Transcript: The Most Optimized Blue: Differences Between UI and User Experience Design with Nick Cawthon
0:00 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.
0:30 Brad All right. Welcome, everybody,
0:31 Brad to another episode of the How Many CTOs podcast.
0:34 Brad I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub, and this is my trusty co-host, Scott Porad.
0:37 Nick Hello, Brad.
0:38 Nick Nice to talk to you again.
0:40 Brad I took your name. I stepped on your name,
0:42 Brad didn't I? You usually say your own name.
0:44 Nick That's okay.
0:45 Brad Do
0:45 Nick You
0:45 Brad another.
0:46 Nick want to do it over again?
0:47 Brad No, we'll just leave it in. B-roll.
0:50 Nick This is the most gripping entertainment for our 39 fans out there.
0:55 Nick There.
0:55 Brad This is content.
0:56 Brad Anyway,
0:56 Brad we have a special guest here today,
0:57 Brad Nick Cawthon and Nick from Gauge.io.
1:01 Brad And I would love to have you introduce yourself and tell our many listeners what brought you here.
1:08 Scott Yeah,
1:08 Scott Brad,
1:09 Scott I'm taking a break from RSA. It's just down the street here in San Francisco.
1:13 Scott I've been to a lot of conferences at the Moscone Center and I've never seen one as big as RSA 2026.
1:19 Scott It is absolutely massive.
1:21 Scott It's taking up both convention centers,
1:23 Scott north and south,
1:24 Scott packed the brim with vendors and booths and the expo and must be 10,000, 20,000 people.
1:31 Scott So it's great to see the vibrancy in the community,
1:35 Scott both here as a native San Francisco Bay Area resident,
1:38 Scott as well as somebody who works in tech and has had a long.
1:43 Scott storied career in UX and how that applies to design, mostly for InfoSec, SecOps, and DevOps-based companies,
1:51 Scott some of whom had booths there on the floor.
1:54 Scott So yeah,
1:55 Scott that's my week here in lovely springtime of California.
1:59 Brad Love it. It's interesting.
2:01 Brad You have mostly done user interface design for InfoSec and security companies.
2:06 Brad That it's.
2:08 Brad Of course, everybody needs quality user interface design,
2:11 Brad but it's so it's interesting.
2:13 Brad Like I kind of think of the security stuff as like the more propeller head nerdy stuff.
2:20 Brad And is that where we.
2:22 Brad overlook design or what's your take on on how you how you kind of got there
2:27 Scott Yeah.
2:27 Brad in that space
2:28 Scott Well,
2:29 Scott let me take you way back to the early 2000s before maybe design-led companies were a thing.
2:35 Scott And there was a sense that it was by engineers for engineers and that made it.
2:40 Scott secure,
2:41 Scott robust,
2:42 Scott scalable,
2:42 Scott there was a sense that if it didn't look a bit off, then maybe something was a bit off.
2:47 Scott What really changed was the success of the iPhone.
2:51 Scott 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
3:03 Nick Yep.
3:03 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
3:17 Scott Design-focused companies or design-focused products can be successful and be something used at scale.
3:23 Scott And ever since then, it's been an evolving and moving target.
3:28 Scott And I see that as really the turning point from maybe it was hard on the eyes,
3:34 Scott 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.
3:49 Scott 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
4:14 Scott That is your weakest link is the sec ops professional,
4:18 Scott 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.
4:28 Scott Well, that's when fatigue and vulnerability begin to set in.
4:31 Scott So that's what I'd love to talk about today is how to design for the human factor.
4:36 Brad Fascinating.
4:37 Nick How do you design for the human factor?
4:39 Scott Yeah, it starts with research. It starts with not what technology can we slap on other technology and maybe solve a problem,
4:47 Scott but it's to understand where those laborious tasks are.
4:51 Scott I'll give an example of a burndown queue.
4:54 Scott A lot of companies all call out DataDog.
4:58 Scott 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
5:22 Scott 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
5:48 Scott 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
6:03 Nick That's a really interesting,
6:05 Nick I never really had that thought about fatigue.
