Bob Baxley

Episode 39
Brave UX

Design is Much More than a Job

In this episode of Brave UX, Bob Baxley reflects on his time as a design leader at Apple, why no one can name a famous product designer, and the importance of having conviction in your ideas.

Highlights include:

What was it like presenting design work to Steve Jobs?
Is a job in design more than a means to an end?
Why was Dr. Seuss trying to kill Dick & Jane?
What role does humility play in supporting ideas?
How can you present design effectively to senior executives?

September 7, 202101:03:31

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Who is Bob Baxley?

Bob is a design executive who lives and works in Silicon Valley. He is currently the SVP of Design & Experience at ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence and data analytics platform.

Prior to ThoughtSpot, Bob was Head of Product Design at Pinterest where he built, led, and managed a multifaceted design team, responsible for both the consumer and business facing aspects of the product.

Bob also spent over eight years at Apple, where he served in senior leadership roles for Apple’s retail and e-commerce teams. As a Director of Design, Bob hired and led the creative team responsible for a broad variety of applications including the Apple Online Store.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX. Though it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Bob Baxley. Bob is a design executive who lives and works in Silicon Valley. He currently serves as the senior vice president of design and experience at ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence and data analytics platform. Prior to ThoughtSpot, Bob was head of product design at Pinterest where he built, led, and managed a multifaceted design team responsible for both the consumer and business facing aspects of the product.
Starting in 2006, Bob spent over eight years at Apple where he served in senior leadership roles in Apple's retail and e-commerce teams. As a director of design, Bob hired and led the creative team responsible for a broad variety of applications, including the Apple Online store, the Apple store app, and the transactional areas of I Photo and Garage Band. As director of design for Yahoo Search, Bob built and led the design team that created Yahoo Answers and designed other search centric properties, the author of Making the Web Work, Bob is also a sought after speaker, sharing his experiences and observations about a range of topics related to design, technology, innovation, and the culture of Silicon Valley. He holds a BA in history and a bachelor of science and radio, television and film from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a master of liberal arts from Stanford University. Bob, welcome to the show.
Bob Baxley:
Brendan. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is great to have you here, Bob. I have to say you give some amazing talks and I have thoroughly enjoyed researching for today's conversation. Thank
Bob Baxley:
You.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I want to go into many of those things that came to mind when I was looking at those talks today. But I also wanna let you know that I was speaking with Peter Mork a couple of weeks ago and he's just adopted three baby goats. How do you feel about goats, Bob?
Bob Baxley:
Well, as you know Brendan, I was mauled by a baby goat when I was young. I was in a petting zoo and don't let anybody kid you, it's not a petting zoo, it's a baby goat attacking zoo [laugh]. And I remember being knocked to the, knocked down on my back with some little baby goat, those crazy eyes glaring down at me as they were trying to grab my food. I'm generally not a speciesist. I try to love all animals, but goats have a special spec. Should we just say a special place in my heart?
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, we won't dwell too long on goats so that now that we've gotten that outta the way, I feel like we've set the tone for the interview.
Bob Baxley:
There we go.
Brendan Jarvis:
So Bob, as I mentioned, I've watched a few of your talks in some of your interviews recently and I got a very real sense that you love computers and computing. Why do you love computers and when did this love affair begin?
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, it's kind of hard. I try, I'm not sure I can explain it at a really fundamental level. It's like why does somebody love baseball? Why does somebody love chess? Why does somebody love Legos? I remember the first time I saw a computer in various moments that I've had with other technical professionals. It's always fun and I'd encourage everybody listening now to do this just as they say, pause the video and just think for a moment for yourself. When was the first time you saw a computer? Because if you can remember the first time you saw a computer, I'm almost certain it was this magical experience and I don't know how to explain that. I just know that when I've talked to people about it, all of them describe it with the same passion and memory that I have and it just comes back in this amazing rush of memory.
And they talk about the computer that at home and how they first got into Photoshop. I'm a little bit older than most of the people in the profession and first time I saw a computer was probably around 1976. I was at a friend's house. I was maybe 11 or something, 1112. He had a home-built heath kit computer, which was a kit computer that he'd put together and had this tiny little black and white screen. And I remember, I mean I can conjured up in my head this second better than I can remember my own childhood bedroom. And I can remember that moment when Glen Wilkinson hit a key on the keyboard and something changed on the screen and it was just amazing. Just such a phenomenal moment. And perhaps it's because I didn't have home video. I never felt in control of something that happened on the screen before.
So to see that you could do that was just this amazing feeling. And then I learned a program when I was in junior high. I got into basic and I think my rather a D H D brain just sort of took really well to the systems app, how systems work in computing and the concepts. And I just took off learning basic and just completely fell in love with programming and computing. And I don't know, I think for a while I kind of wrestled with it and I sort of thought it's kind of not cool to be a nerd or somehow I wasn't supposed to say that computing was my medium. But in recent years I've sort of been more comfortable acknowledging that. And now I kind of think about computing as my medium in the same way that filmmaker might think about movies as their medium or a musician might think about the saxophone or the piano or sports figures. Think about sports, they love the thing. And so I can't fully explain it, but as you can hopefully tell [laugh] that the reality is that I just personally really, really love computing. I just think it's freaking magic.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is freaking magic. And I too remember that day that actually it was my grandparents when I was living next to them with my mom at the time. And I must have been about 10. And I remember the computer being unboxed and turning it on. And this is back in the days, this is 95. So 95 windows 95 was on the machine. And just the magic and the magic of the modem, that sound that it used to make, this was a 28.8 K modem or something,
Bob Baxley:
[laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
Menzel. But that sense of marvel and wonder of what awaited you once you'd connected and what you could learn and where you could go. You've got two adult children now. Bob, I think you mentioned they were 20 in the early twenties. Do you get the sense that that marvel and wonder about computing is shared by people of that age or younger that have grown up with these machines to surround them in an omnipresent way?
Bob Baxley:
Not quite as much. Alan k, a famous Silicon Valley legend he had a great quote. That technology is anything that was born after that was created after you were born. So technology is anything invented after you were born. And so from my kids now, the iPhone came out when they were seven or eight, something like that in elementary school. And of course we had those at the house early on cuz I was working at Apple and we just brought all that stuff home, didn't quite realize the impact it might have on their young minds, but at the time it seemed really cool. So computers were around the house. But I remember it was a pretty funny moment actually when I got my son his first laptop for school and I was so excited cuz he also has kind of a programmer's mind and I gave it to him kind of hoping he was going to kind of get into it and learn how to program and stuff.
