Indi Young - Paying Better Attention to the Problem - #NUX8 - @indiyoung

okay now iose know it sounds like something okay so only a few of you heard the trapdoor joke listening to everybody else there are a few themes that came out and I want to just kind of quickly go through them the first is that we introverts are the professionals who can make the change we have the power we have the Cape should we want the Cape right we can do this because we're professionals if there's anyone in the audience who's a student you're going to be a professional in another couple years okay and it's all about that word professional the other thing is that we want to be more aware self-aware aware of what other people are thinking we want to be more intentional with what we want to do we want to be more honest about our gaps and knowledge and we definitely definitely put people first over technology and over stakeholders and then last but not least and this I've got a little preface there is somebody who asked me just two weeks ago to do a workshop for their company for this you know it's the whole division of user experience people just just make it simple just make research simple for them in one day I'm like really sorry it's not simple it's never simple and we're the people who can embrace that and we're the people who can help get that message I was like yeah people are all different we're not simple there's no one answer but that's okay we're okay with that we can take little bites we can understand certain sections and little intersections and we'll take it one bite at a time as we go but we're up against a bunch of problems I want to give you three really quick examples of some air-quote research that we've run across this happens to be from a researcher at UC Berkeley called Paul piff and it was back in the era when the 99% protests were going on this was in the US and it was like oh hey the 99% of the people have little money in the 1% of the people have all the money and so we're protesting anyway right around then what he wanted I believe I'm imagining this what he wanted was grant money so he's like what kind of research can I do that will get me the attention of the grant grantors so he went he positioned his grad students at a crosswalk and in a crosswalk a zebra crossing in California where UC Berkeley is you have to stop by law as a as a car if you see a ped who wants to walk across the roadway you have to stop and so he stationed one grad student there about to cross and the other grad student writing down the make and model of the cars that did not stop and his conclusion all the expensive cars didn't stop so that means rich people are not empathetic okay good you guys are laughing correlation is not causation that's a rule sure there's correlation it is not causation the only way to really understand it is to ask well do we know why do we know exactly why those fancy cars are not stopping for the poor grad student no we don't okay if we don't know why can we accept the risk of not knowing well in his case yeah sure all he wanted was a good headline so you'd get his grant money but if we could have one of those grad students chase down the cars that didn't stop right get their attention be really friendly get them to roll down their window and talk to them you might hear stories like this and these explain why and only the one in the upper right-hand corner has any sort of hint little taste of someone feeling superior the rest of them have no association with that so okay I heard this he actually gave a presentation on a TEDx stage and I'm like yes seriously I cannot believe this guy's God came to attention this is not research here's another example Christian rudder he was one of the cofounders of OkCupid he wrote a book called Datak lism and in it he he talked about all sorts of things apparently he has a blog where he posts things that he learned from his quant data and one of the things he was talking about was like oh you know we're so hypocritical we'll say like oh yeah we're open to a relationship with somebody of a different race but then you know nobody did well so he's talking about large sets of data large sets of data can be applied to large populations but they can't be applied to individuals so you can't say we like you you right there you're the you're a hypocrite right you can't do that that's just not the way it works here's another example this I was working with a team who worked for an airline it was actually two merged Airlines so there was a lot of infighting going on but that's beside the point they would get data like this this happens to be data about how many people checked bags for that particular airline in one particular day and I sat down with animal like wow look at the way they broke this down and they're like what do you mean I'm like take a good look you're like oh man you're right that's interesting our boss he's all like he was looking at that gender breakdown going yeah you know women they can't carry on because I've got all those shoes make up and and so we know how to break down the data better we'll break it down by you know possible reasons why like maybe you pack more if you're going on a long trip and you pack less if you're going on a short trip or you know maybe you're gonna check your bag if you're on your way home but not if you're on your way there because you don't want to lose your stuff for the duration of the time you're there and i'ma like you guys come on you're professionals what are you doing here you're guessing you're guessing you have no idea let's go do some research so we did we went and did research this was just our first pass at the research but look at what we found it happens to be four quadrants again but none of these people are talking about return trips or number of days that they're packing for they're talking about something that's extremely precious to them in that one there was the guy who was in the band traveling with his guitar he carries that on he keeps it with him some people actually buy seats for their musical instruments there was also a guy who was going to Nepal he was an ophthalmologist he was going to