Design Salon

But just one follow-up there. We did leave the text for about 200 years and we're fine. What happened? I guess we went from writing prose, we wrote books and articles and stories, to just conversations. We didn't used to write one line. Yo, how's it going? You know, that's not what we used to do by text. We'd write a long letter, we'd spend a week writing it, and we'd post it off and we'd spend a lot of attention. But now we just go back and forth. It's replaced the day-to-day communication topic, conversation. So that's the difference. Yeah, I mean, I think there is kind of a problem in terms of how software deals with emotions. I think there's some antiquated thoughts around, especially business or enterprise software, needing to be cold, needing to be professional because you are at work and you should not be doing anything but working. Obviously, people found other ways to not work. There was a water cooler that became a thing that we would circle around and talk about television. All these ways that we could express our personal beliefs or our tastes. But I think now we're starting to see a shift where it's okay to be a little human in the software. It's okay to bring your whole self to work every day, you know what I mean, and express yourself in a certain way. So I think it is lightening up a little bit. But I do think that... Software in general has kind of a cold streak that is slowly warming up. Yeah, I mean, I just love to see it expand. I mean, I love to see people... I feel like some people are not very... I don't know if it's like they're not very good writers or what it is, but sometimes they have a hard time articulating what it is they're trying to say. And they can't put it into words. And so sometimes it's just an animated GIF or something. I mean, we actually use Slack on our design team at MailChimp all the time. You go through our feed and it's pretty much all just Slack. It's just a Slack slash Giphy something slash Giphy something. We do that all day long. And it's because it's efficient, it's quick, and it's actually kind of funny and it's humorous. And it's also kind of like rolling a dice. You never know exactly what you're going to get. Sometimes Giphy is spot on and sometimes it's like, well, that was awkward. Like, what was that? Sorry. So sometimes the expression doesn't quite line up. But yeah, so in general, I think it's something that we use a lot and something that we use to communicate internally. But does it reflect a change in the society, in the way we work, in the way we consider work? Are we less formal, less top-down? I mean, it is funny how grown-ups speak teenage language. It's funny how old institutions start using a very young language and there's a class there. It's also because something is changing. It's not only technology. Yeah, this is something that I actually struggle with on my team because I manage a lot of junior people who grew up in the digital age and are accustomed to texting and are accustomed to communicating that way all day long. And if left alone, they will sit there at their desk all day with their headphones on from 9 to 5, just texting, you know, and talking in Slack, talking in HipChat, whatever else. And they will be there all day and they're totally fine doing it. And there are times in the day where, you know, they are like hitting me with so many questions and so many things and I see it. And I'll just get up from my desk and I'll walk over to their desk. And they're still going. And I'm like standing behind them watching them, you know, and just kind of tap them on the shoulder and be like, Can we just talk about this? This is going to be so much faster and easier. And they're like, Oh, yeah, sorry. And so you kind of, I think you forget people get into those worlds and they kind of, you almost have to remind them about human interaction. But it's a weird thing. But I don't know if it's generational or what. But I think for me, I try to break out of that world whenever I can. So please just yell out, come up with a name. And I'll be in the arm whenever you have a question. And there are no stupid questions. There are only the ignorance of not asking questions. And I know that. I'm a reporter, so I do make stupid questions a living. So whatever you sort of been having of questions for the last day and a half, please just come out. No one? This is not specifically for Todd, but you talked yesterday about the wink. Uh-huh. And just... Oh. When is it too much emotion? And where do your company see yourselves in like five years from now? Will the emotion be more present? Or what do you think will happen like with the evolution? I think that's actually a general problem that we have with the company. We continue to scale. And so we're starting to do more advertising campaigns, more big media campaigns. And the trick is like how do you retain those values and that character that you had that made you special when you were a startup during all these small years? And how do you scale that? And how do you make it still relatable? You know, an example that I use a lot because I come from a music background is, you know, think about bands that successfully made the leap from being like a small indie band to suddenly playing songs. A small band to suddenly playing stadiums. And, you know, I think like a band like Radiohead like fits that really well. Like somehow they were able to retain those core values and are still popular just on a mass scale. And so with the wink and like that type of character, it's just something where I have found that we have to have people internally at the company that understand the brand and really understand when too much is too much. They're almost like taste makers. pacemakers, so to speak, you know, an engineer in the room would be like, well, what do they do all day? You know, like I write code, what does that guy do? You know? And it's like, there are particular people in particular positions in the company that know when too much is too much. And they're like, if it bends one way too far this way or this way, it could come across as being kind of lame or just being kind of tired or, um, or just, I don't know. I think you see that in a lot of companies like banks, you know, that are trying to be cute, you know, and try to be funny. And it comes across as kind of weird, you know, and he's like, this is my bank, you know, why is my bank talking to me this way? Um, and that's just, that's that taste level. And, and so I think that's where the wind comes in. It's, we always zero back in on that element. Yeah. And I think, um, it's funny, you know, seeing five years in the future, I can't really do it. Uh, I don't think with any accuracy, but I think it's so ingrained. It's like to build software for humans and make it feel human. I mean, there's obviously a fine line. Um, there's a lot of very smart people, you know, focused on voice and tone and it's very embedded in our design team and our product teams to speak a certain way and know when to not speak that way. Um, I'm going to give you a little preview of something from my talk and say that, you know, there's a very fine line between friendly and annoying. And the thing that pushes us over it is frequency. If I'm getting a bunch of errors, I don't want you to be jovial and like, whoops, sorry about that. Like you're actually ruining my day. It's the time to be serious. And like, you know, knowing that line, I think is a really important thing. And it really just takes like an embedded team who truly, like Todd says, like understands the brand, understands the voice and nuance that needs to go into it to achieve that. I don't have much to add here. I will say one thing though, that, uh, that surprisingly enough, Emojipedia, we don't, the website is a hundred percent serious and a hundred percent straight because the first version, was kind of humorous and make a joke about this. It was just me writing it. And I'm like, oh, this is a bit funny. And look at this one, but people use it as a reference. So even though we have fun on the back channels on Twitter, on Facebook, Emojipedia, a hundred percent straight. It's the, it's a boring looking website because people use it as a reference. And so we don't go there. Yeah. Yeah. We are the responsible ones. So you guys can have fun. Andrew from Google said yesterday that designed to take up as little attention as possible. And I guess that you don't quite agree because I mean, humor takes up a lot of attention among you certainly does. Um, so, so what is the balance between discrete design and putting in the tone and voice and personality? Where is the balance between the two? Um, well, like I was saying, I mean, I, I think it's all about, um, just having people who are just really tied into, to the values and understanding, uh, and are, and are aware of when we're going too far. This is, this is actually something that I didn't really talk about yesterday, but like when I talked about how we had two different logos for the