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An Interview With Alana Wood

Founder and CEO of Steer, Amelia Humfress, was joined by Alana Wood, Studio Design Lead at Ustwo and one of the speakers at Beyond. They discuss what it’s like to work at a successful studio like Ustwo, and how to get ahead in your career. Read below for the full transcript.

Mentioned in the Interview

Full Transcript

Amelia: Hello and welcome to episode 42 of the Steercast! I’m Amelia Humfress, the founder and CEO of Steer, and I’m going to be your host today. This week we’re being joined by Alana Wood, who’s the Studio Design Lead at Ustwo, an award winning studio that’s built popular iOS apps like the incredible Monument Valley. If you’re a regular Steercast listener you’ll know that we’re organising a conference for junior developers and people who have recently started coding called Beyond Conf. Alana is going to be one of the speakers at Beyond, so we thought we’d get her on the Steercast to tell us what it’s like to work at a company like Ustwo and how you can get ahead in your career. At Beyond, Alana is giving a talk on how to make apps that people use, and she’ll be sharing stories from her most recent project, Moodnotes, which is an iOS app that helps people improve their thinking habits. Prices for Beyond increase on Thursday so head over to beyondconf.co before then to get your ticket for 25% off the regular price. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about Alana’s career, the difference between UX and UI designers, how to make yourself stand out as a junior designer and how Ustwo work on products. Let’s get started!

Amelia: Hey Alana thanks so much for joining us today!

Alana: Hello, thanks for having me.

Amelia: So before we dive into the questions, could you tell us a little bit about what it’s like being a Studio Design Lead at Ustwo, and what your responsibilities are like day to day?

Alana: Cool so yeh, it’s always tricky with job titles, especially in Ustwo where everyone gets involved in multiple things. But my background is in Interaction Design, I’ve worked in many different projects throughout many different industries and these days I’ve started to get more involved in the strategy side of things and more involved in thinking about the business model around a particular product, and leading a team to create that product. Whether it’s getting the initial vision out for a client or whether it’s actually getting a build of a product into the market, my responsibilities lay around team coaching but also planning, road mapping, and then boiling down to the niggly things of checking in with some of the details within screens. Essentially we have teams made up of designers, whether that’s UI and UX, or sometimes it’s both, developers, and than a product lead which would normally be myself. Sometimes it’s a leaner team without a coach, it really depends on the project at the time.

Amelia: And what exactly is a coach? Because I think that might be new to a lot of our listeners.

Alana: A coach at Ustwo tends to take more of the responsibilities within team coaching. On an individual basis helping each individual meet the goals that they’ve set for themselves over the course of the project, whether that’s inter-personal skills or particular skills that they want to drive and improve. But it’s also down to what methods we might use as a team. So working practice around agile methodologies or lean methodologies. They really help put a framework in place for the team to achieve their end goal of getting a product into the market.

Amelia: They sound extremely useful! My first big question is going way back. You studied product design at Bournemouth University and I notice that you focussed on designing physical products at the beginning of your career. How and why did you transition to interaction design, and why did you decide to specialise in UX design?

Alana: Good question! I always knew I wanted to be a designer, so very early on, I was inspired by lots of influential furniture designers like James Dyson, and as a teenager when I was planing my GCSES and A Levels and going to university, I didn’t really know about interaction design. On my course we learnt how to think through problems - so how to immerse yourself very quickly into a problem you don’t know about, and all the different steps that you go through. Exploring what a problem is, and understanding how someone is going to use that end product. The underlying principles of product design and interaction design are actually very aligned. It was in my gap year when I was doing a placement in Singapore for a local company called Osim that I met someone who’d studied at Carnegie Mellon and she really inspired me to go down that track of specialising in interaction design. At the time I was working on products like massage chairs or fitness equipment which had computers inside of them, so I was really interested in the psychology behind how somebody interacted with a particular product, and all the steps they thought through were along that experience. After that I decided to specialise in interaction design. There’s so much you can do in interaction design, and so quickly, that it’s really rewarding as a designer. You can play quite easily.

Amelia: Was Ustwo your first interaction design role, or did you work somewhere else between your degree and working at Ustwo?

Alana: I went back to work for a short period of time, again in Singapore. I worked for Samsung and part of their global internship where we worked on a camera. Then I worked for Orange in London and Tokyo in their research and development department. I was working on future concepts, all kinds of things - whether it was TV, augmented reality, or mobile apps. That was a really cool job to go into. Then I decided that I wanted to go into a studio, so that I could work for different clients and that’s when I joined Ustwo, and I’ve been there for about four years.

