Isabelle Olsson, Design Director — Google Home

Isabelle Olsson explores the approach that lead to the unique aesthetic of Google hardware

What’s it like to be friends with a robot? How does it feel to hold Google in your hand? Why should we value friction in design? These are just a few of the questions that arose onstage during Google Design’s 2018 SPAN Helsinki conference.

Behind the scenes, we invited Longform co-host Aaron Lammer and Google Design’s Amber Bravo to delve deeper by recording interviews with a handful of our world-class speakers: Google hardware designer Isabelle Olsson, artist and writer James Bridle, transdisciplinary artist Stephanie Dinkins, artistic director Marko Ahtisaari, and sibling design duo Tuuli and Kivi Sotamaa.

This interview is part of that series.

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Aaron Lammer: Uh, welcome, uh, Isabelle Olsson.

Isabelle Olsson: Thank you.

Aaron: Um, so you grew up in Sweden. What was your, uh, relationship to design like as a kid?

Isabelle: Well, I started making things at a very early age. I didn’t think of it as design then, but now as I look back on it, that’s what I was doing.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Isabelle: Um, my grandfather had a workshop in his basement and he was kind of a self-taught industrial designer, um, never went to school, but, um, started making lamps and furniture and, uh, so, I experience lathes and saws and, um, different kind of ways of, um, treating, um, wood very early on. So, I started making little boats and things like that.

Aaron: Was he making furniture and stuff for functional purposes or like-

Isabelle: Yeah. I mean, he would, he always tried to reinvent everything, so. The one object that I really remember was a bottle opener and it was just a piece of wood, uh, with a nail, um, through it and it was so beautiful because it was extremely simple to make, but it was well crafted and it was one of those things that, well, bottle openers have looked the same forever, but he found a way to reinvent it. He hacked into his car. He thought I, he wanted an armrest and, you know, built one and covered it in leather and now that’s part of status quo in a lot of cars, but it wasn’t back then and he just kind of found problems and, and tried to solve them, um.

Aaron: That’s the best do-it-yourself project I’ve ever heard, an arm rest in your own car. (laughs)

Isabelle: (laughs) Yeah.

Aaron: What point did you realize that, um, building things could be your job, not just your childhood hobby?

Isabelle: Well, pretty late, I think, um, because I didn’t realize there was a way to combine kind of my passion for science and math with kind of the creative side of painting and, um, I started sewing clothes very early on and I just didn’t understand that combination, um, and after high school, I felt like I needed a creative outlet, just a break before I was going to be, you know, a doctor or a lawyer or one of those three things that my parents thought was the path in life, um, and no offense at all, but that was what they thought and that’s how I grew up.

And then, I did go to art school, um, to kind of learn more of the foundational of, you know, form and, um, new drawing and color theory and all that and that’s when I realized, like, wait a minute, there’s something called industrial design, um, and that’s where I could take my, my passion for kind of the technical side and combine it with the arts and, um, applied for industrial design school and that’s how, how it happened. So, it was pretty late. I was like 20 or something. Yeah.

Aaron: It seems like you, you were well timed, um, within industrial design for a shift that happened. Where computing was mostly a software, uh, problem looking for a software solution and, um, increasingly, like, the thing that’s in our pocket physically is what we think of as a computer.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: What, um, like, what were the first few industrial objects you built?

Isabelle: Well, um, that’s also interesting because that happened late for me, as well, because I didn’t go to design school, but I focused a lot on jewelry design, furniture design, nothing to have to do with technology, at all. Uh, but after graduating, after working a couple of years and I did exhibitions in Milan and, and had a lot of fun with it, I realized I was only designing for a very small group of people, um, and I felt like I could maybe apply my skills, um, to have more impact.

So, um, I learned about this project called [inaudible 00:05:14] um, and it was super inspiring to me and not necessarily for the specific design of it, but just this idea that with great design, um, you can, you know, have an impact on people’s lives. So, I figured out who, who did it, um, and found this, um, agency in San Francisco and that’s what took me to San Francisco and I applied there and, and they took me on.

Um, and, yeah, I worked on a huge range of things, but I ended up designing a lot of tech products, um, and it’s not what I expected and, but what was cool was back then I was still, when I was looking around and seeing what everybody was sketching, it was all kind of black glossy boxes and, and I had this naive kind of reaction, is like, “Why is everybody just doing the same thing?”

And just even in the inspiration boards, I was just seeing the same object over and over again. Um, so I started, you know, putting up images on the wall of details of furniture and chairs and, and jewelry and at first people just kind of laughed at me a little bit, but then they just started to, like, you know, “Well, maybe there’s something there.” And that’s how I kind of, I started to realize over and over on each project that I had a little bit of a different point of view and how to, um, you know, rethink the way of design technology and it doesn’t have to all be the same.

Aaron: What, like what kinds of lessons from jewelry making do you take with you?

Isabelle: Well, I think first of all everything that we design have to fit into people’s lives and, you know, jewelry is that most extreme version of that because it actually literally has to fit your body, but it also, you have to create a desire, you have to, um, provide, you know, a range of things that, you know, people get excited about.

Um, and, and then, and then the similar problems as anything else you design, you know, come up like how can we manufacturer it, can we manufacturer it at the right price? You know, all of those things, so I think, I think the, the jewelry piece is just, it puts those things into the extreme.

