Latest / Incredible Mind / The Invisible Art: Product Design with Cathy Bergstrom

Transcript

The Invisible Art: Product Design with Cathy Bergstrom · Incredible Mind

• speaker-0: You were made for creativity, learning, problem solving, and of course action. On the Incredible Mind podcast, I speak with neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, artists, and others, whose work expands our understanding of how the brain works, where things can go wrong, and what simple everyday steps you can take to make the most of the unique intelligence you were born with. The Incredible Mind I'm talking about is yours. As we round out season one, which is really about creativity. I'm excited to bring in somebody from a field that I think really exemplifies creative problem solving and creativity in the workplace. In today's episode, I speak with Kathy Bergstrom, Senior Director of Product Design and Product Management at NextRoll, an advertising technology company. Product designers are the epitome of creative thinking and creative problem solving, and their work largely is invisible to the rest of us. But whether you are using an Elevator, riding an electric bike, or even listening or watching this podcast episode on a piece of software. Product designers are behind many of the things that we use every day. I think you're going to like this episode. And if you do, please like and subscribe and share this podcast with friends and family. Let's get started. Welcome everyone back to Incredible Mind Podcast. I'm your host, Michelle Cross-Smith, and today we are speaking with Kathy Bergstrom. Kathy is the Senior Director of Product Management at NextRole. Next Roll is an advertising technology company. So far on the show, we've had a lot of great researchers who've come and explained all the different ways that creativity impacts our lives, makes it better. Last week we had a small business owner come. That's Elisa Bowser with Second Chance Dance. But there are also other avenues for creativity that exist in the workplace. And as someone who spent a few years in tech, I can think of no better creative profession to talk to than product design. So Kathy, welcome to Incredible Mind. speaker-1: Thank you so much, Michelle, for having me. I'm excited to be here. speaker-0: For our listening audience, I'm assuming not everyone knows what a product designer does or what product design is. So to start off, can you just explain product design? speaker-1: Yes. ⁓ that's you're starting with the hard question, Michelle. Explain product and I'm gonna use product kind of general, product management and product design. There's so much that it encompasses. But if you think about it, we really are the intersection of sitting between what you, the person using the product, right, the user, is wanting to be able to get done. Why did you quote unquote hire this product for your work? What are you trying to get done? And then we sit between. the engineers that are actually building it to make sure that it is both technically sound, but it is also usable. And that's the design part that really comes in, right? When we talk about design, sometimes we can think of it more as the visual aspects of it, but it's about making sure that you as the user have the experience you need. You can get that job done. You can navigate easily. We spend a lot of time interviewing and talking to people. And we spend a lot of time looking at how you use our product as well as others. speaker-0: So when you describe a product, you're really talking about software. speaker-1: Yes, in this context, in the context of my job and in the context of the field of product management and product design, it absolutely is software. All of us exist in hardware environments as well. Even everything from, you know, regular manufacturing, you're gonna have some product designers. But for me, in my experience, it's all software based. speaker-0: Well, software, we live in a digital world. So all of us literally interface with software all the time for the most part. What would be a classic example of software that we that most of us probably know that obviously they all have a product designer, but maybe you think the product design's really great on a particular piece of software. speaker-1: ⁓ so now you want me to pick one that's great, and we all know I'm an Apple user. So I'm gonna go with the iPhone. It's been an iconic one for some time. It is something that's come out, and even with every update, as annoying as they may be. Open up the notes document on your iPhone or the version that you have for Android. It's something we're all familiar with, and it is a very simple design that is happening in there. Part of why it's one of my favorites. is because it's not some overly graphic designed no product. And it is one of the easiest things to use. speaker-0: I use it all the time. I love Apple Notes better than some of the fancier interfaces that they have because it's so easy to use. speaker-1: Yeah, it's that simplicity that actually I think is what brings the creativity side of the product design job. It is about how do we give you the job you're trying to get done? So in this case, a note. You just need to jot something down quick. You don't need a lot of complicated interface to do that. In fact, the more interface that was on there, the more difficult that job would be for you to get done. speaker-0: Absolutely. I never thought about it. But the more simple the design, the more easier it is for me to do what I wanna do on a piece of software, there's no friction. speaker-1: One of things I love about the Apple Note in particular is the graphic design that they do