company and how we had a signature and we had a mascot and something I've seen over and over again is when we hire junior designers, they come in and they put Freddie on everything and it's because they think that's what they're supposed to do. And it's like, okay, that's cool. But it's kind of like playing the same note over and over again. And we don't want to be Geico. Like we, I don't know if you have a Geico here insurance, but with the lizard, you know what I'm saying? Okay. Um, like we don't want to just, we don't want it to be so overbearing where Freddie gets old, you know, Freddie is still supposed to be fun and, and kind of like this, almost like a treat, you know, I didn't show a picture of it yesterday, but we actually did a campaign where we just bought billboards just all over the, all over the country. And we actually did billboards and like small towns where there really were not that many people. And honestly, we didn't get that much value out of the ad buy, but we put Freddie there. We didn't say mail ship. We didn't say anything. We just stuck. Freddie on a billboard and people loved it. Like people were like, Oh, you know, this is amazing. And they felt like we were talking to them. So for me, it's always a balance and it's a constant question I get from designers of like, should I use the word Mark or should I use Freddie? And that's a very hard thing to describe when you have these two pieces. I can empathize there for sure. Uh, there's that, that feeling when somebody new starts at Slack and they are aware of the voice, they've seen it executed in these really good ways, but it is really hard to execute. And, and design I think should be generally quite transparent. It should seem kind of invisible. Um, it doesn't mean your software can't have personality. Um, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Uh, but in other, you know, to empathize with Todd there, it's like sometimes you just want to create a feature or a flow that achieves a goal. Um, it doesn't necessarily have to be whimsical. It doesn't have to be playful. It should be thoughtful. Um, but it doesn't mean you need to go full bore all the time. It's a knowing the time and place again, uh, is very important. I have a follow up questions I really want to get to, but we'll just go right down there first. Just start with the follow up quick. Okay. Just because you just mentioned it and I'm just curious to, how do you actually like on a very concrete project work with humor? I mean, it's, it's, it's one thing is like discussion and taste is really tricky, but there's nothing as tricky as humor. Um, how do you do that? I mean, the designing of humor or tone. I, I've actually, I've done this with a couple of projects before I worked at MailChimp. I founded a, um, this new network for Turner called super deluxe that was connected with cartoon network and adult swim. And we had a similar thing where, and this is, we still do this at MailChimp actually, where we basically get a spreadsheet and we just write the copy. It was like, if I was a business person writing this, let's just do it just vanilla boring. And we put it all into a spreadsheet and we just list everything. And there's particular people in the company. That I can share that spreadsheet with. And I'd be like, just do your thing, like make this magical, make this relatable, make this human, make this, you know, humorous and fun. And they go away and they come back and they'll do their versions to the right of it. And then we adjust it from there. But you have to start with something like, like if you were just a normal business, what would you write? And then when you just have to find ways to subtly tweak it, it's like a punch up, you know, when they get the comedy writers to punch up scripts. Exactly. Basically be like, this is a little too boring. I need you to inject a little bit here because the audience is going to be seeing a little bit of a dead zone for this next one, 20 minutes or so. That's interesting. We have product writers too, actually at Slack. The what? Product writers. It's a growing team. Essentially it used to be focused pretty much the product design team would be doing the writing. We'd have design reviews and we would be so stringent. We'd talk more about the language that we were using, whether humor was correct, whether like, you know, playfulness was correct. In this context, more so than we talk about the UI in a lot of cases, which I think was the biggest eye opener for me working at Slack. But I'm sorry, I'm kind of losing the plot of the question. It was the designing of humor. How do you work with how you actually could work with that? Carefully, I think is the answer. Yeah. Yeah. On your tiptoes. I think, again, it's working with a product designer, working with a product writer now, which we're lucky enough to have. They're very good at re-linkage. It's like a little bit of push and pull, but it's a very iterative process. You know, you can spend weeks on getting the writing just right. You both work at international companies. And one thing is taste in Finland and Atlanta, but humor in Finland and Atlanta. Big time. Yes. That is a real problem we've run into before where I think especially in England for some reason. I don't think they really – they were like, oh, it's just like that stupid monkey, you know. I don't know what it is. No fun. Like one additional point I'd like to make is like one of my favorite things to see on my team is when we are doing prototypes and we're designing ideas for features, I encourage all the designers to write their own copy. You know, like don't do Lorem Ipsum. You know, everybody does Lorem Ipsum. Don't even use a Lorem Ipsum generator. Like act as if you are the brand and the voice and actually come up with your own labels and your own titles and your own copy. And every now and then they'll strike on something just magical. And we'll run it. Like we have product writers. We have writers on the marketing team too. And we'll run it by them and they'll be like, I don't need to change a thing. Like this is great. And they might tweak a couple of things. So I love it whenever copy gets into our app that was actually made by a designer and it was not actually written by someone else. That's always fun to see. Cool. It seems that both Slack and MailChimp have really great cultures that really shine through in your brand. How do you keep that culture alive and how do you pass it on to new employees? You want to start? I can start, I guess. Yeah. That's a tough question. And I totally agree. I will say the culture at Slack is one that is welcoming. It's transparent. It's just like lovely to work there. You know, obviously the core few that started and, you know, as the company grows, you have these pockets. The design team itself was, you know, quite small up until recently. There's a lot of bake. You know, institutional knowledge there. But more than anything, I think it's just actually living by the values that you actually portray as your company values. It's a lot harder to say than, sorry, a lot harder to do than to say. You know, there's likely some very large conglomerates that have, you know, empathy massively printed on a wall somewhere. And whenever anybody walks by it, they kind of like scoff. You know, don't really believe it. But I think, you know, when you track really well to your values. And you actually live by them. It's pretty easy for it to permeate as you grow as a company. You know, we have a lot of smart people who think about how we're going to scale. Because, you know, we are rapidly growing. And that's always generally a concern. But so far, so good. I think what we have noticed at MailChimp is that anyone that's new, it generally takes them about a year to understand what is going on. Because they come into the environment and they think they know what they're getting into. And they think they know what the relationships are like. And you just don't. And it takes months and months and months. I sometimes refer to it as, it's almost like an oral history of sorts. Like, we don't really have a mechanism or a book that we hand somebody and say, this is the culture. Or like, there's nothing like that. And perhaps we should create something like that. But I don't even know what would go in it. I mean, it's just something you have to kind of live in for a while and understand. It's almost like moving to a different country. And it just takes you some time. So that's really the hardest thing. It's really an oral history. And I think it helps having people in particular positions, like as a manager or a director, that are able to pass that message along. In newspapers, you say it's in the walls. So you get in there and you feel it. And there's no real way to put it in, to document it, to put it down anywhere. Yeah. There was a question back there. Thanks. You touched a bit on this yesterday, about changing your tone of voice depending on an action that the user is taking. Have you investigated or have