Podcasts about indi young

In this conversation, Ali chats with Indi Young about the power of listening and empathy in building products and brands. They discuss the practice of deep listening and the steps to improve rapt attention. They also explore the impact of toxic work cultures on mental health and the need for broader protections in the workplace. Indi emphasizes the role of individuals in creating change and suggests forming groups, talking to HR, and organizing lunch meetings to address these issues. They also touch on the potential of AI in freeing up human resources for more meaningful work and measuring the value of products based on user needs and well-being.  About Indi Young:Indi Young is a pioneering problem-discovery researcher and solution strategist. With over 30 years of experience, Indi has developed methods centered on inclusive and purpose-driven research, helping teams design solutions that align with various thinking styles. As a founding partner of Adaptive Path and the creator of mental model skylines, she has deeply influenced user research and product design. Indi also authored three books, including Practical Empathy, Mental Models, and Time to Listen. As one of the impactful voices in product development, Indi continues to share her expertise through teaching, coaching, and public speaking.Links:Indi Young Web and Courses: https://indiyoung.comTime to Listen (Book): https://a.co/d/bBooU8tIndi Young on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/Support the show*Disclaimer: The information provided in "The Ally Show" is for general informational purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified mental health professionals or medical professionals regarding any mental health concerns or conditions. The views and opinions expressed by guests on the show are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or the show. While every effort is made to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information shared, "The Ally Show" cannot guarantee the completeness, validity, or timeliness of any information provided. Listeners are encouraged to use their discretion and consult appropriate professionals before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information shared on the show. "The Ally Show" is not responsible for any consequences resulting from the use of or reliance on the information presented.For Guests: The views and opinions expressed by guests on "The Ally Show" are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the host or the show. The guests share their personal experiences and perspectives for educational and informational purposes. The information provided by the guests should not be considered professional advice or treatment. Learn More For questions, please contact: ali@theally.show

Meet Indi Young, a renowned UX expert, as she joins host Tina Ličková to share details about her upcoming full-day workshop on "Listening Deeply." Indi will discuss her workshop's focus on deep listening and understanding user cognition, offering practical techniques to uncover users' underlying thoughts and emotions through non-directed interviews. This conversation offers valuable strategies for UX professionals and a preview for those interested in attending the workshop, which will be happening at Co-Inno Factory, on September 18th, 2024.

Mein heutiger Gast ist Benedikt Salzbrunn. Benedikt ist Leiter des Master-Lehrgangs UX Management an der Technikum Wien Academy. Der Lehrgang verbindet die Themen Design, UX-Methodik, Psychologie mit Management auf Masterniveau und ist im deutschsprachigen Raum einzigartig. Neben Lehr- und Forschungstätigkeit ist Benedict auch seit mittlerweile 15 Jahren auch für das Usability Labor der Fachhochschule verantwortlich. Das Labor berät Projekte aus verschiedensten Fachbereichen, von mobilen Apps aus dem Finanzbereich bis zu komplexen Medizinprodukten, bezüglich Usability & UX und bietet auch Eyetracking-Studien an.Ich spreche mit Benedikt über die Inhalte des UX Management Lehrgangs, was UX Management eigentlich genau bedeutet und er erklärt wie die umfangreichen Test-Tage ablaufen an denen Studentinnen Produkte aus der Praxis auf Herz und Nieren testen.Benedikts LinksBenedikts LinkedInUX Management LehrgangBenedikts BuchempfehlungenThe Inmates Are Running the Asylum - Alan Cooper100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (2nd Edition) - Susan WeinschenkUsability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set ...Test! (2nd Edition) - Carol M. BarnumMeasuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting UX Metrics (3rd Edition) - Bill AlbertSponsorSponsor dieser Folge ist die uxcon vienna. Sie findet 2024 bereits zum vierten Mal statt und versammelt 600 UX professionals aus 40 Ländern.  Mit dabei sind internationale Top Speaker wie Steve Portigal, Indi Young oder Vitaly Friedman und super spannende Brands wie Bumble, Netflix oder Zalando. Teilnehmer:innen können aus über 50 Sessions ihre individuelle Agenda zusammenstellen und jene Talks und Workshops besuchen, die für sie besonders relevant sind. Egal ob Research, Design, neue Technologien oder Selbstentwicklung, es ist für jeden etwas dabei. Neben dem dichten Programm mit Content für alle experience levels gibt es auch jede Menge Social Events, am Vortag sowie während und nach der Konferenz. uxcon vienna hat sich in den letzten Jahren zu einem der wichtigsten europäischen UX Events entwickelt und ihr solltet das Ganze keinesfalls verpassen. Termin ist der 19 & 20 Sept. und Location ist wieder die Expedithalle in Wien. Mit dem Code „uxconheroes“ erhaltet ihr 10 % Rabatt beim Kauf eurer Tickets auf uxcon.at.Ich hoffe, ihr fandet diese Folge nützlich. Wenn ihr auch die nächsten nicht verpassen wollt - abonniert UX Heroes doch auf Spotify, Apple oder eurem Lieblingspodcaster - ihr könnt uns dort auch bis zu 5 Sterne als Bewertung dalassen.Ihr findet ihr mich auf LinkedIn unter Markus Pirker. Bis bald bei UX Heroes.UX Heroes ist ein Podcast von Userbrain.

Power of Ten is a show about design operating at all levels of zoom, from thoughtful detail to changes in organisation, society and the world, hosted by design leadership coach, Andy Polaine.  Indi Young is a solution strategist who uses purpose-focused qualitative data science. She created her method over a 30-year span, and teaches that method in courses, coaching, workshops, books, talks, and through working with teams on research studies. Indi discusses how people are complex and nuanced and their mental models and thinking styles are not fixed personas or personalities. They changed based on context and it is essential that organisations listen to and consider different ways of thinking and addressing user needs. Indi was a joy to speak with and this is a long episode, but she articulates her thinking and insights so well I could not bear to edit out more. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Introduction 01:25 Indi's background 04:12 Origin's of design and strategic research - before UX research existed! 08:50 Persuading stakeholders to trust research 18:25 On Netflix, bias and unintentional harm 26:42 On Mental Models and interior cognition 33:20 The gobstopper/jawbreaker model 40:01 Thinking Styles 47:35 Why do companies still get this wrong all the time? 55:07 One small thing 56:52 Where to find Indi online 57:45 Outro SHOW LINKS INDI Website: https://indiyoung.com/ Indi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ Indi on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/indiyoung.bsky.social Indi's Newsletter: https://indiyoung.substack.com Indi on Medium: https://indiyoung.medium.com Time to Listen - https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/ Practical Empathy - https://indiyoung.com/books-practical-empathy/ Mental Models: https://indiyoung.com/books-mental-models/ ANDY Website: https://www.polaine.com  Newsletter: https://pln.me/nws  Podcast: https://pln.me/p10  Design Leadership Coaching: https://polaine.com/coaching Courses: https://courses.polaine.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apolaine/  Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@apolaine  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@apolaine MENTIONS Lisa Dance's Today is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer Experiences: https://serviceease.net/book

Indi Young is an expert at teaching clients how to prevent false assumptions from causing damage to themselves and their customers. The author of 3 books, Indi speaks with John Collins about how she evaluates individuals to understand how they think, and why they think it. Perhaps it's time to stop dwelling on bias and begin thinking about mental models and how they can be leveraged to our advantage. References Visit Indi Young's Website Indi Young's Book Author Page

Nick Fink is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research in Seattle through his company, Craft & Rigor.   Listen to learn about: Core disciplines of UX design What is interaction design? What does it mean to be a UX designer today? The challenges UX and design face in today's business environment   Our Guest Nick Finck is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. He strives to improve people's lives through crafting well-designed experiences that matter. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research through Craft & Rigor in Seattle. Before this, he was in design and research leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Ubermind, Deloitte Digital, projekt202, and his own agency Blue Flavor. Nick's contributions to the UX community go far and wide. He is an experienced public speaker and has given over 102 talks in 10 countries. He has helped countless industry professionals and career transitioners as a design coach and mentor. Earlier in his career, he was the publisher of Digital Web Magazine, an online magazine for web professionals   Show Highlights [02:44] Nick takes us in the wayback machine, back to dialup days and his start in web development. [03:53] Moving from web development into web design, and following that thread into interaction design and UX. [05:53] Nick talks about creating his model highlighting the core disciplines of UX. [07:27] Starting off with user research and understanding your users. [07:53] Communicating through content. [08:12] Adding structure and organization. [08:41] Designing user interactions based on user behavior. [09:38] Evaluating the work. [11:29] Changes Nick would make to his model today. [13:41] What's happening in UX design today. [15:39] What does it mean to be a UX designer today? [16:02] People are often confused as to what UX design actually is. [16:50] How the confusion has fractured the UX community. [20:45] UX and design teams. [21:12] The concept of design maturity. [23:04] There is a lack of resources and transitional roles for a designer's career path into management. [24:56] Nick's “Big Wheel” analogy for design in organizations. [26:00] You probably don't have enough designers. [27:02] There is more to UX than UI design. [27:46] The disappointment of companies not giving UX design the time and space it needs to really shine. [28:34] You cannot do effective UX design without user research. [30:41] Form ever follows function. [31:55] UX is about helping users solve problems. [32:40] Dawan talks about how Indi Young approaches user research. [33:07] Understanding someone's purpose as the starting point for design. [34:10] Nick shares an example from his work on the importance of understanding someone's story and journey. [38:23] A Miro Moment. [40:51] Things Nick wishes companies knew about UX. [41:08] UX is not just about the product. [42:54] Rethinking how your company operates and taking the time to examine legacy tech and processes. [44:45] Bill Buxton's talk about technology and innovation in technology. [47:06] Nick's advice for company executives when it comes to design. [48:49] Where to learn more about Nick and his work. [49:31] What Nick does in his business advisory consulting work. [52:34] Sharing what a “yes” would look like to plant the seed for future change.   Links Nick on Twitter Nick on LinkedIn Nick's website Craft and Rigor on Twitter Design Career Network, How to build a well-rounded, effective design team User Defenders Podcast: 036: No Designer Left Behind with Nick Finck Bill Buxton at TechFest 2013: Designing for Ubiquitous Computing     Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like UX + Into, Through, and (Almost) Out of Design with Kara DeFrias — DT101 E103 UX + Navigating Rough Design Waters + Design Leadership with Dennis Lenard — DT101 E82 UX Research + Research Teams + UX Camp DC with Glennette Clark — DT101 E80

Nick Fink is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research in Seattle through his company, Craft & Rigor. Listen to learn about: >> Core disciplines of UX design >> What is interaction design? >> What does it mean to be a UX designer today? >> The challenges UX and design face in today's business environment Our Guest Nick Finck is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. He strives to improve people's lives through crafting well-designed experiences that matter. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research through Craft & Rigor in Seattle. Before this, he was in design and research leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Ubermind, Deloitte Digital, projekt202, and his own agency Blue Flavor. Nick's contributions to the UX community go far and wide. He is an experienced public speaker and has given over 102 talks in 10 countries. He has helped countless industry professionals and career transitioners as a design coach and mentor. Earlier in his career, he was the publisher of Digital Web Magazine, an online magazine for web professionals Show Highlights [02:44] Nick takes us in the wayback machine, back to dialup days and his start in web development. [03:53] Moving from web development into web design, and following that thread into interaction design and UX. [05:53] Nick talks about creating his model highlighting the core disciplines of UX. [07:27] Starting off with user research and understanding your users. [07:53] Communicating through content. [08:12] Adding structure and organization. [08:41] Designing user interactions based on user behavior. [09:38] Evaluating the work. [11:29] Changes Nick would make to his model today. [13:41] What's happening in UX design today. [15:39] What does it mean to be a UX designer today? [16:02] People are often confused as to what UX design actually is. [16:50] How the confusion has fractured the UX community. [20:45] UX and design teams. [21:12] The concept of design maturity. [23:04] There is a lack of resources and transitional roles for a designer's career path into management. [24:56] Nick's “Big Wheel” analogy for design in organizations. [26:00] You probably don't have enough designers. [27:02] There is more to UX than UI design. [27:46] The disappointment of companies not giving UX design the time and space it needs to really shine. [28:34] You cannot do effective UX design without user research. [30:41] Form ever follows function. [31:55] UX is about helping users solve problems. [32:40] Dawan talks about how Indi Young approaches user research. [33:07] Understanding someone's purpose as the starting point for design. [34:10] Nick shares an example from his work on the importance of understanding someone's story and journey. [38:23] A Miro Moment. [40:51] Things Nick wishes companies knew about UX. [41:08] UX is not just about the product. [42:54] Rethinking how your company operates and taking the time to examine legacy tech and processes. [44:45] Bill Buxton's talk about technology and innovation in technology. [47:06] Nick's advice for company executives when it comes to design. [48:49] Where to learn more about Nick and his work. [49:31] What Nick does in his business advisory consulting work. [52:34] Sharing what a “yes” would look like to plant the seed for future change. Links Nick on Twitter Nick on LinkedIn Nick's website Craft and Rigor on Twitter Design Career Network, How to build a well-rounded, effective design team User Defenders Podcast: 036: No Designer Left Behind with Nick Finck Bill Buxton at TechFest 2013: Designing for Ubiquitous Computing Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like UX + Into, Through, and (Almost) Out of Design with Kara DeFrias — DT101 E103 UX + Navigating Rough Design Waters + Design Leadership with Dennis Lenard — DT101 E82 UX Research + Research Teams + UX Camp DC with Glennette Clark — DT101 E80

Allen Higgins joins me as we share host and guest roles to talk about design practice systems and creating for and with the people we serve. Alan is a research associate and lecturer in the Center for Innovation Technology and Organization in the School of Business at University College Dublin. Listen to learn about: Design and design thinking process Design thinking mindset How to introduce design thinking to teams and organizations What is innovation? Design Justice and ethical design  Our Guest Allen Higgins is a researcher/lecturer in the Management Information Systems subject area in the UCD College of Business—University College Dublin, Ireland. He is a member of the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology and Organization (CITO) and the UCD Centre for Business and Society.   Show Highlights [00:39] Script is flipped! Dawan talks about how he got into design thinking. [02:14] Launching Fluid Hive in 2008. [02:38] Allen's interest came while developing a course for university. [04:48] Allen and Dawan compare how they approach design thinking [06:46] The big question: What problem are we trying to solve? [08:30] Finding the problem is the real problem. [09:30] IDEO as people's first introduction to design thinking. [10:05] There is no single recipe for innovation. [10:40] Experienced designers are comfortable with ambiguity. [11:32] It's hard to change our view of the world. [12:09] Designers can see the world in multiple ways. [14:08] The difference between reaction and response. [15:55] The answer to the question should take you from the world you have to the world you want. [17:57] Failure is part of the process. Failure is actually learning. [20:56] A design thinking culture values continual learning. [22:06] Part of bringing design thinking to organizations is speaking the language of that organization. [23:53] Dawan and Allen talk about making design thinking part of organizational culture. [25:27] Inviting people into learning and using design thinking. [27:04] Allen talks about innovation, and the hospitality metaphor. [29:42] Allen offers an example of a case study where an organization was introducing large-scale change to its systems. [31:42] Designing with the people who will implement and support the solution in mind. [32:40] Dawan's preferred definition of innovation. [35:47] The world we have, and the world we want. [37:05] Best intentions, and the need for design justice. [37:47] The racism (and sexism) in AI image generators. [38:47] The systems we design often reinforce societal bias. [44:11] Doug Dietz's MRI story TED Talk. [45:50] Ethical design. [46:31] The concept of the “user” in design. [47:01] The difficulty with personas. [48:25] Indi Young's mental models for user behavior. [49:24] Focusing on why and how people decide instead of empathy. [50:32] “Nothing about us without us”: co-creating with the people you're designing for. [52:27] You are not your user. [54:01] Giving everyone access to the tools of design and design thinking. [56:26] Designing for accessibility. [1:02:19] Allen and Dawan end the conversation by talking about empathy vs. sympathy.   Links Allen on LinkedIn Allen on Google Scholar Allen on University College Dublin Allen on ResearchGate The Design Talk podcast Transforming healthcare for children and their families: Doug Dietz at TEDxSanJoseCA   Book Recommendations Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs, by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young   Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like How to Learn Design Thinking + Design Thinking Pedagogy with Julie Schell — DT101 E15 Launching and Leading a University-wide Design Thinking Initiative with Danielle Lake — DT101 E31 Systemic Service Design + a Critical Lens on Design Practice with Josina Vink — DT101 E85

Allen Higgins joins me as we share host and guest roles to talk about design practice systems and creating for and with the people we serve. Alan is a research associate and lecturer in the Center for Innovation Technology and Organization in the School of Business at University College Dublin. Listen to learn about: Design and design thinking process Design thinking mindset How to introduce design thinking to teams and organizations What is innovation? Design Justice and ethical design  Our Guest Allen Higgins is a researcher/lecturer in the Management Information Systems subject area in the UCD College of Business—University College Dublin, Ireland. He is a member of the UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology and Organization (CITO) and the UCD Centre for Business and Society.   Show Highlights [00:39] Script is flipped! Dawan talks about how he got into design thinking. [02:14] Launching Fluid Hive in 2008. [02:38] Allen's interest came while developing a course for university. [04:48] Allen and Dawan compare how they approach design thinking [06:46] The big question: What problem are we trying to solve? [08:30] Finding the problem is the real problem. [09:30] IDEO as people's first introduction to design thinking. [10:05] There is no single recipe for innovation. [10:40] Experienced designers are comfortable with ambiguity. [11:32] It's hard to change our view of the world. [12:09] Designers can see the world in multiple ways. [14:08] The difference between reaction and response. [15:55] The answer to the question should take you from the world you have to the world you want. [17:57] Failure is part of the process. Failure is actually learning. [20:56] A design thinking culture values continual learning. [22:06] Part of bringing design thinking to organizations is speaking the language of that organization. [23:53] Dawan and Allen talk about making design thinking part of organizational culture. [25:27] Inviting people into learning and using design thinking. [27:04] Allen talks about innovation, and the hospitality metaphor. [29:42] Allen offers an example of a case study where an organization was introducing large-scale change to its systems. [31:42] Designing with the people who will implement and support the solution in mind. [32:40] Dawan's preferred definition of innovation. [35:47] The world we have, and the world we want. [37:05] Best intentions, and the need for design justice. [37:47] The racism (and sexism) in AI image generators. [38:47] The systems we design often reinforce societal bias. [44:11] Doug Dietz's MRI story TED Talk. [45:50] Ethical design. [46:31] The concept of the “user” in design. [47:01] The difficulty with personas. [48:25] Indi Young's mental models for user behavior. [49:24] Focusing on why and how people decide instead of empathy. [50:32] “Nothing about us without us”: co-creating with the people you're designing for. [52:27] You are not your user. [54:01] Giving everyone access to the tools of design and design thinking. [56:26] Designing for accessibility. [1:02:19] Allen and Dawan end the conversation by talking about empathy vs. sympathy.   Links Allen on LinkedIn Allen on Google Scholar Allen on University College Dublin Allen on ResearchGate The Design Talk podcast Transforming healthcare for children and their families: Doug Dietz at TEDxSanJoseCA   Book Recommendations Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs, by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young   Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like How to Learn Design Thinking + Design Thinking Pedagogy with Julie Schell — DT101 E15 Launching and Leading a University-wide Design Thinking Initiative with Danielle Lake — DT101 E31 Systemic Service Design + a Critical Lens on Design Practice with Josina Vink — DT101 E85

En esta temporada regresó Bibiana Nunes, quien nos comparte sobre la evolución del Research; del 2020 para acá, todo lo que ha cambiado, tanto a nivel estratégico como profesional. Hablamos sobre la madurez de las organizaciones para ejecutar la Investigación, el como comunicar resultados, y sobre todo ser flexibles al momento de ejecutar e implementar metodologías y marcos de trabajo. Además, nos compartió el track de los cursos que ejecuta junto con Indi Young, para complementar las prácticas para realizar investigación en el Espacio del Problema. 

