A transcript of Episode 273 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Indi Young to discuss the need for us to switch from a solution or process focus and to study people’s purpose.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 273.
[music]
James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden.
Per Axbom
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.
James Royal-Lawson
We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson,
Per Axbom
and Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
We have listeners in 200 countries and territories in the world, from Australia to Iran.
Per Axbom
And I am super excited about today’s interview. This is a person I’ve admired and followed for many years, Indi Young. She’s an independent qualitative data scientist, problem space researcher, coach, empathy and listening expert, speaker, and the list could of course go on and on. She’s also been in this space for decades. And I first came across her at a conference in Boston in 2002, where she was introducing her brilliant signature concept of mental models.
James Royal-Lawson
I met Indy for the first time back in 2012, at UXLx in Portugal, and I took part in her mental model workshop at that conference. So we’re spreading out our Indi moments quite evenly Per.
Per Axbom
That’s right.
James Royal-Lawson
But this year, Indi gave a talk at From Business to Buttons. Now, I normally say here in Stockholm, but it was, like all conferences this spring held online. So we didn’t get a chance didn’t get chance to meet her in person. But we have caught up with her now, afterwards, a little bit afterwards. And we’re gonna talk around her presentation, which was people, purpose, patents and problem space.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So Indi in your talk, you run through the history of software development, all the way to the present. And you illustrate sort of how we have moved from building solutions for professions, like spreadsheets and helping people get to the moon, and towards building them for everyone. And along the way, we’ve realised the value of user friendly and user centred. And to fully cater to human needs however, you’re stressing that we still have a ways to go because we’re still looking through the lens of the solution. Can you expand on what you mean with the lens of the solution?
Indi Young
Absolutely. So um, usually, when you join a company you are, or when you’re a consultant, and you’re, you know, doing a project for a client, you’re very interested in what that client is producing. What that solution is that they’re producing, whether it’s a product or service, or something that happens in one minute, or over the course of several years, it’s a thing that they do and that they’re trying to get better and that they’re trying to grow, or grow the market for or something. And that seems to be the capitalist way to just keep growing, growing, growing. And so when you are that employee, that tends to be the way that you look at the work you do, so all of our agile, all of our jobs to be done, all of our even, you know, design 101 and sorry, design thinking and all of those little methods, while they say we’re going to be human-centric, they start with the idea of the human using that solution, or the human in the position to maybe consider buying that solution.
So there’s a usage or a buy in sort of a lens on it. Rarely, rarely do people actually spend time getting out, they do it. In design thinking there’s this part where you’re trying to get out there and jobs to be done, they try to do it too, I think in the hands of somebody very good at it, they will do it well, as well as I do. But, very rarely do people try to figure out what’s going through somebody’s mind as they’re trying to accomplish their purpose. So if you’re trying to support somebody, and you’re only looking at it through the lens of your solution through the lens of like, “Well, how do we support them?”, you’re only seeing a part of what that person is trying to get done, only a part of their purpose, only a little subsection of their thinking and you don’t see the whole. Not only does that mean you’re running around blind, but it also means you’re missing a lot of opportunities. You’re missing a lot of breadth there that you could grow into, or that you could start supporting more strongly.
So this is all tied together with my thinking styles. That those are just archetypes that are demographics free, trying to make people more aware of the fact that we are generally trying to solve for just one thinking style. Even the personas that people make, are very often one thinking style with a different demographic layer on them. So they’re just designing for one person, they’re designed for that average user.
And I’m saying that, right now we’re at an inflection point about this average user, we need to stop designing for the average, because we are harming people who are not average. This happened in the past, when we decided to start accommodating people in the built environment, with curb cuts and bathroom stalls and sinks and things, but also accommodate them, like in the classroom with different ways of taking tests and different possibilities, just to fully recognise people as human. This also happened earlier than that in the mechanical area where we were building things like fighter jets, and cars. For an average size human,
Per Axbom
Yeah.
