Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the characters is a poet that evokes much emotion with his work, and one of his fans asks, how do you do it? How do you come up with these words that are so moving? And he says, well, the key is the poet has to speak the words that are already in the person’s heart.

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.

I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague, Leonard Sursky. Hi. And Leonard, it’s one of my favorite times of year now that I live in a place with seasons. When the leaves turn orange and red and fall off the trees, kind of have that smell of the, I guess it’s the decaying leaves in the air, little bit of a chill, but it’s not too cold yet, Halloween and pumpkin carving. How are you enjoying your fall so far?

00:00:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it. It’s my favorite season, I think, especially since we both live in a city in Berlin which has a lot of parks and a lot of forest area. It’s just really great to be able to go into a forest and enjoy a long walk in that atmosphere.

00:01:09 - Speaker 1: My dog loves it as well. Basically, the leaves on the ground all over the place, I think, give like plenty of stuff to kind of sniff through, so it makes dog walks more interesting as well.

00:01:19 - Speaker 2: Even for humans, I feel like the smells in the autumn are more exciting than in the summer.

00:01:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. Well, I’ve got exciting news. The Muse team is growing.

I’ll link to our jobs page here. We actually have two positions now. Longtime listeners of the podcast might remember we talked about our partnership model all the way back in episode 4.

That’s when we were hiring the 5th member of our team who ended up being Adam Wulf. That was a good year and a half ago, I think. And it’s certainly nice, the stability, I think, team dynamic compared to the kind of fast hiring growth startup environment that I was previously used to where you just always have new people coming in, you’re constantly on boarding, group dynamics are constantly changing. We’ve had this really stable group for a while, which is nice in a lot of ways, but also it’s really exciting to think of new perspectives and just fresh faces coming in to to join us. And I guess growing from 5 to 6 or 5 to 7 isn’t such a huge jump, but also it’s a pretty big change for us, I think.

00:02:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a really exciting moment for the company. So we’re hiring for two positions. One is a local first engineer and one is actually a design slash storytelling position, and that’s what we want to talk about today.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. It felt like something really worth digging in on that we landed in this kind of maybe slightly unusual job description.

Well, I suppose local first engineer is also unique in its own right, but The designer and storyteller versus other ways we could have titled this role led me to really reflect on like what is storytelling and why do we want to call it this for a marketing role or just a designer or brand designer or something like that, and how does Muse tell its story today? And what do we think of the unique qualities of a person like this that could join our team and That’s kind of the whole deal with this podcast, right, as we take a relatively straightforward thing like a job listing and then go very philosophical. So, maybe we start there. Our topic is storytelling, so, Leonard, for you, what does that word mean?

00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting process to figure that out internally for us as well. You and I have been kind of filling that role as the storyteller from MS and doing all the marketing and the design on the marketing side for that. And on one hand, we have had really great success. I think with telling our story, I think that’s kind of what we have to do for Muse, since we are a small company and we don’t have that much budget basically to spend on advertising and stuff like that. So we kind of have to tell our story and share our ideas.

And the good thing is for us, for us, we have a lot to say.

We have built the product based on research that you’ve done at I can Switch for many years. And so there’s actually a story to tell here and we just need to be able to really tell that story well.

00:04:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of different layers of it telling our story as a team, telling the story of the product, telling the story of how people think and how technology has helped or hindered that over time. There’s many different dimensions here, but I think it’s pretty important, the software by itself without the explanatory elements would be at a minimum hard to understand and possibly worse, just easy to dismiss if you don’t have that kind of backstory in context.

And so I found myself just kind of researching this fundamental question, what actually is storytelling and of course, I think we all sort of know that stories are fundamental to how humans understand the world.

That’s how we, for example, share culture or instill moral lessons, how we bond with each other, entertain, obviously, and everything from religious and mythological texts, the Bible or fast forward to Something like modern day superhero movies, those are sort of our modern myths and those stories are ways that we not just are entertained, but yeah, we kind of understand the world and what we as society value or don’t value.

