The role of design in behavior change (Alan McLean & Ben Grynol)

When you design a health-focused productivity product, there is a high bar set for the user experience. Users want an attractive experience that both informs and motivates them, which is why Levels hired former New York Times, Fitbit, and Google design alum Alan McLean. In this episode, Alan shares his thoughts around the special needs of health products, his approach to re-designing the Levels app, and the importance of personalization.

The importance of design for health products

User experience is very important for health technology, and Alan is excited to play to his strengths to help move Levels forward.

I’m really excited about reframing your relationship with technology and your own health. So, that probably slots in more into a product design or a UX design role where it’s defining the principles of the experience and the framework for it and how you might potentially even just think about it on an emotional level on a regular basis. Now, the thing that I love doing but I know that I lack some of the aptitude around is just some of the core visual design stuff that you can muddle your way through and design systems, but I’m not going to create a typographic system for you. I’m not going to come up with a new font face. I’m very adept at the practice of color in data visualization, but coming up with a brand palette, that’s the kind of thing where, I can definitely figure it out, but I don’t love it.

Design generalists vs. specialists

Alan said that sometimes all your company needs is a strong generalist designer, but occasionally you’ll want help from a specialist.

There’s so many sub-practices within design. And probably at the stage we’re at right now, it makes sense to have a generalist, like have a handful of generalists. But every once in a while, and especially because it’s a consumer product, you’re going to need to tap those experts to create something that really stands out and has less rough edges.

The value of technical expertise

Alan has found that the biggest impact on his design career came when he embraced more of the technical pieces.

I think one of the biggest transition points I found was actually having some technical know-how really transitions your thinking around the product and how you design it. Even just some basic play with the data or look at the framework and the constraints. I mean, a lot of design is just about thinking about constraints. And when you operate in a world where there are no constraints, you can come up with the most elegant, beautiful thing in the world that no one can make. And so, for me, I’ve had a lot more success just as a designer really digging into what are the people that are going to be making this having to deal with and is it even feasible? And then you’re defining constraints on your terms rather than defining constraints, but re-evaluating those constraints and changing on the fly a little bit later. And then you just compromise the overall vision for what the design could be. So yeah, like digging into code when possible has, for me, really been the thing that impacted my design the most.

The benefit of constraints

When you have some guardrails, you can actually create cleaner, more creative work.

It’s almost like there’s a balance in all these things. Too many constraints, and it’s really difficult to do anything compelling or expressive, creative. But too little and you don’t know what’s working, what’s going to be successful. And a lot of design is really about solving problems. So, maybe it isn’t a boundary or an initial thing to do is always what problem am I trying to solve, right? That’s the set of constraints. What problems do I have to deal with even to define a successful product experience? So, it’s a little bit of design word salad, I guess, but I feel like without some reins, it’s hard to go fast. It’s hard to work expressively. But when you can get that sweet spot of constraints, you can come up with something that is really elegant. I’ve always found that mobile design tends to be, for me at least, more elegant and more directed because the constraints are so there, right? You have less space to work with.

The print/digital divide

Working for the New York Times, Alan had the interesting experience of working on digital design for a legacy print publication.

There’s a lot of user research, and user testing, and solving. Design thinking can be thrown at a lot of different problems, but specifically at the New York Times, they had a digital design team that was even in a different building. And so, there was this deep divide between the New York Times gets a story, reports it and prints it in the paper and then eventually it makes it onto the web. Whereas things were happening in real-time like stories, you couldn’t only release a paper a couple of times a day. Whereas on a website, you can just update it constantly. Right? So, it demanded a different way of approaching stories and storytelling.

User expectations are high for productivity tools

When your product is about change and productivity, there is a high bar for the UX.

In general, I’ve noticed that productivity tools, utilitarian things that solve a problem, in some ways you can get away with less refined design, but when you’re talking about a product like Levels, we’re very wed to your identity and your journey towards a healthier you. And when people are using a product like that, they need an experience that also feels attuned to your needs, especially attuned to your needs. That’s elegant, that’s well taken care of. So, I think the more consumer-ended you are, typically the expectations are just going to be a lot higher. And also, there’s just more opportunities for design. There’s all kinds of interesting ways to delight people and help them feel positive about the change that they’re making or just the journey in general.

Seek out magic moments

The catalyst for great design is often magic moments, or a compelling interaction between the user and the product.

There were magic moments in there where people saw that they ate some food and it caused the line to move in an interesting way, and something that they weren’t expecting. And a lot of people have referred to that as a magic moment for them. That’s what product designers are trying to do is to find those magic moments that you can build an experience around. Like what is the user need? What is compelling about this? If you were to go too deep into visual design in the beginning and you didn’t know what that magic moment was, then you would have something that looked beautiful that no one cared about. So, visual design definitely comes later. Find those magic moments first. That’s what I’m most excited about looking for.

Consider user context

Alan recognizes that Levels users want information, but there is a right way to surface that information depending on the context.

I think we’re almost iterating the delight and the reveal of insightful information to you. We’ve got to do it like a really deliberate and intelligent way. If you’re at your birthday party and you’re having a slice of cake, we need to be thinking about, hey, we might want to have a bit more context and be a bit more like a human being and acknowledge that maybe at that time it makes sense for your glucose to spike up. Right? Those are the kinds of design challenges that we’re going to face that, I think, are super important. We’ve got to become a welcome part of your life every day. Right? And so, there’s magical moments there where – a magical moment could be that Levels doesn’t tell you that your glucose is spiking because it knows that you’re in a moment where that’s what’s going to happen.

