Henry Modisett: Perplexity’s VP of Design on embracing ambiguity and leading with curiosity

21:32Henry Modisett:So it's a lot of showing the work, if that makes sense. And I mean, to be honest, the most important thing we can do is not fuck it up. It has to actually work. It can't go off the rails. We only have a few chances to prove ourselves. And if it starts doing the wrong thing, then you're probably going to be scared to try it again. The most important way to create trust is just for it to actually work. But beyond that, yeah, we just try to show the notes and let people take over. And it's a moving target as well. I think we're still learning. There's obviously like an early adopter type of person is going to be more comfortable trying riskier things.

22:07Henry Modisett:And so we want to make sure that it works for everybody too.

22:13We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is supported by Framer. For years, shipping a website required a really complex process, maybe a team of people involved, and a launch could take weeks. But Framer changed all that math for me. Framer's a pro website builder with AI agents built right into the canvas. They draft pages, manage CMS content, handle all the SEO for you. You inspect it all, review it, edit, and decide what goes live. Agents bring the speed. You bring your own personal taste. That's why teams at Miro and Perplexity build on Framer. It's an incredible platform.

22:56Builds production-ready sites, published in minutes, not days. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist. Or get started building a site for free today at framer.com slash designbetter for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash designbetter for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. Designbetter is supported by dupe.com. I was shopping for a couch a few weeks ago, and I found one. It had a beautiful shape, a perfect color, and then I saw the price, and I nearly closed my laptop. As a designer, I am super picky about form and materials, so, you know, cheap just isn't really an option for me.

23:41And that's the problem that dupe.com solves. Paste in a product link or upload a photo and it finds a similar piece, same look, same quality, often from the same factories for a fraction of the cost. It works for fashion and jewelry too, not just furniture. Using dupe.com is insanely simple. Just go to dupe.com, paste any product URL or upload a photo, and it'll instantly show you similar items for way less. There's an app and a browser extension too, so it's always at hand. No account needed, and it's totally free. Start saving money today with dupe.com.

24:24And now, back to the show.

24:31Given all the capabilities of these tools as far as actually designing products for AI, how has that changed your workflow for you and your team? I know you've mentioned that you were already part of teams that use code a lot within the design process, but now that that door is open even further for, let's say, designers like me who don't have a background in being a developer, it makes it very easy to go out and build a prototype. So how is that changing for your team and what kinds of tools are you taking advantage of?

24:59Henry Modisett:The brand and the product team are kind of embracing things in different ways. You know, what I learned working at Quora and working on early machine learning powered product experiences, like user feeds and notification systems and automatic emailing things, is that it's really hard to mock all this stuff up because there are infinite states. You know, every user is getting a different experience, both in terms of what's being delivered, but also what the UI looks like. And so there's a lot of designing these stencils. I don't know what text is going to be in here, but some kind of text block will be there.

25:31Henry Modisett:So there's a lot of system design, like UI system design thinking required to do any kind of non-deterministic product experience. And I find that that type of work, it can be done using like a static tool like a Figma. But it's a lot easier to do it in code, even if you're in some kind of prototype environment. because either you're using real data, like the way that I designed Perplexity is I would just ask questions and then change the UI and just keep asking more and more questions because I just wasn't sure whether the way that I was rendering everything was going to work. And so it helps so much to just be able to test it with real outcomes, to test the efficacy of your decisions.

26:12Henry Modisett:There's kind of like a natural requirement. But I found that everybody that dabbles in an environment where they're able to code as designers, they suddenly feel much more empowered. There's this feeling you get where you see something that can be better and you can just go change it. And that is addicting because if you're a designer that loves the most pedantic details, there's nothing in your way to just go make it better. For the right people, it's incredibly empowering and gets you that last 10 % of quality very quickly. Given that we really benefit from working with live data have streamed through our designs.

