If you weren’t able to join the session then here’s your chance to catch up. Grab a coffee and take a break from your busy schedule to hear some thoughts on how we can help to be part of a movement towards positive change.

Session links:

• Design community advocates at Industryfish: https://industryfish.co
• UX Mastery’s Get Started in UX: https://uxmastery.com/get-started-in-ux
• UX Educators Slack channel (thanks Julia!): https://uxeducators.slack.com
• Mike Montiero’s Design is a Job and Dear Design Student
• Phil Cleaver’s What They Don’t Teach You at Design School
• Jon Kolko’s ‘How I Teach Design: https://www.howiteachdesign.com
• Jon Kolko’s free book about large scale social problems: wicked problems.com
• Library of free content fron AC4D: http://library.ac4d.com

Transcript:

Hawk: All right. Hello and welcome. This is the latest in our UX Mastery series of live panel events. I’m Hawk, and I’m joined today by Simon Pemberton. We’ll be discussing the future of design education and the part that we all have to play in it. We planned on sharing our discussion today with Marissa Mills, but unfortunately Marissa has been waylaid by some unexpected childcare admin. I also need to apologize for the weather here in Auckland, New Zealand, quite likely to see an amazing thunder and lightning display behind me very shortly. Fingers crossed!

Before we start, I’d like to apologise to those of you that tried to join us for our session a couple of weeks ago. Due to a technical difficulty we were unable to go live at that time. Sorry for anyone that had to reschedule, and thanks for your patience.
Quick housekeeping: please keep yourselves muted and ask questions at any time via the chat sidebar. You can open the chat sidebar by clicking the chat icon at the bottom of your screen and time permitting we may invite you to ask your question on video. This is obviously absolutely optional. Luke will hit you up via direct message to check in whether you’re comfortable doing that. If you’re not, I can ask on your behalf, but please shoot through questions as soon as you like via chat.

I’d love to start by formally introducing Simon and then I’m going to throw over to Simon to set the scene and give us a little bit of context around the subject of today’s session, before we throw it open to you for questions.

So let’s talk about Simon. Simon has over thirty years experience in both the design and advertising industries and has combined experience in the successful creation, development and implementation of brand identities and cultures. And his experience as the head of school at four leading design schools brings together a unique blend of creative and management skills within a successful educational environment. Simon is also a published author in a wide range of design magazines and recently published ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’, which is a book and video documentary featuring interviews with 13 of Australia’s leading designers. Simon’s joining me today as one-third of Industryfish, the collaborative effort of three individuals who are passionate about people, design, and learning. And their mission is to create an environment that’s committed to building a culture of strong dynamic and effective design education in Australia.

So Simon, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us today. I’d love to get a bit of an overview on your thoughts around design education and why it is that we are responsible, and what we can do.

Simon: Thank you. And thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. I’m looking forward to the conversation and in talking with the people who are joining us today. I think the main thing that I would like us all to talk about is —and I’ll probably use the word ‘community’ more than I should—but, what we can do as an industry, what we can do as a community, to support design education. It’s a truism, but I don’t think it’s given enough attention and there’s a lot of the detail around that because clearly students are our future, and clearly students want their future to be what we do. I think underpinning, some of the issues that I hope we talk about today is the fact that it even starts at high school — and I think we should include high school students, very definitely not just tertiary level or post secondary level, whatever, whichever way you like to refer to them— students in high school, because they’re beginning to think about their careers, but they are being taught by people who are, I’m sure, very talented, very committed, very smart, tick all the right boxes, of course, but who may not either have the time or who may not have the experience to understand the the design industries that students are thinking they might want to go into. I think as an industry there’s a lot we can do to support those teachers. And I think there’s a lot we should be doing. And to some extent the same happens at tertiary level. I’ve been heavily involved with tertiary level design education for a number of years now. All tertiary level design schools are required to have industry engagement as part of their accreditation and they all do, to be honest with varying degrees of success,varying degrees of depth, and also varying degrees of responding to any feedback they may get from industry.

Actually quite often not their fault because they have to have industry engagement to keep their accreditation, but they also have to follow very stringent educational guidelines, particularly degree-based programs, in terms of what they deliver to their students. And there’s often a conflict perhaps in terms of time as much as anything else between teaching students what they think they should know from the industry, but also to get them through their degree and pass all the academic stuff. It’s complex. So, given those two environments, the high schools and the tertiary level schools, I think there’s a lot we could —as an industry—we, could and should do to support the students in particular, the teachers as well, and that can relate to better quality graduates, which can only lead to a better quality industry. Seems to me to be a bit of a no brainer. And as far as I know, no one’s really doing this. Industryfish is very much hoping it can be part of the catalyst that helps this improve.

Hawk: You’re right. I was surprised that nobody seems to be doing this because it does seem like a prevalent problem, yeah.

Simon: As far as I know, no one is doing it anywhere in the world. It’s astonishing.

Hawk: You talked a little bit about not enough industry engagement, but what are some of the other issues with how people learn design and how it’s taught, maybe even some of the courses?

Simon: Um, well again, I think it’s by us as an industry being involved, but it’s going through the curriculum content. I think. I know there’s been various discussions about Phil Cleaver’s book “What they didn’t teach you in design school”, but you almost don’t need to take design, and this is a bit controversial, but if someone’s going to be a successful designer, or they already are, they already have an innate creative talent. Probably, or almost certainly. They also have the will to want to be a great design. Well they don’t have is all the other stuff – design as a business,  design and the people skills (and that’s a huge conversation right there), but in terms of UX and UI, all that stuff, at high school especially, and even still at tertiary level school, they don’t have the skills or the knowledge or the experience to understand that they aren’t designing only for them. They’re designing for a community, an audience, a client base. They’re designing to improve a business, ‘ROI’, the ‘bottom line’. There’s a whole world of stuff that they’re doing their work for, which is really not so much about ‘design’.

Hawk: One of the things that I notice from our community, especially, one of the most prevalent issues is that people coming into the community that want to get into design based roles, specifically UX design-based roles. Sorry – the thunder is quite outrageous! What I noticed is that they just really have no sense of direction. They’ve come from school, they’re excited about the idea of doing something, but they don’t really know what that something is, or what it involves. So it almost feels to me that there’s a bit of a disconnect between the teaching of topics or subjects themselves and directing people as to where they go as their next step. How do you think that we can maybe kind of confront that issue? It seems insurmountable in some ways.

Simon: Oh yes it is. I’m thinking on my feet here, so I reserve the right to change my mind, but I’m not sure that directing students is really something that we should focus on. This industry is changing so fast, and in so many ways that when we’re at the coalface we can kind of keep a handle on it, but for else it’s a bit harder. I think just giving them the skills to be able to know where they’re going, or to know the complexities of the environment that exists out there. I think probably a more important priority. So, support them if they have ideas about what they’re interested in, ambitions or areas of interest, we can certainly steer them in the right direction, to meet people, to find out more about what they’re going to do. But, can the education process — if it starts in high school and goes right through, we’re talking about quite a number of years — so this idea of directing, I mean, for example, who would have thought 10 years ago you could be a commercial drone pilot. It was a toy 10 years ago!

Hawk: Yeah.

Simon: So there are things we’re going to miss, if we try and be too prescriptive – I think is what I’m trying to say, so trying to keep open minded and inspirational, and the kids will find, the students will find, really, where they want to go. And where they want to go will find them too, actually.

Hawk: Yeah. I agree with you. One of the issues is, especially from a high school — if we’re talking about a high school as a starting point—then design is one aspect and then there’s obviously just so many other vocations. We’re focusing on design. How might this stuff specifically affect people that are designing digital products? Or a human-centred approach? How we different from some of these other areas or vocations?

Simon: If I’ve understood the question properly, Hawk, I think in terms of digital products, and the people listening will certainly understand this, this is all fundamental UX stuff, but really understanding who’s on the other side of the screen, that your work’s going to be on. It’s people skills. It’s being emotionally smart enough to understand how people are going to react. And of course it’s about the aesthetics, but aesthetics have to be driven by consumer responses, not via pure aesthetics alone. Um, you know, one person’s idea of cool is, is not necessarily somebody else’s. So, it’s really creating an education environment that’s all about helping people understand that it’s a big world out there full of complicated, complex people with their own aims and desires and how to make things work for them. And that applies to UX as much as it does to architecture, or really any aspect of design, I would have thought.

Hawk: I’ve got another question here. Given the state of the industry, what’s the potential that we should be growing in design students? What’s does a design student at the pinnacle of success look like for us? In what state do we want these people to be coming to us?

Simon: I think it’s the same state that we have always wanted—we always recognize it, but we don’t always see it—which is clearly having some talent, and that has to be the first thing. The second thing is being really hungry to learn. You know, all the radars are turned on. They’re listening hard, they’re watching hard. And there’s an energy that comes with that. You know, the top 2-3% of students that graduate from any course, you can just feel it in them. They’re itching to go. You can really feel that. And the other one, of course, is the ability to get your head down nd your bum up and just work hard when it’s needed. Thankfully it’s not all the time. You do have to do that as you do in any commercial environment these days. So I think those three qualities.

Hawk: Right? So sort of an energy and work ethic.

Simon: Yeah. Energy mixed with equal amounts of curiosity. And be really quite open and, not aggressive, but enthusiastic with that. Don’t piss people off with it, but inspire them with your hunger.

Hawk: So we have established this problem exists, hence your mission to change it, but is there a more helpful way that we could reframe the problem? And the complicating issues that you know, how to get it noticed, to try and get this message out and a bit more widespread?

Simon: I think it’s by, and here’s this word again, community. I’m getting a bit stuck!

Hawk: We love that word here at UX Mastery.

Simon: I think what we should do is very much—as an industry again—is to build a community which includes and focusses actually, to some extent, on our creative educators. People say, ‘what are the problems with learning about design?’ I think the question is kind of slightly wrong. It should be ‘what are the problems or the issues that we can help resolve about teaching design?’ If you look at it from that perspective you’ve got more chance of success. That has to be managed carefully of course, because we didn’t want to offend or upset those that are teachers, the bulk of whom do a good job, and whom are committed. So we have to be circumspect and supportive about that. But I, the teachers I know (and I know quite a lot of them), I know that if we as an industry go to them in the right way, offering them support, they’d welcome it. They’d absolutely love it. “Come to us”. Brilliant.

Hawk: This issue starts at a high school level, or at a school level. Are you seeining it coming through at a tertiary education as well? I ask because lots of tertiary education providers are specifically providing design education, and it’s a bit of a scary thought if they’re not doing that one thing very well. Do you think it is a high school issue? Or is it much, much wider than that?

Simon: I think it probably is an issue of high school. Part of the problem, part of the challenge that we face, is for students who think at high school, who think they’re interested, or even know know they’re interested in design, is to help them understand what they think design is. Or for us to understand what they think design is, so we can really support them. The way to do that—and Industryfish is about to embark on exactly this journey—is to go and talk to the high school students, and you ask them questions about where are they getting that knowledge from? What sort of levels of support are they getting from parents? Are mum and dad creative? Someone in the family? And then add whatever the learnings are from that research to the knowledge and experience the teachers have.

My knowledge of high school teachers in the design space is more limited. In fact, probably fairly limited to be honest. I know quite a lot, but I don’t know hundreds. And many of the ones I do know have a fine arts background. They get kind of corralled into doing the creative arts, if you like. But it’s not their fault that they may not have the skills or the knowledge or the experience to know how to help students. And if the student wants to build a website or do something in the digital environment or in any of these other spaces, they may struggle, you know, to really help them in a good way. Because we all know if we struggle in subjects at high school, we’re often put off them and focus on other areas. So it’d be a shame if we’re losing potential talent just through that.

Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. So who are some people doing good things in this space, what’s being done by the various sides. I’ve got a couple of examples but I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Simon:  When you say people, do you mean institutions or…

Hawk: The examples I’ve got down here are Mike Montiero in the States with his “Design is  job” and “Dear design student”. Phil Cleaver from Pentagram “Things they don’t teach you in design school”. Julia Debari from our own community (I used that word!) has shared a link as well too a a slack channel that’s currently challenging these ideas. I wondered if you had some other examples of people that are doing good things, or examples that we could follow.

Simon: No, is the short answer. I mean, Mike Monteiro, yeah genius of course. Really interesting. And lovely that he commits his time and energy is to create an all the videos that he does, and the other stuff that he puts out. Thought provoking. A lot of it to be honest, we probably know about and probably instinctively understand, but as is often the case in these instances good to be reminded and to hear someone articulating what we’re thinking. And same with Phil Cleaver’s book. That was published a few years ago, and again, just reminding us. So the reason I’m saying no, which was my short answer, is that as we said at the beginning, none of these people, as far as I’m aware, and if there’s someone listening or watching now, it’d be a thrilled to, to learn more about it. That is actually doing stuff that’s helping support the teachers. There are a lot of people talking about issues, and what’s missing, what’s not missing, strengths and weaknesses, but it’s the ‘doing’ part that I’m now interested in — in this idea of building a community base, coming from us, as an industry you’re in. And I think that’s the missing part. So, as I said when we started, I don’t actually know anybody who is doing that ‘doing’.

Hawk: Right. And that’s what you’re doing at Industryfish?

Simon: That’s absolutely our intention, yes. And we have started, albeit gently so far, and slowly, but we’ve certainly started. And the conversations that we’ve had with our industry connections, I mean completely unsurprising from our perspective, but they’ve all been saying “Yes, great idea. Of course”, and being very supportive.

Hawk: It would be interesting to hear some of your business strategies because I imagine that there are people listening now, and people that will listen to this recording in the future, that just go “Hell, you know, I one-hundred percent agree with Simon, this is an issue. But you know, what can we do? What can I do? What does an initiative look like?” Because there’ll be people— and obviously our audience is not just Australian based, I’m not Australian myself—so, what kinds of things can other people do?

Simon: Well, I think the things that we’re talking about now. Work out how big a chunk people are prepared to bite off, and then go for it. So for example, if you have a local art school or a local high school or your students are going into high school and if you’re a practicing creative/UX/graphic designer/it doesn’t really matter. Engage with the teachers certainly and just offer support and just find out what keeps them awake at night. That’s a cliche question, if there’s anything. But also if they can, try and talk to the students. The way that I’ve approached doing that. I mean, when I was Head of School it was easy, I would just pull my weight around and talk to the students. But now, you have to go through the teachers of course. But it’s to say to the teachers that you would love to talk to the students about what their hopes and fears ar, what their expectations are, get a good understanding of how they’re thinking and feeling about what they’re doing, and that whatever comes out of that, you’re comfortable sharing with the teachers, so that they can kind of improve what the school or college is trying to do. So that hopefully then becomes non-threatening for the teacher.

Hawk: Right, yeah. That would be an important approach as well because people would come out reasonably defensive if you went in with the strategy of “Hey, you guys are creating this issue for us”. Yeah.

Simon: It’s not always going to be an easy path to tread. But driving us forward is the fact that we want better graduate outcomes. So this is a completely non-political, and if we can talk to the teacher enough for them to understand that this is absolutely apolitical, then hopefully they’ll relax and become part of that same community.

Hawk: Yeah.

Simon: And we as an industry can ask the questions to the students that the teacher frankly can’t, because the students… if a teacher asked students questions, the students—as we all would when we were students too— will want to tell the teachers to a large extent what they think the teachers want to hear, not what they’re actually really thinking. So we have to do it. The teachers can’t possibly do it to the same degree of success or integrity of depth that we can as an industry.

Hawk: Yeah. Good, I’ve got a great question again from Julia Debari (Julia is a member of our UX Mastery community, as I also mentioned, and she has a lot of experience with, with all the different design options that are out there,especially around online learning, and we’re talking about after high school) and she’s asking because of the wide range of options, what are your thoughts on licensing designers on some kind of regulation or some kind of, well, yeah, licencing is the right word really.

Simon: Hi Julia, first of all. Licensing in the context of this? I’m not sure I’ve understood the question.

Hawk: I’m assuming, Julia correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m assuming that she’s talking about creating some kind of overarching qualification indicator, is that right?

Julia: Correct. Just like architecture or something like that.

Simon: Okay. So getting into the area of things like accreditation and stuff, Julia?

Julia: Yeah. Or just a licensed or body, like you have for architecture and you have to take continuing education credits to keep your license, things like that.

Simon: It’s a contentious issue, Julia. I have been the national president for the Australian Graphic Design Association – it was a little while ago, but I was two and a half years, and the state president for New South Wales, and it used to come up quite often at that level, too within AGDA. The DIA (Design Institute of Austraia) I know I do something as well, which is sort of similar to what the architects are doing. I personally think it’s a good idea, because, if nothing else, it speaks to the idea of currency in practice, but there are a lot of people who worry about it. It’s absolutely essential in architecture because if a building falls down people are going to die. It’s unlikely we’re going to kill anybody, although not impossible I suppose. It’s a complex issue, but in principle I think it’s a great idea. But if it were to move forward,I think education (and supporting education, as you would have understood by now because that’s my agenda) must be part of it. So I don’t want to use the expression of “giving back”, but it’s that principle of being involved in where we’ve come from to help shape where we’re going to I think is really important one.

Hawk: Great. Does that answer that for you Julia?

Julia: Yeah, I just wanted an opinion. I know it’s a very divisive topic.

Simon: Well, my opinion, Julia, is absolutely. But it has to be done thoughtfully and it has to be done for actually the right reasons. But yes, I personally do. As I’ve said there’ll be a lot of people wouldn’t agree with me.

Hawk: I do, for the record!

Simon:  The other one that I always have difficulty with is this whole notion of work experience. We’re getting off topic a bit perhaps.

Hawk: Let’s do it. It’s important, yeah.

Simon: I’m so not a fan of students having to do work experience. And again, a lot of people don’t agree with me, including a lot of students and, interestingly, a lot of their parents. I understand the notion that going into the studio for two weeks or two months or anything in between, might give you some insights into what’s going on in the industry and for those students are really heading out to do it, then fair enough, try and organize it. But as far as I know, 98% of the time it’s unpaid. That’s controversial. But also I think equally 98% of the time it’s probably a complete waste of time because you’re never going to become a long term member of that environment you’re in. The people in that environment and know that, so they’re never going to take all that seriously. They’re going to like you if you’re a nice person, they’re going to enjoy having you there. They’re going to love the coffees you go and get for them. But the actual learnings, I think, are probably fairly marginal. And if you do work on any projects which hopefully along the students would, these are not projects they’re going to really be necessarily very helpful for you as a portfolio piece because when you finally get a job somewhere else, these are not projects they are going to want you to work on. So I think it comes with some very mixed blessings from the professional point of view. And a lot of downsides in terms of your time. So if you’re gonna spend two weeks or two months, I think there’s an awful lot that a student can do that would be more productive, more valuable and more educational more inspiring than just sitting in someone’s studio and not getting paid for it.

Hawk: I’d love to hear to hear what some of those things might be. I’m curious. Speaking to the work experience, I agree with you. especially around the unpaid aspect. But I also think that there is a big part, uh, to work experience, which is kind of taking away the, the pipe dream. I’m going to be an architect, I’m going to be a designer, I’m going to be this or that and hey, this is what it actually looks like to do a week in the life of this job. You’re not going to change the world next week. You’re going to do a lot of little shitty things. And so I think that that aesthetic of it can add some value, but I’m more interested in hearing your ideas around what would be a better way to utilize that time for our students.

Simon: Well, first off, there’s something thats a bit glib. Use that time to be a better student. Work harder, work on your student projects in more depth with more integrity, with more vigor,  rework (if you have the time) projects that you’re working on, just focus on the quality. Just be the best you can be. You’re never going to be a student again. You never going to have these opportunities again, so absolutely max them out. But probably more usefully in the context of what you’re asking about, Hawk, is for schools to think about—and I mean high school and tertiary schools—to think about a better way of insisting that their students (if that’s what they want to do) have a work experience environment. So that might be, organizing a period. It could be a month, that could be two or three months. Once the students have graduated, it could either be free or a small bolt-on program that students can then do on their way into the industry once they finished the period. I think thought through properly that has a lot of merits, because the students can stop then thinking about being a student and start focusing on their future. But within the learning environment, within a two or three or four or five years context in high school, I’m really not convinced it has a great deal of value. I’m really not. I mean, go on trips to see studios, listen to all the industry people who are coming in and listen to their stories. But do you need to go into an expensivly fitted out, open-plan office and see rows of computers to really know whether you want to be a designer or not? I need some convincing.

Hawk: That’s fair. That’s very fair. It segways nicely into another question I’ve got here actually. That goes back to just speaking to my point before about there being a very big difference between being a school kid with, with a perception of, of what a career and design looks like. and the reality. So how can we teach design graduates and understanding of the more holistic side of “design as a business”? I guess is the best way to put it.

Simon:  That obviously has to start within tertiary level education. It absolutely has to. A big challenge I understand for a lot of curriculum content writers because they’ve got all this other academic stuff that they just have to get over the line to keep their accreditation. And of course in the university space, accreditation means spending. So this is politically and strategically and financially fraught, but that’s what we have to do. So do we have to go to the, accrediting authorities? Probably. And talk to them as well? That would apply to every country in the world, I would think. So yeah, bringing much more focus on all the aspects of design that we have already talked about a little bit this morning, about design being a business, absolutely being a business, and that it’s not really that we create lovely things (or hopefully lovely thing all the way through), but it’s commercial enterprise and to understand what that means and the responsibilities that brings both in terms of running a business, but in terms of what you’re designing for your audience, it’s imperative. And most design schools tend not to focus on that nearly enough. And I think a lot of those would argue that, you know, that something that students will need to learn once they graduate and that they’re trying to teach students to be the best designers they can be. But that’s a slightly shallow promise because being one of the best designers means having a bit of an understanding about business, about the commercial pragmatics of being in a business. The one we all know about the student who joins the studio but then spends way, way, way too long trying to do something. Because they’ve had 12 weeks experience at university and college to do that logo. No one’s ever told them we’re going to do it in two days. And then stand up and present it up to four or five times. And it’s a shocking experience still now. I believe that in 2019 know this is kind of, this is old school stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

Hawk: From Julia: “I live in San Francisco, California,” (and this is a problem, believe me, that extends well, well beyond the boundaries of California) “and no one will hire you without examples of real work”. So coming back to that portfolio, but not a contrived portfolio, a portfolio of stuff that you’ve done. And for Julia, that’s even university graduates. So how as an industry, can we be proactive and break that cycle of ‘we’re not giving you a job because you’ve got no experience’, and ‘we’re not giving you a experience because you won’t give me a job’. How do you think that we can help to combat that?

Simon: Julie if you’re still listening. Thank you again cause that’s such a good a question.

Julia: Yeah. Sorry. I live in a bubble.

Simon: A big bible, if you’re asking questions of this calibre, it’s fine. I’m impressed. Again, for fear of sounding like a stuck record, I think we as a community should go into certainly tertiary level in terms of portfolios, perhaps the high school level as well. And help students create opportunities to do live projects. It can’t be that hard in, it can be projects that we worked on and that will support the teachers as well. So again, it takes some managing, but we all have loads of work experience, loads of projects, loads of briefs that we can do that we can help students with. And as part of that also helps students understand what type of work they want to do. I think it could be really valuable pathway, certainly very supportive for those teachers, in theory and in practice I would hope, very supportive for students. So let’s us in industry, just get in there and really, really help these kids. Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m calling you kids. I don’t want to sound patronizing. Students.

Hawk: Nice! I’ve personally got no problem with being called kid. But that’s really helpful, and that’s the same kind of advice that we try and give here at Ux Mastery as well – go in and offer to do some pro bono work, go in and talk to your local school, your local museum, or hand off that project that you don’t have time to do yourselves to a student that’s got some time to run with it. And there was so many opportunities out there to do the work. I often hear pushback from people that don’t want to go and approach organizations, but you’ve kind of got to. Cause that’s, that’s also a big part of being an employee. You’re going to have to start learning to do that kind of stuff at some point. It’s not all about designing. So yeah, I encourage everybody to do what they can to find real world examples.

Simon: And actually a fairly easy, or an easier, way to start with that too, Julia, and to you, Hawk, is charities. They love creative and they, they haven’t got the big budgets to pay for creative. So any support you can get from them and they often will support it. And it’s often a very pleasant experience. I’ve done this a few times for students, for charities and not for profits because the people who run these are fairly illiterate in terms of design, probably, just because that’s not their background. So they usually learn from the process and, and as a result, really enjoy the process, which is really uplifting for the students too, in a way. A classic that’s coming to mind, I’ve done a few, was for the Tram Museum here in Sydney and these lovely old codgers—trams, so men, unfortunately there were not very many women I met, but that’s the way it is—they were just the fact that students would even want to spend some time thinking about doing some design work for the Tram Museum was kind of, you know, their faces lit up. They thought it was amazing. And then when they saw the standard at work, they just… you know? These were men became boys again. It was fantastic to see. And how lovely a response is that for the students? To know that you can have that kind of effect on people. Great! It’s brilliant.

Hawk: I’ve got a question from Rick. I might have to put my own spin on this. Work experience can indeed be problematic (which we’ve already discussed, obviously) and he’s saying it’s probably better for schools to teach UX design (which is to a degree what you were saying) But he’s saying the problem is what do we learn? Do we learn art? Do we learn programming? Do we learn business? How do we encapsulate that into a valuable topic that that does take a student to somewhere valuable for the next step. I hope that is what you were asking, Rick?

Simon: Yeah, that’s a good question. Thank you. Rick as well. The answer I think I want to give is probably not going to be that useful. I think it’s going to be a bit of a pipe dream, but in a perfect world, what I would like to see us doing is going to ask the students, first of all. But then also, what areas are they interested in? And then try and support them rather than be prescriptive about, well, this is what you have to do. Are you mentioned it in the world of medicine? Or are you interested in science. I mean, I don’t know what the questions are even, but to ask the students. Because if we go in feeling prescriptive, about it, or with a particular mindset, we run the risk of the students not being engaged because they don’t particularly feel interested in what we’re talking about, or missing an opportunity. Back to the drone pilots: if we went in saying, okay, we want to teach you these skills. But this kids sitting there at the back of the class thinking, shit, I love flying drones. But if we hadn’t talked to him or asked him about that, he would have missed the opportunity with our support to become a drone pilot. Yeah, right. So I think trying to go in and with questions before we go in with answers. It’s idealistic, but I think if we can try and do that, then it’s going to be more constructive actually for everybody.

Hawk: Yeah. Great. Um, I guess along the same lines from Rick, um, we know that lots of courses focus on tools or on processes. Is that a helpful approach in your opinion? How do we know which course, which process, which set of tools, which approach is the right one for us?

Simon: Again, it’s the right question to be asking. Actually UX is not my background. I know a little bit about it, but it’s not my core skill. But I think my answer would be, irrespective of that, not to worry so much about what software or what technical skills to teach, we have to do some of that, students have to learn some of that. but it’s the  higher levels of thinking perhaps rather than the pragmatic skills. So creative thinking, design thinking, lateral thinking, different ways of approaching, how are you consult, particular communications or design issues? And again with UX almost in particular really, really work hard on the whole customer experience and the CX thing. But do it from a customer’s perspective. So from the other side of the screen, not from your side of the screen. You can learn a particular software, you know, those of those on the planet that learned QuarkXpress 100 years ago and I’m sure now are really good in InDesign. So it’s, it’s not really the technical skills you need. It’s all the other stuff. You have to work in a studio, I understand that. So you do need technical skills, but I don’t think it needs to be a priority.

Hawk: And those things are reasonably easy to learn reasonably quickly as well. Whereas some of the overarching strategies and frameworks take a lot more time and a different focus.

Simon: And these these days, I mean, I’m not so sure. I’m not so confident, I guess in the UX space, but if you’ve mastered one software or one particular piece of technology, the chances are you’re going to get onto the next one really easily and quickly, or fairly easily and quickly. It’s not gonna it’s not going to break your balls, but if you don’t understand all that other stuff then your balls are already broken.

Hawk: Yeah. It’s not a good space to be in, I’m sure. What we tend to see in our community is a lot of people asking questions about bootcamps. You know, which bootcamp is best for me? They’ve come out of high school or they’ve come out of a kind of tangentially related degree and they decided they want to get into a design role. And so they’re kind of sideswiped by these massively expensive bootcamps which pretend to be all things to all people. Do you have any thoughts about that as, as the kind of middle ground between high school and industry? Is that the right approach? I know that’s a difficult question. But that’s the one that I’m probably confronted with the most at the moment.

Simon: Of course, of course, and then making the question even more muddy, if you like, (I’m not sure if that’s quite the right expression) but some bootcamps are really good, some are rubbish. Um, and then make it even more complex is some people go to one bootcamp and and love it and others will go to the same one and get absolutely nothing from it. And will say they hated it, so you know, wow, in theory it’s a great idea. Of course it is. I think the secret to having any success is have a look at the outcomes that the bootcamp is offering, but really have a look at them. And even talk to some graduates if you can and be selfish about what you want out of it, and make sure as best you’re able, that where you’re going to end up after your boot camp, whether it’s two weeks or 12 weeks or however long it might be, that you’re going to be, you will have moved forward in a way that you’re happy with. And that represents value for money because its obviously a lot of money. It is difficult though. I know of some quite clearly where I’ve spoken to people and they’ve said one of the best things I ever did, but someone in the same class said don’t do it, they’re rubbish, quite literally polarized opinions at each end of the spectrum. So never easy.

Hawk: And I think for the audience that is listening as well. I think one of the perceived benefits these days, especially in UX  bootcamps is the portfolio of projects that you come out with. What Julia and I are seeing more and more now is that employers aren’t even looking at these graduates or these projects because, let’s be honest, they’ve all got the same project. Um, and so it’s become such a narrow size that, that it’s lost its value all together and these people are paid thousands of dollars for this waste of paper.

Simon: And I think that’s really important. If that’s one of the outcomes when you’re doing your research, walk away. Save your money I would suggest.

Hawk: Yeah. Yeah,

Simon: That sort of thing was happening at tertiary level schools, and actually still is too. How many of us had been to student exhibitions from art schools and we’ve seen where they all had to design a book cover or they all had to design a poster. You know, it’s just heartbreaking stuff.

Hawk: Yeah. Yeah. Agrees

Simon: If someone went through them, they’d never go back.

