THE OMNI SHOW

Nick Disabato: But I actually think within this, OmniGraffle hits the sweet spot for me. And I know that, this is obviously on the Omni Show, but I'm not being paid to say this, but for me, I can crack out a new design within 10 to 15 minutes on OmniGraffle. I can make a screen end to end and do everything with real text very, very, very quickly. And it's because again, I started using OmniGraffle when I bought my very first Mac in, what was that? May of 2004.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show where we connect with the amazing community surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn how Nick Disabato uses OmniGraffle. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason and we are honored today to have Nick Disabato with us. He is a guest that spent more than a decade probably proving a pretty radical idea, and that's that design isn't just a cost line, it's a revenue engine. And if you can prove it with evidence instead of opinion, we'll dig into a little bit of that, but we're also talking about how Nick's also the author of Cadence & Slang, a little book on interaction design that started life as one of Kickstarter's earliest projects and never stopped finding readers. Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.

Nick Disabato: Thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely. Dig in a little bit deeper, if you don't mind. A line or two about Cadence & Slang, but also the work that you do day-to-day. Where do you find yourself and what do you find yourself doing?

Nick Disabato: Yeah, so I'm Nick Disabato. Everybody calls me Nick D. I'm a designer and writer from the city of Chicago. I wrote Cadence & Slang in 2009, '10 and put out the second edition, I think '13, and it's been selling at a clip since. Those are boxes of it right behind me, which is very exciting. And I run a design consultancy called Draft. I've been operating, doing that since 2012. And we basically make the numbers go up for independent software companies in a way that's hopefully not gross. We interview your customers, we chat about what makes them tick and try to observe what they're actually doing. We find that what people say, what people do are radically different things. We use all that evidence to inform our design decisions. We run a lot of A/B tests and one-off fixes and slowly improve your funnel. And I'd like to believe I'm pretty good at it. We've got over a hundred clients over the course of our history and I'm really grateful to be doing the kind of work that I do. So that's the short answer.

Andrew J. Mason: I love that. And let's dig in a little bit to the short answer as well because for people that let's say this is a new concept to them, they're not really spending a whole lot of their life or time thinking about the software world. What are some surprising things in that delta between say and do that you're talking about here? People say, oh, I would use that or I would do that or this is the thing. And then on the other side of that, what do you see show up for folks?

Nick Disabato: The amount of times people have told me that they very, very deeply care about a certain product's value proposition and then go off and never click on the call to action would melt your brain. Right?

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Nick Disabato: That's I think the biggest one. And ultimately I think that what we want is to understand what motivates people in a more emotional sense because I personally believe, and you can disagree on this, that almost all purchasing decisions are emotionally driven.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow. Okay.

Nick Disabato: Feel something when you buy something basically, or you feel something when you're missing something and you start to be in the market to buy something. And so I spend a lot of time asking people what, jobs to be done, like what Clayton Christensen was talking about from Harvard Business School, what do you hire the product to do? And where were you? How were you feeling when you decided that you actually wanted to be trying to find this product? What research process did you go through? What held you back before you decided to buy? What were you still worried about when you hit the buy button that you didn't think was actually addressed on our site? And sometimes we'll see people read our funnel for 19 minutes and then quit off and it wasn't actually landing for them or they had to convince their boss and we don't know what the org chart looks like. So there's a lot of different psychological, operational, behavioral things that are happening and it's my job to get to the bottom of it and offer some clarity to the team. And that's job one actually, I think. I don't think that there's... The second job is what do we do about it because nobody ever ships an interview report in the history of humankind.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right. That's right.

