Beyond Pretty: The Real Work of UX/UI

[00:00:00] Michael Meyers: The thing about great design is that when it works, you don't even notice it. It's invisible, like flipping a light switch. You don't even think about your wiring or how power gets to your house. You just expect it to turn on.

[00:00:06] Michael Meyers: But when design misses the mark, when it's confusing or hard to use, people feel it.

[00:00:11] Michael Meyers: You felt it. And when it's really bad, that frustration is real. It's intense.

[00:00:17] Michael Meyers: And your business goals bear the brunt of that frustration. Unlike a light switch, design success isn't binary.

[00:00:22] Michael Meyers: There's a spectrum. Some issues are glaring, but others are more subtle. And even those small moments of friction are gonna quietly erode your users’ trust and engagement.

[00:00:30] Michael Meyers: That's why thoughtful design isn't just about beauty.

[00:00:38] Michael Meyers: Creating great design requires real effort and expertise, research, strategy, testing, iteration, psychology, business thinking, and yeah, it has to look good too.

[00:00:45] Michael Meyers: But if you're not deep in the design world, it's easy to see only that final product, that picture. That visual layer is just the tip of the iceberg.

[00:00:53] Michael Meyers: A lot of that real work is happening beneath the surface, and if you don't understand the importance of that work, if you don't prioritize it, if you don't invest in it when you're building your site or application, it can leave you with a really weak foundation that limits your long-term success.

[00:01:12] Michael Meyers: So today we're pulling back the curtain. We're gonna go beyond pretty to talk about the real work of UX and UI design, the thinking, the research, the strategic problem solving that happens before a single pixel hits the screen.

[00:01:26] Michael Meyers: And that should continue to iterate and evolve long after launch. I'm Michael Meyers, and this is Tag1 Team Talks, the podcast by Tag1 Consulting.

[00:01:46] Michael Meyers: Hello and welcome to Tag1 Team Talks, the Tag1 Consulting podcast. I'm Michael Meyers, managing director at Tag1, and I'm joined today by Andrew Glassett and Pilar Belhumeur.

[00:01:54] Michael Meyers: Thanks for joining me.

[00:02:02] Pilar Belhumeur: Thanks for having us, Michael.

[00:02:02] Michael Meyers: Andrew's our product and UX design lead. He's been doing this for over 15 years and he's worked with some really incredible brands, including Vimeo, Lego, and Walmart.

[00:02:10] Michael Meyers: And Pilar, our creative director, who's been doing this for over 25 years, working with the leaders in every industry, BBC, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, MasterCard.

[00:02:20] Michael Meyers: These guys have amazing experience. I'm excited about today's episode.

[00:02:28] Michael Meyers: The work that goes on behind the scenes that goes beyond making your site look good is a really big part of what they do. But before we dive into the conversation, let me tell you a little bit about Tag1.

[00:02:37] Michael Meyers: Tag1's number two all time contributor to Drupal, the world's second most popular CMS.

[00:02:42] Michael Meyers: For almost 20 years now, we've led the development of many of the amazing features and best practices that millions of websites and several hundred thousand organizations depend on to run their businesses.

[00:02:49] Michael Meyers: We're the architects of the open web that your sites rely on.

[00:02:57] Michael Meyers: We apply that architectural expertise to many technologies. We're a full service technology partner from discovery and design to identity and branding, to building and scaling complex applications.

[00:03:03] Michael Meyers: We lead AI strategy and implementation, design and manage infrastructure, and do performance tuning across a wide range of platforms.

[00:03:11] Michael Meyers: Organizations like Google, Pfizer, Harvard, and the AFL-CIO trust us to solve their most mission critical challenges, and what Andrew and Pilar do—that strategic design work we'll be talking about today—that's a foundational part of how we help our clients succeed.

[00:03:27] Michael Meyers: To learn more, you can reach out to us via our website or email us at [email protected]. That's TAG the number one dot com.

[00:03:40] Michael Meyers: Let's get into it. Why do you think that people have this really common misconception that the job of UX and UI designers is just to make things look pretty?

[00:03:53] Andrew Glassett: I would say a lot of it comes to do with maybe the history of a lot of designers. They, I mean, me included, started in graphic design and worked primarily on things like logos and colors and stuff that have classical design background to them, but are not really thinking deeper.

[00:04:10] Andrew Glassett: I just think about some of my early projects, like designing a banner ad or something like that. I could focus more on what a user is seeing.

