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- [00:00]
Gunner Gray
Instead of going out and trying to find a bunch of tutorials on how to build metal shaders, you just ask Cursor. Build it along with me. You're building, but you're also learning along the way. It almost feels silly to sit in Figma for too long or, like, work in a static environment for too long when you could just be prototyping it.
- [00:20]
Rid
You get a little taste of shaders and it's like the slipperiest slope in the world.
- [00:24]
Gunner Gray
I think there's this element of always leading with curiosity, and I think that's what sort of led up to that moment.
- [00:31]
Rid
The value of a generalist designer is unreal. Right? Like, you can contribute in so many different ways.
- [00:40]
Gunner Gray
That's one of the things I love about Perplexity, is it lends itself really well to generalists and you can flex so many different ways.
- [00:50]
Host
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Gunner Gray, whose leading mobile design for Perplexity. So we're going to go deep into some of the mindset shifts that are required to design AI products. But he's also a great example of what it looks like to thrive as a generalist in the age of AI. So we talk a lot about his experience making shaders and designing voice interfaces and learning to code. But before we get into all of that, let's go all the way back.
- [01:24]
Rid
To the beginning of Gunnar's Perplexity journey.
- [01:28]
Gunner Gray
When I first joined at Perplexity, I was brought on to lead mobile design. So that was right in my wheelhouse and I joined the team as, like, the only mobile designer and then was immediately just like, dumped into the. The fire. The fire hose there. And there was a lot of, like, different moving tracks of work, and it was already, like a pretty good working mobile app, but there was still a lot of work to be done in terms of refining certain areas and scaling new areas, like the Discover feed, for example. That was one of the first things that I. I worked on and sort of redesigned right when I started.
- [02:10]
Rid
You mentioned the fire hose. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what was life like in those first few months? Give us a sense of what it's like being a designer at Perplexity in the early days, in the midst of all that scale.
- [02:21]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, I mean, everything was just moving so fast and the team was still very small. I think I was the third or fourth designer on the team, including brand. So everyone doing a lot of different things at that Time and the, the shipping velocity was just going so fast too. So every week felt like something new was shipping and you're just trying to like catch the moving train when you hop in there. So, you know, getting thrown into the deep end and, and figuring it out and making it work, I feel like that was the best way to really get started. There wasn't really much onboarding. It was sort of just like pick up, jump in figma, you know, understand what we're doing and working on and just, just go. So it was, it was important just to pick up quick and start contributing fast and not like dwell on, you know, getting ramped up or learning too much. Like just sort of learning as you go. Learning how the team is working, learning how we're shipping. Learning more about the ins and outs of the product itself too.
- [03:22]
Rid
All right, here's the thing.
- [03:23]
Host
You don't need another dashboard. What you need to do is to talk to customers. So I want to introduce you to GenW AI. You can think of it kind of like Vibe researching. To validate your ideas quickly, just draft your questions, select an icp, and then their AI agent runs interviews on your behalf by pulling from a panel of global participants. I mean, you could literally set it up in the morning and get actionable insights by lunchtime. It's validation at your fingertips and you can try it out free for 14 days. Just head to Dive Club Genway to get started. That's G E N W A Y. Raycast is my portal to AI. It's a quick keyboard shortcut away, which means it's always at my fingertips. I can add attachments, build presets to streamline certain workflows. And they even support over 30 models from OpenAI to Claude to Perplexity. So your chats aren't bound to a single model. And the best part is you can try their AI and all of their extensions for free. No subscription, no account needed. And Raycast has pretty quickly become the cornerstone of how I use my computer. So if you haven't tried it yet, do yourself a favor and head to dive club Raycast to get started. That's R A Y C A S.
- [04:46]
Rid
T. Okay, now onto the episode. Can you go a little bit deeper about what those early contributions were like? You get in there, there's this pace. It's hardly even an onboarding. It's like, hey, start shipping kind of thing. How did you as a designer then identify the ways that you wanted to make an impact on a product that did already have a lot of, you know, Functionality there was a baseline that already existed.
- [05:07]
Gunner Gray
Yeah. It certainly had strong foundations. So I was sort of just auditing and assessing the, the product and figuring out, like, where we could start refining things or spotting inconsistencies and just starting to, in my own head, kind of form a. A design system and a design language to better define and roll out. So that was one thing I was looking at. And then to make it a little bit easier to digest, one of the first things I did was just redesign, like the Settings view.
- [05:41]
Rid
Nice. That's the perfect first step.
- [05:44]
Gunner Gray
Yeah. I mean, you understand, like everything the product has, all the settings and preferences, and you can then just sort of redesign in this. In this sort of isolated area first where you're not touching the full product. So that was sort of a nice start into things. And then we just ramped up on the Discover feed. And that was also really helpful because it was sort of like a new zero to one project. We were totally redesigning the thing. We had new ways of creating content, and we wanted to create a more immersive new experience for engaging with that content and consuming it. And that was nice because we didn't have to work too much within the constraints of the current product or any of the current patterns. We got to then create new patterns and new paradigms that we wanted to use for Discover, maybe even for quick.
