Issara Willenskomer from UX in Motion stops by the podcast to chat about the exciting possibilities of UX design for animators.

Our industry is expanding like gangbusters, and one area that seems to be exploding with new opportunities is the world of motion for UX, or user experience. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon are betting BIG on the power of animation to help their users have a better, more thoughtful experience with their products. And when they need to train their UX designers to understand the principles of motion... they call Issara Willenskomer.

Issara runs UXinmotion.com a site that focuses on the animation for user experience, a niche that is growing very rapidly and offers some incredible career opportunities for animators. He's become a leading expert on the subject, and has an incredible talent for articulating the principles behind good UX. In this interview you'll learn about mental models, skeumorphism, and about the companies and jobs that are out there for motion designers who are looking to use their skills on the cutting edge of product development. We get super dorky in this episode and talk about using After Effects for prototyping, some of the new software alternatives that are out there, and we even grapple with some of the ethical questions that Issara thinks about quite a bit while doing his work.

So sit back, and say hello to Issara Willenskomer...

Issara Willenskomer Show Notes

Issara

• UX in Motion
• Selling Motion to Stakeholders-Special SOM Link

ARTISTS/STUDIOS

• GMUNK
• IDEO
• Superfad
• Don Anton
• Will Hyde
• Dos Rios
• Todd Siegel
• Adam Plouff
• Sander van Dijk

RESOURCES

• Humboldt State
• Material Motion
• Dribbble
• Behance
• GitHub
• Lottie
• Clear (app)
• 12 Principles of Animation
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Creating Usability with Motion Article: The UX in Motion Manifesto
• Framer
• Principle
• ProtoPie
• Flow
• BodyMovin
• Haiku
• Inspector Spacetime
• Adobe XD
• Sketch
• InVision
• How I Destroyed My iPhone Addiction Article
• Deep Learning

MISCELLANEOUS

• Lutron
• This is Fine Meme

Issara Willenskomer Interview Transcript

Joey: This is the School of Motion podcast. Come for the MoGraph stay for the puns.

Issara: So to me, when you talk about partnership with UX, that's the value is, what is the UX from screen A to screen B, what are the user's mental models, and how can the motion reinforce that rather than contradict it? Because granted, if we had that A screen and B screen and gave it to your people, we could come up with like 30 different ways to get from A to B using motion. But if we start to use mental models as a starting point, all of a sudden, those options, the more obvious one becomes more clear and the value it brings becomes much more apparent.

Joey: Our industry is expanding like gangbusters, and one area that seems to be exploding with new opportunities is the world of motion for UX or user experience. Companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon are betting really big on the power of animation to help their users have a better, more thoughtful experience with their products. When they need to train their UX designers to understand the principles of motion, they call Issara Willenskomer, our guest today on the podcast. Issara runs uxinmotion.com, a site that focuses on animation for user experience, a niche that is growing very rapidly and offers some incredible career opportunities for animators. He's become a leading expert on the subject and has an incredible talent for articulating the principles behind good UX.

In this interview, you'll learn about mental models, skeuomorphism and about the companies and jobs that are out there for motion designers who are looking to use their skills on the cutting edge of product development. We get super dorky in this episode and talk about using After Effects for prototyping, some of the new software alternatives that are out there, and we even grapple with some of the ethical questions that Issara thinks about quite a bit while doing his work. This episode has something for everyone, including a cameo from GMUNK and a special link that we will put in our show notes that Issara set up just for the School of Motion audience. I know you're going to dig this one and learn a ton. So sit back and say hello to Issara Willenskomer. But first, say hello to one of our amazing School of Motion alumni.

Sergio Ramirez: My name is Sergio Ramirez. I'm from Colombia and I took the animation bootcamp from School of Motion. What I got from this course is a deep understanding of the art of animation, how to send a message and create an impact through movement. More than the technical part of it, it's about developing yourself as an animator so you can improve your work in any area that you want. I will recommend animation with them to anyone who wants to have a solid foundation in their animation career. My name is Sergio Ramirez and I'm a School of Motion graduate.

Joey: Issara, I feel like we're already buddies. I've only talked to you twice, but now this is like, this is happening really quickly.

Issara: I know.

Joey: But listen, man, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast. This is awesome.

Issara: Thank you, Joey. I'm just super excited, man. I've been a huge fan of School of Motion for a long time and I just really, really admire and respect what you guys are doing. So, I'm just excited to jump on, and if there's any value I can add to your folks, I'm just really excited to do that.

Joey: Thank you.

Issara: And yeah, it's weird. We've had like this is like our second call, but I totally feel like we can hang out and go on a hike or something, dude, so that's awesome

Joey: Yeah, there we go. Well, let's start with this, and this is something I've wanted to ask you. Your name, Issara, it's really unique and interesting. You're the first Issara I've met, so I was just curious. Where does that come from?

Issara: All right. Well, where it comes from is Indonesia. My parents studied meditation in the 70s, and I got some amazing photos of like hippie white people studying meditation, these really cool slides, in fact. I think what's more interesting is not where it came from but what it means. So, I was teaching a workshop last year and my parents always told me that my name means freedom in Pali, you know, freedom, I'm like, cool, right? And that's been like a theme of my life, right? Like am I free? Am I not free? What does it mean to be free? Does structure create freedom? Does lack of structure create freedom? It's just been this thing that's been driving me.

So, I Googled my name for the first time last year, because I want to lead the workshops and know what I'm talking about, and I just wanted to do my due diligence, and it totally doesn't mean freedom at all. And I called up my dad, and I was like, "Dude, what the hell?" And he was like, "Yeah, in hindsight, that dude who told us that may not have been like the most reputable source of info." I was like, "What are you talking about?" So, I think it means like leader or something. At this point, I'm totally over it. Freedom is no longer a theme of my life.

But yeah, that's the story. They were studying meditation. Me and my sister have really weird names. So, my full name is Issara Sumara Willenskomer, and my girlfriend loves to make fun of me about that. And my sister's name is [Rahai] Karuna, and my parents' names are Mark and Barbara, of course. There you go, man.

Joey: That story was even better than I thought it was going to be, and it reminds me of like, I had friends who when they would turn 18, they'd go to Mexico and get like their first tattoo or something, they'd get like a Japanese symbol, and they would say, "Oh, it means strength," and then you'd look it up and it means duck or something like that.

Issara: Yeah.

Joey: That's awesome.

Issara: Yeah.

Joey: All right. Well, so our audience is probably isn't as familiar with you because you sort of operate in a part of the industry that's like, I guess, like a tangent to the traditional motion design world. So, I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about your background. How did you go from your education into what seems like the motion design industry. You worked at Superfad, but then you went back to school, you got a degree in awareness,-

Issara: I don't know where you got that.

Joey: ... and then you ended up in this.

Issara: I don't tell people that. That's Hilarious, man.

Joey: It's on your Linkedin, man. You may want to go and check that.

Issara: Is it? Oh, crap.

Joey: Could you give us the background on a Issara Sumara Willenskomer.

Issara: All right, fair enough. So, full background, the full journey is I was studying ... I went to school at Humboldt State and just kind of was bumbling around, didn't really know what I wanted, was changing my major, discovered photography through one of my mentors, Danny Anton, who just really changed my life and a whole bunch of other folks lives. Amazing photographer. You can Google him, kind of just this spirit wild man. So I discovered photography and I was like, oh my God, this is my thing. And then I was hanging out in the art department at midnight, just pulling all nighters, and lo and behold, this other random weird dude was walking around and we became friends and eventually roommates, and that dude is a Bradley [Grasch], you might know him as GMUNK.

Joey: Wow.

Issara: Yeah. He's just really cool, amazing guy, and so we went to college together and we were just this group of kids who were just pulling all nighters in the arts department. And so, he was doing design work, and I was doing photography and film, and we just kinda started cross pollinating. And I was like, "Oh, design is pretty cool," and he was like, "Oh, photography and film is pretty cool." And so we just hung out, and became roommates and he's just an amazing, cool guy. But when I look back, I really look at not like events that happened, but people that I met that changed my life. And so he's one of those folks that really changed my life and got me turned on to design.

So, I started doing that, started getting kind of obsessed and doing web projects, this was before UX and all that stuff. Of course, he was doing cool motion stuff, and so I was getting turned on by that. And then I dropped out of school, and I just basically freelanced, man, for like seven years. I mean, I just fought in the trenches on Craigslist, dude. I would take any job. I've done like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of projects at this point. I would compete against tons of people, and get the project because I had a crazy portfolio, and I would just do anything. Man, I was so hungry, I loved what I did.

And so I just did, it was such a huge variety of stuff. Everything from like photo production work, to motion graphics, to photography, to design and print. I've designed every print thing you can possibly imagine, and I just I loved print. And so that was kind of just my thing, was just quantity. I would just do tons and tons and tons of work all the time. I would do it for trade. I was just so happy and stoked and I lived practically off of nothing, and it was just my lifestyle man.

So, I had this website, which was designbum.net.

Joey: That's great.

Issara: Yeah, and it was just my life, so like a surf bum, right? But like a design bum. So, I would travel, and I would stay on my friend's couches, and I would trade. I was just cool. So, I was doing that and then I got a job working at IDEO. They had a startup office in Seattle, and it was this tiny office. It was like, I don't know, like seven people or something. And I got mentored by the studio ... They'd build the office around this guy, Rob, Rob Garling, who's amazing guy, and he mentored me.

And we did this project, and I was just doing design work, but there was a motion component. So we passed it off to a freelancer. and he brought it back, and it was really like the first time it connected for me that I had designed something and now it was turned into motion, and there are things that users were doing, and it was like this light bulb just went off and I was just like, "Holy shit. This is amazing, and I need to know how to do this more."

