Computer voice
UX podcast episode 287.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.

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

Per Axbom
And this is UX Podcast. We are in Stockholm, Sweden. And you’re listening to us all over the world, from Latvia to Switzerland. And this is the first of our shows in collaboration with Ambition Empower, where we record our interviews in front of a live audience made up of the… [stutters] Let me do that again… And this is the first of our shows in collaboration with Ambition Empower, where we record our interviews in front of a live audience made up of the Ambition Empower community.

James Royal-Lawson
Ambition Empower is a professional education programme. It’s directed towards design leaders and UX professionals interested in upping their game through a continuous learning journey that engages you in small chunks every week during your membership.

Per Axbom
Okay, and so this is the way it works. There are different tracks. There’s ‘Design and Product Leadership’ with Kim Goodwin, ‘AI Mastery’ with Chris Noessel, and ‘Behavioural Design’ with Susan Weinschenk, and ‘Design Ethics’ with Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
Who’s that?

Per Axbom
Yep, I have one of those tracks, actually. And there’s also now the track ‘UX Podcast.’ And you can follow as many tracks as you want. And there is new content every week from each track. And the leader of each track has a live session roughly once a month.

James Royal-Lawson
And you can read more about Ambition Empower by visiting uxpodcast.com/empower, E-M-P-O-W-E-R. And when you sign up, use the code “uxpodcast” for 1000 kronor off your yearly price, which is also about 100 euro or about 100 dollars. Just now it’s kind of nicely imbalanced between all these currencies.

Per Axbom
And the first person to be honored with this setup. Having a live audience is…

James Royal-Lawson
Joe MacLeod, previous podcast guest, author of “Ends” and “Endineering” and expert in designing endings.

We talked to Joe, almost exactly five years ago back in 2017, about how there’s the gap in consumer lifecycle that needs attention: the end.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And our relationship with Joe did not end five years ago, and neither did his thinking on this topic. And his new book is called “Endineering.”

Joe MacLeod
Hi, cool. Lovely to be here.

Per Axbom
So fun to see you.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah!

Per Axbom
It’s crazy. It’s been five years since we talked to you last.

Joe MacLeod
I know! And I didn’t realise that the last time we’d done it, I hadn’t even published the first book.

Per Axbom
Right.

Joe MacLeod
So, there was some resolution, I think from talking with you about like what I was going to write, I guess, but it must have been quite close to it being published. I guess.

James Royal-Lawson
It was March 2017…I think we sat down in your apartment and chatted.

Joe MacLeod
Oh, okay. Cool. So it was published in June 2017. So I guess I was polishing stuff off and getting it edited at around that time.

James Royal-Lawson
What I do know for sure is we didn’t get a preview version of the book to read.

Joe MacLeod
[Gasps] Oh, yeah. But you did this time, didn’t you?

James Royal-Lawson
[Chuckles] Yeah, this time we did.

Joe MacLeod
It was also quite a lot of learning for how to publish a book as well for me. So I was like fumbling around, like “How the hell do I do this” and stuff.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh yeah.

Joe MacLeod
Learning, like doing the physical book, then doing an e-book. And I’ve done an audio book, which all of them took up a lot of learning and how to distribute and how to tell people about it. So, yeah you learn a lot about just publishing books, I guess, then, and this time, it was a lot easier. So I know exactly what I’m doing. And sharing out was a lot easier as well.

James Royal-Lawson
We’re always, always learning all the time. But for people who maybe haven’t listened to the interview we did five years ago or repeated I think a year ago. How about just giving us a little recap of what we mean by ends or endings.

Joe MacLeod
So, I guess a little recap, a summarization of what we mean by endings is the consumer experience has a consumer lifecycle. The majority of our efforts as designers, developers, product creators goes into those first two quadrants which is onboarding – so sales, telling the story, marketing; and usage – so that’s interaction design, product development, product quality, etc. And then the last quadrant which is offboarding, which is the between the consumer feeling like that product has ended for them whether it’s being totally consumed or it’s not doing the service it was, and it being totally neutralised and recycled or other alternatives or recycling, like, you know, erasing all the digital assets out of it. We’re not designing that quadrant. So we’re talking about offboarding, which is between usage in the end. Hopefully, that was fairly good sort of summary of it?