Focus on positive reinforcement

Everyone loves a gold star, which is why Alan is thinking hard about how Levels can tap into that deep-seated user need.

This is the stuff that I really love looking into and reading about. And so, it’s always been a passion of mine. We’re at this stage where we help you develop metabolic awareness. We can show you for the first time how different foods affect you. But for a lot of us, there’s a point where you get it where you understand. And so, when you get to that stage, we don’t have to keep hammering you with metabolic awareness necessarily. We might even want to dial that down and shift our focus to more positive reinforcement. I mean, you’ve got kids, you know how this works. Positive reinforcement tends to lead to more directive and positive change for people. You see this in Fitbit, you see this an Apple, just on their watches. People love getting their gold star. And that’s just the way we are as human beings. We love that reward. So, perhaps thinking now, how do we adjust the journey for you?

Personalization is not a hack

When it comes to fitness and wellness, personalization is key.

I used to think personalization was like a hack, when you couldn’t make hard decisions about the design of what a product should be. But increasingly, I feel more like, especially for health and wellness, there’s no one path for any individual…I remember when I was at Fitbit and we were constantly debating the idea of personalized step goals. And you could find a pretty good recommendation to get people to, some people will be able to do 5,000 per day and some people are doing 20. The default was 10,000. And the problem was that anything less than 10,000 didn’t feel like a success for users. Emotionally, they didn’t like it. Even though they weren’t capable of it, they didn’t like the idea that they have a lower step goal. And so, of course, when Apple rolled out the Apple Watch, I think they recognized that emotional tension in the product and so they no longer had the number. They just had a dynamic ring that changed based on what you were capable of and optimized for closure. And to me, that’s such an elegant solution to a problem that Fitbit literally spent years thinking about and could never seem to get beyond the 10,000.

Alan McLean:

The spectrum of caring about the details matters more to people who are spending most of their time on visual design versus the overall product design. And I think that’s actually something that David is really good at, and Levels has been pretty scrappy until I joined. And to this day still, the design was not super polished at all. But there were magic moments in there where people saw that they ate some food and it caused the line to move in an interesting way, and it’s something that they weren’t expecting.

Alan McLean:

That’s what product designers are trying to do is to find those magic moments that you can build an experience around. Like what is the user need? What is compelling about this? If you were to go too deep into visual design at the beginning and you didn’t know what that magic moment was, then you would have something that looked beautiful that no one cared about.

Ben Grynol:

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol:

In early 2021, the Levels’ team was at a point where the product needed some polish. Polish from a design standpoint. The initial product that was launched was really this beta version of the app, where people could get their own feedback through CGMs, the continuous glucose monitors that we use to provide feedback about how food, and sleep, and exercise affects their glucose levels all through real-time data.

Ben Grynol:

And so, there was a point where it was pretty clear that it was time for a little more refinement in the approach to design for the app. We wanted to make the app look and feel like a product that people wanted to use. And so, in April of 2021, Alan McLean came on board to lead design with the team.

Ben Grynol:

He had past experience in print with the New York Times, in designing health tech products with Fitbit and even working most recently with Google. And now as of October 28th, 2021, Alan’s been deep in product and doing all aspects of design.

Ben Grynol:

And so, we sat down and we discussed his design philosophy, his outlook on the way he approaches design and some of his past experience. We learned more about his background pertaining to why metabolic health is so important to him and what resonates with him. It was a really fun conversation to have, and here’s where we kicked things off.

Ben Grynol:

Well, man, we got to get into all these interesting things because one commonality, actually, so there are two commonalities, you lead design with the team and you came on in April, I believe it was.

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

Beginning of April.

Alan McLean:

Around there. April/ May or so. Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

It seems like six years ago, but you are the fourth Canadian on the team, so that is something that we share in common and both of our backgrounds are in design. That was the first thing that I had trained in. And it is very cool to have somebody come in with the experience that you have, not just in design, but so deep, as far as health tech design. You’ve been around it and exposed to it for so long.

Ben Grynol:

What was it that initially got you into design? When did you recognize it in yourself that you were like, “This is a path that I want to follow?”

Alan McLean:

Well, I think that there was this time when I was in school where I really wanted to go into film. I wanted to go into visual effects for film. And during the course of pursuing that and I was studying printmaking, I actually found myself spending more time making things on my computer and doing art on my computer and even front end coding and creative coding, I guess we would call it procedural painting. Just a fancy name for just using math to make art.

Alan McLean:

And I guess I found at that time that it was actually pretty compelling to want to make a tool that you could use. Design a thing that you could integrate into your life. So, that was the transition from sit back, be entertained, to, oh, let’s make something that I can use.

Alan McLean:

And during the course of that, I realized I’m not a spectacular engineer, but I can navigate my way through design. And so, I started focusing more on design, and yeah.

Ben Grynol:

Was that the early two thousands?

Alan McLean:

Yeah, that was the early two thousands. I went to the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. And there was a time there where I thought for sure I needed a really firm foundation in printmaking and drawing in order to get into animation. And I mean, of course that’s true, but realized through the course of that, that actually that’s not a natural talent I have. And so, transitioned more into practical graphic design and doing that and a lot of front end work too.

Alan McLean:

Like back in the day, the bridge between design and front end work was, it was a lot easier to make a website back in the day. So actually, some of my first paid jobs were more as an interface engineer. Like towing the line back and forth between interface, code and design.

