Computer voice
Season Two, Episode Five.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
And this is UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden and you’re listening to us all over the world, from Surinam to Italy.

James Royal-Lawson
Ben Sauer is a product and design leader, author, and speaker. As a UX designer at the award winning agency Clearleft, one of the first UX agencies in the world. Ben worked with clients such as the BBC, and Tesco.

Per Axbom
And he also worked at Babylon health as a director of product, leading a team of 100 on AI based products. And Ben is obviously also a seasoned writer and blogger, and we invited him to the show to speak about his latest accomplishment his recently published book, “Death by Screens”,

James Royal-Lawson
which has the subtitle, How to present high stakes digital design work, and live to tell the tale”.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Okay, Ben we’re diving straight into this. Setting the first question here. Who are the ones who are actually suffering a death by screens?

Ben Sauer
[Laugh] Oh, that’s a Yeah, that’s a good question. So some people may get this from the title alone, some may not, I don’t know. But the the title is a riff on death, the phrase “death by PowerPoint”, in the sense that designers can kill people by just showing a series of screens over and over and over again. Hence, the book is called “Death by screens”. I actually trialled a few metaphors to see which ones sort of stuck with people. So the reason the book is titled, this is partly from kind of product experimentation in itself, like what did people actually remember when I would tell them the concept. But to talk about the practical thing that it means I think that we often have a tendency to just kind of show the work. And then, if the work is like a whole series of screens that we’re going to show to people or our stakeholders, then often that becomes a pretty boring sequence to talk through.

And I liken it to sort of the Monty Python spam sketch, you know, design, design, design, design spam, spam, spam, spam. And so you can very easily and accidentally bore your audience to death. But there’s a secondary meaning there, which is that when you do that, you’re also going to die on stage, right? That’s the other phrase we use in the West, right? Death, a performer dying on stage. So it kind of means both right? You lose the audience, because you bore them to death, and you die on stage as a result. So that’s, that’s the meaning of death by screens.

James Royal-Lawson
And then, of course, then you’ve got the reputation as being someone who stands on stage and dies, and you’re not delivering a good experience to your audience. Yeah.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, I think that’s exactly the heart of it. Right? It’s about crafting a mini experience for the people hearing about your design. And that can be just as much an experience. And in fact, there’s even a piece of advice I give in the book where I sort of, say, create a little mini experience map of the structure of your talk, because then you can see the ups and downs of the experience that you’re creating

Per Axbom
it essentially a user journey, really?

Ben Sauer
Yeah absolutely. I think that one thing I don’t really say in the book is that I kind of accidentally fell into that myself. I remember outlining. I was doing a workshop in India, actually. And I was outlining a presentation to show the sort of results of a week’s work. And I was doing it horizontally. And then it just came to me in that moment. Oh, I can see the ups and the downs here from this outline, but if I outline vertically, I can’t see that experience as easily. So yeah. Hopefully that’s a useful piece of advice. So people in the book outline horizontally.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, outline horizontally. Yeah. Which I mean, something I noticed we actually were reading the book, not together. So it wasn’t like we’re kind of reading the book and you’re turning a page and I was kind of like, you know, reading after we were reading we were

Per Axbom
We sat next to each other.

James Royal-Lawson
We were co locating when we’re reading your your book. And as you will know, we talked about giving some questions in advance for this interview. And when I was sat there reading the book, and thinking about the design process that you apply to delivering your presentations that you recommend anyway. It just really just struck me the design process that you were applying to delivering a presentation. And also maybe even trying to apply now to this podcast interview.

Ben Sauer
[Laugh] So, to some degree,

James Royal-Lawson
so there was kind of a penny dropped. Yeah, penny dropped about kind of the the overarching structure that you’re trying to give us in the book. And what that is?

