By Janus Boye
Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots in Odense, Denmark
As designers, our purpose should be to design easy-to-use solutions, that don’t require expert users
When I talked to Anja Saabye, she brought up how everyone is busy these days and how time is the limited resource required to move things forward. This calls for solutions that demand less effort and ideally no training.
In her view, we can’t expect that customers know everything, yet as she said, too many people who work with user experience forget this and place a great burden on their users.
Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots, where she has been a part of growing the design team. She’s been there for almost 2 years following an extensive agency background and lives privately in Odense, Denmark.
She’s also our expert of the month.
Growing the design team
Anja firmly believes that designers are the most important people in any company. As Anja said:
There’s a big responsibility on designers. More than ever, we need good user experiences.
Working in industrial automation, Universal Robots are known for producing a robotic arm that is characterised by being extremely versatile and easy to use in day-to-day production. Where the robotics market a few years ago was dominated by heavy, expensive, and unwieldy robots, Universal Robots is focused on making robot technology accessible to everyone.
They were 5 UX designers when Anja joined, and today the combined UX and Product design team counts 18 skilled designers. It’s worth adding that Anja and her team is responsible for all touch points, that includes their software interface, websites and the product.
Growing rapidly and recruiting has also helped Anja realise that her strengths is at scaling and setting the direction — so she’s just hired another manager to help her out with managing the team.
Getting designers closer to both discovery and strategy
At Universal Robots, they want to create a world where people work with robots, not like robots. To Anja that also means changing work, so that as we get older, our jobs don’t wear on us as much as in the past. Let the robots, or as they are called at Universal Robots, cobots, do the repetitive work that can hurt your shoulders or arms and cause you to retire early.
To make this happen, she not only wants to get the designers involved early in the discovery and strategy work, but also the customers. People working with user experience are in high demand, but it’s key to listen and get the customer insights to fundamentally create better solutions.
At the recently held Automatica conference, the UR family grew with the new #UR20 robot. Anja and her team were closely involved in the design and she’s a big believer in the impact of a strong design language
She has an ambitious and memorable vision for her team:
“Create an amazing design like Apple, give the unique experience like Tesla and be Universal like Universal Robots”
Being at a company that designs physical robots, there’s design work in everything. From designing the actual robot interface, to the website and perhaps most daunting, designing the software enabling the integration to the robots.
It’s not just about convenience
In our conversation, Anja also made an important point:
Users don’t just want convenience. They also want relationships
In other words: Sometimes friction makes sense.
Convenience doesn’t really build loyalty, but when there’s some friction, some meaningful effort required, then the customer becomes more loyal and involved. How does that translate to design leadership?
According to Anja, it’s about understanding the customer journey. Where in the customer journey can you identify some valuable friction for the customer that easily can be turned into a positive and memorable touchpoint, so you build a relationship with your customer?
That’s what makes a great user experience and that is what Anja aims for every day.
Learn more about Anja Saabye
In late 2021, Anja hosted a popular member call: How Universal Robots works with UX and Design.
Earlier this year, she helped organise a Global Mentoring Walk in Odense, an initiative with the purpose to empower the next generation of female leaders. This was originally founded in the late 90’s in the US by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
Finally, you can also meet Anja in person in our design leadership community and she’s also a speaker at the Boye Aarhus 22 conference in November, where she will lead a session on the design leadership conference track.