[00:04:18] Andrew Glassett: There's a little bit of getting into seeing what a business is wanting to do while you're making an ad, but really you're just focused more on that surface level of the design.

[00:04:39] Pilar Belhumeur: I think that's true, and I think maybe clients think about what they're seeing, as Andrew said, and they don't realize there's a lot of strategic thinking and thinking about the functionality and micro interactions of a product or a service.

[00:04:53] Pilar Belhumeur: And that really goes beyond just picking a stock photo or, you know, slapping a headline on without any thought for the fonts or things like that.

[00:05:03] Pilar Belhumeur: So it actually goes so much deeper, I think, especially product and service design.

[00:05:15] Michael Meyers: Go on, Andrew.

[00:05:15] Andrew Glassett: Oh, I was just saying there's a lot of processes that center around design thinking, and those are not often seen.

[00:05:26] Andrew Glassett: I think people who work around designers, you know, even they don't have a really clear picture of the actual process.

[00:05:33] Michael Meyers: I don't interact with you guys every day or day to day on projects. But before we dig into the process, just at a high level, could you guys walk us through what happens before you even open a design tool?

[00:05:46] Pilar Belhumeur: I think you have to learn about the clients. You have to learn about the problem that they're asking you to solve.

[00:05:53] Pilar Belhumeur: You have to understand users and really dive into what their needs are.

[00:05:59] Pilar Belhumeur: And I think understanding that client, their problems, the business, and balancing that with kind of user needs and having those two things top of mind when you are designing is critical to having a successful design.

[00:06:15] Pilar Belhumeur: It's about solving problems and creating solutions. It's not as much about just picking a picture and a color and that's it.

[00:06:23] Pilar Belhumeur: It contains all of that, but it's so much deeper.

[00:06:29] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, you gotta clarify business goals at the very beginning. And I think as a designer gets further into their career, the more they move up the chain of a design process.

[00:06:37] Andrew Glassett: And that's where you're understanding more what users need and also the constraints that you may have when you're trying to understand a problem.

[00:06:51] Michael Meyers: So before you can solve the problem, you need to identify what the problem is. How do you go about doing that?

[00:07:03] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, I would say that there's a bunch of activities that you can do to understand the problem. One of them would be first usually start with a series of stakeholder interviews and understand their motivations and what goals they have as you're starting a new project.

[00:07:25] Andrew Glassett: And then there's other things like competitive analysis and also reviewing some existing analytics.

[00:07:31] Pilar Belhumeur: Yeah, there's a lot of investigation and research, I think, that goes on at the beginning. And it's so important to talk to those stakeholders, as Andrew said, because you really need to understand their business and understand their pain points.

[00:07:48] Pilar Belhumeur: And then looking around, looking around at best practices, doing competitive analysis, looking at the competitors—what are they doing, why is your client different?

[00:07:54] Pilar Belhumeur: What can we learn from the competitors? And then also even a heuristic analysis, like looking at what they have today.

[00:08:03] Pilar Belhumeur: From knowing all the best practices of user experience, UX/UI, what can be done differently? What can improve?

[00:08:08] Pilar Belhumeur: So there's a lot of techniques to really dig in and understand the issues.

[00:08:18] Michael Meyers: So when you guys send out a survey, or you're doing these interviews, ultimately what are you trying to discover or understand?

[00:08:27] Pilar Belhumeur: I think from the interviews and all of the gathering of information, we try to understand their business problem, the business goals, as Andrew said, to make sure that we know where success is, what success looks like.

[00:08:47] Pilar Belhumeur: But then also we're trying to help to define the requirements of the project. You know, so that is crucial to creating the right design and building the right product or service.

[00:09:02] Andrew Glassett: I think it goes a long way when you're talking to stakeholders because they're hopefully the experts in this particular area, and before you get into actually talking to potential customers or doing traditional user research, you can figure out some of those pain points and that can help you frame your conversations that you have with the actual customers or consumers of the site you're working on.

[00:09:25] Michael Meyers: I was wondering about that because there's the business stakeholders and their goals internally, but then there's also the users and their needs and pain points. So typically the talking to the end users is something that happens after you talk to a lot of the folks internally?

[00:09:38] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, absolutely. Once you get these high-level requirements, you need to learn more about the people you're actually designing for.

[00:09:51] Andrew Glassett: And so doing stuff like user interviews or surveys helps you investigate what people's motivations are and what their biggest issues are as they're navigating a site or a product.

