John S. Couch is the Vice President of UX and Design at Hulu(hulu.com). With a rich background in entertainment, Couch has worked with companies like eBay and CBS, and is also fluent in Japanese. He’s lived in places all over the world including Europe and Japan, until he made his home in California. He will be speaking on the panel with Grace Kim of Twitter and Jill Nussbaum of Instagram, covering user experience and design on their respective platforms.
Tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you got started with Hulu.
I was born in New Orleans, and I grew up in Texas. Being half Japanese and having a dad as a scientist, I was in Japan as a kid as well. Therefore, I was kind of exposed to the most extreme of cultures, and that’s where I learned Japanese. I went to TCU, and after graduating I moved to London and worked in an art gallery for a while. I finally ended up in San Francisco in my late 20’s where I started working at Wired Magazine. I think that my first entrance into design proper was working with them in the 90’s. I got invited to work on Wired Japan, and they needed someone who could speak Japanese and write and design. There’s about five of us who could do that. Wired was basically my graduate school, because the Internet was new and no one knew how to design for the Internet. In the 2000’s I was working in entertainment and working at CBS. Then I went to e-commerce and worked for eBay for a while, because there were a lot of changes happening. Then the Hulu opportunity came up, and I took it.
How would you say that Hulu plays a role in the panel, Designers Who Broke the Internet?
When Sasha [of Hulu’s corporate communications] and I were first talking about panels, I had a much more provocative title for it at the time, and it was along the lines of really disliking your design. Any kind of change can lead to an enormous overreaction in general. People in general are rather change-adverse. You have to learn how to deal with feedback, both positive and negative, that you get when you are ‘breaking the internet.’ When people ‘over like’ something, it’s almost as bad as someone hating it. There is truth in gradation between the two. The cool thing about what we do at Hulu, and any other digital company, is a constant iteration process. So as we get feedback, and we start to hear a pattern of people really disliking something, we can actually do something about it. That is almost a very organic, living system of design, which is very different from design 20 years ago.
What is your absolute favorite part about working for Hulu?
I think Hulu has a really healthy culture. I’ve been in a lot of companies in entertainment, and Hollywood has this famously difficult environment to work in without getting anything done, because they’re very hierarchical. At Hulu, not that we’re perfect, but there’s much more of a…collaboration between different departments. What I like about Hulu is that it’s small enough to still have the agility of a startup culture, but within the context of working with very large companies who own us. So we kind of have this lovely synergy between the ability to experiment, but also have access to the best content out there. It’s a really unique situation because I find that a lot of companies tend to be hierarchical and a little bit fear-based, and here it seems to be much more of a passion-based environment. So if you have a really good idea, you can be open, honest, and direct about discussing it, and it’s not going to sit in the corner of your mind. More often than not, [that idea] will find life in some level. I do like that we’re doing socially significant work like Handmaid’s Tale; we’re not just doing things that are typical, we’re doing things that are meaningful and impactful, especially in this time in our history.
How do you think Hulu will either have a hand in or pave the way for the future of UX and UX Design?
Hulu needs to be at the front edge of what experience is for storytelling in general. We’re not the biggest company, but we are definitely the little engine that can. What differentiates us from [Apple, Amazon, and Netflix] is a better user experience, or a better experience for the customer in the end. That’s one thing that we can do better than anybody else, because of the fact that we are agile, focused, and we think about the customer first. That is our advantage. We obsessively think about how the person interacts with content and how they want their content. I feel like we have the opportunity here to experiment and push those boundaries in a way that I’ve never seen another company do.
Is this your first time at SXSW? What are you most excited for?
My first time at SXSW was about 20 years ago, and I was there last year too on a panel. I actually like going and seeing a lot of different people speak, and my guilty pleasure is the fact that I get to eat Texas barbecue. I can’t really get good barbecue [in California] like I can in Austin. The other thing is, I’m really into music and even though it’s not quite coinciding with the music part of SXSW, there is a ton of music playing every time I go. It’s great to have this ability to walk into a bar and see a band. Austin is one of my favorite cities in the world, so I’m always glad to go there.
What advice do you have for anyone who is trying to get their foot in the door in the world of UX and UX Design?
If you’re in college, there are now courses in UX that did not exist ten years ago. When I was a young man, UX experience was almost unheard of, you had to ‘DIY it’ in order to do it. But now every university I see has UX courses. The demand for UX designers in Silicon Valley has exploded in the last few years. Most universities have very robust UX programs now. One thing we do at Hulu is internships. A lot of the people who intern with us come in for a certain program and get hands-on experience with actual product. Then they take it back with them to school, and out of the four interns we had [recently], we hired three of them. These younger designers now know how to code, so I think a huge part of getting your foot in the door is actually knowing how to code at a rudimentary level. You don’t have to be great, but have an understanding of it. The more that you’re in control of the code, the more you understand how you want your design to appear, and the more dialogue you can have with the developer, and then get the best experience launched.
Tuesday, March 12
11:00am-12:00pm
JW Marriott – Salon E/110 E 2nd St
Find Out More: Designers Who Broke the Internet
Featured Image: Pixabay