Copenhagen, October 20th, 2016

Eva-Maria Færgemann Nielsen, User Experience Advisor at Nodes works in at the company’s head quarters in Copenhagen. With offices also in Aarhus, Denmark and in London, Nodes team comprises of 65 developers, designers and advisors, all passionate about apps and effective user interfaces.

Nielsen’s introduction to the creative digital industry happened by a happy accident. It was all a matter of expressing her opinion freely – and loudly; and successfully dealing with the consequences.

“I enjoy this anecdote enormously,” confesses Nielsen, “I was having dinner with a friend on a restaurant. We were talking about a specific company working on some digital solutions. I was very unsatisfied with what they had produced and I was loudly sharing my opinion… When I was done complaining the woman at the table next to me turns towards me and says “Hi, I’m a director in the company you are talking about” – inside my head I panicked at this moment – then she continues ‘You sound like you have some backbone and strong opinions… Here is my card, send me your CV if you think you can do better’.”

“Two weeks later, I had my first day at a digital company. Neither the director nor I are working in the company any longer, but we still keep contact every now and then.”

Nodes was founded in 2008 by two friends who met at the Copenhagen Business School, where they studied Corporate Communications. The company started at their shared living room.

Initially all development tasks were outsourced to foreign companies. But once they gained traction they quickly transitioned to employing in-house developers. The focus of the Nodes today is to deliver world-class enterprise applications. Apps where the back-end and front-end go hand in hand to create extraordinary user experiences.

To Nodes, apps for internal business use don’t have to be boring or dull but fun instead, while providing top-notch security and usability. The company’s philosophy is to make enterprise apps awesome.

Nielsen tells us more about her work at Nodes and their user centric design approach.

Can you describe your agency in three words?

Awesome app development.

What is your personal definition of creativity?

To me creativity is about identifying potentials and transforming technology and user needs into a business app.

How do you work out your design taking into account your target audience or users?

My corner stone for UX is that it has to be user centric. There are several ways that the users can be involved in the design process: to identify new biz potentials, to create ideas, to validate the concepts, to proof test final design o name but a few. In this way the design I help producing always take the target audience or users into account.

Which are the most important web tools that you use?

Sketch, Slack, Google Drive and Trello.

Can you tell us about a project you worked on and that was especially successful?

Earlier this year I helped carrying out a ’proof of concept’ task for a UK-based client of ours. The client’s approach was very open and they were letting us define the directions for a new app.

To identify how an app could be the bridge between our client’s business and the target user’s behaviour, I carried out a user specific research, spread over several weeks. This gave us valuable information about the user’s needs.

Together with the UX team we had an intense ideation session based on the findings, business goals and technological opportunities, to generate the best ideas.

Before presenting the ideas to the clients we validated and iterated on the ideas with other target users to make sure the quality of the proposal was satisfying… And I have to admit; presenting these bulletproof ideas to the client was a pleasure. They were extremely happy, and a few weeks later we started the actual development.

How do you imagine the UX concept to work in the future?

First of all, I think that we will see an increased number of companies coming round to the idea that they exist for their users and not the other way around.

Second, I imagine more and more of the user’s behaviour and needs being captured on the massive amounts of data that we are able to track today. That means that a lot of the behaviour that we try to detect can be foreseen before we introduce prototypes to users.

And thirdly, I think UX is moving towards a process that doesn’t necessary takes up weeks of work but can be conducted in fairly good quality in shorter time.

How do you organize your team and their tasks to guarantee quality assurance (QA)?

It’s in the DNA of our work to conduct peer2peer feedback on each other’s work when we need help and on each other’s performance when we need to exceed. In this way we make sure that not only the quality of our tasks are kept to a high level but also our competencies.

In addition, we have a rule that the UX’er who created the concept is not the one testing the ideas with the users. In this way no biased opinions are transmitted to the test users.

Name a challenge your team is currently facing.

I believe this is a general thing for all teams working with UX, service design, CX and other user centric innovation processes. Often times we can use terms or buzz words that only some of us understand the value and meaning of, and sometimes leave out others in the process.

For our team in particular formalising processes is becoming a challenge. We’ve experienced substantial growth in team and project sizes. So we are currently working on setting up our work process and aligning it throughout the team and with the rest of the organisation. At the same time, we know that all our clients are different with individual unique goals and needs – so we strive to make our UX process and toolbox flexible to match our clients as well.

What piece of advice would you give a recent grad looking to work in digital marketing?

– Network the best you can so you can meet awesome people that will help you to exceed
– Don’t be arrogant towards technology, learn it – or at least learn what it can do – stay updated on it and challenge it when you develop new awesome stuff
– Get an internship, student job or start your own company NOW! You learn a lot in school, that’s for sure, but it can never be compared to how much and how fast you learn when you face the real industry. It’s fun, it’s challenging and I promise, you will learn more than you expect.

Are there online publications, professionals, industry leaders you follow?

Many…
Industry leaders:
Bill Gates, James Caan CBE, David Cameron, Meg Whitman, Naomi Simson, Tim Brown, Bernard Marr, John A. Byrne, Heather Elias, Eric A Spiegel, Leila Janah, Opra Winfrey, Kofi Annan, Perer Brabek-Letmathe, Emily Chang, Marianne Cooper, Hilary Manson, Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Chen, Jeff Jordan…

These people are from all types of industries and they all contribute with a lot of interesting inputs. I think it is easy to get too obsessed with things ongoing in ones own industry, but from my perspective true creativity happens when two different industries meet and create new common potentials.

Online publications:
Nodes Blog (obviously), The Huffington post, Huffpost Women, Financial Times, Get Rich Slowly, WIRED, The Next Web, Forbes Tech, How-To Geek, Gizmodo… And probably many more.

Which cities outside where you live interest you creatively?

I think Tel Aviv interest me, mostly because there is SO much new biz is flossing out from that city and yet it is a relatively small city. But that fact doesn’t seem to keep them from being ambitious. I’m quite convinced that mentality will get them to a league above their level.

Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik is another. Also a small city… actually not a city – a town I would define it as. It takes about two hours by foot to walk all streets of Reykjavik, so calling it a city would be over exaggerating… Anyway, the town produces some of the best food I have ever tasted, it contains massive amounts of great music, and the nature is a big part of everything the inhabitants do. Very inspiring and creative I think.

Please list a few of your favourite digital brands:

Google, Pinterest, Net-a-Porter…

What do you like doing in your free time?

I believe that on a regular basis I do quite normal things in my free time – so here are some of the more interesting things I spend my time on:

I’m a very social person who depend strongly on my network so I often go out with awesome people I know, awesome people I do want to know and awesome people I didn’t know I wanted to know.

A few times a month I’m volunteer mentor for young ex-criminals who want to get back to a life without criminality. Some people thinks “what – why are you spending your time on that”, but honestly I cannot think of anything more rewarding than giving these guys a new chance and supporting them doing the right thing. It only takes a few hours of my month and it changes the entire life for them ☺

And lastly I take classes in whatever I find interesting – rather it is new tendencies I hear about in the UX and digital strategy area or something as simple as tennis classes. I personally think that keeping ones competencies up to date are quite important in order to stay relevant and to keep ones market price high.
(I sound like a super cool person right?)

By Geny Caloisi.
genyc@topinteractiveagencies.com

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