Episode 3: Design in Motion with Nattu Adnan, Co-founder & CTO at LottieFiles
50:41 Share

Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core.

Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year. Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design.

Very good evening. I am Dalen. I am the founder of Curious Core. So we're very lucky today to have Natu, who is a founder, co-founder and CTO of Lottie Files. They are based in

in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. So Natu used to be a product designer himself, right? He previously worked as a lead product designer at Service Hero and senior product designer at Mindvalley. He is very much focused on building the future of animation and interactive design. His company is funded by Adobe, 500 startups, and more recently, Microsoft Venture Capital M12.

And he has over 20 years of experience building web applications and using and practicing human-centered design. And I think we're here to hear his story. There's a lot to share tonight and there's a lot of ground cover. So feel free to ask any questions along the way. Please give your virtual round of applause for Natsu. All right, Natsu, welcome to...

Thank you, Galen. Thanks for having me here. You're welcome. So it's really awesome to have a global product backed by some very well-known venture capitalists based in Malaysia. I'm just really curious, why did you choose Malaysia as your base to grow your company?

Interesting question. Thanks, Devan. I think this started as more of a weekend project. I didn't choose to be in Malaysia to start Lottie Falls, but it actually came out while I was working in Service Hero, another home services mobile application, more like a marketplace. I know Aswan is in the audience and then he used to work with me as well back then.

And as a home service marketplace, it's not really sexy. Like you need, even if you're going to put in or design a mobile app, it's going to be like plumbing and so forth. So you have to make it more attractive to the end user. And while figuring out ways to bring more motion and things there, we stumbled upon Lottie. So again, that's,

So, the Lottie Files was started as a weekend thing based out of Malaysia trying to find a solution for the problem that we had and over time we started growing that and soon we knew it like it started growing big and we are based out of here. Right.

So it was not a strategic move, but rather it was just because by chance you were here. And did this start during COVID? Did you have this idea or it was before COVID? Yeah, so the library and a lot of that came years and years ago. Different libraries, one for the webcam by another name, a couple of five or six years ago. But people discovered the potential and the gap that fleshed out, let's say,

companies like Airbnb and others were trying on, let's say doing a mobile player for this sort of format and they called it Lottie. And then there was us as Lottie Files trying to build a platform tooling and testing to enable the designers. So this

This was, again, a project that more like a weekend project, just creating back in 2017 until 2019. Like I left Service Hero and then I was like, hey, can I jump into Lottie Fuss? I was like, oh, this is too early. I still need to like keep on baking this and never thought that Lottie Fuss would pick up to be a platform one day that I'll end up

working for. So I joined Mindvalley and around the time, you know those days when you cannot put new things that you learn to your everyday work, so you go back home and then put that to a side project. So everything that I learned that I could not put on my day work, I started adding that to Lottie Files and then soon I knew it, there was like millions of downloads. I was like, okay, it's time to quit my job and go full-time on this. Wow, what a story. And thank you for sharing that. I mean,

Service Hero, MyValley, they're both companies that are based in Malaysia. Great companies. MyValley is a self-development firm. So they actually sell globally. So it's really interesting that this started as a side hustle. I wonder how many of you over here tonight can relate to that. And for the benefit of all the designers that introduced themselves in our Zoom, and for the benefit of people who don't know what Lottie Files is, can you just...

share with us like why should people use Lottie Files right now like as a designer in order to understand what Lottie Files as a platform does you gotta know about Lottie as a format so this is sort of like let's say back in the days or without Lottie

a designer will have to create an animation or a small short motion design. And they usually save this as a video file and pass to the engineer. And usually the engineers goes like, okay, let me just look at that design and code it. And that was sort of the world where

how people used to put in like motion design or micro animations within the mobile apps or the products that they actually do. So Lottie simply put is like, I would say,

Flash, but in an easier way that you can ship it to your Android iOS as well. But these days, people don't really use Flash, so the alternatives are videos and MP4s and image sequences and all of that. It's like all of them is none of them are interactive and super heavy compared to file size as well compared to Lottie or anything. And because Lottie is just a vector format right there,

Put it like SVG, but you can add motion to that. And so what Lottie first did was

all the problems that you might encounter while using this format. How can we bring in tools, resources, and ways that you can even share the files and play around with it to this format? So essentially when it started, there was only one way that you could create a Lottie, that is using After Effects. And then so this enabled a lot of people that who actually know motion design and who've been like masters of After Effects for 20, 30 years,

Suddenly, they can export to a format where their products can use straight away. To put it lightly, it's just a new type of animation format that helps designers and developers to use this asset across Android apps, iOS apps, the websites, and so forth. Because this is code, sort of a code, you can manipulate it. Imagine you ship something and you just want to change the color of it.

