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- [00:01]
Matt Ra
I think one of the superpowers of designers is to bring people around the table around a vision of the future. And everyone at the Times is very excited about building that future and so they'll make the time to do it. And we hold up our end of the bargain by coming every week with new things to share, new points of view, ideas that will push us forward.
- [00:20]
Aaron Walter
Matt Ra, Interim VP of Design at the New York Times, and his team have a tough job.
- [00:27]
Eli Wilber
Their work is seen by millions every.
- [00:29]
Aaron Walter
Day who come to the Times website and apps for information they can trust, presented clearly across many platforms, striking a stylistic balance between tradition and innovation, and somehow they approach the pressure of their work with grace.
- [00:44]
Host
In this episode we talk with Matt about what it means to design for a mission driven organization in a time of profound technological and cultural change. Matt shares how his team is navigating the tension between tradition and evolution, how they balance experimentation with editorial integrity, and why even the smallest interface details can carry the weight of institutional trust. We also explore how the Times is adapting to new reader habits, the impact of generative AI on journalism and design, and why listening deeply to colleagues and readers remains a superpower for their team. If you missed it earlier this month, Matt also interviewed us for an AMA at the Times headquarters in Manhattan.
- [01:20]
Aaron Walter
Also stay tuned after our conversation with Matt for a special conversation with Australian design agency Noise, who uses wix Studio to create amazing sites for top brands.
- [01:31]
Host
We chat with Christopher Henry and Simon Poratt, the co founders of Noise Agency.
- [01:35]
Eli Wilber
About how they use WIX Studio for.
- [01:36]
Host
Rapid website development, global collaboration and bringing design and code together, empowering their team to build iterate and launch faster than ever. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology.
- [01:49]
Eli Wilber
I'm Eli Wilber.
- [01:50]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you, refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [02:28]
Eli Wilber
DesignBetter is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio.
- [02:44]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. Matt Ra welcome to Design Better.
- [02:53]
Matt Ra
Thank you so much for having me, Matt.
- [02:55]
Aaron Walter
We're currently sitting in the New York Times building and for Eli and I, this is magical. For you, it's every day. It is, yes, but presumably still magical. I mean, it is a historic building. It is a historic location. It is literally kind of the voice of record around the world of all major events. You've been in this role as head of design for eight months now, is that correct?
- [03:19]
Matt Ra
That's right.
- [03:19]
Aaron Walter
That's a big job.
- [03:20]
Matt Ra
It is, yeah. It's a fascinating job. You get sort of this wide purview over our entire suite of products. We call it the Bundle. Obviously, get a chance to work with such a talented team of product designers. There are about 85 of us. And in a leadership role, you get to work with some of the people who are at the absolute top of their games when it comes to journalism, business, brand marketing, you name it. The Times has a way of attracting and collecting talent that I've never quite seen at any other place I've been and makes it one of the reasons that it's so fun to be here.
- [03:52]
Aaron Walter
Yeah. How's the design team organized and integrated into the breadth of the organization?
- [04:00]
Matt Ra
One piece of context. So I lead the product design team. We are one of many design disciplines at the time. I believe There are over 300 designers total at the time. So you think of print, you think of marketing, brand advertising, all those disciplines. So we are collectively. If you're thinking about that entire community of designers, we're spread out all over the place. You have a group of news designers who work embedded in our newsroom, work directly with desks and editors there. Within product design, we tend to embed with products. So we have a group of designers who work on the news product, a group in cooking games. You sort of look across our bundle and you'll probably find a group of product designers working there. We also have designers working on our platforms. So think of the content management systems, publishing tools, some of the underlying infrastructure that powers all of these experiences. We also think about how to design that too, but those are for internal customers, primarily for journalists, for data scientists, product managers, those folks.
- [04:57]
Eli Wilber
Can you tell us a little bit about the workflow for a given design team? It could be a specific example and maybe what critiques are like, or approval processes, things like that.
