Erik
Hello. Welcome to Picture Me Coating with Eric Aker and Mike Mull. Hi, Mike. Hey there. Nice to see you again, Mike. You as well. Mike, our guest today, Jonathan Whitmire, is one of my oldest friends and the artist responsible for all of the picture recoding logos and design work. His career has been focused on user experience design, and I thought it might be fun to have him come on the show, talk about this work and what it's like working among software developers today. Welcome, John. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

Mike
John also designed the 50,000 stickers that we gave away at the SoCal Lindenka Expo. Yeah, if you got

Erik
one of those stickers, that's my buddy John. Now, John, we've been friends for a very long time, so I'll try not to let my friendship get in the way of asking hard-hitting questions like we typically do on this show. I would expect no less. Would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about your background?

John
Yeah, so I didn't take a very direct route to get into design. I went to college. Like Eric said, we've known each other for a long time. We didn't go to college together, but I went to college and got a degree in art history, which is super useful and applicable in lots of different fields. And so after college, my immediate need for money got me into kind of more of an admin role, which I proceeded to work in some form of office admin managerial for about 15 years. that was not very fulfilling, not very fun. Finally, in around 2015, with some nudging from an at-the-time girlfriend and other people in my life, I decided to quit my job and sign up for a UX immersive, a 10-week UX immersive course through an organization called General Assembly. So for 10 weeks, I did that. And then afterwards, basically, my life was spent trying to break into professional UX design. And finally, in December of 2016, I got my first design job. So it took about a year and a half of sleeping on couches and trying to figure things out. But I eventually got broken. I've been doing UX and product design is sort of all the titles that I've had. I've been product design titles. It's one of those things where there's a lot of nebulousness or ambiguity around titles for this kind of design. And so I've kind of just been working in some capacity of designing tools, digital tools for companies.

Erik
Digital tools. I like that phrase. Yeah.

John
Yeah. I mean, there's there's I've worked on web applications. I've worked on internal tools. I've worked on apps. I've worked on, I don't know, just little widgets and software. And that's about it, I think. Yeah,

Erik
I mean, I thought it'd be interesting to talk to you on our show because Mike and I talk a lot about software. We do talk about computer science. We talk about the industry a little bit. We talk about what it's like to build and release the stuff, like as sort of journeymen, software developers, as programmers. And there are people on the other side of the table from us quite often. Those are business people, and they'll come to us with requests, and we have to try to interpret those and translate those into software requirements and actual applications. And there are often people on our side of the table, but they're not developers. And those are people who are doing the kind of work you're doing. They're sort of adjacent to us. They're among us. And sometimes I'm curious what it's like to see the work through their eyes and what it's like to see our work through their eyes. I mean, this sort of comes up because my wife and I, we've been watching the show ER. It was on the show. It was on air for like 30 years or something like that or 20 years. And all the doctors are out there just spitting out this technobabble about, like, we need a CBC and a Ken 7 and we need to check the lights. And it just, it sounds good, but I don't really know what they're talking about. This technobabble. Mike and I, we have a friend, Irina, and she'd hear us talking about this Python library celery. She'd say, you guys are always talking about vegetables. So I guess I was curious from your perspective what it's like working with developers and sort of among them. But I wonder if we shouldn't talk about more about what UX means before that. Should we do that first?

John
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because, like I mentioned, I didn't really take a sort of typical route to get into design. Like I don't have any sort of scholastic, rigorous background educationally with regards to design. So I had to look up some of these details about UX and the history and kind of like where it originated and kind of like how it came to be what it is.

Erik
Well, but I would think the art history is foundationally useful, right?

John
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of like principles, like a lot of sort of like the visual design principles, you know, things like hierarchy balance, you know, color, you know, all the visual aspect. But the UX is a lot more holistic. UX encompasses – like it's become kind of – and this is something that I've always noticed whenever you are talking to me about design work is you do seem to kind of focus on the visual side. you're like oh i'm i'm no good at that stuff and it's like all right like like i'm terrible at color i'm i'm not very strong at typography but like ux uh and sort of the product design encompass a lot more of the like psychology and sort of like trying to understand people's you know how people think how people do things how people want to do things people's expectations how people react like like emotions uh how like what kind of emotions when they're experiencing things like ux is a lot more holistic and i feel like in the industry in general um there's been a lot more or a lot less of that sort of there's only like that surface level understanding and people kind of tend to forget how broad it's kind of intended to be

Mike
is there like a clear dividing line between user experience and design or is it like a subset? I think a lot of times and informally people think of UX people as being one thing and design people as being the people who are concerned about like colors and icons and fonts and that kind of stuff.

John
Yeah I mean that's I mean that's sort of the issue is you get what I feel like I've seen is you get a lot of people with a cursory understanding and they're the people in hr doing the hiring they're the people who are like at the managerial level who are kind of making the decisions on on you know titles and maybe the scope of work and that kind of stuff and they they can kind of start blurring all the lines like ux strictly by definition you know they they get as broad as you know one definition was all possible aspects of a person's interactions with a company and its products or services.

Erik
Wow. That's huge. I walk into the lobby and I'm using the water cooler and that's UX right there.

