Blueprint For Modern Web Design: Deep Dive w/ Vitaly Friedman

sometimes I can smell your GPT text I can just I don't know I just feel like people make mistakes and typos and I want to see typos I would never ever buy anything from anybody who just does that I think once you do that once you actually get to the point where somebody feels valued oh they will move mountains for you what is up everybody my guest for today is someone I met on the road on the stage he's a super funny guy I I kind of think of him as the maybe the European Dr Evil he's got a wicked sense of humor and he's a super experienced person he's done so many different things his name is vit interesting name just to begin with so vit for people who don't know who you are please introduce yourself and tell us a little story about the quirkiness like the human that's in front of me right now oh thank you so much for having me Chris well I never been called evil on like evil like I know it's like yeah yeah so I think there is a bit of connection right there indeed so um dear friends thank you so much for having me uh I would say that my life has been full of surprises I've been torn between so many different things I think it all started somewhere in 1999 remember maybe you don't remember you're too young maybe so I was doing all this Shockwave stuff and before flash even existed and then got all the way into web design web design was so exciting web design web designers we're not web designers anymore we are product designers now we're not web designers and so yeah I got to the point where I actually just was doing stuff for the web and then um I was so obsessed like The Moment I Saw CSS and I could do a bit of stuff around you know design I was just incredibly excited and basically we ended up then creating a magazine in 2006 because it's called Smashing Magazine which was basically for me a way of just bookmarking things that I was basically needing for my work I was working in an agency for a while and then books and then conferences and then workshops and then more design stuff and then I got torn between front end and design and performance and accessibility and then moving back to ux and then research and then what the the hell am I supposed to know to do now and then gloss and then Co and then everything everything just got mixed up and then here we go we're meing here today well there there is a point of intersection here that is is kind of funny and interesting where're both backstage were at awards I forget which Awards it was but it seems like a gazillion million years ago pre-co and the world has turned upside down it's kind of neat that we're kind of reconnected here there's something that you that people are going to understand right away you you have a way of speaking and presenting information that's a little bit dry but just like with that um sarcasm and then you present things and you you go deep into the crevices of the internet I was rewatching one of your talks where you're I think it's called Uh something about bringing back personality to the web and you just talked about all the horrors of the internet and the way that your brain works and the way that you talk about this stuff it's hilarious to me you're like so who thought of this form like um do you have any children and there's a slider like who think of these things and and all these usability issues tell me a little bit about your observations as a person who's pretty much grown up with the web and has been shaping it for so long why did these things keep you up at night yeah I think you know you know Chris this has been very interesting because I asked my question I start the question myself as well and I think you know when I was growing up with the web somehow you know I'm maybe one of the few people who happen to be listening to this who remember the time before the internet even existed and for me the internet was magical it was literally magical I felt like I I can wow wow this is just a an incredible change in thing and life and everything it was like there was a moment before there was a moment after there of course a few moments like that in everybody's life but for me this really like truly felt so magical in so many different ways and I just paid attention to little fun things like those HTML things what you know what can you do like wow this is like magic I can just do right things in my notepad textor it's actually it actually appears in the browser so I got super excited very early on and I got really this oh wow this is how it's working and then as time passed by I got to the point where I was just really more curious about not just like the technical stuff but more about ability accessibility of things and I got to the point when I struggled with things I I have like I have a feeling that I have this really like a magical power and the Magical Power is the my I mean everybody has one I'm sure that youis have a lot of those for me it's I can feel if something isn't right I just feel I cannot tell necessarily that is you know how to fix it but I can tell oh something is not right here and I would go and I would just bring like 5 10 people in and I say are they struggling as well and very often and more often than not they would struggle as well then I realized maybe that's not just me you know of course my mom told me always when I was growing up that I'm special but I'm not that special you know I'm just I'm just kind of channeling the problems that many people are experiencing as well I'm just extremely average and that is my superpower because I can be feeling really well what other people are experiencing what their problems what their troubles are right and so that got me to this point where I actually started paying more and more attention to the point that right now like with Co and all like we basically been working on this big project with the European Parliament where the big ambition is to bring a lot of the different presences that they have a lot of different websites into one and this is where can also bring all of those little insights about oh we shouldn't do it this way oh we should do filters that way oh we should be adjusting searched over here this way and I'm really really happy very honored to be working on Project of that scale but indeed this has been I guess my journey I I can speak four hour and I'm not joking at this point I can speak four hours about accordians and really nice beautiful complex data greets and M Enterprise dashboards Oh that's oh this talk dir me baby yeah we we can we can talk about those things forever like we can you can just create set up a fireplace you know like you know it's also funny Chris I think I'm speaking too much but it's still funny because I for a while I decided that I'm going to do this little tradition of mine set up a new tradition I'm going to do like you know people have book clubs where they get together and they kind of review books I'm going to do website clubs like where we're going to just get together and then we're going to decide let's go to Turkish rail way system websites for Friday night because why not and then we're going to review and discuss together explore patterns what are they doing differently how are things different there what do they do with carousels do they also use hamburger menus how does it all work right that's that's a lot of fun and then you really start paying attention and I think the most remarkable point of your career gets to you when you realize you are accidentally stumbling upon South Korean Postal Service websites this is this is probably the peck of your career once you achieve that point okay before our audience runs for the door and unplugs their podcast hold on we're going to talk about some meaty things but you're getting a little sense of the personality behind the person I think we're gonna have a lot of fun today I know one of the big things I want to talk to you about but maybe we don't open there about measuring the impact of web design okay we'll put that aside we're going to put that aside because I want to end there that's the tease for you to hang around with us what are some of the things that you're super excited to talk about and let's let's pick two of