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speaker-0: Hi everyone and welcome back to Author Hour. Today's guest actually first recorded with us back in 2018 when his first book came out, Experienced Thinking, Creating Connected Experiences came out. And Tedder Van Geldren is the founder and president of Akendy, which is a Toronto, London, and US global-based UX research and design consultancy. And before that, he held senior roles at Nortel, KPMG, and Philips Design. And in his book, he argues that most organizations deliver broken experiences. Because they work in silos. And eight years on, he says that the message is even more relevant than ever, especially with that with AI. And today we're going to talk about connected experiences, why the people who most need this book are hard to reach and also what AI changes. So Tedder, welcome back to the podcast.
speaker-1: thank you.
speaker-0: Well, so you published your first book with Scribe, Experienced Thinking, back in twenty eighteen. At the time when you wrote that book, what did you see in organizations that made you want to write that?
speaker-1: Well, in the UX space, the approach that often is taken is is one that's really good, of course, and and people really like, which is involving the users throughout the design process in in in different ways. And that's really the premise of that that whole industry and the the way they're looking at it. What I felt was missing was a a need to to recognize that not all experiences are created in the same way. And so when you look at product design, yes, you may involve the users and you may do the those kind of things. When you look at service design, the design is slightly different because it's much bigger and it's more involving different products and different services. But I I didn't stop there because I felt like there's actually more to this than just those two processes that most people think about when they think about service design in UX and and CX, even to a degree. And one of them was brand. And brand is something that often is overlooked or not seen as part of the experience, even though it has a huge impact on what happens to the perception and and what people see of organizations and how they see products and services. So why not incorporate that or take that into account when you're designing products in a more structured or formalized way and say the product design process needs to include a distinct moment where you think about brand. So that's number three. Number four is that I have in my in my model is the content. And content really has I would say grown in the last eight years in terms of importance. Because of AI, mostly because all the generative things that we're we're dealing with right now. But content back then and I would say still to this day is seen as a sort of secondary thought, as saying, well I'm I'm creating content and I mean by that creating audio, video, writing, of course, all kinds of things that that we're we're very familiar with. But it's again not having a specific process to to deal with and to incorporate that into the brand, the product and service experiences that we have. And so I felt that it needs to really have that its place and creating the framework really helped with that.
speaker-0: When when it comes the first thing he talks about was the brand. When when when when you talk about the brand, what what exactly do you mean when you're talking about a brand in terms of the connected experience? 'Cause it's not just the logo or like the colours you use. What what what do you mean by the brand?
speaker-1: Yeah, the b the the the brand is is is really the first starting point of the experience. I would say many organizations when they create a brand, like you said, it's it starts to think about the logo and the colors and and the and the font and but it starts to become more interesting when you look at the experience when you think about tone of voice, for example. Even with AI tools nowadays, everybody can see the tone of voice that these tools have. And it colors the way we see JetGBT, Cloud and all the others, in ways that that's connect to the brand. And so The brand is not just that logo and color, it is it is also the tone and voice. But it on top of that, it's also the starting point of product design, I would say, when you think about the brand promise, which is a very typical point in in brand design when you look at so what do we promise the customer, the user in the experience they're going to get down the road with our service or products, the thing, the content even. And so brand promises are very nice little one liners that that tell you a bit about who they are, but also about where you need to go in terms of product design and and service design. And it it is the start of design. Like really that that doesn't start with thinking about the user necessarily, it starts with thinking about the brand.
speaker-0: And so that's basically what the connected experiences is all those things you're talking about is bringing them all together.
speaker-1: Yeah, and and and seeing that that these things are often done in an an island approach where brand is is done by the communications team or sometimes by the C level, somebody's with the founders, then content is done by the marketing slash communication team, or it's been externalized often because a lot of times it's just been been freelanced by by and then the product is seen as the core, saying, Well, we have an engineering team to think about the col the the the the the product and and again that's a s that's a third island. And so the connected experience is really about how do you how do we make those bridges? How do we make sure that these things are not stay on the island because when we throw it out there in the marketplace, you you as the user or customer need to make these connections and need to make those bridges between these islands, whether you like it or not, because you're forced to do that. And if it's
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really done poorly, it's so obvious that that these were three different departments doing their own thing. And they happen to be launching it at the same time, but it doesn't feel connected at all.
