Tag: Interview

04-user-interview-questions
09 Jun

12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

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12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

Slava Shestopalov

An experienced interviewer takes care of many things: builds hypotheses, selects interviewees, composes invitations, schedules appointments, sets the stage, and, of course, writes an interview script. Any of these preparations can go wrong, but the script failure means all the effort is in vain. So, if you haven’t interviewed people a lot before or you have to delegate it to non-designers, I’d recommend paying attention to high-quality questions, in the first place. Then, there is a chance they’ll smooth out other potential shortcomings.

We’ll talk about 12 kinds of questions explained with examples. The first part includes six frequent mistakes and how to fix them. The second part presents six ways to improve decent questions and take control of difficult situations.

Pitfall #1: Hypothetical Questions

“I don’t care if people will use the new features,” said no budget owner ever. Investing in design and development, people want to make sure money will return. And direct asking, unfortunately, is not an effective way to check it, although it may intuitively seem a great idea. “Let’s go out of the office and ask ‘em!” In my practice, there were a lot of cases when people said they liked a feature but were reluctant to pay for it. So, is there any method to make sure that something not functioning yet will be needed when implemented?

Examples of hypothetical questions and how to transform them into experience-based ones.
Hypothetical questions put an interviewee into the position of a dreamer, thus don’t provide reliable answers. (Large preview)

I cannot recall anything more relevant than referring to people’s past experiences and behavior in similar situations. If users don’t have a habit of saving articles for later on all the news sites, what is the chance they’ll start doing it on your website? As Jakob Nielsen said, “Users spend most of their time on other sites.”

Pitfall #2: Closed Questions

Closed questions appear from a natural human wish to be approved and gain support. However, in the interviews, they aren’t useful enough. A yes-or-no question doesn’t provoke reserved people to talk and doesn’t help much to reveal their motives and way of thinking.

Examples of closed questions and how to turn them into open questions
Open questions help to gather more information than the closed ones. (Large preview)

To be fair, closed questions are not evil. For example, they can serve a handy facilitation technique to make a talkative interviewee stop and turn back to the point. Also, they can help to double-check the information previously received through open questions. But if your goal is to gather as much information as possible, open questions will work better.

Pitfall #3: Leading Questions

The things considered polite in everyday conversations may be harmful to the efficiency of a user interview. Trying to help an interviewee with the options can guide them in saying what they don’t really think. A user interview is not the most comfortable situation for the majority of people, and they try to pass it as quickly as possible and at minimum effort. As a result, people tend to agree with anything more or less close to the truth or with a socially-expected choice instead of composing their answer from scratch.

Examples of questions that include answer options and how to fix them
Questions that suggest answer options lead to biased answers. (Large preview)

That’s why it’s better to move one step at a time and build the next question upon the answer to the previous one.

Pitfall #4: Selfish Questions

Idea authors sometimes act like proud parents — they want everyone to admire their child. The downside of such an attitude in user interviews is the unconscious usage of the pronouns “we” or “our.” As a result, users feel as if they are taking an exam and should either adore what they see or maintain neutrality, disguising real complaints.

Examples of selfish questions with possessive pronouns and how to formulate them in a neutral manner
Possessive pronouns like “our” provoke people to praise the subject of talk instead of sharing honest feedback. (Large preview)

In your interview script, replace possessive pronouns with neutral words like “this site” and “that application” or just call a subject of conversation by the name.

Pro tip: as an interviewer, you can try hiding or understating your job title and relation to the topic.

Pitfall #5: Stacked Questions

There are many reasons why we ask stacked questions. It can be a human desire to be heard, the fear of being interrupted, or worrying that you might forget the next question while listening to the current answer. However, for the interview efficiency, stacked questions are not an option. Interviewees often select the one they are more comfortable to answer to or the one they managed to memorize from the stack. Remembering questions shouldn’t become the interviewee’s burden, so it’s better to ask them one by one. (And maybe the answers are so comprehensive that you won’t need some of the planned questions anymore.)

An example of piled up questions and how they should optimally go one by one in the interview
A stack of questions leads to a messy answer, whereas a sequence of separate questions works much better. (Large preview)

Pitfall #6: Explanation Instead Of A Question

Teams that work together for some time often establish their own language and tend to bring it into the product they are building. But will users understand such words as “dashboard,” “smart update,” “inclusion,” or “trigger”? Explanatory questions put an interviewee into the position of a lexicographer and help to check what sense (if any) they put into brand concepts and expert terminology. For a designer, it gives insights into how the future product — a website, app, or self-service terminal — should speak to people.

Examples of questions that already contain an explanation and how to turn them into neutral open questions
Instead of inserting the explanation into the question it’s better to openly ask interviewees what they think this is. (Large preview)

The opposite side of this approach is explaining it yourself and leading people before they have a chance to share their opinions. Think about this: in the interview, you are superior and can put pressure on users making them get your point. But will you always be there for thousands of users to explain how the product works? Probably no. So, it’s more efficient to discover people’s thinking styles and then create self-explanatory solutions rather than create something and push it in interviews.

We’ve just covered six major interviewing mistakes. The next portion of advice will be about making fairly good questions even more powerful and dealing with difficult interview situations.

Pitfall #7: Question Clutter

Open questions are great until you realize there are too many details to figure out. The best method in such a situation is storytelling — describing a recent or the most prominent experience. As a result, an interviewee talks about a real situation and is less inclined to compose a socially desired answer or summarize various cases.

Examples of good open questions and how they can be turned into even more helpful storytelling questions
When a topic is broad, it’s better to ask for a full story instead of a series of open questions. (Large preview)

Besides, storytelling gives the freedom to speak about aspects a person considers necessary. Usually, people start with or talk longer about the most crucial experiences.

Pitfall #8: Too General Questions

When you’ve figured out regularity or general attitude, it’s the right moment to ask the interviewee about an example. Recent-experience questions can fill in the gaps, which might have appeared while answering general questions. For an interviewer, it’s another powerful method to check if users aren’t accidentally exaggerating or dropping significant details.

Examples of good general open questions and even better questions referring to the user’s recent experience
Past-experience questions give more insight into users’ behavior than general questions. (Large preview)

Pitfall #9: Talking About What You Can Observe

When you are lucky enough and interview people in their “natural habitat,” it’s a perfect chance to see their work process with your own eyes. So, if there is an opportunity to ask a user to demonstrate typical actions — offline or online — you’ll gather tons of insights. It’s a chance to learn about users’ habits (including shortcuts and favorite programs), level of computer skills, software environment, and the way of thinking (mental model).

Examples of experience-based questions and even more efficient requests to demonstrate behavior instead of talking about it
Sometimes it’s better to witness user’s behavior than to listen to its verbal description. (Large preview)

Pitfall #10: Tolerating Vagueness

Abstract nouns and adjectives, for example, “comfort,” “accessibility,” “support,” “smart,” or “user-friendly,” are probably the trickiest words in the language because everyone interprets them differently. When you hear abstract names, that’s not enough to document them as they are. These words require “unboxing” and only then can support design decision-making.

Examples of questions that help to 'unbox' abstract nouns and subjective characteristics
Abstract concepts need unboxing; otherwise, they cannot back up design decision-making. (Large preview)

“Nothing is clear enough” has become my second favorite slogan after the classical UX phrase “It depends.” “Nothing is clear enough” means that you cannot be certain about the meaning if you hardly visualize a scenario from your interviewee’s life. The best way to unbox abstract concepts is by turning them into verbs.

Pitfall #11: Missing Numbers

Generalizations like “all,” “never,” “always,” “nobody,” “often,” or“frequently” are as unclear as abstract nouns and adjectives. But the way to “unbox” generalizations is different — through quantifying. Basically, you ask questions about approximate numbers or proportions. An interviewee, of course, might not provide you statistics, but at least you’ll understand whether the user’s “very frequent” is about “more than a half” or “nearly 20%.” Another example: the same phrase “a lot” can mean “50 per day” for work emails, but it’ll be only “5 per year” for cybersecurity alerts.

Examples of questions that quantify vague words like 'all' or 'often'
Exaggerated or vague characteristics deserve to be quantified in the interview. (Large preview)

Pitfall #12: Undervalued WH-Questions

As a non-native speaker, I remember these questions from the English classes at school. The teacher often asked us to make WH-questions (What? Where? When? Who? How?) so that we could start a conversation and break the awkward silence. Nothing had changed from school times. Now, as a designer, I often use WH-questions as the main interviewing instrument.

Examples of open questions that start with WH: why, where, who, how, etc.
WH-questions are great for figuring out time, locations, participants, consequences, and other details. (Large preview)

My favorite question is “why.” For the sake of politeness and a more friendly atmosphere, I conceal it behind the following phrases, “What are you trying to achieve when you…?” or “Can you please explain the reason/value of…?” This is how in pursuit of a root cause you can ask several “whys” in a row without annoying your interviewee.

Summary

The question techniques above are pretty straightforward and might not take into account the nuances of a particular conversation or interviewee. Of course, even the best questions won’t make all the answers automatically objective, but they can make information more reliable and actionable. All in all, it’s always on an interviewer to adjust according to the situation. Here are the three core principles if you are in doubt about particular questions.

Experience holds more truth than a hypothesis.

“

That’s why it’s recommended to ask about cases from the past and similar examples from other areas of a user’s life.

Let them tell their story; your ideas can wait

The goal of an interview is to explore the truth, not to sell or demonstrate something. If you force an interviewee to support you, it might mean the rest of the people won’t agree either. Also, give preference to clarifying the unknown versus checking hypotheses — for hypotheses, a better method is prototyping and testing.

If you cannot imagine it, you don’t get it

In a series of 1–2-hour user interviews, it’s so easy to get lazy and pretend you understand what you hear. Try challenging interviewee’s statements in your mind, “Did he say the truth? Do I know why she says that? What exactly do they mean telling me about it?”

Recommended Reading

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Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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10 Feb

An Interview With Rémi Parmentier: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

by TBSCategories: News

An Interview With Rémi Parmentier: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

An Interview With Rémi Parmentier: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

Rachel Andrew

We are so excited to be bringing SmashingConf to a new city this year. We’re bringing you SmashingConf Austin and we have a fantastic line-up of speakers.

Check out this post, where we introduce our new venue of Austin and share an interview with Miriam Suzanne, and last week’s video interview with Zach Leatherman. This time we speak to Rémi Parmentier and find out what he will share with the Austin audience.

Rémi will be talking about HTML email at SmashingConf Austin. See you there?

