A transcript of Episode 221 of UX Podcast. Kim Goodwin joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about decision systems. Design systems are often a good investment, but do they give the highest rate of return? No says Kim, changing how we make decisions gives more. 

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.

Transcript

Per Axbom
Thanks to john James elf Chris and Ben for supporting UX podcast. We really appreciate it. You can support us podcast on the UX community too, by visiting UX podcast.com slash support and making a contribution

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 221.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody. Welcome to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom. With listeners in 189 countries from Honduras to Qatar.

Per Axbom
Earlier this year, we met up with Kim Goodwin in Stockholm, as she was doing a talk at from business buttons. And Kim is deservedly framed there as author and design leadership guru. Her must read book is the for the digital age. And our talk was on organisation as a design system.

James Royal-Lawson
In this conversation with Kim, which is kind of a follow on from our chat we had a year earlier in episode 193. We start with design systems, but move on to critiquing Maslow’s pyramid, the ethics of digital the Nuremberg Code, and independent review boards, we have a brief evaluation of capitalism and then finishing strong with the two not one things you need to be measuring.

Design systems are something we’re talking about an awful lot as a as a industry at the moment it is it is the kind of shiny, hot new thing. But you opened your talk today with our design systems the best investment?

Kim Goodwin
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Are they?

Kim Goodwin
I would say design systems are often a good investment. But are they the best investment? Is that where we’re going to get the highest rate of return? if you will. I don’t think so, in most cases, because when you when you look at the impact on the user experience, the impact on the world, how much difference does it really make that our buttons are consistent, and our type sizes are consistent? Yeah, there’s some usability improvement. There’s a bit of aesthetic improvement that users appreciate.

I think design systems are more about making ourselves efficient, and making sure that our visual design intent is rendered, at least the way most teams use design systems, then they are about really making a fundamental difference for users. So in that respect, I think design systems are kind of about us. Right they’re, they’re very satisfying deliverables for us, because we can say, look at this thing that we made, and it feels very concrete and productive. And it’s useful, but I’m not sure it’s really the biggest impact we can have.

James Royal-Lawson
I think you’re right. But it’s been about us because I when I think about worked I’ve done with design systems, it’s about making that thing we’re trying to grapple with and manage more manageable.

Kim Goodwin
Yes,

James Royal-Lawson
not just for the users. But for us.

Kim Goodwin
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
But scaling and scaling design systems.

Kim Goodwin
Yeah, yeah.

Per Axbom
And mainly for us, because we don’t know when when do I deviate from the design system for the benefit of the user?

Kim Goodwin
Yeah. And, and there’s nothing wrong with spending some time on our own tools. But the level of effort I see go into some design systems, I think, Wow, that’s a lot of time to spend obsessing over your own tools. It, it reminds me a little bit of the phase where you remember personas were the shiny object. And people were making really extensive use of personas. I mean, I remember one consultant, he actually built persona living rooms at one of their clients and things like this. And I just think we don’t need to gold plate our tools. We need our tools to accomplish the basics. But anyway, I don’t mean to slam design systems. I think they’re useful tools. I just, I think it’s a shame when we focus on design systems, and spend absolutely no dedicated time on changing how our organisations make decisions, which has a much bigger impact on the user experience, on the world at large.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And I think that was that was good. How you framed this this question with what has more impact, so it becomes a prioritisation thing? Yes. And the other thing and you, you compared, look at my notes, design systems or targeted ads, targeted ads. Material Design in the case of Google or I think was the image analysis algorithm?

Kim Goodwin
Yeah. Yeah. So you know, Facebook’s business model, for example, is probably the most profound impact on its user experience, the fact that everything is about getting you to click More about getting you to share more data. That is the user experience of Facebook. So shouldn’t designers be engaged in – Is there an alternate business model that might be a healthier relationship between Facebook and user and its users? In the case of Google, there’s a tonne of algorithms that are shaping the user experience, shouldn’t we be concerning ourselves with what exactly are those algorithms doing? And based on what data that is used to train the algorithm? That creates user experience, too.

Per Axbom
So you moved on to this decision systems?

Kim Goodwin
Yes.

Per Axbom
What does that mean?

