Per Axbom
From time to time, we will bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts from the past that we believe are still relevant and well worth revisiting. In this UX podcast classic, with information architect and UX designer, Dan Brown, we learn about dealing with big hard questions at the beginning of the discovery phase, so we can make good design decisions later. And also, how we know when we have thought and discovered enough.

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 295.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
This is UX Podcast. I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
And I’m Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
Balancing business, technology, and people, every other Friday from Stockholm, Sweden. We have listeners in 172 countries around the world from Germany to Peru.

Per Axbom
And today we are bringing you our interview with Dan Brown, an Information Architect and principal at the User Experience consultancy 8 shapes. Dan has written two books that deal with communications and collaboration on design teams. And in his most recent book, Practical Design Discovery, he deals with the very first phase of a project in which the product team seeks to understand the design problem. We met Dan at Euro IA 17, where he held a workshop called Crafting the Discovery Phase.

James Royal-Lawson
Yep. And I actually, I sat through his workshop. It was really quite good. Now, when we met him now, I tried to be funny, and said, ‘so where do we start’ as my introduction line to Dan. And that was me joking about discovery phase thinking. Well, where do we start? I mean, it’s kind of, I thought it was funny.

Per Axbom
It’s funny, but not when you have to explain the joke.

James Royal-Lawson
No, I know. Can I say we must have been tired.

Per Axbom
Yes, we were.

Dan Brown
Where should we start? I don’t know, we should maybe talk about why discovery is important in this day and age. And I get a lot of people coming to me, in my workshops, almost tired of the relentless pace of design these days. Emerging movements in design have done a lot to raise the profile of design, of the role of a User Experience designer. But I worry that we’re also doing ourselves a disservice by not taking the time to think deeply about the problems that we have.

We think at the surface level, you know, we’re really good at designing screens, churning them out, working with developers to get those things built. But I worry that we’re starting to lose our ability to dig below that surface, and really understand the things that are going on, in a sense behind the scenes of an experience.

James Royal-Lawson
I think the way we’d start things, that’s getting worse with the speed at which we’re forced to work and the expectation that we’re gonna start tomorrow.

Dan Brown
Right.

James Royal-Lawson
Sprint minus one, your design sprint.

Dan Brown
Right. Or we only need a week to get started, and or a kickoff meeting to get started. And, yeah, I mean, I think those things are important and good. And I don’t want to say that we’ve got to slow design down entirely. I do not think that the way we did things in the old days was good. Insofar as we spent a lot of time trying to tell people that doing the research was worth it or doing discovery was worth it.

And I don’t want to go back to that time where we would sort of go into our rooms, lock ourselves away, do the research or what have you, and then emerge weeks or months later. You know, this move towards greater collaboration, more interdisciplinary design, all of that stuff is really, really welcome. But the more we work on hard design problems, the more we need to take the time to think deeply about those problems.

James Royal-Lawson
And then leave ourself. I mean, you said, in the workshop we were in, ‘create gaps’.

Dan Brown
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
So we’ve got time to think and reflect when we’re doing the discovery.

Per Axbom
So I’m thinking instantly about agile and how sometimes we struggle so hard to fit design into the Agile process. So is that sort of the the solution to this, then stop trying to fit it in and give it more time?

Dan Brown
I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I know enough about how agile works to say one way or the other. But what I do think is that designers should know what they need and understand that agile serves a purpose or whatever, bastardised product development methodology they use internally that serves a purpose, but is it their purpose. They need to play a role in that but there are other responsibilities that they have to the product, or to their team or to their organisation.

And my hope is that designers can be assertive about, here’s what I need in order to provide the best possible work to you. And sometimes that’s, ‘I want to sit next to a developer, so I can draw and pass things’. And sometimes it’s, ‘I need to sit over here for a little bit and just sit and think deeply about this problem. And sometimes it’s, ‘I need to get out of the building, and talk to users’. And we, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to cultivate some of those things, that I worry that we’re losing other ones of those things.

