Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The purpose of design is really to marry the kind of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved and serve some practical function.

00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name’s Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Andy from Andy Works.

00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi guys, thanks for having me.

00:00:34 - Speaker 2: It’s great to have you on. I understand that uh you’re a woodworker. I was just looking at your clock project.

00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, when I moved to Seattle, I finally had the space after moving from New York to open up a small woodworking shop here.

00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And how would you compare doing things with your hands where once you make a cut, you cannot take it back to the digital virtual space that is your day job, let’s say.

00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it definitely requires a greater degree of thoughtfulness, I’d say, and the material is certainly a lot more expensive when you screw it up. But it’s been, you know, woodworking, I think has just been a great kind of like new creative field to get lost in and feel like a newbie again as someone who’s been in the design field now for 16 years or so. It’s great to just kind of get back to something and feel lost.

00:01:24 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can tell us just a little bit about your background.

00:01:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I came into design really through filmmaking first, and that was really sort of the first creative expression that I had sort of growing up in a, you know, small fishing village in Alaska and then found my way into design here in Seattle at the University of Washington, studied graphic design, and then started finding my way into this interaction field kind of combining filmmaking and storytelling with design and communication.

This was definitely at the early years of product design, wasn’t wasn’t even called UX or product design at the time. And came through some different agencies, worked with Nike for a bit, worked at the big corporation Microsoft for a while on a project called Microsoft Courier, doing some ink and touch.

00:02:13 - Speaker 2: Courier, absolutely. That’s a, perhaps not a commercial success, but a um say a source of inspiration for future notebook computers, right?

00:02:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, we like to say it’s the new duo now, it just took 10 years or so to finally get out there.

00:02:29 - Speaker 2: Unfortunately, in this business, being early is the same as being wrong. Exactly. That’s a quote I often reference.

00:02:37 - Speaker 1: We used to joke at Microsoft that back in the Balmer era that they were either 5 years too early or 5 years too late with all their products. So in this case, maybe it was both. So 10 years off.

But I did that for a while and that’s really what got me interested in tool making in the digital world and so left Microsoft and then ended up starting a company called 53 with some people from Microsoft. And that was really about taking that idea of building creative tools forward.

And at the time, creativity wasn’t really a market that anyone was really looking at. The iPad had just come out and we started to see a lot of interesting opportunities with this mobile touch space on a larger screen and came up with a product called Paper and Paper was like a digital sketchbook and is still out there and doing well.

00:03:29 - Speaker 2: I suspect a lot of our audience knows paper and I certainly think of it as being one of the first apps that maybe really demonstrated the potential of the iPad, and especially back in those days, you know, there wasn’t an official stylus yet, and it was a much more nascent piece of. And yet if you saw an app like this and you thought, OK, now I can kind of picture what this might be for, how it could be more than just a big phone, not just a weaker computer. Right?

00:03:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great because that was our intention. I think people forget when the iPad first came out, it was primarily marketed as a consumption device, you know, as Steve Jobs leaning back on a couch on the stage there. Reading books and watching movies.

And, you know, we just always felt like that’s one view, but really technology for us really amplifies what makes us human, and a lot of that is creativity.

So we just saw a lot of potential there. So we built paper, we built a stylus called Pencil before the Apple pencil, and really tried to kind of build out this ecosystem of creative tools. So we did that for a while and then ended up joining up with We Transfer and I worked there for a couple years heading up one of their products called Paste, and recently jumped away from that to start up this thing called Andy works.

00:04:54 - Speaker 2: And maybe that brings us to how we in fact got in touch, which is I came across here, let’s call it your uh initiating blog post.

I don’t know, it’s the first article on your site in any case, uh, called No More boring Apps, and in fact, that’s our topic today, and maybe I can just scroll back in our, we have a slack inspiration channel here, and I posted the link when I first saw it a couple of months back or last month I guess.

And I have a couple of quotes I pulled out here.

One was, if you’re small, it’s to your advantage to be weird, you can build apps that the big tech companies never could.

And secondly, when I use your app, I don’t want to see your company’s KPI that’s a key performance indicator. I want to see your point of view. And so those ideas being weird, particularly being weird and small, and not necessarily surfacing the business' needs, which I feel so much of technology today is something where they’re asking me for something because it helps their business, not because it helps.

Me and the point of view, the perspective on the world, which could of course be wrong, but at least it can be unique and fit with your app and fit with your team’s vibe and dynamic, that sort of stuff is what I’m in this business for and hopefully is what we’re doing on the Muse team.

I’ll link the article in the show notes, of course, but Andy, maybe you want to briefly summarize why you wrote that article or what you think the thesis is.

00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll try and summarize it as kind of succinctly as I can, but That statement, no more boring apps really was something of a rip off of the artist John Baldassari, who was a painter back in the 70s, who famously, you know, at the age of 39, well into his midcareer, done hundreds of paintings of landscapes, took all of his paintings, lit them ablaze. And took the cremations and made cookies out of them and it was a whole performance piece, but one thing that he did is he proclaimed, I will not make any more boring art and recorded a video of him writing that thousands of times over and over again. So I just loved that story, that sort of like epic moment of kind of renouncing your past and then going on to something else.