Kim Goodwin
Well, what I think that means is, or I’ll explain it as parallel. We see design systems as a tool or a tool kit for designers and developers to make better, more user centred, mostly visual and occasionally interaction design decisions. So we think of ourselves as the consumers, we think of development teams, as the consumers, and sometimes maybe we think of third party app developers as the consumers of that. So if you think of a decision system as a parallel thing, how do we create components and tools and all of the parts that are necessary to help people across a whole organisation may more user centred, more human centred decisions?

So think of a decision system as how do we support executives in making choices about revenue models? How do you support the Human Resources organisation in hiring the right kinds of people and creating an employee centred hiring and evaluation experience? How do you incent employees, focused on values and not just on business metrics? So it’s a decision support tool for a lot of different people beyond just us – And that’s why I deliberately moved away from the word design.

Per Axbom
Right

James Royal-Lawson
You have to keep keep that, Oh, yeah. So not not allow it to be something we can point out and say that’s what the designers do.

Kim Goodwin
Right? Yeah, I mean, I have often said that, you know, things like a business model, or pricing decisions or policies, those are design decisions, in a way, if you look at designers, the thing that creates the user experience, but I think we just confuse ourselves and other people when we think of all of that as design. Because, hey, we don’t really do that stuff. We claim user experience broadly, but we don’t really cover that ground. And then we start to get into the weird territorial thing of is everybody a designer or not? Yeah, let’s just not even go there. Right? It just ticks people off. Everybody is creating user experience. That doesn’t mean they necessarily have a designer skill set. But if we’re really about driving user experience, we’ve got to enable the better decisions for everybody.

Per Axbom
And to find the better decisions you onstage brought up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And when you did that, I was like, Oh, no, what she doing! And then of course, being you, you went on to critique it, because I’m not a fan of it, actually. And it’s, and you critiqued it from the basis that many are saying that it’s very westernised. And it’s about individuals.

Kim Goodwin
Yes.

Per Axbom
And so it should be more about communities.

Kim Goodwin
Yeah, I think you can look at it as “an instead of” or you can look at as a “yes and”. In my view, I think there’s, there’s a lot to like in Maslow, because it’s, it basically says, when people are concerned about putting food on the table, they’re not focused on self actualization, right? They can’t, those fundamental needs have to be met. And so I think there’s some truth to that. But yeah, the critique that many native, I don’t know about many, at least a few Native American scholars have made is that Maslow’s too individualistic, it’s too focused on just actually being you. And we can’t be actualize as a community, and we can’t survive as cultures, if we’re so focused on the individual. And self actualization is important. But community actualization is really more of the goal. And I like that construction, because what it says is, yes, we are about helping individual self actualize. But we can’t focus on some individuals, and move others away from self actualization, which I feel is the case with many products.

You know, if you look at a lot of the app business models that are focused on convenient services for those of us who can afford them, are they actually helping the people who provide those services? You know, whether they’re Uber drivers or other people. Are they helping those people as well as kind of help everybody in the ecosystem to self actualize? So I like that construction of it much better than just the individual,

Per Axbom
which made it easy, easier, or at least easier for you to the employee the model then for thinking about, am I actually moving people towards self actualization – And am I taking steps to avoid people moving away from self actualization,

Kim Goodwin
Right.

Per Axbom
And I like the example of like, recruitment systems and applying for a job. Because I actually hear people today telling me, they don’t know how to apply for a job, because it’s all digital now.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
And they just can’t do it. So you’ve just moved a lot of people who were able before to do something, and now they’re not able to do it.

Kim Goodwin
Yeah. And I think that when you have say, young tech savvy people designing all these systems, yeah, there’s a certain assumption that there’s a level of literacy and comfort. And because look, those of us who work in tech were like, Please don’t make me talk to a human. Can I just do this online? Right? Because probably most of us think that way. But yeah, there’s a population of people. for whom. That’s not the natural go to. And so how do you enable that?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, no, I think is important, the community aspect as well, the Maslow’s need that it is to, it drives us too much towards individualism. As a goal on that we’re prepared to sacrifice others on the way to achieving that self actualisation. So I really like the community aspect too. You mentioned, as well, then Nuremberg code, talking of…

Kim Goodwin
…nice light cheerful subjects!

