Not the product, but the person is the end in view.

- Laszlo Maholy-Nagy

Know your ‘why’

I sincerely believe that if you want to be a better designer, study people not design. And I also strongly believe that people are what truly matter. At the end of the day if what you’re making doesn’t somehow positively shape the life of someone else - if it doesn’t bring them value, or joy, or peace, or insight, then truly what is the point. We do what we do so we can potentially, positively shape the lives of others. That’s why you should study people. Technology changes, markets change, industries evolve, but what makes people human does not.

Some context

Highlights of just the past 10 years or so…

  • My time at VideoAmp will forever be one of the most demanding challenges of my career. On just the product side, the challenge was completely reimagining, re-envisioning, and re-designing the core paradigms of an industry built on 80 years of anachronistic thinking? It takes a lot - but while the challenge was extreme so was opportunity. The ultimate goal was nothing short of displacing Nielsen as the de facto currency for linear media and to couple broadcast buying and measurement. We needed to combine that with buying and meaningful audience data insights and optimizations from digital, OTT/CTV, mobile, OOH, social, and the major walled gardens and do it all in one platform. 5 years, achieving a unicorn evaluation, and 60+ personas later, we finally began to scratch the surface.

  • My time at Factual was relatively short. I had a brief stopover there as Sr. Director of Product Design and while my tenure wasn’t long, it was definitely fun. Factual was a leader in location data used to assist ad targeting and audience creation. They had a suite of tools and capabilities that ranged from pure data science and ML capabilities through to enterprise integrations with folk like The Trade Desk, and their own application toolset that lived on both desktop and mobile platfrorms. Factual was eventually acquired by Foursquare in April 2020

  • When I took over design for the Aol One Ad Platform I was tasked with rebuilding and redesigning 3 years of unfortunate design decisions, shutting down a failing relationship with an external design agency, and building a brand new UX design discipline and 20 person team, and rebuilding the team’s relationships with some seriously disgruntled Product and Engineering orgs. And I had to do it all while not being able to change one already agreed to release date or dropping any of the platform’s $5.5B revenue on the floor.

  • It’s a pretty big deal when Microsoft asks you if you’d want to take over design for one of the most successful, prolific, and influential software packages of the last 40 years. With over 1.5 billion users even if you make 0.05% upset, that’s a lot of people. Much of what I accomplished while at Microsoft I can’t show, but it was an amazing experience working at that scale. I will forever be grateful for that experience.

ABOVE: Part of some in depth persona work done at VideoAmp for the OmniChannel Ad Platform

Whether you’re talking about driving a product strategy, designing a software experience, or building a brand, at the center of all of it will be people. That means that at the core of every idea, component, feature group, work flow, user story, etc. has to be an intrinsic knowledge of the human in the other side of the screen. In every Design team I have ever built I have made sure to add and invest in a research function. The data, the insights, the analytics, and the impartiality and context provided by the UXR function is critical - and it doesn’t matter what level of product maturity you’re dealing with. There is always more to know.

Putting people first

ABOVE: High level cut at the buying and approval process around “upfronts” (linear ad buying across agencies and networks, This process is wildly convoluted and can take up to 9 months to complete.

ABOVE: High fidelity wireframes from the VideoAmp Ad Platform

Obviously design systems are vital to the creation of a toolset that is not only trainable and extensible, but wireframes and technical documentation is critical to establishing a source of truth between Design, Product, and Engineering.

There is no way to really know how many wireframes (low, medium, or high fidelity) that I or the teams I’ve lead have drawn. But the one thing I can confidently say is that it is most definitely in the many thousands of images. Be they created in Sketch, Figma, or the laundry list of now antiquated drawing tools that have existed, wireframes have been and are still an essential piece of documentation for all UX designers. However I am very hopeful that will be changing soon.

Wireframing and documentation

ABOVE: Medium fidelity wireframes from the VideoAmp Ad Platform

ABOVE: Hand-drawn concepts for Microsoft Excel

I’ve been a champion of separating the front end from the middle and back from the moment I started doing any software and interaction design 30 years ago. And while the technologies and the analogies have changed, what remains the same is well constructed systems, workflows, templates, and component architectures allow for the most extensible, scalable, and adaptable front-end experiences. The only real question is ‘build, buy, or open source’ and while I’ve done all of the above, the answer is completely dependent on the business, technology, and market needs at the time. Each solution has it’s positives and negatives, but you always need a solution and that solution needs to be documented in a way that everyone has a solid understanding of what’s configurable, and what is not.

