Irene Au

Episode 116
Brave UX

Reflections on Executive Design Leadership

In this episode of Brave UX, Irene Au shares some of the learnings from her stellar career ✨, the early life experiences that have helped her to succeed 👂, and the importance of sweating the right stuff 🧘🏻‍♀️.

Highlights include:

What role does the C-Suite play in a company’s ability to realise good design?
How did you navigate the strong points of view of founder executives?
What did you see in the designers you’ve hired that wasn’t in those you didn’t?
Why do design leaders need to carefully choose their stakeholders?
Why do you wish the job title UX Designer would disappear?

August 8, 202301:27:38

Listen on:

Who is Irene Au?

Irene is a Design Partner at Khosla Ventures where she works with early-, mid- and late-stage startup CEOs to help them realise the value of design through better methods, practices, processes, leadership and talent 🚀.

Irene has been one of Silicon Valley’s most successful design executives and has played an important role in shaping and elevating design within several influential technology companies.

She was the VP of Design at Udacity 🎓, where she helped the leadership team to find product-market fit and to define the company’s strategy, vision, mission, and values. Irene also led the design and research efforts for the company’s first product offering.

Irene was also the Director of User Experience (Global Head) at Google for nearly 6 years. During her time there, Irene scaled and led the design team to over 350 people 📈 and transformed the way the famously engineering-driven company valued and operationalised design.