You can even look at something a little less that’s sort of like a fictional story and something more directly explanatory.

I think like TED Talks, for example, you can make fun of the format and people do, and maybe they’re sort of annoying sometimes, but in a way, I think they have been so successful and so far reaching because they’ve found. a format that on one hand is addressing big meaty questions about how we improve the world, but they also have kind of a gather around the campfire vibe. Let me tell you a story that will enlighten and entertain, but also instill a lesson or at least some enlightenment. So I think once you start thinking about this, you sort of see it everywhere.

00:05:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think TED Talks are a great example of a format that’s made for storytelling or like built around storytelling.

Yeah, I think the most popular TED Talks are all just really, really great stories and it becomes less about the point that’s being made or that’s something you could also get elsewhere and less time if you want to, basically.

But the reason they’re also so popular is because the story is so well told. And that to me points to the interesting thing about storytelling, which is that it’s really independent of the specific medium that we’re talking about. And I think that’s why it’s so difficult or so unusual to have an actual storytelling job, because most people see themselves more as craftspeople for one specific medium, right? Like maybe a, like a video person or you have a writer, or you have someone that makes music that is a great public speaker. But all of these sort of have the underlying element of storytelling and you kind of need to be great at at storytelling in order to be a great artist in your specific medium.

00:06:49 - Speaker 1: Or in some cases it may even just be a CEO or a leader or an entrepreneur or product person. So Steve Jobs comes to mind as probably one of the greatest storytellers, certainly in the tech industry, but also of our age. Now, folks like to point to that original introduction of the iPhone video, but also many others of his, even here now, more than a decade after his death, we’re still sharing. Videos and other clips that show him, in some cases really specific anecdotes, but in other cases, he’s introducing a product, he’s framing how to see the world, and how this product fits into that, and how it serves user needs. That is storytelling.

00:07:28 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s an often underrated aspect of that sort of role where we say usually, OK, Apple, you know, they have great designs, Steve shops had a great sense of taste.

But yeah, I think a lot of it really comes down to storytelling where, OK, the iPhone can be really nicely crafted and it can be a great product, but the thing that will make it feel right and will make it feel like something that people want is actually the story that’s told around it and the story that the product tells. And I think that’s something that A lot of people don’t like consciously consider and often I think it’s sort of naturally like a story builds around it without the people making it really considering what that is, but I think it’s really valuable if you do actually sit down and figure out what kind of story you want to tell.

00:08:13 - Speaker 1: So then if we bring it to the realm of, yeah, business and yeah, especially tech products, you know, clearly Steve Jobs or anyone else getting up on stage to announce a product that is conventionally you would call that marketing, right? You’re marketing your product. And I think it’s interesting here to kind of compare a little bit how we see. I think actually originally we had had sort of two job descriptions here for this role and you’d call it a marketing designer and I think I’d called it a marketer and storyteller and so notably there we both were using this term marketing to capture part of what the role would do and I kind of think that marketing has a bad name or It’s sort of disrespected, I think compared to all the other disciplines that go into building a company. Certain product development, because people think of annoying or bad marketing, you know, invasive paid media advertisements getting in your way, whatever, shoving information in your face that you don’t want or demanding you to do something.

But I do think marketing is a really important function. You can build a great product, but if no one knows that it exists, or how it fits in their lives or whether it’s for them. Then it kind of doesn’t matter, right? People need to be able to find out about it. And I also think marketing as a discipline has a lot of great tools, which includes, for example, this concept of the marketing funnel, which we do rely on.

Especially in the early days, we looked at stuff like how many people convert from essentially downloading and logging into the app for the first time to kind of making it far enough that maybe they’ve sort of like figured out what the app is for and call that the onboarding stage. And we use that to figure out that our onboarding, we tried a bunch of different things, and basically it wasn’t working. So many people just didn’t even make it through it because they just couldn’t figure out what this weird app was about. It’s kind of how we landed on the onboarding, the you design that we have now that Still plenty of people get confused and don’t know what the hell this weird app is, but enough of them make it through to make it work.

