A transcript of S02E02 (312) of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Torrey Podmajersky to discuss getting our words to work and uncovering the right context.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Cristian Pavel.
Transcript
Computer voice
Season two, episode two.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to us Podcast coming to you from Stockholm Sweden.
Per Axbom
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge for over a decade.
James Royal-Lawson
We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson,
Per Axbom
And Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
We have listeners in countries and territories all over the world from Estonia, to Madagascar. Today’s interview was recorded at From Business to Buttons, which is a conference that is held every year here in Stockholm, Sweden.
Per Axbom
And we are talking with Torrey Podmajersky, who helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has written inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft. And she speaks, teaches and mentors UX folks worldwide.
James Royal-Lawson
He’s also the author of the book “Strategic content for UX, drive engagement, conversion, and retention with every word”.
Per Axbom
You can visit TorreyPodmajersky.com, to get in touch with Torrey, read more from her and about her, find info on her workshops and classes and of course, a link to ordering her book.
Per Axbom
So Torrey, there’s one thing that was a huge takeaway for me, because it’s something I complain about so much. And that is, like content management systems and those big tools that we have. And they’re not really flexible at all. And you had an example where you said, “The only thing we could do with the software was change the text”.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah.
Per Axbom
And so, that is what you have the power over, and it is powerful.
Torrey Podmajersky
It’s incredibly powerful. I mean, the designs I was showing were not pretty. Yeah, right. They were, I mean, they felt antiquated in 2017, I think when I was working on them. And they were they know the framework had been built for it. It was interconnected into all of the systems, we definitely couldn’t touch any of it without that House of Cards falling down. Except we could replace the strings. And I may have misled you that there was a content management system behind it. Oh, no, there was no, there was a file of strings.
Per Axbom
Oh, wow.
Torrey Podmajersky
So that’s all we could change was rechecking that, you know, update in code, this XML file, check that in, do some testing, pray that it still works, push it to prod, pray that it still works. Right? You know, you, you know, you’re in a startup when there’s that two-prayer cycle?
Per Axbom
Yes.
Torrey Podmajersky
And then, we had to do pre-post testing, because none of that had instrumentation for A-B testing. And doing that pre- post, it was still significant enough to say, we made a huge change here. And that was critically important. We got more of the right reports into the right category. And I mean, isn’t that most of what we do as UX designers is like, “we’re looking for this behaviour when you are in the situation”. Great.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and we’ve mentioned in previous podcasts about how we’ve gone through a series of something first, you know, we’ve heard, like mobile first, and now been talking about content first. But we constantly ignore all the firsts. We just go back to pretty pictures first. I don’t want to be mean, probably, but well.
Torrey Podmajersky
Sketch first, whiteboard first, draw the thing…
Per Axbom
Tool first, Figma first…
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, design system first, component first. That actually drives me a little bit nuts. There is a great time and place for that, like, “Oh, here’s this solution that we have already talked about building. And it’s about, you know, putting up this interstitial with the pattern we already know we’re using because that’s the only solution that anybody’s going to code for us. So we’re gonna pull that out and do it. Great, go straight to Figma for that.” But if it’s anything more complex, no start with.. what is it we’re trying to do? Write it down, what’s the conversation we’re trying to have? What are the key ideas to hit here? And then you can open it up and say “Oh, I have at least two good ways to go about talking about that. And that might even imply different interaction patterns. Which would be really easy to sketch out like we can Sharpie those out right now. And then we can do some cafeteria testing, to say, “Should we mock these up? Are we off track?” It’s so much faster and so much more valuable, in my opinion.
Per Axbom
At the end of your talk, there was this situation where you were supposed to be put on the spot. And there were like screenshots. I don’t know how prepared you were for that. But it was so funny because it was everything that is wrong about UX: “Please, this is the thing, just tell me what I need to do.”
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah.
Per Axbom
And you haven’t given me any context at all about what this thing is supposed to do and who it’s for. And I feel that we are put in that position so often. And then you have to counter but you did such a wonderful job of explaining, asking questions back.
