 Hi, this is your host, Upinaparthia, and we are here at Open Source Summit in Vancouver. And today we have with us Lisa Noble, Distinguished Engineer at Discover Financial Services. Lisa, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, it's my pleasure to have you here. First of all, tell us a bit about yourselves. What do you do at... And also, I would actually love to know a bit about the company also, because if I'm not wrong, this is the first time... I've been covering Open Source Summit for a long time, but this is the first time I think I'm seeing you folks. So I have two full questions. First of all, talk about the company, and then you're all there. All right, yeah. I'm here on behalf of Discover Financial Services, and it is our first time here at the Open Source Conference as a sponsor and as a contributor. We have been a firm believer in Open Source for many, many years. So we know the value of Open Source, and we've certainly been consuming Open Source for a long time, but this is our debut in contributing Open Source and sharing the Open Source that we are working on with this community. The thing that's kind of unique about this Open Source project that we're working on is we are encouraging both developers to contribute, but also for designers. So UX designers, visual designers, accessibility designers, any type of designer to get involved in this project. I would love to know a bit about for the community that Discover Financial Services, what you folks do, and then we'll talk about what are the areas because you folks are big. You do a lot of open source, you do a lot of propriety, but I want to understand what you folks do and what are the expect where you engage with Open Source. I myself am a distinguished engineer at Discover. That is a new initiative at Discover to introduce the idea of distinguished engineers. It was important them to identify distinguished engineers in regards to their digital transformation. So Discover's in the midst of a digital transformation, really understanding that they need to be a tech company as well as a financial company in order to move effectively and to scale and respond to customer needs quickly. So we're in the middle of that transformation. It's a really exciting time for Discover and that's really why we are here today at Open Source Summit to share our commitment to open source and digital transformation and to share and collaborate with people and share some of our ideas. And it's not just you folks are in your digital transformation, your clients are also in the early stages of digital transformation. So talk a bit about when you folks are embarking on the journey, what are the challenges that you saw or your team's face where you felt that, hey, open source is the right way because you don't have, there's so much code to be written. There is, yeah. Well, first of all, in terms of, all financial companies have to balance innovation and risk together, right? And we don't have to do that alone. Actually, one of the things, one of the initiatives that we have right now, this Open Source project, we actually paired up with Finos to sponsor a hackathon around the theme builder, which is the open source project that we're doing because we recognized, as a company, we have certain challenges that other companies and industries can relate to as well. And rather than at trying to champion these changes ourselves, we work better when we collaborate with other people. So, we have to pick and choose the areas where we can innovate fast and quickly and those where we need to take it a little slower. But certainly in regards to making user experiences for our customers more accessible, more consumable, and more customer centric, is definitely one of our goals. And that's something that is low risk and is a great place for us to contribute. You mentioned Finos, which is once again, you know, Linux Foundation. Talk a bit about your involvement with Linux Foundation. Well, in the past year, we've really started to engage in a lot of collaborative communities. So, we've just become very involved in the Linux Foundation to become a sponsor as well as becoming a sponsor of Open Source, so, of the Open Source Summit. So, you know, this is again sort of our reckoning or like a revolution for Discover. We're really entering this space of innovation and collaboration. And it's really a transformative time for Discover. So, it's a super exciting time. Can you talk about your engagement here, you know? Of course, you know, since you're part of the sponsor, any sessions that you personally are excited about that Discover is presenting here? Well, I, for one, am presenting, so I am very excited. I'm presenting on the concept or on the issue of design in Open Source. And we will also be presenting our debut project, Open Source project there, which is an integration of design, engineering, and accessibility. And we're super excited about this because as I mentioned, we're not only encouraging engineers to get involved, but we're encouraging end users and designers to get involved in this Open Source project. And so, I'll be talking about Open Source and design in its current state and, you know, talk about some of the reasons why we don't see a lot of designers engaging in Open Source, some of the pain points that are associated with that, and then talk about how beneficial it would be to bring designers into the field of Open Source because there's a lot of magic happens that happens when you intersect design, engineering, and collaboration. And of course, the ultimate platform for collaboration is Open Source. Can you talk a bit about the importance of design when we talk about code, you know, to the end user, you know, UX, especially if an end user can be developer, end user can be someone like me who is leveraging your services or using the service. So talk about the importance of, you know, UX and design in general for, you know, and then we'll talk about Open Source. Well, UX is incredibly important and impactful and I think, you know, people are beginning to understand that more and more. I do wanna emphasize, however, that, you