- [05:07]
Matt Ra
I would say at a high level, our design process is probably pretty similar to lots of other organizations. You can broadly think of it as a double diamond type of process. And for a given project, we'll have a goal. We'll have usually many goals, and we will go wide at the beginning, and we call that envisioning here. Designers will go wide to think of many different sort of ideas, bring them back to the table, and critically sort of engage our stakeholders in the process of figuring out which of all these ideas really makes the most sense for the times, for our users, for our business, for the newsroom. And we sort of go from there in terms of design critiques and reviews. Every product has their own review, and some products have multiple reviews, kind of depending on what we're focused on. I see sort of two types of design critiques at the times. One is where just designers are coming together, designers giving critique and feedback to other designers. Those can run the gamut from very abstract and theoretical to very concrete and tactical. It just really depends on what stage of the project we're in. The other type of design critique is one where we invite stakeholders into the room. Those are usually around specific sort of deliverables or milestones in the project. And they tend to have sort of a decision to make or alignment that we're seeking, things like that. The thing that I think might be kind of unique about that process is that we try to have it going all the time. We try not to have long periods of time in between reviews with stakeholders. We try to make sure that we are bringing everyone along throughout. It's a very matrixed organization. We get a lot of input from a lot of places, and ultimately that input really strengthens our work. We see those reviews and critiques where we're involving stakeholders as ones where we can get really valuable feedback and sort of move the work forward. Alignment matters so much here in a very matrix organization. So as a result, what it means is for a designer, you bring work to a review or something like that, you're going to get lots of feedback from lots of different parts of the company. I remember when I was just starting at the time, feeling somewhat annoyed by this, like, oh, everyone gets to weigh in on my work. Why is this? And I've come to see this sort of ability for designers to get alignment from a very diverse group of stakeholders is actually a real feature as opposed to a bug. Meaning if you've got somebody coming in with a lens of journalistic integrity and quality, you've got somebody else, another leader giving feedback through the lens of business performance, maybe a third lens, that design brings around user centricity, it makes the work better. And I've started to really realize that that alignment piece of the process here is actually kind of a quality filter. And I think is a large part of the reason why the things that we produce tend to be pretty good. When we release them. It does mean that sometimes it can take a minute to get there. But it's something that I've noticed is fairly unique, I think, to the Times in terms of like, we really seek alignment from a diverse set of stakeholders with our design work.
- [07:52]
Aaron Walter
Matt, can you say more about why it's so important to not have these long gaps between what you're making and when stakeholders review?
- [08:02]
Matt Ra
It's important for a couple reasons. One is just basic sort of project momentum. We want to keep things moving. We want to ship as quickly as we can. We want to get to the right thing as quickly as we can. The other tends to do more with making sure that we are inviting the right voices into the project. And so what we found is that if we can sort of establish, let's say, a weekly cadence of doing reviews with key stakeholders, then we're getting frequent feedback on the work and they're getting their own sort of conviction and views on what it is that we're designing and ultimately committing to ship. If you go too long between those things, things tend to get out of alignment. People may start to form different conceptions of what the work is meant to do. You may lose sight. A little bit of the goals, even just a little bit of misalignment can start to amplify over time. And so by having these sort of weekly check ins, or sometimes even more frequent than that, we just ensure that we keep everyone on the same page about where we're at in the process, where we're going, what decisions need to be made. You know, it can be hard to get people around the table all the time. Right. It requires a lot of scheduling, effort, a lot of time from people. I think one of the superpowers of designers is to bring people around the table around a vision of the future. And everyone at the Times is very excited about building that future. And so they'll make the time to do it. And we hold up our end of the bargain by coming every week with new things to share, new points of view, ideas that will push us forward.
- [09:19]
Eli Wilber
You mentioned the visioning stage of a project and Aaron and I got to take a little tour of the museum here, which was really cool to see a few things stuck out. There was sketches, there were sketches of the logo. There was a sketch, I think, of the layout of maybe an early version of the Sunday magazine. I'm curious if that's still a part of the process. Do you still do hand sketches or do you explore ideas in early ways in a more early tactile? Way.
- [09:41]
Matt Ra
Yeah. So depends, I suppose, on which designers you talk to here. If you're laying out the front page of the paper, there's very much a process of sketching that out first. Tom Bodkin, our former chief creative officer who retired last year, there are lots of things you can find out there of his process sort of drawing out the front page. It's very cool to see. When it comes to product design, I still very much believe in sketching. I love to do that myself. Even if they're the world's worst sketches, you usually can clarify your own thinking about what it is you're trying to accomplish, or a flow, let's say, through what do the steps need to be. Sketching can be super valuable for that. It's also really low effort, really low cost. You get to something very quickly. So while what we bring to these critiques and reviews tends to be higher fidelity than that, that is still a really useful place for a lot of designers to start in getting their own thinking straight and thinking very rapidly about a number of different ways they could approach a project.
- [10:31]
Aaron Walter
You mentioned earlier that one of the challenges is that New York Times has so many products at this point. It feels like maybe this is a renaissance time or just like the New York Times is operating from a position of strength right now, that there's been some acquisitions and there's a number of great products that kind of fit into the different moments in a person's life. There's recipes, there's the athletic, there's games, et cetera. The wire cutter, which is a personal favorite of mine. With that comes challenges of designing across these products, that there is a continuity and yet there is an independence of brand. You also have to think about user flow. How is your team thinking about that? What are some of the techniques or strategies that you use for designing across products?
