[MUSIC] 0:01 All right, let's go. 0:16 If you're still coming in, come all the way up to the front. 0:19 It's better up here I promise. 0:21 It's more fun. 0:23 So, let me, there we go. 0:23 All right, so I'm Han and I design products, mostly for the music industry, 0:26 as I just said. 0:31 And it really started here. 0:32 I feel like if I'm going to be talking to you guys for a while, 0:34 I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a story first about who I am and 0:37 where I come from, from a more non-professional context. 0:40 So, I started designing really early. 0:43 I always knew I wanted to be a designer as a kid. 0:45 I started messing around with computers pretty early on. 0:47 And I come from a good place to do this. 0:51 I come from Canada where it's freezing cold. 0:52 So actually sitting in front of a computer all day is a great thing to do. 0:55 Oh, are there Canadians here? 0:59 >> Yeah. >> [APPLAUSE] 1:00 >> Oh, hello, Canadians. 1:01 All right, so yeah, I'm originally from Edmonton. 1:03 That's where I grew up. 1:05 And I moved to Toronto right after college, which was probably the hardest 1:07 challenging move of my life because I moved there with no job and no money and 1:12 had to sort of hack my way into the big city. 1:17 And I did and started working as a professional web designer. 1:19 And then in 2006, I made another big change, and I moved to London. 1:22 And I stayed there for eight years, and I became British. 1:27 Are there any British people People in the audience? 1:30 Hello, as I'm Canadian and British. 1:32 Where everybody looks like that, obviously, no, I'm just kidding. 1:35 I went to go work for 1:37 a company called Last.fm, and this the office that I went to go work in. 1:38 That's what it looked like. 1:41 It was the start up before their first round of venture capital funding. 1:42 With these crazy mother fuckers here, 1:46 back in the day before phone cameras had even good dpi cuz it was so old. 1:48 And there we started working on the social music revolution. 1:53 And that was a lot of fun. 1:57 And I did all sorts of things in London, had a great time. 1:59 Here's two of the guys on my design team, DJing one of our parties. 2:01 And I learned many things about the music industry, about technology, 2:06 about design, and loads of other stuff. 2:10 And then after I left Last.fm, I started my own company. 2:12 This is My Jam with my co-founder Matthew Ogle. 2:16 That's us at fitting imagery. 2:20 Hey, come on in, come on all the way up to the front, it's better up here. 2:23 And I recently moved to New York City in December. 2:26 So I have moved around a lot for my job, and it's been a lot of wild rides and 2:31 putting myself into places where I feel really uncomfortable. 2:35 But it's ultimately been really fun, and I'm so grateful that I could do it. 2:38 Similar to what Aaron was talking about yesterday in the keynote, 2:42 I think that moving around and doing some of this wild stuff is pretty amazing for 2:46 your career in terms of what it teaches you. 2:50 And New York has definitely been a wild ride, 2:52 because I moved to here, moved to New York, rather, to go work for 2:55 a brand new product incubator that was funded by MTV. 2:58 And it sounded like an amazing job on paper. 3:01 And three months into it, my boss's boss left, the president of MTV left. 3:05 And then my boss left, and so I left as well. 3:10 [LAUGH] That's that slide. 3:13 Needless to say, it has been an adventure. 3:17 Hey, come on in, we're still just getting started. 3:19 So other very highly important things that you need to know about me before we get 3:23 started are I have five sisters. 3:26 My spirit animal is the tiger. 3:30 But that doesn't mean you should be afraid of me, it's a nice tiger. 3:33 [LAUGH] My favorite film is Monsters Inc, 3:36 because I'm like five on the inside. 3:40 So that's a good tone for the rest of this talk, okay? 3:42 That's how seriously I'm taking things. 3:44 And I'm a cellist, but I love hip hop. 3:47 So those are my two favorite kinds of music. 3:51 And right now I'm really into power clashing, 3:53 which if you don't know what that is, you should go look it up on the Internet. 3:56 Okay, all right, let's go get started now. 4:00 This is my favorite picture on the Internet, right? 4:03 Isn't this good? 4:08 I love these guys. 4:09 Okay, now for some serious stuff. 4:10 So, my background is in designing these digital platforms for music. 4:12 And the reason I wanted to mention this up front, 4:16 is because we're gonna be talking about content today. 4:18 And a lot of content comes sort of from the background of talking about it on 4:21 the publisher's side. 4:25 So if you're sitting in the audience here today as a publisher or 4:26 as a content creator, I'm gonna be talking mostly about the other side of the coin. 4:29 And so what happens to that content when it winds up on a big platform? 