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Get a seat at the table and build the design career you want. This podcast is for designers looking to break in, level up, and take control of their careers—whether you're freelancing, climbing the corporate ladder, or just trying to get noticed. Every two weeks, we dive into career fundamentals, design best practices, and the hottest topics in the design community.
But there was definitely two camps in the room. One was I'm so annoyed about, like, AI is really messing things up. Everyone around me is trying to do my job. They think that they could just... You know, they ask Figma make to to spit out an interface and it's crap.
Danny:And I'm I'm really frustrated. And one person told me they were leaving their job because of this kind of the the alienation that's being created. Think particularly product managers and, you know, they're And
Tyler:we're officially live.
Nick:We're officially live. Exactly. I mean, this is just an experiment. Morning, Tyler. Happy Thanksgiving.
Nick:How are you?
Tyler:Happy Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey Day. Thank you. As we call it. Thank you.
Nick:Yeah. I mean, I I don't... We don't have tank... Thanksgiving here at all. But how is it?
Nick:Is it is it the same as, you know, the American Thanksgiving?
Tyler:Not quite. But also my family has a has a different tradition in terms of what we eat, but we still come together as a family. An excuse to come together, I'd say.
Nick:Nice. Okay. That sounds that sounds great. But, I mean, I now understand why you have the week off because probably it's, you know, to make it fit with Thanksgiving.
Tyler:Yes. A 100%.
Nick:We had Smart.
Tyler:Fried chicken, mac and cheese, and cornbread. So can't say it was cool. Delicious. Was my favorite.
Danny:Nice.
Nick:I mean, that sounds great. You know, special episode today because we will have our second ever guest on the show. Me too. Here. Yeah.
Nick:We do. We have Danny Hope with us today. Hello, Danny. Hey, Danny. Hey.
Nick:Thank
Danny:you for having me.
Nick:Yeah. Well, you're very welcome. You you are in Brighton in The UK?
Danny:Yep. South Coast Of The UK. Yep. I'm Yeah. I'm I'm...
Danny:I can just about hear the sea sometimes from from my
Nick:home office. That sounds very nice and very expensive, I imagine.
Danny:Yeah. It's... Yeah. I don't know where it isn't expensive at the moment in The UK, but it's it's fine.
Nick:Well, okay. Well, I mean, that's... It's it does sound like... Every now and then, I hear a very loud scooter driving through the street, which is not as dreamy as hearing the sea. So you are in Brighton, and you run UX Brighton.
Nick:Tell us a bit more about that.
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So, yes, I'm the founder of UX Brighton, and I and I curate our annual conference. We've been going for a pretty long time.
Danny:We... I think we we were one of the first UX place names back in 2008. I think we... And quickly followed by UX Copenhagen, UX Hong Kong, and... Yeah.
Danny:We we we run a a conference down here. We started off as a kind of grassroots thing, you know, little evening events. It was gonna be like a pub meet where I just get around the table, but it turned out that, yeah, a lot of people wanted to talk about UX in 2008. And so, yeah, it turned into a thing. So here we are.
Danny:Yeah.
Nick:Well, that's nice.
Danny:Yeah. So we Yeah. We we kind of had, yeah, we we had all these ideas about how we do all these different things. We'll do field trips. We'll do, you know, we'll do talks.
Danny:We'll do book book, you know, book clubs and that. We did quite a number of of sort of smaller events around around the the the main event, but really, the main event is is kind of where it's at these days. We do a few other bits and pieces like job boards and and that as well. But, yeah, the main event is is this conference that's coming up in in a few weeks. And so, yeah, my my head's all full of full of full of that that kind of that kind of stuff at the moment, getting to speak to lots and lots of interesting people.
Danny:Yeah. It's quite a privileged position. You get to speak to so many people, are willing to get in touch about their ideas. And, yeah, we were saying before the call, it's like so many conversations almost like, we should have recorded that. That would have made a good podcast.
Danny:No. But, yeah, that's that's that's what UX Brighton is to me at the moment. It's just lots and lots of, yeah, fascinating conversations with with with potential speakers and...
Nick:Yeah. And what's what's the the overall feeling? Like, when you talk to all these people, like, how do they feel about UX in the industry, and and are there any any patterns or recurring topics that you feel like, hey. That's interesting.
Danny:Yeah. Recurring topics. That's a that's a good question. Well, I I mean, most people are coming with with an idea in mind so that, you know, that that the people that I speak to, I... We get together around particular concepts, particular ideas that that they think are important, you know, across sort of research...
Danny:A lot of research, some design, and a little bit of kind of dev stuff and a chunk of project management stuff. But it's... Yeah. It's either things that methods that they've tried out or, you know, concepts they think peep... More people should be aware of.
Danny:As for the feeling, so, yeah, like gauging the temperature, I suppose. The last time I really had an opportunity to do that was we had a little kind of... I think we called it a vibe coding show and tell. So it was like we we do these little, you know, micro events where people sort of talk about projects they're working on and things they're trying out, you know, the products they're using, whatever it is. But we did a particular one about...
Danny:Around Vibe Coding. It's very well subscribed, but there was definitely... I saw it as like two two camps almost in the room. One was I'm so annoyed about, like, AI is really messing things up. Everyone around me is trying to do my job.
Danny:They, you know, they think that they could just... You know, may they ask Figma make to to spit out an interface and it's crap, and I'm I'm really frustrated. And one person told me they were leaving their job because of this kind of the the alienation that's being created. I think particularly product managers are, you know, they're they're, oh, I'll just do it, you know, this kind of DIY attitude. And and so there's, yeah, it's completely understandable sort of set of themes there.
Danny:But then on the other side, it's like, oh my god. I can do so much now. I can build things. You know, you're hearing this from people who maybe knew a little bit about development. Maybe they've been a webmaster in the past like me.
Danny:But, yeah, it's like, I I can build things now. I can put my ideas into, you know, out into the world, my own products, or I can just prototype a really high level really quickly and do... You know, increase the quality of my design work, or I can, you know, get AI to do the the ops part of my research and my planning and things. So there's a kind of empowerment that people are feeling from these new tools, but then there's also... Yeah.
Danny:Some people are being displaced by them. And I'm I'm on both sides of that of that situation. I definitely got a foot in, you know, one foot in in each in each of those camps. But, yeah, there's there's there's excitement and apprehension, I would say.
