Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This season's special series celebrating ten years since the launch of Material Design closes out with Rich Fulcher, former Google UX director and Material design lead. Fulcher remembers the career-defining journey of creating Material, what it was like to make beauty a UX priority, how to pressure test a system, and what he's learned about world-building across disciplines. Today, he's creating board games, continuing to apply the design-thinking and problem-solving skills developed during his time at Google.
Leave us a rating, and subscribe so you don't miss new episodes with creative practitioners across disciplines.
📻
Design Notes is a podcast about creative work and what it teaches us. Hosted by Liam Spradlin, a Senior UX Designer at Google focused on the philosophy of the user interface, the show features conversations with people from unique creative fields, uncovering what inspires and unites us in our practice. Tune in to learn how UX design connects to creative work across disciplines and around the world.
Find episodes on your favorite platform at design-notes.show
1
- Design Notes is a
show about creative work
and what it teaches us.
I'm your host, Liam Spradlin.
In this episode, we're
wrapping up a special series
celebrating 10 years since
the launch of Material Design.
And joining me is one of
the original team members,
former UX director
and material design lead Rich
Fulcher, who has now moved on
to another passion, the
design of board games.
In the episode, rich and I talk about
how material shaped his
career, what it means
to make beauty a priority
in a business setting,
and what he's learned about world building
across disciplines.
We had a great discussion
and I'm so glad to close out this special
miniseries with Rich.
Let's get started. Rich,
welcome to Design Notes.
- Hi, it's great to be
here. Good to see you
- Again.
I am, it's so good to see you
and I am really glad to, yeah.
Have you on the show as
part of this, this series.
I think this will be the final
episode in the M 10 series,
so we are
- Bring it in the closer.
- Yeah, exactly.
I actually want to ask, first
of all what you're up to now
and also the journey that got you there,
including your time and material.
- I didn't know what a designer was.
For a long stretch of my
life, I was doing things
that were related to design as a, as a kid
I was, you know, drawing
maps or drawing cartoons
or doing different
illustration work, you know,
building out for role playing
games, all these, you know,
modules and dungeons and things like that.
And populating it with
encounters and enemies.
But from a school perspective,
I was always interested in
kind of math and science.
I jumped into computers at a
pretty early age.
My dad had one of the
first personal computers,
the Timex Sinclair 1000,
which was quite ancient.
And then I had, you know, a, a series
of computers from there.
But in college I studied computer science,
I studied electrical engineering,
computer science engineering only.
Came out kinda later in my program
and when I went to graduate school I was
studying computer science.
I was focused on computer graphics
and ray tracing and things like that.
But along the way I, as part
of being a working grad student,
I taught non-major classes in the
computer science department.
So I was teaching students how to use Word
or Excel, you know, products at that time.
And just watching these
otherwise perfectly
intelligent college students,
flail in front of these
unresponsive ill designed interfaces.
And I got really interested
in, well, who are the people
that make these things?
And I took my first class in
human computer interaction,
not even a design class, more
of a research oriented class.
And then from there it
just kind of continued
to be this area of, of focus
for me where I was like, well,
maybe I'm not gonna be a programmer.
Maybe I'm front end engineer
and I'll, you know,
build these interfaces.
But I just kept GE digging
into design and design
and design, learned that word
and kind of pushed on that ever since.
I had a number
of small jobs doing like
front end logistical software.
But then I got a job at America online
in its heyday.
And I worked for, as a designer in their,
what they call the community.
They didn't even call it
a division, it was just,
they called it a dt, a small division.
I know, it's so cute.
And I worked on a bunch
of products like a LL Instant messenger
fledgling blogging product at the time.
And then by that point
I was just, you know,
very much a working interaction designer.
I would go on to work at TiVo, a startup
that was later acquired by Dell.
A few kind of interesting places.
But then by 2009 I found
myself with the opportunity
to join Google and specifically
to join the Android team.
And then from there I spent my next 12
or 13 years as part of
Google in various ways.
One of those was material design,
which we'll definitely talk about.
When I left Google, I kind of
moved into quasi retirement.
I'm no longer work in tech,
but you never really leave design behind.
Once you are a designer
and you have been doing
design thinking for decades,
you never get to shed that.
You still look at the rest
of the world as a series
of design problems or
design opportunities.
I've found that to be very true.
So in terms of what I'm doing now,
I'm doing a few different things.
I'm doing a lot of volunteering work.
Some of that has been
as an elections official
for the county here in California.
So I ran a in-person voting
center in the last election
and in the prior primary
election earlier this year.
