Aarron Walter is the VP of Design Education at InVision and is the author of Designing for Emotion. Previously he founded the UX practice at Mailchimp.
In this interview Aarron discusses his early life embracing fine arts, his transition to software, and the interplay between the two. He also shares his philosophy for user research, why he joined InVision, and his thoughts on the future of product design.
Episode TRANSCRIPT
Sam Solomon: Hey everybody, this is DNFM, and I’m Sam Solomon. DNFM is a show brought to you by Designer News. This is Episode 2. We’ve got a fantastic show today. I’ll have Aaron Walter joining me. For those that don’t know, Aaron Walter is the Vice President of Design Education at InVision. He was the first employee at MailChimp.
He’s an fascinating guy. We’re going to be trying something that’s bit different this episode. My friend Joel Califa from DigitalOcean, he’s going to be joining me to discuss our top stories today. But first, we’ve got a few announcements. Related to our upcoming meetups, we’ll be in Minneapolis on August 11th.
It’ll be a fantastic time, come out, have a drink with your fellow designers, meet someone that’s in the community that you didn’t know was part of Designer News. We’ll be in Seattle later that month on August 25th. We’ll have two speakers, Flow VP of Design, Jesse Herlitz, and here’s Seattle co founder Todd Binnings.
Also, a special thanks to Kraft CMS and InVision, who will be sponsoring both of those meetups. DNFM is brought to you by InVision. InVision is a prototyping tool that I’ve used for many years. When my current company, TrustFuel, pivoted to building a customer success CRM, I spent weeks designing screens and building a prototype.
We took that InVision prototype to the customers we had previously talked to, and their eyes lit up. Many of them thought the prototype was real, and Asked if they could start using it. While day to day I use InVision to explain to our engineers how I’d like features to be implemented, I tell you this story because it helped us show customers and investors our product vision.
If you’ve got an idea to pitch, go to InVisionApp. com and give them a try. And now for top stories. We’re going to be doing something that’s bit different for our top stories this episode. My friend and Designer News regular Joel Califa is going to be joining me for a bit of commentary. Our first story today is the redesign of sidebar.io. For those of you that don’t know sidebar.io is a project by D and regular Sasha Grief. They’re known for featuring the five best design links every single day. They have a fantastic newsletter, but they also have the site. The site’s been around for a few years, and because every single day they put out this, these, these new links, they’ve got a wealth of articles.
So now they’ve added new features where you can filter and search and look for articles on a specific topic.
Joel Califa: Yeah, it looks like it’s, it’s packed with features now which is awesome.
Sam Solomon: I’m curious how this update will affect traffic to the Sidebar website. The way I generally interact with Sidebar is through their newsletter.
I wonder if these features will make people more inclined to go to their website.
Joel Califa: Yeah, I mean that’s interesting because before you kind of had a website that mirrored the newsletter one to one and didn’t really have any bells and whistles on it. Interestingly, like I only use the website, like I get the newsletter, but I only just open the website like once or twice a day and take a look at that.
Yeah. And this change actually probably is going to make me use the newsletter more because there’s just like a ton going on in a new design.
Sam Solomon: You know, there’s, there’s so much design content out there. I find it sometimes difficult to keep up. I mean, is it, do we have too much design content?
Joel Califa: I, I definitely have been overwhelmed in the past by the amount of design medium posts and stuff going on.
Sam Solomon: There’s designer news, there’s sidebar. There’s another newsletter I love called Spaces. If you’re into architecture, I highly recommend it. But, I mean, there’s only enough hours in the day.
Joel Califa: And, and, I think Sidebar was so powerful because it just took three or like five design links every day and put them in, in some sorry, some email.
And it’s, it’s useful to have someone curate that for you, especially when it’s, it’s people you trust. And I think Sasha has a curation.
Sam Solomon: Absolutely. Well, let’s move on to our next top story. Recently, Designer News held an AMA with the Really Good Emails team. Really Good Emails is my favorite resource for inspiration when it comes to email copy, design, transactional email ideas.
Basically, they’ve got an email for every situation every type of email you can think of. And just from some of the responses on the AMA, it’s obvious that, you know, these guys really know their stuff. Yeah, yeah,
Joel Califa: I took a look at that too. I think it’s super powerful to spend so much time around a certain medium.
Like, you end up having such an interesting perspective because you have time to think about all the intricacies. So, the really good email guys. Just know so much about emails and it’s so clear from like how they’re how they’re writing about it and their responses that they just Have spent so much time thinking about this Yeah, the the site’s an amazing resource and I’ve used it for a while not just for like great visual design But also for content and copy and tone.
Sam Solomon: It’s just really awesome to have—speaking of copy and tone, one of the interesting questions that came up in that AMA was can newsletters exist without images or layout basically sending a plain text email. What the really good emails team said was that in their testing and research, some sort of layout will almost always be just a regular test email.