And we were recently having a discussion again, now he is almost 23 and at the time he got his first laptop for school, he is like 13 or something. And I was like, yeah, just hoped you were going to turn into this programming thing. And instead he just turned it into a portable video game system. And now he's gotten into programming and he looked at me and he kind of goes, you bought me a computer when I was in high school or elementary school thinking I was going to turn it in a programming device. And I was like, yeah. And he is like, well that was kind of stupid
Brendan Jarvis:
With good intentions though, right? Yeah.
Bob Baxley:
You have a clear memory of when you got a computer. I have a really clear memory. When I first saw a computer, if you listen to interviews with the astronauts, the guys that walked on the moon, they all have really vivid memories of the first time they saw airplanes. And they talk with the same sort of passion. They talk about mechanical objects flying in the sky and clearly people like you and I don't necessarily have that same zeal for airplanes cuz we grew up seeing airplanes all the time. So
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke about recently becoming comfortable with being a geek and I think it's pretty clear now that if you look around us, anybody actually who's fortunate enough to have some technology that geeks tru truly do rule the world. And I believe you had a nickname back in the day and I wonder just how comfortable were you with that nickname when that came out? And I believe the nickname was GUIBOB.
Bob Baxley:
GUIBOB. Yeah. Well for one I think we have to distinguish between geeks and nerds cuz there is a difference. And I think of myself as a nerd and not a geek subtle distinction but an important one to make. So,
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's go there. What is the distinction?
Bob Baxley:
Well, at least in American or at least my American vernacular, I think of a geek as someone who's socially awkward and not terribly comfortable in civil society, shall we say. Whereas I think of a nerd as someone who's who can nerd out on things and really get into the nuts. And you can be a baseball nerd, but at least in my vernacular, I also prefer the word nerd to geek cuz nerd was invented by Dr. Seuss in one of his books. So I just like the origins of the word a little bit more. But
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, we're going to come to Dr. Seuss because well
Bob Baxley:
I know we're going to, yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
We're going to get there. Most definitely before,
Bob Baxley:
So people used to call me GUIBOB, which was kind of cute and clever. A friend of mine gave me that moniker back in the.com boom. And I was kind of okay with it. It seems nobody really uses the phrase GUI anymore. I think everything
Brendan Jarvis:
I know I was going to say seems
Bob Baxley:
To be GUI. Yeah, I mean in case people don't know, GUI is a acronym for graphical user interface, which is to say anything that's not a command line interface, which is to say pretty much any computer any of us will ever interact with is at least a GUI, if not a voice activated system. So
Brendan Jarvis:
I was going to say, if they dunno what a GUI is, they're certainly not going to know what a command line is
Bob Baxley:
Unless
Brendan Jarvis:
They're an engineer. Unless they're an engineer. [laugh]
Bob Baxley:
The last COBALT programmer on earth. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's talk a little bit about getting uncomfortable or what I perceived anyway. This is a big assumption here about getting uncomfortable and it is that I understood that you presented to Steve Jobs several times while you were at Apple, I think four in total. Four, yeah. And you said about him that whatever Steve would say, he would make the work better. So thinking about those times, casting your mind back to when you were in front of Steve and he's an icon and I absolutely had to ask you about this. Yeah, of course. Cause there's not many people that have been in the room presenting design work to Steve Jobs. Which of those times stand out for you and why? What is the one that stands out the most?
Bob Baxley:
Well, for what I should say, I only presented to Steve four times. I worked at Apple for eight years. Many of my friends who worked on the products that Apple sold, so all the core products that you would think about, they would've presented to Steve so many times they can't even really remember them. So they would've been meeting with Steve every two weeks or so. So in some ways, if I look back on, I'm a little grateful that I only got four times [laugh] because I remember them all quite vividly. And I took notes off after all of them cuz they were so special. So I can't say I worked with Steve, I got to present to him some very thought out planned work a few times. Each one of those meetings has a really strong memory with associated with it. There was times when he was super direct and we showed him something and at one point we were showing him a design for the product details page on the online store.
And we had suggested putting the ratings and reviews behind a tab. And when he instantly saw that, he's like, the quote was something to the effect of there's no way you're doing that to my store. These ratings and reviews are really important to people. You can't hide 'em behind a click. They have to be visible. That was typical of the kind of feedback we would get. He saw it, he had an instant reaction to it and he just immediately cut to the heart of the issue. These things are super important, you can't put 'em behind a tab where people have to click on them. And as soon as he said it, we didn't walk out of that meeting with some uncertainty as what we were supposed to do. That particular comment was concise, clear, and actionable. And every time we presented to him, that was the kind of feedback we would get that that's the kind of feedback we would get from all the Apple executives.
And I really think this is sort of a story of Apple that doesn't get told. And when I try to talk to other companies that want to emulate Apple, I try to drive home the point that the executives at Apple have phenomenal taste in design, just phenomenal and they really, really care. And so you wanted to present to them, you wanted to go present to Phil s Schiller and Eddie Q and Tim Cook and whoever was in your line of command because they always, always made the work better and you didn't present to them because they were the c e O or whatever role they had. It wasn't because of that role that they were going to tell you what to do because they actually had really good taste and they would invariably spot an issue that you had read. You'd been looking at the work for months. And I remember putting to Eddie a couple of times and every time we'd be looking at this stuff for months, we'd take it into Eddie, he'd look at it for 10 seconds and then he'd just hone in, oh well that thing right there is not going to work. And then we'd all be like, oh crap. Yeah, dang. So wait
Brendan Jarvis:
Too close to it.
Bob Baxley:
It was more than that. Again, they just looked at and thought about the design work all the time and had incredibly refined taste. And I mean personally I've seen very few companies where the executives had that level of refinement.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, and it's interesting hearing you, someone who's been in the inside, describe what it was like to receive that feedback and get some insight into how design was led at Apple. And it seems to me that at least it runs counter to a lot of the commonly accepted wisdom in the field of design at the moment where you know, sort of find great design, not within designers, but within the users in which you put your work in front of and you have those cycles of feedback and learning with customers. It doesn't seem to me that there was a very strong emphasis at Apple, at least not at that time to work in that way. What was your experience if involving people outside of Apple in providing feedback on the design work that you and your teams were working on?
