UX-radio 5j4940

MORE ABOUT MARIANNE Marianne Sweeny is a well-known Search Information architect, SEO and experience designer. Many moons ago she started advocating the relationship between information architecture, experience and search engines. Her charming wit and intellect make her a sought after speaker at many conferences and this interview tells the story of how she defines her path with an insatiable desire to learn and create meaning. Marianne’s focus is on information behavior, navigation of information environments, and making searches work better for s. She holds a Masters of Library and Information Science degree as well as certificate degrees in Software Product Management and Content Management Systems from the University of Washington. She worked for Microsoft for seven years as a Web producer, which helped her gain further insight into technology and information management fields. Before transitioning into the technology field, Ms. Sweeny was a development executive in the entertainment industry, acquiring, managing, and developing feature film and television projects. As a development executive, she was in charge of content acquisition, production, personnel and client relationship management, presentation design, research, writing, and editorial aspects of her projects. Marianne is a member of the Information Architecture Institute, Content Management Professionals, an Advisor for World IA Day and the American Society for Information Science and Technology. For more information and a portfolio of her work, please visit Daedalus Information Systems. Find Marianne on Daedalus Information Systems Twitter SlideShare UX Magazine University of Washington Information School IMDb Vimeo   The post Skeptical and Respectful SEO appeared first on UX-radio.

Dorian Taylor has been deg and creating custom information infrastructure since 1999. He says that Infrastructure is all that dull plumbing that makes the world actually function. It’s dull because when it’s working, it’s invisible. Dorian‘s overall goal is to lower the friction between people and computers, and to allow computers to do more for us with less intervention. He was a former Board member of the Information Architecture Institute and is currently the Principal of PrivateAlpha Technology. His skill set is impressive to say the least. TRANSCRIPT Welcome to UX Radio, the Podcast that generates collaborative discussion about information architecture, experience and design. Dorian Taylor has been deg and creating custom information infrastructure since 1999. He says that infrastructure is all that dull plumbing that makes the word actually function. It’s dull because when it’s working, it’s invisible. Dorian Taylor overall goal is to lower the friction between people and computers and to allow computers to do more for us with less intervention. Here’s a former board member of the Information Architecture Institute and is currently the principal of Private Alpha Technology. His skill-set is impressive to say the least. Dorian: I’ve been a visual designer, I’ve been a system , I’ve been a back-end developer, I’ve been a front-end developer. Databases, internationalization, security. I’ve really been all over the map that is if you see where it is connecting to subcutaneously..To me it’s all different facets of the same thing. The thing that was really serious to me.. I quit my job as a developer in 2007 and I vacillated. I was like, OK this is a question a lot of people have — do I go and get another job or do I freelance? I was vacillating back and forth and I got advice from people like, ‘Why can’t you do both?’ And I’m actually beginning to believe that they are mutually exclusive, they have mutually exclusive attitudes. And going for one is the opposite of going for the other. You’ve got to pick one. I ended up leaning towards consulting. And I needed to understand why. What is it that repulses me so much about the model that we do? The model that we do as designers, as developers, the acquisition of what I would call highly synthetic artifacts. And by highlysynthetic, I’m mean you have to do a lot of synthesis in order to get the final result. You have to make a thing, to make a thing, to make a thing. So I put software and websites in there but there are other things too, like writing a novel would be highly synthetic. Any sort of really creative endeavor like recording an album. Or making a movie not so much because there is a crap load of industrial activity like building sets and what not in there. But there are a very set number of things for which the physical medium is not actually all that important. What’s on the medium and information is on the medium in the case of anovel, it could be an eBook, could be print, could be media as it doesn’t matter. The physical. And that’s important because I believe that.. I believe this because I have observed it, I havelived it, is that the way that we treat the acquisition of these highly synthetic artifacts is like a construction project. You’ve got a business person who has this chunk of capital and they are like, ‘How do I turn this chunk of capital into a bigger chunk of capital?’ That is the only question they are asking, that’s the only question  that they care about. So somebody comes along and is willing to accept that principle, that whole premise that we can turn your certain sized chunk of capital to a size x+n chunk of capital. That’s what we call ROI. So now we are speaking the same language. And what ends of happening at least in my experience is that the risk of getting that thing done on time and on budget is all of course on the part of the person doing it. Their prize is a big hunk of money that’s usually cut up into 2 or 3 different pieces. And so their incentives get all out of whack and their risk is extremely huge. And this is why we have death marches and feature bargaining and why we have all sorts of really nastycompromises [inaudible] in my opinion, the way that we thought about it, the way  that we conceived the deal was we just changed our understanding of what it is that we are actually trying to deliver and what we are trying to conceptualize and what we are trying to do — the service and the product that we are actually trying to make. If we took a look at that from the level of finance, from the actual level of business, there might be something in there that would make it possible to make greater, better products that didn’t compromise. I understand compromise, it’s a calculus of what you can work with. And if you push one value up, another value shrinks and another one juts out in another dimension. I get it, I’ve lived it, I’ve been there. But what is really depressing is the compromise that you have to make that is like so bad that it actually obviates the entire purpose of why it was that you were doing whatever it was that we’re trying to do. And it turns into.. you are like, we just have a  perfunctory result.. we need to show something.. That kind of interaction, I really want to make that obsolete. I want to make that idea as something that you just don’t do because it’s nonsense.. The magic word to tell a lawyer is nonsense.. So that’s just an aside. Lara: What’s the solution? Dorian: So the solution? As it pertains to the web, I think apps are a little bit harder and other things are a little bit sketchier. Going back to Charles Dickens who wrote serials and got  and his stories would meander all over the place because of the that he was getting from his readers. Like, ‘I don’t like what that character is doing. Make them do something else.’ I’m not a huge Dickens scholar but I understand that much. The solution as it pertains exclusively to the web and that’s the only thing I’ve really beenlooking at is we look at it as a medium.. we actually look at the.. I hate to say the technical affordances  because they are more like the conceptual affordances of the medium. We are dealing in websites where we probably should be dealing in discrete business processes and goals. We should probably be dealing in discrete pieces of content. And that does not correspond one to one to the page, it could be an inset, it could be severalpages. But the idea of like, we do wire frames for the homepage  and then we fill out the sections and then we go and pester the client for content. And then it’s on us to make sure that this all happens all the time. I find that pathetically inexcusable. I find that that is completely lacking of any spine. It might be harsh but any understanding of the medium that people are working in.. It hasentirely different affordances like the fact that you can just replace stuff. There are technical constraints. But I believe that those technical constraints have beenconceived under the assumption of the business constraints. Lara: You were talking about the discrete  needs. I think so many companies come to us when we’re doing freelance work and they say, replace this or just make it look better. I think in the business world, it’s kind of talking in that language. So how do you help them uncover those discrete needs? Dorian: I think just to continue on the notion of what the goal is, a lot of the time people say we need to redesign the website and they call it the site redesign. The implementation is considered the end product and the goal. And just some of the things that I’m doing with my clients is I’m actually changing the objective to say that the implementation is not the goal. The goal is understanding the s so that when you have a widget on the implementation, you can actually trace back the provenance of why that thing was put there in the first place all the way back to the persona and the initial research. And the thesis there is that a design criterion or a set of abstract ideas around why things should be the way they are can out live any implementation and if that is good enough, then that is actually better than the implementation. But you need an implementation. But what if we imagined that the implementation, like the programming platform language or whatever you use was disposable and that the design artifacts were so good.. And of coursethere is a lot of on this, this is not a one way process. But the design artifactsmature to the point over time that they are so good that you can if you felt like it, just go and change that piece of discrete business process from one implementation to a completely different one and not upset anything in the process. If you could do that, you’d have a lot more freedom I think from vendors which is one of the things that we cared about, we care about  not getting locked into vendors. Because we sort of believe what if we based our relationships, our business relationships, on mutual valuerather than dependency. It was a very difficult thing to articulate with this one client, what the priorities are. And it was like, we don’t want to get screwed. That was the major motivation. I think a lot of entities have this problem, they have somebody they go and hire and they ask a certain set of questions like how much is it going to cost and how long is it going to take? As long as there is somebody who is willing to answer that, they are going to get the same kind of result.. the site launches and a lot of its features and most of them were cut which is another thing. The remaining, surviving features kind of go thud. Some of them might and some of them might not or whatever. But the features of the site.. because the information that created them was considered to be of less importance than the implementation. But what if we considered those as being more important? Imagine you can have a persona that lasts 20 or 30 years, why wouldn’t it? As long as that constituent exists in your business, there is no reason why you would shred those when you have your PHP do that. You have your Drupal site, ‘We can put that in the shredder because we don’t need these personas and wire frames and flow diagrams anymore because we have the implementation now. So thanks designers, bye. And I don’t see how that is a smart idea. Lara: Yeah, the personas should be consistent over the years. And I think that it’s our job to educate corporations and so when you are presenting some of those abstract ideas to change objectives, you are also educating them at the same time. Dorian: And that’s sort of why I’ve been starting to talk in CFO language. When I start talking about stuff like risk because risk makes the bio- ears pop up. The risk of theconstruction project.. when you look at it from an ROI-centric construction project style perspective is  I try to look at risk as a 3D object where.. what they call a tensar, which is a 3 dimensional vector or whatever.. You have three dimensions in risk. You’ve got probability, the likelihood that the risk is going to happen. And a risk can be positive as well. The risk of winning the lottery for example. And you have the magnitude which is the size of the lottery ticket, the size of the prize. And then you have the horizon. And this is a new one to me because at first I was just using those two. The third one was, when the risk stops being a risk, when it goes away, it doesn’t matteranymore. So getting your product out by Christmas for example. Well after Christmas it doesn’t matter. Or say catching an airplane, it’s the same sort of idea, like if you miss the airplane it doesn’t matter. In that framework, we can kind of imagine when we push and pull on one we get a differentshape. So it’s like what if we think about changing the shape of the risk involved in acquiring these artifacts? What does that look like? You look at the affordances of the web and what it afford? It affords these little pieces. What if we said instead of a lottery ticket that looked like it had a very, very expensive cost.. And relative to cost, it had a very low return. And it wasn’t measured in multipliers it was measured in percent. In the horizon, the duration or the period where the risk is still a risk, is a really long period. You are locking up your capital a year or two years or whatever. And you can’t do anything with it. It’s an all or nothing excursion. And what if we took that and stuck it in a blender is really the idea. And we changed it so that instead of one big monolithic risk, we change it to a bunch of little tiny risks. So the equivelent to pull tabs  but hopefully with better expected value.. The cost is low relative to the cost of the ticket, the value of the prize is extremely high, not measured in multipliers butmeasured in exponents. And the probability is arbitrary. We actually can’t measure it and we aren’t even going to try because the amount of effort required to figure out just how likely this was going to happen… It’s what Nassim Taleb says, ‘Do not even bother forecasting.’ And he also says for example,’Take your portfolio, put 80% of it in the most boring bonds that you can find. Take the other20% and put it in the sketchiest stuff that you can find.’ So what I’m saying is hack  80% of what you expected to pay off this, let’s look at that 20% and then we hack that up as well into little pieces that have potentially exponential returns, arbitrarily high as we have no idea how high they will be but we know the downside is fixed. In the construction model, the upside is fixed. ROI has a fixed upside. It’s also a fixed downside but it’s a fixed upside too. If we figured out a way to actually bring the last mile to the ground because right now it’s sort of like a helium balloon up floating.. So if  we could teether this idea to the ground, we might actually be able to..  specifically again websites because they are so easy to bash up like that. We might be able to invent an entirely new methodology. Lara: Are you saying that if someone says come redesign my website, you possibly present.. again  looking at the objective but still maybe scaling down the project and only look at certain parts that might have a hard impact? Dorian: The only way that I know how to do this so far is to stop thinking about it. And this is something that I  have yet to talk to actual business people about. But  stop thinking about it like it is a capital allocation. Think of it instead like a rate. It’s a burn rate. You change it from a capital expense to an operating expense. That rate is fixed. And so over the course of the year, you only spend a certain amount ofmoney. So your downside is bounded. So you can’t lose arbitrarily large amounts of moneywhich is what the CFO wants to hear. So rather than thinking about it as a redesign as well, the way that I’m actually doing this, the way that I’ve implemented it, I made some very specific technical [inaudible] that it’s kind of like putting up scaffolding. You setup the server or bank of servers depending on the size of the site. And what they do is they go in front of the existing server. I should probably provide you with a diagram. It’s actually in a piece in Content Magazinecalled ‘No longer, no sense of an ending.’ Lara: We’ll put a link on it. Dorian: And there is another one called [inaudible]. You put these servers in front of your site or a server, let’s make it simple.. You’ve got a small to medium website and it only needs one hosting or whatever and it’s not some crazyclouded CDN monstrosity. It’s just a little modest website. So you put this thing in front of it and what it does is it first of all creates a space to put newstuff. And if you put something at the URL on the new one, it serves out the new one. If there is nothing there on the new one, it pases through to the new one. It’s as simple as that,  it took me an afternoon to write this and it’s called a reverse proxy.That’s a very technical term and the idea is it just sits in between the and the origin and mediates and  it’s conditional so that if you stick something in the way, that’s what it [inaudible]. That was the first intervention. The next intervention was trying to figure out how do you look at the template. So we took astrategy of effectively sponging off or bleaching off the header, the side bars, the footer, and just leaving the little nugget of content in the middle. And that was what was correspondingto the site. I’m super over-simplifying this stuff and are probably going to get a lot of listeners saying, ‘how the hell do you know how to do that? What about this thing you left out.’ I’m leaving out a bunch of stuff right now. The basic idea is not only do we bleach the content coming through the old server, we stick in back on in a template system that actually runs below the application. That way we can manipulate things like the navigation because that becomes a resource.. you can just hack on that. We can manipulate the.. We can actually change the look of the site even though I would never recommend that to anybody. But we could change the look to the site without actually changing any of the back-end. We aren’t even touching it. We are scraping off all the stuff and we are sticking it all back onagain. As we create these discrete  goals, as we create these discrete pieces of content, they start to occlude the original site. They start to get in the way and once there is nothing left.. Once every single piece has been patched over and covered up, then we go back to the template and we make a pretty new one and then we ‘launch’ because the reality is that a lot of the actual material functionality of the site could’ve been running having people using it for months. But we just reskin it with something pretty and now we’ve theoretically launched the site even though you’ve been using this thing for a while. What we are doing is we are actually demoting the launch from something.. either demoting or promoting, depending on how you want to look at it. But we are demoting it from being this nail biting affair of like, ‘Do we through the switch or what?’ To like, ‘It is like a PR complete  smoke and mirrors of  all we are doing is changing the look of it. And thefunctionality is running..’ Wouldn’t that be nice to live in that world where that is the norm? When all that stuff is covered up, you cut it loose and then you take off the scaffolding. And now you have a completely new website. It’s also handy for when you’ve got a hair ball like we do at the IA Institute, we’ve got a hair ball of back-end  platforms.. We have WordPress there, Drupal there . We have some SaaS monstrosity, some platform hosted thing. We’ve got all of these things, I counted 13. Like how do you sever those relationships? How do you kill that vendor? How do you get rid of [inaudible]? You have to make it not matter. And that was the impetus for this I guess at the beginning. Lara: That’s good. I think it really helps take the fear out of looking at something so big and putting it into small pieces like you said.. But replacing those a little at a time so that when you do, just add that  visual layer, then it looks like to everyone that it’s a new site but yeteverything else is running really smoothly. All of the other components are already solid. Dorian: Correct. And we do use the word component except it has a very specific meaning. It has a meaning borrowed from graph theory in mathematics.. A component in a directed graph is something that [is closed. So you can imagine that every dot or every box in the graph is a page or a resource of some kind. And the arrows are links in between those resources.. not necessarily just links, they could be embeds as well..  They could be an image or something like that. Or an inset, you embed an inset. It’s closed though, it doesn’t have arrows going out of it. And that’s a diagram.. If you have adiagram where you make this thing, it has a terminal condition at the end and it goes to the final node and then it’s done. That is the exact equivalent to a discrete business process. You can make that and you can install it and deploy it and have your s use it, and the turnaround time on that, we aren’t talking about months but we are talking days.. possibly hours. I mean the idea of this would be that you’d get so much useful information about the kinds of things that you need to do.. And not only that but it’s also the decomposition of its anatomy and  how that all works that you don’t prioritize as a first order activity anymore. You prioritize because there is this thing sticking out and it’s obvious that that is the right next thing to do. And you know that it’s going to have value. So it’s not an issue of how do we bargain  features. And I’m totally ripping this from Alan Cooper, you try to make it obvious that we’ve got the information that we need and if we change the job into making the next step obvious, then we aren’t going to have this sort of disconnect of, ‘We are the experts, you should do it this way.’ If you have ever actually looked at the problem of task prioritization from a computational perspective, it’s NP complete which means you have to use heuristics which means that you aren’t going to get the same result twice because if you try to do an exhaustive result, it would take you so long to figure that out that there would be no value in it is basically the issue. And of course if you added one more item, then you would explode the overheadexponentially and you’d have to do it all over again except that much more work. So let’s not do that. With task reprioritization, the reason why we care about it when we do require [inaudible] once we’ve done that, we prioritize. There was a really good book written in 1964, it was a PhD thesis by Christopher Alexanderwho was getting his PhD in math I believe at the time and he said something really profound about design. And that is, ‘Two arbitrary designers are not going to believe that a given misfits, a given thing that needs to be dealt with, has the same importance. But they will all agree on whether or not it is valid but they aren’t going to agree on whether or not it’s important and whether or not it’s a priority.’ So there are techniques for saying, rather than trying to mitigate the amount of requirements, why don’t we just blow them all up and make the.. and this is kind of what I’m getting off into the weeds because we had some conversations about this.. Jorge [inaudible] interested in this [inaudible] is really interested in this.. We’d blow up the requirements and we’d say throw in 100s of requirements and what we’re going to do is we’re going to stitch them all together, the relationships with each other, and how they either correlate with each other or they conflict with each other. And then what we are going to do is forget all about whether or not they are important because we are never going to agree on what’s more important. What we do is we decompose the structure, we pull the structure apart mathematically so that we get these little islands of [inaudible].. So we get little bits of requirements here and there. When we’ve got that, they become more manageable and then we can sub divide themfurther. And then that little thing that you thought was either not worth doing or maybe it was your pet thing that you thought was really, really important.. When you do that, you actually sub-divide the problem to the point where these little things of arbitrary importance becomeirrelevant because the problem is so damn small. And if the problem is small, and it’s obvious what the solution is, you just solve it and you ship it. And even if it’s something silly like the favicon on IAInstitute.org I was like, ‘Wow that’s blurry and doesn’t look good. I will open up Photoshop and I’ll make a little pixel art one that is clear and looks better.’ That took me 10 minutes. It was obvious to do. I didn’t need clearance for it because I happen to be a director of that organization. So I didn’t ask anybody’s permission, I just did it because it bothered me. It was obvious what to do and I just did it. So what I want to do is I want to pulverize these problems into something that you can do obviously, you can care of as an obvious thing. And then also setup the infrastructure so that if somebody has.. And I know there are legalissues and there are issues of who owns what turf and so on and so forth. That I’m going to hand wave away because it doesn’t need to be the processes as totally cavalier as making a new favicon because I’m authorized and I felt like that. It can be a little bit more rigorous than that. But it doesn’t have to be paralyzed I guess by the complexity and it also doesn’t have to beartificially simplified because it’s that process of artificial simplification degrades the value of the product. What makes a good product is people actually solving problem, not looking like they have solved the problems. So let’s explore the idea that the construction project is not the only way to acquire this stuff because there is tons. Lara: That’s great. That’s a great wrap up. Dorian: Thank you for having me. Narrator: This episode is sponsored by WeWork. Meaningful conversations are essential to the success of every entrepreneur, freelancer, and small business owner. At WeWork we consistently strive to make meeting new people and having interestingconversations natural and effortless. From the design of our work space to the events at our buildings, we do everything we can to the idea that if one of us is successful, we all benefit. Thanks to Steve Crosby for digital development and original score piece by CameronMichele. [music]     The post Uncovering Discrete Needs appeared first on UX-radio.

