Vitaly Friedman:

I think this is 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 pop-ups, to everything. I think once you do that, once you actually get to the point where somebody feels valued, oh, they will move mountains for you.

Chris Do:

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 think of him as 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 Vitaly. Interesting name, just to begin with. So Vitaly, for people who don't know who you are, please introduce yourself and tell us a little story about the quirkiness, the human that's in front of me right now.

Vitaly Friedman:

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Chris. Well, I've never been called evil on-

Chris Do:

No, Dr. Evil. You're hilarious.

Vitaly Friedman:

I know. It's like... Yeah, yeah. So I think there is a bit of connection right there, indeed. So, thank you so much for having me. 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. So I was doing all this Shockwave stuff and before Flash even existed, and then I 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.So yeah, I got to the point where I actually just was doing stuff for the web, and then I was so obsessed the moment I saw CSS and I could do a bit of stuff for the 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 hell am I supposed to do now? And then gloss, and then COVID, and everything just got mixed up. And then here we are. We're meeting here today.

Chris Do:

Well, there is a point of intersection here that is funny and interesting. We're both backstage. We're at awards. I forget which awards it was, but it seems like a gazillion million years ago, pre-COVID. And the world has turned upside down, and it's neat that we're reconnected here. And there's something that people aren't going to understand right away. You have a way of speaking and presenting information that's a little bit dry, but just with that sarcasm, and then you present things. And you go deep into the crevices of the internet.

I was re-watching one of your talks where you're... I think it's called 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? Do you have any children?" And there's a slider. Who thinks of these things, and all these usability issues? Tell me a little bit about your observations as a person who has pretty much grown up with the web and has been shaping it for so long. Why do these things keep you up at night?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. I think, Chris, this has been very interesting, because I asked my question... I saw the question myself as well. And I think in many ways, I got so... When I was growing up with the web, somehow I knew I may be one of the few people who happened 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 can... Wow, this is just an incredible change in thing, in life, and everything.

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 truly felt so magical in so many different ways. And I just paid attention to little fine things, like those HTML things. What can you do? Wow, this is magic. I can just write things in my notepad, text editor, and then it's H1, 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 the technical stuff, but more about the usability, accessibility of things. And I got to the point where I struggled with things. I had a feeling that I have this really a magical power and the magical power is that... I mean, everybody has one. I'm sure that you, Chris, 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 how to fix it, but I can tell, "Oh, something is not right here."

And I would go and I would just bring 5, 10 people in, and I say, "Are they struggling as well?" And very often, more often than not, they would struggle as well. Then I realized maybe that's not just me. Of course, my mom told me always when I was growing up to them special, but I'm not that special. I'm just 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 and what their problems, what the troubles are.

And so that got me to this point where I actually started paying more and more attention, to the point that, right now, with COVID and all, we've basically been working on this big project with 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 I 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 search 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 can speak for hours, and I'm not joking at this point, I can speak for hours about accordions, and really nice, beautiful complex data grids, and enterprise dashboards. Oh, that's-

Chris Do:

Talk dirty to me, baby.

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, we can talk about those things forever. We can just create... Set up a fireplace. It's also funny, Chris. I think I'm speaking too much. But it's still funny because, 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, you know how people have book clubs, where they get together and they review books? I'm going to do website clubs, where we're going to just get together and then we're going to decide, let's go to Turkish railway system websites for Friday night. Because why not?

And then we're going to review and discuss together, explore patterns. What is it 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 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 probably the peak of your career, once you achieve that.

Chris Do:

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 going to 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 pick two of those things, and let's go there first, before we get to the thing that I want to talk about.

Vitaly Friedman:

Sure. I think I always like to find challenges. So for this last year, I think I got extremely excited trying to find ways on how to improve experiences in scenarios in which I usually was not involved in, or which I usually haven't even considered closely. For example, one of the things that really was interesting for me is 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 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 different age groups, you'll find remarkable differences in how we're designing. And I think that if you look at these areas, you really start realizing that many things that we are taking for granted, or maybe many things that we accept as reality, they're just not true.

In many ways, what you find is that when you think about, let's say older adults, you probably have a number in your mind what age that is. And obviously, everybody will have a different number at which point you become an older adult and whatnot. 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. You have to design entirely different depending on what you're dealing with there. And then, of course, there are certain things that are more likely and less likely.

