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IIIMPACT is a Product UX Design and Development Strategy Consulting Agency.
We emphasize strategic planning, intuitive UX design, and better collaboration between business, design to development. By integrating best practices with our clients, we not only speed up market entry but also enhance the overall quality of software products. We help our clients launch better products, faster.
We explore topics about product, strategy, design and development. Hear stories and learnings on how our experienced team has helped launch 100s of software products in almost every industry vertical.
If you want to get a bunch of knowledge from a bunch of different industries while making an impact, UX Design is 100% clear for you. Because I think my knowledge base of industries and careers and just general knowledge grew so much since I made this shift because you really have to dive into into the products.
Speaker 2:I see so many immature companies. You know, they think one person can do it all. And if you're so focused on trying to do too much at once, then the details are missed. You can't refine the UI or the visual design. You can't spend extra time to bring it to another level.
Speaker 2:You can't really set up good processes or design systems, you know, you're really just banging out wire frames as fast as possible to feed the the development teams. All right, here we go. Welcome to the show. I want to welcome everybody who's listening in. Today will be one of our, I call it my Teams interview, where we take a look at basically an individual look at the people on my team, get to really know them, what they do for impact, and just to get to know, you know, a little bit more about their interests and what got them started in in UX or development.
Speaker 2:And so on the guest today, I have Aldo. Can you say your last name for us so I don't mess it up?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. So my full name is Aldo Karlitz. It's a
Speaker 2:Here we go.
Speaker 1:Very German surname. I don't think there's a lot of us here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm gonna give you a little background on Aldu, if you wanna pronounce it correctly. Aldu is a award winning senior UX designer with a proven track record in crafting user centric solutions. His passion for usability, aesthetically pleasing, and visual design with intent ensure he always aims to enhance the user experience. You've been in the design field, I think, for about, what, 8 and a half, 9 years?
Speaker 1:Just about.
Speaker 2:And you've been recently focusing on helping our cybersecurity clients from heuristic evaluations to bringing life to low fidelity wireframes. Making brand guidelines actually make sense in our applications as we know branding agencies get involved with messing up some beautiful UX within our with our client applications. So we tried to set those guardrails purposely. And, yeah, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you. It's, it's good being here. Looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:Definitely. So, yeah, I wanna get started with a few questions and, you know, I guess to start off with a little discussion of your personal journey into UX design and project strategy and kinda what inspired you to pursue a career in UX design.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I've got a very interesting road into UX. I actually come from a performing arts background. That was my first studies ever, and then mixed it up with graphic design and then human behavioral studies in psychology. And during your drama practicals, you always had to write up these user personas to step into the shoes of the character that you're going to portray.
Speaker 1:And during my graphic design, I would say it was a short stunt in graphic design because I think I did one branding client, and then I jumped into web design. And the first web design project that I had to do, they told me, Okay, cool. So we're going to do some user persona setups. And immediately, it took me back to, Oh, this is easy. I did this in drama.
Speaker 1:And I would say since then, I've actually focused heavily on who am I designing for rather than what am I designing as a result. So even though the graphic design and the UI elements are quite a strong suit, I would say that I have I can really pour out quick designs. UX in itself is like the driving force behind it. I love to use my brain, and I call it my compassion radar when it comes to designing. So, I love bringing in the research and the validation behind what I do rather than, Oh, this is pretty.
Speaker 1:Let's put it out there and see what the user thinks. So, yeah, that's a sort of a little background of how I got into UX.
Speaker 2:Okay. You owned a creative dance studio, right? What was that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I actually I so I represented South African hip hop, and then I was like, Okay, maybe I should pursue this as a career. And I had this little small choreography studio for like 2 years, and that actually paid my studies in graphic design. And then I made the big switch to actually focus on design. I think if I were to jump into a dance now, I would probably make it, like, 5 seconds into the dances that I choreographed.
Speaker 1:I would literally die.
Speaker 2:Well, I did take a breakdancing class when I was younger, so I could almost do the helicopter.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice.
Speaker 2:And maybe the worm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that is different terminology around the world, but I think a helicopter would be a a windmill. Yeah. That sounds about right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think I could do that anymore without breaking something.
Speaker 1:That's why it's called break downs.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Can you share a client success story that demonstrates some of the impact of your work?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. So I had this one client who's actually a dev agency for one of South Africa's major sort of e commerce platforms, where they started this delivery straight to your home, sort of from the store. And essentially, they took a time slot approach to so basically, you put in your bookings or your order, and they would sort of deliver it within a set hour, and you can expect your order during that hour. Where, when I joined the DevHouse, they already had a similar e commerce product, but their goal was to deliver within 15 minutes.