You might know of Christina Wodtke from her best-selling book, Information Architecture:  Blueprints for the Web. She’s spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide, currently consults and teaches at Stanford and California College of the Arts. She’s led large teams at Yahoo!, Zynga, MySpace and LinkedIn. In this episode, Christina talks about co-founding the Information Architecture Institute and takes us on a journey through her life. TRANSCRIPT Welcome to UX Radio, the podcast that generates collaborative discussion about information architecture, experience and design. Lara: And you are one of the founders of IAI. Christina: Yes. Lara: Yeah. Christina: I was one of the founders of the IA Institute. That was actually started at the – I think it was the – third IA Summit in Baltimore and Lou and I had been both up, staying up late that night, drinking with a bunch of people complaining about how are we gonna move the practice forward? And the next morning we kept talking about it and we decided to have a retreat so we went to Asilomar, which is this unbelievably gorgeous conference center in Pacific Grove, right on the ocean. They don’t have TV’s or telephones in the rooms. There are deer running around everywhere and a group of people got together and said, “Okay how are we gonna help the profession grow? How are we gonna get smarter at what we do” and decided to start an institute committed to the practice of information architecture. It was something a little bit different because at that time anyway – I think things have changed but at that time – the professional organizations just seemed like I don’t know kind of clubs and they’d hand out credit cards and I don’t know. It was really strange and insurance providers and we wanted something that was only about the practice, just focused on how do we do this thing called information architecture better and it’s been going for a long time, ten years now, I guess. Lara: Right and there are some fabulous resources on the site. It’s great. Christina: Yeah I’m pretty proud of that one. They say the sign that you’ve done something right is you can walk away and it keeps going without you and even though I was the president that first year after that it’s just grown all by itself and that’s a sign that that initial crowd – you know Peter, Lou, me, Andrew Gusholm, I’m forget everybody’s name, there were a whole bunch of us, Jesse James Garrett, you know – we built something special. We built something that lasts. Lara: I saw that you had gone to the Kansas City Art Institute and I was curious, like, what prompted you to go there? Christina: You know I saw that question and one of the things that I’m very much committed to in my life right now is telling the truth as long as it can help someone and I think this is an important story. I went there because when I was a teenager I was suicidality depressed and I was a small-town Iowa. People who were different were not accepted and I was seeing a therapist. I was even institutionalized a couple of times for attempted suicide. I mean it was quite serious and even though I had a great SAT and had high scores and was applying to you know Ivy League colleges I kind of blew off the essay. I didn’t really care. I didn’t really think I was going to live and then my wonderful great-aunt Peg, who I love so much, suggested we take a tour of the Kansas  City Art Institute, which was near, relatively near where she lived in Lawrenceburg and from the moment I walked on campus, I knew this was a place I could be. In fact it kind of gave me a new lease on life, having a place where everybody was freaky and weird and strange and creative and everywhere people were making art. There were no sports unless you count three-speed. I don’t know. It just – it really – it made me feel like there was a place for me. One of the funniest things I was walking through the Design Building and seeing toasters and I think that was the first time in my life I ever thought, “Hey, humans make these things” and I started looking at the whole world, going, “Oh yeah there’s a human being out there somewhere who thought this house would be a good idea or this door would be a good idea or this toaster oven would be a good idea” and I think that led me down an interesting path of seeing the world as something you create and shape as opposed to something you just accept. Lara: Right and so you had mainly a focus in photography and video, is that right? Christina: Well I started in painting but the instructors in Painting were Abstract Expressionists and I was very committed to working figuratively and I felt like philosophically we didn’t really get along so I switched to Photography and Video and that’s when I really fell in love with computers, doing computer-altered photography. It kinda cracks me up because I was having lunch with my friend Irene and she was talking about how amazing Google is right now. They have this thing called Auto Erase where you can – if you your photos to Google + you — push one button and it will erase everybody who’s not a member of your family from the photo. Christina: And I studying Photography in school and going, “What will happen to the truth when people can change photographs?” I don’t think anybody ever pictured how far from the truth photography would end up being. Lara: Well that’s interesting that you did a lot of editing on the computer and that’s kind of – is that – where your interest sort of started in getting more digital? Christina: Well I wish I could say yes. All my stories go sideways over and over again. [Laughs] So I did photography and I started doing digitally-altered photography and I liked that and I liked computers and I thought, “Okay where can I move that does computers?” And at that point it was either California or New York and I hate snow so I picked California and it turned out that was a good bet and then I went back to painting and I spent ten years waiting tables and painting, believe it or not. I didn’t get back into computers for a long time. I did fine dining and I was making quite a huge amount of money working very few hours waiting tables but then a friend of mine pinged me and said, “Hey you know CNET’s trying to build a Yahoo! Killer Directory.” I don’t know if you when Yahoo! was a directory. Lara: Yes. Christina: And [laughs] not so long ago and they’re looking for people to review websites and so I had to review 50-websites-a-week and I still have the t-shirt for it. It was called SNAP. It was my first launch, very exciting. Lara:  Wow. Christina: And I just fell in love with the internet. I mean being forced to look at every single caffeinated water or every single fine-dining guide on the internet just made me realize, once again, it was like the toaster story. All of a sudden I realized this was a world that people were making; this was world people were creating. This was a place that we both explore and invent and create all at the same time and we have a responsibility to make those things great and it gave me a chance to look at so much of the internet and, after that, I used my magical internet-surfing powers to teach myself HTML. I got involved with the Web Girrrrls with, like, four “R’s” I think it had and started teaching them how to code as well and got a job at E-Greetings and never looked back. I love the internet. The internet is the most amazing thing in the world. Sometimes I think I was just waiting for the internet to show up. Lara:                           And so how did you make the transition from working from E-Greetings over into information architecture? Christina:                    Well that actually happened at E-Greetings. I came into E-Greetings as a temp. I was just reviewing cards. I would organize them and classify them though they didn’t call that information architecture. They called that temp work. Putting them in categories and writing little snippets about it and then I started working in the HTML team and then I ended up running the front-end Development Team there and I was thinking about becoming a hard-core coder and, at that time, I was doing design reviews, with the creative director, David Rossi , and I would go there and I would go there and I’d say, “Well you know we can’t build this” but I’d also say, “And by the way this isn’t going to be usable because Don Norman or Jacob Neilson says this and this.” I was very ionate about making better websites at that time and so when I mentioned to Dave that I wanted to become an engineer, he said, “No, no, no, no, you have to the Design Team. If you’re gonna change groups you have to my team” and I said, “Well what am I going to do?” And he said, “Whatever you want” [laughs] and I had just read The Polar Bear Book. It was the first edition of it. It had just come out and I said, “I wanna be an information architect” and I switched over and taught myself everything and grew the team and ended up leaving a team there as well and then moved over to Hot Studio working for Maria Giudice who had worked at Richard Saul Wurman and so I got the other half of information architecture from her and I feel like that was just something I was lucky, lucky enough to fall into, lucky enough to find and lucky enough to be part of. Lara:                           Yeah it’s interesting that everyone I meet has such a different path on how they got to either information architecture or experience. Christina:                    It was a crazy time. I mean if you think about it websites were this brand-new medium and everybody was trying to do it with their own point of view. You had the graphic designers who were very frustrated with the limited technology that was available to them. We had the things like the 1-pixel gif to try to hold up a table so we could get text to a line and then you had the other side, the people who had been building software forever and were very, very interested in things like time-on-task and usability and the web was a place where these two disciplines sort of banged into each other. I’ve often thought that wireframes were the ugly bastard child of ____ violence because on one hand you had all these graphic designers who really understood how to make things beautiful but didn’t understand how to make them usable and then you had the people who knew how to make things usable but not how to make them beautiful and so in order to explain an interface that was useable they’d build a wireframe that then the designers would pretty up. These days we have people who grew up with the web and they understand it natively and they can do absolutely everything, the unicorns aren’t mythical anymore. They’re sort of every day in our back yard, like. So I think that sometimes we forget why wireframes showed up and don’t ask hard enough, “Are we really doing things the way they need to be done or are we just doing things the way they used to be done because it was a ____ hack?” Lara:                           Do you find value in the wire-frame design? Christina:                    Well it’s really hard to say. If you’re doing everything end-to-end the wireframe might just be a phase of your process, right, where you’re trying to think about the layout but you know how you’re going to color it and you know what sort of type you’re gonna put in there and so it’s a way of saying, “Okay do I have all the content right? Do I have tings more or less organized in a sensible way?” But when I see an information architect or an interaction designer hand over a wireframe to a designer I feel like often they’re emasculating them. They’re giving them a coloring book and saying, “Okay add color and type and make it pretty.” I mean designers — that’s not using your designers effectively. If it’s very sketchy or it’s on a whiteboard and they’re doing it together that’s another story, too, so – and actually I have to give credit for Mike Monteiro. It was when he worked with me at Hot Studio that he pointed out how insulting a highly-designed wireframe can be to a competent designer. Lara:                           Well now I think it’s getting even more difficult because of dynamic content and CMS systems that use content modules in several different locations so it’s gonna – it’d be interesting to see how it evolves to represent visually how that content becomes dynamic. Christina:                    Maybe we shouldn’t be asking if it should be represented visually. A lot of the folks that are coming out now go straight to making prototypes. Lara:                           Right. Christina:                    So why are we trying to make something that’s interactive and endlessly tall fit on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper? What logic is that? Lara:                           Yeah just to focus more on rapid prototyping rather than on this glamourous, dynamic wireframe. Christina:                    Yeah exactly. It’s harder for the older folks who came from a different world, for them and for us because the reality is we’ve learned so much. We’ve spent so much of our time learning about anthropology or taxonomies or whathaveyou that the idea of having to sit down and learn really unreels on top of that all. I mean my gosh between my daughter and writing I barely have time to read a book so the idea of sitting down and learning to write code is inconceivable. On the other hand you know we make great managers. We make great strategic consultants. We make great design leads so why worry? Mixed feelings. Lara:                           So much is focused on ad rail right now and getting things done quickly but they also have to be efficient so we can’t skip all the stopes but we can do them in a different way where we can still apply our knowledge and expertise to the design but not necessarily provide all the documentation and go through all the steps that we used to go through just because we used to do it and kind of revise our process to be efficient but also very thoughtful. Christina:                    Yeah I think if step back and you think about what’s useful and what’s necessary and what’s just sort of how it’s done and separate those, you can start to find a more flexible road forward. Another historical artifact is we knew information architecture interaction design was incredibly important for making useable objects but it was invisible to the clients and therefore it was really hard to charge for. They’re not in the office. They don’t see you working the way you do when you’re in-house and so I think a lot of this documentation got invented as way of proving to the client that actual work was being done and because you were showing it to the client it started getting prettier and Snap to Grid and Helvetica and so on and suddenly it became a thing all by itself. It kind of grew like a monster and I think that there are still people who very, very much think about documentation as communication. Dan Brown is a fantastic example but there are other people who are just obsessed with wireframes and I’m a little bit horrified. I see all these classes on how to be a UXer and they all say, “We’ll teach you how to make wireframes” but they don’t say, “We’re gonna teach you how to talk to s, how to do task analysis. It scares me. Lara:                           Right. Christina:                    We don’t need more wireframe monkey. Lara:                           That’s true. That’s true and so I know we’ve been talking about deliverables and we talked a little bit about how teams can work effectively, and I know that’s one of your latest interests. So share with us some of your thoughts on that. Christina:                    As I left Zynga I started doing a lot of advising to startups and consulting to teams and I feel for them very much because often they’re really struggling to get these really wonderful ideas into the world and they can get in their own way sometimes. Sometimes it’s a matter of not having enough focus. Sometimes it’s a matter of not having enough focus. Sometimes it’s a matter of having too many opportunities, too many good things they could be doing. Sometimes it’s really hard to get a team all pointed in the same direction, working towards the same mission and what I’ve been really lucky is, especially with LinkedIn and Yahoo! back in the day and actually Zynga, I learned a whole bag of tricks and techniques that let you get your entire team focused, goal-oriented and able to execute and measure over time. And so this sort of mixture of a little bit of this and a little bit of that has become sort of a protocol and when I’ve been teaching it to the startups they get really excited and they get really good at executing as a team and so I’ve been focusing very much on that. In a lot of ways it’s just an extension of design. I feel like my life, you know I started with deg features and then deg products and then when I moved into Design Management I started deg teams. I used to say at Yahoo! I designed a place where design could happen and then when I went to startups I was deg a business and now I feel like I’m deg a path forward. I don’t think we ever stop deg once we start deg but the things that we make change as our interests wander around. So this new system like I said it works. It works pretty well. Because I’m a designer I think very much about the vision:  What is thing going to do to people when they interact with it? Is it gonna fill them with joy or is it going to cause them anguish? And so I started the process with this idea of the North Star, which is you have to figure out when people use your product, how do they feel, how have their lives changed? I like to use the example of Mint, you know? If Mint was going it they might say, “We won’t ship our product until people feel empowered to control their own finances” and so every single choice that they make is about making sure that the people who use the product really feel empowered. I got this a lot from game designers who won’t launch games until they’re actually fun because what happens when you launch a game and it’s not fun? Work fails on the market. There’s no point in launching a game that isn’t fun or at least engaging but redesign, like, say, email, we’ll just launch it because it’s time because we have a deadline and it doesn’t matter if it does anything interesting or different or well and so I think just taking that idea from game design but there’s a real emotion, a real change you wanna create in the s and aim for it. It’s important and then once you have that goal, you can use OKR’s to keep yourself aimed at that goal month-over-month. OKR’s are “objectives and key results.” We used these at Zynga. They’re used at Google. I think John Doerr is the great meme spreader across the Silicon Valley for them and what you do is you create a really qualitative objective so, for this quarter, we’re going to create an amazing tool that makes you feel like you’ve gotten the best rates on your credit cards and then the KR’s would then qualify that. Well what is that? What is best? I’d wanna have a sense. I wanna make sure that it was comprehensive so I would make sure that I was comparing the rates against at least 100 different credit cards. I’d wanna make sure that I was getting the best rates and I’d be alerted that it was changing so you know you’d have to make sure that it was up-to-date. You just go ahead and figure what there would be quantitative ways to understand what best was and then you have a confidence level. You want people to stretch but you don’t want people to feel like their goals are impossible so you could set a confidence level of 5 out of 10 and then every week you report back. Is it 8 out of 10? Do we think we’re going to hit that goal or is it 3 out of 10, we think we’re gonna whop that goal and if you see a 3 you could have a conversation, basically, “Hey why are we missing this? Did we do a bad job of figuring out is this a right goal or did we pick something that was too hard for us, there was no way or somebody not doing what they shouldn’t be doing? Do we pick a goal that we’re actually in control of?” And then if it’s an 8 let’s say 2 weeks later you’re 8 of 10 you’re obviously going to hit this way before the quarters end, you have to say, “Are you sandbagging? Are you blowing it off?” And so there’s that. I have a couple of other tricks, one that I think is really designerly:  A lot of people think about doing participatory design you know where you have an interface and you have little modules of things that could go on it and it you talk to your s and you have them put it onto the interface to understand what’s really important to them and what you care about. Well I learned another approach which is participatory roaps and so you so the same thing. You have a roap that’s basically “Now, Soon, Later.” You have all the features and then you work with your clients, your potential clients to decide what features should go where so the exact same things I did to the designer worked beautifully when you’re working as a product person or a startup so I think there’re some very powerful tools and my hope is that companies will take those and be able to put more good products in the world. I’m writing a book basically because I got this knowledge sort of through blood and tears and many years of suffering and I would hate for that knowledge to stay in my head so I’m writing it up and I’m sharing it out. Lara:                           That’s fantastic. I can’t wait to read it. Christina:                    [Laughs] I can’t wait to be done writing it.   