Irene Au

The ability to listen, to make people feel heard, to bring ideas to life, to make vision tangible, to negotiate. All of those things are really skills that are not taught anywhere, especially in school, but even explicitly. And yet those are the skills that are most critical to, and I it really makes or breaks a designer's career.

Liz Gerber

Welcome or welcome back to the Technical Difficulties Podcast, where we celebrate the careers of amazing female designers and technologists. We are thrilled to welcome Irene Au. Irene is an outstanding designer. She's the mastermind behind the user experience teams at Yahoo, Google, and Udacity, and early experience at Netscape, which I'm hoping we get to hear about.

Today she's a partner at Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm, where she spreads the wisdom on building design and user experience teams. She's also a board member at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, a founding member of the Design Executive Council, and a juror for the Red Dot Awards. In addition to this, she is a lifelong yoga teacher and writes about the Zen magic of yoga. We can't wait to hear from Irene. Thank you for joining us today, Irene.

Irene Au

Thank you for having me.

Liz Gerber

So quick warm up question, what is your favorite way to start your morning?

Irene Au

I like to start with a quick meditation and then I play New York Times games. I like connections, strands, the mini crossword and spelling bee.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. What's your favorite among those?

Irene Au

They all have their gifts. Spelling bee entertains you for a longer amount of time, but connections, just really love seeing things come together. It's very satisfying.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, any strategies you wish to reveal or share with our listeners? Or are they top secret?

Irene Au

I don't know if I've got a good one. You know, it varies day by day, but it's just, you know, that's also part of the magic. Yeah, yeah.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, yeah, I love that. love that. Recently, there was a visual connection. I don't know if you saw this one, but I was so excited. was images as opposed to words.

Irene Au

You'll have to send it to me. That sounds fantastic.

Liz Gerber

Something to check out. I'm going to have if I can search for it. I will. My sense my son sent it to me and said, Mom, you're going to love this. And I did. It was good. Relatedly, what is your favorite creativity tool?

Irene Au

Hmm, tool. That's an interesting word. You know, I just I just like pen and paper. And and the mind. Yeah.

Liz Gerber

Awesome. Great. And why, may I ask, why pen, paper, and the mind?

Irene Au

I just feel, mean, like if we're talking about design tools, you know, because the realm that I operate in is typically software and like our lives are so digital that I think the obvious way to interpret your question about creativity tool might be like some kind of online tool for supporting creativity. But I actually think that being offline actually supports creativity far more effectively. We just have such tunnel vision when we're in front of a computer. And so anything that gets us more into our bodies and allows us to exercise our peripheral vision and just integrate the mind and body is going to be far more effective at supporting creativity than like a tool.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Is there any example you have to illustrate that anything that recently use pen paper in your mind to solve versus a computer?

Irene Au

I mean, you know, with pen and paper, it could be just a sketch or just, you know, you know, writing down like, you know, stream of consciousness kind of words. And then it's a it's a way of metabolizing, you know, all the stuff that's like stewing inside. Being outside is a chance to exercise personal vision. It's a chance to look up. It's a chance to appreciate and enjoy nature.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Irene Au

And there's always like tons of inspiration because there's so much stimulus outside. Like the world is so interesting, but really expansive because it's kind of limitless. You know, it's boundless.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. So has anybody ever pushed back and say, isn't the internet limitless? Limitless and aren't there a number of inspirations there?

Irene Au

It's true. Yes, there is. There's a lot of input. But you know, like when we're practicing focused attention, when we're practicing practicing focused vision, that is putting our brain in a certain state where like that our attention is narrowing. And so that's kind of the antithesis of being creative, where you want to be more expansive. You want to try to draw connections between very disparate things. So you know, and there's a time and place for both.

But I find that too often our field of focus is more narrow than it is expansive because we're either on our computers or on our phones. So yeah, I mean, I think that's the most powerful creativity tool is our attention and how we place it.

Liz Gerber

I love that. I once had a teacher who said to stimulate your creativity take a different way to work every day even if it's just a different you know going around a block in a different way or going up a different set of stairs parking a different parking lot because you'll notice new things was her observation. Yeah I love that.

Irene Au

Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly.

Liz Gerber

Okay last warm-up question which is is there any favorite book or podcast or TV or movie you've seen that's making you think about design and technology differently and why.

Irene Au

There's so many things. There's so many things, but I won't pass up this opportunity to pump up this documentary for which I was an executive producer. It's a documentary.

Liz Gerber

Congrats. Wow. So you're also a producer? I mean, you really, you really, you're, you're, you do an amazing amount of things. Okay. What is it? What is it?

Irene Au

Thank you. It's. Yeah. Well, this this is a documentary about Brian Eno. Yeah, so for. Wonderful.