Ben Grynol:

Early days of dream leader.

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

Classic. Classic. I mean, it’s interesting though, because there are so many different aspects of design. So, to an outsider, it’s very much like Josh and I were talking on the hardware episode that we did relatively recently, but they’re all different types of engineers. And the same thing goes with design.

Ben Grynol:

I mean, you could probably extrapolate that to any role in any company. There are so many nuances to it, but design is really neat because being a graphic designer, well, are you a brand designer? Are you a product designer? What does that mean? Are you an industrial designer, right? Go down the list? Are you a UX/UI designer?

Ben Grynol:

All of these things are so nuanced and they’re not the same. So, to your point of you really wanted to be an illustrator and doing animation, that is a very, very different skillset than being a very, very good product designer.

Alan McLean:

Yeah, totally.

Ben Grynol:

Totally different skills. And so, when you think about all these different types of design, how do you break it down and bucket it as far as what interests you versus things where you know, you’re like, “I know.”

Ben Grynol:

And again, not saying it from a self-serving perspective where it’s like, it’s okay to pat yourself on the back and be like, “I know I’m better at this and not that.” What are areas where you’re like, you know that you crush and then other areas where you’re like, “I am not touching that one?”

Alan McLean:

Well, I think the best way for me to infer that is where I spend the most time, and what comes really easily and what comes really feels like takes a longer time to really come up with the right direction.

Alan McLean:

So, I think for me, I’m really excited about reframing your relationship with technology and your own health. So, that probably slots in more into a product design or a UX design role where it’s defining the principles of the experience and the framework for it and how you might potentially even just think about it on an emotional level on a regular basis.

Alan McLean:

Now, the thing that I love doing but I know that I lack some of the aptitude around is just some of the core visual design stuff that you can muddle your way through and design systems, but I’m not going to create a typographic system for you. I’m not going to come up with a new font face.

Alan McLean:

I’m very adept at the practice of color in data visualization, but coming up with a brand palette, that’s the kind of thing where, I can definitely figure it out, but I don’t love it.

Ben Grynol:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I mean, that’s the brand designer skillset, right?

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

Where it’s like people who are just so good at brand. And then let’s go down that rabbit hole for a sec. There are people that are really good marketing designers, that being, they’re good at designing collateral, they’re good at designing assets that… Let’s define it because this is getting a bit nerdy and academic. But marketing collateral being like digital ads.

Ben Grynol:

There is a certain skill that comes with being really good at designing the right aspect ratio, the right headlines, right? Visuals, the right… Go down that rabbit hole. That’s a skillset in itself. And then brand designers are people who are really good at designing the elements that being like the, assume a company uses illustration or even photography.

Ben Grynol:

Not setting up the ads, but giving creative direction to what those assets might look like. And then what you said about topography, there are people that are just experts in designing typography, and kerning, and line weights and I could go on and on. And that’s where it gets really, really difficult where you can be a generalist as a designer.

Ben Grynol:

But then once you see people who are specialists where they’re like, “I am world-class at designing YouTube thumbnails that are going to get high engagement.” Right?

Alan McLean:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

That’s a real job now.

Alan McLean:

For sure.

Ben Grynol:

That’s a real job.

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

It’s wild, but that’s the skill.

Alan McLean:

I mean, there’s so many sub-practices within design. And probably at the stage we’re at right now, it makes sense to have a generalist, like have a handful of generalists. But every once in a while, and especially because it’s a consumer product, you’re going to need to tap those experts to create something that really stands out and has less rough edges I think.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. So, when you start to think about design and design systems, what was it that you exposed yourself to growing up? What were certain things that you did to hone your skills and get better and better as a generalist, but also to get really deep in certain areas?

Alan McLean:

Yeah. I think one of the biggest transition points I found was actually having some technical know-how really transitions your thinking around the product and how you design it. Even just some basic play with the data or look at the framework and the constraints.

Alan McLean:

I mean, a lot of design is just about thinking about constraints. And when you operate in a world where there are no constraints, you can come up with the most elegant, beautiful thing in the world that no one can make. And so, for me, I’ve had a lot more success just as a designer really digging into what are the people that are going to be making this having to deal with and is it even feasible?

Alan McLean:

And then you’re defining constraints on your terms rather than defining constraints, but re-evaluating those constraints and changing on the fly a little bit later. And then you just compromise the overall vision for what the design could be. So yeah, like digging into code when possible has, for me, really been the thing that impacted my design the most.

Ben Grynol:

Well, let’s push on that for a second, the constraint side of it. Because you could argue that having things that are open-ended allows for full creativity. You can take this wherever it goes. The other side is that I used to love constraints from a design challenge perspective. So, not necessarily designing something.

Ben Grynol:

Assume I did, so it’s a design challenge. You have to come up with a design, you’re not just design thinking that is solving problems through the lens of design. But when you’re given constraints, paint me a picture of the sun, the constraint becomes the sun. You know that that’s the deliverable you have to give.

Ben Grynol:

And then the interpretation of it is, we have to deliver on this constraint. Extrapolate that to product, right? So, when you’re given the constraint of certain things, sometimes, and this is the debate or the pushback on it is sometimes constraints can actually help you be more creative because you have a targeted point that you have to go to and then you’re trying to unlock what it is that is going to solve that challenge.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. It’s almost like there’s a balance in all these things. Too many constraints, and it’s really difficult to do anything compelling or expressive, creative. But too little and you don’t know what’s working, what’s going to be successful.

