Transcript: A - Z of Tech Episode 23: U for UX
Louise Taggart:
Hello, and welcome to the A to Z of Tech Podcast, which today we're recording in our virtual studio. As always, I am your host, Louise, and in this episode, we've made it all the way through the alphabet to ‘U’. So, we're going to be discussing the topic of user experience. I do have to say this isn't a topic that I am hugely familiar with. I am really looking forward to this discussion today. I am delighted to say that we're joined by two brilliant guests. From PwC, we have Roger Gagnon, who is our Chief Experience Officer, which I have to say is definitely one of the best job titles I've ever heard.
Roger Gagnon:
Thank you, Louise.
Louise:
Alongside him, we have Patrick Glinski, who is the president of Normative design and who is joining us all the way from a very snowy Ottawa today.
Patrick Glinski:
Thank you so much for having me today Louise.
Louise:
It's a pleasure. Thank you both. Roger, I will at some point definitely be asking you about that job title. But maybe first of all, you could give me and also our listeners, of course, an introduction at a fairly basic level into what the term user experience actually means.
Roger:
The analogy that I always give about user experience, for folks who don't have much exposure to it, is that it's like a park. Picture yourself in a nice park with lots of footpaths. We have a ton of those here in London, up, down, left, right. But curiously none on the diagonal, the trodden footpath in the dirt that connects the southeast corner, like the bottom right of the park to the northwest corner, so the top left is user experience design. We call those things in our field, desire lines. That's what UX designers do, really. They design products and services and experiences based on what users want and need and desire. And to the extent that they can, they try to make those things useful, usable and enjoyable. You can trace the discipline, maybe not back to ancient Rome, but at least as far back as the 1970s and 1980s with two big companies, Xerox and Apple.
Louise:
So you're basically helping users to tread the path they want to follow, it sounds like.
Roger:
Absolutely, yes, that is first and foremost I think what UX in the field of user experience design is all about.
Louise:
Brilliant, thank you. Before we sort of plough into the discussion, I'd be really interested to hear a little bit about what both of your jobs entail, and they sound absolutely fascinating, I have to say. Roger as the chief experience officer at PwC. What does that mean? What does your kind of day to day look like and how did you end up in that role?
Roger:
You are right, I have the best job in the firm. I'm the CXO for a fast growing part of our business called experience consulting, which brings together innovators, creators, complex problem solvers and engineers to do what we call design and build a better future for our clients. The people that use their products and services and experiences and whether they call them customers, citizens, patients, students. We design experiences that meet the needs of all of those different types of user. I actually started my career as a scientist, I was doing a master's degree and I was at University of Calgary at the time in a field called perception, ageing and cognitive ergonomics or PACE. My home lab was the vision and ageing lab, because I was a vision scientist. My second home though, was a lab called the human factors lab, which was run by a professor named Jeff Caird - still there today I believe. It's where I first started practising UX, although I didn't know that this was what it was called at the time. It actually didn't even have this name back in the early 2000s. But, I was helping companies design products and services that were just starting to get connected to the internet. At some point, I chose not to pursue my PhD and instead joined the global digital agency, Critical Mass, which is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, my hometown, and that's where I met Patrick. This might be the first time where you have Canadians on the podcast, because I am also Canadian.
Louise:
I think it may be. Absolutely. Well, that was the perfect segue. Thank you, Roger. Patrick, Ottawa calling at this stage. Could you tell us a little bit about what your role looks like at Normative and what the company does?
Patrick:
Sure. Absolutely. I have to say after this conversation, I'm pretty sure this won't be the last time that you have two Canadians on either. Because, Roger and I like to talk.
Roger:
We are going to be the best guests.
Patrick:
Absolutely. Maybe to start things off, just a little bit of my background. Probably like a lot of your listeners, I've sort of struggled to explain to my mother exactly what I do for a job every day. I know it's a bit of an odd label, but I really consider myself what you would call an innovation practitioner. What that means is, I play a lot of different roles, really all mashed into one person. One day, I'm researching people's experiences and preferences. The next, I'm talking to a business about how they like the service people's needs. The next, I'm looking into new and emerging technologies to figure out how they can support people in a better way. Then I design how all those things really come together, both in terms of the screens and the businesses that are put right in front of you, and then also within the operating context or political environment of a company. The one sort of consistent thing for me is that air quote label ‘new’. I really work with people in companies who are ready to find opportunities by specifically making themselves uncomfortable by pursuing things that they're not used to. For me, both through my collaborations with Roger and with other leaders, I've had the opportunity to work in applying emerging technologies to businesses for the better part of almost 20 years.