James Royal-Lawson
Succinct. That was nice.

Joe MacLeod
Okay, good. We’re getting somewhere.

Per Axbom
And the problem is?… So in summary, what we also came up with last time, I think, when we talk to you is we realize that companies are doing this really bad. So there’s like an opportunity here, of course, to do something better.

Joe MacLeod
Yes.

Per Axbom
And in this book, you even started talking about, “Well, how can we, how can you measure the performance of the ending? How can we look at the return on investment of the ending as well?”…which is really nice to start getting these tools for understanding, there is an opportunity to do something better, but also to be a better company, by and large.

Joe MacLeod
So I think the first book I really dug into trying to give a bigger landscape of like, “Why are we having all these problems with consumerism?” So that can be climate change, plastics in the sea, mis-selling and financial services, or privacy and social networks. And the majority of our I think our discussion currently goes “that companies bad, that’s why this is bad.” And actually, I tried to reframe that in this in the first book to, there’s actually a big societal problem in terms of how we approach endings, and that relationship with long term consequence. So the first book is very much why we don’t do endings, and then that links it into consumerism. And then the second book is about how we need to design endings, so like a ‘how-to’ book so if you’re in product development, this is the book that you need to improve those sort of things.

Per Axbom
And you’ve even broken up endings into phases to work with. I love the concept of, for example, ‘the crack of doubt,’ which will be the first phase.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah, so in the…I guess I’ve been researching this for like, seven, eight years now. But as you go through the researching, and in the broader themes across both books, you come across different psychological things. And so the ‘crack of doubt’ comes from a woman called Helen Rose Ebaugh, and she used to be a nun. And she left the habit and she became a psychologist, and she was really interested in role exit. And that means a role can be a role at work or a role as a partner or like a romantic partner. And it can be a role as a parent, all sorts of roles we have in our life. And we feel comfortable in those roles until such a point that we start to feel like it’s not working for us. And Helen Rose Ebaugh called that ‘the crack of doubt.’ I think it’s such a great phrasing that I’ve sort of adopted that into the sequences. And now think the beginning of the end, is that sort of thing that Helen Rosa Ebaugh’s describing in her work around role exit is ‘the crack of doubt.’ And it makes a lot of sense, I think for the consumer experience as well.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, is it when you start doubting, do you start doubting from your own side of things? So like, doubting that, like, “This is right for me?” Or is it more doubting the products usefulness? I mean, you see what I mean? Like, which end are we coming from with the crack of doubt.

Joe MacLeod
It’s when you are currently in that relationship, that usage period, for example, that you might start feeling like, “This isn’t really for me, I’m feeling like this isn’t working.” So it’s, essentially it’s a very subconscious feeling. And part of that moving through the crack of doubt, to the next phase in the offboarding phases is ‘Acknowledge.’ And so it’s a subconscious thing…it’s very emotive, a good example is when you’re in a restaurant, it’s late at night, other tables have left, you’ve finished dessert, the wines finished, the conversation starts to slow. And then that’s the sort of crack of doubt, that vibe that “Maybe we should get the bill now.” And then you acknowledge it with getting the bill.

And the other thing is that I think a good example is when you’ve got a cupboard full of really old clothes that you never ever use…you sort of, you sort of know they’re there. And you know, you should sort of do something about it, but you never really acknowledge it and start going down that path of action. So it’s the sort of subconscious thing and she talks about it as this crack of doubt. And what happens in her examples is that you reinvestigate the crack, and then that crack opens up if you’ve confirmed that, “Oh, yeah, this is the end…this is the end coming,” and you sort of open up that crack. And then there’s a second rate phase of role exit that Helen Rose Ebaugh talks about, which is where the first phase is the ending happening and the second phase in terms of roles is seeking a new role. So what happens in role exit with Helen Rose Ebaugh is that you realise that your current role is broken. And the second phase is finding a new role. And it’s really interesting, it’s well worth looking at her work.