those things and let's go there first before we get to the thing I want to talk about you know I always like to find challenges so for this last year I think I got extremely excited trying to find ways to how to improve experiences for uh in scenarios where which in which I'm usually was not involved or which I usually haven't even considered closely for example one of the things that really was interesting for me is to how do we design better in terms of inclusive design and Universal Design accessibility and so on for specific groups of people for example one of the thing that was really really like almost like a rabbit hole for me is how do you design better for older adults and then how do you design better for children just because very often when you look at you know groups like different age groups you'll find remarkable differences in how we're designing and I think that if you look at kind of these areas you really start realizing that many things that we are taking for granted right maybe many things that we kind of accept as reality they're just not true like in many ways what you find is that uh when you think about let's say older adults you probably have a number in your mind like what age that is and obviously everybody will have a different number at which point you become an older adult and what not but what we don't talk about is that actually when you speak about older adults there are massive differences of people between 55 60 65 70 and so on huge differences they have to design entirely different depending on you know what you're dealing with there and then of course there are certain things that are Mo Nest like and of course we often think about maybe like The Stereotype like not very active problems with technology those kind of things which are not true at all there are of course people who have problems with technology and there are of course people who are slightly kind of experiencing uh issues but very often they're going to be extremely active for example and they're going to be extremely savy because they grew up with technology so we have a lot of stereotypes that goes for very different areas so that was like a huge Rabbit Hole to the point that I started looking into academic papers uh around just just you know how people of different age deal in life with work in life it's like it's been a huge rabbit hole right um that was that the other thing that was also quite surprising and I had no idea where to even start was again we'll talk about it later the kpis and the metrics and stuff but it was also digital sustainability I got to this project where I was in a position where I had to well basically the ambition was to create the most sustainable digital presence for public service what does it mean I mean where do you what does it actually mean because usually you would think about packaging you would think about physical assets and compression and efficiency and you know things like that but as a designer what does it mean sustainable ux I mean these are kind of Uncharted territories and I like tapping into them because I have no idea where I am and I always feel lost first and then I go getting a coffee and then I go get another one and then I just stop and think and very often eventually um some interesting ideas emerge so I guess this is these are the topics that really really keep me awake at night Chris what about you by the way well I don't know enough to even form an opinion to keep awake at night so let's do this let's dive in so what we'll do is we'll unpack three topics on on this episode with you and as you can see vly has spent a lot of time thinking about these things I just want to ask a quick question because I hear an accent are you German well this is um this is quite a question because I actually grew up in Germany indeed uh but I hardly speak German these days uh I was born in Minsk bis and then my parents brought me in the year 1999 so but I did grow up in Germany indeed oh you're good at this Chris I'm just enjoying the accent with which I hear a couple different things in there I'm like okay fascinating to me okay so we'll talk about inclusive design and accessibility we'll talk about digital sustainability and also then how to measure kpis or something like that effectiveness of design in ux because I think that's really important because today it seems to be really a conversation needs to happen about your role as a designer when when it comes to like actually moving the needle for your client and what we need to think about in terms of sustainab sustainability and who we're designing for so let's just start there first let's start with how do we make it a more inclusive web yeah I think in many ways it all starts with including a diverse group of people into testing or into design process I think we very often we kind of try to rely on assumptions and hunches which are nothing more than that just hunches and it was incredible just absolutely incredible to see just how unreliable we as humans are in the way of with thinking in you know everything like even like you know these are things that really are kind of important to me the close button the close button like a model window goes up and then there is this a in the right upper corner right it's incredibly confusing to so so many people and normally I would think what what are you talking about this is just a just a dialogue it's like it's all over we've been doing this like for what 20 years now uh what's the problem and when you start looking people have such a tremendously different understanding different groups of people have very different understanding of what it represents to some this close mean close and apply to others it means close and dismiss to others it means clear right to others it means cancel and then they get extremely confused when you also get the button like the close in the right upper corner next to it you have done the button saying done and then at the bottom left you have clear and then you know on the bottom right you have something like show 24 items which is like what what is this how is this all working together I learned for example this was a quite a surprising um Discovery for me that X is extremely confusing so if the best thing you can do is to just spell out what you mean like just say save and exit in text or save um save and or sorry um close and discard right just to make it extremely explicit like that's one thing the other thing is of course uh that we need to keep in mind I mean these are basic kind of usability things that you just discover when you actually start doing some testing the other things of course are all around accessibility screen reader users um people with disabilities people who have mental health uh issues people who uh happen to be um you know have ADC people who have dyslexia left-handed people there are so many very very different groups of people I'm not saying that we need to just go ahead and create some sort of a checklist and then go all in like okay that group of people what do with there and that group of people what do we do there right but I think that as we are creating more um I don't know just using regular good principles of accessibility is ability we kind of cater to everyone we cannot really design something that's Universal for everyone really but we can try and that starts by Simple Things color contrast typography font sizes tab Target sizes right if I see somebody who deliberately set the font size for their text at 12 pixels or we will have a conversation I am going to be very very difficult uh and I am going to try I'll try my best to prove you wrong right but also kind of overall when we look at all of this it's like a lot of things that we need to just need to be aware I'm not saying that there is one solution that just works but for example one thing that was really astonishing to me there is a high like a high percentage of people who have a condition that's called disc calula disc calcula is a problem of of interpreting numbers you would say oh okay uh interesting so these are situations where you actually have issues remembering phone numbers where you have issues remembering uh your credit card number right if you ever wanted to