speaker-0: When the brands don't do this well and they become quite siloed, what does that do to the customers? Do you have any good examples of that?
speaker-1: Well it's it's the brokenness that you see. Of very often it's very often visible when you look at, for example, changing channels. When you're when you see a broken experience, you notice it because you're start on your mobile, you do some stuff there, then you're thrown into the main website or you're thrown to a a phone conversation or an email that's been sent and then somebody else calls you back, or you have to do the redo the whole process and flow again Because the phone actually doesn't allow you to do the full service end to end. It allows you only to do twenty percent or thirty percent of it. And there's there's so many organizations that that tend to do it. The most egregious ones are the insurance companies, I would say. They they're they're they're really good at that. It's to break that channel, to break the modality that you're in. So that's one example. But it comes back to a lot of times organizations are not ready for digital yet. Because they start in the paper world and then they start to inject some digital form of the service, but it's never end to end. It's never complete. It's it's always pieces of that are digital and then pieces of that are still in paper or even in person. How often do you not start, you can download the PDF, you fill it in, you're still forced to go then to some physical place to hand it in or to to have the the last bits of that process done with you.
speaker-0: Yeah. I know how that feels living in Portugal, dealing with all that bureaucracy and having to do different parts all the time.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what it is.
speaker-0: What about on the other end? Do you have any examples of exam of of of organisations where they do this really well?
speaker-1: Luckily the the the and I take the insurance companies as an example again, they start to become more aware and they start to see how how these service delivery needs to have one platform only. And the banks have been starting to become better at it too. It's this which is not always the first kind of industry you think of when you think of innovation, but since the mobile banking became a thing, they've become more and more and more self-serve on your phone. And that's another interesting part too. They're not focusing on the desktop anymore as much. They're focusing on the phone as being the main vehicle for the interaction. And so when you think mobile first, the the the banks are actually more on the forefront of that. And they're really have taken it farther than most other industries in that regard. And like I like I said, it's always a bit a running to think that banks are on the forefront of things, but but in this case they are.
speaker-0: Yeah. Your but your book itself, your and we talk about these examples, but your book is aimed at more like the directors and the VP levels, and you're quite specific about them we we were chatting before. But you said that actually more of the feedback tends to come from more of them either the practitioners or the marketing people who are actually doing this work on a day to day basis. Why do you think that audience is quite hard to reach?
speaker-1: Yeah, and and it's yeah, and that's a funny thing. I'm I I never intended this to be a practitioner's book for people that do UX work and they know it well. And when they read it, they go, Well, but I already know this. And and I I I want to say to them, Yes, but you're really not the intended audience. You need to talk to your boss or to people out there or your client or any C level person, but you need to introduce it. Because the words that I use are simply not familiar at that level. They don't know how to speak. Connected. And they know the how to say these things in a way that because like any field, we have jargon. We have things that people just don't understand. And not because people don't understand them as an as an intellectual thing, but they just don't understand because it's a jargon word where we have a specific meaning for stuff. We need to introduce ourselves to those people and say this is a book that gives you a high level overview of what this is about, why you should care, and also why you as an executive need to start connecting these dots better. But it needs that introduction without going into the depth of the how do I do this now? Because that's that's where where the feedback sunsets come from. Well, we didn't go far enough into the details of him. Yes, that's deliberate. I stopped at that level. I stopped at a process and at the activity level without going into the detail of what that activity really entails. Because that's not C level people don't do that anyway. They will they will go and they will read it, but they do need to understand the story behind it and understand the vision that that goes with that.
speaker-0: Yeah. That's really interesting that you you wrote for one audience, but it's ended up being picked up by a different audience. Well w when you wrote this book, obviously it's not designed to be like a mass market book. It's very aimed at very specific people. When you when you planned on writing it, what was your aim for the for did you have a particular target in mind?