Her success at Google was in part enabled by her prior experience as VP of User Experience at Yahoo! 🟣, where for four years she was the design leader responsible for the company’s user experience across all of its products and design infrastructure efforts.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
My today is Irene Au. Irene is a design partner at Coastal Ventures, where she works with early, mid, and late stage startup CEOs to help them realize the value of design through better methods, practices, processes, leadership and talent.
She's also an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University where she teaches students advanced product design for the university's mechanical engineering department.
Irene has been one of Silicon Valley's most successful design executives and has played an important role in shaping and elevating design within several influential technology companies.
She was the VP of design at Udacity where she helped the leadership team to find product market fit and to define the company's strategy, vision, mission, and values. Irene also led the design and research efforts of the company's first product offering.
Irene was also the director of user experience, global head at Google for nearly six years. During her time there, Irene scaled and led the design team to over 350 people and transformed the way the famously engineering driven company valued and operationalized design.
Her success at Google was in part, enabled by her prior experience as VP of user experience at Yahoo, where for nearly four years, she was the design leader responsible for the company's user experience across all of its products and design infrastructure efforts.
Irene's career started at the legendary Netscape, where she was an interaction designer who then became the global lead on Netscape communicator, a suite of software that included Netscape Navigator, mail and news client and website editor.
Since 2021, Irene has served as a trustee on the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design, and between 2010 and 2018, she also served as a strategic and editorial board member for Rosenfeld Media.
A generous contributor to the field, Irene has published many popular design articles on Medium and spoken on notable stages across the globe, including at Mind The product, Talks at Google, the AIGA and TEDx. She's also the author of the Definitive O'Reilly book Design in Venture Capital.
Irene has been featured in Wired Fast Company coms and on the cover of Mindful Magazine, and now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Irene. Hello, and a very warm welcome to the show.
Irene Au:
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's great to have you, Irene. I've very much been looking forward to this since we first talked, I think it was back in January, and since then I've learned some really great things about your career and also about your contributions to the field. And one of those, and this might be a little bit of a strange way place to start, but one of those things is that you're a huge fan of eighties alternative music and in particular, and in particular one band The Cure, which I understand you've seen Play Live 40 times or more. I also understand that you've named your first born after two of their songs. Now that's really a true fan. So I'm curious, what are those two songs and why those two songs?
Irene Au:
Oh, well, I'm impressed by the homework you've done. That's really incredible research you've done. My first born's name is Charlotte Elise, and the simple answer is that The Cure actually doesn't have too many songs that have female names in the tiles, but they do have Charlotte sometimes and a letter to Elise. So that was nice inspiration for her name.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now, I understand that one of your daughters, I'm not sure if it's Charlotte, asked you at one point and I'll quote her now, how do I know if the music you'd listen to is good? I think it's good because you told me it's good, but how do I know it's good? What did you tell her?
Irene Au:
Oh, at the end of the day, it all comes down to how it makes you feel and whether you feel seen, whether it's something that you relate to, where the feeling resides in you. But I'm pleased to say she's a dj. She was just featured in the Pittsburgh local paper. So I think she's coming into her own and I think she's discovered for herself what good is.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, that's really good to hear. And what is it about the cure for you that makes you feel seen?
Irene Au:
Oh, well, I think as an angsty teenager in the eighties, there's something about the passion with which Robert Smith writes and sings that really resonated with me and still does. I was actually just listening to the Cure today. Yeah, something it, it's the depth of feeling and the passion and the artistry is just beyond anything else I've encountered.
Brendan Jarvis:
I want to go wind the back even further for people and have a little conversation now about your upbringing. Cause I feel like there may be some parallels in what you've just said that start further back. And I understand that your parents immigrated from Hong Kong to South Carolina, which is where you grew up. And for people that aren't in America and aren't that familiar with South Carolina, it's one of the states that is in the Christian Bible Belt of America. Now, I understand your father was a physics professor and that you've previously described him as a profound atheist. So thinking about this, when I was listening to you describe this previously, it struck me that combination of being Asian, living in the Bible belt and in a household that was profoundly atheist, mustn't have made for the most easiest of upbringings.
Irene Au:
Yeah, that's true. But that's the reality that I knew and that was my baseline. Fortunately, I came from pretty educated parents and language was not really an issue. They actually went to English speaking schools when they were living in Hong Kong. The reason why they moved here is because my father went to Columbia University to pursue his PhD in physics and then subsequently got his postdoc at the University of Illinois where I was born, and then he taught at Yale University in New Haven and then ended up in South Carolina for a tenure track position in the physics department. I think the isolation, the social isolation there for us as a family, everything, there's a duality to everything and there there's a good and a bad. And so I think that certainly I encountered difficult times bullying, feeling like an outsider feeling like I didn't belong, and also the pressure to assimilate was so great.
So I refused to speak Chinese because I was kind of ashamed or embarrassed of that. And even the food that I would bring to school for lunch, it was delicious, but people made fun of my weird Chinese spoon. But I think that living in a place that's culturally different also really gave me really interesting perspective because I think increasingly people live in a bubble where they have their internet bubble and then they have the bubble of their community that they surround themselves in. And I did not have that luxury. I really had to cultivate a lot of empathy for not only myself and the situation that I was in, being different from everyone, but also cultivating a lot of empathy for different perspectives for the people around me because I could connect with them on a human level and see even though their political beliefs or their upbringing, their religious beliefs were different than mine, that everybody's coming from the same place. Everyone has a heart, everyone has certain level of intentions or desires or dreams. And so I think it's important to remember that especially during these times when everyone is so polarized.
Brendan Jarvis:
Irene, did the discrimination that you were experiencing at school of being noticeably different, did this come up in conversation with your parents? Were they ever really aware of the things that you were encountering as a student? I
Irene Au:
Did tell them when I was younger and they would just shake their heads and just say, just ignore it. Just ignore it. But they would never go into really deep conversation or coaching around how to handle that. And what's so funny is that, so my family has a slack channel and my brother's on it and my parents are on it. And my father recently was asked to talk about his experiences living in South Carolina with his college. I don't know if it was his college friends or his high school friends. They were very curious to hear about his experiences. So he started a conversation on our Slack channel and kind of invited me and my brother to talk about it. And all these stories came up and my parents were like, wow, we had no idea. We had no idea. So was
Brendan Jarvis:
It willful ignorance, do you think? Did they not want to see it?
Irene Au:
No, I mean, my brother claims that he tried to tell them about some of the hostility he encountered, and I think as a boy, it was actually different and worse for him because it got very physical and my father experienced it too, even in his efforts to get tenure. And I had learned some stories even in the last couple of months that I had not heard before that were really jaw-dropping.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now, I've heard you talk about your childhood before, and I'll quote you now. You said it was very lonely. I was very introspective. I had imaginary friends, but not a very active social life. Outside of that, I had to really hone and develop my listening skills and my negotiation skills and being able to get along with people who were very different to me. And I think all of those qualities I had to cultivate to survive as a child came in really handy later in life. And you touched on those skills a little earlier when you were speaking, and I was wondering, is this something, this realization or these skills or the practicing of these skills, was this something that you were consciously aware of that you consciously decided to do to hone them? Or was it something that you became conscious of more retrospectively when you were thinking about how it is that you've managed to achieve the things that you've achieved in your career?
Irene Au:
I don't think that these skills were deliberately cultivated, but they were strengths that were grown just because they helped me be successful. But I'll share one story that really did change the way I saw myself, which is that as a petite Asian female, I was in a very vulnerable position growing up. I had no, I mean you had just the deficit of being a woman, especially in a conservative culture, and then the deficit of being a minority and then the deficit of being physically petite. So I didn't have the physical stature. And there's a lot of research citing how people who are male or taller or bigger or how deeper voices whatever are generally more successful in the workplace, for example. And even though I had not been exposed to that research as a teenager, I instinctively knew that that was the case. And I remember talking to my guidance counselor in high school trying to figure out what my future path might be, and I mentioned something like I could never see myself working in a corporate environment.