James Royal-Lawson
And pushback. You did pushback.
Torrey Podmajersky
It was pushback. And I knew that David was a very kind and gracious host, and he wasn’t about to be affected.
James Royal-Lawson
He needs pushing back.
Torrey Podmajersky
I mean, he does seem to welcome it. I’ve never met him before this weekend. But it was like “Okay, you’ve warned me that you’re going to put me on the spot.” He did offer to show me the screens ahead of time if I wanted to prepare. But having done this for a few years, I know like, there’s no way I’m going to prepare to rewrite your screens on the fly, whatever they are, I don’t know the context, you won’t know the context.
James Royal-Lawson
And just add some context. I mean, these were literally just screenshots
Torrey Podmajersky
From the internet.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, yeah. From the internet, like modal interstitials, with some text on, very small amounts of text. I guess the idea was that you’d rewrite that, there and then or something. Because you are a content person.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, or at least give it some critique, “Oh, they could have done X or should have done Y”.
James Royal-Lawson
This word needs to be moved because you’re words person and here are the answers in words.
Per Axbom
But perhaps there was even a context where that was okay. Where the screen that was showing was okay, you don’t know that.
Torrey Podmajersky
And I was prepared for all of those eventualities, including just turning to him and saying, What’s your framework? To note like “You’re presenting this as if it’s a problem, what’s your criteria for a problem?” I didn’t get to pull that one out.
James Royal-Lawson
But that, the whole kind of thing, “Can you quickly just write a thing for me?” So we’re put into that situation of, polyfilling with words, almost all the time. And I’ve got this experience because I’m a native English speaker and I work often in Swedish environments, these many situations where I’m the best English in the room.
Torrey Podmajersky
Alright, what’s the right English for this?
James Royal-Lawson
How do we? Just translate these messages for me. Then you have to say, “Yeah, sure.” Because there maybe is no content writer or UX writer? I mean, you are in that situation, the UX writer.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, you are.
James Royal-Lawson
Like it or not.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yep. So wouldn’t it be great to have that included in your design system? To have like a framework for here’s what we know to be good. Here’s what we know to be, you know, the target. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a design system of any size that didn’t include a type ramp, at least, you know, like, here are your top four levels of what you’re going to use in terms of size and font and spacing. Great. And there are places where you break those rules, where you just said, Oh, we hadn’t planned around labeling something in this way. And I’m going to do a separate thing. And I’ll maybe I’ll remember to add that to the design system documentation later, et cetera. So it gives you a target that you try to hit. What do you have for words? What is the target that you try to hit? That’s hard. Right? And it’s mostly not done yet. But where it is done? It’s a whole lot easier to do.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So if we’re in teams or situations or organizations where there are zero content writers, UX writers, you know? What are the first steps that I need to take? Because this is the thing, we know that the words are going to be produced.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, absolutely.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s a given. It’s just not going to not happen. So given that context, we’ve got the UX designers, programmers, the product owners, all the rest of it, but no UX writers. What are those life-saving steps to take? Possibly even the steps I can take to help future me or a future UX writer person? When did you realize it even?
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah. So there are, a couple of things that I would but it’s all very context-dependent. If you’re working on a startup or for such a new product that you haven’t even made decisions yet about, logo or principles or anything else, you’re in like a test environment of just exploration. There’s not much you know, yet, right? Maybe you haven’t written down like even anything about like, we think it should be light-coloured, right? Like, we don’t know anything yet. But if you’ve done any of your user research or even market research, you probably know what are the key ideas that you need to be hitting, right? And what are the, what do you call them? And even just writing down “How do we talk about our user, or customer?” Whichever it is? What is the who? What is the when? What is the where, what is the how? What are the key verbs and nouns?
James Royal-Lawson
And this is something you can capture from your environment.
