The Social Impact of Product Design with Laura Nunnery, Strava

Episode Transcription

Laura Nunnery:

Having a good design eye and aesthetic lies within being able to see so much and being able to understand the value that it's adding into the environment or the value that is taken away. Being able to see those nuances in your day to day, that comes through travel, that comes through perpetual learning and having a beginner's mindset. Always trying to have a self betterment attitude.

Christian Beck:

This is a part of a Better Product, original series on the business impact of product design as usual I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna. Lauren Nunnery joins a series as the senior product design lead at Strava before leading design at Strava. Laura works at Facebook and Instagram using her design skills to address social issues within the product.

Christian Beck:

If you look at her career, she's been at some of the biggest design oriented companies that exist today, starting with TurboTax. To take a step back we asked how she got into product design because her background doesn't follow a path we've shared on this show before.

Laura Nunnery:

I had a physics background, and so it doesn't initially feel like it's quite a natural progression into the product design world. But if, when you're looking at complex systems and simplifying that within a physics sense or within a design sense, they kind of do go hand in hand. The initial career was going into agencies and understanding just the gamut of what's going out there as far as a visual presence. So that was kind of the incubation state. And then from there I've seen some time off TurboTax oppression said, I've seen some of your systems work from a physics setting. Would you like to apply this into a product world? I was like, that's quite intriguing. And also hardest problem to solve is taxes in my mind, if you can solve for that, that's success, what next? And so that just seemed like a very enticing thing to do.

And so not your natural progression, but it felt right to be able to look at a holistic viewpoint and then go to the granularities and then kind of solve user problems. Based on that background.

Anna Eaglin:

What I love about her answer is how she found herself in product design. As she mentioned, many people find themselves in product via other routes or non-traditional avenues, which gives them a specific type of expertise. They can apply to problems in tech.

Laura Nunnery:

I think it's anything that comes within the realm of thinking and looking at things differently from different vantage points and aggregating all of those vantage points to one singular output. I think the people that can do that well are the people that go into product design because there's so many edge cases that you have to consider.

Christian Beck:

With some of this context in mind, let's jump into the conversation, starting with her time at Facebook and the impact the 2016 elections had on her design career.

Laura Nunnery:

So at the height of what you probably can all recollect of the media chaos around influence on elections in 2016, that was right as the fruition of my time at Facebook began. And so when that started initiating, I was on a team called Pages. So essentially Pages is a place for small businesses and businesses to actually build their network and build a community, have advertising, and things like that. And so when we realized within the data at Facebook, that it was coming the source of truth and the mass social engineering was happening within that environment with that affordance of a platform.

When I started, it was fortunate enough that that team was just spinning up. And so we had to really get down and dirty really, really quickly to actually get to the root of the problem and understand it more and just start from learning. I mean, I just lucked into it honestly, and that's kind of the entirety of my career. Everything just kind of falls eloquently into place. Although, there are struggles within all of it. I mean, dealing with foreign governments, circumnavigating your platform to cause social divide, I mean, not something you want to look at every day. It's kind of disheartening

Christian Beck:

When we hear about ethics and technology today, I feel like, at least from my personal reaction is there's a lot of it's driven by AI and engineering side, but obviously as a designer and designer yourself, I'm curious what you think design's role is and in integrity and ethics when it comes to design and what ability does design or maybe responsibility does design have in ensuring ethics are upheld?

Laura Nunnery:

Yeah, I think design is at the forefront of it, it's an equal partner at the table. If you're not considering how a feature affordance can be manipulated or abused, then you're not doing your part as a designer and you're not actually covering the gamut of ways design should actually unfold and the different methodologies. And so in building integrity products, a lot of people need a lot of designers. If Facebook had to be educated on what to look out for and what types of abuse can happen. And there's always new ways of abusing being created left and right. So you always have to have that reactionary model in your brain and always try to combat it. That's not something that comes easy for designers because they want things to be beautiful, and they want things to be eloquent, and simple, and work really fluidly. When you're thinking about people abusing something, then it completely puts a wrench in the system. So it's an education gap that we had to work within.

Christian Beck:

Do you think there's a conflict in between designing something for elegance and simplicity and designing something that is maybe the right thing to do? Or do you think that there it's just really about educating people to understand how they all work together?

Laura Nunnery:

I think they're one in the same. Because it has extra privacy matters or extra things that could be more complicated that I don't think it takes away from the fact of it being needing to be intuitive and easily understood and readily adaptable.

