Abstracts — An Interview with Drew Bridewell
Senior Design Specialist & Design Educator at InVision
Welcome to Abstracts, Drew. How’s your life at InVision?”
Exciting! Ever since I joined InVision, I have been on a wild, creative, challenging ride. I joined to help establish a new team at the company that would be full of Design Specialists.
These individuals are previously lead/senior practitioners in the field who are passionate about design education, who had success in their previous roles at executing world-class design experiences, and overall a thirst to do something that would allow them to flex entirely different design muscles in their career.
We recently brought on more team members and merged with the design practice team. We are now the “Design Transformation” team, led by Stephen Gates.
I get to work, partner, and collaborate with some incredibly talented individuals. Chris Avore, Stephen Gates, Nabil Laoudji, Andrew Godfrey, Aarron Walter, Elijah Woolery, Leah Buley, and Emily Campbell to name a few.
Life at InVision is not just about working with a talented internal team. It’s about getting to learn from and meet thousands of designers from around the world.
I love learning about these teams most heartfelt pain points around processes, implementations, tooling, and cultures. These are challenges that InVision is working on every day. We have a desire to make every team in the world better designers and practitioners.
Teams from around the world are building amazing experiences. It’s exhilarating to know and to be a part of this design revolution.
Could you share your experience working at LinkedIn and talk about your initiative project ‘Practical UX Weekly’.
I previously worked at LinkedIn before joining InVision. I was a part of the Lynda.com acquisition and also the Microsoft acquisition of Linkedin.
It was such a fantastic experience to work at both of these companies. The people that made up Lynda.com and Linkedin were some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. LinkedIn and Lynda are companies that understand growth mindsets. They encourage it, and we were trained as managers to be first class people managers.
What I mean by that is our weekly 1:1 with our reports was all about career growth, setting them up for success, and being supportive. This manifested into meaningful relationships and removing unnecessary noise from the individual’s plate.
I believe that this was a mindful practice that stemmed all the way from Jeff Weiner to the VPs, down to the design leadership and across the company.
I dedicated my tenure at LinkedIn focused on Learning solutions like world-renown online learning platform Lynda.com and LinkedIn’s newer learning experience Linkedin Learning.
I’ve always had a love to learn and develop myself. In doing so, I’ve become incredibly passionate about sharing content. At first, I would read article after article on Smashing Magazine and CSS tricks with Chris Coyier. I would share anything that added value to my life. I watched endless hours of Lynda.com video content to learn the tools and practices needed to be better. Then I gathered more and more experience in the field and started to develop a perspective that I wanted to share.
That’s when Practical UX Weekly emerged. I realized there was so much content out there in the industry, but it was often hard for me to read an article then apply the skill that I had learned. I enjoy the video format, connecting with the teacher, and being able to put myself in place to apply the knowledge of what I learned immediately.
This feeling led me to develop what is now Practical UX Weekly. A weekly series I produced and published on Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning where I share the practices, perspectives, and methods of being a user experience designer. It’s important to me that these videos are short, concise, and engaging. Right now, there are 40 episodes, ranging from working with product management and engineers, to designing a responsive website. I also include some case studies from when I worked on the Lynda.com product.
Season two of Practical UX Weekly is in the works.
How do you connect user experience, data & storytelling?
UX, Data, and Storytelling are all interconnected. You need a user experience to signify the context and to orient yourself to where you are at in space and time.
You then need both qualitative and quantitative data to help inform and drive new hypothesises of solving problems and to validate the success of your newly designed solution.
Storytelling comes on multiple fronts.
The first one would be how you articulate and walk your product partners through the problem that your customer is facing. You could say that we talked to five customers and they all had the same problem, or you could pull five video clips of the customers stating the same thing. Then mix it with an introduction of the quantitative data points that were informing you in the first place that there was a problem.
Thinking about storytelling at every stage of the product design lifecycle is not only going to help every member of your team understand why they are building a new feature, but it’s also going to help all parties empathize better with the customers existing experience.
When you can get your team to empathize with the customer’s experience, it increases the sense of urgency and can increase the focus on implementing the right solution.
Keep in mind, cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests content delivered as a story can be up to 22 times more memorable than just facts alone.
I’ve read this research from others as well. So when I have a chance to jump into storytelling around user experience, I’m going to combine people, problems, data, research, along with setting the stage of walking through the solution from the first thought a customer may have, to the recurring use of that solution.
To learn more about storytelling in UX check out my episode on “Storytelling in User Experience Design.”