I mean, I don't think people would see me as a leader, even though I held many leadership positions in high school. I was president of the math club or whatever. But she said, well, actually, I think you're going to be an entirely different kind of leader. You're going to be the kind of leader that people want to follow, not because they have to. And so it kind of opened my mind to the idea that there can be different ways to lead and different ways to be effective, and that one does not have to be a towering imposing male boss who's telling everybody what to do, and that there were different ways to effectively lead. This is in the days before there were terms servant leadership or things like that. But that is kind of the perspective with which I have always built and led organizations throughout my career, not necessarily thinking of it as servant leadership, but thinking of it as my job is to create teams that can do the best work of their lives and that as a team as a whole, they can create something greater than any individual alone could do.
And I think that's something that I became really well known for and well regarded for. And that's been kind of the guiding light behind a lot of the organizational strategy and design that I've put in place throughout my time at Yahoo and Google, especially those two companies. And then beyond with a lot of the startups that I work with,
Brendan Jarvis:
That conversation with the guidance counselor and how you saw yourself previously in the shift that occurred for you after she said what she said, and you were able to, I imagine on that and see yourself differently. I heard you describe yourself in another interview as being an Asian American woman, being petite, seeing yourself in corporate America as somewhat of an underdog, and I was curious about that, and I think you used that word underdog. So I was curious about that framing and whether or not that framing played any role in your willingness, not your ability, but your willingness to take on some of the biggest design jobs and software.
Irene Au:
I never thought of. I mean, I was never motivated by this underdog kind of identification. That's definitely not the position that Netscape, Yahoo or Google were in at the times that I joined, even though they were still very early on. What I saw was an opportunity to make something great, and especially at Yahoo and at Google, I was sort of lampooned by my design peers at the time on both occasions for joining those companies. I actually had a colleague laugh at me and said, oh my God, you took that job. When I told her that I was going to Google, because both Yahoo and Google at those times were famously non designed. They were perceived to have no design, but I kind of felt like, look, in spite of their not so great looking design, they are grabbing huge market share and people are spending a ton of time here, so there's great value that they are bringing, they're doing something right.
And if I can take this company from 20% to 90% with design, that is going to be even more value, even more valuable than taking a company that already values design, but maybe at the deficit of something else. And taking the design from 95% to 97% like that to me is not that fun. I know some people enjoy that, and there are plenty of designers out there who only want to join a company where design is already highly regarded and has a lot of power. For me, that is, well, first of all, there weren't that many companies at that time who held design in such regard and prioritized it in the way that you see companies doing it now. But I was far more interested in bringing the internet to a large scale consumer audience. That is what motivated me to join Yahoo and Google and Netscape.
I mean, I first encountered Netscape actually very early on because I was at the University of Illinois for graduate school, and that's where N C S A was housed, and they developed Mosaic, which then became Netscape. I did not know the founders. They left maybe one semester into one or two semesters into my time at the University of Illinois, so I didn't know them, but because Mosaic was developed there, there was an incredible culture around the worldwide web at the university way before most other universities had had that this is where the research was at. This is where all the early work towards getting interesting content online was happening and using the worldwide web as a useful tool for the students and the faculty at the university. And so it was far more fun to poke around on the web and think about how it could be useful and how people used it and how to design it.
It was way more fun to look at that than anything else I could possibly study in graduate school. So that's what motivated me to join Netscape. And when it was time for me to leave Netscape and I was considering Yahoo, I looked at a variety of companies. I looked at design agencies, I looked at other startups like Webvan, and ultimately I chose Yahoo for a couple of reasons. And I think this is important to share because I think it's really important for people to be this intentional with how they spend their time. For me, I knew that I wanted to help develop internet technology and bring that to people. And this was in 1998, so it was still not that common. It wasn't that widespread, but gaining a lot of traction and there was more and more interesting content going up daily. And then the way websites were developed and designed was still taking shape.
I could have joined a place like Web Van. I mean now it's like, okay, we've got Amazon, we've got Instacart. I mean, it's kind of the same thing, but back then I felt like that was ultimately grocery store that happened to use the internet to connect with customers. Whereas at Yahoo or even at Excite, that was about bringing the internet to people. And the reason why I chose Yahoo over excite is because just energetically, I liked the energy more. I mean they, there's like a happy kind of stressed where it's like, there's a lot of work to do, but we're having a lot of fun. And then there's this sad kind of stress, which I observed at the other company, which was like, oh my gosh, there's so much chaos and political infighting and there's no vision and there's no North Star. Yahoo had the fun kind of energy where I just couldn't believe mean this was true at Netscape and at Yahoo.
I couldn't believe I got paid to do this work. I would've done it all for free. I basically did do it for free because I didn't sell my stock at the right time, but it was just exhilarating to work on these kinds of problems with these kinds of people. And to this day, even the boss who hired me at Yahoo, I talk to him every week, so mean it's like first love or family, that team that was built there, they're all some of my closest friends and I consider them to be my brothers and sisters.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's a lot in there. There's a connection to something bigger and more important than design itself, right? A connection to this mission that you are on to want to bring the internet, the benefits of the internet to a global set of consumers. There's also, you spoke about family and the way in which you viewed the people that you were working with and the positive or the happy stress of actually having a lot to do, but it being exciting because it's contextualized within that broader mission. And you talked about not really being attracted to opportunities where design had already arrived. You wanted to get in and get involved at the grassroots and help to make something to actually do. What I'm going to frame here is the hard work of making design something that's valuable and useful to a company and to the users. Now, this attraction or this fire within you was recognized quite early on in your career. I understand when you were at Netscape that you were actually given an award, a rather tongue in cheek award by your colleagues at the time, which was called the jump into the Fire award. This jumping into the fire, this does seem to be a repeated pattern for you. Is this something that is innately rewarding for you? Do you ever get the sense that you just want to take it easy or are you still driven to jump into that next fire?
Irene Au:
Depends on what the fire is, but that particular award was given to me because I developed a reputation for going into difficult situations with other people and being able to work out positive outcomes. So there's something about I guess my ability to listen to others and to negotiate in a way that makes people feel heard and everyone having some sort of contribution that I think is especially powerful and particularly for design, especially meaningful because everyone has an opinion about design and it's not just the designers that have good opinions. And I think you get the best design outcomes when everyone is involved early and upfront. I have encountered colleagues who, not anyone I've worked directly with, but I have encountered fellow designers who have told their engineers like, well, we don't tell you how to code, so you shouldn't tell us how to design. And they kind of feel like design is their rightful domain where they should dictate how everything should look and feel and that the engineers should just implement to spec.
I mean, I'm a computer nerd, so I came into design through engineering psychology and with an electrical engineering background. So I grew up really as a math and science geek, and for love of personal computing, I didn't have Barbie dolls, but I had a personal computer. I had a Commodore Vic 20 and then a Commodore 64, and then a se I thrive off of technological innovation. But you can't get that kind of innovation if it's a completely waterfall process where the design comes up with designers come up with the idea and then the engineers just go implement it. You have to have cross-functional collaboration and ideation up in order to have the true truly meaningful innovations come to the world. So that means that I've had to really hone my skills around how to work effectively with product management and engineering, how to be inclusive, how to be an effective facilitator, and then what are the skills that design uniquely brings to the table where they're contributing in a meaningful and valuable way as much as engineering and product management are. So that's the fire I like to jump into. I guess
Brendan Jarvis:
Other people see you as a designer, and you've held titles that include design. You talked about your background in mechanical engineering and science and math and being a huge personal computing nerd. While you've had that label of designer and you've definitely embraced that label of designer, is it a label that you feel encapsulates the value that you represent? Do you identify as a designer or is that just something that you've adopted as part of trying to make the change you've tried to make at the organizations that you've been at?
Irene Au:
Well, to me, design is about intentionality. It's about kind of having a point of view and optimizing for that point of view. So to that extent, yes, I am first and foremost a designer, but not a designer. I'm not trained formally in the way that many people think about designers, whether it's graphic design or communications design or fashion design or interior design. People, a lot of non designers who know me think, oh, you're a designer so you must know how to draw. It's like, no, these are different skills. Yes, I mean, I'm more a designer than I am not a designer. Design also is a word that is so encompassing these days almost to the point where we have to do some level setting in some conversations. Are we talking about design as problem solving? Are we talking about design as a journey or a process?
