by Jesse James Garrett
October 3, 2007
Khoi Vinh, Design Director at the New York Times, will be presenting at MX East, our design management conference, taking place October 21-23 in Philadelphia. Jesse James Garrett had the opportunity to speak with Khoi about his role at the Times and the challenges facing design managers.
Jesse James Garrett [JJG]: Khoi, hello and welcome. Let’s start with your role at the New York Times.
Khoi Vinh [KV]: My title is Design Director and I run the design group for NYTimes.com. A lot of people make the very understandable mistake of assuming that we are responsible for all of the interactive graphics that you see on the site — Flash graphics, interactive charts, and so forth. That’s actually not the case. What we’re responsible for is a bit higher level, and a little bit more invisible. We’re actually designing the platform of NYTimes.com much like a design studio or a consultant would. I have to design a site for editors to work with and for multimedia generalists to produce those graphics. We consult with the graphics folks, to help them with best practices in terms of how to make their graphics in keeping with the overall interaction models for NYTimes.com. We don’t get into the business of being generalists. That’s what they do and they do it better than anybody else. So we try and get out of their way as much as possible.
JJG: Is this a role that existed there before you started there?
KV: Yes, it did. It’s a fairly unique set of requirements. It’s a bit of a creative director role, it’s a bit information architect or usability authority role, it’s a bit of technical generalist. It requires some savvy about how journalism works and how the Times treats news. And it requires a lot of straddling the divide between journalism and business at the New York Times; trying to reconcile that stuff as the company heads towards a digital future.
JJG: This role is pretty unusual in most organizations. Most organizations have a design team on the ground on a day-to-day basis working alongside someone responsible for the content. The idea of someone in a strategic role interfacing between both of those groups is a relatively new idea. How did The New York Times recognize that that they needed someone in that position between those groups?
KV: The Times, throughout its history, has tried to do things in the best possible way with best practices. There is a long tradition of appreciation for really good design here in all its forms. Plus, the people who run the site — the assistant managing editors responsible for the editorial and integrity of the site — play a huge part in directing the evolution of the site. They are all something unique in my experience: They’re actual bona fide users of the Internet, something you don’t find at a lot of organizations. A lot of times responsibility for the online business falls to somebody with a lot of seniority but not necessarily a lot of experience. It’s something that passes into their portfolio as a reward for having brought in $X million of sales. These people are genuine, enthusiastic, passionate users of the Internet and they understood early on that they needed to bring aboard somebody who is actually a web designer and not just a graphic designer transitioning from print; somebody who understands this new medium.
JJG: I find myself wondering about the contrast between the ways that design plays out on nytimes.com versus how design is perceived in the larger organization. In a lot of organizations, you find web designers struggling against the preconceptions that people have about other kinds of design.
KV: If you go back and look at the very first versions of NYTimes.com, it was literally a graphic of the front page put up on the web in .jpg form. Then it evolved into a version of the front page that was typeset so it was better suited for the web but it was still mostly an image map. They really wanted to hold on to their control over how the brand was expresses. That was over ten years ago – they’ve obviously come a long way in their thinking since then.
That way of thinking is still one of the challenges, though. We have a lot of people here who are really smart about the way the digital world works. And we have a lot of other people who are just getting their feet wet online for the first time. They go through a lot of familiar patterns where they want the online world to behave like the offline world. Part of my job is trying to help these people understand why we do things in a different way online — and also to periodically reevaluate what we’re doing to see if it makes sense to revisit some of these ideas from print. Technological changes might make them appropriate now. There is some value in these really, really smart journalists’ initial take on the new medium. Sometimes they have insights that cause us to reconsider assumptions.
JJG: One of the very first things you were involved in at the Times was last year’s massive redesign. Was that project underway when you came on board?
KV: It was already rolling. They had locked down the look and feel and the grid and almost all of the navigation and behaviors just prior to my starting. I started in mid-January of 2006, they had a series of about 10 or 15 templates that covered a good deal of cases, but not all of them, and they had not yet been implemented. It was a little strange for me because ideally I would have liked a lot more influence on the way the design worked out. In retrospect, it was a great education for me in taking those templates, trying to implement them, and then learning all of the obscure business rules for the way the various parts of the site evolve. It set aside the expectation that I do something revolutionary and creative with the redesign. It let me focus on taking a look and feel that could have been the subject of a very subjective argument and treating it objectively and applying it to the site and making calls on the spot as to what we would change and where. It was a good trial by fire. I like what we have today and it’s one of the best sites functionally and aesthetically online, but I’m looking forward to the day when we get to redesign.
JJG: You were in an interesting situation, where the organization says, “We have this great position here, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for you to have an impact on the design of this major brand and this fantastic product but, oh, by the way, you’re being dropped into the middle of the biggest redesign we’ve ever done — and you can’t change anything.” For a lot of people, that would be a bit terrifying.
KV: It was definitely terrifying. It was also a test of whether I was ready to be a team player. I had been in the design consulting business for 10 years and I was very apprehensive about coming into a big organization where design is not the principal revenue generator, but just one of the crucial links in the chain — not the whole chain itself. It was a great exercise in whether I could get behind the design and take ownership of it. I don’t take credit for the design, but I do take credit for how we’ve worked with it since. I don’t make the mistake of distancing myself from decisions that were made before I got here. It was a part of what I signed up for and I’ve tried to get on board with that.