[00:10:14] Michael Meyers: Yeah, I hear you saying things like user interviews, surveys—not necessarily what I would first think of when I think of a UI/UX designer. Is this something that you guys are leading the charge on? Does it depend upon the project? Who's putting the questions together? Who's getting the information? Who's analyzing the results? How does this actually work?

[00:10:35] Pilar Belhumeur: Yeah, we do that. We actually are doing it right now for one of our clients on multiple projects. So we actually collect all of that information.

[00:10:40] Pilar Belhumeur: It's super fascinating and actually interesting. Another thing that we could do is usability testing or baseline usability testing to test how their product is doing now, see where the pain points are, understand what users need and what they're not finding.

[00:10:56] Pilar Belhumeur: And so all of that information is taken back, just like with the stakeholder interviews that we do, and really synthesized into: this is what the product should be, this is where we're gonna fix things.

[00:11:12] Pilar Belhumeur: If there is an existing product, this is where your business goals are, your users are not getting what they need and here's how you can fix it. So I think that, yeah, we do all of those activities.

[00:11:19] Pilar Belhumeur: So it's a combination of skills, I think. And it's like anthropology and design, so it's kind of, you know, it's fascinating. It's much deeper than just, as Andrew said, creating an ad or simpler things like that.

[00:11:39] Pilar Belhumeur: It's a longer process.

[00:11:39] Michael Meyers: Yeah. Nice.

[00:11:48] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, you can start to see—oh, sorry, go on, Pilar.

[00:11:48] Pilar Belhumeur: Nope, go ahead.

[00:11:48] Andrew Glassett: I was just gonna say, I've worked in several different contexts where we had a dedicated user researcher, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't involved in figuring out what we should research. It's like they were then tasked with doing the actual interviewing of people.

[00:12:02] Andrew Glassett: But I feel like UX/UI people are always involved in every phase of the process.

[00:12:15] Michael Meyers: Yeah, true. I think that's part of what leads to some of these misconceptions. You guys are involved in a wide array of activities that you might not immediately associate with it, but that are core to who you are and what you do for the project and the organizations.

[00:12:28] Pilar Belhumeur: Yeah, exactly.

[00:12:34] Pilar Belhumeur: And it's true, if there are—you know, it's great if you have someone that is a dedicated user researcher. You're also able to do smaller things too.

[00:12:41] Pilar Belhumeur: Like if you don't have the budget to do something larger where you're hiring a user researcher and a vendor that's helping you, there are websites that you can test on your own and moderate your own tests and then collect the information that way.

[00:12:55] Pilar Belhumeur: So it really depends on the scale of the project.

[00:13:01] Michael Meyers: Yeah, we're gonna talk about constraints a bunch throughout this conversation. I think there are some really big projects we do where you can have dedicated people in these roles, but often, you know, and for a lot of organizations, budgets are tight, resources are tight, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach regardless. But knowing that there are ways that you can adapt like that is key.

[00:13:25] Michael Meyers: Like, are there other ways that you guys have to adapt within that kind of a constraint or situation?

[00:13:33] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, I would say that I believe that it's always better to have some user research than none at all. So even if you're doing stuff like a hallway test, where you're putting some ideas down and even showing it to somebody you work with or something like that.

[00:13:49] Andrew Glassett: Throughout my career, there's been a lot of times where I actually didn't have access to users. For whatever reason, I couldn't access them.

[00:14:04] Andrew Glassett: So you have to rely on more expert opinions, and that's where you are then turning back to stakeholders at that point, or people who are experts in the area, to show them your ideas and get some feedback from them.

[00:14:20] Michael Meyers: I know there's no—

[00:14:28] Pilar Belhumeur: That's a great point, just getting feedback from the people around you. It's a great point.

[00:14:37] Michael Meyers: Yeah. I know there's no one-size-fits-all approach to projects, and I know that this is an iterative process, but, you know, assuming we're going through it from the beginning as we're talking it through, what comes next after you've talked to stakeholders and done some research? Where do you go from here?

[00:14:51] Andrew Glassett: Yeah. I think that once you have as much research as you're able to get, you are then put into this mode of ideating, exploring potential solutions to the problem. And you're doing brainstorming at that point.

[00:15:07] Andrew Glassett: You're doing sketching, you're doing wireframing, and you're encouraging divergent thinking before narrowing down.