- [06:38]
Rid
Context for people listening. Can you talk a little bit about Artifacts, the role you were at before, and how much crossover was there with the types of things that you were designing?
- [06:48]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, so at Artifact, I was brought on as a founding designer. This was six months away from going to market and starting to really define the brand for the product, tell people.
- [07:01]
Rid
Listening who the founders were, just for people unfamiliar with it, because it's pretty cool.
- [07:05]
Gunner Gray
Yeah. So Artifact is founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the Instagram founders. So it was really cool to be able to come into there and like, work with them and learn from them and see how they work. I mean, they were in the work all day, every day, coding and building. So it was so, like, freeing to come in and, and have that opportunity to just build alongside them and then help them further shape the design of Artifact and work in the brand and sort of identify, like, what we wanted to bring to market first.
- [07:42]
Rid
And there was an AI component to that too. Right.
- [07:45]
Gunner Gray
I feel like AI and ChatGPT really started taking off like a few months into Artifact when I joined. So a lot of what they were doing was building all the machine learning and personalization for Content discovery. And then AI started coming into the picture and it was like now you can do all of these new things like summarizing content, changing the summary styles, reformatting or like rewriting headlines actually so avoiding clickbait by rewriting better headlines that that are a little more clear and valuable. So that, that all started like ramping up really quick and we, we jumped on that and started exploring all the ways we could use it and how we would want that to show up in Artifact. So it was super fun to work with those like early day ideas and the technology there.
- [08:39]
Rid
Yeah, I mean if you were working on anything AI related, especially in consumer back in 2022, that's kind of OG, which is funny to say but you know, like that's pretty early days. So maybe we could talk at a high level to start about the different ways that designing AI experiences has shaped the way that you approach your practice as a designer.
- [09:02]
Gunner Gray
I think the first thing is just a mindset shift. Like I think of AI native products as, as a new medium to design and build for and what those differences are from like the way we used to build and thinking about sort of what does this AI medium mean. Now we have outcome driven interactions where you can just state what you want and the system is going to handle it. It's very much context aware, so the systems will dynamically adjust based on your, you know, your requests or asks and in a totally non deterministic way. So it's very, very fluid in that sense. And then it's also very multimodal. So I think voice becomes in an AI context as we think of voice interfaces and conversations and voice assistants and things like that. So I think there's some newer foundations to understand in the medium that you're working with to better design those outputs. So there's like the foundational level of that and then there's also the process for designing those outcomes. So previously it just felt very, very static from a design standpoint. In my world at least, where you would spe spend a lot of time in Figma and you would do a lot of work up front to then start building and shipping. But since joining Artifact, since joining Perplexity, being on an in house kind of scrappy startup team, it's so much more of a dynamic environment and there's such a blurry line between design and engineering now where sometimes design is setting the vision or sometimes engineering is showing what's possible and you need to be so close to those inputs and outputs that like it almost starts to feel Silly. Working in such a static environment where you want to get working software as fast as possible and you want to be able to see those outputs and understand what those are in order to kind of shape those and form them however you want. So you really need to be super close, like designing and building at the same time. I think that's one thing at Perplexity where we, we try to get working software as soon as possible so we can learn much faster. Because AI has like totally increased the, the number of reps you can get on, on a problem and as you iterate through a problem. So I feel like there's such a tighter feedback loop there. It's much faster to come to conclusions where you don't want to sit around too long or like dwell on ideas or designs. You just want to do whatever you need to do to get something working and then refine it from there.
- [11:55]
Rid
Is there some kind of an example from something that you've shipped? Maybe it's a discover, maybe it's something else where we could really go deep into how you all collaborate as a team within this bucket of an opportunity or a problem you're trying to solve or a feature you're trying to release. And I really want to understand where you insert yourself in that process, how you collaborate with engineers, how the output even evolves over time. I feel like there's a lot to dig in there, so I'm wondering if there's an example we could point to.
- [12:24]
Gunner Gray
A good example of that way of working is probably with our voice features, both our Android voice assistant, but also the voice mode on iOS. So that was a project that it went through many iterations. And I think that it was so back and forth in like testing and experimenting to truly understand what outputs you were dealing with and like how the actual prompting was working to get those outputs, how fast it felt and what the performance was like and how accurate it was too. And then also just like uncovering all of the different use cases and all of the different scenarios that you could run into with voice because it's so dynamic, it could go any which way. So that was something that was, you know, we, we designed like kind of the core shell interface, but it became much more of a system to define in terms of like the, the back and forth voice and how you're interacting with voice and accounting for all of those, the different states you could be in.
