What has 2020 brought us besides cultural and operational change? Hopefully, it has pushed you to appreciate the aesthetically pleasing design of Puppet’s User Interface. Rick Monro is one of the wizards behind the architecture curtain of the Puppet UX. In this episode, Rick explains why IT Directors should care about UX Design, some of the ethics around the new Puppet code terminology, and how he designs the Puppet Way.
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- Find out why Puppet is moving toward a more diverse culture and also removing harmful language from its code.
00:00:17 Demetrius Malbrough Hey, everyone, thanks for joining this episode of Pulling the Strings podcast powered by Puppet. And I'm delighted to be your host. My name is Demetrius Malbrough, and I'm on the product marketing team here at Puppet. And I'm really excited today to talk with Rick Monro. And Rick is a user experience architect here at Puppet, and he's well versed in product design, user research, interaction design and design strategy on products that are used globally. Welcome to Pulling the Strings, Rick. How are you today?
00:00:56 Rick Monro I am good, Demetrius. Thanks for having me along.
00:00:59 Demetrius Malbrough All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump right into the questions for our audience. First question I have for you and I want to start off a little light and easy here. So why don't we open up with, how did you get started with UX design, in the UX design world? Share that with us.
00:01:20 Rick Monro I'll attempt to. I've been something of a I would almost say journeyman in design over the years. I got started in graphic design and what we might term visual design. So I was working with, you know, maybe wayfinding systems in universities, I was working with exhibitions and really just dealing with visual information on the communication, all of that with the Web. I got into Web design and designing Web sites. And in the earlier years of the Web, I'll say I've been around the block a few times. There's a few gray hairs on above my ears. And then I got into something that was called rich Internet applications, which was, you know, creating more elaborate front ends, which then kind of spoke to through middleware, to databases. And that was really something which sent me down the product design route, I guess, and then I took over a design team around 12 or 13 years ago and we had different processes and we all went to put our work in different ways, and something called user-centered design emerged as a flag that we can all rally around. It became a new way of talking about the designs that we were creating and then users had to design as one of the kind of foundations of user experience. I came through agencies and consultancies through those kinds of projects. I had access to startups and just helping them get off the ground and defining their product from a user's point of view. Because of that, I wanted to get into the work product and kind of work longer term with products. And kind of live with the decisions that I was taking and then seeing them through to fruition and then just going back and iterating through in part where I could. Puppet is certainly the kind of challenge that you'd want as a designer. You know, some of the issues and the challenges we have are sizable, but they're good challenges. You know, it's good work.
00:03:14 Demetrius Malbrough Okay. I appreciate you sharing your journey and kind of going back and remembering some of the gray hairs that have occurred over your career. So one thing that I do want to ask is kind of the like, let's go back to the evolution of UX, specifically within Puppet. Like when you first came on board, and just kind of that whole history and the evolution of UX kind of starting within Puppet.
00:03:42 Rick Monro Yeah, Puppet has quite a distinguished history with UX and user centered design. So I know that in the early days when Luke Kanies had started the company, if you were one of the early employees as you came through the door, you were given a copy of a book called The Design of Everyday Things, which is, you know, a really foundational text for designers. It's written by a man called Don Norman. He's one of the luminaries of the industry. And it just changes your mindset to think about the things that we use in a different way and understand when they're being well designed, you know, with the user in mind. So this was given to everyone in the company. So if you speak to any of the early employees in Puppet who are still with us, they'll be able to tell you that they were given this book. I think that was a real statement of intent. I look to say, yes, we're building very complex products. We need to understand the user and we need to give them tools that are effective that they can understand in order to help manage the complexity that they're dealing with. So that really impressed me. I'm not speaking about myself, but the caliber of folks who work in UX at Puppet are, you know, I was very impressed and that helped.
00:04:58 Demetrius Malbrough Now this book. Is that book still relevant today? I know it's probably written maybe back in the early 2000s, maybe somewhere around there. But do you think that it's still relevant today?