Torrey Podmajersky
You can capture from the environment, like, “Where am I right now?”. And if you are the designer on a thing, and you don’t know the answers to those things, that should be a red flag for you. Like, oh, oh, we should call our users the same thing every time we refer to them. Right? If there’s a key verb, actually, I really like Sophia Prater’s “Object-oriented UX” for this, because it’s the nouns and the verbs that make up your experience. So if you have a pile of nouns and verbs that you know, you should use, great. You have a great start, put them in a document of some kind that you might actually use, and be able to find later.
Those are all hard problems to solve. But it’s a good place to start. Because then when somebody’s like, I just wrote error messages, and you look at them and you go, “But that’s not… Oh, you’re saying they were trying to do X? When really, we use this other word for that?”. And then it’s, you get a little bit better. So as soon as you get beyond that, then like, maybe you’re working within already a fully-fledged design system, maybe you’re part of a greater design team. You say: “Hey, is there a way we can just look at the…? Can we search the strings that already exist in the product?” So anytime I’m writing about a thing, where it’s like, oh, here’s a new feature, or a tweak to the feature? And we’re bringing in this idea? What’s an idea that you would add some kind of product?
James Royal-Lawson
It’s always chat. In the end
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, my goodness. So there may be other things that… chat is a great example. You may already have in your experience, notifications, messages, chat, you might have something else you call chat. You might also have alerts, you might have all of those things and it actually means one experience. But if you can search your string for synonyms for the new thing you’re building, and uncover like, “Oh, here’s where we’ve been inconsistent in the past”. Or uncover like, “Oh, we’re consistently using this word over here, I want to avoid that, because that’s a totally different concept. I’m going to use this here.”
James Royal-Lawson
And you need to create some space.
Torrey Podmajersky
And you create some space really intentionally. So it’s about like, what is the problem you’re trying to solve? And being aware that the words are part of your solution. And how would you attack this problem? What problems would you anticipate if you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to use this icon? Well, it’s super similar looking to this other one”, that has a totally different purpose that you’re not even aware, because a different team is developing it. Same problem.
Per Axbom
I keep thinking that how many times at this conference have they said please download our app? And thinking about how many times have people gone into the AppStore? Looking for the app that does not exist there? Because it’s a web app, it’s a web page.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. And so the are used to this…
Per Axbom
They use this word, “app”.
Torrey Podmajersky
And people expect to, they go to the app store every time.
James Royal-Lawson
Which context wise, what language would work here, when you’re in amongst lots of UX designers, Web App almost certainly would work, I think, as a phrase, but in other contexts, maybe it wouldn’t.
Torrey Podmajersky
Right? But here, it probably would. So you have to modify.
Per Axbom
Exactly, very nice. And I noticed several times, I love that about your talk, also very sensitive to reflecting on the fact that some of your examples were for the English language. And that it’s different. Because we’re thinking sometimes about the number of words you can have on a button, things like that, how wide it can be. I immediately started thinking about when I worked for a big energy company here in Sweden, which also has a presence in Finland. And none of what we did worked in Finland, because they are long, words are so very, very long.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, we found when I was working on Xbox, and we worked very, very closely with our localization team there. We found that German would almost always break our designs first. And then it took longer to get the Russian translations back for whatever reason, and then we would think we had fixed them, and then Russian would break them.
James Royal-Lawson
I’ve seen that with a bank.
Torrey Podmajersky
And then we found out that the Russian translations for Xbox were being done in a formal Windows sort of tone. And we said, “Hey, can we ask the localization…?” and this was a long time ago, right? This was much less localization infrastructure that had been built out. And casual tones were a pretty new thing in software. So asking very sweetly for the Russian translations to be like, no, no, say it as if you would say it at home to your brother.
Torrey Podmajersky
And you got the same thing back.
Torrey Podmajersky
No, we actually got a different thing back and they were much shorter. And everybody was much happier because our people who spoke Russian who worked on Xbox just kept saying, “This is just, it doesn’t feel like it doesn’t feel like Xbox.”
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, it’s interesting. It’s fascinating to think about that kind of cultural thing is like, you’ve got a global brand global thing like the Xbox. And then you know, how you communicate at home, that’s very cultural.