26:50Henry Modisett:I think there's a fundamental empowerment to designers coding. And the world has changed. React exists now. React's pretty easy to write and easy to understand. Swift UI, equally so. The abstractions that we're working with are easier than they used to be. I think HTML and CSS, that era, a lot of designers were coding because it's not that hard to understand. And then the MVC framework era got really messy. And designers were having to think a lot more than they should have. And now we're kind of back to a place where I think things are easier and you can use AI to generate a lot of your code.

27:26Henry Modisett:So there's this kind of explosion in output happening. I have designers that are fantastic engineers that are teaching designers who've never coded before how to get in there and do it. And it's a really kind of wonderful environment, both because it's empowering for them, but also it's kind of the right way to work for a lot of our problems. It's not the only way we work. I mean, if we're trying to solve like some hard interaction design problem And when we're figuring out our color system, there's better tools for that. But just having it available to us, it does change everything for how the product designers are working.

27:57And does that go both ways where engineers are also sort of bleeding into design as well?

28:03Henry Modisett:You know, it's funny. I found the opposite to be true. They're like, thank God we don't have to write CSS anymore. Because CSS is not programming. It's like you're learning this layout language and you're learning the best practices on how to use it. And it's a thing that seems easy to write, but that's a trap because it is easy to put stuff on the screen, but it's hard to do it right. It's hard to do it in a way that scales well, that is bug free, that it considers mobile web, whatever. And most of the tweaks you're making, I would call like design decisions for the most part. It's almost like let the engineers focus on bigger engineering problems, thinking about performance and speed and how to get the data on the screen.

28:42Henry Modisett:Whereas we're then kind of handling that UI layer. You know, it's a spectrum and I'm happy to embrace. There's a lot of gray areas. We don't have this super clean delineation of designers do this and engineers do that. But I think that's good. It's solved easily every day by just being like, okay, here's 10 things we all have to do. Who's going to do what? Then projects go just fine. Do you have product people in the mix as well? We have a few. We're kind of in that later stage startup outcome where we've hired a lot of people. Most of the people in the company are ICs. We don't have that many managers.

29:13Henry Modisett:We don't have that many people in what I'd call meta roles, like people leadership or product leadership. It's a lot of ICs shipping stuff every day. And so there's certainly a coordination challenge there. And the few PMs that we have, the majority of their work is like, how do we get everybody on the same page and ship things in the right order and things like that? But I would say we're definitely an IC-oriented company where people are just solving problems and shipping them themselves. I was listening to an interview on Rick Rubin's show with Arvin, one of your co-founders. It was a great interview.

29:45And it was clear that he really cares a lot about design and the product experience. And you're the founding designer at Perplexity. Is that true?

29:53Henry Modisett:Yeah. Yeah. What was that experience like? And how did you get to know the founding team? And what was their vision that excited you to work there? Yeah, so I worked with two of the other founders before at Quora. We worked together on the feed team. After Quora, they all went to do more stuff in machine learning or AI. and they started the company with like, hey, LLMs are interesting, let's start a company. There's something to this stuff. And this was before Chachapiti had come out. And then they were toying around with ideas and building prototypes. And at some point they hit me up because they were like, we should have someone to do the UI.

30:28Henry Modisett:And I'm the only designer that they probably ever met. And so I got lucky. So I started working with them and I had been doing another startup. So I was very much in startup mode writing code every day, building stuff, throwing ideas out the window. I was certainly in this rapid, iterative headspace. So I just jumped in, we started building stuff, we built a completely different product before, and then eventually we landed on this basic version of perplexity. A lot of the energy that I brought to the team, there's maybe two things. One, I just built all the UI, and so they didn't have to think about it.

31:04Henry Modisett:And naturally, whether they realized it or not, I was shaping a lot of the product because of that. It was like a way for me to very freely kind of first principles put together. Okay, what would an answer engine actually work? How would that work? We weren't really thinking about Google. We weren't thinking about any other product. Just like, okay, you need to ask questions. You need to see the answer. And follow-up questions just felt like such a natural engagement loop. Then this sort of the construct of this like linear thread came about. but one where it's just like question, answer, question, answer into an infinity.

