Nick Cawthon - Mobile first, agents next: The future of UX

Steve Usher (00:00) So Nick, welcome to the Experience Designers. Nick Cawthon(00:03) Hello Steve, good morning. Steve Usher (00:05) Good morning to you, sir. Good morning. So Nick, I'd like to dive in if I may. Let's just jump in. I'd like to kind of sink in a little bit before we go into like the what you do and some of your perspectives around the discipline and the passion for the work that you've chosen to spend time in for a couple of decades now. I'm just curious about the roots and your roots. What were some of the moments maybe in your childhood or early career that was really influential to the work that you do today? Nick Cawthon(00:37) Yeah, I know you are in time zones far away, but here in California, it is camp time for any of the moms and dads listening ⁓ at 8 a.m. on summer weekdays is time you shuttle your kids off to camps. And that's certainly the case in our household this morning. And I remember going to these camps and my parents had enough attentiveness to know that I was into the visual arts and I wouldn't mind spending a day drawing or ⁓ painting or doing things that were craft-based. Those kinds of experiences, I think, were very formative. I remember one where I was sitting at a table with a couple of my mates at probably third grade or so, ⁓ drawing a World War II dogfight. This whole story or this whole passage may have taken the sum of 15, 20 minutes, but I'm still talking about it 30, 40 years later. I remember at the end of the exercise where She just wanted to keep us quiet. I'm one of the den moms. ⁓ I looked up and I looked at my drawing. thought, wow, I really cared about this, this drawing of this idea that I had in my head. And I really felt as if my work was good and that it was a worthy investment in my time. And you kind of hold onto those moments. I hope everybody has moments like that in their lives where it's these throw away, mean nothing exercises, ⁓ but They reflect back on a point of pride and confidence and direction that steered me ⁓ all the way through university, staying focused on the visual arts and ways to express yourself across different mediums. And I remember talking my way into a university ⁓ upper graduate course. So it was my first semester, my first day of school at university. And I walked into a upper graduate visual design, visual arts course. And the teacher was willing to give me a flyer and let me try as I may. And I knocked the first assignment out of the park. really just went all in and tried to show that class that I could do as good as they could. Now, my lack of discipline ultimately caught up with me. But I think that when we are all away from home for the first time, it was a lot of getting used to and adjustments. it were moments like that. gave me assurances of the ability to express oneself through what eventually became design, which eventually became interaction design and user experience design and now service design. it, you know, again, I do consider myself so fortunate to have those seminal moments early on in my development, as well as the ability to recognize them to say, you know, there are worse ways to spend your summer afternoon ⁓ than being able to do this all day. ⁓ And so I've really enjoyed that aspect of my career, my life. Steve Usher (03:31) Hmm. Yeah, love that. Can I just reflect on this? This is where experiences gets us just so interesting and so impactful. ⁓ that, you know, this ability to kind of recall this kind of memorable moment that is so burnt into your memory and you know, that ability as designers to get more intentional about that. going forward for others and ourselves and those around us and how much impact we can create. ⁓ Can I just ask though, like having a think, like maybe breaking that down, is there any additional learning that we can take from maybe that environment that you were in at that time that really fostered or created that space for you to explore and be creative? Even though there's an actual inherent internal element to this, I'm just maybe to scratch away at the external conditions and what could we learn from that maybe? Nick Cawthon(04:40) What is shocking to me is that this whole episode of sitting down and doing a thing and coming away from it and being able to recall the feeling it gave you, ⁓ even if that time span was again as short as maybe 10 or 15 minutes. ⁓ Yeah. Again, I mentioned as it was a throwaway afternoon, it was a Wednesday afternoon. We were just trying to kill time. ⁓ Steve Usher (04:57) Yeah, it's crazy. Nick Cawthon(05:08) the ability to the notion of flow of where you find yourself in a flow state and that you are working, but you're not working because your mind and body are sort of in synchronicity. I think that might have been an early flow state experience of how did that feel to a nine year old? What does flow state feel like? because as you get older, you're like, well, I'm distracted all the time and I really want to find this state again. I want to find that. Steve Usher (05:31) Hmm. Nick Cawthon(05:38) that feeling, but what do you tell a child who experiences it for the first time how you describe that experience of time slips away and you are completely involved in the work? ⁓ So I hope we, again, it's something it's the, as a musician, especially as a bass player, ⁓ we are eternally in search of tone, which is this ethereal concept of I want to sound just like I want to sound. I think that as practitioners, ⁓ in these fields of experience and design, we want to find that flow state. And ⁓ if you think about it from the customer standpoint, to come through an experience without any roadblocks or barriers or friction points where it just all easily flows into one another. Steve Usher (06:24) Yeah. So, as we