Full Transcript for Designing for Digital Adoption: Why UX is Good Business with Nick Cawthon

affirmation of you know, this is not a bad thing to do with my time and with my mindset. 00:05:04.708 --> 00:05:18.449 I think I was one of the early instances of a flow state where you know as a kid you don't quite know what flow states are and how rare and wonderful they can be to all of us that are constantly trying to achieve them. 00:05:19.100 --> 00:06:04.567 But that has given me reflection about who it is and what I want to do, and I've held on onto that throughout the universities and then into my early career, and so those visual designs into interaction design and then interaction design, when it became more of a experience-based concept, where it wasn't just the interaction or the interface, it now became the entire experience of somebody as they went through a product tool, technology event, whatever it might be, that spun us designers off into being researchers as well, so that our subjective presentation of a ui or design was now being processed by somebody else. 00:06:04.869 --> 00:06:08.035 And where did they get confused and where was it intuitive? 00:06:08.035 --> 00:06:22.653 And that has been sort of where I've sit ever since is to be able to conduct research and strategy to inform educated design decisions, to sort of mitigate risk of are you designing the right thing? 00:06:22.653 --> 00:06:30.331 It's like no, we can prove that we did the homework, so that it's not just this showcase of technology or shiny new tool. 00:06:30.331 --> 00:06:36.012 This, in fact, is meeting a user need and will be adopted upon arrival. 00:06:36.012 --> 00:06:41.584 That's about 40 years and 30 seconds, so thank you for letting me know that. 00:06:43.048 --> 00:06:44.932 Awesome, okay, no, that's perfect, thank you. 00:06:44.932 --> 00:06:48.249 So to kind of continue on with our discussion. 00:06:48.249 --> 00:06:54.783 So, from your perspective, what are the biggest misconceptions that organizations have about user experience? 00:06:54.783 --> 00:06:55.927 And I know we keep saying UX. 00:06:55.927 --> 00:07:00.406 I just want to make sure everyone understands that we're talking about user experience here with enterprise software projects. 00:07:00.887 --> 00:07:24.927 Yeah, you know, misconceptions 20 years ago was that anything with a perceived aesthetic was seen as weak or not enterprise grade, if you think of the old sort of Oracle databases of the past or the Sun Microsystem CD ROM where you install or have just really bad UX of their interfaces. 00:07:24.927 --> 00:07:33.494 But there was a badge of pride because it was built by engineers for engineers and so that must be of quality. 00:07:33.494 --> 00:07:38.358 A horrible metaphor that I'm using is a Russian tank isn't known for its seat cushions. 00:07:38.358 --> 00:07:52.115 A Russian tank is big and robust and, current geopolitical situations aside, it brings to mind this sort of impenetrable efficiency because we built it to be big and strong. 00:07:52.134 --> 00:08:08.625 But the iPhone changed that, where this notion of it just works, and that it clearly played attention to it and it had a design aspect to it and, most importantly, was wildly successful and it made Apple the most valuable company in the world at the time. 00:08:09.065 --> 00:08:35.096 And it changed the perception of design and there was also this notion of Apple products of just working is that they changed the perception of experience, where they anticipated human needs and points of confusion and were very good at understanding those paths of decision and consideration and really began to be the forefront of what it meant to deliver an experience. 00:08:36.061 --> 00:09:08.388 Another early example is Uber, where there was this notion of a peer-to-peer economy that wasn't as commonplace as it is today in the airbnbs and all the other gig economy companies of the world, where when you opened up that uber app and you saw these taxi cabs driving around, those were fake, but what the ux provided you was an affirmation that oh, they're everywhere and I've never used before, but I can see all around me that there are people inside of them. 00:09:08.899 --> 00:09:21.188 So therefore it must be safe, it must be convenient, because a reason that I'm using this app is A I don't want to talk to a dispatcher and B I don't want to stand on the side of the road with my arm in the air because it's embarrassing. 00:09:21.188 --> 00:09:41.428 And so Uber was wonderful with that little animation, alleviating two of the vulnerabilities that the consumers might have had in adopting what was a fairly new concept of a ride sharing service and that came with research and understanding of the user and providing of a good user experience. 00:09:41.428 --> 00:09:56.370 Even if it was fake when you open the app, it helped alleviate that adoption consider it adoption any of those barriers as well as sort of gave you affirmation that it was going to be more easier and convenient than a traditional way of doing things. 00:09:56.759 --> 00:10:11.414 I love these examples because you know, I think a lot of the people that work in the organizations that we deal with you know they get tools, they just use them right, whether they like them or not, they're not really thinking about this too much and they're just doing it because they're told to and it's their part of their jobs. 00:10:11.414 --> 00:10:23.769 But I love the iPhone example and the Uber example, but for me, iphone I just I can't help but think back to the Blackberry I had before my first iPhone and yeah, it was cool and everybody had that. 00:10:23.769 --> 00:10:28.243 But my gosh, like, that little keyboard was absolutely awful. 00:10:28.243 --> 00:10:42.760 It tried to, you know, it tried to mimic a small laptop, right, and it did a terrible job of doing such and so it was so easy for when the iPhone came in, that made such sense with that, that small size and and just the the user intuitiveness, you know, and the

