Podcasts about adaptive path

In Conversation with UX Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2023 62:41

This is a special archived episode of Brave UX. Jesse James Garrett reminds us that once we were pirates, encourages us to understand how soft-power works, and to know and be true to our red-lines. Highlights include: How are UX designers like classical composers? What is the role of personal preference in design? Should design leaders leave strategy to product leaders? Is design leadership about actively resisting the status quo? What have you learned as a result of the “no's” in your career? ====== Who is Jesse James Garrett? Jesse is the Principal Leadership Coach of Intentional Associates, the executive design leadership coaching practice that he founded in 2020. And it's through his coaching work that he is helping design leaders to develop the skills to lead with greater purpose, intention and creativity. Many of you may know Jesse for his influential model from the year 2000, “The Elements of User Experience”, and his book of the same name. It's this foundational thinking, at frontier of UX, that has helped to inform, inspire and enlighten multiple generations of UX designers. Jesse was also a Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path, one of the original and most renowned User Experience consultancies. At Adaptive Path, Jesse worked tirelessly for 13 years to put UX design on the enterprise map. Throughout the years, his writing, teaching and public speaking has been unfailingly generous, taking him all over the world, including to events such as UX Lisbon, UX Salon, and USI. Jesse's contributions continue through the “Finding Our Way” podcast, a show about design leadership that he co-hosts alongside Peter Merholz, his good friend, fellow Adaptive Path Co-Founder, and Brave UX alumnus. ====== Find Jesse here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesse-james-garrett-1341/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jjg Website: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/ ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

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Designing Systemic Change with Sheryl Cababa // Invisible Machines S2E21

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2023 76:09

Massive amounts of system change are necessary to put AI to work in ways that elevate humanity, and Robb and Josh welcome author and experience designer Sheryl Cababa for a deep discussion of the road ahead. Author of the Rosenfeld Media book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, Sheryl has worked as an experienced designer at Phillips, Adaptive Path, and Frog and is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial. Her insights into the important convergence between systems thinking and experience design come at a critical moment when the rapid advancement of technology calls for sober consideration of how we can improve the many systems that make of the world we live in.

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How Service Design Shapes the Future of Organizations: A Conversation with Patrick Quattlebaum

This is HCD - Human Centered Design Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 29, 2023 49:21

Todays sponsor MIRO: https://www.miro.com/podcast In this exclusive interview, dive deep into the realm of service design with Patrick, co-author of "Orchestrating Experiences" and a key figure at Harmonic. From the early days of Adaptive Path to the rise of service design as a strategic force, Patrick reveals the nuances of running a successful design studio, Harmonic Design. Discover the significance of staying true to one's purpose amidst rapid change, the importance of self-care in the entrepreneurial journey, and the diverse applications of service design in today's organizations. Whether you're a seasoned design enthusiast or just starting out, this chat offers rich insights into creating impact in the world of design. https://thisisharmonic.com/

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Nudging Systems + Equity-centered Design + Systems Thinking with Sheryl Cababa — DT101 E120

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2023 51:31

Sheryl Cababa drives a human-centered design practice focusing on systems thinking and evidence-based design, working on everything from robotic surgery experience design to reimagining K-12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies such as Substantial, Frog, and Adaptive Path, she has worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IHME, and IKEA. Sheryl is an international speaker and workshop facilitator. When not in the office, she can be found at the University of Washington, helping educate the next generation of human centered design and engineering students. Listen to learn about: Equity-centered design Systems thinking and designing in complex systems Co-creation and working with lived experts Sheryl's book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers Our Guest Sheryl Cababa is the Chief Design Officer at the Insights Design + Development Studio, Substantial, and a multi-disciplinary design strategist with more than two decades of experience. She is focused on reinventing the approaches of learning and collaboration in today's educational environment to help equity-centered research affirm and advance relationships between institutions, educators, and students. Sheryl has worked extensively in human-centered design within the social impact space. She specializes in developing tools and methods for designers to expand their mindsets beyond user-centered design, anticipate unintended consequences, and engage in systems thinking. Her recent work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation includes leading student voice research to inform the K-12 Balance The Equation Grand Challenge. Sheryl works with their teams to provide equity-centered technical assistance to their grantees, designing the Use Case Guide for demand-side thinking programs, and conducting extensive design research with both U.S. Programs and Global Health teams. Her book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, was released in early 2023. Show Highlights [02:36] Sheryl's degrees are in political science and journalism, not design. [02:46] Getting into design by creating infographics and websites. [03:20] Turning an intern job at the Seattle Times into a job at Microsoft. [03:54] Sheryl's official entry into design was as a product designer. [04:56] Becoming a design consultant while living in the Netherlands. [05:33] Shifting more into design strategy over design execution. [06:03] Why Sheryl started integrating systems thinking methods into her work. [07:19] Sheryl's current work in equity-centered design. [08:52] What is equity-centered design? [09:58] Design is an act of power. [10:51] Equity-centered design is about designing with, not for. [12:03] The problem with personas. [14:28] Going beyond personas. [17:50] “When I was in college…” and the biases we tend to start from. [18:54] Co-creation, and letting people speak for themselves during the design process. [20:43] Thinking about legacy systems and designing in complex systems. [23:12] There aren't really any “broken” systems. [24:10] You can't sit down and just design a system. [24:38] When we “design” for a system, we are intervening in order to shift outcomes in a different direction. [26:25] Thinking about potential harm and harm reduction during the design process. [27:18] There is no silver bullet solution. [30:34] Re-examining solutions to see if they are still working as time goes on. [31:23] Looking at generative AI from a systems perspective. [34:24] A Miro Moment. [36:39] Sheryl's book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers gives designers tools and frameworks to better understand systems. [37:49] Encouraging designers to think intentionally about how things interconnect. [38:15] Viewing the system as a whole ecosystem that surrounds your design. [41:28] Sheryl talks about one of her favorite frameworks from the book. [45:28] Sheryl introduces the concept of “lived experts.” [46:25] Shifting mindsets leads to different outcomes. [49:35] Dawan's post-interview thoughts about systems. Links Sheryl on LinkedIn Sheryl on Twitter Sheryl on Medium Sheryl on UW Human Centered Design & Engineering Sheryl on Women Talk Design This is Design School: Ep 33 – Sheryl Cababa on Unintended Consequences The Product Design Podcast: Sheryl Cababa – Systems Thinking for Designers Content Strategy Insights: Closing the Loop - Systems Thinking for Designers | Episode 141 UX Podcast: #308 Systems thinking with Sheryl Cababa Substantial Substantial on Instagram National Equity Project: Liberatory Design The Donella Meadows Project Book Recommendations Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, by Sheryl Cababa The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, by Peter Senge Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Adding System Awareness to System Design to Your Innovation Stack with Julie Guinn — DT101 E43 Design Council UK + Systemic Design + Design in Government with Cat Drew — DT101 E78 5.5 Things Every Designer Should Know About Hacking Bureaucracy with Marina Nitze — DT101 E106

Nudging Systems + Equity-centered Design + Systems Thinking with Sheryl Cababa — DT101 E120

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2023 51:31

Sheryl Cababa drives a human-centered design practice focusing on systems thinking and evidence-based design, working on everything from robotic surgery experience design to reimagining K-12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies such as Substantial, Frog, and Adaptive Path, she has worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IHME, and IKEA. Sheryl is an international speaker and workshop facilitator. When not in the office, she can be found at the University of Washington, helping educate the next generation of human centered design and engineering students. Listen to learn about: >> Equity-centered design >> Systems thinking and designing in complex systems >> Co-creation and working with lived experts >> Sheryl's book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers Our Guest Sheryl Cababa is the Chief Design Officer at the Insights Design + Development Studio, Substantial, and a multi-disciplinary design strategist with more than two decades of experience. She is focused on reinventing the approaches of learning and collaboration in today's educational environment to help equity-centered research affirm and advance relationships between institutions, educators, and students. Sheryl has worked extensively in human-centered design within the social impact space. She specializes in developing tools and methods for designers to expand their mindsets beyond user-centered design, anticipate unintended consequences, and engage in systems thinking. Her recent work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation includes leading student voice research to inform the K-12 Balance The Equation Grand Challenge. Sheryl works with their teams to provide equity-centered technical assistance to their grantees, designing the Use Case Guide for demand-side thinking programs, and conducting extensive design research with both U.S. Programs and Global Health teams. Her book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, was released in early 2023. Show Highlights [02:36] Sheryl's degrees are in political science and journalism, not design. [02:46] Getting into design by creating infographics and websites. [03:20] Turning an intern job at the Seattle Times into a job at Microsoft. [03:54] Sheryl's official entry into design was as a product designer. [04:56] Becoming a design consultant while living in the Netherlands. [05:33] Shifting more into design strategy over design execution. [06:03] Why Sheryl started integrating systems thinking methods into her work. [07:19] Sheryl's current work in equity-centered design. [08:52] What is equity-centered design? [09:58] Design is an act of power. [10:51] Equity-centered design is about designing with, not for. [12:03] The problem with personas. [14:28] Going beyond personas. [17:50] “When I was in college…” and the biases we tend to start from. [18:54] Co-creation, and letting people speak for themselves during the design process. [20:43] Thinking about legacy systems and designing in complex systems. [23:12] There aren't really any “broken” systems. [24:10] You can't sit down and just design a system. [24:38] When we “design” for a system, we are intervening in order to shift outcomes in a different direction. [26:25] Thinking about potential harm and harm reduction during the design process. [27:18] There is no silver bullet solution. [30:34] Re-examining solutions to see if they are still working as time goes on. [31:23] Looking at generative AI from a systems perspective. [34:24] A Miro Moment. [36:39] Sheryl's book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers gives designers tools and frameworks to better understand systems. [37:49] Encouraging designers to think intentionally about how things interconnect. [38:15] Viewing the system as a whole ecosystem that surrounds your design. [41:28] Sheryl talks about one of her favorite frameworks from the book. [45:28] Sheryl introduces the concept of “lived experts.” [46:25] Shifting mindsets leads to different outcomes. [49:35] Dawan's post-interview thoughts about systems. Links Sheryl on LinkedIn Sheryl on Twitter Sheryl on Medium Sheryl on UW Human Centered Design & Engineering Sheryl on Women Talk Design This is Design School: Ep 33 – Sheryl Cababa on Unintended Consequences The Product Design Podcast: Sheryl Cababa – Systems Thinking for Designers Content Strategy Insights: Closing the Loop - Systems Thinking for Designers | Episode 141 UX Podcast: #308 Systems thinking with Sheryl Cababa Substantial Substantial on Instagram National Equity Project: Liberatory Design The Donella Meadows Project Book Recommendations Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, by Sheryl Cababa The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, by Peter Senge Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Adding System Awareness to System Design to Your Innovation Stack with Julie Guinn — DT101 E43 Design Council UK + Systemic Design + Design in Government with Cat Drew — DT101 E78 5.5 Things Every Designer Should Know About Hacking Bureaucracy with Marina Nitze — DT101 E106

How To Solve Any Problem In Any Industry For Change with Sheryl Cababa

Nonprofit UNPLUGGED

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2023 29:04

Human-centered design is a strategy used to solve problems AND cultivate innovative solutions within the corporate sector. Now, you can take the same principles and develop solution-oriented missions that drive real change for the organizations and the people that are served within your community that is equitable. Sheryl is our expert in this realm!Sheryl drives a human-centered design practice that is focused on systems thinking and evidence-based design, working on everything from robotic surgery experience design to reimagining K-12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies such as Substantial, frog, and Adaptive Path. Sheryl is an international speaker and workshop facilitator. To learn more, check out her book Closing The Loop. Save 15% at checkout when you use this code: cababa-npu Starting Your Nonprofit Doesn't Have To Be Hard or Scary. In Fact, I Created These Tools And Affordable Resources To Ensure Your Journey As An Executive Director Is Simple As A, B, C.Download Your Free Nonprofit Startup Workbook HERENext, Learn The Exact Steps To Scale Your Nonprofit The Right Way So You Can Achieve Wealth At a Higher Speed. Learn How Our Team Has Supported Other Organizations/Businesses Earn Over $20M In Funding: CLICK HERENeed Grants?? Want To Train Your Grant Writer? Want To Make An Extra $10K/Month As a Freelance Grant Writer? Then You Have Come To The Right Place. This Master Grant Writing Mastermind Course Is Designed To Take You From Novice To Expert In 90 Days or Less When It Comes To Writing Grants And Winning Awards. Become A Grants Expert Here

Systems Thinking for Designers, featuring Sheryl Cababa & Leigh Allen-Arredondo

UX Cake

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2023 43:24

In this episode, we chat with Sheryl Cababa, Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial and author of "Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers." She introduces the concept of systems thinking, which is a way to consider the broader implications of design decisions. By examining the entire problem and understanding the interconnections between various components, designers can anticipate and address potential issues and create more holistic and impactful solutions.