We used to work with this approach of average behavior and we have been building a solution that likely works for some people, guessing that it is enough. Or the right way to do it. Even the way of mental model works with a kind of average people mindset in certain situations. There's been a vast movement to increase a design vision within companies and projects, but, It seems that the industry doesn't know how to handle this User experience subject exactly. And how to run about the Designer itself. We talk a lot about empathy in UX. But unfortunately, we talk so much that we almost forget the real meaning, and it seems that we create a poetic layer far from reality. This show will pass through some questions like: How we can change, or shift, this model of building digital products? How much is finding patterns important for our work as designers? What is the power of listening to break this average approach? How can we handle and talk more about empathy without distancing ourselves from the day-to-day business, delivery, and projects within companies? What do we have to do to help companies understand how to use the design? For this, we invited Indi Young an independent researcher who teaches practitioners a life-changing approach to Listening deeply, building cognitive empathy over time, and properly handling qualitative data analysis. She helps teams with person-focused research, design strategy, interaction flow, communications, and information architecture. She wrote a few books, speak frequently, and always makes ways for you to join my courses no matter what your circumstances. —---------- The past year we decided to start this new project called Good Morning UX, an extension of another show called Bom Dia UX, with such special-international guests. Actually, we invited a lot of professionals who are references for us and that have so much history in our industry. Follow Indi on these links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ https://indiyoung.com/ https://indiyoung.medium.com/ Indi's book: Time to Listen: How Giving People Space to Speak Drives Invention and Inclusion (Assumptions Aside) https://amzn.to/3yF0stR Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work https://amzn.to/3nZjDcX or https://www.audible.com/author/Indi-Young/B001JP01C2 Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3c29r0w Related Links: https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/thinking-styles-research-indi-young https://uxpodcast.com/273-purpose-indi-young/ https://womentalkdesign.com/speakers/indi-young/ https://vimeo.com/640576865/e2d04d0635?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=97574367 ----------------------------- This is the Bom Dia UX, a live show produced and launched on the Design Team channel every Wednesday at 7 am, in the Brazilian time zone.

This can transform your business strategy... That's what I thought during my recent conversation with Indi Young. Indi recently published a book titled Time to Listen. Here's my summary of the book. It teaches you how to design services that are less harmful, more accessible, and in the end, better for business through the "simple" act of listening. Basically, transforming open and honest conversations with your customers into one of your most valuable assets. But if it's that easy, why isn't everyone doing it? Well, Indi argues that we first need to become better listeners. So what does that mean, and what is the path to get there? Can anyone do it, or is it a natural-born talent? You'll get all the answers in this episode. By the way, if you fear business stakeholders will disregard qualitative research through listening as subjective and anecdotal, you're in for a surprise! Enjoy the conversation. --- [ 1. GUIDE ] --- 00:00 Welcome to episode 165 05:45 Who is Indi 07:00 Lightning round 11:15 Origin of the title 17:15 It's time for listening 20:30 Who is the book for 26:00 What do we need to do 29:45 A concrete example 33:30 The magic of listening 40:00 Why do patterns matter 43:45 Will our patterns differ 50:45 Natural language processing 54:30 Common mistakes 58:45 A shift in vocabulary 1:02:15 Book giveaway contest 1:03:45 Closing thoughts --- [ 2. LINKS ] --- https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/ Braiding Sweetgrass (book) - https://amzn.to/3VgPiVB Mismatch (book) - https://amzn.to/3PIQr72 Just enough research (book) - https://amzn.to/3jjq4sq --- [ 3. CONTEST ] --- To enter the contest, head over to the video version of this conversation on YouTube and leave a comment there to answer the question posed in the episode. https://go.servicedesignshow.com/episode165 --- [ 4. CIRCLE ] --- Join our alliance of in-house service design professionals. https://servicedesignshow.com/circle

Today I'm chatting with Indi Young, independent qualitative data scientist and author of Time to Listen. Indi explains how it is possible to gather and analyze qualitative data in a way that is meaningful to the desired future state of your users, and that learning how to listen and not just interview users is much like learning to ride a bicycle. Listen (!) to find out why pushing back is a necessary part of the design research process, how to build an internal sensor that allows you to truly uncover the nuggets of information that are critical to your projects, and the importance of understanding thought processes to prevent harmful outcomes.   Highlights/ Skip to: Indi introduces her perspective on analyzing qualitative data sets (00:51) Indi's motivation for working in design research and the importance of being able to capture and understand patterns to prevent harmful outcomes (05:09) The process Indi goes through for problem framing and understanding a user's desired future state (11:11) Indi explains how to listen effectively in order to understand the thinking style of potential end users (15:42) Why Indi feels pushing back on problems within projects is a vital part of taking responsibility and her recommendations for doing so effectively (21:45) The importance Indi sees in building up a sensor in order to be able to detect nuggets clients give you for their upcoming projects (28:25) The difference in techniques Indi observes between an interview, a listening session, and a survey (33:13) Indi describes her published books and reveals which one she'd recommend listeners start with (37:34) Quotes from Today's Episode “A lot of qualitative data is not trusted, mainly because the people who are doing the not trusting have encountered bad qualitative data.” — Indi Young (03:23) “When you're learning to ride a bike, when you're learning to decide what knowledge is needed, you're probably going to burn through a bunch of money-making knowledge that never gets used. So, that's when you start to learn, ‘I need to frame this better, and to frame it, I can't do it by myself.'” – Indi Young (11:57) “What you want to do is get beyond the exterior and get to the interior, which is where somebody tells you what actually went through their mind when they did that thing in the past, not what's going through their mind right now. And it's that's a very important distinction.” – Indi Young (20:28) “Re: dealing with stakeholders: You're not doing your job if you don't push back. You built up a lot of experience, you got hired, they hired you and your thinking and your experience, and if what went through your mind is, like, ‘This is wrong,' but you don't act on it, then they should not pay you a salary.” – Indi Young (22:45) “I've seen a lot of people leave their perfectly promising career because it was too hard to get to the point of accepting that you have to network, that I'm not going to be that one-in-a-million person who's the brilliant person with a brilliant idea and get my just rewards that way.” – Indi Young (25:13) “What's really interesting about a listening session is that it doesn't—aside from building this sensor and learning what the techniques are for helping a person get to their interior cognition rather than that exterior … to get past that into the inner thinking, the emotional reactions, and the guiding principles, aside from the sensor and those techniques, there's not much to it.” – Indi Young (32:45) “And once you start building that [sensor], and this idea of just having one generative question about the purpose—because the whole thing is framed by the purpose—there you go. Get started. You have to practice. So, it's like riding a bike. Go for it. You won't have those sensors at first, but you'll start to learn how to build them.” – Indi Young (36:41) Links Referenced: Time to Listen: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Listen-Invention-Inclusion-Assumptions/dp/1944627111 Mental Models: https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Models-Aligning-Strategy-Behavior/dp/1933820063 Practical Empathy: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Empathy-Collaboration-Creativity-Your/dp/1933820489 indiyoung.com: https://indiyoung.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indiyoung_/

What are the different categories of product owner? This episode goes outlines all the different types of product owners as well as the characteristics/pros and cons of each by considering them against the definition of a product and how you may deliver value. Join me as I also bust a common myth: product management being taught at product ownership classes. #productowner #agility #managementconsulting In this episode I drew on my information I gained from my interviews with: Indi Young - https://anchor.fm/xagility/episodes/Indi-Young-on-why-you-shouldnt-look-at-a-problem-through-the-aperture-of-a-solution-e1fpr78/a-a7j8he8 John Carter, chief engineer of BOSE noise cancelling headphones - full interview available here: https://anchor.fm/xagility/episodes/John-Carter---chief-engineer-of-BOSE-noise-cancelling-headphones-on-the-BOSE-culture--marketing-a-new-invention-and-agility-e1k1g3t/subscribe Enjoyed this episode? Or perhaps you may have a question? Let's connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncolemanagilitychef/ or Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johncolemanagilitychef/?hl=en If you are looking for scrum or kanban training, check out my upcoming courses at: https://orderlydisruption.com/collections/courses As always, thank you for listening. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/agilityisland/message

Indi Young explains how the point of having thinking styles is to get away from the “average user”, and move towards building your solutions for humans. Supporting them in whatever purpose they have. You might wonder: What are thinking styles?

Marc Bolick is the managing partner of the DesignThinkers Group. We're talking about innovation and culture, the future of work and designing value. Listen to learn about: DesignThinkers Group Using design thinking in innovation strategy and projects The future of work Innovative leadership International Development Change management and “corporate antibodies” Our Guest Marc leads DesignThinkers Group, an innovation support firm with consultants across North America and associates in 20 countries. He uses his technical, business and design skills to help organizations ask the right questions and find innovative solutions through human-centered problem solving methodologies. Marc has led projects for a range of multinational brands, non-profits, foundations, NGOs and public sector agencies both in the USA and abroad. He holds an MBA and Master of Business Informatics from Rotterdam School of Management and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University. Marc is an inspiring speaker, a probing strategist, a curious observer of human behavior, and a highly experienced group facilitator. Show Highlights [00:59] Marc gives a brief introduction to DesignThinkers Group. [02:00] His early career in mechanical engineering and working for GE. [02:34] Seeing design first-hand in a GE research lab. [03:47] Representing CT service engineers gave him the chance to interact with customers. [05:08] Shifting into product management. [05:45] Becoming an “accidental consultant.” [06:38] Discovering design thinking. [07:50] Incorporating design thinking into his innovation work. [08:10] Jeanne Liedtka's social technology concept. [11:32] Working with clients and showing what's possible with design thinking. [11:58] Learning design thinking isn't just about taking a class. You have to practice it. [12:38] Using design thinking to design the project. [13:07] Creating the guiding star for the project. [15:48] Working with company cultures. [17:41] One of Marc's favorite questions. [19:10] The future of work. [19:48] Echoes of the Industrial Revolution. [20:49] Marc offers thoughts on what makes a strong innovative leader. [22:53] Exploring the opportunities, offered by design thinking and human-centered design, for improving how we work. [23:53] Why Marc doesn't like the term “empathy building.” [24:30] Better connecting with customers leads to better serving them. [27:24] Pitfalls of personas. [28:27] Marc and Dawan talk about using Indi Young's mental models instead of personas in design work. [32:01] Working as a designer and innovator means you're always learning. [32:45] Books and resources Marc recommends. [34:41] Being with clients is Marc's biggest learning space. [35:04] Marc talks about a co-creation workshop DesignThinkers Group did in Cambodia and using design thinking to solve wicked problems. [39:15] Some other projects DesignThinkers Group has worked on. [41:47] Innovation requires putting something of value out into the world. [43:55] Innovation is all about change, and change management. [44:19] A project DesignThinkers Group did with a large corporation that wanted to tackle the issue of gender representation in top leadership roles. [46:21] Corporations and the status quo fight back against change. [47:47] The responsibility designers have to work on better inclusivity and representation in design.  Links Marc on Twitter Marc on LinkedIn DesignThinkers Group DesignThinkers Group on Twitter DesignThinkers Group on LinkedIn Design Talk What is Design Thinking? Delivering Innovative Solutions Through Service Design Thinking With Marc Bolick How Design Thinking Can Take Service to Another Level, interview with Marc Seth Godin Dave Gray Wednesday Web Jam Book Recommendations The Connected Company, by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wahl Gamestorming, by Dave Gray and Sunni Brown This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See, by Seth Godin Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers, by Seth Godin This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases, Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs, by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Designing for the Greater Good, Strategy + Design Thinking, and Measuring Design Thinking with Jeanne Liedtka — DT101 E1 Problem Spaces, Understanding How People Think, and Practical Empathy with Indi Young — DT101 E6 Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey with Karen Hold — DT101 E71 Looking for a design job? Maybe you'd like mine!

Marc Bolick is the managing partner of the DesignThinkers Group. We're talking about innovation and culture, the future of work and designing value. Listen to learn about: DesignThinkers Group Using design thinking in innovation strategy and projects The future of work Innovative leadership International Development Change management and “corporate antibodies” Our Guest Marc leads DesignThinkers Group, an innovation support firm with consultants across North America and associates in 20 countries. He uses his technical, business and design skills to help organizations ask the right questions and find innovative solutions through human-centered problem solving methodologies. Marc has led projects for a range of multinational brands, non-profits, foundations, NGOs and public sector agencies both in the USA and abroad. He holds an MBA and Master of Business Informatics from Rotterdam School of Management and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University. Marc is an inspiring speaker, a probing strategist, a curious observer of human behavior, and a highly experienced group facilitator. Show Highlights [00:59] Marc gives a brief introduction to DesignThinkers Group. [02:00] His early career in mechanical engineering and working for GE. [02:34] Seeing design first-hand in a GE research lab. [03:47] Representing CT service engineers gave him the chance to interact with customers. [05:08] Shifting into product management. [05:45] Becoming an “accidental consultant.” [06:38] Discovering design thinking. [07:50] Incorporating design thinking into his innovation work. [08:10] Jeanne Liedtka's social technology concept. [11:32] Working with clients and showing what's possible with design thinking. [11:58] Learning design thinking isn't just about taking a class. You have to practice it. [12:38] Using design thinking to design the project. [13:07] Creating the guiding star for the project. [15:48] Working with company cultures. [17:41] One of Marc's favorite questions. [19:10] The future of work. [19:48] Echoes of the Industrial Revolution. [20:49] Marc offers thoughts on what makes a strong innovative leader. [22:53] Exploring the opportunities, offered by design thinking and human-centered design, for improving how we work. [23:53] Why Marc doesn't like the term “empathy building.” [24:30] Better connecting with customers leads to better serving them. [27:24] Pitfalls of personas. [28:27] Marc and Dawan talk about using Indi Young's mental models instead of personas in design work. [32:01] Working as a designer and innovator means you're always learning. [32:45] Books and resources Marc recommends. [34:41] Being with clients is Marc's biggest learning space. [35:04] Marc talks about a co-creation workshop DesignThinkers Group did in Cambodia and using design thinking to solve wicked problems. [39:15] Some other projects DesignThinkers Group has worked on. [41:47] Innovation requires putting something of value out into the world. [43:55] Innovation is all about change, and change management. [44:19] A project DesignThinkers Group did with a large corporation that wanted to tackle the issue of gender representation in top leadership roles. [46:21] Corporations and the status quo fight back against change. [47:47] The responsibility designers have to work on better inclusivity and representation in design.  Links Marc on Twitter Marc on LinkedIn DesignThinkers Group DesignThinkers Group on Twitter DesignThinkers Group on LinkedIn Design Talk What is Design Thinking? Delivering Innovative Solutions Through Service Design Thinking With Marc Bolick How Design Thinking Can Take Service to Another Level, interview with Marc Seth Godin Dave Gray Wednesday Web Jam Book Recommendations The Connected Company, by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wahl Gamestorming, by Dave Gray and Sunni Brown This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See, by Seth Godin Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers, by Seth Godin This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases, Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs, by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Designing for the Greater Good, Strategy + Design Thinking, and Measuring Design Thinking with Jeanne Liedtka — DT101 E1 Problem Spaces, Understanding How People Think, and Practical Empathy with Indi Young — DT101 E6 Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey with Karen Hold — DT101 E71 Looking for a design job? Maybe you'd like mine!

We kick off our Throwback Summer series with a re-release of our conversation with Indi Young,  a qualitative data scientist.  Indi helps organizations better understand human behavior for product design strategy and innovation.  Find Indi Young Online:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/Website: https://indiyoung.com/Referenced:Dr. Brene Brown: https://brenebrown.com Inside Out by Pixar:https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Out-Plus-Bonus-Features/dp/B00ZZMEBFSPractical Empathy: For Creativity and Collaboration in Your Work by Indi Young:https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles:https://www.amazon.com/Future-Ethics-Cennydd-Bowles/dp/1999601912  We Get Real AF Podcast Credits:Producers & Hosts: Vanessa Alava & Sue RobinsonVanessa AlavaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessahalava/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessahalava/Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanessahalava Sue RobinsonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-robinson-29025623/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/memyselfandfinds/Twitter: https://twitter.com/sociallysue_Audio Producer/Editor: Sam McleanInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcleansounds/Website: www.inphase.bizAudio Music Track Title: Beatles UniteArtist: Rachel K. CollierYouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiHnYgtOn8u9YovYplMeXcwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelkcollier/Website: https://www.rachelkcollier.com Intro Voice-Over Artist: Veronica HortaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronicahorta/Cover Artwork Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@alicemoore We Get Real AF Podcast OnlineInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wegetrealaf/Twitter: https://twitter.com/wegetrealafFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wegetrealaf/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wegetrealafWebsite: https://wegetrealaf.cThis episode is part of the Summer Throwback series - a re-release of favorite WeGRAF episodes. The We Get Real AF podcast is a production of MicDrop Creative, telling inclusive stories through film and media.Support the show

In this episode, Jesse and Peter speak with their friend and former colleague Indi Young on the eve of the release of her forthcoming book, Time to Listen. The conversation ranges from our time together, to how she approaches her work, her focus on listening deeply to each other, and her passion for matters of equity and inclusion.

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.

In this video version of the Xagility podcast, the incredible Indi Young joins me to talk about why you shouldn't look at a problem through the aperture of a solution and the effect this can have on overall performance. Packed with metaphors and anecdotes, this episode is the perfect mix of fun stories and incredible wisdom. Indi's website: https://indiyoung.com/Indi's book: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-l... Episode transcript available here: https://share.descript.com/view/Td8V7... Alternatively, if you wish to listen in audio format: https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/xagility/message

In this video version of the Xagility podcast, the incredible Indi Young joins me to talk about why you shouldn't look at a problem through the aperture of a solution and the effect this can have on overall performance. Packed with metaphors and anecdotes, this episode is the perfect mix of fun stories and incredible wisdom. Indi's website: https://indiyoung.com/ Indi's book: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/ Episode transcript available here: https://share.descript.com/view/Td8V7... Alternatively, if you wish to listen in audio format: https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/xagility/message

If we want to make products and services that people want and use, we have to talk to those people. Whether you're involved in product strategy, UX, development, marketing, any part of building products or a business or a service – you've got to understand what your audience or user's goals, what will really serve their needs, what motivates them. And how do we do that? We talk to them. More importantly, we listen to them talk. So, how do we get them to talk about what's really most important to them? Today we're going to explore a different approach than what you might be used to in user research. It's focused on getting into someone's most inner unconscious purpose and motivations, and this will help you identify the most important opportunities to act on. Indi Young, is a researcher who coaches, writes, speaks, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her books on mental models and empathy are widely known & respected, and personally I've been a fan of hers for years and I have learned so much from her. She's developed this approach of deep listening over many years, she offers training and coaching in it, and now she's written a book about Deep Listening called Time to Listen. Order Indi's book here: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/Get training by Indi on Deep Listening: https://indiyoung.com/courses-list/Connect with Indi Young Website LinkedinTwitter********If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: follow us on twitter - like and reshare our postssubscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus contentshare this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. rate & review us on Apple Podcast or iTunes on desktop!Listen Apple | Spotify | Google | WebsiteConnect with UX Cake! leigharredondo.com | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked InSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.

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:

“All humans are fully human, with many ways of being in the world”. Rather than study the process or solution, we should be studying humans. Indi Young, author of mental models and practical empathy, joins us to talk “purpose”. People may be complicated, but Indi says if we frame our studies by purpose we can... The post #273 Purpose and thinking styles with Indi Young appeared first on UX Podcast.

In this episode, we host Andrea Goulet, and she brings her own heuristic: “Empathy system architecture”. She has been doing research about empathy within the software industry, and the results are amazing. We discuss the implications of empathy both at the individual level, as well as, group level. Last but not the least, we discuss one of her passions, legacy systems and the hidden communication artifacts with it! Andrea recommends: Practical Empathy, For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work by Indi Young    The War For Kindness, Building Empathy In A Fractured World by Jamil Zaki Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design by Cyrille Martraire Andrea Goulet (@andreagoulet) is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. She is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. Andrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist and learn more about her work at https://empathyintech.com.