John
Well, that's the experience you have with regards to a company or a product. UX got sort of like embraced in the tech industry, you know, for all the interfaces and all the sort of, you know, all the different phones, tablets, but then like TVs, cars, appliances, like those are all over the place now. And so there's like this sort of very specific area that the user interacts with. But the UX of that product involves so much more. It involves like for an appliance, like it involves, you know, maybe you heard someone talking about an article they read about a product and like the company has some sort of like some shady business practices So you're like, oh, that affects your perception of the product immediately, and it might make you not want to use it. It might make it harder to use because you have these feelings. Elon Musk's whole thing is hugely affecting the perception of Tesla, which affects people's experience of using their cars and wanting to drive the cars. And if they don't have a car, whether or not they want to buy one. So it's very broad and it's become much more narrow in a lot of people's view.

Erik
So you're saying UX is about manipulating people's emotions. That's what I'm taking from the comment.

John
That's really how it's been sort of leveraged by business. UX is about understanding how people's emotions and how they use things to – in the altruistic sort of sense. You want to help them do these. You want to help them use the tools. We want to help them accomplish whatever task they might be trying to accomplish. But I fully agree that like the business side of things, like, okay, like, how can we get them to do like, it feels like there's been like a rise in the use of the title product designer. And I think that a part of that is that they don't want to have user in there so that they can sort of, because like product designer typically is where you're. taking more into consideration the business goals as opposed to the user goals but like you need to still balance the user goals because if someone can't use a product then like you're not going to sell very many yeah so it's like but but they're trying to kind of like ease the focus away from just being on the user and making it more about this like striking this right balance so that So a business can like make money to operate, you know, companies that do, you know, even really positive things. They still need, you know, revenue to be able to do those things.

Erik
It's a pretty new field, right? I mean, when we think about user experience design or product design in relation to software, are we talking what, like 10 years, 15 years? Maybe it's, I mean, I guess Windows, right? People have to use Windows.

John
I mean, it goes back, like this was another thing I was looking into. It goes back pretty far. I found some articles talking about Bell Labs, which was the phone company, and they spun up this department or this subgroup that was pioneering the sense of UX or the key elements of it where they're trying to understand people. Fun fact that I found in these articles was that they actually created the touchtone keypad on phones. And that was like the result of their research and like, you know, talking to users and learning that rotary phones are terrible and they can be really hard to use. And so I thought that was pretty interesting. But yeah, like that, I mean, that was like in the 40s. And then when, you know, when the PCs, you know, the PC revolution and then the web revolution. And then for some reason, the article that I read didn't talk about phones and apps, like smartphones and apps.

Erik
Yeah, I would think those like blobby icons on the iPhone would be. When I think of UX, I think of that. Like, oh, it's so fun to push those buttons, but I'm really just touching a piece of glass.

John
I mean, that's a huge thing. Like the sort of change in our perception of how we interact with all these things really started to kind of – The velocity was increasing of how things were changing and how things were understanding. And it was important to kind of consider how a person uses a device or how a person can use a device and what they want to do with the new smartphone devices and what they're capable of accomplishing and whatnot.

Mike
There's this sort of academic subspecialty of human-computer interaction. Is that something that is part of UX, user experience? I

John
had a similar, I was curious like where that fit into things because I've heard it kind of mentioned in the same breath with UX. And I think what I learned was that human-computer interaction kind of spun out of the PC revolution. And it was more of it spun more out of computer science. So trying to like understand, you know, how people were using these new computers. And then since then, it seems like it's just kind of all mixed together. There's a lot of areas of user experience that touch on other disciplines, either design disciplines like visual design or research disciplines like human computer interaction, like cognitive behavior type stuff, like a lot of psychology. and I think that that's one of the ones where it still seems to be differentiated in name but for from for everything that I've read and from what I can understand it still feels pretty like a like the Venn diagram is pretty close to being overlapping

Erik
well if you can you help us think of like maybe some illustrations maybe some good examples where do we where do people typically encounter us what would be a good

John
example you think um the one thing i thought of i mentioned the touchstone keypad which obviously i think i think we're all old enough to remember rotary dial phones and if you mess up on one of the numbers you know it's like clicking it on the damn thing and then starting all over again you always got annoyed when you had a nine or an eight or a zero in the number. And another good example that I personally thought is a really great example was when Gmail introduced the whole conversation style of organizing emails. I mean, it's become pretty much the norm, I think. I haven't used a whole lot of other email service providers in a while, so I don't know exactly. But I feel like that kind of changed the game with regards to email.

Erik
That's right. I didn't even think of that. Every email you would get as a response used to be a separate email, like document. A separate message, yeah. I forgot about that.

John
Yeah. And then if you were unfortunate to have, you know, multiple conversations going on, they're just all sort of like the order comes in weird. Yeah, 100%. Remember, and I remember like the growing, like, like they would, they started like quoting the previous message in the new message. And so you would just get this like exponentially growing like message tacked on to the bottom of

Erik
everything that you responded to. That's really interesting. So that actually like the behavior of users has changed as a result of the tool getting better. So far, the two examples you've given are things where I'm like, oh, I wouldn't even think of that because it's just so background, you know, so easy to use. You know, it's like the typical tool use. I don't think about how the tool is designed because I'm just using the tool. If I forget the tool, then it's successful.

John
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the questions you asked. What it means to encounter good user experience and why does it help us? And so there's like that sort of one of the popular notions with UX design is that good design, quote unquote, is invisible. Like it doesn't register because it's just facilitating achieving whatever it is you're trying to achieve. Like if you have a message with 10 people, an email with 10 people and you're trying to get a conversation going, like, you know, the Gmail format of seeing responses kind of all strung together and, you know, a coherent format. It's easier to focus on those messages than you would if you had to, like, go through your inbox and pick out which were messages from that conversation and what order they came in and that kind of stuff.

