The Road To Excellence

Kevin Clark at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/jvwyS050p3o

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

What are you obsessed about?

[00:00:01] My name is Kevin and I'm a design lead on the channels team at Shopify, and for the past few years I was a design lead on our checkout team. So if you bought something from any of these stores, that means you've probably used a checkout flow that was designed by me and my team. This is what it looks like.

[00:00:17] On top of that I also have a design podcast with my co-host Rafa, where we talk about what's going on in the world of design, and we also welcome the occasional guests to tell us more about their design philosophy. In the last few years we've produced over 200 hours of audio and we have listeners all around the world, including right here in Dublin. On top of that I'm also the co-founder of the Montreal Design Club. We host all kinds of events for designers, from product design, architecture, fashion, graphic design and more.

[00:00:54] So I want to start this talk with a question that I asked myself when I was putting together this presentation: what are you obsessed about? Take a moment and think about it. I'm obsessed with excellence. I'm fascinated by it. Whether it's physical products, architecture or software, I'm fascinated by products that go above and beyond and solve problems in interesting ways.

[00:01:21] Now, I say that I'm obsessed with excellence, but I think in a way all of us are. You see, every one of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. We can tell the excellent from the mediocre. But when we look at our own work it often feels like there's a gap. What you're making is good, but it's not that good, and your taste that got you into this is still excellent, and your taste is good enough to tell you that what you're making is, well, kind of a disappointment. So for the past few years I've been desperately trying to close that gap between what my taste recognizes as excellent and what I'm able to produce in my own work. So today I'll be talking about three unconventional ideas that I've uncovered on my quest for excellence.

Idea one: solving problems is easy

[00:02:13] So the first idea is that solving problems is easy. Now I know this is controversial, but to illustrate this idea let me tell you about a story. The story I want to tell you about is about how human powered flight was invented. So it started off with a prize that was created by Henry Kremer in 1959 that would be awarded to the very first person to create a human powered airplane. So years and years go by and tons of people try to take a stab at this problem, but nobody can solve it for 18 years. So many people tried and failed, until all of a sudden an engineer solved the problem within six months of even trying. His name was Paul MacCready.

[00:03:07] This is 1976 and Paul is in serious trouble. He owes $100,000 that he borrowed to start a company that completely failed, and that's when he hears about the prize. If only he could win this prize, he would be able to pay off his debt. So he starts working away at trying to solve this problem, and he eventually realizes that the problem was the problem itself. So MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not in fact human powered flight. So he came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months?

[00:03:46] So he built a plane with mylar, aluminum tubing and wire. Those are materials that could easily recover from an impact. So as soon as he put the finger on the right problem, the solution became easy. While others needed a year's worth of effort for any test flight, he created a pliant plane that he could fly, fix and fly again in mere hours, which was completely revolutionary and changed the course of the aviation industry.

[00:04:15] So as soon as I heard Paul's story, I couldn't help but notice that in my own work I was focusing so much energy on the solution and not enough on the problem itself. A common practice in our work, which I'm sure many of you have done, is UX research, and when you start doing research one of the first things that you learn is how much your questions can bias the answers. For example, asking someone, did you like the experience, will yield a lot more positive responses than a more neutral question would.

[00:04:51] So the same thing happens with the problem that you're trying to solve. The problem you focus on will define the solution you produce. So if I wanted to improve my work, I would have to start asking better questions. And the analogy that I make all the time is the one of the doctor and patient. So when the patient comes to the doctor, they usually come in saying something like, my arm hurts, and that's only the symptom. It's the doctor's job to ask questions to find out what the root cause of the problem is.

Apple Pay: questioning what we were asked to build

[00:05:21] So today I want to show you two examples of how I applied this in my own work. Here's the first one. We recently were tasked with adding Apple Pay as a payment method for our checkout, and this seemed like a fairly straightforward project at first. We already had a bunch of payment methods, we could simply add another one to the list. But we started with the simplest question of all: why? What's the point of all of this?

