Design Meets Business

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Christian: Welcome to the show. It is such a pleasure to have you here.

Rachel: Thank you for having me.

Christian: How was your week? You just spoke at Schema, I think a couple of days ago, a Figma design system focus conference. How was that? What was your talk about?

Rachel: It was awesome. My talk was about uh, designing for infinity and basically how we've always been designing systems for infinite expressiveness and infinite potential in terms of user engagement. Uh, So it was fun. It basically was kind of a portfolio readout from the last few jobs I've done

Christian: Yeah.

Rachel: across the last decade.

So it was fun. I always enjoyed that. I always enjoyed talking about my work.

Christian: Yeah, that's great. So for everyone or anyone who doesn't know you've been uh, one of the designers who put the foundations of Google's material design, which over the past decade or so has really impacted the way we build design systems and has been such a useful resource for a lot of people learning how to build this.

But it's, that's just a small, perhaps part of your work. You've touched so many different products over the past years. It's wild from billboard.com to working on some of my favorite products, like the Nest thermostat. Uh, Then you worked in Google Home, Airbnb. Now Expedia, loads of uh, awesome products there. So you've seen design evolve across so many industries and eras. How did it all start for you from those early photography days? If I'm not mistaken, if I've done my research correctly and what pulled you into tech later on?

Rachel: This is a question I get a lot 'cause I'm a pretty atypical start maybe.

I was a photojournalist, I was a photographer and photojournalist and thought that I was going into the photography world and started my career as a photo director at AOL and really loved photography, was shooting a lot, was curating a lot, but it was during the time before the internet had any rhyme or reason in terms of more traditional tenets of graphic design?

Right. So grid systems and what we know is more contemporary design systems uh, within software and, and online just didn't really exist yet . It was in the era where, 960 grids were just coming online. But I was doing all of this awesome work, shooting and working with photographers and doing great sort of art direction and creative direction within music and culture.

And then we were putting these beautiful photographs in these tiny little boxes online. These experiences had not yet been designed for these fully immersive, multimedia oriented experiences. And I thought, this is terrible. What am I doing? I'm doing all this work to put in at this tiny like, 300 by 400, even less 150 by whatever box.

So I started working with the design team and started learning how to design and built and worked on some of the first multimedia, imagery, video with audio type of experiences online, and realized I love doing that as much, if not more than I loved shooting and being in the photo world.

So transitioned more into creative direction and design, and that sort of kicked off my career. But it's interesting. I've always had that art direction, deep understanding of technology and of content in my background, which I think I brought with me across all of my roles.

Christian: It's so interesting how sometimes in your career you end up doing things maybe randomly or just because that's where you happen to be and then those things become fundamental for something that you're gonna end up doing later on. 'cause I assume learning to do all of these, or not learning, but being part of it, has then been so important when putting the foundations for Material Design, hasn't it?

Rachel: Absolutely. I think I've talked about this a few other times, but this idea of the best education or the best thing that I've ever embraced that's led me to my career is curiosity, I don't have formal education in a sense. Many people don't in this industry, in some of these areas of design, but really it was just about being hyper curious and frustrated and optimistic.

That sort of allowed me to jump into learning things and producing things and getting in with the right group of folks that were making things to kind of like, have a lily pad type of approach of hopping into interesting areas of discovery, which then I think has really been the definition of a lot of the work that I've done in my career.

Christian: Yeah. Is that something that you'd still recommend someone early on in their career to do? Just to try as many things as possible and learn a little bit from everyone? Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah, a hundred percent. I say this to my kids all the time, and so throwing spaghetti at the wall. One of my daughters, she likes sports, so we've got her trying a bunch of different sports to see what she likes and see what sort of ignites her. And I think that method of just really jumping into a lot of areas, I, I feel like within design or within our industry, there's been this sort of fluctuation between being hyper specialized.

I'm a UX designer, I'm a visual designer, or I'm an art director into an era of more generalist kind of capabilities. And I definitely think we are really within that era of generalist multihyphenate design being really open to exploration and curiosity because there's a lot we're doing that we just don't know how to do yet.

And so it takes a very kind of particular type of curiosity and optimism and proactivity to actually do our work right now and actually be a lead or to actually be an ic. So from the top to the bottom, having the skillset I think is really important.

Christian: Maybe this leads into something I was gonna ask, which is looking at the way technological revolutions have happened over the years. They usually happen in one area, the typewriter or Photoshop or Figma or Canva, whatever it may have been. They usually, there's one thing that happens at a time, and if you want to stay relevant, you pick up that tool and then you are ready for the next iteration of your career until the next revolution happens.

Today, looking at AI, that's a bit different. And I'm wondering whether what you're talking about, curiosity plays a really important part of that. Because today the revolution that's happening is not focused. It's not just one thing, it's not one tool. It's a Swiss Army knife that can do a lot of different things.

And I'm wondering whether, when we're talking about, okay, what should you focus on? Should you use AI for better research? Should you overlap more with your PM? Should you write code? Should you, which one of these should you do? Maybe the answer is you should try a little bit of everything and be curious and stay inquisitive , and then find your path that way.

