Design x Munish Dabas
Product Designer at Facebook
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Zach Vieth on September 24, 2020
You grew up in many countries and went to art school when you were young. How does this influence your work today?
My father worked in the Indian Foreign Service, so for the majority of my childhood we would get posted every three years in a new country. I was born in Burma, and then spent time in India, the former Yugoslavia, Malaysia, Jamaica, then back to India, and eventually New York City on my 13th birthday. And that’s where we stayed put for a while.
While I was growing up in New York and going to college, I would talk to my friends and they would always tell me about growing up in their childhood home. They still had it, their parents still lived there. For me, I don’t even know where I was born in Burma. My closest thing to a childhood home is the place we lived in Jamaica. I maybe stalked it on Google Earth once a while back. It’s interesting to me that my childhood memories are in my head, not physical places that are easily accessible for me to go to.
It was interesting growing up experiencing different cultures and behaviors. For example, Jamaican culture and Malaysian culture were strict in different ways. This forced me to grow up as a bit of a chameleon because I needed to fit in with different schooling systems, people, and cultures. From an early age, it taught me to go with the flow, but also be observant. I learned to keep an open mind and understand that you don’t know as much about the world as you think you do.
Growing up around different cultures taught me a sense of empathy. You don’t really fully understand what’s going on in somebody else’s mind just based on a superficial level of talking to them. You can’t understand their experiences and what they’ve gone through. You can’t really judge people because you have to walk in their shoes or at least try to empathize with them and understand their environment.
“Growing up around different cultures taught me a sense of empathy.”
How does this empathy mindset influence your work leading a User Experience Engineering (UXE) team at Google Maps?
I think it’s led me to be a little bit more skeptical and take on a trial-and-error approach to my design philosophy. Because of that, I gravitated toward the UX engineering role, which involves a lot of prototyping.
Design is a very messy and iterative process. It’s partly because you never truly understand the user, even though you think you do and might have done some research. People may find a totally different way to use your product that you may have never thought of.
“People may find a totally different way to use your product that you may have never thought of.”
I think users are inventive, and if they want to do something, they’ll find a way and a product to do it for them. When you internalize that and play around with it, you can take a broader design-thinking approach to any problem that you have to tackle. Try a bunch of different prototypes, put them in front of users, and see how they interact with them. Even then, once you launch something, you might not know how inventively users will interact with it.
How can other designers think about prototyping?
I think prototyping is something that every designer should do, and it goes back to how we define prototyping. Some people think prototyping is actually building an artifact or something interactive that mimics the final product. But there are varying degrees of fidelity when it comes to prototypes, some that may still be backed by live data or frankensteining data to mimic the final idea. It can be fairly broad depending on the stage of your design process.
I think every designer at a certain level should be able to do that level of user interface (UI) prototyping that maybe isn’t really backed by data but simulates enough of the desired product or feature to get a good sense early on which direction to move in. But later on, there may be a stage where you do want to introduce data and see how your design scales across multiple layers.
Specifically for Google Maps, it’s a global product, so we do need to test how it looks across multiple locales and countries. So we find it interesting to test these designs based on latitude and longitude and see how that design holds up across multiple areas.
I think the general prevailing notion of a prototype is to test and validate a concept. There’s also this notion of prototyping to fail, where the goal of the prototype is to not come up with the right solution necessarily, but to test a variety of solutions.
Regardless of how well you as the designer feel like it’s going to behave, we don’t always know how the user is going to use it. So as we test multiple prototypes, if our testers aren’t able to complete a task we’ve assigned them, then we have to hypothesize why that happened and whether the other prototype successfully hinted at that too. The results from the user studies inform essentially how effective the UI being tested is, and how we iterate.
In terms of prototyping to fail, if we have prototypes where our user completely bombed, we will also often try to understand why that happened. Sometimes it could be a problem with the prototype itself—maybe it wasn’t the appropriate level of fidelity for what needed to be tested. Then based on our learnings, we keep iterating until we arrive at a prototype that does test well.
