GSD Podcast - Scoping UX with Vik Kudesia
Jeff is joined by Vik Kudesia, a UX Designer that was a customer, co -worker, and now former coworker. Topics discussed were how to scope projects under pressure, pro services team vs product teams, remote working, and many obscure Seinfeld references!
Transcript:
Jeff 01:02
Hey there, it's Jeff, I just want to quick intro from my waist episode with Vik, who's a great friend of mine, we worked a bunch at at generic digital and he really helped me out on some some design stuff when we were there. We got into a bunch of great topics here. The reason why I want to put this quick intro is that the sound was zoom was doing a little funny compression stuff when when Vik was speaking a little bit but definitely stay in, he raises some just incredible points, we get into how to scope design aspects of professional services projects, we're always under the gun for that stuff. And besides that he we got into what can make or break professional services projects in the design aspects. And then just how to best work with existing teams and dev teams and internal teams and how to make that all work. So definitely give it a listen. We'd love to hear your feedback. And I'll put another one out there next week. I think Hold on, hold on. Now it's recording it says recording. And then it kind of gives you a little thing. So maybe I'm sure you get this all the time that like maybe you can work on that. And on the UX department. Do you get those snide comments all the time?
Vik Kudesia 02:18
I love getting requests. I need help with this. I need some this needs some UX hell, it could mean anything from a PowerPoint slide all the way up to a system that is connected to a robotic arms. DNA, you could run the whole gamut.
Jeff 02:40
I actually meant to tell you, I really need help with my GSD logo for the podcasts. And so that's kind of why I brought you on here.
Vik Kudesia 02:50
Excellent. Yeah, I'll just load up Microsoft paint and
Jeff 02:57
paint dot exe brain 16 bit maybe you can get some Nintendo music in the background that
Vik Kudesia 03:09
was terrible recording. I mean, why does Why is the text in white and has a drop shadow? Why did they use the blink tag from like, the 90s communicator? Netscape Communicator 4.5
Jeff 03:27
is one of my friends is going to call me on that because I actually use the Netscape Communicator joke yesterday. But what's Well, let me let me do a quick intro Viggen, our former co worker so you'll hear lots of private jokes and we will try and sell them but but they I'm actually going to try something new. Instead of waiting till the last five minutes to throw in all the random questions. I'm going to just randomly drop in. You'll see you'll see you'll appreciate it. Because then people can just go oh, they just bullshit now. Like I'm gonna hit stop now. But no, we're just gonna, we're just gonna sprinkle it in through right into it. So talk a little bit about yourself because you had a so let's drop the concept here. First of all, mixer, UX designer, in the context of professional services, that can mean lots of things. So I want to talk about sort of your you had a very interesting career path where you did some other stuff and then moved into UX, and then did services work and then said, I'm all set with that. I think you got sane, unlike some of the rest of us so
Vik Kudesia 04:32
first and explain me to myself. It's
Jeff 04:35
very nice. Interesting. Yeah, by the way, I think where we first met I can't remember I was I can't remember if I first met you in your old offices on Harrison Ave. Because I was there yesterday. But then I know you guys did like a Wife Swap thing with blue port commerce and I'm not sure whose office was whose so
Vik Kudesia 04:54
I fit in. Yeah. The term Wife Swap. First of all, just abstracted that mental model. So definitely
Jeff 05:02
put half our employees here and then you'll come over there.
Vik Kudesia 05:07
And then everyone will be confused on what the priorities are. And also be really siloed and unable to actually be getting the positive change. Yeah, I think we first met the Harrison Avenue shop. It's dunnhumby. Yes, products they handled by agents, which was really interesting how that meeting with you eventually turned into working with you full time that that that story is also really cool and impartially the story of Boston tech heads that small here we're closely community we also just want to yell at each other to get out of each other's faces.
Jeff 05:47
We eat around Absolutely, exactly.
Vik Kudesia 05:51
proud of it. I have what I think people hiring managers referred to as very background, I started off studying biomedical engineering at BU because I was compulsively curious child and wanted to study the human organism as like a biological system. So that
Jeff 06:12
will actually plays out a little bit more later on. So that's interesting.
Vik Kudesia 06:16
Yeah, I took many side paths and segues. And the reason for that is I started to work in the industry in biopharma, and I was really young. For some backstory. I graduated from high school when I was 16. Boston, it turned 17 that summer. Part of that was I was in West Texas. Lee
Jeff 06:39
so you could spell so you graduated. Partially? Apologies for all of my West Texas. Listen,
Vik Kudesia 06:45
I'm sorry. I'm from West Texas. So I think I can I can present a little bit but grown up as the only Indian kid in West Texas. I was like, I think I gotta get out of here a little bit, I think.
