Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 254.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
I’m James Royal-Lawson. And this is UX podcast, bouncing Business Technology, people and society every other Friday for almost 10 years, and reaching out to listeners in 197 countries and territories from Poland to Jordan.

Per Axbom
From time to time, we will bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts from the past that we believe are still relevant and well worth revisiting.

James Royal-Lawson
This time, we’re joined again by Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton. They’re both authors and information architecture gurus.

Per Axbom
And we’d recorded this conversation way back in 2015. At UX LX, where both Abby and Andrew had held talks and workshops,

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we were sat in room 4 as it’s known UX LX, when Abby and Andrew just spontaneously turned up at the door. We sat them down, mic’d them up, and pressed record. And we captured a conversation with a great number of interesting and thought-provoking points.

[Music]

Per Axbom
We’re joined by Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton. just popping in to have a chat with us.

James Royal-Lawson
The door was open. You’re welcome. Excellent. Now, Andrew, you’ve actually had it quite easy. You’ve only done a workshop: Designing from Context.

Abby Covert
Yeah. I mean, I’m seriously jet-lagged. But I did a workshop first morning, and then I’ve just been sort of walking around,

James Royal-Lawson
Whereas Abby you’ve had to work a little bit more for your for your books during this trip?

Abby Covert
Yeah, I did a workshop the first day. And then yesterday, I got to give a talk, that was fun.

James Royal-Lawson
on ‘How to make sense of any mess’ was your workshop,

Per Axbom
which also happens to be the name of the book that we both own, now.

James Royal-Lawson
We do both own the book now. Yeah.

Abby Covert
I hear there’s a feud about which one is signed?

James Royal-Lawson
Mine is signed, yeah.

Abby Covert
I will sign the other one.

Per Axbom
Yeah, thats what I was…

James Royal-Lawson
No, no, no. That’s not on, mine is signed, Per’s is not. That’s where we know the difference. So information architecture for everybody was your talk yesterday. Which was fun, despite the heat, the soaring heat in the main room.

Abby Covert
If you thought it was bad in the audience, you should’ve been on that stage!

James Royal-Lawson
What was the very first thing you said in your talk yesterday? wasn’t it because our world is a mess.

Abby Covert
Our world is a mess.

Per Axbom
And you’re obsessed with messes?

Abby Covert
I am obsessed with messes, I mean, you guys, I can’t give my mother technical support anymore for her Apple devices. I used to be able to do that. Like, are you guys still capable of doing that for other people?

James Royal-Lawson
I find it I find it getting tougher and tougher, getting through a tech support session with my mom without really hitting the wall. And losing it, because I do it internationally. Because my mom doesn’t live in Sweden, she lives in the UK. So it’s all via telephone. But from a user from a usability point of view, from user testing point of view, sometimes it’s fascinating. And what she, when I’m describing something is ‘Oh, well press the press the main menu icon, menu button down at the bottom right’. And we’ve got Android phones, so you’d think it’d be pretty straightforward, but she hasn’t quite the same flavour. So she actually presses things what she thinks is a menu, and then says to me, yes, I pressed it. So I go ‘great, now you should be able to see this, this and this’. She says ‘No, I told you it wasn’t that I told you it wasn’t working.’

Abby Covert
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
So you have so little understanding. It’s like, well it’s the blind leading the blind? She’s discovering a world.

Abby Covert
My father converted to Android and I mean, it was like, *gasp* you’re in different languages now! Like, now he can’t help and he has trouble with his and they can’t even discuss it. And they have to go to different stores to get their technical support. And their photos can’t live together anymore. I mean, it’s like, yeah, they’re having a cross platform relationship. It’s like, very, very awkward. And I don’t know how much, I don’t know how much we’re thinking about that kind of stuff, when we’re making this, these decisions of like, how to differentiate our operating system from other operating systems

Per Axbom
Not enough obviously.

Abby Covert
And how to keep our content in our ‘walled garden’ of where it will be the most useful for us.

James Royal-Lawson
Or not caring enough about it.

Andrew Hinton
Abby and I are both pretty obsessed with this idea of place in place making and sense making and this is a big piece of it, right? Is that you can make an environment be really fungible and different across so many different instantiations. To the point where, yeah, they’re not, there’s not a sense of coherent place. And so yeah, you’re having to have tried to have a conversation with, you know, someone about this place that they’re in, trying to figure it out and make sense of it. And the labels are different, the structures are different. You know,

Abby Covert
Yes. No different than if I was to call someone who lives in a town that I don’t live in and be like, Yo, I’m lost in your town. I’m standing on the corner of this and this, like, how do I get back to my hotel? Like, it’s not that dissimilar from my mom calling me and saying, I’m trying to get these photos off of my phone, and it keeps giving me this error. And I’m turning the wrong way, obviously. So which way do I go to get back to an album that makes sense on my phone?

