[00:00:00] Karthik: Thank you Lisa, for joining. I was pretty excited when you said yes to this podcast and I’m happy that this is the first episode of season three of Design Aloud. Let’s jump right into it. I was quite curious from your LinkedIn profile when you introduce yourself and also mentioned that you wanted to explore technology and collaboration and everything, but within a framework of how we can keep people more present and engaged with the physical world. I felt that line kind of made sense to me and I could relate to that. So yeah, I think what we’re going to talk about today is the gist of that small statement. So yeah. How are you? 

Lisa: Thanks for asking and I am super honored to be your first podcast guest on the third season. So I’m doing great. I am in Prague this week, so I am really lucky to work with a team of designers here.

So I’m working from the office though normally I’m working from home, so definitely the remote office lifestyle is the world I typically live in. And as you know usually based in Germany. 

Karthik: And how is it in Prague? Are you there for just this week?

Lisa: Yeah, I’ll stay close to two weeks. It always gets so busy meeting everyone here in the office and it’s a fantastic city.

For those of you who have visited, I’m sure you already know this but with our European summers where it’s sunny until, you know, 10 o’clock in the evening, and of course Prague is so international with lots of, lots of tourists. There’s just a really great energy and summer vibe happening here, so it’s really nice.

Karthik: That’s amazing. It’s so weird because Budapest has this kind of weird phase of weather right now. One day it’s pretty cloudy and a bit cold, and then it’s super sunny and you just don’t know what to wear sometimes. It feels like the London weather. I’ve not been to London, but from what I’ve heard, it just that you don’t know what to wear.

Ah, like that right now. Yeah. Looking forward to the summer. It’s always fun and good to see people out and just enjoying the sun. So, yeah, for our audience members I would like you to introduce yourself without a name or a profession. How would you do that?

Lisa: Oh, that is such a tough question, but a fun one.

I’d say the thing that’s been happening that I notice that I do a lot and how I would introduce myself is I think I am the queen of customized emojis. So for those of you who use Slack, you know, and usually you can put a thumbs up or a smiley face, and I know they have this in teams and I’m sure some other products as well.

But with Slack, there’s a lot of fun you can have with finding sort of the right funny image or even taking a funny picture of a team member and using that as the emoji reaction. So that’s how I would describe myself. I am the person who loves to add those little details that bring a little bit more joy and fun into the workplace.

I am the person who loves to add those little details that bring a little bit more joy and fun into the workplace.

And yeah, I don’t know. That makes me sound really unserious in that, like I get paid to add Slack emojis. But that it’s not true. But anyway, that’s how I’m gonna answer the question today. 

Karthik: It is fun. Like it makes people laugh and just smile a bit. Do you have a favorite one? 

Lisa: Oh, that is a good question. Actually, I do.

So my favorite one – that someone else added, not me – that is really popular in our company right now is the rocket ship with two strong arm muscles. And so it’s a combination of two different emojis. And for me it represents that we’re doing amazing things with a lot of power and energy.

And yeah, I’m using that emoji nonstop right now. So rocket ship with two strong arms coming out the sides. That’s the best one. It’s called Muscle Rocket. That’s the name of it. 

Karthik: Muscle Rocket. Yeah, that’s a good one. It kind of motivates also people. For the listeners here, I met Lisa at one of our client projects with a company now called GoTo, but it was LogMeIn before.

Lisa: That’s right.

Karthik: That’s how I got to know Lisa. And yeah, I always felt like really good vibes with Lisa. She was the lead or head of research there. And it was always fun when we had our design meetings with the design folks and it was always fun and I felt super safe.

I was just there for three months and it was one of my [00:05:00] best client projects ever just because of the team members and how proactive and fun they were. Yeah. Do you want to add something, 

Lisa: Lisa? Yeah, no, it was a great time and I don’t remember all the details, but I think we were always like, how can we get Chimpy hired full time?

You definitely stood out in, in your short time there. Yeah, and so just for context, I mean, I think the. Was probably close to 70 people at a certain point, and I, no, and I did not lead that, the whole organization, but really lots of designers, researchers, writers, a really great group of people, and we were working super internationally.

And so I think that was the biggest challenge of that job, is having team members all the way from California to the India time zone and everything in between, and kind of making design happen in a consistent way in a and yeah, it 

Karthik: was fun. Yeah, it was pretty smooth to be honest. And everybody was proactive and willing to help.

That’s something that I [00:06:00] enjoyed a lot. Mm-hmm. That’s amazing. And, and what are you doing at Prague? Do you want to talk a bit more about what you’re doing right now? 

What you should know about make.com

Lisa: Yeah, sure. So I joined a, I guess you would call it a scale up called make, make. We have the, we actually have the domain make.com.

I joined about a year ago to build and lead our product design organization. But when I am talking about design, I’m also meaning that to include research in writing as well. And what do we work on? Make is a platform that allows people to connect their data together no matter what apps they use.

And so what does that mean exactly? It’s a way to think about improving your workflow. So if you are someone who’s using Slack and Gmail and Airtable and you have lots of different information and lots of different places, Make, allows you to transform and manipulate that data, automate it so that you can [00:07:00] do more.

So let me give a specific UX use case to, to make it come to life a little bit more clearly. You know, one of the researcher on my team, one of the things she did is she uses make to add our customer list of the people she wants to recruit for studies. Mm-hmm. And our automation tool then automatically contacts these customers and then they can schedule themselves for a research session.

And so this is in contrast to having to individually write and email each person keep track of it manually on a spreadsheet make is allowing her to do this with automatic updates of these people were contacted, here’s the status. And so it’s a, it’s a really great tool and is for essentially any use case you can think of.

That’s amazing. 

Karthik: Yeah. It does make things a bit more easier, especially if you’re sitting eight hours or 10 hours a day in front of the desk, in front of your computer. I would, I mean, I’m going off context here [00:08:00] a bit. Mm-hmm. But I’m just wondering if there’s an element of AI involved generative ai.

I would say not just ai. I feel like this is more or less ai, especially when it’s a bit more complex workflow. But yeah, this the opportunity and the the market is really amazing now. Yeah. 

Lisa: Yeah. I think it’s interesting. So I, I feel like you’re using we can think about the word. Yeah, AI sort of in two ways.

