A transcript of Episode 293 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Kate Swindler to discuss the different situations in which we use digital products and services while stressed, and how our stress response works.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Dave Trendall.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 293.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So hello, everybody and welcome to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts Per Axbom
James Royal-Lawson
and James Royal-Lawson
Per Axbom
balancing Business Technology, people and society with listeners all over the world. And joining us today is Katie Swindler, and Katie is a user experience strategist, originally educated as a theatre director, and I had to look that up, of course, and a theatre director is responsible for ensuring the quality and completeness of theatre production and for leading the members of the creative team into realising their artistic vision for it. So I love how people within the design profession often have this deep well of other perspectives to draw from.
So Katie published the book, Life and Death Design – what life-saving technology can teach everyday designers with Rosenfeld media. Oh, it was earlier this year, wasn’t it? And another pandemic product, but this time, also very aligned with the emotional distress that many of us have experienced over the past two years. The book focuses on designing for people under significant stress, which, as we shall see, can happen in many different circumstances.
I feel like kind of a method actor today, because I’ve been messaging James all day, and telling him how stressed I am. And so between meetings and holding workshops and stuff, and so I’m ending the day with interviewing a person who can teach me about how to design for stressful situations. And I’ve been thinking all day about how it’s affected my driving and my decision making and my intuition. Can you tell us a bit more about who is the book for and what types of life and death situations are we talking about?
Katie Swindler
Sure. So the subtitle of the book I chose was, hat life saving technology can teach everyday designers. Because, you know, as you mentioned, pretty much any human user that you’re designing for, might be stressed, right? So I look in the book at a lot of high stakes, high stress industries that study the intersection between stress and design. But one of the things when I was researching that I found was the things that they discover in those research for those high stakes industries. They’re applicable across all industries.
So things that, you know, I was, I was reading and learning about designing for aviation and healthcare and the military, I could see broader implications for applying those to, you know, other sorts of high stress, high stakes, jobs, you know, things like that that might not be life and death, like you’re like a day trader or a customer service rep. But it’s still a very high stress job, or designing for stressful moments for consumer. Like maybe you have a whole app, and you have one feature that’s meant to be used, like after a car crash, right to order a tow truck or something, or, you know, maybe your product shouldn’t really be stressful at all, but people, like you said, they were having a hard day, you know, they’re in the midst of a pandemic, or they’ve read the news headlines in any of the last three years.
They’re coming in a stressed out state of mind to the product, and all of that makes it more difficult for them to use your product. And so I think it’s essential for any designer of any product that’s used by humans, to understand the human stress response and the sort of impacts it has on behaviour and understanding and people’s ability to use and learn the products because it can affect the design choices.
Per Axbom
And I do appreciate how you start us off with thinking about all these high stress situations and these professions. And then as you read along, you sort of realise, well, this, this is everyday life, it applies to basically everyone. So it’s really about helping people solve problems. And you don’t know that if people are in a stressful situation. I mean, you have several examples. And you mentioned the car crash, and I was almost in a car crash the other day, and that of course, it wasn’t about me calling afterwards because I didn’t have it. It wasn’t that bad. But everything after that, no matter what I was doing was affected by that, of course, experience. So you don’t know where people are coming from which means that it really applies to all the designs you’re making.
Katie Swindler
That’s exactly right. And you know, I use this information as a designer obviously, but you know, I also use it it as a mom, or as a manager, or as a neighbour trying to help get people in my neighbourhood to work together, you know, like it, like you use the once you know these fundamentals about the stress response and how it affects human behaviour, at least I find myself using it all of the time to, to help, just make my life better and to manage my own stress, because this is, you know, it’s been a very stressful period in all of our lives.
And it was a really unique experience writing a book about stress during the pandemic. I hadn’t intended to do that actually signed my contract, January 2020. So you know, like, Oh, really, yeah. And so I had signed to write this book, it was just a topic of interest to me. And then, I signed the contract January 2020. And I was supposed to start writing on March 15 2020. That was, that was the day I learned that my daughter’s school was going to be closed, supposedly, for two weeks, right. But I’m not that was supposed to be the first day I was sitting down to write this book.
