Episode 290: Creativity in Digital Product Design with John Roescher
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the UI Breakfast podcast. I'm your host, Jane Portman, and today our special guest is John Roescher, the amazing founder of Raw Materials, and we're going to talk about creativity in digital product design today.

This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio, the new web platform for agencies and enterprises. The magic of Wix Studio is its advanced design capabilities, which makes website creation efficient and intuitive. Here are a few things you can do. Work in sync with your team on one canvas. Reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites.

create a client kit for seamless handovers, and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Step into Wix Studio to see more at wix.com slash studio. Hey, John. Hey, Jane. We're excited to have you here today. You have a pretty special agency story to share. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to talk to you.

Before we dive into creativity, which is a controversial topic by itself, let's learn a little bit more about the story behind raw materials and where you personally come from. A good idea. And I love that you said creativity is a controversial topic. I think it gives it even more importance. We should talk a lot about that.

And I think that has a lot to do with my background. So yeah, I grew up in a small town in Texas. And in the kind of mid to late 90s, I was going through a junior high. So it kind of places and dates me.

And that's around the same time that the Internet was becoming somewhat, I wouldn't say mainstream, but was making its way into people's homes and to businesses and things like that. And so I had the fortune of growing up in, for a kid, a very boring place that had just gotten a window or portal to the world of the world and then also to what's possible with technology. And that was fascinating to me. And so I quickly...

jumped into that world. And I thought it was amazing that you could write a few lines of code, make something that was beautiful or not beautiful, but could be seen by the world and used by the world. And that to me was just like magic. And so I taught myself how to write code. I tried to design things. I tried to make things. And after high school, I went to the military for four years to have nothing to do with that work. And then coming out of the military, I

needed to do something to make money. And I jumped back into that world because it was very hot at that time, say around 2007, which kind of iPhone app store launch. And, you know, I was mostly freelance working on odd jobs here and there and helped start a few companies, always working in the digital product design and development space, whether it be just pure marketing websites, e-com or kind of web apps and some mobile app stuff.

And that life was interesting and learned a lot. But also, you know, I learned a few things that I thought were very important in how to approach designing experiences, designing software. And I was having trouble getting those things to happen, both because I wasn't familiar

very skilled at the various things that needed to happen. And also because I, as an independent freelancer, I didn't have a lot of leverage in how my clients were thinking about doing things. And so I said, well, what would solve that problem? How could I build a team of talented people that could do these various things and then build a brand that would give me leverage and having clients be able to do work that way? And the answer was agency. That just kind of lands on agency. And so I started an agency called Handsome in around 2011.

with a few things that I wanted, like I said, that I wanted to solve. I wanted things to be evidence-based. I wanted to think before creating. I wanted things to be human-centered. I want to understand people and people who are going to be using this thing, let's design it for them. I wanted technology to not be the limiting factor, but to be the enabler of what design had come up with. And I wanted beauty to be an important, to play an important role in why something was successful.

Those things were somewhat novel at the time. They're not that novel now. And the whole human-centered design and things exist. And then we have design researchers that in some companies outnumber actual visual designers. And so those ideas are pretty well established at the time. They weren't. So I said that this is how things should be. So I started an agency to solve, to do things the right way, which was that.

I spent for about a decade that agency Handsome existed and grew about, I think it was about 12 years. And we worked with Audi and Facebook and Visa and FedEx and all the biggest companies in the world, a bunch of startups, did some really interesting things. And I found myself growing quite a bit. I found myself being asked by companies, you know,

how many dozens of FTEs can you bring in to work on this design system? And I just started thinking, my job has become

how to scale, not how to create things that are great, but how to scale. And I thought that's not what I want to be doing. And then I took a look around me just in the industry and I said, oh, that's because that's where the industry is at. The industry looks at design as an implementation and integration role.

The industry looks at design as a way to take some decisions that someone else made and implement them as fast as possible, as scale as possible. And then to look at how to optimize things and just kind of incrementally make things a little bit better here and there so they can perform better on a short-term basis. Of course, I'm speaking very broadly, but I took a broad look at the industry and I said, that's not great. And so...

So myself, Pablo Marquez, my chief credit officer, and Jennifer Allen, chief operating officer, decided to metamorphosize, you know, let's say blow up handsome. That's like kind of an ugly way to look at it, but decided to...

to take the drastic move of shutting down a very successful 140 person, if that matters to you, design agency out there working with big clients and big projects and start raw materials from scratch. So we spent about a year, year and a half figuring out exactly what we wanted to do, what problem we wanted to solve, how we wanted to build this agency, build this company. And May of last year, so May of 2023,

launched raw materials into the world based on a pretty fairly simple philosophy that when everything is the same, different is the greatest opportunity.