Jeff 06:57
Yeah. You are progressive. Right. Like you got the cool guy dressed. Nice. You got the earrings, you know, I that least the ones I could see. I'm not gonna get
Vik Kudesia 07:07
Yeah, so many piercings. I do body suspension? I don't. Really, that's my, that's my main passions is being suspended by piercings in my body. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah, I'm like an openly progressive person, I feel like you can't get dropped into a place like West Texas as a complete immigrant and have some different empathy. So I was as a high school kid, I was taking classes during the summer like as, as a teenager to say, what I want to do with my summer, I think I'll do more school. Get out. But the school was was my way out, and also was my way to get in touch with people who were like minded to have the level of conversations that you need to have to start learning how to do more with your life than might have been offered to you in high school. So I took that and I started to work in the biopharma era was again, very young, and at the point where you see 3% of the world and you say, Yup, I know the other 97% Because I'm grown and grown up. Yeah, so I saw animal testing and weird FDA type things not being followed. And I didn't get a good a good feeling from the biotech world. So I just went off and started doing what I called firehouse programming. And just while I was at BU, I worked at the US engineering IT department. So I started my career, dealing with scientists, researchers, engineers, doctors doing research, we would break their systems by making them update just one.to OSX. Something else, it was still in that era of technology circa 2003, and four where every update meant, oops, we've broken everything. Kind of in the same spot. Now actually,
Jeff 09:08
think about it. In the same moves so far. Yeah,
Vik Kudesia 09:11
but a lot of my work was reverse engineering these like, weird scuzzy devices that were supposed to detect the ion exchange rate of something. And they no longer had an interface. So I didn't have to talk to them and both create the interface and capture what their requirements were. So I saw I took a look.
Jeff 09:29
For people that don't realize, like what makes scuzzy devices work next to like an airplane engine as well, too, right? Like, they're just
Vik Kudesia 09:38
they're just really loud and they actually generate a lot of heat. They transfer things at the rate of like one, the 500 kilobytes every few minutes or something. Like those. Zip drives. Giants. Exactly. If anyone's picking up what we're putting down here, I think Google these things, which is good. Anyways, zoom and pass that I took a little break and programmed independently, people would call me up and say, Hey, man, we totally botched this, we had investors and we told them that we would have this whole chat system set up and a way to schedule a call with an author as part of a book club. I Friday, and I would just jump in and figure that out before them and work with different teams, different tech stacks. So I became kind of a polyglot programmer. And then at some point, I realized that I really didn't actually care about the code itself. Like, that was fun for me. But I really wanted to see what happened when people used it. And I really wanted to design the experience. And at the time, there was no user experience. It was human computer interaction, and we didn't have UX metrics. We had product telemetry, and it was
Jeff 10:53
like all the Jakob Nielsen stuff and back then, or is this like that stuff? Or is a different different sort of philosophy?
Vik Kudesia 10:59
Getting into the Jacob Nielsen stuff? Yeah, it's that sort of school of thought, and the Don Norman school of thought of, you know, affordances, indicators, signals and control systems and how humans can, like interact with computers, to actually accomplish a task or a job wasn't really seen as a distinct job. It wasn't really seen as an independent role. And I feel like you remember in the 90s, when all of a sudden we woke up and like everybody loved oasis. And like, a week before the band, like all of a sudden, everybody was like, Oh, my God, Oasis is so cool. And like, what? What happened? Like, why is everybody obsessed with them? All of a sudden, I feel like the same thing happened in the industry where like, a flip, like, switch flip somewhere. And all of a sudden, everybody, every company was like rabid for hiring us. We need UX like they didn't, you know, it was a graphic design over hiring and graphic design. No, we're UX designer, someone to make PowerPoints, like it's still in that, in that area of a morphus. In Enigma, I think, I feel like it's firmed up a little bit. But I feel like now we're gonna come to a point where the designers themselves have to do some more rigorous not on what our role is in an organization. And yeah, what it means to actually provide value to the end user. So I feel like my career has put me in an interesting position, I have a broad perspective on like the end to end product lifecycle from the technical aspects of how to actually develop the things I can interact with resources in some database, all the way to the cognitive emotional level of what's how to reduce someone's anxiety, or a fixing up a more well defined term for what cognitive load means. Having a biomedical engineering background and some cognitive neuroscience skills can help me understand what the brain is doing when it's trying to process the edges and zones inside of an interface.
Jeff 13:10
On that point, actually, I got a quick question. Do you feel that you use those skills? Or do you approach things more with empathy? Because I'm hearing both there, right? There's like, Oh, you're processing x, which means we want you to have y and we don't want that? Or is it more like, oh, man, I'm so sorry. Like, we want you to have this feeling?
Vik Kudesia 13:31
Well, I think it depends on the audience. Okay. I think that there are times when a designer may need to purposefully pull on someone's heartstrings. I'm in an industry, that's healthcare wellness, that my company Foundation Medicine does precision medicine, so we we try to make good recommendations for people on patients with cancer. So there are times when you can pull that lever and say, Look, every 30 minutes we save for each of these 40 people is 120 minutes, every five minutes, we make a good recommendation for a child that has pediatric bone marrow cancer, like think about that. If I want to punch you right in the gut with, I can have that through line. But by the time I need to get this into code, if for me, it's more about I'm having, hopefully high level meaningful conversations with stakeholders, and I need to transmit those conversations to code.
