#14: Google Material Design Lead, Rich Fulcher, shares origin story of Google's design vision

hey welcome to high resolution my name is Bobby go Shawn and I'm JD Rhonda we are sitting down with a superstar today an amazing master of design who are we speaking to we're speaking with rich Fulcher he leads up material design UX and engineering here at Google he's going to tell us how they actually built material design how you can build your own design system today and why designing your culture is just as important okay before we cut away to break if you haven't yet left us a review on your favorite podcasting app if you haven't commented on YouTube on Facebook you know we cover a lot of ground in these episodes and rich is going to go deep on some serious stuff stuff that you can bring to your company so you can't follow up questions the best thing you can do go on to Twitter tweet us or tweet rich go on to youtube leave us a comment ask us a question but really asked which the question he'll respond he's here to help you guys how many times you get help from people like him probably not too many I know I don't so I feel pretty lucky then cool we'll be right back for decades design has impacted how we live now it's beginning to shape how we work here at IBM design thinking has given us a new framework for teaming for co-creating with our clients and users it's helping us make decisions faster and it's keeping humans at the center of everything we do [Music] you rich thanks for joining us my pleasure thanks for having me awesome so first question what's one thing about design that's clear to you that you don't think it's so clear to other people I think design is a lot bigger than a lot of people give it credit for you know we think about a really specific form of design what we think about kind of UX design and we think about building these digital products or we think about graphic design and layout and kind of aspects like that maybe we think about motion design but even as you start to move like a little bit further as to what we touch you might touch packaging industrial design but there's actually you know many many different forms of design that are out there and I think some of the best teams that I've worked with draw in you know influences from you know very different schools of design you know some of the best motion graphics people I've worked with didn't start on anything resembling you know interface design they came from TV or they were do cranking out bottom thirds and chyrons you know on a daily basis on kind of insane schedules but if they have kind of the interest and the kind of fluency to think about users that can find a really interesting home here I think people design processes did you have to we'll talk about systems I bet a bit today there's a lot of different modes of design that all connect together a few years ago when when Larry Page came back as as CEO one of the first big mandates that he gave Google is yeah or was to make Google beautiful right which was this big bold statement almost a commission what did the designers rally behind what was the first thing you guys did after that because that's like Google is like a multi-thousand person company where you start with so many products and all that where you start yeah well first you start from excitement like you hear a message like that coming from you know that high up and executive you're like we're on it like this is what we want to do this is what we came here to do so you first like have that great moment of like okay it's game time for us like we've got the opportunity to kind of really do something interesting here and you'll having that kind of endorsement from the top makes good of a lot of the kind of day-to-day negotiation with with your peers outside your function a little bit more easy because you can kind of refer back to that because like you Larry said yeah right maybe other you have the permanent member yeah the more than the permission actually like the mandate right oh man you go and do this so then you you look at the products that you have and you think about I think each designer kind of looked at the the scope of what they were responsible for and tried to think about okay how did where can I start to infuse more of this or where can I think about what some of the opportunities would be I think Google always had this really good connection to utility it's right there in the mission statement you were organizing all the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful so useful is right there but we hadn't had a lot of focus kind of publicly around kind of just I I think the kind of beauty that we had a reputation for it was very kind of simple beauty I'm just like okay it's just very minimal it's kind of the pristine page with a single box but that kind of challenge gave us a little opportunity to think about in other ways as well and to think about other notions of how we could inject kind of beauty and and liveliness into the experiences that we were making so one of the things that came about after Larry's very broad mandate was material design right and material design is awesome like I remember watching it when you guys shifted and going through the documentation is very extensive and very thought through but I imagine that when it started that is not exactly what you guys saw the end outcome being right so I want you to take us back to those early conversations and what spurred this was it a reaction to a problem that you saw with your own design system was it a proactive moved yeah yeah more than anything I think it was the fact that there wasn't a single design system across Google at that point you know I was on Android at the time we had the hollow design system was the design language we were using within Android but that wasn't what our web properties were using it wasn't what our iOS products were using so a few design teams saw the opportunity to be well maybe there's a way that instead of kind of diverging we can actually converge here and come up with something that's more harmonious across a number of different platforms so like a lot of great things that come out of Google it starts with a design sprint you get a couple of people together from different teams they throw a bunch of music they lock themselves in a room or set of rooms for a week and they just brainstorm they just come up with ideas they pursue directions that maybe can't ever happen and they just you see what comes of it you know there was a clear focus it was well what would a single kind of language that could speak for all these different Google experiences look like so that's where we started and in fact like that work kind of happened before we had kind of this goal of kind of unifying it but we were able to take some of that work and kind of kind of slowly get it seen by more people in the company and say well well you know what about this direction or you know we we're kind of interested in this and this might be a way that we can kind of work forward for Android it may be work for for other teams as well so from that level it kind of started a little bit ground-up but then we could have you know escalated it and then