Indi Young
And it wasn’t working. That’s why we got adjustable seats. That’s why we got those kinds of ways of customising something to you. And so that’s going to be where I stopped this a little answer, because there’s a lot of little rabbit holes in there. [Laughs]
Per Axbom
There were a lot of phrases there, like thinking styles and average user. An average user is really interesting, because you talk about it alongside this, this concept of edge case. And I think that we’ve moved in the design industry or in the digital industry. Overall, we’ve moved away from thinking of edge cases as something that is like being about the commonality of the area to being the action of the user. So we’re not talking about how the system behaves anymore, we’re talking about how humans behave and how humans behave, becomes an edge case, which is a dangerous thing.
Indi Young
A very dangerous thing. That’s a very bad misconception. An edge case is specifically for processes. And like a process normally works this way, but in this particular context, it doesn’t happen all that often in this area. Here’s this edge case, right. And so as software engineers, we’re trying to like not only solve the process as it normally happens, but solve all the different variations as well. And then we feel very proud of ourselves for how many variations we solve for. That did creep in to this idea of user experience and the user. And I think it crept in there because of the way that marketing and capitalism thinks of their market.
So when you are thinking of yourself, as an organisation that has, you know, a limited number of resources and a limited amount of money to spend on growth, then you’re going to pick and choose what to do. And what you do is you end up looking at like, well, who is our markets, quote, unquote, often defined by demographics, which cause a lot of assumptions and a lot of harm. But it’s defined often by demographics, and there’s this little sort of bell curve to it. And they say, let’s focus on that centre of the bell curve that’s going to get us to the greatest area, the greatest number of people and those other edges of the bell curve, we’ll call them the people that are the edge cases. I think that’s how it happened. And super dangerous I agree.
James Royal-Lawson
I’m just reflecting on that. So what we did, we basically were going through the industrial revolution, and like optimising processes and looking at edge cases that would not following our nice process or streamlined factory or whatever. And we were trying to kind of eliminate these things that were not efficient and not kind of going to keep us on track to our process. And then, somehow, suddenly, we’ve ended up applying that to how we produce things to sell. And we’re no longer kind of optimising a process or a production thing we’re actually thinking it’s all too complicated, this like human variation thing and edge cases.
Indi Young
[Laughs] That’s interesting because I did take a digital viewpoint on that. So I was looking at it through the lens of digital and what you just brought up is the lens of the physical, like that factory floor and the efficiency of productivity on the factory line or what have you. And so yeah, that’s definitely another way of looking at it. And again, let’s tie that to something more modern. Let’s talk about Amazon and Amazon warehouses. I’m assuming that you’ve got them there, too. We have this literally mushrooming of warehouses, anywhere you drive anywhere near a metropolitan area, there are big warehouses with lots of those little truck doors for trucks to backup to. Growing, they pop up overnight, like mushrooms. And then they, the company hires people.
And I know somebody who works at one of these, he was a lifeguard at the pool that I swim at, for many, many years, amazing guy. He said, like, Hey, I can, I can earn a few dollars more there. So I’m going to go try it. And I saw him like, I don’t know, seven, eight weeks later or something, he looked like a scarecrow. He had lost about 25, I can’t remember exactly what he said 25 or 30 pounds, he was like, you can see the bones in his arm. I’m like, “John, what happened?” He’s all like, “well, I walk about 10 miles a day. And I get a 30 minute break for lunch. And two ten minute breaks, one in the morning, one in the afternoon”. And you have to like follow this algorithm.
So there’s a lot of articles that I could, we could reference in the show notes or something that people are writing these days about the way that the algorithms are now trying to drive people to be more productive. So there we’re joining that digital lens with the physical lens. And the physical lens is also the human. And humans are being driven to go faster and faster. And as soon as they don’t meet some of those numbers that the algorithm is like ratcheting up, then they get fired. So if you’re a woman, and you have a heavy period, and you have to go the bathroom more often. You get fired.
Per Axbom
Yeah, because you’re an edge case and that the algorithm doesn’t take that into account. Yeah,
Indi Young
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And you’re effectively not as productive.