Per Axbom
Essentially, we’re not the first industry who has ethical dilemma SN concerns?

Kim Goodwin
Right. Right. Why don’t we learn from others who’ve gone before, right? medical ethics is a very complex problem. It’s the Nuremberg Code actually works pretty well. It’s not perfect, but we don’t have to start everything from scratch,

James Royal-Lawson
the Nuremberg Code and, or review boards. And that’s, that’s an established practice. In the in the medical world, medical research world, we were quite a long way off that kind of thing, if it’s desirable, even to have a similar Review Board for for design, digital work or design work. Maybe we should – you’re smiling at me as if we maybe should have it already now.

Kim Goodwin
in my opinion, we need it. I think anybody who is collecting user data, collecting human data, I guess I should correct myself, and anybody who’s trying to manipulate behaviour, I think we need to put all that in front of an independent review board. Because it’s very clear that we can’t be trusted to police ourselves. There’s too many examples. And there are actually some discussions of that kind of thing being put in place, I think that there are government entities starting to have those discussions, even in the US, which is probably going to be the last place to regulate this sort of thing. So what’s interesting about the the review board model is nobody has said, these are exactly all of the detailed things that you can and cannot do in human subjects research. Because, as we see in the digital world, you can’t anticipate all of those issues and uses in a in a bunch of legislation. And when you try to legislate in the fast moving technology world, yet we know that legislation is always badly conceived and outdated.

But the Nuremberg Code does is it says, here’s a handful of really important principles. And the review board is a way to say, are we actually being honest with ourselves and how we’re interpreting that. Because I think in house, even when you’re a consultant working with a client, it’s very easy to sort of delude yourself into thinking that something that’s about your needs is really serving user needs. Oh, yeah, this is going to drive our business. Yeah, this helps users. Right. How does it help users? Well, well, it helps users. I mean.

Per Axbom
if we’re more efficient than has to be helpful for them.

Kim Goodwin
Right. Right. And, and, you know, somehow us being more profitable, it’s good for users, right? Because we can, in theory, offer our services cheaper. But of course we want, you know, I think that that that review board keeps us honest, it’s a way to say, we’re going to hold you accountable. But it’s also a way to introduce some flexibility and some real world translation, right? Because when you have a regulation, you you can’t argue with the nuance.

Whereas an independent review board will look at things and say, Well, okay, I see your intent here, I see why this is good and useful. Let’s talk about how we can make it happen. And and they’re not necessarily going to just shut you down. And those Review Boards consist of diverse interests, right? There’s there’s people who represent patients, there’s people who represent researchers, there’s, there’s a bunch of different perspectives, typically on one of those review boards.

So I think it’s a decent combination of, let’s call it clear intent in regulation, with human interpretation of flexibility. So it’s not perfect, but it’s an interesting model to start with, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, is there a degree of transparency with it as well, or..

Kim Goodwin
transparency, in what sense?

James Royal-Lawson
I was just thinking about review boards, and they would, would we would we want any level of transparency with that process? Would reviews happen behind closed doors – is I suppose what I’m trying to say.

Kim Goodwin
Well, that’s an interesting question, right. So let’s say that you’re a pharmaceutical company, developing a drug. And there are some details about your drug development process that would be really problematic if they got out into the world. And I think the same is going to be true with tech companies that are going to be trade secrets involved in some of the decisions that need to be reviewed. So I think in order to get tech companies to do this kind of thing, there has to be some degree of closed doorness to it, I think, because you don’t I want all of your proprietary business decisions out there in the public record. But there has to be a degree of trust in that review board.

And so I think, you know, we need to be specific about how are those constituted? How independent Are they really, how are they paid for, without compromising their interests? Right. And that’s, that’s an issue in the medical world as well. Because if you have an independent review board, and you pay it fees to review your projects, are they kind of incented to go easy on you? Well, they are a little bit but you know, if you have an accreditation process, and so there are ways around that it’s all a bit bureaucratic and complex, but it largely kind of works.

Per Axbom
And you made some really important points about diversity today. And that will be something that would have to play into the review board.