James Royal-Lawson
I think I mean, it’s also interesting, you mentioned you use the word ‘relationship’ as well just then, and the parallels with ending your relationship with a digital product, or even a product full stop, and our real life relationships now… that feeling… that crack of doubt that this relationship is working, and then acknowledging that your relationship is not working out and finding a new role post relationship, I guess.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah. And I think the first phases of the offboarding experience are quite emotive. So when you go from the ‘crack of doubt’ into ‘acknowledge’ you’re bringing forward something and starting to action it. And then after that, there’s a couple of other phases, which are a bit more tangible. So then you go into sort of more like visualising those phases. So you get to…

Per Axbom
Actioned.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah, so you go to action, that gets a lot more tangible then, and then observed – a lot more tangible, but then settled. And then ‘aftermath’ and ‘rebirth,’ which are the final two stages, they’re a lot more emotive as well. So you go into like a more reflective mode in the aftermath. Most aftermath periods in consumer experiences is quite raw emotionally. So that’s the time that people like just get really angry on TripAdvisor or, etc. And then there’s a the rebirth period, because when I was building these, I was thinking that I just got up to, I just got up to the aftermath period. And then I was reading around ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces” and the cycle of the hero’s journey. And when the hero comes back to normality, they realised that there actually hasn’t been much changed, they’ve changed, but actually around them, not much has changed. And there’s a point, after we leave something, where “How much benefit of we got out of it?” that there’s a sort of a really reflective period of rebirth, where you go, “I’m going to seek it again, I’m going to join it again and start to do that cycle again.” And I found that quite interesting. So there’s emotions, definitely within this sequence of off boarding, but there’s some other tangible points in it as well.

Per Axbom
I love how you frame that because when we’re saying it’s a relationship, when we’re talking about all these emotions, it becomes so evident that it can be also emotionally disturbing to make that decision to actually leave a service or whatever, you’re leaving – the ending. But then you would also expect the other part, the other party in relationship to also feel something. And that is what often happens that the other party, the party we’re buying something from, they don’t care, because once we’re gone, they’re not making any money from us. And all of a sudden, it’s almost like that relationship meant nothing to them.

Joe MacLeod
Absolutely. So what a big problem with I think the offboarding experience, those first two quadrants are very much a partnership between the consumer and the provider. And it’s always celebrated – that partnership, “Oh, you’re such a good customer to us. Why don’t you do this, and we’re so loyal to you.” And there’s this very bonding, relationship… Offboarding – the consumer tends to be abandoned, they tend to be almost blamed for some of the consequences of consumption. And they haven’t got the right mechanisms and instructional sort of content to do the right thing. So there’s many examples for all of us where we’re sort of abandoned and haven’t got an idea of what we want to do.

A good example is the amount of mobile phones we got in our drawers. So I can easily go out and be celebrated as a consumer with a wonderful partnership from a mobile phone company, or mobile phone producer. And the onboarding is great. The usage is great, but then the offboarding and when I get that new phone, “What do I do at the end?” and then I open up the drawer of my desk and put it in there and with the other five generations and mobile phones. Giffgaff done some research in the last couple of years in the UK; they reckon 55 million abandoned phones are just hanging around in people’s homes. That is mind blowing. And then they counted e-waste in homes and I think it was in London there was 13 bits of unused electronic products that people just don’t know what to do with at the end. So this is the problem space we’re in and especially with e-waste it is massive toxic problem space that we’re not even grappling nearly. And we’re not getting hold of this at all as a consumer experience.

James Royal-Lawson
I wonder how much… because the whole thing about like the feeling of guilt after relationships at the end of it, and what we’re talking about now where the business side of things kind of run away. And I guess brush themselves off from all the guilt. And then maybe we’re the ones that were left then with… if you do actually realise you’ve got all those phones, that’s when the feeling of guilt maybe kicks in. I mean, I don’t know, I’ve got a drawer down here, we’re at least I think five or six in.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah, and haven’t we all? Yeah, the feeling of guilt, I think is, and I in the first book, I talk a lot about different religions and how they approach consumerism – consumerism is very embedded in our relationship with heaven. So there’s a strong relationship between our life on Earth and our relationship with heaven, and that relationship with abundance. And we haven’t reckoned with that since our earthly presence has such massive abundance. So you get Buddhism, which is very counter to that and very much more reflective about how we grapple with abundance as it were. So when we think about managing that we don’t really have the tools. So when we think about guilt, we it’s not very actionable guilt, until you start putting things in place that people can do something around, we need to have instructional guidance, which is partnered with a provider to take us on that journey from usage to the end. So we can reclaim those assets, whether they be, you know, the sort of minerals and metals in the mobile phone or whether it’s about neutralising things coherently with the digital. I think there’s a lot to be said around how we manage that in a big, more sociological sense as well.