Jeff 14:30
What's actually let's let's stay on this subject because it's gonna cross the services line and product line. And this is kind of where I want to draw the delineation. Because on service, you know, everything's very much timeframe based, right? You know, we need this three weeks and the marketing's being sold on it already. And all that stuff, which we didn't we didn't. We didn't really have those types of projects when we were together, but But everything's deadline based right. Do you see We'll deal with that more where you are now? Or is it more like no, just keep doing it till you get it? Right?
Vik Kudesia 15:07
That is a great question. Yes. I think it's actually, we would like to think that we have more time. And that's the mantra should be take your time to it, right? We're playing with people's lives. But the reality is that when we when we falter, when when we fail to meet internal deadline, some other company is probably hitting that deadline, or we have assume our competitors are moving at a faster clip, we have to assume that there is some company that is starting next month that does not have the technical debt that we have. And we'll be able to be more like a better term agile, truly agile, and we will be able to be so it's it's a game of trying to peg when you can put more time into things and understanding that you do need to have a sense of urgency. And I think that is why having a services a professional services background actually been so helpful when I'm in, in house. Yes,
Jeff 16:12
I would always when I was on the other side, after doing services, and then doing product stuff, I would really try and hire services people because they do have a little bit of that deadline philosophy, room urgency, sense of urgency, right, you know, so yeah,
Vik Kudesia 16:28
and for for for a designer, the skill to be able to estimate and point design stories is it should not be underestimated. And that's one of the things I really learned working with you at a generic was a was being able to estimate like, even at arm's length, and have those estimates be meaningful, because we were at the point that we were able to discern what was what was the boilerplate? Among the boilerplate stuff are still complex, like you can make complex things, boilerplate. There's a there's a Don Norman quote, that's my complaint, complexity is not the problem. It's confusion. That's the problem. So anytime someone says we need to make this simple, what do you make this? What is? What on earth is intuitive about, about using a digital interface? And humans have been alive for humans have existed for how long? And out of that time? How long have we had these applications available to us? Yeah, very short time in comparison.
Jeff 17:34
Well, on that note, did you work on that? How can I phrase this that financial application that was based in Boston?
Vik Kudesia 17:43
I worked on, oddly enough, some of the components for it? So but just
Jeff 17:46
just on that? No, yeah. Because I didn't want to just give it away or break promises to people. But on that note, like, they were that was a very complicated interface. But there's basically like, I need to make a trading decision this so people are saying, this is a biotech hedge fund company that we worked on where we were pulling just disparate information for a buying decision, should we invest in this company? And they were like, No, we need all this on the page right now. And I wouldn't say like, a lot of the UX people that I worked with would like, you know, clutter eyes out with Forex, if they looked at these things, but like, you've got the actual user saying, No, I need all this front of me right now.
Vik Kudesia 18:31
Absolutely. Yeah. And there are actually studies that are coming out that are showing what happens whenever it can, a designer who was too consumer minded, comes in in terms of internal application into a beautiful apple product. And the amount of turnaround turnaround time that is reduced, because people are literally scrolling 1000s of pixels. So there's, there's a disconnect between key usability heuristics and design sentimentality, versus aesthetics and abilities people need in house for internal expertise, experts that that need to use this stuff at a high level. I mean, and I think part of that is a lack of understanding of just how much processing power the human mind actually has. And, you know, you have all of these design books that people have written in, and that we read, I love Steve Kreuk, he wrote a book called Don't make
Jeff 19:34
me think, oh, yeah, and I read that. Yep. Yep.
Vik Kudesia 19:37
I think people have taken that a little bit too far. People have taken that to me that the interface should do all of the thinking for you. And I don't know a single human that enjoys a robot
Jeff 19:53
think No, and it's funny. Let's bring it back to that specific application. That application if you went and program at all, you could do some machine learning on that and say like, they're gonna make the buy decisions. They're like, No, no, no, no, no. Like, they're we're not doing automatic buying decisions like, right, although you could probably model it and do that. But there's a certain point where they're like, no, no, we just need to see this information in front of us. Because there is something else, there's a little bit of a gut, there's a little bit of a feel aspect to it as well, too. So let me let me one quick thing I wanted to go over when you're sort of doing your intro, and you kind of hit when he talked about, hey, can you just work on that PowerPoint? Which is funny, because I used to sit with all the designers and sit in an office and design people or break code, and just the stuff that they would just just grown at was was all that but would this UX in designer, what's the biggest mistake people make about your role currently?
Vik Kudesia 20:54
What is the biggest mistake? Like when whenever somebody looks at me and what I do what is
Jeff 21:00
like, I will tell you, maybe this is I'll tell you some of the stuff kind of here on the outside, sometimes you'll be like, No, I can't believe people say that, but it's like, oh, they're gonna come in, they're gonna do their two month thing. They're gonna interview a million different people, they're gonna drink their avocado lattes and come up with
Vik Kudesia 21:20
delicious avocado latte. It's got to be from the avocado skin. I see what you're picking up what you're putting down?
