Bob Baxley, SVP of Design at ThoughtSpot and former design leader at Apple, Pinterest, and Yahoo!, talks to Maze about the history of Silicon Valley, the importance of creating products that resonate with people, and the qualities that define great designers.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
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Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today, I'm joined by Bob Baxley. Bob is a designer, advisor and mentor who has built and led UX teams at some of Silicon Valley's most respected companies. His career spans three decades, including executive design roles at Apple, Pinterest and Yahoo, and his work has touched hundreds of millions of users around the world. Bob is currently the Senior Vice President of Design at ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence and data analytics platform. Thank you so much for being here.
Bob Baxley:
Thanks, Ash. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here with you today. Looking forward to the conversation.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, love it. I'm really excited to connect with you specifically on this topic. And as I've said, have thoroughly enjoyed preparing for this interview. Our topic is on software as a medium, but I thought we could start from more of your personal connection to and love for computers. Maybe you can take us back to your earliest memory of a computer and your eventual entry point into design.
Bob Baxley:
So, yeah, that's sort of my origin story with computing and I encourage everybody to take a moment and think about their origin story with a computer, because as I've talked to designers and engineers and people in tech industry over the years, almost all of them have this really amazing, very specific memory of the first time they saw a computer. And the stories vary based on when they were born in the state of technology at different points in their life. But all of them have this magic moment when they first saw a computer and it still sticks with them decades later.
Bob Baxley:
So, I'm a little bit older than most people in tech. I was born in 1963, before the personal computing revolution. But I remember when I was 11 years old, so it would've been been around 1974, I was visiting my friend, Glen Wilkinson and his dad, Tom Wilkinson, worked at Texas Instruments in Dallas. And Tom had actually worked on the Apollo program, which was also near and dear to my heart. And I remember sitting in Glen's bedroom and him and his dad had built a Heathkit personal computer. Heathkit is this old brand in the United States where you could kind of buy electronics that you would assemble at home and create stuff yourself.
Bob Baxley:
And I remember sitting there watching Glen and it was this little bitty black and white screen and a keyboard and he pressed something on the keyboard and something changed on the screen. And my little 11 year old mind just went holy crap, like what just happened? Like I had only grown up with broadcast TV. So the idea that you could change the image on the screen was just mind boggling to me, completely blew my little brain away. And so, clearly, it had an impact on me because I could remember it even though it was almost 50 years ago. So there was something about computing that touched me at my core as a very young person that has stuck with me and driven me to this day.
Ash Oliver:
Well, I love that story and what's striking to me is the relationship factor, right? Like who's in the room with you, who's doing this introducing. For me, that was my grandfather who recently passed and I've been reflecting a lot on his influence on me and my now career. But it begs the question like how many stories like this involve men in this introduction role?
Bob Baxley:
Sorry about your loss, your grandfather. It sounds like he had a special relationship and he introduced you to something that he cared about. When I have asked this question to people over the years about, can you remember your first time with the computer? Invariably, they talk about seeing their dad play around with Photoshop or something like that.
Bob Baxley:
One of the really interesting historical arguments about why there's not more women in software—because if we go back far enough, the early days of computing, women were very, very well represented in programming in the early days. Invented most of the original stuff. Grace Hopper and others had played seminal roles in the programming of the Apollo mission, etcetera, etcetera.
Bob Baxley:
But then what happened is when personal computing started taken off in the mid seventies, there was this marketing decision of, were you going to market computers as a tool or as kind of a toy and how were you going to position it? And there was a decision that they were going to market personal computers more as a tool. And so as a tool, they decided to market more to men and it became sort of an extension of the male workshop and the garage or something. And so computers became something that was advertised largely to boys, as an extension of this toolkit. And that's where you really start to see this big shift in how many women were going into software engineering. The boys had access to the computers because they were invariably in the boys room.
Bob Baxley:
And when you talk to women in the industry, they'll talk about, "well, I had to go to my brother's room to use the computer," which is not a great setup. Unfortunately, you don't hear many stories of women in design or technology saying, "well, my mom showed me a computer." Invariably, it's sort of attached to the male side, which obviously is a huge, huge miss and a huge loss.