Bob Baxley:
Well, Apple's was and is a unique environment because so much of the promotional strategy and the marketing strategy is around secrets. And so almost by design, you know, couldn't really talk to people outside the company cuz it would destroy the secret which pulled down from the excitement around the launch. So you know, have to start with that PR strategy. And then the reason it could work at Apple is because the people inside the company were actually users of those products as well. So the products that the company was making, whether it's the OS or the hardware or photos or numbers or keynote or whatever, the people making them were bonafide, useful, meaningful users of those products. So they had sophisticated and thoughtful opinions about those products. Now if you're creating something where you're not going to be a user, it's a completely different ballgame. And I experienced that at the Apple as well when I worked in the retail team. So I worked in the corporate side of retail, designing some of the software that they would've used in the stores. What was amazing about that experience was that I had a already made place to go do ethnography cuz I could just go to a store. Perfect. And yeah, it turns out also to be a great reason to travel. It's like, I don't know, I think we're just going to have to go see what they're doing in the Covent Garden store this week.
Brendan Jarvis:
I see what you're doing there.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, exactly. So we would just hang out around the stores and watch and it was phenomenal to see the interactions between the specialists and the customers, watch them using the handheld point of sales system. At one point we were trying to do some role playing to understand some ideas for how we might be able to use technology to assist in the initial intro between a specialist and a user. And so we just did role playing with some of the people working in the stores in New York and they had super useful, interesting, relevant experience. So that was a great way to feed the design. In my current role at ThoughtSpot, I'm not a data analyst, I'm not a business user. So we have to look to outside, we have to try to understand the mindset of those users and then incorporate that into our design. So it is true that Apple didn't do external design, or sorry, external research. I was on the online store for six years. We didn't really do any usability studies, we didn't even really do metrics stuff. I don't know what they're doing now, but we didn't do it then, but we could do that because we were ourselves users of the product. I don't know how many other places that would work.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah, it's a really valid point. I just wanna come back to the presentation in high stake situations to someone like Steve Jobs, what advice or thoughts do you have for people that might be stepping into a design leadership role that's going to mean that they need to be representing the design organization well at an executive level to their peers and even leaders that are more senior to them, how can they prepare and be the most effective that they can be in those situations?
Bob Baxley:
So these kinds of presentations, I think it's important to distinguish between communicating in headlines and communicating in punchlines. So when you communicate in headlines it's like, here's the story and then let me give you the detail versus in punchlines, let me give you the big lead up and then I'll have the reveal. If you're trying to sell design work to a customer and to a marketing audience at a keynote or something, then you do the punchline bit. Let me explain to you the whole problem, what we were trying to solve, et cetera, et cetera. Here's the reveal. Everybody's like, whoa, look at that. I didn't expect it. I found that when you're presenting to executives, cuz they already have all that context and I found it to be much more effective to just start with the work, skip the setup. And this was another piece that happened I think two or three of the four times I presented to Steve.
There was somebody, a product manager person in the room who tried to set things up and let me give you a couple of slides Steve, and every time he'd be stop it with the setup, just show me the work. Because the setup is a way of marketing the work. It's a way of trying to avoid and PreOn to any criticisms of the work. And a seasoned executive will see right through that they're just not going to accept the setup. It's better to just get straight to the work, which by the way is the experience the user's going to have. No user is going to sit through all your setup about oh this was the business problem and we did this process and we created these personas and we went through these options and we came up with this solution. Aren't we smart? That's not how a user experiences it.
So it's like just start with the big scene and get into it and then later you can then deconstruct it and say, and here's how we got here. And then you can use that to justify it and have that rationale. So with Steve the successful reviews, it was just, here's the demo, let me show you use case. We always had a story. So the user is trying to, in the case the Apple store app, somebody's trying to buy an iPhone through the app. That was the first time that you could buy an iPhone through the phone which was a dramatically simplified the purchase experience because we knew you were already an iPhone customer cuz you were buying on the phone and we could get all sorts of useful information about you from the phone that would speed up the pre-authorization process so you get your subsidy from the carriers and stuff.
So there was some simplifying things that happened by doing it on the phone. So we just walked him through that process like, Hey Steve, lemme show you how you can buy a new iPhone in four clicks. That's a good demo. So a bit of context but cut to the chase. Yeah, yeah, just show me a day in the life of the user end-to-end flows. Like all the executives I've worked with, including the team of ThoughtSpot, all the really thoughtful savvy executives, they wanna know about end-to-end flows. That's the thing that they probably focused the most on because the teams in most tech companies, the teams are pretty fragmented. They tend to work on particular areas or layers of the technology and it's what a friend of mine describes as the factory model. So this designer does this feature, this designer does this feature, this designer does that feature and hardly anybody really backs up to look at how it's all connected. And I think that's a unique role that design can play. And so when we would show stuff to Steve, when I show stuff in my current roles when I show stuff at Pinterest, Yahoo, wherever, it was always lemme show you the whole thing beginning to end and that always made a lot more sense and was more meaningful to whoever the decision maker was that we were talking to.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How do you think your time at Apple shaped the way in which you see approach and lead design now?
Bob Baxley:
It's funny, I used to think that if you started with the right people and enveloped them with the right culture, you would get the right product as a result. And so my view at Apple at the time was that Apple was this culture that took people from the outside and turned them into Apple people. After I left the company and I started spending more time studying the Apollo program and particularly how they structured and then staffed mission control which is a whole other thing, I flipped that and I realized that if you established the right culture, you'll attract the right people and then you'll get the right product. And so to answer your question, I don't think it's at Apple shaped me. It's said Apple had a culture that fit my view of the world and how I wanted to work and I found that culture and I fit in really quickly cuz it just made sense to me.
It's frankly, it's like a whole life philosophy. I would say that it's a philosophy that says things can be better. There's a great quote from Steve that I use when I'm talking to high school students where he talks about if you ever stop and look around you and realize that everything you see in the built environment was created by people who really aren't any smarter than you, then you start to realize that everything could be changed and you could probably change it for the better. I mean everything mean every book cover and just looking around your desk, everything you see in the built environment was created by somebody who's not any smarter than you. Everything could be changed. And once you really internalize that, the world just seems like so open with possibility of improvement and that's the spirit of Apple. Every everybody in that company is focused on making their little thing better.
I mean the company has a patent on the pizza boxes that they serve at Cafe Max because the staff there figured out how to make a round pizza box that would keep the pizzas warm, longer, fresher than the typical square cardboard pizza box. So even the guys making the pizzas are thinking we can do better. And I don't know where that spirit in me came from the spirit of continuous growth, but it it's there. That's how I'm oriented towards the world. And so I think that fit Apple and so I fit Apple and the places that I've gone after Apple were places I felt embodied that culture as well and embodied that spirit. Not a fixed mindset, but a growth mindset. I think that's why I've lived in Silicon Valley and called it home for so long. Love all the other issues with Silicon Valley, but [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
A different topic. Hopefully we'll have some time to come to that as well. There's quite a few things to get to. You touched on the notion there that design is about making the world a better place and a lot of jobs and companies seems to me at least to be a means to an end. People are there, they're not saying they're not doing a bad job, but they're mainly there to serve other needs that they have as people. I get the sense though in design that being a designer is more of a way of life. I don't see people in procurement, for example, waking up one day before they decide to get into procurement and saying, I want to be a C corporate procurement person. Is design a way of life? Is it an attitude? Is it more than what we are doing in terms of pushing pixels around screens?
