Under the UX hood: Metalab’s Sara Vienna talks design

IT pros are often head-down and focused, relying on apps like Slack to facilitate communication and workflows. But who makes sure those apps’ UX remains crisp and easy for users to manage?

Sara Vienna, chief design officer at Metalab, is one of those people. Her work with Metalab has spanned the tech gamut, from Slack (where the company’s design work helped the app become the dominant workflow facilitator it is today) to YouTube, Uber, Midjourney, and Windsurf, to name a few.

At this month’s Web Summit Vancouver, IT Brew got the chance to sit down with Vienna and ask her about Metalab’s first 20 years, and how she sees the intersection between her work and the day-to-day of IT teams.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

What would you say to IT pros that maybe they wouldn’t expect or know about what you do and how it influences and affects their work?

First off, they’re providing a service. At the end of the day, that’s what we do, too. We work with great product teams or great founders who want to make something that people love and who want to make something that people talk about and people adopt and retain users over time—and obviously retain the bottom line over time too. It’s that blend of the head and the heart.

That applies to services like IT, and anything that is embedded in the company, because you’re providing a service that is really about solving problems on the ground. You’re the humans who understand the contextual needs of the users. There’s something really beautiful about that.

If you were talking to an IT pro, what would you tell them is something they do that impacts your work?

You’re solving problems all day, and that’s what we do. We just do it through a different avenue. We do it through product design. You’re doing more of the piping or the installation component, yes, but there’s a symbiosis that has to happen between those two things.

As the IT person, you need to know what the problem is that’s worth solving, You need to know the solution set around that. And that’s why I think there’s such a connection between what we do, even if it’s not direct.

A lot of our audience knows your work from the products that they use like Slack. What unique approach did Metalab take to Slack? How did you help them develop a tool that works and looks like it does?

If you rewind back to that time, in that era, there were a few things out there that could have done what Slack did—but they weren’t moving the needle, for whatever reason. I think Stewart [Butterfield, Slack co-founder] and his team figured out how to create a moat around their hypothesis, around changing the way we communicate at work.

They wanted to be the email killer, but there was other stuff, like HipChat, if you remember, and even Google had a couple things that people were using it, and Skype. People were using it, but not in a really meaningful way. And it didn’t have the stickiness that Slack did.

That team has grown a ton and built an incredible product. Since the time that we worked with them, they were bought by Salesforce. They’re now a huge enterprise.

That’s a sign of success for you, right? That means you did your job.

Totally. And we did become Slack famous, and people came to us for what we did with Slack, but now we apply that across the typical logo quilt you see on every website—but we back it up with the case studies in our work.

We still do a lot of B2B. There are still so many great design problems in B2B, but also B2C and early stage through enterprise at this point. It’s nice to be able to have our hands on a lot of different verticals.