And that is just an amazing
bit of kind of system
and service design to look at as well.
Just kind of all these voters with very
distinct needs for what they're,
they're hoping to get out
of in-person voting or assistance there.
And just trying to build systems that
feel very secure and very
trusting for the user,
but also can kinda meet a lot
of different tasks that they have.
So that's been part of
what I've been doing
and that part is I've just
embraced my lifelong kind
of interest and passion
into board game design.
So I've been doing that in a way.
I've gotten my first title
accepted for a publisher.
It'll be a couple of years now still to,
to see it hit the market.
But that's been a really fun exercise
'cause it pulls together all the threads
of design in my experience.
You know, I'm doing interaction design,
building out the
mechanisms and the systems.
I'm doing, you know,
technical writing in
composing the rule books.
I'm doing some graphic design,
I'm doing a little research
every time you run a play test.
So it's been a fun way
to continue in my career in a way that
doesn't feel nearly as professional.
- Yeah, okay.
First of all, you have
to come back on the show
when the game launches
because I think there's like
a whole, a whole episode,
multiple episodes there.
Sounds good. Second, at
the beginning you said that
for a long time you didn't
know what a designer is
and now you cannot stop being a designer.
So I want to get your take on
what being a designer means.
Like what, what it means generally
or what it means to you and your life.
- I think the quick foundational
definition is a designer
is a problem solver.
And I know that's just over broad,
but it's, I always come
back to in that first,
you know, HCI class that I
mentioned this kind of definition
of the field, which was
we're focused on users
who use tasks to accomplish a goal
and in support of that
they have some tools
and they're operating in a context.
And that, like those five
things I think drive a lot
of definition of not just design,
but of user experience broadly.
Who are the users? What are the big things
they want to achieve?
What are the smaller
things they're trying to do
to move towards that direction?
What can we create for them
and what is the context
in which they're going
to use that thing we create?
I don't know, I even when I'm not
actively working like in tech on design,
I find myself coming back
to those, it's not natural
for people to talk about their goals,
but you, you kind of need
to get at that a little bit
to understand, well, which set
of tasks should you be doing to get there?
And things like that. And
I think context is super,
super important and is
one of the easiest things
to kind of ignore.
Like what else is happening
with this user right now?
Not like intrinsic to who they are,
but what else are they experiencing?
Are they rushed, are they worried?
Are they operating something
that's very unfamiliar to them?
So I, I think all
of those facets come into play
when I think about design.
- Yeah, I can't help but,
but like the, the ideas of this kind
of straightforward human
computer interaction definition
plus the concept of like
watching people try to use Excel
and the concept of role-playing games,
like these are like smashing
together in my head in terms
of like how contextual and
contingent these experiences are
and like all, all the
different factors that
could be influencing
it that you're kind of,
you're like occupying a
certain mindset that allows you
to uncover that.
- Absolutely. I mean I use
the word conductor a lot
to talk about systems and,
and kind of designers.
Like, it may not even be that we're,
we're building each thing
that's in front of the user,
but we're the order we
present things in the way
that we're trying to
understand where the user is
before they engage with the tool at first.
Like there's a lot of that that
isn't just making the thing
that goes into understanding
its broader kind
of applications and and sense of views.
- Okay. So we are here today
because it is material's
10th anniversary Woo hoo.
All year long. But you
were actually at Google
for several years before
material even started up
and I want to get your perspective on
what design was like at
Google before that moment.
- Sure, I'll caveat that.
I think my experience might
be a little bit different than
others because I did join
directly into Android.
Definitely had a little bit
of a reputation within
the company of being a,
the pirate ship amidst
the, the flotilla of,
of other products where it
just behaved a bit differently.
And if you're around in 2009
and you're looking at the kind
of the competition in the smartphone
and smart device space, there
was just a lot of liberty
to focus heavily on design
and user experience.
So I think Google
as a whole when I joined
certainly is very engineering
forward company in a lot of ways.
And I think that was
utterly key to so much
of its early success.
Android felt a little
bit different though.
It was very much close
partnership across a
relatively small team between
design and engineering.
I can cast my mind back to when I came in
for my first interview in person
and I wound up, you know, part
of the way Google approaches
interviewing is they bring in a
cross-functional team to talk to you.
You're not just a designer
talking to other designers.
So I was talking to an
engineering manager on Android
and I think maybe we were like the second
or third question in
and he was like, well what
would you change about Android?
And I said, well I really
think the backs stack
and navigation behaviors are a little bit
confusing for users.