Hawk: The other challenge that we face, as designers and UX designers is a lack of mentorship and a lack of really personal guidance. And that’s one that Luke and I’ve been struggling to crack as well. In terms of how do we support our audience to find this kind of mentoriship. Our community does it to a degree, but there just seems to be a real shortage of genuine mentors. Julia’s suggestion is that more companies need to do mentoring. What are your thoughts about that?

Simon: I couldn’t agree more. But again, I thinkthat can happen if we start building a community that includes teachers. And then mentoring just automatically becomes part of it. Cause at the moment there’s no environment that allows this conversation that we’re having right now, that includes teachers. I’d be fascinated to know if there’s any design teachers in the audience today. I would guess there probably aren’t, maybe some people today had done some teaching or do some part time teaching, but um, you know, let’s, let’s really go and embrace the teaching community as our friends and as an investment in our future, which is our graduates and have these conversations. It’ll all become much easier, much, much easier. But yeah, mentoring. 100% Really, really valuable stuff.

Hawk: What we’ve been discussing so far this polarized aspects of education and of industry – really quite disparate rather than kind of the same spectrum where we are always learning. It’s not “Right. I’ve done my education and now I am a professional” Maybe we need to reconsider what that spectrum looks like, and think about education as a continuing journey through the workforce.

Simon: Exactly. I mean, as you were making that point too, I don’t know where this came from, but I was just thinking of the sports industry. The coaches and the managers (the teachers) are there all the way through. They are part of that community and are as much a part of that community as the fans are as well. I mean, they get it. We so don’t. We’ve kind of come compartmentalized, you know, when you’re in a box at high school, you’re in another box at tertiary level, and then you’re in the industry box. Crazy. Let’s get rid of those barriers.

Hawk: So what is it as an industry, that can we do to make hiring managers more open to who they hire? Kind of going back to that, I’m not going to look at bootcamp graduates because they all have the same project. So I’m not going to look at people that haven’t done this. I haven’t done that or haven’t got experience. What do you think we can do to blow that apart a little bit and, and soften those boundaries, all those barriers to entry. Hard one.

Simon: I think probably not very much. Okay. I think we have to see this as a long game and that the end game is worth it. So let’s go and invest our energies now, starting in my opinion, at the high school level, and start building up this community so that. If we started right now, in theory, in three, four years’ time as these graduates start coming through, this will be much less of an issue. I think, right now, however, and I’m tap dancing here a bit, so forgive me, but we can certainly make sure we start conversations within our existing communities. UX Mastery can talk about it more, AGDA can talk about it more, the DIA can talk about more, and Julia and all the other people in the states can talk about this more and get the conversation going. But actions always speak louder than words. So let’s get in there, let’s start gathering these people up and brining them in, you know, and, and, and making them feel like we’re joining their community too. We mustn’t be patronizing about this, we want to be as much a part of the teaching community as we want them to be a part of us.

Hawk: Nice. Again, Julia (and gosh, you’re full of all the good questions, Julia) what did you want to ask us?

Julia: Oh, you want me to say it instead of just you reading it? You’re really good at articulating what I say.

Hawk: Well I can do it if you want?

Julia: Yeah, you’re better at it than I am!

Hawk: You just want to laugh at my accent! Simon, Julia asks what your opinion is of teachers with industry experience vs academics. So she has seen teachers that have awesome experience, but aren’t particularly good at translating that into education or into teaching. What are your thoughts on that?

Simon: Dead right. I also have seen lots of seriously lovely people who are very talented creatives, scarily bad in the classroom. Not their fault. You can either relate to the students or you can’t. Actually I’ve just said the wrong thing. The students either relate to you or they don’t, it’s got nothing to do with you. Um, as we all did when we were 15 to 18, we formed opinions about who thought we can learn from and respected in a heartbeat. And that’s the way it is. And they can try and be as cool and as knowledgable and as open as they wanted but you know, you switch off. So, that’s in trial and error thing. You just have to be honest about it. I’ve had to let lots teachers go, which means I’ve let designer go who’ve said I’d love to do teaching. And it’s really tough. Many of them are friends of ours, friends of mine, but you just say, I’m sorry, but as talented and lovely as you are, it’s not working. Yeah, it’s really hard. And academics, trained teachers, yeah. Generally probably pretty good because they know how to teach, but they’re the people that need our help because then you can help them with the industry stuff. Luckily quite a lot of industry people who offer to go and teach, they get paid for it, of course, and a lot of them are, are good, and a lot of the students relate to them, and do learn a lot from them. But Julia is right. There are quite a number that don’t. So I don’t think we should put pressure on ourselves for suddenly all of us to become teachers. I think the pressure should be for all of us to help the teachers. And that includes industry practioners too, we can support them as well? No question about it. No reason why they aren’t part of the equation because they are us.

Hawk: So I’ve got a challenge, or I guess a ‘challenge’ might be the wrong way to put it, but we’ve got Moses from the chat, who is asking, “What criteria are you using to form your opinion?”

Simon: To form my opinion about forming a community?

Hawk: Maybe we’ll ask Moses for some clarification on that and I’ll pose this next question to Simon in the meantime?

Moses:  Hi Simon. It’s Moses from New Zealand. The criteria you’re using for your opinion on that teachers with industry experience versus academics. At the moment in New Zealand, the teachers are striking because they’re not getting their wages on par with the local industry. But again, that’s not the question. So what criteria do you use to form or as a basis for your opinion that you’ve just offered?

Simon: My opinion on practitioners sometimes being problematic as a teacher? Or? I just want to make sure I’ve understood your question Moses.

Moses: Well you’re sort of offering an opinion with teachers in the industry experience versus academics. So the teachers with experience, and those with just experience, how do you compare them both? The academics and the teachers with industry experience? What part you already use to make sure? Your opinion on both?

Simon: I don’t think making a straight comparison is actually that useful, Moses because they’re coming into the process with different experiences, different backgrounds and different things they can offer the students. I think teachers want to be paid a more realistic wage, and their professionalism is absolutely legitimate. There is never big money available in education as we all know. So it’s a hard one, but I think the right to ask for more respect about what’s being done as a teacher is absolutely correct. And, and I think governments the world over should acknowledge that. I think they kind of do, but meanwhile they got roads to build and hospitals to build, and bullets and stuff. So it’s, it’s a hard one. But I don’t think you can make a straight comparison. So I think the focus is probably on people who are actually teachers and less focus on industry people coming in to support what they’re trying to do.

Moses: Thank you, Simon.

Simon: Pleasure. Thank you for being part of here. Good.

Hawk: You’re welcome, Moses. And I guess along the same line, um, what we are noticing is that organizations like General Assembly are starting to approach designers sometimes in our community, sometimes outside. (Sorry, I just got excited because the sun’s come out.) What advice do you have for those people that just decide to take this offer up and therefore start to become design educators? Arguably good ones. What advice can you give them, about how they start to challenge these issues that we’re seeing. What advice would we give to people that are new teachers to kind of break down some of these barriers?The question I’ve got here says, “do you have specific advice about at least in terms of more longer term view as to how we can improve results for students?

Simon: Predictably I’m going to say let’s invest in the education industry. But I guess more immediately places like GA, almost in particular too, given that we’ve named them already. I think if you’re considering wanting to get involved in education through the process, through something like GA, be clear in your own mind about why you’re doing this, and who you’re doing it for. It’s very, this… I could end up in trouble over this… very clearly they are doing this because they are a business. It happens to be they are in the business of creative education, but it’s a business first and foremost. Anyone who’s worked with GA would know exactly what that means and what that feels like. So that aside, and you can’t blame them for that and that’s their commercial pragmatism. That’s, that’s okay. I have education running through my veins, so I had mixed feelings about how I feel about that, but I get it. I certainly understand that position. So I think, yeah, just be clear about what you’re trying to do as a teacher and exactly what it is you’re teaching. Is it just more of the same or is it something actually useful that the students can really relate to? Um, and also ask yourself as you’re putting your content together, if you were to present this to a panel of industry board members, what kind of review would they give you? Would it be one that said, okay, this is useful? Or is this one that says, okay, this might earn a few dollars, but actually I use what is in terms of the student experience. I think if you can go through that process yourself and come out the other side feeling as though you’re onto something, then have a crack at it, and then do the other thing which some teachers may do at GA. But I suspect not many do or do properly – follow up with the students and make sure he get the feedback properly from them, not from GA, about what he thought, what they got out of this. Easier said than done, but just to make sure that what you’re teaching is what they wanted.

Hawk: Cool. Well Julia is a brilliant example of somebody that’s come from industry and taken this education career pathing and I strongly agree with her. She chose that as, as a third option. Once you get to that point in your career where you’re looking at becoming a principal, when you look at becoming a manager and you look at what your next step could be, then I think that it’s a strong approach from us. If we start to encourage people to consider educators or teachers as, as a third career path and it’s probably not something that is thought of often enough. I often give advice to people who are sort of stuck at that. What should I do now? I’m intermediate, I’m senior and I kind of want to be a down a particular path. And, becoming an educator isn’t one that’s often raised, and therefore we just don’t have enough and not strong indicators. So, yeah, I encourage people to consider that as an option that is, as valuable, if not more valuable than than a manager or a team leader or a or principal of an agency.

Simon: As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons. Not doing it just because you’re afraid of freelancing or you’re running out of work, for example, The old adage is “those that can, do. And those that can’t, teach” Unfortunately still kind of exists out there a little bit. And also harder and harder these days is – and I don’t know what it’s like in the States Julia, but certainly in Australia, I don’t know what it’s like in New Zealand either. But you as a teacher, you are now required to have minimum level qualifications in a number of area if you’re teaching in a higher education, you have to have, well in theory you certainly have to have a degree and ideally you have at least a masters and not many graphic designers yet. Well it’s changing. But not many graphic designers have those levels of qualification. So that can make it more complicated. So back on my old soap box, I think yes, by all means do that if that’s what you want to do. And if you can find an environment where you can do it, but equally support the teachers and make our contribution that way. Not necessarily by standing in front of the group of students.

Hawk: Right, solid advice, right. We’ve reached the top of the hour. I guess I will ask you what key takeaway you want to leave people with. You’re not allowed to use the word ‘community’… Haha, yes you are

Simon: Actually, it’s it’s a nice challenge. I’ll try not to, I think keep this conversation going, keep thinking about what we can all do in our industries to support education. And talking, talking is always good, you know, just keep the conversations and talk to teachers, talk to students, talk to parents of students. So the more we learn now the better equipped we’ll be as we do start moving into getting engaged more with students. Um, so I think anything and everything we can do to start off – step one, learn from the students, what do they actually want rather than us telling them what we think they want to know, what do they want to know? Start there. Easier said than done. I’ve said that a few times, but um, I think that would be really useful. And then based on the level of interest we’ve had today and the amazing questions we’ve had, We’re on to something here. As an industry we’ve kind of waking up to this, this could be really, really fun and certainly really valuable. Yeah. Um, and not a difficult way for us to build our industry’s future. It’s not going to be hugely time consuming. It’s talking and working with stuff we already know about and we’re talking and working with a bunch of students who want to join us so they already love us or they’re interested in us. What’s to lose? This can only be a good experience for everybody.

Hawk: Well then thank you so much for your time today. Simon, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I encourage anyone that’s listening, or that listens in the future, then wants to continue this conversation to either jump over to our forums, community.uxmastery.com or contact us. You’ll find you’ll find Simon at industryfish.com, is it?

Simon: dot co

Hawk: industryfish.co but if there are any questions. I’m happy to field them and put them through to Simon, but otherwise, yeah, I hope to continue the conversation, and figure out how we can push through some strong ideas here. So thanks heaps Simon for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Simon: Thanks to you and Luke for the opportunity—and also, more importantly, for everyone who’s out there—thank you for giving up the time to be part of this.

Hawk: Yeah, absolutely.

Simon: I hope most of you got something out of it.

Hawk: I’m sure everyone did, and thank you very much, Julia and Moses and Rick for your awesome questions. Cool. All right. Take care. Enjoy the rest of your day everybody.

Simon: Thank you. Bye!

Hawk: See ya!

The post Transcript: Simon Pemberton – “The Best Way to Predict Our Industry’s Future is to Create It” appeared first on UX Mastery.

If we believe design school graduates must enter industry with the best possible preparation, then we as the incumbent industry practitioners have an obligation to help them.

This is an essential priority because of the rapidly evolving nature of the design industry and the careers that design students will inherit and drive forward.

The seeds of their careers are nurtured in certain directions during high school, but as an industry, we have little control over the quality of people influencing this. What we can control however, is the quality of design-based information available and the experiences our future designers have access to as they discover their interests and aptitudes.

We’re going to unpack these ideas with Simon and Marissa in our upcoming live panel discussion.

The Details

• Where: To be confirmed.
  When: 6pm Tuesday 4 June PDT or 11am Wednesday 5 June AEST (or find out what time that is for you)

Meet Simon Pemberton

Simon’s combined experience in the successful creation, development and implementation of brand identities and cultures and his experience as the Head of School at four leading design schools brings together a unique blend of creative and management skills within a successful educational environment.

He has over 30 years experience in both the design and advertising industries Simon and has won Gold and Silver awards both here and in the UK.

Simon recently published “On The Shoulders Of Giants” – a book and video documentary featuring interviews with 13 of Australia’s leading designers.

Meet Marissa Mills

Marissa is a designer driven by human relationships, curiosity and the desire to solve problems. With an outgoing personality, Marissa thrives on the connections that are created with individuals on a deeper level and believes that the best aspect of a designer’s role has always been the ability we have to create solutions that are meaningful as well as functional.

As part of the Grenadi and Tractor teams for many years, Marissa worked in collaboration with extraordinary people to create educational programs that help students learn and develop through discovery, challenge and realising their own potential.

Marissa’s passion for seeing people connect is evident at Industryfish in the way they are striving to bring people together for collaboration and shared learning from across the design sector.

Some Questions to Inspire You

1. What is the current problem with how people learn design? What are the causes?
2. How does this affect people designing products or using a human-centred approach?
3. What is the potential we should be growing in design students? What is the best design graduate capable of?

How will the session work?

We will be live streaming the session on our YouTube channel. If you’d like to ask questions of the panel during the session, use the chat feature there. If you can’t make the live session but have questions, we’d love to collect them ahead of time and ask the panel on your behalf. You can ask them in the comments below. We’ll publish the responses (along with the full transcript) in the days following the session.

The post Ask the UXperts: The best way to predict the future is to create it — Why responsibility for education in the design industry belongs to all of us appeared first on UX Mastery.

If you missed the live stream, fear not – you can watch the recording below at your leisure or read through the transcript if that is your preference.

Here is a full transcript of the session for your reading pleasure:

Hawk (host): Hello. Hello and welcome to this live panel event. My name is Hawk, and I’m really excited to be part of this session today.

Hawk (host): So one of the reasons that we’re hosting today’s session is to celebrate the upcoming launch of our latest collaborative e-book, which is called Products, Projects, and Experiences. You can’t say that too fast in a Kiwi accent. I’m joined today by three of the contributing authors – Laura Klein, Dan Szuc, and Jorge Arango. And I’m really thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with these guys. They’re really inspiring UX practitioners. And I’m excited both for my own selfish pleasure and so that I can put to them some of the questions that we’ve been collecting from our community over the recent weeks.

Hawk (host): For those of you that are watching live, please send your questions through via YouTube’s chat feature, and we’ll get through as many of those as possible in the next 60 minutes; no promises, but we’ll do what we can.

Hawk (host): Before we start, I’d like to briefly introduce today’s panel. So, Laura Klein first stumbled upon UX in 1995, and she fell in love. She’s forged a successful career in Silicon Valley, and these days she coaches product teams that want to get better at UX. Laura is the author of UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products, and you can follow her on Twitter @LauraKlein.

Hawk (host): Dan Szuc’s been involved in the UX field in Hong Kong for over 20 years, and as well as being a published author, Dan’s co-founder of UX consultancy Apogee, of UX Hong Kong, and of his current passion, Make Meaningful Work. And you can follow Dan on Twitter @dszuc.

Hawk (host): Jorge Arango is best known for designing systems that can [inaudible 00:01:37] people with knowledge. He has been involved in the field for the past 25 years, and these days he splits his time between his design consultancy practice, lecturing, writing, and speaking. And you can find out more about Jorge and his work at jarango.com.

Hawk (host): For any more information about our speakers or the panel today, make sure you visit our blog, uxmastery.com. There’s lots of information there in really brief, so that we can get to our questions.

Hawk (host): So welcome, panel. Welcome so much, guys. Thank you for joining me today.

Jorge Arango: Thank you for having us.

Hawk (host): And for those of you watching us, the reason we’ve chosen these three guests – aside from the fact that they are featured in our book – is that they all have really well-established and enviable careers, which have brought them not only success but real satisfaction. And today we’re going to dig into some practical ways that we can begin to shape our own careers and explore our own vocations more deeply.

Hawk (host): So that’s probably enough from me. We can jump straight into the first question, and that first question I am going to put to you, Dan. Let me find my questions. My first question: So most workplaces today are still very much geared towards driving efficiency, productivity, and growth. As a result, people often feel that work is wasteful, busy, stressful, or purposeless. What would happen if we changed our mindset and allowed ourselves to choose projects that are both energizing and empowering?

Daniel Szuc: Ah, well. Thank you. Thank you for the question and thanks for having me today. So, I guess if we zoom out a little and we were to look at work as an environment, and I realize that sometimes people use culture to describe environments. So, we tend to use the term environment, where culture can be described as an instance of environment, and then we start from the point of, well what do we actually want our environment to be at work? So that’s in … It’s actually inferred in the question. Well, it’s not inferred; it’s very explicit in the question of how can we make meaningful work, where work is actually happening within an environment.

Daniel Szuc: If we were to split environment – for the sake of today – into two halves, one half is what we call the explicit half within the environment, and that’s where we often see the work at play, which tends to be our transactional; it’s things that are to do with the day-to-day delivery of the work, and that’s having an impact on people. And the language that we use in that first half of work in reference to delivery, is also having an impact on people. And it tends to be – to speak in more general terms – it tends to be driven by, still very driven by a significant amount of Industrial Age ways of working. Terms like … Some of the terms we’re even fond of – agility and speed and velocity and productivity. This is … These are happening in the first half of what we call the transactional and delivery.

Daniel Szuc: There’s actually a second half to the environment, and that’s what we call … It goes by different names, but we could call it almost the healing part, or the healthier part, perhaps, of work, which tends to be the more implicit part, and the part that’s not made explicit enough. And that part is where practices exist and practices are often hidden from view. And so, what happens in this second half of work, is we’re trying to be more explicit about what we call the learning mode, the learning or the reflection mode. Now this is different to what would be described in Agile as retrospectives. This is really creating a larger portion of time at work for explicit learning and explicit reflection to happen, whereby you can capture practices through what we call practice spotting, so that people have the time not only to be doing the day-to-day production of the work, but also equally would be doing the learning and reflection to determine, in fact, if they’re doing the first half very well as connected to the second half.

Daniel Szuc: And so I’ll finish the probing at that question with mindset, and what it actually implies in everything that I’ve said within the environment is we have to … It’s in … We encourage people to think about the attitude as related to mindset that you’re bringing to the environment. And what that means is, instead of – which happens a lot at work – instead of reacting to the environment, you’re able to hold onto specific practices to have a very specific attitude, to have more intention in the work that you’re doing. It’s not only to do with the delivery and transactional part, but equally to do with the learning and the nurturing and the healthier aspects of what we’re trying to do with Make Meaningful Work.

Hawk (host): Awesome. I’m interested, Laura … Thank you, Dan. I’m interested, Laura or Jorge, in your thoughts, especially around thinking about our audience. And I’ve spent a lot of time with Dan, talking through these things, and have a really good idea of what he’s referring to, but for beginners or for young or inexperienced UXers, how can we put ourselves in the position where we are able to get into this mindset, or even have the opportunity to be picky about the kinds of projects that we do choose. Does anyone have thoughts there?

Laura Klein: Oh, go ahead Jorge.

Jorge Arango: No, go ahead, please.

Laura Klein: Oh, I was gonna say Dan has clearly thought about this far more than I have, so this is … That was a great answer, Dan.

Laura Klein: Here’s my take on it, which I think is a little bit … maybe less well thought out. I … Look … I think, Hawk, you hit on it. When you’re new at this or when you’re maybe a more junior person just getting into it, sometimes you gotta do stuff that’s not super exciting, and sometimes that stuff’s just gotta get done, and sometimes the things that even I, who’s more senior – I’ve been doing this for a long time – I still have to do stuff that sucks, and that’s why they pay me to show up, right? It’s work. That’s why it’s work and not hobbies.

Laura Klein: That said, the times that I find myself and that I’ve seen people really get burned out, or the times that I’ve seen people really feel disconnect, were the times that people didn’t get the why of what they were doing, and they didn’t understand what the outcome was supposed to be and … or they did and they didn’t care. I, for a long time, had a rule that I won’t work any place where my coworkers seemed to hate their users. And this is a thing; I’ve definitely worked at places that were … what I would call user-hostile. And I mean, I’ve seen teams like that and they just seem to be in this antagonistic relationship with their users, and you get into this point where you don’t wanna help these people, and it becomes really, “Oh, these people. They’re always asking for stuff and I don’t want to be there.”

Laura Klein: So, if you care about the people you are helping and if you truly feel like you’re helping people and you truly understand how what you’re doing fits into the greater scheme of things, I think, hopefully, you will have a greater tolerance for maybe some of the things that you do that maybe aren’t that exciting or aren’t really learning opportunities, or maybe just there was something that had to get done and it wasn’t that great. I mean, God knows I’ve done my share of data entry because it had to get done and I was available.

Hawk (host): Yeah, very fair, very fair points. Jorge, did you have anything to add?

Jorge Arango: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s implicit in this question is that you have some degree of agency in choosing the products that you’re working on, which, for someone who is just starting out, that may not be the case. And I would say, think about what you can do to create the conditions necessary for you to be able to have a greater degree of agency over the work that you’re doing, right? So that then you can make sure that the work is aligned with your why, right? So it’s … Have a clear hierarchy of values, which I think everyone has to some degree – a clear hierarchy of values; they just don’t … perhaps they’ve acquired them accidentally and haven’t thought about them very clearly, right? And I don’t think you can expect that at the beginning of someone’s career; you’re going to be able to choose exactly the sort of work that you want to be working on. But you can set things up in such a way that you gain a little bit more agency over time over that sort of decision, so that you can have greater alignment.

Hawk (host): Yeah, awesome. And I guess coming full circle back to what Dan was saying, it’s just about that mindfulness, yeah? It’s about whether or not you can currently make those changes because of the position that you’re in. If you’re constantly mindful of it, then you will come to a place where you potentially you can put those things into place.

Jorge Arango: Yeah, and knowing what the role is for someone who is just getting started. My background is in architecture, as in the design of buildings, and that’s a field that, over the past 100 years or so, it has developed as an academic discipline that you can go to university and learn. But the traditional way of learning design disciplines like architecture was by being an apprentice to a master, right? And folks who were entering the field knew that they were coming in to work on stuff that might be more detailed or might … perhaps less grandiose than the sort of things that the masters were working on. But they were there, in part, to learn and to become masters themselves, right? And there was this understanding that that would happen over time.

Daniel Szuc: Yeah, I think it also implies that there’s … I think about when – I’m not from an architecture background, so I apologize for the crudeness of this reflection – but when I think about, I think about buildings, I think about the infrastructure of the building, the scaffolding. It’s interesting in Hong Kong. People who visit Hong Kong are always in awe that they use bamboo to create scaffolding around buildings, but bamboo is actually incredibly strong, and what the scaffolding implies is that you can stand on and feel safe in standing on it.

Daniel Szuc: So I think when you think about people coming in to any career, I like this idea of scaffolding around people in the form of other people as well, that allows for them to feel that they understand and can begin to articulate that hierarchy of values, that principles, and also think about, from a maturity standpoint, where they would like to get to over time because within UX – and I am trying to say this very respectfully – I think sometimes we have a really hyper focus on what I call the tools layer and the tools and the methods layer, but there’s not always the … and there’s a lot of conferences and books and great places you can go to learn about methods, but I think sometimes what’s lacking – even amongst the more mature of us – are places where we can connect with other practitioners to allow ourselves to feel, in safe spaces, to go even deeper. And sometimes that’s counter intuitive because what it actually implies is I might very well learn more from someone that’s come from an architecture background than I might from someone that’s within UX.

Hawk (host): Yeah, nice. I see ways that I also studied architecture, and we’ve got a comment from the community, from someone else, from [Louis 00:14:38], who also studied architecture, and says that there are lots of similar principles, especially to do with ideation.

Hawk (host): But another interesting comment, from [Matthew Oliphant 00:14:50], going back to having those choices about the projects that we all take, and he says ideally we’d find a way to offer that option to people that are new, rather than just say, “Hey, too bad, that’s how it is.” And yeah, I agree. Yeah, follow that by systems don’t change if we don’t allow that. Very true.

Hawk (host): So, I might throw another question out there now. Maybe this one for you, Laura. So our personal solutions are usually driven by our own strengths, weaknesses, and goals. How can we explore these aspects of our personalities and of ourselves, and make career and vocation choices that drive us towards the success that is gonna be the best fit for the person that we are?

Laura Klein: Yeah, this is … that’s a really good question. I have done a bunch of work with mid career switchers – people who are switching into UX from other things. And one of the things that’s been extremely successful for some of them, is focusing on the skills that they’re bringing into UX from other things – even not necessarily even design-related things. I worked with a woman who wanted to do research and she had been a scientist and she wanted to do more user research, and … so she ended up doing a bunch of user research for scientists, and it was incredibly helpful because she sort of knew how it worked.

Laura Klein: So, sometimes I think that part of it is just understanding that you have skills that might not be what you think of as UX skills or product skills or whatever. You have skills that you bring to this and then, also to recognize the difference between things that you’re really good at doing and maybe things that you’ve been praised for doing. That’s just kind of a … an interesting thing that like … Things that you’re actually good at, that you enjoying doing, you have to really find that Venn diagram of here is something that I actually enjoy doing all the time and that I do well, and also that people will pay me to do, and focusing on those.

Laura Klein: I find that most people have so many skills and so many things that they are good at – that they might not even know that they’re good at – , so part of it is trying to recognize what you can do and accepting that and just be like, “Yeah, now I’m a badass at that.” So, figuring those things out and putting them together and finding the right place for you to do all the things that you’re good at. I don’t worry too much about weaknesses. Just … I focus on, oh, that’s the thing that I’m good at and that I like doing; I’m going to do more of that. And I’ll get better at some of the stuff that I’m not very good at, if I have to. But that’s harder. Sometimes that’s fun, but sometimes it’s fun just to focus on the thing that you’re really good at and get really, really good at it. Other people really like the challenge of getting better at the things they have to overcome, but it seems way too hard for me. Too much work.

Hawk (host): Dan and Jorge, have you guys got an opinion?

Daniel Szuc: Well … Oh, Jorge, did you want to go first?

Jorge Arango: Well, yeah, very briefly. And another alternative is if you are clear on what your weaknesses are, surround yourself with people who are complementary to you, right? That’s one way to overcome it.

Jorge Arango: I just want to stress, again, something that is implicit in the question is self-awareness, right? And taking the time out to do the work of introspection and really kind of honestly taking a look at what you enjoy doing and don’t enjoy doing, and the things that allow you to fall into conditions of flow, right? Where you’re just kind of in the moment and lean into those somehow, right? That’s not gonna happen if you don’t take the time out to really think about … step outside of the day to day and think about what brings you joy and what is more challenging.

Daniel Szuc: Yeah, I think related, we have something in the Make Meaningful Work story, which is called a learning portfolio. Now, we’re not using the word portfolio in the UX portfolio, design portfolio sense of the word. We’re actually using the word portfolio more in reference to like an investment portfolio, where you’re investing in yourself. And so, it’s really simple. It’s got two columns. One column says “What can I learn?” And it’s got another column that says “What can I teach?” And both of those have their challenges for people, but it’s very practical and it’s saying, “I’m keeping a track on where I feel I have some gaps in my learning, and I am also keeping a track on what I can teach.” And the way we think about teaching, sometimes teaching is thought of a frame to be, well, I have to be an expert to teach it. The way we’re using it is, just try something, try and teach something, try and write an article on something, get your voice out there because when we talk about the second half that I spoke about in environment, it’s all practice anyway. It’s continuous practice.

Daniel Szuc: So that’s part of how I think about improving daily, and I also think about it in reference to where I have those deficiencies, but not in an overly negative way, rather in a more opportunistic, positive way to say, “Well, what can I continue to learn?” Because the learning never stops. It just never stops.

Hawk (host): Yeah, I love that, and I like the whole what can I teach concept, especially I’ve found that to be one of the tools that I personally use for combating impostor syndrome, which I know that some of our community has mentioned because I’ve learnt that in teaching myself, I’m going down this track about the things I specifically think I’m trying to teach, but then somebody else takes from what I’ve told them something really quite different that meant something for them, and that’s empowering and that gives me confidence and makes me go, “Hey, hang on a minute. There is something here that I have got to offer for other people.” And that’s confidence-building, and I think that’s a lot of the thing that’s missing, especially for young UXers starting out.

Hawk (host): And speaking of that impostor syndrome I’ll just read out [Nothrop’s 00:21:48] thoughts, which are about the master and apprentice relationship, and how lacking that formal structure can sometimes contribute to the prevalence of impostor syndrome. And I also note that I’m assuming [Marc 00:22:01] is from Australia or New Zealand because he spells impostor syndrome with an e, as I do; it’s actually spelled with an o, I found out yesterday.

Hawk (host): And he also says a really interesting thing, “What about the journeyman notion, the notion of traveling and learning from multiple masters and from multiple cultures?” And I think that that’s something that’s very easy to forget as well, when we’re doing our own thing in our own bubble.

Daniel Szuc: Through.

Hawk (host): Go.

Daniel Szuc: Through … Was that from [Marc 00:22:31]? About the journeyman?

Hawk (host): Yes, indeed.

Daniel Szuc: Yeah, I think that is a really, very astute – and by the way, hi, [Marc 00:22:39], and hi, [Matthew 00:22:40] – that’s a very astute reflection. I have lived really two lives. One, I grew up in Australia. I grew up within a Aussie community within Australia and a Jewish community within Australia. I grew up with a whole range of nationalities at university and at school.