Erik
That's really interesting because I always tell people at work, if I write some software and you think to yourself, oh, I'm using the software Eric wrote, then it's obviously a failure. Once you notice that there's software happening, you're not actually using it for whatever its purpose is. The existence of it is present in your brain, then it's going wrong. There's something bad happening. And that's the same as if I watch

Erik
a TV show and I think, oh, the writers are structuring this in a way so that they could do this other thing. I'm no longer just watching the show. I'm like piecing it apart

Erik
and the construction of it has gotten in the way of my ability to use it, to appreciate it, to consume it.

John
Right. But then you can turn that on its head and use, you know, break the fourth wall to kind of like use that for an effect, which is like something UX can do. And I'm sure in development you can do that too if it makes sense.

Erik
Can we do that? I want to forget. What about crappy UX? Are there examples of that? Or is it like just pointing fingers at people and trying to embarrass people? I'm not trying to do that. I just want to know, are there examples of bad UX?

John
Well, I mean, definitely. It's like what you just said, those times when you aren't thinking about what you're doing and start thinking about everything around what you're doing. Like, why isn't this button working when you go to click a button? Design is very subjective, like visual design. And even like the sort of interaction design and like how things work, you know, can be very subjective. And there's products that I just think are dumb or, you know, don't work.

Erik
You don't want to call them out,
though? I

John
don't want to put you on the

Erik
spot.

John
I mean,

Erik
Microsoft operating

John
system. Microsoft, you know. Windows? Yeah, like Windows. You always had, you know, these kind of like Apple versus, you know, Windows, Mac versus Windows thing. But it was like when I had to use Windows for work, I hated it. It was just like, oh, this is gross. I can't find things very easily. I was definitely like I fell for the whole Mac is easy kind of thing. But I also thought that it was. It made more sense to me. And people who were diehard Windows fans, which I didn't know too many of those, But they were like, I feel like theirs came from having had to use it for so long that it was just more familiar to them now. It wasn't necessarily like an instinctual kind of thing.

Erik
Oh, so like Stockholm Syndrome UX.

John
You could do that too, I guess. A little bit, yeah. I mean, one of my roles, I was building internal tools. And internal tools, I don't know if you guys have ever worked on those. But those are often, they don't bother hiring designers for those because it's like an, you know, it feels like an extravagance. And it's like you're not building something to try to, you know, you're not trying to sell something like as a product. It's like a tool. It's like you're trying to build these tools to be able to, you know, achieve something in the company. But if you spent a little time and, you know, made those tools better, how much more work could people get done, which I hate kind of saying sometimes. But like how much easier could the work be for those people, which I like thinking about, like you can improve efficiency. You could make it more visually appealing, which would make people like there's like the aesthetic usability effect where like people, you know, when something looks nice, people think like people honestly think it works better. Like even if it doesn't,

John
big, big asks or gets or whatever. I always thought Apple, they made things visually nice, like Windows, you know, had that sort of like blocky sort of like, like.

Erik
Khakis and polo shirts. I got a start button. Yeah.

John
Pocket protectors. No, but like there was there was a more and you still I mean, you still that's that was always sort of a delineation where like a serious, you know, person was more interested in using the Windows because there was a certain level of power. based on like the freedom that of like what you could do with it. And Mac sort of limited that, but made it look really nice. So you had like all the, you know, people who wanted something flashy and sort of slick. And I feel like that, that sort of understanding of, of the impact of aesthetics has sort of finally bubbled up to the top, but you still see it in things like internal tools. Like you still see it in companies building, you know, something for, you know, that they need to do for a task and they just don't want to invest anything extra. They want to just do the bare minimum because they don't feel like it's worth it.

Erik
Yeah, you got a captive audience. Where else are they going to go to

John
file their HR claims

Erik
or whatever?

John
Exactly. Sadly, I mean, I've been on the job hunt for a while and so I'm applying to all these jobs and having to fill out all these applications. And it's the exact same thing where there's a very stark difference between, So it's like the same thing with the Windows and Mac. You have some of the older companies who are just like, well, if you want to apply for a job, you've got to go through these or you've got to do what we want you to do. But then there's the newer startups who are trying to make it a smoother process and make it as painless as possible for better or worse.

Mike
I wanted to ask if anybody still reads the book About Face. I have that somewhere.

John
I mean, I think when I was doing that immersive class and I was like just kind of keeping an eye out for any sort of source of new info and stuff like that was pretty high up on, you know, a lot of people's lists about learning about interfaces and things like that.

Mike
He had one of my favorite UX principles, which was don't interrupt the proceedings with idiocy. That's good.

John
Sounds like a mic.

Mike
That's

John
really good. In the day and age of like pop-ups and whatnot, you get a lot of the business side of people wanting to insert something in as many places as possible. Even just on like a nice clean, you know, like a dashboard, they want you to throw in some sort of nudge or some sort of call out for, you know, upgrading or feature that they haven't signed up for. Or, you know, maybe they need more seats to collaborate better, that kind of shit.

Mike
I actually have a friend. I won't name him, but I have a friend who's partially responsible for that thing where when you start to move the cursor toward the corner of the page, it says, are you sure you want to leave?

