Transcript

Jen

This is The Web Ahead. A weekly conversation about changing technologies and the future of the web. I am your host, Jen Simmons, and this is episode 55. I first want to say thank you so much to today's sponsor: Environments for Humans, once again supporting the show. Their Accessibility Summit, which is coming up very soon. I'll talk more about that summit later in the show.

Today we're going to talk about design research and my guest is Erika Hall. Hi Erika.

Erika

Hi Jen.

Jen

Welcome! You're one of the co-founders of Mule Design, a very well-known, kickass design firm out in San Francisco. You're Director of Strategy there and you know tons and tons of things about designing and have written this book about design research for A Book Apart, called 'Just Enough Research". I saw you speak at An Event Apart, I guess it was in Seattle, not that long ago. The whole talk was just so funny and really well... you just made such a great case for why every one of us, all of us, should be thinking about research and doing some research as a part of our process in creating websites. Which is something I haven't really... I don't think many of us think about that very often. Your book's coming out, when?

Erika

It is coming out on the 9th. Which I believe is this coming Monday.

Jen

Yeah, this coming Monday. So if you're listening to the podcast now, like, live, or in the next couple days when it first comes out, then this book release will be in your future. Although a lot of people listen to this podcast much later. Maybe it's 2015 already and they're just learning about the podcast for the first time. So for you people, the book's already out. You should go check it out. [Both laugh]

Erika

Go buy it!

Jen

I knew your book was about to come out and I'm like, you have to come on the show and come explain what the heck and why and make a case for design research. Why is this a topic you know enough about to do a really amazing talk and write a whole book about? [Both laugh]

Erika

Well, I've been doing internet things for a very, very, very long time. Since the 20th century. When I first got into it, I had the privilege of working for a fantastic agency that introduced me to the concept of user-centered design and this set of methodologies and I had the opportunity to work with my first colleague who was a design ethnographer. I'd never heard of this before. It just so happened... it was the last internet boom and this agency was hiring people like crazy, right and left, just sort of shoving them wherever, to kind of hoard people and then put them on projects. I ended up seated next to Jared. We become friends and we were talking and I said, "How did you come to be here?" and he said, "I was in academia. I was an anthropologist, an ethnographer, and i'm done with academia and I'm working here." And I thought, "Well, that's fascinating that there's an anthropologist working here.' He was so fantastic and so collaborative. People come to research from a variety of different backgrounds and he had a really, really academic background but I think a little bit unusual for somebody with that very formal training... he was very, very much about collaboration and inclusiveness and he would take us... we'd do so many research activities as part of our design work. They were not only fun, they were incredibly valuable and incredibly informative. I took that early part of my client services career with me. I went to another agency that had a similar process and philosophical orientation. When we founded Mule, of course that sort of research-thinking informed everything we did in our work when we were starting out here.

Jen

What kinds of research do you typically do on a project? Where in the timeline does that come in?

Erika

For us, it's always at the beginning. We do something that's pretty, I think, common in the agency world. I think especially back in the late 90s and early 2000s, every fancy agency had a process diagram on their website that would explain how, "We have this very unusual and advanced process." And all of these were exactly the same. It was "Research" by some name, frequently "Discovery", which is what we call it. And that's also what lawyers call it. And then after "Discovery" there was a "Concept" phase and then there some some sort of detailed "Design" phase and then often an "Implementation" phase, they're building the whole thing out. And then all of these phases had various fancy names in all these agencies. They're all really the same thing, because all it is, is, making sure you understand the problem you're trying to solve before sitting down to solve it. Because we're hired by clients to come in and work on a project basis and solve very specific problems, we absolutely have to make sure we understand it. We understand the constraints and opportunities and we share that understanding with the client so we all agree, "What are we here trying to solve?" It's amazing how frequently people can... individuals or teams or companies can develop their own idea of what's going on and their own interpretation. If you don't check that, if you don't check your assumptions, the client could say, "We're hiring you to solve this problem." And you say, "Ok, we understand. We're solving that problem." And then if you don't go through this process, then you might have a very different idea about what you're doing and how to interpret your mission for that project. So that really forms the foundation of everything that happens afterwards.

Jen

I feel like some of... listening to you talk right now, you're reminding me of all the kinds of things I've heard that have to do with getting to know your client and making sure that you understand what they want. Not jumping to a conclusion too quickly about what the words they're saying actually mean. Or exercises you can do with your client to get to know them better. Looking at the book, it seems like you're talking about that stuff but you're also talking about, like, more ind-depth research that reminds me a bit of market research, but it's not market research. There are different kinds of research where people will go out sometimes and do, like, "What is it that people want?" and "How can we build what it is they want?", or "We're here at this startup and we're trying to move into such-and-such market and we want to go do research and find out what..." You know, "How can we be successful? Which direction should we be going in?" Can you describe some of the different kinds of research, where is it that you've found things to be really helpful? What I just described is very muddy. Can you, like, clean that up? [Both laugh]

Erika

This is, again, the first step of research. How I kind of came into this, my undergraduate degree was in philosophy. Philosophy's about two things. One is asking questions, some of which are very naive questions, you know, like, "What's the purpose of life?", "Why are we here?", "What's the best thing?" And then the other part is very clearly defining your terms so that you can make an argument. This is also very important to do. This is a part of this research process, but this also very important to do when you're talking about research. Because you say that word, and there's a lot of baggage around it, depending on what your attitude is, or what your experience is. There are many, many kinds of research. There's very academic research, there's what's considered "pure" research, which is the research that people think about, like, you know, the National Institute of Health is going to fund a study to find something out about the human genome. That might be "pure" research and that's science. What that means is that there's no... it's not tied to any particular goal. You're doing research to add to the body of human knowledge. There's a very high bar for that kind of scientific, "pure" research. Often it's published in peer-reviewed journals, people have to agree that it's really valid research. Then there's the kind of research that I talk about that's "applied" research. Sometimes there's a concern about bias or about this kind of research not being sufficiently "science-y" and that's why people want to do things like, in labs, or in settings that seem more scientific. But what it comes down to is: Any kind of "applied" research is successful if it helps you meet whatever your goal is. You're always finding out more information to help you meet another goal. You're not doing it to necessarily add to the body of human knowledge in general. It doesn't have to be "pure", it doesn't have to be unbiased. Biases can change the effectiveness of the results. But you can do some research that's kind of biased and kind of casual and still get really useful results. It's all a question of how useful it is. The kinds of research that we do and that I focus on in this book are, first of all, just flat-out critical thinking. Which I think is not done frequently enough in the product design process. Which is just, asking questions, like, "Why are we doing this?", "Do we all have the same understanding of why we're doing it?", "What are we trying to do?", "What are we trying to accomplish?", "What are our goals?", "How do we know if we've succeeded?" Those sort of foundational questions might not necessarily match people's idea of research but they're so fundamental. Sometimes you'll see a product or a service out there and you'll think, "That's a terrible idea." Sometimes it's because people didn't actually ask that question or ask it and really mean it. Because they had this idea and it's like, "Let's try this." That's the fundamental first step. Just really asking the initial questions to make sure that everybody involved in a particular endeavor is very clear on... it's like defining your terms.