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Ty Hatch loves the joy of creating random doodles - S13/E07

Sketchnote Army Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2023 45:14

In this episode, Ty Hatch, who started sketchnoting as a practice to pay attention and stay awake shares why he still loves the art and his work on creating headshot illustrations and creating sketchnotes for meetings and conferences.Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework.Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again.Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that's ideal for sketchnoting.SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try.Running OrderIntroWelcomeWho is Ty Hatch?Origin StoryTy's current workSponsor: ConceptsTipsToolsWhere to find TyOutroLinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.Ty's websiteTy on TwitterTy on InstagramTy on LinkedInTy on MastodonTy on PinterestTy on Artist Trading CardsTy On DribbleUX Week 2008 SketchnotesInktoberTy's Son's Pokémon DrawingsToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Mechanical pencilBallpoint Rotring 600 pencilKaweco fountain penPost-It-NotesGlobal Art Materials SketchbookMoleskine Art sketchbookSketchnote Idea bookPaper by WeTransferiPad ProApple pencilProcreate Adobe FrescoTipsEverybody is creative in their own way, and that's okay.Enjoy what you do. You can like a range of different things, and that's okay.Set boundaries for the things that are really important to you, in your life that are not work-related. Set those boundaries, talk about them, and live your life in a way that reflects your priorities. CreditsProducer: Alec PulianasTheme music: Jon SchiedermayerShownotes and transcripts: Esther OdoroSubscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source.Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde's bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off!Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, this is Mike, and I'm here with Ty Hatch. Ty, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.Ty Hatch: Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here.MR: Ty, we've known each other for years and years. We were talking about when we thought we connected, you had a pretty pinpoint accurate time-point.TH: Yeah. It's funny. Back in 2008, I went to a UX Week, which was a conference put on by, for those that remember Adaptive Path, I think they got purchased and became the in-house UX department for Capital One a few years ago. I was there and I was like, "I need to pay attention." Did some sketch notes, or just did notes, I wasn't thinking about it. Got an email from you after I posted them up on the OG photo-sharing Flickr, and you're like, "Hey, can I put these into my Sketch Note Army?" And so, we just stayed in touch throughout the years since then, so.MR: Yep. Well, that leads right into telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.TH: You bet. I am a UX manager for O.C. Tanner, which is an employee recognition company. I help create the space for employee recognition. I Work with a team. I have three people on my team. We're part of a larger experience group, and we focus on how can people feel appreciated at work by the employers. It's a really fun thing to do. I also, as you know, do sketch notes at times and random doodles and whatnot when the time allows. That's me. I enjoy UX design. It's a fun problem space to be in.MR: Well, I can relate to that as a UX principle, UX designer. I find it fascinating as well. I focus on software, but there are tons of opportunities to make things better, always, seems like. It's good to hear you're focusing on that, and that's such a critical space, especially now with all the challenges of hiring people and maintaining employees, and having them not leave by recognition. Huge, huge opportunities there, I would think.TH: Yeah. It's huge. You, like me, it's hard to feel sometimes like you're moving the needle and you're making a difference for people. One of the things that really gets me going is knowing that the work that I'm doing is actually helping people feel that appreciation, that they get that recognition from not only their peers, but from their leaders and whatnot.MR: Yep. Super important. It's something that often goes under the radar and managers might not think much about it, but is so critical. Often it doesn't cost you much other than time and a little bit of thoughtfulness. So, that's really cool. I would love to hear a little bit more about how you ended up in the space where you are both professionally, but also as a sketchnoter. Had you always drawn since you were a little kid? What's been your history? Let's start from when you're just a little guy.TH: I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up. I grew up in Southern Idaho and southeastern Washington. Miles outside of my small town. There wasn't much to do there. We were too far out to get TV reception. We often joked we got matching ants on our TV screen because this was back in the days before cable. We had terrible TV reception on our black and white TV. We did have indoor plumbing, and electricity, so that was always good.My brother and I, we would leave the house, go out in the backyard. We didn't have neighbors at the time, and so, we would just go out sometime after breakfast and typically we'd come back around dinnertime 'cause we were hungry. We would always have some sort of adventure and whatnot. I think at some point, a friend of ours introduced us to Dungeons and Dragons and I became a really big fantasy nut.This was the early days of D&D. I used to have a first edition, Monster Manual and Player CanBall and DMS Guide and all that. We colored them, I coloring books 'cause they were all just black and white illustrations. I loved it. Got into reading books and whatnot. Wanted to play football, but didn't seem to get enough interest for college people. We were in a small town, nobody really knows what's going on with a small town.I served a mission for my church for a couple years and then returned home. I was visiting my grandparent's house, and this is probably my favorite story about what got me into what I do today is there was this really awesome a couple of these burly looking pirates on it. I was like, "Well, this is cool, visual stimuli to get someone board at grandma and grandpa's house, right? It said the white family, I said, "Oh, that's a Piratey name."I was like, "Oh, let's read about these pirates." It wasn't pirates. It was a story about the artistic legacy of NC Wyatt and his son Andrew, and his grandson Jamie. I just got hooked and in fact, I have a self-portrait from that issue that I took out of the magazine. I think I found a couple copies over the years. But there was a really little self-portrait that he did that I have hanging on my wall.There was some painters tape. And I was like, "Oh, you get paid doing art? What? Completely radical concept for me. I'd always loved comic books. My brother and I collected comics over the years. I figured, I was like, "Oh, what can I do with art?" I started exploring the different art-related careers and I stumbled upon graphic design because as I learned about illustration as a career, I was like, "That's really competitive. I don't know that I'm good enough to compete there, but I can definitely think visually and solve problems." So, I tended toward that.That was about the time I was a junior at state school in Washington State where I'd met my wife and I applied for an art school in Portland and I'm like, "There's no way they'll let me in." But surprisingly, they did. I finished a BFA in graphic design. My senior capstone project there at the time was a website, this is what? 1998 I wanna say. Right about the time my oldest was born. And my senior project was an informational website on typography, which is still out there.I did a really quick redesign of it the next year 'cause it was a hideous thing when I got looking at it in reality. But it's still fitting there, 20-some-odd years later. It was an informational website about typography. Cause actually, I fell in love with typography in school. That's one of the things I absolutely loved. I was like, "Oh, could I make money doing typography?" I was like, "No, I can't." Type is another one of those professions, it's a very niche specialty.MR: Yeah. You can do it, but you have to really work at it.TH: Yeah. But I love design. I love the visual solving of problems and communicating clearly with design. For several years, I did that and slowly over time morphed into more of an interaction UX designer. Just as the industry changed, I'm like, "This is a good thing. This can provide for me and my family and I enjoy doing it." You slowly over the years gravitated into technology and doing UX.That was the thing that got me where I'm at. Particularly doing sketchnotes, like the sketch note that I did at UX Week was the first time that I actually shared anything that I'd done like that. I would do 'em in my sketchbooks 'cause it helped me process what was being communicated, presentations that I would go to.I really took off though, I wanna say about 2014, 2015 when I got my first iPad. There's this little app that was really cool. I'm like, "This is cool." I was trying to use it with my finger, but the company that made the app, which is Paper. The company at the time was called, FiftyThree.MR: FiftyThree. Yep.TH: I think I got one of their styluses, which looked like a carpenter's pencil. I was like, "This is cool." But I didn't like the drag of the rubber on it, but it made my finger drawings not as crappy. I'd used that stylus. I tried to play around with it a bit more. Then Apple introduced the pencil and it was a game changer for me.I've dabbled a bit with other applications, but the Paper is still my go-to when it comes to sketchiness because of how it works. I still maintain sketchbooks. I have one now. It's more random skulls and patterns and headshots. Like you see I participate in October each year, which is a drawing challenge. If you go over into my Instagram, you'll see that I have a few. I think I actually made it through all 31 days this year.MR: You did.TH: Which is like maybe the second or third time that I've done it. I've completed Inktober. But that's just fun. It's a good challenge to just do random headshots. I enjoy the personalities that come out of those headshots. That's a bit of how I got into it, what I've been doing.MR: Wow. And now, do you still do sketchnoting from time to time?TH: I do. I haven't had as much with the pandemic. Right before the pandemic, I was actually doing a fair amount of it. I was getting contacted by conferences to help with that. I did a Mind the Product conference and did a plural site live as well. They were a lot of fun. Did the thing with—what I like about—my particular process with sketchnotes is I prefer being in person at any one event 'cause processing that real-time is the thing that I did. I've tried to do it with different random, YouTube presentations and stuff like that, but I don't get quite the energy and the vibe off of a live event.MR: Interesting. When I look at your style, I see you have a very unique ink style, I dunno how to describe it, but it looks like you're using a brush pen or something. There is some single-line work, right, but there's some that looks like it's kind of thick and thin. What is the tool that you're using to achieve that? I assume you're still on Paper, right?TH: Yeah. Looking at the ink over stuff, I typically, I'll pencil it out, I'll sketch out in pencil and then I just use fine liners. I use a fine linear and then like a 0.8. Sometimes I'll go in with the smaller one. One little tool that I saw, a Kaweco.MR: Oh, yeah.TH: I was like, I put it in my cart and it's really hard to justify that experience. Not a cheap thing, hey. But it got low enough and I'm like, okay, it was my birthday. And I was like, I told my wife, "I'm gonna splurge and get this." And like, okay. I love it. I haven't done much drawing with it. I got an extra broad nib and it's a little too thick for me. My pen addiction, my writing instrument addiction is breathing and well, and I collect art supplies when I'm trying to figure out something I wanna do. I ordered a broad nib off of Jet pens, which is not a good site if you like ready instruments. It's not good for your wallet. It's a great size.MR: Great site, and yeah, you spend a lot of money there pretty easily.TH: Oh yeah.MR: Paper now is owned by, WeTransfer the file transfer company, and still is maintained and has had some updates. Like you, I use Procreate for illustration work, but if I'm doing sketch notes, I go right to Paper. At this point, it feels really natural, the tools, I'm very aware of them. When you do sketchnoting in Paper, what are the tools that you like to use there? I'm just curious about that. Looking at, just have one of your samples up here on my screen. Looks like you're—TH: I have an iPad Pro that I use with an Apple pencil. Typically, when I do it, I'll—what I love about Paper is the intuitiveness of the tools. They have a paintbrush, they have a ink pen or fountain pen. They have a couple different types of markers and a pencil. Typically, I like to do a little sketch of the presenter. And so, if you look at it, you'll see that most frequently. Then notes around the topics they're talking about.Often, I'll get the sketch of the presenter. I do that in the quiet moments of their presentation. I'll either use the ink pen, the fountain pen version, a medium nib. It's relatively inexpensive to pay for the pro version for Procreate or for the Paper.MR: Right. It's $12 a year, I think.TH: Yeah. I'm more than happy to pay that 'cause it's given me a lot of opportunities. The thing that I love is the color mixing. They've nailed color mixing like nobody else has, and I think it's one of the best things that they've done in software. I'll use that or I'll use a one the fine liner to do the block letters and whatnot.Every now and then, I have little people pop up that are just a head body and arms, legs to sometimes self-characters and concepts that the designers are doing. Because the thing that I found really interesting with sketch notes is that it's that real-time synthesizing of the concepts that they're presenting that I get the most out of 'em. Largely, it started as a selfish practice to pay attention and stay awake, but I found that I still love doing that because it really helps me to get something outta these presentations as well. But yeah, Paper is hands down the most intuitive tool, I think, for just sketching out in general. I love it.MR: I agree. Well, we're talking a little bit about Sketchnoting specifically. We've done who you are and what you do. We got your story of your origin. Tell us a little bit about something you're working on now, whether it's work or personal that you're excited about that you can share with us.TH: Well, let's see. One of the things I'm really excited about, I have no clue how to do it, is I want to try and figure out how I can work a little bit more in conversational device. Conversational device seem to be taken a lot. There's the ChatGPT bot that everybody's talking about. All these AI-based tools, which have their place, I think. But how can I build a conversational way to present my work or to present myself?I've done some really terrible things. Experiments that will never see the light of day. One of the things I love about design is that's experimentation is part of trying to figure out a solution. You and I both know as designers, it's like, you can't really come up with a good solution unless you know what the problem is. And so, trying to figure that out from my perspective, like, okay, how can I make something like this happen and in a way that I can somehow manage, right?I will fully admit to being an old school. It's like my personal psych is there. I think I got a redesign out last year that I'm really happy with. That was the seven-year cycle of refreshing a personal site. It seems like seven to eight years is about the time it takes for me to get around to saying, "I should probably redesign my personal site." And actually, finding the time to do it.I want to, being able to maintain that in a way because with all the different social media things, it's really hard to improvise where your content is in a good way. 'Cause if you post on social media, you don't have a real centralized location for any of the content that you can put out. You have to say, "I'm gonna focus on this platform."That's really the dangerous thing, I think. How do you position yourself not only as a working professional, a design professional like we're as an artist you know, and give yourself a home where people know, "Oh, if I go here, I'll be able to find and go look at all the other things."'Cause as much as I love social media and Instagram, I'm tired of seeing an ad every third post in Instagram as I scroll through my feed. Then you have other social media services that kinda self-destruct. I want to have a good centralized location, and I haven't been able to get that fully done yet.'Cause as much as everybody loves WordPress and it powers so many sites, you have to really want to put in that time and effort to make WordPress work. There's other platforms and stuff too, but it's like, how can you make your content your own and have it in a place that everybody can know, "Okay, if I go here, I'll find their stuff." I'm trying to figure that out for myself.MR: That's something that challenged me as well. Years ago, I decided to go to Squarespace just because I could build what I wanted and not think too much about it, and constrained me a lot. Paper does provide, and it's grown to meet my needs over time. That's been really good to secure as well. I had an instance where I ran websites on WordPress and didn't update, and someone was running a legal pharmaceutical site buried in my website, and I was like, "All right. Not doing that anymore."I was out on WordPress self-hosting and switched to Squarespace, and it's been a good experience. But yeah, I felt the same way you talk about, you know, scrolling through Instagram, it feels like more and more of its ads and less and less of its actual content. I have to really fight through the ads to actually get to my friends for interesting things, and that's frustrating. Someone's going to hopefully solve that problem soon.TH: There's a lot of different platforms out there, you know, Mastodon is taking off, but it's like, in my mind, it's a little too complex for the normal person. Just about everything, you have to feed the algorithm. You have to continually be putting stuff out there to maintain any audience. People have lives outside of posting on social media.One thing I think in general that people don't think about too much is I have a life that is very important to me with my family, and it's like, I'm not gonna be posting all the time for these different platforms. It's great. I love doing it, but it's like, that's not my primary, one of my key focuses.MR: That's the question everybody has to ask, right, to what am I gonna feed this thing? What are its expectations of me? 'Cause sometimes you come to realize that these platforms have expectations for what they want you to do that doesn't align with what you wanna do. You have to make that decision because you only get so much time. It keeps going away. That's really fascinating. Well, I hope that redesigning your website goes well. I know what that feels like. I haven't done it for a while, so I know what a challenge it is.TH: I appreciate that. One thing I'm really interested in trying out, and maybe I'll be doing it a little bit this week a bit if I can, is AWS has this thing called Amplify Studio where they've pre-built some components and whatnot, in React powered by a Figma template. And so, you change your components in the Figma template, connect your account, and you should be able to launch out some app or whatever.I have the template, it's been taunting and mocking me for several months since I discovered it. An inanimate software can't do that. AI might be able to do that, but inanimate software doesn't necessarily do that as you're constant saying, "Hey, you got this, are you gonna do something at some point?"MR: For those who don't know, Figma is a design tool, vector-based design tool where many designers build often their prototypes and their mockups with. What Ty's talking about is he would build a mockup of his site and then use React, which is kind of a backend technology, I think is a fair way to describe it populated by—TH: It's a JavaScript framework—MR: Framework, that's the word I was looking for.TH: Yeah. Just help build out components. AWS is Amazon Web Services, which is the—basically simple way of looking at it is they provide a lot of the Cloud hosting services for a lot of providers. When your services aren't working, there might be an AWS outage somewhere causing some of that stuff. When the internet services go down, sometimes there's outage with some of these cloud providers—MR: Well later in the show, we'll definitely have a link to your website. Maybe by the time this episode launches, you'll have a new site up there that people can look at.TH: It gives me a goal to work on.MR: There you go. There you go. Let's take a little shift now and talk about tools. We've hinted at some, you talked about Paper by WeTransfer as a digital tool. Let's jump back into analog, and more specifically, are there brands of pens that you like, brands of paper, notebooks, pencils, so that people who are listening can dig them up and maybe experiment a little bit?TH: Absolutely. Right now, if I look at my desk, I have a mechanical pencil, and I'll send you some links so you can put these in show notes. It's a mechanical pencil, 0.51 with a metal coral is by Uni. The nice thing is, when you have a metal pencil, you'll often have this little nib that kinda gets bent and breaks. But what's nice about this pencil is that it retracts. It's fairly affordable. I think it's like maybe about 15 bucks. It's not a polymer is on the back of it.I also love fine liners. I've gotten the rounds with a whole bunch, I have some, Copics. The current one that I'm using is a Uni pen fine liner. I've found that I really like these really good waterproof so I can lay down watercolor washes or alcohol on so on. I got this one earlier this year. We did a team offsite. We got a rotating 600.MR: Those beautiful pens.TH: It was a Ballpoint. I'm not such a huge fan of ballpoint pens. But I discovered that Kaweco makes a gel pin insert refill, and so, I got a Kaweco gel pen insert in there. Then have a Kaweco fountain little porch fountain pen. The thing that amazes me-- yeah, it's tinier than I thought it was, but the thing I love about it is that the ink just flows and it's beautiful. It's really great.As far as what do I draw on, in the day, it's often post notes, making lists, and whatnot. I have sketchbooks. Right now, I'm using one. I've been experimenting a little bit with what I want to use for sketchbooks and stuff. This one's by a company, Global Art materials. It's just a generic kinda sketchbook.For years and years, I've used Moleskin's Art sketchbooks, which are great. I love that size. I got a eight by eight, or seven and a half by seven and a half watercolor sketchbook. I found that that was a little too precious. I was like, "Oh, I gotta do art in this stuff." I got the Kickstarter for "The Sketchnote Idea Book."MR: Thank you.TH: I love it, Mike. It's fantastic. The pages are bright white, which I absolutely love and they held all sorts of things. I got some watercolor in my old one. I have one somewhere, an Emergency Kit in case I have to go somewhere. I have another one somewhere that I'm like, lemme experiment with this stuff, and then maybe I'll get back to the Idea book. I found that that notebook that you guys put together was really one of my favorites in recent years.MR: Great.TH: The quality of the paper and the whiteness and the thickness made it really, really flexible. The only thing for me is maybe it was a hair too big, a little too wide. I like a little bit smaller, but I absolutely love the paper quality you guys did on that. Then like sketch notes or not sketch notes, but on the Ink Tobra drawings, I found a five by seven Strathmore 400 pad of paper that's really thick that I absolutely love.All of the years, and 2021s, I only did like 16 of them. I have all those originals hanging out on a piece of paper somewhere. One my goals with my personal site is to be able to set up a way to sell some of these 'cause that's fun or good if this is just sitting and collecting dust in your house. If you do it, I think that one of the real choices of making art is sharing it with people and helping them appreciate it. One of the things I wanna get going as well.MR: That sounds good. As far as digital, you talked about, of course, Paper. We got into that a little bit already. Are there any other tools that you like to play with? Or is that your go-to for pretty much everything?TH: I do have Procreate on my iPad. My kids use it a lot more than I do. One thing I found is I don't like the glossy slide of the Apple pencil on just a make a screen so I have a textured screen protector on it to give it that textural fill of paper. I found that that makes a huge difference for making marks on iPad. That's really it. I've toyed with, Adobe Fresco, Concepts app. There's one that the Icon Factory does, I can't remember it's Ben's go-to tool.MR: I think Ben Crothers likes that—Ben Norris likes that one.TH: Norris, yeah. I dabbled that a little bit. What I like about Paper is the ability to go from pencil to ink to watercolor. The brush that they have in Paper is fantastic. How you can lay your color, make it deeper and rich if you want.I haven't been able to get Procreate to do that. Procreate's a fantastic tool. I love it. But for Sketch notes, to me, it feels like it's a little too powerful. What I love about Paper is Paper's really good at just capturing your flow of thinking, whereas you have to be a lot more deliberate in your usage of Procreate. Although, if you're a Concept artist or somebody that's doing stuff like that, then absolutely that's a great place.My son does a lot of—he loves Pokemon, he loves Mario. He's been doing it. He's gonna be turning 25 this next year. And I'm like, "Dude, you could do commissions of people's Pokemon on teams." He does this fantastic stuff. I'll send you a link to his Pokemon stuff. He'll do characters and whatnot. He's drawn so many Mario things. He's drawn hundreds of Pokemon and he gets them scaled. I just absolutely love looking at his stuff. I'm like, "Dude, you could probably do something with this. "But he's like, "Yeah, I know Dad, but I do this for fun." Which is great.MR: That sounds like a great variety of tools. You had quite a span. Some that I hadn't thought about, especially the Kaweco. I think it was the Kaweco insert that goes into the Rotring, I think you talked about. 'Cause I'm not a ballpoint fan either. There's a Schaffer insert that I use in my Retro 51s that I really like too. Probably a similar insert, I suppose.TH: I really like the Kaweco one. There's another one that seems to get pretty good reviews that I've seen on, I wanna call it Otto.MR: Oh yeah. Otto. I've had otto. Yeah, those are great. That's Japanese, I think.TH: Mark-making on a budget is a big deal for me. It's not necessarily the tools that make the person, it's what you do with the tools that you have. I think having a widely available set of tools is really important, but also making sure that they're budget-friendly, right?MR: Mm-hmm.TH: Is an important thing too.MR: Yep. I totally agree. Let's make one last shift into tips. The way I frame this is to imagine someone's listening. Maybe they're kind of at a plateau, or they just need some inspiration, little inspiration, little boost. What'd be three tips you would give that person to encourage them in their sketchnoting or visual thinking or just thinking, doing visual work experience.TH: The first tip, and I think this is a pretty important one. I've had a lot of people, when they find out I'm a designer, they throw, "Oh, I'm not artistic." And to me, it's not about being artistic. It's about being creative. I like to tell people everyone's creative in their own way. How you express your creativity is going to be different than how I express my creativity.My creativity comes out in the form of sketch notes and these random headshot illustrations that I do. Your creativity may be that you are a fantastic accountant and you can come up with really great ways to make things better and more efficient. Other people may just be fantastic books or bakers. Everybody expresses their creativity differently.It's not about being artistic, it's about expressing yourself in the work that you do. I think it's perfectly okay to admire for somebody's work and say, "Oh, that's fantastic," and be a fan of it, but also not beat yourself up like, "Oh, I'm not that good at because I can't draw like my sorority and illustrate all these school books." I can draw my own thing and I can be happy with it. And so, I think my first one would be, everybody is creative in their own way, and that's okay.With that, it goes to what I would say is my second tip is enjoy what you do. That it's really hard, I think, especially today for people to feel like, oh, I can enjoy this. I think you need to give yourself permission to enjoy those things that you find pleasing. There's so many things out there today, it's easy to get overwhelmed with them.I think it's okay to be nerdy and geeky or really into sports or, you can like a range of different things. If my kids were tell you what I like, they'd rattle off a list of dozens of things 'cause I don't think it's good to limit yourself to liking just one thing. You can like a range of different things, and that's okay. That would be my second one.The third one is, there's a script quote from Iron Glass. You've probably heard this. You can find a YouTube video on it somewhere, but he's talking about the work that you want to do when you—everybody has a particular taste and style in their head that they imagine. But then when you try and do it, it doesn't meet those mental expectations, but you can get there by working at it.I really think that everybody's capable of doing really great stuff, but you need to work to get to that point. Don't give up, but that's the whole—and I think follow your passion is really bad advice, but I think do what you enjoy because it may be that you may not enjoy your job which is providing for you and maybe your family. But if there's something outside of that that brings you joy and that you enjoy doing, do that in a way that helps you be happy.Over time, what you do with that will match what you see in your head. There may be opportunities that come up as a result of doing that because you never know. Opportunity—I forget who said this quote. Opportunity is often masked as hard work. If you're not doing the work to prepare for the thing that you want to do when that opportunity comes, you're gonna be ill-prepared to do that, that you want to do.And so, it's important to do the things that you feel are important that you love and you'll have an opportunity at some point. Timing is really important. I'll do a fourth one because this one I feel—and I've mentioned a little bit. You need set boundaries for yourself on what you do. You need to be able to say, this is what's important to me, and these other things aren't so important.And so, when it comes down to it, you know, I won't be doing this, this, or this because it conflicts with my more important thing. For me, personally, my most important thing is my family, and everything that I do, I do—I love design. I find that an extremely fulfilling, rewarding career, but it's a means to be able to provide for the family and make sure that they're taken care of.I think that a lot of people are like, this is my hustle. This is my thing. If you put so much of yourself into that, that you identify that with that, and if that thing goes away, where are you left? Set the boundaries for the things that are really important to you in your life that are not work-related. Because I can guarantee you everybody has something that's very important to them, that it's not work-related.Set those boundaries, talk about those boundaries, and live your life in a way that reflects your priorities because as you do that, people will see that, they'll understand that, they'll respect that. And as you do those things and you express yourself through whatever creative means you have, you'll gain those opportunities to be able to do those things and then lead a more fulfilling life and that you're you're happy with. You won't be living with regrets if you do those things.MR: I love the fourth tip. That's really great. Really encouraging. Well, thank you for all those tips and we appreciate your wisdom for all of us here. It seems like just minutes and suddenly we're near the end of the show. I'd love to hear where's the best place for people to find you? Websites, social media, whatever you think would be the best place to start and connect.TH: You bet. I do have a personal site as we were talking about. It's at tyhatch.com. That's gonna be where you can find me. I have links off to all my socials. I'm on Twitter for however long that's still up. I'm on Instagram. You can find me at both of those. Most social media, you can find me at Ty Hatch. Instagram, Twitter, those have been my mainstays. I do have a profile on Mastodon as well. You can find me there tyhatch@mastodon.online. And then also most of my schedule archive of at this point in time lives over on Pinterest. You go to pinterest.com/tyhatch.com/sketchnotes. I think I have a collection of about 300 different sketch notes that I've done.MR: Oh, that's great.TH: You can find me there. I'm always happy to field any questions. If you see something you like, send me a note. Say, "Hey Ty, I really like this sketch. Do you have it?" And if it's something from October, happy to do that. I did a thing years ago, oh gosh, it's been almost 10 years. Really, Mike, I'm getting old. I did this thing about 10 years ago called Artist Trading Cards, or ATC. I think it might still be up if you go to apcs.tyhatch.I did a bunch of Artist Trading Cards. It started off ostensibly as like, "I'm gonna do a little Christmas present for coworkers." And it turned into a four-month project that I had a daily post of thumb little sketch that I did. I'm happy to sell these or trade with you if you want to trade physical objects. There's a whole range of those out there as well. It's fun. I enjoy doing random doodles and I think some point, there will be an opportunity for 'em, but until then I get to enjoy them.TH: Yep.MR: Cool. Well, we'll definitely get show notes put into the episode. So if you're anything in or any of these things pique your interest, you can go check it out. We have links to it. And thanks so much, Ty for being on the show. I'm so appreciate the work you do and the representation you put into the world and your leadership really need people like you doing that. And I'm so glad that you do it.TH: Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. It's been fantastic talking with you today.MR: You too. Well, and for everyone listening, that'll wrap another episode of "The Sketchnote Army Podcast." Till the next episode, this is Mike. Talk to you soon. All right. I'm gonna stop my recording.

