A transcript of Episode 309 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom host a linkshow featuring articles about container queries and how design thinking was supposed to save the world.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Harinie Gunasekera.

Transcript

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 309.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, everybody, welcome to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts Per Axbom and James Royal-Lawson, balancing business, technology, people and society with listeners all over the world, from the Czech Republic to San Marino.

James Royal-Lawson
And for this episode, we are bringing you once again a link show. As I would normally say or one of us would normally say, a link show is where Per and I have gone through the entire Internet. And we’ve looked at and read absolutely everything that’s out there, been written in recent weeks, and pulled out just two articles that we think, are worth talking about. I may well be exaggerating in what I’ve just said.

Per Axbom
We always call this our digital travels.

James Royal-Lawson
These are. We find them on our digital travels.

Per Axbom
And the two articles, are, one that you found, that I wasn’t aware of actually, talking about.

James Royal-Lawson
Container queries land in stable browsers.

Per Axbom
What is a stable browser? Is that for horses?

James Royal-Lawson
Yes.

Per Axbom
Yeah, okay.

James Royal-Lawson
[Laugh] I have to be careful about just saying yes when you say things like that, people might actually believe it. Yeah, that’s an article by Una Kravets.

Per Axbom
And the second article we’ll be talking about today is…

James Royal-Lawson
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world and there is a subtitle, which is where did it all go wrong? That’s by Rebecca Ackermann.

Per Axbom
Yes, on MIT Technology Review. That’s quite a long one. We’ll start off with container queries, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
So yeah, this first one, container queries land in stable browsers, and stable browsers is not something to do with horses. So actually, what it means is that this particular feature is now available in all the three major web browser engines. And this article is by Una Kravets, who works with Google Chrome. She’s one like, well, Katie Hempenius, who we talked to quite a while back about other features from Google Chrome. They’re part of a team of engineers that, well communicate and discuss things that are happening and share it with the world. But I picked this one because I think it’s a really meaningful development. If we go back a bit. This feature has actually been around since the autumn but I think September, but what happened, this month in February, is that Firefox added support, meaning that we’ve hit now the milestone of that all the major rendering engines, Safari and the Chromium ones are all supporting this. So that means you’re kind of at a point where, oh, you can probably dare to use it. But I’ll get back to that a little bit. I wanted to back up infer with this one and explain that. Or just point out that, as designers, if we’re working with design in web browsers, we’ve probably been working with and aware of responsive design, and breakpoints. Well, for quite a number of years now.

Per Axbom
We talked about it early days when we started this podcast is when people started really implementing responsive design.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, it’s over 10 years ago, now when we’ve talked about it, and we even brought Brad Frost in reasonably early on to talk about responsive design and designing for mobiles. But there’s been something called media queries in CSS for quite a long time as well now, and media queries are for basically using the type of place where we’re displaying the content to dictate how the design will be displayed. So a media query would usually be for the type of media, so like print or screen, but then you can also target the qualities of that particular media. So you can use things like you know, the viewport width, or the screen orientation or even the pointer type. These are all things, that you can use, you can utilise to decide how you display something, how it gets rendered in the browser.

Per Axbom
And when we say viewport, what does that mean, James?

James Royal-Lawson
Right. So you’ve got your screen, and your screen size and screen resolution. But it’s not always the case that the place where your webpage is been rendered, fills the entire screen. So for example, when I’m talking to you now, the web page of which the communication tool we’re using to talk to each other, that’s actually only probably a third of my screen, and it’s not the full height of my screen, it’s just a portion of my screen. So the viewport is the little window of the browser where my page is displayed. So it’s, you know, it’s rare, well, it pretty much can’t be 100% of the screen, because there’s always gonna be some bit of the browser that’s eating up a little bit of the physical screen. But it certainly can be quite close to the whole thing, like on mobile phones, for example, it’s gonna be very close to the whole screen size. But on a desktop machine, it quite often can be very different to the resolution. But media queries, and responsive designs or breakpoints are something we’ve been using for quite a long time. And when you get used to designing, okay, here’s my design for when something is this wide. Here is my design for something when it’s this wide. And so on.

Per Axbom
so people tend to think of desktop, tablet, mobile as those three major ones. I mean, you can, that’s the wrong way of thinking of it in my mind, because it can be so many other things as well.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly but the the kind of quick way of dealing with that would be the small, medium, large or some days now, when I’m doing analytics of this thing, I’ll often now do small, medium, large and extra large.