We’ve invited Rémi back to share more of his knowledge because he was so popular at SmashingConf Freiburg last year, and in the webinar he presented to Smashing members. You can find all of that content, including a full transcript of the webinar in the post “Become An HTML Email Geek With These Videos From Rémi Parmentier”. Also, take a look at some of Rémi’s articles on the subject.

Tickets Are On Sale Now!

If you want to join in the fun, tickets are on sale. Last year, we sold out three of our conferences well before the conference date, and popular workshops also fill up fast. Just saying!

Smashing Editorial (il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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03 Feb

An Interview With Zach Leatherman: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

by TBSCategories: News

An Interview With Zach Leatherman: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

An Interview With Zach Leatherman: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

Rachel Andrew

We are so excited to be bringing SmashingConf to a new city this year. We’re bringing you SmashingConf Austin and we have a fantastic line-up of speakers.

Check out this post, where we introduce our new venue of Austin and share an interview with Miriam Suzanne. This time we have an interview with Zach Leatherman.

Zach will be talking about type and font performance at SmashingConf Austin. See you there?

Zach is no stranger to the Smashing stage, and if you want to find out more about web fonts and loading strategies, you can watch his talk from SmashingConf London 2018, paired with a talk by Monica Dinculescu from SmashingConf Barcelona, “Web Fonts And Performance: SmashingConf Videos".

Also, take a look at some of the resources that Zach has made available on the subject in his archive of posts about web fonts. There is plenty to get you started, and I think you can agree that there is no-one better to help us understand the current state of font loading while we are in Austin!

Tickets Are On Sale Now!

If you want to join in the fun, tickets are on sale. Last year, we sold out three of our conferences well before the conference date, and popular workshops also fill up fast. Just saying!

Smashing Editorial (il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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03 Jun

When Do We Need A Design System? An Interview With Brad Frost

by TBSCategories: News

When Do We Need A Design System? An Interview With Brad Frost

When Do We Need A Design System? An Interview With Brad Frost

Vitaly Friedman

Design systems have been around for quite some time. We’ve even published a book on design systems, yet just as they can be difficult to maintain, how do we know when we actually need one in the first place?

Design systems are a wonderful yet intricate tool. They provide us with a solid ground to stand on as we tackle the increasingly diverse and fast-moving digital landscape. However, like most things in our field, the hard part of design systems isn’t specific design tools or code frameworks; it’s wrangling people and all their quirks.

I had a chance to speak with Brad Frost, author of the book Atomic Design that introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems, and one of the speakers who I’m looking very much forward to bringing onto the stage at SmashingConf Toronto in just a few weeks.

Vitaly: Okay, so hello everyone and welcome again to one of those interviews where we’re talking to interesting people behind the scenes, doing the magic, sometimes silently, sometimes quite publicly, openly, and so today I’m happy to have with us our one and only Mr Frosty.

Vitaly: Hello, Mr Brad Frost, how are we doing today?

Brad: Hi, I’m doing great, thanks for having me Vitaly.

Vitaly: Oh it’s my pleasure. I’m looking forward to see and explore some of the things you’re going to cover in Toronto but most specifically, I’m kind of looking forward to see what’s going on in your head right now? What are you thinking of right now?

Brad: Oh my. What am I thinking of right now?

Vitaly: Yes.

Brad: I’m thinking about, uh, we’re doing a big design system for an airline, and so I am fixing an excessive [inaudible 00:01:07] and a date picker calendar widget.

Vitaly: Oh, that sounds—

Brad: That’s what I’m doing, like, literally right this second.

Vitaly: Okay, this sounds like it’s a lot of fun.

Brad: Yes, or something.

Vitaly: I heard rumors, maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but I heard rumors that you’re involved in some way to design systems and atomic design and stuff, so I’m wondering, design systems, does every website need one really at this point of life?

Brad: I generally think so, yes. I mean, the degree of formality around the design system is probably not every website needs, but I think that every single website could benefit from component driven architecture, design, and development principles. Just as one example, my wife is a jeweler and also she just has a five pager kind of website and I was able to build that in four days, because I was following good reusable component based design and development. So the first template I had to make, I obviously had to build all of those components sort of from scratch, but then the second page template, I was able to reuse some of those and by the time I got to the third and forth and fifth template, I already had a lot of the building blocks in place, so those latter templates were able to roll off the assembly line a lot faster.

Brad: I think a lot of people will get in touch with me and ask me those kind of questions and say, well, I make these landing pages for a marketing company and people scan a QR code and go to these landing pages, and they have a shelf life of a month at most or something like that. It is like very short lived sort of websites, and they’re like, “Well, we could have used a design system,” and I said, well yes, you’re making the same type of page over and over again, and so rather than rebuilding those pages with 100% effort each time, if you are to put in place a pattern, and you could be as clever as you want when it comes to skinding them or theming them or whatever and making them aesthetically unique. But they have to rebuild a big splashy new hero component or a button every single time, just doesn’t make sense.

Brad: Even for these things that at face value feel very ephemeral, or it’s just like a one-page landing page, surely I don’t need a design system from that? Yes, actually you can benefit from them, so again, I think that, that’s important. Any project could benefit from solid component-based design and development. The whole, “Do you need this big glossy website (like a material.io or lightning design system with a bunch of design principles and a bunch of documentation and stuff)”? Probably not, for those smaller sites, and that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean that you should just be thinking of things as individual screens or individual projects.

Vitaly: So Brad, one more thing though, when we talk about things like again, design systems and so on, I think that especially larger companies, they always desperately try to find case studies, like this company may be preferably our competitor, they build a design system or design a design system and they did magic for them. However, I’m not sure if there are any publicly available data or publicly available case studies which show that we did this, our conversion improved, our maintenance improved, we’re building faster and so on. Do you think there is anything of that thing or is it still something that has to be discovered and then you actually get to see the benefits of a design system, maybe months or even years ahead of time? Is it an investment or is it something you can measure efficiently?

Brad: Yes, great questions, and the questions around metrics, it’s definitely hard to come by, hard numbers, just because sort of unlike just doing a big redesign where you have one site and then you redesign and then launch the new site and then you’re able to look at the Google analytics and see whatever metrics you’re looking for, whether that’s page weight has gone down or time spent on site has increased, or whatever your metrics are, it’s easy to see that result.

Brad: Obviously, if you’re creating a design system, you should still be able to see some of those results as new projects launch and get out into the world. You should see those metrics going in the right direction. Obviously, that’s a sign that the design system is doing what it need to do, but it’s hard to pin down metrics and public case studies because so many of the metrics for the success of a design system are internally facing — right? So it’s not really about like the public website — well, of course, it is, but (and again you can track that stuff with Google Analytics and the rest of them) but a lot of it has to do with how fast the internal teams are working right?

Brad: How quickly you can get projects out the door and how many UI-related bugs are you fielding, what are your customer support centers getting as far as UI-related issues with respect to your website and stuff like that, so there’s a lot of metrics that are tuned towards how many jitterbugs are there around the UI and those should be trending downwards as the design system gets adopted. Or like how many customer service calls are you getting or support tickets around (“Oh, I’m using this browser and this thing is broken, and I can’t do that.”)

Brad: It’s like those things should diminish over time. But because those are also internally facing things, not many companies publish that. There are a few examples though out in the wild, and a lot of them are wrapped up in case-study blog posts and things like that, but one of them that comes to mind is the Westpac design system. They’re gelled, their global experience language and they have some stats on their websites and stuff about how they were able to increase their velocity by 700% or whatever. So there’s stuff out there, but a lot of the stuff — if I’m honest — is pulling some numbers out of the air a little bit, just like looking at, “Here’s what we were doing before, we were able to launch projects in six months and now with the design system we’re able to launch them in six weeks.” And so just putting some marketing spin on that and saying, “oh, we’re able to launch things five times faster,” whatever that math works out to. So it’s just like putting a bow on it and stuff but that’s generally like the metrics that we want to follow as our people getting things out the door faster, is the overall code and design quality improved, are there less customer facing issues on the site and are our products, are people getting things done faster as a result of using a more consistent, cohesive user experience.

Vitaly: Yes, that makes sense. I’m curious though, so when it comes to specifics of a design system, it’s been very interesting because just recently I saw a project, and it’s also something that I explored sometime like in the past but every now and again you see people using interesting naming conventions in their design system. Like for three different sizes for different blogs, like the same media object, they would use something that’s memorable rather than something that’s functional. So they would use something like “momma bear”, “papa bear”, “baby bear”, but would you say, when it comes to naming, what would you prefer to use, what would you rather recommend to avoid?

Vitaly: Because obviously, when you have “papa bear”, “momma bear”, “baby bear”, how do you grow from there if you have a fourth part of the family, you need to find a really convenient name for that right? Is it better to use small, large, medium, like what patterns would you recommend to stay away from when naming things, what works for you best?

Brad: Yes, it’s a tough question that I think that every team faces. The short answer is, use whatever language makes sense for the team. You don’t want to introduce crazy, clever names if one person invented those names, and I was just thrusting them upon everybody else without their involvement, I guess. And I’ve seen that happen with atomic design, which is a naming convention that I created, but a lot of people will take that naming and adapt it or abandon it, or just call things or map them to whatever makes sense for their teams, like, “Oh, we call these things ‘components’, and we call these ‘smaller things’ or ‘modules’ or whatever, so we’re going to call it ‘elements’, ‘modules’, and ‘components’ instead of ‘atoms’, ‘molecules’, and ‘organisms’.”

Brad: And I love that, I think that, that’s really important for teams to establish a language that makes sense with them and how they’re already thinking and stuff like that. You don’t want to get new and jazzy and inventive if that isn’t warranted or if people are just going to, “Wait, what is ‘momma bear’ again?” So that’s important, but you’re also talking about, it’s like what happens when it goes to naming things that might need some space in between? So things like t-shirt sizes. It’s like, yes, there’s ‘small’, ‘medium’, ‘large’, ‘extra large’ or whatever, but what if you need a ‘medium two’ or a ‘medium three’ and a ‘large two’ and stuff like that?

Brad: And so you end up wedging these things in between and that never really feels right. My colleague, Dan Mahr, recently talked about this with respect to typography sizes. A lot of different design systems and style guides and things will tend to call things, ‘H1’ through to ‘H6’ for the different heading styles. But even that’s a little misleading, because one it like time, a semantic meeting to a stylistic thing, which isn’t always great. But then two, there tends to be more than six styles not just for headings for body copy, but also some may be stylized text or a block quote or a pool quote, so he explored that in a recent post where he’s talking about the naming of the stuff.