Um, and same thing with furniture, I think, again, um, how can you create things that a lot of people are going to want to put in their most intimate space, which is your home.

Aaron: Jumping from Stockholm to Tech Boom, San Francisco, um, was it a culture shock for you as a designer?

Isabelle: Well, it was a culture jo- shock in general- (laughs)

Aaron: (laughs)

Isabelle: … I have to say and, and, and I think a lot of people say that, you know, Sweden is one of the most Americanized, you know, countries in the world, and still. Yeah, it was a huge shock for me. And it was the everyday stuff. So, I would go into a store and, you know, people would greet me with, “Hey, how are you?” And, and I would start, “Well, you know, actually this morning, I wasn’t, you know.”

Aaron: (laughs)

Isabelle: And then, they were gone and I was like, “What? Wait. What just happened?” And I felt so awkward because I didn’t realize like, oh, that’s how you say hello. Like it took me like two years and then, I was like, “Oh, how are you?” “Yeah, good. How are you?” You know, and then it became like a normal thing.

And, and I remember a pivot point, which was, I think, two years into my, um, stay in the U.S. I went back to Stockholm and, and I was at a restaurant and I had this epiphany, I was like, “Everybody is so rude.” And then, I realized, like, okay. I’ve adopted the American kind of friendliness and openness and just, um, you know, the less, you know, Swedish people in general are a little bit more reserved. I, I think that’s a fair generalization to make.

And I’m fairly outgoing, so but it was still super strange for me. Um, so, I think it was more the qu- like not necessarily as a designer, but as a person. The other piece is the language. Um, I didn’t feel like I could be myself for, for, for long time because a lot of your personality comes through your humor. You can’t really be funny in a language that you don’t understand. Um, so, that was kind of like, I realized I was a little sad for a moment and then, then there was a turning point where I started to feel like myself again. Um, so, yeah, so, those are some of the things.

Aaron: Designing, um, physical products has a certain similarity to being someone in a culture where you don’t speak the language. You’re building things that people have to use around the world. You can’t rely on labeling or, um, instructions in the same way. It’s, uh, a, a language-less form of communication.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: So, when you’re designing things that you expect to be used, not just outside of California, but outside of America, all over.

Isabelle: Yep.

Aaron: How do you think about those kinds of cross-cultural, uh, communications?

Isabelle: Well, we actually have something called design language and, um-

Aaron: There you go.

Isabelle: … so it, it kind of exists. I think the thing I’m trying to figure out is not so much, um, the usage patterns or, or things like that, although those are really important, but the, the critical piece is to figure out how something makes people feel because at the end of the day, that’s the first thing. Um, you know, people’s attention span are really, really short.

So, no matter of how good intentions you had with, well, it’s very ergonomic and it’s, you know, well manufactured and all that, but unless the five-foot view is intriguing, desirable, inviting, um, you’re not going to catch people’s attention or they’re going to reject you.

Aaron: As an outgoing person who is interested in how the things you make people, make people feel, what have you learned about talking to people about experiences that are largely non-verbal?

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: You know, a lot of people are like, “I don’t know. It’s a phone.”

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: You know.

Isabelle: Yeah. It’s a really good question, um, and what I’ve realized is do not ask what do you think, ask what do you feel.

Aaron: Mmm.

Isabelle: You get completely different answers and in some cases if the question of what do you feel doesn’t work, uh, you can ask people what does it look like.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Isabelle: And then people start making these associations, which they will make in real life, um, anyways. So, we see a lot of this when new products come out on the market. “That looks like a trashcan. That looks like a donut. That’s looks like a X.”

And you better be sure that your thing looks like something positive, something that has a positive connotation because anytime we make a prototype, I force everybody to like tell me, “What does it, you know, how does it make you feel? What does it feel like? What does it look like?” Um, and you know, the other day, we had a review of something and, you know, there was something about, you know, the posture of the, the object that, you know, made it look sad, but, you know, at first people started to like, “Well, this, this hinge” and you know, and it started them thinking about the details.

And I was like, “Well, what does it look like?” And then someone was like, “Well, a very sad person.” And then, people started adding, “Oh, someone with a hunchback. Oh, and” and they just started adding on and all of a sudden we had, you know, 50 attributes about this model that clearly described it in a way that we would never want to shape a product like that.

Um, and then, of course, there are really positive examples of when we decided [inaudible 00:12:38] for example, you know the first time, you know, we landed on, on kind of a, the softer shade, they started saying, “Oh, it’s like [inaudible 00:12:46]. It’s like a [inaudible 00:12:47] It’s like a donut, even.” Although I prefer [inaudible 00:12:51] over a donut, but that’s a whole other story. Um, and, and I was like, “Oh, these are all things that you want to eat.” So, then I started to ask people, like, “Do you want to eat it?” Um, this doesn’t apply to all products, but sometimes that works and just being able to create that initial kind of positive connotation, so you can then let people, you know, understand the object, use it, invite it.

Aaron: Is people wanting to eat it good or bad in your opinion?

Isabelle: Oh, it’s great.

Aaron: It’s good. Okay. That’s what I thought.

Isabelle: It’s a great thing.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Yeah, the donut is, uh — -

Isabelle: [crosstalk 00:13:22] desire, it’s like yummy.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s a powerful lure …

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: … the donut. Um, I was watching, um, actually I don’t remember which product that this was about, but, um, about sort of thinking about color-

Isabelle: Mmm.

