Steven Ray is employee #4, Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Dialexa--A technology, design, and research firm in Dallas, TX. On this episode Steven and I discuss his journey in the design field, ultimate transparency at the core of a business and team -- and all of the mental chapters he's written along the way in his imaginary book, "What Not To Do When Running a Design Agency."
You can find Steven on LinkedIn here.
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Feel free to stalk 'Experience Design w/ Tony Daussat' on Instagram at @xdpodcast
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As always thank you for listening, and if you enjoy what you're hearing, please share with your friends and co-workers :)
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If you are feeling EXTRA inspired, I would love for you to check out my Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/xdpodcast
#staycurious
Steven Ray is employee #4, Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Dialexa--A technology, design, and research firm in Dallas, TX. On this episode Steven and I discuss his journey in the design field, ultimate transparency at the core of a business and team -- and all of the mental chapters he's written along the way in his imaginary book, "What Not To Do When Running a Design Agency."
You can find Steven on LinkedIn here.
-
Feel free to stalk 'Experience Design w/ Tony Daussat' on Instagram at @xdpodcast
-
As always thank you for listening, and if you enjoy what you're hearing, please share with your friends and co-workers :)
-
If you are feeling EXTRA inspired, I would love for you to check out my Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/xdpodcast
#staycurious
Ooh,
Speaker 2:friends. Welcome to the XD podcast, a show that explores how design shapes the way we experience brands, products, surfaces, and our everyday lives. As usual. I'm your host, Tony.
Speaker 1:Sorry,
Speaker 2:what are you joining me for the first time or have come back for more? I want to take a moment to thank you for tuning in and if you find value in this show, I would be honored if you took a moment to share this episode, hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening or left a review. It's always greatly appreciated. And with that, what do you say? We just jumped right into the interview. Steven Ray, what's up dog? First of all, thank you again so much for being here. It's a Saturday. You've got a family. Thanks for having me. I'm just a guy that's like saying stuff they wanted to have you out here. Going to have a break from it. I'm sure, man. Do you have a cute kid? Thanks brother. Um, aside from that, you're a smart guy. We've talked many times, we've hung out and I was like, I got to have you on. Can you give a little background what you do, how you got here?
Speaker 3:So kind of starting my career, I started in an act at an advertising agency as a graphic designer. And you know, me and my buddies, we were all wanting to, you know, we were, I think a lot like a lot of people who have stayed in our industry as long as like you and I have, we've stayed this long because we like learning and we like growing and exploring where we go and, and try new things. So at the time I was working for this very small advertising agency and they had all the pretty, and had the pretty office really. You know, I got, I got sold. Yeah. I mean it was that kind of place where with the great lighting that designers love and anyway, it was the, it was a great experience because it was one of the worst places I could have ever worked. And uh, what I realized actually during, you know, while I worked there, because I was not, why is enough to just move on that quickly and I was like, I have a job. I knew jot right, making like a sweet, like 30 grand a year thinking I was like this is, this is all right. So I started putting together all these things that you know, I will never do when I get to the point when I have a team and I'm running a company, cause you know I definitely fell in that group of people that's like, no, I'm going to do my, I'm going to do my thing one day. And so I basically in a, and there was another coworker of mine, Amanda Evans. So she and I would always, you know, at lunch we'd, we'd say we're going to write a book, we're going to write this book of what not to do when you're ringing a design agency. So I eventually leave there and I go to this, this Nick's place and I'd started doing some freelance for this next place and they treated me really well. I was getting paid to do freelance really well and they were like, come on board full time. It was like sweet. As soon as I was a full time employee, I started getting treated not the same. So I was like, wow, I thought though has place was so bad and now this place is kind of worse. And in some regards, both places, there was a lot of value. You know, there's great designers that I worked with, a lot of great relationships, a lot of great learnings. But from a leadership standpoint, there were some things that were very clear to me that I didn't, it didn't work for me. It