Over that time, I've been a web analytics practitioner, a digital strategist, an intrapreneur and entrepreneur and start-up advisor and today, like you mentioned in your lovely intro, I'm the president of Normative, and we're a 13 year old innovation company that helps corporate innovation teams think and work like startups. We really think that the big mistake that a lot of companies make when they approach innovation, and especially technology-led innovation, is that they're really focused on themselves. What can I build? How can I make money? What's our plan to build at scale? Well, we've worked with a lot of startups, and we know that the purpose of the startup and I'll quote, the amazing Steven Blank on this one, is to find a customer. You don't find a customer by sitting in your office, you don't find them definitely by tinkering in a lab, you find them building things fast and cheaply and testing them with real people. As a company, that's really what we do. We call it evidence driven innovation, which is really about figuring out how to bring the Lean Startup philosophy to teams who are looking to explore new ways of making money. I hope that's a pretty good bridge to today's conversation.
Louise:
Thank you, Patrick. Going back to Roger’s analogy earlier then, it sounds like both of you have followed slightly untrodden paths in your careers to get where you are and to forge the roles that you have at the moment, which sounds really fascinating. Roger, you mentioned in your introduction, what was happening in the 1970s. If we rewind the clock a little bit, back a couple of decades, where did the user experience as a concept or a term actually begin? Presumably, it predates the digital technologies that we're all so used to nowadays?
Roger:
Oh, yeah, for sure. It goes a lot further back then. My first experience with it certainly in the early 2000s, or Normative, who have been around for 13 years, maybe not to ancient Rome. But like I said, at least back to the 1970s and 1980s, with two big companies, Xerox and Apple, and two very important people, at least in my estimation, a fellow named Don Norman and his long time co-conspirator, Jakob Nielsen. But maybe, let's start with Xerox first. PARC stands for the Palo Alto Research Company. They were some of the people to first think about how people could have a more useful and usable relationship with technology. You don't hear a lot about Xerox anymore. But, they famously invented the first graphical user interface, the thing that we call the GUI, which is what we all interact with on our phones and laptops, and pretty much anything connected to the internet today. The mouse which as some of you may remember, actually had a ball in it at one point, and was a physical and tactile thing. But they were the first company to bring this innovation to market.
They weren't the first company however to make it globally relevant, and that was probably Apple back in 1984. Everybody probably remembers that iconic commercial with the hammer being thrown at the screen. But, the Apple Macintosh basically brought together the GUI and the mouse into a brand new form factor and showed the world that you could have things that were useful, usable and enjoyable. From a tech perspective, you could have at all. And in and around that same time, Don Norman, published a very important book called The Psychology of Everyday Things, which is now called The Design of Everyday Things. It has aged incredibly well. There's a TED talk that you guys could look up, if you're interested, called ‘Three ways that design makes you happy.’ But Don Norman published this book, and the reason I think that it's important, and why he's largely regarded as one of the founding fathers of UX, is because he argued that designing interfaces for all these new things which eventually started getting connected to the internet, needed to be designed well. And in order for that to happen, you needed psychologists, you needed engineers, you need people who understood physiology. It wasn't just a designer working away on a product, you needed multidisciplinary collaboration, and this field of design and of user experience design was born out of that philosophy.
Louise:
Wonderful, so am I right in surmising that the term user experience really came about as a result of the fact that manufacturing or design weren't just thinking about the function of a thing, but also how the end user interacted with it and the experience that they got in their use of it?
Roger:
100% yeah, that's exactly right.
Louise:
Patrick, if I can bring you back in. What has that transition then looked like? Roger just obviously explained to us a little bit about the beginning of this experience and how it began to develop. How has that then transitioned to where we are currently, do you think?
Patrick:
Absolutely. What's interesting is how Roger highlighted what the major areas of focus in those earlier days were around the idea of usability. For example, what we've seen over the last 20 years that Roger and I have been working in this field, we've seen a lot more considerations start to come into play. For example, I still have a model that I learned early on into my career that I reference called the user experience honeycomb, which comes from a gentleman by the name of Peter Morville. Roger laughs because he absolutely still references it every once in a while, as well. What was interesting was, at that time, there were a whole bunch of practitioners who started thinking more broadly than just the usability of things. It started to expand our thinking as practitioners to things like findability and usefulness, the credibility of the experiences that we're putting together, how desirable are they? Really at the core of it, how valuable are they for people? Again, in the early days of user experience design, certainly, when Roger and I were playing in the early days of our career, what was interesting was the folks who were designing user experiences tended to be really off to the side. We were the tinkerers or the experimenters working on these different types of interactions that really had nothing to do with what the core business was. If you fast forward to today, it goes without saying digital strategy or digital transformation are core priorities to pretty much any organisation we talk about. As opposed to it being this thing off to the side that the young people were doing, or that the tech geeks were doing, now it's become core to organisational strategy. Because of that, it's really transitioned from just designing things that are usable to now we're really at the centre of it, figuring out what's valuable to people.