Per Axbom
Ah yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And the reason why I’ve done that, when it comes to gathering data about how these viewport sizes are, is that we have so many of these giant curved monitors, I have one myself, and you can end up with some really wide rendering of webpages, and ridiculously wide. And when I full size my browser on this screen, a lot of webpages kind of break, because I’ve got like 80 centimetres between the left hand side of the webpage and the right hand side of the webpage.

Per Axbom
So if you have a menu bar and the links are at the top right, you’ll struggle actually to find them.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes. Like I have to go for a walk to get to the other side of them. Yeah, I have to carry my mouse with me to move all the way up to the top right.

Per Axbom
[Laugh]

James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah. So that’s all the kind of background and that we have media queries and where it came from. So what’s happened now is we’ve got to the point where we can start using things called container queries. And now I’ll quote a bit from the article. With container queries, you can query the starting information of apparent elements, such as its inline size, with media queries, you could query the size of the viewport, but container queries enable components that can change based on where they are in the UI. So, what this means is, whereas previously, we’ve been using breakpoints and media queries, so based on the viewport of the whole page, now where this was.

Per Axbom
People I think will recognise this, like if you have three columns of cards, then if you have a wide one, you’ll see those three columns as designed. But if you have a small screen, like on a mobile, the same cards get layered on top of each other.

James Royal-Lawson
And there’ll be a snap, there’d be a point where you get in the screen width then suddenly, we changed that look.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
So what container queries allow you to do is instead of basing it on the entire viewport, the screen, you can now go, okay, I’m a component. And I want to look like this when the place I’m sat in, is this big. So we can now target things a little bit smaller, a little bit more contextually. And it is a massive step forward, really, when it comes to how we’re working, how we design because it effectively enables us to design how we’ve always wanted to design. That, you know, I do a card, for example. And, you know, I want the card to look like this when it’s in this size space. Now I want it to look like this when it’s in this size space, you know, a little bit bigger. And that’s been always something that you get pushed back on and oh no no we can’t do that. But what do you mean, you can’t do it. Well, no, because I’ve got no way of knowing how big a space I’m in, is what the devs would kind of like come back to and always say.

Per Axbom
We only know the size of the viewport.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s ultimately the only thing that they’ve got to play with in a lot of situations. And you end up having to go okay, then this is how it’s giong to look on tablet, this is how it’s gonna look on mobile because you got to fall into the media query and the breakpoint. Now, like I said, we can actually with container queries, it can be implemented in a way, which is relative to the place it sat in. And cards are by far the best, or the most easy way of, I think any way, of communicating the impact of that.

Per Axbom
Of understanding it, yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, understanding it, because you’ve got your cards are reusable, reusable components. So here, we get into why this can be such a big influx for many of us, because we work in design systems with reusable components. And if you are working with reusable components in a design system, that now you can finally, actually have proper reusable components, that do work in different contexts. Rather than just this is how it looks in the mobile viewport. This is how it looks on a desktop viewport.

Per Axbom
So, from my example, before, when we had three columns with three cards, and you have a lower resolution, often what will happen then is like I said, it will, the three cards will lay on top of each other. But what I like about this is, that it’s makes more sense now and it’s much easier to implement the fact that when I get smaller, I may now have two columns. And the third card actually, doesn’t flip down and be on its own row. But it can actually be as wide as the two other cards. Because the container that it’s inside is now wider. So it can become wider, even though the width of the viewport is actually more narrow.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you can literally have the same card twice on the same page.

Per Axbom
In different sizes.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and some of the cards are actually just in a different. Like you could have some cards appearing in the left hand column and in the main body. And the ones in the left hand column are your kind of mobile cards. And the ones in the body are your kind of like, you know, desktop search results kind of cards. But it’s the same thing.

Per Axbom
It’s the same card, yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
It’s the same card. It’s just basically using CSS to go, I’m over here now, I only have this much space, I look like this.

Per Axbom
I can see how excited you are about this.

James Royal-Lawson
[Laugh] I’ve talked over 10 minutes about something which is just like one feature.