And of course, we often think about the stereotype, not very active, problems with technology, those kinds 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 experiencing issues. But very often, they're going to be extremely active, for example, and they're going to be extremely savvy because they grew up with technology. So we have a lot of stereotypes. That goes for very different areas. So that was a huge rabbit hole to the point that I started looking into academic papers around just how people of different age deal in life with working life. It's been a huge rabbit hole. There 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 a more sustainable digital presence for public service. What does it mean? I mean, what does it actually mean?

Because usually, you would think about packaging, you would think about physical assets, and compression, and efficiency, and things like that. But as a designer, what does it mean, sustainable UX? So I mean, these are 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, some interesting ideas emerge. So I guess these are the topics that really keep me awake at night, Chris. What about you, by the way?

Chris Do:

Well, I don't know enough to even form an opinion to keep me awake at night. So let's do this. Let's dive in. So what we'll do is we'll unpack three topics on this episode with you. And as you can see, Vitaly 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?

Vitaly Friedman:

Well, this is quite a question, because I actually grew up in Germany, indeed. But I hardly speak German these days. I was born in Minsk, Belarus, and then my parents brought me in the year 1999. But I did grow up in Germany, indeed. You're good at this, Chris.

Chris Do:

I'm just enjoying the accent, 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, and 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 it comes to actually moving the needle for your client and what we need to think about in terms of 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?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, I think in many ways it all starts with including a diverse group of people into testing or into design process. I think very often, we 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 a way of we're thinking, in everything.

Even, these are things that really are important to me, the close button. The close button. Like a model window goes up, and then there is this X in the right upper corner. It's incredibly confusing to so many people. And normally, I would think, "What? What are you talking about? This is just a dialogue. It's all over. We've been doing this for what, 20 years now? 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. 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 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 quite a surprising discovery for me, that X is extremely confusing, so the best thing you can do is to just spell out what you mean. Just say, "Save and exit," in text, or, "Close and discard," just to make it extremely explicit. That's one thing. The other thing is, of course, that we need to keep in mind, I mean, these are basic 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, people with disabilities, people who have mental health issues, people who happen to have ADHD, people who have dyslexia, left-handed people. There are so many very, very different groups of people. And 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 we do there? And that group of people, what do we do there?" But I think that as we are creating more, I don't know, just using regular, good principles of accessibility, visibility, we 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, tap target sizes. If I see somebody who deliberately set the font size for their text at 12 pixels, we will have a conversation. I am going to be very, very difficult and I am going to try my best to prove you wrong.

But also overall, when we look at all of this, a lot of things that we 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 percentage of people who have a condition that's called dyscalculia. Dyscalculia is a problem of interpreting numbers. You would say, "Oh, okay. Interesting." So these are situations where you actually have issues remembering phone numbers, where you have issues remembering your credit card number if you ever wanted to memorize it, or anything that related to that.

And so what happens is, if you are designing, let's say, a FinTech application, you need to be aware of this. This is absolutely critical, because approximately 3-10% of the entire global population encounter to some or other degree different levels of dyscalculia. Especially, it could also be related to low numeracy for example. So it's a large, large area.And then, of course, you have things like color blindness. And you would always think color blindness, it's just red-green problem. It isn't, because as you grow older, for example, you actually start having massive difficulties seeing the difference between blue and purple. And there is this huge... Also when you throw brown into the mix with red and green, it becomes a mess as well.

So I've been kind putting this together, this guide, and posting a lot of stuff on LinkedIn as well around that. It was mind-blowing, just all those things that are not really publicized because 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 our abilities to accommodate for everyone.

Chris Do:

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?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. So there are different flavors of that. But for example, for the European Parliament, what we end up doing is we... And it 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 that it is going to work better than what we have right now. I do not want to waste anybody's time. I don't want to be in a position where I have to get into defensive mode saying, "Oh, well we tried our best, but we failed," especially when you're dealing with a large organization or a large company.

So for that, what we actually do is, before we even start designing, we think about, "Okay, let's create this concept, and we can do around some concept testing." Or also we can also take an existing website and create a baseline or 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 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 tasks depending on the environment in which we are. And then, usually 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 statistically reliable data. What you get is you bring 18 people ideally, and you give them these tasks, all 12 of them, and you spend maybe one hour of them.