ease of operation. 00:10:42.760 --> 00:10:46.307 So it's such a great example for those who aren't familiar with this concept. 00:10:46.729 --> 00:10:52.706 And that keyboard was a huge barrier to adoption for many was they wanted a tactical sensation of typing. 00:10:52.706 --> 00:10:55.493 They couldn't imagine a virtual keyboard. 00:10:55.493 --> 00:11:13.783 But now I've got a couple of those sort of antique relics displayed in my living room of all of these technologies that either I'd burned through or just want to touch again Everything from the Visor Palm Pilot to the Blackberries and the Nokia Flip Bones of the world. 00:11:13.783 --> 00:11:43.087 But there was a sort of a day in which that was a concept that a lot of people weren't wanting to give up is that tactical keyboard, and I think the same thing is true with the technologies that are washing across our bow right now is that there's elements of trust and privacy and patience and curiosity that come in with adopting new tools, of which you must see on a daily basis, Brandy with change management and organizational design of who's willing to adapt and who wants to stay the way they are. 00:11:43.490 --> 00:11:44.072 You got it. 00:11:44.072 --> 00:11:53.707 I mean even me with small hands, or even my kids with small hands, like I think about any general man I've ever met like there's no, they're fat fingering those little tiny keyboards. 00:11:53.707 --> 00:12:01.701 But I agree with you, once we've gotten past what our bias is and open to new things, I think there's just lots of opportunity there. 00:12:01.701 --> 00:12:05.572 So that's kind of key to changing culture and things. 00:12:05.572 --> 00:12:12.225 So you know, how does tell me a little bit from your lens, like, how does user experience directly influence user adoption? 00:12:12.225 --> 00:12:17.547 Thinking about it from like a business perspective, when they've implemented a new software tool, it's rolled out within organizations. 00:12:17.547 --> 00:12:22.849 How does user experience affect adoption and the effectivity of the tool? 00:12:23.350 --> 00:12:52.753 I think that Uber example is a good one because it isolated the embarrassing part, or the frustrating part of what was traditionally a taxi service, where always the dispatchers weren't really good at understanding English or what you were trying to say, To have to call and negotiate with somebody and not have a clear understanding of how long it would take for a taxi cab to arrive at a desired pickup point. 00:12:52.753 --> 00:12:56.241 I remember there's a little story about my past. 00:12:56.241 --> 00:13:28.765 I remember when I was in college, you know, back before I knew how taxis work and I was late to the airport, as many college kids are, and I called three different taxi cab companies, all telling them to pick me up as soon as possible because I was going to miss my flight and all three everything into the ring at the same time and so those kinds of

points of frustration. 00:13:28.765 --> 00:13:47.404 To go back to your question about user adoption is that the researcher would understand the visibility and transparency of how long it's actually going to take, which suggests that a service that can calculate it for you, at least give you a number to look at, is going to be a huge differentiator from a service that previously wasn't challenged. 00:13:47.404 --> 00:13:57.962 And I had mentioned those points of standing on the curb and waving your hands in the air, which is embarrassing because it says, hey, I need a ride, anybody please pick me up. 00:13:57.962 --> 00:14:03.864 And now to be able to do so from the privacy of your own device was a fairly transformational moment. 00:14:03.864 --> 00:14:14.080 I think that that analogy of ending the context for which it's being used in will help any business improve their experience. 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:40.068 Another quick one I am old enough to remember when Snapchat first came out and it was a sort of culture gap for me when I first opened it, because it opened up to a camera and I wasn't used to a social media app opening to a take a picture, because I was just wanting to see what was there and sort of what. 00:14:40.068 --> 00:14:43.440 There was a feed or something, and it was a jarring experience. 00:14:43.440 --> 00:14:54.211 But what I would guess is that the researchers or the strategists, the product designers for Snapchat, what they did was they said you want to be able to take a picture as quickly as possible. 00:14:54.211 --> 00:14:57.442 Our lifeblood is in people sharing photos, so push this. 00:14:58.044 --> 00:15:21.070 As the very first experience and you can see an analogy is that with my, with my pixel, Android Pixel, if I double click the power button, it jumps into a camera, because life happens very quickly and if I want to take a picture of something again, kids are a very fast moving species If I want to take a picture of something, I don't have time to unlock the phone. 00:15:21.070 --> 00:15:25.681 Scroll through my home screen, find the photo app, open the photo app and take the picture. 00:15:25.681 --> 00:15:30.961 I want to be able to jump into that action extremely quickly so I don't miss the moment. 00:15:30.961 --> 00:15:46.572 And those kind of shortcuts aren't evident to everybody, but they're a good example of how there can be an element of frustration, of I missed the moment because I was fiddling around and I couldn't get into that execution very quickly. 00:15:46.572 --> 00:15:50.571 So those were two examples of how UX might lead to adoption. 00:15:51.301 --> 00:15:51.760 I love it. 00:15:51.760 --> 00:16:01.860 You know, I think before Ubers, you know, with the cabs, like you said, even someone like myself who I'm not super worried about being embarrassed but it's just feeling confident I'm not. 00:16:01.860 --> 00:16:12.205 I don't live in a big city, so when I do travel to a big city and now I have to hail a cab, like what Uber did was just eliminate all of the guesswork, right, and I feel in total control. 00:16:12.205 --> 00:16:21.565 I can see where the gentleman's coming or the woman's coming, I can see their face, I can see their car like I know what to look for, I know exactly where they're at and where they're going to show up. 00:16:21.565 --> 00:16:25.900 It just the experience is drastic and it's huge. 00:16:25.900 --> 00:16:31.143 So I love thinking about some of these things that we didn't even realize were poor experiences when we had them. 00:16:31.804 --> 00:16:39.489 When you travel abroad, the notion of how much does it take for me to get from A to B, and the language barriers in a different country. 