Designer

Welcome to the Profitable Web Designer Podcast, the place where women web designers come to raise their prices, book higher paying projects, and run their web design businesses without overwhelm and burnout.

I'm your host, Shannon Mattern, pricing strategist and founder of the Web Designer Academy, where you're just one proposal away from the money you truly deserve to be making.

And I'm here to help you build a web design business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

So yeah, and I have lots and lots of coaches and service providers.

The coaches are like a lot of the people that I worked with in my done for you services for years.

And the service providers are folks who are like me, like I was doing done for you work in different capacities, including a lot of web designers.

So I'm excited to tell you more about the capsule library and hopefully maybe spark the idea with people because it's something that works really well for service providers.

So

Today, I want to talk about a relationship that can either be, frankly, one of the most powerful collaborations in your professional life, or on the flip side, one of the most frustrating.

And that is the designer-architect relationship.

So when it works, it elevates everything.

The project is better.

And then there's the weekly meeting, which I talked about at great length in the last episode.

If you didn't catch that, I highly recommend you go back to episode 294 to hear why weekly meetings are so valuable.

But it's also important to connect that conversation to today because the weekly meeting is also where the designer-architect relationship, it frankly gets tested and also built.

So when you're on that site together every week over the course of months, you develop a working rhythm, right? You start to understand how the architect thinks.

But that's just the latest chapter.

Before college, Graham was an interior designer, a national TV star, a theater kid, and an improv guy.

And now he's heading to Chicago, where he plans to take advantage of the arts, meet new people, see lots of improv, and try every Chicago-style hot dog he can find.

one quick note before we begin you'll hear a little bell throughout this episode i've added it to mark transitions from one subject to the next think of it as the official try hard valley okay what are we talking about now bell so when you hear it that's your cue we're moving on

So when I was in elementary school, my mom began working at an interior design firm, running the business side of things.

And I became very interested in what she was doing for work.

And I decided that I was going to become an interior designer.

I was at the Kips Bay Show House, which for people who don't know, a group of designers come in and they each get a room to design in the house.

People, tho- those are Zach's feet

Designer originals.

Yeah, designer originals.

Yeah.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to Insights Unlocked.

In this episode, Leah Hogan talks with UX researcher, designer, and Gauge founder Nick Cawthon about what happens when AI helps us build faster than ever.

They explore why speed doesn't always mean progress, where AI belongs in the research process, and why human insight and connection could become even more valuable as technology advances.

Enjoy the show.

Thank you.

And our guest today is Nick Cawthon.

Nick is the founder of Gauge and a veteran UX researcher, designer, and strategist who has spent more than two decades helping organizations better understand their users and build better experiences.

He's also an educator and outspoken thinker on how AI is reshaping UX research and why human insight may be more important than ever.

And if you don't take control of it, y- you could end up someplace you really didn't wanna be.

So be the designer

designerIn your book, you talk about how part of this process is knowing what you value and being in congruence with that.

Some values seem more general, like kindness.

I'm sure a lot of us value kindness.

And that kind of responsiveness, that constant availability, which is real-time problem-solving, that has a value that a flat design fee was never designed to capture Now, there's also this second mindset issue I wanna talk about, which is that many designers feel almost apologetic about charging for construction management.

It's like they need to justify it, or, like, maybe the client thinks they're double-dipping, right? Paying the contractor and the designer? Like, that feels odd.

Now, let's talk about this directly, because it is one of the most expensive beliefs costing our profession, right? Let me be clear.

You are not charging for the contractor's work.

The purpose is you cannot help what you don't know about.

Let me repeat that.

You can't manage something you don't know about, right? So the designer who only shows up when something has gone wrong is behind the problem because the problem didn't start the moment it became visible.

There were steps along the way or decisions that were made or small things that shifted, and if you weren't there for those, you don't have the full picture, and you, again, can't manage what you haven't witnessed.

I can take you into a whole nother arena, which I will someday.

I'll send you a paper, we won't do it now, on...

In 1971 at the Aspen Design Conference, there was a revolt with the, with the West Coast designers going up against the East Coast designers and the Midwest, and it basically dissolved the Aspen Design Conference.

It, it actually blew it up.

What were they arguing about?

... a copy of it for you to read.

Yeah.

And with your father having such strong convictions, did he, was he viewed as a threat or were there any enemies that he made along the way for being so, um, so bold and, and having strong morals? 'Cause I, I notice that in design today, I see that there's, you know, the, the designers that accept the status quo and sort of give in to business as usual, and then there's the people that are desperately pushing back, being provocative and, um, and there's some divide there, and was your father...