didn't seem to be working for the people that I was around when you had people constantly quitting crying, things like that. So I was like, okay, that book continues. Um, then I kind of went to the next place. The next place was great. It was one of the, there was the first time I'd had an opportunity. So now that I'm not talking poorly about places, I can mention names. So I went to a company called[inaudible] and this was great cause it was still pretty small and I had started using their software at my previous company and you could do anything with it, but it was this really poor experience. And so that was actually, interestingly, I heard you and Brandon, you know, talking about, he didn't even know what user experience was. Neither did I, but I knew that this could be better. So finagled my way out of position where I had a no compete with the company that I was, you know, ended up going to work for. But this is where I started my more technical career path and it was awesome. It was the environment. It was really a startup environment. I think at the time it was probably about 60 maybe 60 people and it was that type of thing where people didn't leave at five o'clock, you know, they either kept working or you know, on, on like actual client work or you know, internal product work or they would team up together and work on projects and then that's it. This is the first opportunity I had to work on it, like a hackathon. It was. And because I was one of the few designers, you know, it was highly sought after. And so it was this really great experience. And then I see, I got to see things shift. Um, because basically they had some new leadership come in to improve the, the value of the committee, um, as, as things do when they grow. And you know, people start looking at things from an acquisition standpoint. And so I got to see the culture that was really amazing shift overnight and then people leaving, you know, now it was important that we had all the lights on in every office. Uh, so all of these things that really don't matter in regards to making great products. Right. So the book continues. Yeah. Wow. Let me, let me pull out that old dusty book that I thought I was done with. You're writing down notes of things that I think are not conducive to the of company that I think people really want to be a partner of. Someone around that time, you know, myself and a good friend of mine, Anthony Armandarez, we were chatting and I didn't have any kids at the time and he didn't either. And we were part of a group of buddies who would always talk about like, man, we should really start a thing. We should, we should do our own thing. So left teligent on good terms, you know, worked with the product team there and they are a bunch of great people. But it was my time to try thing and I felt confident that I was, you know, good enough at what I did that if this didn't work out I could go get a job somewhere else. I may not be great but from a money standpoint I feel like will be okay. So Anthony and I ran a company for a handful of years, um, before, uh, he decided to move in a different direction and try some other things. I tried to run the company for a while on my own, but we had kind of set it up as a company for two partners to run. So wasn't, he wasn't having a ton of fun. It was a lot of work. And then I had met the dialects at the time, which is the company that I'm part of now was just a few people, a few, two founders and a handful of developers. And I would see them at this place called co Habitat, which is like one of the first coworking spaces in Dallas. Oh yeah. We'd see each other at these parties, but you know, I was maybe one eighth. The networking, the remainder of that was just, you know, for me drinking. So it didn't always do the best networking. So it took meeting a few times, uh, before I realized that these guys did something that I needed, which was development. So I meet the dialects of guys and we chat for probably a year trying to figure out a project to work on and the stars just weren't aligning. And then finally we get a chance to work on some stuff together. They mentioned the idea of joining forces. And so for about seven years I've been the head of research and design at dialects. Uh, and or what's your role? Let's start there. So my role now really is more of more of an enabler. I want to, so it's been an interesting transition. This is a conversation that comes up with my team that's going from full time execution to now you know, management and understanding that there's a huge amount of value and not being a hundred percent executing when you're starting to transition. Like you've now, you have all these learnings, all this knowledge and value now starting to multiply that within the people that report to you. Right? And that's kind of what I am fully now. So fortunately I still, we'll, uh, jump in projects from time to time, you know, but really my role now, I've put a lot of thought into the type of company you kind of going back to that what I would never do. So now I'm fortunate enough to be over one of the divisions of our