4:32 So to start this story off, like I mentioned to you I went to go work for 4:36 Last.fm. 4:41 And the reason that I wanna start here is because I need to talk a little bit about 4:42 computers and people for a sec. 4:45 Okay, just hear me out. 4:47 This is the philosophy part of this talk. 4:48 We'll get into the practical stuff next. 4:50 And so at Last.fm, they had this idea, right, that music recommendations could 4:52 be solved by what they called the wisdom of the crowds or collaborative filtering. 4:58 So this is similar to Amazon, where it's like, you bought kitty litter. 5:02 You might like to buy this cat carrier. 5:06 It's the same idea but for music. 5:07 It was a precursor to Spotify in a lot of ways. 5:09 We did something called scrabbling, which was tracking everything that you listened 5:11 to and using that attention data to figure out your music recommendations. 5:15 Which, at the time, was pretty weird and crazy, and 5:19 now people are totally used to things listening in on their music habits. 5:21 And it was cool. 5:25 I got to work with piles of big data at a time when lots of other people didn't have 5:27 that to play with yet 5:31 and make really cool data visualizations and even print them as newspapers. 5:31 And that was nice, but this kept on happening. 5:36 When I would talk to people, in all of my anecdotal user research every time I 5:40 sat down with people and talked to them about features, 5:44 they were like, yeah but the best music recommendations come from my friends. 5:47 And so I started to become a little bit disillusioned with this. 5:52 But then on the other side, 5:55 there's also a limit to these music recommendations that come from friends. 5:57 Because another story I heard a lot was like, oh yeah, 6:00 my buddy from college he used to have amazing music taste. 6:03 And then he moved to Tokyo and I now, I don't know, 6:06 I just sort of listen to the same music I listened to when I was 18. 6:09 Does anyone know this story? 6:12 Yeah, I see some few people nodding. 6:15 So, while I was starting to get kind of disillusioned by this idea that 6:17 computers could solve all these problems, at the same time, 6:20 this one on one human interaction doesn't really scale. 6:24 And at the same time, there was this sort of war happening in the music industry, 6:27 this war of computers versus humans thing happening. 6:33 So 2012, man versus algorithm face off. 6:37 2013, man versus machine, again at. 6:40 2014 [LAUGH] it's still going on, right? 6:45 And it's probably still happening today. 6:48 And this is just totally ridiculous, because it's a complete false dichotomy. 6:51 Obviously, we need to use the best tool for the job, which means humans and 6:57 computers, and it's all on a spectrum. 7:02 And it just means you have to be kinda smart about where you use what. 7:04 So, after I left Last.fm, Matt and I founded This Is My Jam. 7:08 And This Is My Jam was a huge reaction to this whole sort of like, 7:13 let's use computers to solve everything. 7:16 And it was much more about, okay, let's ask people what they're listening to. 7:18 So it was based on the premise that we're gonna ask you what your favorite song 7:22 is right now. 7:25 And we made those songs look really beautiful and 7:26 sort of different than the way other people were doing it at the time. 7:28 And then when we stuck it into sort of playlists, 7:31 what we discovered is that the playlist just worked, which was crazy. 7:34 Because if you've ever tried to use a playlist engine and hook it up to 7:39 a bunch of data, it's actually really hard to get anything useful out of it at first. 7:42 And the first time we hooked it up, 7:47 we were like, wow, this playlist is just really good. 7:48 Why is this working? 7:50 Is there a bug? 7:51 And so we tested it again, and it just kept on working. 7:52 And we realized it was because we completely stacked the deck, right? 7:55 By asking people what their favorite song was, 7:59 we had this sort of all hits no filler, amazing, beautiful content to work with. 8:02 Then when the playlist engine got hooked up to it, it just worked. 8:07 And so that was really gratifying to me because it felt like we'd sort of cracked 8:12 this problem of making humans and computers work together and 8:16 serving up the best content for you. 8:19 And this is where I'm at today, guys. 8:23 It's that humans can connect us in ways that computers can't. 8:25 We know this because the stuff that humans make with content is emotional, 8:29 it's storytelling. 8:33 It's this wonderful sticky glue that's going to stick in our brains. 8:35 I bet if you remember anything from this talk today, it will probably be that 8:39 whirlwind of Instagram pictures I showed you at the beginning about my life, right, 8:43 [LAUGH] not this stuff. 8:47 But then at the same time, 8:48 computers can connect us in all these ways that humans can't, right? 8:50 They can scale infinitely. 8:54 They can connect people across the world, that, 8:55 otherwise they wouldn't have been able to. 8:58 They can make good guesses about what you need and want, and 9:00 we just saw some of this stuff with centers in the previous talk. 9:03 And so as product designers, obviously, we need to be intimately familiar with 9:07 everything that technology has to offer, right? 9:11 But, I hope that we're all pretty familiar with what computers can do at this 9:15 conference. 