So I feel like a lot of the clients that I talk to are very willing for me to now go out and talk to people. They don’t ever tell me to sacrifice research, which is a great change from when I first started in this business. But it’s all fast, fast, fast now.

James Royal-Lawson
Looking back, I mean, it was very deliverables based.

Dan Brown
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
In the beginning, and those very extravagant design presentations that we delivered to you and then handed over and then you were expected to just implement. The creative process is very backwards and forwards and kind of you go round and backwards and revisit things and think things through again. And how do you how do you go about delivering, but through that chaos of the way you you need to think and you need to work?

Dan Brown
Yeah, it’s interesting. I obviously love documentation. And I think what I really love is sort of the byproducts of the design process. The sort of flotsam and jetsam that comes up on the shore, as part of the ocean of creativity, right. And we draw pictures, we do sketches on whiteboards, all kinds of things, to trigger and catalyse and maintain the creativity that we have. And those artefacts are fantastic. And so I think we get, maybe a little emotionally attached to them. And we want to draw them in, we want to share them with people.

I try and empower designers to think, what’s the purpose of this artefact that you’re creating? Is it to help your brain work through a problem? Or is it to legitimately try and get one of your stakeholders on board with the process? At the end of the day, for better or for worse, regardless of whether we do it fast or slow, our deliverable is screens, or whatever the equivalent is. And something my business partner said to me a little while ago is the best way to help people understand an Information Architecture is to show them how it works.

So even though I like operating in a level of abstraction, at the end of the day, in order to get buy-in from folks, I can’t show them a bubble chart, I can’t show them a spreadsheet, even, I need to show them navigation. And I gotta be okay with that right? Because that’s not moving fast, necessarily. That’s facilitating all my stakeholders in a way that I know relates to them.

Per Axbom
So there’s this trouble with, everybody’s saying we’re moving fast, I’m hearing this so much as well. And that attempt to move fast we, of course, we stray in the wrong directions, because that’s what happens when you move too fast. So in essence, you really don’t have to slow down when you think of what you’re delivering. You actually need more time to think. And you’ll work exactly the same pace. But you won’t make the same mistakes. You won’t stray as much.

Dan Brown
Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, you could argue that we need to have we need to stray in order to know where we shouldn’t be. If that makes sense. Yeah. So we need to kind of go off the beaten path and understand, actually, that’s too far in one direction.

Per Axbom
And I’m hearing from a lot of the speakers actually now at EURO IA, I’m hearing that exactly this, you need to spend time thinking, you need to spend time going outside and intentionally not thinking about the problem, intentionally just being because that is what is going to help you get your problem solved. Like being in tune with yourself and your experiences more, not thinking about a specific design problem.

James Royal-Lawson
Which leads into the question of when have we thought enough? So when when does this process come to an end?

Dan Brown
So it’s a good point. I mean, the converse is also true, right? We’re moving too fast. But there’s also moving too slow. Internally, at my team, we call that churning, right? Some people call it analysis paralysis, right? You just sort of like –

James Royal-Lawson
Excitement, you can get lost in the excitement of it all.

Dan Brown
Oh my gosh, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
When you kind of – because we’re all nerds really?

Dan Brown
Yes. Right. So, I mean, the blessing and the curse for any consultant is your curiosity right? If you can be good at getting excited about a problem, no matter what it is, whether it’s for the biggest brand in the world, or the tiniest, little nonprofit, if you can get excited about their work, that’s great. But it’s also a curse, too, because it means you get dragged down into this, ‘I just want to keep asking people questions’.

I’m fortunate in that I’m given a budget, and I know what I need to deliver at the end of that budget. So I know if I’m spending too much time on the analysis paralysis part, then I’m going to be in trouble. I’m not going to be able to live up to my contract. This is one of the reasons why I characterise discovery as not open-ended, right? It’s sort of, it’s always in the context of a product. You’re trying to do discovery about a specific thing that you have a vague notion, there’s a problem in the world.