memorize it or anything that related to that right and so what happens is if you are designing let's say a fch application oh you need to be aware of this this is absolutely critical because approximately 3 to 10% of the entire global population encounter to some or other degree different um kind of levels of discala right especially it also be related to low um numeracy for example right so it's like a large large large area and then of course you have things like color blindness and you would always think like color blindness it's just you know red green problem it isn't because as you grow older for example you actually start having massive different um difficulties seeing the difference between blue and purple and there is this huge like also when you throw Brown into the mix with red and green it becomes a mess as well so I've been kind of putting this together this kind of guides and posting a lot of stuff on LinkedIn as well around that it was T mind-blowing just all those things that are not really publicized because you know we are not thinking about let's say older adults when we're designing most of the time and I think this is just the point of understanding all these limitations that we have and basically designing at Best of power abilities to accommodate for everyone well when you talk about doing testing and having a more diverse group in the testing I've never gone through this process before can you tell me typically how that works and what you can learn and how you're supposed to observe this there are different flavors of that but for example for European Parliament what we end up doing is we and it's kind of really ties in nicely into the conversation about how to measure design whenever I'm designing anything I need to guarantee even before I start designing a single Pixel on the screen I want to guarantee see that it is going to work better than what we have right now I do not want to waste anybody's time I do not want to be in a position where I have to uh kind of get into defensive mode saying oh well we tried our best but we failed right especially when you're dealing with a large organization a large company so for that what what we actually do is before we even start designing we think about okay let's create this kind of Concepts and we can do round some concept testing or also we can also take an exist website and create a baseline of status quo first so for that what we do is this we take a website or product that we have and then we basically ask ourselves okay what are some representative tasks so-called top tasks that people are going to perform there so if it's like a banking application they're probably going to send money to someone maybe they're going to you know um withdraw money or maybe they're going to add money to the bank account things like that so we create something like 10 to 12 representative Tas depending on the enir in which we are and then usually you need at least 15 people at least 15 people 18 is better but at least 15 after that you actually get to the stable results in terms of like statistically reliable data right so um what you get is you bring 18 people uh ideally and you give them this tasks all 12 of them and you spend maybe one hour of them some of my colleagues do it's kind of unmoderated testing where they're not even present they just send this tasks and there is a basically a tool like you know there are plenty of tools I can just record it for you and then they send you the result of that recording but I like to be spending the time with that person not like in a physical room but usually on Zoom so I basically give them task I tell them I'm not going to speak I'm not going to obser I'm just going to observe I'm not going to tell you what to do we're not testing you of course we're testing the website at this point feel free to stop feel free to fail if you fail I learn from that that's very valuable and they go and what we do is we measure two things first we measure how much time they need to complete those tasks and we measure if they're successful with it or not you get 18 people right completing those tasks you get to the point where you actually get an average time per task right for every task you will get an average time that they need right and also get the success rate typically what you will aim to achieve is at least 80% success rate and then if you actually run it once and then you run it with a new design six months later right of five months later after roll roll out you bring the same segment of people not the same people but the same segment of people 18 people you give them 12 tasks you measure time you measure success rates and you basically get before and after and that's a clear indicator that something has either improved or not right so because you basically give them not just random tasks but representative tasks things that they are kind of critical critical for that application for that website and one thing that I think I really want to emphasize here usually you get to the point where you ask people hey tell us speak uh speak through your experience right as you doing this tasks but that of course delays people because again when they start speaking this doesn't represent the reality so they need more time to complete task and they just not what people do in real life so try to be as realistic as possible and then you get basically the results just in the end after a person has completed all the task we basically do a debriefing get some insights take some notes and we know what to do next time okay that makes a lot of sense to me so you're saying at least 18 people give them 10 to 20 or say 10 to 12 task so you're going to time them on how long they take to do each task and then also to look at their success rate so sometimes it could fail that would be your Baseline and so then anything you do after that's going to be measured so we got we did worse we did better hopefully exactly with experience and your instincts and your observations it'll it'll work better do you do heat mapping as well to kind of see where they dwell on absolutely so very often it depends of course very much on the project and and what we want to achieve there we could also look into things like how far people scroll sometimes you would even go to the point where if you want to explain something to them even like if it's a landing page or so um you just ask them can you describe in your words what you you know what that product is like or what it is offering another thing that we sometimes do if you want to get sort of like a an emotional understanding of how they kind of perceive the brand like usually like measuring like the perception brand perception is very difficult right so what you can also ask is can you describe can you pick maybe five seven adjectives that describe what you have experienced and the brand and they will tell you different things like different people people are strange creatures I mean very strange creatures everybody comes with their own context right so they will pick very very different things but you can see the trend so if somebody tells you uh boring dull generic that tells you how the brand is perceived if it's say if they say shocking or Bal or exciting these are all slightly different ways of phrasing their level of excitement because again they come from with a particular context but you can get a sense about where you are on that Spectrum like extremely boring and neutral which people usually cannot really connect emotionally with or extremely exciting and bold and Innovative and whatever right so that's kind of the other side of the spectrum with you spending as much time as you have in in the web design space uh I think also referred to as product design you ux design and now I saw also on your LinkedIn it says surface designer so you've done this for a long time basically what are are there any like tips you can give someone who's like okay you know what I don't have the time to to to or the resources to run multiple tests with that many people is there a shorthand version where like you know never do this always do this and sometimes do this yeah so I think there fortunately there is a the ex Community is just incredibly incredible