Dr Dani: [00:00:00] Hey Peter. 

Designer Peter: Hi Dani. 

Dr Dani: How are you? 

Designer Peter: I'm fantastic, thanks. How are you? 

Dr Dani: I am great. What are we talking about today? 

Designer Peter: Today, Dani, we're gonna do a bit of a deep dive into ux. 

Dr Dani: Nice. I'm looking forward to getting a clear definition on that because I feel like you asked 10 people and you'll probably get 11 different answers.

Designer Peter: Yeah, me too. 

Dr Dani: So to help us with this topic, we have a guest with us today. Nick, do you want to introduce yourself? 

Guest Nick : Hi Dani. Thanks for having me. I am Nick Kaufman. I'm based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. I began my design career as a young boy in our local childcare group. Drawing on tables and realized that when I was looking at what I had drawn versus what my friends had drawn, I was like, this is a really good I, I feel like I, I invested myself in this and [00:01:00] maybe there's something here.

And stayed with that of this does not suck. I enjoyed doing this and if I have to spend my time doing something, communicating visually was a pleasure. And it stuck with me through university and I was fortunate enough to come back into the San Francisco Bay area around 1999, 2000 when this explosion of art and technology was occurring right in my backyard.

And I've been riding that wave ever since. Being in and out of startups and large corporations for as long as I could pay attention to them. And now finding myself in a consultancy formally for the last 10 years, but informally for the last 25 to 30, trying to figure out where it's all going.

And that's what I would love to talk with you about. 

Dr Dani: We are excited to talk about that as well, particularly given the I don't know if you've heard, but AI has arrived. 

Guest Nick : I tend to timestamp my conversations and conversations like this [00:02:00] about how far into it did we get before that word was used, and I think we are, oh, maybe two minutes and 30 seconds.

So it's a new rec, it's a new record. We've we've extended it and delayed it long enough to preamble a little bit, but yes. That thing you just mentioned is everywhere. 

Dr Dani: Dani, I think this is very relevant given that, sorry, Peter, go ahead. 

Designer Peter: No. It's just congratulating you on breaking a record there.

Round of applause. 

Guest Nick : Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it's everywhere. It's extremely disruptive. Here in the Bay Area we have a lot of people that are looking to start companies. A lot of people that are looking to raise money to start those companies. And a way to do that is to be able to hum a tune that everybody knows.

And those tunes are usually in the way of buzzwords, whether it be Web 2.0 or cloud-based, or blockchain or peer to peer. It goes on and on and NFTs, it goes on and on. And every six to 12 months, when you drive to the airport across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, you'll see [00:03:00] these billboard.

There's a echo chamber effect of these billboards, is that they're all using that same word, the ones that I mentioned as well as countless others. So we're a bit jaded because we've seen these hype cycles come and go over the last 10, 20 years, and we've seen these company rise and fall. My, my NFT stocks aren't doing great.

But this one feels a little different because the breadth of impact is not like blockchain. I say what you will about Bitcoin and it's still a very speculative market, but am I using it on a daily basis other than speculation? Am I using it to transact and send money and do things on to buy groceries and such?

Not likely, but am I using artificial generative technologies to do things like conduct research or produce artifacts or synthesize thoughts every day? And it's not just me. It's, it can be applied. To many different [00:04:00] industries. Yes, you and I are old enough. I'll say Peter, I won't say Dani Peter, you and I are gray bearded enough.

Where we might remember the digital transformation wave of the early two thousands when we had industries that were being told, put down your pen and paper and your fax machines. You don't need to do things analog anymore. There's this new wave called digital transformation that's gonna put it all into Microsoft Office or whatever it was.

And that was revolutionary because now we had things like websites and spreadsheets and work documents and email, and we would change the way entire industries would work. It feels a little bit like that now, where we're looking at supply chains or even, content production or seeing that can be applicable in so many different places.

And so the lessons learned from that first era of transformation. I'm really keen to discuss on how it might be applied for this second wave. 

Dr Dani: Before we get to that, maybe we start with a little [00:05:00] bit of definitions, 'cause that's usually our flow, but also for our audience. So I mentioned earlier that UX ui, these terms are, there's so many definitions of it.

Perhaps you can help us understand when we use these terms, what does it mean and when does it apply? 

Guest Nick : When I talk to my client's accounting department I'd label as ubiquitous expense, but no user experience is something that really came up about 15 years ago with the advent of mobile phones and devices.

A lot of the large technology companies like Google and Apple began to standardize their UI systems, their design systems. Project Kennedy was Google's and Coco was Apple's because what they saw is that they had all of these independent developers developing apps for their devices and they were trying to gain market share.

And the mom and pop developer were just making their own design decisions. And they may have been know hobbyists or each company had their own design team and there [00:06:00] wasn't a standard. And it really reduced the brand value because as you would install and use apps on the phone, they looked kind of podunky, that's a, an American word for less of a quality.

And so I think one of the efforts was. A internally, we wanna make sure a Google application looks like a Google application, but we are gonna release this to the wild so that if you develop on the Android platform, you know that the buttons here and the things like that. And all of the subjectivity of UI became less and less important.

And there was also this reaction of, apple products, quote, just work. They just work. And that was defined as the experience of which somebody had coming through a application or a website. The notion of us as designers being this subjective visual artifact of which you could like or dislike became very much diminished.

It was also when you could go and find people around the world to do design work, to color in the blanks of these design systems and not meet the [00:07:00] bespoke subjectivity of a UI or of an application design. Web design became passe in something of the past, and what was in its place was.

Research and experience and understanding touch points and barriers and emotional reactions and behavioral psychology and attention and all of these things that really went into a greater level of understanding of how humans interact with the thing. And so that is the little bit of background on how I define experience.