company. It's really split between research and design and engineering and engineering has software and hardware and a quality and we do have a strategy practice, you know, so now I'm in this fortunate position where I have an opportunity to really do whatever I want, right? As long as I don't burn the house down, what I've done. But I've managed to cultivate a team of people that have embraced uncertainty and are willing to try things and are willing to be open about things, not always working out the way they expected. We started this, uh, we'll, we'll have themes from time to time at Dai Alexa maybe all the time, but one of them within the design team right now is this idea of like absolute transparency. And so it's really the idea that we look, some people are going to be amazing presenters, some people suck at presenting. I come a little closer to that sort of suck side than I am. The amazing side. And what makes it, what makes it harder when you suck at something is when you don't want to admit it. You don't want people to know, you know, you want to keep it to yourself. Man, that makes it way harder to, to grow at that. But if I was able to say, Tony, dude, you're like an actor. I suck. I suck at presenting. I feel like as an actor you probably have some techniques you could help me with. Boom. You would probably be like, you know, if you're on my team at least you'd be like, yeah dude, I probably, why don't we get together? Let me see what you've got. Let me give you some feedback. If he didn't know what I was trying to keep it to myself, I'm not going to get that wisdom from you. Does this go into the t shape versus v shape team methodology? Yeah, I think it may a little. So we came up with this idea of the v shape. I'm really, because I think that if you're in our field of work, you need to have the ability to own your own, meet with a client, understand what they need. You need to come up with an idea of how you think you can solve that solution and you need to make it presentable. Right? I'm not saying you have to be the master researcher, the master, you know, uh, interface designer. But the term user experience is kind of a broad term. So we just say general user experience means that you can understand the needs create in prison developer presentable solution that that client should be happy with. Right. Okay. So now our v really came from, I started having people on my team that were really strong researchers and maybe they weren't as good at that interface design, but it, no, I, you know, and this could change in the future, but I've never wanted to silo things out. I see some companies, um, there's a company downtown where I would get, uh, recruits or I would get people that would come by for interviews and they would talk about, we would look at their portfolio and they'd be like, well I did this one thing, but so and so did the research. Somebody else did the interaction design. Somebody did the wireframes, I did the visual design and then somebody else did the prototyping and I'm like, wow. To me that's not the way I want to run this thing. Cause I feel like if I were to take you as an individual, I couldn't put you on a project without like some massive team or something. Sure. I'm or I'm going to put you with someone else and then they're going to have a huge burden because they're going to have to do everything except for the one thing that you can do a, and it doesn't mean that that person couldn't quickly pick up those other things. I guess all I'm getting at is that I think that you should have that full package and then you should have a strength and something that helps develop that and you know, general user experience, uh, ability. You know, I know some of your previous guests have had this, you know, formal education around ethnographic, you know, ethnographic research. Yeah. And man, that is awesome. And I definitely want to catch up with some of your, now that we have, that we have you in a comment, I'm going to catch up with some of your other guests, but um, you know, most of us have not had that, but I think largely designers are so willing to try a thing and design how they want to do basically how they want to get the outcome that, and a trained ethnographic researcher would do that. We know that that's what they're trying to get. We don't know all those things. We're going to dive in, learn as, you know, learn some stuff. Yeah, there's definitely some things that we don't know. That would be great to know, I'm sure. But maybe all those things aren't necessary for every project, but we do the best we can to get the outcome that we're trying to get as quickly as possible so we can start creating something.
Speaker 4:So you were talking about when you were at these other agencies, the book that you would write what not to do, right? Yeah. So now that you are employee number four at Dai Alexa, I mean you guys are really thriving. So right now have you looked back in your mental book and said, I can do a gut check and go, okay, I need to, I need a whip it around and this is the experience I need to design for my current team in business.