00:05:10 Rick Monro I would say it's still relevant, Demetrius, and I would go so far as to say it's almost timeless in what it communicates because it's dealing with principles. It's not looking at trends or, you know, interface design specifically. It's looking at products, about how products are put together and what the, you know, the ethos needs to be in product design. You know, if I'm talking to folks who are just starting out their career, maybe they're in college or just coming into the industry, it would be one of four or five books that I would point to straightaway to help them understand the role that they need to play in building products and what they need to contribute. So it's absolutely relevant simply because it doesn't attempt to be timely, it's timeless.
00:05:58 Demetrius Malbrough OK, now you make me want to go read the book just because I'm curious about it. Not that I want to be a UX designer, but I am always a sponge when it comes to looking at one thing and taking that perspective and kind of implementing it into that next thing that I'm working on. Because you gain, you know, ideas in synchronicities just from some of the things that you read from one area and you can apply that to another. So specifically, Rick, you know, we deal with a lot of practitioners today, but just going a level above that, like to IT director or IT decision maker, you know what, let's say an IT director, be interested in in UX design?
00:06:40 Rick Monro That's a very fair question. I don't think IT directors are directly or need to be directly interested in UX design, per se. I think IT directors are interested in value. They're interested in wondering what any given piece of software will do for their organization. And UX design does play a role in that. There's a maxim that says people don't buy into products, they buy into better versions of themselves. So, you know, if you buy fitness equipment, if you buy a new piece of hardware, you know, you take out a new subscription, you're actually investing in a future version of yourself on what you're going to become through that investment. With enterprise software, you know, organizations want to be better versions of themselves, you know, whether they they want greater efficiency, greater agility, whatever that means for them, greater security. And that's ultimately what we want to design for. We want to help facilitate those outcomes. So we're very, I think in UX design we're very conscious as well that any innovation in the enterprise is often replacing something else. It's, it requires an operational change. You know, sometimes cultural change. This is particularly pronounced when DevOps practices are introduced. So we are always trying to, you know, understand the problem that we are solving with our software. And I think where an IT director would be interested is how well are we solving that problem for them? How effectively or are how, you know, how well are we helping them achieve the change that they want to create in an organization? I'm not saying that's a, you know, exclusively a UX concern, but it's certainly something that we need to bear in mind as well.
00:08:28 Demetrius Malbrough Okay, great. Great. So I am assuming that some of these problems that they may not be directly associated for an IT director for UX design, but I guess some of the challenges and complexities just around designing kind of the experience of what that end state, what that end goal is and the vision of how you want, you know, the product to look, you know, those are things that they would probably be really, you know, more interested in and not the minutia of, you know, how does a unique designer actually go about accomplishing that? OK. So, Rick, there's a lot happening right now. You know, we're in the midst of a pandemic. COVID-19 is happening. And I think I read today somewhere over maybe two hundred thousand lives have been lost, but kind of correlating that back into design and kind of where we are right now, just from a cultural perspective and a lot has happened, and the pandemic has brought on some cultural shifts, specifically in terminology and language in some of those things are actually being looked at now and being changed. For instance, like the term master and slave, they are actually being modified and changed by multiple organizations. But how does that correlate to or within the design world? What are you seeing from that perspective, that shift?