And so I left that job and I submitted my portfolio to Superfad. The producer there, his name was Brien Holman, really, really cool guy, and I had like no motion work in my portfolio at this time, really. It was all just static stuff. I mean, I did maybe a tiny bit, but nothing really. So it was mostly photography and design work, static. And he wrote me back and was like, "Hey, would you like to direct a music video," just based off of my photography. He loved my photography, which was super dark and just crazy moody. And so I got in with Superfad, and I worked with them for a couple of years, and they basically taught me everything I know. So I learned all this stuff on the job working with some amazing mentors. Will Hyde, who started Superfad, amazing guy, and he just helped me, he talked to me all the time and helped me get better.

And so what happened was I kind of had this parallel path of like I was starting to do more motion work, more directing, more commercial work, but then I was also getting called in by places like IDEO to do motion UI work, and it was weird because it was so specialized, right? It was just like they would design cool projects, and then bring me down, and then I'd be the one to design motion. And so I was doing a lot of these different things for years. And then I ended up starting a production company called Dos Rios, and I knew that what I wanted to do was just focus on UI motion work, like exclusively do that. I don't like competing with lots of places. I like to really specialize and find my strength and just do that, and that's just been a life strategy, that's been business strategy for me, is just not competing. And so just finding something that's super valuable and getting really good at that.

And my partner is just really, it wasn't their thing, they were more like film guys. And so after a couple of years, I left, and I knew that I wanted to just create training, and resources, and do this and just really deep dive into it more, so that's what I did, man. I started up UX in Motion and that's what I've been doing is just doing UI motion work. And I've learned so much more than I ever thought I would possibly know about this topic now at this point.

Joey: That is a crazy story, dude.

Issara: It's like the most zigzag, nonlinear, bizarre story I can possibly imagine.

Joey: Yeah. And with a cameo by GMUNK, who by the way, I am probably in the top three GMINK fans. I had no idea you knew him. After we're done with this interview, I'm going to ask you to like tell him hi for me.

Issara: Totally.

Joey: So, you did something really smart, and it sounds like you also kind of were fortunate in that you picked something very, very niche to get good at. And this is something that I hear a lot of like business gurus kind of like talk about that if you want to be really successful, find something that doesn't have a lot of competition, meaning just niche down, niche down, niche down, you've done that. It turns out what you niched down into is now a pretty gigantic part of the tech scene, right?

Issara: Right.

Joey: Like every single screen that's interactive has animation on it now. So, you talked a little bit about the transition going from non interactive work, motion graphics and photography and still designed into interactive work, but can you talk a little bit about what that learning curve was like? For me personally, I haven't really worked on a project where I'm prototyping something that is literally going to be controlled by a human as soon as an engineer gets his hands on it, so what's that like? Was it difficult? Was there a paradigm shift you had to kind of undertake?

Issara: There was some. I started off way back in the day doing flash sites for folks, and it came pretty natural, I have to say. And again, this was before UX, and this was when things were pretty simple and we didn't have to think too deeply about user flows, and outcomes, and tracking, and all this kind of stuff. So it was kind of just fun to build like some, it's like a really small site. Like my photographer friends would just have some cool work, and I'd helped them put it up and make it look awesome and flash. And so I wouldn't say that I really got deep, deep into UX. Like I have friends who are like UX designers. My girlfriend, she's a senior UX designer at Amazon, and I go to her for questions. I can do it, and I've learned a lot, and I have a fairly intuitive sense, but UX can be a really deep thing, but you don't have to go that deep to learn it.

So for me, I don't know. I mean, it's a really good question. I never read any books, I never really studied it as a topic, I just kind of had a gut level instinct for what was good and what wasn't, and I know that's hard to translate over. But like for example, one of the things that I noticed at a very early on stage was when people were designing websites, like portfolio websites, they would do this ridiculous thing where you would have to click the link for portfolio, and then click the project name, and then click like the first piece. And so like by the fourth click in, you would finally get to see something, right? And it sounds crazy now, but because we didn't have an innate understanding of what UX meant, people were just kind of winging it. And I just intuitively was like, why not just show people like the instant they click anything, give them good content as just like a best practice.

And so this was like a life lesson for me that I got very early on that nobody taught me, that it was just through observation of like, "Dude, it is fucking lame when you have to click six links in before you can view this person's work." It's just don't do that, it's just bad. And so I made it my purpose when I was designing my sites and my portfolio was to like always give people amazing content no matter where they click. And again, this was like before UX, but now looking back, it's like, "Oh, that's user experience. That's designing intention and giving people value." And that has to be thought through, it has to be like built out, has to be designed, right?

And so UX is obviously a massive topic and I would in no way claim to be like a real UX designer, I'm kind of like a fake UX designer, but I know enough to really, really work with teams, to critique projects, to do everything that I need to do without being a deep, deep expert.

Joey: Let me ask you this, because I'm having a reaction that I bet a lot of listeners are right now, which is, I'm still kind of confused about what UX actually means. So, in the motion design scene, one very popular type of motion design is called a Fake UI, right? So it's like, you had these fake UIs in Iron Man and stuff like that. And so when I think of UI, I think of the design, of the interface, and isn't that kind of what you're talking about? But keep saying UX as though it's different.

Issara: Totally.

Joey: So maybe you could clear up what the difference is.

Issara: That's awesome, yeah. It's so funny having this conversation with you because the people I talk to are all UX designers and so like we just take this stuff for granted, so it's like not even something that people even talk about, right?

Joey: Right.

Issara: Because it's just like so built in. Yeah. So it's a great, great question, and I actually talked to Bradley about this, it was a long time ago. I asked him if he factored in any UX stuff in his projects, in his film work and stuff. And he was like, "Fuck no, dude. It just all has to look dope. There's no real right UX component."

Joey: Right.

Issara: But so let's answer this. So, UX is how the product works, right? It's the flow, it's the wireframes, it's the thinking behind the idea of what this product is and how people use it and how they go from state to state or task to task. UX can also include like the writing on the buttons, right? So there's like UX copywriters who just write copy to make more accessible user experiences, meaning that like there's no confusion when you hit this button, like what's going to happen next? And that actually takes some thinking sometimes depending on how complex the project is. So all of that stuff has to be thought through. Typically, it's non-visual, meaning that you're not dealing with actual UI styling of like the font size, and the color, and that kind of stuff, it's just like bare bones, wireframe, like how do we make sense of this screen or design this screen in a way that is as intuitive and makes sense as possible and sets the user up for success in the next task or the next task.

So, it's really like, how do I ...?

Joey: It's like function over form really.

Issara: Yeah. It's completely function like a reform. Now, that being said, this is my answer, and if you ask like 10 UX designers, you may get 20 different answers to this question, because I've talked to folks who firmly believe that you should be designing the visuals when you're designing the actual UX. And what's nice now is, when you're working on products, that can be one to one, so if you have a product that has a like styles component and a graphic standards, each button you add as you're designing the UX will be styled in the product styling. So it is, for the most part, one to one. So when we first started this, that didn't exist, and so the UX was basically just wireframes, and now it's to the point where if you have a good asset library as you're designing the UX, you are building it with the UI components that are gonna be finalized, so it has changed a bit.

And yes, with the fantasy UI work, there's not really a UX component per se, right? I mean, it looks great, but in terms of actually like if somebody was going to use this thing and get from this task to this task, there's just so much crazy noise and clutter and just like crazy stuff, which looks awesome visually, but if you were going to test that out and actually get that in front of people who are actually going to use this product, they would just be like totally hosed, right? They'd be like no fricking way to use this thing.

Joey: That makes a ton of sense, yeah.

Issara: Yeah. So, you're using psychology, but then you're also measuring and tracking. So, research is a huge, huge part of UX. I'm a firm believer in getting the data, using it and making better products. I really believe that to make great products, you have to do multiple versions, and you have to test it in the wild and see how it performs, and then take that data and make it better. And you're using psychology, you're using human perception, all of these things are super, super important, and these tiny differences can make a 20% conversion difference, which was freaking insane, you know? So, it is a fundamentally different process.

Joey: So yeah, you're making me think of like, I'm trying to think of an example just to see if I get it so hopefully I can sort of act as a proxy for the listeners.

Issara: All right.

Joey: So, like I'm thinking of like the way you order something on Amazon, right? So like in the very old days, you would click buy, and then you'd have to type your name, your address, your credit card number. Are you sure? Yes. Boom, right? Now, it's one click ordering boom. That's it. That's a user experience difference. Now, what does that button look like? What is the styling of the website? That's the interface. Is that basically it?

Issara: Yes. Yeah, that could be it in a nutshell for sure.

Joey: Awesome. Okay. So, I've been reading more and more about this stuff, I've been reading your articles, and it seems like in the last two to three years, this has really kind of taken off as an area of thought, and writing, and development and there's new apps coming out that sort of make this work better. But when you were starting out in this field, I think looking at your Linkedin, it was like around 2009 or something like that, what was it like back then? Did companies and even developers understand user experience? Was that really a word that was tossed around back then?

Issara: Oh man. You're asking a person who like literally doesn't know what he had for lunch yesterday. I've got like 500 aftereffects keyboard shortcuts in my brain that are hardwired at this point, but I'm like so bad with time, man. It's a great question, but I'm like, dude, I don't even know what was happening like last year or in 2009. But yeah. There definitely has been a huge change since I started, and part of the change has to do with answering this question, which is what I've been trying to do in my workshops, and training, and articles. It's like, what's the value of motion when it comes to products? And right when I first started, the value was in making it look cool.