[00:05:51] You see, by adding yet another payment method, it seemed like we would only make it harder for people to decide how they wanted to complete their checkout. And we knew that if we kept adding more and more payment options to our checkout, it would eventually start looking something like this. That's not what we want. So ultimately we realized that the problem wasn't that we needed to add Apple Pay to our checkout — that's not even a problem. The real problem was much bigger. The problem was that it was time consuming to have to do a lot of typing to fill out our checkout, and especially on mobile.

[00:06:30] So the question became: how might we help people choose a payment method that is right for them and that will give them the smoothest experience? And with this question in mind, we knew we couldn't just add a payment method to the list, it would simply introduce even more decision paralysis for people. So we decided that we would leverage signals like which browser you're using and whether you have a credit card saved or not, in order to surface the payment method that you're the most likely to want to use. So if you have Apple Pay, we'll show you Apple Pay, and if you're logged into PayPal we'll show you that. According to our research, the accuracy of this prediction ended up being really high.

[00:07:16] So of course you still have the option to choose any payment method you want, but for the first time we're helping users make a decision instead of just throwing tons of options at them. And so by personalizing the interface, we allow the checkout to adapt to you, the user, instead of making you adapt to it. And since we narrowed down the list of payment options to a single option, it also allowed us to put it right there on the product page, saving time for all the people who make a single product checkout. So once we started asking the right questions, the solution became very simple, and it allowed us to make purposeful decisions that benefit our buyer.

Frenzy: adding friction on purpose

[00:07:58] We have a saying at work that goes something like this: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And falling in love with the problem is so important to us that every four months everyone in our company gets to spend two days to focus on the problem that they care about. One of my projects was Frenzy. Frenzy is an app for iOS and Android that is dedicated to creating a tailored experience for limited release products like sneakers.

[00:08:31] We had been hearing a lot of feedback from our merchants about how frustrating the experience of selling these high demand products was. On one hand the customers were frustrated because these products would sometimes sell out in a matter of seconds, and our merchants were frustrated because, well, their customers were frustrated, and because a lot of their inventory ended up being bought in bulk by bots that would later resell them and profit handsomely from it, making these products even more of a luxury item.

[00:09:05] So what we initially set out to do was to remove the friction of buying in these high pressure environments. But halfway through the two days that we had allocated for this project — remember, this was a hack day — we realized that we were looking at the problem the wrong way. Our merchants didn't want a slightly simpler flow, because they knew they would sell out for sure. And our buyers' source of frustration wasn't really that there was too much friction, it was that they couldn't get the item that they wanted.

[00:09:36] So we reframed the problem. The new problem was that we wanted to give people a good experience even if they ultimately couldn't buy the product. So we realized that removing the friction isn't always a solution, and that in this scenario, in order to solve the problem, we might actually have to add some friction. So we went back to the drawing board and rethought this problem.

[00:10:03] So we designed an experience around that. We wanted to make these sales feel like an event, so we made it so that the longer you had the app open on your screen, the more chances you would get to buy the product. Keeping the screen on at all times added friction to the experience, but for the first time the biggest fans would get a leg up. We also wanted each new person to feel more connected to each other, so with each person that joined you saw a new lightning bolt that would float up the screen. And when the time came, the app revealed a store ready for you to buy something, with this kind of over-the-top animation.

[00:10:44] Our project got enough traction that we've actually formed a team to turn this into a real product, and while I wasn't directly as involved with this project any more, the team pursued one of our ideas called drop zones. So the way the drop zones work is that the store can set up a geofence around the area you have to be in in order to purchase. It's like a park, for example. When the sale opens, only those brave enough to leave their living room are able to purchase the products. So with this feature, not only did people get more chances to get the sneaker that they wanted, but the app also brought people together around this shared interest. We have great experiences like this, so we've actually made people's experience better even if they never got the product, and we would have never gotten to this solution if we hadn't reframed the problem first.

[00:11:45] So if I have to sum it up: always question the problem you're being asked to solve. You'll find that the real problem is rarely the one you begin with. It's your role as a designer to find the source of the problem, because if you get that wrong, every single decision you make after that is going to be irrelevant.

