By Margarida Costa | Head of Marketing at Monday
Undoubtedly the most intense event of the year. When we step into the venue we feel the energy and enthusiasm of the participants, the speakers, the volunteers and all the attendees. An information overload.
This year was the second time that the entire Monday team had the privilege to be present at the biggest technology and entrepreneurship event — the Web Summit 2022!
As soon as we arrived early on November 2nd, we assembled our equipment at pavilion 4 of FIL and started to make our pitch. Our best icebreaker is being approached as if we were monday.com, which always serves to say that we are actually older and were the first.
People often ask us “why are you called Monday?”, to which we always enthusiastically answer with the spirit of someone who’s starting something new. You can find out more about our passion for Mondays in this article by Diogo, our CEO.
During the following days of the event, the Mondianos (our self named team members) had the chance to attend talks, masterclasses and micro-events within the Web Summit. After this intensity and the FOMO that this event causes, due to the simultaneity of moments, we had our deserved rest and opportunity to gather the contacts made, insights collected and share our experiences. The results are impressive!
We all watched various content, about UX, UI, CX, HRX and Marketing, but also more personal interests such as health and beauty, automobile, AI and the metaverse, among others. This is the créme de la créme for us, I leave you with the 5 talks recommended by our team members:
1 — Why accessibility must be the foundation of design — Jane Geraghty, Global CEO at Landor & Fitch
Objective: Highlight the importance of accessibility and inclusion in design, showing the impact that design has for people with some kind of limitation, whether physical or cognitive, whether permanent or momentary. Inclusion and accessibility should be the absolute minimum requirement and foundation for every design.
“It wasn’t so much learning but it was more about being alert that small changes for us can make a difference in someone’s daily life.”
Ana Rocha, UX/UI Designer
When designing a product, it is important to keep 3 aspects in mind:
1)Getting all over the easy wins
2)None of us is as smart as all of us
3) Think smart hacks
Beatriz Duarte, UX/UI Designer
“There are details in the design that make it accessible to more users, we just need to think about it and consider it.”
Maria Costa, Project Manager
2 — Confessions of modern design: How design is changing, and how we need to change with it — Yuhki Yamashita — Chief Product Officer at Figma
Objective: Demonstrate the difference between Design in theory versus in practice, where everything is a work-in-progress (WIP) in which ideas sometimes precede the identification of problems, showing that in the development process nothing is linear.
“I learned how to use WIP as our design asset!”
Margarida Silva, Business and Service Designer
“Wanting to do a straight process following the theory doesn’t work in the current reality of product development.”
Ivone Sousa, Business Designer
Tip 1) Review work at a predictable cadence versus at the perfect moment
Tip 2) The form feedback takes is just as important as the feedback itself
Tip 3) Be less precious about the work that ships
“Everything is a WIP”
Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma
See the full presentation here
3 — UX/UI trends in 2023 and beyond — Des Traynor, Co-Founder Chief Strategy Officer & Co-founder at Intercom; Hubert Palan, Founder and CEO of Productboard; Alisa Cohn, Contributor at Forbes
Objective: Discuss key ingredients to create a seamless and intuitive customer experience. Speakers also explore anticipated UI and UX trends for 2023 and beyond, most notably team collaboration.
“How other team leads built processes and work dynamics to solve growth problems.”
Michael Nunes, Chief Creative Officer
In this discussion table, the speakers mentioned some ways of stimulating collaboration between teams, as well as creating sustainable growth.
- Speak with consumers to understanding their desires
- Be accurate and timely
- Understand the jobs to be done to prioritize and invest in the best design for these problems
- Designing intuitive and creative solutions adapted to the needs
- Celebrate failures, learn and continue to iterate
“Talk with users is the most precise way to get results but it the most slowly”
Hubert Palan, Founder and CEO of Productboard
4 — How to make terrible branded content — Graham McDonnell — Global Head of Brand & Creative at Time
Objective: Examine the most common failures of content creators who produce content for brands
“Practical examples of a professional with agency experience, Graham unashamedly showed his mistakes and what he learned from them.”
Margarida Costa, Head of Marketing
Graham McDonnell stressed that his job is to make what they create have value. Then, one by one, the speaker listed the 10 mistakes to make to achieve the failure of a branded content piece:
- Start without Defined Goals
- Ignore the Value Venn
- Treat it Like an Ad
- Forget to Tell a Story
- Position the Brand as the Hero
- Quality over Quantity
- Decide on the Format First
- Go Too Brand Heavy with the Design
- Sacrifice Best Practices to Stand Out
- Give the Audience Reasons to Leave Early
5 — Search beyond the search: the biggest opportunity in digital marketing — Neil Patel — Co-Founder NPD (Neil Patel Digital)
Objective: Teach how we can make a business stand out and what new opportunities we can take advantage of to beat the competition.
Neil Pater pointed out that the more difficult it is to attract the attention of the public and consumers, the more expensive the efforts become. He also underlined that people spend more time on social networks than on search engines and that the most popular terms searched on google are social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube…)
“Being able to lead and motivate people is perhaps the most valuable quality a brand can have”
Neil Patel, Co-Founder NPD
Neil presented studies in which the new generation Z performs more searches on social networks Tik Tok and Instagram than on search engines and as such, Google has to adapt to keep up with this trend.
There is a Digital Convenience, that is, after Tik Tok became the most used platform in 2020 with the pandemic through short videos in vertical format, Instagram created the reels, Youtube the Youtube Shorts and Google the Web Stories to increase the impact of blog posts on the search engine. In the end, he highlighted what we should do in each social network to increase our engagement and stand out from the competition:
Youtube — In the first 24 hours of a video being published, you need to gain as many views as possible
Linkedin — Within the first 4 hours of your post being live, you need engaging comments
Tik Tok — Like Linkedin, Tik Tok wants a lot of comments
Facebook — Create long-form content that keeps people on their platform, ideally videos with 5 minutes
Instagram — Create live content at least twice a week
Google — Brand queries: Launch free tools for more people to search you brand and gain loyalty
“Good marketing makes your company look great, great marketing doesn’t even look like marketing. Be so relevant that people can’t ignore you”
Neil Patel, Co-Founder NPD
Thank you for reading.
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Monday is a Business Design Consultancy based in sunny Lisbon. We co-create with ambitious leaders to build better businesses. We use strategy & design to transform businesses from within.
This core philosophy stands at the center of everything we create.
Clients include: Mercedes, EDP, Banco de Portugal, Microsoft, Jogos Santa Casa, CUF, Sumol+Compal, Fujitsu, Galp, among others.
