Being a designer at Qlik

To work as a designer at Qlik means that you are responsible for getting the human perspective into our products. To ensure that the user’s needs are not only met, but exceeded. We make sure that the Human perspective is always represented equally along side Business and Technology perspectives.

If you are a designer at Qlik, you need to use your three H’s — Heart, Head and Hand, even if that isn’t always easy. But it’s our dedication to this approach that separates us from the crowd. It’s up to us to think as user centric designers in a product centric environment. To continuously push technology and mindsets forward, putting the human in control. Even as we continue to expand and grow our product’s technology to dazzling new levels of sophistication. We help ensure that it’s human needs that decide what the technology should do. This is the design thinking way of looking at our existence here at Qlik. This is hard work. But fun.

The Design Thinking Process is a blend of Heart, Head and Hand. This means the process is based on vision, need, emotion and feeling (heart) to begin with, continuing on to the cognitive processing for ideation and evaluation (head) and then diving into practical creation and design craft (hand). It’s a holistic process and demands input from all our faculties in order to be successful. This is something the whole company should be doing and we are the ones that need to drive it. The Qlik Product Design Group has the Design Thinking process integrated in our own process and method.

Ultimately, this means we need to know a lot of things as well as do a lot of things.

Different types of designers play a special roles in the process. Utilising there different strengths and skillsets in either Heart, Head or Hand — interaction designers, product designers, visual designers and design strategists.

To make designers’ lives easier and more loaded with insight we have a team with usability specialists & design researchers which we just could not live without. They are essential in helping us understand the problem space, given the nature of our product, the scope of the market and the many user types we have. We are also building our Design Language System with components & patterns to further speed up design work from many perspectives, minimising double work and ensuring the UI consistency in our products. Of course this also helps the UI developers as not only do they not have to recode all the components every time, they can also solve problems, prototype and innovate independently. And we are happy for all the help we can get, as diverse minds make for better solutions.

At Qlik, we are, after all, striving for the same goal — to make products people want to buy, use, love and grow with. Designers have a special responsibility to help in fulfilling these goals for the organisation and we are excited to work on this challenge on a daily basis. And it’s that excitement that gets u through when things get more challenging than we wished for.

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