volunteer his services he's bringing the laser scope for measuring eyes or something out and rural Nepal somewhere he says you know if I let that baggage gorillas handle this it's not gonna be functional by the time I get there so it's my precious so if you know why you know more about your risk okay all of this is called research theater and I want you to be aware of the research theater in your own realm because as professionals we have to persuade people and we need the vocabulary we need the understanding of exactly what's happening so that we can help open other people's eyes not by sort of like pounding them with it but by understanding how they are seeing it understanding what their perspective on it is and being able to talk to them about it being able to show them where this fits in the grand scheme of things so let's look at grander schemes such as more mature disciplines that have been around for eons as opposed to tech which has been around for decades these more mature disciplines constantly they already understand and respect that people have ways doing things of achieving their purposes that is totally valid they respect that people are intelligent they don't call them targets somebody just mentioned to me they understand that people have deeper reasoning about the way that they approach things they then harness that to become more curious about different sections again little intersections let's find out more about a certain thinking style let's find more about a certain approach and then let's build different ways of supporting different people and supporting more people a little bit more about that in a second digital realm not so much no let's just hurry up and get something out there Lean Startup so let's just build an idea this throw it out there let's test it see if it works and this is an idea that has not come from research it has come from the brains of every member of that team and while those brains may be rich and intelligent they do not represent every possible purpose or approach or thinking style or philosophy that is out there they're only representing their own and what they own they have experienced themselves they don't know how to perspective shift to perspective shift is another word for empathy this is not being done this is the key broken part and so what happens is that we end up with companies trying to test things in Senate Bulls book he's talking about how oh my god they call that research they call their little eggs that they throw at the wall research that's not research that's research theater that's ridiculous that but they're doing it without our consent not so great okay bad also this idea of measuring a company's success by how many people we've you know managed to capture in our dragnet look at these things that I have highlighted here these are questions that you might expect if you were to go and interview at one of these companies like Google or Facebook engagement engagement engagement engagement engagement what does that mean it just means that somebody's like looking at you through the screen does that mean that you have supported that person mm-hmm no supported me I'm only interested in how that person supported me by looking at me through the through the glass panel we need to become aware of this engagement okay ours these are not metrics that are measuring how well we're supporting a person trying to get their purpose done this is important okay a couple of books I'm going to run through these pretty quick so take photos if you want to read a book this is weapons of mass destruction Kathi O'Neal's used to be a quant on Wall Street in New York City got disgusted by the way the algorithms were playing with people's money by the way that they were you know making guesses and assumptions and so she went and she interviewed all these different industries insurance medic medical education and she tells all these stories of how the algorithms completely ignore the actual person it's it's a really hard book to read I cried at the end of every chapter joy boola meanie she has this thing called the algorithmic Justice League she is the one who when she was at MIT discovered that the Google photo face recognition software doesn't recognize faces with darker skin should use this mask to get it to recognize her as a human which is degrading and ridiculous not only that it wasn't recognizing her as a woman so she's got a TED talk that's called anti someone good to follow Sarawak tour butcher has written a book that's called technically wrong this has a bunch more stories like Kathy's book a little bit easier to read but also totally incriminating software the way that we affect people the way that we're affecting people through our government services through our our flower delivery services it touches people and the more people we touch the more we are in their lives the more responsible we need to be come so I'm not saying hey it's our fault I'm saying hey we need to step up we're going to put on the Cape we're gonna start recognizing this when it comes out in our team meetings when it comes out of the mouths of our stakeholders we're gonna start quantifying what is meant okay so something called unintended consequences this means ah it isn't working the way we had intended actually people are using it to do something else Facebook Twitter anyone or externalities this is people that we just didn't think about totally ignored and what I want to do is be able to support these people to become more aware of them little by little you can't boil the ocean but little by little study after study you can gather more knowledge and keep that knowledge in a certain central diagram that helps you keep that alive and keep working against it up to the point where you finally get to the metric where you are supporting someone as opposed to just talking about engagement okay there's a lot more also that you can do not only take care of those unintended outcomes or the externalities but also do some gap analysis and Giles showed you a little bit about that earlier today for which I thank him also being able to diversify diversify the way that you support people