Why Great Design Still Matters When Robots Shop For Us with Nick Cawthon

Booking a movie ticket used to mean opening a browser, clicking through tabs, and hoping checkout didn’t break. Now a voice agent can do it while you grab your coat. We explore what that shift means for design, marketing, and growth: when customers are people and robots, how do we build flows that serve both without losing our human edge?

Nick Cawthon joins to map the journey from drafting tables to 640x480 “new media,” then to today’s LLM-driven search and autonomous browsers. We unpack why on-page SEO still matters, how standardized patterns help agents transact, and where many brands still fail at the basics—clarity, speed, and trust at the moment of decision. Nick argues that authentic language is the new moat: transcripts, stories, and thoughtful explanations that search can cite and people can believe. Shortcuts produce lookalike sites; research and insight produce signal that converts.

We dive into adoption reality: enterprise copilots without context, tasks that actually benefit from AI, and the importance of setting psychological safety so teams can experiment in the open. The role of “translator” emerges as critical—leaders who turn strategy into prompts engineers can ship. With PMs, designers, and developers now creating in the same prompt-driven tools, coordination becomes the craft. Nick shares a direct-to-prototype approach using production stacks to validate faster, plus a free assessment for UX and product teams at retrain.gauge.io to benchmark readiness and close gaps.

Along the way, a global study on skate culture shows why human research still beats the sea of sameness: details like scuffed shoes and counterculture norms shape real buying behavior. We close with a simple playbook for the fourth wave—after web, mobile, and cloud—where generative AI rewards specificity, consistency, and humane design. If you care about customer experience, growth, or building teams that learn fast, this one will sharpen your roadmap. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review with your biggest AI adoption win or challenge.

https://gauge.io/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

Transcript

Setting The Stakes: Design Meets AI

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Mediascape, Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

What we're going to talk about today with Nick Cothen is something that everybody needs to be paying attention to. And that is how do we make sure that we are doing everything we can to have the right design elements to reach the right people at the right time for our organizations. Nick, I'm so thrilled to have you on to talk about all of these topics, AI, and also shout out to you being a professor. So love that.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Hey, Annika, thanks for having me on. Good to talk to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about you, your background, and how you got into your organization today.

Nick’s Origin Story And Early Web

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Yeah. My background is I'll give you the origin story. You know, I was fortunate enough to have parents who nurtured things like visual arts and you know arts education from an early age, and uh, you know, found myself in summer camps somewhere along the way doing drawing exercises. And I remember one aftercare program where the Den mother, I say that because I think it was Boy Scouts, uh, sat eight of us down at a table, probably just to keep us quiet for 20 minutes, gave us a bunch of pens and paper and told us to keep quiet and draw for a little bit. And I remember the the deep dive that I took really kind of intensely wanting to produce something in the time that I had, and pulling my head back up out of that exercise and feeling like, wow, this is you know, came out like I wanted it. Uh, had a had a really good sense of a flow state, you know, that concept of really the way that time can shift when you embed yourself into a hyper-focused task, uh, for those of us that might be a little scatterbrained. And that sense of accomplishment and feeling was something that I I really tapped into and I still remember it 40 years later. That notion of, wow, this isn't bad. And if I had to do this for 20 minutes or two weeks during summer, like that's something I I wouldn't mind spending more time doing is exploring how to express yourself visually. And the mediums changed from pencil to you know what turned out to be uh a keyboard and and a display. There were times where it was drafting paper and vellum and and you know using drafting and architectural supplies before computer-aided design took over. And it always was so how do I get myself to express in the best manner possible visually? And uh, like I referred to earlier, that medium is changing quite a bit. Going to university at the University of Oregon, uh, coming back to the Bay Area in 2000 with a degree in graphic design in applied arts, and having been fortunate enough to have had my fingers on keyboards, given that Silicon Valley is in our backyard, and Apple Computer was a very formative in the mid-80s to school children who were understanding what these computers did for the first time. And then returning back from school and in what this this upswing of a new economy with the Yahoos and the Excite at Homes and the later-on Googles were all sort of burgeoning as new companies, as a new form of media. And so I just appropriated those design skills into now interaction and software and screens. And now I feel like there's a similar wave of transformation happening with these new wave of companies replacing the old guard, and the medium is changing. It's maybe not as graphical or as browser-based now. It's a lot of text and structure, and that is something that I'm I'm excited about. And I would love to talk with you more about any of those things along the way.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Yeah. Yeah, we we have a little overlap in terms of I lived in San Francisco from about 1999 to 2004, but I was working at uh Future US on the magazine side. So I was just looking through to see if you ever worked there on any of our magazines, our computer or video game magazines. But the answer is no, sadly. Um but we made it as when I was getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts, there was a decision.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