Sheryl Cababa on Systems Thinking for Designers

Rosenfeld Review Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2023 33:25

Sheryl is the author of the soon-to-be-released Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/systems-thinking-for-designers/ With a background in journalism and political science, and having worked at or with Adaptive Path, Substantial, Frog, Ikea, Microsoft, and the Gates Foundation, Sheryl has an interest in the big picture of systems thinking and how it applies to designers. Working on projects of enormous scale that could directly or indirectly affect thousands or millions of people can put researchers and designers in a state of paralysis as they realize the potential consequences of their work. Systems thinking can help move us out of that state of paralysis and into one of thought, collaboration, and action. Sheryl explains how systems thinking fills the gaps that design thinking alone can leave behind. • Expand your scope from the user to anyone who could be affected by the product. • Don't just ask how the product will be used. Asked why the product is needed at all. • Expand your thinking. Think broadly about who the stakeholders are and the various contexts that could be impacted by your design. • Imagine different solutions that you might not be able to execute, solutions that might require a policy change or a different business model. An approach like the above will feel slower – at least initially. If you have impatient supervisors and engineers, gain alignment with them by getting them involved in the process. • Help them understand the status quo and envision the future. • Have them go through the exercise of creating visual maps with you. What you'll learn from this episode: • The relationship between design and systems thinking • How design thinking falls short • How systems thinking fills in the gaps by expanding your thinking and looking outside your scope of expertise • Why systems thinking feels slower but is more collaborative and more efficient in the long run • How to gain alignment with your decision-makers Quick Reference Guide [00:00] Introduction [01:44] Ways to overcome decision paralysis [04:55] Navigating the complexities of the world through systems thinking [06:45] The problem with formalized systems thinking [08:24] Design thinking vs. systems thinking [13:22] The kinds of interventions that drive successful innovation [15:42] How long-term thinking helps overcome compliance issues [17:38] The difference between Cloud Space and Clock Space [22:10] How designers can tell their superiors to slow down [25:22] An easy way to gain alignment with your decision-makers [30:38] Sheryl's gift to the audience [32:05] Parting thoughts Resources and links from today's episode: • The Book of Delights by Ross Gay: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Delights-Essays-Small-Overlook/dp/152934977X/ • Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers by Sheryl Cababa: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/systems-thinking-for-designers/

design navigating microsoft designers frogs ikea delights gates foundation substantial systems thinking ross gay adaptive path

Becoming Design Partner at VC Firm - Jeff Veen (Design Partner @ True Ventures)

Design MBA

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2022 62:04

Jeff Veen is design partner and head of platform at True Ventures. He brings his design and product experience, management skills of large-scale programs, and common sense knowledge of being a founder to the mission and initiatives of True's Founder Platform. Jeff was the vice president of design at Adobe after the company acquired Typekit, the startup he co-founded and ran as CEO. Jeff was one of the founding partners of the user experience consulting group Adaptive Path. While there, he led Measure Map, which was acquired by Google. INTERVIEW VIDEO:https://youtu.be/CeRkpEOrhWUCONNECT WITH JEFF VEENTwitter - https://twitter.com/veenLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyveen/Podcast - https://www.relay.fm/presentableCONNECT WITH MELinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayneil Twitter - https://twitter.com/jayneildalal

ceo google designers firm adobe design career true ventures positive intent vc firm adaptive path design partner typekit jeff veen

Jesse James Garrett: The key to leadership, authenticity and relationships

Design To Be Conversation

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2022 35:10

Jesse James Garrett has been one of the most prominent voices in digital product design for more than 20 years. His career highlights include co-founding the groundbreaking UX consultancy, Adaptive Path; writing the foundational book The Elements of User Experience, whose iconic five-plane model has become a staple of the field; and defining Ajax, the dynamic interaction model that transformed web technology and design in the Web 2.0 era. His work has been published in more than a dozen languages and he is a frequent keynote speaker on making designers and organizations more human-centered in their work.We dive into leadership through relationships, how most struggles of unhealthy design teams can be traced back to unhealthy relationship dynamics, paired with leading with authenticity, and how too many designers feel they have to shed some part of who they are in order to fit the mold of leadership. But leadership has no mold and comes in every shape imaginable.

