A transcript of Episode 241 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss “privacy privilege” and expectation of better collaboration and design systems.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by James Green.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 241.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody. Welcome to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson
Per Axbom
and Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
We have listeners in 194 countries from Jersey to Georgia.
Per Axbom
And I’ll have you know that James is not talking about any American states. Today we are –
James Royal-Lawson
– well I mean yeah but hold on, but we do have listeners in those states too, and I do mention countries – I say 194 ‘countries’.
Per Axbom
You’re right, you’re right.
James Royal-Lawson
But I think last time I checked, I think we did have listeners in every single state in America.
Per Axbom
Well I would suppose we do, yes. Today, we are bringing you a link show. Discussing two articles we’ve recently stumbled upon.
James Royal-Lawson
And they are actually quite recent we stumbled upon them.
Per Axbom
Yeah
James Royal-Lawson
And both of today’s articles are from people, written by people who have been guests on UX Podcast previously.
Per Axbom
And first out is an article from July 3rd by tech policy and regulation specialist Heather Burns. It’s about the lack of common ground or, or even common knowledge amongst web professionals.
James Royal-Lawson
Second article from the 30th of June is by responsive design legend, Ethan Marcotte. He addresses the expectation that design systems improve collaboration between designers and engineers, and how this has turned out in reality.
[Music]
Per Axbom
We’re moving into the first article, which Heather has titled, ‘Check Your Privacy Privilege‘. It’s you might say it’s actually directed more towards legal professionals, people who advocate for privacy online coming from a legal profession. But I have to say it’s a blog post, where I felt the need sitting by myself to almost stand up and give it a standing ovation. I was that taken by it. And I have to start off actually, by reading the first two paragraphs where Heather is quoting herself as something she wrote a year ago. That actually triggered her to write this article now, after she did a talk last year.
“Other professionals assume web development is an organized profession with a defined career path like theirs. It is very, very difficult for highly intelligent people working in law and academia, for whom their careers meant three or four years at a university, a year or two at graduate school, a full time position in a professionally structured company, and a clear path of career development, to understand that web development has none of that. They assume we learned certain things in certain places at certain times. They assume we receive certain things in the workplace. They assume we have a workplace. They assume that we receive refreshers, CPD” I had to look up CPD, it’s Continuing Professional Development
James Royal-Lawson
Ah, I was going to ask.
Per Axbom
“or ongoing training. They assume we are fed regular knowledge by a professional body. To professionals like those, the reality of being a web development practitioner, with no training, guidance or support is incomprehensible.” And I think that actually sums up the whole blog post even though she goes into much more detail about what people mistakenly think about what web professionals are taught, how they are taught it, if they even go to school or not. So there’s so much to unpack in this really, but why it spoke to me so much is because this applies to so many topics within the web community.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Per Axbom
And I think it really gets to the core of why we keep arguing about what is our responsibility, what is a UX Designer, who does what? It’s because we don’t have this set of defined skills that everybody’s supposed to have. And the expectation from others is, of course, when you sort of, when you’re an employer, you’re looking for a UX Designer as well, of course, you have the expectations that they at least fit some set of core competencies that you’re looking for.
But you don’t know what to look for always. And then you come with all these people that expect these people to also have some sort of accessibility, knowledge, knowledge about privacy, knowledge about ethics, and they just don’t because it hasn’t been part of their curriculum, or they haven’t even gone to school.
James Royal-Lawson
It was also a bit of an eye opener for me. I mean, the whole thing about, we know that our industry doesn’t have that kind of structure. We’ve discussed this numerous times about how we lack those kind of professional bodies. The kind of agreement about what the hell UX is and kind of the standard elements of you know, the education we have and back in our day Per, you know, you didn’t, that you didn’t do what we do now, you know, well it didn’t exist so we can’t be educated in what it was. We haven’t had refreshers, well our careers are our refreshers. But what really kind of made me go ‘oh my God, yeah!’ is I hadn’t really, I hadn’t really considered those individuals as professionals in those, I mean, of course we’ve worked with people, lawyers and you know, it could be HR, or it could be other departments, maybe have to sign off on certain things or agree on certain things before we do things but I hadn’t really thought about how it looks from their perspective, which just makes me feel stupid as a UX-er or, you know, doing the work I do that I didn’t consider it but, when that paragraph, just that paragraph you read from Heather, did make me think about yeah, God.
