Flat Design = Skinny Jeans: An Interview with Jeff Veen and Tony Conrad

A few weeks ago on a beautiful Indian summer Wednesday, I sat down for lunch with Jeff Veen, one of the founding partners of the UX consulting group Adaptive Path, Co-Founder and CEO of Typekit, and now VP of products for Adobe; and Tony Conrad, Founder of about.me and Sphere, and a venture partner at True Ventures.

The goal was to discuss the increasingly important impact of design and user experience, partly because iOS7 has ushered in a real change to the “beauty” layer of today’s products, and partly because Jeff and Tony are both really, really passionate about it.

Liz Mansfield: So iOS7 has impacted a huge number of companies, and really opened the conversation about design and its importance to a product.

Tony Conrad: I don’t know if you like iOS7 or not, but the reality is if you don’t update to that look, you’ll look really dated in 6-12 months. You’ll be part of the web 2.0 generation.

Jeff Veen: Way back in 2001, we founded Adaptive Path with the aim of evangelizing the user experience of digital products. Our goals were twofold: first, to help people understand that the term “design” is too vague, too broad, to talk about meaningfully. We tried to come up with a vocabulary for how companies should talk about design: “interface,” “brand,” “architecture.” It was quite effective.

Our second goal was to convey the business value of investing in design. Design accounts not just for the look of something, but for the usability of a product as well—whether people are able to accomplish what they set out to accomplish. Are people able to get to the process of becoming a customer? Just one example: cart abandonment is still a problem in e-commerce.

The surface level of design is mostly what people think about when they talk about design. It’s fashion, and it changes just as rapidly. The flat design of today’s products is no different than skinny jeans. Don’t get me wrong—fashion is important. It’s important for a company to stay contemporary; that’s something that builds trust in a brand.

TC: An up-to-date design tells you that the company is led by smart, modern people. They’re on top of things. They get it, and as a result, their customers trust them because they feel like the product or service will continue to evolve.

JV: Right. Where are you going to feel more comfortable giving your credit card number?

TC: The application of design in SaaS is crazy. They don’t seem to care as much as consumer-driven companies do, which is a big mistake.

JV: I know why. The people who buy those products are not the people who use those products. IT people only care about the big long feature list. And then they send it off to employees who need training to use these bizarre antiquated things.

We’re just now getting to a point that we’re finally acknowledging that corporations are made up of consumers at work.

TC: I think that’s purely because of mobile.

JV: Absolutely. Employees were bringing in powerful computers in their pockets to get work done around antiquated machines. Now they just revolt.

LM: When did people start getting that design was important from a business perspective?

JV: It coincides with the rise of Apple. That’s pretty easy to say, but people realized that Apple makes things that are not just better looking, but also better designed, more considered.

TC: That distinction needs to be called out—design vs. aesthetic. That’s the whole reason you created Adaptive Path.

JV: Again, it’s this whole idea that so many people define design as how something looks. That’s important, feeling contemporary and being perceived as trustworthy. But it’s the last thing that you get to when you try to solve real problems.

The iPhone wasn’t better because it was beautiful; it was better because it worked better in every possible way. All the way down to the manufacturing and the business model. Design and quality have to run all the way down.

TC: Larger companies wrestle with it. This is the reality of the new world. You have to recognize the importance of design, and how you present services and products to customers. It can change an entire business.

Strategy is hard, but it’s the easiest of all the things that go into radical change. The hard part comes when you get into execution, tactical layers, and how it impacts what roles are or aren’t needed on the team.

JV: Some people have really started “getting it” within the last ten years. Big companies, like Fortune 500 companies, haven’t really gotten it until the last five years. But they’re still struggling with the superficial aspects of it, not fundamentally understanding that the skills and processes we use for good design is what you need to run your business.

TC: What does that mean for big business vs. a startup?

JV: There was a certain user experience we were trying to achieve at Typekit. One of our goals was to separate the creative process from commerce—you shouldn’t be encumbered with our business model when selecting fonts to use in a project. So we moved to a subscription model that gave our customers access to a complete library of fonts, sort of how Spotify and Rdio work for music. That decision—to create that user experience—drove all of our business negotiations. We knew fundamentally how designers did their work, so we went for purity in the user experience.

