Topics we cover in the interview
URLS Mentioned
SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it.
JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’re doing and I think that has historically been kind of difficult for a lot of designers to make that shift, but what’s really interesting now is I’m seeing designers who have come up only having ever designed for the web and while they may lack some of the finer nuances of typography or things like that, what they’re really good at is thinking about what the web is good at, what the web has in terms of constraint and working with that, and being really native to the web. So yeah, that’s changing an awful lot.
SD: Do you see a wider application of how we understand design, I mean in the sense that design is applicable to genomes, to architecture, to graphics, to language, to urban design, to maybe even companies, and as a [web’ designer do you find yourself using a wider application of design…?
JV: Well, I find myself doing design a lot differently. In the past I don’t think we had to think as much about use, and what people are trying to do with our design, and that’s an interesting set of disciplines. I think that product designers in the past have thought about those things, ergonomics and things like that, but people who are working with documents, graphics, layouts, that sort of thing, they never really had to consider that. A book was a book, and you knew what the constraint was and you designed to it. That’s so different now, so I spend far more of my time now understanding technology, doing user research, doing basic ethnography, anthropology, stuff like that which I never considered was going to be part of my career. That takes up probably more time than the actual design process itself, the actual arranging things on a screen that makes sense to people (…) is trying to build that level of empathy for what people are trying to do and try to embody that when we sit do to do that design. So, yeah, it changes a lot.
SD: A lot of your work has been in the areas of both UI design and usability - how to track that, how to quantify that, how to communicate that, how to design and optimise that…
JV: Well, usability is a little piece of that. Usability is a little bit like spell checking, like just making sure that the decisions we’ve already made, we’ve made correctly. I think a lot of people got on this usability bandwagon and put a little bit too much faith into it, to try to use usability to help them decide what to do rather than whether or not they’ve done things right. Deciding what to do, that’s the job of design, right? That’s where you have to figure out what people are trying to get done here, how can I help them do that, what are the expectations people have, what are the conventions that they already understand. Usability doesn’t help us with any of that, but it does help us understand whether or not I did it right, and so there’s an awful lot of different techniques. We try to go out and talk to people all the time, I do telephone interviews with potential users, I demo the thing that I’m working on to anybody who’ll take a look at it. I just want to make sure that I understand the kinds of things they’re trying to do, and that I can help them do that.
SD: Do you find that when you’re showing a product to someone that general patterns tend to come up or is there a unique user experience that you’re seeing when you’re showing it?
JV: There’s definitely patterns. Humans are wired to work a certain way, especially when you have everybody looking at a screen, everybody using a mouse, there’s certainly patterns there. There are also differences in those patterns based on the different types of audiences that we’re working with. I created an application for people who have weblogs. Those are people who have a desire to publish on the web, have a little bit of technical understanding, they’ve maybe edited a template before,so there’s some assumptions that I can make about that audience as opposed to an audience that’s trying to get information about their healthcare. That’s a much broader set of expectations that people have, perhaps a lot [of] different backgrounds in the kinds of experience they have with technology so we can’t just necessarily take for granted that people are going to understand all of this unless we have a really good understanding of who those audience segments really are.
SD: I would imagine at Google that you have a lot of time for really researching your user base, right?
JV: There’s no time! There’s no time for it. That’s the terrible irony about what we do. First, I don’t think that a lot of people understand the value of the research because it take time, and it’s time when people aren’t writing code or designing pages. It is all very qualitative, almost nebulous - I mean, you can create a research plan and you can follow the plan and everything, but it takes time and it’s kind of expensive when time is very expensive. So a lot of the research we do on the fly, really ad hoc, and I think that’s totally fine because a little research is always better than no research at all. But Google is the kind of company that really wants to invest in user experience, understands the importance of research - but even so we’re all doing a million things at once and we still want to get out ahead of the competition, so it’s always this balance between those things.
SD: It was interesting to me in your talk how you contextualize Web 2.0, and I think we’re very much creatures of story: tell us a story and we will often as a group follow it or aggregate towards it, if you will. What do you think is the new story is for us?