I think there’s the current very, very, very popular sort of chat, g p T style AI of, right? How can this language learning model sort of interpret content and produce answers. And then the way I was listening to you talk about AI was more, I’ll say the human is driving sort of what the decision should be and how what actions should take place.

So yeah, I think very much automation is more creative beyond just, Hey, move this data from [00:09:00] point A to point B. When I talk to customers, there’s some really interesting use cases. And yeah, if I, I’ll just share one more, and this is gonna actually go back to the other use of ai, the, the ChatGPT version, right.

With podcasts right now we’re seeing some of our customers upload kind of their YouTube channels, or the, the trans, excuse me, they’re uploading the transcripts of their podcasts and using ChatGPT to generate summaries and then post that into their YouTube channels. And so that’s their sort of automate automated way using ChatGPT mm-hmm.

To make the work of podcasting easier so you can, you know, focus on what you wanna be doing and not kind of the, the harder, not harder, the more labor intensive tasks that a computer is really good at. 

Karthik: Yeah. A lot of manual work is kind of minimized with these things and yeah, if you can use it to your benefit, why not?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Two amazing case studies actually. That’s nice. So yeah, that’s [00:10:00] make, and yeah. How did you get into design research and what was your first job? 

UX design and research in the ’90s

Lisa: Yeah. So I guess I’m, I’m laughing a little bit. How many years back do we wanna go? Like do we really wanna go back to the Yeah. The beginning or start, or start the first, first job ever that Yeah.

And we’ll, we’ll do kind of first professional job. Okay. So that actually, that puts me already in the university years. So that’s a, still a long time ago, but a little bit more in the recent history. So yeah, so I was super lucky in that when I was going to university there actually was programs in human computer interaction.

So I am one of those people who sort of always knew that I liked this intersection between design. Technology and business and H c I programs are a really good fit for people who really wanna explore many different topics. [00:11:00] So I have a degree in kind of human computer interaction and information systems, which is a sort of a, a fancy way of talking about the, the discipline that’s between business and computer science.

So I’m really very multidisciplinary in my background. And when I was graduating, that was the first.com era. So ooh, I don’t know if I wanna say the year out loud, but let me just say that Amazon was still a very new service at the time. Amazon was only four years old at the time, just selling books and music.

So I’m really, I’m just, I’m trying to set the scene of what it was like back in the, the wild, wild west when not everything was yet online. So this was an era of UX design where a lot of businesses needed their first websites and that they were very interested in selling things online, right. ’cause Amazon had such, such a good standard of what was [00:12:00] possible.

And so my, this is a long-winded first job was a user interface designer at a agency in San Francisco, in California helping, helping our clients build their first e-commerce websites. And so, yeah. 

Karthik: That’s amazing though. It’s, I mean, it’s. I don’t know if, it’s hard to think for me how that era felt like, because everything was new and you probably felt a sense of being more creative and explorative.

And when I think about the mindsets right now, it’s completely standardized and patternized and there’s hardly any sense of original thinking I would say. And even the course you mentioned human computer interaction, I feel like 10 years back there were, there were still courses around that, but now the courses are more into ux, ui and it’s more of how to learn [00:13:00] Figma.

I mean, I mean that’s, that’s, that’s what I feel it has come down to. But that’s amazing that you mentioned this and yeah, I mean, I, I’d like to know more about this, mm-hmm. Mindset and how. After your first job, how your thinking towards building an interface or an experience changed. 

Lisa: Yeah. So thanks for that reflection.

I’ll start with your comment around you know, wasn’t more creative because there weren’t standards yet on how people would use such systems and a lot of people were not online yet. Right. So, you know, speaking of, you talked about being in the physical world. Yeah. Newspapers were still a thing.

We did not have mobile phones that have, that have a digital screens that you could use. Like you, you know, you could just do SMS and phone calls. Well, of course. Well, I can’t remember if you do that and then probably not even that. We didn’t even have that yet. So were we more creative? [00:14:00] That’s a good question.

I don’t know if I would say we were more creative. I would say. I think we, we were often doubting ourselves on whether the designs we were creating was going to be successful or not. And I would say actually it was sort of trying to feel our way in the dark. And so a lot of the inspiration for design at that time was coming from print media.

And I would say actually it was sort of trying to feel our way in the dark. And so a lot of the inspiration for design at that time was coming from print media.

So magazine layouts and journalism like these were sort of the first people coming into more or less web design or UI design at the time. And from a engineering or for a development point of view yeah, the code was very limited. Like I still remember like you would have An image an image file.

So you can just imagine, I don’t know, some kind of jpeg. Mm-hmm. And like the engineer would have to like, sort of cut up the image and like add hyperlinks underneath. Like, it sounds super weird and crazy, but basically, yeah, we didn’t have [00:15:00] powerful design tools. We were using Photoshop or like kind of wire framing tools like Microsoft, Vizio.

I mean, it’s really crazy to think about it. So like we had no tool set beyond sort of what Adobe was offering. And then from a engineering perspective, the technology was not yet sophisticated enough to sort of have a great front end development. It was, yeah. It was, it was very limited. So I guess, so you’re asking more, are we more creative?

I don’t, I wouldn’t say we were more creative. We were just trying to figure things out and hope that humans could, could figure out what we were offering. Mm-hmm. 

Karthik: And, and yeah, two points here. Like when I meant creative, I meant just in the brainstorming phase or just when you are ideating on things or thinking about things, I feel there’s more room to explore than now.

At least with the mindset. Mm-hmm. And also [00:16:00] how, how did you, did you do research back then? And did you test things with, with people? How was the the research phase, like mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Lisa: Super great questions. Yeah. I, I know we did some research because I can kind of remember, ’cause actually like Jacob Nielsen’s heuristics mm-hmm.

Were actually existing back then. So in some ways design hasn’t changed a lot. Right? Like, we still use those principles, humans and our ability to process information or to need things full and clear, like, Things were the same x number of years ago as they were today. Mm-hmm. So yeah, I do remember doing some research and using heuristic evaluation.

Yeah, that’s what it’s called. We used heuristic evaluation. But what was funny at that time, and this is another thing where I think design hasn’t changed that much, is that [00:17:00] it’s really hard to be the single designer on a team with. Product managers, they, I don’t, they weren’t called PMs back then. I don’t know what their role was, but we’ll say they were product managers and lead developers who have different opinions than you and want to build things differently no matter what you design.

