A transcript of S02E06, (316) of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Kim Goodwin to talk about Kim’s reflections from her work in healthcare design and how more accountability would benefit the wider design industry.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Cristian Pavel.
Transcript
Computer voice
Season Two, Episode Six.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
This is UX Podcast. I’m James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
And I’m Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And we are two humans here to help you push the boundaries of how user experience is perceived and boost your confidence in the work you do. We’re based in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening to us all over the world, from Honduras to New Zealand.
Per Axbom
Did you change the intro? I didn’t even recognise that.
James Royal-Lawson
I might have tweaked a few words, yeah.
Per Axbom
You might have.
Per Axbom
Kim Goodwin is a well known design leadership guru and really needs no further introduction, but we will try. Kim is a professional when it comes to helping organisations build their internal design capabilities through coaching and organisational change management.
James Royal-Lawson
She’s led design and research projects in aviation, retail, communication, financial services, consumer enterprise, automotive, IT, and many other industries. She’s also regularly photographing wildlife in places with no internet access. So you should really check out her Instagram account, you will see lots of polar bears and other animals that she’s seen over the years.
Per Axbom
It’s just beautiful. And this is the fifth time we’ve had the opportunity to chat to Kim on the show.
James Royal-Lawson
In our previous conversations with Kim, we’ve discussed and I’m gonna do another list here: journey mapping, organisational culture, decision systems and design confidence.
Per Axbom
And today’s conversation with Kim was recorded after a talk about design and leadership lessons from her work in healthcare at “From Business to Buttons”, which is a conference that is held every May here in Stockholm, Sweden.
James Royal-Lawson
And if you want me gems unpowered as part of your next conference event or in-house training, we are offering also workshops, talks and courses to inspire and help you grow as individuals, teams and organisations. Just get in touch by emailing us at hej@UXpodcast.com.
James Royal-Lawson
Kim, healthcare designer Kim. So you’ve come to the realisation that you’ve spent 60% of your career working with healthcare design. And when I heard you say that I kind of straight started thinking about: “God, yeah, it’s the whole what would I be when I grow up, question”. And you’ve kind of got there, kind of?
Kim Goodwin
Well, that implies that I’m grown up, which I don’t know?
James Royal-Lawson
My phrasing, sorry, you’re right.
Kim Goodwin
But yes, I suppose.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s the self-reflection that kind of intrigued me and started to make me think as well about that kind of: “Yeah, okay, if I’m honest, in what have I spent 60% of my career doing?” So I was a bit curious about it. I mean, how did that process go for you? Did you kind of like, really understand that all along? Or was there a moment when that realisation struck?
Kim Goodwin
Um, I mean, I’ve always known that I enjoyed healthcare and that I had done quite a bit of healthcare, but I never really thought about it. I never thought of myself as a healthcare designer until somebody called me one. And I was saying to some UX friends, I said: “I don’t really know why they’re calling me that I’m not a healthcare designer”. It actually was Jared’s fault when he said, aren’t you? I said: “Well, I guess?”. And so that just made me sit down and think well, how much healthcare have I done and I just, I started listing out all those projects and all those clients and “Oh, yeah, okay, I guess that’s a fair description of me”. I don’t think I’m exclusively that, right?. But it certainly is a label that fits in my career.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. The thing of hunting for a label, which as an industry, we’ve got a kind of reputation with labels and having issues with labels. So it’s kind of interesting, to come to that realisation. Well, I’ve worked with a thing, and I can group the thing. But maybe what the thing actually is only half of the story.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. And I think I probably resisted the label just because it was limiting. And it sort of implies: “Well, I don’t know how to design other things”, when I’ve worked in lots of other fields too. And so I think the skills are just so transferable, but you know, as I reflected on it, actually, to put together this talk, I realised just how much of how I think has been shaped by working in healthcare and in some values and some procedures and principles that I didn’t know that you’d see everywhere. And so yeah, it seems useful to acknowledge that.
