The Most Optimized Blue: Differences Between UI and User Experience Design with Nick Cawthon
Resources and hashtags to the end
- How Many CTOs Pod: https://howmanyctospod.com
- Scott Porad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottporad/
- Brad Hefta-Gaub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradheftagaub/
- Nick Cawthon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickcawthon-ux-digital-agency-product-design-leadership/
- Gauge.io: https://gauge.io/
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Guest
Scott: We've established that there are these guidelines and these patterns and they're all going to start looking the same and all the dashboards are going to look alike and it's up to us, it's up to the strategists and the researchers to know where those nuances are.
Brad: All right. Welcome, everybody,
to another episode of the How Many CTOs podcast.
I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub, and this is my trusty co-host, Scott Porad.
Nick: Hello, Brad.
Nice to talk to you again.
Brad: I took your name. I stepped on your name,
didn't I? You usually say your own name.
Nick: That's okay.
Brad: Do
Nick: You
Brad: another.
Nick: want to do it over again?
Brad: No, we'll just leave it in. B-roll.
Nick: This is the most gripping entertainment for our 39 fans out there.
There.
Brad: This is content.
Anyway,
we have a special guest here today,
Nick Cawthon and Nick from Gauge.io.
And I would love to have you introduce yourself and tell our many listeners what brought you here.
Scott: Yeah,
Brad,
I'm taking a break from RSA. It's just down the street here in San Francisco.
I've been to a lot of conferences at the Moscone Center and I've never seen one as big as RSA 2026.
It is absolutely massive.
It's taking up both convention centers,
north and south,
packed the brim with vendors and booths and the expo and must be 10,000, 20,000 people.
So it's great to see the vibrancy in the community,
both here as a native San Francisco Bay Area resident,
as well as somebody who works in tech and has had a long.
storied career in UX and how that applies to design, mostly for InfoSec, SecOps, and DevOps-based companies,
some of whom had booths there on the floor.
So yeah,
that's my week here in lovely springtime of California.
Brad: Love it. It's interesting.
You have mostly done user interface design for InfoSec and security companies.
That it's.
Of course, everybody needs quality user interface design,
but it's so it's interesting.
Like I kind of think of the security stuff as like the more propeller head nerdy stuff.
And is that where we.
overlook design or what's your take on on how you how you kind of got there
Scott: Yeah.
Brad: in that space
Scott: Well,
let me take you way back to the early 2000s before maybe design-led companies were a thing.
And there was a sense that it was by engineers for engineers and that made it.
secure,
robust,
scalable,
there was a sense that if it didn't look a bit off, then maybe something was a bit off.
What really changed was the success of the iPhone.
where you had this device that enamored the world and really changed the paradigm of how we use technology that was beautifully designed that whole mantra about apple was it just works well
Nick: Yep.
Scott: it just works because there was a lot of research and design and user experience applied to how people set up inboxes and are able to diagnose errors and things of that nature and it started to shift this notion of wait a minute you mean design
Design-focused companies or design-focused products can be successful and be something used at scale.
And ever since then, it's been an evolving and moving target.
And I see that as really the turning point from maybe it was hard on the eyes,
but at least I can get through it and sift through a lot of them were translations of, you know, database projects that were just slapped with a UI on it and not, you know, two thoughts were given about I'm still working with a couple of clients who have applications like that where it just looks like a.
you know a bad interpretation of that but now especially with a lot of the foundations and the frameworks that have come out to make generation of ui easier um you know calling back to rsa yesterday i must have seen a hundred dashboards uh on monitors outside of booths and a lot of them look the same but there's a notion of that human error of that human factor and that's going back to the apple references that there is a sense of
That is your weakest link is the sec ops professional,
the analyst that has to stare at the same thing every day and maybe gets confused or stuck or has to go through a couple of hoops that aren't needed in order to get to a task.
Well, that's when fatigue and vulnerability begin to set in.
So that's what I'd love to talk about today is how to design for the human factor.
Brad: Fascinating.
Nick: How do you design for the human factor?
Scott: Yeah, it starts with research. It starts with not what technology can we slap on other technology and maybe solve a problem,
but it's to understand where those laborious tasks are.
I'll give an example of a burndown queue.