The other types of research are organizational research. Really understanding what the organization context you're working in, is. This is very simple if you're talking about a startup. It might be a couple of people, they have a certain amount of money, and they know that, as an organization, they're very simple. Maybe there's only two people working on a software product. All they have to do is make sure that they're clear about what their goals are and what their priorities are. But if you're talking about... some of our clients are very large corporations that have been around for a very, very long time. A design might be fantastic from a user's perspective but if it's not something the organization can really support and get behind and has the capacity to continue to maintain and work with, that design will be a failure. There's a limit to how much you look at the user's side of things. The user-centered design, design ethnography, it has many different names, that's usually what people think about when they think about design research. That's what you were talking about. It shares a lot of history and a certain number of activities with market research, which is, "We want to understand what people's attitudes are, what people's patterns of behaviors are, what their context is." But the different between the design research I'm talking about and market research is, the market research question is, "Given that we have this thing, how do we make people buy it?" From a design perspective it's, "How do we design something that really meets a need?" It doesn't speak to whether or not people are going to buy it, but whether or not people are going to use it. Which is a little bit different of a question. That can be tricky if that people who buy it and the people who use it are very different, which is the case with traditional enterprise software.

And then there's usability testing, which probably a lot of people are familiar with that. That's evaluative research. Once you have a thing, in whatever state it is; it could be sketches on a piece of paper, or it can be a fully working prototype. Once you have something that you can test, the research question is, "How well is this working for a given set of people to achieve a set of goals?" I also talk about competitive research.

Another part of the overall context that's really important to think about is, "What is your competition?" The way that I really think about this, that I find is the most useful for product and service design isn't, "Who else is creating something that does the same things?", it's still very user or customer centered. The question is, "How else are people solving this problem?" Because if you just think about, "Who are my competitors?" And you think about it in terms of organizations who might be developing something very similar... that really limits the way that you think about your competition. But that's not how your potential customer thinks about your competition. They think, "Well, I might be doing something that's really easy and is totally free. So why would I pay you and change a habit to adopt your product?" I think that's the other piece. I think doing all of these, asking all of these questions to some extent, is absolutely essential if you're designing or redesigning a product or service. The reason I wrote this particular book and called it "Just Enough Research" is, I think a lot of times designers or developers or businesspeople shy away from doing research because it sounds like it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of time. Really, what it does, is save time and really reduce the risk that you're going to waste a lot of time or money going down a path that's not very fruitful.

Jen

I mean, even in your describing all of these different kinds of research, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, right? [Both laugh] And we're not even planning to do it, we're just talking about it. I do think... what's my next question? I think that, I mean, I've worked on, I can't even count how many websites... thousands. I've probably done a formal research process on, like, none of them. [Laughs] That's probably not true. But, you know, a very, very much smaller number than the total number. There's something about... how many projects have I gotten Photoshop comps for? A lot. Something in the industry where we've gotten to this place in 2013 where this is not really part of what a lot of people think about or talk about. Some of it is. Especially around user research or some of the user experience design methodologies that a lot of people use. I guess a question is, then, why? I think that people don't really know where to begin. So, A) Buy your book. [Laughs]

Erika

Yes, exactly!

Jen

We're done! Thank you so much! [Both laugh]

Erika

Yeah, thank you! Buy the book! It explains everything.

Jen

Let's go way back to the stuff you're talking about. The basics. You show up to a project. Maybe you show up by yourself because you got a new job and you're working at a startup. Or you are, or you work with, a group as a design firm and you come in as an outside consultant, or whatever. It's funny because it seems almost impossible to say, "Ok, tell me what you want? Alright! Step 1, we're going to question whether or not that's true." And go even back to step 0 and research whether or not you're solving the correct problem. Seems very impossible. Like pushing a rock uphill or something. But I also know from your work, from the work of Mule Design, and from a lot of things I've heard you say, or people say, that ends up being the difference between a super successful project and a kind of, like, you delivered what they asked for but it wasn't a good thing to deliver.

Erika

Right.

Jen

How do you get in there? Let's say you're new to a startup. You're going to go in and start questioning your boss and whether or not they're actually doing the thing that they should be doing?

Erika

I think that's something you should do before you join a startup. There's a whole separate conversation about the way that a lot of startups now are funded and what their goals are. Which aren't necessarily to build a sustainable product that a lot of people adopt and are paying for and there's a real business model. That's kind of what I'm talking about. If you want to make something that's sustainable and successful out in the real world. I think, right now, startup funding and acquisition and this whole cycle is kind of a weird, closed system, where things can be very successful from that perspective without ever actually having a business model or meeting a genuine user or customer need. That's something that we have to set aside, to a certain extent. Which is true and that's a topic that's near and dear to my heart but is ancillary to this.

What I'm really interested in is people who really do want to make something that's successful using, let's call them, "traditional" criteria. Which is people enjoy using it and you get money from people's enjoyment of using it and you've added something to the world that you want to have exist for some period of time. You're not building something to flip it.

Jen

Yeah.

Erika

Given that, the first question to ask is really, "What are we trying to accomplish? What's our goal here?" I think that... if it's not ok, if you're in an organization where it's not ok to ask that question, then that's a very dysfunctional place to do any sort of design work. If people are unwilling to say, "Yeah, here's what we're doing and here's what we're trying to accomplish." If the attitude is more like, "Shut up and just make this thing that I have in my head," then that's not functional.

Jen

Yeah. Do you, as Mule Design, interview clients before you let them hire you to see whether or not they're going to be open to a conversation and open to that kind of research?

Erika

Oh, definitely. Our business development process, for many years here at Mule, our lead research and our business development person were the same person. We considered that first conversation to be the beginning of our discovery process. Which is, "What are you trying to accomplish?", "What part do you want us to play in it?", "What's your ultimate objective?" and "What's your communication style and how does your organization function?" We definitely take all of that into consideration before we take on a project with anybody. People hire us because we ask hard questions, we get them to ask hard questions, and in many cases because we come in from the outside, we create an environment where the discussion can be more open than if it were being lead by an internal team. Quite frequently, we'll go in to an organization where everybody there is... or a sufficient number of people there are very competent people who really want to have these discussions but the culture doesn't really allow it. Or biggest function in coming in isn't necessarily that we have a huge number of skills or ideas that aren't available in the organization, but we're in a position to create an environment for that sort of questioning.

Jen

It's funny because lots of times, when people say "design", what they mean is "graphic design". They mean, like, which color did you pick.

Erika

Yup. Making pictures.

Jen

Making it shiny, right? What design tool do you use? "Well, I use Photoshop because I want to draw a picture of how this is going to look." But it feels like many times actually doing the work of design and being a "designer" that process of figuring out how things are going to look is done by somebody else or it's just a small percentage of a designer's time. A lot of what we do is, like, therapy for organizations. [Both laugh] Or facilitation. You walk in and you find out that nobody's on the same page but they all think they are. You end up spending a lot of time just helping them realize that they don't understand each other and getting them to communicate. Which doesn't look like "design", but then on the other hand, if you look at the end result, that the product or the site or thing at the end is so much better. It feels like, well, isn't that... yeah.

