Interview with Bill Tribble, Senior Digital Product Designer at Hopin
- Misato Ehara
- Aug 25, 2020
- 10 min read
Updated: Oct 31, 2024
We interviewed Bill Tribble to ask about how he got into UX, new job at Hopin, team building and tips for junior UX Designers and he answered them all while full of calmness! Enjoy 😌
1. You have a very interesting background in Fine Art and Education. What made you decide to become a UX designer?
“While I was teaching, one of my students who knew the London technology scene said, ‘Hey, you can do this design stuff. Why don’t you study UX?’ My response was ‘What’s that?’”
It was pretty simple, really. I used to teach quite a lot, things like music technology — that was my day job. At night, on the weekends I was playing in bands and DJing and that’s how I learned graphic design: because I needed things like flyers and CD covers.
It was about seven years ago and I was working for a record label at the time. I was looking into learning coding and checking out the new bootcamps in London — including General Assembly. I decided that a coding bootcamp wasn’t for me, but I noticed General Assembly didn’t have any Photoshop courses.
So I invented a job for myself teaching Photoshop and they were bold enough to take a chance on me. So I started coming back every few months to teach that. While I was teaching, one of my students who knew the London technology scene said, “Hey, you can do this design stuff. Why don’t you study UX?” My response was “What’s that?”
So I ended up doing the UX course — this was six years ago and that was my entry. It laid a foundation, and a scaffolding — for the skillset, the language, and the craft.
2. Did you always have an interest in Technology?
“For the first time I could control what was on the TV and it was just magic.”
Yeah, I feel like my tinkering with technology started from a really early age. I still remember the excitement. I’m very old, so I started on this in the ’80s as a kid getting my first computer and having control over the TV was such an amazing thing. For the first time, I could control what was on the TV and it was just magic. “Wow, I can change the colours. And I can type stuff and things happen.” For me, that was the beginning — getting technology to do stuff that you want it to do.
3. You mentioned you did a UX bootcamp, what do you think were the key things you learned from it?
“ Really, what I learned via General Assembly was to think about getting technology to do stuff that other people want it to do. ”
Really, what I learned via General Assembly was to think about getting technology to do stuff that other people want it to do. I think that’s the key contribution of UX — that you’re not the user and you need to understand who you’re designing for. I mean, that’s design in general and I hadn’t done any formal design training until that point. I was purely, self-taught, just fooling around really.
So that was the first time I really encountered those kinds of topics and started thinking about the point of design. Until that point, I had this crazy, really shortsighted view that design was this easy thing.
I also studied at Kingston and other places — Chelsea as well. I was an artist and I was doing this “really hard, expressive, soul-searching, experimental thing” that Fine Art is. It’s very hard because it’s just asking questions really.
The way I see Fine Art is about asking questions and exploring the edges of the known or the unknown. And I saw design as, “Oh, that’s just easy. You’re just building stuff for other people. You’re doing what clients want or whatever. It’s nonsense.” But obviously, I now know that it’s not so easy!
4. I’ve heard some shocking stories of companies misunderstanding UX, have you had any experiences of this?
“I think — like many companies — their idea of what UX was kind of a box ticking exercise. ... It’s like the worst way to get anything done.”
Yeah, I can talk about one. I think — like many companies — their idea of what UX was kind of a box ticking exercise. That you knew what you needed to build, but then you needed to break it down into design stories and get a designer to fix those little screen things.
The job was basically: “We need some wireframes for this thing. Here’s the spec. This is what it needs to be. It’s an eCommerce site. It needs these three features. Go ahead and design that for me. And once we’ve got that wireframe, then we’ll pass it on to a user interface designer and they’ll make it all pretty, and then we’ll build it.” And actually that’s how most companies approach this and it’s f***ing terrible, excuse the language. It’s like the worst way to get anything done. And it was utterly boring.
