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.