[00:15:21] Andrew Glassett: So at that point it's sometimes a series of activities, like say in the Google Sprint methodology, where you come together, you look at the problem, you sketch out solutions together, you vote on those solutions.

[00:15:34] Andrew Glassett: There's other activities where you go and do your own solution, come back together, vote on those solutions.

[00:15:40] Andrew Glassett: And so that way you're getting an idea of what the group is thinking might be a good solution to the problem.

[00:15:54] Michael Meyers: So it's a collaborative process.

[00:15:54] Andrew Glassett: Totally.

[00:16:00] Pilar Belhumeur: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's where some of the best solutions come from, because you're not in a silo. You're engaging with others, you're encouraging other ideas.

[00:16:07] Pilar Belhumeur: And that's where I think some of the best ideas come from—when you're building on each other's energy and creative thinking and ideation.

[00:16:19] Michael Meyers: I don't know if you guys would consider this a constraint, if that's the right terminology, or if this might be helpful. But I know that you have to follow things like brand guidelines. There's certain business rules that are gonna influence what you do and how you approach this.

[00:16:33] Michael Meyers: Do you view these as constraints? Are these helpful? How does it factor into the process?

[00:16:48] Pilar Belhumeur: Okay. So, so many companies do have brand guidelines and they're very thorough and they're smart, and they have amazing guardrails for us.

[00:16:54] Pilar Belhumeur: Because we need to understand the brand of the company, and we need to make sure we're reflecting that brand in the designs that we do.

[00:17:03] Pilar Belhumeur: So many times they're great guardrails. I think if you have no guardrails for someone's brand, then it can be all over the place. There's so many choices, but you want to kind of align with that business and make sure that you're expressing their brand properly in every design.

[00:17:28] Pilar Belhumeur: And I think as well, sometimes people don't have as many brand guidelines or they're kind of older and you have, you know, someone on the team that wants to evolve it.

[00:17:35] Pilar Belhumeur: And sometimes we're able to integrate some newer things into those guidelines, or create something a little bit more polished or a little bit better during our design process. So that's also a possibility.

[00:17:52] Pilar Belhumeur: Sometimes we're extremely strict about following the brand guidelines, and sometimes the client is open to us kind of exploring a little bit more and slightly evolving some things. And that's really fun actually.

[00:18:05] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, it really depends on the client, how open they are to those kind of newer ideas.

[00:18:12] Andrew Glassett: And it's always fun when they are open to it because then you're creating something new with them. And I think the end result is always better in that situation.

[00:18:24] Michael Meyers: Is there an order to these things? Like, are you always doing wireframes followed by design? I know that there's no one-size-fits-all approach. Is there an ideal and how do you handle exceptions to that?

[00:18:41] Pilar Belhumeur: I think there is usually—I mean, there can be an order, and it depends on the client. Like, you know, Andrew and I are working on something now and we actually know the client really well. Andrew has this incredible connection and he just knows what to do.

[00:18:51] Pilar Belhumeur: And so many times we actually skip over wireframes, but usually you do create wireframes to ensure that we're going in the right direction and things are kind of mapped out before we go into the details and the deeper design.

[00:19:14] Pilar Belhumeur: But, you know, it really depends on the client. It depends on the situation. So yeah. So Andrew, what are your thoughts?

[00:19:22] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, it really depends on the client or the situation. Like in what you were just talking about, we know this client now very well, and because of that we can skip over steps.

[00:19:31] Andrew Glassett: Clients are always gonna like it if you can be more efficient. So when we're able to do that, it's nice to be able to connect with them and be efficient as possible as you're creating a new design.

[00:19:58] Michael Meyers: When we sat down and we first talked about doing this episode, you guys said something that really stuck with me. You called design a team sport. And we talked a little bit about working collaboratively with clients. We're gonna talk more about working collaboratively with the team.

[00:20:13] Michael Meyers: Another one of the many skills that you guys need to bring to the table is managing and coordinating all of these resources, including many cases on bigger projects a team of designers, some of them who might be more junior. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your role as cat herders and taskmasters and how you get all these diverse people to move this forward.

[00:20:37] Andrew Glassett: Yeah. I would say that, especially like you had mentioned, when you have multiple designers, there's always gonna be a more senior designer, there's always gonna be more of a player-coach kind of situation. And the more junior designers often fall victim to staying in their own world and not communicating and just kind of doing the thing that we're talking about, of just trying to make something pretty.