9:19 [LAUGH] So, let's talk about designing for content. 9:20 I want to talk about audio, video, pictures, words, this stuff. 9:23 Because I believe that product designers, 9:30 we're the connective tissue here between this art and this vessel. 9:32 And this art being this content that normally sits inside something that 9:36 we make as a platform. 9:40 And if you've ever been to a really horribly curated gallery show of 9:42 an amazing artist you love, you'll know how frustrating that experience is. 9:46 Or a really great film but in a totally shitty cinema experience. 9:51 You'll know what I mean about when you have great art inside this vessel that 9:55 doesn't really work. 9:58 And that's our job. 9:59 And the reason that it's our job is because we have perspective. 10:01 That's probably the most important thing that as humans 10:08 we can offer to this experience and also as designers. 10:12 I was at this talk at the New School in New York 10:16 last month I think and there was a panel of designers sitting up on the stage, and 10:20 one of the students raised her hand, and 10:24 she asked one of those typical questions that students do about, what's 10:26 the most important thing to becoming a great designer, or something like that. 10:30 [LAUGH] And pretty much unanimously across the board, 10:33 the whole panel answered in a different way. 10:36 Like, have a point of view, have a stance, have a perspective. 10:39 Because, as a designer, what you really want is a reaction to your work. 10:44 You want people to either say like, wow, I love that! 10:49 Or like, no, I totally hate that. 10:51 Like, I would be happy with either of those extremes, but 10:53 what you never want is like crickets. 10:56 I mean why design if you don't have a perspective, or 10:58 a really clear point of view about how you're doing it. 11:01 And so this leads me to another story, which is, 11:05 I was reading this book around the same time, called The Moment of Clarity. 11:07 Has anyone here read it? 11:10 No? It's a pretty good book. 11:12 It's kinda dense, you can skip some stuff. 11:13 But generally overall, good book. 11:15 [LAUGH] Anyways, this book is about building really meaningful businesses. 11:17 And in this book they talk about this philosopher Hubert Dreyfus who's 11:22 a philosophy professor at Berkeley and 11:26 he's done a lot of work in the field of artificial intelligence. 11:29 Particularly in sort of taking it down [LAUGH] by saying that hey, you know, 11:33 I'm not really sure that computers are going to be able to do this kind of 11:38 stuff for us one day. 11:42 What he was telling the authors of the book when he was interviewing with them, 11:44 was like, what's relevant right now is that I'm sitting here, 11:47 talking to you in this room. 11:50 Whoa, what just happened? 11:52 Oh, cool. 11:54 What's relevant is that I'm sitting here talking to you. 11:55 What's not relevant is that the room may have like 10 billion specks of 11:59 dust on the floor, or that there's two screws over there in that wall, or 12:03 these other sorts of things that AI has been looking at. 12:06 The ability to have a perspective, 12:11 to respond to what is meaningful, that's at the heart of humanity. 12:13 So in other words, this is what I jotted down on my sketchbook that day is that 12:19 computers can't give a damn, or at least not right now. 12:24 Okay, let's just take a little break from the philosophy for a light break of fun. 12:30 So this is a stupid thing that I made at Hack Day a few years ago called Drinkify. 12:34 And unfortunately it's probably going to be the most well known of my work which 12:38 sort of pains me, because we made it in 48 hours while we were all wasted. 12:42 But basically you type in what you're listening to like this and 12:46 then it tells you what you should drink. 12:50 Okay? And this stupid thing has like had like 80 12:52 million page views and gone viral on Reddit like twice and when my little 12:56 sister, who's 17, found out that I made it she thought I was like a celebrity. 13:00 However the reason that I'm throwing this up here for a sec is because this is just 13:05 a stupid little thing, but what we did is we gave it some framing and 13:09 we just gave it some humor and had some perspective about it. 13:12 We did all those things that computers can't do in terms of serving up content. 13:15 So if humans can connect us in ways that computers can't, and 13:21 computers can connect us in ways that humans can't, 13:25 then the future of designing for content is really understanding both, right? 13:27 Sounds simple, but it's complicated. 13:32 [LAUGH] I'm talking about products that value, that contextualize, 13:34 that service, that can serve up content, that's adaptive, and platform agnostic and 13:39 do it all with a sense of perspective. 13:43 Does it sound tough? 13:46 Well, let's talk about it. 13:47 Practical part starts now. 13:50 The first thing I want to impress upon all of you is that all content is content. 13:52 What do I mean by this? 13:58 Well, right now at Union Square Station in New York City on the L Train, 14:00 the entire station is plastered with YouTube ads for their YouTube stars. 