 I'd love to get it to a space where more people can prototype in stuff that isn't going to be thrown away, so be that code or whatever it might be. It's self or the feeling of it, you're just, I'm doing this transition, this transition looks smooth rather than what is the intent, I think that's the thing that's often times lost. One of the challenges I find with prototyping tools is you spend all this time working on something and then you just throw it away. But I know the way you've worked on, say, Plaid, is you've actually worked in the code and prototyped in the code, which again kind of like blows my mind. What is your preference with that? I mean, and what your feelings about prototyping tools are they a bit? Do they hold back the design process? I'm asking you lots of questions all I want to go. No, it's cool, man. You're asking me lots of questions about my favorite subject, so that's good. I love prototyping tools because they enable people to prototype and I think more people should be prototyping. I agree that I hate spending time building something and making something that you might end up throwing away. Which is why for me, I find I don't spend a lot of time in prototyping tools because I kind of get to an idea as quickly as I can and then move into code as quickly as I can because I can code. But if that's in your skill set, then moving into code might be a good option for you. Maybe you use something like Framer or something like that where you might be able to use some of the code later on. But if you can't code, if you don't have the skill set in your arsenal, then maybe a prototyping tool allows you to get into that space. So I feel like more people should be prototyping, but I'd love to get to a space where more people can prototype in stuff that isn't going to be thrown away, so be that code or whatever it might be. Yeah, I suppose, I guess it really does come down to a point of thought the intent of the prototype is. I mean, I know there's that go-de-locks principle where it's like you spend so much time, you get so tedious. That seems feels like wasted. Well, like the prototyping tools I like, especially recently between like paper prototyping where you literally just got screened paper and you film someone and you press it and you change the paper right in front of them. That seems more valuable because you're learning the flow rather than thinking really like trying to prototype the transition, which seems like now you should really be getting a developer at the very least doing something. I mean, what do you think about? Yeah, I mean, like doing prototyping at all is the first step because I don't think many people are doing that enough. There's kind of lots of static screen design. And then like things fall through the crack. So I think anyone starting to do prototyping at all is good, but then I agree there's totally a diminishing returns to, if you spend so much time absolutely polishing every fine detail, then like that's kind of past the point of prototyping. For me, it's about getting to learning really quickly. It's getting to that point where you work out, is this going to work? Is this something we should pursue or should we throw it away? And if you spent loads of time polishing your like amazing prototype, then you suddenly become very like, you know, reticent to throw it away. You kind of like your baby, you kind of like polish this too much. And so that's dangerous because then you're not using prototyping for prototyping's like real purpose, which is to learn. So yeah, I agree totally. I think that low fidelity stuff like paper is awesome. Like normally most of my transitions, animations and stuff like that, I normally have post-it notes on my desk. You've probably seen my desk covered in post-it notes. Absolutely. And I'm like going like this, like does this move like this? Does this surface make sense to move like this or something like that? Because it's so quick and I can throw away that idea like really, really cheaply. If I'd spent like an hour, two hours in a tool building that, I might not want to throw it away because I feel like attached to it. How have you gone about the process of designing those like really like the icons transitioning and all like, especially like in Plaid where the heart breaks when you unfavorable? These things are really beautiful. It was like, how do you actually design that? It's great to draw. I think I want to be great, but it's like that final step. Like I know designers use After Effects and I've never quite understood After Effects as a prototyping tool because it's just an animation. I mean, I just don't understand After Effects. So I mean, how do you go about the process of designing those delightful details? Well, part of it is I just find it so fun. So I think there's a lot of joy to be had in some of these animations that I want to bring back into some kind of very, you know, uninspiring UI sometimes. So I find those kind of like delightful details, as you call them, really that can bring an app and an experience to life. So I value that and I think that's like very important to a product. So part of that is like, you know, what motivates me to do it and how I do it. I think for me, because I have overlapping skills in like design and development, I think I take inspiration from both of them. So for example, like those icon animations you're talking about, I kind of went really deep into understanding what the capabilities of the software, the technology were. So I knew what the primitives I had to play with were. I knew, you know, the basics of, you know, you can translate, you can rotate, you can trim like this, you can do this and that. And I think that gave me inspiration into, oh right, so given these, the building blocks I can build with, what can I make? And then just went from there