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Smashing Podcast Episode 66 With Ethan Marcotte: What Is A Tech Union?

In today’s Smashing Podcast episode, we’re talking about Tech Unions. What part can unions play in a modern tech workplace? Drew McLellan talks to Ethan Marcotte to find out.

Note: Listeners can save 15% off Ethan’s book, “You Deserve A Tech Union,” by using the code SMASHING15. Happy reading!

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: He’s a designer and author who over the last two decades has focused on designing and building beautiful accessible web experiences and on helping organizations create more effective design systems. He’s worked for clients such as New York Magazine, the Sundance Film Festival, and Google. And in 2010 coined the term "Responsive web design," which these days we simply call web design. He also writes and speaks about digital design, technology, and justice. And his latest book You Deserve A Tech Union has just been released by A Book Apart. So we know he’s an industry shaping designer and innovator, but did you know if he was British, he’d already have a knighthood. My Smashing Friends, please welcome Sir Ethan Marcotte. Ethan, my friend. How are you?

Ethan Marcotte: After that introduction, Drew, I’m smashing.

Drew: That’s good to know. So welcome to the show. I think people who might’ve heard you talk on a podcast before, might be used to hearing you talk about responsive design or design systems or maybe some of the work you’ve done with very notable clients over the years. And just as the casual observer thinks they’ve got Ethan Marcotte all figured out, here comes a book about unions. To me actually, it doesn’t feel like a big departure because your work’s always appeared to be guided by a sort of strong conviction of fairness and inclusivity and accessibility. And I think you’ve always been in the most positive sense of the word, like an activist, someone who sees something they feel is wrong in the world and then actually takes steps to do something about it.

Drew: And I’m thinking back to 20 years ago when we were both working with the Web Standards project and lobbying browser makers to follow standards and then through to making mobile sites first class citizens, making websites first class citizens on mobile devices, with the whole responsive design movement, which has literally changed the way the industry built websites. So Ethan Marcotte, web activist, is that a fair characterization?

Ethan: I’ll slap that on my homepage and see how that feels. But you just said a bunch of really kind things. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Drew: In that context, a book about unions actually seems to be very on-brand for you. Do you feel that way?

Ethan: I do. It does feel like a different thing for me. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t, but I’m glad you mentioned responsive design because I do think that it really does feel a little bit similar to me in that I feel like I was looking at where the industry was going back in 2009, 2010, and just recommending a different approach. The web was becoming progressively more mobile-focused back then, and I’d been really passionate about designing with inclusivity and access for so long. It felt like around that time we were seeing two kind of inflection points happening, that we were moving beyond the desktop, but we also had all these great design tools to leverage the web’s inherent flexibility. So all I was proposing was, hey, what if we did that? And I provided a name for this thing, but I didn’t invent responsive design so much as just bring some existing tools closer to mainstream notice.

Ethan: The union’s book, I really feel is really shaped by what’s already happening in the industry. I think for the longest time I grew up in a tech industry that felt like it didn’t need unions or it didn’t need worker protections, that it was somehow different and better than every industry that had come before it. And the one thing that has happened over the last few years is that workers are unionizing. They’re unionizing at companies like Alphabet, at Apple, they’re at civic tech agencies like Code for America, at Kickstarter.

Ethan: So this is something that’s already happening in the industry and the book is really shaped by talking to people who are doing the work right now and trying to understand why they’re doing it, how they approached the work, the challenges they face. And the book is really just to try to make that topic more accessible to more people, that this is something that is available to them right now if they’d like to take advantage of it.

Drew: It’s a good point because when I think about unions, I think about growing up in the 1980s where TV news here in the UK was often dominated by images of workers from traditional industries like coal mining and steel production, forming donkey-jacketed picket lines, undernourished men stood around burning oil barrels and that sort of thing. But then more recently we see industrial action strikes by postal workers, by trained drivers, heartbreakingly, by doctors and nurses, who they might’ve swapped Their donkey jackets for something from the North Face, but they’re on strike to campaign for better conditions, for more fair pay deals or what have you. Has the role of unions really changed that much between the shutting down of the steel industries in the last millennium to now, or are they functionally the same even though the industries might be very different?

Ethan: That’s a great question, Drew. I say this in the book, but I think a union means the same thing pretty much everywhere, but in a lot of cases it means something different in every country as well, because it operates in a legal context. I’m writing from the United States, the book has a very US-based focus in terms of how unions operate. But I think at the end of the day, the definition that I tried to put forth in the book is something around the fact that a union is basically a group of workers who are trying to fight for a better life in the workplace through collective action and organization.

Ethan: And I think that’s broadly pretty universal, that when you’re trying to institute some sort of change in your work, whether that’s better wages, better hiring practices, trying to have clearer paths to promotion, the math changes pretty quickly because as an individual you probably have pretty limited influence in trying to instrument some changes at work, but that changes pretty quickly when you’ve got two workers together asking for those changes or 20 workers or 400. It’s really about understanding that when workers in any industry are working together to instrument change, there’s really nothing they can’t do.

Drew: And we’re seeing this to bring it right up to date. Where are we? August 2023. We’re seeing this in Hollywood at the moment, aren’t we?

Ethan: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Honestly, I wish the dues had slowed down a little bit while I was writing the book because I snuck that, because one of the reasons that Hollywood unions are striking, this isn’t the only reason, but one of the reasons is because of the rise of generative AI in the tech industry. There’s all this hype in the tech industry about large language models and ChatGPT, and all the software that takes seconds to produce text or code or imagery that it would take humans hours or days to produce. And so for folks who write and film for a living, there’s an incredible amount of concern about what that means for the value of their work. So it’s been weird writing about the need for unions in the tech industry while Hollywood unions are quite literally shutting down an industry over something the tech industry produced.

Drew: I think when we think about all these different industries that very publicly unionized, I think sometimes the common factor between them all is they work in jobs where there are fewer options in terms of employment. If you’re a train driver here in the UK, we have multiple train operators that you could work for, but by and large, you actually practically need to work for the one that covers the area in which you live. Otherwise you have to relocate. You don’t practically have a lot of choice. And when workers are being treated unfairly, they need to campaign for changes in those jobs because they don’t have the options.

Drew: When I think about tech traditionally, it doesn’t feel to me immediately and first thought, it’s the same situation. As a software engineer, it appears that there’s a worldwide market that I could work for, plenty of opportunities to explore. If a job wasn’t working at how I expected, I could maybe go and find something else. But I also know personally, if I can’t see what the problem is, it’s likely because I’m carrying some sort of privilege that makes me blind to it. What is the need for unions in tech?

Ethan: Yeah, man, we only have an hour Drew. I’m not sure that’s enough time. I guess the way that I like to think about it is, I ask two questions in the book which is, asking folks what they like about their job and then asking them what they would change about their job if they could. And then working through those questions, the question is, okay, for the things you like about your job, how can you actually ensure that they’re not going to change in the future? And then for the things you don’t like, how would you go about changing them? And I think that working through some of those questions, that’s where you can see how a union could actually be helpful to again, change some of that math, to help folks get more leverage at work, to negotiate for better contracts, to actually band together and address some of those issues.

Ethan: But the book was really informed by interviews with a lot of workers who have gone through some of those questions and tried to ask themselves, "All right, how can I make some of these changes?" And by and large, most tech workers felt before they started thinking about unionizing, was that their only option was to leave, to find something else. And there’s no guarantee that the next job’s going to be better at the end of the day. That a lot of the privilege that we may enjoy or the protections we may enjoy at work are really based on social capital or how well the company’s doing at any one point. And obviously in the last year, we’ve seen literally hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs based on arbitrary economic variables, let’s say. So I think it’s been an incredibly challenging time and it’s also helped a lot of folks realize that there is a lot of precarity in tech work. That there aren’t a lot of guarantees, and we do need something that’s a little more stable.

Drew: And it also seems to me to be the case that lots of tech companies operate under, I previously worked for a tech company that was based in San Francisco, which is, I think you call it, is it "At-will employer?" Is that right?

Ethan: At-will. Yeah.

Drew: Is that the right terminology?

Ethan: Yeah.

Drew: Where as a worker you have... It’s almost at whim. You’re at the whim of your employer, where you have very few protections. And so is a trade union another form of protection in that respect?

Ethan: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, it is. And we’ve actually literally seen that here in the United States. I mentioned Kickstarter at the start of the call, and they’re one of the first tech unions that we’ve gotten in the modern era. It’s been pretty amazing to watch their journey, and they just formalized their first contract and they actually managed to enshrine some protections against at-will employment so that you can’t be fired without cause, which is vanishingly rare in a United States based tech company. But I talk about this in terms of power and workers having more say over the conditions that they work in.

Ethan: And in the United States, one of the incredibly powerful tools that a union provides, is the path to something called collective bargaining. Where folks can actually sit down with management and literally define the terms of their employment. And again, that could be related to wages or benefits or working conditions. It’s really driven by the workers who are banding together in unionizing. So absolutely, I think that’s what makes the need for tech unions so urgent, is that it provides that level of democracy in an environment that’s anti-democratic in a lot of ways.

Drew: I guess it’s often easy to think about, when you think about contract law and those sorts of things, is to think about you as an individual and your employer, but I guess a crucial part of a union is standing in unison with colleagues to protect their interests and not just your own. Would you agree?

Ethan: That’s a fantastic point. I would thoroughly agree with that, Drew, that’s beautifully put. I think there’s a preconception, I think, that tech workers by and large are very well paid and that we’re very privileged. And I think in certain cases that’s very true. But one of the things that I heard time and again from folks that I spoke with, is that that privilege and that power is pretty unevenly distributed across different kinds of tech workers. Folks who might look like you and I, who might be fairly senior, who might be engineers are probably doing pretty well. But if you talk to somebody who’s in content moderation or trust and safety or certain kinds of designers, things might be much more precarious.

Ethan: So yeah, asking questions of your coworkers just to be like, "Hey, are you satisfied working here? What kind of kinds of things would you change?" pretty quickly opens your eyes up to the fact that there’s a real opportunity here to think more broadly about this. I talked to several folks who were union members at the New York Times Tech Guild, and they basically did a salary sharing exercise where they collected a spreadsheet and everyone could basically share the amount of money that they’re making. And it was pretty eyeopening for them because they pretty quickly realized that there’s some pretty wide pay disparities. And they also found that it was helpful because it actually helped them realize that this isn’t any individual worker’s fault. This is just a very haphazardly designed and unfair system that they’re all trying to work in. And again, it’s an opportunity to, like you said, to band together and try to figure out, okay, how can we as a union change that?

Drew: And do tech unions exist already? Are they a thing? I know longer standing industries have very specific unions. I remember my parents, both teachers, they were part of a teacher’s union. We talked about some of those more traditional industries. Are there tech unions in existence?

Ethan: Yes. That’s a great question. Again, that varies pretty quickly, country-to-country. I know in the UK, like Prospect I think, and UTAW, I think are organizing pretty actively in the tech industry. In the United States, if you’re looking to unionize, it’s best to find a union that’s doing work in your industry. And there are two that are pretty active up as of the time we’re talking right now. CWA is the biggest union in the States, Communication Workers of America, and they’ve been doing a lot of work organizing different unions. And then there’s another one, OPEIU, which basically spun up like an industry specific branch union to help with that organizing effort. But I think there’s a high level of interest in the tech industry because it’s historically been so difficult to unionize, to get workers to actually understand that they are workers, and to see the benefits of a union. But there’s been so much movement in the last few years that I think there’s going to be a lot more activity in the next.

Drew: And you mentioned Kickstarter a couple of times. Have they formed their own union from scratch and is it specific to the employees of Kickstarter?

Ethan: It is. It is. US labor law is so weird, man. I’ve learned entirely too much about it, but it was described to me by a couple of different folks separately, as a little bit like a nesting doll. Because there are national unions in the United States, and then there were specific branches that are geographically distributed. And then you as a worker have to work with your fellow workers to form a union at your company, which is then affiliated with a branch that then bubbles up to the national union. So they’ve formed Kickstarter United, that is a union specific to Kickstarter, but that is affiliated through I think OPEIU, that national union that I mentioned before. And again, it’s a bit of a nesting doll, but it’s been amazing to see this happening.

Drew: So practically speaking, what does a union look like? We have the workers who join a union. Are there people who work full-time in that or how does it work? And what sort of roles are covered within that?

Ethan: Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Drew. Again, some of that’s going to vary country-by-country, but in the United States, unions do have staff, the administrators, lawyers, full-time organizers, who are basically paid by the union to help their affiliated companies, but also to do outreach and organizing efforts. So for Kickstarter’s example, the workers at the company are all part of Kickstarter United, and those could be tech workers, those could be designers, engineers, product owners. It’s basically anybody who’s not a supervisor for the most part, who’s a full-time employee of the company.

Ethan: But yeah, from there basically, the union operates like a little democratic body. They have bylaws, they can vote on contract proposals. So when I mentioned that Kickstarter actually just ratified its first contract, they hammered out the language, they established a first draft of this proposal with management, and then they circulated it to everybody in the union to ask them to vote on it, to prove it, basically. And so they had to have it ratified by majority vote, and once they did, they actually had a contract in place that’s binding, that defines the terms of their employment

Drew: As generally speaking, as a member of a union, if you’re then encountering problems, say you’ve had a run in with a manager, there’s a back signal you can throw up, so then somebody comes to your aid?

Ethan: Exactly. Yep, yep. They wear a cape and a helmet. No. Yeah. No, that’s how I want unions to work. But watching too many Marvel movies, I suppose. But yeah, so a union representative will basically be an advocate for you. That’s one of the other things that unionizing unlocks here in the United States. It unlocks a set of rights where if you’re called into a meeting with a supervisor, for example, that could be potentially disciplinary, you get to have a union representative actually attend that meeting to act as an advocate and as a witness. And I believe there’s a similar role of a union rep in the UK, I believe. So if you happen to work at a company where there’s union representation already, you might actually see if there’s a union rep on staff already to talk to you with your questions. But yeah, there’s a bad signal.

Drew: I think it’s part of UK law that the union rep has to be the grumpiest person on staff. I think traditionally that’s how we do things here. Yeah.

Ethan: No, that’s good. That’s good. That’s good. That seems like somebody you’d want in your corner when things go wrong.

Drew: We talk about a little bit when things go wrong, but are there other sort of peace time functions that a union undertakes for its members?

Ethan: Yeah, that’s a great question. The contract, so I mentioned the contract as being like the path to power for workers. They can redefine. They can redefine the terms of their employment collectively, but a contract needs to be enforced and it needs to be governed. And that’s a big part of what the union does. Because once the contract gets approved, it’s not indefinite. It has an end date, and it’s over the course of however many years that it’s enacted, it just has to be ensured that both sides of the agreement are actually for to the agreement. That’s another big part of the union as well. Things can break down, obviously, as we’re seeing in Hollywood right now, because the union also is responsible for negotiating the next contract. And basically the union provides, I think, a voice for advocating for workers on a daily basis, ensuring that things remain bare and that they’re as protected as possible.

Drew: Would a union get involved in things like hiring practices so they don’t directly impact union members and the people being hired into roles might not be union members? Would a union get involved in that sort of thing?

Ethan: Yeah, I think so. I think that kind of comes back to what I mentioned about collective bargaining, because here in the United States, for example, that could absolutely be one of the things that workers decide to organize around. That hiring practices are unclear or they tend to enforce different kinds of bias. So for example, if they require undergraduate degrees that certain members of the population don’t have access to, that’s obviously going to change who’s actually applying to some of these companies. That’s absolutely something that a union could be advocating for and fighting for a contract. Yeah, absolutely, I think that’s something that could be an area of focus for that as well.

Drew: We talked a little bit about AI. Obviously it’s growing rapidly and possibly threatening many of the roles that exist today. I guess one job of a union then can be to protect the viability of its very industry.

Ethan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, we’re seeing that happening right now in Hollywood with folks who are concerned about what happens when studios decide to bring in something like ChatGPT to write treatments for scripts or to do editing work. What is that going to change? How is that going to change the work that human writers are going to be paid to do? Are they going to be relegated to lower cost AI cleanup tasks? What is that going to do to their wages? I think that, yeah, absolutely. This is one of those things that keeps me up at night. Because really it’s like what does it mean to be a designer or an engineer or any kind of person who produces work in the tech industry when you could fire up Midjourney and play around with some prompts to get something that’s visually rather striking.

Ethan: But yeah, I get into this in the book a lot, but I think one of the things that’s so deeply weird about our insistence on calling it Artificial Intelligence is that it conceals the extent to which this technology is deeply reliant on human labor. And that could be whether it’s these large language models that are ingesting content, that have been produced by humans, written by humans, or coded by humans or designed by humans, and trying to analyze them for future output. But there’s also a considerable amount of content moderation work that goes into this AI software as well, where underpaid contractors in various countries, are paid dollars on the day, to basically clean up their output, and they’re being asked to sift through just terrible, traumatizing stuff to make sure you and I can enjoy fun ChatGPT games on a daily basis. There’s a lot of challenges with AI.

Ethan: But to your question, labor unions have a very long history of actually enshrining labor protections in contracts to protect workers from automate. I get in a couple examples in the book, but this is another one of those things that labor unions are keenly focused on, because it has a direct impact on wages, on working conditions and the value of the work that we do. So yeah, it’s a key area of focus.

Drew: The whole area of AI, for me, it raises the whole question of what is creative work? What do we mean by creative work? Is something actually creative if it’s been created by AI or if it’s just regurgitating what it’s ingested, there comes a point where there are maybe no new ideas. It just raises so many questions.

Ethan: I want to be excited about generative AI or whatever the term is, because they can be, I think, useful inputs for the creative process. I don’t think that I would never use them as a writing tool, but I do see folks do some really fun experimentations with them, like some of the graphical tools like Midjourney or Dolly, but they exist in an economy and in a broader social context where folks, like we’re seeing in Hollywood, really powerful, very rich studios, are looking to displace workers by using this software. And I think we can’t really talk about them purely in an exciting standpoint because again, there’s some real harms to creativity and to our ability to do more.

Drew: When it comes to the impact of AI on the tech industry and jobs within the tech industry, it sometimes feels like everyone is in favor of progress until it makes them obsolete. We’re an industry that loves to disrupt things. Should we really be surprised if we get disrupted?

Ethan: Yeah, maybe we asked for it. Is that the question behind the question?

Drew: Maybe we should just accept it.

Ethan: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great, yeah, I do wonder about that. Yeah, maybe it’s just time to put all the computers in a lake and shut off the lights and go get jobs working in the trees or something. I don’t know. But yeah, I do wonder if my opinion of all the software would be different if I’d encountered it in my twenties, because I’ve grown up in this industry and I’ve watched it kind of cycle through movements like this, and I do want to be able to keep working in this industry. And I do feel like there’s a real movement right now, both in terms of the amount of investment going into this technology, but also in terms of the amount that it’s being sold as something that can cheapen labor. That you don’t need to have a team of 50 engineers anymore when you have something like just for an example, Copilot or something like that.

Ethan: And I think that by and large, when folks think about automation, they tend to think of jobs disappearing overnight, but it’s a much longer, slower process. It starts with something called de-skilling, which is where basically technology is seen as something that can do roughly decent work for a fraction of the cost. And so what that does is that, yeah, it does obviously impact jobs, but it also reduces wages because why would I pay a human engineer or a human designer or a human writer what they were getting paid, when I can do something that’s roughly good enough for, again, pennies on the dollar. So that’s the process that I think we’re starting to see the beginning of right now, and I think that’s why we need a number of responses to AI from a regulation standpoint, but also I think from a labor organization standpoint as well.

Drew: Is the only safe job in tech being an AI engineer?

Ethan: Right now, I don’t know. We’ll give it six months and we’ll see what happens.

Drew: More seriously, I know that for many folk when applying for jobs, many of us have concerns that whether it’s legal or not, that our gender or ethnicity or religion or sexuality or accent or appearance or any number of factors might bias employers against us. Is it a reasonable fear that being an existing member of a union could reduce the number of opportunities that are available to you?

Ethan: That’s a good question. I’ll be honest, not to center myself in your question, but I definitely did agonize a little bit over writing this book, because at least in the United States union’s a bit of a four letter word. We’re not very good at spelling over here, I guess.

Drew: Lots of letters out, so it probably is.

Ethan: You all keep the U’s, we get rid of them. It’s weird. But yeah, I mean, I do think that there’s ... One of the biggest sections that I tried to stress in the book is that when you’re trying to organize a workplace, especially here in the United States, it’s important to be safe. And that means having conversations about organizing outside of company Slack, maybe taking things to Signal, talking first with folks you trust and then doing planned outreach beyond that. Because there are some risks involved with unions, again, maybe more in countries like the United States where labor law is just such a mess. But I think above and beyond all else, it’s important for workers to feel safe in what they’re doing. And I think that you should only start this process if you feel like that’s something you can’t. But it is a real opportunity to leave your job better than you found it, which is something I heard time and again from everyone I interviewed, that it’s an incredible amount of work, especially in some countries like the US, but it’s also incredibly rewarding as well.

Drew: And ultimately, the best place to start is by being informed and there’s masses to think about, and I wholeheartedly recommend that listeners pick up a copy of You Deserve a Tech Union. For what could be quite a dry subject, Ethan, your quality of writing, as ever, shines through. I don’t want to say it’s an easy read because the subject’s challenging, but in all other respects, it’s an easy read, as always. Was there anything else you think we should be concerned about or be thinking about when it comes to tech unions?

Ethan: That’s a great question. I will say, maybe this is just because you asked a question about privilege, but one of the things that I heard from organizers was that there’s a real opportunity to do good work closing up some of those privilege gaps in the workplace by organizing equitably. Because the folks, especially in the United States where organizing has to happen after hours or on weekends, that kind of privileges who’s able to participate in the process. It’s much harder to do that kind of work if you have kids or if you work a second job. So there are opportunities in thinking about organizing, where you can approach it more equitably by writing a newsletter for your coworkers who can’t be as involved, or trying to over-communicate to folks who may want to participate but just can’t for whatever reason.

Ethan: And I think, at least for me, that was a recurring theme in a lot of the conversations I had, which is these are people who are trying to leave their companies as better than they found them. And it’s incredibly inspiring to watch, and I think there’s a real opportunity to do good work in the industry by forming or joining a union.

Drew: So I’ve been learning all about tech unions today. What have you been learning about lately, Ethan?

Ethan: Oh, that is a great question. I have been learning how to live with two, three-year-old cats. And every day is an adventure. And these two are pretty much, they’ve been keeping me going last few years, but they’re still turning everything upside down at least twice a day. So I’m learning a lot about myself.

Drew: Full of energy.

Ethan: Yeah, full of energy, exactly.

Drew: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Ethan, you’re spoilt for choice. You can find his personal website at ethanmarcotte.com, where you’ll find links to his journal and social media. The book, You Deserve a Tech Union is available now from A Book Apart and you’ll be able to easily locate it at abookapart.com. Thank you for joining us today, Ethan. Did you have any parting words?

Ethan: It’s just great to see you again, Drew. Thank you so much for having me.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 65 With Alex Older: How Do You Run A Grassroots Conference?

We’re talking about running grassroots conferences and meet-ups. What does it take to organize a small industry event for your community? Drew McLellan talks to WDC’s Alex Older to find out.

Note: This episode of The Smashing Podcast isn’t sponsored by anyone. However, our guest Alex has generously offered listeners a 10% discount on tickets to WebDevConf. So if you’re in or able to get to Bristol for the conference go to webdevconf.com for tickets and use the code smashing to claim your discount. Thanks Alex!

Show Notes

  • Alex Older’s website.
  • Save the date for WDC2023: 20 October in Bristol, UK.

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew: He’s a full stack developer and founder of development agency Bluefly Digital here in the UK. He’s also the founder and core organizer of the UK’s longest running web design conference, WDC, which is now entering its 14th year, all of which makes him the perfect candidate for our discussion today. So we know he’s an accomplished developer, business owner, and conference organizer, but did you know he invented the pork jam roly-poly? My smashing friends, please welcome Alex Older. Hi, Alex. How are you?

Alex Older: Hi, Drew. I’m good. I’m smashing.

Drew: Good to hear it. Congratulations on what’s about to be the 14th year of WDC...

Alex: [inaudible] facts are wrong there.

Drew: My facts are wrong? Oh...

Alex: So it might be the 14th event, but it’s been running since 2007.

Drew: Okay. So the 14th edition, is what we should be saying, the 14th edition of WDC.

Alex: Yeah. Absolutely.

Drew: Okay. My introduction and everything is incorrect due to my poor research, but I think we’ll get away with it. But your 14th edition this October.

Alex: Yes.

Drew: For those who don’t know, it’s a very much... It’s a local feeling event, even though actually its reach is felt across the region and across the UK. Correct me if I’m wrong here, you have a day of workshops, and then a conference day, or have done in the past?

Alex: We have done in the past. What I’ve found is that, whilst it’s great to do workshops, is that it can be quite hard to find subjects that are appealing to a lot of people. I’ve seen it work for events and conferences that are very focused in one area. So if it’s a WordPress conference or a design systems conference or something like that, because they’re focusing on one area, a workshop relating to that works a lot better than stuff for WDC, because it’s very general.

Drew: Yeah. It’s a broad subject area, isn’t it? So finding enough people who want to focus down on a small bit for a workshop is trickier.

Alex: Yes.

Drew: Yeah. That makes sense. I remember a few years back, I attended one of your workshops, I think it was a node workshop with Jack Franklin, which was great. I learned a lot that day. That was brilliant. These days you’re sticking to just the main conference day?

Alex: Yeah. So last year because of various things, we hadn’t done an event for a few years, so we decided to come back with a bang and do two days, which was nice because it meant we could get lots of people to come and speak for it, and it drew a slightly different crowd as well, which was quite nice. But the organizing headache of it all, I was like, "No, I’m just going to do one day." It’s a lot nicer just to manage one day with eight speakers than it is to try and manage two days with 16 speakers, because it doubles all the worry.

Drew: Yes. So what was it that spurred you to start this in the first place? Where did the idea come from?

Alex: So I started... This is where I realized how old I am. So I started uni in 2006, and Joe Leach came in one of our induction days, and gave a talk about what the world of the web is, and what it does, and all this, that, and the other. And a couple of friends of mine were talking to me afterwards, "But I don’t understand what this is or that is." And so the idea from there also came about that we were learning command line Java.

Drew: Okay. My condolences.

Alex: Yes. And the university I was at was there going, "You need to learn this module, because if we go to this job site and put in this web development without Java, the results disappear. You get a third of the results." So a lot of it was trying to show my fellow students that what people are doing in the web isn’t necessarily what’s being taught, and showing that actually the web technologies that are out there aren’t necessarily what we’re learning in a classroom or in a lecture. And also trying to get rid of the idea of buzzwords as well. So it started off as an event to get professionals in to speak to students, and then go, "As we’re in Bristol, if you’re in the area and want to come to the event, come to the event." So that’s how it started, and it’s just grown from there as I went through uni.

Drew: That’s amazing. When I think about everything that’s involved in running an event like a conference, it must be like finding venues, finding speakers, finding an audience, it’s overwhelming. As someone personally, I’ve had a bit of a long-running community side project, I’m thinking of the website I used to run, 24 ways, and I just know that organizing something like that year after year, it really takes it out of you. I can’t imagine if it was then a physical event, like a web conference. So what is it that keeps you coming back year after year and doing it again to yourself?

Alex: It might sound really bad, but it’s effectively... One of the reasons I keep doing it is because it gives me a chance to go to a conference, with life and family and everything else. You don’t get as much time as you think you might to go to all these things and fly around and go to events. So it’s a chance for me to see people I’ve heard of talking about something they love doing, and gets me out of the house for at least a couple of days. So it was there, kept going because I want to do an event, and it just benefits me that I don’t have to pay for a ticket, as it were. And then I just have to stand up in front of people and make a fool of myself, very briefly.

Drew: But you get to put on your dream event as much as possible. You can tailor it to you.

Alex: Yes, exactly. And it’s not an event we take far too seriously. And I’ve been fortunate enough with venues that we’ve always, aside from a small test of another venue, we’ve always been at the same venue. And it’s in a really good location in the center of Bristol. And it just means that if people are coming in, it’s quite easy for them to go, "That’s where the venue is, and there are 20 hotels around it. So I can come into Bristol, I can stay in Bristol, and walk to the event, and it’s all good."

Drew: So talking about practicalities then, when you’re thinking about organizing another addition of this, you say you’ve got your preferred venue. So what comes first? Finding a date? Or...

Alex: Yes. So over 14 events, we’ve... It used to be that it was organized early September, because the unis would start then, and it would then mean that I could speak to the union and go, "This is when the event is." It would mean that they can tie it into stuff that they’re doing. And since then, it’s migrated to October, and it’s always been the first Friday in October, except for this year because we’ve had to push it back for other reasons. But we go, "This is the date..." It’s always October now. And then from that, I know the venue’s there, the venue hasn’t gone up in flames, it’s quite established, and it’s... Because it’s at the Watershed, so it’s quite an established venue in Bristol. And so I know that’s sorted, I know roughly when it is, and then it’s just working back from then to make sure that things are launched with enough time to make sales to cover the bills.

Drew: So how do you decide on the lineup? So you’ve got your dates sorted, you’ve got the event booked. How do you decide what’s going to happen on stage on that day?

Alex: So I think I’ve been very fortunate, and I’ve lucked into a lot of it. So I’ve gone, "I really want to see Drew speak," so I’ll invite you along, and you’ll tell me what you’re speaking about. And then I’ll go, "I want to see someone else," and I’ll invite them along. Over the last few years I’ve teamed up with Luke to put the event on. So because of his role, he’s got a lot more contacts that I maybe wouldn’t have come across. And so it’s going, I really like what this person’s tweeting about or blogging about, and I’ve read this article, and they happen to be based in Leeds or Manchester, and I’ll invite them down. And I’ve been really lucky in that, over the years, the theme of the day has echoed through every talk. And I even had, at one point I had Paul Boag speaking, and he panicked a bit, he was like, "But my talk is really similar to the talk that was on now." And it was like, he was speaking to me, there was a talk between the one he was going on about and his, and he was worried that his would basically be sounding the same. And I said to him, "It doesn’t matter. What your talk does will tie everything together at the end of the day." And it worked really well. So I’ve been really lucky, in that there’s been a theme that’s worked with a spattering of other bits and pieces in the middle.

Drew: Yeah. It’s funny how that can happen, because there’s often themes running through the industry at a certain time. Everybody’s thinking about the next ideas, and often they are interconnected, because the web as an industry is moving forward towards the same sort of places. I can remember a similar situation speaking at a conference, where the talk that came directly before mine covered about, I don’t know, about 25% of the same stuff that I was about to go over. And so I had to get on stage and I’d say things like, "I hope you’re seeing a theme here. You’re seeing what we’re trying between us, what we’re trying to say," and make it sound intentional. And of course it wasn’t a problem. It was reinforcing the ideas. It was actually saying, "Here’s the important ideas that we’re all thinking about at the moment."

Alex: Yeah, exactly. And I think it helps attendees as well almost see that these people are up in front of them saying these things, and it’s not just one person saying these things, it’s four or five, and they’re not necessarily saying it in... It’s not a pulled quote that they’re going over and over again. They’re saying it in their way and how it applies to them and what they’re doing.

Drew: Yeah. It reinforces the point and gives different perspectives on it as well at the same time. So at this point, we’ve got a venue, we’ve got a date, you’ve invited some people to speak, they’re working away on their presentations and looking forward to visiting Bristol. How do you go about getting the word out? How do you sell tickets? How do you find an audience and let people know?

Alex: I cross my fingers, and... So I think my biggest thing is I’m not that social, as it were, and what I do is I hope that the speakers who are coming to the event will go, "I’m speaking at this event, here it is." I’ve got an adequate Twitter following for the conference. And what I also do is, before tickets are launched, I’ll say, "Look, register your interest. We’ll tell you as soon as you can get a ticket," and stuff like this. And I’m really thankful that there’s a kind of almost core community around the event that will go, "Yep, I’m coming, I’ve bought my ticket, it’s there, I’ll be there." And slowly but surely word spreads out to different areas of the country as people... Some people would take a chance in it and go, "I had a really great time." And then many years ago, it used to be the thing that people would write up their experiences and do a review, and for a while you could see the referrals coming in through analytics and stuff and going, "Okay." And so it’s grown word of mouth more than, I need to make sure I’m speaking to this publisher or this site or whoever to mention my event.

Drew: Sorry, I’ve noticed that your ticket prices are incredibly low for a full-day conference. So it’s, what, the full price is...

Alex: The full price this year is going to be £100.

Drew: £100. Which is great value. And I guess that enables people to take a bit of a punt on... If it’s not going to cost them too much to get to Bristol, and they’ve heard good things, 100 quid, actually that’s exceptional value.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. The idea is that it... The theory being is that, if you’re missing a day of work and you’re a freelancer, you don’t get paid for that day of work. So the idea being that the whole trip to Bristol, staying in Bristol, coming to the event, shouldn’t cost more than a day of work. And the whole idea of the ticket price is that it covers the event cost. I don’t sit there and go, "I need to charge 250 quid a ticket to make X amount at the end of the event once all the bills are settled." I need to be at zero once all the bills are settled, so that it can keep funding itself every year. And I’ve been unfortunate a few times where it’s lost money, but over 14 events, it’s happened twice. So being able to sit there and go, I know... People will then know and come to expect that the cost of the ticket is reasonable, and I’m not suddenly sitting there going, "Yeah, now I’ve got 100,000 Twitter followers, I’m going to charge this much money because it’ll make it." I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, because it gives even the smaller freelancers the chance to attend an event that isn’t out of a price range.

Drew: And do you find, as a result, your audience is primarily freelancers and primarily people who are paying their own way for their ticket? Sounds like that’s the sort of...

Alex: I think these days now it’s more of a 50/50 split, because being able to see the way... Because I use Tito for the ticket sales, is that I can see how tickets are ordered. And there are lots of freelance, but then you’ll get an order for five, ten tickets from one company. There are definitely companies out there that are buying tickets for their employees to attend the event, but there are freelancers as well. And it makes quite a nice mix, because we’ve even had partnerships with companies in the past who are recruiting. So there might be freelancers who are like, "I’ve been doing this for a couple of years and it’s all right, but I’ve met these guys at WDC, and I had a chat with them, and they’ve got a job, and I might apply for it." So hopefully the idea [inaudible] the networking side [inaudible] event leads to that, and the split in ticket sales between freelancers and companies and bits and pieces like that spurs that on, I think.

Drew: Yes. And I think it’s in contrast to what we’ve seen from a lot of the... Because going back ten years, there were a lot more conferences, single-day conferences at affordable prices that were going on in the UK. And we had Carsonified back in the day running their events, Future Of... We used to have things from Clearleft, dConstruct, and... What’s the typography one called? Ampersand. And some of those people are still running conferences, Clearleft are still running conferences, but what we’ve seen from them is they’ve gone very upmarket, where a ticket will cost over £1,000 or... And I very much suspect their audience are people who are not paying their own way, that their company has sent them, or it’s a significant business purchase, not an individual thinking, "I’ll just go and learn about this thing." So it’s interesting that most of the UK market of what’s left of conferences has tended to go up higher-end. Is there something about putting conferences on in the UK that makes it really hard, that you’ve got to charge a lot of money? Or... I’m just wondering if you have any insight what goes on there.

Alex: I don’t think so. I think a lot of it is that the more higher-end conferences seem to be in London, and from that, the venue’s going to cost an extortionate amount of money. And then you’ve got to get... Especially depending on who your target is, you’ve got to have the right names of people in the industry at that event, which will then be charging their fee, which will be relevant to their experience, and so on and so forth. Whereas outside of London, a venue hire doesn’t cost a huge amount of money, hotel costs don’t cost a huge amount of money, and everything else. But I think that the target for those upscale events, as you say, is our big organizations who have maybe heard of a keyword that happens to be relevant and gone, "We must put some resource into this, and we’ve got our spending for the year, and if we don’t spend it, we lose it." Drew, you’ll go into that event and you might go, "Oh, great," and then you realize that maybe two or three of the talks are relevant to what you’re doing, and not all of it. And I think that there’s obviously a place for them, but outside of that, the costs of everything are a lot less. And for me, it’s not just about putting on the event, it’s about being able to put on all the bits around it, and make more of a community effort to it, and have a community around the event, than it is to go, "I’ve put on this massive event, and we’ve got eight great speakers, it’s going to cost you two grand for a ticket." But you’ll go to the day, you’ll leave, and that’ll be it, because you’re probably London-based, so you’ve gone home.

Drew: Yeah. Yes. It’s amazing the different feel that a more community-based conference like WDC has, than some of the more upmarket and therefore a little bit more corporate events have. And I think you’re right about... Because you mentioned briefly about the ability to network and things, and if you are a freelancer, a community event like this is a great opportunity to get to meet other people, meet potential customers, but also potential collaborators or contacts. And as a freelancer, it’s always useful to know other people with different specialisms who you might want to bring into a project, and it’s a great opportunity to make those connections and meet people. Once you’re advertising your tickets, they’re on sale, you’ve got your fingers crossed, hoping that people buy tickets, I guess you’ve got quite a lot on the line at that point. You’ve committed to a whole load of costs. How do you cope with that? Does it keep you up at night?

Alex: No, because [inaudible] this year’s a bit different to the norm, because normally... So with an event in October, we launched late spring, so April, May sort of time. And then the first thing... If I’ve got that gap between launching the site for the year and the event, what I’ll do, the first thing that I do is I’ll go, "Let me get in 50 ticket sales." So I’ll do what I’ve called in the past a super early bird ticket. I get those ticket sales in, and I know that I’ve got... I believe normally I’ve got the cost of the venue and half the hotel cost covered at that point. And they’re normally on sale for two weeks or until they sell out. So I sit there and try and make a deal about the fact that there’s only 50 of them, and once and they’re gone. And so once I get that in, it sits away in a pot, and I’ve got a space in my banking that’s for WDC, and every ticket sale money just sits in there until I need to pay the bills. And then what tends to happen after that is you then hit the summer, and everything goes quiet.

Drew: Yep.

Alex: So you get to a point where you’re like, "I’ve got at least this cost covered. I’m only out a little bit of money." And then everyone gets back to work in September and it picks up again. And at that point it’s the general admission tickets for the event. And then you get to the point... I think normally by then, I know I’ve got the base costs covered, because of the way I cover speaker travel and stuff, I know all I’ve got to worry about then is their travel. And some people will be Bristol-based anyway. Some people will... I’ve had it before where some people have driven in with friends and everything else. So actually, you’re not sat there going, "Oh no, I’m going to be... I’ve got all this expense to cover that I haven’t covered yet." So what I’ve got to cover now is very small, and every time a ticket sale comes in, it gets closer and closer to zero.

Drew: Yep. So those super early bird, which presumably has snapped up by your core regulars who are going to come back every year, because they just know it’s great and they don’t need to know anything about the lineup, they just know they’re coming.

Alex: Yeah. Yes. I did once do blind birds, where I went, "This is the date of the event. And over the next couple of months, we’ll sort out all the speakers and stuff." And they did all right. It wasn’t an instant success, but I hope that as the track record grows, more and more people go, "If he does a blind bird and it’s 50 quid, I’ll do that." So...

Drew: It’s worth a gamble because the odds are pretty good.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Drew: Yeah. And that then helps your cashflow to make sure that any initial expenses are coverable. Yes. That’s smart. The conference industry as it is has taken a pretty big hit over the last few years with the pandemic and things. I’m guessing you just didn’t run WDC through the pandemic, because you couldn’t.

Alex: Yeah, so we got... It was really unfortunate. I’m just going to bring up the... Because I’m slowly filling out the site. So we didn’t run in 2019, 2020, 2021. 20 19 was because of family commitments and my kids being very little, and they take up an extraordinary amount of time. And then what I was trying to do through the pandemic and stuff like that was at least have something there that people could watch and get to. And we’d done a slot on a conference where we had... It was like a Q&A session, but a very tongue in cheek Q&A session. And I was trying to plan to do something like that, to have people keep engaged, but that again didn’t happen. People got busy. So it took a break just before that, and I was like, "I’m getting ready for 2020." [inaudible] probably sat there in January going, "The ideas are forming..." [inaudible] And then everything went all to hell. So we took a break. And then, as I say, we came back last year once we were past it all. And as I say, we’re back now, and this is what we’re doing, and trying to now essentially build up a bit more momentum to be like, "So we’re back this year, we’re going to be back next, year after that, we’re going to keep going, keep people interested in those things happening."

Drew: And did you find that the audience returned as you’d expected last year? Or was it a little bit slower?

Alex: It was a little bit slower. I think partly that was down to, it was a two-day event. And I spoke to various people about the fact that two days for them, especially with everything else that was going on, is that... It’s just a bit too much time to take off. Which I completely understood and would never... If someone’s got to do something else than attend my conference, then let them do it. I’m not going to hold it against them. And that was part of the reason, to go back to one, is one, it’s always on a Friday. The worst you’ve got to do is travel... If you are an employee, you can travel to Bristol the Thursday evening after the event... Not after the event, sorry. After work. That’s the one. And then you’re traveling home again on a Saturday. So you’re not there panicking that you’ve got to get up after the event, get back on a train to get to an office. No, you’ve got the Saturday, so you can... I’ve known people who’ve gone, "Well, I’m going to spend the day in Bristol."

Drew: The important point then as well is, if you are a freelancer deep in the weeds of a project, taking one Friday off to do some personal development stuff and go to WDC is... No client’s going to bat an eyelid, really.

Alex: Yeah [inaudible].

Drew: I’m not around this Friday, back on Monday and... Fine.

Alex: Yeah. And the worst I seem to have had on a Friday is, "Could you look at this on Monday for me?" Yeah, of course. That’s Monday. That’s after the weekend. So I’ve had it a couple of times where there’s been talks going on and I’m like, "Okay, phone down, respond to the email. Okay, done." And then there’s nothing.

Drew: Yeah. I feel as we dig into the weeds of what’s involved in organizing a conference, there’s a lot going on. It’s a big endeavor, right?

Alex: Yeah. There’s always little things you forget about. And as you’ve covered venue... Date, venue, speakers, and hotels, probably the four big things you’ve got to get sorted out. Then you’ve got to worry about the schedule on the day. The schedule on the day, there’s always one you forget about, because they’re all there, and you sit and go, "When are they speaking?" Or... And the big one as well is that people always tweet or contact you to go, "What is the schedule? What are they talking about?" You’re like, "Okay, yeah, I’ve got to put those details together for them." Because [inaudible] it works, especially for bigger organizations, is that they want to be able to see what these people are talking about to make sure it’s relevant if they’re sending employees. And then you’ve got lanyards, stickers or... I do pin badges, I’ve got a little set of pin badges that I’ve done. Then you’ve got to worry about volunteers. And volunteers I always forget about, and they’re amazing. They give up their time to sit in the Watershed, and they sit out the front and check people into the event.

Drew: Do registration and... [inaudible]

Alex: While I run around crazily going... I’ve got to put banners up here, so I’ve got to make sure I’ve got banners, and I’ve got to make sure that this person’s set up and ready to speak, and... Thankfully the tech team at the Watershed are amazing. So I come in and they go, "Yeah, okay. We’re doing this again. Okay." And they get everyone set up, it’s all working, and they’re all mic’d up and all ready to go. And volunteers just sit there and go, "Right, they’re in, they’re in." And you check on them a couple of times, and they’re like, "Yep, I’ve had these people." What other small details are there? Oh, getting myself to the event. So I live just on the outskirts of Bristol, so what I’ve done in the past is I’ve driven in the morning to get to the venue for 8:00 with a... And I’ve got it in the garage now, it’s a conference box, which has various bits of...

Drew: Canned food, firelighters. Emergency flares.

Alex: [inaudible] Hi-vis jackets. It’s got all the bits and pieces that have built up over the years. Because you sit there and go, "I can put an event on for 300 people, and so I want 300 of these things." And then you get 200 people show up. So you have to go, "I’ve got 100..." I’ve got old dot grid notebooks and stuff that are from event many years ago that I’m like, "I’ve got those to put out so people can have them, because I don’t want them in my garage." So what I’m now doing is I’m making sure that I can book a hotel room for myself, to make sure I can get up at 4:00 in the morning, because I can’t sleep anyway, because I’m like, "I’m putting on conference today," and being close to the venue anyway. And... What else? There’s loads of little bits you always forget about every time you put on a thing, you’re like, "I did that last year. Why did I forget this year?" And stuff like that.

Drew: I guess it’s one of the advantages of having a regular venue that you go back to year after year.

Alex: Yes.

Drew: Is that, as you say with the tech team, they know you, they know your event, they know what they’re doing. You don’t have to waste energy thinking about, "Where do we put the registration desks? Where do we do this?" Because you just know. You’ve done it before, you just fall into the pattern, and it takes off a lot of mental load.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. If it was my first one, I’d be... I wouldn’t sleep for the week before the event, because I’d be like, "Have I got X? Have I got Y? No. Oh, no. What am I going to do?" And then I’ve been really fortunate with, if we’re doing printing of schedules and stuff and name badges, is that I’ve got a printer I can go to the week before and go, "I need this." [inaudible] "Okay, great." And within... In the past, I’ve had a 24-hour notification to go, "It’s been dispatched." You’re like, "This is great." And then I’ve gone, "There was a typo and it’s my fault. I’m really sorry. Can you print these?" So thankfully I’ve now got my wife and a couple of friends who will proofread anything I send that’s going to be printed.

Drew: Yeah. Yes. When you’re used to working digitally, sending stuff to print is terrifying, isn’t it?

Alex: Yeah. I don’t know about you, but it’s the thing I’m always saying to clients is, "You’ve got to remember a website can be changed, as and when you want it to be changed. Can’t do that with a schedule book that you’ve printed out."

Drew: No. And have you ever had any situations like with speakers needing to cancel last minute, or being ill, or anything like that?

Alex: I’ve had an issue with a speaker before where, because of train... We’ve had issues with train strikes and stuff before. I had an issue with a speaker who went to get on a train, to find out that the train was canceled, and they were traveling down late the night before, and they were meant to be on early first thing the following morning. So there was a lot of panic there about what we were going to do, and they made it in the end, and it was just... Essentially, I could probably give a course in crisis management for it. We had... Again, last year, even though I’ve done 14 events, I’ve never spoken at them, because it’s not something I do. And last year we got to a point where I was like, "We’ve got one lightning slot, and the person we wanted to speak at it is unavailable." And I think was 48 hours before that slot was to take place, I was like, "I’ll do it. How bad can it be?" And having spoken to people who’ve never spoken at events before, who’ve done it, and their nerves and stuff like this, I thought I had a really good idea for a talk for 15 minutes. It’s only 15 minutes. And I was there panicking about it, and thankfully we had Gavin Strange on after me. I spotted him walking in the room after I was about seven minutes in. I’m like, "I’ve run out of content, I’ve run out of stuff to say," because I’d panicked my way through it. I was like, "That’s me done." [inaudible] So a lot of it is just making sure... Knowing enough in advance when things are happening, I think. We’ve been caught out with train strikes, I think at least twice now. And that’s always the thing... If it’s something we can control, so if it’s a speaker who’s sat there [inaudible] "I’m really sorry, I can’t do it," we can... We’ve done it before where we’ve had a slightly extended break, or moved things around ever so slightly because they’ve been unable to attend. But something that we can’t control is industrial action and bits and pieces like that. Thankfully they published it well in advance [inaudible] like, "Is this going to impact travel?" And it did last year, which was a bit annoying. And had it been a one-day event, it wouldn’t have happened.

Drew: Yeah. What seems to be clear is that organizing something like WDC, you probably can’t do it as a business. It has to be something you do out of passion and you do because of the love for it, because it’s so much work. And to be able to keep it to being so accessible in terms of cost and things, as a business move, it doesn’t make any sense, right?

Alex: No. If I wanted to do it as a business, I’d have to charge a lot more for a ticket, and I couldn’t do one event a year. I’d have to explore options and go down those very narrow lanes of content to make it a business. And at that point I’m like, "Do I really want to organize 10 events plus a year to run a business?2 And the answer’s no.

Drew: Yeah. It’s a complete change of business, isn’t it?

Alex: Yeah, exactly.

Drew: No longer a software engineer, an event organizer. What would you say to somebody who is thinking about setting something like WDC up, who wanted to do that themselves, a grass root, accessible event, other than don’t do it in Bristol in October? Would you have any advice to give to them?

Alex: So I’ve spoken to people about it before, and the advice I can give is, if you’ve got the community locally... I’ve been very fortunate with the web scene in Bristol, is that if there’s the community locally and you start off with meetups and networking locally, then if you then put on an event that’s aimed at that community, the chances are that it’ll start in Bristol... Not in Bristol, sorry. It’ll start in your location of choice that isn’t Bristol. And what will happen is that the people who are local will obviously have a network that’s ever so slightly further apart, and it’ll grow out that way. And if you get the right people to speak at that event as well, they will tweet about it and everything else. And that’s the way WDC has grown, is through, as I say, word of mouth. I got extremely lucky in that I could work with the uni that I was at to put on the first three events. And so if there’s a partner who’s willing to help you as well [inaudible] "I’ve got an idea for this, but what I need is just someone to help me cover the cost," you can grow it that way as well. So if you know that there’s a community in your area, and it’s... The other thing that I think is very important is good travel links for people traveling in. So obviously Bristol’s quite a good location, because we can get trains from the Southwest, from the East, from the North, all relatively easily. The travel links are really good for Bristol. So if you’ve got that infrastructure in place as well, it means that people coming from outside of your area, can get to it, stay there, and get home again without fuss. And it’s making sure that you’re getting people talking about things that people want to listen to. So it can be about following trends, but what we’ve done with our lightning talks is that it’s a 15-minute slot that you don’t have to talk about web stuff. You can talk about anything. So we’ve had people talking about building desks and furniture and stuff like that, which is great to show that people in the industry do other things. It’s not that you sit in front of a computer all day. Find the community to build the event in the middle of, and let it... I’ve been very fortunate [inaudible] word of mouth, it’ll grow, because whilst your network could be 50 people, their network is then another 50 people for each one of them, and it grows that way.

Drew: Fantastic. I’ve been learning all about what it takes to put on an independent web conference. What have you been learning about lately, Alex?

Alex: So I’ve been learning about Eleventy. Because I’m a big WordPress person. I’ve been doing WordPress for 15 years professionally. And the conference site has been a mismatch of different things over the years. So I’ve been learning Eleventy to pull it all together in one platform. Because obviously it’s a conference, so nothing changes dynamically a lot. So what I’m currently doing is filling in the back catalog of event sites, so that people can see what... Because we’ve tried fun themes and stuff with them over the years, is that I’m using Eleventy to bring all that in and going, "How do I do this with this thing?" And "Why does it error when I do this thing this way, and do something similar but not quite the same this way?"

Drew: It’s always very challenging and a little bit humbling, isn’t it? When you pick up a different bit of software, where you know how to do the task with something else you’re familiar with, and you pick up something different, and suddenly you feel like an idiot.

Alex: Yes.

Drew: But also, it’s so fulfilling, isn’t it? Once you figure out how to do something and just... That sort of dopamine hit you get from achieving things is amazing.

Alex: Yeah. For me it’s like, "But the documentation says this." And what’s getting in my way of using documentation properly is that I think I can do it another way, because in the other systems I use and the frameworks I use, this is how I do it. [inaudible] read what we’re saying. You’re like, "Fine. I surrender."

Drew: I surrender. I will do what the documentation says. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Alex, you can find his personal site at alexolder.com, and of course, WebDevConf returns to Bristol on the 20th of October this year. You can find all about that and get your tickets at webdevconf.com. Thanks for joining us today, Alex. Did you have any parting words?

Alex: No, but please do say hello, because I don’t use social stuff very much because I’m always busy. But do say hello if you ever see me anywhere.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 64 With Alvin Bryan: What Is A Headless CMS?

We’re talking about headless content management systems. What are they, and how do they differ from more traditional systems? Drew McLellan talks to Alvin Bryan to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew: He’s a developer advocate with the content management platform company, Contentful. Before that, he used to be a lead engineer for Dow Jones in the Wall Street Journal and has had various front end roles. He’s very UX driven and happiest when collaborating with designers and pushing boundaries as a team. And these days, he’s learning a lot about DEVREL and loving it. So we know he’s an experienced developer, but did you know he once taught Catherine Zeta Jones to do a cartwheel? My Smashing friends, please welcome Alvin Brian. Hi Alvin, how are you?

Alvin: I’m smashing, thank you so much for having me here. It’s an honor.

Drew: Thanks for joining us. I wanted to talk to you today about one of the key technologies that’s really at the center of so many projects, but perhaps these days doesn’t get the spotlight shone on it so often because maybe it’s not so glamorous as front-end frameworks or any of these other things. It’s content management systems. We’re all using them, but I think sometimes the discussion isn’t there about it when it’s so important. I just — before we start — want to address the elephant in the room and that you’re a developer advocate for Contentful, and I know we have a really savvy audience here at Smashing, and they’d see right through anything that was a thinly veiled ad for your employer. So I just wanted to reassure the audience at this point that this is not that, rather it’s the fact that your work leads you to have some really great upstate knowledge of the space and that’s why you’re the perfect guest for this episode. That’s right, isn’t it?

Alvin: Oh yeah. I think that’s the difference between a developer advocate and a salesman. I’m not here to sell you anything, I’m here to help developers, whatever that looks like. At least this is how we approach DEVREL at Contentful. It varies, and this could be a podcast episode on its own.

Drew: It could be, couldn’t it? What is developer relations? Is it a function of sales? Is it a function of marketing? Is it support? What is it?

Alvin: Yeah.

Drew: So yes, that’s a whole can of worms. Just to give a bit of background on me in this context, I’ve got a lot of history with the content management space from years of building bespoke systems for clients and then distilling all that experience down into a CMS product, which I founded in 2009 and then sold in 2021. All the CMS solutions that I’ve developed have followed this traditional model of the CMS being the entire platform that delivered your website. So it’d be taking content and taking templates and merging all that together to create HTML pages essentially. Is that approach to content management still a valid thing in 2023, do you think?

Alvin: I think it’s valid. Well, it’s valid depending on what you’re trying to build. Squarespace is, I’m pretty sure they’re doing great. I’ve not looked at anything, any numbers, but they’ve been doing great for years and I’m sure they’ll continue. So yeah, it’s definitely a valid thing, but I think for the sort of place that would employ a developer, that may not be anymore.

Drew: It’s almost that market from a development point of view, it’s almost like a solved problem, isn’t it? There are so many good CMSs for rolling out, for example, small websites. I don’t know what the latest stats on how much of the web is powered by WordPress, but it’s approaching half, isn’t it?

Alvin: Yeah. I believe it kept increasing as well, right?

Drew: Right.

Alvin: Yeah, so definitely, it’s a thing for sure.

Drew: I think we’re here today to talk about headless CMS, which of course is a different approach to the same problem. I think most of us will have heard of Contentful in some capacity over the last few years as one of the rising stars in the headless CMS space. And you really can’t talk about content management. You can’t have a content management discussion these days without headless being a factor in that discussion. We mentioned WordPress, but even WordPress has a headless mode. Drupal have what they call a coupled mode, which I think is just the same thing. So getting down to brass tacks, what do we mean when we say a headless CMS? What sort of problem is it solving for us?

Alvin: The problem it’s solving is, it’s making a distinction between what the CMS manages and what you get out of it. With the traditional CMS, you’re tied to a website or a page where you’re made a page on WordPress and ended up being a page on your website. And it’s the approach that, as we said before, this is what Squarespace does, this is what they all do. With headless, you manage your content and you retrieve that content with an API call, so the way that looks on your website is completely decoupled. And this solves a lot of problems, especially with bigger companies. So you can imagine, with Contentful, one of our biggest clients is Ikea, and you can imagine that they don’t just have content on their website, they have physical catalogs, they have ads on the side of the road, so all of that. You really have to break away from this old, one page in the CMS equals one page on the website.

Drew: So you end up more with a multipurpose repository of content with an API that you can then access it. So if you’re Ikea, you can pull the same product description into your mobile app and on your website and into, what, any number. So yeah, I guess it is decoupling, isn’t it? It’s, rather than saying, this content is being produced on this HTML page, it’s saying, this is a system for managing content and here is an API for getting at that content and using it however you want. So it sounds like it makes a whole bunch of problems, especially around the reusing content space, it makes that a lot easier. Are there any things, do you think, that using this approach make more difficult?

Alvin: Well, it’s the time to iteration, because depending on how well your system is set up, you can go around this. But the beauty of it, what we developers love about it is, we have control. What other people in the organization tend to hate is that we have control. And as a result, if you want a brand new section on your website when you need designer to design it, a developer to make it work, you can work around it with templates and other things that we used to do. But in general, this can be a thing where people can be... I can just spin up a completely new section from scratch. Again, it might be, but there would need to be something that’s been set up previously.

Drew: Right. So you can put the content into the system, but you need something then to consume it in a targeted way to make use of it. Yeah, so that, as you say, the iteration speed could be slower. One thing that I sometimes see online is, people say, "Oh, if you use a headless CMS, it’s terrible for SEO." But with my software engineering hat on, that sounds like a symptom of one possible implementation of using a headless CMS, and it’s not inherent to the overall solution, is it? You could be merging this content into a static website offline and then publishing it, or when people take a purely client side single page app approach to using that content, that might have SEO implications and that maybe be is the sort of naive initial implementation that someone might go with.

Drew: But yes, it’s funny how often that crops up almost, sort of one of these myths that drifts around people without maybe fully understanding the implications, just repeat it. One thing that Contentful talks about in a lot of their materials is composable content. What does that mean? What are we talking about with composable content?

Alvin: It’s the fancy new 12-23 thing, isn’t it? Yeah, just to come back on the SEO bit, I think, yeah, as you said, it’s just, anything that Google consumes is, at the end of the day, an HTML tag. It’s no different to the P tag, which you’ll use to display whatever. So it’s also up to you, the developer, to make sure that you create the OG tags that your content is there practically so the engines can crawl it. So it’s nothing... The headless provider will just give you an API, you can do whatever you want with it. To go back to the composable thing now, yeah, so a lot more people have started to move to it. You hear us talking about it, you hear some of our competitors talk about it, and that Defy is also doubling down with the acquisition of Gatsby, for example.

Alvin: The idea is to go headless CMS plus, right? So with headless you say, "Oh, I have this one API that takes care of all my content." But now, what if you could plug other things to this API? What if you could say, "Oh, I want..." I’m just making stuff up here, but what if I want to connect my slack to it? What if we have a weather app or something like that? Any other types of dynamic data that we need to combine with our content to have this one API that gives us everything. And it’s the idea of, again, you’re composing what you need with your headless CMS. And that for us, that looks like an ecosystem of apps, meaning you can extend Contentful with different apps, which could be translation, it’s 2023, so it could be GPT, could be anything else. So that’s the idea. Your headless CMS also integrates with other data providers.

Drew: So it becomes like an aggregator of other content. So as well as having maybe a content editing team creating content, you might also be pulling stuff in from your Instagram feed.

Alvin: Yeah, exactly.

Drew: Or say, a dynamic feed from a third party provider and then making that all available under one API to all your different consumers. Okay, well that kind of makes sense. I think that makes sense.

Alvin: Especially with Instagram, we’ve all seen the horrible Instagram embeds or the Twitter ones. Twitter API is a thing of the past now but anyway, just to give you an example of, you have these horrible embeds, and what if you could get that data from the headless CMS as well and then render it statically? That makes a lot more sense.

Drew: Okay. So yes, it’s just an aggregation function on top of the standard as well as being the source of truth for your own content.

Alvin: Exactly.

Drew: Also then brings in other pieces of content. Now, I’ve personally always been interested in owning my own data where I can, and I’d usually pick a self-hosted solution for something rather than a service, given the choice. Although I have mellowed over the years. The trade-offs I make now are very different from what I would made in the past. But with a headless CMS being API driven, it seems like you’ve got a bit more flexibility there as to where it’s hosted. So you don’t necessarily need the CMS and the website to live on the same server or in the same environment. You could separate those out. So, is there added complexity there or is that an opportunity for simplification? Have you any thoughts?

Alvin: Yeah, for sure. It depends, because everything is from that one API. Depending on your needs, that might get a lot of traffic, which will make self-hosting a problem. As you said, you’ve mellowed as some sort of into self-hosting because it’s become easier to just set up something in the cloud, whereas managing servers, has that necessarily got easier? Tech has changed, but it’s still annoying.

Drew: It’s just got complicated in different directions.

Alvin: Right. Yeah. So there are self-hosted headless CMSs. We’re not one of them because, again, we tend to target bigger clients that have, again, these needs for these APIs, and our CDN takes in, it’s in the billions of requests per month. So we’re pretty for high traffic stuff. But yeah, there are solutions you can install, Strappy is one of them that is self-hosted. You can install it on your own server, and this will give you, as you said, headless CMS. You’ll own your content, you’ll get the API. But the drawback with that is, obviously, if you get a ton of traffic, then it’ll go to your server that you might not scale or you might not want to pay for it to scale that yet. That’s the one true — but it’s possible for sure.

Drew: And I guess you’ve got to manage it then if it’s on your end, you’ve got to keep it updated, keep it running, keep it backed up. I guess the decisions you’d make for a small community website would be different for the things you’d make if you were Ikea. IKEA probably isn’t going to be running Strappy on a VPS. That’s probably not a good solution for them in a lot of ways. So what are the things you should weigh up when picking a headless CMS solution? What are the things to be looking out for that are perhaps different from what we’re used to evaluating for a traditional CMS?

Alvin: I think it depends... Well, as a developer, you’ll know what you’ll be coding so you can look at the API and what it looks like, whether you like it or not. How easy, does it support GraphQL? Everyone does these days, but stuff like that. Then I think it depends on the people who are going to spend a lot of time in the CMS team. As much as it’s great for me if I like the API, but if the people who are going to write in the CMS hate it, then it’s probably not the right choice. So I definitely think you probably want to involve these people to the decision, right? Because they’re going to be the ones spending time. For us, we want to make sure that we can retrieve everything we want from the API as developers, but definitely wants your blog editor to give you the green light and make sure it has everything they need.

Drew: Yeah, you mentioned the API becomes really important, and I’ve seen headless CMSs with Rest APIs with GraphQL, and then various solutions have SDKs that you can import into your project that give you a language native way of interacting. Is there anything you would, from a development point of view, that would be useful to look out for when evaluating availability of SDKs or types of APIs?

Alvin: Yeah, for sure, if it’s something you like. At the end of the day, the beauty of it, is it’s still an API call. So any language under the sun will support that, hopefully. Yeah, so it’s also up to you, right? Do you want Python native SDK where it’s just like, okay, I’m typing three lines of code and I do client, get entry, get this idea whatever, or get these entries that are of this content type, they prefer that grade. But if you’re the kind of person who’s like, "Nope, I’m going to have complete control," it also goes back to what you said about owning your data. The problem with relying on this on an SDK is what happens when there’s a security problem, versus if it’s you and you’re just using the bare bones HTTP client on your language, that there’s less risk. So it also depends on the kind of project you’re working on.

Drew: You talked about the user interface aspect, and it’s got to be one of the big factors, isn’t it? When you’ve got people entering content, creating content in a system and managing it, the user interface that’s provided is a big factor there and how the data is... There are all sorts of different approaches aren’t there? In content management to how you manage data, whether it’s just one big wizzywig block of junk, or whether things are broken down to a granular level for structured content. Presuming that most headless solutions still have some sort of user interface for editing content to get you started, does that reflect what you’ve seen in the marketplace?

Alvin: Yeah, everyone has a wizzywig. Some have varying degrees of support with Markdown, and again, the ecosystem of apps that I was talking about. So more and more players are having their own, and this helps also to extend it so it can help with this discussion of, if you’re talking to a blog editor, it’s like, "Ah, it’s kind of there, but I really wish there was a field that could do X," and you could either extend it yourself or just look for another solution. But yeah, different teams have varying needs. And it could be small things, like for example, scheduling. Like, oh, I want to be able to have this campaign going, I want to make sure that from now, I can make sure a blog post goes on the Monday, another one goes on a Tuesday and another one goes on the Thursday. And if the interface for this is a nightmare versus something else that you might not need. It depends, right? It’s always... But yeah, it’s crucial. Absolutely.

Drew: And I guess, if you’ve got very specific needs, in theory, you could use a headless CMS purely as a content engine and have your own mechanisms for getting data in, and basically write your own interface for writing into that system as well. Is a right interface something that everyone supports? Or is that a feature to look out for when evaluating?

Alvin: I wouldn’t say... I can’t remember if there’s one in particular who doesn’t, but I know we definitely do because-

Drew: It’s a very broad question. With your extreme knowledge of a hundred percent of the marketplace, does every single one...

Alvin: Right. Yeah, I know we support it because, it’s also, I think, with DEVREL, you end up spending a lot more time in your product versus the others, you tend to have a good... And this is where it’s different to sales, what we were saying earlier. When someone comes up to me and say, "Oh, what is the one feature that is different?" I always say, "Well, it depends what you need." What is the one reason I could choose Contentful? And this is where we very much differ from sales, which we’ll have a list right there in the ready. And then we’ll be like, "Oh, for sure you should choose us because A, B, C, D." And for us as developer, is more like, "What do you need? What scale do you have? What do you like working on? How big is your team?" It’s a different question. But as far as writing, having an API that works both ways, we definitely support it, and I would be surprised if others do not.

Drew: It becomes quite crucial, doesn’t it? Because very few projects comparatively start with nothing. Most people have got some sort of system in place before, and taking the data that you’ve already got and migrating it into a new system can be a major project, and a deal breaker for a lot of bigger use cases. You’ve got to be able to get data in. So having a CMS that has an API that you can write code and interface with whatever the previous system is, get that code into a decent shape, and then inject it into the headless system, that’s a major advantage, isn’t it?

Alvin: And you can think in terms of reproducibility as well, because migration is great, but it’s even better if you can say, "Oh, this is the exact script that I ran for migration as opposed to just this collection of random commands that I did on my machine." And it’s like, oh, beta’s over now. It’s much better to say, "Oh, we have this very defined way of transforming this data from this shape to that shape." And having an API helps you with this for sure.

Drew: Hopefully gone are the days when you have two browser windows open and copy and paste content from one form to another. I’ve certainly been there in the distant past. But yeah, flew those days behind us. Is there anything that has particularly caught your attention?

Alvin: I think the composable thing is, it’s been going on for a few months now, but it is definitely a shift. Everyone is starting to think, oh, maybe there’s more than just being the headless CMS solution. And obviously AI, which every market is talking about now. But it’s also content, and especially written content is, the first, right now, at least, the very first industries to be impacted by it. So how do you integrate it? How do you make sure... How do you account for things like attribution? These are discussions that are happening in the content space for sure, definitely. At least right now, it’s the first industry that it’s really attacking.

Drew: Yes. Written content and things like images, there’s Photoshop, new version of Photoshop has come out this last couple of weeks that has completely generative fill in it, which is amazing. So it’s a brave new world, isn’t it? From a content point of view particular, it’s a brave new world. And you mentioned attribution, and that’s a minefield as well, isn’t it? Figuring out how all that works when content has been generated from a model trained on-

Alvin: We don’t know what.

Drew: Yeah, who knows what. So how can you attribute stuff? It’s going to be a very interesting time, going forward, figuring out how we do that. Is there anything else that, say I’m planning a project, I’m going to use a headless CMS. I’ve decided maybe I’m going to use Contentful, and I’m planning out this project. What should I be considering? What lies ahead of me? What should I be worrying about? What is there that I should be thinking about? On embarking on this?

Alvin: I think it’s your content model. So it’s the first thing to get right. We see sometimes people really over-complicating things and having content model for, if you think of an index page, having a separate content for a carousel, and then there may be a river type content. Do you know what I mean? In terms of where you have an image on the left and text on the right, and then it follows by image on the right text on the left. So you can really over-complicate things where it’s content model. You could think, "Oh, rivers is very different to a Carousel," for example. But then you can think, "Oh wait, no, is it just an image with text with it?" And then at the end of the day, oh yeah it is. So it’s stuff like that where it’s easy to over-engineer things, and then having content models that are Carousel homepage one, and then about page Carousel two, and it’s like, well, no, these aren’t the same thing.

Alvin: So it’s trying to think in the abstract way, even if it might be more code originally because you’re building more flexibility into each of the content models, the content types as well. But in the long run, that could save you.

Drew: So it’s about, I guess, thinking of what content you’ve got and what different types it falls into?