Liz Gerber

Wonderful. I have his book on my bedside table. Who is, can you let our audience know who he is?

Irene Au

Yeah, Brian Eno is a very famous music producer. He is also a visual artist and he was also part of Roxy Music, but he's probably most well known for the musical performers that he has produced, including David Bowie, Devo, U2. And then he also is kind of the godfather of ambient music. And I have his artwork in my house and I've also played a lot of his music in my yoga classes. And so when the opportunity to support the creation of a documentary about him and his work in his life came up, the obvious answer was yes, but the director, Gary Husswit, is a legend himself. He created these design cult favorite movies, including a documentary about Helvetica, the font. There's also the documentary called Objectified, about product design. Another documentary called ROMS, which is about Dieter Roms. And so I'm also a huge fan of his work. so like this, you know, blending together of Brian Eno and Gary Huss with passion was great. You know, and so we said, yes, my husband and I, and little did we know at the time that we agreed to be producers for this movie, that this would become the world's first generative AI movie. it's called Eno. It's called Eno.

Liz Gerber

Yes! Yes, well, and you haven't listed the name yet. Can you say that?

Irene Au

It's called Eno. It's called Eno.

Liz Gerber

Eno, it is just called Eno, that's what I thought. Okay, great.

Irene Au

Yes, and it will be streaming for 24 hours on January 24th for $24. I can send you the link.

Liz Gerber

That's tomorrow. Okay.

Irene Au

Yeah, I don't know when this podcast is coming out, but yes.

Liz Gerber

Okay. Sure. Yeah, send us the link. We will post. I had heard about this, but I did not know you were connected to it. Oh, thrilling.

Irene Au

Yeah, so it's built on the fly every time it's shown. So there are like trillions of permutations for how this movie can be played. I've seen it three or four times and it's never the same experience twice. In fact, there's some amazing footage with him collaborating with U2 that I have heard brought people to tears and I still haven't seen this footage.

Liz Gerber

Well, so are you gonna keep, do you have to just keep watching it until it comes up? You have inside, okay.

Irene Au

Well, Gary can give us a special cut, but yeah, we have an inside connection. But anyway, it's a beautiful, you know, not only is Brian, you know, himself such a wonderful human being, because I had the honor and privilege of meeting him this past fall. He is a really talented person and, you know, his life's work, the body of work is so enormous that the only way to do it justice was to kind of create the documentary in this way, where it pulls from all this archival footage. But what really spoke to me in watching the movie was how he spoke about the importance of art and what it means. And so I think it's just a lovely, lovely, wonderful movie for a wonderful person made by another lovely human being. And anyone who's interested in design, art, music, culture, creativity,

should absolutely watch this movie.

Liz Gerber

I'm, we could end the podcast right there. That was, I am thrilled to know about that and that you were per that you were connected to it. had heard rumors and what, wonderful news. Thank you for doing that work and your role in it. Okay. Now we will get to the formal questions. That was just the warmup Irene. So I don't know what else to talk about. but this is, we wanted, we do want to talk about your career.

Irene Au

Okay.

Liz Gerber

Because this is where you are today, but how did you get there? And so the question I want to start with is how did you get started in tech and design? And in particular, was there a moment of like an, I'm a designer, I'm a technologist moment, or was it more in retrospect? How did it, how did it come? You have degrees in industrial engineering, computer and electrical engineering, and human computer interaction. Tell us a little bit about what got you to this fabulous place in your career.

Irene Au

Yeah, I'm the daughter of a physics professor and my mother was a computer programmer analyst. I grew up in South Carolina. My parents were immigrants from Hong Kong and my father kind of did not really support any kind of exploration of hobbies or the arts. Like really, I was kind of trained to just focus on school.

Liz Gerber

Wow, okay.

Irene Au

And I grew up during, you in the dawn of the personal computer era. So like I learned how to program in basic at the age of 10.

Liz Gerber

Yes. Yes.

Irene Au

I never had Barbie dolls or anything like that, but I did get like a Commodore 64. It was first a Commodore Vic-20 and then I got a Commodore 64.

Liz Gerber

Okay, Irene, I have to ask you a question. How did you learn how to code basic? Did you have a textbook? That's the question I want to ask.

Irene Au

So my father paid the brother of a friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine to teach me.

Liz Gerber

I love it.

Irene Au

And so that was my childhood. And I had always been very, you know, more tilted on math and science. I liked how there was a definitive answer to things. There's a right and a wrong. And, you know, but, you know, when I look back at how I like to spend my time, just as a child, like what kinds of things do I engage in? You know, like I used to be fascinated by junk mail, like those Valpat coupons.

