Joe Natoli [00:00:00]:

You have

Joe Natoli [00:00:00]:

to market your stuff. You have to sell. You have to pitch to people. But I had to find a way to do it that was comfortable

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:06]:

for me. And my way of doing that is Welcome to the creator's adventure, where we interview creators from around the world hearing their stories about growing a business. I'm proud to share that today's guest is one of my customers at Heights Platform and he has taught over 300,000 students over the course of his career. Hey, everyone. I'm Brian McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it. Hey, everyone. We're here today with Joe Natoli.

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:37]:

He is a UX consultant, author, and speaker. Everything he does is born from 3 decades of consulting with and training the product development teams of some of the world's largest organizations from Fortune 5 10100 organizations to US government agencies. Joe has taught over 300,000 students through online courses at his UX 365 Academy and is a regular keynote speaker and lecturer at events across the globe. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Natoli [00:01:07]:

Thank you for having me, Brian. I appreciate it. Happy to be here.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:11]:

Yeah. Me as well. I'm always glad to talk with customers of Heights Platform, not not only to to show off, my customers, but also to get to know you better.

Joe Natoli [00:01:23]:

Well, you have every right to show off your customers and, you know, it's for what it's worth. If I can give you a little plug, it's a fantastic platform. Alright. We looked at we looked at platforms for a year and a half before we decided to migrate. And, you're you're hands down far and above everything else.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:40]:

Thanks. I'm so glad to hear that. So my first question for you is what would you say is the biggest thing either that you did or are doing that helped you to achieve freedom to do what you enjoy?

Joe Natoli [00:01:53]:

I mean, that's that's a loaded question. It's a it's a combination of I would say when at the point when I started out on my own, I I always said I was either brave enough or naive enough or dumb enough to sort of take the leap. But I think what it comes back to, you know, my wife is an entrepreneur as well and and what we sort of both call it, it's it's your big why. It's it's like, why do I get out of bed in the morning and do this? Because if as you know, if you work for yourself, there are gonna be days when it's hard. And there gonna be days when it's harder than it probably feels like it should be. And on those days, your motivation is in short supply. So you have to really believe in the thing that you're doing to sort of to push through that. And I also think that in order to be really good at anything, you have to care about it.

Joe Natoli [00:02:43]:

Right? It does have to be personal on some level. So for me, what I think that was is what I learned about myself from working with clients and even when I was employed some 25 years ago, because I've been self employed for almost 30 years. What I figured out is that I was happiest, when I was helping people do something. Even if I was working with teams or clients or there's always component of teaching. There was always a component of okay. Here's what I see happening. Here's what I think you should try to to fix that, to make it better, to make it easier, to make it, you know, more frictionless. And then they would do it and you see the light bulbs go off and then you see the result that happens for their customers and their clients.

Joe Natoli [00:03:29]:

And there's a lot of reward in that. So it it's kind of a, what's the word? It's like a touchy feeling answer, right? But at the end of the day, I what I care about most and what and what continues to get more important for me the longer I do this is that what I'm doing is helping people. Is helping them remove some sort of of pain or obstacle or challenge or friction, or something in their in their lives no matter what it is.

Bryan McAnulty [00:03:56]:

Yeah. That's that's an excellent answer. And one of the reasons that I personally in enjoy this industry so much of online courses and knowledge businesses because you get to help people. Yeah. And there are many entrepreneurs out there who I think either maybe don't think carefully enough about what it is that they wanna do, or they're just trying to jump into, like, how can I make money and thinking from that perspective Yeah? That they end up doing something where they realize only later on, maybe a year later, maybe 10 years later, maybe almost never, that the thing that they're doing is not really helping people that much. It's not really so fulfilling. And it gets to a point that the money can can only do so much. It's ultimately what keeps you going is that why, what you're talking about.

Joe Natoli [00:04:44]:

No. That's right. You you can't do it. Money can't be the object. It can't. It can't. You it'll it'll you'll fall short in any number of ways really quickly, if it's solely about the financial aspect of it, because you, again, unless you're clear on the why part, Right? What what is it that I have to give people? What is it that they actually need? What is it that they'll actually be willing to pay me for? What's the intersection of all that? Because if you're not providing true value to anybody, they'll stop paying you. I mean, it's that simple.

Joe Natoli [00:05:14]:

So it has to matter. It has to matter a lot to you, and it has to matter a great deal to those people on receiving it. I agree with you.

Bryan McAnulty [00:05:21]:

Yeah. Yeah. And and something like an an online course business and a knowledge business in that sense is really great because you are helping people and you're you're making money. So it's something where you're making a positive impact. And, specifically, you mentioned, like, getting people to that moment where they figure it out and it clicks for them. And that's something else that is really cool because if you were just going to coach 1 person, you get to have that experience and bring them to that moment. Mhmm. But with an online course or or some kind of program that you create, there's all these steps before that moment everybody has to go through.

Bryan McAnulty [00:05:59]:

Yeah. And you get to use your course and your training as a way to get everybody up to that point that you can get more people to those moments, and you just get to do the the fun most

Joe Natoli [00:06:10]:

The fun part.

Bryan McAnulty [00:06:11]:

Yeah. Which is really neat.

Joe Natoli [00:06:13]:

Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly right. It's and it's different, you know. The I won't lie to you. It's it's extremely gratifying when you when you do this at scale, when you have a volume of people coming back to you and saying, you have no idea what this did for me. You know? And then they lay it out for you. And you have a moment where you kinda can't believe that this occurred.

Joe Natoli [00:06:39]:

You know? I I I can't think of anything better personally.

Bryan McAnulty [00:06:44]:

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So, yeah, you had a a long career in coaching consulting companies and UX design, working with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies.

Joe Natoli [00:06:58]:

Mhmm.

Bryan McAnulty [00:06:59]:

At this point now, with all of your experience, how would you define UX design and what it means to you and your business?

Joe Natoli [00:07:06]:

Yeah. Well, it's it's a really good question. And I think there are far too many definitions of of what it is, And I think that confuses people. It confuses people in my own profession. Right? People who are just starting out. It confuses companies. It confuses other departments. It confuses clients.

Joe Natoli [00:07:23]:

At the at the bottom line is this, what what user experience is? Trying to create a positive user experience. I'll try to describe it. There's a product of some sort in the middle, Heights? There's a product or a service that you provide to people as a business. On one end, if the product's in the center, you have users and customers, people who use it on this side. You have the business that created it that's investing in it on this side. I call UX a value loop, which is the users and customers have to perceive that this product is valuable to them. Right? They look at it and they go, that could help me. That can make my life better in some way.

Joe Natoli [00:07:58]:

So they try it. They give it a shot. They do something. They sign up for a demo, whatever it is. What has to happen first is they have to get some proof back from using it that, oh, yeah. That is that did what I thought it did, and and wow. I can't believe how simple this is. So then they buy it.

Joe Natoli [00:08:15]:

If they buy it, value goes back to that business as well. Now they have a vested interest in improving it and making it better, because there's a good reason to do so. You have to satisfy both sides of that equation in order to have a good product. Right? It's good design, good good user experience. So the party line is user experiences about users. I don't necessarily agree with that. I think it's bigger than that. It has a holistic approach to business.

Joe Natoli [00:08:43]:

Everything that I do, UX practitioners don't like it when I say this, is is business first, user second. Because if the business doesn't receive any value from that that design improvement, Heights, that user interface improvements, or things are faster, they load faster, they they react faster, whatever. The business doesn't get any value. They have no reason to improve anything. I mean, that's a fact. So I don't mean to make it sound like businesses are barbarians of some sort. They're not. But they only have a vested interest in improving UX or product design if there's a tangible benefit to doing so.

Joe Natoli [00:09:22]:

Right? Which in the end is is usually more customers. It's either making money or saving money at the end of the day. But I think that's a good thing because you're still helping people. At the end of the day, you're helping human beings on both sides. Improving user experience, just to to touch on that for a quick second, is also not always about simply making things look better from a visual design perspective. Sometimes it's just making the thing load faster. It's making data load faster. It's eliminating some steps in a process, or it's labeling something in a way that people suddenly realize.

Joe Natoli [00:09:58]:

They go, oh, I didn't know it did this. I I mean, I've been down that road plenty of times. Client has has come to me and said, we need to completely redesign this product. I said, well, show it to me. Let's let's walk through this. And then I see 2 or 3 screens where the language they're using or labeling or what they call things makes no sense to most people. It makes sense to them because it's their language. So sometimes it's just that.

Joe Natoli [00:10:21]:

It's as simple as that. You know, it's how things are organized. It's it's meeting expectation, Human expectation. We we form expectations for every everything that we use on our phones, on our laptops, and we carry that with us everywhere we go. So we expect things to work in a certain way. So UX is about meeting those expectations in that loop. I hope that was

Bryan McAnulty [00:10:43]:

Yeah.

Joe Natoli [00:10:43]:

Relatively clear.

Bryan McAnulty [00:10:45]:

Yeah. Definitely. And I think people watching or listening, if they're not familiar with or or haven't heard much of about the idea of UX design in the past, Like, you can see how it applies to something like software pretty easily. Mhmm. Okay. We'll have to make the software something that people can understand. And so that way, they can take the action that they expect and get the result that they're looking for. But what are some ways that this like, you can apply UX design to maybe course creation or building content and knowledge businesses.

Joe Natoli [00:11:17]:

Sure. Well, I mean, with course creation, for example, the biggest challenge any content creator has is in your head, you're like, does anybody care about this? Is anybody gonna want to learn this thing? I mean, I think there's a need, but if you do anything long enough, especially in sort of the realm of UX, what you learn is that what people say they want or what people say they need is not often the same thing as what they actually want, or what they actually need or what they will actually be willing to use. So that's the hard part, finding the match to those expectations I talked about. What you learn through UX is is that you learn ways to sort of litmus test those ideas. Right? Any number of ways to put something in front of somebody in a small way, let's say in a in a mini course, you do 2 or 3 lessons or you do one quick video that's 10 minutes long, or 2 5 minute videos on a topic. It's a low risk. You know, it's it's low, effort on your part. You record it, you put it out there, and you watch what people do with it.

Joe Natoli [00:12:26]:

How do they react? You can do that on YouTube. You can launch a short video on YouTube just on a topic. Spend 3 minutes, 5 minutes talking about it. See what the reaction is. If you get a big reaction, everyone goes, oh my god. Do you have more of this? You know, can you tell me more about this topic? Now you probably have something. So there are any number of ways you have to you have to sort of test to see whether that expectation exists and and whether your interpretation of it is content creation is that I, like most people, I have a 1000000 ideas a day. I like them.

Joe Natoli [00:13:06]:

It doesn't necessarily mean that other people will, you know, or be willing to to pay me, to learn those things. So it's it's constant iteration. And I think the last thing I'll say about that is that you have to absolutely be willing to be wrong. That low risk part that I talked about, I think this is where a lot of content creators get tripped up. And I'll be honest with you, I learned this from my wife who is an entrepreneurial consultant and helps a lot of people with online content. You have to be willing to get it wrong on a small scale and you have to allow room for that, you know, for that risk and for the hit that you're probably gonna take if it doesn't work, because it's the only way you're gonna know. You have to test it first. You can't commit to, I don't know, 70 lessons and build the whole thing out and think, oh, this is definitely it, and then launch it, and then you hear crickets.

Joe Natoli [00:13:55]:

Well, now you just spent 6 months of your life putting this thing together, and it was the wrong thing.

Bryan McAnulty [00:14:02]:

Yeah. Yeah. And it it's it's scary to go out there and and ask for that feedback and validation.

Joe Natoli [00:14:07]:

Oh, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:14:08]:

But when you do it, it it feels so much better because now you know for sure. Wow. Okay. I learned all these things. This this one thing is actually the biggest problem, and I wasn't even thinking of that or wording it in that way.

Joe Natoli [00:14:22]:

Right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:14:22]:

And now I know, and now I can build the solution that people really want. And I would say, personally, that though it might be scary to ask for that that early feedback or validation, the extra the the weight off your shoulders that you have when building it afterwards

Joe Natoli [00:14:40]:

Massive.

Bryan McAnulty [00:14:40]:

Is is more than making up for it.

Joe Natoli [00:14:42]:

Yes. Yeah. You couldn't I don't think you could be more right about that. Absolutely. It's it's it's I've done it the other way. Okay. It's very hard. It's very hard.

Joe Natoli [00:14:52]:

And let's face it. You take it very personally when something fails, especially on a grand scale. You know, like I said before, if you're gonna be good at anything, you have to care about it. So these people that say, well, it's not personal, it's business. I don't know about that. I think it is very personal. And I think that you're kidding yourself if you think that it's not. So again, to your point, do it on a small scale and get that validation feedback.

Joe Natoli [00:15:20]:

At least have some certainty and some confidence, you know, and feel good about the direction that you're headed. I think that's critical.

Bryan McAnulty [00:15:28]:

Yeah. Definitely. So we saw you mentioned on your website how great UX design doesn't just come from being a great designer or having exceptional creative skills. Instead, it has a lot to do with how individuals and organizations work from within.

Joe Natoli [00:15:44]:

Yes.

Bryan McAnulty [00:15:45]:

And quoting you here, you said, great UX isn't the result of what you do with your hands. It's the result of how you use what's between your ears. I really like that. Can you elaborate on this and explain in more detail what it means?

Joe Natoli [00:15:58]:

That's my favorite quote, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of that in terms of teaching it to people sort of over and over and over again throughout the course of my career. The thing about design and UX design in general from I started out in graphic design a 1000000 years ago in the eighties. The thing about design that that comes to people's minds first is the visuals, what they see. Heights? So the sort of thinking goes well as a designer sits down and they and they build things, right? They make things. They use software to make things. Designers have the same misconception. They say, well, I I need to learn this software. If I learn this tool, I'll know how to design.

Joe Natoli [00:16:37]:

If I take this tutorial to watch me step by step through designing a layout, you know, designing a screen, It'll teach me design. It's not true. Design and UX is really the thinking behind why that's the right decision. Why that headline size is gonna get people's attention. Why it's the dominant element on the screen. Why there's a there's a subconscious path that the eye follows from headline to subhead to blurb to call to action Bryan? You know? Or or what types of visual cues give people an indication that, hey, this thing can be interacted with. You know, there's an opportunity to to do something here. That's all psychological.

