Jon Deragon (00:00)
When you give them the respect of showing them all of this, doing QA sessions, presenting them with walkthroughs of these designs during the graduated design process, the relationship is like a heck of a lot better and the outcome is a lot more polished.

Rick Denton (00:16)
customer experience wisdom, a dash of travel talk, we've been cleared for takeoff. Welcome back CX Passport listeners. get another new country today. Today's guest, John Daragon joins us from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, who is our first guest based there. John is head of design at FPT, who's the sponsor for today's episode. Thank you FPT for supporting CX Passport.

Jon Deragon (00:23)
in the

Rick Denton (00:45)
John's journey has taken him through Canada, Australia, Indonesia, and now Vietnam. He's built teams, led research, and shaped experiences in mobile apps, IoT, enterprise platforms, and is now taking on AI application design. What ties it all together is his belief that deep user research and engaging design that has soul are what move products from ⁓ okay, to meaningful.

I'm especially curious about how John leads a design organization of over 140 designers towards clarity and impact. How do you balance all the scale, speed, technology, and making something people actually enjoy using, especially when AI and cutting edge interfaces enter the picture. John, welcome to CX Passport.

Jon Deragon (01:32)
Rick, thanks for having me on the show. Much appreciated. Nice to talk with you.

Rick Denton (01:36)
It

is great to talk with you. Let's start with topic du jour, right? It's on everybody's mind, of course, and continues to say nobody's mind. Start with AI. When someone says, quote, designing for an AI product, what does that actually look like in your world?

Jon Deragon (01:52)
Yeah, it's amazing, Rick, because I think if we had this interview each month, my answer to it would be a bit different because that's how quickly all the changes are happening. It's unbelievable. But that's what's so cool about it. What's really a friend of mine right now is around human AI interaction, because I think a lot of the discussion that's happening out there is largely technical, right? We're really kind of grappling with the complexities of it and the compute and tokens and all of these things.

But in my mind, I look at this and say, we have all these established patterns and layouts and behaviors and things that we expect of the products that we use, the digital products and mobile apps, our websites, all of these things. We're accustomed to them working a certain way. But we're kind of stepping into the future of the unknown. So that's much more kind of the unfamiliar.

we're going to start seeing patterns and behaviors and interactions, which I haven't seen before, which I think has to be designed carefully and intuitively. And it needs to have a sense of guidance to it, giving the user a sense of confidence that they're doing the right things. Like the things that they're about to click on or do or interact is correct. And it's leading them to the intended purpose. Right. And when you throw into that, all of this multimodal

input stuff. We're all accustomed to keyboard, mouse and touchscreens. Add to that video and photos and audio and sensors and all of these other things that can all be put into the AI at the same time and in combination. This is really powerful what this does. I mean, it just totally changes how you interact with these products.

Rick Denton (03:38)
I'm glad you brought up that multimodal because I was just reading, and I'm not making this up, just reading something this morning that talked about an effective way to prompt, because a lot of times when we're prompting our fingers or maybe slowing us up, because we don't type as fast as we think. So talk to, so there's one mode of input, but it's more effective to read the input than to have it talk back to you. But as humans, we're finding it of odd to do voice, then read and that method.

the fact that you're bringing that in, how are you kind of guiding from a design perspective, users to not only be comfortable in a world where it feels out of sync, but actually recognize it might be more effective for you to play in this multimodal space.

Jon Deragon (04:24)
Yeah, isn't that cool? So this is really our job is to say here are all the things that are available to you. Here's why you'd want to use them and the advantages of each and how you may want to use them in combination. And why would you choose one over another? So I think we can start to see that unfolding now. You when I go into GPT and I have an issue.

I natively start to take pictures of things and say, Hey, tell me something about this, know, instruct me on what to do. I'm asking it will draw diagrams of that. Show me in illustrations what you mean. And it just comes back and shows that to me. That's the path that we're going on. That's fascinating. So it's a matter of the interface, having the right affordance to say all of these things are available to you. And at what given times, or maybe in the context of the conversation, which ones are most suitable to use.

Rick Denton (05:17)
I had mentioned that I was reading something. Well, it's actually, it's a daily newsletter that I get about AI. And just like what I was reading, there's something changing meaningfully in the world of AI all the time. Well, if you're responsible for that, how on earth do you and your team keep up with all of this, especially given that pace of change?