Bob Baxley:
Well, I think for people who are serious about design, it most definitely is. It's a way of life. It's a way of, to me design is the most fundamental of human activities because it's what design fundamentally is. The ability to project yourself into the future. Imagine the future that you want to be in and then take steps now to bring that future to reality. No other animal that I know of really thinks about the future in the way that humans do. It's sort of a blessing and frankly quite a curse as well. But the idea to look into the future and see that it can be better and different and brighter and then take concrete steps to make it. But that's a really powerful mindset. And personally I think we would all be much better off if more people had that mindset, I guess. I'm glad I have it. I'm glad you have it
Brendan Jarvis:
And hopefully everyone listening to this podcast has it. And speaking of podcast, I listened to one of the recent interviews you gave on the User Defenders podcast and we've been talking a little bit now about culture and I think you touched on the fact that computing is your medium. And in that podcast you said, and I'm just going to quote you now, we live and work in the most important cultural medium of our time, yet none of us can name a famous UI designer. And that's so true. I couldn't really think of one. I mean, I can think of people like Jeffrey VE and a couple of others that come to mind when I'm really sort of scratching scratch, scratching into my brain and trying to find those things. But I don't think anyone outside of the software would be able to name a famous UI designer. Why is this and does it matter
Bob Baxley:
Why? I definitely think it matters and I'll get to that in a second, why it is because design is fundamentally a collaborative process and designers are one part of a much larger machine that figures out software. And software strangely is an unattributed medium. Nobody really knows to the person who works on these things to the degree there's somebody that's the face of it, it tends to be the c e o of the company. So we tend to think about Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever. And again, to reference the Apollo program, we tend to think about the people that walked on the moon. There was 12 of them in total. There's over 400,000 people that worked on the Apollo program until you really start getting into their stories, which is what four of those bookshelf, those shelves back there are about [laugh] when you really get into their stories, it's phenomenal who these people were and what problems they were solving.
But the general public knows Neil Armstrong, buzz Aldrin, and there was a third guy that had to stay behind in the cab [laugh]. Michael Collins sucks to be that guy. Yeah, well I don't know. I mean, [laugh] Uncle Collins got to go to the moon. It's pretty phenomenal. So it's an unattributed medium, which might change over time, but we are where we are right now. And then you had, does it matter? Yes, it matters and here's why it matters. Software right now is in a really primitive state and most people, most as I call them mere mortals, not people that work in technology and really understand how this crap works, just normal people trying to live their lives. I personally think they go through enormous parts of their day feeling victimized by technology. You and I, when our phone doesn't work, we kind of know how to fix it.
We also know that we're the person that somebody calls when their phone doesn't work. So you have to my whole life, my whole life, your whole life. Yeah, I know tech support to the world, which is probably true of everybody listening to this thing. So imagine what it's like to have to call somebody for help. Imagine how demoralizing and how vulnerable you would feel cuz you are surrounded by technology. Try to navigate an airport, try to navigate a train station, try to get an Uber, Airbnb it, try to use a vending machine or an at t m if you don't really understand technology, much less your phone and your computer and your home wifi network and everything else, it just goes and goes and goes. Like if you don't really understand that stuff, I am pretty sure that you're frustrated a lot of the time.
You're probably pissed off a lot of the time. And I think because you don't know who to blame for it. And so you don't know who to hold accountable. And so it seems like there's just this crazy outta control machine that's spinning out this crap that's polluting your life. And if you know who's working on it, if you can call 'em by name, at least you can yell at them. Which means that, oh wait, there's a human being in charge of this somewhere. So there's still hope that it could get better again. Because I was lucky, I worked at Apple and I used a lot of Apple products. I knew the people that worked on many of the products and so much to my family's frustration when I can't get something to work, I yell at people by name he walk down the corridor and go find Steve.
Well, but even that, I'm just at home, I'm like, oh my God, bill, what the hell were you guys thinking when you did this? And it's like what? There's a lot of tradeoffs and decisions. The software's super complicated, but just knowing somebody is behind it all demystifies it and makes it seem that there's somebody on the other side of it. And I were talking before we started, I grew up a little bit more in the Cold War and growing up in the Cold War was a very different existential threat than my kids' experience growing up with climate change. So in the existential threat of my youth really relied on two people choosing not to drop a bomb. And in my head I could say, well I don't think those two people are actually going to do it. And I could make sense of it in that way, but for my kids, like climate change, there's nobody in charge of climate change. [laugh], right? It is happening and there's nobody you can point to, there's nobody you can attribute it to that you think if we could just replace that person or if that person would just get their act together, we could take care of this whole thing. And I think that's why attribution matters in technology cuz it turns out in technology there is somebody in charge of most of these things, like somebody is making these decisions. And I think if users understood that they would be more hopeful and optimistic and frankly demanding that these things get better.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's a huge cost of releasing bad products. What do people and product more broadly, so not just designers, people in product management, people that are executives that are signing off or approving certain things, anybody that has a responsibility to their users, what do they really need to be asking themselves before they put something out there in the hands of the people that it was designed for?
Bob Baxley:
The, you mean the decision makers? I I'm
Brendan Jarvis:
The people collectively involved in making these experiences. What do we need to ask ourselves?
Bob Baxley:
Well, so us as designers, I think if you're in a position where you can do this, you should choose to work in companies where design designed as a competitive advantage. If the company doesn't compete on design and it doesn't make a difference in their business, you're never going to be terribly successful or impactful as a designer. I know not everybody lives in geographies where those kinds of opportunities are possible, but if you could avoid it, don't work at a place that doesn't value your core skillset. And right now the demand for designers has never been higher. So I would encourage everybody to just be honest with themselves when they're looking at jobs is design make a difference to this business? Because I don't necessarily think design is the only business strategy. There's plenty of businesses that do fine without having design in their competitive portfolio.