Jeff 21:26
Yeah, catch the ball thrown, I'm catching the ball, you
Vik Kudesia 21:30
don't know how to answer this. I feel like the mistakes are actually on the designers side. And I'll go into a little bit, but in terms of people looking at what design is, I think that the problem is looking outward, looking from the outside. And the problem is assuming that design does something by itself, it is meant to be information, it is meant to unearth knowledge that needs to be had it is meant to suggest solutions and make recommendations for how people interact with digital services, applications solutions. And I think what they what they miss is the aspect of experimental theory, when the designer should be doing and this is this dovetails into with what the problem with the mistake on the designer side might be is to think that you actually know anything. It's the mistake of assuming you understand the domain, whether you're in finance, you are
Jeff 22:34
we just talked about this when we're talking about somebody last week Exactly. Oh, I know about this. So I'm going to influence my designs about this because I have some knowledge of the subject precisely.
Vik Kudesia 22:43
If anything, that should be a red flag for you to to remove yourself from the situation because you aren't in the situation where you're utilizing it for your job. You're utilizing pixels and different things for your job. As a designer, you should be prioritizing an experiment where you can clearly lay out what your independent variables are, or dependent variables are, and which of those you need to change to help the person meet their goal. So all you really need to do is just maximize the chance that you will learn something, I think, looking from the outside in people expected designer to be able to make some recommendation I often hear here we have this table. It's full of really dense info. How do you think that we should read design this, then my first question is, well, please walk me through why we redesign it. And eventually it'll get down to something like, oh, well, there's inline editing in this table. And after you edit the pre existing information there, there's no error handling or validation. Okay, that's something that I can actually work with. Right. So I think you view you probably know this pretty well. Having worked with designers, the thing with designers is that we always say please help me understand the problem. Don't give me a solution. Right. And that is is an example of a misstep of when people who are an InDesign go to meet with a designer or bridge with them.
Jeff 24:11
Yeah, just need like a you know, endless page scroll and just, you know, a couple of Save buttons on the inline a autosave and just some confirmation that they're doing it and then just like a really nice hero image that'd be awesome.
Vik Kudesia 24:23
There's not going to calm that gives me that And conversely, the mistake on the designers is assuming that all humans aren't designers in some way. If you if you organize or change your environment to maximize some positive outcome, then you're a designer you've been doing that for you know a lot of your life
Jeff 24:44
I'm gonna light some incense here one second just enjoy Yeah. Like the sitar is playing, but that's that's not no offense on your national on that, no, I just would love to say Without a little bit into the because services thing, scoping in services, right? Well, yeah, so whole thing, right? Because there's, you know, we all know, there's a good way to do it. And so you can spend a ton of time and discovery and then all that stuff. But like that rare, we rarely get to do that. So I kind of want to get into like your perspective, we get brought into these situations, people are looking for a quote, and you've got to come up with something. I mean, I'm gonna say what's best and what worse, but like, what can make you succeed? And what can make you fail?
Vik Kudesia 25:42
Well, I just usually blurt out some really high number, like 2.7 3 million. It's not a round number, it's gonna be like a number that makes it seem like I put a lot of oh, you
Jeff 25:51
know, you got that for me. Because we would do these things in like, wow, that's 2.9 million in somebody's like, so you're gonna quote 3 million? I'm like, No, absolutely not no. 2.97.
Vik Kudesia 26:05
That makes it seem
Jeff 26:08
real. The other note on that is, if you give me 3 million I can do anything you want.
Vik Kudesia 26:13
Exactly, yeah. So what can make me succeed is if I have an understanding of three dimensions, number of tasks, number of unknowns, and weights or number of tasks, number of unknowns, unknown unknowns, and the broad level of complexity. And those are tricky, because that's how I'm able to do that. And we were able to do that as a as a product experience team at our last job, because we had a certain amount of expertise, right? So some pattern recognition. Yeah, we had, we could see into the situation and immediately say, alright, there needs to be a services T, or some Federation of services that works together and have notifications, the internal workings of this mechanism need to notify each other. We're all talking about number of tasks here. Whenever this user, or this role type needs to communicate information to this next step, are they working in a queue? Are they working at stack, so right away, because I have a developer background, I can start talking about how to abstract the model so that it can do more work for the team. We started coining, shorthand phrases, ways to communicate very effectively, about what the needs are. And from those conversations, we get those things to code. So it's the it's all about the higher level of a conversation, we can have, internally, a higher level of a conversation we can happen with our stakeholders, the sooner we can start to enumerate broadly the number of tasks that need to be done to even get started, we can start identifying the number of unknowns, do we need more research? Are these unknowns dangerous to us? Or do we need to just let them lie as they are? What are the most dangerous assumptions we have, and then laddering, up to perceived level of complexity and understanding how to iterate as we learn more, I think that if you don't have any component of that, you're setting yourself up to either over promise or under promise, which is also bad. If you under burn, that means you're not getting the most out of your team. And that's very managerial speak. But yeah, people do tend to operate whenever they're pushed a little bit. And whenever they're trying to hit stretch goals. If your team estimates something, and they're like, oh, look, we did the sprint, did we have 47 story points left over? That means there's something wrong? Yeah,