The one thing that I learned of in my research is, our memories, and the way that we form memories is affected by stress. And even though we learn and, and retain a lot about, sort of the things that we perceived as dangerous, like those, those, those markers get embedded very deeply, but the way that we feel, and the way that our brain, you know, the way our mind works in those moments is actually really hard to recall, after the fact. It’s also really hard for us to predict how we will behave in stressful situations, you know, there’s studies that say, women, what would you do, if you’re an interviewer, and a man makes a pass at you, and they’d say, Oh, I would slap him in the face, or I would walk out, or I would do this or do that.
But when you actually look at people’s behaviour, in those moments, oftentimes, they react entirely differently. The most common thing is they just get through it, they just, they are quiet, and they get out of the situation as quickly as possible. It’s just really hard for humans to predict our own behaviour, when we are in a state of stress different than now. And to remember what it was like after the fact, you know, and so, writing the book, while I was in this heightened state of mind, and going through this research and relating it to my time in that moment, I think it really helped unlock as much as I could get out of that research, you know, kind of experiencing that personally in that moment.
So, even though it was a very difficult time to do something like write a book, because I’m not Shakespeare, and this isn’t King Lear, which he wrote during a pandemic lockdown. In some ways, it probably this book is as best as it could be, because of the exposure that I had to this heightened stress space while I was going through the research process.
Per Axbom
Let’s walk through, I mean, the steps within the stress response, because I think that being able to refer to those steps will help us in conversations about the different pieces of the puzzle, because there are different ways that people, of course, can be stressed, and for how long that impacts how they feel, how it impacts their behaviour, and in what situations that can appear. And I liked this ‘startled’, just the thing of being startled is that you realise that people can be startled in so many different ways.
Katie Swindler
Yes, exactly. I break down the stress response into five states. So the first, of course, being the startle response, as you mentioned, and that’s a very instantaneous, you know, we’re talking milliseconds reaction to an unexpected possible threat. From the startle response, there are some things that happen. First, we have what I call the intuitive assessment, that is, you know, yes, we see something flying towards our face. But is that actually a danger or not. We jerk out of the way, that’s the startle response, but then when we when our body is deciding, do we go into fight or flight or not? That’s the intuitive assessment and it’s all based on categorization and just matching two things that we are lived experiences.
So that intuitive assessment is step two, three is if, you know, sometimes the response stops there, the intuitive assessment says, Oh, that’s not a real danger, don’t worry about it. But if it says it is a real danger, then you go on to step three, which is fight, flight, or freeze. That I think is what most people are most familiar with in terms of a stress response. That’s when the you know, cortisol gets dumped, the adrenaline gets dumped. And you can, you know, quickly get to sort of panicked-style behaviours, though it doesn’t always go to that extreme, right? Like, people can just get, you know, feisty. Or people often are just flight response. Especially on a website flight response can just be exiting out, like, oh this website seems dangerous, oooh, I don’t want to be here, I think I’m gonna get hacked, right, so I’m gonna get a virus, they just X out.
So fight flight or freeze, freeze being, I’m gonna take no action, like I can’t make a decision, I’m overwhelmed by decision paralysis, right? That’s sort of the lower level version of the freeze response. So the way we get past the fight flight, or freeze response is when our prefrontal cortex, our logic and reason kick in. And that is then we get this reasoned reaction, which is step four, where we say, oh, I can deal with this, using these tools that I have as a human. I think the most activity within a digital space happens actually, with that recent reaction, we are helping people not panic, not live in step three, but actually get to step four, take action, solve a problem, call the tow truck, get an Uber, you know what I mean? That’s step four. And that’s actually when a big flurry of activity is happening in a digital space.
And then also in step five, that recovery phase, where the moment of crisis has passed, but there is still things that you need to do. And there are things that designers can do to sort of help speed that recovery process. Per, you were saying you were in a near car crash, and that affected your behaviour for a long time afterwards. We get adrenaline and cortisol, I mean, we call it a shot of adrenaline and that is dumped in milliseconds into our bloodstream. But just like, if we take a shot of alcohol, it’s actually our liver and kidneys that have to filter out those neuro chemicals. So it’s a much longer process, that it takes in order to get that out. And our behaviour and our thought processes are affected during that entire recovery period. It’s anywhere from 20 minutes.
