Episode Summary In this episode of Writers in Tech, Yuval Keshtcher, the founder of the UX Writing Hub, hosts a conversation with Nick Babich, a mega influencer in the UX space. They discuss the intersection of AI and design, the importance of UX writing in the era of AI, and the tools they use to enhance their design process. Nick shares his insights on the importance of balancing user needs and business goals, the role of AI in design, and his approach to content strategy.
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00:00
The most important thing here is that your way of thinking, how you approach the problem, how you think about the user and business needs. And it's extremely challenging actually to find a sweet balance between user needs and business goals because most of the time business wants to make more money and they don't think about how this might look like for the user on a high level.
00:24
Let's, this is Writers Intact, a podcast where today's top content strategists UX writers and content designers share their well kept industry secrets. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Writers Intact, a podcast that brought you by the UX Writing Hub which is a company that I've founded. My name is yuval Keshe and I am the founder of the UX writing Hub. Super happy to be here. If you're interested to get it to UX Writing, check out the UX Writing Hub have some free resources courses. We have a blog, we have this podcast, a weekly newsletter and overall a lot of fun. And later we spend our time exploring with generative AI and adding it to our resources. So check out our blog and also the free course it have also artificial intelligence components that might be helpful for anyone that is also experimenting with it.
01:22
Just like us today. We have a fantastic guest. His name is Nick Babich, a huge influencer in the UX space. I've been following Nick's work for the past few years now. Nick worked as a UX consultant with many different interesting companies. And what I like the most about Nick's work that I'm aware of, because I'm aware of it to a very small fraction of his work, is the presence of Nick on social media and the influence that Nick have on so many designers out there. Because I really like the content that Nick produced. So I'm very happy to have it here. I'm here today. Nick, how are you?
01:58
Thanks you alpha introduction and I feel great about being here. Yeah, I work primarily in product design and one of the area of interest, my personal interest is sharing interesting things about product design with community because I think that it's extremely important to share relevant and valuable information with people because it allow people to design better products. And better products means more happier user and better world. I agree.
02:29
And I really like the way that you choose to curate the content that you produce. You have an eye to see what is good and what is effective and what can be helpful for the community and you share it. I'm aware for the stuff that you're doing on LinkedIn, but are there any other places that you share your content?
02:46
Yeah, I try to write for you explain it. It's my own resource. It's a blog for dedicated to design and I try to write posts about product design and publish there. And I also create a contribution to this resource trying to find the best articles that we can publish there and share it with Community. And I also write for major magazines like Entrepreneur and even some blogs like the VIX Block which is also Israeli company. And yeah, I share a lot of information there too.
03:24
Yes, to be honest, I was aware to you also I'll be the content you produce for you. Explain it as well, including the last article about UI design using Mid Journey.
03:35
Yeah.
03:36
That I love.
03:37
This is one of the coolest topic I think. I mean design with AI because I think when we think about AI, some designers think as a complete replacement, AI will replace designers. But it doesn't work like that. It will be like assistant for the designers and help us to achieve more in short period of time. And that's what I wanted to explore. And it's mind blowing to see how the AI tools like Mid Journey progresses. I mean, I had experience working with the first early versions of the Mid Journey and the current version is mind blowing in terms of the way it can deliver the results. And it's also less dependent on a prompt. The prompt is the query that you used to just ask the system to design something. And I see that now. You don't need to be extremely explicit on what you want to have and the system will still try to understand you and design the interface or whatever image you like to see and in a decent quality.
04:41
I agree. And I found it really useful to do different graphics and icons as well. I use this resource many years named Flat Icon. Are you familiar with it?
04:52
Yeah.
04:54
Lately I'm doing prompts to Mid Journey which is I needed a tree. Right. So I need a tree illustration in flat icon style with white background and then it generates like a few flat icon style trees, which is really cool. And because it has white background, I go to another website named PG Remove which automatically remove the background and then I actually have a PNG file of an icon that I could use. It's not a vector, it's not an illustration, it's not SVG, but it's useful for some things.
05:32
Yeah, that's exactly the process I follow. Also it's funny because you're trying to explain the same way I use the.
05:40
Tool, so it's cool. Is it a similar prompt also like with a flat icon?