A lot of companies all call out DataDog.
um adopted this this mantra of let's make it like facebook where you see this feed and it just starts cascading like scroll scroll scroll scrolling is a really hard cognitive act because your eyes are bouncing up and down and you're sort of doing this it's like watching a tennis match but uh reverse the dimensions uh and you know to understand what is a hard behavioral science what's a hard cognitive task
and seeing how many are missed versus how many are caught to know that the movement of mouse or the movement of eyes on screen are things that if you're spending six to ten hours a day on these applications are going to cause errors and fatigue so it's really recognizing those tasks there's a kind of a trigger word of when you hear somebody say every time I have to do this it's just
just sort of loaded with you know frustration and fatigue and those are the things you start to address first because humans find a way idiocy finds a way workarounds are always present to make our lives a little bit smoother and easier
Nick: That's a really interesting,
I never really had that thought about fatigue.
I have a job where I sit and look at a screen all day.
than doing a variety of activities.
Well,
that's not entirely true.
I'm mostly looking at video conference calls on Zoom or Google Meet.
But in that context,
I'm doing a variety of activities,
conversations.
I was just reviewing a document with somebody earlier today.
I was reviewing a roadmap.
We had an all hands meeting where I was presenting different activities, but I still get fatigued. In fact, today,
earlier today,
I had been in meetings from nine.
9 a.m. not get 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. and I said to my two o'clock meeting I was like hey Bruce could we just postpone this till tomorrow I've just been sitting in this chair for like five hours I need to get up but I never really thought about until you just said it like designing applications like there's some people who have to sit and look at the same application all day long
Yeah. And how that fatigue can lead to, I guess, just sloppiness and errors.
Scott: There was one. This is a related field. It's not info sex specific,
but I'll do the analogy anyways.
It was LinkedIn.
When you are searching for a candidate and you're trying to find 30 or 40 to begin to sift from, if you type into their search query criteria or experience.
and they'll bring up a list of 100 and you scroll the list and you click next and you scroll the list and you click next and again there's that eyes bouncing from the top to the bottom processing a list hitting the bottom of a list and hitting next or the lazy load of we'll load up another 100 and it keeps going and going and going and if you take into account that the things that i'm looking for when trying to find these candidates are let's say education and experience and those are the only really
two data points that need to reference in the analogy to infosec whereas i'm wanting to know what kind of threat it is or what the ip address or the origin country may be there there are some dimensions that if i know i can identify very quickly i can approve or deny and then move on and when again in this linkedin analogy you're having to then just scan and find and everybody can order their sections in linkedin differently so
education's in a different space if you click into a result and then into a detail page and then back into that list that's
uh scan click load return scan click load return and that's what we call swivel chair uh where you think about like i'm throwing a lot of metaphors at you so i hope you're buckled in if you think about you know the jurassic park eras where this mainframe did this job and i would swivel chair and then i'll type in and tap into that and you would sort of completely context shift what screen you were looking at or what application you were looking at or in the case of link
linkedin what view you were looking at there was an alternative called angel list i think they've been uh purchased or merged but they had this wonderful card-based analogy where you didn't have to move your mouse you would just go through like a a rolodex card and say nope nope yes nope nope and it was such a more easy and usable way to scan many different instances of the same thing where the the
The data points I was looking for were in the exact same space every time and I didn't have to do anything then either hit if the company is good enough on the keyboard hit a Y or an N or at least put the approve or deny buttons right next to each other so I can really start to process those quickly.
So that's an example of we design with good intent of these many many lists of screens and again it's a
It's an artifact of our DBA days where we would return a list of 100 and off it would go,
but it also is a hard task to begin to sift through some of the noise.
Nick: You just described two physical behaviors that cause fatigue,
swiveling.
and scanning.
Are there other physical behaviors that cause fatigue?
Scott: the interpretation of layouts you go from a list-based layout to a detailed page layout and then i'm having to hunt for the things that i'm looking for that kind of refresh of one to the other linkedin won't change a thing they are a very profitable company and they're the only game in town or for whatever reason and they're they're not going to reinvent the wheel same thing with sales
is that they've done very well and built their tall buildings and they'll not need to go into those kinds of reimagining.
But those are some of the main ones is that every time you have to then go into these different screens and not have encapsulation of what it is you might be looking for or have a consistency on the screen of what it is you need to do.
Those are ones.
There's also a sort of think about post notifications. It's such a small thing is this quote tacticalness of what I did worked.
of something that I did occurred correctly and it saves me that sort of hunting and wondering is what I changed something that needed to take place and I think those kinds of affirmations of what you're doing is the right thing and the action you took was the right one helps people along and move quickly I'll segue into a product-based perspective in that
It's hard to find those who work in B2C companies,
business to consumers,
that have the same sort of mindset of SecOps B2B, I'll say,
because oftentimes,
as we saw with the 50,000 different vendors at RSA,
is that your app,
your utility is a chain of many.