So I would typically get hired for these top secret vision videos that were like three to five years out, these huge expensive projects, and the value was like, "Let's just make it sick dude," right? But in the back of my mind, I was just wondering like, what is the value? And I would ask people and I would just get a blank look, right? Because like, dude, the value is making it look awesome. But I was unsatisfied with that answer because I really suspected that there was more, and it wasn't until I discovered mental models and how the motion can partner with the UX, and the visual design and possibly the gesture to create these like synergistic moments that I really had an aha moment and that's when things changed for me.

And to some degree, I also think that one of the game changers was that the tools changed to the point where we can start to do more and more motion, and you see it all the time in products. And so now when you're designing motion, you have to be thinking, well, can this be built? Right? And that's typically not a conversation you have with a traditionally trained motion designer because the end result is just making something that looks awesome and then just exporting from After Effects. But when you're talking about UX, you really have to be thinking several moves ahead. And I talk about all this stuff in the workshops, which is about strategy, and scoping and scaling your work to what's possible, because if you design great stuff but it never gets built and you're just frustrating your team, well then, how much value are you really adding at that point? You know?

Joey: Yeah, definitely.

Issara: So I do see the conversation having changed a lot in terms of what the value is.

Joey: And is this being driven by the ... I would imagine this is being driven primarily, especially like a few years ago, by big tech companies like Google, and Apple, and Microsoft, and Airbnb. Actually, we had the creators of Lottie have been on the podcast, and it seems like back in those days, which was really only a few years ago, there weren't great tools for doing this and so it took the resources of a big company to even create tooling to do it. So, has that been your experience that this is being driven sort of from the top down by tech giants but now it's trickling in to smaller and smaller companies?

Issara: It's funny you say that, because my experience has been the opposite from a product standpoint. From a vision video standpoint, yeah, the people who could spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on a futuristic vision video would be definitely bigger players, so that was top down, and for that, they would have to hire like a film production crew and a huge post production team, and now that was like huge budget, right? But when it comes to actual like motion design in products, like the real deal, like a product you can use like on your phone, I have to say, man, the online world and small companies seem to be crushing it and really kind of leading the way in what's possible. I mean, there are some exceptions like Google motion, Material Motion comes to mind where they've invested years of research in developing a really interesting motion design standards framework.

But for the most part, in terms of expanding the conversation of like what we can do, I've seen just a lot of incredible stuff on like Dribbble, on Behance, on Pinterest, on GitHub, and even small product places like ClearApp, when that came out. I mean, there was a minuscule company, they designed a whole new way of interacting with a product, and they weren't like a massive company. And also in doing these workshops, I found that a lot of these big companies have so much legacy and they're so invested in their platform that it's actually very, very challenging for them to do motion.

So, certain places that I've done workshops at like name brands, huge places, they really, really struggle because as a scalability function of their business, their system that they invested in just isn't agile and their hands are really tied. And it's the smaller companies who can come in and say, "Look, we know that motion is going to be part of our product," so they're designing it more from the ground up that I think have some kind of edge. But that being said, since Airbnb released Lottie, that's been I think, just a bomb went off, and everybody's using that, and now it gives big companies and small companies the opportunity to build cool things and then get that directly entered into the product.

Joey: So, where do animators fit right now? Because we talked about the distinction between UI and UX, and from a motion design perspective, animation as part of the presentation, right? It's the gloss on top, but reading through your stuff, it's very clear that you're also communicating not just in the way like if I have a character walk on screen and do something, I'm communicating, I mean, by having the button grow versus shrink versus move left to right, I'm saying something different. Is animation part of that user experience or is it like after that?

Issara: Yes. Okay. So, this is where things get awesome, dude. So yes, this is the opportunity for your folks. So, the way I see it, I distinguish two kinds of motion in products. One is where it like integrates with the UX, and we'll talk about that, and then one is what it causes more like additive where it's like a loading screen or an onboarding screen or it's some kind of passive kind of more like a little movie inside the product, right? So typically for the latter, yeah, you're using more Disney's 12 principles and you're just making it look good. And if it's like a character, it's done really well, and there's a lot of craftsmanship and like detailing and stuff.

On the former though, this is where I think the major opportunity lies. So, the way I look at it is that motion can be used as an explanatory feature that partners with the UX. So, a great example that I like to use is like the calendar app on the iPhone. So when you're zoomed out on the year view and you tap the month, it zooms in, right?

Joey: Right.

Issara: There's this kind of a zoom motion thing. That's like partnering with the UX, but so what's it doing? What's the value? Right? I mean this is what I always get to. It's like, okay, we see that, it seems to be working, but how and why and really what's the value here? So one of the mental exercises I like to do is just imagine that interaction without the motion. So you tap the month and it just pops to the month, like full screen. So, you're on the year view with the months like on a grid, you tap like August and it just cuts to August. How is that different and is it better or worse than it is now? So that's an interesting question, right? Like what is the motion actually doing to get you from A to B?

My assertion is that the motion is serving as an explanatory function. It's telling a story and it's keeping the users in the task domain. So if that motion wasn't there or if it was like different motion, say like you tapped the month and there was like a 3D card flip and on the other side was the month, right? That would be fricking weird because our mental model is that we just want to get closer to these small numbers on the screen, and that's what the motion's doings. It's reinforcing the mental model that already exists. We just want to get closer to it, because visually, we see that it's zoomed out and really, we just want it to zoom in, and that's what the motion does. It reinforces that and it does that via an explanatory way. It's telling us a micro story that happens, and again, this isn't really like Disney's 12 principles, it's not about really getting the feel right, it's about like a design system of motion that's telling this very, very brief story. And again, this is in like half a second or less.

So to me, when you talk about partnership with UX, that's the value is, what is the UX from screen A to screen B? What are the user's mental models and how can the motion reinforce that rather than contradict it? Because granted, if we had that A screen and B screen and gave it to your people, we could come up with like 30 different ways to get from like A to B using motion. But if we start to use mental models as a starting point, all of a sudden, those options, like the more obvious one becomes more clear and the value it brings becomes much more apparent.

Joey: So, this is so fascinating to me.

Issara: [crosstalk] stuff too.

Joey: Can you talk a little bit more about ... yeah, I want to hear a little bit more about mental models, because this is something that ... I think this is the key difference between animating for UX versus animating for traditional motion design. Now, there's always a tendency when you're starting out, you learn After Effects, you buy Trapcode Particular, you use it on everything, and everything becomes a question of what's the coolest way to get from A to B? And then you kind of mature a little bit as a motion designer and you learn to be a little more tactical, a little more subtle, more deliberate. But what you're talking about is like 100 steps deeper than that.

Issara: Yeah.

Joey: So, maybe you could give us like what are some other examples? I love the calendar. I think that was pretty clear. You've got the bird's eye view of the entire year and then you zoom into one month, and that's a pretty obvious one, and in a way, I'm gonna use a word and you can tell me if I use it correctly. It's a little bit skeuomorphic, right?

Issara: Yeah.

Joey: Because that's really how a calendar is. It's a collection of months and then you can look at one at a time. But there's other less obvious mental models, I think, that I'm sure you come up against. So, I'd like to hear a little bit more about that.

Issara: Yeah. Well, so going back to skeuomorphic, that's really, I think, a large component of this. So, when I go back and I look at the article that I wrote, it's fundamentally about a skeuomorphic behavior, which is not necessarily the visual content, but the fact that we are these creatures in a world and we have to navigate this world and we do that by making sense of the world. And so essentially, there are these four things that help us make sense, and these are kind of like overlapping things.

And I keep coming back to it, man, and this was something that just showed up a couple of years ago as I was just trend mapping thousands and thousands of these references, and I kept trying to understand the value, right? So I would literally spent like a couple months and I just like looked at thousands and thousands of references, and Joey, I was just asking myself, "Okay, what is this doing to my mind? How is this working? What are the mechanics here?" And one tool that I developed was this like four questions, right? So like continuity, relationship, narrative and then like expectation. And not everything has all four of these, but what I have found is when you're designing motion for UX, if it doesn't have any of these, that's usually a red flag that it's not partnering, it's not working with mental models. If it has one or more, that's a good sign, but it may not be the end all determinant of whether it does provide value.

But when I'm designing motion, when I teach in my workshops, I really encourage people to start using these four tools to look at it. So like the real world, continuity, things don't pop into existence or out. That would be alarming and it would trigger our nervous system to basically react because that would potentially be a threat and there's more downside than there is an upside.

Joey: It's sorcery, you know?

Issara: Yeah. Well, it's just like from an evolutionary standpoint, if something approaches us quickly, the chances are that it's harmless ... What am I trying to say? There's more of an upside in reacting quickly, right?

Joey: Right.

Issara: So, that's what we're primed for. So, there's like continuity, relationship, being able to see things in relationship to each other, which could be a like cause and effect for instance. Narrative, having these little stories. Our mind makes sense of the world through narratives. This is kind of a problem because the world is non-narrative fundamentally, but this is how we internalize like information for instance. And then, expectation. Using affordances and signifiers to start to design motion from that.

So, Don Norman wrote this really great book called The Design of Everyday Things and he talks about how we look for these visual cues, and these visual cues help tell us what to do and how to use this thing. Well, the UX can often provide those, and so if we're using those as starting points when we're designing motion, typically, we're going to have much more of a partnership than if we're just designing completely from scratch, which may not be a bad thing, but when you're looking for opportunities on leveraging existing mental models that are already implied in a static design, oftentimes, they're already there, man.

