Computer voice
Season Two, Episode 18.

Steve Portigal
That problem, which is an organisational one and an institutional learning one, is addressed or is hoped to be addressed with a software solution, without asking some larger questions like, what information do we need to save?

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.

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

Per Axbom
This is a UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden. And you’re listening to us all over the world, from Somalia to Bangladesh.

James Royal-Lawson
And today, we are chatting with Steve Portigal, a vastly experienced professional in the user research space with over 25 years of experience interviewing users and guiding organisations in building and maturing their research practices.

Per Axbom
Steve has written two books, User Research War Stories, and the classic, Interviewing Users, which is now in its second edition, which we are going to talk about today.

James Royal-Lawson
Interestingly, well I think it’s interesting, when the first edition of the classic book, Interviewing Users, came out, we didn’t actually talk to him about the book.

Per Axbom
We didn’t. No, we talked to him, though.

James Royal-Lawson
We did talk to him around that time, but not about the book. So what makes this especially fun is that we’re getting to talk about the book, when it has a second edition.

Per Axbom
You are releasing a second edition of the book. And so you have all this experience over time. And you’ve probably reflected now on the fact that even something that people think of as ‘asking questions to people’ – doing that has changed over time. So talk to us a little bit about how has interviewing people changed in the past 10 years.

Steve Portigal
Right, 10 years is the gap between the first and second editions of of Interviewing Users. And, you know, I’ll just backup a little bit and say I was resistant way back when to doing a second edition because my thought was, ‘well, nothing has changed about the person to person activity of interviewing.’ So like, that’s what the book is about, and tells you how to listen and ask follow ups and, you know, body language and tone of voice and all that. That’s all in there. So it’s evergreen, so why would the book change? Yeah. Yes. So, you know, the book stands, and it’s been a successful book for a long time, first edition, so yeah, why would it change? And I guess the short answer is that, you know, that doesn’t change. But the things around it have changed. The book is not just about asking questions, right? It’s about doing interviews, it defaults to, or assumes a context of, doing research in kind of a business context to learn from people, to make an improvement to the product or service or user experience. And that is what’s changed in 10 years. Right?

The context in which user experience is practised or user experience research takes place. So, for example, you gotta go back a little bit further than 10 years, but at one point, this work was done entirely by consultants. There were no in-house teams. And as you kind of progress over time, you start to have more researchers inside the organisation, but you don’t have leaders. So it’s not sort of, it’s not a function in a corporation that is managed, that means that you know, how its structured, where it’s placed in the organisation how individual researchers are given tools, how they’re given encouragement or support for their careers or developing their skill set. That’s not being handled with sort of the special attention and care that’d be placed to a discipline that’s seen as itself.

So if you have user researchers reporting to a head of design, for example, that makes for certain kinds of advocacy for researcher championing of it or building up what that capability is, as you start to see research leadership being seen as a thing, and people with that title and that responsibility, then the manner in which researchers practice – and again, asking questions and asking follow up questions is still the same. But, you know, working with stakeholders and colleagues to understand what the need is, collaborating during the course of a project, knowledge sharing, delivery of information, having an impact, all that stuff, is very different than when it was just consultants. Now it’s primarily internal people. And then I think an evolution beyond what I’m describing is, you have lots of people doing research who don’t have that, in their title, don’t have user experience in their title.

The term that Kate Towsey coined is PWDR – people who do research. And that’s such a great term, I think, because it sort of says, like, hey, you’ve got researchers, and you’ve got people who do research, and they both have different kinds of needs. So I think, you know, 10 years ago, we just didn’t have that model of who was doing research and where were they? And what do they need? And what are they concerned about? So that larger context, I think, is something that’s changed. And I’ll add one more thing here that, you know, even the sort of fundamental human activities of listening and asking questions and so on, you know, as the author, I have 10 more years of experience in doing it, making all kinds of mistakes while doing it, reflecting – I know I’ve had those things where it’s in the book, and then I do it wrong. And I just go home and stew about it. And I realised, oh, yeah, I am now failing to practice my own, you know, best advice and realising how that screwed things up.

James Royal-Lawson
So, Steve, just picking up on that. Given that you have now 10 more years of research experience, what what’s your biggest take home from those 10 years?