Per Axbom
I mean, it sounds extremely technical. But I think that again, comes down to what we as designers, we need to know the material we’re working with. So previously, like you were saying, we may have asked questions, can we do it like this? And you may have gotten a no, and it’s important to understand things you may have gotten a no for in the past may actually be possible now.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you’re right. I mean we are both advocates of designers being able to understand some of the concepts of coding, like this one. And for me, that’s always been the same thing as like, well, you know, you’re not going to be an architect without understanding gravity, or you’re not going to work with pottery, unless you have some idea how clay works. It’s kind of like understanding the medium you’re working with. And just this particular one, I think, even if you don’t fully understand the technicalities of this feature. This is going to revolutionise in some situations, your communication with devs. That now rather than kind of let you say, oh, I’d really like this card to behave like this. Instead of just kind of getting some kind of deep sigh at like a whole kind of push back and a sad looking dev who was trying to explain again, why you can’t or why they can’t. Suddenly, you could get the eyes lighting up. And you know, your dev team looks at you and go, oh, excellent ,we can do it like this. And it’s so much simpler.

Per Axbom
And I’ve even seen myself realising that I’ve worked the QR code, where the challenge has been that sometimes when you are, you have low vision, and you don’t actually see the browser, but you’re perhaps using a screen reader, or you have low vision and you’re assuming, and you have to scan a QR code on screen that is provided a huge challenge. I had to solve that with viewport sizes, and making all these different types of calculations. But what I’m realising now as we’re talking, the way I would implement that now, knowing this is completely different, it would be much much easier. We don’t appreciate responsive design enough. I think we take it for granted. [Music]

Per Axbom
So onwards to this MIT Technology Review article. Design thinking was supposed to fix the world, where did it go wrong, and approach that promised to democratise design and may have done the opposite. And this one’s by Rebecca Ackermann, who’s a freelance journalist and she’s done a tonne of research. I understand. You saw her mentioned this on Twitter, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, months of research is what Rebecca says she’s done for this article.

Per Axbom
And I really wanted to do this one because it’s a lengthy one but it’s a fantastic read.

James Royal-Lawson
Or listen, I noticed that they’ve got listen to this article on MIT.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I saw that.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s almost a 28 minute listen.

Per Axbom
Yeah, just to listen to it, is almost as long as this show. [Laugh] I always appreciate, when we question our own tools and methodologies in the design space. And I think we have to acknowledge and be aware, because that means that if people are criticising, in the way that we can gather from this article. We need to be talking about design in different ways, and probably performing it in different ways as well. And this article at the outset, it talks, of course, about how IDEO helped market its design thinking to the world. And in the first paragraph talks about a workshop, that’s attended by a person by the name of Kyle Cornforth. And of course, it’s magical, this workshop, with all these Post-it’s everywhere, and prototypes everywhere. And this was like this framework for collaboration and creation, of course, people are happy within the workshop. But I love this first questioning of “what did we actually perform?” And what was the outcome of the workshop? And she looked at the ideas themselves, and this is the quote: “I was like, You didn’t talk to anyone who works in a school, did you? They were not contextualised in the problem at all.”

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I love that bit in the opening bit as well, Per. The whole way she gets across the feeling of that kind of, those workshops. And “key to design thinking spread, was it’s reputable aesthetic and presented by the Post-it notes, a hopeful square that anyone could use infinite ways, not too precious, not too permanent, the ubiquitous Post-it promises a fast moving, cooperative, egalitarian process for getting things done”. It’s kind of you know, there’s momentum and enthusiasm kind of embodied in in the way she describes the method.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So it’s alluring, just a way of doing it. And that I think that’s key to the article as well. And now I realised I didn’t even mention that this first workshop was about the Edible Schoolyard project. So this was about using gardening and cooking in schools to teach and provide nutritious foods. So that’s why they didn’t talk to anyone who worked in a school. That’s why she was surprised about this.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that was IDEO.

Per Axbom
They had all these ideas, but they weren’t anchored in reality. [Laugh]

James Royal-Lawson
That was IDEO that was behind that research in that project. Yeah. If you notice Per, but halfway down the article, there is a really interesting parenthesis. In brackets, it just says “ideo.org declined to be interviewed for the story”.

Per Axbom
Yes, I’ve noticed that as well. Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
The brackets for me were really interesting. Because it was added halfway down in brackets, almost like kind of almost quietly as the company that we’re mentioning a lot in this article. And is behind this format, I guess you could say has been pushed out there. Didn’t take part in actually, being interviewed for it and researched.

Per Axbom
That’s very true. Yeah. But there are quotes from some of the founders.