Erika

Yeah. I mean, design is problem-solving. A lot of times what we do is, we come in and we identify where the real problem is. I think if you see an interface that is particularly cluttered... this used to be true with just straight-up marketing websites. A lot of them, in many cases, were reflective of the organizational structure and the org chart. That used to be the joke. We've moved past that. You don't see too many of these anymore; sites that are impenetrable to the outside world because they reflect how the organization thinks of itself. But a lot of times, if you see a very unclear, what a lot of people would call an "unintuitive" interface or strange language, what that reflects is a lack of clarity or an excess of politics within an organization.

Jen

I feel like in more naive days, I used to look at, especially big-budget websites, some sort of big company, like a television, not a station, but a... well, television stations are even more... like a channel, their website. I want to watch the video for the TV show I didn't see on broadcast television. I want to watch it now, right? Go to the website or these other sort of big, giant companies, and they're just so bad. I used to think, "How dumb are the people who work there? They don't know anything about how to build a good website." And then, especially after I moved to New York and I became more and more involved in big projects like that, I was like, "Oh, it's not that each person is dumb or that they don't have any experience or that they don't know what a good navigation is. Or they don't know what's wrong with their video player. It's that the politics or what it takes to get anything finished or having an idea in a meeting and then going to this other meeting and what happens in between those two meetings... is just so painful that everything breaks down somewhere there. Somewhere outside of what you would imagine if you were only on the outside.

Erika

We say this all the time. A design project is a series of decisions. It will be successful or not successful based on the ability of everyone involved to make those decisions in a clear and straightforward manner. Sometimes they're decisions that seem really simple at the outset. For example, what color should be the background be? But there might be all of this organizational baggage around that. That gets absurd. And then you end up with, we can't decide if it's green or blue, so we're going to make one part green and one part blue.

Jen

We're going to do 47 shades of blue and test them.

Erika

Yeah, exactly. That's where that comes from. It starts with an organizational problem. If you don't have an understanding of that as a designer, you could design something that you think is personally beautiful and that totally doesn't fly. Because anybody else involved in it will, if they don't agree and if they have kind of power to make changes to that system, which a lot of people do, and if they don't understand why certain decisions were made, then that design will just fail. That's why asking these questions is a part of the designer's job and should be done at the get-go.

Jen

It sounds like when you're describing this as "research", you're basically describing this as... this is the homework you should be doing at the very beginning of the project. Don't make assumptions. Pre-prevent some problems that are going to be coming. There's going to be crazy stuff coming down the road. See what you can do to get out ahead of it and get everybody all lined up in the same direction before it gets crazy. Is that what you mean by research? In some ways it's like, well, why is that called "research" then?

Erika

Because that's the most concise term for it, I think, and then you've got to get over the idea that research is some highly formal process. All research is, is asking questions in a sort of systematic fashion, right? What I want people to do is accept that asking these questions is part of the design. To think about designing something. Because whatever you're designing, if you're any kind of interactive design, you want something that doesn't just exist on your own computer screen of your own phone or mobile device. It has to exist out in the world, in a wider context. It's absolutely necessary that you understand that context if you're designing something to go be out in it. If what you're designing is something that you're just going to use on your own personal device, then it doesn't matter, but the first step is to recognize and acknowledge that it's in a context. That's step 1. Whatever you're designing is in this context. It's in a business context, it's in a competitive context, it's in a user context.

Jen

Organizational politics context.

Erika

Yeah. All of that. Just start there. Say, "Ok, these are either requirements or constraints in my work."

Jen

What are some of the tools you use to grab that information and document it someplace so that it's useful?

Erika

The most important tool is the will to do it. People are always looking for tools as a substitute for having hard conversations with other humans.

Jen

[Laughs] Let's automate this for the robot. [Both laugh] I'll sign up! Where do I sign up?

Erika

It's the same way in which a designer... we get people applying for design jobs all the time, who list Photoshop as a skill. It's like, Photoshop's not a skill. Photoshop's just a tool and that tool is only as good as the intellect and the will to use it. Steve Jobs would always talk about how the most important thing he did at Apple was to say "no" to a lot of things. This is where I want the focus and the conversation to shift about, "What is design?" and "What makes a good designer?" and all of these things, is not to focus on the how, but to focus on the why. Because you have to be really clear about the why before any how makes sense. When you talk abut, "How do we collect and share this information?", you won't know an answer for the best way to do that unless you know why you're doing it, or with whom you're doing it. Then it's like, "Oh, how?" Then there are a variety of tools you can chose. But if you start by choosing the tool, then you've already constrained and limited the way you're going to do things. In a way that might match. What I want people to do is really get out of their comfort zone. I think one of the reasons that many people object to research... there's a whole set of arguments against doing research. About how it takes too long and it takes too much money. But you can do some really, really useful research in a day. It's not a formal process. It's a way of getting more informed inputs into whatever process you're already doing. You asked, "When do you do research?" There are many, many points. Whenever you have a question that you need answered to make a good decision. That's when you do research. That just means, that's when you find the answers to these questions. It should be a continuous activity that you're doing as part of your design work, as part of your development work. It isn't something that you just front load and then never do again. We put it in the front because we have a very specific project structure that we work with, with our clients. But anybody who's working on designing or developing a product or service should just think, "Oh, at what point do I need these particular inputs?" The reason I was so excited to write this short little book is because a lot of research books and materials about this, they're 500 pages long and they're aimed at very specialized audiences. I think that creates a real barrier and that creates this set of objections, or that abets this set of objections. But to go back to what I was saying about the real deep objection, is people are just afraid, I think, to expose their ideas to scrutiny. There's this idea that, like, "I want to be the genius who came up with this brilliant idea. I want it to be totally mine." As soon as you say, "I'm going to ask people," and I don't mean specifically asking people, I just mean putting it out there to be invalidated or to be criticized through the work you're doing. Then, it's not your anymore and you're going to hear about how it's wrong. But you want to find out that you're wrong if you're designing something that's not just for you personally. You want to find out the ways you're wrong as quickly and as cheaply as possible. That's really in your interest. But I think there's this huge ego barrier that people often need to get over.

Jen

I agree. Especially when, later, maybe you put a thing in your portfolio and people are like, "You didn't design that. We did that as a team." It's like, "No, I did!" That's what design means. There's this sort of, like, you want to be the brilliant...

Erika

The sole author.

Jen

Yeah, the sole author, the diva, the... what's it called in the film world? The auteur.

Erika

The auteur, yeah.

Jen

The myth of the auteur.

Erika

And I think there's a very, very strong drive to have that kind of ownership. It can be really, really hard to let go of. And it can be really hard to develop that thick skin to say, "Ok, I'm gonna ask. I had this idea. I love this idea." In writing, there's this saying, "Kill your darlings." Have you heard that? If you're writing something and you have a phrase and you love it, you love that turn of phrase, and then your editors reads it and says, "Oh, God. That just makes no sense. It has to go." It's editing. That phrase doesn't mean what I'd hoped it means, or it's actually a distraction. It's that same sort of mental process, where you have to say, "I want a particular outcome and the outcome I want is something that really works well for as many other people out in the real world as possible." You have to just get to a place where you're like, "I'm good accepting all of these inputs and putting all of these ideas out there and floating them and wanting to be proven wrong." And have that be fun. Have that openness to being proved wrong be enjoyable. Because it's like, "Oh, now I understand something more." It's understanding, feeling like the understanding is more important than that sense of sole ownership. Or being the genius designer.

