Transcript of Interview With Sindhuja Narasimhan

Interview With Sindhuja Narasimhan

This interview features Sindhuja Narasimhan, founder of Abracadabra Books. You can watch it on Sindhuja’s profile page.

Transcript

– Hello again. I’m Joe Welinske, conference director for Convey UX, and that’s Blink’s annual conference coming up the last week of February in Seattle and also online. And this is another episode in my series where I get a chance to talk to the many speakers that will be participating at Convey UX Today. I am pleased to be speaking with Sindhuja Narasimhan. Hello Sindu. How are you today?

– Hi Joe. Doing well. How are you?

– Oh, everything’s going well. It’s actually looks like a fine day in my home office north of Seattle where Blink has its headquarters office. Where are you talking to us from today?

– Well, I’m talking to you from the very nice suburbs of Issaquah, Washington right here. And it’s definitely a pretty day outside.

– Well, excellent. Well, it’s great to have you involved in the event. And the best place to start is if you could tell us a little bit about you, your background, and the types of things that you’re involved with for work.

– Oh yeah, absolutely. Excited to. So thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to speak and convey ux. I am super excited and I’m looking forward to meeting everybody in person. So just to talk about a little bit about my background and how my interest in design came to be. I started to pursue the UX design career, basically driven by my curiosity about technology and how it affects the lives of people in an everyday basis. So I have two master’s degrees. One is in computer science and the other one is in human-centered design and engineering. It’s basically about like understanding how computers work and then finally making them usable, accessible, and beautiful to users. So some of the highlights of my career include the time that I spent at Amazon. So at Amazon I was able to really like work on very, very new products like in-home and in-car delivery. And when you work on early projects, you learn that a lot of it is about interface design and about like how the interface is presented to users, but you also learn that you are really focusing on the user at that point, right? Like it’s about introducing a brand new experience and seeing how people will take that and what different wrappers you can use to be able to introduce that experience to users in a way that it is not too jarring to them, but also in a sense that they will wanna try it and be curious about it. So those were some very interesting learnings from the in-home and the in-car experience. So we, we built brand new apps, we worked within the existing Amazon app and we tried different modalities and finally figured out what works for our users. And it was a very exciting journey to do that. After that I worked in Amazon ai and Amazon AI again in 2018 was a very, very early stage project. So a lot of interesting learnings there. But, but yeah, I was, these are some of the projects that I worked on in a very early, early stage and an early basis. Currently I work in a startup called a labra store, and the goal here is to actually introduce children to, you know, concepts that they will not be exposed to in school, like stem cultural education and really give the control to children and let them be the founders or, you know, the, the leaders of their own education over giving them a specific set of curriculum and having them follow through that.

– Well, it, it sounds like you’ve been very busy and active and your work with startup sounds very interesting, you know, that the work that you’re doing right now, is there anything Yeah, particularly challenging or an aspect of it that you’re really passionate about?

– Yeah, some of the key things that come in mind when we think about education is that, you know, you see that a lot of times kids are not really interested in some of the things or concepts that they’re introduced to, and that really dilutes the whole concept of education, right? Like, that makes it look like children are not really interested in learning. But the truth is, when you introduce the right set of concepts and when you introduce them to very different concepts very early in their lives, and give them the opportunities to be the leaders of their own journey and to be able to choose topics or ideas that seem appealing to them and power that with technology, you will, you might actually have different outcomes in education. You might have children that are interested in going and picking up that book and reading it and spending hours in being immersed in it. So that’s kind of the whole north star that I’m trying to pursue with my startup. And we’re obviously trying to incorporate AI into it. We want to be able to learn from the children, we want to be able to introduce them to concepts progressively, and those are areas where AI can help us excel right now in the way it stands. But, you know, excited about how it’s going to evolve in the future and make this even better for us.

– Well, AI is one of the major themes of our conference. And and so you’ve mentioned your background there and, and how it ties into your work. Your topic is entitled UX in the AI age. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you came around to that topic and what we could expect to learn from it.

– Oh yeah, absolutely. So most of the things that I want to share in the talk would be about some of the learnings that I had when I worked in Amazon AI very early. So I worked in IT in 2018, which gave me a lot of perspective into this technology when it was a fledgling technology, right? Like we didn’t have the power of GPT force that exists today, and we were actually trying to package and provide an interface for people to interact with when in the background it was not really true AI in any sense. So that really taught me a lot about how to think about AI systems and how to think about presenting that to users. A lot of the things that I want to be talking about in the conference is how UX is going to be impacted with the advent of ai, but also about the future of what AI is going to, how, how the challenges that we’re going to face as UX designers, as AI evolves, and how we are going to have to like, think about new areas that we’ve not really focused on currently, at least when we are in the world of interface design.