But there was a great term, I'm gonna throw back another definition to you from a professor at the University of Ottawa, I believe, who is teaching something called thinglessness, where it's not about the artifact, it's about all of the things regardless of what they may be that go into an experience of everything from the consideration to the onboarding, to, there are many different touch points and dimensions to it.

Dani, I know that was a very simple question, which I gave you a [00:08:00] complicated, long-winded history and background and answer mixed in with a few jokes. Thank you for your patience and letting me land the plane. 

Designer Peter: Thanks for landing the plane, Nick. No you're in the right place. That's why we like to do this podcast.

I particularly love to get into definitions of words and, oh, I'm sorry. I'm a bit like a magpie with some things, but this idea of thinglessness, can we take a slight detour into that just briefly? Yeah, that's, that sounds very interesting. 

Guest Nick : I agree. I often wonder who am I designing for anymore if I'm doing web applications or all in not too distant future.

In fact, it's already here. We have agents that are performing tasks whether it be reserving concert tickets or booking tables or things like that. And if an agent were to go through whatever application or product that you are building a thing for and need to accomplish a task, why do we even have visual displays anymore?

If it's a lessness, it's just an internal service. How do we provide the [00:09:00] humans that are using these tools, moments of delight so that in a world that's increasingly algorithmic and standardized, that we showcase, ah. There's a there, there's somebody behind this. This notion of our medium being fixed of our skillset being finite and our advantages and capabilities being defined, I think get blown up.

Where if, as designers we're used to doing design tools and dragging and dropping and illustrating with pixels of light on a screen, that's how we've been working for the last 20 years as for digital product designers. And we had this great tool. The industry was so fragmented and it was so wrong, and we're using XD and Sketch and Basal me and on and on, and these design and prototyping tools every year you just have to relearn a different one.

But for that brief moment, there was two or three years in which this tool, Figma. coalesce the entire industry. And it was defacto and it was great. And I attended config 2025 and it felt [00:10:00] like Altamont, which for those of you who don't know the history of the Rolling Stones was a free concert that went horribly wrong in many ways.

And it marked the end of the 1960s, which of the peace and love era here in the San Francisco Bay era because Figma for those who knew, was now obsolete at being replaced by generative tools and prompt based design and, vibe coding or vibe design or whatever you wanna call it. And Figma is still extremely far behind with this adoption of that capability of that technology.

But it brings into the question thinglessness, is that if we don't attach ourselves to the medium and deliverable, we know what skills we bring to the conversation that allows us to be evolutionary. See, thank you. So 

Dr Dani: this is an interesting, touchpoint.

'Cause my research has been on, so I traditionally trained as a graphic designer.

Web design was my first career.

And, then I've gone on to do other things [00:11:00] obviously. And then in my PhD work, I came back to design because I started to figure out that actually much of what helped me succeed in other arenas were the skills that I developed in design school.

And then at that time, I was seeing how design thinking was being productized and becoming more of a process than a capability. Then I decided actually I wanna figure out what are these underlying capabilities that allow us to do design thinking.

Guest Nick : And 

Dr Dani: what we found in that research is that when you focus on building the capabilities, the tools become irrelevant.

And I think this is this is lining up really well because what you're arguing is it's not about Figma and it's not about whatever tool you're working. 'cause if we assume that the tools that we have today are gonna be different tomorrow, then the only thing we can fall back on are the human capabilities.

Guest Nick : And Dani, I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. On one side I'm saying Figma is dead. On the other side is look at this shiny new tool. I can do all of this wonderful stuff. And the gap between [00:12:00] design and development is gonna be reduced down to the finite because you can use an existing code repository that the developers work in and all the constraints and versions and package JSON files, and you can use that as a language model to train your UI generation.

And so your handoff is gonna be saving heaps of time for the developers to be able to adopt the real prototype that has all the logic and conditions and variables and values and the web experience as you want it to be something that Figma was never able to do. So that's the other side of my mouth saying, but look at this tool, that tool's dead.

But look at this tool dead. And I'm mentioning that because there's increased velocity on that side of the double diamond of we know. We know how we're gonna design things, right? We know how we're going to be able to design and execute at a greater speed. But when you can have that velocity an analogy I often use an electric bicycle is like the feeling of using these prompts to design and to [00:13:00] develop is like the first time you ever rode an electric bike.

This is amazing. Look how fast I can go and I'm barely pedaling. But if you've ever been 30 miles from home and the bike breaks down, you gotta know how to fix the chain or change the tire or know why the brakes don't work because you're now, you're twice as far and you, it takes, gonna take you twice as long to get back from an organizational cycle or a product development cycle.

If we have greater velocity at the back end, what does that mandate on the front end to ensure that we're going in the right direction? And that's where I think you reside is that you have an understanding of the behavioral sciences involved with making sure that we've got the right direction for this increased velocity so that we don't find ourselves as twice as far in the wrong direction as when we started.

Designer Peter: Love it. That's a think we broke a record with with Dani's mention of ai. Not sure. For break, we're definitely calling a record with mind, my mind being blown. I [00:14:00] start with thinglessness and I'm really loving the direction, excuse the pun of this conversation. No, all and yes maybe to, I dunno if this is gonna break the analogy or extend it or, but the e-bike analogy, I do like a, an e-bike analogy and I'll love Yeah.

That idea of running a battery twice as far from home or needing to fix it. But there's also something about when you do first ride an e-bike, it's very tempting to. Crank the assistance up to say five or 11. 

Seems we're talking rock bands, just one spinal tap. Yep. Yep.

Got for reference. Crank up to 11 and you can just sit there on your on your e-bike. And actually this is a quite a good, I think, oh, praise myself. Where analogy, some countries like the UK will actually limit that assistance. So the, you must be pedaling in order for the e-bike to help you go at a certain speed in New Zealand.

We don't have that regulation where I live we a I live in a beautiful seaside town that has a path around our estuary. Also has a reasonably large retired population. And in the last two or three years, [00:15:00] that retired population has definitely discovered e-bikes. I think some of 'em have rediscovered bicycles for the first time in say, 50 years.

