A Chat with Boltmade VP of UX Robert Barlow-Busch
Part 1 in our Fluxible Week DesignChats Interview Series
This week is Fluxible week here in Kitchener-Waterloo. To celebrate that, we’re interviewing local designers involved in running Fluxible. This also marks the launch of our DesignChats interview series, highlighting local design talent in KW, and across Canada.
To kick things off, I sat down with Robert Barlow-Busch, a co-founder of Fluxible, and Co-VP of User Experience at Boltmade here in Kitchener — Waterloo. Robert also started the first UX community group here in the region now known as UX Waterloo.
Can you tell me about your first experience with ‘design’?
I remember my first experience clearly. In fact, it made me realize that design was the career I wanted to pursue. My undergrad degree is from Waterloo in Rhetoric and Professional Writing, but I’d always had an interest in technology and engineering, as well. So I found myself in a co-op job as a technical writer. At the time, it was the obvious choice for someone in my program with those interests.
On my first day on the job, I was given an assignment to write instructions for a new module in the company’s Geographic Information System software. I spent the morning doing some research and digging into it, outlining what the instructions might need to be. I discovered they were going to be pretty substantial. For this one feature, we were looking at probably ten pages of instructions. Some would be conceptual, some would be procedural. By the end of that morning, I was feeling frustrated because most of the complexity I would have to explain wasn’t inherent to the task at all — instead, it was caused by the design of the user interface. The words they chose, the way it had been organized and structured, there was nothing going on to help people get oriented and understand what to do.
I decided after lunch to track down the developer who had built this feature. I hoped to have a chat, to see if there were any updates we could make. I saw some very simple things we could fix, such as just changing wording, that would have a big impact. Thankfully, this developer was really open to talking with a new co-op student. Phew! We worked together for a good chunk of the afternoon doing an iteration of the UI. It was really awesome.
After the changes we made, I managed to boil the instructions down to almost nothing. It was a page or two, at most, of some contextual knowledge that you needed about the feature. For me, this was amazing because it was fun as hell, it took advantage of the skills I was building in my English degree, and it would have such an obvious impact on the users. I remember thinking, If we could do this to the whole product and not just my small feature, that’d be great for the business!
That day was, for me, the moment when my eyes opened and I decided to become a designer.
Can you speak to your path into design? From our discussions, you have a somewhat non-conventional path.
That story was how I got started. Afterwards, I would find jobs that let me insinuate myself into the design process, wherever it was happening and by whomever it was being done. Eventually, on one of my later co-op work terms, I had the chance to build a team that was responsible for documentation — but also for UI design. That was such great opportunity that I decided to finish my degree part time and just stay there. So I did.
I ended up working there for almost five years. Afterwards, it took another five years for me to fully shift into a design role and leave the writing part behind.
You’re now one of two Vice-President’s of Product at Boltmade, can you speak to what that entails?
That’s right. Mark and I are Co-VPs. Boltmade as an organization is very flat, very collaborative, and very open. I think of the role primarily as helping to reflect on our practice and work with the team to consider how we can get better at providing value to clients. Provide coaching and support to people as they might need it or want it. It’s pretty loose, and pretty effective for our culture.
Another part of the role is new business development. I’ll often meet with prospective clients and help understand what their needs are, assess if there’s a fit with Boltmade, and help get projects off the ground.
On the topic of design, there seems to be many ideas of what design is — what do you believe design to be?
It’s problem solving.
To me, it’s about finding the right form and the right behaviour of a system, or a product, or a service to achieve specific goals for the business through the value it offers to the user. A big part of problem solving is framing. Framing means clarifying and understanding what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. That’s a fundamental activity in design.
The work we do in user experience has the effect of holding a mirror up to a product team and even an entire company. Our work forces companies to answer the big questions: Who are we designing this for? What is it supposed to do for them? How do they perceive it? Is it having the effect we want? Do we even know what we want? It turns out, these questions aren’t about the product we’re designing at all. They’re actually about the business. And they’re very powerful questions. I like that metaphor for thinking about the impact we can have on our organizations.
How does UX and Design fit into the process at Boltmade?
