A transcript of Episode 298 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss how car culture colonised our thinking, and how Figma is making you a bad designer..

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Dave Trendall.

Transcript

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 298.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
I’m James.

Per Axbom
I’m Per.

James Royal-Lawson
And this is UX podcast balancing Business Technology, people and society every other Friday since 2011. And we’ve listeners all over the world from, okay, Dominica, to Sao Tome and Principe.

Per Axbom
Oh, I noticed that you actually had some help there. You’ve written out how you’d say it.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. The thing is, even though we visited Portugal a few times during the years, Per, I haven’t really got the hang of Portuguese. So there we had a Caribbean island, and a West African Island.

Per Axbom
Yep. And today, our dear listeners, we have for you a link show, which is when James and I go off on two articles, and try to dissect their meaning. We found these on our digital travels, and some of them have been this time found for us. And we have time for two articles. The first one out is ‘How car culture colonised our thinking and our language.’ I paused there for James to take over. But he was too slow.

James Royal-Lawson
I did come in exactly the same time as you. So arguably, I was just as fast as you.

Per Axbom
That’s a fascinating article about about language. It’s actually from The Guardian, and their bike blog, which is really interesting as well. And the second article out is –

James Royal-Lawson
‘Figma is making you a bad designer’. Now, this is an article that we’ve actually had in our shortlist of articles to discuss on this type of show for a little while. But what allowed it to make the cut this time was the news that many of you will know that Adobe has bought Figma for $20 billion.

Per Axbom
I love that figure. But we’re going to get to that article later. We’ll start out with car culture. So how car culture colonised our thinking, and our language.

James Royal-Lawson
This is a this is a translated article, isn’t it? This is an article that we found on the Guardian, which is a British newspaper website. Originally written in Dutch, by two Dutch authors,

Per Axbom
And those authors are Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brommelstroet.

James Royal-Lawson
Fantastic, Per.

Per Axbom
I have no idea if that’s correct. But I tried.

James Royal-Lawson
Better than me.

Per Axbom
And it was translated by Fiona Graham of The Guardian. And, diving in, because I think we’ll have some some examples to read out from this article. Because I just love it when I read something that has small nuggets of insights, that completely make me rethink and reevaluate my thinking processes, and realise how limited I am in my thinking sometimes.

James Royal-Lawson
And when you shared this article with me, Per, one of the first things I thought about is that drawing that you’ve shared before about the electric scooters, and the pavements.

Per Axbom
Oh yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Before I even read this article I had I had that picture in mind. So I guess now we have to include that link to that in the in the show notes.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So as you might feel has been suggested already by the title is that our thinking around cars is somewhat controlled by systemic things in society. So the way we speak about cars is actually also centred on cars, which means that when we talk about other people, or motorists or cyclists, we don’t talk about them in the same way we don’t centre them. So just the first paragraph of the article makes you think. When we block traffic from a street, like for a sports event or a street party, we say that the street is closed. So the street is closed when we block it for cars, but it’s only closed for cars. It’s actually now open to people. Which is fascinating.

It’s fantastic. It’s very fascinating. It’s fantastic. Just that first example you’re just going oh my god, we’re just framing this completely wrong. We’ve kind of focused on the, I suppose on the negative aspect, I suppose you could talk. I mean, well maybe not the negative aspect, but yeah, it just focuses on the wrong bit. It’s a good thing for all these people and for the sporting event that the street is available to them.

Exactly. And they go on to say that this is actually something that’s only been happening in the past century. I mean, previously, streets have always been for many things, for talk, for trade, for play, for work, for moving around. And now it’s about helping cars get from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible. And that is what they mean has actually colonised our thinking.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the quote there is, this idea is so persuasive, that it has colonised our thinking around traffic and roads.

Per Axbom
And a large part of the text actually is from an interview with a transport researcher. It’s so funny because they also write, meaning he is interested in traffic, but not in cars, is Roland Kager. And one of the first things he says in the article is, we speak of vulnerable road users. And that’s what we talk about. And that’s sort of the the cartoon that you talked about there with these E-scooters, and having this small slice of an area, the sidewalk to travel on, and pedestrians and people in wheelchairs, and then you have this big space for cars.