So that was the same back then even with research results as it’s sometimes Oh wow. In today’s world. 

Karthik: Yeah, it does. It has not changed. You’re right.

Lisa: Well, but okay. But actually what I, what I will say has changed is that I do think the sophistication in the knowledge level of non-designers having a design opinion mm-hmm. Has improved. And that the quality of the feedback and the ability to be more of a equal thinking partner with a designer like that to me, has actually changed for the better.

Karthik: So you’re saying At least the key stakeholders in the [00:18:00] product team have a sense of UX and design and they’re much more correct 

Lisa: before. Exactly. Yeah. Like I think the ability to recognize that, ah, we have this thinking, you know, we have user experience and we need to think about different people’s contexts and their mindsets.

There’s more awareness of these topics in other stakeholders compared to when I first started. 

Karthik: Yeah. And this is something that I loved when I was working at LogMeIn. Mm-hmm. Go to yeah. E every engineer, every software developer, engineer, QA tester was very proactive in suggesting few ideas and mentioning that this is not the same as this, this might not work well.

And that was really helpful and. At the end of three months, I kind of managed to have asynchronous collaborations or asynchronous workshops with them. ’cause they were that proactive and they [00:19:00] were willing to make the design better. Mm-hmm. So this is something that I enjoyed there. And yeah, I agree that the maturity has gone up.

One counterpoint, mm-hmm. I would say, especially for agencies is to help the clients understand this level of maturity because it’s completely different for businesses to understand this. And that’s the main reason why they’re coming to UX agencies or design agencies. And yeah, that’s something that still needs to be Thought through and Yeah.

Yeah. But I think we are going in a good direction 

Balancing design and business mindset

Lisa: overall. Yeah. And that’s a really tough power dynamic when a client has hired an agency. Mm-hmm. And so they are essentially, you know, paying for your time through your work and from maintain sort of your standards and your rationale for a particular design.

When the client comes in and they said, ah, yeah, I don’t [00:20:00] really like that. Can you just, yeah. Get rid of that one section and it’ll be better. And yeah. And, you know, it’s not better. And that I always, people who work in agencies and the ability to the, the design skill is really not about creating a great design.

That’s actually the easiest part. The design skill is really how do you work with a client so that you are not Forcing them to like that. They feel that they understand why the design is so good, and there’s not sort of this battle of opinions. And that’s really one of the most magical skills that I am still working on to this day.

I do not have that skill and yeah. 

…the design skill is really not about creating a great design.

That’s actually the easiest part. The design skill is really how you work with a client so that you are not forcing them to like that design, but they feel that they understand why the design is so good, and there’s no this battle of opinions.

 

Karthik: Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Being a consultant or being able to sell what you’re doing is it’s a, it’s a really great skill. Mm-hmm. And, yeah. Speaking of this business mindset, let’s say, mm-hmm. You said you had this interdisciplinary streams of design and science and [00:21:00] business mm-hmm.

And maybe psychology when you went that. Mm-hmm. Do you want to dive deeper on that, how business came into the picture? 

Lisa: Yeah. So. For most of us we’re, you know, we’re 10, we are working for specific companies or in agency settings where we’re trying to help the clients and the business perspective is important because as designers or researchers, anyone in ux, you need to understand the motivations on why your offering will be successful in the market.

So, you know, I will say even today, I still struggle with some of the financial metrics. Like the craziest one is always ebit a, like earnings before income tax. Did I, I, I can barely remember what it means but why it’s important or I think when I think about having a business mindset, what I think about is [00:22:00] what can we, as UX people do to balance out.

What we see as the best experience. And typically a lot of us are also working in settings where the what we’re offering is intended to help someone accomplish a task or improve their ability to communicate. Right? We have these user centered sort of jobs, if we’re gonna use jobs to be done as a talking point, you know, job centered tasks that we want to see happen within the product.

But simultaneously from a business perspective, we need to understand what’s happening in the marketplace from a competitor point of view, and what do our what’s perspective around who is the target audience. Mm-hmm. And how do our designs help facilitate and support the right sort of persona or organization that match the business goals.

So honestly, I mean, UX people need to be. [00:23:00] Good at so many different thinking styles and contexts. So I guess to answer your question on where business comes in you know, I think most of us sort of really learn it in the context of where we’re working, right? So I, you know, I think generically reading books about management or what are the best metrics to measure a business, I think it’s always hard to understand what that means until you’re in the business itself.

Right? 

Karthik: Right. And yeah, I’ve come across terms like the ROI of UX or the KPIs that you can measure mm-hmm. Make or to measure these things. And it’s a very business oriented or financial oriented terms. And yeah, I feel like a lot of the people entering this field are not quite aware of this.

And it’s only when there’s a sense of, or a sense of leadership role or a [00:24:00] management role, you get to dig deeper into this metrics. Do you have any suggestions for the early adopters or the early UXers and how they can think about this or learn more? 

Lisa: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So what I would recommend for people who are first coming into UX and wanna build out their business perspective more is actually spending more time with the podcasts and blogs all coming out of the product management discipline, right?

Because product management is the the discipline that’s responsible for driving the business strategy through the development of the product. And so, you know, I think like ux like. What I mean by that in terms of like ux, the ways that product managers are pulling in multiple streams of information [00:25:00] and channeling that into kind of key business decisions and priorities.

You are going to have a much easier time working with your product managers if you understand sort of their key learnings and theories. So, so to be practical, so let me give, give your audience some, some clear examples. I’m sorry, I should have come prepared. But I think that one is Lenny’s newsletter.

So yeah, l e n n y. That’s a good one. Where the, yeah. Someone who’s really sharing sort of the latest thinking on, on how to do product management. There’s Marty Kagan’s book called Empowered. I’m hoping we can link this stuff in the show notes in case Yeah. In case I get any of the names wrong. But yeah, kind of learning how your stakeholders think, especially the product managers, and then having a good sense of what are your developer buddies?

Mm-hmm. What is the world they’re dealing with that is going to take you much further than just [00:26:00] focusing only on how can I get better at UX design or yeah. How can I get better at Figma? Sure. Those are important as well. But you’ll go, you’ll go much further by understanding PM and engineering.