Brad: For a project we’re working on now, where basically we have just ‘typography preset one’, ‘typography preset four’ and ‘five’ and ‘six’, and the first few are loosely mapped two sizes and things like that, but for a lot of them, as the system has grown, and we’re like, Oh we actually need an additional preset, and we need the ability to add even more, they just get thrown onto the pile as ‘typography preset eight’ and ‘nine’ and ‘ten’ — and those aren’t terribly intuitive names. It’s not like, “Oh, this is ‘baby bear’” or whatever, and “Oh, this is…” (you know, Dan was toying around with the names of X-men or whatever — you could get clever like that.) But ultimately, at the end of the day, we picked a convention in a system that scales in that, “here’s what happens when you need to add a new thing” and crucially — the crucial bit to any of this — is the documentation and the shared understanding of that stuff.

Brad: In our style guide, in our reference website for the design system, we have a typography page where we spell out, here’s what ‘typography preset one’ is, and here’s what characteristics it has and here’s what usage it should be used for. And it’s like, “Oh, here’s ‘typography preset eight’” which is more of like a kicker, really small eyebrow, you know what I’m talking about, it goes above a title that might be the category of the blog post or whatever, I don’t know, but it’s like a little stylized, so it’s upper case, it’s spaced out a little bit, it’s like a thinner font, it’s like an understated typographic thing.

Brad: Now, none of that says ‘typography preset eight’, it just comes with the usage, you have to understand, “Oh, that’s the ‘kicker styles’.” But it can’t just be called ‘kicker style’ because we’re actually using it for a bunch of different things. We’re using it for a primary navigation, we’re using it for the eyebrows or the kickers above a title, but we’re also using it for a bunch of other things as well, which is why I think it’s important to establish more agnostic names, rather than tightly coupled to its usage names.

Vitaly: That makes sense, of course. I heard rumors that you might be doing or covering something along the lines of design systems in Toronto? May it be that I’m right or maybe I’m wrong? Maybe you’re even having a workshop in there — if I’m not mistaken?

Brad: Yes…

Vitaly: So I’m wondering, can you briefly describe maybe like within a minute or so, what you’re going to speak about, what is the session going to be like and also what the workshop is going to be like?

Brad: Yes. I’m super excited for Toronto and the gist of my session at the conference is going to be live in front of everyone, building a design system, so this is using what I call a workshop tool like Pattern Lab or Storybook to build out a design system, components as well as the screens that we’re building from those components, like live in a session. And that’s to demonstrate how that process works, how that component driven, so the design and development process works and how we iterate inside of this environment to build real pilot projects for the design system, as well as actually extracting the components from those projects.

Brad: So that’s the session, which I’m excited about and then the workshop is more of a deeper dive, there’s so many aspects to a design system initiative, and so basically the workshop is set up to go soup from nuts, from selling the design system to kicking the design system off, to planning what tools and technologies we’re going to use, what methodologies, what processes are we going to use, launching a design system, getting it into actual products, so deploying a design system, but then crucially maybe like the main bit is like, how do we maintain this over time? How do you set up your team structure? How do you set up your technology structure and infrastructure to support an ongoing living, breathing design system? So, that’s the workshop: it’s soups to nuts and how we build and maintain a design system?

Vitaly: That sounds pretty intriguing. So maybe then just the last one — the last question for you — and thank you so much for your time… I’m wondering if there were some lessons you learned the hard way, things that you would definitely not recommend to do when building or designing or creating or setting up our design system? What are some of the hard lessons you had to learn, things you definitely would recommend to stay away from?

Brad: There’s a bunch. I’ll say that one thing I’ve learned in consulting with a bunch of clients is, probably one of the biggest things (pitfalls we see teams falling into) is that they think that a design system is just the components and so I’ve worked with teams that they’ve spun up entire teams for, “Oh, this team is going to work on the buttons,” and, “Oh, this team is going to work on the cards,” and, “This team is going to work on the foreign fields” — it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just create these things in isolation and then cross your fingers and hope that they come together to form a cohesive experience.

Brad: Our big recommendation is, you have to start with real work, this is why pilot projects are so incredibly important. It’s like, you start with a real thing that really needs a built and then you use that as an opportunity to build your design system from. If your pilot project is the home page, you’re going to have a hero, you’re going to have some cars, you’re going to have a newsletter sign-up thing. You need to build all those in order to build the home page. And so through the lens of building out the home page, you’re able to extract those other components. So that’s my mistake to avoid is: don’t just build a design system in isolation. It has to be tied to the real products that your organization needs to produce.

Vitaly: Okay, that makes sense. Wow, Brad. I’m looking forward to your session. I’m wondering maybe you will be, I don’t know, building a design system for horoscopes, or maybe for, I don’t know, for something else? Is there a particular project you ever dreamed of, maybe like for NASA, design systems for NASA? No?

Brad: I mean that would be awesome. I don’t know, in my view I’ve never really thought of that in what would be like a dream client, I think that my sweet spot is where the technical ends of things but also the organizational end of things are both interesting. They have some interesting problems to solve, and so I love working with clients that are at that place where it’s like, “Oh, we need some technical heLp, but crucially we also need a lot of organizational or cultural help,” so I’m being vague here but I love that sweet spot in between. The work itself is good and I have fun as a web developer swimming in those waters, but then I also really like helping teams establish better processes and cultures around design and development.

Vitaly: Yes, well listen Brad, your curiosity of things, in things, and seeing things through and also making things a bit better, so let’s make things a bit better in Toronto then.

Brad: I’d love it.

Vitaly: Alright, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time, I’m looking forward to seeing you soon. And please say ‘hi’ to Louis as well.

Brad: Alright, hey, thanks for having me.

Vitaly: Of course, my pleasure! Okay, talk to you soon Brad, thank you.

Vitaly: Alright, so thank you so much to everybody for joining in. Let’s see, well, I hope I will see some of you in Toronto as well. It’s going to be an interesting conference with a couple of live sessions along the way. And please stay tuned, we’re going to have a couple of more interviews like this one and if you’re interested, please do let us know in the comments, or even ask the questions we should ask next time. With that in mind, signing off, and see you next time.

That’s A Wrap!

Build a design system in less than an hour? That’s crazy, but not entirely impossible.

We’re looking forward to welcoming Brad at SmashingConf Toronto 2019, with a live session on building design systems. He’ll demonstrate how to use Pattern Lab to simultaneously build both a design system’s front-end components and several screens of a real pilot project. We’d love to see you there as well!

Please do let us know if you find this series of interviews useful, and whom you’d love us to interview, or what topics you’d like us to cover and we’ll get right to it!

Smashing Editorial (ra, il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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27 May

Demystifying JAMstack: An Interview With Phil Hawskworth

by TBSCategories: News

Demystifying JAMstack: An Interview With Phil Hawskworth

Demystifying JAMstack: An Interview With Phil Hawskworth

Vitaly Friedman

Some of you might have heard of JAMstack, and perhaps even about how to switch from WordPress to Hugo, but is JAMstack a viable option for any kind of project?

I spoke with Phil Hawksworth, a front-end engineer who (after 9 years of working at agencies has returned to working on a standalone product) is now focusing on developing strategies for JAMstack technologies to make building for the web simpler, faster, and more secure. Phil will also be co-hosting JAM_stack ldn, a conference dedicated to static site generators, serverless and JAMstack in London, on July 9–10.

Vitaly: So hello and welcome to one of our conversations with our speakers at Smashing Conf and generally nice people. You might remember those times when FTP was a big thing and maybe actually you’re still deploying why FTP is a perfectly safe space so you don’t have to worry about that. But changes are high that you’re not using FTP anymore and instead move to Git based workflows, and probably continuous deployment. All this fancy whistles and bells. And so today I’m very happy to welcome Phil Hawksworth who is actually working at Netlify, Developer relationships [inaudible 00:10:00]. Hello Phil. How are you doing today?

Phil: I’m great, how are you doing Vitaly? It’s nice to see you.

Vitaly: Aw, I’m doing great. It’s always pleasure to see you. You’re like a sunshine streaming Netlify and Jump Stack and everything.

Phil: I try. I’m not even branded up, what a missed opportunity.

Vitaly: That’s okay, that’s okay. But you have to tell me, so that gem or jen or jeet, like, jem? Is it jem?

Phil: Jam. It’s jam. It’s all about the jam.

Vitaly: It’s all jam. So the JAMstack. For developers or designers, actually never heard the term before. If you wanted to maybe sum up what it is and why it’s good and what are the benefits of it in the first place. Why would you ever want to move from your traditional, good old stack to JAMstack. Maybe you could sum it up briefly.

Phil: Let me see if I can try because it’s tempting just to say, JAMstack, the JAM stands for Javascript, APIs and mockup. But that in itself doesn’t really explain very much, just knowing what it stands for. So really, JAMstack is all about a way of deploying and serving websites that don’t rely on an origin server, they don’t rely on requests hitting an active server all the time.

Phil: So you might be more familiar with stacks like the LAMP stack which was Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, that was the kind of stack that was serving your site there. With JAMstack, it gets a bit different because we’ve kind of moved up a level, away from the server and closer to the browser so it’s thinking a lot about getting in a browser as fast as possible and then using technologies in the browser to enhance and augment it later on. So JAMstack is all about pre-rendering sites, getting it into the browser, and then maybe enhancing it, augmenting it, the experience with Javascript running in your browser, maybe making requests to APIs and that kind of thing.

Phil: So that’s the model, trying to get away from having a server that you need to maintain because I know maintaining a server is difficult. I don’t know about you but I’ve got lots of sites that kind of went away when I just turned my back on them for a few years. I needed to upgrade PHP which meant I needed to upgrade the version of Linux which I’ve done once in a blue moon. So maintaining servers is difficult so the idea of the JAMstack is to try and make it as simple as possible to serve sites as static assets and then make the most out of all the APIs and inabilities in the browser to do augmentation and do more things with them there.

Vitaly: Right, makes sense. Well, in fact, we moved to JAMstack 2 years ago or so now.

Phil: Two years?

Vitaly: Yeah, it was quite a journey for us. And of course, we learned a few lessons along the way. But I’m wondering, would you say that essentially every project could benefit somehow from moving or moving some parts of it to JAMstack or like, where do you see its limitations? Is it something that potentially every developer could use in a project or is it something that’s kind of dedicated to a particular group of websites or a group of projects?

Phil: Yeah, I mean, it’s tempting to say, oh yeah, you can use it for everything but I think you should be careful saying that about any technology. You know, you really need to kind of pick the use cases and make sure it’s tailored well. I would say the first instinct when you think about a JAMstack site and maybe think about something which is served as static assets, maybe directly from a CDN. You might think, well that’s only good for sites that don’t change very often, they’re quote on quote, static, they don’t change. But in actual fact, that’s not really the case because so many tools exists now that can reduce the friction in deploying things.