Like usually you go back to the design, change the color of something, export it, render it to a video and then send it over to your engineer. And they will usually change whatever that they need to change in order to ship it in a way that this is because it is core. It can be the single source of truth at all times and change those and ship it straight away.

I know it's sort of a new startup. We're trying to keep the description short as possible. It's just one word. But usually it takes a long time, I hear, that you can actually explain your product in one line. Yeah, that's okay. I think that's a really fair proposition, as I'm also showing some of you here who are listening in on the page itself, which is lottiefiles.com.

they talked about the benefit of this industry standard and how it's 600% smaller than GIF, which is the natural file format that you think about using animation. And it's 10 times faster to ship it. So it is really clear when you say Lottie Files is focused on building the future of animation and interactive design because I see on your site that you have marketplace, you have the ability to have animations and hire animators.

So I want to dive a little deeper into this acquisition, recent acquisition that you made for IconScout. Some of us over here who have been using Figma have heard of IconScout. We use the icons, we put it in, there's a subscription for it. So just trying to understand, how is IconScout going to help you achieve this mission or this goal?

Interesting. I think that is something that we've been thinking about for a long time. When we started, when you go to Lottie Falls, you see a lot of animations submitted by the community, which are free animations released under Creative Commons licenses. And that helps anybody to download them and start using their product right away. But we saw that as a community, these animations take a lot of time for them to build it.

So, since they're given a lot of free resources and things, why not enable them to earn some money out of it? So that was our initial thought, that we want to appreciate the hard work that they do. So during, I would say, COVID lockdowns and even before that, we're creating the marketplace where these creators can sell their animations. And how they differ from the free ones in the marketplace is amazing.

is usually in the marketplace you have more of a pack, while the free ones are individual ones that you can just use this right away. And then we also added the hire me feature. So I'm going on the IconScout site, but before that one, the free animations that we have and the community that we have, and then also adding more features like you can bring in your Lottie like SVG and then use our presets to automate them.

But at the heart, Lorifas is also a tooling and a product company. So now there's this community and the marketplace and then the tooling. So when you look at this, the entire thing becomes a whole ecosystem where you have the community, product tooling, open source services and so forth as well. And we thought like,

What if we could make this thing bigger? Let's say IconScout has over 2 million icons and illustrations. How can we combine that with the effect of Lottie and how can we enable more of the creators to bring in assets back and forth and animate them? Also, why not give a bigger audience for Lottie to exist?

That means all the marketplace that we have today and probably will be moving that to IconScout as well so that they have a bigger audience. We've seen around that there's a lot of marketplaces coming out even for Lottie as well. And it makes sense that there's like when you have illustrations that you might want to easily animate them. And then there's icons that slowly coming into micro animation site as well.

So sort of like mixing the creator's area together so that we can serve to a bigger audience, not only people who wants Lottie, but people who wants an MP4 video, somebody who wants an icon illustration, a 3D or anything, may not really relate to Lottie, but it creates a bigger space for these creators who not only create Lottie animations, but they create all other stuff as well. So I think when you place it in that way,

IconScout is more for the creator community than actually the Lottie itself. That makes a lot of sense. I can kind of see on

on a big picture how you're trying to serve even more creators and more designers and suddenly like a healthy ecosystem is one where everyone benefits from their creation and their work not just being enabled using the tools but also being able to be compensated right that's how youtube got big because of their creators as well so kudos to that

And I just wanted to ask you, you know, like you used to be a product designer. Now you're the CTO, the chief technical officer of your company. So how did that happen? What do you do on a daily basis now as compared in the past when you're a designer? Oh, this is crazy because from all the formal sort of jobs that I had, this is the only technical job that I've ever joined.

Because all the previous jobs were mostly in product design side and like UX, UI designer to a product designer and then more to a tech. But at heart, I was still building the stuff. And that's what I was able to sort of bring a problem, design something and implement it.

