Partners Share HUGE History

This week, we hopped on the A Train to DUMBO to visit HUGE Inc, the Digital Design shop that’s grown from 10 staffers in 2004 to 400 employees in four offices--Brooklyn, London, LA and Rio. In DUMBO, they’ve literally had to burst through their own ceiling. The puns are too easy.

HUGE has held onto IKEA for a decade and revolutionized the e-commerce game with their design of the Jet Blue site back in 2004. Recently, they designed the most beautiful video App we’ve ever seen--the HBO Go App. We were lucky enough to catch two of the company’s seven partners--Michal Pasternak, User Experience, and Joe Stewart, Executive Creative Director--in the office.

Design Gold: Michal Pasternak and Joe Stewart

READ MORE

JL: Let’s just start off talking about what brought you both to HUGE.

M: [Laughs] Let’s see, it’s been six and a half, almost seven years. I was in a quarter life crisis--I studied mechanical engineering--so I was doing all kinds of random things, and then saw a posting for HUGE for a copywriter, actually, and applied to it and said, “Here’s my resume. I have no experience with copy-writing but I love what you guys say about yourselves and how you approach your work.” They just had literally one paragraph and it was great. Then I met with Gene, one of our partners, and he said, “You know, you should really think about Interaction Design instead.” So I looked into it and I was like, “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s the engineering minus the hard math and science I was getting really sick of during my masters. So, that’s kind of the rest of it, and it’s just been a ride.

JS: I didn’t know that. That’s a good story.

It’s funny, we went to high school together but we went on complete opposite paths and ended up together. I was living in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom and I dropped out of school to go and make websites, which was a bad idea. Like I don’t recommend it to anybody. But everything was happening in that area at the time. So while Michal was at Stanford...

M: ...Geeking out and making robots.

JS: …I was basically interning and learning how to do it. It was back in the day when basically every big company website really sucked and was horrible work, so everyone had side projects. Every designer had their own art project. So I had my own little side project, and one of the designers at HUGE in 2001 saw it and asked if I wanted to move to New York to work at HUGE. So I did, and this was like ten years ago now, which is crazy. And then the economy collapsed, and HUGE got very quiet and everyone got laid off, including myself. Then like, six years ago, they were doing a couple new projects and they called me back. I moved back again to work again at HUGE.

M: We worked on JetBlue together.

JS: Yeah, that was my first project here, we designed JetBlue together.

JL: That’s a really good first project to have. Beautiful site.

M: Unbelievable.

JS: Yeah, it’s like six years old now, which is crazy to think about.

M: In web, even crazier.

JL: So is that the project that really kicked off HUGE’s fantastic growth? Or what has led to that in the last six years or so?

JS: Well, we’ve been IKEA’s agency for ten years. That’s basically the founding of the company, it’s been IKEA. In a lot of ways, it’s been the definition of who we are. We definitely have a very Swiss design style, like Scandinavian European. It’s also really business focused, of course. It has to achieve goals but at the same time it has to be fun and cute and feel good. It’s sort of what we’ve always been about. It’s like it has to work, but you have to love it working. IKEA’s always been there for us and then JetBlue kind of fell right into that. And for whatever reason—well, for a lot of reasons—that site did really well. That was kind of the beginning of phase two for HUGE. Maybe that’s egotistical.

M: No, I mean—IKEA had so many awesome challenges, but at the time you couldn’t really buy anything online so it was sort of not the whole story and JetBlue was the first time. It was just soup to nuts kind of everything. You could book, you could manage it. It was such a powerful brand, they had such a great campaign going on at the time, so it was just really big shoes to fill. IKEA was still growing at the time in the US. I think on both of them, the other piece—and this is such a typical UX person comment—was the really rigorous user research that we did, too. That’s something that we don’t just do as something to check on a box and we never have. That’s where we get our ideas, from user research and insights.

JS: I want to pause on that point. At the time, when those sites existed, if you look at what else was happening on the web, it wasn’t anything like that. Anything that was considered cool or buzz-worthy was just Flash micro-sites, a bunch of 3-D, spinning lights and things like that. It was cool for designers; designers thought it was cool. But no one else thought it was cool. No one would ever go back. It wasn’t good for businesses and it actually wasn’t good for people either. It was good for CMOs I guess, maybe. And good for winning awards, but it actually wasn’t a good use of design. So we kind of took this big giant zag and said, fuck it, we’re going to make an HTML website. JetBlue is going to be HTML only.

M: At the time, that was insane.

JS: That’s a strange thing to say, but because it will work on every browser, like it will work for my mom, it’s search optimized, the back button works--all these things that seem so obvious now. But at the time, it was sacrilege. Our website, for the last six years, has been an HTML website, and that was insane. Now they all are. And the only reason we did that is because it works better. It was what people really wanted, it wasn’t what designers wanted or companies wanted. It was what people really wanted. It was being quiet and humble and listening. That seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s hard to do, actually. Because of that, people use that site. That site actually paid for itself in about a week, in increased revenue. We kind of patterned after that. User Experience is just listening to people, that’s all it really is.

JL: Did you do user research for JetBlue then, to form that experience?

JS: We did a ton.

M: We flew to their customer service center in Colorado and listened to calls and talked to their customer service reps. We went through all their emails and call logs in depth, really analyzing what the top questions were. Then we did first hand research just to have people try and book a ticket online, gave them money to do it.