any thoughts on how you might use machine learning or artificial intelligence to then change the way you respond? I think it's interesting because there has been a lot of press and a lot of attention recently on bots. And on... On automating that process somehow. And this is actually something that I have been interested in. And I've been talking to people internally about at MailChimp because I feel like we have been doing voice and tone for so long. And we've been in this game of thinking about how we communicate with people and making it a more personal experience. That of all companies, that hopefully we should be able to do it well. And we should be able to make this automatic somehow and turn it into some type of chatbot or whatever it is. I don't know. I'm not even sure what the application is. But everyone seems to want to do it for some reason. But, I mean, we researched it. I mean, I actually had an intern this past summer work on some things in that regard. And I think for us, we've yet to find like a really solid use case for it. There's still something about having that human-centered kind of like hand and voice in there crafting the message as opposed to turning it into a machine-based system. I'm intrigued by it. I would love to find ways to make it happen. I was actually having a discussion last night over dinner, as a matter of fact, about something to this degree with a lot of the folks yesterday that spoke about the future of generative design. Or even Andrew's talk about creating something that doesn't exist yet. We're just like we're postulating what could possibly be done with, you know, we start talking about like, oh, maybe designers are going to be losing their jobs because X or Y exists. But then what we started to really talk about was like, well, what about A-B testing? What about? What about A-B-C-D-E? Whatever. Like, you know, A-X testing. What would happen if, you know, you could actually generate, you know, based off of a certain amount of variance, either language or design compositions, something that would just like test, test, test, test. And then all of a sudden like cut down the bottom 10%, only present these designs, start like actually working them into these sort of different layers and shapes. And you could surely do that with language. I am certainly not smart enough to do that. But I could see it as a possibility. And really tuning the language. And who knows? Especially in. International markets. That could be something really useful to understand what works, what doesn't. I wouldn't be the one to write it. But somebody smart could, I'm sure. Could you say also that last maybe 10, 15 years we've spent so much time doing personalized technology that is almost this whole discussion we're having here is also sort of just going the opposite direction. Instead of personalized, you're going personality. I mean, it's too very like as opposed to getting on a platform that's just always reflecting yourself. All of a sudden there is someone out there that you actually meet. There is. It's not just a platform that reflects yourself. There's an extra personality on the other end. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Scary. We have. We launched a bot for Emojipedia called Botmoji. And people can ask it emoji questions. And it's a really simple implementation. You send any emoji, it will tell you what it is. But it's amazing how much you give it a name and a face. And it's called Botmoji. Technically, she's female. There's nothing about it. We just call her her. But people argue with her all the time. They'll say, what is this emoji? Yeah. And she'll say, oh, it's the smirking face. And they'll go, no, it's not. Yeah. And yeah, it's amazing that as soon as you add a bit of personality to anything, suddenly it takes on a life of its own. Nobody argues with our Emojipedia account with a human there. But it's a bot with a personality. And sometimes she might give a sassy response or she might shut somebody down. And yeah, they'll just argue with her even though she clearly only has about ten things to say. But it's just amusing that you put her face on it. It's similar to Slackbot, I think. Yeah. You have like proposals. Like I can't remember what the number is right now of like wedding proposals or engagement proposals to Slackbot. And it's up in the hundreds for sure. Yeah. I mean, Slackbot. I'd propose to Slackbot. Yeah, me too. Maybe it was me. Slackbot's chill. Yeah. Yeah. We have a question back there. My question is more on emojis. I found it interesting that you never thought about multiracial emojis. What do you think is the future of emojis? Are we going to get so many that we don't know what to do with them anyway? Because there's so many different races. There's so many different cultures. There's so many backgrounds. When is enough enough on the emoji? Yeah. It's an impossible question, hey? So I mean, right now, the goals of Unicode generally are about taking off the biggest chunks first. So race was a huge one, especially because people were white. If they were just all yellow, then maybe we could just say there never was race in emoji. Let's not introduce something new. But it was... Like The Simpsons or something. Yeah. Even though there's still an ongoing sort of debate, is yellow a version of white or is yellow really nonracial? But nonetheless, it's too late. Emoji's got itself in a big hole. But it started out with genders and with skin tones. And it's really digging out. So yeah, we got the skin tones. This year was gender. And probably the next big thing is like these cultural aspects. But yeah, there are foods in every country around the world. And if you add everything, it's ridiculous. You're going to have this giant keyboard. So I don't know where the line is. But to me, it seems clear that some of the benefit of emoji is that it is a limited set. But I don't want to be the person that says, that's it. I don't want to be the guy that says, no more guys. We've done it. We're finished. So I don't envy the person whose job that is. Because inevitably, someone's going to miss out. So, so far, to answer the question, though, just every year, shipping away at new things and hoping that it covers a greater and greater percentage. And it's not going to be greater and greater percent until we're just left with fringe items. Okay. Anyone else? By the way, now we just had the race issue up. Then if you notice, as with any panel on a technology conference, there's all men up here. So if there's a woman with two questions that are common, please come up here and take a seat. So I have a question for Jeremy. First of all, great talk. Great talk. Great talk. I want to know if you see any disadvantages of emojis. Because some well-known German graphic designers or typographers like Eric Spiekermann also criticize the development and the use of emojis. So we forget our language and forget how to speak. And also a topic a couple of minutes ago was like how do employees speak at the employee or with other colleague and something like that. And yeah, I want to know your opinion on that. Right. I think it's pretty clear that emoji is a shorthand. It's definitely an abbreviation. It's something that we can use in general for communication, for quicker communications. And what Instagram looked at last year when they were analyzing all their emoji data is that it wasn't replacing real words. It was replacing Internet speak. People were using less lol. And they were putting in... Laughing face. So at least as far as the stats that I can see seem to back up that it's, if anything, it's removing the last scourge, the last generation when I was growing up. They'd be in the newspaper. What do these terrible acronyms mean? What are the teens saying? And it's replacing more of that. But you can't hold it back. People are going to do what they want to do. Don't tell people what to do. If people want to use emojis, they can. If a workplace or if a person finds that offensive or if they don't want to do that, then that's up to them. But it's not like schools are teaching how to use emojis. I think it's probably a bit overblown to say, not that you're saying that, but if that's the argument that emoji is somehow ruining language, then I think language has bigger issues to think about. Laughing. Okay. Is that the grain of... Yeah, yeah. Great. But just you had the Hillary thing in your...just before. And it's weird. There's... And I think there's nothing surprising in people having personality, but it's strange that a newsletter company all of a sudden has a personality. So there are certain expectations that we have to who's stiff, who's supposed to be boring, who has certain attitudes. And I think that's also what happens with emojis, that you have certain idea or formality that you sort of transcend somehow. They're definitely on the casual side of communication. If you feel like you can communicate with somebody casually, tick. Emojis are fine. If you're a professional, probably know if you're