And maybe that removed the friction between the designer and the engineer thing in my mind, because that's sort of like my mind saying, oh, I can do this cool stuff with the coding. Well, on the other side, the product side goes like, oh, but the users doesn't really care about that.

So I had that battle in between. But also at the same time, when I'm designing something, I need to know whether this can be implemented as well. So most of the part, just being like a product designer or designer, I was still coding and building my own things. There was a fun one on a weekend project that I did something called Haze Malaysia that was fun during the haze times. Yeah, I remember those periods. The haze, yes. Yeah.

Yeah, so those are like things that I can quickly build and move forward. But as being a CDO of a company, and what's interesting about that is it's a very different journey for everyone. For me, I became not only a CDO, but also a co-founder. So that's the bigger job of building up the company, building up the team, not in terms of only the CDO part.

And it's very different in one way, but also just how you become like a head of a product design or a product. Like you have other people that you rely on, that you trust, and then you sort of pass the message. And then you sync with rather you becoming sort of a key person that solves the problem. Rather, you are the ones who I trade on the problem.

and then give that to the team to bring the solution to you. I think that's one way that you can scale any team. So when you look at on the technical side versus design side, it's pretty much the same. It's just the team that you bring in and making sure that there's no blockers around so that they have enough play field to play around with both creative side and both technical side as well. So would it be accurate to say you're currently leading product development in your organization as well, other than also...

kind of taking care of design and taking care of the technical side. And it's really interesting because this would be what silicon pundits call a unicorn, right? Like someone who actually knows how to code, knows how to design, and knows how to get stuff shipped.

So what are your thoughts on that? Like, have you met anyone else like yourself? I mean, there definitely, there are tons of people and I don't really call myself that, but when you think of that way, imagine like you want to be a designer, but if you've done like,

a bit of coding for at least two weeks just to understand the gist of it. Then you be a product manager so that you actually learn the whole platform and then also you can communicate better with your stakeholders as well.

right where I am, I think it can be a blessing and a curse as well. That means sometimes you know how easy you can fix something and then you just push that to the team and say, here's a solution, just implement it. So you become sort of a key solution maker for every team, like the design team, the product team and the tech team. And I think the

The best way is be the last person to talk about things and let the team come up. And if they're not focused on the right problem, try to gauge that, be it like design, tech, or any sort of unicorn that you want to be. I think the whole game changes from you becoming a freelancer to starting with the team, because now it's all about the team and the people that you surround with.

Yeah, I think that's a kind of transition to being a leader, right? So I'm interested in that transition. Tell me a little bit more about your transition to not just taking on the technical responsibility, but being an entrepreneur, being a leader. How is it working out for you right now? I think this is the hardest part because...

Last 20 years, I've been building products and it's so easy. Somebody comes to the problem, you find a solution, you give it. You don't really have to deal with people at all. And then also, you don't have to think it through. You have like, it's very binary. This solution or that solution, just push it.

And that's also my happy place as well. That means like building something and shipping it. And all of a sudden, like when we think about six months ago, we had nine people who were doing amazing jobs. Now there's about like 27, 28 people. And with Icon Scout, the number goes to 50.

So you no longer have that you're happy place that you go to a corner and design something or do the coding which excites you. And all of a sudden, your time is managed by everyone else as well. And your computer no longer like you don't really need a computer anymore. You just need an iPad to be on a call every day and sort of like talk constantly.

And rather than have the pencil and draw something. So I think this is the biggest learning I would say that I had in years and years is to read.

see how other companies have done it, other founders who have done this. There's tons of materials everywhere. And this is the biggest growth from being a maker to sort of be on the leadership or be on the one to manage people as well. Because in the company, I'm also doing hiring as well. So all the people, meaning like having initial conversation, it's not just design, like tech, design, marketing, community, and so forth as well. So

I would say this is not an easy question to answer with just a binary answer. The journey is very interesting. I'm still taking that journey on because it's not only you're learning how to manage people, but you have to know sort of every part of

the product as well, where it is going, for example. And it's difficult if you're trying to build an ecosystem. That means you have to think about community. So how does communities work? Is this something you can replicate, take it from one side and put it to the other side? How can you see all the queries that are coming in so that you get the customer sentiment as well? So there's so many. I think the biggest learning I have is delegate, delegate, delegate.

And then find time for you. Don't get burned out.

