Transcript

00:50 Hey, great to see you.

00:51 Thanks for coming.

00:52 This is the pilot episode of Wireframe.

00:56 And today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what to expect in this

01:00 show and give you some background into my journey with design.

01:04 So, my name is Donnie D’Amato.

01:06 I’ve been designing experiences on the web for over 25 years.

01:11 And that started from a very young age, before the web, working

01:15 with things like Legos as a kid.

01:17 And I used to build all these very creative interactive, tactile pieces that

01:22 were really engaging, of course, to me.

01:26 And as I got older, I started getting into, of course, larger materials.

01:30 So I used to go to Home Depot or Blick or Michael’s and pay all this money to

01:35 make this object that was, you know, again, artistic, but interactive.

01:39 And that made me feel good because people can forget that feedback of just touching

01:44 that piece and seeing how it reacted.

01:47 But as you can imagine, that gets expensive really fast, you

01:51 know, especially as a teenager, you know, you can’t really.

01:54 Keep that up for very long.

01:55 So when the web came around about that time, I was very excited.

02:01 I saw a lot of potential because now I’m able to create experiences

02:06 with very low resources and having that very high reward.

02:10 And what I’m talking about is being able to create a website, make that hyperlink

02:15 and put it into an AOL chat room.

02:17 And I know.

02:17 Some people might not know what that is potentially, but just imagine you being

02:21 able to post it on your social feed and actually have people respond to it and see

02:28 the number of people in your analytics.

02:30 And back then it was just a counter to see that just go up and get feedback from

02:35 your peers or even people that aren’t your peers that are just visiting your site.

02:39 And that meant a lot to me back then, not really knowing.

02:44 What user experience design really was.

02:46 I mean, it was the wild, wild West back then.

02:48 Like anything was possible.

02:50 We didn’t know what a good experience on the web was going to be yet.

02:54 But you know, fast forward to today.

02:57 For me, I’m working at GoDaddy as a principal engineer on

03:01 the UX core component library.

03:03 I’m also faculty at Parsons School of Design where I teach user

03:06 research and interaction design to dozens of students a year.

03:11 And I’m also the founder of a company called Design Systems House, where we’re

03:14 dedicated to the future of design systems.

03:16 So, very busy and doing a lot of things.

03:19 In fact, I have a couple of side projects that you might have heard of.

03:22 One of those is called Gridless Design¹, which is talking about the mismatch

03:26 between Design tools and our web medium.

03:30 You might’ve heard of something called token operations², which is meant

03:34 to describe how we might transform design tokens in a JSON file, and

03:39 I also presented at Clarity last year, something called Mise en Mode³,

03:42 which is scoping our token values to create new brand expressions.

03:47 So obviously very involved with design and development, and I

03:51 really am excited to share some of these thoughts and ideas with you

03:56 in this new form called wireframe.

03:59 So let’s talk a little bit about what to expect.

04:02 What I want to do is I want to make design clear and that’s, not just

04:07 for our users, but also for creators.

04:09 We’re talking about designers, developers, and anyone that’s involved in our field.

04:13 And I think.

04:14 It’s really important because there’s a lot of information out there and it

04:18 can get really confusing, it can get contradictory, it can get complex,

04:22 and I really want to break it down.

04:24 I want to simplify it.

04:25 I want to make sure we cut all the fat out and get right down to the

04:28 things that we really need to address.

04:32 And if you know me, you might know that there’s going to, of course, be

04:35 a whole bunch of hot takes that are going to question popular opinions.

04:40 But I also want to empower folks to re evaluate their own needs and make their

04:45 own decisions based on the things that I’m talking about here on this show.

04:50 Now, I also want to make a little note about the word wireframe and why

04:54 I chose it for the name of the show.

04:57 A wireframe is supposed to be the foundation of an experience

05:00 and that’s without any influence of the brand or expression.

05:04 It’s really trying to be the first step in providing that interface to our users.

05:11 And I find that wireframes are often missing from the professional

05:15 design process these days.

05:17 And my hope is that the name wireframe will grow in popularity.

05:21 And so will the practice also.

05:24 I think that would be great.

05:26 So what’s next here?

05:29 Well, of course I want to hear from you, right?

05:32 What is confusing about design or development and where you’d like

05:36 clarity in these things, right?

05:37 I want to discuss this.

05:38 I want it out in the open.

05:40 I want to be explicit about it.

05:41 I want to tear it apart and I want to make sure we’re, we’re understanding and

05:45 Exactly what’s important to all of us when we’re making these things for our

05:50 users So if you want to get involved and interact you can tweet at me at wireframe

05:55 FM on Twitter⁴ Or whatever you’d like to call it at this point, and I’m hoping to

06:00 hear from you I want to interact with you.

06:02 I want to share stuff with you folks.

06:04 I’m really excited to start this thing it’s been a long time coming and

06:08 I’ll see you on the other side.

06:10 Thanks