So those concepts like the marketing funnel, I think, are really valuable, and we do use those, and I do think that there’s a misunderstanding of what marketing really is, in the sense of a conversation with the market, understanding the market, figuring out how to explain the product to the right people, all that kind of thing. But at the same time, it does come with a lot of baggage that maybe it’s better to kind of leave off and certainly it implies a pretty transactional or you’d say pragmatic, but sometimes almost crassly pragmatic, just like try to get people in your funnel and get them all the way through. With whatever annoying tricks and dark patterns you can versus the longer term investment and we’re telling a story about the product, about us, about you and about the world and over time, if you like that story, you know, maybe that also means the products fit for you. How do you see marketing that terminology, does it have the same kind of negative implication for you, or how do you see that connecting to what we do at Muse with selling our product?

00:11:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like we both had a similar realization during this process of writing the job description that we were sort of at opposite ends of the spectrum where I was thinking more from a marketing perspective and you were thinking more from a storytelling perspective.

And as you said, I think like the realization is that These both kind of need to come together since they both touch so many different things and it would be wrong to just think of marketing as, OK, we are doing paid advertising, we’re doing a website and we’re doing like a few little banners of local design. And it will also be wrong to just think of storytelling as this purely artistic activity. Instead, we kind of need to bring them both together and really think about how we can use storytelling in our marketing and how we can sell our product in a way that also tells our story.

00:11:57 - Speaker 1: And maybe this question of selling, which is almost is more clarifying than talking about marketing, which is a pretty broad, maybe term or discipline, maybe that helps clarify, which is there’s the very artistic side, which I’d put this podcast in that category, you know, we’re basically here to explore philosophical topics that are of interest to us and our guests. Basically, Mark and I started it essentially for fun and then things got out of hand.

Whereas maybe something like the memos we write where we describe the philosophies behind a particular product feature, maybe that’s in the middle, like, you know, we want to explore why and how we made this thing, but in the end, it’s partially to to that, hey, this feature might be useful if you’re a person that needs whatever it offers, and so in a way that’s sort of selling the product a little bit.

Then you take something like our website or the app store listing page, and that is very explicitly when someone comes to your website, or at least when I go to a website for a product. Tell me, right? Tell me what’s good about your product. Tell me quickly, like, pitch me, impress me, help me figure out right away, is this for me, is this not for me? Do I want it? Can I afford it? Does it fit into my life? Does it solve the problem I have? Does the vibe of the product and the team like, fit with me well, and I want that, that’s appropriate for that setting.

So yeah, there needs to be, or at least for us, what works is this balance between, we do have a product to sell, we have a business to run, and we need to be pragmatic about that, but at the same time, we’re all here because we want to express something artistic, we want to, as Mark would say, make a statement and, you know, our goal is to have an impact on the industry and how people see creative computing, and also we need to be viable as a business.

Now, on the product side, how do you think storytelling does or doesn’t fit in there?

00:13:39 - Speaker 2: So we have already talked about all the different mediums that storytelling is really useful for. And I feel like Adam, you’ve been doing most of the exploration for us there and trying different mediums to tell our story and what’s been your experience so far.

