In the early days of product design, the opportunity to influence the world was through tangible products, like toasters. Our role was to incrementally improve on, or ‘decorate’, the built world around us. It didn’t take long, though, for software to become the dominant focus in design innovation, with the mandate being to make software more useful and beautiful.
A shift happened while we were making beautiful things, one that turned out to be monumental — software embedded itself deeply into our everyday lives. It now determines our access to friendships, jobs, romantic relationships, financial success. …
Reflections on a year we won’t soon forget
Looking back on a year that challenged our modes of work and collaboration, and even the optimism that is fundamental to our approach, the strength of our culture shone through.
As a new year dawns and we celebrate the 7th anniversary of argo’s founding, here’s some of the work we produced with forward-looking clients who continue to invest in the future. We celebrate their vision and shared optimism.
A unified digital future for Salesforce
Crafting a design system that evolves with its users
Products are a reflection of the methods, processes, and cultures that produce them. A siloed company can create product experiences that feel disjointed. A thoughtfully crafted Design System solves for this, creating a commonality and cohesion across products and ensuring that decisions aren’t being made in a vacuum.
While a typical first step is for an organization to build and adopt a Design System (DS), that’s just the beginning — design systems don’t take care of themselves. They need to be maintained, updated, and evolved, just as products, customers, and businesses must evolve. …
Topics include social good, personalization, and remote collaboration
Our annual “It’s that time of year again!” post for SXSW voting is slightly different this year. SXSW has had to adjust to pandemic circumstances along with the rest of the world, and updated its PanelPicker process to account for a (primarily) virtual 2021 conference.
Coming later in the year and in a shorter window than we’re used to, the 2021 PanelPicker is now open for community input—so get your voting fingers ready! argodesign submitted three fantastic sessions this year, each that define a better future, and we hope you’ll show your enthusiasm for them by logging on and voting.
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How a life of exploration helps uncover and hone your strengths
We spoke to Sonia Prusaitis, General Manager of argodesign’s Austin studio, about her adventurous streak and how it’s informed her work and world view. Sonia grew up in Austin and moved around throughout her 20s, living in Florida, Sydney, Las Vegas, and Seattle. As General Manager of argo’s Austin studio, she focuses on client partnerships, studio operations, and bridging design delivery with backend operations.
You’ve consistently thrown yourself into challenging situations that developed your skills and prepared you to take an entrepreneurial risk with argo when it was in its infancy. Tell us a little about your path here.
I moved…
Machine learning can help us reimagine personal finance tech as a tool for developing emotional intelligence | by Roxanne Ravago
Money is never just about money. Emotions play a huge role in driving the way we spend and save, and the feelings we place towards our spending say a lot about who we are, what we value in life, and who we want to be. As we go down the funnel of collecting to processing, analyzing to displaying our data, the technology we use today in personal finance fails to capture the emotional qualities of our spending, which leaves us without a full, accurate, and nuanced picture of our money.
A dictatorship by numbers
Most personal finance apps today, even the most popular ones…
A creative director’s love for interaction design has an unlikely source
From his early years in East Germany to his current role as Creative Director at argo, Matthias Dittrich has brought his passion for interaction into every design opportunity. He started his career as a web designer in his hometown of Berlin. Matthias moved to Amsterdam to join frog design where he focused on interaction design and information architecture to help clients in various industries like telecommunication, health care and travel. Later, Matthias and his colleagues started their own consultancy, Raft. In 2019 Raft was acquired by argodesign, establishing argo’s first European studio. …
How to make your virtual collaborations flourish | by Sky White
Workplace technology is clearly trending towards real-time, high-bandwidth collaboration. Digital product design is increasingly influenced by this shift with tools like Figma, whose web-based foundation allows users to build digital products together in synchronous workflow.
Can Figma do it all?
When our team at argo started a project for a major telecom client, we decided to test Figma’s potential by using it for as many aspects of the design process as we could. We did this partly out of curiosity, but we also saw promise in Figma’s collaborative nature to accommodate a remote teammate.
In our experience, Figma cleverly supported remote collaboration in almost every…
Innovation accelerates in crisis. How should the employee experience evolve?
by Marcus Piña
The construct of the workforce continues to evolve and transform. That’s a given. From the notion of working in offices, moving into cubes, out into open floor plans, and then back into offices again, we’re a restless and curious lot. We migrate to and move on from staid designs about how and where we should work. We see technology, also ever-evolving, as an unstoppable force in shaping what we mean by “workforce”. And this couldn’t be more true or relevant than right now when COVID-19 is upending almost every existing paradigm and forcing us all to re-evaluate.
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Expedient decisions are the new norm — but with less time comes higher stakes. How can decision-makers navigate those challenges?
By Matthias Dittrich
In every business, decision-makers wrestle with the same question: “How do I know if I know enough to make this decision?” Being too hasty might lead to mistakes, but more investigation will result in higher costs and longer timelines.
In my years as a design consultant, I have had the pleasure of working with great product owners who excelled in making decisions, as well as some that struggled. Often, what defines the difference is a clear decision framework.
The challenges of product management
Product development has never been an easy undertaking. In recent years, with the advent of digitalization and globalization, the…
argodesign
We are a product design firm. We love design – for the technology, for the simple joy of craft, and ultimately for the experiences we create.