Kim Goodwin
Yes, for sure.

Per Axbom
Because when you think of a review, Review Board, you think of people a certain age, a certain experience, making these decisions, but that methodology of having people from the outside giving input must be there.

Kim Goodwin
Right. And I think, you know, diversity plays into making better decisions in a couple of ways. One is, if the team generating the concepts is not that diverse, then you’re going to have a bunch of flaws built in from the outset, and a bunch of privileged assumptions based on you know, education, income, gender, all sorts of things. But there’s never going to be a team that’s diverse enough to cover all the bases.

And so I think we always need to have a mechanism to go out and listen to people other than ourselves. And I don’t just mean the review board. You know, I’m talking about making sure we get good diverse recruiting in our user research initially. And also, you know, that there are people talking about things like consequence scanning, and can we identify potential negative consequences? You need to involve some outside people in that and say, Hey, other people help us figure out what could go wrong here.

Because there’s a bunch of stuff companies put out, I look at that. And I think, yeah, if there had been a woman in the room, even one, yeah, that wouldn’t make it out the door. Right? If there had been a person of colour in the room, today would have been really suspicious of that, like everyone I know. So some of these things, I think, are very avoidable. But, yeah, you’re not going to get every possible life experience or interest represented in any team.

James Royal-Lawson
I think that’s that’s definitely the case, when we’re dealing with we’re talking about global products, is what 200 plus countries implied to 200 plus cultures, On top of the Western ideas of different, people that we’ve got, that becomes really difficult to manage

Kim Goodwin
For sure. And, you know, I see some of that, beginning to evolve. I think more companies are realising for example, that you can’t just design a product in the United States and assume it’s going to work in you know, India and China and Kenya, you have to actually have local teams designing for those cultures in many cases, because there’s just so much context. That I’m sorry, a Western design team dropping into, you know, East Africa for a couple of weeks to do ethnography. Yeah. Good luck with that.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s, it’s still gonna be it’s still gonna have that kind of filter put on it, and it’s gonna come out the other end westernised.

Kim Goodwin
we’re still gonna get colonial garbage layered on top it. Damn right.

James Royal-Lawson
There is a journey. There’s a journey there as well, for which we’ve gone kind of like too far too quick before. And we’ve gone global.

Kim Goodwin
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
And we’re having all these issues and problems. Yeah. And now we’re going to risk All right. How do we back off from being a global product? Yeah, a little bit. So we can actually start to reflect and and maybe adjust to, to localization in a more healthy way? Yeah. And that’s difficult when you’re a Facebook who’s got it’s foot on the pedal and is earning as much money as it is,

Kim Goodwin
Right.

James Royal-Lawson
Already.

Kim Goodwin
Yeah, the profit model is a tricky one, right? Money is addictive. Gotta make it somehow keeps you going as a company. But I think that we’re so focused on moving that profit number. Look, I think the hardest part of this whole thing is it’s fundamentally capitalism, right? There’s no room for a soul in capitalism, as it’s currently conceived in the world. I think it’s very hard to be a corporate leader with stockholders and say, Hey, guys, we’re going to make some decisions that make you less money. That’s very difficult to do.

I actually saw someone preparing for an IPO, I forget the company name, but they had their perspectives out. And one of the things that they actually put in it was, we intend to be a principle driven company. And so sometimes we are going to make values based decisions that reduce our profitability, and investors need to be aware of that risk. And I thought, Wow, that’s a good start. You know, let’s let’s have more companies take that stance. It’s very difficult to do, though. Lots of CEOs would get fired for doing that in existing public companies. You know,

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, I, we’ve we’ve discussed, I know you and I Per, discussed the capitalism side of things, I normally defend capitalism by saying, well, shareholder ownership is part of the solution, there, where the one of the big issues we had is, Share in share ownership has been so concentrated in such a few bodies or banks or institutions.

Kim Goodwin
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Whereas if we had share ownership on a much more individual level more widespread than you have activism, you can you open the door to activism. on an individual level,

Kim Goodwin
Maybe, maybe,

James Royal-Lawson
Theoretically, sounds quite nice. But yeah, practice, we’ve still got the fact that now how do you get how do you include the lower end of society, maybe the less wealthy society? How do you get them to understand the the benefit of investing that few dollars, maybe they have over – if they have any dollars in a company.