- [11:16]
Matt Ra
It's something we grapple with every day. You kind of nailed it. A number of complexities here. We've got multiple products, we've got multiple states of those products. So you could be a subscriber, you could be a non subscriber. We have multiple kind of surfaces where you might encounter these products. So our apps, website, sometimes off platform, backend systems that need to be orchestrated, all that stuff. So what that adds up to is obviously complexity, but a sort of way of looking at things that has to be very matrixed. You can't necessarily think about, oh, there's only one user journey people have with us. There are many. There are different user journeys for each product. And so one of the things we really think a lot about is within a product, within, let's say, cooking, we try to keep the focus on what the user's trying to accomplish at the end of the day. So are they in a meal planning mindset? Are they actually in the kitchen right now with eggs on their hands or something like that, and trying to figure out what the next step of the recipe is? Keeping the focus on what it is that the user's trying to accomplish is one way to keep your eyes on what is the most important thing for them in that moment and how do we get them to that thing. But, yeah, it's a real challenge to choreograph these things, especially across products. You mentioned also sort of how you think about the whole set of products that we offer. And there we think a lot about how people authenticate, log in, are there navigation systems or profile elements that sort of follow you around as you travel through the products, Things like that that will help you feel like even if you spend all of your time only in wirecutter, it will still feel like, oh, I have access to maybe this wider universe of things that the Times offers.
- [12:48]
Eli Wilber
Matt, how does your team think about the legacy of the New York Times? Again? Up in the museum, we saw excerpts from the moon landing, like the front page from the moon landing or World War II, and obviously goes back much further. So there's this legacy of look and feel and tone of the newspaper itself. But you also want to think about bringing in new people and modern product design. How do you balance those considerations?
- [13:13]
Matt Ra
When I started at the Times, I remember feeling such a sense of reverence and kind of awe for the brand and for the product and what it is that the Times stood for. I remember when I came to one of the company orientations that everyone goes through when they join a company, and you hear from various company leaders about what they do and why the Times is important to them. And I remember somebody from the newsroom stood up and said something that has really stuck with me to this day, which was, the Times didn't hire you because we want you to keep doing the same things that we've always done. We hired you because we believe you can bring something new that will help us innovate, that will help us push the brand and the product to places that it may not be right now. And I think as a designer, that is such a liberating thing to hear, especially in a place where with such an established brand, such an established history, almost 175 years, which is a massive amount of time. So to be able to hear that, I think just sets the right mindset from the start, that this is a place that, yes, it's a storied institution, but at the same time, we're here to innovate. We're here to create new things, solve new problems for our users, for our newsroom, for the business. The mindset you have to have as a designer here is to both respect that legacy, but also be willing to push it and know that the brand has survived this long because we've been innovating and will continue to innovate in the future.
- [14:32]
Aaron Walter
It strikes me as this interesting idea that the Times is here to innovate because ultimately, it's a storytelling company, company that tells stories. And we have lived in some pretty dynamic times in the past couple decades, from 911 to Iraq, Afghanistan, Covid, multiple elections that have been pretty intense. And all of that requires kind of specialized storytelling. And that is something that I have noticed, is that the way that information is presented continues to evolve. I can't help but think that the newsroom wants to tell stories in new ways, but they need a partner, a design partner to help them find how to do that. Or say, here's what's possible. What can you tell us about that partnership between design and the newsroom?
- [15:24]
Matt Ra
I mean, you nailed it. You can go browse the archive of newspapers from starting at 18:51, and if you just look at the front pages over the years, you'll see, especially as you get into the 20th century, such a richer expression of the ways we tell stories. You'll see photos start to appear, you'll see colors start to appear, different sections and typographic treatments. So in some ways, it's a continuation of just something that's been happening from the beginning. But in a digital context, there are just so many different ways you can tell stories. Now, something that might be helpful to think about when you think about this question is we have designers in our news design team who sit in the newsroom who work directly with journalists and editors on exactly these types of questions. So for a given story, what is the best way to tell that story in could be print, could be digital, but what are the best ways that will bring clarity and help people gain understanding about what it is that the story is trying to say? Where product design comes in is we kind of look for some of the patterns and the systems in those. So if we are seeing lots more visual treatments of things, lots more, let's say, video or just immersive graphics and things like that. We can start to think about how do we create systems that allow us to reproduce these types of stories, these formats and at scale, so that they're not always something that has to be done in a kind of one off way. And I think that's another place where design can sort of not only help tell the story, but ensure that we are helping tell the story in the future as well. Giving tools to the newsroom to allow them just the full range of visual expression and all the storytelling tools they might need to really communicate and bring life to a story that they're trying to tell.
