THE OMNI SHOW

Christian Young: And so with OmniFocus 4, that was one of the big things is we wanted to solve, okay, how can we make it easier for people to move around and not have as much friction? But how do we do that within the constraints of, say, an iPhone, which has a lot less space. On the iPad, we were more easily able to just replicate the layout that's on the Mac.

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show. Where we connect with the amazing community surrounding Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we hang out with OmniFocus user experience designer Christian Young. Welcome everybody to this episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we're super-duper honored to be able to have Christian Young with us on staff at The Omni Group sharing his journey of doing UX in OmniFocus. Christian, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

Christian Young: Thank you for having me.

Andrew J. Mason: I so appreciate you taking the time to join us in this episode, talking about your journey, getting to do some really cool work on a beloved product for a lot of people, OmniFocus. How long have you been in this position of UX and then also what does your day-to-day look like? Maybe just start to break a slice of that down for us.

Christian Young: Yeah. I've been doing UX at Omni for coming up close to three years. So I believe, if memory serves, started sometime in the fall of 2021. And then my day-to-day, it can vary quite a lot because while my official role is now UX designer, as with many people here at Omni, we wear many hats and do different things. So some days it is brainstorming plans for an upcoming feature in OmniFocus and how these various pieces should fit together. Other days it's not doing any sort of design-related things. It's working on processes related to our documentation, user manuals for our apps, other odds and ends for the website. I have been with Omni as well ... I've been doing UX for close to three years, but I've been with Omni for a little over 10 years now.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow.

Christian Young: Having started with doing customer support. And so sometimes I still help out with that when the need arises.

Andrew J. Mason: That's really cool to think that we have a company culture where just kind of wherever the need shows up, we jump in and just say, "I'm not too beholden to a title or to a certain hat that I happen to be wearing. If I have the skill set to be able to help somebody out, of course I'm going to jump in and do that." That's very neat. Over time, you were talking about shifting from those other roles into this role in design. How did you start to lean in that direction? I mean, was there anything that just drew you in that spot saying like, "Okay. I see other people doing that. Maybe that's something I should be doing too."? Did the need arise? How did that show up for you?

Christian Young: I've always been interested. I went to for graphic design and prior to starting in this role as UX, had never done anything professionally with that degree, but certainly had that background on the education side of things. And starting at Omni, I actually interviewed maybe a couple years after I'd been here, interviewed for a design role at the time. They chose someone else. Someone else that also was working in sort of our front desk, the sales side of things, and she was super, super talented. I don't know if she was ever on the show. Caitlin. But in terms of how I ultimately ended up coming to it, it was during the OmniFocus 4 development design cycle where we had actually lost all of the people that had been doing that design work, which had primarily been our former product manager for the design department, Grayson. So after he moved on to other things, there was an opening needed to be filled. And during the development of OmniFocus 4 to that point, I had certainly had some thoughts and opinions on some things that I saw that could help the app become the best form that it could take. And so it started with me just offering those ideas and sharing like, "Hey, I had this idea. What do people think about this?" So initially it just sort of started as, okay, well I can help out a little bit here and there with doing some iterating on certain things. I think the first ... At least my memory is the first thing that I really worked on was designs around what the editing experience for items in the outline on iPhone and iPad was going to be like. Because that was, among many things, one of the more fundamental changes when we were working on OmniFocus 4 was that instead of tapping on an item and having that bring up another view, particularly on iPhone where it just brought up the inspector, that you could just have certain fields that you could actually pick and choose what fields would show, and then you can tap on the item and just see those specific fields rather than the full inspector with all the possible things could be set and changed for a task. And so it initially just started as little pieces of work here and there and then at some point Ken asked if I would be interested in taking on the role of UX designer full time. And at that point in time, my work was almost entirely UX, though there was not a lack of things to do during that initial OmniFocus 4 design cycle.

Andrew J. Mason: Very much a formality at that point. So just kind of leaning into it and slowly going in that direction. I probably should have asked this from the get-go, but for those of us that aren't necessarily super duper technical, what is UX and how does that play out for people day to day?

