In this engaging talk, we were joined by Alison Bemis, a proud UX Academy alum and one of the pioneering product designers behind Gamma, the rapidly growing AI-powered platform transforming how people communicate their ideas. Gamma streamlines the creative process by eliminating the hassle of formatting, enabling users to focus on content and storytelling.
Alison shares her career journey, her experience designing for an innovative and fast-growing organization, and provides a live demo of Gamma in action. This session is a great opportunity to gain insights into the world of AI product design and check out what Gamma can do!
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Emilyann: And without further ado, we are going to get into from UX Academy to Gamma. So Alison, I know you shared with me that you were previously working in the restaurant industry as a barista, but if you want to share a little bit about your background, how you became interested in UX, and how you decided to make the career shift into design, that would be great.
Alison: Yeah, so I actually have a degree in history. I went to college, took a pretty standard path. I went to high school, then to college, got my degree, and then when I was leaving school, I took what was supposed to be a summer job at Starbucks, and discovered that I really like coffee and the service industry. I really liked being part of people's daily rituals and just interacting with people. It was really nice for me to have a break from the school pace. I didn't want to be at a desk or studying all the time. So, what was meant to be a summer stopgap job turned into a little career, and I was working in coffee for several years in a bunch of different places, different types of shops.
But I was at a shop in the Bay Area when lockdown started, and so I, along with thousands of other people, obviously got laid off in the early days of lockdown. For the first few months, I basically just took it easy because, you know, shops were closed, I didn't really have any other plans, and I was fortunate to have a partner who made a salary that, combined with my stimulus, we were good, we were covered. Come September, October, I was like, okay, I should start thinking of a job, and I should maybe start thinking of leaving coffee, which hadn't really occurred to me before because I really liked it. I looked at the commonalities between all the things that I had done before, because I had done internships in college, I had my degree, and I thought about what I liked about coffee, and what I pulled out of that is that I wanted to do something that wasn't the same day-to-day.
So I would have a diversity of experience within my role. I wanted to do something that was related to people because the thread between all the different things that I had been interested in between like history, coffee, was they were all sort of people-focused. And the aspects that drew me to those things were really about people's and people's stories. Then I think those were my two north stars when I was looking at roles. So I did a dive through the internet on what roles could sort of meet these checkboxes because I had always had this fallback in my mind of I'll become a copywriter, I'll become a content writer when I'm done with coffee. I have writing experience, I'm a pretty good writer, but when push came to shove, and I was sent a writing challenge for a job application, I froze and had a mental breakdown. So I was like, oh, I can't do this. I can't do this for work. I will be miserable if I try to do this.
So that was like, I have to accept this isn't for me. I'll find something else. And on the list of suggestions or things that I could do was UX designer. And years prior, my partner, who was a software engineer, had suggested UX design as a path for me, and at the time, I was very much in the coffee world, and I was like, nah, tech bro, I'm not doing that. But, you know, here we are now. I realized that UX design and product design was a really good fit for me because it did fit a lot of these boxes. It was something that was intellectually stimulating, allowed me to work with people, and I knew that no day at my job would be the same.
So that's kind of how I decided to make the transition. I chose Design Lab just because it seemed like the most flexible option, and I really wanted the opportunity to work with a mentor, which was something a lot of other programs didn't have, or you had to share more. So yeah, here we are.
Emilyann: Nice. Yeah, I think it's really interesting how, speaking to so many different folks, the amount of transferable skills from a lot of fields into UX is wild, you know, whether it's hospitality or education or healthcare, like they can be really, really diverse backgrounds, but there's so much that you can pull into UX, regardless. So, it's interesting. So, what was your experience like in UX Academy, you know, especially as someone sort of new to UX, and what did you really enjoy about the learning experience, and how did you kind of stay motivated, especially, you know, sort of in a pandemic environment?
Alison: Yeah, so the thing that I really loved about UX Academy was actually the people. So I was really fortunate to meet a lot of great people and make some really good friends out of UX Academy, people who I'm actually still friends with today and who I still talk to, people who I've gone to visit who have lived near me. Like, we've done trips together, and so I think that having this experience really bonded us in a way that few other things can. So that was like number one.