Torrey Podmajersky
Right. And you had to, we had to ask that. Actually, there’s a screen I worked on for Xbox, which was a privacy screen and we were at sign up, your first time turning on an Xbox or your first time adding a new account to the Xbox if you had the Kinect sensor installed, it would show you a live video of yourself and show that it was associating this with you with like a little flag above your head that said: “This is you”. And it would say you know, “Do you want to use, Do you want to sign in this way?”. And I had to disclose that this can recognize your gestures, this can recognize your face. Or this can sign you in automatically, you can use your voice. And I said something like the final string that shipped 10 years ago was you can start playing Xbox before you turn on a light or put down your sandwich. Right? Because we also had to get we had to get the light in there because it was using IR sensors.
So it could actually see you enough to recognize you with just IR. Yeah, and your hands could be full. And so I was in the room with the regulatory attorney and the other attorney and the designer and everything we were like, and we had spent many weeks trying to get this three pages of legal text and requirements, distilled down to a screen. And we called the localization team from that conference room, back when conference rooms had phones, and said, please find out if “put down your sandwich will work.” In all of these languages, like, will it? Because also an Xbox, it’s like “make me a sandwich” is a gamer thing that was part of the culture at the time. So we wanted the sandwich if we could. And we heard back in 20 minutes “Yes, we can go a sandwich in all of our languages.”
James Royal-Lawson
Wow. Everybody loves a strong cultural reference.
Torrey Podmajersky
Because, yeah, like everybody loves a sandwich. And it was appropriate for the audience. So it was like, okay, sandwich.
Per Axbom
That’s really cool.
Torrey Podmajersky
It was really fun. It’s one of the best strings I ever wrote.
James Royal-Lawson
Food-related legal strings. That’s a niche area.
Torrey Podmajersky
But that only happened because my attorney partner on it kept saying, like, I came up with many things that were short and would work. And I was exhausted. And this was one of many features I was working on. And he was also working on many other features. And he kept saying, “But it’s Xbox, it should be fun.” We need to remember that they’re here to have fun, and we need to always reflect that. And I’m like, dammit, I’m being schooled on UX by my attorney. And it was… and he’s so good. I would work with him again in a heartbeat. But then
James Royal-Lawson
But those kinds of moments are where your job’s done kind of. In that, if you’ve gone to the level of teamwork with colleagues, then you’ve broken down the silos, right?
Torrey Podmajersky
There are no silos there. It was just like, we got to make this work. You know, it’s “Avengers, assemble!”. We’ve got this.
James Royal-Lawson
You’re already well past the schooling bit, you’ve schooled back. That means you’ve done probably, the reverse job.
Torrey Podmajersky
The seat at the table has been there. We’ve pushed the seats back, and we’ve worked at the whiteboard. You know, there’s a whole lot more to do once you’re in the room. It’s fun.
Per Axbom
So just being able to communicate what your intent is to other languages. Well, it was really interesting to understand. Throughout your talk, you had words, obviously.
Torrey Podmajersky
I had a lot of words on that screen.
Per Axbom
And everyone’s always looking for a checklist. You almost gave them a checklist. But you were very good at explaining that you may think you know what concise means. But this is what I mean with it in this context, you may think you know what conversational means. But this is what it means in this context. So you’re essentially building a controlled vocabulary for the audience to interpret your messaging.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah. And try not to overwhelm them with putting all of the details of it on the screen, and having them read. Turns out people tend not to like to read. Unless it’s reading for pleasure, right? Or for the wordplay or the… I mean, there are good reasons to read. Getting through a talk, that’s not much of a theatre.
Per Axbom
We also had a question about, that was an “Aha!” moment for me, because you had a question at the end for the audience about controlled vocabulary where nobody raised their hand. And honestly, that surprised me. Because it’s something we’ve been talking about for a few years, now.
James Royal-Lawson
I remember or more than that, I remember… God, when was this? We must be going back to 2003 or 2004. When, you know, controlled vocabularies were really hot back then. I mean, especially in intranet circles and stuff, which I was working with a lot.