So it's not a moral imperative. The companies compete on design. You should try to pick places that do and go work there. And then if you're in a place where design matters, then you have a empathetic audience with the executives and you always need to get to the executives. If I can give designers any advice, it's always get as close as you can to the key decision makers. That is the critical element of your success and your impact as being as close as you can to the people who are going to make the call, the people who can move the deadlines. Those are the ones who make the call. And hopefully those people feel honest, not to put too glamor or too big a point on it, but hopefully they feel some moral obligation to make users lives better. And they realize that if they release crap, it brings people down.
It's a net negative on their users and not every executive's going to see it that way. Sometimes they're just going to prioritize their business, but you should try to avoid working with those people if you can. So I don't know, when I look at my executives and they're trying to make choices about whether or not to release something is the phrase I've been using lately, is we should be releasing things that we're proud of. That's the number one metric that I always come back to for myself and for the team, is this work that you're proud of? And if you're not proud of it, well let's work on it some more and try to get it better. I know that that's not again the case in all businesses and I don't want to think that that's a simple choice for everyone. Again, I'm fortunate to live in Silicon Valley and there's design opportunities everywhere around me and I know that's not the case for everybody, but I do think designers have some level of where they want to be employed and where they want to deploy their creative and life energy. And I would encourage people to be thoughtful and demanding about that and not put yourself in a situation where you're going to be victimized by quarterly profit and loss numbers.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it's usually important. Bob, it feels like this is a good time to shift gears a little bit and talk about your 2015 TED Talk. And I really enjoyed this talk. It's sort of relevant to the people that are listening because we are living in a time of great change and great uncertainty. And as we were talking before we hit record where I live in New Zealand's just been pl plunged into a snap lockdown. So I'm now recording from my spare room and we just have to get on with it. My three-year-old's down the hall watching a bit of tv, which I feel a little bit guilty about. But let's bring it back to your talk. You had some lessons in that talk that were highly relevant to the here and now and there are three stories in that talk and I wanted to talk about that first story, which was about conditions to start with what changed on Friday, October the fourth in 1957,
Bob Baxley:
That was the day that Sputnik went into orbit from a field in Kazakhstan. They launched Sputnik, a basketball sized satellite, the first manmade object to or orbit the earth. One of the fascinating things about Sputnik was it was basically a PR program so the Soviet Union could demonstrate their technological prowess of the world. So instead of trying to hide it, they tried to make it super visible. And they did that by creating a satellite that emitted a tone, a beep that was beeping at recurring intervals and that all the world could hear. There was a couple of young researchers at John Hopkins I believe it was John Hopkins, I believe it was John Hopkins. And they immediately, I mean all the rocket nerves in the United States of course are all listening for this thing. It goes up, you can hear the beep beep beep, you can go get the recordings today from the, I mean just do a Google search, you'll find the recordings.
So they listened to this beep and then using the Doppler shift, they were able to calculate the trajectory of Sputnik. Within a couple hours they were able to figure out where Sputnik was based on the Doppler shift. There was another researcher there at John Hopkins who came to them and said, Hey, that's a pretty cool trick. You were able to figure out a moving object in space from a fixed location on the earth. Could you do that the other way around, which is from a fixed location in space, could you calculate a moving object on earth? They went away, they played with the math for a little while and they came back and said, yeah, that would actually be easier. That became a small collection of satellites called the Tyrus satellites, which was the first satellite-based navigation, at least that I'm aware of. There may have been some by the Soviet Union before that, but that's the first that I know about.
Kennedy was actually referring to those satellites by 1962 when he made the call for the Apollo program at Rice University in the famous, we choose to go to the moon speech. And then that concept of space-based navigation of course now is the G P S system, which we all take for granted on our phones and elsewhere. But if you think about navigation, certainly even in World War ii, even Vietnam, much less just sailing across the ocean and an ocean liner like g p s is a really big deal. [laugh] like GPS is a massive, massive game changer. It's one of those things we just take for granted like containerized shipping, but it is just a transformational technology for civilization. And it came out of these two guys being able to calculate the orbit of Sputnik and then this other guy saying, wait, we can use that technology in this completely different application, which is to figure out earth-based navigation from fixed objects in space.
And the fixed object in space has to do with what's called geosynchronous orbit. If you get a satellite up to 22 and a 5,000 miles, then it orbits at the same velocity as Earth's rotating. So it's effectively the same position as it rotates around the earth. People can look up how g p s how the GPS system actually works. I actually encourage you to do it quite, it is phenomenal how the thing actually works and what's actually happening, how your phone's able to get GPS signals and calculate your location. It's mind boggling what is actually going on. But we all just take it for granted cuz it's there on our phone. Heck, it's on my watch. I got it right here. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous really how easy it's gotten. What would a Columbus traded for my watch? Columbus would've given anything for my watch.
So I think the reason you're bringing up the story is there was this fundamental condition, conditional change. We can now put satellites in orbit. That was a fundamental conditional change that had all these downstream effects, the second, third, fourth order effects that nobody immediately recognized. And now truly we've moved into a completely different era. We have proven that remote work that it functions, that productivity can stay high, creativity can stay high. We've proven that we don't have to commute. We've proven that we probably actually want to hang out together in person now and again, we've proven that actually the restaurant experience isn't that great. So a, we've just run this massive, massive experiment and as certainly in Western society, we have this complete new model of thinking about how a society could be and there's going to be some people that are going to use this moment and they're going to come up with stuff that is way beyond anything you and I are thinking about.
Cuz if we had those ideas, that's what we'd be doing right now. But this is a as big a game changer as the invention of electricity, for example, not the invention, the discovery and propagation of electricity. There's a great article I read a while back about how so electricity comes up but nobody really knows what to do with it. And it was actually about 20 or 30 years after electricity kind of went into broader distribution before in the factories, they realized that they could create machines that had localized engines instead of there just being one big engine that turned the whole factory. And when you had that, then they started reconfiguring all the factories to have smaller electrical engines instead of one big engine. And that was really the huge fundamental shift from electricity. And it didn't happen until electricity had been around for 20, 30 years. Arguably the same thing's happened now with the internet. Certainly we had the internet before the pandemic, but we are using the internet in a completely different way now. And this may have been the Internet's kind of really game-changing moment when we realize that internet connectivity can fundamentally change how human society's organized. It may be that,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, the conditions have changed as a result of Covid 19 and what wasn't forced upon us now has been forced upon us and that has meant that we've had new constraints applied to how we live and work. And your second story was all about constraints. And now we're going to get to something that I was really struggling to remember earlier before I cut that bit out of the interview, which I won't cut this bit, which is who was Theodore Geisel and why was he trying to kill Dick and Jane?
