Episode 42 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
If you’re a technologist or designer who happens to be passionate about reversing climate change, what do you do? Join an advocacy group? Donate to a nonprofit organization? Write your congressperson? What if you could leverage your skill set and play an active role in reducing the amount of CO2in the atmosphere?
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Full Transcript
Announcer: listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world's first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I'm Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gambill. We're in the Nori office. This is episode 42. So obligatory introductory joke here, the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. We got it out of the way nice and early.
Christophe Jospe: That was one of my favorite books growing up.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's a good one. Actually, Stephen Fry reads them and you can listen to him. Well, well worth your time. And I think Martin Freeman ends up doing the rest of them.
Christophe Jospe: He was in the movies too, right?
Ross Kenyon: I don't think I really saw the movies. Wasn't there just one? Was there multiple?
Christophe Jospe: There's just the Hitchhiker's Guide.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I don't know. I never saw it. I don't think. Feeling very intergalactic. I just finished Earth in Human Hands by David Grinspoon over the weekend.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that is a house favorite around here. We love that book.
Ross Kenyon: You should check it out sometime. He reads it on Audible as well. If you'd like to get through it, want to learn about climate change from a planetary science perspective, well worth your time. Today we have four star designers against their will, they twisted their arms. They're like, all right, you have to explain how this works because design is one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it. You realize how many choices are made for you in your everyday life, whether it's in apps or other places that how you think about products, how you can use them. And learning more about this has definitely helped me career wise and also released me from some of the baggage of feeling bad when things don't work the way I plan. Like, uh, what's up? God, I always forget. Is it, what's the Design of Everyday Things?
Michael Leggett: Design of Everyday Things.
Ross Kenyon: That book is great. Yeah. And there's a bit in there about if you've ever tried to open a door and you pushed it or pulled it the wrong direction and felt like an idiot. It's not your fault. Give yourself, you can move on. And, uh, since then I've been thinking about design and I've sat in on some of these meetings that y'all host here and the amount of thought that goes into every single screen, every single action that takes place on the Nori platform as it's being built is really stupendous. And this happens for probably every app that you have ever used, will ever use.
Michael Leggett: Not everyone, unfortunately. Maybe not nearly.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I've definitely used some apps where they rush that one to market. But yeah, let's get these introductions going. Well, did you want to add anything, Christophe? Or we're going to let them do it.
Christophe Jospe: I think you just about covered it in that very nice soliloquy, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you.
Christophe Jospe: Ross's musings on design.
Ross Kenyon: I'm very qualified to do so.
Christophe Jospe: So let's start with you, Jacob. Sitting across from us, we've got both Jacob Farny and Michael Leggett. We'd like to give each one of them a chance to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what they do at Nori.
Jacob Farny: Thanks. So I'm a principal product designer at Nori. Basically what that means is I do a lot of the more kind of like nitty gritty UI stuff, but also user research. It's kind of a generalist role.
Ross Kenyon: So what's UI? Can you give us a little, is that a rock band?
Jacob Farny: Yeah, yeah. It's really famous rock band. No, UI stands for user interface, which is, people say UI because it's easier.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's not the most graceful, tiny little turn. It's a little harder.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, so at Nori, there's a product that we're making, and that product needs some type of face for people to interact with and figure out what those workflows look like. Who's using this tool? What are they trying to accomplish? How are we solving problems for them? So that's kind of the general overview of my role here and what I do. From Indiana.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Jacob Farny: I don't know if that's the, is that the Rust Belt? Am I in the Rust Belt or the?
Ross Kenyon: I'm not sure, well is there really a city there that's post industrial like Pittsburgh or Buffalo or Rochester?
Jacob Farny: Yeah, Indianapolis.
Ross Kenyon: Was that ever a big manufacturing hub? I'm not even sure.
Christophe Jospe: You're derailing my question, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, what was the question?
Christophe Jospe: Well, okay. So here we are at Nori. We're developing a methodology so that people sequestering carbon dioxide in their soils are able to get paid using our platform. And in Indiana, I believe there are a whole lot of people doing that activity already. You've got a lot of farmers. And what is interesting to me is I bet before you started working for Nori, you didn't think you'd be designing a product that would be helping farmers potentially monetize carbon sequestration in their soils. And I bring this up because there's this buzzword that I hear from designers called human-centered design. And what is a multiple part question, we like to ask many questions at once. One, like, yeah, now Ross is doing it as well.
