#116 Making design decisions w/Tommy Geoco
59:37 Share

designers should remember that what we're really crafting is our businesses, not software. And when you think about it like that, there is still a level of craftsmanship you can bring to the table that might not have a lot to do necessarily with how high quality a certain detail in your design work is, but in about the approach you took and the justification for why that design is the way it is.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa, and again, I'm not joined by Ioana. This time, I'm joined by Tomi Gyoko. He doesn't even need the introduction because I feel like most of us should know who it is. But if you, for some reason, haven't heard about Tomi Gyoko,

Tommy is a very notoriously known designer on the community today. He's the author of the UX Tools newsletter. So if you see UX Tools newsletters every year where there's big statistics and a lot of people fill in the survey to understand the market situation today on the tools market, you probably have seen it. It also was run by Tommy.

Tommy also has 14 years of experience in product design. He's a content creator, marketer outside Genius Marketing, in my opinion, and a father of three people, like three kids, right? Am I correct? Four boys. Four boys. No way. Oh my God. No way. How did you even survive it? I would probably already go crazy. I don't know how you do this. All right. But we had a little chat about how hard it is to be, at least in the beginning, maybe later it'll be better.

And the reason I wanted to invite you, first of all, is because people asked for it. We did a little sticky questions in the Instagram and people asked, we need Tomi Gyoko. We don't see a lot of episodes with you for whatever reason. I've seen the episode with you at the deep dives and I don't remember if they have

many more episodes, but I'm hoping we can get people covered today. But before diving in today's episode, I also want to mention that this episode is proudly presented by VIX Studio. VIX Studio is an intuitive way for designers and agencies to build exceptional websites with full stack solutions, multi-site management,

and built-in AI. Building AI tools is something I actually want to talk about because it's my favorite part. We all know that AI helps to speed up the process and make us focus more on creativity. And here are some of the features that I personally love that helped me to speed up the process of web designing. First is called responsive AI. We all know that there is nothing more frustrating than working on your desktop for days and hours, perfecting every single pixel. And once you're done, boom, you have to start all over again with the rest of the breakpoints.

But it doesn't need to be that frustrating. With Responsive AI, you can adjust your designs with just one click, and within seconds, you'll have an entire section optimized for each breakpoint. Another amazing feature I want to mention today is called AI Meta Tag Creator. We also know that drafting effective meta description and titles is crucial for SEO success, but it's a time-consuming task.

brainstorming taglines accurately reflect the client's site content and target keywords can feel like starting from scratch each time. And this obviously slows down your workflow. With AI Meta Tag Creator, you can find suitable little tags and meta descriptions based on your client's site content and

and tweak as needed, also defining the tone that you're looking for. All right, I hope it gives you a good idea. And of course, I encourage everyone to go ahead and check out the link in the show notes and explore Vick Studio yourself and save yourself a lot of time and hustle while focusing on designing exceptional websites.

And with that being said, let's now go back to the episode. The topic of today's episode is making design decisions. Especially would be an interesting angle to think about making faster design decisions, more efficient design decision, even when you don't have a lot of insights. So let's see how we could do this.

Before diving into it, maybe you can give us a little intro about yourself. I already did it, but I want to hear from your own words and a little bit history about your journey, how you got here. That was a really kind intro, by the way. So that made me very happy. And it's really cool to hear that people were just wanting to hear us chat. I've been on a couple of podcasts, but people have been asking me to come and chat a little bit more. And it's like, okay, I can do that.

My background and the whole kind of premise of the making design decisions just came from really scrappy environments. So when I first started, I was actually a developer and not a great one, but I got by. I grew up in an area that wasn't super influenced by modern tech cities. I grew up in a large city, but didn't have the Silicon Valley vibe to it. And so it always felt behind. We were regularly working in like feature factories. I was working at like agencies.

I kind of romanticized Silicon Valley and all the stories we heard of like Drew Houston and Dropbox and all these people building these wonderful pieces of software. And it just seemed like everything that was coming out of Silicon Valley was just such a higher level of quality. It seemed like the teams were more mature.

And I spent a lot of time working out of Arizona in the United States, just kind of dreaming of what that work environment was like. Meanwhile, I was doing like UI development and just like crushing through these mediocre designs. And, you know, someone would come over and be like, hey, we need this feature. And they'd throw it over the wall and I'd catch it. And I would just kind of like code it out and put it together and daydream of a better way. And then eventually I met a really fantastic friend of mine.

a developer, and I had all these startup ambitions and ideas. And we would try to create a couple of products over the course of a couple of years that would kind of get off the ground and then crash. And we got really fortunate with one of the ideas at some point, and we created something called StreamPro. And that helped Twitch streamers. At the time, Twitch streaming was a very new idea, and it helped them create

really engaging broadcasts with their viewers. Today, it's really standard behavior. It's like you can donate to a Twitch streamer, you'll see your name pop up, you can maybe send them a message. Twitch streamers now have all kinds of graphics on their live broadcasts. Well, that was a new idea back when we were trying to make that easy for people to do that. So we brought that to the market and it kind of just went bonkers from there. And after that, we were acquired

and that took me to San Francisco. And I had this moment of panic because I'm not college-educated. I learned everything online. I'm a self-taught person. And suddenly I found myself in Silicon Valley. It felt like this place I had romanticized. I was now playing under the big lights. And I didn't feel like I belonged there. Everyone was Ivy League.

Everybody was so I just appeared so much smarter than me and I was so nervous working in these environments. The teams were so mature. But on the flip side, people were like, oh, you're a startup founder and you sold this company. And they were kind of giving me this sort of celebrity. And it was a very interesting four or five years that I was out there. And then I would go and lead some design teams across a couple of

of different companies and kind of earned the street cred. And it broke a barrier that I had thought, which was every design team that is mature operates in this really mature way. That's not really true. Even teams in Silicon Valley, even some of the best teams still have velocity issues or still have maturity issues.