Nick Disabato: That would be cool. I would actually like that someday. But no, it's pretty much only for the CEO and a few interested parties and then we figure out what to do. And so what we do, that's where OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner come in and a lot of other prototyping tools, that notebook back there. Yeah, I start prototyping solutions for people. And because I've worked in OmniGraffle for 22 years now, I'm pretty fast at it. So I find that it goes better than Figma for me for whatever reason, just my brain has been stapled to it forever and it doesn't change. So there's that element of it, but really we want to place safer bets. So if the CEO says, "Hey, we want to take our product in this direction, or we want to talk about our marketing page in this way, or we want to validate or redesign in a certain way." Well, by that point, I'm probably sitting on a ton of research that says whether to do what we're doing, but also how to do what we're doing. And so I end up acting as a lot of guardrails on the process. And I find that to be really, really useful for people because they don't really have a library of research beyond maybe support inquiries, individual anecdotal evidence from talking to customers, just colloquially, whatever, but they haven't done the work and they haven't done a work that gives them critical distance because they're the CEO. If I find out you're the CEO of Omni Group, for example, and you ask me what I think about OmniOutliner, I'm absolutely going to sanitize my response to you, right?

Andrew J. Mason: Mm-hmm. That's right.

Nick Disabato: And at the same time, if I come in and say, "Hey, I'm an independent consultant and I say this at the beginning of every interview I've done for 15 years, I have a direct line to the CEO, you cannot hurt my feelings," and they will not find you. So if you want to just savage me for 30 minutes, go off queen, you can. And it's wonderful actually because that's when we start to get honesty out of people and that helps inform the process really well.

Andrew J. Mason: It's really interesting this framing you've given around what this process is because in the center of it is this accuracy that you want to arrive at. What is the truth about the behavior and why we do things we do inside of software? But on either side of it, there seems to be an educational layer and also an emotional layer that you have to navigate. I akin it a little bit to hostage negotiation where it's like, "Okay, over here on this side we got to figure out, okay, is what you're saying truly the case? 99% of the time, no, it's just based on a story or an idea or some single interaction you've had. And on this side, you're saying that you absolutely would or wouldn't do something here, but then the data that we have here in the center tells us otherwise." I mean, that is the question. How do you start navigating through all of that and drawing truth and clarity out of it in a way that makes, number one, not only the truth emerge, but also number two, everybody okay with it?

Nick Disabato: I don't know if it's a hostage negotiation unless they're being really... I mean, you get me thinking because I have read books on hostage negotiation and I've dealt with in other areas of my life sociopaths. So navigating that, thinking about... But it does make sense if the politics of the organization that's buying from you are really busted and there's a lot of weird subterfuge and people are openly lying to you, and that can happen. That can also happen in taboo industries. So I used to work for a cannabis brand for a little while and you would talk with people and they would be like, "Is this being recorded? Are you the feds? I live in Florida." And so there would be an element of heightened nervousness. But when we think about emotions, I'm actually thinking more about the idea of buyer's remorse and more about the idea of objections showing up in my head as to whether or not the company is trustworthy and whether I will get what they say they're going to give me, right?

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Nick Disabato: I have a ton of examples of this. I'll give a couple. One of them, for example, I have a cell phone with a very large American carrier and they were like, "We're changing your plan. It will not go up more than $6." Then it went up $15.77. And of course I called them. I'm like, "Why did you lie to me, girl? That's not good. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And ultimately you have to tell me what you're going to do." Or, I know that's an egregious, very obvious head slapping one, but then you can have something that is, oh, you have really, really good concierge support and will help you every step of the way, but then it ends up only being for a few months or they may not be able to help you in the way that you're expecting. So then we have to go into what does it take to actually get you onboarded effectively and get you started to get value from the product? And how often do you actually need to reach out for touch points? I actually don't know the answers to those questions because I'm a weirdo off in a different space from the company. And so I have to learn those things myself, but that gives me the ability to come from a more naive standpoint and not internalize the existing busted practices. And then lastly, how many times did you revisit coming back? Did you keep asking questions? Is this a simple $5 purchase? If you are running out of Kleenex, you go and buy another box of Kleenex and you're done. But if you're buying a $4,000 computer, you're going to be doing more research and putting in more involvement with it and I tend more on the latter side with my clients. So you have to think about, well, what is their head space? Who else are they talking to? What does the competition look like? Is there a sales cycle? If so, are there contracts or SLAs or other things that we need to be thinking about? And truly it's different for every client, but I think that within all of this is a messy meat sack on the other end of the line who wants the promotion, they want results, they want to look good to their boss, they want to not invest in the wrong vendor, they want to make sure that you do what you say you're going to do and not dilk them with usurious fees going forward or a product that's going to suddenly put sparkle emojis everywhere and piss everyone off.