speaker-1: Well first I wanted to capture the idea and so the idea of experience thinking is half half sort of a play on design thinking, which is a more marketed, I would say, process, design process for for people out there. And so experience thinking is for me the obvious step up from there because it's not about just design, it's about the experience that we're trying to to to figure out. So that
was something I really wanted to talk about in the in the book. the second thing is that connection with with these other elements apart from product design. So service design, content and and brand. That's the major pillars. And not many people talk about that. We're we're very siloed that way. UX per people, user experienced people that do this work are still very sort of blindness on focused on the product side of things. And they don't they don't see beyond that. And they think everything else is another department or other and even though we talk in in general about doing well for for UN's and for users and for customers, it it doesn't express itself in that way and and I felt a need to to tell that story and and and say this is something we need to pay attention to.
speaker-0: Yeah. I i what I quite like about th this conversation is it sounds like you've got so many thoughts and experience and practices that you put into work on a day to day basis. Did you find that writing the book helped you to bring those ideas down into like a sort of set of core values that you work with?
speaker-1: Yeah, for sure. It it went the the process even went very fast when I when I wrote the book, within the six months we had the full thing done. And I did have any issues coming up with the ideas or telling the story because it's it is something that I live every day. I run a consultancy and and and we we deal with this clients and with these kind of issues on a on a daily basis, I would say. So so it didn't come as a as a hard thing to do. But the other part is that The notion that people have around design is often when when you look at user centered design or human centered design or design thinking, all those processes are trying to bring the user inside the design process. What I really wanted to have in there and and and white came easy because I'm dealing with this so often is that when you do brand work and even when you do content work, it's much more an an inside out kind of activity. You start with yourself, what you want to say when you're a content creator. And you start, yes, you listen to people, of course, but initially it comes from you. It's your your your your brainchild, if you will. And then you want to communicate that out and you think about ways to do that effectively. Brand is very similar. You think about a brand and a brand value value proposition and promise and the tone of voice, all those things are something that you want to be for the outside world. And I found that world was so different from how UX people think about the world where you say, No, no, no, no, no, don't stop talking about stuff that you think of. internal person start to listen to what the external audiences think. And I'm going, yes, that's absolutely true. But that but we all know that's just not the whole story. We always will have executives. We always have people that are subject matter experts and they're really passionate about what they know and they want to put that into the experience. They want to put that into the product and services. So as UX people, we have to learn to listen to both those users out there, but also be very effective in listening to the internal business people that are there in the partners that you see.
speaker-0: Yeah. As a consultant, did you find having a book that brought all your ideas into one place helped you to get your message across to clients and help them to understand a bit more about how you work?
speaker-1: I think so. I think the book is is it was definitely a a bucket list thing to to me to to have a succinct story to tell. It is evolving though. I find even after eight years I'm I'm massaging the story to to change slowly in into what happens in the world. And AI of course is a big one as as it happens today. I definitely felt that that that's that was part of of the story and it it helps solidify the thinking. Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. That leads on almost perfectly to what I was going to ask next about the 'cause be before we talked on this call, we were talking about the changes that have happened in the eight years since the book came out, especially to do with AI. So what do you think has held up from the original book that you wrote and maybe what's proved ahead of its time?
speaker-1: Well the the the it's still ahead of this time to a degree. So the the parts that I think held up in in general because of the the sort of the universalness of of the process, which is the the the the product design and the service design, that is still in space today is as valid as it was eight years ago or even twenty years ago. It really didn't change that much. And it's really still hard to do because you're dealing with people and and and that that's always the hard part in in in the creation of the of products and services. The change I saw mostly is happening in the content area, where content now, as we all know, is is being created in a different way and it's still evolving and we and the goalpost is still moving on that and we don't know where it stops, I would say, for for the next, I don't know, five years before we actually know where it really ends. But I think that that has been the biggest change for me in in in the in the kind of thinking because the content as I saw it was more a human content creation process and now It's the human plus AI content creation. And I think I'm not sure if it's gonna move over more to the AI front. I don't think so, even though they they think you're pretty smart. I think the human will stay very firmly involved in all of that and make the the big decisions. And I think but I think it that grew. That that notion grew. I think that concept grew as as saying, yes, this is really part of the experience now, because now yeah, all the obvious examples around creating content with AI. are are now much more on people's and in the forefront than it used to be.
speaker-0: Yeah. One of the one of the problems with creating
content with AI I found is that it's actually quite hard to get that brand voice, which goes back to your original point about the connected brands and the connected thinking. what's your thoughts on that? Because, you know, I I I do my personally I like using AI to speed up a lot of processes like emails and stuff like that, but I I wouldn't want it to like completely run my whole advertising or marketing campaigns. So what again, what where how do you see that working?