kind of explore experience design, as I shared like ⁓ from a discipline perspective, I'm very much welcoming you onto the podcast because you are the very first guest that I've had. As I continue to explore all of these kind of different disciplines in experience design and just to give some context to the audience, you've worked in San Francisco. and in the field of UX design for several decades. ⁓ San Francisco is kind of a perceptually anyway from here in Europe, it's kind of the Mecca of UX design for many of us. I'm just really curious to just ground for a moment to give everybody a bit of a sense of the, not the history, but the vibe of UX design in your context and in your location and how you've seen it evolve over the over those times? Have there been key pillars or pivotal evolutions? If you were sitting in a bar having a beer, what are some of the things that you would anecdotally share or say, these are the good old days of UX design? What would you be sharing in those moments? Nick Cawthon(07:30) Yeah, it came from UI, ⁓ this notion in the early 2000s of design as it's no longer being applied to graphics, the cork express and the page makers and the magazine and the book layouts. ⁓ There was a ⁓ bifurcation, a deviation from you're either going to choose the old print media or you're going to do this new interactive media. When I was returning to graduate school here in San Francisco, that was a very distinct path that one could choose. ⁓ And I chose the latter. was privileged and fortunate enough to have access to technology growing up. And so I felt very comfortable with these new mediums as the internet was described at the time. And that sort of expression of subjective design went on for years. ⁓ You have an idea and a skew warpism of how you want it to look. Wood panels or ⁓ leather and we all have this subjective way of expressing ourselves through user interfaces. And that went on for a while, ⁓ but then design became commoditized. We had things like ⁓ freelancing websites pop up where now the price to find somebody to do an interface became significantly cheaper. We had the introduction of the iPhone and the Android where ⁓ Steve Usher (08:33) Hmm. Nick Cawthon(08:55) Along with that, those major technology companies like the Microsoft, Apple's and the Google's of the world realized that when they have a device and all these independent developers are making interfaces that look completely different from one another, A, it's bad legibility and hard to use, B, it diminishes the brand value because it doesn't all look the same. in reaction to that, ⁓ started to put money and investment and time into pattern libraries and design systems and carbon design, material design and cocoa and all of the ways to say, if you are going to build an app, use these kinds of parameters in your visual interface because we figured out what the best legibility and human factors as they used to call it. And that began the advent of user experience, where if you take the subjectiveness of the design artifact out of it, and it now becomes how does the end user move themselves through this digital experience, it became the thing that was the most important. That notion of Apple products or Mac products, it just works. Well, no, because it works because they paid attention to all of the blockers and the roadblocks and the friction points and the points of misunderstanding. that had come along the way. For years, the technology companies in Silicon Valley thought that if something was well-designed, was a show of weakness. ⁓ was an aesthetic that meant that it wasn't engineering-focused or enterprise-scale, and it was almost like a badge of pride to say it's horribly designed, but that must mean it's powerful. you think like in a Russian tank, like what's the human factors involved in a Russian tank? Well, no, it's it's probably not doesn't have the nicest of cushions. Sorry, ⁓ geopolitical issues aside. The it's so but the Apple and the iPhone changed that because it was such a success and it had such a beautiful interface ⁓ that it began to be more focused on the experience of using it. And there are many other sort of anecdotes along the way. The one that I'll share at the bar, the proverbial bar we're talking about is the first time you opened an Uber app when this notion of a peer-to-peer economy was still fresh in our minds, where there wasn't the same comfort level that we might have today about getting into a stranger's car and have them take you to the airport. That notion was foreign to many. But when you open the Uber app, you saw these little cars driving around and you think, ⁓ it must be okay because there's all these other people inside of cars and they're all around me. So that humiliating experience of standing on the curb and raising my hand and trying to flag down a taxi ⁓ is alleviated because I can see that they're everywhere and I can have this affirmation that I'm not the only one that thinks this is crazy. It's in fact commonplace. And so there was a wonderful marketing ploy of A, those taxis on that loading screen were fake, but it alleviated the fears that I might have of somebody adopting a new technology or in this case, a new industry and getting me to the point of yes, a lot faster. Steve Usher (12:30) How has this shifted customer behaviour in this sense as well? For those that don't work within UX and also from a human behaviour point of view and the way we interact and also get influenced by these products. What's some of the kind of things that we need to know about that would be, you know, behind the scenes insights of some of the practices or some of the like methodologies that really sit behind that. Nick Cawthon(12:59) I'll give you some hodgepodge. remember the first time I felt old, one of the first