Andrew J. Mason: Well said. [inaudible 00:10:49].

Nick Disabato: So I think that's all relatable.

Andrew J. Mason: Three products came to mind immediately. That's hilarious.

Nick Disabato: Right. Including the one we're recording this on.

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome.

Nick Disabato: Yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me a little bit about where does OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner enter the conversation for you? When you're staring at this, there's a messy problem, what does opening that blank canvas or that blank outliner do that maybe a whiteboard couldn't for you? As you mentioned, there's this muscle memory attached to it. What are some of the things that show up for you as you're like, okay, number one, which tool do I choose? And then number two, how does that show up for you?

Nick Disabato: If I knew the precise answer to what tool I choose, it's such a fine art. I would know more about myself, I think, but I have OmniGraffle, I have OmniOutliner, I have a competitor Figma, I have my notebook. And sometimes I literally just want to get the rough idea down and run it past the CEO or whomever, whatever decision maker and be like, "Is this right?" And that's usually if an actual fundamental design would be a little bit too complex or require designing a lot of new components or it's just greenfield. And so I literally am just napkining it out and seeing, all right, well, and also is the layout clean enough? If I have more complex widgetry or interesting grid systems, I need to snap it in, I need to do a little bit more fine grain design, then we move into OmniGraffle. If we need to do something super high fidelity, then we move into Figma. If I already have access to your design system and I know how to use your components, it's worth the extra 15 minutes for me to go into Figma and do what I'm doing. But I actually think within this, OmniGraffle hits the sweet spot for me. And I know that this is obviously on the Omni show, but I'm not being paid to say this, but for me, I can crack out a new design within 10 to 15 minutes on OmniGraffle. I can make a screen end to end and do everything with real text very, very, very quickly. And it's because again, I started using OmniGraffle when I bought my very first Mac in, what was that? May of 2004. It was my graduation gift from my parents when I got out of college, and you now know how old I am.

Andrew J. Mason: Congratulations.

Nick Disabato: [inaudible 00:13:16]. And I started using that and I just candidly, I thought it was a lot nicer of a tool to use than Visio, which was the major competitor that Microsoft had. I know I'm dating myself again, but that was what I was using in -

Andrew J. Mason: I know. I remember it. Immediately a splash screen jumped into my head. That's right.

Nick Disabato: ... 2002, it was like the architecture blueprint app that was not in Microsoft Office, but it should have been, question mark. Ask Steve Balmer.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Nick Disabato: And so I got into it that way, and I still think you guys have the best smart guides and the best smart pasting better than any other layout app that I've ever experienced.

Andrew J. Mason: Let me ask you about specifically OmniOutliner. What are the scenarios you find yourself in as you're starting to reach for that as a software? Is it where you know what, it's not as much associative, it's more sequential, in my thinking? What are the things that show up for you when you're saying, "I think OmniOutliner is the tool for me"?