Andrew Hinton
Where is this right? Yeah. Where if I take this photo off of here, is it still going to be in it’s the main place where it lives? But what is that anymore,

Abby Covert
Right.

Andrew Hinton
And in a lot of the messaging and stuff isn’t very clear around that. So all these ecosystems are super confusing, even to those of us who have been doing it for, you know, 20 years – for a living.

James Royal-Lawson
And also they’re, they’re evolving, and they’re changing at a pace, which are our own mental models just can’t keep up with. So you know, especially with parents and things, you see that they mean, they’ve got mental models that were basically built decades ago. And they’ve tried their best maybe to overlay some of the digital world that we’re working in with our help offset. And then they just think they’ve got it. Yeah, and bam, iOS seven, or you know, or Android gingerbread or something, you know, something happens, and it’s not the same anymore, and they don’t really properly ever update their mental model.

Abby Covert
Like watch little kids use phones. It’s freaky, because you’re gonna feel like that very soon. You’re gonna feel like, Oh, I finally got a hold on everything that they changed it again, like, little kids don’t understand the Phone icon. They don’t understand the filmstrip icon because it looks like a bunk bed. Like they don’t understand.

Per Axbom
Like a floppy disk icon.

Abby Covert
Yeah, a lot. Like, yeah, the floppy disk for save like that’s so antiquated. Yet, we still use it, because it makes us comfortable. But like, when they’re in the designer seat, things are going to have to change. And then we’re going to be in the position that our parents are in now when it’s just like, well, what is this? I paid money for this? It should make sense to me. Why doesn’t it?

James Royal-Lawson
The impact of digital change is really underestimated. My daughter when I upgraded, she has an Android tablet. And I upgraded that to what is it now? Lollipop, latest version of Android. And they change notification system between the last two versions of Android. And I upgraded and she goes, ‘Daddy, I don’t like this. I don’t like my tablet. now, I can’t find any of the things,. And she knew exactly where all the icons were, here it was, and they’d move completely. And some of them have shifted down a level. And she just she just couldn’t work it out anymore. She was clicking around.

Abby Covert
It screwed with her taxonomy. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And she didn’t like that.

Abby Covert
Seriously, when I updated the software on my Apple device, and it automatically like restructured some of my folder structures to like, remove apps and change labels and things I was like, really annoyed. Like, I put those things in those boxes, because that’s where I wanted them. And I gave them labels because I wanted them to be there. I put the things where I wanted and then Apple was just like, let’s just wipe it away. Yeah, I did it wrong. I wasn’t doing it their way.

Andrew Hinton
People want to say they keep saying oh, well, children are natural with tablets, right? No, they’re not. We just don’t notice how much they’re playing in order to figure it out. Yeah. Right. Like, we don’t have time for that. So yes, they don’t fear just trying things, right. So but once they figure it out, if it changes on them, they’re just as frustrated as we are right, because they learned a system. But that’s still the same object that’s supposed to be still doing the same things. And that’s what’s so confusing.

So in an evolutionary scale, okay, we did not evolve to learn how a certain kind of thing behaves in the world, and then have to learn how that same thing suddenly is a different thing. So this is a cognitive problem, right? That, but because we can move all that stuff around, we do. But let’s try it like this. Let’s try it like that. And, and it’s not just, you know, I mean, people poopoo it and they’re like, Oh, you just have to get used to change? Well, yeah, I get that. And it could be that what it’s evolving to is much better. But there’s not enough thought given to the fact that, um, you know, you need, this needs to make sense.

Now, the funny thing too, is that a lot of times, even if you change, if you change it it in a way that is coherent, and that is actually better, and in the structure actually makes sense. People can learn pretty quick. But more often than not, you’ll start with a simpler structure, because the first earlier versions of what you’re rolling out is simpler. And then as you start doing feature create, which is inevitable, because you want to grow your user base you want to keep what else you’re going to do other than your software, you can’t just keep updating the code and to just to work on new OSs God forbid you would ever do that which I just wish more people would frankly

James Royal-Lawson
you can’t possibly be happy that the spade actually digs ground.

