A transcript of Episode 205 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Jonas Söderström discuss three articles they’ve recently read – Are you an evil genius? How dishonesty can make you more creative, It’s never a good time to do research, and Research questions are not interview questions.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tomasz Koper.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX Podcast, episode 205.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Hello, and welcome to UX Podcast, coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts – James Royal-Lawson.
Jonas Söderström
And Jonas Söderström.
James Royal-Lawson
We have listeners in 182 countries from Barbados to Bahrain.
Jonas Söderström
And today is a link show…
James Royal-Lawson
And a link show, for those of you, perhaps including Jonas, that don’t know what a link show is, it’s when we’ve scram… scavenge the whole of the internet for interesting articles and we found a couple, in this case three, this week, this time, that we think are interesting and would like to share with you and talk about. The first of these articles is going to be “Are you an evil genius? How dishonesty can make you more creative” by Dr. Julia Shaw.
Jonas Söderström
Yeah. And then we have a set of two articles by Erika Hall, who is @mulegirl on Twitter. And the articles are “It’s Never a Good Time to Do Research” and, couple of that, also “Research Questions Are Not Interview Questions”.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
So Are you an evil genius? How dishonesty can make you more creative by Dr. Julia Shaw who is @drjuliashaw on Twitter, doctor as in “Dr” Julia Shaw. Now, this is an article that’s on The Guardian. Actually, it was, it’s actually in The Observer, which doesn’t really make any sense now in digital world because they’re all on the The Guardian website, but in the printed world they print a different paper and so they call it The Observer, which I seem to have now managed to reinforce, once again in the digital world.
Jonas Söderström
Very confusing.
James Royal-Lawson
Very confusing and quite unnecessary. But, anyway, Julia Shaw. I’ll read you a little bit from the article. “We tend to think evil is something that other people are. We think of ourselves as “good people”, and even when we do morally reprehensible things, we understand the context of our decisions. With others, however, it is far easier to write them off. If their actions deviate substantially from what we consider acceptable, we may label them evil. Although there may be differences between those who do “bad” things and those who don’t, these are not fundamental.
Acknowledging the similarities between all of us can be far more useful than aggressively highlighting the differences”. So what Julia’s trying to say here now is that we’ve got this, well, we’ve got to scale that we’ve got ‘evil’, as deviation from what’s socially acceptable. And this is typically referred to as deviation – evil is deviation from social norms. So we’re formal deviants would be the violation of laws like murder or assault, and so on. Whereas informal deviance would be a violation of just social norms like lying.
Jonas Söderström
Or you might say she’s stretching the word ‘evil’ here, but that’s more or less what she says because she says, and I like this -” the word evil is insufficient – there are no simple explanations for why humans do bad things: instead there are many, and they are all marvellously nuanced”.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Jonas Söderström
Which is true. She has a point about challenging social norms, of course. But the interesting thing is actually what I think you also described, there was the experiment that she talks about here, which is called “Evil Genius” (the research paper).
James Royal-Lawson
Yes, “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead To Greater Creativity”, published in 2014 by behavioral scientists Francesca Gino and Scott S. Wiltermuth. Before I dive into that, though, it was interesting that she starts off by saying, well, that deviating on norms make us villains, on the evil side of things, but also make us heroes.
And she gives an example which I think is good to frame the research, an example of a child – “If a child notices another child being bullied in school, they deviate from social pressures, when they stand up for that child being bullied. So it’s a form of social deviation, but it makes that child doing that deviation a hero”.
Jonas Söderström
You might call that a benevolent genius – the child.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So this research, how was done, is they wanted to examine whether people who behave unethically in one task are then more creative than others on a subsequent task. Julia explains that this research was repeated five times, I think it was five studies, and they found the same thing that participants who cheated in the first task then went on to do better in the creativity task.