use is the familiarity of a paper notepad. Yeah. And this is a subtlety in design that I'm gonna bring in is it's that familiarity that actually makes it feel easy to use, not just be easy to use. speaker-0: So it's the feeling, not just Yeah. speaker-1: Because it's we're comfortable with that. We all use a notepad, right? Paper and pen is comfortable and something that we recognize. And so by bringing that into a software application, you're tapping into the the subconscious, the emotional side without it being this glaring obvious thing that to all of us, right? That is the difference why that app I find beautifully designed over some others that I would say they're colorful or they're trying to have a a gimmick kind of differentiation on them and still be a note app. But it's that familiarity that Apple brings in their design of that particular application that makes me speaker-0: One thing that's could be easy for people to confuse product design with would be UX design, the user experience design of say ⁓ interface. But they are connected, right? speaker-1: User experience design is an aspect of product design. We are experienced designers, but we are as a product designer encompassing more than just the actual, is this a drop-down or is this a button? What is this icon? It's the totality of that altogether and how that not only helps you do your work, but how it helps you feel about the work while you're getting it. speaker-0: That makes sense. UX design is a piece of product design. Yeah. But product design is is going a bit deeper back. speaker-1: It's the totality of it versus the pieces of it. Yeah. speaker-0: So you gave us a great example of how notes constitutes good design in Apple. What are other elements of design that a normal person can look out for? speaker-1: Kind of my favorite example of how I talk about design is like if you have to think about it, it was poorly designed. And I'm gonna use a non-software example that we all encounter every day. And it's a very common one. There's the book out there called The Design of Everyday Things. It's a very foundational book for anyone. I would recommend reading it if you're interested in design or design thinking at all. But one of the examples used in there is doors, particularly public entry doors. And so if you think about the last time you walked into A bank, a grocery store, a mall, any any public building. Next time you do it, I want you to look at the door before you go in. Does it have a label to tell you push or pull? If it does, that door was poorly designed. speaker-0: ⁓ the fact that you need instruction. speaker-1: That you need instructions. The other thing to keep that this book kind of points out is if I need to push a door, it should not have a handle to pull. There are a lot of doors out there that have these handles on them that makes it very unintuitive that that's a push. A flat surface to a human brain is a push. speaker-0: Right. I never thought about that, but my eyes pick up the presence of the handle and I'm reaching for it because it's there. It makes me assume that it's a pull door. speaker-1: Exactly. This I would say is kind of some of the differentiation in the term design and experience. A beautiful door would be solid glass. ⁓ that would be gorgeous, right? That's such beautiful design aesthetically. But how do I operate that thing? I don't know. speaker-0: Or it looks like a window. You don't know it's a door. Right. speaker-1: Right, and you might put some small little button on there somewhere, and now you've changed the aesthetic design to make it usable. And so really great design brings both of those. Product design is I want to make it beautiful aesthetically. I want to make it very simple to use it, and I want you as the person interacting with this product, whether it's software or a door, I want you to not have to think about how it works. speaker-0: And most of us don't. So that's something I find really interesting about product designers is that they're sort of the Keebler elves in the back making these things happen. And it's not common to know, ⁓ this person is a great product designer. Unless you've worked with product designers, you don't it they're not you're not a household name. speaker-1: Correct. If you know about us and you have to figure out who we are and what we've done, then we've done our job terribly. Because the best design is is you've never thought about it, right? And so it is absolutely a job that and a and a career even that can be very hard to quantify. The whole way that we know we've hit like solid gold, beautiful design is nobody knows we're there. Nobody knows we did anything. Nobody even was paying attention and listen and To what has been done because it's so easy to use, it's so intuitive. That is the most beautiful design. speaker-0: How does a person get into product design? How did you even find your way there? speaker-1: Well, there are much simpler paths now, much more direct ones than the one that I took. I got into product before I knew it was product. This is the case for many people in kind of my generation will say. I'm the child of a nurse and an engineer. I have always lived in that like curiosity intersection of how do things work and how do I take care of you as a person? So how did I get yeah, how did I get into product design? I was born into it, but how did I get into it as a career? I came up as the internet grew, as technology took off and as these things became more needed. My background was all retail, brick and mortar working. And I've taken even to this day that experience of when somebody walks in the door, how do you treat them? How do you greet