Ep. 27 | The State of the Design industry today with Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly Friedman, co-founder of Smashing Magazine, joins us to discuss the current state of design, exploring how designers can navigate industry confusion while creating meaningful impact in an AI-driven world.

• Our industry is experiencing "confusion with a big capital B and C" creating both challenges and opportunities for designers
• Finding gaps where nobody fits allows designers to make tremendous impact in companies
• Articulating design value through business metrics helps secure resources for innovation
• Organizational design maturity isn't about deliverables but about human connections and continuous improvement
• AI implementation requires moving beyond simple chatbots to thoughtful multimodal experiences
• Designers should focus on understanding how humans interact with AI rather than becoming prompt engineers
• European Accessibility Act hasn't driven the expected transformation because companies aim for minimal compliance
• Make accessibility relatable by connecting it to everyday experiences like using devices one-handed or in bright sunlight
• Future-proof design skills include business literacy, technical understanding, and ability to solve real human problems
• Digital sustainability will become increasingly important as we recognize the waste created by AI-generated content

Join us for Vitaly's upcoming meetup & workshop at Movify in Brussels:

- Monday 17th November at 6pm - Meetup: 'You will not be replaced by AI'

- Tuesday 18th November at 9am -  Full day workshop on 'Design Patterns for AI Interfaces'

Register your seat now

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Flux with Vitaly Friedman
• 3:21 The State of Design: Confusion and Opportunity
• 18:37 AI: Beyond Adoption
• 34:31 Accessibility & Inclusion as Design Mastery
• 47:36 Evolution of Designer Skills and Roles
• 54:25 Fire Drill: Five Quick Questions
• 1:03:06 What's next for Vitaly
• 1:03:39 Vitaly is coming to Movify!
• 1:05:41 Outro

Transcript

Isabelle: 0:00

Hi everyone and welcome to Flux. This is a very special new episode that we bring to you today. This post-course is hosted by myself, Isabelle Bamber, marketing manager, partner and designer at Movify.

Alexandre: 0:13

And Alexandre Mazzy, I'm designer, business designer and team lead at BNP Paribas Fortis.

Isabelle: 0:20

Today we have with us someone who hardly needs an introduction, especially in the design world. Please welcome Vitaly Friedman. Welcome. And in this conversation today, we're going to discuss the state of design, untangling the myths, navigating the mess and building momentum.

Gael: 0:38

You're listening to Flux, a podcast about design and development. Our crafters will take you on a journey to discover more about digital innovation.

Vitaly: 0:54

It's such a pleasure to be here. This is such a magical space. I think I cannot live without these headphones anymore. I'm just going to leave my world, like live outside and just enjoy the sounds of world and life. It's nice.

Isabelle: 1:08

We're really, really happy to have you here. I mean, I saw you at UX London, I think it was in 2023, when you were doing your UI complex workshop, UI design complex, what was it called? Complex UI patterns. I'm sorry.

Vitaly: 1:22

Who comes up with those names? Unbelievable.

Isabelle: 1:24

the title is complex itself and it was it was super inspiring and i really liked your presentation skills how you were interacting with the audience and stuff so i'm really happy that you're here and you are also best known for being co-founder of smashing magazine and the driving force behind smashing conferences which i believe you've been doing recently

Vitaly: 1:47

a long time a long time

Isabelle: 1:48

since what 2006 i

Vitaly: 1:50

think the first one was 2011 if a conference was around okay but But the magazine since 2006, it feels like it's a different generation almost at this point. And yeah, this has been a journey. It's almost like 20 years.

Isabelle: 2:04

And also what defines you is the way you connect with patterns, people and places.

Vitaly: 2:11

That's very poetic, by the way. I like it. Yeah, I think that if I look back, I think that one of the most definitive or kind of defining things for me has always been trying to translate this messy, complex, unknowable world around us into something that we all can manage. And I don't mean to simplify it, but map it properly. Just really try to understand what that thing outside actually means for us if we want to improve it. Because if we want to improve it, we need to understand it first. And so this has been something that drove me all these years, I guess.

Isabelle: 2:45

And you're not only a designer, you're an educator, a publisher, a community builder as well, which is awesome. We've all seen your LinkedIn posts on a daily basis that are so complete and interesting and valuable, I find. And you take the messy reality of our industry from design system and accessibility to AI and content strategy, and you turn it into structured, teachable knowledge, which is amazing.

Vitaly: 3:11

It's very kind of you to say. But now we're going to the hard stuff. Yes, let's do that.

Alexandre: 3:22

When you look into 2025 and maybe a bit beyond of that, how do you describe currently our society, industry we are living in? Are we in period of growth, confusions, reinvention?

Vitaly: 3:37

I think that's what I wanted to say right away when you asked that is I think this is a big confusion with a big capital B and also big capital C. And that confusion has always two sides. On the one hand, it has its obvious downsides. size because everybody just doesn't know what to do. And I think we really shouldn't underestimate it. And I'm not necessarily speaking about just design. I think there is a lot of aimlessness around. So what is the future for us? I mean, if you're like, I don't know, 18 years old now and you're trying to figure out what to do in your life, you can maybe design because apparently digital design is cool, right? And it's interesting and it's exciting. But what does that future look like? What skills should you acquire now to become relevant or be relevant or remain relevant for the years to come. That's a big uncertainty that I think a lot of people are very confused by, because there is no clear path at this point. And then everybody's saying, maybe I will replace you and all that. So I think confusion on that personal level, in terms of personal growth, is there. Also on a professional level, it's there. But with it come also opportunities, because of course you can shape your own role and see where your skills would work best in a company. I think that this is something that I always try to encourage people to do by the way and I know I'm kind of jumping back and forth but a lot of the times we're looking at the job opening and we try to see how well we're going to fit in the job opening and then we send an application and then there are 400 other people probably who are sending the same who are doing the same thing but if you happen to be already in a company the best thing you can do I think is to find a gap where which nobody feels every company has something like a constraint or a problem or an issue that is not touched upon because There are no predefined shoeboxes where people must fit in, right? And so if there is nobody who is speaking up and saying, hey, you know, I'm a designer and maybe I could help with that and maybe move here and then maybe explore that. That can be very interesting for companies and they could be very, very useful for companies as well. And that can bring you out of this confusion that is happening. So what I mean by that is like on the one hand with confusion, we have a lot of downsides. People are very frustrated. They don't know what to do. But it also means that there are opportunities and maybe there and maybe tasks and maybe responsibilities that you can acquire or kind of try to fetch and get to, to then make tremendous impact without even company and companies actually realizing that they need it. That has tremendous potential.