Bob Baxley:
And so what happened is that women would then get into engineering schools, not having had the chance to experiment with the computer because it just wasn't in their room. And that put them at a huge disadvantage. That may be changing now with the broader distribution of computers and whatnot. But again, if you roll back into the seventies, eighties, through the mid nineties, when a house would still have one computer, when a house would probably still have a telephone landline, it became a thing of who access to the computer to play with.
Ash Oliver:
Wow, that's super interesting. And to think of this deliberate turning point and how much that has shifted the trajectory of the entire industry, it's pretty wild, which is a great segue maybe into more of the history of Silicon Valley. What was specific about that time and place that made it possible for the Silicon Valley that we know today, both in the good and the bad?
Bob Baxley:
So I moved out here in 1990. I'd grown up in Dallas and I went to college at UT Austin, studied history in film and through a weird sequence of events ended up getting a job with Claris corporation in 1990, which at the time was a wholly owned software subsidiary of Apple. I got hired to design the first version of ClarisWorks.
Bob Baxley:
And when I came here, Silicon Valley wasn't what it was today. Because there wasn't nearly as much money at play. And I remember, as a kid from Texas moving out here at 27, that there seemed to be like everybody had a windsurfer or a mountain bike on the roof of their car going to work. And I remember it just seemed like people left at 5:00 every day because they were going to go live their lives and go to the ocean or go to the mountains or something.
Bob Baxley:
And there was sort of this hippie vibe kind of thing to the area that was really compelling and interesting to me. And then something happened, advertising showed up as a business model and it kind of destroyed, I think, it destroyed that hippie ethos of Silicon Valley because it very quickly became about the money and not about anything else.
Bob Baxley:
So I came here in 1990, worked in tech for a long time. And then I was at Apple for a while, went to Pinterest in 2014, left Pinterest in 2016 and took a little time off. And your listeners may remember there was an important presidential election in 2016 and it was relatively well understood that social media had played a powerful if not decisive role in that election.
Bob Baxley:
And so I was kind of spending my days driving up and down 101 through the heart of Silicon Valley meeting with different design leaders and sort of asking myself, what the hell have we done here? Like what have we really built in Silicon Valley? And I became very disillusioned with the whole thing. And then randomly, but fortuitously, I came across a podcast called Raw Data, which is put together by one of the institutes at Stanford and it rolls through the whole history of Silicon Valley and the whole history of personal computing. It really galvanized for me all the things that I had kind of intuited about the area. And I sort of knew all these random little stories, but I hadn't been able to thread it together into a narrative.
Bob Baxley:
And they mentioned a book by a guy named Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyber Culture. And in the early part of the book he's talking about in the mid 1960s, there was this real rebellion against computing and there was actually some protest on the campus of University of California, Berkeley where students are wearing punch cards around their neck, complaining about, "I will not be a number," because the whole point of computing in the mid sixties and even into the late sixties was computing as tabulation machines.
Bob Baxley:
And then in the book, the author mentions that there was this small group of folks kind of hippies in Northern California, specifically in and around Palo Alto and Stanford University in the late sixties and they had this different idea. And what they believed was that computing was a new medium. That software was a medium on par with movies, music, and books. And that manifested in things like the Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand and how much he talked about computers and different forms of software to help people run communes. That was certainly the work that Alan Kay was doing at PARC.
Bob Baxley:
And this idea of software as a medium as opposed to a computing tool, a calculation tool, it just really hit my heart like really hard. And all of a sudden I was like, Oh crap. Yes, that is how I think about software and that's why I am so disenchanted with the state of the world in Silicon Valley right now. And how people think about computing because we've just turned them back into counting devices. It's just, we're counting advertising dollars and we're tracking people and we're just thinking about turning out functionality and we're not seeing it as this beautiful medium of human expression on par with movies, music, and books.
Bob Baxley:
And so just personally I reoriented towards that idea of software and it kind of got me reconnected to the hippie kind of revolutionary ethos that I think is central to the founding of Silicon Valley and why it's become what it's become. And it's really, it's why I'm on this podcast. It's why I do most of the public speaking I do now. And it's I found that to be a really exciting and energizing message for me personally, as a designer. And I think it's resonating with a lot of other people in the community.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. So, much to react to there. And as someone who worked at Apple, I can't help but see the influence of the history here. Like in my mind, this counterculture and alternative and creative spirit was so clearly a part of the ethos and then differentiation and messaging and brand of Apple. I want to go deeper on software as a medium and thinking of this as craft. I think Apple is an obvious example of this, but how do you see this being tactically embraced by designers?