Amelia: Before we started this podcast we talked a little bit about how in the technology industry it feels like there’s a little bit of a backlash against studios and agencies and lots of people are becoming freelance. I was curious to hear your thoughts about what it’s like to be in a studio and how thats beneficial to you as a designer, and how they can support you.

Alana: It’s a really good question, Ustwo has a great culture within the company, and we’ve tended to not hire that many freelancers. Generally people join the company as permanent staff, and we have a really low rate of people leaving. If you join, you stay. The benefits are that you get to experience an awesome culture, you get to work on projects which people are passionate about. So lots of people have a say on the projects that we’re working on. And also, you can work on projects and products in different industries. So you can go from one day working in a pitch for a discovery channel, to the next day diving into some detail on a banking application, looking into a booking system, or doing some competitor review for that. There’s so much variety of work that you can get stuck into, and you can learn from different industries and apply those insights elsewhere. The opportunity to be creative with the concepts that you’re generating is quite vast. It’s an exciting place to be. There’s a fast pace at which you work, but at the end of the day, most people have left by 6 o’clock. You get a healthy work-life balance. Within Ustwo I was also part of a team that helped to kick off a mentoring platform so everyone within the company now has a mentor who helps them on their action plan. You have a career progression and you can help to fulfil your potential in terms of exploring different things that you want to try out and using your strengths to your advantage. So there are many benefits to staying put somewhere, versus being freelance. I’ve never been freelance so I don’t know too much about the benefits other than that it pays quite well and that you have a lot of flexibility with your holidays!

Amelia: So the variety of the work that you’re focusing on, really that sounds like the core benefit that comes from working in a studio or an agency, over say working in-house in a startup or at Samsung for example, which is where you were working before.

Alana: I guess you can still have that variety as a freelancer, but within a studio you’re all working towards a same vision or bigger greater goal. So you do have that sense of a community. Whereas if you’re freelancing you’re bit more out there on your own. Obviously you can choose the people you work with but at the same time you’re probably still working to someone else’s greater vision each time.

Amelia: I have an interesting question, one that I’m personally curious to hear your answer for. Say you met someone who was completely new to the tech industry and they didn’t really understand the difference between product design, interface design and UX design. How would you explain the purpose of each role to them, and what they’re all expected to bring to the table?

Alana: So product design - there’s a lot of people using this term now for digital product design, so, initially I would clarify - do you mean physical product design or digital prodict design? They’re very different obviously, one has physical components so you need to know about materials and how things are manufactured, and the other you need to know about limitations of certain platforms and also the strengths and opportunities of each platform. Interface design, and interaction design, and interactive design are all a bit different. If someone were to tell me they were an interface designer or a UI designer, I’d imagine that they’d probably have quite good skills around creative direction, a good visual sense, they’d know about colour palettes and typography. They’d have a good eye for detail. They’d probably be very familiar also with creating a brand from scratch and knowing how different components size on different screen sizes. An interaction designer will know the patterns of each platform - how do you use things from a behaviour point of view? They might also know about sensors for more physical interactions, that kind of thing. They’re probably really good at user research and spearheading that. An interactive designer is probably someone who’s familiar with digital tools and applying their design to that, but probably more in the advertising space. It’s maybe less utility and applications, and more promotional and advertising. Maybe shorter lived but still creative work. UX design can be all encompassing and is an interesting one because you can also think of it as service design. For example, Barclays Pingit is a good one. The bank has it’s branches and call centers, they then also have their application. They have multiple touch points, and how a user navigates those touch points from start to finish is almost like a car journey - where do they go next? The UX designer will be able to map that out, but also help to navigate that area, so they’ll be able to create a blue print for their customer. Typically a UX designer will also have a business hat, so they’ll understand business analytics. They’ll also have a psychology hat, where they’ll get involved in user research. It’s more encompassing, and you get some designers who do all of that.

Amelia: That was going to be my next question - how much do those different roles overlap? If there was someone who was going to be a UX designer, what do they really need to study and focus on early in their career to be able to progress within that career development line?

Alana: Studying at university is fantastic - there are some great courses out there. But you might also not choose the educational route. You might be working already in a profession and choose to top up your knowledge part time. There are lots of courses out there now, so there are lots of venues to learn about this stuff. I started trying to get as many different books as possible to read up on all the different tools and methods. There are also some designers who are into prototyping on the Front End and creating the visual assets that you’ll use in a digital screen. So you might go down that route and start to learn a bit more about coding and branding and that kind of thing. I definitely think that pursuing your passion, taking a topic and looking into it in more detail, and understanding who’s at the forefront of either UX design or UI design and seeing what they’re creating is a great way to start learning from what’s out there in the industry already. There’s a bunch of tools and lots of things for free online. Ideo publish a lot of toolkits online that you can download and use. ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries is quoted a lot in our studio. These lean ways of working like Roman Pichler - there are lots of business tools too. So if you want to have a more holistic view of how to create a startup and how to create a business as well, there are lots of toolkits out there already about lean canvases, and we use those a lot in our studio.