James Royal-Lawson
Former, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Per Axbom
And then the project that gets quoted a lot, as well as school and food related. But it’s another project that was the San Francisco Unified School District, who wanted to redesign their school cafeteria. And this one’s interesting, because this is on the IDEO website as like a successful project. And as the article says, 10 years on this has had a big impact. But it may have more to do with the slow and integrated work inside the district and the school, rather than that first push of design focused energy from the outside in the beginning, which were, I don’t know how much time they spent, but a couple of months, I guess.

James Royal-Lawson
And that was the thing, where the the actual recommendations that came out of the design thinking process hadn’t really been implemented.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
But they had implemented some other aspects to change the space. So the cafeterias were then changed to be more, a better experience of eating in them.

Per Axbom
Yeah, that’s good you bring this up already now because they return to this at more at the end of the article. But it’s interesting, because they have these ideas, but they did not take into account the complexities of the districts operations. And I love this one and the effort it could take to even drill a hole in a wall in accordance with asbestos abatement rules. So there are things you have to do to actually accomplish what the suggestions are. But those haven’t been taken in into account at all, because you have these great ideas. And of course, how hard can it be to drill a hole in the wall? Well, apparently, it can be very hard to drill a hole in the wall. And that’s the same thing with the app. Oh, you need the app? Oh, but yeah, but that would have required a whole new department to continually update the software and content.

James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s fascinating, especially when you think about the episode before this. Episode 208, when we’re talking about systems thinking, that design thinking really didn’t, gear itself up to be iterative. Or even to consider the system that the interventions were playing out in. You’re saying now, it’s like, oh, yeah, we’re gonna do all these kind of grand designs of how the cafeteria should be. But we didn’t take into account there might be asbestos in the walls, and we aren’t allowed to drill into them, which you would pick up perhaps, if you had a more holistic systems thinking approach to it, design thinking is more solve, instruct someone to build, and then move on.

Per Axbom
Right. And that’s a big important thing you’re bringing up there, instruct someone to build because sometimes you don’t even instruct someone to build. Sometimes you actually do the workshop you come with the suggestions, and then you leave it with the organisation. And they have to find someone to implement. So, and as I’m saying this, I’m aware, of course, that everyone does this differently. And I’m sure that not everyone listening, is doing this in the way that we’re describing right now. But the problem is that many are and design thinking has become this sort of religion, wherein people say that will apply the design thinking process, and everything will turn out all right. At least it has been like that for a long time. And of course now, I think over the past two, three years, people have been questioning it more and more.

James Royal-Lawson
There’s a quote right towards the end, I think Per, that Scott Doorley, who summarises what students are saying to him on reflecting on the design thinking process. They were just saying, “I want to make something that not only changes things, but changes things without screwing everything else up.”

Per Axbom
Yeah. That’s a good way of summarising. And then this part of the article actually talks about how IDEO themselves are actually trying to reconfigure what design thinking means and how they’re teaching it. And so that’s what they’re hoping for their students. That this is how they reason. That they’re trying to get more equity into it. They’re realising, well I mean, because design thinking has been critiqued also, of course, for it’s a lot of Western thinking and Western people coming into a space and deciding that we’re going to solve this using this fantastic tool. So it’s like magical thinking as well. And it’s more oppressive than we would probably like to admit,

James Royal-Lawson
I think that ties in with the whole how might we thing.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Because it was a number of the of the tools that came out of IDEO. And the process they had was the “how might we”? And there’s been a lot of talk and write ups and criticism over the week. In all this process that..

Per Axbom
Exactly,

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly you’re saying with a privilege and who you are, that the we is the people in the room. People that we bother to include in the process and how that in many situations was often white and educated and all the other kind of WEIRD things that we normally list there. They’re not really, in many cases, the actual people like you say kids in the school or whatever it is, having the meals, not in there saying how they might do it.

Per Axbom
So it’s not only that design thinking doesn’t even. Sometimes it even omits that crucial final step of implementation is what the article says as well, which is interesting. But it’s not only about omitting the implementation. It’s not even thinking about the aftermath. What takes place years after the implementation. Design thinking is at the very, very beginning and takes responsibility for not much.

James Royal-Lawson
There was another quote from Carissa Carter. I think this one was that they’d come up with more questions in the process that she’d adapted to bring more care into it all. The added questions about “how are we thinking about our ancestors? What is the legacy that this is going to leave? What are all the intended and unintended consequences?” So like you said, to kind of think about, think beyond just this kind of initial thinking. What else can we bring in to ensure this has kind of positive legacy?

