I’ve always liked technology, but it needs to be connected to a deeper purpose.

What do you do when you hit a wall in your day-to-day work? How do you get over it?

I seek out feedback from other people. I really don’t believe in that “lone genius”-idea. The best work comes from teams. It comes from being proven wrong. So when I feel like I’m hitting a wall and I don’t know what to do next, I try to not see that as a block, as something negative, but simply as a checkpoint.

What are three things that have influenced and inspired you?

Ernst F. Schumacher | Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Schuhmacher was an economist in the fifties, and he was way ahead of his time. He wrote “Small is Beautiful” in the middle of the post-depression era when there was this huge excitement about technology and growth: build more cars, grow bigger, grow faster. Here we have someone who had the foresight to say, “Wait. Faster and bigger isn’t always better. Small is beautiful. Small allows for people to understand all the details and purposefully build things that matter.” Way before the word user experience had made it into this world, Schumacher wrote about how we need to make sure that we design technology in a way that serves people. To me he’s a personal hero and a hidden figure, in a way. We still remember Ford and Taylor, the industrial giants, but very few people have heard about Schumacher’s alternative model of economics, but I think his model has really stood the test of time and is more relevant today than ever.

Patrick Dawson | A Taster’s Guide to Brews that Improve Over Time

I have my own beer cellar at home and Dawson’s book on how to age beers has come in handy more than once. I’m generally really inspired by the craft beer movement. Usually when people hear “craft beer”, they think “hipster” or “trendy”, but for me it’s all about a movement of consciousness and intentionality. If you visit a brewery and talk to a brewer, you very quickly realize how intricate craft beer brewing is. To me, it’s incredible how brewers can turn ingredients that taste disgusting by themselves into something insanely tasty by intentionally introducing different elements and processes.

David Gelb | Jiro Dreams of Sushi

A central idea to this documentary, and Japanese cuisine in general, is Omakase. It’s a mode of serving and receiving food. When you go to a restaurant, you entrust your entire experience to the chef, and the chef has full control and confidence in his ability to deliver a unique dining experience. As an experience designer, that kind of orchestration of an experience really inspires me: the craftsmanship and apprenticeship behind it, and the idea of delivering an experience that is high quality, meticulously prepared and has a flow to it.