And then he is like, well what
would you change about that?
And then we spent the next 35
or 40 minutes like on
a whiteboard, walking
through all these kind of
thorny edge cases around,
you know, what does it
mean to go back and forward
and when do you kind of do
a lateral move when you push
and pop things on onto
the stack of screens?
And I remember leaving that
interview thinking, man, I,
I think that went well and
I know I wanna work here
because that was a like
really clear signal to me
that there was this
opportunity for engineering
and design to do really
wonderful work together.
So that was Android. So I
think across the company
we had a wonderful slate
of user experience
designers and researchers.
They were really pushing to do
innovative, groundbreaking work,
but I think there was a fair amount of
constraint on them.
You know, I think it was
just kind of the identity
of the company at the time.
I don't attribute any kind
of ill will to any of that,
but I think there was this
reputation that Google lived to
that it was like, yeah,
design is important,
but we're gonna be engineering first
or we're gonna be product
and and business first.
And I think that started to change
and I think Android was part of that.
But I also wanna credit, you know,
the leadership at the top.
I remember there's this, there
was this practice in Google
of a weekly all hands, you
know, meaning like thousands
of people could tune in
and see this event, this,
this TGIF was the, the nickname for it.
And we had one where a few
UXers, myself included,
were invited to kind of
speak on the topic of beauty.
And this was very much
brought by our CEO at the time
who was just like, yep,
we're an engineering company
but we really need to think about
how do people perceive
the things that we make?
How do we not just kind of
pass the toothbrush test
of, do we make products
that users use twice a day
to make some meaningful
difference in their lives,
but how do we make it pleasurable
to use that toothbrush?
How do we make it a rewarding experience?
And that in retrospect, it
didn't feel like it at the time.
At the time it felt like, oh this is cool
that we had that opportunity.
But it was a little bit of a
pivot point for the company
where I think it was like,
okay, if you were a, you know,
UX or in a meeting two
weeks after that, two months
after that you could be like,
but do you remember when
Larry told us about beauty
and how important that was?
And you just had this kind
of new wedge to kind of press
for a little bit more,
not necessarily change,
but just more, more time and opportunity
and space to really take design seriously
and design quality seriously.
And material kind of emerged as a kind
of a second moment following that,
that there had been some
groundwork that had been laid
and then we had this opportunity
from teams across the
company from not just mobile
but from web as well to try
to take a bigger step in that direction.
- It's striking that the explicit pursuit
of beauty was not always
part of, you know,
it wasn't always a given
when making products,
- It just wasn't.
And you know, it's interesting
to try to reflect back
and you look back at, you know,
a Google search results page from
12 years ago or something like that.
Not only is it, you know,
that different Google
logo at the top of it,
but it is very much the classic,
you know, Ted Blue links
and the, the box above
it super valuable, right?
There's a reason Google became
such an incredibly valuable
company and a resource
that people used every day
because it did a thing to exceedingly well
and directly, But it also did it in a very
sanitary way.
It was very, you know, clinical
or Spartan, you didn't really kind
of emotionally engage with that.
It was just truly a doorway
onto something else.
And I think you look at a, a
search results page right now
between, you know, how much
imagery it might include,
how many different facets
of possible four directions
that it can hint at, you know,
maybe has an AI summary of,
of response to your question.
And it's just so much richer now
and it just affords so much
more of a sense of opportunity.
You know, back to those
users tasks and goals.
We were presuming that, you
know, the question meets with,
you know, a one size fits all response
with the 10 blue links
and now it's this possibility of like,
well maybe you're interested
in this direction,
like what's the first
thing you can tell us
after your, your query that
that's gonna help steer
us towards something
that's gonna be good for you?
- Yeah, that, that reminds me of
a conversation I think I had
with Zach Gibson a couple
years ago where he told me
that material kind of thought about
the company's mission statement of
organize the world's information
and make it universally
accessible and useful.
I can't believe I pulled that out nicely
- Done
- First try.
But thinking about that mission statement
as a design challenge,
that the design is not just
enhancing the experience or
like helping you do a task,
but it's interacting with
the fundamental nature
of the information
itself and how accessible
and how useful it is to you.
- Yeah, I remember we had a bunch
of slides early in
material that were taking
that mission statement, you know,
printed out in proper type
and then you'd go to the next slide
and we just had a little
carrot at the end of it
and then handwritten in
and beautiful that that didn't have
to be like an afterthought
that that could be just as core
to what it means to serve
the users in that way
and to provide that information.
That was always a kind of a rallying cry
for us in the early days of material.