And so, one of the biggest mistakes I find motion designers making is they just go off and they just start designing shit. And you're like, dude, none of that was implied by the visuals and the UX, right? Because we don't want to be surprising people, we want this to be a seamless thing. We want the motion to be invisible. And I think when you're a motion designer, typically, you're looking to design amazing, beautiful, luscious, great things that is noticed, that is apparent, where like people say, "Wow." But in this case, because you're talking about keeping people in context, in the flow of their task, you don't want the motion of pop them out and have them notice it, and then they have to return back to their task. That's usually not what you're going for.

Joey: So, you mentioned earlier an app called ClearApp, which I think you're talking about like the To-Do app, correct?

Issara: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joey: Yeah. So, I know this is going to be kind of difficult to do in podcast format, but what is it ... because I think you've used that as an example in one of your articles too, what is it about the way ... because a to-do app, right? It's like you make a list, and then you should be able to like click a checkbox and then you did it, right? Hooray, now it's checked.

Issara: Right.

Joey: So, using mental models, how would you use motion or how do they use motion to add and make it clearer to the user what's going on or make it feel more satisfying or whatever it is that the value is?

Issara: Yeah. So, that's a great question, and to me, that's a completely different category. So, previously we discussed like looking for affordances and signifiers that would imply what would happen or provide some kind of clue. With the case of Clear, they basically took away all of those things and just basically said we're going to train people how to use this. And so they didn't rely on any mental models at all to learn it, but when you learn it, these become intuitive gestures. I bring this example up in my workshops because I want to show that I believe there is leeway to train your users to do new things. Now, the caveat being of course, that you have to know your users really, really freaking well.

So for example, I did a workshop for Lutron, and they design lighting systems. Now, they have like a very challenging task because their user base is like the most split user base I've ever seen. So, on one hand, they have this core group of like old school users who are really kind of like not used to learning new things, and then they also have a group of young users. And so they're constantly trying to answer this question like, "How much can we push them and have them learn new things?" So, in the case of Clear, I think it's safe to say they were just like, "Look, we just want to design something great and cool and have it work really, really well. We're not going to be using mental models per se as a starting point for designing the motion, but what we are going to be doing is using motion as an explanatory part of the gesture." And so, this is where it goes back to like using motion to explain things, right?

So again, when you have that A/B state, and if you can imagine with the Clear app, you pull it down to make a new a like item, and the way it comes on is a dimensional like 3D hinged rotation to create this new item. Now, if you include that as the B state and then the A state is before that, you could design all like 50 different ways to transition between those or different gestures. But what they did was they had a very simple explanatory model just based on gesture alone. So for me, when I think about designing motion, the mental model conversation isn't as important as the explanatory conversation of using motion to explain how we get from one state to the next.

Joey: So then, maybe a better way to kind of come at this would be to talk about like maybe some hypothetical. So I mean, like I would imagine a common task that you need to design a UX for would be, I don't know, let's say you sign up for a new website, and you have to fill out your name and your email address, and then some other information, and then your preferences and things like that. You could just load one screen, then load the next one, then load the next one. But if you're using this mental model approach, are there ways of looking at that where maybe it would be a little clearer to the user which information is most important, which is least important. How much more information there is after this screen, like things like that, and you can design around that?

Issara: Yeah, totally. And again, I tend to look as a starting point, what is the UX, what is a visual design? So, in the case of like a longer series of forms, I would hope that there would be some kind of visual indicator that would let the user know where they were in the progress. So, if it's like a long scrolling thing, they would have some kind of visual thing, and then I typically use that as a starting point or a hook and then design motion like around that hook. And not everything will have that, but in terms of looking at opportunities, I always encourage people to just really, really examine what's in the UX, what's in the visual first and how the motion can support those things, because you don't want the motion typically to go off and then just do it's own thing. You want to create really seamless user experiences. So, depending on the design that could afford all kinds of different motion opportunities, right? So, I think that's a great example.

So, one question I get asked a lot is like, for X situation, what kind of motion would you design, right? And I really don't think it works like that at all. I think that because the motion is so dependent on the UX and it's so dependent on the visuals, it's really not helpful to create prescriptive like cases. It's much more helpful to train people on how to just use the UX and the visuals as a starting point and then start to do versioning around those things, but not to say like objectively like, "Oh, you should use motion type 3B in this example here," if that makes sense.

Joey: Yeah, it does. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to include in the show notes a link to your article where there's lots of great examples that I think do a really good job of sort of illustrating some of the things you're talking about. There were some great examples in there of having parallax in the animation between states or moving sort of in zSpace forwards and backwards to imply that there's a time component to the information that you're giving the user. And these are just things I'm not used to thinking about typically as a motion designer that I think more and more and more of us are going to have to wrap our heads around. So we'll link to that and everyone should read that. It's amazing, amazing article.

And I want to talk about sort of the work you're doing. And I think in that article or in a different one you pointed out something really interesting is that there's a linguistic barrier that we have in English, and probably other languages, to explain what it is we're talking about. So, even the word motion design, no one really truly knows what that means. And then to explain what it is you're talking about, I'm tripping over myself trying to explain it. So, do you find that to be a big sticking point? Like if you're pitching companies, doing a workshop, or if you're trying to explain to your friends what it is you do, is that a big problem?

Issara: It is a huge challenge, and it's also a big opportunity for teams and design companies. So yeah. I mean, dude, my parents have no idea what I do. I try explain and it's just this just going nowhere. My mom still thinks I do like web stuff is what she tells people.

Joey: Right. He works with computers.

Issara: He works with computers. Yeah, totally. But yeah. So, it comes down to what is language, right? And language is distinction. That's what language is. So if you say the color red, you're distinguishing some sensory experience from something else, and same with blue, or hot, or cold. These things are distinctions that only exists in language. So, what we're trying to do here is develop more rigorous language around motion. Now, in the past, before UX and like products, things were just passive, and we had movies, and Disney's 12 principles, and those were the source of linguistic distinctions when it came to motion. Now that we're dealing with things that are interactive and that are in products and that we really have to kind of articulate the value in deeper, more meaningful ways, that is a huge challenge.

So, for example, when it comes to motion products, the stakeholders might talk about it one way, the design team might talk about it in a different way, the engineering team might talk about it a different way, the research team might talk about it a different way. It gets super hard for everybody to get on the same page like this is what we're talking about, here's what we think the value is, here's how we should build it. And so, yeah. Part of my workshops are geared around developing language. Now, the funny thing is like, dude, I'm not trying to start a cult, right? So I tell people like, "Okay, in this workshop we're going to develop these terms. The language isn't as important as the concepts that they represent," so I'm trying to get people to, try to teach people how to see, and then in their own words, communicate these distinctions.

I'm not too attached to the actual language and wording per se, the concepts that I use I've found to be true at whatever team you want to talk about that's doing motions so that Google will talk about the same ideas that I talk about in my workshop, they might use slightly different words, and again, I don't want people in my workshop to leave the workshop and then use these words and then end up confusing people and have them think that they're in some kind of weird motion design cult thing, right? It's the concepts that we want folks to get.

And so that's why I think it's really important when you're designing motion is to get everybody using some sort of common words and phrases. And I find that the most challenging usually comes from stakeholders because UX projects are so like stakeholder dependent in terms of resources and like vision. If they have like giving their team a mandate to do more motiony stuff but that's really not clear what they're talking about, then I just see it creating like a lot of friction and a lot of challenges for the design team.

Joey: Yeah, yeah. It's a challenge in the traditional motion design world too, but I can imagine what you're dealing with. Okay. So, this is all like super interesting and I really encourage everyone to read your article. I will link to it. I want to talk about sort of the tools that UX designers are using to do this sort of thing right now and motion designers. So, I know that through your site, UX in Motion, you're currently using After Effects primarily as the tool. But before we talk about why, I want to know what's the current state of the toolset for doing UX animation prototyping?

Issara: Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot of tools out there and there's new ones coming out every day. The tricky thing is that not only is there a spectrum of tools, but each tool kind of has its own capabilities and things that it's good at and then limitations. So, when it comes to prototyping motion, there's some considerations you want to be looking at when it comes to products. So typically, you're looking at several different things. One is, can the tool draw assets, right? Just draw the things that you actually need. Number two, can you link screens together and actually build little like click throughs where you click from this region and it goes to this screen? Number three, can you actually design motion selectively in certain regions? And then number four, can you share this and use it for presentation? And then number five, can you package up the assets and deliver it to your team?

So, these are typically, like if you want this broad picture approach, and I learned this from my friend Todd Siegel, who's a prototyping genius. This is how he evaluates and vets, qualifies tools. So, there's a lot of tools that fit various aspects of that spectrum. Yes, I tend to focus on After Effects. That's all I use, and I get asked this question a lot like, "Dude, why do you want to use this?" And I think part of the answer is just, I'm fundamentally a lazy person.

My strategy is to get good at the tools that I use, not be the person who uses all the tools. So, I have friends who have a fundamentally different strategy, and I don't think there's anything right or wrong. I've seen people succeed with both strategies, so if you want to be the person who wants to learn all the tools, go ahead and do that. I found the most success for me just like this is just what I do, and if you want to work with me, this is what I will deliver. And again, just super, super specialized, and I don't necessarily think that that works for all people.

So, that being said, I think about being able to deliver high fidelity as having a ton of value. So, at the high fidelity end, there's only a couple tools that I really look to and notice when I teach workshops and I talk to folks like what tools they're using. So, Framer comes to mind, Principle comes to mind, Protopie, those are kind of the top three that I've seen folks use for delivering super polished, really, really, really polished work. That being said, within that, those tools don't do a lot of things that like After Effects does. So, like 3D comes to mind and just having literally complete control over everything is fundamentally different. So, that's the state of tools. It's still kind of the wild west. I don't have the data on what percentage uses what tool and so forth.

