Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.
Jim Zarkadas (00:25)
Yeah, welcome to the podcast officially as well. And thanks a lot for joining me today. As I mentioned before, the first thing we always go through is who you are, what is your story actually, and what are you currently working on? And then we're going to dive into all the interesting topics we have in the agenda for today.
Alicja Suska (00:43)
Sure, excited to do it. So my name is Alicja. I'm a product designer. Currently, I work at Buffer, which is a social media management platform. I've been working as a designer for 10 years now, so around a decade. It's been a while. Mostly focusing on SaaS products and helping people develop the value for customers.
getting things off the ground, like getting companies up to speed, but also for big works for bigger companies. I worked for example, for toggle, for work front, for source graph, which is source graph was quite interesting because it's a code search tool for developers. So quite a technical audience in comparison to buffer where I work now, which is like completely focused on single users. And at buffer specifically, now I work on community, which is a tool for replying to comments and connecting with people.
from your social media channels and also on insights which is quite interesting like a new thing coming up where we use data we already have to provide you with insights that actually will change how you post and how you create content. So I'm super excited about that as well because it will be like a new approach to dashboards and seeing your insights about social media.
Jim Zarkadas (01:53)
That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and with Buffer, I've been always curious, like, what is the core user of Buffer? I know it's not part of the agenda, but like, it's a topic that I've been always thinking about when designing, it's like, who is the user? And with Buffer, I can imagine that the audience is super broad, right? Like you have all kinds of different users.
Alicja Suska (02:14)
The audience is quite broad. So the philosophy of Buffer has been for a long, long time going down market. So going to small creators who are just getting started or started growing so that now they treat their social media channels a little bit more. They need to post systematically. They treat it seriously. Maybe they are business owners and social media is like a way for them to get clients, to get visibility. So that has been history for a long time and that's why Buffer has built
very strong tools for connecting with these people, like writing articles, serving them with content and also in product as well. This is very skewed to that audience. But we also serve bigger customers that are agencies, for example, with multiple clients that they create social media posts for or manage social media for. And we are currently, so we've been in a...
Jim Zarkadas (02:45)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (03:03)
phase where we go down market and we really pay attention to these customers. We want to maintain this, but we also now are working on many more features that are collaboration focused, which are for bigger teams and for larger companies. And this is a completely different.
Jim Zarkadas (03:15)
Mm-hmm.
Alicja Suska (03:20)
⁓ way of approaching the product, like different priorities. And it's interesting design-wise how you think about it because every single flow needs to work for a user who has like one channel and maybe gets 10 comments a week and then for a user who has 8 or 10 or 20 channels from the same customers and they get multiple comments a week and you just have to marry all of that. ⁓ Which is quite interesting when you think about it.
Jim Zarkadas (03:23)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. That's been a challenge with some of the teams that we've been working on. Designing for small, like for solo cleaners, example, for Sendmate, which for cleaning businesses and for large teams with like 20 plus cleaners. It's not only the design complex that changes, it's also the needs, it's how the actual feature is going to work. Yeah, has to work like, but yeah, it's always an interesting challenge.
Alicja Suska (04:10)
It is. So for example, for community, the tool where you reply to social media comments as a solo creator that gets like 10, 20 comments a week, you want to reply to everything. Every comment counts. Everything is like so important. When you are a bigger account, you get so many comments that you may not be able to reply to all of them. And the question is then how you select the ones that are valuable, how you select the ones that are going to spark further conversation. So completely different mindset, like how you optimize, how you make things more efficient.
Jim Zarkadas (04:28)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Alicja Suska (04:39)
And for people who get no comments, like how do you, the open community and they have no comments for a week, for two weeks, how do you make the product still interesting and engaging for different, even different empty states, right?
Jim Zarkadas (04:51)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Cool. Okay. So for the, for the topics for today, the first one that we have in the list is the, the, the topic of taste and of combining growth and product growth with
We call it delight, you can call it also taste or arts, let's say like running, illustration, motion and so on. By combining the growth design with the more artistic visual design. So my first question on this is how do you define taste as a designer? What are some thoughts on this topic?
Alicja Suska (05:24)
Hmm. Taste, how you define it. So it's a really weird thing because people, so with designers, I have this thought that like everyone thinks...
that they are sort of a designer and they have their own taste. So with programming, for example, engineers, I'm not going to go and say, hey, you've coded the wrong way because I think so. I have this feeling. I can see that this code is like messy or whatever. That's not how it's going to work. But people see design and then can tell, like, I like it, I don't like it. They may not think about why I like it. So.
Nobody comes to the product and they say, I like the color balance or like the proportions are really great. The composition of the screen, amazing. But, you know, they feel it. And as a designer, you're designing for a feeling sometimes. And there are many products in the past where...
they won the market. For example, Slack, they had very similar features to other similar tools that they wrote and after Slack was successful. But Slack was still like the most delightful colors wise, interactions wise, et cetera. So I think that to define taste is just something that resonates with many people maybe. And like how you shape your taste as a designer, as a designer, you...
watch other designers work, you define what you like based on the work that you're doing, based on what users react to it. And I think taste is a different thing. So visual taste when it comes to composition of a painting or an illustration, completely different thing than UX taste when it comes to interactions, et cetera. Yeah, I would say it's like about...
Jim Zarkadas (06:55)
Mm-hmm.
Alicja Suska (06:56)
understanding what the right balance is. If I were to make a definition, but is it a correct definition? Maybe it's not, you know, in capturing everything, right?
Jim Zarkadas (07:01)
Hmm.
Yeah, why I love these questions is because there is no right or wrong answer in a way.
It's just like when you think about, for me, I'm always interested into hearing more about what comes to your mind when I ask you about taste, like balance between stuff, like different types of taste is another one that you mentioned, like you taste on the UX versus UI versus like on an illustration, it's all different.
Yeah, and then the idea of delight is something that I really like that you also mentioned when it comes to taste because taste is like it's an overused and overhyped term nowadays. And like, I'm kind of a sick of flingling content where people say, yeah, the world of AI tastes is everything. Taste is your mode. Like everybody's obsessed with finding a new mode. I'm like, guys, come on. Like this is not how business works on this part.
Alicja Suska (07:50)
You
Jim Zarkadas (07:53)
Yeah, it feels like people are just trying to promote things by calling them the new mode essentially, because with brand, it's also for something very abstract. We're into brand design, but brand has many, many layers. Like brand can be copy, can be messaging, can be positioning strategy, can be your visual identity, can be your logo. It's like it's a collection of hundreds of assets that all together create this feeling that people have when they hear about you, which is how you could define a brand. yeah, I feel like the idea of taste is...
It's very...
Yeah, Taste and Delight, feel like they're really close as concepts. And the reason I like Delight more as a term is because it's more practical in a way. Like the example that you saw with Slack is a good one. Slack was delightful and felt like the team had great taste. It was because of the copy in the release notes, the micro copy in the app that was not a technical boring product. It was the funky design and funky logo that they came up with and everything. So yeah.
Alicja Suska (08:50)
And I think that a lot when it comes to delight comes also with interaction and how clear the UI is at the beginning. So how understandable it is. So if you as a user, you come to the product, it looks great. It looks trustworthy. think that trustworthy is like the threshold that we should be aiming for. Then it works well. It helps you accomplish a thing relatively fast. Then you're sold.
then you're delighted by a certain thing. You're surprised by how easy or how effective that was.
I wouldn't overindex on how things look or how the copy is. It's the general flow and how quickly you accomplish a goal that contributes to delight. Because I see many people saying, small UI interactions, they contribute to delight. Or hover states or whatever it is. Yes, they contribute. But if they don't achieve the goal, you can have all the hover states and all the animations in the world, and they will not be delighted.
Jim Zarkadas (09:44)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
It's like delight is a layer you add once you have solved the problem, like that you build something that really gets the job done, people are happy, and then you make it more delightful. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm also curious on this topic, you're a product designer that has also illustration and animation background, right? You're also into arts and painting. And I'm curious to hear from you how...
How does this influence your design brain, let's say, and your design process compared to other designers that have maybe like, let's say they come from a UX background or just, yeah, visual design background and functional visual design, like this diverse background, how does it have an impact on you and how you design?