- [13:35]
Host
Can you talk more about the role.
- [13:36]
Rid
That you as a designer play when you're shaping what this voice interaction should become when there's really not that many pixels involved.
- [13:44]
Gunner Gray
I think my role on voice mode specifically was more about crafting the system and accounting for all of the different states you might be in, where virtually there's very minimal interface to it. But there's so much feedback and interaction to design, even though the interface is fairly minimal. So one thing I did was first just try to understand all of the interactions and what sort of patterns we could map to that. So when you think about voice, you're. You're going to have a few different states. You're going to have a connecting state before it's actually active. You're going to have a listening state, you're going to have a response state, you're going to have an end state. When you stop talking, what is that moment? Like, how do you know that the system knows that you're done talking too? So there's all these little interaction details that are really the core UI elements of that experience. So when I, you know, came into the project and started thinking about it more, I kind of went into defining those different states, knowing that those are pretty crucial to, to the experience. And if you don't have that feedback from the system, if you don't understand what's going on, if you don't know those cues, it feels very confusing and you're not really sure how it's working or if it's working at all.
- [15:09]
Rid
I'm going to go really deep and nerdy here and it's going to be for selfish reasons because I'm literally working on this right now. Like yesterday I was having all kinds of back and forths with AI, trying to figure out different states and patterns and trying to create some kind of a blueprint that I could give to engineers to help refine this underlying conversational system that we're working on for inflight. So you've already figured out a little bit about this, so I'm just going to get kind of deep here for a second.
- [15:40]
Host
When you're collaborating with engineers on a.
- [15:43]
Rid
Voice based product, what are the very specific deliverables that you are bringing to the table and what are you then doing to figure out what those should be when there's not as much of a playbook and refine and iterate on those in a way that is helpful.
- [16:00]
Gunner Gray
I think that's a perfect example of the way that design and engineering work so closely together. Because design can lead a vision, but also engineering can show what's possible. So it's really about getting the working demos as soon as possible and starting to just play with it and understand how it's responding and using it in real context as well. So I think it's pretty easy to fall into the trap of, like, ideal context and ideal use cases, where everything just works and you have the obvious states down and you're like, this is exactly how you're going to step through it. But to actually use it in practice and to use it on the daily for yourself, like as you want to ask questions or how you want to interact with it, actually using it from the standpoint of like, real use and real problems you have, you start to kind of see those little edge cases or like nooks and crannies and how it's really feeling and. And also understanding how fast it's feeling too, because that's a super important thing for voice, I feel like for both voice mode, but also the voice assistant on Android, that goes even deeper because you can do so many more things on. On the Android assistant, where it can inter with other apps, it can pull up websites, it can do tasks for you, and there's so many little things that can happen during that process. So we're really both relying on engineering to show us where those moments are and how it's really working, but also really testing it out ourselves and identifying those uses as we go, or those problems or those edge cases, if that makes sense.
- [17:51]
Rid
No, it totally does. And I get now, like, the importance of racing to get something in code that you can play with, especially for voice, is so important because there's only so much you can do as the designer without using this thing, figuring out where it falls down. Maybe then you're saying, hey, it fell down here. I would have expected this to happen. Maybe this is how we could set up this ideal use case. And then you're giving that back to engineers and just having that loop. I would imagine you probably had many, many of those refinement touch points.
- [18:19]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or. Or if you're asking it to do a task and you realize halfway through it you're like, oh, this would actually be really cool here. Or this would be really helpful to do in this context. Like, it's really about going through those motions to uncover all those little moments.
- [18:37]
Rid
Have I told you about my weird personal use case for voice mode and perplexity?
- [18:41]
Gunner Gray
No, I don't think so.
- [18:43]
Rid
Okay, so I do the dishes, right? That's like my kind of nightly routine. I put the baby down, I do the dishes, and I throw in AirPods. I open up voice mode and perplexity. Has actually stolen a little bit from my podcast consumption because I just pick a topic that I want to riff on and I ask a question and then it turns in this rabbit trail and I'll end up just talking to your voice Mode for like 40 minutes while doing dishes. And I'll just go down the craziest convers paths. It's one of the main ways that I learn right now, actually.
- [19:17]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, that's so cool. I've. I've heard others use it that way as well. It's such a great thing to have that passive conversation where you don't have to be at your keyboard, you don't have to be at a computer, you don't have to be looking at your screen. You can just be riffing like hands free and, and that's always been the goal of voice mode as well. And we're, we're, we're, we're pretty much, you know, there now with the hands free experience. It wasn't always like that. You had to push it button.
- [19:44]
Rid
You had the big orange button.
- [19:46]
Gunner Gray
Big orange button.
- [19:47]
Rid
Okay, let's talk about that for a second then. When you first joined, did V1 of voice mode already exist in the mobile app?
- [19:53]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, V1, it did exist. I believe it was like a little half sheet that came up. It just kind of overlaid Home view.