Aaron: … with regards to hardware products, and as you said, um, one way to deal with it is to just make black boxes and not think about color at all.

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: Um, but when you’re, because you’re really into unchartered terrain like that, like, “Hey, everything, every version of this product to date is a black or white box.”

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: We’re making the first color one.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: How do you like start from zero to something like that?

Isabelle: Yeah. Yeah. And I had to convince a lot of people that color was important, um, and it took awhile, but I think the key piece here and it’s actually quite logical it’s is we have to be inspired by the context in which our product live in and we don’t live in black and white homes. I mean, we for sure don’t live in black homes.

Um, you know, a lot of people have a lot of white walls, so therefore, you know, it makes sense to have a lighter skew and, you know, it might make sense to have a darker skew too because you might put it next to your TV or whatever other tech things you have. Um, so you might have to have those things, but if you think about, you know, people’s homes, accent pillows, shelves, chairs, you know, they’re all sorts of colors. Um, and I think if we want to have people invite our products, um, into their home, you know, we have to have a higher bar, it has to fit in or be something that you’re, you know, excited about. Um, so, I think that’s the very fundamental piece of it, fitting into people’s lives and their homes.

Aaron: Yeah, I hadn’t really thought of that, you know, in some ways, your career has come full circle and you’re making, um, household goods.

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: That happened to have a technological brain inside of them-

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: … but basically have to operate, uh, in the same way as something that could be sold at Crate & Barrel or something like that.

Isabelle: Yep.

Aaron: So, has that been a re-education process for you?

Isabelle: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, it feels like coming home.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: Um, and it’s, you know, incredible to be able to combine something that was, you know, a passion of mine or an interest of mine with, you know, my job. Um, so, it doesn’t feel like a job always. Uh, which is cool. So, yeah, I agree with you. It’s, it’s great and, you know, it’s been helpful for me because, you know, now again, I get to go back to Milan to Furniture Design Week and I get to see the things and even last year we got to do a little exhibition with Google [inaudible 00:15:59] software, which was super fun. Um, so, yeah, I feel like, I feel like I’m back.

Aaron: Have there been any products from the non-hardware world that you have been like, “I want to make the technological version of this” that you’ve encountered?

Isabelle: Oh, that’s a really good question. I haven’t, you know, necessarily thought about that. I mean, I think, you know, the speakers are a really good example of something that, you know, I’ve always wanted to revisit. Um, you know, and even anything that surrounds entertainment, too, I think it’s just currently at a not a great spot. I mean, the fact that we have to have all these media cabinets that we use, we design furniture to hide technology.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: We got to get, we got to get away from that. Like, that’s silly.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: Um.

Aaron: We even like hard code it into our houses to hide it.

Isabelle: Yeah, it makes it inaccessible both literally and conceptually and I think that’s another piece that, you know, I really enjoy about my job is we, we’ve set some pretty challenging requirements for us to create things that are desirable, but at a really affordable price point. Um, so there you have to be pretty creative.

Aaron: Do you often have, like, iteration design, where it’s like this is the $1,000 version, this is the $500 version?

Isabelle: I think it’s more about, you know, what we’ve been having to do is figure out a design language and an approach that scales across different price points.

Aaron: Mmm.

Isabelle: So, whether it’s, you know, a thousand dollar laptop that goes in your bag or a $50 speaker that goes in your home, just figuring out what are those common elements and how, how does it hang together? How does it feel like one brand while not just applying the same thing on both, but, but more philosophically, um, thinking about them, um, so that they belong together.

Um, and, yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of times when you design things, you have to, um, I think first of all, have the idea of what, what you want to achieve and then there are multiple ways of achieving that, um, and some are more expensive to make than others. And as [inaudible 00:18:04] I have to collaborate really closely with engineering and be clear about, “Here is what we want to achieve, what are like five ways we can do that?”

Aaron: It seems like a lot of the things you’re making now, like the first generation of hardware was, “Wow, here’s a novel experience you’ve never had before.” And these are almost like instead of this technological experience, how about you switch to this one, like Google Glasses. You know, don’t walk around trying to film everything and experience everything with your phone, like put this in your eye. Or the, a lot of these home speakers are, “Don’t look at it, talk to it.” These kinds of things. What has it been like sort of building experiences on top of existing experiences?

Isabelle: Um, I don’t know if I have like a super great answer to this question. Um, I mean, I’m, I think fundamentally, we have to recognize that while, while there is evolution in the way we live and, and, and work and think, you know, we’re fundamentally humans and, you know, someone was asking me, “What does the home look like, in you know, 20 years from now?” And I was like, “Probably pretty much the same.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: Because if you think about what the home looked like 20 years ago, it’s pretty much the same. It’s just the TV has gotten a lot thinner, um, and we talk to our speakers instead of, you know, using a remote control or a control panel. So, I think, um, it’s really about how can we, you know, create experiences that are simpler, more beautiful, um, easier to use and that kind of let’s us go back to, like, cooking and chatting with your partner or, you know, having a party or doing the things that we want to do and if we, with technology, can make those experiences either more fun or better or cooler or simpler or less expensive or whatever it is, uh, if we can improve it in one shape or form, I think that’s what’s, what’s challenging and what’s cool and what’s interesting.