Christian Young: UX is the shortening of user experience design. It's one of those terms that isn't necessarily super well-defined. Various people have their own take on it, but generally speaking, the combination of ... Mostly it's how are people going to interact with the app. So some people, it can at times take on more of just an aesthetic. What is this button going to look like? But a lot of it is broader. How do all these pieces fit together so that when someone opens up the app, what is their process going to be? What things are they wanting to accomplish and how can we structure the app in a way that facilitates the ways in which people want to interact with it and make it as easy as possible for them to do the things that they want to do? And that was certainly a big thing in OmniFocus 4. So an instance of that that I think about is in OmniFocus 4, again, particularly on the iOS side of things, one of the big things that we changed was how does navigating around the app work? And we essentially wanted to make it more Mac like where in the Mac app, going back to OmniFocus 3 and earlier versions, you had a skinny bar on the far left with your favorited perspectives, the different views where I'm working in my inbox or my projects, list of all my projects or the forecast view that organizes thing chronologically. So you have that, which is the highest level of your navigation. And then next to that you would have a sidebar that would offer choices specific to ... So if you were in the projects perspective, you'd have a sidebar listing all of your projects and your folders. And so you choose between that and then that filters down the main content area, the outline where you actually see a list of tasks and potentially projects that you want to interact with. The iOS side of things, there's not as much space, particularly on iPhone. So there it worked down where you had initially a view where you saw those perspectives, you pick a perspective to view, and then you get a list of the top level of items within that. So again, if you had your projects organized by folders, you might see just a list of folders and then you tap on a folder and then you see some projects and maybe some other folders, and you drilled down into your navigation like that before ultimately landing on a list of tasks for projects, let's say. And one of the common points of friction there was people wanted to get back to going to another perspective. And we tried to provide some affordances to help with that. You could hold the back button and if you just kept pressing on that, it would jump you all the way back up to that top level list. But that wasn't super discoverable and so mostly people found it can be really annoying when I have to tap back five times to get back to the top so that I can go somewhere else. And so with OmniFocus 4, that was one of the big things is we wanted to solve, okay, how can we make it easier for people to move around and not have as much friction? But how do we do that within the constraints of say, an iPhone, which has a lot less space. On the iPad, we were more easily able to just replicate the layout that's on the Mac. Sometimes that can still get a bit tight depending on what size iPad that you have and if you have the inspector sidebar open, et cetera. But on iPhone, it was a big struggle where how do we let you choose from your perspectives and then separate out here's the list of things relevant to that perspective, which a big challenge was what do we call that even. Because on the Mac, it was always just the sidebar. On an iPhone, did sidebar really make sense? Because you don't see it as a sidebar alongside something else. So we experimented for times with calling it a filter list, but that didn't necessarily feel quite right. A lot of people don't see ... The existing interaction was they didn't view it as, I'm filtering this view. Again, they viewed it as navigating. So trying to call it that was a bit awkward. And ultimately we landed on just calling it the sidebar and we use the same icon that we use on the Mac and on the iPad, and we ultimately felt that worked better because it provided an icon that people are familiar with. They associate the content with that icon, and we just viewed it as the iPhone is just sort of this window into a larger thing. So you're looking at the outline and you tap the sidebar button and it's just shifting everything over. So you're viewing the same sidebar, it's just pushing everything else over because that's all you have room for. So that I think just speaks to what user experience design is is not just can we make it look pretty, but what actually facilitates people understanding the app and getting around easily within the app.

Andrew J. Mason: I picture somebody who maybe was just introduced to UX via that answer for the first time and probably thinking simultaneously like, okay, that clears up a lot. And wow, that raises so many more questions to me about what all of that encapsulates and everything that there is to be considered. It blows my mind the level of precision that is needed to be able to take something ... When you're developing an app from scratch, then you're just basically working against just conventions or people's current understanding of how an app should work generally. But when you're upgrading or doing another version, you now have this mental model for an entire user base that is thinking in trees like, okay, there's the main app home page, and then I go down the branch to the twigs to the leaves and get to the tasks and the project I want to get to. And then if I want to go back to a different project, then I have to go back to the twig, back to the branch, back to the tree, and then go down the different branch to find the other tasks. And to be able to have the insight say, okay, let's just make that kind of more interconnected so that you have a more seamless flow, I don't know how you would begin to develop that. So number one, kudos for getting that done and kind of figuring that space out. But two, is doing it in a way that there's a little bit of a stretch for people that maybe are used to doing something a particular way in this existing user base, but then also having it be fresh enough that it does deliver on this new results, this new way of doing things, this improvement so much so that you're able to bring along the existing user base and somebody that's new to this thing and have it not be so overwhelming for everybody all at once. I don't know how you do it.