times I felt old, is when I opened Snapchat and it immediately jumped to ⁓ the camera and I didn't understand what I was supposed to do. had used the early Instagrams and the photo sharing apps. I had to use those sparingly, but the fact that the interface took me into an experience that was jarring and confusing to me. ⁓ Well, okay, they understand that their value and their users value is in sharing photo apps, but they're not presenting me with an aggregation that I can see other people's there instead sort of putting it right into my hand of you're opening this app to ⁓ take a photo very quickly. And if you look at ⁓ some of the enhancements that Android and Apple have done over the years where double clicking the power button will automatically open up a photo, ⁓ the picture because if you've seen our parents have a moment with grandkids and then they okay, they take their phone out and then they turn it on and then they unlock it and then they find the app and then they press the button and then the camera comes up and then they figure out how to point and click it. And that was like a 25, 30 second process. But what these technology companies did is they realized these moments happened so fast. And by the time you do those seven steps, the moment is gone. And so if you can have some sort of hardware shortcut to get you to the point where you can take pictures a lot quicker, the likelihood that you capture those moments is much higher. So Snapchat knew that ⁓ and put you right into that photo mode earlier. But ⁓ again, my pragmatic brain wasn't able to comprehend that. ⁓ Going back to your question, ⁓ I think that some of the strategies that we can apply is being able to be in context with our user is to try to find those vulnerabilities of the person on the curb with their hand in the air. What a humiliating experience that must be for you. And to say, can we make that easier so that you don't have to stand and locate the service that's driving by at high speeds that may or may not choose to pick you up. And I think that's something that only comes with a human experience, that only comes through being patient and honest and embedding yourself into what that service experience is. And as we hit the 19 minute mark of this recording, ⁓ it's always fun to see how long it's going to take to start mentioning words like AI and generative tools. But I think that 19 minutes is a new record for me. ⁓ Steve Usher (15:49) Haha! Nick Cawthon(15:52) It's it. Steve Usher (15:52) Well, I like to create the foundation first because I, do you know what? I'm human centric by nature. AI, shmay I, what can we say? Nick Cawthon(16:01) Yeah. But it's something that, yep, you're a place. Like it's something that, that you cannot, you cannot find those vulnerabilities a blinking cursor that has to be done with patience. Steve Usher (16:11) No, Yeah. let's dive into those two letters for a moment because I think reflecting on this kind of journey for UX as a discipline, it's evolution. And there's a turnkey moment and lots of industries are being disrupted, evolve, growing, developing, whatever word we want to insert in that comment. ⁓ But how is it impacting UX? What's the fundamental impacts that you're seeing? Nick Cawthon(16:39) UX is so standardized now. We understand what it means to create an interface. And I think even to the point where ⁓ as more and more agents come into the world, ⁓ the interfaces become obsolete because we've seen with ⁓ Rabbit and other ⁓ tools is that there may be agents that are using the browser instead of humans. ⁓ And that's fine if they need to buy groceries or book a ticket or things like that. ⁓ If the interfaces and the patterns are all standard, ⁓ that makes it easier to process information. There was ⁓ a good number of years where we weren't sure what a tab structure looked like. Amazon used to have three rows of tabs, one for every category of department in their store. But I think that we, as a... society figured out how to present complex information pretty well. I think that we figured out these patterns in these libraries and they're commonplace and now they can be generated with a touch of a finger. ⁓ And so if you take that UI almost completely out of it, what does that mean for experiences? Like where do we need to ensure that there is a human in the loop? If we are now giving them Steve Usher (18:04) Yeah. Nick Cawthon(18:06) A very standard approach and again, your site is going to start looking like everybody else's site unless you discernible actions or your app or your product. Dissertable actions to show that there's a human being behind all of this. And I think if I may sort of beat this drum, ⁓ this humanist experience may come out in different ways. It may come out through things that are hand done, things that are messy, things that are imperfect. Because we know that the computers, the algorithms are very good at presenting the orderly, where in that human interpretation does disorderly come as a point of delight. So that's where my head has been, is to really try to that chaos. Steve Usher (18:46) Yes. Wow. You know, I saw a post someone saying that they actually enjoy seeing typos in emails ⁓ because it highlights that it's potentially a human typing that with errors. It's now seen as a thing, which is so interesting. I've got a question here, which came to mind. Super interesting because we're in this kind of transition phase right now. We're in a turnkey moment. ⁓ If UX design has been focused on the human interaction with the human centricity designing with and for humans and how they interact And then now we're moving into like agents who don't need to design, you don't design for agents necessarily or do you design for agents and present it in a different way or is the agent still capable