Lara:                           I’m sure. Well you’re talking about teams. I’m just curious if you have a story about transforming a team, a team that wasn’t working so well together and how some of your tips and tricks helped them change their mindset and work more effectively together. Christina:                    You know it’s funny because one of the things I feel like I’ve struggled against my entire career is companies do not like to share anything in case it might be competitive advantage, even – and it’s hard to get a profession to move forward and that’s why I started the IA Cocktail Hours, that’s the IA Institute. That’s why I started Boxes and Arrows because I feel like nothing ever moves forward unless people share what they learn. It’s kinda the same thing here which is I can tell a story but I have to not say who it happened with [crosstalk] — Lara:                           Right. Christina:                    Because – and in the book I’m gonna actually make up a game company but — this company I was working with, they had to decide whether they were going to be B2B or B2C and to be quite honest they were trying to do both and so they had some people who were very committed to the consumer side of things, you know the business-to-consumer and they had another group that was committed to the B2B, direct sales, and so I sat down with the Leadership Group and, over a series of meetings, first we clarified their mission statement: Why did they exist? What businesses were they in and what businesses were they not in and what was a really quick-and-easy-and-short way to state so that everybody knew when they got out of bed in the morning what they were doing? And through that we were able to clarify that the real focus was on B2B and, from there, then it was the question, okay, how are we gonna transform the company to be focused on B2B because there were people who were off doing their consumer marketing and consumer-research stuff and it came really down to a couple of things. One was setting clear goals and create 50 prospects and build the sales team up to 5, something like that, something you’d do in a quarter. So we did that and then the other one was getting the team onboard, including firing somebody who wasn’t gonna be part of this new vision and I will tell you people are scared to fire people. People are scared to lay people off but the reality is that everyone I’ve ever seen has gone on to find a job that suits them better and not only that but the team usually does better. In this case this person was strong, very strong but it just wasn’t a fit and because they were strong, very strong. You should never be afraid to lay off somebody who’s awesome because, guess what? Thirty seconds later they got another job. It’s really not a thing in the Silicon Valley. Now I understand there are depressed areas where that’s not true and I don’t wanna be facile about it but, overall, if you really want the company to survive and be healthy and be strong enough to keep everybody else employed sometimes somebody has to take a hit. It’s a tough thing to say but it’s true. Lara:                           Right it’s getting the team more focused and who you have on your team really makes a difference. I mean you look at their skillset, their personalities, how they work together, how they complement one another and you know if they’re not all focused on the same goal or vision it can be really difficult. Christina:                    Oh it can be horrible because you have this person just constantly questioning whether or not you’ve made a good decision and, believe me, that doesn’t help. As well as that I think most front-line designers don’t realize how expensive every human being is, you know? Somebody who’s making say $120,000.00 could easily be costing a startup $200,000.00 and that could be another 3 months of run time or even 6 months of survival for the startup and that’s the difference between making it to raising the next round or not, making it to raising the next round. In other words if you don’t fire somebody the entire company could go under and then you have multiple people without jobs. So you really, really have to do lots and lots of hard things when you run a startup and it’s important to just accept that as part of the fate that you’ve chosen for yourself. So the other thing is it’s not enough to set the OKR’s. You have to make sure that they’re living. Many people set goals and then they go, “Okay we have goals now,” and, you know, 2 weeks later you’ve forgotten them so I also set up a situation where every Monday the Leadership Team meets, they make promises to each other, “Here are the things that are gonna happen this week” just like – it’s just straight out of – Agile. “Here’s what’s gonna happen, here’s my confidence level on the OKR, has it gone down, has it gone up? Here’s sort of the roap for the next month, here’s the health of the team, here’s the health of the technology,” just continual checking in. And then every Friday with the whole company – and these are startups, they’re small companies. With a big company you might just do it with your general team. You have basically a Demo Day at the end of the day, with beer, and you know if you’re a salesperson and you don’t have anything to demo you can talk about what sales you’ve closed, if you’re a biz-dev person, what deals you’ve closed but people start to really want to be one of those people standing up there with wins. Designers show off their designs. Engineers show their code. You don’t wanna be the guy who has nothing to show that week so it creates a little excitement to be part of the celebration and it also makes you feel like you’re part of a company that’s winning. I think that cadence of making promises and then celebrating wins is a really, really, really important one if you wanna move forward and if you want to succeed and there’s a few other _____ to this, a few other tricks but this team we did exactly those things. We set up a mission. We put into place the OKR’s and then the first few weeks of the company let’s just say they were a little worried about budget and they wouldn’t buy beer and I would [crosstalk] —   Christina:                    Go by – [laughs] I’d go by the local liquor store and pick up a case and put it in and after the third week I think I shamed them into starting to buy beer for it because, you know, that’s part of a celebration, you know? I think a lot of small companies don’t spend their money wisely but I talked to one startup that paid this big-name LA-brand firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for their logo but they wouldn’t pay for a UX person to do a heuristic analysis of their prototype and I was, like, “You know your logo will matter when you’re big but it won’t matter when you’re small.” It can’t look like somebody in a garage did it but you don’t need the best guy either, you know? Lara:                           Right. Christina:                    But if they can’t use the site it won’t matter what your logo looks like and it’s really hard to kinda get it through their head sometimes to think about where you’re spending money and I’ve seen startups that are so cheap they don’t wanna spend money on anything and then they do fail because they have inexperienced people and bad tech and bad design. And I know it’s really scary when you’ve only got you know half a million dollars in the bank and I know it sounds like a lot of money but I just told you about salary so you can do the math pretty quick. That’s not very much money. The money’s gonna go no matter what you do. It’d be nice if you succeeded along the way. Lara:                           Well I think it’s up to the leadership to create the culture or to at least heavily influence the culture and if you’re celebrating those wins you’re really making the team feel like they are contributing something of value and that’s gonna roll over into many things, I mean morale will be fantastic. They’ll be more dedicated and loyal to their work and to their designs. It has so many positive effects. Christina:                    Absolutely and you know what’s funny? But you said something interesting which is you talk about the leadership but in a startup everybody is equally responsible for the success, you know? I was just a consultant and I was just buying beer out of my own pocket because I knew it was part of the puzzle but it could’ve been done by a frontline designer. It could’ve been done by a QA person. It could be done by anybody. In a small company that’s one of the changes that’s really tough for some designers is they’re used to be taken care of in a big company and a lot of the hard decisions are made but in a tiny startup every single human being in the building is shaping the culture and the potential success of the company. Everybody has power and I think that’s one of the most important things for designers to get into their head if they decide to switch over to startups is the plus is they really can shape the culture of the business. The negative is they really have to shape the culture of the business. The negative is they really have to shape the [laughs] culture of the business and everything. It’s a big responsibility as well. Lara:                           I really wanna make sure we have enough time to talk about your commitment to joy. I just find so much inspiration in that and I think it’s important to share it with other people, especially as you have found so many other people that are taking actions to commit their lives to joy. Christina:                    Or just starting to consider it and aren’t sure if they can do it or not. When I left Zynga I was pretty tired. I’d been Senior Management for several years and worked insane hours and been so stressed out and so exhausted and had stomach problems and back problems and was sick every 15 minutes, I swear, and so when I left Zynga I just decided not to take another job for a while and you have to before Zynga I was a general manager and I’d been a Principle Product person. I’d run a startup. I mean we’re talking a lot of years of very hard work so I took 6 months off just to goof around and relax and rest and think about what made me happy and what would be the kind of life I wanted to live and I’m lucky to be friends with the wonderful Harry Max who’s said, when I was saying, “Oh should I this company or should I do this,” he said, “Optimize for joy” and that’s become my personal North Star. That’s the thing that guides every decision:  Is this going to increase my joy or is this going to deplete my joy? And from that I thought, “Okay how do I wanna design my life?” “Well let’s do it lean. Let’s run a lot of small experiments.” So I thought, “Maybe I’d like teaching. Maybe teaching might be fun.” What’s the smallest thing I could do to find out if I actually liked teaching? I like workshops. I like giving talks so I got introduced to a couple of place and General Assembly offered me an evening class, “12 Weeks to Teach UX” and I tried it out and then I found, “Yeah, I really like teaching. Teaching’s awesome. Let’s do more of that “and so now next year I’m going to be teaching with both CCA and Stanford and probably doing a few more things with GA as well. It’s been like that with everything. Do I like giving talks at conferences? Yeah I kinda do. I like travel an awful lot. Sometimes it’s nice to travel on [laughs] somebody else’s dime and be able to teach at the same time. I think too often we make up lives that other people tell us to live. I mean that first 6 months was so hard because everybody wanted to know “Where are you going next” and “Are you gonna do another startup” and “Are you gonna another company” and “I can’t wait to see this next big thing you’re doing” and I’m like, “What if I did small [laughs] things? What if I didn’t do big things? What if I did quiet things? What if I was happy?” I think it’s a struggle because the entire universe or not the universe but most of humanity is really happy to judge you. Most of humanity is willing to tell you you’re doing it right or you’re doing it wrong. It takes a little bit of courage to try to find your own path and to do something that hasn’t been done before. Even though it’s hard the rewards are epic and I would encourage people if they’ve ever thought about something, if they’ve ever thought about teaching or having a startup, don’t quit everything and just do it, test out those ideas and if it increases your joy do it a little bit more and if it increases it your joy do it a little bit more and commit your life to being happy. Lara:                           If a person is kind of earlier in their career you know I was gonna ask you what’s one thing that they could do but I think, well, like you said just take it in little bits and test it out. Christina:                    Absolutely and you know what’s nice is when you’re young you think it’s gonna ruin your life but it’s not because you’re young, like, you can actually a company. You might say, “I have a theory:  Being at Google could be awesome. I have a theory:  Going into game design could be really cool” and you can a company. And six months later if it doesn’t work out you could quit and you could go somewhere else. I wouldn’t do that too many times in a row but one mistake isn’t going to kill you. It really isn’t so be brave once in a while. I think if you’re always doing things out of joy it will lead you well. I’ve done a lot of things out of curiosity. I ed Yahoo! at the moment I did because I wanted to learn about search and I know that sounds funny now but at that particular moment in time I had ed it just the right moment. They were just building up their search competency and I got to be able to figure it out with them, which is not an opportunity that comes around very often. People who laugh now at my ing Zynga, well, I’ll tell you I ed with some very senior people in the game industry because we were all curious:  What does it mean when games are actually social? And I managed to work with some amazing people, like Brian Reynolds and Mark Skaggs and learn from these giants. And for that I can only be grateful, you know? Curiosity is a piece of the puzzle. The other thing is you have to watch out. Just don’t get seduced by the big brand just because it’s, you know “I’d like to have Facebook on my résumé.” Well is this a place that’s gonna make you happy? Are you gonna enjoy going to work every day? Oh my gosh. I have a friend who worked at an extremely, extremely hot startup and she told me this story that one of her coworkers got home and his dad’s an artist and he said, “I didn’t wanna go in the kitchen where my dad and his other artist friends were talking because they’re gonna all be talking about how satisfying their life is and I’m just suffering. I’m just dying inside waiting for my payout.” And I thought, “There’s nothing that’s worth that.” “There’s nothing on your résumé that’s worth that. There’s no mysterious IPO that’s worth that.” You can’t see the future so you have to take care of your present so don’t a company because it’s a big, sexy brand. Don’t a company because you think it’ll look good on your résumé. a company that you’re gonna be excited to see everybody every single day and I think the rest will pretty much take care of itself. Lara:                           Well thank you so much for your time today and thanks for being on UX Radio. Christina:                    Well thank you Lara. It was wonderful. I really appreciate it. This episode is sponsored by WeWork. Meaningful conversations are essential to the success of every entrepreneur, freelancer and small-business owner. Thanks to Steve Crosby for digital development and original score piece by Cameron Meshell. [Music] [End of Audio] More About Christina Wodtke Elegant Hack – Christina’s website LinkedIn Twitter –@cwodtke Wodtke has held a series of executive roles in the tech industry, most notably leading teams who built the events platform and created an algorithm for Linkedin’s newsfeed, leading a redesign of Myspace and its profile pages and leading the design and launch of the Zynga.com gaming platform. Wodtke is a co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute. As a Experience professional, she has worked for such companies as Yahoo, Hot Studio, and New York Times to improve and develop their Web sites. Wodtke founded Webby-nominated magazine of design thinking [Boxes and Arrows] and has been publisher continuously (as well as sometime contributor). Boxes and Arrows was the first online magazine aimed exclusively at working practitioner designers, and has inspired a host of other excellent online ‘zines, from UXmatters to Johnny Holland. Known for a blunt and humorous speaking manner, she is frequently sought out as an expert for interviews and talks on social web design, gamification, experience, start-up management, and innovation. In 2003 her book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web was published.   The post Optimize for Joy appeared first on UX-radio.