Rachel: I think that's right. I think a lot of the time, AI and it is a technology, it is sort a capability enabler in a sense. It is not a feature in and of itself. I think a lot of the time we get stuck in this industry of being like the AI feature or the thing that is the AI experience when, no, it's not really that at all.

It's just that the capability and this technology has now enabled a lot of opportunities to arise. And what I think is so nice about this technology is it. Yes, it's unlocking a lot of things that we were historically not able to do, but it also is just like solving a lot of core problems in a lot of different verticals that we've always been trying to solve.

is such a great example of this, because travel historically has been so incredibly laborious and complex to plan. There's a lot of variables that go into that equation to make for a good trip. It also is hyper-personalized and something you really want to connect, your dream state to an experiential state. It is this really kind of personal manifestation of your needs. And I think historically we've had travel agents. Travel agents have existed for a particular subset of folks, right? Because traditionally travel agents have been somewhat expensive. But the whole idea of a travel agent was someone that helped bring your dreams to fruition that demystified and made much more simple, the complex logistics of actually planning travel, and then they were there with you throughout your entire experience to make sure you got what you need.

So that's a lot of different human needs that I think are now being unlocked potentially by AI, right? Search and discovery made infinitely more simple. Help when you need it most proactively occurring with you on a trip. All of these things that a traditional travel agent really was set up to do now, that type of technology can really assist with.

it almost democratizes travel in that sense and opens up this vertical to a lot more people um, of having sort of a personalized connection to this vertical that historically maybe we haven't seen. And I think in general, that's how to think about this technology is what is it really good at, right?

Thinking about information synthesis, making connections that you can't necessarily see that are somewhat complex structuring information. I'm a super non-linear thinker, for example, and I've always been able to sort of have like a proliferation of ideas, but a tough time sort of rationalizing and making linear statements or PRDs or documents or white papers related to that.

Because of my non-linearity. And now suddenly I have this tool that's taken the core of my ideas and thinking and has allowed me just to really be quite prolific with my ability to write papers and write sort of strategy documents, et cetera, because I've taken my non-linear thinking and made it linear because of the capabilities of AI.

So I just think there's. The way to think about this is what are the capabilities that this technology unlocks? What is super exciting to me? And then how do those things match? So thinking about, I wanna get into AI. No, it's not. I wanna get into AI. What industry, what area of exploration are you interested in, and how does new technology unlock some of those areas?

Christian: I was listening to a podcast the other day. Someone at chess.com was talking about how they're using AI and he said something very similar to you, which was, LLMs are just generally very bad at playing chess. For them it's about pattern recognition. They don't really understand chess the way a chess engine understands.

So if you wanna play chess, ChatGPT is not gonna teach you much. But what it is really good at is in that indeed seeing patterns and, you can give it a dashboard and say, explain to me what this is 'cause I don't understand. So I think it is opening a lot of different worlds for designers that we previously, maybe only people who are really niche had access to.

I think it is a bit paralyzing in a sense that, whoa, now the whole world is open to you you can do everything. And I think just like a menu at a restaurant that's 200 pages exaggeration, it's so much more difficult to choose what you're gonna eat than a one pager. And I think that's where I see a lot of designers I talk to, they're a bit paralyzed.

Actually. I try this, should I try that? Ooh, I don't know. I can't do, I don't have time to do all of them. Maybe what you're saying is stay curious, fi figure out what the technology's really good at, and maybe start there.

Rachel: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I, I guess as a designer there's a few different paths you can take with playing with AI. I think there is, like what I was talking about in terms of I really believe in designers straddling strategy and business and design. So for me, I've been using it really to think through strategically in a lot of different areas.

And often what I do as a designer is I will on my drive home if I'm heading into work or if I'm taking a walk, I will speak to AI for 20 minutes about like, okay, here's what I think strategically we need to focus on in terms of some of these areas. And kind of go through a really, my sort of non-linear thought process.

And I'll say like, make me a more sort of formal strategic document related to this, but use my thoughts, don't augment them. And what will result is like coherence for me to like, oh yes. And also an artifact that I can share cross-functionally an artifact that PMs understand and engineers understand and can get excited about.

So I think there's that aspect of sort of your own productivity and your own sort of thinking. There's also obviously that in product design form, right? Of the ability to uh, use vibe coding and sort of natural language to actually construct UIs and sort of do discovery through actual product design.

And there's a lot of tools for that right now. There's cursor and lovable and obviously Figma Make is coming up and just had a lot of announcements at Schema this week . I love this 'cause so many designers are non-linear, right? That's like maybe why we got into this profession of just being able to talk into an engine and then it producing sort of visual artifacts for you and you can see, does this make sense?

Is this something I'd wanna engage with? I think that's such an exciting thing for designers to be able to just use a new interaction modality, a voice or of natural language to actually design. So I think just in general kind of playing with this material and seeing what you can make out of it is, is really exciting.

Christian: So talking about playing with it and seeing what you can make out of it. You've joined Expedia very recently, a few months ago, and in the last few months uh, something very exciting has happened, which is that you're one of the first app to build inside of ChatGPT. Tell us a little bit the story of that.

Where did that come from? And um, for people who don't know, haven't been able to play with it just yet, what does it do? What, What is really good at?