really. So it was like, okay, so I know what I can build with it. What might make sense for this transition or this state change or, you know, moving into here? Do I want to direct attention or do I want to make this super subtle? So I think, yeah, the combination of the intent piece you were talking about with understanding the platform and then like bringing your creativity like to that basis is how I went about it. So for me, yeah, learning the capabilities was a super important part of the process. In terms of like designing the motion before you've actually made it, I mean, do you look at the UI and you're like almost searching for, what can I do to make this thing really cool? I mean, what is that step? Is that you drawing on paper or is it, you know, how are you like visualizing that in your head? For me, animation, especially like state change stuff, is all about lessening the cognitive load, it's hard to say. And for me, it's about like, you know, if something changes, how do I make it explain that change so like the user knows what's going on? That's always where I'm coming from. I don't really start from what can I do? How can I make this show busy or, you know, like bling? So coming from that, you normally have a start state and an end state and I want to make the, you know, transition between those two as smooth as possible. So I think that's where I start from. So then it's thinking of creative and like delightful ways that you can ease that. So I think the example you picked of like the heart breaking, you know, I knew I wanted to go from a state where you had a filled heart to a state where you had an empty heart and it's like, what could be a way that you could do this and, you know, I just, that's the way you bring the imagination and you play with it and you understand the capabilities and the thought that heart breaking and then it redraws, why not? And motion seems to be like the fashionable thing at the moment, but my fear is, motion is like the sort of the jazziness that you were speaking about people doing it because we now have the capability to do it. Like you have the frameworks and the libraries and whatever, which makes these transition states quite simple. The fear from my point of view is, are people just doing it for the sake of doing it? Like it becomes visual distraction as opposed to what you're saying earlier, that you're supposed to be guiding a user's eye to like... That's definitely a fear. I mean, there's always a pendulum swing, right? Where something becomes easy and people overuse it and then it kind of goes out of fashion and it swings back and it probably readjusts somewhere in the middle. Like I agree that maybe we are in that state, maybe with the explosion of prototyping tools, suddenly motion has become more accessible to a bunch of designers and maybe they're kind of like going into that space and like learning the boundaries and maybe there'll be a readjustment back to it. But I think you nail it because like good motion shouldn't be noticeable in many ways. It should be that thing that kind of explains or supports what's changed, but it shouldn't be like eye catching. Sometimes it should be, sometimes you need to draw attention, but a lot of the time it should actually make this kind of a transition simpler and like you don't notice it. It should be the case where if you turn animations off and that suddenly it feels very staccato and it just feels kind of like broken like really because you understand the motion is playing this supporting role. It's not like the style. It's kind of like helping to unfold the scene. Do you think that sometimes we leave motion design and interaction design as an afterthought? Absolutely. Like there seems to be like, and maybe that's where the problem lies. Like because it's an afterthought, it's like how can I make the explosions rather than I've got two view states. I want to go from one space to another. What can I do that actually enhances the experience and not like. There's a couple of things going on. I think in the industry as a whole, I think like the increasing tooling, like making it more accessible to some people is one thing. But also a lot of people have a lot of fear because they say, hey, I'm not a motion designer. I'm an interaction designer. I don't know what I'm kind of doing here. So I think they kind of are intentional a little bit that some people are getting into it like headstrong and some people are like too scared to do it. So I think we're an interesting place in the industry now where motion is becoming more apparent. My favorite things about material design is that it elevated motion as like a first class citizen. It kind of explicitly said, you know, we don't think that motion should be sprinkled on at the end as kind of little moments of joy or whatever. It said that this should be part of the experience. They kind of put it on the level with like, you know, layout and content and hierarchy and had motion as like one of the main pillars behind it when it kind of first launched. And I kind of really appreciate that because I agree. I think good motion makes an app more understandable. It's more akin to kind of interaction design to me than it is to kind of a visual polish level. What do you think is the next step for a designer who, okay, they've seen the theory. They've got some ideas. What should they be doing next? Because material design is great, but if it doesn't fit your app or if it, you know, you have other ideas, how can you improve on your own transition and motion? What I'd love to see is people taking that to the next level. And I think motion can be, you know, a real like pillar in your kind of like brand strategy, almost like the personality of your like application or program, whatever it is. You know, you wouldn't want every single app to use the