You are coming from one layer.
into the next and then need to get out of there into the next layer you are one of one of many and this notion of stickiness that is so often adopted by b2c companies well we took you know three hours of brad's day because they brad couldn't get off the scroll or scott visited our site uh 15 times last week that stickiness is a desirable trait to show to investors and to show adoption and and
and product momentum.
However,
when you look at SecOps-focused B2B companies,
oftentimes the analyst wants to get in, find the answer,
and get out as fast as possible because there's a fire or there's a threat or there's something,
and they need that indexability to be crystal clear.
So that way they can take that bit of information and move on, and hopefully the systems talk to each other. But we learned that early on at a couple of sysadmin companies.
and companies that I worked at is that there was no fucking around it was something's on fire and you need to either surface it for me or you need to give me the ability to advance search bookmark index save a state so that when this happens again it's all there presented and ready for me
Brad: Nick,
I'm having all these, I don't know if Scott,
you're having the same flashback. Scott and I worked together years ago at a health tech company.
Nick: Mm
Brad: And
Nick: -hmm.
Brad: a lot of the things you're talking about,
I feel like, you know, kind of showed up in this like, you know, virtual AI assisted dashboard for the doctors to try to provide care for patients.
And I'm struck by, as I listen to you talk about these common design mistakes,
that's what I'm hearing you describe.
I mean, I've been doing this for 35 years, like so many of the apps I've used.
all have those same common design mistakes.
I guess I'm just struck by,
you sort of said, we kind of just have this database mentality,
we're kind of just putting this crud layer on top of a database.
How do we ever get past this?
Like, why do we keep making the same mistakes?
Is it we all just need to hire you?
Or is it why is it that we all continue to make these same types of mistakes?
Scott: Yeah.
Nick: As an industry.
Scott: Scott,
do you have any opinions before I jump in and start talking?
prognosticating again yeah
Nick: Well, no, I was just thinking as an industry, we're making the same mistakes over and over again,
but
Scott: yeah
Nick: I don't have any, I mean, I've got many opinions,
but I don't have an answer to this question.
Scott: i mean yeah what does it mean to be design-led i think design again is seen as a nice to have especially with the commoditization of design and bootstrap and packages and things like that and and to be honest it's had a rough go in the past couple years um you know we've often thought that
we seat at the table.
But design is often seen as an extension of product, at least in the circles that I'm swimming in these days. And there's a chief product officer and a head of product that may or may not understand the value and the pace of design.
It's gotten faster.
It's gotten much more integrated with engineering. Again,
our abilities to create a front end that is
As we would want it to be in the last 12 to 18 months,
the tools that we've used have been revolutionary to the point where my agency is launching things that weren't possible ever before.
And I think historically it's thought as a soft skill and it's thought as an expensive,
nice to have and that, you know, it's a subjective measure of you like blue and I like red and let's call the whole thing off.
And I want to implore that there is a difference between UX and UI.
I have a client who should be getting back to me any day now in the healthcare space.
private equity and they have bought a company that has 12 different systems 12 different applications and this is where i got the reference of it looks like a front end to a i'm sure HIPAA compliant database and it's atrociousness of of how they organize information and how they present information and how they outline workflows for people on that swivel chair and when I was in the vetting phase well
Well, still am.
For this contract,
the CEO kept talking about UI,
and I didn't correct him.
I said, if you want it to be red,
if you want it to match a brand,
if you want the CMO to hand down what the mission and the vision of this new identity is,
sure,
we can hum a tune and make it look like you want it to look.
What I need to do from a professional services perspective is earn their trust to understand how we can work with engineering at a velocity that makes their job easier,
meaning we're creating system pattern libraries,
components,
Nick: Yep.
Scott: UI elements that the engineers can now take and speed up their process and not slow them down.
And then eventually to say, well,
you really understand how people think about organization,
taxonomy,
clarity,
workflow,
what you should do is help us redesign this workflow so it doesn't take 10 steps.
It can be something that we rise to the surface and make a lot easier.
That's not going to happen on the first engagement, but I'm hoping that on the second or third that that will be.
something they see value in so not everybody understands ux but
Brad: Yeah, exactly.
I think that's, you said that really well, like I, so many people think UI and UX are the same thing.
Like, I can't count the number of times I've had to try to explain the difference between those two things.
And, you know, it's interesting,
you said something else that I thought that also kind of struck a nerve for me, I guess, you said design is often thought of as a component of product.
Scott: Mm-hmm.
