Some startup founders don't understand what Louisa Heinrich does. She is not afraid to tell them. That's how she began her career in tech.
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Prior to the dot-com crash, the roles he held at companies came with titles like Director of Experience Architecture and Head of Interaction Design. The positions would be called user experience design.
In the early aughts, Heinrich found herself at odds with chief executives who often only focused on the bottom line, either because they didn't understand what she did or why she was needed.
She said that she has had many conversations with people who want to do something but don't have a good reason.
The way Silicon Valley has worked for the last few decades, and still works right now, is fairly straightforward: a founder has an idea. They raise money from venture capitalists. They hire a team to build their idea in hopes of changing the world or at the very least, paying their investors back. The ones who make it have either pure luck or humancentric products.
Since luck is unpredictable, he wanted founders to think about how they use the tech they build as a metric of success, not just the hardware or software itself.
Information architecture was called that because we talked about building interactive products like we were building a house. You can't have a room without an exit. When we started thinking about digital properties as physical spaces, it gave us better ways of constructing them.
The internet has become a staple of the Fortune 500 companies that have led design for digital consumer projects. If you have ever modified a car on an automaker's website, you owe it to him to thank him. Do you have a bank app on your phone? The earliest form of digital banking was designed by Heinrich. The first iteration of the U.K.'s largest broadcaster's searchable index of over 4 million pages of content was released by her when she was an executive director.
She started Superhuman because she saw a gap between what clients were asking of agencies and what they actually needed.
Management consultancies can tell you how big the market is for a hypothetical product.
He spends a lot of time thinking about the future of technology, its inevitable regulation, and the god-ification of founders.
One thesis she has discovered time and time again is that creators can have the best intentions for how their product will be used. There is no telling what people will do once they get a hold of them. Superhuman is an advocate for framework-based regulation of tech.
The idea that the government can pass laws that are somehow going to be.
If governments moved as slowly as technology, we would all live in a state of chaos.
Lawmakers and stakeholders need to ask themselves a few questions when crafting legislation to understand the consequences of different types of technology. What are some of the signals we can see? How can we build frameworks to guide our behavior?
Even though the technology industry and the government are bound to misunderstand each other, the predictability of those conversations is slim.
He is optimistic. People are more critical of tech now than they were when she started.
She said that a lot of the chaos in the political world over the last six years has caused more people to question what.
The more widespread technology becomes in the lives of people across the world, the more creators are forced to think about the impact of their products. During the Black Lives Matter movement and the public outcry over the rapid spread of misinformation, the researchers and critics who protested the use of biased, harmful artificial intelligence protested, leading to a backlash across social media platforms.
That's why he's happy to see the roles embedded at the start of businesses, rather than as a response to backlash.
The people who pay for the product or not are the people who generate the revenue, she said.
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