of extracting information regardless of how it's being designed? Or actually, we just going to put aside, in the future, we're not even designing for humans anymore. actually because there's so many agents. It's purely for the agent to agent connection interactions. Nick Cawthon(19:59) We hit this around 2008, 2009, we hit this inflection point, a gentleman named Luke Roblowski, I'll butcher his last name, was very famous of saying mobile first. And so those of us who were interaction designers from the term of the century were used to designing for desktops. At the time, those resolutions were 640 by 480 and then they expanded to 1028 by 720. But then all of a sudden, this new medium came out, this new platform of mobile devices. And there was a time where we weren't sure which way it was going to go. And Luke was this sort of flag bearer of, you do the mobile first and then everything falls back from that. And I think we're in that same kind of inflection point of who are we designing for anymore? And if we are using these generative one click gives you a UI. Is that good enough? And where do we need to intervene? Change the copy, change the art direction so that it is not just cookie cutter off the shelf. And these are brand extensions and aspects of visuals. But I think that ⁓ there's also a ⁓ way to approach things like growth. such adoption of SaaS platforms because there are so many different tools that you can put into your workflow and process. What is really interesting to me, ⁓ and I click on it every time, ⁓ is when CEOs of seed or series A companies that are trying to offer a service say, find some time on my calendar, ⁓ book a half an hour with me, let me know how you're using the product. I will do that every time and I will take that. effort and I'll put it on my LinkedIn to say, Hey, this is a customer centric company. This is somebody who's willing to stand in front of their product and take random calls from strangers so that we can help give them feedback on the misconceptions of how we think you're using it versus how you're actually using it. And I think that's a, from those of you who are in the start of space and entrepreneurs to offer yourself up that kind of vulnerability. And. Calendly or whatever calendaring service you use can constrain it so that there's only so many slots a week or a day So it doesn't take over your life as you grow but to put yourself in front of that research and that interpretation I think from an organizational standpoint is a wonderful humanist approach To just say anybody that wants to come in and talk and walk me through it. ⁓ I'm all yours Steve Usher (22:47) Yeah, think that's amazing. That's a great does this mean then with this everything kind of changing, there's this kind of term I think that we discussed, which is around what gets left behind. And it's something you're exploring yourself. Elaborate on this term, like what gets left behind. Nick Cawthon(23:07) Yeah. That kind of, makes me sad because if we, if we look at digital transformation and I know that's a buzzword that the big consultancies of the world have made billions, not trillions of dollars of selling transformation efforts to their clients. We've already experienced a wave of it. know, Y2K Microsoft office was going to just change the way the workplace functioned. Steve Usher (23:12) Let's go there, let's go there. Nick Cawthon(23:37) pen and paper we're going to get left behind and we were going to use spreadsheets and Word documents. And that was a huge under going and there were those who weren't comfortable with it and wanted you ever go into those restaurants or their stores where it's all the same way then it'll never change and they're just going to write out their processes and no amount of discounts on Microsoft Office suite is going to get them to adopt a new way of working. I had lunch at a place in San Francisco that had their receipts written on the back of a napkin ⁓ and that every transaction in that place was cash only to the point where every diner around me would go across the street to the bank to get the money to pay the bill that was written on the back of the napkin. ⁓ And so that wave of digital transformation occurred, know, 80s and 90s. ⁓ And then there was another with regards to the cloud. And I think you and I are both old enough that we may have seen people who are still not comfortable with that cloud transition of SaaS products. And they like the file on their desktop, that virtual icon that indicates this information is on my hard drive. And I can trust that it's there and I'm not going to lose it. Nevermind you lose your laptop, your hardware gets corrupted, the file gets corrupted, but that gave them a sense of confidence. Whereas if you adopted cloud-based tools, you knew that it was much safer now that the SaaS platforms have matured and backups are secure and that there's a sense of ⁓ stability to SaaS platforms that there may not have been 10 years ago. But there are those who have still resented that and then don't want to do the online-based CRMs and think that spreadsheets are good enough for everything. I think there's also privacy issues there as well. ⁓ I'm leading to ⁓ what's happening now is this new core workplace competencies of generative tools and we're putting information into our own models to begin to query and understand insights from and issues of trust and privacy ⁓ are going to start to come up again, whether or not it be the transformation way of a pen and paper or local versus cloud based or I know I know it's true because I looked at every reference and research myself and I generated this on my own without any assistance from an algorithm. So, you know, those were three very distinct waves of transformation that I've seen over the course of my career. And