Rachel: Yeah I, I mean, I was super excited about this opportunity. We have a tremendous team at this company that's really thinking about the future of AI. And this opportunity came our way and I was very excited that, the timing arrived, that I could be participatory in this and really activate this within the design team.

And we have a great set of designers and folks here who jumped in and in a very expedited period of time designed a super high fidelity proposal for what, lodging and finding hotels and flights could be within ChatGPT powered by Expedia. And we expedited the engineering work and got it out in a really, a record amount of time.

And it was really exciting because I think what I really saw doing that experience was a few different things. Firstly, we had an opportunity as an Expedia team to sort of open up our own design thinking related to designing for hotels and flights. So me being new, I was like, great, this is fun, right?

I want to tackle some of these gnarly things that we're seeing in the product design experience today. And now we have this amazing new canvas, conversational canvas to do that. So that was really awesome, just general sort of visual design principles and system design paradigms and patterns there that we could really get into content design paradigms.

So that was really exciting. The other thing was thinking about designing for conversational surfaces is a really different way to think about designing, right? Instead of, this is the flow. You're gonna ask for something, you're gonna get a carousel. These are always gonna be the type of results. There's no variability.

No, this is not the surface that we're designing for anymore. Basically what I said at the Schema conference, you're designing for infinity, you're designing for infinite inputs, and how do you create a really good system that maintains those infinite inputs? And I think initially a lot of the patterns that we built into this initial ChatGPT experience, were quite static in a sense, right?

They are more traditional card paradigms, carousel paradigms. There was some degree of expansion and contraction of information and modules within the card based on what you were specifically looking for asking for, but it still is not that dynamic. We're creating an interface for you on the fly based on really specifically what you're asking for and what we know about you and that hyper personalized interface in the same way that in content in text right now, that is the experience in ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is using history and using personalization and using memory and using very specific queries and inputs to craft a really specific and unique content experience for you. We're not quite doing that with product design yet, but you could really start seeing the potential when we were jumping into that surface and doing that design work around, okay, how could we flex?

Hey, if you ask this instead of this, should this still be the UI? You know, If you ask something specific about a neighbourhood, like if you ask, oh, I really wanna go to some cool hotels in New York, the map maybe should not just show you a bunch of different hotels across a bunch of different neighborhoods in New York, the map experience should be uniquely different and be more of a cool vibes browse experience on a map than a specific point of interest hotels experience, right?

So you could start seeing the vectors of how these experiences might and should shift based on personalization and the uniqueness of your input. So I think we're just at the beginning of really designing for these surfaces and really unlocking what these kind of conversational and really what it comes down to hyper-personalized experiences should be.

Christian: I can imagine there are so many nuances here and so many small questions that on the surface you might not even think about that you need to answer in order to design a good experience for this new surface of conversation. One of the things that I'm thinking about also looking at how I use AI, I use it order as a thought partner.

I talk to it, I say, challenge me. What am I missing here? Where's the gap? it's interesting, after you do this for a while, you kind of know how to program it and prompt it so that it knows just the right amount of information to ask for, and then it gives you the answer you are looking for.

So I'm wondering whether this is another thing that you team has talked about. When should the agent gracefully back off versus push forward with more questions? Or have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? I can imagine you've thought about that.

Rachel: Oh my gosh, disambiguation and understanding the, the right information that you need to really give great results. How human is that? You know, It's like, of course we need to figure out I've been noticing more, I don't know if I'm in a particular build or what, like that in ChatGPT when I've been engaging with it, it's been asking for a lot of sort of disambiguation questions to keep building my responses to the point where I'm like, just stop asking me questions.

gimme an answer here. But I do think it's great, right? I think it's great to figure out what are the right disambiguation prompts, especially with travel, because you're gonna get to a much better response if you have more information. And just more personalized input about what people are actually looking for.

I think there's an interesting also idea here around modalities. I think when we tend to speak the veracity is higher, right? We're putting much more information in there, like somewhat unlocks our natural nonlinearity of thinking versus typing. So I do think there's an interesting opportunity here to really just activate and engage voice much more to get that type of information that often helps in these contexts where maybe there's not enough information to really give you the best result.

But I believe there's more information states, right? Like always there should be an attempt to give you some smart defaults that maybe serve as disambiguate, right? Hey, you said you wanted to go to New York. Here's a flight to New York that's really cheap and easy. Here's a flight to New York that's grand and is gonna be the best first class experience of your life.

Like, What are you looking for? These are answers, these are communicated answers, but they're also serving as disambiguation questions. Is this the type of thing you're actually looking for? So I think there's different ways to get information, and I think we're all exploring what's the best per experience to engage with.

Christian: You wrote a, an article about all of this, and I pulled out one of the things that you said I, I found interesting. I thought it would be interesting to unpack. You said, or you argued that we shouldn't necessarily build a separate comparison feature, but instead define great search results. And I think that's just such a different paradygm, a different way of thinking about browsing.

Browsing equals comparison generally, but you are arguing that it shouldn't be and that we should just build great search. What, can you unpack that a little bit?

Rachel: Yeah, man, this is gonna be hard to do. But I think historically, if we think about search and discovery, you have a sort of search phase where you're inputting information and we're giving you a set of results and there's some tweakable filters and ways that you can refine those results.