Brad: And it's interesting what I don't know exactly what you meant by that. But the thing that flashed through my mind when I thought that was that I've worked in organizations where.
They maybe had a strong design function,
but they were product-led companies,
and so the product owners kind of were telling everybody what to do, right,
the engineers and the designers.
I wonder if maybe this is that just another example of the same disease that you're speaking to,
which is not really understanding the value of getting.
UX correct,
getting the
Nick: Hmm
Brad: sort of the human factor right.
If you don't really value the human factor,
then it's an afterthought for product as easily as it's an afterthought for engineering.
Scott: Depends on the ethos of the company.
I have a glutton for punishment. And so I like going to engineering-led companies. I feel like I speak that language fairly well.
I'm technical in how I apply design.
But engineering-led companies tend to be things that are built upon not a user's experience,
but more on what would happen.
happen if we connected this with this or what would happen if we engineered something pardon the oversimplification and that changes the dynamic because now the product lead is at the whim of the engineering
And then subsequently,
the designers are at the whim of product,
at least in the organizations that I've worked with.
And oftentimes,
the chief product officer is the CTO.
How many CTOs? I was hoping the podcast would answer that question.
Brad: Ha,
Scott: But
Brad: ha, ha,
Scott: there are other
Brad: ha, ha, ha.
Scott: companies in which that's not the case,
where Airbnb is a design-led company,
where it was here in San Francisco, two founders.
that had a design background and figured out the engineering side of things and made sure that design was at the forefront of everything they did and that made perfect sense to be to see company as somebody as a company that wanted that luxury feel and accommodation and comfort like having that aesthetic layer was extremely important to to their success and we're dipping into hyperbole a little bit because every organization
is different and you know every dynamic is different but I've enjoyed the challenges of understanding what is really underlying in the technology what does this actually do
And again,
for another,
for the third callback of RSA,
just breezing through that conference room floor, I was like,
what are you actually doing? Everybody's using acronyms and analogies and how many of them all do the same thing, each with their own specialty. And then where does that, what need does that solve other than you've got agents doing things for you? What's the cost of that? So I'm hoping that.
You know, we see this is from a personal perspective.
We're seeing these companies that are touting agent based environments and AI and simplification of workflows with those tools now come into a sense of maturity after there are 18 months from getting funding and they're trying to understand how to scale to a larger user base.
And it's one thing to do it with a private portfolio invite of customers and clients. And it's another thing to now try to release it into the world. Where that falls on me is to understand the behavioral sciences between what's working and what's not and how can we understand the different causes. In fact, we're seeing that with the rise of the forward deployed engineer,
if that rings any bells with you.
Palantir and OpenAI have coined this phrase. They love using the military acronyms of Delta Team for deployed and such and such.
But what that meant was, is that we are going to send people into your biggest conference room and the most outspoken amongst them are going to interview you and your team about your workflow and your constraints and your frustrations and do all the things that user experience practitioners have been doing for 10 years.
And then they're going to go back and prototype something out and problem solve and that group of engineers are going to take.
take the task of user experience where I question is is what kind of training have they had to really
Brad: Yeah,
Scott: stop and totally. understand and what what kind of framework or are they just riffing it and then they'll come back and throw it against the wall and see what sticks so I think that's an opportunity for somebody like me is that likes working shoulder-to-shoulder is to be there in place and help understand what that interview and that qualitative research process can be
before that Yeah. so that was a long answer to an organizational question but um
Nick: No,
I think you've hit on at least a couple other topics.
By the way, it only took 25 minutes before AI was uttered in this latest episode.
Scott: that's
Nick: Good job on that one,
Scott: new nick. record it's a new record
Nick: Brad,
I've been thinking about a question you posed a few minutes ago,
Yeah.
which is why does the as an industry do we keep on making the same?
same user experience stakes and i have a hypothesis i want to put out there for discussion it actually has two parts to it the first is high quality design is a strategy that people some companies choose and some people don't right you mentioned airbnb they've chosen that strategy vrbo who's their direct competitor it's not like they have a terribly designed website but that's not
a strategy they've chosen.
Yeah, I agree with that.
We have probably the most visible example in our industry,
which is we have Apple,
which has chosen to design for a strategy, and we've got Microsoft,
which chose a developer for a strategy,
right?
First is I think a lot of companies aren't thoughtful about their strategy.
They're just going for it.
Which gets to the second thing,
which I think the design first strategy, I guess they connect together,
the design first strategy takes discipline,
it takes patience and discipline, as opposed to just going for it. And I guess what I'm really getting at is a lot of companies.
for different reasons,
are impatient.