what has gotten left behind on each one of those? ⁓ I think, again, there's sort of these issues of ⁓ privacy and trust and vulnerability. ⁓ Steve Usher (26:12) Hmm. Nick Cawthon(26:30) I fall on the fault of I'm all in. I will accept it and see where it takes me. And then for whatever happens, I can make up ⁓ the loss of data, the loss of money, whatever that can figure out a way around it. Because ⁓ just in the sense of my ethos and being, I've got to keep moving. I got to keep moving forward. Steve Usher (26:53) Yep. Yep. I agree. I think you described your career and I might butcher this, uh, pronunciation, but is it Ouroboros? Um, yeah. Nick Cawthon(27:01) Yes, Oura boros the snake that eats itself. Steve Usher (27:05) Yeah, this kind of constant cycle of like reinvention. ⁓ So for me, like what's the message around why is this mindset crucial now, ⁓ particularly when we compare to the past ways of innovation that you shared? Nick Cawthon(27:17) Yeah. If we look at experience design or service design, but I think that the notion of what are our core skills that we need to fall back on, and that's the ability to have human conversations, to extract experiences, to help generate new experiences, to understand requirements. Those are some core competencies that we can never get rid of. But the snake eating itself happens more in the tools that we use in order to get there. Once you feel comfortable, of, I've got this tool set or I've got this style of this way of doing it. You've got to now throw it away and learn, learn it again. You know, of the age now where I'm seeing a lot of my contemporaries struggle in the workplace, especially in technology, especially in Silicon Valley, where it's a young person's game. And the commitment and the time and the group mindset it takes to go into some of these companies. is not for those who have now found other avenues of their life in which they find valuable, wife, kids, travel, ⁓ health, those basic concepts. And to say that, okay, if you have to now reinvent yourself every five to 10 years, because standing still isn't gonna work anymore, to achieve balance, you must keep moving forward, that... It's a very cyclical feeling where you are constantly trying to reimagine what it is you do, how you can continue to add value, especially if the tool set keeps changing from underneath you. Those are very sort of transient and cyclical feelings in nature. Steve Usher (29:02) Yeah. I think so. just to build on that. What I heard there also was probably like, we think about our talent pipeline and we think about talent in the space period from a career perspective, I'm sensing a little bit of a, yes, there's an override across all of those different generations of talent in terms of this continuous mindset of ⁓ either iteration, learning, keep going with this, keep evolving, lean in, all of these elements, strong message, of course. But I'm also like sensing a bit of a sandwich as well, because you've got this kind of gen, I'm going to use the word older for a moment, but let's just say more experienced generation who might be struggling right now. Then you've got kind of the younger generation, which I am particularly in this moment have a particular concern about across a number of industries. You know, even just in say consulting right now, you're seeing a graduate perspective, a huge reduction in intakes, the whole role of auditing period on a junior level is almost being rewritten. And so while we are in this period of rewriting what does junior look like, maybe in the context of UX, what do the current generation do and how are they evolving? So maybe this leans into this who gets or what gets left behind. It might not just be what, it's who. as well as part of that. Nick Cawthon(30:27) Yeah. It's a weird emotion to think I'm glad I'm not going into the job market now, not only as somebody who's got more experience, but also as somebody who's more junior. ⁓ The most recent engagement that we've had ⁓ here at our studio, where I hired an interaction designer that had spent the last four years using Figma. And she came into this contract thinking, I just graduated, I am really good at this. And within three weeks, we put that tool down and never used it again. Because we had a deliverable for a client where we were doing a prototype ⁓ and we wanted to have a deliverable that the front end team could implement very easily. And it was a return engagement with this client. And I saw the last deliverable we did 18 months ago, 24 months ago, and how that internal team, that engineering team wasn't able to implement this vision of experience that we had designed for them because we delivered in Figma comps like designers do. And so I said to this junior that, look, we're not going to fail again. We're not going to fail to acknowledge the gap between design and development that exists at this agency. at this firm. And so in order to do so, we're going to reverse it. We're going to take their existing front end code base and use it to train a model and then take all of the code components that are already written and use those as our Lego blocks, as our building blocks and figure out how to prompt a prototype based upon the tools that already have been built, put guard rails on so that ⁓ these generative tools aren't installing external elements or third party libraries that we keep it within the versions and the control systems that they have in place. going back to your original question about the juniors in the job market, it must have been very shocking for her to come into the industry. And I'm not speaking in hyperbole. This was her first job to say, everything you knew up until this point now gets put on the shelf, you have to go back to those core principles, the things that you're good