And we now have slightly dangerous groups of slightly outta control elderly e-bike riders who, just crank up the assistance, sit there with their pedals flat and zooming around the the esry. And so that thrill of being able to do things without really putting anything in and seeing a result, we can, and I've sensed it.

You, you, there's that definitely that temptation with any artificial help LLMs, figma, anything. And there is some something from your own well buy. Being forced to pedal and to get the help, then I still retain some fitness. I'm still building my muscles, my cardiovascular system. I think that's

Guest Nick : yep.

So this, there's the allure of technology that it's gonna be faster or better may not be in fact true. Yeah I, [00:16:00] the standpoint, and not to belabor the metaphor of, more people on bicycles is better. Yeah. The more people we can get peddling or throttling the better it's gonna be.

But I think from an organizational standpoint the bike mechanics are not gonna go out of business is that they're now gonna see that there's more people developing and there's more people needing their assistance. This notion of is design dead or is engineering dead? Depending upon what your LinkedIn algorithm is biased towards, you're gonna see these kinds of conversations of self-examination, of how.

Does, how do I, in my role, contribute to the team anymore when anybody can do what I do? Anybody can ride the bicycle, but not everybody can get you back home. So that's where, from an organizational standpoint as well as when you speak to the leaders of these departments I'll speak design because it's what I know best, the design and UX departments to say, all right, you've got a team of 20 people, mid to junior level, senior level, and [00:17:00] they've all learned Figma.

And your workflow is all in the sort of design centric approval flow where you design a component, you submit it for review, it goes into review, it goes back to review, gets approved, gets put in the queue, gets sent to development's gonna develop it. And then it can be used in a real life scenario when you could jump to the finish line and say, just gimme the code base of all the existing components, and I will.

Examine that and use it as a building block to then create my own components. And I don't need to go through an approval process because I know that it's not gonna break the rules of the design system because it's using that as guardrails for which it generates. And oh, by the way, I save the design community time and I save the engineers time as well.

As a leader of that department, when all of a sudden your resources get called into question and your tools get called into question and your budgets and your hiring strategy and the velocity of what you're expected to do things, I think that's a moment that as consultants as you Dani and I are coming in [00:18:00] from the outside, we have the ability to adapt.

And we are not encumbered by the quarterly release cycle that's gonna cause distraction on these kinds of motions, but we can really see and iterate and understand the impact of what is going to have with design teams. Speak to the leadership and be able to retrain so that we can keep their velocity and their justification of going.

Dani, that goes back to the thinking skills of designers to understand human empathy and prioritization and how did that align with the organization. That's not something that has anything to do with design nor development. That is all about being human-centric. And I think that's where the design thinking advantages are gonna really persist throughout this upheaval process.

Dr Dani: I completely agree with that I'm fascinated by AI and every time there's a new ai, something like I, I am one of those early adopters. So I show up, I try, I may not know what on earth I'm doing, [00:19:00] but I'm there. 

Guest Nick : Yeah. 

Dr Dani: But as much as I am in that way, I also come back to this point of the so what, so the code that you're creating that, like ultimately we create things that are consumed by humans.

Guest Nick : So maybe mo

Dr Dani: mostly used by humans. Which is a whole other topic. Are we at some point going to have consumers that. Are paying money that aren't human, but that's a whole other conversation.

Guest Nick : I, the rabbit R one, I've got one on my shelf. Teenage engineering is a Swedish de industrial design company that I just drool over. I haven't opened it up because I bought it for the perseverance aspect of the R one, which I'm hoping someday will be like the iPhone. But they have an entire marketplace of agents that are meant to automate tasks for you, and that involves browsing on websites and clicking on buttons.

And we've seen that across a number of different major platforms. And okay, where [00:20:00] does that change our pattern library? If we are now accommodating for agents as well as humans, what are the patterns that one of those two don't quite grok what sliders or error states or whatever they have I feel like we're at this threshold of increased standardization and now, the pattern libraries of which the anthropics of the world have adopted or the open ais of the world have adopted. When it comes time for you to change your prompt into a ui. These are now referencing a fairly standard set of design components. And so I'm bearing myself in the details of the implementation here.

But if we keep the conversation around that humanist element of what does it mean to provide the joy and the positive experience to a human being versus the executional task of getting from A to B in the most efficient manner possible.

Dr Dani: It still comes back to we have to understand the human [00:21:00] and their context and what they need and what they want. 'cause at least at this stage, yeah, there is this blend of agent and human. For the most part, at this stage we are still serving humans. 

Guest Nick : I agree. Yes. 

Dr Dani: Even with all of that advancement, the need to understand humans is going to get bigger and bigger.

Because the problem with ai, and I see, and I've been around long enough to know, like when I started my career we were in the, we were at the tail end of offshoring everything and then bringing everything back. For one of two reasons because we found out that we, the royal, we found out that actually offshoring tends to be more expensive, or if we outsource crappy processes, we get outsourced crappy processes.

Guest Nick : Garbage and garbage out. Yeah, 

Dr Dani: exactly. And, what also was happening is because when every, organization is outsourcing, [00:22:00] it is no longer a competitive advantage. It is now the way, the standard way that businesses are done. And I see the same thing happening with ai. When AI is universally adopted, it's no longer gonna be a competitive advantage.

It is just gonna be the standard way that this is how businesses operate. So then how do organizations compete in a world where AI is everywhere? 

Guest Nick : Yeah. A tip of the spear would be in human resources where we're seeing garbage out in the sense that the job requirements are being. Run through a GPT and spit out and that the processing of applications, it's being done through an algorithm.

And then on the applicant side I want some automation in how I respond to these jobs. And if you saw it last week, there was a hack which I'm not a hundred percent sure is true, but it didn't seem untrue, where you put in white [00:23:00] letters on a white page, keywords that also offer the algorithm instructions that are unreadable by human beings.

