It is no secret that UX / UI Design is one of the most in-demand skills in Silicon Valley today. This demand extends well beyond the consumer-application domain. At Wing, we focus on technology products for business markets, and the entrepreneurs we work with feel the design imperative as much as anyone.
This is for good reason: the consumerization of IT in the enterprise has placed a tremendous premium on UX / UI. Even if you aren’t a bottoms-up, subversive force like Dropbox, it is still essential to deliver applications that employees actually want to engage with. The right user experience helps accelerate adoption and drives renewals and expansions—all of which are keys to the SaaS model. Perhaps more subtly, it also increases an application’s data-power, allowing it to gather more and better data through increased usage.
We love this data-driving property when we find it in business applications, and look for it when making new investments. We also try to help our companies achieve it, which is how we met Chris Guidroz. Chris is a UX / UI designer par excellence, with the rare ability to elevate a product’s deep technical capabilities in a form that people connect with. He has worked with us on projects ranging from next-generation storage systems to breakthrough big data platforms to new content-delivery technologies.
None of these are easy to explain, much less to use. Chris helped these companies bring their core IP to light in a way that makes value obvious to the intended user, and drives usage continuously up and to the right. The Wing companies love Chris and we see huge benefits in creating a new role for him as our first Designer-in-Residence.
We are thrilled to welcome Chris to the Wing family, and look forward to collaborating with him and his team throughout our body of work.