John
Oh, wow. That's really funny.

Erik
I don't think I've seen that in a long time, though. John, you said, way when you started, you said, I'm terrible at color. I don't even understand what this means. And I have this assumption that to be able to do the work you're talking about, that it's like you either have it or you don't. I consider myself to be aesthetically inept and clueless. Could I learn to do this work? Can it be learned at all? Or do you just have to have it?

John
So, again, that's a very – there's a popular thing in UX with it depends. Like you say, it depends because everything – like UX is really dependent on understanding a lot of different things. And so that question makes me think like, well, I fully agree that there isn't a talent or like some people have an inborn ability to like see things a certain way. It's like artists. It's like designers, musicians. It's yeah, it's like, yes, there's a certain element of it. You know, having that talent is definitely beneficial. But like I said early, like UX encompasses so much more than just the visual design, just the like what you see. So there are aspects that, you know, if you don't have the visual talent, the visual design side, like talent per se, you might be able to focus on, you know, a different part of it. Like the research part, like the psychology part, like understanding people or working, working with people, like communicating with people, like testing is a big part of it. And that's something that I think I kind of struggle with. I've found that I can assume a lot on the other, like when I'm either doing user testing or even if I'm like working with engineering or stakeholders or whatever, like I assume that they have some level of understanding of what I'm talking about. So I might gloss over certain details and that can be detrimental to like communicating things. But like a lot of the going back to color specifically, like a lot of aspects of color theory is theoretical. Like you can understand like the triad, like, like, or, or complimentary colors or adjacent colors and even how colors in the browsers are built. Like with hex code. Like I remember when you were trying to teach me how to code, when you were like trying to teach me how to do, you know, the different, I don't even remember what they're called, but like binary. But then

Erik
like hex code.

John
Yeah. Yeah, the, you know, that's, you know, a lot of designers probably don't realize that that's like a decimal system. Like it's, it's, it's not, it's not, it's like something different than just, yeah,

John
yeah, exactly. And so you can learn those things and you might not produce the same designs or have like the same sort of attention to the visual side of things. but it's like you might be able to structure them really well or like know how to suss out certain interactions and things like that so

Erik
yeah it was interesting you talked about color rail reminded me of musicians like you could learn music theory and learn the circle of fist practice your scales and stuff you may not necessarily be a phenomenal musician but you could learn to play

John
or yeah and it's or it's like sports like like somebody can learn you know all the mechanics around a sport but they may not be able to play it as well. So I

Erik
don't necessarily have to be innately good at this to still be able to learn how to emotionally manipulate users through my software. Exactly.

John
And that might be a designer's talent manipulation. Like they might understand how to manipulate people, which unfortunately is probably a more valuable talent these days

John
in the app world at least or in the current state of things. One other thing I wanted to mention because I thought it was kind of funny when you were asking about examples of bad design. And one of the pioneers, the guy who actually termed the coin user experience, his name is Don Norman. He wrote a book called The Design of Everyday Things, which is one

John
of the required reading kind of things. But one of his things is he always talks about doors. And he talks about how like doors you can often walk up to a door. And there are times when you just don't know, like how to open the door, how to, you know, like whether it's a push pull, like what you need to do to use the door. And those are like, that's a really strong example of bad UX. Like it should be it should be simple and straightforward to like walk up to a door and be able to get through it. But there are often times when you walk up to a door and you think it's a push because it has maybe like a flat panel or the panel is like a weird hybrid of a push and a pull. Like it's like a long bar, but it has like a little thing underneath it that you pull. And there's no labeling, so you don't know necessarily.

Erik
Oh, that reminds me of those touchless faucets in public bathrooms where you – when they first introduced them, they were not that reliable. So you'd be just waving your hands like an idiot repeatedly to try to get the water to come out. And after a

Erik
certain point, I was like, somebody released this product just to make fun of people. That's what they're doing. They're just trolling us.

John
Or in the lab, it worked a lot different. They were just like, this is great. Everyone in the world needs this. But then the implementation ended up being half-assed or something. And so nobody was understanding what was going on. Or

Mike
it's wet all the time on the sensor. I was going to say, I've worked in software for 40 years, I guess. Like Eric, I am bad at user interface design. I have a very engineering mentality about it. So if I designed something, it would have like 40 checkboxes for different options and lots of text fields and that sort of thing. So I've always been appreciative of working with good UX people. It's been probably like 15 years or so now where that's been a pretty standard. But I've also noticed that there's not a lot of overlap between programmers and UX people. So I'm kind of curious if you think there's, if these are sort of mutually exclusive talents or if there are people who actually combine them into one person.

John
When you say overlap, do you mean like a single person who is doing the design and the development side of it? Yeah, I mean,

Mike
like I've known pretty good front end developers who are competent in design, But I've never known anybody who was a really strong UX professional who was also, you know, a guy who could write database codes or something like that.

John
Yeah, I mean, so one of the more recent titles that's starting to make its way into things is UX engineer. So it is like it has become a thing. You know, there's the whole unicorn thing. From the business side of things, obviously, it's more economical to have a single role that can do all these things as opposed to two or more people doing the design and development. And so I get why, you know, like companies would like there to be the combined roles. But I feel like it's just one of those things where you kind of want the right amount of focus on each of those different aspects of it. And like you want the engineers to focus on the engineering, like you want them to make, you know, the code solid and good. And, you know, like. The depth of knowledge goes pretty deep, I think, is what

Erik
you're getting at there, huh?