Some of my colleagues do unmoderated testing, where they're not even present. They just send these tasks, and there is basically a tool. There are plenty of tools, they 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 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 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 completing those tasks, you get to the point where you actually get an average time per task. For every task, you'll get an average time that they need. 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, or five months later, after a rollout, 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. Because you basically give them not just random tasks but representative tasks, things that they are critical for that application, for that website.

And one thing I think I really want to emphasize here, usually you get to the point where you ask people, "Hey, tell us. Speak through your experience as you're doing these 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 tasks, and that's 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 tasks, we basically do a debriefing, get some insights, take some notes, and we know what to do next time.

Chris Do:

That makes a lot of sense to me. So you're saying at least 18 people, give them 10 to 20, or I 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 rates. So sometimes, it could fail. And that would be your baseline, and so then anything you do after that's going to be measured. So we did worse, we did better hopefully.

Vitaly Friedman:

Exactly.

Chris Do:

Experience and your instincts and your observations, it'll work better. Do you do heat mapping as well to see where they dwell on?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yep, absolutely. So very often, it depends, of course, very much on the project and what we want to achieve there. We could also look into things like how far people scroll. Sometimes it would even go to the point where if you want to explain something to them, even if it's a landing page or so, you just ask them, "Can you describe in your words what that product is like, or what it is offering?" Right?

Another thing that we sometimes do, if you want to get an emotional understanding of how they perceive the brand, usually measuring the brand perception is very difficult. 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, or the product?" And they will tell you different things. People are strange creatures. I mean, very strange creatures. Everybody comes with their own context, so they will pick very, very different things. But you can see the trend.

So if somebody tells you boring, dull, generic, that tells you how the brand is perceived. If they say shocking, or bold, or exciting, these are all slightly different ways of phrasing their level of excitement. Because again, they come with a particular context. But you can get a sense about where you are on that spectrum, extremely boring and neutral, which people usually cannot really connect emotionally with, or extremely exciting, and bold, and innovative, and whatever. So that's the other side of the spectrum.

Chris Do:

With you spending as much time as you have in the web design space, I think also referred to as product design, UX design, and now I saw also on your LinkedIn as a surface designer, so you've done this for a long time, basically, are there any tips you can give someone who's like, "Okay, you know what? I don't have the time or the resources to run multiple tests with that many people." Is there a shorthand version where, never do this, always do this, and sometimes do this?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. So I think that fortunately the UX community is just incredible on LinkedIn, and I don't know, where are people these days, I think LinkedIn, I guess, to some degree at least. So there are plenty... There is no shortage in templates. We always need to take certain templates with a bit of grain of salt because again, it needs to be customized for whatever your needs are, I think.But in general, there is this almost unwritten rule, and I think that this is something that we often forget. Even if we just take five people, five users, and speak with them about whatever they're going with, what are they encountering, the issues, is everything clear, things like that, 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 commitments. Not necessarily. You just bring five people in the room or 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 run a couple of one-on-one visibility 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 service is, and so on, and 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, then test that individually.Usually, the good layer or good level that you want to achieve is when you have this end-to-end testing. Somebody just lands on the product, they go for onboarding, eventually they have to do some tasks to get things done, and then eventually they maybe upgrade, right? This could be like end-to-end 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,

Stewart Schuster:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back. Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do:

You mentioned something about not just adults, but adults on a spectrum, so there could be different physical accessibility issues as you get older, some people might have dyslexia, or maybe are colorblind, and so that's going to affect the design. In trying to design something that's more accessible, do you have to build a bunch of different versions of the site? Or do you just designed for the one that works for everybody, and that's the one that gets used?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, I think that it's very dangerous part to create multiple websites or multiple versions, because very often what happens is people don't necessarily associate themselves with a particular group, and you need to speak to that group in some way. Of course, you could have the toggles between dark mode, and light mode, and high contrast mode, and so on. But usually, very often what you get is that if you create something that's just accessible out of the box, like large font sizes, color contrast, just simple things, I mean things that we've been speaking about for 20 years, I guess, you'll be okay.

It's just if you are working in a specific environment, where you actually, again, like FinTech, there, you need to be very, very careful of how you design things. When you think about something like just mobile interfaces, where to put the menu, how to use it, very often, what you will get is, for example, really important buttons that are all of a sudden hidden or 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 straightforward rules around accessibility that are not... It's not like a magic science. It is complicated. And if you want to let's say bring accessibility to a not accessible, 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.One of the greatest example for me is the Wise, the bank, Wise bank redesign or rebrand, I should say. They went all in on accessibility, but it's bold, it's on brand, it's strong, it's huge. It has a point of view. It's authentic. It's extremely attractive, and it's extremely attractive because they actually thought about accessibility from the very start. So it's not like it's 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.