Torrey Podmajersky
I’m sorry, you just said 2003, or 2004?
James Royal-Lawson
I did.
Torrey Podmajersky
That was 20 years ago.
James Royal-Lawson
Don’t do that.
Torrey Podmajersky
I’m gonna do it. What do you think the average age here is of this conference?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, and our listeners now listening to this podcast. I mean, I do realize what you’re doing to me now.
Per Axbom
I see what you mean.
Torrey Podmajersky
What I’m bringing up is, maybe it’s time to bring back these conversations. Because there are so many more people in it. I mean, think about even 10 years ago, the UX field was still small, and every conversation had some version of: “Why can’t I get in the room? Why did they ask me to… you know, the PM comes to me at the end, they keep telling me to make it pretty?”
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we had a conversation a number of years ago now with Donna Spencer. And we came up with the idea that well, reintroduction to information architecture was, you know, some of these things for those of us who have been in the industry for a while, it seems to come and go, and it’s coming back again. But the understanding is not there anymore. And I guess this is a consequence of some of the ways that UX boot camps work, education works, that we’re pushing to Figma in many situations very quickly, especially in the junior roles. And these concepts that we’re talking about, like control vocabularies, information, architecture, and so on…
Per Axbom
They came before we went to the interface, really?
Torrey Podmajersky
They did, they came mostly from the content world.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
Torrey Podmajersky
Like, we had to have all of those things. And then, the content world, like the content strategy world and the technical writing world, all of that was required by regulation. All of that was required by I mean, I have a talk where I take people through, like, here’s the first user interface I could find. And what it is, is text, right? It’s a graphical user interface, it’s on the screen. And you need to use, or I’m sorry, it was even pre-screen, it was a census machine that was electronic, that had tiny labels on all of these metal keys. And it was, it’s really pretty astounding. And the interface is made up of this grid of keys and tiny little labels, all text. And you had to know what that text meant. And it had two or three-page document of how to use it that it’s inscrutable, so hard to understand. And then we get things like WordStar on old CPM machines. And there’s, like you guys are nodding.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Torrey Podmajersky
And I remember using it, and I remember that I really wanted the keyboard surround that had all of the shortcut keys, right? That had all of the labels, all of that is UX writing. Because it’s that stuff. So UX writing has been around a really long time, and rarely gotten the attention that it needed to be consistent or good. And now we’re coming full circle again, and being like, it turns out that matters. Turns out that information architecture, because that’s all that was right it was, oh, we need to put things in categories that people will remember and understand.
James Royal-Lawson
I guess in some ways, it’s natural in a sense, back then when you’ve got so many physical constraints, that you know, we weren’t going to be able to design a new keyboard or a new control panel or whatever. But you know, putting a new row of labels, taping it on top of something else, we keep going back to your example of the, you know, the options in XML file that you change text, it’s back to that kind of basics of you know, what can we change without, you know, causing lots of disruption to the production of everything else, the scaffolding has to stay up while we tweak something.
Per Axbom
All the payment machines and stores, so many of them have actually Post-It notes or take messages on them. That’s the fix.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. But now of course, with the browser, design possibilities are now endless.
Torrey Podmajersky
Right?
James Royal-Lawson
So before we have very constrained situations where there’s a keyboard or a little strip, where we can put a new set of labels on. Now we’ve just got a whole wide world out there. Yeah.
Torrey Podmajersky
It makes it a lot harder. And I think about that, that explosion of possibility. With like, “Look, you’ve got this two-dimensional space, you can still use language and all of its multi-dimensional power.” And you’ve got colour and layout and primacy and right direction and picture and all of these things. Great. And we’ve gotten so that we’ve systematized a lot of that, and there are norms, that are hard to start using as an adult, and be like “Why would these three dots in a row mean something different if they’re up and down versus on their side, versus three lines?” How would you know? And you have to be taught these things if you didn’t grow up with them. So we have that.