I mean, the friends I know who are lawyers of various different flavors. I mean, yeah, they go through huge amounts of education, there is a kind of truth, there is a, there is a source of knowledge for their occupation. If you’re a tax lawyer, there are books with the tax guidelines for every country, usually, or there’s some kind of documentation for every country, ‘this is the current tax law’, you can go there and you can argue about it. There are places you can go to argue what it means. And then a decision’s made about what it really means or it’s taken up at a higher instance.
There’s processes for evaluating and arguing about what things mean. It’s also incredibly structured, and definite. And in what we sit in, is a constant, ever changing blob of things, which even the things that inside, in our realm of things isn’t stable. They change, and more comes in, things go out. People who work with you come and go out. And it’s said, some people have no skills whatsoever and still do our jobs.
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Some people have a huge amount of skills, but don’t do a very good job. It’s incredible, I can understand how it would be incomprehensible as how they put it, to people who live and work and spent their entire careers in that world.
Per Axbom
Right. And I can also understand how it would be frustrating for them, expecting people to understand what they’re saying when there’s, in this instance, talking about privacy and trying to help people understand how important it is to, to think about these practices when they’re coding. Whereas they’re talking in a language probably, that is not at all the language that speaks to the people that they’re talking to. So, in essence, now that I’m thinking about it, she’s really talking about, I mean, the lack of education perhaps is one part but, but the people in our profession, the coders, as she’s talking about in this article, they’re not getting the help they need, because people are assuming things about them that aren’t true.
So how do we get them the help they need? And then she goes on to of course describe how she’s really struggling to put lots of time and effort and lots of free time and effort into being an advocate for this online. But also, I think she’s really appealing to the professionals, if we call them that, the other professionals –
James Royal-Lawson
– privacy professionals.
Per Axbom
Yeah
James Royal-Lawson
Is a phrase that she uses
Per Axbom
Change their language, change, change how they approach because obviously they have a goal. They have a goal in mind when they are talking to the web industry. But they need to understand the web industry better to be able to reach their own goal when they’re communicating with them. But it also makes me think so what is our responsibility then as the web industry in listening to these people who, who don’t understand where we’re coming from.
James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s a good point
Per Axbom
Heather’s doing something. She’s informing them here. But I mean, how do we talk about this? It’s sometimes it felt it feels almost like we’re hiding parts of this, because it feels like it’s something to be ashamed of that we’re so unstructured.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of bits here where she’s written, I’m seeing academics wanting to give talks to developers on how they’re not meeting legal compliance, to which Heather would respond. Why do you assume that they know that they even meant to what they’re meant to be compliant with? Who do you believe they received education from? And I’m seeing privacy professionals saying we need to rethink how we train technologists, to which Heather would reply, why do you assume that technologists have any training?
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
So you know, the point is the gap is, the gap isn’t just a small gap where you need to improve the training. We need to rethink how we do x. Heather’s trying to make this point where, you know, we’re light years away from your world. We don’t, you know a lot of people just don’t have any knowledge about privacy matters. Or I think you’ve mentioned accessibility. This, someone in one of the comments, or one of the tweets about the article brings up accessibility that you could switch out privacy to accessibility. And it could be pretty much true. The same, the same text could hold true.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And for ethics, I mean –
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah
Per Axbom
– and it’s eye opening, and it’s frustrating for both parties, because it’s so hard to understand what you’re supposed to do. And, obviously, what made Heather write the posts as well is because she’s, she’s seeing that the people who are supposed to care about adapting their message for the web development community aren’t doing that because they’re not understanding the web development community.
But at the same time, I feel that frustration with the fact that we are so unstructured that we are this disparate group of people that can’t define what we have, what we are working with. But of course, that’s a testament to how, how young our industry is because it’s so, changing so fast. But there are so many important aspects of web development that are just getting lost in translation.