Aaron: I was, uh, I was talking to a locksmith, uh, a few days ago because I had to have the lock replaced on my door.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: And he, and I was talking to him about innovation in locks because there’s, you know, smart locks have become a thing. He’s like, “Yeah, no one is really buying them. Um, people only change their lock like once every 35 years on average, so, like we’re waiting-

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: … we’re waiting to hitting that point in the cycle.” A lot of the things that you make are not on a 35-year cycle, they’re on a one, two, three, five-year cycle. Is it, is it emotionally difficult to see these things that you made and poured your heart into get inevitably recycled at some point?

Isabelle: Um, I mean, I think the thing I want to be, it’s not, like, for me personally, that’s fine. The thing that worries me is just, you know, we have to be considerate about the environment.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: And I just, I don’t want to contribute to like a wasteful way of-

Aaron: Sure.

Isabelle: … you know, buying things and, you know, so that, so that keeps me up at night. But that’s why I want to make sure the things that we design can stand the test of time if you do decide to keep it around and that it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, that was clearly 2018.”

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: You know, but like how can it be that it, you know, last for years like just like a really good chair, um, or any, anything else in your, in your home. Um, that’s one of the reasons, for example with Google Home Max, we made it so ultra simple because we know that people keep their speakers around for like 10 years.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: So, instead of, like, coming up with a flashy design, and, you know, we had some more expressive option, like options on the table, literally, and, and I was, and I was convinced we had to go with the most minimal approach because this, this product needs to live for a long time. That’s also why we actually didn’t make Max in a bunch of like trend colors. We made it in a dark and a light.

Aaron: Tell me about, like, bringing fabric into that equation.

Isabelle: Yep.

Aaron: It seems like a weird, like almost a radical decision to include fabric in a technological product.

Isabelle: Yeah. Fabric is an incredible material for like a million reasons, but, but I’ll talk about a couple of them, um, first, it’s you know, for the, for it’s properties. It’s flexible, like physically flexible. It’s, um, lightweight. It’s fairly inexpensive. It’s soft. It’s durable and it’s what we’re surrounded by. Our clothes, our, you know, sofas, everything that we have in our home and on our bodies are a fabric. So, it can let through sound, it can let through light, you know, hide buttons behind it.

You can really reduce the complexity of an object and I think, you know, as designers and especially as we create technology, we have to not only make it easy to use, but make it look easy to use. Um, and not be a distraction. So, for me, fabric was this kind of turning point where we realized we can have this premium finish for not too expensive of a cost and then we can kind of tuck the technology away so really all that you think about is that you’re talking to it. You know, and it alludes this kind of simplicity.

Aaron: All right. Well, I’m, I’m really looking forward to your talk today.

Isabelle: You make me nervous.

Aaron: (laughs)

Isabelle: I’m still working it out in my head. (laughs)

Aaron: All right. I’ll give you-

Isabelle: But I have, I have some nice pictures, so hopefully that helps.

Aaron: There, I think it’s going to go great.

Isabelle: Cool.

Aaron: Um, thank you so much for this interview.

Isabelle: Thank you.

Ryan Snelson

Designer Ryan Snelson on inventing your own aesthetic and challenging industry norms

In this episode, Liam speaks with Ryan Snelson, a user experience designer known for his thoughtful product designs and trademark maximalist style. The pair talk about Snelson’s experience redesigning the Myspace UI in 2009, why he champions a gritty and expressive experimental aesthetic, and the importance of understanding the constraints of technology and design.

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Liam Spradlin: Ryan, welcome.

Ryan Snelson: Hi.

Liam: So, just to get started, like I always do, I want to ask about your journey. So, I’d like to know what you’re doing now, and what it was like to get there?

Ryan: Right now, I’m working for myself pursuing my own projects, contracting here and there. The journey has been kind of weird, I’m still trying to figure it out. I started as a graphic designer. I went to art school. Uh, this is like the late ’90s, when the web was kind of coming about. I had previously, like, played around on GeoCities, making websites. And I thought it was interesting, but it- it didn’t really seem like a field at the time.

Fast forward, in like 1999, I got a job at a start-up in New York, and I didn’t really know what a start-up was, and then it went out of business. And then the next start-up went out of business, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. Because the design stuff was cool, but the technology and the business model really hadn’t worked properly. And- and that just was like a re- recurring theme, early in the late ‘90s.

And then I worked at some digital agencies for a little bit, and doing a lot of marketing stuff, marketing websites, and I realized I didn’t like marketing websites. And I was very interested in what was happening with Web 2.0 and social media, and this idea of like building a web app was interesting.

And then mobile came about, and I did a lot of native mobile. And then, I’m experimenting a little bit with AR, and then I just made a really cool sticker app.

So that’s like the nutshell of things. We can unpack a little bit, all of that.

Liam: You describe yourself as focusing on product strategy and design.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I want to get into the relationship between those two. How do those two blend together, the product strategy versus actually executing something?

Ryan: It’s a great question, I love that question. I’m still trying to figure that out as well. But I would say that where the design and the strategy are separate is that, typically in organizations, whether they’re big or small, the idea of the product is owned a little bit more by product management.

And even though design has a seat at the table and they have a say in vision and aesthetics and potential, when it comes down to like the nitty gritty of what the product is going to be and that definition, I think that’s where the product strategy comes into play.

Where design takes over is in that tangible documentation, whereas product is still kind of doing the same stuff as UX, uh, but they’re diving a little deeper, more into analytics and usage and trends and optimizing in that way, which I think is really, really fascinating.