relationships leadership web authenticity elements ux ajax user experience adaptive path jesse james garrett

Jesse James Garrett - Flying the Jolly Roger While Sailing With the Navy

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2022 62:41

Jesse James Garrett reminds us that once we were pirates, encourages us to understand how soft-power works, and to know and be true to our red-lines. Highlights include: ⭐ How are UX designers like classical composers? ⭐ What is the role of personal preference in design? ⭐ Should design leaders leave strategy to product leaders? ⭐ Is design leadership about actively resisting the status quo? ⭐ What have you learned as a result of the “no's” in your career? ====== Who is Jesse James Garrett? Jesse is the Principal Leadership Coach of Intentional Associates, the executive design leadership coaching practice that he founded in 2020. And it's through his coaching work that he is helping design leaders to develop the skills to lead with greater purpose, intention and creativity. Many of you may know Jesse for his influential model from the year 2000, “The Elements of User Experience”, and his book of the same name. It's this foundational thinking, at frontier of UX, that has helped to inform, inspire and enlighten multiple generations of UX designers. Jesse was also a Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path, one of the original and most renowned User Experience consultancies. At Adaptive Path, Jesse worked tirelessly for 13 years to put UX design on the enterprise map. Throughout the years, his writing, teaching and public speaking has been unfailingly generous, taking him all over the world, including to events such as UX Lisbon, UX Salon, and USI. Jesse's contributions continue through the “Finding Our Way” podcast, a show about design leadership that he co-hosts alongside Peter Merholz, his good friend, fellow Adaptive Path Co-Founder, and Brave UX alumnus. ====== Find Jesse here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesse-james-garrett-1341/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jjg Website: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/ ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

co founders navy flying elements ux sailing user experience chief creative officer finding our way usi jolly roger adaptive path peter merholz jesse james garrett

Peter Merholz - Keeping Design Weird & Leadership Clear

Design To Be Conversation

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2022 70:38

Peter Merholz demystifies design leadership, openly shares the ups and downs of a trail-blazing design career, and how we can keep design “weird” without getting fired. Highlights include: ⭐ What is the fundamental job of the designer leader? ⭐ Why do design leaders find it difficult to figure out what their job is? ⭐ What advice did Obi Wan give Luke that design leaders need to hear? ⭐ Why are you a design pragmatist and not an idealist? ⭐ What do design leaders need to know about politics and relationships? #DesignLeadership #UX #UXDesign #AdaptivePath #BraveUX ====== Who is Peter Merholz? Peter is the Founder and Principal at Humanism at Scale, the consulting practice he started in 2019 to amplify the practices and potential of design teams by shaping design organisations and bolstering design leadership. Before founding Humanism at Scale, Peter was the VP of Design at Snagajob, where he oversaw design for both product and marketing. Peter has also held positions such as Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, VP of Global Design at Groupon and VP of User Experience at Inflection. But it is his role and the almost 11 years he invested as a Co-Founder and the Head of Design Practice of Adaptive Path - then the world's leading UX strategy and UX design firm - that he is perhaps best known for. In 2016, Peter co-authored “Org Design for Design Orgs” with Kristin Skinner, which was the first book to address building and managing effective in-house design teams. And, last millennia, Peter coined the term blog! ====== Find Peter here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermerholz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/peterme Website: https://www.petermerholz.com/ Peter's book: Org Design for Design Orgs - Building and Managing In-House Design Teams: https://orgdesignfordesignorgs.com/ ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

S3 E9: What Bubbles Up in... Creative Leadership!

What Bubbles Up

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2022 54:08

In this very special episode, Barry and Phil are joined by none other than Jesse James Garrett, co-founder of formative UX Design agency Adaptive Path and author of the seminal book, "The Elements of User Experience". Jesse takes us through his journey from designer, to entrepreneur, to business leader, to corporate executive, and finally to his current pursuit of providing Creative Leadership coaching. We discuss why being a Creative Leader is different than other types of leadership, the dynamic between team-leading and team-building, and, on the 1-year anniversary of his infamous FastCo article, what attributes do and do not make for great creative leadership today. This is an inspiring and hopeful conversation with one of the true luminaries of the design world. Enjoy! Drinks: Lawson's Finest Liquids Triple Sunshine Imperial IPA, Dogfish Head Brewing Co. Slightly Mighty Low-Cal IPA, Blackhammer Brewing Zoom Room Romance Belgian Tripel Links: Leadership Coaching: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/ Podcast: https://findingourway.design/ Books: https://www.amazon.com/Elements-User-Experience-User-Centered-Design/dp/0735712026 The FastCo Article: https://www.fastcompany.com/90642462/ux-design-is-more-successful-than-ever-but-its-leaders-are-losing-hope --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/whatbubblesup/message

books bubbles elements user experience ux design creative leadership fastco adaptive path jesse james garrett

Indi Young: Make time to listen

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2022 59:43

In today's episode, I speak with Indi Young. Indi is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people, without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in. Indi has written two books: Practical Empathy and Mental Models. She builds knowledge and community via a series of live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency. You can follow her on Twitter @indiyoung and access many resources on her website indiyoung.com as well as at medium.com/inclusive-software.We dive into what it means to listen deeply when doing research, how to collect knowledge about a purpose rather than a solution, and how to create a safe space so the person you're listening to can access their interior cognition. You'll come away with some fascinating examples and actionable techniques for deep listening.

ux make time indi mental models adaptive path indi young

Jeff Veen: How trust leads to innovation

Design To Be Conversation

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 29, 2022 49:42

In today's episode, I speak with Jeff Veen. Jeff is a Design Partner and Head of Platform at True Ventures, where he spends his time helping founders create better products. He does this as an advisor, as well, for companies like about.me, Medium, and WordPress. Previously, Jeff was VP of Design at Adobe after they acquired Typekit, the company he co-founded and ran as CEO. Jeff was also one of the founding partners of the user experience consulting group Adaptive Path. While there, he led Measure Map, which was acquired by Google. During his time at Google, Jeff designed Google Analytics and led the UX team for Google's apps. Much earlier, Jeff was part of the founding web team at Wired Magazine, where he helped build HotWired, Web Monkey, Wired News, and many other sites. During that time, he authored two books: HotWired Style and The Art and Science of Web Design.We dive into ways in which trust is established at work and how it's necessary in order for people to be as creative – and successful – as possible.

ceo head trust art google science design innovation leads medium platform wordpress adobe ux google analytics web design wired magazine true ventures adaptive path design partner typekit hotwired wired news jeff veen

Indi Young on Time to Listen

The Informed Life

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2022 36:10 Transcription Available

Indi Young is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. She was one of the founders of the pioneering UX agency Adaptive Path. Indi wrote two influential books: Mental Models and Practical Empathy. Now she has a new book, called Time to Listen, which is the focus of our conversation today.Show notesIndi Young@indiyoung on TwitterIndi Young on LinkedInTime to Listen by Indi YoungMental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi YoungPractical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work by Indi YoungLiminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think by Dave GrayGobstopperDaniel BurkaErika Hall on LinkedInShow notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

amazon time creativity ux human behavior indi way you think mental models change you want your work adaptive path indi young

Peter Merholz - The Success of in-house Design and the Design Executive Leader Role

Business X Design

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 10, 2022 52:07

OVERVIEW:In this episode, I am joined by Peter Merholz, Design Executive and Organisational Consultant, Author and Founder of Adaptive Path.His book, co-authored with Kristin Skinner, Organisational Design for Design Orgs is a go-to book for so many Designers, Design and non-design Leaders. In our conversation, we cover specifically the difference between Tech-First and Legacy Organisations in how they see Design within their organisational structure, what difference this makes to the way they invest in and support Design, what this means for newly minted design executives. We touch on themes that I covered with both Jose Dos Santos and Clive Grinyer in earlier episodes about the blockers that Design-Leaders face on the way to the c-suite.This is a conversation about the mindset, skills, attention and orientation of executive leadership and what Design needs to ‘get over' (sometimes itself and sometimes others) in order to achieve that. SHOW LINKS & RESOURCES:I referenced an article that Peter published recently on the focus and role of a Design Executive which is really useful to remind Senior Design Executives what is expected of the executive role.Other ways to connect and follow Peter's thinking:Peter Merholz on LinkedInPeters Personal Website contains his writing and musings on humanising DesignOrg Design for Design Orgs the website contains updated reflections on the topic of Design Orgs and Design Leadership and is worth followingPeter has his own podcast - co-hosted with Jesse James Garrett - call Finding Our Way that is absolutely worth adding to your regular downloads - I'm a subscriber and find it invaluable.subscribe to the Business x Design Newsletter hereand connect with your show host Martin Dowson on LinkedIn - we really welcome feedback from our listeners so do get in touch!

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Indi Young

creativity north america indi mental models human behaviour your work adaptive path indi young

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2021 64:25

Indi Young challenges us to unlock the potential of the problem space, to be business-wise when engaging with stakeholders, and to listen deeply to learn peoples' purposes. Highlights include: - Why are we so obsessed with solutions in software? - What do we need to ask ourselves before running research? - Can we expect business stakeholders to trust qualitative data? - What does it mean to listen deeply and why is it important? - Is Big Tech morally bankrupt? ====== Who is Indi Young? Indi is an independent qualitative data scientist, problem space researcher, coach and consultant. She's also a globally recognised leader in inclusive product strategy and author, and if you've used opportunity maps and mental model diagrams - you can thank Indi. Her books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models, have helped design and product people around the world to create more human-centred experiences and to understand - in practical terms - what it means to put people before technology. Before becoming an independent consultant, Indi was a founding partner of Adaptive Path, one of North America's most well known user experience agencies. ====== Find Indi here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/indiyoung/ Website: https://indiyoung.com/ Indi's books:

Coonoor Behal - Mindhatch - Improv with Elephants and Generals

At the Edge ⚡On Hybrid Work & Employee Experience

Play Episode Play 56 sec Highlight Listen Later Aug 17, 2021 29:01 Transcription Available

In this episode, Coonoor shares with us the secrets of using improv in corporations and shows us a few specific improv techniques. She also talks about the time she taught improv at the Pentagon, and tells us how a pet elephant can improve our situation at work.Coonoor Behal honed her creative problem-solving skills during her years as a strategy and innovation consultant at Deloitte Consulting LLP. For part of her time there, she worked in the firm's Global Innovation Network, spearheading and managing open innovation challenges across more than one hundred member firms. With years of experience as an improv comedian and teacher, Coonoor brings levity, adaptability, and composure to every experience and is an expert in using improv techniques to enhance collaboration and ideation. Prior to her creative business career, Coonoor worked in non-profit international development. She was trained in Product Design at the Wharton School of Business, is a graduate of Adaptive Path's User Experience (UX) Intensive, received her BA from New York University (summa cum laude) and her MA from The University of Chicago. She was awarded the prestigious GovLab Innovation Fellowship at Deloitte Consulting, is certified in “Creative Facilitation and Design” by Retreats That Work, and is a regular guest lecturer on “Improvisational Mindsets for Leadership” at The George Washington University School of Business. She recently published her first book, I Quit! The Life Affirming Joy of Giving Up.Silicon Valley based company Innovation Minds takes a crucial step in helping solve the new challenges of the post-pandemic global workplace by launching this podcast, in which we interviews a diverse offering of business leaders from around the planet on how to use innovation to engage the workforce, as well as how to innovate engagement using technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to humanize relationships in the new distributed workplace.Innovation Minds is a leader in using AI-driven technology to engage employees through their philosophy of Innovation At the Edge, and decided to launch this podcast to promote the urgent need for engagement at this delicate time.Guests for our first season include corporate HR leads, world-class consultants, best-selling authors, and employee engagement and innovation experts working across a wide range of industries: Clint Pulver, Themba Chakela Jamie NotterMaddie Grant Delano Johnson Shawn Nason Luke Jamieson Coonoor Behal Jeff Tobe Niven Postma Adriana Bokel Herde Sindhu Joseph and Dickson TangYou can read more about our season one guests at our website, and sign up for reminders to make sure you never miss an episode.

Peter Merholz - Designing Your Org

DesignOps Island Discs

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2021 39:01

Peter Merholz, co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs, consultant, conference speaker, podcaster and all-round great human being, talks to us about how his and Kristin's book was born, what's changed in the last five years, some red flags that your org isn't working and how the concept of org design fits within DesignOps. petermerholz.comOrg Design for Design OrgsPeter on TwitterDesign at Scale conferenceTalking Heads - Remain in LightMoby Dick by Herman MelvilleDesignOps Island Discs is brought to you by zeroheight, the design system documentation platform. You can jump in at any point and create your first styleguide for free. Until next time, bon voyage...

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Peter Merholz: Design at Scale is People!