05:45
No, not similar tool. But the trick is like use the white background because it allow you to remove the background completely and use it as the image in the design to.
05:58
The listeners that are not familiar. I just published a free Mid Journey class, so I will drop it in the show notes. But Mid Journey is a tool that helps you to generate visual designs and it's like Dali, if you're familiar with it. And it's quite useful and very creative and I think it's very cool. And I will also drop the link to the article of Nick named UI Design using Mid Journey, where he shared a lot of best practices about how to take inspiration from Mid Journey for your own UI. That's exciting times to be alive, right?
06:36
Yeah. It's like the industry is changing so rapidly and it's a perfect moment to just jump in. If you didn't have a chance to just explore the domain of product design, it's a perfect moment because the way product design will work in the next decade will be different. I mean, the way we work and we structure our activities and AI will have a significant impact, I think, on that domain especially.
07:03
How do you incorporate AI in your process? That design.
07:06
And this means I have so many ways I can do it. I use such a GPT on a regular basis and I use it for almost any part of the design process. For the user research, for exploration, for ideation, even for prototyping. I mean, I just try to prototype animations and sometimes or write code, sometimes I need to write code, especially when I work on web design. And it's much easier to just use chat GPT for that purpose because it allowed me to specify the effect I want to see and just leave the chat GPT to do the rest. So I tried, for example, I write a prompt, create a loading spinner and specify some things. It should be like created from a red dots and animation shouldn't take more than 5 seconds, something like that. And I also specify the language that I want to see.
08:05
For example, it should be like three GS, like specific JavaScript library and boom, the tool generated for me. I mean, it might not be the perfect code, sometimes it might not even work. But with the small adjustments, I'm being able to just speed up my design process and my prototyping so much.
08:25
I mean, and then when you have some kind of a JS code, do you just hand it to the developers or just find a way to incorporate it with your figma files? How exactly does it work?
08:34
Sometimes I need to just ship the coded prototype, so I use the tools like Visual Studio to just visualize the page. Sometimes I ship it to the developer so it depends on the project and in a way that it can be tricky to just debug the code. But I have the trick for this particular part. I mean, when the chat GPT generates code for you and you see it doesn't work for some reason, you can just submit it back to the chat GPT and tell the tool fix it and it will fix it for you. It's like not in 100% of the cases, but in 90, I think 90% of the cases it will fix the code for you. So I personally use it to just even through I didn't have a lot of experience. For example, with Swift UI, I was able to just speed up my design process, writing the iOS prototypes, creating iOS prototypes with this tool.
09:30
Wait, so are you a developer as well? Because it sounds like you have no.
09:35
I don't see that I'm a developer. I have some developer knowledge that I can apply because I had to design prototypes and many times I have to show how it will work exactly, especially animated effects. And it's much harder to do that when you explain it in a plain words or even use the figma design. I mean, you can of course design animations in figma, but still, it might be hard to just ship it to the developer team because sometimes you see that what the design that you shipped. At the end of the day, developer team implemented something different and there are a lot of back and forth. And thanks to the chat GPT, you can do the things like animations or transitions yourself and then ship the ready to use code to develop our team. So, yeah, that's how it works on my side.
10:29
No, actually it doesn't require a lot of knowledge. I mean, right now what I'm trying to say is that when we say I'm a developer or I'm a designer or I'm a writer, the boundaries between the different domains are blurring because of AI. And you can be anyone you want be I mean, if you want to focus one specific domain, I mean, be super cool developer, you can be it. But I'm not like super cool designer or developer or writer. I'm like the person who has explore a lot of domains and try to just connect the dots between different domains. And that's how I do my work. So that's why I have some notes in different domains.
11:12
Yes, I think that's what makes the great designer. Right. At the end of the day, we need to be goal driven. Our goal is to make something useful, usable to the end user. And nobody cares what tools were using, what reason, what code we wrote. People care what was the type of experience that they had. At the end of the day. And great designer, unlike a mediocre writer, UX writer, will get copy in a screen and the boss or stakeholder would say, hey, I need you to make better micro copy in this page. But a great UX writer would think, wait, do we actually need this page? What is the flow? Give me more context about the users and there's going to be a lot of thinking before we even start writing. So I really like the fact that the focus that you were talking about is not about the medium, but about the goal.