And so we speak of the vulnerable road users because they can actually get hurt more easily, of course, than the people in cars. But they’ve only been vulnerable since the advent of fast traffic with big heavy vehicles. So why don’t we call those vehicles instead, the dangerous road users. So time and time again, throughout this article, they highlight how the language centres around the importance of cars.

At the same time, as they show some statistics where you realise, well hang on, how many people are actually affected by for example, traffic jams? Well, because it’s a Dutch article the example is from the Netherlands, but only 15%, 15% of Dutch people are caught up in traffic jams each week. And only 5% of the population say it’s a problem that affects them personally. 5%.

James Royal-Lawson
5%. I mean that’s such a small figure that say they actually care about traffic jams, effectively.

Per Axbom
And that made me realise all the times I’ve seen news about traffic jams and hear news about traffic jams on the radio and how prevalent that is in our media reporting. It’s certainly an important thing. Because it affects a certain type of person, I believe.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I haven’t really – I’ve thought about the fact that they don’t talk so much yet on the radio in Stockholm about how much traffic there is on the cycle paths, which I know from talking to people who bike into town and back that it can be really bad at certain times in the mornings.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And I also was reflecting on, this morning I was thinking about this, listening to the radio, after reading this article, that we talk about how there are queues of traffic. You know the traffic is backing up X number of kilometres, or there’s an X number of kilometre long queue as a result of an accident and so on. But yet, trains are delayed. I presume that’s because they’ve got a timetable so you’re relative to the timetable. But I was thinking, well, why don’t we say that when you’re driving along this stretch of road, your journey is currently delayed by 20 minutes, rather than talk about the extent of the queue?

James Royal-Lawson
Because ultimately, that’s what we’re talking about. How much longer is your journey going to take? And whether there’s a queue of five kilometres or not, doesn’t really tell me much about me actual impact on my journey. But that’s the way you do it, isn’t it? You talk about the length of traffic jams?

Per Axbom
Exactly. So why are we talking about this on UX Podcast? Well, besides how, I mean realising how important language is, it’s also about how do we change to get other outcomes? And the example here is from these types of, speaking of other traffic or motorists or people in traffic, the train cyclists. So the example is that there are people who travel a lot by bicycle to get to trains which is why your example just now was really good. And, but there is no there is no like category, or statistic for these people because we don’t talk about train-cyclists, people travelling to trains.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, or at least in Holland, the Dutch politicians didn’t talk about this as a particular category of transport or people using transport. There were people who bike, and people who took trains. So this was a hidden category, you could say. The information structure and architecture of the transport categories didn’t include these people who did this kind of journey, and wasn’t the case that this is a large number of people that fall into this category?

Per Axbom
Yeah. It’s fantastic. A huge number of trips, of course, because I mean, the Netherlands really is a biking country. And I mean, if you’ve ever been there, you’ll have noticed this. And so, they’re really useful to get to trains and there are such good, I mean parking space for bikes is fantastic in the Netherlands as well. So there really is actually an infrastructure there for them for this to be going on. But you also need the trains to be on time for the full extent of the actual journey to be completed.

And actually, what the article says is that these, the Dutch Railways, they actually have these public transport bikes that they offer, and they continue to break new rental records each year. Each year they’re breaking new records. But the planning website, the Dutch travel planning website only recently adopted is door to door itineraries that include bikes, and still with very basic functionality. So what you’re looking for is, how do I plan my journey from home to where I want to get with the bike journey included?

James Royal-Lawson
All right, because that is something that Google Maps does generally offer doesn’t it?

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
It says you can get to that train station using foot, bike, or I think sometimes it even suggests scooter, depending on whose scooters they want to kind of promote.

Per Axbom
But it doesn’t mix. It won’t mix. Because if you want to go by bike first, train then, and bike later.

James Royal-Lawson
It does.