Jen

I think people always think, "Oh, Thomas Edison, he was just a brilliant inventor, he invented so many things." It's like, actually, he didn't.

Erika

It was all Tesla. It was all Tesla.

Jen

Tesla invented a lot of it. [Erika laughs] Even more of it, yes. That's true. But the things that Edison gets credited for, it was the Edison Corporation. He had a whole bunch of employees working for him. He was running a lab and it was much more like, Apple. Except if Apple was called Steve Jobs. And no one knew that there was a company. It was the team of people at Edison that came up with a lot of those lightbulbs and stuff. It wasn't him all by himself. And Tesla's a whole other discussion. [Laughs]

Erika

It's interesting you bring up Apple. For a long time, the way that Steve Jobs led Apple and the products that came out were used as an argument against doing research. Because a long time ago, Steve Jobs said something like, "You can't focus group your way to an excellent product," or something like that. People took this to mean, "Oh, you shouldn't do research." Frequently, people who don't want to do research conflate focus groups and research. I think focus groups are the devil and that's a whole other topic. They feel like research theater. They feel like you're doing research, but you're actually not in a natural... it's supposed to be an ethnographic process where you understand people in their real context. No one that I know of, usually, uses a product in a group in a group, in a conference room, with strangers they've never met before...

Jen

With a glass wall.

Erika

With a glass wall. But you're supposed to get some useful information. Like, it feels fun to do a focus group, I think. But what you get out of it is totally conditioned by their weird group dynamic. The only information you get out of it is, "How do people function in these weird groups, in conference rooms with two-way mirrors?" There's this myth or idea that Steve Jobs is this total genius. And I think he's a great designer but I think he's a great designer because of the way that he would say "no" to inferior products and the way that he would cut things out and the way that he would make decisions. But Apple is so secretive. There's a ton of research that goes on that people never hear about. Because they have this image, this "genius design"... I mean, they call their, essentially their customer service people, "geniuses", right? They have this incredible branding and this incredible marketing and people take what they see from the outside and say, "Oh, the way to be like Apple and design these incredibly successful, beloved products is to have a sole genius who's kind of a jerk to people." And you don't see what's going on under the hood. Apple does a huge, huge amount of research and they go through so many things that nobody ever hears about, that never see the light of day.

Jen

We know that they're doing tons and tons of testing inside. Where they'll develop all kinds of ideas and try them out. And with each other.

Erika

But they've got ethnographers in there. They've got people understanding how people work. Another objection to research is, if you ask somebody, and this is kind of related to Steve Jobs and the focus group thing, is asking people what they like. You should never ask somebody, "What would you like to use?" Because people come up with all of these things that they would never actually use in reality that have no correlation with behavior. What you want to understand is what people actually do. This is something I said in my talk. You can't ask people what they like, because it's like, well, I like horses. But I'm not going to buy horses online. I like plenty of things. Liking is this mental state that's not at all correlated with behavior. You can see this on Facebook. People "like" stuff all the time, but that doesn't mean that they're gonna buy something or not gonna buy something or gonna communicate in a certain way. It's really easy to say you like or don't like something. What you really want to understand is: What do people actually do and why do they do it?

Jen

I guess even the people themselves might not really know and they can't predict or explain it to you verbally but you can still learn about what it is that they would do. What's an example of how you have done research like that?

Erika

We're big proponents of remote research because anything like a lab... a research lab is a place where you bring people in, it's like a focus group room and you talk to them in this really artificial environment. It's super expensive, also. There's a huge amount of overhead with booking a room and getting people to come in there. There's an organization called BoltPeters. Nate Bolt is a friend and he's super smart and he wrote a book about remote research. They have a tool for recruiting and it's fantastic. What we do, we'll recruit people with a little survey to make sure we're talking to people who match the kind of people we want to talk to. Then we'll just get them on the phone, sometimes with screen sharing, and we'll have a one-on-one phone interview. That is so low-cost. That will just give incredible information. I encourage anybody who does anything to just use Ethnio. I'm a huge fan and they're super nice people. Just put one of these surveys on your site and talk to 10 people. You could probably just talk to 10 people about what they did that day and learn so much about your customers. People get really concerned about, "I need to be asking..." There is a methodology. What I'm saying is, there is a formal interviewing methodology, but the most important thing is just to talk to people who aren't you or your project team. We'll have a one-on-one phone conversation and we'll have a pretty clear idea in advance. We do have more rigor behind this than I'm talking about. We'll have the things we want to know about what they do. We'll talk to them. We'll have a conversation that feels comfortable and natural to them and we'll just get them to talk about, as much as possible, what they do and the things they do that are relevant to what we want to find out about. But just having somebody walk you through their day will give you a really... even if you never talk about your actual product or what you're trying to do, at all, but just say, "Hey, just start from when you get up in the morning," "Tell me about what you did yesterday." People will probably be fairly reliable reporters about that. "How did you use the internet?" You can ask specific things about, "What computer did you use?" "What was going on while you were doing that?" You get this picture. Because people aren't these little lab specimens that operate in these totally controlled environments. People frequently have a lot of distractions. Say you're making a banking app and it's like, what prompts you to interact with that? What else is going on? They might have kids that are screaming for their attention while they're trying to do something. So you can't require them to hold too much information in their minds. They might do things that are in cafes or on the train or places that aren't really that secure, so you might want to say, "People are, no matter how we caution them, they are going to be entering sensitive financial data in a really public place." Because people... the thing that is most important to keep in mind is, people are creatures of habit. And they're pretty lazy. And they'll do what's habitual to them. Getting them to change a habit, especially if there are all these other incentives. Because a lot of times designers can get a little solipsistic about what they're designing. They're like, "Ok, they're focusing on what I'm doing and there's nothing else going on in their life." But I'll tell you. If they're at their desktop, they have, like, 700 tabs open. They're also playing Dots on their iPhone. There's noise in the background. Those are the kind of things that you won't think about unless you talk to people and have them describe the context that they do things in. That gives you so much that you can take into consideration that you would never, ever think about. And it's cheap as dirt. Anybody who says, "We don't do ethnographic research because it's expensive and complicated." It's like, talk to 10 people you don't know. Then you'll have this input that you can use. Another objection I heard... I heard this one guy, I think it was from Tumblr or something. "We don't do research because we don't want to do what our customers tell us to do." Just because somebody says something, even if they're in your target customer group, you don't have to do it. It's not this directive. It's not like, "We did research and these people said this and we have to do it." That's just one input. You're just looking for inputs that will help you be more successful in the way that you've decided you want to be successful.