TRANSCRIPT Welcome to UX-radio, the podcast that generates collaborative discussion about information architecture, experience, and design. Jared M. Spool is the founder of Interface Engineering, UIE, and a co-founder of Center Centre. He’s been working in the field of usability in experience design since 1978 before the term usability was ever associated with computers. In this episode, you’ll hear about how Jared wrote some of the first personal computer software for office space systems, the back story of creating his businesses, and some advice for designers just getting started. We’ll pick up the conversation with host, Lara Fedoroff, talking to Jared about how he began his career. Jared Spool:                I was just fascinated by libraries and how libraries were put together. In fact, one of my first jobs was working for the school library. The school library also had the school computers. So, I became a software developer when I was at high school and learned how to program by the time I graduated high school or left high school. Lara Fedoroff:            How’d you do that? Jared Spool:                How’d I learn how to program? Lara Fedoroff:            Yeah. What resources did you have? Jared Spool:                Books, lots of books, it was all books. I worked at a library. Lara Fedoroff:            So, you just taught yourself. Jared Spool:                Yeah, pretty much. There was no web. You couldn’t look things up. I just had the books. There were a couple of magazines. Byte magazine was one of them. Computer Language Magazine was one of them. I really love those magazines. But, yeah, I taught myself how to program. Lara Fedoroff:            That’s impressive. Did you have friends also that were interested in or were kind of just shut your bedroom door and you’re hunkered down. Jared Spool:                No. There was a small group of us who were interested in it. But I think I was the most fanatical about it. And so, yeah, when I was in high school I wrote the school scheduling system for scheduling classes and I wrote the school report card system. I never gave myself a false grade in the report card system though I did manage to end up with three years of medical excuses instead of having to take Phys Ed. Lara Fedoroff:            Very nice. That was my next question. Jared Spool:                So, I left high school as a software developer. I got a job writing software. Lara Fedoroff:            Tell me about that first job you got. Jared Spool:                It was working for a couple of folks in Worcester, Massachusetts that had this little software company that made business systems, general ledger, s receivable, s payable, financial systems for medium sized businesses, companies that had 200 employees, something like that. It all ran on Data General MicroNova’s and Prime minicomputers. So, I wrote software for these things. The business was also connected to an Apple dealership. The same owners owned an Apple store. They sold Apple IIs. I was fascinated by the Apple II. I went and got myself one and started programming on that. I had previously used a TRS-80 which was also a personal computer and had written some software that I sold for that. This was all when I was 18 years old. Lara Fedoroff:            That’s crazy. That’s amazing. Jared Spool:                Yeah. It’s nuts. I was actually productive back then. Lara Fedoroff:            How did you sell the software? What did you do? Jared Spool:                My parents had a friend of the family who was a shrink. I don’t know if it was some desperate attempt to keep me off the streets or some plea from my mother, which it probably was. But he said, Jared, why don’t you come and build me a piece of software to run my practice with? So, I wrote an ing system, what would today be QuickBooks that didn’t exist back then, this being 1977. I wrote this thing. I wrote it by just looking at how he kept his books and mimicked it. If he did it here, I did it there. I knew nothing about ing. When I worked in Worcester, I went to classes at Worcester State in ing. I aced them. I loved them because I was learning at night this stuff about ing practices, all this double entry bookkeeping. What’s a debit? What’s a credit? What’s an receivable? What’s a payable? I was learning all this stuff and my day job was programming it. And I’m like, oh my gosh. There’s actually a reason why I do it this way. So, I was just fascinated by that. I just loved it. So, the computer store that we were working at decided that they wanted to build a word processor on a DG MicroNova, which was this small end minicomputer system. The only word processors at the time were the Wang word processors and the digital equipment word processor, the DEC web system. We had a DEC web system. So, I just, again, by mimicking figured out how to build a word processor. I built a word processor for the MicroNova. They sold that a bunch. I ended up getting a job for Digital Equipment Corporation to work on a brand new personal computer project that they had. It was going to be based on little PDP-11 chips. They hired me to write the word processor for that. So, I ended up writing another word processor and then writing an e-mail client and then writing the world’s first voice mail client and then doing a bunch of things, working with the spreadsheet developers. So, I worked on some of the first personal computer software, office basis. Lara Fedoroff:            What was that like? Jared Spool:                It was crazy back then. I mean, we were all making stuff up. We had to figure it out. If I wanted to take a character from the keyboard and display it on the screen at the end of a word, I had to write the code that scanned the keyboard, figured out which character it was, figured out where in the word processor buffer it belonged, figured out where the word processor buffer needed to be updated on the screen, figured out how to get the character on the screen, and what pixels to light up in the display, you know, fonts and everything. None of that was built into the operating system. We had to do all of that. And we had to make sure that it would work with fast typists. So, we would go out and we would go to these typing pools where there were people who could type 135 words a minute. We would put our stuff in front of them. We would watch the software just dismally crash as the letters just could not keep up. Then we’d go back and we’d optimize. We’d close the loop. We’d come back. We eventually got it so that people who typed at 135 words per minute could actually, the software could keep up with them. But we had to write every piece of code that did everything. While I was at DEC, there was a group of people who had just been hired to do this stuff that they called software human factors. The software human factor stuff was basically the beginning of what we would today refer to as research or usability testing. Their job was to figure this out. There were people there in that team; Sandy Jones, who inevitably invented contextual inquiry; Dennis Wixon, who created a lot of the thinking today. He’s been a keynote speaker at UPA and CHI. He was at Microsoft for a long time. He’s now at the University of Santa Cruz. John Whiteside, who really defined what research and usability and experience was about. This was back in 1979, 1980, 1981. We were doing a first usability test that had ever been done on software. We had to figure out how you create a usability test lab. We built one from scratch. Lara Fedoroff:            What did it look like? Jared Spool:                It looked like a janitor’s closet because it was – basically, we kidnapped a janitor’s closet. We put a one way mirror in. We lit one half. We darkened the other half. We had all this TV studio equipment that we were using to do the video and cameras mounted on the wall with remote controls and all of this stuff. We were making up protocols. We were making up how do you conduct a usability test? We did some of the first Wizard of Oz studies. We did all this stuff. It was crazy stuff. It was back in the day. We were just inventing everything. The consent forms that people use today we had to invent. We had to figure out, what do you say to people when you start a session? How do you recruit? How do you do any of that? Nobody had ever done this before. Lara Fedoroff:            Well, thank you. Jared Spool:                You’re welcome. Lara Fedoroff:            Do you have a picture of that first lab? That would be so funny. Jared Spool:                No, because at the time we didn’t it was – well, for one thing, I wasn’t into photography then and cameras weren’t easy. It’s not like you’d carry one in your pocket all the time. We never thought of it as a special place. I know I had a camera back then because to have a camera inside the building I had to have a special camera . As an employee, you were not allowed to bring cameras into the building unless you had a . But because we were operating all this video equipment we had to have a camera . Lara Fedoroff:            That must be so fulfilling to know that you were on the forefront of all of that. Jared Spool:                It makes me feel really old. I hear the kids today whining about stuff. I’m like get off my yard, my lawn. You weren’t there. You don’t know how hard it was. We had to carry the equipment up the stairs each way. Lara Fedoroff:            What was the next step in your career? Jared Spool:                I went on to do more software with this real interest in systems and people and research. I got involved in the ACM SIGCHI community. I went to the early conferences, the first ones, and really fell in love with this whole group of people, this whole tribe that was forming at the time of people who were studying how to build software that was easy to use. This was just new and novel. Up until that point, software was built to meet requirements that were defined by business people. The idea of building something for s was just a really novel idea. So, I went on to do that. I worked at a couple of companies who had some amazing technologies and things like that. Then, in 1988, I started Interface Engineering. Lara Fedoroff:            What made you start that? Jared Spool:                I got fired from my last job. Lara Fedoroff:            Why? Jared Spool:                The official reason was a dress code violation. I, apparently, had been caught walking around my own office in my socks. And so, they decided that was a dress code violation. The unofficial reason, I was told later, was that you’re really not supposed to go around telling everybody that your boss is a complete asshole. The way it was put to me was you’re not supposed to do that even when he is a complete asshole. Lara Fedoroff:            What a blessing that was. I mean, obviously, you started this amazing company. Jared Spool:                Yes, not on purpose. Lara Fedoroff:            What were the early days like? Jared Spool:                Actually, the very next day after getting fired someone who I had worked with at that company, he was an independent consultant who had done work there. He had said, you know if you ever want to leave here, if you ever find yourself looking someplace else, give me a call. So, the night I got fired I gave him a call. He was like yes. Show up tomorrow. So, I ended up doing a project right away for him. It was a backup system for Banyan Networks. I did the design work on this automatic backup and restore. Basically, something that was very similar to Apple’s time machine but back in the ‘80s. I ended up just consulting and contracting and doing that for a couple years. Then, in 1992, I hired my first employee, which was Carolyn Snider. It was four years that I was on my own. Lara Fedoroff:            In that four year time, did you create a vision of what you wanted the company to become? Jared Spool:                I was always interested in work that evolved around usability testing. I’d had, at this point, more usability testing experience than most other people on the planet. So, I was interested in seeing if there was a way to bring usability testing to companies that couldn’t afford it, that perceived that you had to have this big lab and this big stuff. I had been doing a lot with portable usability testing stuff. At the time, it was being bandied about as discount usability. The idea was to bring the cost – basically, the key is the cost per participant so to bring the cost per participant down. Lara Fedoroff:            How low was it? Do you ? Jared Spool:                I think we got it down to $75 a participant, not including remuneration. It didn’t have to be very expensive. Lara Fedoroff:            What was your portable usability testing equipment? What was your setup? Jared Spool:                It was this jerry-rigged system. It wasn’t like I had this super briefcase that had everything packed up. It was basically off the shelf video cameras and stuff I might rent. We would keep it very simple. I wrote my own software loggings tool because there was nothing like Moray out there or Silverback at the time. So, I wrote one in visual basic and we used that to log usability test events and track them and map them against the video. But, yeah, everything was very crude. Lara Fedoroff:            Then you would, obviously, take all the data and put it together in a presentation and bring it back to them. Is that how – Jared Spool:                Yeah. I’d collect up all the comments and categorize them. A lot of what we were doing at the time was figuring out how do software teams need this? We were putting it all together and showing them to people and then saying, does this help you? Yeah, it’s really helpful or no, that’s not useful at all. So, I’d go off and do it again. Lara Fedoroff:            Did you make recommendations based on your knowledge and experience and what you learned from the testing? Jared Spool:                Yeah. I’ve never been a big fan of making recommendations. I always felt I was the least equipped person in the room to make the recommendations. It was always better to me that the team themselves come up with the recommendations. So, I just wanted to present stuff. The clients would ask for recommendations and they’d sometimes get frustrated if I didn’t give them. I never found it very satisfying because I always felt like the recommendations I was making were not taking into , having been on the software development side and knowing what that was like, I don’t know how hard or easy this is to do. I don’t know what your code base is like or what’s there. So, I’m not going to make any assumptions about what you can do. For me to say these are the top five things you need to change and here’s how you should change them felt to me to be presumptuous. I was more about saying these are the things s are stumbling over. If your goal is to get s to do x, they’re not doing that. It occurred to me very early that I would have better results if I could get the team to participate in the usability tests than if I did them off on my own. Lara Fedoroff:            How did you get them to participate? Jared Spool:                That’s how I pitched the project. This is how we’re going to do this. For most of them, they were fascinated by the idea. , this was all new and novel to these folks. They had never heard of this before. The idea of doing it was just radical and intriguing. So, there was no preconception that you hire this team who will do this stuff and produce this result. That came later when people who were used to big companies having teams or having consultants who did this would then call us and say this is how we’ve done it before. We want to do it this way again. We’d say no. We’re not interested in doing it that way. They’d say then we’re not going to hire you. I’d go okay. Lara Fedoroff:            You stuck to your guns. Jared Spool:                Yeah. I never really liked that business. For one thing, it raises the cost per participant. The other thing is, again, I felt like I was the least qualified person to be making these assumptions. You’re wasting your money by having me do this. Everything that we’ve ever done at Interface Engineering has been 100 percent guaranteed. We tell every client, every contract, every time someone gives us money, it’s basically, you’re completely guaranteed. If you’re not happy, we’ll give you your money back. Producing recommendations that people don’t follow, that’s a recipe for people not being happy. You know, what did they pay for it if they’re not going to follow the recommendations? So, I wasn’t interested in doing that. I can’t guarantee giving you recommendations that you will follow and I’m not interested in giving you recommendations you’re not going to follow. That seems like a waste of your money. So, I’m not going to do it. Lara Fedoroff:            How did you evolve the company? How did you grow it? Jared Spool:                Carolyn came on. We started doing more projects. We were doing a lot. Right around ’92, ’93, ’94, we were now neck deep in Windows 3, which came out in ’91. We started doing a lot of usability testing around Windows 3 applications. We would do them for a variety of companies. All these companies were diving in. Nobody knew what to do. They were running into these complexity walls. Usability testing became easier to sell to them. We started to see all these patterns with how people used Windows apps. If you did the toolkits or if you actually did things the way Microsoft did them, there are all these usability problems that would crop up that were present all the time. I did a presentation at a software developers’ conference on these design patterns that we kept seeing and the problems they were causing. Suddenly, that became a really popular topic. We started to unmask this stuff. It grew from a short presentation, to a longer presentation, to a half day workshop, to a full day workshop. Suddenly, we were finding ourselves actually making more money teaching about these design problems that were propping up in Windows than we were actually doing the research work to find the design problems. So, the business evolved into this company where we go out and we do a bunch of work for clients to uncover these things. Then we publish what we learned to everybody else. That will help us get more clients. It was this nice system that fed itself. It worked really well. Lara Fedoroff:            When did you develop your vision for the company? When did that happen? Has that stayed intact throughout the years or have you shifted and pivoted along the way? Jared Spool:                We have what we call the 100 year mission. That came out in the late ‘90s. We were about 15 years old when we pushed that. There were two catalysts for that. One is that there was a popular book that had been pushed into my face that I had read called Built to Last. Built to Last talked about all these companies that survived more than 75 years comparing them against direct competitors that had started about the same time in the same markets but didn’t survive all that time. That book was very much a seminal book for stuff and it helped me with a problem which was that we were really unfocused in of where we were going. The book basically said, look, all the most successful companies have a very clear focus. They have this plan that actually will take a century for them to accomplish. That was a common thing. I started thinking what would our plan be if it took more than a century? Right at the same time what had happened was that my then wife ed away. She had died primarily because the computer systems at the insurance company had decided that her condition was not ever going to be cured. They cancelled all her therapies. Her quality of life diminished very fast. Before we could get a human involved to review her case, she had degraded to a point where she then had caught a bacterial infection. It was the same thing that killed Jim Henson. It’s a nasty little thing that takes 24 hours to kill you but 48 hours to diagnose. So, we didn’t know what had happened. She went in the hospital for what we thought was a routine kidney infection and she never came out. In processing what that was like, I had come to realize that part of what killed her was computer systems, computer systems that were just poorly designed. They were new systems. I had been spending the last decade watching people be really frustrated by new computer systems. So, those two things coming together, we formulated this plan. The plan originally was that we would figure out a way to eliminate all of the frustration that comes from the introduction of new technology. We called that the 100 year mission. Subsequently, we’ve updated it to be something simpler which is to just eliminate all the bad design from the world. But we still think it takes about 100 years. We’re, at this point, about 15 years into the mission. So, that was really where the thinking was coming from at that point was this idea. Eliminating bad design, what does that mean? The first thing we need to do is understand what bad design is and where does bad design come from? What causes bad design? How do you start fixing that? Over the last 15 years I think we’ve made some good progress. We now know that bad design is really a people problem. As a people problem, you can eliminate it through education and culture and structure. The sources of bad design now are really educational issues. There are cultural issues. There are structural issues. They’re not because there is something engrained in the human condition that creates bad design. Bad design actually comes from a lack of understanding of good design. That’s very clear today. It wasn’t clear in 1996. We didn’t understand that. That’s where we were at. All of a sudden we were now focused on education is going to be a big part of what we do. Design literacy is going to be a big