[00:21:01] Andrew Glassett: And so it's always this—not really a struggle—but it's like a teaching experience to be able to help them understand that what they're putting together needs to be tied to all those business goals and make sure they don't just fall in love with a design. That a design is also going to be a combination of all the stuff that's come before it.

[00:21:36] Pilar Belhumeur: Exactly. I think that that's, you know—yeah. You're saying a coach. I think that's so true. Like young designers especially, they’re creating beautiful things so they fall in love with their design. So I think that's really on point, Andrew.

[00:21:57] Pilar Belhumeur: And, you know, they have to kind of hone their skills. So it's more production work maybe, if they're refining or building viewports or pages to help out the more senior person.

[00:22:09] Pilar Belhumeur: So it is production, but they learn their craft. I think it's really important for those junior people to really pay their dues in that way, and I think we all have. So, and that's how you learn. You learn from others, you learn from being on that team and watching others and what they do and their knowledge, and I think it's super important.

[00:22:30] Michael Meyers: Yeah. You know, it definitely is—I think the whole thing is a team sport, within design, but also all the different teams that are working on it. And I think in addition to the misconception that designers just create pretty things is that they then just hand these pretty things off to developers.

[00:22:49] Michael Meyers: How does it actually work, or how should it work, when you guys are coordinating with and collaborating with the development team?

[00:22:58] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, there's that whole period of design handoff, and that term I think is not great because there shouldn't be necessarily a handoff. That's more like a waterfall type of workflow where you're just throwing the designs over the wall to them.

[00:23:16] Andrew Glassett: But my preference is to have engineers and developers be involved as early as possible, like even in the ideation phase, because they're the experts on knowing more of what is feasible in the context that they're currently in.

[00:23:37] Andrew Glassett: And also they are the ones that can tell you if something is scalable. So effective communication is going to prevent major issues down the line.

[00:23:51] Pilar Belhumeur: Totally agree. I mean, I think some of our best team meetings are where I'll learn something new that I didn't know from the dev team, and I'll be like, “What about this idea?”

[00:24:02] Pilar Belhumeur: And they'll say, “Not so great because of this, this, and that,” and, you know, “then we have to build it seven times,” or whatever it is they're saying. And then I learn something, right. So I feel like it's invaluable, that connection early in the process to run your ideas by them.

[00:24:18] Pilar Belhumeur: And then they may have ideas for you that are, you know, mind-blowingly amazing and you're just like, “Oh my God, I never thought of that.” So again, it's like the melding of the minds and the building on each other's thoughts, ideas, and skillsets. It's so critical and it's fun, actually.

[00:24:39] Pilar Belhumeur: It's fun.

[00:24:46] Michael Meyers: One of the many constraints that we deal with is that sometimes things have to happen in parallel. So in an ideal world, it's not a handoff, but there is a design process and then you start a more collaborative relationship with the development team. There are times where some of this has to happen more in parallel.

[00:25:02] Michael Meyers: What are the main risks or concerns that surface, and how do you try and address them when you're forced to do more of this design process and development process at the same time?

[00:25:17] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, I would say that one of the major risks is making sure that we understand what a user actually wants or needs. If we're jumping into development too early, it can be tricky to back out from that design or that development process.

[00:25:36] Andrew Glassett: And so there's a lot of risk of duplication of work. And yeah, I would say that it's not ideal.

[00:25:56] Pilar Belhumeur: Yeah, it's not ideal. It's not ideal, but so many times clients have deadlines or they're just like, “Can you build it in like five minutes?” You know, so they're really rushing into a solution, and I think, as Andrew said, if you're parallel pathing, you've got dev going, they're already starting to code.

[00:26:09] Pilar Belhumeur: You're trying to find out what the business problem is or user needs, and then you end up in a place where, yeah, maybe dev has built something already and you're like, “Wait a minute, this is the wrong solution.” That's the risk. If you very, very carefully define what's possible with the least amount of risk, can they start setting up some sort of environment, whatever it is.

[00:26:35] Pilar Belhumeur: I'm making it up, but can we start doing these activities over here? And it's almost like slightly staggering.

[00:26:42] Pilar Belhumeur: So maybe that's a slightly better approach than parallel. It does happen, but there is risk and there may be rework, as Andrew said.

[00:26:56] Pilar Belhumeur: And I think it really depends on the situation, the client, all of that, the budget. If they have endless budget, then maybe they don't mind that you're redoing stuff, but that hardly happens.