Per Axbom
That’s a perfect example of the opportunity, isn’t it? Because we have these mobile phones that we feel guilty that we have in our drawers. And so if we see the opportunity, then the companies themselves could actually be transparent about the fact that they know that we have these in our drawers, and offer us the possibility of “Let’s order this box, and you can put all your phones in it, and we’ll take care of it and you can follow their journey to reuse.” And that will make me feel much better. And there’ll be a perfect ending that will make me respect the company that much more.

Joe MacLeod
Exactly. So our maturity, I think with brand relationships now is so much better than it used to be too and we celebrate that onboarding usage. And brands are really delighted to be cozying up with the consumer having this strong partnership, that partnership and that brand equity is totally abandoned at the end as well. So doing things like what you’re just talking about here is really building that brand equity, keeping that in place. So irregardless of what the assets are in a physical sense, you’re keeping in place that very rich brand equity, that strong relationship that you can be partner with throughout the consumer lifecycle, and then potentially into a good ending, which both parties feel collaborative, it’s under control, it’s a conversation. And also, it celebrates the potential of obviously having another relationship with that brand.

James Royal-Lawson
I really liked actually in the book where you brought up the whole idea of ends at the beginnings, ends at onboarding…

Joe MacLeod
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
The importance of fronting with the end, which sounds really odd when you when you’re saying it like that, you know, begin with the end.

Joe MacLeod
So I’ve come to a realisation that we can do so much more with thinking about this aspect of the consumer lifecycle. So thinking about the end, at the beginning, you can start thinking about how, for example, the transaction model at the beginning, we have broadly like five different transaction models: payment before delivery, payment after delivery, continuous observation, for example, or a synchronous payment or sheduled payment, which is like subscription models. And some of those really load a bad ending. So for example, if you pay before an experience has happened, the consumer has no leverage because you as a consumer have already given up the money. But if you pay after the delivery, then the consumer has loads of leverage. And going back to the restaurant example, you have loads of leverage, if you haven’t paid yet, then you’ve got a discussion, an open discussion. Why restaurants are so good at services when they’ve got these… they’re quite comfortable to hear feedback, and they’re always asking for feedback: “How’s the meal? How’s the wine? Did you like this?” And they’re always open for that discussion because, you know, the end is going to benefit them in terms of knowledge and potentially financially.

James Royal-Lawson
I think you point out as well, Joe, the difference in…yeah, so…Yeah, exactly, that willingness of wanting to pay before. Another example was a washing machine, wasn’t it? That with white goods, the goods that you have the utility of the home, just washing machines and so on, then you loath to pay for them.

Joe MacLeod
So what was that?

James Royal-Lawson
So you’d loath to pay for…you really don’t want to pay for the washing machine because it’s like something you just have to have and use in the future.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah, there’s, I can’t remember the people who’ve done the research, but there’s things that we like paying for, like holidays, because we see like that as a celebration. And there’s utility things that we don’t like paying for, like washing machines. And the researchers were talking about how Apple when they brought out the very colourful computers, desktop computers, it sort of bridged this gap between utility and fun. And it’s sort of twisted that relationship between payment and the long term consequences of that payment, as well.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s for the perception of the of the thing you’re buying.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the…yeah, the onboarding can really frame those relationships for offboarding. And a really good example is terms and conditions like the the gravity of ticking the box of terms and conditions has no, there’s no elements and graphic elements around that, that gives the impression of the gravity of ticking that box. And then you’re into this, the last sort of quadrant of transaction models, which is continuous observation. And it’s very hard to realise the continuous observation in the density of the terms and conditions, it’s not really revealed as a, as a consumer experience, like you’re going to be continuously observed, isn’t really said so neatly, yet you are and that goes on and on forever. And even ending that relationship is very, very foggy, unlike different transaction models that end very clearly like payment after delivery.

Per Axbom
I think what some people who want to get into the space and understand why we should be doing better offboarding and better endings. I think the example with 3 Denmark is so spot on. Because I think people are afraid if we make it too easy to quit and leave and cancel the account or whatever, the more people are going to do it. And we’re 3 Denmark, it really proved that is not the case.