- I can't help but fall
a little bit into the
philosophy of the situation.
Also I want to dig into what are some
of the constituent parts of
beauty, especially when it comes
to software?
- That's a great question.
I'm just gonna start rattling things off.
- Great.
- Absolutely.
There's just, you know,
the aesthetic beauty of it.
So let's start there. Let's
start from the surface.
But as you dig past that,
it's, well not just like,
does it look good static?
How did it appear? How does it exit?
You get, start to get to
transitions, you get to animation,
something beautiful might be just
how efficient was it?
It might be how did it work for me
and my set of contextual
abilities and constraints.
So I think beauty has so many facets. Yes.
Aesthetic, yes, kind of functional,
but also accessibility, universality,
you know, the kind of immediacy
of understanding, you know,
intuitiveness if we want to call it that.
And I think some of that is every
discipline kind of has
their own model of what,
what beautiful is, including engineering,
including a product.
And that lens is really just one
of, do I really appreciate
the way this thing was made
for that, that lens that I
am, that I'm applying to it.
I guess I'm coming around
to beauties in the eye
of the beholder, but I think
there's that aspect of like,
what are you bringing as
the person experiencing it
that's going to spark that
reaction of beauty to you.
- Yeah, there's, there's
a, a strong like subjective
or emotional component there.
- Yes.
- I think
getting back into the system
itself, in my conversation
with Bethany, she told me that
in the beginning of material
you were working on navigation
and patterns on a small three person team
with her and Dave Chu. Is that right?
- Yes.
- What was that like as, I mean first
of all to be on a team with
Rich Vulture, Bethany Fong
and Dave Chu is like a dream.
- Absolutely.
- But being on that team,
taking on like such big
chunks of the system,
like what was that like?
Did you have a sense of the kind of scale
and also the implications
of the work back then?
- We had a good sense of the scale
that kept expanding on us
almost on a weekly basis it felt
like, but we knew it was large
and definitely ibid by going
from kind of just Google to,
for Google and for the rest
of the world to build all
of their interfaces in.
So it got big, it was a really
wonderful, exciting, scary
period of, of design work.
I think especially for that team
as being interaction design focused.
We were in a place of reacting to a lot of
the kind of conceptual visual work
that had already been achieved by the team
and which was super excited.
We were, you know, thrilled
to to kind of jump in and,
and bring our lens to
bear a little bit more,
but thinking about, you know,
even calling it navigations
and patterns, I, I
think just fundamentally
we were trying to systematize
to rationalize all this
wonderful creative output from a
bunch of different minds in a bunch
of different application
contexts, both real
and imaginary to turn that into something
that could actually have coherency across
applications.
I know when you had your
conversation with, with Bethany,
there was a lot of discussion about kind
of the the mechanical operation of,
of things at the component level.
And I think the same is
true at the system level.
We spent a lot of time thinking about
what the properties of material,
what we call, you know,
paper at the time would
be how can it operate?
How can it split or heal or raise
or lower in the Z plane,
when can it shift,
could it fold, could it bend?
You know, just trying to
understand from this kind
of amazing outpouring of design effort
that had already occurred.
Okay, well what are the rules
that actually bind this universe together?
What's gonna make it feel
like a functional universe
that has some degree of
consistency as opposed to just,
you know, a series of wonderful
but maybe too disparate
from each other experiences.
I would hear authors talk
about, you know, world building
for, for fantasy or science fiction
and it's always just like,
well what are that core set
of rules that under
undergird this, this world
that they're building
that give it a coherence
and that they're gonna
animate kind of the,
the other things they wanna
do within that context.
And I think we really thought
about the work in that way.
- Yeah, it, it reminds
me, I had a conversation
with Adrian Secord for the show recently
and we got to talking about
creating kind of, you know,
the interface as like a
a pocket world like yeah.
In terms of how important it is to have
internal consistency so that you can kind
of like orient your things
yourself and things like that.
And it strikes me that
working on a system level
to create that kind of coherence
or yeah, that, that kind of
orientation that you also have
to embody it or instantiate it somehow.
Like creating, especially for
something like navigation,
creating kind of a test ground
or like a portal into
that world where you can
see how it's going.
What was the process
like specifically on kind
of the navigation and, and
the things that connect
all these principles
like throughout an app?
- Yeah, I, I really agree
with that perspective.
We focused a lot on
what we call pressure testing the system.
So it was very much, okay,
here's a bunch of directions.
Let's build things that feel
like end-to-end experiences.
And so we used the, our shorthand
was, you know, vignettes.