Alexandre: 6:08

That's super true. I'm thinking about two main avenues of discussion for this forward. On one hand, if you look into the people in big companies, you have mostly analytical people like business analyst and all these name title with ending analytic and you have maybe on the other spectrum designers who have to get out ideas or patterns without knowing the futures because either you're going from analytic point of view and you're looking in the past what happened in the past to predict what's going to be happening in the futures or you anticipate because people change over time so the past will not repeat itself over and over again so you innovate right And then you look into what is the future, not based on previous patterns, but on what people expect in the future to be. That's one of the methods to do it. That's one part. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have other paradigms like new people and new generations will come to the job market. And we don't train them probably enough in a way to be reflective, to be analytical in a way, to be critical on what's happening. Is it going to be the good metric for the futures? I'm wondering how you can balance a bit all of that because I was feeling a bit these two ideas into your explanations before but I want it

Vitaly: 7:36

to be a bit more. I think that there is this golden nugget that you kind of really connected there and I want to kind of take it even further because one thing that we should be very clear about that there is no successful business without successful customers right but we need to ask ourselves we are designers and we're here to do the job to help you know to kind meet user needs but also help companies grow and be sustainable and all this stuff right companies always want to have sustainable growth now that sustainable growth means that they need to be able to be different somehow and present themselves as having competitive advantage and so they can attract customers you'll see in a moment why I'm talking about this because once you have that and you have a competitive advantage you must kind of understand what that means now that appears in two places either through cost leadership where you're just cheap or cheap than the competition or through differentiation right when you want to be perceived differently not in terms of just perceived differently just be perceived as having enough value for people to be attractive now I think we often forget as designers that the best thing that we can how we can frame our work is to be perceived as somebody who is encouraging and creating differentiation for companies we just need to make that connection that however requires us to do two things on the one hand we must innovate we must explore things that maybe haven't done before not in a particular way right and so you kind of end up becoming more competitive and on the other hand we also must be measuring that impact that we're producing to visualize it and I think in both of them we are we are often not getting far enough just because we often get tasks that we need to complete rather than having the time to really imagine that future that you were discussing right we just don't get the time and at the same time we're not really visualizing that impact so we're not going to get next time any time to imagine that future and then this is kind of this vicious circle that keeps going and going and I do not speak about designers being monkey pushers or pixel pushers or anything like that that's not about that it's just about not having the time or resources available to really imagine that thing that is very much necessary especially in the world in which we're living right now and I think that this connection between between the two for me lives in really being able to understand how do we measure what we're doing here to explain it to the business, right? But on the other hand, how do we get to the place that by doing that, by measuring and reporting and having maybe a design KPI somewhere on the dashboard of senior management, right? Get the time or acquire the time to actually innovate and come up with something that's more profound that of course also requires user research. And this is sort of my twist on that. And this is why I've been so obsessed with design metrics and UX KPIs for the last couple of years.

Isabelle: 10:32

That's really interesting. And I think it's quite linked to organization maturity as well in design. And I'm quite interested to know how, if you walked into a design team, what would be the thing that screams maturity or not in design? I

Vitaly: 10:49

think for me, it's also things that do not happen that are really, really significant. I'm just coming from a like literally well a couple of weeks ago which I was really really shocked by to be honest so it's a it's a nice company and we having I was expecting to have like a big project and there are I think it was supposed to be 24 designers on the call I was very excited and meeting everybody for the first time and then you know in anticipation I'm jumping in and a call earlier than I was expecting to be joining and there is nobody like okay so I'm just sitting there and this text tells me you will be entering this whenever you know people come in and then it starts and everybody has camera off oh no except from two people yes who were just inviting me right and that tells you volumes around what that project is going to be right and I don't want to be this person saying hey can you please everybody turn the camera on and can you speak and you know but that gives you a lot of insight about what is happening because it tells you company culture company culture yes so it tells you right away of how that probably people who are not even you know turning the camera on although there might be very good reasons for that right if it's I don't know 50% of people don't do that that's okay right you might be in a place you might be going somewhere and so on but at the same time it kind of gives you an indicator that either people have been burned in the past by unsuccessful project of that kind that I'm introducing so I know what to expect from the team right and how it will be or they're just been around for such a long time that and they've been through so much in the company they don't even believe that there's significant change in terms of maturity or anything that I'm usually would be kind of trying to initiate is impossible

Isabelle: 12:37

yeah

Vitaly: 12:37

right and so both of those things are very sad

Isabelle: 12:41

yeah

Vitaly: 12:41

right

Isabelle: 12:42

it's almost like kind of a post-traumatic stress

Vitaly: 12:44

I think so

Isabelle: 12:45

trauma

Vitaly: 12:46

yeah and I think I'm watching out for things like this a lot I'm really paying attention to that but also very often what people say what people don't say what people kind of leave out what this kind of where you can kind of almost anticipate between the lines, things like that. And I think that a lot of people, a lot of times, we're expecting to look at the quality of deliverables. That's an indicator of UX maturity. I don't necessarily think that's true. That's, I mean, I've seen some remarkably low fidelity deliverables, kind of just because, well, we're doing low fidelity here and then we're moving to prototyping, then we're trying and experimenting and playing and A-B testing and working with developers and engineers to make it work, right? And that works wonderfully. And then you also see teams spending a ridiculous amount of time creating this polished, high-fidelity mock-ups and prototypes as well. And then they never make it. Because somebody just thinks like, eh, not today. It's a rate first. So for me, deliverables don't matter. Even processes, I would say. I mean, of course, some things are broken, some things are not. If you, of course, have a situation where there is no culture of retrospectives, that's just a missed opportunity. I wouldn't say it's a sign of a broken culture, a broken maturity in some way, but it's an incredible opportunity to really grow with every sprint or every second sprint or whatever. And those things really can add up, right? But a lot of companies can be extremely successful in whatever environment they are because people always are great at bending the rules and finding the ways to make it work. And if you have a really nice team and if people are laughing and sending... jokes to each other, that's probably a good team.