on LinkedIn and I don't know where are people this I think LinkedIn I guess to some degree at least uh so there are plenty like there is no shortage in templates we always need to take templates with a bit of you know grain of salt because again uh it needs to be kind of customized for whatever your needs are I think but in general you know there is this almost like Unwritten Rule and I think that this is something that we often forget even we just take five people five users and speak with them about whatever they are going with like what are what are they do they encounter any issues is everything clear is you know things like that right just try to find any problems any issues any pain points that they have just five people you don't need a lot of time I think that very often we think that this is going to take an incredible amount of time this is going to be extremely expensive it's going to delay the project it's going to derail our commitment not necessarily you just bring five people in the room or you in a zoom room you have a conversation and you will find incredible insights already so just start with that then once you have that in mind what you can do is just you know run a couple of you know one-onone is a buil testing where you start giving people tasks to see how they're performing those tasks and as they do you can bring up your questions and try to figure out what exactly was the issue but for that you need to of course understand what your environment is and what your product is what your services and so on what things are important you might want to break it down by different groups of people who are using the service or using the site and then kind of test that individually usually the good layer or good level that you want to achieve is when you have this kind of end to endend testing somebody just lands on the product they go for onboarding eventually they have to do some task to get things done and then eventually they maybe upgrade right this could be like endtoend testing but then if you have let's say something very specific that you've been working on last quarter like search well then you go in and you start looking okay let me come up with 10 12 tasks related specifically for search different types of searches with filters without filters with sorting without sorting and then you see if this is working this doesn't have to take a lot of time I know five people already you will get incredible insights you mentioned something about not just adults but adults run a spectrum so there could be different physical accessibility issues as you get older some people might have dyslexia or maybe are color blind and so that's going to affect the design so in trying to design something that's more accessible do you have to build a bunch of different versions of the site or you just designed for the one that works for everybody and that's one that gets used yeah I think that it's very dangerous part to create multiple websites or multiple versions because very often what happens is um people don't necessarily associate themselves with a particular group and you need to speak to that group in some way right of course you could have the toggles between dark mode and light mode and high contrast mode and so on but usually what you get is that if you create something that's just accessible out of the box like large phone sizes color contrast just simple things I mean things that we've been speaking about for 20 years I guess um you'll be okay right it's just if you're working in a specific environment where you actually again like fintech right there you need to be very very careful of how you design things when you think about something like mobile interfaces where to put put the menu and how to use it like very often what you will get is for example like really important buttons that all of a sudden hidden right really important content that is hidden and people experience problems finding them so if you have something that's really important just don't hide it right there are basically some relatively simple and straight four rules around accessibility that are not it's it's not like a magic science it is complicated right and if you want to let's say bring accessibility to a not accessible or inaccessible product oh this is going to take incredible amount of time and effort but even if you look at accessibility accessibility is extremely exciting like one of the greatest example for me is the wise the bank wise Bank redesign or Rebrand I should say right they went all in an accessibility but it's bold it's on brand it's strong it's huge it's has a point of view it's authentic it's it's extremely attractive and it's extremely attractive because they actually thought about accessibility from the very start so it's not like we it's not like it's you know that boring part that is a part of the job no this can be extremely exciting to and again don't forget that it makes it accessible to so many people who are potentially all your customers that's just not something we should be forgetting I'm curious and I'm throwing you a curveball here in the age of AI do you see a future where okay it could take something that you've done where you've labeled it a certain way you've given it certain rules that depending on who shows up it creates a version of the site just for them not just the way it looks but even the offers and the copies written differently so hyper targeted super narrow Niche what do you think about that well this is an interesting feuture we're talking about here I think you know what Chris I wouldn't mind that at all as long as people who are coming to that site or using the service or product can get their work done fast right and then understand what is going on and it's all clear I think we can still create experiences that are pretty much accommodating for a vast majority of people I don't know if we need to go that route to really C hyper customize hyper personalize because at some point you also get to the situation where the system maybe understands the human better than the human does him himself or herself so it becomes a little bit you know freaky a little bit dangerous in a way right and I think it's it might not be necessary at times uh what is however necessary I think is simple Humane things this is also what I'm missing I mean we have conversations about Ai and of course AI is extremely important and of course this is a future and of course we need to understand as designers what to do with it and of course we probably shouldn't be afraid of it I think well we'll see what will be we'll know in a couple of years I'm sure but I also miss Humane touch I mean I don't know about you and I don't know about everyone who's going to watch or listen this to this later sometimes I can smell your GPT text I can just I don't know I just feel like there is something chitty PE in it it's it's I cannot point the finger it's maybe like you know the bold and then you have the text and then bold and then you have a bit of text as well and it's a little bit too perfect and it's too too clean in a way too sterile and some way that's not how the world is the world is messy and complex and people make mistakes and typos and I want to see typos I want to see typos everywhere I mean not maybe in formal documents but I want people to be just respectful and kind and sometimes forget about things and sometimes remember things and sometimes be inconsistent we do not have to have 100% consistent experiences just for the sake of being consistent just make me I don't know surprised or smile or worried about that footer that is not align that's okay that's the web you can always interact and play and change and experiment you decided on your um on in your keynote talk a couple of the things that they had done one was about putting some funny copy into the fine print the terms and conditions thought that was pretty hilarious because it's like you're you're giving away your soul your firstborn to this company and they put it in there just to show you people that they don't read it but there was one that was pretty funny because you're like they designed something to annoy and irritate people because of they wanted increased dwell