Are you graphic design for graphic design or are you graphic design for this quote new media? And that new media was delivered on CD ROMs and discs. It wasn't quite accessible over the uh the phone lines because uh again, DSL wasn't yet around. And I took the latter path of graphic design for new media, and it took all the skills of hierarchy and typography and photography and balance and composition, and now applied it to these 640 by 480 pixel screens. And so that was uh, you know, again, as as design extends itself, those were some very clear paths 25 years ago of which one could take.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Well, there's a lot of discussion these days on SEO, LLM search, generative search. And the fact that what you have, your on-page SEO is still really important. But you can get people there by using those techniques, but then you have to have great design and make it really easy for customers or potential customers or clients to find out how to make a purchasing decision and get the information they want. And when I do these kind of exercises for myself or for my students or my own websites, it's shocking to me that the number of big brands that we all know that still make it really difficult to make a purchase. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about what you're seeing in the market and you know.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Where that goes. Yeah, I I wonder are we designing for humans anymore? On the fringes are these agents that are performing these transactions where you and I can speak to a bot and say, book me some Ubi tickets for Friday night at 7:30. And there used to be a time in which we would type that into our desktop screen and bring it up and click and do it. And then there was a time maybe around 2010 in which that was all on a mobile device, and it became easier and easier to do it when the thought crossed your mind. And now I don't think you're gonna be turning on uh a device anymore. You're gonna speak into a voice assistant and the agent is gonna go and transact that for you, or those things that are really pretty straightforward. A movie at a certain time, at a certain location. And as you mentioned, SEO or optimizing for LLMs, I think the same is true with agents. These are the things that are on the fringes right now. They're not commonplace, but they are occurring, and there are companies that are more and more adopting. And we saw those Google sort of robotic, let me do a human-like voice to try to make a restaurant reservation for you. And that's awkward, and you know, the the reaction to that can be very triggering. But uh we're also seeing these autonomous browsers that know what the buy now button looks like and that know how to fill out a form. And I think that this standardization and the use of design pattern libraries uh has really sort of made that all a very systematic way of accomplishing tasks. So my advice to anybody's listening that has some of those transaction-based businesses to look at what it means to make it, quote, easy to use, not only for humans, but also for some of the agents and algorithms that will begin to be more and more a portion of your user base. Uh, again, don't even know who I'm designing for anymore. Is it the humans or is it the robots?

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Yeah. And I would argue that those of us who live in the more tech AI world, we're talking this language. I'm so excited to have agents running all of the appointments that I keep forgetting to make, right? The the real life stuff, the dentist appointment for my daughter, or whatever, or scheduling the oil change or whatever the case may be. And then getting to the point of, you know what kind of clothes I like to buy, you know, my sizes, go ahead and I need a shirt in this color, this style, show me a couple options, purchase for me. I'm really excited about that time, but but the reality is there are still I most of my friends and family are not using AI yet. And so this, you know, this is important for us to think about as entrepreneurs, as people who work in business, as people are teaching the next generation of digital media marketers, advertisers, designers. How long do you think it's going to be for us to be able to make that change to getting everybody else comfortable enough with AI that this is a reality?