Jon Deragon (05:38)
we're kind of in those pioneering days, right? And everyone's kind of feeling their way through this together, which is kind of reassuring. I know there's everybody on LinkedIn that's supposedly experts now, ⁓ but I can still safely say we're all feeling our way through it. And that's kind of reassuring. And I think I've tried to ⁓ form my own perspective and my own position on AI and a pool of knowledge that

has been gathered from sort of a broad range of sources and perspectives, looking at it in layers. And the first is like the technical layer, which is like, you know, the technology, the terminology, the how does it work and what does it do of AI, right?

After that, we kind of have another layer, which is like, what are the advancements of that technology? How is it progressing? What's new on a, on a literally a week to week basis? I understand the things that are kind of coming into the picture as they come along.

How do I apply this? What's the application of this technology into the design of the applications? How does it change the experience, the functionality, all of these things?

lastly, and probably the most exciting part of it is like its impacts. So it's not just an impact of like this immediate product that's in front of you that you're designing or developing or what have you. It's like societal impacts, like larger.

Yeah. Commercial impacts and markets and industries and countries, humanity. like, when you start to stretch your, when you start stretching your mind of like really big picture, for me, it was like solve fusion power, uh, get the quantum computer stuff sorted out. Um, life longevity, uh, material sciences. This is stuff that is truly will, will change our, our, our world.

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for

Rick Denton (07:40)
for listening to CX Passport

today. We've now reached our cruising altitude, so I'll turn that seatbelt sign off. While you're getting comfortable, hit that follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast apps. Love it if you'd tell a friend about CX Passport, leave a review so others can discover the show as well. Now sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Jon Deragon (07:52)
so you'll never miss an episode.

So the other part, Rick, is really around the sort of a multi-pronged approach to the sources of getting this information. And one of those was conferences. Last year, I had the privilege of going to Design Up, which was in ⁓ Bangalore. And there was a gentleman that did a talk called Josh Clark. And he started to talk about basically sentient design. And his keynote was

pivotal in my own kind of learning journey about AI and completely shifting how I thought about what AI's impact would be on interface design. It completely changed it in a 45 minute presentation. I was a new man walking out of that auditorium.

So Josh Clark is actually going to publish a book called sentient design, and it's going to come out in 2026. Yeah. And there was another book I've started reading called reshuffle. it's Sanjeev Paul Choudhury's book. And it's about how the whole knowledge economy.

is in shuffle mode. I first learned about, ⁓ about send Jeep through sub stack. the amount of kind of very interesting, different angles and perspectives on AI and sub stack articles have really been quite amazing. that's a good source. The other is just YouTube. Matt Wolf and Tim and theoretically media.

Every week they're kind of doing these updates. Here's exactly the latest things that these technologies are capable of doing. When you're watching these, you really keep on top of what is the capabilities at this exact moment. And they're relatively entertaining to watch. I've found LinkedIn, all the thought leaders in the space, you know, like Rory Flynn or Drew Brucker. they're just so generous with their posts, sharing everything that they've learned

podcasts, as you know, right? Uh, when you're just starting, yeah. When AI for humans is not only like informative, but it's, it's just damn funny.

But on the other end of that spectrum, Rick, one of the most fascinating ones I listened to was called moonshots and that's Peter Diamandis. And it's this very optimistic view about what the implications are, what, is AI going to do to change our world?

One of the best things to do is just ask AI about AI. Ask it about how to interact with it, how to do different things. And actually, its responses are very good.

Rick Denton (10:33)
You almost, as we're talking about that, it almost takes me back to our multimodal conversation that there's just this wide variety of ways to engage. want to take a little bit of a shift here. And there's a phrase that is often said in customer experience. And it says, you know, often everyone is responsible for the customer. I've started to hear a similar phrasing around design. Like everyone should have design literacy.

Even the way people used to say everyone should know how to code. Well, what's your take on that? Everyone should design. Everyone's the customer. Everyone should learn how to code.

Jon Deragon (11:12)
Yeah. And Rick, we kind of go through waves of this, don't we? ⁓ it started with everybody needs to be a developer and everybody's responsible for the, ⁓ customer. Now everyone needs to be a designer. ⁓ so I think yes, we are responsible for the customer, all of us, no exceptions. Nobody can kind of hide in the corner and say, well, that, doesn't apply to me. That, that I truly believe.