- [20:02]
Rid
And so the orange button is not V1.
- [20:04]
Gunner Gray
No. So it's actually, it's V2. We have three versions of voice mode.
- [20:08]
Rid
I didn't know that. Okay.
- [20:10]
Gunner Gray
So I, like, I honestly kind of forgot about the first version where I.
- [20:13]
Rid
Never even saw it.
- [20:14]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was like, feels like so long ago now, but the first. Yeah, it was like a little half sheet. We had this little like sine wave visualizer. It was done before I had joined. I believe that was also like a push to talk. It was using a whole different API. And so I don't know the full ins and outs of like that first. First iteration.
- [20:37]
Rid
So you went 0 to 1 on the orange button flow, though. Like that was your visual direction. Talk to me a little bit about that then, because I understand all of the reasons why you did the V2 and the hands free and it's beautiful. But there was something also so unique from even just a UI perspective on that second version that I definitely loved. So I would love to talk about it and kind of get some of the story and maybe we can even talk about just at a high level, how this feature has evolved from a design standpoint.
- [21:07]
Gunner Gray
That second version of voice mode we knew it wasn't the end game, but we had to get something out to market, something that worked, something that was still like pretty good, even though it didn't have all the interactions we wanted. So we used that. Push to talk button was somewhat of a hedge because there were issues with the latency of voice and that ask to response time. You didn't always know like when the model would finish or if it knew you were done talking. If we were trying to do the hands free mode, it would either interrupt you too early or you would finish and there was like a really long pause before it detected you were done. So by introducing the push to talk button, it actually made it feel much faster and kind of gave it this tactile experience. We had haptics and sound to it. So even though it was somewhat of a hedge, we still wanted to make it feel very delightful and we wanted to make it feel good to interact with. So it made it faster because you knew when you were finished and you were able to signal when you were done by just releasing the button. So that alone just made it feel a little bit faster and then, you know, the whole response flow could, could kick in right after that.
- [22:28]
Rid
Let's talk about the button for a second, because not many people, I mean, definitely not myself. Like, I've never designed an interface where like pretty much the entire interf is one button. It's got to be a damn good button if there's one button and that's the entire ui. So how many things did you explore? How did you arrive at the art direction for that page?
- [22:46]
Gunner Gray
Knowing we had a big, big button on the page, we're like, we got to make this the best looking thing or like the most fun to interact with. So really leaning into sound and haptics and just like a new visual accent that looked a little bit different from the rest of the product. So you felt like this is sort of its own special thing or its own special entity that like this, you know, this is different. And the rest of the interface was built on this idea of this adaptive and dynamic, like grid visualization. So we had this like full screen dot grid, and we wanted to use that because it was a way to take up the full screen and really build in more like visual feedback mechanisms. So we could animate all the dots in different ways depending on the state you were in for whether it was listening to you, when it was loading, when it was responding to you, which then we had like streaming text coming in and images. That was sort of the foundational system we wanted to use for feedback and communicating what the system was doing. And it allowed us to do that in cool, interesting ways with like, the patterns and the color and made it feel, you know, a little bit more immersive. For a voice mode, whether you wanted to look at the screen or not, it was there if you needed it.
- [24:12]
Rid
Okay, so then, now let's move on to V3. There's the technological jump where you all get to the point where you're like, okay, the hands free mode feels attainable now. You're kind of given this blank slate, apparently, because it looks very different than what you had. So how did you think about the right visual accompaniments to whatever this real time voice interaction could become?
- [24:37]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, yeah, real time really changed it. So it changed it in that it was so much faster and it was so much direct. So you were able to go from ask to answer almost instantly. And the previous version of this like big full screen visualizer, it was going to feel a little bit jarring maybe in how fast it could sort of move. So we looked at a few different versions and like jumping into tools like Cursor to spin up some metal shaders to see like what we could do within that environment and what sort of interesting visualizers we could make to help communicate that system feedback or those different states. And we did some exploration with the grid. But again, it was almost like taking up too much space, surface area for what we wanted. And then I ended up landing on this like particle sphere visualizer with, with metal shaders. And that instantly felt like the perfect form factor for voice because it could sort of shape shift in many different ways depending on the state you're in. And it was a very focused entity on the screen. It could shape in different ways that were like drastically different too. It could be like a full circle sphere or it be more of like a ring visualization. So having that contrast between the different states just felt right. And then layering in more and more like color, like different colors for asking or listening and a different color for the response. Just the way it could sort of move and shift around felt really, really dynamic and natural and a little bit softer than like the full screen grid experience that we used to have. So I think that lended itself really well to voice and the real time function. And it really worked well when we got into transitioning between more states. So we introduced more assistance and like tasks. So you could have voice mode bring up actionable widgets for you, booking restaurants, playing podcasts, playing YouTube, looking up places all sorts of different use cases, and you could really see this particle orb sort of transition between the states where it kind of like moves down lower and it's a little de emphasized so that other information could take over and have a clean surface to do so. So it really felt like the right pattern. And then it was about really dialing it in on, like, the metal shaders and working with production to get that in and actually, like, hook hooked up to voice. So it was my first sort of intro into actually jumping into code and prototyping and making something useful that engineering could roll with and roll it into production.