TC: That makes sense. Think about how that decision at Typekit impacted about.me users. You made it possible for our users to try different fonts and see what they look like on their profile before locking in on one of the options. If you hadn’t created a subscription model, we wouldn’t have been able to do that on our end and our users would have had to pay to try out a font. That would have been a horrible experience.

JV: User experience and design have to drive business strategy. One of the things we said at Adaptive Path is that designers should have a seat at the table. Now it’s like designers have their own table and they decide who should have seats.

LM: So what do the next five years look like, in terms of design?

JV: In the startup world, I actually think that good design and UX have become table stakes, period. It’s not a competitive differentiator anymore to have good design. So what we’re left with is the culture of the teams. That’s the thing that leads to momentum and trust to allow people to do the work is exponentially better. That’s going to be the next thing that everyone talks about.

We see it in the impact that startup culture has had on corporations. If everyone is doing good design, the way to make your product really sing is to have a team behind it filled with people who work really well together and trust each other.

LM: How does this play out in the enterprise?

LV: Right now there is such a high demand in startups for good designers, I don’t think the big companies can really compete. A bigger salary is pointless if all your attempts to do good work are mired in process and bureaucracy.

TC: I’m curious: how does it impact the 4-5 person team starting a company early on?

JV: Question in return: What skill mix do you look for these days as a two-founder startup?

TC: I’ve learned to differentiate between product, design and engineering. A founder who has instincts around product maybe can’t contribute any code. So what am I looking for? I don’t care if you’re an engineer or not an engineer. All I care about are your product instincts.

JV: That’s a change. The question in the past would be “can you scale the thing?” A lot of the skills a technical founder used to need or have have become commoditized. Building out data centers, monitoring basic scalability—a whole layer of our industry has become so much easier. You just don’t need those kinds of skills to get started anymore. You’ve got to be the world’s biggest business before you really need to set foot in a data center.

Now, obviously, there are different types of business that require different levels of technical proficiency. But it’s just no longer mandatory. We grew Typekit to a few hundred thousand users serving a couple billion font impressions a day before we even crossed 10 employees.

What’s mandatory now are product instincts.

TC: And hiring.

JV: You hire for culture.

TC: But you cannot hire if you cannot explain the problem. You need to be an evangelist.

JV: That was great advice you gave me early on. The founders have to start doing the enterprise deals. If you can’t sell the product, what are you doing?

TC: Then you need to hire and get out of the way.

JV: Culture and product instincts. I would also add good taste. That’s one of the things that we hired for. That sounds a little squishy, but I actually think that everyone on the team at every level—everybody—has to have an appreciation for design. I would measure that in good taste. I don’t care how they dress, but I care about the things they find beautiful, useful. I would spend time with everyone to find out.

You have to keep raising the bar. Why did Steve Jobs have a Ducati and a Steinway in the lobby? That’s the kind of quality and beauty he was striving for. That was also the consensus among the Typekit team. That’s what we were going for.

The drawback is you can become a pretty homogeneous bunch—basically, the whole Typekit team ended up looking like a big group of Mission hipsters.

LM: How did you convey these values to your team and clients, outside of the product itself?

JV: One of the things we did was spend a lot of time on terms of service, working together and rewriting them.

TC: It’s where to start to flesh out where the value is. It’s your basic agreement between you and your users.

JV: The work we did on terms of service reflects the same values that we used when designing and building the product. We did product reviews twice a week, talked through it, talked through our motivations, discussed how we solve the problems, solutions we tried that didn’t work—the whole company did it. That’s a level of transparency that made us highly competitive as employers.

TC: I came to one by accident and asked if I could come again. You had amazing design that worked its way into your team meetings. Your team presentations were beautiful. That commitment to design in your internal communication and management really impressed me, and I think it’s one of the reasons your team made an incredibly beautiful, intuitive service.

JV: One thing we do in the life and culture of company is we’d have what we called “The Week.” We’d review everything that happened during the week and we’d walk through a set of slides. It could be an update on anything from what shipped to what vacation someone took. And we’d put effort into the slide deck—not spend all day Thursday on it, but give it some care. It was very visually driven. Now I have a record of the first Friday all the way up to last week.

LM: It’s interesting how our conversation about design developed into a conversation about culture.

JV: It’s the only way to do good design—you must have a culture that supports it. And the only way to do good engineering is to have a culture that supports engineering. And so on.

This conversation has been edited for clarity. Huge thank you to Jeff and Tony for your time!