And I really want to get into a conversation around craft a little bit later. But the reason that I kind of tell that story is what it taught me was a lot of environments we work in, whether you're working in a region that's not influenced by kind of modern software practices, or if you're in the heart of Silicon Valley, you are often still forced to make really complex trade-offs about where you invest your limited time. As designers, especially today, we've got maybe a

100, 200 decisions to make in a single day and maybe only enough time for 10 of them. And so the question is, how do you quickly do that without just like crawling into a hole and just kind of panicking and hoping you're making the right decision? And so I started to talk about that a couple of years ago because everybody was like, you need

incredible research. Let's fight the good fight for really good research. And it was like, okay, so all the designers, we were moving towards everything we could to advocate for good research. And then it was like, we need to have a process or a maturity that works this way. And so we were all kind of moving in that direction. All right, let's all fight the good fight for this interesting or ideal definition of maturity.

And then finally, I kind of stopped moving in the direction that everybody was telling me I was supposed to be going and said, no, you know what? Actually, what's working for me is recognizing how I need to be supporting this company instead of trying to mold the way we work into something that isn't really in support of how we're trying to win in the market. And then when I had that, when I kind of accepted that idea, two things happened. One, I stopped feeling miserable at work.

I stopped going, oh my God, my work sucks. My manager doesn't understand the VP of product is going this way. And then I started to really understand almost like it made me feel like I was overcomplicating it because I started to go, oh, wait a second. Now I understand how my design is supporting the business. And it was never about like, hey, does this design move a growth metric or some sort of KPI or OKR? It was more about like, what are we doing as a team, as a

culture that we believe is going to help us win in the market. And suddenly when I knew that, I could say what I'm doing on the production line of design is in support of this thing. And so I felt a lot better. Maybe sometimes the quality wasn't up to a standard that like it had I had some more time, I would have loved for it to get there. But I felt really good

knowing that, hey, like the fact that we were able to make some of these decisions quickly and ship a little faster than this competitor, it allowed our product to serve more people. And now we're kind of moving the needle in winning a bit more. That is something I think a lot of us really get stuck to is like trying to really associate every design project we work on with like a really hard metric. It's great if you have them. But a lot of times I'll ask designers like, hey, what bet is your company making? And maybe it's one or two.

And they won't even know it. It's like, are you guys betting on innovation? Are you trying to create something new and novel? Are you betting on distribution? Kind of the Slack versus Microsoft Teams example. Slack maybe was betting on innovation. Microsoft Teams, well, they bet on distribution. They're like, we might not have the best craft. We're going to create a critical mass of a product, but we're going to bet that we have better channels than you do. And they went and shipped it and they dominated a market strictly out of their ability to win with distribution. Are you betting on efficiency?

You know, we believe our systems and processes are going to be our competitive advantage. And so therefore we need a designer who is really thinking about how do we reduce the amount of production line waste, design systems, processes, things where we are not reinventing the wheel every day. Or are you betting on something like accuracy, right? Amazon's rule being be right a lot. And that's maybe comes with a lot of really good discovery and research upfront so that maybe you're not shipping fast, but when you do put something out there, it's like nailing the mark.

and your company maybe believes that's how you win? Or in a lot of cases, are you betting on velocity? Or is it that you're betting on velocity? Your company believes that we're not going to ship the highest quality all of the time, but we do believe that the more volume we produce will help us win in the marketplace right now and serve more people. And once you can kind of identify which of those bets your company is making, it's really easy to start to pivot

to say, "Hey, this is how I can really support this company. You can really make more interesting case studies off of things like that." So that was my background. That's kind of where this whole making design decisions thing happened. And that was something that resonated with me. And as I started to talk about it, I was really surprised to see how many people that resonated with as well.

Wow. First of all, there's a lot of things I want to talk based on what you just shared. But before doing this, I have one quick question. Yes. It was very interesting what you shared. Based on this, I'm very curious, what do you believe is your strong power today as a creator? My power today as a creator? I think I'm just very pragmatic. I never got into design. There was never a point in my career where I said, "I want to be a designer." That wasn't intentional.

I kind of became a designer because I was a really bad developer, to be honest. And then I saw a career path open up for like UX and I was like, oh, cool. I really liked that part of thinking through the process. I just really hated debugging code. And for me, it was always about like, I just wanted to close the gap on I have an idea and I want that idea to become a reality. So my code was always very bad.

but it brought things to life. You know what I mean? Could it scale? Not without help, you know, but so pragmatism has kind of been something that's been this undercurrent in my career, which is what matters.

really identifying the things that matter and going in that direction. And I think that's such an important skill for designers to have too, because as designers, we do need to be ideal. We need to have like the most ideal outcome in our heads. And I think we're really strongly suited to be the best advocates for that most ideal situation. But the thing that I think a lot of designers lose in that is how to pursue that idealism with a sort of fierce pragmatism that

you may not be able to achieve that ideal outcome in the timeframe you want to. So you really have to think about how can you pragmatically get there? Because if your company, your team can't ship a successful product or capture a bunch of small wins along the way, then your ideal outcome is going to die with the company. And it's like some designers

would kind of cut off their nose to spite their face as the saying goes and and that's not the way to do it let's go for those ideal outcomes but very pragmatically what is the next best thing we can do how can we be efficient in doing it that comes from wisdom it's a lot of reflection and realization so it's really really beautiful for me to hear it rings a lot of bells in my head right now i always think about company culture and how it affects us as designers

Because I was working as a startup, as a freelancer as well, a little bit in agencies, then big corporates with 12,000 people and now in the scale up. So a lot of different dynamics and different cultures as well, because dynamics, culture, company organization, people obviously shape the culture and the way you work and then the way you will be rewarded for your work, I would say.

And what you were just saying is that it's almost like you had this rebellious call in you to realize that, hey, I don't want to mold under culture that I'm embedded in. I want to realize what I can bring there. Like, I don't want to follow the bit and pass within this company. Like, okay, people do this. I'll follow this.

instead of following what the industry is dictating, what the particular company culture is telling you to do, you might actually realize, "Hey, my strong power is not what they tell me to do, but here is my strong power. I can help you ruthlessly prioritize the right thing for you." And probably also given that I know how well you are with marketing, at least in the content space, you probably were also very efficient in communicating this to the businesses you worked with. I'm at least assuming so.