And now we have AI? Right? We have a new tool we did not know, in Netscape 3.0. Those were ugly websites, we did not know that we would have this robust language of interaction design then, that we do now. Like 2003, 20 years ago, it existed on the internet, hilariously, I made some of those pages, they’re terrible, and yet they worked. And they advanced. Thanks. So we’re about to have much more access to very powerful tools that required an enormous amount of energy, like climate change-producing levels of energy. And we want to use them, much like the Internet creates climate change-producing levels of energy, or I’m sorry, uses that much energy. So we have another one of these things happening. What would we like it to be? Could we do something beyond wealth extraction with it? Seems like we’d be able to do that. That’d be cool. I’d like that. I just went full communist on you.
Per Axbom
I mean, that positive messaging that we can actually play a part in deciding what these tools should be used for and how they should be used, instead of just leaning back in horror and saying, Oh, I don’t want this. We can actually be taking initiative.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. Instead of letting them be prescriptive. I mean, we could let these tools be prescribed to us. This tool you’ll need to use it for X. And it doesn’t have to be.
Torrey Podmajersky
And it doesn’t have to be. No, I mean, we… so let’s go 20 years ago again, did you misuse things like PowerPoint to do interactive prototypes? Because you could like, click from slide to slide?
Per Axbom
I’ve done that.
Torrey Podmajersky
Oh, yeah, right?
James Royal-Lawson
We did it. I remember us doing it. It was UX Lx in 2011. Guerrilla research, and taking a presentation out on an iPad.
Torrey Podmajersky
Yeah, it works beautifully. Was it intended for that? No. I mean, could it be used for evil? I mean, that would be way too much work.
Torrey Podmajersky
But like the AI takes a lot of work, can you? Can you use it in ways it wasn’t intended for? It’s harder to do because of the explicit goal from the AI purveyors, I’m not speaking on behalf of Google, by the way, but the explicit goal I’ve heard in the news is you should be able to use it for everything you tell us what you want to use it for. And that is a little bit weird to me like that raises a red flag.
James Royal-Lawson
I think any of us that have been there during user research or usability testing or so on. Will, or then, contextual observations, you would have seen or realized that people do all kinds of things. I mean, there’s not never been a session I’ve been part of where you haven’t gone: “Oh, wow, they did that!.” I never thought of the fact you could even do that.
Torrey Podmajersky
I think I need to do eyebrow exercises before I go and watch these things because if my eyebrows will just keep climbing up my forehead going: “Oh, I didn’t see that coming.”
James Royal-Lawson
But it’s, as we know, it’s that, you know, a constant reminder that there are more possibilities with the things you create, than you realize at the time of creation, always.
Torrey Podmajersky
That’s one of the things that very much strikes me about large language models is that they work towards the mean, right? They work towards the average, what is the most common thing here? It is not terribly surprising to me that if you think of the gendered aspects of language presentation, ChatGPT has been compared a lot to men, and how men talk with great confidence and great… And that is, the norm of how a lot of marketing content on the web, I mean, which is for the part of the internet, that is not porn, the most of the rest of it is marketing, geared towards the groups that are seen to be the most in control of the money, the most in control of the power. So, is it surprising what ChatGPT sounds like? No, not at all.
Per Axbom
And I guess that’s the positive note to end on. We don’t have to be afraid because they will not take our jobs.
Torrey Podmajersky
No, they can’t make these decisions. They can just regress to the mean. And that, it’s that’s like, I do not feel the need to compete with such mediocrity. I just said that in a really fancy way.
James Royal-Lawson
We stop there.
Per Axbom
Thank you, Torrey.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you.
Torrey Podmajersky
Thank you so much. This was an awful lot of fun.
James Royal-Lawson
Listening back to that chat with Torrey, I kind of kept writing down or coming back to context, there were multiple times we talked about context, and how important it was for many different aspects. You know, culturally, cultural aspect to just cultural context, general context, design context. It’s just their context and how important that is.