Let’s try and understand that problem a little better and start to imagine what that solution looks like. I think by doing it, by constraining yourself in those ways, you can avoid the opposite problem, the one that you’re talking about. And that’s moving too slowly, just sort of getting stuck.

James Royal-Lawson
If we’re processing that the produce from a discovery phase is not necessarily the artefacts of old, what is the what is the produce coming? We say now, yeah, the discovery phase can be used as a vehicle to help kind of onboarding stakeholders or to work out what’s kind of too far to extremes. But normally, phases have a kind of thing.

Dan Brown
Yeah, when I think at a pragmatic level, what I want to get out of discovery phase is knowing when I need to do in detailed design. So that could be a set of screens, that kind of paint a picture at a high level of what the experience could be, as well as a plan for here’s what the next steps are, right? The bare minimum, I feel like that’s what discovery is. I talked in the in the workshops about having things like a vision spelled out or having principals spelled out. And these are all just variations on a theme as to where we’re going and what are we doing next.

If you cut below the surface, though, there, I feel like the real deliverable, so to speak, is what I call the shared pool of knowledge, right? The fact that we all participated in this process together, and that the three of us, for example, sat in those interviews, or reviewed those notes or brainstormed together. And we’ve built up this kind of team product culture that we can draw from, so that as we continue on down this process, we can draw from that shared experience, that shared pool of knowledge.

What did the keynote speaker call it, yesterday? She called it like the communal accumulation of understanding, or something. She had a fantastic phrase for it. It was so elegant. And I was like, that’s what I should call it.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s that kind of that common vocabulary, a shared language.

Dan Brown
So when we talk deliverables, I want the vision and the plan. But at the end of the day, the real deliverables, so to speak, air-quotes, is this shared vocabulary of the work that we did together,

James Royal-Lawson
Because I think you and I are similar in the sense that I love to, as soon as I can sketch something, as soon as I’ve seen an idea, I want to get it down on the paper. Many times you’ve been told, don’t do it too soon, you’ve got to kind of do your research or do it enough. so you can actually not jump to conclusions, you get stuck and stuck on your initial designs.

Dan Brown
I remember people saying, don’t do anything until you’ve done research. And it’s like, why should I hold this back? Right? That is a tool for understanding, a tool for making sense of the things that you’ve been processing or the things that you’ve been accumulating over time. Go for it, draw pictures, just don’t get too precious about what you draw.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Because you want to avoid the situation where you’re telling people, the first thing you draw is wrong. Because that’s not true. Everything you’ve sketched will have some intrinsic value, there’ll be something that you’ve picked up on that has materialised itself through that little sketch or whatever thing you’ve produced. And that will have some value, probably later, or at least you’ll churn it in your head and it’ll come out maybe as something else.

Per Axbom
Visualising is how you explain things to yourself. So I mean, yes, you need to do that. But aren’t we also saying that discovery is something you revisit throughout the project. So it’s not ever done in a sense, so there was not a deliverable from it because you’re doing it all the time.

Dan Brown
Yeah. I mean, it’s a great point that one of the punch lines to to the book is to sort of help people understand that discovery isn’t just a phase. It can be a phase but what it really is is an attitude, right? It’s sort of this acknowledgment that sometimes I don’t know enough to make good decisions about the product. And in reality, the way creativity or innovation works is, I go back and forth between knowing and not knowing, right? Or confidence, and no confidence, or just having the tools to do something or not having those tools. And when I acknowledge, I need to know more.

That’s when I go into this discovery phase, this discovery mindset, to sort of tap into my curiosity and my scepticism to surface more information, more raw materials, so to speak, for me to put together a good solution. But the truth, the sad truth, is that we work in environments that don’t permit us that flexibility of in and out. I do think it’s important for people to understand how things could work. So that when they make those compromises to work in an environment that’s far more structured, that says you have six weeks to do discovery, that they understand what that sacrifice is, so they can make appropriate adjustments to their approach based on that.