6:07 Nick I have a job where I sit and look at a screen all day.
6:11 Nick than doing a variety of activities.
6:13 Nick Well,
6:13 Nick that's not entirely true.
6:15 Nick I'm mostly looking at video conference calls on Zoom or Google Meet.
6:19 Nick But in that context,
6:21 Nick I'm doing a variety of activities,
6:23 Nick conversations.
6:23 Nick I was just reviewing a document with somebody earlier today.
6:26 Nick I was reviewing a roadmap.
6:28 Nick We had an all hands meeting where I was presenting different activities, but I still get fatigued. In fact, today,
6:34 Nick earlier today,
6:35 Nick I had been in meetings from nine.
6:36 Nick 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
6:57 Nick Yeah. And how that fatigue can lead to, I guess, just sloppiness and errors.
7:03 Scott There was one. This is a related field. It's not info sex specific,
7:07 Scott but I'll do the analogy anyways.
7:09 Scott It was LinkedIn.
7:10 Scott 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.
7:22 Scott 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
7:48 Scott 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
8:14 Scott 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
8:23 Scott 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
8:49 Scott 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
9:14 Scott 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.
9:32 Scott So that's an example of we design with good intent of these many many lists of screens and again it's a
9:39 Scott It's an artifact of our DBA days where we would return a list of 100 and off it would go,
9:45 Scott but it also is a hard task to begin to sift through some of the noise.
9:50 Nick You just described two physical behaviors that cause fatigue,
9:54 Nick swiveling.
9:55 Nick and scanning.
9:56 Nick Are there other physical behaviors that cause fatigue?
9:59 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
10:20 Scott is that they've done very well and built their tall buildings and they'll not need to go into those kinds of reimagining.
10:29 Scott 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.
10:44 Scott Those are ones.
10:45 Scott 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.
10:54 Scott 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
11:19 Scott It's hard to find those who work in B2C companies,
11:25 Scott business to consumers,
11:26 Scott that have the same sort of mindset of SecOps B2B, I'll say,
11:32 Scott because oftentimes,
11:34 Scott as we saw with the 50,000 different vendors at RSA,
11:38 Scott is that your app,
11:40 Scott your utility is a chain of many.
11:43 Scott You are coming from one layer.
11:46 Scott 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
12:10 Scott and product momentum.
12:12 Scott However,
12:13 Scott when you look at SecOps-focused B2B companies,
12:17 Scott oftentimes the analyst wants to get in, find the answer,
12:20 Scott and get out as fast as possible because there's a fire or there's a threat or there's something,
12:25 Scott and they need that indexability to be crystal clear.
12:29 Scott 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.
12:39 Scott 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
12:56 Brad Nick,
12:57 Brad I'm having all these, I don't know if Scott,
12:58 Brad you're having the same flashback. Scott and I worked together years ago at a health tech company.
13:04 Nick Mm
13:04 Brad And
13:04 Nick -hmm.
13:04 Brad a lot of the things you're talking about,
13:06 Brad 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.
13:16 Brad And I'm struck by, as I listen to you talk about these common design mistakes,
13:22 Brad that's what I'm hearing you describe.
13:24 Brad I mean, I've been doing this for 35 years, like so many of the apps I've used.
13:29 Brad all have those same common design mistakes.
13:32 Brad I guess I'm just struck by,
13:34 Brad you sort of said, we kind of just have this database mentality,
13:38 Brad we're kind of just putting this crud layer on top of a database.
13:41 Brad How do we ever get past this?
13:43 Brad Like, why do we keep making the same mistakes?
13:45 Brad Is it we all just need to hire you?
13:47 Brad Or is it why is it that we all continue to make these same types of mistakes?
13:51 Scott Yeah.
13:52 Nick As an industry.
13:53 Scott Scott,
13:54 Scott do you have any opinions before I jump in and start talking?
13:56 Scott prognosticating again yeah
13:57 Nick Well, no, I was just thinking as an industry, we're making the same mistakes over and over again,
14:02 Nick but
14:03 Scott yeah
14:04 Nick I don't have any, I mean, I've got many opinions,
14:06 Nick but I don't have an answer to this question.
