 Having a technical background or having technical knowledge. Do you think that it can help? Make the creative process virgin and grow or do you think it can hinder the creative process? It can go both ways But I've definitely found myself early in my career kind of noticing that Yeah, I started thinking about how to actually implement and a design and that sometimes hindered my design process Because I was thinking so much of how to actually make the solution happen. That's quite challenging things How did you manage to break through? So it's not Stopping you but maybe enhancing the stuff that you actually do I think one of the things that I always struggled with is that From a visual standpoint like I'm not a super talented visual designer I've seen some amazing visual designers that I'm just like oh my goodness like that is really really slick and I love that and That's not like my strength And so I was a lot came back more from like the coding or perspective being able to actually implement some stuff And code which they couldn't But you know there was this kind of this deciding factor realizing am I more of a designer or more of a developer like you know I'm not necessarily that great at the graphics, but there's still so many other ways of design that can kind of spread in So really like doing some research and finding about more about UX design and realizing that is really kind of Wondered what I wanted to focus on Is kind of what led me to that so it's it definitely was this this kind of process of navigating through it It's like where do I fit am I a designer am I a developer we're you know From the first projects that I started doing you know a lot of time I did a lot of websites and when people come to you they go Hey, we need a website built that are necessarily say hey We need to front-end developer to come come do this especially if you're working with the smaller businesses and clients So you do take on the designer and developer hat to kind of make that happen A lot of developers are very afraid to learn about design It's like because I get question like if I was to write an article the perfect article for the developers would be how to How to learn to design or how do you you know which makes no sense to me because learning to design doesn't really mean anything? It's just like what what part of design you know what discipline of design But there's still that question of okay What is the first step that someone who wants to really as someone who's gone through this process yourself? What was your first step to say? Okay? That's it. I'm becoming a designer, right? I think you know following a lot of design patterns at that time I didn't really understand that they were called design patterns, right? You kind of you implement them and the sites doing a lot of web work You kind of take on okay the navigation menu where does that live and you're following a lot of the patterns that have Already been created and so you kind of learn to explore through that and then you know testing out the site and realizing Oh, this doesn't feel right like something's off. Let's let's work on how to make this better But I think one of the the great things that can really help designer or developers wanting to go into design is Looking a lot of like the material spec guidelines are actually really really helpful because not only does it actually tell you Hey, here's some guidelines of what to follow But it actually does a really got a good job of explaining why you're doing that Yeah, exactly. So that actually is really helpful because then you're able to understand why was this created? like what was the thought process behind Adding potentially a bottom navigation or why would you have a side side nav? You know, it's it's really getting to kind of explaining that so you're able to learn from Learn from actually interacting with something and seeing how they're doing it But also getting finding out why they decided to do that because I think so much of design is so much It's problem-solving, right? So So many people forget that when they think of design they think of the finished product But there's so many different stages of how you got to that finished product And so a lot of it being able to understand how someone was thinking through that really really helps you From a development perspective get into that design field of understanding. Oh, okay How do I get from thinking of how do I develop this versus how do I even arrive to the solution? I think that's the that's kind of the big difference there as developers, you know You have something that's already designed for you for the most part I mean, some people get handed things some people get handed an iOS mock and said hey make this make this into Android So then at that time you kind of become an Android designer in that aspect What do you think is like the biggest thing that stops developers really understanding design? One of the things that we do at Google is we do design sprints So the design sprints are really great because it brings people from all the different disciplines and specialties together To work into solving a challenge that we have, you know So you have product managers engineers designers researchers everyone in the room together And kind of thinking and working through a problem, which is really fantastic because you get all these different ideas And one of the things that I really notice is we're as we're bringing in designers, you know And engineers and all these people together is when we're walking through the challenge The engineers are already thinking of the solution and already thinking about how to implement it They go straight to that which makes sense that that is their role right as engineers Usually you are given something and you have to go Oh, how do I how do I make this happen? How do like I'm thinking through problem-solving and how to actually get to that solution whereas designers We don't know what the solution necessarily is so I think a lot of the blockers is Automatically wanting to know the answer Instead of being more aware and being okay with saying, you know, I don't know the answer to that But let's let's explore it together. Yeah So I think that's the biggest hindrance that can really stop developers into getting into design is wanting to have all the answers It's it's okay not to have them. I mean, and what do you think developers can actually do? To get past that I mean because I find like for me it's way sketching and just experimenting So I suppose is how does the developer maintain that kind of playful space where they're not thinking, right? Here's the library. We're gonna use to do like a Whatever widget or a fab or whatever But what can they actually do that allows them to To not thinking about like the end result or breaking from that cycle. Yeah, you actually bring up a great point with sketching That's probably one of my favorite exercises when I'm working with different people to get them thinking of Solutions so it's particularly if you're developing a nap or so is hey Let's get some sketches out there get a sharpie and just start sketching out through some ideas because that really That doesn't you can really get some ideas on paper and not be married to them You know and not feel like really connected because you spent all this time developing the solution and realizing Oh, it doesn't really work And so if you start really low fidelity with some sketches that can really open up your mind in terms of thinking about different solutions Because as you're sketching through it, you're realizing. Oh, like maybe I want to use this fab button or something or everyone loves fab Right, so you want to incorporate it somewhere and then you realize hmm Maybe that's not the the right thing to do and I haven't spent all this energy Developing or even designing this so then I can kind of toss that and move on and create a different solution So sketching I think is a great resource instead of people go straight a lot of people like to prototype in the code But I usually like to challenge people and go hey start sketching some ideas And then once you've landed on something that you think you you want to explore some more than dive into code or dive Into sketch or whatever you're you're using so I suppose For the engineer to really understand design is almost like okay to start sketching first And start thinking about the thing you're going to build and the possibilities rather than straight to the end solution One of the things I really noticed there was the way really good designers responded to constraints, you know I think about I don't know like black-and-white photography or geotone prints. Whatever their responses to you know restrictions on the medium