Jonas Söderström
Well it’s quite normal, all natural, actually. Because to lie you have to be creative or to cheat you have to be creative, because you’re making something up. Just following the rules is, of course, not creative. At first, it might seem counterintuitive, but when you think of it, it really makes sense. In a way.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. We’re constantly in, like, all these workshops and team building sessions, where we’ve been encouraged to think outside the box and be innovative and, you know, to be creative, to think of new things you do have to break away from what is already established. And, you know, so creativity is absolutely a deviation.
And Julia mentioned, she talks about how we’ve created some wonderful things with deviation for creativity, innovation, like modern medicine and cures. We’ve created plenty of things that help do good. But on the other side, we’ve also created things like nerve agents and nuclear weapons, where we’ve used our creativity to end up with a less positive results.
Jonas Söderström
You naturally come to think of Steve Jobs, of course, and you’d come to think of ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’ quote. And I know people that say that Steve Jobs actually was a bit crazy. And probably a bit evil. He certainly crossed the number of lines, dealing with family and dealing with co-workers. And someone also told me that ‘Well, I would never work with Steve Jobs, but if that’s what it takes, his deviation or his crossing lines, if that is what it takes to create a decent computer, I’m happy with that’.
James Royal-Lawson
That’s interesting itself, because it implies like a normalization of the situation. So you don’t feel deviating by being part of it. It’s acceptance. But I think that for me, this is what’s fascinating about the article and implies that as creators we are constantly working in this zone, where both divergence and creativity are conflicting so that there’s a good side and a bad side, we got dark side.
Jonas Söderström
The grey area.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Jonas Söderström
The Twilight Zone.
James Royal-Lawson
Twilight Zone. But that’s the thing – as creatives or designers – where is the line? And I think if we look at the evidence around us in recent years about start-ups and so on and some of the bigger, current internet giants, that we’ve got an issue of ethics.
Jonas Söderström
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
And how these big, modern start-ups have struggled with the ethical side of things. And so clearly, we’re not great at recognising where the line is, where our divergence to be creative suddenly morphs into, or eventually morphs into, a divergent studies of evil. That is not good.
Jonas Söderström
Well as well as, well, I have been working with the gambling industry and when I worked with them I told myself that working with sports betting is okay, that it is reasonably fair sort of betting but I won’t go into casinos, I won’t go into poker. So I tried to draw that line. But in any case, I was in workshop with another guy who also worked with the gambling company. He was Irish. And he said at a workshop that “When I took this job I accepted I was going to hell”. And he looked at me and said “And so are you”.
James Royal-Lawson
The line was drawn quite clearly in the sand.
Jonas Söderström
Yes. Eventually, I quit, because I felt like couldn’t really defend working in that business.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s a choice. I mean, we all know people that have worked with those industries that are kind of, maybe, generally frowned upon. I wouldn’t say evil, but maybe it depends on your viewpoint, but people do still work with them and maybe this in part explains it that, you know, you will think it’s better to be part of it. And then maybe you can kind of alter it from within, you don’t think it’s beyond salvation, maybe.
Jonas Söderström
Perhaps, perhaps. There was a panel discussion at the AI Summit a couple of years ago in San Francisco, I think, with people who had worked with websites of certain kinds. As I recall, most of them either had sort of stumbled into it and started working on the website, and then suddenly realized “this is not just a tourist website, this is an escort service”.
Or someone who realized that “this is not what I consider ethical, but I need to put food on the table for my kids”. Which is what we do as humans, of course, we try to get a living at some time. I don’t remember anyone talking about going into those areas and trying to change anything. But might be.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, something else I’ve recalled from a few conferences in recent years or meet-ups and so on, is that there’s been a lot more of these improv sessions, where people are practicing or encouraged to do improvisation as a way of improving their design skills or creativity. And that fits in exactly into this scale or pattern that Julia is describing – that we need to practice lying, or faking, or being another character.
Jonas Söderström
Roleplay.