14:08 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
14:23 Scott we seat at the table.
14:26 Scott 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.
14:39 Scott It's gotten faster.
14:40 Scott It's gotten much more integrated with engineering. Again,
14:44 Scott our abilities to create a front end that is
14:47 Scott As we would want it to be in the last 12 to 18 months,
14:51 Scott the tools that we've used have been revolutionary to the point where my agency is launching things that weren't possible ever before.
15:01 Scott And I think historically it's thought as a soft skill and it's thought as an expensive,
15:07 Scott 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.
15:15 Scott And I want to implore that there is a difference between UX and UI.
15:21 Scott I have a client who should be getting back to me any day now in the healthcare space.
15:26 Scott 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
15:53 Scott Well, still am.
15:54 Scott For this contract,
15:55 Scott the CEO kept talking about UI,
15:58 Scott and I didn't correct him.
16:00 Scott I said, if you want it to be red,
16:02 Scott if you want it to match a brand,
16:03 Scott if you want the CMO to hand down what the mission and the vision of this new identity is,
16:10 Scott sure,
16:10 Scott we can hum a tune and make it look like you want it to look.
16:14 Scott 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,
16:26 Scott meaning we're creating system pattern libraries,
16:29 Scott components,
16:30 Nick Yep.
16:30 Scott UI elements that the engineers can now take and speed up their process and not slow them down.
16:37 Scott And then eventually to say, well,
16:39 Scott you really understand how people think about organization,
16:43 Scott taxonomy,
16:45 Scott clarity,
16:46 Scott workflow,
16:47 Scott what you should do is help us redesign this workflow so it doesn't take 10 steps.
16:52 Scott It can be something that we rise to the surface and make a lot easier.
16:55 Scott That's not going to happen on the first engagement, but I'm hoping that on the second or third that that will be.
17:02 Scott something they see value in so not everybody understands ux but
17:06 Brad Yeah, exactly.
17:07 Brad I think that's, you said that really well, like I, so many people think UI and UX are the same thing.
17:13 Brad Like, I can't count the number of times I've had to try to explain the difference between those two things.
17:18 Brad And, you know, it's interesting,
17:20 Brad 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.
17:30 Scott Mm-hmm.
17:31 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.
17:42 Brad They maybe had a strong design function,
17:44 Brad but they were product-led companies,
17:49 Brad and so the product owners kind of were telling everybody what to do, right,
17:53 Brad the engineers and the designers.
17:55 Brad I wonder if maybe this is that just another example of the same disease that you're speaking to,
18:02 Brad which is not really understanding the value of getting.
18:08 Brad UX correct,
18:10 Brad getting the
18:11 Nick Hmm
18:11 Brad sort of the human factor right.
18:15 Brad If you don't really value the human factor,
18:17 Brad then it's an afterthought for product as easily as it's an afterthought for engineering.
18:23 Scott Depends on the ethos of the company.
18:25 Scott I have a glutton for punishment. And so I like going to engineering-led companies. I feel like I speak that language fairly well.
18:31 Scott I'm technical in how I apply design.
18:34 Scott But engineering-led companies tend to be things that are built upon not a user's experience,
18:40 Scott but more on what would happen.
18:42 Scott 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
18:55 Scott And then subsequently,
18:56 Scott the designers are at the whim of product,
18:58 Scott at least in the organizations that I've worked with.
19:01 Scott And oftentimes,
19:02 Scott the chief product officer is the CTO.
19:04 Scott How many CTOs? I was hoping the podcast would answer that question.
19:08 Brad Ha,
19:08 Scott But
19:08 Brad ha, ha,
19:08 Scott there are other
19:09 Brad ha, ha, ha.
19:10 Scott companies in which that's not the case,
19:13 Scott where Airbnb is a design-led company,
19:17 Scott where it was here in San Francisco, two founders.