And he went on to become one of the seminal conceptual artists of the 20th century. And sort of hesitate to put myself at that same sort of epic moment, but a few things kind of started coming together for me and one of those was simply kind of looking around at the industry.

Again, I’ve been in this industry for a bit now and talking with friends, you know, I just wasn’t finding that much inspiration from the product industry itself. And the more I started to look at other design disciplines, you know, fashion, architecture, industrial design, furniture design, you see so many inspiring things there and when you talk to people from those fields, they have their heroes, they have like these amazing pieces that are coming out, people that are really pushing the boundaries of what can be done in that field, even though many of those fields are many decades if not hundreds of years older. Than product design. And at first kind of thought it was just me, you know, I was like, maybe I’m just reaching that age and I’m getting a little jaded, but the more I started asking others, the more I started to hear the same response, you know, people struggling to find interesting work in this field.

00:08:28 - Speaker 2: And I’ll add on to that point by it was actually just a couple episodes ago on this podcast that Mark and I were talking with Josh Miller from the browser company and we got onto this topic of architecture and buildings and how architecture we find inspiring both because it’s sort of an active. Creation that’s like art, but at the same time has these practical and functional elements, but notably there we all got excited about this. We knew the names of specific architects whose work we find inspiring. That’s exactly an illustration of your point. I think that we look for inspiration outside our field, not within it.

00:09:03 - Speaker 1: Exactly. And I think, you know, some of it is because it’s a younger field, like some of those titans are probably still yet to be really christened.

But I think all the ingredients are there for great things to happen.

You think about our field compared to these other fields, there’s so many people in product design today and building products, it’s an incredibly vast field. It’s one of the largest creative disciplines there is today, and there are many more product designers than there are furniture designers, for example, but you know, furniture designer doesn’t struggle to find inspiration within their own field. That was part of it, you know, part of it was just feeling that sort of frustration and some people have asked, does that mean I can’t have any boring apps, you know, does that mean, what about my bank app or something a lot more sort of cut and dry? Does everything have to be breakthrough and different? And that’s not really what it’s about. It was meant more as a kind of manifesto for Andy works itself. So what I’m trying to do with Andy Works is really push on this idea of design driven products, a truly sort of design differentiated software business. Because there really aren’t that many of those, I think when you actually strip it back.

00:10:25 - Speaker 2: Certainly a word that people use plenty in this world shaped by the Apple juggernaut, and that word went from being not really a part of the computer industry that I was part of 20 years back, let’s say, to being something that I feel like every company does talk about use that word in some way, but it sounds like you feel like they’re not getting quite right or at least it doesn’t push the button for you.

00:10:48 - Speaker 1: I mean, I think for sure design plays a role, but I think there’s a big difference between design, driving a business in something like fashion. I mean, fashion, it’s clothes. It just needs to be as functional as software. Like it still has a purpose and a function, and yet there’s an expressive element to it that’s very important. And there are fashion studios that wouldn’t exist. It’s entirely about the design, right? And same with architecture, there’s architectural studios that are entirely about the design, and it’s really the design that sells the product. And something that I’ve come to appreciate, I think more so over the last 5 years or so is, and this is not a knock on business, but how much business drives everything at a company. And it can be for kind of good or bad.

And I think a lot of this is gonna sound either really obvious or maybe unintuitive, uh, depending on who you are, but business really drives everything in a company and it drives the goals and the objectives of what you’re trying to achieve as a company.

And design serves that goal, just like anything else, just like legal development, everything else, all the other operations at a company. And that’s not always aligned with people or users. And so if that goal, it can be really be based on anything. And it can be based on some like core revenue metrics that you want to hit, but everyone sort of has a different pathway there to get to those goals.

And it’s not always coming directly through design.

A lot of products that we use today that we think are well designed, they may be well designed, but I contend that a lot of them aren’t actually design driven. Examples of things like, I mean, I love the design of something like Airbnb, great design, great design team, but I think the truth is that like, I don’t know if it’s truly a design choice that you’re making when you go there. I think it’s actually a number of other factors like price, maybe some other aspects of convenience. There was a time where Airbnb design was not so good, and they did pretty well, and they found a great foothold. It’s not to pick on Airbnbs.

00:13:16 - Speaker 2: Is that partially a function of the business you’re in or who your customers are, you know, maybe in the Airbnb case, you just want access to the inventory that they have to offer. Exactly as you can imagine something else where you mentioned the bank example before, and I do think there is, yeah, we can come to the best practices versus the more original. Approach, but I do choose banks based on whether they have a good user experience in the way that I interact with the services they’re providing me because lots of banks can hold my money, but being well designed is in fact a differentiator and a big one for me, a deciding one.

00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think there are these key kind of companies like that that really, for me, it comes back to how much of it is what you’re doing and how much of it is how you’re doing it.

And I think design really comes into that latter portion. It’s really about how you do it. So where everything else is equal and you’re offering sort of the same thing as someone else, design really comes in and helps differentiate it.

You know, paper is a good example of this. Paper was not the first drawing out on the iPad. There were literally, you know, 40 or 50 others. That we looked very closely at and just felt like they weren’t capturing the right sort of spirit of creativity and weren’t executing on it very well. And we took all those insights and thought, well, let’s formulate it into something else, something that focuses really on some of the key things that we knew were really important to the creative process.