When you start to talk about ⁓ designers, there's an element of truth to this, but we really have to be careful about it. ⁓ The big difference is you can say, the people throughout the organization should have a bit of design literacy, the basic understanding of design in the context of digital products. I think that's a good thing. And maybe it doesn't take much to get people up to that level so that

They can contribute into discussions and understand what designers are talking about when they meet with them. It's a good thing. The difference though is, you what if it really, what its intent really is, is design work. That's a very different proposition, right? The expectation is that you're contributing usable design into a product carries a very different weight.

it. You know, when it was the coding thing, everybody should be a coder and that included designers, right? When the expectation started to extend into, well, when designers design, shouldn't they just do the code that they're designing? And that's where it started to get really tricky. I went the total other way with my team. I basically said, look, you guys have no responsibility for code. We've got thousands of people that are incredibly qualified.

and live and breathe code. And so why should we be fumbling through this as like an add-on to a career that we've invested countless hours of our life into, built the expertise, did the learning, the training, all of these things? Why don't we focus on that? And so that's really what we've kept true to. We do kind of need to know the limits and capabilities of the technologies that we're designing.

If we're designing for something that's a very technical application, absolutely we should know what is the coding capable of doing. We have to have an appreciation of all of the functionality that's required to pull off some sort of a, you know, an interaction or a design feature that we're building so that we can sort of gauge, is this going to be a lot of work for someone that has to actually develop it? And is it feasible?

I think we're also responsible for having a good relationship with those developers. That is very important as well. I think, you know, when you look at everybody should be a designer, you know, Rick, I've seen my fair share of like horrifying PowerPoint slide decks, right? Really, ⁓ really quite, quite heinous, right? And the thing is, is that I respect and appreciate the work that went into them.

And it probably was a total pain in the ass for them to do it. However, it didn't translate into a viable output. They expected to be designers. And I think not.

Rick Denton (14:36)
you

John absolutely loved that answer about design as someone who's been guilty of some poor PowerPoint slides. can totally appreciate the value of a great designer well beyond just simply crafting PowerPoint slides. I've been around some amazing ones in the physical space and the digital space. So 1000 % agree with you there. It's time for us to take a little break here. Join me here in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Jon Deragon (15:10)
you know, amazingly enough, a long time ago, that would have been Vietnam. But amazingly, you end up living where you dream to be. And ⁓ I just find it a powerful realization that, that was Vietnam at a point. And here I am years and years later calling this home is just so incredible. It's really, I very fortunate. Yeah. ⁓

but I've, I've, you Rick, I've watched enough of your show to realize that my actual answer to your question, it's not going to score me any originality points. That's for sure. ⁓ it's a Japan. I, I, there's something about it that really, ⁓ speaks to me, ⁓ even still after many trips, it still feels like I'm kind of taking a shuttle to another planet. And, and there's, there's just something about.

Tokyo where I just get swallowed up in this city. There's something I love about that experience and it's just the culture, the electronics, the cars, the gaming, all of these things that really resonate with me. It's just, ⁓ it really is amazing as a destination. It's funny because I do a little bit of gaming and there's this series I play which is called Like a Dragon.

And so it's kind of like a realistic simulation of a fictitious Japanese city that you walk around in. It's three dimensional. And every time I play this, it's just calling me back to Japan. must be some kind of a Trojan horse put out into the world, calling, beckoning people back to Japan.

Rick Denton (16:47)
is absolutely spectacular. love that it is bringing you back into a world that you weren't expecting. Well, what about a world you haven't been to yet? What's a dream travel location that you've not been to yet?

Jon Deragon (16:59)
Can you believe I still haven't been to London? And I think it's, it's kind of getting time that I go in and do all of the kind of museums and galleries and cultural stuff and sit at an English pub and have a beer and just all of these things to me. think that would be kind of one of the next on the list for sure. Yeah. Um, it's funny is I watched this food delivery guy on, on YouTube. think he's called like

London eats or something like that. It's the most ridiculous thing to watch and he's he's taking his moped winding through the streets of London just doing deliveries and talking about various aspects of his life and I'm looking at the streets and going like there's parts of this I want to walk through I want to see firsthand and yeah be in it and see it and witness it. Yeah, London.