There is a dangerous trap in the ways you use to capture the needs of the people you're designing for. Of course, you have constraints and need to make design decisions. And the saying is true that if you're designing for everyone you're essentially designing for no-one. So there are a lot of tools and methods to describe who it is that you're designing for. Personas, empathy maps, customer avatars, user profiles, etc. But when not used mindfully and with care these tools can do more harm than good. The consequence might be that you end up designing services that unintentionally exclude people. Or even worse, cause real harm. As a community that takes pride in being human centered this is not what we signed up for and we need to avoid this at all cost. So in this week's episode Indi Young shares a better approach to defining and describing the people we're designing for. The best part is that it's an approach that you can easily embed in your current practice. If you're serious about human centered design this is an episode you can't miss. --- [ GUIDE ] -— 00:00 Welcome to episode 130 03:00 Who is Indi 06:45 60 second rapid fire 09:45 The upcoming book book 12:00 Unconsiouce biases 17:45 The uptake 20:45 Designing with constrains 25:00 Thinking styles 31:00 Making it actionable 33:15 Where do we start 39:15 Getting business listen 42:45 Who are the adopters 45:15 The outlier 47:00 Common misconceptions 49:30 Unsolved challenges 53:00 Recommended resources 55:30 Final thoughts --- [ LINKS ] --- * https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ * https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/ * https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/ * https://indiyoung.com/essays-talks/ * Weapons of Math Destruction (book) - https://amzn.to/3BLxFEK * Design for Real Life (book) - https://amzn.to/3rB6Mic * Set Boundaries, Find Peace (book) - https://amzn.to/3ynACJL --- [SERVICE DESIGN JOBS] --- * https://servicedesignjobs.com/podcast --- [ HOW TO EXPLAIN SERVICE DESIGN ] --- Learn what it takes to get your clients, colleagues, managers, CEOs and even grandmas as excited about service design as you are. https://servicedesignshow.com/free-course

02:51 - Jennifer's Superpower: Kindness & Empathy * Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-complex-ptsd-2797491) (C-PTSD) 07:37 - Equitable Design and Inclusive Design * Section 508 (https://www.section508.gov/) Compliance * Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) (WCAG) * HmntyCentrd (https://hmntycntrd.com/) * Creative Reaction Lab (https://www.creativereactionlab.com/) 15:43 - Biases and Prejudices * Self-Awareness * Daniel Kahneman's System 1 & System 2 Thinking (https://www.marketingsociety.com/think-piece/system-1-and-system-2-thinking) * Jennifer Strickland: “You're Killing Your Users!” (https://vimeo.com/506548868) 22:57 - So...What do we do? How do we get people to care? * Caring About People Who Aren't You * Listening * Using Web Standards and Prioritizing Web Accessibility * Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/dp/0321616952) * Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm (https://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Web-Design-flexibility-protecting/dp/0321509021) * Progressive Enhancement * Casey's Cheat Sheet (https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility-cheatsheet/) * Jennifer Strickland: “Ohana for Digital Service Design” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfsZlkm59BE) * Self-Care 33:22 - How Ego Plays Into These Things * Actions Impact Others * For, With, and By * Indi Young (https://indiyoung.com/) 44:05 - Empathy and Accessibility * Testability/Writing Tests * Screen Readers * TalkBack (https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/6283677?hl=en) * Microsoft Narrator (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/complete-guide-to-narrator-e4397a0d-ef4f-b386-d8ae-c172f109bdb1) * NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/about-nvda/) * Jaws (https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/) * Heydon Pickering (https://twitter.com/heydonworks/status/969520320754438144) Reflections: Casey: Animals can have cognitive disabilities too. Damien: Equitable design initiatives and destroying the tenants of white supremacy. Jennifer: Rest is key. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDO: Hello, friends! Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 243. My name is Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my wonderful friend, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thank you, Mando, and I am here with our wonderful friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Jennifer Strickland. With more than 25 years of experience across the product lifecycle, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services. She first heard of Ohana in Disney's Lilo & Stitch, “Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten.” People don't know what they don't know and are often unaware of the corners they cut that exclude people. Empathy, compassion, and humility are vital to communication about these issues. That's Jennifer focus in equitable design initiatives. Welcome, Jennifer! JENNIFER: Hi! DAMIEN: You're welcome. MANDO: Hi, Jennifer. So glad you're here. JENNIFER: I'm so intrigued. [laughs] And I'm like 243 and this is the first I'm hearing of it?! DAMIEN: Or you can go back and listen to them all. MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: That must be 5, almost 6 years? JENNIFER: Do you have transcripts of them all? CASEY: Yes. JENNIFER: Great! MANDO: Yeah. I think we do. I think they're all transcribed now. JENNIFER: I'm one of those people [chuckles] that prefers to read things than listen. DAMIEN: I can relate to that. CASEY: I really enjoy Coursera courses. They have this interface where you can listen, watch the video, and there's a transcript that moves and highlights sentence by sentence. I want that for everything. MANDO: Oh, yeah. That's fantastic. It's like closed captioning [laughs] for your audio as well. JENNIFER: You can also choose the speed, which I appreciate. I generally want to speed things up, which yes, now that I'm getting older, I have to realize life is worth slowing down for. But when you're in a life where survival is what you're focused on, because you have a bunch of things that are slowing your roll and survival is the first thing in your mind, you tend to take all the jobs, work all the jobs, do all of the things because it's how you get out of poverty, or whatever your thing is. So I've realized how much I've multitasked and worked and worked and worked and I'm realizing that there is a part of the equality is lost there, but we don't all have the privilege of slowing down. DAMIEN: I can relate to that, too. So I believe every one of our past 243 episodes, we asked our guests the same question. You should know this is coming. Jennifer, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JENNIFER: I don't know for sure. People have told me that I'm the kindest person they've ever met, people have said I'm the most empathetic person I've ever met, and I'm willing to bet that they're the same thing. To the people, they just see them differently. I acquired being empathetic and kind because of my dysfunction in my invisible disabilities. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma and then repeated life trauma, and the way it manifests itself is trying to anticipate other people's needs, emotions, moods, and all of that and not make people mad. So that's a negative with a golden edge. Life is full of shit; how you respond to it shows who you are and rather than molesting kids, or hurting people, I chose to do what I could to make sure that no one else goes through that and also, to try to minimize it coming at me anymore, too. [chuckles] But there's positive ways of doing it. You don't have to be like the people who were crappy to you and the same goes like, you're in D.C.? Man, they're terrible drivers and it's like, [laughter] everybody's taking their bad day and putting it out on the people they encounter, whether it's in the store, or on the roads. I was like, “Don't do that.” Like, how did it feel when your boss treated you like you were garbage, why would you treat anyone else like garbage? Be the change, so to speak. But we're all where we are and like I said in my bio, “You don't know what you don't know.” I realized earlier this week that it actually comes from Donald Rumsfeld who said, “Unknown unknowns.” I'm like, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” MANDO: You can find good in lots of places, right? [laughs] JENNIFER: If you choose to. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah. JENNIFER: Look at, what's come out of the horror last year. We talk about shit that we didn't use to talk about. Yeah, it's more exhausting when lots of people, but I think in the long run, it will help move us in the right direction. I hope. MANDO: Yeah. That's absolutely the hope, isn't it? JENNIFER: We don't know what we don't know at this time. My sister was volunteering at the zoo and she worked in the Ape House, which I was super jealous of. There's an orangutan there named Lucy who I love and Lucy loves bags, pouches, and lipstick. So I brought a backpack with a pouch and some old lipstick in it and I asked a volunteer if I could draw on the glass. They gave me permission so I made big motions as I opened the backpack and I opened the pouch and you see Lucy and her eyes are like, she's starting to side-eye me like something's going on. And then she runs over and hops up full-time with her toes on the window cell and she's like right up there. So I'm drawing on the glass with the lipstick and she's loving it, reaches her hand behind, poops into her hand, takes the poop and repeats this little actions on the glass. MANDO: [laughs] Which is amazing. It's hilarious so that's amazing. JENNIFER: It's fantastic. I just think she's the bomb. My sister would always send pictures and tell me about what Lucy got into and stuff. Lucy lived with people who would dress her in people clothing and so, she's the only one of the orangutans that didn't grow up only around orangutans so the other orangutans exclude her and treat her like she's a weirdo and she's also the one who likes to wear clothes. Like my sister gave her an FBI t-shirt so she wears the FBI t-shirt and things like that. She's special in my heart. Like I love the Lucy with all of it. DAMIEN: Well, that's a pretty good display of your super empathetic superpower there. [laughter] And it sounds like it might be really also related to the equitable design initiatives? JENNIFER: Yeah. So I'm really grateful. I currently work at a place that although one would think that it would be a big, scary place because of some of the work that we do. I've found more people who know what equity is and care about what equity is. The place I worked before, I talked about inclusive design because that's everywhere else I've worked, it's common that that's what you're doing these days. But they told me, “Don't say that word, it's activism,” and I was stunned. And then I'm like, “It's all in GSA documents here,” and they were like, “Oh,” and they were the ones that were really bad about like prioritizing accessibility and meeting section 508 compliance and just moving it off to put those issues in the backlog. The client's happy, no one's complained, they think we're doing great work. It's like, you're brushing it all under the rug and you're telling them what you've done and you're dealing with people who don't know what section 508 is either because who does? Very few people really know what it means to be section 508 compliant because it's this mystery container. What is in this? What is this? What is this thing? DAMIEN: So for our listeners who don't know, can you tell us a bit what section 508 is? JENNIFER: Sure. So section 508 means that anything paid for with federal funds must be section 508 compliant, which means it must meet WCAG 2.0 success criteria and WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If you're ever looking for some really complicated, dense, hard to understand reading, I recommend opening up the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I think the people that are on the working groups with me would probably agree and that's what we're all working towards trying to improve them. But I think that they make the job harder. So rather than just pointing at them and complaining like a lot of people do on Twitter, or deciding “I'm going to create a business and make money off of making this clear for people,” I decided instead to join and try to make it better. So the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are based on Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust, POUR. Pour like this, not poor like me. [laughs] So there's just a bunch of accessibility criteria that you have to meet to make your work section 508 compliant. It's so hard to read and so hard to understand that I feel for everybody like of course, you don't know what section 508 compliance is. It's really, really hard to read. But if somebody who is an accessibility specialist tells you and writes up an issue ticket, you don't argue with them. You don't say, “This isn't a thing,” you say, “Okay, how soon do I need to fix it?” and you listen to them, but that's not what I experienced previously. Where I am now, it's amazing. In the place I worked before here, like just the contracting, they welcomed everything I said to them regarding accessibility. So I just clearly worked at a contractor that was doing a lot of lip service and not talking the talk, not walking the talk, sorry. [laughs] Super frustrating. Because accessibility is only a piece of it. I am older probably than anybody on this call and I'm a woman working in tech and I identify as non-binary. The arguments I've had about they/them all my life have been stupid, but I'm just like, “Why do I have to be female?” It's just, why do I have to be one, or the other? Anyway, everyone has always argued with me so I'm so grateful for the young ones now for pushing all that. I'm Black, Native, Mexican, and white all smushed together and my grandma wouldn't let me in the house because apparently my father was too dark so therefore, I'm too dark. Hello? Look at this! [laughter] Currently, some people are big on the one drop rule and I always say to people, “If you hate me, or want to exclude me so much because somewhere in me you know there is this and how do you feel about so-and-so? I'm done with you and you are bad people and we've got to fight this stupidity.” I have also invisible disabilities. So I'm full of all these intersectional things of exclusion. I personally experience a lot of it and then I have the empathy so I'm always feeling fuzzy people who are excluded. So what am I supposed to do with the fact that I'm smart, relatively able-bodied, and have privilege of being lighter skin so I can be a really good Trojan horse? I have to be an advocate like, what else am I supposed to do with my life? Be a privileged piece of poop that just wants to get rich and famous, like a lot of people in tech? Nope. And I don't want to be virtue signaling and savior complex either and that's where equitable design has been a wonderful thing to learn more about. HmntyCntrd.com and Creative Reaction Lab out in Missouri, those are two places where people can do a lot of learning about equity and truly inclusion, and challenging the tenants of white supremacy in our working ways. I'm still trying to find better ways of saying the tenants of white supremacy because if you say that in the workplace, that sounds real bad, especially a few months back before when someone else was in office. When you say the tenants of white supremacy in the workplace, people are going to get a little rankled because that's not stuff we talk about in the workplace. DAMIEN: Well, it's not just the workplace. JENNIFER: Ah, yes. DAMIEN: They don't like that at sports bars either. Ask me how I know. MANDO: No, they sure don't. [laughter] JENNIFER: We should go to sports bars together. [laughs] Except I'm too scared to go to them right now unless they're outdoors. But when we talk to people about the actual individual tenants about power hoarding, perfectionism, worship of the written word, and things like that, people can really relate and then you watch their faces and they go, “Yeah, I do feel put my place by these things and prevented from succeeding, progressing, all of these things.” These are things that we've all been ingrained to believe are the way we evaluate what's good and what's bad. But we don't have to. We can talk about this stuff when we can reject those things and replace them with other things. But I'm going to be spending the rest of my life trying to dismantle my biases. I'm okay with my prejudices because even since I was a kid, I recognized that we were all prejudice and it's okay. It's our knee jerk first assumption, but you always have to keep an open mind, but that prejudice is there to protect you, but you always have to question it and go, “What is that prejudice? Is that bullshit? Is it right? Is it wrong?” And always looking at yourself, it's always doing that what you call self-awareness stuff, and always be expanding it, changing it, and moving it. But prejudice? Prejudice has a place to protect, speaking as someone who's had guns in her face, knives through her throat, and various other yucky things, I know that when I told myself, “Oh, you're being prejudiced, push yourself out into that vulnerable feeling,” things didn't go very well. So instead, recognize “Okay, what are you thinking in this moment about this situation? Okay, how can you proceed and keep an open mind while being self-protective?” DAMIEN: Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 Thinking. We have these instinctive reactions to things and a lot of them are learned—I think they're all learned actually. But they're instinctive and they're not things we decide consciously. They're there to protect us because they're way faster, way more efficient than most of what we are as humans as thinking and enacting beings. But then we also have our rational mind where we can use to examine those things and so, it's important to utilize both. It's also important to know where your instinctive responses are harmful and how to modify them so that they're not harmful. And that is the word. JENNIFER: I've never heard of it. Thanks for putting that in there. Power accretion principles is that it? CASEY: Oh, that's something else. JENNIFER: Oh. CASEY: Type 1 and type 2 thinking. JENNIFER: But I know with a lot of my therapy work as a trauma survivor, I have to evaluate a lot of what I think and how I react to things to change them to respond things. But there are parts of having CPTSD that I am not going to be able to do that, too. Like they're things where for example, in that old workplace where there was just this constant invalidation and dismissal of the work, which was very triggering as a rape survivor/incest survivor, that I feel really bad and it made me feel really unsafe all the time. So I felt very emotional in the moment and so, I'd have to breathe through my nose, breathe out to my mouth, feel my tummy, made sure I can feel myself breathing deeply, and try to calmly explain the dire consequences of some of these decisions. People tend to think that the design and development decisions we make when we're building for the web, it's no big deal if you screw it up. It's not like an architect making a mistake in a building and the building falls down. But when you make a mistake, that means a medical locator application doesn't load for an entire minute on a slow 3G connection—when your audience is people who are financially challenged and therefore, unlikely to have always high-speed, or new devices—you are making a design decision that is literally killing people. When you make a design decision, or development decision not to QA your work on mobile, tablet, and desktop, and somebody else has to find out that your Contact Us options don't open on mobile so people in crisis can't reach your crisis line. People are dying. I'm not exaggerating. I have a talk I give called You're Killing Your Users and it got rejected from this conference and one of the reviewers wrote, “The title is sensationalism. No one dies from our decision,” and I was just like, “Oh my God, oh my God.” MANDO: [laughs] Like, that's the point. JENNIFER: What a privileged life you live. What a wonderfully privileged life! There's a difference between actions and thoughts and it's okay for me to think, “I really hope you fall a flight of stairs and wind up with a disability and leave the things that you're now trying to put kibosh on.” But that's not me saying, “I'm going to go push you down a flight of stairs,” or that I really do wish that on someone. It's emotional venting, like how could you possibly close yourself off to even listening to this stuff? That's the thing that like, how do we get to a point in tech where so many people in tech act like the bad stereotype of surgeons who have this God complex, that there are particular entities working in government tech right now that are told, “You're going to save government from itself. You've got the answers. You are the ones that are going to help government shift and make things better for the citizen, or the people that use it.” But the people that they hire don't know what they don't know and they keep doing really horrible things. Like, they don't follow the rules, they don't take the time to learn the rules and so, they put user personal identifying information, personal health information on the public server without realizing it that's a no-no and then it has to be wiped, but it can never really fully be wiped. And then they make decisions like, “Oh, well now we're only worried about the stuff that's public facing. We're not worried about the stuff that's internally facing.” Even though, the internally facing people are all some of the vulnerable people that we're serving. I'm neutralizing a lot of what I'm talking about. [chuckles] MANDO: Of course. [laughter] DAMIEN: Well, convinced me of the problems. It was an easy sell for me. Now, what do we do? JENNIFER: The first thing we do is we all give a fuck about other people. That's the big thing, right? Like, how do I convince you that you should care about people who aren't you? MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: I always think about the spectrum of caring. I don't have a good word for it, but there are active and passive supporters—and you can be vocal, or quiet—like loud, or quiet. I want more people to be going around the circle of it so if they're vocally opposed, just be quiet, quietly opposed, maybe be quietly in support, and if you're quietly in support, maybe speak up about it. I want to nudge people along around this, the four quadrants. A lot of people only focus on getting people who passively care to be more vocal about it. That's a big one. That's a big transition. But I also like to focus on the other two transitions; getting a lot of people to be quiet about a thing that as opposed. Anyway, everywhere along that process is useful. JENNIFER: I think it's important to hear the people who were opposed because otherwise, how are we ever going to help understand and how are we going to understand if maybe where we've got a big blind spot? Like, we have to talk about this stuff in a way that's thoughtful. I come from a place in tech where in the late 90s, I was like, “I want to move from doing print to onscreen and printing environmental to that because it looks like a lot of stuff has gone to this web thing.” I picked up Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards and Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design and all of them talk about using web standards and web standards means that you prioritize accessibility from the beginning. So the first thing you build is just HTML tagging your content and everyone can use it. It's not going to be fancy, but it's going to be completely usable. And then you layer things on through progressive enhancement to improve the experience for people with fancy phones, or whatever. I don't know why, but that's not how everybody's coming into doing digital work. They're coming in through React out of the box, thinking that React out of the box is – and it's like nope, you have to build in the framework because nobody put the framework in React. React is just a bunch of hinges and loops, but you have to put the quality wood in and the quality glass panes and the handles that everybody can use. I'm not sure if that analogy is even going to work. But one of the things I realized talking with colleagues today is I tend to jump to three steps in when I really need to go back, start at the beginning, and say, “Here are the terms. This is what section 508 is. This is what accessibility is. This is what A11Y is. This is WCAG, this is how it's pronounced, this is