SEO, LLMs, And Frictionless Purchase

SPEAKER_02 8:54

We're coming up on Thanksgiving. I'm not sure when this podcast is going to be released, but uh it is in the fall right now, and and it is sweater weather uh and pumpkin latte season here in the B area. And we can look ahead to Thanksgiving when we're with our relatives of this use of quote AI, which has been around for a long time. It's been around for you know 10 years, like the chat assistance helping you navigate support documentation on a company's website. Yeah, that's that that's all sort of models and language models that we just had in our our ubiquity for for some time, but now we've branded it into this scary term of of AI. And I I am interested to see what people do with it, where I have friends who use it for cocktail recipes or use it for a friend or an assistant, like really uh has a much deeper emotional back and forth sort of fluent conversation with a voice assistant, giving its fears and hopes and aspirations to it. And then there for from my standpoint, it's a productivity tool where I can go further, I can go broader than I ever had before. Now, whether or not the quality is the same as me actually learning in the case of code bases and and sort of developmental tools, that is all going to be proven right or wrong fairly quickly. But I think that what I would want to sort of refer to, especially as we've mentioned education, is the curiosity to see what it can and cannot do, is to go behind some of the hype cycles and some of the fear cycles and the triggering aspects of it and see what it can do. I I want to also go back to the year 2000 when I had a a teacher, uh Martin Vineski, and he was so big on tactical tools and tactical methods of image making, you know, stamping and ripping and burning and tearing and that sort of tortured aspect of imperfection. And it was it he was a magazine publisher, and he was wonderful to watch at this time in which technology in early 2000s was really starting to, as we mentioned, replace graphic design as we knew it with the typesetting and the letting and the kerning and all those things, and now it's all just fingers on keyboards. And what Professor Vineski made you realize is that you can still do these methods of tactical image making and then begin to see how can I scale this? How can I scan and publish and and do the things that that computers are good at, but still not lose touch with the craft and the sort of self-examination that comes with forming a product or an image or a brand or design in general.

unknown 11:40

You see.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Yeah. So one of the things that we're also seeing, and and I appreciate with this will come out before Thanksgiving. So I appreciate your nod to 2025. Oh, whether they're 2025, yes. And those are conversations I'm sure we'll be having. And one thing that I have uh, because I'm not a designer, right? I'm I work with designers, but one thing that I have heard also is that the move is going to be towards not having websites, towards just having apps. And then I think that might be the first transition for most people, and then the transition to agents just doing it all for us. So what are you seeing in your world working with, you know, and as a designer, working with engineers, ethnographers, data scientists, to make sure that all of the design is there? You know, are you seeing the shift away from websites into apps? Or is it still kind of early days?

Designing For Humans Or Agents

SPEAKER_02 12:41

It's I mean, apps, websites are so I mean, there was a time in which you got paid a good salary to build websites for people, brochures, online brochure called brochureware, where you know how they look. And now you can do that in 30 seconds through a prompt and an application that gets built for you to assimilate what a uh charcuterie company in San Francisco might want to display. Really, that that is the um electric bicycle feeling of generative tools, where like, wow, I it would have taken me weeks to get to this point, and now it's it's there. And so I think that's always going to be there, you know, the branding, the name recognition, the domain. But it's those other tasks of a customer experience where you need to integrate now reservation systems and CRMs and you know, payroll and all the finances. That's all that wiring that goes behind these companies that again, AI has been so good at figuring out. I mean, there has been SaaS companies, think tech Calendly, or in my case, rough form processing that generates PDFs and does analysis. And that's now all able to be understood, deployed, and hosted on your own. So those low-level SaaS apps that were used to be very good at doing one thing, in the case of Calendly, like looking at your calendar, presenting open times, and then booking that. That's that's something that, again, for for those of us who are in a low-code or no code environment, those are things that are not far away from being achievable. And then you think, well, how much did I spend per month on this tool on something like Calendly? Okay, well, it's between 10 and 20 bucks, and now I've got a cost savings of 200,$300 a year. And then you multiply that towards however many of these SAP applications, SAS applications, we're taking 10 bucks a month, we're doing one thing that again, if you just give the integrations to some of these algorithms or some of these um these tools, they can often do those things for you. So going back to your question about the websites and websites versus apps and what that kind of balance is, I think there's always gonna be a need to be reputable, to be online, to be referenceable. That's never gonna go away in terms of our online presence, our online brand. I am of the knowledge that what we used to do was link backs and keyword mining, and we would have very obvious techniques, uh, robots.text, we would have meta tags, we would have all of these methods for which to increase our SEO. And now those metrics are changing. And part of the reason I'm having conversations like this is because I'm trying to feed an algorithm. I'm trying to have referenceable text, which is automatically transcribed. And as you post to however many platforms this podcast is on, it's going to be something that starts to seed. And I think it's much better to do so in the natural language that you and I are speaking than into something that's a little bit more programmatic with how we're trying to find people like us. And so it's also great to be able to talk with people about these things and expand networks and understand the connections that we have with one another. But as a brand leader, I would recommend being very forward about how you're contributing new and interesting and innovative and unique content to this thing that we call the sphere of index. So yeah, that's uh I know that was a long answer to a very distinct question, but that's where I'm I'm heading with with brand and and the web.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah, no, I appreciate that because what I'm hearing, and I think this is what I'm also preaching to people, is that people still want to work ultimately with people they know like and trust, going back to the basics, that they know that what your values are, that they know you're a real human, flawed, you know, very flawed, whatever, all the things fundamentally flawed. Yeah, behind the brand. And so that part, we're still going to need our humanness. We're still gonna need this connection.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