Indi Young
Yeah. And if you’re John, and you’re only eating like one hard boiled egg at lunch, you’re losing weight, like hell. Oops. So yeah, it’s a very dangerous situation. Because somewhere, somebody made the decision that this was a smart thing to do, to have an algorithm run humans. Now, maybe eventually, those humans are going back to normal human activities, and there’s only going to be robots in the warehouse. And they’re still going to have physical constraints. So this idea is all creeping back to this idea of like, in capitalism, always, always growing, always always growing. We’re never thinking about sustainable, we’re never thinking about reaching a level where it is a good balance. We’re never thinking about the ecosystem. We’re never thinking about living this way.
Per Axbom
So that’s, I think we’re where you also introduce this concept of thinking styles. That’s where you bring in how humans are. And humans aren’t always thinking long numbers. And how many of these things can I accomplish in a day? Because humans things think in other ways, they think about sustainability. And they do think about quick and efficient sometimes, but also think about tradition, and what ancestors did? and walk us through what how thinking styles can help us get out of this mess that we built? [Laughs]
Indi Young
Yeah. It’s tied with the average user message too,. I, so yeah, we’ve built a mess for sure. Oh, my God, how many people have been elected in countries because of disinformation or gaming the algorithm for advertising? on Facebook? Right. So it’s a mess. So yeah, thinking styles. I think that thinking styles alone are not the solution. I think the biggest thing that we have to do is catch the attention of the people who are making these bad decisions and show them how harmful they are. So one of the things that I have done in this past year is develop a graph. This graph is tied to the opportunity map, but imagine that you are a product owner, okay, and you’re responsible for like this. section of what normally people think of through the solution lens as the product. But if if we can get hold of that product owner, who’s open-minded, and really does want to do a good job for person, a human, if we can switch their attention to the person’s purpose. And so I am responsible for helping this person with this section of their purpose. I have it graphed out in that opportunity map based on listening sessions based on deep data, patterns, understanding of how well we are supporting thinking style A, thinking style B and thinking style C.
I have an example of this. This was from an opportunity map that was done for a group in the US government who is responsible for helping employers adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act in terms of hiring and employing Americans with disabilities. Probably similar rules in a lot of different countries. And this little group was originally just creating pamphlets, you know, like how to hire somebody with disabilities. And then they started doing some trainings. And they were really initially very focused on veterans. And so what we did was an understanding of what people who are responsible for hiring, and addressing the needs of their employees, what has been their experience over the past, you know, few months or years, it’s really memorable, where they were doing this, for somebody with a disability or a disability came up. We took all of that data made a mental model diagram, it looks like a city skyline with a bunch of towers in it. And the towers are kind of organised into city blocks. And those city blocks can kind of come together into neighbourhoods, just like a city it grows from the bottom up, it’s not like, “Oh, this is gonna be this neighbourhood. And we’ll put these things in it”. That’s called curating. And that’s how we get our bias into our data.
So, this city skyline of the people who are hiring and sustaining people in their organisations, specifically about what was going through their mind with respect to people who had a disability. It was all their thinking, all their inner thinking, that includes motivations, that includes procrastination, that includes wondering and worrying and feeling frustrated, and all these other emotions that cause more inner thinking. And it also includes guiding principles, which are kind of their philosophies. And so these guiding principles are what help us see whether there are different philosophical approaches to this job, this purpose, right. In Jobs to be done, they call it the core functional job. I call it a purpose because as a person, I don’t refer to you, what I’m trying to do as a core functional job. [Laughs]
James Royal-Lawson
[Laughs] What? It’s only you who doesn’t.