at, design, layout, hierarchy, color, priority, tone, all of these things that are irrespective of the tools that you use, because now you have to learn a new language. And I think that's very healthy. ⁓ It's one of the reasons that Steve, I'm going to guess you enjoy what you do is because you have to constantly reinvent. You have to rethink and reposition and it's a muscle that takes a while to form and shape. ⁓ Steve Usher (33:23) And it comes with a lot of emotion. Yeah, I love that. I think there's a really powerful message in that is regardless of the tools and given what's happening right now with the layering of tools on top of AI right now, I I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk. I saw one of his talks recently. Even for Gary Vayner, who in his industry, respective industry, is at the forefront. He tends to be right on that periphery of trend, like what's hot, what's undervalued. I value his content a lot. He tends to be pretty bang on in terms of his predictions. Even he openly shared the struggles in which he's facing because you can't predict right now as accurately as before, whether it is Northeast or Southwest. Um, with a degree of like confidence, because literally something will come out so quickly, get commoditized even quicker. And then the next tool comes along and then the next tool. it's kind of a, in this insane moment right now where, you know, what do you go with? Do you go with Claude? Do you go with chat? Do you go with, I mean, it just on a very basic level here and forget all those kind of more specialist tools. Um. So I think, as you just going back to your point is I think got always falling back on those core principles of discipline, regardless of whether you're creating an immersive theater production, an employee experience, a UX design, I think is super important and to really always anchor back to that. As we know, one of those core elements being so human centric, ⁓ because I think if we always have that anchor as part of our principles, won't, we hope. Nick Cawthon(34:49) Mm-hmm. Steve Usher (35:07) Theoretically, we won't get lost in all of this as well in terms of the why we're actually doing these things. Yeah. Nick Cawthon(35:14) I want to loop back around to one of your questions earlier about UX and how did it come up. When the question of ⁓ breaking from UI and maybe the subjectiveness of the deliverable into UX and the notion of experience, it created researchers out of all the designers where now you didn't just stay behind a keyboard and a mouse and draw all day. You were expected to go and understand basics of qualitative research so that you could go sit with somebody and listen and watch and observe and figure out how they were using your design in order to inform what your next design should be. And so that was a huge sort of a secondary skill set that became a primary one overnight. And I think that has led us into where we are today. Whereas if anybody, engineer, PM, whoever, can type in a few lines and get an interface, then where does that leave the design community? Well, we've been fortunate enough to understand the value of that human connection, of that human-centric input loop. I mentioned the CEO earlier. And I think that when we're all now in the same tools, in the same collaborative workspaces, generating the same code to have that understanding of the methods and the applications and the importance of probing, strategizing and delivering experiences is going to be our unique factor. It's not going to be the design anymore. ⁓ It's going to be really how do we craft an architect the end-to-end process. Steve Usher (37:00) Really nice from the pure human perspective, from a thorough deep understanding. What's your thoughts on ⁓ some of the, I might butcher this terminology. it synthesis? No, not synthesis. There's basically AI tools that are for qualitative or for research purposes where it's synthetic users. Thank you. ⁓ Tell me about what's your thoughts on this? Nick Cawthon(37:04) Yeah. synthetic users. ⁓ Yeah, I'm going to plug as well as give you a direct answer to the question. The last few weeks I've spent coming off that contract that I mentioned of reimagining the design and development process at a financial services company of whom is a Fortune 100 company and worth billions and yet their design team is very archaic in how they go about starting from design and all the way to deliverable. And it led me to this aha moment of when you are in enterprise companies, a lot of the times you're behind that curve of adoption because as you mentioned, Steve, the number of options are everywhere. It doesn't copilot, just do everything you need it to do. And what about Gemini and like these notions of maturity for design and UX teams ⁓ is where I want to start investigating. So if you go to retrain. ⁓ g-a-u-g-e dot i-o. I've done a ⁓ survey that does a maturity assessment and it'll generate a PDF and give you some feedback and ⁓ help you understand your different categories. And it's meant for the community to start knowing where the boundaries are. And I need to test this to be at scale. And so my thought is, okay, I need to go find some synthetic users and start pumping this through to understand my segmentation algorithm, are my clusters working correctly so that I know this kind of industry tends to have these kind of tendencies. And that is a very sort of procedural approach of like, I need to go from zero to 1000 and then back to zero again, just to clean the pipes and understand all the analysis that would result from the synthetic users of design professionals at various levels. of seniority within a number of different industries. Would I ever use it for actual analysis? No. ⁓ That would be something that I wouldn't ever go and try to parse ⁓ insights