Alexandre: 14:28

It's

Vitaly: 14:29

more about human connections. But it is, of course, kind of different from UX maturity of the organization. And also differs from one unit to another, from one guild to another, from one vertical to another. But for me, it's really all around this sort of Understanding that we want to do something meaningful here and we want to get better over time. These two things, if they kind of fit in and they work and they are present, then maybe the company is on the right track.

Alexandre: 14:57

I can challenge just a bit with that idea. You can have the most volunteer designers. It can be a team of, let's say, 20 people. So it starts to be meaningful. It's not someone in a corner. It starts to be a real team or maybe multiple teams together really going in the same direction. But But in the end, if some higher management or decision power in the room says, no, I prefer my idea over yours, it will be shot in

Vitaly: 15:24

the egg. Yes. But you need to prepare for this not to happen. So my way of dealing with this usually is when, so for example, one thing that I always try to avoid with our team effort and in general is to make sure that we don't have a big reveal moment.

Alexandre: 15:40

That's for sure.

Vitaly: 15:41

Right? So like, hey, this is like, let's get it together. The designers came up with this new mug innovative concept and we're going to show it and you're going to approve it and this is going to be amazing this never happens so this is all around stakeholder engagement right and of course when we start working on things I would always show the law of fidelity stuff and very rough sketches and ideas to important stakeholders very early so they have a chance to give feedback and so on so get their buy-in or at least their confirmation that we're on the right track or that feedback if we're not on the right track and then improve it over time right and so before that meeting right continuously I will identify these important stakeholders or key influencers there are always two groups there are influencers who can be really helpful for a project and there are also stakeholders and so I would identify them and I would have one-on-one with them before that big meeting so when we are in that big meeting there are no big surprises right and that can be very helpful so they can still have very strong opinions but I'd rather prefer them shutting down that project in the early beginnings.

Alexandre: 16:48

Yeah, for sure.

Vitaly: 16:49

Instead of publicly in that big meeting. And then, of course, you have this trickling effect, right? If somebody says, I don't like this because X, the other person will say, oh, I don't like that because Y. And before you know it, you're leaving this meeting thinking, oh my God, this is it. This is the most frustrating experience I've ever had in my

Isabelle: 17:06

life. That's quite a good idea to take each stakeholder individually to explain it to them so they're not thrown out by other

Vitaly: 17:13

people. And also just to make sure that you hear different things because they have conflicting priorities quite often and obviously there must be a decision maker about we're doing this or we're doing that but if you share this ownership right and they have a chance to contribute and you heard them out right that's great the one more thing that I want to highlight here I always pay attention to the concerns and challenges that they highlight that would be kind of important for them to address for the project to be successful and I always reflected back to them so we have heard and considered those things, and that's what we did with it. And of course, you wouldn't do it with every single stakeholder, but with senior stakeholders and key stakeholders, that's a really good investment of time and effort.

Alexandre: 17:58

I often advise junior designers or people who join a company to go and have lunch or have a coffee break with people, just to get to know each other. Get out of the office, yeah. It's mostly get to know people and just understand, oh, you are that person. And you have kids. Oh, you do have that hobby. Oh,

Vitaly: 18:18

that's who you are. Because there are people too.

Alexandre: 18:20

Exactly. That's where you need to connect first. And then over time, if you are in a pickle in some meetings, they will remember you by the human you are. And that's a really meaningful connection you can have over time and over your career as well. Thank you. All right, I will switch a bit gears to the next topic. It's one that you probably are aware of as it hits the market over time and over time. It's the one of AI for sure. But for me, it's a clear way for what it's part of the day-to-day of designers already. You adopt it or you go to some other jobs at some point. So it's not about the questions of what designer needs to do now. But at some point, I feel like there's still a lot of progressions. We see Figma going out with new tools on how to integrate image there. You have articles as well on Smashing Magazine about that as well and the patterns that exist in the market. So I feel like we're getting to some place where we know what's working, what's not working. That's already a progression. We were not there a year ago, so it's progression. But I still feel like we're still leaving a lot of value on the table. We don't know really well on how we can execute AI on what designers should invest their time into learning now to be ready for the future not really now not in the next project but maybe in a project of a year because you have a learning curve to get into there is a new way of thinking it's not deterministic so you will not ever get the same result it's always changing so it's really a different pattern it's a way to look at information architecture so how do you approach AI in general and how would you adopt is enough for the futures to be ready.

Vitaly: 20:12

Yes. I think overall what we see with AI is this sort of attempt, I guess, by a lot of businesses not to be left behind. Right? That's not very surprising. And so this is why we have all these AI initiatives. However, many of these AI initiatives feel like they're urgent. And so again, it kind of brings us back to what we talked about in the beginning. There is no time to now innovate and come up with all these new interaction patterns and things like that. And of course, when you think about AI, because of chat GPT we think about the chatbot experience right this is sort of it and so what do companies do be it enterprise or not they just plug in a chatbot AI chatbot and that's the story that's the AI experience as it turned out as you rightly say Alexander it's just just barely scratching the surface of what we can do right I think what is really significant is around this is to be very much clear about what that thing actually means right and what I mean by that is what does it mean for us and what does it mean in terms of user experience? How do we break it down? Is it just a type of text box and you type into text box and you receive something back? Well, I think it can be much more than that. We usually think about it from the perspective of maybe four or five different layers. Now, on the one hand, you have this input UX where somebody has to type in something, a query. It doesn't have to be text. It could be audio. Just to give an example of that, I was so impressed by seeing, I think, a new release by Shopify and in there they had onboarding right and obviously you have to set up a store and all of that and they have AI features of course right and they have an AI feature but that feature wasn't like a kind of text box or anything like that you could actually talk to an AI with voice you can say let me ask AI how do I set up my text ID here and AI is aware of the screen so can you do you see this button in the bottom left which is settings can you click on that please and say yeah clicked alright excellent thank you so much for that can you also now look at here and type in that if you have this scenario then you need to type that if you have that scenario you type that right that's incredible that's awesome yeah that's way beyond the text box and it's like a friendly onboarding right and they call it I don't think they call it call I don't remember I have to double check what that button was saying right but this is great experience I love it right and then this is also in right and a lot of times input is also quiet just the user is doing something repeatedly over and over again that's an input you don't have to be asking them to type in something in the query so input is one part of the story that of course just because it's such an important part it often relates to prompting and I really just don't understand why are we so obsessed with prompt engineering guides I mean you see them all over why should I as a human being I think we agree on that that I'm a human being there is a recording happening so it's probably true I can also like wave and do everything there but why are we supposed to learn prompt engineering I mean AI is supposed to be intelligent right that's what it says in the title so I kind of hope that this is still true right so shouldn't AI just interpret my input in whatever horrible way I'm you know presenting my intent right and then and just make sense of it? Why should I say act as this and do this and so on and so forth? If anything, we should really slow down people in how they prompt to say, hey, hold on for a moment. Thank you for your wonderful and very inefficient prompt. Can you please extend? Do you mean this context? Could you mean that or this and that? To really create this most articulate and most detailed prompt, right? So, or maybe even voice or anything like that. So, I mean, I can go for hours on this but it's input UX which is very important it's output UX which is the output of the journey I mean it's also so weird to me like we always get this list of things it's like we're living in I don't know in 1980s with AI I feel really confused because we're getting this summary of what AI believes is true and it has links which very often don't really exist at all but why should I go now click on a link and find out where that source of information is coming from in the this page. Why should I do that? Why can't we not point directly to the fragment of the paragraph or sentence or whatever that actually is the reason why it's here, right? I mean, there are technical limitations of how AI works and so on and so forth, so we need to do more work in creating this mapping and all of that, but that would be much more useful, right? And so this is on the level of the output, and then very often there is this refinement journey. And with the refinement journey, you need to be able to find maybe from the output that you receive something that's relevant to you. So what people do, and this is the most ridiculous hack ever, what people do is they look at the output and then they cherry pick. They say, okay, this sentence is useful. Let me copy that in a text editor. That thing is useful. Oh, let me copy that. And then scroll, scroll, scroll. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, that's useful. And they copy that. So they copy paste things from the output in a separate other workspace, Notion, text editor, whatever. And then they bring it back into AI. Now, summarize this, this, this, this, this for me in a nice comprehensive way or whatever. Or make a PowerPoint presentation out of that or something like that. That's ridiculous. Why shouldn't it be just a part of it? I just