part of what we do. We had just started looking at the web at that point. So, we wanted to understand what is the difference between good web designs and bad web designs? We started to measure this in ways that were more than just site of the day aesthetics. Back when the web first came out, there were all these website of the day sites that would, hey, look at this cool thing. But they were just assessed on how could you use HTML in a way that no one had seen it before? They weren’t about good usability. We started to look at things from a usability standpoint. We ended up publishing our first report on that topic in 1997 and then just kept going from there. We focused primarily on the web because it was a nice constrained laboratory to start looking at bad design. Lara Fedoroff:            Were most or all of the measures that you used back then similar to what we use today? Jared Spool:                Yeah. They were cruder. We have a much more nuanced notion of this. We focused on information retrieval initially. Then we moved to transactions. In transactions, we focused on e-commerce. The main reason for the move to e-commerce for us was it was easy to measure success. We could determine success. In e-commerce, you have the ’s goal and you have the business’s goal. The business’s goal is to sell you something. The ’s goal is to buy something. Those were the conditions we were interested in. We weren’t as interested, when we were doing e-commerce stuff, in people who were browsing with no intention to buy. So, we were interested in just people who were ready to buy and wanted to and people who were ready to sell and wanted to. The beauty of that is I know exactly when both of those conditions occur. I can tell you the exact moment that those happen. For other types of success, that’s really hard. One of our clients over the years has been the National Cancer Institute. They have all this amazing information on what is cancer? How does it affect your life? What are your options? What clinical trials are there? How do you measure success for them? I know that when Best Buy sells us a camera that they feel they’ve been successful. Getting out of the National Cancer Institute, how do you know you’re successful? It’s actually really hard. And then, when you’re talking about someone whose loved one has just been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer, what is success of using the cancer.gov website for that person at that moment? I don’t know what that is. I can’t tell you that point where we go from not successful to successful like I can in e-commerce. It was just a convenience that we honed in on e-commerce because we needed something to be able to measure success so that we could then say things that aren’t successful are worse designs than things that are successful. We couldn’t do that with a lot of the client work we were working on because we didn’t know how to measure success. I think now we are much better at measuring success. If we talked to the people at the National Cancer Institute, we can get a lot of different nuance success factors that they believe are measurable. We can get from someone who is in the context of dealing with understanding cancer and what it means to them a whole bunch of success criteria that we could then use to measure the site. But we couldn’t do that in 1997 or 2001. It has taken us a long time. Lara Fedoroff:            What’s this new, crazy, wrangling unicorns thing? Jared Spool:                You must be talking about the job position I posted. To continue on this education thing, to start at the beginning, for the last 26 years we’ve been working with lots of companies, thousands of clients. I get people talking to me all the time. I’m finally getting design sold to my organization. People understand it. People know what it is. But I can’t find designers. Designers have been getting harder and harder and harder to hire over the last decade. Lara Fedoroff:            By designers you mean? Jared Spool:                I mean people who can design websites or apps or kiosks or services or whatever. Design is the rendering of intent. To some extent, everybody designs. But there are a bunch of skills about how to bring to the table, particularly in the area of digital things, you bring to the table all these different things we do, so that we can structure the information, so you can find it, so that we can visually present it in a way that communicates effectively, so that we can actually measure the success of that. Looking at all the different pieces of that and getting people who know how to do all that stuff is getting harder and harder and harder. A few years back, I was having dinner with a woman named Molly Holzschlag. She’s been a force in the web design world for decades, since the beginning. She’s written 40 books on web design and HTML and stuff. She fought all the browser wars. She actually went to work for Microsoft to help get them on to the standards track. She’s done just amazing stuff over here. She was visiting us. We were having dinner in this little Chinese restaurant in Boston. I was saying it’s getting harder and harder. All these companies are trying to hire designers. There are no designers to be hired. All the designers that are any good are entrenched in jobs that they like because, if not, they just quickly get sucked up by somebody else. So, it’s almost impossible. There are no schools that are producing designers in the quantities that we need them. I had estimated that we were going to need 10,000 or 20,000 designers within five years. There’s no place where there were 20,000 designers. Someone needs to start a school is what I said. Molly said that should be you. I said that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. She said, yeah, you’re perfect for it. So, that was what it was. The original name was Project Insanity. Project Insanity was basically a project to figure out what it would take to build a school. Part of the charter of Project Insanity was that I was going to go talk to all my good friends who were really smart and explain to them that Molly said I should start a school. Have them do what good friends do, which is look me in the eyes and say that’s a stupid idea. If this was a good idea, someone would have done it already. There are good reasons why no one has done it already. So, you should not do this. I would go out. I would meet my friends. I would tell this to them. That’s not what they would say. The biggest thing I learned from this was that I have no good friends. Nobody would take me aside and say, Jared, this is a stupid idea. Don’t do this. Every single one of them said this sounds brilliant. You need to go do this. I thought damn it. How did I end up with this crappy group of friends? One of them, a guy named Dan Ruben, who had also been around from the beginning and had done some amazing stuff, visual designer, said to me, have you talked to Leslie? I’ve known Leslie for a while. He was talking about Leslie Jensen-Inman who was a friend of both of ours. I said not lately. He said you need to talk to Leslie. Okay, why? He said you just need to go talk to her. Leslie, at the time, was getting her EDD, which is an educational equivalent of a PhD. She was getting that at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. Her thesis was on creating a web designs curriculum but I didn’t know that. She had been teaching at the university. A few days later I see a tweet from her that says I’ve just given notice at the University of Tennessee. I’m looking forward to the next chapter of my life, wherever that might take me. I sent her a DM and said, hey, we’ve got to talk. Within 15 minutes we were having a phone conversation. That changed history for both of us. She’s now my partner on this thing that’s called Center Centre, though its nickname for a long time while we were in stealth mode was, we changed it from Project Insanity to the Unicorn Institute. Now that we’re out of stealth mode, it’s Center Centre. That’s what it is. So, the thing you were talking about, the unicorn wranglers, is our first faculty. We have two types of faculty. We have guest industry instructors who come in and teach. There are 30 courses over the two year curriculum. They’ll come in and they’ll teach. They’ll kick off with a two day workshop. But most of the education comes from this team of what we officially call facilitators who facilitate the students’ education. The unofficial name is unicorn wranglers. That name just stuck. So, that’s what the job ads all say. They say come and be a unicorn wrangler. Lara Fedoroff:            Are the classes in person? Are they online? Jared Spool:                They’re in person. It’s a two year, full time curriculum. It’ll be in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We have classroom space down there. The whole city is opening their doors for us. It’s really exciting. It’s going to be really awesome. Lara Fedoroff:            Are you moving there? Jared Spool:                I will probably get an apartment there. I still have Interface Engineering in Boston. So, I’ll probably be shifting back and forth though I’m learning the new and novel ways to get Skype to crash. We use Skype a lot. Actually, between crashes it works really well. Lara Fedoroff:            Yeah. I’ve noticed that too. What advice would you give designers? I’m sure there is a lot. What’s one of the golden nuggets that you have? Jared Spool:                What advice would I give designers? Lara Fedoroff:            Who are just getting started. Jared Spool:                Who are just getting started. I would probably give them advice spend a lot of time watching your s. Spend a lot of time. If you had to divide your time up between creating designs and watching s, watching s should be a minimum of 50 percent, if not more. Your designs will be wholly better the more s you watch. So, the more time you spend watching s the better. If you’re not spending any time watching s, then you need to start doing some and start spending time doing that. That’s really how you learn what the difference is between good design and bad design. You put something out there with an intention that it’s going to work but then you see that it doesn’t quite work the way you intended. You have to make changes. So, you do it again. You make changes. You do it again. In that process, you learn the basic principles of what works and what doesn’t. So, that’s really the best way to do that. Lara Fedoroff:            What would you like your legacy to be? Jared Spool:                I don’t know. I don’t think in of legacy. I imagine going on forever. There’s an old saying which is God put me on this Earth to accomplish something and at the rate I’m going I’ll live forever. My to do list certainly feels that way. I think that it’s too early to be thinking about – you know what my legacy is? It’s making this podcast with you. Lara Fedoroff:            Very nice. Well, thank you. Jared Spool:                It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Lara Fedoroff:            Really? Jared Spool:                Yes. Lara Fedoroff:            Well, thank you so much for being on UX-radio. Jared Spool:                Thank you for having me. This episode is sponsored by WeWork. Meaningful conversations are essential to the success of every entrepreneur, freelancer, and small business owner. At WeWork, we consistently strive to make meeting new people and having interesting conversations natural and effortless. From the design of our workspace to the events at our buildings, we do everything we can to the idea that if one of us is successful we all benefit. Every WeWork location is staffed with community managers who work directly with to understand their business needs, struggles, and growth plans, and connect them to other who can help. Events are an integral part of the WeWork experience from product launches to elevator pitches. Whether you’re asking for advice, looking for product , or just meeting likeminded entrepreneurs, wework.com is a seamless extension to the community. For more information, go to wework.com. That’s wework.com. Go to wework.com/uxradio to receive a discount now. UX-radio is produced by Lara Fedoroff. If you want more UX-radio, you can subscribe to our free podcast on iTunes or go to ux-radio.com where you’ll find podcasts, resources, and more. [End of Audio]   MORE ABOUT JARED Jared M. Spool is the founder of Interface Engineering and a co-founder of Center Centre. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak er experience design, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and experience design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers. Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the Interface Engineering, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. With Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he is starting a new school in Chattanooga, TN, to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. In 2014, the school, under the nickname of the Unicorn Institute, launched a Kickstarter project that successfully raised more that 600% of its initial goal. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference and UX Immersion Conference, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work. You can find his writing at uie.com and follow his adventures on the twitters at @jmspool. Twitter: @jmspool LinkedIn UIE Blog Centre Centre LET’S TALK What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with the author? What inspired you from this episode? What did you learn? What resources were most helpful? Please add a comment and share your thoughts with us! The post Experience Design appeared first on UX-radio.

DON NORMAN Don Norman wrote Design of Everyday Things in 1988. Now, 25 years later, he revised it. This podcast is a reflection on the many changes that have taken place in the industry in these 25 years — what has stayed the same and what has changed. And what does Don foresee for the next 25 years: what will the industry be like in 2038? TRANSCRIPT Welcome to UX Radio, the podcast that generates collaborative discussion about information architecture, experience, and design. Perry Norton: Guest Don Norman is director of the design lab at the University of California San Diego, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, IDEO Fellow, and former vice president of Apple. He helps companies make products more enjoyable, understandable, and profitable. His books include Emotional Design, Living With Complexity, and an expanded revised edition of The Design of Everyday Things. He can be found at jnd.org. In this podcast, Don talks about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same over time in relation to how we think about and implement design. And now your host, Lara Fedoroff. Lara Fedoroff:            Thank you so much for ing me today. Don Norman:             You’re welcome. Lara Fedoroff:            I’m excited to talk to you. So you first wrote Design of Everyday Things in 1988, and a lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same with design. So I wanted to start the conversation with the things that have stayed the same, and maybe even something that has surprised you that has stayed the same. Don Norman:             The book was published in 1988, 25 years ago. What’s stayed the same is people; basically the psychological principles of how people interact with one another, with the world – it’s been true for thousands and thousands of years. It maybe will be true for a few more years, and we can talk about that. All the fundamental parts of the book are unchanged. The thing that changed in a minor way is my ability to explain things, and there is at least one major concept in the book that I know people have a lot of trouble with. It’s called affordances. And so I try to simplify it by adding a new distinction, which I call signifiers. Affordances tell you kind of the actions you can do in the world on – with the physical objects that exist. It’s a relationship. Relationships are hard to understand, so I added signifiers, which are signals that say, “Hey, this doorknob is a signal of this is what you should grasp.” It doesn’t tell you what you should do once you’ve grasped it, whether you should turn it, or push it, or pull it, or lift it, or slide it, but it still says, “Grasp here.” So that’s the signifier component, so that’s what’s stayed the same. Everything’s about principles. Now the technology has changed dramatically, and therefore the way we apply these principles have somewhat changed. The principles are the same, but because we interact no longer with just a keyboard, or with buttons, or – we interact by gestures, for example, or just by being someplace. We don’t even realize we’re interacting. That had to be changed. The examples had to be changed. The original edition of the book didn’t speak about emotion. We didn’t really understand emotion – we, being the scientific community in 1988. And today we have tremendous advances in our understanding, so much so that it actually – along the way I wrote a whole book about it to call it Emotional Design. So I was able to incorporate my learnings of emotion into the earlier book, which is all about understanding, ’cause those two really go together. It’s – emotion drives us. Emotion is very important in human behavior. Actually emotion is what mostly causes us to act. It’s not logic. Logic is our official – it was invented. It’s not the way people normally think. And finally I learned a lot. I’ve changed a lot in 25 years, and one thing is that I was a professor when I wrote the book, and in that time I’ve become, well, much more involved in industry. I was a business executive at Apple, and then at HP, then a few start-ups, and I’ve been an advisor in start-ups and other companies, so there’s been a big change and I was able to incorporate those changes in the book. Lara Fedoroff:            With Emotional Design, can you give us an example of how that plays out with one of the designs that you either consulted or worked on? Don Norman:             Oh, it plays out all the time. Don’t you ever get angry at your equipment when it doesn’t work or doesn’t do what you want it to do, or you have no idea how to do it, or, “Gee, I did this yesterday. Now I can’t how to do it today.” It makes you angry. Or it makes you feel good when things work well or it looks neat. I know people who take their phones out all the time and caress it with their fingers. They’re not using it. They’re just holding it, and rubbing it, and turning it around. Design requires emotional commitment. You know, I left that out of the first book basically because I didn’t know how to treat it, but we take so much pleasure in physical objects, and their appearance, and their feel, their sound sometimes, and their smell. I look at the computer that you’re using in front of you. It’s exquisitely designed with tremendous attention to the little details all around it that make it just so beautiful, and that makes a difference. Lara Fedoroff:            It’s really important. Don Norman:             First of all, it’s really important, but I also point out to people how – how many times are you editing something and you start realizing that, “Oh, it hasn’t been saved for a long time. Oh,” and you start getting nervous, but you wanna finish this paragraph, right? And what does the body do? Your body feels tense. That’s emotion. Lara Fedoroff:            So in the design process, where is the best place to incorporate thinking about emotional design? Don Norman:             There is no place where you should not be thinking about emotions, because the – we have to have empathy with the people who are using the equipment. We have to understand what drives them. We have to understand what they’re trying to accomplish. And among other things, yeah, they have a task to learn to accomplish, but they need – people like to feel good, like to feel – we like to feel we are in control and we understand what is happening. And so it’s really important in the design to always give people this kind of control, to give them the so they know what is happening, to let them discover – I call it discoverability – discover what actions they can do and make it easy to do it; not, “Oh, I know I wanna do something, but I can’t how to do it.” You get anxious. So designers always have to be thinking about the impact of their choices upon the way people behave. Lara Fedoroff:            I agree. I think it’s so true, and I think we get so deep into the deliverables. We’re thinking about the context and we’re thinking about the technology, but we’re not necessarily incorporating the thinking about the emotions. Even though we have the personas, we’re thinking about the s, we’re empathizing with the tasks, I still think that there is a need for an emphasis on the emotions during the whole process, like you’re saying. Don Norman:             I think about the person. When I think about the whole person, I think about how they’re going to react. I think about will they understand this. What might they do next? What happens if they change their mind or wanna go back? I think about the behavior of the persons, which automatically incorporates both their cognition or understanding and also their emotions. Lara Fedoroff:            And I think also getting back to all the things that have stayed the same, you get into the psychology of everyday things, and certainly like you said, human behavior has stayed the same. Don Norman:             That’s actually the psychology of everyday things – thank you – is why I named the book The Psychology of Everyday Things. The fundamental principles of how we interact with the world are unchanged for thousands of years, and they will remain unchanged until people change. Now maybe people will change. We’re starting to implant all sorts of weird things inside the brain and body, and maybe that