My first question is, what do you think about when it comes to human-centered design? Two, do any of your experiences growing up in Indiana inform things that you're thinking about? Three—
Michael Leggett: Let's improve the design of this question.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, let's start there. Yeah, so human-centered design, HCI, I can take a stab at that. So I think the easiest way to understand what that means, it's a very kind of like feel good label to describe kind of like what people do or a discipline. The opposite of that from my perspective is technology centered design. And I think the key difference is technology centered design, you say, hey, I have a cool thing. Find out a cool way to use this cool thing and just see what sticks.
Human-centered design is who are the people? How can I empathize with who's trying to kind of accomplish a goal or what is their task? Find an appropriate solution for that person.
Ross Kenyon: The latter technology-centered design sounds like a lot of blockchain projects I've seen too where they are not built per the average user. I don't feel much empathy interacting with the blockchain on a regular basis.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, I'm going to just jump in. I think that there's interesting— I think it's Jared Spool. He's a famous researcher. He does a lot of talks. And he talked about the arc of technology and how often early on the technology is able to just do something. And it's successful just because I was able to do something. So you think back to the Gordon Gekko cell phone, the things like the size of a shoebox. It took literally 10 hours to charge. And you got about 10 minutes of talk time. And it costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars. But by golly, you could be on the beach, on the phone, and look as cool as—
Ross Kenyon: Martin Sheen?
Michael Leggett: No, it wasn't Martin Sheen.
Paul Gambill: Oh, Mike Douglas. Yeah, there you go.
Michael Leggett: You can look as cool as Michael Douglas on the beach with a cell phone. So you could think of the arc of cell phones in the beginning. They're not often very accessible, very easy to use, they're very cumbersome, but they're just able to do something. Now I think almost any successful technology still, back to Jacob's point, meets or solves a problem, addresses a problem. There's a need for it, right? It's not just technology for the sake of technology.
But over time, technology gets better. But typically, the way the curve goes next is, how many features can I cram into this? And it's also like, can I make it accessible? Can I make it cheaper? Can I make it small enough? And then you could think of the Motorola StarTAC phones or some of the early BlackBerries and stuff. They got smaller. They got cheaper. And then it was like, how many bullet points can I put on the front of the box? It does this. It does that. It does that. And then eventually, the third phase technology [unclear] is where it's really easy to use and experience matters more than how many features. And so if you look at the very first iPhone that came out, it didn't do 3G data, it didn't have all the apps. There's a bunch of stuff it didn't do and a lot of people laughed at it for that. It was expensive, it didn't have a keyboard, but it was like this really amazing experience. And I think in a lot of ways I was working or really coming around this backwards here. I was at Google at the time as a designer and saw how that really, that was a big aha moment for Silicon Valley and the tech companies of, "Oh, the experience matters. I get it now. We understand that has value," and reorienting how we built products or where we place value of the different people involved in that. It was a long-winded interjection.
Ross Kenyon: That's okay. It's a good thing to throw in there. We'll definitely come back to that. There was the second part of Christophe's question too about—
Christophe Jospe: Can you do the Al Pacino, just when I thought I was out? Pull me back in.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we're back to farming. You thought you escaped and now you're there. We've got a dude that we [unclear] around here named Bill, right? [unclear].
Jacob Farny: Yeah, we've got a list. That's not a real person. We just made up that.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, no, it's totally fake person.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, good. Oh, I'm Bill listening being like, how dare you abuse my family's heritage on air.
Christophe Jospe: But the name Bill actually holds meaning here at Nori because when we say Bill, it represents a persona that you have in mind when you're thinking about designing a product for them.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, so trying to go back to your original question about growing up in the sticks, I knew some Bills back in the day, so my, my dad—
Ross Kenyon: Literally chewing on a piece of grass right now and sticking—
Jacob Farny: My dad bought five acres of land in Evansville that was a cornfield and everything around it is still a cornfield. So all of our neighbors are farmers to one degree or another.