- [17:02]
Eli Wilber
You spent an earlier part of your career as a UX architect, in fact was at a competitor in the Wall Street Journal, but you were a UX Archite. How did that kind of inform the way you think about information architecture and your own leadership of the design teams here?
- [17:16]
Matt Ra
I'm sure that it does, but I feel like I've really internalized it. Let me go way back. So when I graduated from grad school, I'm going to date myself here. It was 2006, I graduated into a market where titles were all over the place. So my first job was as an information architect. But you might be a UX architect, an interaction designer, just huge range of titles. So part of what I graduated into was this world where there wasn't really necessarily a clear definition of what an information architect was or wasn't. But what I saw then, and what I continue to see now is that my job is about trying to sort of architect. It could be spaces, digital spaces. It could be time, it could be increasingly, as I've moved into design leadership roles, it's thinking about the architecture of people and processes. And there are a lot of tools actually that you might use as an information architect that are still very helpful today in a totally different context. So I think of things like, you know, a controlled vocabulary, just being very precise and specific about the terms you're using to make sure that in a design review or in a performance review or something like that, that the meaning is understood. I think about sort of the architecture of how you grow as a designer. We have career frameworks and things like that that are meant to help people understand their progression through time and through their careers. I think those are very much kind of architectural questions just applied in a very different way than they were 20 years ago when I started.
- [18:42]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [18:49]
Eli Wilber
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- [21:52]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. Information architecture in I think a lot of places has sort of faded into the background, but it strikes me that the Times of all places really, really needs thoughtful information architecture for discovery and movement through all of this content. And there were some major IA changes in the past couple years. Could you talk us through that process and how you and your team think about information architecture these days?
- [22:27]
Matt Ra
It is really important. Under the hood there's tons of metadata that describes and categorizes the journalism and some of that then we find ways to express in the user experience. So you might be thinking of the relaunched news app last year where we introduced the top kind of ribbon of navigation. One of our main goals there was to help introduce people to the breadth of things that the Times could offer. We would hear over and over from people, we have do interviews and user research. They would tell us that they know there's things that they're missing, they know there's parts of the product that they would find valuable, but they just can't find it. And so that is fundamentally a sort of information architecture, a findability kind of problem. So the process of creating that ribbon that started actually a while before it launched, we did a larger envisioning process where we looked at the news product as a whole and said, where do we think it should be, say three years from now? And coming out of that, we had a number of opinions about what would make it great, what it needed to do. And one of those was that it needed to sort of create a larger canvas for the news. And so you see now that we have a lifestyle panel, we have a wire cutter panel that you can go to opinion, all of those are places where allows a little bit different kind of expression of editorial judgment. Also a different texture to what you'll see and feel there. Each of them have a little bit of a different feel to them, similar in some ways to sections in a newspaper from long ago.
- [23:56]
Eli Wilber
Matt, how do you think about striking a balance between the needs of the users and customers and the business needs? And again, this can be more high level, but I know on a much, much, much tinier scale. Aaron and I think about this a lot because we want to make a really great product and we want to provide value for people, but it's also our job. So we have to make Some money. And Times has a big company, expensive real estate here in Manhattan. You got to pay the bills. So what's that balance like for you?
- [24:20]
Matt Ra
It's a constant conversation for us. One of the unique things about working at a media organization is that you're balancing not only what a user needs and is trying to do, but you're also balancing what the business needs and is trying to do. Not unlike another company, but you also are trying to balance what the newsroom and its journalists are trying to accomplish. As a result, you're constantly thinking about all those things and finding the sort of overlap and all of those concerns that will ultimately create a really great experience. I think in general, the way we think about striking the balance between the user experience and the business needs is ideally we look for business needs that have a very natural sort of expression in the product. We've tried really hard not to do things that feel off to users or don't make sense. If we're asking them to take an action to subscribe, let's say we want to be really clear about the value that they get by doing that. So we've created this sort of deliberate state as a non subscriber where you get a little bit for free, but you don't get the whole thing. And we think a lot about sort of how to move people from that non subscribed state to a subscribed state. And the product does a lot of the work there. We think about the different moments where it feels appropriate to ask somebody to subscribe, but also doesn't necessarily block them from doing the thing that they came to do, which is they came to read a story or something like that. We want to make sure that they get that information, but also make it really clear that there's so much more beyond that story that if they subscribe, they'll have access to.