the way you understand what different perspectives they have what different contexts they have recognized that a persona or I call them thinking styles because persona has too much baggage that goes along with it but a thinking style can actually change for the same individual based on context so it's thinking style plus context and context is the variable thinking style is the variable it all shifts but we can understand it that one at the bottom the metrics being able to actually understand how well you are supporting someone I have some good stories from Salesforce that are doing that that I can't fit into this talk but this is called exploring the problem space it's mapping out the landscape so that we can with full clarity and awareness start to move and support people now it's a sketch the stuff that's close in that we've studied we can see in detail the stuff that's farther out we're thinking it's out there I think Giles had that three-part thing yeah okay that's the stuff we'll explore next it's not the next three months so what I want to also and I'm going to answer the question that he's always asked like what do I want my legacy to be I want the balance to shift there is a problem in balance in that most of the work we do is in the solution space the solution space is about coming up with ideas that solve problems in the solution space we speak of people as the user or the customer or the passenger or the member or the civilian or whatever noun we use to represent the person that we have some sort of a relationship with or potential relationship with we're all familiar with this this is where most of our work takes place we are not spending enough time in the problem space I have been getting lots of tweets just this week of people who are saying we're doing this we're doing this year we're doing this there so it is growing this is what we're going to be focused on for the next ten years is to balance that out and pay a lot more attention to the problem space where we speak about a person not a user not any of those other nouns it's a person as a human like you and me who has a purpose that they're trying to accomplish and they could care less if they're gonna accomplish it with you or some other entity that will serve them they just need to accomplish that thing okay we'll also look across the bottom we've got quantitative and qualitative and I'm gonna talk about those in a little bit but you can see I put a few circles around here to talk about the disciplines so we've got user or UX research kind of wandering into the foundational exploratory area it's very much in the generative and evaluative areas because that's idea generation that's checking to see if our ideas are worth while testing them right we've got big data and we've got usability research as our other disciplines so quant and qual there's a lot of misperceptions about them oftentimes people will think that qualitative is like the the shoddy sort of iffy stuff and quantitative is the actual valid stuff to put it lightly but they are completely different Continuum's quantitative is telling you about scale and causation qualitative is focusing on people and the patterns and consistency of those patterns the rules roles the thinking everything that's going through people's heads okay both of them have a subjective end and an empirical end and you can actually map put little dots on this very diagram and these slides are available so that you can grab this image yourself put little dots on here to represent the different studies you've done and see where you lie see where your studies are okay notice that stories and anecdotes are on the subjective end we need patterns to make qualitative data empirical okay I'm gonna throw something else at you stakeholders man they're just they just got a different philosophy they're tow they don't think the same way here's why go to business school you learn to be an Objectivist you learned that reality at least social reality the social sciences the understanding of people hey you know what it's pretty stable and I can understand it in fact I can understand it in a positivist way and just like I would do for natural science I can I can study these people and I can get results that are repeatable well in our qualitative world we don't believe that the reality is stable because each person each human has their own agency and they can change they can change their own behavior so it's messy that's how we like to talk about it we also embrace we called interpretivism we embrace the idea that we're gonna understand somebody from their own frame of reference okay this the stuff on the left is what they they learn in business school they've never even heard of the stuff on the right and it's interesting I've heard several people say yeah you know once I got a voice at the table I was able to start talking to people about the value the equal value of qualitative data and start talking to people about what the differences are and how you can mix methods and how both approaches are valid but you need to have more balance so more balance in the in the problem space area more balance in the qualitative data area so I'm gonna go stand on the lawn again Here I am on the lawn Sam Ladner's but she just came out with this it's all about mixed methods and it talks a lot about this I highly recommend this book well the more professional we look the better it is for us as a community and for each of us as individuals within our own team in our own workspace and I can leave these books lying around and show that there's actually you know a whole field of study about gathering qualitative data about mixing methods about empirical data okay so this is my diagram it shows how to hook problem space research with solution space problem space research is not a part of your dual track continuous agile whatever flow you want to call it it can't fit there's no time so the best thing to do is to keep it completely separate there are periods of time during your year where you can do this this is the kind of research that doesn't go on continuously because it's not about ideas and it's not about solutions it's