So I’ve tried to balance that a little bit more with my design practice. I’ve learned a lot through that. I wasn’t always like that. I always thought, like, oh, this is a cool design, so that means everything’s great, and that’s really not the case.

Liam: Yeah, I think of some of my experiences working on smaller design projects and seeing that potential, like you mentioned, and it’s really easy to lead that into suggesting new features, or like one thing builds on top of the other as you dig into the design.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: So product strategy might actually be reigning that in a little bit-

Ryan: It is.

Liam: … and actually putting constraints on that.

Ryan: And- and I think the big constraint is m- matching the blue sky potential, with what is really possible. And seeing how developers work, and working closely with developers, has really opened my eyes to, you know, what is possible versus, oh, check out this really cool design. Oh, it can’t really be built and it’s not really possible, but let’s do it anyway. Like, that’s just setting yourself up for failure.

So the product is like, you know, thinking of the product strategy and- and seeing what’s the potential with developers, what’s the potential with design, and then where’s the vision and the- and the business goals and the user goals, and trying to match that a little bit.

Liam: Right.

Ryan: That’s how I think about it. Whereas, talking about, to answer your question, the breakdown of the execution part, the other side of this is, you know, inheriting a set of requirements and executing in a very siloed manner, even though you’re collaborating and solving little interaction problems and user problems, you know, to have more understanding and voice in the product, helps, I think, at the end of the day, make that product a little bit better.

Liam: Absolutely.

Ryan: Yeah. It makes the design better, I think.

Liam: I want to dig in, specifically, to one project you’ve done which is Flashback Sticker Attack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: What was the motivation behind creating a sticker pack?

Ryan: So I originally set out to create an augmented reality prototype, and I sat down and I taught myself how to use Unity. And I was playing around with it and I finally got my web camera to show a floating box, and I was like, this is cool. Like wow, this is really cool. And I realized, yeah, it’s cool, but it’s not doing anything. It’s not really a product. It’s not something I would use every day. It’s just like a gimmicky, wow factor for now, and I wasn’t happy with that as like building something.

And, uh, what I realized is that, I had been doing that a lot in the last couple of years. I’d been playing with prototyping tools, and I’d been getting things that are just close enough, but they needed to be built.

So what I wanted to do is build something that I could handle end to end, from content to deployment to updates to marketing. And then I came up with this sticker pack, because I had tried to teach myself Xcode last summer and I totally bombed at it. I was like, this is … I’m not- I’m not messing with this.

But then when I was looking at the different options within Xcode, the sticker pack was something that I could do. And they say, well, there’s no coding with sticker packs, and that’s technically correct. Like, you’re not sitting there writing lines of code, but there’s this weird protocol with getting your, you know, developer license and getting your keys right and sending your builds out through TestFlight, and just going through everything that you would normally do with like a native app, besides having to write millions of lines of code.

I’m having a lot of fun with it. It’s the most fun thing I’ve done in a really long time, and I think mostly because I just get to do whatever I want to do and see what happens with it. And so far, it’s been, you know, it’s been good.

Liam: I’m especially interested in, like, the potential of sticker packs, because I see them coming to like more and more apps.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And even things like Google’s keyboard enables stickers now. So I’m interested, like, what do you think are the broad possibilities of communicating that way?

Ryan: Well, you know, using emojis have been a lot of fun, but emojis are getting really boring. And people are using emojis in really fun creative ways, um, but every time like Apple or Google come up with the next set of emojis, they’re kind of limited, and they’re very, very static.

And when I started looking at stickers, I found that all of the stickers were just really, really cute and quote unquote “delightful”, and there were so boring. And I was like, you know what? Why aren’t they animating? Why aren’t they- why don’t they look like crazy gifts? Why aren’t they a little bit more random? Why aren’t they a little brighter? Why aren’t they a little bit more lo-fi and flashy? And that’s kind of where I was thinking, well maybe I’ll- maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll make a sticker that- that moves a lot. So all of them are animating.

My requirements for building one is that they have to be blinking, they have to be animating, they have to be moving, even if they’re a very limited amount of frames, because I think that they’re fun when you layer them on top of each other.

So in iOS, you can pull them from the tray and then you can add another one on top of each other. So, if you create them with transparencies, that creates a- another effect when you combine a couple of them. So that’s been fun. I’m trying to make them not boring and cute.

Liam: I want to dig even further into that.

Ryan: Let’s do it.

Liam: Into the aesthetic of the Flashback Sticker Attack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: You’re kind of like cutting together a lot of visual styles, and like animations and stuff, and I also kind of get a similar vibe from the way that you present your work online, and I want to get into where that aesthetic comes from.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we were coming up to this, like how to start describing what you’ve just asked. And in retrospect, I attribute it to learning Flash, the application Flash back in the late ‘90s.

So if you remember, if you’ve worked on the web back then, you had html and then you had Flash. And html was just the static tables, you know, very, very boring aesthetics. And then you had Flash, which was just like … I don’t even know how to describe it anymore, but it was animation. It was intros, outros, it was sounds, it was everything that motion is, and everything that native animation kind of is today, but it was unregulated. Like people were just experimenting.

And what’s happened, I think, stylistically to answer your question, is that there has been a wash of style over the web and over apps. Everything’s quote unquote “clean”. Everything’s delightful, everything’s safe, and everything’s not rocking the boat a little bit. Not to say that style rocks the boat, but like when you’re a little bit sloppy and a little grittier with it, I think there’s a little bit more of an emotion that comes through. Now that’s, you know, specifically related to the content of the stickers, right? Obviously, if I was building a system, I’d want it to be very, very usable.