them? How do you help them find what they're looking for? And those are design principles in software. ⁓ speaker-0: There isn't even a name for it. speaker-1: The X design. Yeah. Customer experience design. That's like store layout and things like that, right? All these things we don't think about as users and consumers of products and places. But it's all design. speaker-0: And you're right, we only notice it when it's poorly designed. Yeah. We expect it to be well designed. Or we feel a sense of frustration. Maybe going through a particular purchase process, whether it's in person at a brick and mortar store or online. We don't understand, but we just can't stand logging into this website to pay my bill or that kind of thing. speaker-1: Right. ⁓ logins. There are some things we have to work within constraints, ⁓ legal and tracking and and whatnot, right? Security and those experiences can still be made better through good design. speaker-0: This is so interesting. You're a director of a product team. How do you work with your team? I mean, obviously you're not just designing whatever you want. You're designing within the constraints of the place you work and their the needs and the business needs. So I guess it's a two-part question. First of all, how do you decide what needs a design or a redesign? And then how what does a software design process look like? speaker-1: Yeah. ⁓ how do you decide what needs a redesign? Everything does all the time. So that is a very that is that is the challenge. Mostly the the decision kind of comes a little more naturally than the way that like a textbook or even job training would explain it, right? ⁓ here's a list. Let's use some type of prioritization framework to do some weighting on these things of what is the value to the To the customer, what is the value to the business? What is the level of effort from engineering? You do that. There's that mechanical side and calculated side of it. But as far as kind of finding what's the stuff that needs to bubble to the top of that list or even be on it to start with, that comes a lot from seeing how people are getting stuck. And whether that getting stuck is like actually in our software. And there's tracking, and we can see where. Rage clicks. So you you can't get past a certain page or something like that. That's you can see that we track Yep. Yeah, you have like a kind of a heat map of where people are navigating within the page, or there's a button or even like a spot on the page that people are clicking and it's not doing anything. There is software that tracks that and lets us see and records not you as the person, but records what's happening on the screen. speaker-0: You can see that? speaker-1: And so we can even watch those playbacks and kind of see where people were trying to navigate to. That can be a little more like kind of the tangible interface navigation side. Right. Of hey, people are getting stuck here. We need to solve this. This is a bug. This is something that needs to be addressed quickly. There's also the side of there's this feature we know is really valuable and no one's using it. So then we'll do some tests. Or we'll go in and do some research of like, well, why can they not find it? Is it actually not as valuable as we thought it was? Is it not actually solving the job to be done as a framework we use? Is it not really solving that for the user? Why aren't they using it? We put all this time, right? We did our calculation of somebody said we needed a new report or you know, I'm just trying to give s give a generic example there. And so we went and go and build a new dashboard. Some way for a customer to see how much they're spending with us. And then nobody goes in there. Well, why not? It is a good thing, right? People do want to know what they've spent when it comes to their advertising. If it's not being used, we would throw that in a bucket called discovery. That's we put our detective hats on, and we get to go discover why isn't it being used? Why isn't anyone interacting with it? speaker-0: How do you find that out? speaker-1: You talk to a lot of users, you watch a lot of playback. My favorite thing is that we just ask people why. Sometimes the simplest thing is actually what gets you the answer. Hey, can you help me? How do you know how much you spend with us? Rather than asking someone, why don't you click on this field? I'm gonna ask my customer, how do you know how much you spend? Are you interested in knowing how much you spend? Is that even part of your job? That's the detective side of the job of That's cool. It's not just about asking, it's it's what you ask and how you ask it. speaker-0: First of all, I wonder if we are inspiring a new generation of rage clickers now that they'll know. Now we all know. I worked in tech. I didn't know that that kind of precise granular detail on interaction on a screen was even tracked. It's slightly creepy, but that's technology for you. And it's orbiting. We don't know okay. Don't know it's me. Okay, good. But also if a piece of software or even some other product that you're using, if somebody from that company comes calling to ask you questions over email or whatever, answer it because you might just make it better. speaker-1: Absolutely. ⁓ my gosh, Michelle, thank you. Yes. If somebody with product in their job title is asking you, you have just been given the opportunity to truly shape the product you're using. Because the customer's feedback is our most valuable piece of discovery evidence. speaker-0: I know from working in businesses, but especially in tech, that a lot of times the idea for a new product might not spring from a user, but it might