00:13:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I think medium is incredibly important. The medium is the message, I think they sometimes say, but by here, by medium, you know, we talked about the TED Talk is one kind of format or like conference talks or lecture maybe is the medium there, but a different medium would be, for example, long form writing. So this is something I’ve done a ton of in my career, including at Hiroku and these long kind of academic essays that I can switch. And that’s actually quite different from the much shorter, punchier kind of copywriting you do for a website, for example, or an app store listing page, like here’s some bullet points of features, but also a huge one on the internet these days is video. Now that everyone’s got fast enough computers and connections and things and we have everything from YouTube to videos on Twitter to TikTok. Videos are really, really important format, certainly one we’ve used a bit for these like short product demo videos we do on Twitter, but also we embed them in our website. The moment there’s a big hero video on the front page of our website, and so on, and that was something you really couldn’t do on computers generally, but even on the internet up until relatively recently. But in working on this job description, I found myself really reflecting on the web as a medium, and I’ve been working in web for a long time, working with web technologies for a long time, and I feel like a lot of the discussion about technologies there and how the web is advanced is typically about web apps, the notions and Google Docs and so on in the world, but I feel like what gets less, I don’t know, airtime, let’s say, is the web as more of a content medium, and you’re a storytelling medium, so. That certainly includes something like, you’ve got a personal blog, and what do those pages look like, what’s the reading experience like on that, but that also includes something like a marketing website that is more of an exploring, you know, you tend to skim it, you maybe don’t read all the copy carefully, there’s a lot of embedded images, there may be a little animations with CSS transitions. And one of the things that we kind of built into this job description is we really want someone who uses the web as one of their primary mediums for telling stories. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the world’s greatest web designer, it means that they’re taking advantage of this new and frankly pretty unique medium to tell their stories, even if they’re, say, primarily a long form writer, that how you make that article page for your personal site. What the reading experience is like there, that that’s something you put a lot of craft and thought and design work into. And it occurred to me kind of again in thinking about this and thinking about our own needs and what you and I have done on the website as well as what I’ve done on my personal site for my articles and things like that, that the web is really a pretty unprecedented medium because it combines many together. Obviously there’s texts and typesetting is quite sophisticated, and you also have images, but now you have videos which are very easy to embed whether Using a hosting service or just kind of hosting your own HTML 5 video playback stuff, but then you bring in the dynamic medium element of it, and that is quite the next level, right? So you could say to begin with, it might be something like, OK, you know, a PDF and the web can both have pretty sophisticated rendering, but the web can be totally responsive or you resize the window or you’re on different sized devices and everything reflows. But then you can go a step further from that, right? You get into the CSS transitions, you get into something like changing behavior when you’re scrolling, and, yeah, sometimes scroll hijacking is sort of annoying, but you’ve also seen sites do some pretty interesting and sophisticated things with using your scroll as a way to kind of progress you through this understanding of a product or whatever it is they’re offering. And then, of course, that can ultimately go to totally interactive things you can click on and explorable explanations and things like that. And I feel like it’s really only in the last few years, let’s say the last 5 years, the web has really come in doing its own on that, that all this stuff is very universally supported on every browser, that you can view it on your phone, almost just as well as you can on a desktop device. That it’s fast, that you have these amazing transitions and animations, that you can do video and audio, and almost everything that you could possibly think of can all be put together and integrated and controlled in a way that’s potentially very sleek and very powerful, and there’s really been nothing like that to date. And what I’m most excited about for this position and just also broadly, is telling stories through the web, really taking advantage of All that’s come together with that in the last 5 or 10 years.

00:18:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I feel like there’s a ton of untapped potential in the web for telling stories in new ways.

And some of that kind of happens on like personal websites. So there’s still like some spark of the experimental web as it was like a few decades ago.

But most of that has been sort of restrained into a Very small corner of the internet.

And if you look at most companies or products or websites, like they are very much the same and don’t really try to tell any kind of special story or tell a story in a different way than the competition, basically.

And I think that is a unique opportunity for companies like us and that our size to kind of have an outsized impact with this sort of goal in the company to, yeah, do something that basically other companies can’t do.

00:19:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, part of that might actually be the reason you see more interesting experimental use of the medium on people’s personal sites with smaller teams is I think it does require a kind of person that puts together a lot of skills into one.

I know one mind and so the same person that designs the site can also be implementing the HTML and the CSS.

They’re maybe not a front end developer, I mean, you do this, certainly, I do a bit of this as well, they’re not necessarily an expert at that, but they know enough to really use the medium to its fullest.