James Royal-Lawson
Roleplay to be more creative. Which I think does sound excellent. But I think obviously it is a real challenge – recognizing when we’re just flexing a muscle to keep us fit and when we’ve done that human thing of blocking out the truth to make something acceptable, that perhaps isn’t at all acceptable.
I think at the end of Julia’s article, she’s actually written a book called “Making evil”, I guess these tips [at the end of the article] on how to be more creative are from the book or connected to the book. So perhaps I can read the three tips, but I won’t judge them. I’ll see whether lay that for you all to judge and see whether they’re useful. First tip: Free yourself from the concept of evil – all people, including you are capable of great harm.
Deviate from what the rest of the world is saying and avoid dehumanizing others. Second tip: Realize that to be creative is to be deviant. Unfettered thinking is important, but reapply your mortality when you turn your ideas into action. Third tip: Harness your inner hero. Internalizing the realization that you too can be a hero makes it more likely that you will use your deviant power to help others.
Jonas Söderström
I think the core of this, the most important part here, is to avoid dehumanizing others, because that’s when you turn a deviation or just some challenging of social norm into something truly evil, when you dehumanize and that is the line.
James Royal-Lawson
You’re absolutely right, Jonas, that’s the point where you’ve blinkered yourself to what is actually going on, you’ve dehumanized the situation. Completely correct. So that’s something also you need to practice, I think, as well as improvisation, practice, learning or understanding where does dehumanizing lines are in your work? Yeah.
[Music]
Jonas Söderström
So the second, well actually the set of two articles that we’re going to discuss are two articles by Erika Hall -@mulegirl, and the first one is called, It’s Never a Good Time to Do Research – Which Is Why You Should Be Doing Research All The Time. And the second one, which is related to the first one, obviously, is called Research Questions Are Not Interview Questions.
And I really like the first one, the “It’s Never a Good Time to Do Research – Which Is Why You Should Be Doing Research All The Time”, because she lists there a number of excuses that we’ve all heard in projects or in organization, the reasons for not to doing research, the reason for not finding out what the user actually wants. I know, it’s a wonderful list, a short list, but it’s a wonderful list.
Like “we are a data driven organization” and “we are a delivery-driven organization” or “real-world knowledge is irrelevant to our blue ocean/blue sky/blue moon/blue cheese opportunities”. And of course, the classic – “we don’t have time, we don’t have money”. And finally – “we are freakin’ geniuses”.
James Royal-Lawson
You gotta love that last one. I think the second paragraph of the article is really, really quite good: “Like most myths”, because she says that the right time to research is a myth, “this contains a truth about human nature. The truth is, people tend to procrastinate and avoid activities that make them anxious in favor of those that deliver immediate satisfaction, and then justify their behavior with excuses after the fact”.
Jonas Söderström
I also love the sentence just after that which says, and this relates to our previous discussion, “people are amazing at coming up with excuses. This is the best evidence that every human is born a Creative Problem Solver”. Which is exactly what we talked about-
James Royal-Lawson
We’re deviants.
Jonas Söderström
Yes, finding excuses, inventing excuses. But it’s interesting, what she says, about people being anxious, because I often find that even colleagues, Junior UX colleagues are sometimes afraid of asking questions. And I think they’re afraid of it is interview and use this I think they are afraid of showing that they don’t know everything, that they don’t know everything about the subject or the context of the user that they supposed to investigate.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, well, this is strange in some way because we’re constantly doing research in our daily lives, as Erika says in the article, and, you know, these are I start basic human thing about thinking of a question, gathering evidence and consider what it means – that’s what we are, we’ve been doing that for all time, you know, looking at what’s around you and then trying to weight up and then deciding whether it’s going to eat me or whether I’m going to eat it.
Jonas Söderström
She has these examples of “you people won’t go out and invest two hours and 15 bucks to see a movie without doing research”. That’s very true.
James Royal-Lawson
And I love the example she gives of buying a car that you would never, kind of, set-off buying a car and not talk to anyone who’d recently bought a car, read any reviews or anything or considered how to use a car in real world situations. Or then maybe perhaps you could run a 10 question survey about cars. And whoever volunteered to answer or got incentive on a follow-up would answer it.