be an inferred solution made by senior leadership or someone has some awesome idea that they want to get out there. First of all, do you get ideas like that? And if you do, how do you find out through the user if this is an idea worth taking on and building a product around? speaker-1: So I'm gonna use one of my favorite examples here. That's not one that I've designed, but it's one that we'll all be familiar with. There's a quote about Amazon's prime free shipping when this first came out. And you could buy, it was like $79 when it first came out. You could pay for a year of free shipping, right? No user asked for that. No Amazon customer sent in a request form for can I pay for all my shipping up front? But it's something we all expect now. Yeah. Because there were product and design people in a room thinking about what is a barrier for people to checkout online. ⁓ you have to pay shipping. You don't have to do that if you walk down to the grocery store. speaker-0: Before the prime, you'd have to spend at least thirty bucks or something like that. So then you'd wait or you'd just say forget. speaker-1: It those of us that are old enough to remember early days of online shopping, we paid shipping. It was normal, seven dollars. You just kind of expected that. And then this idea was introduced into the market. And free shipping became something that marketers would do as a coupon because not everybody was Amazon, not everybody could afford to as a business run their business that way. But it caused this chain of consumers now expecting free shipping. But they don't want to see that charge now. I know I'm kind of talking about like e-commerce. It's a business decision, but it's a design decision because there is a friction at the moment of purchase. And the friction that's identified is not any customer saying, ⁓ I did not complete my purchase because you charged me shipping. It's a group of product people in a room talking about and saying, Let's test some things. Let's take shipping off for some people. Let's try giving coupons. Let's try, let's test, let's put some things out there and see what people respond to. And this idea of the moment you start pulling that shipping charge away, you start seeing a bunch more people check out. Great. Now we know if we take shipping off, people will check out. But we have to meet the business need of still making money because we still have to pay for shipping as a business. And so how do you recoup and ensure that the dollars and the revenue is still flowing? Not just the product design is better. speaker-0: What you're describing does remind me of my conversation with Zarana Ivchvic Pringle. I'm gonna be referring to her forever, I think. Zirana, you're the best. In the process of creative ideation, you need to have the ability to think divergently, think of ways of doing something or making something that hasn't been done before, and shoot out as a bunch of different ideas, but then comes convergent thinking, where you start to either test and eliminate. Or just logically start to eliminate free shipping forever was probably one of their many ideas, and they realized they had to cut that one because it was unaffordable for the business. In your work in product design, how do you and your team come up with ideas? Do you play around with divergent and convergent thinking? speaker-1: Absolutely. I think it becomes so second nature you kind of forget you're doing it. This is a good interview. It's kind of reminding me a little bit. One of the things in our field is three legged stool. We all understand a three legged stool kind of concepts, I believe. And for us it's we have a product designer, a product manager, and an engineer. speaker-0: ⁓ team of three. speaker-1: All three of these people have a very different discipline and viewpoint, right? The product manager tends to have a bit more of the business side. How are we making money on this? The engineer, they're the engineer, how do we build this? And the designer is the, well, what do people need? It's the feeling, the emotion, the experience. And when you start getting that level of diversity in a divergent brainstorm, you get so many ideas. Of how to solve a what felt like a simple problem. The hardest thing about people starting into product or even in engineering working with product, you have to stop giving a solution up front and start thinking about the problem and really talk about the problem for a while. And then go into your massive sticky notes or just put down everything you can think of, every possible way that you might. be able to solve for a user a simple note on their phone. What are all the different ways we could think of solving that problem? Yeah. And then you start to pull it back and you start to converge those ideas together. And what ends up coming out of that is something that is beautifully technical and beautifully designed. speaker-0: wanna step back a little bit and talk about defining the problem because this is another element of it. What does a problem, a typical problem first, sound like when it comes into the door of this three legged stool? And how do they work with it to kind of drill down into the heart of the problem and really get down to what's really going? speaker-1: The problem normally comes in as a request. Fair. So it normally comes in as a solution. So you hear from your customer support manager would be saying, Hey, we have a lot of people calling in that can't get past the login page. You need to fix the login page. Okay, well let's let's see. Maybe, but we don't have any bugs. So I don't think we need to fix the login page. Let's see why people are getting let me