I don't think you know it's it would be boring for me to listen to my agent talk to your agent and try to come up with the same kind of connection and questions because it it would that's what the job application cycle is these days, is that you used AI to create the job description, and I used AI to fill out my resume, and now our algorithms are just talking to one another about am I a match for this job or not. It must be really hard being in HR right now, and it must be very hard trying to find full-time work. A friend of mine made a joke that's kind of resonated with me. In this town in San Francisco, it's easier to come up with a company and receive two million investment, which will pay you as a founder$150,000 a year to see if this idea will come up than to find a full-time job which will also pay you$150,000 a year doing something in AI. It's better just to make something up and get paid to succeed or fail than it is to go and work for somebody else who's already done that process. And so, yeah, I think that the the job market's really scary because our algorithms are talking to one another and there's not that human connection.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Yeah, I haven't really thought about it that way before. But that's and I think one of the other things we're seeing is that we need to upskill workers at a much quicker pace. We need to fill those jobs that we do need. Translators, right? A lot of other jobs that aren't being filled right now because people don't know about them, people don't think they have access to learn how to do them. So there's a whole bunch there. We can, I mean, I think we've we've probably hit on at least five, six tangents that we could go off on right now. But I wanted to ask, because I was just at the AI conference in San Francisco. In August, I went to AI4. AI four's conversation was around singularity, also around education and AI and the integration needed there. But it was really not just singularity, but about people and robots working hand in hand and forming a partnership. So, you know, I that is taking it past the point where we're looking at it now, where we have goals for our organizations, our companies, ourselves. We use these different tools to help us reach those goals, do some research, find out some other information, make our workflows faster, better, easier. But the machine doesn't have the same goal as we do as a human. At AI4, I went to the AI Alliance the night before, and it was a lot of people who are actually who are coders and developers talking about agents and how they're not perfect and getting really granular. So I thought it was really interesting how how different the conversations are. And you live in San Francisco, obviously. You hear all these conversations every day. So from the kind of inside baseball, where do you see that the issue, like what are we working on right now? And what do people who are not in one of those major tech hubs working in it every day need to be thinking about for their organizations?

Adoption Reality: Hype, Use Cases, Limits

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Yeah. I'll go back to the electric bicycle metaphor. Yeah. Is that we've sort of given ourselves this augmented ability to go faster. We can also direct ourselves further away in the wrong direction. Or because now your range has exponentially increased, you can find yourself down a path that you're not quite sure where you're going. And uh, as somebody who used to commute on an electric bicycle, there's also this uh very real scenario of hit brakes where I've gone down this path and now my bicycle doesn't work anymore, and I I don't really know how to fix it. So that curiosity of what is it doing? What is actually happening here? Where where is it making mistakes and how can I identify how to fix it? Because it's easy to be entranced with the speed. It's easy to think that this technology is gonna get us to a better place, but at the cost of a not being able to analyze what the output is, and at the cost of did it take me in the right direction. So those are some things that I always keep in the back of my mind. And uh to not be entranced by the allure of the acronym, to to know that it's good at very specific things in repetition. It's not good at hand waving and making problems going away because it often makes more problems than it does solve. But if there are isolated tasks that we find ourselves repeating over and over and over again, uh that is something that that it can assist with. I heard a quote about this is gonna I'm sorry for for the lack of attribution and and just the the generalization of it, but the adoption at enterprise level is one thing because co-pilots installed in your office suite, and that's great, and you can ask it. I I found mixed luck with with Gemini in the G Suite of trying to fulfill spreadsheets or do tasks of any real depth and importance. But the ability to have an assistant that has context for what it is that's being asked of it on a daily or weekly basis so it can help you at a better rate than it were if if it was starting from scratch. I think that that adoption on the enterprise level isn't there yet. We've turned on this one widget and expect it to solve things when it's no faster than a search engine, but it's it's when we begin to train our own models to have our own context because we can now inform it. Hey, I do this task every day or every week. Can you make this faster for me based upon what you heard last week? I think that's when you start to see improvements. So in in recap, it's being very specific about things that a generative tool might assist with, whether it be analysis or writing or whatever it might be, it's saying, I want it to do just this one thing and to be able to position your yourself or your organization into a subscription package or into some sort of suite of which it can now learn from and remember where it made mistakes last time, so that the next time you're asking to do something, it improves its response, or else you're just going to be bang banging your head against the wall and thinking this isn't working or this isn't good enough. So, yeah, that's my advice for for those who are not drinking the Kool-Aid as heavily as we are here in the world's favorite city.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Yeah, so it so it really is about you can't just provide the tools to your teams. You have to give enough time for people to learn how to use them and train them. And I think that's one of the biggest issues that we're seeing in adoption is people have access to all these things, but it's not like you said, it doesn't just, you don't just turn it on and all of a sudden it's working perfectly. You still have to train the models.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