But when these application systems scan your resume for text, it sees these commands and reads them and then elevates your application to the top of the heap. So that I think that's just the new normal. If you so choose to try to play this as a numbers game, then that's. What world you're going to be living.

And I have more than I would like to admit a number of friends and coworkers that are looking for work now. As you get later in your career and you're turning over, sometimes those jobs don't come as fast or as furious as they might used to now. And to, to the letter. Not a single one of them will find a job anonymously.

It will always booth be through the strength of their network and through somebody they know in real life. And I know it's easy hyperbole to say [00:24:00] make sure you go to these networking events and make sure you make these contacts and make sure you get yourself out there and in front of other human beings.

But I think that's no longer an optional thing to do. I think that is now mandatory because again, the noise in this space because of ai it has made that connection impossible. If it isn't IRL.

Designer Peter: It's a, that's a, an amusing, interesting yeah. Story about the white letters and the white background. I can imagine that being true, that, it is it's about cops and robbers, isn't it? There's just 

Guest Nick : yeah. 

Designer Peter: One step ahead. I thought where you might be going with that and is and this is going back.

I want, in the early days of chat GPTA year ago, is it 18 months, maybe two? I had a colleague who was right on the cutting edge and using it to draft and then send emails. And I'm fairly certain some of the responses he was getting were also written by whatever chat or Microsoft AI was. And it's I'll have my AI 

Guest Nick : co-pilot Yeah. Co-pilot. Yeah. Co 

Designer Peter: yeah. Co I'll have my copilot talk to your co-pilot and we can just go and, have coffee and [00:25:00] have the real conversation. Yeah. Cutting humans out all, all together. Yeah.

It's a 

Guest Nick : It's a different reaction coming outta COVID when we were all estranged from one another. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. 

Guest Nick : And now there's this, there is this desire for human connection. Like we Yeah. Need to be able to see and talk with one another. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. 

Guest Nick : But something in the way. 

Designer Peter: Yeah.

The, I'm sure we're, or we're, we are definitely not alone, but this, I guess hypothesis or, vision of the future where AI is doing everything that computers can be the best at. And it frees up humans to be the best that humans can be human. Yeah. 

Guest Nick : Yeah. Peter, I was asked verbatim this week if I had a AI girlfriend. I've been married for 23 years no. Or did not use AI for personal development. Yeah. One of my mentors does executive coaching. And yeah, Dani, you'll be interested in this.

And one of his clients had recorded all of their conversations for which he paid thousands of dollars to have. And he had trained [00:26:00] a model based upon my mentors, the coaches' responses. And began to take his writing and his social media posts and feeding this model so that at the end of the duration, he now had a virtual version of this coach and could ask it questions and, seek guidance from it.

And his reaction to finding out that a client had done this. Was unnerved. He wasn't quite sure what it meant because one of the things he advises on is AI practices and policies and integration. But when somebody had taken him and made a virtual version what does that say for the need of coaching and companionship?

Yeah. I'm not sure where I fall on that, but it's not really, the first thing I go to is a version of myself online or a companion of myself online. I tend to need a little bit more dirty of a, of a signal of the imperfections of human conversation. Provide more reasoning [00:27:00] than an algorithm.

Dr Dani: Something we forget in all of this talk about AI is that the technology we use today are of 21st century. But our brains are not of 21st century. So we as humans still have a fundamental need for human connection that we don't get the same gratification that from a brain chemistry perspective, talking to AI that we do if we're having coffee with a friend , and that gets lost in the, in AI conversations.

Guest Nick : Yeah. It goes back to the notion of time when I talked about the time allotted because of this new technology of man, you could get an app in two days. Okay, if the sprint is a quarter and you know that the last two days of the quarter are gonna be getting that app, what do you do with the other 10 weeks?

We make sure that the app we do develop is the right app. And I'll use your analogy again, Dani, [00:28:00] of if our brains are not yet in the 21st century at the speed of efficiency of this augmentation, then let's let that time sink in and let these relationships develop and let these conversations percolate because we shouldn't be in any hurry to get work done, because that work is gonna get done pretty damn quickly.

We should really feel comfortable about what it is we're doing. A conversation with a gentleman who's junior to mid career trying to make sense of it all and, and where that progress now happens because all the skills that he picked up were called into question six to 12 months ago.

He is like, how do I climb the ladder now because I don't quite know that wrong? I'm not gonna become a master at Figma and feel like I can elevate to a senior design position. And my, my cheeky metaphor is you don't need a ladder now you have a jet pack you could put on this jet pack and go right up to the top.

You just need to make sure that the direction you're going in, will land you atop the building. Which is [00:29:00] to say that if you are so empowered, you have the skills that you didn't have. Five years ago, you have the ability to execute now on a, on an exponential level. And there's nothing that would stop you from doing it.

So it, it's exciting in that field of entrepreneurship and innovation and transformation and change and all of these things that are disruptive. But it can be quite scary if you're stuck in a silo and expected to advance in a certain way at a certain rate. Which I imagine is a lot of the clients and the discussions that you two have is around this organizational transformation.

Dr Dani: This is what's bringing a lot of uncertainty in organizations, right? And lots of uncertainty and anxiety and in humans. Because if you spent your whole career with I'm gonna work to get to this level and then I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get to this level, and then I'm gonna get to, and you have this whole thing mapped out, and now we're moving into this time that, there are no levels.

Guest Nick : Yeah. Flat based organizations. [00:30:00] Yeah. 

Designer Peter: And everyone has access to a to a jet pack. And potentially everyone could go off in d different directions with their jet packs and maybe it comes back to me. What one of the, the things we like to delve into is the importance of what we're talking about .