InVision is playing a major role in design education. Could you talk about some innovative projects from InVision?
InVision has led the way when it comes to design education in my opinion. It’s difficult to go a week without InVision either publishing a new Inside Design at X company or a fresh new email from CEO Clark Valberg that has some of the most hilarious and meaningful CTA’s you’ve ever seen in a product.
I still get asked if Clark from InVision is real when I go to a customer on sites, and the answer is always Yes. He is very much real, and an incredible human being.
Then you have DesignBetter.co led by our Design Education team, a set of curated content consisting of ebooks, podcasts, workshops, and our newest section called Conversations.
Our workshops hosted through DesignBetter.co teach anything from storytelling to building out design systems.
As of late, the team has pioneered a new innovate project called the Design Genome Project. This is a combination of stories and data points, and practices that leading technology companies are applying to their day to day.
I enjoy the Design Genome Project because it gives you an opportunity to look inside a company’s infrastructure without them giving away all their trade secrets. With this new project, we’re democratizing design knowledge that can help shed new perspectives for organizations across the world.
Then you have my newly formed team of 2018. We’re called the Design Transformation Team. Our team consists of ex-head of designs, Design Leads, Design Managers, and Design Strategists.
Our goal is to help elevate design practices, collaboration, and design maturity across the globe.
What does this mean when it comes to working?
- We travel to companies to host workshops on design thinking.
- We’ll coach teams on getting started in the building, maintaining, and scaling of a design system.
- We’ll share best practices in working inside the InVision platform, and how to get the most out of it.
- We’ll help remove mental roadblocks for VPs, teams, and individuals who need a new way of looking at the problem.
- We’ll encourage looking at challenges as opportunities, and then we’ll prescribe ways for our partners to take an iterative approach to the solution.
I think what InVision is doing around Design Education is a “people first” approach. It’s all about the people.
That in itself is innovation, disruption, and of course, transformation.
With InVision Studio, Design System Manager — DSM, InVision V7, the app marketplace, Inspect, Freehand, Boards, Craft, DesignBetter.co, Design Genome Project and the Design Transformation team, I believe this company is focusing on making a massive impact.
Creativity marries with technological intelligence to create some outstanding results. How do you envision the influence of Artificial Intelligence in design?
I like to think of AI in many positive ways. I believe that AI could help empower all product designers to build better products faster. I like to tie the idea and thought of AI back to things that we do day in and day out. Which could be all the tasks that are known as busy work.
Think about the things we do as designers that require us to dig for details, search for artifacts, reorganize our layouts, share our files, find specific users to test, and the list goes on and on. I believe that AI mixed into our creative workflows could not only be incredibly resourceful, but it could help us solve problems faster. Imagine telling your computer the following:
Hi InVision, open the sign-up flow I designed last year in September, the KPIs we were measuring, and the outcomes for the project. Can you also load our competitors sign up experience and map their existing workflow?
This way you can see every step of the workflow so that you can find the strengths and weaknesses in the flow immediately. This is just one fundamental vision of how AI could empower us all to be better designers.
It’s not about AI taking over and telling us what to do, it’s about us utilizing free internet data and parsing out the most meaningful information that you need to do your job better. To me this isn’t scary, this is revolutionary.
It is essential as we scale new technological advancements that we are mindful of our actions and hold our society to high ethical and moral standards in the experiences we design.
I have faith that we can do that even though there have been some movies and stories created to scare the living daylights out of us with regards to AI. I have to admit I still love watching them all. I’m a bit of a movie fanatic.
InVision introduces a free design tool ‘Invision Studio’, How does it stand out from rest of the design tools?
I first want to say that I’ve always been a lover of tools. I took my first Photoshop class in high school, and it immediately changed my life. The ability to create something you could imagine was a sense of magic for me. It was like I found my place in the world. It would challenge me, keep me inspired, and drove me to a place where I always wanted to learn more. Then it was Front Page, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks, then Sketch and now we’re in a world of Studio.
InVision Studio has been a game changer for me with regards to how I think about design tools. I’m used to looking at a design tool to solve 1 or 2 specific use-cases. I would use Photoshop for high fidelity photo manipulation and graphic design. Then Illustrator for vector illustrations, workflow maps, and iconography.
I’d use InDesign for print/pdf work that required better use of typography and grid systems. Fireworks was for everything screen design. This was one of my all-time favorite tools. I loved the pages, states, and layer model.