Joe MacLeod
Oh, totally. I hear this all the time. So many businesses think like if I make it easier to leave then people are going to just fall out of the relationship, I think that’s such a…and it really comes from I think, I think I have no backup to this… I think it comes from years ago when we used to go out and do hard manual sales. So you would go physically somewhere to sell something. And then you would make loads of personal effort as a salesperson to make that sale, and then you keep that relationship going. So you’d want to keep them very actively inside the relationship. We have digitised loads of onboarding and usage period. And to the point where no one’s actually present physically in that space. So,essentially, in terms of human power, it’s very minimal. For offboarding, we’ve still got this crazy, human element into it. So loads and loads of companies have humans on the phones to talk you out of leaving.

And so one of the things in the 3 DK example was from the customer services team, they said we’ve got loads of other things in place that we’ve made minimising improvements in the product offering from 3 Denmark. But we need to resolve this thing around talking, endlessly hours, talking people around from leaving, all of these people have, you know, very valid reasons to leave this company or any company. And what’s interesting in that space is that we digitise the onboarding usage period, but we’re we’re still manually operating the ending. Digitising the ending and making it… it’s easy to come into the relationship and leave the relationship won’t result in more people leaving it will improve your brand offering and improve your product offering.

James Royal-Lawson
So, I think like we’ve talked about, or we’ve listed the seven different phases of the, of endings, and we’ve now touched on some of the different types of ending. I think you’ve described nine different types of ending in the book.

Joe MacLeod
I think it’s eight.

James Royal-Lawson
Is it eight? Okay, yeah, maybe miscounted.

Joe MacLeod
So, time-out ending, exhaustion/credit-out, task of incompletion, broken/withdrawal, lingering ending, proximity ending, a cultural ending, and the competition ending.

James Royal-Lawson
That was 9. [Laughs]

Joe MacLeod
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Some of them have two words in them so…

Per Axbom
I thought it was interesting… I reflected on the cover of the book. You mentioned also customer burnout as one of them really.

Joe MacLeod
That’s the WIRED quote, isn’t it?

Per Axbom
Yeah, it probably fits into one of these. But that one was interesting to me because it really touches on this aspect of sometimes you just can’t keep going for for some reason that could be unrelated to whatever service or product you’re offering, which is interesting and you have to be aware of that. And that’s a problem when you realize that people are making it harder for people to end the relationship when they could be going through so many other things, that they really need to end the relationship because they need it for their own well being and health.

Joe MacLeod
Absolutely, you hear this on like cable, I had some terrible ones from cable companies who will sell people the extra package. So I heard of a story where this elderly gentleman was trying to undo his contract with a massive cable company. And instead he was sold the movie channels and sports, the biggest sports package and increased his burden. And he was trying to leave there to save money. And instead he went in and because they’re professional salespeople at the end of these relationships, it’s massively irresponsible some of the things that fall out of that. So there’s an ethics thing around some of these relationships where we don’t let people leave is I think, horrifying mis-selling, but it isn’t considered that because they’re already customers.

James Royal-Lawson
And that’s, that’s the one… I think that type of ending – the not allowed to leave – is the one that you think of or I think of first and foremost when we’re talking about this, but your list of types of ending. And I realised where I went wrong in my counting, I had ‘exhaustion’ and ‘out of credit’ as two separate ones. But when you look at these different examples, and you realise that, yeah, if I’ve run out of gems in a game or whatever, then the game effectively comes to an end the death because I haven’t bothered a top it back up, or your example of you’ve done a fixed subscription, you’ve bought something like a magazine for 12 months, if I don’t do anything, it just fades away. So a lot of these ones, I’ve realised looking around me this, there’s a lot of ends that are fades more than ends, they’ve kind of disappeared into the background.

Joe MacLeod
So that’s the one of the reasons like that lingering one is in there, in physical products, and where you can have it in all sorts of products. So it’s that lingering one, which in the foreground, consciously, you think you’ve ended it. In fact, you haven’t really consciously ended it, you’ve just forgotten about it. So you forget about subscriptions, software subscriptions, or like magazine subscriptions. But you also forget about clothes in the cupboard. So these things are out of sight. So a good way to look at those and talk about the invisibility of things is, if you think about a chair, for example, the physicality of that, even if I’m not liking the chair, and I want to get rid of the chair, it’s still in my house, it has physical assets. And it’s going to be very apparent to me, because I walk past it all the time. So physical world assets don’t tend to linger so much until we buy some off site storage and put it in off site storage.