Bob Baxley:
Yeah. Well, I'm lucky because I get to talk to designers about this multiple times a week actually. And the thing I always tell people is that as a designer, you should think of yourself as a practitioner in a medium, in the same way that you would if you were a filmmaker, a musician. And you should study the history of the medium, you should understand the seminal figures. You should work really hard to develop taste, and you have to believe in the idea of taste. You have to believe that there are people who have better taste in software design than other people and the people that have good taste have that taste because they've worked at it long and hard. They've looked at tons of software. They've internalized all these different patterns. They've formed like opinions over decades about what's good and bad.
Bob Baxley:
This idea that everything can just be measured by numbers and that design A is better than design B because they got more click through. Well, that's a bunch of crap. That's just saying that the best thing is the one that's most popular. And if that's the standard we're going to use, then we would have to agree that McDonald's is the height of cuisine in the United States. So that's just a stupid, stupid way to think about it. We're trying to create a product here, something that helps lift people up, something that's meaningful and useful and powerful in their lives. Like it's not simply about numbers. It's about, does it resonate with people's soul? Is it meaningful and powerful to them?
Bob Baxley:
And so as a designer, that's just the lens that I come at, all these discussions and I never give up on that. Do you love the products that you're working on? Are you proud of them? Do you think they're a force for good in the world? Do you think your users feel better after interacting with your software than they did before interacting with their software?
Ash Oliver:
Really important questions to ask oneself. Hugely important, for sure. I wonder though, when thinking about software as a medium and likening it to the industry of film, for example, where is ego in all this? Because I believe you've said this yourself, that if you're a designer and really operating as a designer and not an artist, you'll be only proud of the things that are really useful to your audience because that's really what it means to be a designer. So how might we interrogate that further and ensure people don't confuse this craft for some artistic pursuit of self-expression?
Bob Baxley:
Well, I think you hit part of it right there. Design is fundamentally an expression of empathy. You fundamentally have to understand who's on the receiving side of it and I'm not sure with art you really have to do that. You have to do that if you want to make successful art, but actually the best artists weren't successful during their lives. And they pushed the medium so far that they made the audience really uncomfortable and that's awesome. That's a great role for art to play in society. But that's not design. Design is trying to make people's lives better by providing them things in the built environment, which are useful and meaningful and serve them.
Bob Baxley:
And it takes a really different mindset in the head of the creator to do that. Like I have to always be thinking about who's on the other side of whatever it is I'm creating. I'm constantly thinking about the audience and I'm always arguing things from the audience's point of view.
Bob Baxley:
And so you talked about ego. For me, it's not ego because it's not something I'm trying to force into the world. I may believe passionately that I have a particular solution that's better than another one, but it's because I think that solution's better in the context of the people receiving whatever interaction it is that I'm providing.
Bob Baxley:
I'll also say like software is this really bizarre and challenging medium because you don't get to see the audience. So as you mentioned in the intro, I have been fortunate to work on products that have been used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. I've never seen any of them actually use any of the things I've created in real time. They may tell me later, oh, I used to shop on the Apple online store, but I never see them do that in real time.
Bob Baxley:
An actor can go to a movie theater and see people watch a movie. A musician obviously has an audience in front of them. Stand up comedians have audiences. Every other medium, they all have some sort of real time feedback. But those of us working on software, it's so bizarre because it's mostly just us sitting by ourselves with our headphones on, looking at a screen. And it's very easy to forget that there's people on the other side of the glass, but there are thousands, millions, billions. The decision software designers are making today are probably the most consequential decisions being made in culture. Decisions being made at Facebook and Twitter obviously are moving things. Things that are happening in FinTech are moving markets. Like we make incredibly consequential decisions and we don't have any idea who's on the other side of the glass.
Bob Baxley:
So when you talk about is design art or is it science? It's neither. It's design. It's a different mindset. It's a different problem solving methodology. It is its own thing. We don't have to keep trying to shoehorn it into these other disciplines or either these other modalities. Design is design, and it has to start with who is receiving the message on the other side.