Daniel Szuc: But when I came to Hong Kong, for the last 21 years, naturally I am immersed in completely different cultures and predominantly Asian cultures, and my wife and business partner, Josephine, is Chinese, and she was born in mainland China and she moved to Hong Kong when she was little. I listen to Cantonese most of my days, and so I think what [Marc’s 00:23:27] touching on there is very important in reference to multiple perspectives. I think it’s really easy, especially as we get older, to be locked in to these really fixed views about things. And we get sucked into our local vortex, where we sometimes can’t put our head above water to breathe and see other perspectives.

Daniel Szuc: So, in reference to learning – junior, mid, or senior – being able to have people around you who can give you multiple perspectives and challenge you to think in different ways, it’s a very, very astute reflection and one that I fully support and embody.

Hawk (host): Right, should we move on to the next question? I’m going to put this one to you, Jorge. It can be difficult to translate important philosophical decisions and beliefs into practical outcomes. How can we ensure that our career is moving in a direction that satisfies both our emotional, spiritual, as well as professional needs?

Jorge Arango: So I think that we’ve already touched on this to a degree, right? Like this idea that you have to be clear on your why. And I was part of a team a couple of years ago where we would periodically take time out from our work to kind of work on the work itself, like work on our ability to do the work. And that included asking the question, “What are we in service to here?” And I think that that is an incredibly powerful question to ask, right?

Jorge Arango: I think that the word philosophy is a word that makes people anxious because they associate it perhaps with academic philosophy. They think, “Oh my gosh. Are we gonna be talking Nietzsche or Heidegger or any of these things?” But really, I think of philosophy as living a considered life, right? What is the life that you want to live? And if you have not thought about that and you haven’t consciously set out to align the life you’re actually living with the life that you would like to be living, you’re going to live a life that is not guided by you, but somehow kind of riding along by … on circumstances, right?

Jorge Arango: So, again, I think that this notion of taking time out from the day-to-day, the daily grind, and doing the work of really sitting with these questions and clarifying what your values are. I actually – pardon me – I have a book I pulled out from my library that was actually really helpful to me, called The Highest Goal by Michael Ray; I think he teaches at Stanford, or he used to teach at Stanford. And it’s a book about … He offers a process for you to sit with your values and just clarify what they’re about, and I think that that’s something that everyone – not just in UX design but everyone – should do.

Hawk (host): Yeah, I agree, and I think that we need to be encouraging our team members and other people that come in to the industry to take that time and to stop worrying too much about overperforming and making sure that everything that they do is visible and everything they do is contributing to … every second of their day is contributing to the project at the detriment of mental health and of satisfaction and of general well-being of your organization.

Jorge Arango: Yeah, just add to that. So, the exercise is the following, and I think that this came up in Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, right? Do the mental exercise of imagining yourself in your deathbed – as morbid as that sounds, right? And think it’s like, “Am I … Did I live a life that I’m satisfied with?” And folks who work in palliative care and who work with folks who are kind of at the end of their life, report that that’s like the number one thing that comes up for those people. It’s like the ones that have regrets are … they’re not regrets about not making enough money or whatever; it’s regrets about not having lived the life that you really wanted to live. And you can’t do it at the end; you have to do it while it’s happening.

Hawk (host): Yeah, I agree. Laura, Dan, do you have a comment? No?

Laura Klein: That was great. I agree with Jorge.

Hawk (host): Well, a question has come through along these lines, so I’ll jump into that before we move on, and it’s how do we encourage sitting with these uncomfortable or challenging notions, especially in environments – sorry, [Louis 00:28:35], [Louis 00:28:35] is replying to me as I read – especially in environments when we’re having to explain the basic value of our work, let alone the nuances? So I guess a little bit of what I literally just said: that we do need to encourage this kind of thinking and stopping to take a breath, but how do you think we can encourage that? How can we make that part of our daily routine for our team members or for our colleagues?

Daniel Szuc: Well, we have a tool – we’ve only got one tool currently – but it’s a tool that we’ve put a lot of years of thought into and arrived at it, called practice spotting. And [Jo 00:29:17] and myself are predominantly researchers at heart, so it’s very much a tool that you can imagine it like a key. It’s a key that you insert into really any environment, and you can also use it on yourself and with other people. And what it’s there to do is to help you observe and listen with intent about the environment to determine if that environment is indeed a fit for you.

Daniel Szuc: And so I think that is something that everybody can continue to practice because not all environments are right for us and it’s not a matter of being overly negative about the environments that are not right for us, it’s knowing which environments are conducive to us growing in healthy ways and which are not. But being explicit with the practice spotting tool to insert that in and to be able to arrive at those practices within the environment, people within the environment, conditions within that environment, values as Jorge has been talking about that are right or not right for you, also begins to … perhaps with intention begin to define or design your own philosophy. And I agree with Jorge: I don’t think we should steer away from philosophy as he said because it’s seen as academic, it doesn’t need to be seen that way; it can actually be an incredibly practical driver in the way that we work and we live.

Hawk (host): Yeah. Awesome. Agreed. Okay, I’m going to rein it back from the philosophical and to something significantly more practical. I’m gonna throw it at … Who am I gonna throw it at? I’m gonna throw at you, Laura. Did you ever have a time in your career, which we know you did because you told us before, when you became bored or disillusioned with your work? And when it happened, what did you do to rekindle your excitement?

Laura Klein: Oh my god. So, you have to understand that when I say that I started with UX back in the mid 90s, what I mean is I started doing some research back then. Since then I have been an engineer, I have taught UX, I have written books, I’ve given talks, I’ve taken time off to work on my own stuff. I get bored I would say every couple of years. It’s not so much like, “Do you get bored?” It’s like, “Do you … Are you ever not distracted by something shiny?” The answer is yeah. I mean … I very … I know that I am the kind of person who needs to be in an environment, where there is a lot of stuff going on and there are many different things that I can do and be involved with, even like day-to-day, I do much better if I’ve got a … Yes, it’s great if I can get them to flow to work on a specific design, but even at this point, where I actually am the head of product at a company, I still occasionally will just do design work for four or five hours because I love that, and also sometimes I’ll do prototyping, and also I’m teaching a class in May, and I just really have to do a kind of a whole bunch of things, or I get very distracted.

Laura Klein: So here’s the thing: that’s not gonna work for everybody – in fact, it’s not gonna work for most people who have what we like to call an attention span. So, if you are that kind of person, you need to figure out what keeps your interest. I think part of it, though, for me, was realizing that not beating myself up over it because I would do this thing where I would kind of skip around and, I mean, if you … I am the very traditional sort of job hopper when you look at my customer; it’s kind of all over the place. And you know what? Honestly, it’s weird. I think I might have done better had I actually been able to focus on any one given thing, but I don’t think I would have lived the life I wanted to.

Laura Klein: So, figure out what you’re like. Live the life you want to live. Don’t beat yourself up over it if you’re not doing this sort of … Oh, and then I went and I did this, and then I went and I got my MBA, and then I went I … Whatever. Or if that is the kind of person you are, great. Do that. But recognize what it is that you love, and when you get distracted and be okay with switching to something else.

Hawk (host): Awesome. Yeah. [inaudible 00:34:11] I just want to jump in. I’ll ask you others as well the same question, but I just wanted to mention – I should have, before I asked the second question – Dan, the tool that you were talking about before, if anyone wants more information on that, I’ll make sure that’s included in the transcript, which we’ll post up of this session afterwards.

Hawk (host): So yeah … So Jorge or Dan, do you have a response? How do you manage disillusionment or boredom in your career? How do you kind of convert into something that’s stimulating?

Jorge Arango: Yeah. So I can’t say that I am ever really bored or disillusioned, which I guess would make this a good answer for the question, which it … because I think I’ve discovered a way of beating that demon, [crosstalk 00:34:57] and it has to do … Yeah, I gotta boast about something, right? And the approach is – I think this is gonna sound a little Yoda of me, but – be open to serendipity, right? And what I mean by that is especially people whose job it is to design, which is to make the future tangible, we can have a tendency to overspecify our own future, and I think that if you are open to accidents, intrusions into your perfect little plan, you might be led down paths that might be very interesting.

Jorge Arango: I’ll give you a small example: Just today I finished reading a very long book on the history of the Reformation in Europe; that is something that is kind of way outside my professional area of concern. I spent way more time reading this book than I should have, given how busy I am and how many other things I have to read. But I am coming out of that experience full of interesting, I think, ideas of how our time kind of mirrors that time and how some of the changes that those folks were going through can inform our own time. And I feel a little reenergized after that, right? So … And that came to me completely accidentally; I wasn’t looking to read a book on that subject. So just being open to serendipity, I think can be helpful in this regard.

Hawk (host): Awesome. Mr Szuc, have you got anything to add? Have you ever been bored or disillusioned in your life?

Daniel Szuc: I was just thinking that bored and disillusioned would be a great name for a stand-up comedy team. Good evening, I’m bored and I’m disillusioned, and thanks for joining tonight. I … Living in … Having lived in two … what might appear to be two very different cultures – and I’m oversimplifying like a sort of a Western way of thinking and an Eastern way of thinking. Wwhat I’ve learned in working and living in Asia is, I find, especially amongst Chinese, I find they tend to, at times, think in what I call multiples. And so the idea of multiples is, they don’t necessarily always think of a linear way of this or it’s that, or it’s a or it’s b, or it’s black or it’s white. So boredom feels like one extreme, but I very rarely hear people say that they’re bored. I hear kids say that they’re bored sometimes. I hear adults say more – and I think sadly – that they’re busy. And I think we’ve all been caught up with busyness and distraction.

Daniel Szuc: So, I remember growing up in the 70s in Australia, before gaming machines and mobile phones, and I remember lying on my bed and spending hours just staring at the ceiling, thinking about stuff, and that was fine. So I think my practical answer would be, find the moments to not be thinking deliberately, not be thinking about anything, as a practice and use those moments, the … use the serendipity to be able to help you determine what is it that energizes you.

Daniel Szuc: Busyness to me – when people say busyness – busyness sounds like they sometimes haven’t necessarily found the thing that energizes them. It’s just that they’re trying to find things to keep them busy because they’re not necessarily confronting the things that they need to. And boredom, as another extreme, sounds almost of a similar nature, where they’re just kind of motoring along. So there, again, there’s something – to use Jorge’s language – is something inherent in that that’s troubling to me.

Daniel Szuc: I think seek more diversity in your practices, and it’s okay to be busy at times and it’s okay to be bored at times, and look in the spirit of multiples, look for every nuance in between those two states.

Hawk (host): Nice. Alright, I’m going to put a bit of a downer on this – not quite as much of a downer as Jorge-

Jorge Arango: Can I add something real quick there?

Hawk (host): Yeah, you may.

Jorge Arango: If you find yourself being bored, that’s good, right? Because there is awareness there of your state, right? That’s tell … Your body’s telling you something.

Hawk (host): Yip. Yip, that’s coming back to that mindfulness that’s not necessarily seeing boredom as a negative thing, but as a cue to make a change.

Jorge Arango: Right.

Hawk (host): Alright. So yeah, back to the downer – and not quite as much of a downer as the deathbed conversation of previous questions – but I want to put this question out there because it was asked by a member of our community on Twitter during the weekend. It’s something that I actually get asked a lot, especially in our forums, and I’m gonna put it to you, Laura. When do you know that it’s time to leave a company? When is it time to go, “Actually, I’ve gotta be brave.”

Laura Klein: So this is [crosstalk 00:40:13]. Yeah, this is a good one for me because I have left a lot of companies ’cause, like I said, I hop around. I realized many, many years ago – and this is a hundred percent consistent – that when I am driving into work, sometimes if things get to a point where they’re bad enough, I will – I swear to God – start fantasizing about getting into a small car accident that is just bad enough-

Hawk (host): Good lord, that’s pretty grim [crosstalk 00:40:45].

Laura Klein: Not actually injured, but just bad enough that I don’t have to go to work that day.

Jorge Arango: Wow.

Laura Klein: But when that happens, I will just go in and quit because that’s telling me is, now my body is saying, “I would rather suffer physical damage. Don’t go and deal with these people any longer.” And I … This is a hundred percent true, it happens every single time, I, in some ways, credit the fact that I have been at my current job for three years, to the fact that I work remotely and don’t have a commute anymore, so I really have just no idea how to know when to quit.

Laura Klein: But there is … I get an actual physical reaction. I’m not any … I mean, I say it like it’s a funny thing; it’s not funny, it’s horrible at the time when I’m just like, “Mm [inaudible 00:41:31] this.” And it’s a physical reaction, where I’m just, “I’m not happy.” And I don’t … I mean, I’m not the kind of person who’s happy all the time, God knows. I’m happy some of the time. So it’s not just a little thing; it’s I’m so unhappy that I don’t think this is fixable. I’m not optimistic, it’s not a thing. It’s just a … We’re done here. And I just … and … Since I’ve been doing it for so long, I sort of figured out what that feels like to me again. And the funny thing is, I’m saying a lot of things about, “Oh, it’s just a feeling.” I’m not really that touchy-feely of a person. I’m not that in touch with my emotions, which is probably why I have to imagine getting hit by the bus. But I’m telling you, it really does get to that point.

Laura Klein: And here’s the thing, I actually … I’ve talked to folks, I know a lot of people who, I swear, they have gotten past that point. They are so beaten down and they are so unhappy at their jobs, but they are staying because they feel like they have to or because they … I mean, I a hundred percent get that some people have to because they literally have to; they need the money and I have so much sympathy for them. I am not there anymore and I am so happy not to be there anymore, and I hope everybody gets past the point where they are.

Laura Klein: But if you are in UX right now, there is a good chance that you don’t have to. And so, don’t stay because … If you’re feeling that sort of thing – it doesn’t have to be the bus – but if you’re feeling that sort of thing, you don’t have to stay because you’re worried about your company or your product or your coworkers. I mean, those are nice, it’s great that you worry about that stuff, but worry about you. Worry about the fact that you’re honestly just so deeply unhappy that you gotta go.

Laura Klein: Also, there are all sorts of other good reasons to leave a company, like you get a better offer, but I’ve never quit a job with another job lined up. I honestly let it get to the point where I fantasize of being hit by a bus – and then I just leave.

Hawk (host): Alright, there was [crosstalk 00:43:45]. I’m not necessarily going to post to my community that you all [inaudible 00:43:52] car accidents. I understand what you’re saying.

Hawk (host): Yeah, [inaudible 00:43:58], I was gonna try and avoid jumping in with my own opinions here. My answer to that question is, when you actually start to have that thought, when you start to think, “Should I be staying in this job?” Not necessarily jump straight out, but just start to talk to your peers and start to talk to your network and start to kind of examine those feelings a little bit for two reasons. One is because it does help you get some clarity about the things you love about your job and the things that you don’t, and it helps you get some realistic feedback about maybe ways, practical ways that you can solve whatever it is that’s causing the problem. And worst case scenario: Everybody goes, “Hell, you’ve gotta leave.” Then everyone knows that you’re looking for another job and that’s an important next step. People aren’t gonna offer you something if nobody knows you’re looking, so it’s kind of win-win. I’d try that before any car accidents, especially involving buses.

Laura Klein: I will say this: I think I feel like you have to have some optimism. There has to be some optimism left that whatever’s broken can be fixed because like I said, that stuff’s, sometimes you have to do stuff you don’t like – it’s work. Sometimes not everything’s gonna be great. That’s fine. You have to have some optimism that the thing that is upsetting you, is going to get better and that it realistically could get better in that there’s something you can do to make it better, and that it is gonna get better on some timeline that doesn’t involve you just giving up entirely before that.

Laura Klein: So that’s important, and I think the times that I’m feeling that way are times when I’m just kind of, it’s not … It’s that moment when your body just goes, “This isn’t getting better, is it? This is never gonna … This is just how it is now. I need to go.”

Hawk (host): Jorge, have you got an opinion?

Jorge Arango: Well, I’m just thinking that this is where it’s helpful to read about things like sixteenth century Europe, right? Because-

Laura Klein: Sure!

Jorge Arango: Because you have choice [crosstalk 00:46:00]. Folks back then, if you were born a serf, basically, you did not have a choice as to what you were going to do with your life. And these questions about does it align with my values? Do I like my coworkers? Hand-to-mouth living basically, right?

Jorge Arango: So we, you, my friends, who are watching this, are incredibly privileged to live in a time when we don’t have to do things for reasons other than this is the thing that I want to do with my life. And you have the privilege to be able to reach old age, feeling satisfied with the way that you’ve spent your time here. Make use of that.

Hawk (host): Nice. Dan, are you going to keep things positive?

Jorge Arango: I didn’t mention death.

Hawk (host): [inaudible 00:46:57] Should we go into another question? Alright. This is at no one in particular. I’m keen to see who feels the need to jump in, but one of the questions from the community is, what are some key things that you guys believe that you’ve done to get you where you are today? And I think by where you are today, they mean in a place that you are confident and comfortable and enjoying your job enough that you can be philosophical about it and you can give guidance. So yeah, what was a key aspect of your career that’s kind of helped you to get to this place?

Daniel Szuc: I’ll mention three, I think quick ones. One is read. I think more people I know don’t read than read. I was never an avid reader as a kid. I’ve had to practice and teach myself to read. I read every day. Every day. And so I’m trying to diversify what I read. I don’t just … I very actually, very rarely read UX-related materials now. So read.

Daniel Szuc: Two is, surround yourself with great people. This is this call; the community that’s listening in. Where UX is really lucky, it’s predominantly made up of really fantastic people. You get a couple of exceptions there sometimes, but mostly it’s made up of really lovely people, and we’re really lucky in that respect.

Daniel Szuc: And I would say the final one is, I’d like to think that within user experience, there’s one, this idea of care. It implies that there’s a people aspect still within user experience, although I, perhaps another discussion, I feel like it’s being degraded over time, but it implies people. It implies care, so seek people out who give you the opportunity to try things out, and seek feedback in that, and again, I come back to the spirit of continuous learning.

Hawk (host): Awesome.

Laura Klein: I have … So, there is a single thing that I did that I actually can trace, I think, sort of all of my later success to, and that is I started writing about stuff I knew about – and that’s it. And what I had to do to do that, is I had to realize that I had something that I knew that nobody else knew – and I actually had to be told that by somebody; I was, “Everybody knows this.” “No, no. Very few people know that.” “Oh, okay.” So then I started writing about stuff and I was, “Oh, I know things and I can share them with other people.”

Laura Klein: And then that has over time turned into, again, the podcast and the teaching and mentoring and all of these things where I just, “Oh yeah, no, I do know things.” And putting it out there … It has created for me – I think hopefully, I always, I’m afraid to jinx it when I say this – but it has created for me … Somebody told me once that there was a difference between job security and career security. Job security is when you feel like you’re at a job and that job is safe and they’re not going to fire you. And career security is where you’re like, “Well, if they did fire me, I’d be fine.” And I feel like I’ve sort of moved to more of that career security, where I do know things, I am good at things, I put them out there. People see that. They know who I am and they sometimes want to work with me based on what I put out there.

Laura Klein: The other great thing is that if you write like I do, some people read it and go, “Oh, no. We don’t want to work with her.” And it’s a great filtering … it’s a fantastic filtering mechanism. So be yourself and the people who really like you will want to hire you and work with you, and the people who don’t, you’ll never hear from and it will be great.

Laura Klein: But really, it is huge just having that recognition that there’s a thing that I could teach somebody, so I’m gonna do that and I’m gonna put myself out there and I’m gonna get feedback on it and put more of it out there.

Jorge Arango: Yes, I love that distinction, Laura.

Laura Klein: It wasn’t mine, by the way. It’s just something I was told.

Jorge Arango: Career security and … Well, wherever it came from, right? But I will add to that that job security does not exist. You have to work on career security, right? If for no other reason for the reason that Dan brought up at the beginning of the call, which is that the construct that we know as job security is something that comes from a different era, and it’s an era that is going away. And you have to work on career security first and foremost. And working on career security is going to make you better at your job, so that falls from that, right?

Daniel Szuc: And putting yourself out there’s also a lovely point. I think the UX community, again, generally is a nice, supportive, and caring place to be able to do that. Putting yourself out there comes in different forms – articles, presentations, workshops, podcasts. It’s a way of when you move it from outside your head on to another medium, something changes in that it’s … you’re able to … if you can reflect on that moment that it shifts from your mind to your head and then be able to talk about it with other people, it’s a very useful thing.

Daniel Szuc: And I have to say, as I’m made perhaps handing back to Hawk, that UX Mastery is indeed one great place to do that. So how’s that for a segue, Hawk? Back to you.

Jorge Arango: Well done.

Hawk (host): [crosstalk 00:53:07] But I agree with you. And what I’m hearing from all of you is read, is write, is put yourself out there, is network, is make your voice heard, is build your reputation. And all of those things incrementally help you get to a place where you have the confidence to be able to make choices that you might not have had the confidence or other resources to make before [inaudible 00:53:35], and I love that.

Hawk (host): And you’re right, Dan. At UX Mastery, so much of the reason that we do what we do is to kind of help the community and help new UXers not just find their way into UX but to start to have a place to make their voice good, and so yeah, for anyone listening, if you’ve got something to write about or you’ve got something to share, head us up. Send us an email or go to our website because yeah, we’re always keen to hear new voices, and if we can do something to help you, then yeah, let’s have a chat.

Hawk (host): But enough marketing. I am going to read out a couple of book recommendations from [Louis 00:54:19], who says, “Read Mitch Horowitz’s The Miracle Club, which segues into the previous conversation about finding who you are, and Hero’s Journey.” So maybe give those a go.

Hawk (host): Alright, another question. We’ve got six minutes to go, and I’m aware that we need to end at the top of the hour, so I like this one: How do you consistently stay aware of what brings out the best in other people? How do you create a space to bring out the best in the people that are around you and to help bolster them into this place that we’re talking about trying to get to? What can we do to help the people that we work besides to support them in their journey? Any of you. I’m gonna go for Jorge.

Jorge Arango: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind here is teaching, right? That’s something that is very big for me, and teaching requires you to be very conscious of how you respond to the things that are being presented to you by folks, and how their perception of who they are and what their level of ability is either reflects or doesn’t reflect on the work that they’re showing you, right? So, it … that calls for knowing how to create the space to give feedback in a way that is constructive and that allows folks to grow in positive directions, right? And I can tell you that it’s for, at least for me, not easy; it’s something that I have to work on, but it’s, I think, very important. And being in a teaching context, where I’m formally teaching students, is a way of exercising that particular muscle, which I appreciate tremendously.

Hawk (host): Awesome. Laura?

Laura Klein: Oh, I’m terrible at this. I mean, we’ve been talking about being self-aware; I am not good at this. I just am not … The one thing that I have gotten feedback from students of mine that, the one thing that I do right – and this is I think useful – is that I … In … For many people, not for all of them, they can tell that I care deeply about them as a person, so even if … and that I will often try to figure out what their superpower is and how … what they’re good at and just feel like, “Great, you’re doing that.” So I very much let people kind of run with stuff.

Laura Klein: But in general it’s a really hard thing to do. I tend to limit myself to working on small teams of people who are really good at certain things that I am not necessarily good at, so I can kind of go like, “Great, you’re in charge of that and I’m in charge of this, and let’s work together on this thing.” Because I know that that’s important, and I do care deeply about the people. Well, when I do care deeply about the people, they can tell. And for sure they can also sometimes tell if that’s not true, but … so, if you get feedback or if you give any kind of negative feedback, as long as they know that you love them, they will take it better.

Hawk (host): Yeah. [inaudible 00:57:57] and honesty, right? It’s just about having the courage to put ourselves out there and go, “Hey, I’m not very good at this,” or “Shit, I’m … [inaudible 00:58:08] struggling,” which kind of gives other people – I just swore – which gives other people the opportunities … I’m a Kiwi.

Laura Klein: [inaudible 00:58:18] bad influence.

Hawk (host): [inaudible 00:58:18] if she said that she doesn’t feel good about that, then, can you maybe, maybe it’s normal, and to give people the opportunity to go, “Hell, no one feels good all the time,” and making it a safe place to talk about those feelings, I think, is often a good way to support.

Hawk (host): Dan, do you want to add something? You’ve got two minutes. Can you do it?

Daniel Szuc: Sure, yes I can. There’s the me and the we within an – let’s do full circle, we’re back to the environment. There’s the me and the we. We’re on a call right now. We’re on a call that’s an environment in itself. There’s Laura, there’s Jorge, there’s Hawk, there’s Dan, and there’s someone behind the scenes, and there’s the people listening in, so it’s not just about you. It’s about the we. So I have found I have a habit of reading articles and sending articles to people to read; some of the people listening on the call know that I do this. Whether they read it or they don’t read it, I’m not entirely sure, but the act is to give, so it’s about them in the way, it’s about giving, it’s about creating a security and a trustworthiness within community, and I would say, to hand back to you, Hawk, I’d come back to the notion of UX Mastery is one place where – of a number places globally, in reference to UX – that is explicit and intentional in community-building, and that’s a great thing.

Hawk (host): I want to say thank you, again, for your kind words. [inaudible 00:59:55] that is the top of the hour, which means we’ve got to go. But thank you all so much. I really enjoyed today. It was good fun and I’ve [inaudible 01:00:04] learnt a lot. And thank you to those of you that were out there and listening and sharing your questions and your thoughts.

Hawk (host): So, we will compile this transcripts and post it on our blog next week, and also keep an eye out for the book because if you guys thought that these guys were good today, wait till you read all the other stuff they have yet to say.

Daniel Szuc: Cool.

Hawk (host): Thanks. Thank you.

Laura Klein: Thank you.

Jorge Arango: Thank you.

Daniel Szuc: Thanks a lot. Bye.

Jorge Arango: Bye.

The post Transcript: What personal rhythms and habits support success in experience design careers? appeared first on UX Mastery.

Today Derek was talking to us about the differences between inclusive design and accessibility. In short, one is the journey and one the destination. He has been agonising over whether it matters how we get to an accessible product if we do ultimately get there, and today was all about discussing those thoughts.

If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.

Transcript

hawk

2018-12-11 23:30

First up, a huge welcome (back) to our Slack channel to @feather – who is one of my personal favs

hawk

2018-12-11 23:30

Thanks for your time to day Derek, we appreciate it

feather

2018-12-11 23:31

@hawk :slightly_smiling_face: excited to be here!

feather

2018-12-11 23:31

It’s me!

hawk

2018-12-11 23:31

Ha, love it.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:32

For anyone that hasn’t come across Derek before, here is the formal intro:

hawk

2018-12-11 23:32

Derek Featherstone is an internationally known speaker and authority on accessibility and inclusive design. He has been working on the web since 1999. He migrated to the field of accessibility and quickly discovered the need to move thinking about accessibility and inclusion into the design process.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:32

Derek is a former high school teacher, that brings his passion for education to the web industry. Derek is the Chief eXperience Officer at Level Access, helping clients understand that accessibility is part of creating great user experiences for everyone, including people with disabilities.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:32

Derek lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife and their 4 children. He’s also a fitness instructor and 3 time IronMan triathlon finisher.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:32

He has graced us with his presence a few times before and we’re grateful for this opportunity to learn from him again.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:32

@feather Tell us a bit about today’s topic and why it’s important to you (and us).

feather

2018-12-11 23:34

Thanks @hawk! There’s been a huge groundswell of interest over the years in accessibility.

feather

2018-12-11 23:34

Then around 4 yrs ago, I started seeing people writing articles saying things like “Accessibility is boring” and “Accessibility isn’t even the thing we should be talking about any more… we should be talking about inclusive design”

feather

2018-12-11 23:35

and it struck me that many people in the industry use the two terms interchangeably.

feather

2018-12-11 23:35

But in reality, they’re not… I always felt like “Oh, I’m practicing inclusive design” because I was working really hard to make things accessible.

feather

2018-12-11 23:36

So I really got to thinking “Does the difference even matter?”

feather

2018-12-11 23:37

I went through a personal roller coaster because I’m all about the practical reality of delivering things that are accessible — that’s the end goal we’re after. And does it actually matter HOW we got there, if we actually get there?

feather

2018-12-11 23:38

At times I thought — no, it doesn’t matter. And at others, I thought “Actually, HOW we get there matters MORE than whether we get all the way there or not”

feather

2018-12-11 23:38

So I dug in, and started to reconcile my own thoughts on it, and I’ve ultimately come up with this realization:

feather

2018-12-11 23:38

> Accessibility is an outcome.
>
> Inclusive design is a process.

feather

2018-12-11 23:38

That’s it, at its most fundamental.

feather

2018-12-11 23:39

Accessibility is a thing that we can, and do measure. Inclusive design is ONE process that we use to get there.

feather

2018-12-11 23:40

Now, I’m a believer that Inclusive Design is one of the VERY best ways to get there for a lot of reasons — its repeatable, sustainable, and directly involves people with disabilities in the process.

If we don’t include people with disabilities in the process and/or we don’t enable their participation in the process, we can’t call it inclusive design.

feather

2018-12-11 23:41

We may still achieve accessibility as an outcome, but that doesn’t mean we used inclusive design to get there.

feather

2018-12-11 23:42

And, by using inclusive design methods, we’re not necessarily guaranteeing that we’re creating a fully accessible “thing” — we may need to use other methods along with it. But inclusive design at its core, empowers people with disabilities as co-creators and co-designers.

feather

2018-12-11 23:42

That’s what it is important to me, and is a concept that I will always be fighting for now.

feather

2018-12-11 23:43

I don’t want to design FOR disability, or FOR people with disabilities. That’s me doing all the decision making and holding all the power.

I want to design WITH people with disabilities.

feather

2018-12-11 23:43

I hope that distinction makes sense, and is a thing that you might embrace as well

hawk

2018-12-11 23:44

It does! Would you like questions now?

feather

2018-12-11 23:44

Yes please! I’d love some :slightly_smiling_face:

hawk

2018-12-11 23:44

go ahead with your questions please!

dave

2018-12-11 23:44

How does accessibility apply to VUI, voice apps in auto, home and work?
What about for touchscreens on physical devices, watches, glasses?
Do you think govt disability laws will account for this?

feather

2018-12-11 23:45

@dave I’ll answer that in three parts :slightly_smiling_face:

feather

2018-12-11 23:51

1. How does accessibility apply to VUI, voice apps in auto, home and work?

It applies in many ways — but from a UX perspective, we need to be thinking about the ways in which people with disabilities use these technologies. The biggest opportunity is for innovation — I talked with a woman earlier this year and I asked her what assistive technologies she used and she answered “Alexa.”