Per Axbom
It’s Xbox, it needs to be fun. I love how she shared that the lawyer actually saw this as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, localization teams? We do a lot of no-context design. I think in some ways, the way that we have a more production line way of working with design, in many organizations and so on nowadays, does, I think increase the chance that you are going to be in a context-less situation. I actually don’t think we can avoid it completely.
Per Axbom
I don’t think so either. I mean, maybe you shouldn’t have to avoid it in all situations, either. But I think a big risk from a design system perspective is that the science systems actually support working out of context, because you say that you’re saying essentially that this widget can be used in a lot of different contexts, but you may not, then actually do the actual research work and the testing that you’re supposed to do because you’re assuming stuff, because the design widget already exists.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and Torrey alludes to that in a conversation we had about going back and updating your documentation to explain your context or to reveal more contexts where something else might be more appropriate. It’s, yeah, that’s really not easy. But I really liked as well, how Torrey now in a presentation actually created a shared vocabulary. Yeah, we talked, you brought that up in the interview. So in order to create context and improve the understanding of her audience, then she was aware of the fact that the words she was using might not be the words that were used in the way that audience would expect. So she then explained that, and created that shared vocabulary, so they could go forward together, improved communication.
Per Axbom
It is improved communication. And I love that conversation we had about controlled vocabulary and the realization that it’s really difficult because, from a communication science perspective, you always need to get the feedback to know if the person is understanding the message you’re giving them. But within the context of giving a presentation, you’re not getting feedback constantly, because you’re actually giving the presentation over 30 minutes maybe. And then you have to set the stage and make sure that do are people understanding what I’m saying, and you can help them understand whit the control vocabulary. I’m imagining this could also be the case of course, that she’s actually doing the research after her talks and talking to people what parts did you get, did you not get and being really attentive to hearing what people are interpreting and what words they are having trouble with?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, because of course, as you said, if you’re actually performing, when you’re actually putting the presentation on, then cognitively, your mind is somewhere else. So you’re not going to be able to, it’s not a conversation in the same way as like many we’re having now where you respond to the context of here and now. You have to be more planned and deliberate about it. And that a was useful way of taking control of that.
Per Axbom
And also, one aspect of that controlled vocabulary conversation was that so much of UX work perhaps is internalized within us and we don’t bring it up often enough, because you went back 20 years, and realized that we talked a lot about controlled vocabulary back then. But maybe happened in the past 10 years, and so many people have entered this trade now.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. It’s what 20 years mean to us, is a different thing to what maybe, you know, the passage of time means to someone else in this industry and what they’ve experienced and what they’ve done. So yeah, that’s some really interesting reflection about what we did know what we do know, and when stuff needs to be brought up to the surface a bit again, to revisit it.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And I just love the fact that we can change so much of the experience by just changing the words.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s all about the words.
Per Axbom
Recommended listening that some people came up during our interview, and you may want to check out Sophia Prater talking with us about “Object-oriented UX”, that was episode 135.
James Royal-Lawson
Yep.
Per Axbom
And then there’s also the “Reintroduction to information architecture” with Donna Spencer. That’s episode 286.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so 135 and 286 of season one, you can go back, scroll back to and listen to. And if you want me and Per as part of your next conference, event, or even in-house training. Then we’re offering workshops, talks and courses to inspire and help you grow as individuals, teams, and organizations. Just get in touch with us and start a conversation by emailing. hej@UXpodcast.com.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
What did the grilled cheese sandwich say to their date?
Per Axbom
I don’t James, what did the grilled cheese sandwich say to the date?
James Royal-Lawson
Not to the date, to their date. Someone that you know, like in a restaurant, you know, they have gone out for dinner, it is the first time, the grilled cheese sandwich is there. And then, I don’t know, maybe it’s a salad. And they’re there, and they’re kind of chatting away, and like, what did the grilled cheese sandwich say to their date? And the answer is: “You make me melt.”
James Royal-Lawson
I resign.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Torrey Podmajersky recorded in May 2023 and published as episode S02E02 (312) of UX Podcast.