And I mean, it can be hours, and days, if you’re in a dangerous wartime situation, right? Like where you’re in this like constant danger. Usually, if you’re we’re talking about an acute event that happens and it’s usually about two hours afterwards, whether that cortisol gets completely out of your system, that adrenaline gets out a little bit faster and then the cortisol follows couple hours after.
Per Axbom
I realised it’s helping me to understand my own behaviour, just like you were saying before. It’s helping you to understand – I probably did that because this was happening within my body, it’s so valuable to actually understand that process. But of course, then also, as a designer, as you were speaking, I was thinking, even if microinteractions. Every design is about people getting stressed about not knowing what do I do now what will happen. So there’s this tiny stress goes on, and then you find it, and then you get this information telling you that you did the right thing where you ended up in the right place, and you relax, and that’s the recovery phase. It was like, I’m thinking, you can bring it big or small. And if you have all those small, tiny micro interactions, and a lot of them are getting you stressed. I mean, I guess that just adds and adds until you get really aggressive and angry.
Katie Swindler
Yes, exactly. And I think people often you’re talking about micro interactions, like the fight or flight response happens all of the time. And it’s very intuition-based. We talk all the time about intuitive design, but we don’t often talk a lot as designers about intuition and developing Intuition and what makes you know, people’s spidey sense tingle. People develop intuition around how websites should work. And when your website violates those expectations, if the branding doesn’t look quite right, or if the the accordions don’t open and close or if they click on a button expecting to go one place, and they get taken to a completely different website, like when those expectations are violated, that triggers our intuitive sense of danger,
We are programmed as humans and the ones who survived millions of years of evolution right to get where we are, because we pay attention to things and we treat things that are unexpected as dangerous. By understanding that, that, you know, violating these expectations are is really going to trigger people’s stress responses, I think it helps us make better choices as designers, and helps us understand when people are going to leave, when people are going to get angry, right? Like, oh, this didn’t work out as expected, and now I’m mad about it.
Or, more often than not they just get out, that they are triggering that flight response. And as you said, it’s at different levels, they’re not in a panic, because the branding is off on your payments page. They’re not like fuming in their room or throwing their computer across. But it’s scaled, the response is the same, it’s just scaled to the situation. Because at the end of the day, we’re fairly simple creatures driven by the same set of neurochemicals.
James Royal-Lawson
This is really interesting about the expectations, because, I mean, you see when you’ve got more general products or to more general audience, then my experience would say that the evenness of their expectations or existing knowledge about interfaces, or what’s possible, really does vary. And then when you work with an enterprise product, and you’re dealing with an interface that someone’s gonna be using for, 40 hours a week, their expert expertise in the interface or related interfaces become so exact and if you vary from what’s an industry standard, maybe for that branch, you can end up causing all kinds of problems. So that’s a fascinating thing to think about, like, how do you assess and understand people’s intuition or existing knowledge about things?
Katie Swindler
Yeah, the interesting thing is in this space is actually the tactics that you take to design for consumers in stressful situations versus experts in stressful situations they have trained for is very different. I actually just taught a workshop a few weeks ago and the whole first half was dedicated to designing for stressed-out consumers. And the second half was about designing for experts in high stress situations. Because the thing that differentiates the novice from the expert is experience, and it is experience and repetition and training that develops somebody’s intuition. And so, when somebody, when somebody has developed that reliable intuition, they have moved a lot of the processes that they are doing, from something they have to think about, and it takes a lot of time to something that’s automatic, right?
They can actually do, they can’t do the hardest parts of their job, the parts that they really need their expertise for, if they are thinking about all of the things that they have made automatic, the reason they’re able to get to the depth of expertise in their particular area is because they’ve automated a lot of the pre-steps before it, so they can put their cognitive effort, their brainpower, towards that most difficult end of the scale. And that’s what separates them from from novices in the space. And if you interrupt that first part, the part that they have automated, that is a really terrible thing. And you’re gonna undercut the, the expert, right?