Louise:
Might you be able to give us a brief example of this in practice? I know there was mention for example of the health sector earlier, just a sort of a tangible example would be lovely.
Patrick:
Absolutely. One of the examples that I love talking about around the evolution of user experience design really comes to fruition in a lot of the interactions that we have at point of sale. Roger and I both honed our chops at working with banks, trying to figure out new types of digital interactions. Hopefully many investors remember the early days when things were all cash driven. Now as the time has advanced and user experience design has advanced, we have a transformation that has happened at that point of sale terminals. Where you went from needing to fish a couple of coins out of your pocket to then you were putting a credit card in front of people, then you were tapping. And now we're at the point today where designers are really focused on dramatically reducing the friction that happens at the point of sale, so that it's so seamless for an individual that they're in and out really quickly with really very little effort. An example like that is really a great example of how you have a whole bunch of different capabilities really coming together to design something that is incredibly valuable to a user. The need has always been there, but now it's way more usable, it's way more findable, it's way more desirable and certainly way more useful. It's really because people have spent the time understanding what are the needs of people at the point of sale, what are the frustrations that they experience. In parallel to that, they've worked with technologists that understand how systems work together or talk to each other in the background, in order to enable a set of experiences. Then of course, we have a whole bunch of different technologies and different systems working together like an orchestra in order to enable an experience that otherwise would not have been possible in the past.
Louise:
It sounds as though when the user experience is done really well, you don't even notice you're interacting with something, it's just a seamless interaction and it's just life.
Roger:
Yeah, almost invisible.
Louise:
Yeah.
Patrick:
Absolutely. As user experience designers, we often talk about the idea of friction. Tangibly, you can think about the grittiness of sandpaper against your skin, super uncomfortable right? If you have sandpaper against your skin, you're going to do absolutely everything you can't to get that feeling away from you. User experience designers think of the world the same way where we're like, what is that friction? What are those little points of frustration or annoyance that are happening in the interactions that are around us every day?
Roger:
So interesting, you mentioned friction Patrick because we've gotten to the point where everything is frictionless and I'm not sure that's always a good thing, something should have some friction in them. You shouldn't be able to cash your pension out on a whim, for example. There should probably be some friction in that process. You shouldn't be able to cancel your health insurance in the same way that you one click buy on Amazon. It's really interesting you mentioned the behavioural economics team, of course, we have one and we work very closely with them at PwC. They do things like help us build friction into experiences, so that we actually get the user to pause and take a breath maybe, and see if that action is worth taking, after a short period of time. We've all been like running around chasing friction for so long, it's so interesting to me that we're putting it back in now on purpose.
Patrick:
It's a great point, right? To exactly what you're saying, designers have always had an ethical responsibility to do the right thing to support the people that they're trying to serve. I think a lot of the time, we'll look at things purely from a who is contracting us perspective and think what are new ways to sell people, or what are new ways to transact more easily so that people forget how much money that they're spending. It's an interesting and pretty awkward reality of the design field right? In parallel to that though, of course Roger, we have huge ethical responsibilities to do the right thing for people. And as you said, in many instances, it would be introducing friction in, for example, for things like privacy and security, which I think is a great area where there is lots of friction that's been introduced in order to prevent things like fraud. The introduction of those things, what becomes interesting there is that it all comes down to requirements and constraints. When you have a requirement to help to prevent fraud or help to prevent losses, then you'll do things like introduce two step authentication, or introduce that person who calls you up on your phone when a weird charge has gone through Of course, those are intentional points of friction. But they're also ones designed to offer different points of protection, which are very much in line with an organisation setting a set of requirements and constraints. I think that really begs the question though, who's requirements and who's constraints are we designing for? That's what has made user experience design such an interesting field to be in today.
Louise:
You both mentioned there are some considerations that are taken in as part of the design phase and fine process. So, ethics and security. As we go forward into the future, as user experience develops some of the technologies that we interact with become ever more integrated into our day to day life. Thinking about for example, wearable technology is probably a great example to flag there. How would you think these considerations will begin to evolve and change in the next few years as part of UX?
Roger:
UX designers have to take a lot more input modes into account now than they ever used to. At least when I was growing up, it was just used to be about clicks, and now it's not just about clicks anymore, it's about touches and taps, as well as clicks of course, and also gestures and voice input and ambient input and declarative input. There are just so many ways that we can interact with the digital world around us now that experience designers and user experience designers in particular have to be a lot more thoughtful about how a brand's product or service or experiences are delivered. It used to be a lot easier, it's a lot more complex now.