JJG: Before you came to the New York Times, one of your highest profile projects was the redesign of the Onion. How much of what you learned from the Onion have you been able to apply at the Times?
KV: The fact that I worked on the redesign of the Onion’s website and I am now the Design Director at NYTimes.com is more of a funny coincidence than anything. I didn’t get invited to talk to the management here at NYTimes.com directly because of my work on the Onion. Actually, when I got here and showed them my work they had already come very far along the road in designing the new design for the site. It just happened that they bore resemblance to each other.
I think that at a subtler level, a lot of the design problems that we tackled working on the Onion’s website do apply to the New York Times’s website. There’s a similar density in information and the need for an interaction and navigational model that will get people from chunks of content to chunks of content. But I think NYTimes.com is much more complex than the Onion site. There’s many more business factors involved.
JJG: How does what you’re doing now compare to working as a consultant?
KV: It’s much different than working as a consultant. When you work in-house you get a much bigger picture. You gain insight into the much bigger concept for the design work you’re doing. You really have to roll up your sleeves and learn the other parts of the business. The job is much, much more composed of building relationships with people. It’s clearly one of the most important things about the job: Can I work not just through the next six weeks or six months with this person but the next six years? Getting the trust of these folks and showing them we add a real tangible value to the journalism or the business side is really important. Before I came aboard, the design team was a bit beleaguered. They had been marginalized and they didn’t have the voice that they felt that they deserved. I spent a lot of my time on rebuilding the reputation of the design group here, which as a consultant was always out of my purview. Rebuilding the team, living and evolving a brand, and trying to keep all the many different parts in their various stages in my head at once is different from consulting. You can spend six weeks or six months with a project and it leaves your consciousness because you’ve moved on to another client.
JJG: You’ve got a group that you’re managing now. Is that different from how you worked as a consultant?
KV: In some ways it’s actually easier because I was doing a lot of the administrative part of the business as well as running clients and managing staff. So, in a sense, I had to do a lot more to do with management. I no longer have to deal with insurance or lawyers or deal with taxes. I can focus on career development for the designers, and creative trajectory of projects. In some sense it’s actually easier because we have other departments in the company that handle that stuff.
It’s similar in terms of trying to get really good work out of designers though. I don’t think that equation changes too dramatically, except that I can put designers on certain parts of the site where they have a clear affinity for the subject manner or the interaction model. I can let them grow into it in a way that’s not always possible when you’re working with the staff in a consulting game. For instance, I have somebody who focuses now on application design; they do other kinds of stuff too, but they focus on the editorial applications that we create. So we’re embedding functionality into major areas of the site, and this designer has grown into this particular niche where application functionality and editorial designs overlap. It’s a bit more like assembling a team of specialists.
JJG: You mentioned something I think a lot of design managers are facing, which is the challenge of establishing and then defending your team’s reputation among your peers in the organization. How have you approached this, coming in as the new guy? Saying, “Hey, we’re an important voice in this organization and we want to engage with our peers,” while inheriting the legacy reputation of the design group in the organization. How have you overcome those hurdles?
KV: I was lucky in that I was able to hire a lot of staff when I came aboard. There were about six designers when I got here and there are about 12 total designers now. Of the six that were already here, two remain — the others went on to other opportunities. Thankfully, I didn’t have to fire anybody. They all had better opportunities elsewhere that made better sense for them. Hiring is an important part of building the reputation of the design team within an organization. If you add the right people, that is the best sales tool. The editorial, business, and human resources staff interacts with the designers. If they can see that they’re talented, reasonable, interested and curious, and easy to work with, that is a huge step forward for any design team.
That is number one on the top of my list when I hire someone: Will I be able to work with this person day in and day out, and would my peers feel comfortable working with these people? I’ve been very lucky, we’ve been able to find really good people who really believe in the brand and who have the character makeup that allows them to work efficiently and positively with their peers.
The other really big part of it is just being present, vocal, diplomatic, and responsive when you interact with other folks. It’s the same thing I looked for in hiring staff, and that’s what I expect of myself when I go and sit in on editorial, sales, and business development meetings. It is also important to be able to speak intelligently and to ask intelligent questions when dealing with arenas that aren’t design.
JJG: What will you be talking about at MX East?
KV: I’ll be talking about what it means when we say we’re the design group for NYTimes.com and how it differs from editorial design and where it overlaps. I’ll explain our general outlook, where we’re going as an online product and talk a lot about how we’ve adapted the design group for that trajectory as well as techniques that I’ve used to get the best work out of designers. We spent a lot of time and effort trying to make it a really great place to do design, to talk about design, to feel like you’re working alongside people who are passionately committed to the Times.
JJG: What do you think are the biggest challenges that design managers are facing right now?
KV: I think the biggest challenge is establishing relationships with other parts of the business. I think that is the key to design success when you’re working inside an organization. Really trying to get a seat at the decision making table, and knowing how to work these people. It is especially important to have a feel for your relationships so that you can evolve your work over time.
JJG: Thanks, Khoi, and we look forward to seeing your talk at MX East in Philadelphia, October 21-23.
Jesse James Garrett is president and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. He is author of The Elements of User Experience (New Riders), and is recognized as a pioneer in the field of information architecture. Jesse’s clients include AT&T, Intel, Crayola, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and National Public Radio.
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