00:09:59 Rick Monro Yeah. That's a great question, Demetrius, and the tech industry as a whole is, you know, playing catch up with what's happening in society. You know, put bluntly, the ethics of what we we make have not evolved at the same rate as the development of the technology itself. And we've seen how software, sometimes very simple tools can reflect and magnify the worst aspects of our humanity. And certainly we want to be part of a shift to being better than that. I run a UX meetup in Belfast, and it evolved from a book club, but it's kind of retained its roots in that we talk to authors and look at things that new publications are surfacing. And a couple of years ago when there was a whole run of books that we looked up. They were just too important not to cover. I would highlight two specifically. The first is Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, which it holds up a mirror to the tech industry. It just listed a catalog of failures where technology had let people down. If I tell you the subtitle of the book, it's called Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. That should probably speak volumes. But like I say, it just holds up a mirror to what we have been. And then another book, Tech Humanist by Kate O'Neill. It's almost like a manifesto for the tech industry of tomorrow. You know, those and other books are helping us as an industry wake up to how we can do things better. At Puppet we of course, we want to be a part of that. We work with a set of design principles. There are universal principles of design, it should be said, that we are taught, as, you know, as designers at college and that we learn as we grow as professionals. But as with a lot of software producers, we have our own principles that we apply to the context of our own software. And we recently committed to rewriting those design principles. So these formed the bedrock of design. These are the lens through which we judge our work, and the first and most important of those, as far as we're concerned, is to design ethically and inclusively. That means that we don't use terms or conventions that are biased or exclusionary or cause harm and, you know, inclusive design, as we would, helps everyone. So just as inclusion in society helps everyone. So inclusive design helps everyone. And that's that's what we're committing ourselves to, so there's a great blog post actually on the Puppet website reflecting the work done by Melissa Casburn, our UX director, and Ben Ford, who's our senior engineering product manager. And they've done some great work in, as you say, looking at where we need to change across our products in terms of terminology. But that's just the start of it for us. This isn't a, you know, ticking a box. This is this is a shift.
00:12:55 Demetrius Malbrough OK. And I really love the shift that is happening. Just, you know, not really looking at some of the things that COVID-19 has done, but, you know, I am more of a glass-half-full type of guy. So I remember when all of this started and I was unable to get a haircut and I started looking like Wolfman Jack. I just remember sitting on my deck, and breathing in the air, it was so cool. And I think emissions also dropped, and smog, and, you know, just the air was so much clearer. And so also I remember just my thinking being a more clear as well. And then things kind of started, I guess, heightening around the world. And then people start really paying attention to some of the things that have happened in the past, primarily around, you know, race relations, et cetera. But I won't get into any of that really deeply here. But I really like the direction that the industry, the overall automation industry has gone in around considering changing terminology and language and just really reevaluating that. So, you know, thank you for being a part of that and also implementing some of those design principles within Puppet. Anything cool that you're working on? What projects are you working on right now that you can share with Pulling the Strings listeners?
00:14:19 Rick Monro Well, there's always interesting stuff going on at Puppet. I will say one thing at highlight from the past that before you look at the future, what I worked on at Puppet, as soon as I came through the doors, I was working on the PDK, which is a Puppet development kit, which some folks out there might be familiar with. That was my first encounter with Puppet as a technology and with Puppet users, and that taught me a great deal about, you know, what we needed to create for for folks to help get their work done. I'm still really proud of that, that was around three years ago. Now that the PDK emerged, I think it's a very good example of design for the command line. But I was assisted, that's not to kind of inflate my own ego. There was a great team I was working with around then who, you know, produced something that I think offers great value to folks who are trying to develop for for Puppet. Currently, I'm working on product called Puppet Remediate. So this is a tool which we are hoping will kill the spreadsheet and take the pain out of manual vulnerability management processes within teams. And that's something that we are developing and iterating on all the time. It's turning really nice, too. And I recommend anyone to to take a look at it. If they are, you know, they have a very painful vulnerability management process with them and their organization, Puppet Remediate is something that can help them. I'm also working with our tech docs team to improve some of the usability around tech docs. I mean, documentation is such a key touch point, such an important kind of interaction point with our technology, and we're always trying to improve that as well. So we're going out with some research with users to see how we can make that better. And I mentioned research there. We are really fortunate of Puppet to have a program called the Puppet Test Pilots program. And the Test Pilots program is something that helps us make better products. It is made up of the users of our products. We could be going for usability testing for participants and surveys, we might want to shoot beta versions of some of our releases, prototypes. And we know that we have folks who want to help us do that because ultimately it will help improve their work. So one thing I would ask for, for anyone who has an interest in helping us improve what we do is to get involved in the Test Pilots program. And there's a link on the website that will take you to a forum where you can just ask to be included in certain studies or just give us feedback on anything we're doing. And that doesn't have to be a huge, onerous task. It could be just 30 minutes to try something out for us or just give us feedback on something we're trying to achieve. So we will always look to the end users and the teams who are using our products to help make them better.