Bob Baxley:
Oh, so Theodore Geisel was also known as Dr. Seuss and in 19 54, 50, I think it's 1954, there's a famous article that came out in Life Magazine by an journalist named John Herschel. And Herschel was noting that American school children were not learning to read as quickly as other kids around the world. Notably there's Soviet counterparts. And he was arguing that the reason they didn't learn to read quicker is because all the reading primers at that point were super boring as Jack and Jill went up a hill, there was just nothing interesting about them. And in that article he mentioned, how come we can't get some of America's great children's illustrators like Wal Disney or Dr. Seuss to go off and write children's books? Well, Dr. Seuss's editor saw that Dr. Seuss's editor at Random House saw that article and he went to Ted and he said, Hey, do you think you could do a book to teach second graders how to read?
And Ted said yeah, sure, that sounds like an interesting project. And so then they said, okay, well here's the list of 200. I think it was 220 words that a second grader should know. The most complicated word on the list I believe was together maybe mother, but everything else is about an end and cat and things like that. And so he gets this list of, I think it was again around 220 words. He thinks that he's going to whip up this book in a matter of months. His other books would typically take a year but he thought this was going to be a super simple project. Months go by, he can't have an I, doesn't any ideas. He's just getting really frustrated. And at some point he just says, I'm going to look at the list and the first two words that I can rhyme, I'm just going to figure out the story from that.
And he comes across cat and hat, he accepts that constraint. These are the words. I can do a story with the first two things at Rhyme Cat and Hat. Okay, I'm going to make a story with that. And of course it goes on to create cat and hat. It's enormously successful. Spawns an entire different line of books for Random House, which is the beginner books, which are the smaller Dr. Seuss books that we all teach our kids to read with the cat. The hat's one of them. GoDog Go, who was actually written by pd Eastman is another in that line Mr. Brown. And there's, there's many others in that line that they're about kids learning to read. And of course Cat and Hack is financially successful for him. He buys a beautiful house out in San Diego and the rest is magic. But I always come back to he accepted the constraints.
I mean you could sort of sit around there and say, well, could we throw in a couple of extra words? Could I invent some words? Which is what he kind of famously did. Inventing were words like Nerd and Lorax and many others. He invented many words, but with Cat in the Hat, it's like, no, I'm going to stick to this thing. And then as I mentioned in the talk, like Cat in the hats arguably a rather subversive book cuz it's about two young kids get into all this trouble while they're moms away. And you have to remember the context. This is the mid to late fifties when children were seen and not heard. And society's very in the western world, very uptight and very hierarchical and very misogynistic. And so the kids mom goes away, the kids get into all this trouble with the cat, but the cat's like, man, don't stress. We'll clean everything up. It'll be pic and span by the time mom gets home. She doesn't really need to know today. We might sort of laugh about it, but in the 1950s it's a pretty subversive idea.
Brendan Jarvis:
It actually sounds like an analogy for remote work
Bob Baxley:
Maybe. So the boss doesn't really need to know the hierarchical authorities maybe don't need to know everything that's going on.
Brendan Jarvis:
Are you saying that I didn't need to make the spit up behind me before we record it?
Bob Baxley:
You didn't for me, no. Yeah, Dr. Seuss constraints, man, love them Mean when he wrote I think it was Green Eggs and Ham was actually written on a bet with a buddy that he could write a book using, I think it was less than 80 words, something like that. And so it was just that one it by then he's kind of leaning into the constraints. He's like, oh, it's actually kind of interesting to take this limited vocabulary and try to make a children's book out of it. That's actually an interesting, fun technical writing problem. So he sort of leaned into the constraints. And I think as designers and software we're often like, well do I have to do this? Do I have to do that? At some point you kinda have to settle into it and sort of say, okay, these are the constraints. Maybe it's a constraint of time, maybe it's a constraint of resources, maybe it's requirements. Like there's all sorts of different types of constraints. But if you just accept the constraints, there's like, it's actually really liberating cuz it takes a lot of options and optionality and procrastination ideas. It takes all that crap out of your head and it's okay, this is the problem. And it can be very centering and very focusing if you'll lean into it and embrace it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you think that the reason why so many people have had trouble dealing with, and I'm oversimplifying here probably quite grossly, but trouble dealing with the change in constraints that Covid 19 has meant for us has been because that wasn't a choice that they exercised to lean into.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, yeah. Look, I think that's a ton of it. And the uncertainty, when is this going to end? And there's a lot of people that unlike you and I don't have a spare bedroom that they can work from. So we're super privileged and lucky to have that. I would in no way diminish that when we went into lockdown at my company. We have a number of my colleagues work in India, for example. And even many of them here in Silicon Valley, they're living situations are very different. And so for them not having the office was definitely an issue. But the lack of control, doc Theodore Geisel's life was not going to change whether he had 220 words or 500 words. This wasn't an existential constraint, it was a constraint that he chose to embrace. When I talk about constraints, I might sort of limit that a little bit to thinking about it in the creative context. As a creative, it's good to embrace the constraints of the creative problem in your life. Constraints to a point can maybe be helpful, but constraints can also turn to oppression pretty quickly.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's get to the third story and the final story was about conviction. This is a great story. What is the significance of the words somewhat as a voice in the wilderness?
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, so the third story is about John Houbolt, who was one of the people involved in the Apollo program. And he was the guy that championed the concept of lunar orbit rendezvous. And the idea lunar orbit rondevu is that you take two spacecraft of the moon. One of them is designed solely for the lunar landing and therefore is optimized for weight. And the other one is heavier, won't go to the lunar surface, but will be the craft that you use to reenter the Earth's atmosphere, which is more demanding in terms of material science and whatnot. So when Kennedy announces the space program or announces the Apollo mission in 1962 at race, there were actually three different ideas on the table. One of 'em was you'd put two spacecraft into Earth orbit and then you would take one of those to the moon and land it.
That's called Earth orbit rendezvous. There was another that you would just build a big gigantic rocket and you'd fly that sucker to the moon, you'd land on the moon with this big giant thing and then you'd come back. That was actually the favored approach. That was the approach that Wernher von Braun was championing cuz von Braun was ultimately a rocket guy. And so he just thought to build a bigger rocket. That was the idea that Kennedy actually wanted to do. And John Houbolt had discovered a paper from a guy named Yuri Kondratyuk who was a u I believe Ukrainian Polymath who in the 19 teens, I think it was around 1917, came up with the idea of lunar orbit rendezvous. And the story I think is somewhat about Yuri Kondratyuk, he ended up dying in one of Stalin's camps. In is relatively unknown and I've only been able to find a couple of pictures of him and I'm not even sure that that's actually, they're not even sure that's actually his name.