Christian Beck:

I just realized you mentioned the word affordance, which I think is really well known in the UX design space. But for many of our listeners might not be fully familiar with that term. I'd love to hear what maybe an example of when you say an affordance and design and software, what's an example of that and how it could be used negatively?

Laura Nunnery:

Yeah. So it's just another way to put a feature within a product. So essentially say if we're looking at the Facebook family of apps, and so specifically with the products I was on Pages, a particular affordance would be the mechanism of buying an ad or the mechanism of adding an admin. It's another, just a subsequent thing you can actually do within the parent company, if you will, of the future.

Anna Eaglin:

Well, it's really interesting in that, I mean, dealing with what was happening in Facebook in 2016 and kind of taking that on, and then you were like, "You know what? This isn't a big enough challenge. Now I'd like to deal with bullying." So the idea that you then went to Instagram really focused on overcoming the ability for people to cyberbully each other. So I'm curious a little bit about that transition and what that was like for you.

Laura Nunnery:

Yeah. I mean the transition, I mean, it wasn't easy. There's this external perception of you get a lot of snacks, you get dinners up the wazoo, et cetera. But the time that I spent within the Pages Facebook team and working on that integrity of product in that realm, we were in this state called a lockdown, which is kind of, it's pretty typical within the tech brought out here, you get into it like a very intensive, I mean, it could be two weeks. It could be six months working period where the issue that you're working at has to have finite focus and attention to detail where nothing actually on the peripherals can saturate what you're focusing on.

So within that time span, I was in a lockdown group, I think, a good nine months. What that meant was it was just heads down, completely working through all these problems, also dealing with senators, coming in and giving product recommendations, and then things coming out in the media and different things coming to the surface.

So you had to have, one, your end goal and ideal state to work toward but you also had to be able to compartmentalize all of the external chaos and noise. Leading into that and kind of my exit and in that team space, I took two months off went surfing and traveled a little while. And then came back and started Instagram. And so Instagram within the context of Facebook, it's a few years behind, as far as capabilities, as far as machine learning, as far as just any type of infrastructure. And so in coming to that space, I already had acknowledged that set precedent and of how to apply it to different realms.

We hadn't seen any type of certain navigating in that space yet. In a natural evolution of human behavior, they're going to eventually get to that platform and find the weaknesses. So that felt like a natural progression to kind of go to the Instagram wellbeing team and the first start there was with then bullying, and preventing spam, and providing support for suicidal posts or any type of users that might've need more help. It just felt like something that I already had a knowledge base and that actually applied really quickly.

Christian Beck:

How do you determine what is the responsibility of the software that you're on or the tech that you're running? How do you determine what their responsibility is for the tech that you're building or how far to go with it?

Laura Nunnery:

We just have to like, take two steps back and look at the genesis of any type of medium or platform. There is always going to be some form of harm being displayed on that, and it being a conduit to propagate that harm and to the masses. The issue lies within not actually being able to foreshadow that type of harm and the type of scale and type of social graph, you would have to actually propagate that to the masses. There's a responsibility, but I also think there is a headspace that needs to be known of this will manifest in any other medium. This will because these are the ones that were first to market and actually built that user base and expanded so quickly. Those are the ones that are highlighted, but it will literally manifest in all the different surfaces. I can't name any type of product that hasn't dealt with any type of abuse of it.

Christian Beck:

Do you think that this is something that you think all products should almost have as something that they're looking at specifically? Abuse of the product?

Laura Nunnery:

Absolutely. I mean, if I think everyone needs to have the mindset going into it that we are humans and animals, and we are coming from a survival mental model. People will do that to survive. Maybe it's survival within making money. Maybe it's survival within manipulation to fraudulent account or maybe it's any type of incremental gain that individual can have that will surface in any type of setting. That has been the nature of our evolution since the dawn of time. So I think everyone needs to actually go in with an integrity mindset first and making sure it can't be manipulated.

Anna Eaglin:

You have a lot of experience countering these big issues inside products. You're not just designing this for revenue outcomes. There are other less measurable things that you're trying to affect. So I'm curious, how you would recommend that people learn about that or get better at addressing those types of problems.

Laura Nunnery:

Yeah. I think if you come from the most pristine background that you've never experienced any type of bullying in your life, you've never experienced any type of hardship then, I mean, best case scenario for the live projection sure. But I think every single designer, every single human can go into a space and being able to relate to what's going on. And so if the vantage point that both were taken from a user empathy setting, and then also from just knowing the hardships on a day to day and just being hyper present within all of the ways the world and the material, things can saturate your mind and having that hyper top of mind and always kind of dictating or point of understanding. I think that will definitely help.