Kim Goodwin
and and those people that you’re talking about, don’t have the education or the time to be active as shareholders. So that sounds good. In theory, I think it’s an optimistic interpretation of the ability of the masses to do that. I agree with you about the concentrated ownership being a problem. I don’t know how you reign in capitalism, unless it’s government. And there are lots of reasons that lots of people don’t trust government, sometimes with good reason. But yeah, some part of making tech more humane is going to be dependent on governments, just as companies are not going to do this on their own. Capitalism is not going to do it for us. So I think if we’re really wanting to make better user experiences in the world, I think we have to be active as citizens, not just as designers.

James Royal-Lawson
But I think that’s that that is essentially why I say what to do about share ownership, because, you know, we have votes, and the government’s I think, are part of the solution, We vote the government’s in. But I think also that we won’t be able to pivot from capitalism, if we need to pivot from capitalism, as quick as possibly we need to. Whereas today, those of us who do have the interests, and the awareness, and even the resources can go out there. Sure. And make make make it change by buying into some of these companies we want to change. So as usual, there’s a mix of things.

Per Axbom
Yes. Feel a whole new episode here.

Kim Goodwin
On capitalism.

I’m not saying oh, my gosh, capitalism is evil. We must crush it. Of course not. That’s ridiculous. But I think that all things in moderation, right? Yeah, there is no moderation to capitalism right now. We’re over optimising to the profit metric. Just as Facebook is over optimising to the engagement metric. And in real life, we never optimise to only one thing. That is not how we make healthy decisions in our lives. We’re always making a trade off, there’s always something that provides a boundary on our behaviour. And I don’t feel like we have that right now in the business world. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
I think that brings us probably nicely into the, you said, toward the end of the talk about always measuring two things.

Kim Goodwin
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
The obvious one, is the thing that you’re actually trying to achieve. What’s the other one?

Kim Goodwin
The thing you’re not willing to sacrifice to get to that thing. So we’re always trying to achieve some business outcome, usually, it goes back to profit. You know, sometimes the the metric is sort of an a leading indicator of profit. So we’re always trying to accomplish something for the sake of the business, but there’s always a trade off, we’re always losing something when we crank up that metric. If we crank it to a certain point, maybe we don’t lose anything noticeable. But there’s, there’s a point at which it starts to stress other aspects of the user experience, whether that’s we’re introducing more privacy risk, or, you know, we’re just degrading the experience.

Think about the ad model. In an online newspapers, for example, there’s a point in which you put so many ads in there, that the papers literally unreadable, you have completely destroyed your user experience. There are publications, I just will not visit online, because it’s just too bad. Clearly, you’ve over optimised for that, that metric, so you need to look at some different approaches. But companies aren’t measuring that trade off decision, they’re not measuring the thing that is ultimately going to be problematic for them in the long run.

So I guess I think of it is, it’s like the trade off, we all make professionally, we can pour all of ourselves into work. But at some point, our health starts to degrade our mental health or our physical health or both. And you know what, the job isn’t always going to be there. We only have one life. And I feel like we have to find a way to introduce that balance in our work, too. And right now, we’re very focused on on the productivity metrics, and not on the long term health metrics. And that’s, that’s the thing we need. And I have no illusions that designers are going to necessarily solve that on our own. But I think it’s a conversation we need to be part of.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Kim Goodwin
And starting to introduce that where we have a friendly ear in an organisation. And metrics are one way to do that, right? We don’t have to say, Hey, we need to rethink capitalism. And nobody’s going to have that conversation with us at work, right.

But I think what we can do is we can say, look, we want to optimise for this metric, we’re worried about what might happen if we over optimised for and what do you think if we measure this other thing alongside it, we don’t have to have that bigger, deeper conversation, we can just start to introduce the metrics. And those are probably conversations most of us can have. And I think that’s a good starting point. Because then the trade offs will start to become apparent to other people. And it will be the metric doing the talking instead of us whining about oh, we’re degrading the user experience in a way that isn’t really evident to people who are not focused on it.