The, we have start to get right into AI and its impact on ux, but if we take AI outta things and just think about user experience design, UI design, and why it's important we are touching on it. 'cause it essentially, yeah. It helps us if we take this approach, we can really focus in on the important problems to solve.

Yeah. And then do our best to create the best solutions we can. Whether it's, in a screen or in a whole app or in an end-to-end service solves a problem or helps somebody to do something better. But what you're saying there that has really started to come alive in my mind is that it's the old was it attributed to various different people, whether [00:31:00] it's George Washington or Einstein.

If you give me an ax and tell me to cut down a tree and I've got six hours, then they said they would spend the first, five hours sharpening the ax. This is actually what we're being invited to do. Now, if we, if it literally does take us two days to, to build an app then yeah, let's take the nine weeks and three days to, make sure that we're solving the right problem in the right way.

For the right people and that we've got more time to examine all the unintended consequences that might occur. Yeah. Before we hit that go button on our AI colleagues and get it built and shipped 

Guest Nick : That's only done through outreach and research and, informed strategy.

There, this is an overused example, but I try it anyways, is that notion when you first opened an Uber, and these were the days before ride sharing. Was commonplace and the magic moment was that you opened it and you saw all these Ubers crawling around the screen. Now those were fake. Those all weren't taxis available to be [00:32:00] booked, but you had this moment of, oh, it's everywhere.

And it's you ubiquitous Now it's not this outlier of a concept of getting in a stranger's car. They're all around me. And sure. Then you booked the taxi and then you waited for the 15 minutes for it to get there. It wasn't just around the corner, but you addressed this. User, this customer's notion of, I'm trying this new thing out and there's not gonna be any of these things anywhere, and therefore I'm gonna get standing here on the curb, which is the worst nightmare for anybody that's trying to hail a ride, whether it be through a ride share or through a traditional taxi.

And that comes through ethnography that comes through, user-based studies is how do you find that aha moment of wonder of which you can then build a billion dollar company around, even if that animation is fake. It really doesn't matter once you're in the transaction process because , you've [00:33:00] pierced the veil, if you will of the leap of faith that it takes for the adoption of the app.

Designer Peter: Yeah. So the the Uber story there the, they, spent time and effort to really, to understand the real problem to solve, which is that less stranded on the side of the car, but whoever knows, wherever, whenever. And it's that fear of being left behind. And they started to resolve that in people's minds by showing them what they needed to see to encourage them to go, I will use this service.

Guest Nick : Yeah. Yeah. Wisdom of crowds. Yeah. Yeah. I should be afraid of getting into people's cars. I funny backstory, there was a coworking space around the year 2000 called Citizen Space which was in south of Market in San Francisco, which is a famous sort of tech corridor.

And I had gotten to know the manager there who heard I was a designer. She came and she said, oh, there's there's these guys and they're, they started this company called Air Bed and Breakfast. And what they do is you go and you stay at a stranger's [00:34:00] house on their couch for a night. And I looked at her, I shook my head.

I was like, that's the dumbest idea I have ever heard. I would use a website to book a room in somebody's house. What are you talking about? That, that shows the savviness of my business decision. So discount everything I just said up until this point because clearly I have no instinct of what's a good idea and what's not.

Dr Dani: But on the surface, these things sound crazy, right? Yeah, we were all taught never get into a car with a stranger. And now we literally, yeah, we literally call strangers to our home to come in their cars and pick us up. 

Guest Nick : Sure. Spend the night if you want, if anything goes wrong, it's your repu online reputation that's at risk.

And it's my star writing, so let's just keep things polite. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. Don't feel too bad, Nick. I remember this is when I first arrived in New Zealand and we made friends with a, with another couple and they were renting their place. And there was a knock at the door one evening when we were around there, socializing and yeah, it was [00:35:00] strangers and, oh, this is.

So and so they've come to stay in our spare room. Who are they? Are they paying you money to stay in your, but hold on. You're renting this in your rent sub. What? That this was my introduction to Airbnb, so that was nine years later. What, I'm sure it was a roaring success in various parts of the world by that point.

But I was like, no this doesn't make sense to me, and this seems a bit weird. 

Guest Nick : Yeah. Tying it back again to the human connection is that we're in this era. Which we can connect with humans in the most random ways possible. And it's totally acceptable and yeah. And, encourage and an entire economy based upon random connections.

Yeah. And I I, so there should be no lamentation of, oh, we live in this sort of cyber world where nothing is real and emotions are fake and there's no personal connection. Yeah. You can have some, you can have people in your house seven days a week if you wanted 'em to. Yeah. It's just how do we process and structure those kinds of relationships.

Yeah. Is what I deal with. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. [00:36:00] Nice. 

Dr Dani: I just had this random thought to go with me. Usually Peter's the one that takes us on these wild goose chases.

As a New Yorker, one of the skills that you hone is being able to hail a cab. Like this is something that you just, I don't even know how I learned to do it, but it's just like a skill I had, but now I don't need that skill, right? Like I just opened my app, so this has got me thinking about, but nobody's like sitting around crying about the fact that now people don't know how to hail a cab anymore.

So this is bringing up for me what are some of the skills that we might be losing because we're becoming reliant on ai. Particularly in the context of design work and do losing those skills matter and do we have to be mindful about what we lose versus what we need to be mindful about retaining?

Guest Nick : Yeah. It [00:37:00] brings to mind what the structure of these design and development team should be. If we used to work in our silos where the designers did their thing based upon the PM's requirements document, and that all came together when it got handed off to engineering to say, Hey, we went from requirements to ideation design and now here engineering, it's all packaged up for you to make it real.

When we break down these boundaries and silos, and as you had mentioned, so the knowledge structures. Of which each department was expected to bring because now the PMs can just take the requirements document and tell the algorithm to give me a design and the designers can take the design and tell the algorithm to give me a code base.