Speaker 1:So I had to do a lot of user interviews, sort of set up what happens within the company, understand every single flow that's taking place because you need to not just think about the end user. There are people shopping for your products. There are drivers that need to deliver it. There are inventory stock take that needs to take place. There are financial implications from the finance the finance department.
Speaker 1:And then, at the time I worked with them, they started bringing in pharmaceutical items as well. So that really broadened the horizons of what the app needs to do. And during my time there well, for launch of my work that I've done with them, they now deliver within 15 minutes, and they gathered a lot of new customer trust because at the time that I was joining them, they had a lot of bad reviews on the App Store. And now, they're like the new thing. And they're basically competition 100%.
Speaker 1:I can confidently say they're competition for the biggest ecommerce platform in South Africa, or delivery platform in South Africa. So I think that's probably one of the biggest impacts that I had in my design career.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's amazing. Did you work with a big team when you were with that project?
Speaker 1:Yes. There were about, I think, 8 developers alone, and then the finance department were like 7 people. And then, working closely with the marketing department, I had to come up with most of the work through them because they recently also did a major brand rework and refresh, but I was the sole UX or product designer for this project. So I literally had to get hands dirty and restless nights to get everything going.
Speaker 2:You know, I think that's a common theme out there is where your UX team of 1 in a lot of situations. And being a UX team of 1, you know, it could be very challenging and just it could there's a lot of frustration. I I think knowing that you've gone through that, what do you think were maybe a couple big frustration points being a team of 1 trying to launch a new product?
Speaker 1:The one thing that I always refer to is UX is biased. So I would design for what I personally think might work. And because I'm alone, the feedback loop is quite big because there's not designers that I can bounce ideas off or go in a strategizing workshop or design sprint with where we come up with a few concepts and get to validate them. So, I think that in itself is a hurdle as well as a frustration point that you have to deal with as a solo designer. And then, I think one other frustration point is you are expected to do everything.
Speaker 1:So, you need to be able to really know your stuff, put in time, and as I think I mentioned it a lot, sleepless nights that you put in because you're the only designer in essence. So in itself, it's either you are the blocker, or you're blocked by something else, or you're waiting on a workshop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're the gatekeeper of all the information and and what comes in and out.
Speaker 1:And if you fail, the the business fails in essence as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I see so many, I guess, you know, as a good word is immature companies depending on what kind of maturity level they are at when it comes to product and design is that they, you know, they think one person can do it all. And if you're so focused on trying to do too much at once, then the details are missed. You can't refine the UI or the visual design. You can't spend extra time to bring it to another level.
Speaker 2:You can't really set up good processes or design systems. You know, you're really just banging out wireframes as fast as possible to feed the development teams.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's usually high fidelity wireframes. So you don't really have a chance to even go into low fidelity to sort of keep changes quick. So if it's one change, it's usually a big change. And as you said, you don't have a design system that you can necessarily fall back on because that's usually an afterthought.
Speaker 1:So I 100% agree with you on that.
Speaker 2:You know, for when it comes to basically collaboration and, you know, working with our teams and and our clients versus what you've seen in the past, kinda what do you see as far as the differences is how we've structured? I know it's been a you've joined us recently, so you've gotten a little taste of how we run things. But what differences have you seen between what we do and with your past jobs?
Speaker 1:I think that the major thing is that I can see there's strong suits in the design team itself, like someone who's very strong at just pushing out wireframe, low fidelity wireframe ideas, where I'm stunned at the rate that they just brought it out. And another one is super good with design systems. So, it's awesome for me to see that there's even strengths within a design team. So, it's not like everyone is great at everything, and the support in itself is great. It feels like you're part of a community in Impact.
Speaker 1:So it's not just like, Oh, you're a team. We literally share insights. We share, Oh, this is a cool plugin, or Look at this update in Figma. So sometimes you might miss it in normal publications or something, and then you'll find it within the Impact team, which is great. And everyone gets excited about it.
Speaker 1:Where I think in previous companies, this was like, you do your thing, and this is the system that you're doing that you're going to move, and everything relies on you. So you need to figure it out. You need to set up the workshops if you want a workshop. So there's not necessarily someone that's driving research. If you have to do it or if you want to do it, you'll have to set up time out of your own day to do that, and you'll have to catch up on designing at the end, which is something that I feel is lacking, especially in the UX culture today.