Alvin: And what you might have in the future, which is complicated for sure because you can never know. But trying to build flexibility of, in terms of trying to think outside the box that, for example, what if there was a caption in this river? What if one of the images was actually a video? These little tweaks like this, which it will save you a lot of time in the long run, because it will prevent you from having to rethink everything later.

Drew: From a development point of view, from a developer point of view, one thing that always gives me reassurance in my work is having a good test suite that you can run to make sure that things aren’t broken before you deploy.

Alvin: Yeah.

Drew: Is there anything in terms of testing around content that we could make use of?

Alvin: For sure. It’s an API too. So if you can think of using something like Storybook, where you have your different components, you could say, right, so, as we said about, this is a generic component. What happens if there’s three instances of it? What happens if there’s five? What happens again, if one of them is a video? It’s this whole, the meme, cue engineer walks into a bar, orders zero beers, orders a thousand beers, stuff like that.

Drew: What is an elephant?

Alvin: Right. Yeah, exactly. And that type of thing. You can build into test suite and see what happens.

Drew: Yes, that’s quite interesting. I guess, again, it’s the decoupling of things that makes that really easy. And I guess then, if you’re running that Storybook, you can then run it through some visual regression testing and spot breakages or what have you. Yeah, that’s really fascinating.

Alvin: You can think of human errors too, right? Sometimes when you set up everything, you’re like, "Oh yeah, of course they’re going to put a date on the article," but then sometimes you forget or sometimes there’s something else and you realize, oh, that the date you published is different than the date you had in the article, whatever. Or one of the author’s Twitter doesn’t work. Stuff like that is, it’s writing your test suite is a good time to think about these edge cases, right? Sorry, what was your question?

Drew: Yes, no, I was just jabbering on. In fact, I remember years ago writing a sort of system for blogging, and every one of the absolute required fields was a title for the blog post. When I created it, I never even questioned, would a title be optional? A title is fundamental. Every blog post has a title.

Alvin: H1.

Drew: Right. And then you use that to generate the nice slug for the URL and all these sorts of things. And in listings, it’s the title that appears. And then Tumblr came out, and you could create all sorts of posts on that, and you didn’t even need a date or a title.

Alvin: Oh yeah.

Drew: What madness is this? But it’s like you’re saying, it’s thinking outside of the box and thinking about the different types of content that you might have. And it turns out that fundamental assumption that I made early on in that system, that we absolutely a hundred percent always had a title, became a limitation of what we could do with the system, because then when content came along that didn’t have a title, I was stuffed.

Alvin: Yeah, Instagram is another example. Or as we said, the great thing about headless is that it can go anywhere, but if you’re also planning stuff that is written in Contentful, but that will go on your website, again, your catalog, but also on Instagram, we have this great promotion this week for half price of whatever. On Instagram, that might just be the image and nothing else, and the description or something else. Yeah. Or you want to make sure, definitely don’t pull the hashtag into the blog, stuff like that.

Drew: Yes. Yeah, and I guess just thinking about Instagram and using content in that way, having this API with your content opens up all sorts of possibilities for generating images. You could pull the content and render text onto an image and post it to Instagram and do all that sort of things, that imagining doing that with a traditional CMS would just be... It’d be a flight of fancy, it’d be difficult. You’d be fighting against the system rather than working with it.

Alvin: Yeah. And this is where other features, as I said, scheduling for example, can be very important, because you can say, I want to make sure that whenever this campaign launches, we also have the Instagram stuff going out, which are again, these images generated from the new publish in the CMS, and this is where the CMS itself can have a scheduler, you can use Zapier or you can use Zapier to capture it and run a script that will then generate the image. You can do all of this in a Chrome job somewhere. It depends, but this is where these features become important.

Drew: Your content then just sits as one piece in a big chain of loosely joined elements that are delivering your various digital products or what have you onto your customers.

Alvin: And the composable stuff is about this being less loose, is to make sure you have some kind of control that’s defined, right? That’s not like, oh, there’s this Chrome job here and this app here, and it’s all duct tape.

Drew: Yes. So yeah, it gives you a level of control and potentially then, quality control or moderation or any of those steps that you might want to put in between rather than just... Because it would be possible to federate content in a front-end JavaScript app, you could do that, but then you’re missing that potential gate-keeping or any of those steps that you might want to put in, that having a platform that does it for you or enables that as a feature. Sounds super useful. So we’ve been learning all about headless CMSs today. What have you been learning about lately, Alvin?

Alvin: I was on web rush last week, so I did a lot of work with Astro, the different web framework. It’s been out for a bit, but since 2.0, I feel like they’ve really stepped on the gas and started releasing so many things. So I’ve really been looking into it, and it’s great. I have a blog post coming out. But yeah, I’ve been looking at the docs and learning a lot about all the new features, references, which are amazing. If you’ve had to deal with Markdown before and the whole type safety that they’ve added to Markdown, it’s really interesting. And the fact that they support all the frameworks is just even better. So yeah, I’ve been learning a lot about Astro recently.

Drew: That’s great. I think we did an episode on Astro, maybe a couple of years ago now, so perhaps it’s time that the Smashing Podcast Revisited.

Alvin: Yeah, there’s a lot of new stuff that came out

Drew: That’s amazing. If you, dear Listener, would like to hear more from Alvin, you can find his personal website with links to his various projects and social profiles at alvin.codes. Thanks for joining us today, Alvin. Do you have any parting words?

Alvin: No, thank you for having me. I’ve been a reader of Smashing Mag for a long time. My first article, I think, came out last year, which was also a great honor. And yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 63 With Chris Ferdinandi: What Is The Transitional Web?

In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about The Transitional Web. What is it, and how does it describe the technologies we’re using? Drew McLellan talks to Chris Ferdinandi to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew: He’s the author of the Vanilla JS Pocket Guide series, creator of the Vanilla JS Academy Training Program and host of the Vanilla JS Podcast. We last talked to him in late 2021 where we asked if the web is dead, and I know that because I looked it up on the web. So, we know he is still an expert in Vanilla JS but did you know he invented fish and chips? My smashing friends, please welcome back Chris Ferdinandi. Hi, Chris, how are you?

Chris: I'm smashing, thank you so much. How are you today, Drew?

Drew: I'm also smashing, thank you for asking. It’s always great to have you back on the podcast, the two of us like to chat about maybe some of the bigger picture issues surrounding the web. I think it’s easy to spend time thinking about the minutiae of techniques or day-to-day implementation or what type of CSS we should be using or these things but sometimes it is nice to take a bit of a step back and look at the wider landscape. Late last year, you wrote an article on your Go Make Things website called The Transitional Web. What you were talking about there is the idea that the web is always changing and always in flux. After, I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this, 25 years or so working on the web, I guess change is pretty much the only constant, isn’t it?

Chris: It sure is. Although, to be fair, it feels like a lot of what we do is cyclical and so we’ll learn something and then we’ll unlearn it to learn something new and then we’ll relearn it again just in maybe a slightly different package which is, in many ways, I think the core thesis of the article that you just mentioned.

Drew: And is that just human nature? Is that particular to the web? I always think of, when I was a kid in the '80s, the 1980s, okay, so we’re talking a long while back-

Chris: It was a wild time.

Drew: One of the pinnacles that, if you had a bit of spending power, one of the things you’d have in your living room was a hi-fi separates. So, you’d have a tape deck, maybe a CD deck, an amplifier and I always remember as a kid, they’d all be silver starting off and those were the really cool ones. And then after a while, a manufacturer would come out with one that wasn’t silver, it was black and suddenly black looked really cool and all the silver stuff looked really old. And so, then you’d have five years of everything being in black and then somebody would say, "Oh, black’s so boring. Here’s our new model, it’s silver," and everyone would get really excited about that again. I feel like somehow the web is slightly and, as I say, maybe it’s a human nature thing, perhaps we’re all just magpies and want to go to something that looks a bit different and a bit exciting and claim that’s the latest, greatest thing. Do you think there’s an element of that?

Chris: Yeah, I think that’s actually probably a really good analogy for what it’s like on what our industry has a tendency to do. I think it’s probably bigger than just that. I had a really, I don’t want to say a really good thought, that sounds arrogant. I had a thought, I don’t know if it was good or not, I forgot what it was.

Drew: Oh, it’ll come back.

Chris: So, I can’t tell you but it was related as you were talking.

Drew: I bamboozled you with talk of hi-fi separates.

Chris: Yeah, no, that’s great. It’s great.

Drew: We last talked about this concept of the lean web where we were seeing a bit of a swing back away from these big frameworks where everything is JavaScript and even our CSS was in JavaScript. And we were beginning to see at that time a launch of things like Petite Vue, Alpine.js, Preact, these smaller, more focused libraries that try and reduce the weight of JavaScript and be a little bit more targeted. Is that a trend that has continued?

Chris: Yeah, and it’s continued in a good way. So, you still see projects like that pop up, I’ve seen since then a few more tiny libraries. But I think one of the other big trends that I'm particularly both excited about and then maybe also a little bit disheartened about is the shift beyond smaller client side libraries into backend compiler tools. So, you have things like Svelte and SvelteKit and Astro which are designed to let people continue to author things with a state-based UI, JavaScripty approach but then compile all of that code that would normally have to exist in the browser and run at runtime into mostly HTML with just the sprinklings of JavaScript that you need to do the specific things you’re trying to do.

Chris: And so, the output looks a lot more traditional DOM manipulation but the input looks a lot more like something you might write in Reactor view. So, I think that’s pretty cool. It’s not without, in my opinion, maybe some holes that people can fall into and I'm starting to see some of those tools do the, hey, we solved this cool thing in an innovative way so let’s go and repeat some of the mistakes of our past but differently traps and we can talk about that, that didn’t make it into the article that you referenced. I recently wrote an update looking back on how things are changing that talks about where they’re headed.

Chris: But I think one of the big things in my article, The Transitional Web, was this musing about whether these tools are the future or just a transitional thing that gets us from where we are to where we’re headed. So, for example, if you’ve been on the web for a while, you may remember that there was a time where jQuery was the client side library.

Drew: It absolutely was, yeah.

Chris: If you were going to do JavaScript in the web, you were going to use jQuery.

Drew: jQuery was everywhere.

Chris: Yeah. And not that you couldn’t get by without it but doing something like getting all of the elements that have a class was incredibly difficult back in the, i.e., six through eight era. And jQuery made it a lot easier, it smoothed things out across browsers, it was great. But eventually browsers caught up, we got things like querySelector and querySelectorAll, the classList API, cool methods for moving elements around like a pen and before and after and removed. And suddenly, a lot of the stuff that was jQuery’s bread and butter, you could just do across any browser with minimal effort. But not everything, there were still some gaps or some areas where you might need polyfills.

Chris: And so, you started to see these smaller tools that were ... jQuery, they did some of the things but they didn’t do everything so the ones that immediately come to mind for me are tools like Umbrella JS or Shoestring from the folks over at Filament Labs. And the thing with those tools is they were really popular for a hot minute, everyone’s like, "You don’t need jQuery, use these," and then the browsers really caught up and they went away entirely. And actually, even before that fully happened, you started to see tools like React and Vue and Angular start to dominate and just, really, people either use jQuery or these other tools, they don’t touch Umbrella or Shoestring at all.

Chris: So, I think the thing I often wonder is are tools like Preact and Solid and Svelte and Astro, are those more like what reacted for the industry or more like Umbrella and Shoestring where they’re just getting us to whatever’s next. At the time that I wrote the article, I suspected that they were transitional. Now, I think my thoughts have shifted a little bit and I feel like tools like Preact and Solid are probably a little bit more and Petite Vue who are ... You called it something weird because you’re British, I forget, Petty Vue or something but-

Drew: Petite Vue, yeah.

Chris: No, I'm just teasing, I'm sorry. I love you, Drew.

Drew: I was attempting to go for the French so ...

Chris: Right? Sorry, I have the way you guys say herb stuck in my head now instead of herb and I just can't. So, yeah, I feel like those tools are potentially transitional and the what’s next just as an industry is, in my opinion, and a lot could change in the next year or three, the way I'm feeling now, it seems like tools like Astro and Svelte are going to be that next big wave at least until browsers catch up a lot. So, in my opinion, the things that browsers really need to have to make a lot of these tools not particularly necessary is some native DOM diffing method that works as easily as inner HTML does for replacing the DOM but in a way that doesn’t just destroy everything.

Chris: I want to be able to pass in an HTML string and say make the stuff in this element look like this with as little messing up of things as possible. And so, until we have that, I think there’s always going to be some tooling. There’s a lot of other things that these tools do like you can animate transitions between pages like you would in SPA. We’ve got a new API that will hopefully be hitting the browser in the near future, it works in Chrome Canary now but nowhere else, your transitions API. There’s an API in the works for sanitizing HTML strings so that you don’t do terrible cross-site scripting stuff, hasn’t really shipped anywhere yet but it’s in the works.

Chris: So, there’s a lot of library-like things in the works but DOM diffing, I think, is really the big thing. So much of how we build for the web now is grab some data from an API or a database and then dynamically update the UI based on things the user does. And you can do that with DOM manipulation, I absolutely have but, man, it is so much harder to do. So, really, I get the appeal of state-based UI. The flip side is we also use state-based UI for a lot of stuff where it’s not appropriate and it ends up being harder to manage and maintain in the long run. So, I'm rambling, I'm sorry. Drew, stop me, ask [inaudible 00:09:57].

Drew: Yeah, I don’t want to gloss over the importance of jQuery as an example for this overall trend because, as you say, at the time, it was really difficult to just find things in the DOM to target something. You could give things an ID and then you had get element by ID and you could target it that way. But say you wanted to get everything with a certain class, that was incredibly difficult to do because there was no way of accessing the class list, you could just get the attribute value and then you would have to dissect that yourself. It’s incredibly inefficient to try and get something by class and what jQuery did was it took an API that we were already familiar with, the CSS selector API essentially, and implemented that in JavaScript.

Drew: And, all of a sudden, it was trivially easy to target things on the page which then made it ... It very quickly just became the defacto way that any JavaScript library was allowing you to address elements in the DOM. And because of that trend, because that’s how everybody was wanting to do it with quite a heavy JavaScript implementation, let’s not forget this was not a cheap thing to do, that the web platform adapted and we got querySelector which does the same thing on querySelectorAll. And of course, then what jQuery did or I think its selector engine was called Sizzle, I think, under the hood. Sizzle then adopted querySelectorAll as part of its implementation.

Drew: So, if a selector could be resolved using the native one, it would. So, actually, the web platform was inspired by jQuery and then improved jQuery in this whole cycle. So, I think the way the web has always progressed is observing what people are doing, looking at the problems that they’re trying to solve and the messes of JavaScript that we’re using to try and do it and then to provide a native way to do that which just makes everything so much easier. Is that the ultimate trend? Is that what we’re looking at here?

Chris: Yeah, for sure. I often describe jQuery as paving the cow paths. So many of the methods that I love and use in the browser, I owe entirely to jQuery and I think recognizing that helped me get less angry at some of the damage that modern frameworks do or modern libraries because the reality is they are ... I think the thing is a lot of them are experiments that show alternate ways to do things and then we have a tendency as an industry to be like, "If it’s good for this, it’s good for everything." And so, React is very good at doing a specific set of things in a specific use case and, through some really good marketing from Facebook, it became the defacto library of the web.

Chris: I think tools like Astro and Svelte are similarly showing a different way we can approach things that involves authoring and adding a compiled step. And they are, by no means, original there, static site generators have existed for a while, they just layer in this. And we’ll also spit out some reactive interacting bits and you don’t have to figure out how to do that or write your own JavaScript for it, just write the stuff, we’ll figure out the rest. So, yeah, I do think that’s the nature of the web platform is libraries are experiments that extend what the platform can already do or abstract away some of the tough stuff so that people can focus on building and then, eventually, hopefully, the best stuff gets absorbed back into the platform.

Chris: The potential problem with that model is that, usually, by the time that happens, the tooling has both gotten incredibly heavy to the detriment of end users and has become really entrenched. So, even though the idea ... Think of jQuery, we talk about it in the past tense but it’s still all over the web because these sites that were built with it aren’t just going to rip it out, it’s a lot of work to do that. And there’s a lot of developers even today who, when they start a new project, they reach for jQuery because that’s what they learned on and that’s what they know and it’s easiest for them.

Chris: So, these tools just really have persistence for better or for worse. It’s great if you invested a lot of time in learning them, it’s great job security, you’re not wasted time. But a lot of these tools are very heavy, very labor-intensive for the browser and ultimately result in a more fragile end user experience which is not always the best thing.

Drew: I remember, at one point, there was a movement calling for React to actually be shipped with the browser as a way of offsetting the penalty of downloading and pausing all that script. It is frustrating because it’s like, okay, you’re on the right path here, this functionality should be native to the browser but then, crucially, at the last moment, you swerve and miss and it’s like, no, we don’t want to embed React, what we want to do is look at the problems that React is helping people solve, look at the functionality that it’s providing and say, okay, how can we take the best version of that and work that into the web platform. Would you agree?

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. React will eventually be in the browser, just not the way everybody ... I think a lot of people talk about it as in literally, the same way jQuery is in the browser now, too. We absorb the best bits, put some different names on them, arguably more verbose, clunky, difficult to use names in many cases and so I think that’s how it’ll eventually play out. The other thing that libraries do that I wish the web platform was better at, since we’re on this path, is just API consistency.

Chris: So, it’s one thing that jQuery got, really, is the API is very consistent in terms of how methods are authored and how they work. And just, as a counterpoint, in JavaScript proper, just native JavaScript, you could make a strong argument that querySelector and querySelectorAll shouldn’t be separate methods, it should just be one method that has a much shorter name that always returns ... Hell, I’d even argue an array, not a node list because there are so many more methods that you can use to loop over arrays and manipulate them to nodes or node lists.

Chris: Why is the classList API a set of methods on a property instead of just a set of methods you call directly on the element? So, why is it classList add, classList remove instead of add class, remove class, toggle class, et cetera. It’s just lots of little things like that, this death by a thousand cuts, I think, exacerbates this problem that, even when native methods do the thing, you still get a lot of developers who reach for tooling just because it smooths over those rough edges, it often has good documentation. MDN fills the gap but it’s not perfect and, yeah.

Drew: Yes, using a well-designed framework, the methods tend to be guessable. If you’ve seen documentation that includes a remove method, you could probably guess that an add method is the opposite of that because that’s how anybody would logically name it. But it’s not always that way with native code, I guess, because of reasons, I don’t know, designed by committee, historical problems. I know that, at one point, there were, was it MooTools or prototype or some of these old frameworks that would add their own methods and basically meant that those names couldn’t be reused for compatibility reasons.

Chris: Yeah, I remember there was that whole SmooshGate thing that happened where they were trying to figure out how to ... I think it was the flat method or whatever that originally was supposed to be called. MooTools had an array method of the same name attached to the array prototype. If the web standards committee implemented it the way they wanted to, it would break any website using MooTools, a whole thing.

Drew: In some ways, it seems laughable, any website using MooTools. If your website’s using MooTools, good luck at this point. But it is a fundamental attribute of the web that we try not to break things that, once it’s deployed, it should keep running and a browser update isn’t going to make your use of HTML or CSS or whatever invalid, we’re going to keep supporting it for as long as possible. Even if it’s been deprecated, the browsers will keep supporting it.

Chris: Yeah. I was just going to say, the marquee element was deprecated ages ago and it still works in every major browser just for legacy reasons. It’s that core ethos of the web which is the thing I love. I think it’s a good thing, yeah.

Drew: It is but, yes, it is not without its problems as we’ve seen. It's, yeah, yeah, very difficult. You mentioned the View Transitions API which I think now may be more broadly supported. I don’t know if I saw from one of the web.dev posts that’s now, as of this month, has better support, which is transitional state but like an SPA style transition between one state and another but you can do it with multipage apps.

Chris: Yeah. A discord I'm in, just quick shout out to the Frontend Horse Discord, Adam Argyle was in there today talking about how, because he built this slide demo thing where every slide is its own HTML file and it uses U transitions to make it look like it’s just one single page app. He was saying that it still does require Chrome Canary with a flag turned on but things change quickly, very slowly and then all at once, that’s the-

Drew: Well, that’s pretty up to date and an authoritative statement there, yeah. But we saw, it was Google IO recently, we saw loads of announcements from them back to things they’re working on. Things like the popover API, which is really interesting, which make use of this top layer concept where you don’t have to futz around with Z index to make sure, if something needs to be on the top, it can be on the top. It’s these sorts of solutions that you get from the web platform that are always going to be a bit of a hack if they’re implemented by a library in JavaScript.

Drew: It’s the fact that you can have a popover that you can always guarantee is going to be on top of everything else and has baked into its behavior so that it can be accessibly dismissed to all those really important subtleties that it’s so easy to get wrong with a JavaScript implementation that the web platform just gets right. And I guess that means that the web platform is always going to move more slowly than a big framework like React or what have you but it does it for a reason because every change is considered for, I don’t know, robustness and performance and accessibility and backward compatibility. So, you end up with, ultimately, a better solution even if it has weird method names.

Chris: For sure. Yeah, no, that’s totally fair.

Drew: I think-

Chris: Yeah.

Drew: ... we had-

Chris: Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Rich. Drew rather.

Drew: I was about to mention Rachel, we had Rachel Andrew on the show a few episodes ago talking about Google Baseline which is their initiative to say which features are supported to replace a browser support matrix idea. And if you look at the posts that Rachel writes what’s new on the web on web.dev every month, she does a roundup of what’s now stable, what you can use and there’s just a vast amount being added to the web platform all the time. It could be a change log from a major framework because it is a major framework, it’s the native web platform but there’s just things being added all the time. Is there anything in particular that you’ve seen that you think would make a big difference or are you just hanging out for that DOM diffing after all those things that are yet to come?

Chris: Yeah. So, things like transitions between pages and stuff, I'm going to be honest, those don’t excite me as much as I think they excite a lot of other people. I know that’s a big part of the reason why a lot of developers that I know really like SPAs and, I don’t know, markers, get really excited about that thing, I’ve just never really understood that. I am really holding out for a DOM diff method. I think the API I'm honestly most excited for is the Temporal API which is still in, I think, stage three so it’s not coming anytime soon. But working with dates in JavaScript sucks and the Temporal API is hopefully going to fix a lot of those issues, probably introduce some new ones but fix most of them.

Drew: This is new to me. Give us a top level explanation of what’s going on with that one.

Chris: Oh, yeah, sure. So, one of the big things that’s tough to do with the date object in JavaScript ... For me, there’s two big things that are really particularly painful. One of them is time zones. So, trying to specify a time in a particular time zone or get a time zone from a date object. So, based on when it was created or how it was created, no, this is the time zone. Figuring out the time zone the person is in is really difficult. And then the other aspect that’s difficult is relative time. So, if you’ve got two different dates and you want to just quickly figure out how much time is between them, you can do it but it involves doing a bunch of math and then making some assumptions especially once you get past days or, I guess, weeks.

Chris: So, I could easily look at two date objects, grab timestamps from them and be like, "Okay, this was two weeks ago or several days." But then, once you start getting into months, the amount of days in a month varies. So, if I don’t want to say 37 weeks, I want to say, however many months that ends up being, it’s going to vary based on how long the months were. And so, the Temporal API addresses a lot of those issues. It’s going to have first class support for time zones, it’s going to have specific methods for getting relative time between two temporal objects and, in particular, one where you hopefully won’t have to ...

Chris: It’s been a while since I’ve read the spec but I'm pretty sure it allows you to not have to worry about, if it’s more than seven days, show in weeks, if it’s more than four weeks, use months. You can just get a time string that says this was X amount of time ago or is happening N amount of time in the future or whatever. So, there’s certain things the Date API can do relatively or the date object can do relatively well but then there’s a couple of you’re trying to do appy stuff with it.

Chris: For example, I once tried to build a time zone calculator so I could quickly figure out when some of my colleagues in other parts of the world, when it was for them. And it was just really hard to account for things like, oh, most of Australia shifted daylight savings time this month but this one state there doesn't, they actually do it a different month or not at all and so it was a huge pain.

Drew: Yeah, anything involving time zones is difficult.

Chris: Yeah. It’s one of the biggest problems in computer science. That and, obviously, naming things. But yeah, it will smooth over a lot of those issues with a nicer, more modern API. If you go over to tc39.es/proposaltemporal, they have the docs of the work in progress or the spec in progress. It’s authored a lot more nicely than what you might normally see on, say, the W3C website in terms of just human readability but you can tell they borrowed a lot of the way the API works from libraries like Moment.js and date-fns and things like that. Which again gets back to this idea that libraries really pave those cow paths and show what a good API might look like and then the best ones usually win out and eventually become part of the browser.

Drew: And again, back to my point about the web platform getting the important details right, if you’ve got native data objects, you’re going to be able to represent those as localized strings which is a whole other headache. I’ve used libraries that will tell you, "Oh, this blog post was posted two weeks ago," but it’ll give you the string two weeks ago and there’s no way to translate that or, yeah. So, all those details, having it baked into the platform, that’s going to be super good [inaudible 00:27:24].

Chris: Smashing, one might even say.

Drew: Smashing, yeah. It raises a question because the standards process takes time and paving the cow paths, there has to be a cow path before you pave it. So, does that approach always leave us a step behind what can be done in big frameworks?

Chris: Yeah, theoretically. I think we can look at an example where this didn’t work with the Toast API that Google tried to make happen a few years back. That was done relatively quickly, it was done without consensus across browsers, I don’t think it really leaned heavily on ... I think it was just doing what you described, the paving before the cow paths were there and so it was just met with a lot of resistance. But yeah, I think the platform will always be a bit behind, I think libraries are always going to be a part of the web. Even as the Vanilla JS guy, I use libraries all the time for certain things that are particularly difficult.

Chris: For me, that tends to be media stuff. So, if I need to display really nice photo galleries that expand and shrink back down and you can slide through them, I always grab a library for that, I'm not coding that myself. I probably could, I just don’t want to, it’s a lot of little details to manage.

Drew: It’s a lot of work, yeah.

Chris: Yeah. So, I do, I think the platform will always be behind, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think, for me, the big thing I’ve wished for years is that we run through this cycle as an industry where a little tool comes out, does a thing well, throws in more and more features, gets bigger and bigger, becomes a black hole and just sucks up the whole industry. I keep picking on React but React is the library right now. And then eventually people are like, "Oh, this is big, maybe we should not use something as big," and then you start to see little alternatives pop up. And I really wish that we stopped doing that whole bigger black hole thing and the tools just stayed little and people got okay with the idea that you would pull together a bunch of little tools instead of just always grabbing the behemoth that does all the things. I often liken it to people always go for the Swiss Army knife when they really just need a toothpick or a spoon or a pair of scissors. Just grab the tool you need, not the giant multi-tool that has all this stuff you don't.

Drew: It almost comes back to the classic Unix philosophy of lots of small tools that do specific things that have a common interface between them so that you can change stuff together.

Chris: And that’s probably where ... Now that you’re saying it, I hadn’t really considered this but that’s probably where the behavior or the tendency arises is, if you have a bunch of small libraries from the same author, they often play together very nicely. If you don't, they don’t always, yeah, it’s tougher to chain them together or connect those dots. And I really wish there was some mechanism in place that incentivized that a little bit more, I don’t know. I got nothing but I hadn’t really considered that until you just said it.

Drew: Maybe it needs to be a web platform feature to be able to plug in functionality.

Chris: Yeah. Remember the jQuery, I think it was called the extend method or they had some hook that, if you were writing a plugin, basically you would attach to the jQuery prototype and add your own things in a non-destructive way. I wish there was some really lightweight core that we could bolt a bunch of stuff into, that would be nice.

Drew: Yes, and I think that would need to come from the platform rather than from any third party because done the interface would never be agreed upon.

Chris: Very true.

Drew: You talk a lot about Vanilla JavaScript as a concept, I think it helps to give things names. I feel like this approach that we’re talking about here is being web platform native. Do you think that describes it accurately?

Chris: Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Drew: Yeah. So, you’ve talked about still reaching for libraries and things where necessary. Would you say that, if it is our approach to pave the cow paths that, really, the ecosystem needs these frameworks to be innovating and pushing the boundaries and finding the requirements that are going to stick, are they just an essential part of the ecosystem and maybe not so [inaudible 00:32:08]-

Chris: Yeah, probably more than I-

Drew: ... to paint.

Chris: Yeah. I think, more than I’d like to admit, they are an essential part of the ecosystem. And I think what it comes back to for me is I wish that they did the one thing well and stayed a relatively manageable size. Preact, for example, has done a really great job of adding more features and still keeping themselves around three kilobytes or so, minified [inaudible 00:32:33] which is pretty impressive considering how much like React the API is and they have fewer abstractions internally so a lot of the dynamic updates, you, user Drew, interact with the page, some state changes and a render happened, that ended up happening orders of magnitude faster than it does in React as well. Now, to be fair, a lot of the reason why is Preact is newer and it benefits from a lot of modern JavaScript methods that didn’t exist when React was created. So, under the hood, there’s a lot more abstraction happening but it’d probably require a relatively big rewrite of React to fix that.

Drew: And we know those are always popular.

Chris: Yeah. They are dangerous, I understand why people don’t like to do them. I’ve done it multiple times, I always end up shooting myself on the foot, it’s not great.

Drew: So, say that I'm a React developer and I'm currently, day-to-day, building client side SPAs but I really like the sound of this more platform native approach and I want to give it a try for my next project. Where should I start? How do I dip a toe into this world?

Chris: Oh, it depends. So, the easiest way, and I hate myself for saying this, but the easiest way, honestly, you got a few options. One of them, you rip out React, you drop in Preact, there’s a second smaller thing you need to smooth over some compatibility between the two but that’s going to give you just an instant performance boost, a reduce in file size and you can keep doing what you were doing. The way that I think is a little bit more future-proof and interesting, you grab a tool like Astro, which allows you to literally use React to author your code and then it’s going to compile that out ... Excuse me, into mostly HTML, some JavaScript, it’s going to strip out React proper and just add the little interactivy bits that you need.

Chris: I saw a tweet a year or two ago from Jason Lengstorf from the Netlify developer relations team about how he took a next app that he had built, kept 90% of the code, he just made a few changes to make it fit into the way Astro hooks into things, ran the Astro compiler and he ended up having the same exact site with almost all of the same code but the shipped JavaScript was 90% smaller than what he had put in. And you get all the performance and resilience wins that come with that just automatically, just by slapping a compiler on top of what you already have.

Chris: So, I'm really excited about a tool like Astro for that reason. I'm also a little bit worried that a tool like Astro becomes a band-aid that stops us from addressing some of the real systemic issues of always reaching for these tools. Because you can just keep doing what you’re doing and not really make any meaningful changes and temporarily reduce the impact of them, I don’t know that it really puts us in a better place as an industry in the long run. Especially since tools like Svelte and Astro are now working towards this idea that, rather than shipping multi-page apps, they’re going to ship multi-page apps that just progressively enhance themselves into single page apps with hydration and now we’re right back to we’ve got an SPA.

Chris: So, I mentioned some stuff has changed, I recently saw a talk from Rich Harris, who’s the creator of Svelte and SvelteKit, about this very thing and he’s very strongly of the belief that SPAs are better for users because you’re not fetching and rerunning all of the JavaScript every time the page loads. And I get that argument and SvelteKit does it in a really cool way where, rather than having a link element like you might get in Next.js or something like that, a React router or whatever, they just intercept traditional hyperlinks and do some checking to see if they point to your current page or an external site and behave accordingly.

Chris: The thing that nobody ever talks about when they talk about SPAs are better is all of the accessibility stuff that they tend to break that you then need to bolt back in. So, even if you’re like, "Okay, this library is going to handle intercepting the links and finding the page and doing all the rendering and figuring out what needs to change and what stays the same," there’s this often missed piece around how do you let someone who’s using a screen reader know that the UI has changed and how do you do it in a way that’s not absolutely obnoxious. You don’t want to read the entire contents of the page so you can’t just slap an ARIA live attribute on there.

Chris: Do you shift focus to the H1 element on the page? What happens if the user didn’t put an H1 element on the page? Do you have some visually hidden element that you drop some text in saying page loaded so that they know? Do you make sure you shift focus back to the top so they’re not stranded halfway down the page if they’re a keyboard user? It’s one of those things where how you handle is very it depends, contextual. And I think it’s really tough for a library to implement a solution that works for all use cases. I think it’s optimistic to assume the developers will always do the right thing.

Chris: I mentioned at the very start that I'm excited about these tools but I also see them doing that let’s repeat the same mistakes all over again and this feels like that to me. I absolutely understand why, on certain very heavy sites, you might want to shift to an SPA model but there are also just so many places you can really do real harm to yourself or your users when going down that path. And so, I worry that these tools came up to solve a bunch of UI or UX and performance related issues with state-based UI just to then re-implement them in a different way eventually. That’s my soapbox on that. If you have any questions or comments, I'm happy to hear them.

Drew: So, as often happens when we talk, we get all the way to the end and conclude that we’re doomed.

Chris: We’re not. I think it’s mostly we’re headed in a right direction, Drew. I'm a little less doom and gloom than I was a few years ago. And as much as I just ragged on tools like Astro and Svelte, I think they’re going to do a lot of good for the industry. I just love the move to mostly HTML, sprinkle in some JavaScript, progressively enhance some things, that’s a beautiful thing. And even though I was just ragging on the whole SPA thing that these tools are doing, one of the things they also do that’s great is, if that JavaScript to enhance it into an SPA doesn’t load or fails for some reason, Astro and SvelteKit fall back to a multi-page app with server side HTML. So, I think that promise of, what was it, isomorphic apps they used to call them a while ago, it may be closer to that vision being realized than we’ve ever gotten before. I still personally think that just building multi-page apps is often better but I'm probably in the minority here, I often feel like I'm the old man shouting at the cloud.

Drew: And yes, as often happens, it all comes round to progressive enhancement being a really great solution to all of our problems. Maybe not all of our problems but some of them around the web.

Chris: It’s going to cure global hunger, you watch.

Drew: So, I’ve been learning all about being web platform native. What have you been learning about lately, Chris?

Chris: I’ve been trying to finally dig into ESBuild, the build tool/compiler I’ve been using, Rollup, and a separate NPM SaaS compiler thing and my own cobbled together build tool for years. And then Rollup V3 came out and broke a lot of my old stuff if I upgrade to it so I'm still on Rollup two and this was the motivation for me to finally start looking at ESBuild which also has the ability, I learned, to not just compile JavaScript but also CSS and will take nasty CSS imports and concatenate them all into one file for you just like ES modules would.

Chris: So, now I'm over here thinking like, "Oh, is it finally time to drop SaaS for native CSS?" and, "Oh, all these old SaaS variables I have, I should probably convert those over to CSS variables." And so, it’s created this whole daisy chain of rabbit hole for me in a very good way because this is the kind of thing that keeps what we do professionally interesting is learning new things.

Drew: You’ll be the Vanilla CSS guy before we know it.

Chris: That’s Steph Eckles. She is much better at that than I am. I reach for her stuff all the time but, yeah, maybe a little bit.

Drew: If you, dear Listener, would like to hear more from Chris, you can find his social links, blog posts, developer tips newsletter and more at gomakethings.com. And you can check out his podcast at vanillajspodcast.com or wherever you’re listening to this. Thanks for joining us today, Chris. Did you have any parting words?

Chris: No, Drew, just thank you so much for having me. I always enjoy our chat so it was great to be here.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 62 With Slava Shestopalov: What Is Design Management?

In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we ask what is a design manager? What does it take and how does it relate to the role of Designer? Vitaly talks to Slava Shestopalov to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly: He’s a design leader, lecturer and design educator. He has seen it all working as a graphic designer in his early years and then, moving to digital products, UX, accessibility and design management. Most recently, he has worked as a lead designer and design manager in a software development company, Alex, and then, later, Bolt, the all-in-one mobility app. Now, he’s very keen on building bridges between various areas of knowledge rather than specializing in one single thing, and we’ll talk about that as well. He also loves to write, he has a passion for medieval style UX design myths. Who doesn’t? And is passionate about street and architecture photos. Originally from Cherkasy, Ukraine, he now lives in Berlin with his wonderful wife, Aksano. So we know that he’s an experienced designer and design manager, but did you know that he also loves biking, waking up at 5:00 AM to explore cities and can probably talk for hours about every single water tower in your city. My Smashing friends, please welcome Slava Shestopalov. Hello Slava. How are you doing today?

Slava: I am Smashing.

Vitaly: Oh yes, always.

Slava: Or at least I was told to say that.

Vitaly: Okay, so that’s a fair assessment in this case. It’s always a pleasure to meet you and to see you. I know so many things about you. I know that you’re very pragmatic. I know that you always stay true to your words. I know that you care about the quality of your work. But it’s always a pleasure to hear a personal story from somebody who’s kind of explaining where they’re coming from, how they ended up where they are today. So maybe I could ask you first to kind of share your story. How did you arrive kind of where you are today? Where you coming from or where you’re going? That’s very philosophical, but let’s start there.

Slava: That’s quite weird. I mean, my story is quite weird because I’m a journalist by education and I never thought of being a designer at school or the university. During my study years, I dreamt about something else. Maybe I didn’t really have a good idea of my future profession rather about the feeling that it should bring, that it should be something interesting, adventurous, something connected with helping other people. I dreamt about being a historian, geographer, maybe traveling in the pursuit of new adventures or inventions, but ended up being a journalist.

Slava: My parents recommended me choose this path because they thought I was quite talkative person and it would’ve been a great application for such a skill. And since I didn’t have any better ideas, I started studying at the university, studying journalism. And then, on the third year studying, during our practice, and by the way, I met my wife there, under the university, we are together since the first day of studying, we were in the same academic group, not only on the same faculty, and we were passing our journalistic practice at the Press Department of the local section of the Ministry of Emergencies, meaning that we were writing articles about various accidents happening in the Cherkasy region, taking photos of, sometimes, not very funny things. And accidentally, there I tried CorelDRAW, there is the whole generation of designers who don’t even know what those words mean.

Vitaly: Well, you don’t use CorelDRAW anymore, do you?

Slava: Not anymore. I don’t even know whether this software is still available. So I accidentally tried that in our editorial office where, as our practices, was not even real work. And somehow, it was more or less okay. I created the first layout. Of course, now I am scared to look at it. I don’t even have it saved somewhere on my computer. That’s an abomination, not design. But back then, it worked out and I started developing this skill as a secondary skill. I’m a self-taught designer, so never had any systematic way of learning design, rather learning based on my own mistakes, trying something new, producing a lot of work that I’m not proud of.

Vitaly: But also, I’m sure work that you are proud of.

Slava: Yeah. But then, later, I joined first small design studios and I’m forever thankful to my, back then, art director who once came to my desk, looked at the layout on my screen and told me, "Slava, please don’t get offense, but there is a book that you have to read." And he hand me handed me the book Design for Non-Designers. That’s an amazing book, I learned a lot from it, the basics of composition, contrast, alignment, the visual basics. And I started applying it to my work, it got better. Then of course, I read many more books for designers, but also, books on design, on business and management and other topics. And gradually, by participating in more and more complex projects, I got to the position where I am right now.

Vitaly: So it’s interesting for me because actually I remember my days coming also without any formal education as a designer, I actually ended up just playing with boxes on page. And I actually came to design through the lens of HTML, CSS back in the day, really, through frontend development. And then, this is why I exclusive design accessibility lies way, it’s close to my heart. And it’s the thing that many people actually really like that kind of moving into design and then, starting just getting better at design.

Vitaly: But you decided to go even further than that. I think in 2019, you transitioned from the role of a lead designer, if I’m not mistaken, to design manager. Was it something that you envisioned, that you just felt like this is a time to do that? Because again, there are two kinds of people that I encounter. Some people really go into management thinking that this is just a natural progression of their career, you cannot be just a designer, and this is in quotation marks, "forever," so you’re going to go into the managerial role. And some people feel like, let me try that and see if it’s for me and if not, I can always go back to design or maybe to another company product team and whatnot. What was it like for you? Why did you decide to take this route?

Slava: The reason was curiosity. I wouldn’t say that I was the real manager because design management is slightly different, probably even other types of management like product management and your engineering management, it’s not completely management because what is required there, if you look at the [inaudible 00:07:01], you will notice that the domain knowledge, the hard skills are essential and you’ll be checked whether you have those skills as well apart from the managerial competence. So I wouldn’t say that this kind of management is 100% true, complete management as we can imagine it in the classical meaning, it’s the combination of what you’ve been doing before with management and the higher the percentage of management is, the higher in the hierarchy you go.

Slava: In my situation, switching from the lead designer to design manager was not that crucial. I would say more critical thing that I experienced was switching from a senior designer to lead designer because this is the point where I got my first team whom I had to lead. And that was the turning point when you realize that the area of your responsibility is not only yourself and your project, but also someone else. And in modern world, we don’t have feudalism and we cannot directly tell people what to do, we are not influencing their choices directly. That’s why it’s getting harder to manage without having the real power. And we are in the civilized world, authoritarian style is not working anymore, and that’s great, but we should get inventive to work with people using gentle, mild methods, taking into account what they want as personalities, but at the same time reaching the business goals of the company and KPIs of the team.

Vitaly: Right. But then also, speaking about the gentle way of managing, I remember the talk that you have given about the thing that you have learned and some of the important things that you consider to be important in a design manager position. So I’m curious if you could share some bits of knowledge of things that you discovered maybe the hard way, which were a little bit surprising to you as you were in that role, for example, also in Bolt. What were some things that you feel many designers maybe who might be listening at this point and thinking, "Oh, actually, I was always thinking about design manager, maybe I should go there," what was some things that were surprising to you and something that were really difficult?

Slava: Something that was surprising both for me and for other people with whom I talk about design management is that we perceive management in the wrong way. We have expectations pretty far from reality. There are some managerial activities that are quite typical for designers, for the design community in general, something that we encounter so often that we tend to think that this is actually management. Maybe there is something else but not much else that we don’t see at the moment, not much is hidden of that management. And that’s why when we jump into management, we discover a lot of unknown things that this type of work includes.

Slava: For example, as a Ukrainian, I know that, in our country, many designers are self-taught designers because the profession develops much faster than the higher education. And that’s why people organize themselves into communities and pass knowledge to each other much faster and easier. And there are so many private schools and private initiatives that spread the knowledge and do that more efficiently so that after couple of months of studying, you get something. Of course, there might be many complaints about the quality of that education, but the sooner you get to the first project, the sooner you make your first mistakes, the better you learn the profession and then, you won’t repeat them again. That’s why I know the power of this community. And mentorship, knowledge-sharing is something extremely familiar to Ukrainian designers.

Slava: And then, generally, I observe the same tendency in the Western Europe that knowledge-sharing, mentorship is the usual thing that many designers do, that many designers practice. And we think that when we switch to management, we will simply scale this kind of activity. In reality, it’s just not even the largest part of management. And when people are officially promoted to managers, to leaders, they discover a lot of other areas like hiring people then being responsible for the hires because it’s not enough just to participate in a technical interview and check the hard skills of a candidate, but also then live with this decision because you cannot easily fire a person, and sometimes, it’s even wrong because as a manager you are supposed to work with this person and develop them and help them grow or help them onboard better and pass this period of adaptation. By the way, adaptation and onboarding, another thing than retention cases, resolving problems when your employees are not satisfied with what they have right now, including you as a manager and many other things like salary, compensation, bonuses, team building trust and relationship in the team, performance management, knowledge assessments.

Vitaly: Right. But then, is there even at all any time then to be designing as you’re a design manager? I know that in some teams, in some companies you have this kind of roles where, well, you’re a design manager, sometimes it would be called just... Yeah, well, [inaudible 00:12:54]. Sometimes design leads are actually also managers, depending if it’s like a small company or a larger company. And then, would you say that given the scope that is really changing when you’re kind of moving to management, should you have hopes that you will still have time to play with designs in Figma?

Slava: It depends on how far you go and on the org structure of the particular company. In some cases, you still have plenty of time to design because management doesn’t occupy that much time, you don’t have many subordinates or the company so small that the processes are not very formalized. In that case, yep, you can still design maybe 50% of your time, maybe even 70% of your time and manage during the rest of the time. But there are large companies where management occupies more and more time and then, yeah, probably you won’t be designing or at least designing the same way as it used to be before.

Slava: There are multiple levels of design, multiple levels of obstruction. For example, when you’re moving pixels in Figma in order to create a well-balanced button, that’s design. But when you’re creating a customer journey map or mapping a service blueprint together with stakeholders from other departments of your company, that’s design as well, but on the higher level of obstruction. You are building a bit larger picture of the product service or the whole experience throughout products and multiple services of the company. So I would say that there is always space for design, but this design might get less digital and more connected with organizational design, interaction between different departments and other stuff like that.

Vitaly: Right. So maybe if we go back a little bit into team building or specifically the culture and the way teams are built, obviously, we kind of moved, I don’t know when it was, but we kind of moved to this idea that T-shaped employees is a good thing. So you basically specialize in one thing and then, you have a pretty general understanding about what’s going on in the rest of the organization, the rest of the product and so on. It’s quite shallow, but then, in one thing, you specialize. At the same time, you see a lot of people who call themselves generalists, they kind of know a lot about different things but never really specialized deeply into one thing. And so, you also have this, this is probably considered to be not necessarily just the I shape, where you kind of get very deep in one thing, but really, this is it, you just specialized so deep that you have pretty much no solid understanding about what’s happening around.

Vitaly: And then, one thing that has been kind of discussed recently, I’ve seen at least a few articles about that is a V-shape, where you kind of have a lot of depth in one thing. You also have a pretty okay, solid, general understanding about what’s going on. But then, you also have enough skills or enough information about the adjacent knowledge within the product that you’re working on. So I’m wondering at this point, let’s say if you build a team of designers, what kind of skills or what kind of shape if you like, do we need to still remain quite, I would say, interesting to companies small and large? What kind of shape would that be? If that makes sense.

Slava: Yeah, so you want me to give you a silver bullet, right, for-

Vitaly: Yes.

Slava: ... a company?

Vitaly: Ideally, yes.

Slava: Doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. On the one hand, I think that’s a good discussion, discussions about the skill sets of designers, but on the other hand, we are talking a lot about ourselves, maybe, more than representatives of all the other professions about what we should call our profession, what shapes, skillset should we have, what frameworks and tools should we use? It’s extremely designer-centered. And here, of course, I can talk for hours and participate in holy wars about what’s the best name for this, all that, but essentially, at the end of the day, I realize that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make sense at all. Okay, whatever we decide, if you are whatever shape designer, but you are not useful in this world, you cannot reach the goal and you cannot find your niche and make users happy and business happy, then it doesn’t matter what’s written on your resume.

Vitaly: Right. So-

Slava: But then, the one hand, yeah, of course, logically, when I think about it, I do support the T-shaped concept. But again, depends on how you understand it, whether those horizontal bar of the T is about shallow knowledge or good enough knowledge or decent knowledge. You see how thick it is? And that’s why we have another concept with this We shape designer, which is essentially another representation of the T-shaped format. The idea is the same that as a human being, of course, you want to specialize in something that’s passion, that you maybe love design for and maybe that’s why you came into the profession. But at the same time, you are obliged to know to a certain minimally required extent, the whole entirety of your profession.

Slava: Ask any other professional, a surgeon, police person, whoever, financial expert, of course, they have their favorite topics, but at the same time, there is a certain requirement to you as a specialist to obtain certain amount of knowledge and skills.

Slava: The same about designers, I don’t see how we are different from other professions. It’s why it’s quite fair to have this expectation that the person would know something about UX research. They are not obliged to be as professional and advanced as specialized UX researchers, but that’s fine for a designer to know about UX research, to do some UX research. The same about UX researchers, it never hurts to know the basics of design in order to understand what your colleagues are doing and then, you collaborate better together.

Vitaly: Which brings me, of course, to the question that I think you brought up in an article, I think maybe five or six years ago. You had a lot of comments on that article. I remember that article very vividly because you argued about all the different ways of how we define design, UX, CX and all the different wordings and abbreviations, service designer, CX designer, UX designer, and so many other things.

Vitaly: I mean, it’s really interesting to me because when I look back, I realize now that we’ve been working very professionally in this industry, in whatever you want to call design industry, UX industry, digital design industry for like... What? ... three decades now, maybe even more than that, really trying to be very professional. But when we look around, actually, and this is just a funny story because just as we started trying to record this session, we spent 14 minutes trying to figure out how to do that in the application here. So what went wrong, Slava? I mean, 30 years is a long time to get some things right and I think that we have done a lot of things. But frankly, too often, when you think about general experience that people would get, be it working with public services, working with insurance companies, working with something that’s maybe less exciting than the landing page or a fancy product or SaaS, very often it’s just not good. What went wrong, Slava? Tell us.

Slava: Nothing went wrong. Everything is fine. The world is getting more and more complex over time, but something never changed, and it’s people, or we didn’t change. Our brain is more or less the same as it was thousand years ago, maybe a couple of thousand years ago and that’s the reason. We are people, we are not perfect. Technology might be amazing, it even feels magical, but we are the same. We are not perfect. We’re not always driven by rational intention to do something well. There are many people who are not very excited about their jobs, that’s why they provide not so good service. There are periods when a good person does bad job and they will improve later, but the task that they deliver today because of many reasons will be at this lower quality.

Slava: Then decision making, we are emotional beings and even if you use a hundred of frameworks about decision making and prioritizing, it doesn’t deny our nature. There are even people who learned to manipulate all the modern techniques, who learned about design thinking and workshops and try to use it to their own advantage. Like, "Oh, okay, I cannot persuade my team, so let’s do this fancy exercise with colored sticky notes and try to-

Vitaly: Well, who doesn’t like colored sticky notes, Slava, come on.

Slava: Digital colored sticky note, they’re still colored and look like sticky notes, right? And those people just want to push their own ideas through workshops. But workshops were designed for something else. The same with business, there are unethical business models still flourishing, there are dark patterns just because some people don’t care. So the reason is that we are the same, we are not perfect.

Vitaly: Right. Well-

Slava: We create design for humans, but we are humans as well.

Vitaly: But sometimes I feel like we are designing for humans, but then, at the same time, I feel that we are spending more and more time designing with AI sometimes for AI, this is how it feels to me. I don’t know about you, every now and again I still get a feeling that, okay, this message that was written by somebody and sent to me, it has a little bit of sense or feel or I don’t know, taste of ChatGPT on it. Just I can tell sometimes that this is kind of for humans, but it’s in a way appears to me as if it was written for AI. So do you have this feeling sometimes that you get that email or you get that message, it’s a little bit too AI-ish? Do you have this experience?

Slava: Sometimes I have this experience, but the reason is that it’s a hot topic right now. You may have already forgotten about another trendy topic, NFT, blockchain, everything was in blockchain, everything was NFT. But over time, people realize where the use cases are really strong and deserve our efforts and where it just doesn’t fit. It’s like with every new technology, it passes the same stages. There is even a nice diagram, the cycle of adoption of any new technology when there is a peak of excitement first when we are trying to apply it everywhere. But then, there is this drop in excitement and disillusionment after which we finally get onto the plateau of enlightenment, finding the best application for this technology.

Slava: I remember the same in the area of design methodology when design sprint just appeared, people tried applying it everywhere, even in many places where it just didn’t fit or the problem was too large or the team culture wasn’t consistent with the trust and openness implied by such a methodology as a design sprint. But over time, it found its application and now, used not that often, but only by those people who need it.

Vitaly: Right. Talking actually about team culture, maybe just to switch the topic a little bit, maybe you could bring a few red flags that you always try to watch out for. Because of course, when you are working with a diverse team and you have people who have very different backgrounds and also have very different expectations and very different skill sets, inevitably, you will face situations where team culture clashes. So I’m wondering, what do you think would be the early warning signs that the manager needs to watch out for to prevent things from exploding down the line?

Slava: That’s a good question. I would turn it into slightly different direction because I think of that kind of paradigm. I would try to prevent this from happening. The best way to deal with it is not to deal with it, to avoid dealing with it. So embracing the culture, understanding it and building it is important because then you won’t need to face the consequence. I wouldn’t say that there are real red flags because culture is like user experience, it’s like gravity, like any other physical force, it just exists. And whether you want it or not, if it’s described in a fancy culture brand guideline or not, it exists anyway. The thing is to be sincere about culture, to embrace the existing culture and to broadcast it to the outside honestly.

Slava: The problem is when the communication about the culture is different from the actual culture. There are various cultures, there are even harsh cultures that someone would find extremely uncomfortable, but for example, for other people it can be a great environment for growth, for rapid growth. Maybe they will change their environment later, but during a certain period of life, it might be important.

Slava: I remember some of my previous companies with pretty harsh cultures, but they helped me to grow and to get where I am right now. Yeah, I wasn’t stressed, but I knew about it. I expected it to happen and I had my inner readiness to resist and to learn my lessons out of that. But the problem is when the company communicates its culture externally as the paradise of wellbeing and mindfulness, but in reality they have deadlines for tomorrow and never ending flow of tasks and crazy stakeholders who demand it from you immediately and give you contradicting requirements. So that’s the problem.

Slava: Of course, yeah, there are some extreme cases when the culture is really toxic, when these are insane, inhuman conditions, I don’t deny that. But in many cases, something that we simply perceive as uncomfortable for ourselves is not necessarily evil, sometimes it is, but not always. And my message is that cultures should be honest. And for that purpose, people should be honest with themselves.

Slava: Manager should look at their company and try to formulate in simple way what type of a community this is. For example, in, again, one of my previous jobs, we realized that our team is like a university for people come to us and are hired because they want to grow rapidly, they want to grow faster than anywhere else, that’s why they join our company. They don’t get many perks and bonuses, the office is not very fancy and we are not those hipster designers who are always using trendy things. But at the same time, you get a lot of practice and you can earn the trust of a client, you can take things you want to be responsible for yourself. You are not given task, but you can take the task you find important.

Slava: And when we realized that, we included it into our value proposition because as a company you’re not even interested in attracting people who will feel unsatisfied here. If you are working this way, but your external messaging is different and you attract those people who are searching for something different and then, when they come in they’re highly disappointed and you have to separate with them in a month or a year or they will bring the elements of this culture to your culture and there is a clash of cultures.

Slava: So the point here, I’m just trying to formulate the same idea but in different ways, it’s to be honest about the culture, it’s extremely important. But also, awareness about your culture. It’s not written, it exists. And sometimes, the company principles are quite misleading, they’re not often true because the real culture is seen at the office, it’s in the Slack chat, it’s in the way how people interact, what they discuss at the coffee machine.

Vitaly: Yeah. And there are, of course, also, I think I read this really nice article maybe a couple of years ago, the idea of different subcultures and how they evolve over time and how they can actually mingle and even merge with, as you might have very different teams working on different side of the world, which then find each other and bring and merge culture. So you kind of have this moving bits and moving parts.

Vitaly: Kind of on the way to one of the conference, I went to Iceland. And there was a really nice friendly guy there who was guiding us through Iceland. And he was telling all this story about nothing ever stops, everything is moving, everything is changing, glaciers are changing, the earth’s changing, everything is changing, everything is moving. And people are pretty much like that. People always find... I mean, maybe people don’t change that much, but they’re still finding ways of collaborating better and finding ways to create something that hopefully works better within the organization. How do you encourage that though?

Vitaly: Very often I encounter situations where it feels like there are people just looking at the clock to finish on time and then, go home. And then, there are people who just want to do everything and they’re very vocal and they will have this incredible amount of enthusiasm everywhere and they will have all the GIFs in Slack and so on and so forth. But then, sometimes I feel like, again, talking about culture, their enthusiasm is clashed against this coldness that is coming from some people. And then, you have camps building. How do you deal with situations like that? You cannot just make people more similar, you just have to deal with very different people who just happen to have very different interests and priorities. How would you manage that?

Slava: That’s an amazing question, and you know why? Because there is no definite answer to it.

Vitaly: I like those kind of questions.

Slava: Yeah. It’s not easy and I struggled a lot with that. I know perfectly, based on my experience, what you’re asking about. One of the solutions might be to hire people who have similar culture or at least consistent with the existing culture. Because if your whole team or the core team, the majority in the team who set this spirit and this atmosphere, they are proactive, you shouldn’t hire people who are highly inconsistent with this kind of culture. Yeah, they might be more passive, more attentive to their schedule, but they should not be resisted at least. They can support it maybe in a more calm way, but you don’t need someone critically opposing that state of things, and vice the versa. Over time, I understood that.

Slava: Sometime ago, I thought that all designers should be proactive, rock stars, super skilled, taking responsibility about everything. But you know what? That’s quite one-sided point of view. Even if I belong to this kind of designers, it’s important to embrace other types of professionals because the downside of being such a designer is that you are driven forward by your passion, but only when you have this passion and motivation. But if it disappears, you can hardly make yourself do the simplest task. And that’s the problem because this fuel doesn’t feed you anymore.

Slava: On the other hand, those people who are more attentive to their balance between work and relaxation, people who are more attentive to their schedule and are less energetic at work and may be less passionate about what they do, they are more persistent and they can much easier survive such a situation when everything around is falling apart and many people lose motivation just because motivation is not such a strong driver for them. So over time, I understood that there are multiple types of designers and they’re all fine. The thing is to find your niche and to be in the place where you belong.

Vitaly: Right. Interesting. Because on top of that, I do have to ask a question. We could do this forever, we could keep this conversation going forever. I want to be respectful of your time as well. Just from your experience... There are so many people, the people who I’ve been speaking to over this last couple of years, but also here on the podcast, everybody has different opinions about how teams should be led and how the culture should be defined in terms of how people are working, specifically all-remote, a hundred percent remote or all on site, a hundred percent on site or hybrid with one day overlap, two days overlap, three days overlap, four days overlap.

Vitaly: What do you think works? I mean, of course, it’s a matter of the company where people allocated. And obviously, if everybody is from different parts of the world, being on site all the time, moving from, let’s say, fully remote to fully on site is just really difficult. So what would you say is really critical in any of those environments? Can hybrid work really well? Can remote work really well? Can onsite work really well? And there’s truly no best option, but I’m just wondering what should we keep in mind for each of those?

Slava: The culture. So look, culture is everything and it influences the way how people work efficiently. If is networking is really active in the team, if people communicate a lot apart from their work and tasks and everything, and if it’s normal for the team, if it’s part of the reasons why people are here in this company, then offline work is preferable. If people are more autonomous and they like it and everyone works like that in the company, then there is nothing bad in being hybrid or remote. So you see, it depends on the attitude to work and general culture, the spirit, how people feel comfortable.

Vitaly: All right. But are you saying that if you have, let’s say, a mix of people who really prefer on site and then, really prefer remote, then you kind of get an issue because how do you merge both of those intentions?

Slava: But how do you get into that situation in the first place?

Vitaly: Well, good question.

Slava: Why have you attracted so different people to your company?

Vitaly: But for the rest [inaudible 00:37:39] with HR?

Slava: Yes, I read processes.

Vitaly: But there might be different teams and then, eventually those teams get merged and then, eventually, some people come, some people leave and people are rotating from one team to another. And then, eventually, before you know it, you end up in a situation where you’re working on a new product with a new team and then, part are remote, part are on site and part don’t even want to be there.

Slava: That’s why large companies have processes. The thing that you are describing is quite typical for huge companies because you cannot keep similar work culture forever. As you scale, it’s becoming more awake and hard to match all the time. There is an amazing diagram that I saw in LinkedIn, it was created by Julie Zhuo, who also wrote a great book on management. And this diagram shows how people are hiring, like this, A hires, B hires, C hires, D, and there is a slight difference in their cultures. And if you imagine it as the line of overlapping circles, when A hires B, B hires C, C hires D and so on, then you notice how far A is from let’s say H or G, they’re very far away because this line of hiring brought certain distortion, certain mutation into the culture understanding with each step.

Slava: It’s like evolution is working. With every century or thousands of years, certain species changes one tiny trait, but in a million of years, you won’t even recognize that. The same with huge companies, you cannot control everything and micromanage it. So naturally, they’re extremely diverse. And many companies even are proud of being diverse and inclusive, which is another aspect, which is great, but in order to manage it all, they have to introduce processes and be more strictly regulated just to keep it working.

Vitaly: Right. Right. Well, I mean, we could speak about this for hours, I think. But maybe just two more questions before we wrap up. One thing that’s really important to me and really dear to me is that I know that you’ve been mentoring and you’ve been participating in kind of educating about design also specifically for designers who are in Ukraine. And I mean, at this point, we probably have many more connections and many more insights about how design is actually working from Ukraine right now when the war is going on. I’m just wondering, do you see... Because we had a Smashing meet a couple of months ago now. And there was an incredible talk by one of the people from set up team in Ukraine, in Kyiv, and they were speaking about just incredible way of how they changed the way the company works, how they adapted in any way to accommodate for everything. Like some people working from bomb shelters. This is just incredible.

Vitaly: Those kind of stories really make me cry. So this is just unbelievable. And I always have this very, I don’t even know how to describe it, like incredible sense of the strength that everybody who I’m interacting with who is coming through [inaudible 00:41:00] keep after all this time. It’s been now, what? It’s like one and a half years, right, well, much more than that, actually looking at 2014. So the question, I guess, that I’m trying to ask here is that strength and that kind of obsession with quality, with good work, with learning, with educating, how did it come to be and how is it now? I don’t know if it makes sense the question, but just maybe your general feelings about what designers are feeling and how are they working at this point in May 2023?

Slava: That’s a good question. Unfortunately, I might not be the best person to answer because I’ve been living in Berlin for three years and fortunately, I never experienced working from a bomb shelter, although, many of my friends and acquaintances did. But what I know for sure is that Ukrainian design community is quite peculiar and it’s an insurance trait. It’s not something that we are taught, but something that just our characteristic. I know that unlike many other people from other countries, Ukrainian designers are really hungry for knowledge and new skills. And the level of self-organization is quite high because we are not used to getting it off the shelf, we are not used to receiving it, I don’t know, from educational institutions, from the government, from whoever else.

Slava: In Ukraine, or at least definitely my generation, millennials, we understand that if we don’t do anything, we will fail in life, that’s why we try to build our career early, we think about our future work during the last years of school and at the university, already planning where we going to work, how much we going to earn and how to find your niche, your place in life.

Slava: And the same in design, we are not waiting until our universities update their programs in order to teach us digital design, we are doing it ourselves, partnering with universities, participating in different courses, contributing to those programs. And I think that this feature, this trait of Ukrainian designers is extremely helpful right now in crisis times. Maybe it didn’t get us that much by surprise, it was still unexpected. But Ukrainian designers and other professionals in other professions, they just try to always have plan B and plan C and maybe even plan D.

Vitaly: Yeah, that’s probably also explains... I mean, I have to ask this question, I really do. Why medieval themes in your UX memes? Oh, even rhymes, it must be true.

Slava: First of all, it’s beautiful and funny. The first time I used medieval art-based memes was several years ago when I worked at EPAM Systems and prepared an internal presentation for one of our internal team meetups. And it was hilarious, everyone was laughing. And since then, I just started doing it all the time. It’s not like-

Vitaly: And you have like 50 of them now or even more?

Slava: More. Many more. It’s just something original. I haven’t seen many medieval memes, especially in the educational and other materials about design and UX. So it’s just, I like to bring positive emotions to my audience. So if it’s hilarious and makes them laugh and if it’s something new that others are not doing or at least that intensively, then why not? And I simply enjoy medieval art, including architecture, gothic style, Romanesque architecture, it’s something from fairy tales or legends, but then, you realize, it was real.

Vitaly: Yeah, so I guess, dear friends listening to this, if you ever want to give or find a nice gift for Slava, lookout for medieval art and any books related to that, I think that Slava will sincerely appreciated. Now, as we’re wrapping up, and I think that you mentioned already the future at this point, I’m curious, this is a question I like asking at the end of every episode. Slava, do you have a dream project that you’d love to work on one day, a magical brand or a particularly interesting project of any industry, of any scope of any sites with any team? Do you have something in mind, what you would love to do one day? Maybe somebody from that team, from that project, from that company, from that brand is now listening.

Slava: Great question, and maybe I don’t have an amazing answer to it because it doesn’t matter. I’m dreaming about bringing value, creating something significant, but I never limited myself to a particular area or a particular company or brand, it just doesn’t matter. If it’s valuable, then it’s a success.

Vitaly: All right, well, if you, dear listener would like to hear more from Slava, you can find him on LinkedIn where he’s... Guess what? ... Slava Shestopalov, but also on Medium where he writes a lot of stuff around UX, and of course, don’t forget medieval-themed UX memes, and also, on his 5:00 AM travel blog. Slava will also be speaking in Freiburg at SmashingConf, I’m very looking forward to see you there, and maybe even tomorrow, we’ll see about that. So please, dear friends, if you have the time, please drop in at SmashingConf, Freiburg, September 2023. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today, Slava. Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you would like to send out to the people who might be listening to this 20 years from now? Who knows?

Slava: Oh, wisdom, I’m not that wise yet, but something that I discovered recently is that we should more care about people. Technology is advancing so fast, so the thing which is left is the human factor. Maybe AI will take part of our job and that’s great because there are many routine tasks no one is fond of doing, but people, we are extremely complex and understanding who we are and how we designers as humans can serve other humans is essential. So that’s where I personally put my effort into recently, and I think that’s a great direction of research for everyone working in design, UX and related areas.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 61 With Rachel Andrew: What Is Web Platform Baseline?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about Web Platform Baseline. What is it, and how can it help determine your browser support policy? Drew McLellan talks to expert Rachel Andrew to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew: She’s a web developer and technical writer and editor. She’s currently working for Google on the Chrome team where she’s a staff technical writer and content lead for web.dev and developer.chrome.com. Prior to Google, she spent 20 years as a freelancer and business owner and she’s written almost countless books and articles where she excels at taking complex technical subjects and making them more readily understandable. She’s also an experienced conference speaker, able to deliver a technical talk to teach an audience about CSS layouts or a keynote to inspire them drawing from her wealth of experience developing for the web. So we know she’s an experienced technical writer, teacher and developer, but did you know she once taught a Canada goose to make a bourbon cocktail? My smashing friends, please welcome back Rachel Andrew. Hi Rachel, how are you?

Rachel: I’m smashing.

Drew: Welcome back to the podcast. It’s been a couple of years and theres been a change of day-to-day role for you.

Rachel: Yes, yes. I guess last time I was here it was mid pandemic and I was still editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine and yes, these days I’m over at Google on the DevRel team with my content team sort of helping to get good docs and information out to our developers about things on the web platform.

Drew: So still in the realms of helping people learn about the web platform and assisting their busy lives, trying to keep a pace of all the new technologies and developments?

Rachel: Yes. Yeah, it’s kind of a perfect role for someone who spent most of their life sort of explaining things to web developers. So yeah, it’s great and within a really great team of people who were very dedicated to talking about all this new stuff.

Drew: So speaking of new developments and also Google, last week was Google I/O 2023, which is always an exciting time for us tech nerds because there are all sorts of announcements and updates from Google. With Google being such a large contributor to the web platform, it then becomes an exciting time to see whats been worked on for the web in particular and see what might be coming out next. I feel like we’re in a place with a web platform where it’s continuing to develop a fantastic pace at the moment.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: Those of us who have been working in the industry for a while remember the years when nothing was added in terms of browser capabilities, I mean sometimes years at a time. You were working on the web back then. Was it frustrating that things weren’t getting added or did it just make it easier to keep up?

Rachel: I think it was frustrating. You know, when we had, we had five years between IE6 and IE7 so that was kind of five years that the web platform just basically stopped because so many people were using IE6, although there were new other browsers around you couldn’t really use all the new stuff that they were putting into the browser because the majority of people coming to your website were in a browser that didn’t support it. So I think it was very frustrating because that’s a very, very long time, especially when IE6 had all sorts of bugs and issues as well so that we weren’t getting fixes to things.

Rachel: It wasn’t even new features. We were dealing with problems, like bits of your content disappearing for no apparent reason. So yeah, it was frustrating, but it was very stable. Buggy but at least the bugs that we could list them, there were websites that listed all of the IE6 CSS problems, so you’d hit one and you’d be like, oh yeah, that’s that. I know how to fix that. So we all became pretty expert in dealing with browser bugs basically and knowing what they were.

Drew: I remember things like Peekaboo, was it Peekaboo bug was that era.

Rachel: Yes.

Drew: And what was the website that listed them, listed them all? I can’t remember it’s name now, but the list of known bugs just got longer and longer and longer over time to the point where it became difficult to find the one you were, the particular bug you were experiencing because the list was so long. We were in a place back then where the dominant browser, which was Internet Explorer at the time, was the browser that was seeing the least technical innovation but that doesn’t mean there was no technical innovation because there was a broader ecosystem, but was it ever possible to use new bits of CSS that were appearing in things like Firefox? Is that something we could do when the dominant browser was so far behind?