I like that you mentioned the story about I was just a bad developer, so I turned out to be a designer. I almost wanted to ask you a question about it, but I totally laughed all over my face because I had the same story when I was just looking for my particular, like, what I want to be when I grow up. My parents are architects, and I was horrible at this because I'm horrible at math, and I...

decided to be an interior designer when I was young because I'm horrible at architecture. But then suddenly I turned out to be a UX designer because it's the same thing, but with a digital world. So I feel you with that part. But there are a lot of different things I want to continue talking to you about. For me, the biggest insight so far was really like, what is your bet? At the moment, I'm working at the company where we

Every company has its own process, right? You have its own like, either it is agile, is it a waterfall? Now we are in my company following this shape up process. You might have heard about this. It was the process introduced by the guys who wrote the book. Basecamp team? Basecamp team. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, I know. I love that book. We now following this like...

shape up process and it's all about the bets. Is it a small bet? Is it a big bet? And what you are saying is like, what is your bet? What are you betting on? It's not just the feature that moves some metrics and I don't know, reaches some KPIs, but it's what are you betting on against the market? And this is actually something we just talked about it, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We're at an interesting time. I think it's easy to be very bleak and maybe fearful of where things are. And it's certainly understandable to be upset and afraid when you're out of work and looking to apply your skills. And it's like, maybe you can't get a job right now. Very interesting.

sympathetic to that because I've been there. It's not a fun place to be. I've been very observational this year. And obviously with our UX tool survey, and we do have the report coming out this mid-December, that's been one tool that I've used to try and understand the different types of work that designers are doing and how the tools are playing a role in that. For a lot of

years the narrative has been kind of the same figma is just kind of dominating these little categories i think we're starting to see a different narrative or we will so my bet on the market right now is a couple of things first obviously ai is at the forefront of everything everyone's having that conversation i do think there are going to be layers of how the responsibilities you know the

big question, the meme of like, what's the title? Is it a UX designer or a product designer? You know, what is it? Title is just influenced by employers, right? It's influenced by the market. We as the contributors don't get to choose what they call this. We just have to say these are the set of skills and the market will put them into a

box based on how the majority of companies work and they will assign a value to that box. And then we can try and fit into those boxes. And so for me, it's always been interesting jumping in and out of playing in the labor force because I'll either be a founder and then I'll

sometimes I'll go back into the labor force and I'll come back out. And so it's the only time labels really matter is when you need to get a job for it. And that perspective has been interesting because I do think we're going to see the responsibilities of what the current titles are. I do think we're going to see those change over time.

But the way these big changes happen is someone noteworthy in a company will do something drastic in like Silicon Valley, let's say, and maybe it's Airbnb in the way that they're kind of combining product marketing with product managers. And they announced that what earlier this year or late last year, I can't remember when they did that. And everyone's like, oh, look at Airbnb did this.

And then like, it's not so much that a ton of people followed suit yet, because what happens is someone who has built a reputation on maybe operational genius or something to that effect will make a move. The market will kind of watch it. And then in about maybe another year or two, let's say Airbnb is just killing it.

Then they're going to say that decision that Airbnb made maybe was responsible for how successful they're doing today, two years later. And then you're going to start to see more companies start to say, well, maybe we should start doing what Airbnb had proven out. Maybe that is a proven process now. So a lot of companies that are kind of inundated with their current process, I don't think they're going to change a whole lot.

right away. I do think a lot of startups who have the ability to be more agile with their movements are going to try and figure that out. I think a lot of day one businesses are going to have a lot of players who are hybrid design engineers. You see this at Lanier or I don't know if Lanier has too many design engineers, but Vercel and some other companies are looking into the design engineer category. But the pendulum has swung to

the tooling being a really interesting place right now and really driving what's possible. It's not that tools are new. Historically, tools have always driven the types of responsibilities we do, but we are seeing a level of innovation around the tooling, both for development and design right now.

that we haven't seen before in the software production era. We have not seen the quality and the innovation in tooling the way we're seeing it now. We are seeing just a spike. And we don't know who are going to be the winners in all these categories of tools right now. So for that reason, a lot of just playing and experimenting with tools is a really good idea. But I think the tooling is very much going to drive the process of what the responsibilities of the designer are.

Because all the tooling now is closing that gap between idea and reality. And once we have winners in these categories and the tools are even more refined because we're still kind of early in some of the tooling, once some of those tools really hit some breakthroughs, companies are going to adopt those tools.

and someone's going to be using them and they're going to be using them in such a way to deliver value. And it's like, where is that value at? The big thing about that though is eventually fantastic tools are going to kind of level off on a critical mass and we'll see the pendulum move away. There's a lot of designers who kind of make arguments against tools, not being like, oh, just because you can use a tool, just because you can use Canva doesn't mean you're a designer. It's like, okay, maybe there's some arguments inside of that, but you're missing the point. The tooling has gotten so good that

I think we are appropriately having the pendulum swing towards tooling. But then I think eventually the pendulum will start to swing back towards how to think and how to hone your taste. And that will become now equally important. Once the playing field is pretty even, we know which tools, which breakthroughs to really lean on, then it's going to be like, all right, who are some of the best users of those tools? Well, it's the people who know how to think, who have really good taste. I like where we're at with this. I'm not cynical about it. I think it's really fun. So my bet right now is open yourself up

And this is something I'm doing. Like we got really comfortable with Figma. We got really comfortable with certain tools for a while. And then it was like, how do we strategize and how do we do a lot of these other things? Good research practices. How do we just move faster? Really interesting prototyping play right now. If I'm a designer, use some of these tools. Go play with Unicorn Studio. Go play with the prototyping tool. Play. Go play with Claude.

right? Go play with the tools right now. It's going to open up a lot of ideas and a lot of the tools are still rough. It's like, oh, these could be better. They're going to get better. And I think playing right now is one of the big bets that a lot of designers should be making because designers are the best positioned right now. And I kind of talked about this the other day. It used to be that like jacks of all trades was the saying, right? It was like, oh, if you're jack of all trades, you kind of only

maybe master the T-shaped designer, you have like one vertical that you're maybe a master and you kind of touch on the others. The tooling is going to increase our capacity for work. It is going to make it easier to become a master of multiple verticals. You can use Unicorn Studio and create really sick motion and you don't have to have years of experience to do it. It's the tools gonna enable you to do it in four hours in a day. That's crazy.