The other things that I really appreciated about UX Academy was having the flexibility to choose projects that made sense for me. There are a lot of other ways to sort of learn and things you could do to try to get into the industry, but having some sort of structure is something that I needed. That's why I signed up for a boot camp in the first place. I knew I couldn't do the transition without structure, but also the freedom and flexibility to say, this makes sense for me, and this doesn't, was really important. So, yeah, that was really helpful as well.
And I had a really great mentor in the program, Janet Fu, who may be here. So shout out, Janet, you're the best. And yeah, I think UX design, product design to me is a very malleable process. It's a very malleable field, and it's something that has to adapt to the problem that you're facing. You can't root force it into a mold that you think it should fit. So, yeah, just having that flexibility was really important to me.
Emilyann: That's awesome. Yeah, we hear that from a lot of folks, the ability to be flexible, whether it's because it's just how you learn or because of your schedule, is really important. And the support is big as well. So for sure. Thanks for sharing that. That's awesome. So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're working on now. I know that later you're going to be providing a demo of Gamma, but it would be great if you could tell us a little bit more about what Gamma does and what its specific use cases are for.
Alison: Yeah, so when I joined Gamma, it was pretty different. So I was the eighth hire and I was the second designer. They had been working on the product for maybe six months, and it was like a pretty rustic experience, like it was very bare bones, there wasn't a lot there, and so at the time the focus was really on it was on this thing called memos, so sort of like a communication productivity type tool, something between a presentation and like a doc. But as time shifted, we went more into the presentation space, and when the whole AI boom started a couple of years ago, my co-founders fortunately saw the writing on the wall, in this case, sort of a positive way, and we're like, we should add this to the product because we think it can add value.
We had a problem, which was the blank slate problem, the blank page problem, and AI is like a potential way to solve it. The other reason is because, just sort of historically speaking, right, like startups need funding, they have runways, and ours was not running out, but AI was sort of a Hail Mary. The market that we were in when we launched the AI features was very different from the market we were in when we raised our seed round, and the sort of bar that you had to clear as a startup to get funding at that time was quite high. So AI is this like, if this works, it's going to like carry us, and if it doesn't, we need to like really think about what's going to happen. So I've worked basically, and now, now we're here, we have like millions of users, we're profitable, like we're very stable, and we're growing really quickly. So I've seen the company through a lot of different phases, and I've worked on almost everything, basically.
So that's if you're thinking about joining a startup, that's one advantage. You will not have a lot of structure, and you will not have necessarily like the sort of oversight, not oversight in a bad way, but you won't have as much like coaching necessarily as you would in like a bigger company, but you will have access to like opportunities that other juniors at other companies, especially big legacy companies, juniors do not touch core features like that quickly in those companies, but I was launching, I was designing, launching, and iterating on like really fundamental parts of the product from basically day one.
And that's something like that's very cool and very sort of unique to being a startup designer at Real Stace. So, I've worked on everything. Right now, I've moved into like the growth team, so I'm focused on like helping users sort of see the real value of Gamma. We have a lot of power, we have a lot of features and functionality that like most users just don't know about. And so my focus is how do we bring people into the product in a way where they can finish onboarding and be like, okay, I know what's going on, and like I'm excited to keep going, and that motivates them to keep exploring and, you know, keep trying things.
Emilyann: That sounds really cool.
Alison: Yeah, it's really fun. The growth team's pretty new. Like, we were all basically like one amorphous product team blob until like six or seven months ago. So, it's just another like startup like milestone, splitting into like a couple amorphous blobs.
Emilyann: No, that's awesome. So, I know that you said Gamma has like generative capabilities, and you're going to kind of ask folks for a suggested prompt. Can you tell me a little bit more about those generative things, like what exactly we would be generating?
Alison: Yeah, so the thing we're probably know best for is presentations, and that's where we've invested the majority of our time because that is what people come to us for. So if you need a presentation, like we can generate one. We've also added like sites capabilities, so if you want to generate like a website, then you could do that too. I think that what's really useful about Gamma is that it solves the blank page problem.
So instead of staring at, like, I remember building my site in Webflow and having to go through so many different iterations of the most basic components and just thinking about how do I even start making my portfolio presentation, like, I don't know, those are like questions that really plagued me and ultimately were sort of solved by Gamma because my interview process was a little bit unusual timeline-wise. It was very compressed. So my I had a portfolio chat on a Wednesday, and at the end of that, my now manager asked after that, and I was like, let's do the day after that because at the time I didn't have a portfolio presentation ready, so I had nothing to show. I had that call from like 1 pm on a Wednesday, and my onsite began at 9:00 am on a Friday. So it was just an all-out like I must finish this thing.
