Paris, March 20th, 2019

French agency DISKO, which has this year received the accolade of ‘Luxury Digital Agency of the Year’, is prepared to invest in young talent to produce amazing designs and use interfaces for its clients.

A great example of this is Victor Colas, DISKO’s UX designer and digital producer. He joined DISKO in 2015 and has quickly made his way up. He tells us more of the company’s UX strategy and his own journey.

How did you get started?

After having successfully finished my UX Design and Project Management scholarship, I was hired by DISKO where I started as a standard/global project manager. I worked on different types of websites: e-commerce, showcase, editorial, and experimental, to name a few.

The team consisted of art directors and developers. From there I naturally got involved more and more into the UX Design aspects of my projects. To my delight, I gradually switched to a full UX Designer job.

Can you describe, in your words, what UX is and why, in your opinion, is it important?

UX design is all about creating the most simple and enjoyable experience as a response to users’ problems. By providing the best solution to the users, UX improves the relevance and the quality of the proposed service and therefore the happiness of the people using it. As we all know, user satisfaction being the aim of all business models involving human interaction, UX is a crucial point, if not the most important.

UX design is a significant key to success for your product.

What ingredients are crucial to creating a successful UX design?

Being able to empathise with the user is an essential ingredient to create a successful UX Design. Being able to understand how your future user will feel and interact with your design is the key to give him or her the right answer to their questions or needs. UX designer should also be focused on usability and simplicity to create a great experience.

The secret ingredient is the ability to think outside the box and not be afraid to challenge the limits fixed by the best practices regarding design. Finding the solution that nobody thought of which will amaze users could lead your design to be the next reference in your domain.

How long has DISKO been working with UX?

DISKO has been working with UX since its creation in 2010. As a part of our agency DNA, we always seek to provide the best experience through our creations. User Experience is the central pillar of every project made by DISKO, on platforms as well as on all interaction with brands (social media, retail etc.)

Can you give us some examples of your experience dealing with usability studies, eye-tracking study, field study, or focus groups?

Recently we created an intranet project for our client Hennessy, a cognac house with headquarters in Cognac, France. Named ‘My Hennessy’, the intranet was designed to help the company optimise all internal processes and information. It also allows the company to regroup in one place every task carried out by its thousands of employees.

To build a tool that would best match their needs, we used a Design Thinking approach with Hennessy’s collaborators so that the final product would be the fruit of collective and collaborative work and reflect everybody’s ideas.

Design thinking includes processes such as context analysis, problem finding and framing, ideation and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modelling and prototyping, testing and evaluating. Core features of design thinking include abilities to: resolve ill-defined or ‘wicked’ problems.

We created multiple focus groups, within the different departments, to collect this precious information. We did a field study to observe their work habits so that we could identify the pain points encountered daily. To finish with, we ran several “test and learn” sprints based on prototypes that were given to a selection of users to improve the MVP before its first release.

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

I worked on another project for Hennessy to create an experimental website to launch a new limited edition in collaboration with artists. The idea was to imagine a user-centred experience where Social Media data provided by users mixed with the assets crafted by the artists for the campaign would create a unique and personalised tailor-made symbol.

Craft My Symbol was a massive success because of the uniqueness of the experience. The satisfaction of users (including global influencers) led to large shares and had a significant and very positive impact on retail sales. The brand benefits were clearly visible at every level, turning this experimental project into a true success for everyone.

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

The UX concept in the future will rely much more on the use of collected data and will be centred on behaviours and habits to continuously improve the experience, not only based on what UX designers think they know but also leaning on factual Data Analysis.

Name a challenge your team is currently facing.

One of our most significant challenge every day is to find a way to solve our dirty tasks ingeniously while not trying to reinvent the wheel so we can have more time to focus on details that matters: Users benefits.

What piece of advice would you give a recent grad looking to work with UX?

Stay aware, we learn every day from everyone and listen to the users, they have all the answers without knowing it. Learn with passion, then create with your guts.

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

InVision blog, Medium posts, Muzli Design, Dan Petty, Ethan Eismann, Jonathan Ive, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, Nike, and Apple. There’re too many talented people in our industry to name them all.

What would you work on if you could choose any other job?

I would work in the music industry with artists to create and compose with them.

What do you like doing in your free time?

On my free time I like drinking beers. I also find myself buying way more sneakers than my account balance allows me. I listen to every song in Spotify’s hip-hop section. Then I keep drinking beers. It sounds like a good summary of my lifestyle!

Thanks Victor!

By Geny Caloisi.
genyc@topinteractiveagencies.com

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