Nick:You know? Yeah. Why the the difference is in in this room also. Like, if you want to talk to someone who's really, like, an expert and really pro prototype and pro vibe coding, you should talk to Tyler.
Danny:Nice.
Tyler:Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm I'm deep in the thick of it. But I'm curious, like, on the on the first camp that you were speaking about where people are feeling like they're gonna be, like, this place. Like, I'm...
Tyler:I never quite understood that sentiment. I'm just curious. Like like, what are what are what are people's fear? Because, like, we've seen all over the Internet, whether that's Twitter, LinkedIn, like, these, like, vibe coded or AI kind of UIs, and they're not really that good unless you're really good at that art direction piece. Like, what are they...
Tyler:Like, what is the trigger? What do they think is being replaced? Because there's more than... Like, that's one part of it, like, spitting out a screen, but there's a lot to UX in general. Like, what is Yeah.
Tyler:Maybe you can double click on what the actual fear is.
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. So... Well, one's a very personal experience. So I was made redundant a few months back.
Danny:I was in a development, like a sort of programmer centric company. Everyone was... It was it was a company full of developers, and I was the the UX person. And the part of why I wasn't sort of kept on board was, oh, hey. We've got Claude Design now.
Danny:And it was like, well, there's quite a lot more to UX than just, you know, than cranking out prototypes. But their understanding of UX was at that level of like, oh, UX means you're you're you're a wireframe monkey. You're, you know, you're just cranking cranking out screens. And as long as it looks like a screen, as long as there is what they would call a UX, which, you know, we can go into whether that is a UX. But as long as a a screen gets cranked out, then that is the design done.
Danny:That's... I mean, it's not actually a new problem. Design has has always been a qualitative improvement, whereas something like programming is a... Is is quantitative or is is more observable. If the program isn't running, you know you need a developer to help you get it running, whereas, there always will be a design, and the quality of that design is not necessarily so easy to measure.
Danny:So there are definitely situations where, you know, that there is there is genuine displacement happening. The... I think the the person that I was talking to who said that they had or were about to quit their job, it was a similar thing. I think they... A lot of a lot of stuff was being created by people around them.
Danny:A lot of design collateral was being created by people, others on their team, nondesign type, so like project managers and and I think maybe even a CEO or something. And that that creates... Again, it's not so much a fear. It's a it's a genuine... It's a phenomenon that is occurring.
Danny:And it's like, what do you do with all that? You know, when someone just comes and thrusts their laptop in front of you and says, hey. Look at these designs. And you say, can you tell me what these are for? What what problems they solve?
Danny:It's like, no. I just thought they might be useful. I just vibe coded them. It's like, that's really hard to do. It's very time consuming because you gotta really dig into, like, what are you showing me here?
Danny:So there's... You know, when it becomes easy for for people who don't know your job to kind of produce a ton of stuff for you to review, then it... Just... Yeah. That's a time vampire, and you can't concentrate on what you're really there to do.
Danny:I think... Yeah. I I I think that's the that's the sort of thing that people are getting annoyed by. I don't know if it's fear. I don't think...
Danny:And it's not a sort of Terminator kind of fear, but I think it's a kind of, you know, business as usual can't happen because we're in what I... What I've just learned from one of our speakers is is a liminal period, a period of change. Right? But I think... Yeah.
Danny:When when things are really changing, when you're... You know, when when the old ways of working are dying, if you're not sort of quickly jumping into pursuing the new ways of working, you're gonna be in this weird limbo space where your feet aren't on solid ground. And, yeah, that's that's very, you know, it's very anxiety inducing. But I find the way past that anxiety is to is to... Is the...
Danny:Like, the more I use these new things, these new ways of working, the the less anxious I feel about it. Mhmm. So like yourself, Tyler, I I I love creating creating stuff, vibe coding or prompt engineering or whatever it's called today.
Tyler:Fair. Yeah. We have... We had that kind of period where my team had the similar thought, but then where... I think we're now we're more embracing everyone prototyping.
Tyler:With one rule in mind is that everyone can prototype, but the thing that you create goes through the same scrutiny that a design review would go through. That way, like, yes, you can produce a screen. Cool. Nice. But that thing that you're passing on is basically just like some kind of communication method.
Tyler:Like, here's an idea. This is how I visualize it. But we're not taking that thing as like the thing we're building because we've done... We we had an experiment where we did that. We kind of pushed that version through, but obviously, they didn't think about the edge cases.
Tyler:And then a flow was inevitably dropped and not thought about because we were blinded by this artifact that was given to us. So, like, the rule of thumb now is, yes, anyone can... And we embrace everyone creating a thing or prototyping, but we are gonna essentially take that thing, put it in the trash, and then basically start from the idea versus the actual artifact that you're giving us.
Nick:Very mature way of putting it. Right? The way you're saying it's like it's... I've seen so many places where the founder of a company, five code, is a thing. And then because he's the founder, can just bypass all the rules.
Nick:You you return on a Monday after a nice weekend, and then you see the thing you worked on the week prior is just different now. You know? And then the founder is like, yeah. I mean, this is... I was just sitting at home and I was like, well, you know, maybe what if he changed this thing?
Nick:Then he just Yeah. Does it. You know? That's very annoying.
Danny:Yeah. I think... Yeah. If it's not if it's not couched in those terms that Tyler laid out of, like, it's part of... It's an utterance in a conversation or it's a sketch, it's just a very high fidelity sketch, then, yeah, it's like...
Danny:And and I think part of why it's annoying is because it comes down to responsibility. So, essentially, if you're... If you still are expected to be responsible for the... You know, how how users receive the product as a UX person, whether it's a researcher or a designer or whatever, if you're expected to take responsibility for that and yet someone else is creating it and putting it out without your involvement, then that's a that's a a huge mismatch. And, essentially, you you kind of you kind of have say, well, we can do it your way, and I, you know, I don't know the ins and outs of the philosophy behind the design.
Danny:I don't know if it's gonna hold together underneath. I don't know if it's gonna support all the edge cases. But if you're gonna force it through, that's fine. I just can't take any responsibility for it, and that's not a healthy... You know, you don't want employees who are refusing to take responsibility, but then again, you don't wanna be the employee having to take responsibility for something that you don't understand.