- [25:38]
Aaron Walter
Are there design values that guide the work that your team is doing? When I interact with the wire cutter or games, recipes, et cetera, they're different. I mean, they look very much like different products, but they still feel like, well, they came from the New York Times. There's some common feelings that I get from those. They're friendly, they're erudite, they definitely feel a little elevated. But presumably there are different teams working on each one of these products. How do you unite that? It's going back to that earlier question. What are the design values that guide it?
- [26:15]
Matt Ra
Yeah, I think that there are a couple ways we unite it. One is less about values and just more about systems. You think about maybe a design system. One of the advantages of being in a company that's been around for so long is you have pretty sophisticated systems of type and layout and things like that. Just ways that we present information that we don't have to necessarily constantly relitigate those things. And I think you see some of that in common across all these products. Even when you have very different types of content, like you have games, obviously is quite different from a recipe or a live breaking news story, but there's definitely some DNA that's just encoded in those design systems that I think helps with that feeling of it all coming from the same place. In terms of values, we do have a set of. We call them UX tenets. They are a set of principles that are meant to complement some of the objectives we have both in our newsroom and on the business side. There are things like clarity or making sure that we are achieving. We call uncommonly high levels of craft. They're meant to be kind of opinionated things that would help us not only evaluate work, but decide that when it's time to sort of put it out into the world, that it really hits that standard that the Times is known for.
- [27:24]
Eli Wilber
So being that you're in the business of news and I know you have other products, games and things like that, but at least personally, I found that occasionally during especially turbulent times, I just have to take a little break from the news and just, you know, find some. Some other. Something else to occupy my mind or get outside. And I'm curious how you personally think about that or for your team when there's a lot of stuff going on and you might just need a break in order not to burn out.
- [27:46]
Matt Ra
Yeah, I can think of that in a couple ways. In one way, that's kind of the beauty of the strategy we have at the Times is that we offer this bundle of products that if the news becomes too much, there are other things you can do with your life that still feel like. In the case of games, it's like you can still have smart, fun. You can still feel like you're doing things that are enriching your life. So strategically, I just sort of love that about what we've created here is that we have other outlets if the news has become overwhelming. When you ask, sort of personally, I think one of the things that we've talked a little bit about on the design team is there are these moments where the news intrudes on the work. It becomes so pressing that you can't not look at it and it's interesting because you work with the news all day, you can actually start to become kind of blind to what actually you're putting in these mock ups and these prototypes. But there certainly are moments where the outside world presses in. And I think we have just really tried to ensure that designers or anyone really at the Times feels like they are able to step back if they need to. They're able to talk to a friend, a colleague, things like that. We've tried to be pretty deliberate about knowing that this phenomenon exists. And during times of sort of overwhelming news, it can be a tough place to work. But just by recognizing that and giving folks a little time and space to step back if they need it, that's really one of the ways that you can kind of strike a balance.
- [29:02]
Aaron Walter
Personally, you mentioned earlier that part of your process in the team is to always stay connected to your users, people who are using the product on a regular basis. Presumably that's a very broad demographic. And with games, it definitely seems like there's a younger demographic. Just speaking anecdotally, customer of one here. But my children who are 11 and 15 are using the New York Times every day because it's in this school we're always talking about wordle. And if we're at a restaurant, first thing my kids say is, hey, let's do the Wordle or let's do strands or something like that together. So it's interesting that the Times, the demographic is shifting. How do you think about designing for different demographics, especially for younger folks?
- [29:48]
Matt Ra
I have the same thing with my kids. My son loves to grab the phone and start playing strands and things like that. And I couldn't point to necessarily a strategy or a document that says, you know, what strands or games generally is going to be, how we sort of go after the next generation of news consumers. But it does sort of have the effect of working that way. Right. Games are such an inclusive thing. Some of our games, you don't even have to speak English to play them and have fun. Right. And so that opens up huge new audiences for us potentially who could come into the Times ecosystem and over time, you know, maybe decide that there's more than just games that they're interested in in terms of how we design for those audiences. I think it is a very broad, you know, it's a mass market kind of product. We want to reach as many people as we can. We talk a lot about the curious sort of being our target audience and anyone who's curious about the world being somebody that we might be able to serve. So you have to kind of break that down a little bit. Curiosity is a huge, very human motivation. But to break that down, we think a lot about jobs to be done, meaning what is it that someone has turned to the times to help them with in their life? So in the case of games, it could be just, you know, having a moment of relaxation and fun. With any of our products, there's probably a different job that somebody's sort of hiring us for. We stay in touch with users, obviously, we do a lot of interviewing and research, shout out to our audience insights group. We love working with them in design. They do a great job of sort of recruiting very widely. And so we do get a chance, I think, to get exposed to lots of different folks, opinions, their habits and routines that ultimately inform how we design things and we hope make for a better experience. At the end of the day, big.