Isabelle: 25:50

communicate with it, basically saying, no, I'm not happy with this. Can

Vitaly: 25:53

you change this? I won't copy and paste. And you know, it's so funny because whenever you ask deep research, right? Whenever you ask Gemini or CGPT any question, it gives you an answer. But then it also, before it even starts executing that query, It will say, hold on for a moment. Here are eight questions I would like you to answer. You have seen this before? Yeah. And then what am I supposed to do? Now I copy paste these eight questions into the text box and then I add empty spaces in between and then I answer each individually. But you know what? It's inefficient. Yeah,

Isabelle: 26:27

time wasting.

Vitaly: 26:28

Yeah, but you know, I don't know, maybe 20, 30, 40 years ago we invented wonderful things called, I don't know, buttons. Buttons are incredible. Like think about the button. Simple and effective UI. And radio buttons and checkboxes and sliders, all of those things can be very... I mean, sliders are difficult to be precise. But checkboxes and radio buttons shouldn't be just giving me options and say, tick off things that are relevant to you. So all of these things are just very simple, really, examples of how we can really innovate quite well, I think, in that AI space. But usually we are kind of sitting on the fence and doing basically just... obvious thing because there is a demand to ship now.

Alexandre: 27:15

And what would be the differentiator for designers of some mindset then to approach it? We should not

Vitaly: 27:20

forget the good stuff that we have learned. Every single AI product should have one single button. Not that button. Oh no, not that button. The button which would say filters.

Alexandre: 27:32

I've seen maybe an example to illustrate that. You should see how you feel about it. It's for an insurance company. You were able to go to a show room a car showroom you take a picture of that new car and it will give you the insurance for it

Vitaly: 27:46

That's

Alexandre: 27:48

nice, I guess. Yeah. You don't have to go through anything. It just detects you are in a showroom. You just take the pictures of that car. It knows the price automatically. It gives you, do you want the full protections or do you want the light one? You pick the button that you want. Buttons. Buttons. And then you have a price. And then you can tweak and whatever you want. But you get in seconds information about it and it's picked into intelligence. It recognizes the car, it to the database to see the premium of that brand and everything so do you I feel like in this kind of example we can illustrate the way we can move forward with AI but I'm not sure that in the market we do have the space in most companies for designers to be able to challenge themselves into going into that direction so I heard your message about for designers encourage them to go to use the good stuff the good nuggets we have and that we have acknowledged for like 40 years in the market So that's fine. I really like that message. But there is a disconnection for me in terms of business objectives and the space we do have to innovate. So that's one thing. And for me, the question is also about, sure, at some point, UX, UI designers are going to be able to cope with this gap. But by the time they call, they need to be ready for the next waves. And what will be the next waves for you?

Vitaly: 29:16

So to the first point, I think ultimately the business is all around things like conversion, retention, engagement, and things like that. And the question is, will this sort of experience, like in the showroom, increase any of that? And I think it will. I think it will. The only issue is that very often people don't know what to do with that AI thing. If you have something like Ask Me anything like so what should I ask then right so it kind of needs to be very clear to them that they can just scan the car and take a photo and stuff like that and then produce something from that right so that's kind of an option there so it just needs to be this kind of this awareness needs to be created I would say but when we're looking at what do we need to kind of be aware of to be prepared for the future I think that we probably all hope that AI will get more accurate and more reliable we don't know for sure right but frankly I'm not too obsessed by that I'm because I think like yes AI is a technology but technology is not very helpful if it's not used and who is it used by well sure enough we could have floating agents all around the world discovering AI agents and setting up teams of agents and speaking up more agents and we have all the agents in the world but they must in the end produce something meaningful for the human right and I think if anything we shouldn't be really that obsessed with AI we should be more obsessed with humans who then end up dealing with AI so if we can understand really well what people do with AI what people don't do with AI how people use AI how do they understand or not understand some AI features and how they expect AI to behave in some way and then map into that that's probably the most impactful thing we can do so it's just it might be shifting of course over time and evolving as we discover new multi-model experiences and so on but if we can encourage people to really understand how people think, do what they say, what they don't say, what they think and never say, and how they operate these AI machines, that's the best investment of time and effort.