00:16:39.489 --> 00:16:57.049 I, my wife and I, when we used to travel into Portofino, into the Italian Riviera, there, I remember one time we got hustled because the cab driver said something that we thought we heard, and when we got there the price was 4X and we're like, wow, okay, here's the money. 00:16:57.049 --> 00:17:14.000 We'll be walking home no-transcript. 00:17:13.825 --> 00:17:21.912 Yes, I love being able to feel like I'm empowered to make good decisions and even when it's really expensive because I'm in a big city, I still have options. 00:17:21.912 --> 00:17:25.154 I still can pick someone who's going to be here in three minutes as opposed to 15. 00:17:25.154 --> 00:17:27.376 And I can decide whether or not I want to save money or not. 00:17:27.376 --> 00:17:29.199 But it it makes me feel empowered. 00:17:29.199 --> 00:17:31.421 I love that feeling. 00:17:31.421 --> 00:17:33.142 So it's it works for me. 00:17:33.142 --> 00:17:52.826 Okay, very cool. 00:17:52.826 --> 00:17:55.732 So one of the recurring challenges that we see with our clients is we write and IPX helps this right. 00:17:55.732 --> 00:17:57.396 We help them with business processes, lead and tools follow. 00:17:57.396 --> 00:17:59.101 So we write and help people write formal configuration requirements and then. 00:17:59.101 --> 00:18:12.858 But what people don't know is what truly ends up feeling clunky or inefficient until they've gotten to the point where they're at user acceptance test or even after go live and it's kind of, in some light, seen as scope creep or new requirements. 00:18:12.858 --> 00:18:17.176 So, from your experience, how can organizations think about that up front? 00:18:17.176 --> 00:18:23.397 Is there anything we can do to help drive usability expectations early during that requirements gathering phase? 00:18:24.205 --> 00:18:42.130 I've come across this many times in my career, especially with large organizations, where a product is dead on arrival and how do you mitigate the risk so that all of the time and investment that has gone into that product makes sure that it sees the success that it was designed for? 00:18:42.130 --> 00:19:01.987 And I think that there's also this fallacy of that we are experiencing within our

professional lives, that we can jump to the end much faster now that we have these tools at our fingertips that will improve the development, the design and the speed in which those occur. 00:19:01.987 --> 00:19:21.130 And if we're able to conduct user-centric activities with an admittance of, how would we think about this if we did have time savings in the back end, rather than saying, well, we can do it in half the time, so let's make half the timeline and we'll just rush to the end? 00:19:21.130 --> 00:19:31.935 An analogy I use a lot is electric bicycles, where these generative tools have given us this newfound feeling of speed and velocity and augmentation. 00:19:31.935 --> 00:19:38.457 And the danger is that you are on an electric bicycle and you are in 30 miles the wrong direction. 00:19:38.457 --> 00:19:47.694 Well, that speed and efficiency has just carried you further from the true north that you're trying to go to and now put you even further in the wrong direction. 00:19:47.694 --> 00:20:08.290 And so to save that time at the end of the development process, of the business process, to use these new tools to buy you time to do more strategy research is where we're going to see improved experiences and again mitigate the risk that everything we did up until that point. 00:20:09.374 --> 00:20:23.469 I spun up a landing page around this Sorry for the shameless plug, but it comes to mind and the URL is doa deadonarrivalgageio and it talks about all the different methods that one can do Prototyping. 00:20:23.469 --> 00:20:49.787 Again, prototyping is something that admits that you have an idea you want to put people in front of in this case, an application, whether it be mobile or desktop, or an experience, and that you're willing to iterate that prototype quickly so that by the time you get to the end deliverable, you've got everything locked down, it doesn't feel clunky, it feels intuitive and that it takes into account all the data in an elegant manner. 00:20:50.248 --> 00:20:58.795 I like that and I also think you know we all from a company perspective, you know we all talk about being agile. 00:20:58.795 --> 00:21:10.432 I think from an implementation perspective, I think it's really helpful to to not have that big bang approach right when the developer goes off and does a bunch of configuration and then comes back and says here, we've met the requirements. 00:21:10.432 --> 00:21:13.050 So how do we think about it? 00:21:13.050 --> 00:21:28.317 From an iterative fashion, where we're seeing snapshots of of capabilities throughout time, so that way we have some visibility throughout and we've already incorporated maybe a percentage of resources. 00:21:28.317 --> 00:21:35.268 We've scoped it in, not knowing exactly what this is yet, but we want to make sure that we're thinking about these things so as they come up. 00:21:35.268 --> 00:21:38.471 It's not saying well, that scope creep right, like we've met the requirement. 00:21:38.471 -->

00:21:41.105 Well, we didn't really know. 00:21:41.105 --> 00:21:44.875 You're always going to uncover requirements as you start to implement and use these solutions. 00:21:44.875 --> 00:21:51.145 So how do we make sure that we're thinking about that throughout, ahead of time and then as well, throughout the development of the project? 00:21:51.626 --> 00:22:02.067 Yeah, the good PMs build this in and you know, as a consultant, I come into contact with two or three a year with two or three different projects. 00:22:02.067 --> 00:22:30.565 And the ones that have that sense of time, have that sense of pressure of we need to launch this by this date, are the ones that often rush the strategy and the research and the conversations that need to occur and the requirements that need to generate from those conversations and, as I mentioned, there is going to be this time savings through the ability to generate engineering design deliverables at a very faster rate than we've ever experienced before. 00:22:30.565 --> 00:22:44.277 And so you used a good word allow for ourselves to take those inputs in and schedule and budget and resource them accordingly, so that the increased philosophy is met with informed decision-making process. 