Interview with Ryan Wilson (Director of User Experience @ Bitovi)

To kick off this interview, can you tell us what companies you have worked for?

Bitovi has built apps and done UX work with Apple, Nokia, Levi's, Lowe's, Sam's Club, CALI, and HaulHound to name a few.

Would you say that all great products have been built by great teams?

Creating a great product comes down to great communication between the team, the stakeholder, and the users while the product is being built. However, I would say that it doesn't hurt to have your product built by a team with extensive knowledge in what they do.

What are the qualities of a great team to you?

What makes a great team is trust. Trust in the ability to represent the company to people outside the company. Trust in "doing the right thing" both based on requirements as well as best practices.


Written and verbal communication is a necessity whether you are remote or not. Bitovi has been a fully remote company since we started in 2006 – we rely on asynchronous communication – style guides, commenting on issues, great documentation, etc. – as well as great synchronous communication like to how you present yourself on camera in standup.

Having had experience with multiple products, what are the things you would never do again?

Two things that I would like to pass along:

• Make prototypes as small and task-based as you can - this supports allowing quick changes and iterations, as well as easy recovery to jump between tasks in testing.
• Stay ahead of UI concepts to avoid refactors later – so features can be planned for in advance.

Can you tell us about a widely accepted idea that you believe is overrated or wrong?

'Work Smarter Not Harder' – Working both smart and hard are essential for great outcomes.

You now work in tech, but digital products are a relatively new thing. What would you do, had you been born 50 years earlier?

If I would have been born 50 years earlier I probably would have been a Sociologist or worked in Marketing. Both have principles that greatly overlap with being a User Experience Designer.

What apps do you have on your Home Screen?

All of my apps are meticulously organized on my Home Screen... but the ones I could not do without are Notion (for notes, documentation, and internal project tracking), Slack (for all company and client communications), and Spark (so that I can always stay up on my emails and calendar events).

What's your favourite Jira alternative?

GitHub - I like how simple GitHub is in relation to Jira.

Many products that do one thing really well or one product that is ok at many things?

I choose 'many things that do one thing really well'. IMO the more an app tries to do the worse the user experience ... cough cough MS Teams ;)

Where are you on the scale from "Deploy early and often" to "Only deploy when you are 100% sure there are no new bugs"?

I'm a "deploy to prod only after you've built it in dev and tested it in qa" sort of person.

How much do you think the culture of "Move fast and break things" has affected the quality of modern products?

I'm all about "fail fast and fail often" when developing the concept of the application and getting user feedback to iterate to the next round. However, when things don't work correctly in production it greatly affects how users perceive your product.

What makes a bug report great?

What makes some bug reporting better than others is the level of detail included in the report. Bug reporting without screenshots, a method of reproduction, or console details is relatively worthless.

If tomorrow your whole team could spend 0 time on bugs, where would you invest those time savings?

If I magically had more time on a project I would use that time to do more user testing for new features, or adding more detail to the style guide or documentation.