Take some time to breathe and know that it is okay. Like I'm learning as much as everyone else and let the team know that I'm learning too and feel free to share your feedback and so forth as well. So like be together in this journey. Don't be too hard on yourself and have some fun. Oh, that's awesome advice. I really like how honest you are and open about your weaknesses. But I think as a coach, this is really where I was,

I would say this is where you're in your growth zone, right? Where you feel a little bit uncomfortable, but you're like, I don't know everything, but I'm trying my best to figure it out, but I'll figure it out. Like we're doing okay now. We're all doing okay. And then you're learning and you're hiring good people and you're delegating, you're trying your best. That's awesome. Really glad to hear.

So I think one of the things when we last spoke about was this idea of hiring talent, right? Especially talent in Southeast Asia and specifically in Malaysia. It's pretty challenging to hire good talent. Can you explain to me, like, what are some of the challenges you're facing trying to hire talent in Malaysia or even within the region right now?

Yeah, that's a very interesting question. And then I remember us having a conversation about it as well. I just, to begin with, sometimes like as a startup, it's really hard because you don't have your specific task for anybody to come in. It's more like, hey, can you come and join and figure things out for us? It's more like the job description. I remember like us getting a motion designer thinking that we'll end up only

be in the marketplace. And she's actually, I know Regina is here from Brazil. And so we went to Dribbble and found really amazing motion designers. And one of them, her name is Gabby, and she's from Brazil as well.

So we brought her in just to do premium animation so that we can sell and then maybe be a million dollar company. But it didn't turn out to be that way yet. So one part was that because she's a motion designer, she understands Lottie. We're like, if she's interested, why not?

teach her about product design and make her lead product designer. So she's now leading the product design where she comes from motion. She be around the platform. She knows the value that we are giving back to the motion designers as well. So that's one way to go about it.

The other one is go look for, rather than posting all of your design jobs on LinkedIn, go look for Dribbble, Dribbble or Behance. I remember like a year ago last year, I approached somebody on Behance, I think. So on Behance, approach on LinkedIn, found the contact. She replied a year later, two weeks ago. We offered her a job. She started in March.

So mostly it's via context when you see somebody doing amazing work. And most of them, we did not even have a job description and say, oh, this is the job description. Rather, it's more like,

hey can we work together what can you bring and here's our gap this is what we need can we work together and if you're not sure do you want to do sort of a contract so that see whether this actually fits between us as well i think mostly like amazing hires that we had was not with a job description but actually with people approaching to us saying that hey we are really excited about what you guys are doing can i be a part of the journey right yeah so you

good advice i'll say and uh this is really interesting that you you get people to grow right even though they're not specifically in the role themselves or have done that role before but you trust that they are smart and they are very capable in whatever they're doing and then you try and adapt and get them to

adapt to the role and I think I can really relate to that as a startup founder as well. So I was wondering, we were talking about skills, we were talking about talent and we're talking about design education. As someone who has worked in Malaysia and maybe have worked with Malaysians as well, curious to know, was there a problem

Or was there some difficulty finding good talent when you were working in some of these startups that you used to work for in Malaysia? It was hard because one part was that the designers in, let's say, Southeast Asia, specifically Malaysia, they're not very vocal on social media or

Now maybe on Instagram as much, just showing their work and all. But back then, if you look back two or three years ago, it was really hard to find. If you go to Dribbble, you will only see a handful of people sort of like pushing the works that they do. There wasn't much portfolios. But today, whenever I find a designer, they will have a sort of a landing page or a personal homepage website where they show their portfolio and all of that.

I remember it was challenging because mobile app was a hot thing, but there was a lot of designers, but not specific to product designers. And I remember Aswan, again, is in here as well. He came from graphics design. So we had to bring in the product design element and sort of teach that part where

is that as a graphics designer, you want to make things very unique. Then you bring in your output and it just stays on a wall or a design. It doesn't become that interactive part where you learn that and see how somebody gets to that or interact with it. That mindset of making something unique and bringing to product design where product design isn't from where we were at. It wasn't about creating unique

dialogue boxes or buttons or anything. It's about having things that other people understand. That empathy part was tough to install in anyone because at the end of the day, you're building for the user base. In our case, it was very interesting back then because in Service Hero, all the service providers, they were going to use a mobile or smartphone for the first time. They never had the idea of any app.