Liz Gerber

I did too. Tell me what you fascinated you with.

Irene Au

Yeah, just like so interested in like the language, the marketing, the design. I didn't know that there was such a thing called graphic design that there would even be a field that you could study, but I was just fascinated and I would kind of try to reverse engineering by creating my own fake junk mail.

Liz Gerber

Yes. I love it.

Irene Au

So when I was a kid, I used to create my own fake junk mail. I created a library of all of my books. I forced my brother to check out books from my library. And I loved like the task of organizing my books. And so later when I went on to Google, I was like, my God, this was exactly tied to my amateur library science background as a child. And then... and then the other thing I like to do was to draw interior elevations. Like I was an amateur interior designer and so it was just, but I chose to study electrical and computer engineering because I was a math science kid in high school. I was president of the math club and know things like that and my boyfriend at the time said that he was going to study electrical and computer engineering and so I was like, well if he can do it then I can do it. So that's how I fell into that and you know like I had a Mac, I'm Mac SE in 1984-85. So like that blew my mind.

Liz Gerber

Yes. Can you just describe what that looked like? Like what was the volume, what were the proportions of that just for our listeners?

Irene Au

You know, it's like this big.

Liz Gerber

Like a foot, it was like a foot tall, maybe a foot and a half, but the screen was six inches at max, right?

Irene Au

Yeah, yeah, maybe it was tiny. Yeah, maybe six or seven or eight or nine inches. My dad, think still has it and uses it as doorstop. But, know, that really blew my mind too because it was like this visual representation of what I had imagined in my mind when I learned how to navigate file systems and things like that, like, oh, folders and files. And the display was so obvious, but there was nothing else like it. So that was really cool. And then eventually I learned how to log in with my 1200-bot modem onto bulletin boards, and I would have my own email account and things like that. And this was like 1987. I mean, I was like a real nerd.

Liz Gerber

Yep. And then the modem, just to be clear, was it still the handheld rotary phone that you stuck into the modem box?

Irene Au

No, at the time, I mean, it's like it was connected through the Jack. So you know you yeah.

Liz Gerber

Okay, the jack. By then it was jack. Okay.

Irene Au

But yeah, so I was you know that that's like early childhood. I mean it wasn't even the Internet at that time, but there were bulletin boards. So in college I built robots and I learned about chip design and things like that, like logic gates and all that was really fun and without a clear vision for what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering. At the time, I thought I was going to work on chip design, like VLSI design, which is really funny because that ex-boyfriend of mine, he is actually a chip designer at Apple now and lives in Los Altos.

Liz Gerber

Oh, no way.

Irene Au

Yeah, it's so funny. But what I discovered at the University of Illinois when I was there was I was the only girl out of hundreds and hundreds of students. I mean, definitely the only girl in the graduate program.

Liz Gerber

I was ask you. Yeah.

Irene Au

And I was just looking around feeling like I am not like these people. Like they are, they're just interested in building stuff for the sake of building stuff. Like they just love technology so much. But I, I found that I was like, you know, how can technology support people? And then how do people influence the creation of technology? And then one day I was studying in the student union and this acquaintance of mine approached me and asked if he could study with me. And so he sat down and he pulls out this textbook and it's called Engineering Psychology and Human Factors by Chris Wicken. And my God, so I was like, wow, what a cool title. Can I flip through this book? And I'm looking through the pages like, my God, this is so amazing. I had never in my dreams imagined that there was like a whole field of study around this, like understanding using the principles of human cognition, perception, memory, attention, and how do you apply that towards the design of machines? And a lot of the professors, and not a lot, but there was like, you know, some prominent professors who were looking at human factors as it applied to the design of airplane cockpits. So like, how do you avoid pilot error? And so I was like, this is it, this is what I want to do. And coincidentally, and it's so funny how like, you know, things kind of converge in your life at the right time, at the right moment.

Liz Gerber

Yes.

Irene Au

I remember in sitting in my computer architecture class one day flipping through my textbook. This was written by John Hennessy, who later became the president of Stanford.

Liz Gerber

Correct, great.

Irene Au

But I was I found myself bored in class. I flipping through the textbook and I found this graph. From IBM Human Factors research that like illustrated fits law or something and I was like wow, this is another aha moment and it happened all around the same time and so I I researched like, who are all the professors at the University of Illinois who are, you know, tangentially interested in this space? And I wrote to every single one of them and and and one of them wrote me back and she she was looking for someone to join her lab as a graduate student who could code and develop software. She was a professor of cognitive engineering and she was looking at a variety of things, but among them were like human factors and emergency rooms and operating rooms as well as like the, how do you apply human factors towards the design of software? And I knew how to code. So I had something to offer her and she taught me everything she knew. And so that's how I kind of pivoted. I, you this is before you could study human centered design or human computer interaction, but I created my own program of study drawing from classes in the departments of psychology, computer science and industrial engineering. So that was.