And maybe you're bringing in some degree of personalization, but it was the result set. And then maybe then you activated a comparison feature. You found a few things that you liked and you put them side by side. And there was a table that was looking at the most important data based on heuristics around price and location.

And, this is specific for travel. And so that search experience was a little bit different than the comparison feature that we were building. And then maybe there was sort of an itinerary building feature where. As you were selecting things or enjoying things, you were sort of putting them in a bucket and you were building an itinerary based on that.

And that was a separate feature. And I think what we're going to see, and again, this is a large design challenge, is the just intermixing of now that sort of search and discovery, especially in a surface like ChatGPT like search and discovery is a comparison feature, right? That's how you search and discover things is by naturally comparing things.

So again, it becomes more of this natural experience around decision making. So we're bringing in sort of itinerary building and dreaming and like, ah, if I pick this and I could go on this and this could be my itinerary. Or if, I look at these two things, ah, this one's cheaper, but this one has the pool.

But if I get the pool, then I can do this activity on day two. And that's an itinerary plan I wanna make. And all of, again, all of this non-linearity in the way that we think about planning. And we think about discovery specifically in a travel space. It all starts coming together, and the design challenge, is how do you bring the non-linear nature of dreaming about a trip and logistics and all of the needs that relate to that dream and that logistical planning into a single experience.

Right now, again, we're segmenting it up feature by feature. You do this and then you do this. And it's a very linear way of thinking about it. But I think the future is really this non-linear mix of all these different feature sets together. And the, the design challenge. How do you go in and out of those feature sets really seamlessly?

Christian: One of the ways I've recently used it to kind of search and discover and compare at the same time was trying to buy a car. And there's just so much out there. There's just everything you can buy, anything and everything. Again, sort of on the restaurant example, when you can buy everything is just so difficult to make that decision.

So I talked back and forth. Here's what's important. Kept asking me question, do you want this, do you want that? And by the end, it wasn't that much a classical experience of comparing, like it was when I bought my first car 12 years ago, whatever it was, where it was tables and, and spreadsheets. It wasn't so much like that.

It was all happening through conversation. And at the end there was like, these are the kind of couple of two, three cars that you wanna look at. And then the decision was made much easier for me. So

Rachel: yeah.

Christian: it is a different way of, of browsing. Obviously it's not in

travel.

Rachel: everyone has different ways of thinking about importance and what makes sense and Right. And some people really care about certain types of information that historically we've had a search mechanism that's about where are you going how many people are you traveling with, and what are your dates?

Right? And I think those are still going to be very core pieces of information from a travel perspective. But maybe there's a lot of additional information that you see as the priority piece of information set that really you want to input to make your search great. And I think some of this more natural language experience is really opening up a different prioritization structure on what is important to me.

Like for your car search, there were potentially like things that were just like nuanced and small and important, but that maybe weren't in a traditional car search. Right. I think about some of the stuff that we. You know, I'm jamming with the team on now related to like, what if you really care when you're traveling for business about making sure in the gym, in the hotel that there's a Peloton.

' cause you're a massive Peloton ' user and that's how you wake up every morning. And that's, that's really you should be able to search for that, right? And see if you can find that in a hotel. Traditionally that's been a really tough thing to find, right? It's like a really unique and nuanced attribute of a hotel to search for.

But if we really unlock sort of natural language and getting the right data in from our partners, you should be able to find that in your search results. We're really opening up opportunities for people to create much more personal discovery experiences just based on what they find really important to them.

Christian: Another thing that you said is that agents should never say we can't help. And I think one of the frustrations that people have with AI today is that often it pretends to help when it can't. It just ends up making things up because it wants to please you. Why is saying I can't help off limits?

Shouldn't an agent be able to say that? Or similar to how an interface might say no results found, or the travel agents might say there are no flights on that day,

Rachel: Yeah. But a travel agent would never say, if I said I wanna travel on this day, a travel agent would never say, sorry, there's no flights on that date. Like the door is over there. The travel agent would say, there's no flights on that day, but let me see what I can do. Look, it seems like the next day there is flights and I know you wanna leave earlier.

Maybe you could leave a day earlier and bring in your trip and here's how we can manifest this thing that think you want, the dead end of, I'm sorry, I can't help you at all. Of course there's gonna be that dead end if you're asking for something that's inflammatory and off limits and not within the policy of some of these engines, I get that.

But I think if you're asking for something, there's always a thread to pull on. There's always either a disambiguation question that can be asked, or again, some degree of, I can't do this, but I can do this. Is this something you might be interested in? So I, I do think there's always a continuity in a conversation, even if you don't know a hundred percent that you're gonna get it right.

Christian: That's what I was referring to when I said, is there more than nuance here? Because it's not about never saying, I can't solve that. It's about saying, I can't solve that in the specific way you're asking for, but here are some alternatives or perhaps continuing that conversation in

a

Rachel: don't dead end the conversation. When I was at Airbnb working on some of this for servicing, we had really strong principles from a content design perspective around they should always feel like you're helping them, that you're not dead ending them.

And they, you're not saying, no, I can't help you. Right. There should always be sort of a depth of understanding. And I think in general, designing for AI and when you're getting in more of these sort of personified type of experiences, you do wanna build that trust and empathy. And the way to do that is not just saying, Nope, you're wrong.