So that was very, very interesting where we did not know how even to start. So we were using a lot of tools back then, like InVision had integration with LookBack.io so that we could bring in people in, sales providers, and then see how they actually interact with these products that we were building. That gave us a lot of insight to take it back. So I think that was more about as a product design, that was more about UX design.

research and journey and so forth in order to build a really valuable product. Whereas in today, a lot of these parts are installed. There's a lot of like best practices of let's say onboarding, a login screen to how the grids work, how the rows work, how the child and wheels and all of that works as well. So it was tough and it mattered how much people were exposed to those patterns, like Apple having the human design guidelines as well.

and and so forth so not everybody was reading that so they weren't really familiar they were like i could design a mobile lab and here's my concept and nobody would actually use it in a product real world product so i don't know that answers your question directly but that is sort of an experience that yeah i i think what i hear from what you said earlier is essentially that

In the past, it was much harder to hire a UX designer or product designer because not everyone was exposed to the materials or the books or the amount of content that we have today. But now that there's so much available content, there's so much available material, like everyone

And what I hear you say, it's much easier to onboard like a designer, even though they might not be so familiar with the practice of UX. If they are very, very talented and good at what they do, you could still teach them product design, provided that they are open and willing to learn. Am I saying that correctly? Yeah, I think so. And I think here's one thing that I learned about how people describe product design.

I think that's an interesting topic as well because I come from UX, I would say UI, UX sort of design. And why I became one was initially when I started with the coding, the design that I got was very, very shitty, I would say. So I became a...

sort of a designer and then from the design, the UX was really, really messed up. So I was like, I know I need to do a UX part. So I think the term that product design is sort of like in this startup world where you do everything, UX, UI, UX research, and sort of everything. So they just label you as like product designer.

rather than in a larger, more structured organization. Like you have the UX, UI, UX researchers, and so forth as well. So I think if somebody wants to know what it is, usually it's like mix of all of these things that you cannot describe. You just call them product designers. Yeah, absolutely.

So just a question, when you were the lead product designer, how do you train people up to be more, as you say, empathic about their users or customers or be better at what they do in user experience? Like what's your strategy?

I think obviously I've grown a lot over the years in terms of working with people and seeing that potential and giving that play field or space. One thing that I do now is mostly rather than talking about the UI of things, it's more about talking about what the feeling the design actually gives. What I mean by that is

Haven't let's say a call and think about what are the things that you can eliminate from this design and still make it sense because at the end of the day, if you're really like perfect with your design, somebody else could look into your application and say, I could do it.

I could easily build this app or UI design, but it takes a long time or a lot of work for a product designer to actually remove the elements and still make it sense.

And in a way, what is the problem that we are trying to solve? How can we bring in design to solve that problem for them? Right. So I think a lot of that is along with the conversations, along with design and tools that we can share. There's a really amazing course that we found out like a few days ago about design systems. And I know like these are really, really tough things as well. But.

if you can find any of these resources, if you can share with the rest of the team as well, because as a product designer or being in the design team, it's just one piece of the entire Lego, right? Let's say like you have to work well with the rest of the people. They need to understand there's the communication and need to work together in order to get something shipped because you're at least on the design and solution design side of things. You still need to get this one.

implemented and there's a long journey to ship this to the users that actually matters, right? So I think mostly it's about skills or Photoshop skills or Sketch or Figma. Those things only saves you time.

It doesn't really make you learn the concepts or the learnings. And I think a lot of that is shipping them and then learn from it and keep on iterating, keep on changing because there's one really funny commercial about, a documentary about drop downs, right? Drop downs, send drop downs to hell or something. That means like,

we just add dropdown to a female and a male, like a two option thing. And there's again, a dropdown as well. So there's like tons of things everywhere. Just look at them and then say, does that make sense to you? If not ship it, somebody else will definitely complain about it. And then now you'll learn from me. The good thing about product design, digital product design is that you can change everything. You can change the entire thing. Yeah.

