Thoughtful design, taking risks, and AI: we sit down with WP Engine
On a sunny day in Austin, we sit down with Lauren Cox, WP Engine's Senior Director of Brand and Communications, and talk about how we've made an effort to root our work in purpose and creativity, why listening is the most critical part of the design process, and how the rise of AI makes human-centered interaction more important than ever.
This is Velocitized Talks and I'm Lauren Cox. Today I have with me Chris Oquist, co-founder of Dialogue Theory. Welcome. How are you Chris?
Thank you Lauren. I'm very well, thank you.
I'd love to learn a little bit about Dialogue Theory. I've heard that you founded Dialogue Theory with your brother. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that.
That's true, yeah!
John and I came to the work we do following a pretty circuitous path. He studied linguistics in college and got into creative technology and is a visual artist, and I went to music school and then got a job at an e-commerce company, then software companies.
And I think in the periphery of the work that we were doing day-to-day, we also got to explore really interesting things: John started working with data at one of his jobs and I started playing around with the way that interfaces are designed... and at a certain point we'd been doing work on the side and our interests became enmeshed to the point where we could provide something together that was really fun to do - and it just kind of grew out of that.
Yeah, that's wonderful. You're family, right? You think about so much of your time in the day is spent with your work colleagues - but your work colleague is also your family. How do you add to that dynamic and choose the right colleagues to join your team?
That's a good question, and something that he and I think about quite a lot because we're still a small team, but we've tried to cultivate -whether it's deliberate or maybe just an expression of how he and I like to work - a culture of listening and of conversation. The people that we've chosen to be part of Dialogue Theory very much fit within that general vibe. And also curiosity. One of the things we like to look for in the people we hire is that they have some sort of secret life in a way or another. Some of us are musicians. Some of us are visual artists. Our first outside UX hire described herself as a rehabilitated architect -
Yes!
- which I loved. One of our head developers is an accomplished journalist. I think anytime you've got people that are putting their energy into making things outside of work, it just really signals that there's curiosity there and there's an ability to to connect dots in a way that you don't normally if you're just in one place.
Dialogue Theory kind of balances approach of complexity, like solving complex problems, and then also like diversity of thought, audience etc. So, how do you seek to kind of balance those two out when working with a client?
It's difficult sometimes, but I think it's all about listening to external audiences and listening to internal audiences. We very rarely work with consumer brands. So, a lot of the projects we have, it's not like 80% of the goal is "we need to sell watches on the website" and the other 20% is, you know, partner or employer branding or something.
We have projects where the audience mix is broken out really equally among people that an organization serves, and policymakers, and grassroots activists, and affiliates or partners and journalists. So really the only way that we can triangulate solutions that solve for all of these things in some way or another is just listening to everyone.
So our discovery process is like "let us talk to fifty people." We want to have workshops, we want to have brainstorms, we want to build a really intuitive understanding of what you're trying to accomplish and what everyone's mandate is so that that's in our brains as we're assessing new ways to solve for things. You know, a lot of times you'll just try tons of things and it's kind of fun. There's a play component to the work that we do - it's almost like let's explore 30 or 40 things -and eventually you hit on a really elegant solution that might not solve all your problems but goes a long way to getting the organization to where they need to be.
And I think a really cool thing about the approach of just listening and involving a lot of people across the board is you also get buy-in from a really wide variety of stakeholders across the organization. Everyone feels like they've been involved and so there's a sense of ownership over the deliverable.
Can you tell me a little bit about what really gets you started in the morning from a work perspective? Like what do you think about in the mornings?
Well, first of all, I work with my brother and that makes it really easy to get up in the morning and sign into work and also we work with a team of people that we handpicked. So you hear people at other companies complaining about their co-workers: that never happens to us, you know? It's literally going into work with people that you really respect and you've chosen to be there. So that's the first thing.
I think the second thing is we are really really fortunate to be in a place where we could kind of pick and choose our work right now. John and I made a pretty deliberate decision early on to try and take on work that generated some sort of net good. And like that's pretty abstract. It can mean a lot of things, but it usually means that what we're building we think is going to be a good thing for people. You know, and it might be also interesting to us.
We kind of ignore a piece of common wisdom in the agency world, which is "hyper specialize and hyper-niche down into something." Some organizations can make a great living building websites for estate agents or the best credit union websites. John and I try to do a lot of very different things because we can learn from them and we can bring those findings to clients in completely different spaces and also just makes it really really fun.
So on the flip side of that, would you be able to give me a little bit of like what keeps you up at night?