Jen

Let's say you're at a startup and you're building some kind of app, a phone app. And you have an idea of who you're target audience is gonna be. And you build the app or you're almost done building the app and you decide to do this kind of research and see if people are liking it, if they're using it in the way that you want them to use it, right? Let's say you get four people because that's how much time or budget you have. It seems like one of the things that would be kind of scary about that is, "What if we just randomly get four people who throw us way off? That aren't necessarily representative of who our users are gonna be in a year?" And it also seems a little scary because, yeah, you're opening yourself up to criticism but maybe not even as much directly from the research results but more from the colleague who's been lobbying for that shade of blue for the past six months is now gonna have one random sentence from one random person. This colleague can then use to justify something that you think is a bad idea in the first place. What do you think about those kinds of concerns?

Erika

It's understandable that people have these concerns. It all comes back to that critical thinking and how you weigh different evidence. It all comes down to, like I said, any sort of design endeavor like this is a series of decisions. You say, "What is my basis for making those decisions?" I'd say the weakest basis is that, "Because I say so." You know, like, the parent of a small child basis for decision making. But you say, ok, well, if we're making a decisions, what is that based on? That could be based on, well, the people working here... say you have a team who's very experienced. We say, "Ok. We're creating this application and the team we've assembled is incredibly experienced and they have the benefit of all of this knowledge that they've gained through their real-world experience." I'm not saying discount that. I'm saying that is insight that they have with a real basis. But what you have to be very honest about is, "What's don't we know? And how do we find that out?" If you're like, "We don't know if..." say, for example, this particular phrase. Because language is one of the greatest, the most important and neglected parts of interface design. People always say, "Language is writing or it's content strategy." But that's part of the interaction design, is the labels you use, the button labels, the words. And you're like, "We don't know if this phrase is meaningful to people outside our product team." That could be something that's really easy to answer. But if you're like, "We don't know which shade of blue is more effective." You have to say, "What does effectiveness mean? What's the best way to get the answer to this?" It might be through waiting until you launch and doing some quantitative testing. There are some things that are easier or more definitive to get via different means. That's why I try to talk about all of these different types of research and not say that one is right. Because it really, like, people hate the phrase, "it depends." But it really does. It depends on what you need to find out, how big your risk of being wrong is. If you're considering doing research or how you're making decisions, you're like, "What's the worst-case scenario if I'm wrong?" If you're an established company with an established product that a lot of people have habits around, your risk of being wrong, or the downside of being wrong, is incredibly high. One of my favorite examples is, a couple of years ago, I don't know if you remember, when Netflix split off their video-by-mail service. It was going to be "Quickster".

Jen

Yeah.

Erika

They were like, "So, everybody, instead of having one website, you're gonna go to two, and Netflix is streaming and Quickster is DVDs by mail."

Jen

Right.

Erika

And all of these people had this habit, which is like, "I go to Netflix." I love Netflix. Netflix had huge brand equity and they had this habit of, "Netflix is how I get my media. And sometimes it comes via DVD. And sometimes I just stream it in my living room without having to go mail anything." This was this huge miscalculation and the cost of that mistake was huge because they confused a lot of people, they pissed people off. They had to backtrack on that. It seems, in that case, I don't know how much... if they did any research, in terms of talking to people. Really understanding, "How do you think about DVDs vs streaming? Do you think of it the same way? Is it going to be inconvenient for you?" Because they're like, "It's more convenient to have two totally separate websites and billing systems."

Jen

[Laughs] Right. And get charged twice.

Erika

And get charged twice! "Thats gonna be more convenient." That was a big lie. I think that they didn't probably talk to people about that because they didn't want to be told that was going to be wrong. So, that was a huge risk. They ended up having this PR embarrassment and pissing a lot of people off and it cost them a lot of money.

Jen

Yeah, I'm sure they lost a lot of business.

Erika

But if what you're doing is, say, that you're building an app. You just have a hypothesis. Any design is a hypothesis. You just want to launch it and see how people use it. It's like, "What if you're wrong and people hate it?" Well, maybe iterative design is the best choice for you. Maybe you don't have to go out and talk to a lot of people. Maybe it's like, "I have this thing in my head and the best way for me to see how that works is just to put it out there. It's not going to hurt anybody's reputation in the marketplace. The only costs I'm going to incur are the costs of my time in building and launching it." If you're like, "Ok. I'm just going to do that." And you've decided that those are acceptable costs, and that's your investment in learning, then that's fine. I'm not saying, "Don't do that," I'm saying, "Be really considered in these choices that you make." Because you have more options than you might think.

Jen

Here's something that I feel comes up a lot. I don't know this personally, I'm just asking for a friend. [Both laugh] It feels like there's some kind of mushy chaos that could happen if... I'm working on something, I have a very clear idea as a designer as to what would be a good solution. I've talked to the client or I've talked to other people in the company and I just have this vision. I know what's needed. I'm the designer. I'm a professional. I've been doing this for... I mean, not me... my friend's been doing this for, you know, decades. Decades and decades and decades. Why would we then go ask a bunch of random strangers to tell us stuff that is gonna effect that vision?

Erika

If you're solving a new problem. For example, if your friend, in this case, has been working for decades and decades and decades, and the design problem that you're trying to solve is one that you've solved, like, five times over, then you have knowledge, right? It's not a new problem. You don't have any questions about it, probably. There aren't as many unknowns. It's a question that, "Are there..."

Jen

So if it's the 45th restaurant website you've built, you kind of know how it's going to go.

Erika

Yeah, so you know you should use Flash. [Jen laughs] You know that you should have a .midi file that starts playing an all the menus should be downloadable PDFs.

Jen

That are out of date.

Erika

Yeah. Right. If it's a problem that you've solved successfully in the past, or a flavor of that problem, yeah, you don't need to talk to people because you have knowledge. It's all about different ways to get knowledge. There are different ways to get the knowledge. Some of the research techniques that I talk about are ways to help you do that. But maybe you already have this knowledge. If you've launched these sites and you've seen how people use them and you're like, "Oh, I designed this site. It launched. It met all the business goals. People seemed to like it." That's data. That's data as much as any other sort of research data or data you get from something else or data you get from a third-party study. But people are really keen on doing something new or doing something innovative. As soon as you say, "Ok, we're gonna solve a problem. We're gonna require people to change their habits. Or we may have a hypothesis about people's behavior and we don't have any actual information. It's a guess." Then you should do research. But definitely, if you don't think you're going to learn anything useful, don't ask the question. Does that answer your mushy chaos question?

Jen

Yeah and it really kind of takes the word research away from the lab coat and chemistry beakers idea to, "Oh! You mean we should go learn something as we're working on this? Because we don't already know everything?"

Erika

Right. I could have called the book, "Just Enough Learning" or something.

Jen

What I found to be so hilarious about your presentation was that you were talking about minimum-research. Just enough. What is it that you can get away with and how can you do it quick and dirty and how can you stay away from those rooms with the double-paned glass and the survey that you got out of the book and you just changed a few words and then used that survey... stuff that just feels awkward and weird. And you were like, "Yeah, that's awkward and weird. Don't do that."