I don't know. I can't do this. Sorry. It is continuously engaging just in a way that a friend would. Your friend isn't gonna dead end you in a conversation if you ask them a question. So I, I do think there is a lot of, things to learn in human behavior and psychology that really need to be brought into these experiences.

Christian: When the interface becomes more conversational and perhaps less around the screen and the mouse or the thumb or whatever device you are browsing. How do companies then ensure that their brand identity and the trust in their product still remains strong? You know, What happens to Expedia or any other product that is partially embedded into these conversational agents when most people are going to communicate mostly with an agent in the future?

Rachel: There's a few different things in your question. I would say, that, uh, most products, like products that we know today, vertical products on iOS, Android, and web experiences are going to become conversational, right? Like those experiences will be more conversant. Conversation is not always the best interaction modality to use.

Sometimes just click and buttons and really sort of more analog metaphors of design systems are the best ways to understand things or select things or control things. I do believe that products like vertical moats on iOS and Android and on web are going to exist for some period of time, right?

But those experiences are going to change based on new engagements with technology. I think what you're addressing is in some of these larger AI platforms, things like open AI or Gemini or Perplexity in some of these, how do kind of multi-brands exist in these ecosystems? And that's a, that's a different question, right?

Because I think what was interesting about engaging with OpenAI on, on building the app is this idea that we were sort of in an open canvas potentially with, um, some of our competitors, which, you know, exists within Google today as well, Um, if you search for, hotels, et cetera, we're, we're going to be next to Booking and some of our other competitors as well.

But now it's an interesting thing where we're combining sort of the paradigms of that sort of like more historic Google canvas with a conversant sort of more traditionally vertical experience. And I think that's where it gets really tricky from a brand perspective is what are you branding?

How are you bringing your brand to the front? How do people understand that in conversation, these results that are being given to you based on you looking for hotels in New York or the best flights from San Francisco to New York are being brought to you from Expedia and Expedia's data set, which is different than other competitors' data sets, is your sort of uniquely different and it's gonna give you these really great results.

That's an interesting challenge. 'cause you're all together now in an ecosystem. So I do think we're gonna have to think about, and these platforms are gonna have to think about systems design and what are some of the platform standards related to sort of brand identity in the same way that we created design systems for Android and iOS and thought in those particular circumstances around brand expression.

Christian: Yeah, I, as, as you were talking, I was trying to think, is there anything else out there that resembles this? And I guess there is not in tech, but if you think of, um, fashion for example of brands like Nike or whatever, they have their own stores, but you can also buy a Nike shirt in a, a different, in different store with a different name that just happens to sell.

So perhaps and there is a, a world for both, right? It is not either

Rachel: Absolutely. No, I think that is a great point. I, there's so many e-commerce marketplaces that have that multi-brand. I think a great example of this, I mean, all of the kind of the commerce work that's been built into Instagram or TikTok, right? Is dealing with this type of brand expression.

Who's the merchant of record? Who's responsible for this purchase? Is it Instagram or is it the merchant of record that's embedding in this e-commerce experience? This does exist in a microcosm, right? But I think the difference is these experiences are a little bit more controlled than the possibility of some of these more open, conversant canvases that we're gonna be jumping into.

But you're right, a hundred percent. I agree. A lot of these e-commerce experiences of today are dealing with this sort of multi-brand, uh, experience now.

Christian: When the paradigm shifts and we're designing more for agents and conversation, I assume that the metrics and the way you are looking as a business at whether this works or not, or whether we should invest more here or here or there also changes. Just like today, we, we have experimentation frameworks and we always look for sort of the same metrics.

Any company you go to and do growth in, they all have the same 2, 3, 4, 5 metrics that they're looking at. Right. I assume with this shift we're also gonna shift the way we look at design metrics or metrics in general. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Rachel: Yeah, I mean I think it's, it's a little bit of an open field right now in terms of thinking about success metrics, right? I think there is obviously a really interesting question that's gonna be asked in sort of data sharing and how do some of these larger platforms share with verticals and vice versa, and how does that integration work?

So there's a lot of those sort of data questions and that is, is kind of a, an interesting area for focus right now. It's like how much do we know? How much do you know? Do we share what we know? There's so much sort of privacy and security and morality wrapped into a lot of that as well. And I think we're, we are at this sort of incipient stages of figuring that out, right? There's a lot that can go wrong. There's a lot of value that can also be generated from that, but I just don't think we quite know yet. And part of that data sharing is also monetization models, you know? I won't speak too specifically about this 'cause I, I really just don't know yet how we're gonna do this and how these platforms are thinking about monetization versus the verticals.

I think there's just a lot that's currently up in the air around this, but an exciting time to try and figure that all out together.

Christian: Yeah. I think the more I talk to people about this, the more that is the conclusion that it's an open canvas. We don't know. We have some ideas, but we don't know. And that the best thing to do right now is sort of be in that mindset of exploration and curiosity and be open-minded towards what's coming.

Rachel: Everyone is thinking about it. Obviously this is, we're all running businesses, right? But I just think we just don't know yet. And it's a, an exciting time to be involved in these types of collaborations to figure that out.