Rachel: It was pretty hard. I mean, I think all the ideas of things like polyfills and also there was a lot of us kind of pushing the progressive enhancement story as well and saying, look, it’s fine, your website doesn’t need to look the same in all browsers. I think I’ve been saying that for most of my life at this point. And that was a big thing at the time because people were just sort of A/B test in the browsers, you know, there was no... you’re sensing off to your client and they would just open it in another browser and be like, "Oh no, this is wrong 'cause it’s three pixels out on this other browser."

Rachel: And that was very, very common. People would talk about pixel perfect and what they would typically mean is it should be exactly the same as the PDF or whatever that you were working from or the Photoshop file and all of the browsers that they were aware of, or at least both browsers typically. So I think it was quite difficult to push the web forward at the time, you got quite a lot of resistance and you’d often have to just do it anyway and hope you’d get away with it quite a lot of the time.

Drew: We don’t seem to see that so much these days where clients or anyone really is looking at a web experience side by side in two different browsers and saying, oh, they’re not quite the same. Is that because browsers are much more standardized now and they do look the same or have the expectations changed, do you think, because of so many devices that we’re looking at, the fact that mobile devices and tablets and so many different screen sizes that has that expectation gone away?

Rachel: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both, isn’t it? I think the web browser is how we do everything these days and it’s less of a separate bit of software, it’s just kind of how you use your computer and a lot of the time and I think theres less of an awareness of, oh, we should be checking this for someone who isn’t a developer, we should be checking this in the different browsers. Far more likely, I think, would be someone saying, "This doesn’t work well on my phone." 'Cause they’ll get the email saying, oh look at the new site, and they’re probably on their phone when they get that email and they’ll open it on their phone and then they find, oh, somethings overlaying something or it’s hard to get to something because of a toolbar or whatever.

Rachel: So I think it’s far more likely that a client is going to be coming back with that kind of problem. Maybe they’ve got an older version, an older phone that they’ve not updated and it’s got an older version of software on it or whatever than doing that kind of desktop A/B testing that used to be really common, even with a fairly non-technical client, they would’ve been told by someone that they should make sure it works in these browsers and so they would be doing that checking.

Drew: Yeah, I mean clients would come along to those of us who are building sites for them and they would say, right, we need this site built and it needs to work in IE6 or it needs to work in IE7 and they’d have these very definitive browser versions that things had to work in. And now between, as you mentioned, between IE6 and IE7, there was a multiple year gap, so that constraint from the client could have, it could massively impact your sort of choice of technology or design, couldn’t it?

Rachel: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean that was just sort of fairly standard when you were building sites and at the time I was building sites for clients that would be on the spec for the site would be which browsers that you had to support and you would be expected to test it in those browsers and if it worked in those browsers, that was all good. That was the line that you were following.

Drew: Yeah, I guess even things, even that things were pretty limited. It was a fairly easy decision to make to say these are the browsers that we’re supporting. It’s got to work in IE7 for whatever reason.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: It was fairly clear cut, but these days I don’t think I could even tell you what version of Chrome or Firefox or Safari I’m running or if that’s the latest, I’m presuming it’s the latest, but it’s not so clear cut and straightforward now, is it?

Rachel: Right, yeah. You don’t even notice that the things update. They just update and you don’t realize if that’s a major version or just some say security release that’s come out that you need to update to. I don’t think most people know which features landed in which version of a browser. We used to know. We used to know exactly what was available in each browser, so it’d be like, "Oh great, this project is IE8 and therefore I’ve got, I don’t know, display table" or something that landed in that browser.

Rachel: We used to know. These days we don’t know. I know I spend all of my time documenting this stuff and writing about whats new in the web platform and even so, I’m fairly hazy. If you said to me, "Oh, what was in Chrome 113?" And I’ve just done the work on that, I’d be like, "Err, was that in that one or was that in the beta?" So the average developer then you’re not going to be able to keep track of all that stuff. Theres so much stuff landing all the time.

Drew: So it makes the situation quite difficult, doesn’t it, when you might have sometimes contracts with people you’re building stuff for and certainly expectations that theres going to be a level of browser support but it’s not, if you don’t know what versions things are and they move really quickly, it can be really difficult to pin down to a targeted browser version. And this is, I believe it’s the crux of the problem that’s addressed by one of the big announcements at Google I/O. How do we figure out whats safe to use?

Rachel: Yeah, and so this is something we’ve been thinking about actually for as long as I’ve been at Google is we’ve been thinking of this top pain point that we hear from developers that they struggle to keep up with the web platform and they struggle to know what is safe to use, what is okay to roll out in production without worrying about it. Typically developers will be building for the latest versions of a site and then suddenly they’ll realize that, oh, this is broken over here and they just don't, they didn’t realize that and to actually figure out the browser support involves going kind of property-by-property, feature-by-feature to say, can I use our MDN and looking at the compatibility data. It’s all out there, but you have to do that on a feature-by-feature basis.

Rachel: And so we’re kind of thinking about this issue and it always comes up, we talk to a lot of developers and it always comes up as the top problem and so we’re thinking about how we can resolve that. And that’s what kind of came to this idea of, well, can we create this line and say that everything that’s passed this line has interoperability, is kind of safe to use without worrying about it. And that’s where this idea of Baseline came from, to have this kind of moving line that includes all of the features that are interoperable and don’t have any major standout issues. And that’s what we’re calling Baseline.

Rachel: And the whole project is it’s not just a Google thing, this comes from the Web DX community group. So we’re working with other browsers and other people on defining this and kind of coming up with the feature groupings so that we can try and create this clarity for developers that they’ve got a sort of line where they can say, they can look at that and say, oh yes, this thing is in Baseline and therefore I know it’s going to work everywhere in the most modern browsers.

Drew: So instead of saying this, we’re supporting these particular browsers, you’re saying this is a core feature set that’s common across all the currently available browsers. This is a safe set of features and it’s that set that I’m going to be developing for compatibility with.

Rachel: Right, yeah. And that sort of takes that requirement to figure out each individual feature for, and also because we get partial implementations of stuff all the time on the platform and it’s like, so the kind of feature grouping part of this, it is the big piece of work really to actually identify, does the feature completely work everywhere because sometimes there will be support for things. I think one of the things that, an obvious thing that people understand is the gap property in where in Flexbox and Grid and so on. Now you could test for that. You could test for where the gap was supported and a browser would say yes because it was supported in grid layout even when it wasn’t supported in flex layout and therefore there was no way to check for this. And it was quite confusing for people if they were just doing that test. So I think theres these sort of groupings of things is also quite useful. So the things that are in Baseline are things that do work as a feature, even if that does actually involve various moving parts.

Drew: Yes, because theres been a trend from the sort of latest CSS specs to be, whats the word, sort of unifying some of the properties isn’t there rather than-

Rachel: Yes.

Drew:span> ... rather than having individual properties that do the same thing in different context, using the same-

Rachel: Right.

Drew:span> ... keywords across different uses.

Rachel: Yeah, so things like alignment, fragmentation, we’ve got these specifications that deal with sort of alignment across all of the different layout specs, which is great because it means that say if you want to switch from a flex to a grid layout or whatever, all the alignment stuff should work in the same way, but does mean that we potentially get these partial implementations and that’s quite difficult to understand. So yeah, I think it’s things like that and so that theres an awful lot actually goes into the creation of this sort of feature set grouping and we’re not all the way there yet. We’re hoping to get most of CSS and JavaScript done by the end of the year because it’s actually quite a job just to figure out how things all fit together.

Drew: So it’s almost like instead of targeting a version of any particular browser, we’re targeting a version of the web platform. We’re saying-

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew:span> ... look at the web platform as it is here today, these are the things that are universal, that are reliable to use and that’s what we’re going to support. And anything that falls out of that boundary included because the implementation might be patchy.

Rachel: Right, yeah. It might need a bit more care. And it’s not saying to people, oh, you can’t ever use these things, but if you know it’s not in Baseline then maybe theres some things you need to think about there and it might be fine for your project or it might be that it has a good fallback or it’s something that is polyfillable but those are things that you do need to think about on a case-by-case basis rather than just, this should be fine to use.

Drew: I think most of us are familiar with sites like canIuse.com, which you mentioned briefly before. Is this just replicating information that already exists or is it different from can I use?

Rachel: I think it’s different in that, so something that can I use does, and also the MDN BCD data, they work very much on a sort of feature-by-feature basis. They don’t actually cover all of the web platform. Theres definitely, certainly Can I use has made some decisions in terms of how to group certain things. I have a long standing open issue to split out fragmentation from multicar for example, because they’re bundled together, making multicar look harder to use than it actually is because there are fragmentation bugs in there.

Rachel: So they’ve done some of the same stuff, but what we haven’t got there is this sort of full view of the platform and this idea of this is within Baseline, this is out, you still have to go to each thing and make those decisions. Ideally we’re hoping, I mean as MDN are using Baseline on feature pages, they’re rolling that out at the moment. It’s probably saying that we’re hoping that Can I use, we’ll also be able to use and say, "Oh, this feature is in Baseline" as well as that more fine grained data.

Drew: And how do you make that decision to say that yes, this, not only is this supported but this is widely supported enough that we can include it in Baseline. How do you make that distinction?

Rachel: So at the moment we’re going back the last two major versions of browsers and theres been a lot of debate about that — as you can imagine. It’s something that’s great to [inaudible 00:17:38]. The fact is I think the line will always be wrong for if we say this is the line, two versions back, a lot of people are saying, "Oh, you should use minor versions of Safari" because we’ve seen some massive features going in doc releases because of the way that Safari do their versioning because obviously a main version of Firefox and Chrome, that’s every month we’ve got a new main version. And so that’s obviously up for debate. Some people are saying we should go further back. Other people are pointing out the fact that just because Chrome has updated, all of the browsers are derivatives that use chromium, they might not have updated. So I think the line will always be wrong, I think.

Rachel: But what it does give is this sort of stable view onto things. And the other thing that we’re planning to do as part of this is to have these kind of moments in time. So at the end of the year we’re going to say, right this cut is where we are at that point is going to be Baseline 24 and that will be a static line. That will be whats in Baseline at this point in time. And then in a years time we’ll do Baseline 25. And I think an interesting thing then will be the difference between those two points because I think a conservative web team could say, "Right, I am sticking with Baseline 24" even though maybe they’re well into 25, we’re sticking with this.

Rachel: But the things between those two lines then I think become the things that you might want to make judgments on rather than having to look at the entire web platform and say, "Oh, can I use this? Can I use that?" And say, "Well, we’re going to use this yearly cut of Baseline." And then the things that came after that that are in Baseline as it moves forward we’ll take a look at and see, oh, I can polyfill that or this is fine as a progressive enhancement.

Drew: It puts me in mind slightly of things like Ubuntu Linux distribution and their long-term support releases that they do.

Rachel: Right.

Drew: They’ll say, "This is the one that we offer long-term support. It’s stable, it’s reliable to use." And so you might adopt that and that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t necessarily install a couple of key extra, more frequently updated packages or whatever, but you know that the system that you’re working with is sort of frozen in time and supported and is a known quantity going forward.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: I guess those who work in very regulated industries who sort of frequently go under contract with customers or suppliers, whatever, to say they’ll provide compatibility with certain browsers as it is at the moment. Surely this would be a very welcome change because these are actually more concrete measures that support can be tied to and it’s a stability that’s more in line with the stability of a binding agreement than an arbitrary version number that some nerd in Silicon Valley might attach to a build of a browser.

Rachel: Right.

Drew: So you can say our platform is targeting Baseline 24 and you could keep that way for three, four years maybe.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: And then review it and update.

Rachel: Yeah, I like that. I like that stuff, yeah, the idea, this is a sort of stable thing and I think that that yearly release will become, I think, quite important. So I think I can see libraries and frameworks and so on tying themselves essentially to a stable release, one of the yearly cuts and then moving on. And I think it should be really interesting as well being able to see, well actually how has the platform moved on between those two yearly points? We don’t really have a look at that at the moment. I mean you could work it out, but it’d be quite a lot of work. It’d be nice just to be able to see that and see how things are changing.

Drew: I always enjoy a list of features that are included in whatever. Heres things that you can use that you won't, perhaps weren’t aware of. And I can see how a big list of Baseline features might highlight different things that an individual developer might not be aware of that-

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew:span> ... have arrived on the web platform and are ready to be used.

Rachel: Yeah, I mean the awareness is a big thing. I mean, I’ve been doing, me and a colleague as well have been doing talks, whats new on the web platform type talks and typically introducing things that are interoperable. And every time there will be people saying, "Oh, I never knew you could do that", or "I never knew that worked. I thought that was an experimental thing." And then realizing that it’s actually a feature that’s in all engines. And I think that that’s very, very common. So I think that’s the other sort of side of this is that it also raises awareness of features that now are interoperable, that people have got an idea that the web platform moves incredibly slowly.

Rachel: I think particularly people like us who’ve been doing this for a long time and remember those days. And so people are very surprised, you know, you still see people saying about a new feature, "Oh well it’ll be five years before I can use that." And yet you’re looking at things like container queries and cascade layers. All of these things landed cross browser very, very quickly, which is great. And I think that’s a story that this can help tell as well.

Drew: So this was a big announcement from Chrome at the big Google I/O conference, but you mentioned it’s not just a Google thing is it, there are other parties involved. So who is deciding whats in the collective Baseline? What parties are involved in this?

Rachel: Right, yeah, so I mean obviously we partnered very closely with Mozilla and MDN in launching this. So that actually during the developer keynote we launched this on web.dev and on MDN at the same time on a select number of pages because we haven’t got a full feature site yet. But it was nice to actually show what it would look like rather than it being a kind of theoretical thing. And also MDN published a blog post about it too and their thinking. But yeah, the work has been done within the Web DX community group and that group has representatives from all of the browsers and various other people including interested developers.

Rachel: Anyone can join that group and be part of those discussions. So that’s where we’re also asking people to go and comment on this stuff rather than, I mean people are very welcome to come and talk to me about it, but in terms of getting sort of information out there and discussed by the wider group, raise issues on the Web DX community group site because that’s where the people are who are making the decisions. And at the moment it’s just fantastic to be getting the feedback into that group so that we can actually see is this solving a problem, what problems maybe we’ve missed and be able to talk about that.

Drew: So it’s a broader community effort, but it just so happens that the major players Google, Mozilla and everything are putting a lot of time and effort into it and really backing it as an idea.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s something that as DevRel, you know, as developer relations, that’s kind of what we do. We try and bridge the gap between browser engineers and spec writers and the developer community. And so I think that’s something that we can do as DevRel for the web is to actually bring forward these things that we think might help and see where we can take them.

Drew: Now I’ve heard about the Interop 2022 and now 2023 initiatives. Does Baseline relate to Interop at all? Or maybe you could talk us through that where it fits in?

Rachel: Yeah, I mean it’s kind of the same group of people certainly as Google who are involved with those projects. So the Interop project takes a set of features that if it’s based on web platform tests, so it takes a set of features that have some sort of interoperability problem. So it might be that they don’t work in one or more browsers or they have sort of bugs that are causing pupil problems. So we’ve got this set of features and then over the year all of the engines work to implement or fix those things. So we’ve kind of got a score, a scoreboard where you can go and look and see how everyones doing.

Rachel: So the Interop project works to fix known issues, either make things interoperable or fix books and things that look on paper like they work, but have some sort of problems. And so that project is getting more things essentially into Baseline. So they’re linked in that way and they’re a lot of the very similar people are working together on those from the browsers. So I think in terms of the relationships there and the fact that Interop did bring, for the first time, all of the vendors together in this sort of common goal to make the platform better, theres definitely a link there in terms of this is what we care about. Whereas Baselines kind of from the other side, it’s saying, well, okay, what is there? What is interoperable? What can we already use? So yeah, hopefully things like Interop will help to add more things to Baseline as we go along.

Drew: So it is basically just identifying things that could potentially go into Baseline, might be nearly there, and then swarming on those features to get them across the line and get them interoperable and usable on the platform because they’re seen as important or significant in some way.

Rachel: Yeah, and I mean we know that that developers aren’t going to use things in general unless they are available across all engines. So it’s kind of in everyones interest to work together to get to that point because then people use the stuff that we’re building so that, yeah, it’s said so they kind of work very well together. And I think it’s just this sort of spirit of collaboration and trying to make things better for developers.

Drew: We’ve talked about how developers might target, in past, a browser version and now we’re saying would target Baseline, but it works the other way around, doesn’t it? If the frameworks and the tools that we are using as dependencies in our projects, they can also declare that as a level of support. Is that right?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s something that we’d love to see how a framework or whatever you could say, everything that is used by this framework is Baseline or is Baseline 24 or what have you. That’s going to give a lot of clarity to developers to not then need to fish around in the framework and find out what they’re doing to make sure 'cause if you’ve got to do a certain level of browser support in your project, you need to make sure that everything you use also has that level of browser support so that it could definitely make that a lot clearer.

Rachel: And I think also things like publishing articles. One of the things that frustrates people, and I know as someone who writes and edits a lot of content, is if people get halfway through an article and then they find something that is experimental or is so new or only works in Chrome or whatever, that’s really frustrating because you think, oh, I’ve found the thing that helps me solve my problem. You’re working through it and then you’re like, oh, that’s not coming 'til next year. And so have been able to put on an article, everything in this article is in Baseline. That gives you a lot of confidence to go forward. So I think theres lots of uses for this out in the community and that’s something we really hope will happen, that just to give that kind of clarity to developers.

Drew: It’s that last section of an article, isn’t it? You’re reading along about some interesting technology and then it comes to the section of how you might work around it for the browsers that don’t support it.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: I thought-

Rachel: Exactly.

Drew:span> ... we were into a good thing here.

Rachel: Yeah, 'cause when you’re searching, you’re searching to solve a problem, things come up. It’s very frustrating if you realize that it’s a year away or other browsers have said we’re not doing that or whatever, you know? So yeah, I think theres a lot of opportunities for clarity for people who are writing and for developers of libraries and frameworks to actually just make it very obvious to developers what the status is.

Drew: And things like WordPress themes for example, or any of these sorts of things where you’re taking somebody elses code and making it part of your project to know that what level of support in terms of web functionality is in that is invaluable. I guess it would make sense for things like tools that any tool that gives you code to embed into your site, be that a Stripe checkout or a live chat widget or any of those sorts of things, I guess it would make sense for them to declare their state of compatibility too.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, it’s just kind of a shorthand. It saves you having to do all of that investigating for each thing that you use. And we know that every website these days has tons and tons of third party stuff in it. We’re not all sitting down with Notepad anymore and carefully crafting our websites. So I think anything that makes that easier and allows people to show the status of things is really helpful.

Drew: It actually is a really simple concept, isn’t it, to say heres the set of features, they’re well supported, we’re giving it a label, we’re documenting it. It’s actually so simple, it’s really rather genius I think. It’s some amazing work that’s been done there by everyone involved.

Rachel: Yeah, I think it speaks to a lot of what I’ve thought about over many years in terms of that kind of clarity. And that’s always been my thing is making things clear to people, making things seem straightforward rather than trying to make things complex. And so I really love being able to be involved with this and bring it forward.

Drew: The HTML spec for example has a process for an element or an attribute to be deprecated. So things get removed from the spec as they become obsolete or they’re replaced by a newer specification. Is it possible for features to drop out of Baseline once they’ve been included?

Rachel: It could be possible. It’s one of the things we’ve talked about a lot. I think really the devil will definitely be in the detail with all this stuff. And that’s one of the things is well what happens if something essentially gets broken? Maybe one engine does something which causes a problem with something. There is a possibility that yes, we’d have to remove something. That’s definitely something we’ve talked about. I mean hopefully browsers aren’t going around breaking stable features, but it is a possibility or something might get deprecated although we tend not to fully remove things from the web platform very often. It’s more that we say, "Yeah, maybe don’t use this," but there is a possibility that something that is in Baseline could start to have a problem because of something that one of the engines does.

Drew: I guess then that’s one area where these sort of yearly cuts as you’ve described them, become sort of quite useful in that something might have appeared in Baseline 24 but then in Baseline 30 it might be gone and there is a way of having a distinction there.

Rachel: Yeah, and it would also highlight that stuff I think a lot more clearly than we have a way of doing at the moment because I think hard to know what things have actually been deprecated on the platform. A lot of things that are deprecated are things that are only in one engine and therefore would never have been in Baseline in the first place. But yeah, it is possible as things move forward that that would happen and it would make it clearer.

Drew: And such as the way of the web, we do deprecate things, but as you say, they don’t ever go away really.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: We don't-

Rachel: I was just saying maybe don’t use—

Drew:span> ... tend to remove things, you know, can still use the, I’m guessing you can still use HTML font tags because we don’t break things once they’re standardized.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: Even though nobody would ever recommend using them, they’re still going to work in your browser because sites have been developed to that standard and the browser-

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew:span> ... will continue to support it. I guess, in a way, theres Baseline forms a little bit of a positive pressure. If a feature does get broken, then the fact that it was in Baseline and the whole community is relying on it being there is a factor in prioritizing what gets worked on by that particular maintainer of that browser engine. They’re going to see that, no, this is important, we need to fix it pretty quick.

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: So hopefully it’s a sort of positive pressure in that regard. There seems to be so much really in development and coming to the web platform. Are there any particular things that you’re really looking forward to seeing becoming interoperable in the coming months?

Rachel: Yeah, I mean theres a bunch of interesting stuff. I’ve always been interested in the things that look at things that developers are already doing. So they’re using JavaScript to do it, or what have you, and then having them built into the platform because obviously things that are built into the platform we can build in things like accessibility and also performance. Things that tend to perform an awful lot better if they’re a built-in feature as opposed to being JavaScript on top. So theres sort of interesting stuff from the open UI group. The next thing that is about to land in Chrome is the Popover API. And of course popovers are something like everybodys building all the time.

Drew: Yeah.

Rachel: And I think a lot of these open UI things are very much those sorts of features that pretty much every developer, every front end developer has built on numerous occasions. And every front end developer has tried to solve the accessibility issues and the performance issues and the sort of weird bugs that come up when they interact with other things. And so the fact that these are getting actually built into browsers, I think, is very exciting because it just, it’s a bunch of work you don’t have to do and it’s probably going to have better accessibility and so on than most people are going to be able to manage for themselves and it gives something to build on top of as well, you know, can add things to them.

Rachel: So yeah, so I’m excited to see Popover and in a similar sort of vein is the work on scroll-driven animations because that’s a thing that people like to do and is very hard to do well, you know, having things that animate on scroll and that, again, is something that is coming in. It should be in Chrome 115. So it’s, again, it’s these things that we’re doing on the front end of the web and we’re actually able then to build into the browser. I’m always very keen to see those 'cause I think they solve a lot of problems.

Drew: Yeah, definitely. I mean anywhere where a developer has to mimic something that you think is native browser UI and you’re trying to build it yourself, there are so many places to go wrong, aren’t there?

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew: If you’ve ever had any of your work through an accessibility audit, you know that it’s things like modal dialogues and all these sort of things that constantly will contain flaws that need to be addressed because theres just so many things to think about in terms of keyboard focus and clicking away and all these different subtleties that you need to make sure that you take care of, that is, as much as anything, as much as it being bad for accessibility, if you get it wrong, it’s a massive waste of time for all us developers doing this all ourselves over and over again when it just makes sense. Most apps will have some sort of modal or popover functionality. So yeah, it makes complete sense for it to be part of the platform implemented by the browser vendors in a way where it’s accessible and it’s just a good solid layer to then build on top of in terms of styling and yeah-

Rachel: Yeah.

Drew:span> ... it makes total sense. It’s a exciting way to see the platform go.

Rachel: Yeah and I think, because the other thing with everyone building their own thing is that a lot of people don’t build their own thing, they rely on a third party thing and quite often things people are relying on are actually really old and they haven’t been updated to, they might have issues with accessibility or whatever and they haven’t really been updated for more modern browsers. And so it’s sort of, I think the more that people can use whats built into the browser, the sort of better experience that the end user of the site is likely to have.

Drew: So your team at Google maintains a bunch of resources to help developers keep up-to-date with the web platform. What are those resources and where should people go to look and find things? What would they expect to find there?

Rachel: Yeah, so we’ve got web.dev and developer.chrome.com are our two sites that DevRel own. It used to be, back in the day, when I sort of arrived, there was a real mixture of things on each site and a sort of thing that was commonly said was that Chrome were using web.dev to pretend things that were only in Chrome were stable APIs, lets say I don’t think anyone ever intended to pretend that. I think there was just a slightly disorganized content strategy. So as kind of part of the preparation for Baseline, because I wanted to make sure that we could be clear because if we’re talking about developer clarity, it’s pretty bad if all of our stuffs in a mess. I started moving content. And so now, certainly all the newer content, there may be some older stuff that we haven’t tracked down, but the newer content, if you go to web.dev, you should really be seeing stuff about stable APIs.

Rachel: So things that are interoperable and also things that are coming onto the platform. I do a sort of whats new on the web platform that includes some new stuff from all engines. So that kind of looking at what the broader landscape is and also things like our best practices. So things like about performance, which while some of the tooling is Chrome-only, raising the performance of your site, it is going to help in all engines. So that’s whats there on web.dev. So that’s kind of the practical side of things. You’re building a website, you want some advice. That’s what we’re doing there. And I try very hard to make that about the web, not about Chrome and that’s the sort of content there.

Rachel: But obviously we are a team that’s supporting Chrome and supporting the things that Chromes releasing and so we do that over on developer.chrome.com. So that’s going to be your new APIs. You want to find out about popover that’s landing, there’ll be an article about that soon. So all the things that Chrome is doing for the web, essentially you can find on developer.chrome.com. So that will be experimental things or Chrome-only things, things that are Chrome-only for now, all that stuff is there. And I hope that brings a bit of clarity to our content and that we’re not trying to pretend anything. We’re just trying to be clear about what we’re doing and how well supported it is.

Drew: Great. So we’ve been learning all about Web Platform Baseline. What have you been learning about lately, Rachel?

Rachel: Theres always something interesting to learn about. I’ve done a couple of things. I’ve been learning Python because it’s a language that I, for whatever reason, never learned. I’ve learned various languages over the years, but I do less web development these days and more kind of comparing of data sets and Python is the language that a lot of that stuff is done in. So it’s quite fun to learn new language anyway and it’s useful for the sort of stuff I tend to find myself doing these days.

Rachel: And I’ve also been thinking a bit about the whole generative AI space and in particular as a content lead, how do we prepare our content to make it more useful to those kind of models because theres a lot of stuff about asking questions of a chatbot and so on. And so I’ve been kind of just starting to read around that subject a little bit and start to see, well, if we’re preparing content, how can we be making that more useful for that kind of thing and that interaction?

Drew: If you, dear listener would like to hear more from Rachel, you can find her on the web at rachelandrew.co.uk where you’ll find links to her socials, her writing and numerous other projects. And you can find her writing regularly about the web platform at web.dev. Thanks for joining us today, Rachel. Did you have any parting words?

Rachel: Let us know about Baseline. Comment and raise some issues, or just join in the chat on the Web DX community group, on the GitHub repo there. We’d really like to hear what you think. This is, we’ve been talking about it internally for a long time and so now we’ve got it out there and I think the work starts now and the discussion with the community starts now. And so we’re all very, very excited to read the feedback and find out what you think.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 60 With Mei Zhang: What Is Design Storytelling?

We’re talking about the process of design. How do you build a process to enable your best work? Vitaly Friedman talks to designer Mei Zhang to find out.

Show Notes

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Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a senior UX designer and a UX consultant with a strong product and strategy background. As a kid, she was busy creating arts and fell in love with UX while studying industrial design in college. She has spent her career developing design systems and solving problems for e-commerce products that are loved by millions of people around the world. Now, she also loves helping designers uncover root causes, explore multiple directions, and identify sweet spots between user and business.

Vitaly: She’s currently working with Booking.com and resides in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Of course, she is a cat person, as it often is in the Smashing Podcast. And in her spare time, she can be found painting, skiing, serving her cats — there are a couple — writing on her design blog and learning about design, business, leadership and management. We know she’s a wonderful UX designer, but did you know that she used to swim in order to participate in the Olympics? That was one of her dreams, which unfortunately didn’t come true. However, help her have a lung capacity of over 5,000, which is a big deal. My Smashing friends, please welcome Mei Zhang. Hello, Mei. How are you feeling today?

Mei Zhang: Hello. Hi, everyone. I’m smashing.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s wonderful to hear. How are you? Is it cold out there in Amsterdam these days or is it sunny?

Mei: Luckily, it was sunny in the couple of days. In the past couple of days.

Vitaly: So, it’s better. I have to ask this story. Swimming in the Olympics. Why did you decide to do this? Because I guess you were playing with design and UX already at this point. Or was it before or prior to design?

Mei: Oh.

Vitaly: Why did you decide to take on this challenge?

Mei: It was definitely before the design career. I was in my elementary school and I fall in love with swimming. And as a ambitious little girl who want to have some targets. So I need to compete for the Olympics because this is something very challenging. But unfortunately, I didn’t go through the competition. But I think it definitely gave me something, make me a stronger person. Not only physically, but also mentally. So I really appreciated that.

Vitaly: I have no doubt at all. We’ll probably bring up — I’ll probably bring up this question about how it in the end influenced your UX and design career. But maybe before we dive into that. And maybe you could share a story about how did you even end up in this design and UX world? Maybe you could share a bit about your journey and what brought you where you are today.

Mei: I think what brought me where I am today is the iPhone 4. I got iPhone 4 as a gift at the first year of my college and then I get to learn about human-computer interaction which published by Apple. And another fun fact, the human-computer interaction guidelines are already there in 1987. That is what I remember. Whoa, it’s a long history of something that I have never heard about. I start studying basically X design by myself. I just genuinely really interested in the fancy interactions at that time. What CSS can do for you.

Mei: I was also a Smashing Magazine fan. I follow all your articles and try to do something with CSS and JavaScript. And I think also during my study, people start discussing about what you want as a career after graduation, what industry you would like to join. I was lost at that time, but I know I love UX design and I’m good at it because all my school project was related somehow to human-computer interaction. And, I think, at that time, the IT industry also was booming because people started having Facebook. I think that somehow made me feel like maybe that is something that has a future. So, that is basically my journey into UX design.

Vitaly: But then, you ended up where you are here today. And you have all this. I always reminded of all this UX methodologists and methods and all the ways. And you have created these incredible mind maps as well. But all the things that you potentially need to keep in mind as a UX designer when you are working on a product or on a project. And maybe before we dive there, maybe we could speak a bit more particularly about breaking complexity into something that’s more manageable.

Vitaly: I know that you’ve been working or you are working on relatively or quite complex products. And again, just given this huge amount of all the different methods and options available to you as a UX designer, how do you choose your path? Or specifically, maybe, how do you start when you have a really complex. Maybe an enterprise product or maybe B2B or maybe anything that’s complicated and you need to break it down. How do you do that? What would be your process? And maybe also, your methods to make sense of it all?

Mei: Such a great question. I would guess the first step is always find what is the real problem. What we are designing for. To deep dive into the problems and find the root cause. That is definitely the first step I would choose because the problems also help the designers or people around you to define the process because with different problems you might need different methodologies. And also, the second step will also be identifying the stakeholders. As you mentioned, you have people around you who are genuinely interested or who are in charge of the project. Identify the people around you and what they need.

Mei: The outcome is not only the end product that deliver to the users, but also to. Let’s say it in the simple way. Make your stakeholders happy. I think those are the two basic principles for navigating through what methodologies that I pick. And also, you need to look at availabilities as well. That is, usually happens in the real life work. Maybe for example, you don’t have data for some project. But also, it’s impossible to collect that. Maybe you need to find another method that could answer the same questions that is available.

Vitaly: But then I’m also wondering: you also mentioned data. I’m actually quite wondering because I feel like very often, I end up in this dilemma with teams I’m working with. Where there is a person or there is a team, they have a very strong design vision. This is how it should be. It’s usually based on research and usually going to be very much focused on user needs or customer needs. A very customer-centric view. But then sometimes, it clashes against the business idea of how things should be and the business direction of where the company wants to go. And sometimes, I feel that there is this really strong tension between where the designer wants to go and what the, let’s say, A/B testing tells.

Vitaly: And maybe, testing is such a short-term thing. Where you test if it works now and then. It might be a good thing, of course, to improve things and that will drive conversion, though. But where do you see? How do you see this resolving? How do you get to this balance between doing something? Because again, we run A/B tests and this performs better than this. Against the big design, the grandiose, so to say, design vision that exists in designers’ heads based on user needs and based on business needs.

Mei: First of all, I don’t think those two A/B tests. Let’s say A/B testing and a great vision in the designer’s head is something that cannot exist together. I think they can co-exist because A/B testing is just one of methodologies to validate the concept. It’s the small steps to take you towards a big vision. It’s not a easy task, but it’s the designers who need to guide the product managers or guide your team towards the vision. That is actually sometimes underestimated by the outside because we have a lot of things showed to us designers because we are visionaries.

Mei: We have a vision, so we need to take that through. What I usually do is first, definitely have a great relationship with your product managers because you are actually working together as a whole to reach the vision. They are more business of course, and they are more data-driven or metrics-driven. But on the other hand, you are the user advocate. Build a good relationship and trust with your product managers and work together on a daily basis. It shouldn’t be like, "Ah, I don’t agree with you". Or something like this. But more be like, "Let’s sit together and make a great thing or make a great product."

Mei: And I think sometimes, I also feel like it’s really important to have a businessman side as a designer. Especially if you are working for an organization that’s aimed for profit, your responsibility is also to keep the business running. The business goal is also your goal as a designer, as well. Your responsibility is to craft a great user experience that will improve the business or make the business stronger. For example, learn about business metrics, understand the view from the product side. And also, sometimes I find what is helpful for me is to define user behavior metrics because for A/B testing.

Mei: Sometimes you, say that, maybe some business metrics doesn’t increase but the user behavior metrics were improving. You can also use this as a argument to get things through. It’s not only about A/B testing. It has to be improving business. But if you can prove that it’s going to improve the user experience and the user experience can lead into long-term business growth, then that will happen. And also, I think what I’m doing very often in the past is also to break the vision into smaller pieces that is experimentable.

Mei: In this case, it’s also help as a designer to validate your ideas. I know we are all, as a designer, we’re all proud of our ideas and we believe that’s going to work. And most of the time, of course it’s going to work, but we also need to use data and argument to support our ideas. I would say it is something. It definitely bring a lot of positive side from A/B testing to build a vision.

Vitaly: The reason why I brought this up actually because I’m just coming from a project where this has become a big issue. Where essentially, it seems like there is this very strong tension between, again, the ideas of we need to do something now and drive conversion up now. But again, we also need to think about the long-term goals. And very often, what happens is you might be improving things by showing a new set of popup very prominent and then a bit more prominent, then a bit more flashy and then even more flashy. But then it’s actually going to hurt your long-term goals. I actually want to maybe dig a little bit deeper. When you speak about user behavior metrics or any ways to capture the quality of the design work basically done. Could you maybe share a few of them that would be most important in your work?

Mei: I’m thinking about something related to the example you just gave about the flashing popup. One example I can think of right now is that, in the past, I also had experience where the product was pushing for metrics. They’re making things rainbowy or flashy. I think definitely what helped was to conduct user interviews to understand what is user’s point of view of that. They’ll be like, "Oh, I think this brand was just to trick me." They also understand the black UX part or the bad. Sorry. The bad UX pattern that try to trick them into something.

Mei: And also, something help me as well is to look into the long-term user flow because they tend to only focus on one metrics and improve that. But have you looked through the whole flow? Maybe the click rate went up, but in the end, less people are converting. Then you cannot say that this is a good solution. You just. Try to find different metrics that can, to build your argument with the product. And also, try to, in your daily basis, try to make your product manager or your product colleagues to more understand what is a good user experience.

Mei: Because I work with all kinds of product managers and some are like you mentioned in that case. Really focusing on one metrics and don’t care the UI. And there are also product managers who really understand what is UX experience. I want to do something good for the long run. Try to also influence your product managers to understand what is good for the long run. Because in the end, someone has to clean up the bad UX in the end because that will lead into something in the future.

Vitaly: Absolutely. I think it also heavily depends on the culture that the company has, the organization has and how the teams are organized. And sometimes, you see that there are. Whenever everything is siloed, you will end up in the situation where a silo would have very specific goals and they don’t even know what the other teams are doing. Or how their things that they may be performing or they’re working on in the vertical effect everyone else. This is more probably a slightly broader question in there, as well.

Vitaly: Maybe you could also share a bit of insight about some of the really complex challenges that you are facing at this moment. And something that you’re working on that, I would say, keep you awake at night. Hopefully not, but maybe there are some things. Just get sense about what you’re working on as well at the moment.

Mei: I couldn’t share details of product strategy with you inside.

Vitaly: Sure.

Mei: Because of the NDA stuff with my current employer, but I will say, the current challenge definitely about how to level up your people skills and communications as a designer through your career. Because I’m running a very big project right now. Basically, more than 30 stakeholders on the play. I really need to learn connecting people. How I can connect with people first by establishing yourself with your activities in your field. And also, to connect people and find the right person for the right question.

Mei: And also, at this point, you need to try to work through other people. I don’t know how to put it in the beautiful way, but more enable others to contribute to the project. In this sense, you need to really articulate the project and the impact of this project. So you can onboard people and to create a win-win situation where they can learn something from the project or they can do product improvement in their services, project as well — so if they would like to be onboarded and work with you.

Mei: Think that was about communication, connecting the people. But the most challenging part is leading the whole project. You need to be super organized, which I was not that great before. You need to have a roadmap of this project and keep updating this every day. So you can visualize what is going on. What are the updates, and also identify the key stakeholder for each phase of the project, of the activities. And how to communicate with them. And you need to visualize them, document them to help you organize the whole project. I guess that was the most challenging part for me.

Vitaly: That doesn’t sound like a lot of moving pixels around in Figma, though.

Mei: Which, I actually missed that part as well. I’m not sure if this is a common case, but I guess so. When you are running a big project where we are not in the phase of creating new ideas and Figma files. It’s more communicating, documenting, pitching or about the project.

Vitaly: This is just a normal state of things, I guess, all the time. Guess I become this person who would move away from, well, sketch at the time and Figma to spreadsheets. I don’t know. Much of my life these days is basically organizing things and also documents in Dropbox Paper or Google Doc. Just organizing things in a way that’s available, accessible to everyone else. It also goes, for example, for organizing meetings. I actually decided to take a design approach to design the best meetings experience. And this is really difficult, I think.

Vitaly: In general, processes which involve people be hard, of course. I’m also just curious about your take on the process because I know that you. Meetings including, for example. Because I know that you often say that you need to design your design process. And this is, very much plays. It’s a melody, beautiful melody to my ears because this is what I’ve been doing to some degree, I guess, for the last couple of years. I’m wondering though, how do you mean that? We’re designing the process. We need to figure out the right way of working for us, for the team, as well.

Vitaly: How do we design meetings? How do we? Do we do stand-ups? Do we do written stand-ups? When do we do retros? How often do we do this and that? Maybe you could share a few things that tend to work better for you that you learned working well. And something that you definitely advise as a consultant, as well, companies do really stay away from when it comes to design process.

Mei: I can quickly tell what companies should stay away for, in terms of a design process.

Vitaly: Sure.

Mei: Is to, for the sake of having a design process, to have a design process. Regardless of what problem you are trying to solve. I still remember in my career there was a company who really want to have a persona. I’m like, "Why we are going to create the personas?" They were like, "Oh, because everybody’s having a personas for this project and it’s a key important deliverable for understanding our customers. So we need this persona." So I’m like, "But do you have any?" I trying to explain persona is more you need to conduct interviews.

Mei: You need to gather datas and then you come up with someone that represents the key problems or key pain point of your customers. It’s not like you just create a persona out of a workshop with some people, internal colleagues of your company. So they’re like, "Oh, okay. Then we need to gather data or we need to have a lot of insight of the persona." But we couldn’t because they don’t have infrastructure to try user behavior. So I’m like, "No worries, just interview eight customers. It’s a good number. And try to find what are the common pain point or what’s a common desire or need they have? And then you have a persona."

Mei: That is something I learned through my career. Oh, you shouldn’t just say, "Oh, this thing looks fancy, the personas or something else. Oh, customer journey map, we need that." It’s not what you’re trying to understand and what do you have. And based on those two aspect, to try to find a methodology that really serve your needs or can help you move forward. This is definitely not advised for people or company. I think what I definitely enjoyed is to design, as you mentioned, design your own design process. Because when I was studying UX design, we have this design thinking process and everyone tried to follow.

Mei: Define a problem and try to understand and create something, iterate. I was also one of them trying, really into that. But then, when I start working I found, this is not always the case. You need to find what is the most important phase of the project. For example, if you are tackling a very complex problem and you don’t even understand what exact problem it is, then you need to spend a lot of effort in defining the problem phase. Or if it is a project really focused on deliverables, we need to shape a marketing video or we need to shape the design within two weeks. Then, maybe you need to spend more energy in the executing phase of the design.

Mei: While we are working, it’s very hard to have everything. To have a very complete design process where you have a solid deliverables for every phases. But you need to figure out which phase is the most important based on the needs and the problem and try to shift your energy there. But that doesn’t mean that you should skip some process. You can still have them, but it’s more trying to say what you have already have and not create new words on there. I think that’s what I learned from design your own design process.

Vitaly: That’s fine. You also, I always keep coming back to this. I don’t even know why. But I always feel that many of the colleagues I’m speaking to, they’re always just don’t even know how to navigate that space of UX methods and models and process. And sometimes, it feels like there is this huge amount of all these different things that very different companies are doing. And they’re inventing for themselves or using some of their other established, already established methods. Luckily, and fortunately for all of us, you have created two mind maps. Which I found really useful to be able to navigate the space in a bit more predictable way. Maybe you could tell a bit more about this and how it helps you in your work.

Mei: A very good question. At the beginning, I was just writing them down for myself. It’s more like library where what is available there and you can grab them as a building block to build up your own design process. But it’s not like something can mapped out the how of those design process and those methodologies and what it can bring. What I’m trying to say is to be flexible about your design process. To not just see the articles and I need this and this in exploration phase. But maybe you don’t need it based on your problem or what you are trying to design. Try to be flexible.

Mei: And also, I will say sometimes it’s more of the experience you get. When you are first time. For example, if you are conducting a user interview at first time or maybe you are doing a survey first time. It’s more you start learning how this methodology work and how you can improve based on the methodology. But then, as you try multiple methodologies in your career, you can reflect on. Well, this can help and what do I need to conduct this methodology? And then if you keep reflecting on them, it will help you in the future to decide, do I need this methodology in my design process? Will this fit the timeline? Will this fit the requirements? Will this be the best methodology to answer the business questions?

Mei: Then you start reflecting and then you can say, "Then, I don’t need this. Oh, I really need this methodology." It’s more, if you haven’t had a lot of experience, try to try them out. Even if you are not working or you are just doing an internship. But try things out to understand how those methodology work. And then, later on, you can. You get a next experience, then you can decide when to use what. So that would be my take.

Vitaly: That’s interesting because I think that to many of us, it’s... I don’t know... Many companies have the process. This is the process that they’re following through. It doesn’t matter what department. Doesn’t matter what their designers are working on. There is the process. This is how we work here kind of thing. And what I’m hearing from you is that basically you might need to be adaptive there. So if you are, say, switching from one design team that you’re working with or another team that maybe have different experience.

Vitaly: Maybe have different preferences. Maybe most of them are working remote. Maybe most of them are hybrid in one way or the other. So adjusting the methodology and the process based on the team that you have. The only thing that’s required there to get it right and to do it well is to know and be comfortable with the different techniques and different methods that are out there. Does that make sense? Is that pretty much what you do?

Mei: Yes, thanks. Yeah, definitely. That is a very great summary of what I just said.

Vitaly: But I think it is also very interesting because it can be quite challenging. Do you find yourself sometimes maybe stuck because you have a particular way of approaching a particular problem with the design team? But then you might have very different levels of experience on the team? You might feel like we need to do something because we might not be able to get things done in time. Or we are not moving along fast enough and I need to switch gears and move something to another methods.

Vitaly: The reason why I’m asking or what I’m asking here is that not only do we need to be able to switch and be adaptive moving from one team to another in your process. But also, as the process is in place, do you feel like sometimes you need to shift gears and change things and plug in something else because what you have is not working?

Mei: Yeah, definitely. I think a very great question. This is a daily life of designer, I guess.

Vitaly: The sad life of a designer, isn’t it?

Mei: Yeah, the sad. We have a dream design process defined before project or before we start working on something and maybe one month later something changed. Then you need to be flexible and adapt to it. We decided to collect user data because the PM was super into quantitative data and we need that. But our source was not available at that time. So we need to really think about, what can we do? Because we are not going to run the survey anymore as a design team or. What I did, I think it’s a really good step. I was also not super experienced at time. I’m the newbie in the company.

Mei: I bring this to the design team. So I never feel shy that if I couldn’t solve them myself, I should consult with other colleague. Then we start doing some root analysis. Why we need this survey? Because we want to discover problems. We don’t have a clear problem. We want to discover the problem. Then do something to also discover the problems without the researcher that can help us send the survey. Then we said, "Maybe we can do a diary study with UserTesting.com. We can set this up together."

Mei: So we did, in the end, a diary study. Those two methodologies actually serve the same purpose in the end. I guess you need to shift when you can, I think, maybe try to have another methodology that can give you the same insight or maybe. Also sometimes, just trust your gut feelings.

Vitaly: Sure.

Mei: If some data is not available, you can validate them later.

Vitaly: That’s right. But Mei, I have to ask a very provoking question at this point. And I’m sure that some of the listeners listening here will be, "What is this? What is he asking?" I do have to ask, do you think that chaos could also be a process? The reason why I’m asking is if you have a relatively small team. Imagine you have maybe two, three designers. You do not have this. And surely, we need to have research. We need to use some methods to make things work. Sometimes, you see companies trying to over organize things.

Vitaly: If you have a team of two or three, do you need daily stand-ups? Doesn’t seem necessary because people are there in the room talking all the time, anyway. It’s not like you have this big organization where you have five departments all doing different pieces and all that. Sometimes, I see companies feeling very comfortable in being extremely unorganized. Being chaotic. Not even having proper documentation and nothing. Obviously, the problem is that you actually end up with the knowledge being stuck with these people. If somebody leaves, that’s obviously an issue. Onboarding is a problem. But they feel like you can be very productive and very successful without having a proper process and pretty much a chaotic environment.

Mei: To be honest, I have to say that I agree with you.

Vitaly: Oh.

Mei: I think to not have a well established progress or being chaotic may be the norm for designers. Because we are creative beings. Sometimes, you get ideas or you discover something just randomly while understanding your customers, users. But I would say totally agree with you. If you have a small team and you are working very closely on a daily basis, you might not need to follow a design process super strictly. It’s more like, "we are in the understanding phase, then what can we do?" And we discuss together. It’s more like you just need the rough framework to guide you through. And the iteration will also be very fast-paced. You don’t need to go through everything then iterate again. Totally agree with. Another point, I feel like the design process is sometimes also more for the non-designers. Your product stakeholders in the organization or people who are not in your project or another designer who don’t have any background knowledge. It’s more for them to help to organize your self-process or just it’s for your own deliverable. Your ideas that work. To have it to communicate to the outside. That is what I have to say.

Vitaly: That makes perfect sense. Well, as we’re wrapping up here, I do have to ask you of course. But this is a question that I’m asking everyone and I’m really curious about your answer as well. Do you have a particular dream project? A really complicated challenge? A really complicated UX? I don’t know. Monolithic challenge that is probably so hard that it’s pretty, almost impossible to think about it? Just to give you an idea, some of my colleagues when trying to answer this question, they start thinking about, "Oh, I would love to design some, I don’t know. A deck or I don’t know. A control center for Rocket Science Center or anything like that."

Vitaly: Some other would say, "I just want to be able to work with United Nations." It goes really different ways. I’m just curious, do you have a particular dream project or dream task maybe or dream challenge that you would love to tackle one day?

Mei: I will say, I will go for the second direction. I really want to work for the sustainability topic or some project for NGOs because I have been spending my career working for E-commerce company. I really want to contribute to some non-profit organizations that, for example, sustainability or a turtles saving organization. I think what I can help them is my experience in E-commerce to convert people. Maybe I can convert more people doing the good stuff. That would be something I’d definitely love to work on in the future.

Vitaly: Maybe just totally ruining the arc, the story arc of the podcast. I do have to hook onto the thing that you mentioned about E-commerce because I’m just really curious. I spent quite a bit of time around E-commerce as well. Maybe you could share a few stories about things that you learned by working in E-commerce. Thing that’s how customers think or some important things to keep in mind when it comes to E-commerce UX in general.

Mei: I think what I have learned is your customers are smarter than you thought. That is what I have learned. Sometimes, you try to trick them. Sorry. Another dark part in UX I’m talking about. You think you can convert them somehow, but actually they know. They know what you are doing. It’s not the customer of 10 years ago on the E-commerce platform compared to right now. They’re very press sensitive. They compare with multiple competitors. They compare and they make the right decision for them. And that is also related to what we talk in the beginning of the podcast.

Mei: You have to focus on the long run to create a great experience for the long run. To bring them benefit in the long run because they understand everything. And you cannot. If you got them converted once, you might not get them converted the second time and they might leave you if they have really bad experience. I think right now the E-commerce world is really competitive, but also that is good for the customers because they have multiple choices and then they have learned everything. I think that is what I have learned from the E-commerce experience. The customers, they also grow as you grow.

Vitaly: We’ve been learning about UX and design today, but if there is one thing that I do have to ask, Mei because I know that Mei is very much interested in the something that maybe bothers or excites or inspires all of us. Who knows? I know that you’ve been playing with ChatGPT and AI in general, Mei. Do you see? I don’t know. Do you see this wonderful tool, AI as an opponent to us? Something that we need to fight or something that we’re going to embed in our daily workflow and just make the best use of it? How do you use AI today?

Mei: Very good questions. I think, we should see AI as our friends. We’re holding hands together.

Vitaly: Good friends.

Mei: And help us.

Vitaly: The best friends or?

Mei: Good friend.

Vitaly: Good friends.

Mei: Good friends for now before they replace our job, which will happen, I guess. Recently, I started using ChatGPT to write write documentations or write presentations for me. It’s still, you need to write down, get the key point and then ChatGPT will help you generate a good sentence. It saves your time as a designer. You could spend more time in Figma or creating new ideas or creating something or dreaming vision for your company for the coming three years. I think definitely AI saves our time and make sure we can concentrate on works that requires more creativity.

Vitaly: But I do have to ask a follow-up question. Do you think, Mei, that AI is creative?

Mei: I think, to some extent. They are creative based on basically data and stuff that already exist or they could find on the internet. But they might not be able to dream further. Maybe predict human in 10 years. But I’m not sure. I’m not a expert in AI. I would say they are creative to some extent, but it’s also up to us to think about, do we want them to be creative or not?

Vitaly: That’s a good question. Maybe, we can resolve this issue once and for good once we ask ChatGPT if it thinks it is creative. And if so, then it should better prove it to us. Well, if you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Mei, you can find her LinkedIn where she’s at, Mei Zhang, and also Medium. Medium.com/ThisisMei, if I’m not mistaken. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Mei. Do you have any parting words of wisdom to the future generations who are going to listen to this very podcast 25 years from now thinking, "What are they talking about? Everything is AI anyway now."

Mei: What I want to share is definitely know AI is something not new, but something innovative in our generation right now. Designers are using ChatGPT to create their daily slides. But I would like to talk to the future generations to maybe being creative or follow your intuitations is something that cannot be replaced by AI. I think I really treasure. I think designers should be really treasured because we have the power that might not be able to replace by any machines and stuff because we are human. We are caring and we are always creative and we can connect the dots. That is something you should develop or treasure as a skill. I think that is something I would like to tell to the future generations.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 59 With Chiara Aliotta: What Is Design Storytelling?

In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we take a look at design storytelling. What is it, and how can it help us shape digital experiences? Vitaly talks to Chiara Aliotta to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s an award-winning graphic designer, art director and brand consultant working on digital products, print, editorial, UX, and branding. She has founded until Sunday a design studio focusing on regional branding and visual communication. Now in her work, she usually wears many different hats, designing for large and small organizations such as Joomla, PAMS Foundation, Smashing Magazine, Action Aid Hellas, and Medicine South Frontiers, co-running an art gallery, managing a personal lifestyle brand, and speaking at creative events.

Vitaly: Now, she also strongly believes in the power of storytelling and incorporates it in every project she works on. When she’s not working, you’ll find her traveling, capturing photographs or taking a dip in the sun deviled Aegean Sea. And of course, she’s a cat person living with her wonderful husband and her wonderful cat Kesa on the heavenly Greek island of Syros in the Aegean Sea. So we know she’s a wonderful designer and illustrator, but did you know that she also absolutely loves typography and children popup books? My smashing friends, please welcome Chiara Aliotta. Hello Chiara. How are you doing today?

Chiara Aliotta: I’m smashing. How are you Vitaly?

Vitaly: Hello, Chiara. Hello. Thank you so much for coming along. We have so many questions. We have so many things to discuss.

Chiara: Yeah.

Vitaly: And it’s okay, it’s unbelievable because every time I see your smile, every time I see you smiling, you always think about something, you always dream about something, you always have a story that you’re sharing. Right? And I really want us to start today by exploring your story first. So before we dive into storytelling, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you even end up in this wonderful world of design in the first place?

Chiara: Okay. So let me tell you a story. So once upon a time, there was a little girl, she was probably five years old and asked her mother, mom, is there a job where you can actually draw something every day and you can get paid for it? And the mother answered, yes, you can be a painter like your grandfather. So that little girl was me, five years old wondering if there was a job where I could actually always draw things that I like and that I see around me. And I end up doing art school. And then from that I move into design because I studied at the Polytechnic of Milan, and this is where my design journey actually started. When I was 18, I left Sicily in Italy to go in Milan, still in Italy, but in the north and discovered the world of design.

Chiara: While in Sicily, no one knew about design, of what was designed. The closest thing to design was architecture, but architects and designers and not really the same thing. So yeah, so it was quite a journey because I had to convince everyone in my family that I was going to make money out of this job. And it was quite a thing. I met the only female girl moving abroad and in Sicily we are always taking care of the girls. So it was quite a fight with the family before I could actually do what I wanted in my life.

Chiara: And the reason that I decided to study design it was because I wanted to design toys and furniture for children. So that was my goal. But I end up in doing a master in communication design, and this is where I discovered the world of branding. And I love it so much that since that I didn’t go back to toys. For me, everything is a playground. So it’s almost the same that branding and brand consulting sees what I’m enjoying right now. I love to do. And with different brand from printing to digital products.

Vitaly: I can see that for me it’s always very frustrating, I would say just to see the journey that people take when they get from one place to another in their life. And then I always feel like it’s always either hyper coincidences or just random people that you meet somewhere that kind of really motivate you. I remember a story when I was growing up, I had an uncle, or maybe it wasn’t even an uncle, I don’t even know because I saw him only once. But I remember him coming to me once and I was sitting, I was very young, very small, I don’t know, maybe six, seven years old. But he drew something, I think crocodile on a napkin at the time. And I was so impressed by that. I kept that napkin for a very long time until I think I probably lost it or so. But it had such a tremendous impact on me. Did you have those kind of things that really drove you to design or did you just want to draw things since you were a child?

Chiara: I think my inspiration was my grandfather who I never met. My mom was talking very high with him. And my grandmothee’s house, which was my family place, was full of paintings from my grandfather. So to think that someone could actually leave just drawing for me was mind blowing because I was like, wow, can you actually do this for living? I was very much discouraged by my family somehow to become a painter, but they never say no to my decision to go to art school. So that was also good. But yeah, I guess my grandfather played a big role into this decision and probably because I never met him, he became a me, like an important figure that I wanted somehow to be close to because everyone had a very strong idea and image of him.

Vitaly: But then off you went all the way to becoming a branding consultant as well at this point. But actually when I think about branding, I think that many of our dear listeners will be in the same spot as well. I often think about branding, is it just, I don’t know, logo and a bit of a tagline maybe. And sometimes I see this in advertising like a melody or this tune, which is two, three seconds long and maybe even if you go to extreme, it’s like a color palette and typography, right. But I can sense from the way you’re smiling is that you see branding as something slightly broader than that. Could you explain that?

Chiara: Yeah. Okay. You touch a very hotspot right now because I probably had a lot of discussion about this with clients. And slowly I’ve been educating them into understanding the brand is not the logo or the type line or the color palette. For me and in general for many in the field, a brand is how you make your customers feel about it when they experience your products or service. So it’s not anymore something physical, it’s something that is emotional. And it’s a very important aspect when we design anything, any touchpoints that could be an application, could be a brochure, anything really, even a stand, even a conference. That’s an experience when thinking about smashing conference, this is an experience more than of course you have your logo, you have your taglines, you have everything, but what you’re providing is an experience. And that is your brand.

Chiara: This is what you bring with you no matter where you are. If you are in San Francisco, New York or in Freiburg, it doesn’t really matter. That’s what it for me is a brand is the consistency of an experience that no matter how you decline it, then it’s always the same for the customer, for the final customer.

Chiara:So there was definitely a time where a logo, color palette or the tagline were enough to make the difference. And this was the even maybe I was not even born when this was still valid because there was an economy based on manufacturing physical products. So that was, I’m going to say that was more like there was less competition first of all, and there were less products on the shelf. So you don’t have to really show up too much. There was not talking about experience. The economy of the experience is something that we talk about today and it’s been around for a while. And this is where the brand start to become a bigger player. So when the client asks me for a logo or the color palette or the tagline, I usually call it the identity. I never call it the brand. The brand is something else and it goes just beyond all this. It’s one part is probably made of the logo, but it is never about the logo, it’s always about how people feel.

Vitaly: But then I’m wondering also as well at this point, so where does it stop, right? Because if you think about the experience that you’re providing, the website is an experience, the customer service is an experience and you will see that sometimes we have this kind of terms also in the industry, customer experience design, service design. Obviously user experience design as well. So where do you set, lee’s say the frame or the limitations of the boundaries of your work? Because if somebode’s coming to you and they want to have you to design the branding, do you also design things like voice and tone of the copy that they’re writing? Do you also design, I don’t know, things like the personality, the illustrations, the characters and whatever they want to have? Or would you say that there are particular limitations that branding typically has after all?

Chiara: Yeah, that’s a good question. It really depends by the brief and the budget of the customers. This is first of all, one important thing. This is first of all, the limit. Then of course as you say everything could be brand. And indeed, it is, you produce under the name of something that could be, I don’t know, I just seen Smashing because I just took as an example. So whatever you build under Smashing brand has to fill up the same experience. So the same experience of a community has to be consistent in everything you do. Now, when it comes to tone of voice, or things that are very specific, even a video editing, how we renowned design the entering tone of the Smashing podcast. So that also it’s part of the branding. So you usually go back to the tone of voice that you set up for the Smashing magazine maybe.

Chiara: And then you go back and say, okay, it has to be fun. Maybe we can have some cats meowing. And then you start thinking how this could come together. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be the person. I usually go into a very high level aspect of the brand. So it could be indeed the tone of voice, it could be the keywords we are going to use. And then based on that there are specific people, video editors, copywriter is going to tick my work and interpret it like it’s a script. Actually, that’s what it is. Usually that’s what a brand manual is. It works like a script so that everybody can follow it. And of course it needs some kind of interpretations too. So my work finish when I decline the brand in all the aspects, thinking of how it can be declined in a very high level.

Chiara: And after that there are specific people joining and coming and working with that script, let’s say, which usually is a brand manual, which is wider. Sometimes if you have applications, it could be more than a brand manual, it can go down to design system as well. That’s part of the branding for me because that’s another way to experience, but a digital product. There are a lot of things. So you define those things up very high level and then you find people working with you in defining the tiny bits of the brand. So it could be then, as you say, they could be the copywriting, the task, the illustrations, and so on.

Vitaly: What I really like about this approach, seeing it in this way is that it provides us with some opportunities to do something really interesting with branding. I mean, I know that you’ve been very vocal and very interested in how to connect storytelling and branding. Maybe before diving into storytelling though, I’m very curious just about your feelings today about brands per se? So if I think about brands, I don’t know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, I have this strong feeling, and please correct me if I’m wrong, have the strong feeling that many brands could be neutral in so many things. They didn’t need to take a stand, they didn’t need to have an opinion. They were for everybody. And this is how I perceive not all brands of course, but some brands. So for example, it would be very uncommon for a brand to have a political opinion about how things should be or express it on, of course not on social media, but in print or in advertising.

Vitaly: It was more about the product and really kind of advertising for marketing and all that for the product. And now I have the strong feeling that it’s impossible. You can’t be a brand and, you can be a brand, but you cannot survive if you don’t have principles that you stand behind. If you are afraid to make somebody or some of your customers unhappy, you really, if you want to speak to anybody at this point, you have to eliminate somebody just because you have to stand for something. So do you see it in a similar way when it comes to branding or would you say that many brands can be perfectly fine being neutral around topics that are happening in society or in the world?

Chiara: So that’s a very good question. Probably it’s about evolution of brand. I think the brand, every brand or any is political somehow, if you want to say it this way. So they need to stand, they need to have a culture, they need to have a belief and values. So all these words are already defining what you are standing for. Maybe in the past it was easier because you were talking to the mother with the children or the father working until late at night. Now we are talking to communities, and this is something that’s changed because of the social media. So what we do is usually all together we always influenced by what other people are doing. We feel more and more that we need to belong to something. And this is something that social media is probably, how going to say, exasperated. But the sense of community is so strong that now when a brand talks to community, it identifies himself with the community values and what they believe.

Chiara: So definitely that means that a lot of people are going to be cut out from that brand culture or values, and it’s fine. Because if you want to please everyone, probably you’re not going to please everyone anyway. So you have to be very, I’m going to say, loyal to yourself. It’s about consistency. It’s about being true to yourself. So the brand needs to stand for something. And I recall when I was at the conference in New York and there was Debbie Millman, she did an amazing talk about how brand actually stand for a cause and how they can become a real propeller for a change. And I really love that talk because she actually was nailing it because she show how everything, every movement now has become a brand and how actually this is the power of branding. And this is an amazing aspect of branding, especially when they stand for causes that are bigger than us. So as a unit, as small people, we can do very little, but as a community we can really make a big change. So that’s my take on this.

Vitaly: Yeah, that makes sense. I still have to bring up one question about branding. I know that we will want to speak about storytelling, but one thing that really surprised me, I think it was actually quite a, I don’t know, viral thing I guess for a while maybe a couple of years ago before pandemic, where all of a sudden many fashion brands decided that it’s a good idea to redesign. And they kind of rebranded and they ended up becoming quite generic. So the logos that they ended up having are very generic. The website’s very generic, even the copywriting of how the emails were sent, very generic. But then on the other hand, what has been happening also is that you look at the music industry, and you look at festivals happening and every single DJ, every single music producer needs to have their own brand. They all like whenever you have this wall of DJs that are playing, they all have their own branding in a way with their own custom design typefaces.

Vitaly: On the other hand, you also have these big institutions like banks, huge banks, they don’t know should we now be more kind of citizen-centric and then more playful or not be more conservative and traditional because we’re managing other people’s finances and all that? So I do want to ask you at this point, where do you see what would be the right way of putting it? Where do you see maybe the storytelling, right? Where do you see it fitting well and where it doesn’t? Do you think that pretty much every organization, small and large, every company, every product can benefit from integrating storytelling as a part of the experience?

Chiara: My answer is yes. And I’m completely biased because.

Vitaly: I think you’re a little bit biased. Yes.

Chiara: I believe in the power of storytelling and that’s my motto that I guess it will always be because I have a proof that this is working. But it really depends what storytelling is because what you call storytelling. Because storytelling could be, I’m telling you a story about something very specific and about our customers doing, I don’t know, I’m just thinking about one of the most famous story that I recall when I was young. It was a very child, it was with Barilla, the pasta brand worldwide. And their story was always around the family as mother, father and children. And this was the story of the family joining together and the pasta was the thing that was keeping them together because there was a time when they were eating, so they were all at school, the children were at school, the mom was probably working somewhere, the father was coming home.

Chiara: And then the moment of reunion was the pasta. So the pasta Barilla became the symbol of family. This has changed of course with time because of family now it’s broader now and we have a lot of gender consideration to do based on that, but has been changing. And this is a story, this is a story translating to another type thing. Then there is a story as an approach, like a methodology, which is what the banks and other institution could actually use. And then we use this a lot with organization where especially the not-for-profit ones, because most of the time when they work they focus on analyzing the wrong side of the story. The most of the time it’s the effects, your actions do that you need to reflect on. And this is where storytelling comes to play because through the approach you start following your customer and understanding the emotional journey.

Chiara: And this is where you start to understand probably the story of a child dying every day is not, it’s not the one you want to promote. It’s the one that you save every day is the one you want to promote because that is going to give you the climax, which is what you want in a story. So we are not going to tell, of course, the story of a child dying somewhere or someone, I don’t know, losing their house because of a earthquake happened. Unfortunately of all this disaster, we just try to tell a different story.

Chiara: And so the storytelling approach is mostly a background methodology that help us define what our message is going to be. So it’s not going to transform into an advertising necessarily, but it’s going to be, I can say the narrative behind everything we are going to do and say. So that’s the difference. It’s what could be a story. So the advertising I told you before, it’s Barilla, it’s a story that you see happen in front of your eyes. And then there is the background storytelling, the approach itself, which helps you to actually identify the right message. So I see storytelling apply to everything because there are many ways to apply it. We need to decide what’s the best case and the best scenario for applying it.

Vitaly: Talking about the best scenario, I think I have just the question that I wanted to ask for a long time about specifically how to apply storytelling. And obviously it would be very interesting to see your design process. And I heard rumors that you have just published an article about that on Smashing Magazine, so thank you so much for that. But also I know that you’ve been working with the crypto platform in trying to embed storytelling in there. And I’m just really have to ask, I’m just really curious, how do you work to integrate storytelling to this kind of environments or banks or public institutions or some very conservative environments?

Vitaly: I can see it being almost straightforward for brands that care about fashion or that care about work-life balance or they care about lifestyle brands, that’s probably relatively straightforward, although please feel free to correct me at this point. But I’m really curious how you would try to bring in some sort of storytelling in this slightly less straightforward, I would say, environments.

Chiara: Okay, let me tell you a little bit because I think there is always a misconception about storytelling. Because lee’s say, first of all, I’ll start my meetings with the client saying once upon a time as I did with you when I was talking about myself. So I usually-

Vitaly: Oh, you do not?

Chiara: No, I don’t. They will probably throw me out of the office. Like what she talking about? No, never. So the storytelling is a more subtle thing. And I never disclose in the way, hey guys, I just storytelling. They would never understand everything. What are you a screenwriter, a novel writer? I’m still a designer. So what I actually do is what I was telling you before is that I use storytelling as an approach. So when I meet them for the first time, I usually ask all the questions that help me to fill up the script, my script.

Chiara: That stays with me, it’s the behind the scene that you have seen that you can read now on the Smashing Magazine article that I wrote about the landing page we designed together for smart interface, the design pattern. So is this athlete that script, but you were never going to see it. What you’re going to see is the final movie. It’s what you’re going to see in the cinema. You’re not going to see the behind the scene. I’m not going to tell you how I’m going to fill all the blank spaces of my script or what scene I cut and what other actually went into the final movie. So what I usually do is I usually follow the storytelling structure, so the beginning, middle, and end to help the user be with me on the creative ride so that they actually know exactly what to expect, when and how so that they can actually provide me the feedback I need when I need them.

Chiara: And this is what a director of movie will do, they will ask the actor to say specific line because this is like now shot, cut, done. This is what I do. I just direct the scene and I provide specific elements that I wished them to answer. So the client answers in specific times so they don’t feel too overwhelmed. And what they see at the end is the final product, so the final movie or the final book. They will never see the correction and all the things that went through it.

Chiara: Unless I write an article as I did. So that’s the storytelling thing. So I usually go through the story brand script that Donald Miller provide in his book, The Story Brand. And then from there I start filling up the single spaces. And so the clients want to hear, of course I’m happy to, but really they want to go straight to the climax of the story. They just want to see what I came up with. So I just go very quickly through the different steps but very quickly and then go into, okay, this is a final product and this is where they actually usually they have this wow moment. I still remember actually wow moment when you saw this Smashing book six. I still remember that.