look into that. Let me kind of speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: dig into some of those phone calls and hear what they were doing at the time. So it may not be that the the problem is that people can't log in. It might actually be that after they've logged in, they don't know what to do and they get caught in a loop on their own. speaker-0: Another quick question that I have with that is when say customer support comes with a problem, how many examples do they have to before it can be considered valid? Because there is this certain fallacy of availability. If you've heard it three times, you think you say everybody's complaining about XYZ. What typically counts as a valid enough number of times someone's having a problem that it gets we're gonna address this? speaker-1: Would say most of the time I don't think there is a number. Often the ones that I am listening to the loudest are actually ones that we've already started working on. Nobody's gonna like to hear me say that. Because everyone wants to believe that their idea is like new and unique and they thought of it first. But we have these plethors of backlogs and roadmaps and ideas that have been sitting there for some time, right? And we also spend a lot of time looking at Where the industry's going, where is technology going? So the first time that I started getting a bunch of requests for an AI type of powered assistant in our product, it was already well developed by us because we can see that coming. And so this need from our customer support, or even this need or request from our business of saying, hey, we need to be able to do AI-powered customer support because we need to. We need to let people be able to serve themselves quicker, right? Yep, we've got that. We're working on it. But you tell me why you think you need it. Right. Help me understand why you're now asking for it. I I'll I'll use this as an example of, well, they were asking for it because they had an increase in customer support calls. And so they're overwhelmed. Well, let's take a look at why you've had an increase of customer support calls. Because maybe there's a different problem for us to solve here. speaker-0: At any hour of the day. speaker-1: Right. Why are you overwhelmed with so many calls all of a sudden? ⁓ because we just opened a new market and the website's not in their language. It's not translated for them. So it's not actually an assistant or customer support help that you need. You need a website that is auto-translating based on the IP address of where the person's coming from. speaker-0: ⁓ cool. So so you're right, product designers are detectives. They're getting to the bot they're getting to the bottom of the crime. speaker-1: Yeah, so I mean that's that's you've gotta ask like how do we find the pro I'm like that's how I find the problem. I ask you, wait, tell me a little more about that. Help me understand just a little bit more. I have yet to meet a product person that in our brains doesn't exist, that cork board with the strings drawn all over it, making all the connections. We've all seen it in the movies. That's how our brains work, and that's why we're very good at our jobs. speaker-0: ⁓ that is so yeah, totally. It and so so first of all, you have to be capable of analyzing the problem and starting to pull it apart, but then you have to have that synthesis element of connecting the dots. Yeah, ⁓ I love that. I have always, always admired product designers because it is such a creative field, but now you're also really showing me that it is a detective job as well. speaker-1: There is definitely discipline within it. The product design side and product management side tend to overlap quite a bit, but it is in that design where you get the creativity side of it. You get that just that spark of like, we don't know why. We don't know why some art speaks to people in different ways. An interface that's really intuitive for me. I want to make sure it's intuitive for everybody. And that's where we kind of go back to where like, We're gonna put it in front of people. We're gonna get their feedback on it. We're gonna see how they are using it. Is it accomplishing the job that they wanna get? speaker-0: Now, I have interviewed someone about the experience of art and it often comes from meaning making and familiarity with what you're looking at and connecting it to your own alives. So when I think about that experience with product design, I'm a little conflicted because I think, yes, we love that familiarity. Apple notes is a great example, but say the hamburger menu, the three lines in the top quarter of most websites, you know you click there and it will be a drop down menu. Beautiful. But not to bring up Apple again, but but it's such a good example of the designers they're thought outside the box enough that their new version of interfaces has changed our standard for what a user interface looks like. So I'm curious where the line is between maintaining familiarity and stepping outside to something new that might be even better. What does that look like in design? speaker-1: Some of that will come from the constraint of the company you're with. Some companies, Apple's one of them, they want to be a disruptor. So they will put a lot more research and development into ideas that may seem completely out there. A lot of our large tech companies have these lab type of teams. They get a little bit more freedom with what is the return for the company that on this research and development, this RD that these teams are gonna go do because their job is to, you know, think a little farther outside of the box. In those environments and in those companies, it