Christian Young: Yeah. And that was a big thing when we were working on that. That's definitely one of those areas where it's like, okay, you have an idea and you start working on it and you think you've got the answer and you start putting views together and you're like, "I forgot about this thing. Where does this thing fit now into this?" And that was one of the things that when I was going from high school to college and trying to pick a major, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was like, "Oh, I like drawing." I never saw myself as trying to go fine art. That wasn't me. But I was like, "I like drawing," and just happened like graphic design seems sort of neat. And it was chosen not with a lot of careful thought, but then I ended up really liking it because it was taking a creative aspect, but combining it with problem solving. I never liked when I was in just a drawing class, drawing 101. It's like okay, just free rein, do whatever you want. I was like, that's too many things. There's too many possibilities. So what I liked about design is that it puts constraints around things, which you can always put your own constraints, but it's sometimes nice to have things that it's not an arbitrary constraint that I'm making because then I can always break it if I really want to, if I'm not disciplined enough. But you're trying to solve a problem with external constraints and work within that framework. I've always found that to be sometimes frustrating, but that can be really rewarding when you are able to get all the pieces to fit together the way you want. And UX design, user experience design just takes that and adds another dimension to it where I'm also concerned with just does this all look nice and pretty, but there's another layer of how all these pieces stack together and how someone else is actually going to ... With regular design, there's still always the element of how is someone else going to interact with it, but in a more limited way. Are they going to read things in the order that I want to read them? Is the information going to be clear enough? And all of that remains true with user experience design, but you have to, again, think about other levels of just the complexity with how people interact with a touch device versus a computer where they have a keyboard and a mouse, and what those different modalities mean in terms of what the user expects and wants to be able to do.

Andrew J. Mason: It's funny that I actually haven't ever thought about that before until you just said that. The idea that there's a visual component to problem solving. It's a visual problem solving, but all while kind of having the scaffolding of the place that the person's going to live day-to-day be pretty. I want to make sure the Feng Shui is good enough that somebody actually wants to hang out in here while not just solving their problems too. So it's funny that there's an aesthetic part of it, but also a functional part of it, and how do you make sure that it's balanced enough to deliver the result but still have this is a good place that people want to visually hang out at. When you talk about brainstorming changes or bugs that are coming your way, something that, okay, there's a delta between where we are visually and where we want to be, and I'm starting to head in that direction. You talked a little bit about a process that emerges, a problem solving component. Any other thoughts or ideas about ... We were just talking before this call. It doesn't have to be a systemic Pixar's 12 steps to a great movie. It's not a formulaic, but at the same time it might not necessarily be as free form as the muse strikes and I must ... That sort of thing. So any thoughts around structure? How does somebody start to move in the direction of solving a problem visually like that?

Christian Young: I mean, that's where oftentimes you start with trying to work with the broad shapes of a thing. That's commonly wireframing, prototyping where you're just not getting into the nitty-gritty of the exact placement of every button and what every button exactly looks like, but just that broader structure piece. Do these two things next to one another make sense and stack together in a way? A lot of iterating. Just getting stuff down, whether it's on paper or on the screen in a rough form, moving things around. Because as you said, it's not just, I'm going to sit here and close my eyes and hope for that brilliant inspiration to strike. Sometimes you get lucky and just have that first thought be the right thought, but most of the time it's just getting a lot down, playing with things around. And as you go through that, you slowly start to say, "Okay. This is working, this isn't working," and you whittle down to something that's hopefully at least pretty good. And we don't always make the right choices and with an app like OmniFocus in particular, that's an app that people really use it and really care about it, it can be a very integral and important part of their life. So they have very strong feelings about it and people can use it in very different ways. So that adds another complexity. It's like, well, this one person can suggest something that in isolation, you go, "That makes perfect sense. We should definitely do that." But then you have to think about the other people that they don't care about that feature whatsoever. It's not going to do anything for them. It's going to just be clutter. And so that balancing of do we even do the thing that this one person suggested that sounds like a great idea, but maybe for 90% of our users it's just extra cruft. So it's also spending time thinking about that aspect of things. Like we're not solving for one person or even 10 people. We're solving for hundreds, thousands. I'm not sure what the actual current user base of OmniFocus is, but you've got to keep in mind a lot of different approaches and thinking about people that have used OmniFocus for 10 years versus people that ... We still hope new people are coming to the app. And so what is the experience like for them?