- [31:21]
Eli Wilber
Part of our audience is very curious about generative AI and how it inserts itself into the workflow at different organizations at the same time. There's many organizations have restrictions around how you might or might not use it, and curious if you can talk to that at all here, how it fits into your process or experimentation.
- [31:38]
Matt Ra
Yeah, I think there are a couple ways we're leaning in. One way is in thinking about the ways that generative AI might help us make either better journalism or better product experiences. So things that ultimately our audiences would see and use. And the other is around how Genai might change the way that we produce those internally. So how a designer might create a prototype, let's say, on the first one, as far as how we make better experiences for our audiences. One of my colleagues, Zach Seward, has been leading some really interesting work within the newsroom about ways that we can employ generative AI in contexts like investigative reporting. There was a piece that ran right before the election, and it was called Inside the Movement Behind Trump's Election Lies. The Times had sort of gained access to hundreds of hours of recordings of a group that was primarily concerned with sort of election interference. But the challenge was we wanted to obviously publish this before Election Day. There simply wasn't enough time to review all of that footage and to figure out sort of what the story was. So Zach and his team employed generative AI to help analyze hundreds of hours of footage of these meetings and try to identify some of the most salient parts of those conversations and then use the power of our newsroom to verify that those were actually, in fact, salient things and ultimately to write a story on a deadline that got published before election day. And Zach sort of calls this like AI in the middle, where it's human first, then AI and then human last. And I really like that kind of framing. That's an example of one of the ways that we think generative AI can help in the process of telling the stories that we need to tell. And in this particular case, helping us do it in a way that was much faster than would have been possible before. As far as designing how we work. That's the other place I think that generative AI tooling has really started to change. Although I will say it feels very early days to me. We are experimenting with lots of different tools, but I think one of the things that I sort of noticed right away within design, although I suspect this is not just unique to design, is getting over that initial skepticism of is this tool here to take my job or something like that. And I think once you get past that and see it more as an enabler of things that you already do and maybe you can do them faster than you did them before, I think then we're really starting to see like, oh, here's some places, like in our creative process where this tool might help us get to a prototype faster. And because we can get to that prototype faster, maybe we can get to our user research faster, maybe we can get insights back faster than we did before. So we're starting to see a little bit of that. But again, it's so early that it feels like we're in the midst industry wide of reckoning with the tools that we use and figuring out, okay, well, what does this one do that will help me and does it change our overall process or not? But at the end of the day, I'm really pretty optimistic that while these tools are going to change how we work, we're starting to see it already. But the things that designers bring to the table, empathy, user centricity, taste, judgment, I don't see that going anywhere. And these tools might help us pull some of those judgments and those decisions that designers make up earlier in the process, but I don't see them replacing the need for that. So I'm optimistic overall about the ways that these tools will help us do our jobs better. But no doubt it's changing. It's changing every day.
- [34:47]
Aaron Walter
We hear a lot about lines being blurred so specifically between design and engineering, but in other disciplines as well. And you mentioned earlier that prototyping is something that you're thinking about with AI and we used to prototype with. It's a picture it's like a click map type of thing where you could click through and now we're just straight up building that thing very quickly and very simply. If you have some basic coding knowledge, vibe coding, using AI to sort of support your ideation, it's pretty straightforward. Is that something that's finding its way into your workflow?
- [35:25]
Matt Ra
Yes, I have seen that. As far as to what extent it's blurring lines, I think that's really what we are in the process of learning right now. But yeah, without a whole lot of training in these tools, pretty much anyone can create a prototype. And that's kind of cool. But the same sort of thinking and rigor needs to apply to these prototypes that would have applied prior to having Genai tooling, which is what's the purpose of the prototype? What are you trying to learn from it and are you putting it in front of the right audiences in order to be able to learn and make decisions and move forward and really validate that the thing that you're making is the right thing? I'm sure we are going to have lots of interesting conversations about at what point in the process does a designer step in with the prototype versus an engineer. But I suspect that the purposes of those prototypes are going to be very different still and that some of the things we might be trying to solve for in design still kind of remain uniquely within the domain of design, such as validating that it meets a need for our users, trying to assess impacts to our own internal workflows. If we're doing internal systems, things like that.