12:14
So you could learn to develop. And now with AI, which are GPT, they can actually write the code for you. So you don't really need to study Python or free JS and all of those complicated stuff, you could just tell JPT, hey, write it for me, and then pass it to the developers and it will help you to reach your goals faster.
12:32
Well, yeah, because the tools really don't matter, because you can just use the tools that you have more experience working with. Based on my experience, for example, sometimes you don't need, even as a product designer, you don't need to use figma, you can just draw something on a napkin and use it to just demonstrate your idea. The most important thing here is that your way of thinking, how you approach the problem, how you think about the user and business needs. And it's extremely challenging, actually, to find a sweet balance between user needs and business goals because most of the time business wants to make more money and they don't think about how this might look like for the user on a high level. But it's a goal for the product designer, good product designer, a good user advocate, and you need to just convince business that's doing a great design, it will help business grow.
13:29
And you just as a product designer, find the tools that allow you to just communicate this idea on a different levels. For based on my experience, for example, when I've worked with other product designers, for example, as visual designers, I've worked with the excellent, I mean, the greatest UI designers in the world. And I know that my UI skills are not really good, I mean, in high fidelity. So what I did is like I used mix fidelity, wire framing and mockups and let the guys do the rest. So my ideas that was like to communicate the message, what do we want to achieve and why? And when people understand why you want to create something, why you want to design this thing in that particular way, it might cheer for them to just be on your site and help you to do that.
14:18
That's awesome. So you said that you use generative AI so JGPT and majority. Do you have any other recommendations or tools of different tools or processes and prompts to help you with your process?
14:31
Well, I would say that table diffusion is a great thing also because it's a tool similar to Dali or midjourney, but it allows you to train your own model and how it works. You like, for example, as a person who just work in, for example, flower shop, and you want to just create visuals of nice flowers or that of specific kind. For example, it should be roses. And you can train your model, create your special model for that and train on the hundreds of thousands roses for some specific shape, for example. And then stable diffusion will help you to just generate the images that you need for your particular case. And the cool thing, the difference between the Stable Diffusion and other tools like a Mid Journey and Dali is that you have direct control on the model that is used to generate these images.
15:25
You can train it and align the results that it produced so you have more control, which is extremely important when you work in that field right, because.
15:36
The problem with mid Journey is the random malady, right? It doesn't have consistent characters, it gives you like random stuff and then you just pick the best because the outcome is pretty impressive.
15:48
Yeah, it's difficult.
15:52
Yeah.
15:52
I think that in the next iteration the tools will be more predictable and less prompt dependent because right now it's a kind of a magic you just find the right prompt and you align it a little bit, tweak some parameters like a temperature to just find the perfect image. But I think in the next iterations the tools will be less prompt dependent and will give more control to you. But if you compare the journey with us, for example, Stable Diffusion, I would say that me personally, stable Diffusion is more predictable tool even through it requires some investment of your time. So you need to just understand how it works then customize things, play with parameters, train the model by submitting images, like huge collections of images, I would say, but still at the end of the day it will provide you with more relevant results and more predictable behavior, which is extremely important.
16:48
I think it's considered myself as a technical person, but for me it was very sorry. I do consider myself as a slightly technical person, but sample diffusion was a bit difficult for me to operate.
17:00
Yeah, I know. Because it requires a lot of time. I mean, in terms of investment, if you didn't have a chance to experience it. But I would say that the funny thing about all these tools is like the value of writing and especially X writing is significantly more than it was before the tools. And let me explain what I mean. I mean that the way you write the query, the way you formulate your thoughts and write them that defines your risk, has direct impact on the output that the tools produce. So I would say that one of the tricks here is like to master the writing, to be able to just be a good designer, right?
17:44
Some call it prompt engineering or prompt design or prompt writing. But the art of creating an actionable or impactful prompt, basically yeah, to me.