Chris Do:

Okay. I'm curious, and I'm throwing you a curve ball here. In the age of AI, do you see a future where 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 copy is written differently, so it's hyper-targeted, super narrow niche. What do you think about that?

Vitaly Friedman:

Wow. This is an interesting future 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, and 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 hyper-customize, hyper-personalize.At some point, you also get to the situation where the system maybe understands the human better than the human does himself or herself, so it becomes a little bit freaky, a little bit dangerous in a way. And I think it might not be necessary at times. What is however necessary, I think, is just 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 the 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 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 ChatGPT text. I don't know, I just feel like there is something ChatGPTish in it. I cannot point a finger. It's maybe like 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 clean in a way, too sterile in 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 to be able 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 aligned. That's okay. That's the web. We can always interact, and play, and change, and experiment.

Chris Do:

You cited on your keynote talk a couple of things that they had done. One was about putting some funny copy into the fine print, the terms and conditions. I thought that was pretty hilarious. It's like, you're giving away your soul of your firstborn to this company, and they put it in there just to show 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 they want to increase dwell time. They put a fake hair so people are swiping, trying to get rid of it, and they can't get rid of it and they're like, "Oh yeah, you guys got me." What are your thoughts on those kinds of things.

Vitaly Friedman:

But this is definitely not what I would love to see more on the web. So there is of course place for experimentation. And there is actually... I know we speak a lot about things looking generic and looking the same, and this has been an ongoing conversation for years now, but I think that there has been a lot of innovation. I see incredible portfolios, really incredible work happening 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 that thing that you just mentioned. Because it's just dishonest. 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 being deceptive and having all kinds of deceptive patterns. But this is 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, that have now established some guidelines or is trying to establish some guidelines, and rules, and legislation against deceptive patterns, which I think is not necessarily a bad idea. I think it's actually a good idea.

I would love just to see people really respect it. I think this is 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 pop-ups, to everything. 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. But we don't think about that that much. We usually play a short-term goal game. Although I think, well, my life has always been playing a long-term game.

Chris Do:

Let me ask you this before we move on to the second of our topics here. 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 thirty-five images before the one that you're supposed to see. Hot take on that?

Vitaly Friedman:

Well, it's just horrible. I mean, frankly, I think... Yeah, I think so. Every now and again, I would be also in the same position, where I look and I think, okay, we're always talking about hooks. We're all talking about 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 want to be in a position where I can remember a website, remember somebody in a positive light. I don't want to feel tricked in some way. So if you are publishing articles on your feed and it's all full of those kinds of things, I will find it very, very difficult to trust you on a personal level. Maybe you'll post some other useful content. That's fine. But I'll have a very strong feeling to trust you, trust your words.

I would also have 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 in some way. Because I don't feel like this brings anybody forward. This is not helpful for anybody. So sure, you can generate some random clicks, but why? This is always the 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. I would never buy anything from a company, or subscribe to a premium whatever, for those kinds of things.

But if you go to extremes to give me something that I find valuable, again, as I said, I would probably go to do whatever I can do to support and buy everything that you produce. 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. 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.

Chris Do:

I think they're not trying to sell you a product or service. I think they're just selling ad space. So the more they get you to click on the next page, reload, and there's three inline ads there, you're like, "Okay, who's clicking on those things?"

Vitaly Friedman:

I will go to extremes to set up my ad blockers to make sure that I don't see any of that, and I will not have any bad conscience around that at all, even if I go to that article or something.

Chris Do:

Maybe that's revealing a little bit about my dark nature, wanting 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'd not heard before as it relates to digital experiences. What the heck do you mean, digital sustainability? There's no physical thing. 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?

Vitaly Friedman:

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 McGovern for the European Parliament. And in general, this is really this idea of we are consuming so much, there's so much water, so much everything, and very often, it's just one off.

Whenever you get, let's say... 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. Or this idea of repurpose or rebuying every 2, 3, 4, maybe every year, a new laptop, a new phone, and things like that. And there are things that we just don't need.