Joel Califa: Which I thought that was an interesting response. I was a journalist in college, so. I’m a sucker for good copy, but I suppose some layout can help improve legibility. Yeah, and it’s, I mean, I think a lot of designers kind of ignore copy or pass that to marketing or other departments, but really it’s a super important part of the
Sam Solomon: And I believe Jason Fried said this, but on any website, people are there for the copy, the content, you know, the words. In many cases, it’s the words that really should exist before the designs.
Joel Califa: Right. And even if you’re not doing all of the copy, I think being engaged with it is really important and going over these emails and seeing kind of what you can learn from them is going to be really important if you’re designing any kind of email or transactional email.
Sam Solomon: So our next top story is about GitHub moving to default system fonts. I got a message from my friend Mike one day he’s one of those guys who’s just an absolute devout Linux enthusiast. Anyways, he was asking me why GitHub changed their website to use this horrible font. And kind of my first thought was, oh, they updated it, it’s now using San Francisco, but San Francisco’s not really a terrible font.
It’s, it’s very close to Helvetica. And then I, I saw this DN story about GitHub updating. To use system fonts, and I realized that he wasn’t seeing San Francisco, he was probably seeing Ubuntu everywhere and there are a lot of system fonts that work fine, Ubuntu is not one of them, it’s just really difficult to read read body copy in Ubuntu.
Anyways, Joel, I’m curious to hear what your take of GitHub updating their fonts are.
Joel Califa: I think it’s, it’s interesting, like, historically designers have kind of kept their visual designs very close to the chest. You know, just like, I need this to be exactly, exactly this size, exactly this, you know margins around something, I need this to be this font, and like that pixel perfection.
And just being able to give part of that away in order to feel more like a native app is a really interesting choice. It’s like, I am, am gonna, so like, designs have been fragmenting in terms of like screen sizes, in terms of screen types, and how people are watching it, and like different experiences.
And now they’ve also added this other layer of like, okay, everyone actually sees this, Design totally differently like it depending on their system and it’s it’s really cool. Like I haven’t really Noticed it that much I can’t say like it doesn’t feel more like a Mac app to me when I’m on OS X But it’s interesting to see if that’s actually how
Sam Solomon: I find it to be an interesting choice for a few different reasons.
First, in relation to trying to feel like a native application, 90 percent of my experience of GitHub happens through my command line. The exception is maybe for like reviewing code or pull requests. But in day to day use, it, it, everything happens in the console. The second thing I think is interesting is that there are so many different default fonts.
Now, anytime that they want to ship a new feature or need some sort of update to the UI, they’re going to have to test it with a dozen different fonts. I know Mark Otto the design director at GitHub addressed this in the, in the comments on the designer news story and, and said that like the line heights and the proportions of all the system fonts were.
Virtually the same, but even with that, I just have to believe that it does add some sort of, of overhead. There’s going to have to be more testing before you ship something.
Joel Califa: Oh, definitely. I mean, I, hopefully they have some kind of visual testing built into it. But I can’t imagine saying, okay, we’re going to use.
Five fonts instead of one not resulting in more overhead. Right, right.
Sam Solomon: It’s cool though, it’s, yeah, it seems to work. Well, it’s, it’s an experiment, and I, I think it’s really cool to see large companies like GitHub willing to try things like it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with it. I remember not that long ago, Medium, Did something very similar, and they discovered there was this font that was called system leftover from Windows 3.1.
Joel Califa: It had this eight bit pixelated type vibe.
They tried tried opening Medium on Windows 3.1.
Sam Solomon: No, they, they weren’t trying to to use it on Windows 3.1. I need to go back. There was a link in the DN story to this post. Anyways, this post was on Medium, and it was from the Medium team about the company exploring the use of default system fonts.
And apparently there is an experimental CSS feature that allows the word system to be used in place of having, you know, a dozen different fonts in your Sass variables at shorthand. So they were experimenting with default system fonts and the use of this new CSS feature. When they refreshed their development version of Medium, the whole site was covered in this 8 bit font.
And this is because, apparently, there’s also a font called System that was used as the system font for old versions. So they ended up with What was actually the font system and not the use of the CSS feature.
Joel Califa: Oh, that’s great. So, like, Windows machines still have system in them? I suppose.
Sam Solomon: I need to go back and take a look at it.
Aarron Walter: It was a very well written post.
Joel Califa: I, let me, oh, it’s, it’s by Marcin. Yeah. I, I don’t think I ever saw this. I’ll definitely take a look at it later.
Sam Solomon: Let’s move on to our next story. Pentagram designs a new logo and identity system for MasterCard. This, this was a bit of a controversial redesign.
Pentagram, obviously world renowned branding agency, essentially what they did was took the, the red and the gold MasterCard circles and remove the lines kind of in the section where they connect and instead shaded it in orange color. And they essentially kind of created a Venn diagram. That’s probably the easiest way to.
Describe it. And then below this Venn diagram, they, they removed the, the MasterCard wordmark from the diagram and placed it below the diagram. They also made the lettering all lowercase in a dark gray font. A lot of people were saying that, you know, it looks like the work of a first year design student.