Indi Young
So, with respect to understanding a thinking style, do people have different philosophical approaches to their purpose, and in that data, there’s a certain way that we can look at it and understand whether there are differences. And in that particular set, there were two. There was one thinking style that was the empathic, you know, I’m thinking ahead, I’m looking out for people, before they even come to me. And I’m really aware of these things. And I’m trying to stay on top of it. And then the other one was more like, I’ve got a lot to handle here. And so yes, as soon as you come to me, I’m going to take care of you, but it’s not going to be me reaching out to you. Okay, it’s not gonna be like the empathic person was like, “Oh, you know what, this person that we just hired is deaf, and I just realised the other day as I walked in, that our alarm systems are all audio. And we need some sort of visual alarm system to help him out”. I mean, although everybody else running around with their arms in the air might help too. However, that was the kind of proactive thing that they’re thinking. Whereas the more reactive thinking style was like, “Oh, you know, this woman whose eyesight has been going worse and worse, she came to me and said, Hey, I need to get like a screen magnifier. And so that was the first step and then she says, You know, I my doctor says, I think that I could have this kind of surgery. Would you be willing to let me try that? and have some time off? Blah, blah, blah”.
So that’s kind of the difference between those two. And when we went through, and we aligned, all those trainings and all the materials that that group had produced to the towers in the city skyline in the blocks and the various neighbourhoods, in that particular block that, well, actually, across all of them, what we did see was that all the materials were aimed at the empathic problem solver. None of them were aimed at the I’m gonna react. It’s sort of in the same manner, but it’s a very different approach philosophically. I could talk to you about thinking styles around cooking dinner, as a creative home chef, which you might be able to wrap your head around a little bit better, but I’ll stop it here, because I said a lot. [Laughs] Where we should go.
James Royal-Lawson
Just wondering how, when you’ve got the thinking patterns? How do you stop yourself ending up with just stereotypes with a different name?
Indi Young
Right, this comes from what people say about themselves. And so what I’m doing is I am actually looking for patterns, philosophic patterns of people’s own way of thinking, in their own words. So I have a very specific way that I summarise the various concepts at depth, the inner thinking, the guiding principles, and the emotional reactions. I have a specific way of doing that, so that their voice remains present. And what we do is we let that come together. Again, we’re not curating, okay, we do it, when we describe people, we use those phrases that are inner thinking, guiding principles. Sometimes emotional reactions have emotional reactions, there’s really like in the airline thinking style there was one of the thinking styles was very emotionally driven. It doesn’t always happen with respect to thinking styles. But when we write those up, the description is about four or five, six sentences, there is no picture, there’s no demographics, there’s no favourite band, there’s no anything else, it’s just those sentences in respect to their purpose. And that, then, is a very different way of looking at how people get their purpose done. And a very eye opening way of looking at how we’re only supporting one of those thinking styles, or only halfway supporting one of them, because we’ve only been thinking of it from the average user kind of point of view, full of assumptions. And all of that.
The other thing about the descriptions is that everything of the description, I’ll give it a title, like “Empathic problem solver”, the title has to be something someone would be proud to use to describe themselves. So there was in the airline case that I did. These were about people trying to get from point A to point B, that was their purpose. We studied actually a couple of different purposes, like trying to get to the gate on time. And it was interesting, because we ended up with the same thinking styles across all of them. That was a surprise, that doesn’t always happen. Typically, there will be different thinking styles and different purposes. The interesting thing, though, is that, that emotional one, that emotional one, the team wanted to call “The grumbler”.
Per Axbom
Oh, of course.
Indi Young
Yeah. And I’m like, you know, no one would describe themselves as a grumbler. You cannot use that phrase. Let’s go back and see what phrase they use to describe themselves. And the word was the frustrated. Frustrated.
Per Axbom
Right, because it’s from their perspective and the grumbler would be actually from the organization’s perspective.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. It’s a different lens.