That's awesome. And then you switch back over to another tool and you're going to bring that motion graphic over into play and you're going to prototype like a very functional prototype. And that's going to take you maybe a day and a half because of the tooling. And so knowing how to play with these tools, you have an ace in your hand as a designer. If you're a working designer now or you have working experience, you just got dealt an ace in your hand with where the pendulum swung and with where the tooling is currently going. Now, if you just start playing with it,

There are so many vectors that you can go. You can create your own businesses. You can become a really versatile contributor on your team. It's a lot of, in my mind, opportunity ahead of us. It seems like you're using the tooling part to identify the market trends today and where we're heading as designers and what will be important. Obviously, I'm looking forward to the UX tool survey coming up soon to see what trends we can get out of it.

What I was curious about is thinking about the trends. Obviously, the survey is not out yet, but what are you currently perceiving is more important today on the market to be a generalist or specialist? Because I feel like the market was moving towards the specialist area before the tech crisis. We were fragmenting the roles very, very strongly. Like every company needed to have all those specialists. Obviously now, if you think about it, you

you know, crisis, people getting laid off, we need one designer doing everything. So it feels a bit more like, okay, we need now generalists again, depending on the company, obviously, because the bigger company, probably the more fragmented roles you have, the smaller the company, one person does everything. But what do you feel? Obviously, different companies, different dynamics, but what do you feel will be moving forward a more...

Not to say rewarding, but the role that's used you better for success. You have to look at the market right now, and I think it's clear. Some companies have come out and said it in their shareholder meetings and others. It's just kind of writings on the wall that we do see the flattening of the stack. Right. We've heard this phrase, meaning more responsibilities are kind of being merged together. So I think a generalist for the sake of efficiency is what is probably being misused.

sought after right now. I've talked to a couple of design recruiters who are touching a lot of different regions and they're seeing something similar with an emphasis on people who can close the gap between idea and reality, right? How close can you as a designer bring something to life and get it into production?

Does that mean you're coding or does it mean you just have like very rich prototyping, the ability to document very well so that the developers can just literally take what you have and you reduce the QA cycle? There's a lot of just closing the gap that I think is being sought after in efficiency. How long will that last? I'm not sure. If I were to bet, though, I think, yeah, the ability to do more is going to be rewarded heavily. I think we will see that culturally change even if we kind of come up

into better economics, I think we'll have this new behavior of like, oh, we asked more of these people in the past that wouldn't have been possible because the tooling wasn't there and it's and we all only have 24 hours in a day. But now, like I said, with the tooling, that's that's kind of why I think the tooling is dictating or will dictate is because with the tooling comes more capabilities for one person in shorter amount of time. And I think with that, too, we'll come

higher salaries for those individuals who do that. It's not to say, oh, designer, you're being asked to do motion design and product design and business analysis, and you're not going to be compensated for it. I don't think that's going to be the case at all. But I think a lot of designers feel like, I've heard some arguments anyway, I don't know how many people feel this way, but that it's unfair to expect a designer to do all of these things. And I think that's the wrong way to think about it.

I think that because the tooling exists now, I think it is practical to be able to do those things. I think it before used to be a big, tall order. So the tools, I think, are the ones becoming the specialists so that the people can become the generalists.

It sounds like if you were asked the question today, should the designers code, you could say kind of yes, but like with the tools you need to code. - I would lean that way, but I don't think coding is the only way to close the gap to shipping. But I do think in general, the question should be more about should, I don't even like that question, that question feels dated to me. Instead, I like the question, should designers ship?

And I think, yeah, I think designers should learn to ship and shipping something doesn't always mean learning to code. And that's the difference. Shipping something in the past used to mean learning to code also, like it was kind of a prerequisite and that's not always the case now. It's still a case in a lot of instances, but there's many instances as well where no, like you don't have to know how to code to ship product.

I just think that's a really empowering way to think about it. And I encourage more designers as they kind of embark on play to think about it like that. So with this perspective in mind that we are kind of in a state of the market when potentially generalists would be more appreciated, designers who can close the gaps, ship the products, really make this difference by actually producing products.

Because it's true that many, especially the bigger companies, they have this problem. I personally have this problem. In the three last companies where it was always very hard to actually not just design things, but actually make sure it's actually going live. It takes a lot of different layers to get there, starting from strategy, going to the right people, pitching the product, slicing it correctly, making sure it's within the budget for the company. And then like you were saying, using the tools.

or using whatever you're using in the current stake, right? It could be with Figma that like you were saying, just making beautiful handoffs or self explanatory handoffs or sitting together in the room with your developer to be able to do this together. But the point is, yeah, going from like,

We need to solve this problem actually all the way to having it in production life and iterate it based, you know, solving the problems if there are some. This is a huge cycle. It's not just about producing their design and hoping it will fly. Because in my experience, last three companies I worked at, it's never been like this. It was my biggest problem. And maybe in the first company I was like complaining about it. Yeah, well, the developers just cannot make it happen.

ban or something has changed in the company's priorities, blah, blah, blah. But then now looking back, I'm realizing it was actually my, if it was my initiative, I had to strategically position it, making sure it's, how to say this, framed correctly. Yeah. Getting the buy-in.

getting it all the way to, you know, sit together with the developers and seeing it live. So I was thinking it's my career, something is wrong with the companies I work with. Now I completely changed my perspective and I realize it's also on us today. But that brings me actually, I'm not sure if it brings us to the topic of this conversation yet, but what's your perspective on actually shipping the products within the bigger companies, especially those companies who have multiple layers of, I don't know, buy-ins, the corporations?