- [27:36]
Rid
Were you doing explorations with shaders?
- [27:39]
Gunner Gray
Yeah.
- [27:40]
Rid
Talk to me a little bit about that process.
- [27:42]
Gunner Gray
It felt so empowering to be able to. I feel like tools like Cursor have just totally lowered the barrier to entry for anyone who hasn't coded or wants to learn how to code or learn prototyping more. That barrier is so low now, and it felt really empowering to be able to just open up Cursor and not only prompt it to do things, but also have it explained to you, like, what was happening. So using it as a learning mechanism, like instead of going out and trying to find a bunch of tutorials on how to build metal shaders, you just ask Cursor, build it along with me. But also you could ask questions about, you know, explaining how something is working or giving you a breakdown on what, you know, what this does and what that does. And so you're building, but you're also learning along the way. And I felt like that was a really big unlock for me and it's something I've continued to use just more and more in any prototyping context or even like trying to get more into production. At Perplexity, you obviously got hooked too.
- [28:51]
Rid
Because I was just looking and you have a little side project, not working with shaders.
- [28:55]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, I'm hooked, man. I'm always trying to build in code now, and I'm trying to get out of FIGMA as much as I can because I got a little taste of what it's like to just build in code and I've really seen the advantages there. So it almost feels silly to sit in FIGMA for too long or work in a static environment for too long when you could just be prototyping it.
- [29:23]
Rid
What are some of those advantages in your mind? I think we hear a lot about it from a macro perspective, and I see a lot of people that are quick to say, well, of course leaders want us to get more into code because they just want to pay less people. But as an ic, what are the pros that you see?
- [29:39]
Gunner Gray
Pros are just speed. It's definitely faster. It's easier to work with. It's faster to learn too. So really being able to code and feel out the interactions at the same time just leads you to make better choices or understand very quickly if something's not working. And you're also working within the bounds of the system as well, and understanding where you can push and where you can pull and where your constraints lie or where those limits are. So you're not spending too much time dwelling on one solution that you might end up changing anyways as soon as you get to production. So it's really just speeding up that process and that iteration cycle. Also, at the end of the day, you have something working that you can hand off to, and engineering can roll with that. And it saves them a ton of time trying to figure out what you mean by like a static comp or even a prototype, because you have working code at the end of the day and you can then just roll that into production. They can rewrite some of it, of course, but it's still. It's much more helpful to have like a piece of working software to hand off versus maybe like a video of a prototype or some static comps with notes. So it's really helped that engineering collaboration on design as well. I think with the shaders, I've done a lot of 3D work and after Effects, it's something I've just picked up out of curiosity over the last four years, because I was genuinely interested in how it works and I was inspired by everything you could create and sort of what opportunities that opens. So I did think about like 3D and After Effects as a way to prototype the shader experience. But at the end of the day, I was still thinking, like, I can't really hand this off. And it also might not look exactly how I want it to. Like, I would better understand how it works in the system, in the environment, to start art directing from there. So all the art direction came in just riffing and cursor on different shader patterns and sort of tuning those and refining those to what was in my head where certainly could have done it in after effects and Cinema 4D and. And that would have felt more natural to me, but I wanted it to feel like more useful artifact and I wanted to simply just learn too. Like, I was just curious how it could work in a metal shader environment. In iOS now we have the ability to do that. It just made sense to pick up a new tool and learn it there. But every time I'm approaching something new, it's really just about what tool is going to get the job done the fastest. So, like, sometimes it's a static mock up, sometimes it's just one isolated component of something. Other times it's an animated video if. If I really can't, like, do that or pull it off in cursor or with a different prototype. So really, I see all these tools as just exactly that, just tools in your toolkit, and you get to draw from those depending on what you're trying to do. But you should think about, like, what will be the fastest path forward and how to best use those tools.
- [33:11]
Rid
I know you have the video background. How much of a technical background did you have before? Perplexity?
- [33:15]
Gunner Gray
Not a ton of technical background at all. So early on, when I was doing a little bit of web design, I did a little development, like HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript, but that's years behind me. I haven't picked that stuff up in a long time. So I felt very much like I was starting from scratch and especially getting into SwiftUI. That's a different, you know, a different language and a different tool and xcode. So, yeah, that was all new. But cursor was really helpful to sort of guide me along the way and help me out.