We looked at the industry and saw sameness prevalent and being reinforced by the way that design was being handled and treated by companies. And as the opportunity to figure out what different is and what different means from a design perspective for our clients or for companies and help build a practice that could do that extraordinarily well. And so that's where we are now, about a year, now a year and a half or so later. And that's what we're doing with Raw Materials.

So after some preliminary questioning, I learned that raw materials does not just provide wild creative advertising solutions, but you do pretty technical things and you look into positioning and you're really solving business problems there with creativity. So how would you define creativity in the way that you approach it? Because there are definitely so many ways one can interpret it. I love that question.

And it's good that that question comes first, because that really is the basis for everything. I throw that word around a lot. There's a quote by an old ad guy that says, creativity is the last legal unfair advantage. And I love that quote. And I think what that means to me is that

When the table is set, the table stakes are out there. We have designed enough software that we can do basically anything. We have figured out supply chain problems. We've commoditized so many things. There is still an opportunity for companies to do something and to be something that is great and therefore valuable compared to their competitors. And the way you find what that is...

is through creativity, is by looking at the problem in such an essential way and kind of down to the essence and kind of obsessing over a problem and saying, okay, I understand that problem and that goal and the clearest solution

detail, now I'm going to set out to find the absolute best solution to that problem. Not the best that exists, not going to the UI kit website and going and buying the best UI kit to solve that problem. Not the hamburger menu, fine, we'll just use that. It works. And in fact, we'll animate it so people like it. No, we're going to go and say, what is the best solution to that problem?

And the actual best solution to a problem doesn't exist yet. And so therefore we have to create it. It's novel. And if it is a solution to the problem in a maximum way, it is the most effective solution. And I think that's what creativity is. Creativity is the way that you find the novel and most impactful solution to any problem. And I think if you take that way of thinking and apply it to design,

You are looking at creating things that don't exist yet. And if you're creating something that doesn't exist yet, then in doing it and finding out what that thing should be by finding the thing that is most maximally effective for whatever the problem is, you're both being creative. You're also creating difference, which is competitive necessarily, consequentially. And you are also pushing yourself to create something that's great. And I think that's why it's such a powerful idea of creativity.

To give our listeners a bit more context, what type of projects do you find yourself doing at Raw Materials? Like specifically, what kind of deliverables are you hired to create? And then maybe you can share some of those case studies, like Voltas, for example, where I was pretty blown by...

the amount of business change you were able to incur by your somewhat creative process? So the majority, I'd say the core of our work is in the realm of, I would say, digital experience. And so that can include a marketing website, that can include e-commerce, that can include digital product that gets into web app, mobile app, etc.,

And so I would say that's digital experience, whether it be more kind of marketing experience type stuff or the core digital app for a business. Now, through the process of that, we are often finding ourselves working on branding, brand strategy, brand design, and then the design of communications that go kind of between the brand and product.

And then sometimes we're working on the marketing and kind of going to market of any of the things that we've worked on, which then can include advertising. But our core kind of the core target that we're aiming for is the design of digital experiences. And ideally those that facilitate the strongest connection between a brand and its consumers, which we find ourselves working on the digital on the app, quote, the app. So some examples, um,

You mentioned Volta, which is an electric vehicle charging company that created their own electric vehicle charging network, their own charger charging kiosks, terminals and place them all over the United States. Volta was acquired by Shell about a year or a little bit more than a year ago as part of Shell's effort to diversify its energy offerings.

And so what we worked with Volta to design both the Volta brand as well as the Volta app. So I mean, Volta really exists as kiosks or terminals and an app. I mean, that's it, right? You're driving your car along and you go and you charge your car. And so the work we did with Volta was to design the brand and the product. And it's just a great example of this idea of creativity applied to digital product design. So

So, you know, I think there was a there is a tendency to go into the market and say, let's look at all the competitors and say, what are all this set of digital mobile apps for electric vehicle charging companies? And there's going to be a clear winner. There's one that is that is subjectively and objectively designed the best compared to all the rest.

So we line them all up and say, you got this best one. We say, OK, that's great. If we wanted to design that, we could. We have enough skilled craftspeople. We can create better, just as good a rounded corners and gradient backgrounds and carousels and things as anyone else. All right, cool.