But I have to tell you, man, I keep thinking that After Effects is going to go away as a prototyping tool of choice, and it's still hanging in there, and people are making more tools for it and making it better. So, one of the big game changers was like Lottie being able to literally build incredibly beautiful things and then export them as JSON files for your like engineering team to use directly like in the products. That is amazing. So, I think in terms of that alone, that gives After Effects a huge edge over other tools. And using something like Flow, like the plugin Flow to create shared libraries of velocity curves and like using that would sync with your like engineering team, that's also really helpful.

So, I don't man. I'm not a person who pushes After Effects and says, "Oh, you have to learn this tool, dude, you need to learn this." I say, look it depends on where you're at. If you're looking to really expand possibility and blow folks away and really have all the granular tools to go to work on and deliver high fidelity polish work, then yeah, you might want to consider using like After Effects even though it's not designed for this kind of work. But plenty of folks are happy using something like Framer or Principle.

Joey: Yeah. That cleared up actually quite a bit, and it's kind of what I suspected is that After Effects is just so feature rich being like a mature animation program that aside from just having every option available to animate in 2D, 3D, Graph Editor, you've got great tools like Flow. But the one downside that I've heard from people using it is that you're still out putting pixels, right?

Issara: Yeah.

Joey: Now, even with a Bodymovin and Lottie which do spit out code, it is not a tool designed to spit out code. It's kind of a ... and I'm not a developer, so I could say thing wrong, but it's a little bit of a hacky way of doing it and it works. However, it's not the super efficient compared to ... I'll bring up a tool that has recently come on my radar. I'm super impressed with it. It's very new, but it's called Haiku, and it literally spits out code and it kind of does so in a way where you can like embed that into your app. And when you change the animation curve on the button, you can export that and it goes right into the app and it just works, and it's interactive, and you can program, it's got almost like a flashlight feature where you can program interactivity into it.

So, that seems like a far more appropriate tool for someone building interactivity into an app. And with After Effects, you still have this layer of friction between the work you're doing and then how it's eventually going to be turned into react code or something like that.

Issara: Exactly.

Joey: So, is that kind of the case and do you think is it just that it's still worth it even with that friction?

Issara: Well, I think that's a great question and it really depends on where you're willing to tolerate your friction. So, some people have a need to whatever they build, they have to get it put into the product, and I think, yeah, then you might want to come down on the side of a tool that may have less designed features but has better export features, or you may be designing something and really just need to not be limited by the tools to just help expand what's possible and expand the conversation. So for that, I still think that After Effects does have the best set of tools, even though it does provide a lot of friction.

And this is also why I think the strategy component is super, super important, meaning that if with UX you're working with team, stakeholders, like engineers, possibly researchers, but you're also looking at inherent platform limitations. So, I really encourage people who are designing motion to do their freaking homework, and it's amazing to me that people don't do this.

So, like in my workshops and in everything I do and when I start a project, I'm like, "Okay, put me in touch with the people who are going to be building this. Let me figure out from them how I can help them win." Right? And so sometimes, those teams are like, "Yeah, we'll take like a render from After Effects and we'll make it look great," because they have the capabilities, they have the skillset and they have a deep understanding of motion, and the platform can support that. Sometimes they're just like, "Yeah, we need to have like exported assets because we can't rebuild stuff because they aren't motion good," or it could be that the platform itself just really doesn't have the features that support what you want to do. And so I like to do all of this homework up front before I even start designing anything man.

Because the way I see it is like my job designing motion for products is to have the engineers win because motion is so dependent on the ability to get it executed well, and if it's not done well, like for a simple transition site, if it's clunky, and if it's junky, and it just looks like shit, it could be even worse than not having motion sometimes. And so because there's so many dependencies in getting motion executed really, really well, I like to really invest my time at the beginning of the project before I design anything, to really figure out what can the platform do, what can my like engineering team do, what do they have the bandwidth for, what's low hanging fruit for them and kind of work backwards from there.

And I find most people just really don't do this enough, and you run the risk of like when you're done and you've made cool stuff and you hand it off, your team is like, "I have no idea what this is," or like, "Dude, we can do a half of this," or it's just going to be junky, right? And so it's a different way for motion designers to be thinking.

And I've had motion designers in my classes who when they got this, they're like, "Oh crap." Like they all of a sudden become a very super valuable part of the team versus being the person that just gets motion handed off to them, right? Which is a common complaint I hear from motion designers who join product teams, it's like nobody really listens to them. They don't get the input and they're just kinda marginalized a lot. And I really advise them to like, "Well, do your homework. Really, really find out how you can maximize the value and that means you're making friends with the people they're going to be building this thing and talking to them and really working through what's possible and what's not. Because if you're just designing beautiful stuff but you can't hand it off or it can't get built, then you're not really adding value, you know?"

Joey: Yeah. I think you just nailed it. I mean, that to me seems like the biggest challenge with having this type of work become mature and stable and everyone knows how to do it, it's that there really are two sides that have to somehow interface, you've got animators and you've got software engineers. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Like to me, it seems like as a motion designer, there's a certain of software engineering that you just probably need to understand enough, right?

Issara: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally, dude.

Joey: To be able to think of things like, well, this is going to be on an android device and so I can't do something that's going to require fully ray-traced 3 ... you know, whatever. And then on the engineering side, there probably also needs to be a little bit of animation knowledge, right?

Issara: Yeah.

Joey: They need to at least develop a little bit of an eye for things like easing so they can tell if it didn't come through correctly, things like that.

Issara: Well, so from the engineering side, it's a couple of things. One is, yeah, the eye for it, but it's also having an eye for, is the motion adding value here? Is it working with mental models? Is it keeping the users in context or is this just totally fluff or is it even distracting? Right? So, from that perspective, they can definitely help. And then from the motion perspective, yeah. Here's the thing, dude, I can't write any code. I am literally like, I'm like mentally deficient when it comes to writing code. It could be because I was dropped on my head when I was a baby. I went to the hospital, I suspect that's the case. But I've tried to learn how to write, I'm just like, dude, I don't have it.

So, what I do is I have conversations with people who write code and I show them examples of things and I say, "Hey, look, how doable is something like this? How about this?" And so I have a working knowledge of the platform limitations, and the low hanging fruit, and the strengths and weaknesses, and how long things will take, but I don't have like a technical knowledge. Now, that's not to say you shouldn't because there are plenty of amazing motion designers who can write code who really love and hunger to have that technical knowledge, and I think that's great, that just makes you so much more valuable, but I don't see it as being a requirement. What is a requirement is the ability to walk over to somebody else's desk, and have a conversation, and be like a cool person, and make friends with the person so that they want to help you so that you can help them win, right? This is just basic like human interpersonal team building stuff what I like talking about.

I think most of the time with these tech jobs we have, people are just so used to like sending a like email and just being like, blah blah blah, blah blah. And it just becomes this weird thing where it's like, dude, a conversation has so much more information density, right? Like in a three minute conversation, just having, talking to a person face to face and showing things, you have more information density than you could in like a month of corresponding back and forth about stupid stuff.

So, I think very strategically, I tend to maximize my time and I really want to know as quickly as possible what I can do and how to hand off projects like assets, I don't want that to take three weeks to figure out of back and forth. Like if it's literally I'm just not walking over to this person's desk because I have a habit of not doing that or because I'm socially weird or something, then like you just got to get over it, make friends, move things forward quickly and get to that point where you can really deliver on how to add value to your team who's building this. Because a lot of folks, they're just like building these out and they're just dropping the mic and walking off, and you're like, "Dude, you can't do that." Their work is maybe half done at that point. You know?

Joey: Yeah. I think that that's certainly part of it. I think also though there's an aspect of like as motion designers too, we're used to having fairly efficient workflows. Like if I'm working with Video Editor, I can render something out and put it in Dropbox and they can put it in the edit and that's it. There doesn't have to always be so much back and forth, and I don't know if that's ever going to go away because this is just a more complicated thing. But let me ask you this, we mentioned already that using After Effects is incredible for prototyping, but then there's a little bit of friction getting that translated into the app. It's getting better and better with things like Bodymovin and Lottie. But what would it take for After Effects to become the ideal tool for this? Like what are the features that like engineers and software engineers love?

Issara: I can't even do it. It just breaks my heart, man. I mean, this conversation, this topic is a can of worms, dude, and the reason is, is because like there's those sites that are devoted to like, could you guys please just write this feature in? And it's got like 10,000 thumbs up votes where everybody knows that it would just save the world like millions of man hours if they would just write this one little thing in and they just don't, dude. And I love the team, I love the product, I love what they've created, but like in order to really deliver on this, for them to really make this a prototyping tool of choice, I think it's just a fundamental cultural shift that they need to solve their problems, not with third party plugins, but in actually addressing some major problems with their software. And it's such a frustrating thing for me these just simple things that they could do.

But yeah. If you want to have that conversation, I think definitely being able to export assets to engineers would be absolutely critical and not have it be a third party plugin, but like actually built into the tool, because that's a huge obstacle, right? That's a huge source of friction right now like you said that we all know is that there's really very little it can do, other Lottie, that can add value as a like handoff asset, right? And so just taking a step back and saying, "Look, we're actually working with shape layers that are vector. We should be able to give people a ton of options around this," and packaging up files.

Inspector Spacetime, the Google plugin also sort of solves pieces of this, and I think if they took it seriously, they would either buy these plugins and just build them, make one super rich feature or create like a different export modality or something. I don't know, man. But like I just don't see it ever happening at this point, you know?

Joey: But it's just the exporting is really the friction. I mean, is there something else? I can understand like not having it spit out code creates an extra step, but are there other considerations like when you're designing a lot of times for like things that have to react to different screen sizes and adapt and things like that.