I think that’s pretty important and I think not to beat up on content management systems, the WordPresses and Squarespaces of the world, but I think they do tend to naturally take you into templates and sort of pretty restrictive, just sort of doing what’s been done. Before, which again is totally fine and appropriate for many people’s websites, that’s fine.

But the interesting stuff tends to be when you have someone who can put all that together into one mind or one set of skills, and you don’t tend to have that, I think in bigger companies.

You do have that with an individual’s personal site and with a small team site, and certainly that’s what we are striving for to some degree with our website and hope to really expand on this, especially if we get the right kind of person on the team here.

00:20:28 - Speaker 2: And as you said, the big factor here is that the web really works as a medium that a lot of other mediums can kind of build on top of. And so if you have a basic understanding of how the web works and are interested in getting into that, then you can combine that with another skill you have, whether it’s music or video production or just drawing or writing. And on top of that, you can kind of build a really unique experience on the web that you wouldn’t be able to do with just a single skill.

00:20:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s one of the things that’s great about the web is a multimedia medium is you can basically bring most other types of storytelling mediums into it.

So, for example, photography is a really great format for storytelling. But you can use that potentially together with the web, taking the right photo that tells a story that then gets embedded in a website, whether it’s part of a post, or whether it’s something more of like a hero shot or background image or something like that, as just one really simple example.

Now, I also think another medium worth talking about here is social media. I don’t know if it’s quite right to call that a medium, but at the same time I think it is.

And one of the things that’s always struck me, obviously Twitter is our kind of main social media outlet for various reasons, but whenever I go to try to use some other social media platform, and I think, OK, well, maybe people would like to see new stuff on Instagram, or apparently notion blew up on TikTok for a while there. And the idea of a short video that shows productivity software, well, you know, guess what, that’s a lot of what we do on Twitter, right? We record these short demos that show a particular feature or a little vignette of how you use this product in the real world and show the hands and the stylus in action. It’s not just a screen recording. So clearly that works, but times when I have gone to look at these other social media platforms and think how we might fit in there, and I realized as soon as I’m there that there’s a whole universe of What format is it? What’s the aspect ratio, how long are these videos, you know, what goes in the text, you know, how’s that superimposed, and then on top of that, of course, it’s just the culture and the conventions that come with the platform and people have been using them a long time. So I think that being proficient in a particular social medium platform is sort of a medium in and of itself, and like the web, can incorporate other mediums, which is images and video and text and short form, long form, etc. but each one is almost its own language to speak. You have to be fluent in it to get good use out of it.

00:23:02 - Speaker 2: And social media seems interesting because there are so many different communities within that. Like it’s not a single thing that you post to and then it’s on social media, like you always post to a specific group of people. And ideally it’s full of people that are already telling a similar story and are really familiar already with the context that you’re sort of setting.

00:23:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a great point.

The stories resonate with our own experience or they match to something that we understand or believe to be true about the world. And actually there’s a quote in a fantasy book, it’s probably Guy Gabriel OK, I have to look that up after the show, but essentially it’s a medieval fantasy, I think set in China or something like that, and there’s one of the characters is a poet. And like a famous poet that evokes much emotion with his work, and one of his fans basically asks, how do you do it? How do you come up with these words that are so moving? And he says, well, the key is the poet has to speak the words that are already in the person’s heart. The key is you’re putting words on something you already feel implicitly or believe to be true, or have an underlying sense that is the case, but finally someone has put these really poignant words on it, or somehow described in a way, and you say, yes, that right there.

00:24:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like there are a lot of lessons like this and really the classic storytelling, you know, that hasn’t been invented in the last few years basically, there’s so many great storytellers that we can learn from and so many classic lessons about storytelling.

00:24:36 - Speaker 1: All right, so my next question then is how does design fit in with storytelling or how can one tell stories through design?

00:24:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the important thing to remember is that it doesn’t have to be a visual story that you are telling, but a lot of it is really stuff like world building, setting the context for something, and sort of conjuring up mental images in the user’s head.