kind of turned it into something that was a well yes we actually need this language a single unified design language works across Google and all of its properties so go and figure out what that's going to look like for us and if you can achieve that then we'll get all the other product teams to kind of line up and execute on that yeah but what did that research phase look like because we're talking about Google right like there's a Wikipedia page called Google products that is basically infinitely scrollable right yeah it's not like you have two or three apps and it's like okay like make our website look like our iPhone app you know like it's make Google look like one thing right so how did you guys go about researching all these service - come come up with the common language so you can't you can't possibly do it all at once so we definitely tried to kind of look at as broad a sample as we could and but at some point you have to distill to something a little bit simpler to start from so you go to kind of the core kind of consumer facing products you you kind of turn it to what what's the users lens because you know what's the kind of typical user what do they see do they see search maps gmail calendar you know etc and start from that core because those the ones that you know honestly also they'll also be some of the most political ones because the ones most tightly associated with a brand or they have the brand is right there in the name for many of them and you start kind of building from that space you ask like what it was like it was messy its message of anything at that stage but I think every beautiful thing I've been a part of starts messy it doesn't kind of it's not a straight line from like you know this instant to complete perfection there's a ton of exploration that happens in there some of that stuff you just like it gets crumpled up and thrown and you never uncouple that piece of paper other stuff sometimes it comes back after we launch material you know we did some of the rebrand work like what the Google logo looks like some of the ideas from that original work were brought out again and kind of formed a good launching point for that new work as well and yeah it's a it's definitely not a linear process you wind up talking to a lot of people along the way which is great because you're not trying to just kind of solve it in isolation and then tell everyone okay the thing we're all going to do you want to make sure that as you're kind of crafting it you're getting the sense of okay it's actually going to work for this product the work for this product and you can kind of go gradually wider and wider and wider until you reach the point where you feel a little bit confident enough to take that next big leap to to trying to get to everyone I like the the metaphor of getting material design which is a digital design system to mimic the real world so it feels pretty familiar but that didn't happen in one design sprint in one week there's no way like but right did it a guy could he took two days yes yeah no it didn't I mean obviously it wasn't completely realized anyway but I will say that like one of the first concepts in that first week sprint that I referred back to was about well what if it were more of this kind of realistically lit photographic environment where there we were using kind of surface elevation and shadow to be the basis for how different areas of content within the interface were housed so that idea actually did go that's like the germ of that idea that didn't account for well how does that relate to motion how does that relate to like the users touch it was more of just like that's just how we might set a scene but that kind of key idea was was present pretty early I what were the other crazy ideas that you guys didn't go it because that wasn't the first idea they were definitely that are making all these assumptions that it wasn't the first day right a bit but there's I read you no no no they were there are a few others they were you know some that were like a more amplified version of like the the holo pattern so kind of like you know holo plus plus kind of thinking there were stuff that was incredibly flat it was just like okay and like like that some aspects of that actually saw their way through so there was early models that were like okay everything's flat and there's big blocks of color we'll use color blocking is like a core set of the identity for this language we didn't kind of end up with a flat design system but bold use of color and kind of drawing from kind of classic graphic design and you know type hierarchy as a way of expressing kind of structure within a view those are particulars and we did pick up on where did the material name come from the material name came really late in the in the process so we had been using an internal code name for probably at least a year at that point which was quantum quantum paper was the idea so the the notions of paper in came fairly early and became something that we kind of talked a lot about within the team and it became an important aspect of how we would try to communicate the design system to other people that weren't on the immediate team and the notion of quantum as an adjective for papers okay it's not boring standard paper like it can can scale it can move it can split it can magically heal it can do all of these things so it's kind of super juiced paper and as we were nearing launch we were probably about I would say like four to six weeks away from the reveal at i/o so it was pretty close we were kind of looking back at the name we were trying to think about okay well we like that name but we didn't know if it was going to be the right kind of go-to-market name for it and we didn't really know if we want to like market it as a name like we kind of thought we'd come up with something that's both like the specific design language and just a way of thinking about design I want to say a school of design the template to overstating what it is but it is a kind of set of principles like skeuomorphic my page or so it's more kind of describing that type of design system we thought so we wound up kind of thinking about it we liked paper we liked that idea but we also didn't want to kind of closed off other possibilities or other things that could exist within that system so paper is a material you know what if the system had you know acrylic or glass or kind of different types of structures that could exist within it so we're able to broaden it a little bit to material which felt good but it was there's a hard transition we had like a we actually had a swear jar in the office for people that would say quantum because we have to like completely retrain ourselves in took a matter of weeks before we started talking about this in i/o it was like every time you said quantum the moment the germ of the material design method not really method but like the the language started to build internally on the design team yeah how did you guys decide to first present it to Larry and his team like were what did you show them so we showed them a fairly short video of just because motion is a key part of the systems we want to show like at a somewhat