Phil: You can deploy many many times a day, or many times an hour if you want and actually make things feel a lot more dynamic than they might have done before. So some of those use cases where you think they wouldn’t be appropriate; those actually come into the fold as well. The time that it gets challenging, perhaps though, is when we’re creating sites that have many many pages, many hundreds of thousands or many millions of pages because the JAMstack model really makes a lot of sense when you can pre-generate your site so you might be using a static site generator. Those have really in vogue at the moment; those are really really popular.

Phil: But of course, they have to do a piece of work every time they deploy an update so if you have a site, maybe like a newspaper site, that has many millions of pages, the work that is required to re-generate that can be quite, you know, that can take a long time so that’s when you start bumping into some of the limitations of where JAMstack can be, kind of, simply used. You can start to get a bit crafty and start to work around that if, you know, you’re very very crafty but it definitely introduces some challenges.

Phil: One of the things I’m starting to see from a variety of different static site generators like Gatsby for instance or React Static, and also Hugo. The teams behind those static site generators are starting to explore ways that you can do progressive generation of the pages so in other words, you don’t re-deploy the entire site or regenerate the entire site every time something changes but try and find ways to do incremental builds. It’s kind of a challenging problem to overcome but there’s work being done on that at the moment so that will help to try and break down that barrier as well. But, certainly at the moment, finding ways to use a JAMstack site for a website that has many millions of pages or many hundreds of thousands of pages, that’s where it can be a little bit challenging right now.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s interesting. So actually the idea of being then to serve a div of the state that you have and essentially that whatever you have to build, like a new portal has to be kind of paged into it so it’s interesting to see this happening. Because you also, just recently, I think two weeks ago, there was an article by Jason Pamental coming up where the idea was actually very similar where you would actually load the fonts, and then you load the first page that you need and then you load the second and then you actually merge them in a way to create a new font, like also incremental font loading.

Phil: Interesting.

Vitaly: That would be really interesting to explore that.

Phil: Yeah, and it’s not just so much of the loading, it’s the generation-

Vitaly: The generation, the build out.

Phil: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: I understand. But what do you think are kind of the common challenges that most developers have? Well, I mean, let me move back first. If you have never worked on JAMstack before and you are very much comfortable and happy with your LAMP stack and you wanted to maybe explore the possibility and advantages like security and performance of JAMstack. How would you actually start? What would you move, what does it mean to workflow change?

Phil: So, the changes to the workflow can actually be quite profound because you are taking away a lot of the infrastructure that you’d normally depend on and say actually we can do away with that and start deploying things directly to a CDN. But in terms of how someone might get started experimenting with this, chances are they might be using some of the aspects of this already. You know, even on kind of traditional ways of building things for the web.

Phil: If you think about how you might build something on the LAMP stack, chances are in your PHP there, you’re doing things like writing a template that grabs data from a data source, in this case, the MySQL database or some kind of database, rendering those things into view and then getting them served. And that’s kind of similar to how static site generators work. They have templates, they grab data from somewhere that might be kind of structured data in files or it might be hitting some kind of database or a content API. Either way, it’s grabbing data, combining that data with templates, generating views and the only difference is that it’s not doing that on demand, it’s doing that ahead of time. So, some of the logical steps in that kind of cognitive steps for a developer might not actually be that huge.

Phil: The biggest change is in thinking about how you deploy things. Because really what you’re deploying is your built, rendered assets entirety every time you want to do a deployment. That starts to bring things like the management of the content and the management of the code all into the same place so that things like the vision control across all of those things together. So it starts to be a slightly different way of thinking about how you might develop and manage sites and the content within it. So there are a few changes there. But the nice thing is, a lot of static site generators can be quite straight forward to start experimenting with and the nice thing is you don’t need a ton of infrastructure to do this. So the nice thing is that you can really start to build things out right on your local machine. You’re running a static site generator right on your machine and you can get a really good sense of what the outcome is going to be without needing to lean on lots of other infrastructure.

Phil: So that kind of first step, the on ramp, can be quite shallow for you to start to say, “well, I’ll try this particular set of tools. I can run them locally.” And you’ll have good confidence that when you deploy the output of that somewhere, that will be exactly the same where you deploy it as it would be locally. That’s one of the things that I love about rendering things that are static because you’re not depending on lots of infrastructure and moving parts to serve them. You can look at them on the static server on your own machine and think, “yeah, this is how it will work when it goes off to a CDN.”

Vitaly: Mm-hmm (affirmative);And also the infrastructure when we look, for example, into the way we build single [inaudible 00:10:07], and there is a huge number of options of what you could do. For the server, for the client, and everything in between.

Phil: Yeah.

Vitaly: And so, I think, in our case because we are kind of building out a skeleton and it’s serving straight through CDI with content and all and enhance with Javascript. It was actually quite reasonable and quite, I wouldn’t say easy but it made sense to move to that kind of set up. Because in the end, it’s just content that leaves on the page. It’s just HTML with a few comment areas and search box and a few other things. But if you’re moving towards really standalone application, maybe even financial application, online banking, this kind of thing. Do you think still that JAMstack would be a good option to consider there if you’re having something that requests a lot of logic? Does it need a server or not?

Phil: Well, I hate to trot out the old phrase, “it depends.” But it kind of does depend a little bit. With that said, there are lots of applications which work just as well being a Javascript application as actually having a service side component to them. I say that with a certain amount of caution because I’m a little bit old school when it comes web development and I really like getting things into the browser as HTML as much as possible and then having a really high watermark from where you progressively enhance from. So I don’t personally like doing everything in Javascript and just shipping an empty body tag and then running everything through Javascript.

Phil: With that said, there are sometimes where that’s perfectly acceptable. If you’re thinking about a certain kind of application which, of course, would heavily depend on Javascript and you know your audience. That can be completely reasonably. There are things that have been shipped recently. I’m thinking actually of something that shipped to Google IO for, as an example, the chrome team put together a game which was very heavily Javascript and that worked beautifully served statically. There are plenty of use cases where that can work.

Phil: Going back to your financial example, I used to work, my very first job actually, was putting numbers on screens for traders to trade off using web technologies and this was before web sockets, it was before Ajax, it was before anything really that was useful to help you do that and it’s kind of challenging but more recently, you would do a lot of that kind of thing in Javascript and that makes perfect sense. You can start to make secure requests to APIs right from the browser. There’s plenty of models now for doing authentication and authorization directly from your browser. So in many ways, this can simplify the stack for financial institutions that want to build some of these things out because the way that they can decouple some of these things can make them much more manageable. So I’d certainly think that the JAMstack model could perfectly work in that scenario as well.

Vitaly: Okay, so maybe coming back now to explore that world of JAMstack and front end. What are you most excited about these days, Phil? If you look at JAMstack and front end in general, is it something that’s really keeps you awake at night where you wake up in the morning hoping that yes, I’m going to work on that someday. One day I will get it done. Do you have [crosstalk 00:13:33]

Phil: Yeah, and this is the kind of thing where your answer can be different day by day because it feels like this world moves so quickly. And that in itself is one of the things that excites me so much. Now that we’re starting to see the browser APIs start to really progress and the kinds of things we can do directly in the browser without having to implement them ourselves. That’s kind of exciting to me. I’m still very much a duffer when it comes to SVGs. I should explain the word duffer, if anyone who’s not English and watching this, it means a fool. It means I’m way behind the curve.

Phil: But I find myself really wanting to do more with SVGs and animations are kinds of things I’m just way behind on and I want to play with that. But things like the browser APIs whether that’s things for offline or for improving performance and particularly at the moment the way the font loading seems to be getting more and more accessible so that we can start to really create things that visually are very rich and closer to what we might want to make with typography. I’m a bit of a nerd for that stuff, I like that kind of stuff so I want to play more and more with that.

Vitaly: So Phil, talking about JAMstack conf in London. Can you also explain in a few words like what is it going to be about, what’s the focus and who is it for and what is your role there? Just behind the scenes, taking care of the content and all. What is your role there?

Phil: So I’ve had the fun part of the job. So I’ve had the opportunity to go out and find speakers and find interesting content so I’m really excited about how the programs come together. We’ve got people like Chris Coia who’s going to talk about empowering front end developers and how much we can do with front end technologies now based on this JAMstack model. We’ve got people like Jake Archibald and Surma from the Google Chrome team who are going to talk about things like performance in the front end and ways that we can really drive very performance experiences either with static hosting or infrastructure or code that runs right in the browser.

Phil: We’re also going to have Yuna Kravitz talking about things to do with CSS and Houdini and all of those kinds of things. And much much more besides. We’ll also be talking about things to do with the cultural change that a JAMstack model can have on your organization and on your projects so it really reaches all over the place. So I’m kind of excited about that. I’ll get the chance also to introduce all of these people because they’ve let me go wild and be the MC as well so that means I get to talk to these people and ask a few questions and those kinds of things. So I think it should be very interesting for anyone who is interested in front end development and also new models of delivering projects on the web in a really efficient way.

Vitaly: Oh, so you do like the spotlight on stage, huh?

Phil: I’m an attention seeker. You should know that by now, Vitaly.

Vitaly: Oh, actually I always thought you were very humble and nice and kind person, apparently I was-

Phil: It’s an act, it’s an act.

Vitaly: Okay, that’s fine. Phil, we’ll meet in a few, oh actually, tomorrow.

Phil: I’ll see you soon for another event but otherwise I’ll see you in July, July the ninth and tenth.

Vitaly: [inaudible 00:16:52] So with this in mind, thank you Phil and signing off. Bye bye everyone.

Phil: See you soon.

That’s A Wrap!

We’re looking forward to welcoming Phil at SmashingConf Toronto 2019, with a live session on JAMstack. We’d love to see you there as well!

Please let us know if you find this series of interviews useful, and whom you’d love us to interview, or what topics you’d like us to cover and we’ll get right to it!

Smashing Editorial (ra, il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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20 May

Designing For Users Across Cultures: An Interview With Jenny Shen

by TBSCategories: News

Designing For Users Across Cultures: An Interview With Jenny Shen

Designing For Users Across Cultures: An Interview With Jenny Shen

Rachel Andrew

In this video, we are pleased to feature Jenny Shen who is a UX Consultant and has worked with numerous startups and brands including Neiman Marcus, Crate&Barrel, eBuddy, IBM, TravelBird and Randstad. Her current focus is helping businesses innovate and designing inclusive product experiences for global users. She is interviewed by Jason Pamental, who has already spoken at our San Francisco conference. Jason is a strategist, designer, technologist, and author of Responsive Typography from O’Reilly.

