In this episode, I caught up with Rachel Been, SVP of Design for Expedia Group, about her journey from photography to design leadership and why she believes this is "the era of the generalist." The conversation unpacks the recent launch of Expedia's new app on ChatGPT and what it means to design for "non-deterministic flows" and "infinite inputs." Rachel explains how AI is breaking old, linear design paradigms and why, in an age of potential "design slop," deep curiosity and human-centered craft are more important than ever.
Liam (00:33):
Rachel, welcome to Design Notes.
Rachel (01:03):
Oh, thanks Liam. Nice to see you again.
Liam (01:05):
Yeah, it's nice to see you too. I feel like this episode has been a long time coming. I know we'll get into it in a second, but you and I had the chance to work together for a while on material at Google, and since then you've gone on to do many other things, which we'll get into. But I want to start for the listeners by talking about what you're up to now and what your journey was that led you there.
Rachel (01:34):
Yeah. About two months ago, I recently joined Expedia Group to lead their design team to be the SVTP of Design Across content research, customer advocacy group. I can talk a little bit about and product design, and I had previously been at Airbnb for a few years, really learning and experiencing and understanding travel in that particular vertical. And when this opportunity came up at Expedia, I thought, wow, what kind of an incredible scope across that particular industry, and to be able to oversee multiple disciplines and create the connectivity across the design projects and team, it was a great opportunity. So I recently joined and that's what I've been up to the last few weeks.
Liam (02:27):
Nice. I want to go back a little bit further actually, and understand how you came to design and design leadership as a practice.
Rachel (02:39):
It's a great question. I was originally a photographer and photo director. I led the student newspaper at UCLA. I was a photo director of the Daily Brewin there. That was my goal, my dream, my career path. My father had been a in the Civil Rights movement and a teacher, my grandfather had been both a war photographer as well as a police photographer in Vegas in the fifties. So it was sort of in the family blood photography. And when I got my first job, I worked for A OLI was based basically a photo director for music and loved the job. Super fun, would shoot a ton of artists. And then at the time, well, the non-existent grid system online made all of the imagery that I was shooting and directing and curating looked horrible. So I started seeing this and started to become really conspicuous that all this work that I was doing was not nearly as good as it could have been.
(03:43):
And at the same time, looking at now what we would consider sort of beautiful analog magazine spreads and why couldn't we do that online and on the internet on a OL? So I started working in design. I started working with the design team to tinker and figure out what was the next generation of design for multimedia experiences, and ended up working on some of the first audio multimedia oriented galleries at a OL and loved it, realized that actually this practice and this trade was more of what I wanted to do than become a photographer and become a photo director. So I made the switch and then continued the progression of that switch by combining everything I had done in creative direction and photography and imagery with design. Ended up working at Billboard Online for the very well known music magazine and becoming their design director and creative director and leading the charge and combining all this original photography and content work with design direction. So that's how I became a designer originally and just progressed from there, but always had this sort of backbone of combining our direction and creative direction and content and imagery with honestly technology and looking at sort of what was the cutting edge of technology, whether that was at the time when I started becoming a designer audio galleries to where we are now with generative ai. So that's my origin story. I guess as a designer,
Liam (05:17):
That story really resonates with me because early in my career I was a photographer as well doing studio work, and I kind of consider studio photography as a form of design practice. Absolutely. I remember years ago seeing a panel where someone said that design is a liquid that will fill any container, and I think it's just the container of photography overflows into the interface around it. I think that makes total sense to me.
Rachel (05:43):
I mean, I really believe in that, right? I think folks specifically, I've worked with quite a few folks that have come from the editorial world and their understanding specifically in building interfaces that really contain content and highlight content is sort of a different type of understanding than folks that maybe didn't specifically work in that space as art directors or working with content or working with words or working with content in this really intimate way. And I really always cherish that from my background for such a long time. I tried to hide it. I wanted to be that capital D designer. I had never formally studied, so I was sort of afraid of saying, well, actually, I'm a photographer. I didn't study this. That was my passion. But now I'm an all in, especially now when we're in this world where content and photography and image creation is such an intimate part of what we do as designers, that it just feels like really the perfect time for me to really celebrate that and appreciate that about my background.