Alan McLean:

And a lot of design is really about solving problems. So, maybe it isn’t a boundary or an initial thing to do is always what problem am I trying to solve, right? That’s the set of constraints. What problems do I have to deal with even to define a successful product experience?

Alan McLean:

So, it’s a little bit of design word salad, I guess, but I feel like without some reins, it’s hard to go fast. It’s hard to work expressively. But when you can get that sweet spot of constraints, you can come up with something that is really elegant. I’ve always found that mobile design tends to be, for me at least, more elegant and more directed because the constraints are so there, right? You have less space to work with.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah. Constraints allow for chunking, right? Like let’s assume three constraints. It doesn’t matter what they are, but there are three constraints and you’re like, okay, I know that it’s not about here are the lines or here are the boundaries. The constraint can just be a category, right?

Alan McLean:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben Grynol:

So, it’s not like you can’t do this. It’s just you know that you… So actually, let’s define a constraint. A constraint might be, let’s just use age, gender by birth, geography. If you’re designing for that, you’re going to look at those buckets and that’s going to start to unlock certain things for you in the way that you approach the design.

Ben Grynol:

But if it’s just like, “Alan, we need you to design an app.” You’re like, “Great. What type of app is this?” And it’s like, “Just an app, Alan. Just an app.” And you’re like, “Is it for cars? Is it for health? Is it sports?” It’s like, “No, just an app, Alan.” Because that’s what you do is design apps.

Ben Grynol:

So it’s like you need to chunk things out into these constraints so that you have a starting point. That also allows for expectation setting across the company. Or if you’re doing design work that’s client-based, it’s like you set the expectation about… And I don’t think anybody ever goes that wide where they’re like, “Just design an app, Alan.” But maybe it’s happened, who knows? Who knows?

Ben Grynol:

When you think about the role of design at Levels, so you’ve got all this experience, right? You started out in print, that being with the times, the New York Times, doing editorial and content design. And then you moved into working with some of the largest health tech companies in the world.

Ben Grynol:

And when you start to think about design at Levels as it pertains to some of your past experience and things like using design to create behavior change, how do you approach that problem?

Alan McLean:

Yeah. I think some of that does come back to constraints. And just a quick clarification of the New York Times, there was some print, but almost all of it when I was joining it was essentially creating an interactive team within the newsroom. Which at that time there, there wasn’t really a solid presence for one.

Alan McLean:

And I was pushing on constraints too. The New York times is this storied newspaper and there’s paper in the name, like newspaper, that’s what people are making. And so, you’re coming in and you’re like, “Hey, I’m mid-20s, I’m a designer. I’m going to make some stuff on the web for you.”

Alan McLean:

They’re like, “What do you mean?” That medium where you can change what it is immediately if you make a mistake. That was the dynamic that I started in. But in healthcare, the constraints are often, can you do this thing safely and can you provide guidance around changing behavior in a safe and deliberate way that’s informed by people’s behavior and can you do it in a way that is compelling?

Alan McLean:

And a lot of health and wellness, there’s a lot of constraints there, just talking about, is the suggestion you’re making correct or is this particular user in the frame of mind to make that change? You’re architecting choice in such a way that hit that sweet spot of beneficial to the user, enjoyable and limited effort.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah, it’s one of those things where you can go really, really deep on it. But when you’re getting back to the Times, let’s define it. That was still web one, right? This is 2007.

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

You had finished school, you went to New York. So you left Canada, you went to New York and you started working when things were just getting online. That was still relatively new. There were a lot of major companies that didn’t even have websites, which sounds absurd. But that is true.

Ben Grynol:

I think Shopify was ’06, but it really didn’t catch on until ’08. And by catch on I mean it was an actual company at that point. So, you’re talking about pre-ecom, pre-social, social being in addition to Facebook. Right? So, that being like Instagram and TikTok and name all these platforms.

Ben Grynol:

It was really just like, we’re just getting into social. Twitter was just being formed. These are very, very early days. And so, the approach to digital design was still such a new frontier that I think people traditionally in that time thought about design as being this outsourced thing as opposed to a core competency within a company.

Ben Grynol:

People thought that it was bonkers if you’re like, “Oh, we have not a design team, we have a full-time…” Before design in companies would just be called a graphic designer was basically their role. But it’s like, “Yeah, we hired Alan as a graphic designer.”

Ben Grynol:

And you’re like, “You have somebody full-time that does design for you? Full-time? 40 hours a week?” And it’s now there are all these facets of design and roles of design and companies, and that’s commonplace. You have companies with design teams that are 100 people and you’re not even batting an eyelash at it. You’re like, “Yeah. Well, of course, that makes sense.”

Alan McLean:

Yeah. I guess the scope of the problems they’re solving are bigger now than maybe in the past. So, there’s probably a deeper appreciation for the practice. Because there’s a lot of user research, and user testing, and solving… Design thinking can be thrown at a lot of different problems, but specifically at the New York Times, they had a digital design team that was even in a different building.

Alan McLean:

And so, there was this deep divide between the New York Times gets a story, reports it and prints it in the paper and then eventually it makes it onto the web. Whereas things were happening in real-time like stories, you couldn’t only release a paper a couple of times a day. Whereas on a website, you can just update it constantly. Right? So, it demanded a different way of approaching stories and storytelling.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah. And you get with all these different teams too, that was still a team that was focused, a digital design team. But companies now will have roles like human factors designers. That’s not a weird role. That’s just, yeah, of course, there are human factors.