But I made it in Gamma, and just because of how Gamma works and sort of the editing, it's not like a drag-and-drop, like pixel fussing thing. There are constraints on where you put things, how you position things. And so having something that makes puts you closer to the final product as soon as possible and also something that just writes template content for you is really, really useful. That's what most of our users find helpful. So that's what I think the generative AI is best for, is like, give me a template that I will fill out and make more specific to my needs, but like, I don't want to spend all the time writing filler content, you know. That's not a good use of my time. So yeah, we can basically generate anything.
Emilyann: I mean, that sounds exceptionally useful. How's it been like working specifically within the AI space? Do you feel that there are maybe unique, you know, challenges as a product designer working on an AI product?
Alison: Yeah, there's a couple of unique challenges. So I can I've worked on several of our AI features. So I worked on our initial AI generation capabilities. They were sort of born out of a hack day. We were like, let's have a hackathon on AI. I was really bullish on not giving new users just a big empty box. I was like, they need to have a little bit of structure around what they can create because prompting is once you get the hang of it, like very doable, but at that point, this is March, February 2023, like most people didn't really know what they were doing. And so if you come in and you don't know what you're doing and because of that, your output is bad, then you're not going to realize it's like a you problem, you're going to think it's us problem, and you're never going to come back.
So I was like, how do we make it as difficult as possible to get something bad? That's basically my mentality. I've also designed most of the AI image generation features. And so I think that some of the unique considerations are when designing for AI is that you don't necessarily have control over what's going to happen. You can put up a lot of barriers and sort of like bumpers, right, like if you think about bowling, right, you can put the bumpers up, but like someone is still inevitably going to be able to mess up so badly that they get the ball into the gutter still. So like you just have to prepare for that case and make sure that like if that does happen, things don't just go horribly arai. There are moments of unexpected delight. We internally, this is one of my favorite slack channels, have a channel called Bone on Hail. It's like an inside joke, but it's basically a place for us to like drop like AI nonsense.
So like internally, we're very aware, maybe more aware than most people, of how ridiculous AI can be and like how unserious and not professional or not usable a lot of AI output is because we go through so much unusable stuff to like get our AI into a place where you can show it to a real person at work. So yeah, just knowing that you're going to get a mix of things that you should not see the light of day and maybe some things that are kind of useful, and you just have to learn how to tease out the gems. There's also this like, like there's more of like an ethical moral consideration. When we were first thinking about adding AI to the product, I was pretty hesitant. I was concerned, and it was important to me to advocate for us using AI and implementing AI in a way that made sense for our product, our users, and that we weren't doing it just because it was like a buzz word, that it was serving a real purpose.
And so I've this entire time been really, really passionate and loud about advocating for us having our AI features serve concrete purposes and solve concrete problems that our users are having. And so for example, like speaker notes, right, generative AI can look at the content of your card and then generate like a draft of speaker notes. And that is something that is super helpful and super useful. It doesn't feel like a gimmick. It feels like something you would actually want in any given slides tool. So yeah, I think those are sort of the biggest things that are top of mind for me usually.
Emilyann: Thanks so much! Let's get into some of the audience Q&A. First one, what are some of the things we can do now to work with AI once we enter the industry, like topics we can learn from, resources, etc?
Alison: Okay, so I think there's a couple things here. One is that anyone who's like, I'm an AI expert, they're they're like kind of full of it because AI is like really new. So there are actually not established best practices or patterns in yet. AI is like such an emerging space that there aren't really like best practices in the way that there are for like FinTech or like Healthcare or something like that, these really like longstanding fields. So chat is definitely a pattern that has emerged, and whether or not it's like the best way to interact with AI sort of remains to be seen, but it is a really good way to get people through the door.
The other thing to sort of be like have in your mind as you're like working with AI, thinking about AI, is that people's level of familiarity and level of competence with AI will grow as time happens. So right now, the things that work and that make sense aren't necessarily things that will work and make sense in like 5 years or 10 years because people will like know so much more about AI and how to work with it, and AI's capabilities will like grow exponentially over that time as well. Like you can already see the difference between an AI image generated today versus like three or four years ago.
And I think this is something that has really come out in Gamma where a couple years ago when we launched AI features, we had to keep it really really simple. We had to keep our explanations like really tight and make it really really like just for lack of a better phrase like dummy proof because the people who were coming into the product had no idea how to use AI. We like only kind of knew how to use it, and there we couldn't trust users to like be advanced because there were no power uses of AI at the time like that didn't exist like everyone was new. But now we can do more things with it and ask more of our users because the average like level of competence and like knowledge about AI has like grown over the years.
So I think it's just like it's a very quickly evolving space, and there aren't really like standards like on how to do things. So having like a willingness to experiment and a willingness to like iterate and sort of push boundaries in like what is being done right now I think is really helpful. In terms of like particular resources, I don't have any off the top of my head. I think just using it is like the best the best way. Use it for like whatever you can think of. I've been using it for I've been studying Chinese lately, and so I've been using it to help me with that. And whether or not it is giving me the correct answers is I'm not totally sure, but it's definitely helping me think through um think through and like break down like problems that I'm having. And I think that's that's something useful as well.
Emilyann: Cool, that's a very thorough answer! Next one, what is something you wished you had known before starting to work as a UX designer?
Alison: So I think that something that I found out because when I decided to make the career transition, I went pretty deep in reading. And I think that's something that's important for all people who are trying to transition into industry is to know that the the design process is is very I said this earlier but the design process is very malleable so it does not I would say ever almost ever start and end at the same point.
Emilyann: So typically, you won't start a project with extensive research and discovery around a problem you've identified, right? Usually, it's your PM or someone external pointing out a problem and suggesting we address it. They might even have a specific solution in mind, or it could be something we've discussed tackling previously.
Alison: Exactly, that’s why the design process often starts at different points. But it's rare to begin with the kind of discovery user research you learn about in boot camps. It’s good to know this so you aren't confused or worried if you're not following the steps in the order you learned them or even skipping some steps. Often, I might start with some research and problem scoping, quickly put together a design, get some feedback, iterate, present it to users, launch it, and then iterate based on the response. That’s pretty normal and perfectly okay, as long as you're continually trying to improve the user experience.
Emilyann: Oh, that’s interesting. Crystal wants to know if the images in the presentations are generated or pulled from a database.
Alison: All images are generated. You can request web images, but those can be a bit tricky at times. If you click on one of the images in the presentation, you can actually see the prompt used to generate it. Gamma has a feature we call 'prompt enhancer' or 'prompt creator' that can automatically write a prompt that should ideally be understandable to an image generation model, producing an output close to what you want. If you're having trouble writing prompts, looking at how we structure these can be quite enlightening.
Emilyann: Alex had a follow-up question about how editable the generated items are, specifically regarding the templates.
Alison: Once generated, everything is quite editable. The content of the cards, which we call 'slides', can be freely changed. Although you can't yet change specific elements like turning a blue dress into a red one in AI-generated images, that's something we're considering. However, you won't be able to choose exact pixel dimensions or positions, but it's pretty flexible.
Emilyann: It sounds like Gamma really streamlines the creative process. Before we wrap up, any final thoughts or stories about your first job that might be inspiring to our listeners?
Alison: Certainly! My path to my first job was a bit unusual but it underlines the importance of making your own luck and knowing your unfair advantage. I didn’t complete my UX program on a traditional timeline, and when I interviewed at Gamma, I only had a partially completed portfolio. However, my profile was linked in my Twitter bio, which the Chief Product Officer at Gamma clicked on after seeing a tweet of mine. He reached out directly for an interview. I wasn’t fully prepared, but I seized the opportunity. This shows that being in the right place at the right time is crucial, and sometimes more important than being ready. Knowing your strengths and how to leverage them can make all the difference, especially when transitioning careers.
Emilyann: That’s a powerful message, Alison. It really shows that everyone has unique strengths they can harness. Thank you for sharing your journey and insights with us today.
Alison: Thank you for having me. It’s been great to share and hopefully inspire others. If anyone wants to connect on LinkedIn, just make sure to add a note so I know where you found me!
Emilyann: Absolutely, and thank you to everyone who joined us. Check out Gamma and consider enrolling in a Design Lab course to further your skills. Have a great week everyone!
Alison: Goodbye, everyone. Thanks for listening!
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