Oh, well a lot keeps me up at night, but I think the primary thing is you know a lot of other people started agencies after working at bigger agencies. John and I didn't do that. We started this having never run an agency before.
We've gotten to a place over the years where the work product, the deliverable, the strategy is really good: I would put it up against the output of agencies 10 times our size.
But the [administrative] process is not something that we ever witnessed or observed at a more sophisticated organization - an organization that has been doing this for a long time. So, there are logistical and operational things that I just have no idea about. And we've sort of concocted our way of solving for problems. And a year down the line, two years down the line after we've been doing something totally goofy, we realize like, "oh, that's how a company's supposed to handle payroll, or putting together a master services agreement." Things that are not on the forefront of our work, but I have to deal with every single day.
What would your perspective be to - it's a generic kind of way to think about it - but where would you encourage your clients to put money?
I would say two things -and it's difficult to answer this question without understanding exactly what the situation is -but one thing is listening. We find that there's a tremendous amount of value - often untapped value - in listening to your users, holding insights groups, things like that.
The second thing is that the digital landscape is changing: there are a lot of experiences that are becoming commoditized: people's expectations of what consumer experiences are like are driving their expectations of what service experiences or industry experiences or B2B experiences are like. So I think taking risks and trying to build things that solve problems, feel different, and feel more directly aligned with intent and need in sometimes creative ways and unexpected ways can be really powerful.
A little bit of that is do you find that your clients are asking about new technologies as well to invest in or or they're asking for your perspective on any kind of recommendation that they might need to build into their digital stack? So I'm thinking specifically here about artificial intelligence. Do you find that with any of your clients where they're asking you for recommendations or how they want to improve certain things like workflows, data, whatever?
I think AI is interesting because - we get the conversation along the borders of our work - but we still see it as a hype technology, right? And so like any hype technology, there's just this big echo chamber of people saying the same thing over and over again.
A really interesting thing to dig into that John and I have been interested in is: everyone's focusing on "is AI going to be able to write my copy?" or turn analytics into insights or replace the need to hire illustrators or photographers. But one thing people I think are not paying enough attention to is the flip side of that, the consumption of information. It used to be that you'd perform a Google search and you go to a page, and it's just 10 blue links. "How much does an orca weigh?" Two years ago it would be that plus rich snippets and featured widgets and things like people also ask and "here's a carousel of other endangered species." Now it's just an AI answer at the very top.
So if people aren't writing the websites and people aren't reading the websites, you get into this sort of cycle where it's machines writing for machines. Where's the human component of that? Not only is that like where's the fun in it, but also it's not serving your audience, your constituents, right? It's like feeding into this machine that's kind of distilling it for them. That's not always going to give you the right answer, the right value.
So, our reaction to AI right now is it just increases the importance of building something that's different, that they can't get from a distillation. Building your websites so that they're appier or more like tools. Creating things that feel richer or more immersive is I think a much more interesting way to go in 2025 than "we need these 28 web pages for different services and we need a hero content and then we need the schema metadata." What does this allow you to do that can't be replaced yet by, you know, "hey Alexa, my dog ate grapes. Is he going to be okay?"
What kind of strategies do you employ for different, for new innovation? Clients asking for different types of things that you maybe haven't done before, how do you approach that?
We work with users a lot.
We ask them a lot of questions that kind of help us surface gaps in the current offering. A lot of times when we're doing our discovery and speaking to people from across an organization, we surface things that have nothing to do with the website, but they give us a really interesting understanding of current obstacles to growth or problems or unaddressed opportunities. Those will sometimes just yield wild ideas that we might not have considered. A client might hire us to build a website for an educational experience and we end up building a directory of tools or something like that - and it could have way more impact than what they initially thought.
When it comes to a new exciting project that you're working on, and I know that, you know, we can't always talk about the clients you're building for... is there one that you have in your mind that you're thinking like how they got to choose WordPress?
Yeah! we're building a really cool multisite project for a client that's got their their main presence, and a couple of adjacent presences and they're all going to be part of a WordPress multisite framework. They also need to communicate slightly differently and address different things in many different communities.
We're doing a secondary project for them that ties together just dozens and dozens of little regional microsites that can be multilingual, that can pull in content from a shared database so that we've got consistency when we need it, and we've got nuance when we need it. That's really cool because it gets us into using some of the WP Engine tools that we haven't really gotten into playing with before fundamentally. And that's kind of changing the way we think about how how we build things from the ground up.
Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. This is Velocitized Talks. I'm Lauren Cox and today we had Chris Oquist, co-founder of Dialogue Theory. Thank you.
Thank you, Lauren.