Ben Grynol:

So, if you’re designing hard tech, that being like, let’s say a car like Tesla, they will have human factors designers to see how people interact with the product, psychologically how they think about it. And they’ll work with industrial designers to relay all of these insights about the way people actually interact with the product.

Ben Grynol:

And that’s where design is such a strategic advantage. It’s not a transactional part of any product experience or product stack. But the irony is that some companies are very diligent about design. So, let’s use Ford just because I love cars. Ford is notorious for having a fairly large design practice. That’s probably a good way of framing it. A good design practice within their company.

Ben Grynol:

And then Airbnb. Airbnb is design-centric, design first. Everything is design. And then other companies think of design as an afterthought still. So, what’s your outlook on that as far as where does design come into play in a company as far as the juxtaposition between being a strategic advantage and then this afterthought?

Alan McLean:

Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s a really interesting question and it’s funny, Airbnb is founded by a designer, right? I mean, they’ve got a deep history of design there. I think the expectations about what you’re experiencing in a product, not just in the real world, the digital world and so on. They’re a lot higher than they used to be, I think.

Alan McLean:

But in general, I’ve noticed that productivity tools, utilitarian things that solve a problem, in some ways you can get away with less refined design, but when you’re talking about a product like Levels, we’re very wed to your identity and your journey towards a healthier you.

Alan McLean:

And when people are using a product like that, they need an experience that also feels attuned to your needs, especially attuned to your needs. That’s elegant, that’s well taken care of. So, I think the more consumer-ended you are, typically the expectations are just going to be a lot higher.

Alan McLean:

And also, there’s just more opportunities for design. There’s all kinds of interesting ways to delight people and help them feel positive about the change that they’re making or just the journey in general. In some ways, design in a wellness product is trying to find ways to expand the surface area for positive reinforcement. And ultimately, that’s going to lead to the greatest change for most people.

Ben Grynol:

And so, when you start to think about, like if you’re giving guidance to somebody who is thinking of starting a company, when do you think they should start thinking about design? And it’s open-ended, right? There isn’t a right answer. I think you and I can both confirm our own biases and be like, “Man, day one, design is so important.”

Ben Grynol:

But other people who might have a different background or different experience will be like, “No, we’re going to punt on design so that we can just put out duct tape and Popsicle sticks and we’ll keep shipping that. And full caveat, I love the idea of duct tape, and Popsicle sticks, and shipping really fast, but also I love design. Those two are completely at odds with each other because design is about perfection and shipping fast is about being scrappy. And so, it’s like they’re absolute trade-offs.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. Well, I embrace the scrappiness too, although I do find myself, because I’m doing a lot of visual design lately, I think the spectrum of caring about the details matters more to people who are spending most of their time on visual design versus the overall product design.

Alan McLean:

And I think that’s actually something that David is really good at and Levels has been pretty scrappy until I joined, and to this day still the design was not super polished at all. But there were magic moments in there where people saw that they ate some food and it caused the line to move in an interesting way, and something that they weren’t expecting. And a lot of people have referred to that as a magic moment for them. That’s what product designers are trying to do is to find those magic moments that you can build an experience around.

Alan McLean:

Like what is the user need? What is compelling about this? If you were to go too deep into visual design in the beginning and you didn’t know what that magic moment was, then you would have something that looked beautiful that no one cared about. So, visual design definitely comes later. Find those magic moments first. That’s what I’m most excited about looking for.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah. And you talk about those magic moments so much, not just from a user standpoint, but from a personal experience standpoint. So, do you want to go into that a little bit? Just your outlook and your connection to you’re very much in tune with everything that we do.

Alan McLean:

Well, I mean, I’ve been looking at glucose and healthcare data for my whole life. I’m type I diabetic. I think I’ve been trying to redesign diabetes apps since I was a kid, whether I knew it or not. Throwing together Photoshop mocks and things. I’m almost forgetting the question now. What was the question again? Sorry.

Ben Grynol:

Just talking a little bit more about your connection to it, right? Because you’re talking about these magic moments that other people see in product, right? They look at it and that is a true insight to them, but you’ve experienced, you’re lived experience of these, we’ll call them “magic moments”.

Ben Grynol:

They’re not necessarily magic. It is a different lens through which you view that product experience, but you’re trying to create behavior change around what you know the implications of certain inputs and outputs are going to be.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. Well, magic moments, that’s when something unexpected happens, but there is also just this, you almost seeing a manifestation of your choices in a digital space. And that to me is pretty compelling. All of a sudden you see something that you’d never seen before materialize in front of you. It’s almost like virtual reality in a way, but you’re seeing your body like you’re looking inside, which is literally our catchphrase, I guess.

Alan McLean:

And those are the kinds of moments that, obviously I’ve seen in my own data over the course of my life. And they can be really powerful and they can be powerful in positive and negative ways. And so, figuring out our emotional intelligence around that is super important because too many magic moments and you’re going to have a hard time taking a break and having pasta dinner someday. Right? But not enough and it’s going to feel pretty forgettable.

Alan McLean:

And so, I think we’re almost titrating the delight and the reveal of insightful information to you. We’ve got to do it like a really deliberate and intelligent way. If you’re at your birthday party and you’re having a slice of cake, we need to be thinking about, hey, we might want to have a bit more context and be a bit more like a human being and acknowledge that maybe at that time it makes sense for your glucose to spike up. Right?