Ben Sauer
Yeah, absolutely. I think it is a process of designing an experience. And it needs a design head to kind of immerse itself in what that experience is going to be like. And I think that it partly comes as a response to how maybe design has shifted, certainly, since you two and myself have had a career right, in the sense that I think that a lot of design communication, today, has naturally and sensibly become more informal, over the last, let’s say, 15-20 years. And I think that’s because designers are now working in small product teams, and have reasonable degrees of autonomy. But I think for you, two, and when I started design, and UX, specifically, it was often practised agency side. And so when you’re showing your work, you’re kind of selling yourself inherently. And it was usually stakeholders. And so my book is sort of response to the fact that I think there’s a bit of a lost art in presenting design, and that it’s become more challenging to do it and to apply that kind of thinking, because people are just not practising it as much. And I noticed that when I was leading design teams over the past few years, it seems to be more of a challenge than it was when I started. And so I thought,

James Royal-Lawson
So the hypothesis there Ben. Sorry, hypothesis there is that now we shifted. So instead of being a bulk of us working agency side, now the bulk of us are working organisation side, internally, in house

Ben Sauer
Yeah, exactly. And, of course, the requirement to be, you know, sort of selling the work, has to some degree gone away. But it still happens every now and again. And that’s the kind of scenario that I’m designing for. And hopefully, it will really help people lift their careers, if they can learn to sell their work and explain it in a way that I’ve put into the book.

Per Axbom
And I have to say, as I teach at a design school. I was thinking, as I was reading, that the, one of the big target groups for this are the junior designers who are coming out of design school, because it’s not part of the education. And they’re not really learning this. They’re not practising it, as you’re saying. So I was, I can, I think I actually heard them express this and that they really need more presentation skills, and helpful hints and tips, which is exactly what they’re getting in your book. So this is definitely one of those that I’ll be recommending to junior designers coming out.

Ben Sauer
Oh, yeah, that’s great to hear. One of them. One of the processes I went through in creating the book was to use beta readers. So I gathered some people early in their UX careers, and then I would get them to read sections. And it was to help me figure out how to improve the book. So kind of usability testing for books, I guess. And one of the designers that I interviewed was somebody who came from the architecture world, and they actually studied architecture at the Bauhaus. And so we were talking about the act of presenting. And he told me that, at the Bauhaus on day one, they kind of sit you down and say, you are going to present a story today about your work as an as a designer and an architect. And if you can’t do that today, on day one here, you should probably leave. And I was like, wow, that’s really harsh. forcing people into this sort of high stakes presentation on day one. And you know, of course, we wouldn’t want to do that to any students today. But I really understood the principle of it, which is that if you if you want to be you know, a good designer, it’s really important that you can communicate it well.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, communication that comes up again and again, in chats we have and then when we’re talking or taking part in UX education sessions ourselves, but this is a good point that communication isn’t, isn’t just kind of like you as designer on to maybe a developer or product owner, then this is an aspect of communication from a design perspective to stakeholders or a slightly. A group that’s a little bit further away, perhaps than your daily work.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it’s, although I given a sort of an example scenario in the book, I’ve been reasonably nonspecific about what a high stakes presentation means, right? Because it can mean different things to different groups of people, it could be, you’re doing a presentation to the entire company. And so you need to spend more effort getting the communication rights. Or it could just mean a group of stakeholders. Or if you’re working agency side, it can mean clients. So I think it’s important to recognise that high stakes can mean different things to different people. But generally, the methods that I put into the book are genuinely applicable in most of those situations.

Per Axbom
There are some really important messages and pillars in the book, at least, that I think, and one of those as you’re thinking about high stakes meeting. And the stakeholders in that meeting, is this idea of thinking of the stakeholders as collaborators, because so often we think of them as listeners, or someone who’s supposed to just understand what we want them to understand, rather than seeing them as part of the way of solving whatever sort of issue we’re trying to solve. Can you speak to stakeholders as collaborators? What does that really mean?