Systems & component libraries

BELOW & RIGHT: Standards documentation examples from both VideoAmp and Oath’s ad platforms

By the end of my tenure at VideoAmp we had finally begun to achieve what has been a career long dream. My goal has always been to try and create an environment where UX designers could effectively ideate and design using actual production code. No more Sketch - no more Figma - no more ‘drawing’ in the traditional sense. Gone would be the days of iterative wireframing and notations and endless revisions and the pain of trying to keep pages of static documentation up to date.

Using UXPin we were finally able to get to a place where our production React components could be referenced and accessed from an interface, dragged to a canvas made from one of our standard page layouts, dropped in place and connected to a live data source. The designer could freely move components around, set variables for style, behavior, and interaction, and then ship that coded front-end to the Research team for use as a testing platform or directly to Engineering so that same code could be included in a published release.

Designing in code

Unfortunately what we built is fairly proprietary, and I’m not at liberty to share good examples of what this process looks like at the moment, but perhaps in the future.

Regardless, it was a very special day when were able to truly pull it off, and the realization of many many years of pushing to make it a reality.

Beyond Personas and user journeys and wireframes there comes a moment when fit and finish is everything. It demonstrates the company’s commitment to it’s brand, to the experience, and to the human on the other side of the screen. And if it’s done correctly it’s not additive or something you think about at the end of the process. When done properly it’s baked in to the thinking and planning from the very beginning. Why? Because the end design is THE thing that the user will interact with. It is the company. It is the promise that the product makes to the customer, and it will be the thing that is judged to either be of value to the user or not.

The examples here are both prototype and production UI designs for some large and very complex enterprise platforms. And enterprise or not, mobile was a large component of either the current production solution at the time, or being seriously vetted as a next level forward for the overall product line.

Visual Design and UX

ABOVE: Concept screens from the Aol One Ad Platform

ABOVE & RIGHT: Screens and flow from the VideoAmp Omni-channel Media Platform

One of the tenets of my career has been to bring a consumer level of production design, fit, and finish to the enterprise. The reason why is as simple as knowing that every user of a B2B platform also has a personal cell phone in their pocket and an established perception of what truly beautiful consumer UI experiences look and feel like. It has always been my contention that the levels of expectation for what makes software feel well honed and considered has been rising steadily for the past 30 years, and if you want to be perceived as truly valuable and at the top of your class, B2B solutions have no choice but to keep pace

Aesthetics Matter

ABOVE: Concept screens for next-gen Oath Advertising Platform with companion mobile application

ABOVE & LEFT: Screen captures and walkthrough from the Factual ‘Engine’ Location Product

ABOVE: Screen captures and walkthrough from the VideoAmp internal/external mobile app, “IYKYK”

Biophellic Design is typically a concept or a way of thinking that one typically sees associated with architecture, interior design, and environmental design. However, during my tenure at VideoAmp it was a concept that we began applying to UX and software product design

The concept was that by beginning to introduce more organic shapes and color palettes to the product we might begin creating a more pleasurable or at least more comfortable environment for our users.

We dove into a number of experiments along these lines. The two of most note was the creation of a new data visualization scheme we dubbed “data clouds”. (And we definitely realized there was probably a better, less confusing name out there but we were leaving it open at the time.) Using color saturation, hue, and density we were attempting to create a new language where the data visualization might be able to leave the confines of a static graph or chart and instead create more of an ambient feeling across an entire page or page area.

Biophellic Design

ABOVE: VideoAmp Data Cloud explorations

A second area of exploration was warming up our color palettes across the board and even more specifically choosing more Earth tones (richer, darker tones) in an effort to bring more of a natural feeling to the overall experience.

wires and components then maybe Visual design biophilic stuff, then a separate area for and prototyping? and maybe a small section that calls out UXR in some way - like, responsible for bringing and specifically staffing a research function in my last few four positions - Aol, Oath, Factual, and VA. maybe?

Customer Experience (CX) & Research (UXR)

If you’ve made it all the way down this page, I could not be more appreciative of your time, your attention, and your energy! Thank you so very much for being both willing and interested enough to explore all of this work and being willing to take a little journey with me.

If I can provide any additional information, additional samples, or should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me and ask! Again, thank you so much for your time and curiosity.

/frank

Thank you!

“Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research.”
- Bruce Mau

“Not the product, but the person is the end in view”
- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy