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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.
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 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, engineering management; it’s not completely management because what is required there, if you look at the reconsis, 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, hmm — 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 — 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 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.
Vitaly: 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.
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.
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.
FreshRSS feature-set: Exploring the set of interoperable features of the web platform, GitHub
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