Ben Sauer
Yeah, I think that, you know, hierarchy, power, the formality of the scenario creates preconceptions and changes in behaviour. Whereas actually, although I put, you know, I recommend putting a high degree of effort into, you know, sort of crafting a presentation and being very deliberate about it. Actually, what a lot of what I’m doing, you know, and recommending in the book is to try to puncture through that formality. And to get to a place where we can really understand each other and have really connected conversations about the design, because ultimately, anyone can contribute to design. And especially in a situation where, you know, you’re dealing with shared organisational needs, we should be treating them as collaborators, and not just as, you know, bosses, or people who have power over us.

And so there’s some methods that I put into the book, which are deliberately targeted to kind of put people into a slightly more collaborative space while you’re presenting to them. Because that’s, that’s ultimately, you know, who they are. They’re our colleagues. And if we stripped away the power structure, and we were just want to be working as effectively as we can together.

Per Axbom
Nice.

James Royal-Lawson
I think, yeah, I think it’s far too often as designers, we, we forget just this, about applying our designer skills to more than just the screens that we’re working with. Now, it obviously, for me, anyway, it seems to come as an aha moment for many designers, when they realise that collaborating or like a developer experience or stakeholder experience, to consider that and to work with it. And to design that experience isn’t really much different from the same process you would follow doing your screens or you know, doing your website or your app and so on. But we forget this. We don’t. I don’t know if it seems way too often that we just don’t make. The penny doesn’t drop.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, I think it’s a combination of not realising where we can apply our powers, but also, sort of time, right, is that, you know, when you’re asked to design something, you apply your design here, don’t you right. And then in these other situations, you act a little bit more unconsciously or habitually. And so we forget to use those powers. And I think that there’s something there about being, like deliberately habitual about this, like trying to raise the game when it comes to how you communicate and not just falling into kind of standardised habits, if you like. And I didn’t really speak to that in the book. But I think you’re right, in that it is applying design thinking in a much sort of broader range of your work, definitely.

Per Axbom
I mean, everything you’re recommending really is part of designing the meeting and designing the presentation. It all is design thinking, which is fantastic. And another one of those I wanted to address, that I really loved was that, the part where you actually think about how everybody’s mind wanders during a meeting, and thinking back to yourself when I have to just as we’re about to attend a conference, I’m realising my mind will wander during people’s presentations. I know that, but I don’t think about it enough when I’m myself getting giving a presentation about how everyone’s mind is wandering all the time. How do we manage that?

Ben Sauer
Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. I mean, I guess the sort of main direct piece of advice in the book we talked about a little bit already is to create an experience map for your presentation in your meeting, right so that you are actually deliberately crafting the kind of ups and the downs and when you outline you can start to see where, you know, you might lose their attention because you going into too much detail. For example, I think that’s a very common habit for us designers. Although I do want to tell you a funny story. I just got back from Japan and I was training some parts of the book there as well. And I did a talk on it at “UX Days Tokyo”. And I learned that in Japan, it’s not considered rude to fall asleep during a meeting, because that signifies that everything is fine. And I think there’s,

Per Axbom
Oh Wow

Ben Sauer
I think that speaks to another element here, which is that I think it’s, it’s impossible to hold somebody’s full attention for, you know, let’s say an entire hour presentation at all times. But to be really clear that, that is a good goal to have, and to think about where you’re going to hold somebody’s attention easily. And where you’re not is an important sort of design consideration for both a meeting and a presentation.

James Royal-Lawson
You also, think about the ebbs and flows, the ups and downs of the presentation that you’ve both just mentioned there then, where you might have given too much information. So people get bored and fall asleep or drift away from the presentation. But there’s the counter aspect of that, too, that there are moments you’d learn, you need to understand the moments of your presentation, I guess where you’re delivering something which will provoke a reaction will provoke a thought response will make people go, Oh, God, now I understand. So that means and then they start drifting off into their own little design world, planning world, implementation world, how am I going to solve this? Because you’ve done the reveal?