00:17:13 Demetrius Malbrough OK. Well, let's see, we are rolling into the the final moments here. And I also heard that you were a big electronic music fan. Is that correct?
00:17:29 Rick Monro It is probably bigger than it should be. I spent a lot of my day listen to electronic music when I'm working. Eric Sorenson, who works at works at Puppet, some people may be familiar with Eric. He produces electronic music. I just consume it. I find it helps me concentrate and work.
00:17:53 Demetrius Malbrough What are you listening to right now? Is there like an artist that you're really listening to, or someone new?
00:18:00 Rick Monro Yeah, there's actually a label that I listen to a lot called Anjunabeats, and they have another sister label called Anjunadeep and the artists on there are just phenomenal. Nox VahnKnox Vonn is a favorite at the moment, but yeah. I'll go old school as well. I'll go right back to Jean-Michel Jarre or Kraftwerk, anything.
00:18:26 Demetrius Malbrough And I guess also due to the pandemic, you know, movie theaters are kind of shut down right now. We're not able to really go and sit and partake in, you know, the Dolby surround sound and, you know, kind of feel the experience of a movie.
00:19:04 Rick Monro Sure. I mean, I was, I grew up on Marvel Comics. They were my, you know, the Marvel movies when I was growing up took place in my head. That was the only thing that could create the special effects that it was I was imagining off the page. So I would still keep up with what Marvel does. And I think Marvel is great because it kind of gets some of the best indie writers from the industry and, um, brings them into the fold to kind of offer something new and different. And, you know, when you think of some of the writers they've had in the last fifteen years, maybe, a lot of what they were doing on the page made it into the movie universe. So it's actually, some of what you might read nowadays will probably end up in a movie in five years. So it's always worth checking in on those. Jonathan Hickman was it was a great indie comic producer. The first thing I read of his was called The Nightly News, which was, you know, like so many of the indie graphic novels, as far away from capes and masks as you could get. I'll read anything, I mean, my daughter is studying the Shakespeare play Macbeth in school at the moment. There's a great graphic novel series that illustrates classics like that, like Shakespeare novels, includes the full historical or the full original text in the you know, in the graphic novel that brings it to life in a way that makes it much more accessible. So I think it's a great art form. I think it's not at its peak the way it was in the 90s. I think there were millions of X-Men comics sold in the 90s. And I'm sure a lot of people were reading it back then. But it's still a great industry and some great creativity and I'm still very much a proud comic fan.
00:20:48 Demetrius Malbrough All right. Well, if you happen to see anything related that looks like it could be related to indie or Marvel within the Puppet design, then you can blame that on Rick, OK, because he just, you know, shared with you how much of an enthusiast he is and he may even have like some hidden things in there that will play some electronic music or something if you happen to, you know, upload some code to GitHub, and you know, it returns, you know, the output and desired state that you would like to achieve. Right.
00:21:21 Rick Monro Yeah. You're giving me some good ideas here.
00:21:25 Demetrius Malbrough All right. So please provide our listeners, I guess, details of how they can reach out to you on social media if you're on Twitter or maybe LinkedIn. Not sure if you are, but it would be great to tell them.
00:21:38 Rick Monro Sure. You could find me on Twitter at @Monro. That's M-O-N-R-O. And I'll generally that will be, I'd say 90 percent professional and design related, and the other 10 percent is probably comics, to be honest. I would ask if anyone's interested in the Test Pilots program if you want to email testpilots@puppet.com, and just say that you want to get involved in any research we're doing. I would strongly encourage you to do that. We just want to hear from the folks who are using our software or who need to use it and aren't using it yet. So your view and your feedback would be great to get.
00:22:21 Demetrius Malbrough You have it, listeners, please check that out. Go to testpilots@puppet.com. Also, I would like to thank you, Rick, for sharing with us here on Pulling the Strings podcast powered by Puppet. Until next time, you know, everyone have a fantastic week.