And there should be an amnesty where it's not like we're cheating at work. If you use one of these tools that you do so with transparency, that you do so with acceptance of it's okay to use these to do your job better. However, we need to have some mentorship program, we need to have some sharing and documentation that you're bringing in these tools, you know, classic change management principles, so that all of us can benefit. And it's not just you being able to save five hours a week from the tasks that you do in repetition. And that, you know, as you you described that notion of how do humans and robots work with one another, it's really how do humans and humans work with one another? How do we share the knowledge for those of us who may be more technically literate? How do we start to do education programs and change the organizational fears and really begin to multiply our ability to learn and do things? There is a a county down the way. I've I've been going into civic and um government organizations to to try to slow down some of my uh some of my contract cycles because those tend to be longer. They're harder to get, but they last longer. And there was one around town halls and uh forums where they were looking for a contractor to be able to conduct these things, especially since the county of San Mateo has five official languages that it needs to support. And you mentioned translators, and one of the mandates of working with the county is that if you offshore offset a task that was normally given to a human being, you need to retrain or accommodate for the loss of that role. So as somebody who would find a translator for a subcontractor typically, and now can run these through a translation algorithm, what do I do with that job role? And the answer is they go in and they edit and they figure out how to post and they understand all the workflow process uh that comes with the noise that maybe auto translate creates, but now they're not sitting there and typing uh in real-time translation. They're now managing the translation process. And so I like that as from San Mateo County, where a lot of these companies are founded in, to sort of acknowledge that, hey, there are those who are going to be left behind by this wave. So let's make sure that we reach down and pick them up again and give them upskilled, retrained jobs so that they can uh manage that process as as good as anybody.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Yeah. I applaud that because now, of course, we have YouTube allowing us to share content in multiple languages, even if you don't speak it. If you're you're then getting responses back from people in that language, are you going to get the translation and be able to write an answer in that language? We have, of course, the new AirPods coming out. But then there is a specific translator that's still needed, which is the one that can translate the C-suite to the developers, coders, engineers, and vice versa to make sure that all of the company's goals and strategies are being accomplished with two groups that may not speak the same language and may not have the same goal in mind, right? But all need to be working together so the company can continue, can make more money, can do more good, and make sure that all of these people in this ecosystem continues to thrive. And and what I'm hearing is that there aren't enough of that kind of translator either. So how do we that's a whole other how do we train people up to understand that role? Because you have to understand two very different disparate sides.