Danny:So there's definitely a... It's very understandable that, yeah, that would be would be irritating.
Nick:Yeah. Yeah. There are lot of challenges there, and I I do get people that aren't sure anymore if they want to stay in their field.
Danny:Yeah.
Nick:Because it it is a big difference. And, you know, and then I think one or two episodes ago, Tyler and I, we we discussed something along those lines. And it's about the thing... It depends on the thing you enjoy most about UX. Like, is it the the crafting that you're zooming in and pixel perfectness and just making something look good?
Nick:Or do you more enjoy the strategic part, you know, the zooming out and thinking and discussing and facilitating and that kind of stuff? If you really like the first, the actual drawing, you'll probably not like the the direction this is all heading into. Yes. It's more... Yeah.
Nick:Write send, wait, look at the thing, write some more. You know, it's it's you're you're stepping back and just looking at things appear on your screen. It's it's different and, yeah, difficult also for many people. So I I do get it. So these are topics topics people will talk about in the conference.
Danny:Yeah. Hopefully. Yes. They are. So I I guess the...
Danny:It it it suddenly sort of came to me that this this is what we should do the conference about. So we always we always curate it around a theme, and it's like... It's it's a really cool thing being able to sort of think, oh, I'm I'm kind of overwhelmed by all the stuff I need to learn in this this year, this this year's example, you know, all the different methods that are that are emerging. So, oh, hang on a second. I can just get loads of people to come to me with their ideas about how we should work, and I can pick the things that sound interesting, and we can put them on the stage, and we can learn about them that way.
Danny:That's an amazing... Yeah. I guess you guys maybe have a a similar sort of feeling. Like, when you host these things, it's it's like you you get to you you get to allay your own fears or learn about the... Whatever topic is is top of mind from from Oh, yeah.
Danny:You know, whoever you think is the best person, you know, around on on that thing. So so, yeah, we've got people talking about... So there's there's... We're kinda splitting it in two. There...
Danny:There'll be half the talks are almost like matching the the the sort of the design process. So there's, like, figuring out user needs, coming up with sort of product definition, kind of PM sort of stuff, doing designs, then evaluating those designs. So we've kind of got... You know, if that's if that's the loop, if you like, we got like four speakers that are talking about how to... In blunt terms, how to get fast at each of those each of those things, but in a way that doesn't lose lose quality and where you don't end up creating slop and where you don't end up having to use hundreds of tools that are sort of all doing stuff for you but not quite solving the problem.
Danny:So... And... Yeah. So that's that's that's the that's a big part of it. And then the other talks are maybe a little bit more conceptual.
Danny:Yeah, we can get into the details of all the talks. But this in general is what we this is what we wanna want solve with this event. And a couple of years ago, did... We we curated around the subject of AI, and I think one of the things we wanted people to to to to sort of leave with is this sense that if you if you just grab hold, you know, grasp the nettle as it were, try the things, you know, really jump into it, you... The anxiety that we were feeling as a, you know, as an industry for want of a better word kind of goes down.
Danny:So we wanted people to come in, Maybe they're feeling anxious, but we want them to go away at the end of the day feeling a lot less anxious and a lot more excited about these things. And it, yeah, it's hard not to just constantly talk about AI because it is, you
Nick:True. It's true. That's true. We have an episode coming up where we are going to force ourselves to not talk about AI the whole episode.
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, the talk that's the one of the talks that's furthest from there's there's two actually that are really not anti AI, but they they don't don't go into that at all. One of them is about designing for when when the human is the is the product. So what strange way of putting it.
Danny:But you know when you go into certain shops, you go into them, and you you can tell that the staff have been trained to respond to you in a particular way. Mhmm. That interact... Particularly, you know, the Apple shop is is is probably one of the best known. Whether you whether you whether it's to your taste or not, you can tell that that's been thought through.
Danny:It's been designed. You know, there's the the the sort of what do they call the captain or the concierge type roles, and then there's the the the techies who you only get to interact with if you've got a booking or whatever. That... And and how they took... You know, they ask you about your work or what you've been up to or whatever it is.
Danny:That's been designed. But but... So... Yeah. So so one of our returning speakers, Patrick Jordan, is gonna be talking about how do you design those kind of human to human interactions.
Danny:So that's... That couldn't be further away from the from the AI thing. But I I... But funnily enough, I I I sort of think that that the prevalence of technology is kind of raising the value of human to human interactions.
Tyler:Yeah. 100%.
Danny:You know? You go into, like, some chain fast food place, and there's screens you have to interact with. It's horrible. I'd rather pay maybe twice the price, but go and sit down and be waited on by a human being and, you know, pay for their wages and but not out of any altruism. It's just nicer.
Danny:So I think there's gonna be, you know, there's gonna be the cheap tech way of doing things, and then there's gonna be the human to human sort sort of way of doing things. I don't know. It's... I've got some some kind of hunch there.
Tyler:No. I I 100% agree. I think, like, the the moat of a future company is gonna be, the customer service they really invest in. Like, we can... Yes.
Tyler:To save costs, you can invest in automation. But, like, at the end of the day, like, if I'm calling a hotel and I get a robot to handle my check-in or if I have a question, I'd 100% rather speak to a person and feel like I'm being catered to because I'm spending money on whatever product or service. And I... If I feel that human connection, that'll that'll sway me to be a loyal customer to this company versus some that automated majority of the process.
Danny:Yeah. And and and, you know, maybe pay a premium for that. But, yeah, if if peep... If if that's if that's the case and people are prepared to to pay a premium for that kind of service, then, you know, there's... That perhaps there's a little bit of an answer to, you know, what do you...
Danny:What happens to some people who are displaced by technology. It's like, well, maybe they can go into... You know, maybe there can be a concierge of a hotel or or, you know, a masseur or or, you know, I don't know. Like, it's all very speculative, but...
Nick:Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean, it's good to good to remember it's all speculative because people want to make you believe, like, they they know everything. You know?
Nick:It's all going to be done in eighteen months. You know? That's what they've been saying for five years. So
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. All these developer jobs that are that that are supposedly being lost, but then there's more developers now than there were two years ago, I guess, from some source or other.