You’re taking away what makes them the expert by making them think about the part of it that they have gotten automated through repetition and practice. There’s great studies around, you know, taking novice golfers and expert golfers. And if you try to have them make their putt shot and you give each group a task, like, Oh, you have to make it timed, like you have to do it fast. The novices get worse when they have to do it fast. The experts get better when they have to do it fast, because they are falling back on training and expert and intuition. And it just goes, the same with if you try to have them do like math while they’re taking it right, though, that they are versus thinking really hard about their shot. If you actually make an expert think really hard about their shot, they get worse, whereas the novices get better.
And then if you distract them, we call it sometimes have you guys heard the phrase get out of your head, the actors use it all the time. I think sports people use it, you gotta get out of your head. Because as designers if we are working on a tool that is meant for a professional to use, we need to be thinking about how do we design that tool in a way that helps them get out of their head, that that they are not having to think about the nitty gritty, they are focused on the thought work on the hard work on the problem solving that they need to be paying attention to. And yeah, I think that when we think about things that are kind of cornerstones of our industry things like test and learn, right?
We have to be really thoughtful about test and learn especially when we’re going to expert users, because somebody was telling me, a colleague at Allstate, they were watching some of the customer service representatives in our company use their interface, like their software, their customer service software. And they noticed that as somebody is going through all of these screens, they’re actually moving their mouse to where the next button they’re going to need to click will be, before the screen has even loaded. It’s all muscle memory. And so if you, if you’re trying to improve that flow and you switch what that button does, you switch the placement of the button, or you switch around what the buttons do, it’s going to be very difficult to circumvent those habits.
And we know that even if the first couple of times they use it, and they’re thinking really hard about it, and they can do it, they’re going to constantly fall back as soon as they start to gain competency in the new area, they’re gonna go into unconscious competence type things, and they’re gonna fall back on old habits, right? So it’s very difficult to make small changes within a familiar environment that they have had a lot of practice in. And it’s almost better when redesigning things to just do a hugely fresh redesign, where all you’re dealing with is somebody learning the new learning curve, and not a learning curve plus fighting, remaking old habits. Right.
Per Axbom
I love that perspective. Because that’s completely opposite to what you hear other people say is that you design incrementally and improve incrementally.
Katie Swindler
Yeah, and it’s because so much of the rules of our trade, are focused on designing for consumer audiences because that’s where a lot of the money is, I guess, I don’t know. Or at least that’s the stuff that is more shared in our industry. Usually if you’re designing something for a professional audience, there’s a lot of intellectual property and protection and NDAs. We don’t talk about that stuff, because it’s a secret sauce for the company, right?
And so we’re not as open as opposed to designers who design for consumer space, like yeah, you can go click to it, and you can look at it, and it’s all public. It’s very easy for designers to build their portfolios, if they work primarily on the consumer side. And it can be really difficult for designers who are designing primarily on the professional side, because a lot of that stuff is secret. But it also affects the sort of standards that we have and best practices that are shared throughout our industry, not as many of those best practices are shared amongst designers for professional software, just because they’re not allowed to be as open about it.
James Royal-Lawson
This sounds to me – I’ve been thinking about how we’re talking about intuition and familiarity, repetition and so on and prolonged practice makes you an expert. If you’re a design expert, when you’ve been working in all these different environments and different projects and design situations over the years, can you ever trust your intuition as a designer. In the sense that – I think in the book you give the example of a fireman that was a fireman in a building with a seller they didn’t know about? Yeah. That was a wonderful story whether the fireman trusted his institution and saved his crew because there was things that were fishy about this fire he was dealing with. I won’t go into all the details, but there were unknowns that he didn’t know about, but his spider sense basically picked up on these things.
Katie Swindler
Yeah, he thought he had ESP extrasensory perception. He thought he had a supernatural power because he was in a situation where the fire seemed very dangerous and he couldn’t put his thumb on what it was. But he trusted his gut and got his crew out. But then when Gary Klein, the researcher, really pressed him to say, Okay, well tell me more about the situation. He was like, yeah, the fire was too quiet and the fire was hotter than it should have been and the fire wasn’t reacting to the spray of our water in the way that it should have. And Gary’s like, okay, so it was actually your experience.