19:20 Scott 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
19:47 Scott 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
19:59 Scott And again,
20:00 Scott for another,
20:01 Scott for the third callback of RSA,
20:03 Scott just breezing through that conference room floor, I was like,
20:06 Scott 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.
20:25 Scott You know, we see this is from a personal perspective.
20:30 Scott 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.
20:51 Scott 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,
21:13 Scott if that rings any bells with you.
21:15 Scott Palantir and OpenAI have coined this phrase. They love using the military acronyms of Delta Team for deployed and such and such.
21:22 Scott 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.
21:40 Scott And then they're going to go back and prototype something out and problem solve and that group of engineers are going to take.
21:49 Scott take the task of user experience where I question is is what kind of training have they had to really
21:54 Brad Yeah,
21:54 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
22:14 Scott before that Yeah. so that was a long answer to an organizational question but um
22:18 Nick No,
22:18 Nick I think you've hit on at least a couple other topics.
22:23 Nick By the way, it only took 25 minutes before AI was uttered in this latest episode.
22:29 Scott that's
22:29 Nick Good job on that one,
22:30 Scott new nick. record it's a new record
22:32 Nick Brad,
22:33 Nick I've been thinking about a question you posed a few minutes ago,
22:35 Nick Yeah.
22:36 Nick which is why does the as an industry do we keep on making the same?
22:41 Nick 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
23:06 Nick a strategy they've chosen.
23:07 Nick Yeah, I agree with that.
23:08 Nick We have probably the most visible example in our industry,
23:13 Nick which is we have Apple,
23:15 Nick which has chosen to design for a strategy, and we've got Microsoft,
23:18 Nick which chose a developer for a strategy,
23:21 Nick right?
23:21 Nick First is I think a lot of companies aren't thoughtful about their strategy.
23:25 Nick They're just going for it.
23:27 Nick Which gets to the second thing,
23:28 Nick which I think the design first strategy, I guess they connect together,
23:31 Nick the design first strategy takes discipline,
23:34 Nick 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.
23:43 Nick for different reasons,
23:44 Nick are impatient.
23:45 Nick They're impatient because they're maybe burning money and want
23:49 Nick Capitalism.
23:49 Nick to figure capitalism is impatient.
23:52 Nick Capitalism
23:52 Nick Yeah,
23:53 Nick definitionally makes everybody impatient.
23:55 Nick okay.
23:57 Nick I think I get that. It's probably right.
23:59 Scott Specifically venture capitalism.
24:00 Scott You've
24:01 Nick Well,
24:01 Scott got runway
24:01 Nick venture
24:01 Scott maybe.
24:02 Nick capitalism is impatience on steroids.
24:04 Scott Yeah.
24:05 Nick So I guess that's it is that because you're impatient.
24:09 Nick Your companies aren't necessarily thoughtful about their strategy and because they're impatient,
24:13 Nick companies don't necessarily have the discipline to be design focused.
24:18 Nick Wouldn't you say that one of Apple's most amazing,
24:21 Nick like the legacy of Apple and Jobs is that he was they are the most patient company out there.
24:32 Nick They work on things and never going to let them see the light of day until they're designed perfectly,
24:40 Nick right?
24:41 Nick Like that is their – that's their ethos.
24:44 Nick So they're rocking it from a capitalism perspective.
24:48 Nick I mean they're one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.
24:53 Nick But they are unique in that patience and that willingness to hold.
24:59 Nick Until they feel they have the design right.
25:01 Nick And that allows them to charge a premium.
25:03 Nick So I guess maybe that fits into it as well, which is some companies have chosen a low price,
25:10 Nick low cost.
25:12 Nick 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
25:30 Nick 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
25:46 Nick 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.
25:53 Nick But but it does strike me that.
25:57 Nick 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.
26:02 Nick And I think because because because Nick, every every every expert in design I've ever spoken to in my career,
26:08 Nick they often are they feel like the gosh,
26:11 Nick 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,
26:21 Nick right? Jobs where like lives are.
26:23 Nick 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
26:34 Nick Mm
26:34 Nick yet I
26:34 Nick -hmm.