removed from the specifics of the interface you know how do we what do we think the feel of this system would be and that animation was an important part so we wanted to kind of put that story first and you see like that video evolved into something that became like the reveal video at at Iowa it was awesome thank you a lot of hard work from the people are a team on that one and then we we wanted we went back to let's show it in the context of products you know so the the language any design system really doesn't exist outside of the products that make use of it you know it's it's this platform it's this invisible layer that only becomes realized when someone adopts it and turns it into an experience that actually meets a specific goal so that's the kind of story we want to build up you know what if your Gmail work could look like this and calendar could look like look like this and it would be here on iOS and here on Android and here on desktop and that's kind of a big core of the narrative that we put together whoever was his first reaction when when you saw it um it went very well so I did there's always comments but it was very much immediately the you've got the Charter go go make this happen how is the material design being set up and like what responsibilities you have yeah so right now the team is set up into basically four sub teams that we call initiatives so each of those initiative teams is a cross-functional team that's engineering it's UX which covers for us interaction visual motion design UX writing is really important to us and communication is a huge part of what we do at the system level and then we have kind of program managers design producers sometimes and each of those teams has kind of a particular set of responsibilities so one is focused on like just the core of the design system itself there's another that's focused on all of our kind of advocacy and outreach efforts in terms of like how do we actually get out and just engage the design community even if it isn't about material specifically so when you see things like our span design conferences that is an offshoot of that in our Google design site is from there as well and then we have a team that's focused on kind of a tooling and some of that is like the spec in the guidelines and some of the supporting tools that go with that and then we have a team that's all about just managing the Google ecosystem and managing all those product relationships that we have internally so just kind of being the easy points of connection for entertaining and managing launch and release processes that are related to UX things like that you just thought about how in a world where a material design is meant for the screen and increasingly the products that Google is releasing with Google home etc don't have a screen how does material design and its language fit into that world without an inner glow I guess you of what voices and interface but without a visual interface that you can touch how does material couldn't know that yeah it does not a question we have fully answered so the beautiful thing is you know we get to work with teams that are kind of building out these design systems so whether it's you have a voice team or with the VR team the daydream group like they're having to solve problems that we didn't have to solve like we had to think about very particular modes of interaction that were available and even when we did like something like wear or something like you know Android TV they're still fairly familiar you know kind of mapping a four-way control to a mouse isn't that hard if there's obviously like very platform-specific needs you have to keep in mind but it's not a radically new input modality voices VR and kind of gameplay mechanisms tied to that certainly are as well so we take the approach of like we work with the teams that are experts in those domains so we partner to that ecosystems group with teams are focusing on those areas we try to see okay are there things about material that maybe are useful for them and in some cases are the more the visual component it has the more there is that we can do there but if not are there kind of philosophical ideas that still kind of connect across the design systems you know for instance we have something like the floating action button which kind of this hallmark control within material design and that's the idea of I mean it is still just a button right it's around it has an icon on it and it's listed and it floats over content but it's still a button that you press but the kind of interesting thing about the fab is it's saying well what's the one most important action in this context and we want to highlight for the user like distill it down what's the one and there are ways that you could think about that in those other context even if it's not depicted as a button it's like what is that one most natural gesture I'm going to make or that utterance I'm going to make to kind of a to a voice system so we're looking for ways that we take some of thinking even if isn't like especially visual and threaded through and for teams who are willing or ready to invest in creating their own design system right what are some principles that they should keep in mind coming in and where should they actually start sure I think the first thing is you'll make sure you're clear on why you want your design system you know I think it may not make that much sense for kind of very small teams or very fast-moving teams to do it the the impetus to build a design system is usually I want to get kind of this knowledge out of a designer's mind so that someone else can take it and use it to build something new so but if you are at that point and you've decided yeah either I have like external partners that I need to serve need to be able to understand like what the structure that we're building is or you hit that kind of point of scale where that makes sense you have to recognize that it is not like a right and done kind of effort it's definitely something that needs ongoing support and the writing down part is actually like really important and it kind of hurts right because like we've we've gotten to the point where like if you were practicing design like a decade ago you're like okay detailed specs I remember these are all the red lines and I got a word doc there's a table and then we were kind of in this wonderful age of like close collaboration and prototyping and all that where it's like no I'm just going to you know want to long work really closely either with my cell friend but the engineering team we're just going to work this out and it's not throw the spec it's not like create this stupid like artifact books like you know I think people look at written specs and they're like this is like stone tools for dinosaur but for design systems if you don't write it down if it's still like captured up in the head of the designer and not externalized in some form that you haven't really captured the system yet you your goal is to create something that live independent of people that created it that can be taken like almost as if there's like a wall where like you don't get access to the people that made it anymore how what do