14:04 And this is pretty cool, but it also means that I think in 2015 the lines 14:09 between pro content and amateur content have now completely dissolved. 14:15 And we need to take all content onboard as content, whether it's UGC or 14:20 pro, I don't care, it all needs to be treated with some level of sensitivity and 14:24 perspective and understanding as designers. 14:29 So here's an example that's kind of interesting, right? 14:34 Because one of the biggest challenges with amateur content is sort of 14:37 understanding when it's becoming popular and 14:42 shining a light on it and making it discoverable, right? 14:44 And Snapchat recently launched this Discover tab. 14:47 It's pretty cool. 14:50 I can go in there, I like sharks, 14:50 I can go read stories about sharks on the National Geographic bit of it and stuff. 14:52 But has anybody ever tried to find a Snapchat star on Snapchat? 14:56 Raise your hand if you have. 15:01 No? 15:03 Okay. It's basically totally impossible. 15:03 You have to like look up the names of these people first, and 15:07 then you have to like type them in, and add them as friends to find them. 15:10 There's no way. 15:13 It's completely opaque. 15:14 Which is a real problem, and I think that if you approach user generated content by 15:17 thinking about the way publishers might approach content, this might not happen. 15:21 Here's a really great example. 15:26 I like sushi, and I'm looking for Japanese restaurants in Vegas, 15:28 this one comes up right here, and hey isn't this really nice. 15:31 There's like two nice reviews, two pieces of content, one is by a user and 15:35 one is by a food magazine that I recognize. 15:40 And they're not really that different from each other but 15:43 just based on where they're placed at the top of the screen I can see them both 15:46 right next to each other and this is very useful. 15:49 It's a really nice example of sort of treating UGC and pro content in balance. 15:51 And as this authenticity trend that were seeing right now I think 15:57 increases with no filter tag and this sort of DIY approach 16:02 to making content we're seeing other sorts of lines being blurred. 16:06 This is a new product called the Players Tribune, and 16:12 it's quite interesting, because what they're doing is basically 16:15 telling the stories of athletes through an editor, so 16:18 it's like direct to fan stories as opposed to going through a sports journalist. 16:20 They're disrupting that industry right now. 16:25 So in Kristina Halverson's book about content strategy for the web, 16:29 she talks about how you need to think like a publisher. 16:33 And I really like this because she also mentioned something along the lines of 16:37 like authors know their subject and publishers know their audience. 16:41 And so do we, as designers, right? 16:45 I hope we know our audience. 16:46 That's like a big part of our job. 16:48 And when we make digital things, we become publishers, she points out. 16:50 Whether we're publishing our own content, like on our blog, 16:54 which is like the way we've sort of typically thought about content strategy. 16:57 Or as I am challenging you to think right now, 17:01 on big platforms where we're helping people create content like YouTube. 17:03 We need to think like a publisher there too because this is everybody's problem. 17:08 Okay. This is point 2. 17:14 This is why you need to listen. 17:16 So Christina also points out that content has typically been somebody 17:18 else's problem since the beginning of the web and if you work 17:22 in content strategy you'll know that this was one the biggest hurdles to sort of 17:26 becoming a discipline when that book was written; I think it was like 2010. 17:31 We've come a long way since then, right? 17:35 It's gotten a lot better. 17:37 But I think it's still not enough. 17:39 And the reason I don't think it's enough is because I'm not convinced that we're 17:42 always being conscientious enough about content in the context 17:45 of dynamic content on platforms which is what I'm talking about today. 17:52 Typically content strategy has been more about thinking about it 17:56 from the publisher's perspective or this pro content perspective not from 18:00 the perspective of user generated content or large platforms. 18:04 So these are real things that real people have said when I've worked with them. 18:09 Actually really smart people. 18:13 And this is just stuff that happens when you're building a really large platform. 18:16 It's like oh, the API kinda returned this crappy image what do we do with it? 18:22 Or like, I don't know when copy goes there yet, 18:26 so I just like put some [INAUDIBLE] in. 18:27 Not allowed ever, by the way. 18:29 [LAUGH] Or like, you're not gonna like this, this last one. 18:31 So I actually have a story about this one. 18:34 When I was working on the Last.fm mobile app, 18:38 we were designing a new radio station because that's sort of 18:42 what we learned from our user testing that we needed to do. 18:45 And, one of the most difficult things about this, was that I wanted to 18:48 rename the radio station, and I wanted to give it some context. 