Joe Natoli [00:17:19]:

It's all, and it has to do with how the eyes and the brain work together to perceive things. So that's all thinking. Doing a tactical part of learning how to design well visually, is certainly part of this. But it's the smallest part. You know, it's 15 to 20 percent of the entire thing. The rest of it is, what is the right thing to do here? Why is it the right thing to do? What evidence do we have that people expect this to occur in this way, in this sequence, in this order across these series of screens? So it's like the old Einstein quote that always gets mangled about problem solving where he says, you know, if I had I can't remember what it was. Like, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes executing the solution. It really is that.

Joe Natoli [00:18:10]:

So from clients to product managers to other designers to anyone I've ever come in contact with, my thing is always look, If you want the design to be good, that starts here. Put the tool away. Put the software away. Put the laptop away. When I work with clients, the only tool that I use and have for the last 20 years of my career is a whiteboard and markers. Now I can draw I have artistic talent I have since I was a little kid. And I'm a I'm a if I may say so, I'm a good visual designer. But the problems that we're working out are problems of use, are problems of interaction, and sometimes they're purely technical problems.

Joe Natoli [00:18:52]:

It's easy to say the interface should look like this. You need a developer in the room saying, yeah, but that's gonna take 4 weeks to build. We don't have 4 weeks. But what I do have is this other module that looks like this, and everybody looks at And you go, oh, okay. So what if we modified this piece and then you draw it out? That's what design is. I mean, that's what UX is too. It's it's a lot of thinking. Now UX is research also, but that's all up here.

Joe Natoli [00:19:19]:

The core of of what makes this work, the core of what makes a product design appropriate, relevant, easy to use. So anything that makes something better or faster or more efficient doesn't come from what you're doing with your hands. It comes from up here. It comes from how you're thinking about that problem. It's why I believe everybody can design to some degree.

Bryan McAnulty [00:19:45]:

Yeah. And also why the way you can apply this to, like, somebody building their own web page or or even hiring a a visual designer to build a web page for them. It's not it doesn't matter how nice it looks if your potential customer, student, member, whatever it is, if they can't find the button on that page because they don't know the button is something they can actually

Joe Natoli [00:20:08]:

Correct. Correct. And visual designers do that all the time. There are trends right now that show up on design Heights, like the best web designs of 2024, best mobile app designs of 20 20 4. You look at these things, and they're breaking every rule of human cognition that you can think of. They look beautiful. But I promise you, if if any company spends money on implementing those things, they're gonna be a problem. It's gonna be failure for the reason you just mentioned, actually, that 9 times out of 10, the interactive elements don't stand apart from everything else.

Joe Natoli [00:20:40]:

Clearly, There's no clear indication of, like, okay. What the hell do I do next? Especially in the world of enterprise software, it's even worse because people are fatigued because they're staring at a screen literally, you know, for like 12 hours a day. Solid. Entering dealing with data, heavy duty content. You know? It's it's it's a lot.

Bryan McAnulty [00:21:02]:

Yeah. Yeah. 1 of 1 of the stories that that kinda impacted me and and helped me shift my thinking away from, like, perfection being a perfectionist in visuals and and focusing more on the experience was one of the first, web applications I built was just to do, kinda habit tracking app. And this was back in, like, 2,011.

Joe Natoli [00:21:25]:

Mhmm.

Bryan McAnulty [00:21:25]:

And I spent so much time on the input of your goal of what you wanted to accomplish. And the the shadows and the glowing effects and everything

Joe Natoli [00:21:33]:

You're right. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:21:33]:

I was so happy with this. I was like, alright. It's ready. And I had a designer I was working with. I had him try it out. And he gets back to me, and he says, I couldn't find the input where I type in my goal. The main thing of the whole entire app that I've just spent so much working on, He couldn't he as another designer, he didn't even realize where that was on the screen Yeah. Because it was, like, up in this bar instead of being part of the actual list.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:01]:

Yep. And I realized, okay. Well, I've gotta ditch that whole idea. I've gotta completely redo it, actually. And that is what helped me realize that those are the things that are important. And I think, yeah, when when you go through that experience of of making a really nice site, but no one knows where the button is to to press to buy

Joe Natoli [00:22:21]:

Oh, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:22:22]:

Yeah. Then you'll learn it, definitely. But, ideally, you you wanna be able to, figure it out before going through an experience where you actually put it in front of people to be able to realize that.

Joe Natoli [00:22:33]:

Yeah. It's one of the most humbling experiences you will ever have in your life. Okay? Like, way back when, it used to be a thing where where companies literally had rooms with double sided glass. And you would have people in the other room using, you know, either working prototype or an actual build, you know, of the product. And you're behind the glass. And and as those evolve, then you had a screen where you could see exactly what they were doing as well with a computer screen in front of you. And people would get stuck and not be able to find the next step. And to you, it's painfully obvious.