James Royal-Lawson
I think there is, the transferable skill thing is really important. And you mentioned enterprise design today. And I’ve done a fair bit of enterprise design. And I’ve realised after years that I actually enjoy enterprise design more than some of the commercial design and outward-facing design. And I don’t know if that’s just because there is something about the nitty-gritty of an enterprise design project that is rewarding, or whether, I actually have just spent more time doing it. So, you know, you’ve collected that insight and experience from being submersed in that particular label or angle of design.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. I mean, I enjoy enterprise design, too. And I think that, for me, it’s about the intellectual challenge, right? In my experience, the more complicated the design problem is, the more fun it is to solve. And maybe that makes me perverse and weird, but I just enjoy the complexity of it. And what’s fun in consulting is you go when you learn new domains, right, and I can have a cocktail party conversation about all kinds of really weird things. And, you know, I know enough about them to be dangerous, but it’s kind of fun. I mean, I don’t really do hands-on design that much anymore. But over the years, I’ve definitely got gotten to know, lots of weird little details, some of which I’d rather I didn’t know, like, I don’t necessarily want to know certain things about how the airline industry handles this or that, or, you know, what happens with bodies in nursing homes, or, you know, there’s lots of little things that maybe, I could have done without knowing that.
Per Axbom
One thing that struck me was when you talked about healthcare design, and talking about it from the perspective of, well, you’re dealing with life and death, but then also the realisation of how that is transferable to just about anything. I mean, even to enterprise design, it’s about human well-being in the end. And everything we do, has to do with exactly that.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that, you know, healthcare is not perfect in lots of ways. And I don’t think most people would point to healthcare as design innovation, although I think that’s actually an unfair characterization in a lot of ways. But certainly, on the software front, they’re not really known for sexy things. And yet, I think that focus on safety, that sort of, frankly, kind of boring stuff of applying a discipline to what you’re doing and applying a rigor to what you’re doing. You know, there’s no reason that we can’t take some of that, without maybe the unnecessary bureaucracy part of it. And just get better at what we do. Because, frankly, a safety-critical industry like healthcare, or aviation, or anyplace else, where there’s a lot at stake, they do have those kinds of procedures for a reason, and they are a bit slow and methodical for a reason. And I think that in software, we’re so used to that Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things”, that we are breaking things. And I think there’s something to be learned from. Okay, what happens when a lot is at stake? What can we learn from that?
James Royal-Lawson
The “move fast and break things”, thinking about the healthcare design, and some of the examples you’ve shown us where you’re looking at the design of some kind of end-user device, or healthcare professional is using some kind of device or interface in relation to the patient. And when we think about breaking things, you’ve shared some stories about this, too. In healthcare, there are a lot of systems with integrations. And the complexity of these integrations, in my experience, but listening to some of the stories is it’s there, where it’s really fragile. I mean, you can fix the interface and do some good work there. But fixing the integrations…
Kim Goodwin
Sometimes, yeah, I think the integrations are complicated. But honestly, the integration is often just a matter of, okay, you know, we have a data-sharing protocol we can use between these systems. It takes a little engineering effort to do, certainly, there’s complexity there. But honestly, I think where the bigger gap is, is in configuration, not so much the integration. Because, you know, in any enterprise system, you’ve probably seen this, right? You have some sort of very flexible software package that gets installed. And it’s meant to be configured and if it were configured correctly, it actually could be pretty good, but people forget that “Oh, way that you lay out that form or the information architecture you use of this or the settings you put there”. People forget that that part is interaction design. And so that part is just done incompletely or done badly. And that’s actually where a lot of the usability issues crop up.
James Royal-Lawson
I’ve got experience where we’ve seen the enterprise products that organisations decline, the configuration package, as part of the deal of buying. It’s crossed off the procurement list or it’s crossed off as a cost-saver.