you need to capture so that anyone can take it and build with the uh the understanding they need to kind of effectively translate that system and that's obviously like an incredibly lofty goal that like we're still aspiring towards but I think that is the goal especially when you're trying to kind of adopt at scale where I can't have the pleasure of like sitting down talking to everyone who's building a material design app like they their understanding is going to come from reading our guidelines and watching our videos and looking at how other people have realized it that last one's a little dangerous because it comes with echo chamber of well here so somebody interpreted the stock and I'm just going to kind of keep feeding into their understanding of it as well so kind of making sure you're ready to nurture it making sure that you're willing to like write it down and and write it down doesn't just mean text like it's it's the videos it's all the visual examples examples are really important showing not just the rule but or the guideline but how does it apply in in context how does it get used counter examples are really important just like with any kind of brand style guide just like not this way not this way those can be they can be so expedient compared to trying to specify all of the rules sometimes the counter example is just the best way so getting a little tactical here are there levels to a design system you go I'm thinking through the lens of you know a small team or fast-moving team who at least wants to make some investment in consistency right like what is level one or level two that they can actually actuate today yeah I think there are levels I think that's a good way to say it I think the simplest are kind of shared resources right so here's the sticker sheet of all the common components will be used within our system here's our standard size button here's kind of the type of corn around that we're going to use and that's kind of you can do that visually you can do it for interaction you can do it for motion here's our standard kind of two-point motion curve here's our in-and-out that we usually do you do it for writing here's our or usage our common kind of common word list and glossary here's just how we kind of land with respect to certain forms of phrasing and I think that's where most design systems begin people want to kind of come to some agreement we have a lot of tools that are great for like collaborative authoring out so it's like a bunch of people get thrown into dock put their ideas down they start building out repositories of sticker sheets or icons is another kind of common element that gets passed around and people I think just get tired of like having to ping someone and say can you send me the icon for X so they know they want to create something that's more of a central crease it can also happen when people transition off a project so maybe someone's moving off of something moving onto something new and they want to wrap up a nice package for you know whoever's filling it to take their place so I think that's the start I think a step above that is actually coming to like a very firm consensus that okay this is what we want and starting to do the recycle back to see okay are we actually employing this through all of our products is it actually being applied consistently and just kind of walking through to that and just kind of trying to give nudge projects closer and closer to consistency and then I think the further steps are about just kind of refining that documentation how do you capture it which I tools be built to support that and where do you go from there so we're going to keep talking about design systems when we come back and how important their but before we go to break I'm actually very curious when not every designer at Google and you guys have a lot of designers at Google we're able to inform material design so when this thing was revealed to the world what was the reaction from the internal designers and did they feel like they weren't authors in this and you know like what the heck now I've got this rigid system that I got to work with or or they just like cool about it well the good news is that wasn't the person I heard of it so you know we have we have this great practice at Google of having it's called the TGIF it's on Thursday don't ask but we had the chance to kind of go before the whole company kind of months before we've revealed that IO to say okay here's this thing here's this thing that's coming we're really excited about it here's why we think you should be excited about it now at that point I'll try to answer your question for good still it's an interesting one yeah we had to talk to every team at that point and what we had tried to do was talk to at least as many teams as we could we would try to kind of work through the UX community so that least like from the design side there was good awareness of because what was coming and what we were tracking but it definitely freaks people out yo change it depends a lot on where any given team is like at that instant to kind of offer this kind of hopeful opportunity of material design to a team that's been like just champing at the bit to like do a redesign for their product like they're excited they're like okay this is a golden opportunity I can go we can do everything we've always wanted to do but if you come to another team that just completed their reading nine it's a bitter pill painful yeah and so we definitely took the approach of um not trying to get everybody to cut over it at the same instant you talked about the you know hundreds of products that we have that probably would have been would have been impossible anyway but we just kind of wanted to make it clear like this is the direction we're going here's what we've got figured out for the rest of it we want we want to collaborate this can this only happens if it's this kind of Coalition of the Willing income so the approach he took was not to say you know this is approved from the top this needs to happen across the company on this timeline it was what do you think and and let's all work together to move in this direction we definitely had like a timeline and so for in some cases for like particular platforms so like Android with something we're going to push like really hard on doors because that was kind of going to be a first realization of that system but we just couldn't in other cases like you know we work to define this kind of core system but then we go to a team and maybe we go to something like you know Edwards yeah and they have a set of components and a set of use cases aren't the standard ones yeah but are utterly essential for their users and for their product and we can't tell them you know here's what you're going to do right we kind of very kind of politely go and be like we know we haven't answered everything that you're going to need but here's the basis here's the principles you know let's work together to figure out how this applies to your particular set of needs for decades design has impacted how we live now it's beginning to shape how we work here at IBM design thinking has given us a new framework for teaming for co-creating