Andrew Hinton
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Upgrade your spade

Abby Covert
Spade 2.0

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah

Andrew Hinton
You’ve got to add a really good Yeah, and a tuba on the handle or something, you know, because well, people need to be able to play a tuba while they’re digging and

James Royal-Lawson
And LED so that it knows when you’ve hit the ground.

Andrew Hinton
Yeah, yeah.

Abby Covert
Digital display that gives you analytics that would be really useful my efficiency would go up.

Andrew Hinton
This is just like a design charrette that clients trying to have where they just come up with all this crap. So point being right that, um, there’s a lack of clarity in those structures, because they’re trying to still be the old thing, but also cram in the new things. And they end up complicating everything. And so that the only coherent model you’ve got is the one you learn in the previous version. So not to go too far on all this. But there is a cognitive aspect to this, that I think it’s important for us as designers to kind of understand so that we know what we’re throwing at people. You know, when we do these things.

Abby Covert
No we train our users on the interfaces that we make, there’s very few interfaces that are natural, I won’t mention the one that by science standards fits in, but we learn all of it. Oh, look that. So, you know, I feel like once we’ve trained them, I think there is this inherent fear of, can we retrain them? Like, if we retrain them do we have to admit we got it wrong the first time, you know, because like, if I’m giving you money, as a service to give me software or ability on the internet, and you have things some way, and I’ve learned how to do it, for all these years, maybe I’ve even based my business on it like something like MailChimp or WordPress, or Twitter, right?

And then all of a sudden, something changes. Like they, I understand that feeling of like, oh, even though it’s bad, maybe, like changing it might be worse, because of how much you’ve trained people into one way of believing. So it’s, it’s something that I think I asked the question of Josh, yesterday, after his presentation, Josh Sidon, about what the role of ‘lean’ and things like that is in an incremental project, because I’m dealing more and more with businesses that are not blank slates. It’s like, let’s think of something not even startups, like startups already have all these words that they’ve decided all these structures, they have their beta app, they have the thing they sold, and it’s sometimes getting people to kind of kill their darlings, from the very beginning. And that’s what made them their money. That’s what got them their pride. That’s what got them the house they own, like, all those things. So to get them to give it up can be, I think, a really challenging thing for the work that we do.

Per Axbom
It’s really a changing society. Because I mean, everybody’s expected to do everything online. Now we do banking online. So it’s, everybody’s getting online. So the number of users getting online is actually increasing every month, if you look globally. So this is a huge problem, all that you’re describing, and how fitting it is then that we have two professional information architects in the room. So where do we start? And how do we go about doing it the right way?

Abby Covert
Well, you sit around and complain about it. That’s the first step.

Per Axbom
Gaining awareness about the problem.

Andrew Hinton
After that…

Abby Covert
But seriously, I know you’re joking, but I do feel I do believe that admitting it is the first step. And I know that sounds very much attached to other things that you hear and just in life in general. But if you can’t convince your organisation, that there is a problem, you’re going to be banging your head up against the wall. So the first step really is getting them to see it the way that it is. I see way too many young designers and technologists and marketers getting themselves very frustrated, running around with pictures of the way they think the world ought be and trying to convince people, this is the way it should be come to my side of the fence come to my side of this whole thing. And all they would really need to do to sell that kind of an idea would be to listen to the people that are currently there and to get them to understand what the mess is that they’re trying to solve.

Because if you can’t see it, like you can’t understand what the value of sorting it out is. And I don’t think that we pay too much attention to pointing out the messes because somebody that we work with probably made that right? Or we did five years ago when things were different. I mean, Andrew and I were talking about the Information Architecture Institute website. And he was mentioning that at the time that it was designed and built, it was a time where broad and shallow navigation schemes with lots of hyperlinks revealed and the use of embedded links within text was incredibly trendy. That was the way the entire internet looked.

I get emails from kids today, wanting to join the institute who are offended by our graphic design choices, thinking that this is something that like we’ve done recently. So it’s like the role of change and the role of deprecation in technology and time. I mean, there’s like all these things that are there around the stuff that we do, but integral to the stuff that we do, and if we can’t get that part done, we can make diagrams all day have structures that would work better, but it doesn’t matter.

James Royal-Lawson
I think this ties in with Lisa Welchman. Oh, yeah, that was such a great time she she says, you know, to fix your website properly, you’ve got to first fix your organisation, because that is the organisation that got you to that website.