from. But it is a good testing ploy to see, do all of your systems work? ⁓ So yes, yes, from an executional standpoint of when you're designing large scale surveys, when you're trying to understand Steve Usher (39:44) Mm-hmm. Nick Cawthon(39:53) factor analysis and segmentation and customer research, you do want to have a testing set for which you could do some. But would you ever ask an algorithm to assimilate what it would be like for a consumer product to be tested in the field? That would be irresponsible because again, there's no insights or vulnerabilities that would come out that you couldn't ask yourselves. Steve Usher (40:19) what does this mean for, uh, like experimentation? Because I think this is something which I think is super interesting with AI particularly, is this kind of ability to experiment at pace and to just experiment, explore, right? And I think that to your point of, you know, sitting down as a young boy, just having that space to experiment and just to be creative, how we can maybe embrace this kind of word experimentation in a much more kind of intentional way. Nick Cawthon(40:51) Yeah. I think experimentation is a artifact of curiosity where you want to see what you can do with this. There's a misnomer of these generative tools of being ready for enterprises and they're not. They're wonderful for Pomodoro timers or in my case, know, surveys or things that are one-offs. But how do you incorporate them into a very restrictive environment? at an enterprise organization. And that's going to come through that experimentation and that failure and that constant sort of trying to see where it fits within the workflow. The small nimble companies have it already. There are sort of now job titles that are positioned towards head of AI products or head of AI first CEO, like these sort of very ⁓ strong tells that this is something that you are curious about that you're experimenting with. and that you've made it a part of how you do business on a daily basis. But I think that that's going to be a core competency going forward is to show what you can do with this. there was this tell again, a couple months ago, years ago, where people would try mid journey for the first time and put it on their LinkedIn and then tell people that I used AI to make this LinkedIn post. Well, now it's just commonplace because we're all using it and it's evident. ⁓ Good ones are the ones that are not evident. I think that notion of experimentation and failure shows that you're trying and that you're curious and that you're willing to find those boundaries of when does it not start to feel like failure? When does it start to feel like I'm building on something that the next time I do it, the level or the percentage of failures is to get shorter and shorter and shorter because my speed and my efficiency and my proficiency of these tools gets better and better and better. Steve Usher (42:55) Yeah. what's from an optimistic lens, if you had to kind of share some of your thoughts in terms of UX design, where's some of your optimism in that space right now? Nick Cawthon(43:10) ⁓ I think it goes back to those who chose the path of ⁓ UX versus staying within the discipline of UI. ⁓ I thank you for your service. Those who were in the pattern libraries and the system design and were the very sort of Swiss standard of everything looks the way it should be, that pixel perfect application of a design identity. because you help train these algorithms that create patterns easily. My optimism comes from the researchers who, when we tried to define what experience is, when we went to the British double diamond approach of understanding, are we designing the right thing for designing things right? That notion of, okay, you are able to frame conversations in the way where now you can have an informed opinion. I think that gives me optimism. And the fact that Experienced Designers, I know it's the name of this podcast, I think that's the most valuable aspect of it all. The last contracts that I've gotten have been through showing journey maps and service design principles and artifacts of conversation and strategy. They haven't been from showing prototypes or interfaces or UI. They've come from the ability to think and communicate and strategize about what it is we need to design, where those digital touch points, the UX inside of those are going to be the most important. It hasn't been from those artifacts. It's been from the greater ecosystem that they live in. So that gives me confidence and faith as well as, know, again, somebody who has more experience in the field, you look to as a trusted source of ⁓ a higher level view. ⁓ So if there are some small things that I'm holding on to. ⁓ It's the understanding of the greater experience. Steve Usher (45:06) Yeah, that's really cool. I love that. You just triggered a thought for me as well. What's your thoughts around, if we've got this boom in technology right now, which everybody's jumping on that bandwagon of technology, ⁓ could this also fuel the fire and the need and demand that if people are jumping purely from a technology lens, they end up actually recognizing that, well, hang on a minute, this isn't landing or working or bringing the value. We actually need to go deeper into the human in order to connect the technology. in future as well. So if we're going to deepen the technology, make it faster, quicker, more options, do we not want to also balance this out a little bit and go deeper into the human side as well in order to bring these connections together? Nick Cawthon(45:51) Let me transpose that analogy where if we have a six month cycle to do this and now our technology tools are going to allow us to do the implementation in a shorter period of time because we can design and develop so quickly