with our clients and users it's helping us make decisions faster and it's keeping humans at the center of everything we do of course we're inspired by our design program which is over 60 years old but today IBM employs more than 1300 professional designers and we've certified more than 60,000 IBM errs in the practices of IBM design thinking the result diverse teams working more closely than ever with our clients their users and our partners to create modern solutions that provide differentiated human centered outcomes to the world we'd love to share this story more closely with you and I hope to see you soon at one of our IBM Studios worldwide we'd also like to thank our friends at envision for their support envision is the world's leading product design platform powering the future of digital design through their understanding of the importance of collaboration they're used by some of the most innovative companies in the world like Facebook Capital One Netflix and Airbnb I work with remote teams all the time and I found that keeping a healthy dialogue is really important without it building strong work relationships gets a lot harder and that leads to poor collaboration I've also found that prototypes are a great way for me to show my full vision for a design and this helps cut down a lot of back-and-forth envision makes all of this really easy you can rapidly prototype your designs and collaborate across every stage of your project taking your ideas from concept to code it simplifies virtually every aspect of the design workflow it makes collaboration a core part of the process for everyone from project managers to designers developers and writers teams that build digital products are at a serious advantage when they use envision suite of prototyping and collaboration tools it's the best way to get everyone on board visit envision app com+ high-resolution for three months free [Music] so building a design system takes a lot of time and energy right so thinking through the lens now of a more mature company or team design team who's ready to invest in this it may be a little bit difficult to pitch it to stakeholders right because from the perspective of a non designer what it looks like you're asking for is time to stop working on product and features and to start creating a system that they themselves are not actually going to use right so what are some things that people can keep in mind design teams can keep in mind when they're actually pitching this to stakeholders what value are they saying that they're actually going to create for the business yeah I think there's a few and one is that you can kind of think about it as we're trying to remove risk from the design system and I mean that in the sense of like the more as I was talking about before like the more the design knowledge is tied up like you walked up here in the minds of a few you're really relying on those people it's going to be there and tab continuity so just when you think about like engineering for redundancy in any way you think about well what is my fallback plan if I don't have this person I don't have this resource I could I've heard it talked about somewhat like gruesomely is like what's the bus number for your team like what's the the number of people that could be hit by a bus that would actually cause your product to fail because they've just became unavailable so you can take that aspect of okay we're going to do do risk you can also take kind of the more common to software engineering arguments around ok we're going to do this refactoring effectively of the design to make it easier to build going forward so we're making an investment now that's going to pay an efficiency dividend kind of down the line and I think the third argument is around just kind of consistency and just you know if you don't have the design system where you don't have the right set of tools to support it then you are going to get creep and you're going to get divergence in the products and that will have kind of a consequence you know for the end user and some cases especially if they're a user who does kind of move fluidly between multiple experiences that you're responsible for and it can also just have kind of it can lead you to some of that that cost in terms of okay now we've got a real line coming back together later and so just kind of as long as you have that that focus and that concentration on kind of the value of a consistent experience then I think it can make this kind of argument were you surprised when after a launch of material design that companies that weren't even designing Google products or for Android kind of just started using material design for themselves was that one of the goals that you guys went after it wasn't one of the initial goals but as we started building it out it definitely became a goal and it's you know one of our core goals now is that material is not just for Google it's not just Google it's not just Android it is we think a good foundational design system that can be used in a lot of different ways by a lot of different brands for a lot of different experiences but on the initial rollout I mean it's like any product launch you have this idea in your head of what this thing is going to be and how it's going to be received and you've done testing in the sense of like we've tried it with Google products and we maybe had a couple of early partners here and there to kind of get a feel for it and then you release it and the world gets a shot at it and and things surprise you I mean I think we were you know you look at your guidelines and you look at kind of the message you think you're putting forward but then you see what people actually hear so we were surprised by things like and there was a huge responsibility action button but sometimes that becomes a weakness if everybody perceives as okay I have to have this thing right well that's not at all the guidance like sometimes you have a scene where there is no one kind of hallmark action so you shouldn't have it you shouldn't like force something to be suddenly more important if it actually isn't important or we saw a lot of products adopting the left navigation drawer which is something that a lot of Google products do because we have a lot of secondary you know ancillary functions whether it's like you might have settings or help or send feedback or count you know management where other you know apps don't have those needs you know yet they were still whining you know using this pattern where we were like oh but you really if you'd read the guideline and for that that's hard like if you know what you want to kind of know material well it's not me that's not material it's just not it's not it's not good or their product yeah right and you feel bad because you don't want to be like putting something out there that kind of misleads people into a direction that you wouldn't want them to go down well plus their framing of what they anticipate to be material design actually abuses what material design is for people who don't know material design and so suddenly Google's products are not seen in the best light even though their products have nothing to do with but yeah I totally get