Idea two: quantity over quality

[00:12:06] Now, once you're confident you found the right problem, you're asking the right questions, then how do you solve that problem? How do you make sure that you find the right solution? Well, my second unconventional idea is that if you care about excellence, you sometimes have to prioritize quantity over quality.

[00:12:30] And to explain what I mean, let me tell you about a story that I read and that stuck with me six years ago, in this book called Art and Fear. This is a story about a ceramics teacher. So on the first day of school the ceramics teacher decided to do an experiment. For the whole semester he would be dividing the class into two groups. So all those on the right side of the studio would be graded solely for the quantity of the work they produce, and all those on the left side would be graded solely on their quality.

[00:13:00] When grading time came, a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all being produced by people being graded for quantity. So it seems like, while the quantity group was busy turning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the group on the left had sat there theorizing about perfection, and in the end had nothing more to show for their efforts than theories and piles of dead clay.

[00:13:31] Now, the story probably never happened for real, but I think there's some interesting learnings to be had there. The first one is that it's really hard to come up with something great on your first try. Can you imagine the pressure? This is why so many of us have that blank page syndrome when we sit down and write.

[00:13:53] The next one is that if you believe that in the universe of possible solutions there is an optimal solution to the problem you're facing, which I totally do, then what's the likelihood that you end up here on the first try? I think it's probably more likely that you'll end up somewhere like here, or here. By exploring as many ideas as possible, you cover a much wider range and you're much more likely to hit on an idea that works. I call this design by brute force, by the way.

[00:14:29] And so the reason why quantity works is because your inner critic will shut down a lot of good ideas before you even have the chance to refine them. So the key here is that by making a lot of things, you have to separate the creator from the critic. I see this process as similar to an author editing their manuscript with a red pen. So instead of mixing solutions with critique, you want to get all of your solutions out of the way first, then critique, and finally make a decision.

The order status page: 30 card designs on the wall

[00:15:04] I used this process when I was working on the order status page at Shopify. The goal for this project was to be more transparent about the status of the order and give people more confidence in our merchants. A lot of these explorations took place on paper, but for the sake of this presentation I'll show you three high fidelity versions of the concepts that we've explored.

[00:15:34] All right, so here's the first one. I had kind of this map and this progress bar thing. The second one was more of a timeline version, where we could see the entire history of your order all at once. And the last one had sort of like this card style design that collapsed over time.

[00:15:53] Now, once you have all of your ideas, now's the time to get your critic hat on. And in this process you want to be as objective as possible and talk to as many people with different opinions as possible, collect that from different sources, then we start rating them. So the visual one was engaging, but it was missing a lot of key information. The timeline design was very clever and had the most information, but it was kind of hard to tell the current status of your order. And then the card design made the current state much more clear, but it was hard to get a sense of what comes next.

[00:16:36] So we decided to eliminate the timeline idea, trying to get my things and say okay [?], and we finally merged the other two designs to come up with this card design. And so over the course of this project we've explored over 30 different card designs, and to further separate the creator from the critic we've actually ended up printing all of them, putting them on the wall and writing on them, voting on them to see the ones that resonated the most.

[00:17:06] This is the final design that we've settled on in the end, which solved all the problems that we had uncovered in our research. In that process we had to discard a lot of good ideas, and this is another reminder of just how important it is to fall in love with the problem, not the solutions. A few years later we've taken a very similar card approach with the Arrive app. Arrive is an app that collects all of your orders in one place to make sure you don't miss anything, placing controls into people's hands, quite literally in this case. With each iteration we've gotten closer and closer to our ideal, and this made me realize that you might not reach excellence the first time you try, and that's okay. But just like Paul MacCready did with human powered flight, you just have to keep trying.

Idea three: don't specialize

[00:18:03] So the third idea I want to tell you about is: don't specialize. Let's face it, our society really wants specialization. I think that is best articulated by Malcolm Gladwell's idea of 10,000 hours, and basically, if you don't know, this idea says that you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to become a world-class expert at anything. So he talked to the best chess grandmasters, violinists, golf players, and one thing they all had in common was that relentless practice of their craft.