So we were like, okay, we're
gonna tell a short little story
inside this application that
shows this task for this user
just to kind of illustrate not
just what do these individual
screens look like,
but what does a coherent set
of actions across it look
like And then we're gonna make
another vette in a different
context than another
and another and another.
Do those all feel like they're
speaking the same language,
not just visually, but are,
does the navigation feel the same?
Are the scene to scene transitions kind of
relating to each other?
And that was a critical part of
how we evaluated basically
every design decision
that we were making.
And once we built out those
vignettes, then you're like,
well what if the floating
action button worked in this way
or had this size, okay,
put it across all the
vignettes, let's look.
And we intentionally tried to pick things
that would be broadly representative.
So there was, you know,
a communication task,
a navigation, you know vignette,
a composition vignette,
a more playful thing,
a simple info lookup.
We tried to kind of cover a large terrain
of possible task types with
the way that we selected those.
It's never gonna be comprehensive,
but at least it's giving
you a meaningful test bed
and you start to understand
where the riffs start to come in
where like, well this is
working really well for this set
of tasks,
but this one over here,
it just doesn't feel like
it's landing, which is okay
as long as you find
another alternate approach
that still fits within the system
that lands in that context.
So it was something
where we got to the point
where we like knew the names of these apps
and we used it again for later
versions of material as well.
- And
- For these, you know, fictional
but realistic apps that we
construct, we like knew them
as not just their brands
but we, we never built
these apps in many cases
but we just kinda knew what they were
and what every screen was
and it's like they existed
sufficiently in detail from the
for for a designer to engage with.
- Yeah, there's something there
that I think is really important
to focus in on, which is
that you created a set of vignettes
that were like realistic product cases.
I mean I've looked back
through the documentation
like in many cases they were
really well fleshed
out like parameters for
what the product is like
what the brand is, all of that stuff.
But importantly,
and interestingly they
were not Google products.
Can you talk about that decision?
- So initially they were,
our first set was very
much just Google products,
but then we realized we're
doing a disservice here.
We're like just focusing on the world
as it is and just our world.
So we knew we needed to broaden
and then we very consciously said,
well let's pick brand expressions
that are almost antithetical
to Google's in some way.
Let's pick products that are in spaces
that Google isn't competing within.
And that was a very conscious
decision again towards
that pursuit of how much
of the terrain do we think
we can cover with a good set
of representative vignettes
that is still large
but manageable, you know, a
dozen different vignettes to try
to represent hundreds of apps.
It's a stretch or thousands
of apps or tens of thousands.
But there was still enough
and there was enough variety within
and we'd occasionally add
something if we really felt like
we had a, a gap that
was a blind spot for us.
- Was there anything from that process
that really surprised you?
Like once it was built out in such a
tangible kind of realistic way?
- I think the more seriously
we took the vignettes,
the more we saw the need for
customization within the system.
Like the earlier versions
of material don't
have the later versions
than the material shape
or color systems or any of that.
And the vignettes were one of the early
things pointing us
towards, you know, we wish,
we just had a couple
of levers here for how
to approach this if we could
just move a little bit outside
of this defined color system, if we could
bring a little bit more
of the brand to bear by,
by using shape in this way.
So that was I think a
really early signal for
what would drive a lot
of M two and and forward.
- I want to, I wanna get into,
in kind of a broader sense
how this experience of building
out material design kind of
informed or changed your
practice as a designer.
- I think a couple of things come to mind.
The first is,
and this is maybe a comment
that just will feel ridiculous,
you know, now that it's 10 years on,
but like we were just living
in a different world of,
of interface design that was
very like, go to this screen
now, go through doorway
and present this screen.
And that was just the state
of application design, a lot
of web design, even a lot of
mobile design at the time.
That's why I was having
that conversation at
my interview about like
navigation and back stacks.
'cause it was all about
I don't get from one
screen to another.
And because we were leveraging
so much excellent work in motion design
and transitions as a core part
of what material was going
to mean, that really adjusted my thinking.
I was gonna say broke,
let's be more polite.
But it, it moved me to a more,
it's not that we have to draw
or design to this screen then that screen,
but we can have a more fluid
exploration of like, okay,
how does the context
change back to context
to present the right tools
back to tools for the user
in a way that maybe
doesn't feel like they walk
through this doorway and now
they're in a different room
because the cognitive
load of that is real.
Like every time it's like
whole screen goes away,
a new screen comes back,
the user has this moment
of like, where am I now?
How do I get back to where I was?