31:37Henry Modisett:You know, we were kind of like just shaping it and building it. And by just kind of building what was in my head and not really having to explain it that much and showing them, I think they realized a designer can kind of open a new world that nobody else had imagined, if that makes sense. I do think that's the largest value that a product designer can bring is, hey, there's way more outcomes than you can imagine if you just let somebody run with an idea. Yeah. Fast forward, we ended up with something that basically nobody else had. And because everyone else was copying each other, meanwhile, I was dead set on pushing what felt novel and different and just so much more thoughtful.

32:13Henry Modisett:So they got on board with that. Just, I think, naturally, they started to see like, oh, there's a lot of value in this way of thinking. Through that product shaping, once that felt good, then all the details came together, you know, and suddenly people were like, hey, this product looks pretty good too. And there was just like a natural kind of building of design culture through shaping something that felt good, making it actually look good. And then I do think it really clicked when they allowed us to go all in on brand through just sort of like a pitch of like, hey, this is going to be good for our company strategy.

32:45Henry Modisett:We're in this market that's messy. There's a lot of different startups. There's Google. If we show up and act big and look serious and sophisticated, people are going to take us seriously, act like we've always been here, that really worked for us. There's sort of this snowball effect, I think, of the value of product design, product designers that code, brand, brand strategy. Ervin, I know, had not really thought about any of this before, but he pretty quickly got it and supported us and let us really cook, as he likes to say. I think we're really lucky to have a leader who really does support us in that way without getting on the weeds and changing it, you know what I mean?

33:24Henry Modisett:How often do you have a leadership that understands design and respects it, but lets it happen? So I think that's a unique thing going on here. I think it's fascinating that there are so many founders, engineers, people out there that still don't understand what value design offers a company. And not abstract value, but real concrete, tangible value that can be created. There's a reason why people pay lots and lots of money for luxury cars, luxury goods, etc. Because it makes you feel something different, and there's real value in that. I wonder if you could say more. You said they probably didn't know any other designers, and they didn't realize that there was something else that a designer could bring to the table.

34:11When I think of design and engineering, engineering brings a really great focused understanding of detail, of how something will work. But design is the telescope, this broad view of being able to see the big picture of how all of this stuff fits together. So you've got this microscope and telescope symbiosis there.

34:34Henry Modisett:How do you think about design and engineering and how they plug in? I found that I can be an engineer on any day and I can be a designer on any day. And it's so easy to get too zoomed in as an engineer. One example to forget that like, hey, this interface, this whole product could actually be completely reorganized to be a different way. And if you reorganize it slightly, it'll all work differently, even if the code's the same. There's this sort of composition part of product design that I think designers just are more comfortable imagining. In my head, I could look at Riverside and rethink how it could work.

35:05Henry Modisett:that seems to be harder to do for people that aren't designers. So there's that part of it. Because what happens most companies is without strong design as part of the product development process, is you just see people copying each other straight up. The exact same pattern, the exact same UI. There becomes a lack of original thinking because it's scary. And also maybe we don't have any other ideas. Obviously, sometimes things become common patterns and they should be used everywhere. I think software typically could be more different from each other than it is, if you just sort of clay that out a little bit.

35:40Henry Modisett:The big thing that happened, I think, for us was we had been building our prototypes, ChatGPT launched. And I was like, hey, guys, this is not a consumer product, obviously. And they're like, what do you mean? What does that even mean? The hardest part about being an intuitive person is having to explain your intuition. I think I'm maybe slightly better at that than I was 10 years ago. But I was like, look, you have to log in to use it. It's confusing. It's called ChatGPT. The interface is confusing. What is an AI model? I broke it down for them. And I was like, we have an opportunity to build something for everybody.

36:12Henry Modisett:If we just think differently and we approach things differently and make different tradeoffs. When you really kind of meld strategic company strategy with design, that really opened it all up in our conversations. Because then it's not that hard to slap brand on there too, because I don't really think of these as separate. It's like, how's it going to work differently? How are we going to build it differently? How are we going to tell the story of how it fits into your life in a way that creates contrast in the market? That's all one thing. And especially when you're doing a consumer product and it's like a free consumer product, you really need to have some conviction in how you do all those things.