Vitaly: Oh yes, I remember that vividly because everything is coming together all of a sudden. Because what I think that I have a strong feeling that very often when people like something, it’s not just because it’s aesthetically pleasing or it’s nice typography or anything like that, it’s just something clicks and that something clicks when you actually see or not necessarily see, but you perceive the connections. So for the Smashing book and also for the landing page, the idea of having all the different elements that kind of have their own life at first, but then put together, they bring everything else to life as well.

Vitaly: But they also, the only kind of best way of how to compare it in my head is they’re playing in a orchestra. So it’s not every single element is doing their own thing. And you have this horizontal line that looks like this and you have this little characters there having this and then you have this image corners looking like that. Whenever everything really fits well together, it’s always like they’re playing in an orchestra or some sort of a symphony or anything. And I think that people notice that. They might not necessarily be able to articulate it and point it directly, I know exactly why it’s done this way, but it’s almost like you are fighting a little bit of jams or Easter eggs every now and again here throughout your design for people to discover. It’s like a treasure hunt almost. So this is at least my feeling about it. What do you think?

Chiara: Yeah, I really agree with you. And that effect is like magic for me when it happens. It’s like when you watch a movie and you really like and you can watch it again and every time you find something different in the movie that you didn’t notice the first time. And I really like this kind of feeling. If I can say, evoke this feeling, for me it’s like one tick in the box. Actually it’s one of the highest thing that I can hope for my work when somebody notice things that were there, but I haven’t told them, but they notice it. And yeah, this is amazing. This is magic for me. And that’s why again, I believe in storytelling so much because only with storytelling you can put all these pieces together to work together well and also to create sequels if you want to and expand that story even more. That’s what storytelling can help you do. And yeah, I’m happy that you felt this way because that’s the highest achievement for a designer.

Vitaly: Yeah. Also, just to maybe go a little bit more into the process. So you would literally sit down and take a piece of paper and think about the plot, thinking about the climax, think about the Aristotle’s Arc, maybe, the story arc or the heroes in the story and the rivals and I don’t know, all the different things. And really map them before you start designing. Or does it help you to design the elements that will then go into the composition or would you say that it guides you towards the structure, the layout of the page or both?

Chiara: Depends. Depends how, it depends really the kind of work. When it comes to branding, because it’s a little bit more complicated, I usually go through the values and all the elements of the story. So value, emotions and actions that we want the user to do with the brand. So all these things. And I really need to create a plot for that because there are so many variables happening when it comes to brand. When it comes to landing page, like the one we design together for your course, usually I use the landing page as a shot. And the first thing I do is really divide it, the landing page in three scenes: the opening, middle and closing scene. And then I start to fill up with the elements I already asked you about the story. For example, you remember I asked you, okay, how do you want the people to buy your course and what else are you providing?

Chiara: Is there any gift? These are all things that help me. Then I position them inside the page between the different act and this is how I start to build the story for you. And to ensure that actually we can move from one act to another one, so I put some delight. So for example, you were telling me, oh there will be a gift and for the people, I’ll name it access to the deck. And I was like, okay, we need to put it somewhere on the website. It needs to be just before maybe they sign up. So it’s going to be a delight moment or surprise that going to convince them that this is the right way to go. And I try not to use dark patterns, but of course the idea is always to propel to the final action. I just want people to finally go to the end.

Chiara: So it really depends. But for example, for your landing page, it was difficult to find the central team, the concept, how can we look different? Okay, we’re talking about video course, but yeah, but how can we make a little bit more memorable? So the people saying, oh, this seems different. It seems interesting. How we can keep this curiosity and playing around because the designers are very difficult to please. So you were talking with a very difficult audience. So I am one of them. So I try not to put myself in that shoes, of the shoes of the customer. But I have to feel some empathy about a designer who wants to discover a little bit more about UX design and design patterns.

Chiara: So the playful side of registration was probably the most difficult part because I mean was like, oh my god, we’re going to talk about food now. But yeah, he’s in the kitchen. Oh my god, everything leads over there to food experience. Oh yeah, this is what it’s going to be. It’s going to be a food experience. So that was me talking to myself, putting down the notes and was like, yeah, this is going to be, that’s it, this is all for experience. Now I need to transform the cogs into fishcakes. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it. Yeah, that was exactly what happened. So I don’t know if I answer your question, but-

Vitaly: Yeah, of course. Yeah, this is just exciting to get a little, I would say, peak behind the scenes. But I also just wondering at this point, so as you keep evolving and you create all these worlds that you then put and bring into life when it comes to designs and all, does it happen to you sometimes that you create this universe almost that actually incorporates all the different aspects of the brand, aspects of the company and the values that they believe on the culture and all that? But then the project is done, you move on to other projects, right, but they need to maintain or evolve that universe that you have created.

Vitaly: And I’m wondering, does it work? Because again, this involves everything, right? Because again, as I mentioned, when it comes to branding, it’s a voice and tones how you do your marketing, how you design your advertising spots or banners and you send out emails through your email list and all. Do you also do some sort of, I don’t know, do you write actually the script as well or would you advise companies to do that, to make sure that you actually speak in the same voice that independent on what touchpoints the customer is going to be experiencing or going through with the brand or the company?

Chiara: Usually when I, okay, lee’s talk about brand because it’s a little bit more my sphere, but I will say than it probably open up to all the other things I design. So when I approach a brand, usually they have a, what is called a design brief. That is like a blueprint for anyone approaching the design of any part of the design to read what we have decided up from. It contains the vision, the mission. I know, the brand manual could have that too, but this is very specific. It really have, it’s called design brief because you read this piece of paper, which usually is made of a few pages. And you really understand what kind of elements come into play when you design something for this company. And then you have the brand manual, that’s also combined. You get a very full picture of what it is going to be, the brand.

Chiara: Whatever you’re going to design, this has to be, someone has to be aware that are these two documents. And usually I provide both of them. If work really well for startups, especially because with startups I’ve been working for a long time with blockchain, especially the last two years. During the pandemic, blockchain was probably one of the best industry to work with and a lot of startups started and they wanted to have documents so that the product while evolving could actually follow up what we have decided. That’s always an evolving procedure with startups. So you never know how the product will end up to how it’s going to look like.

Chiara: When it comes to simply product. They’re digital like an application. Then is a little bit more difficult. I usually like to provide element bits and bites of the interface. Also extra that may be used in the future just in case just to give an idea of what it can look like. I want to call this design system, they’re not. They’re just the elements of the user interface that I provide extra. But most of the time I just leave, how I going to say, I just leave it to the interpretation of the developer to come with some ideas about that.

Chiara: And I have clients that coming back and say, oh, our developer design this bit, can you look at it? Does it look in brand for you? And sometimes it’s good. They’re being reused some pieces, which is great because what I do is usually design by modules. So they just take pieces together and they form the new component. Sometimes it’s not that good, but then when it’s bigger part of the design, maybe they come back to me and ask me, please Chiara, can we continue our story together? Can you think about something for this specific element of the website or the application?

Chiara: And now we move forward from there. It’s more working, I don’t know, I think about the sequel or I don’t know, stranger things, okay. Or maybe, oh no, maybe I will say some movies, where a different director working together and then at the end you have a nice melting pot, but it’s nice. It doesn’t look like strange. Because all of them, they pick up from where the other has left. So sometimes they commit to review some of these pieces and it’s a nice moment because you refresh a little bit of brand, you refresh a little bit what you said and you hope they will follow up from there with their own stats. Most of the time it’s easy. It’s easy then. But I usually been called back to review big pieces of design just because they didn’t feel it was quite right as they were done.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think it’s also can be almost like a never ending story when it comes to this kind of embedding storytelling involving the brand and its on. And fortunately there is a wonderful chance that our wonderful readers or readers or listeners can get to join one of your upcoming portraits where I think going to look into just that. And it’s called the Power of Storytelling and it’s taking place in March in about a month or so from now. Maybe you could share a bit of a few insights with us about what it will be about and why all the wonderful people who are listening to this now should absolutely go ahead and join you in that adventure.

Chiara: Okay, so first of all, thank you for mentioning and thank you for the opportunity to actually be able to run this workshop with the Smashing community. So it’s a quite interesting workshop because I’ve been running this live here on the island of Syros on a very basic level because the students are very young and they’re very new to storytelling. And when I decided that we can do a high level workshop online and because I imagine to be, it’s going to be a very directed workshop because we are going to start by analyzing the fundamentals of storytelling. So again, it’s not going to be once upon a time. Okay, we can start every day of the five sessions, say once upon a time, but it actually is going to be a real diving deep into the elements and methodologies of storytelling. So how we actually divide and map the user journey.

Chiara: So if you think about user journey map and heroes journey, and emotional journey, forget about it because we are going to write a script for an Oscar word application or product that every user going to love. So in general, this is what I want. I want to teach and want my student participant to learn how to use a storytelling in a way to create products that are memorable. So it’s not going to be the beautiful illustration, but it mostly like how we can make an experience memorable for the user.

Chiara: Then it doesn’t matter how you decline it. It matters that it’s consistent. So it’s a mix of user experience, probably a little bit of understanding of interface design because we are going to do it for a digital product mostly. But then after that, once you apply the and you learn these methodology, then you can apply to everything you want. Whatever it’s your project, you can just take this methodology and apply it to everything else. To your next project that is in pixel or in print or just an experience for a venue. It really doesn’t matter because that’s the beauty of storytelling and of this pluses that you can really apply it almost everywhere.

Vitaly: Well, if this is not exciting, I don’t know what is, right. So I’m very much looking forward to this as well. So on the Power of Storytelling, which is going to be taking place with Chiara in a month. Just to wrap up at this point, maybe I do have to ask one final question I like asking because it gives us a little bit of a hint about what people who are in here on the Smashing podcast are really interested in. Do you have a particular dream project, something that you maybe would love to work one day? Just to give you a few ideas, right. Some of the people we interviewed are going really big. They want to necessarily have the option to design one of the rockets that are going to go to the moon. That could be the ambition. But it could also be just something as simple as a series of children books. That’s perfectly fine as well. Do you have a particular dream projects that you would like to realize one day, Chiara?

Chiara: I’m a dreamer and I honestly, I think I live a life that is already close to what I dream of. But there are always new dreams coming up. So one thing I would like to do is on the field of storytelling, I really would like to create a little empire around this idea, methodology, that I want to share with the people. Because I’ve seen it, the magic of transformation that happens behind storytelling. So I would like to write a nice book or things that are maybe pop up book as well, something different that about storytelling and the approach and the methodologies behind storytelling. That’s one dream I had. And to become a more like a mentor in this field because I think I have a lot of to share. Just sometimes you don’t have the time to do that, to start writing a book or writing on things you’ve been through just for sharing.

Chiara: And so the other people don’t have to experience the same, they can just jump at the end of the book and read how it’s ending. So you who is the killer, this kind of thing. I would like to share more so that no one has to endure what I endure because there is no need because you can live out the experience someone else. So that’s one dream.

Chiara: And the other dream is something that I’m working because it was a dream until two years ago. Because of the pandemic it couldn’t happen before. And I’m putting together a little hub here in Syros of designers that are on the island. Because the pandemic brought so many people working remotely. They don’t want to live anymore in a big city. They want to live in a nice place with a sea two meter away. And so I start to meet a lot of people, interested in design, and there is a design school here.

Chiara: And so I think there are the right basis for creating nice hub for a nice spot on Syros to be like in the map of the destination for designers. So I’m working on it right now with some other professional creatives in the field and not only, but also musicians and food experts. So I have an entourage of people that we’ve been thinking and discussing how this could happen. And I don’t know, I keep you posted because I don’t know what is happening.

Vitaly: Oh yes, please.

Chiara: And maybe, I don’t know, Vitaly, you can do a Smashing edition, summer editions, Smashing conference summer edition on Syros one night because yeah

Vitaly: That sounds very exciting indeed.

Chiara: That would be lovely.

Vitaly: Yeah. Excellent. If you dear listener would like to hear more from Chiara, you can find her on Twitter where she’s @ChiaraAliotta. On Instagram where she is @untilsundayagency and also on her homepage, beautiful homepage, untilsunday.it. Thank you so much for joining us today, Chiara. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for people who might be listening to the show? 10 or 15 years from now, where storytelling is just everywhere. Anything that you’d like to send to the future? A message to the future generations?

Chiara: I just think about, just design always to put the smile in the face of your customers. So if storytelling is one way, please do it. If you know other ways, please share it.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 58 With Debbie Levitt: What Is CX Design?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask what is Customer Experience design, and how does it differ from User Experience design? Vitaly Friedman talks to expert Debbie Levitt to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a Customer Experience and User Experience Strategist, Researcher, Designer, and Trainer. She spends most of her time helping companies of all sizes, big and small and large, medium, transform towards a customer-centric approach. Now she’s been teaching how to improve customer satisfaction, predict and mitigate business risk, and increase ROI by investing in, of course, great customer experiences. Now she lives east of Olbia-Sardinia, what an incredible city that is in Italy, out in the countryside.

Vitaly: Also, she has recorded over 175 episodes of her livestream podcast on YouTube and has over 600 hours of videos on the wonderful Delta CX YouTube channel and has just published a wonderful book, Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies To Better Understand, Attract and Retain Customers. So we know she’s a great design strategist with a keen eye for customer satisfaction. But did you know that Debbie is often called the Mary Poppins of CX and UX? Why? Well, because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs every now and again, and flies away to her next adventure. While, in fact, a set of clients started calling her just that.

Vitaly: My Smashing friends. Please welcome Debbie Levitt. Hello, Debbie. How are you today?

Debbie: Hey, thank you so much for having me. And I’m almost Smashing. I’m unfortunately getting over Covid, so some people might hear that in my voice. Luckily it’s been mild, and I have to apologize, I accidentally sent you that I live east of Olbia. East of Olbia would be the Mediterranean Sea. I live west of Olbia. Totally my fault. Oh my gosh. I promise I live on land.

Vitaly: That’s okay. But you do not live in the sea, right? It’s not like fish are your neighbours, or?

Debbie: No, I’ve evolved and I live on land, and so I’m sorry about that. That’s what happens when you are multitasking. So thank you for putting up with me, but...

Vitaly: That’s okay. Well, I didn’t check where it is because... Actually I was in Olbia and-

Debbie: Oh wow.

Vitaly: ... I was waiting for a bus four times in Olbia and it never came.

Debbie: I’m so sorry. Don’t do it. No, you must rent a car if you’re here.

Vitaly: Well, we will speak about that for sure in our future seasons as well.

Debbie: Come on back and stay with us.

Vitaly: Yes, that might be very reasonable. But when I look at all the wonderful things that you’ve been producing and you’re always there and you’re always advocating for the humans, right? It seems like you’re really care about people, don’t you?

Debbie: I do, yes. Thank you for noticing. I certainly do.

Vitaly: Yes, I think you do. But one thing that’s really struck me,.. I spent quite a bit of time in organizations, also large and small, and every now and again, I have to explain what CX means, what is different between UX and CX and so. Because there are many kind of ways of we can do that, and I think you also mentioned in your book as well. Some people see it as something that marketing does. Some people see it like customer support or customer success. Sometimes it’s like this magical overlap between business and customer experience. And what is it, Debbie, tell us what is it in the first place?

Debbie: Well, the way that I see CX is that it is end-to-end customer experience. It’s that everything our company can possibly do or offer touches our customers. And so we have to be considering all of that. They could be products, they could be services, they could be experiences, they could be digital, they could be all of these things. Very often when people think of UX, they’re thinking, well, that’s just screens, that’s just digital design or research for something that’s going to be digital. But when we think about CX, for whatever reason, CX is generally understood to mean that full customer experience. And so to me, I believe that when we’re doing CX and UX right, they’re the same thing because many people who work in UX don’t want to just think about the screens. They do want to think about the full and holistic journey that the customer has. They want to think about where the customer interfaces with the bank branch or the customer support or the hotel desk people. We do want to think about those.

Debbie: I remember when I was a contractor at Macy’s, we were fighting to be involved in the stores and they said, "No, you’re just the people who make the screens" and they wouldn’t let us. And we really wanted there to be that holistic tie between the digital experiences, website, mobile web and app, and the in-store experiences. And so again, I believe that when you’re doing them well, they kind of are the same thing and they can be the same thing. And we still use some different names for them, but I don’t want to fight too much over that today. I’m dying on other hills, as we say.

Vitaly: So what I hear is that basically CXs ideally would be also a wonderful world of beautiful, beautiful UX and the other way around. But I’m wondering actually still at this point, and maybe you can enlighten me at this point, Debbie as well, when I see companies thinking about how they should work, how they should operate, that often feels like it’s still a feature factory... So you just, let’s deliver that feature for that release and let’s deliver that feature for that cycle and then keep going, keep going. And it’s interesting to me because I think that we’ve been doing this now what for 15, 20 years, this UX, CX, whatever, that kind of thing, did we fail in communicating to companies the right way of running business? Or why is it that we are now by 2023 are still in the position where we kind of have to almost fight for the role of CX — or even UX actually at this point — in a company small and large. So why is that?

Debbie: To me it tends to be two things. I think that in many companies, the question is what’s the least we can do that we can pretend is good enough? And I think some of that comes from what I call “fake agile” because if you look at original Agile and the Agile manifesto, it cares about customer satisfaction. It cares about good design. But the idea of agility was ultimately to make engineering teams faster and more efficient. So we got into this way of thinking, how fast can we go? Can we go faster? Can we go faster? Can we release more? And I say, well, congratulations on going faster and releasing more, but if you’re not attracting customers, making them happy, keeping them, let’s not congratulate ourselves on whatever that agility was.

Debbie: Same for Lean. Many people are working from a definition of Lean that runs against Lean. Lean is supposed to be about finding defects and risks and waste early, mitigating them, proving your efficiency, not because the weapon, and you made people try to go faster, but because you were driven more by quality, and you were more likely to put out how great things that you didn’t have to cycle back and fix later. So think part of what we battle in most of our companies is really mediocrity because everybody who we work with knows that they hate every company that chips crap. You hate those apps, you hate those websites, you hate those hotels, you hate those airplanes, you hate those whatevers. You hate it. And then you show up to your job and you go, "That’s probably good enough. Just get it out there." And it’s like people have really lost their sense of what customers define as quality and value. So I think part of it is that mediocrity of ads good enough.

Debbie: Let’s just say we’re fast and keep going. And this is going to be a little bit spicy, but part of it to me is UX leaders. I think in some cases, not everybody, we have some weak UX leaders. We have some people who are over-focused on making the stakeholder happy. They’re over-focused on the visual design. They’re over-focused on, "Look, we can pretend we’re agile and Lean too. We’ll just slice UX down to the least we could do, we’ll research for a day. We’ll run a survey, uh.. we’ll design for two seconds. Yes sir. Yes ma’am." And I think that our UX leaders have done us a disservice and in many ways continue to when they are not fighting for quality, they’re dying on the wrong hills.

Debbie: They’re coming in and they’re saying, "Don’t you understand my job? These are artists, these are not artists." And I say, stop dying on that hill. Talk to people about how great CX and UX work, mitigates risk, saves companies time and money, increases customer satisfaction, is more likely to increase that loyalty. You’re dying on the wrong hills and you’re saying yes to ridiculously short timeframes, UX work being badly done by a circus of everybody just to say, we got more done. And again, it’s all speed over quality. So I think this has not yet sunk in for companies because we’ve been selling the wrong things. We’ve been trying to sell the value of my job instead of selling the value of the outcome. Hey, remember that crappy project we did where we ended up having to go back and figure out what we did wrong and fix it and redo it? And our customer service had to give people some free coupons to apologize and remember the multidimensional disaster that was? Well, that would’ve gone better if we had done this research, this design, this testing.

Debbie: If we had spent three more weeks, three more weeks would’ve saved all of this wild expense and marketing problems and voice of the customer issues and customer support usage. We are not doing a good job showing the math of how much carnage and waste and money we can save if we just fought for, what sometimes is a few weeks, maybe it’s a little bit longer in some cases, but we’re not demanding generative research. We’re claiming we can work from assumptions and guesses. And I say no one wants that, Agile’s against that, Lean’s against that, Scrum is against that, Nielsen Norman group is against that. Nobody wants to see that. And yet I’m fighting some dude on LinkedIn last week who says, "Assumption-based methodologies are valid." And I say, well, there’s a Grand Canyon between valid and a freaking good idea. You can work from guesses and assumptions, but this is where they’re landing us. We all see what this is like. We mostly hate our jobs. We need our leaders to be fighting more and differently.

Vitaly: Well, that’s interesting because I think in many ways I do find myself really in these positions where I still wonder sometimes, why do we even bother this position of I can over here or the side of the I can matters, but I mean the position and we went on the left, we test that with A/B testing testing and then we see if this works better or not. But then I always think this always goes into this notion of speed. I think this is very much the core of it really as well, because it seems like we are rushing all the time. We need to deliver, we want to deliver good quality, but in the end, we just want to deliver — be it features or anything else. And one thing that I find quite weird is that we ended up in this situations where we want MVP to validate a product. So MVP is important. We don’t want to spend too much time building and designing and all, but shouldn’t we be designing, I don’t know, the minimal first-class user experience kind of VP or something? I don’t know. What is your take on MVPs in general? Is it just me seeing it wrongly?

Debbie: No, I’ve been fighting MVP and Lean Startup for some time, and then I’m mostly fought back by a lot of white guys who want to comment on my Medium articles. It’s a very narrow audience there wants to fight me on that. But I think we do have to take a second look at MVPs and some of these, again, Lean Startup or other ideas. A lot of these things came from books from over 10 years ago and there’s nothing wrong with 10 years, but they haven’t been updated. And they come from these books that were really aimed at startups. The Lean Startup was for startups. It wasn’t for Oracle or Fang or whoever they are now. It was for startups. And it said, "Hey, if you want to go really fast" — and we have to remember where we all were in the late 2000s and 2010, one of the biggest problems with startups, and you’ll remember this because there was vaporware, there were people who were promising technologies and features and systems and they were never even built.

Debbie: So the Lean startup made sense as an answer to that, "Hey, stop waiting and waiting and waiting and never putting out your mysterious vaporware. Really something early. Just get it out there, give it a try." And I think that advice can make sense for startups in 2010, but they really don’t make sense for our company and the size of projects we have, the amount of customers we have, the reliance we have on retaining those customers and making them happy. It’s not the same as two bros in Silicon Valley in 2010 who are going to rush some early version out.

Debbie:And the other thing I remind people is that the MVP can be reframed. There’s no reason why a solid realistic UX prototype can’t be your MVP. And in fact, in my book, I think in chapter 21 where we interview Steve Johnson, a product manager, he says, "Eric Rees admitted that he made a mistake." He meant minimum viable prototype. He didn’t mean minimum viable product. He didn’t imagine that this early pseudo beta, almost beta early version was something that you would sell, something that you would expect people to pay for. He really expected that it was almost like an early prototype. But of course we have that in user-centered design and human-centered design. I don’t need engineering to build it for me to see if it’s going in the right direction. I’m a big fan of Axure (hashtag not sponsored), and I want to make sure that I’m making a highly realistic prototype, but not realistic from the perspective of visual design, from the perspective of usability flow —

Vitaly: User experience.

Debbie: Yes, process. Can you type in a field? Yes, you should be able to type in the field. And then I can bring that to usability and other testing and be able to say, aha, we are solving the real problem well or we’re solving the real problem, but we’re not there yet. Or wow, we’re way off. We are really not solving the real problem well or at all. And that’s what we should be doing early on and in cycles. But the problem is that people read Lean Startup and they saw a couple of things that said Agile, and they now think you can’t know if you’re going in the right direction without having engineering spend sprints, weeks, months, building it, testing it, merging it, releasing it, and then sitting around waiting for customer support complaints or an A/B test, which is often quite flawed or some sort of feedback.

Debbie: And then what do we do? We go, it’s probably good enough and we put it in the backlog or the ice box. So we have a lot of problems with our processes, we have problems with our standards. We have much lower standards internally than our customers have for us. So I think that the MVP is our problem, but I think it can be reframed. Ultimately the minimum viable product or prototype is an early UX prototype that can help us test a concept or one of its many endlessly, many executions.

Vitaly: Well, I think also when it comes to customers, standards are different, expectations are much different now as well. So it’s just a very, very different world. And coming back to your book, I rarely read one single chapter in which is so packed that I feel like, wow, there is so much stuff in it. And I usually don’t do that to be honest, I actually printed out chapter 18.

Debbie: Oh, thank you.

Vitaly: Just because I wanted to underline first because the reason I do it is like I read and then I underline and then I was so tired of underlining. I just said, I’m just going to put it next to me. So maybe just to make it a bit more tangible, I would say to all your listeners, so let’s imagine you’re working for a company that is just a regular conservative company, very much legacy ridden, a lot of good old processes in place, not really a culture of sustainability or interest in user-centric or ethical design or anything of that sort maybe.

Vitaly: But there is a strong need and there is a strong will to move there. But of course when it comes to little exercises like that, it’s a big shift. It’s a culture shift. It’s a shift of how people are working, what they believe in, how they embed their values and the way they’re working into the product, how the metrics are going to be working for that, namely specifically, how do we even choose metrics that fit? How do we track them? How often do we track them? What do we track and all that.

Vitaly: Maybe you could just give us a little bit of insight in that kind of scenario if you wanted, let’s say, to support in some way, some sort of a shift like that. I would say what is absolutely required for this to be successful? That would be question maybe number one. Question number two, how to get there? Because you are Mary Poppins, right? So you just come in, you fly in, you solve problems, you fly away. So what would be your magic dust that you would sprinkle all over all departments in the organization?

Debbie: I would say the first way to help yourself get there is to shift to the language that the business cares about. The business doesn’t care about delight, the business doesn’t care about empathy. The business cares about the usual stuff. Find more customers. We hope they’re happy because we want them to stay. That’s it. Attraction or adoption satisfaction and some sort of loyalty or retention. That’s it. Talk about those things. Talk about risk, talk about wasted time and money. Look up Six Sigmas, cost of poor quality. It’s a wonderful model that I go into early in the book. I think in chapter two, it’s a whole list of things that your company is wasting time and money on because you didn’t build something better for the user. So forget about some of the words we tend to use in UX and design because they make sense to each other.

Debbie: Makes sense when you and I talk about it, empathy, delight. But somebody who is just counting beans as they say, or looking at numbers and budgets and bottom lines, they don’t care. They just don’t. They want to know how do we make more people join and stay and we hope they give us some good satisfaction scores in the middle. So we have to start there and we have to make sure that’s our common ground. And that’s where I focus. I focus on how can we find ways to bring more customers in, make them happier so that they’ll stay. Focus there. And then the question is, what can CX or UX work do that augments that, supports that? How do we use early generative research to bring us customer intelligence we don’t have now? Because sure, we have endless analytics, we have surveys, we have, what do you want?

Debbie: We have AB tests, we’ve got lots of things that are mostly quantitative, but we don’t know a lot of the why. We don’t know a lot of the how. We get an NPS score that says negative 30 and we don’t really know why, but everyone will get together in a brainstorming session, guess why, and then guess how to fix it. And they’re surprised when that doesn’t work. So I drive people towards customer intelligence. Now some people think that’s just more market research. Let’s just find people who demographically fit into our sweet spot and throw more darts at them and give them $10 off and advertise more heavily to them. But I say, look, you can do that. That’s the adoption piece. But if you’re not building the better product, service or experience, you won’t have the satisfaction and you won’t have the retention and the loyalty.

Debbie: So all of these things are that longer arc. So I’m making it sound over simple, "Hey, you just have to speak the business’ language." But it’s a huge shift that a lot of people in UX and design are not always doing. They’re still focused on we have to delight the user. Someone asked me, "How do you build a usability test to prove that people are delighted?" And I said, "I don’t think I would do that. I’m not usability testing for delight. I’m usability testing that we’ve solved the correct problem with a good execution of a good concept." So we get hung up on some of these buzzwords. And so I say to people, forget the buzzwords. Take that MBA approach. That’s why I went and got an MBA. I could have gone out and gotten a master’s in UX HCI. Human factors.

Debbie: I went for the MBA because when I come in, I want companies to know that I care about how the business works, I care about how the business runs. I care about the business making money. Yes, I want it to be done ethically. Yes, I want it to be done with customers in mind, with DEI, with accessibility, but I am dedicated to good, solid, long-term, not quick shortcuts, ethical ways to attract those customers, genuinely make them happy, not fool them into some sort of weird high score or pay them for a good rating. And then loyalty because we’ve built something great. The example I use is I am a super wacky wild fan of Monday.com (hashtag not sponsored). I just paid them for another year. They pay me nothing. They have no idea who I am. Can you think of a system that you freaking love that much that you are going to tell people this thing is the bomb?

Debbie: You couldn’t pull me away. When I left my previous project management system for Monday, the CEO contacted me, "You’ve been with us for 10 years. What can I do to keep you?" I said, "Nothing. I wouldn’t stay if it were free, I wouldn’t stay if you paid me." Monday is a better match to my needs and tasks. I will be more productive there. Those are my standards. So we have to be using better research, earlier research, generative qualitative research to know our customers so that we can say we really built that thing. Was it 20 years ago, we talked about the killer app. We don’t seem to care about that anymore. We don’t seem to care about if we’re really building what customers need. We seem to care about checking stakeholders ideas off a list.

Vitaly: That’s right. I think I also read an article about the boring designer or boring products that we actually got. So in the past, as you were saying, we got so excited about building just that cool thing that’s going to take off and take over the world. But now I think that many of us have discovered the sympathy and I guess also interest in just boring product that help us sleep better. I always go in a medium and your collective and so on. And I read all these articles and I would love to see more things about, I don’t know, healthcare or enterprise, B2B, CX, UX, I don’t know, anything like that. Those kind of case studies. They’re not necessarily most exciting applications to some people, but they’re also so important. It’s so interesting to solve.

Vitaly: And maybe one thing I wanted to dive in a little bit deeper with you here as well is, so if you encounter a situation where you are in that legacy environment and corporate environment and enterprise environment and whatnot, the question is for me at least in my work, is to always prove that what I’m doing is moving in the right direction, kind of moving the needle in the right direction. So again, what you’re saying is just music to my ears, speaking business terms to people on who are your managers. I think this is an incredibly important skill for designers to have rather than having the design, I don’t know, design dish, I guess, which many people might not understand.

Vitaly: So I’m wondering though, how do you convert the needs that the company has in terms of business into something that’s necessarily customer-centric? Because at least this was my experience, it cannot not necessarily go hand in hand. Sometimes we end up with some business goals, which are we need to be aggressive on the market, we need to take over, we need to be better than every competitor. We need to be, I don’t know, newsletters all over the place. We need to be as prominent as possible. How do you balance it out with something that’s more, because it’s more like short term, long term? Because usually in my experience, you need a strategy for both.

Debbie: Oh, there are a lot of questions rolled into there. I’m trying to figure out where I start. I think that companies are looking very much at the short term a lot of times. So you have to have a short and a long term strategy. But a lot of people don’t even have a strategy. As you said, they’re just saying, "More newsletters, more content, just more things. And then we’ll throw those darts and see what happens." And I think that companies have to get a little bit more focused. And a lot of that goes back to customer intelligence.

Debbie: If you don’t really understand who Debbie is and why she comes to your site or uses your product or is still at the trial version and hasn’t paid. If you are guessing or making things up about me or trying to assume something about me because I’m a 50-year-old white woman, then you don’t really have good customer intelligence. You are probably going to be guided mostly by guesses, assumptions, and copying your competitors. And you can do that. But let’s not pretend you’re innovative. Do not sing the song of we’re innovative if you’re just going to copy your competitors.

Debbie: But I think that one of the biggest key steps that a lot of companies need to take that they haven’t taken is they need at least a few customer-centric metrics. Very often when we look at a company’s KPIs, not only are they business-centric, but as you said, very often they’re the opposite of what people want to do. When I see a KPI in a company or even a North star metric of how many people did we get to apply to jobs? And I go, well, that’s funny because we know that people want to apply to as few jobs as possible.

Debbie: So you’re going to try to make people apply more in a world where people want to apply less, there is a mismatch here. And what often happens is because we are feature factories and because we tend to be very stakeholder driven, the stakeholder says, "Look, we just want to see these numbers go up. We want to see more people applying to jobs." And I say, what about the long term mark of their success or happiness? "It doesn’t matter. We just want to see more people applying to jobs." And then they’ll do whatever it takes. And we see this reflected in traditional impact maps, which in my chapter 18, I blow impact maps out of the water and I give you a different version of them that’s more customer focused. But you see these impact maps that are like, "Hey, what do you want to make happen? You want to make people click on a button more? Well, cool, as you said, more newsletters, more discounts, more whatever, you more content, more emails." Hands up who wants more emails?

Debbie: So I think we have to start with always looking at both, how does this create something the business wants? And we have the metrics to measure that and how do we make sure this is something that’s going to produce in our customers what they would want for themselves. We want them to be loyal, but we can’t trick people into being loyal. We can’t force them into being loyal, that’s a short-term win. It’s not going to be a long-term win. So we have to start with some of these metrics and being able to have some tough conversations around crappy metrics. How many page views did someone see? I have an example in the book where when I tried to log into an online stock investing account, I saw six pages before I could get into the account.

Debbie: Now we all know that that could be done in one screen. It absolutely can be done in one screen. Hey, what’s your username and password? Hey, we sent you a text to make sure it’s really you. Hey, it’s really you. Thanks for chopping by. You’re in. That could be one screen. This was six separately loading pages. And I swear one page was just a giant screen that said, "We’re going to text you a code." Continue. And that’s how I know someone has a metric of more page views. Congratulations on achieving your more page views metric. That’s a vanity metric. It’s meaningless. It doesn’t improve the customer experience. So we have to start looking at both of these in terms of each other.

Debbie: Which is hard for companies. They’re going to need consultants, they’re going to need specialists. They’re going to need new people because the same old people that are there are probably used to tap dancing along with the way we do things and following and not making waves and not challenging the status quo. You’re going to need a few new leaders or a couple of consultants to come in and shake that up and say, "Look, it’s great that you’ve been successful thus far. You’re doing many right things, but there’s room for improvement. And you have to be open to that change."

Vitaly: Yes, I think one of the funny things is that I often find so much passion, I would say around things like time on site as well, but what does it mean time on site? Does it mean that people like what they see? Does it mean that they don’t find what they need? Does that mean that they’re just totally frustrated and annoyed just try to find it all over the place because search is not working well? What does it even mean? All those things are not really reflecting in any way the customer experience at all. So that’s very much aligns to my experience I guess as well. There is one thing that’s really is probably to me the most problematic, and that’s the shift of culture in a company like that. So the problem is that very often, very different departments have their own set of KPIs and they track trying to improve their own KPIs and very much they’re not really aligned.

Vitaly:So maybe one department just wants to publish more just to be out there. The other department will be looking at traffic and other things and the other, what is our velocity in terms of their deployment or features that we have and things like that. But then we need to really change the culture so that we have this customer centricity as again, our north star. And so that defines what is going to happen in all these different departments, but that requires a lot of movement in organization, which is really slow and a lot of time as well. Now, fortunately, we have wonderful people like you who come in and just hoof and get it all done.

Debbie: Well, not quite. But yes, I try to push as many boats out and as many needles as I can. I usually can’t get all the changes on my list done. Sometimes I’m lucky if I can get half, but I can go into a place and I can affect change. But obviously that company has to want to change, but then you also have to have that change management hat on because that company’s afraid to change. They feel they’ve been really successful thus far doing it this way. Why should we care about that? Why should we prioritize? I remember having a conversation, I think I put it in the book where I said to someone, almost all of our app ratings in the last X months are one in two stars, and I’ve confirmed that the complaints are valid, we really are broken. And I said, what are we doing about that?

Debbie: And the person said, "Well, we have a 4.6 rating out of five overall on the Apple Store. So what’s the problem?" And so again, like you said, if you’re watching the wrong metrics, you can tell yourself any story you want. I can tell myself any... I recently lost 10 pounds. I thought I looked amazing until the pictures came back. And then I said, I’ve got more change to make. So you can see numbers and you can tell yourself any story you want. The better company with that better future is going to tell itself some more honest stories about that, which is, isn’t it great we’ve got a 4.6 rating in the Apple Store that’s probably going to help us get download a little bit more than if our rating was lower? But we probably should prioritize all of these complaints coming in, especially since we found that these aren’t just complainers.

Debbie: These are valid complaints. So what I have found in companies, what tends to block this is usually in some cases, a very toxic leader, a narcissist, a malignant narcissist, a person who the only way to do it is my way. A person who will make up fake facts and fake stories. A person who creates fear in people under them. A person who loves to put people on performance review plans or performance improvement plans when you speak up against the status quo or question something or want to try something different. So first of all, to me, there are a few toxic leaders. And the wacky thing is every company I go into has them and every company knows who they are. And I always say, you know who this is. And they stand out from other people, which means you’ve done a good job hiring.

Debbie: If they fit in and everyone’s like that, then this needs an atomic bomb to fix. But these people are different because they’re that bad. Why aren’t we removing them? Or why aren’t we shifting what they do? Why aren’t we demoting them? Why aren’t we putting them on a performance improvement plan? Why do we allow them to continue to create such negativity and carnage? And in some cases, attrition, people quit. They can’t stand to deal with that person anymore. So we have to do something about those toxic people and we have to work with corporate strategists on how they measure success. How do we measure success internally? If it’s making people click the button that nobody wants to click, that’s just going to come down the line. And especially in companies where CX and UX have no voice, then you just have the engineering team pushing for faster delivery and you have the product team pushing for I am unfortunately an order taking puppet who’s just going to do what the stakeholder says and not really push back and stuff like that.

Debbie: We need people. We claim we have empowered teams, we claim we want empowered teams. We don’t. We’re not even close. And somebody with some watts has to start saying out loud, we’re not empowered. We’re not empowered. We’re not living up to our company values. I saw a company last year who was not living up to their company values, changed their company values, and they changed them to the most watered down, meaningless things I’d ever seen in my life. You can do that. You can make your company values more meaningless if you’re having trouble adhering to them, but that also sends a message. So you’re right, it’s a complicated thing. There’s a lot of gears locked into each other and I can’t say, here’s that one thing that everybody needs to do that’s going to really help. It’s mostly speaking up against the status quo.

Debbie: Does it mean that your job could be on the line or you could receive some badness from saying those things out loud? Sure. At an unhealthy company, there could be that retaliation. There isn’t supposed to be, but there could be. So you take that chance. A lot of people don’t want to take that chance. And that’s why I say bring in the outside consultants. I will come in, I will say everything that needs to be said, and you know in six months I’m gone anyway. I have no horse in the race. I just want to tell the truth. But a lot of people working there can’t tell the truth anymore. And that’s a bigger culture problem, as you said. So I don’t have the one magic bullet. If I had the one magic bullet, my book would be 10 pages long. Three pages of introducing the magic bullet, five pages about the magic bullet and two pages thanking everybody for reading.

Debbie: But my books tend to be on the long side because I am trying to walk people through a lot of different instances and scenarios that they will run into at their jobs as consultants and say, here’s some things you can try to just chip away at that piece. Because if you try to look at the whole mountain of overwhelming BS at our companies, you just give up. You go, how am I ever going to change that monolith? But we have to look at some of the smaller pieces and how we can make small changes there just to start and just to show the company it’s worth it.

Vitaly: Debbie, we could be speaking for hours of course and have so many questions prepared, which I know didn’t get to, but I do have to ask one question that has been bothering me for a very long time, and I still haven’t found the proper answer to that. So can you make this shift? Like transition to customer centricity in an organization without a proper commitment from the top?

Debbie: Oh, definitely not. Because what I found is that everything comes from the top. You can certainly have a bottom up swell of support for this. It can be a bottom up person who goes to their manager and says, "Why aren’t we saying more about this?" And that person goes to their manager and says, "Look, we know this sucks. Why aren’t we saying more about this?" So there can be some bottom up support and action, but the change and everything else comes from the top. That’s it. Now, we may not have to impress the C level executive, they may be too high up. They may not care as much about some of the day-to-day. Sometimes it’s those mid or high level leaders, maybe the directors or heads or whatever it might be in a particular country or business’ hierarchy. Those are the people. The people looking at budgets, the people looking at outcomes, the people checking on the KPIs.

Debbie: It’s not always the C level. It’s probably somebody below them and they just report up. So it’s those people that we have to affect. Could be VPs. Those are the people that we have to go to and say, "Look, we know you want more adoption, satisfaction and retention. How’s that going right now?" "Not so well." "Oh, why not?" "I don’t know." That’s our first problem. Why don’t we know? They usually don’t know why. Or they’ve made something up. People are disloyal, they’re tire kickers, they’re broke, they’re whatever, echo. Cool, bro, you made that up. You don’t really know. That’s probably only true for a certain percentage of your customers. Let’s not work from guesses. Let’s not work from assumptions. Let’s use guesses and assumptions as an opportunity to dive deeply into customer intelligence. You think a survey’s going to answer that? Go ahead. Start with a survey.

Debbie: When the survey comes back, I’m going to ask you again, what do we know and what don’t we know? Is that survey enough to take action and do we know what action to take? If we’re guessing again and going into another brainstorming workshop to guess again, we still don’t know. And so I want to make sure that we are not creating these strategies or making these decisions or pushing these KPIs without better knowing some stuff, knowing some stuff internally about ourselves, knowing some stuff externally about users, customers, partners. Obviously this ends up falling into service design, which to me can also be CX and UX. These all float in the same ocean. But that’s what I tried to tell people is you don’t even know. You don’t even know why sales is losing people. They picked a competitor. That’s not the full answer. That’s the surface level answer.

Debbie: Oh, our NPS is low. Do you know why? We can’t seem to retain people. Sales even offered them 10 bucks. Do you know why? I just keep pushing for why don’t we know why? Shouldn’t we know why? Can you give me four to six weeks to start learning why? And some companies will go, "Oh, it’s only four to six weeks? I thought it was months." It doesn’t have to be months. I can get you some preliminary data from generative observational or interview research in four to six weeks. Can we start there? Yes. Then you make sure you collect their-

Vitaly: That’s probably going to be very difficult to say no to that.

Debbie: Well, look, and especially as a consultant, I then put a number on that, and I don’t overcharge as a consultant, I’m very fairly priced. I hear, I’m under-priced. I say, "Hey, a six-week project, let’s just call it five figures." It’s 60, 80, whatever, thousand dollars. Maybe I have to throw more people on it to make it go faster. It’s a hundred something thousand dollars. Hey, how much money are we losing right now in customer loyalty? How much money are we losing because sales couldn’t get those people to stay? Isn’t $150,000 worth it and six weeks for us to be able to answer all these questions of why and to replace these guesses and assumptions with knowledge? We don’t have to work from guesses and assumptions. We can work from really good knowledge that goes beyond our market research, that goes beyond demographics to look at behaviors and perspectives and tasks. I am task-oriented person 100%.

Vitaly: Well. I think also there are so many different other stories and companies that you also mentioned in your book of course. So this brings me to an important of probably the last question for today. Given the fact that you’ve been working again with small and large companies all over the place, what were some of the most interesting lessons you learned? What would say some patterns which emerge, you would say, if this is that kind of company, I have to do this. Or if that’s kind of company, I’m going to do that. If this, oh, no, I’m running away. This is not, no, no, no, I’m not going through that. So would you say are some of the most important notable lessons that you’ve learned? Just maybe a few personal stories. It’s always interesting to hear.

Debbie: Yes, sure. One of the things that I mentioned in my book and in the workshop version of the book, I talk about making sure... A lot of change management courses say, find your allies. But I say also identify your detractors. There are going to be those toxic leaders who want you to fail. They don’t want that change because even if that change brings something good, people might wonder why they didn’t make that change. It accidentally shines a negative spotlight on them. So you’ve got detractors, you’ve got toxic people who are probably going to work against what you are there to do. It’s important to identify them and to manage them. And I won’t have time to go into how, some of that’s in the book, but you’ve got to manage those detractors. You can’t just focus on who are my allies or who is excited about this or who’s buying in.

Debbie: You have to look at who might sabotage this or me. That’s definitely one of the things that I would warn people about. And another reason why I remind people, this may be an area where you do want to bring in consultants because that person can sabotage the hell out of me and undercut me as much as they want and make themselves look foolish, and then I’m gone. But if you work in a company and you try to do some of this stuff and that person sabotages, you could lose your job. You could be demoted. I’ve seen this. And so that’s a place where you want to put me in front of the target instead of yourself. Save yourself. That’s one thing. Another thing is you have to look for the company’s compelling reason to change. You have to figure out why should they change?

Debbie: Because again, many companies, even those who claim they want to change, they claim they want to be customer-centric, they claim they want more customer journey maps. Even when companies claim this, a lot of times they really don’t want to change. They’ve been profitable. They’ve been making money, they’ve been growing stock prices, doing okay, whatever ways that they measure themselves, they’re usually pretty happy. And so the question is, now, do you want to run away from that and say, these people don’t want to change, I’m not going to bother? Or can you find either that compelling narrative or that reason for them to make some sort of change or find the area in which they are willing to change? And that’s hard. Last year I was working with a 1 billion dollar European company that competes against Indeed there, therefore job posting and applying to jobs.

Debbie: And when you’re a $1 billion company and you’re the market leader of Germany, why change? Is it going so badly? Can we just say, this is going pretty well? And so that’s hard. So I had to find some places and some allies where we could get people to say, you know what? This part of things isn’t going as well as it could. And oh yes, our UX team doesn’t really have a voice, isn’t really treated well, are treated as order takers. What can we do to improve that? How do we elevate our user experience work and workers? So I think it’s a matter of, and I know that we’re supposed to stop saying things like, pick your battles because it’s violence based language. And I’m still bad at that, I apologize. But we really have to take a look at where can I make change?

Debbie: Where will they let me make change? That’s why when I do the Mary Poppins thing, I say, hey, look, I fly in, fix as much as I can, as they’ll let me, and then I fly away. So you have to find the places where that door is open or where you can create that compelling narrative. Has the company lost a lot of money in a certain area lately? Have they burned customer trust and now they’re over-utilizing customer support? And it would be great if people weren’t so unhappy in calling in so much that saves companies money. You have to start looking for all of that. And so one of the exercises in chapter 18, which I’ve been doing on my YouTube show on some Mondays, is the Delta CX version of an impact map. Where we start not with what the company wants to do, we start with the customer’s problem, and then we look at what’s the root causes of that, and then what’s the impact on the business?

Debbie: What’s happening in the business, what money, time, resources, environmental damage, what’s happening because we have this customer problem and these root causes we haven’t addressed. If you can start building something like the Delta CX impact map version, you now have that built in argument. We need to make this better for our customers because here’s all the stuff. Here’s all the waste and risk and lost time and money that our company is dealing with, and that’s what we’re going to save. These are the arguments that we need to start making on all levels. Could a junior make that argument? They could try. Why not? They’ll have access to some of that information, but it’s probably more for our managers and leaders. You got to find that small open door.

Vitaly: Well, if you the listener would like to hear more from Mary Poppins or also called Debbie, you can find her on LinkedIn where she’s, guess what? Debbie Levitt, but also on her website, Delta CX. And of course, get her wonderful book: Customers Know You Suck: Actionable CX Strategies To Better Understand and Track and Retain Customers, well, whenever you get your books. Now, thank you so much for joining us today, Debbie. Should I call you Mary? No, probably not.

Debbie: No, I’m definitely Debbie. Mary Poppins is somebody else. And I also want to mention we’re putting up a website at customercentricity.com, which will have even more information because guess who owns that domain? And you can also grab my book at DeltaCX.media, which is where I’ve got information about our books and workshops, and we’ve got the digital version up for as little as $1. So if anybody is from a country or area or life situation where buying a book right now doesn’t feel affordable, we do have the $1 version to try to make it more available.

Vitaly: That’s wonderful, Debbie, wonderful. Well, as we often do in the end though. Well, imagine somebody listening to this 20 years from now thinking, oh, they had problems in 2023 mean, but by now, like 2043, we have solved CX issues for good. So is there anything you’d like to send out to the future or any parting words of wisdom you’d like the future generations to follow along? Like I don’t know, maybe aliens 200 years from now thinking, how do we improve CX of our ships?

Debbie: Yes, that’s a hard one. I can certainly hope for the future. I can certainly hope that in the future we’ve made more ethical choices, we’ve made more customer-centric choices. We’ve realized that we have no business, no staff, no money if we aren’t making customers happy. I don’t know. I wonder what our problems, I think in, I want to say 2043, but it really feels like it’s going to be 2025 where we’re battling for what should we let a machine learning machine do, and what should we let a person do? I think that’s going to be our first challenge. I can’t even think out to 2043 right now. I have to admit. I really think that the, we’re already seeing the question of what do we really need Debbie Levitt to do, and what can we ask a bot to do? And what I’ve noticed is a bot can rehash stuff that’s out there.

Debbie: For example, if you go to Google right now and you say, how do I be more customer-centric? See a load of great sounding things that aren’t actionable at all, you’ll see, “Care about your customer. Build empathy. Brainstorm and be innovative.” None of those are actionable. You’ve no idea what to do and what not to do. So I think if we can just talk about the nearer future instead of the distant future when it’s the robot uprising, I think that our more immediate challenge in the coming years will be how do we keep critical thinking about what the bots are feeding us or returning to us to make sure that even if we do find a place for what I’m calling bots to assist us in our work or be part of our adventures. How do we make sure we’re still critically thinking about what we’ve put into them and what we’re getting out of them? Because I see a lot of stuff that people are very excited about that just looks like crappy rehashed articles you can find anywhere on Google or Medium and blog posts that just say, “Yeah, have more empathy and make a customer journey map and be more customer-centric.” That doesn’t help you at all. And that may be where our AI is for some time because it’s not yet a thinking robot. It doesn’t have my ability to be strategic. So that’s my wish for the immediate future because I can’t even think about 2043. Hope you don’t mind the answer.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 57 With Marcin Wichary: What’s The Key To A Great Keyboard?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask what’s the key to a great keyboard? Is this essential part of our daily toolkit easily overlooked? Vitaly Friedman talks to expert Marcin Wichary to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: He’s a great designer, excellent writer, and wonderful engineer. Originally from Szczecin, Poland, he used to work as a design lead and a typographer at Medium. He was a fellow of Code for America and a UX designer at Google working with the Chrome search and homepage dual teams. He now works as a design manager and editor design lead at Figma in San Francisco. He studied at West Palm University in Szczecin, and completed his doctoral in human computer interaction in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and also in Amsterdam. Apparently, he speaks at least — well, that’s from what we know — six languages including Polish, Dutch, and a little bit of English. Now he is extremely obsessed with many things, but most notably link underlines, typesetting, fonts, and guess what? Typewriters.

Vitaly: So we know he’s a great designer with a keen eye for typography, but did you know that Marcin is a former Polish handball goalkeeper, and after hours he likes to force his friends to watch Sneakers, over and over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog Day all over again. And he managed to put Pac-Man on Google’s homepage. My Smashing friends, please welcome Marcin Wichary. Hello Marcin. How are you doing today?

Marcin: I’m smashing, but the handball players... That was funny. There’s a guy whose name exactly like me, who’s a handball player.

Vitaly: Oh, I thought it’s you. Marcin, this could not be coincidence. He looks like you.

Marcin: Kind of looks like me. It’s funny because I’m sort of little sour because he has a Wikipedia entry and I don’t. But also there are these cool YouTube videos of people chanting his name like Marcin Wichary. And I sometimes play them and pretend that that’s me.

Vitaly: But I’m sure that there are wonderful listeners who are listening to this very recording right now... They’ll be more than inspired and excited to create a Wikipedia page for you, just need to tell us about your story, all the things that typically go in a Wikipedia page.

Marcin: When the Wikipedia learns about this collusion here. I don’t—

Vitaly: That’s okay. I think we’re all safe here. We have wonderful friendly people listening to us. Marcin, it’s such a pleasure to see you again. I mean we haven’t seen each other for.. a long time. You spoke at SmashingConfs a while back as well, and it’s such a pleasure. You never change, do you? You never change. One thing that really excites me about you is that you are really obsessed with things, but in a good way. I mean, not in a bad way, right? In good ways. And I’m wondering, maybe it’ll be a good start just for you to briefly share your story. Where did it come to be? Did you want to become a web designer when you were growing up?

Marcin: Oh, that’s a great question. I’ve heard this... So the answer is probably no, in as much as web design didn’t exist when I was growing up.

Vitaly: Exactly. Yeah.

Marcin: For kind of an aspiring little nerd, I got pretty lucky because my dad had this sort of dream job at the moment, which was repairing arcade games and pinball machines. And it’s fun because it’s obviously games, right? It’s nice to be able to go into the arcade and play for free in early nineties or mid-nineties. But it’s also fun because you can kind of open them up and see how they’re built. And that I think was what got me hooked into, "Oh, this fun was designed, made by somebody." And you can look up all of the assets, you can open the pinball machine and poke your finger at things and—

Vitaly: Which is, of course, what you did.

Marcin: I did, yeah. I highly recommend it if you have a pinball machine next to you, ask them to open it up and show you. There’s so much under the play field. And that sort of led eventually to computers and kind of programming and I think as many people probably, I felt like I was just a bad programmer who got distracted by phones and colors and recreating UI elements.

Marcin: And eventually much later I learned this is actually something like what I’ve been doing. It’s called UX design or interaction design or whatever you want to call it. And that became kind of my thing, but not before I actually invested in a lot of becoming a programmer, because I thought that’s the closest to where I was. And so I backed into the... There’s the classic should designers code question, which we shouldn’t really talk about it because it’s unanswerable. But I kind of walk myself back into it by accident. I was a programmer first and I kind of became a designer with all of this programming baggage. Which actually ended up being kind of at least useful in my line of work.

Vitaly: But I mean one thing that’s really interests me most of the time is that I had a very similar story as well when I was growing up. Because I remember there was no thing, becoming a designer, you just do some web stuff and then you kind of webmaster in a way. And one thing that I noticed many of my friends who were moving into design and this web thing, they came from everywhere. They were doing all different things. Some of them were building glasses, the others would be architects, the others would be writers. And it was this incredible moment of almost a wave, a very strong wave of just people from all over the place coming in. And it felt like you are more... You are just becoming something new, something entirely new.

Vitaly: So it’s like you used to be that person, then you’re becoming a new person. Do you feel, and this is moment of transformation, at least this is how I experienced it, did you feel the same way? You’ve become somebody else over time or you just grew naturally into this role being interested in everything digital? And obviously we’ll talk about also some of the technology. Ancient or I would say... Not ancient maybe, but vintage technology. So I’m really wondering just what brought you to that specific place. You could be doing so many things, not just programming, not just design. There are all those things.

Marcin: It’s a great question and it’s something I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about, because it’s attention between two things. One is have having a plan. I want to become this person, I want to do those things. I want to invest in that. Which you can and probably should have to some extent. But I think more of my career has been reflection on what things meant to me, and what excited me, and what I gravitated to, and seeing what more I can do with that and how I can connect it to other things. Like to give you a specific example, I joined Medium back in the day because it just seemed like extraordinarily cool, and huge kind of focus on craft, a small team, a very beautiful but also meaningful product that kind of helped people write. Which felt important to me, always felt important to me. But in the process of it, I started writing more and more in a different way.

Marcin: And I think Medium was actually kind of important for me. You joked about me knowing six languages, which I only know two very well and a few poorly, but at that point in my life I still wasn’t really sure if I can write in English, because my original language is Polish. And Medium got me over that hump. It got me comfortable with English enough and then I started writing about this typewriter stuff and people started reacting to it and at some point I was like, I connected these three things. One was I’ve always wanted to write a book because my mom was a librarian and I thought books is the biggest thing you can do in your life. If you write a book, you paid your dues on this planet. And then I crossed some sort of a threshold where I could do it in English.

Marcin: I felt for the first time English is my language. And then I found a thing to write about, completely by accident. So I think for me it's, I’ve never really felt there was an inflection point that I became a new person. But in hindsight I always kind of look at those connecting things and saying like, "Oh, should I invest more in typography because I seem to be really into fonts." But I didn’t know I was. I don’t know. Maybe at some point pinballs are going to be back and I will be the pinball guy. I don’t know, that’s probably not going to happen. But that’s kind of often how I thought about it. Think a little bit about what you want to do, but also connect the things that you already have, at least worked for me.

Vitaly: Yeah. I mean one other thing that really interests me is that we all get super excited about technology. We all are almost possessed or obsessed I would say by this notion, "Oh, we can do things faster and we can do things better." And what I learned is that although we try to make things faster and we try to make things better, the humanity is still incredibly busy. We used to think that technology is going to help us and we’re going to be doing less and we’re going to be just a little bit more relaxed in life. But it seems like we’re doing more and more and more with that technology.

Vitaly: But what I really like and what really gives me a little bit of fascination I guess, is that you are always looking back. You are almost obsessed with old technology. I mean, probably also with new technology, maybe I’m wrong here. But I’m wondering is something wrong with modern technology that you are almost spending most of your time with the old one?

Marcin: What isn't? Yeah, I mean there’s always something wrong with technology. I think we go through these cycles where we get excited and then we reevaluate it. I think crypto just went through this phase. I mean honestly, as much as I think you and I both love the web, there are probably some moments where we’re like, "Oh, was this good for all of us, or did it create some challenges? But I don’t think Tim Berners-Lee is just universally happy with what came of web. But I think generally, I can’t say the old... I want to actually very specifically avoid, "They don’t make them like they used to," kind of line of thinking because I don’t think it’s particularly helpful.

Marcin: I think for me a lot of it is about connecting the past into the future and remixing it. Literally this week at my work, I will probably use some things that I learned in my research for the book about the keyboards, because keyboards are still around and typography is the same. Typography kind of has all of these waves and existed for hundreds of years, and you can grab things from the past and you have to be careful, because nostalgia is incredibly powerful but not always useful. And you can see what still makes sense and what can you learn from the past, and what you can throw away, or what needs to be revisited. Because there’s a lot of baggage there. I don’t know how much... I was just thinking about this. Do you know Playdate, the little game machine with the crank?

Vitaly: Yeah. Yes, yes.

Marcin: They made it, I think last year. Shipped it exactly at the pandemic time, so it slowed them down. But it’s this beautiful little device. It’s a handheld device with games with a monochrome screen and this kind of strange user interface. But what I really like about it as a statement is that it tries to negotiate with nostalgia. It’s not just an emulator of an old game. It’s more sort of looking at a past and saying, "What of those things that we moved on from were actually interesting and better." Maybe the limitations of a monochromatic screen with fat pixels is something interesting for creativity. Maybe a device that’s sort of small and dedicated to one thing, it’s great and we kind of lost it over the years. But I also say we want internet connectivity. We want a really nice metal device that feels great.

Marcin: It’s this figuring out how to recombine those things. And I think that’s ultimately very important to me. That was the same story with Underlines at Medium. It wasn’t that let’s be forever indebted to the gods of typography from 200 years ago, who designed a perfect underline. Because that’s really not that exciting. I mean it is from the craft perspective, but it was really interesting, like how do we make links that look beautiful, because then you want to link to more things. And linking to more things, it’s just a very, very powerful thing that you can do.

Vitaly: And a very unique thing that we can do. Interactive media as well, right?

Marcin: Yeah, and I was inspired by just people who write in a way... That’s what I miss sometimes of writing for "paper." That you cannot link to things. Because that’s just like-

Vitaly: Well, we have footnotes.

Marcin: Yeah, yeah. But you cannot... Do you remember John Syracuse’s MacOS 10 reviews? They were on Ars Technica for many, many years. Every time a new MacOS 10 came out.

Vitaly: Yeah, I remember. Yeah, yeah.

Marcin: And he linked all over the place, and it was just genuinely inspiring how much it changed the way you could read actively.

Vitaly: Yeah, but do you think Marcin, I mean I kind of keep coming back to this actually, for the last couple of weeks. Somehow I remember vividly this notion of imperfection when I was growing up. So I assumed that we have a similar age and I remember viewing all these TV shows, and the conversations and the broken, semi-broken internet connection, and pretty bad phones and all these things. And it felt so human to me somehow. Like, "Oh, of course this thing is broken." And that’s fine.

Marcin: And I feel like these moments of almost serendipity, I guess. I mean, I’m not trying to be nostalgic here just for the sake of being nostalgic, but I have this feeling that maybe we have too much of what we actually want these days, in terms of technology. So you can watch anything you want with the click on a button. There is this notion of, you don’t have to go anywhere. Everything is right here.

Marcin: But then I kind of liked this moment. I watched one of the silly nineties movies, and there was this moment where you would go to this VHS store and you would pick up the VHS tape and you would have an endless conversation with your friends about what are we going to watch, without actually watching a trailer of it. Kind of imagine what it’s going to be. And I feel like, "Oh wow." I don’t have that experience anymore. We just pick something up based on IMDB score and call it a day.

Marcin: Yeah, I think we are figuring out what this sort of abundance of things means to us. I think there’s a parallel argument you could make, and I think some people made, that for example, Twitter with its sort of virality and outrage and all of that, is just an expression of, we were never meant to be connected to so many people so intimately. That’s just not how we’re wired. The Dunbar number exists for a reason, and I think hopefully we’ll figure it out. I don’t know.

Vitaly: I’m very optimistic about that. I’ve always been.

Marcin: Yeah. I think you can see even in the wake of Twitter news, people trying to think... Maybe the sort of small curated set of blogs that I follow is actually a little bit more human, like you say. Maybe the Google reader was right all along. And so hopefully we’ll adjust and figure out what is that sort of human moment on this scale of zero to everything.

Vitaly: But I also think the human technology, I want to see more of human technology. And I think that’s in some way the hub. Actually, this is a nice segue to your work. Like the Figma editor, where you see cursors coming in and moving around and doing things together. I always feel just a little bit of excitement when I see cursors moving in and people coming in, and a few more of us just play around, and they do these things and sometimes it’s broken and sometimes this isn’t kind of... I don’t know. Sticky note or whatever.

Marcin: It’s just falls over the cliff or anything. But I like this notion. It seems like this is really something that really connects me with people all over the world, just the cursors. Maybe you could actually speak a little bit more about what exactly you’re working on than the Figma context. I noticed you’re working on the core, the heart, the classic Figma editor, but specifically keyboard shortcuts, if I’m not mistaken.

Marcin: Yeah, I’ve become the keyboard person also at work because, for obvious reasons, I guess. I joined Figma almost five years ago, and originally I was one of the designers. I work on the first version of auto layout and a bunch of typography things, selection colors, which I think turned out well. And a lot of smaller things, because I think we hope that Figma is also a lot of smaller things done well, and a lot of big things done well and they coexist.

Marcin: These days I’m moved towards being a manager, so I’m basically trying to help other people who are more talented than me to make those things happen. They’re working on really, really impressive features that you know might have seen already or you will see later this year. It’s all in the... We call it the editor, the classic Figma. And as for the keyboard, yeah, it’s kind of funny how it’s haunting me in a way, because Figma is kind of the productivity app in a way. And in some ways it’s actually really old school, if you think about it.

Marcin: It’s in a modern context, it has multiplayer on the web, but it really has right-click menus and a bunch of the... And again, it’s a negotiation with nostalgia in a way. It’s like how much of this is good, how much of this we need to revisit every day? And the same with the keyboard, because keyboards are still the tool if you want to do a lot of things really quickly. It’s kind of miraculous how they were not built to be that tool originally, maybe. But it’s still probably the best connection between your brain and the outside world, is the keyboard. So we are constantly, "Where do we put these keyboard shortcuts?" And there’s so much history of keyboard shortcuts that you have to negotiate. "What do we do with this modifier key?" Which we constantly run off modifier keys. That’s like an ongoing joke.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s not surprising. Even just how many keyboard shortcuts you already have.

Marcin: And how many things. It’s like the classic Doug Engelbart thing. It’s just one of the most beautiful things happens when you have one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard. If you watch somebody use Figma or other power tools really well, it’s incredible. And yet, it’s funny how Doug Engelbart tried to invent his own device for the left hand, or if you’re right-handed for the mouse, which was a key set, a special device.

Marcin: But we don’t have that. We use the keyboard with the other hand, and the keyboard is not really designed that well to do that, because of the combination of modifier keys and a mouse. So that’s always... It’s funny, my job is in a lot of ways, it’s the same sort of historical research as my book, except put in a very different context. Like Shift + A for auto layout. That’s a shortcut we invented, right? In a way for Figma. It didn’t exist, but we were just... First of all, we were lucky that it was free, because Alt + A is already art board, Command + A is already select all. And you could argue Shift + A is actually not the proper shortcut because shortcuts are not supposed to start with Shift, except we all started doing this a few years ago because we run out.

Vitaly: I would love to be in that meeting where you’re actually deciding, "Okay, so we need to find a new shortcut. So this is how we’re going to this." I’m just curious, how do you even run that meeting? So let’s explore all the options we have, or it needs to be connected in some way or the other with what we’re trying to do here.

Marcin: Yeah, it’s funny. You don’t want to be... It’s hard. I’m just going to say it’s really, really hard, because there’s just so many limitations. And I think the really hard part about keyboard shortcuts or anything revolving around motor memory is that you can’t really negotiate it. Once a keyboard shortcut puts itself in your fingers, it’s really hard to get it out of it.

Marcin: There’s this great research I learned of a long time ago, probably a century ago, they had a person who learned how to touch type, and then he moved on to do other things with his life. I think at this point it was still possible not to touch a keyboard for years or decades. So he touch typed for a while on the typewriter, and then for 25 years he did nothing. He had a secretary who typed for him. And they put him in front of the typewriter like 25 years since he last wrote, and he just typed. It wasn’t as fast as 25 years, but it was sort of miraculous how quickly he got back into typing really, really well. And then they did it again 25 years later.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s quite the experiment right there.

Marcin: Yeah. There was a funny... They just found this person, and because things just installed themselves in the motor memory in sort of really beautiful ways, in a way. That’s how we can walk, that’s how we can chew gum, that’s how we can do all sorts of things. And that’s how we can type.

Marcin: For some of us, not to make it very dark, but at some point in our life, you might forget who you are, but you will still be able to type, because that’s a different part of our brain. So if you are used to Command + S to save, if you’re used to Command + A to select all, if you used to Command + B to make something bold, that’s non-negotiable, more or less. It’s really hard to take that shortcut away and put something else in its place. So it’s very easy to just keep adding shortcut, but it also is tricky because there’s only so many keys.

Vitaly: Yeah, because it’s wrong.

Marcin: ...those slack conversations, and I have some guidelines internally to Figma, but it’s just really hard. Every time, it’s just a really long conversation where you feel like you cannot win, but you have to.

Vitaly: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean obviously keyboards have been following you for a long time, and I even heard rumors that you are working on a book around that. Started writing back in 2016, if not mistaken. And it’s not just the book, from what I could tell. It’s almost an epic monumental opus about keyboards in three volumes, beautiful slip case, 1,300 photographs, 42 chapters, 520 full color photos, 37 Easter eggs, and four photos of keyboards using Comic Sans. Well, that must have taken quite some time. And you probably are a little bit... Maybe you wouldn’t mean that. A little bit obsessed with keyboards. So maybe you could tell us a bit more about how this all came to be and what should we be expecting in the book?

Marcin: Yeah, so it started, like I mentioned earlier, I was at Medium and I think Medium offices, they used to have rooms named after typewriters. Just because it’s a publishing company, it’s kind of a cute gimmick. But they also had typewriters in those rooms as decoration. And I didn’t care as much about keyboards before, but I started looking at those typewriters and they all had QWERTY, but they had interesting keys on the periphery and they all were a little bit different. And I started being curious about why. And you mentioned this sort of obsession. What was really interesting about keyboards for me is that the more I kept reading about them, the more there was. There’s this sort of fractal for anything, let’s say backspace. I start looking into backspace. It’s like, "Oh my God." It’s a whole set of stories just around this one key.

Marcin: And I learned over the years that not everything’s as interesting, but a lot more things are more interesting than you think, in general. I think you get into this little... You develop this sense of, "Is this world digging deeper?" And it felt like this. And so I started writing some Medium posts, and then people had really nice reactions to them. I think I wrote one about the Turkish typewriter just because I somehow learned about it. And I got messages from people in Turkey saying, "Thank you. Nobody appreciates this thing that we have." And then I wrote something else about I think typography and typewriters, because that’s increasingly connected. And at some point I had this moment where I’m like, "Wait, if I keep doing that, there’s just enough words for a book." There was almost a numerical approach. I multiplied, I was like, "Oh, it’s a book length."

Marcin: And of course the joke’s on me, because it ended up being much more than I expected. Took a lot more time. But I was talking to Craig Mod, who’s a really good author and just this wonderful creative person. And I think at some point he told me, "If you want to write a book, I think you have to pick a subject that comes back to you even if you don’t want it, because you will need a lot of energy. You will need a lot of help. You will need something that will carry you when you are in the darkest moment. And there will be dark moments." And I thought, "Oh, the keyboard thing keeps coming back to me." I keep looking at it, I keep researching it, I keep writing about it. And that ended up being very, very helpful.