In their conversation, we discover how we can approach localizing and internationalizing our websites, over and above simply offering a translation of the material. This is something that Jenny will also focus on in her talk at our Toronto SmashingConf.

Vitaly: Okay, hello everyone. I’m looking forward to having a wonderful conversation today. We have Jason with us today. Jason, how are we doing today?

Jason: I’m doing very well. I’m excited about this.

Vitaly: Oh yes.

Jason: Something new and fun.

Vitaly: This is new and fun. Some of you might know we have Smashing TV and Smashing TV is all about planning some sort of webinars and sessions and interviews and all that. We always look for new adventures. Jason, you like adventures?

Jason: Very much.

Vitaly: Who doesn’t like adventures? In this particular adventures, we’re looking into actually just having conversations. Like, you know, you take a cup of coffee, sit down with a person you admire or you like or you feel like they have something to share. You just have a conversation. This is not about slides, it’s not about presenting, it’s all about really just kind of human interaction between two people genuinely interested in a particular topic. And so, with that, I’m very privileged to have Jason with us today, who’s going to be the interviewer, and who’s going to introduce the speaker or the person who he’s going to speak with. We just came from Smashing Con, San Francisco two weeks ago. It was a wonderful experience because Jason would just come on stage, sit down, take a cup of coffee, work through his design process and stuff. And he’s very curious, right? This is something that you need in a person who can run interviews really well. You might see Jason more often in the future. Maybe, Jason, you can introduce yourself. What do you do for life? What’s the meaning of life for you?

Jason: Well, I suppose in the order of frequency, it’s spending time with my wife, walking the dogs which, most people see on Instagram, riding my bike, and then a whole lot of stuff about typography. Which, is what I was demonstrating when I was at Smashing, San Francisco. The thing that is sort of common for me that runs through is just being curious about stuff and learning new things so the chance to actually learn from more amazing people who are gonna be getting on stage at other Smashing events was too good to pass up. So, I’m pretty excited about this.

Vitaly: We couldn’t be more excited to have you. I think it’s time for me to get my breakfast. I’m sorry, I’m so hungry. I woke up four hours ago, was all about meetings and Jason will take over. Jason, have a wonderful time. I’m looking forward to seeing you when they’re wrapping up this session. Okay? Jason, the stage is yours.

Jason: Thanks, Vitaly. Well, I’m super excited about this for a whole bunch of reasons. But, the main one is I get to introduce to you someone who, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the first time you’re speaking at a Smashing Event? Is that true?

Jenny Chen: Yes. It is the first time.

Jason: Okay. Well, The voice that you’re hearing and the face that you’re seeing is Jenny Chen who is a UX and localization consultant who’s worked with all kinds of big brands including Neiman Marcus, Crate and Barrel, and IBM. In the course of your travels over the web of a number of years which has some pretty amazing lists of credentials. I mean, some things that really stood out to me, that actually I think kind of made you a little bit more compelling in terms of who I really wanted to talk to first: is that not only are you doing all of this incredible work but you’re also a regional director for EMEA for Ladies UX, which is an amazing organization, and you also started your own mentorship program. That teaching aspect, you know, I think is one of the things that I love about getting up on stage and giving talks and workshops and stuff. So, before we actually jump into what you’re gonna be talking about, I’d really love to hear a little bit more from you, about your journey from Taipei, to where you are now, to how you came to be in this industry.

Jenny Chen: Yeah, sure. Thank you, Jason, for the amazing introduction. Yeah. So, as you were saying, I started from Taipei. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan. My journey was…I moved around in a lot of places. My family moved to Canada and I studied there. I studied in Vancouver, Canada.

Jason: Oh, wow.

Jenny Chen: Yeah. I studied Interaction Design. At the time it was like Human-Computer Interaction.

Jason: Right.

Jenny Chen: And then I moved to Singapore and now I’m based in the Netherlands consulting regarding UX projects/localization projects. And just like you mentioned, I am a volunteer EMEA director at Ladies UX and I also run my own mentorship program in the spare time. Yeah. I’ve also been speaking in [crosstalk 00:04:59]

Jason: Because you must have a load of spare time then? So, tell me a little bit about the typical day for you if there is one.

Jenny Chen: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Typical day. These days I have more of a typical day because I’m working with clients and then I am basically just taking my to-do list and doing the job that can help the organization, can help shape product strategy, offer feedback to designers, do some consulting on localization, working on research. And, yeah, like a typical day I could be reviewing a design, giving feedback to my design team. I could be helping a client with more of an approach to hire a designer and I could be running a workshop on product strategy, like really talking about, “This is model canvas and valid composition.” And some days I’m drafting a user research strategy and on some days I am flying over to a different country to actually conducting on-site localization and culture research. So, yeah, there’s not really a typical day because I really do different types of work, types of projects, and I get to work with really amazing clients.

Jason: That’s amazing. I’ve looked at your resume. Your speaking schedule last year was incredible. You were at some of the best events on the web. You were speaking on all kinds of different things. It makes me feel so monotonous. All I ever do is talk about web typography and you seem to cover an incredible range of topics. That really is fascinating to me. And I love that your focus is so well-rounded in that it’s not just about UX it’s also about how design can impact the business. And that’s something that I think is really fascinating and it’s really starting to gain a lot of prominence with research from InVision and McKinsey about what design can bring to the rest of the organization. So, how long has that been more of the focus about business model innovation and all those kinds of strategic topics?

Jenny Chen: Yeah. I actually just transitioned from a designer to a strategist in a little bit more than a year ago. I’d been in the design-

Jason: Really?

Jenny Chen: Yeah. I’d been in the design industry for like six, seven years and I’d been doing, you know, wireframing, the same type of thing the designer would do. Wireframes, prototypes, icons, and stuff like that and it was to the point I really wanted to be more involved on the business side of things. Now that I’m in this role for like more than a year, I really see how being more business-minded and being aware of the business goals and how that needs to work together with a strategy and a design to actually move the needle. Really, the starting point just because I’d been a designer for like six, seven years and I really want to do more. I really want to actually see the impact of my designs. So, that seems like the natural step. And I think learning from a lot of experts from my community as well as going to different conferences and listen and learn from those people who do strategy and are leading design. So, I’m very honored to have a chance to be in those conferences and learn from these leaders.

Jason: That’s really amazing. I hope we’ll have time to come back to that a little bit because I think a lot of designers, as they advance in their career, really look for ways that they can achieve a greater level of impact than just this one project they’re working on. And I think it’s really hard for designers to kind of figure out where they can go.

Jenny Chen: Yeah.

Jason: So, that’s amazing to hear that you’ve made such a great transition. I can’t help but think that there’s a really great relationship between multi-lingual, multi-cultural and localization as this sort of central part of business strategy and how it relates to design and I gather that’s kind of what you’re gonna be talking about in San Francisco. Is that…I’m sorry, in Toronto. Is that true?

Jenny Chen: Yeah. So, my talk will be on moreover how culture affects the design and then I’ll also be touching on how…what are some of the reasons…how can companies benefit from localization. How can companies benefit from expanding to a new market? So these are the type of things that I want to talk about in my talk in Toronto as well as showcasing some case studies. How do reputable companies…how do big companies approach localization and market expansion? Because I have been doing this specifically designs with multiple cultures since 2013 and I’ve definitely learned a lot and then also learned from the companies who are really experts in doing internationalization and localization. So, yeah. I am really excited to share about this.

Jason: That’s really great. And I think for a lot of people, when they think about a language addition to a website, they kind of lump adding a language into what people refer to when they say internationalization. But I know I learned a ton when I listened to Robin Larson from Shopify talk about their work over the past year or so in adding multiple languages to their system. But the phrase you used was localization and that was the thing that really stuck out to me and what I wanted to ask you about because that was something Robin spoke about where it’s not just the language but it’s the phrasing and it’s the cultural things about other aspects of design. So, I’d love to hear more about what that means to you when you’re designing and the kinds of things that you consider in adding a language…whether it’s English and Chinese or Korean or whatever the other kind of cultural implications that go along with that.

Jenny Chen: Yeah. So, regarding localization, for me, it means in all kinds of ways how to adapt a product, an interface, an application to meet the needs, the preferences, expectations, and behaviors of the local users. Like you mentioned, it’s not just about translation, but there are many things from icons, from symbols and colors and sometimes you have text direction and of course the content…all these sort of things that can help a local user feel like, “Hey, this app or this software is designed with me in mind. It’s just not some foreign company…they only hired some translators and they expect me to feel connected to the product.” So, localization, that’s what it means for me and that’s the kind of work that I like to do.

Jason: Mm-hmm (affirmative) And so how often is that work…just for frame of reference, I’ve mostly worked on web content management systems. So, when that first comes up, the first thing that comes to mind is, “Okay. I need to add a language pack. I need to factor this into the language encodings for the theme,” and that sort of thing. But I know there’s a lot of other considerations and there’s a whole range of what people work with. From things that are sort of static sites, where you have a lot of freedom to customize things. But I think a lot of us end up dealing with either its an app infrastructure or a website infrastructure that has to support those multiple languages. So what kind of scenarios have you had to deal with in terms of the technology behind…you know and how you…I’m trying to phrase this better. You know sort of implementing that design and finding the freedom to change the icons to change the phrasing to chan — you know, to make it feel connected. Are you often involved in the technical implementation of that or at least mapping things properly?

Jenny Chen: So actually, on a technical side, not really and there is really different kinds of clients. And then some of them I come into a project and they have already things mapped out, and then usually when I come in is when they have decided a market, or maybe they are thinking about localization. They haven’t decided what market, but they have the infrastructures in place, so I can’t really speak to about the technical infrastructure. But then I’m thinking like what might be useful for someone to know about like why rolling the process, and how to actually even think about, “Well should we change this icon?” It’s all related to — We should think about the business case of localization. I mean we don’t do it just because we can we don’t do it just because its fun, but localization or expanding to a different market or supporting multiple languages. There must be, well, there should be a business reason behind it: is because we want to expand markets, we want to expand to a different market, we want to reach the users, and definitely we are hoping for some success matrix from that market. And if we deem that this is a market that is likely to succeed, or we want to experiment and then the users of that culture/of that market, and they have a strong tendency to let say go for applications that are feel more native, feel more intuitive. And as user experience practitioners like we know that designing the user experience like is going to make the users more loyal, more engaged. So its also considering like the user experience business matrix to decide: Okay, do we want to have this customization available, do we even want to customize it, or do we just want to go for like the minimum localization effort which typically is translations and content localization.

Jason: And so how often does it go further than that? So I mean the things that come to mind that we had kinda gone back and forth a little bit in the questions beforehand: language length, or color, or typography, or layout. How often does that come into play?