Nick:Yeah. I mean, you you can, you know, you you can fire all your people and and use AI to be, more or less as productive as you were before. You can keep your people and give them the tools they need to become extra productive. And I think that second option is is way more useful for everyone compared to the first one.
Danny:So maybe one of the new skills is, like, how do we get, like, a little bit more ambitious about everything we do? You know, instead of working on one product, how do we work on 10 products? Or how do we make one product 10 times easier to use? Or, you know, how do we, as individuals, like, whatever researchers, developers, designers, whatever your role, how do you, yeah, elevate your expectations for yourself? And it's it's not as easy as it sounds.
Danny:It's like, well, you just just just describe a bigger thing, we'll build that. It's actually
Nick:Mhmm.
Danny:It's not habit that I think people are in, you know, like scaling up their ambitions.
Nick:I I I think that's that's partially out of their control. Like, if you are a designer in a, you know, medium plus sized company, like, you have a manager and that manager has a boss and, like, somewhere higher up the ladder, they see this thing called AI and they're they're like, well, we can be so much more efficient now. And then it just rolls downhill like you have to be super quick now. You have AI tools so we can do everything in two weeks instead of four weeks. Even not really realizing that most of the UX job is outside of a computer.
Nick:It's you walking around with your user in their environment, learning, asking questions, doing workshops, that kind of thing. And then, I mean, you can resist. You can rebel against that decision, but you might lose your job. People don't dare to take that risk. I think many designers want to be way more ambitious, but I think they're forced from higher up to, you know, just do the Yeah.
Nick:Speed thing only.
Danny:Yeah. I... Yeah. And this is this is not a new thing either. I remember seeing an interview with a musician.
Danny:I think it was maybe the late seventies or the early eighties. Her name was Laurie Spiegel. Really interesting. She was one of the sort of pioneers in electronic music, and so she had all this... She had a, you know, a fascinating studio that was just like huge computers and musical instruments.
Danny:Anyway, there's an interview with her on YouTube where the interviewer is struggling to understand that what the technology enables is a different type of music and a different approach to music, and that... And and they just keep asking questions about, oh, it's things like, oh, it's gonna get it's gonna get faster to write sheet music now. And it's like, no. We we don't do that anymore. We do this totally different thing, but they they they...
Danny:You know, it was a struggle for them to comprehend this this new thing. That was quite natural, I suppose, but it's it's quite amusing. And, yeah, we're going through that, aren't we? I suppose in a way, it's good that you have these... You know, the rate that technology changes or it's like multiple exponentials compounding each other.
Danny:It's crazy. But then the rate that, you know, big organizations change at is, you know, we know that that's... They they're famously slow, but maybe that's... Maybe the... A benefit to that is it it means that everyone isn't suddenly jolted out of one way of of being and suddenly, you know, all landing in another way.
Danny:It's like society isn't gonna... It's not like a you know, an earthquake with a sudden shift. It's like some parts are moving fast. Some parts are moving really slowly if they're moving at all. And in between, there's...
Danny:You know, you can you can shift your employment around and, yeah. Maybe it's not such a, you know, terrifyingly rapid thing when it actually comes out into the into the the workplace.
Nick:Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Things you do not understand or see very closely are always scary. In this case, AI thing is changing my job. Well, I don't want to change my job.
Nick:I'm used to my job. But then once you start experimenting with it, you will have this model. Actually, it's kinda useful here. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. So Yeah.
Nick:I mean, yeah, that that... That's really, I I think, a very important thing to consider. Like, if you give it a shot, it's probably not as scary as you think it is.
Danny:Yeah. And and, I mean, you can... I think that ambition thing that, you know, like, it's got a bit of a it's a bit, you know, as the ambition makes you look pretty ugly as a radio headset, but this is a different kind of... I I think there's a way of putting it. So if what we're doing as, you know, we're we're thinking about the user experience, we're we're trying to...
Danny:Essentially, we're trying to help people. So when you're ambitious about how... You know, about helping people, that's that's... I think that's actually a nice thing. But you...
Danny:But, anyway, if you if you wanna sort of practice thinking bigger and moving faster and and and delivering more, but your organization won't let you, there's always, you know, side projects. And I think,
Nick:you know, some of
Danny:these side projects now, I mean, I... I've not really sort of lent on a portfolio very much, but these days, I think my my side projects represent me better than a portfolio. So I think there's... Yeah. It's it's...
Danny:There's a couple of benefits. One, it's really fun to experiment with stuff and if you can carve out the time in your personal life to do that. But then, yeah, it could actually, you know, potentially lead to better, more forward thinking, faster work... Workplace kind of opportunities maybe.
Nick:Well, I think so.
Tyler:I'm curious there. Like, that... That's interesting because what made me think about when you're talking about, like, being more ambitious is, like, historically, when we're building products or things, were historically thinking about, like, what is an MVP? What is that minimum amount of features that will get us through the door? And then we'll iterate to get to, like, the desired state.
Tyler:Like, you'd imagine something like, what's the bar? Like, what... Like, is the new bar just, like, better than an MVP? It's like, how can you create a thing that actually competes with something that's in the market? Is that, like, one level of being more ambitious?
Nick:Before we continue, if you're feeling stuck in your design career or if you feel like you're doing solid work while no one really notices, we've got a bunch of extra stuff on our website.
Tyler:We're building a community for product designers to actually learn, grow, and get hired, not just scroll and collect more inspiration.
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Tyler:All based on real world experience from both of us. No fluff, just what actually works.
Nick:Check out designtablepodcast.com. The link is in the description.
Danny:Better than an MVP. I mean, I suppose with an MVP, you always want it to be you always want the you always want it to be as minimal as possible. Right? You you don't wanna put effort into, you don't wanna put more effort in than the experiment requires. You wanna get your you wanna get your information.
Danny:You wanna, you know, you wanna run the experiment, with with the least effort and the most reliable data, I suppose. So I guess there'll always be a place for an MVP, but maybe you would do an MVP for a for a car instead of a skateboard or something to use the lean sort of imagery. Maybe you would, like, you know, jump into something that's a bit more, you know, a bit more feature rich or or, you know, feature complete. No. That's a bad way of putting it.