Steve Portigal
Yeah, my biggest take home on those 10 years. You know, I think and maybe this is just age in general – and I don’t know if this shows up in the book, necessarily – but just thinking about the way I work with people as, as a researcher, myself, but also as a trainer, or coach, or whatever, helping other people. I think I started off thinking, and this is not your question, but I think I started off with the belief that, you know, I can articulate the best way to go about something. So I’m going to pass that along. And people are going to go and do it. But then I guess, like I said, I make those mistakes myself. And I think what has changed maybe in just my overall dialogue with people is helping people with their confidence, and maybe even a little bit of acceptance. There’s just mistakes that we make that are sort of the conflict between human nature and how we converse socially, and what you need to do in an interview. And I think I’m more accepting of the fact that there are lots of, there’s lots of right ways to do things, there are just so many different paths that any interaction can follow.

We all make mistakes, we can recover from some of them. But I think, you know, we have to forgive ourselves for these things. And, you know, I think like, I’ll find myself in a training situation, and people will describe something that’s really hard for them, like “I have a bunch of questions on a discussion guide. And I don’t really know which one to go to next.” And they kind of bring that question up, and I think maybe their hope is that I can say, you know, “In the first eight minutes, you would do this,” and I should give them some formula. And I think what I ended up doing first, sure, there are some practical tips that I can always give to some practical question. But I think I also want people to hear that. Yeah, you’ve got it. Right, that struggle – where do I go next? What questions do I ask how to? Do I keep going on this thing? Or do I move on? Is there more you don’t know. And so I think it’s a more elevated way of thinking about what the interview is, it’s an exploration with no map, right, and you’ve got your little flashlight, but you don’t really know where you’re going or how to get there.

Per Axbom
So it’s really it’s a journey of self discovery, even just being a researcher, you’re learning about others, but you’re learning about yourself along the way, as well. And you’re learning that I can master this approach in in a different way than Steve does.

James Royal-Lawson
I think I’m hearing here is like that difference between thinking you can, or have to, fix something compared to improving over time.

Steve Portigal
Yes, and the fixing is sometimes about the other person, right? I think the naive research question, the naive researcher asks me or you, ‘Hey, how can I get this other person to stop doing this or to start doing this?’ And then the more one progresses, there is that self discovery like, ‘Boy, it sure is uncomfortable for me as the researcher when this other person does or doesn’t do this or that, and what am I going to do with that feeling? And I might have to sit with it and be uncomfortable.’ And actually, that’s okay. Because there is no, you know, there is no formulaic answer. So, again, you know, you’re asking me, like, that’s a personal takeaway. I don’t feel like, Oh, if you read the two books side by side, you would see, I don’t know that that’s in there. I haven’t really, you’re asking me a question I’ve never really given voice to. So it’s not like I wrote the second edition, trying to convey I guess, a somewhat more nuanced take on what the goal is.

James Royal-Lawson
Steve, I guess, if that’s what you’re answering now as your experience for the last 10 years, then you cannot have not written the book and drawn some of that experience in to doing the second edition.

Steve Portigal
I think I mean, I think it’s in there as I’m just thinking about how I explained this example, or this tactic and so on. But you know, it wasn’t in the book proposal. For example, I didn’t set out to say, ‘Hey, I used to think a now I think b. This book is going to revisit this topic so that we make it clear this.’ But yeah, thank you. Yes, it’s written from – I’m 10 years older, I have 10 years more experience – I’m writing from that point of view. I’m rewriting or revising, from their point of view.

James Royal-Lawson
Thinking about changes are in the book. I mean, you’ve added two more chapters, this time around. You have a ninth and 10th Chapter. What’s the story behind those two chapters? I mean, why? Why were they not there in the first place? And what led you to actually add them? Yeah, well, you asked, I haven’t said what the two chapters are, though, haven’t even said that.

Steve Portigal
Right. The two chapters are on first analysis and synthesis, like what do you do with your research data? And second, you know, how do you have impact? How do you influence the organisation? Those were topics that were addressed, but they were kind of in the first edition, they were kind of like, ‘Alright, everybody time to wrap this thing up. Let me just kind of acknowledge there’s more.’ And some ways that it’s an artefact of what does it mean to write a book, like I had never written a book before. And, you know, sort of starting off with a lot of experience and a lot of, right, I’ve been doing the work for a long time before I wrote that first book. And I had information, a bunch of different places that I had to sort of organise into this book. And so how do you draw that kind of dotted line around what’s in and what’s out?

