On prosthetics, underground research groups and the one industry that’s doing design right...
At EchoUser, we try to keep it fun and a little silly to balance out the serious work we do. Even though we’ve been around for seven years, a lot of people don’t know that we’re part of the design and usability of several household names, including Google, NetApp and Cisco. We are opening up our walls and will be posting to our blog interviews with EchoUser team members to give you an inside look at the magic we’re making.Who better to kick off this series than our co-founder, president and all around UX expert Mick McGee? Mick shares stories about how he got into user experience, how and why he started EchoUser, and what’s next for the industry.
1. How did you get started in design?
Where to start. Growing up my mom was a physical therapist who worked with people with highly debilitating issues, such as car accident victims and people who have suffered very significant strokes. In hearing about her work I became extremely interested in amputees using prosthetics. She would describe how they worked and how her patients used them. I would think: I want to make those limbs, I want to help those people by making those limbs better.
Fast forward to grad school and I entered the Systems Engineering program at Virginia Tech. Even within this highly technical program, I was looking at the human factors of engineering. My peers were studying mechanical optimization and I wanted to optimize products and services for people.
While I was (and still am) interested in medical design, I made the decision after grad school to take my intrigue in human behavior and design to the tech world. But really, design is just one small slice of what I do. I look at the feel, the context and the environment and determine where and how humans fit into that. It’s the entire human system interaction that we can try to optimize.
2. Why did you start EchoUser?
When I was at Oracle I started an underground and unsanctioned research team -- I’ve been known to take a few career risks. The whole point was to apply optimization practices to ourselves. What could we do to enhance our work? What could we develop to make us work harder and more efficiently? That rogue research group is what became the foundation of what we do here at EchoUser. And we still do a lot of research on ourselves and profession.
We’re always looking for ways to improve. We’ve even wrapped in a “labs” component to ensure researching and understanding how to optimize our work at EchoUser is always part of our mission.
In the last seven years we’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest tech companies, push the barriers of user interaction, and we’re still having fun. We actually just announced 63% annual revenue growth in 2013, the addition of four new members to our senior team and our work with incredible enterprise clients such as Google, NetApp and Oracle (bringing the story full circle).
3. What keeps you passionate about understanding human behavior?
It's an endless exercise. The whole idea of optimization is that it's an ever-changing goal. But technology is advancing rapidly and really opening up how we can optimize systems. Even if the world was to change in a non-tech way, it is still changing, which means there is still optimization to be done. It would just be a different system.
4. How are EchoUser’s designs different than other design philosophies?
To this day, the most dominant design philosophies are brand marketing, creative and advertising. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, but not how we at EchoUser think of as design. Brand marketing says “let’s give something a fresh new look,” we say “how can we make this product/experience/setting better.” It’s largely separate from how you would brand or market it. It’s getting to the core of how a person uses it.
Even getting out of marketing, there are a lot of creative firms doing fantastic work. Frog is changing industrial design, IDEO focuses on rapid prototype, but we do creativity with a purpose and really go after Any Experience. Being holistic across the process we dive into complexity, security issues, enterprise and business products. Complexity is really the first thing for us. If you're good at complexity you're good at design.
5. How would you characterize the evolution of design since you started EchoUser?
You used to have to defend design and the value of its investment. But now, design is becoming more self evident and recognized as a business “must have.” You can put a premium on a company like Apple's focus on design even if the general components are the same as a PC. You don’t have to justify that anymore. Now most companies get it and most companies need it. It's business critical, not a nice to have.
6. How do you describe what you do to your mom?
I usually say something along the lines : “We try to make your Gmail easier to use.”
When describing it to most people, I try to incorporate something from their everyday life into the conversation to explain how design can make it better. For example, if the person I’m speaking to rides public transit on a regular basis, I would explain how the service could potentially improve through design. We identify problems and create solutions.
7. Where do you see opportunities for design in enterprise tech?
Industries that have been slow to react to technology -- medical, sales, environment -- are starting to see the importance of design. They’re entering the stage that other tech companies were at before.
The environmental industry is really starting to take off. For example, monitoring the energy use of homes with both in-house products and backend technology, as well as the emergence of electric cars and figuring out what will best fit people is going to need to be studied much, much further.
8. How do you continue to inspire creativity in your workforce?
It's not hard to sell Any Experience. If anything I’m guilty of over selling it. The fun part of running a design firm like EchoUser is being surrounded by people who are extremely passionate about saving the world and pushing the boundaries of design. It’s about taking what Apple and Google did to the next level.
Those are the kind of people we have at EchoUser, which also means we don’t have negative attitudes if people do decide to leave. Passionate people are growing and moving, they’re always chasing Any Experience, always chasing to save the world. My job is to try and help as many EchoUsers as possible save it.
9. As an avid marathoner, how would you redesign a marathon?
Make it easier? In all seriousness, that’s one industry that has things fairly dialed. I’ve been in a lot of races ranging from the Chicago marathon with its tens of thousands of runners and fans on crowded city streets, to the Avenue of the Giants where it is just you and a few other widely separated runners, with the giant redwoods silently looking down at you. Each race has been memorable and awesome. They do a great job of making race day as amazing as possible for the runners.
What I would like to do is redesign training programs. There are programs for elite athletes, but not as many for the casual runners. There needs to be less intimidation for the occasional runner. Running can be fun for everyone, but the opportunity isn’t all the way there just yet.
10. What does being a marathoner teach you about running a company?
The determination, persistence and the planning aspect of longer runs certainly influences the way I think about leading EchoUser. It’s a journey. You can’t just do nothing for three months and then show up on race day expecting top-tier performance out of yourself. You practice, work hard and refine your technique to develop the best plan possible for race day. I try to instill that same attitude here.