Per Axbom
So it’s a way of making the sacrifices more visible to the decision makers.

Kim Goodwin
Exactly. And you know, if you can put a number on something, it feels much more real to many stakeholders. And whereas right now, there’s a lot of designers saying, Yeah, I don’t think we should keep pushing on this, because look at what’s happening to the user experience. And that’s viewed as a matter of opinion. Other people might say, I think our user experience is still fine. No, it’s not fine. But we don’t tend to measure these things, right, because we don’t spend time thinking about them. But they’re also harder to measure then more automated metrics are, right, because the values that you’re not willing to sacrifice are usually not things you can measure with click through and, and other things like that, that you can just instrument, you actually have to ask people. And that means you need some mechanism to go out and say, Hey, how are you feeling about this? And I don’t mean Net Promoter, I mean, detailed actionable metrics that say, hey, how connected Do you feel to other people after using this and, and this is where, again, drawing on the the healthcare world. If you are developing a drug, there’s ways that you can scientifically ask people questions about the impact of it, that are viewed as medical evidence, and that actually hold weight scientifically. And we should be using that same level of rigour in what we’re doing with our products, because, frankly, it’s an interventional study. And we need to up our game on when it comes to understanding the impact of what we’re doing.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we’re we’re doing, effectively doing medical trials on the world population.

Kim Goodwin
In fact, we’re literally doing medical trials in some cases, right? If there’s increasing evidence that a lot of internet usage is increasing depression and suicidality, and people no joke. So we’re definitely intervening in people’s health. And we need to be a lot more responsible about that.

Per Axbom
Which on the positive side means that we can learn from a lot of other industries that have already gone through these issues.

Kim Goodwin
Right, right. You know, on the optimistic side, since we’ve gotten rather dark in this conversation, on the optimistic side, I think it it speaks to the power of what we are doing, you know, the fact that we can induce depression and suicidality also means maybe we can induce positive things in people’s lives as well, right. And so, behaviour change isn’t inherently evil.

If you look at, say, some of the fitness trackers and so on, that are helping people change habits to be healthier. That’s behavioural intervention to it just happens to be beneficial behavioural intervention. So I think we need to figure out, how do we make sure that behavioural intervention actually is beneficial? How do we put some checks and balances in there? So that we are using using our power for good, so to speak?

Per Axbom
Thank you for sitting down with us, Kim.

Kim Goodwin
Sure. My pleasure. Thank you.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
You know, I think if we, as an industry had the opportunity to to elect a leader. I’d cast my vote for Kim.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, I would definitely vote for campaign. I mean, listening back to this interview, now, some months after we actually did it as well. And just hearing it and just remembering the state at first that we were in when we were listening to her and her responses, and listening it back to it now, just confirming that she’s one of the few people you can actually pose really complex questions. And she has an extremely coherent answer for every each and every one of them. And they all seem so obvious. It’s like, but people have been thinking about these things for years, and they’re still trying to figure them out. But you ask Kim, and she has them figured out, or at least she can, she can express the answers in such a way that you understand the complexity, you understand the nuances, and you realise that we have to forge ahead anyway, with the information that we have on hand.

James Royal-Lawson
I think I think we actually had similar kind of reflection, when we talked to her last in Episode 192. I think I said 193 and beginning, it’s 192. Yeah, Kim’s wonderful at articulating complex things in response to complex answers, like, we posed to her I think, but picking on some of the points that we raised. I, I really like the idea of some kind of review board.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Kim says we need them, I think we need them. And we wouldn’t be the first industry to have an independent review board. But But getting there is complex and creates a lot of additional challenges. We mentioned in the chat there about how do you how do you ensure their independence? And how do you regulate how they’re paid? How do you recruit them? You know, how do you control the incentive side of being part of a review board? And another thing we mentioned, you mentioned was the need for accreditation? To be allowed into the review board. That in itself, just that one word, is an entire can of worms. How do we then accredit people, as designers, so they can be part of an independent review board, so they can then review design decisions, things that we’re doing in a way that’s that’s safe in a way that’s good, healthy, and successful.