Per Axbom
And the interesting thing about all this, and this is something I took away from, from some quotes from Cyd Harrell, one of our favourite people in the design space. Is that design thinking may have provided benefits but not the benefits that we may intuitively think. But actually the fact that like we were saying in the beginning. It’s an exciting process. It gets people excited and energised within the space of the workshop and collaboration and talking to other people, which usually happens within an organisation, but not outside. But at least it gets people out of their normal way of working. And that can itself have a benefit in that they get more excited about doing stuff in the future.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, there’s a whole thing where if you’re working with civic tech, or public sector initiatives, you might have been banging your head against a concrete wall for decades. And, you know, it’s nice to have something that gives you some positivity and optimism and enthusiasm. And the methodology, perhaps, despite its failures does that and that’s what that’s what Cyd Harrell does say in the article, she says, “often the biggest piece of design problem in civic tech. As I said, is not generating new ideas, but figuring out how to implement and pay for them.”

Per Axbom
Yeah. And that’s where the critique comes in as well. Of course, because, we’re not helped by that at all, when it comes to design thinking. At least in most cases, I’m sure people will be applying design thinking to those types of problems as well. But it’s, again, this magical thinking that’s problematic. In the sense that we’re promising stuff we’re promising results from these types of workshops and this type of work, but it’s not including the people it should be including in the work itself.

James Royal-Lawson
Before that was fine, because we were moving fast and breaking things Per.

Per Axbom
And that was okay back in the old, yeah exactly…for some reason.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s the whole point. The magic, you’re talking about. The magic is fine because, you know, if you get out there quickly. Then we’re going to learn whether it works or not, so we can quickly change it again. So you know, you’re arguably limiting harm, because the harm doesn’t matter, because it’s only going to be a short time before we iterate. Maybe.

Per Axbom
And I love the honesty that’s presented. And that’s why I think everyone should read this article. There’s so many good quotes. You’ve you’ve shared a lot of them now James as well. But there’s the former IDEO designer, George Aye, his quote about, because you’re supposed to have this “beginner’s mindset”. And I think Tim Brown, one of the founders of IDEO, as well, he had this suggestion that it’s good to have a “beginner’s mindset” as you come in. So there’s no expertise involved really at all, because so anyone can go into any space and solve any problem, is what they’re saying. And what George Aye says is that he and his colleagues would use the language of a “beginner’s mindset”. But what he saw in practice was more an attitude “that we’re going to fumble our way through and by the time we’re done, we’re on to the next project”.

James Royal-Lawson
You see, there’s just.

Per Axbom
Very honest,

James Royal-Lawson
It’s honest but that whole kind of agency mindset that is worrying about this. So many of the feelings I get from a lot of these frameworks and processes is not genuine usefulness. It’s more, how do we package something so our agency can sell more projects. And you’ve mentioned in this chat we’ve had now about how, you know, IDEO, they mentioned the success of a school project on their website, they promote it, they promote these projects, as look at the projects. We’ve done. These the badges we’ve got give us more badges. I mean, it’s this momentum in the agency world.

Per Axbom
It’s exactly what you’re saying. It’s gamification of business, I guess, we can go out and promise. Because that’s what the article is saying. And that’s one of the conclusions is that the promise of design thinking was that anyone can do it, as long as you follow the process, which was very attractive to companies thinking that, well, I can just bring in this design agency, or they can teach me design thinking, and then I don’t need anyone’s advice anymore. I don’t need the experts.

James Royal-Lawson
Well, you just said as well. But the experts didn’t even need to be experts. You could come in with the beginner’s mindset. So it’s perfectly packaged, to be something you can roll out again, again, again, and keep on selling. And everything from towards the end of it was talking about storytelling, and how maybe storytelling was a key activity. But it was realised that maybe storytelling is “the” key activity. And if you listen to this podcast often then you know that we talk a lot about communication and how so many aspects of design is just communicating to the next person or the other person or the other people, and storytelling is crucial. We’ve done a few shows about storytelling, like Donna Lichaw and others talking about storytelling. But the feeling I got in the article when they mentioned storytelling was more connected to that feeling of sales or the feeling of persuasion, that if we use storytelling as a way of getting the ideas, you know, as a result of our design thinking across, as, you know, we’re selling those ideas, and they’re getting buy in for the ideas, as opposed to genuine communication of a potential intervention.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And this is, again, Tim Brown saying this, this is one of his realisations after many, many years working with these types of frameworks is that “I would never have guessed that we would have as many folks who come from a storytelling background within a design firm as we do today”, because that’s who they’re bringing in. So yes, I’ve felt that was kind of worrying as well, that we’re still not really about doing the work.