Another take is if you go back to the 1979 and earlier logos, it’s very, very similar to their original logo, except instead of kind of the The red, yellow, orange, you kind of get this red, brown, gold color. Joel, you know, I’m curious to hear what, you know, what your opinion of the, of the design is. I think in general
Joel Califa: I’m pretty shruggy about this, about this rebrand.
In general I try not to, I try to like quell my opinions early on because Really like the the success of the rerun happens over time. Yeah, it’s like everyone reacted to You know the airbnb bailo when it first came out and I think there was a lot of hate and now it’s just like Airbnb and it was a huge success with mastercard.
I don’t think it’s quite that dramatic. I mean it looks Like the MasterCard logo. It’s basically a Venn diagram like you said I don’t think anyone’s not gonna recognize it as MasterCard. Yeah, I I it’s simple. It’s interesting They have like a huge brand. I think someone in the in the dn comments actually pointed out that it’s not about creating an insane new logo really the reason that they hire agencies like pentagram is because they have all of these different touch points on their brand and Making sure you’re creating a brand that works You Throughout everything is why you need, like, such a big agency.
Sam Solomon: I’m glad that you brought that up. My own personal taste for, you know, logos and branding work is, tends to lean towards simplicity. The MasterCard logo is absolutely still recognizable. So I’m a fan of the logo. But the cohesive, building a cohesive brand is absolutely the goal. And that’s actually where I think Pentagram fell short.
The article had examples Pentagram had done collateral signs, landing pages, kind of other marketing materials, and they just overdid it with the circle metaphor. The circles are absolutely everywhere, and they just, I think they went a bit too far. Another oddity in those materials is that the, while the logo is very bright, you’ve got orange and red.
But all the materials in there have these weird browns and dark greens. It just, the color choice seems a bit bizarre. I think that’s about it for our top stories today. Joel, thank you for joining me. Next up, my conversation with Aaron Walter. You’re listening to DNFM. I’m Sam Solomon. DNFM features the latest stories in design and tech, brought to you by Designer News.
My guest, Aaron Walter, is the Vice President of Design Education at InVision. He’s the author of Designing for Emotion. Previously, Aaron was the VP of R& D at MailChimp. Welcome to the show!
Aarron Walter: Hey, thanks for having me.
Sam Solomon: Absolutely! Aaron, you’ve got a background in the fine arts. You’ve got a bachelor’s and a master’s in painting, I believe.
I’m curious, when did your interest in painting begin?
Aarron Walter: Oh, I was interested in in drawing primarily as a kid. I remember as a very little kid, I think I was in kindergarten, I made a drawing. And it was the first time I’d made a drawing where it actually looked like the thing that I, I was trying to draw.
I got some, some praise and some positive feedback for that. And that was kind of, that kind of hooked, hooked me on drawing. And then I spent most of my childhood doing a lot of drawing, cartooning. Not very good. But I, you know, I had a lot of fun with it. And you know, I grew up in the Midwest in primarily small towns.
I craved culture. There wasn’t a lot of culture where I was. You know, I, I wasn’t Often exposed to art museums or yeah, it just, I wanted. I wanted more. And so painting to me was, was two things. It was sort of it was creative exploration that kind of dovetailed with my interests, but it also felt like the way that I would take creative thinking to the next level because painting was, you know, in my mind at that time was, you know, high art and it was a way
You know, complicated ideas. So at any rate, I started to read about painting and try to learn about famous painters in history. And then eventually, you know, I went to art school and from there, you know, that’s just sort of rocket fuel that I spent a lot of time painting, thinking about art, making sculpture, doing performance art.
I just, I just love the process.
Sam Solomon: And after you went to art school You taught for several years, right? I did. But not all of those classes. You weren’t necessarily teaching painting, right?
What were some of the things you were teaching?
Aarron Walter: No, so teaching started right after graduate school.
Because it was the late 90s and I was one of the only people in the fine arts department painting and drawing, sculpture, all the departments. I was one of the few people that knew how to use a computer. So I had been taking Photoshop classes. I took a director class. I learned to do some programming.
I learned after effects. I’ve done some video editing. My roommate had taught me HTML. We started to learn JavaScript. So they knew I could do this stuff. They knew that I was a painter and it was sort of this weird combination. So where I went to grad school, Tyler school of art they hired me as their first first.
teacher that bridged digital technology and the arts. There were some other teachers doing that. They were mostly in graphic design. And so that was, it’s a very different type of thing. We were trying to make art with, with computers.
Sam Solomon: So so how did, so how specifically did you get that job?
And you know, what types of things did that class entail? What, and what, when, when was this? How long ago was
Aarron Walter: this? Oh, we’re talking 98, 99. And, and how I got that job was so my painting professors knew I was getting further and further into the computer. I was trying to prototype my paintings with Photoshop because my paintings just took so long to make.
And they, I got really negative pushback. I was literally told you’ve got to get away from the computer. It’s going to ruin you. You know, you, you can’t be a real painter if you’re working with a computer. And I just didn’t I just didn’t buy that. I wasn’t deterred by that. And I also, at this point was becoming a bit jaded with the idea of painting as a medium that could really change.
