Bob Baxley: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, look, the example I use mostly is if you go to an airport and you look around, you'll see a lot of people using their phone to navigate that system. They're trying to figure out where their gate is, what time their flight's on, whether or not... Can they pull up their boarding pass, et cetera. And just watch people, watch their faces, watch the level of confusion and frustration. Some of them are tech superheroes like you and me and most of your listeners, but a lot of them are just mere mortals and they're not living and breathing this stuff all the time. And a lot of times they're super frustrated and then take that and scale it out to their entire day. And almost everyone living in a modern economy now is going to have hundreds of interactions with the phone or with a computer. And a lot of those interactions are going to be consequential. Unfortunately, a lot of those interactions are not going to be great. They're going to be confusing and frustrating. When I'm speaking to live audiences, I often ask people, okay, please raise your hand if you've had a frustrating or confusing experience with software in the last month? And obviously every hand goes up. Okay, how about so far this week? Most all hands stay up. I'm like, okay, how about so far today? And most of the hands stay up, and it's often that I speak in the morning, I'm like, okay, everybody's had a frustrating experience with software and it's 10 o'clock in the morning. That's a problem, people, because each one of those interactions, it takes a little bit of energy away from you and it ramps your frustration just a little bit. And the bummer about software, both for the audience and for the creators is that it's an anonymous medium. Nobody gets to see who's making these things. You and I together, we might be able to name six designers that have worked on products we care about. And the only reason we could do that is because a designer and I know a bunch of them. By yourself, I'd be surprised if you could name more than a handful. And again, we work in tech. So if you think about the billions of people out there that don't work in tech, to them, these products are just these crazy faceless things created by a bunch of people who knows where, and these products are causing them untold amounts of frustration and confusion, and it just takes away from their life quality. And I think we have an obligation as product people to put that emotional energy back into people's lives. They don't want to try to figure out how to navigate our login screens or go through our onboarding process, they just want to get home and spend time with their families and pet their dogs and have a nice dinner. I just think every time we make a demand on the audience, that's a failure on our part. rocess, they just want to get home and spend time with their families and pet their dogs and have a nice dinner. I just think every time we make a demand on the audience, that's a failure on our part. And so I do think it comes... I cast it in a moral way, and I talk about it that way because I don't think many people working in the industry understand the scale of what they're doing, again, because it's an anonymous field. We never see anybody on the other side of the glass. But I think with this podcast, it'll go out to, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people. If you and I saw all the people that will potentially listen to this in one place, we would think to ourselves, oh my goodness, that's like a lot of people. And we might think of it differently. We might behave differently. My team at Apple, but also my friends that are working at Facebook or Google or wherever, it's very hard to really understand that they're creating something in Figma on their computer that's going to be interacted with by billions of people, thousands and thousands of times. If you lose sight of that I think just, I don't know, you get sloppy and disrespectful is the wrong word, but I think you just lose sight of how much impact you're having on other people. Wow, that's really inspiring. That makes me want to build products and make them awesome. There's so much power to that. What this makes me think about a little bit is kind of random, but when I see someone click and watch one of my podcast videos on YouTube, I'm like, wow, that's one person that's going to spend their time watching this thing. Wow, I really want to make... It gives me more motivation to make these even better and better.…

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