Per Axbom
It does, so – I enter my home address and so if I wanted to go from to where I’m at ,where I live, maybe where I go by bike first to the train and from the train, I want to bike to my studio. I could not do that because it doesn’t have those connections.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, no you’re right. Yeah, I can’t think of when it would suggest biking to this station, then taking the train and then walking at the other end, for example. Ah, yeah.

Per Axbom
And so what was happening is that there was actually an MP in the Netherlands, a Flemish MP who who started recognising this and because there were articles written about it with this guy, Kager, so we started employing this terminology with the train-cyclists.

James Royal-Lawson
De Kort. I think it was, wasn’t it? The name of the politician. But yeah, he adopted, he co-adopted the category of train cyclists to help him push for extra funding. So he eventually got additional funding for a scheme to help with this. And I think he also adopted the phrase for, wasn’t it bus-cyclists as well.

Per Axbom
Exactly. Yeah. So what they’re saying in the article here is that, so this guy Kager, he made an invisible group of travellers visible just by giving them a name, because there was no name before. And so now they’re actually an official category. And now policies are taking them into account and are being actively developed, which is fascinating.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s wonderful for us as designers, this just makes me think about the importance of the words, we use, the phrases we use in so many ways that it can really influence how our designs are actually adopted or used in the future. And I think it also reminds me of the power of defaults. That comes back to mind again, that what we set as a default, as well as what language we use on interfaces, can have profound effects for society in some cases.

Per Axbom
It also makes you think, because we often do our research, and we listen to the language being used by the people we do our studies on and we use the language because we want it to be inclusive, we want as many people as possible to understand. So we don’t often challenge the use of language, where often probably should try to think of other – when we change perspectives, we can change the language to allow people to see new things. That has to be part of design thinking, I think, when not getting stuck with the defaults, but actually trying to evolve even the words we’re using in our design interfaces.

James Royal-Lawson
And in this example, with train-cyclists and bus-cyclists, it’s kind of a second order nudge in some ways. Their research, discovered or uncovered that there was this particular group of transport users that mixed transport styles. But they needed to nudge the politicians in a certain way so by adopting that category, politicians then became more open to understanding this group and giving some more funding to it. So we didn’t actually, I guess this doesn’t exactly nudge the behaviour of the people doing the transport, not directly, it’s using that to push a further change further down the line.

Per Axbom
Ah, interesting. One thing that struck me was when we talked about making up new words. It’s, we often criticise politicians sometimes because they use new words to describe things in our environment. And then we accuse them of making up words. But what we often fail to recognise is that all words are made up. All words are made up. We need to remember that always. And it’s interesting, then can we actually escape? Can we escape language?

Per Axbom
And that’s something that I think a lot about when I’m talking to you, I’m being bilingual. And it’s interesting when you and I attend dinner events or something, and everybody’s bilingual, and we switch language mid sentence. And it’s interesting, because I think you’ve said to me once, I often choose the word that I think makes the most sense, or the one that feels that carries the most meaning of what I want to say. Recognising that, language is always going to be interpreted in some way by someone else, and you’re trying to always adapt it to that to that effect.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, but it has its roots in not just the culture that you’ve been submersed in, but your entire life experience. Because all that is what adds layer upon layer of nuance to the words, you know, you present to everyone else and you use.

Per Axbom
So I think the big takeaway here is just, sure, listen to the words, listen to what people are saying. But then also challenge what they are saying, and find new ways of saying the same thing and look for who is not being included with the language being used.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the article actually finishes off with the question of what kind of town do you want?

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Which is interesting. And we could rephrase it and reframe it to maybe even what kind of internet do you want? Or even ultimately, what kind of world do you want? Because it’s not just limited to transport in the Netherlands in a town. This I think you can pull, you can abstract and pull apart.

Per Axbom
Yeah it made me think a lot about ethics and how I can rephrase things to help people understand working towards something that is value-driven, rather than data-driven. Data-driven is one of those words that’s become so ubiquitous in the design world now. We’re so data driven, and that’s supposed to be a positive and it isn’t always.

James Royal-Lawson
Computer says yes.