Jeff 28:40
that's terrible, or gross margin is great. And like, Oh, that makes me feel terrible when I talk to them. You know, it's so funny, because I get so much pushback in the sales process about what I believe is absolutely the only way to go, which is like, look, unless you wants to go in and do a book report for two or three months, which we're all happy to do. There really is one right way to do this for what we know right now. And that's to give you a base level team. And, and they just start working on things like you would have a product team and they will they will is as we go through and we start building up requirements we let you know if we're going to need more people to do that. Or maybe we drop stuff out. But you know, and that's that's really the most sane way to do it. Besides the guests. Well, we're gonna need 15 screens here. Like how would you know that right, like right so it's I'm always trying to bridge those things where now I'm at this like minimum viable team like work without knowing where we are. I can tell you, you're gonna have like two back ends a front end and architect a pm QA and does that right? The project will never get smaller than that. But it can get a lot bigger if suddenly you want to start adding more and more stuff on But like, that's how you build product, right? You put a team together and you start, you know, going through requirements. And that's just, you know,
Vik Kudesia 30:09
I feel like I get pushed back on. I mean, I'm not in sales, but I get pushed back, I feel like we're talking about a similar thing that is, from the outside seen as I'm doing air quotes, you can't see me jumping to solutioning. Yeah, and that's something designers talk about with each other, we would build up to solutioning. However, whenever that's very denigrating, whenever you, for example, the there's a great resource. That's the gold standard for research on expertise. It's the Cambridge Handbook of experts and expert performance. And whenever you read, well, it's it's like 1000 pages long, I believe, read like five pages of it. I looked at a lot of studies, there's an abstract, it was an abstract, and I think I knew all about it, no, but I found out about this resource, because a lot of white papers kept referencing it. And I noticed a trend when I looked at it, it wasn't white papers. And when I looked at the actual book, experts tend to create a partial problem frame, they start to just make a loom a scaffolding. And they only go into it as much as they need to at the time. And then experts in nearly any field, whether it's design, architecture, engineering, they jump pretty much immediately to solutioning, based off of their wealth of experience based on subconscious things that they aren't even aware of, in in their conscious domain, the ability to jump to a solution and use it to direct resources and point back at the problem is key to expert level performance. And what you're talking about is exactly that. It's the ability to just make deep like broad block cuts with the problem is, and then get your hands dirty, and start talking about real things. And a lot of times designers want to stay up floating in the clouds, high level, talking about mood boards in framing the problem. And I love those things. I think they're really cool. And there's a place for them whenever you're closer to the ground. But if you try and assert yourself as the designer and say, No, I'm the one who's going to be doing the solutioning. You give me the problem, then you you cut that entire conversation out you you relegate the ability to direct resources at learning more about the problem, because potential solutions, do nothing more than illuminate more about the problem space. And how else are you going to talk about the problem space, aside from just talking about it, and hand waving, you need to have some tangible, cogent thing that people can use. And that's why I think that you're totally right. And that's why as a services professional, that was my go to as well, it was Okay, the next meeting, you're going to have some thing we can look at and then talk about in a meaningful way. Because the problem statement, like if I wrote a problem statement on day one, and you've been in meetings with me, we tend to like to do this as consultants, because it's very hard. If we ever compare the problem statement from the beginning of a project to the end, I don't think it's very often that it's the same statement or that it's written the same way.
Jeff 33:31
It'd be interesting to do that in the not the post mortem but the after, and as you know, and the right to use post mortem excuse after party because it should be successful to the party afterwards.
Vik Kudesia 33:41
A nicer way to put that was using a retrospective lecture was nice and professional really feel that either it's kind of austere after party seems seems pretty cool. That's fantastic.
Jeff 33:51
Actually, I'll wait for another quick second. Like I promise, what are you know, we're big into memes and GIF postings back and forth when we work together. What is your current favorite go to like I'm gonna just copy and paste this and I know the last we'll keep going. Like
Vik Kudesia 34:11
I'm opening UPS slack right now. Okay, so, apparently my favorite one is the hydro kids hydro wife GIF. I think that I've been using that. I've been building momentum here in terms and to to step back
Jeff 34:33
as a as a Giffy. Expert,
Vik Kudesia 34:35
as a Giffy. Expert. Again, talking about the role of a designer or a product professional in the services environment, consultancy and agency versus ad in house product. I feel like either way, your job is to install design processes. Yep. All across the company. Now an agency that's a little bit different And then how you do it in house. So I think that's why I've been doing the hydrogen spice stuff is coming down the pipeline. I am. We are. The design team over here at Foundation is really gearing up putting our big boy and girl personally and starting to make some headway here. So it's great Gary for us, but
Jeff 35:24
I'm currently using the fire festival water guy.
Vik Kudesia 35:29
Oh my gosh, that is amazing.
Jeff 35:35
I guess I'll write this quote for you.