These weren’t matching your expectations, right? We were talking about, it doesn’t match and so you have a fight, flight response, right? Like I gotta get out of here this, this isn’t meeting my expectations, and therefore it’s dangerous, really. Sometimes that is not a great thing that humans have, that things that aren’t as expected, we perceive as dangerous. I think a lot of our social problems are kind of rooted in that. But in the sort of survival sense, it is essentially what has allowed us to survive as a species. So it does have good implications in situations like that fire for that fireman. It’s interesting, because the fireman was kind of like, as he went through this, he was, Klein in his book talks about he was both proud that it was actually his experience that saved his crew but he also was worried because now he’s like, wow, I thought I had this superpower and it would protect me. And now I realise I’m just like everyone else.
Per Axbom
He does have a superpower.
Katie Swindler
He does.
James Royal-Lawson
His superpower is his experience. Actually, that’s just fascintating that when you’ve got that, I suppose that narrow specialism you know, he was a fireman, and he worked on dealing with fires. So it allows them to get that kind of, not tunnel vision as such, but you’ve kind of really narrowed the world down so that these are the things I deal with, I can see what’s off track. And you know, my responses can build up from that. Whereas going back to what I was saying us as digital designers, our world’s massive and complex. And we’re just constantly dealing with new problems, different problems. So even though we’re specialist designers with huge amounts of experience, I just wonder whether we can actually ever really trust our intuition.
Katie Swindler
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
Given the broad scope of what we work with.
Katie Swindler
It’s a really good question to ask, as designers we need to constantly be checking our bias. But the good news is Klein, the researcher who has that awesome psychic fireman story, and Gary Kahneman, who is a Nobel Prize winning economist who spent his career studying bias, they actually collaborated on a paper that looked at when can expert bias be trusted. And so they have two very different takes on intuition and bias, like Kahneman calls it bias and Klein calls it intuition and you can kind of guess what, which bias they have towards towards this automated subconscious process that we have, just based on the names that they call it but it’s the same, it’s just two names for the same thing.
And so they’ve created these rules that say, you can you can trust and rely on expert intuition, when two things are true, and both have to be true. That there are rules that can be learned and that there is that somebody has enough time and practice to learn the rules. Now, these rule sets can be extremely complicated. But there are rules, right? The reason the fireman could build expert intuition is because he’s learning through experience little laws of thermodynamics, right? Fire behaves a certain way, because of the laws of thermodynamics.
There are really there are tonne of rules that guide it and it’s a fairly finite number of rules. It is complex, don’t get me wrong – it really is complex, but it is predictable enough that it can be learned through study. A lot of study, but through study. I would say that the rules of design, especially when it comes to things like how human attention works, right? Like where is an eye drawn on a page, right? Those are rules that we can learn. We also are relying on a set of established normative patterns, right things like an accordion, right? It opens and closes, it works just like a drawer would in real life. We’re leaning on metaphors that it should work like a drawer and that it opens and closes and reveals something, it’s the same thing in the drawer every time just like a physical drawer in your you know, I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have any magical drawers in my house where I put something in it, I close it and I open it back up and it’s something different.
Per Axbom
My sock drawer.
Katie Swindler
Okay, fair enough, you got me, you got me.
James Royal-Lawson
We got some hidden, we’ve got drawers hidden in our skirting boards in the kitchen, they’re fantastic.
Katie Swindler
But you know we have a set of fairly standard, you know, an X in the corner of the page and that is always going to close whatever you’re doing, or it should always close, otherwise, you’re violating those expectations. And as a community we are creating, and we’re adding to it, right? Like the infamous hamburger menu, those like three horizontal lines, that Facebook started using to indicate a menu that people would think look like a hamburger.
Now people have seen that enough and we as a community have used that in a standard way enough that that has become an intuitively recognised icon, it was not for years, right? Facebook, put it out there so it got lots of exposure, but it took a long time for it to really proliferate into the sort of intuitive use. But we can make new intuitive UIs, UI elements, new intuitive components, through the proliferation throughout our community, which I think is really interesting.