Alicja Suska (10:26)
I think it has impact in a way that some things, I would say, came a little bit easier for me. like understanding colors, understanding composition, understanding how elements work together in the interface. Like that was more natural to me. And I feel like if you're coming from like a technical background, that may be something that you need to spend more time learning. But also there is this interesting thing where
if you're painting or creating illustration, I can walk you through the process, but I cannot explain how I came up with it. It just came to me. I just saw it in my head and I then produced it. And there is a very similar experience in UI design and UX design that I have that I analyze.
and then I come up with a solution and it's quite hard for me to explain like how I came up with it. I can reason why it is good, et cetera, but the process is something that sometimes I kind of struggle to explain and I feel like many people who come like from a technical background, have the thought process more structured in their mind. I have to dig for this thought process because I work more intuitively.
Jim Zarkadas (11:12)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (11:28)
and they have a completely different way, which is very helpful for teaching people. So when you have students, I had to learn it over time to explain how I came up with things, what were the alternatives that I was considering, et cetera. But people, for example, used to be engineers. It kind of comes to them easier, I've noticed. Of course, not all of them, not every single person is the same, but I've noticed this trend that they struggle to understand what I'm saying.
It just came to me, like I just saw it in my head and then I produced it and it worked. And they're like, okay, but like there was a process. I'm like, there was, but I can't really explain it that well.
Jim Zarkadas (12:01)
Yeah, but that...
Yeah.
Yeah, that's something I've experienced lots of times, yeah.
Alicja Suska (12:08)
And I think it's from artistic perspective and delight perspective, when working on things like empty states, onboarding screens, et cetera, that include visual elements or incorporating brand elements into the UI, I think it's easier for me to bridge those two worlds. Sometimes I find that UX designers...
they struggle to apply brand into the interfaces. So whatever is shown on the website and how the website looks like, for example, other materials that are sometimes created by another designer who's like a web designer or brand designer. Translating that sometimes is difficult because product has such different needs and we cannot use such vibrant colors or big elements or like it's a very different world. So maybe that made it easier for me to translate.
Jim Zarkadas (12:33)
Hmm
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (12:55)
also grant into the product.
Jim Zarkadas (12:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I fully hear you on this. And for me, I come from an engineering background. And so for me, I'm like a product designer that is...
Alicja Suska (13:02)
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (13:05)
is really about strategy UX and like technical complex and these kinds of things. And in the team we have a brand designer also that we, it's not that we separate the process and I don't do brand design, but I'm not an illustrator. I do some parts of the visual design and then Joe comes and adds the delights side, like the delight and branding on the product. And it's really what I said, it's very different needs. We saw it for example,
We have the design called Yes Day with Brittany and so for another team we're working with Brittany, another product designer on the team. And we were discussing about illustrations in the onboarding flow and we realized that these illustrations.
it's a new thing that we're coming up with because they don't use any illustration on the website. It's mostly photography because the illustrations don't make sense necessarily there. And also the illustrations have to be more minimalistic and with more wide space so that they don't distract you from the core flow. And they actually make it more delightful. They add a bit of emotion. They make it more branded and less boring essentially. And they contribute a bit to the UX as well by visualizing the questions, let's say that we ask on the onboarding.
Alicja Suska (13:52)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (14:06)
It was very interesting to see how this Anakin illustration for the product has very specific needs because it lives in a very different environment compared to a website where it may need to be more colorful or more flashy, like it needs to attract more attention in a way and has, it may have more details because it needs to tell a full story, let's say through the illustration. So yeah, I fully hear you on this.
Alicja Suska (14:30)
That's true. And also in product illustrations, in many, many cases, it is just like enhanced UI. So UI with some sparkle added to it, let's say. Whereas on websites, they can be abstract, they can be humans or whatever you want to put there, depending on the brand. But I can share an interesting, funny anecdote when I was...
Jim Zarkadas (14:36)
Mmm... True.
Alicja Suska (14:51)
trying to get my first job, it was like an internship. And the recruitment process was quite interesting where it was like 10 people during a workshop and we were workshopping like a UX solution. And based on this workshop and how you were collaborating, et cetera, they were going to invite you to the next step or not. And I then later found out that a big thing that convinced them to eventually hire me was that I was great doing the UX design work, of course,
basics were covered but I also just stood up and started drawing things and like this feeling like loose with drawing and being able to draw on the spot and explain your ideas visually that was like a big selling point that I wasn't aware of but apparently like it's a good thing so all the people who are in artistic schools right now UX design might be a thing for you
Jim Zarkadas (15:33)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah,
love it. Love it. Yeah. the whole idea also of just kind of a designing on the spot, like coming up with sketches. Like, yeah, that's an interesting one actually, because that's, now that you mentioned like a personal story on this is that in the past, I used to feel that I need to serve police designs with the teams that we're working with. So let's say
Yeah, for the design goal, when we do the cues that I have to present designs. And once I started saving my mindset to, I present versions of a design and a version can be really crappy, can be an ugly sketch that gets the idea through.
until like in order to discuss with the team and see if it's the right direction, it was a big unlock like in terms of the mindset and also from an efficiency and pros point of view, got very much much easier and on what you're describing it's a good one because when you're painting it's normal to start with a sketch right but when you're designing yeah maybe you do a wireframe but when you do a mock-up it's either bad or good there is no kind of a sketch of a mock-up so that's that's a good one on how painting can have an influence on the
Alicja Suska (16:29)
Yes.
Jim Zarkadas (16:42)
or think about the actual design and the process to come up with it.
Alicja Suska (16:46)
Yes, and you can explore many more things. And it's interesting that, for example, engineers, you start with something rough. It doesn't work perfectly at the beginning. And you're willing to show it to the team as a V0 version of whatever you are trying to achieve. And designers, we're perfectionists. We want everything to look perfect from the very first presentation, which usually leads to comments about the color of the button, which was not even included in the design. But that's the common story where people focus on this unimportant.
Jim Zarkadas (17:06)
care.
Yes.
Yeah.
Alicja Suska (17:14)
elements I would say. So sketching, that's a good recommendation.
Jim Zarkadas (17:16)
true. It's absolutely misleading and that's the power of
People call it wireframing. I say black and white mockups. Like that makes more sense because I just see it as a mockup with less details and like just black and white color essentially. And this can be useful sometimes because it's really what you said. It forces people to focus on the right thing, which is content, composition, flows. And that's it. Not if they like a border or anything like that. yeah, fully agree.
Alicja Suska (17:40)
Yes.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (17:45)
I feel now it's a good time to, now that we've just been discussing like design process, so should jump into AI stuff and ask you, what is your experience with, so with AI, are two ways to think about it. The one is I design features that use AI behind the scenes, so I design AI products, and the other one is I use AI to design products, no matter if these products use AI or not. So I want to touch first the process part and ask you, what is your experience?
with using AI into your design and product building process, I would say. So yeah, that's my first question. I have some follow-ups, but let's keep it open-ended and just ask about your experience. really curious.
Alicja Suska (18:23)
Sure.
it's been, there is a lot of ups and downs when using AI as a designer. Let me say that first. So when it comes to process, all of us had to learn to use AI to certain extent, or at least explore how we could use AI in certain extent, especially with like pressure from the companies that we work for and overall industry. seems like everyone is just going for AI right now. But I find that...
AI is great for certain things, but certain very small, simple tasks, you can overcomplicate it and spend so much more time trying to move a button or create a button somewhere or just design something super simple that would take you 10 minutes in Figma. You're trying to prompt your AI and just running out of tokens, just mess, especially at the beginning when you're learning and you don't know about efficient prompting, et cetera. So I went through all of these phases. I think that using...
and using cloud code is definitely a good way of prototyping and it unlocks a lot of things when it comes to usability testing, for example. So you have a more realistically looking and realistically functioning prototype, even though it's like not production ready, but it is enough for you to test the design and the results are more credible.
Also, Claude, for example, for me, is like a great brainstorming body where maybe I will not use its ideas when it comes to, hey, this is how the UI should look like or how this interaction should go. But at least that gives me one more step in a different direction. Sometimes it just thinks completely differently than I do. So I would say like brainstorming body and prototyping for usability testing. When it comes to
design system management, when it comes to designing from scratch, when it comes to solving problems. I'm like 50-50 on that. I don't think it's really where it needs to be for designers to be replaced or take all the busy work from you. Unfortunately, it's not that there yet, but I've heard that Cloud is working on some like their own UI design tool.
Jim Zarkadas (20:05)
.
Alicja Suska (20:19)
that is going to be released soon. I've seen something on social media. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. ⁓ It was a spicy news. I'm like, OK, that will be interesting because all the Figma MCP now is better than it used to be. But it's still like you have to learn how to properly use it. it's just it's not like you start using it and then you are like a great designer. And at the end of the day.