How do you do this there? And then we will finally hopefully get into the segue with making the good decisions. - So there's been this other question, and I think a lot of UX researchers, folks who live a lot in the strategy part of the design process have scoffed a bit at this movement towards production, where a lot of designers spend a lot of time producing

designs and a lot of the tools that are being talked about are all about output type activities. But I am actually more excited this year about some of the research tools, a lot of the tools that are innovating in the research category. And the reason is because just the same way the production tools are innovating to make that process easier and faster, the research category is getting a ton of

boost in two ways. I think the research category actually stands to gain the most from the current state of AI than most of the other tools right now. I think next year and the year after, we'll see a lot of the production tools continue to evolve with AI. But I think the research tools have really found some innovative ways to quickly leverage the cognitive load that a single researcher or designer has to manage in synthesizing all the insights,

and using those insights to storytell and to bring that to the larger organization and say, hey, look at the data here. We really believe this is the right design decision that we want to back or this is the right initiative that we'd like to spend the next quarter on. And

The research tooling is going to allow a designer to make those cases now in half the time, if not even more. Like I've looked at Dovetail. I've talked with Hey Marvin. I've talked, you know, there's user testing, there's Genway. The tools that are coming out right now in research

aren't just innovating in really useful ways for researchers and designers and raising that floor of what's possible quickly. They're also becoming more affordable because a lot of the research tools we've used in the past, it was like you had to buy the enterprise account, you had to get a budget for it. And the cost of these tools

is pretty expensive when you're buying for enterprise level. And it's not necessarily to say that like the price tags significantly cheaper at the enterprise level, but there are tools out there now that have really affordable starting plans in the research category that like an individual designer can go and just snatch that up, start funneling a bunch of those conversations with customers or the insights in there.

The tools I'm talking about, by the way, aren't necessarily instrumentation. It's not full story for your product where you've got to have the engineering team go and rope it in. It's like these are kind of self-serve tools where you can just start bringing in your qualitative insights and then they do wonderful things that help you bring hero elements from a conversation with a customer. And they do it with storytelling in mind.

I think that that type of facilitation on the research tool category is what's going to help designers make better arguments for whatever the ideal outcome they want to pursue. And I think that's huge. And this, again, I'm going to talk about tools so much because that's the headspace I've really been living in, but it's also what I truly believe is going to augment and change the role a bit over the next couple of years. And I'm so for it.

I think it's only raising the floor of the quality of products across the board. Anyone who says otherwise is being cynical about it. There's plenty of warts that we can look at and unintended side effects. There always will be. But ultimately, better tooling is going to reduce suffering in the world. And I really think designers should be on board with that and try to consider how you can leverage that.

to story tell in your organization. You know, I think it's a, I think it's a huge thing. It's interesting to hear, honestly, because I think for mapping it on some pain points we experienced today in the design product organizations, all this jazz, one of the pain points I personally experienced is having tools with insights and with evidence that supports your case is great.

but integrating those insights in the right moment for the right initiative with the right people is what is hard at the moment. Maybe we will see radical change in that space, but I personally still feel like, for example, we do have a lot of research tools. I'm not going to name the names, but we have a lot of research tools with great insights. We collect them, we organize them, we tag them, we make sure it's there and everybody can access them. But it's the space today that is very overwhelming. We have so many tools. We have to manage such a

extensive stack of things. Everybody lives in our own little tool or big tool. And sometimes organizations obviously push us to use those tools. This is the central hub. We have to use it there. Yet people still tend to go back to their comfy corners. And that's where I'm still struggling, to be honest. Do you feel like there will be possible change there? Do you think there is a ray of the light in the end? I think we are absolutely in for some short-term tool fatigue. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Because the amount of tools that are coming out now and that will continue to come out and grow. I mean, there's going to be the way Figma, Sketch and Envision kind of had a battle for a few years on who was going to be the incumbent. And Figma won that. We're going to see that in a lot of specialist categories and we're going to see that in the research category. And so what that means is we're going to see kind of the same thing happen. Organizations are going to place a bet on the sketch of a research category or whoever it might be.

but then another competitor might beat them. And so you're gonna have to switch again. And we're gonna see that. And we're probably gonna see that in a more exhausting way for the next few years, if I had to guess. So that is an unintended side effect that is, I think, a fair thing to be critical of. Kind of part of the process of getting to a place where we have really good tools that help us build really good products. I would plan for that.

Again, the remedy to something like that is to turn on your curiosity, to find opportunities to play with some of the tools, don't get stuck to one. This is why I think once we experience that tool fatigue, if you're not already experiencing it now, it kind of sounds like you're experiencing some of that already too, is the pendulum will swing back to, as I mentioned, how to think, how to hone your taste. And those two elements, hold onto those. When you start to experience tool fatigue,

remember that that's the time to remember that, you know, it's not, it's not necessarily just the tool that makes me a designer. I can interchange between tools, but hold on to how to think and how to refine your taste, continue to gather inputs so that your taste is growing with your ability to actually craft.

that's kind of the best advice I have for that. So there is going to be some tool fatigue, for sure. I'm sure it's like a lot of us experience and given that since the COVID, everybody was online, the more tools were dominating the market, everybody's trying out new tools, and we all end up with a bunch of tools to support. Not so much if

productivity because there's just a lot of context switching going on. But yeah, I like that you started thinking, okay, right. The products, the companies that are fighting right now for the customer base, for the majority of the market, which is understandable, not a good news for us, for our productivity. However, it seems like if we try to speculate, the tool that is winning the market in the future might actually start creating the ecosystem where it's sort of like

collaboration ecosystem with all the productivity tools in one bulk, in one sort of out-the-box type of bucket, which hopefully will make it easier for us. Who knows? Yeah, I'm curious if we will have like an all-in-one player that does all the things. It always seems like we do this pendulum thing where in a space

given industry, we get the leader who then grows into the incumbent and then they tried to do the all in one thing. And then someone comes up and they're like, no, no, no, we're going to specialize and just do one thing better than anybody. And so it always seems like we get a back and forth between a tool winning a market because it specializes and then getting really big and trying to grow into an all in one. And then that suddenly opportunities open up for like new specialist tools. I'm curious to see how that plays out. You know, it's going to be interesting.