00:22:44.277 --> 00:22:54.268 And so I think that also goes into the curiosity of an organization to say, okay, how do we start to think about this in a new way? 00:22:54.268 --> 00:23:02.752 How do we bring in the honesty to say that we don't know everything, but we do have educated guesses and want to go confirm that before starting. 00:23:02.752 --> 00:23:12.653 That vulnerability from an organizational standpoint or a departmental standpoint is something that needs to be baked in to say, you know, we are this human-centric organization. 00:23:12.753 --> 00:23:50.834 Here in San Francisco there are a number of SaaS products, very small companies, series A, series B even Seed Round that, because they're so concerned with user adoption, within their onboarding process they will send a link into their CEO's calendar and I'm sure they've sort of guarded the time effectively so that you know there's not more than one or two a day or not more than a handful a week, but to be able to book time with a CEO or a founder of a product and communicate to them directly to say here's how you think I'm using it, but here's how I'm actually using it. 00:23:51.213 --> 00:23:55.776 It's failing on these measures, but here are ways that you never thought I was using it before. 00:23:55.776 --> 00:24:14.327 I try to adopt a lot of different tools into our process here and every time there is that link into a CEO's calendar to show them hey look, this is my interpretation, my evaluation and context of use, what do you think? 00:24:14.327 --> 00:24:27.980 And it's wonderful to see these companies, from an organizational standpoint, allowing for that input cycle to be constantly occurring so that the decision making that they're choosing of is this

valuable direction to take my company into. 00:24:27.980 --> 00:24:39.059 Is this a loop? 00:24:39.059 --> 00:24:48.932 But that needs to be established and maintained as a constant feedback cycle, and that's healthy for any organization, whether it be Series A or Fortune 500. 00:24:49.815 --> 00:24:54.308 Yeah, I agree, and I think about user acceptance testing. 00:24:54.308 --> 00:25:03.127 You know, I know a lot of times organizations, you know they lean on their system integrator to do all the things because they say these are the capabilities that are included in this contract. 00:25:03.127 --> 00:25:11.755 And to me, when that happens and this is not against the system integrators they're there to get the project done and to meet the requirements. 00:25:11.755 --> 00:25:17.258 But what we see sometimes is that they've just included Happy Path. 00:25:17.258 --> 00:25:27.009 So they've, they've done this user acceptance test plan and it walks through exactly what the business process says and walks everyone through their roles in an ideal world. 00:25:27.009 --> 00:25:30.237 But in real life that's not always what people do. 00:25:30.237 --> 00:25:32.631 They're not always going to have their how to right next to them. 00:25:32.631 --> 00:25:34.586 They may go in and they're going to try to do different things. 00:25:34.586 --> 00:25:56.112 So to me, I think it's really important that organizations own their user acceptance test plan and try to think about it from I don't know if it's a misuse or just a, you know, like more of a off case kind of scenarios as well, and see what they can do to I don't want to say break it, but just, you know, to make sure that we're trying to think about these things so that way these things are caught now, as opposed to. 00:25:56.372 --> 00:25:59.499 You know, we typically use our acceptance test with the subject matter experts. 00:25:59.499 --> 00:26:02.894 Then, after it goes live, everybody's happy. 00:26:02.894 --> 00:26:06.194 The rest of the world then starts to use the tool. 00:26:06.194 --> 00:26:08.692 That's when you start to have issues. 00:26:08.692 --> 00:26:11.069 And you know, we've seen this where we call it. 00:26:11.069 --> 00:26:15.651 We've fed the organization food poisoning in some way, right, because now they don't want to use it. 00:26:15.651 --> 00:26:17.355 But the money's gone, the project's done. 00:26:22.785 --> 00:26:25.509 Tell me a little bit there about your perspective on user acceptance tests and how do we be better at that? 00:26:25.509 --> 00:26:26.569 I think it needs to be a constant cycle. 00:26:26.569 --> 00:26:43.376 It becomes not as the end point of a process but as an ongoing point of the process, where it's a voice of the customer program and it's not from a sales perspective but it is informing strategy and PMs as much as anybody else. 00:26:43.376 --> 00:26:57.277 And that feedback cycle can happen at conferences, it can happen through observed UAT testing on specific products and it can happen as an open invitation of come find my time on the calendar. 00:26:57.277 --> 00:27:13.336 The community of users will also help each other, and so to foster out forums and to be able to facilitate those who are the rock stars of your user community is a customer experience feedback cycle. 00:27:13.457 --> 00:27:23.250 We've seen UX get reappropriated into that CX term, where now're trying to really make it feel like you've made a choice, you've joined a community. 00:27:23.250 --> 00:27:40.855 We are fostering an open and it's not transactional where every time it's at the end of a sale or at the beginning of a sales cycle, but instead it's that a friend just calling to say how's it going or how are you using it, what's happening in your life, a friend just calling to say how's it going or how are you using it, what's happening in your life. 00:27:40.855 --> 00:27:47.632 That is good user experience because, again, you're absolutely keeping the conversation open for honest and vulnerable feedback to the product. 00:27:48.012 --> 00:27:59.392 So tell me a little bit about how can both sides maybe the from the vendor side and the client side collaborate better to avoid this scope creep label that comes. 