Liz Gerber

Right.

Irene Au

That was kind of my transition over there. And then this was in the mid 90s. And at the University of Illinois, we had NCSA, which is the research institution where Mosaic was created. So the University of Illinois was literally the birthplace of the first graphical web browser. And so this kind of permeated the whole culture at the university. Like we were probably the first university to have our course catalog online and things like that. so.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Irene Au

as an early adopter, can really start to see how is this going to change the way we do things? And then also like, my gosh, the design of these websites are so bad. How do you apply HCI principles and practices towards the design of websites? And so I was a very early person doing that. And so my then fiance and I, as we started to look at job opportunities, we had considered offers from

variety of places, but we knew in our hearts that the number one place we wanted to be in was Silicon Valley and we wanted to work at Netscape. And so it happened and that was kind of how I launched my career.

Liz Gerber

And that was an amazing story. And they say that, you you have to be in the right place, but you also have to be prepared. And I think you were very prepared to take advantage of those, those opportunities. For our listeners who might not know what Netscape is, would you mind just sharing, sharing, sharing what Netscape is and just how exciting it was to work at Netscape at the time. And maybe in one minute, you know, what, what Netscape led to and what we think of what we, what services we may think of today.

Irene Au

Right, yeah, Netscape was the first commercial web browser. So whereas Mosaic was the academic kind of research kind of product, all these guys like Mark Andreessen and a bunch of other people from the University of Illinois decided to form a company. And it was really the first internet startup darling that kind of kicked off the whole frenzy around internet startups. So yeah.

Liz Gerber

And established so many interesting principles and practices. And then you went on and you worked at Yahoo and Google. So you've really worked at the powerhouse.

Irene Au

Mm-hmm.

Well, what's funny is that, you know, at the time that Netscape made me an offer, they were still a startup, but I still had one semester left in school. So I said, no, I need to finish school to get my degree. And I joined in like June of, you know, 1996 and they had gone public like in May or something. So I missed the IPO, but nevertheless, around the time I joined is when Microsoft started integrating Internet Explorer into the operating system. And that led to, you know, a precipitous decline and that Microsoft's anti-competitive practices were not the only reason why Netscape didn't survive. But I won't get into that, but long story short, like I started to realize that the interesting design challenges for the internet was not so much in the viewfinder through which we see the content, but in the design of the content and the experiences within that viewfinder itself. So, whereas I was a designer for the browser, the mail news client, the page editor,

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

I was increasingly tilting my interest towards the design of the content and that was next. It was not really the place for that because they were so focused on the browser technology and the server technology that the people working on the content side of things. The Net Center portal was just like not really a priority and then at some point Netscape decided to open source the browser code and I realized there's no place for a designer in the open source community.

You know, like a bajillion people working on the code, like an engineers, you know, it's like your ratio. So I was just not mature enough in my career to want to handle anything like that. But interestingly, Yahoo, which at the time was really just a directory of websites. It was a hand curated directory of websites. At the time they had 500 employees. They just bought Rocket Mail, which eventually became Yahoo Mail.

Liz Gerber

Yeah.

Irene Au

They had just launched MyYahoo, which was the first personalized homepage. They could see a direction where they were going to start developing web services. And they wanted someone with my background and experience to help them methodically build experiences that were usable, useful, desirable. And so I thought about you know, a variety of different companies to join. But ultimately I picked Yahoo because I loved the hiring manager and I loved the energy at that company. Like there was just this, everybody's stressed out and busy for sure, but it was a good kind of stressed out and busy. There's like a happy energy that I found there that I didn't find anywhere else. And in fact, that very boss who hired me is still one of my closest friends. I talked to him almost every day. And even the team that I eventually built and hired like,