Culture or affect society because it was so you know, so contained. It’s just it used to be that art was was a big deal and lots of people, common people, not just wealthy people would go to the galleries to see work because it was a form of entertainment as form of socialization. That’s just not the case these days.
It’s very elitist and so I started to become more jaded with the idea of being a professional painter at that point.
Sam Solomon: You felt you had to kind of do, you felt that painting wasn’t the best way to, to make an impact.
Aarron Walter: Right. Yeah. That, that was starting to kind of creep into my thinking, which was, was my own personal revolution because you know, keep in mind, I had basically spent all of my childhood just.
Drawing and painting. This was, you know, I wasn’t into sports. I wasn’t any good at that. I was in a student council and stuff like that and into theater. But you know, the arts were like the, the, the thing that I took my identity from as a kid and so for me to start thinking like, yeah, maybe there’s another way to do this, that was.
It was hard, especially when the people that I looked up to my mentors in art school were telling me not to go in this other direction. So but it was the right time, right? So this is before the. com bubble burst. This is essentially as the web is getting more mature. Like we’ve got image tags, we have gifts and image maps.
You know, it’s really early days. I remember. It was at that time like I had just graduated with I had, and I had been out for about a year when Blogger was just launched and that’s Ev Williams. You know, this is and that was a huge deal. I, you know, those are the sorts of things that were happening.
Flash was not even really on the scene. It was just beginning to start. bUt I could see, like, the beginning, the I could see so much potential of what it could be. Yeah,
Sam Solomon: absolutely. Well, so, you know, that, I think that makes sense that why you’d start transitioning to kind of things that were web related and software related.
How have you been able to kind of look back at your background in fine arts and take a lot of those things and apply that to software?
Aarron Walter: Sure. It’s all just, it’s just critical thinking. You know, I think about the way that I used to make paintings. So in, in undergrad, for example, I would spend a lot of time in the library.
anD I would find old, strange science books books with weird images. Sometimes they were technical, sometimes they were animals, medical. And I just Xeroxed a lot. So I just have a pocket of quarters and I would Xerox all these. I bought a three hole punch and some three ring binders and I would collect these images in the three ring binder.
And then so I had these. These big books that I made that I would use in my studio. So when I would go to make a painting, I was pulling from these different images and I would combine them and I would look for conceptual relationships relationships. And what, what, what’s an example of that?
So an example would be like, I remember having a scan of my fingerprint A double helix diagram, like a scientific illustration from a 1950s science manual. And a National Geographic photograph of a zebra. And pulling those out of the book, looking at for meaning there. And seeing, like, a relationship in form that a fingerprint has these linear forms.
A zebra has these linear forms that help disguise it. A fingerprint is not a disguise, but it’s an identifier, as is DNA. So, like, there’s, there’s this formal relationship between these elements, and there’s also a conceptual relationship with, you know, identity. And so I w I would work with images like that and combine them to create something that was, you know forcing me to think about who I was as a young man who I was as an artist.
And that, that sort of thought process of critical thinking of trying to connect the disconnected to, to, to many people, they would see that as very unrelated to what we do in software. But. You know, software, where the ideas come from of talking to people, of observing culture where culture and technology intersect, and seeing things that are seemingly unrelated and finding a relationship there, and seeing how that relationship could be an opportunity for a product.
That’s what I love to do, and that’s what I, I judge I’m best at. Is seeing the big picture and finding the ideas from that. So it’s served me really well. Yeah. I mean, I think the,
Sam Solomon: the difficult, most difficult thing about products is bridging all of the features and different inputs and things like that together.
So I can definitely see that. sO speaking of, of, of products, you were an early employee at MailChimp. How, how’d you end up there?
Aarron Walter: Just by being curious. So I was a professor at the Art Institute of Atlanta. And in each one of my classes, I was so it’s freelancing at the same time.
So I was, you know, working on real projects in the real world and then teaching students design coding. We even did a perceptual interfacing class where we hooked up sensors and motors and various things to the computer. And we built little programs to make art like one student did a pair of sit and spins that were connected to audio tracks.
So as you spin on them faster, they would change pitch slower. They would drop, could do different things to switch tracks. And so it was like this physical dual of. Of audio. So we would do things like that, but you know, I taught a lot of different types of classes PHP class usability class. So it was great opportunity to learn the breadth of, of the medium.
But in as many classes as possible, I would invite guest speakers. And so, you know, I was paying attention to what was happening in the industry who was on the forefront and I would just email them, I would just contact them and say, Teaching this class. We’d love to have you come speak to those who are local.
I’d invite them to come in person. Those that were far away, we’d say, you know, like, could you give us 45 minutes of your time via Skype? And my students will prepare questions ahead of time. We’ll have a great conversation. And almost no one shot me down. They almost always said yes. And what’s interesting is from that I ended up building relationships with people and getting to know people that I still know today.