Karthik: Completely agree. Yeah. Yeah. It brings a whole new perspective into how you even think about solutions or how you discover problems. Yeah, I completely agree. And yeah, so this was at Carnegie Mellon, right? Where you studied these disciplines. 

Lisa: Yep. For my, yep. Sorry, sorry for the long pause. Yeah.

Carnegie Mellon for undergraduate and then University of Texas at Austin. For my PhD. 

Karthik: PhD. What did, what did, what was the PhD about? Yeah. 

Lisa: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it was about multitasking. And so you mentioned at the start of the podcast that like, you know, you were intrigued by my byline around how can we keep people [00:27:00] more engaged with the physical world?

That really was sort of a, a thought that always was in my head during my, my dissertation because, oh, We have to go back in time again. Okay. So the internet now more fully exists. E-commerce is normal. We, we’ve, we are past the year 2000 now. But what’s happening is so when I started in Austin, Texas we still really, so that yet we’re, we’re not quite, not quite at modern times.

And so what people did was you carried around your laptop and there was kind of wifi, like you sometimes had to stick in a device called like a, like a PC-MCIA card in order to like have a, we 

Karthik: didn’t have that back in India. 

Lisa: Okay, sorry. Yeah. And this is, sorry, is, these are very US-centric answers.

But basically in order to access it on the go, you were carrying [00:28:00] around your laptop during that time. And of course I was a student at that time, which this all felt very normal and so, What I studied at UT Austin was really a blunt, again, this is kind of a common theme with me psychology now bringing in some sociology.

I continue to take classes in the business school. It wasn’t doing so much with design during graduate school. But anyway a lot of blending of different social sciences and business classes. And I got really interested in the fact that people just started to seem constantly distracted with their laptops in classroom settings.

And again, this seems so strange now because it’s completely normal that people are always glancing at their mobile phone or people are doing something on their laptop. Like, we don’t even think that’s weird anymore. Yeah. But like, I promise all of you, it was really weird when it first started to happen.

And so [00:29:00] I got really curious about whether. Are our brains kind of changing and are like, social dynamics going to be ruined because people are constantly distracted because now the internet is existing enough that like there’s stuff to do online. So again, like back in the back in the day, there wasn’t really that much to do on the internet.

Like yeah, you could read some about some company and like celebrities were not on the internet yet. There wasn’t Twitter. Like it was, the internet was kind of boring, like the physical world was still better. But anyway so what I wanted to understand was what happens when we’re sort of layering multiple levels of information as we’re going about our everyday life.

So I’m in a student trying to listen to a classroom lecture, but I’m simultaneously starting to browse something else on a, on a website. And maybe it’s related to the lecture, maybe not like, What’s happening here? Yeah, so what I did [00:30:00] was I chose to study meeting settings, so, or business meetings and, you know, what happens when people are supposed to be in a meeting room altogether?

And yeah, half the people seem like they’re kind of tuned out and working on their laptops and doing something else. Like, is this going to be the fall of business? Like, you know, like, will rocket ships, you know, like never be launched because we’re just not capable of listening to each other and everything’s going to you know, go crazy.

No, it’s not, it’s fine. Yeah, the the funny part for my dissertation is, you know, of course I had all these big ideas on how much being distracted would sort of hurt, or, you know, these were my hypotheses that this would be deeply negative, right. What we found is that as humans we find ways to accommodate for our distracted colleagues.

And so what I mean by this is, no, everything’s fine. Like what I mean by this is everything’s [00:31:00] fine when people start to multitask. So yes, they do misinformation. Yes. Sometimes people do find it rude and slightly annoying. Mm-hmm. But especially for business meetings, you’re going to get this same content at a later point through a different channel.

Right. Someone may send meeting notes or you’ll have more conversations. So I was a little bit disappointed to find that I didn’t have some like major discovery that all of humanity was going to disappear because we were multitasking. I found that humans are very accommodating and figured out workarounds to help each other out in this distracted state.

So, 

Karthik: Yeah, that’s a very interesting Assumption and a premise. Did you, did you find this switch from because of geographical reason or was it based on just the context of going to university and just finding people in their, with their laptops? [00:32:00] Or what was the context like there? 

Lisa: Yeah, so for my field site in terms of like where I actually, you know, let say did data collection and was doing measurements I.

I was lucky enough, or actually it took me a long time to recruit two different companies who would let me come in and observe their meetings. And I literally followed a couple different employees all day. And I was sort of writing down timestamps of like, you know, from eight in the morning, 15 they’re working at their computer doing this.

And then they go into a meeting and here it’s actually it’s called micro ethnography when you start to look at the tiny little movements and gestures that people have or sort of where their eyes are looking in any given moment. So I was using micro ethnographic techniques, it sounds very fancy to analyze behavior.

And then I paired that with a large quantitative survey to have a more robust data set. So, and the [00:33:00] survey yeah, my sample was people who were professionals in the working world. 

Karthik: Amazing. Did you notice any behavioral changes ’cause of this? 

Lisa: Yeah. Not during my dissertation time, but what I would say I noticed these days, and of course this is the classic n equals one.

I’m talking about it about myself, Uhhuh, I noticed that my attention span is terrible, right? So I don’t know how it is for you, but if someone sends a YouTube video and if it is longer than one minute or two minutes mm-hmm. It feels like such an effort to click play and watch it straight through.

So I do wonder, and I have not studied this, but I do wonder if our expectations or my expectations anyway, have really shifted and there’s an expectation that content is very quick and short. TikTok style that everything is designed [00:34:00] to be consumed at a glance. It’s almost like design has changed to know that people are so distracted and the only way to to communicate with them or to get your message across, it has to be short.

I don’t know. What, what do you think on this topic? I’m super curious. 

Karthik: I completely agree. I feel like we’ve it’s the, the, the world has become a bit more faster. When you spoke about the, the internet device that you stick to the laptop, it kind of reminded me of the DSL modem mm-hmm.

Systems that we had back in India, and it used to take around three, four hours to download just one song. Yeah. And. We had that patience to wait for three, four hours and we just went about doing our own things on the side. And sometimes we left the computer on overnight just to download some songs.

Mm-hmm. And that was our very happy moment. Let’s say when you finish when you see the download finished and you can listen [00:35:00] to it. But now when the moment your phone says Phone turns from five G or four G to two G, when you go to a remote place or when there’s no bars signals you just kind of go into panic mode and you just don’t know what to do.