Are we talking about the beauty of it, the aesthetics? Are we talking about the journey that people make? And the answer is often yes, all of the above, but it can get really confusing for people for a variety of reasons. So it's important to set that context. I often say design thinking is not design making. One of my concerns is that there's so much fo because in some places that on design thinking that there may not be enough regard for what is beautiful or what is delightful. There's almost like a shunning of that because it's perceived as superficial that aesthetics are just superficial and that design is really deeper. It's more strategic. And yes, all that is true, but I also celebrate the superficial layer like beauty and delight and joy. All the things that great design can bring us is actually wonderful to have in this world as well. My friend Ivy Ross just published a book called Your Brain on Art, and she and her collaborator cite all this research around how art, beauty, aesthetics make us happier and healthier. So I think it's important for us to also celebrate and want better design in this world at not only at a problem solving level, but also at an aesthetics level.
Brendan Jarvis:
I want to come to some craft-based topics soon. I want to come back to before we do that, something that you touched on earlier, which was cross-functional collaboration. And you also mentioned design thinking in there and the difference between design thinking and design making and how some colleagues or people that you're aware of in the industry have felt quite strongly that designers the domain of the designers and put up barriers around that. Now you've said, and I'll quote you again, you've said, no, great product gets created without great product management, great design and great technology, which in that you're speaking to, at least in my interpretation, the importance of that collaboration. You've also said, I think for design to succeed in a company, we need everybody caring about the user experience. It can't just be the jobs of the designers. We need everybody thinking about the product experience. So what was it that you experienced or that you saw or that you came to realize was important about everyone caring about the product experience?
Irene Au:
Well, design is kind of a canary and a coal mine. I have a blog post with this title. All the dysfunction inside a company will manifest itself in the design if it's not great talent, lack of strategy, lack of ability to execute well in poorly trained designers, all of that will manifest itself in the user experience in the design. I point this out because I think a lot of times when executives complain about the design, the temptation is to blame the designer when in reality there are so many systemic factors that affect design outcomes. There's the classic problem of the product looking like the org chart for a company, and you can see the political divisions within a company playing out within the product experience. I've definitely seen those political play out in the design, and sometimes those, I mean, at that point, the issues can only be resolved at the very top. It goes beyond the purview of the designer or the design organization. And have you
Brendan Jarvis:
Seen the top successfully resolve that dysfunction before?
Irene Au:
It depends on the company and it depends on the people. But this is why I think these days there's more interest in investing in founders who have a strong product focus because then they're better equipped and more interested in resolving the issues that lead to better product design.
Brendan Jarvis:
So the founders that you are working with at kosler, by the time you get to work with a founder, do you have any clue as to just where they sit in terms of their attitude or their perception of design and what you might be starting to work with? Or how do you establish that if you don't?
Irene Au:
Everyone's starting at a different place and I try to meet them where they're at. The fact that they're having a conversation with me is already a good sign. I'm never going to cold call an entrepreneur that we've invested in and say and shove myself on them and try to convert them. Usually by the time they come to me, they're motivated. Maybe somebody on their board or on the investing team said, you need to go talk to Irene. Or maybe they decided on their own somehow. But in any case, I meet them where they're at. Everybody has a different kind of understanding of what design is or how to position them within the organization or what role they should play or even how to identify good designers when they see them. And so all of those issues are kind of up for grabs when I talk to them.
And this is why I have a job, because we tend to invest in hard tech. We people working on very difficult problems that are being solved with advanced technology. So this is a bit different from maybe investors who would invest in I don't media and entertainment or commerce platforms or things like that. I mean, we certainly have those in our portfolio, but the main focus really is on heart tech, which means that most of the entrepreneurs we invest in are brilliant scientists or engineers, sometimes doctors, sometimes lawyers, whatever. And so many of them are not designers. And if we do invest in designer founders, which we have a few of them, they're already so savvy with design that they don't necessarily need to work with me because they already value it. They already have a really good understanding of what a good designer looks like.
They know how want a design organization or design partner within their team that they can partner with to make something great. I think Square is a great example of that. Jack Dorsey is himself a designer even I don't know if he identifies as one or not. So I don't really work with Square because I don't need to, but there are plenty of other companies in our portfolio that have this kind of potential because they're building something really great, but they can go even further with great design, which is exactly kind of what I saw in Yahoo and in Google.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk about that because you've worked at a number of Silicon Valley darlings, two of which have since faded being Yahoo and Netscape for various reasons, and one of them's gone on to become Google, one of the most successful companies on the face of the planet. And you also, as you were talking about there, you advise these highly technical founders, these people that often come from different backgrounds like law or science, not necessarily from design. What impact, if any, does the company ceo, but not just the ceo, the other chief, the chiefs that they surround themselves with, what difference does that have on the success or failure for them to realize good design?
Irene Au:
The founders need to have a strong point of view. They need to know what is it that they prioritize above everything else that makes the product and the experience great. In the early days of Yahoo, that was about hand curation of really interesting websites in a browsable directory. So we had a team of web surfers that was their official title, who were themselves very interested and interesting and curious. And so they brought that curiosity and their quirky interests to the task of editing and hand curating what was interesting on the internet. So that was Yahoo start, and that's where it was when I joined the company, they saw the opportunity to build web services, so going beyond a directory, but to build services so that Yahoo could be like the one stop shop for all your information needs as well as any major tasks that you wanted to do on the internet.
So at that time, Yahoo just bought four 11, which built rocket mail, and that became Yahoo Mail. They also started launching my Yahoo. So this is the beginning of a personalized homepage, a personalized portal. And so that's why they hired me. They wanted somebody with my background to help build a human-centered design practice. So I was the first interaction designer there, and I built their first usability lab and brought user research to the whole practice of product development. So there was a very strong vision at the very beginning, and Jerry Yang and David Filo felt like the most important aspect of the user experience was that it was fast. And so that's why Yahoo was so bare bones and was perceived to be undesigned. But it was actually very designed because the absence of any adornment was a deliberate design decision because speed was paramount. I mean, this was during a time when people were accessing the internet on 2,400 bod modems be 4,800 BOD modems if you were lucky. But along the way, as Yahoo grew, we found our challenges because of the.com downturn in 2001. And so most of our competitors went out of business, and we were doing everything we could to keep the lights on. And that's
Brendan Jarvis:
The bad stress you were talking about earlier.
Irene Au:
That is bad stress, but it's bad stress for a different reason. And that's because the company reorganized into different profit and loss units, PNLs different business units that each held their own p and l. So like Yahoo Sports had its own p and l, Yahoo personals had its own p and l, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Each of those business units was run by a general manager. Most of the general managers had sales and business development backgrounds. They did not have product backgrounds, and so they were optimizing for revenue, and that dramatically changed the course of Yahoo forever. Yahoo was actually a very successful product company up until that point, but what ended up happening was that we just started to shove ads in every aspect of the experience as much as possible. I mean, it's like in Yahoo Mail, you would send a message and instead of sending the message and then going back to the inbox or wherever you came from, we would serve a monster ad on a confirmation page just for the purpose of having that pay, that view, that ad impression.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is the dysfunction you were talking about earlier, right? Playing out in the product.
Irene Au:
Yes, exactly. And I mean, who knows what might have happened if we had not done that? Maybe we would've gone out of business too. I mean, we were doing what we had to do to keep the business going. I would've liked to have seen more product innovation, but there was such a short-term Wall Street focus quarter to quarter that there wasn't room to do long-term product planning and strategy and things like that. But at the time, the company c e O came from Hollywood. He himself did not use the internet. He did not use email. And so you just had a very different kind of relationship between the C E O and what was actually being built at the company. That's what has led to Yahoo's Unfortunate Destiny was that was the beginning of it, the lack of product vision and the loss of a sense of who Yahoo was.
And then everything was so fragmented because every product was its own business unit. Suddenly there was no infrastructure that allowed Yahoo to scale effectively. So we had a listings platform for Yahoo classifieds. We had a listings platform for hot jobs. We had a listings platform for personals, a listing platform for Yahoo Autos, you know, get the idea. Everybody was building the same wheel multiple times with different resources. So it was incredibly inefficient. It led to one of the executives wrote a famous manifesto called the Peanut Butter Manifesto. What's that complaining about? These we're spread thin, like peanut butter. All right, so this is the real contrast with Google, and this is where I talk about when people ask me about the differences between Yahoo and Google, because both on the surface, both companies seem to have similar origin stories. They were both founded by graduate students in computer science from Stanford University.