They also were early to the component game. It made prototyping incredibly easy. Then there was Sketch. I would jump in between both Sketch and Fireworks for a period because Sketch started to blow past Fireworks from a stability perspective and I couldn’t deal with Fireworks crashing over and over.
After now using Sketch for many years I have become very fond of it. It doesn’t crash, it allows for plugins and is pretty compelling.
Tools need to be stable, reliable, fast and empowering. The path InVision Studio is on is incredibly exciting for me. It has taken what I love about all the screen based tools and built a foundation that can be scaled to become the world’s greatest design tool.
From the new developer platform for plugins, the integrated motion editor and timeline, to the in context prototyping, and simple contextual user interface. I believe the design, product, and engineering team driving this forward are genuinely incredible.
It’s not just essential to have the vision of where it is going and what it can be, it’s about the team behind the experience. A lot of teams struggle because the operational side of building products is tough, painful and sometimes ruthless, but I’m feeling confident in the heart and soul behind Studio.
That is what creators will connect with, and the community will be able to know that this product is going to evolve, get the proper attention, and will not be abandoned.
The future needs InVision Studio. Studio’s heart and soul is being thoughtful about each of these pillars. Features will come fast, but the soul of this product is where it will win, and that’s something I believe in.
Do you think design defines business? How would you empower designers to focus more on user experience and the business of design?
User experience and business thinking need to go hand and hand.
Full stop. All individuals on a team should understand the business goals, mission, vision, history, and of course the people that use the product. If you don’t know where to start for any of these, it can start by asking your manager, or senior leadership inside your organization.
It’s important to understand each of the following topics because this information both qualitative (opinion based on experiences) and quantitative (metrics of usage) help inform you to create meaningful, actionable steps to solving business problems. Let’s get into practical examples.
If you choose to skip the product or company’s history, you lose sight of what worked in the past, what failed, and what’s been tried. You learn about past solutions that might not have been shipped because the time in the market wasn’t the right one. Knowing the history enables you to see the evolution of the product which gives you a far better perspective.
This allows for a far better strategic outlook in how you approach your thinking. Business goals are what keeps the company in business. If you don’t understand what those are then you’re disabling the possibility of innovative solutions.
You’re also making it harder to help your product and engineering partners who are primarily depending on you. They rely on you to help execute, collaborate and facilitate the team’s ideas. We are the individuals who help bring our team’s hypotheses and solutions to life. If you’re not aware of what metrics help drive the business forward, then you are just a service. You’re not a participant or a contributor, you’re just more of a resource.
I’ll hear from designers from time to time say that they want a seat at the table.
They want to be a part of the decisions.
This doesn’t come from you asking for permission. You have to KNOW that you are meant to be a driving force in the conversation. You must be included, and if you’re not, then you need to put yourself in a place where this is a basic expectation for you to do your job.
Period.
You need to know your company’s mission and vision because this is the WHY of your company.
If you don’t know your why then again you are just a service to a more significant thing. When you get to understand the deep level of your companies mission statement and vision statement you start to truly manifest a combination of higher quality hypotheses that have higher chances of solving your company’s biggest problems.
A designer’s role allows them to tap into so many different areas of a business, but where the magic comes in is when you get to interconnect all of those insights into a solution that can be tested, validated, and deployed.
This is the magic of our role. The last topic is the people aspect. There is no excuse you could tell me that should stop you from talking to your customers every other week.
Knowing your customers is what makes mediocre products graduate to world-class products. Why is that? It’s because you are building solutions that truly solve the problems that people are dealing with, and when you solve those basic problems, then you evolve to creating product enhancements, and that’s when true innovation occurs.
I don’t think you should expect innovative solutions if your product is not functional. Once you have a beautiful, consistent, and functional user experience that’s when you start to open new doors of innovation and creativity.
Sometimes you just need to build a great wheel. What you should be mindful of is where that wheel is going to live, how it can be improved, and how it could fit into other cars.
Working remotely is the new norm. Could you share the benefits of following a remote work culture?
I’ve worked at LinkedIn, Lynda.com, Crosscap, NICUSA, along with another handful of other companies. Every single company has had remote offices in multiple locations. Not one of these companies had a single space, a single entity, or a single place where everyone was co-located. What does this mean? This means that I’ve always been working remotely to a certain degree.
When you’re in a position where this is your world, collaboration isn’t a choice. Your survival in the role depends on it. I also played sports my entire life before graduating from SCAD, and sports were no different. If you choose to skip a day and don’t try to be a good collaborator then you lose. Not only the game but possibly in your relationships.