Ross Kenyon: Farmers, are we saying farmers? Are we saying growers now or does it matter?
Christophe Jospe: Growers includes ranchers and people raising animals too.
Ross Kenyon: That's right. Yes.
Paul Gambill: Are we cutting this?
Ross Kenyon: Why would you cut it? What is this?
Christophe Jospe: It's definitely one of the internal debates that goes on of like what's the modern term. They come up on the podcast too. We say different things.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and I think if you're a listener and you have preference for what is the best term, I think we want to draw a really large tent over anyone and think if anyone who is sequestering carbon dioxide in their soils and so...
Christophe Jospe: We look at that one sort of what's the consulting term, MECE, mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive it, and then there's non-MECE. So non-MECE would say you've got growers, you've got ranchers, you've got farmers, you've got food producers, conservationists, and if through all those people in a large bucket, we've just about covered it. The question is how do we get the right umbrella? And I think that's still up for debate of the right term that we're using. I think growers is just food producers and then farmers or [unclear] is also used interchangeably with farmers sometimes, but and then people who raise. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So Jacob's dad, you had some land in the background.
Jacob Farny: Yeah. So yeah, going back to this started with Bill, kind of like growing up around the bills of the world. I didn't think, no, to answer your question that I would circle back to designing something for somebody like Bill. But I do like solving problems for people that don't look like me. It's fun. You get a walk, a mile in somebody else's shoes. That's one of the really fun things about appearance design as a profession is you have to not necessarily be an expert, but you have to ramp up pretty quick about things that you know nothing about. I'm just kind of getting into the weeds of, man, what is he doing all day long? Or why is that a problem for him? Or can I empathize with this situation? It's just a really fun role-playing activity. And I think we do a decent job here at Nori making sure that if we're solving problems, we're solving them for Bill and not for us. And that's why we have personas.
Going back to kind of the point you started on, there's a list on the wall over here. It was a failed activity, but we were assessing some different designs and we literally have a column that says, "Things Bill won't like, Bill will like." Pretty rudimentary rubric for evaluating your designs, but I mean, I think it gets to the heart of human centered design is and what we try to do with the things that we make.
Ross Kenyon: You're very famous around the office too for your whiteboard domination skills. I have seen every piece of real estate occupied by some important nugget of information that has been visually mapped in a way that I can make sense of it. There's many, many examples.
Christophe Jospe: Can you make sense of it? This is a question I have most days.
Ross Kenyon: If I wanted to, but I have never wanted to. No, some of it isn't pretty intuitive. You're going through screens saying if they do this, then this is just big flowcharts but visually oriented for an app or a platform.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, I mean people have different skills. I think one of the really critical things about design is that there's a storytelling component to it that's really critical because you can throw a bunch of facts at somebody and say like, "Hey, I know that these are indisputable things." You can't connect with that emotionally. But if somebody tells you a story, you're instantly there. You can feel it. All of a sudden, the stakes are real. So we spend a lot of time visualizing what that is. And we use the term experience, which is super nebulous. It can mean a lot of different things. At the end of the day, these are all just vehicles to communicate what that overall narrative looks like. And at Nori, it's a very exciting, interesting narrative. I think it changes a lot.
But yeah, we're constantly rewriting different chapters of the book and trying to look at it from a different perspective, whether that be a different marketplace participant or whether it's just a different flavor of Bill, because we're definitely lumping all the bills of the world into one big bucket.
Ross Kenyon: Through the flavors of Bill. Yeah. Well, speaking of stories, did we maybe let Michael introduce himself over here? It's been a while. You're in the bullpen.
Michael Leggett: I'm nice to you. I'm enjoying. Yeah, it's just good. No, my name is Michael Leggett and I'm from Houston originally. My dad is an architect and then eventually I went into lighting design. My mom is an artist and has done a lot of different things in her career. I often draw to that to say I really grew up thinking of the form and function of things.
And I think that that, I always kind of had someone of an engineer's mind of how do things work, taking things apart. I remember at like age six, I had this really cool programmable remote control car and I took the whole thing apart and tried to put it back together and had about 60 screws left over. They never worked again to say the least. So I've kind of carried that with me and I've just kind of been on this journey for a long time.