And I made a probably the (I don’t know, I mean, I don’t want to sound regretful about it), I made the choice at that time that like, yeah, that’s, it’s about interviewing, it’s in the title. And so you know, all the stuff that happens after is important, I want to acknowledge it. But that’s a different book. Like maybe I would write a follow up book, and I would write that book. That was kind of my way of rationalising. Yeah, I don’t want to I don’t want to get into this, alright, or maybe less selfishly, like I don’t think it fits within sort of the remit of what this book is supposed to accomplish. But I think early feedback said, like, ‘hey, where is this stuff?’ Like, where’s the thing about what to do next? So it was clearly a gap or something I want him to address in the future. Early, early on.

James Royal-Lawson
I was wondering, though, whether the context of the time – 2013, like you’ve already mentioned, where we’re looking at more agency based models and and outsourcing research, and now it’s in-house and in house teams. Is that something maybe that led to some of these more, ‘what did we do afterwards’ topics? Not really maybe getting the focus that now we we seem to think that of course they get that focus?

Steve Portigal
Yeah, you’re right. I think if that these two chapters, Analysis and Synthesis, was something that I sort of felt like it was outside, that now I think is really important. And this discussion of having an impact? Yeah, you’re right on. It represents the change. It’s a thing that comes up more in workshops, that comes up more in my own work, that is more germane to, you know, these in-house teams and these in-house leaders. So yeah, I think it was less than obvious omission 10 years ago, and it’s clearly a necessary… it’s that’s the topic that everyone wants to talk about. Yes, yes, yes. But my stakeholders, my team, how do I how do I kind of have this impact? So it’s something I’ve certainly been thinking about for 10 years and talking about and writing about and applying myself. And, you know, I had more to say now. So I think it was easier to kind of commit to like, you know, having this be something to talk about, because it’s, I guess I practice it differently than I did 10 years ago.

Per Axbom
As you were describing this shift to in-house teams, I almost felt this sense of jealousy, in that in-house teams then get to work with research over time in a way that I as a consultant cannot. And they have a shared experience. And they can even reflect back on research they did two years ago, based around the same product or service. So that has to be a lot different, I guess, when you when you talk to people about research and how you’re doing the same type of research around the same type of product service for a long time.

Steve Portigal
Right. And, as I’m a consultant myself, right, and I see this with my clients, that they live with some space, they live with some product topics, set of stakeholders, set of users. Some have talked to researchers that meet with the same set of users over years, and they they build these kind of longitudinal relationships. And I’m jealous of them, too. I’m also personally happier where I am, I think I bring value not being in that, right. I think when you get … there’s a rut, I think that is easy to fall into. And the rut has all these wonderful attributes, like knowing that people and their limitations, like if you have their limitations, their strengths, their preferences, if you’re working with a bunch of different stakeholders, and they have different communication styles, or they they have different ways that they engage or different availability, you know, you the in-house person do not have to figure that out every time.

I mean, yes, as the team changes, you’re going to be constantly adapting your styles. And there’s even like a mention of this in the book, I think, because one of the people I quoted describes how they try to have a communication approach that is inclusive, but spread enough to sort of deal with the different needs and expectations of everybody. And so yeah, right, as consultants, we come in, and we don’t have the lay of the land. And I think sometimes that’s an advantage because you don’t… you know, this may be arrogant sounding, but I think we have the responsibility to speak truth to power, we also have the opportunity, we’re a little less constrained by risk as consultants.

Per Axbom
And not as biassed maybe.

Steve Portigal
Yeah. Well, you know my compensation isn’t tied to the success of the product. Right, this the mob, those models create all sorts of interesting incentives. That, yeah, that, you know, you’re part of an organisation, you’re part of a corporation, if that’s the domain that you work in. And your your success is tied to success. And as a consultant, it’s not yes, the company does, well, they hire us back, we want things to do well, but I don’t think we have the same kind of incentive model. So I’m glad they’re still our consultants, because I think there’s a nice, there’s a nice triangulation, or a nice partnership that can happen. I love working with somebody that has the long view inside and they can kind of give me the highlights of who and what and, you know, I don’t have to do everything my way. But, you know, we can negotiate the kinds of approaches and practices. And, you know, I can be that unbiased voice just by the fact that I’m not part of it.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. You’ve got that, you know, the fresh eyes approach that you can offer as a consultant coming in. But then we’ve got the opposite edge of that. And you mentioned this in, in chapter 10, Making an Impact, that internal research organisations, they need to keep track of what they know, and what they don’t know. And, what have we already researched? And and that opens up a whole different aspect of historical record keeping, I guess, you could say, which as a consultant, maybe we didn’t have to deal with that. It wasn’t an assignment you were given. And then you delivered.