Louise:
Patrick, what do you think the future is going to look like for user experience, are we all going to end up with microchips and cyborgs as part of the user experience of the future?
Roger:
We’ve talked about this, and I volunteer to be a cyborg!
Patrick:
The first thing that I would say is, there's no shortage of user experience designers, who are very die hard science fiction fans. You can look to many examples of science fiction and how the interactions that we have either in place now, or developing, are very much influenced by famous science fiction writers. In fact, with a number of organisations that we've worked with in the past, we've actually done science fiction scans and actively looked to examples, where science fiction authors have explored what is the future of healthcare for example, or what is the future of financial services. And we’ve tried to actually take examples and inspiration, or literally interactions, that have been envisioned from this, and really started to apply them to the things that are in front of us today. Some of the considerations that user experience designers are bringing in when they're actually creating their work. For example, there's a major discussion right now within the field around ethics and inclusion. Because in the early days of digital user experience, you had a pretty interesting community, who often got into it through a lens of technology. That group is really educated in many instances, a privileged group. Eventually the community really realised that it was designing for itself, not necessarily for the audience around them. You’re starting to see different organisations and different people introduce different types of tools that better empathise with who the user is and what they really want.
Now, as the field matures, there's a deeper understanding and appreciation of the diversity of human needs. And that's everything from reflecting marginalised communities to considering people of all different types of abilities. And historically that might have been driven by policy, but today, the community has really taken on an important role in evolving the practice that focuses on these things. In parallel to that and into the science fiction realm, like you were mentioning before, there are a lot of views of the future, and how this gets applied to us today sounds very far out. Computer microchips in our heads, these are the stereotypical examples of what the future of user experience looks like. When you think about it today, though, probably all of us have a phone sitting somewhere on our desk at the moment. Well it may not be implanted in our brain to fully reduce the friction of data entry. The reality is we are already whether you want to call it cyborgs or we like to use the term at Normative: ‘centaurs’. We are really already a human computer fusion, hybrid of humanity, because we're so reliant on the technologies that are in front of us to influence what our experiences look like. Whether that's you sitting in the car and putting on a mapping program that helps to predict what the fastest route to get from point A to point B is. That’s a great example where. I think today if I was trying to drive across my city, I might struggle to actually figure out a route. Whereas 10 years ago, if I was driving in the car I would know exactly where to go. That’s because today humans have really started to rely on the technologies around us to influence what our experiences look like.
Roger:
Just to pick up on that science fiction point. It's not just classic science fiction, like the Star Trek tricorder for example. You don’t need to look that far back to see examples of really great science fiction work that ended up as consumer facing innovation. Think about Minority Report, for example. In that famous scene with Tom Cruise, scrubbing the image and taking content from one giant screen and literally throwing it onto another screen and picking it up and walking with it. I have literally sitting on my desk right now, a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro, and Sidecar which allows me to literally throw content from one device onto another. Experiences like that, people don't know that they want them until they see them. You don't have to look that far back to find modern examples of science fiction influencing the user experience of everyday products.
Louise:
My takeaway from this discussion is that we are basically already living in a science fiction world and that we are already all human computers. From one cyborg to two others, that has been such a fascinating discussion. Thank you both so much for joining me. I know we've already mentioned a couple of resources, but do either of you have any other resources that you think it will be useful for our listeners to look into if they have more interest in this topic?
Patrick:
Absolutely. I would encourage you all to visit Normative’s website, normative.com, where we have a very healthy blog talking about innovation and user experience. Like I mentioned before, I would strongly suggest you check out ‘Peter Morville’s Classic User Experience Honeycomb’, which is such a great tool, just to hold the things in your head that are really important for you to think about as you're creating user experiences. If you ever want a little bit of interesting Manga career advice, check out ‘Daniel Pink's Adventures and Johnny Bunko’, it’s a classic.
Louise:
Roger, is there anything that you would like to suggest?
Roger:
If you ever want to go down the rabbit hole of UX design, then absolutely start with the two books that I mentioned at the top of the podcast. ‘Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. Like I said, if you just Google three ways that design makes you happy and watch that video, I guarantee you, it will be 20 minutes well spent. Jakob Nielsen, again one of the founding fathers of our discipline and a super interesting fellow, and you can check out their website, Nielsen Norman Group. They will be able to do a much better job of giving you the history of UX and where it came from that I was able to do today.
Louise:
That's perfect. Thank you both so much again. It has been such an interesting conversation, and a real pleasure to have you both on. Listeners as well, thank you very much for joining the three of us, and don't forget, as always to rate us, to subscribe to this series and to join us for the next episode in which we are looking at the letter ‘V’.