Take that as your advantage. Ship things, learn from it, and keep on training. And allow yourself to make those mistakes, get those learnings, and say, hey, there's thousands of ways to do it. This is one way to do that. Let's just ship it. If they don't complain, maybe you must have been overthinking about things. I agree.

fully agree with the approach of learning by doing. I think that's really critical. It's what we practice in our school as well, encouraging all our students to learn by doing. That's where the fun is at, right? Exactly. And also, all the revelations come when you realize about the mistakes that you make and you actually learn from it. Because design is something you have to practice. How

How do I put it? It's kind of like a muscle memory skill as well. Once you understand what good design is, it's ingrained in you. You cannot take it out of someone anymore. So it does take...

a lot of practice before someone gets there and thanks for sharing on that that approach did you had any thoughts about design education or how can we help our communities because now you you're running your own community you are trying to encourage designers to learn about motion or encourage them to at least pick up and use motion in their design so what are your thoughts about like

learning and getting more designers to upgrade their skills and upskill themselves? Interesting question and that's something that we are still

I think I'm still trying to figure that out as well because on one side, you have thousands of people creating and giving away their files, even the source files. The best way, I think, is for you to just dive in and then see how somebody has created something. And when you have unlimited, let's say, files to play around with, whatever that you want to do, you can do that. And I think we shouldn't start with

basics or from scratch. Take something somebody else has already done, see how you can change it to the way that you want to do that. Be it like taking an illustration, modifying it and adding motion to that. It can be just a single, like a simple, subtle animation as well. And share with other people to see how they feel. All of a sudden you're like, hey,

I got a new skill. I know the gist of this. I can now animate. It's like a lot of us, even when we code, we're like, okay, let me start with Python and go with the full-on basics.

That is important, but also it takes sometimes the fun away because now you're doing a lot of things and a lot of weeks in order to get to the fun stuff where you just want as a designer visually doing helps you. So take these files, play around, see how you can like do the things that you want to do. And there's always YouTube. There's always these channels. Ask these questions. We even have a Discord channel where a lot of designers come in and then ask questions.

sort of like questions that, hey, I'm trying to do a linear path. I can't really get this motion to the really way to do it. There may be

you might have to start somewhere by having that discussion or conversation, you learn something new and you might just change things as well. So I think we all are, there's no like specific way of doing anything. We all have our own ways of learning things either by doing, either by Skillshare or learning or video or even like getting inspiration from what others have done, right? So

That is something that we are trying to figure out, even myself. That's okay. We're all figuring out over here. We don't have to let everyone know though. In this case, I wanted to ask you very quickly, I'm sure as one of the destinations for motion designers to gather and build stuff and to share stuff, I'm just wondering what kind of trends are you seeing in UX design?

where motion is applied. Do you see more people using motion in their design? Because I see a lot of great companies on your site like Grab and some of the others like BBC and all that. So I was just wondering what kind of trends are you seeing in the field of UX with

with regards to like motion design. Yeah, I think this is where the future is heading, where all of us, we are sort of tired of looking at the stock photography on every website that we go, or maybe we see that static illustration, you know, humans by Pablo or like Andro on a page and we're like, oh, this isn't moving. Our muscle memory is like,

now trying to ignore all the stock photos and all of the aesthetic stuff. The only thing I think can capture our attention is now with motion. And a very basic example about, let's say, companies utilizing and using motion is when you order something via Grab. If you're looking at a map,

of somebody that is sort of like delivering the food and you're looking at the car or the bike, which you have no control over. You're just stressed about the next turn, the next road that they actually turn in. You don't really need to worry about, but because like the way that the things are designed, you're just giving unnecessary stress and worry to someone.

Rather, how can we make things better for them to show them like some sooth in animation or something so that you take their worry away for long, right? So I think more and more apps, what they're trying to do is bring in motion so that you can ease people's mind and more humanize the entire experience. Because today I think it's very robotic where things are very still. There's an alert, there's a warning, there's a...

like there's no delight even if you finish something right so uh and i think uh without lori or anything similar it was really hard for these motion designers who've been doing

let's say, motion design for 20, 30 years to put their motion into these products. And now with Lottie, it enabled, it empowered them. We know, like, we had, like, a conversation with one of the designers from Disney, and then he was like, you guys extended my career by 10 years. Because by letting him export to formats that, from softwares that he's very, very familiar with,

And finally, these animations and these end result becomes reactive as well. So people will interact as well. And now there's like dark mode and light mode coming up. And these animations needs to adapt to those things as well. That's where I think the future is sort of going, where I think there's going to be at least a subtle motion in different things because it engages our mind. It gives us delight. And there's like more humanizing that's in products as well.

I fully agree with what you're saying in terms of delighting people or taking that anxiety and burden away and even creating the illusion of something is actually coming to you in a very quick manner, right? So it receives your perceived waiting time in some cases. So I think all these are really fantastic use cases of emotion in user experience design.