All right, so as you were speaking, you mentioned that the best advice I can give you is to hold on to that thinking cup, right? So we're all do-ers, we're receiving information, processing information, delivering information, outputting it on the world, etc. And there is another big bucket of things or big topic, which is design thinking, I'm guessing. And this is where the quality of your design decisions is

playing a big role and this is probably something I'm assuming you will have a lot to speak about given that you're about to launch your course which is called Design Decisions. For anybody who's listening and want to check it out the website is uxdecisions.com so go ahead and check out the course should be live literally soon maybe it's already there as you're listening and

I'm guessing this is your second biggest bet today on the market with building the quality for design decisions or making the right design decisions. Yeah. And when I mentioned how I'm a self-taught shipper designer and I mean, the internet really helped me in my life a lot because of the resources and the education that was available 15 years ago, which was nowhere near as good as it is today. I believe very heavily

that designers, whether it's your time or your money or both, should be investing into yourselves. So play with the tools. Find educational material, free and paid, and invest the time and money into that when you need to unblock a specific thing.

right? I really believe in just-in-time learning. Like right in the middle of trying to build a design system, go hang with Dan Maul. He's got plenty of books and courses and content. That's when you should be consuming that. Not like a couple steps before you need that. I'm a real big believer in just-in-time learning.

And so making UX decisions, which is kind of the name of what I'm producing, and it is out today, I think as of when this podcast airs, is more about understanding that a lot of design work, not all of it, but a lot of what we do, no matter where you live, is in the context

of capitalism and whether you agree with that idea or not, it is a universal truth. Because the internet has broken those barriers, a lot of what we do is in competition within a market. And when you have competition, you have time constraints and resource constraints and a lot of trade-offs. We are all very familiar with these things I am talking about.

For that reason, a design decision is usually, not always the case, but usually only as good as the time it took you to arrive at it. You can have the most brilliant idea for a product, for what you think will take this craft to the next level. And if it takes you three to six months to get there, that might cost you everything. It might cost you your job. It might cost you your position in the market. Who knows what, right? We have a lot of

cautionary tales in the marketplace about that. I think it took Envision like an entire year before they shipped anything. And unfortunately, there's a lot of opinions about what happened to them, but I promise you that that was definitely one of the things that held them back. In the end, right now the big conversation that's happening is around craft. And a lot of designers I think are kind of cheering and rooting for companies who are prioritizing craft.

really good user experiences. And I love products with really fantastic user experiences. And I don't think that that's a bad thing to use as a sort of North Star to say, like, we want to create the word that's getting overused now, but delightful experience. We want to have that product.

the arc browsers and the super humans and the, you know, linears and Vercels and these people leading the way. But there's a couple of things to think about around this idea of craft. One is in a lot of cases, and I've done a thing where I've gone back and I've looked at the websites and the products of some of our favorite companies that we hold up in craft.

in their first year and Kraft was not there. So it becomes this question of first you have to understand, is that company prioritizing Kraft because they're profitable or are they prioritizing Kraft to be profitable? And that's a big distinction. There's a lot of companies out there who have the luxury to invest a lot of resources into things that other companies do not have the luxury

of. I don't want to call it an ivory tower, but it kind of is because there's one section of like there's Airbnbs and there's companies like them who really prioritize every detail. And it's wonderful to see that. But then there's those of us like on the streets and we're still like trying to get to the place where we have the resources to do that. We just don't yet. And because of that,

designers should remember that what we're really crafting is our businesses, not software. We're crafting businesses. And when you think about it like that, there is still a level of craftsmanship you can bring to the table that might not have a lot to do necessarily with how high quality a certain detail in your design work is, but in about the approach you took and the justification for why that design is the way it is. I always say that the

best person in the room to say that that could be better, but it's good enough is a designer. That person should be the one in the room who has like a very strongly held or I guess a better way to say that would be it's just I think somebody who's quite capable.

to make the distinction that this design decision, if we could probably spend some more time on it, but I think what we have here based on the bet our company is trying to make based on the fact that maybe we're not profitable yet or we're not as profitable as we need to be, we're not quite winning certain segments of the market, this is good enough to achieve the concept of critical mass. And if we continue to kind of bang our heads on this decision, it'll probably have diminishing returns.

That's hard sometimes for designers to know what that is, though. This is all great to say, like, yeah, you can say that that's good enough, but what is good enough? And that's the judgment. That's the thing that starts to get more difficult. And that's really what I am trying to help designers figure out is how to define good enough. Because good enough changes. Good enough is different for all different types of situations. Yes, it is fair.

to say it depends. I also think it's a really lazy answer. I think that if you say it depends, you probably will benefit from more experiences to inform that. Have a stronger opinion than it depends. And so for that reason, it's like knowing when is good enough is a definition that I'm a very big fan of.

It's interesting to hear, honestly. I love your example with specific products that prioritize craft. It's definitely a perspective we have to be reminded of. This example you brought in with Arc, I love this because let's imagine somebody's asking me, "What's your favorite product?" Like, let's do the design critique. Walk us through your favorite product. I would bring Arc, but I would never use it.

I bring it because I love the onboarding experience. I love the details, the interaction, the personalization. When it comes to my daily grind and like going through efficiency, doing my busy day and everything, I just don't find myself using it. Some people do, but then I've heard stories that they just still go back to the old other browsers. And it's a good interesting example and perspective because I feel like at this point in the market, it's not just about the craft. It's always two things, right?

It's doing the right thing and doing the things right. Right depends on the company, depends on the values, depends on what you prioritize the best, which you talked about. Sometimes right needs to be scrappy. I hate it, to be honest. I would personally hate to design something scrappy real quick. Sometimes it has to be. We are never proud of this work and we never want to be working with this type of work. But balance is so important and you're so right when you're saying that.

It's good to have different comps in your team. Somebody who's pushing for the craft and for the quality, somebody who's pushing for what's the most important thing right now. If we're rustically prioritized, what's the thing that will get us there? Because you still need business, right? If we run out of business, the whole team is out. We can't focus on the craft anymore.