Isabelle: 31:21

How do you feel about the future in agentic AI? Do you think it's going to bring real value? Do you see real value in this? Or are you slightly frightened about the future? Because, frankly, to me, agentic AI, I see the benefits, but it's kind of scares me at the same time because where is it going to go if it's just basically agents talking to each other like communicating between each other and we don't they don't need people anymore yeah i think

Vitaly: 31:48

i always try to in all this excitement i'm not trying to be the party pooper by saying oh this is all horrible it's not going to be bad i think there are serious consequences we need to keep in mind with agents because i think it was i think a vice president of signal she gave this incredible interview in one of the conferences i just forgotten the name i can look it up later and she was saying we should not underestimate not the complexity but consequences of having agents like literally so not only in terms of you know them reaching out to websites and doing something on websites and so on but for them to be able to do things they must have permissions which means they must be able to you know open the browser and look up credit card number and you know if you want them to send an email or message then they have access to all your contacts and they can send the messages on your behalf to all of them. And what for? For being able to check out in a commerce store, right? And for some people, that's probably going to be okay because they don't think that much about their privacy, don't think about things that can go wrong. But it's probably enough to have one big disaster in that space where credit cards get published by an agent because it feels like it's a good idea, right? For people to start getting a bit worried maybe And just to be like, again, this whole world of agents is a very unknown yet and very complicated, and we don't know what is going to happen, right? But to be honest, I'm not ready to be afraid of it yet. And the reason why I'm saying that is because we're not even close, I think, at least from what I've been reading and exploring, from having agents floating around and doing things on our behalf with permissions and everything. I mean, I don't know. From what I've been observing, maybe this will be speeding up and by tomorrow, just probably on the day when this interview goes out, we have this new agentic framework and it changes everything. Could be. But I don't see it happening at the moment. It's the same way like we've always been talking about. The AGI is coming. It's like imminent. It's two months, one month, two weeks. And then, you know, a year later, we're sitting thinking we're not even close, really. And so as of agents... I think let's explore what happens here. But I don't think I know if we are getting even close to this. So let's wait and see. Well, but then probably I will be getting a bit more suspicious and scared when the time comes. But maybe it's a bit premature at this point.

Alexandre: 34:29

Thank you.

Isabelle: 34:34

All right, well, thank you for that input. Now we're going to also step it up a gear, well, change direction slightly, but still with a very current topic that you're very familiar with, I believe, and accessibility. Basically, where the current state of this accessibility and the new acts done in June 2025. Where do you see us going in the future with this?

Vitaly: 34:55

Yes, I think when I look back at accessibility, I think I've had the very first early conversation about accessibility back in 2009 or 10. And it then, of course, evolved towards more inclusive design in general, not necessarily in the level of technical accessibility for screen reader users and so on, but also being more inclusive and embracing, so to say. Frankly, I was expecting European Accessibility Act to change everything. I really was believing, I believe that this is the thing that is going to change everything. Did you think it would

Isabelle: 35:27

change from one day to the other?

Vitaly: 35:29

I was pretty certain that companies will pay very close attention and that they will in reduced some measures and there will be a lot of buzz around accessibility months prior to it. This has happened partially, but not to the level that I was expecting. And so what I see now is that a lot of companies are sitting still waiting. Are

Isabelle: 35:51

these really large companies, government companies?

Vitaly: 35:55

Governments

Isabelle: 35:55

have to. So

Vitaly: 35:59

big companies are in there, right? So if you look at big enterprise software, yes, there were massive effort to improve accessibility but most of the time when we look at maybe non-enterprise world I don't see people doing really a lot of accessibility work very typically the way of how I can kind of feel the pulse of it is you know what people write in the case studies and I'm really monitoring case studies a lot I really find them very useful in general not only about accessibility but everything and of course people are writing around what they're experimenting with AI a lot still and you know, they're experimenting more and more and more. I don't think I saw a single accessibility case study over the last month, which I really, and I really do pay attention to all the different sources and so on. Maybe I'm missing a bigger picture. I'm not quite sure. I think that there is sort of an involvement to do, I mean, I would say that there is a desire by companies to do just enough to be compliant and stop.

Isabelle: 37:01

Yeah.

Vitaly: 37:01

which is not very surprising to be honest right but there is no will to do real accessibility work because of course it's it doesn't happen by accident it must be intentional it must be designed in some way there must be people who are paying attention to that and so what I do see is that every now and again you see companies hiring accessibility experts for a while and then they think okay this is done now we've got the badge we've got the badge we can document our accessibility efforts as we need to and then maybe will do another effort two years from now or so right but that's also sort of like a sprint you stop and then you see what happens right at least this is kind of where I feel we currently are that's a bit sad and disappointing to me I have to say

Alexandre: 37:46

I follow you 100% there most of the people are treating that as a compliance rule I need to do that and I need to mitigate the risk I have so mitigate the fine I will receive if I don't comply but in the law itself there is different shades of grey there is things like colors easy to spot easy to analyze and get a fine automatically because of that but if you look into having B2 level text and copy that's a harder thing to detect and to get fine on so I feel like there is multiple shades of grey there to be able to everyone be sure that I know what I have to do so that's one part of the angle for me who is not that clear in So if it's not clear, I will get a fine because I'm driving too fast on the highway. That's a very clear signal. I will be enforced and there is monitoring everywhere. So now, even on the regulation side, I feel like they know the rule is there, but we don't have the personnel, we don't have the training, we don't have the skills to be able to apply these

Vitaly: 38:50

rules. I mean, there are a lot of websites out there, right? There are a lot of websites out there. And companies and everything. Sure.

Alexandre: 38:57

So that's already something that is different. But if you travel a And you've seen a lot of different teams and different people. I'm wondering, for me, all of this debate about accessibility is more a debate about inclusions. It's about design principles and master principles of inclusions. If you look at something like the GovUK, they have 10 or 12, I don't recall exactly the number, but inside that, there is the number seven or something. That is really about inclusions. And in there, we do everything for people. And you said government is a bit outside of the companies in general. but I'm wondering what does it take for designers to elevate inclusions as master principles because in my case for example we were very advocate of accessibility and inclusion for a while now and because of that and because of the fact of the regulations we were able to push and to push developers and to make it into something that is meaningful so I'm wondering how can we advise all the designers or all the people listening to this podcast on how do you elevate the debates to really part of inclusion as a master principle, not just an act to apply to compliancy. So I have

Vitaly: 40:12

one strategy that has been working much better than anything else. Although I do have to say that it's not like I've been very successful in most situations. No, no, not like that. I think when I start speaking about accessibility being a legal requirement or ethical considerations or anything that feels like it's compliance thing people don't listen they feel like oh well yeah what is the chance of you know and even if then you know probably not going to happen anyway so the reason why I think that happens is that because they feel like this accessibility thing that these designers are talking about inclusion as well

Isabelle: 40:54

it's like

Vitaly: 40:55

hot it's annoying it's boring it's boring it doesn't bring the revenue It's not a waste of resources, but it's not what we should be pushing. We need to do AI now. It's an obstacle

Isabelle: 41:11

rather than a...