– Well, it sounds like that’s gonna be a, a really interesting topic to hear from you. You know, without getting into the details about your presentation, which we’ll get at the conference, do you have a, you know, a thought you might wanna share now about your experience with AI and, and, and what you think it it means in terms of either our, the tech industry or UX or maybe broader society?

– Yeah, of course. I will go into details in it in the conference I promise. But one of the areas that I’m really passionate about that I want designers and design practitioners to be thinking about is the ethics around ai, right? Like, when you think about this, we really want to be thinking about how do we introduce users to a different modality that they’re going to be interacting with in the, in the future, right? Like, and what I mean by that is currently when somebody picks up a call in customer service, users are used to talking to a real human. If they are going to be talking to a machine in the future with AI and agis, should we disclose that and how do we disclose that in ways that are more inviting to users than off putting? Right? Like right now, a lot of, a lot of people will tell you if I know I’m talking to a machine, I don’t really wanna talk with it. Instead, how do we introduce that and how do we introduce these concepts of talking to a machine versus talking to a human? What’s ethical, what is not ethical? There’s so many questions around the sociological aspects of AI that I strongly think that designers and design practitioners should be focusing on and should be pushing the industry forward. And, and this really involves us thinking outside our mainstream interface design and experience design, which we’re used to. So I want to urge as many practitioners to think about this early and often as AI is evolving so that we can hold the line and we can define this experience before it goes into the hands of people that are just focused on building technology and improving it.

– Well, I think that will promote a lot of great discussion around AI when we get to, to the conference. Yeah. Another question I wanted to ask was, you know, if you have a, you know, a tip or a thought for people who are relatively new to the UX profession, we have a lot of people that are very ex experienced, but we also want to bring along the the next generation of UXers. Is there anything that maybe you wish you would’ve known earlier on that you could share with people that are just getting started today?

– Yeah, one of the things that I, one of the badges or labels that I attached on myself when I was starting out early was I’m a junior designer. When I’m a junior designer, that means that I’m just going to be focused on craft, right? Like, I’m just going to be focused on pushing pixels, making sure I’m great at Figma and making sure I understand color theory and concepts of design. Those are great. We still need, and we still want you to be able to do those things. But I also want you to think of yourself as a designer and not really as a junior designer, right? And what happens when you give yourself the label that I’m a designer instead of a junior designer is you start to focus on bigger problems. You start to focus on your users, you start to focus on journeys inside, outside, and possibly on the day in life of your users. And that really promotes leadership thinking of, oh, maybe we could think about this product idea and this way the product could evolve and change instead of how this particular piece of interface or, or UI needs to function. So my tip or like, you know, request from young designers would be to really think about themselves as design leaders already and start acting like it and start to think about things outside craft while also mastering their craft. I know it’s a lot to ask for, but I’m pretty confident that the next generation is going to be bigger and brighter than us. So it’s a good expectation to have.

– Well, thanks for sharing your advice on that. The last question I had to ask you was about books at the conference. We have a conference bookstore that is sponsored by a Seattle local bookshop, adas, and they bring books for sale to the conference as well as having an online bookstore. Is there anything that you’ve read recently that you might want to recommend to the people listening to this video?

– Yeah, I think we got into it a little bit, the context of this a little bit in the earlier part of the interview, right? So I’m focused on building ed tech and educational projects for young children, and that really means that understanding and how kids evolve and how they learn and how they actually develop this sense of entity or identity around themselves has been very important for me. So one of the books that I’ve read in the recent path that’s really helped me understand how children become their own humans is this book called Hold Onto Your Kids by Gabor Mate. And I definitely encourage that to be a good read for people that are curious about how kids grow up and learn, our parents who are trying to deal with toddlers, teenagers, and different stages of kids in their lives.

– Well, thanks for adding that to our recommended list. We’ll see if we can get that into the conference bookstore. And thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with me about your background and AI and, and your topic and, and other things. And I look forward to seeing you in Seattle in, in, in just a few months.

– Yeah, looking forward to it too. Thanks Joe.

– All right. Thanks a lot, Sindu. Bye-Bye bye.