know, user experiences are things that we as individuals encounter a hundred times a day, right? It's checking into your hotel, ordering a cup of coffee, registering at the conference, right? But more and more those experiences are becoming digital, right? They don't have to be digital. They don't have to be tied to a user interface to be a user experience, right? And you can apply things like design thinking to investigate how those user experiences are for the end user. Where are the pain points? Where are they having a hard time? Where is their space to improve? But more and more those experiences I mentioned are becoming digital and when they are digital, they often have a user interface and then a user interface becomes a very important part of creating an exceptional user experience. So, you know, my passion is that I am both an engineer and a designer. So I sort of have that unique perspective from an engineer's point of view as well as from a designer's point of view and creating experiences and digital experiences. And it's so important that we work effectively together in the creation of user experiences. And that's when you see beautiful products come out and it's rarely when the intersection of design and development are working seamlessly and effectively together. Perfect, thank you. As you said, you're an engineer and you know what I'm saying. We are seeing a lot of cultural changes happening with the cloud which was like devos, we have devs across. What kind of cultural changes you are seeing in terms of UX and developers? So that was again, these are not two different silos? Yeah. Well, I think that there's lots of cultural changes going on and I mean, there can be cultural changes. So when we talk about ethnicity and race and all sorts of things, but also one thing about design that I'm super passionate about is inclusive design, which includes being considerate to people's different backgrounds, but also being very aware of people's accessibility needs. And this is becoming more and more important to companies as they're creating digital experiences. And so that actually is the focus of the product that we're debuting, the open source project that we're debuting. It is a product that helps teams move from, you know, design to development to deployment and creating better experiences that are more inclusive and not just meeting the minimum criteria that's out there, but rethinking what it is to create accessible experiences. Let me look at financial services. First of all, as you said, you are in your own stage of digital transformation, which means you have room for UX development, you know, kind of rehauling it or modernizing it. At the same time, you also start global audience, which also means once again, you get to the point of, you know, it could be China, it could be India, it could be Africa, which means that, and UX is where people interface, it should take into account where they are coming from. Yes, absolutely. So let's go back to the same point of, you know, diversity is not just diversity for the sake of, diversity has a lot of business value as well. Well, I think when you were saying diversity, I think the key in understanding your customers and the broad ranges your customers really starts with empathy, right? You need to understand that your customers, who they are, what their needs are and how you can better serve them. And as you were mentioning, they could be from anywhere in the world, their cultural habits and things like that may very much affect the way you wanna deliver a message, how you wanna create an experience. And so that's why I'm so excited that Discover is in the midst of a digital transformation and they're embracing things like design thinking and really focusing on the end customer and creating the journey. Now Discover has always done a really great job at identifying the needs of customer service and it's been super committed to creating great customer service like when you get on the phone. And now I think Discover has identified we need to do that same thing digitally. And so this is an incredible time to be at Discover and to be creating these digital experiences that are quite transformative and really are gonna be designed to be inclusive for everyone. When we look at UX in general, and when we look at software and open source, open source makes a lot of things easier because once again, you can collaborate but it also makes sometimes things difficult also. So as you are kind of getting into this, what kind of challenges you are seeing when it comes to engage me in the open source committee where you see, hey, you know what? There are a lot of gaps that we still need to fill or you see they have taken care of everything. All we have to do is just bring in more value. I guess I can say that there's a couple of areas that I identified that I think could bring value to open source right now. And truly, one of the biggest things is that there aren't more designers and open source, right? And there's a reason for that. If you look at the history of open source, open source software, if you look at just like the definition of open source, it says that it's open for everyone, for contribution, consumption, for modifying and using how they see fit. And in that definition, it does say anyone. So it should be open to bringing designers into the fold of open source. I think there are some reasons why we don't see more designers in open source, although designers are very comfortable, very comfortable in collaborative spaces, right? Sort of design thinking is foundational to what we do. And the cornerstone of design thinking is collaboration and transparency. And yet you don't see designers in open source. And I think if you look at open source, there's a couple of reasons. Design is definitely, open source is definitely developer led and therefore it tends to be about commits, right? Like bug fixes, new features, and engineers are recognized for their contributions. So designers who are interested in collaboration are often not even aware that open source exists, right? Or that it's a space that they can play in and contribute