So Moneka from the chat asks, do you see motion design as another skill for product designers to acquire or do you see like this is a very specialized discipline where you need a specialist to do the job? I think this again depends on how much of

like motion design that you want to do. If it's something, let's say a small load indicator or something that you just want for your onboarding screen and so forth, you already have the design from Figma and so forth. Adding those motion to those, I think is a very handy skill for a product designer. I myself started with After Effects when I saw Lottie. So that was me first time jumping in and trying to learn After Effects. And I know After Effects like a huge project.

beast. But in order for you to create a small motion, it's easier. There isn't like much of the things that you need to pick. I think Lottie only touches about 10% of After Effects and people use After Effects to even create movies and so forth as well, being there for ages. There's a course called Lottiefiles.com slash course. If you go there, you can find a lot of free courses, one from Lead Motion Design from Airbnb as well. There's one called UX in Motion as well.

And these are like easy to do once you learn it, this can go a long way because when you mention to any of the new companies that you want to join saying that, "Hey, I know Lottie," you immediately get the respect of the engineering team straight away because Lottie saves a lot of time for them. And we've seen even on LinkedIn, a lot of people are using the skill Lottie for us or Lottie as a skill.

because, and if you go to any sort of like Fiverr or anywhere, you can see a lot of companies looking or people who are looking for people who can animate. And these are very, very simple things. Most of the time it's like,

can you change the color and then do a minor edit and can you send it to me even i get because i've enabled hire me just to test the feature and then i get requests saying that hey can you change the color and i was like can you go to lori editor and do it yourself it's like okay how much do you charge i was like you can go and do it yourself i've made all of my files free as well so and then there's

a lot more products coming in. There's a post-Lottie, there's Create with Haiku, and then I think somebody mentioned that they're from Stockholm. I think there's Keyshape app somewhere within that region as well. There's a lot of tools coming around that you can actually convert to Lottie. There's a SVG to Lottie feature in Lottie files where you can just bring in your icon or your illustration and quickly use a preset and export to a Lottie format.

And if you want to use it on your products and so forth, WordPress or anywhere, most of them have today Lottie plugins and other things to use it straight away. Even if you want to use it somewhere else, even in Lottie files, you can export all the files as MP4 and GIF as well. If you want to share that on your Instagram and so forth, if you're not really into product design straight away, right? So there's a lot of opportunities everywhere by learning the skill and

And I honestly think that this space needs to be more democratized. What, let's say, Sketch and Figma and XD did to sort of visual design or screen design. That needs to happen in motion design as well. Yeah, I get what you mean. So what I hear you say is that maybe you don't need to be an expert in animation or motion design, but...

at least if you pick up this skill, it's going to make you seem more valuable as a product designer or UX designer. And in fact, you don't even need to know more than 10% of what After Effects is doing. So sounds easy enough. Sounds like a challenge, but it also sounds like an achievable challenge. And Lottie is, of course, providing courses for free for anyone who wants to learn. So you can go to Lottiefiles.com/courses

I want to ask you about building a global product. It's quite incredible that you have a remote team that's based in Malaysia and also in different parts of the world.

and you're shipping a global product, something that everyone in the world is using. So I was just wondering, you know, what are some of the things that are necessary to have in a global product? Like what are some of the considerations when you're building for a global community or global audience? Thanks for this question. I think,

This is not something that we actually like, or even I stopped and thought about. I think a lot of things happen very naturally. One part is being very close to customers wherever you are, wherever they're from.

I think that plays an important role because when we started, I went on Twitter and then I messaged sort of like any person that I thought would use this. For example, even messaging to people straight from Uber to Google and Airbnb and other companies as well straight away. And I think

This is what the social media brought us was that it's so accessible that you can reach anyone in any company. Back then, it was like you have to go through the company in order to reach a person and so forth. Now it's like one-on-one. Even if it's an enterprise, you're still dealing with a person at the end. And they just immediately respond to you if it's something that saves their time and work.

then they're just hooked into it. They will give you the feedback. So Lottie Falls got its shape today and it will be getting that based off this feedback that we got early stage, which saves a lot of time, not just for ourselves, but for them as well. And most of the features that I've added on the early days are out of Twitter conversations. It's like somebody is trying to export a Lottie to a Jeff. It's like, oh, maybe...