idea at the argument I think so happen yeah and and and you see it and you're like okay so what have we what do we miss on the messaging size because you always have to kind of take responsibility for what happens there you're putting all this stuff out there so okay we needed to kind of cover more on this there if we see too many products that are looking like just kind of their Google branded but they're not we needed to miss on that messaging and maybe that means that we need to have a lot more examples that don't kind of just look like white labeled you know Google products yeah that we kind of and that's something we've embraced over the last couple of years and we have this process that we call them getting where we just kind of make up an artificial brand that hopefully solves kind of a real use case and just building a material at a visual level and then trying to turn that into more of the examples that we use when we talk about it so that's a way that we can kind of get closer to what especially third-party expectations or hopes for adopting material would be in addition to designing systems that shape the products here at Google you're also designing systems that shape the design culture here right yeah what first of all like what even attracted you to that kind of work because that's a hold of set of design challenges and what are some of the efforts that you're currently investing in yeah I mean I'm just I'm just endlessly fascinated in how kind of design teams operate so obviously you guys are as well yeah 24/25 interviews it I'm sure you've seen a fair amount of that yeah and I do think kind of one of the most important things a company can do is hire well I talked about it with kind of people on my team not to gain all like hiring is the most important thing I do during the week so whether that's like interviewing someone who's looking to join Google and have a career here or sitting on the hiring committee that are kind of making decisions around who should we bring in and talk to or you know who do we extend offers to or even things like you know promotion committees where it's like okay who's ready to take that next level step in their career it's just really important that you hire great people that you give them great opportunities and that you kind of recognize them when they do a great job great great great but but it's really important it's it's like some of the things that can cause even with a little bit of kind of ignoring or sliding it that can just kind of really trigger and kind of cascade into into a failure within a company we've been really fortunate at Google over the last you know several years I feel like our reputation within the design community has has changed a lot and I I have the pleasure of being able like be on a phone interview with someone and talking to them and ask him like why they considered Google or what and they'll say well you know I read the material design guidelines or I saw you know this product came out and I just thought wow Google's thinking about design differently now so we're in a good place where we're starting to attract like a lot of I think really great fresh design talent that don't even though we're a massive company like obviously we're like big big company that still see the opportunity to get a bring a really great design and I should say it kind of UX thinking right through the design its research its writing is everything and bring that to bear and feel like they can produce something really really valuable here you mentioned the hiring committee on which you have been on for almost six years yeah some of the efforts you did there was establishing rubrics for how people in this company evaluate designers coming through right yeah I'm curious what you actually look for like when someone comes to the door and says hey I want to work on Google design what are you looking for in that first meeting yeah I mean I'll I don't want to give away the rubric but I can come over taking down I I can talk a little bit about like the kind of things I look for and when I kind of interview a designer I always kind of start with the simple question which is how did you get into design and which I've never heard answered the same way twice like several hundred interviews in people take all these radically different paths into design and like that moment where they realize well a the design is a thing that is a career that someone could do and B I'd like to be that type of person those are always kind of really interesting so I want to get a sense of that person's story like what is the passion that is driving them to pursue this career and that helps me understand a little bit too about like I talked at the very beginning about how broad design is like what's kind of the kind of vector they're taking through that space I think kind of communication and collaboration or essential you know I don't just need somebody who can kind of produce beautiful work I need somebody who can explain to me how they got to there I need someone who doesn't just kind of complete it and then say my job is done I need somebody who is willing to kind of really sit down and work closely with everyone that's needed to realize that from like the engineer is going to code it to the product manager who's going to framing it to communications to the end user to support like we have to get owned design across every touchpoint that I have I look for people that are pretty egoless in terms of like how they respond to ideas if somebody who presents their work and gets a question and like instantly goes defensive about it that can be okay if they really like to have a very principled defense for why that is but like I want somebody who wants to kind of listen and kind of really be open to ideas that's really important especially and maybe not especially at Google but you know a lot of our decisions get made by consensus between you know a design or UX lead and engineering leaving the product lead and if you're not kind of hearing the ideas that are coming from them or kind of able to kind of at least consider the feedback that you're hearing but that's a problem that's that's going to kind of slow your growth through this company how do you think about design exercises and in the in the process because I you guys do on site design exercises or is it off site out we do both depending so we do both I like to do them on site I just designers want to design so like you're getting somebody up out of their chair in the interview you know pen in hand at the whiteboard just gets me to see like what is this person going to be like to work with and I can get at communication I can get at like ego and I can just see like how they break down a problem I think it's great to ask a lot of questions but to kind of give something specific where even if it's kind of a small toy problem you only has been 15 minutes on it maybe so it has to be constrained but like where do they go first I did they just jump and start drawing do they ask me a few clarifying questions do they step back and start telling me about the user that they think this is going to be for those are all kind of really good cues to me as to kind of