Designing with purpose: How the Qlik design team shapes the future

As a design leader at Qlik, I have the privilege of working with an incredibly talented team of designers dedicated to creating thoughtful, intuitive, and impactful user experiences.

We see design as more than aesthetics—it’s about problem-solving, innovation, and ensuring that every interaction adds value. Our mission is to craft experiences that are not just functional but also delightful, trustworthy, and consistent across our products.

Our foundation and design principles

At Qlik, we have a design philosophy that is deeply rooted in a foundation and a set of core principles that are now even more critical when designing for AI:

• User-centric: We design with empathy. We prioritize users' needs, goals, and pain points. We understand our personas, their jobs to be done, and user journeys.

• Purpose: We ensure that every design initiative has a well-defined purpose that directly aligns with the target audience's core needs and challenges. We relentlessly focus on solving the right problem throughout the design process.

• Delight: We add joyful touches that enhance usability rather than distract from it. We balance function with visual elements that evoke positive emotions.

• Trust: We build trust with users by clearly describing functionality, processes, and data handling. We also create forgiving interfaces that help users recover from errors and maintain control.

• Consistency: We adhere to our design system and patterns to create coherent and predictable experiences. We maintain a unified ecosystem while adapting to diverse contexts and emerging technologies to drive innovation.

These principles make me proud, even though they might seem to be jibberish to many out there.

Purpose comes by engaging with our users

Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.” That’s kind of how design works; it thrives on feedback, iteration, and collaboration.

So, we engage with users in several ways, both qualitative and quantitative. These insights and feedback give us purpose and help us inform and refine our design choices, crafting experiences that empower users to get the most out of our products.

At Qlik, we connect with our users through various channels to ensure we meet their needs:

• Design Partnership Program: This initiative connects us directly with users who are passionate about shaping the future of Qlik. Through monthly demonstration sessions and workshops, we exchange invaluable insights with one another.

• User research program: Sign up to be contacted for upcoming studies.

• Qlik Nation: A vibrant space where customers, partners, and developers collaborate, share ideas, and influence product direction.

• Qlik Community: A hub for discussions, support, and user-driven innovation. It’s where we listen, learn, and refine our designs based on real-world use cases.

• Ideation: Make your voice heard, suggest improving our products, or vote for existing ideas.

By collaborating closely with our users, we ensure that our designs solve real problems and deliver meaningful value.

Recent projects that make us proud

Delight is central to our mission, and we take immense pride in the recent projects our team has undertaken:

• Data Flow: We reimagined how users transform and prepare data for analytics or machine learning, making the complex task of data preparation more intuitive and actionable.

• In-application navigation: The updated sheet navigation with grouping and the navigation object help application creators build even more bespoke and user-friendly applications.

• Qlik Answers: An out-of-the-box, user-friendly RAG solution for unstructured data.

These projects embody our design principles and showcase our commitment to finding insights and actions from your data.

Looking ahead

The future of design at Qlik is bright, and we have strong support from our management in our pursuit of creating delightful experiences for our users. This support is essential as we design more AI-powered interfaces. I’m excited about what lies ahead, and our team’s passion and dedication fuel our drive to push the boundaries of what’s possible in design.

If you share our excitement for user-centered design, we’d love to hear from you! Whether you’re a customer, partner, or fellow designer, let’s collaborate to build the future of data-driven design together.

Stay connected, stay inspired, and keep designing with purpose!