JS: It’s so goofy. It seems so obvious when you say it. When you ask people what they want from an airline site, they say “to book a ticket” or “to manage my flight.” It’s like, okay, I guess that makes sense. So what Michal did, is she put the booker on the homepage. No other airline had ever done that before, and it seems really dumb, but it’s like, “You want to book a flight. Here!” And now every single airline has a booker on their homepage.

JL: Before was it just big flash images of airplanes?

JS: Big promos, yeah. Big advertisements.

M: And there was a book a flight button that ninety percent of people came to the site and clicked on.

JS: So it’s like, “Why didn’t you just save them having to click that, and just make the book a flight page be the homepage instead?” It seems so silly, but it’s just taking your ego out of it. That’s really it.

JL: Did you have any push-back from anyone internally or externally when you decided to go in that direction?

JS: No, because you can test. It actually doesn’t matter what the client thinks, it doesn’t matter what Michal and I think either. You can put pages in front of people and test it and whatever works is the right answer, whether or not you like it. If it works, it works.

JL: So how did the boom of the business go after that?

JS: Well technically, if you look at the numbers, I think, except for this year, we’ve almost doubled in growth every year. And actually, we’re putting the brakes on right now to sort of chill out, because it’s actually really hard to grow, and dangerous. We kind of did that, and then this funny thing happened in the publishing world: people stopped buying magazines.

So we did tons of magazine’s websites, which is fun and good, but they’re a bit repetitive. And then much more sort of e-commerce stuff, so it’s been a lot of shopping carts and a lot of article pages. Product pages and article pages, every person could do here with their eyes closed. We’re really good at them, but long white pages with lots of Arial, it gets sort of boring. So now it’s really about trying to round the corners and still being able to rely on that stuff, because you know what works. But being able to do iPhone apps and TV apps and big touchscreens and all that kind of fun stuff.

JL: Yeah, HBO Go is a beautiful app. I’m such a fan of it.

JS: But the only reason we could do that is because the background is such functionalism. When we started working on HBO GO, you can bet people came up with all sorts of goofy ideas. It's like, "What if you could talk to Sookie during the episode! We could film special versions just for the iPad and they geo-locate and talk to each other and then you can watch with your friends all at once and talk about it all at the same time!” And it’s like, no one will do that.

When you ask 1,000 people, what do you want your HBO iPad app to do? They say, “I want to watch Sopranos.” So all you do is make it unbelievably quick to be able to press play. And there are a lot of ways to do that too, and it has to feel very premium. I mean, HBO’s unbelievably expensive and their shows are amazingly brilliant. It’s the best TV content in the history of the world, so the app itself has to feel quite premium. It can’t be like YouTube, which is ubiquitous and democratic, it has to be this solid gold kind of thing.

JL: It feels luxury.

JS: Luxury. There you go. Exactly.

JL: What is it that HUGE does better than anyone else?

M: I think it’s what you’ve just been talking about. I think it’s that incredible…you cannot break down our focus on delivering what the users need. We help clients figure out how not to add 22 bells and whistles but instead, really do this one thing that they need really really well. We talk to users, we look at the analytics and the data and see how people are using a product. And then we build what we know is going to work. Then we test it with people.

For me, coming from a product-design background, where you can’t really fuck around, if you’re making a bike, you need to test it many many times before you put it out in the market. We’re doing the same thing.

S: No one else in our space offers the kind of business insight that we do, based on all the experience we have. JetBlue is a very good example of a time this really clicked into place for us. you’ve got visual design working well with user experience. But also, everything we did was designed to solve, or to help business needs.

JS: That’s a good point. There’s sort of a horrible realization—there are lots of horrible realizations in this industry—design is not art. It’s just not, at all. It’s solving problems. It is about meeting goals, and the reason companies come to us is to make money. CNN came to us to redesign their site so their website would make more money. They’re not coming to us to make it prettier. It’s great that it’s prettier, but candidly, no one cares, because they want to make money.

M: JetBlue is such an interesting example. When we tested with people, they actually said that they loved the site. The initial site. It had these cute little icons at the top and it was really friendly, but when you ask them to actually do something like, “How do you fly with your pet?” which was the number one question we knew in the call center, no one could figure out how to fly with their pet. But they loved the site! And then once they start trying to figure that out, okay they like it a little bit less. So for us, that was an incredible challenge. That was actually meeting both the user need and a business need. It’s going to lower their call volume, their Call Center people can focus on real tough problems, and then it’s going to make the users come back and realize that the website is a real source of that kind of information.

JL: What do you think you’re going to have to improve upon to meet your goals within the next couple of years? I mean the landscape is obviously changing every day.

M: Yes. There are a couple things for me. I mean, one is, we have to focus, essentially. Our goal is to maintain and continue to improve our quality of work, and that means doubling down on people that we have, doing more training with them, so things like the UX school as means of recruiting new amazing talent, but also building and growing our own talent incredibly quickly. Challenging them and giving them amazing opportunities like we had, to work on JetBlue with relatively little experience.

I think the other piece is not getting complacent. The speed with which e-commerce is moving onto mobile is unbelievable. We’re so lucky, and Joe can speak to this more, but we’re so lucky to be working with companies like Target who are on the forefront of that and are thinking ahead on some of those things. That’s really where we need to be. We need to be really focusing on where things are going and being ahead of that curve.