And it’s so weird. I, I can naturally see this shift in being more impatient mm-hmm. With a lot of things. I feel we don’t enjoy the outside world too much. There’s plenty of stuff to enjoy. And I read this really nice book it’s called RAPT RAPT Attention. It’s, I think it’s by Winifred Gallagher, or I might be saying the name wrong.

But yeah, it, it talks a lot about this, about A D H D, about the environmental context of attention, the cultural context of attention, how you are paying attention in relationships and how you are paying attention to things online, especially for people who work eight hours a day. And [00:36:00] it’s pretty interesting and it’s, I I kind of agree with your hypothesis and your premise that it is going in the wrong direction.

I feel we are not as focused as before. There’s a lot of distractions and it’s hard to focus on one thing at a time and. Yeah, I completely agree with the hypothesis and I don’t know why it’s, you, you’ve you feel negated about that. But yeah, that, that’s, that’s my thoughts on this. 

Lisa: Yeah. And I don’t know if you’ve seen any articles related to this topic, but I’ve seen some that are like, Hey, the young people of today, you know, gen Z is, I guess, you know, some, some people call them They are specifically wanting kind of dumb phones or, or, you know, phone, not I, no, no fancy iPhones or fancy Androids so that they can minimize distraction and be more in the moment.

Like, people I think are really starting to push back [00:37:00] against this always on who put the, like on my latest post, right? Like, this is just really distracting for our minds and I am definitely guilty of kind of exhibiting all those behaviors. Like, I notice it in myself and I’m like, how did I live before sort of this basically, are you ever bored anymore?

Right. Like, you know, like it used to be that you would just have to, like, if there was nothing to do, you just had to sit with your own thoughts. Yes. And just, you know, wait until the event of, you know, whatever thing was supposed to happen next. And now it’s like constantly there’s something. 

Karthik: Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like Folks read less, more now, folks. Don’t spend time outside anymore. Just sitting, like you said, I feel like boredom is such a nice thing. Mm-hmm. Feel obligated to just keep doing something at every moment, even if it’s just scrolling meaninglessly over Instagram or Facebook.

Yeah, I feel [00:38:00] that’s a wrong way to go about doing things. I mean, we were talking about this yesterday with my colleagues. I. Apple, for example has created this sort of notification system in the early two thousands or 2010. I, I’m not sure, but that kind of triggered this mentality of what’s happening, what’s, what notifications did I get?

People just keep lifting their phones just to check if they got any notifications or not. And then the, now they’re reintroduced this Do not disturb mode or mm-hmm. This book. Mm-hmm. I, I feel it’s pretty counterintuitive and just solving for things that didn’t exist or that’s manmade now. So, yeah.

It, I don’t know. I don’t know. I have weird feelings about this, but like you said, people are getting used to it. Human beings are getting adapted to it. Babies are getting adapted to watching YouTube kids on mm-hmm. While eating. Which I feel is completely wrong because you want to [00:39:00] enjoy food with your family or friends, or even in when you’re alone, just enjoy the food.

I feel that’s kind of going away because of tech and the sense of notifications. So yeah, it’s, it’s, I feel it’s going in the wrong direction and I’m very extreme about it. I have a really strong opinion about it. Mm-hmm. But yeah, it is it is the current state of affairs and it’s the reality now.

Lisa: Yeah. But I’ll say on the positive I think it’s very much okay and accepted when people say like, Hey, I’m going offline. I don’t, you know, like, or I don’t check messages on the weekend. So I will say from a societal perspective, I appreciate that. Like it’s, yeah, it’s normal and considered okay to, to be offline.

Karthik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The meeting fatigues and all these things post Corona. Yeah. That’s a really positive sign that you can just say, I don’t want to turn off my turn on my camera. I’m doing my thing. [00:40:00] I’m here to chat. That’s it. And that’s really good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. 

Lisa: So yeah. But if I wanna, yeah, so I’m sorry that it just get sparked a thought in my head because it relates to thinking about design and kind of what was our responsibility as designers.

Like kind of big ethical question in terms of and this relates also to business. What do we think about. I don’t wanna call it necessarily dark patterns, but a lot of the work we do is about keeping people engaged and using our systems. And I don’t know, I don’t have a very well-developed perspective on this topic, but it’s something that’s always in the back of my mind, which is what is this balance in the work we do of helping promote sort of great experiences and yeah, we want people to use our product.

Mm-hmm. But at the same time, like, maybe, maybe it’s too much, right? Like sort of all these nice little tips and tricks and we [00:41:00] want, we want you to see this feature and, and here here’s more things our product. Like what is our responsibility to help keep a balance for, for all human beings? It’s a big 

Karthik: question.

It is, it is. I’ve thought about this and yeah, I’m not well read with these things to be honest, but I. We were doing an inclusive workshop with our colleagues, and one of the examples was, let’s say a person, person named Matthew. He’s 17 years old and he has autism and he’s afraid of, or is socially anxious, and he’s not like stable enough to go and pay for himself in a, in a Starbucks, let’s say.

And how do you design an experience for people like Matthew? That’s something that I would consider as a positive way of contributing to society in terms of design. But for folks like who want to be influencers, the majority of [00:42:00] influencers, let’s say it’s just I mean if they’re happy and if they’re doing good, fine, but sometimes it goes beyond a point of just.

Mindless scrolling over Instagram and it just, it’s, it’s of no use to your own personal value system and life. And I dunno where to stop this, or I dunno, how we can, as designers and researchers stop this. Yeah, because everybody has their own individual way of looking at things and one should appreciate that and respect that.

And if, if there’s a, a, a standardization or a control, it should be for everybody and not just for a certain section of people. Mm-hmm. So it’s, I don’t know. There, I don’t see a balance there. And I feel like what we are doing is what needs to happen right now. Yeah. 

Lisa: Yeah. It’s, it’s such a big complex question.

I agree. Yeah. Yeah. And [00:43:00] again, I, I am, I’m enjoying our conversation because I’m like, oh, but what if, like when we’re interviewing people, what if we started to just kind of ask more about like how how, how do you maintain focus during your day? Right, actually, so, and what I’m saying by that is helping sort of raise awareness of these issues by sort of asking about it and helping people let, of course, letting them decide what’s right for themselves, but just kind of sparking an awareness on this topic.