Abby Covert
Yep.

James Royal-Lawson
So if you want to redo it, start there.

Abby Covert
Because otherwise they’ll do it again.

James Royal-Lawson
It’d be in a cycle which is what frustrates me about that is, a lot of organisations or a lot of agencies in our branch, that’s their bread and butter. They need organisations to fail digitally constantly so they can come in and take over. And we can help fix this for you. So the business goes round according to, you know, the cycle of three year failures with websites.

Per Axbom
You talked a bit about this as well with with the fear, uncertainty and doubt and the rabbit holes that you mentioned that people fall into.

Abby Covert
Yeah, people are constantly saying things to me, like, oh, but that’s, that’s just a semantic argument. And I’m like, yeah. That’s exactly what it is. And if we can’t agree on that one thing, how can we agree on anything else, I had a student in my workshop, the first day here, and he said it more brilliantly than I’ve heard anybody say it, his name is Lee, I don’t remember his last name. But if you’re listening, Lee, I remember this. He said, If we can get them to agree on the word, we can get them to agree on so much else. And I really believe that that’s true. And I think people run away from semantic arguments because they’re hard. And because the reason they’re hard is that somebody has to bow, somebody has to say, oh, okay, when we’re talking about this in the future, I’ll use your word, because that makes sense to me.

Andrew Hinton
Or I’ll use your meaning of that word.

Abby Covert
I’ll use your meaning of the word, or we’ll agree in this conversation, that those are the same thing, but we’re gonna call them differently for these two different contexts. You know, it’s not about consistency, necessarily. It’s about purposefulness. It’s about deciding and not just letting it go by the wayside and kind of letting it lay where it is, because where it is, is messy, and nobody thinks that’s working. But nobody wants to fix it either.

Per Axbom
Actually had an argument in your workshop during that first activity, around the stranger.

Abby Covert
See even strangers are having an argument about language.

Per Axbom
Around the first word, one person wanted to call it upload. And then I realised, well, it’s not upload really, isn’t it post? And another other person said, No, it’s publish! And so the first word we were talking about, we’re having these arguments. And that was really an eye opener for me. Because we don’t have these arguments enough.

Abby Covert
No.

Per Axbom
Because people just assume that you know what you’re talking about?

Abby Covert
Exactly. And Andrew and I have a unique perspective of being able to go around and make people have arguments like that, which can kind of make you into an asshole. I mean, you know, it’s one of those things that if you don’t do that, with humility, and without opinion on how it goes, you can get yourself into being really hopped up on arguing, you know, I mean, because there is something about getting people to kind of go there.

Abby Covert
Oh, there’s this. So sometimes, I make the point a lot that language for us is like water is to fish, right? And it’s just this medium that we’re in, and we don’t think about it. And how deep it actually goes. And we when we do have to think about it, like explicitly, it is it’s challenging, right? It’s actually pretty challenging to try to think through like, what are these things mean? How are we using our terms? So this isn’t just about persnickety defining or, you know what I mean, it’s not just about ‘no let’s just, let’s be consistent.’ It’s not just, it’s not consistency, for consistency sake, it’s because that actually is the that’s a problem on the other end of the spectrum, right.

Richard Saul Wurman, whom we both pull from a lot, has this wonderful thing where he says, order does not mean doesn’t, that’s not the same as understanding that, just so this isn’t a matter of saying, nope, let’s just all agree on these words. And then we’re gonna be good. Because really, the words are just a little signifier that’s connected to this whole root system. And that is connected to business rules, and cultural baggage, and legacy beliefs and..

Abby Covert
Databases!

Andrew Hinton
…politics. And, yeah, the way things are named in a database even, or the way marketing wants to talk about things versus the way that advertising wants to talk about things. And, so this becomes an entree into some really difficult conversations that the organisation has to kind of deal with, and that they hadn’t that stuff to deal with before. Because it used to be that their channels were siloed comfortably. They didn’t have to make everything kind of make sense as a sort of, like ongoing ecosystem, right? It, they could just quit sort of the static, these put these static things out of the world these broadcasts and things. And that’s just not, you know, it’s not going to happen anymore.

So the language becomes this map that everybody has to be able to get onto and everybody understand what, what it is. And then they’re just the signifiers that stand for these tacit deep alignments that have to happen. So a lot of our jobs really become that in terms of what information architecture can do. It has an awful lot to do with just it’s a it’s our version of the go the way Lisa was talking about it, right, which is getting the organisation aligned on what it is that they do and what they mean by stuff.