James Royal-Lawson
You mentioned the scepticism and the curiosity, do you have a – wasn’t there a third?

Dan Brown
Humility is the third mindset.

James Royal-Lawson
Humility, yeah.

Dan Brown
I mostly pick on things that I feel like I personally have trouble with so I can really strive to fix those things in myself, and humility is definitely top of that list. So, one of the things I like to do, or try to do, is give designers tools for reflecting on their own performance and their own work.

We were sort of talking about this at the beginning. I think a lot of younger designers are coming into the field, having a good handle on tools, but not having the depth of experience that people like us have, where they can say they can exercise judgement, how to use the tools, how to talk to their stakeholders, things like that.

I think a lot of the schools these days, try and give them that opportunity. But it really only comes with time. And what I never had, at the beginning of my career was any sort of mentor who could help me think about, why did this meeting go poorly? Or would you have run this project differently? Things like that. So tools, like a mindset, tools like curiosity, scepticism and humility, allow me to say, where did this behaviour come from? When I was talking to the stakeholder, and I got really defensive. Why did that happen? Where did that come from? And how can I do it differentl next time. Those tools I think, are really crucial.

James Royal-Lawson
Do it different next time and understand why it happened that time.

Dan Brown
Right. I mean, it still happens to me today. I remember, I guess it was last year, I was having conversation with my teammates. We do like these internal reviews with the 8 shapes team and I was sharing some work and my partner started critiquing some of my work. And I just felt the defensiveness come up, and it doesn’t happen with everything, but with certain things. And I really had to control my behaviour.

Because Nathan wasn’t doing anything wrong, he was doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing, which was giving each other feedback. So it really sort of forced me to just pause, and reflect and say why in this particular instance, did I feel so defensive? And it was good. It was useful for me to kind of zero in on exactly what it is that gets me gets me going.

James Royal-Lawson
Did you manage to get that step further and find out what it was?

Dan Brown
I did. But I’m not remembering.

James Royal-Lawson
You don’t have to share it. It’s okay. I was just wondering –

Dan Brown
No, I feel like this is a safe space. It’s just between us here, right?

Per Axbom
Of course, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Because the self-reflection is one part of it. But then being able to actually

Dan Brown
Articulate it, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Take it to the next step. Okay. I’m aware that I’ve reacted like this, which is an excellent point to come to. When they were able to take that second step and go, ‘Okay. Now we’ll we’ll take that, we’ll put it there and we will analyse that later, rationally and be able to come to some kind of action plan, I guess, or conclusion about why it happened and what we could do next time.

Dan Brown
Yeah.

Per Axbom
It’s that thing where you’d signed it, or you thought of it, and it becomes your darling, and it’s so hard to receive criticism from it. Something I struggle with a lot but something I think about a lot as well is the ethical part of even starting out in the discovery phase is, how I must challenge myself to look into and delve into things that I’m not aware of, myself, that I need to accept that there are people getting hurt, potentially, by the design we are doing.

And I need to seek those opportunities to find out what those could be, wwhich is something I think a lot of people actually don’t struggle to do. Because it’s sort of, it’s tough, because you realise I could be wrong in so many ways, and you need to seek out the situations where you are proved wrong.

Dan Brown
There’s no greater test of humility, I think than sitting where I get to sit, and inviting regular users to come in and use a product, and you learn a lot about people. If you can run those interviews right, they will tell you lots of stuff about themselves and the challenges that they deal with. I got to work on a consumer product, couple of years ago, that was geared towards parents, and parents who might give their iPad or iPhone to their kid to entertain them, right.