Rosenfeld Review Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2021 33:57

Design at scale is perhaps the most interesting challenge facing the design industry right now. How do you maintain quality and not get bogged down as your team grows? Much of the discussion focuses on systems and processes, but that starting with systems runs exactly contrary to the true value that design brings to companies, which is a humanistic and creative problem-framing and problem-solving approach. In other words, this focus on systems could ironically undercut design’s potential within organizations— in other words, “Design at Scale” is humanism at scale, and share what’s needed to keep people at the center of this work. Peter Merholz will be both a speaker and a workshop instructor during this year’s Design at Scale conference! Here, Lou and Peter muse over stories from the early days of information architecture before meandering their way to contrasting UX in the public versus private sectors. They also discuss a preview of Peter’s talk at the conference, Design at Scale is People! More about Peter’s workshop, Design Your Design Organization: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/design-at-scale-2021/cohorts/design-your-design-organization/ Peter recommends: HmntyCntrd https://hmntycntrd.com/ More about Peter Peter Merholz has been active in digital design and product for 25 years, most notably in building premier user experience consultancy Adaptive Path, and now advising teams on design organizations and leadership. Recent clients include The New York Times, Wells Fargo Bank, Cloudflare, and Zendesk. He co-wrote Org Design for Design Orgs (O’Reilly), the first book focused on the organizational, managerial, and operational challenges of building in-house design teams. https://www.petermerholz.com/about-peter/

new york times design scale ux cloudflare zendesk wells fargo bank adaptive path org design peter merholz

Jesse James Garrett on Leadership and Information Architecture

The Informed Life

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021 29:15 Transcription Available

Jesse James Garret is a renowned leader in the user experience design field. He's a co-founder of the influential UX consultancy Adaptive Path and author of The Elements of User Experience. These days, Jesse coaches UX design leaders. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between leadership and information architecture. Listen to the show Download episode 58 Show notes Jesse James Garrett's website @jjg on Twitter Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, 2nd Edition by Jesse James Garrett Peter Merholz Finding Our Way podcast MacGuffin Concept map Mind maps Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Jesse, welcome to the show. Jesse: It's good to be here. Thank you. Jorge: Well, it's my pleasure and honor to have you on the show as a guest. I don't imagine that there are too many folks in the audience who don't know you, but for those who don't, would you please tell us about yourself? About Jesse Jesse: Sure! I'm Jesse James Garrett. I have been working as a professional in the user experience field for, 20 years or so now. If I am known to you at all, I am probably known to you, dear listener, from my book, The Elements of User Experience, which was published in 2002, or the work of my company Adaptive Path, which I co-founded in 2001 and was a part of through its acquisition by Capital One in 2014. I now work as an independent leadership coach working with leaders of UX design teams. Jorge: And as we're recording this, I believe that the founding of Adaptive Path happened 20 years ago. Jesse: Yeah! Yeah, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the launch, a fun milestone to reflect on. Jorge: Well, the influence that the work has had both in Adaptive Path and The Elements of User Experience is palpable in the field. I occasionally still run into people who bring that diagram — "The Elements of UX" — bring it up so many years later, and it's an artifact that has proven long-lived. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on why that might be. On the longevity of The Elements of UX Jesse: It's a little bit of a mystery because Elements seems to have an enduring appeal to people that other similar models don't seem to have that kind of traction. I think that part of it is that I tried with the model to capture — as much as possible — to capture the things that I thought were less likely to change. Although I put the date really prominently at the top of the document when I first published it, in part because I was expecting to update it. I was thoroughly expecting there to be multiple versions and each one would have a date stamp and there would be iterations and evolutions of the model. But then when people started using it and getting really attached to it, I changed my mind about it and felt like I should really leave well enough alone and not tinker with it too much. I've made some little adjustments to the language that I use in the model over time, but the model itself has stayed the same. And I think the fact that people keep picking it up and putting it into practice is surprising to me as it is to anybody, I think. Jorge: Apart from minor tweaks to the language, do you feel like the model stands up overall? Even today? Jesse: Well, I do really think that if it didn't people wouldn't be using it if it didn't produce some sort of positive result... It may not be the positive result I intended. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot more to be said than what is encapsulated in that model. It is intended to provide a basic level framework and obviously there's a lot more complexity to what it takes to actually get those things done. And there is a lot of nuance to how these issues play out. So yeah, in some ways it's not my call as to whether or not the model is still relevant. It's like, it's up to other people as far as I can see. Jorge: Well, that's as good enough as any test for relevance, right? Whether people are using it or not. And for any listeners who might not know what we're talking about, this is a model that describes the work of user experience as happening in... would it be fair to call it five distinct layers? Jesse: Yeah. I call them 'planes' in the book, but it's a visualization. It's this sort of layer cake, sort of visualization of all of the considerations that go into UX work. Jorge: And they range from strategy at the lowest plane, scope, structure, skeleton and surface, which is the stuff that we see when we interact with a product that has been designed. Information architecture and leadership Now, I asked you to come on the show, not to talk about The Elements of User Experience, but because you and your fellow Adaptive Path co-founder and our mutual friend, Peter Merholz recently wrapped up what I'm describing as the first season of your podcast, Finding Our Way, and you and Peter had a conversation in that final episode where you synthesized the things you'd learned in the course of that first season. And you made a statement, you said, and I'm going to quote you back to you now, which is always nerve wracking! You said, "I think leaders are of necessity, orchestrators of systems. And systems instantiate knowledge as information architecture within them. So, the IA that gets embedded and coded, baked into your systems, becomes the way that the organization understands the world. And so, it is on the leader to imbue, infuse, enrich that IA with as complex and nuanced and understanding as they possibly can." There's a lot there... Jesse: I believe that statement. So, so that's a good test. Jorge: That's great. But I feel like there's a lot there to unpack and I wanted to talk about it with you. The context of the podcast, Finding Our Way, is about design leadership, but this strikes me as a statement that might apply to leaders in any field. Jesse: I believe that's true. I believe that any leader, anyone who gives direction to people in an organization, is on some level a steward of the organization's understanding of the problems that the team is trying to solve. And that understanding — when that gets systematized -information architecture is systematized understanding; it takes the associations between ideas that give meaning to human endeavor, human behavior, the world, and makes that concrete in ways that systems can then use. So that knowledge, that insight, can be scaled. And a lot of organizations run into trouble when their information architectures internally don't match the nuances and the complexities of the problems that they're trying to solve. Either problems that they're trying to solve for users or problems that they're trying to solve as a business. Businesses are often getting caught flat footed by market trends that they didn't see coming because they weren't paying attention to the right signals. Because those signals weren't part of the fabric of their understanding of the problem that they were facing. So yes, absolutely. We were talking about the context of design leadership specifically because that's what the mission of that show is. But yeah, I completely agree with you. It is something that I think is a part of what leaders do for organizations is give shape to the ways that organizations, hold onto the ephemeral meaning that otherwise just lives in the heads of the people in the organization. Jorge: Now, this is something that has been happening for way longer than we've had the phrase 'information architecture' and I'm wondering if there are any practices, tools perhaps, that have been around for a while that might point to this function of leadership, as a going concern for leaders. Jesse: It's an interesting question because honestly, a lot of the sensitivity to this stuff, when you're talking about what data does an organization collect, what systems does an organization put in place to make sense of the data that it has collected — this kind of stuff often ends up being the domain of like IT and business analytics and people who do some serious number crunching, which is fine and great. And, in the case of a lot of organizations... I've done a lot of work with financial services organizations. Insurance companies are fascinating in this respect because the actuarial tables rule all, in that business. And the keepers of the actuarial tables really are, expressing a point of view about what constitutes risk in the world. Jorge: And that is a formal structure of information that is stewarded by someone in the org, right? Jesse: Yeah. It's the foundation of the business. If your actuarial tables, as an insurance company, don't reflect the reality of things, then you're a bad insurance company, because you're likely to take on risks that you shouldn't. Jorge: What this implies for folks who are either in positions of leadership or aspiring to be in such positions, is that A) they need to embrace systems thinking, right? A systemic perspective of the work. And the other is that it would behoove them to look for the structures that best articulate the core of the business somehow. And there are formal information structures in a lot of organizations. You've pointed out that in the case of insurance, they're very manifest, but what you're saying there resonates for me in other fields as well. Jesse: Yeah. It's definitely something that I saw in my consulting career across, a lot of different kinds of organizations. I feel like every organization has its own sort of arbiter of truth, internally. I think one thing that we've been doing for a long time as UX practitioners, or at least, one thing that we often did as UX consultants was encourage the leaders that we were working with to step into storytelling as a tool to be able to make their case for what they wanted to do from a design perspective. Storytelling is a sense-making activity. It's a way of giving people an understanding of the world. It's very similar to information architecture in that way. So, for leaders of any stripe, whether you're leading a design team or whether you're leading any other kind of team, to take a step back and ask myself, "Where am I the sense-maker for the organization? Where am I the one who is interpreting and giving meaning to information?" And sometimes that is happening largely in Slack or emails to the team or other kinds of communications, and sometimes that's happening in the context of more formal data structures like you and I have been talking about. So, if the leader is noticing and attending to sense-making as a core part of the value that they bring to the organization as a leader, then they can look across their communications and the various pools of data that they may be responsible for tending and to interpret what they're doing in terms of creating more robust and more nuanced and more accurate information structures. Jorge: I'm hearing two things there. One is that leaders need to have the wherewithal to understand the organization, its context, its goals, its way of being in the world — understand it in some kind of systematic way. And the other thing I'm hearing is that they also need to be able to reflect that understanding back to the organization — through things like stories — in ways that affect how the team understands what they're doing, basically. Jesse: Yes. It gives meaning to the team's activities by placing those activities in a larger frame — a larger context. IA as MacGuffin Jorge: In my experience in interacting with teams and organizations and their leadership, I get the sense that these two functions — the "let's first structure the environment for ourselves, and then, let's think about how we share that structure with others" — they're happening, to greater or lesser degrees, in different organizations. But they're happening somewhat informally. Like, I haven't seen too many processes to say, "let's now draw up the information architecture for what we're doing here." Usually, when people talk about information architecture, it happens in the context of redesigning the website or making changes to the navigation structure of our apps or what have you. And in some ways, those projects end up being kind of MacGuffin for these deeper conversations that need to happen. And I'm wondering if there's a way to overcome that gap where we do information architecture more explicitly in service of having the organization understand itself better, or the team understand itself better and its role. Jesse: Yes. I have done work like that in the guise of process work, that engaging with a team, trying to understand what the different elements of the team are, what each element of the team is intended to accomplish, how those pieces are supposed to work together. In order to engineer any kind of a process like that, that has to be rooted in an understanding at a conceptual level of what are the factors that go into play in producing whatever the team is there to produce. Or achieving whatever the team is attempting to achieve. And how are you making sure that all those factors are accounted for? And how are you setting priorities among those things? These are all decisions that inform the process work, but that's not the process work. That's the IA work that underlies the process work. Jorge: Is this more of a top-down or a bottom-up effort? Jesse: I think of it as being more of a top-down effort, just because I am... I've been thinking a lot about stewardship as one of the elements of leadership that we don't really talk about. Which is that you have a group of people and a set of resources in your care as a leader. And that creates certain obligations from my perspective, on you as a leader, to ensure that you pass those things along to the next leader in the healthiest possible state that you can. And that means looking out for your team. It also means looking out for your processes. It also means looking out for your systems. And it also means looking out for that deep, underlying understanding that drives all of those things. I mean, where are leaders doing that information architecture work right now? I'd say they're doing it every time they structure a document that presents to their executive leadership what they want to try to accomplish with their work. Jorge: What that hints at — to me at least — is the fact that this storytelling function that you were talking about earlier — the part that has to do with sharing with the rest of the organization, the understanding that we have of our own understanding — that act of telling the story influences the understanding. It's like the two are related, right? Jesse: Yeah. Jorge: There's a feedback cycle happening, where you put it out there, you say, "well, this is how we see things." And maybe your peers and other groups might say, "no, it's not like that at all. From our perspective, it looks like this!" And that tweaks your own architecture, no? Jesse: Yeah, I mean when we talk about cross-functional collaboration, what we're often talking about is the process of aligning the differing information architectures. The differing models understanding of the problem that these cross-functional teams have. That the design team has one understanding of a problem, technology team has a different understanding of the problem, business folks have a third different understanding of the problem. These things need to be reconciled in order for those teams to move toward a common goal together. So, we don't end up with the design team is designing a car, but the engineering team is building a submarine while the business folks have sold to the senior leadership that we're building an airplane! Jorge: This is such important work, and it strikes me — just in hearing you describe it — that it's something that happens often as a side effect of other initiatives. It's not like you set out to explicitly build that understanding and compare the delta with the understanding of that other org. It's more that both of you are tasked with collaborating on something and the process of collaboration is what surfaces these distinctions. Jesse: It forces it! Yeah. You're not really doing it as a separate explicit step because it's part of everything you have to do as a leader, in a lot of ways. Leadership as a design problem Jorge: It feels to me like we're talking kind of in the abstract when we talk about these understandings. And when we say that somebody is presenting to their colleagues, what might come to mind is something like a slide deck, right? And folks tend to gravitate towards things that they can see and understand. And the slide deck might be the manifestation of this understanding, but it's not... it might not be its purest expression. And I'm thinking of things like concept maps, where we map out our understanding of a domain, just not even for sharing with others, but to understand it ourselves. And I'm wondering if in the process of stewarding this understanding of who we are, what we do, what our role is, how we're structured, what our processes are... I'm wondering if there are artifacts that could embody that kind of abstract understanding? Jesse: I think so much of it depends on the leader. And I feel like what you're reaching for, or suggesting, is a mode of leadership that is really kind of an IA-centered or an IA-driven leader. And that's a very interesting idea to me. I haven't met one. You know, I would say I have met some leaders who, because of their experience with collaborative ideation processes, are used to getting their ideas out in a way that is still abstract. You talked about concept maps. That's a great example. Mind mapping is a tool that I've seen business leaders use. That is definitely an information architecture tool. You're doing an IA process when you're engaging with mind mapping. But they wouldn't necessarily think of that as IA work. And they don't necessarily make it central to how they analyze problems or make decisions. The people that I've worked with who have been those kinds of leadership roles tend to be a little bit more constrained and not have formal tools for getting their ideas out. They just communicate. And they do it in the context of structuring and organizing their communications. And a lot of times, that is what is foisted upon them by the communications culture of the organization. I have worked with organizations where there were such strong cultural... Taboos around what you could and could not do in the context of a slide deck. Where, you know, like I had worked with an organization, for example, where if you had anything that was going to the board of directors, the Deck had to follow a very specific structure and format. And if your idea needed more than three to five basic sections to express that idea, your idea was not ready for the board of directors. Because they were consuming so much content from across a very large organization, they needed everything encapsulated and summarized and standardized so that they could make the decisions that they had to make. But what that forced on the entire organization was a communication style that drove out nuance. Drove out conversation. Drove out a lot of what you're talking about, which is that moment to moment flexibility in the decision-making process that you know, for a lot of decisions is utterly necessary. Jorge: Yeah, it comes back to this notion of top-down versus bottom-up, right? Because the implication there is that there is a level of nuance that is inappropriate for folks at this level. And that's a questionable stance, I think. Jesse: Yeah. Jorge: So, you advise leaders, you advise folks who are stepping into leadership. How would someone who is either in a leadership position or looking to get into leadership, how could they develop these particular muscles? Jesse: The way that I talk to folks about design leadership, who have come from a design background -that is to say they've been doing design work — is that leadership is just another design problem. And you're working with different materials and you're working toward different outcomes and you're having to follow different principles, but the task is the same task. It is a creative problem-solving task. It is a systems-thinking task, as a leader. So, looking at the ways that you're already doing that systems-thinking, the ways in which you already doing that architecture for yourself in the work that you're already doing, and those will be your strengths. And those will be the pillars that you can lean on that are going to support your work as a leader going forward. They will evolve and they will not look like what they looked like when you were doing content inventories or task flows or whatever other artifacts you might've been working on as a designer. But the skill set that you're building is the same skill set. Jorge: So, it's in you, you just have to recognize it as such, and build into it. Which is kind of what we've been talking about, right? Getting the sensitivity to read the environment and articulate it in a structured way. Jesse: And also, to remain true to your own perspective. You know, I see a lot of people who step into leadership for the first time, and they start trying to emulate what they've seen of other leaders. Which is a totally natural thing to do. It makes total sense. However, every effective leader leads from their own strengths and recognizes that those strengths are going to be different from the strengths of the people around them, and leverages that difference. And leaders who try to emulate modes of leadership that don't suit their natural abilities, they struggle. And they create a lot of hardship for themselves that they don't need to have if they could just believe that they already had the power. Because I believe they do. Closing Jorge: Well, that strikes me as a fabulous place for us to wrap this conversation. It's an empowering exhortation to folks to be themselves and develop their own powers. Thank you so much for that, Jesse. Where can folks follow up with you? Jesse: You can find me on Twitter. I'm @jjg. I'm also on LinkedIn from time to time these days. You can find our podcast, Finding Our Way, at findingourway.design, and you can find out more about my coaching practice at jessejamesgarrett.com. Jorge: Well, thank you so much, Jesse. It's been a real treat having you on the show. Jesse: Thanks, Jorge! It's been fun.

