Krupa 2019 review: key thoughts and messages
Key thoughts and insights from Krupa speakers
On the 6th of April Kyiv became a central design-point as 2500 designers gathered for the biggest Interface Design Conference in Eastern Europe — Krupa. People from Ukraine, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Kazakhstan, Belarus, England, Estonia and USA…
Krupa is a design conference has been organized by Projector team in Kyiv since 2017. The topics of the conference is centered around interface design, UI/UX design, product & project management, product design, web design, art direction and future of design in general. During 3 years Krupa was honored to host Vitaly Friedman, Alan Cooper and Don Norman.
The conference proved that Ukraine is already a remarkable point at the world’s creative map, our design community is active and strong, and we have a lot to share with the rest of the world.
Here’s everything we were inspired by at the conference and took with us to our work:
Senior UX-Designer at Cloudmade Dmytro Starkov started the day with a speech about studying driver’s behavior using Machine Learning.
His main points about design in Automotive:
— Design should look natural and comply with the chosen platform. If it works on your screen or prototype it does not mean it will work inside the car.
— Car manufacturers consider themselves as serious businesses, so their designs should conform to that.
— The design must not be distracting as safety is the most important.
— Notifications are not desirable, but predicting driver’s needs is a key.
Max Shirko focused on another issue of concern for us: When the website builders will replace designers? Why do we need websites in 2019? What is this new profession — web designer on Tilda?
2008–2018 tendency:
Companies that don’t want to be successful certainly shouldn’t spend the time and money to develop a company site.
2019:
Websites are often treated like business cards of the 80s; as pure ego-boosters.
All these rambling speeches that design as a profession will disappear sounds more like the rumors about the end of the world. Website builders could only replace designers in 3 cases: if designers will stop thinking about aesthetics, if designers will distance themselves from developing content and when designers will only be interested in nothing else apart from design. I’d like to believe it’s not gonna happen.
Oleksandr Ivanov, Head of Product at Lun.ua continued with a speech about the value of product designers. Is it only in “moving the pixels and doing research”? Oleksandr and his team stated that the power of a good product designer and every team player is actually in a team and a will to collaborate.
Learn to communicate in a team, ask questions, ask for advice. Only then your decisions will become better.
Serhii Valiukh from Tubik Studio proclaimed that Interfaces are Art.
As a designer solve the pain, don’t create it.
Users want to see vivid pictures. It’s like an addiction.
Interface is a background for art objects. It should be boring, simple and understandable.
Illustrator’s work is getting increasingly popular.
In the competitive environment the WOW-effect wins.
The era of “New Renaissance” is coming.
Design is like a sport. It’s not enough only to work a lot, you have to put a high goal for yourself.
Head of Design in Kiwi Jiří Tvrdek delivered a speech about visual design testing.
We have a unique business model, that’s why we have unique f*ck-ups. We don’t have anyone to look at, we don’t have anyone to borrow a solution from, because we create an experience that never existed before.
“Why would a Kiwi’s Head of Design talk about a visual design testing? Because it helped us to get rid of ineffective discussions on a top-level management about a color of the button on a website. Insights from research helped us to focus on UX, not on the graphics. So we could create a sharp design-system for a product.”
Albina Cholak from Octopus Labs: How might you as a designer influence and improve the way products and services are created in environments not traditionally lead by design?
The moral of transformations:
Mindset: Empathise with an organization as much as with customers.
Process: Design your own process before designing products & services. Make it official.
Organization: Show an organization through the eye of customers and teach how to improve.
Guillermo Torres — Product Designer in Airbnb. His speech was related to happy relationships between users, products and businesses. The most successful products are those that manage to build lasting relationships between users, products and companies. Designers have a toolbox to make it happen. How to build relationships based on mutual trust and satisfaction?
Guillermo talked about his work in Google: how they made it humane and “native” for users in Brazil, shared his experience from current position at Airbnb: gave an example where the design focuses on ensuring that each user belongs to the community so everyone feels included. Also Guillermo shared an amazing example from Spotify: it sends you a breakup playlist when you unsubscribe.
People should see themselves in your product.
Takeshi Horiuchi — UX-director at the Age of Learning.
Takeshi told us how their team is researching childhood and a process of growing up before designing any kind of product. They learn how a child perceives this world. They learn from kids how to teach kids. The kid is a boss here.
Design Director at Wix.com Lior Pinco and Creative Director Anna Kuntsman-Rozenberg were discussing a tech designer’s role.
Without numbers you’re just a dude with opinion.
Cole Mercer — Soundcloud ex-product manager — if all you trust is data, all you’ll get is a small optimization.
The biggest innovations in the world have come from vision: taking risks, trying things, failing and trying again.
With a help of 1034 presentation slides Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine took us to the dark corners of the web and showed advanced interface design challenges. Today we have to work on thumb-driven design.
Vitaly explored better approaches for onboarding and offboarding, authentication patterns and infamous GDPR consent cookie prompts. Websites ask for more and more access to users data, while they prefer to share less and less.
The living legend of UX-design that is Don Norman, co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group has brought a talk to a higher level that caused discussions during the speech. He spoke about complex problems such as climate change, hunger, nature destruction, producing things we cannot recycle. Designers should be solving these significant problems by using design frameworks and our problem-solving skills. This will make our world a better place.
When the hall became crowded we thought it would be difficult to get to the food court. But actually the crowd was to Don Norman as he had 3(!) autograph sessions.
Specially for the event Projector School and Ukrainian publishing house ArtHuss released Don Norman’s books in Ukrainian for the first time.
More than that, Don was open for any adventures so Fabricator FabLab asked to make a 3D model of him. You can see Don in 3D here.
It was a special day for both for attendees and speakers — a lot of people has opened Kyiv for themselves for the first time. Everyone noticed a positive energy, optimism and activeness of our design community which is pleasing in any way.
Krupa-2020 is already on the way. Organizers promise speeches, meetups, workshops, portfolio reviews, hackatones, more networking and a very significant line-up.
If you want to be a volunteer on Krupa-2020, write us to hello@prjctr.com.ua.
Apply for your Press Pass via media@prjctr.com.ua.