Andrew J. Mason: It blows my mind because very often the right answer, as you say, for different chunks of the user base are opposing things. So it's a wonder anybody produces software at all to begin with. So two more questions for you and I'll let you run after this because you are actually working on the product. But one is kind of a hot take thing. I know that it's latest and loudest for anybody in the development space. What are your thoughts on Apple's just released this idea of liquid glass. We talked about it a little bit in our last show with Ken. Do you have any thoughts on visually or also some reasons why or just philosophically? I'll leave it wide open for you, but this is a space for a hot take if you want it.

Christian Young: Yeah. For me, it's a bit of a mixed bag. The liquid glass part of it specifically can look very cool. So visually it can be quite neat, but beyond that neatness factor, in a lot of places, I don't know how much it's truly adding to the experience. And that's something that can vary a lot from one user to the other. Some people really care about just those little sparks of whimsy. I've seen a lot of stuff recently with this, people going back and looking at the evolution of Mac software, going back to the early, early days when everything's just black and white to the latest. It can be something that comes very near and dear to people. So liquid glass visually looks really cool at times. Though even that is one of those things where when you see where they're demonstrating it, it's in apps where there's a lot of content going behind the liquid glass. So you get to see all that neat refraction of this picture going behind and you see that doing the neat things that it does on the glass. But for an app like OmniFocus where we don't have text that would be scrolling, if we had a liquid glass sidebar, we wouldn't have any visual stuff like that scrolling under it. So it doesn't do nearly as much. Doesn't become nearly as interesting as compared to if you're an app like Photoshop or I think they even showed an image of Acorn during the keynote where yes, you've got this image scrolling beneath it. Or in some of music and podcasts where you've got artwork and things that's scrolling underneath play controls, there it sort of shines a lot more. And in other cases like in our app, it's still can add a little bit of new visual interest, but it's not doing nearly as much. And even already just this week Apple released the developer beta three and they have softened the effect of liquid glass a significant amount and I was reading some people that are very mad about that. Now it's just going back. The previous operating system's just a little bit different versus a whole new thing, which just goes to show there's a lot of people that immediately are like, "I don't like liquid glass. The accessibility and contrast issues. It presents to many problems." And then these other people where when they try and walk it back to meet those initial criticisms, they're angry, which just speaks to the, it's really hard to make everyone happy with this stuff.

Andrew J. Mason: It's true.