And privacy, I think is a huge part of that. Because what we’re realizing now is that people are just not caring enough about maybe they are caring about privacy, but they don’t even know how to make sure that they’re taking enough care for it.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, Heather, Heather’s put a huge amount of effort and you know, personal money, time bits of her, I guess, her soul into privacy on the web and the fact the second half of the article, goes, when he asked about, you know, what do you need to do? She lists a lot of the stuff that she’s gone through in the years she’s been working with this. And, you know, oh, there isn’t, I don’t think there is a simple answer. Reading her article, I don’t get, there isn’t a simple kind of like TLDR at the bottom of her article saying, well, we know we can’t just be reeducated instead, you need to just do this. This is a long, this is a trek. It’s a long haul.
Per Axbom
Well, it’s back to that, really, you need to gain trust. If you’re a privacy advocate, you need to gain trust with the web development industry. And that means immersing yourself really in with those people understanding them. So it’s like anthropological research, contextual inquiry. It’s really back to UX, but it’s means that it’s not the UXers who have to do the X. It’s actually, it’s, so it’s back to communication. It’s really wanting to understand the other person, where are you coming from, what are your needs
James Royal-Lawson
to even acknowledge to even acknowledged that other people exist, because I mean, well no this kind of one is it’s one of those, it’s one of those areas where you can miss this completely. If you don’t even have any understanding of what privacy means at all in the context of what we do, and I think you listed, well we listed a few things that could relate to the same topic. We said, well not just privacy, but also accessibility and you said ethics. Now, if we want to try and if if I’m going to try and give a shortcut, or at least some kind of stepping stone on the way to improving all this, one of them is just to have at least those three points as checkpoints in everything you do.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Have we considered privacy? Have we considered accessibility? Have we considered the ethical impact of this? I mean, if you just run, if you just even do what I just did, then, before every single feature you embark on then, if nothing else you’re going to, you’re going to understand that you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing.
Per Axbom
And for me that comes down to like, doing a risk analysis. Is there anything that could go wrong here that we haven’t thought about? Is there any knowledge we’re lacking to release this?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And here, we’ve got down three, three keywords that you can have on your risk assessment, kind of cheat sheet if you want to kind of highlight some of the areas where you almost certainly are at some risk of not, of not doing stuff as well, as you maybe would hope to do it.
Per Axbom
And then it comes back, of course, because now we’re talking about the individuals, the professionals doing the work. But I mean, it comes down to the organization and organizational change, the culture, is this even something we value? So I understand there’s, I mean, there’s a huge struggle, because it doesn’t matter if the web developers care enough. If the organisation doesn’t care.
James Royal-Lawson
But yeah, it does, it does though Per, it does matter, because we are the ones, and the developers working with us, are the ones who are producing stuff. If we don’t design something, if we, if our developers and our teams don’t code something, it doesn’t exist. So –
Per Axbom
That’s true.
James Royal-Lawson
– so if we, if we basically say, ‘hold on, this has privacy issues’, or we don’t feel confident about the privacy issues, we don’t want to do this, we don’t feel comfortable doing this, then at least then, you’ve taken a stance and we’ve, you’ve started, I suppose at the worst case, you’ve got an audit trail that says you did actually take a stance against this
Per Axbom
Oh the audit trail I like, absolutely.
James Royal-Lawson
Now, okay some are gonna say butt covering or where you’re covering your backs, but you know, if you’re saying that the organization isn’t –
Per Axbom
No it’s not about, but it’s about if you get audited, then you actually have something. But you also feel more comfortable about yourself. That’s when I talk about these things it’s about. I mean, if you do understand the risks, you’re also at risk of burnout if you constantly have to do something that goes against your values.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And, and having, having that kind of
Per Axbom
It’s important to be able to raise your voice
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly raising your voice and having some, having done that visibly means that there’s a, I suppose a larger chance that, it will be, at least on a sufficient level be understood higher up so maybe there’ll be action taken or it’ll be, somebody will connect two things together, and something will be done about it. Given the huge gap, as Heather points out between educated professional bodies outside of our world, that means that they’re not going to understand how it is to be in our world.
Per Axbom
I think, yeah, finding your allies is really important there. Because if you find your allies, if you speak up, then other people would understand that you also care about the things that they care about. And so all of a sudden you have an ally, you can start talking, and that’s when you actually can start as you’re saying, to create change within the organization. If it’s not already there.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Well, Heather Burns is @webdevlaw one word there of course on Twitter, and you can find her website at webdev ‘lav’ .uk?