Speaker 1:There's this dribble ideation or Dribbilitation. Dribbilitation. That's a good word for it. There's a dribbilitation when it comes to UX, and I think that's the misconception regarding UX and proper product design at the end. So I think that's probably my biggest take that's the immediate effect that I saw since joining the team is that you can rely on a team within their strength, and you can push out designs and validation and research and sports gathering and workshops in a few days.
Speaker 1:And, literally, if you are struggling with something or need to figure it out, someone will probably be able to sort it out for you and explain what the problem might have been. And it's literally something like, Oh, you forgot to connect your text color to your design system. Because I keep on doing that, and then I do the switch of palettes, and then I'm like, Oh, oh, where's this text gone? And then it's literally a simple thing as connecting that. So it's great to have that team that can support
Speaker 2:you. Yeah. You know, I think everybody on our team has a vast or a variety of experiences and quite a bit of experience, especially working in in the enterprise software space and just different applications. And so we're we're, you know, we're all experts at what we do. You know, that kind of t formation of your depth at one expertise is there, but then you have a kind of a wide range within the UX knowledge of other things that don't go as deep.
Speaker 2:But what I've seen from our team is the ability to leverage the knowledge off of each other. And there's so much things that are happening in the space of UX and software and just tech. And so being able to share that knowledge and keeping up with the with the latest trends, what's working, what's not working, what did you do for this other client that didn't work or did work, helps tremendously. And I think that's something that maybe the clients don't understand in the background is when they see us coming together. You know, we roll in about 5, 6 deep within a team to to really showcase, like, hey.
Speaker 2:It's not just one person. One person may be talking, but it's all of us and our combined effort putting in the effort to show, like, this is how you do things right. And so that's the value I think that hopefully clients will see, but, you know, us being present at these at a lot of the meetings and giving feedback and taking in the feedback helps with that. And, you know, you see that with bigger teams generally, but a lot of times what I've seen in the past, especially consulting, even though there might be big UX teams, they're all working so siloed. They're not collaborating.
Speaker 2:They're firefighting, just trying to get things done and out the door. So you don't have that time to really refine your processes. And I think that's what we do pretty well just to toot our own horn. You know, I think that's those are things that we've refined over the past 20 years to do really well.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. No. I can that's something that I can see clearly, and I'm not even a client. It's actually great to have, like, 3 other designers working on the same project with me, and we're all working towards that same goal. As you said, we're not siloed as designers, which is what I like.
Speaker 1:So one can pull out wireframes, and I can go and make it pretty like we're doing it now.
Speaker 2:Cool. Any as far as how you stay up to date, or how do you follow the latest trends and best practices on your own?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I have a few things that I do. So, UXL is a platform that basically teaches you UX design and good practice, I would say. And I've been part of that platform since inception, where I actually had interviews with the founders and everyone. So that's a place where I also go and just test my skills and obviously stay up to date.
Speaker 1:As soon as they bring out a course, I do something there. And then I'm also part of Jared School's Leaders of Awesomeness. And there's a lot of workshops that happens there, and basically education and updates regarding certain things in the UX field, which is extremely insightful. And then also, I'm assigned to a bunch of blogs that I just read, like, 5 minutes on Medium.
Speaker 2:And I've got 50 newsletters and emails that I get. I think I probably read 1 or 2 of them now.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly. If it's got a good headline, then I'm like, Okay, cool. Let me read this. Or, I follow a bunch of industry leaders as well in the UX field on LinkedIn. So I think that's also a very good place to stay up to date.
Speaker 1:It's just to make sure you've got good connections on LinkedIn as well, if you want to stay up to date as well. So that's basically, I would say, how I stay up to date. I won't say daily because then I would lie on a weekly basis. Yeah. I'll make sure to to go through those things.
Speaker 2:I guess, what is what is one lesson that you that took too far too long for you to learn in your career?
Speaker 1:Don't try and do everything. I think where we started out, I wanted to be the one stop shop for for, let's say, a website or a platform. I looked at doing illustrations and animations and photography, and I'll be able to do your social media. I'll be able to help you with digital marketing campaigns and all of those things. And I think that's what a little bit of our discussion was previously, is when you try to do all of those things, you lose sight of what's actually important and the goals at hand.
Speaker 1:And I actually lost a client because I did I basically played the role of 4 departments. So that's 100%, I think, the biggest lesson that I learned. And so it's a jack of all, trade master of none type of situation. And I would say since I saw that and moved my mindset a little bit and said, Okay, cool. This is what I specialize in, but I can also do this if there's time.
Speaker 1:And I don't necessarily want to place myself as a UI or illustrator designer. I want to be a UX designer and service designer. That's what I want to do, and essentially, that's what I want to be good at. And since I made that mind shift, I started getting good at it, and that's when the awards started getting in, and the good clients and the effective workforce. And then, at the end, the great results came about.
Speaker 1:So I would say, 100%, that's probably my biggest lesson. And I think I only learned that about 3 years ago, 4 years ago. So it's not too long ago, actually.
Speaker 2:So you didn't take up front end and back end development as well?
Speaker 1:I actually did study front end development. And I got to that I think I studied it for like a month. And on Codecademy, I got like 3 or 4 certificates, and I'm like, No, my brain doesn't work this way. So I would rather understand what needs to happen, but if I need to code, it will take you 5 years longer.
Speaker 2:Maybe 1 or 2 unicorns that are on our team that are really good at programming and design. But, you know and I'm giving this as a warning to any clients that that try to combine both is it's very difficult because it's a conflict of interest when you have, you know, what's my backlog of features that I have to get out versus this is a detriment to the user experience. That's why you need 2 voices in the room to argue for eitheror. But if it's, Hey, we need to get this out the door, that usually tends to win and the user experience gets detrimented for the sake of getting a backlog item done. So yeah, I've always seen that conflict of or you've seen the job postings of, can you do all this design work and program at the same time and maybe a little bit of QA?
Speaker 2:So it's, it's an interesting
Speaker 1:test your code as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I think that, as I said, that's different departments work, and that's why we got different departments. So there's a reason for that.
Speaker 2:What advice would you give to someone considering a career in UX Design?
Speaker 1:Do it. If you want to get a bunch of knowledge from a bunch of different industries while making an impact, UX Design is 100% a career for you because I think my knowledge base of industries and careers and just general knowledge grew so much since I made this shift because you really have to deep dive into the products and into what people experience the product is, and how product works, and how the people or the founders who came up with the idea, where their mindset is as well. So you get all of those experiences and get paid for it as well. So essentially, you don't have to get a degree in cybersecurity, which we're working on now, but you're getting a bunch of good knowledge as to how those practices work, and you get paid for it. So, I would say getting paid to learn is a great thing in general, and then you get to design as well.
Speaker 1:So that is something that stands out for me. But I think regarding advice that I would give someone who wants to join UX, that make sure you join a company that actually values UX. So don't just go into a company that's focusing on globalization. Look at a company that actually has a department and focuses on research and setting up workshops and really values your time and your experience. Because I'm seeing a little mind shift in the industry, I must admit, where design in itself is being valued a little bit higher, and look, starting to get designers at a founding stage, which is great.
Speaker 1:And that means that you'll have great design products. So, I would say, if you're starting UX Design now, it's probably a great time to start. Because I would say, in my time where I went through my career, we probably only had the title UX Designer 5 years ago, 6 years ago. So it's a very new industry. So if you're joining it now, there's a lot more knowledge out there of how to do it right, where we had to sort of figure it out as we went along into this digital era.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think there's there's definitely gonna be variations, like you said. I think starting at the right company is going to set you on that path of, is this the best career for me or not? Because one bad job can really make or break whether you have a passion for this career or not. Because, yeah, I mean, you can get a completely different flavor for a company that doesn't value UX, just sees you as a asset producer making wireframes as fast as possible.
Speaker 2:You don't have a seat at the table, and you're just kinda consider, oh, hey. Make this look better. And if you're seen as that and not really seen as a, you know, worst strategy and there's ROI, there's really if you take a step back to do things right, you could take 2 steps forward if you just give it the right time and effort. And so, yeah, I completely agree with you. It's there's, you know, there's some cases of where I've heard just in in talks of the UX circles where it's actually getting harder because of kind of those views of where UX is not considered, you know, something of high value.
Speaker 2:But then, you know, those organizations tend to you know, there's a lot more churn in those positions versus organizations that have good leadership to really help support the teams that and individuals that are really trying to champion the right processes and the right approach to UX and be more user centric with your product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I think that as soon as companies actually make that mind shift into being more user centric, start seeing quicker feature releases or better feature releases and more focus on what the users actually want, which is great. And then you'll actually start prioritizing that instead of what will give me the biggest payday at the end type of deal. Instead of, okay, what's the best for my users in the long run?
Speaker 1:Because I think in today's space, there will always be a new competitor. Because especially with AI being so effective or prominent in the industry today, there's new business popping up everywhere. So, if you I think it's at this stage, if you're not listening to your audience in general, then you will probably fall behind to someone who actually is in making impact or listening and making the changes to their product through a good user centric and user focused experience. So, I think that's also something to think about as an outsider of UX, like, apply UX principles even if you're not a UX designer.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned AI, I guess, in the field of UX. Where do you see it evolving over the next 5 to 10 years? Do you do you think, AI will have an effect? Does it does it get rid of all of us and start designing everything? What's your stand on that?