in a state strict environment, it's just the middle bit and everybody's line is obviously going to be different. Me, I don't care. I'll chuck emojis in anything. But the people with real jobs, then yeah, there is a line somewhere. And I guess it's up to each company, each person, each country to decide where that line is. This may be kind of a cold way of looking at it, but from a business perspective, there is real return on investment from using them. Because MailChimp supports that. Yeah. All right. where we were outputs that, well, they're going to be a big deal Și my firm wasn't going to have that again. basicsétais For whatever reason, seeing an emoji in an inbox makes people more inclined to tap on it and to look at that email and to take action on it. So there is actually, like, regardless of your feelings, there's real data that suggests that you could probably sell more products or you could maybe do more with your marketing and your email marketing specifically by using them. But couldn't that change real fast? I mean, the media company I work for used emojis every single day when we sent out our MailChimp newsletter. But it works now because you don't expect to see that from a news outlet. And you kind of get a feeling when you see it, this might be from my teenage daughter or something like that, right? Text message. And that's why you open it. So at some point, when it does become sort of corporate language, it might not work in the same way. It's hard when you are the company that is trying to democratize something that, like, some other marketing genius found to be true. Like, they found the secret sauce to something. And we're like, oh, we're going to democratize that. And we're going to give that to everybody. And then you do it and you ruin it almost. Because, I mean, like another example would be we have scheduling in our app where you can actually send an email at a particular time on a particular day. And we'll tell you when is the optimum time to be doing this. And the problem is, is that sometimes that optimum time is the optimum time for a number of other people, too. So everyone kind of follows the same logic. And so some people we've watched are interesting. Like, they'll actually do the opposite of, like, what we're recommending. To see if their conversion is better. But it's, yeah, it's interesting. Because it's like, yes, too much could totally be too much. It's like driving with Google Maps. When they'll reroute, you have another small trip because it's fat. Right, and then everybody does it. They're driving and everyone does it. Yeah, exactly. I want to go just back for one second and talk about the casualness of emoji. Just because it rung in my mind for a second. I agree that in communication it is definitely further on the casual scale. I think there's an interesting business case that we see pretty often in our. Actual Slack team. We use emojis for triage or for, like, marking GitHub pull requests as, like, I'm looking at it or I'm done. And we're using it in very official ways. But we're using it with, like, reactions, which we allow you to react with any emoji. So it would be like, you know, red light, green light or eyes. You know what I mean? So there is, like, that other side where it's like, sure, it's shorthand, but it doesn't have to be casual either. Yeah, it's got a technical advantage that it is everywhere that text is. And you're right. You can use it however you want to. Yeah. You can utilize it any better than a letter or a punctuation. Yeah. If you use it in that context. Yeah. I love that. I kind of want to send you three guys out next door and do a little 10-minute workshop, come up with a subject line with emoji for Deutsche Bank or something. But before we do that, we'll just have a question back there. Yeah. I just wanted to say, Todd, I thought it was really interesting yesterday when you were talking about how you built empathy by setting up an actual store. I thought that was really cool. Yeah. And I wondered if, Brandon, if you guys. Have done any sort of crazy experimental type things for building empathy with Slack or do you just primarily rely on your own sort of usage of the tool? No. I mean, we are as empathetic as we possibly can be and are always seeking ways to empathize with our users and customers. I think one thing that's really key just day to day, and we've done this since the beginning, is that everybody does support, which means that whether you're me or you're a designer or you're a developer, you're always going to be able to build empathy. I think that's one of the things that we've learned is that if you're a designer or you're an engineer or a product manager, you spend time in Zendesk seeing what people are having trouble with. I mean, there is something amazingly humbling about it because you're like, oh, yeah, no, that was an obvious design. We shipped it. No big deal. You get 200 tickets about it the next day and you realize that your bias is what made it look really simple. So I think that's like it's not crazy and we're not the only folks who do it. We don't go too wild with that. We haven't built a store and I don't know. I didn't get to hear your talk, so I'm not exactly sure what that is. But I've heard of like, you know, user experience experiments where somebody will build an actual, you know, storefront or, you know, a place that you can experience to see how you feel. But other than that, you know, we just listen really intently. We do a lot of, you know, user research and interviews like that to see how people really use the product. And that really, I think, raises our empathy bar. Yeah, we actually do the same thing at Mailchimp. I'm actually, as far as support goes, because before I worked at Mailchimp, I was a developer. Before I worked at Mailchimp, I used to run my own company and I would do support like at night with a laptop, you know, like sitting in bed or something. And I did it every single day. And I just, it's just such a part of me. And it's something that I'm always working with our support team. I mean, because we have hundreds of people in support, you know, 24-7 that are doing it. And it's something that I work with the designers on to try to get them exposed to the problems that people are having so we're not so siloed. We actually have an internal app in the company. Where you can go at any particular time, like you're eating lunch, whatever, and you can just type in something like product recommendations or abandoned cart or campaigns or whatever. And you can go through everything and like get like the fire hose of like what everyone is saying and like griping about. And it's amazing. It's cathartic. I mean, and it's hard to do when you're a big company and you don't have so much of that exposure with people on a day-to-day basis. Thank you. Thank you. Talking about tone. How would you recommend transitioning to a more lighter tone in an application? Should you come up with a completely new texting way in the pop-ups or should you transition slowly? That's a good question. You want to go? I'll start just by saying that my first suggestion would be to make sure that the lighter tone is appropriate for your audience and for the application that you are designing. Because I think that maybe like a sub-message in this theme that is not described is that or has not been articulated too much is that fun and friendly and casual may not work for everyone and may not be completely appropriate. And it all depends on the context of your business and what you're doing because it could completely backfire and it may not work. If it works though and you find that that's what people want and that's what people are engaging with, I think it really comes down to copywriting. I think you just have to really sit down and put yourself in the mind of a character and think about how you interact with friends of yours or how you would speak this in a non-corporate way. I kind of think a lot of us, we go through school, we join companies, we try to be professional and we change the way that we speak. And I think you almost have to unlearn some of that. That would be my suggestion. I would also suggest testing, like A-B testing your language. Just getting a feel for what is kind of, you know, what is the language that you're using. And what is it that you think is so okay to interact with or what people are interacting or not interacting with. It's a good barrier. There used to be a newspaper where all the journalists came together every morning and had a long discussion. And we were famous for having very long discussions in the morning, very, very long morning meetings. But the fun thing was that you could have a heated debate, a discussion, and it was really sort of whatever, you know, cartoons, whatever was on the subject. And we'd be yelling at each other for an hour and a half. And then the next morning you saw the newspaper and it came out in that weird newspaper. And it was speak and it was boring and it looked like something from, you know, someone else could have done. There was no, the fire was gone. And there's something in that transformation from like initial discussion, idea, to that actually sort of, you know, very sort of... Yeah, it sounds like design by committee. Exactly. It's the same concept of where the final design is oftentimes so watered down when you have too many designers collaborating on it. Yeah, that and also there's something in the newspaper language specifically in that design, in the way that the children are speaking. And that's something that's been shown over years have been designed that it's very sort of formal. And by that loses that immediate and vibrant feeling. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Any questions? Yeah. So I was just wondering how you work over time with your tone of voice. You mentioned A-B testing and you see what would work for your company, what doesn't work, what people pick up on. But I guess over time, if you've got that quirkiness or the tongue-in-cheek approach, couldn't that also get really old? I mean, you're saying about the emojis, maybe it's hard because no one uses it. Then whenever one uses it, it's lost its novelty. How do you work with that over time? I think A-B testing usually has a sort of a short-sightedness built into it. Yeah. Like anything, like anything in design, part of a product like that will evolve over time. I think things like that will generally get stale over a longer period. But if you're paying quite like a lot of attention to it, and you have a team that's thinking about it, you kind of just like ebb and flow with how to change it, how to reshift, how to refocus, ensuring that you're still keeping your personality, but maybe like updating some of your language or the ways that you communicate. I think it's just like revising designs or updating whatever, a modal or something. It does get a little stale. Maybe it doesn't work as well as you want it to. You do a quick design pass and lo and behold, it actually works really well again. But isn't it a good question though that all of a sudden, without you realizing, you do become that weird uncle at the family party? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I mean, that's a valid concern. Or at the same time, like we're talking about once, the voice and tone thing. If things lighten up just generally quite a lot, we could start seeing it being a lot more obvious or everywhere, in which case you are no longer individual. You are very much like these, some of these parts over here. It's just something to watch. We do this all the time with design. I think we should be pretty willing to do it with language. Yeah, I have the mic. For Jeremy, how do you make money on Emotio? That's a good question. I'm guessing it's no longer like a passion project, or it is, but I'm guessing you're doing it full time and how does that work for you? And when did you go full time? Right, so yeah, great. I like it, straight to the point. You're right, it is my full time employment now and there's five of us in total. No one full time. I was very dedicated to not make anybody full time. Everyone that works for the site, they have other projects. Our designer does other things, our developer. It doesn't need five people full time, but it helps to have a variety of different people involved. The short answer is advertising. We have 15 million page views a month and advertising pays terribly. But if you get 15 million people, it adds up, is the extent of it. But in the early days, I can actually remember the first few months of Emojipedia. I'd watch the ad revenue every day and it would be one cent. It would literally be the ad revenue. And then I doubled it to two cents a day. I'm like, yes! 100%. That is amazing. What happens if I get this up to sort of $10 or $20 a day? And it did and it just kept going. And now obviously there's more overheads of servers and keeping something up for 15 million people. But the short answer, we don't really have products. We are a weird hybrid of a tool. A lot of people just use Emojipedia as an emoji search tool, like a web app. And a lot of other people use it like Wikipedia as research. I see a lot of people got a random emoji button on the site. And some users you can track in the analytics, they're just there for hours and hours just going through every emoji because they all have a backstory. Some of them don't have much, but some of them, there's the guy, the man in business suit levitating. You've seen this guy, he's got a shadow beneath him. And he, to cut a long story short, but he was included in Windings and Webdings at Microsoft because one of the designers there liked this scar band and he was on the cover of the scar band. And Unicode added a bunch of Webdings and Windings characters so he became an emoji. So there's a lot of these characters that have quite a long history of documentation. People just find it amusing. But to answer the question, advertising is how we make money and effectively, therefore, we have a publisher model that more page views mean more money. You guys are in a good business. When your newspaper conferences, business model is the first question always. This is at MailChimp. Can you talk a little about your merchandising? I know it's not merchandising in the sense that you sell it, but what does it do for you? And what's good about it? We actually have this... Well... That's the only reason you asked the question. Oh. So there's actually some philosophy behind it. We used to attend conferences a lot like everyone else. And we would oftentimes go and see... We wouldn't have booths there. I don't know why. It's just something culturally we just never felt inclined to do. And we would go and we would see like all the other things that companies would make and they would do. And we kind of felt like in a way that if we were going to do this, we wanted to be something that people really loved and they wanted to keep and they wanted to maybe put on their desk or they were like... They'd wear it like they really actually want to wear the T-shirt like out and around or they'd want the Freddy on their desk. And so we just decided that if we were going to do this, we were really going to invest in it and we weren't going to do it cheap. We wanted it to be valuable. I mean like these Final Freddies, I mean we get nothing from them. But they're so fun and people find such delight out of them. They're obviously very expensive but that's where that comes from. I think it's also tricky for us because we can't really... It's like a business accounting tax thing but we are not product people. We're outside of software so we can't really... People oftentimes ask us why don't we sell T-shirts and stuff and it just doesn't jive with what we do. So anytime we do it and sell stuff, we always give all the money away to charities. Okay. Anyone else? Hi. So as designers, there is a lot of taste involved. And when you... When you create something and show it to people, they might not agree with you. Have you ever had really horrible feedback and how did you tackle it? Oh boy. That's a good question. Good question. I'm actually trying to think of a good example of when... I don't know. If anyone just right now... You mean like myself, like personally speaking or like anyone or... If somebody was tax-raising, what would you do? Yeah. Well, I have had creative directors tell me that like that my work sucked and that it was horrible. Yeah. I mean, I've had that experience. I think everyone has at some point in their career. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's so much subjectivity in design that I think the first thing you learn at least after getting your work ripped apart over and over again is that that's valuable and maybe you should consider those opinions. But you just have to roll with it. If you trust your intuition and you're at least willing to grow, I think you're going to be okay. I don't know. I've never really like... It's definitely been like a few dark evenings just like really questioning whether I was a designer or not. Yeah. But you get around to it. Yeah. You figure it out. I mean, it's something you learn because I mean, I know from past... Like I'm now in a position where now I'm coaching and I'm trying to lead people. And like one of my biggest jobs really is to be a designer. And one of my biggest jobs really at the end of the day is to make the designers better. I'm trying to make them better designers. I'm trying to help them not just think about interface and not just think about the shade of a button or whether this should have a drop shadow or not or anything like that. It's all about having... Training them to think more laterally, horizontally across the entire experience like I was talking about yesterday. Changing like... I actually did this recently where everyone was like, Where everyone was called UI designers before. Like we were actually segmented to teams of like UX and UI which sounds very clean and nice and everything. But