Speaker 3:Ah, well that's a great question. I will tell you that I went through a phase where, um, I wasn't always being myself because there was a period of time where I felt like I had to be this like super intellectual sounding thought designer. Yeah. And um, boy all that did was make me less and less confident and uh, and it really affected my ability to sound like an intellectual or a smart person, right. Because I was, you know, I was trying too hard to be perceived as something that I wasn't, I couldn't, I couldn't own it. You know, I finally recognize that and realize that, you know, I think I'm going to experiment with just being myself and putting some nonsense into the conversation and trying to make this more fun. Cause I really liked to smile and laugh, I think. I think most people do, but I think sometimes we get caught up in is like sort of like this corporateness of some of the companies we work with or whatever and work at. Once I started doing that, I realized that, Oh yeah, you actually, these are just people and you know they have kids, they like to laugh. They like that same stupid movie that you're ashamed to tell people that you like. The other on the other side of that is having the ability to somewhat transform into the audience that you need to resonate with. I think there's a huge amount of value that I've created for myself by having the ability to speak the language of the person that I'm with. It's not to the point where I'm trying to act totally like a person that I'm not, but it is understanding the right words and the right language to use at the right time in order to resonate with that person, to build that relationship and over time that you can break that down a little bit and kind of just be, you're kind of I think neutral self. Yeah. But there is a, there is a starting point. Yeah. You have to understand your audience. Right. And so there a little bit of that intent behind not being the neutral you, I guess
Speaker 4:what's interesting is you go to meetings and you start looking at all the titles of the people. It's some big business sometimes and you started thinking, man, this meeting is expensive for their time, for your time, et Cetera, et cetera. So it starts adding all this undue pressure when you start thinking of things like that and then you start thinking, okay, I've got to be like just on fire. I've got to be the expert thought leader. Like we were talking about it and it creates anxiety and that's why we're going to get the job done. You know, we're all in there to get the job done. What's best for the user, hopefully by the end of the day. But if we can make it a little light sometimes and realize, like you said, these are people, these are human beings. Some of the kids, some of them have dogs, someone got pet, he'd go on us, you know, just, yeah,
Speaker 3:just relate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And you know, honestly, that's one of the things that is really, you know, sometimes I'll call that one of our differentiators. Like, you know, I think, I think dialects, there's really fun to work with. You know, we want to have opportunities, you know, we want to create those opportunities when we're with our clients to go out, you know, go out to dinner, go out for drinks, maybe have a little bit of a social life. It's not throwing axe throwing. Haven't actually done that one. Yeah, it seems like it's hot right now. I want to do it. Um, but you know, uh, it's not always just about the work and that's what I think is really important too, when you can get on the same page at least in terms of, hey, we want to get this, we want this thing to work. We now is not just the Alexa, we, his client into Alexa. And actually either there's some, even some intent behind the types of language that we use when we talk about the projects that we're working on. It's not your project anymore. It's, it's our project. We're in this together and we're truly like, we want to see success, we want the next project and we don't want the next project because we were able to bait you into the biggest project up front. Some of the projects we start to get our toe in the door. Some of these bigger companies is just a hey show you that. You know what we are able to do with timeline and limitations that we have.
Speaker 4:One of the things that I, I sort of talked about with experience design as a whole is thinking outside of the screen, so at Dai Alexa, what have you guys done as far as service design as far as industrial design? Are you guys heading in those areas or have you leaned in those sort of sectors before?
Speaker 3:Well, you know we're doing a lot more service design and then we ever have before. It's one of those things where you use it with the right company the right way and then it all clicks and you go, now I know exactly how we can use this for different types of clients. And so we've been doing a lot of service blueprint design. Uh, James has actually been really heading up that, uh, we have, uh, we have a class that we uh, do every week, which is really interesting that a lot of our engineers show up too. Oh, nice. Yeah. So it's really cool. So we're doing a lot there. You know, you said industrial design. Um, we do some that is not a, one of the primary service offerings that we have just because hardware is just a different beast.
Speaker 4:On a little side note, there is a billionaire that owns the mavericks that you did something with.
Speaker 3:Uh, yeah. So this was actually before this was back,
Speaker 4:but this is, this is a, this is maybe a few years ago. 10 1215, 2072.
Speaker 3:That's about eight years ago. Yeah. So his name is Mark Cuban. Yeah. So now let's, okay, so we don't have to talk about it by the way. It's fine. Um, this was one of those things where you try thing and um, you know, it doesn't succeed and it's fine and you let it go and you don't relish on it for the rest of your life. So myself and a friend of mine, Ray Hernandez, we, we had this idea, we were actually, I mean it was one of those stories where we literally were, uh, jogging one day and it was really hot and we didn't have water with us. And, uh, we did see a, like a vending machine and I mean, it was very generic idea. I mean, we'd been talking about some things around this sort of space about something that we wanted to create. And this was kind of the day that it clicked. It's like, oh, this idea that we've been talking about, this is a, this is all coming together. Now, if we had an APP that was, you know, keep in mind, this is a long time ago, this was before Google pay, apple pay everything. Okay. So we were like, wouldn't it be amazing if we had an app where you could just go up and basically just, you know, get, at the time it was a free Vin, a free vend, right. And the way that we initially started that was through this idea of like social currency. So you would go up and the first version of it was that you would go up and uh, we, so we actually created hardware. Um, it was a bolt on, bolt it on to almost any vending machines since like 1970 or something like that. Anytime we would say that some guy, some old guy, if a long beard would pull up vendoring vending machine out and go, oh yeah, definitely no, wouldn't work on. Yeah. It's like, thanks bro. But, um, we did create this thing and, and, and ray ran with it through multiple versions, but basically we started with something that you had post, uh, something, uh, when your social timeline, we started with Facebook at the time, so it's like, hey, hey guys, I just got this free event, you know, Chuck's pizza, amazing, or whatever. It was kind of like this advertising kind of idea. But then that actually once ray took over, it was around the time, um, you know, I was ending 39 argyle and merging into dialects. Uh, and uh, ray took that over and he had moved to San Francisco and turned it into an actual payment platform. Uh, it was just, we might've been a little too early. I don't know what it was. We never really quite got off the ground, but we did make some, we did make a cool thing
Speaker 4:to end every interview the same way. And it's with a question that is what non digital thing that you own has had the greatest impact on your life or means the most to you and why?