Following that passion, and I'm looking for the right label or right outlet for it, I think I ended up in college and ended up doing a computer science degree. My first couple years were actually electrical engineering. I took a year off of school, worked for a startup. I was trying to put medical records online in 2000. That went bust with when the bubble popped. Came back, started my own company to finish paying for school, where I basically made websites and web apps for people. Moved out to California after college and started looking around for a job. I started working on my own and got really lucky. I got a job at Google as a designer. And I really feel like I became a designer at Google. So I was there for 10 years. Most of that in the Bay Area. Some of it up here in Seattle and I worked on things from Google Finance, I led Gmail for five years, I started Google Inbox, worked on Android for a few years, helped start Project Fi, worked on the massive Google-wide redesign, I worked on a bunch of different stuff there, and around a lot of really talented people. And then I spent the last few years at Facebook working on Messenger and then on kind of large complex ad systems. And I think really the turning point for me was when this last election, well, actually, my climate change story, I warned y'all this was going to be a verbose. I think it really started with a—
Ross Kenyon: It started 300 million years ago.
Michael Leggett: That's right. Thanks for the present.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you for saying y'all. You don't say it enough. I'm glad the Texan in you come here.
Michael Leggett: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's definitely. Well, y'all is like the small group, and then all y'all is a large inclusive group.
Ross Kenyon: So four people is y'all?
Michael Leggett: Yeah, that's about right. I think when you get up to about somewhere around 15 or 20, it's all y'all.
I think it started with seeing An Inconvenient Truth and that really kind of blowing my mind and feeling really moved by that. I'm not really sure what to do with it though. And that was kind of in the back of my mind for a while. And then increasingly, I was donating to things and voting on it. It didn't feel like, it killed me that it wasn't brought up in the debates even once in the presidential debates.
Ross Kenyon: The climate change.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, the most recent ones.
Ross Kenyon: I don't think much in the previous ones either. So when the election happened, what happened?
Michael Leggett: I did two things. I had a good friend of mine, Margaret Stewart, who's a design VP, Facebook, and she created a 100-day plan. I thought that was really inspiring. And so I created a 100-day plan for myself of what was I going to do in the first 100 days. The two climate change related things that I just read more was go vegetarian and look, I was leaving in a year, go work on climate change. I had no idea what that was going to look like, but I set that out and they were willing to let me stay even though I basically was quitting a year in advance.
And so that's what I did in March. I left and then I started talking to a bunch of different people, a bunch of different companies and really liked the people and kind of what y'all are doing here. And felt like I've learned a ton just in talking to y'all and super excited to kind of join up with Nori and do what I can do to bring my experience to this really important problem space.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. And you occupy such a unique role on, in fact, I'm not even sure personally how to categorize you because sometimes you end up working on things that strike me as quite technical. Then you chime in on a lot of creative aspects of the business too. So do you see yourself as a sort of a bridge here? Is it a form of communication? Just done more visually? How do you, how do you describe what you do here?
Christophe Jospe: What would you say you do here?
Michael Leggett: I talk to the engineer.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, reference noted.
Michael Leggett: I think that back to one of the things Jacob says, I like storytelling. I think a lot of, I think you could distill a lot of what we do. What any of us do is down to storytelling, right? And it's about either telling the right story to investors, telling the right story to each other when we're trying to just share information and get on the same page and move the ball down the field, grab another metaphor.
Telling stories to our customers, right? Who are we? What are they doing here? What are they, could they gain from participating in Nori? And is it legit and credibility? And I think that that kind of is one of the pieces of tissue. I'm also one that has like strong opinions, but I try to hold them loosely. And so I'm very comfortable sharing. I almost always have thoughts on things.
But I try to, and I like kind of getting involved in things, so I think I tend to dip my toe into any pond that I can see. But I try to add value and then get out and try to be clear, am I responsible for this in a certain way or am I just kind of throwing some ideas over the fence? I love, I love rich debate and discussion, no matter what the topic, no matter if I'm leading or if I'm just throwing some ideas, and then really trusting people to kind of do the right thing with that.