James Royal-Lawson
Well buy in, I mean, this could be a whole different episode, just the whole thing about the need to get buy in. And we were talking about stakeholders, and including stakeholders. But also, understanding organisations and, like Cyd Harrell, talks about getting the money to pay for stuff. I mean, we’re constantly in situations where we need money to implement things, and I know that I’ve been guilty. I mean, I know that over the years, I’ve packaged things in certain ways, and obviously get buy in. When I’ve actually got maybe other motives, or I’ve got something I really want to implement.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
But I’m going to piggyback it or I’m going to use another approach to get management or organisations on board, because they want something. But they haven’t got to the point of understanding, maybe an underlying need. So I think this is somewhere where we often find ourselves as designers, or at least working on research, that you will cover insights, you will uncover things. And sometimes they can be too controversial or too contrary or too much against an existing model of working.

Per Axbom
Existing belief, as well.

James Royal-Lawson
A belief model of working, where you earn your money. All of these things, that you can’t just throw them in the face of the people who ultimately make the decisions. They’ve got to be. You’ve got to tell stories over a period of time, or you got to communicate it over a period of time in a way that, people like accept and understand. Yeah, so I can understand the storytelling, it does work, packaging things in a way, does work, to get buy in for things, to enable other things. But maybe it’s a small criticism, of what they were saying, that the good intentions there, but I got that feeling of sales and persuasion. But that’s probably built up because of the whole, where the story talks about IDEO and their agency way of selling, design thinking as a process over many years. So I’m kind of I guess a bit primed to be critical of the of the agency model.

Per Axbom
Right. And I mean, that’s where this all this comes from, that’s why we have the models and frameworks, because they’re easier to sell than bringing someone in to figure out the problem. I mean figure out the problem doesn’t fit like in a in a box of a service. But in the end it’s all about recognising now that yes, this tool maybe hasn’t served everyone as well as we claim, or as many people claim in the industry. And it’s something that we need to start working towards more equity, and justice within the design space.

James Royal-Lawson
More care, which I think it’s an excellent point. And like you brought up at the beginning here, that just having that critique of our tools.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
You know, shows that we are maturing as a industry as a branch or whatever. And that we can have those moments of reflection and look back at it and say, well, that worked that didn’t work. How can we do better?

Per Axbom
Exactly. [Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Some recommended listening before we close up for today.

Per Axbom
Well, I love that Cyd Harrell was in this article. So I think we’ve done, I don’t know how many interviews with her.

James Royal-Lawson
She’s been in and we’ve done two proper interviews. She’s been featured in Episodes 247 and 194. But she also made a little kind of guest appearance on Episode 193. So Research on the fly is Episode 194, it’s an absolutely fantastic guide to doing research. And then we have Civic Tech with Cyd Harrell, which when we interviewed her and about the time she released her book about civic tech. She created a friendly a guide for people working in the public sector. Always really good for anyone who’s even not working the public sector.

Per Axbom
It is and it’s really good for everyone. Yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you for listening. We don’t say thank you enough. And add us and subscribe to us wherever you’re listening, if you’re already doing. If you happening to be listening to this episode as a one off. And if you are our audience now, you can always rate us and review us. I think that still makes a difference.

Per Axbom
I think so, all the other podcasts seem to say it so go give us a review. It really makes a difference

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly all those big Youtubers as well Per. They always go on about how, you’ve got to do the pointing down to the bottom, saying click there and give me a thumbs up review.

Per Axbom
So James is right now pointing on camera.

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you for the audio captions there Per.

Per Axbom
[Laugh]

James Royal-Lawson
And the show notes of course and full episode archive can be found on UX podcast.com If wherever you’re listening doesn’t have a full archive.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
James, what do you call a parade of rabbits hopping backwards?

James Royal-Lawson
I don’t know Per. What do you call a parade of rabbits hopping backwards?

Per Axbom
A receding hairline?

James Royal-Lawson
Ohhh.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom recorded in February 2023 and published as episode 309 of UX Podcast.