For example, if I think about delivery, if I think about Amazon Prime, you can get anything delivered to you within what? One hour, two hours, one day. I don't know what it's like now. I think I don't really need it. I mean, maybe we should actually, instead of saying get it faster, get it in the next 12 hours or six hours, say if you're not in a hurry, maybe we can deliver to you within six days, but you would pay less. I don't rush. That's okay. It doesn't have to be delivered to me in two days or three days. That's okay. So maybe we could actually slow down people instead of encouraging them to do more. I would be willing to even pay more if it was more sustainable packaging potentially. So things like that could work.

But on the other hand, what this ultimately goes to, when I'm 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 sitting here and maybe people who are going to watch or listen to this later, if you are, let's say, coming to a website, a relatively complex website, and you need to spend something within five to 10 minutes to do your thing, whatever that thing is, that's a waste.Not only is it a waste of your lifetime, also it's a waste of resources, be it energy, be it power, be it water, be it everything. So maybe instead of making things more polluted and blinking things all over the place, especially again, sure you can do that for public services, because this is how it's supposed to be, it's supposed to work, but also for any digital product, just help people get the results faster. And that requires testing.

So if you can get... One thing, it's really been annoying me for a long time now, we got to this concept, 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 it gets search results page. Then that search results page has links to pages. Why? If aliens ever came to this planet, they'd be very confused why the hell we're doing this?

Wouldn't it be better, especially with the wonderful capabilities of AI, that we say, "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 that list 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 through results, and filter, and maybe navigate between different tabs, between images, and photos, and videos. Those kinds of things. That would be helping people so much better to actually get the results faster.

Or another idea, and this is probably one of the most impactful ones, very often, people watching streams online, on YouTube and whatnot. But what I miss on YouTube is the option to just have audio only. I might be watching a documentary, maybe I'm cooking or whatever, I'm not even looking at the screen, but instead it's streaming to me at 4K, and I don't need that. So why do we waste? We waste so many things, 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 the part of design and part of sustainability, of course. But very often, they're just not thought through, I guess.

The final one, I'm really, really thinking. We need to think about those things. We often have auto-save, but we never have auto-delete, right? Wouldn't it be nice to say if nobody has accessed this page or this article in the last two years, automatically delete it, right? Do we need to store everything that we are producing for eternity? I don't think so. Because eventually, it has to be stored somewhere, and that also has other costs related to that. So yeah, this has been on my mind a lot lately.

Chris Do:

Well, I'm surprised you didn't mention this one thing about just energy use, designing sites to use more black so that the energy that's used to display, it's generating heat, using 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 one or to zero, or something like that. You talked about the designer's role in working with their physical partners to... What is the rush? Why do we need to get this so fast?

And I think Amazon does do this now where they say, if you are 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 there's somebody like you on the other side thinking these things through. We don't need it today, we don't even need it in two days. You're right. There's lots of things like, I'll read that book whenever it gets here. It's okay.

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, so I certainly agree with it. I wasn't aware of that, but wow, that makes me hopeful, I think. Because again, there are many things that we... We were always obsessed with efficiency and speed, and very often, just calm down, just go get a coffee. And there is no need to be efficient all the time. 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.

Chris Do:

I think YouTube has also addressed the whole audio only with a premium account. I forget what they call it now. Used to be called YouTube Red, and now you can do audio only. It's less on the bandwidth. It's using less energy on 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 I know this is bad for me to say as a creator, but I noticed sometimes, when I'm watching a 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 stop and say, "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 a very thoughtful, conscientious guy who has a philosophy on all this stuff, and I love that. And I'm glad there's somebody like you in the world to make sure the other people who aren't so thoughtful have a voice to like, "Okay."

Vitaly Friedman:

Oh no, no, Chris. I'm just being difficult most of the time. I'm just being difficult to most people, that's all I am.

Chris Do:

I love it. But you do it with a sense of humor too, so 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 make designers accountable for things and also to give them credit for things that they do. So in web especially, maybe with 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 design and UX?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, I think that's very much related to a couple of things. First of all, what we need to understand is, and this is something that has been discussed quite heavily over the last couple of months as well, this idea that we, as designers, we often see on LinkedIn, and Twitter, and everywhere, we see those 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 at least the position in which I am, it might be that of course all 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, who happen to be not designers, they don't really trust me. And not in a 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.

So the thing that we're trying to do is establish this connection between what the business wants and what 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, you'll 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 by the end of 2023 or 2024.