So I would say that, to a certain extent, yes, we as designers, there are rules of design, and there’s rules of human attention. And there are rules that we can learn in order to develop good intuition about, oh, I’m going to look at this design, and I can predict to a relative certainty, that that is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people, right? We’ve all had that experience, like, oh, man, nobody’s gonna be able to find that. And you know, then if you put it up, nine times out of 10, you’re right. Now, we’re not always right, when we try to predict future human behaviour, that is actually one of the areas that both Kahneman and Klein agree is really difficult to do to predict future human behaviour.
Because it’s really difficult to try to predict whether a criminal will reoffend, right? Because there’s so many contributing factors that are around if that person, like, why that person would reoffend? Is it personal, is it environment. It’s just so complex things like trying to predict the stock market, and try to outdo the base of the stock market. It’s really difficult to predict that, because it’s such a complex set of rules, and so much really complex human behaviour. So, if you’re just trying to predict one step out or two steps out, you can probably learn to a relative certainty what the options are, and help somebody and be able to develop good intuition about where those are going. But when you’re trying to predict something, like how well will a student do in college three years from now. You’re getting outside of the realm of which, you know, the system is predictable enough to be learnable.
Per Axbom
I think you’ve done this beautiful job of explaining how different it can be for different people, because then you have these people with the expertise, and then you have the people with the serial familiarity. And I have just have to say this, I have this aha moment when I was reading the book, because especially when you were thinking about the types of effects of stress, with tunnel vision, with your body shaking, difficulty reading and focusing and getting information overload.
You have people who live with that constantly. And so it overlaps perfectly with how we do accessibility. So if you follow the advice in your book, I think you’ll support the needs of so many more people than just the people who are under stress, but actually the people who are living under these conditions and have these difficulties every day.
Katie Swindler
Yeah, I think that in general, accessible design and inclusive design tends to benefit everyone because even people who aren’t stressed, if you are simplifying your design enough so that it can be used by a stressed person, then it’s simpler for everyone to use. So much of accessible design is like that, you know, things like closed caption. It was originally created for the hearing impaired, but it’s so useful for everybody, like people who are in loud environments or, you know, from the car the other day, and my daughter was watching her iPad and I was like, can you just turn it off, like I don’t want to hear it. And then she could put on the closed caption and still enjoy her show, even though her mom didn’t want to hear the noise in the car, right?
Curb cuts and sidewalks, these are things that were created for people in wheelchairs and with mobility issues, but it helps parents with strollers, it helps people who have a cart for their groceries, it helps everybody. And so often when we create designs that are meant to help people in extremes, we end up helping everybody. And I think that’s just good accessible design.
Per Axbom
That’s so beautiful to end on. Thank you, Katie.
Katie Swindler
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you Katie.
[music]
James Royal-Lawson
So the very beginning of Katie’s book, and we touched on aspects of this during the interview, but the three, I suppose, types or situations where products and stress appear or happen, one of them is products that are used in notoriously high stress situations or by people who have stressful jobs. The examples are day traders, or some people doing certain types of Customer Service,
Per Axbom
Pilots, maybe?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Acknowledged high stressful job. Answering managed service calls, that kind of thing. I mean, clearly if you do design work on those products, you’re aware of the task of dealing, designing a product to be used in those situations, your research and so on will clearly show these people are experts in it. So maybe they’re not in heightened stress in the same way, some other people will be with unexpected stress. But anyway, there’s flags to tell you as a designer, you’re gonna have to work with that. Then we have the products that are intended to be used in moments of high stress. So you’re actively designing a product to be used by someone who isn’t normally stressed. But that situation is stressful. And the examples like the one you give with the or talks about the car crash or car incidents, you’ve just had an incident you need to report it. These are important right report, the only way to get help from a repair service or pickup truck or whatever it is.
Per Axbom
Yeah, just finding that number. Because I’ve been in situations where I’ve just had to call someone and finding the numbers is he hardest part.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, used to be like, I remember we used to have stickers on car windows that used to have emergency numbers and so on, but yeah, so again, you’re the designer, when you get into that design job, you are aware of scenarios, situations are going to be stressful, and that’s going to be an input into your design work. Then the third group, or type of product is, all of our products, the ones that we don’t think of them as products, that will be stressful to us, they aren’t fundamentally stressful products themselves, but nevertheless, are being used by people while they are in a heightened state of stress.