17:57
It'S like when I first interacted with Chat GPT, I was mind blowed by the fact that you can interact with the tool in a conversation manner. For example, if you ask the tool to create you some, I don't know, brief, for example, product brief for some particular kind of the product and you see that the brief is too long for example, you expected to see a couple of sentences, but the tool wrote you the few paragraphs. You just write a short note, like, write me a shorter version of this brief, and boom, the tool will do it for you. But I think it's also the part of the way we design product, because design is a conversation and the words we use when we communicate with each other or write something, no matter whether it's article or the text for the UI, the way we master this craft of writing has significant impact on your output that the tool produce.
18:57
And I think that I would say that Yux writing will be the top skill in the next decade. It's still important skill right now, but in the next decade it will be like 100% more important than it is now.
19:14
So you want to say that Yukes riding is not dead like many people saying right now?
19:19
Absolutely. But maybe the way I think about it through writing is different because I think that UX writing is a foundational part of design. I mean, the words we use in the interface has direct impact on users and we also have those AI tools that helps us to design products and we can use our skills of Uxrite. And when we write prompts and magically this becomes extremely valuable right now because the prompts, the quality of prompts right now have a direct impact on the output that is also spread use. And since we have good experience with.
19:59
Uxfide and we can just write good prompts, that's awesome. I agree with you. And yeah, a good plug also to check our updated version of our free Uxwelling course at the Uxworthyhub.com because we did create a component about how to write prompts as well for artificial intelligence. We're getting into the end of our conversation, Nick, and I was curious because you have so much impact on the international community. So my tip for people that get into UX and UX writing specifically is to work on their own personal brand and content strategy and to share knowledge and information and to write in Medium UX planet and to write in other publications to increase the amount of eyeballs that are on their work and then it will increase the likelihood for them to find a job or to get better projects and so on. So I would love to hear more about your process of building your content strategy.
20:58
Well, personally, when I work on some projects, I try to find the challenging tasks, I try to solve challenging tasks. And based on that, I identify areas where I, as a designer, experience friction. For example, to me one of the areas was a data visualization and I tried to find resources that helps me to achieve the goal of creating good data visualization. And then I share these resources with community because I think that the resources is valuable for me. Maybe these resources will be valuable with other people who experience the same problem as me. And that's my strategy. So all the information that I share, I think this information is valuable and helped me to design better products, and I think that hopefully it will also help other people to do the same.
21:53
That's awesome. So thank you for sharing that. And what will be your process of so you said, I'm looking at the challenges and how could I solve those challenges? But for those who just want to create their first content piece, what will be your tip, your number one tip?
22:11
Think about the topic that you want to write about. It might be something that you think is cool, for example, or you love to talk about, because the things that we want to talk about will matter to you. You are more willing to just share more detailed and more valuable information because this piece is important to you. And you just communicate this message, your love, to this particular topic to other people. And then research, invest in your research. Try to make your topic, your article, blog post more valuable people by providing more details, like different perspectives on something, for example. And then I would say, share it anywhere you can. I mean, if you active Instagram users, share there. If you have presence on LinkedIn, share there anywhere you can in your social media, just share there. Don't be afraid about that. Some people might say that this is not good, for example.
23:12
Sometimes it happens. But don't think about that because focus on what you want personally to achieve. And your goal must be is sharing something that you care about with your people, with people that you have in your circles. And the more people will see your articles as you all sell, the more chances that you will have good traction. And yeah, that's how it works.
23:36
That's awesome. Nick, how do you think we should name this episode?
23:39
I think something about AI and design something like the Words Matter in the world of AI design something like that. Because I think it's about the conversation, and we should have the keywords, like Conversation, AI and product design, something like that. Because after all, we had a conversation, and the conversation is the part of the interaction between people and the part of the interaction between a user and a product. It's also the conversation. That's what I think.
24:18
I think we have some great ideas over there. Figure it out. Nick, thank you so much for being here today. It was a pleasure to have you.
24:26
Thanks you all for inviting me. It was a pleasure to meet too.
24:29
Awesome. And thank you for the listeners for sticking around. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Writers in Tech, a podcasted party by the Youth Training Hub. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. UVAL. Yuval yuval. Uxwritinghub.com. You like it? Share it with your team. Share it with your friends. This is also a piece of content that we appreciate if more and more people would see. So feel free to share it. And that's about it. See you next time. Bye.