Ben Sauer
Yeah. So I talk about managing that in a very particular way. And I think it’s, it’s akin to, sort of the way a magician operates. So one of the things I recommend in the book is that you don’t show the design, if you’re going to show a screen, don’t show it all at once. Right, you know, break it down, use, I don’t know, blurring or, you know, obscuring of your design and then talk through the elements slowly so that you are managing exactly where their attention goes at any given moment. So that they’re not wandering off and thinking about implementation, or whether the KPIs on this piece of the feature set are gonna go down, you know, right. And that’s how a magician actually operates, right, they will often do something to hold our attention in one place while they’re doing a trick with their other hand. And of course, we’re not doing the trick with our other hands. But it’s the same sort of method, right, which is, don’t just show everything like craft the experience of revealing the design, just as much as you have the design itself. Because that’s how you stop kind of, you know, silly questions, or people jumping ahead or going off topic or thinking about implementation details, is just by making sure that you’ve crafted where their attention goes at any given moment.

Per Axbom
Yeah, you also talked about attention grabbers, because what you just said about one idea per slide and a consensus insight that’s sort of related to this. And the part about just showing one thing at a time and not the whole screen that spoke to me because I know I’ve done that so many times and people have just got sidetracked by the things that aren’t really part of the design. It’s just there to actually fill out the screen. Which of course is a problem in itself when I’m designing so it’s just embarrassing to admit. [Laugh]

Ben Sauer
I’m guilty all the crimes in the book and all the mistakes I have made. [Laugh]

Per Axbom
But the other part of that, then is the you introduced the concept of attention grabbers as something that you really need to focus on as well to understand when when you need to have them but what is an attention grabber? What would be an example of an attention grabber?

Ben Sauer
Yeah, so great question. So I think that if we look at places where good storytelling happens in other mediums, like in movies or in books or you know, Ted Talks, there will tend to be something at the beginning that really grabs your attention or near the beginning, at least that really grabs your attention and gets your mind into the kind of the themes and the action of the overall story that is being told.

James Royal-Lawson
The big opening scene.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Hollywood for example is going to talk about, Hollywood has moved in that direction because I think writers and probably marketing departments I’d imagine as well have become more and more aware that you need to grab the attention of the audience right up front. And it when you do that, it means you’re going to get better attention for obviously the rest of the piece right that’s that’s the whole idea of having an attention grabber. But the second thing, that I actually recommend doing in the book is that that attention grabber should speak to the themes of what you come on to later. So, you asked the question, you know, what is an attention grabber? Well, the examples I give in the book are fairly simple things, at varying levels of difficulty. So a very simple one might just be a quote at the beginning, right?

So some piece of wisdom, you know, that classic Einstein quote around, if I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes exploring the problem and five minutes designing the solution. Now that one, if you have an audience who struggles to understand user research, that’s a good quote, to start with, if you’re gonna then talk about user research later on, and why it’s valuable. And a couple of other examples are quizzes. Those are quite nice ways of engaging in a very informal, interactive way at the beginning of a meeting. And then there’s storytelling itself. So can you tell a micro story at the beginning, that then sets up the themes for what you want to talk about later. And the kind of the hardest one I talk about, and it’s much harder to achieve, but it is really valuable is just humour, like, if you can get people laughing at the start, that, that really helps, especially when you’re delivering a challenging or an unexpected message.

James Royal-Lawson
When we talk about storytelling? It does make me wonder, how do you go about deciding who’s going to be the hero of your story? Because I mean, you know, it’s not about me, it’s not about me, I’m not the hero as the designer, am I or?

Ben Sauer
No, no, you’re not. I think it’s important to,

James Royal-Lawson
Damn it. [Laugh]

Ben Sauer
You know, story is a very general concept. And we, I apply it in the book in a few different ways. So there is the story of the design being used. So actually talking through how a user uses the product, as, as one of the best ways to explain the rationale, the why of the work. So that’s sort of them, the sort of mini story within the overall story. And then there’s the story of the presentation itself. And that is, you know, not so much an explicit story in the way we would normally think of it, but it is kind of a narrative, and it has structure, you know, beginning, middle and end. And so we can think about storytelling methods. In the same way now, I think your question is like, how do you choose the sort of hero? Well, the protagonist of the design story, right, so somebody’s using it, how do you go about choosing that? Well, I think that, you know, I talk in, in the book a little bit about sort of not doing a sort of Persona level work, it’s just more sort of setting up a little story that makes sense. And when it comes to choosing who that person is, who’s experiencing your new piece of design, I think, probably, for me, it’s not about ideals, or happy paths.

