TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Welcome to Shallow DeepDive, where we take
a deep-ish dive into the shallow world of
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branding, advertising and creative.
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I'm Joe Qualls.
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Today, we're covering what a NASA redesign
can teach a project a fraction of its
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size.
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Every project starts with the same
question.
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Who is this for?
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On one particular project, the client's
answer was: everyone on the planet.
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Not a figure of speech.
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The client was NASA, and NASA genuinely
means everyone — scientists, school kids,
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journalists, retirees, government
officials, and people in a dozen countries
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just like looking at photos of space.
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Everyone.
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All of them.
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It's the least useful answer a brief can
give you.
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It's also the most honest, because most
briefs are a version of it.
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That answer kicked off a genuinely
enormous job.
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By 2018, NASA's website wasn't one
website.
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Decades of nobody quite being in charge
had grown it into more than three thousand
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separate sites.
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Different layouts, different fonts, the
same content duplicated in a dozen places,
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no single way through.
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People came looking for something, got
lost, and left — often for a slicker site
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with better search ranking.
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The agency that flew humans to the moon
couldn't get to the top of Google.
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A law had just passed requiring federal
sites to be less terrible, so NASA brought
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in a design agency, Blink UX, and spent
about two years rebuilding the whole
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Two of the designers, Ben Shown and Megan
Greco, recently walked through how they
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did it.
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Here's why it's worth your time, even if
you never touch a project that size.
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The process behind a three-thousand-site
rebuild is, almost move for move, the same
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process behind a good five-page website.
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The budget changes wildly.
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The moves don't change at all.
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Let's earn that, starting with the part
most people get wrong.
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When a client says "everyone," you have
two options.
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Argue about it in a meeting, or go and get
evidence.
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They got evidence.
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A survey of a couple of thousand people,
and then the part that mattered more:
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twenty long, one-on-one interviews.
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Not to learn who these people were on
paper.
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To learn why they cared.
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And that difference — who someone is,
versus why they care — is the whole
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Because Ben Shown said something out loud
that we've wanted someone to say for
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years.
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Personas, he said, are the horoscopes of
UX.
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Vague, comforting, and rarely any use when
you actually sit down to design.
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You've met the type.
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"Meet Mackenzie.
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She's twenty-eight, she's a photographer,
she likes space, and she owns a
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" Lovely.
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Now, what do you build for her?
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Nothing.
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It tells you who she is and nothing about
what she needs.
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It's a stock photo with a name.
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So they used something else, which they
called thinking styles.
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Same Mackenzie, described a different way:
she's a dreamer, pulled in by big
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speculative ideas, and when she comes to
NASA she wants to know what's coming next.
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That, you can design for.
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You know what to put in front of her, and
why.
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They landed on four thinking styles for
the whole audience.
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The pragmatist, the learner, the explorer,
and the dreamer.
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And because they're designers, they cast
them as Muppets — Miss Piggy the
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pragmatist, Beaker the learner, Gonzo the
explorer, Kermit the dreamer.
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It sounds silly.
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It worked, because a team can hold four
mindsets in their heads far more easily
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four spreadsheets, and a mindset tells you
what to make.
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But the sharpest part is what they did
with one of them.
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For years, NASA's site had quietly ignored
the pragmatist.
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Miss Piggy.
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The person who looks at a photo of a
distant galaxy and thinks, "lovely, but
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does this help me down
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" The research showed that person isn't
anti-science.
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They're pro-impact.
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They wanted to know what all of this does
for life on Earth — the climate work, the
Load full transcript
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health research, the practical spin-offs —
and nobody was telling them.
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So the team built a page for it.
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Literally called "impacts and
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" They found the audience they'd been
underserving, and they served it on
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That was one of the biggest unlocks in the
whole redesign.
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Now shrink that to your size.
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You do not need a demographic file on
"Sarah, thirty-four, two kids, drives a
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" It won't help you write a single line.
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What you need is why people come to you,
and which of them you've been quietly
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ignoring.
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Take a plumber's website.
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The person calling isn't a persona.
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They're standing in a flooding kitchen,
slightly panicked, and they want one thing
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to know you'll actually turn up.
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Build the site around that feeling, and it
works.
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Every business has a Miss Piggy: the
customer who's been underserved and
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underestimated.
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Find yours.
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That's usually where the real gains are
hiding, and it costs nothing but attention
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to see them.
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The second move maps down just as neatly,
and it's the opposite of what a project
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this size would lead you to expect.
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They didn't win NASA over with polished,
finished designs.
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They won them over with Sharpie sketches.
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Deliberately rough.
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Because a rough sketch gives people
permission to be honest about the idea
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Does this concept work?
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Does it make sense?
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A finished mock-up does the opposite.
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It pulls the whole room into arguing about
fonts and colours and which photo to use.
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Their phrase for it was: low-fidelity
design gets you high-fidelity feedback.
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One of the best ideas in the finished
site, a navigation menu that folds away
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Murphy bed when you're not using it,
survived only because it started as a
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Cheap enough to try, and cheap enough to
be honest about.
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That's more true on a small project, not
less.
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You don't need a budget to sketch on
paper.
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The pull to jump straight to the polished,
impressive version is strong at every
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size, and it buys you politeness instead
of honesty.
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Show people something rough and early, and
they'll tell you what they actually
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think, while it's still cheap to change.
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One more, because it matters more every
month.
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On the brand side, Megan Greco made a
point we'll be repeating.
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As AI tools get better at generating
design, there's a strong pull toward the
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average — the safe, competent,
seen-it-a-hundred-times middle.
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The antidote is the messy, divergent,
human exploration that a tight deadline
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tempts you to skip.
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If these tools give you time back, spend
it going wider and finding the unexpected.
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Not arriving at the average faster.
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Now, the obvious objection.
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That's NASA.
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Thousands of research participants, two
years, a budget you'll never see.
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None of it applies to you.
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We'd argue the exact opposite.
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The budget was enormous.
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The ideas were cheap.
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Understand why people care, not just who
they are.
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Find the customer you've been ignoring,
and build something for them.
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Sketch it before you polish it.
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Explore wider than feels efficient.
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Not one of those needs a NASA budget.
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They're just what good work looks like, at
any size.
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The scale of that project is why it made
the news.
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The reason it turned out well is small
enough to use on Monday.
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Thank you for indulging us in today's
Shallow DeepDive.
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We hope you'll join us for the next one.
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Until then, take care.