Ross Kenyon: Strong ideas, weakly held, I think in general more people would be better off if they adopted that. Because many people have strong opinions that are strongly held that are not ultimately justified. There's only a couple positions that I know enough about that you would have a hard time talking me out of, either whether that's politically or something else. But I try everything else to be like, "Oh, I guess I mean, empirically if that's better, okay, I'll go with that." And I try to do that. It isn't easy though because sometimes your identity gets tied up in there.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, totally. And once that happens it's very hard to change.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. I'm trying to check your ego at the door.
Michael Leggett: I mean, I think it's really important to have certain ideas should be strongly held like we shouldn't kill each other and should take care of the planet. But I think that especially making products, I think it's really important to be flexible. There's so many times that I was so sure of something, you're wrong. And it's really hard to know. Often you don't know if you're right or wrong. So it's easy. I just don't think it's helpful. I think you know. And I think it really excludes people from being involved in stuff. So I think the other thing, if I could say the second thing beyond telling good stories, is trying to pull people into telling that story together and not taking over. And I think that that's, that's something I'm still kind of growing and trying to get better at.
Ross Kenyon: I think we're always still growing and getting better at things.
Michael Leggett: But how do you pull people out there? Because other people know things. And this field has got a great team of [unclear] and expertise. So I think that's also really important.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. I don't know if you had something you wanted to say, Christophe. I want to introduce something new. We have talked about writing an article for a while, and it didn't quite happen. Jacob, I believe you taught me this conceptual schema that I've been using for thinking about design. But if you think about an X axis that is just a line basically on one side of the line, there is abstracting and on the other side of the line is teaching. Could you explain how that works and how give us an example perhaps?
Jacob Farny: Yeah, teaching versus abstracting. I think a lot of it gets down to not lying to your users, but also not making it more difficult for them to do what they're trying to do. So it's kind of, it's a line that you flirt with, but fundamentally the idea behind teaching is, "Hey, I'm going to tell you exactly how this is working. Be as transparent as possible. Kind of spell it all out. Here's the disclaimer at the bottom. Dig into it."
Ross Kenyon: Or surmise all the options if you want.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, abstracting is this idea that hey, maybe you know how to drive a car, but you don't really know how it works under the hood and that's fine. You don't need to know how to fix your engine in order to drive your car to work, which is a horrible example to use for this company. I think you get where I'm going with that. It's kind of like figuring out in a situation by situation basis, is the juice worth the squeeze? Like I'm going to try to teach somebody how something works, but to what end? Do they really need to know that? If not, and it gets in the way of them accomplishing what they're trying to do, get it abstracted. And this is where we can start talking about mental models.
Mental model being the idea that people have a certain structure in their head for how they think about certain ideas. And one of the easiest things in design, well not easy to do, but it's kind of like a good place to start is, well, I've got this problem over here. It's kind of a new thing, but it's somewhat similar to this other thing that people know something about. So I'm gonna make it look like that other thing and then hopefully people will know what to do. To me that's kind of, and an easier way to solve that problem without—
Ross Kenyon: It's like mimicry.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, you're not lying, you're being transparent about the things that are important. And then I think you can make that distinction, not even just on a case by case basis, but there could be smaller parts of that story that you're teaching or abstracting away. So one of the things that we've been talking about a lot here at Nori around new blockchain concepts is, you know, what is the value in teaching Bill going back to Bill? Like how much does he need to know about blockchain? How much should we teach him versus how much should we just abstract away? So an example is Bill signing up for an account. Does he need to know what a private and public key pair are in order to make his account? Probably not. We can probably find a better way to figure out like how to educate him on how that works. Maybe Bill just has an account.
And we kind of put a layer on top of it that makes him feel like he's just interacting with a regular bank account. And everything else related to the blockchain is hidden or buried as one idea. Or maybe there's bad things about that. Maybe Bill needs to know that he has this unique pair key because he's responsible for his identity in a way that we're not managing. So there's legal implications too and we have to evaluate for any situation.