Kim Goodwin
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
We’ll go with defaults, or we’ll figure it out ourselves. Whereas, you know, the cost-benefit of taking that initial configuration package is almost certainly worth it, because then you will get that custom solution that you’ve bought.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. And I mean, having bought a few of those packages, I think that the configuration costs can look ridiculous. And I also know from experience that, for some companies, that configuration is actually where all their profit is for those enterprise companies. So you know, sometimes I wonder, is there an incentive maybe to be complicated to configure, but even so what is the number? Something like 50% of enterprise software implementations fail in the first year, it’s really not surprising, because people just treat them like: “Oh, we’re installing a new phone system” instead of: “Oh, we’re looking at something that touches all of our processes and, and maybe even some cultural things”. And they’re not really treating it that way. And that’s where that’s where you get this notion of digital transformation, right? That really looks a little bit more holistically at culture, and not just let’s plug in a piece of software.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. So we look at the human cost as well of some of these integrations, if you don’t do the integration, because it’s expensive, and so on, then, you also neglect to look at the long-term impact of that on your co-workers on the end users, ultimately end user.
Per Axbom
But also in a sense, because there is a lack of accountability, which was one of the major topics of your talk. I’ve worked with healthcare services for a bit more than 10 years. Don’t call myself a healthcare designer yet.
Kim Goodwin
You will someday.
James Royal-Lawson
You need to do the math.
Per Axbom
And I’ve worked on so many platforms. And I think this is where all my interest in ethics started, where I realised I’m building all these things. Where anything that goes wrong, I don’t have, nobody comes to me. But the doctor gets blamed because something happens to the patient. And they are accountable for something that I built. And that realisation was like, it can’t be like this. Yeah, but it is like this. This is what we have. And that needs to change. But how do we change it?
Kim Goodwin
And the doctors themselves don’t have any choice about whether they accept the accountability or not for what you have been part of delivering to them.
Kim Goodwin
Right? Well, sometimes they have a choice about whether to adopt a system, not like a hospital information system, because they don’t have any more choice about than anybody else does. But when it comes to, for example, you know, there’s a class of products called Digital Therapeutics, right where you have, say, a mobile phone app that is designed literally to treat a disease and goes through a clinical trial and gets cleared as a prescription product, right? Or even just a sort of slightly lesser degree of approval that is not a prescription product, but a product they might refer you to. But they’re very aware of their accountability. And so if they have any questions about that product, they’re not going to adopt it, they’re not going to suggest that their patients use it. So if you’re making medical devices, you’re very aware that all of those physicians or all of those psychologists or whoever your sort of clinician audience is, that they are gatekeepers to adoption. Electronic medical records are a different story because they’re sort of coming in through another path.
Per Axbom
And one big aspect of it all was also the traceability, which would mean to be held accountable. You also need to be able to show your work, why it happened. And when you went through that, it seemed like, it seems so simple and obvious that we should be doing this, we should understand why a button is placed the way it is why we have that text over there. And there should be like a way to trace back to how that decision was made and who made it essentially. But we’re not even getting close to that in those projects. And people start arguing about “How did this happen? Who decided this?”, and then they change it without understanding the reason and the potential high-risk situation people can be put in if they do change that.
Kim Goodwin
Right. And they may not understand all the reasons that that change was made. I mean, there are a couple of interesting things in what you just said, right? So one is, in a traceable system, you can tell who made the decision and whether they were a person authorised or qualified to make that decision. So let’s talk about that for a second. The way that teams work today, that’s very hard to figure out, because who actually made that decision. And we would have to start having hard, awkward conversations about well, who makes which kinds of decisions. And the project management within product teams is very seldom that explicit. It is in safety-critical companies, right? But people do their RACI diagrams of, you know, people who are responsible and accountable and consulted and informed and who does what, and they get very formal about it. And I feel like software teams in general are just allergic to that kind of thing.
James Royal-Lawson
Will it slow you down?
Kim Goodwin
In theory, right?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, exactly, we’ve seen this…
Kim Goodwin
In many companies, if you could point to a diagram and say: “Who’s responsible for making this kind of decision? Okay, great.” Now, I don’t have to figure that out and have six meetings about it. So there are cases where it actually would speed you up? Yeah. So that I think, is one interesting aspect of sort of more mature product development processes is, you know, there’s, that’s a big culture shift from sort of the Silicon Valley approach. So that’s one bit and I had completely forgotten what else I was gonna say. What did you say?
Per Axbom
Around traceability?