And then maybe you could do that only one Sunday per month before you bought your car. I mean, it’s ridiculous. You would never invest that much money personally and an object like a car without doing your research. But yet, as you said that we have organizations that are willing to spend millions of dollars and thousands of man hours of developments on guesswork.
Jonas Söderström
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
Which is absolutely bizarre.
Jonas Söderström
And actually the list she gives of excuses that is the list of excuses for not doing UX at all, not doing design at all or not doing user-centered development at all. Constantly we get these excuses in an organization and projects.
Now I often thought that I would, I should collect such a list and also give examples of consequences organizations had that just said “we don’t have money” or “we don’t have time” and give examples of the messes they have found themselves in after ignoring the things we know are good and relevant, ignoring user research activities that we bring into project.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Like a little playbook of ways to respond to all these-
Jonas Söderström
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
-situations. Yeah. So, I think she said: “As long as you treat research as a special, inessential activity, you will never find time for it”.
Jonas Söderström
No, of course. We should do it all the time, not only as a prestudy, we should do it all during the entire development process. Of course, as we know, it’s hard sometimes to get that.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Jonas Söderström
But asking questions is stigmatized in our society, one of my favorite people is Richard Saul Wurman who coined the term ‘information architecture’ as far as I know. And he’s pointed out that, for example, in school, we are rewarded for having the answer not for asking a question. So it’s very early, we are sort of told not to ask questions. There’s a wonderful story about a physicist, Isaac Rabi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1944. He discovered this thing, nuclear magnetic resonance, which is what you have in MRI scanners today.
James Royal-Lawson
Mmm, Okay.
Jonas Söderström
And he won the Nobel Prize for that. He was once asked “Why did you become a scientist rather than a lawyer, a businessman, like all the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood? (He grew up in Brooklyn in the early 20th century).
And his answer was: “My mother made me a scientist, without even ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask a child after school: “So did you learn anything today?” “But not my mother”, said Dr. Rabi, “She always asked me a different question. Izzey – she said – did you ask a good question today? That difference, asking good questions, made me become a scientist”.
James Royal-Lawson
She’s excellent. I mean, yeah. That’s one thing now I do it myself – ask the kids what they have learned today, and I should really ask them about the questions. So I’ll do that when I see them today. But that leads us excellently into the second of Erika’s articles.
Jonas Söderström
Yes. Which is called “Research Questions Are Not Interview Questions”. And she highlights here the difference between knowing what you want to know, what you want to find out, and how to phrase it. So the difference here is a good research question is “How do families with school age children decide how to spend money on vacations?”.
That’s what we want to know but that’s not what you ask the family when you find it. You don’t ask them “How do you decide to spend your money on vacation?”. What you ask them is something like “Could you walk me through your last vacation from planning until when you arrived back home?”
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so the research question is the direct question the actual thing you need to answer. The interview questions are probing, they’re not direct. They’re trying to surface information from the person you’re talking to.
Jonas Söderström
Yeah, this is such an interesting subject because there’s so many things that you should not ask your subjects when you do your research. I never asked “Would you like a website?” or “Would you like an app or something with these features?”. That’s out of the question, because that’s like asking someone “Would you like a box of candy?”. Of course they will say ‘yes’ to almost anything.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, yeah, the whole thing about, you know, we’ve kind of used to asking questions. I think generally we are very inquisitive. And we understand this is how we do things. But in business context, or ecosystem or article, this natural asking your questions seems to short-circuit in the business context. And everyone is so worried about whether they’re looking smart in front of each other and colleagues and you mentioned this, just at the start of the other Erika article. Why are we all so worried about looking smart in front of each other?
Jonas Söderström
Yeah, that’s a deep question. I’ll turn to Richard Saul Wurman, again, because he also has told a story about when he started sort of his first job or something like that. And he was really junior and inexperienced so decided “I need to learn”. So he promised himself to ask every time he didn’t understand something. And he writes that “This made me a very unpopular person, my career – miserable”.