Liam (06:42):
Yeah, I mean that's a big goal of this show too, is to point out the fact that many people come to design from these different viewpoints, and that actually is needed. That's hugely informative to design in a way that just studying design, I mean, I don't even know how you can just study design. It's like David Reinfurt said that design has no discipline of its own. It only becomes visible when it bumps into something else,
Rachel (07:10):
Right? It's such a mindset. I keep referring to Carly Ayres wrote this great piece on her stack a few months ago, designers, designers, designers. And I was like, oh, I feel seen about sort of the generalists. The generalists are coming back and the generalists are here. And I was always sort of that tinker that just sort of was like, oh, machine learning. What is this thing? How do I find the weird gnarly engineer that's working on this and learn about, oh, wait a second computer vision. Oh, why don't we do a design system for that? I was always sort of that curious tinker that maybe had no sort of formal business pursuing a path of doing that type of work, but it just always seemed to work out. So love this idea that she's writing about around those types of creatives are now coming and finding their place in this industry. I think it's just a really exciting time to be sort of a generalist creative designer. Right,
Liam (08:06):
Absolutely. How
Rachel (08:07):
Much sort of greenfield to explore?
Liam (08:10):
So you have moved from Airbnb, which is I would say a company concerned with the experience of travel, which is known for its design quality and the innovations that it's made and its interface. Now you are SVP at Expedia, which is also heavily concerned with travel. I want to know how does your life inform that work, leading the design of such a big travel product that
Rachel (08:38):
Goes
Liam (08:38):
All around the world?
Rachel (08:40):
Yeah, it feels like a big responsibility. I take it, I take seriously, but with some levity because important in a job like this. But it was interesting yet you kind of referenced Airbnb. It was an incredible design culture. I mean, it really sort of lived and breathed design and cared about all of the details, all of the details, and I learned so much being at that company and working with such incredible folks and coming into a culture that maybe historically hasn't been known for its design. Prowess was definitely a shift, but I saw it as an incredible opportunity because the vertical of travel is so ripe for beauty and for design, and also the portfolio of Expedia, the history of Expedia, I found that incredible to be able to work on. So Expedia owns literally dozens of brands, has three core brands, hotels.com, vrbo, and core Expedia.
(09:34):
And also what I found the most interesting is multiple lines of business. So we have flights, we have cars, we have lodging, we have short-term rentals, we have activities. All of this is on our platform. So that portfolio to me going into this next generation of how we discover and plan travel seemed like just a rich portfolio to plan as a designer. The vertical is just incredibly fun to work on. These are some of the most intimate moments in people's lives. People dream about travel, people dream in vivid imagery about travel, but it's also highly complex and really logistical and absolutely painful for anyone who's ever planned travel. And these are things that I felt like a technological application, something like generative I could so easily, well, easily is a good question, what that exactly means, but really solve. AI is so great at solving complex logistics and combining that with personalization and understanding. And that's why travel is such the example in so many of these platforms and these moments of how generative AI can be applied because it really is an amazing use case to apply it.
Liam (10:52):
So first of all, it's not lost on me how much this industry relies on imagery and photos again as a common theme. But yeah, let's get into it. I remember while we were planning this interview, you were like, oh, we're going to make a big announcement, so we'll have something to talk about on the show. And yeah, as you said, the announcement is that Expedia is one of the first launch partners with an app with OpenAI, and I want to know what that means. I want to get into how, well, I want to get into a lot of things, but we can start with how that app works and how you kind of account for all of the nuanced kind of deeply personal things that people have with them when they're searching for travel options.
Rachel (11:45):
Yeah, no, on Monday we were very fortunate to be one of seven primary launch partners and to launch the first app in Chatt BT, they launched basically a new capability to build out vertical apps within chatt BT. It was an incredible experience. We very rapidly designed and developed with the OpenAI team, one of these first apps, and I'm actually writing a piece about it, a little piece that I'm going to post soon just about some of the kind of memories that were evoked in that process through making the original material design, this sort of creation of a system, and then figuring out how to collaborate with partners to really reveal it. We thought we had sort of defined a system or at least parts of a system and working through those partners and launching material design in some of those initial days and seeing where the system was falling down or where we could improve or how this was potentially changing Android as a platform.