Then we’ve got things like subscription assets, and they sort of drift below the visibility line into, they sort of forget about them, and then they pop up in your bank statement. And it’s a cliche that people are like, “And then I didn’t, I didn’t see the subscription I’ve been paying for ages until I looked at my bank statement.” And that’s a sort of cliche, but that’s sort of monthly that pops up that visibility, then you have in a digital sense, when we leave, like delete an app, and it’s still churning away data in the background. I’ve really only got access to have a observation of that when I’ve got the app and I dig into settings and I see what’s going on. So you only have very periodicals sort of like when I’ve got access to it. And then there’s a whole load of other invisibility things behind the scenes that are way out of our visibility. And that’s the sort of, especially in digital, those assets are really far away. But they’re sort of getting linked together by marketing companies in the background into a sort of, sort of a shadow world as it were, and then you’re getting sent marketing material, etc, etc.

James Royal-Lawson
So, I’m wondering now as a UX designer, and my company has understood that this something needs to be done with ends and endings. And now I’ve got from you, John, I’ve got what seven different phases and I’ve got eight different types.

Joe MacLeod
That’s right. That’s right, James. [Laughter]

James Royal-Lawson
How much of this do I need to actively design? And then the follow on question from that, of course, is how the hell do I do it?

Joe MacLeod
So over the period of, well talking to you guys over the period of like years, and my engagement with the community and sharing points about endings, I think the first few years and I’ve been sharing the theme. So the first step for anyone who’s listening to this is to start thinking, “Oh, yeah, I need to sort of think about designing endings as well.” So becoming aware of the need. The second step is like starting to think about what things you can do. So you can start looking at your product in terms of endings, that’s a massive step, just acknowledging and thinking, “Ah, how does it end?” Most of the time it’s like, “Oh, my God, we haven’t even thought about it at all.” So then you can start…

Per Axbom
I have to say, when when you wrote that you have these steps that you can go through… when you wrote that, just that question, “how does your product end now?” that was like an Aha! moment for me. “Wow. So rarely do I think about that question.”

James Royal-Lawson
And also that we’ve just mentioned with different types, that the ending doesn’t necessarily mean…doesn’t have to be the catastrophic end.

Joe MacLeod
No, no.

James Royal-Lawson
Just these kind of like moments within the use that become endings in themselves micro endings.

Joe MacLeod
So that’s a really good point to remember that endings are talked about only in the context of competition and competition is aggressive and competitive. And so when you look at those eight types of endings, competition is in there. You’ll be very comfortable in your business talking about “Oh our competitor’s done this, the competitor’s done that.” And one day, you know, a lot of your customers might go off to that competitor. Businesses love talking about that, that’s the only thing they like talking about in terms of endings. All of these other endings that you can look at in your product experience and the consumer experience really need designing around.

So these are the steps, then you recognise that endings exist, you recognise and start observing them in your own product. And then using the systems and tools start thinking about, “Okay, how would we start to build an ending – a better ending – for this product.” And a good place to start is, and it was very interesting in the 3 Denmark thing, because it was one of the core stepping stones, they made the leap to do it. They recognised in their brand, that the onboarding and brands have all of these components in which they’re like, “We’re transparent, we’re honest, we’re authentic.” And they realised that none of those applied to the end of the customer lifecycle. So they looked at transparent and they realised that “We weren’t transparent at the end.” And now they feel they really are.

So look at your brand equity, look at your brand, generally, and think about what would the brand offering be at an offboarding experience? Would it be transparent? Would it be this? Would it be that? And it’s well worth starting it from that storyline, that emotional hook, because it is an emotional experience at the end, as it is the beginning and you want to even that up. And then you can start looking into like, “Okay, so where’s the critical points? Where’s the worst bumps for the consumer?” And then I would start there and think about “What’s our purpose in this? Do we, as a physical company, need to reclaim the assets? Send out packs so that they can send them directly back to our manufacturing house?” or, you know… And if you’re digital, how do you delete the evidence or the data of the consumer, etc? So there’s points where, so I wouldn’t try and like go “Excellent, let’s do these massive leaps!” I would start with simple things like “How do we currently end things?”