Nick Disabato: I don't know if this is the right way to use OmniOutliner at all, but I use it all the time for site maps. If there's a big navigation tree or a site map that I need to be picking apart, and this is less often these days because it's mostly software companies, but if there's a big landing page strategy that I need to be thinking about or a lot of documentation, I pulled out OmniOutliner when I did one recently for a client where I overhauled their whole internal documentation system, and we needed to separate out the API from the getting started guide, from the broader reference section. And that was really, really helpful because it was fast, indentation was really fast, and then I just exported it all to Markdown, posted it into GitHub, and I was done with it, and it was actually really wonderful. But I use very simple parts of OmniOutliner. I know it has almost like a word processor functionality where it can zhuzh it up and make it look nice. I have never used that. I've used it because it's extremely fast and simple for outlining, faster than anything else I've seen. So yeah, I just got it once, I think in... I can look back in my email archives, but I bet it was 2006 or '07. It was another very long time ago. Yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: No, that's really helpful. And talk to me less about the, you're talking about the deep capability of it or whatever, but more about the information grouping that shows up there for you. Do you reach for it when it's like, okay, there's a lot of stuff and we really need to condense down our understanding to it into a single page or a single spot? Or is there something more sequential about it where it's like, we've seen how it's laying out right now on the landing page. If we change the order or the sequence of how things show up for us, that's actually a more helpful way to look at it?

Nick Disabato: I think it's pretty hierarchical. I view it as cleaning up a mess. Let's say I have 2,000 links on a big informational site. Maybe I've run a card sort to handle those links. So card sorting is a common UX design activity for those in the back where you come up with a series of subject headers, which would effectively be your primary nav elements, and then you sort everything under those topic areas. And sometimes you can have 10 team members do it and you'll come up with very different categories, very different methodologies of sorting. It turns out that creating hierarchical sorting for an undifferentiated list of content is one of the hardest human cognitive things we can do, and everybody has their own mental model and school of thought around it. So if I'm able to condense those lists easily and move things around quickly, then I can give form and legibility to a card sort very, very quickly and easily and in a way that makes sense to the rest of the team.

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome.

Nick Disabato: And it's not like Sketch or Figma couldn't just rip you off. I don't know what their problem is, but I found it actually exceptionally liberating and useful. And so for me, when I'm getting something together, they know they're going to get just a bunch of Helvetica and icons, but it will express the problem. And for me as a designer, my biggest thing to do is be a communicator within the team and get everybody understanding why we're doing what we're doing. And if OmniGraffle can make that faster for me, or if Sketching can make that faster for me, then I'm going to go ahead and do it. And really, it's just a question of what the trade-offs are and how much time I need to spend if I think it's going to be faster in a certain tool, and that's something I've just honed over 15 years, 20 years.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. I love this kind of deep reservoir of experience that you have to pull from, as you mentioned, the research externally, but also the personal experience internally as well. Talk to me a little bit about this framing for A/B testing. We mentioned it a bit a couple of questions ago, but I'd love to dig in specifically for, is there a time where maybe you have the interaction set up in OmniGraffle or something wireframed out, here's our conjecture, here's our A/B test, and the test changed your mind or client's mind in a way that not really anybody expected. Here's something that we think it's going to head in the direction of, and then, oh, absolutely not. No, it didn't, or it did.

Nick Disabato: So one thing that you need to know, dear listener, is that industry-wide, all of tech, obviously this is a hard to measure thing, but AB testing platforms have come out with their numbers on this. Only about 12 to 18% of AB tests win, according to whatever metric you believe. So usually that's conversion rate or average revenue per user, depending on what industry you're in. Probably average revenue per user matters the most for e-commerce. Conversion rate matters the most for software businesses. And that percentage is insanely low. 12% is one out of eight, 18% is one out of six. Draft's win rate is somewhere in the 60 to 65% range. It's varied over the course of the past 10 years, and we play it conservative. I don't like to inflate that number because ultimately I don't think I have to. If I beat the A/B test win rate industry-wide by 4X, it shows that grounding things in evidence actually makes sense.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Nick Disabato: But it also, to directly answer your question, proves that 1/3 of the time I have no idea what I'm doing. I think I'm smart. I'm sitting on 25 years of interaction design experience. I'm still failing a third of the time. I view it almost like tennis. If you play tennis or know pro tennis at all, Roger Federer's point win rate was something like 54% over the course of his whole career. That means the greatest tennis player of all time was losing 46% of the time, right?