Kim Goodwin
Oh, yeah. So who made the decision? And then if you look at why that decision was made? I think a lot of teams, if you pressed on it couldn’t articulate those reasons very well, right now. I don’t think the reasoning is always that clear.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, I said, to Per about hypothesis-based design, something I’ve tried to do with a lot of clients is to push them to formulate actual hypotheses. And reflecting on it, after talking to you and listening to you, it made me realise that, I’m using it as traceability. Because I’m making them think, you know, because we’ve seen this evidence, then we’re going to do this change. And we are expecting this to happen. This is how we’re going to know that. And, you know, we’re, we’re aware that these people might get harmed in this way when we do it.
Kim Goodwin
Yep. And the other thing that’s implied in what you’re saying there, which is not typically a thing you worry about in medical traceability is: “What failed, right?” So, is there also a way that we can capture just for learning? Hey, here’s the set of things that didn’t work and why and make those referenceable, too. Because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation with a team. Oh, you know, we tried that, like two years ago, and it didn’t work, but I don’t remember why. And so what happens? Well, that team can’t tell if that concept is broken, or if it was just that implementation that was broken. And so they don’t know. Should we revisit this idea? Or should we just not go down that path? And teams waste a tonne of time on that kind of stuff?
James Royal-Lawson
Yes. It’s the insight generally. It’s coming to the new insights, from the failures, so you can look back into it again?
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. I mean, there’s a gigantic knowledge management problem in so many teams. You know, I think big companies, maybe don’t have efficient systems for that, right. Maybe they have systems, but they’re cumbersome, and nobody uses them. Small companies, there’s no system except, you know, “Oh, asked John, because he’s been here for four years and probably knows”, if somebody offers John a better-paying job, you’re out of luck.
Per Axbom
So, in general, I can see people listening to this, and they have these frustrations. And they’re thinking, Well, I know all this, but people aren’t listening to me. I’m a designer. I don’t have a seat at the table. I don’t have that kind of power. And something that you said you didn’t say it exactly like this, but we want to be treated as professionals. But we are not a profession. Right. And I don’t think we talked about that enough. Yet. There is a reason we don’t have power. Because we haven’t gone through certification processes. We don’t have that kind of accountability, right?
Kim Goodwin
I mean, I think we all envision a world where we can say well, just trust your design team to make this decision, right? And I hear that a lot from people. Well, shouldn’t they just trust us as designers? And you know, when I’m talking with my clients, I can’t honestly say to them with a straight face. Oh, you should just trust your designers because the fact is, there are some people calling themselves designers who don’t actually know what they’re doing. And I know that sounds gatekeepish, right? And I don’t mean it to be that but I do think that you know, there are professions where you can know someone has a certain basic level of understanding, it certainly is not a guarantee that they will be competent. But it’s better than guesswork.
I was trying to help a client recently, who is not a designer, hire some designers into a small team. And they had no idea what they were looking for. So I offered to help screen candidates, but they said, You know what, we’ll do the initial screening, you just interview them later. And so they handed me a set of people they had screened. I’m making air quotes here. And had me interview them. But you know, I could tell even before the interview that these people didn’t actually understand a lot of basic usability principles, right? There was lots of really horrible form layout in their portfolios, there were big accessibility mistakes and stuff that I could have spotted in a three-minute portfolio review with those people.
So, you know, it got me to thinking about the fact that there are tonnes of people, hiring designers, whether it’s consultants or in teams, where they don’t have experienced design leaders. How do they know they’re getting good designers? They have no idea. They have no way to assess those skills. And so, they’re kind of looking and saying, Oh, let me look at the dribble portfolio, looks nice. And this person seems articulate and easy to work with. Okay, good. But they might be making design decisions based on what they like, and not, not actually based on understanding ergonomics, or cognitive psychology or anything. So, you know, when I think about, you know, the Gen X designers, lots of us didn’t necessarily come into the field with formal training and so on. So, you know, I don’t want to say: “Oh, we know what’s right. And we’re perfect”. And that certainly isn’t the case. Lots of people cobbled together their design knowledge from, you know, from reading literature and learning this and that. And so there are plenty of spotty skills in older designers too. But I think that, you know, at some point, we have to be a bit more professional if we want to be treated as such.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, completely agree.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. But it’s not an easy problem, though. I mean, who gets to decide what the bar is? And how was that enforced? And, you know, should we really have the same expectation of somebody who’s designing the video game versus the medical device? I don’t think so.