All right, so you got this big, big, big, very fluffy and very unconcrete 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 other reasons that we learn that why people are abandoning us. This is why churn rate happens and is so high. 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.

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 a 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 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 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 serving, or 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. 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're propagating from the bottom all the way to the top, you have this... And you bring developers, and you bring engineers, and you bring PM, you bring business people on board.

And this is one of the wonderful artifacts that explains to everyone what the hell we are working on towards that goal and why. That creates an incredible sense of alignment as well. And I can also share it with the audience, if I can create a PDF or whatever to explain what it looks like, of course. 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 does the job.

And I'm not talking about A-B 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 these metrics." And these things or these metrics is something that we call then design KPIs.

So for example, just to make it very, very clear, sorry for a very long answer, if you are working on search, usually your quality of work will be measured by how up-to-date a search engine is, which is totally irrelevant 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, to measure search, we go and take maybe top 100 search queries that came our way last year or last six months, whatever. Then we'd 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. They get around 60 to 80% of all the clicks.So we get these 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 2, 3, 4, 5 months later, you run the same test, you take top 100, you go to editorial, you get your current and you match. Well, if it gets better, then it's clearly an improvement. 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, 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, for example, the number of searches 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 start this thinking about measurements before you even design it.

Chris Do:

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 trying to do. It's that lack of accountability that we thrive in because it's like, "I can't guarantee you 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 you have a success, there's a thousand people who will raise their hand and say, "Well, it was because of what I did." The copywriter would say, "Because it was great copywriting." And then the person who designed it would say, "Well, it's because me." Or somebody else who is the engineer was like, "No, because of this." How do you account for that?

Because there's this expression, the expression is success has many fathers, failure has one mother. So when it's successful and the business goal, the global business objective is being met to sell more product services units or something, increased subscriptions, there's a lot of things that go into that. How do you know it's what that one or that group of people did versus what somebody else says? Because this happens to us in the real world.

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. So there are two types... To accommodate for that, there are two types of testing. On the one hand, you have this end-to-end testing, which covers everything. So if you want to get to the goal, you run some tests, you want to 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.

But what you can do, because you establish metrics for everything that you're working on and everything that design teams are working on, you can say, "Okay, this has improved. This has improved. This has not improved." Well, if this has not improved, then surely this has not contributed. So those things have improved though. Okay. So did they actually improve dramatically, or slowly, or was it similar? Do they keep improving? Was it just a variance in statistics? So if you actually run the test again, 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 accommodate for that or see that. But of course, if you have a very large team with, I don't know, dozens or even hundreds of designers or engineers, then you get to the point where it'll be quite difficult. Then you need to test a lot locally. Meaning if you're, let's say, working on search, you want to really test things within search, rather than across the entire product.

But sometimes it's not really necessary to really say, "Okay, I did this," or, "That team has done it." Different teams can claim success because it's their shared success. They all contributed to it together. So however, I would say this is something that I learned the hard way, I think. As a designer, I highly encourage you, and 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 this habit of measuring what you're doing, you will have a wonderful set of things that you will be mentioning in your next negotiation interview, or one-on-one. This will be very, very helpful. So again, showing the value of your work is something that's going to drive you hopefully to the highest salary and have a better position in the company.

Chris Do:

Okay. I have one last follow-up question, and I realize we're almost out of time here. Actually we're already over time.

Vitaly Friedman:

Oh, no, Chris. We could go like this forever.

Chris Do:

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 tests or how we measure? What can give us false positives?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. So I think the most important part is to avoid biases. Very often would be basically, if you are not... With research, you always can gain a little bit. So you can always ask the questions where you want to get the answers 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, or private YouTube, where it's going to be screened towards so the entire organization can watch it, so other designers can watch it, or people who work 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 questions they should be asking and not.

Typical thing is that whenever you are running your research, you should not ask close-ended questions like, "Did you enjoy that experience? Were you always finding what you're looking for?" Because it almost implies the answer and people are falling through 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 point where you get one specific segment, 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 with five people, or 12 people, or 18 people, that they are representative of your user base. That's the hard work. So you have to be quite careful there, because you really need that in order to get decent results.

Chris Do:

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 that are actually going to use it. And the thing that you talk about broadcasting, I didn't understand why you want to broadcast it to the whole company on Zoom. I got lost in that sauce.