She has significant mobility and pain issues, and sometimes doesn’t get out of bed in a day. She uses her Echo to: open the door for her caregiver, to turn her lights out, and to answer the telephone. It’s empowering for her, so I think there’s huge opportunity there.

At the same time, we need to be really conscious of designing and implementing things that use only one modality of input or output. The original Echo devices only allowed for voice input and audio output. How would that work for someone that has difficulty speaking, or cannot speak at all? How does the original Echo work for someone that is Deaf or hard-of-hearing? The most recent Echo — the Echo Show — also provides for screen based output so that a Deaf person can read the captions as output. So, think about this — how can a person that has difficulty speaking get commands into Alexa? We need more than one modality of input.

feather

2018-12-11 23:51

(phew, that was a long one)

feather

2018-12-11 23:53

2. What about for touchscreens on physical devices, watches, glasses?

Touchscreens can be quite accessible, but they need alternative methods for input as well. Watches? already accessible. Not sure if any glasses are already accessible or not, however… it definitely can be done.

feather

2018-12-11 23:54

3. Do you think govt disability laws will account for this?

I’d like to think so, but I think that the government is often a little behind and can’t quite keep up with the latest and greatest technology. So my short term answer is “no” but in the long-term “yes”.

feather

2018-12-11 23:54

Now then… having said all of that, @dave, I will say this one other thing:

feather

2018-12-11 23:55

The best way to figure out these answers for all of is to work directly with people with disabilities to gain all the insights we need.

We don’t figure out how people with disabilities use technologies just by thinking it through ourselves and putting ourselves in their shoes.

feather

2018-12-11 23:55

We have to involve people with disabilities in the research for all of this.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:55

Can you explain some other ways that we might end up with an outcome of accessibility without designing inclusively?

feather

2018-12-11 23:56

Sure thing!

allyraven

2018-12-11 23:56

How do we get accessibility included when teaching new developers?

feather

2018-12-11 23:57

We might end up with the outcome of accessibility in a few ways. The first, by accident:

https://twitter.com/awlilnatty/status/705375555030556672?lang=en

timmoad

2018-12-11 23:57

How do you define what disabilities are covered in your target market?

I create human centred design solutions for people with disabilities to increase independence in day to day life. I also have an online learning startup.

There are some disabilities some of my audience likely have, such as vision/hearing/speech impairments, or physical limitations. But the needs of those with intellectual disabilities is extremely varied and from my experience so far, irrelevant to my product.

This may be a big mistaken assumption on my part, and if it is please feel free to say so. I suppose the question really is, how do you know when to include people with intellectual disabilities and how do you go about including them in Inclusive Design?

feather

2018-12-11 23:57

If you take a look at that tweet you’ll see a very accessible set of oranges, pre-peeled and in plastic containers that are VERY accessible to people with mobility and dexterity challenges.

feather

2018-12-11 23:58

We might also end up achieving accessibility as an outcome by making a thing that isn’t accessible, and then going back and fixing it after. Neither of those employ inclusive design to get there, but they can both get there.

feather

2018-12-11 23:59

Another mechanism? We embrace concepts of universal design. That helps us too…

feather

2018-12-11 23:59

Universal design is its own practice, and it doesn’t necessarily require us to be inclusive.

hawk

2018-12-11 23:59

I hear ya.

feather

2018-12-12 00:01

@allyraven How do we get accessibility included when teaching new developers?

Great question… two things that i recommend:

1. Get them to do everything with a keyboard.
2. Involve people with disabilities early in the process to actually meet developers and show them how people with different disabilities use their computers. I know when I started in 1999 through 2003 some of the most transformative moments were when I saw how hard it was for people with disabilities to use the thing I had created.

allyraven

2018-12-12 00:02

I like the discussion of accessibility vs inclusive design vs universal design in Kat Holmes’ “Mismatch”. Highly recommend.

feather

2018-12-12 00:03

@timmoad How do you define what disabilities are covered in your target market?

Also a great question! Here’s the approach that I take:

allyraven

2018-12-12 00:03

Do you think it’s worth trying to get into the education system e.g. a unit on accessibility within a computer science degree?

feather

2018-12-12 00:03

1. Include more people with disabilities than you did before. Do that work, expand your reach and understanding.
2. Go to 1, repeat.

feather

2018-12-12 00:04

We will NEVER be perfect, @timmoad — but we can always aim for better.

epham

2018-12-12 00:05

When designing for ADA compliancy, I often run into obstacles in finding “guidelines” and concrete “rules” to adhere by. What’s the best advice for this so that my company I work for doesn’t become liable if a client gets sued?

feather

2018-12-12 00:05

I will also say that understanding neurodiversity and cognitive disabilities is the most difficult part of accessibility and inclusion, historically. That’s why we need to press on those a little more intentionally, because it’s very easy to just ignore it and hope it goes away.

feather

2018-12-12 00:06

So when to include people with intellectual disabilities? When it makes sense to, and “more often then you think you need to” — if that makes sense? :slightly_smiling_face:

dan247

2018-12-12 00:06

conducting user research -> how do you effectively (and respectfully) find users to make your feedback more inclusive of those who aren’t usually brought to the table. For example, global product -> needing to test instructional copy/microcopy on users where english is their second language.

feather

2018-12-12 00:07

@epham When designing for ADA compliancy, I often run into obstacles in finding “guidelines” and concrete “rules” to adhere by. What’s the best advice for this so that my company I work for doesn’t become liable if a client gets sued?

My best advice on this is something you may NOT want to hear…

feather

2018-12-12 00:07

Ready for this?

epham

2018-12-12 00:07

Eek*

feather

2018-12-12 00:07

Compliant is a very small step away from complaint.

feather

2018-12-12 00:08

I don’t believe that designing for compliance is the way to go at all

feather

2018-12-12 00:09

The ultimate measure of success is based on two things:

1. Yes, you need technical compliance.
2. You need to test and involve people with disabilities.

feather

2018-12-12 00:09

If it is compliant but can’t be used easily by people with disabilities, the fact that its compliant doesn’t really matter, if you know what I mean.

feather

2018-12-12 00:10

Hope that isn’t too harsh, but I think you want to embrace the mindset that “we want to make things that people can use”

feather

2018-12-12 00:10

Because if you do, you’ll be in a position of protecting yourself much more than just aiming for compliance. If you aim for compliance and miss? yikes. If you aim for really easy to use by people with disabilities and miss? You should still be mostly better than compliant.

feather

2018-12-12 00:11

Feel free to follow up with me more on that if you like (and that goes for everyone, really, on any questions!)

feather

2018-12-12 00:12

@dan247 conducting user research -> how do you effectively (and respectfully) find users to make your feedback more inclusive of those who aren’t usually brought to the table. For example, global product -> needing to test instructional copy/microcopy on users where english is their second language.

Long question, but I think I can answer quickly.

charles

2018-12-12 00:12

What would you say is the most neglected or unsolved aspect of accessibility from the accessibility community of experts and advocates?

feather

2018-12-12 00:15

Most major cities/centres have local chapters of disability advocacy groups. They’re a great way to get the conversation started, and they can help you on that journey as well.

How to respectfully find people and to effectively engage? That one is best answered with one thing: humility.

Be humble. Be the student. Explain that you want to learn very valuable lessons from their experience. Work directly with people where English is their second language. I hope that makes sense — I mean, really… do the work, and be humble, and soak it all up.

dan247

2018-12-12 00:16

great! thanks

feather

2018-12-12 00:16

(@dan247 feel free to follow up with more if you like… happy to help)

feather

2018-12-12 00:17

@charles What would you say is the most neglected or unsolved aspect of accessibility from the accessibility community of experts and advocates?

Ahhhhhh, the question. This is quite possibly going to sound like a far too philosophical and squishy answer, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

allyraven

2018-12-12 00:18

How do we reduce the dependence on “expert” accessibility services and make IT teams more capable at doing their own thing? Working with PWD and using assistive tech is definitely part of it, but there’s potential for a lot of gaps with that model.

dan247

2018-12-12 00:20

…specifically in a global organisation how would you go about finding users within your organisation that have disabilities or use assistive tech to conduct interviews or usability tests with?

feather

2018-12-12 00:21

The most neglected or unsolved aspect of accessibility… This is a HUGE area to discuss, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say a few things:

I’m not sure we need to actually “solve” all the aspects of accessibility. We want to make things better for sure, and many of us have for years. But I’m not sure this is a mystery where we have to have answers for absolutely everything. I’m not saying it’s unsolvable, I think I’m saying that if we’re doing it right, I’m not sure it all needs to be solved. And that mindset to me is the part that might be missing… that we all think that this is a thing that must be solved! it must be solved with engineering! It must be solved with design! It must be solved… and I’m not sure that’s the case.

charles

2018-12-12 00:21

@dan247 I asked Kat Holmes that very question. her reply (since you can’t ask people), was “send up the Bat Signal”

feather

2018-12-12 00:22

I think in day to day terms, that breeds a mindset of “solve it all and then move on and we’re done with this stuff”

feather

2018-12-12 00:22

and I don’t think it should ever be like that

feather

2018-12-12 00:22

So i guess I’m questioning your question, which maybe isn’t fair at all :slightly_smiling_face:

charles

2018-12-12 00:23

i guess i really mean topics and considerations that simply underrepresented, like cognitive diversity and aging.

feather

2018-12-12 00:24

But ultimately — I’d say the thing that isn’t solved is the way in which we approach things.

charles

2018-12-12 00:24

attention versus solving

feather

2018-12-12 00:24

I could be taking that in a completely different direction than you intended

feather

2018-12-12 00:24

and I’m ok with that, but also very happy to talk more about it… we know where to find each other :slightly_smiling_face:

hawk

2018-12-12 00:25

We have 5 mins left in this session. Derek has one question left to answer (for Ally).

hawk

2018-12-12 00:25

If anyone else has one, now is your last chance!

feather

2018-12-12 00:27

@allyraven How do we reduce the dependence on “expert” accessibility services and make IT teams more capable at doing their own thing? Working with PWD and using assistive tech is definitely part of it, but there’s potential for a lot of gaps with that model.

How do we reduce dependence? I think you need a simple model – recognize that you can’t do it on your own *yet* but that you can over time. Engage with experts and at the start of the engagement where the experts are shouldering say 90% of the load and your teams are shouldering 10%. Over time, you learn at their side, and it moves to where you end up being comfortable — some teams end up doing 50% of the work themselves and 50% is on outside experts. For other teams it is 70% in house and 30% external. Numbers vary – but you’ll find the right balance for your team.

feather

2018-12-12 00:28

Any engagement over time with outside experts should include a plan for “here’s how we work together now, but here’s where we’d like to be in X years”

feather

2018-12-12 00:28

that lets you set a target that works for you

feather

2018-12-12 00:28

and you work alongside them so that you learn from their expertise so you can build your own.

feather

2018-12-12 00:29

(also revisiting @dan247: …specifically in a global organisation how would you go about finding users within your organisation that have disabilities or use assistive tech to conduct interviews or usability tests with?)

yes, ask within, but I’d also recommend OUTSIDE the org is just as valuable if not more

allyraven

2018-12-12 00:30

Depends if the systems being built are external or internal.,.

dan247

2018-12-12 00:30

They’re internal tools

feather

2018-12-12 00:30

and for you @charles: i guess i really mean topics and considerations that simply underrepresented, like cognitive diversity and aging.

yes, they’re the most underrepresented groups, but lets talk more about it since we’re out of time

feather

2018-12-12 00:31

@dan247: totally get that… if you don’t have the people inside, then lets look for people outside that we can bring in that use similar tools in other organizations

feather

2018-12-12 00:32

(getting a bit scattered around the end here, but hope all that makes sense — I promise I wasn’t avoiding any of those questions… happy to provide more later if any of you would like to continue elsewhere!)

hawk

2018-12-12 00:32

Ok That’s it for this session!

hawk

2018-12-12 00:32

Thanks so much for your time, energy and wisdom today @feather

hawk

2018-12-12 00:32

As always, it’s been a pleasure

feather

2018-12-12 00:32

THANK YOU all for having me

dan247

2018-12-12 00:32

Thanks @feather!

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> Inclusive Design & Accessibility Are Not the Same Thing — with Derek Featherstone appeared first on UX Mastery.

]]> https://uxmastery.com/transcript-inclusive-design-accessibility/feed/ 0 70600 https://uxmastery.com/transcript-a-practical-approach-to-getting-a-ux-education/ https://uxmastery.com/transcript-a-practical-approach-to-getting-a-ux-education/#respond Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:19:34 +0000 https://uxmastery.com/?p=69849 Mads Soegaard of Interaction Design Foundation joined Hawk to talk about practical ways of getting a valuable UX education.

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> A Practical Approach to Getting A UX Education — with Mads Soegaard appeared first on UX Mastery.

]]> This week we ran an Ask the UXperts session with a difference. Rather than our usual Slack channel text based Q&A format, this time around Hawk braved being in front of the camera. She was joined by Interaction Design Foundation’s Mads Soegaard and the topic was one which is very dear to our hearts – UX education.

Your questions were amazing and they made for an insightful and valuable session. Thanks to everyone that sent one in.

If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, you can watch the recording below or read on for a full transcript of the chat.

Click the thumbnail below to watch the video or check it out here.

Transcript

Hawk: Welcome everyone. Awesome to have you here joining us tonight, maybe this morning, this afternoon, lunchtime, whatever it is for you in the world. It’s evening for me and it’s early morning for my special guest, your expert for this session, Mads Soegaard. Mads is joining us from the Interaction Design Foundation. We’re really big fans of his work. It’s a nonprofit organization which specializes in education and career advancement for designers.

Hawk: Tonight Mads is joining me to answer the questions that I’ve solicited from you, our community, over the last couple of weeks, specifically questions about getting a UX Education, a practical to approach to getting a UX Education. I’m excited to be joined by Mads tonight. I’m going to throw it over to him to give us some context around this session.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, so good morning, Hawk. It’s early, early morning in Denmark and I had to put up these lights here. This is one of our video studios and I had to put up lights because this time in the morning in Denmark it’s completely almost pitch dark outside. So we don’t really see the sun like these four months in the winter, so don’t ever, ever come here during the winter. If you want to visit Denmark come here in the summer. Then it’s a magical place, but in the winter it’s just dark and gray and rainy.

Mads Soegaard: Okay yeah, so on that note, then my name is … Thanks for the introduction, Hawk. My name is Mads and founded the Interaction Design Foundation way back in 2002. We are a nonprofit organization who specializes in career advancement for user experience designers. Specifically our speciality is online user experience courses or basically courses revolving around the general theme of design, user experience design and UI design, design thinking and so on.

Mads Soegaard: So there is a bunch of related terms and that’s our speciality. We don’t do anything else, and we’ve been doing this for, yeah, since 2002. Actually then I’d just like to give some context to that. The reason I actually founded the Interaction Design Foundation and the reason that I find this Q&A so interesting is that the whole reason I founded it was that I felt it was really unfair that these knowledge and design skills have traditionally been reserved for people who are fairly well off and also people in the sort of you could say the Western intellectual hemisphere.

Mads Soegaard: You’d have to go to like a super expensive design school or these skills and the knowledge, design knowledge was really hard to come by online and it still is. So our goal is to lower the cost of high quality design education, so that means up the quality and lower the cost. That’s what we’re sort of incessantly working on. Our medium is the online medium because that’s how we are able to lower the cost and up the quality because we don’t have like big campuses. That’s our take on UX Education.

Mads Soegaard: Then we have local groups, I think in most all major cities around the world. I can’t remember how many hundred countries to get that sort of physical dimension into learning user experience. So these local groups are absolutely fantastic and thriving. Some of them are going a bit slow so we’re continually trying to optimize that. So that’s just to give a bit of context to yeah, who I am. So coming from where I do, then of course I’ll really try not to be biased towards online courses and online learning. I’ll really try to be objective, but just keep that in mind, that I might be slightly biased. I’ll remind you whenever I feel I’m getting too biased.

Hawk: That works for us because as you know our [inaudible 00:04:05] online and most of the people listening, in fact all of the people listening to us right now are people that know us via that medium, so [inaudible 00:04:14]. So are you ready to jump into some questions?

Mads Soegaard: Absolutely, yeah.

Hawk: Brilliant. So yeah, as I mentioned before, we’ve got a combination of questions from an email that we sent out from our online forums, which are a very valuable part of our community and also from our Twitter audience. So the first one is from the email that we sent out specifically about this session and it’s a good open starting question. It goes how can we effectively learn practical UX skills?

Mads Soegaard: Well actually first of all I should just mention that whenever I hear someone with a Kiwi accent, an Australian accent I get like really warm and fuzzy feeling inside because I used to live in Tasmania and I found it absolutely fantastic. I had a wonderful time there. Yeah. So okay, so how can you learn practical UX skills?

Hawk: Yeah.

Mads Soegaard: So that’s, yeah.

Mads Soegaard: Well yeah, emphasis on the practical. So I’d say doing, doing, doing, doing. So the doing dimension is what it’s all about. Then how do you go about doing? I would say that let’s say that you buy a book, then it’s incredibly important that you just don’t sit there and passively read the book, but you actually put those things into like action. If you read a book about customer journey maps or personas or something, then it’s absolutely essential that you start to do it.

Mads Soegaard: So even if you don’t have a job as a UX designer, then I’d find it incredibly important that you just start. Yeah, just start doing. It could be do personas with your friends. It could be usability testing with your friends. That’s really not relevant. Of course it’s better if you have a job as a UX designer already and then you can do this with clients and so on, but often yeah, if you’re new to UX, then you don’t have that as a possibility.

Mads Soegaard: So I’d say as long as you just start doing, then that’s the key thing. So for example, when we construct courses in the Interaction Design Foundation, we put a lot of emphasis on exercises and templates and open ended questions. You’ll also see people who answer those open ended questions, some of them will be just hey, I’ll just do whatever is necessary and other people will be like they really put a lot of effort into it. So that’s the … Yeah. So of course you should be in the latter group. You should really try to put a lot, a lot of effort into it.

Hawk: Cool. Cool. So yeah, buy a book.

Mads Soegaard: So do. The doing dimension is what it’s all about. Yup.

Hawk: Cool. All right, thank you for that. Another one from email. What are the UX career or job options for those of us with really good people or interpersonal communication skills? So good communicators who would prefer to work with progressive companies or nonprofits but aren’t particularly strong at coding, I guess the question there really is how do we match our own skills with the UX positions that are available?

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, it’s super interesting that you mention coding because that’s the question that often comes up. I’d say that in some regions there’s some tendency to look at a user experience designer as someone who can also branch into coding, and so I’d say that it’s for me personally, I love programming by the way, I’d say that it’s important for you as a UX designer to know coding and to sort of know the fundamentals of how code is constructed.

Mads Soegaard: This whole idea of this whole approach of formalism, how do you actually take these ideas and essentially write them into code and make them come alive? Because one of my favorite sayings is ideas are worthless without execution. By extension, you could say that ideas are worthless without implementation, so all these wonderful plans that we make, they need to be written down to super rigid and super terse code in order to come alive, again, and bring a smile on our users’ faces.

Mads Soegaard: So it’s really important to know I’d say the fundamentals of code because otherwise you could fall into that trap of being that wonderful designer who’s like making Post-It Notes and all these wonderful plans, and then they just never come alive. So I’d say that’s important. One that note, I think you should leave programming to the programmers. So I would recommend that you specialize in user experience design and UI design, and just keep your knowledge of programming as sort of at a level where you can interface with programmers and you have meaningful conversations about them with regards to implementation, but no further than that.

Mads Soegaard: I would say that there’s enough, I mean, there’s a ton of knowledge and skills that need to be acquired in that spectrum from user experience design over in UI design, so you need to, everything from usability, testing to user research, I mean there’s a ton of skills that are needed as a UX designer and also a UI designer, so I’d say focus on that, make that your speciality. Yeah. That’s what I would do.

Mads Soegaard: Then also on that note, then I would also advise against becoming like, “Oh, I’m a user researcher.” Some are like, “I’m a usability tester and that’s only what I do.” I find that to be too narrow. I think there’s always this definition of what is a specialization and what is generalization, and some people say, “Well user experience, is that like a generalization across multiple domains and so on?” I’d say no, that’s actually a speciality.

Mads Soegaard: It’s a very well sort of thought out set of skills and disciplines that are needed, and that is a speciality. So you’re not like a generalist as a user experience designer. Actually, computer science started out like way back in the ’70s or ’60s, partially in the ’80s. No, in the ’70s computer science was not considered like a specialization. It was like hey, but you’re basically just a hands-on mathematician because that was what it was considered to be, so yeah.

Hawk: So can I just clarify? So when you say that to a degree that you think that UX-ers should know some code, are you talking more than just markup here? Are you talking deeper than just [inaudible 00:11:43]? To what degree do you believe that, because that’s what we get asked a lot and I think there needs to be a pretty clear definition put around what some coding means.

Mads Soegaard: Yup. I would say more than markup. So that depends on your medium. So if your medium are apps, as a user experience designer or designer let’s just say in a broad sense, you could be working on products, services, apps, websites and so on, so it depends on your medium. So of course it would not be markup if you were like doing an iOS app and only doing that. Then I would just say that markup is not quite enough. It has to be something with like if, then, so just something like that. Just some construed thing, yeah.

Mads Soegaard: I just think take like an online course in programming, it doesn’t really matter what kind. You could do JavaScript or C or PHP something like that, but just get that really frustrating and get that sort of merger between frustration and joy when you’re like, “Why doesn’t this stupid computer or compiler understand what I’m telling it and why doesn’t that button show up?” Then at the same time get that wonderful feeling, like wow, I just created this thing and you can click it.

Mads Soegaard: Just get that basic understanding of programming, that’s all, because then you’ll exactly know why all of these weird questions are coming from developers when you just find this wonderful designer, this, you know, groundbreaking thing that can save the world and the programmer just looks at you like you just … Yeah. You know, came down from outer space.

Hawk: So understand how to grow a plant without necessarily knowing why the plant is growing. Get some understanding of the basic concepts without being able to necessarily write the code yourself.

Mads Soegaard: Exactly. Exactly.

Hawk: Cool.

Mads Soegaard: That’s the key.

Hawk: Perfect. All right, I think that was a good answer. Okay. So from our reader survey, our 2017 reader survey, one that is a personal favorite of mine, what professional development would you recommend for UX professionals? How can they progress once they’re already perhaps in a UX role?

Mads Soegaard: Yeah. So that’s a particularly interesting question. I would say that it’s super important to keep learning. I mean, I’m an addict of learning and I keep learning all the time. I really try to look at myself. Well, I mean I always remind myself, I feel dumb in a lot of respects because I always think of wow, I should learn this or I could learn this or I don’t know this and so on, so personally I’m addicted to learning.

Mads Soegaard: I would say that it’s incredibly important to keep learning. Like for example, at the Interaction Design Foundation we cover the whole spectrum from getting your first job as a user experience designer to like real advanced courses, so we have like super specialized courses on for example, augmented reality, virtual reality, user experience for augmented reality and virtual reality, the UX management with a lot of engineers from people, so we have super specialized courses.

Mads Soegaard: That’s our take on professional development is that it’s important to, the more you progress, the more you learn, to also remind yourself of how little you actually know and that there’s an infinite depth to learning. That’s why I said that I remind myself that I’m or I feel that I’m quite dumb because I always, like I discover new areas where I’m like, “Wow, I didn’t know this.” So that’s important to keep that attitude of like wow, just by you know, UX management. Wow, that’s a whole subdiscipline and it’s a merger between and oh, this wonderful thing called user experience and this enormously challenging thing called management and people and how do they act in groups and oh my God.

Hawk: Love it.

Mads Soegaard: I would say go into those specializations, then I would also issue sort of a warning, and that is the illusion of learning. So when you go on Medium for example, I’m not saying that Medium is a bad thing, by the way, but when you go on Medium it can also be a bit like going on social media. So you get this illusion of learning. You’re like, “Wow, this is interesting. This is interesting. Okay, then they did this over at Dropbox or something.”

Mads Soegaard: It’s like yeah, but you may feel good as you’re reading it, but are you really exercising your muscles? So it’s a bit like going to the gym and you’ll see some people hanging out at the gym and talking and so on, and then you’ll see other people completely focused without looking at their mobile phones and just looking horribly because they’re just working so hard and building up a sweat. I’d say just maybe actually don’t read so many articles and don’t focus so much on the news, news, what just happened at Google.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, focus more on timeless knowledge because if you look at the time that you’re investing in that, then timeless knowledge will just help you like for the next 20 years or 30 years or hopefully for all eternity as opposed to some yeah, something happened to that one. Yeah, what can you really learn from that? So that’s another super important principle when we develop courses for our editorial team is that timeless knowledge, always timeless knowledge. Something that’s super valuable that can last for like decades.

Mads Soegaard: That’s for example why we never develop any courses on tools because a tool will get outdated in a few years. Some tools like Photo Shop for example, when you talk UI design have been around for ages, but I mean, the user interface keeps changing every year of course, but employers will not hire you because you can use a tool. Employers will hire you because you understand human motivations, you understand people in groups, what they do.

Mads Soegaard: They’ll hire you based on the design skills that you can use to create results, to create business value, to create smiles on people’s faces, and that’s another type of knowledge and skills. That’s just not about how they use a tool.

Hawk: Cool. That makes sense as well. So focus on real life, not on gossip I guess is what you’re saying. Focus on the news, not on the social media.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, yeah, and try to go for as timeless knowledge as possible. So look at the, there will be a best before date on your knowledge. It’s like okay, so I learned a tool but okay, what about in two years? So more as humans and human motivations and psychology and our perceptual system for example. That’s fairly invariant and I mean, the human perception [inaudible 00:19:04] over like some 10,000 or 20,000 or however long. So that’s a more stabile skillset and knowledge, whereas if you learn some look, that’s not going to be around in 10,000 years, so.

Hawk: Cool. All right, we’ve got a live question from a listener from [inaudible 00:19:29], from YouTube. I’m a senior developer and I often interact with clients and I’d like to know how I should go about looking for improvement in my skills and how can I judge that I am improving? So I guess senior practitioners, yeah.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. So developers, a developer who’s interested in UX designer or at least interfacing with clients and customers, absolutely wonderful. So I’d say user experience design is the cure or it’s the answer to your question because of course, I mean I’m …

Mads Soegaard: Is the answer to your question, because of course I’m biased, I love it, and you do too, and the audience probably will agree with me because it’s such a fantastic interface between development and the customers and the users out there. So the person who is asking this question, the developer, that’s the missing link to really understand customers, users, and so on. That is user experience design because it provides those structured … It includes the knowledge and the work processes and the skills and the tools that will bridge that gap between the code and the thing going on out here among the users and customers.

Mads Soegaard: I find it absolutely fantastic that that person … Yeah, I really whole heartedly recommend that person to go full all in into UX design and the person will be so immensely, immensely valuable because a developer who has people skills and user experience skills is just a fantastic person to have on the team. It’s absolutely fantastic. The developer does not have to become the UX expert or something, it’s just that interface and that bridge between that you can … Bridging that gap. It’s fantastic.

Hawk: Cool. Brilliant. And another one from YouTube from Tisning who’s a faithful Ask the UX Experts audience member, so thanks, Tisning, for your question. Tising asks, “Which course would you suggest for someone who has already been in the UX industry for more than five years?” So someone that’s intermediate to senior, what course or I guess, what path of training would you recommend for someone in that particular part of their career?

Mads Soegaard: I would advise against thinking in a singular course. So I see this as a continuous journey and the reason may be that for example, when people break into UX design they’re very much … I see that online a lot. I hear people asking, “So which course should I start? Should I start with this course or that course or that provider or that provider?”

Hawk: You hear that?

Mads Soegaard: Yeah. And that’s because the prices are so quite extremely inflated which I, because of the mission of Interaction Design Foundation of course I’m biased, so that’s the whole thing we’re battling against is that these prices should not be so high. We use technology to become so scalable and so affordable that this should not be … Which course should I choose because it such a vast investment and then I’ll be out of money after that, so you the courses should be more affordable.

Mads Soegaard: So in this particular person’s situation I would say it’s not about one course, it’s about strengthening your muscles in different areas. That’s our whole editorial strategy in Interaction Design Foundation. In order to retain members over five or seven years in our community is to offer I think we have 30 plus courses, that are very specialized in each of their areas because that’s really how I think you should go about learning. It’s just to continuously train your muscles in different ways. So if you go to a gym and just do the same thing over again, you won’t really progress. But you need to train your mental muscles in different ways. So I would say take lots of courses. But find the best ones.

Hawk: Right. So maybe start at a low price point, look online and take a whole lot of courses in very disparate and different kind of … Just little parts of our discipline until you find something that you connect with. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Mads Soegaard: Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You can also go … Find some interesting and wonderful books. And the thing about books is that it will require a lot of self-discipline in order to put that interaction because it’s this thing of if you’re just passively absorbing a book and like, “Oh, this is a wonderful idea, a wonderful idea”, it can create that illusion that I warned against earlier, the illusion of learning whereas you really need to be like, okay, take your pen and your paper or go into the world and try to really apply this knowledge that you have from this wonderful book. So it does require more discipline.

Mads Soegaard: For a course, for example, the Interaction Design Foundation or other course providers, you have a bit more structure because then they’re like, “Hey, you need to enter these quizzes”, or answer. We have grading by instructors, so you need to answer open-ended questions or quizzes. The instructor will then rate them from one to 10 and that’ll be part of how you progress towards your course certificate. So in an online medium you can create a bit more structure around your learning so that we’re gently pushing you into a structure so you don’t have to have as much self-discipline as you do with a book.

Mads Soegaard: I then say, still you need quite a bit of discipline or self-discipline to do online learning, but self-discipline can be learned. So that’s it. It can actually be trained and learned. But still, when you’re on your mobile phone or on your desktop computer, it’s easy to just switch over. “Let’s just see what’s going on here on social media”, and then you’re distracted, whereas if you’re in a physical classroom, then you’re locked inside the room. You can’t escape. You may have your mobile phone and can go on social media on that, but you’re locked in a room. So that, I guess, is also the spectrum that you’re in. The pros and cons spectrum of books, online courses and physical classroom based classes is that the degree to which you have a scaffold or structure around you.