And we really wanted to
make much more gentle transitions to help
the user more readily understand
how the context had changed around them.
Oh, you hit that floating action button
to compose something, well that
button's going to, you know,
expand upward and that's
gonna be the, the kind of edit
or the transition that
happens into that next scene.
So it really changed
my thinking, you know,
I was writing specifications
as an interaction designer
that was just like, okay, here's
this screen now here's two
or three pages of breaking
down everything that happens,
then we do another screen and that,
and that just didn't apply anymore.
Like we had to entirely rethink, well
how are we communicating
design in this model
where things are just kind of
scaling, growing, shifting,
expanding, there's lots
of kind of interim states
of the screen, but we're not
rejoining the whole screen.
We're just kinda building more
complex patterns within it.
So that was very much a, this is great,
this is feels like a very
powerful way forward,
but a bunch of the old tools
that relied on aren't gonna
serve us going forward,
so we're gonna have to
adjust our practice to,
to account for that more.
So that was a huge change for material.
You know, I'd been a practicing, you know,
interaction designer for, you know,
well more than a decade at that point
and it's like, well nope,
you're just gonna have to
a lot about what your,
your day-to-day work is
like. Which is exciting.
- Yeah. The the word model
really stands out to me there
because there's, there's a big part of it.
I think I remember hearing Mattias
back when material launched
and I was just a
wide-eyed agency designer,
like taking it all in.
He talked a lot about user intent
and how the user is in
control of the interface
and how important that is
for helping people understand things and,
and how, yeah,
making the interface is
like helping someone create
that map in their head.
- It's also very consciously
trying to flip the relationship
of like, you're the user
going into this place
and you're experiencing it
and you're kind of to your, like walking
through a an environment note,
you're kind of subservient
as the user to that world
that's been built for you.
Like it's an opportunity
but it's also a cage.
It's this Like you're
bound to whatever the way
that's constructed and material
wanted to really focus on,
well how do you make
the user feel empowered?
And part of that is you take an action
and that changes the space.
You didn't leave the space
but what you did caused
it to be, you know,
transformed in some way.
And all the way down to the like, well
how do we have animations
that radiate from the user's touch?
Like that sense of empowerment
went all the way to, well
what if the touch their
finger touching glass
or their, the click of the, the
mouse pointer was the driver
for how energy gets
imparted into the system.
And that's the trigger
that animation stems from.
Yeah, it was a very conscious choice
that we became a kind of a rallying point.
- How do you think about that?
Like something that
that, you know, I'm, I'm
designing screens all day,
throwing up like thousands
of rectangles on the board,
but I'm always conscious
of this, this boundary
that you mentioned like the,
the glass of the display
or the surface of the screen, especially
as we're talking about the
interface as an environment
and mental modeling and everything.
How do you think about that
as a constraint on the design?
- We, we tried to look for ways to kind
of break a little bit outside
of that thinking for material.
When we were trying to kind of
rationalize all this system,
we, we had this conceit that
the entire world should be able
to live between the palm of your hand
and the glass at the front
of the phone so that you know
how many every millimeters of distance
is the full like drawing depth of
what you can see on the screen.
So we try to, you know,
imagine, well what's
really happening inside
of that, that world.
I remember running down to
the local hobby shop partway
through the material development
and I just picked up a bunch
of wooden shapes, a bunch
of different colors of paper varieties
of thicknesses just like scrapbooking
paper and things like that.
A few like round wooden discs
that became floating action
buttons and things like that.
And we would just kind of
physically play with those bits
of material and we'd, you
know, take an exacto knife
and kind of slice it down the
center and we'd get some tape
and connect it back.
And we really wanted to
kind of rationalize that
the whole micro universe
that that pocket world
inside that space.
I remember when we did the first
reveal of kind of early material thinking
to the teams outside
of the material teams.
So the application teams that were like,
we hear this thing is
coming, what is this thing
that you've been working
on that we had lots of kind
of beautiful work we could point to,
but we also made a point of
getting an overhead projector,
you know, one of the,
a camera posed above a,
a flatbed surface where you can just kind
of project what's happening on that.
And we'd take all those sheets of paper
and those, we'd have them stacked up.
We knew so many sheets
of a sticky note were this much in Z
height and things like that.
So we'd actually like build it up
and we would be like, well okay, this is
how material behaves,
this is how paper works.
And we would be physically
moving those things around,
seeing the shadows they create,
seeing how they lift or move
or pass under each other
and just kind of trying
to get other designers.
That shorthand that we had
developed on the team for
how we had conceptualized the
space was an important thing
for us to communicate very early on.
