On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.
Galen Ettlin:
It is the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody, thank you so much for being here. I’m Galen Ettlin with my VP of marketing here at Act-On Software, Casey Munck. And Casey, I know we’ve got a friend here on the show today. I’m going to go through my spiel. Gessica Tortolano, a director of Slalom, a global technology consulting company with more than 13,000 team members and partnerships with companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, Tableau, so many more. And Gessica also has experience serving clients like Google, ESPN, Samsung, Carnival, Gap, Facebook, Burger King, Coca-Cola, the list goes on. She’s an experienced design and user experience evangelist. Casey, talk about exciting.
Casey Munck:
She is that girl. So it’s so good to see you, Gessica, after all of our years working together and all the fun times that we had as friends in Miami many of which are not podcast appropriate. So we’re going to keep it professional today. So obviously I know everything about you, a lot about you, but tell our listeners a little bit about your passion for experience design and user experience and what inspired you on that path.
Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah, thanks everyone. Thanks so much for inviting me. So my journey in user experience started really when the discipline first started out in the industry. I would say back in the nineties, and I’ve been doing this a while, where the really, this is starting to become the norm in companies and industry where people need to understand what their users or their customers or their guests need and what they want and even what their pain points are because once we understand that, we can make the experience better for them. So that’s kind of like the buzzwords distilled down. That’s what we do. We make better experiences for humans not computers. And I’ve been doing this a long time and I learn just as much as all of us do every year. Things change all the time between working at agencies and also teaching. I’ve taken that on to be the evangelist of good experiences out there
Casey Munck:
And she’s damn good at it too.
Galen Ettlin:
The reviews are in. Speaking of those, Gessica stalking your LinkedIn profile as a podcast host does, I did see reviews from people over and over talking about that passion that we’re talking about spirit and joy that you bring to UX and UI education. What sort of trends in that space are you seeing that really get you excited?
Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s true. Over the time that I’ve been working in this career, I’ve seen different trends come up. And I would say that right now we’re seeing a lot of trends in the vision space. So a lot of large companies that, let’s say they got in quotes online maybe 10 or 15 years ago, they had their first website or two, and now they’re starting to look back and say, where am I going from here? Now that I have something out there, and maybe it’s okay, maybe it needs some revisions but what are we like? What’s our North star? So I’d say that a big trend is large enterprise companies looking to set a vision for the future of their digital, and not just digital, but their overall customer experience. So we’re starting to see less of the division between digital and physical spaces. So if you think of a company like a cruise line or a car rental company, it isn’t just the thing you do on the app when you get there, it’s when you drop the car off, it’s when you check into your cruise. What is that like? So the trend is starting to move toward, let’s think beyond just the product or the device, but the overall customer journey.
Casey Munck:
I think you gave some good examples, but anything else that companies or marketers are doing that is just really mixed up from a user experience that you’re saying needs to end now
Gessica Tortolano:
Working in silos? So a lot of companies are separated. They separate the customer journey. They’re physical office spaces are literally separated. So if you think of a company, I’ll just use an example, before you buy a product, that group is in one building. After you buy the product, that group is in another building and just foundationally or operationally it, it’s difficult to create a good experience when your own company is divided. So now put that on the customer or the user and you start to see that there’s divisions and it doesn’t feel like a connected experience. And that’s because it’s not even from within the organization.
Casey Munck:
Well, so you lived and worked in at least 17 cities around the world. For brands that are trying to be more global, is there a universal formula or do we need to be thinking more culturally specific for user experience?
Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah, absolutely the latter. So when you think of a global brand, and I’ll use we have a lot of local brands here and I love to talk about them, but like a cruise line or even a Q S R, a quick service restaurant like a Burger King, both of them are global companies like a Royal Caribbean or a carnival. Their audiences or their customer base is completely different. In fact, even the experiences in, let’s say, for example, a McDonald’s or a Chick-fil-A or a Burger King here in America versus let’s say Holland. So when you go to Holland and you go to a Burger King or a fast food chain, it’s a bigger much different experience than here. And same with the cruising industry. So it’s really important that you don’t just create a blanket solution for everyone. So just within one culture, you’re going to have differences across your customer base, and then you bring it to another country and then you have even more.