Per Axbom
Now, we are going to talk about Figma.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes. Now, as we alluded to, at the start of the show, this has been an article that we’ve had almost for a little while. I mean, yeah, it was one that was written at the beginning of the summer in June. And it’s, Figma is making you a bad designer, by Emily Schmitler, who is Director of Product Design with Included Health. But what really kind of, I suppose, pushed it into this show, is the news this week, that figma has been bought by Adobe.

James Royal-Lawson
And this has been a big bit of news. Not only because Adobe, they’re going to pay $20 billion for Figma, which is an absolutely astounding amount of money. And I think Jared Spool he, he asked the question about, well, you know, if Adobe had $20 billion to spend on a design tool, why didn’t they get their an army of 9000 designers or whatever to work flat out on creating the ultimate tool and do it for cheaper?

Per Axbom
I think I also saw, I saw Jared Spool writes, Adobe is where all great design tools go to die.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and there is a bit of truth in that. If you feel the pulse of, for example, design Twitter, or the design community this week after this news broke, there weren’t a lot of really, really happy people is my quick gauge of how that seemed to be there was a lot of people not really happy about this. Which is interesting. Because I suppose me and you Per over the years, we’ve talked about, even interviewed people about it.

James Royal-Lawson
And Kate Russel, when we talked to her, we chatted to her about lifelong learning and how design tools come and go. And they do, they really do come and go. But the thing with Figma and being bought by Adobe, and the worry for a lot of people is that Figma had, this is my understanding, again of what people have said out there is that it’s not just about Figma as a tool. Figma had a freemium model for their tool. So you could use Figma for free. And it also was, or is, sorry.

Per Axbom
Speaking of it in the past tense (laughing).

James Royal-Lawson
I shouldn’t talk about it in the past tense as if it’s already dead, god. As well as having a freemium model where you could actually use the tool for free, then you also could use it via the web, which means you can use it from a Chromebook, you can use it from a Windows machine, you can use it from any platform that can run a modern web browser, you don’t need to have a Mac.

Per Axbom
And also a big, big point is if you’re travelling and don’t have your computer with you, you can go to a library and finish your design.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so basically Figma has opened the door for many designers, outside of that elite group of Mac-owning, Adobe licence holders who are the kind of – Sketch as well was Mac only but you know, if you think about traditionally, the design tools, they have been a really elitist thing that it’s only people with very expensive equipment and a very expensive licence, could actually use a lot of these tools. Whereas Figma made this open to a lot of people that hadn’t previously maybe been able to use a design tool of this standard and quality. Which might be going now and a lot of people are worried about the fact that it will go into the Adobe world, and it will then become part of the Adobe licencing model.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
And that’s a very different thing. Anyway, that was pre-amble. That wasn’t actually the article, not completely. There are aspects of what we just talked about in the article as well.

Per Axbom
And so this article by Emily Schmittler, from June. I just loved this article, because it resonates so much of what I’m thinking always around these tools. When thinking of design schools, and students are so panicked about what tools they need to learn, and realise when they come out what, depending on where they start working, that it really isn’t about the tool. It’s about the process. It’s always about the outcome of your work. And the tool isn’t the main thing.

James Royal-Lawson
It is. But you’re absolutely right. But at the same time, organisations keep asking for these tools.

Per Axbom
They keep asking. I mean, the job ads kept keep asking for it. So I understand their worry. Absolutely.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. There’s a there’s a loop there. There’s a negative spiral, I guess, in some ways that the job ads ask for these tools, like Figma so they want to learn these tools like Figma. But in the opening part of the article, it says, well, just as my lovely professors said, when she was at Design school, knowing how to wireframe or to mock up in a particular tool, 100% did not matter. In fact, all the projects I’ve done in those tools, I didn’t particularly like, despite all my effort, they ended up looking templated with little new or interesting thinking.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
She got the feeling that doing all this work in these high fidelity mock-up tools didn’t ultimately achieve what she was hoping to.

