2415 - Bridging AI Tools and User Success Through Thoughtful UX Design with 3Leaf's Thomas Watkins

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. with us right now my good friend thomas watkins thomas we've been friends for a couple of years you are the founder and ceo of three leaf consulting you're found on the web at three leaf dot consulting thomas it's great to have you great to be here well it's before we get going you know i always love you know talking with other high-level leaders you know what what they do for fun when they're not at work. And so you mind sharing like, yeah, yeah, no, no, no problem. Camping with the family.

1:26We try to go camping out here in Texas when the weather is good. And my son's doing lacrosse nowadays, trying that out and my daughter doing gymnastics. So we're driving around trying to figure it all out, trying to make it happen. Are you tent camping or RV camping? Yeah, tent camping. There's a lot of really good parks in in Texas. And so we try to with a group of other parent friends twice a year, get to some of those parks and sometimes by a lake and sometimes it's activities, but you, you know, kind of rent a spot and do it for the weekend. And so I kind of need that. Yeah, I don't know if you're had a childhood like mine, but that's, you know, my, my, I grew up pretty poor.

2:10And so, you know, if camping, you know once you got your 10 once you got your stuff man correct you know it's not that expensive that's right the inexpensive ones are visit family for a long distance trip and go camping those are so much fun hiking walking fishing you know all those outdoor stuff you know you know you might be in an area where cell coverage is a little spotty good yeah correct it's good for me so that I unplug and unwind, which is really critical for me to be able to do what I do so much better. It forces you to, if you just left it up to yourself, you're just not going to do it.

2:50But if you've got something on the calendar where this is the family trip, then unplug everything, turn it off, go on your trip. Yeah. Thomas, I'm so excited to have you. So you are one of the most talented people I know when it comes to user experiences within apps, websites, that sort of thing. Do you mind maybe just giving start off by talking about an overview of your work, who you work with, kind of the problems that you solve? Yeah, the idea is you want to resonate with people who are going to be using your products and services. And there's kind of a science to that because it's one thing to have a great idea and it's a whole different thing to get it to be something that connects with people.

3:30And so that's where my team and I come in. And, you know, we worked with a lot of startups before, had a lot of exciting success stories, exciting war stories. And really what it is, is having a good idea by itself isn't enough to really get to where you want to get. Your competitors all have similar ideas and you're building it and you're an expert of your area and you kind of put things on a screen. but a lot of times you need someone by your side who can kind of help you connect with your users and say, hey, if you present it like that, I know that's a popular term in your industry, but people in your target market won't get that.

4:08Or if you lay it out like this, you know, on your hero image, no one's going to know what you sell. They have to scroll down, you know, several screen lengths to kind of see it. So whether it's, we don't do mostly websites, we're mostly in the product world, but, you know, making it so people can kind of get hooked and kind of into whatever it is you're, you're doing and building that connection is something that we focus on. Yeah. Well, so obviously Thomas, one thing I need to talk about is vibe coded apps, vibe coded everything. It's very easy to do. It's amazing. I think since the last time I had you on my podcast, maybe a couple of years ago.

4:45And it's, I know in your world, you see this a lot. What is the state of the industry when it comes to app, product development, digital product development, websites, that sort of thing? I would imagine you take a look at a lot of iBeCoded websites. Yeah. Well, one way to think about it, so a lot has changed and a lot continues to change. And really what it is is speed. And this technology has taken what is out there and knows how to blend it together to give you a website or a service. So anyone can sit down nowadays, and there's so many, you know, Replit, Lovable, there's so many of them nowadays, where you can kind of do commands and basically instantly build a beautiful website, build a beautiful web app.

5:34But the way to think about this is it's still kind of like an LLM, right? If you're trying to write an email, we've all done it. We've written things, written text. It gives you stuff that's good, but it's also generic. It's taking kind of known stuff out there and taking the sort of most likely sentence given the prompt. Well, when you're vibe building apps, it's doing the same thing. It's taking commonly known widgets and layouts and just kind of mushing it together and then spitting it out for you. So you'll instantly see something that, hey, wow, this looks pretty good, especially if it's something that I just built in seconds with just a simple prompt.