Marcin: I think the rest of it is just like, yeah, I sort of approach it in this sort of semi obsessive way as I do, which maybe will one day lead to my demise or some sort, because this is a lot of stuff. But it ended up being this... You mentioned epic, and maybe it is, but I also very deliberately want to make it not... How do I say it. Nerdy in all the right ways, or intimidating, but in a good way that makes you want to read it. Because it’s a lot of stuff, but it’s also I think written, I hope, in a very approachable way. So you can just get lost in some stories of various keys or typewriters or modern mechanical keyboards. I can pick one chapter, you can read it front to back, but also there’s one thing I’m proud of.

Marcin: I think you mentioned 1300 photos. I think most of them are full color, and it’s also just... You can just look at the book. It’s actually funny. I learned this somehow also through giving talks at Smashing conference, other conferences, of how you tell stories that are textual and visual at the same time. There’s all the schools about what do you put in your slides, don’t read over slide, do this, don’t do that. And I think a lot of them are, do whatever works for you, honestly.

Marcin: I saw people read from slides and I was engrossed. I saw people that have no slides at all, and it was great. So you find your way. But I think the way I found was just this rich tapestry of visuals, sometimes showing exactly what I’m talking about, sometimes showing something that’s parallel, but I don’t even acknowledge it. And I think it’s actually the book in many ways was inspired by Hawaii and other people give talks. Where you have your left brain engage with this, your right brain engage with this, and I hope it actually kind of counterintuitively helps you read the book more. By adding photos it becomes less hard to go through, because there’s always something to carry you. Those photos are also very deliberately chosen, not just so they’re pretty, but they also partake in telling the story.

Vitaly: And so did you design the book then as well? Because it’s a really beautiful design too.

Marcin: Yeah, I did. There’s another part of the journey, and I think the explanation of why it took so long is that I originally thought I’m going to have it published, like many others do. And I actually thought, I don’t want to self-publish it because honestly, I thought that’s just for losers. It’s like for people who cannot get a contract or cannot get an agent. And I kind of went 180 over the first few years where I talked to many people and they said, "Self-publishing is actually really interesting, in a way that you can make this book feel exactly like what you want." And there’s no shame in that anymore. I mean, there are bad self-published books, but there are also bad published. The whole thing became much more flatter and much more actually complicated. Kickstarter made it possible for people to just make the book how they wanted. I decided to do it that way. To do it on my own, and Kickstarter actually coming soon in February. So if that works out, I think it’s going to be-

Vitaly: Well, it looks a sense of beautiful. I mean, the moment I saw it, I had to swipe through all the pictures and zoom in and zoom out to see everything. So it’s really beautiful.

Marcin: Thank you.

Vitaly: I’m very, very excited to see it coming to fruition. That’s great. Well, actually, because in that research, working and working on that book and looking at all these keyboards, I really have to ask at this point, what was actually the most remarkable typewriter or keyboard? I think maybe keyboard would be more appropriate, that you have discovered. Like the most unusual thing that you have seen.

Marcin: So yeah, it’s a lot, right? It’s really hard to choose this. I actually am in the process of making this book. I amassed this collection of probably 150 strange keyboards in there. The emphasis being strange, because there’s a lot of strange stuff, and I love that. And a lot of it is in the book, photographed. But I think I’m actually going to go the other way, which is, so if you look at the history of keyboards, I nominated five keyboards as being the important keyboards. Sort of like the milestones. The first one is the first QWERTY typewriter. Then there’s the Underwood No. 5, which is the first hit. First typewriter hit. Sort of like the iPhone of its day. Then there’s this electric, which is a beautiful kind of electric typewriter with a font ball and just reinvention of the typewriter. Then there’s the Model M, no surprise here. The clicky keyboard from mid-eighties.

Marcin: And then there’s the iPhone. I think the iPhone just changed so much how we think about keyboards. And so these five keyboards have centerfold in the book, they’re treated very, very well. But I added one more, just personally. I added one more to that list, just something that really excited me. Selectric, which was this electric typewriter came out in, I think 1961, very early sixties. And they kept improving it. And in 1973, I think, they released correcting Selectric II. Which was like v3 of this Selectric. And I actually rented it, because I was interested in it. And it’s really interesting, because it’s still a typewriter. You plug it to the wall, there’s no electronics there at all, and yet it does... First of all, it feels amazing. There were people saying, "Oh, Selectric was the best typewriter or the best keyboard I ever typed on." And I was just like, "Whatever." You just happened to be a teenager at the time, and you just learned to love it, because we all love everything that happened when we were teenagers, right?

Vitaly: We also associate kind of our feelings, whatever we experienced at the time with the device, although it might be just a device.

Marcin: Yeah, it’s classic, right? I’m not going to deny it. And then blah, whatever, nostalgia. And then I talked to him, I was like, "Oh my God, this is actually a really nice feeling typewriter, right? It’s a typewriter keyboard that feels like a computer keyboard. Which is kind of remarkable, even making that happen. But it also has a lot of these things that you would think only computers could have. So it has a little buffer when you press two keys. It remembers the second one, so you can overlap your strokes. It has obviously the font ball where it can replace fonts easily and type. And it has a bunch of other things including, and this is what blew my mind, it has a functioning backspace. If you make a mistake, you can erase it from paper, which seems like something that shouldn’t be possible, because how do you erase it from paper, right?

Marcin: It’s on paper. You can cover it up. No, they actually did this really complicated. It was chemistry. They made this very complicated. It’s not even ink, I think film where it sticks to paper sort of not very eagerly, so you can remove it. And it had this whole little special backspace key. That’s why it’s called correcting Selectric, that if you do it quickly enough, you can remove it. And it’s pretty much gone from paper, especially if you type over it. It’s obviously a dead end. Soon after that, computers took over and keyboards went in a very different way. And with computers, you don’t have to worry about the backspace. It’s almost the opposite. Everything disappears if you’re not paying attention. So backspace is almost the easiest key to make. But this correcting Selectric tool was just... My mouth was open the whole time I was using those. Like, "How is this possible?"

Vitaly: Yeah, that is very exciting. I never thought about this being even possible or ever implemented. That’s unusual. Now, do you think that for your work you could be imagining actually typing on that kind of typewriter and then it’s kind of in some way plugged into your computer? Or will it be just a misuse of technology?

Marcin: No, no. That’s actually another beauty of the Selectric is that the way it was built internally, and if you open... It’s an incredibly complex device, right? It’s so dense. Basically back in the day, the maintenance of IBM Selectric typewriters was a career. They were both so popular and so complicated compared to regular typewriters that you could literally spend your entire life fixing them if you wanted, and many people did.

Marcin: But one of the other things that I didn’t even mention is that Selectric inside, because of how the keys have to be connected to the ball that rotates. By the way, if anybody’s listening, look up Selectric ball, slow motion on YouTube, and it’s just like that alone is a marvel of technology. But the way they connect it, it’s actually through binary code. So people realized very quickly they could repurpose this typewriter to be a terminal.

Marcin: Like back when display screens were incredibly expensive, a lot of people used Selectrics to interface with their computers, because you could type, you can read, it’s a command line effectively. And then even IBM realized this, and they released what they called Selectric IO, which was just a little bit more prepared computer terminal. So on top of everything that I said, it also became this interface. It’s sort of like missing link, not only typewriter keyboards to mechanical keyboards, but also just sort of between typewriters and computers in a way. It’s sort of an event diagram of the universe, Selectric served both sides. I always loved those sort of transitional products, right?

Vitaly: Yeah, that’s incredible. But I mean, I think you have very strong opinions also about the butterfly keyboard. Then we had on Mac for a while, the issues we had there. And I do have to ask, I really have to ask. So what kind of keyboard do you use for work? It can’t be a regular one, can it?

Marcin: Well, okay, I’m looking at it now. So obviously I care about keyboards, but I’m not nearly as obsessed as a lot of people about mechanical keyboards. People who put keyboards together, lube their switches. I’ve never went that far, but some of those people are in the book. Some of the stories. I have, let me see. And I think the way I talk about it can tell you what’s important to me. So I have a HEXgears Gemini. Which I had to look up, because I actually forgot. But it’s a TKL. So it doesn’t have a numpad, because I don’t use it. It’s a relatively modern keyboard. It has lights, but I don’t use those lights. What’s important to me is that I have this blank kick ups. Just, I don’t know, it makes me feel cool.

Marcin: But also in the shape of old terminal kick ups from the seventies. I think it’s called SA or SAP, for those who know the jargon. And that was important to me because it’s sort of partly what I learned in my research for the book. And I just like the shape, and it sort of feels, again, like a little bit from the past, little bit from the future kind of situation. I don’t know what switch... People are going to cancel me for this. I don’t remember what the switches are, but they’re custom switch. Well, not common, they’re not Cherry, they’re something, they’re yellow. I can tell you that. Maybe some of the listeners can chime in. I got them because they’re quieter. They’re linear and they’re quieter for Zoom, but I also like the way they feel. So it was partly functional and partly necessity.

Vitaly: Well, Marcin, this is way more specific of an answer than I was expecting, but that’s okay. But one thing that you haven’t answered yet, and that’s something I do have to ask as well, is you must have tried at work keyboard or keyboard layout. Or maybe by any chance you have a Turkish F keyboard, I don’t know, or any of the... I don’t even know how to pronounce them. JCUKEN and autopsy or anything of that kind, or are you just using a regular QWERTY one?

Marcin: So again, this might be disappointing for people. I just use QWERTY. I actually don’t touch type very well. Here’s the fun thing. I touch type better with my left hand than with my right hand. I just watched myself, I recorded myself, because I was curious. It just happened. I just happened to learn that way. And that’s kind of like a story of QWERTY. I have a Dvorak typewriter somewhere. I have a Turkish typewriter. I definitely type on a bunch of those layouts as research. Because it’s interesting, and it’s interesting to watch your fingers do all of these different motions. But I think the reason why I use QWERTY, is I think the reason a lot of people use QWERTY, which is it’s just kind of good enough.

Marcin: I was lucky that I never had any issues with my wrists or forearms or what some people call RSI, even though it’s not a proper term. And so I never needed to type a lot. I never needed to type very, very fast. And so I just stopped at some point learning, and I just typed the way I type. And I think that’s true for many people.

Vitaly: Yeah, of course.

Marcin: QWERTY may be disappointing to many people, because we sort of standardized on a really bad thing. But I would argue it’s not that bad, in a way. It was definitely intentional, that we know. It is universal, which we cannot... We have to respect that. The fact that I can use this QWERTY keyboard and type in Chinese or Japanese or many other layouts, even if you switch it to AZERTY or Turkish. It’s just the same physical layout. I think there’s something that actually help us to some extent. And if you care about Dvorak and it’s useful for you, or many of those more modern layouts, or if you have to, because your hands protest at QWERTY, like you can. That’s the beauty of the kind of computer keyboards from the eighties and onward, that you can switch it. You no longer have to... Dvorak had to put it in a typewriter and sell it, and it was just a huge endeavor. Dvorak the person. August Dvorak.

Marcin: And that was hard at that point, in the thirties. Try to convince the typewriter manufacturers to launch a whole new line of typewriters with your thing, even though you said you have scientific proof that it’s better. And I don’t think that’s actually true, but today everybody... And people do come up with their own layouts. I admire a lot of that. But I also think, for example, the kind of market failure of QWERTY has nothing... Sorry, of Dvorak. QWERTY didn’t fail at all. QWERTY keeps-

Vitaly: I think QWERTY is, from what I can tell, from what I’ve heard recently, it’s quite successful.

Marcin: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of like the funny thing. You can grab the guy who puts together the first QWERTY, right? Christopher Latham Sholes. Almost exactly 150 years ago, they released the first typewriter with QWERTY, and you could put him in front of the modern computer and he would know what to do. It’s the same thing. It’s kind of like, you could see it as very disappointing, but it’s also kind of an interesting success story.

Marcin: But I think the failure of Dvorak, or at least the mass adoption of Dvorak and other layouts has really nothing to do with the layout itself. People like Dvorak didn’t really maybe want to care about, which is marketing or storytelling or thinking about transitions. Again, something like with Figma, how do you transition from one keyboard shortcut to the other one? It’s a huge endeavor, and it takes years. So imagine that 50 years after QWERTY was invented. That was already very, very hard. And I think those are the things that also matter, and not just the sort of scientific advantage that’s proved by math of a certain layout, which by the way, is also really, really hard to do, and I don’t think we know how to do that.

Vitaly: Yeah. That’s right. Well, as we are wrapping up here, I do have to ask one important question, of course. Now, today we’ve been learning a little bit about keyboards, and we’ll now know that even Marcin is using QWERTY, which is I think perfectly cool and all. But I’ve been wondering also, what have you been learning about lately, Marcin? What keeps you awake at night? Are there any particular topics where you are diving in, or maybe there is one particular keyboard that you’re dreaming about seeing or typing on one day? Do you have this magical thing that you desperately want to see or touch one day?

Marcin: That’s a great question. So to answer in order, I’m learning a lot of things still for the book. I was learning 3JS for the website. I’m learning a lot about printing and marketing now. Not sure that’s super interesting. The one thing that was hard about writing the book, and I think maybe every historian has that, is that there are the artifacts, right? I actually typed on the first QWERTY typewriter for a very brief moment, and it was really cool. It was kind of magical, particularly that it was just in a museum, and nobody told me it was that, I just realized it was that. It was a great discovery. I wish I had a time machine to talk about some of those people and their decisions. People who made the first typewriter, people who made the Underwood No. 5, people who worked on the Selectric, because it feels like there are no blog posts, there are no talks as much. There are some papers, not very many. There are some patterns, but they’re not very useful.

Marcin: I just want some of those people on Twitter talking about their process. I know that’s not going to happen, and I think part of my book is trying to pretend this could happen, tell their stories for them. But I really wish I could just chat over drinks or something with some of those people. And if you want to tell me something that’s completely... It turns out writing a book is just all consuming. It’s just takes over your life, whether you want it or not. So for those who are considering it, I would recommend it, but beware. But I’ve been really inspired. There’s this person on YouTube called Adam Neely, who I think is a professional musician, and it’s just a very different world. Obviously keyboards and music, yes. But I don’t look at it this.

Marcin: He’s this really good storyteller around this... It’s kind of what I think I would want to be for my domain, which is go nerdy on things in approachable ways, and tell those stories about like, why do musicians need in ear monitors, which I’d never really thought about. And it’s a lot about propagation sound and delays and exactly the kind of stuff you think of as a designer. Or what’s the difference between C Sharp and B. Which apparently there is, or just pop culture stuff. So it’s Adam Neely, it’s really, really well done. He’s a great storyteller. And I don’t know much about music, but I’m surprised how often... It’s like watching a TV show. Sometimes it goes over my head, but it’s like always.... You’re watching a pro tell a really good story, and it’s always entertaining.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s very cool. I would love to look that up. Because I didn’t know why artists actually bother to plug in something into the ear. They probably have a pretty good sound quality anyway. But now I know. Well, if you, dear listener would like to hear more from Marcin, you can find him on Twitter where he’s @ M W I C H A R Y, which is mwichary. Also on his homepage, Aresluna. I do have to ask you, Marcin, at this point, Aresluna, I couldn’t find the connection anywhere between you and Aresluna. What is the connection? Where is the missing link here?

Marcin: Oh, yeah. So it’s actually all connected to the things we talked about. How do I tell this story quickly? My favorite writer of all time is Stanisław Lem, the Polish writer who did a lot of sci-fi. And I think just inspired me to write myself, and inspired me to think of language in much more sort of creative and malleable and fun ways, because he had so much fun with language. And part of that was, so I’m reading this book and there’s this one... It’s a future sci-fi kind of thing. And one ship talks to the other ship, and they say, "Titan for Aresluna reporting to the star base or something." And it’s not explain what it means. It’s just the word Aresluna. And so what Lem was doing was... Turned out to be word building. He didn’t explain something, but if you look at those words, it’s like Ares is Mars, Luna is Moon.

Marcin: So you can very quickly get, oh, they’re flying between the Mars and Moon so often that they just have shortcut, they have jargon for that. So in this one world, you can just establish this big part of story building. So I just kind of like that. I like the sound of it. And I also like that Mars is not like Moon at all. He also wrote about that, and it’s fun. I don’t know, it was just this fun juxtaposition and... I don’t know, it felt kind of important to me to acknowledge that. And if you haven’t read science of Lem, he’s amazing. You should do that.

Vitaly: Yeah. Well, fortunately you don’t have to go to Mars or to Moon in order to read about Marcin, and also read his upcoming book. You can also find all the fine details, obviously on Aresluna, which is aresluna.org. We’re also going to link to it in the notes, and you can also be notified about the book updates. And it is really, really beautiful and really incredible and highly recommended, and the title is unbelievable, shifthappens.site. Which I think is a really, really cool name for a book about keyboards. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Marcin. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for people who are going to listen to us maybe 20 years from now, wondering why were they talking about keyboards? "We don’t even have keyboards anymore. We just speak to computers now."

Marcin: Oh yeah, we’ll have keyboards. There’ll still be QWERTY around.

Vitaly: So are you sure we’re going to have keyboards?

Marcin: Yeah.

Vitaly: QWERTY keyboards? So will it be like, I don’t know, touch slash, trackpad slash, whatever keyboard?

Marcin: No, there will be more stuff, of course. There will be voice, there will be maybe some neural connections. But I think keyboards will be with us for a while, because they’re just really good at what they do. For better or worse, QWERTY will be with us for the same amount of time, I’m pretty sure.

Vitaly: So in other words, you’re saying that your book is probably going to stay up to date for the next 150 years.

Marcin: Hopefully as maybe historical artifact, maybe not. Yeah, it’s funny, I just realized that we never mentioned the title of the book, which is a marketing faux pas. Shift Happens. Yeah, buy my book or do it on Kickstarter. But I’m joking. I mean, you don’t have to. I would appreciate it. I think it’s a fun book. I don’t want to pitch it too hard, but think the "parting words of wisdom," is this whole thing happened because I just looked at the everyday object that I thought is boring, and I found it wasn’t boring.

Marcin: It really was not boring at all. So I guess I’m curious for everybody who’s listening, are there other things in your life that are worth looking deeper into, and checking out, and sort of poking at and seeing what happens? Because I think the journey of the book, we didn’t even talk about how many really interesting people I got to learn from and to interview and to talk about. And people for whom keyboards mean so much more than they ever did or will for me. And so I think that will be my suggestion, if you go deep in something and see where it takes you.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 56 With Veerle Pieters: How Has The Design Industry Changed?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast we ask how has the design industry changed? Is technology making our work easier? Vitaly Friedman talks to veteran designer Veerle Pieters to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a graphic and web designer who founded a graphic and web design studio with her wonderful, wonderful partner, Geert. She was born on the Belgian coast near Bruges — oh, I would love to go back to Bruges — and now lives in Deinze, a city in London with 45,000 inhabitants. From an early age, she immersed herself into drawing and love of illustration has kept her going for more than three decades now. And she’s been designing logos, stationary, brochures, books, websites, and applications since then. She has worked with Facebook, Google, Greenpeace, Adobe, the Library of Congress, and so many other small and large companies and organizations. Most importantly, she chooses her project based on how well she connects with the company, all people working there.

Vitaly: She’s also a firm believer in the power of sharing, which is exactly what she has been doing in her wonderful tutorials, articles, and inspiration feed since 2003. Now, when not designing, she loves listening to soulful deep house music and present her bicycle, and there are plenty of photos proving that this is indeed true. So, we know she’s a wonderful designer and illustrator, but did you know that being a Belgian, she, of course, loves Belgian chocolate, but also Swiss typography and Swiss graphic design. My smashing friends, please welcome Veerle Pieters. Hello Veerle. How are you doing today?

Veerle: Hi, Vitaly. I’m doing smashingly good.

Vitaly: That’s wonderful to hear. I mean, I know you... I don’t know, I remember vividly this moment, I don’t know, it feels like maybe 15 years ago or so when you were posting a lot of articles on your blog about CSS and design and CSS tutorials and all these things.

Veerle: Yeah.

Vitaly: I need to hear your story. I need to know-

Veerle: Where’s the time?

Vitaly: Yes. I mean, I know that you always had a lot of interest in art and drawings and design, but I’m wondering, how did you then come to this workplace? And what excited you about it back then? Why?

Veerle: So, not sure. I should maybe start at the very beginning. I started as a freelance designer, so that was still the early nineties back then, so no internet yet. But the first five years, I tried to make my way in designing for small agencies, ad agencies, doing print work and trying... Yeah, it was right from school actually, which was hard. But then in ’97... So the first five years, I really struggled. And I actually didn’t make any money, but I didn’t give up. I was at the point, should I look for a full-time job or not? But I kind of stick to it. I met Geert then, and actually, when the web was coming, we were kind of interested in it because I remember with my Macintosh back then, I had trouble. And not that I had always trouble, but there was a moment that I had trouble with my printer. And the guy, the technician came and he said, “I’m going to look for if there’s an update and the driver from the print driver.” And he was always mentioning, “Yeah, we can download it from the internet.”

I was like, huh, on the internet, that’s interesting. Because afterwards, I saw the invoice and I was like, it cost me a lot. If I have trouble again, I should look into having an internet subscription. So, that’s how I started looking into what’s the internet? And then it was still text and not graphic. But then all of a sudden, things evolved. There was Netscape coming out, and all of a sudden you could have images in webpages and they became more and more graphically, the pages. So, I was interested in how do they create such page. So, I was looking at... There were basic tools. I remember Bare Bones BBEdit. That was one of the-

Vitaly: Yeah. Wow, this brings back memories, I have to say.

Veerle: Yeah. And there was another little tool I was thinking. Was it from... It was visually. Page. It’s something with page.

Vitaly: Oh, I don’t remember anymore, but I know exactly the kind of tool that you’re talking about.

Veerle: If it’s from Adobe, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I looked into how a page was created, and I remember that it motivated me. Maybe this is the future. If it becomes more graphically, it can become your job.

Vitaly: Right. But you never abandoned print, right? You never really said, okay, I’m not going to do print anymore. I’m just going all web. So, you were doing mixture of both, so you might have some project which you can kind of-

Veerle: Always.

Vitaly: ... partly print and partly digital?

Veerle: Yes. Yes. And also, at that time, I remember there was... Well, a bit later, you had Flash from Macromedia Flash. That was becoming popular. And actually, a little bit before that, you have Macromedia director to create CD-ROMs. I’ve had a couple of projects in that direction as well, which were really big challenges because it needed a lot of testing, Mac and Windows. It was rather technical. I remember we worked also with a freelancer back then, a very good freelancer who knew the scripting a lot of, because it was a lot of coding work as well to create such a CD-ROMs. And with Flash, we also made, not purely for the web actually, but a lot of presentations for ad agencies. Flash-

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: ... a bit of the new... Back then, it was the more graphical PowerPoint thing, but more really, well, presentations. We did that as well.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: So, it was always a mixture of everything together, interactive and print. Meanwhile, we also did logo design and brochures.

Vitaly: I mean, I think when I look at your portfolio, I think you’ve done everything, everything, everything.

Veerle: I remember the app now. PageMill.

Vitaly: Oh, I don’t know-

Veerle: The visual editor. Do you know?

Vitaly: No. So, I got on the web somewhere like 1999, right? And actually, it’s funny that we’re saying that because we just had a conversation with with a friend, and there was this notion that came up that I remember the time before the internet existed, and some of the new generations, they just don’t know that time before the internet existed, right? So, I’m wondering, do you remember that moment when you actually saw the web for the first time or anything that... Maybe not for the first time, but where you were actually understanding what you’re seeing? What is this?

Veerle: At the first time... Yeah, the first time was text, and I wasn’t making the connection with my profession at all.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: But then I think once... I try to remember the exact moment of... I think things changed when GoLive. Do you remember micro-

Vitaly: Yeah, GoLive was-

Veerle: Was it Macromedia?

Vitaly: Macromedia GoLive. Yeah. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah. That’s really the trick for me. Yeah. And then it was evolving fast to design webpages basically.

Vitaly: One thing I learned about you as well, because I was just curious, just researching a little bit. So, you’re actually left-handed, but then you taught yourself how to write right so you become right handed.

Veerle: Not myself.

Vitaly: Not yourself.

Veerle: It was in school. I mean, first... Let me say here in English. When you’re six years old and you start to learn to write and-

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: Well, as a little kid, I say toddler-

Vitaly: Yeah. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah, when you are four or five years old, the teacher is trying to teach you to write your name. So, they write your name on the board.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: And for me, it was like drawing my name. I didn’t understand letters at that age. I was drawing them mirrorly, in mirror. I don’t know how or why something in my brain is, yeah, wrongly wired, I guess.

Vitaly: Right, but-

Veerle: I saw it, and I didn’t understand. My mom was always saying, “Look, Veerle has written her name.” And she was holding it in front of the mirror, so everybody saw them correctly, my name correctly. Then I didn’t understand why they’re already making such a fuss. I didn’t get it. I was too little to understand.

Vitaly: But how does this work? Does it mean that you can actually write with both left hand and right hand, your name, everything?

Veerle: I can, actually.

Vitaly: So, this is your magical power. Have you been using the magical power? So, what would be... So your mouse, is it then in the left hand or in the right hand, or you’re using a trackpad?

Veerle: Right, my right hand. Yeah, that’s why also I have sometimes trouble with those drawing Wacoms.

Vitaly: Wacom tablets.

Veerle: Tablets. Tablets. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. It’s like I’m used to use my right hand for the mouse, but then drawing is with my left hand. So, I was always like, I don’t know, in some kind of dilemma.

Vitaly: Right. Right.

Veerle: Should I use my left hand? Should I use my right hand? So, it was always a mix up and a struggle to use it properly.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: On one hand, it was a good thing because I could use my right hand for the things I’m used to with the mouse, and then switch to left for when I want to draw, but it was confusing me, and also a bit frustrating me because it was always which hands to use. That’s why I like drawing on the iPad, because then I have the pencil in my hand and I’m just drawing, and the rest I can do with my finger or... It’s less confusing or-

Vitaly: Sure. So, then also speaking about the tools that you’re using, I’m curious. So, you’re using an iPad. What tools do you use to get these ideas out into this world? Do you still sketch in the sketchbook first, and then you go into an iPad? Or what tools do you use to bring your ideas to life?

Veerle: I still use pencil and paper a lot. I don’t know why, because on an iPad, you can do it actually as good, as fast as possible. But somehow, I don’t know. I like having my sketchbook in my hands and draw on paper. Maybe it’s just that old fashioned maybe.

Vitaly: Yeah, I can imagine you going in the garden, and then you sit down maybe. And you say, okay, now I’m going to come up with all these wonderful ideas and then bring it into world, right?

Veerle: Yeah, sometimes, if weather permits and time permits. Sometimes I don’t have enough time to do it actually, sketch and... Sometimes it’s directly an illustrator. It’s weird to say that. But let’s say I have this client and I’m doing a lot of icon designs now for them, and they want an icon. I’m not saying that my deadline is three hours, but they is expected to have it done the same day. So, I’m often googling. It’s not very common icons, like hamburger menu or a home icon. It’s more very technical and specific. So, I enter some keywords in Google and see what comes up. And I usually end up with icon at the end or illustration icon. And I browse through the ideas, the concepts that I see, like I don’t know, a basket or a-

Vitaly: Sure.

Veerle: ... I don’t know, a pencil or something. And I say, okay, I can use that, or a house icon.

Vitaly: Yeah. But also after all these projects that you must have heard over all these years, do you feel like, I don’t know, whenever my client comes to you with a particular issue, particular problem, particular project, you’re like, “Okay, I’ve done this before. I think I’m pretty comfortable just going in, and just I can start right away in Illustrator?” Do you feel like you always need this kind of ideation phase, brainstorming phase beforehand to just get in? Or do you feel like... Because this is something that happens to me sometimes.

Whenever I have to write about anything, sometimes you give me any topic, I think I can start comfortably, and with any topic, I mean not necessarily about law, let’s say, or about physics, right? But anything design, I think I can start all the time. I need to do research and come up with all the points and all that, but I can start easily. And I think that the most difficult part sometimes for me to reach, just start, to kind of have a place where I want to go from. And then I kind of explore when to go. Is it similar for you? Would you say that every single project requires you to sit down to research, to try to understand what is it exactly that the needs are, and then design from scratch every time?

Veerle: It depends. Usually, I need some time to have do some rich research, instead of starting just right away from scratch. But I have a couple of clients where I do a lot of work for them, and I know their style and I immediately know the direction, and then I don’t have to do that. But that’s usually layout things that need a bit less of actual new design work. Sometimes I can then recuperate things already created and I’m making a variation of it and built further on that same concept because it needs to be in the same line, in the same direction. But if it’s a new project, a new client, then no. I don’t think I can do, okay, jump directly and Illustrator, or in InDesign or whatever, and start straight away. I always have to browse around for ideas and do some sketching, do some research before. Yeah.

Vitaly: Do you have collage books that we used to have in the day where you would have all the different topics kind of put together, and whenever we have a projects related to healthcare, you have your healthcare folder with all the projects related to healthcare or anything like that.. or something like that?

Veerle: No. What I sometimes do is also... I don’t know if the app, Milanote?

Vitaly: It sounds very familiar, yes.

Veerle: It is an app that I like to use to gather all the things that I like that I come across and I found relevant to the project. It can either be a design style, a color palette, sometimes even sometimes that is not really related to the project, but an element in there that I like, a composition or mood boarding.

Vitaly: Yeah, mood boarding. I mean, actually talking about that, your inspiration stream has been going now for I don’t know how many decades, I think. Because I remember vividly for projects that I had, because I also do with the consultancy every now and again, right? And then we’re speaking with designers about, okay, what would be the style that we would be pursuing here? Would it be going that direction? More playful, less playful, more formal, less formal.” I’ll say, “Oh no, you just go to Veerle. Just go to Veerle.” This is like a-

Veerle: Thank you.

Vitaly: ... a showcase or a gallery of all the different styles. But this is really interesting for me, because I tried to explain.. I was telling to my partner that I’m going to interview you for the podcast and we’re going to have a little session. And she asked me, “Oh, she’s a illustrator. Oh, that’s great,” because we also Belgium a lot. And she asked me, “So, what kind of style is it? What kind of illustration style?” And I almost stuck. I couldn’t tell, because the only thing I could say is that it’s vibrant, it’s playful, it’s colorful, it’s living. This is what I came up with. So, I’m wondering how would you describe your style, or do you have many?

Veerle: Yeah, I think I have many. It’s a bit... I think I try to adapt to what a client wants, because a project that I’ve been working on the past month is a book for a client, one of a long-term client that I love working with. And every page is an illustration. And at first, I remember that I tried to set a style for those illustrations and it’s with people. And I thought like, okay, I’m going to keep them very simple, and I gave them a blue skin, very fantasy. I thought if I use blue, it’s also colorless. All kind of people can be that. It can be visualized or represented by blue figures. But she didn’t like it.

And then she showed me, I like this and that style, because I presented also to her, in which direction should I go? And she picked a couple of pictures, of images that I presented to her. And so I had to change my style a little bit. So, that’s why I always think if people ask me, “What is your design style?” I don’t have a very specific style, but I think the way you describe it could work. I mean, colorful for sure.

Vitaly: Yeah, it’s colorful, for sure.

Veerle: It’s always try to include it to make it a bit playful, depending on the project. But there’re usually the restrictions.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: The client of course, wants this and it’s not like I’m a pure illustrator that has this style and the client comes to me because of this style, and I stick to very strictly... How do you say it? This style.

Vitaly: Yeah. But I mean-

Veerle: It’s a bit broader.

Vitaly: Yeah, but it’s very difficult for me to imagine you working on one of those corporate dry booklets. I mean, maybe you have, of course, but I just cannot imagine that. Maybe I should be diving a bit more into your inspiration stream.

Veerle: Well, the inspiration stream is, of course, not mine.

Vitaly: Yeah, yeah, sure. But I mean, it’s also collected by you, by yourself.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: So, there are all these different styles, but I cannot spot any dry — super dry — corporate style there.

Veerle: No. No.

Vitaly: That’s probably not-

Veerle: That doesn’t speak to me usually. Yes. True. So, that reflects to my own style of design.

Vitaly: I’m wondering, that’s probably also something that many people might be wondering. So, because you’ve been in the industry for quite a long time, when do you think you had this moment when you realize, okay, I can now work with the Facebooks and the Googles and the big companies? How did this happen? When did you experience this kind of, I wouldn’t say breakthrough, but it’s more like a position where you felt like, oh wow, I feel very comfortable now with this space, speed, design in general, and I’m working now with big clients. Because normally... I think that many people listening to this now, maybe starting out as designers, they might be wondering, how do you even get there? It seems like such a remote, distant dream to be working with this clients. So, what would you tell them? And how was it for you?

Veerle: Yeah, for me, it was, of course, due to the block that I got a breakthrough, become popular within the world of web design and everything. So, due to conferences and... I don’t know.

Vitaly: So, you kind of started getting more visible, is that... So, basically-

Veerle: Yeah.

Vitaly: ... how did it work for you? So, for the blog, did you have a schedule, like, okay, I’m going to write at least once a week or month or anything like that?

Veerle: No, it was more like when I had time. And back in that day, around I’m talking like 2004, 2008, that period was most that I spent weekends and everything, hours writing for the blog. And yeah, I just made time. I didn’t go biking either back then.

Vitaly: Well, now you can have the luxury of going biking, right?

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. But still, it’s not like I can, how you say, take a holiday or sit on my lazy As and do nothing. I have to work hard still to make living-

Vitaly: Yeah, of course.

Veerle: ... unfortunately. But back then, I got more visibility, I think, and that’s how they reached out to me for work. Before, just when the internet was... Before I started blogging... And so I had declined the Library of Congress. That was also because of my knowledge of director, Macromedia director, because you could also do interactive gaming things online with that app. And I remember that the site got nominated by Macromedia back then I was site of the day and site of the week. And so that’s how they got in contact with me. And for Google and Facebook, that was actually just the same because I was then in the CSS gallery from here and there, galleries and awards and stuff. And that’s how I ended up working for Facebook on a project. I never had it in my portfolio, unfortunately. It’s something that never got launched. I did do a nice creative job for them, but it was earlier.

Vitaly: Yeah. I think also for me, it’s always been about two things, I think. I always felt like there is a very, very strong need to be present, to share. And I mean, this is also something that has been very close to your heart because you’ve been sharing, and you are still sharing a lot. So, this sharing has always been a very important part of me. And I think that this is through sharing, where you actually not only get to meet wonderful people who like your work, who talk to you about your work, and maybe they share with you their work, but this is also how you kind of spread the word about yourself.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: So, that has been always a kind of very, very-

Veerle: That’s actually the most important part. That’s how I got into the CSS galleries. Yeah. Actually, a most important part that I left out there.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think so as well.

Veerle: Yeah. Because I started that tutorial. There was one tutorial that I shared towards designers who wanted to learn a little bit of coding. How can I code a homepage? And I explained in different parts, here’s how you create a header, here’s how you create the page itself, header, content, footer. Now, I’m explaining it very, very short but... And I explained it going from actually designing it in Photoshop, and then cutting it in parts and-

Vitaly: There a slicing and everything.

Veerle: ... explain how CCS work, very, very basic steps, and then very rudimentary language, very simple so that everyone could understand it. And that got so popular and picked up by so many sites who were way, way bigger than me. But that elevated me up there amongst all the others, and I got an invited for speaking at conference.

Vitaly: That’s right.

Veerle: So, that’s how the ball got rolling it. And then the blog was redesigned and it got an award again, and it never stopped.

Vitaly: Yeah. Are you planning on the fifth redesign at some point?

Veerle: At the moment, I’m actually doing a little... It’s not a redesign, but I’m fiddling with the colors and things a little bit

Vitaly: Like you always are, so I didn’t expect anything else. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah. It’s always harder for yourself, doing-

Vitaly: Yes.

Veerle: ... improvements on work, and also finding the time.

Vitaly: Absolutely.

Veerle: I thought I would’ve launched it by now, the things that I’ve done, I worked a little bit over the Christmas period, but I’m still in the middle of it.

Vitaly: Yeah, of course. I’m also speaking with a lot of junior designers, and very often what I hear is that they have a hard time kind of putting the word out there. So, I feel like maybe back then, for me, it was quite straightforward because there was not much. I mean, there were maybe what handful of people, maybe 30, 40 people who are writing and blogging and being very public about this and sharing.

Veerle: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: Now, I feel like everybody’s posting. And now, you can generate a perfect SEO optimized, shared ChatGPT powered article about design and so on. Do you think that you would be doing the same today if you were in this position, let’s say, not 20 years ago, but today? Would you be trying to be visible on TikTok and Instagram or LinkedIn? I don’t know what would be-

Veerle: I think I probably would. I’m not sure. It’s hard. It’s a whole different period. For us, it was all so very new. I remember Twitter. I remember Jeremy Kieth told me like, “Hey, there’s this Twitter thing. You should check it out.” I was like, huh, Twitter, what’s that? And he explained, and I was like, okay, I’m going to check it out. That’s how I got on Twitter back then.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: Because we were all on... I don’t know if you were too on Pownce?

Vitaly: Oh yes, I remember that. I know for sure that I registered an account. I registered an account on Pownce, and then I think I never posted anything. I mean, there were a couple of apps or a couple of sites, social media sites back then. But I think... I don’t know, for me, I always liked... I liked to write. It was all about writing for me. Because when I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer. Well, that didn’t happen, but I really wanted to write. But it’s not about me. I mean, this podcast, of course, is not about me.

Veerle: But I think I would do TikTok and Instagram. Now, I’ve been using my Instagram always for just photos and everything, but I think I would more try to be visible with my work via Instagram and TikTok and stuff like that.

Vitaly: I think so. I mean, I also remember that one thing that’s really excited me back then, I think it’s still the same, I mean, every single day, I happened to meet, even without being kind of proactive about it, but I happen to stumble upon work people just accidentally, either by searching or by going through some feeds or LinkedIn on... I tend to use Twitter less these days. I always find interesting people. And this is something that’s really keeps motivating me as well. I feel like I always learn somebody who is doing something absolutely incredible. And so this is something that I can also then take and learn from. And I always try to take that step to reach out to that person and just talk to them or exchange thoughts or work or whatever. That’s really, really... I mean, that’s that kind of growth of networking I saw. That’s really, really, really important.

Veerle: Yeah, that’s what I tried actually also, reaching out to people that you admire.

Vitaly: And they reply back. It’s not like they’re in the castle somewhere. Very often, they would reply back. And those emails from those people who do reply back, I remember them forever. I mean, sometimes I’d think, well, why bother sending a message to somebody who has been, I don’t know, designing a famous typeface or something. They reply, and then this thing really keeps me kind of fueling and motivating me.

Veerle: Yeah, me too.

Vitaly: Maybe turning the kind of direction of the conversation a little bit, I’m also curious to know maybe some of the really challenging projects you worked on. What would we say, looking back now, what was some of the most difficult design projects or illustration projects that you were involved with, as long as you can speak about it?

Veerle: I think the most challenging one was actually in the time before internet, the CD-ROM thing. We did... Well, Geert and I did a project for Ernst & Young and a CD-ROM project called Oscan. It was a bit corporate, but it was a lot of creativity. At first, we actually had to win it because it was between us and another agency. So, we got the job eventually, but it was from A to Z, from production, packaging. It was actually a browser hand. The packaging, it was a big browser hand that you could open, and the CD-ROM was sitting in the browser hand. It was in five languages. There was a lot of design work, and it was a lot of technicalities also with testing on windows. That was actually the most challenging, because it was first, to get the job. And then I think we worked on it for more than a year to get it finished. Also with voiceover. It was with voiceover and was very graphically.

Vitaly: So, I assume that must have taken quite a bit of time, quite a bit of time.

Veerle: It was. Like I said, we worked more than a year on it. The other one was for a screensaver.

Vitaly: A screensaver?

Veerle: Yes. It was called Caveman, and it was with a caveman. And it was like with volcanoes, and it was very fun. But I remember how the result was still like... Now, you would look at it, it was like from the dark ages, the pixels and the stuff. Yeah, it was early nineties, but it was so fun.

Vitaly: Oh, I can imagine. So, would you say that coming back and looking back, do you find that doing design work now is easier or more difficult?

Veerle: That’s hard to say.

Vitaly: I mean, of course, we have much better technology and tooling and all of that.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. So, I would say in that respect, it’s easier, but it’s also difficult in a way that there’s so much apps, so to learn. On the other hand, back then it was also a lot to learn. The creative challenges, of course, the same. The tools are easier. Because I remember in the early days when I used Illustrator... Now, I can do stuff in two clicks to say it simple. And back then, it was like it would take me more than two hours to do the same.

Vitaly: Yeah. So, you’ve also done quite a bit of illustration work. I’m curious... So at some point, you just knew that, okay, so you’ve been drawing and you’ve been designing, you’ve been this, and from everything from packaging to stationary and everything, right? Did you want to just say something like, “Okay, I’m done with this. I want to explore fonts. I want to design fonts now, or “I’m done with this. I’m going to go for music. I’m going to create music now?” Did you have this moments where you said, “Okay, I want to explore something entirely different?” Or maybe it was just a different style illustration that you would be experimenting. Because for me... The reason why I’m asking is because I have this problem that I always feel like I’m jumping in with both feet in some topic. And then I realize, oh, I’m done with it now. I want to do something and tiredly different.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: And then I jumped from UX to design, to front end, to performance accessibility. That’s been like the path for my entire journey so far. What is it like for you.

Veerle: I think because my jobs, and I mean the projects that we work on are so diverse, that I always feel like there’s something different. Tomorrow, I work on, this could be illustration work. And the week after, I work on print. Then I work again on some website, then again on some apps, app design. Because of this constant mixture, I don’t have the urge to do something entirely different because it’s always something different. In a way, I can see what you say. That has been on my mind actually, to design a farm. This has always something like, oh, that would be so great to do, design a font. On the other hand, I think there are so many... How do you say? It’s such a specialty that I think maybe I won’t be good at it. Because to design a font, it’s not simple. So, it’s a good font, I mean, really good font. If it’s a script font and from the, you know—

Vitaly: Handwritten font, or so...

Veerle: And even that... Yeah, you can say, okay. But if it’s a sans or sans serif, there’s so many things to take into account, like the letter O needs to be a little bit bigger because it’s round. And then you have all these little things that you have to keep in mind. And then there is the tracking and the kerning and everything.

Vitaly: Sure. Sure. That’s a science for itself, of course.

Veerle: I think I gave up the idea because of it. I actually did design a font belt, not font font, but there was once a project from a guy. I think it’s the guy who founded Skillshare, actually. He had a book project way back before he founded Skillshare, grab back book or something. And he asked many creative people to do something totally out of their comfort zone, totally different. And for me, my task was create a font. So, others had another task, like create a poster or... So, that was the only time. I actually designed a font, but it was not like a font with font files and everything. It was pure on design and it got printed in a book. So, it never got further than that.

Vitaly: Maybe it’s not even necessary anymore, because of course, we have wonderful power of artificial intelligence coming our way. And I’m really had to ask this question, of course. And we could just ask, I don’t know, AI to just design a font of our dreams.

Veerle: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: But I am wondering-

Veerle: It’s easy.

Vitaly: I am wondering at this point, how do you see... I mean, we have all these tools from Midjourney to, I mean DALL-E And so many others, all these AI tools that allow you to generate an image or support you in some way, assist you in some way to get that perfect photo, that perfect illustration, to that perfect landscape, that perfect whatever. How do you see that? Do you actually in some way use or think about using AI for your work, or do you feel like this cannot-

Veerle: So far, I haven’t used it. No. In a way, I kind of see it... It’s back in the days when Photoshop introduced effects and we’re all like, “Whoa, yes, let’s try it out.” And it’s like something new and everybody’s jumping at it. Like we say in Dutch, fly on a shit... I find it a little bit, I don’t know, artificial, too artificial, like the word says. It’s probably going to serve us as help, and in a way, as a tool. Yeah. But on the other hand, I have so many questions about it. I don’t know if you heard... And I was already asking that same question in my head, what about copyrights, the photos that is in there, that they’re using? And I, not so long ago, I think a couple of days ago, I read something about Getty Images asking the question like, “Hey, you guys are using pictures, images of our Getty Images collection.” So, I think they’re going, they’re going to be trouble here and there as well. It’s not that easy—

Vitaly: Yeah. This is actually still a big question that is, to be honest, that seems to be, I wouldn’t say dismissed, but it is not taken seriously often. But you still see some issues where many of the applications that are generating those images, they actually have, in the terms and conditions, a very clear statement that this only for personal use and so on and so forth. But in general, of course, whenever we think about this, one big question that comes in my way is that obviously whenever artificial intelligence is generating those images, these images have a copyrighted designed by humans. So if there were no humans, there wouldn’t be any design work done by AI, right? And then the question is, there is no credit, there is no compensation. Of course, there is mining, data mining.

And this, of course, brings up questions. I mean, when I was looking and playing with DALL-E and Midjourney, and there are so many tools at this point, I was very impressed with results. I mean, I was seriously impressed with the results. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an actual photo or that kind of artwork... Maybe it looked a little bit too perfect at times, and sometimes it had these really strange things where everything looks perfect, but then a person has six fingers instead of five.

Veerle: Yes, I saw something similar.

Vitaly: Yeah, those things happen every now and again. But if you just focus on the face, let’s say, then this problem doesn’t occur. But then there is kind of something almost magical where you can... I mean, at this point, I think also in Figma, you have these options to say, dear Figma, I need a photo of a barista in front of tiled, I don’t know, tiled bakery, whatever in Portugal, and the picture, the result is incredible. I mean, I have to say that this is absolutely stunning. The question of course that I’m asking myself and that many of my colleagues are wondering about is, what does it mean? So, would we, as designers or researchers, use it, or would we be trying to fight the war against the windmill? Because there are so many of those tools. But that’s a question that hasn’t been answered yet. And again, it has raises a lot of ethical concerns as well.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Especially the last thing you mentioned, ethical concerns. And I don’t know, in a way, I can see its purpose, but then on the other hand, I don’t know if it goes that far that it’s overtakes our entire job. I mean, I don’t know what’s-

Vitaly: Yeah, it’s hard to say, because I was this case, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it or not, where there was a project, where an administrator was working on a project. And then I think three or four months in project, he was fired. And what the owners of the company then said, “Well, you’ve designed 15 administration. We can now design the rest with AI.”

Veerle: Okay.

Vitaly: So, we can mine your style and maybe a few more images, or millions of images around the world, and we can replicate your style. So, we don’t necessarily need you to be on this project. I was like, wow. So, those things happened.

Veerle: Wow. And that happened and he didn’t... Did he say, “Okay, here are the royalties?”

Vitaly: I mean, he did the work, and the first, I think 15 images or so, they were paid for, but the rest was kind of canceled, because you can produce the results with a handful of images, and obviously a lot of other data around. So that, again, raises some questions and concerns.

Veerle: Yes.

Vitaly: So, I’m not quite sure-

Veerle: That’s true.

Vitaly: ... what we’re getting with this.

Veerle: Then we have to put a copyrighting in our estimate before taking on the job, like, here’s the copyright.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think in the end-

Veerle: Because otherwise, no. I mean-

Vitaly: I think in some way, this will become probably something that we will be including in our contract or that we’ll be dealing with as terms and conditions. But I’m very hopeful.

Veerle: Yes, terms and conditions...

Vitaly: I think the future looks bright, so we shouldn’t be... I mean, obviously we need to be very careful about what we’re doing there and how we’re managing all that, but I’m hopeful that the community is better off with AI. We shouldn’t be fighting AI too much.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think it’ll have its place, but I don’t think it’ll be that far, like it overtakes our job. I don’t know. I don’t think that. I don’t believe that. I mean, we’re all still human. I mean, needs the human emotional touch and everything. But I see it as... I hope we can use it as a tool and not that it doesn’t overtake us.

Vitaly: Yeah. So, do you think, Veerle, that maybe four years, three, four, five years from now, you’ll be writing a nice article on your blog about how to use AI to speed up your creative process?

Veerle: Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: Maybe.

Veerle: Or it will, I don’t know, get a very bad taste and a very bad, I don’t know, thing, reputation. But I don’t know if it go will go that far, and it’ll not survive. I don’t think it’ll probably survive.

Vitaly: Well, maybe there is something good around that as well. Because while the AI is busy doing the design work, you can go on biking, which is why I have to ask you about, as we are wrapping up here, maybe you could share us with some of the most memorable destinations that you actually have traveled to on your bike. What were some of the highlights in your journey? And what was the longest trip you ever taken?

Veerle: I think the longest trip or the longest ride was 207 kilometers.

Vitaly: 207. Wow.

Veerle: Yeah. But it was in Belgium. I think-

Vitaly: It was all around Belgium still?

Veerle: Yeah, I sometimes go towards direction of France and the Netherlands over the border, but it’s not that I have biked in some destination far away. So, the Balearic Islands, that’s the forest where I’ve rode my bike. It’s more in my own country that I bike. But there’s so many little roads here. I’m still amazed by how many roads there are. And then that I still ride roads that I haven’t ridden. And they’re like, I don’t know, 15 kilometers from here, or 10 kilometers from here. And I say like, huh, didn’t discover that one. I’m always thinking I should... I put my bike rides on Strava, and I think you can look up a heat map. And if I do Flanders, the heat map of Flanders, it’s really dense. I’ve ridden over and over and over. If I see the total kilometers that I’ve ridden, I’ve ridden a couple of times around the world.

Vitaly: Oh wow.

Veerle: The kilometers.

Vitaly: That could be. But I think-

Veerle: Like whoa, that’s mind blowing.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: I ride my bike more than I drive my car.

Vitaly: Oh wow.

Veerle: It’s like double the kilometers in a year.

Vitaly: Yeah. But maybe we should import you into Black Forest, and I’d be very curious how far you go there.

Veerle: It is one of the locations I would really love to go. My local bakery that I go every weekend, he’s like a fan of that area. He’s also a mountain biker. And every year, his holiday is always the Black Forest, and he’s always bragging about it. “If you want some rights from there, I can share you some, and just let me know when you go.”

Vitaly: Well, I think maybe that’s a sign for you to keep in the loop. Please let us know question when you happen to be there. Maybe as a final question here to wrap up, I always ask this question because it always gives me kind of a clue about the motivation, the dreams that guests like to have. Do you have a particular dream project that you ever wished you could work with? So, if somebody from any company could listen to this now or in the future think maybe Veerle wants to work on this incredible project, we should reach out. So, if you had a dream project or if you have a dream project, what would you desperately want to work on one day?

Veerle: Oh man. Well, actually dream project would be if the client says that would’ve really already make it, that would already make me very happy, if I have a lot of time to work on a project, like if they say-

Vitaly: A year.

Veerle: ... you do your thing. I love to have boundaries, but if you can go to your full potential of your creativity and there’s like no deadline... Usually, they clients want things done too fast. And usually, you always end up, like hmm, if I had a little bit more time, I would made this better and better. The things that end up in my portfolio, the things that I’m happy with, that I like, there’s so many work, it’s like 10% of all the work I’ve done, because a lot of projects are like that it has to go so fast, or they put it online, but they have implemented it wrongly, stuff like that. There’s always something. So, my dream project would be if there’s a project from A to Z, it’s like perfect done, a lot of creativity. It can be anything really. I’ve always dreamt in school that I would end up in packaging design. I haven’t done much packaging design, but if I could do, create a brand logo, and then the whole packaging of the interior of, if it’s a shop, an interior, the building, whatever.

Vitaly: But you already did design a logo for an airline, isn’t that right?

Veerle: Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it was actually... It was not a big project. It sounds like because it’s for an airline, it’s like big. It was actually like, we want an icon on the plane, and our logo has this colors, but we want an icon. And so I kind of designed a star shape, I think. And that was like... Yeah, I was proud of it because it was on a plane.

Vitaly: Did you fly the plane with your icon?

Veerle: No. No.

Vitaly: No?

Veerle: No.

Vitaly: Oh, maybe that... So if anybody listening to this owns an airline or a train or a bike or anything and is willing to maybe put an icon... That would be nice to have a bike with your work on it. That’d be nice.

Veerle: Yeah. Yea.

Vitaly: Yes. So, please get in touch with Veerle. I’m sure she would appreciate that. All right.

Veerle: Thank you.

Vitaly: So, we’ve been learning quite a bit about illustration and design and workflow, and AI even a little bit in here, but what have you been learning about lately, Veerle? Anything that you’ve learned, or maybe outside of the scope of design altogether, anything that you felt like, oh wow, I didn’t know that earlier, so here we go, now I know it?

Veerle: Well, actually I’m currently working with Figma, and I didn’t know it. It’s because of the project with the client, the developer is also using Figma and other designers in the team are using Figma. And otherwise, I would jump in with my Adobe XD and I thought like, okay, it’s to speed up the process, and also to work together on something and share. It’s not that you can’t do it with Adobe XD, but they’re already using Figma. So, I’m learning Figma. It’s the first steps, but yeah, it’s been fun, actually. I’m liking it. You can also copy paste from Illustrate, for me is very important.

Vitaly: Yeah, I can imagine.

Veerle: I’m doing most of icon design work. It’s for webpages and a web app. And so it’s handy that I can copy paste. And I’m also using... I’m also trying out Affinity Designer. I’ve been working in it a couple of times now. It’s also very early phase. So, I think I’ve spent, if it’s an hour already. So, it’s really short time, but yeah, I’m liking it so far. So, I’m stepping out of the Adobe environment a little bit to learn a little bit more. Yeah. And then I think on my iPad, I’m doing a lot of water coloring-

Vitaly: Oh, that’s nice.

Veerle: ... coloring digitally, trying out a couple of brushes. And so that’s also a bit new.

Vitaly: Never stop learning then.

Veerle: Yeah, never stop learning.

Vitaly: So maybe now, if you, at some point in the future, will find a nice Figma tutorial on Veerle’s blog, you know what direction-

Veerle: Who knows?

Vitaly: ... she ended up going. Well, if you, the listener, would like to hear more from Veerle, you can find her on Twitter where she’s @vpieters, and also in home homepage, of course, which is veerle.duoh.com, veerle.duoh.com.

Veerle: I’m actually not much on Twitter anymore-

Vitaly: Not much on Twitter.

Veerle: ... to be honest.

Vitaly: So, is it now... What is cool at this point?

Veerle: Actually not-

Vitaly: So, what-

Veerle: Mastodon.

Vitaly: Mastodon. So, are you on Mastodon a lot?

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I’m going... You asked me, you are redesigning my blog. I’m actually also going to do a lot of writing on my blog. Little short post that I tend to do before on Twitter. I’m moving it a bit to my blog.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: It’s called Side Notes. I’m going to call it Side Notes, but it’s still in the making. I’ll try to make good progress that it’s will be online very soon to replace the whole Twitter feed. But up until now, I’m posting the things on Mastodon.

Vitaly: That sounds-

Veerle: It’s actually what I did before Twitter was here. So, I’m picking up from way back.

Vitaly: Sure. But we’ll be following along for sure. So with this in mind, thank you so much for joining us today, Veerle. Do you have any parting words of wisdom? Imagine somebody listening to this 20 years from now and thinking, how did they design things back in the day? Do you have a message to the future or share-

Veerle: Message to the future.

Vitaly: ... I don’t know, words of wisdom to people out there?

Veerle: I think always keep on learning, I think. And open your eyes, try to soak in inspiration from everywhere, even just go outside, find inspiration in nature. Look around, open your eyes. If you are walking in the streets, look at the signs, signs of shops and everything. Yeah, try to keep an open vision, I think, and never stop learning. These are my words.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 55 With Tejas Kumar: Is Technology Making Us Redundant?

In this episode, we ask whether technology is making us redundant; will we all soon be replaced with AI? Vitaly Friedman talks to Tejas Kumar to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: He has been writing code since the age of eight and still continues to do so today. He’s a DevRel leader, YouTuber, advisor, mentor, influencer, and has very, very strong opinions about pretty much everything. Previously, he’s worked with G2L, Vercel, Spotify etc picking up things along the way, sometimes as a developer and sometimes as a manager.

Vitaly: Now he lives in Berlin, Germany, but most of the time travels the world equipping and encouraging developers to do their best work, aiming to make the world a better place for quality software. Beyond that, he’s extremely kind, passionate, friendly, and smart. And not that a passes by that him sharing his opinions again on everything Tailwind, JavaScript and people on Twitter.

Vitaly: Now we know he’s a great product engineer and a kind human being, but did you know that he can easily type faster than 100 words per minute when writing code without a single mistake, especially if it’s a life coding session in front of thousands of developers? My smashing friends, please welcome Tejas Kumar. Hello, Tejas. How are you doing today?

Tejas: What’s up? I’m doing good. I’m smashing. I’m smashing things as we speak. I’m also doing smashing.

Vitaly: Oh, well—

Tejas: Smashing enough.

Vitaly: You always look smashing. Always. I always feel smashing when I see you being smashing in some way or the other.

Tejas: Yes, that’s what my grandpa always used to say. Smash them with kindness.

Vitaly: Oh, really? Wow. This is just the perfect beginning of the interview. Now it’s so nice to have you here. I remember everything from our strange bus trips to our walks in somewhere between Croatia and Germany, and what not, it’s always so, I don’t know. It’s so much fun to be around because you always have, again, opinions about things.

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: You always express them with a very strong kindness. Why is that, Tejas? Where is it coming from?

Tejas: Yeah, it comes from a lot. So when I do talks and things at conferences, a lot of people tell me... they come to me after and they’re like, "Hey, that was so genuine. I felt like that was very genuine." And it comes from that. I’m a strong believer in speaking truth in love or kindly, and I guess that’s where it comes from. I do have strong opinions about things, right, but I feel like they have to come under an umbrella of kindness and respect. Otherwise, nobody wants to listen to some angry person with strong opinions who’s not friendly.

Vitaly: Well, you don’t know. I mean, I’m very happy to hear maybe not angry people, but like whenever someone has a very strong opinion, I’m totally fine with that. Actually, there is Lex Friedman, who is a podcaster. He’s doing all these videos with people on YouTube like you do as well. We’ll talk about it in a moment. But he had just posted recently one thing. He applauded to all the people who are attentive enough to listen to other people’s opinions and their arguments and be willing to change their minds.

Tejas: Yeah.

Vitaly: So I think that if you have a very strong opinion about things, as long as you are willing and open minded to change your mind based on the arguments that come your way, right? I think this is fine for me. This is actually a very important skill to have.

Tejas: Yes. Yes. I think the underlying skill there is critical thinking and being open and receptive. 100%. I was just watching the Welcome to Chippendales. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this show, right?

Vitaly: Not yet, no.

Tejas: It’s a great show. I can recommend it. And in that show you watch the founder of Chippendales repeatedly screw up his company and go into bankruptcy. And the common thread in his mistakes is that he just has a lot of this entrenched, close minded pridefulness where he refuses to have his mind changed despite his strong opinions. So I agree with you. I think that’s something I try. I work hard at and try to maintain, and so I appreciate that you called it out here on this conversation.

Vitaly: Yeah, sure. Well, the reason why I wanted to have you on the show as well, because you have all these incredible experiences and stories you can share, right? And you also are very public about things that are important to you and you’re not afraid of strong words as well by doing so. And so maybe just for everybody to be kind of following your story to know who you are and what you’re coming from and so on, maybe you could just share a little bit of insight about how did you end up in this front end madness? Where is it coming from? Did you wake up one day when you were eight and thought, "This is it. I went to write HTML, CSS, JavaScript for living now for the rest of my life."

Tejas: When I was eight years old, react was actually a thing. I’m joking. It wasn't.

Vitaly: Oh, who knows? Who knows?

Tejas: Yeah. No, but yeah, no, I was born with a disease that was really limiting and there’s a lot of things I couldn’t do. I had a ton of physical limitations. I made a whole 48 minute YouTube video about it, which you can watch if you’re more just interested or we could talk about it here. I don’t really care. But with the limitations I had, I couldn’t go to school every day. I couldn’t carry a backpack. I couldn’t open doors. I couldn’t walk upstairs. I couldn’t do a lot of things. The only thing I could do was take my fingers and type on keyboards with them. And thankfully my family was relatively low income at the time. I grew up quite poor, but we had just enough privilege to where we had a computer and a keyboard. And since this was the only thing I could do in many ways I feel like coding found me. And I was drawn to, I have a YouTube video coming about this coming out about this on Thursday, I was drawn to the quick feedback loop of JavaScript where you just write a little bit of code in your browsers console and it executes. And I was like, whoa. And it’s that kind of whoa, that kind of I found when I was eight just kind of playing with browsers and code. And it’s the same whoa that I chased today.

Vitaly: That’s interesting. So would you say that this was specifically then JavaScript that kind of spoke to you, or would you say that this just, if Flash was still a thing it’d still be running around building Flash websites?

Tejas: That’s an excellent question. No, it’s definitely not JavaScript at all. It was, well, it started with Photoshop, so I was-

Vitaly: Photoshop. What is Photoshop, Tejas?

Tejas: Yeah, I know, right? Nowadays with Figma and stuff, Photoshop’s a bit lost, but when I was young, Photoshop was the design tool. It wasn’t just for photo editing and manipulation, it was for at least I used it for creating stuff because Vector wasn’t so recommended at the time. And so when I was younger, Vitaly, we had Macro S Factor.

Vitaly: Even younger.

Tejas: Yeah?

Vitaly: Even younger.

Tejas: No, no, not even younger. When I was younger than I am now. When I was kind of just getting into it, Mac OS Aqua, the design principle aqua thing, was very in vogue and everybody was trying to design these shiny balls.

Vitaly: I remember them vividly, yeah, yeah. I remember.

Tejas: Yeah. The shiny balls. And so I did tutorials on Photoshop. I was like, I want to make a really shiny ball. And then from there I moved to Tux. They made these penguins with gloss effects, and that’s where I started and I was like, wow, this is so beautiful. And then I found the slicing tool where I could design something and make it html, and I was like, whoa. And then I was like, okay, this is cool, but how do I make it interactive? And then I found JavaScript. So the draw was really creating stuff without any physical damage to myself and without any financial requirement. I was able to create stuff without any barriers to entry other than the crappy old keyboard and computer we had. So that was it.

Vitaly: Yeah, the magic thing for me was really this moment when I realized that I can actually make it available to everybody else. That was that magic thing. I mean, I remember FTPing all the way, and—

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: I mean there were plenty of free servers out there with all the kind of advertising and all of that. And I was just, wow, there are 12 people who visited my website in the last three months. It was incredible. That was just really mind changing, like mind blowing, life changing for me. Yeah, that’s really incredible. And if I look at the industry now, the industry is so mature. There are so many incredible things. Like the thing that we’re building on the internet, on the web, it’s just unbelievable. It’s just the level of software engineering and all.

Tejas: Yeah but you know, Vitaly, I feel a bit sad that it’s so mature now that it’s ... when I was younger, not younger than when I started ...

Vitaly: I assumed that, yeah.

Tejas: As I was growing, I’ll put it this way, I was often terrified of being a mature adult because when I was younger and rebellious, being mature was being boring for me. I was like, oh, I have to put on a suit and tie and kind of be bored. Like my childlike wonder was lost in my definition of maturity many years ago. And I liken that to today. You say the web is mature and I agree with you. It kind of makes me sad because I feel like in this maturity we’ve lost a lot of the awesome whimsy that we used to have. I don’t know if you remember these Geo cities, angel fire type of websites with under construction banner and like all of, you know?

Vitaly: I mean, you can still have them on the web. It’s just not many people do.

Tejas: Right. But it’s because it’s not cool anymore. And I want to bring that back. I remember the dancing baby for no ... like every website just had a dancing baby and a cursor that was a clock that would follow your cursor. Anyways, so all of this I feel like we’ve lost, and I’d like to see more of that. Anyway, sorry. Just a little rant.

Vitaly: No, I think that’s actually, in many ways, it’s like we’re always moving in circles. I have a very strong feeling that in many ways when I look at e-commerce websites, you probably don’t want to have it there necessarily unless it's, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a brand with a personality and things like that. That might be okay. But I do feel like we are a little bit too used to getting things done in a certain way. And I mean, very often we think about we have to be conventional. We need to follow particular guidelines and rules. And we probably should if you want to be conventional and we want to follow the rules and want things to be familiar to everyone. But I mean, there’s also this notion of surprising people, and I’m not talking about delight necessarily, but just surprising them. Just making them think a little bit about where they are and what they’re doing. I mean, if I look at your website, well every time I come to the site for some reason I see a slightly different and sometimes slightly strange photo of yourself. Sometimes in very different outfits.

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: So is that the whimsical that you are kind of mentioning there? Speaking about?

Tejas: Yeah, yeah. If you drag your cursor, if you move your cursor around, you just cycle through a bunch of random photos of me. It’s open source. So I’ve lost control of ... so people will add pictures of me dressed as a flower, pictures of some muscular guy.

Vitaly: Look fantastic as a flower, if I may say.

Tejas: So. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, they’ll do some muscular guy shirtless with just my face photoshopped on him. They’ll do all kinds of weird things. This is not me, this is the community who feel the need to add weird pictures of me on my website. But it’s exactly the whimsy I’m talking about. And as you drag your cursor across, you’ll see some of these. And I like that. And I feel like, to your point, smashing does the perfect balance of this with the cats. The cats are not ... like if you’re talking about content and great content, great tips, great, whatever smashing does, the cats are really non-essential. But I feel like they are essential because they bring that awesome whimsy. So I like that y'all do that as well. I think it’s much needed.

Vitaly: Yeah. So I think we do like cats. I mean it’s been quite a journey with all the cats. I mean, I don’t even know where they have been and have not been at this point, right?

Tejas: Yeah.

Vitaly: But also speaking about you, where you have been and where you have not been yet. I mean you’ve been working on so many different really cool companies. I mean, I look at Vercel, Spotify, Xata recently, right? Maybe, I don’t know if you could share some insights about what did you learn from each of those things? Maybe there was some really interesting insights that you wish you’d known earlier in your career.

Tejas: Yeah, definitely. I was just talking to my good friend Fabian. I just had lunch with him and he mentioned he’s reading this book by an ex-Google engineer called Solve for Happy. Great book. And in that book he talks about how really nothing is really good or bad or happy or sad. It’s just what’s our perception of it. And I feel this way about the jobs that I’ve left because there’s lessons in there from each of them. Most recently from Zeta, I learned the, actually from Zeta and G2I, both of these companies combined, I’ve learned the value and importance of urgency, ownership and autonomy. I think that’s really important.

Tejas: In fact, there’s an old Steve Jobs interview when he was much younger. He had hair and was alive, but he said people tend to leave when they feel like they can’t have ideas. And I saw that, I saw it executed very, very well at G2I where I was reporting to the CTO. And he was just like, he would talk to me on Monday and ask me what my plan is. We’d align and he’d be like, "Awesome, make it happen. Goodbye. Come to me if you need anything, but I trust you." And this phrase, "I trust you." I learned how powerful that can be in a position of leadership. And then I would continue to have multiple management leadership roles there, even as director of developer relations at Zeta. And that’s something I carried with me from G2I was this, “I trust you. Make it happen.” So I would talk to my team on Monday. We’d kind of plan for the week and then by Friday, well on Monday I would tell them, I would say, "See you Friday. Come to me if you need anything, but I trust you." And then we’d go to Friday where we would have just an end of week, what did we do, how do we feel check in. And this was excellent. We came up with this really nice rhythm that facilitated this kind of urgency and ownership without stress, urgency without stress. It was really, really nice.

Vitaly: I mean, one thing that I noticed recently is that many companies try to be very careful about how, on the one hand, to give people this sort of autonomy to just trust them and do the work. Because again, when you think about micromanagement, it’s such a bad kind of really bad pattern to use. And I mean there are probably plenty of companies that are still my micromanaging on some level. But I think there is this way of crystallizing, I guess in some way, those things that really work and things that do not work. One thing that I saw companies were using, and it works seems to be working really well. This idea of, maybe you’ve heard about this as well, is the idea as a manual for me.

Vitaly: That means, for example, where you say, okay, every single individual contributor or anybody, manager. It doesn’t matter really. Every single person who is working in the company, you better go ahead and try to prepare a little Google Doc on Notion document or anything like that where you describe how do you work comfortably, what is important to you, like your calendar, your preferences, when do you work best? So is it okay to disturb you in the morning? Is it better to disturb you slightly later when it comes to an urgent meeting or things like that. And so everybody’s encouraged to create this as long as it can be a mural board or mural board or anything like that. And so everybody’s encouraged then to put the link to it in their Slack profile. And so everybody knows, okay, I don’t know who that person is. And especially in a big corporation, a big company, we have maybe tens of thousands of people working.