Vitaly: 41:12

It feels like it's something that's in a way that needs to be done, but... So this is sort of the attitude. And I think the reason for that then is that very often people just don't feel like accessibility relates to them at all, right? And so what my goal has always been is to never speak about legal concerns and things like that in the beginning, but instead I just try to indicate just what that actually means for them. So if I'm talking to a senior management, right? I always pay attention to, you know, maybe they are left-handed, right? Or maybe they are wearing glasses, right? Or maybe anything, Because as you will see, glasses are an assistive device. It's an accessibility tool. But they don't think this applies to them. You also look at how they use the machine and laptop and what kind of screen resolution do they use and the color contrast of what they have applied as setting. And then I really need to make that connection. That's really important for me. And what I always try to do, and this has been very, very helpful, I always look out for case studies and stories. And there are a lot of those on YouTube, by the way, about how people live with different disabilities. And again, I'm not talking necessarily about only permanent disabilities, but also when you broke your arm, when you have headaches, when you're carrying a baby. So all of those things are also part of life, I guess, right? And that's sort of like, again, to me, sort of like a stakeholder engagement thing. I need to understand the stakeholders and what their needs are, but also how that thing relates to them, right? So how can I explain it to them so they can actually feel what a disability is? They can touch it. They can kind of make it tangible. So I always have these video clips from people with different disabilities, different kinds of disabilities as well, how they go through life. Like, for example, what often works is to really explain to people, well, if you drop a pea on the carpet, right, or beans, right, some people will never be able to find it, right? Because it's just, the contrast is very low and you don't know if it's green and you maybe have color. like 6 or 8% of men have, then you will never be able to find it. It's so simple, right? Or if you have a charger and the charger has red and green, right? So if it's like empty, you will never be able to see that. And a lot of people can then relate to, maybe, you know, depending on what condition they are, to that. Or if they have children, you can actually refer to, you know, if you're holding a baby, then you cannot operate two hands, right? And so maybe it would be a good idea to have voice assistant, right? In our AI experience or anything like that so I always try to create these explanations right also the most common one that I think a lot very successful in sea level environments I have to say noisiness level at airports noisiness yeah so if you have an important meeting and you are in a room where you're just busy well good luck having a meaningful conversation right or glaring screen you know when you're outside all of those things make it a little bit more relatable that what we want with accessibility includes a is to support these conditions without redesigning everything, but just supporting them so people can actually use them more reliably with one hand, with keyboard only, by tabbing through the interface or whatever. And these are just different sides, I guess, of inclusivity.

Isabelle: 44:39

So you would put the emphasis more on the temporary disabilities than the permanent disabilities?

Vitaly: 44:44

I kind of show all, so all the different situational and temporary and permanent as well. but I really want to make them relate to it in some way. And then we can also say, well, and by the way, you know, because we're embracing and making it more accessible to a wider audience, there's of course a business case for that too. And then we also can avoid and mitigate risk. I would actually highly encourage everybody who is sitting or listening to this call to tattoo risk mitigation on their shoulder and pull it out whenever you have a conversation about anything. Yes, accessibility as well. But that's the last point I bring, not the first true so that would be kind of my way of making it more relatable and on its own as if you're just a designer and you just want to make things a little bit better here and there well we never ask for permission just what we do frankly and I mean you can always do proper color contrast first sure all the basics yeah and that already is meaningful and helpful

Isabelle: 45:46

yeah

Alexandre: 45:47

then you can advocate to developers and try to get them on board and there is already a lot that can be done.

Vitaly: 45:53

But I mean, for me, developers have the same stories. I kind of do the same thing like I do with the senior management, right? To also do developers to explain to them. And put the connections, huh?

Isabelle: 46:01

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In large corporate companies, I'm advocating for accessibility when I was a designer, but still now, it's very difficult to get buy-in from the upper management in a company that doesn't know anything about accessibility than to tell them the risks and all the legal requirements because that's the only thing that's going to make them budge and accept to take on accessibility experts to help them. But I really like your perspective of flipping it on the other end so that you actually inspire by making people relate to it rather than come up with all the negatives and, I mean, not negatives, but the real hard truths, basically.

Vitaly: 46:40

But maybe also one thing on top of that, because indeed you're right that sometimes they might not listen, right? The thing that I think works really well is to really make it clear that it's not like accessibility has to be ridiculously expensive and take six months of work, right? There are things we can do as relatively quick wins, like, you know, color, color scheme and color contrast and font size and type targets and stuff like that. This is something we can probably do relatively quickly. And that's already better and also makes us compliant and all that, right? But also we need to kind of break down all the things around accessibility, all the work around accessibility into these buckets of quick wins. and projects and mid-term projects, long-term projects, right? And so getting commitment and okay for quick wins is probably going to be easier, of course, than bigger commitments. But they could start there and then see how far it'll come.

Alexandre: 47:38

So we talk about regulation. This

Vitaly: 47:41

is the most exciting topic ever. That's

Alexandre: 47:42

the most exciting thing. So systems, AI, we spoke a lot of things. But design is done with people. It's not done in isolation. So we see a lot of different roles, engineers, product managers, and so forth. So I'm wondering, is it the work that we do as designers evolving over time with different skills, different expectations of us?