18:52 And this was really difficult, 18:55 because it was [LAUGH] actually hard coded in the back end. 18:57 That wasn't a lie. 18:59 But what I had to do, was think a lot about all the places that that copy for 19:01 that radio station would get used. 19:05 When you start it up for the first time, 19:07 what happens if you connect it to a device? 19:09 What happens on a website? 19:11 On your mobile, all these different places. 19:12 And typically, that sort of framing, like writing a title around something, or 19:14 a caption on a video, or the quality of an image. 19:18 That's typically nobody's job when you're working on a big platform. 19:22 It doesn't really fall into design, it doesn't really fall into development. 19:26 It's everybody's job, it's everybody's job to think like a publisher and 19:29 think about those things. 19:33 The same way I'd argue that UX is everybody's job these days, too. 19:34 So we're actually starting to see a bit of a shift at the moment, 19:40 there's this trend, tech companies are hiring content and editorial staff, right. 19:44 YouTube's doing this. 19:48 Instagram is doing this. 19:49 Buzzfeed is obviously probably the best example of this. 19:51 And content companies are reinventing themselves to be competent in tech, right? 19:54 So the New York Times R&D lab, that's another great example of this. 19:58 So we're starting to see this trend towards crafting a balanced team. 20:02 And I think this is so important if you're working with content because 20:07 when you craft a balanced team, you have the opportunity to learn how this stuff 20:12 gets made, and you have the opportunity to learn about The development cycles, and 20:16 how it gets produces, and 20:20 then how you can kind of line things up to make a better experience across the board. 20:22 This also just seems to me so straight forward from a design perspective. 20:26 If you visit most designers, have to learn about how things get produced and 20:32 their craft, if you're an industrial designer, everybody has, what's it called, 20:36 manufacturing processes on their bookshelf, right? 20:40 It's just it's so basic that we should learn how this stuff gets made. 20:43 All right so we've been talking a lot about sort of what happens when content 20:47 gets sent off and goes to another platform but I want to pause here for 20:51 a second and talk about giving it a home as well. 20:54 So I'm gonna tell you about this with a metaphor of sneakers 20:57 Cuz I really like Nike shoes. 21:01 They're cool. 21:03 When you see people wearing Nikes on the street, you know, I notice them. 21:04 And like these are nice shoes. 21:07 But what's even cooler than noticing a cool pair of sneakers on somebody 21:08 is going to Nike [INAUDIBLE] Town. 21:12 And the reason Nike Town in New York is so beautiful is, 21:15 when you go in there, it's just this incredible experience of their brand. 21:18 And I could sub in any brand here. 21:22 I could also use Apple if you really like Apple products. 21:24 What I'm trying to say is there is this sort of balance between having 21:28 Owning this full experience, this brand story, and 21:32 then letting your stuff go off into the world, and live on these other platforms. 21:35 And you have always be careful about the two things. 21:39 So, to sort of go back in time for a second, TV, right, cable tv. 21:43 They are content companies, tv networks. 21:48 But, they actually don't own their own distribution, right? 21:52 The distribution companies do like Time Warner and Comcast. 21:56 The thing about this is that because they don't really own their own pipes, 21:59 they don't own the experience, which is a huge problem for them at the moment. 22:03 With digital, of course, that is not the case. 22:07 Content companies can own their own pipes, right? 22:09 They own their own API. 22:11 They own their own brand story. 22:13 They can have their own home for their content. 22:14 They can have their own hub where it lives. 22:16 Their equivalent of that beautiful brand story that you get in the Nike Store, 22:18 right, or Nike Town. 22:22 But with publishing out to platforms becoming more and more important, 22:24 which we're gonna talk about later on, 22:27 this brand story is also important to keep in balance. 22:29 And I think the lesson here is let's just sort of keep in mind this lesson from 22:32 the past with cable TV companies. 22:35 Because I could see some things actually going the same way right now. 22:37 All right. 22:40 Four. 22:42 Context. 22:43 I'm a designer. 22:45 I love talking about context. 22:46 I hope you guys like context too. 22:48 It's the best way to answer any question about design. 22:49 Oh, I don't know. 22:52 It depends on the context. 22:52 Okay, but no, seriously. 22:54 I feel like because I've worked mostly on music I kind of got 22:55 dunked into this a lot earlier than maybe some of the other disciplines. 23:00 Especially with regards to sort of the whole responsive design movement. 23:06 And the reason for that is that music is just hyper, hyper contextual. 