Per Axbom
That’s true. And I think I think what Kim is doing here, she’s saying of showing us, that’s a good goal to have. And she’s, of course, also aware that it’s not going to happen overnight. So our challenge, then is to figure out what are the tiny small steps that we can take towards achieving that goal? What is the path we need to take now? Just what I when I talk about these things, I usually tell people to have, like, have every quarter, have a meeting around these things, talk about them, make them top of mind, because you need at least to have some sort of routine in talking about these issues, about harming people about storing their data about manipulation. And those risks. Because if you’re not having conversation, then you’re losing Well, people are being harmed, essentially. But just start having that conversation and realising Okay, so how can we make that even more formalised, and towards the review board, but not? Well, as it as it would be over several years? before we get there? I guess,

James Royal-Lawson
And I think, you know, when you balance, those balances, of business and and, and users or I suppose Kim said the two things was measuring the thing you’re trying to achieve, and they’re measuring the thing you’re not willing to sacrifice to get there?

Per Axbom
Yeah, that’s powerful.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. But kind of building on from that little bit is if we say that we’re not willing to harm users, in order to get there to be, you know, generalising that second thing to measure, then then that’s what allows you then to be empowered, if you said that some real crucial thing for you – not causing harm – then that allows you to be empowered to weight things that help, or benefit, or reduce harm. You can weight them slightly higher than some business aspects, when you can, when you’ve kind of like creating a, if you’ve got two things, you’re trying to decide which one do we do first, and then you kind of give a few extra points to the thing that reduces harm,

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Compared to the thing that generates more revenue, very difficult to, I think, to get buy in from higher up. But it’s not all the time, we have to get everything signed off higher up, we actually have…

Per Axbom
exactly all the time, you have to get things signed off. But also you can just just mapping it out, shows people, okay, so we won’t choose the one that harms the least. Fine. But at least we know that now. And we have to stand by it. Because we have we have it on paper and we put it up on the wall over here. And so just having that conversation is what is going to make a change.

James Royal-Lawson
That most of us work in teams and and work in, in, in constellations in groups, communities, you could say within organisations where we can exert quite a bit of power in our little inner circle to make some of these decisions. We do kind of like spend 10 more minutes on that thing, rather than that thing, maybe isn’t noticeable. Maybe it doesn’t cause kind of like, you know, business decisions, but it might make an actual difference at the other side,

Per Axbom
for me that ties well back to what she was saying in the beginning of the interview about design systems, and what are we spending our time on? are we spending our time on things that promote us as designers? Or are we spending time that help the people we are trying to help with our designs, and we need to find the better balance. I think her reasoning around doing one thing at the expense of another we’re over optimising for the profit metric, even like over optimising for one thing and not finding a balance. That’s a really huge important point. I think people need to start reflecting on.

James Royal-Lawson
And even though I’ve just we’ve just been discussing ways in which way we could practically do something now because some of the the bigger changes will take time and are complex. Kim did say Facebook’s, for example, Facebook’s business model is the one single thing that impacts the user experience of users the most.

Per Axbom
Yes,

James Royal-Lawson
so so this is kind of like micro things are changing here and there, no, you’re just kind of you just scratting in the sand a little bit. You’re not actually making the big changes.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I completely agree. Please subscribe to the show. If you don’t already. Our entire collection of episodes is available on Spotify and on the website.

James Royal-Lawson
And as a suggestion of what to listen to next, apart from Episode 192, and, and even the episode The first time we talked to Kim, which god what number’s that, that was I was even

Per Axbom
One ninety… oh, the first time.

James Royal-Lawson
The first time, that was 93 back in 2015. 2015. But apart from those two, part of Episode 56, we talked to Natalie Nahai, about cultureability, I think is the phrase she uses at the time, and internationalisation. This was this is over six years ago, we had this chat, but it ties in ties in it’s relevant to, to what Kim was talking about as well with Intelisation, internationalisation of backing off from that and reflecting and local people doing local things.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving,

James Royal-Lawson
see you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, how many economists does it take to change a light bulb?

James Royal-Lawson
None. They’re all waiting for the unseen hand of the market to correct the lighting disequilibrium.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Kim Goodwin originally recorded in May 2019 and published as Episode 221 of UX Podcast. 

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.