Apps, Websites, And Owning The Stack

SPEAKER_02 26:54

Yeah. It's an interesting time in the workplace, especially for those of us in digital product development, where now the designers and the developers and the PMs are all in the same tool. We're all using the same chat to generate our artifacts. And when you typically had divisions where maybe in a different room or a different building or a different location, the quote product managers lived. And the same thing's true with the designers, and the same thing's true with the developers, and there were silos and handoffs and cascading responsibilities, and now we're all in the same pool. And that's gonna be when I described that charcuterie, I'm gonna say that word fast five times. When I described that charcuterie company, where now all of a sudden you had the PM, the developer, and the designer all within the power of a prompt was able to create this thing. When that is now scaled to the organizational level, how does the CEO decide we don't need so many designers anymore? We don't need as many developers anymore. Well, the PM's job is going to be defined by a README document, uh which the algorithm is going to listen to to say the priorities of this company are A, B, and C, our revenue sources are D, E, and F, and therefore give me a product that uses this. You know, to be able to use a uh a guidance document to make you know large decisions from an organization to be the CEO. I think that is it's a recipe for disaster. But you know, we we're just looking at the vulnerabilities of things that we don't think we know, and that we can free agents or bots to help us with that decision-making process.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Yeah. Well, one of the things that your company engage does is market and experience research. Of course, there are AI tools. You can put in your brand, your idea, it'll spit out. Here is some potential customer personas, here's your competitive set, some uh, you know, overarching data, not necessarily very specific to your company. So I'd love to hear a little bit about why it is still important to do our own validation, our own research, and not just believe what happens. I mean, we know this for prompts and you know, the sea of sameness that you hear about for captions and and written content sometimes, but I'd love to hear your take on the research side and really understanding who our customer is and how we're going to best reach them, communicate with them, solve their problems.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

I want to acknowledge the phrase sea of sameness. I think that was a beautiful description of I think what most of us know the output is. We can tell a charcuterie site that's been auto-generated because it looks like every other one. There really isn't that connection. So let's keep with that analogy. Let's roll with that, let's slice that ham. If we understand, you know, some of the advantages to why our customers want something like this. In my case, uh, it was a global study for electronic arts on a video game that was just really. Released last week, a skateboarding video game, a sort of rehash of an uh early 2000s title. And we looked at skating cultures in seven different countries around the world, and we found out these nuances and this or the the divisions and and the similarities between them. And that starts to become storytelling. And I don't think that we're ever going to get past the human nature of storytelling to draw out emotions. You know, one of the things that was was so evident was the because the the advisory for electronic arts was on uh their commerce platform. It's a free-to-play game and they're gonna make all their money in their e-commerce store. And so they wanted to understand how different cultures were shopped and where that skate culture would find boundaries or lines uh in how they it traditionally as a counterculture uh how they decided to buy things. And this notion of tortured came about where because skating is such a rough activity, just think about like the feet on the grip tape and the sandpaper that's on top of the skateboard so your feet don't fall off and the crashes and the bangs and the graffiti and the asphalt, like it is uh you know, very uh tortured is not the right word, but it's it's something that's that's very rough. And it's also a badge of pride for skaters where you can tell the good skaters by the way that their shoes look. You can tell what type of skateboarding they do by the scuff marks on their shoes on the toe. It is a vert skater, and on the side it's a street skater. So as you look at a skater's shoes, you know what style of skating they do. And there were these funny examples of uh luxury brands that would put duct tape around the shoes to refer to the method in which skaters use to just stay maintainable. And I don't think you find those kinds of insights or reflection by typing in questions of skate culture again because you're dipping into the sea of saying this. Insights are just that, they're insightful, they're not rehashing of the things that we already know. It's a very uh common reaction for researchers when they present to have their constituents say, Yeah, we already knew that. So if you're able to find out those emotional, those kind of reflections of research, I think that's where you start to shine.

SPEAKER_00 32:17

That was a really great example. I could visualize the entire time you're talking about the skateboard, the cuff, the scuffs as a child, as a Gen Xer who used to read the skate zines and wear the clothes.

SPEAKER_02 32:31

So the uh the no the first athlete to ever get a shoe contract uh was Michael Jordan. And then within six months, Natas, I think was the skater's name, and Satan spelled backward, was the second athlete ever to get uh a professional school shoe contract. And that sort of merging between streetwear and skatewear, and that relationship between you know shoes and apparel and Nike as a brand. And it's such an interesting history and of of a cult culture, especially as my younger son is really getting into skateboarding and and finding out what that means to be.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

Yeah. Nice. Now I just can't stop thinking about skating and uh eating uh charcuterie.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Yeah, that's right. You know, I I'm within arm's distance of both. Uh you know, Justin Herman Plaza is just to my left, and the fatted calf charcuterie is uh within my sight right now here in the ferry building.