Per Axbom
And it’s great way of putting it. She didn’t even use these in her interviews for work.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it wasn’t included in part of her portfolio. Interesting. But she goes on then to say that, it’s after that she decided that if I couldn’t do my job with pen and paper, or whiteboard or marker, then I wasn’t a very good designer. To this day, I find the sentiment to be at my advantage. So here she’s talking about the mindset of of being sketch first. As opposed to being design tool first that you jump straight into a design tool.

Per Axbom
And you say Sketch first. Careful now. Sketch first means pen and paper first.

James Royal-Lawson
What a clever name they gave that tool. So yeah. So drawing something? Is that okay for me to say?

Per Axbom
Drawing you can do digitally as well. You actually mean pen and paper, don’t you? But I draw on the iPad so that it’s sort of a hybrid?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. See, back to words again, Per. Anyway,

Per Axbom
Low fidelity is what we’re saying.

James Royal-Lawson
Doing something away from a high fidelity design tool. Yeah, that’s probably what we’re we’re talking about. So tying into what we said about design tools and how they come and go, she shares a video from April 2019, I think it was, which is about three years ago. And in this, it’s called how to pick the right prototyping tool. And there’s a point in that video where it shows lots and lots of tools. He has it on like a scale of how high fidelity they are and how easy they are to use. And this picture, this chart, includes more than a dozen to design tools. I haven’t counted exactly how many, but there’s at least 12 to 15 design tools on this slide.

Per Axbom
16. I just counted.

James Royal-Lawson
Well done, Per. Yep, good, thank you. 16. And in amongst that 16, there is no Figma.

Per Axbom
I love that it’s April 2019. And there is no Figma. If you kind of whiz forward now to 2021, Figma has been declared as the most common prototyping tool or design tool that we use in the design community, full stop. So in less than two years, it’s basically completely taken over the market. And then after three years, it’s now been bought by Adobe for 20 billion pounds. But it’s interesting though, that this, that’s how quick things change in the design tools world.

Per Axbom
And that’s what you need to remember, because the tool that’s popular when you’re in school is not the tool you’re going to be working with later on.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s definitely not going to be the only tool you work on.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
During your career. It’s probably not going to be the only one you work on during your first job arguably.

Per Axbom
I’m not going to read them out. But I made a list because after this article, I made a list of the tools I could remember it. I mean, there are many more that I could remember that I’ve used over the years and it’s 18 of them. And two of those were bought by Adobe, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Fireworks, were both bought by Adobe back in the day.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I don’t even want to start to think about how many different tools I have been involved in during the years. But you’re right, it’s that slide showing 16 is a pretty good indication of just how many are around at any particular point. But, so these tools like Figma, and Sketch, what Emily points out there is they do have things like built in libraries. So designers can include premade components really quickly in designs and whole teams of designers can work off a single source of truth, to keep designs consistent across many files, and many screens or pages and so on.

James Royal-Lawson
So prototyping in itself has become easier with integrated or inbuilt capabilities. And Figma now has a whiteboarding tool, another collaboration tool, you can chat and work simultaneously on designs. So, to quote her, it really is awesome. With these robust capabilities comes a very strong gravitational pull for designers to work solely in these tools. And that’s a big problem.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
If you sit down to build something with a box of Lego, you’re likely to take your inspiration from the Legos in front of you, and build with what you have. Doing this over and over again, you’ll get really good at building things with those particular blocks.

Per Axbom
I love that.

James Royal-Lawson
Which is where we get into some of the payoff now of what what Emily’s trying to say here that with these tools, and with these lovely libraries of pre-made components, then you’re starting off by pouring all the Lego on the floor and going, what can we build? As opposed to going back and saying, what do we need to build.

Per Axbom
And realising, oh, I have some of the blocks I need. But I need some other blocks that aren’t in front of me. So I need to go get those before I can build what I want.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, in some ways it’s related to the first article. Traffic, cars. But we don’t see train-cyclists. Yeah, because there wasn’t a piece of Lego for train-cyclists. So we had to think of the bigger picture and then produce that, that phrase to put into the system. So if you draw a couple of pictures of what you might like to build first, then you sit down with the Legos, you might find that you have some of what you need, but you also need a few new blocks to accomplish your creative goals. So start by imagining what’s best for the people you’re creating for, and use the components that are appropriate. And this is a creative muscle says Emily, that is important to flex regularly. So the implication here is that by just using tools like Figma all the time, you’re not getting the design exercise, your brain isn’t getting that that creative exercise that it needs. To produce what we should probably be producing.