Alan McLean:

Those are the kinds of design challenges that we’re going to face that, I think, are super important. We’ve got to become a welcome part of your life every day. Right? And so, there’s magical moments there where… A magical moment could be that Levels doesn’t tell you that your glucose is spiking because it knows that you’re in a moment where that’s what’s going to happen. Right?

Ben Grynol:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I mean, when you approach design, design concepts typically get presented, like throughout the week, they’ll be in threads. So, we use threads for all of our communications, which is Slack meets email. But a lot of times you’ll present the macro of these concepts at our Friday forum, our weekly all hands meeting.

Ben Grynol:

You’ll say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about one, two and three this week.” And the lens through which you present the concepts is always standing in the shoes of others, right?

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

You really approach it from this lens of empathy, but also psychology, which is behavioral economics, right? You’re saying, “Hey, if the magic moment creates a negative feeling for people, that being, they no longer want to consume certain foods, then you actually look at it as a failure.” You’re like, “We can’t create that. That’s not magic. That is regressing from being a magic moment.”

Ben Grynol:

And so, it is the fine line of creating enough of a magic moment, but also knowing things like the Day Score, one thing you’ve been working on a lot lately where it’s like, let’s count, let’s take it so it goes up instead of down because loss of version. You’re losing all the time versus let’s show people they’re winning. Very, very different to look at things through the lens of psychology and design.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. I mean, this is the stuff that I really love looking into and reading about. And so, it’s always been a passion of mine. We’re at this stage where we help you develop metabolic awareness. We can show you for the first time how different foods affect you. But for a lot of us, there’s a point where you get it where you understand.

Alan McLean:

And so, when you get to that stage, we don’t have to keep hammering you with metabolic awareness necessarily. We might even want to dial that down and shift our focus to more positive reinforcement. I mean, you’ve got kids, you know how this works. Positive reinforcement tends to lead to more directive and positive change for people. You see this in Fitbit, you see this an Apple, just on their watches. People love getting their gold star.

Alan McLean:

And that’s just the way we are as human beings. We love that reward. So, perhaps thinking now, how do we adjust the journey for you? And for me, I think I talked about this in the past, but finding more… Like we know you’ll improve your health if you have strong social connections that also care about their health.

Alan McLean:

So, can we bring your friends in somehow, your family? Can we give you reasons beyond just yourself to positively reinforce the change that you want to make?

Ben Grynol:

Yeah. And with community, that’s such an interesting one in itself because there isn’t a one size fits all. Some people are avidly waiting. They cannot wait to be part of a social experience with people whom they do not know. And other people have no interest at all. They only want to be engaging with micro-communities, that being, let’s define a micro-community as somebody whom they have a first degree connection with, and it’s less than 10 people.

Ben Grynol:

And other people just want to use the product on their own. And so, to serve up one option to people and say, “This is the only way that it works. Here are your feedback loops.” Some can create a negative experience for people because they don’t want to be bombarded with community connection where they’re like, “I’m stopping using this thing altogether.” It is no longer magic, it feels like a burden.

Ben Grynol:

So, it’s designing around all of these constraints where it’s like you’re offering up something for everyone, but not saying it is the only solution that they have. It’s really hard.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. I heard this saying before that personalization and like… I used to think personalization was like a hack, when you couldn’t make hard decisions about the design of what a product should be. But increasingly, I feel more like, especially for health and wellness, there’s no one path for any individual. Everyone’s unique and we see this in the feedback. We’ll make one change and some people love it and some people hate it.

Alan McLean:

There’s ways to personalize the experience so it always resonates. And I think that’s the thing that we have to unlock in the future. I remember the elegance. There’s all kinds of interesting elegant solutions for these kinds of things, but it’s going to take time to unlock them. Right? I remember when I was at Fitbit and we were constantly debating the idea of personalized step goals.

Alan McLean:

And you could find a pretty good recommendation to get people to, some people will be able to do 5,000 per day and some people are doing 20. The default was 10,000. And the problem was that anything less than 10,000 didn’t feel like a success for users. Emotionally, they didn’t like it. Even though they weren’t capable of it, they didn’t like the idea that they have a lower step goal.

Alan McLean:

And so, of course, when Apple rolled out the Apple Watch, I think they recognized that emotional tension in the product and so they no longer had the number. They just had a dynamic ring that changed based on what you were capable of and optimized for closure. And to me, that’s such an elegant solution to a problem that Fitbit literally spent years thinking about and could never seem to get beyond the 10,000. Right?

Alan McLean:

So, I think there’s interesting things like that you can do on designing a product to be emotionally resonant, but then there’s probably also just fundamental personalization to address your specific needs. And to me, that always struck me as a hybrid approach. Just get rid of the number.

Ben Grynol:

What do you think about as far as the slippery slope of design, right? Design can be such a beautiful thing. It can also be dangerous sometimes. And I don’t mean physical harm as far as danger goes. Let’s disregard the Ford Pinto poor industrial design. Let’s go with I’m talking the Pinto of the ’70s, something we just talked about on our previous episode.

Ben Grynol:

The slippery slope of design being dangerous, where the wrong feedback loops can lead people down a path that is not what the intent is for the design team or the entire company, the entire product team that is putting forth a product to the world.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. This is something I spent a lot of time looking at on the Well-Being Lab at Google. And looking at these, essentially, we’ve optimized for frictionless experiences. And of course, we spend a lot of time on our phone. A lot of people don’t want to spend as much time on their phone as they do and yet they’re constantly almost feeling like they can’t put it in the other room.

