Leader Spotlight: Designing for trust and values with Franck Hoffmann
Franck Hoffmann is Director of Product Design at Tekmetric, where he leads efforts to elevate UX maturity, unify the design system, and partner to embed continuous discovery practices across teams. His 20+ year career spans leadership roles at SailPoint, Orange Logic, and Art + Commerce, where he has built empowered design teams and shaped products that inspire trust.
In this interview, Franck reflects on the balance between aesthetics and function, the role of ego in design, how generative AI is reshaping workflows, and why aligning your career with personal values matters as much as technical skill.
Balancing aesthetics, function, and ego
What problems occur when leaders assume design elements can be applied anywhere?
I wish this didn’t happen, but it continuously does. I’ve realized it probably can’t be solved, though maybe it gets better over time.
In product, leaders often have their own sense of what good product looks like. Some lean toward aesthetics, others toward function, but everyone has an opinion. The problem is, unless you’ve been a designer for years — doing research and being in front of users — you don’t learn to set aside your ego and realize that users are very different everywhere you go. You do your best with prototypes, but once a version one is out in the wild, you measure, you look, and you almost always have to make changes. I don’t think there’s ever a version one that’s good enough.
Yesterday I was at the grocery store. You punch in a number, then print a sticker for your bag. It seems simple, but I caught myself hesitating because the enter and print buttons were next to each other and I wasn’t sure of the difference. That’s beyond aesthetic.
So first you have to define what good design is, which is hard. Then you’re faced with opinions. The work is steering people away from opinions and back to the project brief and the problem we’re trying to solve. If it’s still just opinions, test them. Designing by opinion is detrimental to users. If what worked somewhere else always worked, A/B testing wouldn’t exist.
Do you emphasize function before appearance in your process?
I like to think of design in terms of inevitability. If you have to read the manual, you’ve already failed. It should be obvious enough that users understand what’s happening and what will happen when they click. There can be moments of surprise, but clarity has to be the baseline.
I tell my designers not to jump into Figma too quickly, even though it’s tempting because it’s so efficient. I still prefer to draw on paper because it’s faster, or to type. I evangelize this idea, though it doesn’t work for everyone.
I also encourage writing things out. Instead of typing a quick call to action, write a paragraph: “When I click this button, I need to have the confidence this will happen.” Obviously that won’t fit on the button, but refining from there forces clarity. Today, tools like GPT can help synthesize options. Not to replace a person, but to iterate better. It’s about starting with the building blocks and refining, refining, refining. That’s the craft.
Does ego create tension between what you think is optimal and what users need?
For me, it doesn’t happen like that. I’m very careful of my own thinking because I’ve been humbled many times by believing something would work and it didn’t. That history helps me think faster, but it reminds me I don’t know everything.
Ego can turn against you. When you’re at your screen all day making decisions, if your ego is too tied up in it, every failed test feels like a personal failure. That’s not healthy. Opinions — whether from PMs, engineers, or designers — should all carry the same weight until tested. Then you make a decision.
Something I tell my team is to think about one-way doors versus two-way doors. If a decision is reversible, we can test and pivot. If it’s not, we need to slow down. Framing it this way makes conversations easier and shifts focus back to the problem rather than personal preference.
How do you distinguish between aesthetic and functional problems?
Aesthetics are subjective, but there are truths. You might not like a design, but still admit it works. The better question is whether it’s on trend.
Design is driven by fashion. Apple’s OS7 in the ’90s had excellent UX, but skeuomorphism, shades of gray, and tabs that looked like buttons. At the time no one criticized it. If you used the same style today, the product would look old. That impression alone could tarnish the company’s reputation, even if the function was solid.
Being on trend matters. When designers can’t do this well — especially with so many examples available for inspiration — it’s usually a sign their strengths lie elsewhere. Stakeholders saying “I don’t like it” are often reacting to trend, not specific colors or shapes. Once you uncover that, it’s easier to design accordingly.
Function is different. Especially in vertical SaaS, context matters: how the user got to the page, what came before, what they’re trying to do. You might be designing a small modal, but you need the whole context. That’s where the design effort lies.
AI can feel magical, but it’s often wrong
How divided are design leaders on generative AI for prototyping?
From what I see in design leader Slack channels, there’s a clear split. Some are very excited, saying, “If you’re still prototyping in Figma, you’re doing it wrong.” I’m on the other side. To me it’s not there yet.