For me, it’s about what do you want to talk about in this design, and which users are experiencing? The thing that that helps you tell that story. So in the book, The example I give is of a food delivery app. And the person that we’re sorry. The designers are designing for better options for people with dietary requirements. And I picked a vegan user, because that allowed the story to unfold, because, you know, that person has very particular needs when they’re ordering the food. And the app is essentially responding more effectively, to those needs through design. So the choice of a vegan, it could have been, you know, somebody with an allergy or could have been something else, but it was, whoever allows you to tell the story of your new work most effectively. And that’s different to sort of, you know, some sort of idealised user or just picking the happy path, it’s pick, the user allows you to tell a good story about the work, if that makes sense.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the answer. My question was actually, I think you answered it, in that I was thinking, how do you separate these two? Because I’d realised that, yeah, I’ve got one here who is gonna be the actual user of the product. But now I was thinking about Yeah, in the room in the meeting, then, like you said, there’s, there’s a story arc going on there. And, you know, is it the stakeholders that are the heroes of that story? Or me as a designer like your say? So? So yeah, so I think you did answer that there is two, there is going to be two different sets of heroes effectively, and how you working your way through this?

Ben Sauer
Yeah, absolutely. I think I certainly don’t think too often about the people in the room as being the heroes. I think there’s a little bit of danger in talking about ourselves or our stakeholders as heroes.

James Royal-Lawson
But I’m using the word hero, but protagonist, you said and that’s probably a better way of doing it. I mean, there is still, there is still a story. We do need to get people in the room to feel like they’ve reached the right destination at the end of the journey, haven’t we?

Ben Sauer
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. For sure.

Per Axbom
And for me that connects to what you’re saying choose, don’t choose the happiest user or don’t choose, the one that just first comes to mind. It really connects to your message about prioritising the less powerful. That comes later in the book. But for me, I immediately that connected with, well, I’m telling a story here about someone was struggling. And it could probably teach the audience a lot by showcasing that with someone who has a lot less powerful than they are accustomed to.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, I mean, there’s some very deliberate choices there about how do we help to produce a bit of empathy for the user struggle in telling that story. And prioritise, the less powerful refers to when you’re moderating the meeting, right? So if there’s a design discussion, and people are taking turns to give feedback, kind of how do you moderate that, and there’s a section in the book around being more inclusive with discussions. And you can do a lot as a moderator to make sure that people who are not normally listened to or prioritised, get a chance to input. So you know, picking women first, when people, when a bunch of people raise their hands, pick the women first or you know, the less powerful or the less privileged in the room, because then you’re signalling that their voices matter.

And you actually give permission for for people who are not normally often not normally given space, to give their opinion, to do so as well. This is actually something I learned from a series of workshops at universities, I was running a whole series of workshops, this is 10, or something years ago. And I noticed in the academic community that male academics were just constantly speak over female academics. And so I had to kind of improvise sort of moderation methods to make sure that the right voices were heard at the right times. And over a series of workshops, I learned a few tricks to do that.