Abby Covert
When it comes to language and structure. What are you guys going to do here? Because, I mean, right now, I’m dealing with an organisation that has acquired other organisations. So it’s like, each one of those organisations has their own language entirely like from what they call their employees to the words on their interfaces to the way that they interact with customers on like a billing perspective and back end systems, I mean, everything, the way that their analytics are tracked, all of it. And then on top of it, the company’s happened to be in different countries. So it’s like the cultural baggage of not just the organisation, but then also the cultural baggage of the culture and the language differences, the timezone differences, the differences of work styles, just between the UK and America or any of the other countries and America.

I mean, it’s, there’s stuff there, and kind of getting people comfortable with the idea that like, yes, this is almost seemingly impossible. Like, how would you take four organisations and just go smoosh and make one and get everybody on the same page. And there’s, I think a couple pieces to it. One is letting them know that there’s not going to be a Monday where we flip a switch, and it all changes, because that would be destructive, that would be irresponsible. And that would be a fool’s errand like we would all be, we’d be setting ourselves up for far too much risk and eventual failure by doing it that way. But what’s scarier is instead, we have to take steps towards it every day for like five years to get it done. Which means it’s not a project, right? Like Brad was talking about, it’s a programme.

It’s it’s not a thing that you’re doing, once, it’s the thing that you’re feeding constantly. I thought that his thoughts on on kind of the atomic-level design and molecules and components was just spot-on with the kind of stuff we’re talking about. Like what he’s doing for user interface elements, we’re trying to do with language, we’re making Lego bricks out of language. And we’re saying how are you going to snap these together? How? And you’ve got too many of those. Those all mean the same thing? What are you doing? And it’s, it ends up to Andrews point and everything, customer service scripts. That’s my favourite one. Those are the hardest to edit, help files. Change your verbs? Yeah, think about the impact of that if upload became post, it’s not a Find and Replace. English has words like that unfortunately.

Abby Covert
Well even bigger is, and not to stay on this too long, although this is kind of everything. That so the client I’ve worked with for a long time last year. They sold, you know, credit card, processing stuff, and maintained it and have that relationship with merchants. And they call them merchants. But when we got down to it, they really didn’t know what a merchant was. I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Because of course, they know, I mean, there’s merchants and they sign contracts, and they pay money. But in terms of how you define that, in terms of your database, and in terms of the way you communicate with them, and in terms of classifying them, right, and what information do you need from them? What are the core pieces of information in order to know that you’ve defined that in your systems? Because other processes and everything depends on this stuff.

Well, it turned out, they were gathering stuff that they didn’t even need to gather, but they were gathering because of legacy reasons, way back, and they just kept gathering it. And they had whole business processes using it in two or three different ways, assuming this, department thought it meant this, this department thought it meant something else, right? Incredible waste, and then down the line, like a year later, something would happen. And then somebody would have to scramble to figure out what the problem was. It was because all this wasn’t aligned.

Abby Covert
Dan Klyn calls that ‘Because reasons.’

Andrew Hinton
Because reasons. Yeah. And they’re just, you know, but they’re so busy just trying to grow and make money and get more merchants, you know. And so, I mean, this was a central and it took forever, like saying, but you guys you don’t know what a merchant is. And they’re like, yeah yeah we do! And then finally it dawned on everybody. Oh, no, we don’t. We don’t know what it is. So they’re gonna have to stitch that together. Right? So we did that.

Abby Covert
It’s often a core thing like that, too. You know, like, it’s not like some peripheral term that everybody’s like, Oh, yeah, yeah, no, like, half the company understands that the other half. It’s like, no, no, it’s the one thing that’s like their number one customer or the number one thing that they do, like the value that they bring is just this fuzzy ball of we don’t really know, and everybody has their own idea. And that gets really scary. Especially as you grow. You know, when small teams are pretty good with fielding that ball, but big teams, it starts to feel like a game you don’t want to play.

James Royal-Lawson
I think that’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about this week is just the whole. I mean, we all know our speciality we all know our thing. And that’s one of the reasons we’re here is because we’ve got a background, we good at stuff we do. But we know also that makes it with language structure, research, setting goals, design, build, all of these things and there’s a hell of a lot that goes into them. And we’re pushing this into two sprints and we’re stepping out we’ve got the minimum this,minimum that because we can just do it without, you know, just do it those we can just now we know full well that half the time, that means it never gets done that kind of the full-on research, the real proper care and attention that we were going to enough proper structure for something. It’s not going to happen because you’ve gone into that sprint, and they never made the battle again. How can we get out? How can we make this work. Exactly how can this work? How can we make him understand the true value of doing it? Right?

