Transcript of Interview With Jacob Miller

Interview With Jacob Miller

This interview features Jacob Miller, principal product manager at Figma. You can watch it on Jacob’s profile page.

Transcript

– Hello, I’m Joe Welinske and I’m the conference director for Convey ux. Our next event is coming up the last week of February. We’re gonna be in Seattle, in person and also online. And one of the fun things I get to do is have a preview conversation with our many speakers. And today I am talking with Jacob Miller. Hello Jake. How are you doing today?

– I’m doing good. Thanks Joe. I really appreciate it. I’m spending the time to do this as well.

– Well, I’m at my home office, which is just north of Seattle where blinks headquarters is located. Where are you talking to us from?

– Also currently in Seattle. Recently moved up here. So still moving into the house but loving it so far, being welcome by all of the gray skies that Seattle has to offer.

– Well it’s great to have you as part of the program. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and the nature of your work?

– Yeah, I mean I’ve been now in the tech space for about 20 years and through that time I’ve switched jobs quite a bit. So I started out as a freelance designer. I was given like a copy of Photoshop when I was like nine. Started on that, loved it. And then really started in freelance design when around like 16. I had been doing that for a little while before I entered into college. And when I wanted to study in college, I wanted to shift things around a little bit and studied something that I really didn’t know. So I shifted gears and actually studied computer science, was a developer for a few years following that. And then at that point I actually switched into prototyping ’cause it was a really good hybrid of both design as well as code. And it really allowed me to express a lot of these ideas that I had as well. I was a prototyper for quite a while, but one of the things that I started noticing was that a lot of designers were having problems expressing themselves with prototyping. And so I actually started building out a bunch of tools for prototyping for these designers and that was really my foray into design tooling. After a while I became a design tooling manager and then eventually just a standard design manager. And then from there I was overlooking the design system for Atlassian and that’s what really gave me my expertise on the design system side. And so that combined with the design tooling experience is what really led me into joining Figma where I transitioned roles again into more of a pm. And so I’m looking overlooking all the design systems features over here at Figma.

– Well Figma is definitely a product that has become an important part of the user experience profession. So you know, it, it’s great to have the organization represented through you at the conference. Are there any particular challenges that you’re encountering now, maybe individually in your work or or your organization or maybe even more broadly the tech industry?

– Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s really just the speed of the industry more than anything else. That combined with design systems is still a relatively young discipline. And when you have a industry that moves in a crazy velocity, but then you also have something that is relatively new from a technology standpoint, you’re end gonna end up with just tremendous speed, tremendous speed, both from the tooling that’s out there as well as the best practices that customers expect for how they’re actually approaching this. And so one of the things that we usually have trouble with internally is how do we build not just for what customers want now, but really what they want far off in the future as well. So creating something that can support whatever that future vision may be. And that’s definitely one of the difficulties that we face in our day-to-day. Well,

– The topic that you’re gonna be presenting, he has the title Future of Design, how Figma Designs for a Constantly Evolving Design World. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what we can expect from your presentation?

– Yeah, absolutely. I mean that really touches upon what I was just talking about, which is how do we build for that next step? And one of the things that we really focus on internally here is this concept of atomic design. So don’t build the direct solution to a user’s problem, but rather build the building blocks so they can build that solution. Because if you really build something that’s addressing their problems at that point in time, then you’re gonna have an amazing user experience for just that point in time. But once you move beyond that and the best practices in the industry change, that’s gonna be a restriction rather than a boon for these users. If we instead provide those building blocks where they can create their own solutions, then at that point they can shift whatever it is that they’re doing and the way that they address things because they have a more flexible system that supports the way that they want to work. Now that comes at the cost of adhering complexity within this system itself. For example, take code, code is, code is a great example of this where the authoring experience is quite complex ’cause the amount of things that code allows you to do, but it also provides the flexibility to do literally anything you want to do. And so for us it’s really balancing that well, what amount of flexibility can we provide while still keeping the user experience simple? And for us really one, the main thing that we wanna focus on is keeping that consumption experience simple while still providing flexibility for these design system authors. And that’s really what I’ll be diving into in this talk.

– Well just to, you know, move aside slightly from your, your topic, I just wanted to ask you just some, some of your thoughts about artificial intelligence. AI is gonna be a big theme of the conference. I know it’s not directly part of what you’re talking about, but I know Figma is, you know, working with that technology. So there any things that you could mention about what, what we can be thinking about for our own workflows?

– Yeah, absolutely. And you know, ai, it’s gonna be one of the craziest revolutions that we have inside of technology. We’re super excited about it. I’m super excited about it personally. And one of the things that I’m really excited about, particularly in the realms of design systems as a whole, is we often see that design systems is a set of patterns. AI is amazing at patterns. It’s able to recognize those, study those and reinterpret those in consistent ways, especially when it can learn from examples. And so one of the things that I’m particularly excited for personally is once we have all these patterns set up within design systems, AI is gonna be set up to execute extremely successfully by leveraging those patterns. And so that part is really cool both from the authoring of a design system because I think there’s a lot of things that are consistent between design systems today. Everybody has a button, everybody has a dropdown component, everybody has a card component. These are things that all these design systems share. And if we have these things broken down into the commonalities and we’re gonna detect the patterns between them, it becomes really easy to cover and automatically do some of the pieces that we all have to do manually right now. Likewise, another example of that is design tokens. So design tokens often follow a shared schema and that schema shares a lot of similarities between other token implementations as well. And so I think what we’re gonna see with this is there’s likely going to be a convergence of some of these best practices and once we have a little bit of that convergence, AI is gonna be able to drastically accelerate how we implement design systems today. And I think that convergence and that implementation speed increase is just gonna be a huge, huge, huge improvement for how we do things today. Not only from a standpoint of the authoring speed and experience, but also the ability to have interop between design systems. So once one design system does something, you can take that and then reimagine it in the pattern of another design system. And so I think that part is something I’m really excited for, for ai. I think it’s gonna help tremendously on the authoring side, on the consumption side, and it’s gonna change those best practices again. So again, we have to build towards that future state rather than what the best practices are today.

– Well I appreciate your, your thoughts on that there, there was a lot in there that I hadn’t considered before. And so you, it gives me something to, to ponder and, and probably other people listening to this as well, we, we have a wide spectrum of people who attend the event. Lots of senior practitioners, very experienced people, but we also have people attending that are relatively new to the profession and just getting started, do you have a, a tip or an idea for some people that may just be getting going? Something that maybe you would’ve liked to know earlier in your career that you wanna pass on now?

– Yeah, I think for me it really took me to get to the point in design where I felt confident in my designs when I started just making things on my own and likewise on the coding side as well. You know, I had done all these projects in school but I didn’t understand those projects until I started building things out on my own and running into my own roadblocks and having to find ways around those. So the encouragement that I would give to people that are just starting out is you may still be in school, you may be someone that’s not in this discipline at all. The way to get into it and the way to build that understanding is just to make things and it’s never been easier than it is today to make so many things that are out there. Especially with, you know, things like GitHub copilot, if you’re doing code or the amount of tools that are out there, whether it’s Figma or other ones that allow you to express yourself and create these systems or even just designs, I would really encourage you to just go make things that is the best teacher by far. Well

– Thanks for sharing your, your thoughts with us about that as well as on AI and giving us a preview of your presentation. So thanks for taking the time to do this and I look forward to seeing it you at the conference in a few months.

– Thanks Joe, really appreciate it.

– All right, thanks a lot. Bye-Bye.