But that's not Volta. That's just an app that Volta could have. So we said, what's the app that only Volta could create? And we went back to the essence of why Volta was invented in the first place, the idea of Volta, not the positioning and the marketing, but the true idea of Volta.

was to make charging a convenient and perhaps even somewhat enjoyable part of a person's normal day, which then placed these terminals at where you would go and spend 45 to 90 minutes, like a grocery store or a gym or a nail salon, or ideally a strip center that had all of the above. And so it's a normal part of your day. Why are you using your vehicle? You're going to do these things. And so let's place them there. Let's integrate them into the community.

of this kind of shopping and kind of going about your day with your vehicle. And then let's obviously, and at that point it's obvious, let's design...

an app that does that extremely well. And so we ended up designing an app that brought the idea of how you're going to be spending your time as well as charging, not just where can I find a charger? How much does it cost? How much, you know, what's the line? What's the price? I mean, those things are there. That's what everyone else designed. Of course they're there, but we took it a step further and created something only Volta could create, which ended up being

bringing that idea of shopping and spending your time into the mobile app. And so we didn't create the best electric vehicle charging network app. We created a one-of-one experience. And that helped Volta become an important part of people's lives. It helped and then eventually helped Volta get acquired by Shell through the success of the business. So that's one great example. I also gave the example of something that everyone would be familiar with is the design of

7-Eleven's mobile app, which now has tens of millions of users, has about a 4.9 star review in both app stores, something that you wouldn't expect of an app that's used by tens of millions of people. And so those are two good digital product core kind of app design projects that we've done. Both of them employed to great success this idea of creativity in the design of digital products.

What is the task, the job to be done that those big companies come to you as an agency and say, oh, we've got X problem, please help us solve this with Y? Because usually the X problem is pretty vague and the Y is also not a very clear outcome sometimes. Well, even worse than that, they're usually asking for something kind of off center of what they really need or want.

And I think it's less of a they don't know what they're doing. I think it's a bit more of a language and a framing problem. These companies and these people are very smart. So I'm not saying, oh, they're all dumb and we know the answer. No, it's actually a little bit more of a language and a framing problem. And it's actually a little bit more of a misunderstanding of

or a misuse of design. And so I think, you know, sometimes what they're coming for is we've just hired a branding agency to rebrand. And so we've got a new brand positioning, a new mark, new colors, we've got this new essence and this vibe and all this stuff. And it all exists in this brand guide and brand kit. There's going to be a campaign about it to launch the brand. And we want our apps to look like our new brand.

Okay. We want our apps to look like a new brand. We want them to perform. They might as well throw it in there. They need to perform better than they performed today. Okay. So again, I think the real thing that we all want, which is how we work with our clients, is we say, okay, that's all good. But what's the real goal here?

And say, oh, the goal is that we want an app that performs well, looks like our brand. Like that's a means to an end. What is the end? What do you really want? I want to sell more shoes. There you go. All right. Okay. And so why did you create this brand thinking that it would sell more shoes? Well, because we had these insights about people. Like, perfect. Well, let's use those insights to be creative now about what your quote app or your e-com or your website, wherever it is going to be, about why and how that should even exist.

And so it's not about changing the business model. It's about bringing the business model into the essence of why this brand or this business exists at all and designing something as special for that.

like I was saying before, to the degree that no one else will. And that's the thing that's going to perform. So we're answering the brief. You know, at the end of the day, it looks like their brand and it performs, but it's how we get there to such a degree that employs creativity in a way that I think is largely missing, largely missing in the industry. Of course, I have things I think are done wonderful and there's people out there fighting the good fight. So, but I think that's the answer to that. You know, I think it's the...

Companies are often coming, you know, looking either to apply a new brand to a product, to their e-com or digital product, digital experience. They're coming to redesign things just because they feel like it should be redesigned and they have accumulated some debt of tech. They've accumulated some debt of kind of feedback and insights and they want to redesign so they can be more performant. Yeah. So it's just kind of different things in the middle there.

Simon Sinek's Start With Why is one of my favorite books. I definitely know the drill of your founding story and how you want to fundamentally help people. But I swear, when it comes to being in real business and being a SaaS founder for a

seven years almost, I still struggle with identifying this for our company. What's your framework for interrogation framework, investigation framework, step-by-step framework for uncovering all of these insights that you later turn into creative fuel? It boils down to two things. One is what is the real goal? And I said that before, and I don't know why, but

Well, I have a theory. I think that, A, we overthink things naturally because we're all very smart, smart, analytical people. So we overthink things. And two, I think we don't like being honest about the goal, especially when it's capitalistic or cold. I say sell more shoes. You can say all you want, Nike, about all these things and empowering and all this other stuff. But at the end of the day, you're selling more shoes.