amazon leadership mind storytelling web businesses insurance elements ia deck slack ux user experience capital one drove taboos macguffin finding our way information architecture adaptive path peter merholz jesse james garrett jesse yeah jesse you jesse well jesse it

Micro Course: How to Conduct Listening Sessions with Indi Young — DT101 E64

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2021 85:11

In this episode, Indi Young joins me to deliver a micro-course on listening sessions. I'm experimenting with new ways to learn on the podcast. Listeners will learn from Indi as we talk about listening sessions, what they are, how to do them, why they matter, and how to get the most out of them. Let me know what you think of the micro-course format, and if I should do more of them. Cheers, Dawan, Your Design Thinking 101 Podcast Host Listen to learn more about: What listening sessions are and why they matter How to structure a good listening session Getting the most out of listening sessions The two questions that are always asked during a listening session Do's and Don'ts of listening sessions Our Guest's Bio Indi Young is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity, maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering user experience agency. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in. She has written two books, Practical Empathy, and Mental Models, and is working on a third, Assumptions Aside, which will cover thinking styles. Indi builds knowledge and community via a series of online advanced courses about design research and the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. Show Highlights [02:54] Listening is different from interviewing. [03:22] Listening is qualitative research. [04:35] Indi describes the knowledge creation / data collection template she uses. [05:05] Problem spaces and solution spaces. [06:57] In the solution space, much of the research is either generative or evaluative. [08:07] In the problem space, the research is neither generative nor evaluative. [08:54] The problem space is interested in the person and how they achieve their purpose. [09:19] A listening session asks the person what they were thinking as they were achieving their purpose. [11:25] Organizations are often only concerned with solution spaces; problem spaces tend to get ignored. [12:03] Why study problem spaces? [12:56] One solution does not fit all – there is no such thing as an “average user.” [13:50] Thinking styles vs. personas, and designing for archetypes. [15:03] An example from work Indi did for the University of Buffalo. [15:33] The benefits of using thinking styles over personas. [16:25] The bias problem in research. [17:10] Listening sessions must be framed by a purpose, and must have depth. [17:39] Surface vs. depth. [18:59] Depth is how we develop cognitive empathy with people. [19:34] The good stuff in a listening session is the inner thinking, the emotional reactions. [21:13] Indi describes the Mental Model Diagram. [23:27] Listening sessions start with a germinal question. [24:28] Listening sessions are audio-only. [26:49] The challenges that can come up in listening sessions. [28:47] The structure of a listening session. [30:27] Indi shares snippets of some listening sessions as examples of how to begin a listening session. [34:37] How Indi works with the results of a listening session. [35:14] Techniques used during listening sessions. [36:13] Listening session examples demonstrating techniques Listeners can use to build trust and rapport with the Speaker. [38:05] The importance of silence. [41:29] Listening session examples demonstrating how to encourage Speakers to open up and share their inner thoughts and emotions. [45:38] Indi talks about micro-reflections and shares some examples from listening sessions. [49:57] Why Indi likes the word “because.” [50:43] Listening session examples where the Listeners used time and place to help the Speakers dig deeper. [Note from Indi at 51:44] - “I forgot to explain that the grocery store example was because the Speaker got flustered and forgot her restaurant experiences. The Listener took her back to the grocery store she had mentioned so that the Speaker could be in familiar territory and relax. After that she remembered some more of her restaurant experiences.” [55:34] Indi talks about ways to simply encourage Speakers to continue talking. [57:12] Things not to do during listening sessions. [57:18] Avoid asking leading questions. [58:37] Avoid asking surface level questions. [1:01:08] Avoid conjecture. [1:01:51] Examples of conjecture from Indi's listening sessions. [1:08:32] Avoiding complex reflection. [1:10:33] Indi talks about normal things that can occur during listening sessions. [1:12:13] Discovering your own verbal habits when reviewing your listening sessions. [1:13:35] Winding down listening sessions, and some examples of that from Indi. [1:13:53] The one closing question you should always ask. [1:16:40] Indi offers advice to those wanting to improve their listening skills and perhaps try using listening sessions. [1:19:44] Indi talks about some of the courses she offers. Links Here are the diagrams and transcripts we discuss in the episode. Indi on Twitter Indi on LinkedIn Indi on Medium Indi's website and course listings 99% Invisible podcast episode: On Average Book Recommendation: Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding, by William Miller Be sure to check out the links from Indi's other DT 101 Podcast episode, linked below! Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Problem Spaces, Understanding How People Think, and Practical Empathy with Indi Young — DT101 E6

Micro Course: How to Conduct Listening Sessions with Indi Young — DT101 E64

tickets patterns ux purposes indi mental models design research adaptive path indi young

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2021 85:11

In this episode, Indi Young joins me to deliver a micro-course on listening sessions. I’m experimenting with new ways to learn on the podcast. Listeners will learn from Indi as we talk about listening sessions, what they are, how to do them, why they matter, and how to get the most out of them. Let me know what you think of the micro-course format, and if I should do more of them. Cheers, Dawan, Your Design Thinking 101 Podcast Host Listen to learn more about: What listening sessions are and why they matter How to structure a good listening session Getting the most out of listening sessions The two questions that are always asked during a listening session Do’s and Don’ts of listening sessions Our Guest’s Bio Indi Young is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity, maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering user experience agency. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in. She has written two books, Practical Empathy, and Mental Models, and is working on a third, Assumptions Aside, which will cover thinking styles. Indi builds knowledge and community via a series of online advanced courses about design research and the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. Show Highlights [02:54] Listening is different from interviewing. [03:22] Listening is qualitative research. [04:35] Indi describes the knowledge creation / data collection template she uses. [05:05] Problem spaces and solution spaces. [06:57] In the solution space, much of the research is either generative or evaluative. [08:07] In the problem space, the research is neither generative nor evaluative. [08:54] The problem space is interested in the person and how they achieve their purpose. [09:19] A listening session asks the person what they were thinking as they were achieving their purpose. [11:25] Organizations are often only concerned with solution spaces; problem spaces tend to get ignored. [12:03] Why study problem spaces? [12:56] One solution does not fit all – there is no such thing as an “average user.” [13:50] Thinking styles vs. personas, and designing for archetypes. [15:03] An example from work Indi did for the University of Buffalo. [15:33] The benefits of using thinking styles over personas. [16:25] The bias problem in research. [17:10] Listening sessions must be framed by a purpose, and must have depth. [17:39] Surface vs. depth. [18:59] Depth is how we develop cognitive empathy with people. [19:34] The good stuff in a listening session is the inner thinking, the emotional reactions. [21:13] Indi describes the Mental Model Diagram. [23:27] Listening sessions start with a germinal question. [24:28] Listening sessions are audio-only. [26:49] The challenges that can come up in listening sessions. [28:47] The structure of a listening session. [30:27] Indi shares snippets of some listening sessions as examples of how to begin a listening session. [34:37] How Indi works with the results of a listening session. [35:14] Techniques used during listening sessions. [36:13] Listening session examples demonstrating techniques Listeners can use to build trust and rapport with the Speaker. [38:05] The importance of silence. [41:29] Listening session examples demonstrating how to encourage Speakers to open up and share their inner thoughts and emotions. [45:38] Indi talks about micro-reflections and shares some examples from listening sessions. [49:57] Why Indi likes the word “because.” [50:43] Listening session examples where the Listeners used time and place to help the Speakers dig deeper. [Note from Indi at 51:44] - “I forgot to explain that the grocery store example was because the Speaker got flustered and forgot her restaurant experiences. The Listener took her back to the grocery store she had mentioned so that the Speaker could be in familiar territory and relax. After that she remembered some more of her restaurant experiences.” [55:34] Indi talks about ways to simply encourage Speakers to continue talking. [57:12] Things not to do during listening sessions. [57:18] Avoid asking leading questions. [58:37] Avoid asking surface level questions. [1:01:08] Avoid conjecture. [1:01:51] Examples of conjecture from Indi’s listening sessions. [1:08:32] Avoiding complex reflection. [1:10:33] Indi talks about normal things that can occur during listening sessions. [1:12:13] Discovering your own verbal habits when reviewing your listening sessions. [1:13:35] Winding down listening sessions, and some examples of that from Indi. [1:13:53] The one closing question you should always ask. [1:16:40] Indi offers advice to those wanting to improve their listening skills and perhaps try using listening sessions. [1:19:44] Indi talks about some of the courses she offers. Links Here are the diagrams and transcripts we discuss in the episode. Indi on Twitter Indi on LinkedIn Indi on Medium Indi’s website and course listings 99% Invisible podcast episode: On Average Book Recommendation: Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding, by William Miller Be sure to check out the links from Indi’s other DT 101 Podcast episode, linked below! Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Problem Spaces, Understanding How People Think, and Practical Empathy with Indi Young — DT101 E6

DR2021: Indi Young

UX Australia

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2021 28:20

Ahead of the online conference next month, Design Research keynote Indi Young joins Steve on the UX Australia podcast. Indi will kick off Design Research 2021 with her presentation "People, Purposes, Patterns & Problem Space". Tickets to the virtual conference are available now https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/design-research-2021-tickets-123110359399 Indi is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people, without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in. Indi has written two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models. Her next book, Assumptions Aside, will cover thinking styles. She builds knowledge and community via a series of live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency. You can follow her on Twitter @indiyoung and access many resources on her website indiyoung.com as well as at medium.com/inclusive-software.

083: The Systems Thinker

Roots

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2020

Sheryl Cababa is the Vice President of Strategy at Substantial, a design and technology consultancy in Seattle, and has more than two decades of experience as a multi-disciplinary design practitioner. With a background in human-centered design research and strategy, she has worked as a design consultant at companies like Artefact, frog, and Adaptive Path. She is an international speaker and facilitator, and has developed methods for designers to integrate systems thinking with their practices. In this episode, we talk about design consulting, Filipino representation in tech, ethical decision making and systems thinking, the consequences of designing products at scale, and so much more.

strategy seattle vice president filipino substantial artefact adaptive path systems thinker

083: The Systems Thinker

Roots

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2020

strategy seattle vice president filipino substantial artefact adaptive path systems thinker

The evolution of UX with Jesse James Garrett – Author, The Elements of UX (Founder of Adaptive Path, Ajax inventor, Ex: Capital One)

Cells and Pixels

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2020 46:21

I feel like this is another dream coming true. I talked with Jesse James Garrett, one of my favorite UX authors; he wrote in 2002: The Elements of User Experience. We talked about his history, from a writer to one of the founders of UX, his consultancy Adaptive Path and the acquisition by Capital One. We also found some time to chat about post-rock and his recent work as a coach for design leaders at jessejamesgarrett.com

founders evolution elements ux talkshow inventor ajax user experience capital one adaptive path jesse james garrett

#36 | Dan Saffer | Driving product strategy and interaction design

Designdrives

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2020

“How do we take things that are very inhuman by nature and make them more human. Tweak algorithms to make them seem more human, more interesting, more weird.” - Dan on designing with AI and robotics.In episode #36 we talk with Dan Saffer, Product Design Leader and Author of 4 influential design books.He gained work experience as a Senior Staff Designer at Twitter, Creative Director at Jawbone, Smart Design and AdaptivePath.He also gained experience leading larger product initiatives as VP of Product at Mayfield Robotics.As an accomplished author; his insights and approach to design expressed in four books that he has written.His latest book, Microinteractions, about the details and intricacies of design, was published in 2013 to critical acclaim.With Dan, we talked about the intersection and differences of digital Product Strategy and Product Design based on his learnings being responsible for the product but also for design efforts.We also touch on how to design for robotics and how different product verticals might evolve considering challenges in the interaction design of these products and engineering challenges.Dan highlights how designing with AI systems changes the design process and how he incorporates this in FTU and Onboarding aspects at his more recent work experience at Twitter.If you want to learn more about Dan or buy his books head here: https://www.odannyboy.com/Thanks to Dan for the great time and IXDA and Interaction 20 for the support.About Interaction 20:Interaction 20 is the annual Interaction Design conference organized by IxDA - the largest community dedicated to interaction design - and in 2020 hosted by the IxDA Milan & Turin local group. Interaction Week 2020 brought together the brightest minds in design, as well as science, philosophy, psychology and business.Interaction 2021 will happen fully online. You can get more details here: https://interaction21.ixda.org

ai driving product creative directors onboarding interaction turin product design tweak product strategy jawbone interaction design adaptive path smart design ixda ftu dan saffer

Peter Merholz on the Structure of Organizations

The Informed Life

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2020 30:03 Transcription Available