Amelia: We noticed that when people were buying tickets for Beyond, a lot of people were saying that they were a designer, a UX designer, or specifically a graphic designer and we were quite interested in that. So we looked into the statistics and found that around 30% of people who are coming to Beyond so far identify as a designer. Alana is that something that you’ve identified as a trend within the industry and how do you feel about it as someone who’s been in the industry a little bit longer?

Alana: We went through a stage within our company where we had a very luxurious set of specialists, so people who would really focus on the UX and UI design, and then on the other side there’d be the developers. But more and more we’re seeing, and with our new hires as well, that there’s this kind of hybrid. More and more people have multiple skills and are learning different types of software and different types of prototyping tools. Whether it’s a UI designer who has a classic graphic design background but is getting more involved in motion using After Effects and other tools, or if it’s a UX designer who’s picking up some coding to use a particular prototyping tool. It’s definitely a more generalist approach to design that we’re seeing. It’s all for the main reason of trying to reach an end goal of creating a wonderful experience, and a wonderful product. You can do that through multiple ways, and people are just expanding their skill set to accommodate that.

Amelia: As a senior designer and someone who’s now the studio lead, you’ve been responsible for hiring a lot of designers through your career. I was wondering if you could let our listeners know what it is that makes them stand out and what it is that you’re looking for when they’re applying for a role with you?

Alana: We get inundated with people contacting us trying to get into the industry and I’ve sat through lots of interviews and met some great people. The people who stand out to me the most are the people that are not only passionate about what they do, but are themselves. When you’re going for your first interview it can be quite nerve racking, but if you talk passionately about the work that you’ve done it just resonates and shines through, so you don’t need to worry too much about yourself as a person and how you’re being perceived. It’s really like the quality of someone’s thinking in terms of how they’ve applied themselves to a project or a problem they’ve wanted to solve. Also it’s always really interesting when people have multiple different interests and hobbies. The more you get involved in different experiences, so if you travel, or have lots of different interests, the more you open yourself up to new ideas.

We quite often don’t want to see finished work - we’re normally interested in how you got to the finished work. What was the process you worked through? What was the design thinking, or the challenges you came across when you were trying to find the solution? So sketchbooks, photographs, or any of your initial ideas. Also prototypes. You don’t have to have a finished prototype, although there are many different tools out there now that allow you to do that, like the Marvel app. If in your project you’ve managed to create a prototype and you’ve managed to get it in front of you target audience and test and get some insights then that’s probably what I’m going to be the most interested in when you show my your portfolio. My advice is to document everything whenever you’re working on something. Don’t throw things away - keep a digital record of your process.

Amelia: We’re big fans of the Marvel app as well, we actually use it on our courses and Marvel are based in the same building as us and they’re a brilliant team. If you haven’t already used Marvel app we strongly recommend that you try it out! Onto a similar question. If you’re a junior designer or a mid weight designer and you’re looking to get ahead or to get your next pay rise, what is it that you can do when you’re working on a project to make yourself really stand out within the team and get ahead?

Alana: I’m currently mentoring 4 people within the organisation. We started that process by creating an action plan. It involved multiple steps, but essentially trying to figure out what it is you want to achieve, and setting out a series of goals to achieve that. It might be something really small or it might be something bigger. It might be about improving your inter-personal skills at work, it can really vary. We have regular check-ins to see how that’s going, and often you might change or Steer the direction you’re heading in based on the latest experience you’ve had in your project. My advice to the people I mentor is always to keep a track of everything you’ve achieved. We’re often hard on ourselves and if we’re ambitious we think that we’re not achieving enough, but you’ve probably achieved more than you realise. Keep track of every win that you’ve had, as well as the mistakes, as that’s where you’ll learn the most. When you get to having a review with whoever it is who decides the promotion or your salary, it’ll give you a business case of what you’ve brought to the team, the wider organisation, or to the client. If you can sell yourself and show the value that you’ve added, you’d hope that you’re in a fair system where you’re awarded appropriately.

Amelia: So say you have a client, and you’ve presented a design to them that they like, and you love, but they want to change a few things and you’re not really sure that they’re making the right decisions on those changes. How do you handle that situation as a designer, and how do you make sure that everyone who leaves the room is doing so in a good frame of mind, happy, and all on the same page?