Christian: I wanna change gears a little bit and talk about craft, and I'm gonna use this as a segue. We're gonna put this in the show notes afterwards so people can find it. But there is this individual, Carly Ayres, who wrote beautiful, beautiful essay about this idea of the great design reset. And so again we'll make it easy for people to find this, to which you responded in a very interesting way.

You said AI is fundamentally shifting the value of design execution and redefining that elusive notion of high craft. And then you continued talking about how when making becomes easier, the advantage shifts to designers who pair craft with strategy, marketing, engineering, and business acumen at every level.

And this is what we were talking about earlier, but I want to go back to the beginning of this, which is that elusive notion of high craft. Everyone talks about craft today and how craft is going to be the differentiator going forward. Again, we don't know, but that's what everyone is saying or a lot of people.

But when you talk about this elusive notion of high craft, can you unpack that? What do you mean by that?

Rachel: I mean, I think craft and high craft, it's always been a little bit elusive. I mean, It's subjective, it's visceral based on sort of cultural norms and standards. I think that, you know, there are obviously basic tenets of craft, of sort of executing your, your discipline well, specifically in design. But I think it also is highly contextual.

I do think that when I think of craft personally, I think around a lot of different types of vectors of execution. When I think of high craft for design, I think of obviously a beautiful sort of a understanding of the visual and brand requirements of an experience, I think about a kind of a deep awareness of really correct interaction principles as well as sort of potentially pushing the limit of interaction where required.

I also think about high craft as a strong business acumen and sort of sense of how you bring the, kind of the most important things from a business perspective into a designed experience. I think craft is a bunch of different things. I think it depends on the context. I think sometimes you could say a high craft experience is one that is extremely sort of surprising and delightful, where you bring surprising elements that you wouldn't expect, right?

Maybe you're doing a very hardcore FinTech experience, but you have just a beautiful illustration that serves a very particular informative or business based purpose to help you on your way in this experience, right? That's a moment of craft, of surprise and delight. But it also serves a really particular and logical need in that experience.

So I do think it's this combination of is it Don Norman, you know, the famous sort of grandfather of UX design that had sort of the visceral and behavioral breakdown between craft and what is quality, right? You have this visceral reaction to quality where it just, it feels right. It kind of gets your gut going.

It looks right. It gives you the idea of luxury or of fun or of simplicity, right? Uh, and then the behavioral is more of that sort of logical aspect of a this works, this just does what it's supposed to do, right? So I, I do think like his sort of three part framework and those first two parts is really right of like what creates quality and what creates craft is this sort of beauty and surprise and delight, but it really actually functions for its purpose.

Christian: And I guess going back to what's still gonna be important in the future for us as an industry, is that what you just said is not gonna change. That's still gonna be important for a designer, whether we design for conversations or whether the medium is gonna be different, those elements are still gonna be as important as ever, aren't they?

Rachel: Yeah, they are. I still think like these frameworks around sort of the visceral and behavioral, uh, make makes sense, right?

But I do think that the needs and sort of the requirements around, okay, if we're designing for non-deterministic interfaces, where you're gonna have a bajillion potential inputs, infinite number of inputs that you need your user experience to respond to, then part of craft is being beautifully responsive, right?

Is being particular for the moment, particular for the input. And what does that look like when you basically in the future could have an infinite number of interfaces? I think right now we're thinking about that with flexible interfaces, and it's an infinite amount of data that could flow into these interfaces.

But I'm more interested in the future where it's not just about sort of data augmentation coming into a card, right? That there's a different headline, there's a different subhead, there's different chips because you're looking for different things. But more on the, it's a completely new It's a completely new component that comes up based on your input.

And I think that focus on craft as really that designing for infinity and really figuring out how to create beautiful, unique experiences. Every time someone may ask something while still maintaining sort of the behavioral standards of people understand how to engage with this, that's gonna be a really new, interesting area of craft.

Christian: And that's just so complex because even in a vertical to say that a company is designing a really high crafty experience in just a vertical where you know a lot of parameters and it's not for infinity, like you said, even that is extremely complicated and very few companies are able to do it now. I can imagine.

Take that to infinity. That's gonna become even more

Rachel: How are we gonna, how are we gonna do this? Like, how the hell are we gonna do? I don't know. I don't know. I talked about it at Schema, like I talked about it conceptually, and I'm, I wanna work on this, and we are working on this with my team at Expedia, but like, we don't a hundred percent know how to do that yet.

And that's what's so exciting, I think about being a designer in this moment is how do you unlock that? What does that look like? I think there's definitely products that are starting to dip into that and creating more of these building blocks of experiences based on input and to some degree, vibe coding is that in a sense. But I don't know. We, we will, we'll see. We'll see. It's kind of a, it's a new space for all of us.

Christian: Yeah, maybe we can bring some of the learnings that we have from today into this future world in which we're gonna have to apply to infinity. So looking at, at your past you've mentioned Airbnb a few times, I think a lot of designers you would talk to and you would ask, what is a, a company that designs really good, high quality products?

They would probably say Airbnb, but a lot of them would say Airbnb. So I'm wondering if we could, um, talk a little bit about that, not necessarily about Airbnb specifically, but about some of the principles and tenets that Airbnb is using or perhaps other companies that you know of to really keep that bar of quality as high as possible.