00:27:59.392 --> 00:28:12.933 You know that are for things that are discovered late in the process and you know, typically we see, you know we're trying to get the best price, so we've negotiated these suppliers and vendors, system integrators, down as much as we can and that's why we've chosen them. 00:28:12.933 --> 00:28:29.884 So you know, from almost from both sides honestly vendors and the clients UX is kind of a nice to have and it's the way that we've set it up from design by negotiating down is that you know the nice to haves are probably not the things that are going to get prioritized. 00:28:29.884 --> 00:28:32.574 So how can we be better on both sides of this? 00:28:32.904 --> 00:28:33.567 So how are you? 00:28:33.567 --> 00:28:35.674 You've taken me to a dark place. 00:28:35.674 --> 00:28:50.799 Welcome to my world, where you have now identified the nice to have, and it goes back to this notion of aesthetics, or there's a misunderstanding of the importance of UX and the risk that's involved with not incorporating. 00:28:50.799 --> 00:29:01.948 And, as I referred to, there are organizations and representatives that see the value or don't see the value or care about the risk. 00:29:01.948 --> 00:29:29.809 And so, to look at the organizations that are known for good design and Apple at the time was this wonderful calling card I was like well, they are constantly rated as having the best design principles and the best UX and, again, at the time, the most valuable company in the world, and so it's hard to write that off as not being important or crucial to the lifecycle. 00:29:29.809 --> 00:29:46.511 It starts within product, where the VP of product or whomever is going through and making those decisions

about how much to over or under engineer or how to prioritize what we do, and we don't know where those decision-making processes exist. 00:29:47.775 --> 00:29:49.679 That tends to be our sponsor. 00:29:49.679 --> 00:30:10.584 We want to make sure we bring in somebody that's able to extract information, emotions and voices and present it in an indifferent manner so it doesn't look like it's being accusatory of one department or the other, but is absolutely neutral in how I'm using this, how this is affecting me. 00:30:10.584 --> 00:30:20.932 And it's a great alignment exercise too, before kickoff of a project or before everything gets going to say, oh, we all see and hear the same thing. 00:30:20.932 --> 00:30:26.888 You know, there's no skin in one opinion or the other. 00:30:26.888 --> 00:30:33.587 We're presenting this out so that the team can be more efficient in a unified, true north goal together. 00:30:33.587 --> 00:30:36.534 So I know that answer wasn't direct. 00:30:36.534 --> 00:30:49.202 It really comes in seeing the value of mitigating your risk and increasing the likelihood that all this work will be well received and the product itself or the service itself will succeed. 00:30:50.125 --> 00:31:03.000 These tools are so expensive and licensing is so expensive and you know, I think we've pushed at IPX on the organizational change management side, as I said, that this is not a nice to have right Like. 00:31:03.000 --> 00:31:16.654 This needs to be its own project that runs in parallel it needs to not be an afterthought in order for this solution to be adopted, used and successful, efficient and effective for your business. 00:31:16.654 --> 00:31:24.444 All of the things that has been promised is pending on these things, and to me, user experience is no different. 00:31:24.444 --> 00:31:36.020 So how can organizations build that culture where user experience is not an afterthought, that it's a strategic part of what we're calling operational excellence right. 00:31:36.020 --> 00:31:37.643 How can we at IPX help these organizations see things differently? 00:31:37.643 --> 00:31:37.983 Excellence right. 00:31:37.983 --> 00:31:40.046 How can we at IPX help these organizations see things differently? 00:31:40.507 --> 00:31:42.470 Yeah, I mean show the horror stories. 00:31:42.470 --> 00:32:07.153 One of them comes to mind as you describe your engagement Adobe, a number of years ago, was looking at their auditing of the technology in place for their support team that would handle ticket requests overseas, and the notion of what the UX of their current solution was doing versus the reality of how that team would operate was a very stark difference. 00:32:07.153 --> 00:32:24.192 And this comes through process auditing and in-depth interviews and over-the-shoulder show me how you handle these kinds of workflows service design, customer journey blueprints but what was revealed is the number of workarounds due to the bad UX. 00:32:24.192 --> 00:32:42.628 They were fighting constraints of infrastructure and bandwidth, as well as the feature set that they thought they would use that didn't actually use it, and because data was being passed from one system to another, to another, to another and they were on the receiving end of trying to find out that customer information so that they could better handle the ticket. 00:32:42.628 --> 00:33:08.940 And the number of ancillary tools that this team was spinning up and using on their own, unofficially licensed, in order to fulfill the job that they were meant to do, showed that the UX of the tool that was provided for them they were meant to do showed that the UX of the tool that was provided for them was suffering, as well as the environment in which they were doing the work under was also needing a revamp. 00:33:08.940 --> 00:33:19.703 So those kinds of horror stories of the expected use versus the actual use are great illustrators of hey, here's why and how we need to improve Again. 00:33:19.723 --> 00:33:21.309 I'll go back to a young kid reference. 00:33:21.309 --> 00:33:23.644 For those of you listening at home. 00:33:23.644 --> 00:33:41.942 Jurassic Park is something that is popular somewhere with the release of the new movie and we were watching Jeff Goldblum in the original talking about human behavior or animal behavior, where you think you know how it's supposed to work, but there's this chaos theory of it will never behave how you think. 00:33:41.942 --> 00:33:51.330 And I think that software and humans using software is very similar to Isla Nubla, where they're going around in the carts and then the dinosaurs eat the people. 00:33:51.330 --> 00:34:02.544 That usage is what's worth illustrating as expected experience versus actual experience worth illustrating as expected experience versus actual experience. 