Per Axbom
You also give the recommendation of going around the room and giving everybody time to reflect. But that also means that you actually do have to give everyone time to reflect and that can take a lot of time and you have risk that someone takes over again by speaking too long.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, I mean, there’s a few things in there about that. And you know, obviously, going around and giving everybody time to speak is not always appropriate depends on the size and the scenario that you’re dealing with. But yes, it can be difficult to moderate those who feel licence to just speak endlessly to their own opinions. And there’s a few things I recommend about that. So one is, and I think I heard this from you UIE, I’m not sure I want to give credit to the right place. I can’t remember exactly where I heard it, but was to separate some roles. If you’re in a team, have one person act as the moderator while you’re responding to questions. And if you can find somebody in a more senior role to do to do moderation, that really helps because then they are more at licence to interrupt, and I give a few interruption, some of moderation tips in the book as well. So if somebody is going on too long, how do you interrupt them and say, you know, listen, I’m I know, this is really important. What would it be alright, if we move this to a later discussion, just so that we can get through all the topics that people have, or questions they have in this hour today, for example? So there’s a few things in there about managing the conversation. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, managing it, deflecting it and kind of grab, packeting stuff, sort of taking things, making sure it’s not lost. And then moving on.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So one thing that I thought was kind of really interesting was, of course, the task checklist that you’ve got in the book. A list that you’ve just take off as you as you plan it and do it. And the essence of what you’re saying here is there are a lot of things that need to be planned and need to be thought about and considered as part of delivering that well, structured, important presentation. And it’s a lot of stuff.

Ben Sauer
Yeah it is. [Laugh]

James Royal-Lawson
I wondered, and you know that my heart started to beat a little bit looking down the list thinking, oh god. But what, what if I really don’t have the time and budget for that? Am I basically doomed to do a bad job? I’m not going to die on stage because I don’t have the time and budget.

Ben Sauer
Sorry, you felt that way. I probably should have put a bit more of a stronger character in the book. [Laugh] So I mean look, like I actually do say somewhere in the book, the structure and the checklists and all the tasks I proposed along the way are not certainly not intended for every single presentation you give and a lot of them well designed for people who are just starting out on their journey in public speaking and presenting. And the more you do it, the less you’ll need those things. But, you know, it’s designed to be a sort of idealised scenario that I give, right.

So as you work through the book, you can kind of go through that checklist and go, Oh, is that important to me is that, you know, just making sure that some of those things that will really make for a great presentation experience for the audience are at least considered, even if they don’t have to be acted on, I should say one really important thing about this, which is that I designed the book carefully so that you can pick it up. Even if you’re in a rush, even if you’ve got like a day or a few hours until your presentation, you’re still going to get value. You don’t need to consume the whole thing in order to get some value from it.

So I put the book, the chapters around suggested structure near the beginning, so that if all you have time to do is just reorder some of the things that you’ve already put together, using some of the structure tips, you could do that. And if that’s the only thing you get, you know, on repeat use is just you refer to the structure, great. So you can do that quickly and easily. And many of the lessons in the book are actually in the table of contents. So again, you can kind of just scan it quickly. It doesn’t need to be consumed in entirety to be useful, if that makes sense.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think, one reflection I had after looking and thinking about that, the task checklist in the book as a whole was, you know, the importance of us allocating or giving ourselves time for this, in what we’re working on. I mean, like you said, the beginning then, that we, all three of us have been in the world where the agency dominated, you know, almost entirely in the beginning ,towards the beginning of our careers, and now in house does it in a different way. But, you know, if we don’t allocate 5 hours, 10 hours, 40 hours, whatever, depending on the thing you’re you’re you’re working on, then you aren’t giving yourself the opportunity to succeed in this area. And I thought, I don’t know how many times, whether it’s sprint planning or, you know, other kind of planning, do we really consider the time, you know, giving ourselves the time to do a good job in this area as part of our estimations?

Ben Sauer
Yeah, I think not. I actually think that the more informal ways we work today mean that we are less attuned to explaining the work. And we don’t give it as much time. I think there’s something there, when you did work agency, sort of everything had to be explained, because you are handing it over to, you know, a sort of a third party, if you’d like. So there’s a sort of forcing function in working agency side where you, it forces you to communicate in a different way. But yeah, I do think that working internally, I’ve noticed that people who, junior designers who’ve never had the experience of agency, they do struggle with this stuff a bit more than people who’ve had a bit of time in agency. And I would argue that ultimately, you know, we keep talking about, you know, a seat at the table. And this is kind of it. I mean, I don’t mean presentation specifically. But to gain influence, right, we have to be better communicators, we have to be spreading kind of useful and catchy ideas around an organisation. That’s how you gain influence.