what it means, and this is the history of it.” I think understanding history of section 508 and what WCAG is also vital in the first version of WCAG section 508, it adopted part of what was WCAG 1.0, but it wasn't like a one to one for 1.0, it was just some of it and then it updated in 2017, or 2018, I forget. Without my cheat sheet, I can't remember this stuff. Like I got other things to keep in my brain. CASEY: I just pulled up my favorite cheat sheet and I put it in the chat sidebar here. JENNIFER: Oh, thank you. It's in my slides for Ohana for Digital Service Design that I gave at WX Summit and I think I also gave it recently in another thing. Oh, UXPA DC. But the thing is, the changes only recently happened where it went to WCAG 2.0 was 2018, I think it got updated. So all those people that were resisting me in 2018, 2019, 2020 likely never realized that there was a refresh that they need to pay attention to and I kept trying to like say, “No, you don't understand, section 508 means more now.” Technically, the access board that defines what section 508 is talking about moving it to 2.1, or 2.2 and those include these things. So we should get ahead of the ball, ahead of the curve, or whatever you want to call it and we should be doing 2.1 and 2.2 and even beyond thinking about compliance and that sort of stuff. The reason we want to do human beings is that 2.1 and 2.2 are for people who are cognitively fatigued and I don't think there's anyone who's been through the pandemic who is not cognitively fatigued. If you are, you are just a robot. I don't know. I don't know who could not be not cognitive fatigue. And then the other people that also helps are mobile users. So if you look at any site, look at their usage stats, everything moving up and up and up in mobile devices. There's some people who don't have computers that they only have phones. So it just seems silly not to be supporting those folks. But we need, I don't know. I need to think more about how to get there, how to be more effective in helping people care, how to be more effective in teaching people. One of the big pieces I've learned in the last six months is the first step is self-care—sleep, exercise, eat, or maybe those two need to be back and forth. I haven't decided yet because I'm still trying to get the sleep workout. Before I moved to D.C., I was a runner, hiker, I had a sit spot at the local pond where I would hang out with the fishes and the turtles and the frogs and the birds and here, I overlook the Pentagon and there's swarms of helicopters. I grow lots of green things to put between me and it, but it's hard. The running is stuck because I don't feel safe and things like that. I live in an antiseptic neighborhood intentionally because I knew every time I went into D.C. and I saw what I see, I lose hope because I can't not care. It kills me that I have to walk by people who clearly need – this is a messed up world. We talk about the developing world as the place where people are dying on the side of the road. Do you have blinders on like, it's happening here? I don't know what to do. I care too much. So what do we do? What do you think? DAMIEN: Well, I think you have a hint. You've worked at places that are really resistant to accessibility and accessibility to improvements, and you've worked at some that are very welcoming and eager to implement them. So what were the differences? What do you think was the source of that dichotomy? JENNIFER: I think at the place I worked after I left the hellhole; the product owner was an Asian woman and the other designer was from India. Whereas, before the other place was a white woman and a white man and another white man who was in charge. And then the place I work now, it's a lot of people who are very neurodiverse. I work at MITRE, which is an FFRDC, which is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. It's full of lots of smart people who are very bookish. It's funny when I was a little kid, I was in the gifted and talented kids and so, they would put us into these class sessions where we were to brainstorm and I love brainstorming. I love imagining things. I remember thinking, “I want to work in a think tank and just all I do all the time is brainstorm and we'd figure out a way to use some of those things!” And I feel a little bit like I'm there now, which is cool and they treat one another really well at MITRE, which is nice. Not to say it's perfect there. Nowhere is perfect. But compared to a lot of places, it's better. I think it's the people are taking the time to listen, taking the time to ask questions. The people I work with don't have a lot of ego, generally. At least not the ones I'm working with. I hear that they do exist there, but I haven't run into many of them. Whereas, the other place, there was a lot of virtue signaling and a lot of savior complex. Actually, very little savior conflicts. They didn't really care about saving anyone, sorry. Snark! [laughs] DAMIEN: Can you tell us a little more about ego and how ego plays into these things? JENNIFER: How do you think ego plays into these things? DAMIEN: Well, I think it causes people to one up and turn questions around it on me, that's one way. Ego means a lot of things to a lot of different people, which is why I asked the question. I think it was introduced to English by Freud and I don't want to use a Freudian theory for anything ever. [laughter] And then when I talk to people about death of the ego and [inaudible] and all of these things, it seems really unpleasant. People like their self-identity, people like being themselves, and they don't want to stop being themselves. So I'm not sure how that's related to what you were saying. CASEY: The way I'm hearing you use ego here sounds like self-centered, thinking about your own perspective, not taking the time and effort and energy to think about other people's perspectives. And if you don't have a diverse set of experiences to lean on your own, you're missing out on a lot. JENNIFER: Yeah. I tend to think about, I guess, it's my dysfunction. Once again, it's like, how do my actions impact others? Why are other people thinking about how their actions impact others? When you're out in public and you've got to cut the cheese, are you going to do it when there are a lot of people around? Are you going to take a stinky deuce in a public bathroom that you know other people in there? If you think about the community around you, you would go find a private one if you cared at all. But most people don't care and they think, “I do what I got to do.” I just think we need to think a little bit more about the consequences of our actions and I tweeted yesterday, or this morning about how – oh, it was yesterday. I was watching TV and a new, one of those food delivery commercials came on. This one, they send you a stove, you get a little oven, and you cook all of their meals in this little throwaway dishes. So you have no dishes, nothing. How much are we going to just keep creating crap? When you think about all of this takeout and delivery, there's just so much trash we generate. We should be taxing the bleep out of companies that make these sorts of things like, Amazon should have the bleep taxed out of it because of all the cardboard and I'm just as guilty because I ordered the thing and the box of staples arrives in a box. It has a plastic bubble wrap all around it. Like it's just a box at $2.50 staples, but I couldn't be bothered to go – I don't know if they have them at Walgreens. Like for real, I don't know. We need to do better. We need to think about the consequences of these decisions and not just do it like, that's the thing that tech has been doing is let's make an MVP and see if it has wheels. Let's make a prototype, but do the thing. Okay, let's do the thing. Oh, it's got wheels. Oh, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. Who cares about the consequences of all of it? Who cares? Your kids, your grandkids someday maybe will when the world is gone. We talk about climate change. We talk about 120-degree temperatures in Seattle and Portland, the ocean on fire, the beaches are eroding, like the ice cap—most of the Arctic is having a 100 and some odd degree temperature day. Like we are screwing it up and our legislation isn't keeping pace with the advances in technology that are just drawing things. Where are the people who care in the cycle and how are they interrupting the VCs who just want to like be the next big tech? Everybody wants to be the next Zuckerberg, or Jack, or Bezos, or Gates, or whatever, and nobody has to deal with the consequences of their actions and their consequences of those design and development decisions. That's where I think it's ego, it's self-centeredness, it's wanting to be famous, it's wanting to be rich instead of really, truly wanting to make the world a better place. I know my definition of better. We've got four different visions of what better is going to be and that's hard work. Maybe it is easier to just focus on getting famous and getting rich than it is on doing the hard work of taking four different visions of what good is and trying to find the way forward. DAMIEN: Making the world a better place. The world will be a better place when I'm rich and famous. But that also means – and that's the truth. [laughter] But what else you said was being empathetic and having a diverse – well, marginalized people in charge where you can see that that's why the impact that things are having on other people. It's not just about me being rich and famous, but it's also about things being better for other people, too. JENNIFER: Yeah. I don't necessarily mean marginalized people have to be in charge. DAMIEN: Right. I took that jump based on your description of the places you worked for. I should have specified that. I wasn't clear enough. JENNIFER: I do have to say that in general, when I've worked for people who aren't the status quo, more often than not, they bring a compassionate, empathetic approach. Not always. There have been some that are just clearly driven and power hungry, and I can't fault them either because it's got to take a lot to come up from wherever and fight through the dog-eat-dog world. But in the project work, there's the for, with and by. The general ways that we redesign and build things for people, then the next piece is we design and build things with the people that we're serving, but the newer way of doing things is that we don't design and build the things, the people that we're serving design the things and tell us what they want to design, and then we figure out how to make sure that it's built the way they tell us to. That goes against the Steve Jobs approach where Steve Jobs said people don't know what they want sort of thing. Wasn't that was he said? DAMIEN: Yeah. Well, there was Henry Ford who said, “If you ask people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses.” JENNIFER: Right. D And Steve Jobs kind of did the same thing. JENNIFER: Right. And we, as designers, have to be able to work with that and pull that out and suss it out and make sure that we translate it into something useful and then iterate with to make sure that we get it. Like when I do research, listening sessions with folks, I have to use my experience doing this work to know what are the – like, Indi Young's inner thinking, reactions, and guiding principles. Those are the things that will help guide you on what people are really wanting and needing and what their purpose is. So you make sure that whatever your understanding is closer to what they're really saying, because they don't know what can be built. They don't know what goes on, but they do know what their purpose is and what they need. Maybe they don't even know what they need, but they do know what their purpose is, or you keep validating things. CASEY: I want to amplify, you said Indi Young. I read a lot of her work and she just says so many things that I wish someone would say, and she's been saying them for a while. I just didn't know about her. Indi Young. JENNIFER: It's I-N-D-I and Y-O-U-N-G. I am so grateful that I got to take her courses. I paid for them all myself, except for one class—I let that other place pay for one through my continuing ed, but I wanted to do it so badly that I paid for all myself. The same thing with all the Creative Reaction Lab and HmntyCntrd stuff; I paid for those out of my own money that probably could have gone to a vacation, [chuckles] or buying a car, or something. But contributing to our society in a responsible and productive way, figuring out how to get my language framework better. Like you said earlier, Damien, I'm really good at pointing out what the problems are. I worry about figuring out how we solve them, because I don't really have the ego to think that I know what the answer is, but I'm very interested in working with others to figure out how we solve them. I have some ideas, but how do you tell a React developer that you really have to learn HTML, you have to learn schematic HTML. That's like learning the alphabet. I don't understand. CASEY: Well, I have some ideas around that. Amber is my go-to framework and they have accessibility baked into the introduction tutorial series. They have like 13 condoned add-ons that do accessibility related things. At the conference, there's always a whole bunch of accessibility tracks. Amber is like happy path accessibility right front and center. React probably has things like that. We could have React's onboarding docs grow in that direction, that would be great, and have more React add-ons to do that that are condoned and supported by the community could have the same path. And it could probably even use a lot of the same core code even. The same principles apply. JENNIFER: If you want to work together and come up with some stuff to go to React conferences, or work with the React team, or whatever. 
CASEY: Sounds fun. DAMIEN: Well, one of the things you talked about the way you described it and made it sound like empathy was so much of the core of it. In order to care about accessibility, you have to empathize with people who need that functionality. You have to empathize with people who are on 3G flip phones. That's not a thing, is it? [laughs] But nonetheless, empathizing. JENNIFER: A flat screen phone, a smartphone looking thing and it's still – if anyone's on a slow 3G, it's still going to be a miserable experience. DAMIEN: Yeah, 3G with a 5-year-old Android OS. JENNIFER: But I don't think it's necessarily that people have to empathize. In an ideal world would, but maybe they could be motivated by other things like fast. Like, do you want to fast cumulative layout shift? Do you want like a great core vitals Google score? Do you want a great Google Lighthouse score? Do you want the clear Axe DevTools scan? Like when I get a 100% little person zooming in a wheelchair screen instead of issues found. Especially if I do it the first time and like, I hadn't been scanning all along and I just go to check it for the first time and it's clean, I'm like, “Yes!” [laughs] CASEY: Automation helps a lot. JENNIFER: Yeah. CASEY: When I worked at USCIS, I don't know what this meant, but they said we cannot automate these tests. I think we can and they didn't do it yet, but I've always been of baffled. I think half of it, you can automate tests around and we had none at the time. JENNIFER: Yeah, you catch 30 to 50% of the accessibility issues via the Axe rule set and JSX Alley and all that. You can catch 30 to 50. CASEY: Sounds great. JENNIFER: That's still better than catching none of them. Still not great, but it's still better than nothing. They're not here to tell us why they can't, but adding things into your end-to-end test shouldn't be that hard if you know how to write tests. I don't personally know how to write tests. I want to. I don't know. Like, I have to choose which thing am I going to work on? I'm working on an acquisition project, defining the requirements and the scope and the red tape of what a contract will be and it's such foreign territory for me. There's a lot of pieces there that I never ever thought I would be dealing with and my head hurts all the time. I feel stupid all the time, but that's okay. If you're not doing something you haven't done before, maybe you're not learning, it's growing. I'm growing. I'm definitely growing, but in different ways and I miss the code thing of I have a to-do list where I really want to get good at Docker, now I want to learn few, things like that and I want to get back to learning Python because Python, I think is super cool. CASEY: There's one thing I wanted to mention earlier that I just remembered. One thing that was eye-opening to me for accessibility concerns is when I heard that screen reader has existed, which was several years into my programming career. I didn't know they were a thing at all. I think it's more common now that people know about them today than 10, 15 years ago. But I still haven't seen someone use a screen reader and that would be really important for me as a developer. I'm not developing software lately either so I'm not really coding that. But if anyone hasn't, you should use a screen reader on your computer if you're developing software that might have to be used by one. JENNIFER: So everyone on a Mac has voiceover. Everyone on an iPhone has voiceover. It's really hard on the iPhone, I feel like I can't, oh, it's really hard. I've heard great things about Talkback on Android. And then on Windows, newer versions have Microsoft Narrator, which is a built-in screen reader. You can also download NVDA for free and install it. It depends on how much money you want to spend. There a bunch of different ways to get Jaws, do Jaws, too. Chrome has Chromebox so you can get another screen reader that way. CASEY: So many options. It's kind of overwhelming. If I had to recommend one for a Windows user and one for a Mac user, would you recommend the built-in ones just to start with, to play with something? JENNIFER: So everywhere I've tested, whether it was at the financial institution, or the insurance place, or the government place, we always had to test with Jaws, NVDA, and voiceover. I test with voiceover because it's what I have on my machine, because I'm usually working on a Mac. But the way I look at the screen reader is the number of people who are using screen readers is significantly fewer than the number of people with cognitive considerations. So I try to use good semantic markup, basic web standards so that things will work; things have always been pretty great in screen readers because of that. I try to keep my code from being too complicated, or my UI is from being complicated, which might do some visual designers seem somewhat boring to some of them. [chuckles] CASEY: Do you ever turn off CSS for the test? JENNIFER: Yes, and if it makes sense that way, then I know I'm doing it right and is it still usable without JavaScript. Better yet, Heydon Pickering's way of like, it's not usable unless you turn off the JavaScript, that was fabulous. I pissed off so many people. But to me, I try to focus on other things like how clear is, how clean is it? Can I tab through the whole UI? Can I operate it with just a keyboard? Your keyboard is your best assistive tech tester. You don't skip. If you can tap through anything without getting stuck, excellent. If you don't skip over nav items. CASEY: My biggest pet peeve is when websites don't work when you zoom in, because all of my devices I zoom in not because my vision is bad, but because for my posture. I want to be able to see my screen from a far distance and not lean in and craning my neck over laptop and my phone, both and a lot of websites break. JENNIFER: Yeah. CASEY: You zoom in the text at all, you can't read anything. JENNIFER: Yeah. At the one place I worked before, we required two steps of zoom in and two steps of zoom out, and it still had to be functional. I don't see that in most places; they don't bother to say things like that. CASEY: Yeah. JENNIFER: At the government, too – CASEY: I wonder how common it is if people do that. I do it so I think it's very common, but I don't know the right. [laughter] JENNIFER: But that's how the world is, right? I can tell you that once you hit this old age and your eyes start to turn against you and things are too small, or too light, you suddenly understand the importance of all of these things so much more. So for all of those designers doing your thin gray text on white backgrounds, or thin gray text on gray backgrounds, or your tiny little 12 and under pixels for your legaleas, karma is out to get you. [chuckles] We've all done it. Like there was a time I thought nobody cared about the legaleas. That's not true. Even your footer on your website should be big enough for people to read. Otherwise, they think I'm signing away my soul to zoom because I can't read it. If you can zoom it in, that's great. But some apps disable the zoom. DAMIEN: So we usually end on a series of reflections. How do you feel about moving to that? JENNIFER Sure! DAMIEN: We let our guests go last. Casey, do you have a reflection you want to share with us? CASEY: I'm thinking back to Mando's dog and I thought it was interesting, Jennifer, that you linked your experiences with the dog's experiences. Like, some of the symptoms you have might be similar if a dog has CPTSD, too and I think that's really insightful. I think a lot of animals have that kind of set up, but we don't treat them like we treat humans with those issues even if they're similar. DAMIEN: It was in your bio, equitable design initiatives, I really want it to dig into that because that fascinates me and I guess, if draws that bridge between things that I think are very important, or very important for me, both accessibility, that sort of work, especially in software design, because that's where I'm at. And then destroying the tenants of white supremacy and being able to connect those as things that work together and seeing how they work together. Yeah, that's what I'm going to be reflecting on. JENNIFER: Yeah. Whenever we're doing our work, looking for opportunities to surface and put it out for everyone to look at who has power, if this changes who has power, if this doesn't change who has power, what is motivating the players, are people motivated by making sure that no one's excluded, or are people motivated by making sure that their career moves forward, or they don't get in trouble rather than truly serving? I still am in the mindset of serving the people with a purpose that we're aiming to meet the needs of kind of thing. I still have that mindset. A lot of the prep work, we're still talking about the people we aim to serve and it's still about getting them into the cycle. That is a very big position of power that a designer has and acknowledging that that's power and that I wield that power in a way that I consider responsible, which is to make sure that we are including people who are historically underrepresented, especially in those discussions. I'm really proud of a remote design challenge where all of our research participants were either people of color, or people with disabilities. Man, the findings insights were so juicy. There was so much that we could do with what we got. It was really awesome. So by equitable design initiatives, it's really just thinking about acknowledging the power that we have and trying to make sure we do what we can to share it, transfer it, being really respectful of other perspectives. I've always thought of it as infinite curiosity about others and some people have accused me being nosy and they didn't realize it's not about getting up in their private business. It's just, I want to be gracious and respect others. What I will reflect on was how I really need to rest. I will continue to reflect on how I rest is key. I'm making a conscious decision for the next couple of months to not volunteer because I tend to do too much, as Casey may, or may not know. [chuckles] Yeah, I want to wake up in the morning and feel energized and ready to take full advantage of, which is not the right way to phrase it, but show up as my best self and well-prepared for the work. Especially since I now have found myself a new incredibly compassionate, smart place that genuinely aims to improve equity and social justice, and do things for the environment and how grateful I am. I totally thought this place was just about let's them all and it's so not. [laughs] So there's so many wonderful people. I highly recommend everybody come work with me if you care about things. DAMIEN: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer for being our guest today. It's been a pleasure. The author's affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only, and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE's concurrence with, or support for, thepositions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the author. ©2021 The MITRE Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Approved for public release. Distribution unlimited 21-2206. Special Guest: Jennifer Strickland.