23:10 So these are some old scenario sketches that I did when I was working on, 23:14 I think some playlist stuff at Last FM But the point is here, you need three and 23:18 a half minutes and you need headphones or speakers to listen to a song. 23:22 That is the bare minimum of context. 23:26 And there's all sorts of cases where that just doesn't exist or 23:29 doesn't make sense for the music and the platform. 23:32 So we're constantly thinking about context. 23:34 Designing for context has become a really hot topic in the last few years. 23:37 I'm sure you guys have seen some talks on it or read some stuff about it. 23:40 usually we're talking about the context of these devises that we're using. 23:44 Why? Because it's exploding right now. 23:48 We're all carrying our phones around. 23:49 We're starting to wear things. 23:51 Context is really, really important. 23:53 But it's more than just the context that we are in as people. 23:55 It's also the context of the content as well. 24:00 So there's two layers happening here. 24:03 So I like to take screenshots of interfaces and up here at the top [LAUGH] 24:07 I was working in the studio really late on a Tuesday night at 1 am in May 2014. 24:12 So this is last year. 24:17 And I was just like totally appalled at what was happening because 24:19 I was working on a talk I think and I'm getting some sexy time, 24:24 evening acoustic, cocktail jazz, easy listening, 24:29 what is this bath time stuff here, on Spotify and I was like guys Come on. 24:32 You can do better than this. 24:37 And this headline, let's have some fun tonight. 24:38 This is so the wrong context for what I'm doing at the moment. 24:41 A year later, down here, it also happened to be a Tuesday this week, same thing. 24:45 I was working in the studio late on a talk. 24:50 And it's gotten significantly better, right? 24:52 This is a lot more sophisticated. 24:54 So the imagery is better, there's nice typography, 24:56 there's some good copyrighting going on. 24:59 They're recognizing that this isn't just sort of a blob of content, but 25:01 there's actually some nice editorial framing starting to happen. 25:04 Except for the fact that I'm being recommended for peacefulness, and slow 25:08 stuff, and like the sleep machine when I'm trying to write my talk at 1:00 am. 25:12 Which is obviously an issue. 25:16 So, there's this combination of both this sort of like 25:17 editorial tone of voice,the human component, right? 25:20 But, also, like what do they know about me as a listener, I think, you know, 25:23 this There's this definitely has a lot further to go but 25:26 they're making a really valiant attempt at it here. 25:31 And also just from a design perspective. 25:33 I mean music should look cool. 25:36 I think like this doesn't speak to me yet as something that looks cool. 25:37 It's not like opening up NME or walking into a record store or 25:40 something like that So here's another example of context. 25:43 Something I'm super frustrated with is just this, 25:48 because you like y, we are going to give you x recommendation for content. 25:51 I think it's so naive, and we can do so much better than that. 25:55 But if you do have to do it, at least give it a little bit of like Emotion, and 25:59 have that perspective, that tone of voice that's so important for design. 26:03 So here on the left, this is Twitter, right? 26:08 So I was looking at the HYPETRAK account, which is a music serving site that I love. 26:10 And because I'm looking at it, it's who to follow? 26:15 Here you go, all these other things. 26:17 And it feels so Basic to me and like why? 26:19 What's it about these things, why should I follow them, 26:24 whereas here on the right hand side New York Times Now mobile app, 26:26 this is really nice, all it took was just one headline at the top that says. 26:32 Your nighttime read. 26:37 Right? 26:39 And it just puts it into context for me. 26:40 Like, okay, this is nice. 26:42 Actually, I would like to read a story about Robert Rosenberg for eight minutes, 26:43 but probably not in the morning on my commute on the L train, but like at night. 26:47 Yeah, sure. 26:52 I might dip into this now. 26:53 It makes sense. 26:54 And it's just the tiniest bit of framing. 26:55 This is what I'm talking about. 26:57 This kind of stuff is our job as product designers. 26:58 Maybe not necessarily to write this copy but to be thinking about this stuff, 27:01 to be that connective tissue. 27:05 And of course when you get the context and 27:08 the content totally right, amazing things happen. 27:10 I mean how many times has this been mentioned in conference talks in 27:13 just the last year? 27:18 It's incredible. 27:18 It's changed our lives where In the golden age of television, 27:19 just because they've figured out the context so well. 27:23 This last thing, we've talked, 27:30 I've actually heard a lot of stuff about this at this conference, which is good. 27:33 It's a big deal. 27:36 So adaptive content, this is a term from Karen McGrane's 27:38 book in Content Strategy for Mobile, which I hope you've read. 27:43 And she uses adaptive to mean that it should be more than just responsive. 27:46 Responsive is great. 