Angel Steger: Wealthfront's VP of Design on what architecture teaches you about software
Design Better
Angel Steger, VP of Design at Wealthfront and former architect, shares how her background in architecture informs her approach to software d
Key takeaways
- High-fidelity designs can become predictable and lose vitality if they don't reflect the core user experience.
- Small visual details, like whitespace between features, can significantly impact conversion rates—Dropbox's revenue dropped 30% due to overly generous spacing.
Main topics
- Architecture as a foundation for digital design
- The impact of subtle visual details on user behavior
Notable quotes
Sometimes when people jump into high fidelity too quickly, the forms that they generate become too predictable and actually lack a certain kind of vitality and magic because they're not tailored to the fundamental experience for the client that you're trying to make.
Conclusion
Angel Steger's journey from architecture to tech underscores the power of curiosity and intentionality in
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:01) Sometimes when people jump into high fidelity too quickly, the forms that they generate become too predictable and actually lack a certain kind of vitality and magic because they're not tailored to the fundamental experience for the client that you're trying to make. It's just tailored to conventional patterns. Speaker 6 (0:22) A few years ago, Dropbox redesigned its website and revenue dropped by 30%. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment. People working weekends, everyone hunting for a systemic failure. And the culprit turned out to be a pricing page. Specifically, the white space between the feature list items was slightly too generous. Angel Steger noticed that her eye kept landing on that white instead of the words. They tightened the gaps, and guess what? Revenue came right back. That's the kind of thing Angel notices, and it's not an accident. Currently the VP of Design at Wealthfront, she trained as an architect at RISD, where the first question in her architecture class wasn't about buildings, it was, what is a drawing? The sort of question that makes you realize every tool that you reach for carries a point of view that you probably haven't examined yet. Angel's path into tech Speaker 5 (1:17) was less deliberate. By her own account, she mouthed off to her boss, got fired, and spent the severance on O'Reilly books. She then taught herself to code and became the first designer at MySpace, where the head of engineering proudly informed her that they never had design and never would need it. She went on to become the first product designer at 23andMe, learned usability from Larry Tesler, and led design at Pinterest, Dropbox, and Meta before landing at Wealthfront. In this conversation, we get into what architecture teaches you about solving one problem at a time. why she tells her team to go lower fidelity, how a default chart setting can push someone into a financial decision they'll regret, and what she looks for in a portfolio. High craft, high intentionality, and no boiled broccoli. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. Speaker 6 (2:05) I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and learn from the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a paid subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. You'll get access to our Slack community where there's amazing people helping one another, our library of e-books, and every podcast and post that we publish. Visit designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe to learn more. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Speaker 4 (2:59) The Speaker 2 (3:00) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 4 (3:11) The new Speaker 2 (3:15) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 1 (3:24) When the world keeps shifting, we're there to help you act with confidence. At HSBC, we bring together the people, ideas, and capital that drive growth, backing your ambitions at every stage. So when you're preparing for the next generation, strengthening your portfolio, or you're entering new markets, we're there, bringing 160 years of experience to help you move forward. HSBC, opening up a world of opportunity. Speaker 6 (3:57) And now, back to the show. Speaker 5 (4:04) Angel Steger, welcome to Design Better. Speaker 3 (4:06) Awesome. Thanks for having me. Speaker 5 (4:07) We're excited to have you. And as a way to start for folks who aren't familiar with you, perhaps you could just give us, as Aaron likes to say, the nickel tour of your career. I know you started with a degree in architecture and you worked your way into design and had a number of individual contributor roles and then worked your way into leadership through companies like Pinterest, Dropbox, Meta, and now Wealthfront. But talk to us a little about some of the key points in that journey that you took. Speaker 3 (4:32) Yeah, if there was a running theme, it's curiosity, not a master plan. I chose architecture after doing a year of illustration because I figured if you could learn to do something as complicated as making a building with everything from aesthetics to real estate, social, cultural, economic, and environmental impact, plus plumbing and making sure things don't fall on people. If you can learn how to do that, you can probably like transfer those skills to a lot of other things. Sort of found myself into tech by accident, had friends who had pivoted from architecture into tech and their startup got purchased by Rupert Murdoch and they finally had money. And they were like, we're hiring designers. Have you ever thought about switching from physical to digital? And I was like, not really. And then they said, well, how would you feel about working on a product that has 100 million users? I was like, that's just not a number that comes up a lot in physical design. And so I was like, well, I just can't understand this. I want to know more about it. Let's try it. And so I sassed my boss at the job that I had, got fired, used my severance pay to buy O'Reilly books on HTML and CSS. Taught myself to code because one had to back in the day. Built myself a little prototype portfolio site and some examples and then got hired and inadvertently became the first designer working on MySpace at the time, which I knew I was the first because their head of engineering proudly told me that they had never had design and they would never need it and they never would. Speaker 6 (6:13) Yeah, how'd that work for them? Speaker 3 (6:16) Well, I said, you know, nice to meet you. And, you know, you can't be mad at people for being proud of having accomplished a certain level of success without it. I was like, OK, you know, I'm not going to take any of that pride away from you. I'm just going to show you that there's more to look forward