JV: I studied history when I was in school, it was my major, actually; ironically, here all I feel I do is work in the future now, but in the presentation I gave today at this workshop I started with a bunch of stories about how this cycle has happened in the past, how there’s been some sort of technological innovation that nobody expected. That’s happened throughout history, whether it was the steam engine or the Model T or the web browser, and a tremendous amount of capital tends to flow towards those technological innovations, so a bunch of people get really rich and it changes the way we do something, typically business - that certainly happened in the late nineties. There was this innovation and suddenly every business changed, some of them subtly, but some of them fundamentally, in the way in which they did their business because of web technologies and a tremendous amount of money went into funding and financing that, and a bunch of people got rich, and people thought this would continue forever. Of course it doesn’t, there isn’t an unlimited supply of capital. Eventually something has to pay off and everybody got scared and there was a big bust. Well, that’s going to happen again, inevitably. I don’t know if it will necessarily happen in this industry with these Web 2.0 companies that are getting funded now. Perhaps it won’t, perhaps it’ll shake out and things will level off and that will be good, but even if it does happen again there’s a lot that we can learn this time around: right, there’s these design techniques, there’s this way about thinking about our audiences, there’s this openness that these new companies have that old companies, traditional companies, never had before, and that’s the kind of stuff I try to tease out of these stories that I look for.
SD: I also think just in talking with people and watching it seems that there’s definitely is a sense of people really building their foundations at this round in a way that was maybe not there before, I mean understanding that incremental growth and smaller, strong foundation, kind of lean and mean instead of bloated…
JV: I wonder about that. Maybe I’m skeptical because I went through it before and certainly there aren’t people going out saying, “I am going to change way people buy groceries and I’m taking this company public and we are going to be a two billion dollar company next year.” That’s not happening, thank God that’s not happening, because that was exhausting. At the same time this idea of keeping things very small, trying to build a business first and then take the funding, like, those are great principles. I don’t think those principles, while they may be spoken a lot, are held by a lot of these companies to be honest, and again I might just be cynical about this, but I think everybody is doing this for the American Dream, right, well, not everybody, but a fair amount of people are getting into this thinking “I can build a web app, I can sell it, I can get rich”, and that’s not going to happen to most people, but I think a lot of people have the potential to think, “I can create a web app, I can build a community of users that like it, I can make a good living off of that”. Ryan Carson is inspiring to me, the way they have done their little web apps, that they are turning it into a business, it’s a great lifestyle for them, things like that and I’m sure there’s a potential reward out of all of that but perhaps y’know, making a living off of a web application, not a terrible thing, so we’ll see.
SD: I appreciate that you have both the wide, the long, and also the deep view. Can you talk a little bit about the company you were at before Google?
JV: Sure, about five years ago, 2001, at the worst possible time in the industry, the absolute bottom of the bust, I started a company with six of my friends, all peers in the industry, all designers in various fields of design, we started a company called Adaptive Path. It was a great time, frankly, to start a company, it was a really bad business environment but still there was projects going on and were able to find the little projects to get started and we sort of grew up out of that. We followed this rebirth of the industry and it’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to have because we tried to embody a lot of the principles of good design in our company and I think we’ve followed through on that pretty well. I miss it a lot, I mean I’m down at Google now, we did a product inside of Adaptive Path called Measure Map which we sold to Google and I went with that, to bring that over but I absolutely miss Adaptive Path as well, it continues to be a fantastic group of people doing really, really important work.
SD: Measure Map, can you tell me a little bit about how that’s playing out as people are starting to use it?
JV: Well, Measure Map was kind of interesting to me in that, much like Evan Williams who started Blogger and now is doing Odeo, he said in his talk today that he needed to make applications that he wanted to use. That’s what Measure Map was for me. I had had a blog for three or four years, I knew it was doing well because I got email, and people would leave comments, but I had no idea how well. I looked at all these analytics tools that were out there, the stat counters and so on, and I couldn’t figure them out. I thought, “I’m kind of a smart guy, what’s going on here?”, and it turns out that most of them were either enterprise level or very powerful open source tools for sysadmins that were managing servers. There was nothing to help people understand what impact they were having with a blog. So I said well let’s do a web analytics tool just for blogs, specific to that kind of traffic, to that kind of web site, and instead of measuring hits or advertising conversions or any of that stuff why don’t we just measure participation, how the blog is doing, and what you can you learn from that. We tried to make it as simple as possible. When you log into Measure Map, there’s just four numbers - how many people came today, and what did they do, did they link to you, did they leave a comment, how many posts did they read… Four simple things - you can drill into that, get a little more detail, but we really just wanted to show cause and effect. It’s like a garden, you pay attention to it and it will grow.