- Speaking of other designers, I'm curious
how you think material changed other
people's design practice?
- I think it really helped
reinforce the movement
toward design system that was kind
of already a little bit in place.
I think we had had pattern libraries,
component libraries, we had
brand guidelines, visual guides,
like those all existed.
It was often atomic where
it was like you'd have one
of those or you, you might be
in a company that has a set
of brand guidelines
that's over in one place.
They have a pattern library
that's somewhere else,
they have a component library
that's somewhere else also.
So we really wanted to pull
that together into something
that felt like a comprehensive system
that could have married all
those, those parts together.
We were adding in that
focus on transition,
on scene setting on choreography,
which was new very much in
a lot of ways we're trying
to pull in more guidance around
accessibility that you know,
might have been another separate segment
in the past as well.
But I think even more so was the sense of,
I, I think there had been a
movement of like, oh yeah,
you should get a design system
if you're talking to somebody
at starting up a new product
and maybe they're starting
up a small UX team.
That idea seemed very out of
reach for, for a lot of teams.
It's like, well that
seems crazy expensive in
terms of our work
and engineering's work to
realize something like that.
What we wound up building, we
didn't know it immediately,
but in material we were building a system
for building design systems.
We, we were building
something ultimately have
enough flexibility
and like if you move years down the line
that's getting into different subsystems,
it's getting into design
tokens or variables.
But is the like, okay,
here's a baseline for you
that you can customize
your heart out on top of it
but still have something
that feels very robust foundationally
but bespoke for you as
you, as you employ it.
And I think that was part of
what made material revolutionary.
- Yeah, that that also really
makes a connection in my mind
between what we were saying about the kind
of user's experience
and how their intention shapes
their experience of an app.
It really highlights that
materials users are not just
users, they're also like other teams,
other designers and engineers.
- We talk about the onion layer of users
that we have for material.
So there was like the stewards
of the system at the heart
of the Onion, you know the people
that are all building it
directly, that the material team.
And then there's the teams
in product areas at Google
that cover a number of different products
but they're focused on coherency
within their product suite.
So maybe that's the team
that's responsible for drive
and docs and sheets or
something like that.
Then there's the designer for
an individual product, whether
that's at Google or elsewhere.
And then finally layers
and layers out is the actual
end user of that product.
And we had to account for
thinking about users at all kind
of layers of that, you know, set
of concentric spheres.
How do we make sure
we're building something
that can be used by that team
that manages multiple apps
but is also valuable for the
designer who's doing something
that's an important
extension of the system
for their specific application context
and how does it still feel
coherent to a user who's using
40 different apps across
their device that are all tied
to this foundational system.
- Yeah,
- As I say, we understood scale, we knew
that we were biting off
a lot when we did this.
- Yes,
- Yes.
- I also wanna know how
working on material, you know,
influenced and shaped your journey
beyond being an interaction designer
to being a design leader and beyond.
- You know, I came to Google
as an interaction designer a few years in.
I started doing people management largely
of other interaction designers.
We started material, we had
that, you know, tight team
that we talked about of
interaction leads or designers.
But I think one great virtue
of my time on material was I,
as a people manager, I
got to have the luxury
of managing people with very
different expertise than I,
you know, it's one thing to
kind of lead a team of people
where your own experience in
that field is like
immediately helpful to them
and you can help them solve problems
or see different ways
of thinking about that
and you can kind of nudge
them in interesting ways
and maybe they're following
a career progression
that you've walked yourself.
But once you start leading
people where, you know, for me,
you know, managing a
motion designer, managing
writers a various bands, right?
Managing UX program managers, it's
at one level it's just humbling
because you become aware of like
how much you just don't know.
But it's very exciting
because then you're like,
okay well this is great.
I get to learn all about this
discipline from someone on the
inside of it and understand kind of
what their tension points are
or what's kind of blocking
them in their work
and how I might be able
to help unlock that.
So it's great if you're
a very curious person
because you have this exposure
to all these other people
that are kind of really
weighted into something
and you get to see like at
least the tip of the iceberg
of their processes, which
is always fascinating.
And then I guess my other
takeaway is then it's like,
well this is a design
problem on in and of itself.
Like just how do I, how do,
how do we best organize teams
to make use of all these proficiencies?
What should the interface of our team out
to others look like to
engineering, to product?
How do we partner
with different specializations like
research and things like that?
So that was always very interesting.
And then you start
to see even like the longer
term series of challenges.
'cause you don't want to
be just looking at the
problem in front of you.