Boltmade is a software product design and development shop. People come to us for both design and development. Well, they come to Boltmade for products, in fact. Our job is to help clients launch great products into the market, and design is a huge part of that.
We try not to draw a strong boundary between design and development because great products require both. Occasionally, clients may not think they need design. They might say, “We need this thing built. We need developers. We need this coded.” Certainly that’s true, but we work in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary manner. It’s unusual for us to have a project that would have only developers or only designers on it.
So even if a client hasn’t asked for design, we’re there for support. We’re asking those questions I mentioned earlier. What’s the outcome you want? Who is this product for? What does success look like? Clients don’t see those questions as design questions. They’re just questions about the business.
I should mention this phenomenon goes the other way, too. Clients may come to us initially for design and UX, but we always work with developers and every project is better for it.
What are we doing wrong as a design industry? Is there something that we should be doing differently?
We have a tendency to design the profession itself. We invest a lot of energy thinking and talking about process and terminology to describe what we do. At the end of the day, we could probably be a little less dogmatic and focus instead on just getting things done and doing what works.
Just try stuff, do something that works, we don’t always have to be philosophical about what we’re doing.
Looking back on projects you’ve done over the years — what is one that stands out? Why?
That would be Fluxible. The conference is the biggest, longest running, and most personal of the projects I’ve done. It’s absolutely a design project, too: we’ve laid down design principles, we’ve journey mapped it, we try experiments, and we iterate based on feedback. We get to apply all the tools of our trade as UX designers, which is loads of fun and quite rewarding.
Can you speak more to where Fluxible fits in the world of Design here in Kitchener-Waterloo, and Canada?
We have three clear goals for Fluxible. The first one is to have fun. It’s so much work to run an event like this that when it stops being fun, we’ll stop doing it. That’s the selfish goal.
The second goal — and this was our primary motivator for getting started — is to help grow and up-level the design community in Waterloo Region. Once a year, we bring top experts to town from around the world. You don’t have to sell your boss on the budget for an expensive trip to some other city; instead, there’s a tremendous learning opportunity right here in your own backyard. It’s also an opportunity to make connections with others who share your passion for design, which is exciting! People leave Fluxible feeling re-energized about their work and their community.
The third goal is to do something interesting enough here that the rest of the design world takes notice and realizes what Waterloo Region has to offer. For over fifteen years, I’ve been in roles where I’ve had to hire for design positions. When you talk to someone from outside the region about coming here to live and work, they simply used to hang up the phone. “Stop talking, I’m not even interested.” That’s changing now, though. People realize there’s a vibrant professional community. “Something’s definitely happening there. I’m not going to be out in the boonies on my own. There are people to connect with and probably other opportunities I don’t even know about.” Which is an important consideration when you think about taking a new job. We see Fluxible playing a role in shaping the perception of KW as a place where you can be a great UX designer.
What piece of advice would you pass onto aspiring designers in the region?
Based on how it worked for me, I recommend always putting yourself in situations where something interesting could happen. Where doors could open. Where you have the chance to create your own opportunities, learn new things, and develop new skills.
No matter what your job role, I would encourage you not to feel penned in. Take a chance and spread your wings. Stick your nose in someone else’s business — respectfully! — and interesting things will happen.
As a member of the local design community in KW, is there something our community is lacking right now?
We’ve been lacking a strong education program for UX and product design. That’s changing, though. Even two years from now, it’ll be a different landscape.
Over the last ten years, numerous attempts have been made to create some kind of Design with a capital D school here. Unfortunately, those efforts tend to get steered it in directions that turn out to be less useful to companies in the region. For example, government finds digital media more easy to understand (and thus to fund) than UX. So we have some great programs in animation, sound design, and content design. But our companies are starving for product design!
To understand the difference, consider YouTube: digital media is about training people to create the videos that appear on YouTube; product design and UX is about designing YouTube itself. That’s where we have a gap, for a while longer at least.
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You can catch Robert on Twitter at @becubed.
If you want to know more about Boltmade, or fancy joining Robert and the Design team, you can check out open opportunities here:
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