[00:18:47] So if we follow this rule, the only true way to become excellent is time and focus. So it goes without saying that if you try to do multiple things at once, you're just dividing your time across all of your interests, which is severely increasing the time it takes to master any of them. This same idea is where the quote, jack of all trades, master of none, comes from. Now I'm sure all of you have heard this before, but what many of us don't know is that that's not the full quote. The full quote goes something like this: jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.

[00:19:31] So for this last segment of my talk I would like to try to convince you that being a well-rounded person is a completely valid way to achieve excellence. So how do we reconcile this idea of 10,000 hours with the fact that the exact opposite of specialization is what makes some people like me successful? Well, it turns out that author David Epstein asked himself the exact same questions, and he discovered that the reason is that there are two types of domains. Number one, you have the kind domains, and number two, you have wicked domains.

[00:20:11] So kind domains are domains like golf, chess or poker, where there are defined boundaries, the consequences are quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. This is where specialization is desirable. Wicked domains are domains like politics, management, technology and design, and in wicked domains the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, and there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and if you do have repetitive patterns they may not be obvious, and the feedback is often delayed or inaccurate or both. As you might have guessed, in these types of environments having a broad range of skills is desirable. In most wicked environments, experience can reinforce the exact wrong lessons and give people a false sense of confidence and skill, instead of approaching the problem with a beginner's mindset.

Multiplying skills instead of dividing them

[00:21:06] So in my own career I've always done a ton of different things. I'm a designer who also does a lot of programming, who organizes events, who has a podcast, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the biggest secret that I've learned is that with each new thing that I do, each new thing improves every other aspect of my life. And so rather than dividing my impact, I'm actually multiplying my skills in order to grow exponentially. So being a designer makes me a better developer, and vice versa.

[00:21:50] So I want to show you an example of what I mean here. This is Climate. This is a project that I worked on for fun when the Apple Watch came out, and at the time I didn't like how the native Apple Watch app displayed things like the weather, so I set out to design and build my own. And I was really excited about getting a graph that would show the intensity of the rain, because God knows it can rain a lot in Montreal, and I've heard that the same thing applies here too.

[00:22:17] The only issue was that there was absolutely no way to render something like this on the first version of watchOS, but I wanted to hold on to this idea because I thought it was cool. So I figured out that I could pre-render an image of that graph on the iPhone, capture a snapshot of it, and then remotely send it to the watch to be able to display it, and I was finally able to get the experience that I was looking for.

[00:22:46] It took me a really long time to build this, and most developers would probably have not obsessed over some seemingly small details like this as much as I would. But a few months later this skill came in handy when we wanted to design the Shopify app for Apple Watch. Now, I agree, we knew initially that people wouldn't want to manage their store from their wrist, that would be crazy, but we knew that people would want stats and rich notifications. So we actually decided to reuse the code that I wrote for my silly side project in order to get the experience that we wanted, and that's how we were able to build this app.

[00:23:28] My interest in photography also led me to design and build an app called Photo Edit, which is a photo editing app that allows me to edit my photos just the way that I want, right from my phone. And in the process I've learned a ton about creating performant interfaces and manipulating images through code, which is still useful to me today.

[00:23:50] Having a podcast has also helped me a lot as a design lead at Shopify. Last year I started selling some stickers to our listeners, which allowed me to truly dogfood our product and get some actual hands-on experience as a merchant, and I've learned so much about the challenges that our users are facing every single day. Even to this day I leverage the learnings that I got from that experience in my work.

Overlapping skills lead to new solutions

[00:24:18] So your overlap of skills is what makes you uniquely skilled at solving problems. It can also lead to completely new solutions to existing problems. I'll show you what I mean. So let's imagine this problem. Your merchants and your customers love your products, but we keep getting a lot of returns. You're kind of wondering why, and you realize that the reason why is that people have a hard time getting a sense of the scale of your products online.

[00:24:53] So let's say your product page looks something like this. A traditional designer would probably find ways to make the dimensions more visible, so maybe they would do something like this, so people can actually pull out their tape or something and measure it and get a sense of what it is. Or maybe another designer would decide to photograph the item next to an object that we all know, like this one, to kind of have an idea of how big the space is.

[00:25:20] Now imagine another designer with a 3D background approaching this same problem. Their solution is probably going to be very different. Maybe they would choose to model these products so that people could preview them in their actual space. Well, this is exactly what our AR and VR team did, in partnership with one of our merchants called Magnolia.

[00:25:45] So the way it works is you open the app, you can browse around, find the product that you're interested in, then tap on the product you're interested in, and then in the carousel you have an option to preview in your own home. Simply find a surface to put the product on, scan it, and once it detects the surface you can simply tap to place it. You can see it right there in your own home, see how it would fit. You can get up close or as far away as you want, you can see the reflections, rotate it. And a nice side benefit of that is you can also take a picture to get some feedback from your friends or family, to know if that's something that would look nice in your home. This is something that you could never do before, even in a physical store. So it's really an example of how having this different skill, that is maybe not usual in the industry yet, you can actually use it to create a better experience.

Three people who combined their passions

[00:26:46] Now, I'm not saying that you should start 3D modeling, or you should start coding, or you should start a podcast, but I'd love it if more of you gave yourselves the permission to explore your own interests. So take a second look at the things that you do or you're interested in and try to spot patterns that you might be able to apply in your own work. And to show you it's possible, I want to give you three examples of people from Montreal who have leveraged their different passions in order to achieve unique things.

[00:27:20] So the first one is Sarah Berry. She's a UX researcher on the checkout team at Shopify. So typical research goes like this, right? You find a diverse set of participants, you get them to perform a task that you're interested in learning more about, and then you ask them some questions in order to get their thoughts. But in our recent interviews we would often get answers like, oh yeah, that's fine, that's pretty easy, it was okay. And more and more we had a feeling that we weren't really getting the full picture.

[00:27:54] And because Sarah has spent over a decade conducting mental health and bioethics research in academia prior to joining Shopify, she decided to use a device called an EEG, which is typically used to detect brain damage. What it does is it captures how much activity is going on in someone's brain at any given moment, and we use this not as a replacement for questions but in addition to it. So with this device she was able to discover discrepancies between what the user would tell us and what their brain would actually tell us, which led to a lot more accurate information, which then allowed us to produce significant user experience improvements.

[00:28:38] The next example is my friend Stefan Reboosto [?], who's a creative director and DJ. And when most people would have chosen one way or the other, he decided to do both. So he created his own agency that is part design, part record label, and his process is really interesting. He often starts with creating the music for a new campaign rather than with the visuals, and so rather than slapping on some music at the end, he uses it as the main creative outlet to communicate with his clients, and that gives him a completely different approach to the problems he has to solve.

[00:29:16] And last but not least is Cynthia Irony [?]. She is a super talented product designer from Montreal, and a few years ago she took her design skills and decided to apply them to designing cakes. The result was a completely new style which spread like wildfire after she started posting on Instagram a couple of years ago, and her combination of skills, taking product design and UX and applying it to cake, is really a big part of what made her stand apart in this industry.

The road to excellence is not a straight line

[00:29:49] So we're all on this road to excellence. On my way I have learned that working harder is rarely the answer, and often if you can't solve a problem that means you're probably looking at the wrong problem in the first place. So once you put the finger on what the right problem is, then the solution will come easily.

[00:30:12] My next one is that I've learned to rethink my process and separate the creator from the critic. I'm now at peace with quantity not being completely opposed to quality, and I've learned how to use it as a tool to solve hard and complex problems.

[00:30:35] And my last point is, I've learned that it's okay to not specialize. In fact it might be better. Being a well-rounded person helps you create connections between various fields and gives you a unique take on problems.

[00:30:47] So each of these unconventional ideas is bringing me ever and ever closer to the ideal I have in my head. And while I initially thought that the road to excellence was this long straight line, I've discovered that real life looks a lot more like this. And so as much as I would like you to follow the road that I'm on, the reality is that there's many ways to get there, and the destination isn't finite, because your taste is still evolving and getting better every single day. So I encourage you to find your own path, find what works for you, don't be afraid to step outside of the norm, because unconventional ideas are often the most powerful ones. Thank you.