(12:51):
There was definitely some reverberations or memories related to that, and it was so exciting to be in that space. I think we're in a fundamentally different way of designing for operating systems now and designing systems. The conversational surface is just a totally different paradigm that I think was definitely created when I originally left material design to go to the Nest team. That was my original role there, which was to think about ambient computing in the home, which is more of this intent-based computing platform. Ambient computing is all about computing exists around me. It's there when I need it. It's proactive. It senses what I need. It automates when I walk through the door to understand, to turn on my lights at a very particular level, what I want at this time of the day, but it's not in my face asking for me to command it. It just is there when I need it and responds to me personally. And I think that concept of ambian computing is now where we're actually here with this new computing surface, and it's extremely exciting.
Liam (14:00):
I also remember the period when the idea of ambient computing and conversational UI was kind of first becoming a big theme here at Google and across the tech industry, and it's one of those things that I feel like we've been chasing for a long time, and I want to know, is this the moment?
Rachel (14:21):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think that when I did join Nest to work on those ambient computing paradigms in the home, it was before we had generative ai. So we were doing a lot of sort of blunt automation work, to be honest. We were like, when you walk through the door, when you enter this threshold, when you activate a sensor in the thermostat, turn on the lights. But now it is very different. It's the capabilities of using intent. I want to be warm when I'm near my house. I want to see my kids during dinner. These type of more intent-based moments, specifically for ambient computing in the home, we have the capability of doing that instead of the literal directions that we had to do before. I do think we're in a moment where ambient computing a hundred percent is going to actually be realized.
(15:19):
And I don't think I understood that It couldn't be realized until this technology existed in the way that it does. And I think back on that time when we were defining ambient computing, I was like, my God, we were working with the wrong tools. We just didn't have the right tech to be able to actually realize the vision. And now we do, and I'm very excited to see what that team does with it, but for all of us to really kind of realize ambient computing across our own unique verticals, it's exciting. It can be done now.
Liam (15:48):
So how does it work for Expedia?
Rachel (15:50):
Yeah, so what we built into Chatt BT was sort of an initial scratch at the surface around what we think we can do within that product. We really focused for the initial launch on the basics of finding lodging, the basics of finding hotels. We also introduced a cool new paradigm around searching for rooms. This is a paradigm that, for example, we don't have in our products, you have to search for a hotel and then you pick a room from there. But I think with this intent-based conversation, need to find, I love my king bed, find me king beds, or I need two twins for my kids. We sort of overruled the paradigm of our traditional product surface. And that was the most fun part about working on this. It was really greenfield. We could sort of break apart our current designs and the way that our product works to basically integrate with this conversational surface.
(16:50):
So we did lodging and kind of room search. We introduced very much similar to what Zillow did and announced a kind of dynamic map where you could understand places to stay based on neighborhoods and cities. We also introduced flights so you could with more conversational filters and asking, I need a flight to Tokyo from San Francisco on this date. I want it nonstop. Give me the latest flight of the day, very conversationally find a flight. Which for anyone who's ever booked flights before, it's painful because you have a massive filter set. It's complicated, it's hard to understand. So I think we're really just scratching at the surface of making an experience like that infinitely easier to undergo. So those were some of the main things that we actually activated. And it was interesting to think about how to activate it, right? Because at first it was going to be explicit invocation.
(17:47):
You had to ask for Expedia, which we know is a really tough thing. People are, when they're searching for travel, oftentimes they're just saying, oh, I need a place to go. I want to go to Tokyo. I want to go to Paris in the summer. Here's my dates. What do you think I should do with kids? Versus explicitly asking for a brand. We're moving into this intent-based world where it's not a brand focus necessarily. It really is. If you're following, you're chasing a feeling. So we had to work within that world. And what I think is so interesting about also working within that intent-based world is what is the intent? The trigger intent for travel is that I'm feeling low and I need someplace to go. I haven't seen my girlfriends in a really long time. Help me figure out what to do with them, what really is a trigger that would maybe trigger a very specific hotel room on the high line in New York. So I think there's just an incredible spectrum to think about around what is travel intent and how do we exist within that world? When you want something more specific?