Rick Denton (17:51)
Yeah, I can absolutely see that. Well, you mentioned food. What's a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Jon Deragon (17:57)
I'm a huge coffee guy, like all in on like, you know, single origin, have a very perfecting my brewing workflow and my ratios, all of this. Like it's, you know, it's, it's a big ordeal. I'm making regular trips to the Indy coffee roasting places, all of that. ⁓ I guess that doesn't answer your question, but I think, ⁓ man, chocolate pairs very well with that. ⁓ so I have to say, ⁓ you know,

Good chocolate and some coffee ⁓ mixes together pretty well. Yeah

Rick Denton (18:31)
That would, I could see how that would mix together very well having well mixed it myself. So I appreciate that. Chocolate is something a kid loves. Coffee is not something a kid loves. What is something you were forced to eat growing up, but you hated as a kid.

Jon Deragon (18:48)
man, whenever I saw onions on the plate, that was it. The whole, the whole meal is over. It's like, you know, just shut down the whole thing. I was, I was tapping out. Yeah. Luckily, luckily later, you you realize that's not so bad after all.

Rick Denton (19:04)
You know, I'm kind of with you. Onions weren't my least favorite, but ⁓ only later in life did I realize the glory of a grilled onion. And so I was a little late to the party on that one as well, so I can appreciate that. John, it's time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item, not including your phone and not including your passport, of course, that you will not leave home without?

Jon Deragon (19:26)
wow. You know, I've gotten recently sucked into this whole ⁓ retro chic Casio watch phenomenon. so, so my faithful companion on trips now is the retro digital Casio watches. It's this like faithful companion.

Rick Denton (19:57)
John, I love the vision of an old school watch like you're describing. Now, do you go all the way in the one that has the little tiny calculator on it?

Jon Deragon (20:05)
No, ⁓ but I do have a Casio Royale, which is, you know, it's a take on the James Bond movie, right? And so it's a 1200 series and it's basically a digital replica of what was in the movie. And it was made back in the 80s and they still make them. There's something oddly attractive. It's so ugly. It's beautiful.

Rick Denton (20:26)
Hey, look, you're talking to a guy that drives a 2001 Chevy Silverado pickup. So I feel the same way about what you're talking about there. Let's, let's get back into design. Let's get back into UX. had mentioned that large organization that you have there at FPT. And you've given us some little dribs and drabs of how you have set it up. But I'm curious, how did you decide to structure and design this organization 140 plus people? So it actually work for the kind of research and design.

that you want to see that creates not the meh output, but the actual meaningful output that we've been talking about.

Jon Deragon (21:01)
About five and a years ago, I came on board and we did a design team centralization. We brought in the designers that were across the organization and brought them into a single team. And so with that, we built a design competency unit. And with this, it gave us the ability to kind of set all the conditions for design success, scale it up.

And ⁓ basically now it looks after all of the design requirements for all the global branches, all the customers, the business units, all of the sort of internal needs for design does that beautifully. It came because there's like such a diversity of the things that we need to deal with as designers. So if you think of all the breadth of like all the customers that we work with.

from all the countries, all the industries, the types of customers, all the different form factors. We have designed for mobile, desktop, spatial computing, 3D, ⁓ automotive design. We have an entire automotive design team just working on infotainment systems and heads up displays and clusters and all of that. When you have that kind of a mix,

And also throwing into it that we come into the product life cycle at any stage. You know, it feels really good when we can all kind of stick together and kind of just have the value of being there for each other and kind of bouncing ideas off each other, learning from each other and just having that as the steady state. That's kind of like the bedrock. Um, I think if it's dispersed and designers are kind of everywhere, I think it's kind of hard to tackle that level of like.

you know, constant change and, and variance in what you have to deal with. But if you're all together, I think it helps a lot. And so, you know, those conditions for design success are having design leadership, you know, someone that's vouching for you, that's an advocate for design and, for the end user understands design understands how to get designers through their career path and help them grow. No, what

their the right toolkit is to find the right processes.

Rick Denton (23:15)
Yeah, and that idea of bringing it all together, especially because that question that we talked about at the very beginning of how do you absorb all that individual information that's coming in at such a rapid pace? Well, I can see how centralization really can help with that too, because then the collective can absorb it from different inputs and then share it with themselves as opposed to these disparate teams that are out there. We'd also talked about something else. And that was before we went in the first class lounge, there was the, look,

designers are really good at designing coders can be really good at coding and you can leverage those strengths. Well, when you do that, you also have the need to find a way to work together. So you've got these designers that are working alongside tens of thousands of coders that you described. There are worlds in which that could absolutely be a mismatch or a battle. How do you and FPT really make that combination work ultimately for the benefit of that end customer?