Per Axbom
And that’s the key isn’t it, start with the small steps. And when you realize that’s working, and you actually benefit from it as a business, then you can go on, then you gain trust with organization and you can go on and do the other things as well.

Joe MacLeod
And it’s the point that I make in the return on investment thing is that you don’t jump into this, think about it in bite sized pieces, because you can spend a lot of money doing the wrong things on any design. So design it out first.

James Royal-Lawson
And I guess the knee jerk response usually is to try and persuade someone to stay or persuade someone away from an ending.

Joe MacLeod
I think that’s actually a good point there, James, is try to stop doing that because everything ends and acknowledge that it ends. Don’t think “This is a new beginning.” When I do training and stuff, there’s so many people in the room, but “and this ends in in the new beginning, and this ends in another sale.” And it’s actually quite a leap for most people to go, “Oh, wait a minute, this is an ending, not another sale. We know how to do sales. We’ve done that for zillions of years.” Well, not maybe that long, but a good amount of time since the Industrial Revolution.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the whole thing where you kind of like you automatically want to save it. If we just if we just put this text there or that button there. We can stop them.

Joe MacLeod
Exactly. Exactly.

Per Axbom
And I feel that’s what the both of you are doing right now as I’m trying to end the interview.

Joe MacLeod
Yeah. [Laughter] But I don’t want it to end.

Per Axbom
Thank you so much, Joe, for being with us again.

Joe MacLeod
Thanks ever so much. It is a delight. As always.

James Royal-Lawson
At the end of our interview with Joe, we got a lot of questions from the audience. And looking at the questions we got, the majority of them, actually, in some way or another, were about measuring. You know, whether it’s the kind of measuring the financial benefit of doing better endings, or whether it’s the kind of return on investment of doing better endings. There was there was multiple questions all roughly around the same thing. Show me the money kind of, I guess.

Per Axbom
Yeah, I mean I think Joe did a did a good job of responding to those. But again, people kept coming back to, but what is the specific number? How much money is there to gain from designing a better ending? And from my perspective, I mean it’s difficult, because that’s also saying it’s more profitable to do the bad thing. So I should keep doing the bad thing, as if there’s only an incentive based on a financial figure that can make you do the right thing.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, a directly visible figure, I mean, we can make the same comparison with the ROI of accessibility, or ultimately, the ROI of UX, right? I mean, how much is worth doing a good thing. But with that said, I mean, Joe, in his book, he does talk about businesses being trapped in single engagement models.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
That there is this kind of business cycle. And you’re working people organisations through the cycle, and the focus is on that cycle. What Joe is working on here is trying to get a cultural shift to happen in organisations. So they move beyond the one cycle approach, and start to realise that these cycles, you can loop in and out over decades, over people’s entire lifetimes, not just the product lifetime.

Per Axbom
Yeah, and I think that he also kills some preconceptions about about endings as well, which means that there’s… I mean there are alternative costs that organizations have around putting money and time and effort into creating those difficult endings, preventing people from leaving easily. But when you take those barriers away, people actually don’t leave, as long as you have a good product, which means that you’re, you’re spending a lot of money on the wrong thing. Potentially.

James Royal-Lawson
Potentially, yeah. Kind of as always, money in the right place. What’s the right place? Well, I think there’s some quite obvious recommended listening after this one. It’s of course, Episode #272 “Onboarding” with Krystal Higgins. I think we actually had Joe’s episode as recommended listening at the end of her episode.

Per Axbom
Right.

James Royal-Lawson
Makes perfect sense that you have been beginning and ends linked through the recommendation of recommending to listen to the other one.

Per Axbom
And the previous Joe MacLeod interview of course is the other recommend listening “The Ends” episode.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes. Which is #258 because we repeated that as 258.

Per Axbom
If you want to join the Ambition Empower programme, use the code “uxpodcast” when you sign up at uxpodcast.com forward slash empower. And remember to keep moving,

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

How many letters are in the alphabet?

Per Axbom
I don’t know. James, how many letters are in the alphabet?

James Royal-Lawson
Eleven.