Per Axbom
Oh law, that’s supposed to be webdevlaw.
James Royal-Lawson
Have you written your notes wrong Per? I thought was a bit weird. Thought it was a bit, strange that Heather would not manage to get the right domain. webdevlaw.uk
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Is it not co.uk?
Per Axbom
No, it actually is .uk That I checked. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, now they’ve?
Per Axbom
It’s been possible for a few years now, you have the co.uk address, you get the .uk address
James Royal-Lawson
Yes. I did actually know that when I think about it. And she was our guest on episode 177. When we talked about GDPR.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Article two, is The design systems between us. This was written by Ethan Marcotte, who has been our guest before as well, just like Heather, and I stumbled upon this article indirectly. It was linked from another article I was reading. And what Ethan is talking about here in the article is, I suppose what the expectations we had for design systems, and how they haven’t perhaps delivered in the way we thought.
I can read a little bit from the article here. “In my experience design systems haven’t brought this kind of rich, cross-functional collaboration to most organizations. Instead, existing divisions between design and implementation has become entrenched, and massively so. This siloing isn’t because of design systems, not really. But because a few factors that have contributed to the current state of things” which Ethan then goes on to list. I’ll quickly just read the headlines of the three so that gives you a bit of a flavor. He says “a matter of limited resources, a matter of front-end complexity, and a matter of collaborative costs”.
So to recap a little bit now about what he means by this with design systems, we’re starting to all be familiar with design systems, ready components, things that have already been thought through, made independent of the maybe the, the product or the application area, but you can just pull in and use and run and go with –
Per Axbom
– with descriptions of the context of use and varieties in different contexts.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and of course, you know, some things. The way that we build components now, using some of these platforms like Vue and so on, then they would have various attributes you can alter and change so there’d be the component itself would have some logic built in to respond to different states, different situations. So each component is a little bit of a box that you can tweak and, and use.
And it’s when you get to a certain level of maturity or size or whatever, then everyone’s dealing with design systems nowadays. And Airbnb is one such organization that’s been doing design systems. Since really early on, they were publishing and talking about things back in 2016, to do with design systems if not slightly earlier, and their experiences with growing and developing while using a design system.
And early days, we didn’t think about it as a collaborative tool, it would kind of help us work quicker and better with not just developers but also with multiple products. And what Airbnb saw, even back in 2016, which Ethan actually mentions, he does quote from it. They were reflecting 2016 back on the lack of improvement in collaboration between designers and engineers that they had expected from a design system. They in their blog post they wrote, “The gap between designers and engineers has only increased. Design teams can often struggle to reach a cadence that balances the creative process with cycles of continuous innovation. Quality suffers, the experience becomes less cohesive talented people spend an inordinate amount of time simply managing communication across disciplines” .And Airbnb they went on to build a collaboration tool to bridge that gap. Which was –
Per Axbom
That’s the thing, isn’t it? Because it’s, if you’re after collaboration, building a tool, that is actually serving as a barrier to that communication. The tool really has to do its job well. Because what I was realizing when I was reading it is that you had one part where we actually mentioned that with this collaboration tool that Airbnb applied, designers were now, designers and engineers would now in effect will be sitting side by side.
And that was interesting to me. Because why do we need tools like that to sit side by side? Because that from my projects and my experience working in hugely different projects of different sizes, each time I’ve been able to sit next to a developer, that is what makes the difference, not the tool we’re using, but the actual physical thing of sitting together, looking at the same screen, pointing at stuff and working together. That is the collaboration. The tool is not the collaboration, but it can be an enabler. Absolutely. But, I mean, the most important thing is sitting down together because the developer will have his or her favorite tools.
