Oct 16, 2018
In this episode, host Travis Neilson interviews August de los Reyes, a UX director at Google, about considering a product’s cultural equity—its noneconomic and nonfunctional benefits—and how that influences a user’s state of being. De los Reyes also touches on everything from game and car design to the Eames’ Powers of Ten to illustrate how zooming in and out of designed systems can help bridge the gap between the designer’s intent, the functionality of a product, and the user’s emotional response. A few highlights:
On the challenge of elegant
design
“Elegance is
complexity described in a simple way... I don't think simplicity is
an end in itself. There can be things that are simple but not
engaging or valuable. On the flip side, there are things that are
just too complex to be meaningful. Where design can add value is
through elegance—taking complex systems or complex ideas and
presenting them in a very simple way.”
On the power of cultural equity
“What helps drive a consumer towards one car
rather than another? I’d argue that it’s neither its functional or
economic value, but rather its cultural equity. And what generates
that cultural equity is design.”
On what designers can learn from video
games
“The interaction of game design
is so well crafted, down to painstaking detail at the mechanical
level. It's my hope that we can bridge that kind of care and
thoughtfulness into other kinds of software.”
Handy info and links for this episode:
August de los Reyes is a UX director in the search and assistant organization at Google, where he leads an effort called Ecosystem UX. Before joining Google he was head of design at Pinterest and Microsoft Xbox.