Vitaly: It might be very, very comfortable to be able to say, okay, I need to reach out to that person, that position from the team, but I don’t want to come across as in kind of pushing my ideas or whatever I want through their agenda in some way the other disrupting them. But I wanted to be more respectful. So that was really magical when I saw that and I thought, wow, I really appreciate it, especially in the remote first environment that where we are working.

Tejas: We did that at G2I as well. We had social contracts, they were called. These documents. And I remember them working really, really well.

Vitaly: Would you say that for your perspective would you... now I assume that you are looking, I don’t know, either maybe building something on your own, maybe kind looking what’s around and all. Is it important for you that you’re working remote first, remote only, or would you say that’s not a problem for me to go to the office every day?

Tejas: Yeah, it depends. It really depends on a number of factors. I could honestly make the office thing work if the other factors were appropriate. But, yeah, no, I don’t think remote’s a hard line for me. I was, again, to cite my friend Fabian. I asked him the same question. I said, "Do you prefer remote or onsite?" And his response was a third option, which he tends to think outside the box. He is like, well, honestly, I prefer a choice. Being able to do a remote for a season and then onsite for a season. Like the choice is the magic to him. And I kind of agree with that. But I could do office if it’s required for sure.

Vitaly: But also looking in general at the IT industry, I know with a big eye and a big T, I guess at this point there is a lot of stuff going on and many people are concerned layoffs, and there isn’t a sense of uncertainty about where we’re going with ... Is it still a thing to be a project engineer? Is it a good thing to be a project engineer? I’m pretty sure it is, right? But where do you see all of this kind of being today? Is it just a natural way of the economy is not in a good shape, so sure there are layoffs after a season of hiring, or do you see this kind of becoming a trend where we have to be careful and cautious about not losing our jobs for AI by any means? What’s the take on this?

Tejas: Yeah, my take on this is it’s normal. I feel like look at the GDP curve of any country of any year and you’ll see is dips recessions are normal and predictable and they happen. And when recessions happen, layoffs happen. I feel like a recession is a sign of economic normalcy. If it lasts very long, then it’s a depression. That’s a huge problem. But I feel like it’s expected. I feel like layoffs unfortunately have their time and place. They’re not good. They affect families. I mean, I had the privilege of quitting, but I also feel the squeeze of unemployment. So I don’t think they’re good. But I think it happens. I don’t think the jobs will be taken by machines yet because machines and AI is being designed now to kind of be a helper.

Tejas: So I feel like it’ll help us. But I do think you give chat GPT, access to the internet, which it doesn’t have, and then it gets extra superpowers and gets more threatening. But I feel like there’s human beings with a vested interest in preserving human beings with jobs. So I’m not so sure the AI will take our jobs, but the state of the industry now I think is actually pretty cool, Vitaly, because when you and I started and I mean you probably started way before me, so I’ll just say when I started. I’m not calling you old. I’m just calling you experience.

Vitaly: That’s okay. That’s okay. We’re all friends here.

Tejas: No, but when I started, there was no front end and backend. There was webmaster. There was a web dev and it was the one guy or girl who would design, develop, and then drag things over to the FTP thing to upload to some shared hosts. Some of this is quite common. But then over time you and I have had the privilege of watching higher specializations develop. So we went from webmaster to now front end and backend to DevOps. And then from that to now machine learning engineers, data scientists, and then an emerging part of this is DevRel, is developer relations, I feel like is still pretty young, but I think the industry has kind of a tree root with branches, has kind of branched off into specializations and I see more of them occurring.

Tejas: And I think it’s pretty great because that means more options for people to get jobs to maybe start at an abstract level, but I think it’s better for humanity. One fear of mine is that the world is becoming, the tech industry is taking over the world, right? We used to have clothing stores, now we have online companies that sell clothes. We used to have travel agents, now we have websites that sell tickets. Like everything’s becoming tech. And this is part of the reason why I used to have strong opinions. This is part of the reason why I campaign really hard for diversity, equality and inclusion because Plan A was heavily unequal of the world, so to speak.

Tejas: I watched a documentary on Columbus yesterday and made me hate the world a little bit more, right? And so I feel like if we’re undergoing some type of tech revolution where more companies are tech companies advocating for fairness, equality, diversity and inclusion is massively important so that people don’t get left out and equality doesn’t get as skew as it has been historically.

Vitaly: I think it’s also this notion in general of I think us focusing a bit too much on speed. I remember vividly having this conversation a while back about, "Oh wow, the technology is moving fast, so fast and we’re going to do less, which is going to do less because the technology is going to take over." It’s the same way we see AI now like oh ChatGPT can do so much. It can be giving us answers, better answers, faster answers, and—

Tejas: Can write code.

Vitaly: You can actually quote ... yeah, you can write code, it can debug and everything. So we are going to do less. But I think that reality, I mean at least in my life so far it has been very different. It becomes faster, but then we tend to do much more. We always find a way to fill in not necessarily the gaps, because these gaps don’t even have a chance to appear, right? We are just moving. It’s like it’s everything. I have the strong feeling in the past. Maybe it’s kind of similar to you as well, maybe not. I have a feeling that I was doing one thing and I was doing it interruptedly, and then I would spend two, three hours on that and I would be kind of done more or less. Now it seems like, well, maybe 23 things. And yeah, we don’t do them in peril. I don’t really believe in multitasking or maybe I’m just really bad at multitasking while other people are much better. But I do have a strong feeling that it’s all so fragmented and we do so many different things at the same time. And so I don’t believe that technology is making us redundant in any way. It’s just we are doing certain different things, right?

Tejas: Exactly.

Vitaly: But talking about that, one thing I do have to ask because we probably, I expect probably can hear the voices in the back asking, "Tejas, what about those frameworks and front? Let’s talk about phone time landscape in 2023." And one question that people ask me, and I want you to answer it is, we came from times when Jake worry was a big thing and it still is a big thing on many websites and legacy website and many websites in general. Do you expect this world of frameworks to change or are we at some level of maturity where a react is going to stay, view is going to stay, angle is going to stay? I mean, it’s impossible to answer that. That’s why I’m asking you now. What’s your take on this in general? Should we be talking ... like imagine 20 years from now we’re sitting in a podcast like this thinking, "Remember when React was a thing and look now?"

Tejas: Yeah, you say 20 years, I feel like one year from now someone’s going to listen to this and be like, "Oh my gosh, this stage Tejas was so wrong about his answer."

Tejas: No. So I think first of all, I think the web is held up by giants who are underappreciated. And by that I mean specifically jQuery and WordPress power more of the internet than React period. So a lot of them people talk about, "Oh, they’re not cool." No, no, they power most of the internet and I think they should be acknowledged. But there was a time in the React story where React had enough momentum and critical mass to look cooler than jQuery. It’s the new thing, it’s the new industry standard. And then jQuery kind of got diminished even though it’s usage didn’t, but it’s I guess perceived value got diminished and reacted over. And I think in 2023 we’re starting to see some of that as well with React. Where React is used a lot. I mean I just put out a YouTube video about why React is unbeatable. And I do think it is unbeatable because here’s the deal: jQuery and WordPress have not been beaten.

Tejas: They’re also unbeatable to some degree. And now especially you have teams at Google investing in React, investing in how React works in Chrome, et cetera. So I think React is here to stay, but I think it’s perceived value is diminishing in 2023. And I feel like it will diminish further with the advent of awesome tools like Quick and solid specifically.

Vitaly: Right, right.

Tejas: And, of course, View and Svelt and Angular are around, so I think they’ll all stay. It’s always looking for this newer shinier thing. The big appeal, right, with the newer stuff with Solid and Quick is that they don’t ship a whole virtual dom implementation to the browser, which is heavy and slow. So React is objectively slower and heavier than Solid and Quick. And so there’s two sides, now it’s divided. Some would say, okay, but it’s just milliseconds. They don’t matter that much. It’s not true. It’s been proven by Google, by Chrome, that milliseconds make millions. And so I do think React is seeing its decline, maybe not in usage but in the popular vote in 2023.

Vitaly: But at the same time also see that there are all this kind of fine tuning almost coming in where, I don’t know when was that? I can’t track drug time anymore. But five, 10 years ago, oh, we have React and we have this full client side thing and off we go. But then now when we can run React on the server, we can now be a bit more clever I guess, about what is going to happen on the server, how much of it do we need to ship to the client and when and when not, and all those things.

Vitaly: I think this is, in many ways we moved away from this notion of let’s have one single React application to let’s have, I don’t know, hundreds. Every single component we have might be a single standalone React application with its own life cycle and all that. And it kind of really changes it. But I also think that, I don’t know, I learned that’s probably, there is no way to know for sure. So maybe just tomorrow there will be somebody coming up with a chat GPT query and this is going to take over both J query and also React. I don’t know.

Tejas: Yeah.

Vitaly: Do you feel like something like ChatGPTQuery it could exist or help us in some way? Like bending in body and making, I don’t know what can I do everything.

Tejas: I would be interested to ask chat GPT to write code for the best fastest UI library on earth. See what it comes up with. But on a more serious note, I feel like a big contributor to this shift from we’re doing things on the client to we’re doing things on the server that then influences the development of React and Solid and all the others to be more server oriented is these serverless platforms - Versa, Netlify, CloudFlare. These platforms have led to what I’m calling server liberation. Like nobody server rendered before, Veril, Netlify, CloudFlare, et cetera. Because servers were inaccessible. They were hard to configure for client side apps. You would need to do a rewrite on a 404 to go to your index or HTML so you can download the client.

Tejas: It was very complicated. And then these companies stepped in there like, “Hey wait, we’ll make servers easy.” And then if deploying a node server is easy, now you’re like, “Oh, now I can render on the server.” And so they kind of unlocked this. So I feel like if we want to predict where the libraries and frameworks will go next, we can kind of look at what is the adjacent surrounding supporting tech that would lead them. And I think that’s kind of a good indicator. But I’m not in a position to make such predictions accurately.

Vitaly: Well of course you are. Of course you are. You’re here on a podcast. You can predict anything, you can see the future. I’m sure you’ve seen it. So here we go. You can definitely report on that. But also moving maybe to slightly different topic, just to explore the landscape. I always fascinated by this feeling of community and by this feeling of bringing people together, the conferences, and we’ve been running conferences for many years now. And you’ve been to so many conferences as well, and I heard rumors, and maybe they’re not true, but I don’t know. I heard rumors that you might even be thinking about setting up a conference one day?

Tejas: Yeah, I’m actually starting ContagiousCon. It’s where everybody comes together and tells me how much they like me.

Vitaly: It’s like a contaga of the SmashingConfs. Thank you for that. But, dude, I’ve been to so many conferences, experienced so many things that I’ve kind of developed an intuition for what attendees want, what speakers want, and the pains that organizer. I’ve spoken to Charis also the pains that organizers have to deal with.

Vitaly: And so bringing this triquetra of experiences, kind of working in coordination with the organizers to provide something very rich for people. I think that’s something that I’m very excited for. Also connecting organizers to sponsors. A lot of conferences don’t have the privilege of money and with the amount of companies I talk to and et cetera, it looks like connecting the right sponsors to the right conferences for the best experience for attendees really. Right. But do you feel like we are at this point where in-person conferences are back for good?

Tejas: Yes, 100%.

Vitaly: Yeah. It feels like different parts of the world maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Things a little bit slower. But I do know for sure is that there is this sense of enough of online stuff. We do so much stuff online anyway. If we do something then we do it in person. Now you having attended so many conferences last year, I think both virtually and in person, would you say that kind of online conferences are here to stay? There are still plenty of them around. We had to do it for a while and now we’re probably going to keep it as a live livestream in addition to an in-person? Or is it a good replacement still?

Tejas: I don’t think it’s a good replacement. Nothing will ever replace face-to-face interactions. I said, I’m not in a position to make predictions about front end stuff. I can make 100% an accurate prediction about this. Nothing will ever replace an in-person interaction face-to-face. No screen can substitute a warm flesh and blood person in front of you. And so I think in-person is here to stay, but a lot of companies and organization teams have invested time and money into getting the online part, right? That why should we throw it away? We have it now.

Tejas: So I feel like it will be a fallback and a second track, as it were. And it’s not bad for business. You can sell a lot of tickets by volume for just some livestream and people will join. And I think it’s good because there’s people who can’t travel that you get to include now, right? So it’s good. So yeah, I think that’s the future is in person, but also virtual.

Vitaly: What is your future though? So I mean, I’m very curious. You always have these ideas of things you want to do in general. I mean, again, having learned so much from all the different companies. There must have been some things that where you said to yourself, "Okay, I would’ve done it differently."

Tejas: Oh man, you can’t imagine.

Vitaly: Oh, yeah, please go ahead. I’m very curious to hear that.

Tejas: I’ve been in positions where I’ve been micromanaged to death, right, and I’m very, I look back at those and go like, oh my gosh, I would do this so differently the way I’ve done it by not micromanaging people. I think that’s probably the strongest one. But also conferences. I’ve seen conferences do things wrong. I think the biggest mistake I’ve seen there is overselling. They’ll show you a venue that’s packed full of sunlight and everything and you get there and it’s just someone’s dark basement.

Vitaly: There is no sunlight.

Tejas: No, yeah, they turn off the sun for this one conference. So I’ve seen conferences that will just not record talks and they won’t tell you ahead of time. So I think the biggest mistake conference organizers have made is a lack of communication about important things. I want to know if I’m not going to be recorded, so then I don’t make the effort of going there. Because a big draw is this thing’s going to be recorded and visible for everybody after. And some conferences have made it known not at all that your thing’s not recorded and then months go by and you’re like, where’s that video? Oh, they didn’t record it. Oh no.

Tejas: So I would do those things differently, but what’s next for me? It’s funny you ask literally, because it’s a new year and I’ve dedicated this week, so I’m unemployed in case listeners are unaware. And I’ve started to feel the squeeze of being unemployed, put it that way. And I don’t know what’s next. I’ve decided to take this week and figure it out. I think I do want to spend time creating YouTube content because I like communicating with people and reaching people and really, yeah, this will sound a bit narcissistic, but blessing them with whatever I can bless them with. So I think YouTube is one thing I want to keep. But really, I don’t know, man, do I join a company as an employee? Do I start my own company? Do I just remain a freelancer? I don’t know. So I’m taking this week to talk to good friends and have them speak into my life and give me the best advice, who know me well. I’m currently leaning more towards starting a... I can’t say a company for legal reasons, but starting a type of company.

Vitaly: And enterprise.

Tejas: Sure, yes. Start starting an enterprises. Starting an enterprise somewhere around DevRel. That seems really attractive to me. And really you are an inspiration for that. Watching you lead smashing, right? I want to be able to do that. To give people a place where they can be creative and do their best work, et cetera, while also earning a good amount of money. I want to create something like that. So I’m kind of leaning towards that. I don’t know if it’s sustainable or if I’m skilled enough to do that, but that’s kind of ... Plan B, listen to this privilege. Vitaly, listen to how ridiculous this sounds.

Tejas: My worst case scenario, my like fallback is I get a job at some tech company and earn a decent salary. That’s unbelievable. But that’s kind of plan B is just take a job somewhere. Of course, it would have to be in a field I’m passionate about, that I care about, et cetera. But yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at.

Vitaly: Where would you see yourself in general? I mean there are many companies, many people who are trying to get to the fan club, the big ones, the Facebook, the Apple, the Google, the Amazon and so on so forth. Did you ever think about, okay, I’m going to do whatever is needed? And I know that, again, looking that you started coding back when you were eight, right? And you’re a software engineer. I assume that that might be on your agenda to get to this top five, top 10 other companies on the world. Is it interesting to you or would you rather work in a smaller company?

Tejas: That’s a great question. Yeah, so it was interesting. I feel like the closest I’ve got to big company energy is Spotify. And just by virtue of working at Spotify with 4,000 employees, I learned very quickly that this isn’t for me. So maybe, but I’m leaning more towards, no, with the larger tech empire-type companies. I feel like it would be great if I had three children in a very busy personal life to go to work and kind of have that much structure and rigidity. But at this point in life it’s a no for me.

Vitaly: I think it’s interesting because I’m being asked that as well. And actually I was under a very strong impression at some point in my life when I was thinking that if I want to make a good career, I have to work in one of the big ones. I have to do whatever it takes. But you know me a little bit. I like my freedom and I don’t want to be sitting day and night working or anything. I mean the work-life balance and I mean everybody’s talking more or less about work-life balance. But I mean it in a very ... it’s been hard to explain in a very personal way. Meaning I want to be able to say to myself, and this is kind of the ultimate test that I put for myself.

Vitaly: Never want to be in a position where at 2:00 PM on any given day, I have to tell me myself, "Okay, I don’t want to do this and I have to, no matter what it takes, I have to do it for the next four hours, whatever it takes." And I kind of always wanted to be in a position to say, okay, you know what? I’m going to go to cinema at 10:00 AM on Monday morning. Frankly, if I’m being very honest, it really never happened to me that I actually wanted that. And it never really happened to me that I made it or I did it. But I mean, this kind of sense of freedom is very important here, but not everybody can afford that. And it’s a lot of risk too.

Tejas: Yeah, it’s also an emerging trend in the industry. Zeta works this way when I was there at least. It’s more results-based than time-based. So on paper you have a 40 hour kind of work week, but you distribute those 40 hours. However, you could do two days straight and then the next day go to a movie theater in the morning. So they don’t care about when you work, it’s just that stuff gets done. I see that. That happens with full-time employment too. I feel like with the fan club, everyone I talked to at fan companies. My own experience at Spotify was, and this is not to speak ill of these companies, there are big companies with lots of things happening. There’s a lot of meetings, a lot of meetings to where you will have a meeting blocked-

Vitaly: And you don’t like meetings.

Tejas: Me? I like meetings, but I feel like look, too much of any good thing becomes a bad thing. And I feel like, respectfully, Spotify when I was there, had too many meetings. It did. And it’s not their fault. There was a pandemic and they’re used to working in office. They were not remote ever. So the pandemic made them go remote. But then there was a lot of learning to do about how to be remote. And I joined just in the middle of that where async meetings were not really a thing and it was very complicated. And so I was just at my laptop all day in video calls because it’s kind of being in an office.

Tejas: So no, I didn’t enjoy the meetings. And I found not just me, but I have friends at Google, at Meta, they’ll accidentally around me be like, “Hey, look at my phone.” And they’ll show me a photo from their vacation, and I see notifications pop up, “Oh, you have meeting at 10 minutes?” And they tap on the notification, go to the calendar app and “Oh my God, the carnage in this calendar app.” You look at that once you’re like, okay, I do not envy you. So—

Vitaly: Yeah, I mean surely meetings are necessary, but it’s also a matter of how to organize it because for me, or for us and at Smashing for example, we don’t have many meetings. But also, most importantly, everybody can set boundaries in a way. So I like to have, for example, like for this call, right? I like to have two or three days blocked out when there are no meetings.

Tejas: Yes.

Vitaly: No meetings. Just almost, I mean, something must happen, something bad, or too good must happen for the day to have a meeting, right? And it’s also really just about having proper boundaries in place of this is when we work, and this is when we have meetings. Although of course meetings also work.

Tejas: Yeah. One lesson I learned working at so many different places is people. I say people because I know people, but even just speaking of myself, people suck at creating good and healthy boundaries in the workplace. I do. I did more when I was more inexperienced, but still it’s a struggle to have good, strong boundaries. I feel like it could work better if the employer enforced and enabled people to think more about boundaries and even suggested, “Hey, maybe you should do a no meeting day.”

Tejas: If managers push, not push boundaries, but how do you say? Establish boundaries on behalf of their people. Yeah, and that’s something I’d like to see more of. I haven’t seen the opposite. I’ve seen the lack of people’s ability to set boundaries be exploited far more often than I’ve seen healthy boundary setting from the top.

Vitaly: Right. Well, now I do have to ask though, I’m just curious at this point, do you then have a dream project that you’d like to work on one day, maybe, I don’t know, be building a, I don’t know, some sort of software for rocket ship or anything? Do you have any particular ambitions in that regard?

Tejas: I’m really thankful, Vitaly, to say that this year I’m actually spending all of my unemployed time working on three dream projects of my own. One of them is a secret. I can’t tell you about that.

Vitaly: Oh, come on. Just give us a little of a spoiler then.

Tejas: It’s a very social thing. There is the spoiler. But the other one is working on this DevRel startup co consultancy thing. I’m thinking of starting is the second one. And that’s really excited about that. Worst case, it fails and then I join a company as it were. But that’s something I’m excited about. And the third dream project is my YouTube channel, which I’ve wanted to be a YouTuber for years, mainly honestly, because I like reaching people, but also I’ve speaking about this Mac OS 10 Aqua Ball thing. I get to do that with video, create beautiful videos, and I’m really into cameras and making nice shots and everything. And that’s a cool project. It’s a dream project actually to be a good YouTuber, emphasis on the good because I don’t want to be an average YouTuber. And also to be able to turn it into a living. I feel like my dream would be to just kind of be a full-time YouTuber. Yeah.

Vitaly: But what about TikTok? We don’t see you on TikTok yet.

Tejas: Yeah, sadly. I’m not so good at dances.

Vitaly: Well, maybe that should be the next skill to learn.

Tejas: That could be my New Year’s resolution. Get good at shuffling. Every day I’m shuffling.

Vitaly: So we’ve been learning a little bit about front end and JavaScript and AI and the other companies and so on, but what have you been learning about lately, Tejas? What have you been reading or kind of the skill that you’ve been trying to get acquainted with recently?

Tejas: That’s a good question. For me, communication is probably the thing that I enjoy the most based on conference speaking and stuff. And one thing I’ve been learning is the difference in mode of communication. What I mean by that is like what makes a great in-person conference talk does not actually make a great YouTube video. And I find this fascinating that when it’s a different modality of communication, people have different preferences. So like what I mean by that is if I come out at Smashing Conf New York or Freiburg, and I’m on stage and I’m like, "What’s up everybody?" High energy. People are like, wow, that’s awesome. But if I do the same thing on YouTube, they’re like, dude, what are you on? And that’s something I’ve been learning how to communicate effectively on different platforms. I’ve yet to learn the TikTok one, but I think it’s mostly through dance.

Vitaly: You’ll get there. I have no doubt about that. All right. Well if you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Tejas you can find him on Twitter where he’s at Tejas Kumar underscore. We’ll probably have to have another call about why underscore. By the way, why underscore?

Tejas: Because the other one was taken. You know what—

Vitaly: That’s reasonable.

Tejas: If that Tejas could delete their handle and then email me I’d appreciate it.

Vitaly: Excellent. So that would be Tejas Kuma underscore. On YouTube where he’s just at Contagious K and potentially on TikTok, where he’s going to show his best dance moves and tips around Svelt and React eventually. But also on his website, Teg.as Where-

Tejas: T E J

Vitaly: T E J. Yes, indeed. T E J dot, yes. You can also find plenty of photos of Tejas as well. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Tejas. Do you have any parting words of wisdom you’d like to send to the universe for people who are going to watch us 20 years from now?

Tejas: Yes. I would say this: kindness and compassion is the most important.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 54 With Stéphanie Walter: What Is User Journey Mapping?

This article is a sponsored by Deque

In this episode we’re talking about User Journey Mapping. What is it, and how does it help us build better digital products? Vitaly talks to expert Stéphanie Walter to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a UX expert, researcher and product designer with expertise in design and strategy. She lives in Luxembourg, teaches at school and universities and facilitates workshops in small and large teams, not a day passes by without Stephanie sharing what she has learned on Twitter on LinkedIn, and in her wonderful weekly roundup called the Pixels of the Week. She recently wrote a book on user journey maps and currently works for MAL consulting and European Investment Bank all around enterprise UX challenges. So we know she’s a fantastic designer and problem solver, but did you know that she once had a full 45 minutes long conference talk on pizza recipe examples. If your favorite pizza surprise, surprise is a vegetarian one, but with added bacon or ham. My smashing friends, please welcome Stephanie Walter. Hello Stephanie. How are you doing today?

Stéphanie Walter: Yay, I’m smashing. And it’s Friday. So yeah.

Vitaly: Yay. It’s Friday. Does Friday usually mean pizza day for you?

Stéphanie: Yeah, pizza or Indian food as well.

Vitaly: Okay, that sounds wonderful. Well, Stephanie, it’s always such a pleasure to see you. I know that you spoke at the Smashing Cup Barcelona, I think a while back. It feels like it was, yeah, I don’t know, 150 years ago. So I always learned so much from you. So maybe it’s a good idea to start by just asking you to share a little bit of your story. So how did you even end up getting into this? I know that much of your time is spent around Enterprise UX, but eventually you had to go through a lot of different things and I know you did a lot of different things throughout your career to get there. So maybe share a little bit about your background and your story.

Stéphanie: So I have a master degree in design and languages. It’s a little bit strange. It’s both. It’s a degree where you learn how to build website and how to translate them basically. And after that I decided to do an internship in Germany. So I was working for a company and I think I finished what I was supposed to do in three months instead of six. So they said, hey, do you want to do mobile apps? I was like, yeah, I’ve never done that, but sure. So I got interested and at the time there was not a lot of documentation on mobile and native design, but there was something on Apple guideline and it was called Human Computer Interaction, something like that. So it kind of drove me into HCI and UX design. So we had usability class at the university. We had kind of a few hours of how do you do usability tests, but that was basically it.

Stéphanie: And then during my internship I discovered UX design. I thought like, oh, this is actually what I want to do. It’s quite interesting, understanding user needs and really building products and services that try to fit and match those needs. So I worked in Germany, then I went back to France to work for a web agency and I said, yeah, if I’m going to leave the agency, I’m going to leave France. So this is basically what I did. And I got hired at the University of Luxembourg as a researcher assistant in the Human Computer Interaction Department. So it was very interesting to work in an academic place. And after that I decided to go back to private sector, and I was lucky I worked with a company that had a lot of different contracts in a lot of different areas, and this is really when I started specializing in Enterprise UX because they were doing a lot of things that were either B2B or B2B to C, but it was always ugly complex dashboards and a lot.

Vitaly: This sounds exciting stuff, isn’t it?

Stéphanie: Yeah, I remember I had to help with the design of a form that was for Luxembourgish customs, and the form was so complicated in terms of levels that I printed it on a piece of paper and I just drew lines to understand the hierarchy and information architecture of that. And it’s a little bit complicated because it’s like you have to have a number and all the numbers stacks up. So if you have the tax number, every single digit means something. So it’s like apples that were harvest between October and November in specific countries in Europe that are designed to become cider, all of that, it’s a number.

Vitaly: Well that does sound like a very exciting exercise in design.

Stéphanie: Crazily complex. But I have eight levels, we have six levels in html, H1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. What do we do?

Vitaly: But then look at that, you have established itself as an expert in helping other people harvest apples, but instead of decided to jump more into design and UX work.

Stéphanie: So it was a lot of different really, really cool stuff around that. And I was like, yeah, you know what? I’m never going to be a fancy designer, like those designer who do amazing website for marketing campaigns or I don’t know, I know a lot of people who do really cool stuff around the museum and things like very immersive. I was like, yay. I like complex challenging, super heavy information architecture and solving problems for people who have to work with a tool on a daily basis. And I was like, okay, I think this is kind of the kind of challenge that I like and I want to keep on working on that.

Vitaly: That’s interesting. So it’s always kind of fascinating story to me because I think that we have a lot of articles about designing a perfect button and picking the right icons and making responsive tables and navigation, things like that. But when I dive deep into this really, really complicated world of enterprise applications or multi-level like six, seven levels of navigation and I don’t know, 20, 25 multi form pages with PDFs integrated and all of that, I’m wondering, I mean I know that this is your life, most part of it. I’m wondering at this point, do you think that the world in which we’re living in, the enterprise world, is undiscovered? Are there a lot of books, articles, resources on that? How do you feel in that world?

Stéphanie: Honestly, there’s not a lot of content that specifically talked to that. And I don’t know why. Maybe because NDAs and things like, that’s a lot of stuff that you can’t show in those areas. Also, let’s face it’s not fancy. No one wants to see an interface that is supposed to help you optimize track driving through the area or something super complicated. So it’s not self explanatory. So a lot of people, they don’t put those on the portfolios because today there’s still this idea that you need some wow stuff in the portfolio. So I think there’s a lot of people around here that actually work in enterprise UX with complex software like that, but there’s not a lot of content about it. But why is a mystery to me.

Vitaly: Well, you are changing that. I think in many ways it’s just the fact that what really surprises me really is that we see a lot of case studies about portfolio designs, about immersive campaigns, like you mentioned, things related to branding, I don’t know, big redesigns that happen in big companies and so on. But not necessarily about those things, which are, I don’t know, insurance companies and truck configurators and whatnot. So that’s kind of always challenging for me. But I also want to ask you maybe on another side of that, when you think about enterprise UX, I think that many of us listening this later or in years from now, maybe still will be thinking about long meetings, long deadlines, complex workflows, a lot of legacy. Is that enterprise UX or how would you describe it? How would you define it?

Stéphanie: It necessarily depends. You can arrive on a project where they have nothing and then there’s no legacy. You build from the ground, but you still have a lot of meeting because the business is complex. So you need time to understand the business. You also need help to, you can’t really go around those meetings because they are usually kind of useful to help you understand exactly what is going on. But then, yeah, it depends. Legacy is one problem. Another problem that I see and foresee in the future is depending on when we are those Gartner, Bloomberg and all of those big company, they either tell people that they need to internalize the team and then you need to do in-house developments. So you have a bunch of developer who will develop the enterprise, product often without designers.

Stéphanie: And then a few years later, Gartner goes like, no, you know what, no. Package the new thing. So stop having an internal IT team, buy packages, and then everyone decides to buy package. And then there’s a new wave from, I don’t know, Gartner, Bloom, whatever, Harvard Business Review, those people that big company listen to. And they say, yeah, no, let’s go hybrid, let’s do something like a package. But then the package is the business web services, and then you can still do the UI, the front ends. So this cycling through, and it’s really, really funny because if you worked in such industry for a few years, you’ve seen the waves of Oh, let’s build everything internally. Oh, let’s build a package. But look, the business is so complicated. We bought a package and now we discover doesn’t fit our need. I think we need to rebuild something internally and then, but building things internally costs a lot of money. So let’s package. It’s kind of every few years it comes around.

Vitaly: I think it’s also related to the fact that there is just a lot of layers and with every layer comes a bit of politics involved and everybody has their own interests and KPIs and goals. And I’m wondering how do you even operate in this kind of environment? I mean, you must have very strong governance, very strong guidelines, and very strong buy-in from the top. The reason why I bring this up is because your work has been known for being you focus very much on accessibility, inclusive design, user-centric design. But then at the same time, if you have all the different layers of politics and all these different layers of business decisions, which in some situations might be more important even than the user research part, how do you even navigate that space? Do you find this or is it maybe the case that now in 2023 or '22 still when we’re recording this, that UX is kind of a part of what we do, that it’s understood by stakeholders?

Stéphanie: I think it’s that bad. The way we do it is we navigate around the mess. Basically. We try to stay away. And I am lucky, I work with amazing people who actually shield the team from all the political stuff. So I have people working with us who try to deal with that so that we on the team can do our daily job. And also I think I’m lucky because my manager understands, I’m my manager. The person I’m referring to understands what is UX design and why it’s useful. So they will fight basically for me to have some time to talk to the users. But I’m super lucky in the place where I work, I think we are the only project that’s actually able to have a very user centered approach. And in a lot of area in enterprise UX not everyone is that lucky.

Stéphanie: In a lot of places you have analysts will ask to the user what do they want, and then the users are expected to provide a solution and then the person will just write a technical ticket saying the user wants an export to Excel. Well, if you go there and you’re like, you talk to the user and yeah, but today you don’t have an export to Excel button, so what do you do? And the user shows you the table, they will copy paste the whole table, paste it in Excel, and then you’re like, okay, so it’s in Excel, what do you do now? And then the person goes into one of the column that is the status of something. So it’s either active or inactive, and she just removes all the inactive from the table and she’s like, so we have an analyst that is writing a story saying the user needs an export to Excel button, but the user doesn’t need an export to Excel button in this very specific situation. She needs to remove all the inactive stuff from the screen.

Stéphanie: And yet the export to Excel is the solution she came up with because this is what she does today. But we could also maybe have filters in the browser directly on that table, modern tables and things. So the user need here is not to export to Excel, is to clean up some stuff on the screen and then you come here and you’re like, yeah, but actually no, we are not going to do the export. We will do the export to Excel for other reasons because it’s needed. But for this specific user need, it’s not an export to Excel that we will provide a solution is a filter on the table.

Stéphanie: And unfortunately in a lot of places you have this kind of old school analysis where they will go to people, ask them what they want and then IT will implement it and hopefully find a place somewhere in the screen in a corner to put that button or that feature. So yeah, it’s really, really complicated. But I think at the same time, a lot of people like me are starting to have this kind of change and pushing things forward, but then you don’t make friends all the time, then the old school people are not super happy about you coming and saying, wait a minute, that’s a weird requirement. Can we talk about that and really try to understand what’s going on here?

Vitaly: Yeah.

Stéphanie: Yeah, definitely.

Vitaly: For me, it’s also just really this interesting part because I feel like in a way everything is a little bit of a fight. Sometimes it’s a bigger fight, sometimes it’s a smaller fight. But one thing is even those little things like discovery, I can imagine that it might take, I don’t know, literally months to just discover what are the user needs, how do we make it work? And then apply the good old UX process to it. Maybe you could describe your UX process in general for those kind of projects. Is it just regular way how we do UX or do you have to adjust, do something else? Maybe some methodologies work better than the others? What has your experience been so far?

Stéphanie: So for me, it’s actually faster I think because here I work with my users are the people who work for the bank I work for. We don’t work in the same department, but for recruiting user for tests and things like that, it’s actually easier. I can have a list of the people who use the tool. So in this specific case for me, discovery really, it actually goes a little bit faster because we lose less time in the recruitment. Also, when you go to the people and you say, we are going to talk about the tool that you use in order to improve it. Most of the time people are super happy to talk to you, even if they have a lot of things to do, they’re happy to be invested, that you take time to talk to them to get invested in the project. And it’s a tool they use on a daily basis.

Stéphanie: So I think in my specific case, but here you have to understand the context is I work in the IT department internally, and we provide tools for the users. So I’m not working for a SaaS company that provides B2B employee tools that they resell. So here it’s very specific context and for me it’s actually easier in this case. But for the process, what we have is, so we are redesigning a tool. So we have some basic data, which is server logs that say, okay, how many people visited this page? But then that’s kind of the baseline to say if we migrate some pages, we should migrate first the one that were visited the most. And we have kind of two streams, we have the pages visited the most, and also we have things around user tasks.

Stéphanie: So the user, they need to do some things in the whole process of loan at the bank. So to give you some context, the bank is lending money is just that it’s a European investment bank. So they’re lending money to other countries, to other banks. So it’s not a loan for your car, but it’s kind of has the same principle. You need to build a project, you need to explain what you are going to do with the money, how it’s going to be used and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of different steps and there’s a lot of tasks and activities around that. So a lot of the things we do is we start with the user tasks. So sometimes people ask me about personnel and I’m like, yeah, if I do personnel, if I have 300 of those, and for me, it doesn’t matter if the person is an assistant, a lawyer, an engineer, or we don’t discriminate based on personnel, we discriminate and we do the user research on specific tasks and then we’d check what type of user needs to do this task at which step of the process.

Stéphanie: And in the discovery phase, we will involve the different users from different department who will have to perform this task. We do a lot of interviews. So usually we have kind of interview script where, so I prepare my research plan with the objective of the research, then I write my questions to kind of understand what people are doing. Often it’s kind of open interview where you will ask a few question and then you will connect topics that will go around. Sometimes we go way beyond the research that we’re currently doing, but you’re like, yeah, we’re going to write this down because eventually we will tackle the other topic that the person is currently talking about. So I’m just going to write it down and then take a note that whenever we tackle that specific topic, oh, that’s a user, I can also talk to you to about that.

Stéphanie: So we do a lot of interviews. We do some kind of light shadowing where we ask people to show us to share their screen where we’re working on a specific feature or page. We would be like, okay, then show us where do you go? How does it works? We do a lot of, it’s not really observational. Yeah, it’s kind of observational studies, but with screen sharing. So we are not observing them work as in they do the daily basis, we’re behind them, but we ask them to show how do they perform a task or an activity so that we can get a better understanding of that. And I’m also working a lot with business analysts to understand the business processes because this is super complicated and I can’t know it all by heart to start with. So yeah, mostly discovery interviews. Then we will do some prototype, what needs a big feature and some usability testing on those prototypes.

Stéphanie: What we do is if it’s not such a big feature, we would sometimes just do a design, implement it, and then ask feedback on the implemented version. If it’s something we are pretty confident about and we know we may not have too many user issues or too many question about that, then we will implement it and ask questions or do some light testing once it’s implemented.

Stéphanie: Add then what we did is we onboarding new users and we gave them the user diary, which is an Excel sheet because I work for a bank. So the idea was they use the new interface for a month to see if anything is missing, if there’s some things they don’t understand. And for a month they have this diary where they can log every time there’s something that prevents them from doing their job, whether it’s a bag, a content missing, a feature or something, they put it in the diary log and then we check those diary. We usually come back to them with specific question about certain area. And then we keep on improving the product. So we are not just doing kind of discovery before launching a feature. We also do a lot of back and forth once something is launched and then, yeah [inaudible 00:21:05].

Vitaly: That sounds fantastic.

Stéphanie: Yeah, we support people. So we don’t do the training unless someone asks us to. But every department basically has some support people who are helping the user with different tools, including our tools. So what I usually do is I attend those smaller training sessions because it’s quite interesting also to see how people react the first time they see the interface, what are their questions, stuff like that. So we collaborate a lot. It takes a tremendous amount of time because then it’s one hour meetings where you just sit and listen and watch what the people are doing. So in terms of time, it takes a lot of time, but it also helps gather interesting data.

Vitaly: Do you also use of a speak aloud protocol when people are going through tasks or you just observe mostly how people deal with, I don’t know, with an interface kind of competing the tasks?

Stéphanie: No, we ask them to speak aloud, so we explain what speak aloud means. Because if you’re not UX, you might not mean.

Vitaly: Yes.

Stéphanie: So we try to make people feel comfortable. So some people are amazing at that. They will just tell you what everything that is going on in their brain where they click, what’s weird, and some people even after you told them, please feel free to explain to us what you see on the screen, what’s happening in your mind, why do you want to click somewhere? All of that. They will still just click and say nothing. So we trying to nudge them like, oh yeah, then when they stopped you just say something like, "Oh, you stopped. What is happening? Can you explain us why?" So we try to nudge them without kind of helping them, but yeah, it’s not academic research.

Vitaly: Yeah, yeah, I understand. But do you feel, Stephanie, at this point, after all these interviews, that you can actually read people’s minds when they start clicking around or tap on buttons and so on? Can you just predict what people are doing or do you feel like it’s always almost a miracle? Surprises are always in there.

Stéphanie: Depends on the people. Some stuff you can kind of predict, especially when we test some of the older things that were developed years ago, we kind of anticipate the issues, but no, sometimes on the new things, we have interesting results and you’re like, yeah, actually that makes sense. We should have thought about this. That’s a really good idea. We will do that. We had a column with the name of the person, and we have a place where you have the team member for a specific project. And in the team place, what I did, I put mail to on everyone’s name. So you click on it auto fills an email with the name of the project nicely, the introduction. And people are super happy about that because then they don’t need to copy paste the email of the person anymore. They do all of that.

Stéphanie: And then I have another page where I have the name of the person, I didn’t even think about putting the link there, and the user was like, "Yeah, but we have the link on the teams here. We have also name. Why is it not there?" Ah, actually, yeah.

Vitaly: That makes sense.

Stéphanie: That makes a lot sense. So it’s easy to develop. So yeah, quick win. Definitely. Yeah.

Vitaly: Yeah. Excellent. Well, one thing that surprised me is that you wrote this entire book about customer journey maps and you published customer journey maps, but you did not mention customer journey map as a part of your workflow. Does it not quite fit, or is it just something that you do for other projects?

Stéphanie: Because customer journey map for me is that research method is a tool that you build based on the research. So basically some of the interviews, we worked on a project that was people have to validate tasks, and we actually build a customer journey map for that. But basically we did some interviews and the customer journey map was kind of an artifact kind of result of the user interview. So no, I use customer journey maps a lot, but it’s as if I’m say I and I didn’t learn to mention that I do word frames. To me it’s the kind of same thing.

Stéphanie: It’s not building a customer journey map to build a customer journey map. You are basically doing some research and sometimes you present it as a customer journey map, sometimes as a report, sometimes as an empathy map. But yeah, definitely we have this amazing customer journey where one of the trigger is human notification. And it always makes me laugh so much, which is they have a lot of email and all of the stuff for notification, but kind of the biggest notifications at some point, an assistant picking up the phone and saying, "Hey look, you need to validate this before six tonight. Could you please do it?" So we have this whole journey with human notification in the middle, which is quite funny.

Vitaly: Well, that’s the enterprise world for you, I guess in some way or the other. I’m also wondering now I can only imagine that it takes quite a bit of time to even work in this space, but then you always find time to, I don’t know, read a lot apparently, because every time I jump into LinkedIn or on a blog, it’s just an incredible wealth of resources all around things from CSS to UX to freebies, goodies, whatever, everything. So how does that work? Where do you find all of the stuff? Do you just spend time, I don’t know, during your pizza experiences by reading articles all around design front and then UX.

Stéphanie: Okay, so the big secret is most of the articles, I don’t read them, I listen to them.

Vitaly: No, come on Stephanie. You can’t say that.

Stéphanie: No. I listen to them.

Vitaly: Oh, so you listen to them.

Stéphanie: Yeah, I listen to them.

Vitaly: Please share details.

Stéphanie: Which means in Firefox you have, I think it’s called Reading Mode, but you can ask Firefox to read the article to you. So usually a lot of the super long in-depth articles, I don’t have the patience to read them on a screen, so I will just put the headset on my ears and then I will listen to the article while cooking, cleaning the dishes, doing [inaudible 00:27:34] for the moving of my flats and stuff like that. So yeah, that’s the secret. It’s like I’m multitasking and often I’m listening to the articles while doing manual labor that doesn’t need my brain.

Vitaly: Right. But I assume that compiling the list of links and writing on LinkedIn is done manually.

Stéphanie: Yeah, yeah. I have actually where it is basically, I can schedule things on LinkedIn and Twitter at the same time, so it makes it a little bit easier. It just allows me to post, so I enter it once. Sometimes I need to check for the handles because the tool is able to get the Twitter handles, but not the LinkedIn handles. So if I post something on LinkedIn, I need to tag someone, I need to go back to the post and edit it, which is a little bit annoying. And also sometimes I will not read anything for a whole day and just read, I don’t know, 10 articles during the weekend. And I don’t want to annoy people with an article during the weekend, so will just schedule the post so that it’s not kind of overwhelming and posting everything at the same time. So yeah, organization and having an AI.

Vitaly: So I think that-

Stéphanie: A screen reader read the articles to me.

Vitaly: I think that enterprise world taught you how to be very well organized, but I’m sure that you’ve been organized even before that as well. I can almost hear some people in the back asking, "But I’m interested in getting into enterprise UX." So maybe kind of jumping back on quickly to the topic, I’m wondering are there particular roles, skills that you think are absolutely important to be able to comfortably navigate that enterprise UX space? Or is it just the regular UX work, just more challenging?

Stéphanie: I think definitely information architecture and the ability to make sense of a lot of data and kind of organizational skills as on information in UI level, because you will get a lot of information thrown at you in enterprise. The business is so complicated that you need to make sense of all the mess. And there’s an amazing book that I think it’s called Making of Sense of the Mess, Abby Covert. She wrote a book on information architecture and she wrote a second book on diagrams, which I really like as well. And so yeah, I would say if you want to work in enterprise UX, it’s definitely being able to not be scared of the complexity because you will get a lot of complexity to deal with on a daily basis. And then, yeah, information architecture is one of the biggest skills at some point to make sure that you arrange the content in a way that makes sense to the user.

Stéphanie: You cannot comprehend all the complexity of the business behind that. Yes, but it’s a bit tricky. Also, I think you need to understand that you might need to let go of all the UI principle that are taught in mainstream articles, like make the font bigger and put some more white space. And no. I have places who wants a small font, they want as much data as possible on the screen, they don’t want to scroll. So if you could condense everything on one single screen. So all these fancy article that say, yeah, big font size are trendy there, it’s like, yeah, sure on blogs and marketing websites, but in my world, nah.

Vitaly: Yeah. So I can only agree with you on that because I think in many ways what my job has been is really trying to keep as I’m really literally also show as much information as possible in given place. And then of course you have a table with filters, with sorting, with multi sorting, with all those things, and they all have to be visible and then you need to add some batch actions on top of that and export features and whatnot. And then it has to kind of in some way or the other, work on mobile as well.

Stéphanie: So this is a very different world for sure. So I think it would definitely be a good idea to see, just to be able to explore or see more case studies and work done in that world as well. But I heard that enterprise UX actually is just one part of your story because you are also interested in other things like for example, illustrations and graphic design. And on your beautiful blog, you also of course have your beautiful illustrations, and every now and again one can see your illustrations, but do you even have time for it now that you are so, I don’t know, so deep dive into this messy world of tables, filters, forms, and all of that. Do you have time for your beautiful graphic design illustration work?

Stéphanie: Yeah, usually in the evenings or weekends when I have a topic that I’m interested in too. This is also why I could not be a professional illustrator because I don’t know, how do you illustrate something someone else asks you to do? So all the illustration I’m doing is just like, yeah, I have this really fun idea and I’m going to draw it, and that’s basically it. So I would not be able to have someone tell me, oh, could you do an illustration on that on that, so I admire illustrator who are able to do that work for other people and stuff. For me it’s kind of just a hobby and just having fun illustrating kind of funny things.

Stéphanie: And also I blame Instagram, they have this Domestica advertisements. So Domestica is a website where you can learn a lot of art, craft and stuff. Really like this illustration, I think the pottery, how to build furniture out of wood. I’ve done some courses on that. So it’s really all the creativity stuff and sometimes they’re pushing me advertisement on my Instagram’s like, "Hey, do you want to do a new class on [inaudible 00:33:37] illustration? I was like, "Damn it."

Vitaly: Right?

Stéphanie: Another class on [inaudible 00:33:44] illustration just for fun.

Vitaly: But it’s unlikely that you’re going to give up your wonderful world of enterprise UX for that. Will you?

Stéphanie: No, no. Yeah, I prefer, I think it’s kind of tough to be in enterprise UX because there’s a lot of politics and so it’s very, very demanding. But artist world, illustration world, then this sounds even worse with everyone thinking they can just do whatever they want. Copyright issue, content theft AI as you know who are fed by styles of a specific artist and you can create-

Vitaly: Well who knows Stephanie, maybe at some point we just waiting for a startup to be building an enterprise AI constructor bot something using mid journey and whatnot.

Stéphanie: I don’t see that. But that’s the same as a package. And everywhere where they bought a package, I saw it fail. Either it didn’t work or you end up with some users super frustrated. In one company they bought a package and they could not have it involved anymore because the company went bankrupt and they basically repurposed some of the labels. So it’s like, okay, this label is something, but it does something completely else. And everyone knows that if you want to do that, you need to click on this label that has nothing to do. But they can’t change the label.

Vitaly: Oh well I think it sad.

Stéphanie: Yeah, I’m like, yeah, I’m curious to see what AI and stuff can do for enterprise UX. But honestly I don’t know.

Vitaly: A little bit skeptical. I can tell from your voice and from the way you answer that question, well, but I’m wondering if your students challenge you because of course you also teach for University in Strasbourg and also online and you also provide mentorship. And not only do I wonder just how do you find time for it all, but I understand that one, I mean for me it’s kind of the same story. I always kind of make time for it. It’s not about finding time, it’s kind of making time for it. But I do want to ask at this point, what is for you, the most rewarding part about this? I can tell that of course, you’re very passionate about disability and design interface design and the world of enterprise UX one can tell of course as well, I think it might be a little bit difficult to convey to students all the difficult part about enterprise UX and how to apply UX work in enterprise UX setting. Or are you teaching something that’s maybe a little bit more just general UXy? And again, just the experience. What would be the most rewarding part for you of taking time to do this?

Stéphanie: So I am teaching mobile usability and UX design applied to mobile and responsive design. So it’s not specifically enterprise UX, but the cool thing is I’m teaching a framework which helps people build products and services with reusable components. And I think that’s the interesting part because then the students are super happy that I’m providing a framework to help them deal with the complexity. And sometime they will be like, yeah, I’m not sure where the teacher is going with this framework. But then after they started working, they’re like, oh, I remembered your course. And then I used that framework and it totally helped me kind of make sense of the mess and stuff. So I have a very small part of my course that is dedicated to information architecture and how to build reusable components for responsive web design. So components that can adapt to different screen sizes or that you can reuse in a big area in a smaller area.

Stéphanie: So I’m not going in all the media query and container query detail, that would be the technical part. But basically I’m preparing designers to be ready for that. And I had a lot of feedback that was like, "Oh, I went back to work on Monday and I reuse what you taught us." And I think this is what drives me, the best feedback you can give someone who is teaching a workshop is on Monday morning, I was able to apply something I learned from you last week, which is amazing because then you really made a difference in that person’s work. So I think it’s the same for students. I’m like, I’m pretty sure that they are not super convinced that everything I’m teaching them today is going to be useful, but at some point later in their career, they will remember, oh yeah, we didn’t know how to decide if we needed to build a mobile or native app.

Stéphanie: But then we remembered was Stephanie said about starting with the user need and checking what makes sense based on the user needs, so user need first, and then decide on the technology instead of deciding technology and try to feed the user need into that technology, which makes very little sense. So it’s often about, but it’s the same for some of my classes. While you are in the class, you’re like, yeah, okay, it’s interesting, but I’m not sure if I’m ever going to reuse that. And then a few years later, you’re working. I like, huh, yeah, actually that was very useful.

Vitaly: That is indeed I’m sure, a very rewarding experience. I think it’s always just getting some sort of a feedback from people who, I don’t know, read something that you posted or found something useful. And all this is in many ways kind of the fuel of motivation to keep going and explore and keep exploring and keep growing. But also, actually one thing that I ask myself a lot based on that, every time it comes to a point where I realize, okay, well these are some bits of knowledge that I’ve gathered and I presented maybe, and then somebody learned from that, I always try to look back and see when did I learn that actually? Or how did I learn that? And how did it evolve over time maybe. So the question that I’m thinking of at this point is when you look back at your career, what do you wish you would’ve told yourself 10, 15 years ago? Or what do you wish you, I don’t know, how would you wish you would have structured your career? Or do you feel comfortable where you are? Do you feel like you would’ve done something a little bit differently, looking back?

Stéphanie: I would’ve loved to have more psychology. I have this whole thing on, we created some [inaudible 00:40:25] on cognitive biases of years ago with a trend and it’s kind of blown up. I have people in different institutions and in some company using it to help their colleagues understand cognitive biases. And definitely I think I would’ve liked to have a little bit more background in psychology, cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, also as a UX designer. But at the same time, I think when I was a student, this kind of UX career path didn’t really exist per se. So in France you had something called ergonomic, which is an issue with ergonomics. That’s my problem. Ergonomics. Ergonomics is chair and posture and how do you make sure physical, but ergonomy in French is both, it’s either the chair, but it can also be the usability part.

Stéphanie: So it’s a tricky word to translate. So there’s some master degree that in psychology that you prepare you to become an ergonomist in the English version of the world, which is you go to the people, you observe how they work and then you try to help them with postures or moving around things, but also adapting their workspace and adapting the processes and stuff like that. And it’s kind of linked to mastering, is it mastering? No, it’s a license. So it’s a bachelor in psychology in France, but this is not your design again, it’s something else. So I wish I had kind of more of a background in that. So now I’m trying to compensate with some online learning, some books and a lot of that. But yeah, definitely I would say if you want to become a UX designer and really if you are interested into that, having a little bit of background in how does the human brain work when it comes to memory, how do we learn, how do we perceive information, all of that can be very, very helpful.

Vitaly: I remember the last one that would be, that’s always something I ask because who knows who is going to listen to this podcast at some point, well, this year or in a few years. Is there a particular dream project that you ever wished or always wished you would be working on? I mean, you are working on some pretty complex environments and projects already, but if you had to pick your battle, what would be one of the really interesting products, companies, challenges, dream projects that you ever wished you could work on?

Stéphanie: I don’t know honestly, but I think something around maybe service design or more having stuff built in to not only the UI but also the whole service around it. So maybe connected houses or kind of helping in different area, maybe working on some tools in factory for instance. I would love to do that, go there, observe how do people work, and then optimize the tool to help them in their daily job. So kind of a mix between a little bit of interface, but also a lot of work around service design, process design, things like that. I think this would be cool. I’ve seen some that Airbus, a plane company was looking for an intern and was like, oh gosh, I would’ve loved to be a York’s intern for Airbus when I started. Because I think it’s working on the cockpits and the UI interface of a plane. That must be something quite challenging and quite fun.

Vitaly: You do a good challenge, one can tell. Wait and see, wait and see Stephanie, wait and see, who knows. Well, so we’ve been learning today what enterprise UX is, but maybe as a final word from you Stephanie, what have you been learning recently? You’ve been publishing, linking to all the articles and mentioning all the tools. What were some of the really interesting things that you learned recently?

Stéphanie: I think I shared it last week. Gary Reid had a super interesting take on [inaudible 00:44:44] 3.0 and the need or not need of interfaces. A lot of interesting thought on how Web3 is not accessible and not open at all, even if people are trying to tell you that it’s open and easy. So yeah, I really like that her take mixing what’s coming in the new work and kind of accessibility in the future and how we will include human being in different experiences. That is something that I really like that talk that she gave because it’s really cool to try to imagine and foresee the future in a not bullshit way, because it’s the end of the year. We will get the trends for next year and it’ll be all bullshit. But her talk is actually, it sound did grounded on reality. So that was really, really cool.

Vitaly: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m very excited actually about this plethora of articles around all the cool and important and less important digital trends in 2023. Always look at them and then think, huh, let’s see how well we or better we have become in predicting the future. It didn’t look very good over the last decade or so at all. Well if you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Stephanie, you can find her on Twitter where she’s @WalterStephanie and on LinkedIn where she’s Stephanie Walter Pro and on her website StephanieWalter.design, Stephanie will also be running a workshop on designing better products for Smashing Workshops. So please drop in if you have time. I totally forgot to ask about that, Stephanie, but is it true that you are running that workshop?

Stéphanie: Yay. I hope so. It should be a lot of fun. It should be about dealing with complexity of product, giving people, again, a framework to help them. And I hope they will be happy and find something that will help them deal with complexity on the work on the Monday morning also-

Vitaly: Oh, you do like complexity?

Stéphanie: Yeah.

Vitaly: Excellent, excellent. So that sounds very, very good. So please do join us on November 28th and December 12th where we’re going to dive in into designing by the products with Stephanie. I’m very excited about that. Well, thanks for joining us today, Stephanie. Do you have any parting words or wisdom that you would like to send into the universe by people who actually manage to listen to the very last sentence of this podcast?

Stéphanie: No, I don’t know. I’m really bad at this.

Vitaly: We all are.

Stéphanie: Stay safe maybe. And yeah, I think stay safe is still something we need to make sure, even if the pandemic seems to be a little bit over. Yeah, stay safe.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 53 With Rémi Parmentier: Can HTML Email Use Modern CSS?

In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about HTML email. Do we still have to design like we would for IE5? Vitaly talks to expert Rémi Parmentier to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: He’s an email and web developer based in the north of France, near Lille and goes by HTeuMeuLeu on the internet. He works in his own small web development agency, Tilt Studio, since 2008. And he also runs workshops, gives talks, and writes articles on his blog all around HTML emails. Now Rémi also likes collecting Game Boy consoles and listening to, Sufjan Stevens. My Smashing friends, please welcome Rémi Parmentier. Hello, Rémi. How are you doing today?

Rémi Parmentier: I’m smashing.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s so wonderful to hear, Rémi. I don’t know when we know we saw each other maybe, I don’t know, 27 years ago now?

Rémi: Ah, yeah, that feels like it. Yeah, I think we met in person for the first and last time in Smashing conference in Freiberg in 2019, I think.

Vitaly: I think so. This seems like it was a very, very long time ago.

Rémi: Yeah, it’s not even this decade, so.

Vitaly: Yeah, no. So Rémi, this is coming here maybe the questions from the audience, coming already. So if it was 27 years ago, was it the same back then, writing TL emails, like it is today? Or have things changed since then?

Rémi: You are already teasing me. No, I would say things have changed somehow. There are differences like mobile emails, we do responsive emails nowadays, that wasn’t the case 27 years ago. So, yeah, there are lots of differences like this.

Vitaly: Yeah. So it’s always interesting for me because there is an ongoing joke about HTML emails and people who have to do HTML emails and people who are forced to do emails. And you love to do HTML emails.

Rémi: Yeah.

Vitaly: You have to explain yourself, Rémi.

Rémi: Yeah, I don’t know how it came to be exactly, but I wouldn’t have had the repulsion that most web developers have these days when they get asked to code an HTML email.

Rémi: And I think one of the reason might be that I’m old and so when I started at my very first gig in a web agency, it was around 2006. And back then emails were coded pretty much the same way that webpages were coded. So we use tables for layouts for webpages and so did we for HTML email. So it wasn’t so different back then. And so it’s just that with time, we saw that web evolved to something different. To as a semantic web first with a growing introduction of CSS and growing use of CSS for layouts. And then we got responsive web. And nowadays we’ve got all sorts of web applications and stuff like this. And yeah, it’s true that emails didn’t catch on to all of these steps, at least not at the same ease, at the same timeframe than the web did.

Rémi: But I feel like somehow it’s catching up every now and then. And we do get to use nice and modern stuff, as well, in HTML emails. So yeah, I really like HTML emails. And I think one part of it is that’s whenever I stumble upon a really weird the bug or behavior or something that’s really maddening for the normal person, I like to just dig in and try to figure things out, try to understand why this happens this way, why things are this way? And so I think that’s really an interesting niche of HTML development nowadays.

Vitaly: But it’s probably keeps you... I don’t know, it keeps you on your toes and keeps you awake at night, thinking about all this incredible, wonderful bugs happening in, I don’t know, in Microsoft Outlook and, God for a forbid, Lotus Notes. Are you still testing Lotus Notes?

Rémi: No, no, no. I haven’t tested that for years now, so.

Vitaly: Okay. That makes me a bit happier at this point. But every time I think about HTML emails, I do remember your wonderful talk where you say that, well, we actually have to think about email development as being a slightly different way, a slightly different mindset that is required to actually get it right. And I remember you speaking about thinking in the Email Geek, which really takes a slightly different turn, I guess, or perspective on what it even means to be designing and developing emails. So if somebody’s very, let’s say unfamiliar, with this territory, if you had to explain how building, designing HTML emails is different from a regular website... I mean, it’s hard to say regular... From websites and applications. Regular always has a little of undertone in it. How are they actually different? And what are some of the important skills that are absolutely required to even make sense of building and designing for HTML email?

Rémi: Yeah, so I think the differences can fall down to two things. The first may be the email client’s landscape. So we’ve got tons of email clients existing and used by people all around the world, while in the browsers nowadays we pretty much sadly have only one browser, which is Chrome and Chromium used by Edge and WebKit used by Safari, which is very similar, as well. And unfortunately, there’s not much diversity in the browser world right now. And so that’s actually a good thing that I enjoy about the email space is that we have got a lot of diversity, tons of email clients. And of course, the bad part of this is that each client comes with its own bugs and quirks and weird behaviors and features that you might not expect and that can be surprising. But I think it’s really the same thing to have such an environment with so many difference email clients.

Rémi: And the second thing that’s really pretty different, I think, is people, it’s users. And on the web, even if you don’t really know beforehand who will visit your websites, you can know it afterwards. If you use any sorts of analytics or if you just look at your server statistics, you will know how many pages, were viewed, how many people came to your website and such. On the email world, it’s really hard to have such statistics because we cannot use JavaScript for this and we cannot use server stats because emails are never on our own server. They’re on the email service server, so we need to rely on invisible tracking pixels. But these are not really reliable because not everyone display images in emails and sometimes you have got image proxying like in Gmail or Apple Mail and so you end up with statistics that are very biased and I think kind of wrong because you miss a lot of the population.

Rémi: So you don’t really know who is opening your emails and how and when. And so you can’t really design and code an email with the expectations that, "Oh, okay. I know that my user base is 90% Apple Mail so I don’t need to care about Outlook." You can’t really do this. So you need to have a more extended view and be really humble and realize that you won’t be able to code for everyone, but you need to do it as good as you can, get close to this. Because you really don’t know who’s going to open your emails.

Vitaly: But despite all of that, despite all this unpredictability, and I remember you mentioning in your session at... Also, one thing that actually quite happens quite a bit, and that’s something that we just don’t have on regular web pages or applications is that email clients also change the way HTML email works. They add links, they change links, they obfuscate things, they change markup for security and privacy reasons. And all those things are very often out of control. And not to mention all the different quirks that go in all the different email clients, as well.

Vitaly: But despite all of that, I’m very surprised, every now and again, to see an enormous, I would even say extraordinary level of creativity when it comes to what people turn HTML emails into. I don’t know, from shopping cart experiences within an email, to games and everything else.

Vitaly: What are some of the most impressive things that you saw built within HTML email?

Rémi: I think it has to be an email made quite a few years ago now. That was an email called Superman Request and it’s actually a mini game. I think it calls this a Night Beat adventure and it’s a choose-your-own-path game where you’re a small character that adventures in the land of tables and TDs and you need to find your path to the best emails. And it’s really such a clever use of all the CSS possibilities with checked input and radio buttons and things like this. That one really blew my mind at the time and it’s still stuck in my mind. Because not only is this really clever in the first place, but it also, I guess, took a huge amount of time and patience to do something like this. Yeah, that was really impressing.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think you mentioned this at some point as well. It looked absolutely incredible just to be able to do that in an email. It’s just something out of control. For me personally, it was, I think when Mark Robbins, I think, he was giving a presentation once. He’s working in one of the email companies.

Rémi: Yes, he’s working in Salesforce now.

Vitaly: Salesforce now. All right. And I remember him giving a talk about the HTML email and it all felt very natural. And then in the end of the session he showed that this was actually within HTML email where the entire presentation and slides and highlighting and everything. That was very, very impressive.

Vitaly: One thing though that really keeps impressing me, I guess, about these things is that there seem to be differences even within the same platform. So if I look at Outlook and outlook.com, if I look at Gmails across different devices and gmail.com, if look, I look at Yahoo web mail and Yahoo applications, it seems like even although they have the same vendor, basically, they operate differently.

Vitaly: So could you maybe shed a bit of light? Are they often very different or what should we as developers and keep in mind when we are, let’s say, dealing with Gmail? Because are there 50,000 versions of Gmail or is it just a few?

Rémi: So maybe they’re not that much. But yeah, there are a few differences and valuations across what we can call a family of email clients, so as you said, like Gmail or Outlook. And it’s not always clear why this is, but perhaps one of the most annoying at the moment is in Gmail. For example, you will get a different level of CSS support whether you are using the desktop web mail, which usually has the best CSS support across Gmail clients, versus if you’re using the mobile apps. And even if you’re using the mobile apps, you would get a different level of CSS supports, whether you are using Gmail address or whether you’re using third-party email address, like if you’re using your outlook.com email address inside the Gmail app on Android or iOS.

Rémi: In that case, you will get what is perhaps the worst CSS support possible. Because Gmail, I think for security purposes, strips a lot of styles and a lot of things. It doesn’t support style tags, it doesn’t support media queries. So you end up with a really bare and really raw HTML with just a few styles, just what you need to get your colors and a few things like this in there. But it’s a really minimalistic approach that you need to get your email to look good in that kind of circumstances. Yeah.

Vitaly: Yeah. So it’s always such a story and you probably can hear the very disappointed voices from the dark corners of the internet talking about, "What’s the deal with Outlook?"

Vitaly: We’ve been making fun of Outlook for, I don’t know how many years now, and I don’t know when it was a 2012 or '11 or maybe even earlier than that where there was a big switch to use the Microsoft Word rendering engine, I heard. And it stayed like this, well, since then, if I’m not mistaken.

Rémi: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: So, Rémi, what are we going to do about this? Is there any, I don’t know, any help in sight, Are we just going to have to deal with Word rendering engine forever?

Rémi: So this is actually a very hot topic at the moment because something is happening at Microsoft. They might have heard all the complaints for the years and it looks like they are doing something. So as you mentioned in 2007, Microsoft decided to move Outlook on Windows from Internet Explorer rendering engine to Word rendering engine.

Rémi: And this has been really the bane of all email developers because Word is really terrible at rendering HTML and CSS. Not only does it just support very limited CSS features and HTML, but oftentimes it does it really wrong. So it doesn’t calculate weight from images correctly in CSS or it doesn’t... A lot of stuff happening that’s really intimidating for a web developer. So what’s changing at the moment is that just a few months ago, I think it was last month or just month before, Microsoft released is the first public beta version of Outlook on Windows, using Edge rendering engine.

Rémi: So they’re making a brand new Outlook on Windows and it’s basically just a web app, embedded as a desktop application. So now it’s going to mean to fix almost all the problems that Outlook had created in the first place. So it’s staying better for now, but I’m in good faith that Microsoft is really committed to push this to their end users and see how things go from there. And if they deploy this as the real update and replacement of the actual Outlook versions running on Word, it’s going to be a really big change because this means that we may no longer need to use tables for layouts. Because the only reason we use tables in HTML emails is because of the Outlook on Windows, because Word doesn’t really understand anything else than tables for layouts. So that’s really what we can out now is that Microsoft is going to push all this update and that all of the users are going to move to it. And yeah, that’s really what we need to do.

Vitaly: Well, I can hear a lot of enthusiasm and hope and I don’t know, I would say excitement about this. This seems like a very interesting move that we should probably be really watching out for, so that’s neat.

Vitaly: But given the scenario then, so with tables or without, what do you think then would be... Maybe actually looking back, look at your work specifically, how would you go around building HTML emails? So there are many solutions out there, obviously there are plenty of templates, very different kinds of templates, there’s also MGML and so on and so forth.

Vitaly: I’m wondering where do you stand in terms of what it takes, so what does it mean to be building HTML emails today? Is it still cool to be, I don’t know, coding HTML emails from scratch or do other particular templates that are normalizing things across email clients? What’s your take on this?

Rémi: So I’m definitely in from scratch camp right here. But I’m also there in for the web, as well. I like to do things from scratch.

Rémi: I think that a way to see this is that it’s not so different from the web. If you were to code a website, would you use something like Bootstrap or maybe start with a WordPress default theme and build your website from there on? Or would you rather build something from scratch? And so yeah, that’s really a way to see things. And both approaches can be good. It really depends on the time that you have, the knowledge that you have, and the will and patience that you have, as well.

Rémi: So yeah, I really, usually myself, I prefer to cut everything from scratch. But for any newcomers then if it’s good for them to start from an already made template that they found from their ESP, then go for it and maybe start learning from there and see how you can improve things from there and see what problems you encounter with the default templates and see how you can improve things and build something better from there. That’s a good approach as well.

Vitaly: Right. And in your case, where would you start? Are starting with... I mean obviously, I guess, I assume. I don’t know if I should be assuming that or not.

Vitaly: Will you be starting with HTML tables, or what is your take? Do you then build mobile first, desktop first, or how does it work for you?

Rémi: Yeah, so for a few in the years now, I think the start I approach in the email development industry and community has been more about doing things fluid, or hybrid, as we go them. So this means that we’re going to build the layouts that can adjust to any screen sizes with our media queries first. So by just using divs for example, a div is responsive by default. If you don’t set any fixed weight from it’ll adjust to your window’s size. And then from there, you can use media queries, whether targeting mobile or targeting desktop to improve things. So that’s really what we call progressive enhancements and graceful degradation. So that’s the whole mindset here, I think, is really important in the email world.

Rémi: So yeah, the approach regarding table and my approach at least, has been more to put the tables in conditional comments for Outlook because that’s really only Outlook that needs them. And then for other clients, use divs and use regular HTML semantics like H1, H2 tags, paragraphs, and such to create your elements and lay them out. And but I’ve been coding like this for, I don’t know, for how long, but for quite long now, and it’s still working well. So I think that’s a really valued approach, as well.