Ash Oliver:
Couldn't agree with you more. We have an enormous influence in the shaping of culture and our part of it really cannot be overstated. It sounds like part of the craft is in this skill of noticing the observation and the ability to deconstruct it and name the mechanics at play like literary elements or devices in writing, for instance.
Bob Baxley:
What was interesting when I started thinking about movies versus software is that because we've been watching movies for so long, we have a common vernacular for deconstructing a movie. So if you and I went to a film, we could walk out and I'd say, "Well, what'd you think of the movie?" And you would say, "Well, I thought the music was really cool and the editing was kind of interesting, but I don't know. The plot wasn't that great. And I thought the acting was sort of suspect." You would instantly be able to deconstruct that movie. By contrast, if I said, "Well, tell me about your favorite app." You would probably say, "Well, I don't know. I just use it a lot." And so to me, that's sort of indicative that we just don't have this language for how do we deconstruct software and we need to develop that.
Bob Baxley:
Habitica, for example, is super cool because their conceptual model is mind boggling. It's not that they've gamified a to-do manager. It's that they've taken the whole genre, the whole conceptual model of a role playing game, and they've adopted that to a task manager, to a to-do list thing. It's one of the most innovative, interesting conceptual model shifts I've ever seen in software ever.
Bob Baxley:
And so when somebody asks me like, "What's my favorite app?" There is no favorite app. What I can tell you is, "Well, this app is cool because of what they've done in the conceptual model. This is really interesting because they've done a great job with copy." We don't often talk about that's why we like a particular product or something that's meaningful. And we need to develop that kind of vocabulary. I've pushed it really hard with my team so that when we do design reviews, we're thoughtful about, well, what layer are we working on right now? Where are we in the process? Because if you don't get that fundamental conceptual stuff downright, it doesn't really matter what comes afterwards.
Bob Baxley:
And Walt Disney's got a great quote about this. It doesn't matter what you do with special effects if the story's not great. Special effects can help a story. But if the story's not great to start with, special effects can't save it. And it's the same thing in software design. Like you can have something that looks beautiful, but if it doesn't fundamentally make sense at the conceptual or structural level, it doesn't really matter.
Bob Baxley:
So Ansel Adams, the American landscape photographer, has this quote. There's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept. And I see that all the time in software, where things look good, but as soon as you start poking on them and trying to make sense of them, they just completely fall apart.
Ash Oliver:
In your experience, both as a designer and design executive, what qualities have you observed that make the greatest designers?
Bob Baxley:
It's an interesting question. We just went through this exercise at ThoughtSpot where we were trying to describe what I call the dimensions of a designer. And we came up with 10 qualities and the team at Figma did a great job with this as well. If you do a Google search for how we built the design team at Figma, you can find the article that Noah wrote about this. And we sort of describe these qualities or competencies of a designer. We came up with 10 and they included three of the hard skills. So any given designer is strong in either information architecture, interaction design, or visual design. Then there was storytelling and pitching, collaboration and teamwork, being proactive in the organization. And I think that original and critical thinking is the one that I might call out the most.
Bob Baxley:
I'll go to my Edward Tufte quote now. His quote is, design is clear thinking made visible. And I kind of constantly go back to that, like when we've really designed something well it's because we've thought about it and we've thought about it deeply and we have real true defensible arguments and logic. It's not personal preference. It is a solution to a problem.
Bob Baxley:
So critical thinking is key. And then original thinking is one that I just don't see that many people purposely trying to engage with. Are you just looking what's come before and you're trying to copy it because that's the easy thing and maybe you're under time pressure? Critical thinking is something that I rarely see designers adequately expressing in portfolio reviews, for example.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I mean, it goes back to what we've been talking about kind of over indexes on how do you show the design work that you put in where either it's potentially not in interfaces or there's not a graphical component to it. How do you express the critical thinking that happens when there's so much emphasis and glamor around the dribble shots, for example? It doesn't promote the layers that you don't see. It promotes the graphical stuff. So I think this is timeless advice. And evermore important, considering as you've described software being so pervasive in our lives, like we have an enormous duty to be thinking about these things more deeply. So I appreciate that immensely.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah. Well, I love you putting it that way because you're dead on right. We have a moral duty to create work that makes sense. We have a moral obligation to try to do all we can to minimize the friction in our user's lives.