So it's not necessarily just and it being embedded in a product and being able to extract yourself and look at all of the nuanced ways it could be manipulated. It's literally taking your step within the world and seeing the manipulation there. You can actually carry that on through, through any type of career and any type of product or building. It starts with a complete innate understanding that intrinsically humans are going to try to do something harmful unfortunately.

Christian Beck:

So we've covered some really heavy side of the ethics of design. Since 2019, you've been leading design at Strava. And it seems like you've carried some of that with you, but approaching a totally different problem set. Since you started at Strava, what was your main charter that you were trying to achieve and how have you been working on it since?

Laura Nunnery:

It's been a bit of a wild ride, but the most fruitful and growth one I've been on yet. I've been very grateful for that, but when I started, it functions as a startup, but it's an 11-year-old startup and it has yet to become profitable. And so in coming into that and coming from a landscape that was so structured and process oriented and so robust, and just the mechanics of running period coming into Strava, I was immediately able to identify various gaps, whether it be within the product thinking and solving processes alone or whether it be within our value prop within the market. Or even if it was product market fit. And so coming from that environment, I was able to really hone in and identify little things that could be quick little lens. Within that, the roles and responsibilities kind of shifted.

My first task there was two called, I would say, monetization value proposition sprint. So within that, you apply design methodologies, and you start with just a robust understanding for the people you're solving for, but also have the business needs in mind and in parallel, and then you marry those. So that was kind of the essence of how I got into Strava. It was from left field. I did not expect to be doing the company's charter or moving things behind a paywall, but also very, very fortunate and thankful for the opportunity. But it was a bit of a wild ride.

Christian Beck:

It's rare we get somebody that represents a product that we use all the time. Let's go back and unpack where you sort of started at Strava. You talked about holding a monetization and value prop sprint. You also talked about Strava is not yet profitable. So help, give a little bit of context of where Strava is in its life cycle and why you're there at a unique time when it comes to monetization?

Laura Nunnery:

So historically we've had a lot of outside consultants, and so before my time, but we had a lot of people influencing, how do you structure the right type of payment model or subscription model? We've gone through the gamut, whether it be breaking up in tears and packs, whether it be one isolated product, very differentiated from the free experience. It's been a bit of a journey.

Starting there initially, I was allotted to be on what we call mobile record. Essentially you go to the mobile device, you tap record and your activities will be tracked and you can actually have those inputs upload to Strava. And so within that priority shifted pretty quickly. Fortunately after identifying some gaps within just a ways of working and not thinking there's an actual product market fit, I kind of came onto the plate of me, myself, and one of our new hires, the product marketing director from Uber, we kind of just got in a room and went heads down. And that started off of defining outputs, understanding all of the knowledge that was there. Kind of looking through the complete threshold and gamut of everything that has been collected over time.

So a lot of that was within our external hires that gave us this tiered structure, identifying why that didn't work, also looking at if the Strava was even worth paying for. If there's not a value that's displayed people won't put their credit card out at all. It was about maybe a five day sprint. And so a lot of it was in discovery mode, which is just the understanding piece of the pie, where you just literally take all the knowledge you can and try to synthesize and extract key learnings, start to build an affinity map around that and some type of somatics to actually guide your next steps.

Within that, we realized that our free product was too good. A lot of our things that kind of set us apart and within our competitors were free. A lot of things that didn't actually provide a lot of value were in our subscription model. It just seemed like a natural next step to start rethinking that framework and understanding, one, how long will this take to reverse engineer from an ideal state and understand if we can build this out incrementally? How much engineering time? Because we can't just reconfigure an entire app and paywall model without making improvements. If you just move things behind a paywall, but you don't actually better them, it's really not really inclined or authentic. We had to identify and break down all the various levels of how to make that shift within a quick way, in order to become profitable.

Anna Eaglin:

How are you making sure that people who are on that free tier are still finding a lot of value, but are also aware of what they could have they became a subscriber?

Laura Nunnery:

Yeah. I think it's from every little interaction plan and it's not within just a singular growth team that implements upsells in ways or interstitial to get them into a paid model. It's within little hints of this features actually, we'll provide X amount of value say there's a toggle and you can adjust your fitness and if you go to the far, right, it insinuates that your fitness will be better over time, whatever type of XCZ, one you want to describe.