Ross Kenyon: Sure, and if Nori were the custodian of these assets and ultimately had discretion over whether they were moved or spent or something like that, there's a lot of company risk. But in some cases, it's definitely easier for the user to have this be something very familiar. So if we're using the language of mimicry, you have a conventional account, someone logs in with the password, and maybe it's like PayPal where they have certain amount of money or Nori tokens in that account and they can access it that way without having to digitally sign a transaction with their private key. But it opens up all of these crazy questions, all of which one of the things I like about design too that I've been noticing is that one of these decisions that's made upstream just goes all the way downstream in ways that you can't necessarily always predict where it goes. Outside of design too, it could end up in legal or some other aspect of the business. So it's really really everything.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, definitely easily touch to the, I mean I think that this is speaking to kind of like I think a successful product, one aspect of a successful product is that it's you know kind of simple and simple I think of simple as being kind of like intuitive but also and like fitting into people's lives but also respectful and honoring the expectations you have as a customer. You can easily go too far in abstracting or in hiding complexity, and all of a sudden someone's like, "What do you mean? You have my entire address book." Or, "You have this information," or, "You've published this," or, "These private messages are actually public," or all kinds of things. I think it's really important to walk that line as well to make sure that you're making things as simple. You're not like to steal from Steve Krug, another guy who's written some famous books around design. Don't make people think. Really is like a really good kind of a shortcut for make things simple. But at the same time, they should at the end of the day, like have a correct kind of correct assumptions around like what it is they're getting into and what they've committed themselves to and going on with that.
Another favorite of mine is privacy isn't about making everything private. Privacy is about you having the correct expectations and control over what's private and what's public. I think that that's one ask. I think simple is one. The other two pillars I'll often draw on is it's actually useful and it's well made. Useful is both it solves a real problem, it does so in a way that's either not solved well or not as nicely solved today. So kind of play into your strengths and then something is well made. It's reliable, it's robust, it's beautiful, other things like that. But those are kind of the three pillars of great product, great design in my mind. It's kind of useful, simple, and well made.
Ross Kenyon: And that seems particularly hard when you're dealing with something that's super complex like Nori. You were describing earlier today that you had a metaphor you wanted to drop, which is using a three-layer cake analogy.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, you're joining the club, man.
Michael Leggett: Oh, yeah. No, no. I already had a membership.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, he's drunk the Kool-Aid. You're in.
Ross Kenyon: How does the cake work? What's that about?
Michael Leggett: You eat it.
Ross Kenyon: I like cake.
Michael Leggett: I like cake. I'm the good man.
I think often in building products you think of front end and back end and I think of blockchain and the Nori token. These are not bullet points in the front of the box. Now with blockchain, this is part of our infrastructure. This is for good reason. There's reasons we're using these things that address real needs in the product and in the marketplace.
So I think often building products is kind of front end, back end. But I think there's a third layer to the cake here. And this comes up more sometimes in what's called service design, but in basically kind of the methodologies. This is the word we use for how do you actually abstract all the different ways of capturing and storing CO2 or greenhouse gases. And how do you take each one of those different ways of capturing and storing CO2 and build up an entire instruction manual for how do we measure that? How do we verify it? How does that actually participate in the market alongside all the other different methodologies so a tonne is a tonne is a tonne? And the brilliance, I think, behind the tonne is a tonne is a tonne, where basically we're kind of methodology and project agnostic when to buyers is I think that that scales a lot better if you're thinking kind of long-term. A buyer can come into the market and say, "I need to pull down 50 megatonnes. I need to pull this down. Take my money." And I want to know that it's credible and it's being done right. And I might want to be able to tell a good story about that with my supply chain and other things. There's ways of accomplishing that, but it greatly reduces the kind of complexity of actually fulfilling that basic need, that basic goal.
And so I think that that's a really important layer of it. And so I think that design is not just designing the front end. It's also thinking about the back end and thinking about how that affects what we can do with the product. And it's also, I think, thinking about kind of these methodologies. And that's like, how do we best design the process to work? How do we think of like, I'm very much thinking of is Bill going to actually fill out all these forms? Is he going to give us all this data? Is that data going to be enough? That is right at the core of what we're doing as to whether or not this is going to fly. I think it's paramount that we get that right, that we're collecting enough data to satisfy the buyers, but also doing so in a way that's easy for Bill. That's back to that simple pillar. It's got to fit into his life. We can't be grossly unrealistic as like, oh yeah, those gonna do all these things, he's gonna fill out all these forms [unclear] complex, but I'd say great, he's so excited about what we're excited about. Well, no, Bill's probably not as excited about it as we are.