Ash Oliver:
Amazing. Transitioning next into our hat trick questions, a series of a bit more personal questions just to get to know each guest a little bit. My first question for you is, what's one thing you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that few others do?
Bob Baxley:
Early on in my career in tech, I was actually a sales associate for Claris and I had to go around and demo all the time. There was something about having to get up in front of an audience, which is not something that comes to me naturally. I'm like introverted. I get super nervous before I go in front of an audience. At Claris, because I had to get up and do those presentations over and over, the thing that I realized was if I did it enough times, particularly if I gave the same demo over and over, I got really comfortable with the performance and I could get out of that anxiety.
Bob Baxley:
And so getting comfortable standing up in front of an audience, pitching, telling a story has been a really, really valuable skill. So if I have to get up and present to the board of directors or the CEO or something like that, it's not that I don't get nervous, because I do, but I can perform well at that moment because I've had the experience and the opportunity to do that sort of stuff.
Bob Baxley:
So I'm not sure how many designers go through their career thinking I need to be in a situation where I can learn to pitch better and be more comfortable with public speaking, because design is a lot of advocacy and your ideas won't sell themselves. So if you don't figure out how to get in front of the audience that can make decisions, if you don't figure out how to get comfortable presenting in high stakes environments, you're never going to design anything of consequence.
Ash Oliver:
Okay. My next question. Personal favor of mine. What is an industry related book that you've given or recommended the most?
Bob Baxley:
There's two books that I always recommend. One is called Creativity Inc., By Ed Catmull. I sort of joke that Creativity Inc. is one of the best books ever written about Apple, even though it's about Pixar, because at least for a long time Apple and Pixar operated under the same principles and a lot of the same ways. So I definitely recommend Creativity Inc.
Bob Baxley:
The other one is called Creative Selection by a guy named Ken Kocienda. Ken was at Apple and was instrumental in the creation of the iPhone. He's one of the 24 people that appear on the iPhone patent. And he's the guy that came up with the keyboard. Obviously, an absolutely crucial part of the phone. If the keyboard and typing on the screen didn't work, the whole thing wasn't going to work.
Bob Baxley:
So Ken played a seminal role in this whole thing and he did a fantastic job in the book. It's entertaining to read. It's incredibly well written. And it's a 100% accurate with how I experienced Apple at the time. So he talks a lot about what the Steve reviews were like, the culture of prototyping, trying different things. He goes into some of the ideas that they discarded for the keyboard. And then he distills it down to a handful of lessons that he took away from Apple. It's the only book I know of that was really written by an insider and it's far and away the most accurate of what it was like to work inside Apple during sort of those days of the iPhone.
Ash Oliver:
Okay. My last question for you, Bob. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Bob Baxley:
I will just say that I have a bit of an obsession with journaling. So for the last 12 years or so, I've kept what I call a personal journal. Each year I buy the Moleskine that's dated for that year. They make a thing called the daily planner. And so each page has a date on it and because I'm ADD and attached to streaks, it is not within me constitutionally to leave a page blank. And so having the date on there every day pulls me through. I have roughly 365 pages a day with a story from the day, which includes things related to my kids or my family, sometimes about work, oftentimes about current events. So I have contemporaneous notes about every interesting historical event that's happened over the last decade.
Bob Baxley:
And then about six or seven years ago, I was starting to write a lot more about Silicon Valley and I realized I was living in a unique moment in time. And so I should start taking notes about Silicon Valley. So I started a second journal where I take notes about a story from the day from work. And I actually count every day I'm at work. Not as a way of counting downtime as a prisoner, but as a way to create urgency for myself because I try to go into these jobs thinking I'm going to be there for four years, which turns out to be a thousand days. And so there's certain things I want to get done in that period of time. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm leaving the job, but it creates a certain bit of urgency for me.
Bob Baxley:
And then a couple of years ago, I started a third journal, which I call my Be a Better Bob journal. And at the end of each day, I try to write something that sort of counsels me about what happened during the day. Some inspirational note to myself.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. It's very inspirational to have that personal reflection and then that boomeranging effect where you can kind of come back in to seeing where you've come from. So Bob, thank you so so much for spending the time relaying these experiences and observations from your time in such a prolific career. So thank you.
Bob Baxley:
Yeah. Thanks, Ash. I appreciate it.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a product research platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening. And until next time.