5. You’ve been working with a lot of smaller companies, do you think you have a preference?
Yeah although I don’t think it’s the size of the company that matters, it’s the working process. Because you could make a rubbish, very mechanical process with just three people. It doesn’t take much to make everything awful. You just need someone with JIRA and no imagination to run it.
6. What made you decide to join Hopin?
I’d been trying to find the right permanent thing for 18 months or so. I’d become tired of going from job to job every few months or so and I was looking for a bit more kind of career development and stability.
Actually, Hopin was the wrong place for stability because it’s very early stage and really growing explosively at the moment! There’s a lot to figure out in terms of how the team is going to work together.
And there are many things that we need to fix and it’s difficult at the moment to kind of make sense of it all and prioritize. There are lots of little fires everywhere with support questions and “Oh my God, my client needs this.”
So that’s the situation at the moment. But I’m a month in now, which is very early, but this week’s been good. Some great new people have just come on board and we’ve got a new designer joining next week and another one in a month. And so it’s starting to feel, “Okay, right, we can figure this out.” A brilliant product manager has just joined as well. She’s fantastic and I’m lucky enough to be on her squad. So that makes a massive difference too.
7. Does a good product manager make a big difference?
“I mean a product manager’s role is not management in the sort of traditional sense of telling people what to do, but it’s critical in terms of collaboration.”
Yeah, it really does. I mean a product manager’s role is not management in the sort of traditional sense of telling people what to do, but it’s critical in terms of collaboration. I really value her attitude — she’s like a product owner: “I understand it. I see what we’re trying to do with it. And I’m trying to make it the best it can be.” This is also the designer’s job, but she’s just got a different perspective because she’s interfacing more with stakeholders and the technology side. So she’s just fitting perfectly there. It’s brilliant. That’s most of it really. If you have good people like that in place (and good designers and good developers as well!).
8. Could you expand on how the right attitude affects performance?
“Attitude is so critical to the positive functioning of everything. You can make the greatest project ever, with the greatest product and the greatest team — but make everything completely boring.”
Attitude is so critical to the positive functioning of everything. You can make the greatest project ever, with the greatest product and the greatest team — but make everything completely boring. It can kill you with the boredom and stress of it, with the wrong setup. So the workflow to me is becoming more and more interesting. I guess that’s become an area of focus for me to understand better. I’ve been reading lots of books on the area, for instance I’m a big fan of the Base Camp guys, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” and “Rework” are both fantastic titles by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. And they’re both really worth looking at.
9. How do you think a Hopin event is different from a physical event in terms of user experience?
“ […] certain things like the networking feature can potentially be really useful compared to real life, because in real life it can be kind of tricky meeting people, right?”
“Tons of competition coming up, and it’s going to be really interesting kind of race, UX race, to see who can kind of stay on top and deliver the best experience really.”
Well, you’re still stuck in your room, staring at a screen. That’s the biggest downside to these things. On the upside, certain things like the networking feature can potentially be really useful compared to real life, because in real life it can be kind of tricky meeting people, right? You wonder around the conference thing and you bump into someone interesting, but then you find yourself in a 20 minute conversation that you’re not really into and you kind of, “Okay, thanks. I’ve got to go.” It can be awkward. The networking thing is great because it’s got a three minute countdown and then you’re off. And if you click the button, you exchange virtual business cards and you can follow up. So that can be good. I’ve played with it a bit and it’s really good fun. Otherwise, I mean, some of the things work really well. The kind of seminar thing, where one person is talking and people can jump on stage to ask questions or they can type them in the chat, that can work. Those are the two main things that Hopin does in addition to “one to many” stages. And they’re a great start. People love it. Attendees love it on that level. It can work really well. Hopin is probably the best in class at the moment in this space. Tons of competition coming up, and it’s going to be really interesting kind of race, UX race, to see who can kind of stay on top and deliver the best experience really. That’s the challenge.
10. Do you think it’s possible to design a digital product that can automatically make all events engaging?
“No. Because there’s always a people aspect […] But I’d agree that it can make a massive difference.”