Jon Deragon (24:15)
Yeah, I noted the word battle. ⁓

Rick Denton (24:21)
It can be, I didn't say there.

Jon Deragon (24:24)
Yeah. And you know what? It becomes a battle when it's not approached right. Yeah. It can become a battle. ⁓ but you know, when you're, when we're here to help the organization, we're, know, we have a mission where we have to improve the overall design maturity of the organization. So if you're centralized design team, that should be part of your mission is to foster the relationships with account managers, product owners.

project managers, developers, all the specialists, the business analysts is to build those relationships. So it's not a battle. ⁓ And when you think particularly about the developers, there's this very intertwined relationship. We both have that same end game. Let's make a good product. We have to have that amazing relationship. It cannot be adversarial. And it's actually very easy for it to be adversarial.

The problem that I see and you know, every time I've talked to a lot of designers, they struggle with this part of kind of the workflow of doing design is, you know, often they'll kind of lob the UI over the fence to the developers at the end of the design cycle and say, here you go guys, you know, whip up a great app. That becomes adversarial. That becomes a problem. ⁓ and the reasons being is that they just weren't involved.

They didn't participate in that process to appreciate it. How did it get to that stage? They didn't have a voice. They didn't have a way of communicating their concerns or maybe technical complications that the design creates. And they don't know the background or the decision making or the research that went into all the details of that design.

You know what that means is that if they don't understand how it got to that stage and they don't appreciate how it got to that stage, what happens is that the temptation to save time and effort, is their KPIs, and they're going to swap out all of these things that you so carefully labored over and crafted to make this amazing, optimal experience with an off the shelf library or module or something that's close enough.

And completely fair to do that because they, they, you know, they've, they've been just dropped this and they're going to do the best that they can with the, all of the time pressures and, ⁓ complications that they have to deal with in their job. So once they start coming along for the ride and there's a regular cadence of communications that there's some transparency there, there's a back and forth. There's prototypes that are interactive.

have annotations are well described about all the non-visual behaviors and validations, all of these things that, you know, they're not mind readers. They need someone to spell all of this out very carefully about what happens when, and all of the little nuances that can't be described easily just through looking at a UI. When you give them the respect of showing them all of this, doing QA sessions, presenting them with walkthroughs of these

designs, fielding questions, all of that during the graduated design process. Man, the a the relationship is like a heck of a lot better. And the outcome is a lot more polished. It's a lot more consistent. It just feels much more refined. Right. And so that's that's the game changer right there. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Denton (28:03)
You said a word and I mean, you may have seen it. I started grinding immediately because you hit on the word that I think is the one we should end here. And it's that idea of respect. And if you respect the team that you're working with, the other team, if you want to even use that word, then you will put in whatever the annotations on all the elements that you're describing. And the same is true in reverse. If you respect the designer, then you'll understand that there was a thought process behind it. So building that culture of respect.

I hear that loud and clear in the theme coming through. John, you've really shared a lot of interesting information with me. We've kind of been in different places. The AI, how does design and code work together? We've learned about chocolate and coffee and onions. So it has been a really exciting conversation for me. If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, your approach to design, your approach to customer experience, and to get to know a little bit more about FPT and the services it offers, what's the best way for folks to get to know more?

Jon Deragon (29:04)
Sure, you can go to fbtsoftware.com or if you want to come and check out just what I'm up to, can go to JohnDarragun.com.

Rick Denton (29:13)
Awesome. Both of those will get down there in the show notes. John, thanks again for talking with me here on CX Passport. I know the listeners have gained a ton out of it. I've really enjoyed it. I've enjoyed getting to add another country to the CX Passport alumni board. Thank you for being a part of that. John, thank you for being on CX Passport.

Jon Deragon (29:31)
Rick, thanks for having me. Great conversation. ⁓

Rick Denton (29:39)
Thanks for joining us this week on CXPassport. If you like today's episode, have three quick next steps for you. Click subscribe on the CXPassport YouTube channel or your favorite podcast app. Next, leave comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and enjoy CXPassport 2. Then head over to cxpassport.com for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience.

Until next time, I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.