then it just makes it sound like the designers all they care about is what the interface looks like. And it's by no means just that. So, we got rid of it all and now everyone is just product designers. Because I want them to focus on the product and to be thinking about the entirety of it and what their contribution is. So, yeah, that was a rambly answer. But that's what I work on. I think that's important, too. I think it's also, I want to circle back and say, like, what's made me grow the most in my career is bad feedback. Or feedback, especially when it was warranted. And I think a lot of it ties into as you're growing as a product designer. You know, I worked at an agency that was very focused on, like, the polish. You know, especially in the early mid-2000s where it's, like, you know, a lot of drop shadows, a lot of 10-stop gradients on buttons. Like, all that really, like, finicky shit that doesn't really matter to anybody but the designer doing it. And I think, like, getting broken out of that cycle was, you know, it came through a lot of feedback. It came through a lot of, like, growth. But it was always bad feedback that got me out of that and got me thinking like a product person. So, yeah, I think that's. Could I just hold you on to that polish thing there? I mean, it's interesting because we're talking, this discussion is very much about how to engage users, basically, engage in a conversation. But what we're talking about mostly is attitude. Vorish tone and less about design. And is there something, I'm just thinking from my business, where in news, like, the way Huffington Post, the BuzzFeed is almost undesigned and looks like HTML from the 90s. There is something in that very unpolished that's open for engaging. It's not, it doesn't have that thing, very polished and closed. Yeah, I mean, some people say that, like, the Drudge Report is the best designed news site on the Internet. Yeah. I don't know if you all know what that site is. Yeah. There's definitely something. There's something about design getting in the way. Also. Also. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, I mean, you know, so when I worked at, I'll give a little story. But when I worked at that agency before I worked at Slack, it was an agency called Metal Lab. And, you know, we, one of the things that we were good at was bringing a lot of polish to the product stuff. Not to say that it got in the way, but there was definitely, like, this push or this pull to be like, especially when working on Slack, for example, you want people to feel comfortable spending all day in this thing. Designers love very simple, minimal, stripped down, like, RDO and Wilson Minor designed it type work. And I agree. It was absolutely beautiful. They did have a lot of album art to sort of flesh it out. But, you know, we see that and we like it aesthetically, so we imitate. That doesn't necessarily feel comfortable to, you know, a million people. In fact, software that is represented that way, so polished, so, like, every little detail thought out often can feel, like, a little too austere or a little too finicky. And they don't want to really. They don't want to touch it or spend much time in it or it feels confusing. So I think, like, an important part of understanding where polish can come in because I think it is very important still. But it's just getting in that mind frame that we as designers have a bias, like a massive bias because we have spent all our years pulling in patterns, pulling in, like, aesthetics and really trying to, like, execute on those. And you lose a lot of what the first eyes look like when you do that. And I think it's important to be able to articulate as well with a little bit less polish. It's also what emojis does. I mean, they're just breaking that polish. They don't fit in at any time. Yeah, they're their own thing. And you know what we get the most passionate responses about is when we design our own version of the next set of emojis and people get very, very involved. We had the, this year there's an emoji called the shallow pan of food, but it's effectively a paella from Spain. And I was getting death threats over how we designed that based on the ingredients of people in Spain. They're saying, I will see you burning in hell. And for the ingredients that we put in there because it's something they cared about. And overwhelmingly, no matter what we do, it's that one. When people say, here's a name and here's how you drew it. Yeah, they care. People get, phew. I think we're going to get a last round of questions and it might be a lot of questions and that's fine. It doesn't matter. Final round could be a long round. It's okay. Just don't hold back now because then you'll sit back with questions you never had the chance to get an answer for. And we're here all day too. So feel free to come up and talk. So. Yeah. I got to talk today. Just going back to the question of emojis in connection with language and communication. I'm a late adopter of emojis. I use the pretty basic vocabulary. I have a vocabulary about a young child. But also I have people on my Twitter feeds, et cetera, that are doing some really, really expressive stuff with emojis. So do you think as cultures and subcultures actually master the vocabulary and start expressing more complex thoughts, that you are going to get a more, you know, almost poetic side to the emoji use? Is that something you're considering and thinking about at Emojipedia? It definitely is. I mean, that's, we look at the two parts in a way we don't distinguish on the site, but effectively we'll try and describe. Here's what it was meant to be about and here's how people use it. And it happens in different geographies though, that different countries pick up their own alternative meanings. I don't think there's ever going to be a universal. Yeah. Hey, we think this nail polish emoji, people use that for sort of nonchalance in the US in particular. Kind of like, did I just owned you with what I just said. But that's not universal. That doesn't happen in other countries. So we try and list what's going on and we're trying to do a bit more crowdsourcing as well to try and pick up, let other people submit how they use it. Right now it's editorial. I literally make the decisions about what I think is representative. But yeah, it's fun. Another one I've seen creeping up. The other one coming up is the Kermit with the sipping the tea. It's a meme that, you know, that's none of my business. People do it in emoji form with the frog and the teacup. So there's fun. Yeah, there's absolutely room for creativity, poetry. There's all that. And I think there's infinite amount of time that we can't document it all. Hopefully we can get a bit more crowdsourcing going on because that's just going to go on forever. There's always going to be new meanings for that. And that's the fun. That's what people like about it. I have one question for the future of emojis. So for example, Skype and Facebook, they have some animations. And I noticed that the emojis are fixed images and they are designed in a really reduced scale. So now, for example, WhatsApp have the emojis a little bigger for the users to see it better. Are you planning to make animations with emojis? So technically, yeah. So technically, emojis are fonts, really. You could have different emoji fonts on my own computer. I've got the Apple emoji font and I've got a black and white emoji font. And you can't really change it on mobile. But technically in the future, there's nothing stopping someone coming up with some kind of animated font technology. I mean it could be done. Or you could just have on the web or Slack or MailChimp or someone could on the web replace. When you see this character, we're going to show this animation. So it could technically be done today. It's just who wants it? They've sort of got the gatekeepers of Apple. Who's going to go first? Yeah, who's going to do it first? Is it going to make people mad? I suspect a lot of people are going to get very annoyed. It would have to be in my mind an extra thing or just a fun service that does it. But I can't imagine the actual keyboard. Imagine if they're all dancing when you're going through the keyboard and they're all jumping around. That would be... It would be like the early web again. Yeah, I don't know. So I don't expect it but it technically is possible. So we might. I've got a question. I've got a question for MailChimp actually. What do you see the future for newsletters? Because with the communication changing to using more emojis and people using Facebook with shorter texts as well as Twitter with 140 characters, what's the future for newsletters that used to be very content heavy? Will they be slimmed down or what do you think? Email is a funny thing because it's very much dependent on compatibility and on what email clients can support. So you can send an email and it can appear in Gmail or Outlook or Mail or your mobile client. There's just so many different ways for it to