Steve Portigal
I will say and I’ve got imagine this has happened to both of you, though, where as the consultant you serve as the kind of the offshored institutional memory, right, where somebody writes you and you haven’t worked with them for a really long time, and they’ll say, Hey, didn’t we do a project about this or that? Do you know what it was? Do you still have the thing that happened to me like, I don’t know, six weeks ago, someone had an anecdotal memory of something and they didn’t, they weren’t involved. And they didn’t know and no one was left working there. So, that organisation wasn’t doing a great job of sort of documenting whatever different initiatives and so on, and that they were, you know, I could put my finger on it, like I actually had the documents quickly. So, yeah, I think there’s an ideal of whatever knowledge management, institutional memory, what have we researched? What are we learned from it? Yeah, I think it’s a hot topic that people are working to kind of try to define.

I think what I get nervous about is where that problem, which is an organisational one, and an institutional learning one, is addressed, or is hoped to be addressed with a software solution. Without asking some larger questions like, what information do we need to save? Like, is it the existence of that report? Is it the report? Is it the person who you know, could kind of talk you through it? Is it the raw data? Is it the decisions that we make? Is it the recommendations? Like, you know, that’s just me riffing on like, what could we what do we want to track? And who’s going to kind of query that information? Is it somebody that is, you know, “a researcher?” Or is it someone that wants to, you know, ‘hey, do we know anything about x?’ and just kind of discover it themselves? So I think there’s just a huge amount of challenges there, like, what do you what? Are you creating different things to archive? Are you archiving them in a way that they’re retrievable by who at what point?

You know, just a number of years ago, people in research organisations that were growing, were talking about bringing in somebody who’s a reference librarian, who’s whose job it is, in other contexts, is to be a human being that that interfaces between people who need information and, you know, storage of information? Yeah. And that’s very different than self service. So this is like a huge kind of culturally based – because there’s no, right, you know, any two organisations are going to deal with this differently – what they expect people to be able to do and who there is to do it. There’s just there’s a technical need here. But there’s also just a process and understanding of what information, why do we want to sort of look back to what end and building those use cases in? And I think it’s turning out to be trickier. Maybe than maybe software vendors had kind of promised us.

Per Axbom
And my biggest worry is that now is that people will just give up, they’ll just loaded into the database. And now it’ll ask the AI, “can you bring me the most important points from that research?” And that’s, of course, already happening. And that brings another aspect into this whole picture of storing that data. And that that is something that’s changed now, in the past 10 years. And you actually mentioned in the book as well, the GDPR, and privacy and how people are becoming more aware of privacy, how people are more aware that they have to consent to things. So I think that introduces an aspect that I wouldn’t pay as much attention to at least 15-20 years ago. And so how do you think that has changed how we do interviews now? Or how would you

James Royal-Lawson
I was just going to add, Per, there, I mean, I think 20 years ago, maybe we would focus on an NDA. So the company’s privacy, but we wouldn’t care less about the individual’s privacy in many situations.

Steve Portigal
Yeah. And this is, I think this is, you know, we’re sort of talking about how the, the way in in house teams work. And in house researchers work. You know, we didn’t have research ops as a discipline 10 years ago, and research ops as a part of the organisation that can build those tools and processes for, you know, whether that is about the archiving stuff that we’re talking about, or, you know, what’s the compliance required workflow? Because I think there’s all sorts of legal aspects and so the legal department of an organisation – and I’m speaking very broadly -but I think in the past, maybe they were someone to be avoided. And in the ideal situation, now they’re a partner. So that you know, legal can help research ops can help how do we set up whatever documentation storage, storage of signatures, storage of material. Do we have to anonymize these things do we have to expire them after a certain time? That stuff that a while back, we would just ignore or just hope it would be fine. I guess the good thing is that, like companies that have customer data of any kind have processes in place. So it isn’t necessarily on research to invent those in the first case. Although I think research leaders and research ops leaders have to help, like compliance people sort of understand that this, this is a different set of data.