SPEAKER_00 33:23

I want to turn the conversation a little bit to what you are doing currently as an adjunct professor and how that's evolved as well.

Content, Indexing, And Authentic Brand Voice

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Yeah. I came off of a contract with a Fortune 100 company out of New York, Financial Services, and entered into what is the traditional design and development process where the designer goes into Figma, does a bunch of mock-ups, uh, they come up with some components that may not exist that goes into a design review, takes a couple weeks, puts into a queue, goes back and revises, go back some revises, gets approved, and it gets handed off to the front-end development team who do the same thing. Who say, okay, we're gonna take this component and we're gonna build it in React and we're gonna make sure it integrates and passes the validation test. And at that point, you can use it on your application.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

And with uh the role of a consultant, I had my badge and my email address and was able to go and clone their front-end code base and use that as a language model for which to develop, in our case, prototypes for applications using the same version of React, using the same version of Tailwind, and all of the code compliance that they needed to do production bubble code. And it was a a rejection of a design and development process. My goal was to get a prototype in front of our users as fast as possible because, again, I had a short-term contract and I needed to validate ideas, make sure that we were going through user-centric methods so that it met the need of the client. But what I burned was the design team and a lot of these junior to mid designers whose job it was to do design operations to make sure that the Figma files were correct and that the components all maped to where they needed to go. And so I acknowledged that, and I had a fear that these are my people, these are the people that I've been for the past 20-something years, is a staff designer, an interaction design. And now I'm challenging that by saying, Well, I can just do it all with with strokes of a keyboard. And so where I've been shifting is to try to address these mid-career professionals, and as we describe the translator at the county of San Mateo, is to understand what some of their barriers might be in terms of adoption at their organization or themselves personally. And I've created a an assessment survey so that they're can examine that this is how I feel, these are things that we've done to adopt, this, these are my outputs. And again, it's free to fill out, and the output is where you compare against similar size organizations, those within your industry, similar-sized teams, and you'll get a sort of spectrogram of here's where we're strong or here's where we're weak. Because I think that retraining and that understanding of design principles as they adopt new tools is going to be imperative as those graduates of university programs are going to come out to the job field. The good news is that nobody's done any of this before. It's like graduating school in 2000, but maybe you or I did somewhere around there, is that there's not going to be the industry vet that has had their hands on these tools for 10 or more years, and that you're just begging to learn how to use it because nobody's used these workflows, these tools, and we're all brand new at this. And so the fastest mover is going to be the one that wins, and the fastest movers are usually the the younger generation that's more technology depth. So how that translates back into a university curriculum, it's to be able to understand, to visualize, and to use data in ways that maybe aren't typically familiar with designers, but is something that we need to have that literacy going forward.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

I appreciate that. It's the same thing that I'm seeing where our programs were created before everybody started talking about generative AI and before we had access to all these other tools that have been built. But if you're going to be in digital social media or digital media management or any kind of career like that, you have to understand a little bit about everything. So, and students in my programs, some of them have been told an undergraduate, don't use any AI at all for your work. Some are embracing it more. But a lot of times I find that in the master's program, I am one of the ones who's introducing it to them and saying, hey, instead of doing a two-color, you know, table, why don't you do a Pixton cartoon to represent the information and what's ethical and unethical about the way that you're collecting data or whatever the case may be, just to get them to try things in a fun way so that they have that knowledge. And then many of the most of the time they end up exploring other things and finding other tools that they can use. And so I think you're right on. And this is why education is still important in this world where we hear so many things happening around education. You know, do you still need to go to university? Do you need to get a master's degree? Is that going to be funded or not? I think there is still a lot of value in that. And from learning, like from someone like yourself who has seen the ecosystem change and transition.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

Yeah, it's saying that you don't know. And it's our role as teachers and as parents is to show what's possible. I love that you're introducing the ethics of data, especially relevant today with intellectual property and with what's creating these algorithms. And that kind of reflection discussion is worth worth any program. I think it it teaches you not just to be about the technique, but to understand the method as a whole. And that levels you up in any conversation you might have.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

Yeah, 100%. So you did say that you have assessments. People can go to retrain.gauge.io and see if they're ready for AI adoption, which is amazing.