time they put a fake hair so people are like swiping trying to get rid of it and they can't get rid of it and like oh yeah you guys got me what are your thoughts on those kinds of things yeah but this is definitely not what I would love to see more on the web right so there is of course place for experimentation and but there is actually like I think that I know we we speak a lot about things looking generic and looking the same and this is kind of this been ongoing you know conversation for years now but I think that there has been a lot of innovation I see incredible portfolios like really incredible work happening in as well we shouldn't forget that we shouldn't just dismiss oh everything looks the same well not everything looks the same a lot of stuff looks the same but not everything of course what I do not want is that everything looks the same like like that thing that you just mentioned yeah it's just not how I would like things to be in a way it's like there is no point in I mean there is financial benefit I'm sure in decep being deceptive and having all kind of deceptive patterns but you know this is kind of a conversation where I think that maybe at some point I think that there are some governments around the world that actually getting and stepping into it like in India I think they have now established some uh guidelines or is trying to establish some guidelines and rules and legislation against deceptive patterns right um which I think is not necessarily a bad idea I think it's actually a good idea um I would love to be just to see people really respect it I think this is such a such a rarity these days just to come to a website and feel like oh they actually respect me because we usually just throw things at people without even considering them from newsletters to popups to everything right I think once you do that once you actually get to the point where somebody feels valued oh they will move mountains for you they will be on your side and they will pay even if you make it very difficult for them to pay right but we don't think about that that much we usually play a short-term goal uh game right although I think well my life has always been playing a long-term game let me ask you this before we move on to to the second of our topics here I I see um I guess there are ads at the bottom of some of the news feeds that I get and they'll start something with a super click baity headline like you won't believe how this child star turned out and they show that star like is that how they turned out I don't know so then you click on that and then you have to dive through all these things where you need to click on is super hidden all the ads are designed to look like real buttons and navigation but they'll show you 35 images before for the one that you're supposed to see hot take on that yeah I think so every now and again I would be also in the same position where I look and I think okay um we all talking about hooks right we're all talking about you know how to get people to scroll how to get people to swipe and yeah I understand the economics behind that I understand why many companies are doing that but again for me I don't know I I want to be in a position where I can remember a website or remember somebody in a positive light right I I don't want to feel tricked in a in some way so if you say publishing articles and you know on your on your feet and it's all full of those kind of things I will find it very very difficult to trust you like on a personal level maybe you will post post some other useful content that's fine right but I will have a very strong feeling to trust you and trust your words I would also have a very a hard time I don't know maybe that's me but I would have a very hard time promoting you or helping you out and in some way because I don't feel like this is this is bring this brings anybody forward this is not helpful for anybody so you can sure it can generate some random clicks but why this is always a question for me whenever I see things like that I'm just wondering so I would never ever buy anything from anybody who just does that all the time right I would never buy anything from a company uh or subscribe to a premium whatever right uh for those kind of things but if you go to extremes to give me something that I find valuable again as as I said I would probably go to do whatever I can do to support and buy everything that you produce like again I'm not trying to be difficult here but Chris you're doing an incredible work at this because you really give so much to people right and then people of course want to give back to you and this is normal this is just human nature and this is how everything should be this is the economics of good I think there is no need to pollute it with some crap I think the they're not trying to sell your product or service I think they're just selling ad space so the more they get you just click on the next page reload and there's three ads inline ads there you're like okay oh I will go to extremes to set up my ad blockers to make sure that they don't see any of that and I will not have any bad conscience around that at all unless I if I even if I go to that uh kind of verticle or in the first place maybe that's revealing a little bit about my dark nature one to see how things turned out for that child star they got me they got the hook in me but I realize what's happening okay let's move on to an idea that i' not heard before as it relates to digital experiences what the heck do you mean digital sustainability there's no physical thing like we're not sourcing things we're not recycling them or upcycling how do we make things that are more sustainable in the digital sphere yeah this was also a fascinating thing to me because this is something that I've been telling quite a bit a lot and I've been working with my colleague Jerry mcgavern for in Parliament this is kind of really this idea of um you know we are consuming so much energy so much water so much everything and very often it just one off like whenever you get let's say you know I'm not even talking just about carbon but just in general about so many things that we just take and we buy and we use once and then it just sits somewhere right or you know this idea of repurpose or re re buying every like two three four maybe even every year a new laptop a new phone and things like that right there are that we just we just don't need like for example if I think about delivery like if I think about Amazon Prime you can get anything deliver to you within what one hour two hours one day I don't know what it's like now right think I don't really need it I mean maybe we should actually instead of saying you know um get it faster get it in the next 12 hours or six hours say uh if you don't have if you're not in a hurry uh maybe we can deliver to you within six days but you would pay less I I don't rush that's okay it doesn't have to be delivered to me to two in two days or 3 days that's okay so maybe we could actually slow down people instead of encouraging them to do more right I would be willing to even pay more if if it was kind of more sustainable packaging potentially right so things like that could work but on the other hand what this ultimately goes to like when you're thinking about designing those experiences I think it's all about not having people wasting their time and their resources obviously now that we're U sitting here right and maybe you know people who are going to watch or listen to this later right um if you are let's say coming to a website uh relatively complex website and you need to spend something between 5 to 10 minutes to do your thing whatever that thing is that's a waste well not only is it a waste of your lifetime right uh also it's a waste of resources be it energy be it you know Power beit Water bit everything right so maybe instead of making things more polluted and you know blinking things all over the place especially again you know sure you can do that for public services because you know this is how it's supposed to be supposed to work but also for any kind of digital product just help people get the results faster and that requires testing right so if you can get like one thing that's