Ross Kenyon: Weren't we talking about something like the attrition rate, the more screens you have to click through to get to the end of something?
Michael Leggett: I don't know what, I think there's a fallacy around that, I think. I think it's more important. It's a very common held thing of like how many clicks. Oh, that one's fewer clicks, so it's better. I think it's far more important that each click is obvious. So whichever one has the most obvious clicks, and that kind of goes back to not having to think.
Ross Kenyon: But certainly at some point, you're going to get tired unless the carrot is big enough at the end of that. How many screens?
Michael Leggett: I think there's also interesting little nuggets of you over a career in design, you build up these little theories that I don't know, sometimes they're valid, sometimes they're not, but the idea that if you're checking out an e-commerce or like you're trying to book a hotel, it's better to put that all on one screen or you look at like Amazon, like people scroll more than they click. Whether that's still true or not, that's definitely still something kind of in the back of my mind. So all these things interplay and I think that it always depends on who the customer is, where they're at, how motivated they are. There's no one size fits all to any of these rules.
Christophe Jospe: That's an excellent answer, I feel. I'm extremely lucky to have you on the team. One of the things that I also appreciate about you is I think you get like an emotional reaction when you see bad design or bad product.
Jacob Farny: I can confirm, yes.
Christophe Jospe: Oh man, I don't know if that makes me happy or sad, not you.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, no, I've been told that. I don't hide it. I don't hide it well at all. Yeah, where were you going with that?
Christophe Jospe: I don't know, I was just sort of flattering you a little bit, Michael. I definitely, you know, I think it's nice that we, in some way, have a design team that are becoming, I don't know if subject matter expert is the right way to put it, but you guys are really knowledgeable in regenerative agriculture now and all the sort of ins and outs and data collection sides of like how can we make these methodologies and how do we make it all work? And so it's been a kind of phenomenal learning journey. And so I'd be curious, this is a question for both of you. What have you learned about this space that surprised you from kind of a design perspective? Or is there anything unique about what Nori is doing that uncovered pieces that you wouldn't have thought you'd uncover.
Ross Kenyon: Let me append to that too, because we often say that we're taking a software approach to these markets in this space. Is that part of what defines how you look at that or not so much?
Michael Leggett: I'm going to suggest we answer Christophe's question first and then we come back to yours. I think those are two pretty different questions. Anything that surprised us and then a software approach. And since I'm talking, I'll go first. I think there's tons that I'm learning every day. And I feel like it's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you realize the more there is to learn. I think that just the idea of kind of mitigation versus actually like pulling carbon down, that's just that framing. That was one of the first things from, a mutual friend introduced me to some people here at Nori and I started listening to the podcast. It was one of the first things I did.
And just that framing was kind of like a smack upside the head. Like, of course, that makes total sense. And so, and then kind of, I feeling like, you know, the curtains were drawn and I could actually see what was going on. That so much of policy and so many things, you know, an activity and press today is larger on mitigation and not much about actually trying to reverse things. I mean, that was, there's all kinds of ahas like that, that prize me and delight me because I feel that much closer to actually having impact. I don't know, there's tons, things like that. Yeah, as I stare at Jacob's point.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, totally. You definitely set me up there and I just whipped it. I think for me, when I started this gig, I didn't realize how in-depth and how long people would sit around a table and talk about soil and how mad people would get when you would call it dirt. It's dirt, man. It can't be that complicated, but there's so much behind soil science. Can I say soil science?
Ross Kenyon: You absolutely can.
Jacob Farny: Have we had a soil scientist on the podcast?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we've had at least one, maybe even a couple. I'm trying to remember. And spoiler alert, the next guest will be a soil scientist as well.
Christophe Jospe: Actually, she's a biologist.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, lots of questions for that. So she studies dirt.