Speaker 3:So I think there's two things because one of them you might just laugh about. So at Ikea there's this dollar 50 for author. It's just a little piece of metal with a little thing on the end of it. Oh yeah. And it just spins. And so I've gotten way into like mixing stuff into like drinks or whatever, whether you're going down to MCT oil path or whatever it is. Um, you know, so the thing, the thing is that it's just a thing that does its job so well and it's only like a dollar 50. Uh, I dunno, I started using it in the office and then other people started buying them in the office, just like mixing stuff. Don't know. And the thing is you could go on, you know, it's a dollar 50 an ikea. That's part of it. That's part of what makes it so great. And you don't care. It's not like you can go buy them for$15 and they do the same thing. Right. But uh, so that's the one you might, we'll forget about that one. Okay, fair. So what actually is continually stuck with me for about 10 years now is there is a mead notepad that is like four inches tall and like three inches wide or five inches tall, three inches wide, something like that. It was very small. The spiral bind is on the top. So I've always, always, I've had problems utilizing to do lists in a way that I can stick with, um, in a way where it doesn't overwhelm me cause I use to do list is like my dumping ground for everything that I ever want to do in the future of my life. So with this little meme pad, I basically, we'll write out what I want to get done that day. The trick is, you know, one page is one day, so it's not a list that you keep forever. You flip it to the next page, whatever, then you didn't finish the day before you write it on the next page. Okay. So if you keep writing that same to do over and over, it's a good, it's sort of a good indicator that, okay, I don't, I'm never going to do this or maybe it's actually not that important. So then you can, you can basically take those things and just start writing them in the back. It's like maybe one day maybe that's really worked out well for me. The other thing that I like about that as I get the gratification of like marking through it, I get gratification of seeing what all I was able to accomplish that day. And so yeah, I mean it's very, you know, very basic, simple thing, but I've done that for about 10 years. Then I'll kind of drop off and don't use it for a while and I'll try to, you know, use a digital to do application. But I always find myself coming back to using that method and I think that for me works really well.
Speaker 4:There is nothing like writing it, seeing it, having it in your hands. Yeah. That's something like an app or Kendall will never be able to do. Absolutely. Some people will always gravitate toward the, the tech, but others it's that tangible thing that you can always just have. Yeah, absolutely. I will even have grocery lists. I'll write everything down. If I'm going through the aisles and I picked something up, I will write it down and then cross it out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can dig it. I do that with the same thing sometimes with a to do list. You know? Yeah. It's like, okay, what's the thing I did? I need to go ahead and, you know, document it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's something there. Thanks again, Steven. Absolutely, man. Thank you very much for having me. I'm going to have your linkedin link on the show notes so people can stop you and I'm excited to take up your time. Thanks again, brother and my brother and with that we will call it a week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, be sure to share it with your friends, family, or coworkers. As always, you can find the show notes and full transcript at[inaudible] podcast.com or stockmen, Instagram at[inaudible] podcast. I can't wait to have you back next week, but until then, friends, stay curious. The[inaudible] podcast as part of XD media LLC and is produced and edited by me, Tony Doe, sad hosting and publication of the podcast is through Buzzsprout.