Joe Natoli [00:23:08]:

So you have this moment where you click we're like, wanna jump out of your seat. Like, it's right there. Why can't you see it? And people do the craziest things. And not just one person. Okay? If you have a room of 20 people, 18 people get stuck in the same place, and you're like, wow. I guess we totally missed the mark here. But it's it's humbling, as you said. It's an in a very good way.

Joe Natoli [00:23:34]:

Again, it it teaches you that that your expectations of of how people do things are very personal to you, and they're not the same as everybody. Everybody thinks, very differently, expects different things. It's From language to labeling to visual design cues to to whatever. It's all very different.

Bryan McAnulty [00:23:55]:

Yeah. And it's hard with whatever business you're in. When you're in it for so long, you know it, like, the back of your hand. Like, you know everything about it. But the the new customer just coming into your business, they're not at that level yet. And so you've gotta remind yourself

Joe Natoli [00:24:11]:

Not at all.

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:11]:

That they know nothing. They they they're starting from a point that they haven't figured these things out yet. And we we always have to keep that in mind for for my business with our support and everything, understanding, like, okay. This person, they're really brand new. So they they haven't experienced this. They don't know this terminology yet. And taking taking care of notice of that in order to make sure we can assist them.

Joe Natoli [00:24:36]:

Well, and as your use cases get wider too, it it's also quite honestly fairly impossible to anticipate every situation, especially when you're building software.

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:48]:

Yeah. I like to say, never underestimate the customer's ability to misunderstand.

Joe Natoli [00:24:53]:

Totally. Totally. I mean, some things you may go 3 years before all of a sudden you have a customer who has a major problem with something or maybe something in the market is changing where you have a different type of customer consistently. Right? And now you've got 15 of these people, and they're all having some of the same issues. And you're like, okay. Where is this coming from? It's just weird because up until now, you haven't had to like, it hasn't been an issue for anybody. And now all of a sudden, for all these people, they're all complaining about the same thing. That's just it's a learn as you go proposition.

Joe Natoli [00:25:24]:

I think anybody who thinks that they can solve everything for their customer base, no matter what industry you're in, If you think you can sort of address every single issue from the get go, no matter how much research you do, I don't think that's possible. Like you said, you have to be you have to be committed to constantly paying attention to that stuff and then constantly trying to improve things, you know, as you go.

Bryan McAnulty [00:25:47]:

Yeah. It's a a great point. And also something that's great about this kind of space in business is, like, when you're building an an information product, of course, a community, you have the ability to constantly iterate and refine it. Yeah. It's not like a a physical product that you you made it. It's out there, and the only chance for improving it is couple years from now when you make version 2 or something like this. You get the opportunity to to be constantly making those tweaks and adjustments, which is something that's really nice.

Joe Natoli [00:26:16]:

All the more reason to work small. Heights? Again, I think people from a a content creation standpoint or people folks who watch courses, it's the same kind of thing. Everybody feels like they have to get it right. They have to get it all right at the same time. I I don't think that that's possible. I think you have to take you have to take small steps forward, engage the reaction and pivot. 1 of the, I know we're I may be getting off topic, but one of the greatest things that I ever learned, I swear to you this is a revelation to me when I heard it and was probably only, like, 15 years ago. Like when when NASA launches rockets into space, you know, to the moon or wherever, my thinking was always very naively that it's on course or computer coordinates like it just goes where it needs to go.

Joe Natoli [00:27:02]:

I read something at one point where it said no, the rocket veers off course a 1000000 times in that journey. And the engineers and sometimes the software will course correct it. Course corrects, comes back. Veers off, course corrects come back. Fears off, course corrects come back. And I thought what an amazing metaphor for what this is like, Heights? To create things and put them out into the world because you don't ever stop veering off course. That does not cease. What gets better is that the time it takes you to to course correct is much shorter, I think.

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:36]:

Yeah. That's that's excellent. I didn't know that either. I also thought I learned something. I thought it was a calculation that they they they I thought they're they're spending all this time doing exactly what you said to not do.

Joe Natoli [00:27:47]:

Right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:47]:

That they're they make sure that they have the perfect calculation, and then that's when they launch it. So there there you go everybody. The the world is not as it seems. Everybody is, correcting.

Joe Natoli [00:27:58]:

That's the reaction I had. I mean, I had a moment like, are you kidding me? And it really did have the effect of making me feel a lot better about what I was doing and and helping me to see it a little differently and helping me to take some of that pressure, off my own shoulders. Because let's face it, If we're creators, what the one thing that definitely comes with the territory is being very hard on yourself, I think. I've I've yet to meet someone who for whom that wasn't true.

Bryan McAnulty [00:28:29]:

Yeah. Great point. So today, you teach UX design through online courses using Heights Platform.