Liam (18:53):
Yeah, what is your approach for unearthing those intents or unearthing these kind of subjective factors that when people are using a traditional website, search interface may be kind of silent, they might not be explicitly signaling that to the site normally. So how do you uncover that?
Rachel (19:16):
Well, I think we're still figuring that out. I mean, I think we did work with OpenAI in this initial apps launch to really define some very particular intents for when this should be triggered. And I think OpenAI is also figuring it out. When do we trigger these vertical apps versus deliver more of the conversational experience that they currently have? But I do think just going into, it's interesting because just going into an app, going into Uber or going into Expedia or going into OpenTable or going into one of these apps is an intent of what you want to do. That in and of itself is an intent, but when you exist within one of these more conversational AI platforms, it's not as defined. You need ambiguation. You need to give information in order to reveal some of these experiences. So I think that's going to be a big thing for us to all continue working on as vertical providers in these general intent-based spaces.
Liam (20:11):
Yeah. I also want to get a bit more abstract because I'm thinking about how something like this affects the kind of rest of the embodiments of Expedia's software. I think absolutely
(20:28):
There's been a thread running through computing and the pursuit of human computer interaction forever. I guess the earliest citation I can think of is the miax, but it certainly goes back further than that of kind of attempting to synthesize information into knowledge or data into experience. And I think for a long time, my thought bubble has been like if we follow this to its natural conclusion in the future, there may not be discreet apps at all. Your experience with a computer may just be a flow of information and action that helps you kind of synthesize what you need to know about for your life. And I wonder how you're thinking about that launching this app and it's introducing new paradigms that haven't been done before in Expedia's experience. How do the two affect each other?
Rachel (21:23):
Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone who is working on some of these verticals right now is thinking about that, this concept of disintermediation. But I think there's a few things specifically that we believe, and I personally believe in that. And why OpenAI specifically instead of saying, well, we're going to build all of these verticals. No, they're working with partners because of the complexity of a lot of these spaces. I think just the history of Expedia, we have an incredible amount of trust built up within the travel space. We have loyalty programs and sort of understanding our users in a very intimate way that some of these general AI platforms do not, right? They do not have that relationship with their users. We have servicing. We have help when you're stuck on the side of the road in Cancun or when you can't figure out how to change your flight or when you need to cancel your car.
(22:22):
So there's an incredible degree of the human touch of servicing and to help you throughout the product experience. We also have the relationships with partners with flights and lodging providers and have an incredibly formidable B2B platform and relationship to this entire industry. And I think a lot of these sort of foundational pieces of travel and not just maybe sort of the app flow and experience are what really define the vertical. And that isn't necessarily going to be something that these larger AI platforms are going to invest in the same way that these verticals can. So I think we will potentially see a mix of experiences in the near future where maybe you do travel and discovery within these AI platforms, but if you really need help and need to talk to a customer service rep or understand something really intimately about your vacation or your flight, you do actually converse with Expedia and go into that brand mode because there's a sense of trust and understanding there.
(23:28):
It may change. I think we're going to see, my guess is we're going to see flexibility that maybe you book on the platforms, maybe you book on our site, maybe you're talking to customer service within our experience. Maybe you go outward into some of these platforms for help, but there's going to be a real sort of membrane, I think, flexibility for a while between a platform and between a vertical mode that we haven't necessarily seen before. And it's exciting to figure out where those boundaries will exist. But I do think that we need to look at both. I do think my thinking on and the strategy for AI is we have to work with these platforms. It's imperative for the future of this kind of discovery and planning. It's also important to look inward at our own app surfaces and really do the best we can to implement this technology in a responsible and great way to make sure that our product experiences when you do come into our brand and our apps is as good as humanly possible. So I'm excited as a designer to really explore that as well.
Liam (24:35):
Yeah. What does that, I mean, again, it's only been a handful of weeks now, but I want to know what that kind of looks like. What is it like to lead design at a time like this?