26:34 Nick am confident most of those systems are
26:39 Nick 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
27:01 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.
27:17 Scott I should have done the opposite.
27:20 Scott 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
27:46 Scott Let's just ask people and admit that we may be wrong about this, that,
27:51 Scott and the other, and that's a profound shift from the all systems go,
27:55 Scott fuck it, let's push it, to get to a reality much quicker.
28:03 Scott That takes, again,
28:04 Scott humility and a fallback to say before we start,
28:08 Scott let's plan and let's validate.
28:10 Scott 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.
28:29 Scott 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
28:56 Scott 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,
29:07 Scott 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.
29:18 Nick My sense, too,
29:19 Nick that I'm curious if you run into this.
29:22 Nick 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
29:37 Scott Yeah.
29:37 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
29:46 Nick Does the person get fatigued trying to approve all of the inbound requests from the dashboard?
29:53 Scott Yep.
29:54 Nick That's a measurable thing.
29:56 Nick And if you are willing to be agile about changing it a little here,
30:00 Nick changing a little there,
30:01 Nick you don't have to argue about it. You can measure it.
30:07 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.
30:22 Scott And she picked 44 different blues and ran A-B tests on which blue would be the most performant blue.
30:30 Nick Mm
30:30 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,
30:39 Scott you take a left or you take a right.
30:42 Scott 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.
30:51 Scott 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.
31:02 Scott 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.
31:20 Scott That's not something you want to see.
31:22 Scott What instead is the number of clicks to task where how can we make that easy.
31:27 Scott 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
31:53 Scott 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.
32:00 Scott And so to de-risk a dead-on arrival is a great measure of...
32:05 Scott user experience leading to strategy leading to risk mitigation and decision making.
32:11 Nick Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
32:13 Nick So a couple minutes ago, you mentioned AI and agents.
32:17 Nick So that does make me have a couple of questions that I'm kind of curious to get your take on,
32:22 Nick I
32:22 Nick Nick.
32:22 Nick was wanting to get into those. Before we do,
32:24 Nick can I say something?
32:25 Nick Yeah.
32:26 Nick I've got the title for this episode.
32:29 Nick queued up brad ready
32:30 Nick Yeah,
32:31 Nick what is
32:31 Nick for
32:31 Nick it?
32:31 Nick 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
32:39 Nick There
32:39 Nick make that
32:39 Nick you go.
32:39 Nick the title i just i just looked that up the
32:41 Scott Optimization, yeah.
32:42 Nick optimized blue
32:43 Nick 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
32:52 Nick Well, OK,
32:53 Nick so I have two questions that come to mind.
32:55 Nick The first one is I'm really curious about your take on can the problems of design,
33:02 Nick 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.
33:13 Nick 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
33:34 Scott Yeah, let me go to the second question before the first.
33:37 Scott My background is at companies like NPM.
33:40 Scott 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
33:56 Scott 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
34:17 Scott 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
34:39 Nick Yeah.
34:39 Scott i i canceled my open ai subscription yesterday yesterday
34:43 Scott 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
35:07 Scott 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
35:30 Scott But that doesn't say anything about how I got there.
35:33 Scott 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.
35:45 Scott So that's how products and technology evolves is that it typically goes from that blinking cursor into that UI.
35:51 Scott What we saw with Logly was the ability to visualize and see the abstract.
35:55 Scott 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
36:07 Scott And NPM was a whole different relationship management because,
36:10 Scott again,
36:11 Scott if you know about front-end development,
36:13 Scott these packages were all calling each other.
36:15 Scott 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.
36:24 Scott But when you started to evolve into an interface,
36:26 Scott that kind of visualization and display was really helpful.
36:30 Nick So wait, to boil,
36:31 Nick to sort of like.
36:31 Nick To summarize that, what I hear you saying is that some problems are just not well suited for text.
36:37 Nick They really do need to be visualized for the human brain to understand them.
36:40 Scott Absolutely. Good summary.
36:42 Scott You and I would make a good comedy team.
36:45 Scott You'll land the punchline. I'll do the setup and you do the punchline.