really is just what you're giving the team. With all of us, we perform based on the goals we're given at work. speaker-0: Yes. Creativity within constraints. Yes. speaker-1: Yes. So if you give a team you have to hit this revenue target, then they're gonna hit that and they're probably not gonna be super risky in the innovation that they're trying to explore. But if you give a team a target of disrupting, we want you to create something that's never been seen before on how people could listen to music. Okay, now I have all kinds of things I could go explore and play around with and A large majority of them can be thrown away. And that is a valuable thing for my company to have spent money on. We always talk about the products that work. And for everything that works, there, I don't have the stats, so don't quote me on that, but like hundreds of things that were thrown away. And those were just as valuable. speaker-0: You mean the fact that they didn't work was valuable information? speaker-1: Yeah, it taught you, it taught ⁓ the team that, okay, let's not try it. Let's not try it that way. One of my favorite development stories is actually that of the segue because it all came about in a robotics lab. They were trying to build the first autonomous robot, and they needed a way for it to move. And so they built this little some wheels and it could kind of tilt forward and backward and move this robot around. The engineers in the lab ended up using that to get from one end of the lab to the other and like play around and do wheelies and have fun on this little thing that they had built for their robot. That company has never delivered a robot, but they did absolutely disrupt. When those first came out, there was not anything like that in the market. speaker-0: No, there really still isn't a lot like it. speaker-1: Yeah, but we do see now fold up ⁓ scooters. If you're in San Francisco kind of tech areas, you're gonna see a little more of these. But even just the like ⁓ electric bike. These things all come kind of from that disruption that first happened. The box has been opened now, right? The box got expanded by some weird harebrained idea or use for something that it that exists and it's just being used in a different way. That opened the box. It made the box bigger. speaker-0: That's a cool story. I did not know that. speaker-1: That's just my quirkiness. Those are the products I like to bring in, is the ones that kind of have an unexpected story and and maybe doesn't go where you think it's gonna go. But to me, that's always one where I'm like, you know what? You really do need that discipline of good design, good engineering. And the reason why we all know about the segue is because there was a business a product manager in that room that went, we could make money with this. speaker-0: Yep. And we do all know what it is, so yeah. Kathy, is there anything else you would like to say about product design in general creativity? speaker-1: I would say the thing that I love the most about the field I work in and the industry and is just because it's practical doesn't mean it's not creative and beautiful and designed. We often apply creativity and design to aesthetic, right? And to art. And I do art, I paint, I have a lot of different artistic hobbies. So I do love that side of things, but I truly, truly love what I do and I think There are a lot of people in my area that it's because of that kind of Venn diagram overlap between practicality and usefulness and the creative art aesthetic. And bringing those two things together, that's what makes me really happy at work. And as somebody that interacts with software every single day, it's what makes me really appreciative of the tools I use that I can see that in them. And so I would hope for some of your listeners. Just stop for a minute and look at the podcast app you're using to listen to this. Or wherever you may be consuming this. And just stop for a minute and look at the icons, the placement, the what you didn't have to think about in order to get here and hit play or pause. Stop and just look at the interface for a minute and appreciate the practical nature of it as well as the beauty of it. speaker-0: Great advice. That is a theme of this season's Incredible Mind podcast is stop and pay attention and you will find beauty and creativity and function. Because to be creative, it typically must be original in some way, but also effective. Start paying attention. And you too will be a connoisseur of product design. speaker-1: Yes. And send a little note of thank you. We read them all. The good ones and the bad ones. We get plenty of requests. I like to send thank yous. I'm in product and so I know what it means to get a hey, I used your product today and it made my job easier. It warms our hearts. speaker-0: Great advice. Kathy, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. speaker-1: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Michelle. I really appreciate the opportunity. speaker-0: This episode is dedicated to all the product designers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years, including Kirby Anderson, Jacob Backelman, Alfred Wu, Lena Simpson, and Hannah Burke. Your innovation has always inspired me. Incredible Mind Podcast is written, produced, and edited by me, Michelle Cross-Smith. Peter Aronson is consulting producer. Angela Ferrero designed the cover art, and the music was created by Alex Grohl. If you're enjoying this content, Please like and subscribe to Incredible Mind Podcast wherever you're listening. Extra credit if you share an episode with friends and family. For more information, visit incredible-mind dot org.