SD: Within Google are you being asked to work on the next generation of the visual UIs for the display of data?
JV: Well, I’m taking a variety of approaches to working in a giant company like that. I really have no intent on redesigning Google. I don’t even want the opportunity. We’re taking Measure Map and they have a Google Analytics product and we’re working with those guys to bring best practices together and help people understand how their traffic is doing and stuff like that. There’s a lot of amazing design work that’s happening at Google right now and we’re sort of looking at what the best practices are for this kind of audience, for these kinds of applications, and seeing how there’s all these points of integration and that’s kind of the work we’re doing so I think there’s going to be an awful lot coming out of all of this.
SD: So, for our listeners, any last jewels you’d like to give? What would be your advice, from your professional career?
JV: One of the things that I’ve always told designers is to go make stuff. Always be making stuff, and frankly it could not be easier now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer or what, the risk in building web application or frankly in visualising your ideas is so much lower now. Ten years ago it cost millions of dollars to try to visualise something. You had to buy very expensive servers, you had to get very expensive software to run on those servers, you had to pay for very expensive advertising before you could even get started. Now we have cost per click advertising for pennies, servers that are dirt cheap, software’s all free now, and the software is so good now. We developed Measure Map on Ruby on Rails and it was remarkable how little effort it took for us to iterate and change our ideas and to visualise stuff as quickly as possible. So that’s my thing, if you have an idea it’s a lot easier now to just go try, and that’s what I encourage everybody to do. Yeah, absolutely.
SD: Well, thank you, really wonderful interview. Thanks.
Transcribed by Scott Morris
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Topics we cover in the interview
URLS Mentioned
SD: This is Sarah Drew for Vitamin and I’m sitting here with Jeff Veen, who’s had a long and illustrious history and is at this moment in time at Google. I’d like to start with design and what you see as the evolution of design that may be happening, and understanding design in a much larger context than what we’ve maybe traditionally understood it.
JV: Yeah, I think that’s true. Even if you look at the past couple of decades it’s changed phenomenally from the print-based, what-you-see-is-what-you-get design to being much more interactive. There’s a lack of control that’s going on in a lot of the design that we’re doing and I think that has historically been kind of difficult for a lot of designers to make that shift, but what’s really interesting now is I’m seeing designers who have come up only having ever designed for the web and while they may lack some of the finer nuances of typography or things like that, what they’re really good at is thinking about what the web is good at, what the web has in terms of constraint and working with that, and being really native to the web. So yeah, that’s changing an awful lot.
SD: Do you see a wider application of how we understand design, I mean in the sense that design is applicable to genomes, to architecture, to graphics, to language, to urban design, to maybe even companies, and as a [web’ designer do you find yourself using a wider application of design…?
JV: Well, I find myself doing design a lot differently. In the past I don’t think we had to think as much about use, and what people are trying to do with our design, and that’s an interesting set of disciplines. I think that product designers in the past have thought about those things, ergonomics and things like that, but people who are working with documents, graphics, layouts, that sort of thing, they never really had to consider that. A book was a book, and you knew what the constraint was and you designed to it. That’s so different now, so I spend far more of my time now understanding technology, doing user research, doing basic ethnography, anthropology, stuff like that which I never considered was going to be part of my career. That takes up probably more time than the actual design process itself, the actual arranging things on a screen that makes sense to people (…) is trying to build that level of empathy for what people are trying to do and try to embody that when we sit do to do that design. So, yeah, it changes a lot.
SD: A lot of your work has been in the areas of both UI design and usability - how to track that, how to quantify that, how to communicate that, how to design and optimise that…
JV: Well, usability is a little piece of that. Usability is a little bit like spell checking, like just making sure that the decisions we’ve already made, we’ve made correctly. I think a lot of people got on this usability bandwagon and put a little bit too much faith into it, to try to use usability to help them decide what to do rather than whether or not they’ve done things right. Deciding what to do, that’s the job of design, right? That’s where you have to figure out what people are trying to get done here, how can I help them do that, what are the expectations people have, what are the conventions that they already understand. Usability doesn’t help us with any of that, but it does help us understand whether or not I did it right, and so there’s an awful lot of different techniques. We try to go out and talk to people all the time, I do telephone interviews with potential users, I demo the thing that I’m working on to anybody who’ll take a look at it. I just want to make sure that I understand the kinds of things they’re trying to do, and that I can help them do that.