36:49 Scott And so your first question was around the patterns that are emerging.
36:53 Scott Design has spent the last 10 years creating pattern libraries without the understanding of...
36:58 Scott 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.
37:12 Scott At the same time, there were these frameworks like Bootstrap and others,
37:16 Scott React UI frameworks that were standardized patterns and tools. And I remember back in the early days of e-commerce.
37:23 Scott 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
37:49 Scott How do we create these analogies and metaphors for what's an adaptive world?
37:56 Scott 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.
38:16 Scott 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
38:42 Scott I
38:42 Nick Yeah.
38:42 Scott think that's the role that that is still going to be very much in demand.
38:45 Nick Yeah,
38:45 Nick Okay,
38:45 Nick totally.
38:46 Nick you hinted at the question I was wanting to get at,
38:48 Nick which is you said it takes two strokes to create a dashboard.
38:52 Nick Over the arc of time,
38:54 Nick my hypothesis,
38:55 Nick and I am not unique in this, I'm a follower even,
38:59 Nick the cost of code is going to get cheaper.
39:01 Nick And so do you think that's going to make it easier for companies to emphasize?
39:07 Nick quality UX or more valuable
39:09 Scott What was the paradigm that I heard?
39:11 Scott It was a conversation this morning about if everybody's doing it, it increases the demand to maintain.
39:19 Scott It's like if I cleaned fireplaces with the chimney sweep,
39:24 Scott I was a chimney sweep.
39:25 Scott And then all of a sudden a new wave of heating the company and where maybe one in five houses burned wood.
39:32 Scott 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
39:59 Scott 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
40:25 Scott Got it generated.
40:25 Scott But if I was a developer or a front-end engineer,
40:29 Scott if there's more code being generated,
40:31 Scott 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.
40:42 Scott Somebody's got to figure out how to manage it and to clean it.
40:47 Scott So that's kind of yes and no to your question of yes,
40:51 Scott it is going to be more commoditized, just like design is.
40:55 Scott And then back to your UX,
40:57 Scott 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.
41:05 Brad Yeah, well, I guess where I'm thinking is if all that let's just let's assume an extreme example.
41:11 Brad 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.
41:19 Brad And so maybe that's why we've had all these same user interface foibles,
41:23 Brad so to speak, is because
41:26 Brad The companies were focused on the software engineering part of it, not on the design of it.
41:30 Brad Well,
41:30 Scott Mm
41:31 Brad if
41:31 Scott hmm.
41:31 Brad your cost of software engineering,
41:32 Brad let's just say effectively comes to zero or very cheap,
41:35 Brad that's not where the value is any longer. The value will come from the design.
41:41 Scott Something better,
41:41 Scott something more important.
41:42 Brad In theory, we'll see more companies like this is my hypothesis as we've been talking.
41:47 Brad Do you think we'll see more companies like Apple and Airbnb,
41:51 Brad not less?
41:51 Brad Yes.
41:52 Scott And I want to expand it not just to what you see on the browser screen,
41:56 Scott 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.
42:13 Scott And it's a notion that goes back into the strategy of, you know, what are we wanting to present?
42:19 Scott 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
42:44 Scott 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.
42:52 Scott But when we look at service design as an end-to-end customer experience, it requires human factors,
42:59 Scott it requires understanding of behavioral science.
43:02 Scott where the frustration lies,
43:03 Scott what can we make easier?
43:05 Scott And that is something that, again, is adjacent to product design or interface design,
43:12 Scott because now you're starting to interview and respond back and have a sense of empathy for those who you are designing for.
43:19 Nick And I guess I was the way I was thinking Scott's question was following would be something like this,
43:24 Nick just like in a world where.
43:27 Nick I used to have to hire 10 engineers to build what one designer could come up with.
43:34 Nick Now I only need, you know, one engineer for one designer.
43:38 Nick That means I can hire five designers and five engineers,
43:42 Nick 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,
43:50 Nick fewer number of engineers producing.