Abby Covert
I think you just we have to talk about it, we have to talk about it, we have to call it by name, we have to give it a name. And when it has a name, it has a place in our mind. And if it doesn’t have a place in our mind, then it doesn’t exist. So right now, businesses do not consider information architecture to be a thing they have already. They think about it as being something that they might buy if they had more money to go get fancy consultants like Andrew and I, to give it to them. And that’s not what it is.

James Royal-Lawson
Usability testing as well same thing.

Abby Covert
It turns out, they’re sitting on an information architecture right there. And they’ve got one already. And guess what, it’s not doing what they needed to do, because no one thought about it. And it became, it’s almost like if instead of making a plan for this building, they just hired a bunch of bricklayers. And they were like, just show up on Monday, bring a brick and put it where you want. I mean, that’s basically how we’re constructing. That’s what many of the systems that we’re doing right. And, you know, some some buildings do look like they were constructed that way. And those are not the ones that we want to dwell in

Andrew Hinton
The language. The language that most still organisations are trying to solve this end is with interfaces. So what they’ll do is they’ll be like, Okay, well make some wireframes and, or whatever comes. Prototypes, sketching stuff, and, and that’s what we’re going to use to figure this all out. And the problem is that that’s actually a very poor proxy for figuring out something like, well, what is a merchant? So you know, for example, this company I was working with, they were launching a whole thing they were called simplify, it’s a simplified way for merchants to enrol. Well, what they did was they just took some of the fields out of the form, and took fewer fields up, and made it look nicer, which really wasn’t solving anything, it was just it was a facade, it was putting whitewash on a rotten window, you know.

And because underneath, you saw all the same problems, all they were going to do then is just add more problems by making it so that when when they did gather that information, it wasn’t actually what they needed. It was just fields that were named things. But they they made an interface, they made it simpler, well, no, not really, right. So everything underneath is thought to be figured out. And so this is a big part of what we do is just trying to get at this idea that, um, you can’t, you try to string or you try to stitch together some kind of interface, a software interface, on top of business rules and definitions and rules and processes that don’t actually make any sense. And you can’t fix it with an interface, right?

You, if you try to oversimplify it, then you’re just going to be obscuring important complexity, that is just going to screw you up, it’s just gonna come back to haunt you. So you either have to fix that complexity, or you have to make it simpler. Or you have to figure out a better way to instantiate that complexity to people. But ideally, a lot of times that complexity is unnecessary, right? Like a lot of the complexity that’s there is not. A lot of markets, a lot of businesses they have intrinsic complexity, meaning that there’s no way around it right there’s going to be it’s there’s some things about what you do that are just complex.

Running an airline, for example, there’s stuff about that the logistics, and all there’s going to be complex, you can’t make that simple. But you sure as heck can simplify or de-complexify some of the other things that go on around that, right, the way you name stuff. So like when I’m, and this is an example from my book, that you you know, you show up at an airport, and like, I’ve got a golden Delta card, but I’m a silver, you know, medallion member, and their sky priority, which is like a whole other label, but it actually contains some of the medallion things and some other stuff. And then there’s, it’s like, I don’t know what I am, right? I don’t know. And then I’ve got the TSA Pre or not. And then and then I’ve got a seat that’s like a comfort plus seat or preferred seat and it used to be you get a comfort plus seat, it didn’t really change how you can only get into zone one, which would sound like it’s the first zone, it’s actually like the fifth. And then and then so just that right, just the the framework of language that they have accreted, like this, these these barnacles that have grown on that over time, has gotten to be such a labyrinth for people.

James Royal-Lawson
The barrier to entry to that world.

Andrew Hinton
Some of you go to like Delta customer forums and these longtime fliers and they’re having long ontological debates about what all this stuff really means and what the rules behind that are. And in some degree, they’re it’s like they’re primitive peoples trying to figure out what the stars mean, or, or what the entrails of a goat are saying. I mean, they’re making guesses.

Because really, it’s becoming almost algorithmic at this point, like from one week to the next, you don’t know what these labels actually mean. Just look at Facebook, you know, you can go, Well, most recent. Select most recent on Facebook, and what do you assume that means? It means all the things my friends post, in reverse chronological order. Okay? No, it’s algorithmically driven, you may not see a whole bunch of stuff that your friends are posting.