My guest today is Peter Merholz. Peter is one of the co-founders of the pioneering UX design consultancy Adaptive Path, now part of Capital One. After leaving Adaptive Path, he has structured and led design teams in various organizations. Peter and his co-author, Kristin Skinner, wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, the book on how to organize design teams. In this episode, we discuss how the structure of organizations influences their customer's experiences. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/the-informed-life-episode-28-peter-merholz-2.mp3 Show notes PeterMerholz.com @peterme on Twitter Adaptive Path Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner Liftoff: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You by Chris Avore and Russ Unger The Informed Life Episode 22: Andrea Mignolo on Designerly Ways of Being IDEO Tim Brown The Double Diamond Conway's Law Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience by Peter Merholz MacGuffin Shopify Forrester Research Kristin Skinner Read the full transcript Jorge: Welcome to the show, Peter. Peter: Thank you Jorge. Jorge: So, for folks who don't know about you and your trajectory, would you please introduce yourself. Peter: Sure. I'm Peter Merholz, I work in — ostensibly — digital design, have for over 25 years. Started in CD-ROMs, so even pre-web. But cut my teeth on the web and through web design. Probably most notably, helped start a user experience consulting firm called Adaptive Path, which I helped lead from 2001 to 2011. For the last eight years, I've been some flavor of design executive, primarily working in-house. A few years ago, co-wrote a book called Org Design for Design Orgs, which is still the only book about what it… Kind of a playbook on building in-house design teams. Though I'm happy that Russ Unger and Chris Avore's book is coming out soon, so we will no longer be the only one on that subject. And a few months ago, decided to commit myself to independence and started a company. The URL is petermerholz.com, but the company name is Humanism At Scale, and it's my one-person consultancy dedicated to helping design organizations realize their potential and helping bolster and improve design leadership practices within organizations. Jorge: What is the link between the potential of organizations, humanism, and design? Peter: I see design as the Trojan horse for humanistic thinking within companies. Design is an obvious contributor of value, particularly in digital contexts and software contexts, and so companies are building design organizations in order to create these digital experiences. What they don't know they're getting with it is that design, when practiced fully, is situated within a humanistic frame that also includes social science and subjects like user research, it includes writing, rhetoric, composition, with things like content strategy… And so I see design as this lead… It's the tip of the spear, but what's behind it is a full kind of humanistic understanding that design can help bring into these companies. And the importance of that is companies have been so mechanistic, so analytical with their either kind of business orientations, MBA orientations, spreadsheet focuses, or engineering orientations. They've been so mechanistic that design has this opportunity to bring a humanistic balance into that conversation. Jorge: I had Andrea Mignolo as a guest in the podcast last year, and she talked about this subject as well, design as a way for organizations to map out possible futures, in distinction to using things like spreadsheets. Is that kind of what you're talking about here? Peter: That's definitely part of what I'm talking about. I mean, there's the obvious benefits or contributions of design in this business context, which is making a strategy concrete. We talked about that at Adaptive Path over 10 years ago, probably closer to 15 years ago, and, and IDEO has been talking about that. Tim Brown's been talking about that, right? It's very easy for executives to have different interpretations of bullet points on a PowerPoint slide and projections and spreadsheets, but it's really difficult to have different interpretations of sketches and prototypes of futures that those PowerPoint, bullet points and spreadsheets are actually inferring, right? Design can very quickly make concrete these abstract notions. And, so I think lead to better conversations about where an organization is headed. So, I think that's part of it. But I think, again, importantly, there's a whole body of thinking, of problem solving, of looking at the world that is rooted in the humanities, that is rooted in not just design and visual expression, but in language in social science, that can inform how businesses operate in and basically encourage them to operate better at least when I think would be better. Jorge: In your book and in your presentations on the subject, you often talk about this three-legged stool, where the three legs are, business, technology, and design. Is that the context in which you're talking about design here, as in supplementing the other two? Peter: I wouldn't say supplementing, but yes, balancing the other two. And that still makes it sound like design is one against two in that equation. But essentially, business and technical approaches tend to be analytical and reductive. And that's not bad in and of itself, but it's insufficient, particularly given the complexity of the things that we're building and how those things that we're building are situated within a society. And so the opportunity that design and humanism brings is providing a more generative, qualitative, creative, big picture frame and approach to problem-solving to balance that reductive, analytical, quantitative metrics-driven approach that has been so dominant for so long. Something I hadn't actually connected it with until just now as we're talking about, when you have that metrics-driven approach, that leads to businesses so focused on the numbers, they lose sight of the, frankly, societal impact of those numbers, right? So, you know, the big issue with social media is that everything's driving towards engagement. Because that's what they're measuring. And having lost sight of the societal impact of what happens when you have two and a half billion people that you're trying to engage, and not recognizing that the product of that engagement outside of the system is massive societal unrest. Jorge: Which has become evident after the fact, right? Peter: Right. Exactly. But if you had talked to or had any social scientists actively involved in that process, and you had a more humanistic approach involved in that process, you would have likely realized those potential outcomes in the process instead of simply after the fact. Jorge: I've worked mostly as a consultant in my career. I did spend some time internally in an organization, but most of my career I've spent as an external designer who is brought into an organization to help them through some of these challenges. And in that capacity, I've had the opportunity to interact with internal design teams. And one of the things I keep seeing in many of those organizations is that designers are working making either products or services better, but often at a very kind of granular level. And I'm bringing this up because I love what I'm hearing you say about design being kind of the organ of the organization that helps them think more systemically. But sometimes that can be at odds with the way that designers are actually working in organizations. And I'm wondering if you can speak a bit to that. Peter: I agree. By and large, most design in most organizations is seen as part of production, part of delivery. This is the challenge, but the opportunity, with the Trojan horse, right? Design is being brought into these organizations because you need designers to design the interfaces, essentially, of these digital experiences. And that is seen primarily in an output mode, right? The stuff that your users are interacting with, someone needs to design that, let's hire designers. And so it gets very much… I often use the double diamond when talking about this type of work and it's very much second diamond, very much on the execution side, the implementation side. Because that is the obvious value that design brings into business. And I think in many businesses, you're right, that's pretty much the limit of the value that design is bringing. What I would argue though, is there's this potential and more and more companies are expecting that potential of design to have some contribution “upstream.” I talk to companies all the time where they want design to have that seat at the table, to be a peer to product and engineering, to contribute strategically, to the conversation. And so the challenge there though, is often — this is part of the reason why design leadership is so important to me — is that I think we have a general kind of industry-wide shortcoming among our design leaders in terms of understanding the breadth of the influence they can wield and how to wield it. My concern is that many of those design leaders have come up in organizations where design was seen primarily as a production function. And so that's how they're approaching design leadership is just to make production better. And so, there's an opportunity, I believe where design leaders, one, can learn how their practices can have a broader influence. And then two, — and this is actually, I think, an even harder challenge — help those design leaders develop the confidence to assert their perspective at that more kind of executive or strategic level. Right? Because they're often a lone voice in a wilderness, right? That wilderness is heavily analytical, heavily mechanistic. And there are some designers saying, “We've got to listen to users,” or you know, “What about ethics?”, or whatever the thing is that the designer is talking about. And they're often that lone voice. And it can be hard to be that one to stand up and be the one that is — not necessarily getting along with whatever the dominant kind of cultural paradigm is — but I believe… Frankly, I believe it's kind of our duty. I think it's, in an unconscious way, these businesses have realized there's a power to this other way of thinking. That the current models aren't working, that the mechanistic model is running its course. And so, they're seeking other ways of working. So, then they bring in design, and when design starts doing its other way, the initial reaction is going to be one of pushing back because it's weird and uncertain and different. And it's up to the design leader then to manage that transition to help the business not react, not lash out, not reject out of hand, this new way of thinking and then also for that leader to help their team recognize its power and its potential in terms of influencing the organization. And it's really hard. Like, I think design leadership is probably, at least within a product development context, the hardest kind of leadership there is right now. It's easier to be an engineering leader or a product leader, or a data science leader, than it is to be a design leader because of this kind of contradiction or conflict of we want design, but design is different so we're pushing back on design, but then when we push back on it, we're unhappy because design isn't being interesting. Resolving that is this interesting challenge design leaders have. Jorge: You're validating how I see the arc of your career. We've known each other for a long time, and we met through the information architecture community, where — to summarize it really kind of unfairly and at a very high level — it's all about the design of the underlying structures of — at least when we met, at the stage that the discipline was in — was mostly focused on digital experiences. Peter: Web experiences. Jorge: Web experiences, yeah. Peter: Not even software or mobile. Jorge: It was pre-mobile. But that's what we were focused on, right? Like the structures that underlied these experiences. And my sense of your career is that there came a point in your own development where you had this insight that the structures… That you can work on the structure of the thing, or you can work on the structure of the thing that's going to produce the thing. Right? And that's where Org Design for Design Orgs I see basically as a book about the architecture of the organizations that define these architectures. Is that fair? Peter: Sure. Yeah. It's so… Conway's law. Conway's law is an interesting concept in this context, right? Conway's law is that any organization is going to deliver… Whatever it delivers will be a reflection of how it is organized. And oftentimes Conway's law is thought of not as a law, but as a thing to be aware of that you can work around. Right? So, if your company has organized in some way, you have business units, but when you present your org, when you present the company to the world, you don't want your customers to get caught up in the business units. Right? That's often… That has been a role for design to play in the past — web design in particular — is to create this kind of skin, this presentation layer, over the mess that is the company in its presentation to the customers. I actually first was writing about this like literally in 2002 or three there was an essay on the Adaptive Path website called Organization in the Way, where I was talking about how the reason websites don't make sense is because they basically reflect a company's organizational structure. And at that time, I thought the solution was, well, you can keep that organizational structure and the role of the design team is to understand the user and how they are approaching that company and again, create this presentation layer, this interface, this interpretation, so that the user can actually engage with the company meaningfully and not worry about how that company is structured. What I have since come to realize is that Conway's law is a law. That organizations will deliver their value, deliver their services, deliver their experiences, shaped directly by how they are organized. And yes, you might be able to paper over that for some brief period of time, launch a website design that, you know, in the past we would launch these kinds of task-based website designs because customers weren't looking at an enterprise software firm and thinking about the product modules, they had tasks they wanted to solve, so let's do a task-based architecture. And that would last maybe even a year or two, but eventually it would break down because that organizational structure has such power that it would reassert itself in how the company is presented to customers, regardless of whether or not it made sense to the customers. And so, what the true implication of Conway's law is, if you want to deliver a meaningful experience — a sensible experience — to your customers, you have to reorganize your company in a way that makes sense to your customers. That is the only way you're going to solve that problem. Jorge: Yeah. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking that I've experienced that very issue as well in projects where I've been brought in to help an organization, for example, rethink the way that their products are presented on their website. And it seems on the surface to be kind of an information architecture challenge; I've been hired to fix their navigation system or whatever. And then when you start digging into the problem, it turns out that the website and its nav structures are actually a MacGuffin for these conversations that are much more strategic and more challenging that people at a very high level in the organization — for whatever reason — have not been able to articulate except in the context of having something actionable like the website to serve as their meeting ground. Peter: Yeah. What was interesting about the web from an organizational perspective 20 years ago was it was the first time an entire company was being presented in a single unitary canvas, right? Before you would just deal with whatever channel that you were a part of and you know, whether there was a sales channel, a marketing channel, et cetera, and whichever part of the business that made sense to you, and you didn't have to worry about anything else. But with the web, all of that got placed on a single point of entry. And you know, we all dealt with trying to figure out how to design websites for these big companies that now their complexity was being exposed to the users, and the company had never had to deal with that before. I do think you're starting to see some companies grapple with this in a more meaningful sense. They're starting to change how they're organized. Shopify. I'm not a customer of theirs, I don't know if this has been good or bad, right? But Shopify for the longest time was basically organized functionally. You know, product team or an engineering team and a design team and marketing teams, and they would then deliver the products. And then at some point two or three years ago, they decided to — it's not radical — organize by products. But they also identified meaningful product distinctions. Products for merchants in one fashion, products for point of sale products, or whatever it is, right? The product line changed. And so that's now how they organize. They had to reorganize in order to make their company makes sense to their customers, possibly make their company makes sense internally as well. And so, I think you're seeing, you know… I'm doing some work with a bank and they have a set of… So, banks are funny, right? Because they're highly regulated, so that actually limits how they are able to organize. One of the things I've learned in working in financial services is that when a bank offers both checking and savings services as well as credit card services, those have to be treated by the bank as two independent organizations that really shouldn't be interacting with each other for legitimately good regulatory reasons. But as a customer, if you have a checking account with a bank and a credit card with the bank, it can be odd how it's not seamless in engagement. And you're like, “It's the same bank. Why can't I just do it?” And it turns out there's regulatory reasons for that. But what I'm starting to see with in this one bank I'm working with, they have this thing called “missions” and “value streams,” and they're organizing by, basically, tasks. You have a payments team and you have within that payments team; you have a value stream for moving money or a value stream for paying bills, and they're pulling people together in these teams. I'm doing work for a journalism company, news company, I guess you would call it. They talk about journalism; they don't just talk about news. I'm working with a news company, and they also have adopted missions. They have an engagement mission, a growth mission. And these missions are the means by which these companies are pulling together cross-functional teams, but providing an organization that now can make some sense to the customer, right? A customer isn't going to want to navigate the marketing team, the sales team, the product development team, et cetera, et cetera. But a customer, you know, if you are new to this company, you are working… You are basically… Your experience is managed by the growth team as they try to bring you into the fold. If you are an active user, you are now being handed off to the engagement team that keeps you engaged, it introduces you to new experiences, et cetera, et cetera. And so, these companies are looking at ways of creating, internally, at least, some new structures that are orthogonal to the kind of functional structures that better speak to customer experiences because they recognize kind of that Conway's law thing. If what matters is the customer's experience, you have to change your organization to meaningfully deliver on that customer experience. Jorge: I'm guessing that a considerable part of the people listening to us right now are not external consultants but are actually… I don't know if to use the word “affected,” or at least their work is influenced heavily by the type of structures that you're talking about. Peter: Hmm? Yes. Jorge: And I'm wondering if there's any advice or any insights that folks working in organizations can glean from this way of thinking about the work that could help them be more effective. Peter: “Yes” is the short answer. I think particularly designers have — which I'm assuming is the large part of your audience, designers and the design-adjacent — I think are particularly well-suited to have an impact on these internal structures because, as I was suggesting these internal structures should be influenced by an understanding of customers and the journeys they are on. And it's oftentimes and design team working with researchers that are tasked with understanding those customer journeys. And the opportunity, I think, for people internally, is to understand and map these customer journeys. So, do that work. And that, that's not hard to sell. Right? That's a pretty accepted practice now. Forrester's been talking about journey mapping for well over a decade. But I don't think every company has recognized the implications that I was referring to earlier, which is that that customer journey becomes a blueprint for how you reorganize your teams. Now, it might not be their reporting organization, right? That might maintain functional organization. So, you know, your designers will still report up to a Head of Design, and you might have 50 designers reporting into it as part of a single design team. But their day to day work, those designers are spending the bulk of their time and effort in these cross-functional teams that are organized by these journeys. And I think the opportunity is to help drive that organization, drive that conversation around, “Hey, we shouldn't be organized by either function…” Sometimes you get companies organized by platform, right? You have the mobile team versus the web team, you have an iOS team versus an Android tea m. Because that's not how people are experiencing it, right? You want to organize by the nature of how people are experiencing it so that you can deliver value across the customer journey. And you're seeing that more and more. I think we're still at very early days for it. But the opportunity for people listening who are in-house is, one, to know that this shift has occurred. It's not even occurring. The shift has occurred within many companies. And if in your organization, you're not operating in this kind of model that is… In this framework that is modeled after the customer journey, that is something to propose, that is something to continue to agitate for. And the customer journeys that you and your team are creating are that architecture for thinking through this and for organizing in this way. Jorge: Well, that's a great summary, I think. And, I think that those folks should reach out to you. Why don't you tell us where they can do that? Peter: Sure. I'm easy to find. My URL is petermerholz.com. That's my professional URL. I'm on Twitter at @peterme. Those are probably the two best places to find me. You can contact me through either means, through petermerholz.com or through @peterme, my DMs are open. So yeah, that's the easiest way to find me. Jorge: Great. And I believe the book has a website as well, right? Peter: Yes. The book has a website, orgdesignfordesignorgs.com, which also has with it a blog that we update in fits and starts. So, the book came out about three and a half years ago, and we've been blogging about ideas from the book, but as we've had new insights, new thinking, we've been blogging about those ideas. Improved, levels, frameworks, improved portfolio assessment tools, definitions of team leadership. As Kristen and I both do our work, and then teach a workshop based on this, we come up with things to write about. And so, the blog has all the most recent thinking when it comes to organizing your design organization. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I hope that folks visit the site and I'm sure they'll find valuable stuff there. Thank you, Peter, for being on the show. Peter: My pleasure. Thank you, Jorge, for having me.