Mads Soegaard: In a classroom, you can actually have little self discipline because you’re locked in the room and the instructor will look at you and say, “Wake up”, whereas online courses you have some structure but of course, it’s easy to just switch over to social media, and in a book, it’s also easy to get distracted so …

Mads Soegaard: That comes back to then, you need to know yourself and how you are with regards to self-discipline. So when you’re choosing your education, then of course you need to keep in mind not only … Yeah, so you need to know yourself when you’re choosing a particular style of learning with the added note that self-discipline can be learned. So you don’t need to say, “Well okay, I’m really easily distracted so I should pay $40,000 US dollars per year to go to school because then I have a classroom based model where I’m locked in a room and then that’s better for me”, because then … Yeah, that’s a huge investment. So shouldn’t you perhaps then train your self-discipline instead of … Then you’ll save the $40,000 US dollars and maybe that’s better for you in the long term.

Hawk: Sure. So experiment I guess, is probably the answer. True. Alright, I’ve got another one to throw at you. So again, from YouTube, Ina asks, “I really want to transition into UX, but I’m coming from a non-designer, a non-tech background. Do I need a proper qualification? Do I need a university degree or a bootcamp like General Assemb.ly or CareerFoundry?” What’s the best way for somebody coming from a completely non-design, non-tech background to break into UX?

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, that’s a super interesting question.

Hawk: I hear that one a lot.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah. Exactly. So I return to my first point in this Q & A and it’s doing, doing, doing because there aren’t really a sure fire way of getting a job or doing the right thing because then of course, you would have written that article. It’s like, “Here’s the recipe for success. Step one, step two.” It really depends on a lot of factors.

Mads Soegaard: For example, as I just mentioned in my previous answer: your learning style. So how do you actually learn? Do you really need to be in a classroom or do you have that self assurance that you can sort of learn by yourself through self-discipline and going out there and doing, doing, doing? So that’s one consideration in that big puzzle.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, so I would say again, it’s about doing. So taking courses where you can do practical exercises and then doing these things and not being shy. So let’s say that this person obviously hits this conundrum again that in order to break into UX design or in order to get a job, you need experience. In order to get experience … How does a person do that? I would say the way I would do it is yes, simply start doing. So I would do a usability test with my friends, I would do customer journey maps on some made up project, I would offer my help to any type of company who are willing to take me on but still have interesting colleagues and ambitious colleagues and then I would work my butt off just to create results.

Mads Soegaard: At the same time in my spare time, I would take online courses and try to take all those practical exercises into my perhaps unpaid job. At the same time I would start building a portfolio and then you don’t need to be like … You shouldn’t be shy about this because you can build a portfolio without having a job. So you could do a usability test on some of your friends and then you can include a snippet of that one minute or 30 seconds of that usability study or test and you can say, “Here. I’ve done a usability test.”

Mads Soegaard: So you can actually build a portfolio without having a job. And I’m not saying that you should then lie and then say, “Hey, I’m a usability test expert”, when in reality you did, you did some tests with your friends. So you, of course, shouldn’t lie. Any type of healthy relationship is based on truthful calibration of expectations. But what you are showing in your portfolio then is that you show initiative and you show a tendency toward action. It’s that, “Hey. I’m passionate about this. I’m doing it. I’m doing something. I’m just trying, trying, trying.”

Mads Soegaard: And employers or future colleagues will recognize that drive, that passion because you know that even if that person has only done a usability test on three of his or her friends, then that drive and passion of like, I want to do this … If you release that into a company then of course, in two years, one year, two months, that knowledge and that skill set will progress and all of a sudden that person will in a few years have become a usability expert. That drive and that passion.

Mads Soegaard: So to answer the question, so to answer more directly this question from your reader, I would say if UX design and design is your passion then just start doing concrete things and then I’m sure it will work out. Don’t worry about if you come from some other background. People have come from accounting and then found out, “Oh my god. I went into accounting because my parents thought it would be a really good thing to do and I could work with a big brand and become an accountant but then I’ve just found out that it made me die slowly inside and then I found this wonderful thing called design and wow.”

Mads Soegaard: So that person should not be apologetic for you know, “Oh, I’m a trained accountant.” Yeah. But that person should say, “Wow, I’m a trained accountant so I’m trained and I’m good at rigid thinking patterns”, because that’s also essential for when you get into implementation and programming, “But then I found this passion and now I’m just working my butt off in order to acquire more and more skills and more and more knowledge in design.” People will see that and recognize that and see he’s completely hire-able despite not having a “Hey, I’ve got a design degree from this super fancy and very expensive university.”

Hawk: Brilliant.

Mads Soegaard: I would say don’t be apologetic about it, don’t be shy, just do, do, do and just … Yeah. Follow your path.

Hawk: I like it. Okay, I’m going to segue slightly. The next question is another from our reader Sirvay, and it is: How can we address the gap between bootcamps and real life industry expectations?

Mads Soegaard: Super interesting question also. I’d say that that gap is actually a healthy sign because the gap is all about you may go into this bootcamp. It maybe takes a couple of weeks or a couple of months and perhaps it’s even actually quite costly, perhaps even very, very costly and then you may work on your portfolio and then you pitch to an employer after that and then they’re like, “Yeah, but …” You may have problems getting a job. So I think the problem here …

Mads Soegaard: I think that it’s perhaps a healthy sign of employers being critical of bootcamps and I think it’s a matter of the calibration of expectations not being well adequate because you can’t expect to become a User Experience Designer from scratch, “we’ll take you through a 10 week course and you’ll end up completely hire-able” and so on. If you think of it in terms of just imagine if we [set that to 00:35:46] people who wanted to become doctors. “Just take this course and then after that you’ll be able to cure patients.” Yeah, but are really sure that you’re ready to take on that?

Mads Soegaard: Do we really want this person to work on a product used by millions and millions of people after 10 weeks and take be really influential in key business decisions? Because that is what a User Experience will be doing. It’s all about the users and the customers and how we interact with them. This is a business critical thing. So you can’t gain that knowledge in 10 weeks. At the other … So, right after saying that, I should also say that that does not mean that you should then be scared. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Hey, but I’m a marketing person and I just want to break into UX design and I have no knowledge and no skills in User Experience”, or whatever. You shouldn’t be afraid and then think, [inaudible 00:36:48] expensive school or something.

Mads Soegaard: That’s not what I’m saying either. I’m just saying it’s the calibration of expectations. The person who asked the question just before, if that person has that drive and passion and so on, I would absolutely definitely hire that person to become a User Experience designer with the note that the person needs to gain more muscle and to do more training so the person would not be released into business critical decisions right away. I think it’s just a matter of calibrating … Yeah. I thought I had another point. I can’t remember.

Hawk: Oh goodness. Would you like me to jump into the next question?

Mads Soegaard: Hold on. Just bootcamps and calibration and expectations … Yeah. Let’s go to the next question.

Hawk: Cool. No problem. So the next question-

Mads Soegaard: No, no, no. Sorry.

Hawk: Okay.

Mads Soegaard: Okay, so one point. So for example, in the Interaction Design Foundation we have one course called “Become a User Experience Designer from Scratch”, and it probably takes a couple of months. The point is that after those couple of months, you will not have become a User Experience designer because one of the key points of the course is to take you through a helicopter ride above the landscape of User Experience and expose you to the various self-disciplines and components and so on and it will have lots of links to other courses and some material from other courses also so you get that breadth and understanding of: wow, there’s a lot here going on and I need to strengthen my muscles in these areas. [inaudible 00:38:40] fooling around the User Experience Designer. So that is again, it just touched upon this point of calibration of expectations. It’s a matter of you not being like a fully-fledged doctor able to cure patients after 10 weeks or two months … But that you have a path set out ahead of you.

Hawk: Sure. No, that makes sense. Cool, alright. I’ve got two related questions, both from YouTube, one from Catherine, which says there’s obviously new technologies every day: artificial intelligence, virtual reality … “How can courses help keep design students up to date with these technologies and do it at the same time. So how do we study for technologies like AI, future technologies? So how can we stay constant, how can we relevant, how can we stay up to date with these really fast changing technologies?”

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, so I would say that it’s a matter of aiming for timeless knowledge because there are certain constants that are, for example, the human [perceptual 00:39:53] system, certain cognitive patterns. So there’s certain things that are timeless and stable across a millennia.

Mads Soegaard: And then, of course, there are some fast-paced changes in technology, and then you have AI, and then you have virtual reality and so on, so technology very fast, but that’s actually okay.

Mads Soegaard: Because, for example, storytelling, how to tell a story, how to, like, narrative thread in a story, that hasn’t really fundamentally changed over a huge span of time.

Mads Soegaard: And when you design augmented reality/virtual reality, it’s also about storytelling.

Mads Soegaard: So, just like when you make a wire frame for a website, you’re constructing some paths and you’re trying to mold or shape the behavior of your users or customers along some sort of path or storyline and you’re trying to make them take a left here or right there based on a certain choice and so on.

Mads Soegaard: And so those storytelling structures are not irrespective of the medium but they still … that knowledge that you have around storytelling, narrative threads, wire frames, will also be applicable in virtual reality/augmented reality.

Mads Soegaard: But that’s the key thing, just go for the more stable and timeless knowledge, because otherwise you’ll get stressed and confused and it’s like, “Oh, wow, we have this new AI coming out, what does that do to UX? Am I prepared for that? Is my knowledge getting outdated?” And then you hit the classic fear of missing out [inaudible 00:41:59] and then you’ll find yourself scrambling across medium articles, then you’re wasting your time all of a sudden instead of just taking deep breath, taking two steps back, and just “Okay, what’s at play here? What’s going on? Oh, right, there’s some common themes here, like storytelling.”

Mads Soegaard: Okay, then better to learn those fundamental things as opposed to having that fear of missing out.

Mads Soegaard: And, again, I’m biased because that’s our editorial principal [inaudible 00:42:33] is time is knowledge, so, that’s the backdrop.

Hawk: So, the next question is one that’s important to me because it’s one that I get asked a lot in the UX Mastery community and it’s a difficult one for me to answer because it really personal for people, and that is one end of the spectrum, James from YouTube was asking, do companies in general still like to hire junior designers and what’s the market looking for new guys?

Hawk: But the thing that I’m passionate about is the other end of the spectrum, I’m a 52 year old x-ray technician with no degree or formal training and I’ve been told it’s unrealistic for me to try and switch careers at this late stage due to my age.

Hawk: So what are your thoughts? Where is the market laying as far as age and experience goes? Is the room for everybody or is there not? What are your thoughts?

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, first of all, of course, it really depends on the individual employer. Some people will not like people who have red hair and thus they won’t hire people with red hair, or black skin, or whatever it is, or a certain age level.

Mads Soegaard: So, you’ll always bump into those things. It’s like “Oh, wow, you’ve got a few stint of gray hair, oh, that’s really bad, so we won’t hire you.”

Mads Soegaard: Or the visa versa, it’s like “Oh, no, no. You’re not 40 yet, then you’re not smart.”

Mads Soegaard: Ignoring all of that, then I’d say it’s about passion and it’s about doing.

Mads Soegaard: So, I know people who have been really, really, really old at the age of 21 and I know people who are, like, 60 or 70 who are not old.

Mads Soegaard: I know the cliché that age is just a number, but I really, really, really believe that. So, if this particular person, your reader, is 52 I’d say that’s completely irrelevant. It’s the passion. It’s his or her passion, and his or her self discipline and that forward motion that really counts.

Mads Soegaard: So I’d just say go for it. When you ask an employer if, if you’re sane is perhaps not the right word. But if you as an employer see someone with passion and drive you’d be crazy not to try to leverage that because when you have a person who’s truly passionate about what he or she is doing, has self discipline, self reliance, and wants to work his or her butt off, not in terms of the absolute number of hours, but really just work intensely because of that passion, then of course, you should align your business objectives with that person’s passion, and then magic happens and love and rainbows and everything else.

Mads Soegaard: And similarly, I’d say as a junior, then it’s about, again, the passion, and doing, and energy, because these two people, let’s say the 21 year old junior person and the 52 year old person, they both feel a bit like insecure, perhaps, but [inaudible 00:46:08] so I compensate and that is what will get you the job, or, make you more happy in life in general and all sorts of other personal and professional goals.

Hawk: So be true to yourself.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, exactly, work hard, be nice to people and just go for your passions.

Mads Soegaard: It sounds so simple, but, that’s really really [inaudible 00:46:37].

Hawk: Sure. I agree with you.

Hawk: A bit of a philosophical segue, now, perhaps. Maybe not. Do you think we need an accreditation system? This is from INL Forums. Do you think we need an accreditation system where UX becomes an accredited profession and that we work under a code of ethics or a code of conduct? Do you think that it needs to be more formalized, I guess is what he’s asking.

Mads Soegaard: Yeah, super interesting and very complex and can get into the philosophical. It can become a philosophical segue.

Mads Soegaard: I would say, do we need some sort of accreditation or certification … okay, so, if we compare ourselves to doctors, doctors have the human body, psyche and it’s remained fairly stable over the past ten thousand years.

Mads Soegaard: So if you have a more stable and fixed object of study or object of object of practice. And of course our knowledge and skills around the human body [inaudible 00:47:47] changes all the time and it gets expanded and so I’m not saying that a doctor now versus 200 years ago is exactly the same thing. But still you have something that’s more stable.

Mads Soegaard: On the other side, let’s look at a user experience. That is constantly changing due to a number of reasons. And I’m not actually talking about technology. Of course there’s AI and VR and bigger more processing power, whatever, is changing on the technological side, but there’s also other things at play here.

Mads Soegaard: There’s the actual definition of what we are as a discipline. So, if you google the definition of UX Design you’ll probably find two trillion search results and it’s because these terms are changing all the time.

Mads Soegaard: For example, [inaudible 00:48:42] term because there’s some institutions, some companies, some individuals who have an interest in promoting that term and then they’re very successful in doing that. Then it suddenly pops up, maybe go away again, maybe it will replace some of the meanings of user experience.

Mads Soegaard: The fancy word is social constructionism. That reality, social reality, is continually constructed and reconstructed all the time based on all the conversations we’re having, the books that are being produced and so on.

Mads Soegaard: So user experience, like any other term, well actually like most other terms, is inherently instable over time.

Mads Soegaard: The question on certification or accreditation is sort of a symptome of that. It’s like “This is so unstable. What is it? Can we please have some stability, people?”

Mads Soegaard: So the question is that type of symptom. I really don’t know what to answer because yes, it would be really nice with some stability, but then on the other hand then we’re trying to make something that’s inherently instable, because it is social constructionism in action, we’re trying to make something inherently instable stable.

Mads Soegaard: Also, it depends, for example if you go certain places globally, you’ll find local definitions of things. So if you go to the San Francisco Bay Area, interaction design is “Oh, that’s this.” And then at the same time I’m at a conference in Berlin, and then there’s a complete different perception of that. And who’s right and who’s wrong? That’s really difficult to answer.

Mads Soegaard: So, case in point, when I founded the Interaction Design Foundation in 2002, interaction design as a term was, in my opinion, more appropriate than user experience and it was getting more popular, also. So if I were to re-found the Interaction Design Foundation today I probably would call it the User Experience Foundation. Which is quite annoying because, like, “Can we please have some stability around these terms?” [inaudible 00:51:23]

Mads Soegaard: This was like an incredibly vague answer to that question.

Hawk: You said something about the state of play, to be honest, and that’s potentially [inaudible 00:51:36] question was posed.

Mads Soegaard: And also another case in point, for example, in the Interaction Design Foundation we say that our course certificates are industry recognized because more and more employers recognize them because we’ve been around for so long and are OCD about the quality of our courses.

Mads Soegaard: But we never use the word certification. That’s the reason for that, it’s a dangerous word because certification, what does that actually mean? It brings up this whole discussion which is a wonderful discussion, but may also lead down to confusion and a wrong calibration of expectations and we don’t want that.

Hawk: We’ve probably only got time for one more, but possibly two. I’ve got two related ones [inaudible 00:52:30] forums.

Hawk: The first part of the question is how does one get around this issue of having to already have worked in UX in order to work in UX so [inaudible 00:52:43] I need experience in order to get a job? Chris asks a similar question, but maybe with the answer involved, he sees a lot of talk about formal internships or apprenticeships. Is that the best way to get experience?

Hawk: So, I guess, what would you recommend was the best way to get experience partly to build a portfolio, partly to have that step in the door, partly to say “I know what I’m doing,” what’s your thoughts there?

Mads Soegaard: It’s a super good question because let’s say that I’m at square one and I want to really, really become a great, fantastic user experience designer and I have limited funds like everyone else on this planet. And then, where should I invest my funds? What should I do with my time and so on. So, I’d say yes, you could pay forty thousand US dollars per year to an expensive design program at a university or you could also say “Hey, I’m investing my own time, so I’m taking online courses, I’m reading books, and I’m offering my help for free.” So try and get an internship.

Mads Soegaard: And you don’t need an internship at some brand name, like “Okay, I’ve been an intern an Google” or IBM or something because that’s not really … I mean, yeah sure you have their brand name to put on your [inaudible 00:54:14]].

Mads Soegaard: If you can find some talented people who are ambitious in a small agency or in a company who’s doing something that’s unrelated to UX design but they know they have a need for UX design and they’re also ambitious, then I would go there and offer my help as an unpaid intern and to see this, that’s like an investment because you can pay forty thousand per year or you can just pay with your own time.

Mads Soegaard: I’d go for the unpaid … doesn’t really matter if it’s paid or unpaid internship, it’s what you want to get out of the internship is not the money, it’s about the more you can work the better. The more you can work your muscles, the better.

Hawk: Right. We lost coverage in the video there for a little bit so we lost a few of the words, but, I think, can I just summarize by saying that you’re saying that an internship’s great, it’s not about the brand, it’s about whatever experience you can get so that may be with a well known brand, but if you can pick up a project for the school up the road that’s equal value it’s more just about flexing your muscles a little bit. Is that fair?

Mads Soegaard: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So pick up that project for your school up the road and just work really hard for them and get a lot of experience under your belt. That’s what it’s all about.

Mads Soegaard: You could also try to go for an internship with Google, but then it’s just a matter of how hard you can work and how much you can work on something that will build your knowledge and skills.

Hawk: Sure. We’re approaching the top of the hour [inaudible 00:56:07]. DO you want to get a couple of minutes to [inaudible 00:56:14] and maybe tell people how they can get in touch with, how can they find out more bout [inaudible 00:56:19] how they can get in touch you maybe they could connect on the forums?

Mads Soegaard: Absolutely. First of all, thanks to you, Hawk, and [inaudible 00:56:30] for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure. It’s super early in the morning in Denmark, and I’m full of energy now after all these questions and full of positivity, so that’s really a fantastic sign.

Mads Soegaard: I just really, really hope for all the people who are listening that they hopefully become more and more interested in user experience and that they’ll just follow that passion and just really, really go all in on it, because user experience design in general just has an enormous potential not only for your professional lives because it’s a fantastic career, that’s the more ecocentric perspective, but also simply for the sake of the human race, so that’s the altruistic perspective.

Mads Soegaard: Design can really change the world. If you just think of all your frustration with ticket vending machines on a busy train station or something, just imagine if there were more user experience designers, usability people, [inaudible 00:57:35] designers, [inaudible 00:57:37].

Hawk: I’ve lost your video all together, Mads.

Hawk: You’re back. We lost you for a minute there. We’ve lost quality of video, so that’s probably …

Mads Soegaard: I think my quality is getting a bit bad.

Hawk: Yeah, it is. So, I’ll take the opportunity to wrap up, perhaps, and just to say thank you so much for your time. I know it’s really early and you’re energized. It’s getting pretty late for me, but I’m also energized. A lot of the questions you’ve addressed tonight are questions that, oh, this morning, sorry, are questions that I get asked an awful lot in our community, so it’s really awesome to hear your thoughts and someone that spends their day on most in this world. So I really appreciate your time.

Hawk: For everyone that’s listening, please check out the Interaction Design Foundation for Mads’s contact details.

Hawk: Please check out UX Mastery, community.uxmastery.com if you’ve got questions there, I will make sure that they get answered either by the community or by myself, or by Mads.

Hawk: But huge thank you for your time, Mads. And it’s been a real pleasure to have your company tonight.

Mads Soegaard: Likewise. Likewise. Thank you so much for having me. And have a wonderful rest of your day.

Hawk: Thanks, there’s not much left of it!

Mads Soegaard: Bye.

Hawk: See ya.

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> A Practical Approach to Getting A UX Education — with Mads Soegaard appeared first on UX Mastery.

]]> https://uxmastery.com/transcript-a-practical-approach-to-getting-a-ux-education/feed/ 0 69849 https://uxmastery.com/transcript-simple-philosophies-for-successfully-delivering-complicated-experiences/ https://uxmastery.com/transcript-simple-philosophies-for-successfully-delivering-complicated-experiences/#respond Thu, 08 Nov 2018 04:06:55 +0000 https://uxmastery.com/?p=69687 Patrick Quattlebaum and Chris Risdon joined Hawk in our Slack channel to talk about some concepts from their book "Orchestrating Experiences". It was an awesome session. Here is the transcript.

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> The simple philosophies for successfully delivering complicated experiences — with Patrick Quattlebaum & Chris Risdon appeared first on UX Mastery.

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Customer experiences are increasingly complicated—with multiple channels, touchpoints, contexts, and moving parts—all delivered by fragmented organizations. How can you bring your ideas to life in the face of such complexity?  Rosenfeld Media – Orchestrating Experiences

We talked through this challenge with Patrick and Chris in our Slack channel today and it was an enlightening session. The questions were excellent, the advice practical and I came away feeling inspired to implement some changes into my own workplace.

If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.

Transcript

hawk

2018-11-07 21:01

Show time

hawk

2018-11-07 21:01

First up, welcome to everyone that’s here.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:01

And a huge thanks for @risdon and @pq185 for giving time and wisdom today so that we can learn

hawk

2018-11-07 21:02

Chris and Patrick crossed our path recently when they published their new book https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/orchestrating-experiences/

risdon

2018-11-07 21:02

Excited to be here!

pq185

2018-11-07 21:02

Hi everyone!

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

Luke wrote a review of it here: https://uxmastery.com/book-review-orchestrating-experiences/
He’s a huge fan.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

Formal intros:

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

Patrick Quattlebaum is a designer and teacher who gets up every morning to bring creativity, rigor, and humanity to problem-solving. He is the co-founder and CEO at Harmonic Design, a consulting firm based in Atlanta, GA, USA. Previously, he was principal designer at studioPQ, Managing Director at Adaptive Path, and Head of Service Design at Capital One.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

An expert in design strategy and service design, Patrick places a premium on pushing design practice to be more value-centered, collaborative, and iterative. He and his co-author, Chris Risdon, share their design philosophy and its practical applications in Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

Chris Risdon is Director of Design for a peer-to-peer carsharing service, Getaround, and co-author of the book Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

Previously, Chris was Head of Behavioral Design for Capital One and a Design Director for Adaptive Path, the pioneering experience design consultancy.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:03

Hello!

hawk

2018-11-07 21:03

Chris has introduced and advanced new methods in design, teaching thousands of design professionals and students. With a focus on designing complicated services and behavioral design, he has been published in a number of blogs, journals and magazines, as well as contributing to a number of books and articles. He’s spoken and taught workshops at conferences such as SxSW, UX Week, and IxDA’s Interaction Conference.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:04

And now I’ll be quiet and let the UXperts speak. Can you give us an intro to the topic please?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:04

Happy too!!

risdon

2018-11-07 21:05

The book we’ve written is fairly comprehensive.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:05

I don’t think we set out to make it so — we were after solving 3 challenges we were seeing in our work.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:06

Across our time together at a couple consultancies, plus in-house at a large financial institution…

risdon

2018-11-07 21:06

First, we noticed more than ever, good design at companies was a team sport.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:06

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/26806707627/in/album-72157668191892598/

risdon

2018-11-07 21:07

Specifically cross-functional. People were in rooms together, who weren’t normally in rooms together, trying to figure out hard customer/user problems. Not just IT, UX, Product, but operations, customer service and other functions across the org.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:07

So the first challenge was the challenge of working collaboratively in this new world — particularly where these groups of people didn’t share the same process or language, etc.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:08

Not to mention work should be fun!

risdon

2018-11-07 21:08

The second challenge we saw was what we were actually designing for. Moving from *just* single touchpoints — say, a single digital product. But instead for *experiences* that spanned time, space, and most importantly different touchpoints and channels. Call centers, digital products, physical environments.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:08

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/41634492722/in/album-72157668191892598/

risdon

2018-11-07 21:09

So we had more complicated experiences, with a collaborative cross-functional teams — those were the first two challenges. Once this group was in a room together solving for these complicated experiences, it brought about the third challenge we wanted to address in the book…

risdon

2018-11-07 21:10

The tools we use. We needed new tools, or to adapt the tools we use, or socialize existing tools with our new partners.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:10

By tools, I mean the methods, or process, or ways we approach solving for various parts of the problems.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:10

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/39867371980/in/album-72157668191892598/

risdon

2018-11-07 21:11

We wanted to address those three problems – and as Patrick chimed in — this needed to feel like a fun, rewarding, way to work, or it just wouldn’t stick.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:12

The companies I’ve worked with talk a lot about being collaborative, creative, and customer-centric… and about solving complex problems. But., they aren’t very good at.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:12

The hardest part was deciding what to include and what not to include, because there are already so many good approaches to solving various challenges in the design process. Determine what to highlight that specifically address those challenges of cross-functional teams, working collaboratively with new shared tools to solve those complex experience challenges.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:13

They just don’t know what it looks like.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:13

Orchestrating Experiences is about changing how we work together and changing how we look at what we are designing together.

jakkii

2018-11-07 21:14

Relatable

risdon

2018-11-07 21:14

One thing I think both Patrick and I are most proud of is, even though there’s a lot of content there, we specifically made it practical — we’ve included specific workshop guides so people can go into rooms with these teams and feel armed with how to facilitate and meet team objectives.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:15

Yes. There are many example of deliverables and artifacts, but our goal was to help you get people in a room (or virutally) and work on these challenges together.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:15

I just stepped out of workshop for this chat in which 10 people from different functions are collaborating for how to create a new service and they need to work differently to pull it off.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:16

We frame any artifact not as a deliverable, but as a tool, and specifically seek to have anything we make (experience map, service blueprint, storyboards) be intended to use as a working tool.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:16

Yes! The workshop I just mentioned is using a journey model to plan out how they will each contribute to each customer moment and the intended outcomes.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:17

How they are making meal together, not each bringing something to the pot luck. :slightly_smiling_face:

risdon

2018-11-07 21:17

The image Patrick posted above — of an experience map with the stickies on it — is an example of this. When we created it, we specifically went through a working session to align on what the opportunities were and what principles should guide different steps in the journey.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:17

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/26806706667/in/album-72157668191892598/

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:18

@risdon – It seems like getting everyone in the same room together for a workshop when working on complicated experiences with a collaborative cross-functional teams seems like the key ingredient to success. I wonder if you could achieve the same success when you work with cross-functional teams that all live remote in different cities… :thinking_face:

hawk

2018-11-07 21:19

Ok – question time! Shoot…

risdon

2018-11-07 21:19

One thing to mention, we specifically wanted to blur the lines between UX, Service Design, and Customer Experience — all have influenced us and have important meaning and roles. In the case of this book, we just wanted to help designers of whatever tribe put these principles into action regardless of affiliation.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:20

And beyond designers. The goal was to propose common frameworks and language for the organization to truly collaborate around the same outcomes for customers, employees, and the business.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:20

Let me see if I’ll do this right…

@sarah.johnston asked… It seems like getting everyone in the same room together for a workshop when working on complicated experiences with a collaborative cross-functional teams seems like the key ingredient to success. I wonder if you could achieve the same success when you work with cross-functional teams that all live remote in different cities…

risdon

2018-11-07 21:22

The short answer yes! It can be a challenge, but definitely doable. We’ve set rooms up to help teams see each other, and had a home-base where the workshop was being facilitated.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:23

One of the keys is for remote participants to be prepped to still don some hands-on activities — such as writing things down on stickies.

glennveugen

2018-11-07 21:23

joining in from Amsterdam, been a while since I attended these talks :slightly_smiling_face:. @risdon @pq185 you mention you encourage the use of your artifacts as tools. How do you ensure these deliverables are actually used in the further stages of a project, i.e. the delivery phase?

tomstuder

2018-11-07 21:23

Do you use any collaborative software/apps to help facilitate workshops?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:23

Another are tools such as Mural (http://mural.co) and other virtual whiteboards, that allow collaboration.

hello207

2018-11-07 21:24

When I’ve done any kind of experience mapping in the past it’s always been with a particular user in mind that’s been backed up with qualitative research. If that kind of research is missing, and all we have is anecdotal experiences with the user is there any value in doing a service blueprint or journey map?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:25

@glennveugen First, we put a lot in the book, but we don’t prescribe that everything we cover needs to be in every project. So first is to make sure you’re only doing (and creating artifacts) that are needed. When someone says, we should do a journey map — ask what the purpose is for? Is it for organizational planning?

andrew.schadendorff

2018-11-07 21:25

@risdon @pq185 the biggest challenge I have at my company is getting stakeholders time and energy. What are your key tips for getting buy in across the organisation and linking these workshops to financial kpis?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:25

Or to understand the experience?

pq185

2018-11-07 21:25

@glennveugen you mention you encourage the use of your artifacts as tools. How do you ensure these deliverables are actually used in the further stages of a project, i.e. the delivery phase?

Often, the artifacts are tested out as a tool before being completed. It’s basically usability and usefulness testing. With experience maps, I often make an initial version, use it in a workshop, refine it, and then distribute with instructions on how to use in strategy and design activities. Testing it out also is a way of teaching people how to use them.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:25

Or to align people to get buy in on doing additonal work. When you determine that you can plan ahead on how you will use it as a tool to be a catalyst for the next steps.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:26

@glennveugen you mention you encourage the use of your artifacts as tools. How do you ensure these deliverables are actually used in the further stages of a project, i.e. the delivery phase?