about understanding people and how people pursue their purpose they each have their own individual way of pursuing their purpose and we want to look at it and see what patterns we can find and see if we can figure out thinking styles and different approaches so we can start measuring how well we are supporting those different approaches so we get so caught up in the solution space that we're missing these like easy low-hanging fruit opportunities of just being able to support people differently from different perspectives so what does it mean to gather problems face data I had that little outlier there that was called listening sessions let me quickly introduce you to it I actually teach advanced courses in this so there's a lot more that goes into this this is kind of a real quick intro but first of all when is it okay she just said a year once a year yeah it could be once a year once every two years I'd the airline one we did eight studies back-to-back over the course of 14 months and that was rare nobody does that but we had a VP who had sneaky power but essentially the question is hey for this next cycle in the solution space let's identify our thinking style and the approaches that were trying to solve for and step into their shoes oh we don't know the thinking style or we can't identify which approaches mmm that means it's time to do some problem space research okay that's the question you may not have to do it yet so what is the purpose purpose is an intention something that somebody's trying to get done it is a larger purpose in that you could technically possibly go back in a time machine and ask your great-grandparents with how they achieved that same purpose so if you're working in an insurance industry somebody has a car crash you're thinking claims they're thinking what god I just wish I could have my life back the way it was before that's their purpose your great-grandparents probably didn't have an auto crash but they probably had some sort of accidents where they needed to get their life back the way it was before sometimes the purposes can be smaller they're kind of Goldilocks different levels but it is emphatically not about your solutions or your ideas so how does it compare to the problem space the purpose versus the problem space the purpose is what's behind it okay so if your problem space is say a crashed car right we want to deal with people who have crashed cars talk to that person the person's purpose you know might not be get back to the way things were but oh my god I've got to repair the relationship with my mother-in-law because she was there and now I gave her whiplash there's lots of different purposes okay what's behind that here's some examples on the Left we have solution space questions phrased from the point of view of the user okay so let's imagine we're at a big-box store we can buy just about anything you might as a user want to order something online and pick it up there or you might want to set up a subscription but in the problem space my purpose might be crap my refrigerator just died and I need to get one pretty damn quick so I'm gonna go over my phone just broke can I need to get a replacement pretty darn quick right it's that that's the purpose doesn't matter what the thing is that they're buying but the purpose is I gotta replace this pretty quick or hey you know I'm really interested in this thing and I want to like test it out you know feel how it weighs or touch or something like that in person as opposed to just looking at it online because that doesn't quite give you everything another set of examples like for the airline in the solution space yeah I'm gonna search for flights or I'm gonna set up my preferences for this particular trip or this particular airline but in the problem space my purpose might be hey I want to make sure that I don't miss my train or my plane or whatever that I'm taking right or I want to make sure that I'm productive on my day of travel I'm productive might mean taking my laptop and notebooks and putting together all of my data or it might mean crocheting or knitting the sweater that I'm making for my niece right productive can be lots of different things so we can include that in purposes lots of examples here is a picture of the top level data this is from the airline we did listening sessions with a hundred people and each study was slightly different than the other and you can see with the red arrow there was a very big mental space it was called explore what takes to get there this was something a lot of people went through is like well you know hmm how can I get there easiest or you know maybe it's a difficult Caribbean island that I have to take a boat to get to at the very end or something but that blue arrow that's where all the airline's start and look at all that stuff that's going on up above it in fact this is diving into just explore what it takes to get that would scroll sort of down to floors this was a 7,200 lines spreadsheet I feed it into my mental model diagram generator and it makes the initial diagram then you layer all your data on top of and align stuff underneath that Michele showed you anyway that's what it looks like when it's in diagrammatic form it's barely readable but essentially that blue arrow is where Airlines Priceline kayak whatever service you're using start they're all like hey look if we have planes and they fly between airports so pick one right that is simply turning the inside of that organization to the outside and asking people to learn your service as opposed to understanding their point of view their point of view is more like this is one thinking style that's called get it over with hey I have a meeting or a conference in this other city this was actually one of the patterns and and I need to get home for this other meeting or conference one woman gone to a conference and then wanted to get back not for a meeting but for her daughter's first piano recital and then the plane was delayed she had made a big four-hour window between the time she landed and her daughter's piano recital ha no problem I'm gonna be able to get that well delay delay delay there's no way it's