Indi Young, independent Qualitative Data Scientist, researcher, author, educator, and thought leader joined our hosts to explain how designing for the “average user” can marginalize and harm real people. Indi shared how she finds patterns in people's behaviors, thoughts, and needs—and how she uses that data to create thinking styles that inform more inclusive design decisions. Indi talked about… Why researchers should look for patterns, not anecdotes, to understand real user needs. What are thinking styles and how to uncover and use them. Why your “average” user often doesn't exist in the real world, and how we can do better --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/awkwardsilences/message

People, Purposes, Patterns & Problem Space How can your org go deep? How can it find 1000 more opportunities to support by studying the patterns that come from people's inner thinking as they pursue their purposes? Indi will unfold a way to bring this powerful perspective to your organization.

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

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

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.

UX-radio.com is a podcast about Information Architecture, User Experience, and Design. Hosts Lara Fedoroff and Chris Chandler talk with industry experts with the purpose to educate, inspire and share resources. In this episode, Indi Young talks about the problem space [of design] where the focus is on people, not users. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people, without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in.

“We're doing all of our education right now remotely, using Zoom and thinking through, okay, how does learning happen there? What's kind of uniquely possible—I like those words—with that medium? And how can we capture those moments? It's not a replacement. It's like, oh, it's going to be just like things that happen face to face. Like, no, it’s different, but also good. And how do we get to that different-but-also-good place?” Dr. Dawan Stanford   In this episode of the Control the Room podcast, I’m pleased to be speaking with Dr. Dawan Stanford of Fluid Hive, a design-driven innovation company. As president of Fluide Hive, Dawan helps organizations to see, solve, and act on challenges that are complex, dynamic, and interconnected. Dawan and I talk about pushing energy into a room, checking in with people, and his experience with remote learning as the Design Studio Director of Georgetown University’s Learning & Design program. Listen in to find out how Times New Roman ended his legal career.   Show Highlights [1:30] How Times New Roman ended Dawan’s legal career [10:33] What’s in it for the Participant [18:39] Cut the Tools Some Slack [24:56] Writing a Detailed Agenda, then Adjusting it [28:36] Pushing Energy into the Room [33:29] Checking in with People   Links | Resources Dawan on LinkedIn Fluide Hive   About the Guest Dr. Dawan Stanford, President of design-driven innovation company Fluid Hive, helps organizations to see, solve, and act on challenges that are complex, dynamic, and interconnected. He has experience in Silicon Valley and international business that he combines with design, design thinking, and academic research in his work at Fluide Hive. Dr. Stanford is also the Design Studio Director and a Professor of Learning & Design at Georgetown University. His studio serves as a space where students integrate their core coursework in the program, develop as learning practitioners, and develop their leadership, collaboration, and facilitation skills.   About Voltage Control Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.  Share An Episode of Control The Room Apple Podcasts Spotify Android Stitcher Engage Control The Room Voltage Control on the Web Contact Voltage Control   Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Douglas: Today I’m with Dawan Stanford, president of Fluid Hives. Welcome to the show, Dawan. Dawan: Hello. Thank you for having me. Douglas: Of course, so excited to talk facilitation with you. And for starters, one of the things I love hearing from guests on the show is how they got their start, because there's not really any college out there that you can go take a facilitation degree. And so most people find themselves in this work through many different channels, and there’s always an interesting story, and so I’d love to hear how you found your way into this amazing work. Dawan: Well, I'm a designer, and my path into design started many, many years ago with some professional training and photography, and that led to looking at layout and then studying color and then studying graphic design. And as I progressed in that career, I had a legal career for a while, and I realized that I stayed late to design the closing binders for the client because the normal design was Times New Roman, centered, and you put some things in bold and underlined them. Like, oh, no. We can do something better than that. And after spending a couple hours designing closing-binder covers, I got a look from one of the partners: Maybe you're not one of us. Like, maybe I'm not. So I found out like, no, I'm not one of you.  And as I started doing more and more work, I was looking at more and more moments where it was design together, creating together, bringing groups of people together to understand how they need to work, how they are working, how they understand the context where they're working. And so I began to take a very close look at my role in those moments, those conversations, and how to be very intentional about constructing them, because it's a precious thing when you have a handful of people in a room, or more, focusing their attention on one endeavor. And to be offered that gift is something that I want to take seriously and treat carefully. Douglas: Yeah, it's interesting. I love this notion that it wasn't that long ago when we started to have a plural form of priority.  Dawan: Mm-hmm. Douglas: I think focus is the same way, right? And so this notion that, hey, we can have more than one focus or more than one priority is very modern thinking. And I think it's a disservice to us, and facilitation techniques can help us get back to that, like, and get everyone kind of aligned in thinking in the same way so that we can actually make some real progress. Dawan: Yeah. Making those choices ahead of time and those tradeoffs. I often look at the situations where I'm leading a group through something and kind of start to think about all the different people involved, because often the person who's sponsoring, has asked me to come in and help, isn't necessarily going to participate. Sometimes they do. So you have the sponsor, you have participants. Then, there's often someone that the sponsor is reporting to, which may be one or more organizations or maybe someone in their chain, and starting to think about how all of these people have expectations and needs. And there may be people downstream from the event or facilitated moment that need to do something with what was created. So how to think about what gets built and passed on and how that is captured and packaged is also a piece of it. Douglas: You know, I love this. That's your design background coming into the center, right? It’s like, how do we make sure to design in a way that considers and accommodates all these various people, because they're all going to come from different perspectives, different roles, different needs, and how do we design for them? Dawan: And so often, people will be asking for an event or a workshop or a moment, and I'll hear a lot about the thing, and “We want people to do this. And we have this much time, and this, this.” “Well, what problem are you trying to solve? Let's talk about sort of the thing that individually or organizationally you are hoping to accomplish. How will the world be different, how will your world be different when we're done?” Then we can start talking about like, “All right, well, what kind of thing actually solves that problem? And maybe it's a four-hour thing instead of a two-hour thing. Maybe it's a two-hour thing instead of a four-hour thing. Maybe it's something that we need to come back to over a series of weeks.”  But one of the first conversations I often have is, number one, listening to how people are framing up the problem they think they're trying to solve, because people don't like to hear that they're wrong about that. And so it’s how you listen. And I say, “Okay. How do you know?” Because what I want to know is, okay, here's the problem you think you're trying to solve. What evidence do you have about that? And sometimes they’re, “Oh, well, this is what's happened in the past. Here's what's led to this. Here's how we decided that this would contribute to this trajectory.” Okay, I can kind of take that as a given. But often I hear like, “Oh, well, we had some space in the schedule, and we were hoping to…” Then I want to dig for a meaningful problem for both them and the participants, for the sponsor and the participants, so that I don't come and do something, and then afterwards people are, “Hey, wait a minute. That wasn't a great experience for us. You didn't do a very good job.” Like, “Oh, because I helped you solve a problem you didn't really have.” So that's a key first step in the conversation for me. Douglas: Absolutely. You mentioned, how do you know? Another question that I think is similar to that is, how will we know? And it’s the, how will we know if we were successful, and did we actually get the outcome we were seeking? And if we're not clear on the outcome, we can't even articulate that ahead of time. So, you know, how do we design in some of these assessment points so that we can tell if we did a good job or not? Dawan: Sort of following on pretty much on the heels of the, “what problem are we trying to solve?” conversation, beginning to map out high-level options on an experience and suggesting, “Okay, here's where we might end up with this path,” and suggesting a couple of different paths so that the sponsor can start to have the conversation about like, “Okay, does this look like a win for you? We're heading toward, we can achieve this, this, and this in this amount of time and with this level of resourcing. Is that going to be worth it? Is that going to be a worthwhile use of both time and money and energy?” And having those conversations explicitly on the front end makes things so much easier, because once you have clear objectives, once you have a clear idea of the problem that you're trying to solve with the experience, then you can say, okay, I can get into design mode with what's happening from minute to minute without having to sort of guess and hope, and, like, show up on a day physically or virtually, and say, “I hope this works out,” as opposed to, like, “I'm fairly confident that this is going to work,” barring the usual emergencies that we encounter during facilitation. Douglas: Yeah. The thing that was kind of coming to mind for me as I was listening is this kind of scenario that you're creating, where you're allowing them to peer into the future, but let's consider that this is the outcome that we’re at, and they can kind of sit with it, because you're right. So many people get so fixated on the thing that they need to go do, especially if something becomes really hip and really, I don't know, there's really trendy. Like, for a while it seemed like everybody was doing hackathons. I think some people still do them. But when do you think to yourself, “I need to have a hackathon,” and your thoughts are so focused on the what that you're not actually peering into, well, what's that going to generate for us? What's that going to...? What kind of new opportunity or a new position does that put us in? And I like the framing that you were sharing around, because we talk a lot about purpose and outcomes, but the way you were describing it was really about setting up this kind of vision into this future scenario, where it's like, oh, this is the way the world will be if we do this. And how does that make you feel, or what does that create for you? Dawan: Yeah. And it's helping the sponsor articulate what is uniquely possible with this group of people in this moment, and how can we start to approach making that happen? because it's, you’re just like, oh, insert hackathon here. Well, no. What is the thing that we need and this group of people needs from this moment? Douglas: Also, earlier, you were talking about what I translated to be buyer versus user, at least that's the language we would use in the startup world, the software world. In the facilitation world, I guess we would say sponsor or stakeholder and participant. And coming back to that design background you have, I think it's really fascinating to think about, if we're not considering both in our outcomes and how we structure the flow of the day or the flow of the event, then we could potentially design something that's at a disservice or is not properly tuned for one versus the other. And often I think the sponsor is the one, or the buyer, is the one that gets a lot of the attention. Dawan: Yeah. The sponsor gets a lot of the attention because they're kind of in the room when you're designing. But the participants have to have not only have a good experience, but you have to understand what's in it for them so that they're going to bring the energy. They're going to be open to the flow of experience. They're going to be open to doing hard work at an intense pace, because the pacing of the events that I build is really, really tight. It's flexible, but tight. And we can we can talk about the mechanics of that, but it's mapping out who all of the people are. And you could say stakeholder or user or customer, but all the people. And that includes sponsor, participant, any people upstream who will be using what you produce. Sometimes it's also the people who are served by the people in the room who will be, perhaps, the ultimate beneficiary of some of the ideas that are put together in the room. And it's, “Okay with all of these people,” and then you can start to map out, “Okay, here's what this person needs out of the situation. The participants kind of need these things.” And you can also start to think about all the different relationships to the work, because sometimes part of the responsibility of the facilitator is to deepen relationships between participants or to help amplify ways people have connected in the past to do a particular bit of work. Douglas: I love this notion of thinking about relationships or the interconnectedness of the group, or the lack thereof, and how that impacts the work to be done or how the work that is done is impacted, impacting the future states of those relationships. I think that way of thinking, almost, like, you know, it's a micro social network, and you’re applying some almost network theory to it a bit and thinking about how you mend relationships or how you lean on existing ones. I think that's a really powerful design tool or lens to apply, and I like that way of thinking about it. I hadn’t really thought about it from that perspective before. Dawan: I owe many debts of gratitude to different designers and design researchers, in particular, Indi Young, and she really talks about the difference between the problem space and the solution space, and people like to race into the solution space without doing the hard work to understand the people and how people are making decisions and why people are behaving the way they behave. And if part of the work is getting into behavior change, to even more wanting to understand the people before you start setting up what happens in the room or what happens online, and especially her work around listening and how to listen well. I've taken that both into the sponsor conversations but also into the room, when I'm thinking about how to bring the deep listening that helps everyone really be fully present in the space. Douglas: It's amazing how much presence and deep listening could just have vast impacts across all meetings. And I often love to ask folks, if you could change one thing about any meeting, where would it be? And I think that might be—it’s hard for me to choose because we think about and work in this space so much, it’s like, oh, man, there's so many issues. But I tell you, that's so prevalent, this attendees just spending majority of the meeting thinking about what they're going to say next, and a lot of it's just because they don't want to sound dumb or they want to say something impressive in front of leadership. But I think there's a real missed opportunity to not worry about those things and to create safety for people just to speak however they speak and let the ideas flow.  And so I guess I'm curious. That brings me to that thinking around these moments in meetings that could be so much better. What kind of things start to surface for you as you think about things that could be and people could just do in their everyday meetings? Dawan: Oh, my gosh. Here comes the avalanche. Well, it's starting off before the meeting, what problem are you trying to solve? What is it that can only be done by bringing this group of people together and being clear about that before people get in the room or on Zoom or wherever? And then it's being conscious, like giving people space to think. And one of the things that I do in most of the events that I create and sometimes in meetings is give people a moment to write down what they're thinking. And it's just a few minutes, sometimes 10 minutes, depending on the length and depth of what we're working on. But then you give everyone a chance to get their thoughts down. That says a couple of things. You have people who are reluctant to speak, and that's because of power in the room, because of personality, because of relationships, because of trust, because of a whole bunch of things. So you have reluctance to speak. Then you have people who are—just need a moment to get a handle on sort of, “All right, what do I think about this? What do I really think?”  And the other thing that you get when you do that writing, especially in longer events, is you're able to capture some of those individual thoughts to process later after the event. So you're setting up what happens after, depending on how you structure what's captured. So that's one thing. Make sure there's enough space for people to think.  And then there's time and being disciplined about time, saying, okay, we have this list of things, and this isn't necessarily an agenda, but it's saying what's most important for us to get accomplished and then allocating your time across those most important things. That way you can say, “All right, we're confident that we're going to get these most important things done. And these couple other things, maybe we can take care of those offline or in a different way.” Those are a couple of things.  The other thing, and this is perhaps harder—can be harder—in meetings, depending on who you are. But it's just looking at the energy of the people who are in the room and helping people come into this space well. And sometimes that's taking moments so everyone can check in with each other. And those couple of minutes to reset and be human can help people attend to the business at hand faster and better. And I've noticed that when I've given people those, a little bit of a buffer and a chance to be human, it just made what follows really, really nice. And that's one of the advantages if you're meeting remotely and every everyone's remote, you can put people into one-on-one conversations for a couple minutes, because often you have the meeting dynamics of, oh, my people come in and they sit by who they sit by, and they say hello to say hello. But, you know, people get patterns. They have people they're closer to and people they know better. And you have the opportunity to force some of that mixing and build some of that team cohesiveness through those conversations, just with a couple of flicks of a switch in your favorite meeting software. Douglas: Yeah, it's interesting. Brings up two things we spoke about in the preshow chat. And the first is anytime we're thinking about design, space becomes a very critical element, whether we're talking about negative space or what have you. And I think in the virtual world, the tools we use can impact the space that we provide for our attendees and for people who are experiencing the design that we've laid out for the meeting and the session. And one of the things you mentioned was there's just too much blame being pointed at the tools themselves. Dawan: Yeah. Taking your in-person meeting practices and not changing anything and just dumping them into—I think everyone’s in front of a laptop. Everyone’s in front of a camera—probably not going to work so well. And there's a decent chance that the meetings weren’t so great to begin with, and now you're expecting that to work better in a different context, where you have different kinds of feedback, different kinds of interactions.  I've been watching the sort of emergency online-education conversations play out. There’re lots of people saying, “See? This whole online-education thing doesn't work.” Like, well, when people have three days to take an entire university online, I don't know, who might want to cut them some slack on that because what can you do? But people are starting to see other deeper examples of designed online education where you have the instructional design team working with faculty. And these are conversations we're having a lot where I teach at Georgetown in the master’s in Learning, Design, and Technology. And we're doing all of our education right now remotely, using Zoom and thinking through, okay, how does learning happen there? What's kind of uniquely possible—I like those words—with that medium? And how can we capture those moments? It's not a replacement. It's like, oh, it's going to be just like things that happen face to face. Like, no, it’s different, but also good. And how do we get to that different-but-also-good place? Douglas: That's amazing. You know, so much of the work we do is about kind of accelerating innovation, and so people can get it in their heads that it's about moving quickly. And just because we're accelerating action doesn't mean that it means that everything we have to do must be fast. And in fact, a lot of it is about taking the time it requires to design things carefully. But what we don't want is analysis paralysis, where we're just kind of spinning our wheels and just thinking about things. As long as we're making progress and doing things, then allowing the design process to take the time it requires, that's goodness. That's good stuff. It results in better outcomes. Dawan: And I like that, allowing the process to take the time it needs. Because I— in one way or another, I often said, like, listen, you're going to kind of pay the price of this now, or you're going to pay later.  Douglas: That old analogy or that old saying of, if you think an expert's expensive, try working with a novice.  Dawan: Yeah. If you don't take the time— I remember a conversation. It was like, “Well, we really don't have time to really do this work you're talking about around the problem we're trying to solve, the problem space. We really need to just get in there and do this and that.” And I say, “Okay, well, I understand what you're saying. How much time and resources do you have to do all of this over again?” And they say, “What?” It’s like, “No, no, no. I just want to make sure that if we're taking this approach, that you can reinvest all of this to do all of this work again in case we get the problem wrong, because then we can just sort of jump in and guess because you have this huge stack of resources to burn.” And usually they're like, “Oh, no, no, no, we don't have extra money. We don't have extra time. So, yeah. Maybe we should spend a little time increasing the chances that we're solving problems that are worth solving.” Douglas: Yeah. It's always a Tilt sign for me when someone comes in and they've got it all figured out and they just want a price. It’s like, hey, I'm not selling cars here. I can't just say, this is what it’s going to be. And, you know, it's always, how much is it? And I think that mentality of innovation in a bottle on the shelf is something that would give the allure that that's what's happening, but it takes a lot of care and a lot of time to design and extract out where the there is. Dawan: Well, I've learned to be very clear around the expectations of what's possible within the boundaries of the work, because there is this—I think we're past the moment a little bit. But there was this moment maybe five years ago when it was the design as magic. It was like, oh, it's magic. It's the Silicon Valley juice, and drink it. You will sprout innovation. You will sprout market cap. Like, it's amazing. Like, oh my gosh, an IPO just fell out of my body. No. It doesn’t work that way, and there are some people who also, like, heard that, went out and bought some, it didn't work. Like, oh, this doesn't work. And it’s like, “Oh, yeah.” And it’s like, you probably said, “I will pay x,” and someone said, “I will take x,” and then you were surprised you didn't get the results, as opposed to someone who says, “Well, what problem are you trying to solve? What are you hoping to accomplish? What are you looking to invest over time in doing this work well and building the skills of your team to do this well?” because ideally, after working with me for a while, people no longer need me. I hate to want to do that to myself, but if I'm doing my work well, eventually it seems like, “No, we've got this. We can build on our own,” or “It's been built into the organization.” Sometimes people will just want me to come in and do. But those are the things that I get happy about. Like, “Oh, you want me to build something that will last longer than I'm there? I like that.” Douglas: Yeah. There’s legacy. We're making a difference in the world. Dawan: Yeah. And it’s also seeing what good design can do once it takes root in a culture. It's not, once again, going to be somehow magical, but I would say it will be better. And better varies from place to place. But I like to see that, or even just to see people taking away little things.  One of the things that I do with all of my engagements is I create a very detailed facilitation guide, and I have it all the way down to one-minute increments for different things. And I showed one of the—someone I work with one of these. They’re like, “Are you crazy? People will be late for this, and this will run long, and that will...” I know. But now that I've thought through it at this level, I know that when something goes wrong here, I know where to adjust and how to adjust. And so once you have that problem to resolve in the outcomes, then you can say, “Well, these people are trying to get to know each other, so a five-minute break here isn't really going to work. They kind of need 10 minutes. And how can we make sure the mingling happens? How can we make sure that people are in the relationship-building phase as opposed to a relationship deepening? So how do we build that into the breaks, or if there's a lunch or whatever the moments are? And that requires getting really granular on paper so that during the event you can roll with the opportunities, whether it's a tech fail or sort of one moment that is better than you expected. I don't want to interrupt this, because the thing that we wanted to happen at 4:00 p.m. is now happening at 11:00. So I'm not going to get in the way of it. I'll just have to redesign.” And it gives you something to tweak, something to adapt. Douglas: And I love this mantra from, I think it comes from complexity-in-form thinking, and definitely heard it in the Liberating Structures community. But what happens was meant to happen. And it's very much akin to what I heard you say earlier around embracing the uniquely possible.  Dawan: Mm-hmm. Douglas: So going back to this concept of participant energy and taking into consideration all the fatigue we're all experiencing, and also someone could have had a crises, even though we've done some upfront research and exploration into where the team’s at and the dynamics, when we walk into the room, things could be quite different. So I'm curious to hear what you've done in scenarios like that or what you do to prepare for things and be ready for the unexpected. Dawan: Well, I leave a cushion in every event of a certain amount of time, knowing that sometimes different things will run over. I design every break. So if I have a five-minute break in the schedule, and I tell everyone, “Hey, it's time for five-minute break,” I have 10 minutes built into the schedule because five-minute breaks always take ten minutes. And those are some of the mechanics on the how I'm connecting with people. I'm assuming, and especially sort of now as we're recording in the summer of COVID, that people are coming into the event fragile and burned out. And so one of the things that I try to stop and do is give people a chance to check in and talk. I'm assuming they’re, like, “Hey, your social interactions are kind of not happening the way they used to. Your coping mechanisms have all been broken and reshuffled.” So it's helping people have just very human conversations and easing into the work, and I also find taking more breaks, not expecting people to sustain the intensity as long.  When I'm in the room with people, it's very easy to read the energy. And I find a lot of the work is me sort of pushing energy into the room. And you can do that to an extent. You’re like, “Well, what do you mean, pushing energy? Is this some sort of mystical, reiki thing? What are you doing?” Well, it's making that eye contact, giving people the big smile, and getting the big smile back, and doing that with lots of people moving around in the space, giving people a different place to focus in. And when I'm doing that virtually, it's a lot of time sort of scanning the faces on the screens, but recognizing when like, “Oh, you know, we need to do sort of an impromptu small-group thing,” and mixing up the types of interaction, the types of things people are seeing on the screen, so it’s not just, oh, you’re seeing other faces. Sometimes there’s going to be oh I don’t know, images, diagrams, but also using if you have any kind of whiteboarding or drawing overlay in the software that you're using, I take it home to mark things up. One of the things I do in small groups, we’ll actually get giant sheets of paper and draw with each other, and that pulls people in. And you can do the same thing virtually.  You know, those are a couple ways I think about just the energy in the room and keeping it going. And also, you have to recognize that there may come a point where people are just done, and it may come before you want it to, but there's nothing you can do about that. The thing I do structurally is I try to put sort of the high-intensity generative things earlier in the schedule and the playing with, making sense with, tweaking of things that are sort of already out there later in the day so that it's kind of organizing and making sense of and playing with so that you're not being called upon to do the mentally intense things or the things that are going to rely on a lot of your interpersonal skills around negotiation and figuring things out late in the day. That tends to be, oh, if people are going to run out of steam, you start to see it in the outputs late in the day. So I try to push some of that earlier in the day so that by the time we are getting toward the end of things, it’s like, okay, these are lighter-lift activities and exchanges. Douglas: Even during break times, I like to remind people to turn off their video and step away to remind them not to go, just jump in the email or whatever, because it’ll only contribute to the fatigue later.  Dawan: I've had a sort of working-from-home career, so the adjustment wasn't quite as brutal for me. I've done my share of time in the office, but I was just used to sort of having my studio in the house and doing everything that I needed to do with the short commute and managing the time and interaction and getting my people time in and having the energy flow. And when you're having to learn those things and adjust those things, especially if it doesn't suit your personality, that's when it can be difficult. And in meetings, it's recognizing that you might have some people who are very comfortable with the screen and the environment and how the technology flows, and other people may be just straining against it because they're desperate to be within touching distance of another human being and get that high-fidelity interaction with micro expressions and scents and all sorts of things.  Douglas: Yeah. The dynamic’s completely shifted. And in the in-person realm, you could have folks that are quiet and don't ask a lot of questions. Those same folks might ask a lot of questions when they're virtual because just that layer of glass and many, many miles of air is separation enough to where they feel more comfortable speaking up. And other folks, you know, like you say, are debilitated because they don't have all the signals they're used to having. I think it's a great reminder that facilitators, we just have to listen, and we have to bring in as much data as we can from the signals we have. And you mentioned reading the room. I'm curious which signals that you use to read that digital room, because that can be problematic. Dawan: Well, in some ways, they're the same signals. I'm looking for, for example, give a set of instructions. I'm looking for the brows that are suddenly furrowed. And usually when people are sort of squinching their eyebrows together, that's their way of saying, “Those instructions were unclear to me.” But people are reluctant to say that. They'll sort of dive into it, thinking that they're the only one who didn't understand. And probably not. It's probably that your instructions were unclear, and you need to try that again.  And another thing is just actually checking in with people. The underutilized chat function, for example, in Zoom, there’s so much that you can do with that, because when you're in a sort of face-to-face environment, you have kind of one channel in terms of, there's like, yeah, there’s sort of visual cues and all that. But let's just say that there's, like, okay, you're going to say something or make a gesture in some way. But if we're actually going to talk, it's going to be voices. Whereas in Zoom you have the voice, you have the chat feed. Sometimes there’s another backchannel if everyone is, say, in Slack. And so you have all of these multiple channels. And that's a different kind of conversation because now you can have people dropping in web links as someone is presenting, asking questions that can be picked up later, and so you have these multiple threads going on. And if you're looking for, oh, we want this to be just like our in-person meetings, that's really distracting. Like, well, that's a huge opportunity for people to just drop in questions as they think of them. And you come back and weave them in. You have if one person is presenting, you have someone else on the team keep an eye on the chat. So there are, I think, huge opportunities presented by that in the different channels. So the reading the room becomes kind of an interactive, participatory process. Instead of one person reading in the face-to-face contacts, you have sort of multiple people nurturing the conversation via those multiple channels. Douglas: Yeah. And those things become elements you can design for, because I think in real life, we've spent years and years so it’s in a lot of ways just second nature, so we don’t consider it much like when we just walk into a room, because we can rely on our innate skills at relating. And sure, as facilitators we sharpen them, but we kind of have matured to a point, I feel, that it's not always a consideration, but in the digital space, you know, thinking of how many co-facilitators do I want? Do I want someone on Slack or Zoom chats, watching that stuff? So to me, it's really become a design consideration before we even enter into the meeting itself. Dawan: And we're still figuring out the opportunities. I like to say, okay, well, before I sort of add other tools, add other functionality, what are the ways we can sort of tweak what we have, twist what we have so that everyone's like, “Oh yeah, there's these simple tools”? Sometimes it's as simple as “Okay, get a piece of paper and a pen, and everyone turn off your cameras and sketch out how you think this holds together for a few minutes. And then we'll have the conversation,” so that you're even having someone, they’re not stepping away from the meeting, but they're stepping away from, “I just have my keyboard.” You're like, “Oh, I get to draw for a minute.” And it's using those simple opportunities to make the exchange extremely rich the same way it would be if everyone was in the room.  And there have been a couple of instances where I was happy that everyone was online, because I knew that their interactions, we wouldn't have been able to have if everyone was face to face. So like, for example, having 20 people have one-on-one conversations and doing several rounds of those, after you've done that and everyone's had a chance to chat for a few minutes with three different people in the room, now you're set up differently as a group for what happens later, as opposed to if you were sort of face to face in a room doing that and having 10 conversations all going on in a conference room, it’s just like, oh, you can't really, like, having trouble hearing, and there's overhearing, and you can't just focus on one person. There's all this distraction. So people are able to connect that way really fast, really deep, which is nice.  So it's finding those things that are the opportunities presented by the challenge of leading and collaborating as we sort of adapt to our world as it changes. Douglas: Yeah. To use your words, we're embracing what's uniquely possible with these new tools. Dawan: Yeah. Douglas: Excellent. Well, I think that might be a great spot to stop here on today's show. But before we go, I think listeners will be really curious how to find you, how to connect with you. You're doing some great work, and I know some people are going to want to know how to reach out. Dawan: Oh, thanks. While I'm easy to find at fluidhive.com. If you search my last name, you will get a university. But Dawan Stanford, there aren't many of them, so that's another easy way to find me. LinkedIn and Twitter are good places to look. You can also learn more about the learning-design work that I'm involved with at Georgetown in the master’s in Learning, Design, and Technology at Georgetown University. And you can also check me out on the Design Thinking 101 podcast, where I am hosting that show. Douglas: Excellent. Yeah, definitely check it out. And Dawan, it's been a pleasure chatting with you today. I hope we stay in touch and continue the journey together. Dawan: Oh, well, thanks for having me. It’s been a ball. Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