You know, I met Jonathan Snook that way. I met Jason Santamaria that way. I met Ben Chestnut, the co founder and CEO of MailChimp that way. And so he would come and speak to my class upon occasion about MailChimp and email marketing and just, you know, like running businesses. And I was writing a book, my first book, because I taught a class where I couldn’t find the book that would serve my needs well, and so I decided to write it in a chapter that I wanted to write about MailChimp why MailChimp?
Because I was a customer since 2005. I loved the brand. I loved the personality that was present there, which was really, you know, Ben and Dan and Mark, the three co founders. And I had corresponded with them back and forth as a customer a few times, but at any rate, I was writing a chapter and I said to Ben, could, could I come in and talk to you guys about what you’re going to do with your API?
where the product’s going because I want to write about you. And he said, yeah, cool. You know, we just hired this sharp new engineer and we need a designer to work with him. And why don’t you come in and just talk to us about a job? And at this point there were I think there were the three co founders, one support person, engineer and one other guy who was sort of business strategy.
So there, there weren’t that many people. In fact, MailChimp as a product at that point was barely that, I mean, it was a product that people were using, you know, there were thousands of people using it, but the company, the Rocket Science Group was an agency. Right. That’s what I thought. So it was a services company that had a product that they were, they had made to basically scratch an itch.
They just kept having clients ask them to send email. And so they’re like, yeah, why don’t we just build a product and help people do this? And in 07, they, they kind of made this pact that we want to get out of the rat race of web design work and try to shift to being a product company, which is why they hired Chad, the lead engineer, super sharp guy.
Came from a different email company and and then they ended up hiring me. So I came in in 07 and met with Chad, met with everybody in the company. And we started to brainstorm about ideas of how things could change. I joined in January of 08 and we spent from January to May, if I remember correctly basically re architecting the whole app, tearing it down.
Redesigning almost every single page. Recoding everything, writing front end code. Like the, the old app was a bunch of font tags and tables and You know, I was a standardista and I really wanted to change those things. So I worked on front end code and UI design and focus on, you know, extending the personality that they had already really deftly built over the years.
So Chad and I did that and we launched in, in May and then we made some changes to the pricing plans and so forth, but long story short we, we started so small and then we grew from a few thousand customers to before we knew it, you know, we were hitting a million and when I left, we were north of 10 million around the world.
So it was an incredible journey.
Sam Solomon: Wow, I’m a huge fan of the company. So you guys have done a great job. I’m curious though, when you guys were initially building it, there must have been, I mean, sending emails and building email newsletters is not a trivial thing. What were some of the big early design challenges you guys had to, you know, get over?
Aarron Walter: A lot of it was simplifying complex processes. You know, like the process of designing an email. Campaign, like there’s a whole series of steps you know, there’s a, there’s some design decisions about how rigid and how flexible should we be. If we’re overly rigid, people won’t be able to create what they want to create and send.
If we’re overly permissive in what people can design They can basically blow stuff up and break things and send it out and then complain. You know, so there’s it’s it’s got to be on rails. It’s got to be easy to do and it took us a lot of tries to get that to a good point and the spot that we’ve been in the past few years when I was still there that was really great, and I see them refining that still, so.
You know, the process of building an email list is complicated. It’s basically you’re building a database, and that’s connected to a form, the sign up form. You make changes to the form, like, I don’t want this field anymore. Boom, you just lost that field in your database. And you can make really destructive decisions.
Unknowingly. So there was a lot that we had to deal with, and of course we were experimenting with the personality of the brand trying to make that feel unique very different from competitors, and That was really fun to experiment with and I feel like that helped us tremendously through the years.
Sam Solomon: Definitely. Well, and talking about some of this you know, you guys, I know you’re big on research. I’ve watched several of your talks. You know, you guys did a ton of research, but you know, there are companies out there that really don’t. They don’t really feel like there should people, they feel like people, designers, engineers should be spending time working on the product.
I mean, if you’re on one of these teams, you know, how are you going to, to convince management that, you know, you know, doing so that they’re going and talking to customers and doing some of these things are important.
Aarron Walter: Generally speaking, I recommend that people don’t confront that directly of going and asking for permission.
There’s just so many ways that you can do research and get the, get the inputs that you need to do good work. For instance, you can create small, simple surveys. You can create a post signup survey or an account closing survey to learn why people buy and why people leave. And those can be automated.
So, you know, you spend a couple of days, steal a little bit of time here, a little bit of time there, set that up and you’ve got data rolling in. If you’re doing a particular project on a very focused topic you can create a small survey and send that to a sample of people And gather feedback and start to learn.
And the idea is not that the survey is going to be the, the end of the research, but it’s basically the springboard. To find the person, the right people to talk to because you’re going to find interesting outliers, people that are using your product in a way you hadn’t anticipated people that are really pushing the bounds.
Like if you’re revising a feature you, you get very vocal people who depend on that feature, but know that it’s broken, know that it’s got potential and they’ve got very specific views. You know, you can get those people on the phone and talk to them for 15, 20 minutes. I don’t have to go ask my boss if that’s okay.