Erika

Don't do it. When people aren't familiar with something, they do things that have the appearance. That have the appearance of doing research. Sometimes we've had to talk clients out of doing lab research. Because they want to go. They want to have a day off and sit in a lab and eat M&Ms, which is the traditional food you eat when you're sitting in a lab watching research studies. 'Cause that feels... people make a lot of decisions based on what feels comfortable or what feels familiar. What I'm advocating for is making decisions based on, you know, a rational evaluation of the circumstances you're in. Based on critical thinking. Which isn't, "This feels fun and this feels comfortable and I'm going to have a clipboard and do this thing." It requires a certain amount of discipline. It requires you and your team being honest with yourselves to say, "If we get answers that we don't like or that require us..." When we really honestly access, say, "Ok, we thought that people would really respond well to this and they're responding badly so are we going to keep going down the same course or are we going to change?" You've got to have that honest evaluation. It can be hard.

Jen

What's another example that you can talk about where... a project where you or somebody that you know did research and how did that work? What was that? How did it make everybody win?

Erika

Make everybody win. [Laughs] Well, a lot of times in the work that we do... because we, like your friend you mentioned [Jen laughs] have been doing this for a really, really long time... I bet our guesses are often pretty good guesses. Sometimes we're super wrong, right? And then we learn things and that's good. Some of the most useful research we do for our clients is that organizational research, is reflecting, is talking to people. Because we can come in and do stakeholder interviews. And what a stakeholder interviews are, are organizational research. Is going in and talking one-on-one with people who either specifically themselves, or who represent a group, that has an interest in the outcome of this project. Somehow the work that we do is going to change something about their world. We talk to people one-on-one, which is incredibly important because, in these really political organizations, a lot of times people are very careful about what they say in front of their colleagues or their bosses or the people who report to them, right? It can be risky to say things that aren't... that don't feel safe to say. What we can do, is, we go and we'll talk to these individual stakeholders and it will be one or two of us. Not an intimidating number of Mules. We'll say, "Tell us what's really going on here." They will, oftentimes, as you mentioned with the therapy, people will just... finally they're being heard. After all of us, "I know we're not doing the right thing, but I have no incentive to argue with people so I'm just going to keep doing what I'm told," or, "I'm going to keep doing what I promised I'd do." They can just unload on us: "Let me tell you how things really work around here." Then we go around and we talk to, you know, 10 or 15 people in the organization individually like that and then we have a really good idea of how things really go. Then we compile that, revealing as much information as we've agreed upon about, like, we're not going to rat people out. That's part of the promise. [Both laugh]

Jen

But you can aggregate it and find trends.

Erika

Right. Or we'll often use verbatim quotes, which are very powerful. We'll say, "This is how you have told us that you want to work," right? "This is your goal in doing this project. You want your business to be more successful in this way. Let me tell you, we've uncovered the way things really work around here. And you're either going to have to change how things work or change your goal." That conversation provides the organization something to deal with. Because we're like, "Hey, we're just reporting what we found here." But because we've done it and they're reacting to something from the outside, it creates an opportunity to make changes in the organization based on what we've heard. A lot of times we're not surprising people with that. But it's like, now that it's been 3rd party acknowledged how messed up our politics are, now we're going to address it. Or, sometimes what happens is, people on the client team will say, "We know that's really the way things are, but we can't do anything about that right now." Then we take that as a constraint. Like, "Ok, we know that there's this department that's doing this work in a way that's not really helping you meet your business goal. But you've told us, 'That's not going to change,' for whatever reason. And we just have to take that a given." That can often be the most useful problem-solving we do for an organization because the other stuff, the actual when it comes down to, "Ok, now we're going to design something." We're going to design something super well and competently. That might not be where the hard problem is. It's always a question of, "Where is the problem to solve?" It's like, we're designing something, it sounds really straightforward but it's the organizational side of things that's really challenging.

Have you seen The Wire? Did you watch The Wire?

Jen

Yes, the TV show? Yes.

Erika

Yeah. That is the absolute best sort of analogy for how this works. The Wire is about the inability of an individual to overcome institutional inertia. Each season is a different institution and you encounter all of these individuals who are trying to do the right thing but then the institution stymies them. That can be the case in the design world, too. People know what needs to be done but the institution has this inertia.

Jen

It also reminds me... so often when we think about a web design project, we're thinking about the external facing result. The homepage. Maybe a couple internal pages of a website. If you are on a big team and you go in and redesign a big university website. You say, "I helped redesign that website, this university website," everybody's thinking about the homepage and the outside. But really a big part of that success or failure of a project like that is the design of the tools for entering content into the website, figuring out the flow. Who's adding the content now? Is that going ok? No, it's not. The reason the content's bad is because nobody really knows who's doing what, or the tools are really bad. It seems like in there, there's both places to design the backend CMS and also design better... bring attention to workflow issues or, you know, who-does-what issues and all of that. Both to make a pretty shiny homepage but then also to have really great content on the homepage. Because you've helped to work out the problems that used to exist around all that.

Erika

Absolutely. Workflow is one of the most essential things to uncover in this organizational research. My super-gross metaphor for this: If you're redesigning something, say you're redesigning a publication or a website for your company. If you don't also redesign the workflow that's like getting a face transplant without hooking up all the nerves and blood vessels, right? [Jen laughs] What's gonna happen is that new face is going to look awesome for one day and then parts of it are going to start dying and then you're not going to be able to feel other parts of it. Yeah, see, really gross metaphor...

Jen

It is!

Erika

But that's what it's like! Because these habits... your target users, your customers have habits that you have to acknowledge and contend with if you're redesigning something for them. Same thing internally. If you say, "We've decided the best thing for our business is, like, we're going to write..." and this is the simplest example, "... we're going to write five posts a week. They're going to be short but we're going to write five posts a week." But if you don't have it set up in your organization, you can't wish that to be the case.

Jen

Right. Who's going to write five posts a week?

Erika

Who? And what's the editorial process? And who's going to enter the content? Who's going to write the content? Who's going to approve the content? What are the standards? What's the goal? How do we make sure that we're staying on track? If you don't solve all of that and you design your whole system around, like, "Ok, we're going to showcase these awesome five posts," and then you can't actually do that as an organization, then it doesn't matter how fantastic the front-end, the outside facing design is. It will fail and die.

Jen

I learned that the hard way through the, whatever, decade, not this one, earlier decades. Building websites for... tiny, tiny websites for tiny, tiny clients and I would build all kinds of awesome, "Hey, you can add content yourself!" and nobody ever did. [Pause] [Erika laughs] They're all empty land. There's just this series of empty lands that I built. It's harder than, "Hey, it's easy! It's WordPress! Just log in, it's no big deal." That's not enough. It's not enough for people to say, "Yes, I want to write content for my own website."

Erika

Yeah. And it comes down to being really honest about what people have the capacity to do. Whether they're internal or external.

Jen

And listening!

Erika

Yeah.

Jen

Really listening to them say, "I don't want to write content." [Laughs]

Erika

Yeah.

Jen

Rather than saying, "You should! It will help your business."

