Career paths in UX are rarely typical. But Owen Derby’s journey from working on visual effects for feature films and advertising to being a product leader for software that is used by millions of people every day, was guided by curiosity. It was all sparked by his early realization that digital design should be about helping real people do things better, easier and faster.
Throughout his career, Owen Derby has displayed the canny knack of being involved at the start of new things.
He contributed to a lifestyle platform for Eircom’s Rondomondo in late 1990s (including the launch of Muse – Ireland’s first online music magazine), developed DVD insets for CDs in the early 00s (while also working on music videos, animation for feature films and stage graphics), creatively led a UX practice in 2012 and launched a program of user-centered design within a large creative agency in 2014.
In 2023, content-focused marketing, human-centered creativity and integrated UX are familiar and mainstream disciplines, but somehow Owen got to them before many of the rest of us. Today, he’s putting that experience to good use in his role as Principal Product Designer for financial and human capital management platform, Workday.
He modestly attributes his “right place right time” serendipity down to pursuing high-quality ignorance – for Owen knowledge is about understanding what you don’t know – but a more sober assessment points to his creative curiosity as the compass which has guided him.
“Somebody introduced me to the idea of UX and I thought, wow, we can help real human beings do stuff better, easier and faster with design.”
Play audio clip
(0:09)
The younger Owen cut his teeth in the frenetic deadline-driven world of motion graphics and visual design at Irish-based post-production business Windmill Lane. For a fledgling designer, it was a baptism of fire, working with directors and storytellers to design title sequences and visual effects for feature films, and motion graphics for advertising, documentaries and TV shows.
Owen reflects on the time with great fondness – working with good people, trying new things as technology matured and learning his agency chops, in particular the need to ship! “I had a lot of fun with the visual flare and the excitement of that world with its very tight deadlines. It just has to be on air when it has to be on air” laughs Owen.
It wasn’t a pure production line and there was space for innovation – Owen and his colleagues were involved in early multimedia projects. “At Windmill Lane our big clients at the time included U2 and other big successful international, predominantly, Irish bands. At the time CDs used to come with DVD ROMs which music fans could put into their computers to navigate around this immersive experience. The work focused around telling the story of the music in an interactive environment. That was my first connection between interaction, post-production and storytelling.” He may not have known it at the time, but that connection between innovation and interaction was to serve him well in future roles.
Around this time in his career, the digital design industry in Ireland was maturing and designers were joining the dots between the common objectives of industrial design, (physical) product design, and interaction design. This piqued an interest in Owen to explore design not just through the lens of aesthetic, but through the lens of purpose.
“Somebody introduced me to the idea of UX and I thought, wow, we can help real human beings do stuff better, easier and faster with design. That switched me on to a kind of human-centric design. I'd always admired product designers who I met – and was impacted by the thoroughness of their processes.”
“UX has a genuine interest in good outcomes, but with post-production it's output, output, output. Once it's left the studio, it's on a tape and that’s it!”
As Owen’s interest in purpose-led design grew, it was making him increasingly interested in pursuing new opportunities within the industry. “I slowly came to realize that the thinking they applied to the design of physical products could be directly translated to the design of digital products.
“I really should have known by then as I had completed a few years in Rondomondo (part of Eircom) designing online magazines, back at the very start of the internet in Ireland. Eircom launched an initiative to create local content because at that time there wasn’t a lot of Irish content available online and the local online lifestyle content was designed to help them sell internet connections. Even then, web design was just seen as buttons on a page and making navigation structure – nobody had any idea that it was called UX or that information architecture mattered.”
The worlds of visual-led and purpose-led design came together when leading UX Agency Each&Other offered him a Creative Director position in 2012. Despite some initial hesitancy about taking the role, patient colleagues encouraged him to reflect that many of his skills were transferrable, most importantly his ability to communicate, collaborate and reflect consensus within his design outputs.
“They were very supportive in assuring me my skills were transferrable – I think they saw my ability to tell a story around design, helping convey a clear rationale for the importance of better UX. They took a huge punt on me at the time and I'm very fortunate for it, but it was a big leap and I had to learn.”
Owen’s next move took him from the focus of a dedicated UX design studio to the breadth of a full-service creative agency in the form of Rothco.
“My experience at Each&Other was directly replicable as Rothco had a digital division which was focused on the interpretation of visual communications in the digital world, and we had tremendous ambition to bring it on much further than that. It was very exciting introducing human-centered design as a core tenet of the new arm of the company. It allowed us to move beyond the staid conversation about creating a brochure or microsite and to explore objectives around engagement, emotional impact and, of course, conversion.”
This human-centred design approach led to his participation in some stimulating projects.
“I personally loved working with Rory McIlroy’s team with whom we worked on brand, identity and messaging. When we talked to them about human-centered design as a source of competitive advantage, I think we saw the same competitive spirit in them which has taken Rory to the top of world golf. Once we’d made the claim that human-centered design would help them maximize the impact of their ‘be yourself’ brand positioning and demonstrated it to them, they invested thoroughly in the process.”
“Thank God, the whole isolated rockstar designer thing has faded. I think what replaces it is a much more inclusive way of thinking about design as something that belongs to everybody.”
Play audio clip
(0:18)
Not every client was so convinced by the power of customer-centered design, but Owen managed to overcome the challenges by connecting with the right people at the right level of seniority within each client company.