- [33:52]
Rid
I was really hoping that was going to be your answer. Yeah, because I think that's, like, my favorite part of being able to do this podcast is I remember a moment in time simultaneously feels like two weeks and five years ago. So I have no idea when it actually was. But all the AI workflows and tools were coming up, and myself, like, I'm sure many other people felt this little.
- [34:14]
Host
Bit of fomo, a little bit of.
- [34:15]
Rid
Intimidation, like, oh, my gosh, I'm getting left behind. All this is so scary. I don't want to jump into that. And then one by one, I've heard people like yourself come on and share.
- [34:26]
Host
Yeah, I had no idea how to.
- [34:27]
Rid
Do this thing, and then I was curious, so I just tried it. And now I've shipped this amazing shader interaction to one of the more popular mobile apps in all of tech, you know, and it's so inspiring, especially given your background where, man, even just down to the last six months, you can just do things.
- [34:52]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, you really can. I think there's this element of always leading with curiosity, and I think that's what sort of led up to that moment. So for several years prior, always just playing with tools and experimenting, learning how 3D works, learning how animation and motion works. That all really led up to that moment of shaders in voice mode and being able to art direct them exactly how we wanted. Because you've already been in other tools doing similar things so you could better describe what you wanted. And yeah, I think it just goes to show like how much curiosity compounds on itself. And you should always lead with that too, because it'll bring you to. To new places you don't even know about yet.
- [35:39]
Host
I'm a big believer in the power of video to explain my thinking as a designer. So when it's time to get feedback, I'll drop a loom link in Slack and another link to a Figma prototype and feedback will be scared, scattered everywhere. And I mean, it's a mess. So I'm building the product that I've always wanted to exist and it's called Inflight. You can kind of think of it like an async crit. It's an easy way to share a video walkthrough along with an interactive prototype.
- [36:05]
Rid
Or whatever you're designing.
- [36:06]
Host
And then AI interviews the people on your team to get you the feedback that you need and organizes everything for you in a beautiful insights page. So right now I'm only giving access to dive club listeners. So if you want to be one of the first to use Inflight, head to dive club slash inflight to claim your spot.
- [36:25]
Rid
I like to think of AI as an amplifier, right? Like if you have the tiniest little seed of know how in a given area, all of a sudden it's 10x more valuable. And so when you use that kind of lens, it's very easy to arrive at this conclusion that especially at startups, the value of a generalist designer is unreal. Right? Like you can contribute in so many different ways just by having tangential interests to what we think of as the traditional box of product design, and then a curiosity and willingness to try out these different tools and see how AI can help you expand in all of these different directions.
- [37:06]
Gunner Gray
100%. Yeah, it's exactly right. It's a crazy time.
- [37:10]
Rid
How wide is the spectrum of contributions that you're able to make at Perplexity?
- [37:14]
Gunner Gray
That's one of the things I love about Perplexity, is it lends itself really well to generalists and you can flex so many different ways. A lot of our designers are writing code. Some of them are more design and engineering built, some of them are more product and brand built. So you have these really kind of cool different spectrums of designers across the team. And I think we have a lot of flexibility to sort of do what we want and what makes sense for any given task we're working on. And I think how that's showed up for me and one thing I've really appreciated is that ability to not only work on product but also help bridge the brand world into that and contribute to some of the brand side of the work too. So for say for example we're launching features for the mobile app. Like I would often end up doing the marketing for those and the show reel like making showreels and demos of those features and being able to animate and present those in the ways that we felt best communicated those features. So you're able to sort of cross into brand and marketing and then the other way around is working more brand into product, even understanding what it means to have brand, brand and your product and how you think about it. I think a lot of that has sort of been eye opening for me too.
- [38:45]
Rid
Can we go deeper on what it means to you to successfully integrate the Perplexity brand into the mobile app? Specifically?
- [38:52]
Gunner Gray
Yeah. When it comes to implementing brand into product, the way I see it is I think of brand and product a lot, just about how the product keeps its promises in non obvious ways. So of course there's visual identity and there's tone of the product and there's visual branding elements in the product. But at the end of the day like how is the product delivering on its value? How is it keeping those promises? And I think Perplexity does that in a few different ways. There's also just the, the brand is very curiosity driven. So how do you evoke more curiosity? How do you bring that feeling into the product? And, and you could see that via the follow ups which, which was another idea that was founded on in Perplexity was all of the found follow up questions where you could just go down rabbit holes. And it's also kind of training you to ask better questions too, ask questions that you hadn't thought of. These are all the different ways I think of, of working brand and product that maybe not be so obvious or like different from just a visual layer that you might think of.
- [40:02]
Rid
I'm working on a lot of similar product challenges right now and one of the things I'm really wrestling with is the value of the follow up questions like the text based follow up questions and how to recreate some of that feeling in voice mode because it's so powerful being able to get the array of options and be like, wow, I wouldn't have thought about that. And widening the array of responses that an AI can give. There's a lot of fun design challenges in there.