Erika

What you can do is say, "What kind of things do you do? What kind of... if you really need..." And I kind of hate the word "content" as this catchall word for "stuff", but I'm going to use it now because it's easy and people like to do easy things. So you say, "What sort of things do you create that re easy for you to create?" If writing is difficult for you, is it the sort of thing where it's like, "What are people already generating in terms of words or pictures or audio? What are they doing that we can just capture and use instead of giving people a new task?" Many times in an organization there's a lot of work going on that you're not really capturing the full value of. You can go in and find out, "People are already writing this kind of thing." Maybe they're already writing this report and we could find a way to use that so we're not adding work but we're just making better use of the work that they're using. Like, "Oh, we can excerpt this," or something. Or we can say that they're writing something for the website and that also functions as their internal documentation. Or something like that. It's really thinking about, "What are people doing? And why are they doing it?" Because the other thing is the incentive structure, right? The best example of this right now is in advertising-supported websites with publications. You might talk to some people in an organization and they'll say, "We really want to get away from the page view metric." You know, that you load the page and you get an ad impression and that's how all of the content-internet-ad-supported-world runs, right?

Jen

Right. You get these nine-page articles that should be one page. Because that's nine impressions instead of one.

Erika

Then somebody comes in and says, "That's annoying to your users. We're going to move away form that. We're going to move to this different model where we'll have everything on one page and that's what our readers really want," and all that. But if the way that your business still makes money is through page views, if that incentive hasn't changed, then you're going to do what still makes you money. You know? Or if somebody, say, for example, somebody's job performance is based on a certain activity. Somebody's job performance is based on writing five things a week. And you're like, "No, instead of writing five crappy things a week, write one good thing." But their personal incentive hasn't changed. They're going to keep doing the thing with the incentive. People aren't going to do, out of the goodness of their heart, the thing that the web style guide tells them to do.

Jen

It sounds like it's... oh, I had the thought in my head. That the... let's put a marker down, we'll cut that out. [Both laugh] God, I totally forgot what I was going to say.

Erika

That's another thing. People have very, very short memories. [Jen laughs] It's true. If there's one thing that I've found in all of my user research, is that especially with the rise of the search engine and especially Google, people have outsourced remembering things. To Google. If you have any hope of getting somebody to return to your website or remember you or anything, just assume that people can't remember a damn thing anymore.

Jen

[Laughs] Look, you just covered so well for me there. Nice. [Both laugh]

Erika

But it's things like that, that are part of the ethnography, which is just this observation of, "What do people really do?" People don't remember things. People don't type in URLs anymore. People type in the name of that one article they found that one time. And they will type in the three keywords that get them to that site. They could be so random. And people will do that because that's their habit. And you're not going to break that habit. You have to think, "What created that habit?" Things like that. The fact that everybody always has 700 tabs open now.

Jen

And your JavaScript that you tested and you think is great is actually not going to run very well because 3/4 of the system memory is already taken up by the other zillion tabs.

Erika

That's the one thing I think that nobody right now... it's the most common user behavior that somehow nobody's taking advantage of.

Jen

The zillion tabs?

Erika

The zillion tabs. That's so interesting to me. Because we hear that again and again and again. It's like, we're not doing anything with that behavior. I'm not sure what to do with it. That's sort of an open question. But I think it's messing with people's metrics, with their time on site.

Jen

Ohhh, yeah.

Erika

You try to follow a path through a site but instead of going from one article to another article to another article, people are maybe going to the homepage and opening up 10 tabs.

Jen

Right. Yeah. Or people aren't staying just on your site, like you were describing before. People are in a context. They're on Facebook then they're on your site and then they're back on Facebook and then they're back on your site for some reason and then they're over here and then they remember something and then they see the tab three days later and they go, "Oh wait, that's right, I meant to finish that article."

Erika

Exactly. The idea of a "session time" on a website is just perverse.

Jen

Mmm.

Erika

Because somebody will have that tab... they'll have that tab open... they might have it open for a month. [Both laugh] But they will also have 50 other websites. This is no exaggeration. Anybody listening is probably like, "Yeah, I totally have 50 sites open right now." And they'll go back and forth. That's a case of where there's this reality and there's the assumption that we're designing against. Or the assumption that we're trying to measure against.

Jen

It sounds like it really is just about keeping your eyes and your team's eyes... helping maybe 2 or 3 people doing research and they're bringing back all that knowledge for a larger group of people. Just refocusing the team on reality.

Erika

Except that I would encourage... this idea that people go off and do the research and bring that back? There is nothing in the world more boring to read than a research report.

Jen

So how do you communicate that?

Erika

As much as possible, I'd say... we have to make research reports and we're always trying to think of new ways to make it more interesting for people. Especially for our clients. But if you're working with an internal team, it's like, get everybody. If you're working with a design team, if you're in client services, have everybody on your team who's going to be involved in creating that design solution, participate in the research. Because even if they sit in on one or two phone calls or they do part of, say, a competitive audit, or they do part of a literature review. If they have a hand in finding the research, then it won't feel like, "I had this great idea," and then the researcher is coming in and peeing all over my great idea. Instead it's like, "I had a hand in finding this knowledge." It's both more present and more interesting to people. And it feels like a more organic part of the process. And it's more fun. It should be not homework or not heinous to go out and ask these questions and find answers. It should be a fun, interesting, integral part of the process. And as many people as possible participate and help create that, whatever the final analysis is, or the ongoing analysis, then it's just going to be a part of the way you do your work. It shouldn't add anything, it should just be a part of the process. It can fit into any process. It can fit into Agile Scrum stuff. Or it can fit into, "I'm one person," you know.

Jen

Do you include clients in some of those research activities? Bring them along?

Erika

Not typically. Frequently because we're already fighting for enough time. For enough time to do these things. I'll tell you, the thing that takes the most time with research is scheduling everybody's time. We can have people listen in or watch or observe. It's super easy to just have somebody be an observer to a phone call or a screen share or something like that.

Jen

Or you could always record a video and play it back later.

Erika

Yeah, exactly. As long as you provide the context. It isn't like you said earlier. What if just one person said one thing that totally supports this crazy interpretation? You always have to put context around it. You always kind of have to quality it. To say, "This is this one person. They're not really in our target group." Etcetera etcetera. If somebody's only in on part of the process, then you just need to help them understand what that part of the process means.

Jen

I was involved in a large project years ago that... I think there were some of us who, especially perhaps those of us who were designers and had a lot of design experience, could see flaws in what we were building. Glaring obvious flaws. But there were other people who were very invested and had been around longer and had more seniority and they had no problem with those things. They thought that they were awesome. Perhaps they were the ones that came up with them in the first place, so they were extra invested. All it took was, like, one user testing example that was videotaped, getting passed around, for all of this digging in and doubling down and being like, "It should be like this! It should always stay this way!" For that to just go away. In two seconds. Everybody was like, "Yeah, yeah, of course that needs to be better!" [Both laugh] Like, wow. It just took, maybe, 3 or 4 examples of people struggling over this piece that was clearly badly designed and clearly super confusing to anybody who wasn't an insider. In that way it can be very powerful. I was shocked. Like, this is magic. You just dangle a video and all the objections dissolve away.

