About Yorick Dekker
I’m Yorick Dekker, Senior Experience Designer and Design Thinker at Stedin, a power grid operator. I’m responsible for providing user-friendly tools that give our customers insights into what’s happening on the power grid, such as proactively updating them about disruptions or helping them understand what ‘netcongestie’ is.
As a grid operator, our biggest responsibility is to make sure everyone has energy at home. Funnily enough, that means my work on self-help portals and environments should rarely be seen by our users, because people mostly visit those tools when they’ve lost power.
With that in mind, I focus on helping our users in those situations in the best way possible. By diving deep into customer journeys and facilitating creative sessions like the annual Stedin Innovation Challenge, a two-week Design Sprint, and regular Design Thinking sessions with innovation teams, I aim to create meaningful and impactful solutions.
What is your vision on our UX industry?
I notice that the creative industry is increasingly shifting from aesthetics-first to experience-first. On top of that, sustainability and ethics are playing a bigger and bigger role in what we create. As a Design Thinker, this truly makes my heart beat faster—because with this shift comes a growing emphasis on human-centered design.
The overall design process is really transforming, partly due to AI, which could take over a large part of our work and massively accelerate the ideation process. Thanks to this development, there’s an ever-stronger focus on the user and the human side of the products we design. And that’s good news!