Per Axbom
We did mention the hairdresser. I thought that was a really good metaphor that they actually, you need a licence to cut someone’s hair?
Kim Goodwin
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Do you need on here?
Per Axbom
I think so, yeah, for the same reasons…
Kim Goodwin
I mean, in the US, it’s about hygiene, right? You can pass along infections and so on and create health problems. And so yeah, you have to have a licence to cut hair. And that’s generally not gonna kill somebody. But I don’t need a licence to design medical devices that can kill people. And that’s freaky.
Per Axbom
That is freaky.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, so straight away to get to that stage, though. I mean, design is a global thing. You know, we’re talking to a global audience now on the podcast, and, you know, all these countries need to get to that point of working out how to licence and credit and so on. I mean, America has got its system for doing hairdressers, and for doctors as the one Sweden’s got.
Kim Goodwin
Worse than that. I mean, in the US, at least, it probably wouldn’t happen at the federal level, it would probably happen at the state level. Yeah. Most professions are actually licenced and managed at the state level. And some by the government, some of the licencing is kind of an independent board, depending on the profession. So yeah, it’s complicated.
James Royal-Lawson
Here in Europe, it would presumably come at the Europe level and then be implemented at the country level.
Kim Goodwin
That would be a lot more coherent, right?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. But you’d still end up with, you know, 27 variations of the implementation. But getting to that point of understanding, on a policy level, that we need this help to be professional. I don’t get the feeling that we’re even on the start ramp of that.
Kim Goodwin
No, I don’t think we are. I don’t think it’s a conversation that we’re having as an industry really. And I wouldn’t say that you know, we’re gonna get regulated tomorrow. But I think it will happen at some point. I don’t know when I hope it happens at some point, because I mean, as a user of these things, I would certainly like to know that they are safe and competently designed. And I think that it would uplevel all of us as an industry to be able to say: “You know what, you do have to be competent to some degree to do this stuff.” But I mean, the same thing applies to our colleagues in software development and product management, right? I mean, they don’t have that sort of professional credibility, either, I don’t think that they necessarily get the same sort of lack of credibility that designers get sometimes. So maybe it’s a little bit less important there. But, you know, when I think about a safety critical system, I want to know, the engineers building that are also really good. And if I think about privacy considerations, don’t we want to know that the people building that stuff actually know how to protect our data? It would be nice.
James Royal-Lawson
And back to what we said about doctors signing off, given their approval on things. I mean, it’d be nice if we had someone who could stand for what we’re producing and say, Look, I’m the one that is licenced, to basically say, these designers, programmers, product managers, whatever, this team has actually delivered something which I can stand for. And I’m going to be the legal front for that promise.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. I mean, there’s this notion that someone is accountable, right? Like, if I hire a general contractor to work on my house, their licence is accountable for everyone who’s working under them. Unless there is a licenced specialty, right? Same thing in a doctor’s office, they’re accountable for what happens in their office too. Some of those other people are licenced in their individual arenas, too. But, you know, in some ways, the physician is sort of loaning their authority, if you will.
Per Axbom
So while we wait on that future to happen…
Kim Goodwin
It may be a while if that happens.
Per Axbom
I mean, you had some really good messaging at the end, at least when we talked about “what can I do now?”, as learnings from your experience in healthcare, when it comes to wellbeing and helping people thrive, and not focusing on preventing and solving problems, just that.