gonna happen and she became very frustrated she stepped out of her get it over with thinking style and stepped into the frustrated thinking style and what did the gate agent do it's not our fault you know it's weather weather delay we can't control this you know you're you're you're a grumbler that's how they thought of them you're a grumbler oh my god no you too can become a frustrated so anyway I mean there's a way to serve these people what about offering them much better secure Wi-Fi or a place where they could actually FaceTime with somebody who was in the audience to actually sort of watch the daughter's piano recital I don't know how is that possible something right so if you can define the purpose that you're trying to understand and if you can carefully select people to study participants who have done a lot of thinking about this purpose then you can do some listening sessions so let's talk about listening real quick first thing when you listen most of the time you're thinking okay I'm waiting for a pause so I can interject what I have to say I want to make them laugh or I want to show them what I know or something like that okay that little description of listening and all of us do it and so we're like yeah is how people start getting less interested in listening deeply there's a book by Dave gray liminal thinking where he talks about he has he lost a cartoon draw these little bubbles that people have like there's a little self-sealing logic and what's happening is that this is how we interact with each other we rub the edges of our bubbles up against each other and our preferences and our opinions and our explanations how something are done and our little statements of fact or what go between the barrier and that's how we understand each other we understand each other by rubbing the surfaces of our bubbles up against each other if you want to really understand somebody you need depth and the depth consists of your inner thought process your reasoning your thinking the little voice in your head it consists of the reactions that you have and how you deal with those reactions habitually or intentionally it consists of your guiding principles kind of the philosophies of the instructions that you follow when you're in a situation so here it is all written out for you without Dave Gray's bubbles and if we want here's a little reason of why we have to get to death cognitive empathy cannot develop at the surface level you cannot understand somebody's in our thinking by rubbing bubbles with them this means we can't rub bubbles with our stakeholders anymore I think Giles said you can't think of your stakeholders as monsters there are people too and we have to get to depth with them okay so how do we get to depth that's called empathy it's called walking in somebody's shoes perspective-taking seeing through their eyes there's lots of articles in her Business Review in Forbes those magazines your stakeholders read that define empathy basically as sensitivity just yep be more sensitive and it's ridiculous it's impossible to sort of like tell everybody okay now we're gonna be more sensitive empathy is not sensitivity it's not only an about emotion it's really all about listening and I wish it's we stop using a heart to represent empathy and start using an ear because an ear is about listening and empathy is only developed by piercing through those bubbles by listening and getting depths okay I want to introduce you to some parts there's like eight or ten different definitions types of empathy in psychology literature people who have studied empathy I'm going to tell you quickly about three of them emotional contagion empathic listening and cognitive empathy which I have mentioned once so far so emotional contagion you know you ever cried at a movie the director the actors they are causing emotional contagion okay they're using this thing called emotional contagion which is a type of empathy to get you to feel a certain way you might do that to yourself when you're you know you have to go to the gym but you don't feel like working out so you put on a certain set of tunes right you're causing yourself emotional contagion emotional contagion is used in your work to change the emotion of someone else and this can be used for good and this can be used for dark patterns for good maybe develop trust medical applications banks things like that you need to use emotional contagion to make people feel safe to have that emotion of safety okay I'm not going to touch on dark patterns we don't have time today empathic listening this one is incredible superpower okay empathic listening is all about making someone feel heard okay I'm gonna do the raise your hand things how many people feel heard by their stakeholders I expect no hands sorry okay maybe some people do anyway feeling heard is it a core human need you know Maslow's hierarchy or whatever should have feel heard in there as the base anyway here's a little cartoon dr. Bernie Brown has written a bunch about shame and empathy she did TED Talks and a bunch of other talks this is a little animation the link is at the bottom that she did about the definition of empathy versus sympathy empathic listening starts with you recognizing that someone is doing some deep thinking or having some sort of an emotional reaction that they're trying to handle with some thinking you recognise that first and then you tell yourself hey their situation is valid for them they have a whole history of how they came here they have their own guiding principles and their own styles of thinking their situation is valid you don't judge their situation as invalid and then you offer to connect with them you say hey wow I notice you know you're saying something about the deep thinking or something about an emotion or something that you're noticing and you're saying tell me more about this I want to understand you're offering a connection if they decide to take you up on that connection then they will talk to you about it and you will stay out of judgment that's it empathic listening is a superpower there's a great example of it in the Pixar film that's about the little girl and their