And so, you know, I did some training for a team in Berlin not too long ago. And the design leader who hired me to run a workshop about the methods in the book, she told me that when she worked at agency side, they would spend just as many hours sweating the words to explain a concept or an issue as they would the design itself. And there was a kind of mantra in the agency where she worked, where you had to create the perfect set of words to explain the concept. And I do think that we underestimate just how much influence we can gain by sweating these details that you might put into a presentation, for example.

James Royal-Lawson
I think you’re right, though, and thinking, thinking about some of the different parts of, of design work, where that time is respected. I guess it was like when you do user research, I mean, you know, if you’re doing like five interviews, then you’re going to need, like, what, four times as much as that time to actually write up your interviews and come with some insights. I mean, if you’re singing some of the other aspects of what we do, you again, with baking in time, but just when it comes to this design that we do, we don’t seem to bake in that presentation or education. If I’m doing a course, I know I’m going to spend like, you know, four or five times as many hours preparing the course as me to delivering it all these kinds of things, right?

Per Axbom
You’re taking responsibility in that situation in a way that you’re not during your everyday working day, which is really strange because we talked about this Meeting hysteria, everyone’s talking about it today. And there are too many meetings and they’re not well performed. But if they were actually planned and performed, the way that you advocate and teach them in this book, Ben, that means, it would be so much nicer to go to work and attend these meetings.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, we also don’t have time for it. I do know that as well, maybe, because of too many meetings. [Laugh] I just want to read you this quote that kind of speaks to this. I don’t know if you know, Tanner Christensen, designer at Netflix, Lyft nd Facebook. I just pulled this quote from them. It’s in the book, “when first designing something, getting caught up in the details is easy. But once you try explaining what you’re building to someone else, you must distill down what’s essential, and how everything fits together to make sense of it.” And I think that often, we’re just not taking the time to do that distillation. Because we’re so busy, focused on other things and being productive and, you know, working in an agile way. And that distillation, I think, James, is what you’re mentioning, right? How often do we take the time to do that distillation? I think is the challenge here.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s like, it’s all well and good saying, oh, yeah, that that login page will take me 10 hours to do in figma. But you know, you’re, you’re focusing purely on the tooling of that task, as opposed to everything else.

Ben Sauer
Yeah, or the principles that you’re operating on, or the goal that you have in mind, or the way that people behave that you want to serve better we, we need to be able to explain those in words. And it’s hard. It’s really hard work. And I, and I’ve noticed that I think designers sort of, are not well inclined to do this sort of writing, wordy thinking part for everyone, I totally respect the fact that it’s not necessarily why people got into the craft. And so as a result, I put a few kinds of writing hacks or sort of thinking hacks into the book to try to make it a little bit easier to kind of get over that hump of having to explain yourself.

James Royal-Lawson
I hope though, now at the end of this conversation that I hope people will be inspired to get up over that hump and to do better in their high stakes presentations. Thank you very much, Ben, for joining us.

Per Axbom
Thank you so much, Ben,

Ben Sauer
|t was wonderful to chat to you guys.

James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s fascinating. We talked about in the middle of this interview, that the thing, where many of us, many designers, we struggle with things in our work. And it shouldn’t really be as big a struggle as maybe it is, because, it’s a design problem. But we don’t always see it as a design problem. So this whole thing about well, presenting the design, to a group of stakeholders or like Ben talks about in his book, that is a design problem. And we don’t see it. And what Ben does here, which is wonderful. He’s reframed it. So it’s easier for us to hook into as a design problem and apply our already existing skills as designers.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I agree. I mean, it’s kind of weird that we always forget that everything is a design problem. And then we jump into something. And I guess we were so attuned to looking at the output rather than thinking and thinking and planning and taking the time and making the effort to plan and the spending time and energy on it in a way that should be obvious when you see it as a design problem, because you need to do the research.