So it took those sets of values applied to something that already exists and I, I mean if you looked at paper just from a bullet point standpoint.

It would have looked very boring, you know, if you just had a feature list. It would have looked like nothing. I think it’s that really that approach that you take that really makes it driven by design.

And I think there’s just so much happening today where people are trying to find new problems to solve. And I think that’s great, but for me, I’m at a place where I don’t feel like I need more or I don’t feel like I have a ton of new problems to solve. I kind of want better, you know, when I look at my phone, it’s full of hundreds of garbage apps, to be honest, stuff that I just kind of downloaded in the moment. And I’m just finding this desire to have like that well crafted thing just like as we are in our homes, you know, I think you look around and the things that you choose to put in your office or on your desk or in your kitchen, you want those things to be considered to reflect your values. There’s nothing revolutionary about a new tea kettle, but maybe you want something that just like really reflects your values and your aesthetics and maybe even be a little bit inspiring.

00:16:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. So my perspective on your post was that there’s potentially a lot of degrees of freedom that you have when you’re designing a business and a product, but it feels like design is often the last variable, so you end up fixing things because of the economics, because of your or structure, because of your product goals, or because of just, um, assumptions or constraints that you impose on yourself.

And then after you’ve done all of that, you don’t have a lot of room, basically.

On the design, so everything ends up looking the same, right? And when I think of when I hear no more bad apps, it’s like break out of those constraints, let design be a more free variable, give yourself more degrees of freedom, so you can make different choices and not take on so many of these assumptions and premises and see what comes out of that.

Yeah. And I think that speaks both to, by the way, the product in terms of where you end up with the design, but also speaks to you as a designer, right? It’s not super fun to be the last free variable where you’re very constrained. You want to be actually to have more agency over how the thing works in the broadest sense.

00:17:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think we’ve kind of seen this sort of central premise of like user centered design. We’ve seen its flaws now, we’ve seen where it can fall short.

00:17:17 - Speaker 2: So here you’re talking about user centered as in more driven by kind of user research, as opposed to, I don’t know, a designer’s internal sense of what’s interesting, special and good.

00:17:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a sense, I mean, again, it’s one of those things that can sound very obvious, but as people like we’re we’re terrible at knowing. What it is that we really need, right? You know, you can kind of ask us what we want, but we’re pretty bad at knowing what we really need. So that’s kind of a direct hit on the idea of user centered design.

Now, there’s a lot of good with user centered design, but I think with anything, you know, once it becomes a dogma, it can go too far and we can start to see its flaws.

You mentioned architecture earlier. I’m a fan of America’s greatest architect really, Frank Lloyd Wright, and His household name back in the first half of the 20th century. I think he was on the cover of Time Magazine like twice. Like everybody knew him. He was like a superstar back in the day and really shaped American architecture in the first half of the 20th century and even beyond that really. But, you know, his last work was the Guggenheim in New York and It’s a weird building. It’s not quite in line with much of what else he’s done. But when it first came out, it was super controversial. You know, now we think of it as this great pillar of architecture. It was very controversial at the time. People were complaining about how it was very disrespectful of the art. I don’t know if you know it, it’s a building that’s basically a giant spiral. So you walk along the outside on a slope. So you’re walking around this large atrium on the exterior around the slope, spiraling upward, and then you walk back down, spiraling down. And it’s kind of antagonistic to users in a way. It’s not very conducive to appreciating the art, but it’s become like one of the best places to build installations because it has become its own kind of unique place that has created its own sort of unique artwork. So artists will sometimes create paintings that follow the curvature of the floor and have this slight bend to it. And I think about that sometimes because I think, again, that wasn’t listening necessarily to what an art museum should be. It was creating this new vision and then having other people jump in and react to it. And that’s something that I think again is kind of missing like user centered design can be this great kind of iterative approach. It can get you kind of to this local maxima. But if you really want to step into new territory and see some new vista, you know, sometimes that takes some crazy leap of faith by like individual minds, right?

00:20:16 - Speaker 3: To look at another art form, Keith Raboy makes this point with movies. You don’t make a movie by surveying 100 people and then taking the average of what everyone said and then filming that, right? If someone has a vision for a movie that should exist and they pull together all the pieces to make that happen. They find the actors, they find the photographer, and so on, and then you test it, and you see, OK, people do where they don’t take that up, but you have to work backwards from a vision.

00:20:41 - Speaker 2: Which once again seeking inspiration from other fields, and actually that strikes square on one of my favorite books in this kind of maker biography category is called Making Movies. I can’t remember the author’s name, but it’s a pretty successful Hollywood director who basically wrote a, here’s how I make movies, he just kind of like walks through the whole process giving specific examples from his work. And the director is this sort of the visionary CEO type of the thing, he, she or they are doing some kind of artistic expression, but they also have all this practical management stuff of just getting the right people there and the technical stuff with the camera and Dealing with weather and dealing with municipalities and zoning and permits and you gotta sort of pull all that together while at the same time keeping the line of sight of the vision that you’re here to make a piece of art and make something that moves people and you do that by having a unique idea and sticking with it through all those practicalities.