Vik Kudesia 35:42
Yeah, there's no water sorry. Peeps, I do actually like typing into Slack slash giffy. And fire will always pull up something amazing. Slash giffy. And cap wrangling will usually pull up some great gardens good. fitting,
Jeff 36:01
since classic just totally random sidenote, if you know this, like my team, the current rails record, we wrote that stuff for giffy like we are our ML team did that so? So the one I always use is like, you upload a picture. Everybody uploads a picture David Hasselhoff, they don't take it as night, right? Or they don't take it as the 8000 Other things that you would backslash into so anyways, I just thought you'd appreciate that.
Vik Kudesia 36:27
I just I just didn't get the thoughts and just came came came up, man. Oh, Baywatch. So
Jeff 36:36
good, right. I mean, it's just it's if you don't think about all these things, so I
Vik Kudesia 36:41
really feel like I can't work and in house place that doesn't use Slack just because of the gifts I feel like it. It disarms me in my ability to communicate.
Jeff 36:53
But it's so funny because I used to work with a front end guy, Andrew, and he was he just would look at me. He's like, gifts are cheap, man. And I was like, Oh, he's killing me here just killing me. Somebody you really respect and he's like, it's cheap humor. It's like Jimmy Fallon. I'm like, Oh, no.
Vik Kudesia 37:13
Oh my gosh.
Jeff 37:15
So actually, if I was to get you know, a couple minutes here, I never confirmed I don't want to put you on the spot here. But I think you're a fan of remote working. Is that correct or not? Correct.
Vik Kudesia 37:28
I am a fan of remote working. I am. Yeah, well, here let me try
Jeff 37:34
to some people I used to actually be very anti and I am here sitting in Ugg slippers and my Merv Griffin. So yeah,
Vik Kudesia 37:44
I like dogs. It's like a turd deer like inside out. Pretty. It's pretty amazing is that?
Jeff 37:52
Yeah, cuz I sit in the Merv Griffin studios here. And yeah, like Kramer. But but I've, you know, we always had those days. And this is where I kind of want to get into with you. Because I knew you would go off site when you needed to hunker down. And I always used to be like, I gotta go hide myself into a corner or work from home. And there's that, but then there's just this other component to it, which is the no commute. You know, the ability to focus. I mean, I could go on, but I was wanting to get kind of your perspective on it.
Vik Kudesia 38:27
Well, I think to qualify my statement that I'm a fan of remote working, mainly for the reasons that you just just said, One, it reaffirms that you think of me as an adult, and that you trust me to be wherever I need to be to do the work. That is a huge part of psychological safety, at work, and being okay with remote working, kind of infers that to me, and I like that now. play devil's advocate with myself. designers do need to get together in person and whiteboard. Yep. And more important than that designers need to be embedded with the people that they're serving. I can't be in some ivory tower, designing pushing pixels around that to have no meaning to the person who's going to try and use it to accomplish their goal. So my statement is that time at desk does not equal work done. And I think that goes for any person, but especially for a designer, like it's almost the opposite. If I noticed that a designer is never at their desk, that lets me know that they're probably not doing a lot of work. They're out doing stakeholder interviews, they're out synthesizing information, they're out doing usability tests, they're out, doing the things that that is, you know, the 85 90% of design that doesn't involve even touching pixels. The real part of design work, you got to do that out in the world unless your users are on the floor above you and should be up there. But I do understand that For product people, we do need to have a bit of that, you know, incubator type workflow of my new director who, you know, I've worked with, use the phrase Test Kitchen. And that to me really, really spoke volumes to me because like you think about a test kit kitchen, it's where you're, you're testing things out, you're innovating, your understanding of certain recipes are going to work or not, you can't do that type of stuff remotely as well. So
Jeff 40:28
you guys are going to the airport a lot. We will test kitchen a lot that now that
Vik Kudesia 40:32
yeah, which is the other part of it. That's why remote work is so great, is you just have a bunch of bourbons. And
Jeff 40:42
I am curious on how that relates. And I don't think we're going to answer it here to like the remote only companies, right, like and whether the remote product or you know, remote offices or this and that, what you just said, Really, I hadn't thought about that, about the test kitchen concept of things and trying things out and seeing when people are doing that sort of, you know, face to face interaction, seeing people's facial expressions and things like that, that's, that's a huge part of what we do hear. That's interesting, you know, what I don't miss though, is the like, Oh, I'm going to the water cooler, I'm gonna go Oh, it's just bring it up to regular standards. Here. I'm going to the Bevy. And and now there's somebody there. So I'm going to engage in a 10 to 15, or five to 10 minute conversation with, and I missed that. And does that. Am I a sociopath for saying that? I don't know.
Vik Kudesia 41:37
I don't know. I think that if you are a sociopath, and lots of us, because, again, psychological safety work. I mean, like some people don't know what to what the niceties are, really do them or how they they've mapped meaningful interactions elsewhere. And I have those conversations, and I liked them. The situations that I'm in today, I could point at almost any person around me and be like, Hey, let's just nerd out about what Rubisco does in the Calvin cycle. And they'll be like, yes, let's do that.