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Nick Disabato: And also, the nice thing about A/B testing is you get to keep what wins and throw away what doesn't win. So that's all a prelude to the fact that I'm surprised constantly by what wins. Oh, that masthead headline test is definitely going to do numbers. Everybody's looking at it. They all care about it. I changed the right element in the wrong way, numbers go down. I changed the right element to something that's too subtle, numbers go down or don't change at all. And that happens to me still a few times a month.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, that's right.

Nick Disabato: So there are elements of surprise, I think also around the magnitude of tests. I once restructured a business's entire, I was an e-commerce client and the business's entire pricing structure and incentive system, and I gave them discounts at tiers basically to help incentivize larger order volumes. An average revenue per user went up by 250%, and that number was so high that I stopped the test, checked to see if there was a bug, restarted the test, ran it again, and it went up by even more than that. And then a month later, I'm literally in Mexico City on my winter vacation. I look at that number, close the tab, close my laptop, and just stare at a duck pond for three hours. And now we have the term duck pond testing in my company to characterize when you get in either direction, like I destroyed the business or you hired 80 new people. Those can happen. Those are the things that get, they do numbers on LinkedIn and bros love them. I get those every other year. I believe more in compound interest in getting tiny gains over and over time, but you get duck pond tests, they happen, and it's extremely thrilling, and you can get really addicted to that idea. So I don't know if I'm being too vague in my answer because you're like, "Give me examples of when you're surprised." I'm like, "I'm surprised all the time." I think that's-

Andrew J. Mason: Constantly. Yeah. I live in a state of being surprised.

Nick Disabato: Literally everything you could conceivably say, things I thought were no-brainers end up doing nothing. And I'm like, "Well, I'm not dumb. Yo." So, yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: That's helpful. No, that's exactly what I'm looking for. And also this mindset that shows up where there's a humility, a beginner's mindset, even in the midst of great experience that shows up there. I mean, your example about Roger Federer, constantly feeling like you're losing, I mean, depending on what you're focusing on, the wins are there or not, but just that sense of, "And I'm still in it because I love this process." It's thrilling to be able to hear that and see. Let me dip into the book real quick too. The book was one of Kickstarter's earliest projects. What was it like to really bet on this interaction design as a book that early? And then what have you learned from watching this book keep selling after all these years as well?

Nick Disabato: When the book came out, I was young and considerably more insane and feral. So I didn't have quite as much of a sense of risk as I do now. It's been, what, 15 years? And literally when I hated my job, I'll go through the very high level of where I was mindset-wise, because I think it will answer your first question more precisely. I hated my job. I was chopping up comps for Internet Explorer 6 for a living. I wasn't doing any UX design or interaction design, even though I had gotten out of grad school for this. I was still using OmniGraffle, and I had the outline together for a book because I had been reading a lot of books to understand the principles of UX design for eventually my first gig. And then somebody who I worked at the same college radio station as emails me one day, and it was classic. It was like 2009, and he emailed his entire address book. There was like 1,500 people on the CC thread, and it blew up my inbox for a month. And he said, "Hey, I have this new website that I want everybody to take a look at, and if you want, I can make an account for you. It's called kickstarter.com." And I'm like, "Can I get in on that?" And he's like, "Sure, here's a creator login." And he invited me, and I got in and put this up, and asked for, I think, 10 or $11,000, and I'm like, "Ha ha, ha, ha ha. I have 200 followers on Twitter and no idea what I'm doing." And you have to sell the idea of the platform too, and no one knows what crowdfunding is in 2009 either. And somehow, miraculously, I made my money and put out the book, but I was not really thinking about whether or not the market had a need for this particular kind of book. I was thinking a lot about how design was having a moment. The iPhone had just come out. Apple was viewed as this godly company, and it was before the Tim Brown Design Thinking book came out. It was before innovation consulting blew up to the degree that it has. And so a lot of people were like, "Well, Apple, this insanely successful company who are cool and interesting, have done it with this thing called design. We would like to learn more about it." And I came in very right place, right time, and created something that synthesized many more technical design books. You can't really recommend Hans Rudolf Bosshard to an executive or somebody who knows nothing about design. You should read the typographic grid. It's a banger, but by all means, please. But there were a lot of weird technical books from the '60s through '80s that either ceased to be relevant or you kind of just took as a buffet. And so I was able to synthesize them all together into something that felt current and a little more urgent, and I think it landed for that reason. And so the reason I think it endured was because I tried to make the principles as evergreen as possible. I was very much caught flat-footed when I made the first version without any idea about mobile, because we had the iPhone for one year when I wrote the manuscript, one year. I didn't even own an iPhone until three months before the manuscript finished. I didn't buy the original one, I bought the 3G one. And I think that was a fatal mistake for the first edition of the book, so I published a second edition that rewrote the whole text. I got a proper editor, and it turned out a lot better, and that's the thing that sells now. I'm very, very proud of it. I always go over, sometimes I'll have a copy of Cadence packed in my backpack, and I will go over and quietly, if I see a copy of Cadence on one of my friend's bookshelves, and it's the first edition, I just [inaudible 00:26:55].