I think that’s something any of us can do. Yes. 

 

Karthik: I agree. And I think that’s something that’s happening with a lot of topics under inclusive design with accessibility and disability. I feel like that’s become more. I wouldn’t say a trend, but it’s becoming aware now. People are getting aware of these things and yeah, even focus mental health, how it affects your daily life, how it affects your sleep, especially how it affects your, [00:44:00] the way you talk to people.

These, these are really major factors in your social interactions. And yeah. Talking about these things help, but at the same time, it feels a bit wrong to talk about these things without having proper understanding of it or mm-hmm. Proper knowledge of it because there’s, there’s like a hundred consequences that lead to different things.

Once you bring this up, so, It should definitely come from people from practiced professionals and people who are specialized in these things. And it, it’s, it’s a really interesting way to integrate, design with them. Mm-hmm. Psychologists or psychiatrists, and just understand this more and how we can design for these experiences more.

I think that’s a really good way to look at it. What do you think? Yeah, 

Lisa: yeah. Well, I love the idea of how do we design for calmness, right? So we’re used to designing for engagement or design [00:45:00] to accomplish a task, what it would, what would it mean to take the product or service that any of us work on and build, build something that creates calmness.

And I don’t, I don’t know what that would be, but that, that’s my design prompt for, for the audience to think about. 

Karthik: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Yeah. And yeah, I wouldn’t. The, the moment you said Design for Calmness, I thought about Headspace and all these things, all these apps. But yeah, I wouldn’t go in that 

Lisa: direction at all.

Yeah. And I don’t mean a separate app, I mean, in the thing you work on today. Yeah, yeah, 

Karthik: yeah, yeah. That’s a good addition to this. Amazing. Yeah we talked about certain trends and how it was back then and how it is now. And you also mentioned that you did this was it micro ethnographic?

Yeah. 

Lisa: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Micro ethnography. Yep. Mm-hmm. 

Karthik: Micro ethnography. And is that how you got introduced to research or [00:46:00] was there UX research back then? How was it like? 

Lisa: Yeah, great question.

It’s funny, but when I first started in the UX field, I. I don’t specifically remember UX research roles, but now that I’m thinking about it more, there were certainly, it was called usability Analyst. So there were usability roles or sometimes actually it was even called human factors. So this is linking back, honestly, to the 1950s and no, I was not alive in the 1950s when people had to design like airplane cockpits or really complex like telephone systems.

And so really actually the the, the study of like, how do people know what button to push in which particular situation, honestly, it’s been around for well before sort of UX was even a thing. I think that research. Came before design. But yeah, in terms of sort of [00:47:00] how I got into research certainly my skills were improved by going to graduate school where yeah, I learned survey techniques and interviewing techniques.

Though of course, many people can also learn these same things on the job. And yeah, I really I enjoy sort of, yeah, getting to think deeply about certain topics and knowing people’s stories. I think what’s funny is you’ll often find that many people who are researchers we’re actually like a little bit shy.

I’ll say again, I’ll speak for myself. I’m actually quite shy and don’t like to kind of share about myself, but I love hearing other people’s stories and research is a great way to connect to people because people really love to share their story and mm-hmm. Sometimes, you know, even when they’re getting paid for it it makes it even better.

Right. But yeah, so I did research in graduate school and then after I finished graduate school, I don’t, I was like, should I [00:48:00] share this story? I will share this story. It was really actually hard to get my first UX job after graduate school, so I. Previously, you know, when we’ve been talking, I was like, yeah, yeah, I had this university degree.

I got my first design job in San Francisco, like super smooth. I’m, mm-hmm. It’s so awesome. So cool. Wow. May may your audience never make the mistake I did, which was spend a really long time in graduate school, so long, eight years that your skills are quite out of practice and you don’t really seem like you know what’s going on with the latest trends and what the industry is up to.

Wow. So I actually had a really hard time getting my first UX job after I finished my PhD because I was kind of overtrained from an academic perspective and then simultaneously very out of touch with sort of how things were happening in the [00:49:00] business world and what was happening in ux. So yeah, that was fun.

Karthik: That must have been a very interesting phase to, did you, did you manage to learn these skill sets or how was it, like, how did you end up bridging that gap? 

Lisa: Yeah, so that is a great question. So how did I come out of sort of that rutt, which I know is, and I don’t, rutt sounds negative. So how did I come out of that situation?

For me it was a lot of persistence and being very open to any opportunity. And what that means is I was still living in the United States at that time. I basically kept applying for any job that was UX related. And I got, you know, out of hundreds and hundreds of applications, only one job offer. It was in a completely different state, you know, and this is before remote work, right?

So I had to move to a city. In some [00:50:00] ways the, the job was kind of amazing in the sense of I lucked out and it was for a huge company. It was for Nokia, the, the mobile phone company. But it actually, well, I miss all the people I got to work with. But we weren’t on the most prestigious product line. So it was a very narrowly scoped job.

We weren’t like designing the cool Nokia phones we were mm-hmm. Making some customizations for telecoms, which means you take some requirements and you make a few adjustments, and that that’s the design update you give. Right. So a very narrowly scoped design job. But the key message in this story, and I was only at that job for a year because Nokia was starting to have some business problems.

Mm-hmm. The iPhone is starting and Android is really being, becoming a thing. But the key takeaway from that story is it’s easier to get a job once you have a [00:51:00] job. And so even though I kind of knew that like, yeah, Nokia seems cool on the surface, but this job. Is really not that great from a learning perspective.

And the company’s not doing super great, having that foot in the door of like, but from an outsider perspective, from someone who’s just glancing at my resume, it looked much better than the reality was. And so from that, I was able to get a job with Intel, which was really the most amazing job I’ve ever had as an individual contributor.

Like just a fantastic group of anthropologists, designers, and technologists, all really thinking about like, how can people use computers in the future? And really a supportive group of mentors. I still talk to many of those same colleagues today, like That’s amazing. Yeah. So I guess I am, I’m trying to give the audience hope that even when you feel like, [00:52:00] who’s gonna hire me?

Like take. Job that you can get that’s more or less in the right topic space. And keep, keep working at it. Good things will come. 