Jeff 42:09
But then you could also have like a, kind of like a, like a Slack status, which is like, you put this badge on and it says, I'm getting water. I don't want to talk to anybody. Even focus. Like I'm not chatting with the Patriots game. I'm not chatting about lunch or dinner the right
Vik Kudesia 42:25
right don't spoil Breaking Bad for me, I still haven't watched it. Oh my God, no kidding. But if there is, if we were trying to put this in some sort of mathematical equation, some sort of formula, the variables in place would be something like how large are Scrum teams are on average? How geographically desirable the situation is how spread out are they? How many time zones do we have? Because to again, it's all about having a high level of meaningful conversations and turning those into code. And my understanding of, of human cognitive ability with language is it's, it's coming along but but so far, all I can understand is that we we can't we carry we possess immense, just amazing abilities. With spoken word, with the ability to have nuance and, and just expressive thoughts through words, is a very human thing. I mean, obviously, no other animals and mammals on Earth can can do what we do but think about oral tradition and how many years past where barely anything was written down. But stories were left. In fact, nearly word for word. So thinking about if I were to type out the words I just said, you just read them that level of abstraction where you don't get all of the nuance from how I said it. I think that's the same level of fix. No,
Jeff 44:00
no, I know exactly what you're talking about the real world right like you lose that Yep. And and if you've seen the recent bill burr special on Netflix he got actually gets into that, but I don't want to offend anybody here so we'll talk about that. But it's the exact same thing, right? Like is talking about certain event and but if the courts demographer read it back, you know, then sounds like you're in a lot of trouble, but it would seem terrible, terrible, but that's not actually how it went. So
Vik Kudesia 44:31
remote work, can can work and fully distributed teams can work. For example, when I worked at a highly distributed company in education based product. Our team was in Switzerland, our execution team was in Switzerland. And what we did there was we had a window to their office that opened up. It was like nine o'clock to 11 o'clock. And we just put up a TV that always had a screenshare or a there camera. was on, like closed circuit TV. Yeah. So it wasn't like they were being watched. But it gave us the opportunity to be like, Hey, man, how's your job doing? Oh, your shirts? I love your shirt. Cool.
Jeff 45:10
Do they ever want to mess with you and just have like this 110 second clip going back and forth, like the time, like speed, speed.
Vik Kudesia 45:18
But I noticed that Ashley, and that was actually kind of some hilarious fun. Like, we started messing with each other a little bit, like, play the feed from yesterday and see if anyone noticed that that's great. It's kind of on our toes a little bit. And it brought the teams together so that the designers didn't look at the engineers, like they were code machines. And the engineers didn't look at the designers like they were pixel machines.
Jeff 45:45
It happens, right? Because at the end, you know, I've heard it before, like, at the end of the day is like, just send me those
Vik Kudesia 45:50
PDFs. Seriously. Yeah. At the end of the day, my stakeholder took a screenshot and dropped some red boxes on it and paint and I need to do something with this, and I need you to code
Jeff 46:00
it. Oh, my God. That's, that's what
Vik Kudesia 46:03
being an agency being in a consultancy, has, has given me that level of? And I was to say that sometimes we designers can be really precious.
Jeff 46:12
Precious is a good word. Yep. So let's, let's sort of, sort of have this like, so to enhance your skills. Now. Like I mentioned, I could hear some of that director that we both know, I could hear some of his words coming through you. Okay, so what are the things that you're what skills are you honing now, you know, which what iron? Are you sharpening in your in your UX design toolbox right now?
Vik Kudesia 46:41
So, domain knowledge, knowledge is definitely one thing I last studied biomedical engineering thinks 15 years ago. Yep. The reality of living in now is completely different. So I'm working on getting my domain expertise up to the point where I can have the types of conversations I need to have. But outside of that, I'm oddly enough delving back into code back into, I feel like I have a good handle on things like vanilla, like vanilla things. HTML. Yep. vanilla JavaScript. As an engineer, I was taught C Plus Plus, and oh,
Jeff 47:20
so I knew all that stuff. It's what should I run? Because my daughter is now going through. She's starting to learn to code and I'm like, oh, let's do HTML to an end html. And then let's do the body. Let's do that. Right. Like, yeah, yeah, it's fun stuff. So
Vik Kudesia 47:34
it's funny how it's almost like your parents forced you to play piano when you like, did lose it. But you kind of, yeah, you find a piano somewhere. You're like, oh, I can score
Jeff 47:43
or orally or four weeks later, it's like, Oh, I've got an error condition here. Is there? You know, can you help me track this race condition? And I'm like, No, I
Vik Kudesia 47:51
don't like, you've just hit the boundary that at that I'm at now. So I'm circling back. And I'm actually going home or into frameworks like React? Oh, yeah. Just so that I can get an understanding of you a little bit beyond hello, world, but more about how, and you've heard me say this, often, nothing I design is going to print, I'm not designing anything that's going to be printed out it that's going to be an application, it's going to be code. So I have been focusing on learning the parameters of some frameworks, just so that I can have an understanding of how to communicate things to an engineer, and to continue to identify the line where I end and where they begin. Because no,
Jeff 48:35
it's a great, it's a great skill set. Yeah, especially since you mentioned, like, all the JavaScript technologies are now object oriented programming. So absolutely. Before it was, as you mentioned, like the blink text and stuff like that.