really been annoying me for a long time now we get to this we kind of got to this concept like whenever you have a search box you type something in the search box you get suggestions and then you click on the search button then you get search results page then that search results page has links to Pages why that's just why if aliens ever came to this planet they'd be very confused why the hell we're doing this would it be better especially with the wonderful capabilities of AI that we say uh well start typing but as you type I'm not going to give you keyword suggestions I'm going to drive you straight to categories that you can jump to without seeing search results page at all and here are some filters you can jump in and click right away so at least gets updated immediately you don't even have to go to search results Pages why would you think about going to search results page to then click through pages that are listed there just go straight to results and filter and maybe navigate between different tabs between images and photos and videos and what not right those kind of things that would be helping people so much better to actually get the results faster or another idea and this is kind of the f probably like one of the most impactful ones like you know very often people watching streams online like on YouTube and whatnot right but what I miss on YouTube is the option to just have audio only like I might be watching a documentary maybe I'm cooking or whatever I'm not even looking at the screen but instead I'm it's streaming to me at 4K and I don't need that so why why do we waste we we so many things like we don't even think about this so having option like audio only would be reducing this waste significantly without any cost because you're not watching anyway so many things like that are kind of the part of design and part of sustainability of course but very often they're just not thought through I guess uh the final one I'm really really kind of thinking we need to think about those things that we often have auto save but we never have Auto delete would it be nice to say if nobody has accessed this page or this article in the last two years automatically delet it right do we need to store everything that we're producing for eternity I don't think so so because every eventually it has to be stored somewhere right and that also has other costs related to that so yeah um this has been on my mind for a lot lately well I'm surprised you didn't mention this one thing about just like energy use like designing sites to use more black so energy that's used to display generate Heat energy but maybe that's really low hanging fruit you talked about number of clicks and actions that somebody has to take and getting that down to to one or to zero or something like that you talked about the designers role in working with their physical Partners to like what is the rush why do we need to get this so fast and and I think Amazon does do this now where they say if you're willing to wait a couple days so that we can not rush through this process and ship things in one box and be more efficient with grouping packages together we'll give you store credit for something I'm seeing this so they are there's somebody like you on the other side thinking these things through we don't need it today we don't need it two days you're right there's lots of things like I'll read that book when it gets here whenever it gets here it's okay I I sely agree with it I I didn't I wasn't aware of that but wow that's uh that makes me hopeful I think so that's yes because again it's like there are many things that we just we I we're always kind of obsessed with efficiency and speed and very often you know just calm down just just go get a coffee and there is no need to be efficient all the time you know there are people there are neighbors there are friends there are dogs there are cats just that's okay just waste time this is your lifetime make the best out of it you don't have to be efficient all the time I think YouTube's also addressed the whole Audio Only uh with a premium account I forget what they call it now used to be called YouTube red and that now you can do Audio Only it's less on the bandwidth it's using less energy and your phone saves your battery from wear and tear so there's lots of things that are going on there and you're absolutely right most of the times people just want to listen and and I I know this is bad for me to say as a Creator but I noce sometimes when I'm watching YouTube video I'll doze off but they keep playing more and more videos even though the one I watched is already done so it's bad for us creators but it's better for the planet if they just stopped and said hey are you still there do you really want to look at this and otherwise we'll stop showing you more videos so you're you're a very thoughtful conscientious guy who has a philosophy on all this stuff and love that and I'm glad there's somebody like you in the world to make sure the the other people who aren't so so thoughtful have a voice to kind I'm like okay oh no no I'm just being difficult most of the time I'm just being difficult to most people that's all I am I love it but you do it with a sense of humor too so it's it's it's awesome okay now we're going to land the plane we got to get to the most important part here which is to to make designers accountable for things and also to give them credit for things that they do so in web especially maybe design and branding is a little harder to measure but how do we make it so that we can measure if it's effective if it's intelligent if it's efficient or whatever how do we measure this stuff when it comes to designing ux I think that's very much related to a couple of things first of all what we need to understand this and this is something that has been kind of discussed quite heavily over the last couple of months as well this idea that we as designers right we often see on LinkedIn and Twitter and everywhere we see this diagrams where ux is in the middle of everything ux is that Central thing that connects the business the technology the design the everything which is most of the time not true at all because most companies don't see it this way so we need to understand that when we actually and this is kind of at least the position in which I am it might be that of course some of the listeners would be in a different position I always feel like I have to show my value I feel like every time I walk in a big room with a lot of people in there uh who happen to be not designers right um they don't really trust me and not in the bad way like oh who is this weird person coming in now but they don't understand exactly why I do what I do and how I do those things and way same way I don't understand how you know people who take care of finances do their thing I don't know that either so I shouldn't expect them to understand how I work but then when I start talking about his ability access ability inclusive design wides space typography and branding and colors and they have no understanding of that at all and again they don't have to but still I have to show my value right right and so the the thing that we trying to do is there is this sort of connection between what the business wants and what the we as designers want so this looks very much similar to if somebody ever heard of it opportunity trees or kpi trees if you ever worked with somebody from sales and marketing uh you will probably have heard about kpi trees and the idea behind those kpi trees is that all the way on the top you have the business goal for example for that quarter we're going to work on that thing our goal is to boost our subscribers uh by the end of 2023 or 2024 and so all right so you get this big big big very fluffy and very unconcrete call goal and at the bottom you're thinking okay so how would I do that so we have these goals and we have a couple of ideas we know that there are certain things that are not working well there are these are the reasons that we learn why people are abandoning us this is why churn rate happens and uh is so high um this is why people sign up that's what we also learned in our user research so maybe we should do this this this this