As menders working with legacy code, we are focused on identifying and reducing technical debt. But how much easier this task would be if the creator of the code or the previous maintainer left us some breadcrumbs to follow? A simple note on the rationale for a particular decision they have made or a warning about interconnected lines of code would take us a long way! Today we talk with Andrea Goulet, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Corgibytes. Her empathy-driven approach to software development earned her recognition as one of the Top Ten Professionals in Software Under 35 by LinkedIn. She tells us about this lack of communication in software development, the phenomenon she calls the communication debt, and how its reduction can make the software more robust and its maintenance more efficient. When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Andrea via LinkedIn, contact her via Corgibytes' website, and check out her LinkedIn courses: Agile Software Development: Remote Teams and Creating an Agile Culture.  Mentioned in this episode: Andrea on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreamgoulet/  Andrea on Twitter at https://twitter.com/andreagoulet  Corgibytes website at https://corgibytes.com  Andrea Goulet, Agile Software Development: Remote Teams at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/agile-software-development-remote-teams  Andrea Goulet, Creating an Agile Culture at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/agile-software-development-creating-an-agile-culture    Changelog podcast with Katrina Owen at https://changelog.com/podcast/108  Katrina Owen, Exorcism.io at https://exercism.io  Indi Young, Practical Empathy at https://amzn.to/3jkDlLH* Legacy Code Rocks with Indi Young at https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/270edc0e/practical-empathy-with-indi-young Ward Cunningham on technical debt at https://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE Legacy Code Rocks with Arlo Belshee at https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/c240c45d/naming-with-arlo-belshee Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow at https://amzn.to/3kceRW3* Legacy Code Rocks with Cyrille Martraire at https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/2fd0fdeb/living-documentation-with-cyrille-martraire  Cyrille Martraire, Living Documentation at https://amzn.to/3kd2J7e* * Heads up! If you purchase a book through the links above, we will get a small commission which helps us continue to bring quality content to our Legacy Code Rocks! community. You won’t pay a penny more, we receive a small kickback, and you’re supporting our friends who wrote them. Everybody wins!

Indi is an independent qualitative data scientist who provides organizations solid data to guide product design strategy and spark innovation by better understanding human behavior. Find Indi Young Online:Medium: https://medium.com/@indiyoungLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/indiyoung Website: https://indiyoung.com/Referenced:Dr. Brene Brown: https://brenebrown.com Inside Out by Pixar:https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Out-Plus-Bonus-Features/dp/B00ZZMEBFS Practical Empathy: For Creativity and Collaboration in Your Work by Indi Young:https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Ethics-Cennydd-Bowles/dp/1999601912 We Get Real AF Podcast Credits:Producers & Hosts: Vanessa Alava & Sue RobinsonVanessa AlavaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessahalava/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessahalava/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanessahalava Sue RobinsonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-robinson-29025623/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/memyselfandfinds/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sociallysue_Audio Producer/Editor: Sam Mclean Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcleansounds/Website: www.inphase.bizAudio Music Track Title: Beatles UniteArtist: Rachel K. CollierYouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiHnYgtOn8u9YovYplMeXcwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelkcollier/ Website: https://www.rachelkcollier.com Intro Voice-Over Artist: Veronica HortaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronicahorta/Cover Artwork Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@alicemoore We Get Real AF Podcast OnlineInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wegetrealaf/Twitter: https://twitter.com/wegetrealafFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wegetrealaf/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wegetrealafWebsite: https://wegetrealaf.com Support the show (https://wegetrealaf.com/how-you-can-help)

On today's episode, I sat down with Nikki Anderson, User Research Lead at Zalando and Founder of User Research Academy. Nikki started her user research career about 7 years ago, with a foundation in quantitative research but has since shifted focus to specialize in qualitative user research where Nikki has worked in B2B, B2C, B2B2C and has both worked as a freelancer and worked in corporate settings. After having started her career in New York, Nikki has since moved to Germany where Zalando is based. With such a robust and diverse background in user research Nikki had a ton of great advice and insight to share. Here's what we discussed: Some of the biggest misconceptions of user research Why quant or qual data alone is not enough to make decisions The trust cost of doing user research and the cost of not doing it Low cost ways to source user feedback What Nikki has learned throughout her career that she wants other user researchers to know The difference between user research and UX design Why planning and purpose are essential to the value of research How to influence executives to care about user research What a great partnership looks like between user research and product management in setting priority for what you build How to know if you're doing user research right in a well-resourced company Ways to get scrappy if you're a user research team of one How Product Managers can do user research on their own Here's the resources: Google's Heart Framework Podcasts: Awkward Silences, Dollars to Donuts & Mixed Methods Books: Just Enough Research by Erika Hall; Practical Empathy by Indi Young; Quantifying the User Experience by Jeff Sauros Recommended resources for user researchers Important concepts, processes, and terminology User Research Academy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/productmanagementlessons/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/productmanagementlessons/support