now. Okay, we now have more than the three months we thought we would to make sure that we're designing the right thing because our speed is going to be seen at the end. Steve Usher (46:08) Yeah. Nick Cawthon(46:20) The fallacy is that, if you've got all this time, you're just going to use technology to grow greater speeds. It's, I often use electric bike metaphor. If we now have this range where we can go 25, 30 miles in a direction, let's make sure that the direction we're going in is the right direction because we've got increased range. And so my hope is that with that space, and I say it's transposed because now we're looking at it from a timeline perspective. Steve Usher (46:48) Mmm. I love it. Nick Cawthon(46:51) If we have this time to again, to do research, to understand, to prototype, to test before we go to implementation, let's make sure that we're using these tools, not to just build more things that are shittier faster. Let's make sure that it's much more targeted, that we're using this as ⁓ an arrow, not as a cannonball. And in order to do so, you make sure your aim is true. and that you know what it is ⁓ that you're tapping into. Whether that be in the retail space or ⁓ in that space, like these kinds of observations and investments in human-centric activities and researches are going to be even more important because the cost of the velocity is going to be greater. Steve Usher (47:39) Yeah, I really thank you for sharing that. That's a really interesting perspective. If we're going to be able to go quicker and faster in the ideation, the prototype and the build of these things, then like let's not skimp on the design. Yeah. Design the right things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That way pushing a very heavy bike all the way back to the start. Nick Cawthon(47:56) Yeah, because the bike could break down and we could be 30 miles in the wrong direction. Steve Usher (48:05) ⁓ Yeah, think those that listen to the podcast, I've said it many times, when we talk about time, if we bring in the experience economy, time well saved, time well spent, time well invested. time well invested is definitely in the research element and really getting fundamentally clear on the problems you're solving. Yeah, I agree. Nick Cawthon(48:25) Steve, you see enough clients to know which value that and also to see the ones that are so pressed for time that they're trying to rush to the end and not take the true diligence required to make sure what they're doing is the right thing. I know I see it in my career and my clients is that there's some that really have to sort of a swage down to a point where you're okay, this is how we know we're doing the right thing. And then at the end, it's the so what, like we knew all these things and those aha moments are few, but we can now take them and perform actions on them. Steve Usher (49:03) Yeah. Fantastic. So Nick, just as we kind of closed down onto this podcast, let's just quickly like reflect, for a moment. what have you taken from this episode? Nick Cawthon(49:17) Yeah, I mean, it's applicable in many places. ⁓ I think when we get out of technology and we get out of digital and the form factors of an app or a website or whatever, ⁓ that there are these notions of strategy, of vulnerability, humanity, trust, privacy, get sort of transported up to a high level. And that's comforting to me. ⁓ As I mentioned that my first four way into this was the visual design aspect and then it became into user research and strategy. And now it's coming into service design and experiences that it's constantly transferring up tears and tears and tears to go and see this from more holistic level. ⁓ That takeaway provides me comfort ⁓ and faith that despite all this upheaval in the tools and the processes in which we use. that we have these core competencies and skills ⁓ that will raise above it. Steve Usher (50:21) Yeah, I agree. And I think that's something I definitely took from this conversation as well as really anchoring into those principles ⁓ and having those as that fallback, I think is incredibly important. And it doesn't matter whether you're a seasoned designer or just entering into the space, ⁓ having your own set of principles and how you act as a human, but also in terms of the discipline itself. I think it's important time for that. ⁓ So Nick, how can people contact you? Obviously they're all going to be available in the show notes, but what's the best place to follow you, connect with you, learn more about what you do? Nick Cawthon(50:54) Yeah, let's get a community together. Again, retrain.gage.io and I'll begin to share out 100 % non-synthetic user results of here's where I find that the field is going as it relates to maturity and AI tools and design leadership. My consultancy is called Gauge and you can find me there or on LinkedIn and I'd love to hear from you as well as what you're up to. and doing within the experience design space. Steve Usher (51:25) Nick, thank you. Yeah, been really great to get to know you. ⁓ I know you've got camp coming up very soon, very busy right now with family. And as we can see in the shot there, you've, you know, with your bass guitar and your music equipment behind as well. So, but it's been genuinely just to learn more about you behind, you as a person, also your career and really unique. Nick Cawthon(51:50) Steve, Steve Usher (51:51) ⁓ and super interesting perspective on UX. It's an area I don't have a huge familiar ⁓ connection to, but I've learned a bunch today as well, and I hope so of the audience who've listened to this episode. thank you for your contribution. As always, a true experience designer, great to have you on and wishing you well for the future. Nick Cawthon(52:01) it's a Steve, it's been a pleasure. Steve Usher (52:13) Thank you.