The Kate Rutter Hypothesis: Things Can Seem Simple and Still Be Very Hard

The Product Science Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 15, 2019 70:47

Kate Rutter is an adjunct professor of design at the California College of the Arts and a principal at Intelleto, with decades of experience in product design and management, infusing time at Adaptive Path and Luxr. In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we talk about how to hire for right traits, work-life balance, and how to adapt a hacker/DIY ethos in your work. Read the show notes to learn more.

simple arts diy hypothesis california college adaptive path kate rutter luxr

Treat Your IT Career as a Business to Maximize Your Success with Andy Budd

IT Career Energizer

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2019 39:57

GUEST BIO: My guest on today’s show was an early pioneer of Web Standards, writing a best-selling book on the subject of CSS. He then went on to found Clearleft, arguably the first dedicated UX consultancy in the UK. He also set up dConstruct, the UK’s first digital design conference, and UX London, the country’s first dedicated UX conference. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Andy Budd is a renowned Design Leader and agency CEO. He started his IT career working as a designer. During his early career, Andy became a pioneer in the field of Web Standards. At that point, he published his first book – CSS Mastery. Over 14 years ago, he co-founded Clearleft, one of the UK’s first dedicated User Experience consultancies. In 2015, he set up the dConstruct conference, which was held for 10 years. It was the first design conference to be run, in the UK. He is also the founder and curator of Leading Design. That annual conference improves design leadership and management. Andy speaks at these and many other conferences that are held across the world. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.09) – The first thing I wanted to ask you really was about how you transitioned from the web standards and the CSS aspect or your IT work to founding Clearleft. Andy as a natural transition, and goes on to describe how it happened. He started his working life as a flash coder, creating games. From there, he discovered CSS. When he did he realized almost immediately that separation of presentation and content was the way to go. Baked into this were standards around accessibility and usability. Andy was an early adopter of web standards. He had the 3rd table list website in the UK. He got together with two other early standards geeks to found Clearleft. At the time he was already creating controlled vocabularies, working with information architecture, usability testing and much more besides. So, he was one of the first people, in the UK, to take care of user experience, rather than just making a site look pretty. For the first few years, it was hard to get clients. Nobody could understand why it took them twice as long to deliver a website and why the fees were higher. In time, that changed. Now, UX design is the norm. (4.48) – Phil comments that at the time Andy set up Clearleft, a lot of people would not have known much about UX. So, he asks Andy how big a part of educating people about education was to making Clearleft a success. Andy agrees educating potential clients about usability was important. But he goes on to say that the fact people had never really thought much about UX before was also a superpower. Nobody else was really doing it. As a result, as soon as firms began to wake up to the importance of UX Clearleft grew really quickly. This was especially the case when companies moved away from using websites solely for marketing. Once, they started to use their sites to sell things and transactions were involved the functionality of the website became far more important. (6.11) Phil asks if the introduction of new devices like iPads and SmartPhones has changed the approach to UX at all. Andy responds by saying that the tools have changed. But, the underpinning philosophy hasn’t really changed. The underlying problem-solving principles remain the same. However, the introduction of smartphones had an impact in another way. Mobile sites had to be slicker and better designed. At that point, a lot of companies woke up to how ugly, clunky and old-fashioned their main sites were. When they saw how good a website could look and what an effective sales tool that type of site was a lot of firms wanted to re-design their original websites. (7.44) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Andy explained that for him no single thing led to his success. His approach has to continually review what he is doing and make little course corrections. But, he does say that working in a company where you are not the best at what you do is a good idea. It ensures that you are continually challenged and stretched. You need to be a continual learner and have a beginner’s mindset. This ensures that you learn new tools. If you do not, your knowledge becomes stale. At some point, those tools are going to become obsolete. When that happens, you are stuck. (10.32) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. Andy has been very lucky career-wise. So, could not think of anything he would categorize as a bad career moment (11.47) – What was your best career moment? Andy has had a lot of great moments in his career. His first speaking gig went really well, so that was a highlight. Meeting Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path was also a great career moment. He was sat next to him at a book signing at SXSW South by Southwest. His work has also led to him traveling the world, which Andy has clearly enjoyed doing. Plus, over the years, he has worked with some fantastic clients. Spending time in Copenhagen working with Nordic Region Banks was a highlight for Andy. Working with Zappos was also exciting. (13.38) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? Andy is fascinated by the rise of artificial intelligence. He believes that in the next decade or so, AI means that things are going to get really exciting. About two years ago, Andy realized he was a bit out of the loop when it comes to AI. Rather than read a bunch of books about it, he decided to pull a diverse group of people together to discuss where AI could take them. The result was really interesting. It is clear that the landscape is changing drastically. AI will lead to wide-scale automation. As that happens, jobs are going to disappear and be replaced by others. So, people are going to have 2 or 3, maybe 4, careers in a lifetime. That is why it is so important to be a continual learner. Some talk about there being a 4th industrial revolution. Regardless, these changes are going to create winners and losers, but it will also be exciting. Andy states that we are already moving away from hand coding using a traditional text interface. Coding is set to become more visual, with developers acting more like curators and editors than creators. (16.57) – What drew you to a career in IT? As a child, Andy enjoyed using the BBC Micro and Spectrum computers. While other kids were out playing football, he was learning to code. He thinks that his interest in sci-fi and love of reading gave him a curious mind, which is why he was drawn to all things tech. But, he did not realize that he could turn what he viewed as a hobby into a career. Nobody, in his family or circle, was involved in the IT industry. So, he was not exposed to the possibilities. After university, he did an aeronautical engineering degree. To do that he had to learn how to use CAD, which he really enjoyed and quickly became good at. Once he had finished his engineering degree, he went traveling for 6 to 7 years. During that time, he started to use internet cafes to communicate with friends at home and research his next destination. One day, while he was in one of these cafes he saw a guy building his own web page. He was creating a travel blog. Later, he met a web designer. He worked for 6 months and traveled for 6 months. Andy decided that he wanted to do the same. In 1999, he arrived back in the UK, bought a Pentium 486 and learned HTML and how to code. To do this he turned to several sources. One of which was a website called Ask Dr. Web, which was run by Jeffrey Zeldman. In time, he became a friend on Andy’s. It was him that inspired him to learn CSS, which eventually led Andy to where he is today. (21.25) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? When Andy set up his IT business he read a book called E-Myth. It contained one great piece of advice which was to make sure that you are working on your business, not in it. That means you need to hire people to do the day to day tasks for you, so you can be free to grow your business. He also explains that you need to see your career as a journey. You have to see it as a business and treat it that way. (22.24) - Conversely, what is the worst career advice you've ever received? You need a business plan is no longer good advice. It is no longer necessary. (23.52) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Andy states that when he got started in the design industry the bar was much lower. The tools and sites were so basic that it was not that hard to compete. You could easily get in at the bottom end of the market building sites for local businesses. Now big providers like Shopify and SquareSpace make it possible for people to put together fantastic sites without employing a technical person. (26.52) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Andy’s focus is on helping others to unlock the power of the web. He is very appreciative of what IT pioneers have done to enable him to succeed. So, he wants to pay it forward and help others. (19.16) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Andy is a keen and experienced diver. In fact, he is a dive instructor. That role taught him the importance of becoming a good communicator. You are working in a dangerous environment, so you need to communicate effectively with your students. If you do not, it can be disastrous. Learning to be a good communicator has ended up helping his IT career in many different ways. (31.01) - What do you do to keep your own IT career energized? Andy works as a servant leader. He is a boss who is very focused on helping others to energize and progress their careers. Taking that approach has had a positive impact on his career too. It helps to keep him motivated and keeps his team engaged and contributing. (31.57) - What do you do in your spare time away from technology? Andy’s IT role takes him all over the world. Whenever he can, he incorporates a bit of leisure time onto his business trips. Doing this provides him with the chance to continue to explore new countries and cultures. Andy also loves good food. So much so, that he has made it his mission to eat at every one of the top 50 restaurants in the world before he is 50. He is really enjoying completing that mission. He still dives a lot and has recently tried cave diving. Andy has also got into bouldering, which is indoor climbing. He says it is a lot more fun than going to the gym. Participating in the sport has virtually cured the RSI he has picked up from his constant mouse usage. This is because climbing stretches and strengthens the muscles in the hands and arms. More importantly, it works the opposite muscle groups from the ones used while working with a keyboard and mouse. Bouldering is very popular with the IT crowd. A lot of it is about problem-solving. Planning your route and working out what techniques and hacks to use is all part of the fun. (36.02) – Phil asks Andy to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. If you work in the design industry, you need a killer portfolio. A CV that shows career progression also helps. But, when someone is hiring a designer they want evidence of what you are able to do. If you are claiming to be a UX designer you have to demonstrate that fact. For example, when hiring, Andy wants to see photos from user research sessions, as well as interactive, paper-based and animated prototypes. If someone claims they can do information architecture, he wants to see sitemaps, content audits and controlled vocabularies. BEST MOMENTS: (4.34) ANDY – "These days, saying you’re a UX designer is like saying you breathe air or drink water. It’s just what all of us do." (5.45) ANDY – "Our clients quickly realized the benefits of not just making a pretty website, but making something that actually delivered business results." (8.27) ANDY – "It's always better to work in a company where you are not the best at the thing you do." (15.31) ANDY – "We're moving towards a kind of visual coding. I think we're moving much more towards being curators, and editors rather than creators" (22.53) ANDY – "It's important for you to be working on your business, not just in it." (36.07) ANDY – "For the design industry, having a killer portfolio is everything." (37.34) ANDY – "A really good resume should be backed with a powerful portfolio that demonstrates that you can do these things." CONTACT ANDY: Twitter: https://twitter.com/andybudd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andybudd/ Website: http://www.andybudd.com/

ceo learning success ai technology career planning united kingdom web treat software mobile spending ipads smartphones developers southwest maximize cv spectrum sxsw shopify ux copenhagen key takeaways coding conversely participating user experience html cad burgess baked squarespace css best moments zappos e myth rsi bouldering itas pentium bbc micro web standards adaptive path clearleft andy budd jeffrey zeldman leading design andy it ux london dconstruct css mastery andy for

#12: Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path, Org Design for Design Orgs) on org design and ethics

Progression Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2019 74:12

In this twelfth episode of the Progression Podcast I'm chatting to Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, long time speaker and blogger on design scaling and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs (2016). We get into the weeds on his back story, including learning how to write and speak confidently. We then got onto managing up, down and across, his book and the ethics of design (and a designers' role within it). Finally we got to some listener questions from various Slack channels that I hang out on. Peter's links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/peterme Peter's blog: https://www.peterme.com/ Org Design for Design Orgs (Amazon) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Org-Design-Orgs-Peter-Merholz/dp/1491938404 Coach, Diplomat, Advocate, Architect. Peter's talk at Leading Design: https://vimeo.com/243666544 Sponsor: Onfido

advocates ethics architects slack diplomats orgs adaptive path org design leading design peter merholz

283: Alana Washington

Revision Path

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2019 50:40

I have really enjoyed talking with some members of the Capital One Digital Team this month, and what better way to wrap up the month than to talk about the woman who helped make all this possible -- Alana Washington! As the strategy lead on the data experience design (DXD) team at Capital One, she not only works with engineers on data visualization, but she's also building out a data journalism practice also! We talked more about Alana's work and she talked about her nontraditional path into tech, her work with organizing UX Week 2018, and the importance of fairness in artificial intelligence and machine learning for people of color. Alana also gave some great information for designers looking to enter the AI/ML space, and gave her predictions on where AI is going into the future. Thank you so much for Alana for all your hard work at Capital One, as well as helping to organize this exciting month of interviews! Alana Washington's Website Alana Washington on LinkedIn Alana Washington on Twitter Get your tickets today for "The State of the Internet 2019", a live conversation with Glitch CEO Anil Dash, Matt Mitchell of CryptoHarlem and Tactical Tech, and Maurice Cherry of Revision Path! (It's also the night of our 6th anniversary, so come out and celebrate!) For tickets, visit our event page on Eventbrite! Big thanks to Capital One for sponsoring this month of Revision Path. The Capital One Digital team is a diverse group of people who work together to build great products for the enterprise and to disrupt how people interact with their money, their bank, and their financial lives. Curious about what they're working on and how they're growing? Check them out at capitalonecareers.com or at their Medium community at medium.com/capitalonedesign. Like this episode? Then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a 5-star rating and a review! Thanks so much to all of you who have already rated and reviewed us! Revision Path is brought to you by Glitch and sponsored by Facebook Design, Google Design, and Mailchimp. Powered by Simplecast. Sign up today for a 14-day free trial! You can also follow Revision Path on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Come chat with us! And thanks for listening!

Patrick Quattlebaum 'Breaking down tribes to enable the orchestration of experiences'

Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2018 34:51

Hello and welcome to another episode of 'This is HCD'. My name is Gerry Scullion and I'm a service design principal now based in Dublin, Ireland. In this episode we caught up with the brilliant Patrick Quattlebaum, co-author (alongside Chris Risdon) of the fantastic new Rosenfeld media book 'Orchestrating Experiences'. Patrick is founder of StudioPQ and former managing director of the service design consultancy Adaptive Path before its acquisition, after of which he was the Head of Service Design and Senior Director of Design at Capital One. Patrick on Twitter Buy the book on Rosenfeld Media Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn This is HCD is brought to you by Humana Design Follow us on Twitter Follow on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter Join our Slack Channel Follow us on Medium Support the show.

head design ireland dublin senior director tribes enable capital one rosenfeld orchestration service design 'breaking hcd adaptive path gerry scullion patrick quattlebaum

How Design Leadership Is Creating Organizations of the Future?

future organizations ferris wheels design leadership adaptive path peter merholz

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2017 42:56

In this Ferris Wheel episode, I speak with Peter Merholz, the co-founder of Adaptive Path. He talks about design leadership and the evolution of design. Design Leadership is growing in organizations that were once never aware of the role of design. This growth also triggers a lot of questions with respect to what it means […]The post How Design Leadership Is Creating Organizations of the Future? appeared first on .

Why Service Design Is The New Unorthodox?

user unorthodox ferris wheels service design adaptive path peter merholz

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2017 38:45

In this Ferris Wheel episode, I speak with Peter Merholz, the co-founder of Adaptive Path. I deconstruct his thinking on user centered vs service design, get him to share his biggest learnings and more. The field of design has changed a lot in the last two decades. User centered design is no longer unorthodox. That […]The post Why Service Design Is The New Unorthodox? appeared first on .

Understanding People using Mental Models

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2017 31:27

In this Focus Forty episode, I speak with Indi Young, a freelance problem space researcher and empathy consultant, to talk about Product Mindset, mental models, undertanding other people and the future of products. She was co-founder of the UX agency Adaptive Path. Who is Indi Young? Indi Young is a freelance problem-space researcher and empathy […]The post DYT 067 : Understanding People using Mental Models | Indi Young appeared first on .

ux mental models understanding people adaptive path indi young dyt

Researching the Problem Space