“Trying to make that leap through the lens of omnichannel and the experience that people have on multiple different channels and touchpoints and different parts of their life was a difficult sell, so I think we learned when to champion the process and when to simply fulfil the brief. It’s the classic agency challenge, but my experience was the more senior the person you dealt with client-side, the easier it was to connect their business problems and opportunities with human centered design.”
That business was bought out by a global professional services consultancy, and Owen realized that his interests were increasingly leaning towards product design and so when Workday made him an offer, he decided to accept and move on.
He found himself on a project team with responsibility for a brand-new bespoke product. The tool was complex and important, introducing some new interactions such as drag and drop, and focused around organizational design. “I worked closely with colleagues to complement their understanding of the feature set with my own focus around understanding the outcomes users are pursuing. Investing time listening to and observing customers provided really strong motivation for me to design and iterate until we had something that helped answer real business needs around organizational change” reflects Owen.
When cross-disciplinary software teams work closely in that environment good things often happen and Owen was thrilled when the product was then showcased at Rising, Workday’s flagship annual event held in major cities across the US and EMEA. “I pinched myself because product design for such a large in-house product was relatively new for me, but it’s not about me – the reason that product was successful was because the team never lost their curiosity, questioning the established roots to everything, and keeping both customers (those who were responsible for buying the software) and users (those who used it) front and center of decision-making.”
Reflecting on how he has evolved and matured as a design professional, he cites an unexpected shift in his approach to his craft, moving away from a conviction that everything must be highly polished. “The shift for me has been an evolution from where the visual polish was my primary extreme preference in everything and has gone down maybe to number three or four on the list.”
He cites, as an example, a project for H&M during his time with Each&Other.
“We were working on a workforce demand app, which allowed staff to manage their shifts, check-in and out, and check and mark availability. When we went to H&M stores, we watched the staff use the in-store terminals with colored blocks, and they were just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
“The speed they worked at was breathtaking. And even through the guy behind the till may be visiting from another store and English isn’t his first language, he can use the interface just as effectively because it’s the one he’s used to and he doesn’t need to know the language – he just needs to know the sequence of colors and shapes on the POS device to print a receipt or check an item.
“So, we made sure to bake that habitual simplicity into the app design, whereas previously I would have labored over beautiful shadows and rounded corners and all this sort of stuff. That small piece of contextual enquiry quickly brought me back down to earth, providing me with some unexpected insight which empowered me to design from the perspective of those users.”
When asked about developments in the UX in the last five to ten years, Owen’s response is blunt and in keeping with his belief in the human-centric approach.
“I think design has begun to stop navel gazing. We realize that the ideas, the concepts, the interfaces, the interactions, count for very little if you can't bring people along with you and you don't have a way of doing really close collaboration between other people who are in charge of implementation or execution, it just won’t work.
“I think when I first started in design, there was this strange idea that design could just solve everything and we were so impressed with ourselves all the time. And you learn very quickly, especially in a large organization, that you have to go and actually meet people in marketing, in sales and in different parts of the business and actually understand the business as a whole.
“Thank God, the whole isolated rockstar designer thing has faded. I think what replaces it is a much more inclusive way of thinking about design as something that belongs to everybody.”
“But it’s not just about a watered-down democracy – in school when you put all the paints together in one pot and they just turned into brown. It's like a shit color that nobody really wants, but we've all contributed, right – it’s so important that colleagues disagree well.”
Play audio clip
(0:11)
Owen believes that data is much closer to design in terms of decision making now than it was perhaps 10 years ago. “We're really encouraged to grasp what are the metrics? Have you baselined what you're trying to do before you start? What improvement? And now I see design a lot more frequently starting to make the kind of argument that a business analyst would make – here's our objective and here's the data and here's what we're trying to improve and here's the opportunity.”
He feels that methods for facilitating collaborative decision-making is one of the greatest gifts UX has brought to product design, by providing “a series of tools and methods to harness the power of collaboration and jamming on stuff together across disciplines. This allows designers to step outside “my” team and what “I” do.
“But it’s not just about a watered-down democracy – in school when you put all the paints together in one pot and they just turned into brown. It's like a shit color that nobody really wants, but we've all contributed, right – it’s so important that colleagues disagree well – that debate is respectful and driven by data, but that people feel free to say what they really feel. Making sustainable decisions that last together as a team is one of the biggest design challenges that product owners face, and I think UX has thought deeply about how that is tackled.”
Enterprise software is by its nature complex, but Owen is adamant that good UX processes can keep one eye on the bigger picture, and one on the small detail. It is the small detail after all which brings users simple interactions, effortless flows and even the occasional moment of delight.
“Over the years when I am involved in product design, I have ended up doing quite detailed form and behavior specification. Colleagues could see what design is by looking at it, but to embrace why design is, they benefit from design documentation, exploring rationale and the decision-making process. Moving at pace is great but if we develop product design amnesia we will pay a design-debt at some stage in the future. Documentation is a gift to colleagues and future designers!
“Ultimately good interactions come from good specification (so designers don’t leave anything to chance) and good collaboration (so that designers and coders can work closely to close all the gaps). The gap between design and front-end development is closing all the time and this is a good example of that in action.”
Despite his natural modesty, Owen does feel that designers should always be advocates for their discipline, but it’s important that it’s done in an analytic and data-driven way, to help colleagues less involved in the day to day to understand how it contributes to the overall aims of an organization.
“Good design is invisible, and Irish people don’t like to boast about their achievements! But good design does get out of the way of its users and when that is reflected in improved design performance metrics, we should take our chances to let our colleagues know, not in a boastful way, but in a way which helps them embrace and value our craft.”