But when the opportunity arises to like make something fun or to make something boring or clean or not boring, it’s like, you- you have that option as a designer. And I forget where I heard it but, one of the biggest things a designer has is their ability to be creative. And I think that product design and user experience design has, in a sense, like, muddled that a little bit because it’s all about following the standard, right? And it’s not about, you know, rocking what the user’s going to come into a little bit.

And this is where the experimentation comes into play, and that’s really all this is. It’s experimenting, you know, if there’s a ton of designs that look one way, I want to try to go the other way. And I think that that’s always a good way to reinvent aesthetics, because aesthetics are like trends that are here and then they’re gone. Which is I think why, you know, a lot of companies are saying like, let’s just be really, really clean and un-style, you know?

It’s no frills, like the design of today’s native apps are just no frills. It’s like walking down a cereal aisle and being like, those are just the Chex. There’s no brand, there’s no nothing, you know?

Liam: Yeah. Although, I could also see extending that grocery analogy. Like, we could get to a point where the aesthetic is so overloaded that nothing stands out in the opposite direction.

Ryan: Well, that the problem, right? And I think at one point that was good, because the web early on, it wasn’t regulated in usability, it was just like a free fall. People are just putting buttons all over the place. You know, you couldn’t read tech sizes, there was loading, splash screens, and I mean it was just wild, uh, and it was interesting.

Ryan: Whereas now, it’s not interesting enough, I think. And it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, it’s just not as interesting.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: So, I’m trying to stylistically be interesting, and hopefully- hopefully (laughs) it’s interesting. Maybe people don’t think so, but I don’t know.

Liam: Yeah, I think speaking of the early web, it reminds me of where I learned html, which is Myspace.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I saw on your website, that you actually worked on kind of a redesign of Myspace-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … a while ago, so I’m interested to talk about that. What was the background for that project, first of all?

Ryan: This was going back, I think, like 2009-ish. I was on the UX team there, and the mandate was to stop the bleeding of users leaving Myspace and going to Facebook. What was interesting about it is that we were the underdog. No one really cared about it, I think, from the generation that had migrated over to (laughs) Facebook.

So it wasn’t about like getting them to come back, as much as it was to stop the bleeding of users, clean up the site in the sense that we could make it more usable. Some of the restraints were, editing tools were difficult from a back end to redesign. The music player, we couldn’t really get into that a lot early on. Like, I don’t know if you remember, but it was all in Flash, and we couldn’t really edit a lot of that.

So there were political reasons for design changes, and then there were things that we could control, like changing the navigation, grouping things a little bit better. We did a lot of AB tests on streams and profiles, and then we released very small changes over time, until the big redesign, and then it got redesigned again.

But the press wasn’t very nice to Myspace. I remember reading articles, like who cares? All the big blogs would be like, what are they wasting time for? And it was fun because being in that space, you could just experiment a little bit and try things a little bit more, and I learned a lot there. I ended up running the mobile team and I learned a lot from people that were on that mobile team, and this was iOS 3, iOS 4.

And there wasn’t really a place to go to get all these design patterns. So you couldn’t go read the HIG, like you could today. So it was learning through the engineers, and they would say like, no, this is what we can do with the navigation. This is how we would use the back buttons.

And so a lot of that stuff was kind of coming through where the developers were building this stuff. And then I would be able to say, well, could we try this, could we try that? And then some of it worked, some of it didn’t work. But I was really proud of the work we did there, despite, you know, the fact that people wrote it off and they were like, we’re going to Facebook, Facebook’s better.

But, you know, Myspace was the biggest social network at one time, and then it wasn’t. And you see that pattern happens a lot, right? Look at what happened to G+. It was there, and then it was gone, and it was supposed to be something. And socials weird, right? Like people didn’t leave Facebook to go to G+. The behavior of crowds in social, it’s just like why would I want to move all my stuff again?

So, I think that’s what we’re seeing with social. Like, with Instagram and Snapchat, it’s like, they- they do it a little bit differently. They’re like sliced off from the bigger networks.

Liam: Yeah. I think that migration aspect is really interesting, especially thinking specifically about Myspace and Facebook.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Because I remember probably in the early years of high school is when I was on Myspace, and that was the social network.

Ryan: Were you catfished? (laughs)

Liam: (laughs) Luckily, no, I was not. But it had like all of these things that Myspace established.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Like, customizing your profile template. Like, that became an entire industry unto itself.

Ryan: It- it did.

Liam: Selecting songs to play automatically on your profile, which now we like shudder at the thought, but.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: It’s interesting to me that it kind of set up all of these things that users were used to and love doing, and yet they still went to a network that did not have those things.

Ryan: And I think that the CEO of Myspace at the time, Mike Jones, wrote a lot about, like, wh- what does he think happened? And one of the focuses was on utility. Like Facebook had a really good utility. Things would work when you submitted the button, right? You didn’t have to wait a lot of time to upload something. The usability was just really right on. So I think users were willing to sacrifice that customization at that time.