Jim Zarkadas (20:21)
Okay.
That's spicy news, I don't know about it.
Alicja Suska (20:45)
you need to think through interaction as a designer. You can speed up the parts of your process, but you're still needed there. So that's an overview. So it depends on the part of the process. Sometimes I'm 50-50 on things. Sometimes I'm like 80-20 on things. Sometimes I'm like, OK, let's not use AI for that at all. So it depends.
Jim Zarkadas (21:02)
Can you share,
if you think about some recent projects you've worked on and used AI, could you share some specifics on how you use the AI? like, that was useful. And then I'm gonna share also some stories from my experience, but I'm curious, like if you have, let's say any maybe skills or like specific setups that you're using or yeah, like that's why I'm asking for a project so that we can see some more, a more kind of a hands-on example on.
how you use AIs inside of it.
Alicja Suska (21:30)
Sure, so I think the most-
The most recent one and the ones where we used AI the most frequently, let's say in the process, was my project, my brainstorming about insights for buffer. So basically I wanted to discover insights that would be helpful for people and that we can create based on data that we already are getting into our system. And this project is like in progress. So I can't share like details, details, but I can share the process. So I worked with Claude.
and fed it information about what data we are getting, what the product is. So I established the whole project with background information. And then I asked it to start brainstorming these insights. And I was going back and forth. It came up with great ideas. I came up with some ideas and then it came up with a dashboard that was visualizing all the charts. I had to do a lot of work when it comes to
because it sometimes was like, I wouldn't say hallucinating, but sometimes it was like, okay, but what does data means? Like sometimes this was displaying data, like the cloud was displaying data for the sake of it. That was a little annoying. But as I said, like this collaboration and brainstorming body, was, okay, change this chart. Maybe let's merge these two charts together. And the outcome was that I came up with like a concept for
Jim Zarkadas (22:29)
Exactly.
Alicja Suska (22:43)
I think around 40 insights that we could choose from, which is a great number when you think about a project. I've created the, so Claude created the HTML for me with all the charts. They were interactive and they had like some mock data. So the other, like then we went parallel. We started analyzing as a team regarding feasibility. So technically are we able to implement these charts, et cetera, but we've also fed.
Claude Codd code, this HTML file that they've created, and we asked it to use buffer styles and buffer design system to try to visualize how it would work in our product. And presenting that to the team was a really great experience. You could experience how things would work. So that's a relatively simple case to execute, but it's also like sped up the workflow so many times because I didn't have to go and design every chart by hand.
Jim Zarkadas (23:19)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Alicja Suska (23:37)
I then didn't have to go to the developers for them to implement these charts based on my designs. We could just bypass the whole product, the whole process to have a visualization and see if this is something that would resonate with people, that would resonate with our team internally. And it was so much easier also to talk, to have conversations with engineers about visibility when we had all the information and the visualizations. So that was helpful.
Jim Zarkadas (24:00)
I see. So it's what I hear from you is prototyping new features and creating interactive prototypes is where you've seen it being very, very useful. Yeah.
Alicja Suska (24:09)
Yes, and if you
have a proper setup, you can feed these prototypes and just like add them to your product, mock them into your product so they look like a part of the product for usability testing. But I don't want to like skip over to prototyping. I think that the brainstorming part of it was also great. I wouldn't came up with all these ideas by myself just like sitting there.
Jim Zarkadas (24:28)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, it's the figuring out the solution through a conversation. Like what should I add and so on, I fully agree. On this one, my experience of a project that I'm currently working on, we're building a customer portal for ZenMate. So let's say you own a cleaning business, you want to be like very modern, so you don't wanna do everything by a...
Alicja Suska (24:38)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (24:49)
just rely on emails, you want to be able that your customers are gonna be able to log in through your website, into portal and see all of their, the future cleaning appointments, their invoices, the campaign voices and so on. And we're building this feature and it was the first project that I said, you know what, let's start in clothes. Let's pretend Figma is not there and see what happens. And it was really interesting because for me it was the time that I actually fell in love with AI a lot.
because I realized I don't have to design static screens anymore. And that was like a big moment for us. Like, yes, this is fun. I'm building. I'm not conceptualizing, just like ideas in a static screen. And it was really way, way faster because within three weeks I could have like a prototype the dev team could look at. like in that prototype, I worked on micro animations and like all kinds of details that I couldn't work on.
on Figma and also like in terms of efficiency, just to give you an example, this portal has like 6, 10 pages, 6, 10 screens. We want to make everything very branded because it has to be branded, the brand extension of our customers. So they need to be able to customize the colors and the logo and they apply one color and then the full UI should adjust to this color and still feel clean, harmonic and so on. And I wanted to prototype this with the 10, 20 colors we're gonna offer. And it was very easy with AI doing this in Figma,
Alicja Suska (26:05)
yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (26:07)
or cumbersome and the reality is like if something is really...
hard to do, chances are that you're not gonna do it because you will run out of time, you won't have the energy because of all kinds of things. And with AI so that I can actually do more things during design that I wouldn't be able to do in Figma. So it's not just the efficiency, but also opening new doors for me. Micro animation is another one. How should the tabs feel like? And also the navigation, I want to test what if it's floating tabs at the top or at the bottom or a sidebar, which one feels right? Let's give it a prompt and prototype three different solutions to see which one feels right. Instead of playing with pixels,
spending one hour in Figma to do this. So it was one of the most I was like, well, this is fun. This is cool. And it's also
Yeah, it's also very easy because we didn't need to reuse an existing design system. And right now we're in the process of figuring out how can we prototype in ZenMate with the existing design system new stuff, because that was a brand new thing outside that doesn't need to use the design system because it's made for our customers. So we can start with a clean brand new design system. And that's the challenge that I'm currently working on and I haven't figured yet. Like that's something that we need to investigate how to integrate the design system and all these kinds of things. yeah, that was a big
one for me. terms of the brainstorming, for me, where it was useful, was tapping into, tapping on insights that we have. So we're creating a workspace, AI workspace for the design team, where we can tap on existing knowledge, like all the support tickets in intacom, transcripts of calls, work and ask a cloud, take a look at what's in there from the last six months, and give me some ideas on what to be in that portal, for example, based on what people have been asking. So
that's for me another big unlock is being able to access all this existing knowledge without having to go and literally filter tickets and spend days reading all these tickets, which is also like a big headache and not really doable in the end of the day. So analyzing existing knowledge as part of the design process is a nice one. And my last comment to add on what you said before the productive part, you mentioned the example of things that can happen very quickly with Figma.
and you don't have to use AI. I'll bring another example of AI sucking your time which is
I would call it a of the shiny object syndrome. For example, this week I got an email from Design Newsletter about synthetic user testing. You can come up with virtual personas in AI and simulate user testing. People have many thoughts about it. Many people hate it. I was like, let's give it a try. In this newsletter, they say it was a good one. It doesn't replace user testing, but it can show you some red flags. I was like, let's give it a try. I wasted two hours of my time with no end outcomes. Like why now I have to work until late today because the actual work that I need to do.
is behind now and I need to cut up with everything. So with AI, the thing that I've been struggling with personally is in this world of new tools popping up every single day and every tool is being marketed as a...
It's going to change your life. It's going to be mind blowing. You're going to be a world class designer without even trying all this kind of stupid stuff that we read every time, every day in line. It's really hard to kind of stay productive and focused into this environment and really filter information and see what you can trust versus what you can't. I'm curious, have you ever used paper.design? Have you heard of this tool?
Alicja Suska (29:24)
No, but I
was recommended that. So I haven't had a chance to actually try it, but it's on my list of things to try, which is a very long list.
Jim Zarkadas (29:32)
I'm curious because I see
people talking about it a lot and hyping a bit the tool. I gave it a quick try. was like...
Alicja Suska (29:37)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (29:39)
I don't get it. It's like Figma, but using actual code and what's the big deal? Because you cannot create interactive prototypes. And I'm like, what is the point of creating a Figma screen with code instead of layers? Like what is the value for me? Maybe the fact is using the design system and you don't have to maintain a separate design system. I'm not sure if that's the unique selling point, but I've been trying to understand what is the actual full value of paper.design. It seems like a nice tool, but that's the other thing. Understanding what is the actual value is
sometimes a problem with AI tools and yeah.