SD: Do you find that when you’re showing a product to someone that general patterns tend to come up or is there a unique user experience that you’re seeing when you’re showing it?
JV: There’s definitely patterns. Humans are wired to work a certain way, especially when you have everybody looking at a screen, everybody using a mouse, there’s certainly patterns there. There are also differences in those patterns based on the different types of audiences that we’re working with. I created an application for people who have weblogs. Those are people who have a desire to publish on the web, have a little bit of technical understanding, they’ve maybe edited a template before,so there’s some assumptions that I can make about that audience as opposed to an audience that’s trying to get information about their healthcare. That’s a much broader set of expectations that people have, perhaps a lot [of] different backgrounds in the kinds of experience they have with technology so we can’t just necessarily take for granted that people are going to understand all of this unless we have a really good understanding of who those audience segments really are.
SD: I would imagine at Google that you have a lot of time for really researching your user base, right?
JV: There’s no time! There’s no time for it. That’s the terrible irony about what we do. First, I don’t think that a lot of people understand the value of the research because it take time, and it’s time when people aren’t writing code or designing pages. It is all very qualitative, almost nebulous - I mean, you can create a research plan and you can follow the plan and everything, but it takes time and it’s kind of expensive when time is very expensive. So a lot of the research we do on the fly, really ad hoc, and I think that’s totally fine because a little research is always better than no research at all. But Google is the kind of company that really wants to invest in user experience, understands the importance of research - but even so we’re all doing a million things at once and we still want to get out ahead of the competition, so it’s always this balance between those things.
SD: It was interesting to me in your talk how you contextualize Web 2.0, and I think we’re very much creatures of story: tell us a story and we will often as a group follow it or aggregate towards it, if you will. What do you think is the new story is for us?
JV: I studied history when I was in school, it was my major, actually; ironically, here all I feel I do is work in the future now, but in the presentation I gave today at this workshop I started with a bunch of stories about how this cycle has happened in the past, how there’s been some sort of technological innovation that nobody expected. That’s happened throughout history, whether it was the steam engine or the Model T or the web browser, and a tremendous amount of capital tends to flow towards those technological innovations, so a bunch of people get really rich and it changes the way we do something, typically business - that certainly happened in the late nineties. There was this innovation and suddenly every business changed, some of them subtly, but some of them fundamentally, in the way in which they did their business because of web technologies and a tremendous amount of money went into funding and financing that, and a bunch of people got rich, and people thought this would continue forever. Of course it doesn’t, there isn’t an unlimited supply of capital. Eventually something has to pay off and everybody got scared and there was a big bust. Well, that’s going to happen again, inevitably. I don’t know if it will necessarily happen in this industry with these Web 2.0 companies that are getting funded now. Perhaps it won’t, perhaps it’ll shake out and things will level off and that will be good, but even if it does happen again there’s a lot that we can learn this time around: right, there’s these design techniques, there’s this way about thinking about our audiences, there’s this openness that these new companies have that old companies, traditional companies, never had before, and that’s the kind of stuff I try to tease out of these stories that I look for.
SD: I also think just in talking with people and watching it seems that there’s definitely is a sense of people really building their foundations at this round in a way that was maybe not there before, I mean understanding that incremental growth and smaller, strong foundation, kind of lean and mean instead of bloated…
JV: I wonder about that. Maybe I’m skeptical because I went through it before and certainly there aren’t people going out saying, “I am going to change way people buy groceries and I’m taking this company public and we are going to be a two billion dollar company next year.” That’s not happening, thank God that’s not happening, because that was exhausting. At the same time this idea of keeping things very small, trying to build a business first and then take the funding, like, those are great principles. I don’t think those principles, while they may be spoken a lot, are held by a lot of these companies to be honest, and again I might just be cynical about this, but I think everybody is doing this for the American Dream, right, well, not everybody, but a fair amount of people are getting into this thinking “I can build a web app, I can sell it, I can get rich”, and that’s not going to happen to most people, but I think a lot of people have the potential to think, “I can create a web app, I can build a community of users that like it, I can make a good living off of that”. Ryan Carson is inspiring to me, the way they have done their little web apps, that they are turning it into a business, it’s a great lifestyle for them, things like that and I’m sure there’s a potential reward out of all of that but perhaps y’know, making a living off of a web application, not a terrible thing, so we’ll see.