emotions anyway so in your work and Pathak listening is really useful for working with your stakeholders it's really useful for working with your peer your direct reports your own team do it on a regular basis it is for relationship development these things don't happen overnight and it's also super useful and I use it all the time for listening sessions with my participants who have a purpose and a lot of thinking that they've done about a purpose so that I can understand their perspective cognitive empathy is what I want to generate for myself in my team out of the tool of empathic listening so cognitive empathy is understanding consciously what went through somebody's head ok it's like their little inner voice and the emotions that go along with that so that's the inner thinking that's the reactions those are the guiding principles that's what we're after with cognitive empathy we can't get it by rubbing bubbles at the surface level with our explanations and our opinions and our preferences okay so in your work cognitive empathy is how you and your team figure out how to support someone to achieve their purpose and their purpose and their way of achieving it versus someone else's okay one more thing you heard that phrase walk in somebody's shoes and it's a great phrase but it only applies to one part of what we're doing and this is the problem I see is a lot of teams try to walk in somebody's shoes without first developing empathy using that ear holding listening sessions there are a lot of teams out there that try to apply empathy on make believe okay another slide for your stakeholders okay so listening sessions this is all about our definition of interpretivism right these are people who have different ways of going about achieving that same purpose that you're listening to for all the participants okay you're gonna go about this with no list of interview questions you're going to follow where they go you are not a researcher you're not a professional you're just another human being okay social reality is constructed by humans who have agency and so you have to step into your human shoes to be able to recognize that build emotional empathic listening connections with that person so that you can build rapport and understand the depth you are also I don't like using the word Explorer for listening sessions because implied in that you're gonna come back with gold or some sort of glory and no it's just you and that other person so what I like to say is that it's you as a listener witnessing the other human as a speaker witnessing their own inner thinking so that they feel heard and oh my god it feels so good to feel heard people are they're like almost in tears thankful for being the participant in a listening session so it's very powerful stuff what you do is you follow them you follow in their footsteps you're it's like following somebody on a hike you're going where they're going you're not guiding them you never bring anything up that they don't mention first you just ask you we do all sorts of things to get the depth out okay so uh there's a word for this that kind of listening session is called the emic perspective and that is being able to let go of your own goals and just try to understand somebody else's approach okay so what were those three things that I've mentioned any one one of the three things yeah yep well we've got no actually the three things we're listening for are the inner thinking the reasoning right the reactions and the guiding principles Kevin mentioned this a bunch because this is what depth means this is what cognitive empathy means so what do we get out of this I mentioned thinking styles a number of years ago I wrote a medium piece that is called describing personas and what I said is hey get those demographics out of your personas and then I went about telling people why and then telling people how to create something called a thinking style which does not have demographics but represents the way that people apply their thinking their reactions and their philosophies our guiding principles so thinking styles are deeply researched they come from listening sessions okay they represent a human mind or the patterns across several human minds in a study here are some examples this is from the Office of [Music] forget what it's called but that's the government office in the US the helps employers follow the rules about employing people with disabilities and we did the research and we came up with the two kinds of managers that we wanted to be able to support with the with the materials that we generate in that government office okay you'll notice the description and you'll notice like a little saying that that's sort of a mash-up of some of the things that we saw in the patterns in their own voice and it's in first person the present tense super powerful so the other thing though is that if your org is ready for this remember the externalities the people that we've ignored this is the point in time where you can start grabbing at externalities and forcing your group to pay attention to it if your org is ready for this um my guess is that the digital office is doing just this I have actually been in contact with them for years about some of the work that they've been doing is fantastic okay and attributes are how you start to recruit you can also throw some demographics into attributes to help support externalities okay this is where we can start bringing people who have been left out of the whole dynamic of being able to afford college being able to get into these jobs that we want this is where we can start people who have been ignored into our understanding into our awareness okay mental model diagrams is the other half of this the diagram the mental model diagram is just this part of it this is the part that represents people's the patterns of what people say their thinking is their reactions are and their guiding principles those three things are what appear here each of those little boxes in those towers kind of looks like a city skyline each of those little boxes is written first person present tense using a person's wording it's a summary it's not exact because