Jobs, HR Algorithms, And Upskilling

SPEAKER_02 39:24

And this is for UX and design teams, product teams as well. But I I think anybody that fills it out will start to understand there's five different categories and what are the aspects and where where that might be. You know, again, it's it's free. It it doesn't uh cost a thing. So it's uh it might be a good five minutes of your time just to see how how we're starting to think about retraining or adopting these new tools, especially if you're in the world of uh application development or brand development. Uh, I think those are all you know very relevant.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Fantastic. What is the the one piece of advice you would give, besides if you're looking at UX and product design, take the free assessment to anyone who is already in business. Maybe their business is you know still in the early stages, five to seven years. They haven't really started dipping their toe in the adoption phase. Where do they need to start?

SPEAKER_02 40:20

I mean, think about where we were 25 years ago. There were companies that didn't adopt the internet. And at times they found themselves painted into a corner where it was too late for them to transform or to pivot. And there are some like restaurants that are are gleefully left behind where everything's written on a napkin and there is no digital process in place. And I know we kind of use this buzzword of digital transformation, but that's really what it was. Is we went from pen and paper to spreadsheets and applications. There was another wave ten years after that of mobile phones. We mentioned it about you know buying movie tickets earlier in our conversation, where all of a sudden it was mobile first, where everything was now going to be thought of as a process that you could do with one hand and one thumb, and that there were companies that saw that, recognized it, and used it as a differentiator, used it as a way to leap ahead where they could now do a better experience on a different device than anybody. And there were issues with that, it required a whole new paradigm of thinking about user experience and thinking about the design process. And then there was this notion of cloud, where we had those who trusted the icon on their desktop of the file that they knew or thought their data was stored in, and that to put that data somewhere else in this amorphous cloud was bringing up issues around privacy, a trust, transparency, and that that was hard for some to adopt to. I I work with some of these people who need to have a file on their desktop, and that really constrains them to the Microsoft Office Suite, where now everything is spreadsheets and office documents, and they don't have the adoption of SaaS platforms because again, there's the the fear or the issues around trust in the cloud. And now I think we're at this fourth wave of transformation where we're now looking at the same issues of trust and transparency and privacy and all that with this blinking cursor. And to what I try to tell myself is that it's this muscle memory of ability to learn, ability to trust, to know when to pull back or when to push forward with uh adoption of various techniques and tools, and to be able to sort of use these to your advantage, it requires conversations with people who are looking at it from a different angle than you are. Again, your your notion about ethics or climate impact, those are all very real. And we should be looking at this from as many different sides as possible, not a sort of monotheistic view of look what it can do for us, is but look what it's doing to all of us. And I think that combined with a very specialized approach to how it could save time, even saving two or three hours a week, week after week after week, is fundamental. That that that is life-changing, our ability to change one thing, but to do so with a consistent and stable manner, it's not going to put us all on the couch for the rest of our our days, but it it may save a couple hours of our day. And who wouldn't want that ability to think and free up and strategize more? So that that's where it's sort of mitigating some of the hype cycles, but also trying to be very directive about how we might use these technologies.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

Yeah, fantastic. Uh Nick, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, poem, verse, family motto?

SPEAKER_02 43:51

Oof. Specialization is for insects.

unknown 43:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 43:55

Uh I don't I don't know. Again, I my attribution is is so bad.

SPEAKER_00 43:59

Um I haven't read that one though, but but I but I do appreciate that. Because there have been times in my life where I haven't been able to get jobs because I wasn't specialized enough. And times when people found my skill set valuable because I can sprinkle a few different things that I've done and knowledge that I have now. So specialization is for insects. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 44:24

That is great. Well, it it may not be correct, but it's inspirational.

Enterprise Copilots And Context Memory

SPEAKER_00 44:29

Fantastic. Well, this has been a a really insightful conversation. I really appreciate your time today. And I know that I got a lot out of it. I got some validations for some things I'd been thinking about, but also learned some new things. I have tools that I'm going to be sharing with colleagues and students. Because we do have some classes where students go through UI and UX design and think about developing. So, you know, we'll have to have conversations about that separately. But I really appreciate your time. And I yeah, and I know that you everything that you've said has given everybody who's listening or watching this episode a lot to think about in this new era. So thank you so much, Nick.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Thank you for having me on. Look forward to talking to you again.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

To learn more about the Master of Science and Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmm.usc.edu.