Indi Young
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so then if you can put yourself into that frustrated mindset, you’re like, “Oh, my God, I was a frustrated on that particular leg of that particular trip. I can be this person”.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
Indi Young
Right. Because thinking styles are contextual. They’re not a personality, they’re not a horoscope. And oftentimes you will get people having fun with personas and turning them into horoscopes. That’s where like the favourite band, you know, and, like, I’ve seen it again and again, it’s like there’s this one example I use in my course, where there are three thinking styles. And it’s about a startup, it’s for a startup who wanted to make a product, a solution that helps people feel safe, walking around in the city, getting some exercise or getting to a place or walking the dogs safely. And they had three different thinking styles. All of the thinking styles were white collar workers. And all of the thinking styles. I mean, they had three different personas, I should be careful with my words here, all of the personas were white collar workers, the personas had basically the same background education. Personas were basically the same age. They were just different genders. And they were all the same thinking style. And they were all written from the lens of the solution. Like, “oh, I’m going to use this solution to blah, blah, blah”, right? Yeah,
Per Axbom
Yeah. That’s even how we write user stories for our backlogs.
Indi Young
Yeah. So for user stories, I think once you’re in the solution space, you’re okay talking about the solution. That’s fine. When you’re Yeah, when you’re doing evaluative, when you’re doing generative work, you’re in the solution space, you are generating ideas, ideas or solutions, you’re in the solution space. But when we’re trying to understand people, let’s just gather an understanding of somebody trying to accomplish their purpose, then you’re in the opportunity space, or what I call the problem space. Ethics calls it the futures research. That’s us trying to understand people as people trying to get their purpose done.
And what I want is in the end, after we get you know, after we get this data into our opportunity backlog, so it’s driven not by technology, it’s not driven by Big Data correlation guesses about assumptions for demographics. But is driven by understanding what’s going through people’s heads and their different philosophies. Then we can go into our solutions much better prepared, we can narrow down what we’re going to work on like, okay, we’re only going to work on this thinking style right now, we know there’s this other thinking style, but we’re making the decision to work on this one. And we feel confident about it. And we’re going to really nail this one, not try to like make a solution that works for everybody. And then we’re going to come back and make another solution, another frontend, another experience for this other thinking style.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
Indi Young
And the other thing that we can do then is also layer on, discrimination lenses and physiology lenses.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
Indi Young
And this is where it gets really complex. [Laughs] But this is where we start really opening our eyes, especially back in when we’re framing our research studies in the opportunity space. Who are we going to hear from? And how can we like, come to our stakeholders and say, “here’s, here’s the orgs goal, right? Here’s the knowledge, we need to accomplish that goal. We have some of that knowledge, but we’re missing some of the knowledge. Is it a big risk? to not know that stuff?” And the stakeholders can go like “God? No, you know, if we, if we mess it up, then it’s gonna be pretty expensive. So yeah, that’s a big risk”. So let’s go make that knowledge. So what tool do we use to make that knowledge? And that’s the question that usually doesn’t get asked, usually in the orgs, what happens is, somebody will say, “Hey, I used this tool in my other job, and it worked pretty well. So let’s use this tool to make knowledge, even though it isn’t the right tool for that kind of knowledge”.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
Indi Young
I was just talking to somebody yesterday, yeah, the product manager came in from this other… “Oh Jobs to be done worked really well there. So let’s do Jobs to be done”. Because we realise that we’re a startup and we made a solution without actually knowing what people’s purposes are, and it isn’t working. So we’re now backtracking and trying to understand what people’s purposes are, and what their thinking is, and see, like, where is it that we can double down because we’re only a startup with so many resources? So let’s double down on this thinking style in this, you know, block in this neighbourhood and focus there.
Per Axbom
I’m gonna throw something at you now.
Indi Young
Okay, yeah,
Per Axbom
Which we don’t have time for so James is gonna hate me now. [Laughs] Because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. And I think that you may also have been thinking about it, because it has to do with what you also talk about orality, this back and forth exchange between two people. And this is in the research phase. This is how you go into depth with understanding people. And besides the design, I do some coaching with clients. And when I do that, what happens is that in the first session, we set up a goal, which the person could be defining as their purpose. This is what I want to achieve. And by the third or fourth session, three week intervals, they will start to reconsider. “That’s not really what I wanted. I’ve been thinking about this so much now I realised that is really not my purpose, that is really not what I want to do, I’m someone different”. How can we get to that type of depth? and make sure that we actually do think about all the possibilities of who a person wants to become, rather than what they’re saying in the one hour session or the one hour interview?