SD: I appreciate that you have both the wide, the long, and also the deep view. Can you talk a little bit about the company you were at before Google?
JV: Sure, about five years ago, 2001, at the worst possible time in the industry, the absolute bottom of the bust, I started a company with six of my friends, all peers in the industry, all designers in various fields of design, we started a company called Adaptive Path. It was a great time, frankly, to start a company, it was a really bad business environment but still there was projects going on and were able to find the little projects to get started and we sort of grew up out of that. We followed this rebirth of the industry and it’s been an absolutely fantastic experience to have because we tried to embody a lot of the principles of good design in our company and I think we’ve followed through on that pretty well. I miss it a lot, I mean I’m down at Google now, we did a product inside of Adaptive Path called Measure Map which we sold to Google and I went with that, to bring that over but I absolutely miss Adaptive Path as well, it continues to be a fantastic group of people doing really, really important work.
SD: Measure Map, can you tell me a little bit about how that’s playing out as people are starting to use it?
JV: Well, Measure Map was kind of interesting to me in that, much like Evan Williams who started Blogger and now is doing Odeo, he said in his talk today that he needed to make applications that he wanted to use. That’s what Measure Map was for me. I had had a blog for three or four years, I knew it was doing well because I got email, and people would leave comments, but I had no idea how well. I looked at all these analytics tools that were out there, the stat counters and so on, and I couldn’t figure them out. I thought, “I’m kind of a smart guy, what’s going on here?”, and it turns out that most of them were either enterprise level or very powerful open source tools for sysadmins that were managing servers. There was nothing to help people understand what impact they were having with a blog. So I said well let’s do a web analytics tool just for blogs, specific to that kind of traffic, to that kind of web site, and instead of measuring hits or advertising conversions or any of that stuff why don’t we just measure participation, how the blog is doing, and what you can you learn from that. We tried to make it as simple as possible. When you log into Measure Map, there’s just four numbers - how many people came today, and what did they do, did they link to you, did they leave a comment, how many posts did they read… Four simple things - you can drill into that, get a little more detail, but we really just wanted to show cause and effect. It’s like a garden, you pay attention to it and it will grow.
SD: Within Google are you being asked to work on the next generation of the visual UIs for the display of data?
JV: Well, I’m taking a variety of approaches to working in a giant company like that. I really have no intent on redesigning Google. I don’t even want the opportunity. We’re taking Measure Map and they have a Google Analytics product and we’re working with those guys to bring best practices together and help people understand how their traffic is doing and stuff like that. There’s a lot of amazing design work that’s happening at Google right now and we’re sort of looking at what the best practices are for this kind of audience, for these kinds of applications, and seeing how there’s all these points of integration and that’s kind of the work we’re doing so I think there’s going to be an awful lot coming out of all of this.
SD: So, for our listeners, any last jewels you’d like to give? What would be your advice, from your professional career?
JV: One of the things that I’ve always told designers is to go make stuff. Always be making stuff, and frankly it could not be easier now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer or what, the risk in building web application or frankly in visualising your ideas is so much lower now. Ten years ago it cost millions of dollars to try to visualise something. You had to buy very expensive servers, you had to get very expensive software to run on those servers, you had to pay for very expensive advertising before you could even get started. Now we have cost per click advertising for pennies, servers that are dirt cheap, software’s all free now, and the software is so good now. We developed Measure Map on Ruby on Rails and it was remarkable how little effort it took for us to iterate and change our ideas and to visualise stuff as quickly as possible. So that’s my thing, if you have an idea it’s a lot easier now to just go try, and that’s what I encourage everybody to do. Yeah, absolutely.
SD: Well, thank you, really wonderful interview. Thanks.
Transcribed by Scott Morris
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