And so we do need, here’s what the needs of research are. And here’s how they’re different from, I don’t know, let’s say a marketing email blast programme or something like that. Or, you know, anonymized usage logs that we can use to find bugs or see when there’s downtime, that this is something like an interview is a different piece. And I would say just, this is very impressionistic, I think there might have been some growing pains and figuring that out. But I feel like when I talk to research leaders and ops people, they have more successes than non successes in setting that up. That, if you believe in research, then you need to create the conditions in which it can succeed. And so figuring out what do we store data in? What are we allowed to do what what happens to it who’s responsible for that, you know, I think has been a growth, it’s such, it’s a maturation, it’s one of the axes of like, the maturity is, is how sort of sophisticated that is.

Per Axbom
Because that’s also true, if you don’t help people feel safe. And because they are aware of their privacy, now, you need to help them feel safe, to be able to have them give you what you sort of required from them, in that they share their information, they share their experience.

Steve Portigal
And at the same time, you have to do that in kind of a human centred way, or a a non lawyer-facing way. So right, there’s a lot of, you know, nine-point type that is required language for something like that. You know, I like to see researchers giving people the information that they need to set their expectations around, what data we’re collecting, and why like stuff that a good consenting process says, here’s what we’re collecting, and why. Here’s what’s gonna happen with it. Here’s what your rights are in this interaction. And you can do that in a way that’s like legalese. That’s not very friendly. Or you can do that in a way that is that’s very compassionate and helpful. And it’s good for the interviewer to set up the relationship in a in a kind, human to human kind of way. There’s an example that I mentioned in the book that the Sesame Workshop, the Sesame Street people did this piece of research, where they – well, we’ve talked about this, haven’t we? We’ve interviewed, you ended up interviewing them, I’m sorry.

James Royal-Lawson
No, but it’s thanks to you, Steve. Yeah, I know, got in touch. So we’re grateful to you for highlighting it.

Steve Portigal
So the folks at Sesame Workshop – the organisation that produces Sesame Street – were looking at how to provide consents in, I think low written language literacy environments, I may have some of the details wrong. But they created a bunch of like Muppets videos, that would have a little scene with a family, interacting, so adults and children, because that’s also the situation where you have, you know, a mix of people that can consent and people to consent on behalf of others. And when they made these videos in all these different languages, and I thought that was just like, it’s cool to see him up. It’s doing anything, of course. But to take something that could be as dry as this document that gets created with all this awful legal language that means the interviewer – I hate starting off my relationship with somebody by putting this in front of them, and then trying to crawl back up to kind of some, you know, empathy base, human to human, you know, creative discussion. So just the creativity in that and like, wow, here’s something as dry as consent. And here’s how much creativity can be put into that. So those folks I was just super-impressed by that as just a possibility of like, there’s a lot more than I think we can do in some of these operational processes to make them.

Per Axbom
I love that because it also brings attention to the fact that not everybody understands what consent is. You can’t you can’t use that word all the time. Which means that you have to be more informed in different ways and find different ways to…

James Royal-Lawson
You have to adapt to your context and and find the right angle to come in at. So I’ve got another question for you to wrap up with, actually, if we came back in five years to have this conversation again, what will be different?

Steve Portigal
There won’t be a third edition in five years, so we can eliminate that. Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve talked a lot about the the organisational context of research, and that is that continues to change. You know, we’re talking right now in a moment where there’s a lot of stress and uncertainty. And certainly in the, you know, the tech environment that I’m in, in Silicon Valley in North America, there’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of people sort of throwing up their hands and saying, you know, the, it’s the end of design thinking. It’s the user research moment of reckoning. So I think there’s confusion based on like, yeah, lots of layoffs. And, you know, we don’t want to be alarmist about it, but we also don’t want to be sort of pretending that everything is fine. And I think, you know, historically, like pendulums swing back and forth. But I think, when you’re surrounded by people that you know, are laid off, or you’re the only one left on what was a 10 person team, I think it’s easy to feel under threat right now. And that there’s, there’s an emotional impulse to answer your question and say, like, well, we wouldn’t have this conversation in five years, because we’re just going to be the smoking ruins of a former practice that doesn’t exist anymore. Right? I think that sentiment is there. And if you sort of get into your dark fears, you can feel that.