what type of designer they're going to be what is the biggest mistake I know thousands of people watching this that really want to work for you a little the great brand and great company to work very designer what is the number one mistake people make in these interviews and these design interviews I'm sure there's plenty of them but like the one that is just it's something that should be avoidable and it's like obviously not a good thing like what is that thing so we have one of the things that we have at Google is to focus on the user and all else will follow and it always drives me nuts when someone treats themselves as the user like right away so I give them a design problem and they instantly jump to their experience and just like you this is this is my exact set of needs and I'm going to build a product that suits me I always look for somebody's a little bit bigger a little bit more empathetic than that in terms of their thinking I think the minute they move away from III sentences and start talking about even if it's in the abstract sense this like other ill-defined user so I think kind of being too much just I'm going to design for myself and my needs is the quickest mistake you can make well now everyone knows they'll make that replay that's why get that out there I want everybody to know that it's a totally that's good advice fashion is interviewing here it's just a design that is got advice for being a good designer I agree I have a question around the career and promotional ladder right um Google is a very established company and you guys have been at this for a long time so you I'm sure have figured it out but there are many people listening who work at companies who have not and the thing that I'm speaking about is how a designer actually progresses in their career yeah I mean management is oftentimes put on a lot of people who are not well suited for it but the reason why they take that is because they feel locked in right it's like well if I don't now manage people how else am I going to show that I've gotten better at my craft right so first I want to hear how Google handles that how you evaluate promotion for someone and then what are some things that people who are listening can take back to their own company yeah Google's approach is really that kind of at the lower levels so we use a leveling system because there's just kind of one one path you're not managing it for one anyone you're just kind of maturing within your profession and by the way this is true not just for design this is what kind of other functions like engineering etcetera at a certain point the job ladder actually splits and there is a track that is emphasizing management and a track that is emphasizing your individual contributions and people kind of after that split in the higher levels you can kind of move between them as well but I think something that Google gets really right is to recognize that not everyone's kind of career path should be kind of based around how many reports do I have how many people am i managing so we have kind of principal engineers and designers who have kind of gone to the very top levels of the company who may manage no one you know they they just know the thing that I love that makes me great at my job is this concentration on craft I'm building on kind of being in the guts of it making it happen I think it's good to have get people like the flexibility to experience like what it's like to manage to mentor I think it's a lot easier to get them know which way you're going to branch between those those two when you had some exposure to it and so Google is really good about kind of giving those opportunities and I think the key thing is to remember that influence isn't just you know how many people are on my team it can be how powerful are the ideas that I'm building or how enabling is this technology that I'm working on so I think we do a pretty good job of that being explicit that you know the only path to that is not the amount of time if you're okay I'd like to go to community questions yep okay well we reach out to the community and we ask them to give us a set of questions that they feel is important to them we five questions I think yes we have five questions that we want to go through the okay um we're going through these with every guess so we'll do this take your time you can do you can answer however you like alright wrap up I okay not we have parted okay as well it's not lightning round it's not a lot of you it could be lightning like answer it in one word okay now you can be thoughtful and analytical as you have will see okay how should designers explain the role of design to people in their companies I don't have to do that that much of Google but I think the simplest way you talk about it is I don't know you I think about it as problem solving a problem understanding are kind of the two essential things that design does I think problem solving is what we hear a lot just like okay there's a challenge figure out how this is going to work for this person or satisfy it yeah but more often than not like challenge that you begin isn't the real challenge yet so that kind of understanding and framing the problem is important part and so for me it boils down to like the very I think I can think back to my first day of class studying human-computer interaction yeah match of the day back in the day I liked the five things we stress there are okay there's a user that user has a context they have a set of tasks they're trying to achieve in order to fulfill a goal and they have some set of tools that they're going to use to realize that and what we as designers are we're trying to do an understanding of the first four to figure out what to give them at the fifth so we want to know the users where are they what are they trying to do and why are they trying to do it and then we can try to figure out what to package for them so this was years ago do you still believe in that those five it still holds very very easily yeah good universal design principles yeah okay good the second question is how is the design team we can focus specifically on material organized here at Google there's definitely different forms at Google so material design I kind of talked about the way we divide across the initiatives earlier within the team the focus on cross functional so we'll kind of put different subsets of people together on individual projects we like the idea that people have kind of mobility I kind of even within the material team where they can work on different parts of the system because that raises kind of their overall knowledge of everything that we're doing and that's true within Google as well so there's a lot of facility for a designer who's been in one problem space to kind of put a hand up and say but actually like to think about something different so we can actually look at like all the job opportunities internally some cases even before they're visible externally and kind of kind of shop within the company to kind of change out so the next question is when you're the only designer in a company how do you convince the leaders of that company of the value that design can bring them yeah I think I think