Joe Natoli [00:28:36]:

Yes.

Bryan McAnulty [00:28:37]:

And you have taught over 300,000 students. So thinking about your marketing approach to selling courses, what would you say is, if you can think of a specific one, the biggest strategy or factor that has helped you to gain those students over the years?

Joe Natoli [00:28:54]:

It's a it's sort of a give to get strategy. I mean, I think you and I talked about this previously. I am not a person who enjoys sales or marketing. And one of the things I had to figure out, because it's necessary, you have to market your stuff, you have to sell, you have to pitch to people. It's just the way it is. But I had to find a way to do it that was comfortable for me. And and my way of doing that is finding different ways to give people a taste of what I know of what I can teach and what I can help them do, before I ask them to pay for anything. So it's a give to get.

Joe Natoli [00:29:32]:

I do that across social media. I do it via, you know, we have email marketing campaign. We've got, you know, a list that has grown over time. We've got current students, obviously, previous students, past students. But it's all a flavor of if if I'm gonna pitch to you, I'm gonna give you an idea and I'm gonna give you an actionable something that you can walk away with right now and do something with and apply to the work that you're doing and see some result. Right? Like see like, oh shit, he's right. That is easier. And I think that has to happen, especially now because there's just we are stuck in traffic in terms of information, messages and overload and things that were assaulted with, you know, 24 hours a day now that we have these portable computers that go with us everywhere, you know, in our pockets.

Joe Natoli [00:30:24]:

And the only way you cut through that is you sort of have to prove in because there's a million people out there saying, hey, what I do can make your life better. What separates you from them? Nothing, except proof unless you can give somebody something that they can take, use, have a moment of, wow, that was really helpful. And then you can sort of casually say, by the way, if you enjoyed that, if that works for you, there's more of that here. That's sort of always been my approach. Now it's a slower sell, by and large, but I think it's better because I think you attract people who not only come with you, but stay with you.

Bryan McAnulty [00:31:05]:

Yeah. That's that's exactly what I was gonna say, and I agree it's better because you you hear of, these online marketers teaching or or talking about these, strategies you can use that are gonna get rich quick, and everything's gonna instantly happen for you. You're gonna get all these sales. But for those listening and and doing this, chances are you wanna be in this for the long term. And, yeah, that's great to to get a bunch of sales quickly if that's if it is even possible in that way. And then a year from now, you do that, but then what do you do next year? Ideally, you get to keep creating and and doing the things you enjoy and just continuously getting more customers.

Joe Natoli [00:31:47]:

Correct.

Bryan McAnulty [00:31:48]:

And so your method allows you to do that, and I think people shouldn't be afraid of giving away things for free.

Joe Natoli [00:31:57]:

You have to. You have to.

Bryan McAnulty [00:31:58]:

A a fear in that, but you'll you always have more that you can help somebody with. And when you show them that and showing them instead of telling them, then you you can help them. You can it makes it easy for them to move to the next step and actually pay you. And then beyond that, there's always something more you can do. And and if even if you give everything away in your your content or or whatever you show them, and that's still not helping them more directly and actually achieve that. And so there's always something else you can offer to them if you want to. And worst case scenario, if you if you find you you accidentally made all of your content as completely free for some reason, you can always take it away. It doesn't have to be free forever.

Joe Natoli [00:32:44]:

Right. Correct.

Bryan McAnulty [00:32:45]:

So you you can transform that and turn that into a product later on. Yeah. But the the method overall, I think, is a great way to go.

Joe Natoli [00:32:54]:

I think it's the only thing that works. Like I said, my my wife is a business marketing consultant for entrepreneurs. She's been with us for 20 years. Her industry, and she'll tell you, is full of snake oil salesman. It's all this all these experts and gurus and all these people are like, just do these 5 steps. And, you know, you have people beaten down your door to buy your product. It's not true. It's not true.

Joe Natoli [00:33:16]:

It doesn't work. Those people are selling those those recipes to get your money. Not so you can make money. You know, it's it's a game in and of itself. And anyone who promises you that there's a shortcut of some sort is lying to you. There there's no other way to say it. There are no shortcuts. There is only doing the work, you know, one way or another.

Joe Natoli [00:33:40]:

And you gotta commit to a long term thing. People will only buy from you, and they only get the right kinds of customers if they trust you. And you can't build trust, you know, with one email campaign. It's not possible.

Bryan McAnulty [00:33:56]:

Yeah. Yeah. There's no there's no shortcuts, but there is maybe a secret, and the secret is you just keep doing it. Yes. And if you keep doing it on a long enough time scale, then you end up with a product and and marketing and everything that is so good

Joe Natoli [00:34:11]:

That's right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:34:12]:

That you will be successful.