27:52 We definitely need to make sure that things respond to Screen sizes, but 27:53 that's really just the tip of the iceberg here. 27:58 So even at this conference we've heard some people talking about diving 28:00 deeper here. 28:04 So yesterday I think Ryan highlighted how 28:04 important it is to prioritize the content properly, so 28:07 that you don't wind up with a call to action that's at the bottom of the screen. 28:10 So that's obviously super important. 28:13 Jen was also talking about how important the wait and the load time for 28:16 images is across different devices and how to improve that. 28:20 But it's more than just adapting to these devices. 28:24 It's also how this content makes sense across social media, across different 28:27 platforms, across print, across this website, across this Apple watch. 28:32 Wherever it might have to live, right? 28:36 All these places where it has to go, coming from the publisher's API, 28:39 how they structure their meta data, and so 28:42 that's what Karen McGrane in talking about when she means, adaptive content. 28:46 But, let's just look at the other side of the coin here. 28:50 The publisher end. 28:54 So the people that are really getting this right now of course are the ones that 28:56 are interested in making money from it. 29:00 [LAUGH] Right? That's always how it works. 29:01 Money talks. 29:03 And we're seeing a lot of changes right now. 29:04 So Snapchat just persuaded people to start making vertical videos, which, you know, 29:06 I think a lot of TV commercial people did not want to do for a long time. 29:11 And already they've seen that like, there's, 29:15 I think Nine times more completion rate on them, or something crazy like that. 29:16 There's this new cinematic pin, video add thing on Pinterest. 29:22 And of course we've been hearing a lot about Facebook Instant Articles 29:26 recently too. 29:29 You might've even seen some. 29:30 So Mark Boulton has a really great quote about this, I think. 29:34 That's, on it's own content is pretty dumb, 29:38 until some sort of smart design system, which is us, 29:41 [LAUGH] in this room, grabs it, and displays it in the right context. 29:44 And that's what I'm talking about here because this whole problem that Karen was 29:48 talking about, about like content strategists having to figure out all of 29:52 these places that this content's gonna go. 29:56 She talks about it like, I think she calls it a crazy magic trick. 29:59 Which it is, it's a totally crazy magic trick. 30:02 And it's way too much work for just one team. 30:05 This is a two-team effort here. 30:08 It's about passing the baton from one end, when you're sending all this stuff out, 30:11 and then on the platform-side also being understanding about how you're gonna take 30:15 care of this once you get it, not dropping that baton. 30:19 Because I think that we do a really bad job of this currently. 30:22 We're not always so perfect with that baton. 30:25 And of course, sometimes when we get the baton too, 30:28 it's not even in a very good state. 30:32 It's already been dropped many times before. 30:34 In fact, I think in the music industry, we sort of feel this all the time, 30:37 because it's this world that some of the grossest, 30:40 most ugly metadata I've ever had to work with. 30:43 But this, this is no excuse, okay? 30:45 So let me just give you a quick whirlwind tour. 30:48 First of all you've got this kinda typical stuff. 30:49 Like badly titled UTC. 30:53 And then you've got all sorts of different languages for track titles. 30:55 And then you need to make sure that those special characters work inside your search 30:59 so that people can find the content. 31:02 Super long band names. 31:04 Oh, remixes, what about more crazy characters, and more remixes, and 31:06 hip hop music, and classical music and all this stuff that's so hard to deal with. 31:12 Music is super messy. 31:18 But that's no excuse. 31:21 Coz those things are not your user's problems, 31:24 they're your problem as a designer. 31:26 And so you need to go the extra mile, and figure out how to clean that up and 31:28 make it presentable. 31:31 With This is My Jam, one of the things we do is, the first time people post 31:33 a Sound Cloud track, we ask them like, hey, is this the right title? 31:36 And sort of get them to make sure that it is, and reward them 31:39 being one of the first people to post this track as sort of a taste maker. 31:43 To make sure that that metadate is nice and clean, so 31:46 we can match it quickly the next time someone posts it. 31:49 Another thing we do is we use YouTube thumbnails as part of the song art 31:52 on This is My Jam. 31:57 This is an original, 31:58 like this is what it would look like if you pull a YouTube thumbnail. 32:00 And it's horrible. 32:04 I mean, this is completely pixellated, it's bad contrast and saturation. 32:05 I don't even know if you can see on this projector very well. 32:09 So the first thing that we did is, I sat down with the developer, and 32:11 I was like, okay, let's write some codes that we can crack the levels on this and 32:14 at least just add a little bit more depth. 