Christian Young: And some of the stuff like I'm personally not a fan ... It's fine on iPadOS and iOS, but the changes with this new design language to the toolbar, particularly the toolbar along the top of window on macOS just does not sit well with me currently. And hopefully that's an area that they can still refine, but I much preferred the more general, here's the toolbar, it's the defined area and the contents beneath it versus the way that Apple's trying to remove that barrier, which again, in some context can make a lot of sense, but in other contexts, again, it makes a lot more sense in an app that there's a lot more artwork or things, pictures, artwork, things with a lot more visual interest to them versus just OmniFocus or OmniOutline. Our apps that are largely ... In OmniGraph, it might make more sense. Might. Some people could still disagree on that. But in an app that's just a list of textual items, do I really need to see that get blurred out and fade into the toolbar? What is that really helping to communicate in any sort of way? But what I do like about at least the stated goal is the unification of things across all the platforms and being more consistent with the way that things work, while still honing things where necessary to. Obviously your interaction on iPhone is very different than your interaction on a Mac. But bringing some greater consistency across those platforms. And especially just consistency in terms of on the more backend tools that we have in terms of ... Even though I'm not the one actually doing this, but working in Xcode and SwiftUI, the code that we use to write the apps and knowing like, okay, if I say I want a button here and I just say button, I know it's going to appear in a reasonable way on all the platforms. Whereas oftentimes SwiftUI has been great and that allows for much more easy designing of things across Mac and iPhone and iPad. But there would be plenty of times where it's like, oh, you tell it I want this whatever it is, I want this table view, this particular control on an iPhone and you get it and it looks nice, and then you look at it on Mac and it's like, well, now I need to do a whole bunch of stuff to get it to look just reasonable at all there. So efforts to improve on that and have more consistency with at a base level, here's how things are going to look and translate. If I have this type of control on Mac, how's it going to translate on iPhone and having an established paradigm versus that being up to every individual developer to figure out. Even though sometimes that can be limiting. But on the whole, I think that is ... Even though OmniFocus actually does a lot of things sort of in opposition to what the standard ... Everything I talked about in terms of how we change navigating around on iPhone and OmniFocus does not work the way that Apple's standard navigation structures work on iPhone. But on the whole, having that sort of consistency and established paradigms across all the platforms ultimately I think is a good thing because that's the sort of thing where if I know I how it works in one place, I don't have to relearn things entirely different on each device. If I've used the app here, I can reasonably understand and get around in the app on any device.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, I can appreciate that too. The developer slice, the perspective. There is a lot of reason for having it be unified in that way and it makes a lot of sense to me. It's interesting how the more opinionated a person might get from having just kind of a sliver of that perspective versus why it might make sense in a larger context. It cracks me up because you were talking about the changes that walk back from beta to beta, and some of it reminds me of some comedian he was talking about it's crazy how quickly people get ticked off about something that they only knew existed like three weeks ago. It's like you really have attached a lot of emotion about what should or shouldn't happen here. And not to say that we shouldn't have strong opinions about it. These are devices we interact with every day. But an interesting take for me about something that I didn't expect to show up with a lot of emotion for people, but I mean you go to any discussion board in the country right now that's happened to be talking about design and Macs and you will see opinions one way or the other about that. Let me ask one final question for you. This is kind of super open-ended. I mean play ball any direction that you want to play ball in here, but anytime I get a chance to pull somebody on staff from the Omni Group aside and you're working at a company that's helping people be more productive every day. It's part of the critical software that people use to sometimes run their lives. I know it's helped me a lot. What would you say it is that drives you or makes you passionate about being as productive as you possibly can be? I mean, this is something that, yes, for other people, but on a personal level for you, Christian, what is it that I wake up and I want to see the best of myself or the most of myself show up in a given way? Why is that for you? What drives you there?

Christian Young: Well, it's somewhat interesting because I actually don't necessarily think that for me personally, that I view productivity as a core driving motivation. In fact, a lot of the times recently I'm not anti productivity, but there's an element of, in this day and age, there are certain people that push like you need to be maximizing every minute of your day. And for some people with what they have going on can be very important. If you've got a lot going on and need to have the structure to do everything you want to do or have to do, then that's important. Filling your day needlessly with, I need to be productive at all times, that I don't agree with. And I don't think necessarily that the motivation for us behind OmniFocus, that's not our motivation is that people need to be filling up. It's how to make use of your time more efficiently, which that going back to even when I was doing customer support, I like being able to help other people. And so that's the really nice thing about working on an app like this, knowing that this is an app that can really help people. And we've heard stories from people that it can be really transformative and critical in getting the most out of their time. But I also came from customer support where I was helping people that were trying to use the app or having issues with the app for a number of years and so that's definitely served me in terms of even if I've not personally been using the app for my own needs, I've been helping people use the app and am intimately familiar with it over the course of several years and have that history with it, which I think serves to help me in making those decisions that I have a bank of experience and knowledge. If I had just come in from the outside into this role when I did, it would've been much different. And again, sometimes maybe I weight some of that too heavily and like, well, I remember this customer that had this problem and again, get too focused on one incident. But on the whole, I think it's really served me and having a breadth of interactions with people that use OmniFocus again in very different ways at very different levels of complexity and able to funnel that into the decisions that I'm making these days.

Andrew J. Mason: I think there's no doubt in my mind that it is a unique career path that it has uniquely positioned you to be able to probably appreciate a really specific cross section of what a customer may or may not want. And so cool. I mean, to follow along on the journey of the career, just to see where that's landed you, but then also know that you've got that behind you as you're moving forward too. So we've stolen you away long enough. I just want to say I appreciate so much you just taking some time and sharing a little bit of the why behind what we see go on in the app. I think it's really cool to get to hear how some of that gets made, but also just to get to hear a little bit of your heartbeat about why it's important to you to see the most people possible be served by what it is we've created here. So I appreciate that and thanks for hanging out with us today, Christian.

Christian Young: Thanks again for having me. It's been wonderful talking.

Andrew J. Mason: Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon at theomnishow@omnigroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omni Group at omnigroup.com/blog.