Issara: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff. So yeah, like making it work on responsive layouts would be absolutely cool. I don't really know, man, because like I've just gotten so used to my workflow and working with teams and kind of adjusting how to best deliver what I can deliver to teams that I haven't really sat down and just had like a wishlist of like, "Man, if this was really going to do it, what would that look like?" But yeah, I think addressing responsive things, having really, really good libraries of like shareable assets would also be really helpful. Probably being able to design instances of things and just really being able to make a like interactive version regardless of it being limited in like functionality, being able to have some kind of way to preview on a device and having the ability to like just tap, or swipe, or even if they just started doing that, that would be a fricking game changer, right?

But not being able to preview on devices I think makes it really, really challenging, because like you're saying it's all like pixel based. I think having a design mode that wasn't like with sub-pixels, which is great for typical motion design, but when you're designing products, it's all like pixel based, so the whole sub pixel thing just doesn't make sense to like UX designers, so it would probably have to be some kind of different mode of working basically that they would develop.

Joey: Yeah. Well, I should point out too for everyone listening that Adobe has a totally separate product called XD that I think does most of these things. I haven't used it so I'm not an expert in it, but I don't think it has nearly the feature richness I guess, it doesn't have all the animation bells and whistles and plugins the way After Effects does. It's a newer tool, but I know that it's designed more for this than After Effects.

Issara: No. Like what XD does well is it works as a design tool for just like drawing assets, but then it also lets you do voice design really well too, and that's actually pretty amazing. I've blogged about the asset handoff from XD to After Effects, but their ability to deliver motion in the program as of right now is like extremely limited, and not only that, you can't even important movie files, or gifs, or anything, dude, it's crazy.

So, as just a drawing tool, I think it's fine, and for doing like basic clickthroughs, I think it's fine, but they have a different motion engine that they wrote, which is much more like the Flash key frame plugins where all the property data is just on one key frame, right? So, with Flash, if you did a position scale rotate, blah, blah, blah on two ... How do I say this, dude? All that data is just in one key frame where as in After Effects, those are all separate properties with several key frame. So, it's really weird. It's really weird and it doesn't give you the levers that you need.

Joey: Gotcha. Okay. I know it's a newer tool and hopefully that continues to get updated too, but it still feels then we are still kind of in the wild west then as far as the tooling goes.

Issara: I think so, man. And having just like on the ground experience talking to teams, going in, I'm always curious like, "Well, what are you using?" And I swear like every single badass person that I've ever met is using like three tools, three or four tools, and it's always a little bit different, right? So like it's usually a combination of like Framer, After Effects, Sketch, like they all solve different problems. So there isn't like one tool to rule them all yet, but what I have noticed, dude, is that all the top people are definitely using After Effects as part of their skillset. And it's just like a pattern that I've noticed, so that's what it is, you know?

Joey: That's really, really interesting. Well, let's talk about your company, UX in Motion. And the way that I found out about you was through an article you publish on Medium called the UX in Motion Manifesto, and you did your homework on that thing. It is a long, dense, really insightful article, and will definitely link to it everyone. Like if this is the only show note you click, this is the one I would click. What made you want to write that piece?

Issara: Oh dude. Well, yeah man. First of all, thanks so much for the kind words. Dude, again, it just came back to that question that was in the back of my mind for years, which is like what's the value of motion, right? And the fact that nobody could really answer it or like people had little pieces here and there, but nobody really just collected. And so, I'm just a thinker, man. I just love to read, and I love to like understand things and just kind of figure out how things work. And I had just been thinking about it for a long time until one day I was just using something, I don't even know what, and it just clicked that like this motion here, my mind was seeking information embedded in the motion. And I was like, "Wait, what is this? This is crazy.

And what I kind of got to was that the motion has information inside of it that can keep me in context or keep me in task or do all kinds of really, really cool things. And when I kinda got that, I was like, "Whoa. Like that's amazing. That's an amazing tool for us to use," and I just really wanted to share that. So I took, I don't know, maybe four months to write that. Like it really took a long time man, because I just had to keep, again, like looking at thousands of references, and like slowing them down in my mind and playing it back, and just doing a lot of meditating on the top on the topic, and just like really trying to answer that question as deeply as I possibly could. And so that's really what it was about was like, if somebody asks me what is the value of motion in products, I wanted to be able to answer that and give other people the tools to really answer and learn from that.

Joey: That's awesome. Well, it does a really good job at that. It kind of opened my eyes up quite a bit and I think our audience is going to really like it. And so on your site, uxinmotion.com, you have a bunch of courses that you teach and there are all sort of focused on using After Effects to prototype stuff. And I think the first time I talked I sort of commented that our audience is motion designers, they already know how to animate or they're learning from us, they don't know about UX nearly as much, mental models and stuff like that. You kind of have the opposite audience, right? And so what was it about your audience that made you realize, wow, they really could use a little After Effects training?

Issara: Well, it was just organic, man. So, I wrote that article and I just needed to get it off my chest. I wasn't expecting to go anywhere, dude. Like I was just like, "Ah, I gotta get this out of my brain because I can't stop thinking about it," it was driving me crazy. So, I pushed it and I was like, "Okay, done with that. I don't need to think about this anymore. I'm just done." And then it just kind of went viral, it's up to like five or 600,000 views or something. Like literally almost every UX designer I've ever met has read it at this point, which is insane to me. It's like freaking insane.

So, I started getting hits from people who wanted me to teach workshops and just publish more. And so I was like, "Well, okay, I guess a better talk more about this." But the weird thing was with my business, before that, it was just After Effects for UX designers. And again, it wasn't like I was pushing the tool, I was just like, "Look, if you want to learn this to do this kind of stuff, I'll help you out. And again, I'm not going to say that you have to learn this, but yes, it'll definitely help you in certain instances." So, that's all it was. But then since I put out that article, it's weird because I kind of have like two businesses now which are totally not related, right?

So, one's like just the agnostic conceptual work without any software whatsoever. We're just learning linguistic tools, drawing tools, exercises, just deep dive into using motion to problem solve, and work with mental models, and partner with all UX, and that knowledge can be applied to whatever tool you want, whether it's Framer or InVision or whatever, it's great. And I'm still doing the After Effects courses, and I've got some new ones coming out, and I don't know. So it's I've had an interesting time having these really two passions and there's some overlap for folks, but I find that some folks just want to learn the conceptual stuff and then apply it to whatever tools they want to use. So, I don't know if that answers your question at all, but it's been kind of an interesting journey and process for me.

Joey: Yeah. And it's interesting because to me, it kinda mirrors this relationship in our niche between design and animation, because they're so related in motion design, but some people want no part of the animation side just because it's way more technical and there's a lot more, I guess, sort of pitfalls in terms of having to learn this tool and render time and stuff like that. People like me, I love that, right? And then the design side it's like this endless black hole that never ends and has no bottom that's very scary. And some people, these unicorns, get really, really good at both, like your boy GMUNK. So, it's really interesting.

And so you've got UX designers who conceptually understand it and then they want to go to the next step, and that's really, really cool. And I know you also do in-person workshops. And I don't know what you're allowed to say publicly, like who you've worked with, but I'm wondering if you could talk about sort of what types of companies at least are you working with and what are you doing with them?

Issara: Sure. Yeah. And I just think like ... and I want to share this not so much for self promotional purposes, but to really kind of make this knowledge more available to your folks too, that this is how tech companies are thinking about motion and talking about it, which I think if you're doing like School of Motion stuff and getting really, really good, and you're looking to break breakthrough into UX, I just think knowing this stuff is really helpful.

So yeah. So, I do a combination of public workshops where I'll just book a venue, and just sell tickets, and then whoever comes comes, and that's been really fun, and I've had designers that at all the top companies there. And then I'll also get booked to do like workshops, like hands-on onsite private workshops where I'll train the design teams. So, I've trained the design teams at Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce, Kayak, Oracle, Frog, Airbnb, just some of the recent ones that come to mind.

So, I'll go in there and we'll spend a day or two depending. So, like the one day workshops the motion, and like usability one, and that's just basically I took the article on Medium and I turned that into a one day workshop with exercises and just really just a deep dive immersion into that article. And then day two, if they want, and not each team wants it, but some do, is I'll train their designers to take everything we learned and then apply that to learning like After Effects. So I basically get their team up to speed creating motion in After Effects in one day, which is like probably the hardest challenge I have ever taken on in my entire freaking life.

And when we start, dude, I pull up this slide from Lord of the Rings, like Mordor, and I'm like, "All right, here's our day." Or like Frodo would say. "We just gotta like battened down the hatches and know that it's just going to be a gnarly day," and you're going to be like pissed and stressed, and we're just like kind of going through Mordor, because it's insane to learn After Effects in one day, but we do it, and I have them delivering professional motion at the end. So, that's kind of what I do.

I think your folks would be interested in knowing big companies are really thinking about this, and if they have a motion background, I know a lot of places like it's a really valuable skill, especially if they can just speak to UX. So, if they want to get a job at one of these tech companies, I don't think they need to learn ... like they don't need to become a UX designer. I mean, I think the more they learn, the better off they'll do, but to just be able to go in and speak to these different tools they can use, and that they know how to work with the design team, and that they can partner with research and really scope and scale their work, there's so much value motion designers can really bring to like product design.

So, I'm super excited for your people because I just see them as being able to deliver so much value because it's really hard to design beautiful motion, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of craft, and if you have that ability they learned from your classes, then when they go in and they can speak to UX, it's just amazing. They really become those like unicorns on the team, you know? So, I'm just really stoked for your folks, man.