to. And we can do that without causing Speaker 2 (6:32) your site to fall over, which was really the primary concern. Speaker 3 (6:35) And then from there, just sort of followed the stream of good friends working on interesting problems. So then became the first product designer working at 23andMe, got to learn usability with Larry Tesler, who coined the term usability, and also copy-paste, though he would insist that he did not, that clients and users made copy and paste, and he just wrote it down. from there, bopped around on anything that seemed interesting, like personal email, what can we do for people? When I squint back at it, it really came down to the things that I find most rewarding are the things that fundamentally uplift the human experience. And to me, those are like, if you want to live a good life, you need your health, you need your wealth, and you need relationships. And if you don't have one of those things, you'll actually live a meaningfully shorter life. And I got to a point where I had worked on health at 23andMe. I had worked on relationships at Meta and productivity through Dropbox, Pinterest, all kinds of things, but had never worked on the actual making of money, which is such an emotionally laden topic. There's a lot of stress. It's one of those things that can make or break relationships. But I had kind of given up on it because it felt like a pretty exploitive environment. unclear if it's always working in the client best interest kind of thing. But I had a friend when I was taking a work sabbatical and just bopping around advising who was like, hey, you need to look at this. I know you're not looking right now, but just take a look. And I saw this job description from Wealthfront for a head of design that was got to have high craft. You got to be strategic. You need to care about culture. And it was kind of the magic triumvirate of all the things I cared about. And then they were very intentional about the business model and how they made money and how that connected to client well-being. And so I was like, OK, I was supposed to be not working, but curiosity pulled me in once again. And so two and a half years later, here I am. It's been a really fun ride. New challenges every day. But when you're helping people get around their finances. Whether it's a good day or a tough day, you know that your time is well spent, which I think as you get further along in your career, it's one of those things that matters. You're like, oh, okay, like I only have how many years left in my career? Are these things spent in the right way? Am I having the kind of impact I want to have? And so for now, the answer is yes. Speaker 6 (9:03) It's a super interesting space. And I want to dive into the psychology of that here in a little bit. But first, I want to go deeper into the architecture background because some of the best designers I have ever worked for, worked with, or had on my team had some sort of physical design background, architecture, industrial design, etc. My wife studied architecture, and we have lots of design debates, good and bad. Speaker 6 (9:31) But it is a discipline and an educational system that is kind of trial by fire. It's kind of like the Navy SEALs of design. If you can make it through it, it is brutal. I presume that you bring a lot of valuable things into your current discipline, leadership-wise, just how you think about design, how you communicate with people who are not designers. What are the core lessons that are most valuable from your education that you see those who have a software design background are missing? Speaker 3 (10:03) So I think one was the way that we were taught. So I went to RISD at the time I was there. It was the top rated undergraduate architecture program in the country. Architecture wasn't my first choice. It was actually industrial design, but there was no room. So I couldn't transfer in. And when I was in illustration, I had chosen illustration because Originally, I thought I wanted to do fine arts, but a lot of the fine arts didn't teach you hard skills, and I wanted things like color theory, perspective, light, form, and illustration was the only major that taught you that. And so I learned a lot of technical things from illustration, and then I watched my friends who were in industrial design, and the way that they would learn how to draw is they were given three markers. a highlight, a mid-tone, and a shadow marker. And they were just sort of taught, make these like sort of quick fix perspective blobby shapes. Here's how to make a cup look 3D kind of thing. And when I took an elective class in architecture, the first thing they said was, what is a drawing? And what I love about that is that it goes to the root of all of the assumptions that people have or could have going into making something. Because when you're taught how to do something, the technique actually comes from a point of view, but you may not be aware of it. You just adopt the frame and sit with it. And by asking, what is a drawing? You ask yourself, well, what is the thing I'm trying to do? And if a drawing is an attempt at representation of the thing I'm trying to do, what is the right form to communicate that thing? It might not be three markers. It might be a performance piece. It might be a painting. It might be a block of clay. What we came with in school was a philosophical grounding of really being aware of every tool and device that you use to capture and interrogate an idea. The other thing that comes to mind is this technique known as translation. So buildings are very, very complex, and they have many, many, many problems that you need to solve. And if you tried to solve all of them at once, you would essentially just beach ball and not make any progress. Architecture translation is about finding a starting point and using intentional abstraction and material choices. to focus on articulating and solving one problem at a time. And then as you solve that one problem, you translate it into another material, which allows you to then solve the next layer of problem. So what does that actually mean? Because that sounds really abstract. When you first start working on an architecture project, you might start with a site map or a city plan. And that is intentionally a certain level of abstraction, right? Like it's the 500,000 foot view. You're not thinking about the doorknobs. You can't draw the doorknobs at that view. You're thinking about what is the relationship of this form that we're trying to put together relative to the life and activity around it. And once you've got a certain amount of point of view on that, then you might. either switch the view of the drawing from a plan view to an elevation or a section, or, you know, there's that Simpsons episode featuring Frank Gehry where it's like, you know, a crumpled piece of paper, like, you know, falls on the table