And so the prot of what it is we did now gets broken down or challenge. And where I'm hoping and where I've seen benefit on projects myself is that when you have these sort of cobra teams, these teams of collaboration, [00:38:00] where the engineering team knows what is important not to forget and teaching the design team what they need to accommodate and vice versa, is that you have this sort of shared knowledge that if you work in silos, nobody knows what's happening or how it's happening.

But if you work as a I mean we had this sort of movement a number of years ago called co-design where designers would always be pair. Pair programming, co-designing. I think that feels right now where you are taking time together because your velocity is exponential. There's no reason not to make sure that the parties involved are all responsible for, again, the prioritization, the features, the definitions, the requirements, and setting things up properly for product evolution, the emotions, the, the visuals the experience, all of the things that the designers will the consistency that the designers will help enforce. And then the adherence to the code base and the [00:39:00] execution that the engineering team will bring in. And to say that we are all in a code base and a collaboration tool and doing this together, I think is going to see dividends beyond just trying to hand it over from silo to silo because those silos have broken down.

Anybody can write a prompt and make changes pretty easily.

Dr Dani: Interesting you mentioned that. 'cause the other day I was doing some work on our website and I used AI to write me some code, but it didn't look quite the way I wanted it to, so I had to go back into my HTML days and go looking 

Guest Nick : Yeah. 

Dr Dani: For what to fix and. You know that's a 'cause you still have to know these things. So if I had no HTML background, I don't know how I would've worked myself out of that situation. It was like I had to troubleshoot the code that AI created. But to do that, I had to have some understanding of how to go in and read the code.

Guest Nick : You were [00:40:00] on an electric bicycle and you needed to know how to put the chain back on the hub or how to fix the tire so that you could get home. I put this engagement we've just come out of a six month project where we were in a financial services firm outta New York, and the design team was all Figma.

And the product team brought us in because the design team wouldn't provide the product team any resources. And they said there's an agency that can come and supplement while the design team does whatever they need to do. And we had enough experience with. With the code base, but we brought on a front end engineer for the first time through this process using strictly generative tools.

I had hired somebody from my alma mater who was out of college, university, and all she had done was Figma up until this point, and two weeks into the six months project, Figma wasn't gonna work anymore because it's what we had done last time. And the gap between design and development, last engagement with the same client was too great and the end product had fallen over.

And so for this [00:41:00] iteration, I was like, I'm not gonna make that same mistake again, is that we're gonna work within the client's code base and versions and control systems and everything and components so that when we use all of that, which I just mentioned, we create a model for which we design within prototypes and user testing and acceptance testing, and making it look as close to what the end goal will be as possible.

Look and feel and be generated from a code base that has been constrained to use all of the definitions that frontend team will then receive. And my point on this was that it was a different kind of engagement and I needed to bring in a engineer to follow us this whole way because I didn't want a get caught in some branch conflict.

I didn't wanna have to rebase, I wanted to make sure that my package do JSON wasn't bringing in third party libraries and that we were working within a version control system, much like an engineering team would. [00:42:00] But we had very few engineering skills. We couldn't go much past HTML in terms of trying to find that tag and why this doesn't look like this.

We needed to know also the repository of a React native app and where to put things and how to comment code correctly. And so it, it lends itself to cross collaboration, which is kind the original point of this conversation was that we wanna make sure that we can connect with one another and that we're not using these tools in isolation and not sharing the skills that we've learned all along the way in our careers as they apply to the different environments that we find ourselves working in.

Dr Dani: This is interesting that I believe as you're stating Nick, that the need for collaboration is only going to increase as the speed of technology increases, which is a bit ironic in that we humans are gonna need to rely more and more on each other to get stuff done.

Guest Nick : and Dani, I will say it for a third time, and there's no better person to do [00:43:00] that than people who are familiar with coaching consulting workshops, facilitation, and that is Design Thinker Institute.

And those are the people that have the skills to encourage collaboration, discussion, and innovation. And those are the core skill sets that designers have and that strategic Thinkers have. And yes, we should be afraid that everything's changing, that our jobs are gonna get into question, that we're gonna have to relearn new tools and find ourselves in uncomfortable spaces.

But yes, we should be confident that all those skills that we learned getting to this point are gonna be as paramount in importance as they were before this whole thing started. 

Dr Dani: Love that. That just feels like a mic drop. Boom. . 

Designer Peter: Absolutely. Fantastic.

Dr Dani: So where are we on our conversation path?

Designer Peter: So I think we are yeah I'll do a bit of a recap, Dani, and you can help me if you like, but we've talked about u UX that helped us understand [00:44:00] that. And we've talked just recently about why UX is important why any design is important, and then we've had woven through that lots of interesting and helpful, viewpoints on from Nick and on ai.

And in terms of where ai, a UX needs to go next to where design needs to go next. I really liked sort doing a bit of a recap. The idea that the velocity of the backend as Nick had described it, where things actually get built and then delivered that, that is increasing exponentially.

That by definition means we have, we should, we ought to not use the extra time to do, deliver more, but we ought to take that same amount of time and do more at the front end, where we actually start to discover from a human point of view what is actually truly needed. And I think in particular, try to spend more time imagining the unintended consequences of what we're doing, which is where I think a lot of design and delivery in recent years has maybe purposefully or [00:45:00] accidentally tripped up.

What other lenses should we be thinking about Nick, in terms of ai and ux?

Guest Nick : We have a a municipality here in the San Francisco Bay area. It's in San Mateo County where a lot of these companies were founded and currently established just south of San Francisco.

And in order to do business with the county of San Mateo, if you want to use generative tools or ai you need to acknowledge whose job you're taking. I'll use an example of town halls, where the mayor or the city council comes and solicits their constituents feedback on policy issues.

And in order to be a vendor for which hosts town halls you need to have translators for the five official languages of San Mateo County. You need to also transcribe anything that's said at that town hall so it can be publicly posted for any of the county's residents to, to view after the fact and to pitch [00:46:00] this business with the county of San Mateo.