Rachel (24:47):
Yeah, I think it's incredibly exciting. I think there's a few different things we just discussed. All of the paradigms are shifting. Where do you exist in the world? Do you exist on these more AI oriented platforms? Do you exist as a brand moat? Do you exist? Everything in between? And Expedia is such an interesting product. We have so many partnerships as well. We're working with so many different partners to bring the experience to life, to bring folks the ability to kind of book and organize the logistics of travel. So it's diverse. It's a moment of just figuring out how we exist as a company and how do people actually change their foundational patterns of how they discover and book travel. This more sort of deterministic, linear form of design that we've had for years, or design systems that just sort of feed into these very linear experiences.
(25:44):
This is the flow. These are the six screens that accomplish your goal, and it's a known quantity that if you click this button, you are going to go here and you're going to get this form. This form's. That type of linear design thinking is just breaking a lot of these experiences as we infuse this technology become non-deterministic flows where you're literally designing for infinity. And that's what I told my team when we were working with open ai. You were designing for an infinite amount of inputs, create the simplest system that can be composed to answer infinity. And I think that's how we're designing across our products now in many ways as we implement and bring this technology into more spaces within our product design. And I think that's a really fun challenge because at the core of it, it goes back to some of my original roots in Google as a true systems designer.
(26:39):
And I do think AI and designing for AI is the biggest technological systems design challenge that at least I've seen in my career. And that is really fun and it's really hard, and I think it takes particular type of thinkers and designers to execute that challenge. And so I'm excited to kind of figure out how we all do this together. I also think it's an interesting time of not only designing for this type of technology, but using this technology in our space. And these types of tools are just super exciting to play with. By giving reference design, suddenly you can make something real in code and what an incredible thing to be able to hand off and share with our product managers and our engineers. And now product managers are also using Figma make or other things like lovable or cursor to basically bring their PRDs to life. And it's just a really exciting time to make things. So many tools that can help us make things right. So that's exciting.
Liam (27:46):
This is another one of those unending pursuits between design and engineering across my career has been how do we close the gap? How can we finally have some kind of shared artifact where we're both working on it and we both understand it at the same level? That's true. Yeah. And going back to your point about how do you design something for infinite inputs or an unknowable user intent, I know that on the material system where I'm working, we've tried to start doing that by making more of the system relational. So figuring out what purpose each little tiny bit is serving and then allowing it to change to serve that no matter what else is going on in the interface. But I wonder, with such a complex set of information and so many constellations of imagery and numbers and descriptions and reviews and options, what that looks like for you all.
Rachel (28:58):
Oh yeah. And this is the work, right? It's so funny, you just triggered a memory for meam of being and sitting with Mish Alvarez who was on material for many years and worked with me, and we were like, what if the entire component system of material could just be basically intent based? A button's not a button, it's just a trigger to want to do something, right? And it was
Liam (29:21):
Absolutely,
Rachel (29:22):
We had these conversations when we were doing material too, before this technology existed. And I remember Christian was also thinking about dynamic compositions and how do you create dynamic UIs and just all of these thoughts that are coming to fruition now because of ai. Were just always there because that is an amazing way to think about creating a system of dynamic composition simply based on what you want to do versus having this is a button, a button goes there, this is a headline. That's not really the beauty of design trying to tell you something. So we're going to make this large and create a hierarchy for it, and we were trying to help you get something done, so we're going to give you something to press so you can do it. Design was always intent based in a sense. We just didn't necessarily have the language and the capability to do that before. What was your question?
Liam (30:19):
I don't even remember either, but what I want to say is
Rachel (30:22):
It was something, wait, it was something about systems design.
Liam (30:26):
Yeah, we were making material. How do you think about that
Rachel (30:28):
For Expedia
Liam (30:28):
Relational
Rachel (30:29):
And the complexity of composition? Well, I think we're figuring it out. I'll say that. I think this concept of an agentic design system and sort of dynamic compositions based on intent, I think there's some really great places in travel where this could pop up. For example, you're giving almost filter data around what you want in terms of a travel experience. So for example, I would love to go to a beach that's great for a family that's near surfing. I only have $1,500 to spend total for a week in my budget, and I really want to make sure there's a fireplace. I want to toast s'mores at night with my kids after we go surfing. I'm making this up. But that then becomes potentially a dynamic composition of a hotel offering. So that is, well, here's the perfect hotel that currently fits your needs. Right now we're not doing that. We use heuristics and general information to compose, well, here's a hotel here, here's how much it costs, here's how many nights, here's some of the amenities, and that's good and helpful, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could dynamically compose information and components that contain that information very personalized and very specific to you.