36:45Henry Modisett:Because otherwise, people are just going to be like, I don't know, it looks the same and then leave. You've got like 300 milliseconds of someone's attention span. It's a game that I think, unless you've had to play it and make all those tradeoffs, that you don't really think about. So that was a lot of the early value that I think I brought. It's just sort of opening up that type of thinking to everybody. And very quickly, I think we were rewarded for that. People were telling us back what we had been talking about internally. People would say, oh, it's the best tool for answers. I'm like, okay, well, we just put that in the UI.

37:15Henry Modisett:And so now people are saying that's what it does. That means we're winning. Aaron and I talk and have written in our newsletter before about the power of writing for designing good products. and most famous examples, probably Johnny Ive, who starts every project with writing. And I'm curious if you use writing as part of your design process, and if so, why it's important to you. I sometimes do. I mean, I try to be very concise. There are a few questions that always need to be answered. Like, why are we doing this? Who's going to use it? And how's it going to work? And I find that without writing those down, you get problems, at the very least, lack of efficiency.

37:52Henry Modisett:but it does create a consolidation of how people think because the alternative is if you don't do writing then you have to do mock-ups and that's a waste of time to go and have to do a lot of mock-ups just to get everyone to get on the same page about what you're building you don't want to have to block everything on mock-ups and so I think writing really gets you to a nice anchor as long as people read it so certainly I like to start with just something at least like a vision that is clear. Do you find your colleagues are receptive to that? I have done some writing in the past and I find that sometimes people will read it, sometimes they won't.

38:29Henry Modisett:It's funny. So Quora was like an essay culture. It was fun, but I think it ended up making us slower because we were thinking too much and debating through intellectualism. What I like about our culture at Perplexity is you need to write something down, but it's like the most concise, clearest framing is what actually wins as far as like a thing that galvanizes everybody. I kind of find that to be a nice challenge. There's like enough that you can say, okay, just read these few sentences. If you don't, then you're not doing the right thing. But I think a longer essay doesn't fit into our culture or like certainly not like a long PRD or there's like the whole corporate PM thing.

39:08Thinking about how your team operates, I know there's some things that you focus on. Speed is a really important value for you. You're developing and spending less time on static mock-ups. You're building real-time. What, if you had a magic wand, would you export from the way that your design team operates to other software companies out there? It works so differently in every company.

39:34Henry Modisett:The one that maybe bothers me the most is when design as an organization is used as a visualizer for leadership, particularly the anxiety of leadership. We don't know what to do. Let's ask the design team to explore 10 options, build prototypes, go off and not actually solve real problems. I think when design gets sort of disconnected from the practice of problem solving, then it's kind of wasted. Because the only way to actually solve problems is build something that you have conviction about and then share it with somebody and see if they use it. when the whole product development cycle gets where design ends up on this like side path of making fake things, then you end up with a lot of nice fake things.

40:21Henry Modisett:And, you know, whether it's a nice fancy design system or like a prototype in like a origami or some sandbox tool, I just think all that's wasted energy because then, you know, in the end, like did the product get better actually? And is anyone even learning anything? I mean, if I make a bunch of mock-ups and share with another designer, am I really learning anything compared to launching it and seeing if people click on that button or use the thing? And so I think something's happened where that seems to be a common thing. So if I could export anything, it's like, hey, what if designers actually solved problems and we built the conviction that somebody needs to do that?

40:58Henry Modisett:Because what's happening is it's so much easier every day to make new things. The amount of code generated by a human is like 10xing. And so what's going to happen is you're going to have to make a lot more decisions on a higher cadence. There's no reason to do quarterly planning anymore. You should do biweekly planning. And you've got to reorganize how you make decisions and how frequently you do. Because you can make stuff really fast. And if you can make anything and you can make it really fast, someone has to decide what you're making. How's it going to work? How's it going to look? How's it going to feel?