Jenny Chen: Mm-hmm (affirmative) That’s a really good question. I would say that it really depends on the industry, it depends on the company stage, it also depends on like where are they, what their business goals are. For just a start-up it’s unlikely that they will fully customize it. They may even not expand into multiple markets when they are just figuring out their product market fit. But lets say for a really established company like Spotify, Shopify as well, they are… they already have a like a market that’s a home market that’s doing really well, and they want to expand and for the — for some target market where they have a really distinct culture like Japan for example, where there’s a lot of different like influences and that can actually affect the layout or the localization element, for example, Singapore or China. And then we look at evaluating what is the — what do we have to do to be successful in the market? For some market, it might not be necessary, like maybe for some markets, they might require less changes than the other. So, I would say, this is a really — it depends, kind of [inaudible 00:17:06] answer to kind of, for us to know, what is actually required and how often does it actually go beyond the basic localization?

Jason: Right, and so in your role, sort of advising your clients on these sorts of things… Do you actually go so far as think about what would the team look like that could do this successfully? Like, what kinds of designers and skills sets you would want to see, to help them be successful?

Jenny Chen: Hmm. Yeah, in my experience, the localization team — then again, depending on the state, depending on — are they in the beginning of setting up the team? Let’s say if they haven’t gotten a team set-up, usually, there is a localization team that takes care of the localization elements, or maybe some, to make sure there is consistency but there is also certain customization elements with the differing market but while the other product team could be focused on specific features. So let’s say like, the whole market team will design the checkout flow, the localization team will then take that checkout flow and customize it for a different market. And, depending on the company size, some more established companies, they could have like the Germany team, the Netherlands team, the Nordics team, the Latin team, to actually hire people who are aware of the culture differences, of the local expectations, the legal requirements and all those things that can actually make or break the product. They either hire people on the ground, or they hire people with that experience, with that knowledge, in their office.

Jason: Right.

Jenny Chen: But there’s really multiple ways we could go about it. What’s really most necessary is people with that knowledge, people with that cultural understanding who can actually design for that target market.

Jason: That’s great. I think that leads into a couple of other things that I really wanted to ask you about. One is, I mean, your background is so geographically varied. How much has that influenced your career direction, in terms of what interests you, and the kinds of things you’ve wanted to focus on?

Jenny Chen: When I was still studying [inaudible 00:19:36] people always like set out their career goal, and what they wanted to be, in 5 years, 10 years, what I want to do. I honestly have never thought that I would be in this industry, in the localization industry. And, I really love what I do, and I think the reason why I’m doing this and maybe like, what shaped my path going here is just having curiosity, you know, towards other cultures and towards the world. I guess, as I traveled more and more, my mind started to open and to really understand cultural differences, the local ways of life. And, being a UX designer like understanding how important it is to have our product user-centered. Then I look at people who are living in other countries and I see, you know, what kind of things do they actually use: What kind of apps, what kind of website, and how that’s so different from what we know and what we’re accustomed to. That’s one of the reasons, curiosity. I really love to travel and I also have moved to many countries just to really be immersed in the local culture, really connect with the local people, try to learn some local language. I’m terrible at Dutch (laughs), but I try where I can. I think it really has enriched my life, it really has enriched my professional experience. I mean, when I moved to Singapore, that’s actually how it gave me the opportunity to design for Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia and countries in that region. When I moved to Amsterdam, I was able to design for Spain, and France, and Germany, and Turkey, like all the countries in this region. I feel very blessed and I really love what I do. I think, again, my curiosity and passion for traveling definitely have played a role in this.

Jason: Yeah, sure sounds like it. So, if you were to try and take — well, so, there’s two parts to this one: I’m wondering if there’s something that you would want, if you could go back to do differently? Like, is there something you had wished you learned more. You’ve moved into business strategy quite a bit more, do you wish you would have studied business? What are the sorts of things that you’re looking to fill in now, that you maybe wished you had learned earlier?

Jenny Chen: Yeah, I think about this sometimes. I think it might have been quite helpful if I studied business administration. But, at the same time, having a degree in design, and having a solid training background in research…I think that’s also a huge asset. Often times I talk to clients and they actually need a researcher. They need somebody who has done this a lot, and somebody who understands the science behind user interface, visibility test and how to like, minimize bias in the whole research process. So I feel like, maybe I should’ve studied business but at the same time, I’m also really happy that I studied design.

Jason: Sure.

Jenny Chen: But, something I’m definitely trying to make up where I don’t have so much expertise regarding the business side. It’s just that I am talking to experts in this area, I’m reading books and listening to podcasts. But definitely, if someone who wants to take on a strategist role, I would say that would be really helpful. Right now that’s actually something that, rather than the design and what tools to use, I’m definitely more interested to learn about the business side of things.

Jason: Mm-hmm (affirmative). At an agency I worked at a few years ago, a bunch of us actually took a Coursera class together, and had a little discussion every week about — It was an MBA focused program to learn about business models, structures, and what is the business model canvas and all those kinds of things. That was really fascinating, I certainly appreciated that. So, the other side of that last question was: your advice to designers who are looking to do more work like this. What are the kinds of things that if a designer wants to understand localization more, and start to move into this world, what kinds of advice would you have for them?

Jenny Chen: I think one thing that quite helped me to do my work in localization is just to be, again, be curious. Not just curious, and physically traveling. Let’s say at the designer who might not have the opportunity to go abroad and do a research trip in another country, we can at least look at international tech news. I still say in [inaudible 00:24:38] my contact in Singapore, and I read tech news in South East Asia, in Taiwan, in other countries where there are English versions available or at least in a language that I can read. You can also download apps or go on websites and really just try to be more aware of how designs or how the software can be different. And, definitely keep an eye out what the other companies are doing in other markets. That is definitely really interesting. We can follow that news like tech crimes to next lab, there’s a lot of news sources, just to keep an eye out and also learn on what people are actually doing regarding localization.

Jason: That’s amazing, great. That’s awesome advice, thank you. The last thing I’m going to ask you about — I think we’re probably getting close to a good time to wrap up but, for you, now, with all these things that you’re doing, what’s getting you really excited? What’s the new thing that you see coming that you’re really excited to learn about and incorporate in the work that you do?

Jenny Chen: Something that’s really new and really exciting… For me personally, I’m just really happy that more and more people are thinking about localization and sharing that knowledge. Like what you just said, Robin is great, and I really like the work that she does, and so people like her, people like me, who are sharing/ raising the awareness of the importance of considering the local cultures, considering the nuances when developing a localized product. Overall, I’m just happy that people are raising awareness of this issue. I really hope more and more companies who actually doing it would be on-stage, or like writing or speaking more about it so other people can ultimately learn from the successful companies. I’m sure like, Facebook does a lot of things, DropBox does a lot of things, but then it’s just that so far we haven’t seen people actively talking about localization or internationalization, so that’s something I’m really excited about.

Jason: That’s great. Well, this has been absolutely amazing, I can’t thank you enough. For anyone who is going to be in Toronto, I hope that — if any of you are listening, I hope that you take this to heart. Go say hi to Jenny, tell her how much this work has influenced you. It’s such a big part of being at these events to be able to people and learn more about what they’re working on. Don’t hesitate, that’s what we’re all there for. We’re all learning together, some of us have just read a couple of pages ahead, and we’re happy to share what we’ve learned. Thank you so much, Jenny, this has been amazing.

Jenny Chen: Thank you so much Jason. I’m so happy to take part in this, thank you.

Vitaly: Thank you so both of you for actually making it all happen. Wonderful interview and also wonderful insights from you Jenny, thank you so much for that. Just a quick note from me, this is just one of the little sessions that we have about people who are going to kind of speak at our conferences but also just interesting people doing interesting work. This is important. I think at this point there’s a lot of failure of highlighting people who are kind of passionately and working hard behind the scenes doing incredible work to change the world. So this is kind of just our humble attempt to bring a little bit of spotlight to those people. With this in mind, thank you so much for watching. Looking forward to the next one.

That’s A Wrap!

We’re looking forward to welcoming Jenny at SmashingConf Toronto 2019, with a live session on designing for users across cultures. We’d love to see you there as well!

Please let us know if you find this series of interviews useful, and whom you’d love us to interview, or what topics you’d like us to cover and we’ll get right to it!

Smashing Editorial (ra, il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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13 May

Setting Up A Digital Policy: An Interview With Kristina Podnar

by TBSCategories: News

Setting Up A Digital Policy: An Interview With Kristina Podnar

Setting Up A Digital Policy: An Interview With Kristina Podnar

Vitaly Friedman

The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry, and sharing what they’ve learned.

For over two decades, Kristina Podnar has worked with some of the most high-profile companies in the world and has helped them see digital policies as opportunities to free the organization from uncertainty, risk, and internal chaos.

Kristina is an energetic and passionate problem-solver, and we’re honored to welcome her at SmashingConf Toronto 2019 for a live session for creating and documenting a sound policy and standards, and a few tools and tactics which will help nurse your website back to health.

Vitaly: So, hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining in again. This is one of those mysterious sessions where we interview interesting people behind the scenes. I think it’s actually very important to highlight the important people doing important work just silently in the back, hiding a little bit, trying to make the world a bit better, one step at a time and, that’s important, sharing what they learned with the community, with all of us, so we can benefit from it.

Vitaly: And so, I’m very happy and privileged today to have with us Kristina Podnar who is a digital policy innovator. And, for over two decades she has worked with some of the most high profile companies in the world, and has helped them see policies as opportunities to free the organization from uncertainty, risk, and internal chaos. This is the official description. What I can tell from my side though is that Kristina is just such an incredibly positive and energetic and nice person. I’m so privileged to have you speaking in Toronto with us, Kristina. So Kristina, how are you today?

Kristina Podnar: Thanks for having me, Vitaly. I am doing really well and really excited to be here with you. You have no idea. This is sort of a pinnacle of my career and a path I’ve been on for a while. As you know, I contributed to Smashing Magazine back in 2016, but having the opportunity to be with you in Toronto is, I think, an ultimate high for me amongst everything else that I’ve done so far. I’m really excited.

Vitaly: This is so nice. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Kristina Podnar: Same here.

Vitaly: So, Kristina, tell me, the truth, the story, how did you end up in this mess? Every time we talk about digital policies and governance, and I heard rumors that you are going to speak about that, everybody thinks about boring stuff. Bureaucracy, slow processes, and communication issues, and maintenance problems. Messy, messy things.

Kristina Podnar: That’s right.

Vitaly: How do you feel there?