speaker-1: I see it still being fed by humans. So I think what's happening now and when you look at brand voice, for example, the best way, quote unquote, best way to do that still is make it look back at what has been written in the past without AI, what has been written by the organization, by the team, even by the individuals, to say, look at my writing, learn my writing, talk like me. And I think a lot of people that use that in their prompting is is is the best approach to to get that voice nailed down to who you are. Even in blog writing, and I find myself doing the same thing, just look at my old blogs. The way I talk, I need the new blog to say to sound the same way. And I think that is still a huge challenge because I would argue that we're we become very adept at finding out that something was written by AI. Little size sentence structures and all that, we're very good at that. So it's still a challenge that that needs work because I don't think the AI tools have have been able yet to really grasp a tone of voice and in the finesses that we can as humans think we're still better than them in that sense and we that's why we recognize it so easily. I I find myself after two sentences going, Okay. And then and and I'm sure that is a very common experience that people have when they're reading new content now and go, just don't give me this. Just give me honest. Because somebody would write this differently. If it's a human you would get a different cadence and a different and it's subtle because we're talking tone of voice. We're not talking just words. Sure, the words and the and the the the big and the the dashes and dashes and all that is gone. We we figure that out. Now it's the real subtleness of tone of voice of how do you say this? What is your what's your style? You're a little bit quirky, you're a little bit funny, or funny. Humor. So hard to replicate by a machine. So so hard to get nail that to the point to say, okay, that's why that person has personality. That's why that person is funny. That's person why they have a character by of their own. I like I said, I think we're quite a bit away from that right now. And the only way to do it so far is to look back.
speaker-0: Yeah. I'm I'm a bit annoyed that AI took over the dash because it was one of my favorite punctuation marks. Yes. now I'm not now I can't use it. We're talking about because we're talking about AI and content, but when we're talking about the five dimensions you mentioned before in experience thinking, we've got other things like the products and the services. Now with some companies we see AI just bolted onto their products. a feels a bit like an afterthought. I'm thinking maybe some chatbots I've dealt with on websites just as one example. But like, what does it look like to have a good experience of using AI in your products? And what are people doing wrong?
speaker-1: Well, th a lot of it is still that AI is very visible right now. I'm still surprised that the experience needs to be overtly AI. And and that's what I always wonder about because a lot of times when you look at experience design, it's actually to massage that away. We talk about seamless, smooth, effortless. Well, it becomes effortless if you don't have to think about it. If you're not making me think at the moment I'm interacting with a piece of technology. That's when when you drive a car, you don't go in the mechanics of how the car works. You just feel it. When you're steering and when you're driving it, it it connects with you as a human. And you and I don't care how many bolts were used to make that happen. And that's what I still we're still in the early stages with the AI because we're we're still chosen to now you're going to the AI tool where you're gonna do even worse, have a very archaic way of interacting with those tools. It's a prompt. how backwards can that be? We're back to the command line interfaces. We don't even have a GUI that is AI. Think about the GUI interaction that came up in the eighties last century. And
speaker-0: Sorry, what's good? I
speaker-1: the GUI, sorry, graphical user interfaces. Yeah. So having the mouse and having a desktop and having icons and and and that kind of interaction or dragging things over and putting things on top of each other, having that desktop metaphor, which was a revelation in in the eighties back then. And since then we haven't really evolved that much. A little bit with the phones and the swiping and the haptic is a bit better. So the the feeling part of the interface, but it hasn't been moved that much. And now we're relying mostly on speech recognition, which is a great fit for some and really not a good fit for many, many, many others. Because I don't see p many people still talk to their phone. Well, unless they just talk to somebody, but they d they don't talk to the phone to to issue commands. So we're still in a in a state of of Seeing the technology as a special element of the experience, not as an integrated sort of below the the surface kind of like and that's what it should be, that's where it needs to go. It just needs to give you the right content at the right time, the right functionality at the right time, because it simply knows, quote unquote. And that's what AI, I think the promise of AI should be in the end, in the long run, but we're definitely not there yet.
speaker-0: Yeah. It sounds like you should be writing a new book about these these topics.