will change the way we think. But until we change the neural circuits of the brain, those principles remain the same – and maybe even afterwards, because a lot of the principles about understanding what’s to be done, understanding what’s happening, getting – if I were a computer interacting with the world, the same principles would apply. Lara Fedoroff:            Well with mental models, because technology is changing so rapidly, I think our mental models are shifting, and I’m curious to know if you agree if that’s true or not. You spoke at LAUX about the different ways you can swipe the phone, whether you pinch, or tap once, or tap twice. And so it’s not necessarily all intuitive and we’re continually trying to learn new things, so the mental model is somewhat shifting. Don Norman:             The principle that people form mental models and use them to govern their behavior, that’s unchanged. But what the mental model is about, what our conceptual model of the things we’re interacting with is about obviously changes when the thing re-interacts with changes. With automobiles, we have mental models of what the steering wheel does, and the brake pedal does, and the controls do, and those models change, because today there could be automobiles getting more and more automated. My car doesn’t wanna let me out of my lane if there’s another car adjacent to me. That’s kinda neat. And so we’re changing our mental model and we’re becoming now much more accustomed to do I – is there a car in my right lane if I wanna shift to the right? Well I just look at the mirror, and if there’s a car there, there’s a bright light flashing at me. If there’s no car there, there’s no bright light. Well, so no light, I go into the other lane. But is that really safe? I mean can I really trust the sensors in the automobile to be accurate all the time? Not really. So my mental model is the car is very intelligent. It always tells me whether there’s something in my path. That’s a dangerous thing to rely on, but I never would’ve had that model even a few years ago, ’cause cars couldn’t do that. So yeah, our mental model’s change dramatically, and the way we interact with things change, and the kinds of things we interact with change. But the notion of a mental model, that’s been around a long time. Lara Fedoroff:            And what are some of the things that you foresee will change in the next 25 years? Don Norman:             Well let me start with some things that will never change. We still have trouble figuring out how to work a door. That is, should we push or pull? And do I – if I push or pull, is it on the left side or the right side? And sometimes doors slide. And so distinguishing among those alternatives is remarkably hard and frustrating sometimes, and that will be unchanged. We know how to do things better. It’s just that I guarantee that we won’t. The same with light switches – a big row of eight light switches: which does what? That’s a mapping problem. That will be remained unchanged even though light switches will change. We’ll have more and more lights that just automatically turn on when you enter a room, and we’ll have lights that sense what you want to do, and we’ll have lights that say, “Oh, you wanna watch television. I’ll turn down the lights,” and we’ll then get even more annoyed, because, “No, no, I don’t wanna watch television. I just wanted to do something else, or I’m trying to sneak in the room and not wake up my wife, and you turn off all – you turn on all the lights, and she gets mad at me.” So those things won’t change. So even when the automation comes in, in some sense the principles don’t change. What will change? Well the room, as I said, will try to read your mind and say, “Oh, I know what you’re trying to do, so let me turn down these lights, and turn up the heat, and do this, and do that.” And when that works well, it kinda feels good. But every so often it will get it wrong and we’ll feel bad. Cars will drive themselves. We’ll have more and more intelligent devices with us. The kitchen will become highly automated. The two major places that will become automated – or three major are the kitchen, the automobile, and the entertainment center. Our bathroom scale will talk to our kitchen, and there’ll be some sort of health monitor that will tell us, “Oh, you need to be careful about what you’re eating. No, don’t make that,” while we’re trying to cook. The notions of privacy aren’t gonna change dramatically. Now I don’t need to remind people that the notion of privacy itself is a very new notion. So this notion of complete loss of privacy is also new, but it’s not as revolutionary as some people think, because the notion of privacy is new. The technology though provides information in ways never before imagined. So yeah, lots of things weren’t private before, but we didn’t expect the whole world to know. And one of the problems I have is that lots of people know about things that Don Norman does, but there are many Don Normans in the world. And so people get upset about things that Don Norman has done, and it turns out that’s not me. This worldwide communication and instant information, and the inability to ever retract anything, because it doesn’t matter if you say, “That’s wrong,” and the company that has the information says, “Okay, we’ll take it out of our database,” well they do, and a day or two later it’s back in, because information is spread all around the world and everybody’s updating it. That’s new. Every day I learn about some development that’s, “Oh, gee,” but clearly it’s about worldwide continuous communication. It’s about wearing glasses that tell us what’s going on around the world. It’s therefore about continual distractions that prevent us from doing our work. At the same time, there are continual enhancements that make us focus and do our work better. The same technology does both at the same time. And automation taking over more and more, eating us at our jobs, sometimes eliminating our jobs by taking over the job from us; genetic modifications are going to happen; new kinds of materials so we can for the first time grow electronic circuits; we can grow homes and houses; 3-D printing, which is really revolutionizing manufacturing; and I’ve even seen 3-D printed homes. There are these great big machines that go back and forth across the entire plot of land, dripping concrete as it does, and building a wonderful home structure, which can take all sorts of forms now. We used to do everything in a rectangular shape, because that’s how we knew how to build structures. But with 3-D printing, it could be any shape and even cheaper and stronger than the ones we’re used to. I could go on and on and on. Changes are happening at a really rapid and fascinating pace. Lara Fedoroff:            With regards to privacy, what moral obligation do you think companies have while it pertains to s’ private data? Don Norman:             Well I don’t trust companies, and it’s not because there are evil people in companies; they’re not. We have several major companies in the United States that have more and more private information. And let me name some of them: there’s Amazon, and Google, and Twitter, and Facebook. Probably those are the major ones that are changing the world. All of these companies are well intended. They are not trying to violate personal rights, but they are trying to do their business more effectively. And all of them believe firmly that by having more information, we can serve you better. So if Google mainly survives through ments, they say, “People really are annoyed by ments,” and that’s because this ad comes in about something I have no interest in, or it comes in – maybe I’m interested in the product, but not now. I’m busy. I’m doing something else. Please don’t bother me. But suppose I could figure out what you really cared about and when so I would only give you the ment when you really cared about it? First of all, you’d be much happier; and second, the companies will be happier too, because they don’t want to annoy you. They want you to buy their product. They want you to like the company. So if the ment came up just when I needed it – so I’m in the airport and I’m hungry, and my plane isn’t going to be for a little while. And just then my phone rings and I look at it, and it says there’s a restaurant right down the way, and maybe even here’s a few cents off if I buy there, and here’s what – not only that, but they serve the kind of organic healthy food that you really like. Oh, that’s really nice. But that very same ment when I’m rushing to get into the plane, that I would hate. So these companies feel they’re helping you and – by spreading the news, by learning about what all your friends are doing around the world. It is kind of nice. At the same time, the side effect is a complete loss of privacy. Now they don’t intend that, but it happens. And that’s why I don’t trust companies, because the company who thinks it’s trying to help you, and one of its goals of course is to stay alive, ’cause the company needs to make money. So they will do things we don’t want them to do, and I think the only solution is for society to get together and say, “We will not allow certain things to happen.” You cannot trust the companies, and it’s not because they’re evil or deceitful. It’s because they have a different mindset. Lara Fedoroff:            What should they be doing differently? Don Norman:             We should have opt-in as opposed to opt-out. Right now everything you do is completely public unless you make a big effort to run around and try to figure out where it is and say, “No, this is not allowed.” Look. Opt-out versus opt-in in theory says, “Oh, it doesn’t make any difference, because in both cases you have full permission. You authorize what can be done.” But in practice it makes a huge difference, because few people are gonna take the time and effort to go through and do the opt-in or opt-out, let alone – in many cases, Facebook and example, it’s really hard to figure out where the permissions are. Lara Fedoroff:            Right. So making it easier to find the permissions, opting out. Don Norman:             Well, how about making it unnecessary to find the permissions. How about maybe for the first time that he’s gonna post something or use something, it says, “I can’t do this until you tell me it’s permissible.” And that box will also allow me to say, “Permissible or not this one time, or never, or always.” I’ve always thought that the computer systems ought to have a special place for notifications, and I tried to do that when I was at Apple, but I couldn’t get any – nobody would listen to me, but I – instead of notifications popping up on your screen, there ought to be a special place. Now actually in the new operating system, Apple has done that, but nobody seems to use it. One place we can go look just where everything is. Lara Fedoroff:            That would be wonderful. Find one place instead of going into each system. Don Norman:             And it annoys you, doesn’t it? Lara Fedoroff:            It does. Don Norman:             See, emotions come into play all the time. Lara Fedoroff:            You talk about the system, and I think that’s so critical to look at the entire system instead of the just the parts. And I’d like for you to talk a little bit about that, because I think it’s something that’s really critical and it’s a mindset that we need to change not only for the designer, the developer, or the business manager, but for all of us to be working more as a complete system. Don Norman:             I looked around the room we’re sitting in, because I always like to do that when I’m asked a question about systems. For example, yeah, we don’t exist in a world of isolated events and isolated actions. We live in a world where everything is connected. It’s a system. And so proper design has to understand that, hey, it’s a system. We should interconnect everything. We should think about the way that one component interacts with another component and it’s remarkably difficult, first of all because usually the designers are charged with bringing out the new product, or getting it out on time, or doing this little piece. You’re not told, “Think about all the interactions that might happen and all the other things that are a part of the system are doing, and make sure it’s harmonious and smooth.” That’s not how we’re ever given instructions, or for that matter we don’t have the ability to do that. But – because it’s difficult. It’s difficult to get all the people in synchrony. Light switches are often a mess to try to understand and know which controls what, because the architect designs this; the interior designers design that. The electricians are called in at the last moment to finish wiring the place, and they don’t understand how it’s going to be used. So they do the best job they can, but it makes the system aspects horrible. So I think the next big challenge in design is they’re trying to figure out how to make the systems work, because that’s what makes our life pleasant and smooth, and that’s a hard job. And actually it’s a hard job that I love, because I like challenges. And so that’s my challenge: how do we make the systems smooth? That’s an interesting new book, isn’t it? Let’s simplify our lives. That’s a good title. Lara Fedoroff:            What does the roap look like to helping companies adapt to that different mindset of looking at the system as a whole? Don Norman:             Companies and artificial entity – companies don’t look. Companies don’t have ideas. Companies don’t have policies. It’s people in those companies – large companies are complex entities. You and I are having this wonderful conversation. There are two of us. If we added a third or fourth person, it might actually make it better or it might make it worse. You don’t know. It has to do with the unique characteristics of all the extra people. We work well as people in small social groups. If you get 10 or 20 people in a room, it’s very hard to do anything productive. If you have an hour meeting, that means everybody gets to talk for three minutes apiece and it’s hard to organize. And companies have thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands; there are companies with one million people. So how do you organize and how do you structure? And who speaks for the company? When you say a company ought to have a certain way of behaving, well no, there is no such thing as a company. There are all these different groups, and the very senior executives could establish a policy, and there’s a big division off on the side that completely violates the policy. When I was an executive – a vice president of a large company, there were problems in my division and I could never figure out what was really going on, ’cause there were too many people. I had 250 people in my division, and how can I really tell in this little seven-person group where there are really disagreements and difficulty who was right and who was wrong, or what the real issue was? I think it’s kinda false to say the company ought to behave better. I mean it’s true, but it’s not as easy as a simple sentence sounds. Lara Fedoroff:            Well you have the executive stakeholders, marketing and sales, you have designers, developers, manufacturers. Don Norman:             Yes, but we also have – now we have all these different groups, but first of all everybody has a boss. You go all the way up to the CEO and you say, “Well, that’s the person in charge.” No, the CEO has a boss. It’s the board of directors, and – but the board of directors have bosses, and they are actually being directed by the people they work for or report to. And on top of that, there’s what’s – there’s a reward structure in the company. So what does a company reward me for? Well the company might say, “I want better products,” but in the end the company really needs to be making money. And so quite often we reward the executives on their ability to make more money for the company. Therefore the executives know they’re being rewarded on their profits. They would do all they can to improve their profits, but the reward structure where you’re getting rewarded for the biggest sales and profits, that makes people do irrational things. How do you reward people for doing good for society, for the community, for their workers, and for the company? Well no one has figured out the formula yet. Lara Fedoroff:            You coined the term experience. Can you talk a little bit about your original definition and whether or not you think people are interpreting it the same today? Don Norman:             There’s a really interesting fashion cycle with words. And so words come in and out of fashion, and as they come back into fashion, everybody starts adopting it. They often just use the word with no understanding of what its original meaning was. I introduce the phrase experience, and I’ll come back to that, and it has been widely accepted and misused. Interaction design is widely accepted and misused. Innovation, creativity, design, thinking: all of these suddenly get popularized and really badly misused. So then people therefore throw them away and say, “Oh, no. We don’t wanna talk about that.” The story I tell is when I was at Apple, quite often I was seeing that the experience of the computer was deteriorating with time, and that was because the priority judgments made by the product team. We’re reaching the deadline. We haven’t finished everything. Let’s sit down and prioritize all the things left to do, and we’ll just do the high-priority ones. We’ll keep going until we run out of time. And the – the interaction for people was suffering, ’cause it was always low priority. And so when you divide things up into small little pars, the small parts often are of low priority. But if you were to realize that no, no, no, the entire experience is deteriorating and that’s a major problem, then it would’ve reached a higher priority. System thinking is required. The whole reason they have the computer is to get a task done, and that task – the ability to get the task done was dramatically suffering, because of all these little problems that were in the way. And each little problem was not very important, but the totality was huge. So that’s what I wanted for experience, and somehow today people think experience had to do with websites or something, and interaction design is all about websites. And each little field that does something thinks it’s all about their little part of the field, and no, it’s about the whole thing. When I buy a computer, how do I learn about it and how do I purchase it at the store? What kind of a box does it come in? Can I actually fit the box into my car? When I open it, is it easy to figure out what I should do to get it going? That’s what experience is about and that’s been lost. Lara Fedoroff:            If you were to give some advice to young designers today, what would you tell them? Don Norman:             First of all, I would always try to see the big picture. Don’t get stuck in your own specialized discipline. But if you’re asked to do a job, try to understand where it fits in the large picture, and that makes you better at doing the job. Second, you should always push yourself. There’s a friend of mine, a management consultant, called Tom Peters, and he actually had a philosophy that I really loved, which is if you’re really comfortable at your job, you’re in the wrong job. You should always be pushing yourself, and you should always be unsure of yourself, and not sure that you can really handle it. Yeah, you should only be looking for challenges. Always be learning new things. Always be trying new things. When you’re trying to select a job or a profession, choose something you really love. Don’t choose the one that pays the most or don’t choose the one that you think you ought to do. The same with taking courses at school and the same with doing anything: don’t do what you think people think you ought to do. Do what you love to do. I always try to look at the big picture and think about new things that need to be done, and I go into areas that nobody is doing. And it’s – that’s dangerous, and risky, and unsettling, but that’s where the breakthroughs come. So if you look at all of the great innovations that have ever happened, or even the minor innovations that’s happened, it’s because somebody has had a new way of viewing things, and persisted, and continued. And then slowly the world started to understand, and then suddenly this person was the great person with great foresight and great insight, and has changed the world, and – but wow, it took 10 years maybe. If you believe in something, then you should continue it. Lara Fedoroff:            What would you like to be your biggest contribution to society? Don Norman:             It’s the students that I’ve taught and the wonderful work they are now doing in a wide variety of fields; and second, the people I’ve influenced through my books. And nothing gives me more pleasure than to have people come up to me and say, “I read your book 20 years ago, and it made me change the field I’m in, and thank you very much.” That actually happened to me last night at the talk I gave. A number of people came up. One person brought a book they had read of mine in the 1960s. Several people brought some of the old books and said, “I took your course at UC San Diego 30 years ago,” and they still had the book. That was amazing, and that’s my biggest contribution. It’s the people I leave behind me. Lara Fedoroff:            Well thank you so much for your time today. It was wonderful talking to you. Don Norman:             You’re quite welcome. Thank you. UX Radio is produced by Lara Fedoroff. If you want more UX Radio, you can subscribe to our free podcast on iTunes or go to UX-Radio.com, where you’ll find podcasts, resources, and more.       The post Reflections from Design of Everyday Things appeared first on UX-radio.