Just steal the time. I feel like people can do it. And you know, the permission thing is, it’s just an uphill battle. You’re just not gonna, nine times out of 10, you’re not gonna win that. So the way you do it is do what you need to do, make the work, and do it well. And, There’s probably going to come a time when you ship that product and it’s good and you know, there’s a review that happens and maybe you get a raise because you’re recognized for your contributions.
That’s when you bring it up. You know how I’m doing this? I’m talking to customers. I’m talking to real people. I’m not just pulling this out of the air. It’s not, not magic. It’s simple to do. I see a ton of potential. I’d love to see if there’s an opportunity for us to find. Some budget to support this activity more.
Sam Solomon: In context of like those doing some of these surveys, what, I mean, what are, you said designers should be, should it be designers that are doing this? Should it be engineers, product managers who should be, who should be kind of doing this, everyone?
Aarron Walter: Yes. Yes. Yes. So at MailChimp, we had dedicated researchers at Invision.
We have dedicated researchers. They are very sharp. That are these people are collecting information and informing product teams, basically product teams consisting of designers, project managers engineers. But there’s also an opportunity for each one of those people to be involved in research.
And it makes the process a lot more efficient. Agile as a, as a formal process actually is anti documentation. So don’t produce 30 page reports with research. Instead, Save that time by taking those people and putting them in the setting where the customer is actually using the product, watch them use the product interview them at at their office or, you know, wherever they use the product.
It’s basically like many ethnographic research and they see it. And you know, it’s sort of like if I went to see a movie and I came back and I explained the concept to you. This is the, the narrative you’d be like, Oh, okay, cool. It’s not the same as being at the movie, right? Like going to the movie is far superior in ways that we can’t even measure.
The same is true of research, putting people in that situation where they can actually hear firsthand from customers, there’s nothing more powerful and, you know, it doesn’t require an engineer to forefoot you know, 20 hours a week to do this, you know, they can participate in research at the beginning of a sprint.
They can go visit a customer or two you know, every month. So there, there are ways to do it. And we used to do this at MailChimp. We would take engineers with us to New York or Portland or wherever to visit customers and learn, especially when we were working on something big. Because we just wanted to try to cut, cut to the chase and help them learn.
Sam Solomon: Right. Well, and, and so for, for context, if, you know, one of the engineers doesn’t go on that trip, so, you know, you’ve got software that’s for account managers or something, and maybe it’s a small company, but what, what types of things, someone gets, someone understands someone’s having an issue, You know, are, are, you know, the people reporting back providing some sort of user story?
Are they, is it some sort of, just a persona? Is Jane from so and so having this issue? You know, how do we solve it? I guess, how is that presented to the team, the rest of the team? Or how should that be presented?
Aarron Walter: And it, it, it all depends. So, and, and there are a number of different philosophies in the industry about this.
There are some people that very much believe in personas. As a way to understand these archetypes of your, your customers that these are the core types of customers we have by understanding these demographics, we understand some motivations, et cetera. We went through that process at Mailchimp of creating personas and they were useful for a while.
And. Then they became a lot less useful to us. Is that because there’s
Sam Solomon: just so many, there’s so many different types of people using the product, or I’m curious what made you say that?
Aarron Walter: There were a lot of different types of, of users, but there were a lot of times where it was very hard to tuck a person into that bucket, that category. You know, for instance, we had Andre, who was a marketing professional. Who is not necessarily a developer and, you know, had a collection of traits.
And we’d have someone that would basically span across different personas. And the criticism I’ve heard is, well, that means that your personas are not specific enough. I don’t necessarily buy that. I think that it’s hard for traits, you know, trait soup to be comfortably you know, segmented out, so you only fit into one spot.
So, there’s a different philosophy in the industry, which is instead of looking at demographic traits, we look at behavior and motivation, and we study the job to be done. And, and that philosophy comes from Clay Christensen, who wrote Innovator’s Dilemma, so, Harvard business professor, really sharp guy.
There are a number of people that have worked with him on that and are, are devout followers of that. And we had great it served us well jobs to be done. I, I, there are some people that just believe like this is the only way to do it. I just, I don’t really believe that about anything, any approach.
I think that there are, you know, a lot of different tools to solve problems. I am considerably less confident in personas. But, you know, it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily, you know, a bad process altogether. So, so if you’re
Sam Solomon: recommending, you know, something to follow, you’d say, you know, Just out of the box without knowing anything else about go look at jobs to be
Aarron Walter: done.
Yeah, I think jobs to be done is a really interesting methodology and the premise is that people don’t buy a product they hire it to do a job. So people don’t buy a hammer, they hire it To create a hole in the wall, a hole in the wall is the thing that they want. When you understand what, what they want, then you understand their behavior, the motivation that shapes that behavior and you can design for that.
And there’s, there’s a lot of writing on medium about this topic. So, you know, if people are interested, they can, they can check that out or even Google it. yeAh, that’s, that one’s really great. But your question was about how is research presented?