speaker-1: Maybe yes.
speaker-0: It
sounds like you need an update on this book, I think, because you know, a lot of leaders are gonna have read it. But how how should they be thinking about those connected experiences in this age of AI? Like what would an integrated approach look like?
speaker-1: It's starting with with what A UX is really trying to do first, which is looking at the journey. It's the overall end to end story, journey, activities that people do in order. And instead of just bolting on the AI tool regardless of what that, it's looking for the right place to have AI in there. Because right now I feel you use ch chatbots as as one example, it's just bolted into the chat bot. And I would argue right now, and maybe never, these things are not suitable for a chatbot. Everybody's fr frustrated with them. And you notice right away that you're talking to a machine and you want to talk to a human because your question is so conceptual, it's so hard to grasp for a piece of technology that oftentimes because otherwise you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. It wouldn't never the simple stuff. Do you know where to go or do you where do you live? It's no, it's always a complicated story that needs nuance, that needs conceptual thinking, and and these tools are well far away from from thinking and concepts yet. Yeah. And so so I'd say that that That part is never gonna change unless we start to think about it in a different way.
speaker-0: So i if you're going into a business and we're talking about create making sure this team is integrated, talking about connected experiences, what does it look like working with you? How does that process work?
speaker-1: Well, for the first part is the awareness piece. And I hope to to do that with the book, of course, and and and through our our our website. It's it's most of the time it starts with a problem that is connected to a specific element, either service design issue or product design issue. That's that's the reality. That's most of the time where it starts. But then it's about expanding that conversation and saying, Did you know that when you think about connected to experiences, you're also looking at other elements and can we talk about that? Because And practically speaking, very often we end up in those conversations anyway, because if you do product design, there there is I would say at least well at least a third, if not more, of the conversations end up talking about brand. Because when you change a product, sometimes the company offering is the product, is the brand, is everything. And so when you start to talk about that and you say, Let's fix the product, you cannot do that really in isolation of fixing the brand or improving the brand or refreshing the brand in so in some way. So we end up often talking about that and and so the interaction is is one of an inkblot, I would say, that is just growing as we talk, slowly as we as we uncover it. But it also scares people because once you start to realize how big your the the the challenge is, that it scares it away. So okay, now let's shrink back to the product, let's shrink back to this small and just fix this first. And then we'll later on we'll start to think about these other elements. And that's that's a that's a typical dynamic. We start small with a product with a problem, we expand it a bit in the conversation and then we shrink it a bit more because the practicality of this, well, we can't solve everything at once.
speaker-0: Yeah. But so if someone is w working in a team at the moment that does work in silos, what would be the first steps they should be taking next week?
speaker-1: Next week they should talk to each other. I'm I'm amazed what what we find sometimes in our client meetings is that we introduce people to each other from within the company to each other for the first time. Because they've haven't talked to each other. It's yeah, I'm not getting it. It's it's it's it's it's crazy sometimes where you go, Well, this department I've never talked to this department. What do you mean? It's just involved in the experience. Yeah, they write some of the content that you put on your website that is then the it's yeah, do they other and then he starts talk so connecting them. Talk about connected experiences, but also talking about connecting people. Yeah. And that that it's such a big, big element that that that turns out to be successful.
speaker-0: So actually just be more human rather than thinking about
speaker-1: In a way, yeah, in a way.
speaker-0: That's great. Well, we haven't got the new book coming out soon, but I'm sure we'll get you back on when it does come out. But people want it sounds like it's needed. I think there's a lot there's a lot of to updates, but where where can listeners find you? Where where's the best place for them to get in touch and to find more about your services and things like that?
speaker-1: Yeah, they would go to so so if you want to find the book, it's on Amazon. But the if you want to find out about more is Akendi, is the company that that I run and and you would find more information on our blog and on the the sometimes the webinars and the white papers that we write about that. But it's Akendi A K E N D I and that's that's where where everybody can find us. It's a pretty unique name, so it's it's quite easy to find.
speaker-0: Yeah. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We'll I've put links to the book in the show notes for this so you can find it easily. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on, Tedder. And yeah, hopefully we'll speak to you again soon when the next book comes out.
speaker-1: Well thank you very much for for having me.
speaker-0: Let's speak soon.