John
Yeah. On both sides, like where, you know, the output is going to be better served if, you know, you have a strong understanding of both. And if you're if a single individual is trying to do too many things, they're getting spread too thin. And that sort of that depth can be sort of lost.

Erik
I guess implied in Mike's question is maybe there's some there's sort of related or there's some kinship in these. But, you know, John, I'm curious from your perspective. Well, let me say this. Whenever I've worked at a company and I get introduced to someone as, oh, this is someone who does UX or this is one of our designers. Those are often kind of people are linked. Those rules are linked. My first assumption is, oh, this person is going to be a lot more fashionable than all the software developers.

John
I mean, I don't know. I feel like maybe the difference is that designers, by nature of what they do, they consider a lot of aspects. Like they consider the appearance of things, how things work, the psychology of why things are the way they are. So that might translate into how they present themselves outwardly in a certain respect. I've met developers that cover the whole spectrum in terms of cool, hip, trendy developers who are wearing Jordans and all the latest cool clothes and whatever.

Erik
Jordans are cool is what you're telling me?

John
Yeah.

Erik
Okay, sorry. To me.

John
Well, but then my first job, my first design job, there was this developer. He like fit the quintessential stereotypes of like the sort of difficult developer. Like he came in at like 1030 every day. Whenever he had to explain something to someone like how it worked, he would be like magic. Like he would just kind of like he would like hand wave and he wore a trench coat. He always had a trench coat on regardless of the weather.

John
he was such a stereotype

Erik
that when you would ask your questions would he first sigh like let me try to explain this to you was that exactly yeah

John
i mean if he had if he ever had to explain something to like stakeholders or like the business side of things it was just like like you were gonna have to deal with a whole lot of condescension that's how i can i try to be

Mike
i used to
work with a programmer who wore a trench coat and to his credit this was well before the matrix so oh trench

John
coats in software jobs yeah he's like one of the sources of that that whole thing when i finally had to work with him on a project this this guy i really hope he doesn't listen to this that'd be kind of

Erik
funny yeah we can tell this if you want if you feel bad about it no

John
when i when i worked with him though um it like bubbled up in the conversations that we were having that he had some background in visual design like he had done something in digital

John
design. And so that was mostly fine, but it kind of created a little friction in a few instances.

Erik
Yeah, because I know you start having feedback from someone who claims expertise too. What's it like working with developers in general? Do you have any, this is a very broad abstract question, but I'm just sort of curious. Do you
feel like you're

Erik
just spouting nonsense and you have to try to figure out how to communicate with them or do you get along with them well? Is it easier to work with developers that work with business stakeholder people?

John
I feel like, I don't know, I don't remember exactly where, but at some point before I got an actual job, I like read or saw somewhere that it's important to have a good relationship with developers. Like it's important to like communicate with developers and just have like a strong working relationship. So I've always made a concerted effort to kind of like have some rapport and like at least have some understanding that you are doing a completely different sort of task related to it, but you're also trying to, we're basically trying to achieve the same goal. Like we're all kind of like, we're all on the same team. So I've just always tried, and I think by nature of like the roles that I have had, how they were structured, like I was always embedded with like with the developers. Like I was always like, I've seen that a lot. All my roles, I've been like basically the only designer. And so I've always been a part of the like engineering team basically by sort of by default. Like I was part of a product team, but the product team was on the tech department. So the product team itself was on the engineering team. So I don't know. It just, I mean, there's definitely like technical, the technical side of things. Like when you start going on about, you know, something with the code or, you know, specific aspects of how something might get built. I haven't put a ton of effort into trying to understand that, mainly because I'm focusing my effort on trying to understand design and trying to grow in my knowledge of the design side of things just because I feel like that's what I should do.

Erik
Do you ever catch developers saying abstract terms just to sort of confuse things and they're really bullshitting? Do you ever catch people bullshitting?

John
I don't know if I catch them, but that could very easily happen. So I've had these weird thought tracks about thinking about the reasoning behind all the different development sort of task tracking, like Jira and

John
Scrum and all the different methods for like… Trello, Kanban. Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, for a lot of the business side and that encompasses design to a certain extent, what you what programmers do is very much like black box kind of thing. Like nobody knows what's happening. Like, you know, it's like we say like, oh, we want to build this thing. And then, you know, three to six months later, like the development team comes back and like here. So they wanted to try to like at the very least understand how long things took.

Mike
Yeah, I wish I knew that too.

John
Yeah, well, that's the thing. It's so hard to – it can be really hard. I have a hard time knowing how long something will take because there's so many factors that can come into play that affect that. But when someone like myself or someone on the business side has no understanding of the development side of things, it can be really easy for the development side to just be like, oh, this will take us like three months. when, you know, in reality, you know, maybe it takes like a week or a day of like just

Erik
cranking out something. You're trying to blow our cover here, John. Cut it

John
out. And that's, I think, you know, there's that fine balance where you get a lot of developers who don't want to say like, oh, that's, you know, I could do that in like half a day. They don't want to say that, even though they might like think that instinctually. So they like pad what they say, which is smart just from a, you know, like you don't know, like things could come up or whatever. There's a lot of unknowns.

Erik
Yeah. Sometimes

John
you think that'll

Erik
be easy and you shoot yourself in the foot by saying that'll take me 10 minutes. And then you go, oh, wait a minute. I have to test all these edge cases.