(31:55):
So I think that's an example of a dynamic composition
Liam (32:00):
And all of that, the dynamic composition, but also this conversation of, we always wanted a headline to just communicate something to you by being large. We always wanted a button, is actually just about facilitating the action that you want to take. Shows me that. I think it finally reveals in the software interface something that I think has been really obvious in other design disciplines for a long time, which is that design is fundamentally subject oriented like a human to human process.
Rachel (32:31):
Absolutely.
Liam (32:31):
And until now, I don't know. Something that keeps coming to my mind is we are unburdened from all of the best practices, all of the
Rachel (32:43):
Yeah, it's true. We are right. But it's also interesting because when we were doing this work with OpenAI, for example, when we were creating the maps view of launching of where hotels, oh, I want to find a hotel in Tribeca, New York, and you'd see a map of Tribeca and see different pins and prices in Tribeca with sort of the carousel on top. And we were like, well, you can refine using natural language. You can say, actually, I want these under $200 and not that you're going to find anything Tribeca for under $200, but I want, and we would just use natural language to refine. And that was such a sort of an bridling of the system of how we refined historically. And actually some of the designers in OpenAI were like, ah, I think it would be easier just to have a filter there. And we were like, yeah, it actually probably would be easier just to kind of click a natural language oriented filter, say under 200.
Liam (33:40):
Yeah, that's an interesting point because I remember, okay, so it might be easier to have a filter there or a slider or something, but why might that be easier? What comes to mind is when I spoke to Judith Donna on the show, she's done a lot of work on sociable computing and how sociality works online. And she talked about how she talks a lot about how metaphors get kind of stuck in the interface or in software because they are things that help you understand something new by showing you something that you already understand.
Rachel (34:23):
It's
Liam (34:23):
Why the computer has a desktop that doesn't really make any sense anymore. But at the time, it made a lot of sense. And I wonder if we're kind of in that beginning stage now with the dynamically composed experiences where in 10 or 20 years we're going to look back and see a bunch of floppy disc icons, the equivalent in our experiences. Totally.
Rachel (34:48):
The metaphors are all different. Listen, I think we were thinking about this also when we were doing design in the home and voice and the voice mechanisms were all the hotness when we were looking at new assistant based screens and the speakers where you could just speak to. And I just remember constantly being in these rooms, looking at these devices and saying, voice is just a modality. It's definitely not the best modality for when you're really making a decision on what sandwich you want to order. You kind of want to look at those sandwiches to some degree, unless you previously ordered the sandwich and it's great. But I want to see that sandwich with all those meats. Does that look as good as the chicken sandwich with pesto? And I think we really need to think about sort of the touch capabilities and being able to touch a filter versus being able to write a natural sentence or being able to speak something just as modalities of control. And there you use different modalities for different things in different moments. And that's what I think actually is also so exciting about intent-based computing. Where when is it easier just to have a little visual trigger to press? And when is it actually easier where you don't need that prompt where we're not giving you that nudge to refine where you're refining yourself and you know exactly what you want and you can just say something.
Liam (36:10):
So
Rachel (36:10):
I think the future is the interconnectivity of all of these modalities and us nudging you visually and us nudging you with auditory clues and hints and us kind of giving you prompts and us talking. I mean, it's all of these things and we just need to figure out the way that they're interrelated.
Liam (36:32):
It's also, I think about creating a vibe. The word vibe gets overused now, but
Rachel (36:37):
Yeah, we can't say vibes anymore now that it's associated with AI slop, right? No,
Liam (36:43):
But mixing these modalities and modes of interaction as well as the content itself is also about creating a feeling. I mean, it's natural that when people are using a conversational interface and they are talking with the chat bot, they feel like they are talking to a person,
Rachel (37:03):
Right?