we want to clarify it and we want to be able to see how it affinity maps to others that we can start building these towers and then we see how the towers affinity map to others so we can start building what's called mental spaces and it all comes together as a mental model diagram which you then map your own capabilities against you can map your competition's capabilities against you can paint on top of it this is what sales force done they they paint on top of it how well smite with smiley faces or myth faces or unhappy faces how well they are actually supporting certain things okay there's a lot of other data that you can rap on top of this so here we're talking about recruiting and assessing new employees with disabilities we're talking about managing employees with disabilities we're talking about addressing workplace health and safety and demonstrating organizational values those titles were not titles that came from the office of people and playing with disabilities those titles came from the words the mouths of those speakers that we listen to those were not boxes that we came up with in advance either we built from the bottom up so the data told us what it had to say as opposed to our own unconscious bias sorting the data into boxes that we pre-selected okay this is this is the way that we build these things properly so let's dive into one of those let's talk about a gap this is some tower that is unsupported so being able to support certain thinking style over another so this is interesting because we've got gaps under those two towers the one on the left and the one on the right the one in the middle has something there with a dotted line which means it's a kind of weak support and what's happening is that the empathic problem-solver is in one Tower dominating one tower and the organizational implementer is dominating in different Tower and this is just how the data came together we are not organizing towers by thinking style we are organizing towers by the intent the step in the purpose okay so now we're going well hey wow are we preferring support to one thinking style versus another oh my god guess what we are most of our support is designed for the empathic problem solver we need to learn how to support better the organizational implementer okay another example of this as weaknesses in this case it's an opportunity to provide some completely different support this is how we do innovation I can't imagine why there's a start-up in the world who doesn't do this research because it helps you see forward and it helps you pivot easily so here's an example in the middle that those are the towers and you can see the towers that are totally unsupported on the right on the left is those towers blown up so you can actually read them and everything underneath that second tower except the very top box is dotted line which if you look at the the key it says weak support so it's not really designed for this it's not really specifically designed to support establishing diversity goals and plans or worrying that we're not in basic federal compliance so how can we do this better okay there's another kind of weakness that I just want to show you this is specialized capabilities for certain demographic characteristics okay so we can we can layer our demographics in here not in our thinking styles so here that the top of that tower there we're talking about veterans a lot and so we're supporting veterans but we're not really supporting other kinds of disabilities so what can we do there god there's a lot of opportunity Wow a lot of opportunity so this is the way that we can actually see our way forward this is how we can start to prioritize which you know of all these opportunities which things do we want to focus on next okay so this is my sort of vow is that I want to show people when they are engaging in research theater okay I want to spread awareness that there is this imbalance actually I want to spread awareness that the like these experiments the people are doing as research is not not not working not research useless in the problem space area I want to shift the balance so that we're doing a lot more problem space research I'm a lot more human to human person-to-person understanding of how people accomplish their purposes within a problem space I want to learn how to listen deeply so that I can understand not just the surface level the way our bubble rub up against each other but really understand a person and how they think I want to identify not only opportunities but externalities this is how we can make that step and it is a valid step with return and then I also want to measure how well we're supporting people not by engagement which is only measuring how well they're supporting me through that glass but how well we're actually supporting this particular thinking style in this particular tower and can we get better we can always get better there might be other thinking styles in that tower that we can get better for - okay so that is my vow I hope that you guys will embrace it this is me I have two books out the one over here is only available digitally I was going to write a second edition of it but I ended up creating advanced online training which is live with me and it's so much fun because I learn a ton we have great discussions but there's also practical empathy and practical empathy is essentially the same book with much more emphasis on how to listen and it's written for product owners and developers not necessarily for us as researchers the word research doesn't show up in there so as not to scare people off I write on medium there's all all sorts of access to your talks that I've given on my website as well I like to make this information available so that we can you know help each other out we're a community I also have a slack channel which people can join so and a newsletter if you want to find out about some of these things and with that I believe it's docked Oberer fest you you

Channel: northernux

Views: 1,393

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux8

Id: fgSt32Jcl6E

Length: 55min 38sec (3338 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020