Vitaly: 48:07

One of the major expectations is that products designers must be close or close enough to business what that usually means they must be shaping or it is delivering value to the product and they must be and this is important their strategy the ux strategy if you like must be aligned with the product strategy which then must be aligned with the business strategy right and so that means that as designers we are expected to deliver that value and we need to be able to explain that value and also our team that value through the lens of business metrics or product metrics or whatever it is I think that this is why we have these big discussions I mean they always keep repeating it's like a never-ending story ROI of design ROI of UX ROI of this project and whatever things like that but I think that really intensifies and I think in some ways this is also partially at least expected so that as a skill just not really going to MBA school and your MBA degree now but really trying to understand a little bit more about the business side of things there's this wonderful book I can recommend which was really quite impressive to me which is called Personal MBA by Joel Joseph Marsh or something I believe right and I would say oh come on give me a break I don't want to read this I'm a designer why do I want to read this and this is such a great book I have to say and I'm not affiliated by any means right but you read this book and you start understanding why certain things happen in the organization in the way it does, in the way they do, and what to do with that. So I think business, definitely one side of that. And the other side of that, I would say, is probably around, I would say more on the technical side, really trying to understand, again, not just in the context of AI, but also in the context of AI, trying to understand what is actually feasible from a technical side, right? So if we suggest this and we want to design that, be it a fancy, any animation or be it a particular flow with third parties and whatever can we pull it off actually and that's that's usually requires bringing somebody from engineering team to say hey we were thinking about this early we're thinking about this can we do this or not so you see this why that's why you see also this sort of ui engineering role right this is sort of a bridge between the design and development then you can say well ai is going to replace that no no i don't think it will be it will be automating a lot of tasks but somebody must be orchestrating that so that works and somebody must be imagining that thing as well and somebody must be able to come up with this new innovative concept that they can be translated also in code right with or without AI right and so I don't think it is going anywhere so this translation right between again in design engineering is still very very significant and again the other thing would be something around the business I would say this would be two key areas I would be definitely exploring and if you can position yourself as search person this is so on I cannot emphasize it

Isabelle: 51:10

enough. That's interesting. For you, so just touching back on the UI engineering role, are you then of the opinion that the UI design role is not dead?

Vitaly: 51:21

Of course, if it's just taking a design system and creating some flows from that with adjusting UI here and there, probably going to be automated to a particular degree. It still probably will be verifying and reviewing it to make sure everything is done well and things like that. But we probably should be expecting this to be automated this partially but then if you are coming up with a new design language or new brand language or a new interaction design patterns or any kind of new multi-model experiences well I think somebody has to design it and I'm not sure if something hasn't been done before yet can be designed reliably with AI ever and that's a very I mean we're talking about somebody who's going to listen to this 40 years down the line thinking what were they thinking back then but I'm taking a stand here.

Alexandre: 52:12

That's a good one. How do you think junior designers should prepare?

Vitaly: 52:18

It's always the same story. I don't think it really has changed. Sure enough, you could say, well, learn AI, learn prompt engineering. That never hurts, but I'm not sure if we're going to have prompt engineering guides in 10 years from now. It will be all happening in some way or the other on the level of UI, about the product. So yeah, probably very useful now, but maybe not 10 years down the line. it's always the same it's always the principles and it's always the interaction design and it's always just good design what does it even mean right so in times of AI so it's all around the good old-fashioned arts and skills and craftsmanship of design that's remarkably important and it's also around things like again just solving real problems not imaginary problem but solving real problems and that requires mapping that messy reality around us in to the problem space and then from there innovating and coming up with ideas in the solution space. It's not very exciting, not maybe as exciting as AI is, but this is the heart of everything. I don't think it's going to change anytime soon because people don't change that quickly.

Isabelle: 53:22

Would you say as well for juniors, a good advice is to get to know the business straight away and really connect with it

Vitaly: 53:29

and understand it? Yeah, I would say so we need this sort of general design mindset, I guess, and that requires critical thinking, that requires being able to innovate that requires understanding the problem space, that requires understanding the human needs, studying human needs and being able to not draw wrong conclusions by observing the domain and the behavior and all of that, but also then really understanding how business thinks. And again, you don't need to become super expert in business, although you are, right? You are a business designer. You can. There is no downside of that. That's very, very beneficial, right? But that really will help because it will explain many things that are happening around, right? So that would be, I think, a very, very good combination to have. And also, if you want to take an extra mile, then again connecting the design with engineering in some way. If you can beat that glue, you will be irreplaceable.

Isabelle: 54:22

Amazing.

Alexandre: 54:28

So, we covered a lot. We have five questions for you to close.

Isabelle: 54:34

Fire drill. Fire drill. So, you mean like, can I answer each of them like six minutes long? No. Yes. Really? It's not five minutes. Let's do one minute. One minute, Max. Okay. It's not the military drills when you have to push up

Vitaly: 54:49

and everything. You know, I like constraints. Yeah, so I need to, so when I, I'm the one, the difficult person who is going to go to management and say, give me constraints. What can I do? What can I not do? I cannot just say do anything, right? No, I need constraints. So one minute is...

Isabelle: 55:04

One minute. And you've got 15 seconds to think about it. And I'm joking. I'm joking.

Alexandre: 55:08

No pressure. So 10 seconds to insert. Good. Excellent. Good. Let's go for the first one. If you had to describe in one sentence what the industry, the design industry will be remembered for in this decade, what would it be?

Vitaly: 55:24

Oh, wow. What will be remembered in the next decade? After a decade, right? Or in this decade. Yes. So

Alexandre: 55:31

we are in a decade.

Vitaly: 55:33

Well, just for the record for aliens, we are in 2025 now. And for GPT as well. Yes, exactly. So I think this is definitely a moment of shift, of change in some way, right? Frankly, I think that there is, of course, a lot of hype, a lot of excitement. There is also a lot of skepticism, probably more excitement than skepticism at this point, of course. I think that this might be the time when people will realize that actually humans are good and important. And we probably need to think more about humans rather than how to optimize things. I think that the big drive behind AI is efficiency. But then if that efficiency comes at the cost of accuracy, what's the point? If that efficiency comes at the cost of people just not being able to do things as reliably as they could in the past, that's not great. So it must be useful in some way. So I think that we're exploring right now a big, big drive towards people really being obsessed with humans. I'm very excited about that.

Isabelle: 56:36

Amazing. Second question. What's one thing you wish product teams, not just designers, would finally get right in the next few years?