The other appraoch is to create living documents rather than static ones. I’ve been experiement with digital tools that position blueprints or storyboards as objects that dowstream requirements and design artifacts are connected to.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:27

@hello207 When I’ve done any kind of experience mapping in the past it’s always been with a particular user in mind that’s been backed up with qualitative research. If that kind of research is missing, and all we have is anecdotal experiences with the user is there any value in doing a service blueprint or journey map?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:27

To answer your question @hello207…

zimmerman1181

2018-11-07 21:27

@risdon you said earlier “We frame any artifact not as a deliverable, but as a tool…” could you elaborate on that idea a little bit more, please?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:28

Re: Service Blueprint — yes! Service blueprints aren’t qualitative…they are about what are the processes, people, technology, to support a service. You can always do those, without research.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:29

Re: journey/experience map @hello207 — it is more of a challenge. What you can do is create a “proto” journey map — one framed specifically being from internal knowledge, but not fully fleshed with the qualitative and quantitative data you might need.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:29

And then you use that proto-map to highlight gaps in knowledge, and possibly get buy in to do focused research in that area.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:30

@zimmerman1181 you said earlier “We frame any artifact not as a deliverable, but as a tool…” could you elaborate on that idea a little bit more, please?

pq185

2018-11-07 21:30

@hey the biggest challenge I have at my company is getting stakeholders time and energy. What are your key tips for getting buy in across the organisation and linking these workshops to financial kpis?

When a culture is not used to collaborating, workshops can be challenging. It’s like going to the gym for the first time after sitting on the couch and watching TV for year.

With workshops, you have to design the experience before, during, and after to carefully set expectations on the benefits of blocking out a day and getting away from their devices. You have to ask for feedback throughout the session to ensure people are having a good experience. And then gaving participants help spread the word that’s it worth the time.

I’ve not had to develop specific KPIs. Typically, the word of mouth after a well designed workshop helps get more people interested in being in the next one.

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:31

To piggyback off of this comment, any collaborative software/apps that might help facilitate workshops for remote teams?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:31

I mentioned a bit above @zimmerman1181 — but it’s planning ahead to determine and get alignment on why *exactly* you want to do an exercise that will produce a specific deliverable (why a persona, why a journey map, why a service blueprint), and once you know that, you can plan ahead what type of working session/workshop you might do once that’s produced in order to drive the next phase.

harpo

2018-11-07 21:31

To the above point, I work closely with engineering folks, and encounter sometimes severe cynicism or resistance to these types of show-and-tell exercises. Some will hate you for forcing them into any new bureaucratic process, they feel are a waste of time thereby undermining your future good will to GSD. How do we demonstrate ROI, or make the case for participation. Does it have to be top-down?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:32

An experience map can help determine where to prioritize opportunities, or define experience principles which will guide new solutions — so if you know your producing an experience map to be a catalyst for those things, you’re using that map as a tool.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:32

@zimmerman1181 you said earlier “We frame any artifact not as a deliverable, but as a tool…” could you elaborate on that idea a little bit more, please?

Often things—maps, blueprints, storyboards—are made to document previous activities, but they are also props to engage stakeholders in downstream activities. So, you have to think about not just how the artifact is used to understand previous thinking, but also as a way to support the next steps of design process.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:34

@harpo – to your question about resistance, it’s a good point. We definitely can’t prescribe a silver bullet for getting buy-in. You have to have people that are at least *a little* receptive to the idea of doing new thins in new ways to get to better outcomes — similarly when teams want to apply new approaches, like Lean, or Dual Track Agile, or JTBD — all new approaches that require buy-in.

dave

2018-11-07 21:34

@risdon @pq185 Have you found that you can apply experience mapping across orgs in all industries? Would it be specific/unique to that industry?

e.g. Non-profit would be different than Oil & Gas corp.

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:34

@harpo I’m having the same problem at my organization… but it’s not just the devs, it’s the product owners that are driving our UX projects that don’t see value in workshops like these. They think it’s a waste of time unless additional requirements come out of them that they haven’t already documented from their “research”.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:35

But, it first has to start with conversations, and then ideally doing something really small, but with a measurable outcome. But I also try to develop a strategy for getting buy-in, give myself a timebox for seeing some results (say 6-9 months, since things can move slowly), and if I don’t get traction, I get a sense of whether this org will ever change. Sometimes change is just slow, other times its hard, and other times it just won’t happen.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:36

@harpo To the above point, I work closely with engineering folks, and encounter sometimes severe cynicism or resistance to these types of show-and-tell exercises. Some will hate you for forcing them into any new bureaucratic process, they feel are a waste of time thereby undermining your future good will to GSD. How do we demonstrate ROI, or make the case for participation. Does it have to be top-down?

To some degree, top down helps not in any particular instance of collaboration, but culturally in that each discipline should be experimenting with its practice to find new ways to be more effective and/or efficient. If there isn’t support/expectation of continually improving how you work, then you do risk resistance when you try to.

The other thing to keep in mind is to be clear about which methods are to support what outcomes. To zoom out and look at the journey of the customer when the product team focuses on one small part does require the right buy in for the value of zooming out.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:37

@harpo if you work in a product-centric environment, then the most important person to get buy-in from is your product manager. If you can find something small, but with a measurable outcome, then they will often buy-in.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:38

@dave Have you found that you can apply experience mapping across orgs in all industries? Would it be specific to that industry? e.g. a non-profit would be different than an Oil & Gas corp.

Experience mapping is a very felxible approach that is about experience over time. As long as you have a person who experience crosses channels and touchpoints and whose context is greater than just the product or service (it always is), then experience mapping can be valuabel exercise.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:38

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/41634480682/in/album-72157668191892598/

risdon

2018-11-07 21:39

@dave Have you found that you can apply experience mapping across orgs in all industries? Would it be specific to that industry? e.g. a non-profit would be different than an Oil & Gas corp.

I think yes, it can be — the key is if there’s a journey to support. For example, pure digital products that want eyeballs — like Twitter, or Slack, etc. — may/may not need a journey map. But things that have operations, or an array of touchpoints (digital app, website, mailed bills, customer service) often can benefit from understanding the experiences people have with the product/service over time. It may not always feel like a linear journey, but it can benefit mapping out what people are thinking, feeling, and doing at different times.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:39

We’re at the end of the question queue. Keep ’em coming.

harpo

2018-11-07 21:39

@risdon I agree with the methodology, I think it’s a positive net result. Just wondering if there are studies that prove it changes culture, in terms of either employee evaluation, or just bottom line profit, or shorter time to market. Thank you for your tips and presentation, good food for thought

pq185

2018-11-07 21:40

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/40784035785/in/album-72157668191892598/

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:40

@risdon – if you ever discover a silver bullet for this, I’d love to know! :wink:

risdon

2018-11-07 21:40

One way, from a UX perspective, is to think about empathy maps — which can often help understand what someone is experience at a certain moment or environment…

risdon

2018-11-07 21:41

Once you know you have many of these (when someone onboards, when someone pays a bill, when someone calls, when someone checks out on the app), you can imagine having some understanding of this string of empathy maps to tell a larger story.

pemarroquin

2018-11-07 21:42

I think workshops should be part of the research, I’ve had experiences where admins and other professionals, share their experiences with much greater details in group. I think is because people like telling stories.

pemarroquin

2018-11-07 21:43

Love that everything discussed is pure design thinking

pq185

2018-11-07 21:43

@pemarroquin yes, and it’s also about systems thinking.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:43

That’s a good question @harpo — I don’t have any studies on that. I have found people love working with each other and enjoy breaking some silos, but no specific studies. Related, there is a book called Outside-In, focused on Customer Experience, that does cite studies showing customer-centric companies do better on the stock market. I cite that a lot for evidence of being more human-centered.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:44

@pemarroquin when you start digging into ecosystems and organizational culture, you’re really going beyond design thinking and crossing over into some other methods and toolkits.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:45

One reason we’re a fan of the journey framing is because it can be this hub of empathy, understanding, and strategy — we have found that different parts of an organization are experts at a distinct part of the system/experience, but everyone lacks a holistic view. When you get people aligned on a journey, they can see the whole, and how their part is connected to, and influences, the other parts.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:46

Outside In –> https://www.amazon.com/Outside-Putting-Customers-Center-Business/dp/1491514221

risdon

2018-11-07 21:46

That will lower silos just a bit.

pemarroquin

2018-11-07 21:46

That’s interesting! @pq185 the need of both worlds so the output’s quality can be assured

pq185

2018-11-07 21:47

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/40784029765/in/album-72157668191892598/

risdon

2018-11-07 21:47

Then when you’ve aligned on what people are experiencing — what people are thinking, feeling, and doing — across that journey, you can zoom in — design a specific touchpoint with better understanding of context, and how it’s connected to what happens before it, and after it…

risdon

2018-11-07 21:47

Or zoom up, and have more insight to help planning, roadmapping, having conversations with parts of the org for solutins that are dependent on each other, or start to transform/change the org.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:48

Depending on what area of focus you are responsible for.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:49

What hasn’t come up yet, is downstream — really getting a shared ‘north star’ — as people need to go to their silos to execute, if you all share in understanding what future you are heading towards, you can make better independent decisions as you go to your respective areas to execute.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:49

levels of zoom is a powerful conceptual model we talk a lot about in the book. our former colleague, Brandon Schauer, wrote a nice medium post about the topic. https://medium.com/@brandonschauer/design-leadership-tricks-zoom-out-1x-33017513c650

hawk

2018-11-07 21:49

I can imagine that sometimes bringing cross functional teams together to collaborate could result in frustrations. e.g. “the developers aren’t really listening to me”. Is the outcome of this kind of work always positive in your experience?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:50

Nice question @hawk If you start asking people to show up to working sessions without getting buy-in or prepping them for what the larger purpose is, then you can really have a negative experience.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:51

One reason to start small, you can tackle principles and activities from the book in as little as two weeks.

pq185

2018-11-07 21:51

@hawk it’s a bell curve with participants. not everyone is an innate or positive collaborator. so you always run into some friction. In the grand scheme of things, collaboration as a skill is more and more expected in organizations. You have to push against the business as usual and keep modeling how we should work. it will be good for your career.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:52

Ok everyone, we have 5 minutes left in the session! (Where has that hour gone?)
Any last questions? Now’s your chance…

pq185

2018-11-07 21:53

@hawk the other thing to keep in mind that collaboration and innovation require different people to participate. it shouldn’t just be product and developers. experiences are bigger than product and technology so it’s best to have other functions involved.

risdon

2018-11-07 21:53

There are also ways to bring people along for the ride. I have been surprised how many developers ask to sit in — as a notetaker — on customer interviews. If they have zero interest, that will tell you a lot. If they are interested, then that’s a great first activity for them to get exposed to this part of the design process, without really affect anything in their day-to-day work.

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:53

How would you recommend bringing cross-functional teams together when those teams work remote in different cities? I feel like that adds to the challenge significantly.

hawk

2018-11-07 21:54

Good question!

hawk

2018-11-07 21:54

My org is fully distributed

innerpeacesjc

2018-11-07 21:55

Thanks for your insights! I was wondering if you have any book recommendations on this topic. Thanks!

zimmerman1181

2018-11-07 21:55

What kind of expectation setting do you do or “pre-work” do you have folks do prior to workshops?

risdon

2018-11-07 21:56

It is definitely a challenge @sarah.johnston — it adds to the difficulty. One way I have started small is to use a tool like Mural to do sprint retros — it gets everyone used to collaborating on a document (or in a virtual space) together, instead of editing a Paper/Google doc, or watching someone update a Confluence page…

pq185

2018-11-07 21:56

@sarah.johnston video meetings with screen sharing is a key. having facilitators in each location also helps. also having people work on paper tools and then sending to one location to print and display; or using tools like Mural for building things together.

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:56

Also, like others that have mentioned in this thread, in addition to dealing with the challenge of working with cross-functional remote teams, I too am dealing with resistance with getting stakeholders to participate in collaboration activities such as workshops. Our product owners think workshops like journey mapping and especially empathy mapping are a waste of time :disappointed:

risdon

2018-11-07 21:57

As they do something small in that virtual space, it won’t be so abstract to say you’re going to review a journey map there, and everyone will label what they see as an opportunity area, and then to do a prioritization on opportunity areas (as an example of something I’ve done recently)

pq185

2018-11-07 21:57

@sarah.johnston
REMOTE WORKSHOPS
Before moving on to the last workshop of the book, I’d like to put in a good word for remote workshops. While it’s more effective to get people in a room together to collaborate, your timeline or budget may not accommodate this idea. Here are a few tips when you need to go remote:
•
Keep it hands on. While remote collaboration tools (in which you type and move objects around digitally) have some benefits, they lack the tactile interactions that come with analog tools. A better approach is to use video to see one another and show your work, while still having people work through exercises with paper tools.
•
Give yourself more time for activities. Everything takes longer to do in remote sessions due to lagged communications and synthesis steps that require more time in this format. You may have to split what would be one in-person workshop into a couple of shorter sessions to keep peak focus, energy, and attention.
•
Design templates. Without you in the room, people need more instruction and structure to work effectively. For this reason, avoid blank sticky notes as much as possible. Design simple templates with instructions that help people understand the form their ideas should be documented in.
•
Leverage mobile phones or scanners. Many ideation methods follow a generation and then evaluation cadence. In remote sessions, have participants work individually and then send in photos or scanned documents of their work. Give them a break, and then magically print and cut their work and place it on a large board. You can then walk through the items on camera, moving and organizing them as people give input and see the results.
•
Train cofacilitators. If possible, assign and prep cofacilitators at each stakeholder location.

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:58

@pq185 – Thanks for the tip. I feel like we need to hone in on a good collaboration video sharing software that aids collaboration and do testing prior to make it easier for remote teammates to participate in the workshop activities.

zimmerman1181

2018-11-07 21:58

other than their’s of course. Haha. :joy:

pemarroquin

2018-11-07 21:59

Nice @pq185 ! :ok_hand::skin-tone-2::clap::skin-tone-2::clap::skin-tone-2:

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 21:59

@pq185 – Thanks for providing this info!

risdon

2018-11-07 21:59

I wish I had a silver bullet for that @sarah.johnston I feel your pain. I’ve been fortunate to have success with this, but I haven’t had success every time. Earlier I mentioned, you likely need to define a strategy for getting people to buy into it, and give yourself a timeframe. 6 months? 12? you’ll determine. There are cases where an org just isn’t receptive to change. You need buy-in *somewhere* — the middle (product managers, team leads, etc.) or from the top. You try small, with little impact to the status quo, and if you can’t get traction over a certain time, there is a point where the org may just not accept that change.

hawk

2018-11-07 22:00

Ok team, we have time for Yancy’s question and then we’ve hit the top of the hour!

zimmerman1181

2018-11-07 22:01

I’m also ok if you just hit up @innerpeacesjc’s question about book recommendations.

pq185

2018-11-07 22:01

@zimmerman1181 What kind of expectation setting do you do or “pre-work” do you have folks do prior to workshops?

It depends on the session, but a minimum is prepping them for what inputs are being leveraged for the session. Distributing prior research, for example. Sometimes, I also assign so solo activities to bring to the session. Such as bringing in ideas based on a prompt.

sarah.johnston

2018-11-07 22:01

@risdon – That’s the sad truth!

pq185

2018-11-07 22:02

Book recommendations:
Meeting Design
Service Design Thinking
Service Design Doing

risdon

2018-11-07 22:02

Living in Information (Jorge Arango)

pq185

2018-11-07 22:03

Especially https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/meeting-design/

pq185

2018-11-07 22:03

Given all the questions about creating engaging sessions!

risdon

2018-11-07 22:03

I’ve got one more tip for getting buy-in…

hawk

2018-11-07 22:03

We had Jorge in this channel last week.

hawk

2018-11-07 22:04

The transcript of that session is here https://uxmastery.com/transcript-living-in-information/

risdon

2018-11-07 22:05

If you’re working with product people, they are often data centric. If you’re expecting them to buy into your human-centered tolls and processes, you should meet them halfway, and buy into their data analytics. Bone up on data analysis and business intelligence, so you can speak their language, and they will likely relate to you and see you aren’t saying that they’re doing something wrong and you want to introduce something right, but that you both share in expanding your toolkit for better outcomes.

hawk

2018-11-07 22:05

Excellent tip!

hawk

2018-11-07 22:06

Thanks so much for that (and all the other wisdom shared today).

hawk

2018-11-07 22:06

It’s been an honour to have you both here.

hawk

2018-11-07 22:06

I’ve learned a lot.

pq185

2018-11-07 22:06

Ok gang, I have to get back to a workshop

risdon

2018-11-07 22:06

I enjoyed this a lot!

harpo

2018-11-07 22:06

Thank you!

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> The simple philosophies for successfully delivering complicated experiences — with Patrick Quattlebaum & Chris Risdon appeared first on UX Mastery.

Jorge explained that over the past couple of decades we’ve been moving many of our key social interactions from the places where we have experienced them in the past — physical environments — to a new type of environment: one we enter through these “small glass rectangles we carry about in our pockets”.

In Jorge’s words, those of us who design these new “user experiences” have greater responsibility — and greater agency — than designers who’ve come before. As such designers, Jorge urged us to think about _How might we design information environments that better support our needs as a society in the long term?_

If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.

Transcript

hawk

2018-10-18 22:03

First up, thanks so much for your time today @jarango – we’re lucky to have you

jarango

2018-10-18 22:03

Thanks @hawk! I’m excited to be here.

hawk

2018-10-18 22:03

The formal intro: Jorge Arango is an information architect and strategic designer. He partners with product, design, and innovation leaders to create digital places that make people smarter. In addition to his consulting practice, Jorge also teaches, writes, and speaks at global design conferences.

hawk

2018-10-18 22:03

Jorge is the author of Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places. You can find it on Rosenfeld Media or Amazon.

hawk

2018-10-18 22:03

https://bit.ly/livingininformation

hawk

2018-10-18 22:04

https://amzn.to/2tfNRvH

hawk

2018-10-18 22:04

And that’s the basis of our talk for today.

hawk

2018-10-18 22:04

@jarango over to you. Give us some context around the book and the topic.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:04

Thanks

jarango

2018-10-18 22:05

And thanks to everyone who’s sharing this space with us.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:06

Let me start by introducing myself. My background is in architecture (as in the design of buildings.) But I’ve been in (what we now call) UX for almost 25 years.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:08

Back in the mid-1990s a book came into my life that changed the course of my career. It was Richard Saul Wurman’s _Information Architects_. https://www.amazon.com/Information-Architects-Richard-Saul-Wurman/dp/1888001380/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539900476&sr=8-2&keywords=information+architects

jarango

2018-10-18 22:08

The cover of that book has a definition of what an information architect is that resonated with me.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:09

However, the content of the book wasn’t exactly what I was into at the time.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:10

The book highlighted people from various fields who were “making the complex clear.”

jarango

2018-10-18 22:10

I was designing websites at the time. The connection between designing websites and making the complex clear was obvious, and there were some folks featured in the book who were doing that.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:11

However, a couple of years later another book came out with a similar title which was much closer to what I was doing.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:11

_Information Architecture for the World Wide Web_: https://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-World-Wide-Web/dp/1565922824/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539900688&sr=8-2&keywords=information+architecture+for+the+world+wide+web

jarango

2018-10-18 22:12

1998. Twenty years ago!

jarango

2018-10-18 22:13

In any case, I identified much more closely with the focus of this book: it had some of the stuff Wurman was talking about, but applying it to the work I was doing.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:13

Information architecture became the focus of my career.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:14

(Sidebar: A few years ago I had the privilege of collaborating with Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville on producing the fourth edition of the polar bear book.)

jarango

2018-10-18 22:15

In any case, I’ve done most of my work in Panama (where I’m originally from). A few years ago, my family and I decided to move to northern California. Before the move, a friend from the IA community said, “You know, IA isn’t talked about much here.”

jarango

2018-10-18 22:15

I was flabbergasted.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:16

How could this be? This is where the digital systems that are turning the world upside down are being built!

jarango

2018-10-18 22:16

Fast forward a few years…

jarango

2018-10-18 22:17

In the fall of 2016 I gave two keynote presentations in a three week period. The first was in Santiago, Chile, and the second was in Rome. The week between these two trips was when the U.S. Presidential election was decided.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:18

It was a very interesting time.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:19

That summer, the U.K. had voted to leave the European Union. A momentous decision!

jarango

2018-10-18 22:21

Regardless of where you stand politically, it’s pretty clear that something disconcerting has happened to our ability to hold civic discourse.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:21

Are you with me so far?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:22

Here’s the thing.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:22

I thought I left architecture 25 years ago. But over time it’s become clear to me that I never did.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:24

Over the past couple of decades we’ve been moving many of our key social interactions from the places where our species has experienced them thus far — physical environments — to a new type of environment: one we enter through these small glass rectangles we carry about in our pockets.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:25

We are having this conversation in such an environment.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:25

It’s an interesting thing.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:26

In any case, I’m not here to teach you marketable skills. :slightly_smiling_face: My aim is to get you to understand what you do a bit differently. To reframe the work.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:27

Because software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen has said. And those of us who design “user experiences” have greater responsibility — and greater agency — than designers who’ve come before.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:28

So I want to share with you the question that drives my work (and my new book): _How might we design information environments that better support our needs as a society in the long term?_

jarango

2018-10-18 22:29

It’s pretty clear that “move fast and break things” isn’t doing it.

rvaelle

2018-10-18 22:29

:+1:

treyroady

2018-10-18 22:30

It becomes “break people” after a bit, doesn’t it?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:30

It this was a presentation, I’d need a drink of water about now.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:30

:slightly_smiling_face:

jarango

2018-10-18 22:30

In any case, you won’t be surprised to learn that I think that information architecture holds good answers to this question.

hawk

2018-10-18 22:31

Would you like us to throw some questions at you?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:31

Happy to entertain questions at any time.

lukcha

2018-10-18 22:31

True dat

hawk

2018-10-18 22:32

Great. you heard the man!

treyroady

2018-10-18 22:32

What are the 3 biggest things that information architecture has leverage on improving for society?

treyroady

2018-10-18 22:32

:sunglasses:

jarango

2018-10-18 22:32

@treyroady that’s an excellent question

jarango

2018-10-18 22:33

There are two areas of focus that information architects (and architects before them) are particularly adept at: structures and systems.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:34

Thinking structurally and systemically is essential if you are to minimize the risk of having to face unintended consequences.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:35

There’s a third area of focus which IAs haven’t paid as much attention to in the past — something I’m hoping to change. And that’s sustainability.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:35

Structures and systems change over time. We want them to evolve in ways that help them serve our needs. That requires that we start thinking sustainably.

rvaelle

2018-10-18 22:36

Can you give an example?

crystal

2018-10-18 22:37

This is especially true twitch AI coming into the picture

crystal

2018-10-18 22:37

I’ve heard it described as a move from taxonomies to ontologies regarding ia

jarango

2018-10-18 22:37

Let me dive a bit deeper before giving examples.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:37

Are you familiar with Stewart Brand’s concept of pace layers?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:38

This is a fascinating — and important — idea: some things in the world are composed of things that change at different rates, some faster than others.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:38

It’s true of buildings (as Brand pointed out in his book _How Buildings Learn_.)

cboyer

2018-10-18 22:39

IA has always felt divergent -> convergent and top down. Are there any tools for architects in recognizing patterns and guiding systems in machine learning?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:39

It’s also true of civilizations (what the diagram above is about.)

cboyer

2018-10-18 22:39

I recognize this is probably too big a question :slightly_smiling_face:

jarango

2018-10-18 22:39

@cboyer that’s an important observation. We’ll get to it.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:41

For the person who expressed confusion at the diagram above, perhaps this one is easier to grok:

treyroady

2018-10-18 22:41

Well, *I’m* certainly interested.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:41

That’s from Brand’s _How Buildings Learn_.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:41

The idea is that buildings are composed of layers that change at different rates.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:42

The site (the ground) the building is built on changes more slowly than services (like plumbing, for example.)

jarango

2018-10-18 22:42

“Stuff” is things like furniture. Super easy and cheap to move around.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:42

In any case, there are things in the world that change like this.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:43

Understanding this is important, especially if we’re aiming to make things that support our needs in the long term.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:43

In the first pace layer model I posted, the slowest changing layer is labeled “Nature.” Think our biological composition. It changes very slowly!

jarango

2018-10-18 22:44

Whereas something like fashion or art change very quickly.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:44

In the middle you have things like governance structures, infrastructure, and commerce.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:44

All changing at different rates.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:45

Brand offers a great insight here that can help us design things that support our needs better in the long term…

jarango

2018-10-18 22:46

The civilizations that last are the ones that strike a good balance between the fast-changing layers at the top and the slow changing layers at the bottom. This is because _the fast changing layers are where civilizations learn new things, and the slow changing layers are where they remember the things that are worth while_. The ones that stand the test of time. (Literally.)

jarango

2018-10-18 22:46

With me so far?

treyroady

2018-10-18 22:47

But what about the interaction between governance, infrastructure, and commerce? Could you say that our governance shift is due to a large shift in infrastructure and commerce as well?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:47

They all interrelate with each other.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:48

We’re living in a period when many of these layers are changing faster than before and going through tremendous disruptions.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:48

I’d love to dive deeper into that, but I have another model to share with you.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:49

This is a pace layer model for what we call “UX design.”

jarango

2018-10-18 22:50

As with Brand’s model, the fastest changing layer is the one on top.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:50

That’s what we usually work on. You can think of it as UI.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:50

Buttons, screens, voice interactions, etc.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:51

You will notice I’ve separated structure from form.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:51

There’s a reason for that.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:51

As with buildings, structure in our work tends to change more slowly that the surface design of UIs.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:52

When I worked on the fourth polar bear book, I had to go through the entire book updating the examples. Some of those screenshots were a decade old. The UIs had changed a lot. But when you looked at the navigation bars, you could recognize that they were the same structure.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:53

In any case, the real power resides in the lower — slower — layers.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:53

As designers, we must be cognizant of the model, and understand what the role of our work is vis-a-vis the real power that drives it.

hawk

2018-10-18 22:54

@jarango Before we run out of time can we jump back and revisit @cboyer’s question:
IA has always felt divergent -> convergent and top down. Are there any tools for architects in recognizing patterns and guiding systems in machine learning?

jarango

2018-10-18 22:54

Yes.

cboyer

2018-10-18 22:54

For those of us who have have seen the cycles, this is very true.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:54

Thanks for bringing it back

jarango

2018-10-18 22:55

The reason I wanted to share the model was because we need to start thinking of things like machine learning in terms of structure and form, and what those structures and forms are in service to.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:56

Architects (the building type) are not form designers primarily. They help clients _frame the problem_. The client may know they want to build a shopping mall, but often lack the tools for defining what the _program_ for a shopping mall should be. That’s part of what we need to take on.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:57

Architecture has a long tradition of adapting forms and structure to contextual conditions and new technologies.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:58

The top-down impression comes from the “starchitects” that are most famous. But much of our lives happens in buildings that are much more responsive to contextual conditions than that sort of work.

cboyer

2018-10-18 22:58

I agree. I’ve been fortunate to lead both product design and data product / machine learning initiatives. Design is rarely if ever at the table for machine learning initiatives, and we have much to offer in framing what we want to know and more importantly, what is discovered

jarango

2018-10-18 22:59

Not sure I answered the question specifically — as Clyde said, it is somewhat broad.

jarango

2018-10-18 22:59

In any case, I want us all to think more architecturally. But that doesn’t necessarily mean top-down.

cboyer

2018-10-18 22:59

I’ll post my comment in the main thread. And thanks for diving in on this. agree. I’ve been fortunate to lead both product design and data product / machine learning initiatives. Design is rarely if ever at the table for machine learning initiatives, and we have much to offer in framing what we want to know and more importantly, what is discovered

jarango

2018-10-18 23:00

Design is making the possible tangible.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:00

And the possible can now lead down unimaginable paths.

treyroady

2018-10-18 23:00

@cboyer: that experience might be worth a good read, if you write it up :slightly_smiling_face:

jarango

2018-10-18 23:00

Our role is to help people envision what that could be.

cboyer

2018-10-18 23:00

We need to be at the table with the data scientists

jarango

2018-10-18 23:00

And the consequences.

hawk

2018-10-18 23:01

As much as I hate to do this, we’ve hit the top of the hour.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:01

:disappointed:

hawk

2018-10-18 23:01

If you want to keep talking @jarango there is no reason at all that you can’t…

jarango

2018-10-18 23:01

I can hang out for a few more minutes.

cboyer

2018-10-18 23:01

I’m notoriously lazy about writing. I tend to do stuff and then jump to the next thing. But this is a topic that has been weighing on me quite a bit.

hawk

2018-10-18 23:01

But you’re free to go if you need to!

hawk

2018-10-18 23:01

Excellent.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:01

It’d be great to hear from other folks.

hawk

2018-10-18 23:02

Agreed. does anyone have something to throw into the ring?

cboyer

2018-10-18 23:02

Thanks so much. You’re book is fantastic by the way and I can’t recommend it enough.

treyroady

2018-10-18 23:02

Well, I can say that I’m working at a very AI / ML heavy company right now, and I could potentially benefit a lot from any major mistakes you made

nwhysel

2018-10-18 23:03

Sounds like we are moving into issues of ethics. Especially in ML.

holliedoar

2018-10-18 23:03

I’d be really interested to hear any examples of IA being used to shift those slower layers as I definitely agree that its where the power is

maadonna

2018-10-18 23:03

Random thought – designers/uxers (whatever we call ourselves now) could do with a better understanding of things like domain and content modelling. That structure layer is a better place to focus than on the form layer. Unfortunately I see lots of focus on the form and little on the deeper layers

jarango

2018-10-18 23:04

@maadonna Bingo

jarango

2018-10-18 23:04

Part of it is due to the fact that structure is abstract.

maadonna

2018-10-18 23:04

And sometimes hard :slightly_smiling_face: And not pretty

jarango

2018-10-18 23:04

People don’t like abstraction. It makes them nervous.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:04

(Especially stakeholders.)

jarango

2018-10-18 23:04

They want to know what things are going to _look like_.

maadonna

2018-10-18 23:05

The other kind of related thing here – AI/ML is all about making models of the world. They are also in that structure layer

jarango

2018-10-18 23:05

@holliedoar as you may imagine, it’s easier to point to change happening in the opposite direction.

maadonna

2018-10-18 23:05

And if AI/ML folks make the wrong model (because they used history as training data) they screw up everything, but it’s already embedded

jarango

2018-10-18 23:06

I remember years ago seeing a presentation about a redesign for a publication’s website. I think it was a magazine.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:07

The navigation structure had been completely changed to conform to what the ad sales team could sell, as opposed to what made the magazine special.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:07

But remember: the fast layers are also where we can _experiment_ with things.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:08

It’s easier to try out new forms (and structures) than new strategies.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:08

Or the sales org. :slightly_smiling_face:

cboyer

2018-10-18 23:08

Choosing the wrong model is a problem. Developers find they like their one hammer and use it on everything. A lot of success seems to come from experience and intuition, similar traits as the most effective designers.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:08

As designers, understanding this can mean that we can provide more value. Not just to our organizations, but to society more broadly.

jarango

2018-10-18 23:10

Any more thoughts/observations? (I must jump off in a few minutes, alas.)

maadonna

2018-10-18 23:10

I must find my copy of How Buildings Work :slightly_smiling_face:

jarango

2018-10-18 23:10

A great book!

jarango

2018-10-18 23:11

Also check out Brand’s _The Clock of the Long Now_

nwhysel

2018-10-18 23:11

Thanks, Jorge!

crystal

2018-10-18 23:11

Governance is becoming critical for benefits to society with information environments and creating safe information environments

hawk

2018-10-18 23:11

I want to say another huge thank you for your time and wisdom Jorge.