41:31Henry Modisett:and who better to do that than designers? Who's most comfortable making those decisions when there's infinite choices? The people that are used to it, that are used to navigating that kind of creative process or the problem-solving process. So I do think that that's what I'd like to export. It's just like a little bit of a reset of like, what does the designer even do? Yeah, I like that. You worked at Google for a long time and you worked on Gmail for mobile. Is that right? Yes, I worked on the first Gmail iPhone app. I wasn't there for very long, but I did get to work on a pretty special project.

42:08Henry Modisett:It was at the time when Google was not really sure whether they should build anything on iOS, which is kind of funny to imagine now. But yeah, it was this sort of side small team that there was not much oversight. And we built a really nice iPhone app, which ended up being really special. It's kind of like before anyone was thinking about design systems. We made every decision, and I worked with Champori, who's now on my team at Perplexity. So it's fun to work with him again. Yeah, I ask about that because it's such a contrast to working in a startup like this, where a lot of the ideas of, I want our team to be quick, I want to write short, pithy descriptions, a lot of those things are possible in a small company versus if you're in a Google where there's just a lot of overhead for just any momentum, any movement whatsoever.

43:03I'm curious if you see yourself and the way that you think, the way that you want to operate as you always need to be within this kind of sweet spot of company size.

43:13Henry Modisett:You know, there's a lot of reasons why big companies operate the way they do. They certainly have more constraints. The reason why I didn't want to stay at Google, I mean, we had built Inbox, if you all remember Inbox, the new Gmail. And we got it like working internally. And then I remember the conversation was like, OK, we think we can launch this in two years. And I just remember feeling like so miserable about that, like having to wait that long. And I don't know, like, what are we doing? And so I just wanted to go back and work against startups because there's just nothing more satisfying than actually making a thing and giving it to people and seeing them use it and getting value out of it, to lose sight of that and to lose the iterative process, I think it's boring for me, but I also think it's wrong as a product development strategy.

44:01I hear you.

44:02Henry Modisett:It is hard. Henry, we often close up with a question about what's inspiring you right now, but specifically, I'm interested, just given that you're deep in this realm, what's inspiring you as far as AI tools and how are you personally using AI in your life right now? I'm kind of the worst person to ask because I put myself in a scenario where I only use perplexity because it's the ultimate dogfooding experience. I'm going to try to use this thing until it breaks and then try to make it better. I don't use anything else, really. We play with a lot of stuff on the brand design side. We use Midjourney and Crayon.

44:39Henry Modisett:Whatever new thing helps us be expressive on brand. But I'm trying to use perplexity and I'm trying to break it and try to make it better. So that is like dominating my life. I don't really know what anything else is like. It's how I choose to think about it. I am inspired though by, I do think we can change anything about how people interact with software. I feel very excited to try to take a crack at like everything. I feel empowered to do that. We've had, you know, a lot of momentum challenging how things operate and like the most commonly used pieces of software, categories of software. It's very inspiring to just be like, okay, what if it worked differently?

45:16Henry Modisett:And then we try to build it. And then some people like it. And then that's a beachhead. And then we go forth from there. And so I think that's already happening with Comet. So I'm very inspired by that because I also lead the brand team. I'm just inspired by the fact that it doesn't seem like most tech companies think about brand at all. And so that's just a huge opportunity for us. Because there's whole industries where they only compete on brand. So there's so many playbooks and so many ideas to be inspired by and borrow from. I mean, you said it earlier. It's like you look at cars and watches and alcohol and cereal, like whatever.

45:48Henry Modisett:There's just like so many stories being told and so many people fighting on the edge of just their brand. And so just to kind of get to absorb all of that and pick and choose what's interesting to us and then bring that in, it's just like another extra thing that we get to throw into our strategy. Such an interesting job that you have, Henry, and such a fun way that you're approaching it. Where can people learn more about Perplexity and more about you? You can go to perplexity.com or you can go to perplexity.com slash comment. And I'm on Twitter, as Henry Modis said. Fantastic. Henry, thanks so much for being on Design Better.

46:26Cool. Thank you for having me.

46:32This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter. with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

47:07Thank you.