So one example I like is when you look at the original iPhone and look at the first apps that Apple built for the iPhone, they all were kind of built, I think, to tell a very specific story both about the iPhone and then also about sort of the features it has, right? So for example, you had the note sap which was very obscure morphic and was sort of built to look like an actual notepad, right? Like you had this leather bound top and the page looked like a natural page with lights on it and it was yellow and the font was some sort of handwritten scribbly thing.

00:25:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you wanted to touch it. I feel like that’s morphic and the leather. And even that makes me think of something like this slide to unlock, which we sort of take for granted now, or, you know, has actually has gone to the dustbin of history a bit, but it had this kind of shimmering effect, and there was a lot of effort put into the physics when you pull it across or whatever. It’s easy to forget this, but at the time, a screen that you touched was just not a very common thing, and so inviting you to want to touch it, seems like it was part of how you conveyed what was special about this product.

00:26:08 - Speaker 2: Right. And since it was a very new product, like if you just look at it from like a key tech perspective, it doesn’t look like a product that is necessarily interesting to basically the whole world. Like if you just compare the spec sheet, it’s basically still something like a BlackBerry that has all the basic functions of the phones of that time. And so what you really need is to sort of build up a story around it that connects it with something that people are already familiar with and that helps those people kind of understand how the product fits into that.

00:26:43 - Speaker 1: This also reminds me of an ad for the first iPhone, and while we’ve may beat up on paid ads, paid marketing a little bit, you know, part of what Apple is great at is ads, these little vignettes that tell a short story that show more than tell what this product is and how it fits into your life.

So in this ad, which I’ll see if I can find a link to it on YouTube or something, they have the person watching Pirates of the Caribbean, which at the time was a popular movie. They see like a sea monster with these tentacles, and they kind of go, hm, calamari, and they hit the home screen, they pop up in the maps app, they type in a search for seafood in San Francisco, they find a place and then they tap on it to like call and make a dinner reservation.

And obviously they’re showing a lot of different things in this, I don’t know what it is, 20 seconds that you can watch a movie, that you can search on the map, that you can do things very spontaneously, that you can do things very fluidly, these different apps coexist side by side, that you do this all on this screen with no buttons, essentially other than the home button, and it’s just a fun and cute little story as well, little vignette. So yeah, the product tells a great story, the apps tell a story, and the marketing that goes with it also tell a story, and all those things fit together very holistically.

00:27:59 - Speaker 2: Right, and I think each of those kind of multiplies the effect of the story, right? Like if it’s just the marketing that tells the story and then the product is kind of really bland and doesn’t implement the story at all, then that story is not as effective, right? And I think you can also go the other way and look at, OK, we have a great story that the marketing is telling and the product is also telling it. And the whole company is living it like maybe even the support team is trying to incorporate that story into their work, but then you can also go down a few levels deeper and look at, OK, what is actually a specific feature of this product doing as part of that story. And that will kind of help explain not just the product itself and the role the product has in the user’s life. But it will actually make the product much easier to use if you can actually tell a story for every single feature and ideally even for every single UI element and you kind of know its place and know where it comes from.