Vik Kudesia 48:48
JavaScript wasn't seen as something you could build an entire application in, that was meaningful. And that's changed a little bit. And now we're running JavaScript on the server side. And before that stuff gets too far away. For me, I just want to make sure to stay up to date with it enough to not get sound like a total idiot when I'm trying to communicate something. Yep. Not that that's really actually a concern.
Jeff 49:10
No, no, but it's great that you're doing that I'm sure that your your developers appreciate that as well, too. And stuff. And they're not like, oh, isn't that cute? He's there's a little environmental,
Vik Kudesia 49:19
it is like there's a great meme that's like design or whatever, developer asked them to change one line of CSS, and it's like Mr. Robot, you know, like, we get so like, who Yeah, wrote some code, but it's really about that partial problem frame and the partial solution that we can make, so that I can just help them understand where some of the boundaries in the framework may or may not ladder up to some of our you know, some of the goals and the people that will be using this. Yeah, that's really as far as I want to take that. But there's also some really cool tools like X code is getting better and letting designers make really quick mobile prototype So using some pretty simple code, code in general is getting more and more human readable. So it's like
Jeff 50:08
yeah, oh, good. You just sorry, but it just triggered off some stuff. I'm not gonna go there. But you know, there was this movement five years ago or so it might have been when you're going through some of that re education stuff, but like, it's probably a little bit longer than that. And I think it's successful is died, but it was the designers who coat right, like, Oh, I'm gonna what happened there? Well, let's wrap up with this because I don't want to go to I said, everything, all these episodes is gonna be half hour now. And here we are, like 50. Like, the conversation is good, that's fine. But what do you think happened there? It was it because the stuff turned into object oriented code on the front end, or just wasn't the best idea and use of people's talents? Or
Vik Kudesia 50:57
why do I think it died away? The I feel like reality set in that these things that we're, we're building now are so complex, multi layered, that it's asinine to think that's actually the full stack, and understand all of the components of the technical stack. And on top of that, the full blown a unicorn, yeah, where they can also create the design. And also, I feel like people realize that that is just asking for a lot of bias. I. Yeah.
Jeff 51:30
And here's where I think it works out, right. I think you're a founder, trying to get some funding, trying to get like angel funding or something like that. I think you're doing some quick MVP type works and things like that. And then after that, shut it down. And you know, but I think it is good to have some of the this was before Squarespace and all those tools and everything. So let's just crank something out and get a website go.
Vik Kudesia 51:56
I feel like any way that you can get better at sketching whatever sketching means. And that's a code pen, if that's whiteboarding, if that's a sketch book, if that's literally the program sketch or Yeah, Photoshop, great. Awesome. Yeah, but the whole movement of of designers who code, I feel like the way that they worked with larger teams was always at odds because that designer brands a line of, Am I being too prescriptive? Am I? Who was toes? Am I stepping on your you're not stepping on every person's toes? And how do you get breadth and depth with that, like, if you're too utilitarian, I've spent most of my career honing my skill as what I call a generalist specialist, like, specialize and be a generalist, jack of all trades. Yeah, but But Matt met Master of the few, and, and very open about where I don't have mastery. And where I don't plan to gain mastery. I plan to use code as a way to communicate not as a way to, to build something in production. And because of that, I'm able to focus on the domain knowledge I'm able to focus on, on mentoring and training other designers. If I'm running around coding and designing and doing on being everything to everybody, then then I'm not helping my my junior designer gain more skills. I'm probably not having the emotional or empathetic conversations I need to have with stakeholders. I feel like it was just people spreading themselves too thin. And the way that we build products doesn't live up to that sort of mentality, either. There's lots of I mean, look at a microservices environment like Yeah, are you also going to code all the test cases and selenium yourself? And what
Jeff 53:49
happens when two people sign up for an account at the same time? What's the error condition? Like? You know?
Vik Kudesia 53:56
Exactly what? For overflow? Are you going to jump on that too? And like, when does man
Jeff 54:04
good point to separation of church and state? I like it, so Exactly. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for your time. Any other final please?
Vik Kudesia 54:14
Yeah, I just wanted to say baba booey lava flow. Hi, Tata, toothy. I don't know what mama monkey Howard Stern rules. I just want to say Howard.
Jeff 54:25
Oh, gotcha. I'm not the biggest stern person. I just never really wasn't my free guide. You
Vik Kudesia 54:31
weren't a stern person.
Jeff 54:33
not by design or any hatred or anything like what I was talking Yeah, I was like, wow, that took a weird Are you having a stroke right now?
Vik Kudesia 54:41
Yeah, no. When do we anything you should definitely mentioned probably one of the flow Hi. And I guess people like you will be like, what, what is he What is he talking about? Yeah, yeah, we started to take that down.
Jeff 54:55
I'm gonna I have no editing ability. Right now. No ability. To do that yeah
Vik Kudesia 55:00
stern fans will rate read stern fans will appreciate it basically
Jeff 55:06
awesome awesome well listen Let me I'm gonna I'll hang up for the recording but we'll just stay on for one quick second and talk logistics at one second here