To say I'm gonna use AI for all of that. And that's where my head goes is if I need five different languages translated well, I'm just gonna feed the audio stream into an algorithm and spit out all five of them. And then if I need this transcribed, I'm going to put this through a transcription engine because they're really good now and they can get you 90% there.

The county dictates is that if you use these AI technologies and you replace somebody's job, you need to retrain them to do something else. And so now you take these translators or these transcripts and you train them to go and edit the machine generated transcripts and to be able to publish their process.

And you take that job and you upskill it rather than just cut it out altogether. And so it was a really socially responsible way to say, we acknowledge that these technologies exist. A lot of 'em were born in our backyard. But when it comes [00:47:00] to the human beings behind the impact of these technologies that you need to still accommodate for who's gonna do the actual work and find something for them to do.

It's a lens to look through of. Who gets left behind and how do you train them? And I think of it through the design department where if we're gonna get eaten by product or eaten by engineering, how do you retrain the designers to be more product focused or to be more engineering savvy or to really be able to use these tools?

I would love to hear from those from maybe a previous generation that lived through the first digital transformation era to know what kind of stories came out of that. That secretary who used pen and paper and they learned to do one thing very well over and over again, and they never adopted.

I don't know if you've come across people in your careers who still use Microsoft Office for everything from time tracking to CRM, to the [00:48:00] Microsoft Excel, and they had a hard time. Adopting the cloud where maybe in the early instances of the cloud, they lost some files and they said, never again will I put my work on the cloud.

I need to see that icon on my desktop to have confidence that my data is there. Nevermind the abstraction, that there's a pixels of light that represents an icon that gives you confidence that it's on your hard drive when the hard drive is much more fallible, than a cloud, they got burned or there was trust issues around adoption of these new skills.

And when you come across 'em in your career, you never advanced or you never retrained or upskilled yourself. You let those. Fears those barriers really stunt your growth. And I think these are all cards at the same deck in terms of when we do move fast and when we do try to adapt quickly, who do we leave behind and what kind of fears might they have that we can help alleviate.

Yeah. [00:49:00] 

Dr Dani: Interestingly, Nick I'm writing a book and one of the things I've been really curious about is, there are jobs that through technological advancement have been eliminated. Very early in my career, I was doing a tour of the the facilities of a bank that I worked for, and I was taken into this room and it was described as the typist room.

I had no idea what this was. And so the person doing the tour said well before personal computers came around, people would hand write their notes and bring it to this room, and this room was full of typists and typewriters. And then somebody would type your, whatever you hand wrote into a, and like to me this was like, what in the world?

'cause I just can't, one, I can't imagine people not knowing how to type because it just seems

but there was a time that typing was a proprietary skill and it's a thing you're trained to do. So I got really curious and I tried to find people that were still alive, that were working during this [00:50:00] time.

And I found two. And they shared with me what they remember. And these typists lost their typing job. But then as the PC started to come. Their role transformed more into an administrative assistance job, and they had to now be upskilled in using a computer and what that meant, and coordinating calendars in a, in a digital and physical way.

So there was this upskilling, so the typist jobs went away, but then the jobs that came in required a higher level of capability and of a collection of capabilities rather than being able to do one thing. Yeah. There's something to be learned from that example in what's happening in the modern day.

Guest Nick : I remember typing was a class that was a requirement in 1993, senior year of high school, and it was the best class I ever took. I didn't know it at the time. It seemed pretty tedious and boring, but to give me those skills [00:51:00] to communicate. By wiggling my fingers. My handwriting is horrible. I'm a left-handed Canadian.

It just smears and is illegible in many different ways. 

Dr Dani: I'm a left-handed American. I get it 

Guest Nick : Typing really opened up the world and now my reflection of my eldest is applying to the same high school. But I think that typing is now inherent to him where because he's been raised as a digital native, I don't think that there's any challenge or there's not a digital divide of, do you know what your hands on the keyboard feel like?

Because we could assume because he comes from a family of privilege because we are lucky enough to have technology in front of him. In fact, that's what he's doing right now. He's maintaining a discord community and coding and Minecraft in that it, he is exposed to that early on. And I think the same thing is gonna be true with some of these.

Skills or some of these technologies that you and I are raving about, but my youngest is gonna think, oh, that's [00:52:00] common. I know how to author a prompt or yeah, come on. I know to attribute entities within an algorithm yeah, come on, that, that's just standard issue.

Dr Dani: Or when the four year olds figured out how to FaceTime me from another country.

Guest Nick : Yeah. For us it was the voice assistance. It was the Google. Once he heard mom or dad use a voice-based prompt to do things like broadcast the message about the house or to turn off and on a television or to do anything using their voice, they parroted it. And that was their first introduction to technology was to be able to talk to devices and have them respond.

It was an interesting exposure early on of that natural language. 

Designer Peter: Which for our parents generation, that was sci-fi. And I'm just gonna, I think there's something else in this the typing analogy that you guys have been talking about in the my dad would've been he was in sales his whole life.

Incidentally. He w he worked for Xerox the photocopier company, selling them. And he tells the story of, he saw a word processor [00:53:00] and immediately started looking for a job selling word processors. 'cause he knew that the photocopier's time was almost done still around. But that aside, he was one of the people who would have had somebody type his me memos or reports.

Or and he learned to type and still types with two fingers. Which, yeah, it works. Okay. What, what makes me think of is, so the people who were skillful typists still had that core skill of typing with their hand. They could still type it, however many words a minute versus, or words a second versus my dad's, handful of words a minute.

So what I, maybe an invitation for everyone who is, starting to write this wave of ai, what are the core skills that we should that we, how do we make sure that we are that we get trained up in typing as we get to use our own keyboard? 'cause my dad would be on unleashed on his own machine and have to type things for himself.