James Royal-Lawson
Right, I mean, that’s true, isn’t it? That you got that feeling about asking too many questions, and we’re put into a lot of situations, where, you know, we, I think, as designers, we’re hunting for the answers all the time anyways – when we’re doing maybe interaction design, that you’re looking for those ready-made patterns that are guaranteed to work, we’re kind of told by managers and so on to look for quick solutions or cheap solutions.
So it forces us to look for pre-med answers, rather than dare to question because I think that’s important – that we need to not only stop worrying about being smart in front of each other, ask questions, but also be willing to question our own knowledge.
Jonas Söderström
Yes, question our assumptions. And I mean, as a experienced designer, experienced researcher, you always risk to recognize a pattern or think that you recognize the pattern, think that you recognize an answer and say “Oh, this is that kind of thing, isn’t it?” and not drill down deep enough. We always have to question our assumptions, don’t we?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Jonas Söderström
That’s amazing.
James Royal-Lawson
And also we both knew of what long enough to know that, you know, even something that we’re almost completely certain is going to work, you end up seeing a time where it really doesn’t. And it surprises you and after a while you get used to the fact that these things surprise you, because they do happen all the time, things are never hundred percent certain to be what you think.
Jonas Söderström
So that’s when you have to embrace your ignorance. And that’s what I tell the junior UXs also, when they are sort of afraid of exposing their ignorance, that you shouldn’t be afraid of that. Just show your curiosity because people will not be angry at you. You think they will be angry at you because you don’t know exactly what they’re talking about. Just display your honest curiosity and ask them: “Tell me more, explain more. I don’t know anything about this”, “I draw on my deep well of ignorance” as I think Alan Cooper said it – which is a wonderful, wonderful picture.
James Royal-Lawson
That ties into another quote from Erika’s article: “Organizations are the social context in which designer and product decision making happens. If you don’t understand how people make decisions in your organization, you will never be able to influence them.
Jonas Söderström
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So back to that daring to ask questions. And your quote you had about someone being in pain at work, because we’re asking so many questions, that’s something you do need to be aware of. Back again to deviation and social norms. I mean you’ve got to learn how you can question or in what ways you can present questions and understand your organization in order to influence it and get things to happen, the correct things to happen.
Jonas Söderström
Yeah. But it’s… I collect these stories about research and the value of it just to make sure that you can get people to understand how important it is. My favorite one is from the school teachers, it’s a blog post -it will be in the links – where she said, or she write: “I have made a terrible mistake, I waited 14 years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching – shadow a student for a day. it was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of 10 things.”
That is, I mean, as a teacher you have these assumptions that you know about students, of course, and about the subject. But just shadowing a student for a day put so many assumptions on their head. That’s such a beautiful piece and I show that to people when I try to explain the value of research and the value of asking questions and the open questions and questioning your assumptions, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I think what Jared Spools calls, well, that’s the phrase, ‘Exposure Hours’ – how many hours you observe or are in contact with the people using the products you make every month? And things generally get better the more exposure hours you have.
Jonas Söderström
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Because it creates more empathy and understanding and awareness of what’s going on out there.
James Royal-Lawson
Please subscribe to the show if you don’t already. Our entire collection of episodes are available on Spotify, and on uxpodcast.com. A good show to listen to next, well, that could well be Episode 194 – “Research on the fly” with Cyd Harrell.
Jonas Söderström
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
And see you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Knock knock.
Jonas Söderström
Who’s there?
James Royal-Lawson
Butch, Jimmy and Joe.
Jonas Söderström
Butch, Jimmy and Joe who?
James Royal-Lawson
Butch your arms around me, Jimmy me a kiss and let’s Joe!
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Jonas Söderström. Recorded in February 2019 and published as Episode 205 of UX Podcast.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tomasz Koper.