Andrew J. Mason: The old switchero there. Whoops.

Nick Disabato: Looks the same. Looks the same. It's a little thicker, that's it. Only I notice.

Andrew J. Mason: Better [inaudible 00:27:03]. That's right, that's right.

Nick Disabato: So I'm more proud of the second edition, but I think that in order to make books that endure. Rob Fitzpatrick wrote a book called Write Useful Books, and it's literally about how to make books that are recommendable to others and that have enduring shelf life. And there are very few books in practice that have enduring shelf life. I'm lucky that some people believe Cadence & Slang is one of them. I still sell a few a week. I might sell some more from this podcast. I would be grateful, but it's something that you never know when you're putting it out. I tried to think, well, I've been in tech for a really long time and I know the only constant is change, but also there's things that are, I think, truly universal principles of design that we can follow that are boring. They're a trend, they're non-trendy, and that's, I think, where we can sit and really start from the center.

Andrew J. Mason: In this world of design thinking, testing, and everything that shows up here, du jour, your one piece of wisdom that you would say, "Man, if I could just give this as a billboard to the world, wave a magic wand, whatever, and have everybody instantly just be cognizant or aware of this fact or this thing, it would make life so much easier within this realm." What would that be for you if you're like, "This is the thing that, man, if everybody got it, we would start the conversation from here instead of here, and that would just help so many things."

Nick Disabato: If we collectively, this is going to sound maybe a little bit woo, so forgive. If we collectively had the ability to understand what technology is doing to us and for us, and we had more lucidity around it, I think humanity would be very different. If you're asking for the one big thing, how do we read an interface? How do we understand this is for us or not for us? How do we act with some amount of agency and personal understanding of what nourishes us? And I'm asking this because I think I feel like a space alien a lot of the time where I'm not using social media and I'm worried constantly about what technology is doing to humanity as a collective experiment, and I'm wondering why are we putting sparkle emoji on everything? And sometimes I click the sparkle emoji, right? Sometimes it is useful, and I think in order to understand what tech is doing, you kind of have to take yourself outside of yourself and watch you watching the product, watch you playing with the computer or the phone. And I'm so blessed to say I've always been able to do that to some varying degree, and I don't see that happening with a lot of people, they just Use it. And I see it with my usability testing. I see it with my interviews. I even see it in UX design. And I don't know how to impart that on people. If I did, I think I would know what to do in tech and I would just retire. That's it. I would make a trillion dollars and retire or I would destroy Facebook. That's it. And then retire. But I really don't know. And when I tell people this, I think they nod and they're like, "Oh yeah, tech addiction is bad." But I think it really goes for everything. It goes for QuickBooks. It goes for Microsoft Word. It goes for the most boring parts of our lives. And I wish that we were able to critique software more effectively and act with more lucidity and agency around technology and not take what it is for granted or as an answer to everything. Because one thing I've learned in tech is that everybody who's making it is no smarter or less smart than anyone else. They got lucky. They specialized early. They were handed a computer when they were four years old, and so they gained a pedigree around it, but we're all the same.

