In this interview excerpt, a startup founder who began as a data scientist recounts the pivotal moment when the team recognized that their product’s poor user interface was damaging the business. Initially embarrassed by a rough, buggy UI reminiscent of 1980s designs, they concluded that design inconsistencies were eroding trust and hindering sales. To address this, they hired design expertise to create a cohesive design system, which yielded multiple benefits: faster development through reusable, standardized components; increased confidence among salespeople who could now present a professional product; and an overall more trustworthy, polished appearance that improves first impressions and supports professional work. The conversation highlights how intentional design transforms trust, development speed, and sales effectiveness.
When you started to give more importance, if you want, to the UX and product side, obviously you started building the product right in the beginning. And then when was the shift in a way happening in your mind that, okay, we need to improve this or we need somebody to help us with this?
A good question. I remember that at one point we were looking at the product and it was just, we were really ashamed on how it looks like because I come from data space, right? So By training, I'm a data scientist. And the first thing that I did was creating this algorithm of how we're processing data, making this privacy compliant. And having this interdisciplinary role was amazing for me. But I never ever built an app before, like a desktop application or something like this, right? I never really designed a website well or something like that. So if I remember the first apps that we had, it really looked like in the '80s, super, super rough UI, very buggy. There was this point where we thought that the design inconsistencies and unprofessionality of our design is actually harming our business, right? Okay. Where we came to the conclusion and we said, if we hire someone to polish this thing, to create a design system, whatnot, first of all, we can significantly speed up in development because we can have standardized components in the code repository that we can then reuse later. We have more confidence in our product just from a selling perspective, because the salespeople were like, okay, what am I selling here? This looks like shit. I mean, that's the point. And then actually what you also want is you want to work professionally, but then you have also to have this appearance. You have to have a professional appearance. And this is something which is very important to us. Excellence in What is the first and the second impression, right?
So in a way, you would say that design helps once building the trust, then helping you speed up development and professionalizing what you have there, even smoothing out parts of the sales process.
Definitely. It comes hand in hand, right? I think this is when you have something which is nice and polished. When you go to a friend's place and the friend's place is very cleaned up, Then you behave different than when you go to a friend's place and it's very untidy, right? That's also what we want, the spirit that we want to have in the company, because the people that are working here, they have to convey their trust to the users, right?