00:28:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this sort of progression or hierarchy from the company or the team story, and then the product has a story and then each feature within that product has a story and then maybe that even goes down as detailed to each UI element, button, whatever that’s on the screen, or non-UI such as our chromeless UI that’s really interesting. One that comes to mind for me right away with that is the pencil toolkit. Which is, you know, essentially it’s this little thing you swipe in from the edge of the screen with your stylus, and we did the very custom and pretty unique thing there as opposed to using the standard Apple pencil toolkit, for example. And at first glance, and sometimes people do have this question, why did you make this weird custom thing rather than using kind of the operating system default? And of course you could argue that there’s sort of our company and team in general and certainly the product has a bit of a do it our own way, you know, follow our own path, story, or maybe more of a theme throughout. But it was actually the very first episode of this podcast where we talked about tool switching, and at the time it was still just an idea. Mark had this technical pen store idea of you go through and they have 1000 different pens, but you pick out the 10 you want and you put those in your kit for what you need for a particular purpose, so that you’re not overwhelmed with choice each time. And that was kind of, we told that story or discussed that philosophy through this podcast, and later on, we went to build it and you designed it, we incorporated some of those ideas, as well as many other ideas, and came up with something that eventually we did a memo about talking about whiteboards and the choice of pens there, as well as the pen store and just looking at a lot of inspiration from These various kind of real world drawing settings and ultimately described why we built this feature the way that we did, and then that in turn boils down to this very specific detail of why does the tool switches show up the way that it does, why is the choice of pen thickness or color, why do I need to go to the settings menu for that, you know, it’s. Taps to get there as opposed to something that’s sort of right there always present in UI, which is what a lot of drawing apps do, but that connects to this philosophy and this concept and story we have about trying to bring some of these elements that we think are good for creating a flow state from the analog world into a digital tool.

00:31:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the pencil token is a great example because as you said, it really incorporates a lot of these ideas that I think at the very core of news and what we want news to be.

And so it’s not just about like a single element, right? Like it’s not just about the pencil case that you have on your desk and like that’s the story of everything that’s related to pencil music. It kind of draws from all kinds of ideas that matter to us and in turn that sort of creates a really unique angle that wouldn’t be the same if even any of those ideas is taking away.

And so then the product design challenge, I think, is you have this long list of things you wanna incorporate and these values you have, the ideas you have, but it’s not a simple, concise story or a simple concise design yet, right? So that’s sort of the challenge to really figure out the essence of these ideas and turn that interaction that incorporates all of these different ideas.

00:32:16 - Speaker 1: It’s often the case that it does emerge organically from following a hunch. For example, in the pencil tool kit, we did have the sort of pen store idea from the start, but many, many details of how the actual implementation ended.

I think with you following your hunches and instincts as a designer, it was Julia following her hunches and instincts as an interface engineer to eventually land on this thing that felt good, that looked good, that seemed to be a reflection of our values and pragmatic. just serve the purpose that it needed to serve, and all those things come together, and then maybe it’s sort of post hoc, you end up with a story where you look at the finished thing that you iterated towards and followed hunches and followed instinct, and you look at this and you say, you know what this reminds me of is, you know, a set of whiteboard markers and why that kind of setup is good for a freeform thinking environment where you’re not going to get hung up on the exact thickness of your pen. And maybe, you know, we had some of that upfront, maybe that was part of our inspiration, but sometimes you sort of look back and realize why you ended up where you did, or I don’t know, do you agree with that? There’s some elements of that?

00:33:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think certainly at the start, that’s often the case. You know, if you compare to writing, you have this fear of starting with a blank page. And so you aren’t going to just start by writing down the whole story, but you’ll need to start somewhere and then you kind of go through this long editing process and at the end of it, you’ll know what the story is, basically. And I think we are a bit further along now where we already have a lot of the pages filled out and it becomes a lot easier to add new sections to the story basically and new subplots to it.

00:33:54 - Speaker 1: So that’s sort of the role that maybe product design has to play in storytelling or the use of storytelling and product design. What about brand design or visual design? How does that fit this picture?

00:34:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think for us, our experience has been that marketing design works best and there’s some underlying truth to it, which in our case is the product. So since we already have a really compelling product, I think a lot of what we do is transform that into different marketing channels and talk about the very same story there. So one example there would be this podcast we are on, which is also a channel for us to talk about the ideas we develop with use the product.

00:34:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, one example of where brand design or visual design can be very helpful in telling your story is, obviously, the podcast is super important for us telling our story of the team and the product and that sort of thing.

But for some time we first made the podcast, which as I’ve mentioned before, was just a weird thing that Mark and I were doing for fun on the side, and at some point we realized it was something really worth investing in, but we had basically were just redirecting to the overcast public pages because they were, I don’t know, better than nothing.