32:18 And then, let's get rid of this horrible JPEG compression by putting 32:20 in a little bit of film grain to smooth it over, so you don't see it as much. 32:26 But let's not even stop there. 32:29 Because we wanted to create this beautiful experience of music, 32:31 why don't we also create some background filters so that they'll be keyed off this 32:34 crappy little YouTube thumbnail, and turn it into something beautiful. 32:39 So we looked at These are just notes from our sketchbooks. 32:42 All these sorts of different patterns and things that were happening and culture and 32:46 street fashion. 32:49 And from there we built a background filter system. 32:50 So again we're just grabbing that image and doing something cool with it. 32:53 And the results were really fun. 32:57 We got all these different sorts of things happening and at time this felt like 32:58 pretty new and different for the way a song could be represented on the internet. 33:01 So, I've talked a lot about content that's created by humans, 33:07 and how it's this emotional grid that connects us in ways that computers can't. 33:13 But then also how computers can spread it and surface it and 33:18 contextualize it, and serve it up in ways that humans probably never could. 33:23 And also I've talked about how content is not just some art 33:28 that lives inside a container, as I think it is often treated. 33:32 And this is a really hard stuff to design for, of what I'm talking about. 33:37 But it's worth it, it's really worth doing, and here's why 33:41 So this is one of my favorite quotes about design, from Bruno Munari, 33:48 where he talks about how a designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense, 33:51 which I think is a really good way of approaching it. 33:55 Then later in my life I came across this quote here from Jack Schulze, 33:59 how he talks about design, sure, it's about solving problems. 34:02 But it's also about so 34:06 much more than that, because design is also about cultural invention. 34:07 And, for me, I think it's kind of a combination of these two things. 34:12 I think that, at a minimum, the job of a designer is to solve problems beautifully. 34:17 But at the best, and when we're at our finest we're also creating culture too. 34:22 And so that is why this is so important, because we have this opportunity to create 34:29 culture when we bring together content and digital products in a way that is really 34:34 meaningful and contextualize, and does all these things I've been talking about. 34:38 So I'm gonna wrap up soon, and 34:44 I want to close with this really lovely quote from Owen D Young. 34:45 Owen D Young was the chairmen of General Electric, and at the time 34:50 General Electric had just figured out how to make the new tungsten filament, 34:56 lightbulb, kinda like those Edison bulbs that you see in hipster places right now, 35:02 you all know what I'm talking about. 35:05 And that was like a pretty big deal, 35:07 because this was the first incandescent lightbulb that didn't break very easily. 35:08 And so they were able to ship it and distribute it and 35:13 put it in people's homes and it was great. 35:15 And it took a lot of chemistry to figure out how to make that filament, 35:18 that wire so strong, and so 35:21 small, and do all the things it needs to do to make a lightbulb work. 35:23 And this is part of a speech that he gave when he was talking to, 35:26 I think it was Hendrix College, in 1934. 35:29 He was talking about culture. 35:32 And he says that culture represents a synthesis, 35:34 a sort of putting together of things. 35:37 So completely that the combination has an individuality of it's own. 35:40 It may only be an amalgam but 35:43 it's better, it's better if it's a chemical combination. 35:45 Culture does not exist in the form of powder, a mere mass of incoherent 35:48 particles and that's how I feel about culture on the internet today. 35:53 For the most part, it is a mare mass of incoherent particles. 35:57 But let's talk about the difference between an amalgam and 36:02 a chemical reaction. 36:04 So thinking back to chemistry here, an amalgam is this. 36:05 It's two things that are sitting next to each other. 36:10 It's a mechanical mixture. 36:12 But a chemical reaction, what happens is there's variability. 36:14 There's unpredictability. 36:18 These two things sort of give up their physical and chemical properties to become 36:19 something completely new and different there in the middle. 36:23 And that's why I think this is so important. 36:28 Because with everything we make, we have an opportunity for 36:30 that sort of chemical reaction. 36:33 Through treating all content as content. 36:36 Through making it every bodies problem, 36:39 instead of just one persons problem on your team. 36:41 By crafting these balanced teams and 36:43 learning about how it gets made and using context, and adaption, and 36:46 responsiveness, and all these things that we have in our tool kit. 36:51 To fuse this content together 36:54 with products to create these new, unique experiences and culture. 37:03 That's it. Thank you very much. 37:07 [APPLAUSE] 37:11