Both companies sought to organize the world's information and make it accessible. And both companies initially at least had the founding design principle of being fast. And that is what led both companies to be successful. But Yahoo from the beginning was about hand curation, and it had a really strong user community, but we didn't know how to monetize that community. We actually had concepts for something that looked like Facebook called Yahoo 360 that we had pitched before Facebook was even around. But it required a huge leap faith because it required incredible infrastructure that had to be built, which we didn't have. And the conventional wisdom at the time was that user communities were very difficult to monetize. And so it was hard for the executives to take that leap of faith to invest in building something like that. In contrast, Google, whereas Yahoo was always about hand curation, Google was about automation and scale in addition to fast.
These are some of the biggest founding design principles as well. So Google has invested probably by now billions of dollars in infrastructure to allow to scale effectively and has never split up the company into different profit and loss statements. They act as one brand, one company. And whereas Yahoo was sort of like a federation of a lot of different companies. So Google's always operated more efficiently and with that singular vision. And the founders were also incredible at operationalizing these principles and ideals almost to the point where it's impenetrable through the processes that were laid out. Whereas with Yahoo, those founding principles got diluted. As new executives came into the company, they kind of lost their vision, and that ultimately impacted the design because nobody really knew what Yahoo meant anymore. So this is a very long-winded answer to your question, but it's a very deep, and I mean it's hard to summarize an pithy statement, but are
Brendan Jarvis:
You very clearly illustrated the similarities, but also the stark differences? And it ties back to where you started, which was the importance of having a strong of view, but not just having that point of view. It seems like the trick, if there is a trick there is actually to persevere with that strong point of view. And in order to do that, you need some form of stability or at least buy in across the senior leadership. That is the way that we are going. Now, I've heard you talk about reflecting on your time working with Larry. You talked about there about the point of view almost being impenetrable. Now, I'll quote you again now, you've said I think Google was amazing in operationalizing the vision that Larry and Sergey had. It was impenetrable actually, and then you laughed, which had its own interesting set of challenges.
There's always been a singular vision for what Google is. It has a very opinionated point of view, and that plays out in the way that it spends money and the way that it invests. And so you talked there about the investment and infrastructure and the centralization and the speed and how all of those things are actually underlying design principles that the company operates by. But this word impenetrable, this has clearly come up more than once. Now you used it just again, right? No, I was curious about this. It sounds like maybe there was a bit of, there's a bit frustration with that point of view being impenetrable. Was it frustrating at times?
Irene Au:
Well, here's an example. Larry had a very strong idea of what would constitute a successful designer at Google. They had to have a computer science degree or training in human computer interaction. They needed to be, I mean, that was the main requirement, but that in itself was challenging. Small
Brendan Jarvis:
Poll. Yeah.
Irene Au:
Larry and Sergey deliberately removed managers out of the hiring process. So we had hiring committees that made the hiring decisions, and they were separate from the panel of interviewers. And so the manager really was kind of cut out of the whole decision making process. So it was like a machine recruiters with source candidates and put them through the system. It was like, you know, put it through the algorithm and then it spits out a packet that hiring committee reviews and then decides yes or no. And everyone on the hiring committee was already programmed that, okay, Larry wants us to look for computer scientists who can design. And so these were the conditions. This was the context into which I entered running design at Google, and so I had 60 designers reporting to me with no middle layer of managers underneath. It was really unfair because three months into the job, I had to write performance evaluations for all 60 of them.
And some of them I had never even met personally. Poor me, right? Pulled in. But yeah, it was really, really difficult to hire designers as you can imagine, and difficult to scale the team. So while the rest of the company and the other functions were hiring crazy, hiring was very slow for us. And so then we were seen as this resource bottleneck because teams certainly wanted to collaborate with designers, but there just weren't enough to go around. And then also Google was perceived at the time as not being really aesthetically that pleasing. I mean, it was just a lot of condensed texts on a white background. And so we wanted to elevate the aesthetics of Google and give it a more refined look. But that was incredibly difficult to do because we literally could not find any visual designers who knew how to code. And so
Brendan Jarvis:
Did Larry and Sergei, did they know this? Was this intentional or did they just assume that these people existed?
Irene Au:
No, it was intentional. In fact, it was so intentional that Larry shut down my headcount when he realized that I was sneaking in candidates who deny have CS decrees.
Brendan Jarvis:
How did that conversation go far
Irene Au:
Out? Well, he shut down my headcount and I had to have a one-on-one with him. That was pretty interesting because it really helped me understand what he was thinking and why he wanted to have coders as designers. So I think this goes back to the jump into the fire activities that we talked about earlier. This was the biggest fire. As much as I hoped to school him on designers and design backgrounds and where they come from and things like that, I was the one who got the schooling because I learned why, and it was actually very reasonable. What did he say? Because it helped me understand the point of view. He felt like a lot of designers create adornment for the sake of it. That ends up slowing down. It compromises the latency and also efficiency of use because if you design for ease of use, sometimes that leads to extra steps or extra explanations, and it does not lead to an efficient interface. And the example he brought up was the Unix interface versus the Macintosh interface. And he wanted an experience that was much more like Unix one that was fast and efficient and designed for advanced users. And actually at that time, Larry and Sergey had edicts saying, this is our target user is basically people like us.
The profile that they wrote out was basical, basically. Yeah, PhD computers, scientists from Stanford.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's just a high bar.
Irene Au:
It helped me understand within the ranks, we had a different archetype in mind because our notions of what successful design meant was different than what he perceived as successful design to mean. Anyway, through that conversation, I was able to understand a little bit better and then find a way a path forward.
Brendan Jarvis:
Irene, do you get the sense that part of the motivation of his motivation was that he's actually looking at the compute cost of design? No, there was never a cost factor. It wasn't like if we add extra screens in here at this scale, we're going to actually end up costing a whole bunch more. No, no,
Irene Au:
No, no. That was never on the consideration. The issue is really around latency. He wanted Google to be a powerful, fast, efficient tool, and in turn, when we create a powerful, fast efficient tool, users are going to feel powerful, fast and efficient. He did not want to optimize for the grandmother in Kansas type of user. He wanted to optimize for the early adopters and the most advanced users on the internet. And that's because the thinking was that eventually new, newer, as newer generations get onto get online, they would be more and more advanced. And he did not want us to compromise the efficiency and the power of the tools that we were building for the sake of people who would not be able to appreciate what Google had to offer. And it was bold at the time. It might seem obvious now, but it was very counterintuitive at the time, but it was the right bet because as a result, Google was seen as a very innovative company.
And it has always been, I mean, I'll give you another example. With Yahoo Mail at Yahoo in general, we were always designing for the lowest common denominator because we did not want to turn away any users who had slower connections or older browsers. And you also have to understand the context in which we were designing. That was before you had automatic software updates. And so people, the general consumer user did not know how to upgrade their software that easily. But as a result, we were not able to take advantage of more advanced web technologies as they got released. So when DH tml and things like that, cascading style sheets started to come be more common, we were still designing the old days, and that was around the time when Gmail came out and it had keyboard shortcuts and all this kind of cool whizbang technology. So anybody who was more internet savvy would prefer to have a Gmail address because they prefer to use Gmail. But also it was like a branding. It's like, oh, if you're using Gmail, that means you're in the know, you're cool, you're smart, you're innovative. Whereas if you've got Yahoo Mail or god forbid, AOL mail, oh my god, you are old and you are not tech savvy at all.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I remember the launch campaign for that. It was invitation only. I think you got five invites or something if you managed to get an invite. It was very clever. I was very jealous of all the people that had had it before I did.
Irene Au:
I don't remember the reason why they did it that way, but probably just because they were trying to refine the product and make sure it scaled well before they had wide release.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you had this conversation with Larry. You suggested that you thought you were going to school him. You were actually were the person that left school and had frozen your headcount. So I was like, you cannot hire any more people. But I know for a fact as per your introduction that you did grow design at Google by quite magnitude after that. So what was it that you focused on? Where did you direct your energy and your intent to within the context that Larry had painted for you, help him to change his posture on design and for you to be able to have the impact that you ended up having at Google as a result?