So in this case, there was an app that let kids, elementary school aged kids, read books, or watch educational videos, you know, things that are good for them. But what this company realised is that there’s a gap between what the kid gets to experience on the phone, and then what the parent can talk to the kid about.

So I was designing the thing for the parents. So this thing, this product, would let parents see what the kids watched or read on the app, and then give them some questions to engage the kid. What did you read about it? Tell me about it. And it was very humbling, because as a parent, we also homeschool our children, so I’m very sort of in touch with the educational side of what they do. And that made me arrogant, honestly. I felt like I could design this in my sleep. But I couldn’t, because I am in a weird, different special place and I didn’t acknowledge the weird, different special nests of other people.

So we had all sorts come into the – I was interviewing people at a coffee shop, which I hadn’t done in years and it was really nice change. And it made for a very relaxing environment. And they came in and just told me their stories about how they interact with their kids or their grandkids. And it really affected me in terms of what I wanted the app to do, what I felt like the app was responsible for doing,

James Royal-Lawson
But disaster didn’t strike? You didn’t get relevation, throughout the entire thing.

Dan Brown
Yeah, I mean, the good news is, it’s not like we created a community platform that can be adopted by fascists. It wasn’t like that sort of but there was just enough. Unfortunately, I don’t really ever have to work on those kinds of things but there was just enough humility there for me to understand, Okay, I need to, I need to open my mind a lot more than I have.

James Royal-Lawson
I think the humility aspect is again – all three of those things, scepticism, humility, and curiosity. I think there’s three mindsets that we can try to live by, then I think you will be a lot more ethical, a lot more good not only with a new discovery phase, but your design work generally.

Dan Brown
I make no guarantees. It’s a step in the right direction.

James Royal-Lawson
Disclaimer,

Per Axbom
Good discussion is important. Thank you so much for joining us, Dan.

Dan Brown
Oh, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

James Royal-Lawson
That was really quite a philosophical chat, in many ways. But one thing that Dan talks about in the workshop, and we talked to him in the interview, was the Double Diamond, or rather, he alluded to the double diamond. But in our interview, now, he actually talked more about, I think, in and out and diverging and converging. During the actual workshop, Dan revealed that he doesn’t actually – he’s not a big fan of the double diamond. framework. For those of you that don’t know, the double diamond –

Per Axbom
I was just gonna say how I mean, do our listeners know what the double diamond is? Not all them knoww.

Dan Brown
Do you know what it is?

Per Axbom
Well, sort of, I see it on slides all the time on conferences, because I never use it myself. But it’s a there’s one, the first diamond of the two in the Double Diamond,

James Royal-Lawson
It’s not a test, it’s okay. All the tests are the discover and define phases. And the second part is to develop and deliver phases, the so it’s sort of like, this was the work process for design. Yeah.

And the idea is that you’d you’d kind of open up during the first diamond and you’d kind of consider all the ideas and possibilities that might be correct for your situation. And then towards the end of that part of the process, you would decide on the thing that you’re then going to take further to development. And then the second diamond is where you’d get into the the Agile side of things and you’d have sprints and you’d develop stuff and you produce output.

Now, Dan’s criticism of the double diamond was that it’s very linear. Whereas the discovery phase is Kate

Per Axbom
Almost like it’s waterfall. It’s a waterfall. Well, it’s a two level waterfall. Yeah. Whereas the discovery phase is very chaotic. So the analogy that Dan gave during the workshop was rather than you kind of opening and closing, you’d maybe turn the dial up and sometimes turn the dial up and turn the dial down. Because at some points during discovery, you might need to max it out to 11. But at other points, you might need to turn it right the way down to one, in various aspects.

Exactly. I mean, and you’re you’re continuously discovering is what we said, when we were talking to them now as well. It doesn’t end at any point,.

James Royal-Lawson
but at the same time, you do, at some point need to produce a code and produce output that the users will actually use.