Alana: We quite often come into this situation. It might be that someone, somewhere, in a big organisation has said that they prefer this colour, or that they want this to change. It’s important that the core team that’s working on the project has a rationale for the decisions they make with the design or the experience. Quite often you can tie that back to a business goal or to the user. Often we’ll start off a project with user research and who we’re designing for, and we’ll create personas and use those in conversations day to day. Any time we’re talking about a product, we talk about how this persona might use it. When the conversation changes to ‘oh I want to change this’, we question whether the persona would want that. Sometimes it’s a case of not discounting and idea, because it might be that someone’s intuition is right, and the reason they think they solution is something else is because something’s not quite right. It’s important to keep questioning why to get to the root cause of why a change needs to be made, and then you can justify whether it’s inline with the bigger project objectives.

Amelia: That’s really interesting and something that we’ve been looking at for our courses internally. We finally got round 3 years in to developing core personas for the people who come on our courses. We always had an idea of who those people were but we’d never really written it down and discussed it. We were quite excited to go through that process ourselves, and if you’re working in a project I’d strongly recommend that you give that a try. It really does bring the whole team together on making decisions and why you’re making those decisions.

Moving on to mood notes which is an exciting application for which Alana was product lead. It’s an incredible application which helps people track and improve their mental health. What were the biggest challenges that you came across when you were working on the project? And before you answer that, could you tell us a little bit about what Moodnotes is why it’s useful for people?

Alana: Moodnotes is a product that we launched a couple of months ago. We did it in collaboration with Thriveport, two clinical psychologists based in LA. The reason we got involved in creating this product was because half of our studio in a survey said that they wanted to work on health projects, and it was in line with one of our bigger visions, where we wanted to have an impact on people’s every day lives. We started looking into resilience and how you can measure and improve your mental resilience, and then we got more and more into the research and discovered that there were some pretty big stats in terms of the growing epidemic of depression and anxiety and these kinds of mental disorders. We felt very passionate about creating a product that could be accessible and affordable for people to access content that would be of use to them, and could help with behaviour change. We started with a conversation around mental health, having looked into emotional health. The end proposition that we got to with Moodnotes was that it’s a diary application, where you can track your feelings and improve your thinking habits. It’s part of a suite of products that Thriveport offers. We thought it was really important to partner very early on with clinical psychologists, because we were seeing a lot of applications coming into the market which perhaps were claiming to improve your thinking habits, but had no credible evidence, or hadn’t worked with anyone who had that expertise, so we really wanted to fuse a scientific approach with great user design experience. It’s been a fascinating journey getting that product out. It started off with a team of passionate people internally, creating a product proposition and testing that with people, and we quickly set up a joint venture with these partners in LA, who we still haven’t met in person. We just worked with tools like Basecamp, Slack, Skype and Google Hangouts, to, in a very short amount of time, create this product. In a month we had a beta trial, so we tested it with people, and we made some changes over the course of a week and a half. It was great to see the response, not only from marketeers, but there were some great articles about how it had changed peoples lives, and also from our fans. Today even I’ve just had 3 people tell me that they love the product, or that they know someone in their family who’s using the product. What’s really interesting is that an emotional health app has become a conversation starter. It’s removing that stigma of talking about your emotions. Mental health is a loaded word and people have a lot of associations with that word, but when you talk about your emotional health and how it can affect how you think or behave, then people let their guard down a bit more and are more willing to talk about it. It’s really great to see so many apps out there doing something similar, like Headspace, and the Mediation app. Recently we launched Pause from our Malmo studio, another one that’s taken off and people are using that too. It’s really great that in a short amount of time we could create something that’s having an impact on people’s every day lives.

Amelia: You said that you developed it in 8 weeks. Is that usual of an Ustwo product, or was it a crazy whirlwind?

Alana: We do like to practise what we preach and quite often we want to get something live out there. Even within those 8 weeks we were constantly creating things and getting them in front of people to get their point of view. Like sending out surveys to get more of a contextual understanding of what issues people face when they’re going through anxiety issues. Even in that very short amount of time it was a very user centered design process. But the beta trial was a great way to down tools as a team and see how the project was going over time and see the response that we got. It really helped to prioritise the backlog before launch and nail down some key branding decisions. We definitely are very quick to get something into the market. The worry is that if you perfect something too much, you can’t get it out and start learning from actual behaviour. We’re definitely believers of getting something out there quickly and then perfecting it, rather than creating something and taking longer to get it out. The longer you wait, the more risk you’re putting on that product, because you might have made too many assumptions. It’s better to get it out there, learn from people’s behaviour, and adjust it.