[00:27:18] Michael Meyers: Yeah. I'm curious, and I know it's hard to answer this in the abstract, but it really does seem that balancing requirements and constraints is a linchpin to your success, right? You guys are strategic problem solvers. If we had to identify another key responsibility of what you're doing as part of this project—you mentioned you don't have the budget you want most of the time. You can never do enough interviews, research, analysis. You're time-boxing your efforts.

[00:27:38] Michael Meyers: The technical constraints, what the team can and can't do, the technology, the brand guidelines. How do you make that work? Is there, and again I'm sure it's situational, but are there key things that you're thinking about? Or is it all really just driven by, okay, in this client, in this instance, at this time, here's how we're gonna make the most of what we have?

[00:28:07] Andrew Glassett: Yeah. For me, I think that a designer's job is to be an advocate for the end user, and no matter what process is happening or what budget you have, you focus on what that end user is actually wanting and needing, and every action that you're doing is trying to move the goal line towards that.

[00:28:41] Andrew Glassett: And so, yeah, I think as long as you're helping others keep the user in mind as you're going through the process, you're gonna end up with a better user experience. But hopefully if there's not budget for it, you're being more efficient as you're moving through it.

[00:29:02] Pilar Belhumeur: Yeah. I think that if we were in the business of fine art, we would not be used to constraints. But we're actually in the business of design and solving problems.

[00:29:09] Pilar Belhumeur: So I feel like we've been trained to understand that we can't do everything we want. And I think that that's just the reality of how we work. And when we come up with great solutions, that's when it's exciting, because suddenly you have something that really works, looks great obviously, and solves problems and fulfills user needs.

[00:29:36] Pilar Belhumeur: And then it's almost like a game, this mystery of trying to find—you have this but you don't have that; you can't do this but you can do that. So it's actually very interesting and there's never a dull moment.

[00:29:46] Pilar Belhumeur: I feel like it's always fun. Always interesting.

[00:29:54] Michael Meyers: How do you guys know that you're being successful? How do you know that you're not introducing subtle problems or glaring problems? How do you know that you're making end users happy? How do you know that you're meeting your stakeholders’ goals?

[00:30:05] Michael Meyers: And how do you do that on a budget with all of these constraints? How does that process work?

[00:30:18] Pilar Belhumeur: You want me to take a stab at it? Okay.

[00:30:18] Pilar Belhumeur: I think that there are best practices out there. You know, there are things that we are constantly educating ourselves on—how user interactions evolve, on design best practices, on design thinking.

[00:30:41] Pilar Belhumeur: And so we really leverage those and those are proven things that work out in the world. And so we leverage those along with really understanding the business problem.

[00:30:50] Pilar Belhumeur: And we use analytics. We look at usability, baseline usability testing, and then compare a test after the fact, like a usability test at the end after we've redesigned. We create prototypes, get those tested.

[00:31:04] Pilar Belhumeur: And we can show over time that things have improved, or there's more interaction. The form was filled out, they've gotten more leads. They were able to complete more transactions. So I think that it's really that knowledge, that expertise, following the best practices out there, and then making sure we have the business goals in mind, top of mind at all times.

[00:31:31] Pilar Belhumeur: Of course the users, but we also are working for a client, so we have to really be realistic about that too. But they're hiring us for a reason: to make their business better.

[00:31:48] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, hopefully we have agreed upon a certain metric before the project even starts.

[00:31:56] Andrew Glassett: And make sure that is kind of interwoven in the process; that we're keeping that metric in mind and have a way to measure the impact in whatever it might be.

[00:32:03] Andrew Glassett: It's nice to have the hard analytics, but sometimes you don't have that and you do need to get some at least qualitative feedback from customers.

[00:32:23] Andrew Glassett: So I often think of a launch as the beginning of learning about a product or a service or a site.

[00:32:29] Andrew Glassett: And it's not the end of design, right? We don't always get to do another iteration, but when you can do another iteration, that second iteration is even closer to what the design should be.

[00:32:48] Michael Meyers: Yeah. Organizations face a lot of constraints, you know, difficult challenges with respect to how they allocate their budget. Be honest. How often do clients prioritize and do the validation process after initial delivery?

[00:33:01] Pilar Belhumeur: It doesn't happen often, if I'm honest.

[00:33:01] Andrew Glassett: Yeah.