## LinksJobs to be doneMilkshake in the morning theoryPractical Empathy - Indi YoungSales SafariMichele Hansen's talk at MicroConf 2019: How to get Useful User Feedback 30x500 - Amy Hoy## Transcript (powered by Otter.ai - Please raise any issues found in the transcript.  AI will one day get us there, but until then...)George Stocker  0:00  Hello, I'm George Stocker, and this is the build better software podcast. Today we're talking about product discovery and customer product research. I have the privilege of welcoming Michelle Hanson, founder and CEO of Geocod.io to the show to talk about this. Welcome, Michelle. Hi.Michele Hansen  0:15   Thank you for having me on today.George Stocker  0:17   Thanks for joining us. Now for people who may or may not know you, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? Michele Hansen  0:24  Yeah, so I'm co founder of geocod.io, which is a bootstrap software as a service company that my husband and I started about six and a half years ago. We started it as a side project and over a couple of years of slowly growing, listening to our customers and building for what they needed, and where the gaps in the market were. Transition to full time. So my background is in product development. And that's primarily what what I would say my background is, is in and where my heart really lies. So now running a company was just the two of us take on a lot of hats far beyond product.George Stocker  1:05   Yeah. And before GeoCod.io Do you also did product research or product management type work for the Motley Fool? Michele Hansen  1:16  Yeah, so I did product management and product development, which was an incredibly fun part of my career, worked with some really wonderful people and did a lot of fun research that led to some some good outcomes. George Stocker  1:30  Okay, so what was so I think that the Motley Fool is a is a services company. They have financial newsletters that they that they sell subscription services to. And Geocod.io is a SaaS product?Michele Hansen  1:48  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So so one was b2c, and the other is b2b, which has shown me some really interesting differences and what it's like to do customer research and in a consumer context versus in a business context, I think there are a lot more similarities than people might think.George Stocker  2:06   Okay, so let's let's dive first into the into the b2c context the consumer. And so that would that would be your work at The Motley Fool I, I believe, right?Michele Hansen  2:16   Yeah So So you mentioned that they create financial newsletters and a lot of what we're doing is basically how do we modernize the concept of a financial newsletter so they had gone from being print newsletters and then and then been fairly revolutionary and bringing them online fairly early. And then how do you evolve that into something that meets the expectations that consumers have now of things being customized and personalized and meeting their interests and being consumable very quickly, all those those kinds of things about that are that are very, that have been very relevant in consumer for quite some time now. How do we make the concept of a financial newsletter or a fight or a sort of financial publishing product meet those kinds of experts. Yeah. And so what was the where would an idea start? And where would the customer come in? When you were designing something new for a customer at the fool? That's a really interesting question because it came in and a lot of different places. When we first started really working directly with customers, when I was there, it was at the very end of the process, which people say is generally not when you should start talking to them, you should start talking to them before you even have the idea. But when we first started, the customer was was not in the beginning part of the process. And so it was more at the very end in terms of usability testing. And the more and more we did that, and the more and and more that we were creating things and then they weren't reaching the KPIs that we were hoping for that we started going back in the process and talking to the customer earlier and earlier and earlier, until eventually the customer was the very first start. We did a lot of different types of customer interaction from in depth interviews that could be an hour or an hour and a half to usability testing to. We did testing of products, we did testing of landing pages. We did observations through tools like hot jar and user testing, where you're not actually interacting with the user. We were fortunate to do a lot of different types of learning from our customer.George Stocker  4:26   Yeah. And so you noticed that there was a KPI difference. So when you talk to the customers earlier, did it did it affect your KPIs? Did they go in, they start going in the right directions. Was there a correlation between the two?Michele Hansen  4:39   Yeah, so where the product process would start, what for probably about the first year I was there was you you would have you know, a spreadsheet of all of the different KPIs and measures of you know, different groups of users and whether they are meeting them and you know, so if a user clicked on this, their livelihood, that they they ended up meeting the KPI was was this but if they didn't click on this, but they clicked on this and said, You know that they and sort of all sorts of permutations like that. And so it really start out with Okay, what's the what is the spreadsheet say about the users who are the most successful did these actions so then how do we make more users do those actions so they become more successful? And the problem was that was that those those actions really weren't weren't causative. And there was an awareness that those actions weren't causative. But there was a limited ability to be able, well, if we don't, if we don't use the spreadsheet, then what are we going to use? And so there could be a little, you know, well, let's bring in customer support and see what they think. And so we would you be gradually refining the products. And it really wasn't until we started interviewing the customers and diving deep into what they were trying to do. And baking usability testing into the process and bringing developers and designers into those interviews and into those usability sessions, that we really started to have breakthroughs. And so it sounds like the fool had a very robust technical process. For getting metrics from users like they, and it sounds like from what I'm hearing, at least that you took that you also but you think started may or once you focused on actually face to face conversations with with your customer. Yeah, there was an extremely strong culture of quantitative data. And where we ended up evolving the process was bringing in the, the qualitative side to explain why the quantitative data was showing us what it was because you can, you can, you know, look at Google Analytics all day, but it's never going to tell you why somebody did something. Only a person can tell you that, of course, you shouldn't just talk to one person, you need to talk to lots of them. But But we found that that really helped explain to us why things were happening as they were. And once we started working more collaboratively with the users throughout the process, then the data started to make more sense.George Stocker  6:57   Yeah, my background is In programming, programming and architecture, and though I've been in customer facing roles, I always get nervous talking to people who are not already, like using the software and not already customers. And I especially would get nervous thinking about, oh gosh, how am I gonna? How do I talk to these people to these people about, you know, a product or a service that they that I want to build for them? But, you know, it's not, it's not baked, it's not formed, how do you how do you reach out? How do you get past that? You know, if we share it with them, it's, it may be embarrassing, maybe not what they want, you know, how do you get past that initial bump? Michele Hansen  7:43  There's so much fear and so much justified fear that when you make yourself vulnerable, and you put something in front of someone that you have created, or you've been you've been working on for years that they're going to say this doesn't make any sense. And so the first big hurdle to get over is that The purpose of the interview is understanding their worldview and how they understand things and what their mental model is. No two humans are alike. And everyone has a different way of doing things. And so what you're trying to do in an interview or a usability session is understand how their brain works. So that you can better craft what you are doing to in a way that makes sense for them. And so there's there is so much fear around, what happens if I put this in front of someone and they don't like it, or it doesn't make sense, or they're critical of it, or there there is also just as much of well, they're going to say something and I think that's dumb. And I purposely didn't do it that way. And I'm going to tell them why and you can't do any of that. Because someone giving you feedback is a gift. And until you can suspend your own judgments and your own insecurities about their reactions to what you have built. You won't be able to receive that gift and if you can put that aside and and understand that someone is taking time out of their day to talk to you about your product, they are giving you so much useful information. And if it turns out that what they are expecting is totally different than what you have built. That is some of the most valuable breakthrough feedback because that can help you overcome so many obstacles because you can understand, oh, this is why people aren't converting or this is why I get the same support ticket over and over and over and over again. Now the ways you could solve that is you could throw more money and advertising towards that landing page. Or you could throw more bodies at it in the form of customer support. Or you could fix the fact that it isn't reflecting how people expect it to behave or what they would want it to say or the kinds of problems they want you to solve. And so only through interviewing and conducting sessions with users can you really get to the bottom of George Stocker  9:57  now for the Motley Fool you had existing Paid premium customers you could reach out to for new features. But I take it when you were starting to build geocoding Oh, you probably didn't have paying customers. So how did how was your process for customer discovery with geocoding?Michele Hansen  10:15   Oh, so we did do interviews with non paying customers. At the full weeks, we interviewed a lot of different types of customers. So we would interview customers who were on entry level products, customers who were on mid tier products, customers were on the highest end products, customers who had cancelled all of those products, people who had only subscribed to free emails for a long time, but never purchased anything people who had never heard of the company before. So that was a really interesting breadth of customers. For GeoCodio, we built it from a place of it was a product that we needed ourselves. So that was where we started from because we had a couple of key blockers with the existing geo coders out there. So the first one was that they're really unaffordable. So at the time, you You could either get 2500, free to code from Google day, which is basically an address to a coordinate or coordinate address because computers don't understand addresses and coordinate. So you can get 2500 free per day. Or you could pay like $20,000 a year for an enterprise license. And like that was it. And so we're like, well, that's not going to work. Because we had this little iPhone app that showed you the opening hours of grocery stores near you. This is before you could just type it into Google. And it would tell you six years ago, it didn't do that. The other problem we had was that we wanted to be able to store the data. Because with Google, you could only cache it or worse, in some cases, you have to reload it every time the map loads. And so you run through those, those lookups really fast. And so you're like, we just want to be able to pay for whatever we need, and then just store the data on our end. And so those two frustrations led us to creating a very rudimentary geo coder that just solved our needs. And as we talked to our developer friends about this, they were like, oh, Like I have that problem, too. And so one day, my my husband ended up going, I think he was I think he was actually on maternity leave. So he brought our daughter who was two months old at the time to a 1776, which was like a hackerspace incubator in DC. I don't know if it's still around.George Stocker  12:19  Yeah, I don't know, either. Michele Hansen  12:21  Yeah. But it was a pretty cool space for a while. And I actually I did a hackathon there once. And so he brought it there and like, talk to some of our friends who were working at startups that were working out of there and like, got some feedback on the API. And so we built it to be very developer focused from the beginning. And on our first day of launch, which is really a sign of the demand. We ended up on the front page of Hacker News pretty much all day, which never happens. And I think today, it would be that would be the equivalent of being on the top of product on the product wasn't around yet. And so we got a ton of feedback from people. Like we got hundreds and hundreds of emails with, can you do this? Can you do that, like, I want to be able to do this, I want to be able to do that. And so from the very beginning, customer feedback was a key part of it. And I remember taking so many phone calls from people who had different needs. And one of the early ones that that came up really often was uploading a spreadsheet. So we had built this with developers in mind. But it turned out people you know, people in marketing or people who aren't developers had spreadsheets of addresses, and they needed this information as well. And the only other option out there was you could email your spreadsheet to like some guy, and he would get it back to you in a couple of days. George Stocker  13:38  You knew a guy, Michele Hansen  13:39  and yeah, it was like it was pretty sketchy andand there's this quote from Patrick McKenzie, that I love that see if you can find a business that where people are emailing spreadsheets back and forth to one another. That's a really good sign that there is a potential SAS out there. And so and so that was one of our first big features that was heavily influenced by customer feedback. But I would say from the entire beginning of the product, it's it's been guided by what people express to us and trying to understand those needs better and trying to eliminate frustrations in their process and their adjacent tasks make things easy for them.George Stocker  14:17   Do you have quantitative research that you do? Which Geocodio do or is it on the qualitative side? What's that? What's that mix look like when you're when you're dealing with product discovery. Michele Hansen  14:28  So the research I do do these days, kind of in two broad categories, and I so the first is direct customer interactions. So customer interviews, usability testing, and responding to customer support. So my husband and I, we do everything, including all the customer support, which people are always surprised by. But we find that we've been able to really, drastically decrease the number of tickets that we've gotten over the years just because we're the ones seeing the issues and so we fixed them so that we don't ever have that ticket recur again.And we do customer interviews are pre pandemic, I guess we do them on a regular basis. So I would have been doing maybe four to five a week. But we've really pulled that back. Now that's the pandemic and, you know, kids are at home and everyone's schedules a bit wonky. Yeah, that wonky? Yeah. And so then on the quantitative side, so I mentioned the fool the quantitative data was very much driven by user actions. So Google Analytics, site activity, that kind of thing. And I used to do that sort of analysis. And I really moved away from that more towards broader market level research. And so for example, you know, we have customers in banking, and they might say to us, oh, there's this specific act that our customers need to be compliant with. And there are these specific types of data that they're appending and there is this tool they use from the government for it, but they don't really like it very much because it's complicated and it's clunky as already thing you can do with that. And so what I would do with that is instead Okay, well, well, what is this act? You know, how many banks are subject to it? You know, what are the tools they're currently using? How good are those tools? You know, it's more it's more market research from a macro level, then it is, you know, specific people. And these days, if I want answers from specific people, I will just go ask them myself, rather than trying to sleuth through numbers and figure out what they're trying to do. George Stocker  16:33  So you'll fire up an email and send it out to a customer. Michele Hansen  16:36  Yes. So for example, if say we are we're looking for we're working on these specific data pens. So our niche in the market I should probably explain is not only the geocoding, but unlocking pieces of data that are only accessible if you have the coordinates. So for example, let's say that you have a charity and you want people to contact Congress about an issue that is important to your supporters. So if you're a To use any other service, in order to send an email to that person with their Congress person's phone number, you would first have to hit one API that gives you their coordinates, then you have to go ahead another API that goes coordinates to the congressional district number, then you have to go to another API, that is congressional district number two, the congresspersons phone number, and then you have to throw all of that and MailChimp or whatever you're using, and what you do, instead, you can just send us the address, and we'll give you all of that information back in one.George Stocker  17:28   Wow.Michele Hansen  17:29   So we'll also do that with with census data or, you know, if you if you want the median household income for an area or you need time zones, or you know, all sorts of other things are very often people or if you need to connect to government datasets, they're at this designation called the FIPS code. And so all the government data is at those levels that is basically down to sort of the the neighborhood block level. And so we make it easy to add all those types of data to eliminate steps simples process. And so if we're like, you know what we are creating Adding on these. So for the banking, for example, we're considering adding on these appends that are the customers who are already using this type of appender. Using that I would fire off an email to, you know, let's say 200 people who have used it recently, and see if I can get five of them on the phone. That's usually my rule of thumb is five people. The real rule is you stop interviewing when you start hearing the same thing over and over again, whether whether that's when you're when you're putting a landing page in front of someone or you're trying to interview people about a specific discrete question, though the most interviews I've ever done for one question is 11, I believe, of course, there can be a lot more for exploratory research.George Stocker  18:44   So for that, for those 11 just ballpark how many ballpark did you have to reach out to to get 11 people to talk to you, you said before was 200 to five is that? Is it roughly linear from that?Michele Hansen  18:56   Yeah, that was a project at the fool so I'm not quite sure how many People, because I was not involved in the recruiting. I think in my recruitment emails to pull up the stats on it, I want to say I usually get about a 5% response rate. So I had I have an email that fires off to two people after they make their first payment, trying to figure out why did they come to us? What are they switching from? What are they trying to do? You know, what, what caused them to switch services and come to us. And I have been, you know, tweaking that every month to try to get that response rate higher, and about about 5% is the best I've been able to get from, and that's for b2b. That isn't that isn't b2b. And so it really depends on on where you're recruiting from. So I've recruited from a lot of different places from users who are already using the product to people who have expressed interest in it to people have no idea that it exists, and I got them off of Reddit or Twitter. It's really run the gamut.George Stocker  19:58   So do you you do sleuthing on Reddit and Twitter to find to find people to interview. Michele Hansen  20:05  Yes. So and and just observing what people are talking about can be such a great way to understand what's going on. If you're familiar with Amy hoy, she has a whole course on sales Safari. And this is one of the tactics she talks about is see what people are already complaining about. What are what are they saying they're trying to do? And they're frustrated by it? What are they tweeting at your competitors, I have found Reddit to be a great place to recruit users who, who don't have any biases about your product, they will tell you, you know, and it's so great for honest feedback when something isn't working. And, of course, you have to provide an incentive, I generally find that a $25 amazon gift card is more than enough for people who have no association with the product. And And that applies in consumer as well. Though, oftentimes, because it's in b2b, and I'm one of the founders of the company. I Find that people are often so grateful to have a company that is willing to listen to them that a monetary reward is not necessary because they're just so excited that there's a company it's going to listen and not just ignore them. And so usually I send them a nice handwritten thank you note and a pair of God of socks.George Stocker  21:19   Nice.Michele Hansen  21:20  , never underestimate the power of a handwritten thing.George Stocker  21:23   Or the socks. I'm a big fan of socks myself.Michele Hansen  21:25   Yeah, those were a new thing that we got, like six months ago. We wanted to get some like fun swag, and you know, t shirts. You know, it's tough because you got to get sizes and be the socks have been a huge hit a lot. It's been kind of fun. And so your God, his business model, is that paid all the way through? Are there free trials? What's the, you know, what's the model look like? We have a freemium model, which I've heard people describe as it's not a pricing model. It's a marketing strategy, which is totally accurate because our our, our free tier does the marketing for us. So everything low level, you can get 2500 free per day, which we started that level because that's what Google was offering at the time. And so we basically, we had to offer that in order to be competitive. And then we have a pays you go plan. So you can just pay for whatever your usage was, which was the big thing that we really wanted beginning. But then we've had to add on a variety of other tiers to meet other needs. So we have an unlimited tier, which is a non rate limited plan for people who need to process up to 5 million addresses a day, which is a monthly subscription. We we also have sort of more custom, you know, on premise options, we launched a HIPAA compliant product about two years ago. So there's a lot of different options for people depending on what their volume security needs are nice. From a from a feature perspective.George Stocker  22:55  You know, how often do you find yourself needing to do research for new features? versus, you know, just go ahead and building it is is the is the interview now an integral part of every time that you want to release a feature? Or is it sometimes you're like, no, this is safe, we'll just we'll just release this?Michele Hansen  23:13  The features always come out of customer feedback, always. And so whether that's it's come up in interviews or in support requests, features are always coming out of a feature requests or feedback from users. We're never doing the, you know, gather the smartest guys in a room with a conference table and have them come up with something largely because we don't have a conference table. And we're not all guys. And but that's a very common, you know, product development process and a lot of companies is let's just, you know, get our smart people together and they'll figure something out. And we have thousands of customers who have been so generous with us on their own, their own feedback and sharing their own vulnerabilities of where they're frustrated with their own processes. We have more than enough to, to inspire us to move forward and to make improvements. So for example, we added zip plus for data for mailing purposes. So if you know you have your zip code, and then there's the plus four, that's more specific. For the USPS, we started receiving requests for that probably five or six years ago. And we just launched that in May. But that came out of years and years of customer feedback and learning very intimately, what people wanted and why they wanted it and how it fit into their process. So that it came time to build it. We had a very clear idea of it. And we also do, if there are questions about especially about interfaces, that's where usability testing really comes in handy.George Stocker  24:47  Interface like API or UI or other types?Michele Hansen  24:52  Yes. Yeah. So the API or any sort of other interface rather than this sort of conceptual level of the need, you know, how do you take tangibly translate that need into something that someone can interact with usability testing is really helpful there. And most of the time we do usability testing in advance of that unless it's a very straightforward change. So for example, we're currently converting our dashboard to tailwind which my husband's been really excited and wanted to do for a very long time. George Stocker  25:24  That's a CSS framework.Michele Hansen  25:26   Yeah, yeah, it is.And, and so we're not doing usability testing on that, but that's because we're doing a one to one copy over that right now. And then once we get it into tailwind, then we can do the usability testing on top of it because it's running on bootstrap three right now, and it's not a delight to work with. So we probably put off work on that, but now that it's in a much more workable framework, we'll be doing more iteration on George Stocker  25:54  modern software development we focus on generally avoiding talking to people A-B testing is big? Michele Hansen  26:01  Yeah, George Stocker  26:02  you know, if you were going to rank the methods of getting customer research, product feedback, and and doing product discovery, kind of what, how would you rank them in descending order?Michele Hansen  26:15   I think there's space for every tool. But I think there are a lot of tools that get used in scenarios where another one might be more appropriate. And, you know, maybe you're using a chainsaw when all you really need is an axe or a hammer. And, and so it's about understanding where those tools fit. And there are a lot of companies that are very, you know, we're very AV testing and this this is this is what we do, and then they don't do other ones or if I mean, if even if there was a company that just did interviews, you need other pieces of information from your users at a high level at at a large scale and at a micro scale. And so I think you need a holistic view of all of the different ways of listening to your customers. Whether that is literally listening to them in a conversation or listening to them in the in the form of which landing page or are they reacting to, but those landing pages coming out as a result of lots of interviews and done usability testing on them, and then you do the A B test, because you're unclear on which, you know, design is really going to work better, even though the copy from that directly flows from your interviews and from the research, the broader market research you've done, and you've tested them for the other other elements. I think a lot of companies skip steps or they see that they say that interviews and usability testing are time consuming, so they just don't do them. And or they're harder to articulate the benefits of them to upper management and so they get shelved. And I think companies are and leaders are doing this over a real disservice when they do that and under estimating the power of usability testing and interviewing. And and AV testing is also quite exciting as well. You know, I think the really underappreciated piece about user feedback, again, whether that's a B testing, or usability testing, is the power it has to invigorate a team. So some of my most exciting times working with other people, whether that's my husband or on teams with people before other jobs was when we're seeing how something is going, you know, sitting in a room with people who are not just product and UX people, but also the developers and the designers, seeing if someone can complete a top task analysis and everybody shouting at them to find you know, of course, then us on mute, hoping that they find the button that we want them to find.You know, I mean, it's so exciting. And then when they do and everyone cheers or you know, you're running, I think about running A-B tests on on login pages, and our logins went up 5% and the bounce rate went down and everyone's cheering and, you know, or you're in an interview when someone perfectly articulate the problem that The team thinks that solving but has not heard the user actually physically articulate and they do. And, you know, I've seen people throw up a touchdown in the in the middle of them. It's so exciting. And when you have those experiences as a team, and you're really connected with the user, and you've heard from them yourselves, or you've seen what they're going through yourself, it's so powerful. And it makes your your meeting so much easier, because you don't have to explain, well, this is our user persona for this type of person. And this is what they're trying to do. Because that's kind of boring. And it's really hard to build empathy for, for that user for that person that is trying to do this. If you can say, Well remember when we talked to Susan last week, and she was talking about how this, this and this? Well, we've seen that in our data of these thousand users. We're also trying to do that. And so here's why we're going to do this test or here's why we're going to redesign this particular page. And everything just clicks for the team so much faster and and and I felt like it just boom So much life and into the team and put the wind in our sails because everyone was moving in the same direction.George Stocker  30:06   Now, you actually had me thinking back to when I was doing customer interviews, it was a long time ago. It was for the army. And it was software to that allowed them to basically manage, set what the armies for string, fourth force strength would look like, and what units would be assigned, what they would have equipment and personnel wise. And we went out and we, you know, we've been getting complaints that the software was slow. And of course, it wasn't slow to us. But we went out there. And we spent a week at these different places talking with users, and you went in day to day and watch them just watch them use the system and watched and what they were expecting. But one of the things that we didn't have is we didn't have the analytic side. So when it came time to, you know, try to solve these problems. It was hard because we didn't Have the analytics were the qualitative, but the people in the decision making were quantitative people. But we had all this nice qualitative data, you know? How do you how do you deal with when there is the person who wants to make the decision? And either I don't want to say it doesn't believe the data or you know, prefers the type of data you don't have? How do you? How do you get around that? Do you? Do you build the quantitative side? Or do you just say, Oh,Michele Hansen  31:27   I think you really need both kinds of data. And what I found to be really, really powerful and helping people understand the value of qualitative data was to bring them into the room themselves. So you know, we had scenarios where there were people who really didn't didn't deal much with the tech side. So for example, you know, a portfolio manager who was used to interacting with people who used it, but but not really in that in that kind of a context. And we would just have them sit in the room as a silent participant in the interview, and it can be so powerful for them to just Hear these things because you could see like the wheels turning for them, and them having break for those Oh, so that's why, because I'm willing to bet that even those those people who arm themselves with data are can oftentimes be doing it out of a place of vulnerability because they want to understand what's happening. And if to what you were saying much earlier, they're they're scared of negative outcomes, and they're arming themselves with data to prevent those negative outcomes. It can be quite relevant to hear someone explain why those things are happening. And so I think whatever you you get friction, invite those people in the room with you. They don't have to be doing the interviewing. That's that's a, it's a skill that takes a lot of practice. And, you know, I'm grateful that I learned from some incredibly talented, well trained people myself, bring them in the room with you just have them sit there on mute. They don't say anything but they can just sit there and absorb because it's so powerful for them to hear it for them. themselves and not read it in a report or, you know, see it in a graphic, share it across the company, bring them in the room. And, you know, even at the fool, we got to a point where even the director of our team was running interviews themselves. And it's it's so powerful to do that. And I think there is there's also a stigma that it's worth addressing here that a lot of organizations have that speaking to customers directly is the lowest on the totem pole, right. And a lot of companies people work their way up from customer support. It's an entry level position. And, and I've seen this in company after company that people basically think that they get to a certain point where they're too good to talk to the customer. And that is one of the most dangerous and toxic attitudes that can exist in a company you are never too good to talk to a customer. Nobody is and in fact your customers always have things to teach you whether you are in the middle of company like, like I wasn't the fool or at the top of it like I am now, there's always something your customers can teach you. And I learned things from them every single day. And I'm so grateful for that. And everybody can talk to customers. George Stocker  34:13  So on that note, how do I, how do I get started? So let's say I'm building a new product. I won't say whether or not I am building a new product. And, you know, I want to take what you're saying, and I want to I want to apply it. How do I get started with this?Michele Hansen  34:27   Yeah, so I would. So it depends on what stage you're at. Right? So let's say you just have an idea for right now. George Stocker  34:33  Yeah. we'll go with thatMichele Hansen  34:34  I just had an idea, and I have this problem. And I want to know if other people have this problem. So the first thing I would probably start doing is I would try to see if I can find any friends who were acquaintances. acquaintances are better because they'll be more honest with you who have this problem or who have and really, when you're talking about having that problem, you want to find someone who is going through that process. They're trying to accomplish that same job. Right and jobs to be done perspective, they have that same end goal. And find some acquaintances you can talk to, but also go kind of like find people online that you don't know. So whether that is in on Reddit or on Twitter or on Facebook groups. I have a friend who did a lot of interviewing last summer. And she specifically wanted to talk to you stay at home military moms who are trying to earn money because she wanted to find a way, a more beneficial way for them to earn money and then getting sucked into pyramid schemes. And so she recruited from a lot of mom, Facebook groups, for example, and listserv. So assemble a group of people that you can talk to you about about the problem. Give them say 10 to $25 gift card in exchange for an hour of their time and do a phone interview with them. It's extremely important that it's a phone interview because they will be more honest with you over the phone than they would over video or sometimes I find even in person Because they basically forget that you're a person who has opinions and judgments and feelings. And the more they forget that the more open they will be with. So you have found your group of users. And I would create a script. And in this script, you're not talking specifically about your idea for something, you want to hear about this process about this problem that they have. And you want to hear about how often they're experiencing it, and how painful that it that is for them. And so pain can be in the form of it's expensive. It's literally painful. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who interviews customers about knee braces.It could be --George Stocker  36:37   -- That is literally painful, Michele Hansen  36:38  literally painful. Yeah. And it could be that it takes a lot of time, or there's a lot of bureaucracy involved, or that they don't like the vendor that they have to use for it. And you want to listen for those problems that are both frequent and painful. So the so Dez trainer, the founder of intercom has a great blog post that I refer people to all the time. It's called Not all good products make good businesses. And what he talks about this and they're the sort of pain and frequency matrix, where you want to avoid the quadrant that is low pain and low frequency because nobody struggles with it. And they don't do it very often. You know, I often think of that, that startup that would squeeze bags of fruit to make you a smoothie or juice throw whatever is, right. Yeah, exactly. It's those startups that people like, why does anyone had a $700 juicer exactly is like this is not a problem, my experience and it's not very often, low pain, high frequency can be great, because it's annoying. It's the equivalent of a mosquito and people might be willing to pay to make that go away. high paying low frequency is a great category. Think of buying a house in this category, like people if they're lucky, maybe do it two to three times in their entire life. So we don't have a lot of experience with it and it's very expensive to get it wrong. So we're willing to pay a lot of money to make sure that it goes right your title insurance and realtors lawyers and high paying high Frequency is the best category to be in. So when I'm talking to customers, and they're telling me about their process and all the different pieces of it, I'm listening for those things that those tasks that they are doing, that they're doing on a regular basis that are in some way painful for them. And so have a script you want to talk about, you know, talk to me about, what is it you're trying to do? What have you already tried? Where are you now? And you know, where are you struggling with? Those are the four things you really want to get out of that ice just writing a script for yourself, demoing it on a friend or a family member. First, print out the script, leave yourself, you know, five or six carriage returns, so you can write your notes in it and make sure you're getting all of your questions. And then the big thing that I tell people is if you have told someone that you're going to interview them for an hour, I always plan that my questions are done halfway through. And at that point, I say thank you so much for Talking to me today. I'm so grateful, and I've learned so much from you. Is there anything else you think? And then you wait, and you wait until it is uncomfortable. And what I have found is the floodgates will open at that point. Basically, what you have done during the first part of the interview is you've gotten your information, but you have showed them that you care about this task or process they're doing maybe on a daily basis that probably nobody has ever cared about. This is especially true in a business context, like how many things do we do every single day, they're just part of our work that are not very exciting, and but nobody has really ever asked us about them or nevermind asked us to how they could be better or easier. And so what you've done in that first half, is build rapport with them and you build that rapport by not interrupting them by not negating them by not explaining why you did something one way or another. You can just let them talk as much as possible. And then so if you've built that rapport with them Then they, you've primed them to talk about this topic. And they've shown them that you're somebody who cares about this thing that nobody ever asked them about. And then they will be so open with you. And I find that the best information comes out of interviews in that second half. And and I have found this to be true with, you know, women who are my own age when I'm talking to them. And I have talked to 80 year old men about their retirement situations and how they're, they're consulting actuarial tables to see how long they're going to live versus their wife and make sure that there's enough money for their wife if they're like, like, all these things. I have talked to people who are interns, and students and people who are company leaders, myself, it works on everyone. Everybody likes to be listened to. And especially in a b2b context, people are used to being ignored. How many times have you filed a bug request with a company or sent off a suggestion and took the time to write that up, and then nothing ever came of it? Right. We're so used to being ignored.Having somebody who is willing to listen to you is it people are really caught off guard by it in a very positive way. And I think it's a really powerful way to start your company. And I tend to find even though this is not the intention at all, but the people I interview tend to become incredibly vocal advocates for the company years later, and it always pleasantly surprises me. But listening to people is powerful. Hmm. There was so much good goodness in there. If you send me the link to the blog post, I will happily add it to the show notes. The one that you were talking about with the four quadrants of pregnancy. And yeah, I think he uses different terms, but it's basically the same thing. George Stocker  41:46  Now, that's for a new idea. Let's say you have an existing team, you have an existing product, whether it's for an internal customer or you know, in a b2b, another paying business. You don't they they Don't currently do any qualitative, it's all quantitative. How do you suggest they get started is the same way is a different approach you would take.Michele Hansen  42:10   So I suggest that customer interviewing isn't done on an ongoing basis, just to build general team awareness of what your customers are trying to do and how you fit into that. And so building off of that, of that baseline, if you have a, you know, a specific tool that keeps surfacing as people having issues with it, the place I would probably start with that is is a combination of your quantitative data, and then some usability testing just to get a broad overview of Okay, where might the problems be, and if you do have a customer support team, definitely bring them in and have them in the room when you're planning this out, so that they can also contribute, you know, here's where we're getting the most support tickets on this or people often have confusion about this that that can helpFocus your script for your usability interviews. And then so you can recruit from your existing user base. Or you can also recruit from people who are prospects or, you know, someone, someone who has not encountered the product but experiences the problem like like from Twitter or Reddit. Okay. Now what resources would you share with people looking to learn more about this? field books, websites? Oh, my gosh. So I I'm a huge fan of the Rosenfeld books. And so Indi Young has a fantastic book that I recommend all the time called practical empathy, which is the use of of empathy and taking other people's perspectives in in business and work settings and the power of that, which I think is a foundational read. There are also several other great Rosenfeld books on this UX team of one is a great one.There are, I would say that I do tend to struggle with UX books, sometimesBecause with the exception of user experience team of one, they're often written from the perspective of a huge corporation that might have a whole usability testing team and lab and you've got 100 people who are just focused on UX and, and so they they can be written from from that perspective. And you know, a lot of the companies doing ethnographic research with customers are huge consultancies. So. So that can make a little bit tricky, but the tactics themselves are quite relevant. I think the best training you can do is probably to try this for yourself. And so we used to run a job speed done meetup here in DC and one of the things we did was had people interview the person sitting next to them about the last product they bought, and just see what see what you find. And there, there are resources available online, have, you know, a sample script for this and just trying to talk aboutWhat is the last thing you bought? We'll teach you so much about how you need to comport yourself in an interview because really, that's, that's one of the most important things to learn when you're interviewing someone, how you treat the other person is more important than what you say. So what's up next for you and for God to continue listening to our customers and building based on that? George Stocker  45:21  nice. So where can people go to find out more about you and more about Geocodio? Michele Hansen  45:26  so Geocodio is Geo COD dot IO . And I do have a personal website at MJW Hansen dot com https://mjwhansen.com/. There's some blog posts I've written other podcasts I've been on or on on twitter @mjwhansenGeorge Stocker  45:42  Nice. Thank you very much for joining me today. I learned a lot. This is really fun. Yeah. Alright folks, that's it for this week. Please join me next time on the build better software podcast.