Per Axbom
You can get really creative with solving problems within the constraints of that tool. But you’ll never go beyond the tool for obvious reasons, because you can only do what the tool can do.

James Royal-Lawson
Granted, I’m gonna acknowledge that Maybe with the role you have in the organisation you have that that might be exactly what you have to do, you are producing UI designs at speed to deliver to an organisation, which is a role that you might have. And I think what we’re seeing here is that it might not be the necessarily the the ideal ideal role to have in your design,

Per Axbom
what you’re saying is that it’s it’s organisation centric, rather than human centric, where it’s yes, good for the organisation that you can move at speed, as you said, but it’s not always good for the person you’re building for, which is sort of why we got into this business from the get go.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So Emily goes on, as well to talk about some of the other disadvantages of high disadvantages with high fidelity mockups. And she says that high fidelity mock ups can actually scare teams. This three point, font example she gives is like one way in which a high fidelity mock up can scale be, Whoa, that’s a lot of effort, because he see kind of the finished design as such, and this high level idea that you’re just suggesting, would be just too much to do. And another reaction you might get is, Woah, how long did this take you to make? Because it looks so finished. So they think about how long time it would take to implement. So they project that onto how much time you must have spent pulling it all together?

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. Remember, Balsamiq? I mean, the whole, the whole point of using balsamic was that it looked like a sketch.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. So you could construct the conversation around the concept. And that comes into the third point that she said of how they might scare people is, or rather a consequence of high fidelity is the people can get really trapped on tiny details. Linking what you said about Balsamiq, the tool that was very sketch-based, very pen and paper based, in its appearance, be a small detail that looks very finished, and comes to, oh, well, how does that work? Why is it there? Why does it look like that? Instead of keeping the conversation and the discussion to the high level idea, the concepts level.

Per Axbom
Exactly your people, your people will be saying, this looks really nice, we could move that over there. Instead of thinking out completely outside the box, finding new Lego pieces and thinking of what shall be put in here based on what we know about what we’re trying to accomplish.

James Royal-Lawson
So by diving straight into Figma or some other tools to mock up a solution, your creative solution space has been eliminated. The team has experienced design as solely the creation of mockups. And there has become an obvious nearly-done path forward. That isn’t all that thoughtful. It’s progress over perfection. Let’s get to work. That’s a summary of three points from Emily’s article. Me and you, Per, we’ve been pushing pen and paper, excuse the pun, we’ve been pushing pen and paper for a lot of time. And it’s partly because that’s the tool, that’s the way our design process has worked. Are we are we detached from reality, in that sense.

Per Axbom
I think we’re privileged in that we can actually do pen and paper and be taken seriously. But in a lot of settings, a lot of junior designers cannot. And they don’t feel comfortable doing it, it feels like it a challenge that they would actually bring a sketch with a pencil and draw on that. But what I feel is missing a lot is that collaborative sketching as well, on whiteboards, together with clients, together with users. I don’t see a lot of that happening.

Per Axbom
So just having that confidence to lead other people into helping you sketch because you cannot do that. What these tools also are besides elitist, as you said, is that they’re not inclusive at all. You can’t let the client in and help you sketch on it. And that’s what I feel is missing if you want to be really, really, really, really good and get a really good solution based on what other people are trying to say. Sometimes they can’t say it with words, but they can say it by drawing and having an inclusive tool can be a really important part of that.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I think now we’re in that situation where there’s a lot of remote design work going on in teams or meeting digitally rather than in the same room, which can at times make this kind of thing even more difficult to achieve when you’ve got co-design happening in a digital tool. But one thing I’ve tried to do sometimes is allow the design to happen with even just post-it notes that you can have, you don’t need to, you don’t need to have details. You can use a post-it note as a block of space in a concept. You can maybe even size the post-it according to what you maybe think how much place it would take in the interface. But, you you don’t need to draw something that looks like anything, you can actually just use a descriptive label amongst your team. As long as you all understand what you’re talking about, you can work together on it.