TRANSCRIPT Welcome to UX Radio, the podcast that generates collaborative discussion about information architecture, experience, and design. Today’s spotlight is on Kendra Shimmell, managing director of Cooper. As an educator and designer, Shimmell is at the forefront of product strategy, design, and business innovation. And her sweet spot is research. Proper contextual research. Kendra Shimmell understands how to ask the right questions and has a keen eye for observation. In this podcast Kendra talks about how she discovered design and the progression of her career as a designer. And now your host, Lara Fedoroff. Lara Fedoroff:            Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Kendra Shimmell:        While I was taking my other classes I did a trade school, studying printing and graphic arts. And had an internship – actually had two internships. One of them was working at a little paper, kind of printing and deg the ads and the stories and doing page layout. And for a 16 year old this was a really big deal.  The other internship was at a place called Holland Litho and I learned to run a large lithography press. And just hung out with the crew there, got to know what it was like to be in the real world working. At that time I didn’t really know that that was related to anything I wanted to do. But I screen-printed a lot of t-shirts, you know, back in the lab there. I made stickers. I did the typical high school thing, you know, so the stickers were all over everyone’s car and we were stoked at how cool we were. I started taking philosophy and psychology classes at the local community college. And I thought, “Oh maybe this is what I want to do.” So I was really in this mode of going, “Is this what I want to do, is this what I want to do?” And eventually I thought, “I’m going to study occupational therapy.” And so I worked in a group home, and I was taking my classes and I became a legal advocate for one of the patients in the home, and went through the process of learning what that means. It’s somebody who can’t advocate for themselves and so you advocate for them, with physicians, in of getting them funds for certain things that they need, and just making sure that generally that the community of caregivers is giving them the care that they need. And I was 18 or 19 at that point and it was a pretty eye-opening experience, so what I started to do was realized that this gentleman that I was working with a lot had a hard time learning a lot of things, doing a lot of things. So I started experimenting with bringing – and I worked with his care providers on treatment plans – and we would bring him for rides down, like a gravel road so that his head would bounce a little bit, and it would stimulate something, and he would pay attention for a short window of time. So we figured out that if you got him to kind of move he could focus more. So we would create this curriculum or these little activities that he would do during his windows of awareness to help him learn how to do things. Things like tie his shoe, that kind of stuff. And I also started deg this different little tools and games to help him learn things. And I’ve always made things, even when I was a little kid, if I got a toy for the holidays my parents would not put it together, I would put it together. I would look at the picture and I would construct the thing. So I got really excited about this and I thought, “Okay maybe this is what I want to do. Maybe I want to be a designer.” And for me at that point the definition of design was really broad. So I started checking into programs around industrial design, and graphic design, and information design, and this was around the time – this was in the ’90s – and it was around the time that we were hearing more and more about the internet, and I thought, “Okay, well maybe there’s something there but I don’t really get it.” So I found this program at the Ohio State University, and it was a foundational program, a bachelor’s of science in design that covered product design. So it was a product design program that focused on products at scale, so industrial design. It also focused on information design. It had a strong research underpinning. And then we also did interior architecture and space planning. So it was really this very holistic thing. And the intention of this program is for you study – it was kind of foundations in Swiss design, and you study the basics of design and you figure out what it is you want to do, where you want to focus. And then you go this excruciating test and ission process to pick your area of focus. So I focused in visual communications, still with a big ___ on brand and product, sort of the intersection of brand and product, and research. Went through that program. My thesis ended up being around design research for service design in retail environments. So I designed this whole shoe store and the communication. I actually designed the environment, like the physical environment, the point of purchase, the information online about it, and really did the research with our customers and sort of help them transform and pivot their brand, because when I thought about brand then, I didn’t think about logos. I was thinking about the cohesive experience. Now we call it the design for experience, we used to call it brand. It’s kind of similar. From there I started doing internships. My first internship was with technology enhanced learning and research and it kind of turned into a job. It was with the Ohio State University and I helped to create asynchronous online learning environments. And the topic that I was helping teach about was plant pathology. I didn’t know anything of plant pathology and so I really had to use the research techniques that I had learned in my other design classes, and really begin to interview people who were experts both in practice and in the university, to learn about what it was that I was going to be creating stuff to communicate about. That was a really good learning experience. And also when you’re helping with communication of curriculum and also creating a cohesive learning environment that’s online, it’s a challenging thing. So it was a really awesome experience to have right out the gate while I was still at the university. My second internship was with the Ohio State House and that one also turned into a job. And that one was in studying and communicating about the law making process, and so I was right there – there were senators walking around – and really trying to understand, how do I help connect the general population with what it is that these people are doing, that’s going to wildly impact the lives of the general population? So that was my mandate there. And again, really heavy in trying to ramp up on a topic or a subject area that I am absolutely not an expert in. I did not study political science. So how do you ramp up? You interview and synthesize themes that come out of it. Try to understand as much as you can about that particular topic. Not to be the expert, but distill the messages of the experts out. Lara Fedoroff:            And communicate it clearly in a way people can intake the information, understand it, and use it. Kendra Shimmell:        Yeah. And so one of the projects I was involved in there was – the State House is actually a museum and so this is in Columbus, Ohio. It was all around creating an experience while exploring the State House that helped you learn about the law making process. After that I got my first full-time job. When I had my internship with Nationwide I was about to graduate and so I realized that I had an opportunity to step right into a role. At that time they were building a experience division in the company, which is kind of crazy because it’s a financial and insurance company, and that was like 2002, that they were already thinking in those . And they were doing proper, contextual research. That was part of what I was brought in to do, is I developed research methodologies, went out into the field, I met with insurance agents, I met with customers that were purchasing these products, you know, and really felt that insurance, in general, is super abstract. You’re really buying a promise and nothing more. I met with people and learned about their stories about when their house flooded or burned down and how devastating that is, and what the company could have done in service of helping them throughout that experience, or to better prepare for that experience. And so again, really cool first job to have out of school. I was part of deg and launching an online auto insurance quote, and this all sounds like, “Oh whatever.” We all take that for granted now, but this was really right in the beginning of when all of this was happening. You know, of kind of figuring out e-commerce online. I worked with Chris Rockwell, who is the president of a company called Lextant, and he and I really enjoyed working together, and eventually I had a chat with him about potentially working at Lextant and he hired me. Then I spent the next six years or so at Lextant, and what I did there was I quite quickly became the Director of Design, Research, and Experience Design. My role was to really be mindful of defining what problems companies should be solving in the first place, and this goes way beyond the screen. We would be defining whole product portfolios and service design, and so it was really about looking at the end-to-end customer experience, for everything from medical devices to consumer products, retail. It was pretty broad. I had the opportunity to lead a couple of programs that really impacted me, and it was really awesome to have the opportunity to go into these companies and really help them shape from the ground up – for example, look at an end-to-end medical procedure. And look at everything from patient intake and what that experience is like, all the way through looking at and studying how cardiologists and radiologists could be more successful overcoming a certain type of heart lesion. And looking at their sources of information, how they planned for the procedure, how they conducted – and looking at that entire ecosystem and thinking that way, and coaching and working with clients so they were thinking that way, and being able to identify all of these touch points throughout that experience where we could really transform it. Whether it was redeg the packaging so that it minimized data entry errors. You know, you can make part of the package sticky. Stick it to the glass. The data entry behind that – there’s things that are even more technologically advanced now, but it was something that was observed, that there was multiple devices used in this procedure and they would set the packaging aside, and then someone would go in at the end of the procedure, capture all of that packaging, and then enter it for insurance purposes. You know some of it gets thrown in the trash, some of it ends up on the floor and so we identified that as a real issue. They were testing devices that made loud buzzing noises during procedures when patients were awake, and the procedure would not go as well if the patient’s heart rate increased. But the minute someone is awake even though they’re sedated and they hear a buzzing noise, their heart rate increases because it’s stressful. And so we were really able to identify all these really subtle things that made the end-to-end experience better. That was awesome. So over the years working there I hired an intern and her name was Alexa Andrzejewski. And her and I worked together for several years on a bunch of different projects and she eventually ended up leaving and going to Adaptive Path. And a few years after that, she came in and grabbed me from Lextant and brought me to Adaptive Path and we worked together there. So my advice to anyone who is trying to advance their career, learn more, whatever, is to be absolutely hungry about any topic. Whether it’s auto insurance, cardiology, plant pathology. Realize that in the middle of that topic there is somebody that is totally ionate about it – the professor that’s dedicated years to it. And there’s also a whole other community that wildly needs the expertise of that person. And as a designer you’re a facilitator of that. You’re a facilitator of that relationship. You’re a facilitator of helping those two groups achieve their goals and that’s really exciting, so be wildly, wildly hungry. Always hungry to learn more, to listen, to investigate. I carry a notebook with me everywhere I go and I listen to people’s conversations – I mean it’s kind of creepy actually. You never want to be on the bus or the train next to me because I’m totally listening to your conversation. I take photos, I document, I mean the world is full of inspiration and full of insight, and just be hungry to learn and realize that your network, the people that you meet – and do it authentically – if you don’t connect with someone, if you really don’t emotionally connect with them, don’t invest time there. Find the people that you share interests with, ions with, that you truly connect with, and pay attention to those relationships, because you’re just going to help one another throughout your entire career because that’s what we do. We’re a relatively small community and we’re here for one another. Lara Fedoroff:            Well it sounds like from your experience at Ohio State that you really had such an amazing opportunity to see all these different facets of design, but along the way you put together this sort of amazingly detailed process for investigation. But not only that. It’s not only asking the right questions and asking several questions and observing. I think something so unique about you is also being able to translate that into a higher level of product or service. Something that is delightful. Something that does surprise them and not only meeting the basic expectations, kind of, but suring that. Kendra Shimmell:        And I think that comes from generally having a love for life. And when you really enjoy life and are really present with what brings you joy, really observant about what brings other people joy. And joy might mean totally different things, depending on context. I mean what brings a cardiologist joy during his procedure, that’s a funny term to use in that context, but there are things. It might be they’ve developed a special relationship with the patient and they have made a promise, or commitment to helping them get through a lesion or get through a situation that their body is presenting. That maybe they’ve been to two or three other cardiologists beforehand and have been unsuccessful. And they’ve made that commitment, so joy in that context is really following through on their promise to their patient. And joy in the consumer product world is very different, but I think having a zest and joy for – and really enjoying life, you’re looking for ways to amplify people’s experience, and you’re looking for ways to give them joy, because that’s my posture. I think the world is really funny and I have a lot of fun, and I want other people to as well. My main mission is to just acknowledge that life is chaotic. People are overworked, over connected, stressed out, and my mission is to help all of that suck a little bit less, and to bring a lightness to people’s experience so they can have fun. Lara Fedoroff:            It sounds like you probably have a lot of opportunity to amplify the experience at Cooper with all the different clients that you have, but what do you hope to be your legacy? Your leave behind? What is the thing that you dream for? Kendra Shimmell:        These are the two daydreams that come up. The one is that I kind of imagine this world where on talk shows and in pop culture, there’s a lot more knowledge and sensitivity to this relationship that all of us are having, not just with one another but with these things that we interact with all the time. It sounds funny when I say it but it’s really about a general sensitivity to the fact that this stuff can either mediate communication and enable people to have a really awesome day, or it can just totally get in the way and be a complete joy kill. And I want people to be more observant of the experiences that they have. I love comedians because comedians are really observant and really stick it to shit experience. They observe human behavior, they make fun of it, they’re so clear about what’s going on around them. Comedians are some of the most observant and spot on community in of being connected with the truth and oddities. And comedians are wickedly observant and are able to really pinpoint people’s pain, and acknowledge funny things that we do even when we know we should be doing things differently. And they’re really great at identifying patterns of behavior and poking fun at when products and services do ridiculous things, or when our government does ridiculous things. And I think that the more and more that design as a role and as a contributor to all of this is – designers as contributors to all of this – is talked about and just kind of a general part of how pop culture, how the general population talks about things, that’s a future I’d like to see. That’s not super aspirational, it’s just more about bringing the conversation, and the practice in the profession, and the impact it has on the world both good and bad, into everyday conversation. The other thing, and this is the aspirational one, is I want to see designers as leaders in business, first and foremost. I think that we’re great at facilitating other people who are experts in a variety of things that we are not experts in. And I think we’re really good at distilling and synthesizing out of that where there are challenges, where there are new business opportunities, where there are opportunities to really connect with people in a way that’s going to bring meaning into their lives. I really don’t like it when designers act like designers are going to save the world. I don’t think we are going to save the world. Teachers are going to save the world. But what we are going to do is we are going to observe people’s experience in a very raw and real way, and acknowledge where things are out of sync with people’s goals. Acknowledge where things are out of sync with the environment, the ecosystem of the business that this is all part of too. Or the actual physical environment. So we’re not going to save the world, but we are going to point at lots of problems and identify opportunities. And I think that we’re the ones that tend to both challenge and provoke, but also be able to walk this line of facilitating business marketing, engineering – when we’re at our best. So I want to see designers striving to be the leaders of businesses. I want to see designers be the leaders of our big businesses because I think putting empathy and candor and a little bit of humor into these big important roles, really helping these business see how they can, A, design a business model that makes money, and, B, be very aware of the life or the lives that are part of the world that their product is kind of plopping into the middle of, and the impact on those lives. And impacting them in a more positive way. That’s a big deal and I think that designers are equipped to do that. Lara Fedoroff:            That’s good. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Kendra Shimmell:        I appreciate it. This is fun. Announcer:     Thanks to Perry Norton for voice over and audio production to Steve Crosby for digital development and original score piece by Cameron Meshell. This episode is sponsored by WeWork. Meaningful connections are essential to the success of every entrepreneur, freelancer, and small business owner. At WeWork, meeting new people and having interesting conversations is natural and effortless. From the design of the WeWork space to the events at their buildings, WeWork does everything they can do to the idea that if one of us is successful, we all benefit. So whether you’re asking for advice, looking for product , or just meeting like-minded entrepreneurs, WeWork is a seamless extension to the community. For more information, go to WeWork dot com. That’s w-e-w-o-r-k dot com. [End of Audio] MORE ABOUT KENDRA Kendra is Managing Director of Cooper. As an educator and designer, she has brought product strategy, design, and business innovation to companies ranging from Fortune 500s to startups in a range of categories, from healthcare systems and medical devices to retail environments, consumer electronics, financial services, enterprise management, and more. In addition to developing Cooper’s groundbreaking UX Boot Camp, Kendra also created Cooper’s popular Design Leadership course from the ground up, offering new tools for designers to lead and succeed in business. Always with a soft spot for healthcare, she initiated Cooper’s partnership with Rock Health, which has since grown to a successful mentorship program, matching Cooper designers with their healthcare startup teams. Active in the design community, Kendra has served on the Board of Directors of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and speaks at numerous industry events. Content links: Twitter – @kshimmell Cooper –  Design and Strategy for a Digital World Cooper U Training – Training in Design Strategy, and Leadership Enterprise UX – Theme 2: Craft Amid Complexity UX Magazine – Quick : Craft Amid Complexity Rosenfeld Media – Kendra Shimmell and Lou Rosenfeld Discuss the Opportunities  for Deg Well-crafted Enterprise UX Interaction South America 2014 – Narcissistic Products Suck   (video and presentation) Fluxible – Narcissistic Products Suck UX Discovery – DS038 :: Kendra Shimmell of Cooper Good Magazine – Learning by Design: It’s Not What You Know, But How You Think Interaction10 – Video: Environments: The Future of Interaction Design and the Presentation SXSW 2010 – My Prototype beat up your business plan Kendra on LinkedIn   The post How to Design Contextual Research appeared first on UX-radio.