And that’s even just a country that maybe reads the same format that we do left to whereas think about if you go to an Arabic speaking country, now all your layouts are in reverse. And that’s something to consider too. Even the use of iconography in illustrations, you have to be careful. It’s just super important to know what the culture is, who the audience is because different symbols that maybe for us mean peace, somebody putting up the peace sign, it means something else. It might not be bad, it just means something else to another culture. So one, you want to make sure you’re not offending anyone but number two, you want to play on the strengths. So if going to eat at a McDonald’s in Holland is high end that’s a different way that you’re going to treat that customer.
Casey Munck:
Great points. Although I think there are some cross culture treats that McDonald’s should bring over from Japan. I was just noticing yesterday they do these little mini pancakes and they have these packets with butter and syrup together that you just squeeze. It’s like, we need that over here.
Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah. Well, I mean it’s all learning from each other I think is the best thing that a company can do is whatever you’re learning or what’s happening over there. It’s like how do you take that learning or even things to improve on maybe things that didn’t work. How do you leverage that from different offices, different departments, and even different countries. But yeah, I love the idea of an international brand because you get to learn so much about just our world even. Yes. And how people interact with it.
Casey Munck:
Oh, you’re so smart, so true. I remember when I first got job at Amadeus, which is a global company, my world just exploded because there were so many different cultures I was getting to in interact with for the first time in my life. So great points.
Galen Ettlin:
Well, I know this is something that Casey has personally helped me with a lot. So I’m curious, Gessica, to get your perspective coming from local news, being a news anchor, very buttoned up, kind of uptight and formal to now trying to shift to be a little bit more human in our communication, if you will. What kind of advice do you give your clients and other leaders to be more rebellious in their marketing and leadership?
Gessica Tortolano:
There are a lot of industry standards out there when it comes to, let’s say, for example, design or even the way you approach design, a lot of industry standard out there. But I would say being rebellious would be putting, I would say your own spin on it. So I kind of over my career have collected, let’s call ’em the greatest hits, and I’ve put them all together. And so one of the things that I would say might be feel a little rebellious would be the way that I approach design. It’s from a very lean scrappy, almost going back to the early days where we still print. In some cases, this is probably not a good rebellious because we’re paper and <laugh> paper comes from trees. But the idea is that we externalize our process. So if we print out our inspiration, we print out, call it the Wall of Awesome.
And what it does is when clients see everything, their own product all up on the wall, and they look at, for example, if it’s a cruise line, we might pull in something totally out of category like an innovation around rental cars or a restaurant, something interesting that we saw in the restaurant space. And it’s completely out of category. But what it allows them to do is kind of like it’s pointalism, it reveals themes when you can see it all up on the wall. And I would say it’s rebellious because it doesn’t fit within a corporate way of doing things like slides. They’re used to, you give me a bunch of slides, I want to be wowed by the shiny end product but this is more valuable is to really just see almost the scrappiness, the homework that goes behind it.
Casey Munck:
So Gessica, what’s the most rebellious or outside of the box thing that you tried with your work and how did it go?
Gessica Tortolano:
Thinking about pushing a vision or a North Star, it’s like what does that mean to companies? And I would say that right now it feels rebellious because it puts companies maybe in an uncomfortable position where they have to think beyond just how much money are we going to make this month, or how much money are we going to save next month? So it’s a little bit uncomfortable. And I think that’s why it’s a little bit rebellious is we’re trying to think of things like, what if the product could come to you or the service could come to you and not you go to them. So let’s take a rental car company for an example. We’re so used to just the way it is. And I’d say rebelling is part of the innovation process, is looking at disrupting what we know it to be right now. And that feels normal to me, but probably pretty rebellious to some of our clients is to say, what if the car just came to you? What if someone could deliver it to you? What if you could pick it up in your garage instead of going to the airport and waiting or wasting an hour and a half in line?
Galen Ettlin:
All right. So Gessica, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?
Gessica Tortolano:
I’m sure Casey has some stories about that too. Again, probably tell <laugh> to share in a different podcast, but I tend to, I don’t know, I guess just not maybe make people feel uncomfortable because that’s not the best thing to do always. But it’s like you pose questions, whether it’s at my daughter’s school or at a store. I mean, unfortunately I kind of live and breathe experience design. So no matter where I am, I’m trying to improve some sort of experience. And so that’s probably where I’m kind of get blended between my professional life and my personal life. I start to try to improve the world around me.