Alicja Suska (30:11)
Yeah, that's true. And I think that also many design tools, show very simple use cases when they like promise certain things or...
they focus on web design or like a very simple design of an application. Whereas my problem is I have so many components, so many variants, then they have like theming of light and dark theme and I have to keep up with all of that and then build something on top of that and then think about how it would affect components in different places of the application. I don't feel they solve these problems because it's very hard to solve and they usually demo.
simple solutions, which is like, okay, it works for creating a dialogue. But then what happens if I want to add a new component that affects like eight places at buffer? Well, probably it's not going to be a tool for this job, unfortunately. So I think that it's an over-promising, maybe unintentional, but it's not solving problems of designers who are working in bigger companies with large design systems. And we face completely different problems.
Jim Zarkadas (31:07)
Hmm.
That's a very good point. And there is a big difference between evolving an existing product and designing something brand new from scratch. Big, big difference. And the use cases you described a hundred percent as well. Like they also you thought we build a tool that nobody will ever have to write code. And then the example is just a simple table and like, guys, I think this existed for years now. Like we need some, like we needed to perform in complex cases. Like what about nested models and complex views and scrolling containers and all these kinds of things that usually front end gets.
get stuff so yeah that's a very good point okay that's that's cool thanks for all the insights and now I think we can move on to the next topic which is actually not sure before that we said AI using designing AI products in buffer do you have AI features or not I think it do have some right
Alicja Suska (31:41)
That's true.
We
do have, yes. So for creating posts, can ask AI to help you create posts, rewrite posts, so basically this type of tools. And also in community, we've introduced replies, like AI replies, where you have the three or four ready replies, good to go, for the comment that you're working on. So these are like two of most important things. We'll also be using AI for insights, which is like something that we're working on.
Jim Zarkadas (32:11)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (32:28)
And that would be, I think, a very advanced use case of using AI because the other ones are more analyzing text and giving you a proposed text. But for example, for comments, we also do this thing where we analyze your past posts and past comments so that the reply sounds like you. So it's not a reply that you would never send because that would just be counter.
Jim Zarkadas (32:46)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (32:50)
intuitive for people, think. That all the replies that we are proposing just don't make sense. So that's a big component here as well.
Jim Zarkadas (32:52)
Yes.
That's a good one. And that's a value that I see into using because
Some people say, Claude is gonna replace all such products and like you have this kind of a stupid statements of like, it's gonna be so powerful that many products are gonna be relevant. Sure for the very basic products, but if I think about buffer, there is a lot of value into having it to actually being trained, like having a specialized AI model being trained on past data around you, right? Like I'm using, for example, Stanley for writing some LinkedIn content. And it's one of the things that is cool is that trained only for LinkedIn. And I can see how the post is gonna fit the character
Alicja Suska (33:20)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (33:30)
limit, the posts that perform, it understands that it needs to write a great hook because if you do LinkedIn versus Instagram, it's two different platforms with very different audiences and needs as well. So yeah, trained AI models for specific use cases, one of the, for me, it's a fascinating topic where I can see a lot of value. And one of the examples is what you exactly, exactly served. Yeah.
Alicja Suska (33:54)
Yeah. But I also had this thought about AI in the
products. So we went through the phase where products were kind of like highlighting, we're using AI. Hey, this is an AI driven feature or AI feature. And I feel that now for two reasons, we need to skip that. People kind of feel like AI is table stakes in many.
cases so you don't have to be like, this is the AI suggestion. No, it's a suggestion. It's an AI written post. It's a suggestion of a post. And the same thing, so people are, think...
Jim Zarkadas (34:15)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (34:25)
tired with gradients everywhere and AI screaming at them from every corner of the product. The gradients part is like, I fell to that and then I was like, okay, no, listen to the gradients all over the interface. But the other thing is also incorporating AI features, so mixing AI features and non-AI features in one product. you don't want to, so for example, for insights, we don't want to necessarily...
Jim Zarkadas (34:30)
Ha ha ha.
Alicja Suska (34:48)
differentiate that this is an AI insights and this is just the coloration of data with an AI insight. Let's just merge everything together, assume that things are, that we're using AI for getting these insights etc. Unless of course users opt out, which will be an option as well.
But I think from the design perspective, it will be so much easier to merge those two experiences together without highlighting that this is AI and this is not AI, because it doesn't matter anymore. Unless it's like revolutionary AI thing that you add to the product and you really want to tell the story for things that are just usual. I wouldn't really highlight it anymore. I think the times have changed a lot.
Jim Zarkadas (35:20)
Hmm
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good one. And it's interesting one because I hear from some people that they say that you should always label AI features as AI features and explain that this comes from AI, but it really depends. it's one of the examples where I like to say that there is no...
Alicja Suska (35:42)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (35:45)
Is it the price in English golden recipes? Like that there is no one size fits all solution that you either say or don't say. It really depends. If it's like a critical piece of info that could be wrong and it's very critical, you should say, hey, this is from AI, be careful with it, for example. But in what you said, like on the suggestions, I don't care if the suggestion comes from AI or from some other kind of technology. It's just a proposal for the comment. What I love to hear is that, hey, our suggestions actually look into past.
Alicja Suska (35:56)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (36:12)
comments that you've made and we give you suggestions based on that. This is useful, but not the fact that it's using an LLM or Cloud or Tadgpt behind the scenes. So yeah, that's, hear you. Yeah.
Alicja Suska (36:14)
Exactly.
So what you said about being transparent, we're using AI, could be wrong, here is a hint text, here is something like, or you can adjust your voice and tone because we're using AI. That's something that definitely should be present in the products. But visual highlighting and like just screaming all over the interface that this is AI, that's what I'm aiming. Like, I'm like, okay, this is not necessary anymore. And people are getting annoyed with that.
Jim Zarkadas (36:41)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a very good one. Yeah. And some that I can totally see, see like that it has happened in the past where, yeah, it also because the new technologies like it's a release strategy, but now we're at a point where AI already exists for a few years. And now it's kind of the new normal in a way. So you don't need to highlight it as much anymore. Yeah. That's a, that's a good point actually.
Alicja Suska (37:05)
It's
like cringy to highlight like, is a suggestion written by AI. Yeah, of course, every single product does this because it's the easiest thing to implement an LLM to ask you, like to give you a suggestion. Of course. Like show me something impressive, then say that this was made by AI. Don't do obvious things.
Jim Zarkadas (37:17)
Exactly.
And from a design point of view, it's also destruction. Like, why do I need to label it? Like to highlight this is a cool AI feature or something. Yeah. Like you, I need to focus on the value. Like the value is not AI. The value is a personalized comment that sounds like you in this case.
Alicja Suska (37:25)
Hmm.
Yes, I think that the other side of the story is label it because people need to be aware so they want to opt out, they can opt out. And I totally understand it, but I think that people who are
who have the mindset of I don't want to use AI for anything when using a given product, they will go to settings, they will disable it. You just need to give them ability to disable. Majority of users, unfortunately, depend how you think about it, but they don't mind. As long as they get the great result, just take my data, take everything. People are like, okay, whatever. It doesn't matter to me that much.
Jim Zarkadas (37:55)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
that's a big topic and with knowledge all one of the
teams we're working with, it's it's a knowledge based software that has been used by big enterprises as well. They're very sensitive with AI there. And because there's a lot of compliance, security and so on. And the way we implemented AI has been very different as well. It's not just connecting cloud and then calling it a day. It's a, yeah, we give them more control. We make sure the data don't get charged like many small details on how you're going to implement it. So yeah, the sensitivity on data and who you're serving is also an interesting one on how you're going
Alicja Suska (38:22)
Yes.
Jim Zarkadas (38:44)
expose AI and how you're gonna design it's something to always keep in mind that's a very good point.
Alicja Suska (38:48)
Exactly. And it's also for enterprise products. You have to be very honest and transparent about using AI. What AI you're using. The same thing for some companies have policy, no money to Google or no money to Amazon. And then you have issues in your contract where it's like, okay, but we're using these companies. So with AI is the same thing. Some companies are like, we don't want to use certain companies or we don't want to like indirectly give money to certain companies and you have to eliminate that. So that's
Jim Zarkadas (38:53)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Hmm
Alicja Suska (39:15)
a very different story than when you're appealing to single creators, let's say, or smaller audiences. They might have this philosophy, but the scale and probability of that is super low.