Joey: Yeah. I mean, it seems like there's, at least for the past two years, it feels like there's this small but growing wave. I know people who have gotten hired by Google, and Asana, and Apple, very high salaries-

Issara: Yeah, totally.

Joey: ... to do After Effects. And that's one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you, Issara, is just because it does feel like sort of a different thing than we've been doing. So, I'm wondering if you'd talk a little bit more about like what are the job opportunities like out there? I mean, obviously, the big tech giants, the Googles, the Facebooks, they're hiring motion designers. What other kinds of companies are looking for animators who are interested in helping a UX team?

Issara: Dude, I'd say anybody who's designing a digital product at this point is thinking about motion. They may not understand the value necessarily because a lot of these people are business people and they'll literally be like "Motion, cool, Do motion," and they won't have the language because they're working on their business and delivering value. But the thing that's awesome, it's like every product design company has a perception that motion is a premium skill. They really do. And so because of that, if you can come in and speak to products, speak to the working with UX, or at least demonstrate like a minimum of understanding, that is just super valuable. So I think it's the perfect time to have this skill. And again, if you just take whatever, a couple of UX classes or something, just read a book, like anything, read a blog post on UX, just start to get your head in the game.

And then also, I mean, I hate to push it but this is a really valuable thing. So, I created what I call a How to Sell Motion to Stakeholders Script. This is like the number one challenge that I've heard designers and motion people face is they don't know how to talk about the value of motion to like stakeholders. I created a free PDF download script that I use in my workshops. It is like probably one of the best solid gold things I've ever created, which helps you get your head in the game answering these basic questions about the value of motion. And if you can have that level of conversation with stakeholders, that's going to be a game changer for you.

So, if you can develop the ability to get quantitative data and really think more strategically about how motion adds value, not just in making cool stuff, I think you'll be super well positioned for your job interview and be in super high demand, honestly.

Joey: I love it. And I know you set up a special URL for all of our listeners and so we're going to link to that in the show notes, so you can all download that for free, and Issara was a super nice to be able to set that up for us.

Issara: Yeah, dude. Seriously, make sure you grab that because that one page will completely change how you think about the value of motion right there. Like I've got it right here, I use it. And it's basically about using like ROI based approach to like selling motion, which is so different than just designing motion that looks great, you're designing motion that adds value. And so how do you start to have those conversations and articulate the value, this gives you like a total framework for that.

Joey: That's great. And I bet there's even things that traditional motion design studios and freelancers and artists can take from that, because ROI is one of those things, it's usually the last thing on our mind when we're creating something, right?

Issara: Yeah, totally, dude.

Joey: And it's the first thing on whoever's cutting the check, it's the first thing on their mind. In the UX world, there seems to be a lot more obvious of a link. You can measure, well, does the conversion rate go up when you add this and stuff like that? So I love it, man, and we're definitely going to like direct our own to that.

Issara: You'd be surprised though, dude. I mean, I'm telling you, I go into these like great, huge companies and they struggle. Most people are still at the point of like gesticulation, sounds, and it'll just be awesome dude, it'll just be awesome. And like when stakeholders here motion, it's weird because A, they understand it's a premium thing, like they totally want it, but B, they also know that it's crazy hard, it's crazy expensive, it takes a lot of time to get right, and so there's a huge cost, and there's a cost benefit analysis, which is that if they're investing in motion it means they're not investing in something else, right? So, you have to learn how to have these conversations and to anticipate this and to be able to make a strong case.

Joey: Yeah. You could just buy more Facebook ads, you know? I get it, I get it.

Issara: Yeah, totally.

Joey: Interesting. Okay, well, everyone's going to check that out. I have a couple more questions for you. I have a feeling we could talk for another like two or three hours.

Issara: Yeah. I know right, dude.

Joey: So, I'll start landing the plane. And this question actually is going to take us completely off topic and potentially derail-

Issara: Perfect. Good.

Joey: ... all the ground work. No, but I had to ask you about it because first of all, it's a really fascinating article. This is something that I struggle with, I'm sure everybody listening struggles with, and just considering what you do for a living, I found it fascinating that you wrote this article. You wrote an article called How I Destroyed my iPhone Addiction in Nine Steps. And I read the whole thing, I've forwarded it, I actually forwarded it to Adam Plouff, who I know you're a fan of-

Issara: Cool, man.

Joey: ... and he appreciated it too. And you were definitely addicted to your phone and you've gone to some pretty crazy lengths to unaddict yourself. So can you just set the stage, tell us what made you write that article, why'd you do that?

Issara: Integrity.

Joey: Fair enough.

Issara: I believe that if I have a platform, so right now I've got about 25,000 people on my newsletter, I've got about another 20,000 on social media. And Joey, I'll be honest with you. This has been a major shift for me because I believe as a person, we need to live our lives with integrity in our relationships and in our way of living with the planet and stuff, but the whole thing changes when you get a business, man, the whole thing changes because I have values that I care about and I now have a platform where I can talk to 50,000 people, give or take, and we are in a market and a job that is demanding, it takes a lot of time, and a lot of that involves being on our phones as just part of our research and as part of learning and developing ourselves and developing an edge and being good. And what I experienced is that there's just a spectrum of people, some people are just more likely to become addicted than others.

So, my girlfriend, bless her heart, doesn't struggle with this at all. For whatever reason, I can't even tell you, it doesn't matter. I'm on the spectrum where I'm going to be more likely to be hooked by these things and get this dopamine feedback that I can't control, and this is a risk that nobody talks about. And so over the last six months, just internally, I've been having this conversation of like, "Okay, I have these topics that I feel are actually important that I am not providing leadership on, and I feel that as part of my own integrity as being a business person who has access to this group of people of this size, what does that look like when I show up in that space?" And so part of that meant having a straight conversation with people that, "Look, we're in a field that's requiring you to be on something that could literally be like crack cocaine for you. How do you manage that and not lose your life, not get sucked in."

And yeah, for me it was a struggle, and I finally cracked the code. I tried pretty much everything until I found what works, and I just felt like if I didn't share that, and again, I don't take a stand here, I don't go pretty deep with my true values, which is that I'm fairly anti-technology myself. I don't own a lot of things, I'm a very minimal kind of person. I'm not talking about that. It's just the more just like, "Look, if you're struggling with this, this is how you solve that."

And Joey, just while we're on this topic, this is something that I am passionate about, which is like running a business and really being an advocate. And so, along the same lines over Thanksgiving, I had a real aha moment where I wasn't providing enough leadership in the spaces that really mattered to me.

And I'm just going to shift topics a little bit, but it is related to this topic of addiction, which is that, I've worked for a lot of companies, I've worked on a lot of teams, I've worked with a lot of people, thousands of people at this point, and I've noticed trends that certain groups of people aren't represented. And I realized that I was lacking in integrity in being more of taking a stronger stand in helping those groups of folks out. So, I kind of just had this come to Jesus moment where I just wrote out this long message and posted on like all my social media and my newsletter where I said, "Look, I actually am going to be reaching out to these organizations and groups." So specifically, like LGBTQ, people in tech, and I have been researching, and I have a person that was in charge of reaching out and creating scholarship programs, like native Americans in tech, like African American folks who I feel are just totally not represented very well at all at this point.

And I have to say Joey, to me, that's one of the more exciting aspects of my business that I didn't even know was a possibility. I'm looking at what it would take to get to zero carbon, because I fly, right? And that's a huge load. And I'm a small business. It's just me, man, and like one or two people who are working part-time, like I'm not a big business, but to me, I'm realizing that I have these values that I need to communicate and do a better job of supporting other people. So, that's just been a shift that I've had is really kind of realizing and waking up and seeing that I have some leadership responsibilities that I've been avoiding that hopefully I won't anymore.

Joey: Dude, that is beautiful man, and I definitely want to give you props for having that realization and then taking steps to actually change it. I mean, a lot of the things that you brought up, under-representation, they're huge problems in just general motion design industry too, and we do our part and there's a lot of great leaders in our that are kind of helping to promote better representation, all that kind of stuff.

And getting back to the addiction article, I found it fascinating, and here's why, and I'm gonna ask you this at the risk of making it a little uncomfortable.

Issara: Oh, please. I love uncomfortable.

Joey: Right. Okay, good. Let's see if we can we get like really awkward thing.

Issara: Let's get awkward, dude.

Joey: Yeah. Well, so what I was going to say was, I work in front of a computer all day, like everyone who's a motion designer does that, right? Everyone who's a software engineer, everyone who's a UX designer. The interesting thing to me about UX designers specifically is you're actually producing the crack. You are engineering the crack that it sucks you in. And I'm not saying that to like say anything negative about you or UX designers, what I'm saying is I understand that there's probably a strange cognitive dissonance or something, there's got to be some weird feeling about that.

It's the same feeling I used to have, to be completely honest, when I was a creative director at my animation studio and I cut the cord, I got rid of cable. If I watched anything, it was like Netflix or whatever. And I was like so ... I hated commercials, but that's how I paid my bills. Like I was literally making commercials and I had that same kind of feeling like there's a weird ... it' incongruence, I can't think of the right word, but I'm just curious how you approach that.

Issara: Well, at the risk of knowing that this whole section might be completely deleted from the podcast, yeah, let's go in all the way, Joey.

Joey: Let's do this.

Issara: Let's not dip the toe, shall we? I kind of feel like we're dipping our toes at this point.

So, here's the context, right? The context is there are whatever billions human beings on this planet and we are about 12 years away from an asteroid hitting the planet, right? And that asteroid is like climate change. And this is just you either like understand and you're just like reading scientific studies of this happening or you're just totally not, and that's fine. That's what we're dealing with.

