“Our colleagues are the stars”

On 11 October, Hungary’s service design community came together once again to share their achievements and explore new trends. The Works. team was also represented among the talks on innovation, corporate culture, branding, customer experience, employee experience and service design, with its experts presenting on accessibility and successful telecoms projects this year. In connection with the event, I spoke with Maczinkó Ákos and Lichter Tamás, two leaders of the design agency, about the present and future of Works. and the industry.

What was the 7th Service Design Day like, and what would you highlight about the event?

Ákos: In my view, it was an exceptionally inspiring, high-quality professional event for everyone involved. Professionals and those interested in the field could choose from a broad range of topics and more than 200 speakers. On a personal note for Works., I would highlight how many familiar faces we were able to catch up with, and how many people came over to speak to us. The event gave me fresh momentum. I felt that, over the past nine years, our team has become an integral part of the Hungarian design community.

Tamás: This year’s Service Design Day was both a great networking opportunity and professionally thought-provoking for me. We heard engaging talks and had some good conversations over by the refreshments. We came with three presentations: in two of them, we shared insights from joint projects with our clients. The third focused on a topic that is both timely and evergreen: accessibility, specifically our experience with accessibility audits.

What do you mean when you say accessibility is timely?

Ákos: From summer 2025, medium-sized and large companies will be required to make their digital interfaces accessible. We see that the expertise required is not yet available everywhere. The Works. team is professionally prepared for this transition, and four colleagues are already working full-time on accessibility audits. It may sound lofty, but we believe that equal access can make the world a little better. We are also committed to educating the profession, and you will soon be able to find content we have created on our website and social channels.

How do you see the market? Beyond accessibility, what other changes are you seeing?

Tamás: One visible direction is insourcing, especially at large companies. Design departments and customer experience and UX/UI design teams have been established in recent years, bringing some of the work previously done by agencies onto the client side. This is a natural process: as design maturity grows in large organisations, they want to build these capabilities in-house. The challenge can be that these teams need to be nurtured and developed professionally if they are to deliver solutions to a high standard. If a team remains small, training and development are relatively more expensive, and long-term operations become difficult. This is the situation at medium-sized companies, where running design departments may not be financially viable even in the medium term. The teams of up to 20 people that are typical of larger companies are more self-sustaining professionally: knowledge is retained even with lower staff turnover, and businesses of this size have enough projects to support professional development. This trend also means that many people are moving from the consultancy side to the client side, which has a pull effect on talent. (user experience and user interface)

We are seeing other trends too. One is the accessibility already mentioned, while another is a growing demand from clients to shift the focus from consumer audiences to the B2B segment. We, too, are doing more and more B2B research and design work. To mention another conference, FinTechShow took place recently, and its main theme was B2B as a target audience for digitalisation. (business-to-business)

I think agencies need to transform and, to some extent, redefine their service portfolios and how they operate. If I look at these challenges positively, I would say they also represent new opportunities, and new types of relationship can emerge with the client side.

Since you mentioned research, what are your further plans in this area?

Ákos: Qualitative research related to design is something that is generally not worth bringing in-house; it typically remains on the agency side.

Expectations around research are changing too. There is an increasingly strong demand from clients for companies to recruit respondents for their user experience research from their own customer databases, and to access the learnings gathered from completed research through a company insight database. In response to these expectations, we are preparing to enter the market with software we have developed ourselves. It will be both a major surprise and a challenge for us next year.

What will this software do, and how will it help?

Tamás: We want to create a tool that helps companies manage research they conduct or commission, from the brief through to completion and beyond. More specifically, the tool will make it easy and quick to recruit respondents from an in-house or external database, and to store and retrieve research-related documents in one place in a structured format. Beyond that, our aim is for the software solution to support the ongoing use of insights gathered from research. So we have ambitious goals for the product.

Turning to the talent side of the design market, what are your experiences of how well prepared design professionals are?

Ákos: We see that the client side is already familiar with the fundamentals of design. They increasingly expect more complex knowledge and broader experience from us. So they are more likely to seek mid-level and senior expertise externally. Tamás and I often discuss how, as leaders, we look for adaptability and a generalist mindset in new colleagues, and we train the existing team to develop these qualities too. I think the design profession will change dramatically over the next five years. The winners of this change will naturally be those best able to adapt to evolving market needs.

It has not helped the profession that the continuous stream of design courses is flooding the market with juniors when there is not enough demand for that many professionals. While participants are enthusiastic and committed, in many cases they finish their training only to be left disappointed and without work.

What remains attractive about the consultancy side, however, is the opportunity to gain experience and develop across a wide range of industries and assignments.

What is Works.’ strength, and what are you proud of after nine years?

Ákos: It is important to us to remain authentic, both internally and externally. We are building a professional studio rather than a “one-man show”. We believe in the team; we do not have stars. We run a self-learning organisation with minimal hierarchy. I think our leadership model is unusual, too. Works. is built around two entirely equal leaders. As neither Tamás nor I have leadership pretensions, we believe more in operating through compromise; the two of us genuinely run the company together.

Tamás: Another strength of Works. is that we have several strings to our bow. Rather than specialising in one thing, we offer services that complement and reinforce one another, while also being viable in their own right, such as UX and UI design, qualitative research, accessibility audits and end-user testing. This provides economic stability while offering colleagues excellent opportunities to learn. We have grown alongside the team and the company ourselves, too. We have had some hard knocks, I will not deny it, but they came at the right time and fortunately we learned from them quickly. Quite a few of our partners have remained loyal to us for many years, and that alone is a great recognition for us. (user experience) (user interface)