Csaba Varga

After joining Kinsta, a cloud infrastructure provider, me and a partner in crime established the Design craft at the company, building both the Product Design and Marketing Design teams. Later I introduced UX Research as a dedicated effort, created a Product Management team, and oversaw the Product Documentation area, as Director of Product.

Highlights: advocating the design craft in a heavily technology-oriented environment has proven to be one of the toughest challenges, so I consider maintaining a strong design sensibility as a great achievement. Also, it is a unique experience to support an organization in hypergrowth, building teams and processes under pressure at breakneck speed.

I built a UX Design division at Mito from a team of one to ten, while helping the company grow from an advertising studio to a full-service digital agency. Besides doing hands-on UX projects, I handled hiring, set up team structure, built out workflows and processes, created a career framework, supervised output of the team, managed and nurtured talent, introduced hackathons, and evangelized self-development in the craft.

Highlight: I loved every single hackathon I had the chance to organize and take part in. There’s few things that beat the rush of what’s achievable in just 24 hours if you put your full mind to it.

Over the course of years, I worked on every possible aspect of MyKinsta, a cloud hosting management dashboard, which supports creation, management, and observability for websites, web apps, and databases. I worked from strategy to UI: defining the product, delivering specific features and complete overhauls from research through ideation to implementation, maintaining the design system, and formulating guidelines.

Highlights: it's interesting to see how you create internal tools and observe user hacks of your product, which end up being the most useful features you can deliver for your customers. Creating an application performance monitoring tool was one of the largest such undertaking that I worked on.

During freelance gigs I often ran design sprints for startups and digital products where I facilitated workshops and created product design to bring ideas to life in a pre-allocated timeframe.

Highlights: this is kind of a catch-all, so it’s full of highlights, having worked on so many exciting and sometimes crazy ideas. Like, an influencer marketing management tool, a clothing style consultant application, an investment calculator for 3D printers, or a diaper subscription service. Perhaps the most interesting was building a complete new service experience for a popup telco company designed to disrupt an existing market.

The new website for Wizz Air (a major European low-cost airline) was a year+ project. This included a redesign of the entire customer journey from flight search to booking management, and an overhaul of the complete information architecture, all backed by extensive research.

Highlights: realizing that the core element of the airline experience is not the travel itself, but the anticipation of the destination it takes you to. Also, looking back from 10+ years, there are patterns we take for granted today in travel search, but it was exciting to create them as new back then. My favorite comment on Behance: "works great in reality!”

The website for the Palace of Arts in Budapest was a love project of mine. This included redesigning the complete user journey from event exploration through ticket purchase to the visitor account.

Highlights: I designed several solutions for this project that I was proud of. For example, letting a user see the theater stage from each seat during seat selection (made possible by taking a photo from every single seat of the auditorium), or making sure that event photos always show up perfectly on the website at every breakpoint (by creating an image editing tool for the website managers where they could choose focal points for images).

In 2013 I started in Design education by mentoring students in fields of Technology, and building curriculum for adult education programs. Eventually I was honored to stick with MOME, the most prestigious design university in Hungary, where I co-built UX courses and co-founded the Interaction Design Lab, which later turned into the first UX Design MA program in Hungary. I held lectures, ran workshops, managed student projects, supported thesis work, organized and facilitated design retreats.

Highlights: our design camps always had almost ritualistic dedication, while we left behind the digital tools and solved real-life problems in remote places with the means of design. It was the most amazing experience to see young talents flex their creativity and be there to support them.

From early on I gave talks at meetups about solutions, methods, and case studies from my UX work. Everything I learned I defaulted to sharing in some way, so others can learn from it, too. Eventually I joined the UX Budapest meetup series as an organizer, helped build a strong professional community with continuous events, advocating the craft, and creating career opportunities for many new professionals.

Highlights: the most rewarding part of working on UX Budapest was seeing how much it helped to grow this craft in Hungary. The first meetups were small roundtable discussions in cafés, and 10 years later every event had packed audiences of 100+ participants up to venue capacity.