They're impatient because they're maybe burning money and want
Capitalism.
to figure capitalism is impatient.
Capitalism
Yeah,
definitionally makes everybody impatient.
okay.
I think I get that. It's probably right.
Scott: Specifically venture capitalism.
You've
Nick: Well,
Scott: got runway
Nick: venture
Scott: maybe.
Nick: capitalism is impatience on steroids.
Scott: Yeah.
Nick: So I guess that's it is that because you're impatient.
Your companies aren't necessarily thoughtful about their strategy and because they're impatient,
companies don't necessarily have the discipline to be design focused.
Wouldn't you say that one of Apple's most amazing,
like the legacy of Apple and Jobs is that he was they are the most patient company out there.
They work on things and never going to let them see the light of day until they're designed perfectly,
right?
Like that is their – that's their ethos.
So they're rocking it from a capitalism perspective.
I mean they're one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.
But they are unique in that patience and that willingness to hold.
Until they feel they have the design right.
And that allows them to charge a premium.
So I guess maybe that fits into it as well, which is some companies have chosen a low price,
low cost.
strategy and some companies have chosen a higher price higher cost strategy i was recently looking at stereos and was random but it's stereo systems right you see bang and olivson i think is the score they got these really beautifully designed systems and they charge a premium for what they do versus you know
jvc which i'm sure they make great stereo components but that design is not part of their story right and so it's also fits with the with the business strategy that the company has chosen although i'm going to i'm going to speak against myself with vrbo and airbnb because it's the same business strategy
Yeah, obviously we got Nick here and he's been in the trenches on this a lot more directly than both you and I have been.
But but it does strike me that.
The answer to why do we all keep making the same mistake has got to be there's got to be an answer to that.
And I think because because because Nick, every every every expert in design I've ever spoken to in my career,
they often are they feel like the gosh,
why don't you listen to me? Like I could, you know, like, you know, when you when you're telling the story of like, you know, infosec or like jobs, jobs like air traffic control,
right? Jobs where like lives are.
are on the line it's an incredibly cognitive heavy job like we should be doing everything we can to reduce that cognitive burden and
Mm
yet I
-hmm.
am confident most of those systems are
just this just like a you know like a reap you know a pressed copy of the same system from the day before like they're just the same old crud interface on top of a database and i don't know maybe it's just because too many engineers are involved and they just they they think in the database they see in the database
Scott: I think we all think of ourselves as experts and that nobody listens to us, whether it be in our personal relationships or our professional relationships that, you know, there's a sense of my mistake was that I was screaming into the abyss and I was staring into the void.
I should have done the opposite.
i get those two confused um the you know the notion of um why do we keep making these same mistakes and i think that scott had the the good callback is that it's strategy and its pace and its patience to admit you don't know what you don't know and there's a lot of males in our field there's this notion of swinging dicks and we all need to pretend that we've got this knowledge it's a hard person to stand up and say you know
Let's just ask people and admit that we may be wrong about this, that,
and the other, and that's a profound shift from the all systems go,
fuck it, let's push it, to get to a reality much quicker.
That takes, again,
humility and a fallback to say before we start,
let's plan and let's validate.
And that often doesn't happen, especially in hyper growth companies or early stage where there's so much pressure and there's only finite amount of money to say, let's slow things down for three weeks and go do some agile research. But the smart investors and the smart companies ask.
uh is this just because you're the expert is this because you've allowed yourself to become the expert from uh from people you didn't know and that's that's my favorite part and honestly that's why i shifted from focusing on subjective and aesthetic and design and acquisition uh and more into experience because that was interpretive and that involved talking with people and that involved the humility and the vulnerability by coming up and saying i want you to teach me because i
because I don't know. And it's wonderful for an outside contractor or an agency such as ourselves to come in because we're often the dumbest people in the room and we don't know,
but we know enough that we can start a conversation and walk through an interface and a workflow and be able to connect the dots of these things are challenging and these things are easy.
Nick: My sense, too,
that I'm curious if you run into this.
misunderstanding but when i what i what i think i understand about uh ux and like you know human interface design is that it's actually a very measurable thing if you take the time to measure it where
Scott: Yeah.
Nick: is the color blue or the color red i think that is much more subjective and that's going to be a taste thing but
Does the person get fatigued trying to approve all of the inbound requests from the dashboard?
Scott: Yep.
Nick: That's a measurable thing.
And if you are willing to be agile about changing it a little here,
changing a little there,
you don't have to argue about it. You can measure it.