So it's important to have both of those people in your team or as designers to understand the value of both camps maybe, or both perspectives. So it's very interesting right now. I've been working in the companies who are either one or a completely different way. It's hard to find that balance in your team and in the companies. I think the strong thing there too is just having an intentionality behind what you do. If you put out some work and you're like, you know, that's not my best work, but

The reason that we decided to go this direction was for some intentional reason that you believe in. It's because, you know, we don't even know if we're going to release this feature general public yet. We wanted to put something together just to see if the customers even signed up for it before we invested a bunch of resources into improving the UX. But like intentionally, we know that if we do get a certain signup response, then that's going to make the compelling case for improving the UX.

And you're the designer advocating for this thing. And so you couldn't advocate for enough resources to get where it needed. But the fact that you even got the resources just to put out the first version to test that suddenly turns that entire, maybe a lower quality amount of craft into a really huge win that's not going to look visually the most impressive as a case study, but the actual story of that case study is really compelling. And so it

Sometimes designers feel like the intentionality behind a decision was, well, my head of product told us this is what we were supposed to do. Someone threw this over a wall and that's the depth of understanding they have behind the intentionality. And if that's the depth of understanding, then you're gonna just feel like a cog in a machine and you're gonna feel like your work isn't actually

adding any value to the company. And I would say that I know that some of these environments exist where designers are deprived of that feedback loop of understanding what their work is doing. And sometimes those environments maybe just suck. Like there are environments that suck, but a lot of times there are environments where it's like you just kind of need to understand what's happening a little bit better.

And that will help you have more faith in the intentions behind the decisions you're making. If your company is just kind of like moving in a direction and you have a very clear understanding, like we are competing on velocity and that just doesn't jive with you and your values, that's totally okay. But at least you understand.

You know, whereas some designers, I think, are still trying to understand. And it's not super complicated to understand. You just have to have more conversations, do a little bit more market research, and then like the clarity is not far away. What would be your advice when it comes to let's imagine in the current specific market space right now, we had to go for quick, I don't know, dirty prototype and we had to put something out there, scrappy product, right?

It, for example, captured the attention we got when we needed, maybe brought some profit to the company. Great. How do you shift your company culture from constantly doing those quick things, quick fixes, quick experiments, quick tests, to actually also balancing it with the quality?

can't just always go on to those quick things right you need to have both of those things but then company gets used to it it's almost like addiction oh yeah we got this nice experiment it brought us revenue let's do another experiment right right don't go back to actually improving the quality and focusing on crafting things so what would you advise there so there's a couple ways to handle that and i've done each of these in different situations and i like the way

rid michael rudering of dive club how he referred to this i hadn't heard of it referred to this way but it's a cool way to refer to it which is just like the secret team approach build some relationships with people who can get some stuff done and just go and like build a thing with them

You know, like you don't want to burn the current initiatives you're working on to do this. But if you see an opportunity to just kind of bring something to life and then show people, I used to be in the military. In the military, this was referred to proceeding until cautioned. And it was kind of being permissionless and just saying, you know what, we've got an idea. You know, if you have some spare resources of your own to maybe put a day or two into this idea to bring it to life.

and then show the team, it's a lot easier for them to kind of sign off on that. You're going to get in trouble if you ended up not getting other things done in doing that. But that is one way you can do it. It's not the only way. The other way that you can do this, and this is something I've done most of the time, which is

creating different versions of visions, right? If I'm working on something, I do try to start with kind of a blue sky. Like what could this be? There's still some constraints involved in that, but what could this dashboard look like thinking about some of these additional really nice to have things that would enhance user experience or would enhance the product in some capacity? And I'll kind of build that out a little

bit because sometimes for me that's more of like a design exercise to get my juices flowing to get into the actual project requirements because I like to work from a place of this is what it could be and now let's take things away and slowly figure that out and when you do that exercise and then you frame it in a like documented way when you present these ideas to the team it actually builds a road

And it actually can show a team like, oh, yes, that ideal version. There's a lot of reasons why we can't get to that by the end of the quarter, the end of the month. But like that's inspiring. Teams can get excited about it. Maybe the leadership has been having a conversation that hasn't yet made it to a PRD and you just happen to give them something that works.

really helps them sell the idea. But what they can do is say, "We can't get there yet." Super interesting to see that. I love that we have that. And in the time it took you to create that vision, you also gave us what we needed today, which is like one or two steps behind that ideal version. And while that's not necessarily the ideal version you as the designer want to come to life right now today, now suddenly is in a step process to what may one day become that idea. Could that just become something that sits on a shelf?

Absolutely. And it will sometimes, right? We've all been there. But that's another way that you can help tell that story that I've helped to tell that story is to show a couple of steps towards that ideal version that solve today's problem as well as like, this is what tomorrow could look like. And so the secret team approach or kind of the incremental presentation approach. I love this because it literally aligns with how I figured out things recently. And it's just like, yes.

somebody else thinks the same way. So good to hear this. I literally do this right now at my team. We're also doing this little secret team, little alignment, but also like trying to not just like scare people with like big vision. Tomorrow we're changing everything, but like slicing it down and like strategically showing how it moves the needle slowly, slowly with low investment, but that also impacts the revenue and profit, whatever the company's chasing. So it's really amazing to hear your perspective in this regard. Can I add one thing to that? Definitely, go ahead. So like,

Another thing that's really helped me too is because oftentimes when you start a new role, you've got fresh eyes. You're looking around and you see all the things that could be, you're like, oh, this could be higher quality or that could be better or whatever the case is. I've learned very quickly not to come in and

be the person saying this is wrong and that could be better. And I'll take mental notes or I'll take actual notes and have like a list of things that I'm like, oh, these I could revisit someday. I do the process of like grab an oar and just start rowing to help the company to get into their rhythm before I start doing different things. What I'll typically do is once I have an idea of things that

could use enhancements or could be better in some way. While I'm just working on the team's cadence, right, rowing, we're all going in the same direction. If we have a shipping cycle coming up or we have something, I'll try to squeeze in one of those enhancements like, oh yeah, we did everything we needed and also I improved

just this quick onboard workflow, or I improved our navigation information architecture just a little bit here in a way that maybe was suitable for the developers to actually implement or easy to get approved. I would try to find opportunities where I could be like, hey, and by the way, if we wanted to ship this with this next release, I've got documentation for it. Now let's just see, if you wanna green light it, let's see what the lift is from the developers. It makes it really easy for that cell. You know what I mean? Small, small increments.

pragmatism leading up to that ideal outcome. Love this. Love this indeed. Like, well, you're already sold on this thing, this whatever experiment or this little initiative. Well, if we could just squeeze it in and things are getting more efficient and we're improving the code base, we can probably try to squeeze in small things like, I love this. I know we're almost at the time, but I really want to also try to quickly touch base on the actual decision-making process. Mm-hmm.

