As robots move beyond industrial environments and into workplaces, public spaces, and everyday life, technical performance alone is no longer enough. People need to understand what a robot is doing, predict how it will behave, and feel safe around it.

Shakir Dzheyranov, Founder and CEO of Hello Robo, specializes in user experience and brand design for robotics companies. After working as an Art Director at Nike, a Creative Director at Spinifex Group and Uniplan, and a product design leader at Fair.com, he now focuses on everything from robot interfaces and operational workflows to branding and human–robot interaction.

In this interview, he discusses when robotics companies should begin thinking about design, how visible imperfection can sometimes build credibility, and which principles will be most important in making robots understandable, approachable, and safe.

Q1. Robotics companies often focus first on technical performance, while branding and user experience are treated as secondary concerns. At what point should a robotics company begin designing how people understand, trust, and interact with its robots?

The short answer is From day one. And it can't be one person's (designer) job — it has to involve everyone building the experience: engineer, designer, product, leadership.

I also want to push back gently on what "design" means here. People hear that word and think logos, colors, a nice-looking dashboard. That's not what I mean. I mean sitting down and answering every "what happens if" question before you write a line of code or bend a piece of metal.

What happens if the operator starts their shift on a Monday morning and the robot didn't finish its job over the weekend? What happens if the person supervising it doesn't trust it yet? Those aren't visual problems. They're workflow problems, and they're design problems in the truest sense — designing how a human and a machine are going to coexist.

But honestly, this question threads back to a more important root question: What kinf of company the leadership is building?

We've worked with founders who are purely engineering-driven — the robot has to work, everything else is noise, design is a polish.

We’ve worked with founders who are sales-driven — get it in the door, figure out the rest later. And we’'ve worked with founders who are building experience-first, where the person operating or standing next to that robot is treated as a real stakeholder from the start.

A company is just an extension of how it’s leadership thinks. If trust and usability aren't a priority in the founder's head, they won't magically show up in the product and brand.

Q2. You recently wrote that visible imperfection and honest effort can sometimes make a robot feel more human than a highly polished presentation. How can robotics companies communicate experimentation and uncertainty without weakening confidence in the product?

I’ll deflect his question a little bit 🙂. I don't think this is a universal playbook. It really depends on the values at the root of your organization — and as a result, what your brand projects to the public. Being honest and showing imperfections is just one of those values. I wouldn't prescribe it to every robotics company.

It is also related to who you are and what stage you're at as a company.

For example, if you're a publicly traded company like Serve Robotics, where every word and every demo can move your stock up or down, showing the seams is genuinely risky. But if you're an early-stage company like Tau Robotics, that same honesty can become your identity.

Nobody expects a young team to have it all figured out, so pretending otherwise just reads as try-hard. Showing the wiring, the rough edges, the "we're still working on it" is a form of credibility.

It says: this is real, we're not hiding behind a render.

So the real question isn't "should robotics companies show imperfection."

It's "what does your company actually value, and does your brand tell the truth about that." For some companies, the honest answer is polish and certainty. Both can build trust — just with different audiences, at different stages.

Q3. As robots move from controlled environments into workplaces, public spaces, and everyday life, what design principles will be most important in making them feel understandable, approachable, and safe to the people around them?

It's an excellent question, and it's basically the question our studio exists to answer. In short all the efforts should go towards designing for trust and safety.
Telegraphing what the robot is doing or about to do. A robot can be brilliant and still feel terrifying if people can't tell what it's about to do.

That's things like a floor projection showing which way an AMR is turning, or a head movement before an arm reaches. A lot of it can also be achieved with sound signals or HMI design.

Predictable consistency.

Everyone wants their robot to feel "friendly." I'd argue consistency matters more. A robot that behaves the same way every time, even boringly, earns trust faster than one with a cute face and unpredictable timing. Humans trust what doesn't surprise them.

Design for secondary users.

Usually we design for the person driving the robot. But in shared spaces, the person most at risk of confusion is the one who never signed up to interact with it at all — the warehouse worker walking past, the pedestrian on the sidewalk.

Sonic design.

A simple sound status system can teach people how to interact with a robot faster than almost anything else. Look at cars: you turn on your blinker, you hear the click. A large vehicle backs up, you hear the beep. Nobody had to read a manual — the sound already taught them what's happening.

Last, but most important.

Design for misuse, not just use. Traditional software and even car interaction design assumes fairly linear flows: a person moves through a sequence of expected steps, and you design for that path. When it comes to robots, especially humanoids, it doesn't work that way. A session with a robot is non-linear: people wander in and out of it, interrupt it, provoke it, test its limits out of curiosity or boredom or malice. Given enough exposure, misuse isn't an edge case — it's a certainty. You can't engineer intent away. What you can do is know the range of misuse ahead of time and make sure the robot fails safely no matter which weird, non-linear path a person takes to get there.

For Shakir Dzheyranov, design is not simply about making a robot look polished. It means anticipating how the robot should behave in unexpected situations, communicating its intentions clearly, and ensuring that it can fail safely even when people misuse it.

As robots increasingly share spaces with humans, predictable and consistent behavior may matter more than a friendly appearance. Ultimately, trust will depend not only on technical performance, but also on whether the robot has been designed with human behavior, uncertainty, and misuse in mind.

Shakir Dzheyranov Founder & CEO, Hello Robo

Reach the people shaping where capital goes next.