We're still like a family. I just had them. We had a reunion at my house with about 100 people this past summer, so it was a really special time that you know I've never really seen anywhere else that I've worked and I just feel so grateful and privileged to have been a part of that. But you know it was really we were the first and one of the few Internet companies that really had human centered design practice. And so to be able to, creative vision for what that might look like and how we would operate and what kind of people to bring on because it wasn't like there were a lot of people who were studying, know, like majoring in this. So it's like, how do you find the people with the right raw material materials who are going to like figure it out? So that was that was just really an amazing journey. And then, you know, I think the eight years I was at Yahoo was really like being at three different companies because there was the Internet boom time. Then the bust in the early 2000s, and then the rebirth in the Web 2.0 era. And by that time, they had kind of lost their way. They had lost their vision. There wasn't a strong technical infrastructure that would allow the company to operate efficiently. And there's been a lot out there on the internet that has written about it, but all that is like 20 years old now, so we won't talk about that. But at the same time, like, Google was kind of on the rise and I was so intrigued by Google. This was around 2006 and my then husband at the time, who's now my ex-husband, he joined Google about six months before I did and he would come home talking about the amazing food and how interesting it was and you know, meanwhile at Yahoo everybody's like, my gosh, yeah, you know, Google this, Google that, what's Google gonna do? What's Google doing? So like when the opportunity came to run the design team at Google, which was still fledgling and kind of an upstart in and of itself. I really was so curious. I just wanted to go there. And what's funny is that a lot of my colleagues were like, my God, you took that job? Because this was not perceived to be a job that anybody wanted. Google, similar to Yahoo actually in 1998, Google in 2006 was not perceived to be like an obvious place for designers to go.

Both of them were very deliberately undesigned in the way that most designers think of design. Like it was deliberately without adornment and it was very tech-based and it was nerdy and you know but to me that

Liz Gerber

Which is a design aesthetic to your point. I mean, there's many ways of designing design, design interactions. Yeah.

Irene Au

Exactly, yes well what I yeah I mean well what I thought was intention. And a lot of integrity towards that intention, which is that all four founders, the two founders at Yahoo and the two founders at Google, all had a similar insight and intention, which was that the best experience and the most usable experience was the fastest one. And so every design decision was informed by this idea of speed and fast. But in any case, when I joined Google in 2006, there were 60 designers, most of whom were new college graduates, and there were about 40 usability analysts. so the whole way that they interfaced with the development teams for different products was still emerging because at that time, 99 % of the traffic coming to Google was for Google search. And yet we were starting to develop Google, like Gmail.

Liz Gerber

That's right.

Irene Au

We were, we had just bought Rightly, which became Google Docs. And then shortly after I joined, we bought DoubleClick, we bought YouTube. And so there was a lot of opportunity to better structure how we did our work, how we engaged with product management and engineering, the ways in which user research could be valued. Cause they were, they were really doing kind of design QA with usability studies, you know.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, right. Yeah

Irene Au

And there was so much opportunity to do more in terms of informing what should be built and how it should be designed. And so that was really a huge transformation that I was responsible for.

Liz Gerber

And I would say that, and I just want to, another highlight that I think I was admiring from the outside was really this, this AB testing, this idea of like, let's ask users what they think, you know, should we do it this way or that way? But, less asking, but just showing and seeing what gets more clicks or what's more efficient. And that was, that was lauded from the outside. I don't know what it felt like to be running that from the inside, but.

Irene Au

I mean, a double, that's the double-edged sword too, because I've seen it at the type levels of dysfunction as well. And I think, you know, one of the problems is there's a time and place for A-B testing, but it's not a substitute for really like designing a holistic intentional, you know, experience. And the reason why there was so much A-B testing at Google is because the search results page is actually a very sensitive interface.

Liz Gerber

Okay.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

Slight changes to the font size, the font choice, whether you bullet item, the search results, whether you underline the links, the letting, know, and spacing between the lines and things like that.

Liz Gerber

Yep, exactly.

Right, right, exactly.

Irene Au

Any of those little details can radically impact the key metrics that Google cared about. And ultimately that means like whether people click on ads. Okay, let's just face it. Yeah, so that's really what all that A-B testing was about.

Liz Gerber

Right. Well, as a design student at the time at Stanford, early 2000s, well, I guess it was early 2000s. I mean, that was just mind blowing to all of us that you had the date that you had, potentially you had the data to speak to that. So that was exciting. Okay. I got it. I feel like I could talk to you all day. mean, I'm like, I'm learning so much and there's so many points of connection and there's so many threads to pull on, but I want to pull on two.

Irene Au

Yeah.

Liz Gerber

The first one is around, tend to, there seems to be a history of you going into places before design is recognized or accepted or fully embraced. And so I want to bring us up to the current position you have, which is at a venture capital firm. And quite honestly, from the outside, again, everybody said, wow, Irene's going in and bringing in design into venture capital. If anybody can do it, it's But it wasn't really there before. So I'm going to credit you with really introducing and popularizing design within venture capital. And I'm wondering if you could speak to that experience.