Generative AI is very good at making you believe something is done. The problem is that it shortcuts thinking about the function and the user. It feels magical, but most of the time it’s wrong. And I ask myself, why spend that much time prompting by yourself when it could have been sketched with a PM and engineer on a whiteboard pretty quickly?
If you’re building a one-page app in a common space like e-commerce, I’d bet an AI prototyping tool can do something decent. But in vertical SaaS, not yet. The bigger concern for me is with young designers. They’re the ones most at risk of losing jobs to AI, and if they use these tools for basics, they don’t practice their own thinking. They skip the craft and it could limit their growth.
Where do you see generative AI being useful?
Many places, for example zero-to-one. If you’re raising funding and need a prototype, generative AI can give you something polished enough to pitch quickly. In the past you’d make slides or sketches or time-consuming prototypes. Now you can generate something that looks and feels like a product.
What are the risks of relying on generative AI too early?
The problem with seeing something too early is anchoring. Once we’ve seen it, we can’t help ourselves — we go there.
I’ve worked with PMs who were talented in design, some with design backgrounds. They usually understood the process. But I’ve also seen cases where a PRD already had a table in the hypothesis, and one of my designers just went straight to building a table. They didn’t even consider other interactions.
If the first generative AI draft takes you in the wrong direction, you waste time or worse — you end up delivering the wrong solution. That’s risky and has to be handled intentionally.
There’s also a bias I’ve noticed: teams critique human-made designs more harshly than generative AI ones. It’s interesting because five years ago I would’ve bet the opposite — that people would trust humans more than machines. But generative AI seems so good that it feels right, even though running the same prompt multiple times produces different results.
Shifting focus to users, does user awareness of AI change how they interact with products?
Trust is the central challenge. Companies building AI know this. GPT, for example, is acquiescent. It “likes” you, and you want to believe it likes you. That builds trust. Even the way it answers — typing progressively instead of showing a block of text — feels more human. That creates anthropomorphism, like there’s a little green goblin behind the screen.
Take autonomous vehicles. In Austin, Waymo cars drove around for a year before opening to the public. First with people inside, then alone. Just seeing them built a sense of safety and curiosity. That was trust-building.
Design has to use similar strategies. If an AI predicts something, users need to trust it. That could mean linking to sources, showing confidence levels, or using careful language: “There’s a 96% chance that…” Transparency matters.
When things happen beneath the surface, designers need to expose some of it. Once trust is earned, the transparency can fade into the background. We tolerate mistakes from humans, but we’re less forgiving of mistakes from machines. That difference and building trust has to be addressed through design.
Why values matter more than trends
What guidance would you give to younger designers?
It depends on what motivates you. For me, working on something that tricks people into spending money on things they don’t need wouldn’t get me out of bed in the morning. Over time, I’d find it depressing to use cognitive science and psychological tricks to push clicks.
There are paternalistic designs, like auto-enrolling people into a 401(k). It’s good for them, but should you be the one making that choice? I’d rather enforce clarity of options.
Would you want to work for Meta, specifically on Facebook? Meta has many departments, some of them super interesting. If you believe in Facebook’s mission to connect people, and it lifts you up, then that’s valid.
Some designers come from art backgrounds and take UX for the money. If that fits your needs, that’s fine. But at some point you might ask, what am I really doing? When the speeches say “we’re making the world better” but the reality doesn’t match, it can be depressing.
Working on real-world problems is different. In cybersecurity, or at Tekmetric helping auto shops modernize, I see the impact directly from users. A tool in the cloud means shop owners don’t have to stay late, miss dinners, or lose years with their kids. That changes lives.
So I tell designers: money is important, and it means different things for different people. But think about the type of life you want to live. Base your career decisions on your values, not just opportunity.
Do ubiquitous products like Google or Apple set expectations you have to follow?
It’s both a good and a bad thing. The good thing is that if you borrow something from Google, you can be fairly sure that users will understand it. Gmail has over a billion active users. They’re testing constantly, so those patterns are familiar.
But blindly following trends can backfire. Don Norman once wrote an article criticizing Apple for prioritizing slick flat design over usability. At the time, iOS required hidden gestures to switch apps. My mother, who has arthritis, found that nearly impossible. For her, the trend was a barrier.
Microsoft did something similar with its “Vision of the Future” videos, pushing flat design and borderless devices. Those trends took over, and suddenly fashion outweighed function. That’s dangerous.
Designers shouldn’t ignore trends, but they also shouldn’t follow them blindly. Basics matter more. A whiteboard sketch or a quick write-up can be enough to test ideas before chasing fashion. Familiarity has value, but usability has more.
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