So let's just be honest about that goal. Okay. We've got the goal set down. And the second thing, the second thing is insights. But I think, you know, I think really, and you were saying it's like that it's about the why.

I think that question, you know, a lot of business leaders have read that book. They understand that and they're great leaders by helping their teams think about that. But why doesn't that question get brought into the moments where we are designing the things that our customers and our users interact with? You know, we can take, you know, the king of SaaS, which I would say is like Salesforce, right? So, you know, Salesforce is now this platform

Frankenstein monster thing includes everything from Slack to stuff that you and I aren't even aware of and empower the biggest companies and governments in the world to run their companies. But Salesforce was invented at some point, probably like in the early 90s or something, late 80s.

To solve a specific problem, there was an insight that drove the invention of that thing. I think getting into that insight, to that invention, like that moment of ingenuity of anything as far upstream as we possibly can and pulling that forward as the insight that drives design and ideation, I think is something that

I don't see talked about very much in the design world. And I think that is talking about framework. I think that's where some of the framework starts to emerge of how do we pull these things forward. And then, of course, like with that, using the word insight. So then, of course, you can supplement that by gaining new insights, additional research into users and the current state of things and things.

you know, social, economic, cultural, technological, you know, there are a lot of frameworks that exist that are all, you know, they exist for good reasons on how to understand a market and people and things like that. But I think those should be looked at as kind of supplementary in the context of understanding the core or original why when you're doing design work, especially design work of great consequence to a business.

Let's talk a bit about differentiation and how not to be the same and things like that. But just embarking on a journey not to be the same, it's kind of a hard journey. It's like being, you know, stop thinking about the white elephant and things like that. Is there an arsenal of tools you're using for differentiation? Like tools?

in what ways you can be different from others, you know, functional, visual, aesthetic experience, whatever, just making this completely up, but maybe you have some ideas or mental frameworks that our listeners could borrow. Yeah. So I think, you know, you said it like embarking on a mission or a journey to be different is hard. And I think it's hard because you,

That just in itself is, is wrong. You're not going to find the answer there. So that's why it's can bang your head against the wall. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's, yeah, it's, uh, you know, it's like, Hey Jane, be original.

No, you're not being original enough. Be original. You'd be like, stop it. I'm Jane. I'm a person. I'm a human. Like, that's all I got to say. I am original. Okay. So what makes you different? Like, why, why are you different? How are you different? Think about it. And that can be hard to think about, you know, as I mean, really hard as a, as a human, because of a lot of reasons, but,

But the same thing as a business can be really hard to think about because the answers start creeping in. It's like, oh, we have this market share or we have this feature. They don't have this feature or, oh, we have the best of this. We have the best of that. And those aren't those are, you know, at best kind of representations of what makes you different. Those are kind of realizations at best of what makes you different. I promise I'll go deeper than this, but it goes back to what we were just talking about, which is the why.

You invented your company. You made your product. You made whatever decision you made for a reason. That reason is your difference. And then the extent at which you're going to implement and execute that based on that core reason, the extent you're willing to take that is what makes you different. There's a Dolly Parton quote that I think for me,

Just drives everything about strategy for me, which is figure out who you are and do it on purpose. And I keep coming back to that. And so it's figure out who you are and then do that on purpose. Do it to the extent that if you really believe in it, you believe in your invention. I mean, unfortunately, if you don't believe in your invention, I don't know if I can help you. But if you believe in your invention, then just do it.

go nuts, take it as far as you possibly can. And that's your difference. One, because you invented something that was necessary. There was a problem to solve. And so it wasn't being solved already, therefore is inherently different. And then the extent at which you're willing to take it, you control that. That's your agency.

Apple is a tired example, but they are a tired example for a reason. Apple didn't invent anything novel at its core. They took things that already existed. They had taste, which was a decision about what should exist. They said these things shouldn't exist, these things should exist. But they took that from a set of things that already existed, and then they took it to a level that no one else was willing to take it.

And then they took it further than that. When everyone's looking around saying it's unnecessary to make it that great, they said, that's exactly why we're going to make it that great and exactly why we're going to make it even 10 times better than that. And that was what made them different. On the pursuit of making something great, they had to invent things to get there.