Scott: There's a famous story in our circles about a designer that worked at Google under Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and then was at a role at Google where she wanted to optimize the color blue of the links.
And she picked 44 different blues and ran A-B tests on which blue would be the most performant blue.
Nick: Mm
Scott: And the designer knew it was time to quit when this was happening. Because if you A-B test your way into a city,
you take a left or you take a right.
And then you find yourself down the first side street of the first intersection of the city that you enter in, in some cul-de-sac because you optimized your way around that.
And so it was such a narrow focus view about what the world's most popular search engine could become is that we're now optimizing for hex values of blue.
So I think that I think there can be too much quantification, but it's easy to say that one of the things that we're experiencing with a product or an application is churn, is frustration. I mentioned the time on site as being an errant measure to apply to a user experience for InfoSec company.
That's not something you want to see.
What instead is the number of clicks to task where how can we make that easy.
reduce the number of things that you have to do in order to log off and move on or you know set up an integration or do these things i think and the biggest risk is um dead on arrival where you've got this idea you've got this product or this feature and you launch it and it doesn't get used and that is something that starts to resonate with investors and executives is to mitigate those large-scale efforts efforts
to say we're going to throw all of our engineering and all of our product and all of our developmental resources at this and nobody's going to use it.
And so to de-risk a dead-on arrival is a great measure of...
user experience leading to strategy leading to risk mitigation and decision making.
Nick: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
So a couple minutes ago, you mentioned AI and agents.
So that does make me have a couple of questions that I'm kind of curious to get your take on,
I
Nick.
was wanting to get into those. Before we do,
can I say something?
Yeah.
I've got the title for this episode.
queued up brad ready
Yeah,
what is
for
it?
it one a o d a b that's that's the color of the links in a google search result the color of blue there is in we
There
make that
you go.
the title i just i just looked that up the
Scott: Optimization, yeah.
Nick: optimized blue
most profitable blue that's what they should call it capitalism blue yeah let's talk about ai because i've been holding on to that question for a while brad so you kick it off because i got some questions in that space too
Well, OK,
so I have two questions that come to mind.
The first one is I'm really curious about your take on can the problems of design,
what do you think, what's the over under from your perspective on whether or not the kind of the trend towards AI based solutions for.
executing and implementing like will they come pre-stocked with the right answers as opposed to the wrong answers so that's like one question oh my next question is kind of like the the words as an interface you know the the the kind of the chatting as an interface you know what's your what's your take on that
Scott: Yeah, let me go to the second question before the first.
My background is at companies like NPM.
VM and Logly and being the first designer there and in both instances whether it be syslogs or node packages it's how to take what was a textual interface and make it into a graphical interface and we're seeing that with these
ides uh these chat platforms is we're starting to see patterns emerge and they're all following each other okay we got agents on the left we got files on the right we've got a chat here and then there's a terminal there and then you can see the specific files in the middle and it's this weird sort of the first mover
mix the rest whether it be cloud code or cursor or anti-gravity or on and on and on open ai they they all seem to have that same aesthetic of the dark mode as well as the same layout as well as the same references so when you jump into one the learning curve isn't that great because you're used to the others and
Nick: Yeah.
Scott: i i canceled my open ai subscription yesterday yesterday
because i'm doubling down on another platform and so we're seeing this cycle cyclical nature of here today gone tomorrow and they all look like themselves but what i'm not saying and maybe it's still in the infancy of these product platforms is acknowledgement of how people use them i'll give you an example when you're in a coding environment or even a prompting environment you're very much in a siloed
space it's you against the algorithm and a lot of times it take planning or coding or collaborative engagements in which there are multiple people doing multiple things and the only artifact of where i made that decision is in my commit is when i send it off to a version control system and and do a code commit
But that doesn't say anything about how I got there.
And so where I'm looking for or what my dream project would be is to try to develop an environment that does take into sense collaboration and does have multiple people call in response.
So that's how products and technology evolves is that it typically goes from that blinking cursor into that UI.
What we saw with Logly was the ability to visualize and see the abstract.
distractions of of what you couldn't see through a textual based environment what was imperceptible in scanning gigabytes of logs that aggregation uh and those actions that you could take upon that
And NPM was a whole different relationship management because,
again,
if you know about front-end development,
these packages were all calling each other.
And to see where those dependencies and those conflicts and versions and upgrades started to lie were things that you couldn't necessarily see through a textural output.
But when you started to evolve into an interface,
that kind of visualization and display was really helpful.
Nick: So wait, to boil,
to sort of like.