and this a couple of features a couple of changes and then we can bring them on right and you can say oh excellent I can just go ahead and start designing but I wouldn't do that what I try to create is sort of a path and it's bit difficult to visualize but you basically have your design initiatives your design ideas at the bottom at the very top you have the business goals and what I first do is for each of those ideas that we have I need to Define metrics that are going to move kind of going to be an indicator that something has changed now if I want let's say just to make it a bit more concrete if I want to say people to be using our uh filters more I can regroup filters I can refine filters I can add autocomplete for filters I can do things with filters but if all of those things that I'm suggesting are effective there must be a way to measure it there must be a way that it's going to propagate all the way to impact business because ultimately I'm s serving and trying to solve rather a business goal so I'm trying to create this connection between what I have all the way on the top in the business side what I'm creating here at the bottom line with my activities so that means I have some ideas I find ways of how to measure them right then I give that I hand it over to Engineers so they know what they need to track and then as we keep going and we propagating from the bottom all the way to the top you have this and you bring developers and you bring Engineers you bring PM you bring business people on board and this is kind of one of the wonderful artifact that explains to everyone what the hell we're working on towards that goal and why that creates an incredible sense of alignment as well right and I can also share it with the audios if I can create like a PDF or whatever to kind of explain what it looks like of course right but the idea is that if you have a design a and you have a design B Because design is not art and it solves a particular problem we should be able to measure how well design a does the job and how well the design B takes the job and I'm not talking about AB testing it could be a part of that but it doesn't have to be you can just go ahead and say we're working on those features we're going to ship them and then we're going to measure how successful they are by tracking this metrics and these things uh or this metrics is something that we call an design kpis so for example just to make it very very clear sorry for a very long answer if you are working on search uh usually you know your quality of work will be measured by how upto-date a search engine is which is absolutely IR relevant for most users but if we want to track the quality of search we need to understand what that represents or what that means so to us you know to measure search we go and take maybe top 100 queries search queries that came our way last year all last six months whatever then we'll run a Check and test okay if we're searching for those queries what is showing up most people will click on the top five results like this is they get like around 60 to 80% of the all the clicks so we get this free results for each query from Top 100 with that we then go to our editors who are responsible for individual domains and we say hey we see people actually asking or looking for this what would be representative canonical pages that should show up when people are searching for them so they gave us a list and then we do the mapping between what we have and what we should have and you get a percentage out of that what is the overlap score between them and you have maybe 5% and then you do your improvements and if two three four five months later you run the same test you tape top 100 you go to tut tutorial you get your current and you match well if it gets better then it's clearly an improvement and and that's important you can use it really really well to indicate the impact that you or your team have produced it's a very clear connection right there right and this is something you can definitely use in order to show that impact that you have not only on search but also on business because ultimately this will also bring other metrics up like for example the number of searches right or findability of content so all of this is framing around this idea of measure what you are proposing and suggesting before you actually or started this thinking about measurements before you even design it I think in your world that's a pretty common well accepted practice outside of web design it feels like we get a little fuzzy with what it is we're trying to do it it's that lack of accountability that we we thrive in because it's like I I I can guarantee those results and the question is then why are you doing this why did you accept money to do something that you're not sure that you can do so it's very very questionable let's talk about this a little bit more here when when you have a success there's a thousand people who raised their hand and say well it was because of what I did the copywriter say because it was great copywriting and then the person who designed it was say was because me or somebody else who's like the engineer was like no no because of this how do you account for that is because there's this expression the expression is um success has many fathers failure has one mother so when it's successful and the and the business goal the global business objective is being met to sell more products Services units or something increase subscriptions there's a lot of things that go into that how do you know it's what that one or or that group of people did versus what somebody else says because this happens to us in the real world yeah so there are two types to commodate for that there are two types of testing on the one hand you have this end to end testing which is everything so if you want to get to that goal you run some tests you want to let's say improve success rate or you want to improve your subscription if that goal is reached that's great but you cannot really point to that person was responsible for that or that department was responsible for that what you can do because you establish metrics for everything that you're working on or everything that design teams are working on can see okay this has improved this has improved this has not improved H well if this has not improved that surely this has not contributed so those things have improved though okay so so did they actually improve dramatically or slowly or was it kind of similar do they keep improving was it just a variance in statistics or if you actually run the test again uh it's very different again so you can actually see that okay there are some branches that are stronger or thicker in that tree you can almost kind of accommodate for that or kind of see that but of course if you have a very large team with I don't know dozens or even hundreds of designers right or you know engineers then you get to the to the point where it will be quite difficult then you need to test a lot locally meaning if you're let's say working on search right you want to search like really test things within search rather than across the entire product so but it kind of you know it's sometimes it's not really necessary to really say okay I did this or that team has done it uh different teams can claim success because it's their shared success they all contributed to it together however I would say this is something that I learned the hard way I think as a designer I highly encourage you well everyone who is going to listen to this have a running document Which documents all your successes and accomplishments like this and trust me once you get to the kind of to this habit of measuring what you're doing or you will have a wonderful set of things that you will be mentioning in your next negotiation interview right or oneon-one or this would be very very helpful so uh again showing the value of your work is something that's going to drive you you know hopefully to you know um higher salary and have a better position in the company can't complain about that we should okay I have one one last followup question and I realized we're almost out of time here Chris we could go like this forever I know you can but my brain's