But, you know, when you think about today, the idea of customizing a profile, you can’t do that. If you remember when you were in high school, if you were customizing Myspace profiles, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. You could get into the code and make your own page with Glitter Graphics and- and whatever you wanted, you know, but you can’t really do that, and there is restraints on systems today. They don’t want you to do that for whatever reason. And I think that there’s just something to be said for, you know, that level of expression.

So that’s the types of restraint I think that the web and native mobile has, is that the expression comes through in the form of content, not really so much the system anymore.

Liam: So do you think that social media has uncovered a way that we wish to express ourselves, that wasn’t present in previous iterations, or do you think that it’s actually influenced that?

Ryan: I think a little bit of both. Like, the first thing that comes to mind is the camera access, right? Like having access to the camera and taking photos, is probably the fastest, quickest way to express, or to show what you’re all about.

So it’s less about, oh, I want to change the color of my profile, than it is saying, hey, check it out. I’m at this podcast with Liam, and l- look at this crazy set. And to have the tools to be able to do that really, really fast, and then to share them out quickly with whoever you intend to see, I think is really, really important. So there’s that utility of it.

But I don’t know, it’s tough to say where the pendulum will swing back. I think that removing the barriers of the UI within social, is always going to happen. But, you know, you see this now with kids, they’re using Snapchat, and then they’re using Instagram Stories, and then they’re not using Snapchat as much, and it’s just like, well that’s what happened with Myspace.

And as cluttered as Myspace was at the time, you know, Facebook is going through those clutter problems. And, you know, that’s why they- they- they seem to like white label a lot of these other types of apps, to test them and to see if they would work to get those users that don’t want to use the main site. They just want to do like snippets of things like messenger, you know, which is a cool way to break off and segment.

Liam: Yeah. I think I’m seeing like a parallel to our earlier conversation about how aesthetics move from-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … clean to gritty and experimental.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And the same way, we see something like Snapchat, that removes all abstraction between you and self expression, because it’s literally just you expressing directly-

Ryan: Right.

Liam: … versus something that’s more produced-

Ryan: Right.

Liam: … like an Instagram or something like that.

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, since Instagram released the Stories, there’s that conflict I have, which is, do I post a story or do I post and curate the perfect photo? And what I found is that, by posting the photo, you get to look back on it in time.

At that present time where you’re posting that photo, maybe it’s not like the greatest, right? Or that the story is exactly the same. But like if you go to look back on it in like a year or six months, and that story is gone, but you have that history there, I think that that’s validation for a traditional social newsfeed or stream, versus this ephemeral, like it shows up and then it disappears. I think it’s cool. I really don’t know which one is going to win at the end of the day.

Liam: Do you save your Instagram Stories?

Ryan: Not really, no. (laughs)

Liam: I would be interested to know how many people save the video clips from their stories.

Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I just think there’s something interesting there about the psychology of like, which thing you would rather consume later.

Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting, I think it’s fun. We’re talking about stickers, you see Instagram using stickers, and they’re pumping out all different kinds. They’re … it just seems like every time you open it up, there’s like a new sticker.

But it’s all the same stuff. It’s like dog face filters and fluttery stars. And yeah, it’s cool and it’s gimmicky, but I- I don’t know. You know, like those are the trends that are happening now. With AR it’s like, put your face in front of the camera and we’ll do something to it, and that’s- that’s cool, I guess.

Liam: I want to switch gears from talking about user experience to talking about teaching user experience. Um, you’re teaching a course at General Assembly, and as a designer, um, a lot of my job is also talking about design, whether it’s with stakeholders or other designers or developers or what have you, but that’s different from actually instructing someone on UX.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I’m interested to explore that difference.

Ryan: As a practitioner in the field, you get to a point where you know the basics, and you- you’ve had some wins, you’ve had some losses. Then you look at like curriculums and teaching that stuff, and I think it’s a very humbling thing to be standing there with people that are excited to learn something new, and to try to guide them and try to show them, hey, this is what works, this is what doesn’t work. I think learning anything is always challenging.

So what I’ve learned through the teaching experience is that there’s two types of mindsets. There’s a fixed mindset and there’s a growth mindset. And the fixed mindset says, this is the way it is. There’s no changing it. This is what I believe. And then the growth mindset says, well, even though this is new, I’m going to be open to seeing what could happen with it. And students come in with one of those mindsets, and that’s always, I think, the challenge in teaching design, right?

Because design is- is … There’s so many different niches within design these days, that I often time meet a lot of traditional designers. Like, I started as a traditional graphic designer, right? But they’re still practicing this today, and they’re getting into digital and they’re getting into product, and it’s a little alien. And sometimes they’re like, I don’t believe in design thinking, or, what do you mean, iterations? Like of course, I’m just coming up with stuff.

And- and it’s like, well, what we try to talk and- and expose is that, you’re not the only one coming up with it, that you’re working with product, and you’re working with developers, and you’re working with stakeholders, and you’re trying to find that balance.

So there’s two parts to it. There’s the skill that the designer learns through the methods, and then there’s the soft skills to make the decisions around those methods. That’s how I look at it.

Liam: I’m also interested in those like methods and tactical things.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: I feel like a lot of times when working as a designer, you come up with rationale and reasons for doing things that are based on this institutional knowledge of all of these things you’ve accumulated over the years.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: What is it like to try to translate that?

Ryan: I think that one of the great things about GA is that people come in from different backgrounds to teach that stuff.