Bibiana Nuñes nos habla sobre la transformación que hubo en su carrera partiendo de la Ingeniería, yendo hacia la Arquitectura de Información y posteriormente en Service Design. Además, charlamos sobre la colaboración actual con Indi Young; el esfuerzo que implica adaptar y tropicalizar el contenido a contextos latinos es una labor necesaria y que toma preparación, tiempo y disciplina. Indagamos un poco sobre generar marca a partir de su expertise, las barreras, las motivaciones y los deseos en torno al ser una referente en la industria. Hicimos un par de remembranzas sobre colaboraciones y ejemplos de cómo aplicar la Investigación y el Entendimiento del Problema para generar información valiosa para la transformación de productos o servicios digitales, y también de manera offline.

Charlé con Indi Young sobre ser investigadora de usuarios muchísimo antes que existiera el término, los retos que implica ganar un lugar en la mesa con los stakeholders, la experiencia de compartir conocimiento a través de webinars, (mucho antes de la pandemia) y comentarios sobre un par de libros de su autoría.

Coding with empathy is one of the Corgibytes' core principles, underlying everything we talk about on this show. But not since 2016 have we taken a step back and dived deep into the subject of empathy, what it means, and how to practice it. Today we talk with Indi Young, a speaker, writer, and UX researcher dedicated to empowering makers and menders to know their problem space through empathy and deep understanding of people's purposes. Indi is an author of two books - Mental Models and Practical Empathy. She tells us how to bring empathy to the developer's table and understand the user's needs beyond what data reveals. When you finish listening to the episode, make sure to visit Indi's website and connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.  Mentioned in this episode: Indi Young at https://indiyoung.com Indi on Twitter at https://twitter.com/indiyoung?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Indi on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/ Indi Young, Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work  at https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Empathy-Indi-Young-ebook/dp/B00RY9R8H8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485488787&sr=1-1&keywords=practical+empathy&pldnSite=1  Indi Young,  Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior at https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/  Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts at https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking-ebook/dp/B004J4WNL2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1587223083&sr=8-2 

Reviewing "Practical Empathy" by Indi Young by Hong Kong Design Book Club

A designer Natália Pery conta sua experiência na Amazônia colombiana, em uma comunidade onde vivem ex-guerrilheiros da FARC. Converse comigo: escreva@alinevalek.com.br Leitura complementar: - Guaviare e o combate ao desmatamento na Amazônia https://news.mongabay.com/2017/05/guaviare-colombias-frontline-in-the-countrys-battle-to-stop-deforestation-in-the-amazon/ - Projetos de design realizados em Guaviare http://unperiodico.unal.edu.co/pages/detail/innovative-ideas-which-support-peace-and-reconciliation-in-the-province-of-guaviare/ - Pratical Empathy, livro de Indi Young https://amzn.to/2VBcsaF - Textos de Natália Pery sobre design: https://medium.com/@nataliapery * os links para os livros são patrocinados. Significa que, se você comprar os livros por meio desses links, ajuda este podcast a se manter. Obrigada!

Special guest and Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young joins the show. We discuss the origins of mental model research, and how it has become an ever-more powerful tool for building inclusive products.

Today's guest is the remarkable Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy. Indi was a founder at Adaptive Path, and is one of the design field's leading visionaries on how we develop an understanding of what people are trying to accomplish, and how to represent it in ways that support innovation. Indi's background is in computer science, in which she has a degree from Cal Poly. In our conversation, she explains how her time there contributed to her learn-by-doing philosophy, as well as her interest in understanding what goes through people's minds. She'll also dig into what it means to research problem space, what practical empathy is and how to use it, and how to develop and maintain an understanding of how people think as an ongoing basis for Indi is focused on the same thing she's been focused on all her life, but with a changing vocabulary around it: understanding the problem space. As you'll hear, she tries to pull the problem space further and further away from the solution space to create a broader understanding. Problem-space research, as she points out, is evergreen. By splitting it off from being solution-focused, Indi hopes to bring attention to what people are actually doing. In our conversation, you'll also hear about the ways in which empathy is more complex than sympathy or compassion. Indi compares the various aspects of empathy to a skilled worker with tools rolled up in a bundle. When the worker needs to use a tool, he or she unrolls the bundle and pulls out exactly the right tool from its individual pocket. This, Indi points out, is similar to empathy, which you use differently in different situations. Indi also digs deeply into the important ways in which empathy is different from emotional contagion, which many people don't realize is a separate concept. She shares how important it is to support someone as part of empathy, rather than simply to feel what another person is feeling. Tune in to learn more about all of this and much more!   Learn More About Today's Guest Indi Young @indiyoung on Twitter Indi Young on LinkedIn Adaptive Path @AdaptivePath on Twitter Indi's newsletter sign up   In This Episode [01:38] — We learn more about what Indi is doing now, as well as why she focuses on the problem space instead of the solution space. [06:02] — Indi shares some of her background and talks about how it has influenced her. [09:10] — Indi talks about making what other people call “personas,” but which she calls “behavioral audience segments” or “thinking styles.” [11:13] — The book Mental Models has been really important to Dawan, he reveals. We then hear about how Indi's ideas have developed between that book and her newer one, Practical Empathy. [15:35] — A lot of people are conflating emotional contagion with emotional empathy, Indi points out, and clarifies the difference. [19:59] — We hear more about the support piece of emotional empathy. [23:36] — Indi talks about her listening sessions (which she used to call “interviews”), and why she changed the vocabulary. [27:17] — Not judging people can be difficult on the airline side, Indi explains, and talks about how one can treat others with more empathy. [32:58] — Indi points out a phenomenon that when you're in a position of authority, the person you're talking to will try to please you, impress you, or tell you what you want to hear. [35:00] — Indi talks more about behavioral audience segments. [40:56] — The method that Indi has been discussing also emphasizes context. She offers a couple of examples of the relevance of context. [44:07] — How do characters, in the sense that Indi has been describing, float into the separation between the problem space and the solution space? [46:19] — Has Indi changed the way she thinks about multi-functional teams from a design standpoint? [48:24] — We hear about Indi brings people into a unique collaborative moment or space. [52:36] — What are some of the challenges that Indi is facing now, whether exciting or frustrating? [55:52] — Indi shares some of the things that have helped her get her clients comfortable with the kinds of investments needed to do the work she has been describing. [62:41] — Where can people find out more about Indi and her work? In her answer, she talks about how to get a discount on her books.   Links and Resources Indi Young @indiyoung on Twitter Indi Young on LinkedIn Adaptive Path @AdaptivePath on Twitter Indi's newsletter sign up Mental Models by Indi Young Practical Empathy by Indi Young Practical Empathy audiobook by Indi Young Describing Personas by Indi Young (Medium article) Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray Against Empathy by Paul Bloom Up (2009 film) Brené Brown on Empathy Inside Out (2015 film) “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” by Eric Meyer Rosenfeld Media yes@designthinking101.com (Dawan Stanford)

Today’s guest is the remarkable Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy. Indi was a founder at Adaptive Path, and is one of the design field’s leading visionaries on how we develop an understanding of what people are trying to accomplish, and how to represent it in ways that support innovation. Indi’s background is in computer science, in which she has a degree from Cal Poly. In our conversation, she explains how her time there contributed to her learn-by-doing philosophy, as well as her interest in understanding what goes through people’s minds. She’ll also dig into what it means to research problem space, what practical empathy is and how to use it, and how to develop and maintain an understanding of how people think as an ongoing basis for Indi is focused on the same thing she’s been focused on all her life, but with a changing vocabulary around it: understanding the problem space. As you’ll hear, she tries to pull the problem space further and further away from the solution space to create a broader understanding. Problem-space research, as she points out, is evergreen. By splitting it off from being solution-focused, Indi hopes to bring attention to what people are actually doing. In our conversation, you’ll also hear about the ways in which empathy is more complex than sympathy or compassion. Indi compares the various aspects of empathy to a skilled worker with tools rolled up in a bundle. When the worker needs to use a tool, he or she unrolls the bundle and pulls out exactly the right tool from its individual pocket. This, Indi points out, is similar to empathy, which you use differently in different situations. Indi also digs deeply into the important ways in which empathy is different from emotional contagion, which many people don’t realize is a separate concept. She shares how important it is to support someone as part of empathy, rather than simply to feel what another person is feeling. Tune in to learn more about all of this and much more!   Learn More About Today’s Guest Indi Young @indiyoung on Twitter Indi Young on LinkedIn Adaptive Path @AdaptivePath on Twitter Indi’s newsletter sign up   In This Episode [01:38] — We learn more about what Indi is doing now, as well as why she focuses on the problem space instead of the solution space. [06:02] — Indi shares some of her background and talks about how it has influenced her. [09:10] — Indi talks about making what other people call “personas,” but which she calls “behavioral audience segments” or “thinking styles.” [11:13] — The book Mental Models has been really important to Dawan, he reveals. We then hear about how Indi’s ideas have developed between that book and her newer one, Practical Empathy. [15:35] — A lot of people are conflating emotional contagion with emotional empathy, Indi points out, and clarifies the difference. [19:59] — We hear more about the support piece of emotional empathy. [23:36] — Indi talks about her listening sessions (which she used to call “interviews”), and why she changed the vocabulary. [27:17] — Not judging people can be difficult on the airline side, Indi explains, and talks about how one can treat others with more empathy. [32:58] — Indi points out a phenomenon that when you’re in a position of authority, the person you’re talking to will try to please you, impress you, or tell you what you want to hear. [35:00] — Indi talks more about behavioral audience segments. [40:56] — The method that Indi has been discussing also emphasizes context. She offers a couple of examples of the relevance of context. [44:07] — How do characters, in the sense that Indi has been describing, float into the separation between the problem space and the solution space? [46:19] — Has Indi changed the way she thinks about multi-functional teams from a design standpoint? [48:24] — We hear about Indi brings people into a unique collaborative moment or space. [52:36] — What are some of the challenges that Indi is facing now, whether exciting or frustrating? [55:52] — Indi shares some of the things that have helped her get her clients comfortable with the kinds of investments needed to do the work she has been describing. [62:41] — Where can people find out more about Indi and her work? In her answer, she talks about how to get a discount on her books.   Links and Resources Indi Young @indiyoung on Twitter Indi Young on LinkedIn Adaptive Path @AdaptivePath on Twitter Indi’s newsletter sign up Mental Models by Indi Young Practical Empathy by Indi Young Practical Empathy audiobook by Indi Young Describing Personas by Indi Young (Medium article) Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray Against Empathy by Paul Bloom Up (2009 film) Brené Brown on Empathy Inside Out (2015 film) “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” by Eric Meyer Rosenfeld Media yes@designthinking101.com (Dawan Stanford)

Host and human-centered designer Jonathan Morgan invites researcher, Indi Young, author and co-founder of Adaptive Path, to discuss the concept of focus. Join us in exploring the limitations of designers and their deep interest in the people who will be using the things they create. Through the lenses of focus, Empathy and Opportunity, Jonathan and Indi delve into the world of design with mastery, precision and… well, great focus. *Editor's note: There is a clarification for the 17:20 minute mark. I

Episode 15 highlights: - Non dominant thinking styles, diversity in product design and user research - Difference between problem space research and solutions research and why it matters - The concept of “thinking styles” in research and how to apply them in UX design - How machine learning and AI can create emergent experiences in the future - Different types of empathy (cognitive and emotional), what they are and how to use each one - A brilliant, tactical example of how to make sense of what you learn from user research

Indi Young has been doing UX research since before it was a thing. With over 25 years of experience in various consulting roles, Indi is a wealth of knowledge and good stories. Not only about co-founding the well-known consultancy and UX think tank, Adaptive Path, but also the conception of mental model diagrams. She has now written two books about this method, Mental Models and Practical Empathy. Check out indiyoung.com for more resources about how to make your own mental model diagram. Enjoy the episode!

Guest: Indi Young @indiyoung Full show notes are at https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-265-indi-young-empathy-in-the-problem-space

In this Topical Zoom episode, I speak with 6 experts about Mastering the Art of Communication, a key Product Mindset topic. I speak with Daniel Zacarias, Kevin Steigerwald, Tristan Kromer, Indi Young, Sarah Doody and Mona Patel. Communication is a key aspect of making products, and yet it is so less talked about. Communication is […]The post DYT 123: Mastering The Art Of Communication appeared first on .

In this episode of Success Factors, I speak with 5 successful women – Laura Klein, Kate Rutter, Donna Lichaw, Christina Wodtke & Indi Young to understand what makes them successful as product makers. I ask them one question – “What makes you successful / different as a product maker?”. What will you learn about these successful […]The post DYT 097 : Successful Women in Product & Design | Medley appeared first on .

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 .

In this Focus Forty episode, I speak with Indi Young, a freelance problem space researcher and empathy consultant, to talk about Mental Models and her success. She was co-founder of the UX agency Adaptive Path. Who is Indi Young? Indi Young is a freelance problem-space researcher and empathy consultant in the technology world. She helps […]The post DYT 066 : Researching the Problem Space | Indi Young appeared first on .

There’s one skill that every wildly successful product manager, UX designer, businessperson, and leader has in common. It helps them unite teams and ship products that customers love time and time again.  What could possibly unite all these technologists?  It’s conscious and deliberate empathy.  Most people believe empathy is just about being compassionate, like lending your friend a shoulder to cry on when they’re going through a breakup. Others dismiss it altogether as a distraction, because they believe it’s more important to be efficient, focus, and get stuff done! Well, it just so happens that when a company is plagued by lack of motivation, missed deadlines, and high employee turnover, often it’s because employees feel that their teammates, bosses, and management don’t “get them.” They might feel like coworkers jump to conclusions or assume their intentions and motivations. In other words, they don’t feel that anyone has empathy for them as an individual. Lack of empathy is terrible for team-building, but it also impacts another crucial part of your business…   It actually seeps into how products are created, so customers feel like your company doesn’t “get” them either! Why would a customer who feels misunderstood stay loyal to you or recommend you to your friends?    Empathy isn’t just about being compassionate. There are actually several different types of empathy. And there’s one that’s most helpful for success in business and technology. We’ll tell you how to start using it right away in today’s episode of FemgineerTV. For expert guidance, I’ve invited Indi Young, a founder of Adaptive Path, user experience consultant, and author of two books: Mental Models and, most recently, Practical Empathy.  Indi will help us clarify several misconceptions and avoid some misuses of empathy...and of course to learn how to actually practice it in the right way. Watch the episode and learn: 1. Why Tom Gruber, the designer and co-founder of Siri, believes empathy is crucial to getting things done in tech companies. 2. Why empathy isn’t limited to just building products but extends to processes and building teams. 3. Why we’ve fallen in love with quantitative data, but it isn’t enough to develop a deep understanding of our teammates and customers—we need qualitative data too. 4. Why empathy is a skill that can be learned and practiced. 5. How to translate our learnings from practicing empathy into actionable insights for our business.   If you’re struggling to understand your customers and find alignment with your teammates then you’ll want to watch this episode! After you’ve listened to the episode join the conversation here: http://femgineer.com/?p=7110

Empathy is a hot conversation topic these days but much as we try, we’re not quite using our empathy muscles to their fullest extent when solving design problems for real people. Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy talks about how our assumptions can lead us astray. Buy Practical Empathy: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/practical-empathy/ Buy Mental Models: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/ Follow @indiyoung Follow @rosenfeldmedia

Indi Young talks about the importance of continuing to ask “why” enough times to get to the core reasons for any individuals’ behavior or actions and how to convert stories into mental models. Her workshop “Unpacking Stories to Server People Better” includes these themes and more. We discuss the elegant way in which mental models can provide a visual representation of these behaviors and support elements that foster the likely repetition of any action. Indi also talks briefly about how her book from Rosenfeld media, “Mental Models – Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior,” can help others create these visual tools.

Indi Young talks about the importance of continuing to ask “why” enough times to get to the core reasons for any individuals’ behavior or actions and how to convert stories into mental models. Her workshop “Unpacking Stories to Server People Better” includes these themes and more. We discuss the elegant way in which mental models can provide a visual representation of these behaviors and support elements that foster the likely repetition of any action. Indi also talks briefly about how her book from Rosenfeld media, “Mental Models – Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior,” can help others create these visual tools.

In February we held one of our most popular Virtual Seminars ever, Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer's Head, presented by Indi Young. We had a number of compelling questions left over from the seminar, and we wanted Indi to have a chance to answer them.