Kristina Podnar: Well, you know what, I don’t blame anybody for thinking that because that’s all that we’ve all been taught, right? I mean, we always think about policies as these 20 page PDF documents that have been signed off by legal or HR, or there somewhere on SharePoint. We have to go searching for them when we need to know something, and all we need is a yes or no answer and somebody’s saying, “No, no. Go read this document. Really, it’ll help you.” And, if you are a digital, that usually means reading 30 or 40 such documents.

Kristina Podnar: I don’t blame anybody for feeling like it’s a lot of bureaucracy. It’s really, really annoying. And, it’s where I actually came from in my career. Well, that’s not true. It was a little bit of a derailment in my career, but I came from the world where we used to live in the wild, wild west. We did things like migrate new websites in HTML with having a backup, which is how I personally made sure that one of my clients didn’t have a website for nine hours. Or, we would pass credit card numbers through FTP without encryption. Right. It was the crazy days.

Kristina Podnar: And then, it seems like the world just went to this extreme of trying to tie down anybody who was doing anything creative. And, if you wanted to do a really cool marketing campaign online, it was like compliance had to sign off, and legal had to sign off, and you had to say certain things. And, by the time you got to this point where your really cool idea came out the other end, you didn’t even recognize it. It was boring and it was dull.

Kristina Podnar: And so, I lived in this world for many years, and what I discovered is it doesn’t have to be like that. We can actually have a really good balance between understanding what needs to be done to protect the business, doing things the right way in terms of laws and regulations, and yet freeing everybody to do really creative and innovative work. And so, I’m on this mission to help businesses understand that because I think far too many people come into their work job every day and they’re not happy. And, I think that’s really sad.

Kristina Podnar: So, I’m all about let’s create policies that free the organization to do what it needs to get done in digital, and let’s free the workers to be creative and innovative and not have to do the humdrum of reading these long PDF’s or putting up with red tape because digital policies are fun and exciting and enabling. They are anything but red tape.

Vitaly: But, Kristina it sounds like a magic dream. It sounds like it’s something that it’s really hard to achieve. So, when it comes to something like that, and I guess this is also something you’re going to speak about in Toronto,-

Kristina Podnar: Yeah.

Vitaly: … where do you even start? Imagine you have this mass organization just in front of you and it desperately needs some better structure, maybe better communication. Every single company I was working within my career had communication issues, including ours to be honest for quite a bit of time.

Kristina Podnar: No.

Vitaly: So, where do you even start? What’s the starting point for you?

Kristina Podnar: So, personally what I like to do is really kind of just come into the organization fresh-eyed, and trying to understand really what are the biggest challenges. And, I’ve worked with really, really large multinationals all the way down to really small companies. And, it varies. The problem varies. But, in most organizations that I work with, what I find is people feel like they have to really control digital because it’s something new and they feel like it’s something that’s really, really dangerous and can kind of pose a threat to the organization as much as it can kind of create that opportunity.

Kristina Podnar: And so, it’s all about trying to find the pain point. So, for example, I recently worked with a pharma company, and they had this really crazy review process where it took 21 days to get content published. I’m thinking to myself that could work if it’s a really big product launch and you’ve been creating the product for years. 21 days isn’t a big deal. But, if you had like the measles outbreak in the United States, you want to act really quickly and get the information out there. 21 days is forever.

Kristina Podnar: And so, what it was is people had to go through the same pain staking points for content review over and over again and their medical signatories had to feel comfortable. They had to do these crazy screenshots of the content on an iPad versus an iPhone versus this screen, that screen. Legal had to review things. And, what we found is that we can actually boil the steps down and creates certain rules that can’t be broken and do this in a way that facilitates the content being created with awareness across the whole sign-off team.

Kristina Podnar: And so, really ahead of time, what we would do is, as content was being created, we would do screenshots with the different devices. We would make sure that, up front, whoever was in charge of the marketing campaign was following certain sort of rules and regulations and actually showing where they were getting creative or where they wanted to kind of relax some of the rules.

Kristina Podnar: And, what that meant is that there was a summary and a summative package at the end of the process that we could serve up, almost in a restaurant where you have your menu item and you check things off and go, “I don’t want the fish today, but gosh, the chicken sounds delicious.” We’ll go with that really quickly and get that order in. And, it was the same thing. And so, all of a sudden we found ourselves in this crazy pharma world, which is probably the most regulated of anybody out there, 21 review day process down to three.

Kristina Podnar: But, it has to do with understanding what the expectations are of sort of this regulatory policy driven world and really making sure that as creatives we address that up front, and that we actually give everybody the ability to exhale, take a deep breath, and understand we’re doing things and working towards the same common goal, and we’re going to make sure we don’t get the company sued. But, at the end of the day, we want to have a lot of freedom. We want to make sure that it’s innovative, that it catches the user’s imagination, that we have these great digital experiences, and that that can still be done within that framework. Because it’s really freedom within a framework, if you will. And, it doesn’t have to be boring and it doesn’t have to be onerous and it certainly doesn’t have to take 21 days.

Vitaly: Wow. Now, I actually getting excited about all that stuff. That’s surprising.

Kristina Podnar: Yay.

Vitaly: I did not see that coming at all. But, I’m wondering at this point, so would you say that every single company of every size could benefit from a very clear digital governance and kind of policy? Does every company has to invest time in it, or do you see it’s more a deal for enterprise or larger level, larger size companies?

Kristina Podnar: So yes, everybody needs to have digital policies, even me. I’m an independent consultant, but even I have to comply with things like GDPR. And so, last year I actually wrote up how I did that and how GDPR applies to the gig economy. So, policies are really good for anybody, whether you’re a single consultant all the way up to multinational. The thing that’s different I think, and we have to be very, very cognizant of this because I don’t want everybody to run out there and create 300 policies. Don’t do that. That’s also wrong.

Kristina Podnar: What we have to be really cognizant of is if you’re a small startup, for example, you’re not going to have the same policies nor the same number of policies, that they’re not going to be as robust, perhaps, in terms of how you implement them, as a large multinational. And, I really wrote my book, The Power of Digital Policy, and that’s really what I focused on. I focused on how can you get this done, whether you’re a startup, or if you’re a small company, if you’re a large enterprise, and it really is about where you are in your maturity growth in terms of policy.

Kristina Podnar: So, if you’re just starting out, don’t worry about 300 things. Worry about the four things that I’m going to tell you about at the conference, right? Let’s kind of just get you started. Pay attention to the most important things and get you to the point where, for you, in terms of what you’re trying to get done, you’ve properly balanced out that risk and that opportunity that digital brings with it. Because that’s really what I want people to understand. There is no magic checklist for policies. Just because somebody else is doing the crazy dance over there with 300 policies and that’s what they need to do, the crazy dance in a happy way. That’s okay.

Kristina Podnar: But, the same thing doesn’t apply to you. You’re unique in terms of your culture, you’re unique in terms of your beliefs. You’re unique in terms of what you’re trying to get done. And so, don’t just take somebody else’s suit and put it on. It’s going to be constructive if it’s too small and too tight. It’s not going to feel good. Same thing with policies. Don’t go off and take somebody’s policies and put them on. They’re not going to feel good. We want your organization to be safe, to be productive, to do the right things for the business. But, by the same token, we want you to actually be able to get some cool things done. And, that’s really what digital policies are and that’s what I’m trying to actually get done and help everybody else do.

Kristina Podnar: And so yes, one person all the way up to multinational, everybody needs policies. What type? It depends on what you’re doing. It could be accessibility, which I know we’re going to also be covering it at Smashing and I’m excited about that. But, it could be anything from accessibility to user-generated content. It could be policy and privacy, lots of conversation around that these days. It could be about just literally who gets to select the content management system we’re going to use inside of an organization so we don’t have to have that conversation over and over again every time we have a new digital martech stack or something else we want to introduce into the organization and get something done. So, to me, yes, policies always sound boring, but the reality is they can be anything but that. And, it’s just about how we get that done and get it done in a reasonable way that helps everybody out and is in the interest of everybody in the organization. And, that’s where I see the most success.

Vitaly: I have to switch cameras now.

Kristina Podnar: Okay.

Vitaly: Interesting. And, it’s also, for me personally, when it comes to policies, I think it’s all about streamlining. So, we improved a lot of things just to streamline processes to make sure that everything is kind of clear, what is following what, kind of how do we move from a to b in a very predictable set of steps rather than chaotic, just throwing everything in the air and hoping that something will stick. And so, this was actually very helpful and it was very informal in many ways. Would you say that a policy has to be kind of stated on a piece of paper or in a document? How do you document it? How does it manifest itself?

Kristina Podnar: So, it’s interesting, I actually spent a year thinking about all of my experiences in terms of what works best in an organization and size, industry, et cetera. And, what I found is policies do need to be written down somewhere, right? Just because most organizations, no matter how small you are, there’s always somebody new jumping onto the team, or somebody’s leaving for maternity leave and so somebody has to step in, et cetera. So, it’s important to document things.

Kristina Podnar: Now, I think, especially if you’re in a small organization, you’re part of a smaller team, you don’t need to have a really formal template. You can even write on the back of a napkin if everybody can see that napkin in the lunchroom and knows where to find it. So, I don’t think we need to get stuck on this is the template, this is the format, although in a larger organization that does help.

Kristina Podnar: What I think we need to really focus on, and this is where policies get the bad rap, policies are not just about how we document things and that’s sort of old-world thinking, right? That’s how we did things 25 years ago. We wrote it on a piece of paper and it’s in a file folder over there. But, here we are in the digital world, right? We’re trying to make these really great user experiences online, but what we forget to do is the same thing for our internal friends and colleagues. And, that’s really what I think we need to be doing around policies.

Kristina Podnar: We need to be making policies and documenting them in a way that’s easily accessible by everybody and it fits into what you’re already doing. And, that’s what I see work the best. If you want people to do certain things, for example, around content creation and they’re in Drupal, honestly just create a little checklist that they can actually link to from Drupal, and understand quickly these are the things I should be paying attention to. Don’t make them quit their day job and go looking for guidance because nobody wants that. Right?

Kristina Podnar: Or, if in a really large multinational, like we just deployed a chat bot that is really great. It actually tells marketers real time what they need to be thinking about and what they need to be doing in terms of that campaign. But, what’s really cool is it remembers and builds on top of itself over and over again. So, if a marketer is focused, for example, on Asia Pacific, we already know you’re focused on Asia Pacific and so all guidance we’ll ever give you is in the context of Asia Pacific and you can get that real time. We remember last time you did a campaign, what you were trying to achieve, and what your performance objectives were. And so, if they’re the same ones, we can just track that going forward and narrow the amount of guidance that you have to think about or even do.