00:34:02.544 --> 00:34:14.563 And how does that translate into our next product cycle of where do we start to guide experience so that we don't have to do the workarounds and the copy and paste and all of the error prone and redundant tasks that can have reverberations? 00:34:15.123 --> 00:35:12.052 I've come off of a financial services client where it was an internal team of about 12 people and the workflow was as such, where if there was a mistake made and they were making deals with other financial institutions, but if they made an error, you use the word fat finger but if there's a sort of a digit or a number off, the impact of that was in the tens of millions of dollars in remits that this financial services firm would have to pay the deal partner and then the cost not only involved with having to redo the entire deal but have it backed up was in such a high impact and that was 100% a user experience challenge of make it so that there's error validation happening earlier on that the contextual information of just enough data to be displayed on any one screen as not to overwhelm the end user so that they're not seeing

everything they need to see from a legibility perspective. 00:35:12.820 --> 00:35:24.005 Those kinds of impacts are real and not just aesthetic or subjective but have a true financial cost to somebody getting their job done very easily and somebody flaming out. 00:35:25.067 --> 00:35:31.806 Yes, unfortunately, I think it's those examples of what are you missing by not including this? 00:35:31.806 --> 00:35:36.983 I don't know if it's a scare tactic, but I don't know how else to get that across is. 00:35:36.983 --> 00:35:45.920 Try to communicate those the food poisoning examples, right, that's. 00:35:45.920 --> 00:35:47.849 That's the only way, unless someone has lived this and done this, and then they're just terrified. 00:35:47.849 --> 00:35:49.135 They've had a really bad experience implementing something. 00:35:49.135 --> 00:35:55.121 It didn't go well, and then they're they're gun shy, moving forward instead of trying to take those lessons learned and work them in. 00:35:55.842 --> 00:35:58.806 So you know, I think we, I think the iPhone example and the Uber example. 00:35:58.806 --> 00:36:04.956 So you know, I think the iPhone example and the Uber example, those companies have spoiled us in some way, right. 00:36:04.956 --> 00:36:29.867 And so when we think about this from an organizational perspective, with big companies implementing tools like ERP or PLM or, you know, requirements management tools, things like that, I think we all expect, we all want a simple interface, right, like, in theory, we want this and we want user experience, but we assume that it's implemented by the developer in the out of the box tool. 00:36:29.867 --> 00:36:36.452 So that's why everyone wants out of the box, because we don't want to make things complicated, but we have very complex, heavy industries. 00:36:36.452 --> 00:36:38.659 So how do we what are? 00:36:38.659 --> 00:36:42.010 Are there any common myths about what people are expecting? 00:36:42.010 --> 00:36:45.206 They want this simple interface and a complex, process-heavy industry. 00:36:45.206 --> 00:36:46.869 How do we solve that? 00:36:46.889 --> 00:36:58.563 Yeah, lack of customization, where it is just this way because it's just this way To challenge that or to have an arrangement again. 00:36:58.563 --> 00:37:16.742 I know you work with large platforms for large organizations, but to work into the contract is that there's this sort of ongoing iteration of our workflow process is not going to be similar to every other customer you have and you're going to sell us something. 00:37:16.742 --> 00:37:24.875 But we're also going to have a professional services agreement built into this so that you can contextualize different steps along the way. 00:37:24.875 --> 00:37:27.367 We'll help provide you requirements for that. 00:37:27.367 --> 00:37:32.800 We'll give you the research and the insight for why this should be in this manner or this should be in this manner. 00:37:33.260 --> 00:37:58.483 But what

we don't want to do is start to create noise in which drags down our internal team or our external users where it's not quite right for them and we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and that, I think, is, from an organizational standpoint, just a call sign to say, look, we have to choose something that is again a large enterprise solution. 00:37:59.025 --> 00:38:09.751 But what we want is to make sure that you will work with us to help it meet our specific needs and that, if it doesn't, or if we see that these workarounds are happening again. 00:38:09.751 --> 00:38:32.293 In this case, it was a lot of sort of going into other documents and pasting data back and forth things that should have been propagated within the platform itself, communication tools through other channels that weren't being used, and forth things that should have been propagated within the platform itself, communication tools through other channels that weren't being used, because the UX of the chat apps inside the platform was insufficient to refer back to what was happening in real time. 00:38:32.293 --> 00:38:55.934 And so to have that professional services engagement with the company, to say that you will customize these things or help us make it better for our team, I think is an admittance that it is an ongoing process, so it's not a one-time transaction, is experience, and it is that workflow, that flow state that we hope to achieve. 00:38:56.681 --> 00:38:57.141 You said. 00:38:57.141 --> 00:39:04.889 One thing that I wanted to just discuss a little bit more in detail is the copy-paste right, data copy-paste. 00:39:04.889 --> 00:39:25.528 And you know, sometimes we think of user experiences as focused at a developer or one tool, and I really want to change perception that we need to own it as someone who's the user side, the business side, and because we need to think about this from an enterprise perspective, that user experience is the digital threat as well. 00:39:25.528 --> 00:39:39.628 Right, it's end to end and that has to do a lot with our tools also being connected and having the single source of truth and the data being edited in the source of truth and also then shared amongst tools. 00:39:39.628 --> 00:39:42.862 To me, that is also user experience, would you agree? 