John
No. Yeah. A hundred percent. I don't think I was more kind of referring to what you said about catching.

Erik
Bullshitting.

John
Catching the bullshitting. It's like, I feel like there have been times when someone's been like, when they're like scoring something, like when they're grooming and they're giving something like a score. And then they're like, you get like a four people who say, oh, that's like a two. And then you get the one guy who's like, oh, it's an eight. Like, why do you think it's an eight? And it's like, usually if it's someone who's like less experienced, who's like not as good, you're like, okay. But if they're like someone who you know is like a solid developer and you're like, why are you saying this is so much like what's the – and maybe they actually – I mean I know that this is part of the process. Maybe they know something about how they understand the problem that other people haven't thought of, which is why they have – my understanding of why they have these sort of conversations. But I feel like I've seen padding happen in terms of like those kinds of things. I don't feel like I've ever, I feel like I've never seen like an outright like total BS, but I feel like the perception is definitely there from the business side because they just want everything, you know,

Erik
they want everything

John
yesterday or

Erik
yesterday or right now. Yeah. Yeah. Two hours ago. I wanted it two hours

John
ago. I wanted my check three hours ago.

Erik
Oh man. Wait, wait. Can you tell us a little bit about the day-to-day work of UX? Like what tools do UX and product designers use and how do they use those tools to communicate with devs and stakeholders? Is it the same tools?

John
So initially, you know, Adobe was the king of all things design. I mean,

Erik
it was funny. Illustrator and Photoshop?

John
Their whole suite, I would say Illustrator and Photoshop primarily, but their whole suite has been leveraged for UX design. And again, going back to how holistic it is. There's so many different aspects of it. But yeah, Illustrator and Photoshop, both of which are not designed for the specifics of interface design and sort of like how UX kind of works. Adobe has always been kind of suspect with how their businesses interact with each other. They don't interact with anything else, like in terms of the software, which is super annoying.

Erik
Don't get me started on PDFs.

John
I mean, yeah, they were still the leader in everything. But with UX kind of becoming this sort of requisite element in the process of developing software and apps and all this web stuff, tools started coming up that were more tailored and focused to that kind of work. And it started to like nudge out Adobe. So like Sketch was what I – like I always hated Adobe products because I would open Photoshop and I would look at it and I would immediately be overwhelmed and it would be just like there's so much shit on the screen. There's so many tools. I don't know where to find anything. Yeah,

Erik
and there were these like six different clusters of things would pop up. You'd be like, what is

John
it, a

Erik
layer manager? Yeah,

John
it was intimidating. I was intimidated for better or worse. And then I first started using Sketch when I took that immersive course. And Sketch was so like, it was like pared down. They got rid of all the fluff. They got rid of all the stuff that was sort of like debatable as to its usefulness in terms of that kind of design. And I was like, oh, I can handle this. I can consume this. And I can start playing with it and figuring it out to learn it. And then since then, I've moved on to Figma. And Figma took all the best aspects of Sketch, that simplicity and the focus, and then they started powering it up with a lot of useful tools. And then their sort of like real kicker was their collaboration side. So from day one, they built their tool to be able to have like live collaboration. Like you can open a design file and you can be in it with like five other people and you can kind of like work on stuff together. So Sketch wasn't built for that collaboration side of things, and it wasn't built as a tool for working with developers. It was a visual tool. There were a lot of third-party tools. There's something called Zeppelin, which you could upload your designs to, and it would do certain things. I mean, you could only do so much, and then Figma has it built in. So Figma combined those things. but it only gives you so much information about the designs because there's only so much that you can kind of pull from the actual like elements on the design so like the text the lines the boxes the icons you know anything that's actually a element of the design but it
can't do like interactions like you still have to kind of spec those
out and kind of

John
of write the expected behavior and so you're like kind of like writing requirements

Erik
basically this this happens i remember years ago i would get these i think they were they came out of photoshop but i would get these designs and it'd be like here's the hex code for this part of the page and here are two boxes and they're going to be 20 pixels apart at this screen resolution and screen width you know like if you're on mobile and stuff like that that's what i used to get handed years ago

John
Yeah, that was like the early stuff. I mean, I'd say early. That was like the earlier, the tools hadn't quite reached the spot of removing the necessity for that, the necessity for specking out all those details. Now it's like almost 100% standard for like Figma has made it standard that you just have all that information like right there. Like you send a link to the developers as opposed to like a document and they can get in there. I mean, the thing that I've and something that I've always tried to do in my roles is like, you know, check with the developers about their familiarity with Figma. And if they have, you know, any questions or they want me to like run them through Figma and like kind of give them the lay of the land so they can figure it out. A lot of, I feel like a lot of developers, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like a lot of developers would like to figure it out on their own. Like they want to sort of like be able to know, you know, from their own sort of understanding how the thing works. So I don't get a lot of, I don't get a lot of people taking me up on that offer, like to show them around. But every so often, someone is comfortable enough to let me.