To summarize that, what I hear you saying is that some problems are just not well suited for text.
They really do need to be visualized for the human brain to understand them.
Scott: Absolutely. Good summary.
You and I would make a good comedy team.
You'll land the punchline. I'll do the setup and you do the punchline.
And so your first question was around the patterns that are emerging.
Design has spent the last 10 years creating pattern libraries without the understanding of...
There was an algorithm all along that was going to suck that down and then take our low level jobs away from us. We were building sites like Dribbble and then saying this is what a model looks like. This is what a checkout flow looks like. We were showcasing our work to one another.
At the same time, there were these frameworks like Bootstrap and others,
React UI frameworks that were standardized patterns and tools. And I remember back in the early days of e-commerce.
when nobody had figured it out when amazon hadn't yet won we were seeing metaphors of design on sites that didn't last three to six months we saw two rows of tabs on amazon each representing its own department until they figured out we have too many departments and we don't have enough space for any more tabs and then they switch that into a left hand now or a drop down something like that but at the time nobody had understood
How do we create these analogies and metaphors for what's an adaptive world?
Now, with these sort of defining notions of the way you treat a list longer than seven is like that, we've established that there are these guidelines and these patterns and they're all going to start looking the same and all the dashboards are going to look alike and it's up to us. It's up to the strategists and the researchers.
to know where those nuances are and and where where do you cut through that it feels like it's just a layer of icing and when do I need to get to the actual data because it's nothing to build a dashboard anymore it's two strokes of the keyboard and off it goes but to figure out how people use the data and what they need to see and what the row based and the permissions are and what those kinds of integrations and collaboration is
I
Nick: Yeah.
Scott: think that's the role that that is still going to be very much in demand.
Nick: Yeah,
Okay,
totally.
you hinted at the question I was wanting to get at,
which is you said it takes two strokes to create a dashboard.
Over the arc of time,
my hypothesis,
and I am not unique in this, I'm a follower even,
the cost of code is going to get cheaper.
And so do you think that's going to make it easier for companies to emphasize?
quality UX or more valuable
Scott: What was the paradigm that I heard?
It was a conversation this morning about if everybody's doing it, it increases the demand to maintain.
It's like if I cleaned fireplaces with the chimney sweep,
I was a chimney sweep.
And then all of a sudden a new wave of heating the company and where maybe one in five houses burned wood.
for me to clean said chimney or coal or whatever the victorian analogy that i'm trying to use is uh and then when the proliferation proliferation of the technology became widespread it took nothing for the chimney sweep to be able to understand oh this is the same thing but i just need to go here and there and i think the same thing is true with coding however we are in a very highly subsidized era right now just as we found with ride sharing and delivery services is that at the beginning you can't
how cheap this thing's like it just 10x my productivity and it cost me what 30 bucks a month like oh my gosh i'm going to do this forever it's because we're trying to be market share we're trying to get locked into a platform and that's going to be something that will change in the near future of what that accessibility from a cost perspective is so yes the commoditization of code is going to go down because now it could be audit
Got it generated.
But if I was a developer or a front-end engineer,
if there's more code being generated,
it's going to take somebody to understand security vulnerabilities and why is there performance issues and understanding how do I manage and maintain what's being generated because it's now exponential.
Somebody's got to figure out how to manage it and to clean it.
So that's kind of yes and no to your question of yes,
it is going to be more commoditized, just like design is.
And then back to your UX,
because these interfaces are now being presented with such a who's going to be able to sit with the end user and see what makes sense or what doesn't.
Brad: Yeah, well, I guess where I'm thinking is if all that let's just let's assume an extreme example.
Well, right now the cost of engineering is very expensive and it's been a very expensive software engineering has been very expensive for a long time.
And so maybe that's why we've had all these same user interface foibles,
so to speak, is because
The companies were focused on the software engineering part of it, not on the design of it.
Well,
Scott: Mm
Brad: if
Scott: hmm.
Brad: your cost of software engineering,
let's just say effectively comes to zero or very cheap,
that's not where the value is any longer. The value will come from the design.
Scott: Something better,
something more important.
Brad: In theory, we'll see more companies like this is my hypothesis as we've been talking.
Do you think we'll see more companies like Apple and Airbnb,
not less?
Yes.
Scott: And I want to expand it not just to what you see on the browser screen,
but also this notion of service design of it's not just the product. It's how a company treats the service of delivery and support and all of all of the touch points that a customer has with that company.