Vitaly: Oh, interesting. So that means that basically... Am correct to assume that you then would be having one markup specifically for Outlook, and then the rest will be getting the good old div or even potential section article. Is it even viable as well there?

Rémi: So regarding some of the semantics like article or editor and photo tags, it’s usually not appropriate because your email might get included in a more complex application like Gmail. And Gmail is web mail and its HTML itself. So when Gmail inserts your HTML newsletter in its interface, you end up with Gmail’s HTML code all around your own HTML code. So then the semantic might not make sense there. And on top of that, Gmail specifically doesn’t support these tags, so you need to find a proper fallback for years.

Rémi: But as far as Outlook is concerned, as the idea is not that much to create a separate, isolated code for the whole email, but more to add small chunks of code just for Outlook, that will say, "Okay, I’m going to open a table for Outlook right now." And then I will have the rest of my concerns come on for both Outlook and other email clients. And then at the end of my email or of my blog, I will just add another block I’ve got just for Outlook that will say, "Okay, I’m closing the table that I opened." And that’s it for tables and just for Outlook.

Vitaly: Okay. Is it actually still a good idea to inline styles in email?

Rémi: Yes. Yeah, it is because even though lot of clients do support style tags and even Outlook on Windows, actually, that’s something often surprising to people. It’s usually a good idea because some clients don’t support style tag. So earlier, I mentioned the Gmail apps on mobile when you don’t use the Gmail accounts. So this is what we Email Geeks often call GANGA, for Gmail apps with non-Gmail accounts.

Vitaly: This is quite an acronym word right there.

Rémi: Yeah, I love this acronym. And so in GANGA, you don’t get style tag support, so you need to inline your style there. So it’s really a good way to make sure that in these very restrictive conditions, at least your email looks properly styled for text and for font sizes and such and such things.

Rémi: But you can have some of your styles in separate style texts. And, in fact, that’s what we can do for responsive emails. When we use media queries, we cannot inline media queries, so we do have to use style tags. So we do a bit of both.

Rémi: And regarding inline styles, it’s also important because whenever you’re going to reply to an email or forward an email, which is something very unique to emails, some of this is really not something that happens on websites... Email clients, and that’s pretty much the case for all email clients, will really remove all the style tags of your code when you do this. And so if you don’t have in an inline style, suddenly your emails will look like something completely broken. So it’s always safer to have at least a bare minimum of times inline so that your emails looks good in this, when it happens.

Vitaly: Right. What about the font phase, by the way? So when we’re talking about embedding fonts, obviously, these font need to live somewhere. You’re not going to attach them to the email. And then sometimes I see that there are code errors appearing where you’re trying to fetch fonts from one place and then it doesn’t know where it’s going to be loaded from. So you cannot just, let’s say, whitelist a couple of domains and call it a day. So it needs to be just public to everyone.

Rémi: Yeah.

Vitaly: Right. What is a common way to deal with this?

Rémi: So, yeah. But that’s a very specific problem. And this happened to me a few times, especially when working with clients who have their own phones hosted on their own server, but they’re using CORS rules for security, so the font cannot be called from a specific web mail. I think in the end, it kind of falls apart because it then is working okay, because CORS restrictions like this do not apply to email applications.

Rémi: So for example, Apple Mail does support font face, and it doesn’t behave to CORS rules. So even if you have CORS restrictions, your fonts will still be available in Apple Mail. And for font face, Apple Mail is really just one of the few that supports it because there’s almost no web mail, so no Gmail, no outlook.com that supports font face like this no Yahoo, either. And there’s just I think a few international or local email clients that do support font face in that case.

Rémi: So yeah, whenever you are using font face, you need to realize that not a lot of people might see your fonts and because it might be stripped from the email clients, like Gmail or outlook.com. And you might have CORS errors like this. So it’s always a question of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation just... I like to use font face in emails when it’s part of the design and it’s a great enhancement, but you always need to realize that that’s not going work for 100% of your subscribers. So just you always have to think about what happens if it doesn’t work.

Vitaly: Right. What do you think in general about things like MGML. Do you use anything like that, sort of a templating language for writing coding, I would say, faster and still distant HTML emails? Or maybe using something else? What’s your take on it?

Rémi: So yeah, MGML is very popular and it’s always interesting to see. And the fun fact, I was actually hired as a consultant by Mailjet when we launched MGML in 2015 or '16, I think. And so I worked with them to make sure that the HTML output by MDML is on par with our industry standards and just works well in all environments, including Outlook. And so it’s really fun to see that still up to this day it holds up pretty well, and even though I know there has been updates to MGML and such. But the basic way of doing things, which is mobile first, has been holding well across all these years.

Rémi: And so I don’t use MGML myself, but I do use a few of our tools. And this year, in particular, I’ve been really digging into Parcel, which is an online code editor dedicated to HTML emails. And so there are a lot of fun stuff in it, to really help you code emails maybe faster. There’s components, there are styles inlining, and you can send tests to your inbox from the editor. So that’s really great.

Rémi: And I’ve also been walking with Mazo, which is a node framework to build HMTL emails, as well. I kind see it like JQL or Ivanti, which is not so much that it impose a way to code to you, but you can bring your own code and it just helps you output things easier and faster and do all sorts of small routines that like styles inlining or things like this.

Rémi: So yeah, I think over the past few years, we are really starting to see tools appearing like this and really catching on across email developers. So you can... Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good sign of maturity among the-

Vitaly: Right, and while they’re talking about sending emails to yourself from Parcel, which I think is actually pretty cool, what would be then your strategy to test and debug emails? So do you literally send it to yourself via email and then you check on your phone, let’s say, if it looks okay, and then you go back to the editor, and then you fix, and then you resend it? Or is there any other way or approach to do that? What’s your take?

Rémi: Yeah, that’s usually my first approach, it’s just testing and sending to myself. And by sending to myself, I mean sending to the dozens and dozens of email addresses that I’ve created pretty much everywhere so that I can see how email code behaves in different email clients.

Vitaly: What a fun place it is for all those email addresses to be in. Probably tons of different tests and spam and everything else coming together in one, fun place.

Rémi: Yeah. That would be a weird thing if these email inboxes were ever to leak as part of, I don’t know, any data leak. People would be wondering, "What is this inbox doing exactly? There’s been 20 emails just this past hour about this thing. I’m not sure why."

Rémi: But on top of that, we’ve got the chance to have email screenshot tools. So that’s kind of like browser stack for email. So where you just copy your HTML email code, just send your HTML email to, and then you will get screenshots on many, many different email clients. So you will get a quick preview of what your email looks like on Apple Mail, on iOS, on Gmail, on Outlook, on Windows, and all of this in just a few clicks. And it’s really a good way to make sure, as well, that your code works well in all these different environments.

Vitaly: And of course there is, CanIEmail.com, but which you wonderfully announced during the SmashingConf Freiburg. What was it like two years ago?

Rémi: Yeah, that was in Freiburg in 2019. So that’s already almost three years now.

Vitaly: Yeah. I mean, maybe you can also talk a bit about this and maybe any new features that are coming up and what it is. But for me personally, this is just a really ultimate great resource to just find out how well particular feature is supported. Think about it CanIUse.com, just for email?.

Rémi: That really was the idea. And I think that’s part of this sentiment that the email community is maturing and growing, is that we’ve got places like this where not only can we learn more publicly about what email clients do, what do they support and such things, but we can also contribute to it. And that was really, I think, the missing part. Because before that, we had a few websites that gave you the state of support for a few CSS properties in a few email clients, but it was most of the time just part of blog articles that were really outdated or on website that you couldn’t really interact with.

Rémi: So the idea with CanIEmail was really to make this available and open source and so that anyone can contribute to it. And if you see that an email client doesn’t support something, then you can report it on website and so everyone benefits from it, from them. So it’s really a great knowledge base that everyone can benefit from.

Vitaly: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, I do have to ask a question. I ask it every single time and I know what your answer is going to be like, but I do want to be... Oh, well these things have changed and I want you just to explain to our wonderful listeners here why we are where we are.

Vitaly: Now, obviously again, there is this large conversation about HTML email being such an outdated thing and HTML tables and everything and all of that. But we have this incredible, growing bloom of CSS features, grid, container queries, cascade layers. CSS is blooming like never. But when we are looking at this HTML email, we should be probably a bit of skeptical, I guess, of when we even would be able to use those things and do so reliably, and if it’s even an option at all.

Vitaly: So I’m wondering, and I think that many people are, should we be expecting at some point now in the future, at any point, really some sort of inter... Oh, this is a very difficult word... Interoperability sanitization around HTML emails and the features that are supported across Yahoo and Outlook. And with Edge moving, oh, well, not moving... It’s Outlook moving to Edge, no Edge moving into Outlook, That’s probably the better way of putting this.

Vitaly: Is it happening? Are we getting there or-

Rémi: So that’s a very interesting question because this is also a hot topic in the email world. Because I think it was just last month, there’s a new group that was formed in the past year that was announced and that’s called the Email Markup Consortium, so EMC for short. And basically, it’s a bunch of email developers and marketers and designers like me, who decided to gather together and try to really get things down to make email betters for everyone. So that means better for developers, with more standardizations and more uniformity across email clients. And also better for users because if email clients get support for all your roles, for example, or all your properties, then we can make some parts of emails more accessible for people who need it. And same thing goes for some things related to performance. If we get support to picture tags and responsive images, we could deliver more efficient and more performance email because we can have smaller image sizes and things like this.

Rémi: So this is really a work in progress. And I haven’t done much of it. So I think it’s mostly Marc Robbins and Alice Li, and I’m sorry I forgot his name, but a few people who are really active in the Email Geeks community. I think they are the main core members, but there are also a lot of members around who will contribute to the launch of this. And so now, it’s really about trying to catch the email clients’ developers attention and get them to improve things. And the good news is that there’s already been a few email clients that said they were interested in doing things better. So I know that there’s been a German email clients like this.

Rémi: So yeah, it’s really something new. So I’m really eager to see where this can go because there’s been attempts to improve things in the past, but that have never really caught on or that fell flat after a few months. So I know that this group has been around for a year secretly and trying to get things done, so it’s really great to see that now this is public and I’m really eager to see where this will lead. And hopefully it will lead to better standards and uniformity across email clients.

Vitaly: Oh, this does sound very exciting and it almost makes me feel like the future of HTML email is bright. However, I should probably curb my enthusiasm a little bit just because I don’t think we should be expecting, I don’t know, CSS sub grid and React or JavaScript getting into the world of HTML email anytime soon. Or am I wrong there?

Rémi: As for JavaScript, I think it’s nothing something you should expect and it’s really not something you should want because first, do you really want your emails to have flashy carousel and things like this? I’m not sure about that.

Vitaly: I mean, you can also do this with CSS and interactive, I don’t know.

Rémi: Yeah, yeah. But I’m not fully sure about this. But the main problem with JavaScript is really security because if you let any single line of JavaScript inside an email client, then some actors could really get your whole inbox and just download all your data and things like this with what you even knowing it. So there’s really a great danger with JavaScript. And so you should never expect full JavaScript support in email clients. But as for you mentioned a sub grid, and I think this is something that I haven’t heard of it exactly, but I think this is something we should expect in the next release of Apple Mail because if I’m not wrong, it’s coming in the next Safari.

Vitaly: Safari 16, yes.

Rémi: Yeah, iOS 16. And usually every time Apple adds some new features in WebKits and Safari, Apple Mail also benefits from it. So this is something that should come in Apple Mail this fall. So in some way if you really need to use CSS sub grids, you should be able to do it by the end of the year. But you just need to remind yourself that it will only work in Apple Mail from now. So, yeah.

Vitaly: But at the same time, I mean, you dismiss a wonderful, beautiful carousel just like that. However, I do remember vividly this time, maybe for a very brief period of time, while there was a huge excitement about this notion of interactive emails. And I think that still is, where you had AMP for Email?

Rémi: Yeah, AMP for email.

Vitaly: And you have all the beautiful carousels and everything else that you ever wanted, without having to write a single line of JavaScript because it would be just embedded into the platform and then you could reuse one of those components. Do you think that this is still a thing or where are we going with this?

Rémi: So yeah, interactive emails is still a thing and everyone talks about it every now and then. But there’s really two approaches to it. So the most traditional one is to use CSS and to ask CSS to use small interactions possible in CSS, like with the checked pseudo selector or hover pseudo selector. And from there you can do things where if you hover specific zone and some other content will appear, so you can do some image swap on hover or stuff like this. And we’ve checked, you can do much more detailed interactions where if you click on something, something else will appear on your email and you can do these sorts of things. So this is quite limitating because you are just limitating with these two sorts of interactions. But it does some decent support, like in Outlook.com, you can do things like this in Yahoo desktop one mail, as well. And Gmail does support hover interactions, as well. So that’s always interesting to do this for Gmail.

Rémi: But the hover approach, as you mentioned, was that Google announced a few years ago now AMP for email, and the idea was to bring the AMP JavaScript framework into the world of HTML emails, which is an interesting thought in the first place. But I think now it’s been quite a few years now that they did this, and I think now looking back that it was probably not the best approach to have because the way they did this is that they added a new mine type inside your email. So when you send an HTML email, you are not just really sending an HTML file to people, you’re sending an email code that’s actually a multi part code where there is a plain text version of the email, the HTML part, and all sorts of editor saying who you are sending your email to and things like this.

Rémi: And what Google did with AMP for email is that they brought a whole new AMP for email section in the email code like this. But this meant that if you wanted to send an AMP for email, then still if you want to send now an AMP for email email, for your ESP, or your email sending service, to support this specific mine types or else you cannot go code this and send it. So this was the whole email industry was really, really eager to look at who is going to support this and who will not. And a few years after, right now, it looks like most email providers and services didn’t really support this. So, for example, MailChimp doesn’t support this, so a lot of famous email services do not support AMP for email. So you cannot send for AMP for email easily.

Rémi: And I think another respect that makes AMP for email quite difficult is that even if you manage to send an AMP for email email, you need to get whitelisted from each clients that supports AMP for email. So if you want to send an AMP for email, you need to get whitelisted from Google so that people using Google desktop one mail will see it, and you need to get whitelisted from mail dot ?? that also supports it. And so it’s quite a difficult process, in my opinion. And it’s also quite opposite to the basic nature of email, which is a very open standard. Anyone can send email, any email clients can read email. So they try to act around the email format to get interactivity inside it, but I think that made things more difficult.

Rémi: So yeah, I still think that that can be exciting uses. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Google Docs and received an email where someone commented on your Google Docs and you can, inside Gmail, answer in the email, it’s an AMP for email email and you can answer right from your Gmail inbox to the comment that was left on your document. I think that’s an amazing use of AMP for email. But it’s hard to see how this could be made more popular. And, yeah, it’s hard to imagine this catching on and to find good uses like this for more traditional emails.

Vitaly: Well, maybe as we’re wrapping up here this point, I do have to ask one question that has been bothering me for a while. If there was a dream feature that you’d love HTML email to have, something that could be appearing in all the email clients everywhere tomorrow, if you just desired that to be in there, what would that feature be?

Rémi: So I think it wouldn’t necessarily be an HTML CSS feature, but I’d love to see something like reactions for emails, like you’ve got on Slack or on GitHub issues or just on messages on iOS and Android. And that would be a fun feature and I think that could spare a lot of emails because every time you need to just send an email to them saying "So, okay, I got this," you could just send a reaction and that would be way faster. But again, this would require a lot of standardization and implementation. So I think we are not really very hit at all.

Vitaly: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Rémi, you can find him on Twitter where he is HTeuMeuLeu, or we’ll have to put that link in the notes. And on his website at HTeuMeuLeu.com, as well. But also at SmashingConf, he often runs HTML email workshops. We will be discussing when the next one is coming up.

Vitaly: Do you have any parting words with our wonderful audience, Rémi, for today? We’ve been learning today all about HTML email, but what have you been learning from this session or in general? What are the parting words you’d like to hand over for people who might be excited to join this dark side of the world and design and build a HTML email together with you?

Rémi: Well, I hope that I convinced a few of you that yeah, email development is a thing and it can be. If you’re frustrated with how a website works nowadays, join us. It’s really fun in here. And yeah, there’s a whole community, as well. So yeah, feel free to reach me and just join us. There are dozens of us.

Vitaly: Of course. And if you are, dear friends, interested in the community of HTML Email Geeks, as far as I understood. Rémi, please correct me if I’m wrong. There are Email Geeks, there is a Slack channel. And you can also talk to Rémi and I’m sure that he’ll be very happy to point you to the group where all the cool kids talking about HTML emails hang out.

Rémi: Absolutely.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 52 With Yiying Lu: How Do You Become An NFT Artist?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask how do you go from running a creative studio to designing NFTs. Vitaly talks to artist Yiying Lu to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s an artist, entrepreneur and educator. She grew up in Shanghai, China and was educated in Sydney, Australia, and also London, UK. She’s currently based in San Francisco as the founder and creative director of her bilingual, creative and innovation studio. She’s incredibly kind friendly, optimistic, and enthusiastic, which is not very surprising given that her name translated from Chinese means happy, creative land, and you have to smile to pronounce it right.

Vitaly: Now, most recently she’s become an NFT artist and she leads a design clinic program to increase people’s mental health. So, we know she’s a fantastic artist and designer, but did you know that she loves dumplings so much that she even went all the way to design the dumpling emoji, which you probably will be able to find on your mobile phone today. My smashing friends, please welcome Yiying Lu. Hello, Yiying. How are you doing today?

Yiying: I am smashing, my friend.

Vitaly: Oh, wow. This sounds very exciting, indeed. Well, you’re smiling now. When I think of you, I always think of your smiling. And when I see you, I always feel like you’re the center of happiness and optimism of the entire universe. Now, where does it come from? Can you share with us a little bit of your story? What are some of the most important things in your life that define who you really are today?

Yiying: Thank you so much for the amazing question. I have to say, my name came really from my father and my grandfather, because my father initially named me Yanying, which means pretty and creative in Chinese. And then my grandfather, after the name has been registered already in the police office, he waited for a few months to come back to my dad. He goes, "Well, we know she’s a girl." And the name actually, Yen, in Chinese is pretty and it has a female radical. And he said, "I want to change the female radical to the heart radical because we want to focus on the heart and the happiness. We already know she’s a female. We want to make sure that she is happy. We don’t want to only focus on external, which is pretty. We want to focus on the internal, which is the happiness." So, I’m incredibly thankful for my grandfather who gave me happy and creative. And this is my life mission. I hope that I’ll carry on grandfather’s blessing and my father’s blessing and bring more happiness and creativity to everyone in the world.

Vitaly: I think that you’re doing that really well, actually, given all the work that you’re doing. I mean, every time I look at work that you’ve been producing, be it on Instagram, LinkedIn, anywhere really, it’s always so happy and it always comes back down ... You remember? I mean, what was it? 2010 or 11 when we were working on the Smashing Book 2 illustrations because-

Yiying: Oh yes.

Vitaly: And all the animals, so beautiful, so happy. All of them so happy. It’s unbelievable. So, would you say that this happiness or bringing happiness into the world, what is really also coming from your name, is this really the ultimate thing that defines your artwork because everything has to be pushing for this positivity in the world?

Yiying: I think it’s about this curiosity and it is about ... It’s coming from this innate almost childlike stage. And a lot of time when I create, I don’t know what it’s going to come out, especially when I create, if you remember when we collaborate on the Smashing Book 2, which is around 2010. When I get the brief from you, I really had no idea what exactly-

Vitaly: No, neither did I, to be honest. I mean, I had no idea what we’re going to end up with.

Yiying: Right, and there is this interesting unknown. It’s literally a destination unknown and you’re working on something you have no idea how this is going to come out, but if you have this innate desire of communicate and innate interest and curiosity to see what you got to be coming up with, it’s exciting. I would say it is a very powerful way of finding the internal state that you want to be.

Yiying: And so to me, every single time when I create something, it always comes out very fun. I think that’s the thing that we’re all searching for, which is something I’m always very interested to search for the fun in the functionality because a lot of times, we write a book it’s very functional and a lot of time, especially I think a lot of the Smashing books are very wonderful tutorials and teach people how to do things, and it’s very functional. And to me, my interest is finding out the fun or highlighting the fun in the word functional. Because if you look at the word function, it has fun in it. It’s just a lot of times, people don’t necessarily get the chance to experience it.

Yiying: And so to me, this sort of light heart joy is something I want to highlight. And I think that visual art has this way of make that immediate emotional response. If the work that I do could help people to be in that state, I think it’s my ultimate joy too, because when I’m creating it, I’m having a lot of fun. It’s just such a blessing for people to experience the fun while I’m creating, when they are looking at the work. So, that’s in a way, is my way of communicating people without necessarily saying the words. But the visual is the medium of the message.

Vitaly: And it’s interesting that you’re saying that word create. I mean, every time I think about the work that you’re doing, it’s always ... there’s this creative create part, if you know what I mean? It’s like sometimes you would go ahead and you would create something basically as, I don’t know, just a to-do list, those kind of things. And sometimes you create something that you bring out into the world to share with other people, right?

Yiying: Yeah.

Vitaly: And so I know that in my experience at least, there are people who are really afraid of creativity as a thing. They might think that they’re not creative. They might think that they’re engineers. They might think that they are doing their own thing. And they’re very focused on that thing, but there is not really creativity. So, when you give them a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, they don’t even know what to do. I know that you had this really interesting project, a big drawing festival that you organized back in the day. Was it during pandemic or just before the pandemic, I believe?

Yiying: It was right before the pandemic.

Vitaly: Right before the pandemic, so where you really brought everyone in to be creative. And how do you feel about this? Do you feel like everybody is creative by default?

Yiying: Absolutely. Honestly, I think everybody is creative. The reason why I’m saying it, is every day when you wake up, you don’t know what the day is going to end up like. Every year, when you start a new year, you don’t know what the year is going to be like. You’re literally creating that year or creating that day. Every day, you are improvising without knowing or without really focusing on the fact that you’re improvising. You don’t know who you’re going to be meeting on the street. You don’t know what kind of conversation you got to be having on the email or the phone call. You are literally creating your life every single second and millisecond.

Yiying: And so, we are innately our own author, or creative director, or actress, actor of our own film or movie, whichever way you wanted to call that, or TV show, or soap opera. But the way that I look at it, when you say engineers and accountants or lawyers, I got to be honest with you, I work with all of the different professions. I think that a lot of times when you give a creative pump for people that conventionally don’t consider themselves as creative, they ended up coming up with some of the most interesting drawings and interesting storytellings because it’s actually the part of the brain that don’t necessarily have the chance to be activated or even expressed. I think that was probably the more appropriate word for that. I think everybody have their creative expression and I’m very, very interested to facilitate that. Not only facilitate that for myself, but for others.

Vitaly: Well, maybe looking back a little bit into your background and where you were born and your travels and your journey until you ended up in San Francisco, I’m wondering, now, looking back at your life, do you think that your travels and you’re moving places and you’re now running across disciplinary and multilingual team now as well in your design work. Do you feel like this way of learning Chinese and then being in Australia, and then being in the UK, and then now being in San Francisco that actually has defined, significantly defined, the way you design, the way you work the way you think? Do you think that this is a very significant attribute of the work that you’re doing, or is it just a part of what you’re creating?

Yiying: That is a great question. That is a great question. I think it definitely influenced me. I’m not sure if I’m being defined already. I think everybody in their life, they’re defining themselves every day. I think that to me, I think everywhere I go, I live, or I have been to, the people that I’ve met, the book I have read, the food that I have eaten, the movies I’ve seen, or film that I have seen, absolutely influenced me, and shaped me, and shaped my way of thinking in very important ways.

Yiying: I think that being able to live and travel to different places of the world is helping me to see the diversity of people. But in the same time, seeing the unity of people, because the more places I have traveled, obviously it’s so wonderful to experience the world in different cultures and food and language. But I really started to see the commonality of people, the thing that we all have in common and that’s something I think is the message that I would love to express through my art, which is the diversity and the unity is seemingly a two opposite idea, but I’m always interested in finding a way to tell these two seemingly polarized idea into a uniformed communication.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you’re saying that because often when we travel to places, when we talk to people in other regions, we always think about what is so unique or special about that particular place and what is the food you need to taste, and the music you need to listen to, and where the people gather. And we try to focus on differences and how different certain places or certain cultures, certain people are. But at the same time, there is quite a lot of, I mean, unity as you’re saying, where people are people in the end and it doesn’t really matter that much where they’re coming from, they will have certain cultural differences obviously, and interests and things like that. But in the end, focusing on that thing that unites us all is actually quite significant. I think that one really symbolic, almost, thing from your work that defines it for me is your research, your incredible research that you have done on dumplings. And at this point, I have to ask you to tell this story because how does one even become a designer of a dumpling emoji that is now available on billions of smartphones on the planet? And maybe you can also share a bit of research that you did into all the dumplings around the world.

Yiying: Thank you, really. Yeah, this is such a fun project. I’m always very happy to share the story. It went back to 2015, which is almost seven years ago. I initially moved from Sydney, Australia to San Francisco and my good friend, Jenni Lee, who used to be a journalist of New York Times, at the time, she moved to San Francisco around the same time I was relocating. And so as Asian Americans, we wanted to unite with each other and was sharing dumplings. And she sent me a photo of a dumpling potsticker in the bowl. I wanted to express my excitement and sending a dumpling emoji, only find out that there was no dumpling emoji on the iPhone. I said, "I’m surprised that they don’t have a dumpling emoji." And she goes, "Oh, good point." I was like, "Okay, well that doesn’t go anywhere."

Yiying: And so for me, I always like to see what I can do. When there’s a problem, I want to find a solution. So, this happened to be something I can do something about. So I thought, "Well, I’m a designer. I have imagination. And why don’t I do something about it?" So, I went back to my table and I started to just create the very first version of the dumpling emoji. I call it the bling bling dumpling, because I made it as a animated gif and it has heart eyes and it blings. So, I sent it over to Jenny with that half moon shape dumpling. And she goes, "Did you make it?" I said, "Yeah." And she said, "We should publish this." And later on, we went to the dumpling party and there was people from around the world in the party and everybody was sharing their own dumpling from their respective country they’re coming from.

Vitaly: So it was a dumpling party then?

Yiying: Yes, so we had a dumpling party, we had-

Vitaly: There are dumpling parties around the world? I should go.

Yiying: We should do a dumpling party around the world. We had a dumpling party at Jenny’s house. We had folks from different parts of the world coming to the party and we learned Georgia have khinkali, Japan has gyoza, Italy has ravioli, Polish, we have pirogi, empanadas, crab legs, momos. Yeah, I have done a lot of research with my folks. And so, I learned all these dumplings. I’m like, "Wait a minute. This is actually a universal food. It’s not just a Asian cuisine. It’s actually a very international cuisine." And so, then Jenny did more research and find out that Unicode Consortium, which is a nonprofit organization that’s based in the Bay Area, in fact is responsible for all the emojis on our keyboards.

Yiying: And so we ended up, went to the Unicode Consortium for their technical reading, with all the different folks who runs the organization. We proposed the dumpling, the chopstick, the fortune cookie, the takeout box, in person and they were approved in early 2016. So, it takes about three month for us to go to the meeting. From initial day I remember it because it’s the very auspicious day, it’s the August 8th. And so it takes about three month and then take about two years for all the vendors like Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter, et cetera, having the actual emoji design in their own style, based on the original design that I did. It was eventually available on billions of keyboards. And the fun story is we also submitted the boba tea emoji in 2015, but it was rejected back then. That’s another story. But then five years later, they were finally available people’s phone during the pandemic in 2020, thanks to three data scientists who were able to prove the number of the users, Timothy, Sujay, and Ranjita, they were amazing. They wrote the important part, which is the data part, to prove the importance of the usage of boba. So, that ended up having the boba tea emoji also available. So, I designed six emoji altogether so far. The dumpling, chopstick, fortune cookie, takeout box, boba tea and the peacock, that’s another story we can-

Vitaly: Oh right, the peacock. Anything else we should be expecting coming anytime soon in emoji?

Yiying: Right now, right now it’s still in the cooking, we don’t know yet. So, I’ll definitely keep you posted. There’s always a lot of exciting things in the making, so I’ll be able to share when the time is right.

Vitaly: Excellent, excellent. Well also of course, I have to mention that just when you look at your CV and all the work that you’ve been doing, and did so much work throughout the years, you’ve been featured on New York Times and Forbes, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Time, White Magazine, CNN, BBC, and the list goes on and on. Now, how did that happen? I mean what do you think was one of the most significant things in your career that enabled all these incredible projects?

Yiying: Yeah, thank you for the question. I think that I’m incredibly thankful for the people that I have worked with. A lot of times, I think I look back some of the most known work or being celebrated work, it wasn’t designed necessarily for the corporate alone. A lot of times, the work that I did and eventually was being used, or celebrated, or known by many, many people, was essentially a personal work. A lot of the work, for example, whether it’s the dumpling, emoji, the boba emoji, or the Twitter whale, the whale that eventually become Twitter, become Twitter’s arrow page, or Twitter’s over capacity page, which is around 2008 to 2013. It was literally seen by millions of people and also remixed by a lot of people online, which I believe is really the power of community.

Yiying: But the essence of the work that really, I think I’m most proud, of a lot of times are my personal art piece in the first place. So, the whale that eventually become the Twitter Fail Whale, was not designed for Twitter. It wasn’t commissioned by Twitter. It was a personal piece that I created when I just finished my exchange study in London and went back to Sydney, New South Wales, pun not intended. I created the whale initially as a birthday e-card that I wanted to send out to my friends or families in Shanghai and London because I met so many classmates in London and they were all graduating a little bit earlier than Australia. So, I wanted to express the fact that I couldn’t go to your graduation ceremony or birthday party, my wish for you is so big, just like this gigantic whale. Naturally in the 3D world, the whale cannot fly, but I have these little birds carry this big, heavy wish across the ocean for you. So, here the whale was symbolized for the heavy, gigantic wish that I have for friends and family overseas.

Yiying: But it was just so happened that there was this teeny tiny little startup in San Francisco called Twitter. And the co-founder, Biz, found the image online and licensed it and that rest is history. But I think there is this interesting connection where, even though Biz look at the whale and thinking of ... The interesting part is he interpret the whale as the big stability issue, where the Twitter employees which are the birds worked really hard on, it was this desire of bringing user happiness, which was the reason why he choose the image in the first place, I think. I heard that from the NPR radio, when he mentioned it was whimsical and it brings the user joy, even though it was a pretty frustrating situation.

Yiying: I think that’s what art does. A lot of times in our real life, there’s so many different kinds of challenges, but I think art in a way is a beacon of light that helps people to release their emotion or help people to connect with that inner light they’re searching for. Or sometimes, there’s art is just highlighting their emotion. It could be very sad, it could be very scary, but allow them to connect with that inner self. I think that’s what art does and that’s why we need art in our lives.

Vitaly: Right. Well, also talking about art, of course, I have to move to a very interesting area, of course, because most recently you’ve transitioned into becoming an NFT artist and that’s a beast of its own, I guess. At this point, I do have to ask because frankly, I mean, I’m just not that much in NFTs and I know that some of the listeners will be surprised maybe, or maybe not, but what does it even mean to be an NFT artist? What do you need to do to get there? Do you need to have some sort of, I don’t know, technical equipment, I have no idea. What did you learn throughout that experience?

Yiying: That is a great question. I always love when people are new to the space and curious about the space. I want to say that first of all, the important part is the definition of what NFT stands for. A lot of people probably don’t really look into it. NFT stands for non-fungible token and non-fungible literally means irreversible, irreplaceable. Every single NFT is unique to itself, just like our human experience. I feel like a lot of times, I can see the correlation between each one of us, even the two twins who are identical looking, they could have complete different experience.

Yiying: The token, that is a very interesting word because I just had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who is a little bit against NFT like, "Oh, I don’t really like the word token." I said, "Wait a minute, let’s look into the etymology of the word token."

Yiying: So, I think a lot of times people only associate NFT with the monetization value, or the business value, or the currency. But I look into the word token. In fact, the word token comes from old English, which has Germanic and Dutch background. It literally comes from the word [foreign language 00:23:42] which means to teach and I suddenly get it. The idea of creating something that being seen as a token, is a way, or is a opportunity for you to teach the world something, for you to create something for the world to learn. In that case, what would you like to create for you to teach, from yourself? And that’s something I want people to keep in mind when you are going to this space, not just looking at creating something as a mean of a transaction, or just as a mean to make financial return, is what would you like to create for people to learn from you, from your experience and from your creation?

Yiying: And so, that’s the fundamental ethos that I have when I create any new NFT art, or new NFT experience. I think that anything that you create content-wise, whether it’s a podcast or a conference, I love Smashing conference, it is an experience. And they can all be seen as a token if that’s how we are going to define it. And so that again, it’s very important for me to have the right intention of what I want to put to the world because we have so much content these days. It’s very fundamental for us to know why we are doing what we do.

Yiying: So, technical-wise, I think that to be able to create NFT, obviously you need wallets, you can create something digitally or you can create something physically as a visual art piece, or you could also create music. It can be a music and art combination as a video. So, the format of NFT can really be any multimedia content in a digital file size, that can stored onto the blockchain. And the way that you could start your first NFT, you needed to have a wallet, a digital wallet. So, it’s almost think of it as your bank account, but on the blockchain. So, that case, you can register for different online wallet. You can also purchase one of these hardware wallet, which also allow you to store the content more safely, because the hardware wallet, you could actually plug it offline. And you also use one of the platforms on the internet that allow you to upload the work. So, it’s quite simple.

Vitaly: Right, but basically that means that you would be designing or illustrating your ... creating your artwork. And then you would be putting it out there on one of those platforms, which allow you to sell. And essentially, that also means that once you have that, you would then initiate an auction, or how does that work? And then you’ll be pretty much getting a Bitcoin in return. Is that how it works?

Yiying: It’s close. So, the currency can be any-

Vitaly: Close enough, that’s good for me.

Yiying: Yes, close enough. You did a great job, really. The actual currency can be any currency. It doesn’t have to be Bitcoin. It can be Ethereum, which we call them Eth, it’s a younger cryptocurrency, but it has been around for a while. And majority of the cryptocurrency website receive Eth and also a lot of them actually receive fiat, which is US dollars. Then you have websites like for example, we have OpenSea and there’s Foundation, there’s SuperRare, there’s MakersPlace, there’s Nifty Gateway. Each of the platforms would receive currency. Some of them might receive multiple currencies, like OpenSea is more open to all kinds of different currencies. So, if you go to their website, you probably will find more than hundreds of different currencies that are acceptable from their website. So that in that way, you could do more transaction if, for example, if you have some of the very smaller known currency, you can use them over there, but then you also have MakersPlace, for example, they allow you to use credit card. So, you could also use credit card to purchase if you don’t have cryptocurrency, but they also allow you to use Eth to purchase. So, you can use your cryptocurrency to purchase or to receive cryptocurrency if you’re a artist.

Yiying: Now, going back to the question, is it going to be auction or some other way? There’s all kinds of different ways of, again, depends on the platform that allow you to do auction. So, I believe that on most of the website, they allow you to do auction, but depends again, whether you issue your NFT as a one-on-one piece, which is unique one and only piece, or you decided to do it like a limited edition, let’s say ... Think of this as a print. Back in the days we create prints. So one-on-one is basically when they say mint, is that you create the digital art or you create the physical art and you scan it and make it digitally, you upload it to the blockchain through your wallet. This process in the crypto terminology, they call it mint. It’s like minting the money.

Yiying: So, once you mint it, if you only mint one piece and you’re not going to mint it again, you call it one-on-one piece and those pieces are usually you can either have a set price and you sell this or you can do auction. So potentially, you should be able to do it on most of the website. You can do auction. There’s also a lot more interesting, fun ways of interacting with your collector.

Yiying: So for example, there’s also a very popular way, people do limited edition pieces within 24 hours. So, this is called the open edition. So, within 24 hours, they’re going to issue, but we don’t know how many pieces are going to be sold out, but within 24 hours people are going to close the mint, meaning that if you are late to the game after 24 hours, you don’t get the chance to purchase it. So, that’s called the open edition.

Yiying: So, sometimes open edition could be very interesting because depends on how many people are going to participate in the sale. You could sell more, you could sell less, but then depends on how many pieces are being sold. There’s also this scarcity interests from the collector because some of the collectors might want to participate into these open edition, but they might want to have something pretty rare.

Yiying: So, I did this really interesting chance-based, almost chance-based sale on MakersPlace, which is something hard to do on other platforms because a lot of times, other platforms will sell the piece right away. What you see as what you get, or they have this thing called mystery box, you don’t know what you get, you purchase it and you open it and that’s it.

Yiying: But what I did was MakersPlace. We did a chance-based sale, which is very exciting. So, we had five different designs and each of the design have different percentage of people being able to purchase, but they don’t know what they’re going to get. So, they might get the unicorn, which is very rare. There’s only less than 10% chance you’ll be able to get it. Or you can also get this particular piece, that’s this new mythical beast that only have 4% chance of winning. So, it gets very interesting because you make the whole open edition process become also a chance-based game that people are very excited to participate and they also ended up walking away with a piece of art they like. Because usually, I have less than six designs and it’s always exciting to see what people ended up getting. So, that’s the way that I experiment with different platforms.

Vitaly: Right. And would you say that this is actually worth it for designers, for example, or illustrators, or artists? So, you might have some people listening in now thinking, "Okay, well I’ve been designing digital art now forever. This is something for me to try out." Because we of course always hear about those stories about maybe one particular artifact being sold for, I don’t know, a million or two, or so. Are those really edge cases and is it really hard to get to any level of success? Or would you say that there are many artists trying? There are obviously many artists failing and some succeeding. Where would you say we currently are in this space?

Yiying: This is a very great question. And to me, I’m still in ... The non-fungible token space is relatively new and I’m still experiment. I think the most important thing, this is just a personal experience that I like to share with the world, that by no mean, I think that doing this is the only way of achieve success or happiness, or whatever you are searching for in your life. I think that by participating in this interesting new piece of technology, I’m able to find something and create something, a new experience that otherwise, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do.

Yiying: And to me, this is as exciting as ... Vitaly, if you remember, I wrote a email to you when we created the Smashing Magazine Book 2 together in 2010. And in 2017, you were leading the Smashing Conference in New York. And I wrote an email to you after seven years, even though we’ve never met. I wrote a email to you. I said, "Hey Vitaly, welcome to town. I would love to come and see you, but I also become a speaker now. I would love to speak at Smashing Conference if there is a chance and if the topic matches." And you ended up giving me this opportunity to speak in New York and it also really helped me to gain a lot more audience. I had such a smashing time and I enjoyed it so much and organically, I had so many more opportunity to speak and to that, I’m incredibly thankful.

Yiying: But I also think that I gave myself a chance. I reached out to you because I just want to create this opportunity for myself and similarly, giving yourself a chance to experiment with a new piece of technology currently, sure there are a lot of people criticizing the current landscapes and some of the existing projects, but please, before you criticize anything, try it yourself and see if you can make a difference. That’s something I want to be able to do. I think that the biggest desire I have with cryptocurrency is being able to create something new and potentially use it as a case study to teach people. Again, going back to the token, to teach people the technology itself. There’s nothing wrong with technology, just like there is so many potential with social media.

Yiying: And going back to people saying money is evil, money is a energy. Money is neutral. In fact, there is so much abundance that we can create if we have the right intention and also if we do it with the right people, who also have the same goal and mission. And so going back to, again, your question on whether or not the space, there’s a lot of criticism. There’s also a lot of projects unfortunately failed, that stemmed back to the innate difference between Web3 and Web2 because in Web2, because it’s cryptic, a lot of times, people don’t really know the early days crypto artists, they’re anonymous.

Yiying: I’m doing NFT, but I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a crypto artist per se because people know who I am and I am relatively public. People know my real name and there’s also obviously, a lot of trust you have to establish with your community. And that’s also something I’m very excited about, is that when you are creating something from the identity, who you are, and the community knows you and vice versa, you wanted to create something that people could treasure. And unfortunately, a lot of the scams are coming from there is this trust that was being established. People wanted to purchase their art piece from this particular NFT project.

Yiying: And yet later on, there was disappointment because the crypto artist or the project failed because it’s a scam, because the foundation was shaky. There was no mutual transparency over there. And so that’s something that I think that there’s going to be a lot more experiment and there’s also going to be a lot more trial and fail, trying and ... how would I put this? Sorry, I’m going off the topic, but that’s what I’m trying to say.

Vitaly: That’s okay, that’s okay.

Yiying: That’s what I’m trying to say. I think that give yourself an opportunity. If there is a new piece of technology that existing, sure there will be a lot of pros and cons, but really try it yourself and you might create something completely new. That would be my message.

Vitaly: Right. Well, at this point, I just really have to ask that one question that probably is somewhere out there in the dark corners of the web, because now that I look at all the work that you’re doing, not to mention of course, your studio, not to mention of course, all the incredible nonprofit work that you’re doing as well from Asian Art Museum and Women Talk Design, the Kids & Art Foundation, San Francisco Zoo, and so many others. And you’re also a San Francisco arts commissioner. I mean, how does it all work? Where do you even find time for all of this? Do you even sleep at night? How does it work, Yiying? Tell us, what is the secret to your productivity?

Yiying: Thankfully, I think I have been always doing the things I love. So, I’ve been always doing the work I enjoy, with the people that really have been supportive and with the community, like Smashing community and yourself, the people that I really have so much gratitude and also had so much fun working with. It’s always helpful when you work with people that you enjoy working with and also learning from them. I’ve learned so much from the Smashing community, the speakers, yourself, and also the community. I always enjoyed meeting all the Smashing attendees offline, and really appreciate the time that we spend in different parts of the world, whether it’s Toronto, Vyborg, here in San Francisco, New York. And yeah, I can’t wait to meet more folks now that COVID-19 is calming down a little bit, travel reopened. To me, it’s something to look forward to.

Yiying: I always, doing something that potentially could look forward to. Going back to your question about being a San Francisco arts commissioner. I am very thankful the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, appointed me to be the arts commissioner and together with 14 other arts commissioners, we work with the City of San Francisco and it’s actually a very wonderful community that works to serve the larger community. In this case, we work with the artists in the Bay Area for RTC in the San Francisco International Airport, SFO. Whether it’s the murals outside of the zoo, or the park that’s within the San Francisco Chinatown, it’s a very big honor to be able to help the community offline. Because I am very passionate about the online community, but I think that we live in that three-dimensional world, in a physical world. And so a lot of times, I do think that being able to also contribute to people’s wellbeing and happiness in the physical world is something that I’m just very happy to be part of.

Vitaly: Right. Also, you just mentioned COVID, of course. I’m wondering at this point for all of us, I think, and for everybody who I’ve been interviewing and for myself as well, COVID had a tremendous impact on the life habits, the views on things, relationships, and so many other things. What was it for you? Did you learn something? Did you something about yourself, about art, about anything else? Did it motivate you to do something? How did it change your life?

Yiying: Thank you for the question. Yeah, I would say the entire pandemic has been very challenging and yet I see it as a opportunity to connect with myself, but also connecting with my community. Because during COVID-19, especially 2020 and 2021, I was in San Francisco and I have not still, until now, I haven’t seen my parents for almost four years. My parents are still in Sydney, Australia and my family, my relatives, at the time my grandmother, is in Shanghai. So, I haven’t seen my immediate family for at least more than three years, three and a half years.

Yiying: And so, I think that it’s a very isolated situation and the only way that kept me going and also kept me stay at float is creativity and community, really, truly. I was very fortunate to be able to get a lot of support from different sources. One of them was Adobe. Adobe had Adobe Creative Funds, so I was very fortunate to receive it. I created this project, which you can see on the back. I was very passionate about biological conservation for the endangered species, but I was also very interested in creating something for children.

Yiying: So, I’ve been always wanting to write a children’s book. So, during the pandemic I was working on this project called The Very hungry Red Panda, because me, myself, I’m from Asia. Red panda was also from Asia and most people don’t know, the cute red panda ... By the way, fun fact, if you use Firefox Mozilla, the Firefox is actually not a fox. Firefox is actually a nickname for red panda, so that’s a-

Vitaly: Oh, this is shocking.

Yiying: I know, it’s not a Fox, it’s a red panda. So, I was very interested in showcasing the beauty and the nature of Asia. It was also during the ... Unfortunately, I think the pandemic was also ... really showed a lot of the issues in the world. I wanted to also find a way to shed some lights on this issues, but in a more uplifting way. What I’m interested in doing is using art as a vehicle to advocate for diversity, for inclusion, and how does that look like when we bring people together? I think that one of the metaphor I was using, which is what if we create these stories that can bring people and children from around the world together to appreciate each other?

Yiying: So, the children’s book, the ethos of the children’s book, which is The Very Hungry Red Panda, was initially coming from the Red Panda Creation. I created the red panda, was during an Airbnb Asian Night Market. That was before COVID in 2019, supported by all the folks in Airbnb. It’s all volunteer work from the employees at Airbnb. So, they wanted to create this amazing, called night market, for the local mom and pop shops and for the local performers for the local hosts who, AAPI heritage, it was during the AAPI Heritage Month, which means Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. So, they bring all the people together. But the attendees, people from all kinds of genders, all kinds of ethnicity, and people are able to come over and enjoy the food from Asian Pacific Islander heritage.

Yiying: And at the time, they didn’t have anyone to do the branding, creative campaign work. Basically, it was two weeks before that market opening and they couldn’t find anybody to do the design volunteer work. My friend Mabel at the time, she was the global lead and she contacted me. She said, "Can you help out?" So I said, "Okay, I would love to help out in any way I can for the community."

Yiying: So, I created that red panda initially for that event as my contribution to my community and because red panda is endangered, just like the artists and all the small businesses in the Bay Area. And so, we need to take care of them and protect them. And the reality is the red panda actually was less than 10,000 in the world on the Earth. Most people don’t know about, they’re really cute, but they’re also very endangered.

Yiying: So, I was very excited to of expand the families of the red panda and then 2020 happened, and I got this creative fund. I wanted to create something to advocate for all endangered animals from around the world, from African animals like the giraffe and the zebra, or the polar bear in the North Pole, and the whale shark in the East Asia Ocean, and the koalas in Australia, or the sloth in South America. So, it’s a way for me to really send my love to not only people, but also geographic location around the world. But essentially, the ending of the story is, it will be a play. All these animals are actually animal costume and there’ll be little kids jumping out of the costume and there will be kids from around the world. So, that’s the hope of that children’s book.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s nice. That’s very cute. I’m wondering at this point, with all the project that you already had done, is there any dream project that you’d love to work on one day? Something that you always wanted to do? I don’t know, NASA? I have no idea. Anything that you have in your mind that will be, eventually you will start work on.

Yiying: Great question. I think I am literally just starting working on it. I am three weeks in on writing a book about creativity, entrepreneurship. Really it’s a book about happiness and creativity, that’s my name. I would love to use this book to bring more happiness and creativity to more people. So, I’m incredibly excited to start this dream project. I haven’t shared this with anybody publicly, so I’m sharing it with you here.

Vitaly: Well, now you have. Excellent, excellent. Now, maybe the final question for you Yiying, until ... and then we’ll wrap up. Looking back at your career and again, all the incredible things that you have been working on. Is there anything you wish you’d told yourself maybe 10 or 15 years ago when you were just starting out?

Yiying: Yeah. I think that if ... One thing I think I would like to tell myself, I love this quote from Conan O'Brien, which is, "If you work hard and be kind, amazing things going to happen." I think it really helped me through some of the hardest time in my life. Another quote I love is from Joseph Campbell, which is, "Follow your bliss." I think that everybody in themselves, they all know what makes them happy, what brings them joy. And that is such a bliss for thing to know or to realize. So, I would say follow your bliss, follow the things that make your heart sing.

Vitaly: That’s very nice. Well, if you dear listener, would like to hear more from Yiying, you can always find her on Twitter when she’s @YiyingLu, and also on her website, which is surprising, surprising yiyinglu.com. Yiying will also be speaking. I heard, I think in New York, at SmashingConf, if I’m not mistaken. So, please drop in if you have time, we’d love to see you there as well. Well, thanks for joining us, Yiying. Do you have any parting words of wisdom? I mean, you already shared some, but anything else that you want to put out there in the world for all the wonderful people listening till the very end of this podcast?

Yiying: Yes, drink a lot of water and take deep breath every now and then.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 51 With Ben Callahan: What’s The Value Of A Design System?

This article is a sponsored by Wix

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask how you can prove the value of a Design System and how you can pitch it effectively to stakeholders. Vitaly talks to Ben Callahan to find out more.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: He studied computer science and worked as a software engineer, as an audio engineer for independent films, as an animator and of course, as a front-end developer focused on standard-based web development. These days, he’s the design system researcher and consultant working with wonderful people, almost sparkling people at Sparkbox to build a better web. Now, he’s always in learning mode and there is no better way to describe him as an explorer, maybe even Internet Explorer, with a very strong focus on design systems. Now, he lives in Dayton, Ohio, loves cooking, poetry, travel, photography, coffee; that was an important one. And has two, pretty as well kiddos, my threshing friends, please welcome. And I hope I can hear the cheers and applause right here, Ben Callahan. Hello Ben, how are you?

Ben Callahan: Hi, Vitaly. I am smashing.

Vitaly: Well. That is fantastic to hear, while you do look smashing as well. If I may say so, Ben, let’s start right away and dive right in there. How does a person who just happens to be a software engineer turn into a design system researcher? Can you show a bit of your journey to get there? Because I know that you’ve been working on design systems probably before it was even a thing. So I want to hear it all.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Vitaly. I do appreciate it. I’m super excited because I love design systems. And one of the reasons that I think it’s become an area of focus for us is because I have seen how it has helped organizations create a lot of unity inside their teams, which is something that I’ve always wanted. And so, if you’re asking about my journey, the reason I’m pointed in this direction is because of that. And if I go back, I did study computer science.

Ben: I was frustrated working in the corporate world feeling like I didn’t have a lot of... There wasn’t just a lot... This wasn’t a vision for the things I wanted to work on. And so eventually, I stepped out of that space, took a year to just explore different technologies like animation and audio, and just other things that I was interested in, and ended up starting a business, doing video production and audio engineering.

Ben: And then we did a website for one of our clients. And as soon as the rest of our customers saw that we offered that, it just was the only thing they wanted. This was early days of the web, and so I ended up buying my partner in that business out and transitioning it to a web studio, a very local web studio here in Ohio. And eventually merged that with a few other folks who were doing good creative technical work in town, and the result over a few years of us churning to figure out what we really wanted to do was again a focus on the web.

Ben: And that’s how Sparkbox was born. I’m really fortunate because we’ve grown slowly and steadily over the last 14 years. And that means that as a front-end engineer, as a computer science guy, I’ve transitioned out of writing code every day. And instead, I get to focus on where I want us to be headed. What do I think is important for us to be learning, and how can we best serve our customers? And that’s really how I pretty naturally ended up digging in deeper to design system work. Because I actually do believe that it is a unifying opportunity for a team, so that’s how I landed here.

Vitaly: Oh, that sounds very exciting, indeed. And I think in many ways, we are everybody who is listening to the show now as well; I think we all have been in one place, and then we moved to a slightly different one just steadily and slowly. And I know a couple of people who used to, I don’t know, sell glasses before the internet was a thing. And then off you go becoming a designer, developer, manager into design systems and all things like that, so that’s really exciting to see that.

Vitaly: Interestingly, talking about design systems, I think we are in a very interesting position right now because it feels like we have been playing, and doing, and experimenting, and working around design systems for many, many, many, many, many, many years now. And I don’t know about you and probably have, of course, way more experience than that. Many teams already have one, right? Or they’re trying to get one, and it might be up-to-date, maybe not, but they’re definitely not something new and shiny around the block that we just need to try out.

Vitaly: Many people have tried to do that, you did spend a bit of time trying to understand what makes a design system mature. So maybe you could actually dive a little bit more into this and explain, based on your experiences, of course, the Sparkbox as well. What is the maturity model for a design system? So what does it entail?

Ben: Yeah, you’re right, Vitaly, that we have been as an industry working very systematically for a long time, years before we started to use the word design system. And Sparkbox, like many other studios or consultants, had been working in that way for a long time. I think when you put a name on a thing like design systems when you give it a name, it takes on a life of its own.

Ben: And so definitely, there was a point probably six years ago when our clients just started asking us for that, six or seven years ago. And so I think when that starts to happen, as an organization, as a leader in an organization, I feel like it’s my job to better understand that. And for us, what that has meant is for the last five years, we’ve done what we call the design system survey.

Ben: And that’s just to open to the industry. And as part of that process, I get to ask; I get to do lots of interviews with folks who I just find online, who are doing this work in an interesting way. And I just ask if I can have half an hour or an hour of their time, and I just ask them a ton of questions.

Ben: And so that has given me a lot of exposure to very broad perspectives on what’s happening in the space. And so with all of that, as part of an input for me, what I have done over the last four or five years is each year talk to lots of folks and then sit down and try to find some cohesion in all the different stories that I’m hearing.

Ben: So, a couple of years ago, leading up to the release of our survey for 2021, I had done that series of interviews. And I realized that there were some patterns that I was seeing emerging in terms of how systems were moving and maturing. And that’s where we landed on these four stages that we think most design system programs move through. And that we tried to keep these quite simple because I don’t want this to be something that’s super theoretical.

Ben: I want it to be practical and useful, but at a high level. The model is there are these four stages; the first is just building version one, so that’s literally everything you do up until you release something for subscribers inside your organization to start using. And then pretty much every team that I’ve spoken with who has gone through that and actually got something out the door, their next big focus is almost always on adoption.

Ben: And that makes a lot of sense, right? You spend a bunch of time building a thing. Of course, you want to see if other folks are interested in using it. And so that second stage is driving adoption. And then, if you’re able to make it easy to become a subscriber, and if you do a really good job supporting folks who are using your system. And if you continue to evolve the system in a way that it shows value to lots and lots of different types of subscribers inside your organization, then you can reach this third stage, which we just call surviving the teenage years.

Ben: And it’s a tricky season, because there’s lots happening, right? You’re having a lot more people use the system. I can guarantee you that they’re probably going to try to do things with it. You never imagined they would. This is where you heard of having to make a decision. Are we actually going to treat this like a product? Are we going to offer support in a really healthy way? Are we going to come alongside the subscribers and engage with them been good ways?

Ben: And if you can continue to survive that stage, you reach what we call stage four, which is just evolving a healthy product. And this is really where the design system team actually takes a role in terms of leadership inside the design organization itself. And these teams that are stage four are doing incredible things. When I talk to people inside these organizations, they talk about the design system team as the place where the most skilled workers in their organization operate.

Ben: They say things our design system team was ready for us. When my product team came and said, “Hey, we want to try view.” That they had already done a spike on the design system team to show they could support that. They’re very proactive. They’re not reactive. And that’s, I think, a really healthy place to be at the table for big conversations, to be driving decisions inside the org. That’s what I think is possible if you mature in that way.

Vitaly: Well, that sounds very exciting. But then in your experience, looking again at the work that your clients are doing, where would you see most companies are at this point? How many actually reach level four, and where do most companies struggle?

Ben: Yeah, that’s great. I’m glad you’re asking that because I think doing that work, one of the outputs I was hoping for is to make it clear how to move through these stages in a healthy way. I think you said something earlier that I’ll just harken back to you which was... You said most folks have a system already. What I’m seeing is that many organizations are on their second, third, fourth, or fifth attempt at doing this work.

Ben: So it’s not just that they have a system; it is that they have been struggling to build a successful system for years in some cases. Most of the time, I would say most organizations that I get a chance to interact with are stuck somewhere between two and three. And it’s actually really common to get stuck there because this is where everything before stage three is about building something people will value and use.

Ben: And in order to transition into three, you have to... What it seems like right now is that you need to increase the size of your design system team. And the skill sets that are needed are a little bit different. This is where you have to actually add in a product support team, like customer service for your subscribers, right? And it’s because the system is if it’s going to take root, it’s going to be a really fundamental piece of any interface work that your organization does. And for that to be the case, you have to really actually support those folks in a really healthy way. If they don’t feel like you’re there for them, if they’re going to use your product, you have to show them that you’re trustworthy, and so-

Vitaly: That’s right.

Ben: ... that requires more people, there’s just more to do. And so that’s a tough spot. I see folks oftentimes moving between two and three quite a bit. I haven’t spoken with a ton of folks who have reached that stage for more mature, really driving more proactive decisions inside the org yet, but they’re out there.

Vitaly: Yeah. One interesting thing for me was when I encountered working with one of the bigger companies from Romania, actually, and they’ve been working on a design system for six to seven years, pretty much aligned to what you were saying as well, where everybody was on the gold-rush design systems, gold-rush in a way. And I was extremely impressed with just how concise, how well established, how reliable, and how sophisticated the design system was.

Vitaly: And so that took a lot of iteration, of course, as well, but it also takes a big commitment from the top. And I know that you also have been speaking for a while now about how to sell design systems because very often it is expensive. And very often, you still need to convince the right people that this is the right amount of effort and that the return on investment will be worth it. Would you say that at this point, it’s something that’s already considered to be true most of the time? Or is it something that you actively have to prove every single time with some metrics or KPIs? How does this work for you?

Ben: Yeah. It’s not proven. I think, I mean there are organizations who have done that work for their use case and I think that’s great. This is a tough area, and I don’t have a single answer. I have more of an approach. I think that has helped us. So I have had the opportunity to speak with a lot of leadership inside organizations where they’re trying to make a decision if they should be investing heavily in a system.

Ben: And I think that’s actually probably the right first step. I’m not somebody who is absolute in this. I think there are situations where a design system is really helpful, really beneficial. There are situations where I probably wouldn’t recommend it. That doesn’t mean some variation of patterns and components and things isn’t needed in most cases.

Ben: But if you have a single product and a small team and you’re in startup mode, it’s probably not worth investing all this time and money to build a design system to support a single product. It's just the bang is not there for your bucks. So there are definitely use cases. That’s one of many where I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

Ben: In terms of once you’ve made that decision to pursue it, then it is about making sure leadership is on board at some stage in there, you have to make that transition to getting leadership really bought in. Not every system starts that way. We talk about in the maturity model, there’s a concept called origin stories, which is just really how involved and aware and supportive your leadership is in those early stages.

Ben: And there are many systems that are very successful now that started without any... No leadership involvement at all. It’s a transition; it’s maturity that has to happen. And as part of a successful system, you do need that long-term, but the way we help our clients figure out how to get support from leadership is that we do what you would do with any other product as we go. And we talk to those folks, and we try to understand what their needs are and what their goals are.

Ben: And how can a design system be shaped to serve those things that are important to them? And if you can reposition, the effort in a way that it solves problems for folks, they’re going to be willing to support it. The other big thing to talk about in those early days when you’re selling the systems especially is that you... A design system is only going to show its value over a very long period of time.

Ben: So this is truly an investment, right? It’s the kind of thing you put time and money into, and you have to trust that over the years, you’ll start to see a return on that, but it’s not a quick thing. So being clear about that upfront is actually really helpful in the work. And your last question was about, is it something you just sell once? And then you’re done.

Ben: I’ve never seen that really work. It’s a constant. That actually is part of the maturity model. We talk about three things, education, which is convincing folks, talking to folks, casting the vision, explaining why, what, how, and all those things. Engagement, which is getting folks involved in the work with you. It’s not a one-way thing.

Ben: It’s definitely very... There’s a lot of work required from all the different groups involved and then evolution, which is just simply making the system better over time. So if you’re not doing all three of those things all the time, you get stuck in that, in those steps to mature, so that’s what we’ve learned.

Vitaly: Right. Well, that’s very exciting. I’m wondering, and I really want to know more about what you have learned because you did mention that you and the wonderful team at Sparkbox have released the design systems survey 2022. And I’m really curious about some of the new things that you maybe haven’t uncovered there. What were some of the most surprising findings that you discovered there during that research?

Ben: Yeah. I mean, each year, we do that. This is our fifth year releasing that; each year, we come away with some really interesting insights, and this year’s no different. One of the things that really stood out to me I remember when we were working on what questions we would ask this year. And there was a series of questions in the survey this year about your top challenges. And we give folks a list of options to choose from, and then what are your top priorities? And we give them the same list.

Ben: And I remember reading that question and saying to my team, aren’t people just going to pick the same things here, right? If these are my challenges, then why wouldn’t those be the things I’m prioritizing? But they convinced me to leave it in, and they thought we would find something insightful there. And, of course, they were right. One of the things that are really interesting to me is in that survey; there are a handful of areas where you can see a difference in what is important to people in terms of what is a challenge and what they’re actually able to prioritize and work on?

Ben: The one that stands out the most is staffing. And this ties in actually with what we were just speaking about, Vitaly, around that stage two to stage three transition where you need to grow the team, the number of folks working on this, like the volume of work gets much larger as you move from stage two to three. And if you don’t have the support from leadership to increase staff, which is what that is hinting at, you can’t really do that well. You can’t make that transition well, and to me, the way I’ve interpreted this is that a lot of folks in the survey data say staffing is a big challenge, but it’s not; it can’t be a priority for them.

Ben: And it’s interesting because I think what that means is there’s a separation in the things that the design system team has the authority to prioritize, right? So they may be able to say, “Here are the things objectively that we have as challenges,” but maybe they don’t have the authority to choose how to spend the money or how to prioritize things, which I feel is a disconnect. If we’re going to trust these folks to run this design system program, we have to trust them to set their own priorities. So that’s one that stood out to me for sure.

Vitaly: Right. Right. It’s always kind of a story because I think in many ways when I deal with companies that choose to go ahead and give the green light to the team for design system, there is still always a little bit of trust that this is a simple, relatively simple site project, which is not going to drive us away from the main core product that we’re working on. So if designers, in this case, believe that this is the right thing, surely this cannot be the priority. And so surely there will be no extra stuff involved in making this happen.

Vitaly: And so that’s pretty much, I guess, aligned with what you are saying here as well. And obviously, people are important. So I’m wondering, though, in your experience, maybe that would be interesting to explore. What would you say are some of the important ingredients of a successful design system? When do you know that you are on the right track? Or how do you know, do you ever know, Ben? Do you ever know?

Ben: Yeah, it’s hard, man. It’s hard because it gets into the promises you make early on, which are the things that people are going to expect you to prove later. So I think successful systems can look very different inside different organizations, and it’s really. I wish there were a simple answer. I think there are some common things; we talk about a lot of those things in our survey we ask each year, do you feel your system is successful?

Ben: And then we can take that information and look at the other characteristics of design system programs that where they feel they are successful? And then we can make some interesting observations. One of the things that we always see is that having better engagement almost always means that individuals feel that the system is more successful. So, in other words, you can’t operate on this. You can’t build and offer a system unless you’re actually working alongside the people who need it.

Ben: It’s like any other product, you have to understand their needs, and you have to get down into the work with them. And so that’s what we encourage and help our clients set up as those engaging practices. I think the educational side of it is always key too. And this is where, in fact, this year, one of the things I’ve been focused on is just going back to what a design system is.

Ben: And this sprung out of a couple of consulting engagements last year, where big companies that have had systems for years, and we get in there and ask a ton of questions. And what we understand very quickly is all the people here have very different ideas about what a system is. Why it’s important? How should it be done? And this is seven, eight years into folks working on this stuff. And people still don’t actually understand what a design system is? And so that’s a problem, right? And-

Vitaly: Right, right.

Ben: ... I’m not saying that you have to have the same exact definition that I do, but if you internal to your organization, don’t have that defined, that’s where the real problem is. So we did a bunch of work this year to lay out what we just call the anatomy of a design system, which is a very simple breakdown of what a system is. It gives us some common language to use, and that’s been really helpful for our clients and for us as we work alongside them. So I think going through that exercise with your own internal team is one way to make sure that you’re going to be setting yourself up for success. There are probably many more.

Vitaly: Right. But then, Ben, can you maybe shed a bit more light on things like, “Hmm, how would I put it best?” So if I’m working with semi design system in the company, and I’m pretty confident that things are going in the right direction, and it seems like everything is reasonably well structured within the organization, there are people who are working on it. It goes as it’s supposed to be. What would you say as some of those red flags that one usually should be aware of? Just avoid... I don’t know, deterioration, I guess, of a design system in the company.

Ben: Yeah. There are definitely seasons. I think folks go through where they feel like, “Hey, we’ve got things figured out. We have a good groove. We’re following our processes. Everything’s good.” I think one of the things that we’ve seen is that, like any other product, there is a level of stability you have to aspire to as well. And the same challenges that we’re used to solving for our externally facing products are also going to be the reality for us with an internal product, like a design system.

Ben: And that’s when things change around. And so many times we’ve come into work with an organization where they felt they had a great program running and leadership changed, like a new director comes in, or a new VP comes in. And they have a very different perspectives on how to approach the work. And they haven’t been there for the journey that you have been on. And so, all of a sudden, you’re thrust into this instability where you have to, again, prove that you’re a valuable part of the organization and the process you have to show.

Ben: Sometimes, this is where the metrics come in, where you have to not just tell them which you have to actually show them. And so that’s one tiny example, but shifts in the market, right? Pivoting a product like a rebrand, all of these kinds of things can impact that. What feels like that stability? And so we try to think about... We’ve done a bunch of work to try to figure out what are the things that we can have in place in the seasons where things are feeling good. How do we make sure we’re creating more stability that will actually help our system last through those kinds of changes?

Ben: And there’s three big things we’ve identified. The first is authority, which is that real visible support from leadership. The second is value, which is that you’re continuously monitoring the product you’re offering. The design system itself is actually valuable to the folks you’re asking to use it; that’s engagement, right? You have to be making sure that it’s doing something helpful for you... It has to be the easiest way to work, and then tradition is the third.

Ben: And that’s a little bit different in that you earn that over time, right? Having authority and being valuable over time, you become the way an organization builds interfaces. And that tradition of this is how we work. Actually is quite a stabilizing force in the context of a lot of change. So those are the three things we help our customers put in place in order to create systems that last beyond just those seasons of feeling like we’ve got it figured out.

Vitaly: Right. But I also think the underlying asset behind all of that is something that we spoke about in Berlin when you were here. I remember that cup of coffee. That was a very nice cup of coffee.

Ben: Yeah. That was good.

Vitaly: And also very nice conversation that we had back then. And we were talking about culture.

Ben: Yeah.

Vitaly: We’re talking specifically about... For all of this to succeed, we need to have proper culture and companies and organizations that not only support and enable a design system but also have a little bit of a design system sprinkled pretty much everywhere in the organization. So maybe you could share a bit more on that because I know that you spent quite a bit of time working around design systems and culture.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. This is what I’ve been working on most recently. And I’m so excited about it. I think I have learned a bit from a couple of our engagements with clients where... Any place where people are getting together consistently, a culture is formed. So that means if you work at a big company, there’s an organizational culture that is created from all of these folks coming together to work on a thing. But also, each day, you’re probably not interacting with every employee.

Ben: And so, your small team that you interact with on a daily basis will form a subculture that exists inside of that larger organization’s culture. And there are probably hundreds or thousands of subcultures inside big organizations, right? The group of folks who get together on Zoom and knit over lunch, there’s going to be a subculture formed there, right? The book club where they’re reading about whatever science fiction book just came out.

Vitaly: Well, I love a Good Book Club.

Ben: Yeah. See, there’s a subculture being formed there, right? I have been doing a bunch of research by just reading papers from the last few decades of other folks much smarter than I who have been researching organizational culture. And I’ve been looking at that because I feel like there’s a missing piece in what we’re talking about with design systems. And that’s an observation that I’ve made just in our work.

Ben: And one of the things that I think is helping us to frame that challenge up a little better is understanding the different types of cultures that can exist. And there’s lots of material on this. There’s a model that I love. That’s, I think, from the late or early ’90s, which is called the competing values framework. And I’ll send you a link that at least you can share in the show notes, but—

Vitaly: Absolutely.

Ben: ... it’s really nice. And it just takes two ideas on a spectrum X and Y. And it gives you four high-level general types of cultures that can exist in an organization. And one of the things that I’ve learned is in my interviews, almost every single one of our design system teams that I’ve talked to is on the left side of this diagram, which means they’re internally oriented. So they’re either collaborative or they’re controlling. Those are the two culture types that are the most common for a design system team.

Ben: And that makes sense, right? A collaborative approach is when you’re saying, “Hey, everybody come help me do this.” And together we’ll build something that we can all use. That’s very common. And then controlling is a little different. And that’s we’re saying, “Hey, this design system is in place to ensure that the output is consistent.” And so you cannot veer from this. It’s more like us being restrictive.

Vitaly: Like a strict guideline that we need to stick to, right? Mm-hmm.