Joe Natoli [00:34:14]:

That's right. Exactly right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:34:18]:

So for UX Design and, like, again, applying that to kind of course creator businesses, Would you say is there any other maybe rules that you would recommend that a creator could follow besides what we've talked about so far?

Joe Natoli [00:34:33]:

I mean, there's there's lots of aspects of that. You know, visual presentation is part of it. People people like to see people. So in the early days of online course creation, it was when it was when everything was new. You know, it was literally just like slides with voice over. That's what you saw. You know, that's what everything was. And then slowly it was okay, here's talking head and slides.

Joe Natoli [00:35:01]:

And then it sort of moved again from okay. Maybe it's a little bit of both. Maybe there's some we've got different camera angles. We've got different sometimes it's just me talking and there's text that just appears next to me. There's visual components and and you you have to mix it up. Right? Because people's attention spans. It's not just that they're short. That's the thing that people talk about all the time.

Joe Natoli [00:35:24]:

But from a as coming from a UX background, you learn a lot about human psychology, cognitive behavior and things like that. And one of the things you learn about attention span is that it shifts naturally throughout even throughout a 3 minute video. Sometimes it's really high, and you got them in and it flags. It's high and it flags and it's high and it doesn't matter what you do. There have been studies done when people watch movies. And the thinking is, well, if we've really got the audience's attention, you know, all the time and we keep, then they'll be riveted. It's not the case. Your attention wanders constantly just because that's what it does.

Joe Natoli [00:36:03]:

So if anything is the same for too long, people wander and they kinda don't come back and they don't pay attention. And the danger of that is they're not getting what you said, so they're not remembering how awesome that was, and they can't go do it and be like, oh, yeah. That's great. So you have to you have to sort of keep mixing it up. I think the other thing that's important about that, if we're talking about UX again, the the misconception, and I think you alluded to this as well is that, you know, everything has to be visually beautiful. Everything has to be visually perfect, or it has to be everything has to be unbelievably professionally shot with the absolute best audio. It doesn't. It has to be lit fairly well like we are right now.

Joe Natoli [00:36:47]:

The audio has to be clear, like I think both of our microphones Bryan. And that's kind of it. You don't have to over design anything. If you put some text on a screen and it's a it's a font that's not overly decker decorative, it's clear, it's simple, it's easy to read. The contrast is good between the text and the background. That's all you need. It doesn't have to be the most amazing visual thing anyone has ever seen. That's not necessarily what drives attention.

Joe Natoli [00:37:14]:

And I think that's the the sort of misnomer. People get really hung up on the fact that, well, my videos don't look like theirs. It's not necessary.

Bryan McAnulty [00:37:25]:

Yeah. Definitely.

Joe Natoli [00:37:25]:

Good UX comes from anything, you know. It doesn't have to be a work of art to be good user experience.

Bryan McAnulty [00:37:34]:

Yeah. And and like we said before, it can it can appear like a work of art but be bad user experience.

Joe Natoli [00:37:39]:

Absolutely.

Bryan McAnulty [00:37:40]:

And what I would say related to the attention in the videos is, like, what we've tried to do with Heights Platform is we purposely limit it to that you're able to upload 1 video per lesson because we understand that as a creator, you have the skill that you wanna teach everybody, but you're not necessarily an expert instructional designer or knowing about these different things. Correct. And so being being a good teacher, that's that's one thing. But then presenting the information in the right way, that's a whole another thing. And if you go and put 15 videos in one lesson, then students are gonna miss one of those. And later on, there's some important piece in one of those and and they missed it. So Yep. When they're all separate, that helps ensure that that content isn't missed.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:26]:

It also helps ensure that the student has a sense of progression because that's why you're making a course. Right? You have these lessons

Joe Natoli [00:38:32]:

Yes.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:32]:

So the student can progress through them. And that's also why you probably shouldn't make, like, a 2 and a half hour or 3:3 hour individual lesson because you mentioned about the movies and everything and even how attention will dip in that. Think of how much money and and work and you see the credits of a movie, all the people that worked on that.

Joe Natoli [00:38:52]:

Oh, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:53]:

So how are you going to keep somebody's attention for 3 hours on the single lesson when you're you're not a a movie producer. Right? Like, you're you're not sure to create entertainment, but at the same point, it still has to be entertaining enough that you actually can get the person to that result because that's what you wanna be able to do for them.

Joe Natoli [00:39:12]:

Yeah. And you're not I mean, to your point. Right? Enforcing that idea that, okay, one lesson is a lesson, and that's it. It it prevents people from getting sort of in their own way. You know? And it it forces you to think smaller, I think. One thing I know, because I made this mistake at the beginning. Right? I had lessons that were all over the place. There'd be a 5 minute lesson or a 10 minute lesson, then there'd be a 20 minute lesson.