Danny:Maybe, yeah, maybe you would just try and build something that's in a different class. Like, yes, skateboard and car, I think, is probably where, you know, it's like, yeah, we wanna... If if the problem we wanna solve is having fun outdoors and... Yeah. Okay.
Danny:Skateboard's great. But, actually, if you're trying to get to work, skateboard's not a great way. So let's design a... You know, we'll come up with this idea for a thing called a car, and and we'll be ambitious that way. So we'll try and solve a bigger problem or, yeah, something that would have been out of our reach before.
Tyler:That's a good No.
Danny:I I think that'll always be a... Always be an MVP.
Nick:You have to be very aware of... Especially in larger corporations where people will abuse the MVP as a way to just cut corners. You know?
Danny:And Yeah.
Nick:I found it very, very challenging, but also rewarding when you succeed to really push on this MVP. Like, once it's done, you know, we have to start working on a v 1.1. Like, we cannot just abuse MVP, build something shitty, and then hop over to the next thing. You know?
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. I think the the the minimum versus minimal thing of, like, oh, let's build a minimal product. It's like, no. It it's gotta be the minimum that is...
Danny:It it might be you've gotta do loads of work. It's gotta be amazingly finished and polished. Maybe that... For some situations, that's the minimum you can get away with. But, yeah, like, yeah, let's just release a shitty product is is often is often what people mean.
Danny:And then you don't wanna be that person who's like, oh, well, actually, MVP stands for this and this and this, and you're supposed to it's supposed to be understood in the context of hypotheses, and and you just... Yeah. You end up... Yeah. That could be quite a frustrating situation as well, I suppose, can it?
Nick:Yeah. Oh, yeah. It is. I'm I'm sure Tyler runs through this all the time. You know, made for you a good snowy sense.
Nick:I'm I'm a freelancer, so I'm... I mostly work with individuals, so I don't really have that that challenge. But I do remember it from my my in house days. Tyler, do do you have that that MVP abusements? Do you, like...
Nick:Do you see that often or at all?
Tyler:Yeah. Well, I mean, we tried to rebrand it. I think... And also some of the industry is using the word MLP instead of MVP, just like the most lovable product. And the idea is basically to communicate that it's not the minimum.
Tyler:It is it is a desired state where a customer would not just like and find it useful, but also would fall in love with the experience that you've delivered. So it's like using MLP versus MVP, but then you have to make sure that you're holding that standard because MLP can be abused as well and and really be used for what actually is an MVP. So it's it's a tough one to navigate for sure.
Danny:Yeah. I guess it's... Yeah. It's a slightly jargon term. And if you have people on the team who are already in the spirit of the thing, they just pick up the term and run with it.
Danny:It can be quite hard to bring in the whole the whole of Lean. Not that it's a huge thing, but, like, there are some, you know... Understanding that there's this older idea of the learning organization, but I... Understanding the idea that, you know, your first version is there primarily so that you can learn stuff, that's a... That's quite a big mindset shift, especially if you are in a...
Danny:If you're lucky enough to be in a fast moving environment. But, yeah, I guess I was just just generally getting at the idea that it's hard to it's hard to be a UX person and and and bring this whole mindset of, like, you know, let's let's have... Let's be a learning organization. Let's focus on learning as opposed to, I don't know, cranking out features. So what does that mean?
Danny:It means we've gotta start writing down hypotheses and Yeah. Coming up with, like, what's the threshold? What counts as a success versus a failure? And defining that stuff ahead of building things. There's there's...
Danny:Yeah. It's a lot for people, for entrepreneurs to to, you know, to to take in. And it's like, yeah. If the first thing you say to... You know, if you if you if you join a company and the first thing you say is, right.
Danny:We're gonna let's just stop everything and and completely change our mindset. It's, like, it's really hard. I mean, I've tried it so many times and some success, you know, like fifty fifty maybe. It's not it's not an easy thing to... For people to do, and especially if they're not already kind of bought into the idea.
Danny:Yeah. You know? But I think it's a really important skill though, being able to... Just even whether you're doing lean or not, to be able to think in terms of these thresholds, these sort of passfail criteria. And the reason I say that is that these kind of modern systems, they'll come up with any number of solutions, and you can describe the solutions.
Danny:But if you can describe the the pass fail conditions, then you've got a criteria that you can give to the to the, you know, to the to the program so that as it mutates, as it comes up with all these different ideas, it can select the ones that pass and and then throw away the ones that don't. So if you can... And I guess it's the same if you're leading people. It's like your job is finished when this criteria is met, when this threshold is crossed, then you've you've... You know, that's that's done.
Danny:That's what done looks like. So being able to think in those in in those slightly more abstract terms and then brief a team or a system to do things, whatever things it wants to do until that criteria is met, I think that's quite... You know, that that's a that's a key thing in maturing as a designer and, you know, maybe becoming a manager or or whatever. Yeah. But but but even if you're just doing design work, it's great to be able to sort of set those those criteria for yourself, you know, so that you can you can...
Danny:You know, if if you're prompting, you can say, this is this is finished. This bit of optimization is finished when this page loads in under two hundred milliseconds or whatever it is. Like, I think there's some there's some value to that. But, again, it's not it's not a natural way of thinking, but I think it's it's a good way of... It's a good thing.
Danny:Skill test.
Nick:Well, I mean, I mean, there's there's a gap there for sure in in how Designers leave school and then... And when they have to jump into a real job. I don't think we are taught anything about thresholds and and when is something good enough and how do you determine where you should put the bar. So Yeah. I mean, if if if someone would would speak about that topic on your conference, you know, I would probably listen to that.
Nick:I think it's it's very interesting to to learn more about this.
Danny:Taught a lot of this stuff because it's like test driven development. You write the test, and then you develop to pass the test. Well, that's part of test driven development.
Nick:I I mean, for developers, it's easier to to to to score your work. Like, this thing now loads 10% faster than before. But, you know, your users being 10% happier, you know, you can do something with NPS scores and SaaS testing and that kind of stuff. But it's it's way harder than just running a, you know, a Lighthouse score in your Chrome browser.
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I see
Nick:the point. Yeah. For sure.
Danny:Yeah. I was just talking to one of the... One of our speakers about this. There's there's always... Pardon me.