- [40:30]
Gunner Gray
It's been such a, such a novel thing. And to do it, we've thought about how to do it in a voice context as well. Like do we use the, the visual surface for that as like quick actions or do we actually work it into the. The prompt itself so it would prompt you at the end with like other questions. But then there's also trade offs with that because you want it to feel very fast and concise. I don't think we've totally nailed it in voice yet.
- [41:02]
Rid
It's. It's tricky. Like I was literally yesterday spending hours with GPT, going back on these simulations and trying to think about almost creating a subtle conversational fork with each response where it's like, here's your path to go deeper and then here's your exit ramp if you want to go somewhere else. And how quickly can you give two paths conversationally in a voice interaction? I don't know. I had this moment of man. I've been doing this for hours. It feels like design. It looks nothing like what I'm used to, but I'm still acting as the role of a designer. You know, it's just very, very different.
- [41:40]
Gunner Gray
It's still, yeah, it's still design. Design through, through prompting and like shaping. It's sort of a new, new skill set and a new avenue of designers to leverage.
- [41:51]
Rid
We've talked a lot about voice. You've been at Perplexity for a year and a half. Things are moving at a million miles an hour. Is there anything else that you've had a hand in or ship that you're particularly proud of that we can highlight?
- [42:02]
Gunner Gray
Some of the most recent work is we also redesigned the Discover feed again from what we did right when I joined Perplexity. So we redesigned the main feed, we also redesigned the pages and, and it's been cool to compare because we've seen a lot better retention and engagement on the feed with some of those design choices that we made. So it's also been a really good learning moment on like, what's been working and what's not.
- [42:33]
Rid
Are you able to describe some of those changes where we can get a sense of what the underlying thinking is?
- [42:38]
Gunner Gray
We wanted to do it for a few different reasons. One reason being that our volume of content has picked up a lot. We're able to Surface a lot more stories in feed now. Before it was very much a manual process, it was very handcrafted, hand curated and you only had so many stories, fresh stories a day to engage with. So that's why we did more of an immersive feed format that was like a single story at a time. But now the volume has, you know, 10x from there and we needed just a little more dense of a feed to make that consumption path a little bit easier. So you might get two or three stories at a time as you're scrolling the feed. So you're able to just consume much faster and find something relevant or find something interesting faster too. So there was that side of things. There was also the personalization and the ranking side of things. So doing a lot of work to better personalize your feeds and the density also helps with that because we can be confident that if you see, you know, a few stories at a time, one of them's probably good and relevant and you'll probably engage with it versus if we want to make the bet that we're just going to show you one story at a time, like it better be spot on, you know, good for you.
- [44:01]
Rid
Higher bar.
- [44:02]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, exactly. So there's the personalization aspect, which that's continued. That's, that's still getting better and better. And then there's also the pages themselves and the stories and reformatting those stories and allowing more control over those stories. So the story details also got a redesign in format. So carrying over that principle of conciseness and density to the content, we shortened up the stories a little bit just so they're easier to consume. And we've also given you tools to manipulate those stories. You can set a preference. Do you want more of like a full report of the story or do you just want the summary bullets? And then we'll, we'll carry that format through for all the rest of your stories. We have a little toggle where it's like summary or report. So you're, you're again very, you're just able to consume much faster. And we've seen a really good lift on that page redesign also.
- [45:01]
Rid
So that's cool. I have to play with that. I saw a similar pattern in Particle News. I don't know if you've. Yeah, that was where I saved that to my notion where I was like, this is really cool because depending on the story, I definitely want to have that initial TLDR take a very different shape or form.
- [45:18]
Gunner Gray
Yeah.
- [45:18]
Rid
And it's influenced even a lot of how I'm thinking about things for in flight too. And even just hearing you say something like we shortened the story, it's like such a small detail. But that alone is kind of crazy, right? Like historically we've always designed around user generated content and you get what you get, you know, and now having the ability to really tailor this output in a way that meets your goals as the designer is totally different.
- [45:44]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, it really is. And it's, it's also all about just like putting users in control too and letting them choose how do they want this content surface to them. And this is just one step depth into that direction too, along with personalization. But it all kind of wraps into the same, same bucket.
- [46:05]
Rid
Something I'm curious about, especially through the lens of, you know, have all this.
- [46:08]
Host
Dynamic content and personalization.
- [46:10]
Rid
But you know, when you joined it's only for designers, there's a smaller product suite and there's just been so much growth where now you have the separate Android mobile app and Mac app and you just released Comet. So I want to kind of get a sense of how much you all prioritize or how you think about the relationship between that product suite as it relates to systems design. Visual languages overlap between designers collaborating. Can you talk a little bit about what's the strategy at Perplexity right now as you all are growing the product surface area?