Indi Young
Right? So the purpose is something that they did, and I don’t study what people want to achieve, it’s something they did. So for example, and it takes framing the purpose, very carefully. So for example, this is a complex example, there was a gaming company that wanted to make games that helped people, especially young women develop self confidence. I don’t know why they wanted to specify gender, or age, because I’m not a demographics person. So let’s say we want to develop a game that helps people develop self confidence. So what knowledge do we need? When so that’s the orgs goal, right? One of the pieces of knowledge that we need is like, well, How do people develop self confidence? So that we can teach it? Now there’s a lot of existing research about that. And we could just use that. But, there’s also sort of this missing component in it, of what actually, like, How did people force themselves through the barriers? So what to gain self confidence, right? We want those stories to understand exactly how they did it.
And so what we did was we decided the purpose needed to be something that somebody accomplished, that required a lot of self confidence. And what we decided on was changing my personal identity. Okay, so from a game, to the purpose of I changed my personal identity. It’s not I’m going to change my personal identity, because you haven’t done any thinking about that. You’ve done a little bit of thinking about it, right? But you haven’t done all of it. And the part that we need is how you worked through those setbacks. Because it’s hard.
So when we’re recruiting for this, I have a very specific way of recruiting, when we’re recruiting for this, we have to make sure that people have done enough thinking about it, it was a struggle, it took months. And I need to understand that they can also tell me about it. Sometimes, so I’ll do a spoken screener, I call it an intro session with the people with a candidate, who is not a participant, they’re just a candidate. And I say it’s an info session. And I’m going to ask you some questions, you’re going to ask me some questions, we’re going to like, see if we’re comfortable with this and want to go forward, right? And part of what I’m doing in that is sussing out whether they, as I’m trying to develop a trust or rapport with them. I’m doing that in that session. And I’m trying to figure out if they’ll take that and accept it and give me some trust. Because trust is important. And we’re going to do it with a tiny little question that is easy for them to answer in a short period of time, but the other thing I’m looking for is can they, like your example, can they express what actually went through their mind? Do they know what went through their mind?
Per Axbom
I love this.
James Royal-Lawson
Right, yeah. So of course with Per’s example, he’s trying to create self awareness through coaching. Whereas what you Indi are trying to do is trying to surface self awareness from a journey that’s already been travelled, you’re starting new journeys Per.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
Indi Young
Yep. Yep.
Per Axbom
That’s a really good way of explaining it. Thank you. [Laughs] To sum things up, I mean, there’s so much opportunity out there to do way, way better than we’re doing today.
Indi Young
Yeah. I think to sum things up, we need to develop relationships with our product owners, with our stakeholders so that they trust us. So that they understand what it’s like to have a trust relationship and to speak at depth to one another, rather than to speak at surface to one another. And once we develop those relationships that I think is the point at which they will start to recognise that, we have some, as researchers, expertise in selecting which research tool to use for our particular knowledge that we need to create, and let us help design the studies rather than let’s just go use Jobs to be done you know, or whatever tool right? So it’s up to us to develop those relationships because without that, they’re going to continue to have the power. And they’re going to continue to run around not knowing they have no idea that they’re doing it wrong. The other half of it, I think, is if we can start to show them the harms that we’re doing, very specifically, to a thinking style in a particular part of what we’re creating as a solution for them, with respect to of course, their purpose, tower in their purpose. So that’s the other half of it, relationships and starting to show them what the harms are and maybe getting attention.
James Royal-Lawson
I love it. So much more to… I’m looking forward to listening back to this.
Per Axbom
Yeah, me as well. Thank you so much. This was really really valuable.
James Royal-Lawson
It was really good fun. Thank you.