Jim Zarkadas (39:22)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, fully agree. Cool. Let me think. I'm thinking about the next one. I think we're going to jump into the onboarding and time to value, because it's an always relevant topic that every SAS founder always thinks about, because it's so critical to adding new customers and actually building a sustainable SAS product. So.
My question, I have a bunch of questions, but what I would be curious to hear here is a bit of stories and no tactical advice, but more like practical examples through real stories of projects that you've worked.
related to the onboarding actually. I'm not sure if Buffer would be the company you'd like to share examples from or some other company that you've worked with in the past. yeah, my question these could be, is a project that comes to you when you think about onboarding a time to value where you're like, okay, we had an impact, we did something interesting and that you would love to share with other people, with other founders.
Alicja Suska (40:04)
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Onboarding in general is quite an interesting topic because if you do it wrong, it impacts every single thing in your business. And I see many companies still being stuck in this mindset of, need an onboarding that shows this is what you can do in the product. Tell me who you are. Tell me how many team members you have. And it's just this lengthy onboarding that serves, that doesn't serve users because it doesn't change the UI. It's just an information that you want to get or some screens that you want to show.
In some cases, it is necessary. But my philosophy and what I've seen the best results with is get people into the product as soon as possible and then work with empty states and some prompts in the product to guide them through the onboarding process. And of course, the disclaimer, some products need set up, some products you need to connect some things to them to make them work, all of that. But many products, they just have this
Jim Zarkadas (41:14)
Yeah.
Alicja Suska (41:18)
unnecessary onboarding screens was like, welcome to the product. And then the next screen is like, this is where you create a project. This is what you do with blah, blah, blah. And people are just like, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. They go to the product and now they're like, ⁓ I haven't paid attention to the onboarding because I wanted to skip and I wanted to see the product. Now I'm in an empty state that is not designed very well for just being empty and for me being uninformed. And then...
they don't know what to do, so you're designing in the wrong way. for buffer, for example, for community, we used to have very simple empty states. Now our empty states are more focused on showing.
what's going on, so like you've replied to all the comments, but also giving you a prompt of, create a post that it boosts engagement or like see this metric or see how many comments you've replied to. So they are a little bit more engaging, which is great. But also for Buffer, we've seen, we've run experiments in the past where we had just a regular onboarding with this is the, this is Buffer, welcome to Buffer, connect your channels, blah, Connecting channels without seeing the interface was a no-go
people don't want to connect their social media channel that they value so much to the product that they haven't even seen yet. They don't know, is it trustworthy? So putting people into the UI with empty states for channel, they connect the channel on the side instead of blocking them from seeing UI, that's a way better solution in my opinion. There are also solutions where we have like a checklist basically of things that you can do, which makes sense for some
products where you have like share a post, reply to a comment, create an idea. That makes sense. In some products it doesn't make sense because when you have a more workflow where people don't use all the features, it wouldn't make sense to ask them to go through the onboarding checklist. But that works sometimes as well. But I'm all for empty states. The better empty states you have and the sooner you get people into the product, that would be my recommendation.
Jim Zarkadas (43:12)
Yeah, yeah. On the channels that you said that they wanted to try before they connect, what was the solution you mentioned there?
Alicja Suska (43:20)
So
instead of having like a dialogue where connect the channel before getting into the product, first now we get them into the product where you can see like an empty calendar, which you would normally see posts. And on the side, you can see ⁓ where a channel list would be with call to action of like connect Instagram, connect Facebook, connect something else. And you can click from there. And that makes so much more sense because you can use...
Jim Zarkadas (43:33)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (43:46)
you see what the product is before you commit to connecting a channel.
Jim Zarkadas (43:50)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. Yeah, that's a very good point to think about onboarding. It's like, what is the level of commitment that you're asking in the onboarding flow and what do they need to see before that in order to accept that kind of level of commitment? What you say with, yeah, actually go for it before I the example.
Alicja Suska (44:07)
Exactly.
For example, being able to use Buffer Composer to create an idea for a post. Not to create a post that you are scheduling and sending, but to create an idea. So you can see how the flow goes. I can write something, I can attach things, can select channels, whatever. And then I'm like, okay, I want to post now, so let me connect the channel. It just feels so much more natural when it comes to exploration than first committing to connecting a channel and then exploring the product and then...
Your first thought when you ask people in advance for connecting your channel is like, okay, but how do I disconnect if I don't like the interface? It will give me another trouble. Do I have to contact support? People have so many questions in advance. It's a big commitment before seeing the UI.
Jim Zarkadas (44:53)
Yeah, yeah, it's a good one. And at ZenMate, for example, we have these long account set up flow that you've been mentioning that like people think that is still think that this is like the other right way. And it's a very interesting one because with some of the teams we don't and it's what it says like some products require that set up. And it's also like in terms of...
It depends on the audience sometimes, but also like the level of commitment you ask. So for example, we asked them to put the credit card before starting the trial and that's on purpose so that we can filter out who is not serious about using the product, for example, because also now the brand is mature and people know about it. That's another thing to keep in mind that can have an impact on your voting gaze, your brand power and the brand awareness you have can have an impact on what kind of commitment you can ask from people. If you're in your startup that people don't really trust yet,
Alicja Suska (45:31)
Yes.
Jim Zarkadas (45:43)
asking for the credit card may not be the best idea. It really depends on how legitimate, how trustworthy you look like as well.
Alicja Suska (45:51)
That's true. And also, you need to pay attention to how it's going to impact your metrics and what you're aiming for. So for example, with another client, I had the situation where we used to ask for credit card information before they started the trial. And then the conversion rate after the trial was X, let's say. But then we came up with, OK, let's give a free trial to everyone and then ask people when they finish the trial for credit card information.
Jim Zarkadas (45:58)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (46:18)
and the conversion rate from that was way lower. So even in relative numbers, so when you're paying attention to the conversion rate, you need to also pay attention to how it's going to impact metrics that you're aiming for. we gathered more people, but at the end of the day, less of this group signed up. in...
not in relative numbers, in like subjective numbers. Let's say a hundred people converted, but then with the second method, 80 people converted, we were like, okay, that's clearly not working. And it's also weird that we've casted a wider net and from these people, they didn't convert. So you may think intuitively with the credit card information that it's a wrong thing to do. Depends on the audience, depends on the products as well.
Jim Zarkadas (46:59)
Yeah, yeah. And it's like the final
metric, which is like the revenue, like how many people, it's what they say that with the reverse trial, which is when you ask for the credit card, you have lower conversion rate, but higher from visitor to sign up, but higher between sign up and paid customer. So in the end it's like how much revenue do you, do you add from these is, is like an important one to keep in mind. And also like for the case of Zenmei, like which is a smaller bootstrap team, it's also resource management is how many people can you really support.
Alicja Suska (47:04)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (47:26)
truly support and keep your support quality very high. So sometimes you want to use friction as a filter to people that are not really motivated and just going to add noise into the support team without any return. So that's what I love with design because
Alicja Suska (47:37)
Sure.
Jim Zarkadas (47:41)
you really need to think like a founder. It's like, what is this business? What is the broad awards that it has? What are the resources that this team has? What is the miles that we're working towards? What does this business need to achieve within the next six months? And you need to take all these into consideration and then design around these constraints alongside with what's best for the user and what is the easiest. So that's what I with product design. It feels like you always need to balance the user and the business and find that sweet balance that is gonna make both successful.
Alicja Suska (48:04)
Yeah.
Yes,
and then metrics are like sometimes you're predicting one thing and the metrics show the other thing and your job is to figure out why and sometimes you just, okay, let's revert to what was working even though we're not 100 % sure why it was working better, but the evidence is it was working better. like theory is one thing and being open to actually changing your mind is a very important thing as well.
Jim Zarkadas (48:24)
Yeah.
That's very true. Right now we're doing an A-B test in the onboarding flow of ZenMate, where when people sign up, we design the high moment flow. So the idea is that the moment you start your trial, we're going to take you through five steps where you're going to receive your first automated SMS, because that's one of the big things that people love about ZenMate. But it's interesting because right now it's underperforming. It's been only one week, so we don't have any statistical kind of a significance where you can say, okay, this is not performing well. But I'm really curious. Maybe it's going to turn out that for some reason people don't like it.
and it turns them down from kind of a... yeah, like it creates more, I don't know, anxiety and they don't convert, I'm not sure, but it's an interesting one to see. So I fully agree that you also need to have your eyes open and be willing to change your mind, even if you think that an idea you have is a great idea, because reality may prove you wrong.