Kristina Podnar: And, what’s really great is if you do this in the right way, it doesn’t just empower the designer, the marketer, or the developer, the content strategist. It really also helps your vendors and agencies that you bring on board. Or, if you’re a part of an agency and you’re coming to the table, imagine how cool when somebody brings you on board and says, “Hey, I want you to do this for me. Stand up this new website.” And then it’s like, ta-da. These are the things we expect you to do and this is how we’re going to measure you when you’re done. I mean, that’s great. You already know how high you have to jump and what you have to achieve, and that allows you to focus on the things that really matter, in where you have that freedom and creativity without having to worry, oh no, are they going to tell me at the last hour my website has to be accessible and I haven’t built it that way. It’s like, man, nobody wants to go back to step one.

Kristina Podnar: And so yes, it’s about documentation, but more than just write it down on a piece of paper, although that can certainly work. It’s about doing it in the context of your culture and how people want to be delivered that information, and treating people who are going to consume this information like they’re actual users because they are.

Vitaly: Oh, this sounds like… I’m so happy now. I’m so happy.

Kristina Podnar: Oh good.

Vitaly: So, if you had to sum up what you’re going to cover in 40 or 45 minutes at this madness show called SmashingConf Toronto, how would you sum it up? What is it all about in maybe 40 seconds or less?

Kristina Podnar: Sure. So, you know what, all of us collectively, even if you’ve only been in this field for a few years, have contributed to a big mess. The mess has been underway in 25 years. It’s not going to get cleaned up right away, but we can make a huge difference in terms of what we do, cleaning up the messes, and making our life easier and more fun. So, we’re going to play doctor and patient in this session. We’re going to have some fun and hopefully make it funny as well. And, we’re going to literally go through how can we diagnose some of the illnesses that our organizations have, some of our projects have, and make sure that we give the right medicine, the right Rx, the right policies so that we can enable ourselves to have fun, be creative, and balance out that risk and that opportunity that I keep talking about.

Vitaly: Wow. I have a question for you.

Kristina Podnar: Sure.

Vitaly: Kristina, are you planning to run for President? Because if you do, I think you have very good chances of winning.

Kristina Podnar: Oh, thank you. I don’t know about that. But, you know what, and I shouldn’t say this publicly, it’ll be an interesting scene in the United States in terms of who’s going to run and where the bar is. And, I’ll let everybody decide on where they fall on that one.

Vitaly: Yes. So, maybe the last one, can you maybe share some insights with us about what you’re working on now, and also what excites you the most in this vast worldwide web of ours? Is there something you’re particularly interested in? Or, if you look into GDPR and all of this stuff, and I know that there is a law coming in California next year.

Kristina Podnar: Yes. CCPA.

Vitaly: Yes, exactly.

Kristina Podnar: January 1st, yeah.

Vitaly: Oh, January 1st. Here we go.

Kristina Podnar: January 1st, yes. Here we go.

Vitaly: What are you kind of looking forward to? What is something that really brings you to life or keeps you awake at night?

Kristina Podnar: Okay. So, two things. I’m working on something really fun right now, which I love. I’m actually becoming a spokesperson for this really small company in the United States. They are active in every country in the world with the exception, I think of Cuba and maybe Iraq. And, very tiny company, really small staff, not a lot of money. They’ve decided to become GDPR compliant, but get this, they’re applying GDPR principles to everybody, that’s their customer or consumer or prospect around the world, and they’re applying the same principles to everybody who works for them. Which is a huge order.

Kristina Podnar: And so, for me, it’s really fun. It’s really energizing. It’s a little bit of a proof of concept because GDPR inherently conflicts with other regulations around the world and other things that we try to do in terms of best practice. And so, I’m kind of taking this as an extreme case and an opportunity to do a proof of concept and see how do you do this in a practical way, and what does an organization do when there’s actually a conflict? Right? Where do you decide to kind of go in terms of your practices? So, that’s really something that gets me up in the morning and I don’t even need coffee to get started. I just go.

Kristina Podnar: And, in terms of what keeps me up at night, I think it’s this entire notion, what I call, the perfect storm of where we are right now. We have a situation where there’s sort of the crazy dance going on in social media, right? We have the opportunity for violence to be streamlined in social media. We have politicians using social media as a platform, claiming that they have First Amendment rights in the United States, of freedom of speech on a private platform, which is just crazy. We have users getting really upset around privacy and all of the privacy laws you just mentioned.

Kristina Podnar: So, I see this as the perfect storm, and what keeps me up at night is are we going to take this as an opportunity and make the best of it, or are we going to just passively sit by and not contribute, in which case the perfect storm will pass. And so, I hope that all of us step up and play a role because we have an important one to play and it’s a little bit more important than we probably realize. So, I hope we all engage in that.

Vitaly: Yeah. Well, so that sounds very exciting. So, with this in mind, thank you so much Kristina, for being with us today. I can’t wait for Toronto.

Kristina Podnar: Me either.

Vitaly: It’s coming up in just a few weeks from now, like six weeks or so from now.

Kristina Podnar: Yep. Countdown’s on.

Vitaly: This’ll be the first time where we actually finally meet. We have many friends in common-

Kristina Podnar: That’s right.

Vitaly: … and so I can’t wait. So, thank you so much, Kristina.

Kristina Podnar: Same here.

Vitaly: Everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m looking forward to the next little sessions about people behind the scenes and all of that. And, with this in mind, signing off. Kristina, any last words you want to share with the audience to kind of send a message out there?

Kristina Podnar: I’m bringing cookies and I’ll leave it at that.

Vitaly: Oh, wow. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what will.

Kristina Podnar: Sounds good.

Vitaly: All right, thanks everyone. Thanks Kristina, and see you next time.

Kristina Podnar: Thanks Vitaly. Take good care.

That’s a Wrap!

We’re looking forward to welcoming Kristina to SmashingConf Toronto 2019, with a live session on digital policy, how to set up one, and how to solve some of the issues most companies are struggling with these days. We’d love to see you there as well!

Please let us know if you find this series of interviews useful, and whom you’d love us to interview, or what topics you’d like us to cover and we’ll get right to it!

Smashing Editorial (ra, il)


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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18 Oct

Top Portfolio & Interview Tips From Creative Directors & Pentagram Partners

by TBSCategories: News

The Dots held a Graphic Design Portfolio Masterclass at the incredible design consultancy, Pentagram.

This was to give emerging Graphic Designers the chance to have their portfolios reviewed by Pentagram Partners and some of the UK’s best Creative Directors, Heads of Design and Art Directors.

Whilst the industry leaders were in the room, The Dots team asked them for their top tips to get ahead as a Graphic Designer. View all the recorded video tips here.

2 Top Tips For Putting Together An Outstanding Portfolio

Portfolio Review

1. Show off all of your skills.

A mutual opinion between the industry leaders was the idea that you should show all of your capabilities in your portfolio – but make sure it’s engaging.

Leif Podhajsky (renowned Graphic Designer/Art Director) said “I would like to see a set of designs where you can show me a good layout, where you can pick a typeface, that you’ve got basic coding skills, that you can take a photo, that you can do something from concept all the way through to completion […] if you can show me an interesting way of how to do those then you’ve got a good portfolio”.

2. Keep it short and sweet!

This is all well and good, but you don’t want to overburden the interviewer with tons of projects and briefs you have completed.

Jane Scherbaum’s (Deputy Head of Design at the V&A Museum) advice was to, “edit, edit, edit. Distil everything down to the really really strong projects that communicate what you as a Designer are about. Include work that you can really talk about, what’s the central idea to each project, distil it down to that. Think about who the portfolio is going to be shown to, tailor it and that all comes back to ‘edit, edit, edit’”.

Paul Pensom (Art Director, Creative Review) supported this, adding that you  should, “always remember that your portfolio is a calling card, not a filing cabinet, so don’t throw everything into it. You’ll be remembered for one or two pieces so choose carefully and edit ruthlessly.”

In the words of Paul and Jane – edit!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyo-cjhUSOE&w=560&h=315]

4 Top Interview Tips

Portfolio Review

1. Be confident, be friendly & be inquisitive.

If you’re anxious before an interview, remember that the person questioning you has been in a similar position so will completely understand what you’re going through!

Timba Smits’ (Creative Director at TCOLondon) most important interview tip is to “come into that room and just try to be as natural as possible. I know it’s hard to say but at the same time, I’m just a person… I’ve been in the exact seat that you’ve been in so just walk in there with a bit of confidence and a bit of flair behind your portfolio”.

Paul Pensom agreed, adding that his top interview tips are to “be confident, be friendly and be inquisitive”.

2. Prepare & Research

It’s incredibly important before an interview that you research the agency that you’re applying for and (if you know who is interviewing you) the interviewer.

Whilst in the interview, be sure that you know what the organisation stands for and why you think you would fit in. Harry Pearce (Partner at Pentagram) told us, “my tips for an interview are to be calm, be clear, know about the person that you’re meeting. Understand their work”.

Be sure to prepare yourself for criticism as well. As Corrie Anderson (Head Lecturer at Shillington College) stated, “be prepared to take on criticism as people will ask questions and potentially be critical”.

Being criticized is a useful part of growth, so take it with a pinch of salt.  If you respond well to criticism you’ll be in the potential employers good books. Just see it as preparation for when you show your work to clients – they’re not going to like all the work you do!

Master Class Review

3. Explain method behind the idea

Naresh Ramchandani (Partner at Pentagram) supported this idea, and said you should “really take the trouble to explain your work as you are showing it, rather than assume the work explains itself. I think the narrative, the heart and the intention that you’ve got behind the campaign or the piece of work is as much what you’re buying when you hire someone as the piece of work itself. The personality has got to come out, as well as how accomplished you are”.

Companies are searching for people who have brilliant ideas, so describing the story and method behind your work is a good way to show how your mind works.

4. Be Concise.

That being said, prolonged explanations aren’t for everyone, so make sure to be concise.

Timba Smits said to, “let your work do the talking and just try to be the rose amongst the thorns” – don’t overburden the interviewer. If they are interested, they will be sure to ask.

Harry Pearce also said to, “let the person who’s interviewing discover your work rather than over explain it or kind of over embellish the story. I think so many people come to an interview with me and tell me how much fun they had doing something – I’m really not interested in that. I’m interested in the quality of what you’ve brought to show”

The main point here, is that all interviewers are different, so if possible – try to establish if the interviewer will be the sort of person that like to hear the story behind a project, or would rather look at the work and ask questions.

Looking to get feedback on your portfolio? The Dots host monthly Portfolio Masterclasses, focusing on a variety of professions. Register your interest in upcoming Portfolio Masterclasses here. Photos by Jack Woodhouse.

More Tips & Resources for Students

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