The notion that there's this guy in 1917 in Ukraine who's looking at the moon and not just thinking about how to go to the moon in a Jules Verne sort of science fiction fantasy kind of way. He's actually thinking about how to go to the moon actually working the problem. And he realizes that the problem of landing on the moon is one of weight and that it's just going to be enormously difficult to get a big mass of stuff into earth orbit and then to land it on the moon. So he comes up with this idea, John Houbolt in the sixties comes across this paper and he realizes that not only is lunar orbit rondevu a way to get to the moon, it is indeed the only way to get to the moon. And so he's fairly down in the NASA hierarchy, he's not getting a good hearing on this idea. And he writes what's generally known as the most famous memo in NASA history. And he writes it right to the guy who's head of the program, goes completely outside of the hierarchy, which is way outta protocol. Definitely risk, danger,
Brendan Jarvis:
Danger at that point.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, certainly at that point in time. Really, really risking his job. And the memo starts with somewhat as a voice in the wilderness and then the memo, I think it's like 12 pages. And he works the problem and he's got the illustrations, he's got the math, he proves the point, and it took some more time. The story of how he sold it takes a little bit more time. I mentioned it in the TEDx talk because John Humbolt had the courage of his convictions. He saw that idea and he said, no, no, this is not an idea. This is the idea. This is the only thing that's going to work. And he was willing to stand by it and sell it through the hierarchy. And I share that story a lot of times with my designers. And I could give you examples from design as well, where one of somebody on the team had a particular idea for how we should do something. I as the authority maybe had dismissed it early on. There's certainly examples where I told them that I thought it was silly and they should stop working on it. And much of their credit, they ignored me. They worked on it some more. They built a prototype or something and they brought it back to me later, showed it to me again and I was like, dang, you're right man. That's genius.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's brave as well. That's brave to go outside of the hierarchy. It's also brave once your senior leader has told you that they don't think it's a good idea to have another go at it.
Bob Baxley:
But it's where the magic happens. You gotta, I mean, that's sort of the point, man. You gotta have the courage of your convictions. You gotta stand by. If you really believe in the idea, you gotta stand by it. And if you have a good manager, I like to think I'm an okay manager. At least if you have a good manager, when the employee person shows some initiative and they come back and they prove out the idea, you're really going to listen to them. It's one of those things, I want to know how much you care before I care how much. And so if somebody on my team has real passion around an idea, I will listen to them. I actually get really disappointed when I push on their ideas and they cave. I find that really frustrating. I'm like, if you don't really love the idea, I'm not quite sure why you're wasting my time sharing it. I want you to defend the idea. I want you to push back. But
Brendan Jarvis:
There are some subtleties in that though. You talked about having passion as being important, not being the first to cave at the first sign of pushback. So I'm getting a sense of what that might be. But if we think about that memo that was written to the head of NASA at the time, it seemed like he led with some humility as well. How much of that has to do with the success of taking a risk, being brave, going outside the hierarchy and having a crack at something where most people at the current moment don't support your view?
Bob Baxley:
So look, your mileage may vary, and I won't speak about everybody's manager. The way I try to conduct things is I want to fight really hard about the ideas. And as long as we're fighting and arguing about the ideas, I'm all good. You should totally challenge me. If it becomes about your ego and it or my ego, and it becomes about somebody winning, now we're into a dysfunction. I don't wanna get into, that's where things get complicated and unfortunate politically. If it's just about me winning and getting my paw prints and the product, that's not going to work. But if it's about the ideas, that's a conversation every company should be willing to have and be willing to have. Every functional company should be willing to have that in a really productive, healthy, but vigorous manner. And I saw that over and over at Apple.
There'd be moments where maybe on the online store we had a disagreement with retail or something, and over and over you'd see the executives kind of back up and say, well, wait a minute. If I think with my apple hat, which was always the line, if I think with my apple hat, this is what we should do. Or we would often use the phrase, well, what's the Apple way to do this? And you'd see in meetings when it got a little bit to be about ego and one person's like ego versus another person's ego. And the company had a couple of different phrases and the executives had phrases that would pull it out of that ego contest really quickly and move it into what's the right thing to do. And to go back to where we were a couple minutes ago, when I presented to Steve or the other executives, they never won. Steve never wanted us to do something because he was c e o. He just made really good, I'll say forceful, but he was right. He made good arguments about why the idea that he was advocating for was the right idea. You'd end up kind of naturally adopting the ideas cuz you believe, cuz you believed in them too. Right.
Brendan Jarvis:
So in that context though, right, this is the c e O, did you fear him? Did you fear that feedback?
Bob Baxley:
No, no, no. Look, I think different people had different responses to Steve and I think Steve was really very gifted at sizing up somebody and figuring out whether they would be more motivated by anger or the threat of disappointment. So I think all these stories about him being an asshole and stuff, I actually think in many instances, certainly in his later parts of his career, he purposely thought that he could get a better performance outta certain people if he pissed them off. So I think there's some cases where he tried to do that on purpose in my case, and I'm sure it was patently evident to him. My biggest concern was disappointing him. I would just have been devastated to disappoint Steve Jobs [laugh] like you wanted to do something great cuz you wanted him, you wanted his approval, you wanted to know that you had met the bar that Steve Jobs has.
And the guy, the designers on my team, they all felt the same way. It was, I mean, as memorable as it was, those few moments, I had a privilege to present to Steve even more so to get to come back to the team and tell them that their work had passed muster. It was just such a great moment of pride for everybody. And I think as a design leader, I try to use more of the disappointment piece. Not really, I don't try to motivate people by anger, but you can see sports analogies, you can definitely see coaches, coaches different coaches have different styles and they motivate their teams in different ways. I wouldn't necessarily wanna be around someone who motivated people through anger. I don't think that's just the environment I'd wanna be in. So I think the disappointment one's a disappointment one's more, I dunno, it's just a place, it's the kind of place I'd much rather work.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I also liked how you told the story there of how at Apple you would create almost a third space for when you realized you were getting into an ego context. You would ask yourself questions like, well, what's the Apple way of doing this? And I assume that that relies on people having a really shared and clear understanding of what the Apple Way is for a start. But it almost seems like that would've diffused the situation and that there might have been some stories or other sort of cultural touchpoints that supported those questions that you would then use to actually bring things back to what's actually best for the company or what's best for the users.