Alicja Suska (49:18)
Yes,
and also what you said about we want them to see the message coming. This is also connected to time to value. And in time to value, so how quickly people realize the value of the product, you need to identify the value correctly. So maybe for them, receiving a message, it's added value, but it's not the main value that they're looking for. Maybe they're looking for something totally different when exploring the product for the first time. So I have noticed also that...
Jim Zarkadas (49:33)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (49:45)
many teams, including myself, I'm also guilty of that, identified that this is the key thing and the aha moment. And it turns out it's one of them, but it's not the main one that people are looking for. And you test your experiment, but sometimes you get surprised about what people actually get convinced by.
Jim Zarkadas (50:02)
That's very true. And one thing that we've learned the last few months from the research we've been doing...
thanks to Cloud by the way, that's another use case of AI that I love, like user research, is that the how moment can be different between the segments of users and segments, the way that we create them is what is the tool they come from? Because this can tell us a lot about the maturity of their business, alongside with the size of their team. So if a cleaning business is coming, let's say from Google Calendar and they have one or two people, we know probably they need the automated communications, let's say. But if they come, they have like 15 people and they come from an alternative
software, then probably maybe they had too many bugs on that platform or maybe the invoicing is not good. It really depends on which tool they're coming from. So the aha moment can be different between every segment and ideally you need to personalize that flow between every segment.
Alicja Suska (50:49)
Mm-hmm.
And this is the excellent.
use case for asking questions in advance. So the thing that I just hate when it's just aimless, because no matter how you answer, you're landing on the same UI in the same place. But if you're asking like two questions, what you said, like the size of the team and the tool that you've been using so far, and you land them in a completely different flow, or the empty state looks different, or the checklist looks different, then it's completely justifiable. And many products can actually see higher conversions from that, which I think
Jim Zarkadas (50:57)
Mmm... Mmm...
Get the same thing.
Alicja Suska (51:22)
It takes work to adjust in the interface. So the research is one thing, but then the technical implementation of these flows is ⁓ challenging in many cases, I find. But it might be so worth it.
Jim Zarkadas (51:33)
Yeah, yeah, fully agree, fully agree. Cool. Looking at the time, we have a few minutes left. So one of the topics we were discussing we wanna cover is the design depth, actually. So...
I think maybe we can go through that and just get your quick thoughts on the topic because the topic you've spent a lot of time thinking about, you've even written, is it an e-book or like some kind of a mini course? I think it's like a playbook essentially. Around design depth. it's a topic you spend a lot of time thinking about and we'd love to get your thoughts. So.
Alicja Suska (51:58)
It's a series of articles on the website.
Jim Zarkadas (52:09)
Yeah, if I keep it very open-ended, design it and then ask you, what are your thoughts on the topic? Like what are the things you want a founder to hear from you on the topic? What would that be? It's super open-ended, but I'm really curious to see what comes up.
Alicja Suska (52:23)
Sure. Design debt is like an analogical thing to technical debt. So basically you're adding things without revising them and then it creates this Frankenstein with a lot of issues and then you have to pay the debt to actually move forward. And I've seen that in many startups where they didn't have a dedicated designer at the beginning or they were working with multiple contractors and design debt accumulated in the product and also in the design system, in the design files.
This is more interesting for designers, but I think in the product it's more interesting for founders. Especially, I've seen these things coming up when it comes to navigation and navigation patterns and something maybe to pay attention to for founders. Every time you want to add something new to the product,
the pattern that I've seen so much was like, let's just add another tab at the top. And then you end up with too many tabs, things that are unimportant being at the very top and visible all the time.
and then struggling to add more things because the space, we're running out of space and we're not going to indefinitely add tabs at the top. And then it goes down to navigation within the pages and also the information architecture. So just creating a product and then adding something.
automatically in a certain way is probably not the good way to go. Every time you add a new thing to the product, you need to think about how to review the navigation, how to redo it, and how to make it the best for people to access certain information. So for example, many products have settings at the top and then they add API-related things there. Maybe we need to separate those two experiences for the users or maybe unimportant things or set up things.
Jim Zarkadas (53:46)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (54:00)
also in the main navigation that user goes through once and maybe changes once later on after a year of using a product and they are sitting there just indefinitely. So I've seen navigation being a major issue, onboarding also being a major issue where we getting outdated and also
Jim Zarkadas (54:15)
getting out at it, yeah.
Alicja Suska (54:19)
adding the onboarding elements like popovers, et cetera, and then you end up with a new, you're not testing a new user experience every time. And the new user experience ends up being, you enter the product and you're attacked with 10 dialogues and popovers and things that are going on. So that's all popover, hints, highlights, different suggestions. So that's also design that's getting accumulated. But I think that the source
Jim Zarkadas (54:35)
Pop over tits, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alicja Suska (54:47)
of problem is usually not having an in-house designer or not having, maybe not in-house, but like dedicated designer for a product who takes care of all these experiences, committed him.
Jim Zarkadas (54:55)
Committed I would say yeah in house means that they're committed and
they're there every day to pay attention. Yeah
Alicja Suska (55:01)
Exactly. It can be an external contractor. It can be also an agency or whatever team you're using, but they need to be focused on the product long-term, not necessarily just like ad hoc work.
Jim Zarkadas (55:12)
Side note, completely autophic, but because you mentioned like that's something that will be working on our positioning at LVS FirstRy, which is we call ourselves in-house design team as a service because the moment you say agency, it feels like you don't really own the product. But the thing with us, like we own it, we're there like every week. It's just that we don't work like eight hours per day, like ⁓ an in-house designer would work.
Alicja Suska (55:21)
Mm-hmm.
sure.
Jim Zarkadas (55:32)
Yeah, it's just a bit of a different model, but it's the ownership part that you mentioned that is very, very important. You need somebody to own it and lead the experience and actually worry about these things. Owning something means that you feel stress about things not being right, essentially. And you need somebody to be responsible to feel stress when things are not so that they're gonna fix it. That's how I like to describe ownership. And it's, go for it, sorry.
Alicja Suska (55:54)
Yes, true. think
the ownership part and taking responsibility for the design long term, that's the thing that really matters because in...
some agency work or sometimes even as a contractor, you're like, okay, I'm done with it. Let's move forward. I have another client. I have another call. have another whatever. And you don't even learn from the mistakes that you've made in this particular project or the things that you've added over time. And you never, for example, come back to them. So having someone dedicated with dedicated attention, that's large value for founders. I know it's sometimes more.
Jim Zarkadas (56:14)
Exactly.
Hmm
Alicja Suska (56:29)
of a commitment or more of an expensive thing to do, but it's worth it, especially now that people don't accept bad design anymore as clients. That's the thing that has changed over the last 15 years that it used to be acceptable. Yeah, it used to be acceptable to like learn a tool or have a course about a tool. Now, if people open it and they don't know how to use it, they're just going to close it and never come back again.
Jim Zarkadas (56:42)
standards are getting higher yeah
yeah. ⁓
Yeah, yeah, indeed the standards are getting higher on these 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a bigger topic on this one that I spent a lot of time thinking of. Actually, it came to me that you've been talking about design tech. I didn't have in mind to discuss it today. But one of the things that I think a lot about building a company myself, but also leading design for some SaaS companies is the whole idea that you have...
two products. The one is a product you're designing for as a designer and the other product is the process you've designed to design the end product, right? So as a designer, I fill out two products, the process and the end product that the users engage with. And the process that I get for a
Alicja Suska (57:26)
Yes.
Jim Zarkadas (57:34)
I find very fascinating and something like insanely important because it's the one that is going to define if things are going to happen or not because many problems are process problems. Of course, it's like people problems as well. So you need to have the right people. Like if somebody, say it's a bad designer, like no process will make them a good designer, but a great designer to thrive, the process can have a big impact on the amount of value that they can produce within a company and the impact they can have on the design quality. Small example of process is that on the way that we work weekly, we have the
growth release and the delight release. So one problem that I faced in the past was delight was never prioritized because we have all these bucks, we have all these features we need to build, nobody cares about a nice illustration over here. But what if we make it somehow like in the design sprint, feasible to add a delight weekly by allocating a few hours, you don't need to have like 100k brand designer, your payroll to do that and so on. And it started happening. Companies that wouldn't pay for delight, suddenly they're
paying for delight, they don't mind and we add delight every week. I was like, okay, that was for me, the moment was like, process is really a thing that can have an impact because I actually took something that was never happening and suddenly it's happening. Britt, for example, she used to work at Zapier and she told me, hey, team, like we didn't do this kind of thing since Zapier. We never had any kind of delight release. What is this thing? Like how can I plan delight releases when she started working with a new team we signed? And it's my favorite example of like,
Alicja Suska (58:50)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (58:57)
process having a real impact. And in the case of design depth, that's also a very interesting one. One idea we had that we tested a bit and it kind of worked actually. So I would say it's one of the process that we still have on our playbook is a weekly activation workshop. So the idea is that we all say in the design community, let's not say all like me and you, we are both on the same page on this that onboarding never.