Alan McLean:

And I don’t think that’s the consequences of over overeager optimization, algorithmic feeds and design plays a huge role in that because we value effortless, frictionless experiences. But it’s gotten to a point where sometimes, like ideally, I could get from point A to B as fast as possible, but sometimes when I go by a school, I need to have some speed bumps so I don’t hurt somebody. Right?

Alan McLean:

The same things relevant to face filters and how much you use your phone and just constantly feeling like you can’t go to sleep because you’re getting pinged all night. And ultimately, without some constraints, you’re going to have people that initially love using your product and then deeply loath it at some point because they feel like they can’t stop using it.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah. And that gets into design. It’s funny because design is a holistic experience, right?

Alan McLean:

Yeah.

Ben Grynol:

It’s back to the conversation of, it’s hilarious to think back that if you were in design, you were just a graphic designer. Like what do you do? That’s all people would ever refer to what you did was like, if you work on the computer and its design, you are a graphic designer, but when you start to think about experiences, they are very much designed end to end.

Ben Grynol:

And this is more along the lines of Airbnb, what they do and how they think about design. The entire stack of an experience. But that’s where all these things like algos or algorithms, interface design, even design decisions that have to do with how notifications are served up.

Ben Grynol:

And you think a ton about that, but how notifications are served up, when they’re served up and why they’re served up, that is part of a product design. And that might not be visual from the standpoint of you’re pushing pixels that is a design decision on the experience side of things.

Ben Grynol:

So, you’re so right though that we have to be so careful in the way that we design products, because some things that start out a certain way, let’s use Instagram, that was a curation platform for people who loved photography. And now it has gotten to this point where there are a lot of challenges around the way that people use it.

Ben Grynol:

And can you blame it on the algorithm? Maybe. Can you blame it on the interface and the behaviors that it creates for people who use it regularly or the content they consume? Maybe. There are all these things, but those are design decisions. And that is what anyone who’s designing a digital product has to be so cognizant of.

Alan McLean:

Yeah, it’s so true. And I’m really glad to hear you say that. Great design advocate because if you’re in graphic designer mode all the time, you look up and you’ve made something that looks beautiful, but potentially has created a pretty sort of a net negative for people. And unintentionally, you optimize yourself into a corner that it’s hard to get out of, especially if the engagement is super high.

Alan McLean:

When I was at Fitbit, I feel like I’m just dropping Fitbit stories here, but I remember-

Ben Grynol:

No, it’s good. I love it.

Alan McLean:

… we had a, you could set goals for individual things, like steps and active minutes and things like that. Stairs. But we also had one for calorie goals. And so, we noticed that a lot of people didn’t use calorie goals, but there was a contingent of people that were very dedicated to using it.

Alan McLean:

And when we dug into it a bit more, it turned out that a lot of these people were suffering from eating disorders and had a really negative relationship with the product. We’d hear stories of people telling us they couldn’t use Fitbit anymore because they felt compelled to set a calorie goal, incredibly low calorie goals.

Alan McLean:

And so, the designer was not thinking about that. And that’s the kind of thing where if you have enough early research, you can start thinking about that or just some critical thinking. But if you’re not thinking about some of the unintended consequences, you’ll get yourself in a position where you’re potentially actually harming people.

Alan McLean:

And so, that’s something that we talk about at Levels all the time. We want to do competitions and things like that. And some people are definitely the right mental model for it, but there’s a small contingent of users that it could potentially be very problematic for.

Alan McLean:

And so, it may not be necessarily that we never do that kind of stuff, but we find the right guardrails and the right ways to mitigate and make it a healthy experience.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah. That is analogous to designing products in long-tail community. So, let’s use designing products within the disability community, and then we should define what that exactly is. Right? So, within the disability community, that being the A11Y community, A11Y, there are all these different aspects of designing for disability.

Ben Grynol:

So, define it exactly as it is type one and type two classified as a disability, right? And when companies are designing for versus with communities, then that can be hard too, because it’s along the lines of what you said, where whomever the designer at Fitbit was didn’t intend for.

Ben Grynol:

And granted that doesn’t fall within disability as far as classification, that being eating disorders, I don’t think it does. Maybe correct me if I’m wrong, but the intent is not we’re designing something and people who use a product like this were just not going to worry about it. That’s not the intent. I don’t think that anybody sets out to design products that are used by people in certain ways.

Ben Grynol:

So, bring that back to the disability community. It can be really disheartening when somebody works really hard or a team works really hard to bring forth a new product to the world and then it’s just not meeting the mark for intended use because a large subset of the population, let’s say people who would be hearing impaired, right? That’s a good example is people who are deaf or hard of hearing, that is a part of the disability community that relies heavily on transcription that is accurate for things like Zoom meetings.

Ben Grynol:

And so, if they have something that’s only 80% accurate in AI transcription, well, that’s not serving their purpose. It’s not good enough. It’s not helping them to digest information. And so, then you go, well, you can’t look past that. And so, there are all these nuances to saying when you’re designing products. There are these considerations where sometimes you can’t see around the corner because you don’t know what you don’t know, but you have to be empathetic towards people who might use a product eventually like in the future.