James Royal-Lawson
But now that you’ve when you’ve got a design system being included in that, then the design system itself is basically, a tool or it’s a, it’s another part of the front-end complexity, which Ethan mentions that, you know, you come across this quite a bit that you even if you’ve got design systems, that little component unit, yes, it’s got a, it’s got a visual aspect to it and an interaction aspect to it, but then it’s probably built in a certain ecosystem. It might be built on Vue or something else. Or, okay, it’s gonna be still CSS and HTML at the end of it, but if there’s a certain flavor to it, so when, when there’s an added level of, there’s an added barrier there to wanting something to change so the dialogue and the communication with your team is maybe different. Because you’ve got the design system there as well, which I think we think is a healthy thing that you’ve not got to start things from scratch. You actually –
Per Axbom
you have an expectancy of the developers to understand the design system before actually talking to them about it.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes. So basically, if you want to ‘Well, I’d like to do this’. ‘No but the component doesn’t do that.’ ‘Well, why can’t we make it do that?’ ‘Because then we wouldn’t be using the component design system?’ ‘Well, why can’t we?’ So there’s so much about the understanding, you have to understand it feels like you need to understand the underlying technology to be able to understand why something is like it is. So you’re back to that –
Per Axbom
And you also need to understand the underlying task to understand why the developer wants to do it differently, which may be what you actually want to do in the end, you may want to do it differently because they figured out something that was better.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Oh, so it’s, it’s still collaboration, but a different, it’s a different way of, it’s a different angle to it. And collaborative costs, which Ethan mentions as well, you don’t have an unending resource, unlimited resources. So –
Per Axbom
The mistake is not, the mistake is not building the design system. The mistake is not collaborating with the design system as your aid but instead expecting people to look at the design system and understand it out of context. But it is when talking about it together, that’s when the magic happens. And I think he has, he makes one point about it’s the work that you put into making the design system. That is what matters as well. And I’ve actually been working on a design system during the spring, and having developers doing it together with us, that is one of what is going to help us make it successful because one of them said early on, ‘I’m not going to look at the design system. I’m going to download the CSS from one of the other satellite sites and use that.’
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Ethan actually mentions here he goes “we’re inclined to think of a design system as distinct from an organization’s broader structure…
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
…which isn’t the case. More often than not, your design system becomes a mirror of the way your team already works.” So I think that’s definitely something that’s underestimated that you, especially if you’re not the team that developed the design system, you know, when you’re starting to apply design systems, to more and more areas or applications and so on on websites, then there you have the truth that you might need to work in a completely different way when you adopt it. Because you’re not the one that originally created or controlled it. So from a developer point of view that might be tough. From a designer point of view it might be equally as tough.
Per Axbom
And again, working with a design system, probably not taught in school, it’s probably not what developers have learned as they’re learning to code. So it’s something completely different. So the expectancy of them to be able to use it off the bat is not fair. So that you actually have to allow for a period of learning. When introducing someone to a design system. The expectancy there that I often see is that ‘oh, oh, by the way over here is our design system. So just use that.’ That’s totally unfair. Yeah. It’s not the way to go with that.
James Royal-Lawson
No, it’s kind of in some ways, like having a new team member. You know, and they say that when you bring a new team member on board, you effectively start from scratch, you have to establish kind of like new shared values, new principles, new ways of working all the rest of it. And your design system is like that extra team member, you have to understand how they work, how they, you know, what they need, and how they can be incorporated and what you need to change to, what your new togetherness is. It made me, one thing that this whole article made me think about, reflecting on design systems was another thing that I’ve stumbled upon recently is the talk of developer experience.
Per Axbom
Right?
James Royal-Lawson
You know, we hear this regularly there’ll be, there’s a new something x that comes up. And I, and I’m being a bit kind of facetious and mocking the, kind of the whole thing. But you know, there’s always a new x, where it’s, you know, user experience, customer experience, you know, developer experience. But, what he’s talking about, the whole developer experience thing is that we have a lot of things that are not necessarily what we first perceive as, a user necessarily, I suppose, or even an interface, and that these things might be experienced and used, and need to be thought about and designed. So, example there would be maybe an API.
So you’re if you’re a developer, you’re expected to use a certain interface, an application interface, then, using that application interface, is an, you have an experience while doing it. And that experience can be terrible. It can be good, and it can be designed. And this is where I think what Ethan’s saying made me, made think about the overlap there with the whole understanding of developer experience. And even design your experience to a degree that, you know, we’re all we’re all users of things.