And so there was invention and ingenuity and innovation, but it was also in a pursuit, all in a pursuit of making a core idea as great as possible in a way no one else is willing to. And I think that can be a framework. I think that not just can be A, I think at the end of the day, that is the framework for how to think about differentiation. It's not a taking your competitors and saying, oh, they're all blue, we'll be red.

That helps, but it only gets you so far. That doesn't help consumers except to be able to see you on a shelf. But if it's read because of a reason that we believe in that drove our core invention to begin with, then that's what's going to help make that, quote, difference just the result of being great. I think if anything, I would say make your differentiation better

the fact that you are great when everyone else is good, if that makes sense. When you're onboarding new team members to Raw Materials, how do you train them? What do they need to do different compared to the previous agency they came from? So I think there are a few things. The most important thing is that there is an understanding of this philosophy that I've been talking about.

and a desire to get there and

an ability from a craft perspective to get there. And so I think it does all stem, it does all kind of hinge around this philosophy of kind of why do you do the work you do? And I do the work, you know, if the answer to that, it's not just a simple one interview question kind of thing. It's not even an interview. It's more of the conversation and, you know, taking a look at work together, your work, the work out in the world and saying like, what is greatness?

why is this great? And do you understand that? Do you want that? Do you want to build that? And why do you do what you do? I do what I do because I want to create great things and I want to push that and understanding of that. You know, I think there's this, there's this idea that

That once you get to a certain level, like once you master a craft, every time you get a little bit better, the craft as a whole gets a bit better because you're advancing the whole state of the, you know, the community's ability to create things. And I think, you know, having that kind of conversation with people is how we both not just kind of vet things,

or qualify people, but how we onboard and how we start to build a culture around the one thing that matters for us, because we have one mission, which is to see more great things exist in the world. That is our culture, full stop.

And understanding and kind of a feeling, both from an evaluation perspective and from an onboarding perspective about the idea and how to make that idea happen. And the rest of from that moment to the entirety of our relationship is going to be one long conversation about that one idea. And then everything just gets built around that.

As we're wrapping up today's episode, what are the couple action steps that you could recommend to our listeners, to the creative teams that run real products in real life? What can they do like tomorrow to be a bit more different? Or do they have to just rework their positioning and do a 180 turn, you know, and do a complete overhaul? Is it the only way?

I mean, it certainly helps to know. I think that, I mean, you, you said it right. When you, when you call, you pulled out the Simon Sinek thing, you know, I think it's that same thing. Why? It's two questions. Why am I doing it this way? And how could I make it better?

And, and that's, unfortunately, this is no one designer's fault. It's the, it's the environment that has been created over the last decade or so, especially in the design of software, it permeates everything else. And you take a look at, open up Netflix and look at just the wall of software.

homogeneity, drive down the road and see every car is designed to perform in a wind tunnel and perform in an ad. And therefore they all are marching toward the same end goal. They all look the same. So it's not just digital products, but it is really prevalent in the design of digital products where there is sameness.

And we're all pulled to create the best performing thing exactly like everything else. We all end up in the same race to the middle. So if you take kind of take a step back, it's not about a 180. It's about taking a step back and saying, why am I doing it this way? And OK. And really, the most important question is, how can I make this better?

how can I make this thing so much better that it's great and so much better that it is ends up being not just the best one on the list, but off the list. And that is the button that, that, you know, I think it is, it exists at the button level. So I'm not just talking about grand. You're talking about Volta and we changed the business model and things. Not really. We changed the business model by making the absolute best buttons that we could ever possibly make. And,

And that ended up, you know, you don't build a building. You do a million little things and a building happens. It's the million little things where this mindset and this drive and this passion to make the absolute best little button possible a million times. And then greatness happens. And I think that's a,

It applies to every minute of every day as a designer. When you're in Figma or wherever you do your work, you're making a million decisions, maybe not a million, 100,000 decisions a day. Every one of those decisions can be influenced to either do the thing that's kind of safe and will work and perform and it adheres to the guidelines in the kit, or you can push it a bit. And I think that's the drive is to push it a bit.

That's super inspiring. Thank you so much. Where can our listeners find you online and learn more about raw materials and yourself personally? Well, therawmaterials.com is where you can find the fun bits about the agency. And if anyone wants to, they can look me up on LinkedIn. John Rocher, that's my...

unfortunately as the CEO of an agency where I do most of my business on the relationship side of things. Thank you so much for being with us today and we hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. Thank you, Jane.