00:21:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love, as I mentioned, my first creative outlet was filmmaking, and I loved those as So I tend to use filmmaking as references quite a bit. And one thing that I love that a lot of great directors, Tarantino, Scorsese, the advice that they’ll give to up and coming directors is really to make the movie that you wanna watch, you know, find something that you want to see, that you want to exist, and make that. And if you’re lucky, there’s probably other people like you out there that are really gonna connect with it.

But that’s really the only way to make a great story, is to really, you know, feel something personal about it.

And I don’t really say it in that piece, maybe I hint at it, but Part of my hope is that the product design and products in general can actually be this vector for interesting culture to emerge. Again, our products are used by billions of people every day, and there’s so much time and so much attention put into these products that I think it’s just this great medium that we haven’t really fully explored in terms of creative expression.

00:22:55 - Speaker 2: Can you think of some examples of digital products as vectors for culture?

00:23:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can, believe it or not. But it doesn’t come from the product world, it comes from gaming.

00:23:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Mark and I reference games and both technology inspiration and design and otherwise more often than you might think for a productivity tool.

00:23:19 - Speaker 1: I think gaming is amazing, and I hadn’t sadly really been following it that closely. You know, you’d think someone in UX design and filmmaking, like the intersection of that is gaming.

But I hadn’t really been following it.

So this last year I’ve really jumped in and kind of immersed myself in gaming, and it’s just fascinating.

I mean, yeah, if you’re talking about ways to really connect with individuals at a brand or an emotional scale in the digital world, I think it’s gaming and so, yeah, I mean, a lot of work from Play Dead Studio like inside. Limbo.

Yeah, I love Limbo. There’s a Swedish game designer, Oscar Stolberg. I don’t know if you guys have heard of him. He did a game called Bad North, uh maybe a couple years ago, but he just came out with a game, you know, it’s, it’s hard to even call it a game, it’s almost a creative toy. But it’s called Townscaper.

00:24:20 - Speaker 3: Oh, that guy, yeah, I just know him as the townscraper guy, yeah.

00:24:24 - Speaker 1: It is fascinating. I mean, the execution on it and the thought put into something, again, like to explain to people like you literally just click.

Like a sort of empty grid and you create these little like cubes of a town and so you build a town. That’s kind of all you do. So it’s almost like digital Legos in a way where you’re like building structures, but just the thought and attention that goes into how these things are built and how they connect and how one connects with another.

He has lighting, he has just amazing sense of polish and execution. On something that’s really just so simple. So those are the things that I tend to look at more and more these days.

00:25:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s interesting when I was thinking about inspiring digital creators, the first big category that I came to was these maverick game designers, and often it’s just one person who somehow builds the whole game end to end.

A few examples that came to mind for me was Jonathan Blow with Braid, Notch and Minecraft, Jordan, I think that’s Bechner on Prince of Persia, and oftentimes they did not only the idea and the story, but the programming, the graphics, they composed the music, sometimes they record it.

It’s an amazing breath, but going back to this idea of degrees of freedom, that gives me the ability to have this vision and to build it up using all of those different angles and aspects to the way that they want it to exist.

So you get these very unified, polished, inspiring experiences from it.

And they’re able to do things that are really out there, because when you have this new idea for how a game should work, you really need to change all those other aspects at the same time.

And it’s hard to convince a bunch of other people to do that. So by having everything under your own control, you can often make that happen.

00:26:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and wouldn’t it be great to have some of that seep more into our everyday lives? That’s kind of my dream, I guess. And what we’re trying to pursue with Andy works is like, can you take some of that playfulness, that fun. That challenge it at times and bring that into everyday experiences, maybe.

00:26:26 - Speaker 2: Now games and film both are probably more on the, there’s obviously many practical aspects to implementing them, but the output really is art and it’s more pure form.

It’s designed to give you an experience or show you a perspective on the world that doesn’t really serve a practical purpose, whereas the clothing and architecture examples we used earlier, those maybe are closer to something like digital tools, productivity tools in the sense that, On one hand, they can be inspiring. They can express an artistic vision and in the best cases they do, but they also need to do practical things. They need to stay on your body and keep you warm. They need to house humans or in the case of productivity tools, they need to solve a specific problem that a person has and is willing to pay for.

How do either of you think about that trade-off between the express something original or inspiring or playful or soulful versus solve a problem such that someone wants to pay you for the product?

00:27:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m not sure there needs to be a trade-off. actually, as I was thinking about other examples of inspiring creators, I came up with this category of like the vertical integrators, this would be again Raboy with and team with Open Door, Ryan Johnson at Cul de sac, obviously Elon Musk and everything that he’s doing. These are people who like, in the case of cul de sac, for example, it’s like, I want a more walkable neighborhood. So do that. I’m just going to go to, I think it’s Arizona, buy a bunch of land and like build an entire neighborhood from scratch. OK, that’s a lot of real stuff to achieve a real end. And likewise, of course, with, you know, Elon sending stuff to Mars and so on. So I think you can get both of those and actually I think when you undertake a more ambitious and inspiring mission, you can often attract more talent, resources, and so on to your venture.

00:28:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll even go a step further. I honestly think that is kind of the purpose of design, is really to marry that the kind of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved and serve some practical function.