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> Living in Information — with Jorge Arango appeared first on UX Mastery.

Lou was talking about a topic which he is passionate about, and it was obvious.

Despite their heavy investment in research, large organisations still face an insight gap, which can gravely curtail product success. Lou believes the time is ripe for InsightsOps: the synthesis and operationalisation of research—currently locked in silos—that can lead to true insights across the organisation.

So that is what we learned about today.

If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.

But first… here are the images referred to in the transcript:

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Transcript

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:01

Greetings from Brooklyn, NY.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:01

…USA

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:01

I shouldn’t forget that.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:01

Welcome Lou

hawk

2018-05-16 21:01

Hello all – thanks for joining us today, and mostly a huge thanks to Louis for his time. It’s greatly appreciated.

hawk

2018-05-16 21:01

So the formal intro: Lou Rosenfeld is Rosenfeld Media’s founder and publisher. Like many user experience folk, Lou started somewhere (library science), made his way somewhere else (information architecture), and has ended up in an entirely different place (publishing).

hawk

2018-05-16 21:01

Lou spent most of his career in information architecture consulting, first as founder of Argus Associates and later as an independent consultant. He co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and the IA Summit. And he does know something about publishing, having edited or co-authored five books, including the IA “bible,” Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and Search Analytics for Your Site. He tweets @louisrosenfeld

hawk

2018-05-16 21:02

And with that, I’ll ask Lou to give us some insight into today’s topic

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:02

Lou uploaded IMAGE1 and commented: My epitath

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:03

Really, that’s what most people know me for.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:03

It gets a little unsettling, as I did the bulk of my writing on it about 20 years ago.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:03

I don’t want to be a one-hit wonder.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:03

So here I am, talking with you about some other new-fangled thing that most people will say–as with IA–doesn’t exist, or is not important.

hawk

2018-05-16 21:03

Maybe you could write about some other kind of bear then?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:03

What would an insight bear look like?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:04

I’m not even sure bears have good vision.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:04

Though they are fast, can climb, and are lethal.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:04

Anyway…

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:04

Here’s the story…

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:04

Around ten years ago, I was an indy IA consultant, working with Fortune 500s and government agencies.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:05

You could have called me an “information therapist” at that point, because I was getting to do precious little IA, and mostly trying to make my clients feel better about the fact that they had precious little opportunity to help their organizations provide a better user experience.

luke

2018-05-16 21:05

But their foraging techniques and scent are great :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:06

I would always start them off with the request to see their user research. Because, of course, if you’re going to try to get an organization to change, you’ve got to have evidence to prove that things are shitty for customers, and that they could be improved.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:06

Not to mention HOW the experience could be improved.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:07

As I worked with these large orgs, I found that there was no shortage of user research. In fact, they were spending HUGE amounts on different kinds of user research.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:07

Only it wasn’t always called user research. Sometimes, they called it market research.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:07

Sometimes Voice of the Customer research.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:07

Sometimes it was locked up in the analytics group.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:07

Sometimes there were multiple user research groups.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:08

There were brand research projects going on.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:08

And on and on. No shortage of information on the what and why of what customers wanted, need, and how they were behaving.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:08

You with me so far, @channel?

hawk

2018-05-16 21:08

I am.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:08

yep! :smile:

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 21:08

Absolutely

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:08

Cool. (Can be hard to type into the ether.)

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:09

Biggest problem is that the research was almost completey siloed.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:09

who you calling an ether :stuck_out_tongue:

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:09

Different tribes/disciplines using different methods and techniques to produce different types of data in order to learn different things about the same people.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:09

And that takes me to a fable. I wonder if you’re familiar with this one?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:10

(Give me a sec to grab the image.)

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:10

Lou uploaded IMAGE2

hello107

2018-05-16 21:10

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:10

This is the blind men and the elephant.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:10

If you don’t know this fable (and I’m actually surprised it’s not better-known), let me tell you the story.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:11

Bunch of blind men, out for a stroll. Seriously, no sighted person to guide them. Don’t ask me why, sounds hazardous.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:11

They find themselves in the jungle. Like I said, sounds quite dangerous.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:11

They encounter an elephant. But, of course, they can’t see the elephant.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:12

One touches the elephant’s trunk. “It’s a snake!”

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:12

Another touches the elephant’s leg. “No, no, it’s not a snake–it’s a tree trunk!”

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:12

And so on.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:12

Not one of them has the truth. No real insight.

heath.alexander

2018-05-16 21:12

My kids have a book by Ed Young that’s a retelling of that fable, https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Blind-Mice-Caldecott-Honor/dp/0399222618/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:13

It’s only after they talk to each other, share information, and figure things out together that the arrive at true insight: it’s an elephant.

martina.net

2018-05-16 21:13

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:14

That’s called synthesis. And it’s something that we don’t really do in most organizations, especially large ones, and for that reason, we’re missing out on the Big Insights. We’re not working or spending wisely or efficiently. This needs to be addressed somehow, and it’s not easy. In the least

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:14

I only use the term–and hesitatingly–of InsightOps to draw attention to this problem. Because we need to go at it consciously. Its a design challenge, and an organizational change problem. And a bunch of other problems to boot.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:15

I’ve been talking about this for about five years–I’m kind of a broken record in that I keep giving pretty much the same talk about it at conference keynotes.

meganweise

2018-05-16 21:15

But it is still so so important, please keep talking about it!

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:15

The good news is that more and more people seem to share this same concern. I’m starting to see them address it. I’m hoping to talk about it here with you and see if you’ve encountered similar problems.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:16

Let me share a couple links, and then let’s talk. I have some ideas for solutions that I can get into later, but I want to open things up–in just a second.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:16

Here’s a video of me giving a talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LRdCAWz1pI

lindamanofficial

2018-05-16 21:16

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:16

Here’s a corresponding deck: https://www.slideshare.net/lrosenfeld/beyond-user-research

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:17

And an ALA article (getting a little old now): https://alistapart.com/article/seeing-the-elephant-defragmenting-user-research

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:17

OK, let’s discuss! Is this something you’re struggling with?

hello107

2018-05-16 21:17

Going through it right now, where even in a 150+ people organization our UX researcher used to work in a silo for 2 weeks and then come back with a deck + showreel from usertesting for a day. Everyone would watch, give comments and then walk away.

dave

2018-05-16 21:17

My teammates Teena Singh and Greg Petroff say Hi :wave:

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 21:17

Yep, same here

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:18

Hi Teena and Greg! Love those folks.

david.balcak

2018-05-16 21:18

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:18

@gary.bunker Where are you seeing it? (Willing to disclose?)

hello107

2018-05-16 21:18

I started with a framework inspired by Tomer Sharon, used airtable to democratize atleast the input part + access to user research insights. Even that small 2 day effort has helped quite a bit.

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 21:18

Forgetful organisations too – they run research, go ‘aaaahhh!’ then get new jobs. 12 months later, nobody even knows they ran the research

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:18

Yes, I’m a big fan of Tomer’s work (we published his last book, Validating User Research).

richard

2018-05-16 21:18

I am not 100% sure I understand. Let’s say my team does a GV style sprint, which means we’ll be doing user interviews to help diagnose a particular design problem, recording it, with a room full of people in the other room furiously taking notes all over the wall on post-its about that user’s experience. After five or so of these interviews, we have a clear direction for our design, and we make some changes. And then all the “noise” knowledge – everything except the decisions themselves – go down the tube.

Are you talking about putting that insight to broader / longer-term use?

hello107

2018-05-16 21:18

I read it!! :raised_hands: Great one!

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:19

He makes the point that @gary.bunker is making: lack of InsightOps/ResearchOps leads to a failure in organizational memory.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:19

Here’s a link to one of his articles; he’s done a lot more in Medium: https://medium.com/amplify-design/polaris-research-ops-by-wework-e1fb54bc99ac

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:19

I think the problem is different teams in one company can have different goals. in my last job the marketing team did a ton of user research that was pretty much almost useless to us on the ux team.

hello107

2018-05-16 21:19

Yes Polaris! :slightly_smiling_face:

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:20

@richard Yes.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:20

There are cases in whch your team would have greatly benefitted from another team/researcher’s data–AND perspective on the problem. And vice versa.

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 21:20

Same here. I’ve seen huge decks with massive data on segmentation and responses and emotive mapping that has literally nothing in there to help design or improve an experience.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:20

In fact, you probably would have had a better outcome if you’d had more blind men at the table, sharing notes and data and sythesis.

richard

2018-05-16 21:21

So, something _other_ than rolling up all the giant papers covered in post-it notes in long scroll-like tubes, and stashing them all in a bin in the corner, running off with our new direction for our 12 person product team given our specific goals for the month.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:21

Now, without some sort of infrastructure and conscious effort, @richard will have no idea that other teams are doing relevant work.

richard

2018-05-16 21:21

Got it

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:21

Hah! Yes

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 21:22

Having a single sharable location for insights and research can help – bringing the blind men together for lunch each day to report on findings

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:22

It does, @gary.bunker But it’s not just an issue of having a giant repository, a la Polaris (or Aurelius or HandRail, to name a couple new commercial entrants into this space).

richard

2018-05-16 21:22

Can these insights get rolled up into our broader personas and other high-level artifacts?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:22

It’s also critical to acknowledge that we 1) don’t know about each other, especially in large orgs.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:23

2) We don’t speak the same language–given that we come from different tribes.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:23

3) We don’t have common motivations.

luke

2018-05-16 21:23

I have worked at large companies and now at a startup. With many different and common challenges. I have actually pivoted my career into a product role to be able to create space for researchers in my team to influence the workspace. I think the more we separate ux as a separate function the more harm we sometimes do

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:23

What I would love to see is 1 person for each team/department come together to do a user research study, that way you get all corners covered for what ever it is people want to get from their own users. I think that would work way better than 1 team doing it themselves, but that would require company organisation and strategy. thoughts Lou

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:23

“company organisation and strategy”

hello107

2018-05-16 21:23

Much like branding, I feel if the key stakeholders have not bought into what the process is, how it impacts the workflow/product and the resources needed to keep it going – it would end up on the bookshelf. – an issue pronounced in larger orgs.

crystal

2018-05-16 21:24

When we finally do know about each other, we don’t know each other well enough to realize we’re working on the same/adjacent projects where we could each benefit from sharing

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:24

Exactly, @luked1uk; that’s why I say it’s not enough to have a repository. Just like DesignOps is more than pattern libraries and design systems, you’ve got to have people responsible for guiding principles, strategy, and organizational change in order to make this work.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:24

Exactly, @crystal

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:25

@hello107 In branding, we’re seeing a growth in “CreativeOps”. On the product side, “DesignOps” (in fact, my company puts on the annual DesignOps conference in NYC in November).

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:26

Of course, there’s (very suddenly) huge energy and engagement in the nascent ResearchOps community.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:26

We need to take that operational goodness and keep extending it.

luke

2018-05-16 21:26

Why would a research ops and design ops be separate?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:26

Lou uploaded IMAGE3

hello107

2018-05-16 21:27

ooooh!

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:27

@luked1uk Not sure they should be. In fact, at our conference they’re very much combined, in terms of the program.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:27

But sometimes we separate things that are closely related simply to get a better look at them.

hello107

2018-05-16 21:27

This is an amazing representation Lou :raised_hands:

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:27

I can see benefits to outsourcing this stuff sometimes for some companies. I love meeting my users and throwing them into tasks and watching them do stuff. Lou Do you think that sometimes out sourcing might be a better way to go? or is it vital that people understand their own users from their own research?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:28

@luked1uk Yes and no. Yes in terms of getting a smart agency to help you with this, because it’s a HUGE challenge. No in terms of implementation–this is basically your organizational brain, and you really, really don’t want to outsource taht.

richard

2018-05-16 21:29

Woah. I didn’t know outsourcing this stuff was even a thing. I’m a product manager, and I want to literally be present during the user interviews. That’s my lifeblood.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:29

I will say that the agency model, as we all know, is very likely dying–except for those agencies that specialize. I’m seeing more smart agencies moving into operationalization. Some get acquired. Think CapitalOne acquiring AdaptivePath, and Verizon recently acquiring Moment Design.

hello107

2018-05-16 21:30

Agency models – highly recommend Jules E.’s writeup on State of Digital Nation :ok_hand:

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:30

Can we change it from User Interview to something more friendly? I feel like when ever I meet users I want it to feel like the opposite of an interview. :smile:

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:30

@luked1uk You’re a smart project manager, because you want to be a part of the research. THat said, I’d be careful–you’ll potentially spread yourself too thinly if your research becomes so multimodal. You really should be thinking about setting up the infrastructure to support the work; IMHO, that’s more critical, as it’ll enable you and your research to scale.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:30

@hello107 Link please?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:31

I’m letting my fingers take a little respite while y’all come up with questions/thoughts.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:32

Go for it @luked1uk

luke

2018-05-16 21:32

We have been harping on about user research sessions should be attended by everyone for years now. What I’ve witnessed as a bigger problem, is that few people use the products they are building. This in itself should be the first step we encourage

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:32

Ill try to push a new phrase, User Hangout or something :stuck_out_tongue:

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:33

Lou in an ideal world, ideal company, what does the perfect scenario look like to you? and have you seen it?

hello107

2018-05-16 21:33

Lou part 1 came out in 2016!
https://blog.marvelapp.com/state-of-the-digital-nation-2016/

Part 2 came out 2 days ago:
https://medium.com/swlh/state-of-the-digital-nation-2020-venture-road-22de4377836

Highly highly recommend

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:33

@luke You bet–but let’s take things further a bit and get down the road to a place where it’s not so much an issue of convincing your org that user research is worthwhile. I’m really talking about a stage later on (which is why the talk is called “Beyond User Research”. I argue that we’ve not won the war–just a battle.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:34

@luked1uk No way. But I’m optimistic that we’re getting there.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:34

I mean, think of how our research is so clearly the sum of its parts. It’s hard to ignore. Here, let me throw a few slides your way that demonstrate this…

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:35

Lou uploaded IMAGE4 and commented: Some of us are really good at figuring out the what, others the why. SO MUCH BETTER WHEN COMBINED!

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:36

What are we saying here? its all the same thing? the what and the why?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:36

Lou uploaded IMAGE5 and commented: Or the obvious complementary aspects of qualitative and quantitive research.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:36

No, not at all. Actually, they’re currently siloed/separate. I’m saying that they need to be combined.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:37

Lou uploaded IMAGE6 and commented: Here’s another: some of advocate for users, other for business–and our data supports us. Why not combine?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:38

Lou uploaded IMAGE7 and commented: Some of us are really good at tracking and measuring what’s known with our products and customers. Others of us are good at finding patterns that suggest the UNKNOWN aspects of how our users and products interact.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:38

Lou uploaded IMAGE8 and commented: Last one: some of our data is facts and figures. Other data is concepts and ideas. How do we combine them?

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:38

I do feel like part of being in UX is pulling it all together sometimes and seeing it from all sides

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:39

Yes, but UX represents a specific POV.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:39

We can’t do this on our own.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:39

We, like everyone else, come to the table with baggage, and therefore are suspect and should be suspect.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:39

very true

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:40

That said, we certainly have much to offer. UX is a synthetic discipline–really a mashup of other disciplines–so we may be more comfortable with a variety of points of view/methods/tools/perspectives than some other, more established disciplines that do some form of user/customer research.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:41

VIVA LA DIFFERENCE!

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:41

:smile:

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:42

I see “several people are typing” but no questions/comments. I’m going to drop a bunch more slides on you people if you don’t type over here soon!

richard

2018-05-16 21:42

Lou Forgive my ignorance on this topic. It’s new for me. At first it seemed like you were talking about problems fairly unique to larger organizations where there are lots of silos, maybe less applicable to a 20 person startup. But now as you describe the synthesis of the different kinds of user insight, that seems to be a different thing than the organizational tribal knowledge / siloing issue.

luke

2018-05-16 21:42

Consolidating insights from all areas of the business has been our greatest challenge. From one off surveys, to web agent support chats getting tagged in ZenDesk. Having a consolidated tagging system has been so difficult to coordinate

luke

2018-05-16 21:42

And advice?

richard

2018-05-16 21:42

As this more about synthesis of different classes of knowledge, or of the process of shared knowledge?

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 21:43

What about having a consistent IA for how we describe the knowledge we gain? Terminology, form, structure.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:43

@richard No need to apologize–it’s new to us all. The synthesis of different classes of knowledge is an organizational/cross-silo pursuit by definition, BECAUSE those classes of knowledge come from different parts of the organization. Parts that don’t know about each other, have different vocabularies and motivations…

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:43

Print it all out and put it on a wall :smile: take a good look at whats going on

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:44

@gary.bunker If you look closely at what Tomer and team were doing with Polaris, it’s IA all the way down. Huge investment in metadata and content chunking. I just gave a talk in Taipei last week and basically said that the fools who say IA is dead aren’t looking too closely at the challenges associated with operationalizing all these aspects of design and research (among other htings).

luke

2018-05-16 21:45

The vocabularies and motivations have been the main challenges for us. Particularly as the CS team is in Jordan, with English not necessarily a first language

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:45

That makes things even harder, eh?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:45

No one has a wall that big.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:45

lol

crystal

2018-05-16 21:45

I completely agree with all of this. I work for an extremely large organization – silos within silos – and have spent the past 2 years trying just to identify the ux team or the user research team. I’ve found a vast majority of people who do this work don’t have these titles, as you said. I have met others who have tried to get a small group on the same page and share. Do you have any hints, leads, gut feelings about some good avenues to begin exploring to make InsightOps/ResearchOps come to fruition?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:46

I’ve got a bunch of things in that video/deck. Let me drop a few on you here.

crystal

2018-05-16 21:46

Awesome! I will definitely watch it in its entirety after this!

crystal

2018-05-16 21:47

And share it with others who I work with

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:47

Lou uploaded IMAGE9 and commented: Many of you are probably familiar with Christian Rohrer’s Landscape of User Research Methods.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:48

It’s by no means perfect–AND it reflects a very HCI-influenced view of research. For example, an analytics person would craft a very different landscape. (And I tried to get Avinash Kaushik, one of the top gurus of analytics, to work with Christian to combine perspectives.)

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:48

But look at those axes, then look at what’s covered in the four quadrants. Think of each method as a blind man.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:48

Now you can audit your org’s research methodology. Are all your blind men living in one of these quadrants? If so, that’s a problem.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:49

ANd one you can address–in some cases, by finding other blind men who are already in your organizaiotn.

richard

2018-05-16 21:49

I like that

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:49

Lou uploaded a picture (1) and commented: Here’s another: the concept of cadence.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:50

If you’re using the Landscape I showed a moment ago to “balance” your research methodology, you might also want to “balance” it over time.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:50

good map

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:50

Some research methods look at user behavior on a daily basis–or even more frequently.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:50

Others are more involved and expensive, like a field study. Can your org balance those things out?

luke

2018-05-16 21:50

Do you have advise for strategy/product people on supporting this better?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:51

Lou uploaded IMAGE11 and commented: Can your org combine balance and cadence to come up with a framework WHAT research it does and WHEN?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:52

@luke What I’m showing are frameworks that can be used to pull together diffuse research, researchers, and research perspectives.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:52

Not that it’s easy, or that I’m providng a solution. I’m not really the right person to solve this problem. I’m just not smart or experienced enough–all I can to is point out the problem and make some broad suggestions as to how to move forward.

crystal

2018-05-16 21:53

Nah, I think that you are once again a bit ahead of your time, which is awesome gets everyone thinking about these things more in depth

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:54

Actually that last slide is incomplete but I can’t get the full version out of keynote right now (as I can’t grab a screenshot of a completed build). It’s in my deck though.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:54

Thanks @crystal

luke

2018-05-16 21:55

Yep I understand what these are showing. But for these to be effective communication tools there also needs to be a space for the research team to influence as well as collaborate. I wonder if you have examples you have seen of companies that do this well – and perhaps what aspects enabled then to succeed?

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:55

@crystal I guess everyone is at a different stage in their Org or team with this stuff. I think its a lot about striving for the future and pushing your self to try these new things and implement new techniques.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:55

We’ve got about five minutes to go. Glad to talk more–also would love to know what people would call this challenge (I’m not wedded to InsightOps).

fmvr26

2018-05-16 21:55

Hello Lou

What is the middle point you think will fit someone from the big data/analytics area within product design? ( I changed careers to product design a while ago but still looking how to use more analytics techniques)

In the other hand I’m currently experimenting with a data-lake like structure for a database of user information (both feedback and research) to then have a central point for analyzing and crafting insights with the hope that it will give a more profound understanding of the users and a better access to all data. *Any thoughts on the matter?*

richard

2018-05-16 21:56

So if the “Ops” monicker is an indication, the thinking here is influenced by the lean movement. Typically that means you accept that there are complex systems nobody can fully wrap their head around, and it encourages interaction amongst parties whose knowledge, inputs and outputs depend on each other, along with feedback between parties.

That evolving system of interaction and continual improvement is in contrast to grand architecture.

Is that a fair representation?

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:56

Trying to digest @fmvr26’s question…

crystal

2018-05-16 21:56

It seems to me to be a lot more than just insights – Collaboration and Strategy

fmvr26

2018-05-16 21:56

sorry if I over-worded it!

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:57

Yes, you’re on the right track. Here’s the holy grail for you and for everyone: how to colocate and, more importantly, CONNECT (in the same repository) those quant and qual data.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:57

I have some ideas about this, but the problem is that “reports” become the intermediary–reports that are based on quant data.

luked1uk

2018-05-16 21:58

If I can take anything away from this talk today Lou its that I need to talk to more people and get more peoples insight. Its not just my job to understand our users but we can all raise each other up to understand the greater overall idea of our users.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:58

Once you’re trafficking in reports, you open up a whole vector of risk. Because reports are the lazyman’s approach to understanding the world. We craft them around a question, then–after running the same report again and again–forget what the question was. Or the question loses relevance.

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 21:58

nicely said, @luked1uk

gary.bunker

2018-05-16 22:00

Thanks Louis, fantastic to spend time with you, awesome insights

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 22:00

So, glad to hear from y’all: I run a free monthly DesignOps community conference call–if you want an invite, email me. And you all should attend these fine conferences: http://designopssummit.com and http://enterpriseux.net. And buy our books: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books

hawk

2018-05-16 22:00

And that’s that!

Lou Rosenfeld

2018-05-16 22:00

Thanks everyone; hope to cross paths again.

hawk

2018-05-16 22:00

Thanks so much for your time today Lou – it was an honour to learn from you.

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> InsightOps: Getting to synthesis and insight — with Louis Rosenfeld appeared first on UX Mastery.

Amir and Kelly are partners in appsforall – a project that seeks to help people create more accessible apps. Their target audience is product owners, app developers and designers. Their mission is to provide the tools, resources and guidelines necessary to start the process of re/building apps with accessibility and inclusion in mind.

Today they shared their vision, their journey and their excellent advice with us.

If you didn’t make the session today because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.

Transcript

hawk

2018-05-02 23:02

First up, I’d like to say a huge thanks to @amir.ansari and @kelly.schulz for their time today. I’m looking forward to learning from you.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:02

So… the formal intros:

hawk

2018-05-02 23:02

Amir Ansari heads up the User Experience Practice at Transpire – a consultancy that aims to create impactful, design lead digital products that empower businesses and make a difference.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:02

https://www.transpire.com/

hawk

2018-05-02 23:02

He has a team of wonderful, talented and friendly UXers helping to make people’s lives easier.

Amir has done his 10,000 + hours (over 18 years) of practice designing and leading designers, and is passionate about creating inclusive and accessible experiences that leave people feeling engaged and empowered. He likes to do all that with a smile on his face.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:03

Kelly Schulz joined Telstra (Australia’s largest telecommunications company) in 2007 and has worked to improve customer experience for all customers.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:03

With five years leading Telstra’s Complaint Analysis & Insights Team, she has a deep knowledge of how product, process and system design plays a significant role in the lives of consumers.

Born with a rare, genetic, eye condition, Kelly has been legally blind since birth. Now responsible for Telstra’s Accessibility & Inclusion strategy, Kelly’s approach focuses on building awareness, and an accessibility conscience, to foster inclusion of customers, employees and their communities living with disability.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:04

They are here today to tell us about appsforall https://www.appsforall.com.au/

hawk

2018-05-02 23:04

A project that seeks to help people create more accessible apps. Their target audience is product owners, app developers and designers. Their mission is to provide the tools, resources and guidelines necessary to start the process of re/building apps with accessibility and inclusion in mind.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:04

And then give us the chance to ask questions about their journey, lessons learned, challenges faced, etc

hawk

2018-05-02 23:05

@amir.ansari / @kelly.schulz – over to you to give us a rundown on appsforall and what the project is all about

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:05

Hi everyone, glad to be here.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:06

I’ll be writing on behalf of myself and Kelly, but feel free to ask either of us direct questions

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:06

Transpire and Telstra have worked together in the past

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:07

As part of last year’s GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day – May 17 2017) Kelly and I ran a workshop to address and explore the challenges of consumers and uxers when building native applications.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:07

We knew that standards and guidlines for the webs existed (WCAG 2.0) however there weren’t solid guidelines or standard for native applications.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:08

This was also made clear because of the number of apps currently on the various app stores that fail to meet basic accessbility (a11y) needs.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:09

We also feel that a11y goes beyond just make apps accessible, but rather it’s a way to ensure and promise simply good design for ALL.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:09

p.s. apologies in advance for any spelling mistakes (typing fast)

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:10

so now re http://appsforall.com.au, we did a very light release early this year…

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:10

the aim was to do a soft launch just to showcase that we have this initiative and goal.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:11

the website has been buiilt quickly using off the shelf diy website builder hence unfortuantely (and ironically) there are some a11y issues and we know about them.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:11

Questions are go…

paul.crichton

2018-05-02 23:11

Hi Amir and Kelly. Do you think WCAG 2.1 will help with native apps?

isha

2018-05-02 23:12

Curious to hear about tools you suggest for ensuring web apps that are accessible.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:12

(Note that I will acknowledge that your question has been queued with a grey ? like ^)

allyraven

2018-05-02 23:12

Some devs will say WCAG doesn’t apply to apps, it’s a web standard. How do you respond?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:12

Question: Hi Amir and Kelly. Do you think WCAG 2.1 will help with native apps? …

eric

2018-05-02 23:12

Hi guys. Thanks for doing this. Any suggestions on best approach for accessible design for designers prototyping native apps?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:13

Answer: yes to a certain extent. It addresses the improvement in ally and a broader remit to help everyone. It foes include some updated guidelines around touch devices and small form factor.

jmdorion

2018-05-02 23:13

Hi @amir.ansari Hi @hawk and everyone joining! So glad we’re having this conversation!

Question about native apps and how should we as designers and developers rely on the accessibility provided by the OS you build your app for?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:14

What our research has shown is that the wcag guidelines can be overwhelming to the novice and people responsible for digital products often may not know where to go or how to use the guidelines.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:15

and also now that there are hybrid native/web platforms (e.g. ReactNative, Xamerin, etc.) there’s a blur between what is web and what has been built natively.

jdebari

2018-05-02 23:15

Question: Are there any good tools to test native app prototypes for accessibility?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:16

Question: Some devs will say WCAG doesn’t apply to apps, it’s a web standard. How do you respond?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:17

Answer: yes that is correct. Again as version 2.1 has included some touch guidelines, it’s a good start, however it doesn’t cover many of the other requirements for devs to build native applications. We at @transpire refer to the iOS Humane Interface Guidelines and Andorid’s Material Design for designing, however for our devs and QAs, the guideliens don’t really help

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:18

Guildelines and standards aside, ultimately the best practice for ensuring inclusive and accessible apps is to put designs (early) in front of all users with all abilities. We have found this to be the best way to ensure we build apps to meet end users’ needs.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:20

Question: @eric Hi guys. Thanks for doing this. Any suggestions on best approach for accessible design for designers prototyping native apps?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:21

Answer: start by visiting http://appsforall.com.au. ; ) The idea has been that we collected the top three tips for the various roles as a place for them to start. as the quote ont he homepage suggests, @kelly.schulz and I believe that do until you know better, then do better. It’s not about solving and designing a 100% accessible app, but just to start somewhere

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:22

Question: @jmdorion Question about native apps and how should we as designers and developers rely on the accessibility provided by the OS you build your app for?

andrew.arch

2018-05-02 23:23

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:23

Answer: the best way is to turn on those various features (e.g. TalkBack, VoiceOver, Scanner, greyscale, zoom etc.) and put designs and prototypes on the device to test as opposed to use emulators on your computer screen. Often there are huge differences and desgning and testing in context is much better.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:23

Also, iOS and Android provide very good dev and designer guidelines on how each a11y feature works and how to design and dev for them

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:24

Question: @jdebari Are there any good tools to test native app prototypes for accessibility?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:25

Answer: Anroid, out of the box has an a11y checker/scanner you can turn on (under settings). I’m not 100% sure if iOS does but I don’t think so. We have found that manual testing (with our QA team and users) is the best approach. Yes, time consuming and more expensive, but has more rigour.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:26

@amir.ansari How can we lead the way with understanding our responsibilities and implementing good processes when it comes to app a11y?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:26

Good question @hawk

hawk

2018-05-02 23:26

We’re at the end of the q queue (see what I did there?) so now is a good time to throw yours into the ring

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:27

Answer: @kelly.schulz and I believe we need to start with empathy. People (devs, designers, PMs, etc.) need to understand the realities of different abilities and needs. This often creates the aha moment. Then we have found they are more open to then explore the next phase of their journey…

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:27

which is the “how do I do this”.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:27

And to some extent, the How is what http://appsforall.com.au is trying to solve for

jdebari

2018-05-02 23:28

Question: do you have any recommendations or resources to find people with various “disabilities” to have as participants when usability testing?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:29

A11y is not a hard line where you either need a11y or not. Everybody can benefit from “good design” and a11y is about good design.

richard

2018-05-02 23:29

Hi, and thanks for doing this. I was legally blind for many years before a newly approved procedure restored my sight, so I’ve been on both sides of this.