Erik
Years ago, I got one of those designs at work, and this was back when I was doing a lot more full-stack stuff. So I was doing back-end, I was doing front-end, I was even doing CSS. I'm horrible at CSS,

Erik
of like a screaming fit every time I have to do it because I'm just terrible at it. And I remember this design had like pixel width for these boxes I had to float on the screen. This is an internal tool. It wasn't going to be an external product. It was also a POC. I wasn't sure that the tool was even going to be used. And it was like a dashboard. So, like, somebody would internally, they would log into this thing, and they would do sort of like a data entry role using this thing I had to build. I was just building that first page, that dashboard. And we had one designer we worked with, and she had an art background, like a fine art background, I think. And so I got this ticket, and it was like there were hex codes for a lot of these boxes, but then there was this color in the background, and it didn't have a hex code. So I walked over to her desk and I was like, I don't really know how to finish this. I've got these boxes on the page. There's some colors. I don't know what the color, the heck of the colors are. She goes, oh, every single box you see on the page is a semi-transparent gradient. And it's all based on the same gradient. And it just, as you go like surface wise, as you go like higher up on the page, the transparency reduces. And I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. I just need a hex code for this background. And she just looked crestfallen. Like she had a vision, an artistic vision for this page. And I just pretty much told her, yeah, I'm trying to finish this ticket. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do your vision.

John
I like that you mentioned her having a fine art background because I feel like that is kind of the telling element of that story. Like, I think, like, a designer, part of design and the biggest, I think, in my opinion, the biggest differentiator between, like, design and art is, like, design is about solving the problem and, like, working within the constraints. And art is, you know, expressive. Like, you're trying to express something. You're trying to, you want someone to see this gradient color thing. What I've come to do is try to get the understanding of what's actually achievable. And I know, like, you could have done what she wanted.

Erik
Oh, yeah. This is before CSS preprocessors, so... But

John
I think you could have done it. It just would have been

Erik
a crazy... It


John
some maybe hacky, like, crazy solution that involved a lot more... It's like, it's just not as simple as like, oh, you just do a little gradient with the visual thing. And that's what works. It's fine.

Erik
I

John
felt like a jerk for saying,

Erik
I'm not going to do that. But it was also like, I'm not going to put all this time in to achieve this vision. I don't know. I remember that story because I felt a little bit like I really disappointed this person. I just pretty much said, no, I'm not doing that.

John
That's, I mean, that's another aspect. like a good designer i think has has a level of understanding that a ton of their work is going nowhere like it's it's sitting in figma and it's going to eventually get deleted like years years down the road like oh that's interesting i mean a lot of it's like a lot of it is like an exploration like you're just kind of like messing around with possibilities of like a layout or something and so you're not intending it to go anywhere but a lot of other times you'll come up with like a nice set of designs for some given project and then like oh the business decided that we're not going to pursue that or we're going to deprioritize that yada yada yada and then you go away and or you you get another job and so it just gets forgotten in some file somewhere

Erik
yeah that's

Mike
money in those things anyway go ahead mike i'm not a frequent figma user but if i recall correctly there they are now one of those companies who has the, hey, we do AI marketing pitch. I'm curious if that's like a real thing or if it's just, you know, everybody wants to attach it to their product at this point.

John
So it's funny that we're talking this week because Figma just did their big like config conference this last week. So they announced all these new products. And last year's at their last year's conference, they introduced their AI, their sort of foray AI. So it was this sort of like product, like design me and app, like a weather app. And then it spits out like the AI just spits out a bunch of designs. I was always like, how the hell could this possibly work? Like, unless you were able to like upload like a spec sheet of like all the requirements that are needed. And like, there's so much that goes into a design that's like not encompassed in like design me a weather app kind of thing. So like, even if you took, like, if you said design me a weather app and then took those designs you would be spending so much time like tweaking them to make them like your product or like your company's product so it's like it just didn't seem like it made sense in that regard but then this week they announced all these new products and one of which was they were leveraging instead of leveraging ai to produce the designs they were leveraging ai to produce prototypes you would take like a design that you had done and you would say like turn this into a prototype that can do x y and z or something like that and it would take like the design and the ai would be able to understand how the different elements on the design like in the design work so like oh this is a button so this should behave like a button this is a drop down this should behave you know this should have a menu the i thought this was like a better a smarter way of leveraging ai with respect to design like some people like uh the generative side of ai with design but even that is only used as like part of the like ideation process like it helps you you know produce a bunch of options to look at and kind of like figure out what makes what works and what makes more sense and what doesn't and things like that but like like it's definitely nowhere near the point where you can just be like oh design me a dashboard for our company's app, blah, blah, blah. And it spits out like code-ready designs. Like they're definitely still in the like, oh, it's a gimmick kind of phase. Oh, interesting.

Mike
The thing that I've seen for myself using tools like Cursor is that I can say to it, hey, take this piece and turn it into a panel on the left-hand side and make sure it's aligned and so forth. And it does pretty well at that. My assumption is that it does that job well because it has so many examples in the universe to train itself on. But

John
if

Mike
I think about more sort of flow issues or simplicity of use issues, I don't know how the models train on that because it's not really encoded anywhere. You almost have to run the program to understand that flow.

John
Yeah, I think that's sort of like where understanding the user side of things, you know, isn't it's not quite there yet with AI. And I think that that's what is going to keep designers in jobs for a little while longer. Although the problem now is that all these places want to hire, want designers they hire to be savvy with AI and know how to like leverage AI in their process. they want to say like, oh yeah, we're, we're using AI in our process for better or worse, or, you know, because they actually might think it's, you know, it's part of their product. So they think it should be like part of their process because, you know, we believe in this so much with our product, like we should believe in it with our process,

Mike
but we should dog food it. Yeah. Which was the company, what was the company where the CEO said, don't hire anybody until you prove you can't do this with AI.