What does a role in User Experience Engineering (UXE) mean to you?
The UX engineer role at Google is a spectrum between two lenses, the design lens and engineering lens. It’s living somewhere in between a user experience (UX) designer and a software engineer. On the design lens of the spectrum, you may be coming from an agency background developing websites and graphics, like I did. Closer to the engineering lens, you may be closer to a full stack developer or a front end UI developer. The great thing is you can play that whole spectrum, so I’ve enjoyed being a generalist in my career.
The most common thing a UXE does is prototyping. Typically we’re embedded with a product team, so we’re working with a designer or researcher, product manager, and software engineer. Once we have a few ideas to prototype, it’s up to the UXE to determine what fidelity and what type of prototype to develop and at which stage of the process.
Another common role for a UXE at Google is to look at the overall design processes on their team and think about ways of improving it. We tend to either build tools or plugins internally that help speed up or improve the design process. These manifest in things like Figma or Sketch plugins or even just internal web tools.
What sorts of hard or soft skills do you think makes someone good at being a UXE?
The most important soft skill is collaboration. Because you’re viewed as a bridge between UX design and software engineering, it’s very important that you know how to communicate and work well with others. At the same time, you’re not just doing as you’re told. As a UXE, you’re a UI technical subject-matter expert, and you’re there to expand upon the work of others by finding the gaps and clearly communicating how to fix them.
So what does the future of that process or the industry look like to you?
Things have changed to a point where understanding the medium upon which we design is going to be very important. The ability to prototype on those mediums is even more important because the fact is, nobody is really an expert in these new technologies yet. An example is the introduction of VR—there were no human interface guidelines for VR and it was the same thing with the iPhone. Around 2007, designers had to invent interactions and as a result, prototyping has become more relevant for the common product designer as they find a way to do some level of concept validation that’s applicable to the medium that they’re designing for. I foresee it’s only going to get more fragmented the more new technology emerges. We need to remember that what we’re designing for is changing, and we need to be open and understanding of that. No longer are we designing for something that’s going to be a website.
“We need to remember that what we’re designing for is changing, and we need to be open and understanding of that.”
How do you look at being a generalist versus specializing in work as a designer?
I think it depends on your personality type. If I were to actually evaluate myself, I’m not amazing at any one thing, but I’m passionate about a lot of things. So I think you have to brutally honestly ask yourself two things: what are you really good at, and does that give you joy? If you find yourself teetering between a couple of options—and maybe you’re good at both—then you’re a generalist. But early on in your career, I don’t think you can ask this question and get an accurate answer. It’s an iterative process. You may not even know the thing you’re good at because you haven’t done it yet. If you specialize too soon, you’re never gonna know that thing. The worst thing you can do is bump into that thing down the road 10 or 20 years later and say, “Hey, I would have been really good at this if I had tried it 20 years ago.” So I think having been a generalist early on in my career, I don’t ask myself that question anymore.
How can designers remain flexible in their career journeys?
It’s going to be hard to have a flexible mindset later on unless you make a drastic change, so I would encourage young designers to either freelance or just work at a place where you get to work on different and varied enough projects where you don’t feel you’ve stopped growing and stopped asking questions.
I think one fear of going to a large company is you get forced into one design system or one visual style of thinking, where, again, it’s hard to break out of that. So when thinking about how designers can help diversify, do that through your work early on. If you’re freelancing, take on different projects and keep an open mind.
You’re a design instructor as well. How have you benefited by teaching other people?
It’s inspiring to see that you could even minorly uptick the trajectory of students earlier in their careers by potentially opening doors for them or getting them to a point where they’re more confident in their work. The most inspiring thing is being in a room where there are all these students that may not be as confident but are super talented and really good at the work. That, in turn, reinvigorates me. It gives me more excitement about the work that I’m doing. There’s a level of impact there that’s intangible.