During the past 7 years we have built up what I hope is one of the best digital product design companies in Europe. We have clients from New York to Belgium and Shanghai everywhere in the world and companies like Google, Netflix and Samsung are reaching out to us to hire our product design and UX research teams. We also help the United Nations to design software tools to manage aid deliveries in Africa.

It was an incredible ride, and the thing I’m the most grateful for is the awesome team with some of the most talented people on this continent. These people choosing to work with us is an incredible honor for me personally.

Now that the vaccination program in our home country, Hungary is going well, and we start to see the end of the covid tunnel, it’s time to start thinking about what’s next.

In this blogpost I share my “secret” master plan for the upcoming years.

Designing for impact

As a boutique product design agency with super talented people on board, our goal is to do design that has a huge impact on our client’s businesses and their end users lives. We would also love to do design that has positive impact on society.

We see how transformative it is when a company starts to work with a proper UX team.

Big banks who were skeptical of even doing one single usability test on their own app has turned to avid fans of the UX method in just a few months after they started working with us.

A software that was hardly possible to use or navigate and even hated by their own creators was turned into customer magnets with thank you emails coming in daily from satisfied users.

Learning a new language, getting a loan for people of color, saving returned products from the garbage landfills and following a cancer treatment will also get a bit easier with the digital interfaces we design for our clients.

As we spend more and more time in our digital world, good design became a superpower, and we are here to use this power for a good purpose. Our goal is to do design that is good for the business, good for the end users, but also good for the whole society.

We don’t want to grow to a multi-hundred people mega agency, where the attention to detail is lost. We plan to stay relatively small and work with the best companies globally who appriciate great design.

In the meantime we want to raise the next generation of design talent in Europe. We continously search for talented people, hire them, give them our training and provide them with opportunity to do the best work of their lives.

As a company run by designers we want to create an environment where the best design talent can thrive and grow.

But doing impactful design and nurturing talent is just half of the story.

As much as we love design and UX, we don’t really like the traditional consulting agencies. Most of them fail when they try to build their own products.

If we want to become the ultimate product design company, we should be able to build our own products as well. A team that can build their own successful products plays in a different league. This is the proof that we really know what we are talking about.

Anyone can start a design agency. Very few can turn that into an actual product company.

Building our own products

We started building our own products 3 years ago. We had our fair share of failures and we learned a lot.

After the first few attempts we decided we will build products for designers and creatives.

Our first product that became a success is UXfolio, a portfolio builder tool for UX designers. UXfolio is now used by more than 45k UX designers in 174 countries around the world. And they love it.

We started building a similar portfolio creator tool for copywriters recenlty, and we are ready to add more professions soon.

Besides our existing products we have many ideas and we plan to start new product teams rapidly.

Currently we have 8 people working in our product teams and 34 working in our design consulting business. During the upcoming years we will make sure to even these numbers, to have as many people working on our own products as working for clients.

Working for clients gives as a wide perspective and a lot of experience: we work with many different companies in different locations, with different sizes and company cultures and what’s most important in many different industries.

With building our own products we go deep. We gain in-depth experience about how product teams work and what’s neccessary for success. We love to have skin in the game, and not just give advice from the sidelines.

With having the wide-perspective of client work and the in-depth experience of our own product teams, we are the ideal home for product designers.

But having these professional opportunities is just one side of the story.

Home for designers and creators

UX studio is a super friendly place for desingers and creators where they are welcomed and valued. We give likeminded people real freedom and real responsibility to do a great work. Our team members are driven and dedicated, they are ready to figure out what needs to be done, and then act on these ideas immediately. This bunch is also very welcoming and helpful when you join.

During the next five years we will continue designing great digital products for our clients and for fellow designers. Because that’s what we love to do.

And during the next five years I will continue nurturing UX studio as a special place for UX people and everyone who wants to join us making a better digital world.