Irene Au:
Oh, he didn't change. We were the ones that had to change. I think that's something that every design leader should also recognize too. I mean, I actually just had a meeting with a colleague recently who was asking me, oh, and the time that you were at XX Company has anything changed? I'm like, no, and you shouldn't expect it to. You shouldn't try to change it because it's their point of view. Your job is to make them successful under that point of view. So once I understood what he was going for, then I refined the hiring process and the interview process to screen for people who kind of met that criteria to show that I had listened to him. But also I ended up codifying the design principles and evangelizing that across all the Google offices around the world so that everyone could understand why we made decisions the way we did and why Google looked the way why did with those principles.
Then we had criteria by which we could evaluate whether design was considered good or not by Google standards, and we could also uphold the kind of experience that Larry wanted to deliver through the products and services. So it was a combination of things. And then there are also some kind of sneaky things that we did to change the culture around design because like I said before, if you have all the people in the company thinking designers, then design is going to be more successful. So I knew that it Google's relationship with design could not be solved just through hiring designers that wasn't scalable. And our relationship with design was much deeper than what it looked like. And so we implemented a new hire orientation. At the time that I joined, our new hire orientation had two modules. It was one was called Life of a Dollar and Life of a Query.
So Life of a Query was all about what happens in the search world when users execute a search query, what happens? How does that technology look? And then life of a Dollar was the ad side of the business. So there was search and ads, which is what Google really was about, and that was what 95% of our users were coming in for maybe 99%. But I was like, if all the things that have lives in this ecosystem, we don't have talk about the users. So we implemented a third module called Life of User, where we literally taught human-centered design to all the new hires, and it seemed radical at the time, but we were hiring at such a pace that we were thinking eventually this is going to be considered normal. It was a little bit pirate at the time, but kind of underground and subversive. But eventually the thinking was when you're hiring enough people, eventually you'll get to a point where the majority of the company will be trained in human-centered design then not, and it will be the normal way and then it won't even be design thinking, it'll just be regular thinking.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now you called that subversive, and I can see why you describe it that way. It strikes me that in a company like Google it, you wouldn't have had cart blanche to just by decree make this happen. I could be wrong. Well, nobody
Irene Au:
Asked me. Nobody asked me or told me, and I also didn't ask for permission. So I mean, this has been a thread throughout my career too. I've always worked in places where the culture was like, you ask for forgiveness instead of permission. I much prefer to operate that way. So we just did it. We kind of bullied our way into the new hire orientation. It demands to be here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now you spoke about hiring. Now I know that you've personally hired over 500 designers in your career and
Irene Au:
Oh, well more than that,
Brendan Jarvis:
Right? So you've also, as a result said no to probably magnitudes more, and that's a lot of interviews that you've been involved in assessing people. What did you see in the designers who passed your bar that you didn't see and the ones that fell short?
Irene Au:
Oh, okay. So the table stakes are just the hard skills. Do they understand human-centered design process? Can they advocate for it? Can they implement it? Are they creative? Can they come up with a lot of different solutions for any given problem? Can they collaborate well? So there's hard skills and then there's the soft skills. The soft skills I think are much more difficult to screen for because at the time, and I think it's the case now, anybody who knew H T M L and draw wire frames could call themselves a designer. So there's a pretty low bar there.
And even the visual design portfolios didn't have to look that great because the internet was still relatively new and we weren't really hiring visual designers anyway. So it's really the soft skills because they were being hired into environments where they didn't necessarily have the final say or any power. There were varying degrees of people wanting to embrace collaborating with design early and upfront. And so the conditions in some cases would be hostile for design. So I had to hire people who could be the person that everybody wanted to work with because they added that much value to the process and to the product.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you get the sense that you were hiring, you were looking for what others had seen in you and the people that you were hiring given that description you've just given of what it,
Irene Au:
I mean, to a degree, I always operate in a way where I want to be the person that people want to work with. I wasn't necessarily looking for clones like me, but I think it's an important skill for people to have.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you are talking, it's a sort of this EQ IQ thing or hard skills IQ and eq. There're sort of separate but needed in different measures depending on the organization that you're working for. And you've previously said that you spend as much time interviewing people for their EQ as I do for their IQ and for their hard skills. And then you went on to say, I've developed some specific questions and interviews just to be able to assess the and social awareness of candidates. So if you could put only one question to a candidate to assess that, a critical question for a position, what would it be?
Irene Au:
This is where giving me this question upfront would've been really helpful because I'm just scanning through my head now of all the questions that I ask people. I'm not sure if I can boil it down to the one particular zinger. It's not like it's something that you can get just through one question. It's more of a heat map that you're developing around a person just through your interactions with them and the challenges that you bring to them. What would you do if you had more time on this project? I mean, that's an interesting question because it kind of tests how self-reflective are they around the work that they did, because I think any good designer will always see an opportunity for improvement. There's also like, what are your superpowers? I think that's always like P people, it's always interesting to see how people see themselves in terms of what their strengths are.
But then also if you were to hire a number two to support you so that they're doing all the work that you don't want to do, what would they be doing? I think that's a nice coded question to, rather than say, what are your weaknesses? It's more like, what's difficult for or what do you not enjoy? I want to know that too. Everybody has a balance sheet, and that doesn't mean that if they name X, Y, or Z, that means, oh, I can't hire this person. I am building a team, which is a comprised of individuals who all have different superpowers and they compliment each other. So I am trying to assess how would you fit into this team and how are you going to collaborate and build off of the work that other people who are already on the team doing so that you're making everything better? Does that make sense?
Brendan Jarvis:
Are they necessarily wrong answers to these questions?
Irene Au:
I mean, there's no wrong answer. I'm just trying to understand who are you, but they're also questions. What are the biggest challenges that you've encountered in dealing with other people on a project, and how did you overcome those challenges? It's interesting to hear the stories too. And again, there's no right or wrong way. And I've interviewed plenty of people who are put in very unfortunate situations that were out of their control. Going back to the or earlier comments about how if the CEO is not willing to have a extra clear point of view or make difficult decisions or choices, then that trickles down into the design. I've definitely interviewed designers who've had portfolios impacted by the circumstances, and yet I want to see how did you deal with that and did you make the best out of it? Do you even understand what are the factors that affect the outcome? And do you have a sense of disempowerment or are you doing everything you can to make the outcome as good as possible? And if so, what does that look like? So those stories are very interesting.
Brendan Jarvis:
Your insight in design's value being enabled or disabled by the politics and the power that's playing out in the organization is just such a refreshing light bulb. And hopefully it's a light bulb for many other people listening. It certainly was for me. Now I want to take that thread and bring it into something else that I've heard you describe, which is the simplicity that we often seek and design, and that this was reflected in Google, in particular in the design of Google's homepage. And you spoke about this in a talk you gave back in 2014 at mine. The product which was called design, is as important as technology. And I just want to quote you again now, you said it took 15 years to achieve this level of simplicity, and it's certainly not because of lack of will or talent, that it took this long for Google to get there to achieve this simplicity in the face of people's opinions, competing agendas, growing product requirements and features just shows how difficult it is to achieve simple design.
So you were talking there about the candidate's ability to reflect on situations that were suboptimal and what it was that they could draw from that, whether or not they could actually see it for what it was. And in what you were saying in that conference talk, it sounded to me like you were cautioning us cautioning designers to have patience. And also the subtext that I'm picking up from our conversation today, it's almost as if you are also trying to say to us that there's an immense of complexity in enterprise and there are some definite limits on our control of that complexity that we also need to be mindful of.
Irene Au:
No, I mean, I'm not excusing anybody from the hard work. I'm not saying like, oh, the condition sucks so you don't have to feel so bad that your design is terrible because it's not your fault. That's not what I'm saying at all. I mean, that talk is geared towards CEOs and product leaders because I want them to understand that their decisions or lack of decision has design consequences and that they need to be the decider or somebody needs to be the decider. If they care about design, somebody needs to make hard decisions. It's easier than done, which is why I pull up those years of examples of the Google homepage to show how even something as that's perceived, as simple as that can go through so many iterations because it comes down to the people at the top who have to arbitrate those tough decisions.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk about another talk and one that is directly geared towards designers, and that's a talk that you gave called the Architecture of Creative Collaboration. And you shared a number of amazing insights in that talk. And I highly recommend that people go and watch that after they've listened to this, into what makes for good design and how designers can actually influence the status quo in order to achieve work that they're really proud of and that dif makes a difference. And I'm going to quote you again now, you said in this talk, as a former leader of in-house design teams, I have found that the ability to choose your stakeholders or internal clients is key to success. So it sounds like you are suggesting there that design, design leaders need to get comfortable with saying yes to some requests for their time and expertise and no to others.
Irene Au:
Absolutely. And this is emotionally some of the hardest work that designers have to do because it is really painful to see bad stuff going out there and getting launched in the end. If designers stretch themselves thin and just kind of doctor up designs before they go out, that's really not serving anyone well, there's a whole, what do you call, putting lipstick on a pig? It's still a pig.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's kind of like the peanut butter manifesto as well that you were touching on there, right?
Irene Au:
Exactly. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And it actually undermines the design team. If their hope is to prove the strategic contributions and value of design, the worst way to do it is to try to spread the resources thin, because if you're not involved early and upfront, you're not going to get to a good design outcome. If you don't get to a good design outcome, then the stakeholders in the organization cannot advocate for you. They are not going to want to invest in design because it's like, well, this is how outcome we get. So I've always managed the teams with the idea that it's better to do a few things really well. And then once you've launched something that's really amazing than the other stakeholders will be like, oh, I want some of what they have. How do I get that? And then you have a little bit more leverage to negotiate for resources or process changes or things like that.
And it's always helpful to choose stakeholders who are friendly to design, who are motivated and are willing to do whatever it takes to make design successful. So sometimes, I mean, a lot of times those teams are not like the highest priority teams. I mean, hopefully they are, but sometimes if the highest priority team has the crown jewels, as was the case with Google search, it's really hard to implement change there because there's, people are just a little bit more risk averse. So you know, don't want to work on something that's so low priority that nobody cares or notices if you do some amazing work, you got to be on the radar. Do you want to find the project and the people where the conditions are right and ripe for success? And then you use that as a case study to argue and advocate for changes and improvements, and then it becomes a virtuous cycle from there. So that has been sort of the operating playbook that I've implemented in all these years.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's fascinating here you talk about this. I had a conversation with Modo, the SVP and chief design officer at PepsiCo, and he almost told me exactly the same playbook, although he didn't touch on, he didn't touch on what you've raised here, which is the scarcity that you've only have so many limited resources. You need to be able to effectively evaluate the opportunities, things that are on the radar, and then really go all in on those to build those proof points. You talked about the frustration of seeing work go out there that's not great, and why that's important to then focus your effort. And if there's a stereotype that comes up regularly about designers, it's the designers that are always lamenting that 20% of the work that they couldn't achieve in ignoring the 80% of the work that's been successful and this frustration that designers feel, or that's something for every individual designer to come to terms with. But you've spoken about this and you've said the reality of projects is that we do often have to make compromises. Sometimes we are so constrained that design can't be all that we want it to be. When we have to live with the reality of a compromise or a constraint, it helps to take an optimistic view. So why does it help to take an optimistic view? How does being optimistic about the constraints that are inevitable, how does that designers and design?
Irene Au:
Oh, where there's constraint, there's opportunity, there's guardrails, and that's where the creativity, that's the space where creativity happens. That's where some of the greatest design innovations take place.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is what Larry put in place for you. He had a preexisting constraint of latency, has to be really, really, really low. And instead of fighting against that and trying to do something different and probably getting yourself fired, you accepted it and then worked within it.
Irene Au:
And I think the outcome was something far better than either of us started with in the beginning. So I appreciate that I was challenged in that way, and he was absolutely right. It forced me to be a better designer and a better leader.
Brendan Jarvis:
You also spoken this talk about getting the details and something that I really connected with was your description of having to work with engineers who just don't see the details to the degree that you do or that designers typically do when it comes to the craft aspect of probably in this case, probably UI more. So this is where it is obvious to me or has been in the past and just how important getting these details is to creating a compelling experience. Now related to this, I understand that there was a beam in your old house that caused you a decade of frustration.
Irene Au:
Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
Tell us about the beam. What was it about this beam and why is this a thing that caused you so much frustration?
Irene Au:
Oh, well, I mean people can see photos of it, I guess in my transcript from the architecture of creative collaboration talk. But I think it reflects the reason why missed details are so offensive is because it shows a lack of discipline, a lack of planning, a lack of care, a lack of attention to detail, an absence of mindfulness. I mean, there are all these vices that we don't want to see in the world. And so seeing that beam where the light fixtures trim had to be shaved off to accommodate the beam, it didn't have to be that way, but every time I look at it, it's a reminder of all of those characteristics that I don't want to see in this world in my life.
Brendan Jarvis:
How is that conversation with the builder?
Irene Au:
I don't even want to go there. I didn't, there's no point in stirring that stuff up, but it was remedied by building a new house
Brendan Jarvis:
In my life. I think if there's any luxury that we have in digital product is that we don't have to live in for a decade with our mistakes generally. Well with other people's mistakes. You've said about the sort of attention to detail and the offensive nature of when a design is not realized as it was intended. You've said no amount of design details will matter if they're not executed well. So this common situation that you've been venting some frustration at this is something that we, the world's not perfect and as design as we seem to notice the imperfections potentially more than most. What does this mean though in digital product for design's relationship with engineering?
Irene Au:
The lack of detail. What does it mean between design and engineering? Well, this
Brendan Jarvis:
Is clearly a problem. It's not an isolated problem like this result of design not being translated in engineering with full care and attention. Pay to the details is not a one off. This is something that happens regularly. So what does it mean in the context of the most successful realizations or expressions of design that you've been involved in? How has the relationship with engineering been different or better than it has been with the situations where it's been imperfect and frustrating?
Irene Au:
So the best outcomes happen when, number one, everybody's collaborating early and upfront so that everyone's on the same page and looking out for these issues well before any code is even written. But also in the context of software development, it is helpful to have this middle layer of talent, which we call the front end engineer or the front end developer or the UI engineer. They come in a lot of different job titles, but ultimately they're like this squishy in between layer between design and engineering where they see the design details and they have the skills to implement the details in the front end. Those people historically have been very difficult to hire in organizations like Yahoo and Google where they're not quite software engineers, so they wouldn't pass the bar for hi being hired as software engineers, but they're not quite designers because they don't have the portfolio of designers.
And so at Yahoo and at Google, we remedied that by creating a whole separate job ladder for these people with our own hiring requirements. And I think these days it's a little bit more conventional, but particularly at Yahoo and Google where the hiring bar for, so for anybody who touches code was extremely high, it was very difficult to get those people hired. And then on the design side, maybe they could get hired if I had allocated headcount for them and wrote the job description for them. But then if they were checking in code, they would still need to have a relationship with the engineering organization and pass some kind of bar to be able to launch shipping code. So that had to get smoothed out.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I think that's an important, those front end. Front front. It sounds like you're trying to articulate the front end designer, engineer, crossover. Yeah, they are very difficult to find. And I think given the constraints that you were put on in Google in particular, that would've been a challenging situation. Yet creating that job ladder that you spoke of was one of the ways that you were able to circumvent that. We talked a little bit earlier about the design as being the people that have the greatest sense of taste, design taste in this actually might have been offline before we hit record, but this arbiter of taste, this idea that as designers, we have a responsibility to be the arbiters of taste. And I spoke with Jesse James Garrett late last year, and he and I also had a similar conversation around this idea of if designers weren't hired at least initially for their taste, then what were they really hired for?
Now with design being, so you talked about it being difficult to define or it being important to be intentional about the definition of design or the area of design that you were speaking about with it being so broad though, and with designers coming from such varied backgrounds from all over the world, whether they're formally trained or unformally trained, how do we do that without having an objective? If there could be such a thing, an objective benchmark of what constitutes good design or tasteful design, how do we bring that to our roles? How do we educate ourselves or how do we know whether or not we're actually being great of taste?