Per Axbom
Just to give people have more ideas. One thing I did recently was having, these were healthcare workers. In that case, we actually cut out like interface elements that were printed out and just threw them onto a table. And they had so much fun just playing around with those and building a website. So that was almost like using a design tool, like Figma. But doing it manually on paper or on a table on a desk with real paper.

James Royal-Lawson
You made some Lego for them.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. I made Lego for them. But that was involving them in a way that a lot of these tools won’t let you do. And that’s really the point of an exercise like that.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I think another thing that you can do, if you are embedded in an organisation, which requires you to use a tool like Figma, or a design system, or something that is effectively a very constrained box of Lego, then what you can do personally, is start with pen and paper. You can do some sketching, or you can do some scribbling down somewhere, before you leap in. And another suggestion that Emily’s got in the article is, remember to play.

Per Axbom
Yes. Oh, I love that.

James Royal-Lawson
Sketch the weirdest idea you can come up with even even drawing some anti patterns and just play with stuff. This, again, is a exercise that’s really, really made for doing outside of the digital screen. And you can do it personally. So you’re doing the exercise. This is like you’re doing a kind of a session at the gym before go into work or during a break or something. You’re actually putting your creative brain to work and trying out some of these things. And yeah, maybe then you do go into the normal design flow that you have at your organisation, but you now are fit and healthy.

Per Axbom
I mean, that’s the most important takeaway. Just that, remember to play. And I’m fond of the last one as well, share the mess. Don’t hold on to those rough sketches. It doesn’t have to be pretty. I applaud you if it isn’t pretty, because that means that we can more easily work on it together and play around with it.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s down to just sharing and communicating Yeah. Which links back to what she says the beginning of our article about what she learned in design school and that whole thing about communicating ideas. And no matter if you have somebody that can communicate your idea, then it works. Yep, exactly. Have we got some good recommended listening for people?

Per Axbom
Oh, we do. One of my favourite ones is paper prototypes, Episode 209. I think that was a design school. I think wasn’t it Instagram? They posted an Instagram video of a paper prototype, and they got so so much criticism for that. And so we went in there and talked about sketching again, and the importance of low fidelity prototypes.

James Royal-Lawson
Another one that I think you should listen to. We’ve almost certainly suggested this before, but it is one of those ones you need to keep going back to and listen to is visual thinking with Eva-Lotta Lamn, Episode 234 where she talks about some of the benefits of using pen and paper to explore your thoughts.

Per Axbom
Nice, love that one. That’s like my mantra that episode.

James Royal-Lawson
So all in all though. It’s okay. Figma’s bought by Adobe. But design will go on.

Per Axbom
So the links to these articles can of course be found in our show notes on UX podcast.com. And one of our teams of volunteers is one that listens to episodes ahead of publishing, and notes down relevant links that come up during the show. And this team could really do with some extra people. So if you’d like to help,

James Royal-Lawson
In fact, Per, to interrupt a little bit, all our teams could do with extra people.

Per Axbom
That’s true. That’s a very good point.

James Royal-Lawson
Transcript, yeah so transcript help. Reference help and publishing. Especially the transcript and the references, always looking for lovely listeners to help us.

Per Axbom
So just email us at a hej@UXpodcast.com which is a Swedish ‘hej’ with a j, or an English ‘hey’ with a y, remember to keep moving

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
What do you get when two giraffes collide?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, what you get went to giraffes collide?

James Royal-Lawson
A giraffe-ic jam.

Per Axbom
Oh, you found one related.

James Royal-Lawson
I’m gonna do a bonus one because we missed an episode of doing a joke so this time you’re going to get two.

Per Axbom
Oh wow.

James Royal-Lawson
What did the traffic light say to the car?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James. What did the traffic light say to the car?

James Royal-Lawson
Don’t look I’m changing.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom recorded in September 2022 and published as episode 298 of UX Podcast.