Ross Kenyon: Rage face not JPEG there.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, I guess I was a little taken aback around how much of it is not theoretical, but it's based on a model that's not an exact science. There's a lot of wiggle room, there's a lot of interpretation. It can only be so accurate and we're trying to make something that looks very accurate and is very transparent. So there's a lot of kind of figuring out, well, how far can we push this part of the narrative? How true is that actually? How do we need to protect ourselves? And what does our insurance policy look like for this and that? It opens up all these really interesting avenues to talk about design in a way that's very specific, like way more specific than I'm building an e-commerce site and I'm designing for people that need to go on there and buy diapers in bulk. I don't know, terrible example. It's so niche. There's so much you have to know. And every single day I'm humbled to work around people that know so much about it and are willing to give their time to kind of explain it to me at the for dummies level, which is great. I think the more you work on something, the more you try to articulate what it is you're trying to do, you kind of get a better grasp for it and then somebody comes along and says, "Oh, you actually just got to level two and there's 500 levels. So good job getting the level two, but now I'll teach you the next round of this thing. Peel back the next layer of the onion to join the metaphor crew."
Ross Kenyon: That was a good one. I got that one. Cool. Yeah, actually, the way that you answered those questions made me think that my appending to that question was totally inappropriate because it was a totally different question that was asked. But I do want to know about the software approach. Is that a term that even makes sense to use? Because we say this internally sometimes. People have applied it to us externally. Is this the correct way to think about what is potentially wrong with some of these spaces?
Michael Leggett: I think to me it's not helpful.
Ross Kenyon: Because it's just like, it's too broad?
Michael Leggett: No, I think it, I suspect there's other people, like it's useful in so far as like, I felt like my skills were applicable here. Like we are building software, right? We are building screens and interfaces for people to use. We are building processes and all these things in so far as that's true as opposed to someone that's just out there trying to find a better way to either advocacy or trying to convince people to use a different fertilizer or trying to do raw science. Sometimes Christophe will say, "And now we do science." I think that there's feels as a, I think a broad term for my background as a technologist, right, like in working on like software, maybe some that work in hardware. It can feel really daunting if you want to work on climate change to feel like, well, I don't have like a PhD in something like how can I work on climate change? I guess I should just like write the editor at my local paper or like vote or donate to this cause. And like for me, like that just was not cutting it. And so insofar as like we are working on things that are familiar to me and a lot of things that are not, and it's actually applicable to climate change. That's super exciting and relevant. And I think that that's relevant to people that are used to working on climate change and aren't maybe used to things that have anything to do with software being applicable to climate change. So I can imagine that being useful for others that are around this ecosystem, but to me, just like, yeah, that's cool. We're working on software. Okay. It doesn't actually help me in my day-to-day. I don't find that a useful framing per se.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it bodes well for our recruiting future, huh?
Michael Leggett: Yeah, no, I think that that's, I don't think we'll have any problem recruiting people as things take off. We're very bullish on that.
Ross Kenyon: That's good. I think we have a pretty nice cap there to call it. Any last words, anything we didn't cover?
Michael Leggett: I think it's a pretty good intro to design and how to think about this. The other thing that I hope we're going to start doing a lot more is we need to start talking to people and showing them things, getting feedback and doing user research and stuff. I think, Jake, I was really impressed when I came in how much thought Jacob had done around the different personas and the way kind of information would flow between them to get things done. And I think that we need to start doing more to talk to people as things start to become a little bit more clear and we have more to show. And so I think there's a lot of avenues through which we can do that, but certainly I wanted to call out to our listeners if there's other people I'd be interested in that feel like they would actually be a part of our marketplace. I would like to sit down and kind of look at some stuff we're doing and see if they can accomplish certain tasks and see how well Jacob and I are doing and the rest of the product team. That would be great. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.]
Ross Kenyon: That's a great idea. Having feedback like that sounds quite valuable after all. You're trying to build for them so they should probably be in the room.
Michael Leggett: Absolutely. No, it's super important. I think especially it's something like this where you're not working or you're not going to instantly have millions of users. It's hard to use data to inform design so you really need to lean more on the qualitative research methods.
Ross Kenyon: [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] Well, thanks for being here with us. If you like the show, please share it with your friends, rate it in your podcast app of choice. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.]