So what are those? Yeah, same, core skills that we need to get good at so that we're not, two [00:54:00] finger typing metaphorically in our AI interactions. I dunno what those are. 

Guest Nick : I've transitioned to a new project since being back from holiday. Yeah. I mentioned the financial services one. Yeah.

Yeah. That took me through the first half of the year and now bringing onto another one. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. Nice. 

Guest Nick : Alright. New project. What do you do?

The first thing is that you get a notebook, LLM, and you start training it. You start giving it all the information you know about this project and you start developing a rag so that it can be a call and response to you when you have questions. And the project is gonna be a bit of publication, a bit of data visualization, a bit of a content piece.

And so I want to have an authoritative source that I can consult against. Five years ago, two years ago, six months ago, I would just put those all in a folder. I would go and find all the aggregation of resources that I need to help me level up my education and put them in a folder and I would scan and [00:55:00] search and index and try to just use that as my own repository for this need to be smart about something.

Whereas now that folder becomes an algorithm and that algorithm starts to digest and learn and see the call and response. And so I think that's. In terms of our step of generative thought. I, you referenced the double diamond approach earlier where you, so first start with this generative thought about what's possible.

What do we need to know? What kind of influences or sources do we need to reference against to say, okay when I'm in this mindset of expansion how do I make sure that I'm grounded so that as synthesis starts to occur I've got enough information so that the synthesis is gonna be correct. Now, in some projects, I think that goes through qualitative research and in-depth interviews and some discussions around, around that, but I I think that's, and that's not to say that I shouldn't be doing those as well.

But to have these available tools that can [00:56:00] synthesize all of that aggregated data so that throughout the project you've got a customized model for which to call against is my. First instinct, that muscle memory of, nothing at this point. See what you can get and then bring it into this repository.

And instead of being a folder, which I'm sure Google drives Gemini, we'll start to now understand that everything in this folder here is of a same topic. Let me analyze that for you. Rather than you putting it into their notebook product, they'll just start to make that into a smart knowledge share.

So to, to answer your question on that end, as strategists as those who are consultants that have to improvise and get very intelligent, very quickly about things that we don't necessarily have expertise in, make sure you're putting it into an algorithm that you can now call and respond and generate opinions around.

Awesome. 

Dr Dani: Awesome. 

Designer Peter: Thank [00:57:00] you Nick. 

Dr Dani: This has been amazing, and I feel like we could probably talk forever, but as we get to the end of our conversation what we like to end on Nick usually is thinking about one thing that we are sharing, one thing we're taking away from this conversation, so as our guest, you get to go first.

Guest Nick : One thing I'm taking away from this conversation I think there's still room for strategic thinking. I think that we still have that need, and we covered this several times in this conversation about the ability to extract requirements and definitions and emotions and insights and needs. I think that is gonna be such a core component to staying alive as designers, to being the ones that.

Guide the course. And I've made this point before, but as scary as this disruption [00:58:00] sounds, those core competencies are gonna be all the more valuable as time goes on.

Dr Dani: I totally agree. And it's probably learning how to embrace those core capabilities and competencies and leading more into them. That's gonna be, 

Guest Nick : yeah. Yeah, that's right. 

Designer Peter: Cool. 

Dr Dani: Peter. 

Designer Peter: Oh, you got in there first? I'm gonna have a couple, I always cheat a little bit. Pohdonky.

Guest Nick : Oh, Podunk, 

Designer Peter: oh, new words. Podunk. 

Guest Nick : I think it's it's hyphenated. 

Designer Peter: Okay.

Guest Nick : I'm not sure which two words are truncated to make that hyphen, but I think there's a hyphen between the O and the dunk. Okay. The Podunk. Except 

Dr Dani: Podunk, but I have never written it. 

Guest Nick : I think it's hyphenated. I think that's okay.

No, it's 

Dr Dani: one word. It's P-O-D-U-N-K. 

Guest Nick : That's the name of my new podcast. The Podunk podcast. Yeah. Podunk 

Designer Peter: Podcast. Podcast Podunk. Maybe that's where we can continue this conversation.

Yes.

Guest Nick : Podunk. [00:59:00] 

Designer Peter: So Podunk and oh my goodness, it's quite difficult to pull one thing out. But yeah I think it's you're it repeated invitation Nick to Yeah.

We should be afraid , there is big change upon us. But or, and I should say, we should take the opportunity to double down and continue to invest as much as we can in building our core designers capabilities so that we can. Do that strategic thinking and connect with our humans and really get into the important why of what we're trying to do.

So thank you for that, Nick. Dani, how about you? 

Dr Dani: The thing I am taking away is Thinglessness. Oh, 

Designer Peter: nice. 

Dr Dani: 'Cause I have, I've always had this belief that there's really only three things in the world that we can really depend on, which is taxes, death, and change. And this thinglessness concept really helps ground that into work. We have [01:00:00] to stop this thing where we like fall in love and want to have lifelong committed relationships with technology. 'cause it, it will move on. Our relationships with tech is more, more like a fling and less like a marriage. And we have to be okay with that. 

Guest Nick : I'm gonna self-censor at this point.

Yes, I agree.

Dr Dani: So there we go. We have to learn how to have flings with technology and not fall in love. 

Designer Peter: Goodness. There's a whole other episode about start here. 

Guest Nick : Yeah. We could censor it later. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. 

Guest Nick : Good. thinglessness and podunk. Good words. Yeah. 

Designer Peter: Told you we like words like definitions. 

Dr Dani: We love our Yeah we love our words.

That's right. As you can tell. 

Guest Nick : Read. 

Dr Dani: Thank you everyone. This has been such an awesome conversation. So thank you Nick for making time to, to speak with us today.

Yeah. And thank you everyone for tuning in. I think we will leave it there this time and we will hear you. [01:01:00] See you next time. 

Designer Peter: Thanks Nick.

Everyone.