And I think without those two ends, it sort of gets lost or the design falls a bit flat or loses touch if it goes too far and the kind of playful.

I mean, I’d be tempted to just build a game myself, but something in me, I think growing up in Alaska, feels like everything I do has to have some practical purpose to it.

And so I like this idea of trying to bring those two together and again like I think we see it in so many other aspects of our lives, you know, the furniture that we buy to the items that we use every day.

We use them, they serve a practical purpose, but we don’t just buy any chair, you know, we buy a chair that speaks to us, fits within our surroundings, maybe reflects something that we think is interesting.

And so it’s always kind of this combination of the two, and again, yeah, you see it in fashion, you see it in architecture. We just haven’t really seen that much in the digital product space.

00:29:19 - Speaker 2: I like your connecting items in our daily life, physical items in our daily life to some of these digital products.

And for me, this is why I like using the word tools. For me, my bike is a tool for me to get around the city.

And my kitchen knife is a tool to help me do a better job at making healthy food, and the furniture, for example, a chair is a tool for me to sit on either to do productive work at a desk or relaxing chair to sit and read or feel cozy. These are all tools that serve a purpose, but also can make me feel inspired or make me have certain kinds of positive feelings and digital tools are no different. The apps on my phone, the software on my computer, the services I use for email and calendar and all these other relatively prosaic things, but in the same way that sitting and cutting and writing are all prosaic everyday things, so too are these digital things. I mean they can’t be inspired and that they can’t, as you say, marry together the practical function that they fulfill with something extra, something special.

00:30:21 - Speaker 1: Especially because we’re spending more and more of our lives in the digital world now, and we expect to spend much more of it over time. I mean, especially now, of course, with the quarantine, but we’re spending so much of our time here. And that was another thing. I just started to see where this was going. It’s like, oh man. This world needs to look a little better and be a little bit more inspiring if this is, you know, where we’re gonna be spending the majority of our time down the road, you know, where we meet people, where we connect with people, where we get our work done. And I’m really drawn to these everyday things.

00:30:59 - Speaker 2: So when we think about everyday physical items in our life, one that comes to mind for me is this clock project that I saw you document on Twitter. How does that fit into what we’re talking about here?

00:31:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so that really came about through one this interest in furniture making and just really like, again, getting really deep and lost in like a brand new field.

As soon as you get that new talent and that new ability, I feel like you start to see everything around you as something that can be rebuilt or redesigned or or recreated.

And one thing that I had my eye on for a long time was a clock. And the reason for that is that my kids, I have two young kids ages 3 and 5, and they would constantly ask me, as young kids do, is it time for bed yet? Is it bedtime yet? Is it time for lunch? Is it time for dinner? They didn’t know how to read an analog clock, and at first my thought was, well, let’s just teach them how to read a clock, but then the design brain kind of kicks in and you’re like, well, maybe the problem isn’t the kids, but it’s the clock, not the user’s fault.

00:32:10 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So you start digging into it and you start to realize how many of the conventions that have really been set.

You know, how arbitrary many of them really are like the sort of twice around 12 hour dial clock that we think of as the analog clock, was more of a mechanical limitation at the time, and it’s just kind of hung around for a few 100 years.

So I started to think about what a clock could be.

It turns out like an analog clock is really hard to read actually. It sounds simple cause we’ve learned it and we looked at it all the time. But if you’re a young kid, or if you’re, you know, it’s even used as mental aptitude test for people that may have like early onset dementia. And so it’s actually quite a complex abstract test.

You know, you have to think of which hand is what, you know, there are multiple hands, they represent different increments of time, and you have to know which direction they’re moving. You have to know that like the large hand pointing at a 3, multiply by 5, that means it’s 15, that’s a fraction of 60.

There’s a bit going on, and that’s just too much for a 3 year old to really grasp. But it’s silly like they understand time, in a sense, they understand that things take time and that something isn’t now or it’s later. They understand the concepts.

00:33:33 - Speaker 2: They just can’t the cyclical aspect of the day as well that there is a dinner time every day that is at the same time and it’s the day that changes, uh, even though there’s a, there’s a, there’s a new day, but maybe the only thing they understand is that there is a schedule.

00:33:45 - Speaker 1: But I started looking at that and just going down a rabbit hole of like questioning every assumption and actually ended up coming back to the first clocks, which were sundials. And that was the first goal was to fix the model rather than spinning twice. We see the sun move around the earth, or that’s how we perceive it, once a day.

So, OK, let’s have a 24 hour clock rather than 12. And then I got rid of the hands that was clearly like just too much information.

And the truth is, if you’re a kid is at 1253 or 1255, like that level of precision doesn’t really matter typically. So I replaced it with just a single hand that moves around a 24 hour clock, and then I painted half of it dark and half of it light.

So the dark half was nighttime, the light half was daytime. And then probably the best move was just, I did this right at the end. I just slapped a sticker next to bedtime on the clock. So just a little red dot. So the hand is like a nice bright red and this red dot. So all they have to know is like, has that hand hit that dot yet or not? That’s when they know it’s bedtime.

And kind of, you know, whenever you make something, you don’t know if it’s gonna work. This like surprisingly worked really well. Like, they immediately got it, didn’t have to really be taught it. And now they can read it and they can tell me the time, they could tell me if it’s bedtime or not. And so it’s really kind of changed their abilities and really like opened up their own sense of agency.