Danny:When you're thinking about, like, user goals and jobs to be done and that, there's always another why. Right? You know, in in jobs to be done, there's this sort of slightly glib but kinda easy to understand example of, like, no one wants a quarter inch drill bit. They want a quarter inch hole as if as if anyone wants a quarter inch hole. It's like, okay.
Danny:They do want a quarter inch hole, but they want it for some other reason. They wanna put Yeah.
Nick:Of course.
Danny:You know, a frame or something. Yeah. Okay. And then, yeah, why do you want the screws so you can hang the frame, and why do you want the frame so the house looks beautiful, and why do you want that so that you can inspire your children and remind yourself that there is beauty or whatever. Like, there's always a hierarchy.
Danny:You can keep asking why until you get to something quite esoteric, but, yeah, you... But but at each of those levels, it's like, okay. How are we gonna measure that? How how are we gonna, you how know, are gonna establish a threshold or a cry... Pass criteria or whatever or a test?
Danny:And there there are there are usually things that are easy to measure, quick to measure that you can use in in your iteration. So that might be, oh, if I change the size of a button, I can quickly measure, at least in theory, how clickable that button is. And as it changes size, I can see a number changing. But that will tell me something that's, you know, that's a very, very fast way to measure a little tiny aspect of the usability of a system. So it's very low down in that hierarchy, that kind of y y y sort of hierarchy.
Danny:But there's a... It's quite easy to measure. But as you get further up the hierarchy, the the things that are really meaningful to measure end up... They can take weeks, days, months, years to to actually get a meaningful... To to, you know, to close the loop with meaningful feedback.
Danny:So you end up... You say you sort of rely on these these nearer or cheaper, faster measurement techniques as a proxy for the thing you really want to to impact, which is, you know, use of happiness or or something, you know, something much higher up on the on the hierarchy. Yeah.
Tyler:Yeah. This is something that I'm I'm trying to get my team, my design team to get better at because we're dealing with long sales cycles. So, like, our sales cycles are from anything from, like, six months to, like, two years. So anything that they build today might only be used or be able to be measured a year from now. So it's like, how do you get someone to get into the habit of measuring something and then seeing the fruits of their labor?
Tyler:So it's... A lot of it is about documentation when you're starting any project is understand what the baseline is, what does success look like, how do you how do you wanna measure what success is, and then making sure that you have this cadence of, yes, when you're... This thing is only gonna launch six months from now, but we're moving on to, like, several different things in the meantime, but making sure that hit a pause, set a reminder, go back into, like, whether it's Datadog or Mixpanel, just like, how is the thing that I built a year ago doing? And then there, we can iterate. But, like, it's it's very hard sometimes to, like, if those measurement cycles are long in that case, what is...
Tyler:To your point, what is short term success or what is long term success?
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. God. That's a that's a... Can I ask what kind of, like, industry or?
Danny:That you're in that that's the that that's the cadence?
Tyler:So, yeah, so it's... We're in fintech, but we're in banking. So, like, anything in, like, that financial world, like, things are slow moving, like, the contracts take a while that has to go through several chains of command to get something approved or bought, especially if you're buying software. So... Especially also for, like, newer features as well.
Tyler:Like, yes, they've bought the core features, but then if they want to upgrade to a new feature, they have to kind of talk about change management training for that particular feature to make sure everything is documented. So things can be drawn out a bit. So... But that's, like, the nature of being within that financial space.
Danny:Yeah. Heavily regulated. At least at least all your competitors are regulated as well subject to Yeah. The same that must be... Yeah.
Danny:That's quite a headache, isn't it? I find this, like, even when I'm when I'm building my little side projects, like, earlier today or yesterday. Yeah. It's not quite like 2,500 PRs a week, but, like, quite a lot of, you know, features getting released in a few hours. But I...
Danny:You've asked you asked the the the tool to start building something, and it's it's going and it's like, do you want me to start working on something else as well? It's like, okay. Yeah. There's this this this this this. Before you know it, you've forgotten what you've asked for and it is not totally reliable.
Danny:It's like 50, 60% reliable at actually finishing everything you ask it to. And even that, that's a, you know, that's within the space of a day. Mhmm. And so I end up having to create documents and lists and things to try and keep track of all these bits of work. But I...
Danny:Let alone months, that must be, yeah, that must require some some some high degree of diligence to keep track of all these these long term loose ends.
Tyler:Yeah. The... I mean, the strategy there is to have what a north star. So we have, like, a like, a north star metric that we wanna hit. So it's like this action completed, which is like part of a chain of different screens.
Tyler:Like, this is this is the thing that we want to make sure that we increase and everything kind of ladders up. But like that's north star, and then what does success look like in the immediate term? Like, if we hit... Is it lower tickets? Is it is it whatever it is?
Tyler:But, like, if everything ladders up to this North Star metric
Danny:Yeah.
Tyler:We at least know that we're going in the in the right direction or at least we're aiming in the right direction regardless if we can measure the success of that within the next six months or so.
Danny:Yes. Yes. Like a tree of, like, little, yeah, little easy to measure things that that are in service of some bigger, slower
Tyler:Exactly.
Danny:Slower thing. Yeah. So that... Yeah. I I remember reading about the...
Danny:I I I don't think I ever read the actual North Star Metrics book, but that was... I can't remember the guy's name who wrote... Who tweeted prolifically about, like, the importance of establishing the right metrics, and he'll come to me. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm just trying to wrap my brains for, like, what some of the other speakers are are gonna be talking about.
Danny:I don't wanna make you all about, like, all about my event. I'm like Yeah. I'm learning a lot
Nick:already. It's it's just been so long since I've been at a conference, in in person event. I've become so so used to working from home, talking to people in in Canada and The UK without having to go there. It's just yeah. I almost don't...
Nick:Wouldn't know how to behave, you know, when
Danny:I know. Get
Nick:there. You know? But it also sounds lots of... It's a lot of fun because, like, real talk, like, in person, not with a deadline because you have, you know, some work to to to get done. Like
Danny:Yeah. We should probably
Nick:do more of that. We just talk and learn and and listen. Yeah. So
Danny:Yeah. And and it's... Those things are hard to do if you... Like, I I did some... A bit of kind of shallow research into creativity a couple of years back.
Danny:And two things that you need for creativity, one is space, physical space, and the other is time. So an actual set aside a bit of time. That's one of the nice things about an in person thing. You you get to have those things. You...