Rachel: Yeah, I mean, I think it really starts with the people, right? And it starts specifically at Airbnb. You know, No surprise, Brian is, uh, is an incredibly high bar bar for craft. Cares, deeply about design and execution, and holds us all to those standards. When we would go in, uh, a room with him and present, he would see the minutiae.

He would see that color isn't right, that alignment isn't correct. And that's, I mean, as a designer, incredibly inspiring to, to know that your CEO is caring about these things that you as a design lead have always cared about, but maybe felt like other folks haven't. So I think at Airbnb it starts there, right?

It, it starts with that environment. And then of course it's an incredible team. It's an incredible group of designers and leads that are pushing those notions of every detail counts that push those notions of beautiful experimentation and delight and surprise. So I think a lot of it is the environment and the folks, but also sort of the green light to both care deeply about the details and to experiment with those details.

Christian: I think the bar for a hiring must be so high in terms of craft because. Is, I I remember that, saying of A people hire A people, B people hire C people. So I, if, if the people at Airbnb are really high on that, uh, on that scale when it comes to craft, then they will want to only hire people who are just as high as them, if not even higher. So that's a perpetuating positive loop, I guess it's called.

Rachel: Absolutely. And that can be brought into so many different companies, right? Is create the team that really values Right? And there's just different mechanisms of value for different leaders. Uh, I think for me, I do really value that of just really good high design craft, but I also really value really good sort of strategic thinking and creativity when it comes to working with your product management peers.

I also really value like deep curiosity around engineering and prototyping, rigor and jumping into hackathons. And so I think like it is a value system that you sort of bring to your team and you as a lead sort of choose what you wanna emphasize. And how do you set expectations with your group.

Christian: I think one of the aspects that's really hard to import and you don't have a lot of control over is how much does leadership care about these things that we're talking about? Again, Airbnb specific example co-founded by a designer. So a bit different but that's the minority of companies. A a lot of companies are not co-founded by designers or, or don't have designer high up. So I'm thinking is there some sort of a practice or something that has to do with, something a bit more in a designer's control that you could learn from?

Rachel: I believe everything's in a designer's control. Honestly, I think that you do need, obviously, some degree of empathy for experience design and really like supporting, supporting that discipline. Sure. Right. You can't have leadership that's like, I hate this discipline. I see no value. Like That is an impossible environment to work in. But the way that I've been thinking about is leadership has interests in making sure that the business is successful, that its employees are successful, that there's fin positive financial impact, right? All of these things that they care about and there's potential projects and programs and investments that leadership cares about and it is design's job to really align with the heartbeat of those priorities and interests. The worst thing a design lead could do, I think, is to say, here's what I think is interesting on design, and it literally has nothing to do with the current investments and interests and business priorities and opportunities that the rest of the leadership sees. I think it's design's job to say, what are those interests and what can we do that is so uniquely different and interesting and competitive and is going to ignite these interests in a way that maybe, um, the rest of the leadership team hasn't necessarily thought about. But you're not diversely going against everything that people care about within an organization, right. You're seeing what that is.

You're being empathetic to what people are excited about and believe will bring success to a company. And then you're igniting it, you're building it up and blowing it up and building it out, and just showing the potential from an experience perspective of what those interests can be.

Christian: This is so interesting. I, I was thinking maybe just a couple of days ago about what are patterns that I've seen between some of the best designers I've worked with or for and it's exactly what you're talking about. If I interpret it correctly, which is that they look at what the business cares about.

And then they draw back from that or they work backwards from that to make design the solution to what they care about. And and I, it's, that's so interesting that, I was thinking about this just a couple of days ago and it's more or less the same thing you were saying.

Rachel: Well, Design is about empathy, right? It's about solving problems that people have, right? So if you're off on a mountain solving a problem that no one perceives is a problem, right? Or you're off on a mountain trying to find innovative new solutions to an area that potentially there's no seed or spark that people see that as a potential opportunity to create a solution.

It's just gonna be really because we're, you're also in our industry design is but just one discipline to actually make something come to life, right? You need you need engineering partnership. And if you're sort of siloed, doing something without really making sure that the interests of your peers are activated, it's just gonna be really hard to actually make anything

Christian: and I

guess the, the alternative to that, which is probably what we had many years ago, was design coming in and sort of having their own agenda a little bit. Oh, I want the, a better experience for my customers. I want this, I want that, but with perhaps a bit of disregard for the realities of running a business and what leadership cared about. So I think, this better way of thinking about it is in contrast to I think how design perhaps was

Rachel: don't, I don't think so. I mean, I think there's like it's always been design's role to do this. One of my friends, John Maeda talks about this. I remember he came out, I forget exactly it was like maybe eight years ago, a while ago, where he was saying design is not important.

What's important is design, working with technology and working with your cross-functional partners. And I like absolutely fully believe in he was saying, right? No one discipline can be ahead and I think you do get into trouble. Like I do think a, a totally design centric led company without regard for strategy and business and engineering is going to fail, right?

A totally engineering led company without any design for user experience and Strat, right? going to fail. You need to have the kind of the capability set, or at least the empathy across some of these areas to actually create sort of successful products. Um, So I always think that was part of the core of how we needed to function as an industry.