Indi Young
Yay.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
So core values, guiding principles, purpose. I do like all this Indi talks about it ties in I feel with behavioural economics, and the move that we’ve had inside economics away from seeing people as totally, our purely rational actors in an economic system. Humans are irrational. Rather, we have core values, we have principles, we have purpose. And that sometimes makes our decisions look different to what we might have expected. Indi in her talk she says “Urgh. People are complicated”. Yeah, which is true. But I love the reframing so that we look at it. Look at all this from a purpose angle, rather than a process, a product, an organisation, a need or even a task. It’s so much more human.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And it’s interesting about that word irrational, I think about it a lot, because we all agree that people are irrational. That’s only because people are really unpredictable. But when Indi goes through these thinking styles in her talk, I really like that. So consider a person buying something a can of soup or something. Some people have this cooking style that’s quick and efficient. So they pick the first one they see. And some think sustainability and they actually want to pay more because you think in a sustainable manner. And that could from another point of view, another person would look at that, well, that’s really stupid, you’re buying the more expensive product? Well, I’m looking at long term. So that’s another thinking style. So I love that if you’re reframing it, you’re not trying to necessarily understand a person and their behaviour, just looking at it and seeing what is happening and understanding that.
Another thing that really struck me and I wanted to bring this up with Indi, but we were running out of time, kind of. But I think this is a great example of how you look at her quote, which I love, “all humans are fully human, with many ways of being in the world”. And something that I come across quite often is this problem, we have that in accessibility, that we categorise people. And we think of the people with accessibility issues. And we categorise those into those with visual impairments and blind people. And what I’ve come to recognise is that, of course, a person with visual impairment, and a person with perfect vision, could have the exact same purpose and needs. That could be separate from a third person who is also visually impaired. But most people jumped to the conclusion that all visually impaired people have the same type of needs, which is a problem. So in that sense, the way that Indi is proposing that we work, actually helps that in that we disregard the inability to do some things or understand some things in a certain way that if they’re designed that way to actually look at what are we trying to help people do?
James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s a great point. It’s also that label and following on from your example that label of how much you can see, a lot of pushback you get from organisations is to do with “oh, those people aren’t interested in our product because they can’t see it”.
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
And if you look at the purpose, than the purpose doesn’t care as much about whether they can see it or not, because that isn’t the purpose, the purpose might be, they might have other needs, they have the same needs as another human, the fact that they’ve got impaired vision or some disability issue. That’s not impacting their underlying purpose.
Per Axbom
Exactly. I mean,and just helping people realise that I think is one big, important purpose as designers that we have as our responsibility is to help people see these things, that there are blind people actually do love cars. There are blind people who do go to movies, there are blind people who do love colour. Because that is their interest. And I think you can knock down a lot of prejudice, just by showing these things that people have no idea is going on. Because I mean, just up until a couple of years ago, I still had people react and think and actually question “So blind people use the internet. How’s that? How does that work?” Which is fascinating to me that there’s just this huge block, chunk of knowledge that people don’t have access to yet. But when you open that door and show people, then they can reframe their whole approach to everything we’re building together.
James Royal-Lawson
Sounds a much better place.
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
I have a recommended listening episode.
Per Axbom
Yeah, this was quite a difficult one to find recommended listening to, as it’s such a broad topic and you can go deep.
James Royal-Lawson
We could also just go random. And just say listen to Episode 143. I have absolutely no idea what that episode is. But anyway, listen to it. No, one I’ve pulled out from our roam graph is Episode 221. Decision systems with Kim Goodwin. There we also touch on a few related issues to topics we touched on now with Indi I think, or at least it’s a good complement, is that show. And both Indi and Kim are people that we admire [and] respect greatly.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And take time to reflect and help us to understand things. And remember, you can contribute to funding the show by visiting uxpodcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I’ve lost my thesaurus.
Per Axbom
You’ve lost your thesaurus.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I don’t have any words describe how upset I am.
Per Axbom
[Laughs]
James Royal-Lawson
Medium level for that performance? You’re giving me medium level?
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Indi Young recorded in September 2021 and published as episode 273 of UX Podcast.