Liam (37:03):
So yeah, there's a whole environment of non-language cues that are happening around that.
Rachel (37:12):
That's right. That's right. I mean, I'm super excited for this era of just talking to your app. They set it on stage at the open ai, the dev day launch for apps, and it's true. It's like talk to your experience and it's moving past this. I'm talking to sort of a disembodied anthropomorphized agent necessarily too. I'm talking to an experience, and I think this transition in who you are as a narrator and who you're communicating with is a really interesting one, because for so long it was like the disembodied agent you're talking to, someone you're talking to in the very origin of this clippy, the assistant theory
Liam (37:56):
Smarter child,
Rachel (37:57):
Right? Yeah, that's right. And now it's like you don't have to talk to someone, you just have to talk to your experience. I think that's exciting to me, is figuring out, okay, we don't necessarily need to create a persona. There inherently will be a persona, but it doesn't have to be this anthropomorphized thing that we have traditionally thought of as an AI persona. And I think for a lot of use cases, I think that's really great and really exciting to see.
Liam (38:23):
Yeah, I'm looking out for a persona who is willing to push back on my ideas around travel.
Rachel (38:31):
Yeah, maybe you do need someone embodied for that.
Liam (38:34):
Actually. You're going to be down the road from the beach, so you probably don't need a pool. It's fine.
Rachel (38:39):
No, but it's true. You were hitting on one of the things that I'm going to write about in this piece, which is this concept around these different journeys, specifically for travel discovery, where you would have a search journey for travel discovery, you would have a comparison journey for travel, and these things were really separate, but I think things like search and comparison and understanding and filter, they're all merging into the same type of experience. A search is a comparison, especially if you have analysis being done for you in the search. And that's exciting to figure out, oh wow, we have this moment of hyper-personalization and analysis. There's no more, can we eliminate all of these comparison tables in a sense, when search becomes the comparison.
Liam (39:27):
Yeah. The sense of turn taking in a conversation becomes much more fine grained versus such big blocks at a time.
Rachel (39:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Liam (39:41):
Okay. I want to close by asking you from your perspective, after everything we've just talked about in the role that you're in now, leading design at this very complicated, exciting moment, what do you think is the most important thing for designers to be focused on right now?
Rachel (40:04):
Yeah. I think that this moment, we've talked so much about designers getting disintermediated, right? And PMs doing all the design work and vibe coding. But Johnny, I've said something on stage at dev day when I was there that I talked to my team about yesterday, and it was a very simple statement, but he had this idea, Sam Altman asked him about craft, and Johnny basically said, we can really tell when people care. And I do think that is the job of designers right now, when so much is going to be able to be made rapidly and there's going to be a lot of slop, and not only slop and image creation and video creation, there's going to be design lop. But I do think designers, we now really have to hold that mantle now more than ever before, of really making sure that we put our heart into this work because people can really tell when there's been care applied, hopefully. I hope that that holds true no matter what we go into in this next generation of design creation. But I think that is really kind of going to be a primary job as holding true to that, making sure that people really see the care in there and the craft in there, because people can really tell.
(41:31):
It's also, I think, one more thing. It's a requirement now in this profession to be infinitely curious. It always was. That was always part of the mandate of a designer, but now more than ever before, curiosity is going to be sort of the material that you use to get your work done. So I'm excited about that.
Liam (41:54):
We were at another one of those inflection points where the information without me applying any kind of valence to that word, information is exploding all around us, and we are tasked with finding a new way of synthesizing it and making the world make sense. That's right. It hard. It's like forever. Forever. No matter what human to human, we can't escape our own humanity to make something for others.
Rachel (42:22):
Yeah. It's so true. Oh God, what are we doing? No, it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. I'm having fun. It's hard, but hard things are fun. If it was easy, we probably wouldn't be designers. I don't know.
Liam (42:36):
That is our work.
Rachel (42:36):
Go do something else.
Liam (42:38):
Yeah. Well, thank you again so much for joining me, Rachel. This was great.
Rachel (42:42):
Thank you, Liam. This was so fun. It's nice to see you again. Take care.
Liam (42:46):
Same here.