Alicja Suska (59:12)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (59:20)
ends, right? So people sign up, they do the first time, the first time user onboarding, but then you need to think about onboarding constantly because it can get outdated, but also when you list new features, you need to make sure you onboard people. And onboarding, if you think about it, it's like an ongoing project that never ends. So
If I look at the process, we're busy with projects, but we never think about onboarding because we're busy with other stuff. So what if we could find a way where we think about weekly and if the first thought is let's add a project for that, but no, we don't have the resource and time to do a project. So if you think about what is like an 80 20 solution, what is a small commitment we could afford doing that could have tiny impact that can compound over time. And the idea was to have a weekly hackathon, me and Amar, for example, the CEO, where we actually think about onboarding and we're like, okay, let's go inside.
enough
for the product once every month and see if it feels right or not and if it doesn't feel right that something is off what is an 80-20 way to fix it not redesign the full onboarding because that's a project but what is a way we can fix things within two hours so this is an example of a process like the the monthly onboarding flow testing the weekly activation workshop that we did for five six months and now we're fully focused on onboarding like it's the main project that turned out to be a good one in terms of like impact but also from a design
Alicja Suska (1:00:13)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (1:00:33)
point of view to actually find the issues because learning design is fun but at the same time it's so many things to lead like an app a product has so many features like how it's really hard to keep the quality of all these really really high so yeah that's another example and last comment is also like AI something I'm happy about I really
dream about the moment where I'll be able to do more front ends because of AI without being a front end developer and without having engineers to hate me because my code sucks and they have to clean up AI, a trusty code. ⁓ And I can actually control the implementation of their visual details because that's another part of design that I see accumulating is the difference between what you design and what gets implemented. And I hear it from almost every team and it's a real struggle. And if you can have designers actually do the thing, that's going to be a big one to retain.
Alicja Suska (1:01:00)
No.
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:22)
use the amount of design data that gets collected. And also it's a process change again, because designers now do some UI development with AI. yeah, very interesting topics.
Alicja Suska (1:01:30)
Yeah.
That's good for, it's a good use case for using cloud code and designers owning the design system in Storybook as well. So like if you need some design changes to the components, you can do that. But I wanted to touch on the design that and what you said about revising the onboarding and looking into that. That's a great idea. In the past, I've, in the teams that I worked with,
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:44)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (1:01:57)
we had this idea of dedicating like 5 or 10 % of time to design that issues, but usually they were... It was hard to find the resources for implementation and also they were a little bit out of context from the projects that we were working on. So we've changed that and wanted to work on design that projects when a new project starts, we need to see the list of design that issues, see if any of it fits, and we can fix them.
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:03)
Mm-mm.
Alicja Suska (1:02:23)
But what I started doing recently and I found a lot of success in that is like a different version of what you're doing with onboarding. I have it in my calendar to have like one or two hours, my own brainstorming session. I need to engage my team, but I do it for myself for now about time to value. So like how to shorten time to value in certain like in the product or in community right now, which onboarding is a big part of it.
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:43)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (1:02:47)
but sometimes it's the continuous onboarding. So how to allow people to discover new features or maybe the value of a reply or a default or a saved reply would be discovered better in a certain way. So as you said, we're not creating like new projects and doing the whole process around it. It's like a one hour brainstorming session and maybe one task for a developer for the upcoming sprint. But it allowed me to think about
value and providing value for users outside of the ongoing projects that we're working on and I've noticed that we Because of that we got to fixing things that we were postponing for a long time because we didn't have time for a big project commitment and it turns out an hour brainstorming session and an hour from development time fixes the 90 % with 90 % there. like evolution of what you said about onboarding
Jim Zarkadas (1:03:28)
Hmm.
scene
Alicja Suska (1:03:37)
Also, you can do the workshop for time to value. I recommend it 100%.
Jim Zarkadas (1:03:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, love it. Yeah, and I really love like...
Yeah, like not reviewing the onboarding, but the time to actually scope in something very, very specific because onboarding is broader and includes this one. So yeah, to keep it more focused. And it's also beautiful, sorry, an example of like, again, like we call it as an immediate 20 principle, which is I think Pareto or something like that. It's called that principle. And it's always interesting that.
Alicja Suska (1:03:51)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (1:04:07)
It's about figuring out the process where you're going to avoid creating a big project because it's the easy thing to say, yeah, we need a project. Let's leave it for later. Then you can just focus on the thing that you already have. So yeah, it's it's an interesting one, the whole thing of process, which yeah, it includes like skills around like product management, prioritization, different kind of, of areas. And that's why I find fascinating, like being a lead designer in the team, because you need, you need to be a talk of all trades. You need to think about so many things at the same time.
and polish them out somehow.
Alicja Suska (1:04:38)
And I think also there's one more factor here.
good leadership from the design perspective and also from the founders. So recently, Joel, the founder of Buffer, he gave us a very clear direction of we're not releasing unless we're proud of the work that we've done, which is a very different direction from release whatever, test whatever, and we're gonna ship fast, ship whatever. He was like, okay, we're at the stage of the product where we've achieved
Jim Zarkadas (1:04:56)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. She passed, yeah.
Alicja Suska (1:05:08)
certain level of maturity, have our client customer base, they expect certain things from us, and also the quality needs to get higher. And we will not get to a higher quality of the interface by releasing just whatever or half-baked things. And now at this stage, we can afford waiting a little bit more, revising the thing a little bit more so that we are actually releasing something that people will come back to. And I totally agree with that because with new features, especially and with improvements,
Jim Zarkadas (1:05:18)
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (1:05:35)
person tests something once and they just have a really bad experience, there's a high probability that they will never come back to it even if we release an improvement or a new version of it. So I know it's not a universal thing, sometimes you have to release fast, but changing the mindset into releasing things that we are proud of, it changed perspective and
of many people I think and gave this like freedom to actually speak up and being like hey this is I don't think it meets the quality bar that we're aiming for let's wait a little bit and release something better very non non-techno Silicon Valley mindset but I think it improved the buffer quality for like a lot
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:15)
Actually, on
this one, you mentioned something important. What the CEO said is that we're at this stage of the company where we can do that. That's a big thing, exactly, that I started realizing the last few years that not every company is the same. So it's not either see fast and break things or don't see fast at all.
Alicja Suska (1:06:24)
We can afford it.
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:34)
depends. Like I think for nine out of ten questions my answer nowadays is it depends because there many variables to look into. Like in this case Buffer is a company with a really strong brand for so of so many years and a lot of features under it so
Alicja Suska (1:06:40)
You
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:51)
this is a good one. You can afford it financially, that's the one thing. You don't need to grow, let's say, maybe like crazy and all these things that maybe a new company that raised money is looking at. And also is the expectation from the crowd because you're such a mature company compared to like an early stage company or compared to a smaller company like Sendmate, let's say, that is around a few years but serves a different audience. And this also, one thing
Alicja Suska (1:07:00)
Mm-hmm.
True.
Jim Zarkadas (1:07:17)
that I more mentioned in past that I kind of like as an idea is that you have the Apple style features where you need to perfect them. That's how he describes it, that they need to be great before they go out and some others that it doesn't really matter. It's okay if it's a bit broken or if it doesn't really stick to every standard we have. So yeah, what you're releasing can be also like a big thing. If it's a brand new feature that you really need to promote and make exciting or if it's a tiny change that doesn't matter too much.
Alicja Suska (1:07:44)
Yes, and you can also lower the bar to what you're releasing to your beta community. So if you have your beta users who signed up for that and they are prepared for, okay, this will not be perfect. There are some issues with this feature that we are still developing. I think that's a fair proposition. But some companies, that's like a mature level of development, we cannot afford to give people...
something that doesn't work. That's destroying our image, trust in the brand, etc. So it's being able to afford spending more time and not being able to afford to lose the reputation that we've been working on for so many years.