Kim Goodwin
Yeah. Although we need to certainly get better at that, too. But yeah, I mean, it’s a big to-do list, right? I’m not pretending I have answers to these things, more things to think about. But, you know, I think that we talk about usability, and we talk about safety. And these are big, important issues. And yet, you know, I don’t really want to eat a meal that is salmonella, free and edible. Because I guess that’s a good minimum bar, but it’s not attractive. Doesn’t really make me want to go to that restaurant. I would much rather eat a meal. That’s delicious and, you know, I think that probably most of us got into design because we want to fill the world with better stuff. We want to make people’s lives better in some way. And yeah, just usability can do that. I mean, I think it’s important that we not underestimate how much impact we can have by just un-sucking at government immigration forms. That can be a really big deal. But, you know, I think we should also be looking for opportunities to do even better than that. And to be surprisingly good. And add an element of wonder and ease and yes, sometimes aesthetic beauty to what we do.
Per Axbom
Beautiful.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you, Kim.
Kim Goodwin
All right, you’re done with me. Excellent.
James Royal-Lawson
One thing I did, after listening back to chat with Kim, is I started Googling the laws in Sweden to do with hairdressers.
Per Axbom
Of course, you did.
James Royal-Lawson
Of course, I did.
James Royal-Lawson
I sniffed the rabbit hole, and I jumped in full body. Well, it turns out that there isn’t a legal requirement to be a licenced hairdresser here in Sweden, no legal requirement.
Per Axbom
Okay.
James Royal-Lawson
But there is an industry body that issue accreditation for hairdressers. And that body does actually encourage, another part of their work is to encourage, people to get their hair cut at accredited or licenced hairdressers.
Per Axbom
So I suppose that’s a good example, then of, that’s one path that would be possible, I guess, where you actually have an accreditation body? Where you are, well, people are recommended that if you want to hire a designer, choose someone who is accredited from there.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. What’s interesting here, though, is well, one thing is of course, the difference from country to country in requirements. So America there we learned that there is a requirement because of hygiene, to be licenced. Here in Sweden, there’s not a legal requirement. So globally, very different playing fields just for hairdressing. And then if you’re talking about the accreditation option, you’ve still got the situation where there needs to be the definition of what a hairdresser is.
Per Axbom
Right, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
And a body that then can represent that defined group of people.
Per Axbom
And that feels like, it’s a little easier for a hairdresser than for what a digital designer is.
James Royal-Lawson
On the surface, it definitely feels easier to create a group there.
Per Axbom
Because you have the physical work. I mean, what makes I guess the digital complex a bit, is that so much of it is virtual.
James Royal-Lawson
And overlapping him in different ways that I suppose a hairdresser is performing a service. And like you’ve just said, it’s a physical service carried out by a human on another human. Whereas we are producing digital products. We’re producing digital services. And we’re producing marketing information. More campaigns, we’re also producing works of reference.
Per Axbom
Right. So if a hairdresser was producing content on how you should cut your own hair, and people get hurt, following those instructions, that would be comparable.
James Royal-Lawson
Then do, I don’t know, how many hairdressers do research into cutting hair? Or, do they, I guess they do testing?
Per Axbom
I guess you would, I mean, you’d probably be interested in different types of styles, I guess. You can have different specialties there as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. With the digital world it does blur the edges, though.
Per Axbom
Yeah, as you say, because if we talk about accountability and responsibility, it’s about avoiding harm and holding someone accountable if something goes wrong. And there is traceability, of course, because the interaction with the hairdresser is there in the moment. Whereas in our case, the effects of what we produce and do, can be far into the future, and far away in the physical space as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, much more difficult to understand or to visualise, I guess where, who is responsible for what’s happening? Because it’s so many different aspects included there.
Per Axbom
And so many actors, so many people involved in different types of tiny decisions.
James Royal-Lawson
And decisions that they don’t always realise they’re making? I think Kim mentioned that about, you know, designers not always realising what they’re doing. And we see this a lot about this is ignorance in our industry, not because ignorance is desirable, or deliberate. It’s, I think it’s again, the overlapping. And you know, what you do, you don’t realise what you’re not doing, I guess.
Per Axbom
But I mean, also, there’s not really someone appointed to be responsible, I think, Kim poses the question, who’s responsible for making this kind of decision, you want to know that even for a decision about where buttons are placed, because I guess you could take like a cookie pop up, as an example, who is responsible for implementing that? That seems like something that somebody realises: “We need this”. And someone downloads the library and just puts it online, but who is actually responsible for the wording on those buttons, there should be someone appointed inside a company that you can always go to, you can look at an organisation chart and say: “Oh, the person who’s responsible for buttons, it’s this person, just go to them.”