Erika

Exactly. Because, how do you argue? It's all fun and great if people inside like things but people inside have an incentive to like things. Because there's a sunk cost, or something like that. That's the greatest rejoinder to the idea that research is expensive and time-consuming. Whatever research you do will be less expensive and less time-consuming than hanging on to something that's not working because you're afraid to let it go. If you can invalidate your assumptions as quickly as possible, then you'll have all that time and money to pursue the right course. It's a change of mindset, that embracing. If I'm wrong, I want to know that as fast as possible.

Jen

There's something about designing that especially, I think, for younger designers, you come in and you feel like, "I've got these really clear ideas," especially some visual vision, you know, visually how this should look. "If only everybody would shut up and let me do it. Let's actually build my idea. Then this whole project would be awesome. But instead, these terrible politics have intervened and this crazy whatever's going on that just derailed everything and my awesome design never got built properly. That's why this project is failing. And meh. You should have listened to me." [Both laugh] Like, "I'm the designer," right? Maybe young isn't fair. But immature. There's some sort of immaturity there, that at some point, or what you're talking about is, asking designers to grow up and be like, look, there's gonna be political stuff. There's gonna be some weird problem about why people can't add content to the website. There's going to be objections to things. There's going to people who are invested heavily in ideas that you already know aren't going to work. So, what are you going to do about it? How can you figure out what those obstacles might be before you get to them? How can you see them coming and therefore have strategies about them? How can you shape the team and the ideas that everybody has on the team and the feeling, whether it's fun or not fun. All that stuff. How can you shape things into a successful end despite all these crazy boulders that are going to show up in the middle of the road?

Erika

The visual design part, people focus on, that's the easy part. Laying something out well or coming up with a nice interaction. That's actually, that's the crust of the earth or the tip of the iceberg. That's the most visible part. But there's all this stuff underneath it.

Jen

It is where sometimes, every once in a while you see a very complicated project launch and it's just so beautiful. The older I get the more impressed I am. The more I know of what a miracle that was to get that to turn out that way.

Erika

Because of that, the very most annoying thing that a designer can do... I don't care if this is something we designed or something somebody else designed, but sometimes there will be a product launch that gets a lot of hype or something. And somebody else comes along and they're like, "That was kind of crappy. Here's how I'd design it." And they just sit down. A designer will be like, "Oh." And they'll redesign something at their desk in 24 hours and be like, "Here's how I would have done it." The way that they would have it is completely unmoored from organization or business realities. I think that's a jerky, unrealistic thing to do. To say, "They could have just done it like this." It's like, "No. They couldn't have. They did it the way they could. And that's what happened."

Jen

Right. In a parallel universe where you own the company and you have no employees. [Laughs]

Erika

And you were the only user.

Jen

Right. [Laughs]

Erika

And you were in charge of all the technology. Yeah, in a parallel universe that revolves entirely you. Which is not actually the way the world... the world is complex and made up of many, many people, and many things that aren't you.

Jen

Yeah. That feels like the whole theme of this book.

Erika

It really is.

Jen

Go learn about the people who are not you. It's hard. It's so hard to... because it's easy to look at, like, "Oh, those people over there, they always think everybody's just like them. Those Android people. People who love Android They just think everybody's going to love everything like they do." But it's harder when you're, like, having to admit when I'm doing that. When I'm thinking of myself that way.

Erika

It comes down to really being clear about the set of things that you, as a designer, or your design team, have control over. And which things you don't have control over. If you don't have control over it, you ought to find out about it.

Jen

Yes. I don't know what else to say about that. [Laughs] Yeah.

Erika

[Laughs] Deep thoughts.

Jen

Deep thoughts. Well, people can... there are show notes for this show at 5by5.tv/webahead/55 where there'll be links to some of the things that you've been talking about. Also, a link to your book. People can't order it this minute but they can order it next Monday.

Erika

Yeah.

Jen

Yeah. And people could follow @abookapart on Twitter or they could follow you on Twitter. It's @mulegirl, right? Is that right?

Erika

Yeah.

Jen

M-U-L-E girl. And people who are... they will be then reminded that your book is now on sale.

Erika

Yes. Once it's on sale, I will be reminding people.

Jen

I took this book to lunch with me today and I was like, "Ok. Speed read the whole thing." [Laughs] And I couldn't! I started reading the first paragraph and I was just sucked right in. It was nice. I was like, "oh, a book that's so well-written that I can't... I want to just read it. In order." I was impressed. I was very happy.

Erika

Awesome. Well, thank you. I made it as short as I could. I really did. But once I got into it, I was like... because I thought, "You know, people need a short book about research." Then I realized why all other research books were so long. I tried to cover as much as possible as an entry point. So people aren't daunted by, "I've got to understand so much or do so much." It's like, just start asking questions. And don't fret too much about being too rigorous. Once you start, you get with it. It doesn't, you know...

Jen

It's not that hard, is that what you're saying?

Erika

It's harder to acknowledge the need for it than it is to do it. If you're already a designer or a coder, you have all the analytic, critical-thinking skills you need. It's just applying them. And being open, you know?

Jen

When you first presented this, I thought, to me... of course, me. I thought, "Oh! I'm sort of, kind of already doing some of that without being conscious of it." I could become conscious of it and maybe write it down or something and then I get to call it research, which is cool because then it sounds like doing more stuff. And I could make it better by being conscious about it. I can make clearer decisions about it while I'm doing it. And maybe not feel guilty. Sometimes it's weird, you know? We start to work on something and I'm like, "I think I need to do this stuff first. But it doesn't really count, so I'm just going to feel guilty about spending time on it." But I think it's important. This was permission to say, "Actually, that is a thing and it is important and you should do it." In fact, you could do more of it. In some ways, it was very, kind of, affirming, of like, "Oh, ok, it is about following instincts and doing it more intentionally."

Erika

Yeah, it's about doing whatever you're doing with better information and with more intention.

Jen

Yeah. Cool. Well, I very highly recommend the book and I thank you for being on the show today.

Erika

Yeah, thank you.

Jen

This was fun. I have another show scheduled for the end of September and I'm working on... I'm saying this because people have been asking me, they've been pinging me and asking me, "Where is The Web Ahead?" I definitely have another show booked at the end of September. I'm trying to get one in the middle of September and get going either on an every-other-week or an every-week schedule. People can follow The Web Ahead on Twitter: @thewebahead is the handle. You can also subscribe in iTunes if you have not subscribed in Tunes and you will get the show automatically. There is actually a place to sign up for an email newsletter that's brand new. Brand, brand new. Has come out since the last episode. If you go to 5by5.tv/webahead there's a link in the sidebar, a little tiny link that says "The Web Ahead newsletter" and you click it and you have a place where you can put in your name and email address and you can subscribe to The Web Ahead newsletter. What that will do is, when a show comes out, you'll get an email that is made by robots that are part MailChimp robots and part 5by5 robots, and they take all the show notes and they format them into this nice, little, beautiful newsletter, and they send it to you. So you know that there's a new show and you have the show notes in your email. And if you don't want that, if you sign up and after awhile you're like, "I don't want this," then you click a button and it's gone, because it's MailChimp and then it's no big deal. So sign up for that if you're interested: 5by5.tv/webahead/newsletter. That's it. That's enough pimping of stuff. Until next time. Thanks.