same typeface or same color. Yet like a lot of applications are using the same kind of like motion curves or the same kind of like motion strategy. So I feel like as people will kind of mature along the curve of like understanding when to use motion and when not to use motion, I think we're going to go into more of a kind of go deeper with it and work out like how, what is my brand's motion? Like am I, how do I have this feeling? I kind of like, you know, should I use some kind of like spring motion to kind of communicate something? Or am I like a slower, more sophisticated thing? Or do I use stagger in this way? So I think we're going to see people go deeper to like express personality through different kind of motion rather than just a vanilla, okay, we've got a transition that's better than not having a transition. But what should that transition say or not say? In terms of the actual tool sets, Lottie seems to be quite popular tool. I mean, how are you using that to design some of the icon transitions? So Lottie is pretty awesome. I think it's really made motion kind of more accessible to a lot of designers out there, especially like the ease with which you can hand off between design and engineering. I think they've done an absolutely fantastic job of that. If anyone has not used it, it's basically an After Effects plugin, which means you can export from that straight into a JSON format. And then you drop that straight into the web or Android or iOS. It will have players for it, which will then just play it. So in terms of workflow, I think it's been phenomenal. There's definitely some ups and downsides to that. So it's very tied to After Effects. So if you want to work in After Effects, then it's great. So that can also be extremely daunting for some people. So say you just want to do a simple icon animation and say you want to do the hamburger to a back button or something like that. Like if you're not already skilled up in After Effects, then it's not going to help you out there, really. Just going back to some of the other stuff, specifically material design, I think one of the challenges we've always had is because of the way the material design guidelines are written is like do's and don'ts. And I think that's really helpful for people who really introduced into design. But likewise, these are complete rules. And the thing that we've always pushed out is guidance. And I know you were speaking about the material design layer cake. If you can remember. And what do you think about this idea of guys versus rules or vice versa? Yeah, totally. I completely agree. I think the way that the guidelines are written are really good. They're kind of aiming to be succinct in that they kind of like have these clear examples do this, don't do that. But they can seem very prescriptive because of that. And we don't always kind of communicate when something is kind of like nearer to a rule and when something is nearer to a guideline. And there is a variety of those things. And we were talking a while ago about this layer cake metaphor where there's kind of free layers or free different types of guideline in the material guidelines. And as such, they're kind of like how close to a rule they are kind of varies. And the way we kind of been thinking about it is that the bottom layer, you have this kind of layer of foundational type things which is based on stuff which is kind of observably true. Based on how people interact with computers, like how big people's fingers are, like certain things are just kind of facts. The ergonomics, the physical. Right. So when we say don't use touch targets smaller than 48 dps, that's not going to change. So that's nearer to a rule. And so you shouldn't really violate that. The next layer is something called We Think of Conventions. So that's saying there may be a dozen different ways you could solve a design challenge. But if every application approached it as a novel thing, then users couldn't learn it in one place and apply it elsewhere. And as such, it's going to feel harder to use your app or it's just going to feel like a mess. The platform isn't going to feel like it has any rules of the road. So in those cases, it's kind of like a not a rule, not a guideline somewhere in between trying to start from the patterns defined on the platform and then vary if it isn't working for you but only do it for a good reason. Deviate with purpose is the phrase we've been using. And then the top layer of this cake is one of personality. So that's things like the colors that you choose, the type that you set, the motion, perhaps the curves that you use in this. We have to express it somehow when we give the guidelines. And so we kind of use some fonts and some colors. But those are in no way prescriptive. Just because material says there's a bunch of different reds you might want to use, we want to help people out if they don't know where to start from. It doesn't mean these are the only shades of red. If you're Ferrari or the BBC or whatever, you have your own brand palette and you're probably going to pick from that or you have to pick from that, you're not going to stick to that and stick to the material guidelines. So I hope that illustrates that while it might seem like rules sometimes, that it varies based on the level of the cake I guess you're at. And you need to understand that as well so you know when to vary it and you know when to stick closer to that one. When you've made it yourself, you've filled it out a hundred times, you've tested it yourself and you don't think about the fact that a user is going to be coming to it in a different state of mind, right? They're tired, they are trying to fill out as fast as they can on the phone, right? So I think developers just aren't really thinking about the fact that they need to take these extra small steps.