Even with that there is actually no way to see everything your friends post, unless you actually go to every friend’s feed. And I think there’s some other tricks you can use by making groups or something where they don’t algorithmically change them. Anyway, so you see what I mean? This is, again, this isn’t just tidying, up this is, we’re, this is a huge layer of our reality, that because of digital technology, it can really get crazy in ways that the physical world just can’t just because of the nature of atoms, right?

James Royal-Lawson
Just that with Facebook as well, I mean, I’ve got most recent, I’ve got a couple of friends that in years ago, they got a bit ranty about certain topics. So I clicked on that option, that gives the chance to just show only most important, there was like different levels, you could set people to when the frequency would alter. Facebook removed that, right? I’ve got people that are trapped with that setting. And, and I’ve looked at that research a little because some of them, I think, well, I want to pull you back out of that kind of rabbit hole now and I want you back in my feed. So you ever do some little research, and apparently the only way for me to get them back out of the hole, I’ve got to go in and like loads of stuff on their wall.

Andrew Hinton
You need to teach the algorithm.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m not gonna do that, because that’s gonna turn into some weird stalker friend who’s just kind of suddenly like 400 things on their wall.

Abby Covert
Like, I want to believe that there are not meeting rooms of people making decisions that lead to these kinds of things, right.

James Royal-Lawson
You mean like consciously?

Abby Covert
Consciously, like having meetings with the decks and pointing at things and going, you know, what we should do is we should lock all these people in purgatory between these two statuses, when we do this, right? Like that, we can probably agree that that meeting probably didn’t happen, right. That is a problem. Because if that meeting didn’t happen, if that conversation wasn’t had, your friends ended up in purgatory. So I think that that’s actually the interesting part is that the world is spending a tremendous amount of energy right now, criticising kind of the way that the world is turning out as a result of some of these things. But I don’t know how much we as the people who are making these things are having the conversations with our colleagues about the deep, boring stuff of like, well, what would happen if this happened? It’s becoming one of those edge case is important type of things.

Andrew Hinton
Yeah, well, in the in the interaction that you use to make that happen was very clear. To me, it was like, Oh, I know. Okay. Although the way it was labelled for a while was completely unclear. By the way, it was like I forget what it was, it was almost as if you were unfriending them? Yeah, it was, but you weren’t really unfriending them, and then they changed the label, so that it’s a little more clear that I’m just not gonna see them.

Abby Covert
I’m glad that you’re doing like a deep ontological study of Facebook over time. That’s really good.

Andrew Hinton
No, no, it’s no, it’s fascinating.

Abby Covert
No I’m impressed! Is it fascinating.

Andrew Hinton
They make so many wonderful mistakes, right? That in terms of wonderful in terms of learning, it’s, you know, it’s like, like a laboratory with like, lots of viruses growing a petri dish. You just have to wear a clean suit when you go in there. Because otherwise that will kill you. But, um, but yeah, so like, you know, and then so then you have to look at what are the forces at work, right. So there’s, there’s their whole advertising model, they have a business model that’s driving the way they do a lot of these things. So that that’s, a pressure in their environment, in terms of the sort of choices they’re making. So you know, so yeah, we’re, we’re getting a lot of like, people want to be able to unfollow people. Okay, well, this.

And then the other thing is, how do they make software? Well, the way they’re making software is somebody is going well, we’re getting a lot of pressure from our users, they want to be able to just hide some stuff, hide certain people, okay, let’s give them that ability. And let’s plug it into the thing, for efficiency sake. That’s the algorithm that is showing them less of those people if they’re not interacting with them. So that you’re fusing those two rules together, architecturally, so this is all architecture, right? This is architecture for the behaviour of an environment. The rules that mean is this door open or not? Is this window open or not? And, and so they’re making this decision, and then but there’s no, in the way that they’re making software doesn’t have a countervailing force that says, Okay, well, if you give them that ability, then what about when they want to undo it? Right?

That’s not there. So there’s just this is again, it comes back to there’s things in the organisation what you can’t just come in and drop in and go No, fix all this make all this better. I know there’s an ecological, literally like ecological thing because there’s a whole environment that’s pressuring them to do certain things. So you could you can make things better for a minute, and it’s just going to go right back where it was. So I’ve worked with so many clients who they’re like, Hey, we need some new thinking, we need some fresh thinking, we need some blah, blah, blah, you guys are gonna help us and like, you know, we’re going to help you, but it’s probably just gonna go, you’re gonna end up having the same problem.