- [36:23]
Eli Wilber
One of the reasons we're here is our mutual friend Meredith Black is a leading figure in the design ops world and has been helping out the times here with some design ops related things. Tell us a little bit about how that's important here for your own teams and the way you do your work.
- [36:37]
Matt Ra
Yeah, Design Office is hugely important. So prior to the role I'm in now, I set up our first design operations function within product design. Leaned heavily on Meredith's advice and wisdom as well to do that. We'd been talking about it for a while, that it was a thing that we knew we needed but didn't have, but once we started doing it, you just really felt it immediately. I would get notes from folks being like, I'm so glad somebody else is thinking about this or handling this for us. Design ops within the product design team at the time is still pretty small and so we have to be very strategic about what we choose to take on and we think a lot in terms of what are things that we can do that will work for everyone or work for a large number of people. So as a result, we tend to focus on processes and things like that where we all participate. So getting really buttoned up about our hiring processes, let's say, or performance management, or honestly, just even things that, like, day to day, like, can I buy this book or not? Like, the answer is always yes, by the way. You know, being able to just sort of take those little things off of people's plates across a team of 85, and you start to feel it right away again. People have sort of told us that this is very beneficial to them, but then you also see it in terms of, you know, it frees up just a little bit more of their time to do what they do best, which is create really amazing work and not have to worry about, you know, spend 15 minutes wondering if the times will pay for that book you talked about.
- [37:57]
Aaron Walter
Design systems and how that design system grows as new story types evolve. Tell us what that looks like. Where does that design system live? How do people access it? And is there a librarian that sort of maintains that? Because that seems like a vast, vast design system at an organization like this.
- [38:17]
Matt Ra
I think of this in kind of two ways. There's the literal sort of design system, literal in the sense of like, there's code, there are figma components, There are things like that that you can go and pull into your designs or use to ship a product. I think then also of something even broader than that. That's maybe a more conceptual kind of design system, which are just some of the patterns and ways of publishing that we've developed over the years that may not necessarily be captured one to one in code, but shape how we approach different projects. I've worked really closely with our design systems team over the last several years, and they're constantly sort of challenged with the problem of across all of these different teams we're working on all these different products, what are the things that we can produce that we can put into a design system that would help them move faster and deliver things more consistently at a higher quality. And it's easy to say that, but it's actually really hard to sort of find those overlaps and to align those groups on. Hey, if we create this component with you, it'll save you this amount of time in your prototyping or in your delivery of a piece of work. A lot of the design system work at the times really boils down to that where there are established patterns or things that multiple teams need that we can pull into one place. Should have a librarian. I love that idea. But pull it into one sort of library that can then be accessed and used by lots of other teams.
- [39:40]
Eli Wilber
Before we hit record, we were talking a little bit about books that we're reading right now, and we're curious. It doesn't have to be a book. Could be something else. Art, could be a podcast, could be music that you're finding inspiring, or your family. You mentioned that you have kids that are roughly my kid's age. And I know we're finding some fun stuff together too.
- [39:57]
Matt Ra
Lots of things come to mind. So for what I'm reading, I was telling Aaron I'm a very slow reader. So I've been slowly working my way through ministry for the future. I love sci fi, but I also love sci fi that's sort of grounded in some sort of realism. 180 from that. I also just started subscribing to Fine Woodworking magazine. The little free time I have. I love to try to make things with my hands. I think that's a very common thing for people who work in digital context. So anyway, that's a very inspiring, beautiful kind of magazine of things I'll probably never quite get to.
- [40:29]
Eli Wilber
But my daughter right now, she's in middle school, but her favorite class is essentially wood shop. And she's made some really beautiful things. She made an end table for us. She just made a ukulele, and I dig it. That's where I started my design career, as in physical products. So maybe I pass a little bit on to her.
- [40:45]
Matt Ra
Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, mine, I totally digital. So to me, this is all kind of new and fun as far as what we read or watch with our kids. It's funny. It's sometimes it's an exercise in finding that, like, lowest common denominator, like, what's the thing? So I think of things like, you know, we all love Spider man into the Spider verse.
- [41:01]
Eli Wilber
Oh, that's great.
- [41:02]
Christopher Henry
Yes.
- [41:03]
Matt Ra
Great movie.
- [41:04]
Eli Wilber
We had the production designer on the show a little while ago.
- [41:06]
Matt Ra
Oh, I should check that out. I didn't know. Love that movie. My son's really into one piece books. I don't know. Do you know that series? Yes.
- [41:12]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, my son is also into one piece.
- [41:14]
Matt Ra
Yeah, it's just one of those that goes on and on. I think he's on book 79. My kids are 10 and 15. And so what it is that all four of us, like the Venn diagram is very narrow. It's a Very narrow Venn diagram.