Ben: That’s right. So those are the two... This is very general, but those are the two general ideas of cultures that exist really in design system teams, but there are two others, and those are more externally oriented. And one of those is competitive, which is about being driven by the market, and the other is more entrepreneurial and it’s creative, it’s called. And these are folks who are just trying to disrupt stuff. And so, with these four ideas, what I’ve learned is some of these cultures work well together, and some of them don’t.

Ben: And as a design system team, you don’t get to choose the culture of your organization, right? You are going to be a subculture. And so what we’re learning now is there’s a lot of nuance in being smart about how to structure the culture, how to curate the culture of your design system team in a way that it can operate successfully inside the larger organization’s culture.

Ben: And that’s a lot of the work that I’ve been doing. And I’m real. I just feel like there’s so much to this. I have a lot more research to do, but it’s already starting to show a lot of value in our consulting work, so-

Vitaly: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Because once you have an organization that already has a culture in place, you probably can’t change that, but you might change the way how your design system would operate in that environment to make the best out of that.

Ben: That’s right.

Vitaly: Well, I hope that at some point you will be, I don’t know, writing articles, maybe even books about this.

Ben: Yes.

Vitaly: Either hear something, a rumor about an upcoming book on just that eventually.

Ben: That’s the plan. Yeah. Trying to put something together that has these three big concepts, the anatomy of a system. So actually getting some nuts and bolts about being very clear and articulate about what a system is? Understanding how systems mature, as we’ve already spoken about, and then recognizing the impact of an organization’s culture on the design system team and how we can structure that in a way that it’s successful? So those kinds of the big—

Vitaly: Any deadlines that you’ve put yourself in your calendar?

Ben: I’m hoping to have my draft done this year. And then from there, that the whole process of editing and all of it, so-

Vitaly: Yeah. I even know a publisher who might be interested in publishing at some point-

Ben: Oh, yeah.

Vitaly: ... who knows you.

Ben: Yeah. Give me their name.

Vitaly: Yeah, I will, I will maybe let’s just spend a bit more time thinking more hands-on about what are some of the things that designers developers working in organizations, working in companies on a design system? What can they do to make things a bit better for the process, for collaboration, for the workflow, for everything?

Vitaly: Let’s start maybe just by you briefly maybe highlighting, how do you start the kickoff projects when it comes to design systems with your clients? What do you usually start with? Obviously, there is going to be some research involved and all, but what would be the initial steps to get to a solid foundation early on?

Ben: Yeah, you’re right. It is research. We call this phase onboarding at Sparkbox and what we try to recognize is that those early days of an engagement like that, or the days when you know the least, right? And so we try to embrace the idea that we’re going to know a little bit more tomorrow than we did today. And we try to be very iterative. I think those early days for us are oftentimes about building relationships with the folks inside the organization.

Ben: And we do often ask to be introduced to lots and lots of people, even if we’re not going to work with them daily in the design system work. We still need to know what they’re dealing with? What they’re going through? How are they accomplishing their tasks each day? What are their goals? And what we’re trying to do is I think, model for our clients that you cannot do design system work effectively unless you really truly understand the needs of your users, your subscribers.

Ben: And so that is where we start. And so it’s about... We do that in a lot of different ways. So we may run a small internal survey and send that to lots and lots of people. We may schedule three to five interviews with each discipline. And one of the things that’s a little bit of a pet peeve of mine is that we talk so much about how a design system can benefit a designer or a developer, but we ignore a lot of other disciplines.

Ben: And so one of the things that we’re intentional about is making sure we’re not only speaking to the designers and the developers but also let’s talk to some folks in QA, let’s talk to the product owners. So let’s talk to UX research folks. I think the system should be broad in its goal of serving lots of different disciplines. And so the only way that we can do that is if we understand the needs of all of those folks so that’s how we get rolling.

Vitaly: Right. And then, as time progresses in terms of collaboration, let’s say between designers and developers, right? It’s still always a topic handoff or no handoff. Den Mole and Brett Frost are speaking about the hot potato model as we throw.

Ben: Yeah.

Vitaly: The stuff from designer to developer, from developer to designer, it’s all alternative. And there is no notion of a handoff because it’s just happening all the time in small bits and pieces. What do you see working? Or do you see it working best or maybe not working well at all?

Ben: Yeah, it’s funny there. This is a spectrum; there are so many organizations that are more iterative in that way. There are a lot of organizations out there that are still very linear, and I definitely fall more in the camp of iteration where we believe, but I talk with our team a lot about this idea of empathy. And I’m not talking about empathy for our end users. I’m talking about empathy for the other disciplines that we have to work alongside.

Ben: And I think that is key to doing this work well, is understanding that every decision you make, say you’re a developer, every line of code that you write to build an interface has an impact on the visual side of the things, right? So, and the experience for the end customer. So recognizing that all of our decisions are interplaying with each other, I think, is necessary. And that’s where building relationships with those people is the way that you can do better work.

Ben: So we encourage that. And that’s why I love design systems because it forces all of us onto the same team instead of us thinking about, “Oh, I’m on this products team.” No, we’re actually all trying to build stuff that better serves our end customers, right? And the one way we can do that is with a system.

Vitaly: Right. And when it comes to... Let’s say those little fine little details; for example, many teams will be working with storybook on the coding side of things and then Figma on the design side of things. How do we then, the ultimate, the billion dollar question from me to you? Ben, of course, how do you breach that gap? Will tools save us? Will processes save us workflows, Slack channels? I don’t know. You give me an answer, Ben. I don’t know.

Ben: Yeah. I definitely don’t think tools are going to save us. I get asked a lot about tools because right now, especially with design system stuff, there are so many tools coming on the market, and every tool that’s out there is investing heavily in offering better and better services. And that’s great. We need that innovation happening in the space for sure. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t use tools, of course, but I don’t think tools will save us.

Ben: I think it’s... So in our anatomy of a design system model, we talk about every layer of the system consisting of three different parts. And those are, of course, the assets, which are the things everybody thinks about, the files, the components and react, the Figma designs, all of it. But those are important, right? But also, we talk about documentation, which is like a major piece, which is offering a really actual, insightful explanation of what a component is or what a token is. Or whatever the thing you’re documenting.

Ben: Of also, why is it important? Why is it that way? And, and then we also talk about the process as a key part of that, of this for each layer. And this is, I think I had to say what will save us; I think being intentional and thinking through the actual process that you’re going to follow and being clear about what it is and how to follow it is the way that we’re able to set these different disciplines up for success. In the example you said, designer developer, like one of the common things that one of the biggest challenges we see is that folks don’t trust the design system because the version of it that a designer used is no longer in sync with the version of it that a developer is going to use.

Ben: And that’s a problem, right? Because now, all of a sudden, I’m going to... The next time when I come around, I go through the process thinking that it’s in sync, and at the end, I realize, “Oh my gosh, I used the design system as a developer. And now, the output is different than what my designer designed. That’s a problem. I’m not going to want to use the system anymore because that issue means I have to go redo stuff, right? So that actually has taken away any efficiencies that we might have gained by having a design system because I’ve just created a bunch of rework for myself.

Ben: So the solution to that, there’s two big things, right? One is defining a process to keep these things in sync and just being clear about what that is. And the other is transparency about the current state of each piece of a system. So now, I can choose as a developer to use the system. I know if there’s transparency, and I know that it’s not quite in sync with what the designer used. That just means, oh, I might have a little bit of iteration to do on it, but I haven’t gone through expecting it to be perfect at the end so that transparency creates trust.

Ben: And the process is the way that you can say, “Hey, we know things will, at some point, become synchronized, you can choose to wait until that’s done, or you can go now and maybe help us create the synchronization.” So I think those are the two things that’s just one example, but it’s a balance, right? Of the way that we work with each other and the tools offering some of that automatically. And then when they don’t putting the process in place to do it manually, so-

Vitaly: Right, absolutely. Well, that sounds very exciting. Well, I do have to ask one more thing, Ben; as we’re wrapping up slowly, I know that you’ve been working on so many different projects with so many different companies, so many different brands, and so many different designs systems across. I don’t know how many companies and brands, at this point, do you still have a dream project that you would love to be working on one day? I don’t know, maybe it could be a design system for a big brand, or maybe it could be anything else.

Vitaly: I know that you know, you are a big audio guy, right? So you have been spending quite a bit of time with audio and as not your engineer as well, and you have so many other things that are really interesting to you, and during the conversation that we had back in Berlin, I just realized just how broad your interests really are. So if you could do anything, any big project that you would like to take on, what would it be?

Ben: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I think it’s not, for me, it’s not about the size of a company or the brand awareness, that kind of thing. I mean, we have worked with some big organizations, and that’s always fun to... When you’re talking with your family later to be like, “Oh, you went to that website; we helped build that.” That’s always a fun moment, but I think for me, it’s always been about impact.

Ben: So if there was a way to help organizations actually create that unity on their teams, that’s the thing that really is driving me at the moment. So, the idea of a book, I think, is a way to put that together and actually see folks grow from it and make better decisions within their daily work.

Ben: That’s pretty exciting to me. The other one, I think, is just that I really enjoy teaching and working with folks. And so, I think at some point in my future, I probably will find a way to give back in that way. And that’s pretty exciting for me to think about. So there’s a couple.

Vitaly: That sounds great. That’s great. So dear friends, we’ve been learning quite a bit about design systems this episode, but I’m still wondering, what have you been learning about lately, Ben, that might not be related to design systems or might be related to design systems? What keeps you busy these days? What keeps on a toast?

Ben: Yeah, that’s fun. My son is at a camp this week, and he is studying VR gaming. He’s learning how to make VR games. And so, he and I have a lot of fun. He’s learning to program as well. And so my computer science background gets me back into some code, goofing around with him. So there’s some stuff I’m learning there. I’m always learning about coffee. You can probably see some of my coffee equipment here. So I have a couple of new toys that I’m playing with within the coffee world too always, so-

Vitaly: That sounds great. So do you think we should be expecting you to become a VR developer or VR engineer or barista anytime soon?

Ben: Yes. That’s definitely. I’ll be a barista probably in the near future if nothing else works out.

Vitaly: Right. Well, that sounds about right. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Ben, you can find him on Twitter, where he’s @bencallahan, and will obviously post the link to it in the episode notes and also on his website @bencallahan.com. That’s not very surprising, or I would say, but you also can find him @sparkbox.com, where the wonderful sparkling Sparkboxers. Is that the right way of saying that?

Ben: That’s what we say. Sparkboxers. Yeah.

Vitaly: Spark boxers are doing all the incredible job on design systems and beyond. So thank you so much for joining us, Ben. It was a pleasure and fun as always.

Ben: Yeah.

Vitaly: Any parting words of wisdom streaming to the internet out there as an Internet Explorer?

Ben: Oh my gosh. Internet Explorer. No. Well, go check out the second draft of the tokens spec that’s coming out. There’s a lot of feedback needed there if you’re into that space, so that would be a thing. I would encourage folks to go read.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 50 With Marko Dugonjic: Can You Change A UX Dinosaur?

This article is a sponsored by Storyblok

In this episode, we ask how you can affect change to UX design in large organizations stuck in their ways. Vitaly talks to Marko Dugonjić to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: For him, everything started with a passionate love for CSS and typography in early 2000s. He used to be a front-end developer and UX designer, then moved to the role of user experience director. Working with plenty of clients, such as Deutsche Telekom, SGS, Hrvatski Telekom, Font Bureau, L, National Geographics, and so many others. He also built a tool called Typetester, which has gained quite a momentum in the 2000s and even beyond that, allowing designers and developers to test their topography in the browser.

Vitaly: Now, five years ago, he moved from Zagreb, Croatia, where he's originally from, to Sacramento, California, where he now is working as a Director of User Experience at SymSoft Solutions. So we know he's an expert in UX, but did you know that he has been an avid fan of Acapulco Beaver's Handball team from Zagreb since the age of seven and remains one up until today? My Smashing friends, please welcome Marko Dugonjic. Hello, Marko. How are you doing today?

Marko: Great... I mean smashing, I guess.

Vitaly: Excellent. That's wonderful to hear. It's interesting because we have these conversations every now and again, talking about the meaning of life and so many other things. But one thing that really excites me, and I think it deserves a bit of attention, I have this incredible story of how you actually just fell in love with the web many, many years ago, where you used to do something very, very different. And look at you now, work on enterprise applications for a pretty fancy company. Can you tell us a bit of that backstory?

Marko: Sure. It's a weird story in a way, but maybe it'll give someone an idea about how to start with completely different expectations about your career in life and end up in, as you said, in California. And so my story really began when I tried to build a website for, believe it or not, my dogs, my kennel because I used to breed dogs. And at that time, my full-time job was as a fitness trainer.

Marko: So as I was working with people who would have rehabilitation needs or any type of permanent or temporary disability, I also learned about how people who don't have the visual ability to use the web by listening to the web pages. And so one thing led to another, and I was thinking about, "I have this website for my dogs. Is this even accessible?"

Marko: And so what do you do in early 2000s? You find a web forum where real web professionals reside, and you start asking questions about how to improve the accessibility of your website. And it was really just my hobby website, and it's almost something that I've built out of my front-end or front page software, Microsoft FrontPage. I don't know if you remember that one.

Vitaly: Who doesn't, Marko? Who doesn't?

Marko: And I don't know how, but I never used tables for layout, but I did. And this is probably the first time after almost 20 years that I'm saying it, "I didn't use tables, but I did use a bunch of frames." It was a frameset that pretty much I used to create the header and the sidebar, and the footer. So I had four frames on that page.

Marko: And of course, it didn't validate and everything was really horrible from [inaudible 00:03:45] perspective. But I was hoping that the web design community would help me. And I started researching and learned about CSS positioning, and that was the first thing that I fixed. And then, I learned about Internet Explorer because at the time, I was using Mozilla. I don't know what was even before Firefox. Maybe Phoenix or something like that.

Vitaly: There was Netscape Navigator, of course.

Marko: Netscape Navigator, yeah. I knew about it, but I think I onboarded with the Mozilla type of browser. But what happened is that at some point, the web forums really weren't enough for, I guess, my obsession with making things perfect. So I started reading web standards from the W3C website, and I read the specs because I thought, "This is probably what every web professional does." And so this is how I learned about accessibility and web standards and all the stuff.

Marko: So that was 2002, 2003. And then one thing led to another, again. I was participating in these web communities, and eventually, people from what today is called Human Design Agency from Zagreb, had a call just like this one. And they said, "Hey, would you like to be paid for what you know?" And I was like, "What are you talking about? I'm a fitness trainer."

Marko: But they did convince me, and then I joined that incredible team. We just had so much fun back in the day. And stayed with them for a couple of years, then moved on to an in-house position, and everything else is pretty much standard. But I think that moment when I realized, "I know something that somebody's willing to pay for," was incredible for me. Again, at that time, it was still almost like a hobby to me. But soon enough, it became a profession.

Vitaly: Right. And then, of course, you also ended up having your own studio, which then eventually, after a couple of years, moved you to this decision of maybe it's a time to move to or try to move to the US. How did that happen?

Marko: Well, I think what has always been following me is that I didn't really have any general plan. I knew what I wanted to do day-to-day. I knew what I felt about projects and work and skills and all that stuff, but I didn't really have a general plan of moving from this company to another company and then to that company. It was really about maybe selecting good projects, and good people to work with.

Marko: And so when I had my studio, we became pretty international. And you know that we also collaborated on a couple of projects in Europe. And for me, it was really for the past couple of years in Croatia; it was really just 100% international. And so one of our clients, and through a good friend, Christina Portner, who also participated in some of the Smashing activities, I think she gave a talk and had a couple of articles for you guys.

Vitaly: That's right.

Marko: She introduced me to Savita Faruki, who owns SymSoft Solutions with her husband. And it's a nice, small, family-run business. And looking at the projects that they had and still have, it just made sense for me to move over here, and so I accepted the offer that they extended to me after that visit. Where I really didn't plan to get employed, but we were just discussing some of the collaboration and maybe working on some projects together, but it ended up being me becoming a director of the user experience here at SymSoft.

Vitaly: Right. That's an interesting story, and also chose a journey that one can take from one place to a very different place. Now you've been all around UX for now 15 or 20 years now. I don't even know. Who counts at this point anymore at this point? And of course, you've seen quite a lot of stuff happening in terms of just UX, I would say.

Vitaly: We've been fighting, as you could probably find thousands of articles stating that we need to have a seat at the table. And it seems like now, at this point in 2022, we have a pretty solid seat at a table. Do you think that we are in a place where we wanted to be 15 years ago? Is there still something missing? Where do you see us as a community and just as an industry, I guess, in terms of the state of UX today?

Marko: So I think the there's a couple of things right in there. It's an interesting and also complex topic. So I think we do have a seat at a table; however, the horizon is now different. Because as you travel, you just discover other things are behind the horizon. And so once you climb that first peak, then you reveal more peaks to climb. So I think this is where we are right now.

Marko: And a huge thing that nobody really talks about is that even IT or digital as a whole has had that problem in the past, of the seat at the table. And so we just now joined the crowd of people who might have better access to decision-making, but it's still not at the level where we can really immediately influence any decision, especially in big companies and enterprises.

Marko: Obviously, this is where I work at. Startups and younger companies are slightly different there. But enterprises or anything massive, like big insurance companies or big telecoms or financial institutions, or the government, 90% of my clients are now the government... these organizations have been around for years and hundreds of years, even.

Marko: So old ways and things that led to the success that they have right now are not necessarily something that you have to change, but very often, you can also change them by applying correct organizational change management principles. So I would say the challenge that we have nowadays is just general organizational change management. That's a hot topic.

Marko: And again, it's not just the UX people. I think it's the technologies in general or anyone who just have this new way of managing things. I would say digital marketers as well. So all of us, we have to sit at the table, but there's just this huge job of driving and steering the organization into whatever is next, whatever is the future.

Vitaly: Right. That's interesting. Maybe we should dive into this a little bit more in a little bit more detail. Just because, of course, we read and see and hear a lot of articles around UX, and many of them are very much focused on traditional, I would say, good all startups, digital products, and so on and so forth.

Vitaly: But at the same time, I find it quite difficult to even find case studies about enterprise UX. So maybe you could actually share those insights about if you do have this situation where you might have a seat at the table, but you actually need to change the organization. And organizations of that size are usually very reluctant to those changes, and people don't like to change their habits quickly.

Vitaly: So what would be then your process to make it all a reality, to establish a user-centric approach in a relatively tight and conservative and maybe even quite dated, let's say, environment?

Marko: Well yeah, sure. I wouldn't say necessarily that the organization is resistant to change or that people are not willing to change. Just, I would say the volume or the size of the organization is really your biggest enemy because you can influence only so many people in your immediate circle in the organization. And then some organizations are lucky enough to have a big enough UX team or, more broadly digital team that would also have a bunch of developers, solution architects, business analysts, and any type of role that you can think of in IT.

Marko: So it's just a matter of how many people you can touch within the organization with the new principles, how many people are actually in a UX type of project, user-centered service, something like that. So the change doesn't happen in the way of infecting people. You cannot just spread the UX type of virus to people, and they'll all get it. It requires a lot of effort. It requires a custom-tailored approach to communication.

Marko: Someone who has a desk job and is in departments that are understaffed, for that matter, they don't necessarily have enough bandwidth or capacity. And it has nothing to do with the personal preference of the individual person, but just the organizational structure is such that you don't have access maybe, to everyone that you would like to. And of course, it would require a lot of, a lot of time out of the regular day-to-day desk job for people to even get educated.

Marko: So I think the biggest enemy is the size of the organization. So you have to strategically pick and choose your champions within the organization. People who, whoever shows up on your open office or office hours, whatever you call it, meeting, that's a good champion. Even if they have low maturity in UX, these are people who have the intent to change something. And so strategically picking and choosing people, and then helping them become almost like a mentor within the organization to the people around them. And maybe you'll have that department embracing more of an interactive approach to understanding end customers.

Marko: I think this is the way to go. But again, I don't think people should be discouraged with that because even 1% improvement in the business process or in conversions or in optimization is... Vitaly, you and I work with web performance and conversions and E-commerce and all the stuff, and 1% can be a huge improvement.

Vitaly: Of course. I'm wondering, though, just what your way of dealing with a situation is when you have people in front of you, maybe higher up the ladder in senior management, who just have a very different view on things. Who very strongly look, of course, at their data and their KPIs, at their business metrics, and try to move them.

Vitaly: And how would you then, in a case where you, again, have to work with a company that might not have a user-centric approach at all and maybe don't think about the customer experience as much as they think about the financial benefit by the end of the year? How would you then argue in those kinds of environments about the role of UX or the importance of UX, or the importance of customer experience?

Marko: Well, I think the best way to sell something is to show them with a live example, with a practical example. And you also know that whenever we would come to an organization and say, "Hey, let's see what's the problem there." And you and I worked with a major German retailer couple of years back, and they were saying, "Hey, mobile is not performing really well. Desktop is much better." And then we realized that the average visit to a mobile E-commerce solution that they had was about 50 years or something like that.

Marko: And so once you start showing off these numbers and say, "This website is now faster," or, "This software will shorten the time from idea to conversion," just, I think performance is such an easy-to-use tool to convince people to invest into it, that it's just unbelievable... Because you can measure the before and offer, and this is something that my team at SymSoft always does. We always do the baseline measurement, whether that's the conversion rates, satisfaction, whatever, you name it, seconds to load.

Marko: And then we test and retest and retest and retest, and then you have hard facts that you can actually tie back to dollar value. And this is how you convince people that this is a good investment. And again, just starting small; almost like when you work with a new chemical that's dangerous, on your car or whatever... they say, "Hey, try somewhere where it won't mess anything up, like in a corner that nobody sees." And so we can also pick a pilot project, a really small case study, prove that it works, and then scale it up to something larger.

Vitaly: Would you say that it's important to have a buy-in at this point? Or would you say, "Just go ahead, experiment. Build a little prototype, maybe even a little bit in your spare time," just to convince that this is working? Or do you think that commitment from management and green light and approval is critical here?

Marko: So I would say that, and again, this is my experience. I don't necessarily think this is something that happens in every organization... But for me, whatever worked, whenever I was proactive and more on the side of, "Hey, let me do something in my spare time," or, "Let me finish the main task earlier so that I can actually work on the fun stuff."

Marko: Also, signaling to the management that you are proactive, that you are self-driven, that you are self-motivated, that you're not waiting for someone to approve, that you're not waiting to be served or approved or given the space. So I think management definitely likes people who are just thinking that way.

Marko: And so you basically have two benefits. You don't have to ask anyone for permission; you can figure out what is the scope and what is space available for you and just decide to do it. And then, if it doesn't work, you are not even embarrassed. Nobody needs to know. But if it works out, if it's a nice prototype, if it's a nice concept, you can definitely present it to the upper management.

Marko: And then again, you get double credit. You create something fun, but you also show that you care and that you are proactive and self-driven, and all these qualities that everybody ever always writes on the job posts, I guess.

Vitaly: Right. Well, you did mention scope, and of course, it's a wonderful keyword for me because, of course, I can almost hear the voices in the back asking about how to deal with scope creep. I mean, you are working with very different organizations and, well, of really big size. And eventually, I'm sure there will be situations where late changes come in, poor specifications are in there, communication issues, delays, and all of that.

Vitaly: So what would be your way to prevent things like this from happening, where you're missing deadlines because of the scope creep or poor estimates? What's your process in there to make sure that we don't get in trouble for delays and maybe underestimating the effort needed?

Marko: That's really a great topic. I think there are two things in there. So definitely, if we underestimate, it's completely on us, and there's no... That's very clear. It's on us. We should have had our due diligence before the discovery stage of the project when we were estimating. But these things happen, I guess, in the beginning for everyone, until you have enough experience to move from a one-page contract into a 50-page contract.

Marko: And my friend, Eva Lucas from NetGAN, from Croatia, he said once to me, "Hey, we started with one page for a contract. Now we have 70 pages," or something like that. So as you are more experienced, you just put more things in the contract and you, I guess, put more things into researching and estimating, and you probably track your hours, and you know how much time for each feature is required. So as you grow more mature in the field, there's less surprising when it comes to estimates.

Marko: Now, the second topic, which is the scope creep, usually in enterprise organizations, they already have this type of... they mitigate that with, again, other contractual clauses. Maybe something that you can communicate early on is the unanticipated effort budget. So that might be 10 or 20% of the budgets that's allocated to the project, that we don't have to spend, but this is our contingency plan.

Marko: And then another thing that's very, very useful, and this is what my director of project management always enforces, is regular meetings. Every week, we have at least weekly meetings. If not, daily stand-ups with the project management on the client side. And we have a really detailed status report that we carry over week after week after week. And we update it, and share it with everyone.

Marko: And we are not really afraid to raise any old risks. So whenever we see that there's a delay in reviewing and providing feedback, we will put it out in the status report, change the green light to yellow light, and just say to everyone, "Hey, we think that this is something that can get out of control."

Vitaly: Yeah. So that's a very interesting point for me as well because I was working with a company where this turned out to be quite a helper. So really having a more clear overview, I guess, of what our expectations are, what the process is going to be, when we expect some feedback and what kind of feedback we expect as well. And one thing that was really critical and useful at this point was to actually explain to clients that late changes are expensive.

Vitaly: Late changes are difficult to implement, and they are expensive because if you're coming from a very different industry and you're expecting a product to be delivered, you might not know just how expensive, how difficult it is to actually make those changes later on because you don't have this technical knowledge necessary. So explaining this early on, having this clear communication channel is indeed, I think, quite useful in many ways actually.

Vitaly: From my end, I think, and one thing I actually definitely wanted to cover today is, because this is something that comes up quite a bit and most recently is... you've been, again, in this industry for quite some time and you had your own head where you had your own agency, and now you are working for a company. What do you think, especially for people who might have just a few years of experience in UX... looking back, what do you think would be the right way to just guarantee personal growth in the company? Negotiate salary, get more ownership, all those things.

Vitaly: How would you say, what would you recommend maybe to people listening to this today, if they want to maybe improve their salary, maybe grow over time, maybe take more leadership position? What skills would be required, and what would be the right strategy to get where you want to be?

Marko: That's a great question. And so maybe from a manager position now, I can talk about people that I had in my teams, and what qualifies a successful UX designer or professional in general is, it's always, I guess people who are able to manage-up are more successful. Managing-up meaning that understanding that your supervisor or whoever you report to also has their life and their problems and their different, different tasks. And just understanding your overall environment, it's leading peer-to-peer.

Marko: So the understanding is that if you're in UX, there's another person at the same level in your organization in frontend or backend or marketing or project management. So just being aware of who's above, below, on the side from you and just understanding that these are also people. And then, what can you do to really move everyone, together, forward? And so this is, I guess, the attitude, being proactive, something that we talked about a few minutes ago.

Marko: Just not asking for permission because it's not true that you need weeks and weeks to create a concept. Maybe you can just catch something and say, "Hey..." You wake up one morning, and you don't necessarily have to open up your company laptop or anything like that. But just put it on a Post-it, and when it's office time, you just can say, "Hey, I have this idea. Let's do this."

Marko: And that really cost you nothing, I mean, you had that idea anyway. But you're building up your muscle of generating and communicating, and suggesting. And of course, it goes without saying, if you hear crickets every time you have an idea in your company, you should just change the company. But if you have a good environment and receipting environment where you can voice your ideas, that's a great place to be.

Marko: And so what happened is that, once you build up your credit and you look like someone who cares, not necessarily about the company... and I don't want to fool myself thinking that people want to stay here forever, but caring about the quality of work, caring about your teammates, caring about leaving some kind of impact after you leave. And there's another topic that we can also talk about. What do you do when you decide to leave the company? So are you that type of person who thinks about these moments?

Marko: And so once you have that, then salary negotiations are just straightforward because you opened up the communications channels, and then you can just come and sit and say, "Hey, what about the raise?" And then we can talk about that. But if your communication is completely blocked and you're just doing whatever you're told, and you're checking out the tickets, then that conversation about the salary is just difficult because you didn't really create an environment where you have this dialogue anyway, in the first place.

Marko: So I think practicing talking to your boss, good times or bad times, and just not necessarily sharing everything that's happening in your life, but just having this more proactive, I guess, communication. When nothing's really happening, you can just drop by and say, "Hey, this is what I'm working on. It's nothing special, but here it is." And then maybe having this regular cadence.

Marko: And if you don't have one-on-ones, and by the way, which is something that you should have with your boss... because that cadence in one-on-ones really allows you the space at some point to say, "Hey, I would like to work on something else." Or "I would like to have a better impact." Or, "I would like to have a better salary." Or, "Hey, I'm actually looking for a new job. Can you support me while I'm looking for something else?" Just being fair, I guess, to the people that you're working with. So that would be my advice about negotiating salary and these types of things.

Vitaly: Yeah. I think that many people are struggling with finding themselves in companies where there is just no culture for this kind of feedback. I mean, in some good companies, you will likely have maybe 360-degree feedback or 360-view feedback, whatever it is called, where you get feedback from everyone. And then you would have a dedicated time to bring up any issues with your manager once every three months, four months, two months, six months, I don't know...

Vitaly: But this is probably an important part to have or an important asset, I guess, to have at least. I think that many people just are afraid maybe a little bit to ask these questions, to bring this up, because I think that it might create a wrong attitude around them and that they're there in the company for the money alone. But I mean, looking at inflation rates happening right now around the world, it's probably important to have that conversation later or earlier. Right?

Marko: Yeah, definitely.

Vitaly: So maybe also building up on top of that, there're quite a few conversations happening in Europe, at least around salaries. And of course, everybody's looking at salaries in San Francisco thinking about, "Wow! Those salaries. This is incredible compared to the pay you get in Europe. Even if you're living in London or in Berlin, it's just much, much, much higher in San Francisco."

Vitaly: You happen to be in Sacramento, in California, and you happen to have moved from Croatia to the US, and shared the story about how you did that. So now being there, can you tell us maybe a little bit more about how different everything is for you? So do you feel like the culture, the way companies are run, the way people are working together that it's influenced you in some way, surprised you in some way, disappointed you in some way? What was your experience overall in these five years?

Marko: That's a good question. I think looking back, what really was new for me is how people over here are really focused. Organizations, not necessarily individuals, really focus on processes and repeatability of the process. So if you have certain steps, we can talk about the process... In design, we have double-diamond or triple-I or 5-Ds, or design sprint or design thinking.

Marko: And the reason for all of that, which is not very common in Europe... In Europe, we have a problem and solution. These are two steps that we have in Europe or have had in Europe. But here, it has to be detailed a little more with applicable tools and a decision-making diagram. So this is different over here. When it comes to San Francisco or Sacramento, I think in Sacramento, what happens is that we have a government here, so I'm not in a position to compare our environment in the projects to maybe the Bay Area, where there's a lot of just private companies and startups.

Marko: And there's a start difference even here. A two-hour drive from San Francisco. So I would even think, and this is completely my personal opinion, that Sacramento is closer just to the rest of the US than to San Francisco, compared to Europe. But another thing that's really different here is that the whole communication piece is just much more intentional because a lot of people are landing in California specifically from all over the world, and then you have a mix of cultures. And this is something that I definitely didn't think about when I was working in Europe, however internationally, but still, Europe, which is super tiny, by the way, as a piece of land.

Marko: And then we didn't have so many differences in the sense of just different cultural backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, how people have just different school systems in the first place. And so all of these people come over here, they're talented, they have certain talents; otherwise, they couldn't make it here. But then you have these different communication styles, and you have cultures that are just very generally speaking...

Marko: Far Eastern countries have high context conversations. And then you go more to the west; you have low context, which means that you have to always reiterate what the last conversation was. While in some cultures, it's implied. Everybody knows what we were talking about in the last meeting. So just these types of, I guess, communications skills that we develop now are really... that was really eye-opening.

Marko: I think especially Croatia for that matter, compared to California, is super monocultural. It's just unbelievable... That contrast is just super visible for me now, mowing from one to another.

Vitaly: Right. So having moved to the US now, do you feel like at any point you could consider moving back?

Marko: I think so, yeah. That's not off the table. I think what we like here, my family and me, and this was really a more collective move, not just necessarily for projects or work, is the access to nature here is just incredible. The way you can consume nature in California specifically is just unbelievable. It's just geared towards families. And over here, everybody's outside all the time, which is our family style anyway. So these are some of the fun things over here.

Marko: The good thing about Europe is that everything is very close. The furthest away is, I don't know, Spain from Croatia, which is a two to three-hour airplane flight. And, of course, I can fly to LA to visit Disney Land or something like that, but it's a drag to even think about the distances over here. So these are some of the differences that we notice. But again, I wouldn't say it's different or better; it's just, I guess, down to every person's personal preferences.

Vitaly: Right. Okay. Well, now, if you actually could recommend something to yourself when you were breeding dogs back, what? 20, 25-ish, 22 years ago, when you were just starting out with UX and all of that, well frontend and all that... what would you recommend to yourself?

Marko: I guess I would enjoy it more. I would joy the ride more. I was lucky enough to meet really, really great people along the way. I mean, such as yourself included.

Vitaly: Oh, that's very kind of you.

Marko: Yeah. But also coworkers and other speakers and just professionals. I think at certain points; I could have enjoyed it more, I guess. Just being more relaxed and having more faith in the future that things will work out the way they actually eventually did. So I guess, just more patience.

Vitaly: Okay. That sounds good. So we've been learning about UX in this episode of Smashing Podcast. So what have you been learning about lately, Marko? Any podcasts, books, TV shows, anything that drew your attention?

Marko: Well yeah, that's a good point. And you know me, I'm all over the place. Right? So I think lately-

Vitaly: You surely are, Marko. You definitely are.

Marko: ... lately, I'm really into mental health and just on all levels. So personal level, family level, organizational level. Just thinking about all the consequences of COVID, and just remote versus in-person. This is something that I'm really thinking about, not necessarily as something that we have to deal with right now, but what will be the outcomes in the years to come? So just getting ready for that, I guess.

Vitaly: All right. Well, I'm very much excited to actually meet you in person after all these years. In four days, we're going to meet in San Francisco for SmashingConf San Francisco. This is going to be very exciting. Quality time, family quality time, isn't it?

Marko: Yeah. It's going to be smashing.

Vitaly: That's kind. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Marko, you can find him on Twitter, where he's @Markodugonjic. And you can also check on Typetester, which is still kicking and still around, on typetester.org. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Marko. Do you have any parting words of wisdom that will be staying with people listening to this, I don't know, decades from now?

Marko: No. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. And I think the best advice that I can have is to keep reading Smashing Magazine.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 49 With Paul Boag: How Do You Ship A Billion-Dollar Idea?

In this episode, we ask what qualities are required to introduce change in large organizations, how to convince management to do the right thing, and how to ship a billion-dollar idea. Vitaly talks to expert Paul Boag to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: He’s a user experience consultant conversion rate optimization specialist, and all-around expert in digital transformation from Dorset in southwest England. He helps savvy marketers, product owners, and UX advocates make the case that a usable, accessible, and people-first experience and are not reading this and seeing this. He’s the best part of business success. In fact, he’s worked in digital for 25 years, and according to his Twitter profile, he’s a very grumpy old man off the web. Apparently, he also is an author of six books on topics such as conversion rate optimization and digital and transformation. And he provides coaching, training, and consultancy for digital strategy. So we know he’s an expert in digital transformation, conversion rate optimization, and UX, and all that stuff. But did you know that he spends every Saturday evening drinking tea and chatting with his Cheshire cat called Frankie.

Paul: Lies.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: Mass smashing friends, please welcome Paul Boag, and hello, Paul, how are you feeling today?

Paul: Not bad. All things considered. That’s the official British answer to how are you. There’s a really funny comedian called Bill Bailey who talks about that. He says about how Americans, when they’re asked how they are, they’re awesome; everything’s awesome. It’s an awesome day. And I’m having an awesome time, while the British say, well, not bad. That’s as good as it ever gets; it means all things considered.

Vitaly: Means that it’s okay. Yeah. Okay.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s a good thing. Not bad is good.

Vitaly: Right. Right. Well, it’s wonderful to have you back here. I mean, we go way back, and it’s wonderful to see you in person as well. Although I have to admit, in a very different setting, with a very great background in the back and no fancy lamps, no fancy lighting, no even fancy microphones, what’s going on with your life, Paul. I was told that you’re now not at home. And this is kind of going to stay this way for a while.

Paul: Yeah. So it’s your fault because I saw your jet-setting lifestyle for so many years where you were traveling around continually. And I thought I wanted that, but being me, being old and not quite as adventurous as you going from Airbnb to Airbnb, we bought an RV out in the states. And so we are now traveling around. We’re basically trailer trash now. We’re traveling around the states, sleeping in car parks, and just visiting the various places around the states. It’s good; actually, it’s very enjoyable, but yes, it means I don’t have my fancy podcast set up, and I just look like a disembodied head amongst the brown background.

Vitaly: No, that’s not that bad actually. So I should give you credit for that. You blend in well. Talking about blending in, I would say it’s interesting because always now, when I think of you, I always think about all the things that you’ve been doing all these years. And it feels like you had so many different hats. At one point, you would be doing mostly UX, and you would be doing digital strategy, and then you were coding websites back in the day as well, right?

Paul: Yeah. Well, we all did back in the day.

Vitaly: Yeah, sure. And also, we worked in agencies, and being a big part of an agency and not having your own big career as a digital UX consultant. So I’m wondering, there might be some people here listening, thinking about, who are just starting out their career, and UX is a good thing to kind of dive into. Is there anything Paul that you are now looking back think, okay, I wish that when I was starting out, when was it like 20, 25 years ago, I wish I had known X or Y, what would be those things?

Paul: Yeah. I mean, it was 27 years ago now, which is terrifying. Yeah, it’s a question that I often get asked. I think the main thing that I would say to myself, and of course, it was a very different world back then, and the web was very different. So people often ask me, oh, what advice can you give someone starting in their UX career today? Well, none because I started mine so long ago that it was totally different. But in terms of what I would tell myself, which is what you asked, I think I tell myself to focus on the soft skills. Don’t get caught up on the latest tool or the latest design technique, or whatever. Those things come and go, but interacting with people, being persuasive, presenting your ideas well, and not being a complete idiot to work with.

Paul: Those are the kinds of skills that really last, so. And we’re really bad at teaching those. Take Smashing Magazine, and this isn’t a criticism of Smashing Magazine, because everybody has got this problem. You’ll find hundreds of posts about design techniques, development techniques, all of those kinds of things, but you don’t find as many posts about how to survive a meeting with your boss or how to pitch the design-in, or how to review somebody else’s code without coming across as an asshole. That those are the kinds of skills that I think are in short supply.

Vitaly: Well, maybe we should change that. I mean, I heard that you have a bit of time while you’re traveling some places. Would you like to write a few articles maybe that would be just on that topic?

Paul: Well, to be honest, yeah. I mean, to be honest, a lot of the articles I have written for you have been around that kind of thing.

Vitaly: True. That’s right.

Paul: Because I do tend to write that kind of stuff because I think it’s important. I mean, the favorite article I ever wrote for you was one about mental health, wasn’t it? “You’re not a machine” and “you’re not alone”, which it’s still one of my favorite articles I’ve ever written because I think it was a very important article to write, but it had nothing to do with design or development.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: Well, I remember another article that you wrote a while back that got quite a bit of... How to put it? It was argued. Many people were arguing if this is a good way of kind of explaining things or not because I remember vividly you publishing that article about SEO, right? Yeah. Do you want to share that story?

Paul: Not really. No. Because I don’t want to drag it all up again. No. So, I wrote an article saying that, yeah, SEO, I can’t even remember really what it said.

Vitaly: I remember.

Paul: But basically, I was rude about SEO, wasn’t I? but that was a long time ago, to be honest. And SEO has come a long way since then. It was back in the day where SEO was a lot of smoke and mirrors, and oh, we’re going to spam links and all of that kind of stuff/ now, of course, because Google’s algorithm has matured, most of SEO is basically good content, which is great. That’s the way SEO should be. And actually, that was what I implied in the article back then, that you should just focus on creating great content. That was part of what I said as I remember. Spend your money on content, not on SEO consultants.

Vitaly: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Pretty much sort of plenty of SEO consultants that came your way decided to argue with you in the comments. I remember that vividly. Not only in the comments, I’m sure.

Paul: But it was really good, you see. See, I think sometimes it’s really difficult because we’ve lost the ability to disagree without it escalating. I mean, that did escalate to some degree. There were a lot of people that strongly disagreed with me, but I had some amazing conversations at the back of that. And I actually posted a follow-up post on my own site, which basically said, “You’ve educated me.” The view that I shared of SEO on Smashing Magazine was even then a little bit out of date, and that SEO was already transitioning away from what I described as being towards more being content-focused. And so, it was a really educational process to me, and I think it was a very worthwhile conversation. But these days, it’s like that would’ve exploded up into quite a violent and obnoxious discussion. And it did to some degree even then, but not as bad as I think it would’ve done today.

Vitaly: That’s about right. That’s about right. Well, you mentioned that you’ve been in this industry for 27 years now. That’s a lot of time, of course. That makes me wonder, though. So, you’ve been doing this, maybe some kind of similar work, for such a long time. So have we actually managed to sort out these general misunderstandings about the role of UX and what UX means and how to use UX, and how to transform organizations? Because it seems like we still keep running in circles, having the same conversations. So did we fail at kind of doing the good UX education work out there? Or where do you see the state of things now working with companies and organizations small and large?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, things have certainly progressed; they’re much better than they were. So I think most organizations now recognize the value of UX, which is a huge step forward. They didn’t always. I think the many larger organizations, UX is taken more seriously. And it does have that “seat at the table” to some degree. I think, however, there is still a lot of confusion about what UX is and what it isn’t. I think it’s still used interchangeably with UI. So UX, UI designer. While in my mind, those are very different roles. So yeah, I mean, we’re making progress, but like anything, these things take time, don’t they? Cultural change is always difficult. And when you’re talking about an entirely new discipline and integrating that into existing organizations, that doesn’t happen overnight, and we’re still only a quarter of a century old, which is barely out of our teens.

Vitaly: That’s right. That’s about right. Well, now that you’re talking about those large organizations/companies because you’re spending quite a bit of time working with companies on digital transformation. And I even heard that you wrote some books about this.

Paul: I did, which are published by Smashing Magazine of the Excellent Publishing House.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: Oh, that’s very kind of you, but this was not supposed to be a promo at all, actually. But I’m actually quite wondering because I’m working on my own in some kind of large rooted organization, and they are bringing along this notion of let’s establish a UX culture. This sounds very foreign. Something doesn’t feel almost alienating to some people like, oh, you want to do this now? We’ve always been working differently. So why should we do that now? Why should we change that now? So what would be then your starting point if you want to start moving an organization again, of any size, really towards something that would be a little bit more user-centric? They have their own, of course, business goals. They have their own KPI. They have their own old way of thinking. And in my experience, changing the way people work is hard. It sometimes takes not even years, like multiple years; it’s really, really difficult. So, how would you start moving the needle?

Paul: Yeah. The bigger the organization, the longer it takes to turn. I mean, there are different ways of doing it, top-down or bottom-up. If you do it top-down, then you are basically targeting senior management initially. And sometimes, someone in senior management gets it, and then you can start chipping away from that angle. But most of the time, it has to come from the grassroots. And really, I think of it as a political movement. Let’s take changing policy towards the environment, right? If you just go in and you write your MP, you’re not going to get anywhere by yourself. Okay? The way that you get large-scale change like that is your band together with other people that feel the same. You make a lot of noise, and you get the attention of those people in power.

Paul: And fundamentally, it’s the same when you’re trying to change an organization, you have to find allies. You have to find other people in the organization that has got the same desire to be more user-centric. Now they might not know the term UX, but they might. Marketers, for example. UX people are very rude to marketers, but ultimately they want to achieve the same thing because they want customers to be happy; because if customers are happy, they repeat buy. They recommend you to other people, et cetera. So you could go to those people, and you start creating an informal group of people that share your views on UX. And then you start to mobilize just like a political movement would do. Write yourself a manifesto, right? What do you stand for? What do you want? What change do you actually want to see? Very specifically.

Paul: Then do you start propaganda, basically. You start doing lunchtime sessions and sharing UX best practices. You send emails around. You get in guest speakers. You make a noise. I’ve run internal conferences within organizations. I’ve started newsletters and internal blogs; you run a marketing campaign, promoting user experience best practices. And that’s how you do it. And you begin to build momentum over time and only go to senior management when you have got sufficient momentum that they can’t ignore you. But you’re right. That takes time. Takes time to build that kind of culture.

Vitaly: Yeah. So the interesting part for me is really that very often it feels like you really have to be so well prepared for that meeting with senior management.

Paul: Yeah.

Vitaly: Sometimes it feels like you have like 20 minutes shot. This is the window that you get. And if you can convince them, that’s the only chance you get because nobody’s going to be talking to you ever again.

Paul: Then you’re doing it wrong, right? I’ve walked into meetings like that. I’ve been in meetings like that, but I already know the result by the time I stepped through the door, right? A meeting like that has got to basically be a rubber stamp by that stage. You have got to have spoken individually to each of the people in that meeting before the meeting, you have to need to have won them over beforehand. And a lot of that is about, let’s say... It’s a couple of mistakes people make; first of all, they go into meetings like that, and they go, well, no one think of the user. And nobody cares about the user other than you. So that’s mistake number one. And then-

Vitaly: That’s a little bit disappointing.

Paul: Yeah. But it’s true. Because we’re all inherently selfish, and we’re no different, right? If somebody from the compliance team said to you, will you not think about our legal obligations, right? Are you telling me you would really give a shit? No, of course, you wouldn’t. Right? Because you’re selfish. You care about users because you’re a user experience designer. So we all are selfish. We all think about our own individual areas. So, that’s one thing, don’t talk about users. You’re wasting your time. The second thing with those kinds of winning over senior management is that you got to not ask for too much, right? So, for example, I don’t know, let’s say you’re Disney, right? And you’re a little group of Disney, and you’ve got this amazing idea of you to want to create magic bands with RDF chips in them that could do all these incredible things.

Paul: But you know it’s going to cost a billion dollars to renovate all of the hotels, all of the theme parks, all the rest of it. You don’t go into senior management and say, can I have a billion dollars? Because they’re going to say no, no matter what it is that you say. What you do is you go in and say, can I build a prototype, a proof of concept, right? For a much smaller fee using a backlog, right? And this is exactly what Disney did. So, reduce your ask, go for little steps. Slimy tactics to move towards your idea. And then in terms of the, not talking about the user, instead what you do is you go to each of those stakeholders and to the finance person, you say, well, if we implemented this magic band, yes, there’s going to be a big upfront cost.

Paul: But our ongoing operational costs are going to go down as a result because the finance person likes that, right? And then you talk to the marketing person, and you say, oh, can you imagine how excited kids are going to be to get their band? And how people are going to photograph it, and they’re going to share their band if we could personalize the band, so they’re different. They’re going to love that.

Paul: And then you talk to the operational director, and you say, oh, well, people won’t have to have money, so the number of transactions that need to be processed will go down. And so we could be more efficient in the way we work. So I’m taking the same idea, and instead of talking about the user experience, I’m tailoring it to each of those different people that I’m speaking to. So when I walk in the room, they’re already all convinced, right? Otherwise, you are wasting your time because you walk into the room, you give a pitch, and you can’t tailor it to the individual person. You’ve not got enough time to convince them. So you’ve got to do it before you get there.

Vitaly: Okay. Well, I think we should be speaking a bit more in the nearest future as well, but maybe actually looking into some more of the kind of navigation search kind of problems that often show up on websites. People don’t find what they want to find. People can’t accomplish stuff that they want to accomplish. And let’s imagine just taking an example, you have a huge site, which has dozens and dozens of subsites, different departments, owning different sites. It’s all very messy. Some of them are a kind of legacy. Some are just really poorly designed, and all those things, plenty of content duplication, ambiguous labels, just all the best things kind of put together, right? What would be the kind of your process to actually just deal with it in a complex organization that has just literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of people involved that is willing to actually get better in terms of UX?

Paul: Well, it depends how willing they are.

Vitaly: Well, they hired you. They hire the best person in town. So they pretty much are.

Paul: No, no, no, no. Do you honestly think that’s the case? Lots of people think they’re willing until they realize what is actually involved. In a situation like that, Okay. I was going to make a flipping comment. I won’t make a flipping comment. What would I really do? Okay. In a situation like that, I think the first thing I would want to do is audit everything, so. And I don’t mean an in-depth audit because there’ll be too much to do a proper content audit. But I literally would want a list of all of the sites. And I would want an owner for every single one of those, who owns it, right? And who is maintaining it. I’d also probably want very top-level analytics on it. How much traffic is each of those sites is getting and a sense of when the site is last updated, right?

Paul: And the reason that I want all of that is because normally, in the vast majority of situations, there will be a load of stuff that could be just cold, right? That nobody really owns, that hasn’t been updated for the longest time, that has got hardly any traffic going to it. So the aim would be to viciously cold back everything that was there. And the logic is very simple, right? The logic basically boils down to... For a long time, there’s been a perception that it’s like a brochure. You publish it, and you’re done, which we now know is not an option. That you get rocked, redundant and trivial content. And so any web service, any website, needs to be maintained over time, which means it needs an active owner and active budget, regular reviews, et cetera.

Paul: So when you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of websites, potentially thousands of websites, you’ve got one of two options, haven’t you? One is that you hire enough staff to actively manage every single one of those websites, right? Which you end up with hundreds and hundreds of people, basically, which is totally unfeasible. So you pitch that first. And of course, everybody says no, because that’s completely unrealistic. There’s no way that you can justify that. So that leaves option B, which is to reduce your footprint, your digital footprint down to a manageable level, right? And so that means culling anything that can’t be actively managed and maintained across the organization.

Vitaly: But Paul, that means deleting and archiving stuff. That’s scary. Who wants that in a large organization? Who knows, maybe we’ll delete something important, maybe we will not be able to find something important. Who even knows all the dependencies on all those things?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So you’re not going to delete anything. Because A, why? The web is cheap. Having content online is cheap, but what we need to do is we need to archive it. And by that, we need to remove it from navigation. We need to remove it from search .it can still be Googled, and any internal links that go to it will still work. But then, at the top of the page, we need to add a banner or notification that basically says this page is no longer being maintained. It was last updated on this date, right? So, that can deal with anybody’s fears that content is going to just disappear and it’s going to break stuff. Then there’ll be other content that you have to have online for compliance purposes that nobody ever looks at, but it has to be there. Fine.

Paul: Then with that kind of content, what you’re going to do is you’re going to remove it from navigation. You may potentially remove it from the internal search, but you still have a direct link that you can share as you need to. So there are lots of ways. Everybody thinks that every page that we have online has to be treated equally and has to be treated in the same way. There has to be part of the navigation. It has to be part of the search. In reality, probably most stuff doesn’t. A lot of stuff is just legacy or standalone content, or that could just be directly linked, that could be handed out as a URL, et cetera. And then, of course, that simplifies your navigation down. It simplifies your search down. It means that people can indeed find the needle in the haystack, so. Because you’ve just suddenly made that who stack a lot smaller. So, yeah, I mean, it’s really about stripping back to something that’s actually manageable and maintainable by the organization.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: I can always hear people screaming in the back of the room, screaming and asking about things that were related to what you mentioned earlier, all those practical tips about how to convince management about anything. I think, at some point, you were even thinking about writing an article, how to convince... Or maybe it was my title that [inaudible 00:25:44].

Paul: You suggested I wrote a book on it.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Paul: And I said, "I’ll write an article for now." And I’ve actually written the article for you, but I just don’t think you’ve published it yet. So it’s your problem, mate.

Vitaly: Oh, okay. Well, I’ll have to look into that, but maybe kind of bringing this up again, it’s always the same story. I think it’s always very useful to get insight from experienced people like yourself about how would you even deal with situations where you get difficult clients, where you get scope changes that are coming in late, where you have situations when you just have a really poor specification, you have communication problems, all those things, right? This is pretty much in every single project that’s going to be appearing in one way or the other. So what would be your good strategy to deal with on the one hand with managers, right? And on the other hand with clients?

Paul: I mean, I do a whole day workshop on this. I’ve literally just done a workshop on that for front-end masters. So yeah, it’s a huge subject that I think... What would be my top tip out of that?

Vitaly: You surely have some topics.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. The trouble is a lot of it is kind of interlinked things. So, for example, it’s about how you set up a project in the first place and manage expectations out of the gate in terms of whose role is what. And let’s take, for example, scope creep, right? With scope creep, there’s nothing wrong with scope creep, right? As you go through a project, right? You learn things, don’t you? You do user testing, hopefully. You do user research, hopefully. You just have ideas when you’ve seen the prototype that hasn’t occurred to you. So what happens out of those things? You have ideas, you learn new things, you learn improvements, and you want to improve them. So actually, scope creep is good, right? The only problem with scope creep is we insist on having projects with fixed budgets, with fixed timelines, and fixed deliverables, right?

Paul: If we get rid of that idea, then suddenly scope creep is fine, but that’s complicated to do, that opens up another can of worms, right? So one of the things that you might want to do is don’t do these big website projects, right? So occasionally, I get asked to redesign a website. I don’t tend to do a lot of that work these days. But often, if I’m asked to do that, I’m asked to kind of oversee the process. And the first thing I say is, I am not going to do a project that is an end-to-end project, right? From initial user research through to delivery and post-launch optimization. I’m not doing that as a single project. That is a big mistake. Instead, I’m going to run a series of smaller projects. I’m going to do a discovery phase, right?

Paul: Which is going to clearly identify user needs, the competition, the constraints, everything like that. And then that is going to inform me, giving you a quote and a timeline for a prototyping phase where I create a visualization of it. And I test that and that visualization and that prototype, that’s going to allow me then to quote for the build phase, right? And I could give you a price hourly because each phase informs the next. So how you structure projects makes a big difference. And then, of course, that means that between each of those stages, between discovery and prototype, between prototype and build, you could change the scope all you want because it’s another project. So things like that make a big difference as well. So, yeah.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: Yeah, but what if you’re working, let’s say, you have this big procurement processes and all those big companies and tenders and all those things where you kind of need to know upfront. I’m guessing looking at your face right now that you are going to say, just don’t do them. But I’m wondering if this is the answer that we should be getting to?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don’t do them. It’s the honest answer because I’m lazy. And any time there’s a procurement team involved, which requires a fixed price and fixed scope, immediately that’s a warning flag for me that it’s going to be a nightmare project. So I’m just too lazy to deal with it. But I understand that I’m in quite a privileged position. What I did do when I ran Head Scape with projects like that, and my preferred approach there is to, yeah, I’ll give them a ballpark for the whole thing, right? I will quote them for the whole thing. But in my tender, I will say that this is an estimate only. And I will introduce the idea of breaking the project down and doing it in different ways. Just because you receive a brief asking for a certain set of deliverables in a certain thing doesn’t mean you have to give them that, right? It’s okay to say, hang on a minute. I don’t think you’re doing this in the smartest way, right? And that there is an alternative, better way of doing it.

Paul: Now, one of two things will happen in a situation like that. Either they’ll dismiss you out of hand, right? In which case, you really don’t want to work on that project, right? Because it will be a nightmare from beginning to end, the expectations will be unrealistic. It will be challenging. There will be problems with scope creep and all those different areas that we’ve just talked about. They will happen. There will be no way around them, right? So that would be a huge warning sign.

Paul: Or they go, oh, these people are suggesting something different. Oh, that’s interesting. And they’ll actually like the fact that you’ve challenged their brief, and suddenly all of your competition that has just blindly followed the procurement rules and done what they were told to do suddenly look less proactive. They look less like they care about the project and that they want the best for the project. So actually, it’s a really good way of differentiating yourself to actually turn around and say, well, here’s something that kind of gives you a sense of the overall budget, but this is how you really should work it. And that ultimately it’ll work out cheaper that way. Because obviously, the overall budget, I have to add a load of guesses in there and a load of contingency in case my guesses are bad.

Vitaly: Yeah. Yeah. So I also see some agencies or companies using value-based pricing, where they actually go in and think about the impact that they can make in an organization and then kind of price based on that. What’s your take on this?

Paul: It’s BS. There you go. Here we go. This could be SEO, the SEO article all over again.

Vitaly: I’m very much excited about what’s coming up next year listeners, please pay attention now. Bookmark this spot in the recording.

Paul: Oh, people are going to hate me for this. Jonathan’s start is a great... I think it’s Jonathan’s Start. My brain is just shut down. He’s a really great guy who pushes value-based pricing a lot. I’m cynical about it. Some people seem to manage to get it to work, and good on them. And well done them, but it feels like a fantasy to me, value-based pricing. I understand, theoretically makes a lot of sense. If I’m going to earn a company a million, then it’s perfectly reasonable for me to take 10% of that $100,000, even though it’s five grand worth of my time, right? That’s perfectly reasonable. Don’t disagree with the principle. It’s the reality of it that is difficult for two reasons. One is that in a vast number of projects, depending on the type of projects you do, that can be extremely hard to prove, to get real numbers, right?

Paul: So unless it’s an eCommerce site or something like that, then actually it’s pretty hard to get a solid estimate on how much potential you could make. Secondly, you are giving no guarantees that you will get that level of return. And you can’t make those guarantees because there are so many variables involved. When you are quoting at the beginning of the project, you don’t know what constraints may exist that would limit what you can do. You don’t know what the client might say they want or don’t want. They might come up with stuff that’s a bad idea. There are so many things you do not know that there is nowhere on earth you can be confident you can generate that degree of return, right? And so how then, can you say, I want this percentage of that number. So I think, in principle, it’s great, and it sounds wonderful in practice, but it rarely works.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: So Paul then can you hear the voices from the back again saying, but Paul, but Paul, but we are UX practitioners. If you look at the number of job applications all around on UX, it’s tons of openings. So because he was speaking about millions, how do you then become a millionaire by being a UX designer? It doesn’t work. Well, the reason I’m bringing up this question is because a good friend of mine told me once many, many, many years ago, he’s kind of more my mentor. And he told me, “Well, you never become a millionaire by just working 24/7 or kind of having a full-time job alone. You really need to think about passive income. You really have to think about how do you invest money? And you cannot just make a lot of money by working nonstop. That’s just not going to work.” So how then do we become a millionaire, as you expect?

Paul: Why are you asking me? I’m not a millionaire?

Vitaly: Why not? Well, you do have a wonderful, fancy chocolate background in there.

Paul: exactly. Well, this looks really high quality, doesn’t it? You can tell that I’m in a quality vehicle at the moment. First of all, I would challenge why do you want to become a millionaire? And this is really interesting. Take my dad, for example, right? My dad is a worldwide photographer. They have barely any money ever, right? They earn below the national average of the UK. Okay? Yet they travel around the world, right? They go on multiple cruises every year. They go all of these amazing places on somebody else’s dime, right? Because he’s a wildlife photographer. And he lectures on cruise liners and stuff like that. So money is only a way of enabling you to do what it is that you want to do. So the question then becomes what you want to do. And because I do a lot of mentorship of agency owners, right? And agency owners, a lot of them start going on about passive income and stuff like that. And don’t get me wrong. I have passive income. I get passive income for the courses that I run. I would say the royalties from the books, but how little that actually is, but I do get-

Vitaly: Let’s not put it out there.

Paul: Well, you don’t get rich writing books. Everybody knows that. That’s not why you write them. I mean, unless you write Harry Potter or whatever, so. So, but I do have passive income, but not an enormous amount, but I live the life. I want to live. I go where I want to go; I do what I want to do. So the question then is not, how do I become a millionaire, but how do I get the lifestyle that I want, right? And that’s a very different question. And there are different ways of doing it. And passive income might be a part of it.

Paul: In other words, an exit strategy where you sell on your business, whatever that is. And then you can retire early. I take the approach of I’ve designed a business where I have to work four hours a day, right? So, and that is achievable as a UX designer or a UX, or you can get your rate to a point where you can get away with working four hours a day, take over a good income, and spend the rest of your time enjoying yourself. So, I don’t think the answer is just to become a millionaire. I think the answer is to get the lifestyle you want. That’s my opinion anyway. Unless, of course, your lifestyle is I want a yacht. In which case, you do need to be a millionaire.

<span class="smashing-tv-host”>Vitaly: Well, yeah, but just because you’re working four hours a day, we cannot afford you anymore. Because you’re getting really, really expensive, no, I’m just kidding at this point.

Paul: Yeah. No, no, I am very expensive, right? I’ll be upfront with you. I will charge anywhere between 195 and 165 pounds an hour, right? That is my rate, depending on the number of hours that you buy. And I can maintain a charge-out rate at that level because I’ve built a reputation that means that demand for my services outstrips my ability to supply that. So basically, I could charge and weed out people that can’t afford me unless I really fancy the project. That’s enough. This is how you should price projects, right? And this comes from Mike Coos. Do you know Mike Coos? Yeah. He’s an amazing, amazing designer amazing from Australia. And he told me this once, he said... when he comes to pricing, this is how he prices. He says to himself, “How much would they have to pay me to make me want to do this enthusiastically, right.” And I think that’s a great way of pricing. Okay? Because then you work on the stuff that you really, really want to work on, right? That you really enjoy. And because you charge that at a lower rate and then the stuff that you don’t want to do, you charge at a higher rate, which subsidizes the stuff at a lower rate, so.

Vitaly: Yeah, that makes sense. But what would you suggest then to people who maybe don’t have that much experience and they kind of have to compete on the market, and the market is quite saturated? I mean, if you’re a UX expert, that’s great. That works, but still, you go to there are plenty of platforms which provide services for like $30, $50, $80.

Paul: Yeah. Don’t play the game.

Vitaly: Yeah. So what would be the strategy for kind of pricing there?

Paul: So, I work with a lot of agencies that are kind working on these platforms like Fiver and Upwork and stuff like that. And those platforms are universally, without exception, price orientated, right? So you are always going to be stuck at the bottom of the market, and you’re always going to be competing on price at that point. And also, you’re competing against free stuff. You’re competing against creating a page that you can use a template from on Square Space; it’s a losing battle. So you’ve got to move out of the bottom of the market. So how do you move out of the bottom of the market? Where you start to build your own audience, rather than relying on the audience that’s provided by these marketplaces. And I’ve got a course on this called Finding Clients where essentially you need to decide, okay, I want to target a specific sector, because most freelancer agencies, their marketing approaches are terrible because they’ve got no training in it.

Paul: They don’t know how to do it. Nobody’s ever taught them how to do this kind of stuff. And so they throw out the old blog post, and they redesign their website for the 20th time. And they put out a few social updates, and they call that marketing well, that’s not going to win you any new clients. You need a strategy for targeting a particular sector, getting into that sector, and building relationships with that sector. So you become the go-to person for that sector. And once you are the go-to person, once you are the person that everybody goes to higher education, you must go to Paul for that; once you get to that point because you are specializing, then you could push your rates up. And also, you are targeting a sector that isn’t just going, oh, I need a cheap web designer. Now I know I’ve skipped over a lot of detail about doing all of that, but you know, we haven’t got that long, but.

Vitaly: We’ll have another session on just that I’m sure, sometimes soon in the future, I think.

Paul: Sure.

Vitaly: So maybe just one final question to wrap this kind of slowly wrap this up. I think just two weeks ago, I received an email from somebody who just, again, working maybe I think three or four years spent in the industry, and what they were asking is how do I negotiate my salary? So I’m working, let’s say, in a product team, or I’m working in an agency, and it feels like you are hired for the position, and you’re kind of stuck. So, the inflation is now through the roof, and it doesn’t seem like everybody’s going to get any increase in the foreseeable future also because the company isn’t doing that well. So at which point and how, what would be kind of strategic advice from your end to say, this is how you do it in order to increase your salary, at least, get a stronger position in the company, maybe instead of salary have more ownership or anything like that over time. What’s the right way of doing it?

Paul: I don’t really know. Sorry. That’s a really bad answer to your last question.

Vitaly: No, that’s an honest answer.

Paul: But the truth is the reason I don’t know is the last time I worked for a company was in 2001. So yeah. So it’s not an area I work in. Of course, I was an employer for a long length of time. And I could tell you what an employer’s big fears are, which is that you leave and so our desire is to maintain our staff because getting the new staff is really, really expensive. So I think if you are getting dissatisfied with your salary, probably an honest conversation with your boss and say, look, I want to be completely upfront with you, all right? I’m getting to the point where my cost at home because of inflation and all the rest of it is getting high. I’m going to need to start looking for another job, I’m afraid, right?

Paul: And instead of me taking lots of half-day sick and that kind of stuff, which is so obvious, I thought I’m going to be upfront with you and tell you instead. And if I get offered another job, I will come and talk to you first; if you want to match the salary, then we can certainly have that conversation because I don’t want to leave here. But this is the situation that I’m in. And it might be that is enough for them to want to nip that problem in the bud. And they’ll give you an increase there; if not, follow through on that, look for other jobs, find other positions. And if you do get an offer, go back to them. So sometimes, that’s the only way of doing it. It’s just honesty about your situation. Because most employers, in my experience at least, they’re not out to screw you over. They’ve got their own targets and things that they’re worrying about their own, budget-free constraints and that kind of stuff. And so honesty is always the best policy. Isn’t it really?

Vitaly: Yeah. That sounds about right. Well, maybe the final one, then. So Paul, is there the universal wish you would be writing a book about all those things combined and again, the management and the growth, and I don’t know what else. Do you have time doing it, don’t you?

Paul: No, I don’t have time on my hand. I will write another book. I will inevitably write another book eventually. It’s obviously quite a big-time commitment to write a book. I don’t think it could be about...

Vitaly: Is it? I think for you, it’s easy peasy. You just go ahead and say, okay, I can commit to the next three months. And then I get a chapter once a week. That’s much what it was like last time around.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, I can write a first draft in about a month of solid effort. Yeah. But I don’t earn any money in that month, so. And you got to keep that in mind as well.

Vitaly: I mean, we do pay some pennies,

Paul: But it doesn’t cover my charge out rate. Let’s put it like that, which we’ve already established is unrealistically high, so. But of course, it’s completely worth it for me to write a book because it kind of generates new business and stuff like that. But it does mean I’m in an interesting position. Let’s be honest about these things, right? I write books about subjects that I want to work on more right. So when I wanted to do digital transformation, I wrote Digital Adaptation. When I wanted to do more organizational user experience cultural change, I wrote User Experience Revolution. When I wanted to do conversion rate optimization, I wrote Click. That is simply how it works. And every time, without fail, it shifts people’s perception of what I’m an expert at.

Paul: And I win work in that, right? So it’s a really good marketing strategy, but there’s the problem. Literally, if I write a book on soft skills or I write a book on winning clients or whatever, what work does that bring me? See, that’s the interesting one, isn’t it? And that’s where you have to think ahead with these things. And what I was saying earlier about your marketing approach needs to be strategic. Yeah, perhaps it would get me more work with agency mentorship, freelance mentorship, and stuff like that. But that’s not a big earner compared to working for a multinational company.

Vitaly: Well, I know I have another title. No, no, no, no, no. I have another title. I would love you to write a book about something like, I don’t know, establishing processes or working in large enterprise organizations.

Paul: Yeah. See, now that one, that’s got a lot more potential, a lot more legs for it in terms of running my own business.

Vitaly: I think so too. So when should we sign the contract then?

Paul: No time soon, I’m afraid. I’m overjoyed in my life at the moment, so.

Vitaly: Okay. Well, that sounds about good. That’s good enough for me, but I’m not going to let it go, Paul. I’m just saying, so I’m going to send you a few messages back and forth.

Paul: Yeah. I’m feeling really bad about this interview. I feel like all I’ve come across is this really callous person that won’t do anything unless I’m paid; there’s other money to do it.

Vitaly: No, I don’t think it comes across this way at all. I think when I look at the articles and every now and again, when I Google anything really, I will be stumbling upon one of the articles that you have written over all this, what, 200 years?

Paul: 200. Yeah. Coming up to 200, right?

Vitaly: Yeah. That’s pretty impressive. So this in mind, I mean, I have no doubt that you do a lot of things also just because you honestly believe in that. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Paul, you can also find him on Twitter, where he’s at Paul Boag, and on his website, which is, surprise, surprise, Boagworld.com. His books, all the books that he’s so kindly mentioned in the last five minutes also available, of course, from Smashing Magazine. So you can also find them and read them. And if you want Paul to write more books, send him messages. Actually, he’ll appreciate that. Right from that end. Thanks so much for joining us today. Paul, do you have any parting words of wisdom with the wonderful people listening to us now?

Paul: I’ve always got the same one, which is a success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm, which is a Winston Churchill quote. And when it talks about whether you’re talking about getting a pay rise, whether you’re talking about changing the culture in your organization, or whether you’re talking about getting a project over the line, success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. So just keep chipping away, and you’ll get there.