Karthik: Amazing. Yeah. We have a saying in India, which basically translates to just starting trouble because a lot of the bikes before they never kick. We had a kickstart me system and it was always difficult to kickstart the bike, but once it kickstart, it just runs.

Yeah. That’s the kind of saying that we had and I totally get what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that story. It’s an amazing story. 

So amazing. So you got of into research through Nokia and then Intel and what happened next? Do you want to yeah, I think we covered the the thesis topic and which is. What the main highlight of this podcast was going to be.

Mm-hmm. About and I wanted to title this physically present, mentally absent. Okay. And I think we spoke about that in [00:53:00] length. We had some really nice ideas bouncing off each other. And that comes to a, that brings me to a follow up question of how are we designing for the modern work environment have you thought about this and how is it at make right now?

Can you enlighten us with that? Mm-hmm. 

Yeah we spoke about research in land and how you ended up from Nokia to Intel and you shared a really good story about your early experiences.

So thank you for that. And I was wondering if I, what we spoke about earlier about being physically present and mentally absent, the ideas that we bounced off each other I was wondering if we are in a phase or we are in a place where we are able to design for modern environment. Mm-hmm. By environment, I mean a very distracting environment where folks, users are having multiple tabs open and how do we design and research for that?

[00:54:00] And yeah, I was wanting to understand if you had some ideas on that, if you’re doing something on that right now at make. 

Lisa: Great question. So I think one of the sort of natural thinking traps that all of us get into when we’re working on our specific product or service is we think that the, the user or customer is just using our product or our service and really focused deeply on, you know, everything why, and the buttons.

And, and of course when you’re doing some some usability studies or some interviews, right? We, we sort of tend to put these blinders up and just focus only on our product. ’cause that’s, we, what we as the as the team care about most. And so one of the things I would certainly say that I always try and do, In my own studies and when I’m working with other researchers or designers, is really help is really encourage everyone to [00:55:00] think about the full context of people’s work environment.

And that actually does even bring us back to the physical world. So not only are people not just using your, they’re also surrounded in a physical environment, even in remote work in their, in their home office. Right. And how do, how does sort of the, the material objects of the built environment, that’s a fancy way of just saying books, furniture, kids, pets mm-hmm.

What, what is that doing to the experience? And just to, to have that in mind. And so, you know. I, I know you would probably push on me and ask a follow up question of like, well, what would we design differently? Kind of knowing, knowing about all those things. Like how is it helpful to know that Yeah, someone may have like a mm-hmm.

A dog or a cat running around? Yeah. It’s not a direct connection, but it’s really about being a extremely strong [00:56:00] worldview about different people in their situations. And, you know, one of the most I’m gonna steal someone else’s story, but I really like it was and actually relates to Nokia and it relates to India.

There was a really fantastic design and research team, and what they noticed is that in the city where they were studying mobile phone use, and these villages in India often floods, and people had to literally phone up on the wall, right? And so this is For most of us, probably we won’t be designing an experience where someone might be in a flooded situation.

But this starts to tie into accessibility and inclusiveness. There are other things happening that we should, we should take into consideration. And so maybe it’s not a, a hook on the wall, but there’s gonna be something else to think about. And so my key point here is it’s all important and it’s the designer and the researcher, the UX person to [00:57:00] synthesize that worldview, to, to build that world, understand it deeply, and then determine what would be the design for it.

Karthik: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And another example that I could think of is the, the, let’s say the light versions of Facebook or Instagram, because in most, and this was this study was in India as well, and in most remote parts they found that there’s hardly any usage of Facebook or Instagram, and they understood that it was because the connection there, the internet connectivity is really bad or poor there, and it runs only on two G.

Mm-hmm. So to optimize for two G bandwidths they, they made a lighter version of the applications which could run on two G. And yeah. This is again a really brilliant point on being inclusive and thinking about these exclusions and digging deeper and finding, you might not [00:58:00] essentially build the best experience out there, but it’s, it’s really worth to think about, oh no, sorry.

It’s really worth to think about these exclusions and yeah, things, things come up. There’s two. Completely unrelated dots that you can connect through thinking about these things which make the experiences better. So I mm-hmm. Completely agree with the point that you made there about being inclusive and thinking about accessibility.

So yeah. Interesting. And how, how, how is it working at Make Now, now that you’ve shifted roles? 

Lisa: Yeah, so with Make, let’s see. So I wouldn’t have I shifted, sorry. With Make, so I’m still working as sort of a UX manager or UX leader. I got to do that at, at LogMeIn slash GoTo as well. So that part feels really similar.

What I would say [00:59:00] is different or what I’m really enjoying learning about is actually important for all designers and gets back to the same topic of people aren’t just using your experience. Mm-hmm. With make, people are connecting many different systems, integrating many different tools. And so even you know, if someone is just using, like, we’re using Google Meet to Talk right now can integrate with other services, right?

Or if we think about our Chrome browser and all these plugins mm-hmm. I think one of the most interesting sort of design areas for not only here at Make, but any designer who’s, who’s working on sa I’ll say SaaS products or think information that lives in the cloud, how do you start to think about the additional services or integrations that your customers wanna connect into?

Because products that we’re designing is standalone, are starting not to be [01:00:00] standalone anymore. Right. So I think Airtable is a great example of a tool that has. Awesome integrations into other services. Yeah. And Make again is as a platform that’s just focused on integrating things. And it starts to be important for designers and researchers to understand basically the, the language of API, so application programming interface.

I think I said that wrong, but these are the the code bases are the ways that to, to access the data across these different systems. And so, yeah. Sorry, I think I went off on a tangent. No, I, I, I more interesting every year. 

Karthik: No, it’s, it’s kind of a similar context to what we spoke earlier. And I also feel that it’s not just about the APIs or two different applications business-wise, connecting to each other, but rather than rather about how users.

Who use these two applications, [01:01:00] connect these two things. Mm-hmm. That’s a really great point. Yeah, the, the experience kind of matters because it’s different personas for two different applications and then you have to connect these two and it’s a whole complex network that you need to deal with, which is very interesting, hard to think right now.

But I think it’s a really good way to brainstorm and come up with really cool ideas there. 

Lisa: Yeah. Can I just build on that? So, sorry. That sparked an idea on with me. So what that makes me think about is the fact that as designers or UX people, We like to think we are designing a specific experience or a specific workflow.