Casey Munck:
Where did you flow at the store? Gessica?
Gessica Tortolano:
I, I’ll often give feedback about the process of checking out or the way that the physical space is set up. Oh no, you Whole foods just started to put in a bunch of self-checkout kiosk, but there’s not enough space in between for people to put their bags. And so that’s so annoying. And so it’s just those little things where I’m like, this is not the best experience. And so funny. I always try and I’ll be on with a customer service representative, and I’m telling them how they should improve their website or their process of returning an item. And it’s some call center person, but even within our city, Casey, you lived in Miami, and it’s like, how could we improve the city? And so any moment I get, if I’m at Bayfront, I’m talking to the guys driving around in the golf cart telling them what they should do to make this experience better for the citizens of Miami.
Casey Munck:
If you were president, I mean, come on, the world would be a better place. But no, I love that. I love that. And you do it in a way, you have a vibe that it’s not like, can I speak to a manager kind of personality. It’s always just comes with the wonderful sort of energy that you exude as a person. So I think that’s why it works so well
Galen Ettlin:
And genuinely trying to improve an experience, not just for you, but for everybody. That’s what you’re thinking about that the broader audience. Yeah.
Gessica Tortolano:
Yes. Our world.
Galen Ettlin:
If we’re looking at an example of maybe somebody else who’s living your rebel dream, what rebel do you think in our culture needs to be celebrated and why?
Gessica Tortolano:
There is a guy out there, his name is Luke W, well, he goes by Luke W in my field. His full name is Luke Robowski, and it’s W r o Luki. And he is someone that I always, I feel like I’ve taken on his cause and his cause is making forms easier to use online. And it sounds really maybe even boring a little bit, but if you’ve ever filled out a form online, whether it’s desktop or especially mobile, have you ever started to fill out a form on your phone and you’re like, no, I’m going to take this to the desktop or my laptop, or just give up? Well, yeah, or you just give up. And so lately what I found myself doing is looking for easier because forms come into play when you check out or buy something. So if I want to buy something and I’ve never bought there before, I can already anticipate that I’m going to take me a long time because I don’t have all my information in there.
So I’ve started to abandon any purchasing that doesn’t use Apple Pay or allow me to just quickly check out. So Luke W, he wrote a white paper in, I think it was before the mobile device even came on the scene and it was like 2008 and it’s called Forums Best Practices. And he took a look at eye tracking, heat mapping, and it found some really interesting, fascinating, best practices that have started to become really industry standard. And mobile has actually supported his view back then before Mobil really existed. So I’d say I, he’s kind of like my rebel guy. I don’t really know him, but I follow him around on Twitter. He’s fascinating. He works for Google. He’ll go back and show you screenshots of the way Google Maps used to look when it first came out. And you may not even notice that shift, but then you start to see each screenshot, you’re like, oh, we used to use that. Yeah, that really evolved.
Casey Munck:
That’s cool though. It’s actually, marketers deal with forums a lot because we have our gated content, which I sometimes absolutely just wish we could get rid of that whole experience overall and just let the content be free. So Gessica, now it’s time for our honey. I don’t think so. Segment talking about what needs to stop now in marketing or the MarTech space. So what’s been annoying you like with Gessica, are you ready for your honey? I don’t think so.
Gessica Tortolano:
Centered text <laugh>, like what? So I like alignment is a really important thing. When you read anywhere online or out in the physical world, it’s like how do left alignment? It just allows you to be able to, cause don’t, people don’t really read everything anymore. They scan. And so when you left align things it’s easier to scan, it’s easier for your brain to process and say, can I actually consume this content? So I would say one or two words centered on a slide is okay. But everything else I would say, please stop centering everything on every confrontation.
Casey Munck:
I love it. That is just sheer magic that things you wouldn’t even think to think about, but it’s like that makes sense. That makes a heck full of sense. Well Gessica, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute delight to catch up and let’s catch up offline as well.
Gessica Tortolano:
Thank you so much Casey and Galen. This is awesome. Thanks for inviting me.
Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time!
Check out the next episode with Jamie Roberts of Rock That Creative Job here. She works to help creatives better market themselves and find fulfilling jobs in a tough economy.