WHITNEY QUESENBERY In this episode we are pleased to introduce you to Whitney Quesenbery who has contributed impressive value to the field of experience and research. She’s written three books, the last entitled “A Web for Everyone: Deg Accessible Experiences, with Sarah Horton. this book builds accessibility into every part of a web site or app design so that everyone can use it. She is also dedicated to usability in civic life and has worked with a number of  notable organizations like Pearson, National Library of Medicine, and the National Cancer Institute to name a few. HERE’S THE FULL TRANSCRIPT Lara:  Let’s share with the audience how you got started. How you got interested in all of this. Whitney:  I went to college and I thought I was going to be a University professor, teaching English literature or something. So I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I discovered theater. And one day someone asked me if I could write because I had some documentation to write on a product for a bank in New York. And I thought, “Yeah, I can do this. A little money, not bad.” And the next thing I knew I was turning down theater jobs because I was so entranced by this new thing called hypertext. This was before the web. I was amazed at how you could put information together and connect it up instead of each thing being some tough job to find, we could make it connect. And we went on and did that and became the world expert on hypertext, which wasn’t saying much because I didn’t have that many years of experience. I did tech , I did documentation, and I became the project manager. And when the web hit, all the original hypertext programs kind of died and in the face of it, and we had to really think about where we were going next. So, that was how I got from theater to experience, was just kind of following an opportunity that came along. Lara: And it’s a great thing to fall back to, to look at the similarities between theater and UX. Whitney: I do think there are a lot of similarities. For one thing, they’re both a live interaction with someone. In both cases there’s a kind of conversation that’s happening between the people imagining the experience and creating the experience, and the people enjoying the experience. And in both cases the real experience happens when someone uses it. Not only is the audience having an experience, but the actors are also in the room with them. And there’s a  loop that happens, a story-telling loop where the actors influence the play, the audience influences the play, and it changes night to night. And, so maybe that’s why I was pretty comfortable from the beginning with the idea that the things we created in UX, the digital experiences, are also mutable and changeable, and respond to people and context. Lara: Definitely. And I  when I was in theater, and not having a speaking part and the director telling everyone that every single role is really important and it’s part of the whole system, part of the whole story. And I think that relates so well also. Whitney: Absolutely, we know that all the disciplines that go into experience are present in one person or a whole team of people; they all have to be there. If you leave one out, there’s a gap. Some of the new apps have been really successful about turning things into a conversation like the way Simple has the “safe to spend” amount. So it doesn’t say, “You’re overspending!” It says, “Your safe to spend amount is $58.25.” You’ve said. “I want to really save for that trip.” And it said, “I’ll help you do that. I’ll be part of your journey towards that trip you want to take, or that thing you want to buy.” Lara: Sometimes it’s hard to come up with a story for a business case. If you’re looking at something serious like business ing software we were talking about. That’s kind of difficult for companies to imagine that there’s a story there. What would you say to them? Whitney: The task of doing ing is not that interesting in itself. The task of doing ing is part of a larger goal. And of course there’s a story. The story might be where business and we send our staff around the world to work on our product. And when they come back we need to cover their expenses. So the business’ story might be I need this information in a proper way so I that could repay you. And the staff person’s story might be I’d really like to get paid back for all these expenses. And the ing department software might be we have an obligation to make sure that it’s done legally. But it’s really a conversation if you think about it. It’s the staff person comes in and they say, “ Hey, I’ve just been on a trip. Let me tell you about what I spent.” Let’s talk about the conference UX Hong Kong. You talked about how you used stories and personas at your workshop for as well as incorporating accessibility into the early stages of design. Whitney: Well, Dan Szuc from Hong Kong was helping organize the first conference, or speakers for the first conference. And it was just a great group of people. I just loved it. And it was in Beijing, the next year it was Shanghai and I went back. And I’ve gone back every few years since then, but not every year. The conference is huge because it’s hard for people who live in China to get visas to travel outside of China. And so this is the big conference, it’s the big practitioner conference and there’s something like eight workshops everyday or ten workshops everyday and then plenaries in the morning. It’s a big gathering. Lara: Do you see any of the Euro IA community there as well? Whitney: Absolutely, people come from all over; they have people from the UK and speakers from Europe and speakers from the US. I think they are looking for who are the people doing exciting things and, bringing them into China. We really are kind of an international community and it’s nice to make it fully international to be able to include everyone. Lara: Definitely. So are you presenting at this one? Whitney: I’m doing two workshops. One is on story. I’m creating stories for your personas. That is, what can you do to use your personas once you’ve made them? I think a lot of people make personas and then they don’t know what to do with them next. We have three exercises that we’re doing, different things you can do with your personas to help inform design more and to help evaluate design. And the second one is, based on the new book called A Web for Everyone. And we are going to look at eight personas for people with disabilities who use the web. And think about not only what we need to do with design for them but also who are they similar to? What are the things that someone, say someone who is fatigued easily — what do they need and who else might need that? So where can we find the places where good UX for everyone equals good accessibility. Lara: While we are on the topic, I really liked what you said when we talked earlier when you were talking about beginning the design with a broader beginning. Like, thinking about it in of all people, not just people with special needs. Whitney: Who we do our research with is part of how we scope our projects. And if the people in your head you are deg for are narrow, they are people just like you and maybe just like you but they live somewhere else. Then you are going to get a product (an app) that works for people just like you. But if you start to think about a broader range of people, people with different capabilities, people with different perspectives. Maybe people that don’t love technology as much as we do, or maybe they love it more. Maybe people who use different technologies. Then all of that thinking goes into your work. So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we get a broader range of people into our research. And that may mean giving up statistical significance in favor of breadth of input. It might mean making sure we can do  research with people maybe who maybe interact differently with the web, who are blind, who speak a different language, who use different things than a mouse and a keyboard. And how can we make them part of our work so that we are just not thinking about them at the end. Because we know anyone from usability to experience to research to content strategy to IA, whatever discipline you are in, we know that getting the thinking in the beginning is what makes it come out right at the end.  And the more people you know in relation to the thing you are working on, the design you are working on, the more all of those influences filter into your design. Lara: Right, to see what is visible and to make that visible, but also to hide the mechanics of things yet in a positive way. Even with forms we need to question every single field. Is this crucial. Is this necessary? Why is this necessary? How can we make sure that we’re communicating that to the  in the correct context? Whitney: And don’t collect data we’re not going to do anything with. In this day of the NSA, we have to be really thinking hard about what data we’re collecting, and what we’re going to do with it. Because don’t ask the question just for fun. You’re wasting server space, you’re wasting time, and you’re eroding trust with every question you ask. Someone has one more excuse to leave. Let’s not encourage people to be fatigued and leave. Lara: The easier we can make forms the better. And there should be an action to how we’re going to use that information for every every single field, we should know that when we’re building and deg the form. The immediacy of  is so crucial. Even within that individual field instead of getting to the end and hitting the submit button and then seeing every different place with red text, where you have to go back and fix it. Whitney: When I’m filling out a form to get a mortgage, my goal isn’t to fill out the form. My goal isn’t even really to get a mortgage, although that’s my immediate goal. My goal is to have a house. And so if you can think about the house goal, what’s that goal? When I worked with the Open University, we worked on the online course catalog, and people’s goal isn’t to study chemistry. It might be to be a scientist, or your goal might be to go to university because you want a better job. And so when we flipped the information around and said, ”What will you learn here and what will this help you become?” And people when we did usability testing, people really latched onto that goal and they would say, “Huh. You mean I really have to study this because that will get me there.” Not, “Ugh, I don’t want to have to study chemistry.” Lara: It’s an emotional motivator. Whitney: Absolutely. What journey is the person on? And you know the university is on a journey with you. And I think part of what a website or a form or an app anticipates what you want all of the sudden they’re like, “They get it, they know what I’m doing.” And you trust them more. And now you trust because they entered into a conversation with you even though that conversation may have been designed 3 years before by people they’ll never meet. Lara: I really like the story you were telling about the opera singer. I would love for you to share that with the audience. Whitney: Sure, one of the things we do a theater as we try to never let the backstage appear on-stage. You want to preserve the illusion. And I went to an opera at The Met, actually. And there was a big scene with a battle going on and all the extras matching around and singing, and the orchestra going wild, and the hero sat at the top of the stage singing and singing and singing and at the end he’s killed threw a spear through him. And that’s an effect. He wasn’t really killed. There wasn’t really a spear that went right through his body. And so how did they do it? It’s an effect. It’s strapped on. And when did they do it? So we went back the next day, and we put our holes around our eyes and just watch this guy and what happened was a stage hand slipped up behind him, walked out behind him and helped him clamp this thing on, and the reason that nobody saw it was that it was timed so that it all happened at a moment when we were watching a canon go off at the other side of the stage. In magic they call this misdirection so they took advantage of a moment when the whole audience was looking left to do something over on the right. Now think about a website that preloads things based on where they think the is going. That’s kind of misdirection as well. It’s about creating an illusion that we know that we’re having that is happening. We’re creating an illusion of a conversation, or an illusion of immediacy to fill the gaps where there isn’t real immediacy. Lara: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your new book and about accessibility. I know you touched on it in the beginning, but what inspired you to begin writing this book? Whitney: Well, I was one of those people who thought accessibility was a good thing and someone else would do it. And as I been working elections, I really started to see how important it is because whatever one thinks about access to computers or games, people can’t access information about elections, or maybe there’s an online registration or voter registration form but if 10% of the population can’t use it then that’s not fair. It gets into serious stuff like civil rights. So that made me take accessibility seriously. And as we worked on the book Sarah and I spent a long time talking about whom the audience for this book was. And we finally decided that the audience for the book was people who were already thinking, “Yup, I’m going to make what I’m working on accessible” but they wanted to know how. And much of the work on accessibility is all about checklists and rules and people’s eyes glaze over on that. And so we wanted to write something that would help people build accessibility into their work, so if you’re a content strategist, you might be thinking about how to write headings, how to structure the information so that it has good headings and good information structure. That helps everyone. It helps visual readers, cause you got the visual of headings. But if it was headings are best they could be coded correctly, and now screen readers can read them. And if you’re working with people who don’t read as well, they can read the headings and get the gist of the page. So all those little decisions, we focus the book not on disability but around experience. We came up with a framework we call the Accessible UX Principles. So “People First” is the most important one. Then having a clear purpose, building a solid structure, making the interaction easy, and making the way finding helpful. Making the presentation clear and the language plain and the media accessible all helps us add up to universal usability and creating delight. Not just getting past the barriers, but actually creating something that’s delightful for everyone to use. Good UX and a good accessibility are pretty darn close to the same thing.  Lara: Let’s dive a little bit deeper into that so that people understand it better. You have a headline that gives you the gist of what it is, it’s informational. But how do you take it to that next level when you’re programming it to make it readable and accessible? Whitney: OK. So if I had a heading on a page, right? I could make it visual by making it large and blue and putting a line under it. But if I hadn’t marked it as a heading, maybe it’s a second level heading so it’s an H2. If I marked it as an H2 then the technology knows how to read it. The browsers know what it is, and by the way, search engine optimization people say that you want to have good headings, and those headings need to have good keywords in them because search engines assume that the things that are marked as headers are more important than just text. So a screen reader or any kind of assistive technology that is specialized technology that helps people with disabilities it’s really just another browser, right? And now we’re saying that there’s one more technology that needs to be able to read the code and have the code – the semantics of the code match the semantics of the content. So if the content is meant to have an explanatory header, it gets marked with a heading tag in the HTML. Think about how you visually scan a page. You look at the page and you can scan down the headings. Or maybe you’re even in a more flexible thing like where you can collapse the headings and see just the headings and open and close the ones you want to read. That’s kind of what a screen reader does. One mode it can work in is the can say, “Read me all your headings.” They can jump from heading to heading very quickly. They’re scanning with their ears. Another step might be thinking about how to make sure that the areas of the screen are marked up. Maybe you have a big mega menu at the top of the page. Well, nobody wants to listen to that over and over again. So is there a way to skip over it? You could do that with anchor link. Or you could do that by marking that whole section as navigation. And now someone can say, “Oh, I don’t really want navigation. Take me to the next section on this page. And once you done that you can adjust so if someone has a tall, narrow screen or a short, wide screen you can adjust the presentation to fit the page as well. So you can think about someone with low vision who needs to make the text really large for instance to be able to read it. And all of the sudden they can. All of your presentation is in the style sheet, and maybe black text on a white background is really hard for them to read, they can change the colors to work for their eyes. Programs like readability use this to be able to smooth away all of the backgrounds. A lot of sites, if you go to print view, it takes out all of the stuff around the edges and just leaves the middle of the content. Well, that’s great because it takes away distractions. So if you’re someone who is distracted by all the colors of the ads around the edges you can now focus on the text. That kind of flexibility to context helps in lots of different ways. But wouldn’t it be nice if the software could say, “Would you like me to show you this part of the screen alone?” Or, “Let me jump you to the right to that part of the screen” even if it’s a long page. Lara: Before we end today’s interview I wanted to ask you, “What advice would you give to designers today, whether they’re just getting started or making a career transition, or they’ve been in the field, what would you say to them? Whitney:  Well, I’d say two things. I’d say that when you get started, I think a lot of your attention goes into your own skills and discipline and making sure that they’re on top of the game. But think about the people who will use what we create. So if you start your work from people, then I think everything else happens on its own. You can learn the skills but find ways to make sure that you’re staying engaged with the audience. Whether that’s through quick sessions, or big usability tests. It doesn’t matter. As long as you and your whole team have a way of stay engaged. It’s probably the most important advice I could anyone. Lara: And what do you foresee to be one of your most valuable contributions that you’d like to leave to society? Whitney: Gosh. I think it’s the notion that what we do is important. That when we’ve gotten what we wanted, people who got into web and digital early kept saying, ”This is going to change the world.” And we have changed the world. But you know, just like Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. Now we have to think about our stuff not as toys but as things that change people’s lives. And think about how we can do that for the better, and I hope that the things I’ve done have been a part of helping us think that way. Lara: Well, thank you so much for being on UX radio today. Whitney: Well thank you, it was great talking to you.   MORE ABOUT WHITNEY Whitney is the co-founder of the Center for Civic Design. She is ionate about making interactions with government effective and enjoyable, giving design literacy to elections and other government workers, and on a mission with Dana Chisnell to ensure voter intent through design. She also provides UX consulting at WQusability including research, usability, plain language, accessibility. I love learning about people around the world and using those insights to design products where people matter. Whitney is the author of three books: A Web for Everyone: Deg Accessible Experiences (with Sarah Horton), Storytelling for Experience (with Kevin Brooks) and Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World (with Daniel Szuc) And in her ‘spare’ time she publishes, presents and teaches workshops on personas, usability and research, plain language, and accessibility. Whitney served on federal advisory committees for voting system design and Section 508. Before she was seduced by a little beige computer into software, usability, and interface design, Whitney was a theatrical lighting designer on and off Broadway, learning about storytelling from some of the masters. Connect with Whitney here: @whitneyq  WQusability RESOURCES & REFERENCES Whitney’s Book List include: Storytelling for Experience Global UX: Design and research in a connected world A Web for Everyone   The post Deg A Web for Everyone appeared first on UX-radio.