Mm-hmm. But in today’s world, with these connected systems, these integrated systems, users are deciding for themselves, or customers are deciding for themselves. Mm-hmm. The experience should be, and I think that’s a really interesting shift. Whereas, you know, [01:02:00] yeah, we think we are delivering this experience, this layout, and this is the way the buttons are supposed to be clicked for this goal.

Uhuh, I mean, yes, that’s part of it, but more is happening on top and I think that’s really cool. 

Karthik: Yeah. A lot more freedom has been given to the user’s hands and it’s, it’s good. I think it’s good. Mm-hmm. Customization is good always. And if it makes your life easier, then why not? Yeah, that was make make.com.

And it’s, it’s, do you want to talk about this, this whole space of no-code and low-code space. I figure it’s make, kind of revolves around mm-hmm. Domain. Yeah. Do you wanna 

Lisa: on that? Yeah. I really enjoy. So let’s, I guess maybe define no code and low code. This is shorthand or sort of a, a phrasing for giving people the ability [01:03:00] to create systems online without having to use code, like, without having to be a programmer.

And sometimes you might hear this being called like citizen developer as well. There’s some other, other ways to think about the way no code, low code is positioned. Mm-hmm. And. Like many things. And this, I think another sub recurring theme of this, this in some ways has been around for a while. So, and what I mean by that is if you think about kind of website builders, so kind of what you see is what you get editor, I don’t know if people know the the acronym WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, but Right, this was eighties, nineties, that you could just take different visual objects and put them together to site, let’s say.

Right. This is so, sorry, I’m, I should, we should jump ahead in the timeline media in Dreamweaver. So this has been around, but what I would say is [01:04:00] different about no-code, low-code is that these experiences that can, that people can build, Are more interactive. And so, whereas Website builders back in the day was just like, Hey, you know, we’re gonna help you with templates and please add your static content.

Like yes, that is helping people build a system without having to, to be a programmer. But no code, low code tools like Make and others are actually letting people process data, data from websites and, you know, update different systems. It actually becomes a way to build a fully working system. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And 

Karthik: yeah. Point, yeah, it’s, it’s a bit more dynamic, I would say. Yeah. 

Lisa: Yeah, and it’s a, it’s quite an ethos. Like no-code, low-code is like super popular in France. Like there’s a whole Slack group all in French of just enthusiasts on this topic. It’s like, it’s a subculture, just [01:05:00] like how people love anime or heavy metal music.

Like this is, it’s a 

Karthik: thing. Pretty interesting. I wonder why just France? Is it interesting? Yeah. 

Lisa: / It’s not just France, but definitely France stands out as yeah, as a huge community. That’s a good thing. 

Karthik: Yeah. Yeah. Anything else you want to add about make before 

 

Karthik: we Part ways ?

Lisa: How can, 

 

Karthik: Yeah, what’s the one? I would say value proposition or one statement to, for people to use make.com. 

Lisa: Yeah. So sorry on blast. No, no, no. I love that. And thank you for letting me talk about one of my favorite products because of course I am biased. So by the way we have a a free version of the product.

You don’t have to add a credit card number, so please go check it out, but okay. Yeah. Why, why should you check it out? What is really great about Make and what I even hear when I talk to customers is that it is a [01:06:00] creative tool for connecting their data. And let me explain what that means. Probably with like Fig Jam or Miro whiteboarding tools that let you start to connect together different elements and sort of create systems or idea or organize your thoughts.

Make is the same in the sense of it is an infinite canvas for you to move your data around these different systems. And so it’s a uses a lot of colorful bubbles and some subtle animations, and we really want it to be playful and it almost feel like a video game experience in some ways. But you’re really doing, but you’re really solving real business problems and smoothing out your workflow.

So if nothing else, even if you’re not interested in automations, like sign up for an account just to play with make it is really a lot of fun. And then when you actually create your automation, you’ll see even yeah, you’ll feel [01:07:00] even better about it. 

Karthik: That’s amazing. Do you have An automated I dunno how you call it, but like a task or automated module that you have from make that you recommend?

Lisa: It depends what you wanna do. So literally we have they’re called connectors, or another way to say it is the different apps that you can integrate into make. One of my team members recently, he was using Spotify and he wanted to automate kind of songs that he was adding this year into a specific type of playlist.

So yeah, if you use Spotify you can, that’s amazing. Yeah. Start to kind of build your own experience with playlists using make so, so that’s a good one. 

Karthik: That’s a really good one for DJs and people interested in music or who are the resident DJs for every house parties. I think this is really useful.

Lisa: Yeah. And you can imagine so someone could build an automation of I don’t know, like every time I’m, I’m on YouTube and if I click like save this on YouTube, [01:08:00] take that song title and that song name, find it on Spotify and create a Spotify playlist. Like you could build that automation. 

Karthik: That’s amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Thank you for that. Cool. I think we’ve reached the end. 

Lisa: Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. You did quite a great job of taking this conversation in many different directions, but like keeping a cohesive thread.

Karthik: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I mean, I really enjoyed the conversation. I, I know we touched a lot of things that were out of context, I would say. Mm-hmm. But yeah, I felt we bounced off some really cool ideas and it’s. Also good for the listeners to think about these ideas. And if you can just share it with us, connect with Lisa on LinkedIn how do you, how do you want them to connect with you?

Lisa: Yeah, LinkedIn is best. I’m not super great with the socials. I mean, I think like Twitter is probably not, you know, something that [01:09:00] any of us should be using right now. Mastodons too confusing. So yeah, find me, find me on LinkedIn. 

Karthik: LinkedIn I’ll, I’ll tag all of the, the links in the description can connect with Lisa.

So thank you so much Lisa, for having a chat. I really enjoyed the conversation. And yes, thank you for your proactiveness and saying yes to this. It’s amazing to connect back with you. Hopefully we can catch up in Prague or in Germany and have a coffee and talk about design. Awesome. Yeah. 

Lisa: Thank you, chimpy.

This was 

Karthik: great. Thank you so much. Oh, it’s been so long since someone called me Chimpy. 

Lisa: I didn’t, yeah, I wasn’t sure. You have to cut? No, no, it’s fine. Thank you, Kartik. It’s been great. 

Karthik: No, it’s fine. Yeah, I like being called Chimpy. Chimpy is good. But yeah. Thank you. [01:10:00] [01:11:00]