No. Because there’s always a people aspect. You always need a speaker or someone to have that conversation. But I’d agree that it can make a massive difference. I mean, just look at the difference between, I don’t know, using Hangouts and using Zoom and using Skype, like it’s not a big difference between them, but they all feel different. And I like some of them much more than others. There’s quite a lot in there. I haven’t used the competition yet, but I’ve been very impressed by how quick Hopin is to go between different event areas as well. You can drop in, see the video straight away, go to a different one, see something else. And things like that work really well. It’s pretty cool.
11. I’ve seen personally how important an event organiser’s communication skills are to the quality of an event, do you think that plays a part of designing Hopin?
Yeah. And we see them doing things like their own little design hacks — for instance at Smashing Con they used a shared Google document linked from the reception, so that you can put all the notes, sketchnotes, links to the speaker slides and recordings. We see unmet user needs being surfaced in real events, because people want to do stuff and they can’t do it yet in the interface. But it’s already flexible enough to allow this kind of creativity, which is awesome!
12. Why are you so calm!?
I tend to get very anxious talking to people in digital conversations, but I feel like very calm right now.
I don’t know. I mean, I can be quite an anxious person as well. And it’s easy to get stressed out by virtual work as well. I do find that happens. Yeah. I mean, I do fairly regular meditation and that helps keep me sane for sure. At the moment, it’s roughly half an hour a day. In the morning.
*Check out Bill’s podcast ‘Awake in’ that talks about mindfulness, wellness and staying sane in the wake of a global pandemic.
13. I read your fantastic article* on getting started with UX where you list the ten key UX skills. I was wondering, if you had to choose one, is there any skill that a junior UX designer or researcher should be focusing on?
“But for working in tech in general, communication and collaboration, that’s the key thing.”
That’s a tricky one. It probably is the first one really, Communication. Most of the other stuff in that list is tools or processes. So, yeah. Communication’s really hard. And collaboration. In retrospect, I’d amend that article to have collaboration as number two after communication. Or maybe even number one!
But for working in tech in general, communication and collaboration, that’s the key thing. Because we don’t build stuff in a vacuum. We can’t get very far doing stuff on our own, and anything we do as designers will be improved with other people’s ideas and input and feedback. That to me is the absolutely key thing, in any kind of design.
*Check out the inspirational article that he gave you answers to the questions like what is UX?, how can I get into UX? and what does the day to day involve?
14. From my experience, Communication is a difficult skill to master. For example, how do you ask people to do something they don’t want to do?
Depends on the situation, but maybe you could do working squads. This is my favorite thing at the moment — though it’s not always easy to do. If you could get a couple of people from each stakeholder group together online. And just get them to work on the shape of it. Even if it was drawing boxes on paper and “copy and paste this, or show it to the camera”. Miro is great for this kind of thing. Because otherwise it’s like this email tag game or ping pong. “Is that thing ready?” “No, it’s not. Is your thing? I need your thing.” And you know, it goes on for weeks. If you can just get them in a space together it might help.
15. I’m going to check out the book you mentioned in the article, “Design is a Job“ by Mike Monteiro!
That’s a great book. I’m actually reading his latest one now. It’s called “Ruined by Design.” Mike Monteiro is a very fiery, opinionated guy but I think he’s right, on most things, I can’t really disagree with him. Look him up on video as well, he does good talks. Quite a funny grumpy old guy!
Interviewed by Misato Ehara
Edited by Misato Ehara and Bill Tribble
Illustrations by Jack Bridger
Transcribed with Rev
Edited with Google docs
Published on 25 Aug 2020
Interviewee: Bill Tribble is a Senior Digital Product Designer at Hopin. Bill is also an Adobe XDI, and a GV Design Sprint facilitator and design instructor. He’s worked with some big names in tech, but he’s most proud of his work with amazing startups like Endlesss.fm and Hopin.to.
Interviewer: Misato Ehara is founder of The UX Review, former design Strategist at Gensler. Currently completing a Masters in Curating Contemporary Design. Open to UX research roles starting in October 2020.
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