James Royal-Lawson
Or you can look back and some kind of audit trail, and see.
Per Axbom
That will be amazing.
James Royal-Lawson
This makes me think of a conversation, it’s eight years ago now Per, with Lisa Welchman who is the person when it comes to digital governance. And she talked with us back in, “Architecting the information edge”. It’s about, it comes up again and again, in that chat with her then about accountability. And being accountable for the things we do.
Per Axbom
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
And she was talking in the context of doing our best work and being accountable, personally accountable. But there are layers to accountability, I guess. But you have got the individual accountability to yourself.
Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, obviously.
James Royal-Lawson
Am I doing my best work? But then you’ve got maybe compliance, legal compliance or audit trail, you know, accountability within processes.
Per Axbom
And it’s interesting when we talked about these healthcare systems if I build something that a doctor has to use, but the doctor himself or herself, cannot decide whether or not they use that system, I mean, we’re victims of this all the time. If you’re working inside a company, there are so many tools that someone else chooses for me, tools that control me and my work that I have no possibility of actually affecting. We always complain, for example, of course in the UX industry, about time reporting systems, and things like that. We have to use them, but they hurt people. All these systems hurt people. But who can be held accountable? Is it the person who buys the system? Is the person who designs the system? Is it the person who says that we can’t invest in the development of the system? Is it that someone in HR doesn’t care to listen to our complaints? There are so many levels or touchpoints.
James Royal-Lawson
And yeah, like if you got hurt by a door going into the building, then that will be easier to work out who’s responsible?
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Because the number of actors involved in it is less, and the trail of work would be shorter.
Per Axbom
And I have to say, I mean, just hearing Kim say those words. Lots of people are calling themselves designers, but don’t know what they’re doing. This is a huge problem for us. Because it’s so easy to go in, and do design work, and have it even look good and appear good, but not perform as well as it could if you actually did the right type of research and the right type of design.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, you very easily fall into… we get into the kind of what is a designer? But I suppose at the end of the day, we’re creating things. And there needs to be accountability for what we’re creating, as well as understanding what we are creating. Irrespective of what label we put on the job we’re doing.
Per Axbom
Yeah, I agree. I was actually thinking, when I was listening back to the episode, maybe we don’t need designers anymore. Because we kind of, when we talked about the UX industry because we needed people who are experts in digital. But we really don’t need experts who are in digital anymore in that sense, because everything is digital now. So all the professions just need a layer of digital on top of them. And so we keep doing what we’ve always been doing. We just need, we’re just inside the digital space now.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I mean, we’ve already moved from saying web to saying digital.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So I mean, they’re transient words, right? Ultimately, we’re gonna move beyond them.
Per Axbom
Definitely. What have you chosen for recommended listening this time, James?
James Royal-Lawson
I was just gonna say, that’s really, really easy. Just go back and listen to all our Kim shows. But then at the same time, we’ve started talking about Lisa Welchman, so I’m gonna go: “Oh, no, now you have to listen to all the Kim ones and all the Lisa ones.” But I’m gonna stick to my guns and say, yep, all the Kim shows. And these are all series one, or season one. Episodes 93, 192, 221, and 262. There will be a link in the show notes that you click on to get to those. Or you can just doom scroll for ages, wherever you are now, and eventually, you will get to 93.
Per Axbom
Just yeah, if you listen to all of those in a row, you will be so much smarter within a week.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, God, yeah, really? Per you should do it. We should do it.
Per Axbom
We should do it, yes, definitely.
James Royal-Lawson
Also, if you’d like to contribute to funding or producing UX podcast, then visit UXpodcast.com/support Or even easier is just email us and volunteer to help.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
What’s the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer?
James Royal-Lawson
Don’t start laughing at me, I haven’t got to the punch line.
Per Axbom
I don’t know why I should be asking this. But, James what is the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer?
James Royal-Lawson
The taste.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Kim Goodwin recorded in May 2023 and published as episode S02E06 (316) of UX Podcast.