But probably the most interesting thing is I found that for me, it was also a little bit easier. I didn’t quite realize just how those micro moments of kind of looking at an analog clock to kind of compute the time. How much that was really in the way.

It’s kind of like uh uh it’s hard to explain, but it’s almost like screen refresh rates, you know, once you jump to 120 from 60, suddenly like, you notice it, you feel it, and it’s hard to go back. It’s that same kind of like mental exercise that suddenly it feels easier. And the other thing is that I noticed that of all the things I built, I mean, paper’s been downloaded 50 million times and I use it every week, but I don’t use it as much as this clock. This clock I use 20 times a day at least, and it’s just like making those small moments better and easier and more delightful. And that really got me on this path and what we’re trying to do with Andy works around taking that idea of like, no more boring apps and the everyday, and you make these everyday moments. Marry them with great design and build something that’s truly like design differentiated. So all these little digital moments that touch our lives throughout the day, you know, I wake up, I check the weather, I set a timer, these things like this, can you elevate those to something interesting, inspiring, maybe even simpler.

00:37:01 - Speaker 3: I think it’s such an interesting example because it shows. How often bad design or boring design is really directly downstream from the wrong assumptions or constraints. So yes, if you assume your clock needs to go around once every 12 hours, it needs to have second accuracy, it needs to have two hands, it needs to have 12 at the top, it can’t have any other markings. Like you basically back yourself into the boring old clock, but when you break free of those constraints, when you allow yourself to analyze the problem from first principles, there’s a lot more you can do. That’s a power and I see a lot with things that end up being boring apps.

00:37:33 - Speaker 1: Well you guys are doing this too. I feel like testing some of the assumptions around navigation, input, creativity.

00:37:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. And not only assumptions on the design, the solution that is, but also on assumptions on the sort of problem or the inputs. So for example, a big one for us is we broke the assumption that you need to be flexible to people having a stylus or not. Basically, Muse requires the Apple pencil to. substantially and a lot of apps, they just would never accept or even consider that being a possibility. We realized, hey, actually, basically, everyone has a stylus, the people who don’t, they’re happy to buy one, so let’s just roll with it. And that gives us a lot more degrees of freedom to use that as an input modality in a more powerful way.

00:38:12 - Speaker 2: Thinking about established conventions like 24 hours on a clock or do the hands go around twice and thinking about Muse and where we’ve tried to sort of challenge the status quo because we think things can be improved, such as requiring a pencil versus places where we just go with what people know and expect. I feel like with apps and software, you have the platform conventions and in many cases even rules, right? Apple and their human interface guidelines and the the app store rules and the review process and there’s a different but similar set of conventions for say web software, desktop software and so forth and.

I think part of the hard part of the journey we’ve been on building this particular product and I expect it’s the same for anyone that wants to do something a little bit original, is trying to decide where to take your weird thing and just really take that all the way and just double down. on the fact that you’re breaking on what’s expected or even breaking the rules of the platform and in other places, you just want to be as simple and standard and boring and exactly what’s expected on the platform as possible because that’s not where you’re really innovating.

How do you navigate the trade-off between those two things?

00:39:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you can’t really play either extreme, obviously, and you see that happen sometimes, especially with younger product makers or designers trying to reinvent everything in their experience or their app, and you can very quickly go down a path of just everything’s too new. Everything’s like, look at me. I mean, you’re really calling attention to something when you are rethinking it. And so just like with, you know, a great piece of graphic design, you kind of know how to control someone’s attention. You can’t make the whole thing loud. You have to know where to put white space and where to draw attention. And that’s really the trick is kind of finding what’s unique about you. That’s usually where you want to put the innovation. I don’t know if you guys have heard this before, but sometimes we in the past talked about things like an innovation budget, you know, you have a certain amount of innovation that you can plug into your app that people are willing to kind of learn because there’s something new and unique and interesting behind it or that is unlocked by it. And so you have to really, I think, know what’s unique, you know, like what is it that you’re bringing that’s unique, and that’s where you focus on what becomes, you know, unique and interesting and rethinking common conventions. But honestly, like most of an app, oftentimes or any sort of product is convention, and that’s important because you need the important stuff, the truly innovative stuff to pop out, to jump out at you. And you can’t have it all jump out. So there are places where you kind of need it to recede a bit, and the best way to do that is to follow some convention. There’s nothing wrong with conventions, like they’re there for a good reason. But they become the sort of like receding sort of principle.

00:41:12 - Speaker 3: This actually reminds me of another great blog post called funnily enough, Choose Boring Technology, which seems contradictory to your blog post title, but it’s actually making a similar point to what you just said, which is, I think he called them innovation tokens, if I remember correctly, this idea you have like 3 to spend in your entire business and so choose wisely what you invest your novelty in.

00:41:32 - Speaker 2: Maybe that one is on the implementation side. And Andy’s talking about sort of the user side, users only have so much willingness to kind of struggle through figuring out something new, so you want to spend that call attention to the things that really matter and everything else kind of follows conventions and on the implementation side, such as technology. It’s just your team is going to need to push hard and invest more and spend more time to get the weird stuff right, to get it good or get it interesting versus following conventions. It’s kind of almost mindless. You just do what is known to be the best practice and that’s it, you can move on.