Irene Au

Yeah, well first I'll just rewind and talk a little bit about how I work with our portfolio. So like in venture capital, have investing partners and they're the ones responsible for deal flow, due diligence, making investment decisions, sitting on the boards, you know, that sort of thing. And then we have a team of operating partners who have deep functional experience, like hands-on experience, you know, helping like working within.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

An operating role and inside companies that have kind of been through the journey that many startups hope to be on. And the existence of operating partners within venture capital firms is also not a given thing. It really only exists within maybe the largest VC firms that can afford it. And I think is also something that comes in and out of vogue depending on the state of venture capital. So like during the boom times when VC firms are kind of competing with each other for hot deals with entrepreneurs, having operating partners is a way for the VC firms to differentiate themselves through these services to help the founders be successful. And then, know, kind of in bust times, you might see operating partner roles go away because there's just no, there's not as much competition for the deals anyway. It's so, so, so I'll just, you know, with that background, you know, I'll leave it at that.

Liz Gerber

Thank you, that's helpful.

Irene Au

And, and at Coastal Ventures, have this, slogan, kind of venture capital, venture assistance. So the idea is that we do more than just throw money at the entrepreneurs. We have a team of people who are really our goal is to help the CEOs be successful, whatever that means. And we invest in hard tech. So the portfolio is largely super nerdy companies. I mean, these are like founded by amazing technologists and scientists in like AI, robotics, food sciences, energy, know, things like that. And so they are amazing technologists, but they don't know, most of them don't know anything about design. And that's where I come in.

Liz Gerber

Yes. Or they think it's like curtains. They think it's like picking curtain colors. If they do think they know something, yeah.

Irene Au

Yeah. And you know, what's interesting is that I think around like, around the time that I joined Coastal Ventures, and I've been there for almost 11 years now, like around the time that I joined, I think there was like a rise in understanding that design is important to a company success. But they there was a lot of naivete around like, well, how do you know a good designer when you see one? How do you find them? How do you structure them within a company so they're successful? How do you set them up for success? And where do you find these people? You know, all these kinds of questions. And then and then because the market, the job market was so hot for designers like.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

You know, a lot of times a small startup can't afford to hire like a senior designer. Like they don't want to, these, people who are more senior, like they have mortgages, they have children, they don't necessarily want to join a small startup. Um, and, but, you know, you can't just hire junior people either because, you know, uh, in a startup, like everybody else has power except for the designer, you know, the engineers are the ones writing the code. The, there's a product manager, you know, usually the product manager is the CEO, but if there's the product manager, like they're considered the CEO of the product.

Liz Gerber

Correct.

Irene Au

And the designer does usually, especially the junior designers, they don't necessarily have the experience or the gravitas to be able to hold power to advocate for successful design. So then it's like the blind leading the blind. So I also, in addition to coaching CEOs, I find myself coaching and mentoring a lot of the designers inside startups, because they're like the only one, you know, and they're still growing in their careers. They're still learning and you know that sort of thing. So anyway, that's one of the ways those are some of the ways in which I get involved. I mean really it just comes down to how can I help? What's keeping the CEO up at night and how can I help?

Liz Gerber

Thank you. The other string I want to pull on is your, your interest in and maybe supporting fastest being one of the metrics of success. And at the same time, I'd love to hear your reflections on the proliferation of AI and the way in which that makes some things faster, but maybe with without attention to unintended consequences or potentially de-skilling some

some people, some creatives, I'd love to just, I'm opening it way up to say, what is the future of AI and design? And what's our criteria for success? What do think it should be?

Irene Au

Mm hmm. Well, that's a very broad and deep question, but.

Liz Gerber

I know and I did not prepare you for that. My next question was supposed to be, what's the most surprising thing you learned in your journey so far? So if you want to take that question instead, that's fine.

Irene Au

No, no, no, I'd love to answer all these questions. You know, so I mean the when we talk about AI and design that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. So you know one vector is to think about like how our designers going to be impacted by AI and certainly and I've already seen this. You know the development of tools that will allow it will basically democratize design.

It will allow anybody to be able to create graphic design assets for marketing campaign. will allow anybody to create any kind of illustration they need, but beyond that it will allow anybody to be able to create an interface. You know and and even experiences on top of various. Modular technical components. You know we already had that with AWS and you know things like that that have really already kind of made it a lot easier for companies to create, for entrepreneurs to create an app or a company with very little capital because there you so this is just like a continuation of that trend. It happened first with technology, now it's happening at the front end. And so like, hopefully that will mean that we start to see better design in the world because maybe there will be better templates for people.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, that's right.