Amelia: And when you put a product like Moodnotes out there into the market, what is it that you’re tracking? What are the metrics that you’re looking for?

Alana: In the very early stages we’re very interested in retention, to see if people come back into the application and how often they come back in. It’s important to know that on Moodnotes we don’t track any of the content that people put into the application, purely because we want to respect people’s privacy. The metrics that we do track is of the overall crowd, so if you downloaded it today I wouldn’t know how many times in the next week you opened it, or which parts of the app you accessed. There’s some really good tools out there for analytics. We use Google analytics. It’s great because it gives you so much information. It can tell you the percentage of your customer base, which device they’re using, and which iOS they’re using. So it really helps you to prioritise what’s going to have the biggest impact on more of your customer base. One of the goals we had with this application was, could it actually help to improve someone’s mood over time? We thought that the negative flow that you can go down by logging your negative feelings might become redundant and people might start to go down the positive flow more. To give you an idea, when you use Moodnotes you input your mood, and depending on whether your mood is up or down, you then start to articulate some of the feelings that you associate with that mood. There’s some fascinating neuroscience behind this, because just articulating those feelings can actually reduce the negative feelings that you’re having. We then start to ask questions within the app, so it’s a very conversational app, a little bit like choose your own adventure. You can choose whether to continue or whether to just leave it like that. Over time, it asks you to note any insights you’ve discovered about yourself. It’s really about reflecting on yourself, and giving yourself time to learn more about yourself. Over time, the idea is that you should improve your awareness of your own emotions, but it also gives you a chance to reflect on how you might think differently about things. The cognitive behaviour therapy, which is behind the science that we’ve used, is really good for identifying thinking traps and find how you might start to think about things differently. In essence, it’s a journaling app, and we were very keen to make it something tangible that people could associate as a social norm. We discovered that a huge percentage of people who do experience severe mental health disorders don’t seek medical diagnosis through conventional channels. We thought it was a fantastic opportunity to use the app store and get this content out to people, so they could use it without having to go to the NHS. At the same time, we’d never say that this is to replace medical treatment - it can be used in conjunction with that. But it might be that someone is experience a negative mood that isn’t that drastic, and can still reap the benefits from that type of content.

Amelia: You mentioned pause, another application that you’ve developed at Ustwo. We talked a bit before this podcast about how Pause is less expensive than Moodnotes, and how price affects the popularity of an application. I was wondering if you could share any insights from your experience at Ustwo with the products you’ve released about how price affects an application, number of downloads and popularity.

Alana: There are lot of apps on the app store that are free, but often to finance the making of the application, they might include advertising or that kind of thing. We specifically Steer away from using advertising to finance our application. Creating an application is actually quite expensive when you have a product team working in London. If it’s an application that’s being made in somebody’s spare time as a hobby you can make it really cheaply, but in a day to day working environment in London, you have a lot of overhead. We wanted to price the application so that it could sustain itself, so essentially we wanted to make sure that we could still maintain the application. That’s why we’ve priced Moodnotes at that particular price. We’ve just launched Pause and it’s slightly cheaper, so we’re going to compare notes with our Swedish studio and see how many downloads they get in the first week, and compare it to how many downloads Moodnotes got. We’ve had very similar amounts of press, so it could be a very good case study. With these types of apps, some people use other models. For example they might have in app purchases. But for that type of model you normally need to have more content or be creating more tools within the application, and at the moment we wanted something that was very clear cut so that once you download it, you have what you need. It might be something that we change in the future, but we’ll always look to see what the customers want and build out from there.

Amelia: Well hopefully we’ll see a blog post from Ustwo in the near future telling us about the results of Pause vs Moodnotes and the pricing on that. Could you just share with our listeners what the pricing is for those two apps, because I don’t think we mentioned it.

Alana: £2.99 for Moodnotes in the UK, and I think it’s £1.99 for Pause, though I need to double check that! That obviously changes depending on what country you’re in.

Amelia: Thank you, those are all the questions I had for you. Could you just share with our listeners where they can find you on social media, or where they can find you on Ustwo?

Alana: ustwo.com is a great site if you want to check out any of our blog posts. You can also find me on twitter @missalanawood. And I’ll be speaking at the Beyond Conference, so hopefully might see some friendly faces there!

Amelia: Amazing, thank you so much, and we’ll have all of those links again in the show notes. Thank you Alana so much for your time today, and for sharing those incredible insights with the audience. We’ll see you at Beyond!