00:42:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think one of the challenges or shortcomings that I see today is that there are a lot of products that are almost all convention and you sort of struggle to find it, at least again from a design standpoint.

I see a lot of companies innovating on business models or distribution or various services, but in terms of design, execution or a user experience, there are very few that I think that are really kind of pushing the innovation button there, but there are things like design systems are great, but again, that’s like a tool you’re establishing a convention, and if your entire design.

It’s just kind of hinged upon pulling components from existing design systems. Then, you know, your index experience is gonna look pretty conventional.

00:42:56 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and ultimately, well, I think it’s important to have a sense of how you’re going to navigate this tradeoff of convention versus originality, I think you ultimately need to go back to first principles and just make a great design. I think some people sometimes get lost in how they’re relating to the convention or whatever. You gotta ask yourself, is it good? I sometimes joke with our designer Leonard, like, Leonard, you can design this however you want as long as it’s good. And I’m only half joking when I say that.

00:43:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to go a little further, I, I, you have to realize, like, why do these conventions exist? I mean, the truth is a lot of conventions exist. A lot of the guidelines for these things exist. Like think of who is building an app like Google has to build these guidelines for everyone. Like somebody that knows nothing about design. They’re kind of building a base layer and also one size fits all, right?

00:43:40 - Speaker 2: So it’s not just the skill level of people implementing, but just all very different kinds of apps or in some cases weighted towards just where their existing customers or revenue bases, right? That’s part of what we run into with Muse, which is so much of the iOS platform and design conventions are based around phone used with one finger or small screen. And so those conventions are basically good there for consumer apps on the phone, but they become quite restricting and even very counterproductive on the iPad for a professional tool.

00:44:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah. So in many cases, the conventions are just that, they’re conventional, like they’re not going to get you to something interesting because they’re not really designed that way. These guidelines are put in place to provide some very base common denominator experience for everyone. Like you’re not gonna be able to kind of push above the noise and achieve something truly great by following those alone.

00:44:38 - Speaker 2: I’m also reminded of a lesson that my high school English teacher taught me, which is I was complaining that we were taught all these rules of good writing and even grammatical rules, and then we would read these classics who were held up as these amazing works, and I would point out all the ways that these authors broke the rules. I said, why are we learning these rules if these great works break them? And her answer was, well, you have to know the rules first because then you can break them in interesting ways.

00:45:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. Thumbs up. I’m curious for you guys, what you think your most controversial belief is. Hm.

00:45:14 - Speaker 3: It was very interesting.

00:45:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, and part of the premise of MS is that I believe that computers can help us think, not just author, but think our thoughts. And actually maybe with some of the tools for thought stuff that’s breaking into the zeitgeist a little bit this year, that’s slightly less controversial, but the counterpoint to that is everything about the way that they’re created now, particularly when you get to the realm of web and mobile platforms, which is essentially where all the action is, let’s say, is designed really specifically to keep you from thinking. There’s literally a bible of user experience design titled Don’t Make me Think. And my view is, no, please, make me think and actually help me think.

00:46:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s related to my belief as well, which is, well, I guess I have 2.

Maybe I’ll throw 2 out there.

But they sort of formed some of the the backbone of Andy works and what we’re doing.

So the first is that a product can challenge its user. So at times maybe even be antagonistic or seem to be antagonistic towards the user, but again it’s something that you see in other aspects and so many other experiences that we experience in the physical world in other areas, you know, again, films, if it doesn’t challenge you, it’s not interesting, right? And so, I really think that design can challenge, it doesn’t have to be invisible. It can kind of be right up there in your face.

And we just have yet to see it. That’s one. The other one is around pushing back against the idea of scale in software, and it really kind of cuts against, I think, what is just natural in the software world, or, you know, software just naturally wants to be high volume, low margin, but thinking about, you know, is there a way to flip that around where it’s, you’re talking about very low volume, high margin value though, and Ship something and create products that are only for a few people, but really deliver a ton of value to them in the consumer space, not just in the like specialized professional space, but in a consumer space. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but I’m really interested in it. And like we’ve been trying some things with Andy works to do some of that, but it’s really cutting against the grain of software. Everything about software wants to be completely open and available to everyone, you know, we’ve been exploring ideas around like making limited edition versions of software. That’s something that is just like, you wouldn’t have to think twice about that in the physical world. It would just come naturally. But like in the software world, you have to do extra work to limit it, you know, you have to like track quantities and things like that. But I’m really interested in that sort of sense of exclusivity and personalization and having this like high impact on fewer people.

00:48:16 - Speaker 3: Nice. I like that a lot.

And that also resonates with what I was thinking about from my controversial opinion, and it connects back to this idea of design is related to everything else in the business.

It’s related to your work structure, it’s related to your business model, it’s related to the economics, it’s related to your users and your protocols.

So I think the flip side of that is that if you really want to do something innovative with design, you have to grapple with those other aspects.

I actually saw, there was a tweet from Patrick Colson yesterday about people who are doing interesting work on desktop designs. And to me, that’s, you actually can’t tackle that without tackling the whole problem of funding that work and getting it distributed.