So, to give you an example, like maybe like a couple of years ago, people were talking a lot about research, and one of the gripes that I’ve always heard and I’ve experienced this myself, is that there’s not a lot of time to research in the real world, right? People aren’t paying for the quote unquote “research” directly, front and forward, and research becomes like an insurance play, in a sense.

So how do you get around that? And it’s always like, well, you just do it. Because I think a lot of times, new designers will look for permission constantly to figure things out, or they think that there’s a magic button that’ll just tell me what the experience is going to be, right? And it’s like, no, you got to go and you got to talk to people and you got to try things.

But I think the biggest thing is like getting new UX and product designers to have a point of view about something. Whether it’s just the fact that they like it for some reason, is not good enough. They have to like unpack it a little bit, and show that this is working because it makes this flow easier, or this is a design pattern that is emerging or- or has been killed, and we should or shouldn’t use it. You know, so it’s defending through that type of validation versus just like, oh I’ve seen this before in the past, and so this is what you have to do.

You know, a more specific example is when we go over mobile and we talk about the human interface guidelines and material design and, you know, I’m always like, here are the components. You want to use a keyboard on iOS, it’s the light one or the dark one, you know. And trying to get people to understand that those patterns and those UI elements have been thoughtfully designed and put into that system, and if you learn how to use them, it’s like going into like Home Depot and picking a bunch of door knobs or, you know. Those are the materials, right?

Are you going to use like the right door for the house, or are you going to use like a garage door opener to open your bedroom door? It’s like, it’s about what’s the most appropriate element.

Liam: I’m interested in that point about developing a point of view in design-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … and working through validation. Do the methods of validating and thinking about design decisions that way, become the point of view itself?

Ryan: I think it could be a little bit of both. I like to work with designers that have point of views, even if I think that they’re wrong. I’m just like, they believe in this thing and then let’s find out why or why not. I think that the problem with new designers is that they’re too timid. They’re too afraid to speak up about what is good or what feels right or, you know, what has worked in the past. And I don’t know why that is, and I think that maybe there’s this timidness in teams, where they don’t want to say the wrong thing or the teams are too big, or.

I mean, I’ve certainly been in positions where I thought something was the way it should be and it wasn’t, and I- I was like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t want to get in trouble, you know. (laughs)

So having like that point of view and that vision for how something could be, even if it’s in the slightest, I think people identify that, and you can always vet it, right? You can try it, and that’s the best thing about product.

Liam: But also kind of balancing your point of view with like not falling into a fixed mindset, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Like establishing like a set of beliefs about design that don’t keep you from evolving those beliefs?

Ryan: I guess to rephrase it, I would rather have a designer start and be on the wrong path, than to wait around and be like, I need more information. I don’t know what to do.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: But I don’t have this, you know. It’s like, no, just start with every information you have, that’s like the point of view. Like, you know, people talk about like self-starting. Like that’s it, right? It’s like, out of all the things that I know and of all the information that I have, I’m going to take this and try to do something with it, not just sit around, and be like, I don’t know what to do.

Liam: I can relate to that feeling. And I think something that helps is just keeping in mind, ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: If you’re trying to make a decision about something.

Ryan: Yeah, and I think trusting your team, right? I’ve been lucky to have good mentors in my design career, where I could watch them and try to emulate them, or if I didn’t know something, feel like it’s okay that I don’t know it and I’ll get to that answer.

I don’t know if it’s just like the state of design teams these days, but they think they’re expected to know everything and, you know, even when I go through the workshops and the design challenges at GA, it’s like sometimes I don’t use all the methods professionally.

Like, I wasn’t using user journeys for years. I was going through them and talking about them, and I would say, you know, full disclosure, I don’t make these, but some people do. You know, I make storyboards and here’s a storyboard.

So there’s not one method that’s better, that’ll get you what you need to do. It’s just like, you’re just communicating what you intend to happen, but you can’t rely on the process alone, you have to have the output of something. There’s a lot of like design people that are just process junkies. It’s like, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re going to brainstorm this way, and we’re going to use these sticky notes, and we’re going to come to this like massive consensus.

And you spend all day in this process, and it’s like, well, if it doesn’t work for you, you know, you don’t have to do that.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: It’s the … The whole point is the output. The process and the methods are just there to get you on the rails, so that you can get to that output, to that deliverable, to that prototype, to that test, whatever.

Liam: Right. So putting a hammer and a screwdriver and a saw, like in the same room, doesn’t build you a house, I guess. (laughs)

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly right.

Liam: So to wrap up, I want to talk about how you see your creative process changing, how it’s changed over time, and I’ll say where it’s going in the future.

Ryan: I don’t even know how to answer that. I think that I’m trying to be a little bit more risky with the type of work that I try to take on. I’m not saying yes to a lot of projects, I’m starting to say no more because I’m getting to the point where, how much time is it worth investing in these projects? And I don’t know, right? But I’m learning.

Ryan: I want to be working with teams that have that point of view, that I can have those conversations with and just figure out like, do we have a … like an alignment on things? Could we come together, create an album and sell a bunch of records, and then be done with it? Or is this going to be just this uphill, figuring it out constantly?

So I think for me now, the creative process is about alignment with the right teams versus thinking that I alone, and my process, will get me to that next thing.

Liam: Right.

Ryan: I think what I can control is my own personal output, but I can’t control the development on a lot of things, or sometimes the financial situation of some projects or some start-ups.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a good answer. (laughs)

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: All right. Uh, well thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s fun.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: Cool studio.