Sam Solomon: Yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think you know, my question was, was in relation, someone goes and, you know, You know, the, the whole team isn’t, isn’t present when they’re in that interview on that trip to go watch the customers use their product.
You know, how, I guess what my question was more like how, what’s the most effective way for that person to relay that information.
Aarron Walter: And I was curious if that was in user stories or whatever. Yeah. So we, we tried a lot of things. So in my research team, I always, advocated that our work wasn’t done until we turn research into a story.
So we would work hard at creating a story and sometimes. We produced a lot of 30 page documents, Google Docs, and sometimes that was effective, but a lot of times, you know, it was just not a good way to get a message across. People just wouldn’t spend the time to read it. And so we would also produce stories in some ways.
At one point, we produced a video from an extensive study where we had visited a lot of customers The video showed the lifestyle of a collaborative work environment that happened not just at the office, but it was everywhere. You know, it was in, at, at home on the couch. It was in the subway on the way to work.
It was at work at, you know, at the office. In the conference room at your desk, like while you’re getting coffee, that work just is ubiquitous and persistent. And that makes our to do list fill up. And so we get stressed out and we have to share those tasks. We have to hand them off and be collaborative.
And in showing this lifestyle you start to understand the behavior and the needs and where our product is falling short. We didn’t have to say like, okay, the product doesn’t do these things. We show this is the modern life and how people work. And people can just grok that, right? It’s like a three minute video we shot and we wrote a script and shot it and edited it in about ten days.
Did it all in house and, you know, people see it and they immediately get it. Like, they don’t have to keep watching that video every day to know what they’re supposed to do. They watch it and they extract the moral of the story and they get to work. They get to work in their domain as a mobile developer, a mobile designer you know, a marketer, a QA expert, whoever it is.
thAt’s really effective. So, you know, we would do stuff like that. Sometimes there would be posters. Posters are, you know, kind of effective, but easily ignored. We would even make like slide decks sometimes where it would be like photos, kind of like storyboards. Yeah. so We experimented with a lot of things.
If people are interested in this you know, I’m, like I said, I’m a big believer in story as a way of motivating people, getting people moving in the same direction. Kevin Chang has an interesting book. It’s called see what I mean. And it’s about using comics to communicate ideas. And of course, Scott McLeod’s book, understanding comics.
And, you know, there’s a follow up to that as well, but you know, it’s just visual storytelling and humans have been telling stories for millennia. And our brains are just expert at plucking out. The, the kernel of truth out of a story. So it’s the perfect vehicle to communicate to a lot of people, especially in a large company.
Sam Solomon: Great answer.
So you recently left MailChimp and moved to InVision. Mm-Hmm. , you know, I, I’m curious what was attractive about InVision to you? What do you see them doing? What, what, what made you move? Want to go there?
Aarron Walter: Oh, well, so I mean, I loved my time at MailChimp. That was eight years of learning and fun and, you know, working with really smart people and I got to a point where I just needed a break.
I was just tired. I think a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of your listeners can probably identify with that, that our industry is fascinating and fun. But it also causes us to burn the candle at both ends. So I took a break for a couple of months, a few months, and kind of just needed to regroup and spend some time with my family.
We went to Disney world. And you know, InVision is it’s a tool that I’ve used for years. My team used it a number of teams that MailChimp used it. And as the company grew InVision became more central to everything we were doing. So I knew the product as a customer just as I knew MailChimp as a, as a customer before I joined.
And that’s been, you know, history to me that I believe in a product. I want to support that and be part of that movement. And I gotta say, I, I think that InVision is not just a great product, but I think it is a very important product for our times. You know, we like to think about our industry as, you know, it’s very mature and it’s been around for a while.
It’s not that, it’s not that old. It’s still very much the early days. Those days of 1999, 1998, when I was hand building GIFs and hand building image maps. It’s just not that long ago, really, in the grand scheme of things. And if you look at other media and their history animation is a great example.
Started at the turn of the 20th century, the beginning of the 20th century in the most crude way where, you know, animators were drawing the backgrounds and the foregrounds on each image. They didn’t yet have cells so that meant that when you want to do a walk sequence, you redraw the same tree, you know, 50 times.
Same, you know, boat in the background, whatever it is took a step forward. We figured out how to use cells. We draw the foreground. We draw the background. One time we animate across we start to add color and, and enhance that. But really what happened with animation is the feedback loop of improving the.
The craft was so painfully slow because you know, It would take like a month to produce a cartoon, a very short cartoon. And they’d have to do all the drawing, do all the inking and photograph every single cell. And then you get to see it and, and realize that, ah, the work I did three weeks ago, nah, not so good.
It’s really hard to learn that way. Our memories just are not. built for that sort of recall. Then comes Walt Disney Studios, and they had a failed attempt in Kansas City eventually had to move out to California because they felt like that’s what they had to do to be taken seriously, but the heart of animation was in New York, and, and they were the underdogs, Walt Disney was.
