Designer Jess Myra takes a low-tech approach to create people-centric tech products

Designer and NSCAD alumna, Jess Myra.

Jess Myra has worked with some of the leading technology companies in the world, including Google and Twitter. Although she expresses her creativity through technology, she describes her relationship to the internet as “turbulent.”

“From my point of view, a lot of what’s on the internet can be a waste of time. I know that seems counterintuitive because I live and breathe technology,” Jess explains over coffee in a North End Halifax cafe. “I’ve literally been trained for years to translate technology into people-centric experiences. But that’s not where I spend my time. I get more inspiration from going for a walk.”

Jess says she never expected to end up in Silicon Valley designing tech products, like apps, websites and wearables, for leading firms. She had a modest upbringing in Lunenburg County that she describes as ‘art-filled’.  After starting a science degree at Dalhousie, Jess left to teach English in Japan. One year later, she decided to apply to NSCAD’s Communication Design honours program (now called Interdisciplinary Design). Jess was accepted and returned to Nova Scotia in 2005.

But before Jess left Japan, her friend convinced her to visit a palm reader.

“I had just applied to NSCAD, and the palm reader told me, ‘You’re not going to be a graphic designer, you’re going to design the inside of airplanes and cars.’ My reaction was, ‘Who does he think he is? I know what I’m doing!’”

As Jess started at NSCAD, the Communication Design program was in the process of evolving to become Interdisciplinary Design. That transition turned out to be an advantage. There was a lot of room for dialogue with the chair of the department and different professors,” she says. “NSCAD’s exploration-based approach enabled me to stretch and grow my mind in new ways. The literal and metaphorical room to explore, combined with small class sizes, meant close collaboration with peers and professors. This made it easy to try new methods and approaches in our work.”

Jess is especially good at translating complicated concepts into understandable designs and outputs. It’s no surprise that her go-to work tools are Post-It notes to capture concise thoughts and multiple Post Mate Flair felt tips, in case one dried up while she’s mid-thought. In fact, Jess created a five-minute presentation for Hub Talks using just Post-Its. Hub Talks are co-organized between NSCAD and Saint Mary’s University.

And although her social media presence may be non-existent, Jess puts her computer through its paces. “I call myself a tab-oholic. I multitask until my RAM maxes out and my CPU stalls. I’m not kidding, it’s a problem,” she says, laughing. “I always want to go back and reference things. I do a lot of research to make connections. I’m a visual thinker so I use the internet as a mirror to my creative process.”

Jess believes addressing nascency bias early has the potential to ‘reduce the churn’ to make the process of creating digital and hardware products more efficient.

Her key area of interest is in ‘demystifying nascent experiences,’ the idea of meeting first-time product users at their cognitive baseline.

“You think about redesigning an app, or a technology that’s never existed before: what’s a first-use experience? Going from zero to one, nothing to something,” she offers. “If my mom opens a social media app for the first time, she might be a bit thrown off because she just got an iPhone. Based on her baseline—her perception, her world—that might feel super provocative. If my sister opens the same app for the first time and her cognitive baseline is attuned to things like Facebook, it’s going to feel a lot more familiar.”

In her work with tech companies and well-known brands including Nike, Honda, and EA Sports, Jess constantly revisits what she calls ‘nascency bias’. She explains nascency bias happens when product creators innovate in a way that builds on their own mental model.

For example, product creators are often energized at the prospect of making an experience that ‘feels new’ through their own eyes. This can be a problem if their point of view doesn’t align with the cognitive baseline of the people who will use the product. In that case, aspects of an experience may feel unfamiliar or provocative, making it hard to use and not enjoyable.  

“Usually, you do some research and then try out some ideas, hear what people say, commit to one idea, then build it and iterate and iterate and iterate,” Jess says. “The challenge is you usually don’t know how the product is doing, or whether your idea is working, until you get to the end of one of those cycles.

Jess believes addressing nascency bias early has the potential to ‘reduce the churn’ to make the process of creating digital and hardware products more efficient.

“Regardless, there’s a lot of moon shots, where you take a shot and see what happens. But there are ways to shorten that trial-and-error approach.”

Jess splits her time between San Francisco and Nova Scotia’s South Shore, where she and her husband are raising their daughter. She recently left Google AI for a “career break” that has so far been packed with research papers, competitive sailing, and working with non-profit organizations in the U.S. and Canada.

Looking back, she realizes the palm reader was right about her after all.

“When he said ‘Jess, you’re not going to be a graphic designer’ he was speaking to interaction design, which is what I do,” she says. “It’s my job to create the systems and to define the connection users experience with a technology or a product to make it intuitive. I make things people centric.”