We’re talking about accessibility, we often use the example of of maybe a parent, carrying a baby or toddler in one arm, being a one armed user, temporary disability. But if you’re a parent, and maybe you have to do something using an app on your mobile phone, while you’re carrying a screaming baby, that’s stressful.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So you know, as a designer, you may be don’t initially, if you’re stress testing, literally stress testing your products, you maybe wouldn’t necessarily think about how your product might be used in a stressful situation, because there are just so many situations where it could be stressful, and you happen to be involved in that.
Per Axbom
And that that is so super interesting to me, because actually, we had a conversation with Katie, after the interview as well as we sometimes do in these live interview situations where we were talking about so in order to make, if we are aware that people can be stressed, we need to actually test that. But it would be unethical to actually bring someone in and make them stressed during usability testing. Which makes it really hard to ensure that your product is working the way you want. Unless you can actually get some of your colleagues to be the stressed people and you have that consent situation. But it also made me think that within accessibility we often talk about, well, if we all always bring in and make sure to focus on people with accessibility challenges, then we will always cover in the widest possible broadest base of users, which means that we should be bringing in people who are especially sensitive to distraction, to tonality, to language and make sure that these people are the ones who we’re bringing in because they can help us cover so many more issues that we perhaps couldn’t anticipate.
James Royal-Lawson
And you brought up pilots as a recognised high stress job, when designing in that industry, then normally you’d have simulations, there would be software be tested in a more safe environment. That possibly also simulates a stress because in some of these flight simulators are really quite believable. But that isn’t always the case for many other situations. I actually don’t know, when you’re doing changes, like, I suppose you test all software, don’t you? But how do you simulate the stress? Daytraders, for example, I mean, how do you really simulate the stress of that job in a test environment? When it’s, yeah, it’s a real challenge, getting people to come in for stress and getting the interview points out about how how bad we are at predicting the future, or how bad we are at kind of simulating some of these things ourselves. So if you merely talking back about things, so if you’ve brought in someone who didn’t normally stress and you’re interviewing them, they might well not give you – like the firemen, they had to dig there in a different way to get out the the expert skill that made him understand what was fishy about the fire. But you still maybe have problems getting them to reveal all about how they would behave in a stressful situation.
Per Axbom
You don’t know. I think there’s there’s a Swedish movie that also remade into an English movie with his father and his family on a ski trip and there’s an avalanche. And the father runs away from his family. And and that’s like the sort of plot point for the movie. How could he do that? He didn’t know what he would do in that situation? Of course.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And that would be I suppose a perfectly biological correct response for the situation? In a way, I think he fled. You might argue that another correct response would be to protect your clan, your flock. Yeah. Stress is difficult. And stress is complicated. Yeah, I mean, the book has a lot of good tips and answers about what you can do. But my own reflections after talking to Katie and reading the book is I don’t think I’ve really given stressed users enough thought and place in my design work. Because a lot of the time I mean, yeah, whenever working with expert interfaces, then I’ve been very aware of it exactly. Like I said, when you know that you’re, you’d very much know that your user base is that person doing that job, customer service, or whatever it is. But in the other times when you’re doing stuff, ecommerce or whatever, general products, then no, I don’t think I really considerate in the same way.
Per Axbom
I agree. And it was a huge aha moment for me reading the book and talking to Katie. It’s really, really useful. And I think this is one of those books that I’m going to be recommending to all designers. So what show should people be listening to next, James?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, I think one that dovetails nicely into life and death design is Design for Safety. With Eva Penzeymoog who we talked to back in episode 270. In that episode, we’re talking more about interpersonal safety so your safety as a human rather than with life and death design we’re talking about mainly stress. Yeah, good compliments.
Per Axbom
Very good. Also one of those I really recommend a lot for people to listen to. Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Katie Swindler
So there are two muffins in an oven. The first muffin turns to the second muffin and says “Damn, it’s hot in here”. The second muffin says “Argh! A talking muffin!”
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Katie Swindler recorded in June 2022 and published as episode 293 of UX Podcast.