- [41:27]
Aaron Walter
Yes, yes, that's great. Well Matt, thank you so much for being on Design Better and thank you for hosting us here at the New York Times.
- [41:35]
Matt Ra
My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [41:40]
Aaron Walter
In this episode of Insight Studio from Design Better, we chat with Christopher Henry and Simon Porritt, co founders of Noise Agency. They've been using wix Studio to bring.
- [41:51]
Eli Wilber
Rapid development into their client work, building.
- [41:54]
Aaron Walter
And iterating on websites in hours rather than weeks.
- [41:58]
Host
They shared how WIX empowers their globally distributed team to collaborate seamlessly and how it bridges the gap between visual design and code, allowing one person to design and build with creative freedom. For Noise, WIX isn't just a platform, it's an extension of the entrepreneur's mind, letting ideas become reality before breakfast. To learn more about Wix Studio, go to wix.comstudio My name's Chris Henry.
- [42:22]
Simon Poratt
I'm the general manager of noise or the CEO. I co founded noise with Simon back in 2016.
- [42:29]
Christopher Henry
I'm Simon, I'm the chairman and head strategist at Noise and I help Chris take the business to new markets and champion the growth of the business. I think the biggest change is the speed and the instant feedback loop that you get when you're working with an editor like wix. We call it rapid development. That's because we're genuinely developing on the daily with our clients website. In the old days it was spend weeks designing something, get approvals, then spend weeks developing something from a website development perspective and then present that for approval and then go. It was this back and forth long process that was drawn out over weeks and weeks. Whereas now you can build a website in a couple of hours. That sort of big agency mentality is a thing of the past. There are still big agencies but they think differently now. There's a lot more room for people to have change and to create change inside of organizations and their clients using that core skill of designs. As you grow in this industry, you realize that where the real magic is made isn't in the boardrooms, it's on the computer creating those designs that's going to have the change for those customers. And we're able to do that on the WIX platform because it's quick. You get an instant feedback loop, you can do things like AB testing and it's a complete game changer for small agencies.
- [43:51]
Simon Poratt
One of the other major benefits I think with WIX and these really like what we call rapid development programs is it also allows you to work with the best talent in the world. In an effective way through that contractor methodology. Like, we've got people in every continent that build websites for us.
- [44:08]
Christopher Henry
The most important thing about being an entrepreneur is being able to wake up from a dream where you dreamt a cool idea and wake up and literally put that into action. The second you get up, like before you even have breakfast, you know, add a new page to the website. That's what WIX is. WIX is like the extension of the business owner's psyche. They can just do it at the minute they think of it. The things you can achieve inside of the WIX framework are highly, highly flexible. There's not a lot you can't do. And whatever you're lacking in your creative team, you can kind of lean on wix for. You don't have to put everything in wix, but you can. Having that flexibility means you can go to market very quickly with an mvp. At the end of the day, that's what being successful in business is about, getting to the money quicker.
- [44:53]
Simon Poratt
One of the big advantages of wix, but also one of the considerations you've got when you're dealing with like your end customer, is you want to have a really good balance between what is functionally a good website from a conversion perspective, but what is also visually something that showcases your talent and your ability as a developer, and then finding a good balance between those two. And I think wix's ability to mix interactions and animations and then all the different sections in such a seamless way really made that possible. So our site, it's got a lot of wow factor, but that functionally it's also very, very good from a conversion perspective.
- [45:33]
Christopher Henry
I think the key is that it's taken the divide between visual creatives and coders and brought them together or actually made them the same person almost. So now someone who lives in that user interface design land, that GUI kind of segment of the creative process, they can have ideas and be able to implement those ideas themselves without having to outsource those to a developer. We create noise ninjas because it's like we would rather have one guy that is a killer designer and then literally build his own website inside of wix and make the system operate in the way that he envisaged it from a design perspective. So rather than it being all disjointed, it's driven by one human. Now, that's a game changer inside of how creative you can be with wix and the tools that it has. The most exciting part about that is that there's so much unmapped territory. The ability to be creative and be the leader of your field inside of the WIX for Framework is huge. We are doing things in WIX that no one's ever done before every day. The cool thing about WIX is they're developing bleeding edge tech that you can get your hands on and work out. How am I going to use this to my maximum advantage?
- [46:52]
Simon Poratt
The best place is our website Noise N o I Z e dot com Just you know, fill out a brand audit form or hit the contact us and we'll be in touch.
- [47:06]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show.
- [47:33]
Eli Wilber
Until next time, Sam.