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. So the reason why we're broadcasting is because we want it to be visible to everyone, so other designers or other researchers can actually tune in and listen or watch of how their product is performing. It's also great for designers to see how their work is being used. It's great for engineers to see how their work is being used. But also it's great for other people in the company to see how the questions are being asked. I think that'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 real or is it 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 one of the sessions or two of the sessions, they can do that and see how a particular feature that they may have been working on recently works with real people.

Chris Do:

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 it my own way anyways."

Vitaly Friedman:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing that I wanted to add on top of that is that one thing that I think is really quite critical is that when you're actually selecting those tasks that you give to people, that they are not skewed either. Because again, 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.

So again, those tasks and everything that you're working on, this needs to be crucial for business. So business needs to care about it. Usually you would have these North Star metrics that every company has. Airbnb would have something like the number of nights that a person is booking for staying with Airbnb. 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... Those tasks that we give that are just random. They need to be somehow best connected to business.

Chris Do:

Okay. You mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned that 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 this is like, "I don't get it." So make sure you check the show notes, everybody. If you're watching this, we'll include it in the description as well.

But I would just want to encourage you to just Google him, search on YouTube, because he's got a bunch of talks. His name is Vitaly Friedman. And among many things, he's a web designer from the early '90s, pre-internet, I believe. He's been experimenting with web, it seems like his entire career. He's self-taught, and he has an interesting background. Is it in mathematics and computer science?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. So I got really-

Chris Do:

Which will explain a couple things about his brain.

Vitaly Friedman:

Yes, I got very much obsessed with PHP, and computer science, and mathematics, and linear algebra when I was growing up. So this was my big excitement back in the day. I also, by the way, just over the last couple of years, I tried to put a lot of things that we've been discussing today in this new thing that we call Smart Interface Design Patterns, which is a video course, and training, and stuff like that. And this is always fun, so if you are interested, you can also find some things around that. It's Smart Interface Design Patterns.

Chris Do:

Okay, so you have a course that teaches what you've been talking about?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

How much is that course, and where can we find it?

Vitaly Friedman:

It's not expensive. I try to be affordable. I think it's like $250, $275, or something.

Chris Do:

Oh, super affordable. So for those of you who could process all the things that Vitaly has been talking about and are excited about learning more, look, the easy thing is go watch him on 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. So his course, what is your course called again?

Vitaly Friedman:

It's Smart Interface Design Patterns.

Chris Do:

Smart Interface Design Patterns. It's only 250 bucks. We'll include some kind of code if you use it. You'll save a few bucks here and there. But you also support a pretty awesome human being.

Vitaly Friedman:

Oh, you're being very kind, Chris.

Chris Do:

Yeah. You're also the co-founder of... It's Smashing Magazine?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, it's been around for 17 years now. Oh my God.

Chris Do:

Wow. And you do events and workshops, in-person stuff, right?

Vitaly Friedman:

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 a place where you'll find it. And oh my God, this is going to be quite an exciting year. Are you looking forward to the next year, Chris?

Chris Do:

Absolutely.

Vitaly Friedman:

This will be the best year ever, right?

Chris Do:

I believe so. I believe so.

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah. It has to. I mean, come on. Give me a break.

Chris Do:

What other choice do we have?

Vitaly Friedman:

Yeah, pretty much.

Chris Do:

Can't go backwards. Yeah, so direct them to your URL. Where do they need to go to find out more information about this course that you put together?

Vitaly Friedman:

Oh, yeah. You should go and just Google smartinterfacedesignpatterns.com, or smartinterfacedesignpatterns.com in the browser, or I think SIDP, I think. If I set up a redirect, that would be nice, but I'm very chaotic and stuff. So if you just look for Smart Interface Design Patterns, you will find the video course. It has a lot of recipes.

Chris Do:

Okay. It's smartinterfacedesignpatterns.com. My guest has been Vitaly Friedman, thank you very much for doing this with us. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I have to probably re-listen to some of this a couple more times before I can process everything. Full transparency, it was a lot for me to absorb. But it's been beautiful. 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 hope to see you in Germany at some point in the near future.

Vitaly Friedman:

Oh, yes. I would love that. And thank you so much for having me. And enjoy, everyone. Most importantly, just slow down and don't work that much.

Chris Do:

There it is.

Vitaly Friedman:

Thank you so much for having me, Chris. My name is Vitaly Friedman, and you're listening to The Futur.

Stewart Schuster:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app, and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborne for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better.Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris, and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

‍