Working remotely is a personal choice that you must make based on your needs. It works great for me because at this stage of my career this is what I was in search of. I wanted to travel, see my son and wife more and work at a company where the entire organization embraced it. The icing on the cake is that our company is building tools and practices to help make this easier for everyone.
If you’re making people’s lives better than you’re making more people and customers happy, which to me sounds like a magical transformational journey that is not only impacting InVision’s success but our entire global society.
I also tend to think that because we have a 100% dispersed team across the globe, we are designing solutions that are uniquely diverse and inclusive. We have people from all over the world, working towards the same mission and vision, inspiring leaders and that is our secret sauce.
How does a designer bring a change in the world by being a good design mentor?
This one hits home for me. I feel like I’ve had some incredible managers and coworkers throughout my journey that have helped me at every stage of my career.
Being a good design mentor is not just about passing along your expertise to another less experienced individual. It’s a way to help expedite a persons journey, and set them up for success. If you ever have an opportunity to do a mentorship I’d highly suggest you take it very seriously. I’d also suggest you make sure that you have mental capacity to be a people manager at the time.
I bucket mentorships into four different quadrants. I look at how I’m going to support, empower, inspire, and coach the individual. If I don’t feel like I can do these four things then I’ll probably not take on the mentorship.
Lets break them down.
Support is what you need when you’re struggling on a topic and you need someone to talk to. You need this mentor to not judge you, not make fun of you, not try and tell you what you’re doing wrong. You want this behavior to be a moment to show your empathy. Empathy for another human being is critical to put yourself into another persons shoes. This helps you relate and truly show you can listen. This builds a bond that will last a lifetime and some of my best managers and mentors were exceptional at supporting me.
Empower is what you do when you realize that your mentee is losing their confidence in what they do. Sometimes people can feel like they don’t have what it takes, or they feel like its hard to expand their skills. This is when a mentor can jump in and connect the situation into an actionable opportunity for the mentee. This could be the designer who often sees opportunities but never acts on them, and has to wait to be told to do it. This would be a great opportunity to help your mentee feel empowered that they have what it takes to do the job and you have faith in them to do it great. You’ll still be able to support them with the right expectations, but you want to enable them to do the work and make their own decisions. This way they can start building and exercising that skill.
Inspire is a what you need when you least expect it. It’s normal to get stuck from time to time and if we have people around us who can help reboot our passions and excitement from time to time this can be a great trait of a good mentor. The other thing to think about is you don’t want to over do this. I like to balance out the amount of excite and inspirational conversations because I don’t want to be all inspiration and no action. I believe this is a balancing act and there needs to be a little time and space for skills to develop. You don’t have to rush.
Coach is something that is probably the most important aspect of being a good mentor. If you’ve ever played in a team sport this is what will save you and your team in some of the most difficult situations. I’ve learned from playing sports that a good coach can be a game changer. They learn the tendencies of each and every player on the field. You know when you need to lift up a player, and you know when you need to tell a player to go for it. It’s situational, and a skill you learn to pick up over time. It’s similar to reading the room, reading the situation, and having 2–3 options to get you the solution.
It’s essential to know that you were once in that mentee’s shoes. When you started you didn’t know what you know now. You were in a place of not knowing how something works or why it’s better to do something another way.
What matters most are the relationships you make. Those relationships matter more than you will ever know. You want to build bridges, not burn them. You want to help your peers and the people that want to learn and want to get better.
The assistance I’m giving to product designers, engineers, product managers, marketing, and so on is having an impact on the future of design. It’s not just helping designers. We are all in this world together, making, building, fixing, and exploring things for the better.
It doesn’t have to be me vs you. We can help everyone become better. Then our next generation will live in a better designed world, where the society doesn’t accept mediocre experiences or mediocre ways of working together.
So when it comes to mentorship remember the words you use have an impact. They can affect a person in ways you would’ve never imagined.
If you want to learn more about a method for mentoring then check out the following article where I talk about a mentorship I did while I was at LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mentoring-designers-non-designers-beyond-drew-bridewell/
Last question, what makes you happy now? :)
I love this question on so many levels. Lots of things make me happy but if I were to prioritize my top 5 things that make me happy I would sum it up to the following items:
- Making my family happy makes me happy
- Feeling like I’m making a difference in this world in a way that aligns with my morals, values, and passions
- Exploring our world and meeting new people
- Creating and making things
- A nice warm cup of Equator coffee in the morning
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Melvin Thambi works as a Creative Director at RapidValue Solutions & Creative Consultant of Emm&Enn Art & Design Studio.
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