00:39:43.282 --> 00:39:45.347 Yeah, your analogy rings true. 00:39:45.367 --> 00:40:04.284 I had a conversation with somebody at a large IT services company yesterday and she had mentioned that a new CEO had come forward and was told that here's the Salesforce numbers and here are the real numbers, numbers, and here are the real numbers. 00:40:04.284 --> 00:40:05.065 Yes, see, it goes like we can't do this. 00:40:05.065 --> 00:40:06.349 Those numbers have to be the real numbers and that's it. 00:40:06.349 --> 00:40:07.773 There can't be multiple sources of truth. 00:40:07.773 --> 00:40:14.652 There has to be a single source of truth, and copy and pasting is an evidence that integration isn't working. 00:40:14.652 --> 00:40:53.476 Is that this system isn't talking to this system or we haven't added a bridge in place to remove that manual process of redundant tasks and I know there are tools out there coming onto the market very quickly that will do that for us and hopefully eliminate those jobs or those parts of our jobs, because they are so error prone and also a high cognitive load is to do that repeatedly, all day, of data entry and transfer, manual transfer of data from one system or platform to another, when this is what we should be paying for is to improve that kind of efficiency. 00:40:54.240 --> 00:41:00.898 Yes, and I think that's the minutia that takes over people's lives at work on a day-to-day basis. 00:41:00.898 --> 00:41:04.570 If we could actually estimate that and capture that, it's an activity that should be done. 00:41:04.570 --> 00:41:21.362 Reducing and eliminating some of that minutiae, I think, is key, and it's about you know making your resources that are already stretched thin, you know actually doing the value-added tasks that they were hired to perform, as opposed to some of this minutiae, right. 00:41:21.362 --> 00:41:25.094 So, which brings me into you know one. 00:41:25.094 --> 00:41:39.422 I'd like to just touch base on AI here for a second, as we're talking about that and you know, maybe tell me a little bit about your brain on AI, of how maybe it's you know, low-code, no-code platforms or whatever it may be, or just AI in general. 00:41:39.422 --> 00:41:43.652 How is this changing the UX dynamic in enterprise software? 00:41:44.239 --> 00:42:04.972 Yeah, I consider myself lucky to have been around long enough to have seen cycles like this in the past, and there was the initial wave of digital transformation that was going to eliminate pen and paper and fax machines and make everything now in spreadsheets and word documents. 00:42:04.972 --> 00:42:18.744 And there were those who accepted digital transformation at that first stage and those who resisted against it, and some of those are the most charming, uh, and intimate restaurants and store owners that you can imagine, where everything is written down. 00:42:19.224 --> 00:42:45.757 Oh yeah, they're cute, but in terms of my life and my work I was one of the first generations to come into were designing for didn't need to be constrained in the 640 by 480 desktop screen at the time. 00:42:45.757 --> 00:43:04.795 Now there was this mobile device in which our context had to shift how we were designing for and I know that's a separate sort of line of thought in terms of UX, specifically because the waves of transformation are even larger. 00:43:04.795 --> 00:43:33.672 Because, as the cloud became industry standard in maybe 2010, 2015, there were those who didn't trust it, who wanted to see the icon on the desktop, on the hard drive, because they may have had a bad experience with losing data in an early instance of the cloud, and they

still stay within spreadsheet applications to do tasks that there are, for example, crms or hour tracking or things like that. 00:43:33.672 --> 00:43:58.847 That's not or budgeting or invoicing and their familiarity was with on-prem or on-laptop solutions and didn't ever make that to cloud-based because of issues around privacy, of trust, reliability, and I think those three emotions are now going into the privacy, the trust, the reliability of the information that these generative services are giving us. 00:43:58.847 --> 00:44:05.068 So, to answer your question more directly, brandy, it is a huge deal about what it is. 00:44:05.148 --> 00:44:40.949 I do because one of the things that the algorithms are good at are establishing patterns, and design is a lot about standards and patterns, just as engineering and code is functions and formulas, and we've had these tools that have been trained on our last 10 years of work of designing patterns and principles and organizations, and now, with the snap of your fingers, you can reference and recreate all of that, and so it brings into the question of where is that value of design now If it's not in the interface? 00:44:41.510 --> 00:44:50.253 Now it's in the experience, and so we'll start to find more of an emphasis on help me give some understanding about what it is. 00:44:50.253 --> 00:44:58.871 I can design and develop even faster, but help me give some understanding of what it is I should design and what kind of emotions do those refer to? 00:44:58.871 --> 00:45:02.925 Because I don't think our algorithm is quite there yet to really have that. 00:45:02.925 --> 00:45:08.452 When somebody stands on the curb and puts their hand in the air, that's a humiliating experience for them. 00:45:08.452 --> 00:45:16.474 That's something that you and I have shared experiences on, and that we can help guide those types of decisions early on in the strategy process. 00:45:17.500 --> 00:45:21.742 Yeah, you know, like you said, like waving your hand for the cab is embarrassing. 00:45:21.742 --> 00:45:23.849 So Uber eliminated pain. 00:45:23.849 --> 00:45:31.760 Now, when we think about this from an organizational perspective or a cultural perspective, you're trying to automate the minutiae that people are comfortable with. 00:45:31.760 --> 00:45:41.989 So, instead of eliminating pain, you may be eliminating pain for the organization, but for the user you're taking away their safety blanket right of the ways that they've always done things. 00:45:41.989 --> 00:45:44.094 So it's a different challenge. 00:45:44.820 --> 00:45:46.708 It's true from an organization perspective. 00:45:46.708 --> 00:45:47.873 We talked about UX a lot. 00:45:47.873 --> 00:45:50.844 I think EX the employee experience is just as important. 00:45:50.844 --> 00:45:57.521 We're going to see this adoption of AI tools as a core competency within the workplace. 00:45:57.521 --> 00:46:06.668 Just as somebody has to be good at email, somebody has to be

