Design x Jeremy Miller
Sr. Staff Experience Architect at GE Aerospace
Interview conducted by Mark Singer on August 21, 2022
What was your journey to design like?
I was originally from New Orleans, and I’ve been designing for almost 20 years now. I started freelance design work way back in the early 2000s. At LSU, I was in a band designing flyers, CD artwork, and websites. In 2008 I got into advertising until I eventually made my way to UX back in 2011.
I'm kind of a design leader now, kind of leading strategy for my teams. I'm not doing much visual/UI design anymore. It's more about designing the experience at a high level, thinking about journeys and how the customer or the user goes through a journey and architecting that, versus thinking about the border radius of a button or the color or the typography. So I'm getting less into the design and more into the strategy, which is fun.
At what moment did you choose to become a designer?
So when I was in the band, I helped design the flyers. Real crappy designs. If you saw them today, you’d laugh. And I remember one day, our bass player, Paul, who was coding our website by hand got into a fight with the band for some reason and quit the band. And they were like, “Well, who's going to build our website?” Well, I'm designing flyers, I created the CD art, and I’ve built sites in site builders like Geocities with drag-and-drop interfaces... so I guess I could do the website? But I had no idea how to code… So I taught myself how to write CSS and HTML from a book. And I started building our website.
About six months later, one of my friend’s bands asked for my help with their website. I told them I didn’t have the time to take on another project with my work and studies. So they offered to pay me 200 bucks to do it. I remember thinking, “Wow, I can actually get paid for this stuff!” And I started doing freelance web and graphic design.
In your podcast, Beyond UX Design, you talk about the skills needed to make it in UX. What soft skill muscles should emerging designers flex when practicing design?
In bootcamps and school, they teach you the process: Design Thinking and Happy Paths. You follow the steps and learn the process. That’s a hard skill.
“But what they don't teach you is that the real world is never that. Often you start a job, and you pick up from somebody else.”
But what they don't teach you is that the real world is never that. Often you start a job, and you pick up from somebody else. You're reading desk research. You're going through all of the results of usability studies the last person did. You're watching videos or recordings. So you're never going to do what you learned in school as you learned it. You rarely ever start from the beginning, as the Double Diamond suggests. It’s understanding that things are not going to go the way you expect.
“We have to understand that if we want to get stuff done, we have to learn how to collaborate.”
We're all about empathy for the users, but nobody ever thinks about empathy for the developers. Empathy for the product manager. Empathy for the QA team. Empathy for the stakeholder. Patience with teammates that we might not always agree with. It requires an understanding of where they are coming from. Simply asking why this is important can reveal a ton. It’s critical and often overlooked.
We have to understand that if we want to get stuff done, we have to learn how to collaborate. We've got to learn how to work with our team to get those awesome ideas pushed to production. Because if we can't, the end user never sees our designs. And everything was a waste.
A pitfall I’ve seen is designers who are self-aggrandizing. They might think UX is the most important part of the whole software team, and everyone should listen to them because they’re the experts. And that's just not the case. It's just different from how software teams work in the real world. Demanding an explanation as to why a CTA wasn’t placed where you laid it out on spec doesn’t make for good software development. So I think for me, the biggest thing is to realize you're not so important. Be humble. Work with your team. Don't burn bridges. There is a ton to learn, and you won’t know everything, so lean into humility.
“People often don’t listen to UXers because every team has its own priorities. Engineering teams have their own priorities. Product teams have their own priorities. UX is not at the top of their priority list. So we’re in the business of convincing people why we think our approach is the best. Our job is to influence. And the best way to do that is to tell compelling stories.”
Regarding company politics, people often don’t listen to UXers because every team has its own priorities. Engineering teams have their own priorities. Product teams have their own priorities. UX is not at the top of their priority list. So we’re in the business of convincing people why we think our approach is the best. Our job is to influence. And the best way to do that is to tell compelling stories.
So present ideas in such a way that you influence the team and beyond. There’s a quote about collaboration from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote this book called The Little Prince in the 1940s. If you listen to the podcast, we talk about it all the time, and the quote goes something like this:
“If you want to build a boat, you don't find a bunch of people, you don't chop down trees, you don't hand out tools, and you don't bark out orders. If you want to build a boat, you teach them to long, or you teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Then they will build the best fucking boat they can build because they want to build the boat.”
My last piece of advice is don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough. Focus on the outcome and figure out what you're trying to change and where you can influence. Know when to pick your battles and know when enough is enough. Know when to say, alright, we're not gonna get access to these users to do a usability study, so let's build it the best way we know how, heuristically, and we can validate it later. Or, put metrics in to make sure we're building it the right way.