Vitaly: 56:48

I would say maybe finding a way to... Finding a really good way in understanding how exactly the value that designers are producing by understanding user needs matches or fits into the overall business strategy. There is this big gap in between. Very often it's not clear what business, how to actually interpret business goals into something that will actually deliver user value. And this kind of match between user value and business value and how they all work together, very often it's very fluffy and not clearly defined and I think that a lot of product teams who are sitting kind of in between the business strategy and UX strategy right they really must excel that in that and that's often missing because we get fluffy goals that we don't know how to interpret or because we're doing random projects on the UX side of things which we are not sure if they're going to drive any impact that is a challenge that needs to be addressed

Alexandre: 57:48

cool we are in 2030 five years from now we meet again for a new podcast what would you you say that we fully misunderstood about now the way we do design and the way we approach problems

Vitaly: 58:05

I think it could be not necessarily related to design but related to digital sustainability actually I think this is a topic that is not discussed enough and to me personally for example digital sustainability is all around reducing waste reducing wasteful prompting reducing wasteful content and so on and so forth producing so much that it's actually becoming absolutely irrelevant. And I hope, this is my sincere hope, that by 2030 we'll realize that AI-generated content is not a good idea. Right? Because right now it feels like we're all obsessed with generating stuff with AI and, you know, there are also tons of tools of you writing and then you're asking HRGPT to write content for you, but then you also need to run it through another AI tool. It will fake it, so introducing errors and mistakes and points so it feels more human so it's AI written but feels like human oh my god I really hope that you're going to realize that this was a bad idea

Alexandre: 59:06

yep for sure

Isabelle: 59:08

amazing if you weren't in design what would you be doing right now? oh I know exactly great

Vitaly: 59:13

yes I know exactly I'm obsessed with two things that most people don't know of I really like ironing because of shirts and things like that and I was really obsessed to figure out the right way to iron and you know there are king and queens of ironing out there so there is just sorry this is a bit of an off topic but it's an important one I would really go in and try to understand how do you iron well steam or not steam well no no I'm not no steamer person no no no steaming is not ironing it's cheating I mean it's just not cool steaming is cheating so there is this big I really have to tell the story there is this wonderful hotel Saint-Germain Hotel in Toronto. It's I think three or four star hotel, but it's a very nice hotel. And they have an ironing room. And when I visited that hotel and I visited that ironing room, they have a museum of irons in there.

Alexandre: 1:00:11

Oh boy.

Vitaly: 1:00:12

They have 14 different irons in there from different decades. And I tried all of them. I stayed in this room, I think for four hours. I ironed things twice and maybe sometimes three times. It was incredible. The different technologies that they were using and so on. incredible I never thought you'd say that yes I think I would probably be spending quite a lot of time around maybe neat clothing yeah that would be and also what I wanted to always do when I was growing up is writing so I'd probably be a poet not poet I think I'm not that but I would probably do prose I could do okay then the last

Alexandre: 1:00:49

question one book article or talk that you think every designer should experience once in their life you

Vitaly: 1:00:58

I think that one book that really changed my mind in many different ways. I mean, may I say two books?

Alexandre: 1:01:04

No, one.

Vitaly: 1:01:07

Ruth. So there is a book that's called, I think, When Big Projects Fail. It's not something that most designers read because it's not about design. It's, however, a very, very useful book for designers, I think, because it shows you, it's kind of a big research, a big study about a lot of architectural projects around the world and a lot of really massive monumental projects which are like setting up Olympics in the city right things like that these are massive grandiose projects which usually take years and years and years and we're studying when such projects collapse and fail and when they succeed and what is required for them to succeed amazing and it's a very interesting type of very interesting book because it actually covers something that we need to keep in mind when we're working on projects right because it feels like our projects are very minor we're just doing a bit of refinement of filters and search over here right but if you do let's say slightly bigger project like I don't know for four or five months and you have a big initiative you do not want it to fail right that's important and so it kind of gives you this perspective about what to think of as you are approaching this project and the mindset to have and the tools to have as well one of the really memorable things and I know I know I have to be short one of the most important things that it actually came to me is when you actually initiate a project like that usually as designers we start from you know research and discovery and the double diamond thing and maybe we add a third diamond to it and it kind of keeps going but the research shows that the best projects that perform best and are shipped on time and on budget are the ones that apply right to left thinking which means we always start from the future the desired outcome we want and then we always iterate back from that point which is not very surprising to make sure that we actually guarantee the desired outcome so we never start from the start we always start from the end and we work backwards Things like that changed my world. Really did.

Isabelle: 1:03:08

Thank you so much for coming to talk to us about this very important topic of our industry and the state of our industry today. And before we leave, we wanted to give you the space to talk about what your upcoming projects in the future, where people can find you or listen to you. The floor is yours.

Vitaly: 1:03:25

So for a long time, I was trying to be traveling as much as I can have and reach every single country in the world at some point, which, well, never was the big ambition, really. But I just really like meeting people and seeing what they're doing and learning from them. from them right and I'm very happy to be maybe I think I think coming back maybe not to this very studio but to Brussels right and to wonderful Amovify studio will it be or will it be like a workshop environment it's a

Isabelle: 1:03:52

workshop environment

Vitaly: 1:03:53

yeah oh we're going to do a workshop look at us and we're going to have a meet up the day before I think it was 17th the Monday of November and 18th would be a workshop the magic combination of everything that we've discussed I think in some way Maybe a bit of AI, maybe a bit of Measure UX, maybe with some complex interfaces as well. We'll figure it out. But I think it's always very interesting to me to see what people are working on and what they're innovating. And I always come up with these moments of, no, today I'm waking up and I'm going to see everything in terms of food delivery services in Indonesia. I mean, why not? Why not? It seems like I really need to understand better what's happening in healthcare. What about healthcare UX? Are there any case studies about healthcare work done in Denmark? So on, you know, every Friday night is a website night. Yeah. That's sort of a story. And so maybe those, all of those insights and all the things and also the work that I'm doing, probably going to bring them together in this sort of workshops and that's fun. And we're just finishing up video course on AI, actually, but not about, you know, how to use AI to design, frankly, I'm not very excited about that but how to design truly incredible AI experiences that people understand that people use that people feel like they can rely on that people find comfortable and meaningful and maybe maybe even fall in love with that would be incredible I don't see people saying oh I love AI this doesn't happen yet maybe we need to change that

Alexandre: 1:05:30

yeah that's a big goal thank you very much thank you so

Isabelle: 1:05:32

much for having me thank you so much it's been a pleasure and good luck for your trip home Have

Vitaly: 1:05:38

adventures. Thank you so much for having me.

Alexandre: 1:05:42

Thank you.

Isabelle: 1:05:43

Bye. If you're interested in knowing more about Moviefy, don't hesitate to visit our website on moviefy.com. Stay tuned for the next episode and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Gael: 1:06:00

Thank you for listening to Flux. If you liked this episode, subscribe and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.