Joe Natoli [00:39:37]:

And because I didn't know what I was doing. You know, I was just sort of winging it. What, like, this is all the stuff I have to say. So that's the length of the lesson. And what you learn over time is, like, once you hit about between 5 7 minutes, past that, you whatever you're talking about better be extraordinary. You know? And and assuming that people are gonna stick around longer than that robs them of control, robs them of feeling like I'm in control of the pace that I learn at. Again, to your point, if I have multiple lessons, I have some level of comfort and that I can start and stop anytime I want. That's more important than people think it is.

Joe Natoli [00:40:16]:

You know, that ability to say, okay. The dog's barking or, you know, whatever. I need to be able to stop this. So, yeah, I'm all that to say I'm in complete agreement with everything he just said.

Bryan McAnulty [00:40:30]:

Awesome. Alright. Well, I've got one more question for you, and that is on the show, I like to have every guest ask a question to the audience. Mhmm. So if you could ask our audience of creators anything, whether it's something you're curious about, something you wanna get people thinking about, what would that be?

Joe Natoli [00:40:47]:

I'll tell you what I'm most interested in, and I don't know if this is what you're after, but what I am always most interested in hearing from other people is how they create, what their process is, how you show up every single day and put effort toward creating. Because there are some days I'll just speak for myself. Okay. There are some days where and you can't pinpoint. I mean, completely on fire. Okay? I'll burn through 10,000 words in a day scripting stuff, you you know, or in one sitting like without even breaking a sweat. Other days, it's a challenge getting, I don't know, 50. There's just you have this idea and you're trying relentlessly to move it forward and your brain or your emotions or whatever are just not cooperating.

Joe Natoli [00:41:37]:

So I'm always interested in how people go about the process of creation and and what kinds of processes or discipline that they employ to be fairly consistent. Because I will admit that that is one thing that has always been difficult for me for as long as I've been doing this is finding some level of consistency. Because the days when I'm off, I'm off, like, big time. There's just nothing. I I might as well just, I don't know, go for a drive for 6 hours because it's not happening no matter how long I sit there or no matter how many breaks I take.

Bryan McAnulty [00:42:15]:

Yeah. That's an excellent question. I think we could probably have a whole another show just thinking about, the ways to solve all that. I think it's something that many people face, at least in some small part. I mean, I definitely do as well. For me, the solution has been to be very careful of how I structure my time to as much as I can to have some kind of schedule and give myself these periods of being able to focus and and work on that thing. And that way, when when you are in it, you're able to just completely focus on that and and get as much out as possible. Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:42:50]:

But I I also think it's normal in some way in very creative work to have these these periods of where you get a lot done and other periods where it's better to almost be absorbing things and learning new things, getting different perspectives, and figuring things out. And so, yeah, I I think there's a careful balance, and the artist part is figuring out when you need to get this stuff done and how can you make sure that you're you're on on those days.

Joe Natoli [00:43:20]:

Yeah. No kidding.

Bryan McAnulty [00:43:21]:

But, yeah, interesting thing to talk about. Alright. Well, before we get going, where else can people find you online?

Joe Natoli [00:43:30]:

The number one place is the UX 365 Academy, which is, www.ux 365academy.com. And that is those are my courses. Those are live workshops. There's special Heights. There's books. All sorts of content, you know, to to essentially help folks who are who are in UX or product design, be better at what they do. And the thing that we focus on that's a little different than most, I guess what you would call UX programs or boot camps, As I focus a lot on the day to day stuff, the day to day challenge of working inside a corporation, which is not just the tactical work itself. It's people, it's politics, it's power struggles.

Joe Natoli [00:44:22]:

It's difficult conversation. It's learning how to say no. It's learning how to present well, learning how to communicate well, how to deal with different people in different positions, you know, How to deal with executives versus product managers versus collaboration with teammates or collaboration with developers. There's lots of of aspects of doing this job that I think make it more difficult, than it should be. And traditional design education doesn't teach anybody how to do any of those things. So that's a huge huge part of of of what we do. And it's it's only growing over the years because this is the kind of stuff that people ask for. So that's my pitch.

Joe Natoli [00:44:59]:

I consider it to be a low cost alternative to boot camps because I think there's a whole lot of people who get priced out of that equation. They can't afford 3,000 or 5,000 or 15,000. So the last thing I'll say about it is is the real goal here was to make u h UX and Design Education palatable and affordable, and more inclusive for a lot of people, again, who are sort of typically pushed out of the equation when it comes to these things.

Bryan McAnulty [00:45:28]:

Awesome. Well, that sounds great. Thanks so much, Joe.

Joe Natoli [00:45:30]:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Bryan McAnulty [00:45:32]:

I'd like to take a moment to invite you to join our free community of over 5,000 creators at creatorclimb.com. If you enjoyed this episode and wanna hear more, check out the Heights Platform YouTube channel every Tuesday at 9 AM US Central. To get notified when new episodes release, join our newsletter at the creatorsadventure.com. Until then, keep learning, and I'll see you in the next episode.