about to explode let me ask you this question what are some things we need to avoid when we're running these these tests or to how we measure like what can give us false positives yeah so I think the most important part is to avoid biases uh very often would be basically you know if you're not with research you always can be um Can game a little bit so you can always ask the questions where you want to get the right the answ that you actually need and you will find this every now and again in testing as well this is why when we do testing we always broadcast it so usually it would be happening on Zoom but then there would also be another Zoom room which or YouTube private YouTube um where it's going to be screened toward words so the entire organization can watch it right so other designers can watch it or people who are working on a product can watch it but in the end yeah you need to be very careful about having at least a little bit of understanding about what kind of questions they should be asking and what not typical thing is that whenever you are running research should not ask close-ended questions like did you enjoy that experience right uh did you find what you're were you always finding what you're looking for because it's kind of almost implies the answer and people are falling into the Trap or giving you the answer that you want to hear so you need to be very careful there on the other hand when it comes to the group of people that they're going to bring in they really should be diverse so if you get to the the point where you get one specific segment like people who just happen to be one small portion of your user base your data your results will be skewed so you have to do quite a lot of due diligence and homework to make sure that people that you bring to testing and even if it's again a small test right with five people or 12 people or 18 people right that they are representative of your user base right that's the hard work so you have to be quite careful there uh because you really need uh need that in order to get decent results okay I follow so you want to ask questions that are not leading that are neutral because otherwise they'll just say yes I loved it you want to make sure the people that you invite in as your test group are diverse and representative of the types of users are are actually going to use it and the thing that you talked about broadcasting I didn't understand like why you want to broadcast at whole company Zoom that I I I got lost in that sauce yeah so the reason why we're broadcasting is because we want it to be visible to everyone so other designers so our other researchers can actually tune in and listen or watch of you know how they being product their product is performing right it's also great for designers to see how their work is being used right it's also great for engineers to see how their work is being used right but also it's great for other people in the company to see how the questions are being asked I think it's very important because if you just get a report like a PDF deck saying like oh we learned that 50% of people cannot find things and so on they will have a motivation to actually look in and see is it like real or is it you know not quite real so we always try to broadcast and announce it ahead of time so people who want to tune in and who want to follow along even if it's like you know one of the sessions or two of the sessions they kind of can do that and see how a particular feature that they may be have been working on recently right uh works with real people makes sense now thanks for clearing that up so you want to be transparent so that everybody buys into the results because we know that results can be biased and so there's no point in doing these tests if the people who matter are like well I don't trust the results I'm going to do way anyways okay beautiful what's the thing that you wanted to add yeah the one thing that I wanted to add on top of that is that one thing that I think is really quite critical is that you when you're actually selecting those Ts that they give to people that they are not skewed either because again if you are you know if you give them super simple tasks that they can complete within I don't know 15 seconds or so that's not testing anything it just gives you the number that you want again those and everything that you're working on this needs to be crucial for business so business needs to care about it like usually you would have this northst metrics that every company has airbnbs would have something like the number of nights that a person is booking for staying with Airbnb right this is a very important number the higher it is the better the outcome will be the better the revenue is right so those things have to matter to business as well it cannot be just something that we like those Ts that we give that are just random right they need to be somehow how best connected to business you know I think you may have broken the record for a podcast with us in most words spoken in a given period of time oh no I'm so sorry about that no I love it I love how fast every now and again I also think I was sitting was just like trying to figure out who you sound like and all a sudden it came to me you sound a little bit like Han Zimmer I don't know if you ever listened to him yeah yeah yeah I did I did a little bit like Han Zimmer so it's I think it's pretty beautiful you mentioned a couple things you mentioned that uh you you may have a PDF resource for people because there's a lot of visual things that you may be referencing that somebody who's listening to is like I don't get it so make sure you check the show notes everybody if you're watching this we we'll include in the description as well but I would just want to encourage you to just Google him uh search on YouTube because he's got a bunch of talks his name is vit fredman and among many things he's a web designer from the early 90s pre pre- internet I believe he's been experimenting with web it seems seems like his entire career he's self-taught and he has an interesting background is it in mathematics and computer science yeah so I yeah I got which will explain a couple things about his brain yes I I got very much obsessed with PHP and Computer Science and Mathematics and linear algebra when I was growing up so this was uh my big excitement back in the day I also by the way just um uh over the last couple of years I kind of tried to put a lot of things that we've been discussing today uh in this new thing that we call Smart interface design patterns which is all like a video course and training and stuff like that how much is that course and where can we find it h it's not expensive I had to be affordable I think it's like $250 $275 something oh super affordable I'm I'm not trying to be difficult okay great great so for those of you who could process all the things that vit's been talking about and are excited about learning more I look the easy thing is go watch him his YouTube videos where he's doing Keynotes he's pointing out a lot of the user experience design user interface design problems and I think you're going to really enjoy his sense of humor and how he presents things we're just getting a little glimpse into his brain oh I believe you're also yeah you're also the co-founder it's a Smashing Magazine yeah it's been around for like 17 years now oh my god wow that feels like you do events and workshops and in iners stuff right yes yes we do we have a couple of things coming up also next year so if you want to take a look smashing conf or Smashing Magazine that's that's a place where you'll find it you know there's always new stuff to learn so here we go my guest has been Vitali Freedman thank you very much for doing this with us it's been a real pleasure talking to you I have to probably relisten to some of this a couple more times before I can process Everything full transparency it was a lot for me to like absorb but it's been it's been beautiful it's it's been too long since you and I have talked so I hope it's not the same amount of time next time I I hope to see you in Germany at some point in the near future hello my name is s Friedman and you're listening to the Future [Music]