Christian: Rachel to bring this one home. I have a couple of questions that I ask everyone at the end. um, you are not gonna get away without being asked either. So yeah, there you go. I think they're easy. I think they're easy. Let's see. First one is, where do you look for inspiration in your day to day?

Rachel: Oh my gosh, that is a great question. That's a hard one, I don't non-linear thinker here. Like, I don't go to one place , I, I read a lot and I read the newspaper. I look at the news, I, go to substack and read a bunch of different stuff. I love Carly. I, as you mentioned earlier, I read, um, her Substack all of the time. I'm going to various blogs and places for editorial. I love, it's nice that I always read Figma blog, right? There's so many different sort of editorial moments that we have access to now as designers. So reading, ingesting, I play a lot of sports, right? So I love running. I play tennis. I feel like when my mind is completely blank doing these things that I get some of my best ideas.

So I often like to go for a run in the middle of the day. My mind goes blank and then I suddenly realize something I need to do or I figured something out and I'll immediately run back to my desk. So I don't know if I'm really doing my running right, but it's been very helpful for, for thinking. I, really like engaging with my children. You know, I love learning, um, what my kids are learning at school and reading with them and reading their books and understanding what they're understanding at school and how they're actually learning. I actually think like engaging with my kids and really asking, how are you learning these things?

How are your teachers teaching you? Not even the material has been just eye-opening for me in terms of like, versus when I was a kid and how I was learning. And again, based on what we've been talking about in terms of curiosity, like learning how to learn is such a kind of an important mechanism. Um, so I get really inspired by how my children are actually learning. Yeah, I think that's maybe a good spread .

Christian: You know, for someone who said the question was difficult, you sure had a lot of good answers, so they maybe it wasn't that difficult after all. Second one is, and maybe this is very relevant to you because you are so deeply embedded into AI, but uh, what's something that you believe AI will not be good at, and therefore designers should or could double down on in the future?

Rachel: That's actually a very hard question. I wanna talk through this one a little bit 'cause I, you know, these like deeply human elements of creating sort of non-linear connections and seeing patterns that maybe previously didn't exist. And this was such a strong definition of creativity, right? Seeing patterns that hadn't historically existed.

But I do believe to some extent that AI will get good enough to do that, right? And to kind of see those patterns and to generate that. And then we kind of go into the sort of like deep empathy and sort of human resonance realm. you know, I think in a sense, AI and sort of, wasn't there a kind of a companion launch?

Like a hu a robot launch that just happened earlier this week, right?

Christian: Neo or Neo or

Rachel: so incredibly, I mean, a little weird, right? And definitely feels slightly creepy, but I mean that's, that's the goal, right? To kind of become a companion. And we know from so much history around sort of, uh, embodied objects, et cetera, that there is real empathy and obviously all the stuff that's happening related to relationships on surfaces, like ChatGPT there is sort of emotional empathy that's occurring right now in these platforms.

I don't know, I guess the question is not what AI won't be able to do, but maybe what it shouldn't be able to do, right? I think that this technology is going to be universally applicable and we're trying to figure out where it makes the most sense right now. But I do think some of these areas of like being with people and being in the presence of people, no, I, I don't think any technology should take the place of that.

Christian: Yeah. I think, um, a lot of us feel the same way. Rachel ,where can people find out more about you, follow you, see what you're up to?

Rachel: Oh my gosh, good question. I mean, If you wanna follow me on Instagram, it's mostly awkward pictures of my children, but it is interspersed with definitely some work stuff. I am becoming a more active participant on LinkedIn. I do love writing and I have started to be more sort of engaged with that surface.

Um, so LinkedIn's always a good place to kind of see what I'm up to, um, what I'm working on.

Christian: Yeah, we'll put all of this in the show notes so people can easily see what you're up to. I think your LinkedIn, uh, when you said you, you've started uh, getting a bit more involved I think it's obvious 'cause there's more posting on, on LinkedIn from you, which

Rachel: Yeah, there's

more posting. I, I, there's a lot of, there's been a lot to talk. And also, you know, I've always been someone again that I've like, oh, I've done all of this work and I'm thinking about this all the time, and I'm just in it. And I think I've had a lot of good advice recently around, Hey, you have a lot of perspectives on this. You know, And for me it's like less around people hearing what I have to say, and it's more like, how can I help younger designers or folks who are interested in this industry maybe just understand someone who's just been in it for a while. It's more about sort of the educational aspects and how can I help people get inspired or jumpstart their careers.

I think when I think back on material design and some of the work I did there, some of the most exciting parts of material for me were, when I and I still hear this to to this day, students or people who were in the beginning of their career or even in the middle of their career saying Material helped me get my first job. It helped me understand how to actually do design. It was so formative from an educational perspective. So that's how I want to engage a little bit more on surfaces like LinkedIn is how can I kind of share ideas and for folks who are kind of new to this industry or who are curious about it, how can I help get them inspired?

Christian: Well,

Just being on this podcast is also doing a little bit towards that. Helping

Rachel: And right.

Christian: Thank you very much for being on the show once again. I've had a blast. It's, it is been a lovely episode.

Thank you.

Rachel: Thanks for letting me talk about this stuff.