to. If they do know that it exists, there's a little bit of fear that exists there, right? And for an engineer, you might say, well, what is there to be scared of in regards to open source? But the terminology and the tools are quite intimidating for a designer, just as our terminology and our tools may be intimidating for an engineer. For example, like words like kerning and the golden ratio or white space or skeo morphism are big words that might intimidate an engineer. And the same can be said for a designer who doesn't know what cloning and batching and stashing and all those things are. And so if we could open the tooling and the technology and the terminology to make designers feel a little bit more included, you also don't see a lot of our design tools incorporated and used in open source. You don't, for example, see things like Figma files being used. So I think if we could bridge some of those gaps and we could identify that design is of great value to open source, then if people vocalize the need and start bringing designers in the fold, I think everyone would reap the benefit. Do you see any trends? Linux Foundation, they folks are involved with, Hollywood also, they have the whole foundation for motion picture, you know, academy, you know. But do you see any either projects are there or do you see some kind of movement is happening where designers are kind of moving towards these and we talked about cultural aspect in the beginning as well. So it goes back to the same, you know, it used what kind of either road back, maybe road block may not be right, whatever hurdle. Do you see any kind of hurdles for UX designers kind of embracing these open source practices? Or do you see, yeah, things are moving in positive direction slowly? Yeah, I think things are definitely moving in a positive direction. You know, you see things like Figma, for example, is a tool that is foundationally open source because people can create plugins for Figma, which allows, you know, a community to collaborate and add and that's what open source is about. So designers are seeing the value of open source, right? First hand, and so I think that it's sort of an awakening like UX designers are starting to realize and all types of designers are starting to see that they, there are these opportunities for them contribute. And I think it's far reaching beyond, you know, web interfaces. I think you could see it in things like gaming, which we heard about today and all sorts of things. And I also hope that accessibility gets brought into the fold more and more into open source as well because it is a challenge that we all struggle with. Every company across the globe is having to create digital experiences and take into account accessibility. And yet the complexities are greater and greater and greater. We have desktop, we have laptop, we have tablet, we have, you know, wearables, we have interfaces in our cars and on our fridges and all of those should be accessible experiences. So it would be much better if we all work together in this effort because I think we should really reimagine, you know, what we can do for people who have accessibility needs. Excellent. One second. Thank you. When we do talk about UX, it's more like I'm a bit of a wrong user as you gave example of refrigerators or cars. It's kind of interfacing with that thing. So of course, text is one input, touch is one input, voice is one input. What kind of, you know, evolution that you're seeing in text stack where you see the once again, that it's moving more towards accessibility? Well, I think there's so many exciting things that can be done, you know, in accessibility that even taking consideration things like mobility. For example, let's say you are using your Google Maps and you wanted to know how to get from point A to point B. If it identified that you had accessibility needs, it might give you a path that's easier for you that's not gonna get you a point where you have to take stairs to get to your final destination. Or it might suggest a bus route that has, you know, accessibility accommodations to get you, you know, in your wheelchair onto the bus. So I think there's all kinds of things that we can do to elevate accessibility. You know, certainly I think one of the biggest areas of accessibility too that's not being touched is the area of cognitive accessibility needs. There are over a billion people in the world who have accessibility disabilities, but the biggest population of that are people with cognitive disabilities. I myself am dyslexic. I was identified as being dyslexic when I was in sixth grade and I'm very grateful for that because I was given the tools that I need to be able to, you know, get back into the mainstream and contribute to society the best of my capabilities. But I also know that technology can provide such a gift to people with cognitive disabilities. You know, for dyslexia, for example, we could render a dyslexic font. We could increase line height. We can increase contrast. And that makes content more consumable for the end user. There's all these things that we can do for people who have mobility, emotion sensitivity. And like there's more and more apps and more and more desktop apps too, have a lot of motion in them, which is great, it can become really overwhelming for users and it can prevent them from actually completing their tasks successfully. So I feel like we can reimagine the way we approach accessibility and customize experiences for people with accessibility needs. Lisa, thank you so much for taking time out here. Thank you so much and I really appreciate you telling me about your interest in your passion. No, it was, I was more interested in learning about you and how you are bringing your experience. Yeah. The note may not point out the word, but to once again improve it for everyone else. And thanks for those insights about diversity is not just about a few things. And how we should become more accessible, technology should become more accessible. Absolutely. That was a great discussion and I would love to have you back on the show again. Oh, thank you. I so much appreciate your time.