Speaker 1:AI won't take your job unless you use it as a tool. So learn with it and grow with it. I think that's my viewpoints on AI. But I definitely think it will make our jobs easier, 100%. I think, especially if I can just use a heuristic evaluation as an example, because that's something that we recently just did.
Speaker 1:I can 100% see there's a platform out there that might scrape a whole platform and measure it on heuristic valuation values, and come back with a score that will help you to obviously start working on your heuristics quicker than a human actually having to go and click through every site and find everything. So that's just an example, and I think that will become prominent. And I also believe that we, as UX Designers, will have to learn how to design with AI in mind because that will most likely be a feature of every single platform that we will be working on. So, we'll have to have a little bit of knowledge as to what AI capabilities are as well. It's a tool that we can use, but also something that we need to consider that will most likely be on the product that we work
Speaker 2:on. And if you could work on any type of project or with any client, what would your dream project be?
Speaker 1:Any product or any project that I could travel the world on. So, I would 100% work on a traveling app that allows me to do user interviews with people from around the world. I've always loved traveling, so I think that's a massive passion of mine. So anything that involves different cultures, I would say, because I'm someone that's studying like 4 different languages at the moment. I can't decide on which one that I want to focus primarily on.
Speaker 1:But I've always had this passion for different cultures, different languages, and art styles, and all of those things. So that's a massive preference of mine, is to work on an app that does that, or a platform or a project that does that. I don't necessarily think there's a specific client that I would say, Okay, yeah, I'll work with you.
Speaker 2:Just say it's all of our clients.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'll say it to all of our clients. I want to work with you. I'll even want to work with you more if you pay me to travel. Better yet, if I can bring my wife to Edwirth, then I will love working for you.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, no, that's probably something that I would definitely like to work on. There is however this brand here in South Africa I cannot say its name, I'm not sure how. But it's called it's like this chicken place, like, not KFC really, but it's very nice. And I think the only reason that I'll do a project for them is they literally take freedom of speech to the next level. And their adverts are so funny and so well thought of that I will probably I just want to be a designer in the background.
Speaker 1:I don't even have to do UX. I just want to sit there and be like, okay, cool. I worked on that. That was funny. That was good.
Speaker 1:So, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we'll try to make some funny commercials, and
Speaker 1:you can be a part of that. Yes, please. 100%. Let's do some commercials. Let's make it UX related funny commercials.
Speaker 2:So one thing I'm gonna do, and it's gonna be a surprise when we interview the team, the impact team, is I've got this little cards called laws of UX as you can kinda see here. I'm gonna pull out a card. I'm gonna surprise you into one of these psychological or UX method concepts. They have different type of laws and things that, you know, you can use when you're designing something. So I'm gonna randomly pick, you know, one of these cards and see which one we've you've actually used in one of our clients.
Speaker 2:Alright. Cognitive bias.
Speaker 1:Oh, cognitive bias?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Systematic errors of thinking or rationality and judgment that influence our perception of the world and our decision making ability.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 100%.
Speaker 2:Where have where have we seen this?
Speaker 1:There's something that I always use, and it's I think it's just because my mentor when I started InDesign, he always said, Use the carrots up and down arrow for your drop down accordion buttons. And since then, I've never used a different way of showing an accordion or a wave for your component to be clickable and dropdown than a caret, which is an arrow that looks like this. So it's not even filled in. That's a biased, I would say, design that I've always started using. And I think the side panel design within a system is something that is like a go to for me.
Speaker 1:And I would say that's a massive cognitive bias because I just don't like pop ups. So, that's something that one of the designers on my team also started using. And I think when he said he liked it, I was like, Okay, Cool. I'm gonna put it in the design as well because that validated that someone else also liked it. So I think that's definitely something that's that's been an impact in the recent project work that we did.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up here. Wanna thank you for your time and jumping on this. It's been great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was super fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everybody out there who's listening in, definitely share your thoughts, leave your comments, you know, rate it, subscribe, all that good stuff. And any ideas or questions that you have, please leave that in the comment section for any future episodes. And then if you want to, hopefully when you reach out to us and we'll have Alda on the team to help make your apps take that to the next level and really work on making it visually appealing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let let's make some magic.
Speaker 2:There you go. Alright. Thanks everybody for tuning in, and you'll see, hopefully, our next episode next week. Take care.
Speaker 1:Alright. Goodbye.