What hard skills do you think emerging designers should develop?
It depends on your role and interests. If you are looking for a research role, you don't need to learn Figma. If you're doing a visual design type of UI design role, clearly you need to learn Figma and how to use components and all those fancy techniques, key commands, and all that stuff. It's about learning what you need to do to do your work. It all depends on the actual role.
I do think that the most important piece when it comes to hard skills is how to do research, how to talk to users, how to ask questions, and how to ask why. Getting down to the root of the problem that you're trying to solve. I think that's not just a job for a UX researcher. A visual designer might need to know about color combinations and why typography is used a certain way. All this goes back to the core problem they are trying to solve.
So there’s some nuance between soft skills and hard skills, you’d say?
Hard skills get you that really beautiful thing. The soft skills get it pushed to production. And that's the big thing. Because you could design this thing, it could be the most amazing and wonderful, and well-put-together thing there is. But if the user never sees it because you couldn't get it built, then you wasted your time. It's only valuable when somebody gets it and can start using it to solve problems for themselves. Otherwise, it's just art. You just stick it on a wall, and people can admire how beautiful it is.
What were some pivotal moments that have defined your career?
Well as I mentioned, when the bass player Paul quit the band, I had to build the website. If that had never happened, I honestly don't think I would be here today.
When I worked in advertising, I would do WordPress websites and had no budget. I was basically a glorified freelancer. So I had 50 hours. I had to bill my time, and with so many clients coming in, I wondered what to charge them. There was constant context-switching to meet deadlines, and often someone would call at lunch saying, “Hey, we forgot to send you a print. Can you design something by two or three o'clock?” It was super stressful. Nights, weekends, and long hours. I often thought, “I hate this. This is miserable.” It was just a miserable job.
And I remember the day I decided I had to quit. I was designing an email for a bank client that had a new certificate of deposit. It wasn't even a big bank– they had 10,000 people signed up for their newsletter that I had to design. And I remember looking at the analytics, and of the 10,000 subscribers, 20 people opened it, and only two people clicked through. I just remember thinking, “what is the fucking point of doing this? This is so stupid. I gotta find another job.”
So I began my search around 2011. The iPhone had been around for a little while. Google was just starting to do their first version of Design Systems before Material, and I was getting into that. There was a Founder and a Product Designer at a start-up looking to hire a UI Designer. I don’t think they were entirely sure who they were looking for. But I thought it was cool. Something different. So I got lucky. And I convinced them to hire me.
What advice would you give junior designers wanting to break into their first full-time role?
The ATS bots nowadays will reject something like 75% of applications that come through. I tell people this all the time– stop applying for jobs; it’s useless. Start connecting with people. Find humans. Find those people on LinkedIn. Schedule a time to talk. Network on ADP List and build your network. Then use that network to help you get a job as opposed to just sending off 200 resumes every day.
Put yourself out there, go to meetups, do in-person things, remote things, whatever. Find organizations and groups with other people, and go network with them. Talk to them and build your network. Because the network is going to be what helps you find a job. It's not going to be your resume; I can promise you that.
And some advice with portfolios, websites, and resumes–don't wait until it's perfect for reaching out to people or applying. It's never going to be perfect. It's software; it’s soft; it’s malleable; it’s changeable; you can modify your website, you can add another case study, you can edit the copy, you can add another image, you can do all that. But just get it to where it's good enough.
Rapid Fire Questions:
What is your favorite thing to do in your free time?
My favorite thing to do (when I'm not having to worry about my kids) is probably just going to the corner bar and having a beer. I think one of my favorite things to do is because I never get time to do it. So that's what I want to do more than anything else.
If I have my kids, I think it's just going to the park with them and watching them play. This is the weirdest thing for adults; you don't do that. You don't think about this. Do you have kids? Just watching them play, it's the cutest thing. They just put their arms around each other, and they’re so sweet.
What is your favorite book or podcast?
There is a Star Trek podcast called “The Greatest Generation,” where two dudes review every single episode of Star Trek. And they make jokes about how terrible and cheesy Star Trek can be. It’s unscripted, and they basically bullshit for an hour. Which was the inspiration for my podcast. They sound great. It’s one of my favorites.
What or who inspires you?
It’s super cheesy, but my wife inspires me. When I think about just how much bullshit she's had to put up with being a woman in the design industry and advertising industry, it inspires me to make sure no one else has to go through that.
You can live anywhere. Where would that be?
Oh, man. I would probably move to Europe if I could.
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Pragmatic. Happy. Easy-going.