- [46:47]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, in terms of growing our surface area and growing the design team at the same time, we have many more contributors. It's still fairly flexible and loose and our mindset is pretty much like, let's have consistent design foundations. But you can kind of use those however you want and shape whatever you're working on as long as it's foundationally consistent. That's what matters most across the product suite. But you still have a lot of flexibility within that. And we're also empowered to, I mean, every, every day, every week, we're coming across new challenges or new use cases or new needs for something and that could afford some different visual language or some different, you know, visual treatment or something to roll into the foundations. And we're not strict about it. If it makes sense and if we need it like we'll, we'll roll that in. And it's surprising how that can like scale too and like scale and inform maybe some of the brand work that's happening. And then in terms of the different product surfaces, we want them to feel unique and differentiated and like you have a reason to use one over the other. We don't just want one product that's going to do the same thing across the board or you might get like the same interface. So Android Assistant is sort of this like OS takeover. It's very contextual to what you're doing. You just kind of have these little widgets that you're interacting with. The mobile version of the app, which we're actually working on a redesign right now where today it kind of feels like a reflection of the web product in terms of navigation, in terms of some of the interaction. So that actually is pretty close and consistent. But the new redesign I would say feels much more focused and much more opinionated and kind of reprioritizes and re emphasizes some of those navigation elements to really distill it down down to like the core mobile use case that you want to use it for. So that's kind of what I mean by looking at our suite of products and making them feel intentionally focused on certain tasks. And you'll see that show up in some newer ideas for macOS. Web app, of course, is like its own Surface. We have Comet that also has new surfaces with like the Comet Assistant. But we really want to drive like focus and intentionality to each of these surfaces to best serve the context you're in or the use case that you need for that platform.
- [49:27]
Rid
I imagine it's probably more fun as a designer that way too. Get a little bit more creative freedom, get to flex the brand muscles and see what happens.
- [49:33]
Gunner Gray
Yeah, 100%.
- [49:35]
Rid
We've covered a lot of ground. Personally, I'm very inspired by your journey as a self learner, someone who is very evidently curious and has the agency to just go try things and make things happen. So maybe even on a personal level before I let you go as someone who enjoys self learning and it's also kind of plugged into the state of the world and where things are heading a little bit. So how do you think about the areas that you want to invest in as a designer and the ways that you want to level up your own skill set moving forward? Forward.
- [50:08]
Gunner Gray
The way I see leveling up is just trying to get a pulse on where things are going and sort of shape yourself from there. So for me personally it was like, wow. Coding has become much more accessible now with tools like cursor. And that's a tool I really need to pick up and learn because I see the value and the advantages and I've experienced it firsthand. So for me personally, that's an area I'm definitely upskilling in. I want to contribute more code, I want to build in more code. Just seeing the way we work now and how much faster we can work that way, that's clearly one pulse on the industry I see, is just expanding your tool set there. That's probably the dominant one. To be honest, as a product designer, if you don't already know it, it, like there's no reason not to jump into that now.
- [51:06]
Rid
And I think it carries a lot of weight coming from you because you.
- [51:09]
Host
Are coming from a more artistic end.
- [51:11]
Rid
Of the spectrum than I am. You know, like, I've always been more of a technical systems designer. I went through a coding boot camp many years ago, forgot most of it, but I did it, you know, like, I'm generally interested in that.
- [51:24]
Gunner Gray
Yeah.
- [51:24]
Rid
Whereas I can't draw anything. And I, I've just started animating in jitter. I have such a low level of artistic skills, you know, but like, like you spike in that area and so for you to come with that background and still say the thing that I'm investing in is more of the technical side of the craft carries a lot of weight in my mind.
- [51:45]
Gunner Gray
I mean, I could also frame it this way in that like, you also need to assess yourself and assess where you're at too. So if you are like heavily technical, maybe less artistic or less visual, why not just start dipping into that and see what opportunities that opens and what that could learn. Learn or what, what you could learn from that. So I think there, there needs to be some, some self reflection to understand like where you want to go. Because in my, in my position, a lot of the work I've done up to date has been visual. Brand motion tied in with product design and encoding was kind of the outlier for me. So that was a clear thing. Like I wanted to dig in further. And I try to make a point of this every year. I tell myself I want to kind of reinvent myself in some way or learn something new. So one year it was animation and after effects. Another year it was Cinema 4D and 3D. This year it's cursor, it's coding. It's that focus just to spend a year going deep on. And all of that experience and knowledge really compounds on itself over time. Time.
- [53:01]
Rid
Well, Gunner, I'm very inspired. Thank you for coming on and sharing a little bit more about who you are and your journey. And I hope that people listening are encouraged to take new steps and try new things and take a little bit more of a generalist mentality to their career because it's working and it's cool to see. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today.
- [53:22]
Gunner Gray
Oh, yeah. I appreciate it, man. Thank you.
- [53:24]
Host
Before I let you go, I want to take just 1, 1 minute to run you through my favorite products. Because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far, the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.