I know you have the whole course coming out on this topic, but maybe you can share with us a nugget or two, or even tips if you prefer, of what people can take away from this conversation. Some things that you feel like needs to be set around making the decisions. Effectively, we already talked about the context, the bets, the understanding, the strategy, and using the research, being the doer and shipping things. But if you are in the moment, in the grind, different context, maybe you have a lot of constraints and you have to make decisions.

What would be your approach and some key tips for people to think about? So I don't love really heavy frameworks, but the one thing that I use for helping me, because we make lots of little decisions, like when we've got Figma open or we're putting together a prototype, we're making lots of decisions about how this should behave, what this should look like.

The way a lot of what the role of design is, is kind of a scouting function, right? Our job is to reveal through a really foggy territory where the company should plant their flag next. And that's why

a lot of people say, "Well, designers are ultimately communicators. We bring these ideas up and we really show a lot of this information." And if that's true, then a large part of our job is about gathering and weighing information. All right, I've had these conversations, I've looked at the market, I've looked at other products. You have all these inputs and this information coming in, and then you synthesize that in your head, and then you stack order it about what is more important, and then

and using that stack order, you come over here and you start to build something that makes sense of that information, right? And it can be kind of overwhelming to know like, well, where should I find the information and which information is more important than other information? And for me, this is the process that has rang true. You know, when we have really tight time constraints,

I lean on this and I think it's one of the best ways to do it. We all have time constraints, but I'm talking about when you are just like really up against it. And the stack order is like this. What does institutional knowledge say is your foundation? Institutional knowledge, everything we know about human computer interaction today, usability principles, there's a lot of information. As of 2024, 2025, the amount of information we have available that we don't need to reinvent the wheel on is tremendous.

And so what does that information tell us? Next, what takes priority after that is what are our customers or users familiar with, right? And what I mean by that is I think it's one of the most important kind of rules to lean into is what tangential products are your customers using? Are they using Chrome browser? Are they managing their money in QuickBooks? What tools?

and what types of devices are they typically used to using. If you have that information available, you can really lean on a mix of institutional knowledge and user familiarity. So now you know, okay, well, I know they use these products or maybe they're coming from a competitor and they're used to certain things. So you can then weigh that information and say, all right, institutional knowledge tells me that the way this onboarding flow would behave better if we reduced cognitive load.

let's say. But I know that we're trying to onboard customers who are coming from this really complicated, data dense onboarding platform, like a lot of data. So we do have to kind of make room for data density in this onboarding flow. It's counterintuitive to the idea of cognitive load and really reducing it, but it's necessary because that's what they're coming from and used to. So therefore, supporting this data density is probably the priority.

But then the final and kind of the golden layer of what takes the most priority is if you have real research, real customer conversations, real instrumentation data that tells you yes or no, this data dense onboarding flow actually kind of sucks or it is in fact making it really easy to onboard these customers from a competitor. This happened to be the right decision in the absence of

real user research fall back on what your customers are familiar with. In the absence of what your customers are familiar with, fall back on institutional knowledge. That's it. And that's the way that I weigh information. Every little micro decision for me revolves around that one.

That one, two, three kind of stack order. And I think that when you kind of distill it down to that, you'll get really close to some good enough answers. So that is my good enough process or my process for weighing information to achieve good enough in really tightly constrained environments. And do you usually love to test those? To iterate on this based on, okay, you published it, you saw it in reaction. What would be your like process? You know, in many, many cases we have to move on to the next shiny thing that it's market is wanting us to do.

Absolutely. Always wanting to iterate. That's where knowing what your business bets really comes into play. You can say, "Yeah, we need to touch on this again." Because how many times have we said, "I'm going to make good enough." And one of the complaints is, "Well, I achieved good enough, but we don't ever come back and iterate on it." And you're like, "Oh, it still is kind of wonky." And it's like, "Okay, are you losing the market because you didn't iterate on that? Or are you winning the market? And is iterating on that going to help you

in the market or do you need to focus it elsewhere? So iteration, I take the same approach to it. What is going to help us win the market? Do we need to iterate? Like, yeah, maybe that thing's going to be not the best thing it can be for one or two years and you're going to die inside a little bit. But if you did that, if you helped design that and it helped your company win in the market, I would be really proud of that. And

And that all goes back to we're crafting businesses, not necessarily crafting software. Well, a lot of interesting thoughts today, a lot of interesting nuggets to think about. Thank you so much for a really nice sort of overview of your thinking around it. You will probably dive a lot into it in your course. So if anybody wants to hear more examples, more details, more practical advices, definitely check out the course, UXDecision.com.

Yeah, I think that will be it for today. I really appreciate all of the time you took today, of your very busy schedule, knowing that you're a father of four and you're launching courses and preparing this survey.

It's insane, but I really appreciate the actual time you took off your calendar to talk about your process, your thinking, your wisdom, because there was a lot of wisdom to this today, in my opinion. Andres, thank you for having me. I'm just happy to chat with you. That was a fun conversation. Absolutely. Okay, good. Everyone, if you want to learn more about what Tommy is doing, definitely go and check out the show notes links because you'll find everything we've talked about today. Also, definitely participate in the UX Tools survey coming up next week.

It's so important. It's so important. It helps us understand the industry, all of us as designers. Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much and see you guys in the next episode. Bye bye, everyone.