And it's a notion that goes back into the strategy of, you know, what are we wanting to present?
present ourselves in terms of transparency terms of accessibility i mean think about the revolutionary aspect that you could buy something off amazon and return it no questions asked and that money would be wired back into your account that was unfathomable five ten years ago that was something that nobody had thought of is this no hassle what is no hassle from a company perspective and that's good service design
And all of the touch points that are needed to stand those things up along the way, we don't traditionally associate that with design with a capital D.
But when we look at service design as an end-to-end customer experience, it requires human factors,
it requires understanding of behavioral science.
where the frustration lies,
what can we make easier?
And that is something that, again, is adjacent to product design or interface design,
because now you're starting to interview and respond back and have a sense of empathy for those who you are designing for.
Nick: And I guess I was the way I was thinking Scott's question was following would be something like this,
just like in a world where.
I used to have to hire 10 engineers to build what one designer could come up with.
Now I only need, you know, one engineer for one designer.
That means I can hire five designers and five engineers,
you know, and now all of a sudden I can get way more design output with either the same level of engineering and with engineer,
fewer number of engineers producing.
sort of the end product or another version of that is like well if if you were to say to me hey brad we've got like this idea and we can see that these users are struggling with this
Why don't you give me five different implementations of these five different designs and I'll
Brad: Mm
Nick: put them
Brad: -hmm.
Nick: in front of, you know, five different test groups and I'll let you know which one works, right?
Well,
Brad: Yep.
Nick: in the past it would be like,
Nick, I can't make five different versions of this thing.
That's going to take me, you know, five times as long.
But now I can turn around and in the same day that I make the one version,
I can give you five versions and you can come back and tell me which one worked.
Brad: And now we can build five versions.
Nick: Yeah, now we can, where we couldn't before.
Scott: And now you don't really even need a designer or product manager to come up with five different ways to skin a cat and then be able to create that testable artifacts.
on their own um you know design is now something we're all swimming in the same pool is
Nick: Yeah.
Scott: uh is one of the point i'm getting at we're using the same tool tools and we're able to create the same artifacts now how we use it and how we test it and how we deploy it and proof is is completely different but organizationally it's interesting to see where these struggles or these power dynamics are going to evolve to
Because in my career,
I've had product managers.
I'll give you a nickel for every time I've heard it. Start sentences with,
I'm not a designer, but what I did, I created something,
a wireframe in PowerPoint.
I wanted you to look at it.
and then you know same thing is true with
Nick: Yeah,
Scott: me it's
Nick: by
Scott: like
Nick: the way, now Scott and I are constantly hearing,
I'm not an engineer,
but I build this in Lovable.
Scott: but yeah yeah and it works great until memory leaks and api keys are exposed and on and on and on of what we don't know and so yeah those are again just holding on to your ethos of what it is you love to do and what it is you think you're good at and how
we can augment or amplify that with our new tools.
I think that's all I keep telling myself as I cry
Nick: Yeah.
Scott: to sleep every night.
Nick: Well,
this has been a super interesting conversation,
Nick.
I think that like, first of all, it's great to meet you. I know I personally am a huge fan of working with UX designers who really.
You know, I love, you know, when you describe yourself as an ethnographer, then I'm like,
OK,
now you're really now you're really getting into it like you
Scott: Yep.
Nick: really care about the human condition.
And and I think it's going to be a wild, wild ride.
We're all we're going to be in for we're already in a wild ride. But I think I think you're right, Scott.
I think I think this is going to be maybe a new age of design.
Where we can now afford to all, we can all afford to do it well.
Scott: Yep. So there's a working group called Moosek, Methods for Understanding User Experience in Security Environments. It's out of the University of Pennsylvania.
And so they're starting to aggregate and install this as an ethos within academia as well as engineering focused companies.
So that's your Google keyword for the afternoon is Moosek, M-U-S-E-C.
Brad: Well, thanks for coming on,
Scott: Nick. Thanks for having me.
Brad: It's been thought-provoking today for sure.
For sure.
Nick: For sure.
And remind us, everybody,
Nick, where can people find you if they want to learn more about your services and doing design right?
Scott: Yeah, gauge.io is where you can find me and feel free to link in me.
I am visible and active on that.
Nick: We'll make sure to include both those links in the show notes.
Well, thanks again,
Nick.
Thanks,
everybody,
for listening to this latest episode of the How Many CTOs podcast.
And what do we say, Scott?
Brad: Smash that subscribe button.
Nick: Smash rate and review.
Scott: Found it.
Nick: Pound it.
All right. Thanks.
This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast was edited by Saffron Heptagal.
Our theme song was AI Generated by Brad.
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