good at file management, somebody has to be good at understanding where the algorithm should and should not come into play. 00:46:06.668 --> 00:46:24.891 The first time you get an automated reply which is clearly a generated email from somebody that you know, you're kind of an eye roller like, couldn't you have taken the time to actually write that, rather than click the button and do a pseudo voice, something written in your voice but not actually by you? 00:46:24.891 --> 00:46:35.751 I think that that literacy of where the algorithms will help us and where it will hinder us or just is not appropriate is going to be a competency within the workplace. 00:46:35.751 --> 00:46:38.081 It's going to be extremely important over the next couple of years. 00:46:39.242 --> 00:46:56.273 So I guess, just kind of closing our discussion today, if you could give one piece of advice to anyone or any organization planning a digital tool implementation today any words of wisdom from your perspective of what could it be to ensure user adoption? 00:46:56.900 --> 00:47:00.871 Yeah, I'm going to again apply DOAgaugeio. 00:47:00.871 --> 00:47:12.110 I want to mitigate the risk of having gone through these processes and user adoption starts to fail to allow for the saved time. 00:47:12.110 --> 00:47:25.389 You'll, or should, hear from your design and development teams on the back end of implementation to really emphasize what kind of feedback cycles can we establish before we begin To start with the? 00:47:25.389 --> 00:47:38.909 How might we, before we pick up our pencils and pens and begin to draw I think that's going to be increasingly important because the velocity is going to allow us to make worse decisions even faster. 00:47:38.909 --> 00:47:54.751 And then the same thing is true with the backend is to have this feedback cycle and envision how, when we design this as an experience, not just as a product how to incorporate feedback loops so that we can iterate. 00:47:55.360 --> 00:48:05.445 And it's not a two-week period at the end of development to say we're going to do UAT testing and that's no, it's going to be something that's an ongoing. 00:48:05.445 --> 00:48:14.300 Part of our organization, of our ethos, is to really connect with that human experience, because that's what's not going to get left behind from the algorithm. 00:48:14.300 --> 00:48:19.862 That kind of voice and opinion, a conversation like this go a long way, and thank you again for having me. 00:48:19.862 --> 00:48:34.882 Voice and opinion Conversations like this go a long way, and thank you again for having me, because I think that's going to be again one of the important parts about what it is we do is our ability to interpret and communicate human experiences. 00:48:34.902 --> 00:48:37.784 Yes, I agree, I think so many times we think, hey, you know it's people's jobs, we're going to give them a tool, they're going to use it. 00:48:37.784 --> 00:48:38.365 It's just is the way it is. 00:48:38.365 --> 00:48:39.186 You know, do it, do your job. 00:48:39.186 --> 00:48:47.637 But I think just being mindful and intentional about success of the project after the fact, I think is is just important. 00:48:47.637 --> 00:48:49.083 That's the recommendation today. 00:48:49.083 --> 00:48:53.032 So this has been super fun for me, nick. 00:48:53.032 --> 00:48:57.646 It's a it's an interesting discussion and you know it's things that we come into contact with. 00:48:57.646 --> 00:49:02.472 You know almost on every project in some light, and you know it's things that we come into contact with. 00:49:02.472 --> 00:49:04.076 You know almost on every project in some light. 00:49:04.076 --> 00:49:09.867 And so I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and I just want to give you a minute, you know, to give yourself those humble plugs. 00:49:09.867 --> 00:49:12.737 So where can listeners learn more about you, the work that you do, and about Gage? 00:49:13.278 --> 00:49:22.021 Yeah, for those of you who are in the product or design industry, I'm doing a maturity assessment for the community or design industry. 00:49:22.021 --> 00:49:23.184 I'm doing a maturity assessment for the community. 00:49:23.184 --> 00:49:30.289 I will start to report back any kind of segmentation or factor analysis as I see more and more results come in, and you can find that at retraingaugeio. 00:49:30.289 --> 00:49:42.780 I do have some concerns about my fellow designers and what will happen when we get automated, and so I want to be able to nurture and grow awareness of what tools and constraints might be out there. 00:49:42.780 --> 00:49:44.905 So that's retraingaugeio. 00:49:44.905 --> 00:49:57.101 I think I name dropped the doagaugeio, the dead on arrival of what happens when you're within this large sort of enterprise design and acceptance cycle. 00:49:57.101 --> 00:50:08.641 It's like how do you start to mitigate the risks of something, um, becoming DOA, uh, and so you could find that there, or else just find me on LinkedIn and I'd love to start the conversation and figure out what you're working on and how I might be of help. 00:50:09.623 --> 00:50:10.045 I love it. 00:50:10.045 --> 00:50:14.621 So you know, uh, we talked a lot about requirements gathering and everything today. 00:50:14.621 --> 00:50:27.592 You know, I guess, uh, just just to remind everybody, requirements gathering is not brainstorming in Word and it's not pulling everyone together in a room and talking about previous tools and what they want in the future tools. 00:50:27.592 --> 00:50:32.547 So business processes really do need to lead and tools need to follow and be implemented to automate those processes in a proper way. 00:50:32.547 --> 00:50:41.405 So IPX does that and Nick does that, so we'd be happy to help with any advice anyone needs as they're approaching the next digital transformation within their business. 00:50:41.405 --> 00:50:45.371 All right, thanks to everyone so much, and we'll talk to you guys next time. 00:50:45.371 --> 00:50:47.704 Thank you for tuning in today. 00:50:47.704 --> 00:50:55.692 Don't forget to subscribe and review the show and for more information on IPX, visit IPXHQcom.