So I I’m telling you what I don’t think it’s going to be. I mean, I think the pendulum will swing back. I have to think that because I’m not making, you know, plans to get into a professional bunker, I think this is important work that people still care about. So, you know, I think we’ve talked about sort of the influence that having an impact, and yeah, organisations change. And, you know, we haven’t used the democratisation word that’s like a word that excites and upsets a lot of people. And I think, to me, it’s Kate Towsey’s people who do research and researchers. So who does research? And what do we mean by research? I think this continues to evolve. And, you know, we are making trade-offs and compromises as we always have. So I don’t know, I think I’m gonna acknowledge the fear that we won’t be here in five years. But I think things change more slowly than that. And that, you know, what? So I’m still avoiding … I don’t know if I have a concrete, what will have changed?

James Royal-Lawson
You can’t answer it really? Can you? I mean, it’s a future question. So there’s this there’s no right answer or a wrong answer. It’s an impossible one. But I personally, I agree, view, time, five years is not that long. And I think there’s still a lot of things. The pendulum will swing. And I think about the times where I’ve taken developers to observe on research sessions, and it’s the first time they’ve ever met users of their products. And, you know, I still dream of the day where that’s not the case. And every developer has seen a user use their product. So if we look bad as a bar, then we’re years away from not being the case where all developers have had some experience of seeing the product product being used and researched.

Steve Portigal
And those developers, for the most part, in my experience, they want that they’re not they’re not saying like, I don’t care, I don’t need this, this isn’t important. And so it depends on the discipline, but those folks are probably not people who do research. Those are people who go along with research or people who observe research. I don’t want to make up another acronym to go with that. But so there’s, there’s a need right there, right? It’s just a very almost a tactical need is just providing exposure, and that’s not going away. So what is sort of the mix? I think the mix may continue to shift, you know: Who’s doing it, what are we doing? What are we trying to accomplish? Even just exposure as sort of a low, that’s not even talking about evaluate of or generating new ideas or you know, finding the future of the business but just exposure is such a, it’s a big bang bang for the buck or… Right, if you can get that you can make cultural improvements, just that. And of course, there’s more to keep doing. So I think the need is there, the demand is up and down, the understanding is up and down. But the need, I think, is not going away.

Per Axbom
And as you were talking about all those fears, all I kept thinking was that research is part of the solution, because it’s about human connection. It’s about that curiosity. It’s about being open to others, and allowing yourself to be surprised about what you can learn about others and challenge your own biases.

Steve Portigal
Yeah. Can we applaud that? Can we insert in some applause there?

Per Axbom
That’s what I take away from your book. So thank you.

Steve Portigal
Yeah, that’s a lovely way to put it. And, again, I think that fear is, we care but no one else cares. Right? That I think there’s a sense of isolation when you go through changes in crises, and there is a crisis, and I think in the field for a lot of people right now. But to come back, as you’re saying to these principles: This is what WE – the biggest we, an inclusive version of we – this is what we’re good at, this is what we care about, this is what we bring. And we know, this is what business needs. This is what design needs. This is what technology needs. And, you know, long term or medium term, I want to believe it’s what will win out. You know, understanding people, caring about them, and doing the right thing for them with this information that helps us make those decisions. I don’t think you can kind of invent your way into, like, consistently invent your way into success. It does take this, you know, understanding and in caring for the the human aspect of people.

Per Axbom
That’s a person note to end on.

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you very much for being with us today and chatting.

Per Axbom
Thank you.

Steve Portigal
It’s great to chat with you both. Always.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s gonna be alright. We can be reassured I mean, we’ve reflected a fair bit during the chat and talked the ins and outs of research and ebbs and flows of it all. But I agree with Steve here, it’s not going away. We’re going to need user research and AI is not going to replace it.

Per Axbom
It’s nice to just have that feeling of being able to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And that makes it alright.

James Royal-Lawson
And good listening now is a reasonably recent chat. Our chat with Meena Kothandaraman about asking the right question. In this series, so Episode 12, or SE2 Ep12, or episode 322 if you’re going by the big numbers, and that’s a really useful one to dive into straight after this.

Per Axbom
Excellent. And if you want us two – James and Per – as part of your next conference event or in house training, we are offering workshops, talks and courses to inspire and help you grow as individuals teams and organisations. Just get in touch by emailing hey@uxpodcast.com.

James Royal-Lawson
And if you’d like to contribute to funding or helping with transcripts and references, then visit UX podcast.com/support.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
So what is the most common job for spiders?

Per Axbom
I don’t know, James. What is the most common job for spiders?

James Royal-Lawson
Web designer.