So I think the most interesting design problems are really these system problems of how do you organize people over time to come to this future that you want.

And I’m excited that people are now starting to try that a little bit, like in your case with software, I’d like to see a lot more of that experimentation.

So before we close out here, I want to bring it back to where we started, which is working with your hands and woodworking.

So Andy, I have a sort of pet theory about woodworking in particular, and I’m curious if it resonates with you as a woodworker. And I developed this theory because a lot of my programmer friends and acquaintances have wandered into the field of woodworking. So I think there’s some particular attraction for people who work in technology. And here’s my theory. So, There’s the kind of obvious piece of it’s a new and different creative endeavor. In the same way that I, you know, play the piano, and that’s a creative thing, woodworking is also a creative thing. But I think there’s more factors at work. One is, it’s a very physical undertaking where you use your whole body and also the work product is something you can, for example, sit in or lie in. And so that is something that I think a lot of people who work in technology are missing because it is very digital, unsubstantiated work products. But the thing that I think is most important with woodworking is you have a lot of agency. As a woodworker, you can go all the way from the tree to the end product yourself. You have control over the exact wood use, you can choose your tools, you can choose what you build. You’re so much creative freedom and agency as an individual woodworker, whereas with Modern programmers, it’s like, OK, you basically got to use iOS and you got to use Swift, and if you don’t like that, too bad, you know, find another job. And I think people are increasingly grinding up against that as developers and when they see woodworking, they see all those ideal qualities as a creative person. So I’m just curious if that resonates with you.

00:50:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, that does. And like you said, I think it’s a common feeling. I think even outside of woodworking, you know, you see a lot of people baking their own bread during the pandemic, right? I mean, to the point where it’s almost becoming a joke. But look, if you’re gonna go out and make something, I’m not gonna make fun of you. I think there is something about, yeah, going back to some very fundamental materials and being able to shape it into something again that you can use and you can use every day. And that was definitely part of it for me.

Another part for me personally was I’ve always been interested in 3D and getting deeper into 3D. But you know, like, uh, when I left we transfers at the start of the year, I’d just been kind of burned out on digital things and just needed to like step away. But a great way to get into 3D is not actually through the 3D software. 3D software is like some of the most complicated software in the world. I mean, uh, the modeling, the rigging, animation, texture, I mean, like building a game is pretty sophisticated stuff, and it can really be a beast to try and get into. So the way that I kind of wanted to break into it wasn’t actually through the software, it was through like playing around with 3D form and thinking about three dimensional form. I mean, again, I come more from a graphic background. So for me, it was a great way to just start thinking and playing in 3D, getting back to basics. I feel like I learned a lot actually about product design now that comes from woodworking that I’m sort of bringing back into product.

But yeah, wordwork is great. I mean, it’s amazingly deep. It can seem so simple, but I mean you could spend a long, long time just trying to figure out the right finish for your desk or your bench or whatever it is, because there’s so much history there, so there’s so much depth, so much history. To dig into and you can never really reach the bottom of it. I feel like you talk with super experienced woodworkers and they’ll all still say like, uh, I don’t really know what I’m doing, you know, like, there’s someone who’s a better expert out there than me. And so I really love that, the sorts of combinations of things, the depth of it, like you’re saying, the kind of like elemental nature of it to take something very primitive and transform it into something that you can use every day. And then again, personally for me, it was partly just like Getting my hands into something 3 dimensional. Hm.

00:53:09 - Speaker 3: Very interesting.

00:53:11 - Speaker 1: Do you guys do woodworking?

00:53:13 - Speaker 3: I had dabbled in it a little bit. I actually took some courses here in the Seattle area, and then when I was younger, I did a lot of model working, which is like, you know, balsa wood type stuff, and I had a lot of those properties of you have agency over what you’re building and what you end up with is something very physical and potentially interesting, if not, you know, useful in the classical sense.

00:53:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think the reason a lot of us, like a lot of people from our generation got into this sort of like digital product world. It was partly because of how open it was. Back when I got into this 20 years ago, there were no tools to design this stuff. There wasn’t a software application to design software, you know, you had to use photo editing software or like, you had to hack Flash, you know, which was meant for animation to build something with scripting. And so we kind of got into this, I think, because of its ambiguity and its openness and now over time as it.

That open field is like slowly started to pave pathways. And then lay down the asphalt. Now things are very set in many ways. And so, yeah, moving something to a discipline like woodworking or metalsmithing. I know some folks jumping into that. That’s just kind of going back to this idea of like, well, now anything’s possible again, kind of going back to something that’s very elemental that you can really shape in any way that you want.

I personally think that there’s still room in the digital world. Oh yeah, totally. And we just haven’t, maybe to your point, haven’t set up the businesses and the sort of fundamentals right to make it possible yet. I’ll stop there, cause I’ll probably keep going.

00:55:00 - Speaker 2: I think that’s a great note to end on because it leaves me feeling inspired. Great. Well, if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or use email with hello at museapp.com. We’d love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Andy, this was really inspiring discussion. Thanks for coming on and thanks for pushing us all to not be boring. Thanks for having me, guys. All right, see you both later. Bye.

00:55:26 - Speaker 3: See you, Adam.