I'll just DM the person and then say, "Hey, we have that feature coming up in two hours." Then I go back and then start coding the entire thing and then deploy it. I was like, "Oh, here it is. Sorry, we just launched it." A lot of features that came by listening to the users, listening to the community, what they're creating,

back and forth as well. And soon you know it. You have like a very unstructured product that solves a lot of solutions for a lot of people. And now it's time for you to see like how can you bring this seamlessly together? And we're still working on that where we have pieces everywhere that solves problems for different people.

But a lot of people need that. For example, SVG to Lottie, if you can already animate it, there's no point of you going in there. And there's free animations. Developers who don't really have access to Motion Designer, they have a free resource that they can go and use it anywhere that they like. But there's also the tooling for people who want to export and do this the best way that they can do it.

This is the result. But I think truly building a global thing is have the global presence, listen to them. And for the last three or four years, I've almost read all the queries that we got. And I love the fact that I keep hearing about it. That means people really care about it. People care what we are trying to build. I would be scared if nobody gives a damn about sending us email about, hey, this thing is broken. So if somebody is really mad at your product,

and giving you a really long feedback, they had the time to write it so that they will send this feedback to you, even if it's a shitty one. I really appreciate it because that person took their time. So I think that was the biggest part that shaped the product as it is. And for the longest time, we never realized this was a global thing because a lot of that comes from tools that we use like Figma to Sketch to XD. We don't really put that in a country.

It's just on the worldwide web, right? So that is the country. And all of us living in this web thing and all of our files are in the cloud. So I think that's where I feel that. And I saw this growing and I see the part that it is growing more and more where we may not be popular here, but we'll be popular somewhere else as well.

Yeah, thanks for sharing on that. I think someone was asking how do you prioritize and develop your roadmap? So it sounds like you listen to your customers. In fact, you go and ask them what's going on and what's happening. And yeah, like, do you have an approach in terms of prioritizing for your product?

I think one part is that we are the users of our products as well. So when we see this pain point, we don't go and solve it immediately, but we see a lot of queries coming in. Like I mentioned, six months ago, we were just nine people. And there was way too many features repeatedly being asked, which definitely makes sense, but we don't have the main power to deliver it. So I don't think we have that problem much, but now we have to think not just...

but as an ecosystem or our main bet is to make Lottie a success. Like this becoming an animation format that's being adopted everywhere. So now the conflict comes where us being a commercial entity or a company, where does our money come from? How do we make revenue out of this? Where's the IP and so forth as well? So there's always like this choice and balances that you need to make in order to push this

out to the market, let people use this format, whether they're using our tooling or something else. I think our biggest priority is championing Lottie, show the use case of it with all the limitations that it may have today. It can solve a lot of time for a lot of people. Let's spread the word around.

And if this is a feature, is this something that is valuable to the existing people that can bring in more people again as well so that it helps them? Let's do that. A basic thing is like, let's say, privately sharing a lot of animations so that the rest of the teams can come on board, see this result so that it helps them ship animations faster between teams as well.

So I think to answer your question shortly, we bet on Lottie full on, try to push it as much as we can before we actually think about, oh, okay, how can we monetize this? Yeah, it's always...

serving the customer first. So that's what a user experience designer would do. We need more CEOs like you, right? To put their customers first. But there's again the time where you feel like, oh, you put so much free stuff on the table. How are you going to monetize it? I'm sure your business partner will help you figure that out. So we're nearing the end. I just wanted to share something. As I was listening to you, I think

If you need to describe Lottie to someone, in my head, this is like my marketer kind of like senses triggering, right? Lottie files helps you design in motion faster,

and more seamlessly than any tool or marketplace out there. Wow, this is amazing because one of the theories that, and thanks for sharing that, I think probably I might just copy that somewhere. Yeah, go for it. Use it. But I think the best way that I've learned so far is to describe what you do or your company, go and ask 10 people.

of your best customers around, how would they explain Lottie or your company to somebody else? I think that's where, because as founders, we go with the future vision and see the bigger picture, not as what it is today.

So the way that we would describe today versus the way that we would describe a week from now would be very, very different. So the best advice that I got was ask at least 10 people how would they describe it. That's the message that the audience or your customers are getting. And use that because they can relate to the rest of the people.

And with that, I think that is awesome advice. Thank you all. Thank you, Natu, for sharing your advice and your experiences. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you.

Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.