James Royal-Lawson
I wonder, okay, we we as humans love boxing things, we love putting things into categories and boxes. The is, is the reason we don’t see some of these things as design problems. Because there’s, well, there’s a barrier there isn’t that we’re, we’re putting them outside of our box. So we’re blinkering. We’re closing our eyes closing our minds at times to the these things been designed problems, maybe, at least initially. Which then makes us feel anxious makes us feel concerned, worried, nervous, inadequate, all these kinds of negative thoughts.

Per Axbom
Yeah, like, like Ben was saying about hierarchy and power and formality. If you think there, there’s a preconception of what this is supposed to look like how it’s supposed to work, what a presentation needs to be. And you forget that you actually are in control over that. If you spend the time with the people you are talking to.

James Royal-Lawson
And of course, Ben himself says “high stakes”. Yeah, you know, so there Ben is actually kind of feeding our anxiety, I guess by telling us these are high stakes. [Laugh]

Per Axbom
Right. At the same time, saying that high stakes can be different things for different people.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And we’ve got to collaborate and work together.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. I just love how practical this book is. Because sometimes I can almost kick myself because I go into these ideas and thought experiments where I spend too much time looking at like systems thinking and trying to figure out complex connections. But this type of book, and what Ben is doing here, it’s exactly what so many people need to just get over that metaphorical bump in the road. Just help reach help people reach both better output, but also a next step in their career, or at least a better understanding of the value of their work within their organisation. So it’s just such an important piece of the puzzle in the overarching system of design thinking that I was alluding to. So I’m just so glad Ben took the time for this work.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I, I really am going to try to allocate some time. Next time I’m going to do. Actually next time I’m going to do a presentation full stop. I’m not going to worry if it’s a high stake, one or not. I am really going to try hard to set aside some time to do some horizontal outlining of the presentation I’m doing and you know, to map out my thinking about what I want to present and hook into some of the points that Ben said, because it’s way too easy to skip over it.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And when one big takeaway for myself personally, it’s okay to repeat myself because people’s minds are wandering and making sure they’re I repeat certain points. That’s just important and helpful for for a lot of people.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Reading the audience too Per. Leaving them moments to think ,wonder like you said.

Per Axbom
Exactly. Leaving them some time to fall asleep. [Laugh]

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, snore quietly please during my presentation. Oh, there you go you can start sat with your funny slide at the beginning.

Per Axbom
Right. attention grabbers, right? Yes, I mean, so many good points in here. I’m glad we do this Outshow. So I had time to re listen to our interview. Because now again, I made some notes about things I need to think about next time I’m doing a presentation or teaching.

James Royal-Lawson
Yep. should invite me along Per so I can do a kind of performance review.

Per Axbom
Of course exactly. [Laugh]

James Royal-Lawson
Recommended listening, dear listeners. Well, it’s related. And it’s useful. And it’s useful in slightly different ways. Actually, it’s fascinating to listen back to our chat with Tom Griever, about “articulating design, design decisions”. There are some common themes. But Tom frames things slightly differently to how Ben has framed things. So I think it’s really worth following up and listen to it. Originally, Episode 119, in series one, or season one, we repeated it as 302. But on top of that, I can thoroughly and highly recommend looking at our tag meetings.

Per Axbom
Because you were saying to me on telegram the other day that, there’s actually a sort of a series that we created about presenting to stakeholders now.

James Royal-Lawson
I think we can put one together Per, there are definitely episodes that all of them kind of linked together in a way which I think can be more useful as a whole. But just the meetings tag there we’ve talked to people about designing workshops, designing meetings, articulating your design decisions. Now we talked to Ben, about presenting in high stakes environments. We’ve done storytelling a few times as well, which helps with the narrative side of stuff. So we’ve got a little toolbox of podcast episodes that you could use to up your game in this area.

Per Axbom
Definitely, yeah. And if you’d like to contribute to funding or helping with transcripts and references, then visit UX podcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving.

Per Axbom
See you on the other side?

[Music]

Per Axbom
James, do you know how you organise a space party?

James Royal-Lawson
No Per, I have no idea. How do you organise a space party?

Per Axbom
You planet.