Per Axbom
At which time you’re also discovering, because you’re evaluating and showing it.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes. And you’re also thinking maybe further ahead. Yeah it’s very chaotic, and it’s very, very circular. I said, very philosophical, this chat. But there’s a lot of aspects to what Dan was talking about that are really big challenges, I think, for us as designers, or UXer or whatever you want to call us. Things that we really do struggle with, not just throughout our discovery phases. The whole slow and fast that we mentioned, that we need to slow down. So we’ve got time to think and reflect as part of discovery.

Per Axbom
Yeah, definitely.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s something I feel a lot of the time, we were just really going too fast. But at the same time, you want to go fast. And there’s an expectation of going fast. And we’re talking all the time about agile and fail fast, fail often, those kinds of phrases, which encourages speed. So we have a quandary there, there’s kind of two opposing forces of nature that are kind of pulling us. And we’ve got to find the kind of Goldilocks spot in the middle.

Per Axbom
Yeah. it seems like speed is something that is encouraged and that people love to see and that you impose upon yourself as well. If we go fast, and we have this new technology, we need to try it out. Because we need to be first to market. And I like to say that direction is more important than pace. You need to slow down to discover that you are moving in the wrong direction.

So I mean, Dan was absolutely right, we need to get off the normal track to try out different things but you need to soon enough discover that we’re on the wrong path, to go back and go in the right direction again. So we need to slow down to discover those things but I don’t think that slowing down necessarily means that we’ve reached our endpoint, slower than if we had been speeding along all the time.

James Royal-Lawson
I think we’ve got the double diamond is actually quite useful. I think for this too, in thinking, in my experience, many times the discovery part of projects has been boiled down to a sprint minus one. Where it’s tacked on as a kind of a bit of time, just a week before you start developing, that’s just crazy. That’s like throwing yourself at the back of a moving bus and holding on for dear life. It does disrespect to the whole the whole work we do. But at the same time, you do need to support sprints, or you do need to support the Agile process.

But that’s you supporting the iterative development process, which would be part of the second diamond. Discovery, the discovery phase on a higher level is the first diamond and isn’t necessarily something you do in a week or two weeks or whatever, just before development sprint.

Per Axbom
And also I love what Dan said. It’s your obligation as a designer to tell other people, here’s what I need to deliver the best possible work. It’s great that you ask the developers what they need, so that you can deliver that to them. But do you also need to be explicit about this is what I need. So I need this time I need this, I need to go outside, I need his time for reflection, or whatever or I need to sit down with you and try out some ideas.

James Royal-Lawson
Yep. It’s all about communication, again. It’s not about the the artefacts that you produce. at the end of a discovery phase. It’s about being open about your communication needs and and also understanding, having the the feeling of what needs to be communicated and achieved amongst your developers or stakeholders.

Per Axbom
Exactly. That reminds me sometimes when I’ve done some artefact, I’ve done some sketches and people have looked at the design afterwards, what developers have produced and some people will say, ‘Well, that doesn’t look like the sketches.’ Like the testers will say that, and that’s because we haven’t communicated to the testers that the purpose of the sketch was not to be pixel perfect, but to actually communicate the idea of why are we producing this and along the way the developers can have ideas about a better way of achieving the same result without unnecessarily following the sketch bit by bit.

James Royal-Lawson
And that little story presumably meant you, you you missed including the testers at crucial moments in the process or earlier enough in the process.

Per Axbom
Exactly, yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Because if they’d been involved earlier on, then they would have understood your intention of what you’re trying to communicate with the artefacts so they wouldn’t need to question the differences.

Per Axbom
Yeah. The good thing about that is that we have standups so we only had one morning to clear everything up.

James Royal-Lawson
You see, that’s going fast with something that was produced slowly.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Knock knock.

James Royal-Lawson
Who’s there?

Per Axbom
Ice cream soda.

James Royal-Lawson
Ice Cream Soda who?

Per Axbom
I scream, so dat people will hear me.