Correct. Correct. Yeah, I agree. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Irene Au

Stronger design patterns that will create more consistency across the board. But you know, it can be threatening for designers for sure. But it reminds, it's not unlike, you know, it reminds me a lot of when I was at Google and I was trying to create a common look and feel for Google. And a lot of the designers at that time felt very threatened by this push towards standardization because they felt like it was going to take away their creativity.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Irene Au

And my answer to that was that look, it's just going to force us to be better. It's going to push our efforts upstream so that we can provide more strategic value to Google. And that has definitely played out. And I think that it's going to change the nature of our profession as designers. AI will, for sure. And one of my pet peeves is when designers kind of moan and groan about like, oh, we don't get a seat at the table.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Irene Au

You know things like that, but you know really design is about making vision tangible and that's the superpower that we have that nobody else has. And if you can use those skills to help. Stakeholders understand the consequences of their decisions, then hopefully that leads to more informed decision making and so that kind of leads into your question about unintended consequences and things like that. It's like sometimes, you know, like I found this many times over, but especially at Udacity where we would talk about stuff and it all, you know, we all thought that we were all talking about the same thing, but it was only until we like actually drew it out that it was like you could get into the specifics and say, you know, no, I was thinking this. No, I was thinking that, you know, and then you can sort out those details and it's only because people get this visceral response when things are brought to life. You get to really feel what it's like to be, you feel it in your body, like what it's like for A versus B. that's really where designers can play a really instrumental role. It's not necessarily in the icons or the layout or.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

You know, all those things are important too. Like for sure, beauty is super important. And I actually regret that as a design community, we don't talk enough about the importance of beauty. you know, in our efforts to, you know, be more strategic, we talk about design thinking and, you know, like the, you know, strategic, but like beauty is strategic as well. And, and it also provides like immense value to the human experience.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

So anyway, that's kind of a ramble. don't know if I really answered your question.

Liz Gerber

No, you did. You answered so many things to follow up on. again, wanting to be respectful of time and wanting to know that I feel like you are a design philosopher and I want to ask you many more questions about your philosophy of design. What it does bring me to and your connection, obviously now you are on the board of the premier design museum of the United States and I'm sure discussing about the future of design future past history of design is and would love to talk more about that. But I'm going to wrap up by asking you about your three questions. I'll ask them, you can answer them in order if you'd like, which is what is a surprising thing you learned in your career so far that might not some advice you might want to give to our listeners. And then what's something you still want to do? I know you've done it all, but I sense you are the kind of person, you probably have a list of a hundred more things you're set to do. So I'd love to hear an unexpected piece of advice and something that you still want to do in your life. That's important to you.

Irene Au

Well, a couple of things. I don't know if this is one of your questions. The surprising thing that I've learned on my journey so far, and I think this is especially important for your audience. Like, I don't know if there's enough understanding or emphasis placed on the importance of soft skills and emotional intelligence as a key critical component for designer success. you know, design.

Liz Gerber

Great.

Irene Au

In comparison is easy. Drawing the stuff brainstorming coming up with ideas really that's the easy part of the job. Relatively speaking, the hard part is that like look everybody's got an opinion about design. You know everybody's prioritizing something. You design is all about having a point of view and everybody is going to be optimizing for something else. And then when you add in like the an organization like a big company with like.

Liz Gerber

Yes. Yep.

Irene Au

people with different agendas and politics and stuff like that. Design, it becomes really hard to execute well because of the people factor. And the only way to bust through that is with like high skills and emotional intelligence. The ability to listen, to make people feel heard, to bring ideas to life, to make vision tangible, to negotiate. All of those things are really skills that are not taught.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Irene Au

anywhere, especially in school, but even explicitly. And yet those are the skills that are most critical to, and I it really makes or breaks a designer's career, whether they get promoted, whether they can become executives, whether they're respected by designers that report to them, and also the peers and their stakeholders within the organization. So that's something I just really want to emphasize to your audience.

Liz Gerber

I love that. And let me just follow up that I got greatest design training, et cetera, but then decided I needed to do a PhD in organizational behavior, precisely because of the reason you said. It's like, wait a minute, the people, not that doing a PhD helps you be a better person with soft skills, but just as a focus of study, I thought, wait a minute, the organization and how people work together, that's what…

Irene Au

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Liz Gerber

What really influences whether a brilliant idea gets out in the world or not. It's got to go through this organization.

Irene Au

Yeah.

Well, I often think like growing up as a petite Asian female in South Carolina really trained me to next level kind of skills in terms of being like a woman designer in tech. Because all the same skills that you have to cultivate, know, like listening to others, seeing another perspective.

Liz Gerber

Interesting! Okay.

Irene Au

Um, you know, and, and, and embracing that and not judging, then also like assimilating and then presenting alternate points of views and ways that are not threatening to other people. And how do you make things, you know, how do you make people feel like it's coming from them and that it's their idea, you know, that's coming from this egoist place because it's really like, you know, I was coming from a position that like where there's no power or authority or control and yet design really like excellent design really requires all of that.

Liz Gerber

Yes!

Fascinating.