appear. So in some ways the potential and the possibilities of what we can do with the design of an email is limited by the output of where it appears on the client side. That said, I think future-based. We're starting to see more email. We're starting to see more emails that are starting to incorporate things like web fonts in them. We're starting to see people do more like web page style designs where they have almost like fluid images that extend all the way across instead of everything always being 600 pixels wide all the time, which I think is really exciting. We've seen a number of people create email newsletters that when you actually open it in a browser, like if you go to the campaign archive and look at it, it actually looks like a web page. It's just in your email client. It's been so perfect. It's perfectly designed to be responsive and scale down so well. So we're keeping an eye on those things. We're waiting for browser, not browser, but email client compatibility to improve. Gmail is improving. Outlook is improving. Gmail just announced the other day actually that they're starting to support media queries now in their code, which is amazing. And like we've been wanting that for so long because the vast majority of people now actually read email on their mobile devices. They're not doing it on laptops and desktops anymore. So it's super important. But there's a more radicalized version of the question. Are the most friendly company on the internet in trouble? I mean, mail users changing with generations. Yeah. I think, yeah. I mean, it's something that when we're thinking about the future growth of the company and where we're going, I think kind of a nice way to think about it is to kind of remove, you know, we're an email marketing company. But if you really drill into what that means, the higher version of that is we're a marketing company. And email is the medium that we use and is what we were founded on. Our mission and our values are still the same, which is to help people grow their business, help them communicate, help them market their products. And whether it's email or anything else is, you know, we don't, it's not something that we're so committed to that we're going to, you know, go down with the ship if email like someday dies or something. It's not like that at all. Our heart and our soul is still in marketing and help people look forward to it. So we could take a number of different avenues in the future. We've been talking a lot about fun and funny experiences. Have you ever thought about using different kinds of emotions than, for example, angry people or sadness in your communication? That's funny, by the way. You idiot. Pretty much. Just click the damn button. I've always wanted to write that in a UI. Wasn't it? There. I feel like Trello did that recently where it's, there was a button and it's like if you clicked anywhere outside of it, it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then once you, then it's just like an arrow points to it and it's like, you have to be kidding me. That's perfect. I guess to your point, it's kind of a brand question too. I mean, that was one of the things we discussed when we standardized on the wink. It was like, well, what if we're sponsoring an event or sponsoring something that's actually kind of a serious topic and you have this winking monkey, you know, that's not very cool. So, I mean, that's kind of like the places where we do rely on the secondary mark we have, which is the score. Mark and so, yeah, that's something we try to be sensitive to for sure. I was thinking about things as well. I mean, what kind of feelings do they want to invoke? Yeah. Comfort security. Yes. Availability. Yeah. Availability, like generally just structural integrity, not playfulness. And hey, you kind of went over your balance last month. No biggie though. Yeah. Which is why a lot of bank logos tend to be like these giant, giant, giant. Like geometric interlocking shapes. Totally. Stuff, right? I mean, they're supposed to feel like they're tight and they're well made and they're solid and your money isn't going anywhere. So, like Chase Bank and people like that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. A while back you mentioned that the sin that we all committed like 10 years ago was having these very old, very over-designed drop shadows. What would you say are some of the common sins that the designers commit nowadays where 10 years in the future we will look back and say, oh, we shouldn't have? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. That's a really good question. I might step on toes, but... Sorry. No, no. I think that like animation, you know, it definitely was like a crux because once we all went flat design, people were like, well, it's got no personality anymore and therefore we need to start like using After Effects to make these incredibly elaborate animations that are not really friendly for any like accessibility reasons, but also like over the top and kind of getting past the point of the design. I think over embellishing on that sort of like motion design and a lot of like over the top materiality, is kind of, they kind of run in the same vein. That's it for me. Or maybe just like, I don't know, it's been pretty hard for folks to break out of the... And it was interesting to talk today about the logos and how it all looked like the periodic table of elements on our iPhones. I think shortening your iPhone application icon to a letter and a color, we'll definitely look back on and be like, bad time. One design trend that I see that is really, really hard to do well is like, I'm seeing a lot of designers now that are taking typography and running it over bitmap images so that when you scroll a page, it's like the type is still on top of what's happening underneath it and it's almost like intentionally done. It's a very stylistic choice. The problem is that when it's converted into other languages, the words sometimes get bigger, they sometimes get smaller and sometimes you could end up with words you can't even read because it's all kind of bleeding and layered and all of this. And... That's a really hard style to pull off, but I don't know how long that's going to stick around. This is a question for you, Brandon. With messaging apps having been around for decades, what do you think is the core need that Slack kind of meets that wasn't fulfilled before? Yeah. Well, there's a lot to this and there's hopefully going to be a lot more to it. But, you know, centralizing your communication in one place, like messaging apps sure have been around forever. We've used different variations of them for a very long time. But Slack, the combination of centralizing the communication, being like an easy to search repository of all your team's information being very useful. But not only that, but it's containing not only your messages, but messages from the tools that you use. And the increasing amount of tools that you're able to use and that stream in those messages in either ported places where you pop them into a channel or into a channel. And that sort of availability instead of context switching between all these different apps you use, but having this funnel of very organized searchable information in one place is the start. Obviously, there's more that we can do there and make workplaces a lot better and larger workplaces a lot more efficient and productive. But to me, that's the difference. It's everything you need and everything your team uses in one place. I would actually add to that because I'm actually a big Slack fan. Because we actually use other clients and adults. And I don't know what it is, if it's the typography or if it's the white space or the character, but there's always just something about Slack that people react to, I notice. There's that too. We need to talk about the lack of occasion to respond afterwards. But we'll just keep on with the questions. You have one? Going back to feedback, how do you handle change aversion and not going into the depression and balancing what users say they want versus what they actually need? Yeah. That's a tough one. There's always going to be change aversion to anything you do, especially when you have an ever-growing user base. There's definitely room to be really courageous and stick through it. There's room to push and push to keep things that really do have value. I think one of the things that designers will constantly and likely struggle with forever is that, and I hate to keep continuing to bring up biasing, but that something to us seems so obviously bad. So obviously better in one case. But it does not test well. Users don't like it, complain about it, find that they're less productive, like the move my cheese thing. I think it's getting over that. It's not like you can't have a moment of sadness, but I think it's pretty easy through user testing or through trying to have as open of a lens as possible to step back and realize where that might be coming from or where that concern might be. It's a lot easier when you're being a little more incremental with your work. Of course, no matter what you do, if you do a full-fledged redesign, you're kind of hooped. You're going to get a lot of complaints. Or if you're Facebook and you change your timeline about that much, there's going to be people creating a group that is one million likes to have Facebook roll back this change. They don't really ever change it back, luckily. I don't know. That's not really an answer except for trying to be as empathetic as possible to the people that are actually having trouble using that software. I'll throw in one additional footnote on that one. One thing that we notice is that a lot of times people are complaining about a particular feature or something that they think could be improved, and sometimes that ends up as a bug on the engineering team, and the engineering team is tasked with resolving it. Where actually if the design team looks at it, we tend to pick stuff apart and we try to think about what the real problem is that someone is experiencing. What is the true thing that they're trying to do? It's probably not the thing they're actually describing. It's probably something much bigger. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Three more questions. I know it will be like that, but someone will make that choice, and then we'll stay up here. So these three white males will stay and stay, and you're more than welcome to do bilateral negotiations with them afterwards. So let's do the next three questions. Okay. Let me be the judge. Oh, you have one already. I'm not the judge. This is for Todd. I was just thinking, did you ever receive any negative feedback or criticism on your tone, like the humorous tone from the users of MailChimp? Not so much negative. It's more just kind of, I think, confused sometimes. I think people will come and they're just like, I'm just trying to send a newsletter. I'm just trying to do business. And what is all this crap? I don't get it. Yeah. So for some people, it's just kind of an annoyance. I think we hear that sometimes. Like yesterday. Like yesterday, when I was talking about how we put the butt on the login page, and people were kind of like, WTF? Like, what is this? So it's a fine line. Yeah. It's not so much outrage or anything like that. But yeah, more annoyance, I would say. Try you. More white males. So what are the hardest thing of managing and creating design teams, basically? What is the hardest thing about growing a team and those types of things? So yeah, the product teams want their own part. The engineers want their own part. So how do you do that? Like internally and externally inside of the company, so basically. Yeah. There's a lot of ways we could go with this. But I mean, I feel like, at least from our perspective, something that we have learned and something that we have really experimented with is, what is the role of design at Mailchimp, just in general? Are we a department? Are we like an agency within a big company? Are we distributed and embedded within engineering teams? What is that relationship like? I think one of the, just to give an example, one of the things that we learned as a team, and something that I've been trying to teach people, is that oftentimes we'll have meetings where we're looking at some new feature that we're thinking about doing, something that research exposed. And of course the designers on my team want to make the most polished looking thing, and they make something that looks awesome, you know? And we come in the room and it's like going to a funeral, like with engineers. And engineers look at it and they're kind of like, well obviously you have all the ideas, so why don't you take the lead? And they feel excluded because it's so pixel perfect and so tight that they don't feel like they can contribute to the project. They feel like we've already sorted out all the problems. So it's a weird thing for me to instruct, but I've actually been asking designers on the team, like put down Sketch, put down Photoshop, don't even open these tools. I want you to draw this thing. And we're going to go into this meeting with a drawing. It's going to look like crap. I don't care like what your skills are like, but the sheer fact that it's a drawing just opens the door and people automatically feel involved at that point. An engineer or a CEO or anyone else looks at it, and they say, oh, it's obviously unfinished. Like I can contribute to this and I feel like they will find some value in what I have to say. Whereas otherwise it feels too siloed. It was an interesting thing that we detected. So I think to answer your question, that is the skill I'm trying to teach, is not just how to be pixel perfect, but when to be pixel perfect. And that's usually towards the end of a development cycle. Early, messy as hell. Like I love it when it's messy. Yeah, absolutely. I can echo that too. And I think that the way that we work, and I'll talk a little bit about this later at 4 o'clock. Come on out. Burn it all. Come on down. We embed designers very closely with product managers and engineers. Everybody is a part of like a team, a smaller team. And just the fact, the nature that we use Slack for everything, when we start a feature, you're in a channel with the people that are going to be working on it. It's not necessarily at a very high fidelity state. It could be a problem statement. And those people will be like tossing around ideas, having like healthy arguments in that room, and getting to a point where we all feel like we understand the problem and we're ready to start executing. I'm lucky enough to have like, you know, I don't do much management anymore. But the team was really wonderful with that. We have such a naturally collaborative design team that that was a welcome change. We used to operate very much like a silo in the middle. And when a project came in, we're like, you and you. So. With scale, it becomes impossible, I think. And it silos designers a little bit too much. And it does get to that point where you get too high fidelity too early. And then, you know, you're kind of stuck. And you get too attached at that point and don't want to reverse. I actually kind of hate the whole idea of like a designer being someone who just works in sketch and visuals and things. I see front-end engineers as very much being designers as well. I mean, especially once you have a defined pattern library, you've got all the bricks, you know how to put something together. Front-end engineers can code in browser. And be just as creative, if not more creative and a better designer than a true, somebody who has designer in their job title. So, one last question. I expected the last one to be informal, have a certain tone of voice. An attitude and a feeling, please. Hi, this is to all three of you. If you could name or describe one emotion. One emoji you feel that is missing in the emojipedia right now. What would that be? Of course, you know, all 1,800 of them, right? Well, yeah. Good. After you guys. I'd love to hear. Do you have artichoke lamps in there? Yes. Very beautiful. Yeah. There was a certain food that I remember that I was so shocked was not in the emoji library. And I really can't remember what it was. I get a bit of feedback sometimes that the food and drink icon on iOS has a soda bottle on there, but there isn't one. I'm not a big soda drinker, but a lot of people are annoyed that that's on the icon for the food and drink, but it's not actually in there. That's a hard question. That might be the hardest one. For me, can I give, I'll give, if you guys want some. Yeah. One that's been approved, but it's not on iOS yet that I'm very much looking forward to, the fingers crossed. Because how often are you, you know, fingers crossed? Good luck. Oh, yes. That was a good one. So that's already been approved, but it's not on my phone yet. As for one that I would particularly like, someone in the room just mentioned this just before, and it's been something that's annoyed me for quite a long time, is how badly done the hug is, that it looks like jazz hands. And again, sympathy, it would be great to have a real hug. MSN used to have a great hug where it was, there were two of them, one face this way and one face that way. So you could send a hug to someone and then they could send you the opposite. Hug back. It was great. I would love that if that was a possibility. Oh, it was fingers crossed. We have it in our internal Slack team. Like we have a fingers crossed emojis. Yeah, yeah. That I just use it all the time. And then when I try and use it on my phone, it's not there. I'm like, what's this? You just list out a lot that I'm going to use. Face, palm, shrug. Very good. Yeah. On the way. And you're not going to come up with an answer. I'm a right. For some reason, my brain just went to the sarcasm HTML tag. Like I'm still waiting for that tag. I've been wanting one for so long. So that's my answer. Thanks a lot. Thanks for being here. Give him a hand. Thanks.