You want to be helping to lead the team
towards some more distant goals.
And For me that was very much
this process of like, wow,
we're gonna build this,
you know, design system,
we're gonna design this
design system that seems hard.
And then you go a little bit further out
and just like, well we're also
gonna have to support this
with a robust set of
engineering components
that actually make this
practical for everybody else
to realize the things that
are in this design system.
Well that seems hard even harder.
And then it becomes, well we,
you're gonna have to make sure
that all these many different
teams at the company
and even beyond our company are able
to fruitfully use this design
system to meet their needs.
Well that's hard. And then
you go even further still
where it's like, well,
and ideally they're not gonna have
to like invest in a different
design system two years
down the line, three years the line.
So how do you think about
building in this in a way such
that it is truly organic and sustainable
and accommodates the best thinking from
everybody else who's
using the system in a way
that they feel ownership of it
as opposed to just the small team.
So like this, this series
of very much people
and people interaction problems
became part of the legacy
of my experience on material.
- Before we close, I want to get back
to your game design
and you don't have to reveal anything,
I don't want any spoilers,
but I wanna talk kind
of qualitatively, you said
that earlier in your journey
you were involved in game
design as well and now you are
gearing up to publish a game.
And I'm interested in how
you reflect on the experience
of designing a game, having
passed through this like
large, like huge design
system project at a huge
company with huge constraints.
How you passed from that into
game design where you see
differences, similarities, how it has felt
to you on a personal level to
work on something like that?
- Yeah, I mean I guess the
biggest difference I'll start
with is how uncollaborative
an exercise it is
compared to everything in
my professional career.
It is very solitary work in a lot of ways
of just like I, I have this
vision for this thing I'm trying
to construct what do I need
to do to build that out?
What's new skills do I need
to learn to get me a little,
you know, closer to what
that idealized version is?
And absolutely like
that'll change as it moves
through publication and,
and kind of more hands come in
to bring their, their expertise.
But just at the level of initial
construction and pitching
and even play testing, it's very much a,
well, I guess I'm just in charge
of this world, which is a,
a pretty unfamiliar feeling
compared to, you know,
the rightly collaborative
work that I engaged in for
so much of my career.
So that's one notable difference.
I guess a similarity is I think about,
I can't not think about systems.
So for a game you're kind of,
for the type of game I've
been working on, it's a kind
of game where there are different stories
that could be told within the game.
So what might get referred
to as scenarios where, okay,
at the start of this version of the game,
this player's gonna have these pieces,
you're gonna use this board
and this other player's
gonna have these pieces
and here's the rules that
they're gonna use to interact
that could tweak the
rules in different ways.
So when you're building those scenarios,
that's really the game,
that's the experience
that people are gonna sit down
and have when they play the game.
But behind all of that
is the system, well,
what are the rules, the
pieces, the boards, all of that
that you can take
and you can assemble
together in different ways
to build different
stories, different games.
So that has been the kind of
place where I fall back on many
of the things I learned in material.
It's like, oh, I'm gonna need a way
to pressure test this system.
So I better build out at least
a couple of test scenarios
that I can play quickly
that are gonna let me know
if this rule is working,
if this component is
fitting in where it needs,
I'm gonna need to think about like,
what's the total complexity of the system?
Like how many words are is it gonna
take to explain this thing?
What do people already think
they understand about the game
based on other games that they've played?
So there's so much of,
of that where I feel like
a privilege of being able to
employ the many lessons that I,
I picked up at Google.
- That's really cool. Well, as I said
before, once the game comes out or shortly
before it comes out maybe,
and we have to have you back on the show,
- That would be delightful.
- Rich, thank you so much
for being with me today.
It's great to close out this
series with your perspective.
Like all the guests that I've had on
and many others, you're one
of the people on material who
I really respect and was
really inspired my own
journey. So thanks.
- Thank you so much Liam.
And it was a, a part of, part
of retiring was also the
realization that, you know,
Google had been the place
and the teams that I had worked with
and the others I'd collaborated with,
where I had just done the
best work of my career
and I just couldn't imagine a finer set.
The material team is a
very, very special team
and I, I really appreciated
all the, all the years I got
to spend working with them.
- It's beautiful. Thanks Rich.
- Thank you.
- You can subscribe to Design
Notes on YouTube music,
apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you're listening right now.
If you like the episode, pass it on
to a friend and leave us a rating.
Stay tuned for more conversations
with creative practitioners
across disciplines
that will help us learn
piece by piece what inspires
and unites us in our work.
And as always, thank you
so much for listening.