Irene Au

So how do you do this in a context where you don't have any of that, you know, but still want to see the same outcome? So it really is like kind of self with ego leadership. But yeah. And then in terms of unexpected advice, like the other thing I will say, and this is an observation I've made after looking at countless resumes and portfolios is that there was a period of time where people would job hop, you know, every 12 to 18 months.

Liz Gerber

Correct.

I love that. Brilliant.

Irene Au

Because the job market was so hot and you could just like go to another role, get more pay, get a higher job title. And now I see a glut of designers who have amazing job titles that X, Y, Z companies and you know, but they've never really accomplished anything because there's only so much you can do in 12 to 16, 18 months in a single place. I, know, like kind of don't quit commit, you know, like you want to be someplace long enough where you can really have an impact and really be challenged and grow. you know, and at the same time, like, you know, you know, I have one of my best friends was that a company who is an enterprise company that she was there for like 20 years and kind of missed the opportunity to challenge herself in a different context. So there's a balance, but I would say that the career trajectories that I've seen of the younger generation over the past 10 years.

Liz Gerber

Mmm, mmm.

Irene Au

It has really been to their detriment. So yeah.

Liz Gerber

Interesting. Okay. That's super helpful. And anything you still want to learn and do?

Irene Au

Oh, you know, it's a little bit difficult to talk about this because it's so esoteric. I mean, I guess one way to sum it up would be, you know, like if I were to describe all of this under a single rubric, it would really be under the practicing the art of attention. And this kind of is an umbrella that that kind of extends into

Liz Gerber

Ooh, okay.

Irene Au

mind-body spirit. So like in terms of the body, it's like how am I moving my body? And this is like really nerding out on physical therapy, like body mechanics. Like I had some muscle imbalances that led to misalignment of my musculoskeletal structure. And then I also like didn't have a neural connection to some of the muscles in my body. So some muscles weren't even firing. And so I just had to reverse engineer all that and then rehabilitate myself. So

I actively saved myself from needing foot and hip and knee surgery, which is great. It's amazing. But also related to the body is like, how do I sleep? How do I feed myself? My younger daughter suffers from a complex chronic illness for the last six years. And so that set me off on a whole journey, learning as much as I could about functional medicine, holistic health practices, and also down this other road of you know, just navigating like my own journey around menopause led me to look into naturopathic medicine, Chinese metal, traditional Chinese medicine. And so that's like the body. And then in terms of the, the, the mind and the spirit, also looking at like, so how, so how do I move? How do I feed myself? How do I, sleep? But then how do I love, how do I show up in this world?

How do I cultivate love for people who like challenge me the most? And in this time of like extreme political division where even everything is politicized, it's like, how do we make the space for understanding people whose views are very different from ours and to love them the same? And that actually takes a lot of work. There's no like quick hack for that, but what I've discovered in that journey is that in doing so, also like my whole being has changed, like my spirit and how I relate to the world. And I spent a lot of time in New Zealand over the last couple of years and just being immersed in that much nature in such a concentrated time where I didn't know anybody and there was nobody to interact with except my husband.

You know, you're really with yourself and you get to know yourself a lot. and, then suddenly just the way I experienced the world is just very different. Like as, as I've gone on this journey with naturopathic medicine and subtle body energies and things like that, like I started to veer into this realm of bioenergetics and energy medicine and

elevated states of consciousness and what kind of powers that can give you and things like that. And it's very esoteric and very difficult to talk about publicly, but it's something I'm really excited to learn more about and to experience because now I've gotten a taste of it and I can see and measure what I felt before but couldn't measure. I can actually do that now. And so it's amazing.

So anyway, that's a whole other conversation we don't have time for.

Liz Gerber

That sounds so powerful. It's, something I just, want to conclude with is I so deeply honor and admire your attitude towards learning and living with intention. It comes through in everything you've said. And I love that we started off with you learning basic programming, and now we're talking about the tensions of the body and the breath.

Irene Au

Mm-hmm.

Liz Gerber

And the curiosity you have for living is inspirational. So thank you. Thank you so much, Irene. I really do feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours. And the next time I'm out there, if you're up for it, I'd love to take you to coffee and thank you personally.

Irene Au

Thank you. Yes, I would love that

Liz Gerber

I feel like there's endless things we could have talked about. Is there anything you wanted to say before we round out that you didn't get to say that you were thinking and planning to share?

Irene Au

I mean, there's so many things, but I always love hearing some people and happy to connect with anyone so you know people can reach out to me on LinkedIn if they want to chat with me more.

Liz Gerber

Okay. Well, I mean, it's a real gift that you shared all these stories, these very specific stories. Just can already, I already know the comments that are gonna flood in. Like she was so real and honest and smart and she took risks and it's the power, as you know, the power of storytelling is incredible. there's people see a lot of love to learn from people they admire. So thank you for giving this gift.