6:17But there's going to be things that are missed, nuances that are missed. It doesn't understand what you're trying to do and trying to achieve. So the more mundane or basic the thing you're trying to build, the better it'll be. But as soon as we start getting into the nuances of your idea, whatever's special about the service that you're offering to the world, the more distance it's going to get from what you want. And that's when you kind of want folks by your side who kind of know how to do it. Yeah. What are examples maybe of some of those things that you've seen, you know, just vibe code? I mean, I've seen a lot of ugly vibe coded stuff and they all just kind of have, it's almost like, you know, as someone, you know, I've been a journalist since the nineties.

7:03And so I appreciate well-written language. And, you know, when you see, and this was much more pronounced, you know, a year ago, I mean, it's gotten a little bit better. But, you know, they're just AI crutches that you see very much in the way that it writes. and it's like humans don't speak like that, at least in this instance, like an agree. You know, for example, like if you're using it for social media content, it's like, you know, I understand maybe in a formal letter, a human might say that, but they wouldn't say that on social media, like something just feels off. And so I would imagine that is magnified when you're talking about a user journey and like where someone might be in their app.

7:49and they're like, wait a minute, you want me to scroll down here, then click on that and then know about this? Like, it's just the founder, we get so blind to, we understand everything. It's, it's, of course you do. It's, it's your creation, right? Of course you understand everything. But the reality is like, you know, it's just that that's, that's not how, like I was talking about, that's not how humans speak. That's not how humans behave in that environment. And that's why, you know, if you're working with someone who's done this a gazillion times, it's easy to spot like I would with bad language.

8:27You know, yes, I know that's factually correct, but it's weird and it's off-putting and people are going to bail and you're going to lose a lot of money. Same thing happens with apps, I'm sure. That's right, because it has a hard time looking at the big picture. You see this sometimes. I was listening to a podcast the other day where it's talking about music generators, AI music generators. and it's talking about like if you just it just turns you just turn on a song and let's say it's a classical symphony song and it's ai generated and you listen to it like oh wow this sounds nice the violins sound exactly like violins the trumpets you could hear the instruments wow that sounds beautiful but if you listen to the whole song it doesn't do what the song you know people who understand what classical music it's not going to do from beginning to middle to end what the song is supposed to do if you say like oh make a ai generated mozart or beethoven someone listen to it.

9:16No, that's actually not it. It's just sort of repeating a generic classical music sound because it has a problem with the big picture. So when you're building an app or, you know, a website, it knows how to build a screen and sort of screen by screen. Okay. You put widgets on the screen, you have a title here and you do that, but it's not thinking in terms of the flows. Anytime we use software, we're flowing through things. It's not about the screens. It's about what we're trying to achieve. So that's why in well-designed technology, the technology actually kind of fades in the background. The technology you notice is usually when things are going wrong, you're like, ah, why won't this button do this?

9:54Or why is this drop down here? Or what is that supposed to mean? How am I, what am I supposed to do with that? So us as UX designers, we're supposed to make all of that extra sort of the fluff, the outside, the technology fade away, and then you just have the human and the task. Once all of that fades away, you have the human faced with their task. They have what they know, and they walk through the kind of flow through the screens, the widgets, and they get to whatever goal they're trying to achieve. So that's what one would need to think in terms of in order to design a good flow. But the AI model will say, okay, well, we need this screen.

10:34So this is how that's constructed. And it just builds it out. This is how this is constructed. And then when you start to use it, that's when the problems get visible. Yeah. Well, there's so much that's being created right now. Thomas, what do you think, just from your perspective, I think that this really creates an opportunity for those of us who are committed to great user experience because the overall quality, the overall volume of content and apps and interfaces is enormous. But this presents such a huge opportunity for those who provide a very superior experience. That's right, because now you need a differentiator, right?