Alan McLean:

Yeah, absolutely. Such a great point. User experience is on here. You’ve got to have a keen eye for those particular users. And I think the thing I’ve noticed, especially around wellness stuff is that maybe a very small percentage of users are in that risk category where they’re potentially transitioned into an eating disorder related to their glucose or blocking food or whatever, but there’s a whole, it’s a gradient, right?

Alan McLean:

There’s the people that will transition into problematic use and they might have had problematic use no matter what the product was in some cases, but there’s a whole bunch of other users that feel it and are uncomfortable with that relationship and just stop using the product.

Alan McLean:

So, it tends to be that you can use those ends of the distribution to inform what the middle wants. They’re big problems to deal with but they can inform that whole slope down the distribution to help you have a healthier, more positive relationship with your users.

Ben Grynol:

Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. So, if you’re thinking about giving guidance to anyone who’s interested in design, what are resources that you dig into or resources that people can check out as far as books, podcasts, articles, things that you reference regularly.

Alan McLean:

Yeah. There are so many. Where should we begin? I mean, I think if you, since we’re just on the topic of accessibility and research and user-centered thinking. I think Mike Monteiro is, Mule Design is, most designers probably know him, but if you haven’t read any of his books or seen any of his talks, they’re really great.

Alan McLean:

It’s about thinking about people in an ethical way, thinking about the relationship with their products in a holistic and healthy way. If you’re interested in visual design, I mean, I’m just harking on my former friends or former colleagues, but your Google design, material design library is actually an incredible resource. I refer to it, even though I use it all the time. And I still refer back to those principles and guidelines on a pretty regular basis and do that through line of design for everyone.

Alan McLean:

Because they’re dealing with scale so much, you get this really thoughtful look at how to design something basic like a component or an input field. What else for design? I spent a lot of time visualizing data and trying to find ways to stretch the boundaries of representations of data. So, I always recommend to people to look at Observable. Observable has all kinds of beautiful data visualizations started by Mike Bostock, he made D3 great visualization library. So, tons of beautiful stuff on there.

Ben Grynol:

Are there other resources that you tap into that aren’t design-related? And the reason I ask is, so you’re an avid biker, you love cycling, but you could be reading a cycling publication and you could be doing whatever else outside with design, but then that gives you insight towards whatever problem you’re working on because you start to connect all these unrelated dots. Are there things that you personally reference regularly that helps you to form these neural pathways?

Alan McLean:

Maybe I’m struggling with the question, but I think where are we going with this?

Ben Grynol:

Who are you, Alan McLean? What are your interests?

Alan McLean:

Oh, okay. Well, personal interest. Yeah. I mean, I spend a lot of time on things like Strava, and obviously I’m a big fan of things like Peloton and Zwift. So, I love all things cycling. Used to do a lot of triathlons for the health and connected space for wearables and digital tech.

Alan McLean:

I follow DC Rainmaker a lot because he does these insanely long posts about health and fitness technology. You see Rainmaker, there’s a prolific blogger that will write like a 30 page article on the ins and outs of a new heart rate tracker, for example. In terms of design, I’m just living on Twitter honestly.

Alan McLean:

I feel like I’ve done away way with podcasts and specific Fast Company articles. And I just inhale it all through Twitter these days.

Ben Grynol:

Interesting. Yeah, Fast Company was, I mean, that was the first real design business resource. The cross section of business and design call it ’04, ’05 around there when there was more reporting in it. Things used to be siloed, right?

Alan McLean:

Sure.

Ben Grynol:

It was like ink is just for business. And let’s say, I don’t know, design boom is just design. And then Fast Company is this hybrid. It’s like ink meets design boom, where the reporting about design and business. And that in itself was such a beautiful, I’ll call it that, because it was near and dear to my heart when I used to read it every single day.

Ben Grynol:

And now I read more TechCrunch, but it was such a great, great resource between we’ll call it ’05 to, I don’t know, even late 2010 or early 2010. It’s changed a lot as of late, but that was really an interesting resource that was doing reporting that no other publications were.

Alan McLean:

Yeah, totally. And they took such a design-centered lens on everything. It was always compelling reading. Like you’d see the ins and outs of how they designed something. It’s interesting how these mediums stick. It’s funny fashion is still very much in print. Right?

Alan McLean:

And a lot of times it’s because the print ads are the fashion advertorial almost. So, I don’t know. I was just thinking as you were talking about mediums and websites and we were talking Twitters… Somehow fashion has seemed to stay out of that convergence on online. But maybe that’s just in my head. I don’t know.

Ben Grynol:

It’s the print in you, the New York Times print. Forever in love with print, Gutenberg.

Alan McLean:

It is a great medium to work with. They’ve got so much space.

Ben Grynol:

That’s very true. Very true.

Alan McLean:

I got turned down the first time I applied at the New York Times and I was like, “Okay.” And I just messaged the recruiter every day for six months until another job opened and then interviewed again. Sent flowers, called her every day until she just gave me the job.

Ben Grynol:

Amazing.

Alan McLean:

And then Google, I applied to Google every month since 2006. I just pinged them. And then finally, I never heard anything back. And then one day from barely, they replied and said, “Oh, we got your application, but it looks like you’re not quite the right fit for this.”

Alan McLean:

And I replied to her and I was like, “No, I’m perfect for this job. You’re crazy not to interview me.” And she replied and I was like, “Oh, okay.” So it’s like, yeah, we’ve got to teach these Canadians to just push a little bit harder.