43:52 Nick 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
44:05 Nick Why don't you give me five different implementations of these five different designs and I'll
44:09 Brad Mm
44:10 Nick put them
44:10 Brad -hmm.
44:10 Nick in front of, you know, five different test groups and I'll let you know which one works, right?
44:16 Nick Well,
44:17 Brad Yep.
44:17 Nick in the past it would be like,
44:18 Nick Nick, I can't make five different versions of this thing.
44:21 Nick That's going to take me, you know, five times as long.
44:23 Nick But now I can turn around and in the same day that I make the one version,
44:26 Nick I can give you five versions and you can come back and tell me which one worked.
44:30 Brad And now we can build five versions.
44:32 Nick Yeah, now we can, where we couldn't before.
44:34 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.
44:44 Scott on their own um you know design is now something we're all swimming in the same pool is
44:50 Nick Yeah.
44:50 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
45:11 Scott Because in my career,
45:13 Scott I've had product managers.
45:15 Scott I'll give you a nickel for every time I've heard it. Start sentences with,
45:19 Scott I'm not a designer, but what I did, I created something,
45:23 Scott a wireframe in PowerPoint.
45:24 Scott I wanted you to look at it.
45:26 Scott and then you know same thing is true with
45:28 Nick Yeah,
45:28 Scott me it's
45:29 Nick by
45:29 Scott like
45:29 Nick the way, now Scott and I are constantly hearing,
45:32 Nick I'm not an engineer,
45:33 Nick but I build this in Lovable.
45:35 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
45:52 Scott we can augment or amplify that with our new tools.
45:55 Scott I think that's all I keep telling myself as I cry
45:59 Nick Yeah.
45:59 Scott to sleep every night.
46:01 Nick Well,
46:02 Nick this has been a super interesting conversation,
46:05 Nick Nick.
46:05 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.
46:17 Nick You know, I love, you know, when you describe yourself as an ethnographer, then I'm like,
46:24 Nick OK,
46:25 Nick now you're really now you're really getting into it like you
46:28 Scott Yep.
46:28 Nick really care about the human condition.
46:31 Nick And and I think it's going to be a wild, wild ride.
46:34 Nick 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.
46:39 Nick I think I think this is going to be maybe a new age of design.
46:43 Nick Where we can now afford to all, we can all afford to do it well.
46:50 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.
46:58 Scott And so they're starting to aggregate and install this as an ethos within academia as well as engineering focused companies.
47:07 Scott So that's your Google keyword for the afternoon is Moosek, M-U-S-E-C.
47:13 Brad Well, thanks for coming on,
47:14 Scott Nick. Thanks for having me.
47:15 Brad It's been thought-provoking today for sure.
47:16 Brad For sure.
47:17 Nick For sure.
47:18 Nick And remind us, everybody,
47:19 Nick Nick, where can people find you if they want to learn more about your services and doing design right?
47:26 Scott Yeah, gauge.io is where you can find me and feel free to link in me.
47:30 Scott I am visible and active on that.
47:32 Nick We'll make sure to include both those links in the show notes.
47:35 Nick Well, thanks again,
47:36 Nick Nick.
47:37 Nick Thanks,
47:37 Nick everybody,
47:38 Nick for listening to this latest episode of the How Many CTOs podcast.
47:41 Nick And what do we say, Scott?
47:42 Brad Smash that subscribe button.
47:44 Nick Smash rate and review.
47:45 Scott Found it.
47:46 Nick Pound it.
47:47 Nick All right. Thanks.
47:49 Nick This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast was edited by Saffron Heptagal.
47:54 Nick Our theme song was AI Generated by Brad.
47:57 Nick Please follow us on all the social media platforms at at how many CTOs pod.
48:02 Nick You can find us on YouTube,
48:04 Nick LinkedIn,
48:05 Nick Instagram,
48:05 Nick Facebook,
48:06 Nick Threads, X,
48:07 Nick TikTok,
48:07 Nick and Patreon,
48:08 Nick or at our website at howmanyCTOsPod.com.
48:13 Nick And remember to rate,
48:15 Nick review,
48:15 Nick and subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.