Per Axbom
It reminds me of when we’ve talked about previously about, you set up the rules of how you’re going to work together early on, you try to understand, so, ‘here are my deliverables as a designer, how would you like them as a developer? What would work best for you?’ So it’s, again, back to collaboration, the way I see it. But I absolutely agree it’s also about the tools and understanding what tools the design and the developers are using.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Per Axbom
Which also reminds me of when I’m working with healthcare, how the focus is always on the patients and the patient experience. PX? I don’t know.
James Royal-Lawson
(Laughter) Yeah.
Per Axbom
And we tend to forget about, well, it’s one about the health care providers –
James Royal-Lawson
Yes!
Per Axbom
– the nurses, the doctors, their interface has to be just as good because if they, their interface isn’t just as good, they won’t be able to provide the best possible health care to the patients. And it’s the same for developers, if their systems that they’re using to build the systems with users. The experience won’t be good.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I mean, I had a, I had a API that I was working on recently and basically had a, a feature of this API, which wasn’t really completely documented, I’d say. And the developers then when it was set loose on them, were having to experiment, to see what worked and what didn’t work. This resulted in their support, so the ops team, kind of getting frantically in touch with us to say, well, you know, you must have built this really, really wrong, because it’s kind of bringing the whole system down. Because basically, we hadn’t, we hadn’t told them, we hadn’t implemented a rate limit on a certain aspect of it. Because we didn’t, we didn’t think it would ever be used like that. Because no one bothered to actually ask the developers how they would want to use it. They just presumed. Which was a classic kind of user research thing.
But you know, you’d based, they’d based what they’d made available on the API based on what they’d built previously with the product, whereas the API opens the door to making new things. So then you’d have to do new, new research to understand what’s kind of, going to be made with that. So it’s interesting to overlook some of these experiences, which aren’t maybe the first ones you think of.
Per Axbom
Right, but even listening to you describe that example. I mean, it reminds me of how valuable it is to both you and me, just understanding development. This is, I mean, back to the old argument about should designers code? Well, if you understand code, wow, that makes your job a lot easier. I mean, we learned code, and the same way that Heather describes in her article by right clicking and looking at the code, how other people have done it. But just understanding that way of coding has helped us understand the challenges and the risks of developers experience getting it wrong.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, no, that’s a good point. You’re right that by being able to, oh yeah, yeah going back to the privacy example, you’re right that we perhaps have a better understanding of language, of the phrases used like I, I threw in the conversation there, API, and then even hit rate, I think or some, some, I threw in a few phrases to do with API’s, which –
Per Axbom
and not all UXers even know what an API is, I’m assuming. Or I know.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I guess so. But then again, we’re making presumptions about research. And that is part of the whole thing, there, isn’t it? Well, we’ve now I’ve kind of wandered off a little bit from design systems and Ethan’s original point, but, but going back to the whole collaboration thing, the expectation of so much in what we do is going to improve collaboration, is going to improve things. And, and yet, many times, we actually just create, we just change. We shuffle things around I suppose. That a design system doesn’t – just changes how we collaborate. Doesn’t remove the need for collaboration.
Per Axbom
Exactly. That’s a really good point. Ethan Marcotte is @beep on Twitter. And his website is ethanmarcotte.com. And he was our guest in Episode 95. Back in 2015 when we of course talked about responsive web design.
James Royal-Lawson
And recommended listening. We’ve pulled out Episode 163, which was when we talked about design systems with Jina Anne that was exactly three years ago.
Per Axbom
Now when you say exactly what does that mean, exactly for you? You wrote it in the show notes here so I had to ask, what is it exactly is it on the day?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, well, pretty much. It was Episode 163 came out in, on July the 21st 2017.
Per Axbom
Oh wow.
James Royal-Lawson
So, so yeah, we’re pretty much we’re four days out.
Per Axbom
But I love this. I mean, this is a great example of, we’re talking now today about what has design, what have design systems done for us. And we actually have the episode you can listen to three years ago, when we talked to Jina Anne about what do we expect from design systems? How do we build them in the right way? And you can compare notes.
James Royal-Lawson
And you can probably see how much me and you have forgotten about our conversation with Jina Anne.
Per Axbom
Exactly. Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Okay Per. There are two kinds of lawyers.
Per Axbom
Okay, James, what two kinds of lawyers are there?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, there’s those that know the law and those that know the judge.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom recorded in July 2020 and published as Episode 241 of UX Podcast.