World Usability Day Estonia 2026 takes place on 19th of February, and registration is still open. Helmes team is there, of course: Artur Sossin, our resident AI expert, as one of the keynote speakers on stage; and many of us in the audience, because user-centric design thinking is much less about “pretty” and a whole lot more about “business critical”.
Elite performance often relies on systems thinking. Small improvements across many touchpoints can yield disproportionately outsized results. It’s a game of “marginal gains”.
An excellent example of this comes from pro cycling*, the total remake of Team SKY. Britain went from never having won the Tour de France to absolute world domination in just 3 years by compounding small advantages into a big gain. If everyone has their best riders in play, what can you do extra to ensure yours get to perform at their peak – every second of the race period?!
The idea of adding up smaller things to build something bigger is certainly not revolutionary. What made it unique was turning it into a strategic business choice. They took the UX of being a pro-rider and asked not what’s broken, but what could be made better. It took guts, investment, and, above all – a desire to challenge the notion that “not being bad” equals “good enough”.
The same principle could be applied to every product you know is already good but you’d like to turn into an excellent one.
True design choices are not just about making things aesthetically pleasing. They define how a user can use your product or service – how they access it, their mindset when using it, the things and skills and knowledge it requires of them, the value they perceive, the number of mistakes they make, the amount of support they need, the way they celebrate (or penalize) you for it. You are a much better client of and a support for your design team if you know how to get involved and where you can provide input that they cannot gain from simple usage statistics.
The World Usability Day conference is about helping people ask questions that would lead to better decisions. About expanding how we think and gaining new perspectives.
So – Helmes will be there, and we hope to be able to catch you, too. Here are a few of the headlines that I am personally most excited about:
- Frans Joziasse, Co-founder and Director, PARK: “Value of design at design leaders (LEGO, Airbus and Haleon)”
- Artur Sossin, Senior AI Consultant, Helmes: “How a proven AI framework speeds product decisions and growth”
- Paolo Ramazzotti, Mind The Gap founder: “From beautiful to valuable: designing for relevance, visibility, and choice”
- Steve Rawling, the author of storyteller tactics: “Stop demanding features and benefits. Start designing spirit.”
- Harri Kiljander, design strategist at Alpha Design Partners: “Design as a strategic lever: how leaders turn UX into business impact”
- Marzie Nadali, UX Mentor & Educator, MarziUXD: “Making UX value visible: how to present design work so decision-makers actually understand the impact”
Shall we grab a coffee at the event?
* Ahh, you’ve made it here. So, what’s the story about cycling?
When Sir Dave Brailsford (the Performance Director of British Cycling) took over the management of Team SKY in 2010, he set an ambitious goal – to win their first Tour de France within 5 years. His strategy was simple: if you improve everything you can by just 1%, those tiny improvements will compound into a huge competitive advantage. The cycling world was more than a little doubtful. Surely there must be “more” to a winning formula, a magical rider for starters…
Team SKY re-did everything – from custom saddles to heat-mapping everyone’s warm-up routines, creating sleeping pods with their own mattresses and pillows (we all know what a bad hotel pillow can cost us!) and employing a chef who learned not only each rider’s individual nutritional needs but also their likes and dislikes.
Instead of trying to narrow down to the “bare essentials” and looking for That One Thing that could change a lot, Brailsford asked what influences each rider, even indirectly, and tried to remove all obstacles, no matter how small.
Individually, none of these things would matter. And yet, within just 3 years instead of the targeted 5, Team SKY and Bradley Wiggins won Tour de France gold. Just luck? Did it still boil down to Britain now having *the* star rider? Team SKY won again the year after, 2013 – with Chris Froome as their lead rider. And 2015, 2016, 2017… and then again 2018, now with Geraint Thomas in the lead.
Sir Dave Brailsford decided that it wasn’t the “core product” that had to carry all the burden, but also the ecosystem around it had to become supportive of growth from good to excellent.
Traditional cycling does not differ too much from, let’s say, a web interface of a banking service: as long as the background doesn’t seem to be “broken”, we assume it’s working well enough. But little frictions in UX often get missed because if a user can “figure it out” fast enough, it tends to register as a win – in both user testing as well as later analytics.
Good UX can happen accidentally, too, but it’s usually because there was someone asking the right questions for your business, and having the power to make those decisions stick.
WUD is a great place to gain a new outlook on business-centric design thinking.
Oh, and if you’d like to read a case study of a project where good UX had to become excellent, we’ve got you covered: A smart medication box for a remote access for emergency services.
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