Bob Baxley:
Look, Apple's been around for a long time, so Apple has a good idea of who they are. I have this joke that companies that they develop an age sort of human beings do. And so if you're at a five year old startup, they kind of behave like a five year old [laugh], like occasionally have accidents at night and they're a little outta control. Two-year-olds are pretty nutty by
Brendan Jarvis:
The time or a 75 year old. Yeah,
Bob Baxley:
By the time you get to be a teenager, you think you have the world all figured out. But turns out you just haven't really been challenged yet. In your twenties, Google, you're sort of coming in, I guess they're mid twenties, they're kind of like a mid 20 year old, they're kind of finding their feet. And Google's probably me more mature than that, but apple's like 40, 40, 45 now. Apple kind of knows who they are. And so when you work, there is an Apple way of thinking about stuff. And I used to talk about that there was this platonic ideal of what it meant to be Apple. And that didn't emanate from anybody. Nobody owned that. It didn't Steve, Steve didn't, he didn't radiate Apple. There was an Apple way of doing things. And your success at Apple as a creative was basically in your ability to channel the Apple way of doing things.
And so we would often debate that, is this the way Apple would do it? And you can tell that Apple's one of the few companies that's gotten to this level of refinement, because I could grab somebody off the street and I could ask them to picture an Apple car or an Apple house or an Apple chair, and they could actually reasonably come up with a picture. So if I went to you and I said, imagine a Facebook car, you probably couldn't, I don't know if you really, I can't get a picture of a Facebook car anymore than I could get a picture of a Twitter Twitter chair. I don't know what those brands mean in different mediums, but I do have a sense of what a North Face car might be or what a train might be like. There are brands that have enough stuff around them that you can reliably transmute them into a different medium. And I think that's an interesting sign of how mature is that design ethos for that particular company. And again, in the tech space, there's just not many companies that have gotten that refined cuz there's just not that many tech companies been around that long.
Brendan Jarvis:
And a lot of those tech companies that you mentioned also haven't really produced any tangible products. So I wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that Apple was able to imbue its design sensibilities into things that are physical, not just as we were talking about before, software, which is has a level of anonymity to it and it changes really, really rapidly.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, I mean, so maybe we could imagine a Nintendo car. I don't know if we could imagine a Sony car. Maybe not. I don't know. Could we reliably, yeah, we could probably come up with a bran chair. We could probably imagine that [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
As a design leader, Bob, how much of your day-to-day now is about telling stories to your team and to the wider organization?
Bob Baxley:
As of much about telling stories, I think my week goes between critiquing design work almost like a director, like a movie director. Like we're recording this on Tuesday. We do all our design reviews on Tuesday, we call 'em Super Tuesday, and Tuesdays are about five or six hours of me and design reviews looking at different parts of the product. And so as that's evolved, I think it's a little bit like me giving daily notes on a film. And then other parts of my week are about helping people with their careers or helping them through certain decisions. And that's a lot of storytelling. And then there's another substantial part of my week that's about selling the design work into different parts of the organization. And that's almost exclusively storytelling. Yeah, I mean, that's a communication style that's natural and easy for me. As you noted, I have a degree in radio, television, film, and film production. I sort of approach a lot of this stuff. It's a movie. When I talked about presenting, you present in headlines, you present use cases you walk people through the flow. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. There's a conflict, there's a solution, there's a resolution. That's how I present a lot of the design ideas and a lot of the solutions we come up with through that lens.
Brendan Jarvis:
Speaking of design critiques, it is Tuesday as you've mentioned. And I do know that you've got something to go to, which may very well be a design critique after podcast. Actually podcast
Bob Baxley:
Actually. No, it's just an executive sync, but all
Brendan Jarvis:
Right. Yeah. Well, it sounds important. So let's bring things down to a close. Given the state of the world and our culture and also our industry, what's your greatest hope for the people working in software today?
Bob Baxley:
I just hope people, well, I'll talk about the design piece of software in particular. I hope that they take it seriously. I really do believe that software is the greatest, most important and influential cultural medium that we're trafficking in right now. I think the product of Silicon Valley, the products of Silicon Valley may well have had a bigger cultural influence on the world than the output of Hollywood, for example. I think that one's probably still pretty close, but as an expression of American culture, it's hard to see something that's had a bigger impact than the products of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So when I talk to designers, I just hope that they take seriously the medium that they have or the privilege to work in. I hope that they learn about the medium, which means learning about the history of it, where these ideas came from, that they read stuff by Veever Bush, who first came up with the idea of kind of GUI style computing back in the 1940s that they study the work of Alan Kay, who came up with the star computer, I believe, at Xerox Park.
The whole history of these ideas is, it's not something that just came up yesterday. There is decades and decades and decades of amazing people doing amazing work that led to what we experienced today. It's very much like the Apollo thing. Don't get so hung up on Neil Armstrong. Dig into the stories and find the John Houbolt, find the Gene Kranz. Find your heroes that you can relate to that are just normal people doing their job, but doing extraordinary jobs in this amazing moment in time. Embrace the medium. If you were a jazz musician, you would know a hundred albums and you would be able to play a hundred Miles Davis riffs and you would know them backwards and forwards. Do you know that many apps? If I talked to you tomorrow and I said, can you name your five favorite apps? And why? Don't tell me Snapchat cuz use it all the time.
Tell me that. I dunno. Tell me Lark. Cuz you thought that the way that they did the onboarding with the slider was really cool or whatever it happens to be. So yeah, it's an amazing opportunity and privilege and moment to work in a phenomenal medium. So I just hope people embrace that and they bring some of their passion and joy into the products and they create products that they're truly proud of. Cuz I do believe in computing. I do believe fundamentally that personal computing can have a transformative effect on the lives of individuals. That's not necessarily the moment we're in right now, but I do believe that and I hope we find a way to get back to it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it's an important and powerful message to finish on. Bob, thank you. I've really enjoyed today's conversation. We've certainly covered a lot of ground, you've told some amazing stories, and I really just wanna say thank you for so generously sharing those with us today.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah, thanks Brennan. I really appreciate the opportunity. So yeah, thanks for having me and thanks for sharing your guest room.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're most welcome, most welcome. Bob. If people wanna find out more about you and what you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
Bob Baxley:
Right now, LinkedIn is the easiest place to find me. I'm just there under my own name. I am also on Twitter @ThisIsBobBaxley. Also pretty easy to find. You mentioned a few of my talks. There's this tool called Google. It'll get you to most of 'em. Some of 'em are on YouTube, some of 'em are on Vimeo. But many of the talks you mentioned are readily available at an internet streaming service near you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Bob. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, including Bob's talks that he is just mentioned, I'll be linking to in the show notes and also we can find Bob on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders and UX product and design, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.

Bob Baxley

Design is Much More than a Job

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Who is Bob Baxley?

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