So it's got to be embedded. It has to be intrinsic. So the role within product design within that is to do that in a seamless way where it doesn't interrupt an experience or an action they want to take. And so making it completely fluid and translate their train of thought is the biggest value in any type of product design can add.

Christian Beck:

I don't know if there's a good way to answer this, but it's almost like the counter to what we're talking about. So in that example, you just described, we've talked about opportunities to use design to effect positive change, on the flip side, how do you determine when you've done something wrong or something's having a negative effect? How do you figure out that oh, actually that's not doing the thing that we think is the right thing to do?

Laura Nunnery:

I always like to use the poisonous cookie metaphor. It's where if one person eats it dies, okay. Maybe it's not poisonous. Maybe it's a nuance with the person. Any type of thing going on. Two people eat the same cookie, both die, probably something else was a cookie. When I think about that within a product realm, users will tell you everything. Is something in our logging? As far as some type of interaction you want to track and understand a little bit further, we'll log it and understand it from a quantitative stance and look at that data. We can see things happening are going differently within that. But then we can also place a qualitative study, whether it be a usability study or whether it be identifying where we've had. So for instance, say the logging is at the completion screen of the payment.

A lot of people are dropping off. And so naturally you can assume make some kind of guesses around some things that are happening. Maybe they don't want to pay right away. Maybe they don't see the value. Maybe there's an actual bug and then they can actually complete the task. So when you look at it in that sense, and you triangulate all of the inputs of quantitative, qualitative, and then just what you have known within the interaction space and just empirical data, then you can actually say, something's up, it's the same with the cookie.

Anna Eaglin:

I mean, so everyone has to support a wide range of users, but you have very, very extreme ends on your users. I am just curious about how you support that [inaudible 00:22:13]

Laura Nunnery:

You're so right. We've made issue in the past that's a great question. As trying to cover every single realm of possibility. And then you obviously can't do everything well at that point. And so what we focus on a lot is the invested athlete. That does carry some type of generalization, yes. Invested athletes. So you could be a different athletic point in time of your life cycle and be more invested than not or say there's injury and then you're less invested. What we do try to focus on is the user base that wants regular cadence, that needs tracking, that needs something to kind of perpetuate them forward. But then everyone kind of reaches that stage at some point. And even if they don't, we still provide a level of future sets that can actually speak to their needs as well. But we do try to focus on the people that really are motivated.

Christian Beck:

I have one more question. I think we've covered it a little bit, but I'd be remiss if I didn't cover maybe the role of being a designer because I'm a designer. I talked to a lot of designers today still and one of the things that I continue to hear from designers is that they... Well, you know designers, designers always want to do strategy. Whatever they think strategy means. So they always want to do something more with design. That's not just like UI design, or pixel pushing, or whatever sort of derogatory term you want to use. But when I hear you describe your career, you tell the story as if you're finding things outside of what maybe the lane is for design.

A lot of times it almost seems it's out there, but you almost have to just make your own path to get there. That's kind of what I'm hearing from you, both at Facebook and Instagram. And then again at Strava, you didn't set out to do these specific things, but yet somehow you found your way there. So you can look back on that. What would you advise another designer that's craving more? What should they be looking for?

Laura Nunnery:

Yeah, that's a great question. If you look at the landscape of design within San Francisco, and just whether it be the big corporations, TurboTax, Instagram, Facebook, what have you and Strava even. Every designer that I intersect with has the most unique way that they actually got into design here in this environment. A lot of it honestly, is just being open to experiences, not necessarily having this forecast of the career that you necessarily want. But just plugging yourself in places where you think you'll grow and learn from. And having a good design eye and aesthetic lies within being able to see so much. And being able to understand the value that it's adding into the environment. Or the value that is taken away.

So being able to see those nuances in your day to day, that comes through travel, that comes through perpetual learning and having a beginner's mindset and always trying to have self betterment attitude. And so, yes, you can have your interaction degree now, you can have your product design degree now, but you're not going to be a great product designer, if you're not actually using the same type of methodologies in your day-to-day in the world. So I think that is that just having an open mindset and to even if you have some opportunity to go on a farm and who knows where, just for six months take it. Because that'll fill it into the narrative and the value that you bring to the table at any point.

Anna Eaglin:

Join us next week as we continue the series on the impact of product design. I'm Anna.

Christian Beck:

And I'm Christian. And this is Better Product.

Anna Eaglin:

Better Product.

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market and sell Better Products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join, well, the community. As always, we're curious, what does Better Product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.