There are a lot of good guidelines for accessibility out there, but frankly they focus on the core usability. Have you seen “emotional design” and delight done well for visually or otherwise impaired users? A blind user may have a different arc with the product and have different moments for designers to acknowledge their experience. Any gold standards? Examples to follow?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:29

Question: @jdebari Question: do you have any recommendations or resources to find people with various “disabilities” to have as participants when usability testing?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:30

Answer: this is a very good question and something we’ve been challenged with. Our first approach was to hit our network and use people we knew (e.g. @kelly). However this was not scalable.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:31

I’m also on the board of Retina Australia (Vic) – a not for profit charity with members who live with Inherited Retinal Disease . I’m in the process of getting these members to join a market research panel.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:32

Also, Intopia Connect is a company in Australia who is trying to solve for this – connecting with and signing up users with various abilities to and accessiblity needs to be open to conduct market research.

charles

2018-05-02 23:32

While WCAG was not written for native apps, all of the understanding criteria apply, and all of the criteria apply to web apps and native apps that are powered by or wrap web content.

Accessibility is still a requirement.

maadonna

2018-05-02 23:32

@richard that is a fascinating topic. I’d love to hear more if you do find resources.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:33

Lastly, ideally people in their local cities would approach representative and advocacy groups and discuss the idea of getting access to their members. However, it’s important to note that these individuals are helping us and shouldn’t be expected to help without some form of appreciation/incentivisation/gift.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:34

Question: @richard Hi, and thanks for doing this. I was legally blind for many years before a newly approved procedure restored my sight, so I’ve been on both sides of this.

There are a lot of good guidelines for accessibility out there, but frankly they focus on the core usability. Have you seen “emotional design” and delight done well for visually or otherwise impaired users? A blind user may have a different arc with the product and have different moments for designers to acknowledge their experience. Any gold standards? Examples to follow?

charles

2018-05-02 23:35

Silver will address digital accessibility more broadly.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:35

Answer: this is a very good question and a really touch one. I love t hat you’ve asked this.

rupert

2018-05-02 23:35

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

profungi

2018-05-02 23:35

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:36

Frankly, when you look at Apple and iOS, they design and build for emotional connection and they don’t get it right 100%, so they’re not even the gold standard. No one’s getting the gold medal ATM (that we’ve come across) and hence why @kelly.schulz and I felt starting the conversation with http://appsforall.com.au.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:37

With this in mind, I’d love to have people (from all over the world) to connect with @kelly.schulz and I and contribute to the site or ideas and examples they’ve come across. This is not an Australian initiative, we just live in Melbourne and also couldn’t get the .com domain, but it’s open for all.

charles

2018-05-02 23:37

also see: ‘Calm Technology’

https://calmtech.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Calm-Technology-Principles-Patterns-Non-Intrusive/dp/1491925884

hawk

2018-05-02 23:37

@amir.ansari Do you find that clients are open to the *perceived* extra work/cost that goes into accessible design. Do you get pushback?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:38

@amir.ansari Do you find that clients are open to the *perceived* extra work/cost that goes into accessible design. Do you get pushback?

hawk

2018-05-02 23:38

Questions please!

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:38

Answer: good question. YES.

allyraven

2018-05-02 23:39

Have you got some examples of mainstream apps that are doing accessibility really well?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:39

Many of our clients (Telstra not included) don’t know what a11y and inclusive design means. They often see it as an extra line item in our invoices.

evaismailov

2018-05-02 23:40

has joined #ask-the-uxperts

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:40

To combat that, we’ve changed our design and dev process where we have build success criteria in our stories that have a11y built in. This way, our response to our clients are that “sorry, it’s just how we work, it’s built into our process – it’s no extra cost to you”. And we factor that cost into our estimation.

charles

2018-05-02 23:40

@amir.ansari question: can you recommend anyone to lead the prototyping projects for the W3C Silver Task Force?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:42

Question: @amir.ansari question: can you recommend anyone to lead the prototyping projects for the W3C Silver Task Force?

maadonna

2018-05-02 23:43

@amir.ansari What ‘kinds’ of accessibility do you build into your quotes? Primarily visual? Other stuff?

dorothee

2018-05-02 23:43

@amir.ansari did you experience pushback from your own business’ side when you wanted to factor the cost for a11y in your estimation?

wearepow

2018-05-02 23:43

@amir.ansari would that cost slightly erode the design process. When the apps inclusiveness becomes a bigger job than expected in the first case?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:43

Answer: to be honest we hadn’t come across the prototyping project of the W3C Silver Task Force as we’ve been mainly focusing on the native space. But I’ll add that to @kelly and my reading list to get up to speed.

charles

2018-05-02 23:44

I can connect you both.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:44

great

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:46

Question: @maadonna What ‘kinds’ of accessibility do you build into your quotes? Primarily visual? Other stuff?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:47

Answer: we start with a big long list covering all – visual, mobility and dexterity, audio, sensory etc. Then we cut back based on what we think we can achieve. I must admit, cognitive is a hard one to plan and design for – we do try and limit and or simplify text and navigation and design.

andrew.arch

2018-05-02 23:47

Hi @richard have you seen https://tink.uk/text-descriptions-emotion-rich-images/

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:47

Question: @dorothee did you experience pushback from your own business’ side when you wanted to factor the cost for a11y in your estimation?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:47

Answer: I’m typing this on behalf of @kelly representing enterprise companies…

lucky13820

2018-05-02 23:48

Hi @amir.ansari I joined late. So if someone already asked this question, just ignore me. Do you have examples that have done accessibility well? Preferably on both android and iOS. Thanks.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:49

The process isn’t to just add a line in an invoice – she has started with education top down with senior execs – to build empathy that responsible business is accessible and inclusive, and to build in the expectation that there will be a cost but also that the market and their customers will benefit.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:49

From Transpire’s perspective, it’s one of our fundamental values so push back for us internally is a no. That’s not to say other agencies and consultancies who compete on price won’t have internal pushback.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:50

Question: @wearepow would that cost slightly erode the design process. When the apps inclusiveness becomes a bigger job than expected in the first case?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:50

Answer: it depends if it’s a new prouct being built or retrofitting / fixing an existing product.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:52

Either way, there are cost and time pressures and unexpected things that come up (be it staffing, tech etc.). We just remain flexible, have our non-negotiables, and our nice to haves. We keep our clients very close and on a weekly basis, review where we’re at and see if something needs to be dropped or put in. I hope that answers the question.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:52

We have ~5 more mins left. If you have a question that you’re sitting on, ask now. If not, we’ll get Amir/Kelly to spend the last few mins summarising the things that they think are most impt. and what they’d like us to take away from this.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:52

wow – the time flew.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:53

@amir.ansari It looks like that’s it from the floor. If there is one thing that you’d like us all to take away to our workplaces/colleagues/peers to help get your message out, what would it be?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:54

@kelly.schulz and I want two things for people to take away.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:54

1. Just start, start somewhere, do what you can until you know better.

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:55

2. Become intimate with your devices’ accessibility features as well as the basics to make designs of your apps inclusive and accessible (again http://appsforall.com.au is a good starting point).

charles

2018-05-02 23:55

thank you @amir.ansari

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:55

And lastly, please collaborate with us – I’m sure there are better experts in this space than @kelly and I. We’d love for you to contribute to the site or educate @kelly and I.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:55

How can we contact you?

amir.ansari

2018-05-02 23:56

<mailto:info@appsforall.com.au|info@appsforall.com.au> – @kelly and I will receive the email.</mailto:info@appsforall.com.au|info@appsforall.com.au>

hawk

2018-05-02 23:56

Awesome.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:56

Thanks so much for your time today.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:56

It’s been an honour to have you here as our guests.

hawk

2018-05-02 23:56

And kudos to the work you are doing. :slightly_smiling_face:

hawk

2018-05-02 23:57

And thanks for joining us today. Great questions.

The post Transcript: Ask the UXperts: Building Accessible Apps — Amir Ansari & Kelly Schulz appeared first on UX Mastery.

Benjamin is co-founder of Dovetail, a new product that helps teams understand their customers through analysis of user feedback and qualitative research.

We were lucky to have the opportunity to pick Benjamin’s brain in our Slack channel yesterday. It was one of the busiest sessions we’ve hosted but he managed like a trooper.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.

Transcript

hawk

2018-03-07 23:04

The formal intro:

hawk

2018-03-07 23:04

Benjamin is a co-founder of Dovetail, a new product that helps teams understand their customers through organization and analysis of user feedback and qualitative research. Dovetail is kind of like Google Docs meets Trello, designed specifically for researchers and product managers.

hawk

2018-03-07 23:04

https://dovetailapp.com/

claudia.realegeno

2018-03-07 23:04

Do you find it easier to structure by primarily by participant, by event, or some other method?

hawk

2018-03-07 23:04

Prior to starting Dovetail, Benjamin was a lead designer at Atlassian working on JIRA Agile, the growth team, and Atlassian’s cloud platform. He led design initiatives to bring consistency and modernity to Atlassian’s cloud offerings and was heavily involved in shaping Atlassian’s new design language, “ADG 3”, and their new product Stride.

Benjamin is a multi-disciplinary designer working across research, user experience, interface design, and frontend development.

hawk

2018-03-07 23:05

Thanks heaps for your time today @benjamin – we appreciate it.

hawk

2018-03-07 23:05

Can you give us some history and a brief intro on the topic?

hawk

2018-03-07 23:05

Then we’ll get into questions.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:05

Hey everyone!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:05

Thanks for joining :slightly_smiling_face:

krisduran

2018-03-07 23:05

Thank you @benjamin for doing this today and sharing your experience!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:06

As @hawk mentioned I’m a product designer, ex-Atlassian, and now founder / CEO of a SaaS startup focused on building a great product for teams to manage customer feedback & user research.

taraleeyork

2018-03-07 23:06

Hi everyone

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:06

I’d love to talk about anything to do with research, product design, and generally just building great products since that’s my passion.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:06

To give you a few ideas for topics: advocating research inside a data-driven organization, the relationship between designers / researchers / PMs, collecting, storing, organizing, and analyzing data, sharing knowledge and getting buy-in with stakeholders, escaping the daily grind and setting long term visions, design / research team org structure, and more.

kaselway

2018-03-07 23:06

Well! There’s 7k people here so it’s a bit of chaos!

hawk

2018-03-07 23:07

Cool. Are you ready for questions?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:07

Specifically the topic is about research data organization / sharing – but I’m also happy to expand beyond that if you have more general questions for me about design or reseach :slightly_smiling_face:

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:07

@hawk yep!

hawk

2018-03-07 23:07

Ok team, shoot…

hawk

2018-03-07 23:07

From @rachelreveley What can you do when you use various tools to create different deliverables such as Google Slides, Axure, Foundation etc?

maadonna

2018-03-07 23:08

How do you avoid re-researching the same things over and over? i.e. how do you make old research information available to start with, and only researching what you don’t know (I have never seen a team do this well – everyone just seems to re-research)

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:08

Hmm. What do you mean by “what can you do”? As in, how can you consolidate everything into a single deliverable / outcome?

taraleeyork

2018-03-07 23:08

What do you do when a client/employer tells you they don’t have a budget for research?

frankenvision

2018-03-07 23:09

Q: What inspired you to create Dovetail?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:09

I think one of the problems I’ve seen in research is that there isn’t really a ‘standardised’ set of tools that researchers use. Unlike designers, which have Sketch / Photoshop / InVision emerging as the platform. Researchers still have a really disparate collection of digital and physical tools

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:09

They also tend not to talk to one another

rachelreveley

2018-03-07 23:09

Yes. I find that I end up with lots of very different pieces and have to somehow link them together

rvaelle

2018-03-07 23:10

And tips on being efficient on organizing and analyzing data? Not getting overwhelmed with data.:fearful:

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:10

@rachelreveley Right. I don’t feel like I have a great solution for you, to be honest. I think the variety in process / methods / and tuning the output to the stakeholders means that the number and type of tools you’ll use varies so much between projects

isha

2018-03-07 23:10

Wow – that’s a lot!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:11

In the past everything tends to end up in a document or slideshow

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:11

which is not ideal, imo

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:11

part of the issue is that the raw data is disconnected from the output

rachelreveley

2018-03-07 23:11

They do. the closest to a solution so far is Basecamp but I’m not a huge fan.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:12

Until there’s something that can suck in a bunch of data in different formats and let you manipulate that, analyze it, distill it, then spit it out as a great output for stakeholders, I think you’re a bit stuck with what we have today

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:12

At Atlassian we talked a lot about the “IDE” for people

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:12

Using that metaphor of developer IDE’s who have lots of powerful features

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:12

What’s the IDE for designers? PMs? Researchers?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:13

I don’t think there’s a strong story yet for the latter

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:13

But you can see software emerging for the first two

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:13

Anyway, I’ll move on!

jamie

2018-03-07 23:13

What do you find is the best way to present your findings not only to stakeholders but to team members both in design and tech streams?

danielle

2018-03-07 23:13

What’s IDE?

james.g.jenner

2018-03-07 23:13

IDE = Integrated Development Environment.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:14

@claudia.realegeno I’m architecting an in-house database to store research findings and struggling with how to incorporate tagging capabilities and account for events where there were multiple attendees. How do you handle these challenges in a world of normalized databases? Do you find it easier to structure by primarily by participant, by event, or some other method?

guido

2018-03-07 23:14

Intentionally Difficult Employees

guido

2018-03-07 23:14

oh

guido

2018-03-07 23:14

well, almost got it

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:14

@claudia.realegeno Your first part of the question might be a bit complicated for me to answer here. But the second part I can have a crack at. I think it really depends whether a) you’re doing a research project, with an end date, or b) you’re embedded in a team and you’re doing ongoing research.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:15

Also if you’re doing strategic / tactical research

claudia.realegeno

2018-03-07 23:15

ongoing research

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:15

For instance, if you have a specific goal or outcome in mind

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:15

Right

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:15

So, user testing sessions, interviews, etc?

bkesshav

2018-03-07 23:15

Is there any tool that use AI and machine learning to highlight key findings and recommend areas to focus as pain points?

claudia.realegeno

2018-03-07 23:15

sometimes we have a clear measurable goal, sometimes it’s more qualitative

claudia.realegeno

2018-03-07 23:16

We’d like the flexibility for both, and even just grabbing ad-hoc statements

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:16

I think the general idea you want to get to then, with ongoing research, is building up a bit of a library of themes that you’re observing over time, beyond the specific individual events

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:16

At Atlassian, researchers are embedded inside product teams

claudia.realegeno

2018-03-07 23:16

yes, exactly!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:16

So across a bunch of different methods, they’re forming these patterns / themes over time, and it’s somewhat irregardless of the actual method they used to discover those insights

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:17

Generally they’ll write up some stuff, maybe on a cadence, or perhaps have an ongoing short meeting, to then present the outcome of the events as evidence to support a more macro theme

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:18

So I would say, for ongoing research, you probably want to structure by theme as you go (you won’t start out with themes at the beginning) and then use the specific events as evidence

krisduran

2018-03-07 23:18

Do you have a recommendation on how to present data when talking with stakeholders?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:18

@maadonna How do you avoid re-researching the same things over and over? i.e. how do you make old research information available to start with, and only researching what you don’t know (I have never seen a team do this well – everyone just seems to re-research)

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:18

Heh

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:18

This is like the biggest struggle that the Atlassian researchers had when I left

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:19

I think everyone struggles with this, especially growing companies where you have new people joining all the time

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:19

IMO the problem comes down to bad tooling for storing research insights

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:19

Too much reliance of “tribal knowledge” of long time employees, who would say something like, “hang on, didn’t we do this a while ago?” but you wouldn’t know that without them jumping in

jamie

2018-03-07 23:20

can you speak a bit about different methods you use to synthesize and document qualitative data

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:20

Part of the challenge is that the type of data you touch with research is so varied that no system handles it all perfectly. One product that works great for storing emails from customers or interview notes might not work for video. Another which is great for video might not work for tweets or survey results.

maadonna

2018-03-07 23:20

I’d be interested in hearing how anyone does this :slightly_smiling_face:

dorothee

2018-03-07 23:20

What do you do when you’re asked to provide a UX budget estimate for an upcoming product release, but you only have a very high-level idea of what the release theme is going to be?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:21

@maadonna At Atlassian we had some success with organising things into “FAQ” style pages by product

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:21

Where you kind of start with the question and that links off to the research

krisduran

2018-03-07 23:21

Q: Do you find storytelling a key part of presenting data to non-research folks?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:21

So if you had a question like, fairly generic, “What do people do in their first 5 days of using JIRA?” that might then link to some research on onboarding

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:21

But there are so many problems with this

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:21

It requires constant maintenance

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:21

It gets out of date

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:22

It also requires people to use the same formatting so you can compare apples to apples

krisduran

2018-03-07 23:22

Q: When do you know you’ve got enough data and need to pull back out of the rabbit hole?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:22

Data repositories are kind of a way to solve it

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:22

But

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:23

The data itself is also quite messy in its original form so the repository ends up being tucked away out of view from stakeholders because it’s a total mess.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:23

You really need some way to say, “hey, here’s my raw data, and it’s really messy, but I can take excerpts out of that and add them into something that’s more bite-sized and shareable.”

frankenvision

2018-03-07 23:23

Q: What do you do with results of your research when you realized you’ve headed in the wrong direction on a project?

bkesshav

2018-03-07 23:24

Q: Is there any tool that use AI and machine learning to highlight key findings from research and recommend areas to focus as pain points?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

So yeah, I think, in larger companies, it’s a tooling problem. I think it’s probably only really a problem in larger companies anyway, because in a smaller organisation, you’ll have less researchers / designers who probably talk more and can hold more in their heads.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

Heh

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

Popular topic

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

Okay, next one

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

@taraleeyork What do you do when a client/employer tells you they don’t have a budget for research?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

Hmm. My co-founder sitting next to me says “offer them a trial”

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

Haha

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:24

No, I think, it really depends

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:25

If you’re really passionate about research for this project

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:25

Then I think you’ll want to find some way to do it sneakily on the fly

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:25

Even a few structured customer interviews, recorded, can be proof of the value of research

aquazie

2018-03-07 23:25

agreed on sneaking in, if needed

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:26

So for a couple of hundred dollars, you should be able to recruit maybe three people for 30 minute interviews

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:26

Then it’s just saying “the proof is in the pudding” right

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:26

We used this tactic A LOT at Atlassian

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:26

Especially a couple of years ago when research was starting to mature

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:27

Atlassian has gone through a stage of no designers → convincing the value of design → no researchers → convincing the value of research

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:27

And a lot of that was simply doing it, even if there wasn’t budget for it

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:27

Not the best answer, but yeah, that’s just the reality of organisational politics I guess

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:28

@frankenvision Q: What inspired you to create Dovetail?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:28

I actually wrote a blog series on the beginnings of Dovetail

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:28

https://dovetail.blog/nothing-to-something/home

frankenvision

2018-03-07 23:28

Thanks @benjamin I will check it out

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:28

So for the full story I guess read that, but the abridged version is that I noticed a distinct lack of decent software for researchers when I worked at Atlassian

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:28

Research software, quite frankly, sucks

taraleeyork

2018-03-07 23:29

Thanks for the answer @benjamin

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:29

Ironically it’s often poorly designed and hella expensive

tyler

2018-03-07 23:29

Q: What are your views on prioritizing Quantitative Data over Qualitative User interviews for a consumer product?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:29

It’s also a huge opportunity because it’s so far reaching

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:30

We think about the key tent pegs of research – collection, organization, analysis, and sharing

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:30

In each of those, you have a variety of tools

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:30

Survey software, data repositories, QDA tools, collab tools

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:30

Nobody has really flipped those verticals into one horizontal, integrated path

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:31

So that’s kind of the realization I had

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:31

@rvaelle Any tips on being efficient on organizing and analyzing data? Not getting overwhelmed with data.

cindy.mccracken

2018-03-07 23:31

Are you able to take study notes in Dovetail? Observers too?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:31

Hmm. Being quite ruthless in what you keep around.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:31

For instance, take a user testing session.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:32

You might have 30 min of video there, but how much of that is setting up, introductions, technical issues, etc.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:32

So maybe cut your user testing videos into a “highlight reel” and you’ll have less noise in your data

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:32

Also, I like the whole “insight as a tweet” thing

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:32

I’ve seen a lot of researchers write these really long internal blog posts or presentations

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:32

And they’re really ineffective IMO

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:33

The most successful approach I’ve seen is simply showing stakeholders actual quotes from customers or video from user testing.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:33

For instance, at Atlassian, instead of creating research reports, I used to buy popcorn for our team and invite everyone (PM, developers, QA) along to watch pre-recorded user testing videos. After each one we’d discuss them together and take a few quick notes. Everyone knew what the problems were and the next steps. No need for a presentation or a report.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:33

Let the data speak for itself

cindy.mccracken

2018-03-07 23:33

In a couple companies where I’ve worked, the best way to make sure research is kept top of mind is writing stories for the backlogs. Then they get prioritized with the rest of the work.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:34

@jamie What do you find is the best way to present your findings not only to stakeholders but to team members both in design and tech streams?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:34

Nice segue there

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:34

I can rattle off another couple of examples of techniques I used at Atlassian

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:34

I had lots of success bringing developers along with me on contextual inquiries or having them sit in on interviews. Assign them a role like photographer or note-taker. They love it and they can experience customer pain first hand.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:35

Another technique I used at Atlassian was to set up a HipChat room and connect it to Twitter using IFTTT. All it did was show all the tweets mentioning @JIRA on Twitter, and spoiler, most of them were not happy tweets.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:35

This brought customer pain in front of the team in the tools they use every day. We even put incoming user feedback on wallboard televisions alongside the developer’s build status.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:35

I think the most effective researchers are the ones that simply act as a messenger for the data / evidence from the customer / users in the research

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:35

In some ways you’re kind of like a director of a movie

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:36

You have all of these clips on the cutting room floor

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:36

You need to take those and edit them into what you’re going to show, fit it into 1.5 hours

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:36

(hopefully a lot less than that)

frankenvision

2018-03-07 23:36

Q: How do you sort through pain points once you find them? Do you put them in a severity chart and vote on them with your team?

hawk

2018-03-07 23:37

FYI We have 10 questions queued up which will likely take us to the end of the session

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:37

Time is flying!

tyler

2018-03-07 23:37

I create a sortable excel sheet

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:37

@bkesshav Is there any tool that use AI and machine learning to highlight key findings and recommend areas to focus as pain points?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:37

I don’t think there is any software that can do what researchers do today

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:38

There’s lots of ML that can *help* you get insights

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:38

For example, we just shipped automatic sentiment analysis yesterday

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:38

This is kind of helpful for parsing large amounts of data

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:38

It gives you a bit of a starting point to work from, everything strongly negative is in one place

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:39

Unless you have an enormous data set (which most companies do not), ML will not be able to uncover key findings / distill insights etc from a variety of raw data

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:39

I think eventually we might get to “black box research” but empathy and context are so important for research

davidbaird

2018-03-07 23:39

parsing is an interesting term. :slightly_smiling_face:. There in lies the appropriate degree of ‘filtering’

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:39

So I think computers can absolutely aid researchers

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:40

And there is not enough of that today IMO

cindy.mccracken

2018-03-07 23:40

I like this idea, but you’d need to capture those next steps somewhere, right?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:40

But I don’t think researchers need to worry about being replaced by ML / AI

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:40

@krisduran Do you have a recommendation on how to present data when talking with stakeholders?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:41

Somewhat covered above – keep it simple, brief, present the raw data / evidence where possible, stay away from long presentations. In Dovetail, the idea is that the raw data is stored alongside your insights, and then that can be shared with stakeholders to collaborate on. So then they can just click around and explore the insights, and dive into the raw data if necessary. It removes the disconnect between what’s in Powerpoint vs. what’s in your spreadsheet or Dropbox.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:41

Another technique that I’ll quickly mention is to involve them throughout the process

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:41

This isn’t always feasible

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:41

But if it is possible, (same goes for design), it’s great if you can have your team involved in collection / analysis etc.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:42

Again at Atlassian we tried to do this where possible

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:42

Turns out a developer is going to be much more likely to be excited about a new feature if she’s been invovled in the design process from the start

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:42

@dorothee What do you do when you’re asked to provide a UX budget estimate for an upcoming product release, but you only have a very high-level idea of what the release theme is going to be?

frankenvision

2018-03-07 23:43

Q: How many researchers did you work with at Atlassian?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:43

Tell them estimation is hard and add 50% ?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:43

I’m not sure, to be honest!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:43

That’s what developers do to me all the time, so maybe it should go the other way too :joy:

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:43

@krisduran Q: Do you find storytelling a key part of presenting data to non-research folks?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:43

Yep, absolutely!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:44

At Atlassian, every year, the design / research / writing team come together from around the world in Sydney and have a week together

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:44

I’ll find the video, hang on

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pejjWaaUYSs

bkesshav

2018-03-07 23:44

I didn’t ask if AI can replace researchers, can technology like AI infer and create insights from the research outcomes.

Most time is spent looking in to the raw data and research findings. Can technology use the data to make the process of analysis and drawing insights.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:45

Anyway, the theme from a couple of years back was storytelling

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:45

I think it’s a critical skill for designers and researchers, and PMs. Everyone, really.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:45

You need to take people on a journey, build empathy with characters (often the users), and propose a solution

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:45

It’s somewhat like making a film. Pixar are very good at this. Channel Pixar in your research!

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:46

@bkesshav Right. My answer would be not right now, but in a few years, possible. At the moment the ML / natural language stuff is mostly helpful for broadly categorising large sets of data.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:46

To get true insights you need a human touch to understand the context and the goal of the research

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:46

@krisduran Q: When do you know you’ve got enough data and need to pull back out of the rabbit hole?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:47

Good question. When you start seeing the same things over and over.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:47

In theory, the obvious themes will emerge quite quickly during your research.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:48

It also depends a lot on how rigorous you want to be

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:48

Often, with research, you’re not looking for statistical significance

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:48

There’s usually no need for that level of certainty

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:48

Research is very helpful as a quick, lean, and directional approach a lot of the time

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:48

I’d recommend Erika Hall’s book Just Enough Research

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:48

Which is entirely devoted to this topic

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:49

@frankenvision Q: What do you do with results of your research when you realize you’ve headed in the wrong direction on a project?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:49

If the data is valuable, keep it, and maybe write a brief summary of what you learned, even if it’s not relevant for the project.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:49

Again depends on whether you’re embedded, doing ongoing research, or whether you’re working on a once-off project

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:50

If it’s completely worthless and will be in the future, then chuck it. Don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:50

@tyler What are your views on prioritizing Quantitative Data over Qualitative User interviews for a consumer product?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:50

Spicy question!

frankenvision

2018-03-07 23:50

thanks

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:50

I don’t think there’s any need to prioritize one over another

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:50

They’re very different

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:51

A huge myth in software development is that these two things compete against one another

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:51

That couldn’t be further from the truth

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:51

Quant can tell you *what* users are doing, but qual can tell you *why*

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:51

I wrote a wee piece on this: https://dovetailapp.com/guides/qual-quant

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:52

There’s a whole topic here, in itself, which is using qual and quant data in software development

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:52

humans love certainty

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:52

people think quantitative data brings certainty

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:53

but often, it’s really misleading / open to interpretation

hawk

2018-03-07 23:53

You’re rocking this @benjamin

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:53

There’s been a huge trend the past few years

hawk

2018-03-07 23:53

We have 2 questions left and we’ll call it a wrap

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:53

Companies think quantitative data has become a “solution” for a lot of people, a silver bullet

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:53

Partly because it’s been much more accessible

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:53

Before we had Mixpanel, GA, etc.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:54

We had to talk to users, talk to customers

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:54

These tools made quant much easier to access, and since humans love certainty, they seemed to provide it

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:54

As someone who worked on growth / analytics at Atlassian, I can assure you that analytics are often anything but certain

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:55

There’s a bit of a renaissance happening now I think

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:55

A few years back, the 4th or 5th hire in your startup would be a data analytics / growth person

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:55

Now I’m seeing more and more Dovetail customers who are startups with researchers as that hire

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:55

@cindy.mccracken Are you able to take study notes in Dovetail? Observers too?

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:55

Yep. Not 100% sure what you mean by observers, but it has a real time collab editor, like Google Docs.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:56

@frankenvision Q: How do you sort through pain points once you find them? Do you put them in a severity chart and vote on them with your team?

cindy.mccracken

2018-03-07 23:56

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:57

@frankenvision Yeah, sort of. It kind of depends on the team. With a newer team, you’ll need more structure, so probably some card sorting or meetings to prioritise what to work on. If the team is smaller, or more established, then you’ll probably have more trust, so maybe the researcher can just suggest an ordered list of pain points to work through.

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:58

I can show you a screenshot of our customer feedback board on Dovetail

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:58

The tags, that is

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:58

@benjamin uploaded a file: https://uxmastery.slack.com/files/U9B1TRPDX/F9LFUNSJ1/image.png

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:59

This is basically how we manage our pain points / customer feedback

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:59

So everything is tagged, then we use the board to group the tags into product areas or existing vs. new feature

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:59

Then rank them

benjamin

2018-03-07 23:59

So something similar to that is probably a good way to sort / organize your pain points – either on a post-it note board, or Trello, or Dovetail if you want to try that

benjamin

2018-03-08 00:00

That was the last question, I think!

hawk

2018-03-08 00:00

Nice!

benjamin

2018-03-08 00:00

I can stick around for a few more minutes, if anyone has anything pressing

hawk

2018-03-08 00:00

That was pretty full on but you killed it.
__end transcript__

benjamin

2018-03-08 00:00

Or maybe a follow up from anything I said?

frankenvision

2018-03-08 00:00

That was a great session, thanks

hawk

2018-03-08 00:00

Much appreciated.