Danny:It's much easier to to to... You know, you can set an out of office responder and really sort of isolate yourself from the the day to day worries of work and and just... Yeah. As you say, just listen and absorb some some ideas, but then have a load of people around you who... With whom you can digest those ideas and critique them and reject them or accept them or, you know, modify them.
Danny:Yeah. And just and just... Yeah. You you you do sort of... Yeah.
Danny:I know what you mean. You just sort of forget how to behave, how to be sociable when it's so easy to work remotely. I find it... Actually find it quite difficult to work remotely sometimes because you don't have that sort of serendipity of just overhearing someone's conversation, being able to contribute to it, or or just quickly grab, you know, grab a white... You know, get around a whiteboard.
Danny:I tell you what, that's actually... That's going back a couple of conversations. That... The whiteboard and and sketching on paper is... That's definitely coming back to me because you can work.
Danny:You know, if you if you're
Nick:in Same.
Danny:If you're Figma person, you can, yeah, you can work quite fast in Figma, and so you sort of skip the sketching bit. But if you don't need Figma so much and you're just sort of vibe coding your prototypes, that you can sort of get a bit out bit out of control. You sort of like need to think it... You can't think it through by telling the the system what to build. Sometimes you need to just sketch it out.
Danny:And paper and whiteboards are... They're really coming back for me. I I think, yeah, there's... They they really help you think individually and in teams. They're...
Danny:Yeah. I've always loved, you know, stuff like paper prototyping. But, yeah, I think it's it's... Maybe it's deserving a a little little renaissance.
Tyler:Yeah. I'm curious. Like, with all these event... Like, you've been doing this event for for quite a while. I'm just curious.
Tyler:Is there something that they used to care deeply about back in the day that now it's... You're finding it's less and less of?
Danny:That's a really good question. I've been I've been I've been conceiving of a of a... Yet another side project to to do, like, trend spotting because I've got all these these transcripts, these talk transcripts and and and historical job archives and things. And it's like... I mean, the...
Danny:I suppose the superficial stuff comes and goes quite fast. I mean, we're... I'm always trying to encourage people to to evaluate the new things using the old things. So what does that mean? That means, like, some new products come along, and it claims to be able to solve this, you know, to to...
Danny:It it does a certain thing. Like, it can generate videos or something. And, like... So how do you how do you evaluate whether that's a a useful tool to have? And so you come back to the the old principles, does it serve the user?
Danny:You know, does it make the task faster? Does it require less cognitive effort than the, you know, than than the other solution. And so the the underlying things, the the the notion that we focus on the user's experience, that really isn't isn't gonna change for, you know, the foreseeable future. And that's the level that we like to sort of talk talk at. I'm just...
Danny:Yeah. I'm trying to think back to, like, what was, like, super trendy, but that's kind of fallen by the wayside. I mean, visual design things, you know, skeuomorphism, things like that. But I think, yeah, a lot of a lot of what we a lot of what we preach is is is relatively timeless. I don't know.
Danny:What what what do you think? What what sort of things do you think have come and gone over the years?
Tyler:Yeah. I think I think about, like, the craft part. Like, I'm thinking, like, Design Systems entered, like, the forefront. Like, I feel like that has removed a lot of crafty things or unique experiences that have been created because
Danny:Right.
Tyler:We're now put into... Everything is now documented, put into this box. So now anything that deviates from this pattern that we've agreed to in this digital handshake is now a no no. So everything is
Nick:Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler:Overly consistent, in my opinion, in a bit of a negative way.
Danny:Yeah. Okay.
Tyler:Some of that serendipity, I I feel. Yeah.
Nick:Mhmm. Yeah. It's it's Yeah. That's into factory work, isn't it? It's it's it's all...
Nick:Know, how we want people to sign up. Let's use this default pattern here and just be done with it.
Danny:Well, factory is right because it's commoditization. So the layers of of what we do get commoditized. Right? So I learned this in probably about 2003 or 2002. It was around the time that content management systems were being open sourced.
Danny:WordPress was just on the horizon. We, yeah, we were doing some work with content management systems, and I listened to a talk where someone someone explained that, like, an innovative thing comes out and then, you know, there's competition. But then sooner or later, maybe like an open source thing comes out, an open source equivalent or, some open standard or something. And and at that point, all of the the ad hoc decision making goes away and is now codified into a, like, into a standard or is now universally available as an open source thing like WordPress. And so, you know, the the conversations about, oh, which is the best thing go away because companies aren't competing on, like, oh, my CMS is a little bit better than your CMS.
Danny:It's like the CMS is a done thing now. Let's... We we don't need to talk about the... Our CMS anymore. That's installed.
Danny:It's running. Now let's focus on the next problem up, the bigger thing, the more meaningful thing. And so... And that and that just always happens. I remember when some designers were up in arms when there was, you know, some of those like, pound design, you know, get get your logo designed for five pounds by someone online kind of...
Danny:And it's like, well, that was just early commoditization of of design. It's like, oh, we don't like, you know, we don't like stuff getting commoditized because it takes away something that we held dear. And people at that... Around that time were, you know, really like the craft of HTML and CSS was... That's definitely something that's I think fallen fallen by the wayside.
Danny:I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's... You know, people would put a photo on Flickr of like, look at my nice indentation in my CSS and how beautiful and consistent it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, that's so far from Like, who cares?
Danny:Who's that helping, really? You know? It's, yeah, master maturity. So yeah, that... Yeah.
Danny:As soon as you said that that craft element. I guess the craft's always going away. Right? As that commoditization creeps up each each bit... Each thing that gets commoditized or standardized, the craft goes away.
Danny:And there's... Maybe there's a few artisanal, you know, practitioners around who who still, you know, really like their their, you know, their their CSS file structures or whatever. But, yeah, I think it's kind of it's kind of right that that stuff goes away in a way because it allows us to focus on, you know, actually helping people with their problems. That's a that's a good thing to focus on.
Nick:I I I think there will always be a market for things handmade. You know, just just like like a painting. Like, why does a painting have value while it's made by this You famous know? But is, yeah, is is that person better at at his craft compared to someone who's doing this, you know, in his basement just as a hobby? You know?