So, I do have this feeling, Joey, that anytime I talk about anything that's not related to modifying our behavior as a species, it's not just like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, it's like debating the paint color on the paint color of the deck chairs on the titanic. And so when I go, and bless their heart, I do these workshops, and there's some of the most brilliant people I've ever met at these teams, just brilliant and the problems they're solving are so small and so insignificant compared to the threats we face as a species.

And I don't have an answer for this question, I just know that this is something I am really like challenged with and struggle with every day because I like to read a lot of stuff, and I'm not talking like conspiracy theory crap, I'm talking about like science and I like to understand the nature of the world and what's going on. And it is very interesting to have an incredibly strong point of view that like, "Look, if we literally found that there was an asteroid coming 12 years from now, would we be debating the color of this button and the fucking velocity curve? Or would we be like, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't do this job anymore and maybe we need to level up our skills and actually learn something that's going to actually make a difference for the planet, you know?

So, just to jump in on this and make it super awkward, that's a conversation that nobody has. So for example, my girlfriend works at Amazon, one of their employees was just written up and featured because she's circulating a climate change petition internally at the company, right? My girlfriend sent that to her team, nobody wrote back, no response, zip, zero, nada. And in doing a lot of this work for years, and I've directed commercials, and I've done big stuff, small stuff, I've worked for a lot of teams, yeah, there is a lot of Kool-Aid you got to drink, just straight up.

Like it is taboo to bring up a lot of these topics and say, "Hey, we're kind of obsessing about the details of this project," and meanwhile, there's an asteroid just heading straight towards our face. Of course, the asteroid is a process rather than a physical object, but that's what's going on man, so I don't know. And I think that the more we surface these conversations and these internal struggles and challenges, which is like, yes, we are business owners, and we've invested in this, and we have responsibilities to our employees, and we're adding this value to the world, and there's a bigger context. So, what are we going to do about that? I don't really know.

But I think by not having these conversations, by like really making and preserving the taboo of like pretending that this doesn't exist, I think it causes a lot of problems, and on top of that, like I checked in with my old production company website, and we did big TV commercials, and I gotta tell you, man, I am really glad that I have a skill set that if I was starving or if I needed to like a feed my family, I could jump in and do that work, and I'm really, really grateful that I don't have to do that work right now because it is not making a difference to the planet. And it's probably even worse than that because from a cost benefit analysis, by not directly doing something that's going to help, you're using resources, that's just keeping things the way they are.

So, I mean, this is a great conversation and I appreciate you bringing this up because I think we do a disservice to listeners every time we don't just say, "Oh yeah," and by the way, this is a good topic, and the larger context is there's an asteroid heading towards our face. So, we can keep doing this, and there's no right or wrong, it's just you get different results and different outcomes.

Joey: Damn, Issara. I didn't know you were going there. You took it to a new level, man. Yeah, I see you [crosstalk].

Issara: You were dipping in your toe there, and I find that most people, they dip their toe.

Joey: Yeah, you grabbed my hand and you jumped in the pool with me. You're like, "Let's go, let's do it."

Issara: I'm tired of pussy-footing. Like I have my own business, I don't give a fuck, right? Like if I'm consulting and teaching a workshop, then yeah, I can't bring this stuff up. It doesn't add value to them, but-

Joey: You've got to hold back a little there.

Issara: Yeah. Well, you have to hold back a lot really, because most people, they just like, "Yeah, I signed this petition, blah, blah, blah," but if you get the data, if you read the data, if you look at the hockey stick graph, right? You're like, "Oh yeah, there's an asteroid heading towards our face," and that is the closest mental model understanding that can possibly exist. It's out there in space, it's coming towards us, at a set point in time, it's going to be here.

And that's the closest we can make sense of it because our minds aren't fundamentally set up to really grasp larger processes. But beyond that, it's just a fucking taboo at teams, man. Like every team I worked at, nobody talks about this stuff. We all know it's happening, but we're just kind of pretending that it's not and we just got to get through the day and go home and watch our Game of Thrones or whatever the fuck it is. I mean, I've cut out almost all TV, I've cut out all this stuff, man. You know?

Joey: Yeah. It's funny because I definitely don't get quite as apocalyptic when I talk about this, I sort of go more on the side of just reminding students who can get pretty frustrated if they're having trouble or if something doesn't go well, it's just animation, right? This isn't like your life, this isn't-

Issara: We're not saving lives, dude.

Joey: Yeah. Remember, we're not curing cancer. This is animation, like keep it in perspective. And you're just sort of taking that to its logical conclusion. Why you were talking, by the way, I don't know if you've seen this. There's a meme of a dog in a cafe with this little smile on his face and the whole place is on fire and he says, "This is fine," we'll link to it in the show notes, that was what I was thinking of.

Issara: Oh yeah, yeah. Totally.

Joey: I was like that is exactly what you're describing. Well, dude. First of all, thank you for being so open and honest about your feelings. I mean, I can imagine that that must be a little weird for you then like teaching people to create user interactions that, if you're at a large social media app, their goal is for that interaction to create more on-page time, right?

Issara: Well, yeah. That's a great question too. And like over the years, I have certain clients that I will not do work for, right?

Joey: Oh, interesting.

Issara: Yeah. So, I will not do work for zoos. I just flat out, I don't care what their budget is, will not do work for zoos. I will not do work for any place that is like homophobic.

Joey: Good for you, man. That's awesome.

Issara: Yeah. So, nothing that's like homophobic or doesn't support gay rights or like gay marriage, that's just, nope. To me, the money just isn't a factor. So yeah, I do have places that for me, and I know other freelancers that I've talked to, we don't talk about it a lot, but it is a thing that we are human beings and we care about these things, and if you're a company that's actively destroying the environment, I really don't want your money. You can find somebody else, and I think that's fine. So, I think that's a conversation that is not also very commonly had because most folks are just trying to level up their skills and get jobs, but I think it's important to have these more difficult conversations.

Joey: Yeah. Actually, that conversation is happening more and more in motion design. We actually just had a really amazing animator on, Sander van Dijk who teaches one of our classes, and he turns down work if it doesn't line up with his worldview and his morals and things he finds important, and I applaud the hell out of it, and I applaud you for sticking to your guns, even if it costs you a few bucks, I think that there's enough work out there and I think that the world needs that. I think it needs more people like you Issara, like actually standing up for what you believe in, putting your money where your mouth is.

Issara: Thanks man.

Joey: I can already tell, this is going to be like a whole podcast episode talking about this, because boy, did I open a can of worms without realizing it.

Issara: I told you man it's gonna get rally awkward.

Joey: Oh my gosh. Yeah, no dude. Thank you. Seriously, thank you for that. All right. So, this is going to be like the awkwardest segue ever, but let's bring it back. And the only reason, like I've kind of been thinking I should just end the interview here, but I actually am curious and our audience probably is too. UX in Motion, it's growing, it's still fairly new, and it seems like you're still kind of experimenting with it, and finding your niche, but it seems to be doing well. And I'm just curious like what's next for UX in Motion, and what do you hope, what's your vision for it?

Issara: Yeah. Well, weirdly enough, the vision that I'm most excited about when I wake up in the morning is getting carbon neutral and providing scholarships to folks who really need it, and helping create more equality in the workforce. So, I didn't realize how important that goal was for me, and I know that's not typically a business goal, but I think providing that leadership is so freaking important, regardless of anything else I do, if I can get this business to carbon neutral and just provide a little bit of leadership, to me, that would be an important legacy for me.

Beyond that, dude, I've got new courses coming out that I'm super stoked about. Like one, dude, and this is just silly, but like one of the biggest edges I've seen is that people who are really good are crazy fast. Like I just read a book on deep learning, which is a methodology for how people who play like extreme sports and are really fast with musical instruments get fast, and so it's the step by step methodology on how to get really fast. So, I'm just doing literally like a speed drills course for like After Effects, dude, and like nobody's done that, right?

Joey: That's great.

Issara: How crazy is that? And like you'll literally get 10 times faster learning these basic speed drills, which are like starting with like atomic little movements and then building up to faster and faster and things. Like I'm just crazy fast when I work. I work on a laptop with no mouse, just my trackpad and dude, I'm just crazy fast, so I'm going to teach people how to get that fast basically. So I'm just stoked about that man, because to me, that's like a first in class training. It's marrying speed drills with like using software, which is like the weirdest idea ever, but I find it like totally cool. So, I'm just kind of geeking out on that right now.

And then probably a book is like coming out this year. And just like really working with my team, man. For the first time, I've actually found some great people that I'm just really excited about, and it's true what they say, if you read any business book, they're like, "Yeah, hire rock stars," and I couldn't do it for years and years and years, and I finally got to the point where I could hire one or two rock stars part-time, and I'm like, "Oh my God," and now I can kind of relax for the first time and not feel like that I'm just behind all the time. So, I'm just excited to keep working with those folks and just, yeah man, I don't know, just keeping adding value to people is really what excites me the most, just finding new ways to help people, more than anything else.

Joey: Head on over to uxinmotion.com to check out Issara's company and his classes, and make sure you check the show notes for all of the articles and resources we mentioned, plus a special link that Issara set up for School of Motion listeners, which contains a free PDF guide to selling the value of motion to stakeholders who may not intuitively grasp how motion can improve their products and also their bottom line.

I hope this one was an eyeopener for you. I know we're going to be talking about this topic a lot more in the future and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if we had a class on Motion for UX in our curriculum soon. Thanks so much as always for listening. If you dug this episode, please let us know. You can hit us up on Twitter @schoolofmotion, or via email, [email protected]. You are incredible and I'll see you later.

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