So they weren’t respected or really seen as, you know Incredible, as we see them today, as the champions of animation. And there was a really important development that happened. Where they created something called the Sweatbox. It was a closet with a Leica camera, a cheap Leica camera. And animators would do a series of drawings, like a walk sequence.
And then they would go into that closet, and it was called Sweatbox because it was just hot in there, and you had to close the door. photograph that and then they would watch it. They could project it right away. So we’re talking a feedback loop of a month for every studio in New York city, where this is the, the, the heart of, you know, this is the leading center of animation.
And here they are in California in Burbank and they’re photographing this stuff and they’ve shortened the feedback loop. Down to a day, like a few hours in an afternoon. And so, Disney’s cartoons started to stand out because they could put personality in their characters. It’s not just all slapstick like Felix the Cat was.
So they could enhance, that enhancement to the tool, was an enhancement to the process, which enabled Them to further the craft in a very big way. So fast forward to the 21st century where product design is happening. And I know what product design has been like in the past 10 years, because I’ve been at it and the feedback loops were, were, were long.
I remember hand building. Prototypes with HTML and CSS. I remember testing that after two weeks of time invested, I test that with a customer and getting feedback and cringing at the feedback because it meant, you know it’s, it’s like a game of chutes and ladders where I, I slid back down to the start and the two weeks of refinement would happen again.
And then comes InVision. And while I was making those prototypes, mind you, I actually had a conversation with Clark Valver, who’s the founder and CEO of InVision. And he said, Hey, we think we can make a better prototyping platform. Here’s what it’d be like. What do you think? And I said, Hey man, I go for it.
Good luck with that. But I think this is the only way to do it because I just couldn’t see another way. I couldn’t see the sweat box, the Leica camera in the closet that, that Clark and team were going to create. That was 2011. And you know, by 2014, we started using vision and we could work through ideas fast.
Even earlier this year, when I was still at MailChimp, we were prototyping ideas. With animation, we would, you know, create simple animations, upload those design screens really quickly and sketch now sketch and InVision are so closely intertwined, like the feedback loop process to get to high fidelity is shrinking at an incredible rate.
And that means product design is going to change because it can change. We can look at it in a different way. We can see it. With, with new eyes. So that’s, you want to know why I’m at InVision that that’s super exciting to me and, you know, the mission that my team has in design education that’s also really fascinating to me as well.
Sam Solomon: Fast forward another, you know, five years, what is, you know, what does. Prototyping, what does product design look like? What do some of these teams look like?
Aarron Walter: You know, we were talking earlier about research and you know, the battle that we have with head honchos trying to convince them that this is a good thing to do, right?
Chances are, they probably know it’s valuable, but the friction is it takes too much time. We don’t have time to do it. If you can produce high fidelity prototypes. You’re shaving days, weeks off of the process. And you can take to a customer a high fidelity prototype that they actually think is real.
So, not only is the prototype high fidelity, the feedback is high fidelity. Because the product feels like the real thing. And that feed, that’s an additional feedback loop that it’s not just the feedback that the designer is getting of refining their work. It’s the feedback from the customer as well and how it fits in the market and you know, how it’d be used and where it’s confusing, is it usable?
Is it pleasurable? All of these things. So fast forward five years and I don’t even think it’s five years, but that is just going to be folded into what we do all the time. And I love that because right now there’s a, there’s a deep culture of AB testing which is basically abdicating design. The design process where we think for ourselves and we make a judgment on the best approach.
We just put out two versions. Well, it’s just AB test. It’s like the easy way out. Let’s AB test and see what customers choose. Well, if you put out two crappy versions. It doesn’t matter if A or B wins, it’s still, you know, still crap, right? aNd a lot of times that’s, that’s what’s happening is, you know, people are trying to go to market quickly and they use A B testing as a their.
Signal of quality instead of actually spending a little time thinking about that design more carefully, checking in with a customer on a real thing, refining that further, et cetera. It’s more iterative. AB Testing tends to be like a one push it and that’s the end of it.
Sam Solomon: Definitely. Well, Aaron would just want it.
This was a great interview. It went a little bit longer than than I had expected, but I, this was, this was fantastic. You know, thank you for joining me.
Aarron Walter: Oh, Hey, my pleasure. I love. I love talking shop, so thanks for having me. My guest is
Sam Solomon: Invision VP of Design Education, Aaron Walter. This is DN FM. And that’s going to be it for episode two.
If you enjoyed it, I’d encourage you to subscribe, that way you’ll never miss a new episode. We’ve got plenty of fantastic guests and interviews lined up I would hate for you to miss on. If you’ve got ideas on things we could do to make the show better, we’d love to hear from you. Maybe there’s a guest you want to have on.
If so, reach out to us on Twitter at Designer News Bot. You can also reach me personally at Samuel R. Solomon. If you’re interested in supporting the show, you know, please get in touch with us. We’d love to talk about sponsorship opportunities. Once again, my guest is InVision VP of Design Education, Aaron Walter.
I’m Sam Solomon, and this is DN FM.