We needed like some home on the web, they kind of give you a default one, but it really didn’t convey that we cared much about the podcast. And so you designed the page for us, which was both the MUA.com/podcast page, which included figuring out what is the podcast actually about. We’ve been recording it for a while and we needed that like top headline, and that required me to sit down or we sat down together, but mostly it was on me. What is this podcast actually about if we boil it down to 3 ideas or 3 areas, 3 themes, what are they? And we ended up on tools for thought, product design, and how to have good ideas. There’s lots of other stuff in there about like independent software development or we talk various things about company building and team building, but you know, we felt like those were the three really top level things. And related to that also is self-hosting the pages, and we have the embedded media there, and you did this little illustration for kind of a riff on our app icon, brainy guy, just sort of wearing headphones, and that conveys something sort of calm and serene and fitting in with our brand vibes. And that in turn, in a way, having this home on the web and having had to figure out this headline and what the three themes are that actually clarified my thinking about what this podcast is for or what kind of things we should talk about and what kind of guests we should have. So there’s a nice feedback loop between the, it’s called the product in this case, which is the podcast and the brand design or marketing design or visual design that goes with its home on the web.

00:36:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and those projects are kind of always the most interesting to me where one part of it is, of course, like the visual side and like the purely design side, but then the other part is, OK, we actually still haven’t completely figured out the story or the message yet, and we kind of need to develop both in parallel, because then one can inform the other basically. We can do a bit of work on the design side and then see if that is sort of the vibe you have in mind for the message you want to get out there. And then once you develop that, that will also inform the visuals.

I think we’ve been doing fairly well on that. Like we have a few projects like this that I think tell a story both through the messaging and the design side.

But yeah, I do also feel like there’s still a lot we kind of wanna do and either I don’t have the skills to do it or we don’t have the time to do it. And so that’s the reason we are hiring and looking for a person to fill in those gaps and really help us out, both with storytelling and brand design, visual design.

00:37:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. We have a lot to say at this point and more than we have the sort of bandwidth to get out of the world, whether it’s through our website or other means. So I think that’s part of what they would do is just this potential person to join the team would be to just help us say more, right? Our website is pretty minimalist at the moment and as we expand the product offering and in general, expand our story, I think we would like to add a lot more content there, but it’s just hard to do with the size of the team we have.

That’s one is just kind of more.

And then the other dimension is the one you mentioned, which was skill-wise, you know, someone could come onto the team. I think you’re underselling yourself a little bit there, you managed to do both incredible web design and product design, and you’ve argued before that there’s a lot to be said for having one person that does both, so that you have an integrated look and feel between them, but then at some point that’s just too much, right? It’s too much for one person to carry on going. And that, of course, is always the tension with the smaller teams.

It’s great to be able to, everyone’s kind of jack of all trades, and you span a lot of different realms, which means also the whole thing can feel a lot more holistic because it’s not split up among so many different craftspeople, but then, you know, you’re just both limited in time and just where you can invest in your skills. So, I’m hoping that a great designer and storyteller could come in here and help us both with uh doing more about telling our story and all the unique and interesting things about our company and our amazing users and customers, and the reason to have thinking tools, you know, reason to have our computers help us with thinking, as well as many, many more details within all those realms, that we can do more of that, but also do it better.

00:39:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m really excited for that.

00:39:29 - Speaker 1: Let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or we’re on email below at museapp.com and you can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Leonard, I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to meeting all the folks who might find it worth their time to apply for this and eventually to add our 6th member to our tiny little band here.

00:39:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m especially excited since I’ve been the only designer on the team so far, so, you know, I get to socialize with designers again. That’s something to look forward to.

00:40:05 - Speaker 1: It’s well and good to have colleagues that have complementary skill sets, but there’s a whole lot to be said for someone you can really talk shop with very directly about your area of craft. I look forward to that too.