Irene Au:
I think that that only comes through experience that's accumulated over time because you start to build a sensibility around what works and what doesn't work, and you can really only get that with experience, and that's okay. It's also people who come in with a fresh perspective because they're brand new. They come in with beginner's mind. There's beauty to that too. So it's nice to have a diverse range of experiences, experience levels on the team because they all bring different qualities to the table. But in terms of being the arbiter of good design, I do think that it comes down to experience and observation. There are attempts at creating more objective measures like usability benchmarking, so looking at what are the fundamental tasks that a product is supposed to allow people to do, and then what's the time on task or the ease of use using lyr skill ratings, things like that. So yes, it is possible to develop more so-called objective or observable ways to assess the quality of a design. But in terms of aesthetics, yes, there are ways that you can develop skills for that too, but they're just less commonly used because it becomes a very inefficient way. It's not a generative way of creating design. So that really comes through like it's an internal leap of faith and understanding.
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke about the role of experience there and the sensibility comes through having experience, and I suppose being a reflective practitioner as well, if you do the same thing over and over again and you're not interested in understanding why you got the results, then you're not really progressing as a professional. So that ability to think critically about the decisions you've made or the designs that you've created seems to be key as well. And yet, on the other hand, you've also acknowledged in something that you, previ previously have said that the field is really relatively new in terms of software design. Now in particular, I'll, again, you said this profession design is still very nascent and we're still figuring a lot of things out, and I think the more we can exchange information and help each other out, the better all of us will be. So in your mind, what is the most important question that the profession is struggling to ask or potentially struggling to answer? What is it that you feel that we need to help each other out the most with?
Irene Au:
Oh, again, and a question that requires a lot of reflection and contemplation. I'm not sure if I can give the best or the deepest answer right now, but a couple of things that come to mind because I think this is, again, I live in a bubble, so the problems that I see may be different than the problems that people see elsewhere in the world. I mean, I think there's still a lot of questions around job ladder. What does it look like to be promoted to a staff designer or a level six designer, whatever, what does that look like? Even questions like should the hiring process, should the interview process include a design exercise or not? That's still being debated. So I think best practices around assessing designers is still inconsistent across the board. And then how we evaluate designers, because that goes hand in hand, but I also think that the nature of the design profession will only continue to evolve because as organizations and stakeholders become more product savvy and more savvy around user experience, we do get kind of a collision at the most strategic levels between product leadership and design leadership. And I think you're nodding your head. So I think you've seen this, and I think a lot of people could probably relate as I reflect on the history of this job title, user experience designer, it's kind of meaningless and I'd like to see it go away. Actually
Brendan Jarvis:
Tell me more.
Irene Au:
Because in the early days of software development, we had user interface designers, but people kind of stakeholders kind of saw the user interface designers as being the ones who just made things pretty and there wasn't an acknowledgement of who was looking out for how you move people through and how do you get people to achieve their goals through a series of tasks, things like that. So it went beyond the screen. So then we had the job title, interaction designer and interaction designer was remarkably different from visual designer. So you have this visual layer and then you have the interaction layer, which is kind of the structure and the strategy. But as designers started to move their efforts upstream into product strategy or product concept, that really is user experience. So the whole job title user experience was a term coined to make sure that there was somebody responsible for advocating for that whole layer.
Jesse, James Garrett has that book, the Elements of User Experience. So I think of all of those different layers, the scope, the strategy, the structure, et cetera, that there would be a design that the designer was at least the person in the absence of the other functions looking out for all of that. What I think what we've seen over time is now you have product managers who are doing more than just project management. They're doing more than just trying to figure out what the requirements are. They're active collaborators in figuring out the scope and the strategy, and in some cases how you move people through the experience. And this is where it kind of collides with user experience design. My hope and dream is that at some point, like everybody is thinking about the user experience and they all see themselves as accountable for delivering a great experience, in which case you don't need to have somebody with that job title, user experience designer, and then the designers can go back to doing design, which is probably interaction and visual design. Anyway, that's a little bit of history behind the evolution of why that job title even started, but why it needs to go away.
Brendan Jarvis:
I just want to make sure I get you right. I understand what you're saying. Are you suggesting that you see a future where designers are focusing on interaction and UI and the design decisions that are now upstream of that wrapped up into product management?
Irene Au:
No. My hope is that everyone is actively collaborating early and upfront on all of the above. If you're a company like Google that's founded on technological innovation, you need engineering to be as involved in the strategy and the scope. There are companies that are founded based on a design innovation or marketing innovation. Maybe they're the leaders, but ultimately you need everybody involved. Somebody needs to be the keeper of the vision, and it may reside in different places depending on what the strategic advantage is or the perspective is of that company. But my hope is that everyone becomes savvy enough to be caring about the user experience and to think like designers. I said design thinking becomes regular thinking then we don't have to call it design thinking anymore. It's just thinking everyone's empathetic, everyone's thinking about user needs, and then designers go back to designing
Brendan Jarvis:
As we bring the show down to a close. Irene, I've got one final question for you, and I'm going to quote you one last time. You've said, in the world of designing experiences where development cycles are significantly shorter, it's tempting to tell ourselves that we don't have time to do these things that need to be done. We take shortcuts and the hope of pleasing the stakeholders by giving them what they think they want very quickly. So what shouldn't we compromise on in order to please stakeholders, and how do we do that without compromising our relationship with them?
Irene Au:
I'm not sure what the context was for that quote, but I am not against pleasing stakeholders. I mean, we should be pleasing stakeholders. We should be the people that everybody wants to work with. I think the gap is that sometimes what the stakeholder thinks they need or what they think they want is different from what they actually need. And so it's incumbent upon the designer to discern that and to bring forth alternatives so that the executives or the stakeholders see whatever it was that they didn't see before or wanted, but could not express verbally before, if that makes sense. So we talk about designers like anticipating needs and understanding people's latent unmet needs and delivering on them. I mean, we need to bring those skills to collaboration with stakeholders as well. I think a lot of times people lack the language to express what it is that they're looking for, and so if you take their words literally sometimes that's not actually what they want or what they mean or nor it may be the best outcome.
And so it's helpful for designers to kind of bring forth alternatives as a contrast to what is being said literally or interpreted literally so that executives can see the consequences of their decisions and what different outcomes might be. Designers, their ultimate job is about making vision tangible, and I think designers are failing their stakeholders if all they do is come up with the one way and bring that to the stakeholder and say, okay, I'm giving you what you asked for. And I'm not saying that designers should not give stakeholders what they asked for. That's not what I mean at all, is that sometimes it requires showing options to help stakeholders understand what they really need or want.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's such an important point and a very crystal clear clarification. Irene, thank you. This has been such an insightful and practical conversation about design leadership. Thank you for being so generous with your stories and insights with me today. And also thank you for your continued service to the design community and also for being such a powerful and positive role model.
Irene Au:
Thank you for having me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thanks, Irene. It's been my pleasure. And if people want to connect with you or follow what it is that you've been doing and that you're contributing to the design community, what is the best way for them to do that?
Irene Au:
I am really trying to stay off of social media these days, but if there are any essays that I'll write, they'll be on medium, medium.com/design-your-life, and then I guess on Twitter, if anybody's using Twitter anymore. I'm certainly not, but I'm @IreneAu and on Instagram, I'm @irene__au. It turns out there are a lot of Irene Au's on Instagram, and I did not grab that handle early enough.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's always that rush, that land grab when something new comes out.
Irene Au:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thank you Irene, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Irene and all of the things that we've been speaking about.
If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe so it turns up every two weeks, and also tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value out of these conversations at depth.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz, and until next time, keep being brave.

Irene Au

Reflections on Executive Design Leadership

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Who is Irene Au?

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