Andrew J. Mason: Without really giving people the end game of here's what I think or what to think regarding that, are there any behaviors you think that would be helpful that if people aren't engaging in these behaviors or thought processes or patterns, is there anything that you think would lead them in that direction of this metacognition that you're mentioning where you're observing and you're like, "Oh shoot, is how I'm using it the best way to use it?" Are they questions? Are they actions to take? What would you say about that?

Nick Disabato: Is it weird to say mindfulness, like presence?

Andrew J. Mason: No. No, absolutely not.

Nick Disabato: Is that weird? I don't know. Do 10 years of meditation and come back to me. I don't know. I have not done 10 years of meditation. I just got lucky with a weird brain, but that does feel like it. It's that we don't possess presence with our technology. We don't possess a real attentiveness to it. We're just like, you use technology never to use technology. You use technology to do the thing. You just watched me try to grind away at a bunch of buttons and get frustrated before we eventually gave up and went to Zoom. And that happened because we had our set of emotions and responses. And then I have my set of background where I just don't have Chrome on my computer, ETC, ETC. So there's this sense of systems thinking and higher level, not necessarily higher level in terms of I'm a genius, but higher level in terms of I'm zooming one layer out and observing the thing. Time may do that, the ability to reflect on it, but nobody actually uses technology just to have fun with it and use technology unless they're weird like me. They want to do it so they can call their friends, send an email, get on a Zoom call. You're doing the task and not the tech. And that's such a fine distinction, but it's why, I'm going to butcher his name, Marcin Wichary. He's a fellow Chicagoan and he writes very lucidly on a blog called Unsung where he talks about how people work with technology. And there's very little technological criticism out there because I think we're all too busy using it.

Andrew J. Mason: [inaudible 00:33:18].

Nick Disabato: So yeah, I don't know if that's a good answer. I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense, but-

Andrew J. Mason: It's an answer I resonate with because a lot of the internal dialogue that I have when I'm not using tech goes away when I am using tech. And it's like, "Okay, there's something there. Let's dig into that. What is that?"

Nick Disabato: When I'm designing in any tool, my goal is to make something that thinks, all right, well where's this person's brain at? How can I be considerate to them? How can I meet their needs? And I don't even think designers ask that question a lot of the time. They ask how they can make more money. They ask how they can make their boss happy or navigate a political morass. And I actually start every time from, "Well, they're telling me this, I should try and read the room."

Andrew J. Mason: That's right.

Nick Disabato: I have found that makes money for the record.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right. Yeah. There's an inherent kindness in there that's like non-verbal communication that's happening visually that is a kindness saying, "Hey, I thought about you as the user." That's good.

Nick Disabato: Yeah. And it's extremely challenging to those in power because they want to believe that they're Steve Jobs and that they have the right ideas. And a lot of my work involves, early on in my engagement with them, I have to be like, "I'm going to challenge you. No, really, I'm..." Here's what happens when I drop an interview report.

Andrew J. Mason: That's right. That's right.

Nick Disabato: So yeah, I hope that's helpful. Yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: It's fantastic. Nick, I've loved this conversation. I feel like it's very instructive, definitely at the design level, but also at the let's be conscious about what we're doing and how we're doing it with technology level. How can folks stay in your orbit and continue the conversation with you? What ways would you prefer them to engage? Definitely add a link to the book in the show notes, but what else should show up for them?

Nick Disabato: The book is a cadence.cc, C-A-D-E-N-C-E. And my website is at draft.nu, draft how you would think to spell it. N-U. My personal website's at nickd.org, but it's pretty thin these days. Just go to Draft's website, that's it. You can reach out to me there, sign up for my mailing list. I send something every Tuesday, no fluff, and that's it. Thank you so much for listening. Appreciate you.

Andrew J. Mason: It's incredible. Yeah, thank you so much, Nick. Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon at theomnishow@omnigroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omni Group at omnigroup.com/blog.