Jim Zarkadas (1:08:17)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, really, really interesting stuff today. My last question, because I know we're over time and I don't want to hijack your schedule, is what is your favorite SaaS product at the moment? Or maybe mobile apps. It doesn't have to be B2B SaaS. Is what is...
Yeah, your favorite product at this moment and why. And by favorite, I mean a product that you feel excited about, you actually use frequently and yeah, you kind of love. It doesn't have to be anything groundbreaking. It's just like whatever comes to your mind. And I'm interested into the why part as well.
Alicja Suska (1:08:46)
Mm-hmm.
Excited about, well, I'm definitely excited about cloud. That's an obvious, just like work-wise excited about cloud and like the whole AI thing and how can I, like there's still a lot to explore there. So I think that's a good thing. And also the results that you're getting from cloud comparing to like chat GPT.
It's just like I've seen this meme and it made me laugh so hard that I've been using charge GPT and I thought that AI, like my job is safe and AI will not take over. Then I actually switched to cloud and I'm like, yeah, it will take over within six months. So I'm quite excited about that. And I would love to see the UI design tool from them if it's, I don't know if it's a rumor or not, but hopefully it's not.
Jim Zarkadas (1:09:33)
Okay.
Alicja Suska (1:09:33)
But for private things, privately and my personal life, I'm in love with exercise trackers and calorie trackers and how you can adjust the interface and you can adjust everything to your needs. it's becoming more more popular with people who are into health and fitness and all of that. Tracking your metrics, and it's not tracking your metrics as in...
My watch tracks things for me. It's like taking control over what you're doing and how you're doing things and customizing these products to fit you. So for example, if you're tracking food, you have custom foods or custom meals and doing things, whatever, it's like efficiency in that part. I'm looking forward to see how those type of tools will develop because I had a feeling that we've reached the...
the ceiling there because there's only so much you can do. They started experimenting with AI regarding like you take a photo of a meal and it calculates calories, which doesn't work because you can hide oil below everything and it just doesn't work. But having fitness trackers and food trackers combined in like one tool and AI analyzes your results and adjusts your training based on how you performed last week and adjusts your food and
Jim Zarkadas (1:10:26)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Hmm.
Alicja Suska (1:10:45)
macros based on your goals and how you're doing so far. That's great because people like there are users who want to take control but there are users who they want this trainer, person, AI trainer, whoever it is or nutritionist. So I'm curious to see that especially that health and fitness is such an important topic now when people are just saying. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (1:10:58)
Yeah.
Mmm, yeah, take
that one.
Alicja Suska (1:11:08)
We've been
neglecting that for a long time as a society and people are coming back.
Jim Zarkadas (1:11:12)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, it's really interesting, like how AI is going to be applied there and help people actually have a healthier life. And this is like the use case of the accounts that I'm excited about, like improving the design quality, reducing design, like bringing more health into the world. Like that's the only thing that I truly hate about AI is the fear of mongering. It's like everybody's going to lose their job. AI is going to eat us alive. Like, come on. And it creates this perception of like, it creates like a bias and like in a behavior that you don't
Alicja Suska (1:11:33)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:11:43)
try it because you have like a toxic relationship with it and like no I can also like fall in love with this it's something good it really depends on how you use it and the whole thing with replacing the job I don't know it's kind of a it's a big topic not for today but
Alicja Suska (1:11:49)
Yes.
Yes.
But every
profession, if you ask a developer, if you ask a designer, if you ask a doctor, if you ask a lawyer, everyone, those are very popular use cases. But every single professional says, AI is great for some things, but I don't see it replacing the whole industry because it has these shortcomings that cannot be fixed right now. Or it gives me bad results, or it cannot be trusted 100 % of the time.
I think we're still safe for like five, seven more years, hopefully. I don't know. True.
Jim Zarkadas (1:12:28)
Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah, you never know what's going to happen like in a full decade. And this one, what I'd like
to always say is that is the concept of ownership, right? Like that's like the last comment that I want to do from my side, which is...
Sure, AI can do stuff on the design, but somebody needs to own decisions. And in a product where you're building like many features, you have a lot of areas, you need people to own areas. maybe the teams are going to get smaller and there will be more independence and autonomy per person compared to the past. 100%. This is already happening. But replacing everybody with AI, I don't really see that coming. Like I believe teams are going to get smaller and we will have more companies popping up. So the market is going to open up as well because
Alicja Suska (1:12:46)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Jim Zarkadas (1:13:10)
people will
be able to create software companies that I can see it happening but not really the whole idea of like AI just leading the world this is kind of a I don't know it's like a crazy story maybe I'm too close-minded that's also like an insecurity that I have sometimes and we're too close-minded and I think it's too small like do I need to think bigger here I don't know like time will show but yeah with AI that's for me like the big thing is save the right mindset and embrace in the right way and we hired actually an AI mentor in the
Alicja Suska (1:13:24)
you
Jim Zarkadas (1:13:40)
I pulled in and she's building an AI product analytics tool and she's also offering some AI consulting on the side and harder to help us and kind of stay on top of AI and also train us on how to use Cloud better. Because honestly, it sounds very simple. You just drop a prompt and boom, you get magic out of it. No, like you need to understand like many things or how it works. It's like, honestly, I feel like when I was feeling back when I was starting Ruby on Rails, like it's in the early days, I'm letting it.
Alicja Suska (1:13:57)
Hmm.
Thank
Jim Zarkadas (1:14:09)
programming language, I need to understand the constraints, the concepts, the you had like the yeah the model view controller set up there, now with AI you have other things so you really need to understand the technology and find ways to leverage it like in specific use case so yeah it's very creative and fun but can also be overwhelming because of the way it's introduced to the world I feel like the aggressiveness of it but yeah I mean that's life it's never easy so we're gonna figure it out
Alicja Suska (1:14:28)
Yes.
soon.
See, the
AI created a job here for this person. It didn't steal a job.
Jim Zarkadas (1:14:40)
See? Yeah, that's also the other thing.
Exactly.
like the market, that's the other thing. If the market gets bigger, like especially for designers, like you're to have more work to do properly because you're going to have more companies out there and more people who need some design direction. Because it's the same thing always like AI can produce like 100 different designs, which one feels right is a very complex decision to take that is influenced by many, many variables. And a founder cannot do this full time. Like they have to build a company, bring people and so
So yeah, it's a good observation that actually what we're discussing here is creating a new job. And last comment on this, because it really fits is the client we signed on January, the team that we started working with, RTC, the reason they're doing the project they're doing is because of AI, because they want their community for women in tech in US. I'm not sure if they're the biggest one or in the top three, but they're pretty big in US and they have really great partners and everything.
and they want to build a custom platform for their community. Maybe you know Circle where you can have like a community. So they want to make a custom version of this because they have many fans and sub communities and stuff like many things that Circle wouldn't be good at.
Alicja Suska (1:15:43)
Yeah, yes, yes,
Jim Zarkadas (1:15:52)
But they needed like, they got coached in the past of like a million dollars to build it. And we're like, we don't have the funds to build something like that. But now with AI, they need a design team with a lot of experience that can do brand and product and a great dev team of two people. And then they can build it because of AI. So it actually created more work also. Like in the past, they couldn't hire us because they wouldn't do it because it was too expensive. So yeah, it's very interesting with AI. There are two ways to look at it. And nowadays I like and I embrace
more the positive way. It's like thinking in an optimistic way and that the society is evolving and creating more cool things. It's a side where AI is gonna eat us all and everybody's gonna be starving and all these stupid things that people communicate.
Alicja Suska (1:16:37)
I agree with that and I like what you said about creating more cool things. Like the technology and development is generally about it. Like we could be driving, like we could be still calling taxis with our phones and waiting for a person to arrive, but we have Uber and we have other like car sharing services and whatever. It's just like creating a better experience and more adjusted experience to what people expect and make life easier. I don't see anything wrong with that as long as we are like reasonable.
Jim Zarkadas (1:17:00)
Mm.
Exactly, that's caveat, yeah.
Alicja Suska (1:17:07)
I got it, yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:17:06)
Good point. Beautiful. So yeah, thanks a lot for today, for your time. It was a really, really nice episode with many cool things that we discussed.
Alicja Suska (1:17:17)
Thank you so much for having me. The time flew by. It was a pleasure talking to you, as always.
Jim Zarkadas (1:17:20)
Yeah, yeah.
Anytime, anytime.
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