Abby Covert
It’s like putting a skyscraper on a swamp, you do not have a solid footing, we need to get you a solid footing before we can put a big ass building there.

Andrew Hinton
Sometimes that means pointing out things like, ‘gee the way you’re actually pushing software out into the world has some problems, because it’s distorting your intent, right?’ Or the way that the way that your business model is pressuring, what you’re doing is distorting your, what you say your intent is.

Per Axbom
Yeah, in essence, so we have this common enemy. And the common enemy is that we have hidden assumptions that everybody knows what stuff means. And the hidden assumptions are invisible by definition. So until we actually put them on a table and put words on them, we can’t argue about them and become aware that, Oh, my God, we aren’t talking about the same thing. So that’s what we need to start doing is actually start labelling stuff, make sure that we are on the same page. And that will take us to the next step.

Andrew Hinton
So so it just so happens that I have a book called ‘Understanding Context’ where I talk about some of these things. And it’s, and there’s a lot of pages in it. So it goes on even longer than I can do.

James Royal-Lawson
There’s value for money

Andrew Hinton
It there’s a lot of value for your for your book buying dollar. And Abby has a lovely book

Abby Covert
I do. My book is called ‘How to make sense of any mess.’ And it is available on Amazon and Kindle as well.

James Royal-Lawson
Excellent. Thank you very much for the chat.

Per Axbom
Thank you very much for sitting with us.

Abby Covert
Well, this was fun. Thanks.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Are you ready to be wrong, Per?

Per Axbom
I’m always ready to be wrong.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
Failing is my middle name. That came out wrong. Are any clients listening?

James Royal-Lawson
No, no, I think there’s many, many excellent points that we discussed in raising that show. But I do want one of them, I like to I want to point out or highlight again now in the outro is just has be ready to be wrong. Or as Abby said, admitting you’ve done something wrong is a first step, you’re not gonna be able to get the organisation to understand that it’s a problem. But if you haven’t got them to understand there’s a problem, you’ve got no chance whatsoever of fixing it.

Per Axbom
You need to be fair and point out the mess. And like she said, I mean, maybe even you or someone you like is responsible for that mess, because it was something you did maybe four or five years ago. But take responsibility.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s fine. We move on, we learn stuff.

Per Axbom
And that’s actually what I mean with failing, responsible and failing over and over again, because that’s what you do. Nothing is ever perfect. Nothing ever goes according to plan. But make sure that you actually talk about what the outcome is how you can do it better next time, and how you can evolve it over time.

James Royal-Lawson
Conscious decisions are better than unconscious decisions.

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
And as you said, remember to keep moving. That’s, really confused people now because they probably think the show’s ended. But remember to keep moving, it’s the same thing. You admit you’re wrong, understand something, learn something from what you did. If you can’t see it, you can’t understand the value of sorting it.

Per Axbom
And there’s no, I mean, design isn’t a way to find the perfect solution is what that’s usually what people think that you go to designer, you find a solution. And that’s the perfect solution for your kind of problem. But there is no such thing. One of my favourite quotes is about strategy. But I think it fits here as well as strategy isn’t a way to find the perfect way to success. But its strategy is finding as many ways as possible to something that is not failure.

James Royal-Lawson
The, yeah, common language as well, that we had that was nice that the two information architects both managed to weave in word and, the importance of words and understanding of them and the definition of them and agreement upon them. It’s team building. I mean, all the stuff we actually discussed, in some ways is team building or consensus building.

Per Axbom
And even in the UX community, we don’t all have the same definition of what UX is. And that’s what we’re doing on the show. We’re talking about it as much as possible, because we’re trying always to find a better definition of what we’re doing. One thing that I loved about what Andrew said, and design terrets, I think he said, we were trying to find stuff to add on when you had feature creep, feature creep.

James Royal-Lawson
Inevitable is what he said.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. Because you’re always trying to find new stuff to do. You’re never satisfied, and you’re trying to find all these different solutions to a problem that never existed.

James Royal-Lawson
This episode was recorded in the spring of 2015 and originally released as Episode 104, of UX podcast. Thank you for listening.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
James, do you know how a penguin built its house?

James Royal-Lawson
No Per, I don’t know how a penguin built his house.

Per Axbom
He glues it together.