when you're trying to convince like anyone of anything okay you want to start by understanding like what motivates them so if it's the leaders for the company like hopefully they're focused on like what's the business return for the company how are we going to build up like a scalable and sustainable audience instead of we we call them users but to them there may be consumer yeah and you want to kind of kind of engage a dialogue that starts from their framing of of the problem I think like a classic mistake people make is kind of talk from their point of view immediately where I think you want to start from someone else's point of view and kind of draw them to yours more gradually and so I think you talk about you know we want to have a product that you know has a really high rating on whatever service that someone might download this from or access this from because that's a very important cue for them as to whether or not they should buy this product engage with this service so there's agreement on that then you can talk about well here's user experience here's how we get to satisfied users by kind of understanding what they expect from us and how we can meet those needs the next question is how should designers measure and present the results of their work in their business it's this is something I honestly still struggle with a lot it's really challenging to kind of know especially at a specific individual level like what my contribution to the like success of this product was I mean I know we work on product teams that are like they may have like dozens or even hundreds of people on them and everybody can point to like the hockey stick chart be like well okay come on this was huge this is a massive success but how do you like connect yourself to that and I think a lot of the way you do that is and maybe I'm biasing towards like the way that we do like performance reviews at Google but a lot of that is on like how do your peers see you as part of this success and I think when you ask someone for like a peer review in the comment about a project I think a lot of times the lens that they're using to frame it is how did this how did this person helped me with my goals for this project so I think you can look at metrics that are you know pageviews or downloads or user satisfaction scores you can use metrics around kind of if I worked on this feature this feature got used this many times that's a little bit more tenuous to me because it's like well but how does that contribute to like yet usage is one thing and views are one thing but did this really like help the user did it contribute but if you can kind of point to users kind of continuing to return to the product it's really hard because like some products don't actually even want like the users to keep coming back right you can build a great experience that is a great experience like three times a year if that's what the users needs for it are so I think just my advice to people would be lean on your peers to kind of give tell tell the story of what you've done use evidence when you can but don't kind of try to make your connection too that evidence as specific as you can and yeah King me when you figure out what other ways they're doing this are because it's really hard it is really a challenge well you know rich there are 24 other people that that also have an answer to this that you can listen to and see if you can learn anything from that okay okay so we're on our final question as the purpose of design continues to evolve what are some roles or methodologies that you think might emerge over the next five years yeah I will say that kind of the most immediate need that I see could have not enough skill in for a lot design carrots I'm looking at the motion design a motion design is just essential going forward we're going to be leaving behind this world too it's kind of flat static here's my scene I do everything I commit and I go to the next scene and I do the next set of steps like where we will happily be leaving that behind and I think we're going to be relying a lot on using animation emotion within an interface to tell a story without words to kind of communicate to the user what's happening kind of as we go through this set of flows so I think Kim gaining fluency there is great that's a skill that we like can't hire enough of honestly I've encouraged designers as always to like connect ourselves to research as much as you can like that's the best partnership you're ever going to have like be joined at the hip with your researcher understand their methods how they approach design of their experiments and how you can have a really successful partnership there and I think voice is also very exciting a voice makes you think about interface in a completely different way that I think leads naturally into thinking about interfaces or thinking about experiences that aren't these kind of fully structured apps yeah but more of these kind of targeted like all the micro engagements but they are like tighter interactions then I need to go and do everything that's possible within a service well that's a good place to end this is thank you so much thank you it's been a pleasure hey you made it to the end congratulations thanks for watching the episode I really really hope you liked it if you did like it please leave us a review on the iTunes Store and by the way if you have any questions that came up because of the content that we covered with our guests go on YouTube go on Twitter you can tweet us you can leave us a comment we'll get back to you we'll help you as much as possible at high res podcast that's the the screen name or the handle for Twitter for Instagram for Facebook find us talk to us we want to converse with you we're not going to leave here by the way without also thanking our friends at Sorrell video they've been an amazing partner on this entire project the thorough video is a creative studio based out of Portland Oregon they've helped creative communities tell stories for over ten years they've done advertisements behind the scene footage and documentaries for companies like Google slack xoxo festival Adobe Intel they're incredible they've traveled with us through the entire country documentary stories with our guests that's incredible thank you so much Cyril listen if your startup looking to elevate your product if you're a big company looking to humanize your brand you're somewhere in the creative community you just want to tell a story you've got to check out the team at several video it's oral video comm sb8 RLE video comm check out our friends at started as been incredible in this project [Music] you

Channel: High Resolution

Views: 25,849

Rating: 4.9548531 out of 5

Keywords: rich fulcher, google, google material, material design, design systems, sketch, styleguide, system design, form, design, design thinking, process, strategy, leadership, ui, ux, business, high resolution, podcast, education, startup, startups, university, design school, bobby ghoshal, jared erondu

Id: djYQvI_MONI

Length: 60min 51sec (3651 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/barnold]

Mighty Boosh?

[u/Plazmaz1]

His name could be easily mispronounced.