11:15So if we are truly entering an age where anybody can kind of create an app, that's wonderful from a democratization perspective. But then it's a challenge from a business that's trying to monetize services, right? So if you've got some technology that you want to offer the world, what's different about you than anybody else? Anyone can vibe code a lot of these things in a weekend, some version of it. There's pitfalls in order to get the security where you need to get it. In order to get other things, you need to beef up some stuff on the technology end. But it's still accelerated. And so what's going to be your differentiator?

11:55If you look at a lot of hit apps, apps that really succeed with people, Zoom, Slack, Gmail, there's a lot of these things that they didn't invent anything, right? They took patterns that were already there. It's just they nailed it. When you go and use their apps, it just feels good. It feels right. You don't have confusion. You don't have the barriers because it's kind of thoroughly thought through. And I've run into so many situations where I'm trying out somebody's vibe-coded app. It looks beautiful. And then I try to do something really simple, and things go quickly south. It's not really thought through.

12:39And we have kind of like a different definition, or we need to develop a different definition for what finished looks like, right? So in other words, 15 years ago or 20 years ago, a good website is going to have a certain level of polish. It's going to have certain things about it that you look at it and you know, wow, hundreds of hours of work went into creating that. Now, in the vibe-coded era, you can create something that looks like that instantly. So our definition needs to shift from how polished do the widgets look on the screen into something like, okay, when I try to use it, is it without pitfalls?

13:19Is it not confusing? Is it optimizing what I need? I'll give you an example. I teach at Rice University, a business class on the side, and it's a class full of entrepreneurs. And many of these students have their own companies or their things, their projects they're trying to launch. One of them in particular was helping people with their civic responsibility of voting and trying to inform people about things before they get to the polls. Now, when you went to the website, there was just so many options of things you could do and analyze legislation and see the history of the various different people wanting for office.

13:59It's just a candy store, just all this stuff to do, but you didn't know where to start. and the uh the person who built it succeeded at putting all of this stuff this functionality into their website but they didn't achieve the really simple thing that the person wants to do i said where do i start if i'm looking for my upcoming election this is oh well it it uh you know you can find you know where where your location and stuff like that okay and i says don't tell me where it is i'm gonna go to your website and try to find it and i saw his face he's agonizing as I'm clicking the wrong things and I'm trying to find it.

14:36And then after a lesson of that, I said, how about you just enter a zip code or something like that? It's not a particularly sexy thing. It's not just something simple. Either use my location through geolocation or enter a zip code or something. And then I just land on a screen. That's what I need, my upcoming election or something like that. And then we followed that. It completely changed the trajectory of what he was building because he just simplified focused on one key task that the person needs to do, just, you know, catering to the, the psychology of the moment of the user, what they're going to probably be looking for, what is going to make sense to them.

15:16And you end up on a much better path toward something successful. Yeah. You know, as founders, obviously we want our clients to be very successful with our creation. I mean, that's why we do what we do. And I know how frustrating that can be when And it's like, oh, people are not crossing the finish line. They're not doing this. They're not doing that. And that's our problem to solve. It's not theirs. And Thomas, you know, hopefully they have someone like you. Your website is threeleaf.consulting, the number threeleaf.consulting. How do you work with folks and what do you recommend they do from this conversation here?

15:56Yeah, like what I do is if you want to reach out to me, you could find me on my website, find me on LinkedIn, Thomas Watkins Three Leaf. Just chat with me. Just tell me about whatever it is you're kind of working on, what it is you're struggling with. And oftentimes what I find is people with really, really good ideas, but they just struggle with closing the gap of how do I get the developers to build it in the awesome way that I'm kind of like imagining it. And I just kind of help fill in that gap. And so you can put out something that you're really proud of and that you start seeing success for.

16:28Yeah. 3leaf.consulting, Thomas Watkins. Thank you so much for joining us. Great conversation. Thank you for having me. Absolutely.

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17:48Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.