Nick:So it's it's all this superficial, like, value we attach to something. Like, if you... I mean, you can hire Johnny Ive to do design work. It's probably going to take way longer than the three of us in this room would take to to do something similar. You know?
Nick:So... Yeah.
Danny:Yeah. And if
Nick:you really want to... Yeah. Yeah. If you really want to, if that's your thing, like, if you're so good and you're really sure about you wanting to take your time and you get something really crafty, like, yeah, I'm I'm sure you can find people to purchase your stuff. And then the good thing is Absolutely.
Nick:You probably need one or two clients a year just to to make ends meet because you're probably going to be very expensive.
Danny:Yeah. Like those people who who make watches. Like, yeah, they make a one off watch by hand. You know, it's absolutely amazing. You see, like, a lot of YouTubers, you know, do do these these crafting things.
Danny:And I'm not sure if they... If the the economics would support someone doing it who wasn't also a YouTuber and on Patreon and everything else. But but, yeah, I I can imagine, you know, it's it's like why would you why would you hire a local artist to, paint a picture of your house or your child or or something like that when, you know, there's... Well, there's, you know, there's the Mona Lisa. That's...
Danny:Or or or, you know, some Van Gogh painting or something. It's like, you can download these and print them out. They're like... Everyone knows these are the best paintings ever. Like, well, they are, but they don't have...
Danny:You know, just just because it's a, you know, maybe an accurate reproduction of a... Of an amazing painting doesn't mean that that that reproduction carries anywhere near the value, and it certainly doesn't have any personal value. It's bit like the thing of going into a restaurant paying extra for the personal touch. I would... You know, if I had the money and I could afford someone to to paint a picture for me, I would really like to just watch them in the studio doing it for a little bit, and that would be part of what I'd be paying for.
Danny:And that would Yeah. Give the the the final product more meaning for me. And, you know, it's like, do we really need oil paintings anymore when there's photos? Well, maybe maybe we do, but
Nick:it's I don't know.
Danny:Yeah. It's not purely materialistic thing.
Nick:Yeah. True.
Danny:You know, you'd pay more for Jimi Hendrix's guitar than than than, you know, an accurate reproduction again if you could afford it.
Nick:Yeah. True. I Yeah. Mean, why do I have a replica of a painting behind me? You know?
Nick:Because I attached some value to it. You know what mean? Yeah. Yeah. Also how our how our brain works.
Danny:I was gonna ask about that painting, actually. Maybe I'll have something for after the after the show.
Nick:Well, no. It's it's it's... Well, you know, just just to answer that question, it's it's... First of it's from a a period in time that I find interesting, seventeenth century Netherlands. It's it's it's made by one of the, quote, unquote, Dutch masters.
Nick:So that's already valued there. People decided to to call this group of painters masters and be... You know, to to make them very famous. And also the the windmill in the picture that's very famous is just like twenty minutes down the road for me. Nice.
Nick:You know, the place where it's it's made. And I don't think the real windmill is still there, but... Yeah. So it's it's from 500 years ago, really close to where I live. So I I thought that was really, really cool.
Danny:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Only thing I've ever is is of the Isle Of Wight, and that's where I used to live. So, yeah, I I appreciate it.
Danny:I think more more art in houses. Yeah. I think we underestimate the value of of having beautiful things around us.
Nick:But You know, I have There's another time. Fun thing is I have a lot more frames, and I want to swap them every week. But now that one's been there for for a month already, and turns out I'm just a bit too lazy to swap them.
Danny:Okay.
Nick:Anyway, before we started this recording, we aimed for like thirty or thirty five minutes, and we are just over an hour already, which in my mind, I'm not sure about you, Tyler, but for me, it can only mean that we are having a lot of fun, which makes me assume that joining UX Brighton will be just as much fun as this talk has been because it's a similar topic, similar people, similar vibes. Right? So if people want to join, if people want to go there, can you tell us a bit more about, like Yeah. When is it? It's in Brighton, I assume.
Nick:And and how does all how does all of that work?
Danny:Yeah. So we're a couple of minutes away from Brighton Station in... On the South Coast of of England. It's very, very easy to get to, and it's on the first Friday of November. And the venue is the the Brighton Dome Concert Hall, which is a really beautiful, extremely comfortable, sort of plush, lush venue.
Danny:Nice. The likes of Led Zeppelin and ABBA and, you know, the like Waterloo. Have performed there. But that's nothing compared to what you'll witness on the the first Friday. Is it the sixth?
Danny:It's the first Friday of November, anyway. That's how I remember Yeah. And so it's a single track, single day conference. So there's none of that or which which, you know, which talk will I attend. It's very straightforward, and all the talks are designed to kinda go together.
Danny:So, yeah, it's really an opportunity to sit back and just absorb and and digest new ideas and and to feel like you're up to date on how to work fast without losing quality and and maybe be a bit more ambitious with your UX career.
Nick:I think that's a good thing to do. I think that's really important with, you know, the people who are going to give you money have this hunch of, you know, I can do this thing on my own with this new tool. Like, you want to level up to make you yourself irreplaceable even for a manager like that. And I feel like it's probably something you're going to learn over there. It's November 6, by the way.
Nick:I just double checked the first Friday of November. I keep forgetting that. Yeah. Mean, UX is our job. Right?
Nick:We we have to be specific for our, you know, user slash target audience slash Right? Where can I get tickets?
Danny:Go to uxbri, that's uxbri.org.org.
Nick:Okay.
Danny:That's it. That's it. That's the page. Well,
Nick:we'll make sure to put it in, you know, around the video and the episode as well, so people can click on it. Alright. Well, thanks for joining, and I'm wishing you the best of luck with the event, and make sure to let us know how it went.
Danny:Thank you, guys. Thanks for having me.
Tyler:Thank you for jumping on.
Danny:Alright. Cheers, folks.
Nick:Alright. Cheers.
Tyler:Alright. That's another episode in the bag.
Nick:Yeah. Great episode. By the way, if you're stuck second guessing your work or trying to figure out your next move, drop a question in the comments or leave a review. We might actually feature you in one of our future episodes.
Tyler:And if you got any value from this episode, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. It helps more than you think.
Nick:You can can find everything else, resources, articles, and more at designtablepodcast.com.
Tyler:Thanks for being here.
Nick:See you next time.