John
Oh,

Mike
I

John
think I know. I think I heard something to that effect and I don't remember who it was either.

Erik
Yeah, I think it was a smaller company. John, I'm still not sure. Do you like working with developers? Are we better than the business people to work with?

John
Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I've worked with good business people. I've worked with really good product managers. I've had a lot of cool product managers I've worked with. I've worked with some really obnoxious business people. It's a real mixed bag. I've worked with difficult developers. Usually the difficult developers, I mean, there's that one guy I mentioned, that sort of like prototypical, like really old school developer, like trench coat developer. Yeah. But like it's never been like a person. Well, I shouldn't say it's not a person. It's never been like – it's just like anything else. It's like I've worked with

Erik
designers that

John
I don't like very much.

Erik
Okay. So it's just, it's just, some people are cool to work with and it doesn't really matter. Yeah. And it's not, yeah.

John
And it's not even like, like, it's not even the, like the problems I've had have never been from like the development standpoint. It's, it's just like, like this one guy, he was, he was like the manager of the, the dev team that we were working with. And it was kind of like by default. And that was part of the problem is like, he just sort of, he just sort of like fell into the role.

John
But he tried so hard to be like both a PM and then also some sort of like business thought leader kind of – he was just trying to do too much. He was overstepping his bounds and he was kind of oblivious to the fact that he was doing that. It's reflected in the work like to a certain extent like you're not focused on it. Like you're focusing on the wrong things. But yeah, I've always – I've been able to get along. I like working with developers. there's, there isn't the same sort of like, uh, drink the Kool-Aid mentality among a lot of developers. Like they're, they're not sort of like, I don't know if it's like, if they're just cynical like me. And so there's like a similar, like not wanting to like, you know, swallow, swallow. Yeah. Not wanting to like just tolerate, or I mean, we tolerate it cause we all want to get paid or want the paycheck, but like we see through a lot of the bullshit and we understand that like, oh like we're just doing this because you know the ceo wants it and it's like it's not the it's not the actual smart play it's just what the ceo wants or it's just what this guy wants and so we can kind of commiserate in that regard but then there's been times when it's like someone may not take it seriously at all and so there's this sort of like

Mike
i know developers can be a little dismissive of design yeah sometimes

John
yeah especially

Mike
if they're like algorithm guys or whatever that's what

Erik
That people just sort of treat you like someone who doesn't know anything about what their work really consists of. So it's like, why are you taking my time and making me explain things to you? Why do I have to talk to you?

John
I mean, I saw that more with respect to the business side of things. Because, you know, I wasn't involved in a lot of like the decisions, like the decision making. And so the business side, and this wasn't like the product managers. Product managers often dodged a lot of these bullets. It was above that. So it was like C-suite, VPs, that kind of stuff who have an idea and they want to pivot to something else. And so they want everyone to start doing this instead of that. The developers would get kind of like, oh, God, here we go again. There can be too much pivoting. Like there's not a lot.

Erik
We call that thrashing, actually.

John
We have a name for that. That's a good way to put it.

Erik
We're a little too agile

John
right now. Yeah, exactly. It's like you got to see how something lands. You got to see how it kind of does for a decent enough stretch to know whether or not you're right.

Erik
Yeah, you have to deploy an app and see it working to know how it succeeds and fails. You got to actually have production volume going through it.


Erik
And after a little while, you can see, oh, yeah, this thing really worked out. This was a good design. We did a good job. Or you could say, oh, we need to fix these aspects of it.

John
That was always something I found really funny in working or like being involved in like developer meetings is when they start throwing around the design word. It's like they mean something completely different than

Erik
my design. Oh, yeah. That's true. Yeah.

John
And I understand.

Erik
Yeah.

John
Design means a lot of arrows. Yeah. Well, but it's like I'll be in a meeting where it's a fairly technical meeting and I'll be like – I would be like roped in just for the possibility that something comes up related to the design. And so there will be a lot of like kind of talking and my eyes glots over. But then I'll hear design and I'll like perk up and then I'll realize like, oh, they're talking about like the database or something else. But I'll be like, I'll like go back to, you know, waiting to hear either my name or the word design to see if something I can actually affect or be involved in.

Mike
There are too few words. We should probably use German for some of these ideas.

John
Yeah, it's like user experience. UX has taken on so many different sort of like nuances, like within these processes. There was actually just recently the head of design at Duolingo. He was like, we're not going to call it UX anymore. We're going to call it product experience. And to me, that was like an extension of product design and kind of like moving away from the focus on the user to more of the focus on the business side of things. Or at least like striking the balance with the business side of things and the user needs and whatnot. But the guy, Don Norman, who coined the term user experience, he like commented. It was on like a LinkedIn post. He like commented on it and was like, yeah, it's like, that's fine. But, you know, we're all using the term user experience. So why don't we just keep using the term user experience and like not throw something else out there? It's like it just seems like it's that thought leadership thing. Like, you know, he just wants to kind of like be like, oh, look what I did. Like, look at this cool, you know, term I coined or whatever.

Erik
Mike and I like to do that too name stuff that exists and take credit for it that's why we have a show

John
yeah well John thanks

Erik
so much for coming on the show with us today it was great having you

John
yeah thanks for having me this was fun

Erik
so this has been Picture Me Coding with Eric Aker and Mike Mull our guest today John and Whitmire and we'll see you again next week see you next time