Ian Silber: preference

Transcript context

…Just to follow that thread, because that feels like a pretty big change in the design world. There used to be this, we had a podcast with, she was head of native design Claud Code, Jenny Wynn, and she talked about this and I think it blew a lot of people's minds. There's been this traditional design process. Prototype, mock, test, use research, iterate. Okay, cool. Ready for engineering, build it, iterate, ship it. And now there's just no time for that. And so the role in her eyes is just move to big picture planning and just steering people in a good direction. Does that resonate? How much that has changed in the world of a designer? I think that 100% we do work that way. It depends. I think for us, it depends on what stage you're at in the process or maybe how far along the product is. There are certain features for ChatGPT where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a hundred things and we throw out 99 and we finally ship one. Or the composer is changing every single day and we try many things and we throw them out. And you could take that for many different things within ChatGPT. And then there are other things like Codex where, I don't know, I mean a super app is a good example where we definitely are just trying stuff really quick. I think that we really embrace building in public, which is a different way of working. But I think that when you get comfortable with it is actually really gratifying or satisfying because you can try stuff and get instant feedback both internally and externally. But yeah, I mean it is moving really fast. And I think it just depends. Like I said, certain things we really sweat the details and we try and we do test, we A/B test, we'll do user research and we kind of iterate and evolve a lot. And then other things, we take big swings and then we learn quickly. But yeah, I don't know. I think the biggest thing is embracing that the technology might change in a month and maybe a certain interaction or setting or whatever that you needed doesn't need to exist or now a new one does need to exist or a new capability is there or the latency profile has changed such that you can rethink this or whatever. All these capabilities are changing or the intelligence has changed. And so you have to be just really quick on your feet and maybe not be so precious about it until it's at the point where, okay, this is kind of hardened. We don't think that this is necessarily going to change tomorrow because of the technology, so let's make this the best it can possibly be. We're thinking a lot about how we should evolve. Really think about ChatGPT becoming deeply embedded in your personal life and how should the app feel? That's something that we're not going to necessarily design and ship overnight and just put it out there. We're really thinking about that and we're trying a bunch of different ideas and we're putting it up on a whiteboard or we're doing some design in Figma. We're prototyping it. We're probably going to dog food a bunch of different ideas long before we ever ship something. But that's a bigger project. And then there's other things where we're like, idea to ship in four hours. This all makes sense. Essentially what I'm hearing is you pick your battles and you focus the design effort on the things that will be durable and not change.…

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