[00:33:10] Andrew Glassett: But I know that those clients that do have that additional step are more successful in their business, because you are opening your ear to what the customer is wanting. And the more you're open to it, the more you can provide them with what they're wanting or needing.

[00:33:44] Michael Meyers: Yeah, exactly. Do you think it's just difficult, like budget constraints and they're forced to make impossible decisions? Do you think that, you know, it's not understanding the importance or something they intend to come back to? Any insight as to why it's not prioritized enough?

[00:33:51] Pilar Belhumeur: I think it's really the budget constraints. There may not be an understanding of the importance of validation testing or usability testing after the fact.

[00:34:00] Pilar Belhumeur: And I think one thing clients sometimes don't think of is evolution. As Andrew said, if you get a second chance or you learn something after you launch, then you want to continuously improve or evolve whatever you're building.

[00:34:12] Pilar Belhumeur: Clients should definitely consider that when they are doing their budgets. It's not a one and done. You're gonna be constantly evolving because users change; how people are interacting with products and services changes all the time. So, you know, you build the site three or even two years ago, and things have changed.

[00:34:38] Pilar Belhumeur: Look at AI—it's here, right? OpenAI just launched a new browser, Atlas, trying to kill Chrome probably. So things change constantly when you're building digital products and services.

[00:34:59] Michael Meyers: UI/UX design, the things that you do, are one of the fundamental pillars of success. And we started by talking about how even subtle problems erode and impact your business goals.

[00:35:20] Michael Meyers: I see another direct parallel with performance and scalability, right? Google and others have proven scientifically that even milliseconds matter. The slower your site is, the worse the user satisfaction is—a direct parallel to what we're talking about. And yet, organizations tend to ignore performance until it is a massive and glaring problem, and then they fix it.

[00:35:39] Michael Meyers: And they also don't tend to do that ongoing performance integration into their build process to avoid it moving forward, and yet they spend a tremendous amount of money on things like advertising to increase conversion rates.

[00:36:00] Michael Meyers: And it just boggles my mind why you could spend less on advertising, address these fundamental aspects of your site and see a better return on investment financially, and do a tremendous job at increasing your success over time with a very scientific and methodical approach to things versus just more marketing, more advertising on these monthly spends.

[00:36:25] Michael Meyers: So my hope is over time that we can push organizations. But I do understand that everybody has to make insanely difficult decisions with respect to where and how they allocate their money. And in an ideal world, I'm sure most organizations would be like, “Hell yeah, let's totally do that.”

[00:36:38] Michael Meyers: Before we wrap up, you know, we talked about so many different things that you do—managing teams cross-functionally, clients, surveys, user research. What do you think, if you had to say that there's a single factor that drives success in what you do, what would it be?

[00:37:00] Michael Meyers: Pilar, let's start with you.

[00:37:06] Pilar Belhumeur: Single factor that drives success. I think collaboration. I think collaboration with the client, collaboration with the team.

[00:37:20] Pilar Belhumeur: If you're not talking to each other, you really aren't talking to the client, don't understand them, don't understand what's happening with them, their business problems, don't talk to users—I think that's probably the biggest thing that will drive success.

[00:37:30] Andrew Glassett: Yeah, I agree. It's about that collaboration and communication. And the real work though is more about building trust, I would say, with the people you work with and trust with the users that are gonna be using this stuff and with the client.

[00:37:56] Andrew Glassett: So, you know, it's a key responsibility to be an advocate for the user, but having that trust on all sides is what's going to bring about the best outcomes.

[00:38:03] Michael Meyers: Andrew and Pilar, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you everybody for tuning in and listening.

[00:38:09] Michael Meyers: You can check out our past Team Talks at tag1.com/ttt. That's three Ts for Tag1 Team Talks.

[00:38:16] Michael Meyers: We'd love your feedback, topic suggestions. You can write to us at [email protected]. That's TTT, the number one dot com.

[00:38:22] Michael Meyers: If your organization needs help with making things look pretty or building out your site, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. Please don't forget to subscribe. We're available via all of the main podcast distribution channels as well as YouTube.

[00:38:44] Michael Meyers: Again, Andrew, Pilar, thank you so much. Look forward to having you back to talk about more topics like the developer–design relationship. We'll see you soon.

[00:38:49] Andrew Glassett: Thanks.

[00:38:49] Pilar Belhumeur: Thank you, Michael. Bye.