A transcript of Episode 288 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss alternatives to saying “user” and the complex world of native emojis.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Jonathan O’Brien.

Transcript

Computer voice
UX Podcast episode 288.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX Podcast, coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden.

Per Axbom
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.

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 Finland to Aruba.

Per Axbom
And today we have a link show set up for you in which we have both chosen an article and are going to be sort of summarising it and arguing about it and seeing if we can come up with some recommendations and how to behave on this strange journey of ours along building for the World Wide Web.

James Royal-Lawson
Hopefully they will inspire you to think a bit more about the subjects that we find in these articles. So which two have we got then Per?

Per Axbom
We’ve got on the blog, The 1/4″ Hole by Lawton Pybus, who is the research manager at UserZoom. The article is called in parentheses “at least” and then end parentheses, “4 Xs that aren’t UX. And why the original is still the best.”

James Royal-Lawson
It does say “Plus: Minecraft robot studies.” But I don’t know is that cause it’s a newsletter.

Per Axbom
It’s a newsletter, exactly. There’s more stuff in it than just this article. That’s right.

James Royal-Lawson
Okay. So we’re not going to talk about Minecraft robot studies.

Per Axbom
[Laughs] No.

James Royal-Lawson
Now we’ve lost half the listeners.

Per Axbom
And the second article is the one you found, “The struggle of using native emoji on the web.” And that’s by Nolan Lawson. No relation to you, I presume?

James Royal-Lawson
Nope, not at all. Nolan, he is a web developer living in Seattle. And working for Salesforce, apparently, according to his blog.

Per Axbom
And his blog is called “Read the Tea Leaves.”

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, nice tea reference there.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So, let’s just dive right in. So, this article by Lawton is actually a lot about the word “user.” And what he’s trying to tell us is that we as an industry, and as a profession, we keep having these endless discussions about words and their meanings. And the standard example is this: can we have this UX/UI phrase? Should we be using that in job postings should even have it as a term. And also, he’s sort of criticising that we are all thinking that the whole industry is new, and that we’re coming up with new stuff. But really, we’ve been doing all these things, since essentially the 40s, even the 30s, I would argue. And so the criticism often brought forward, when it comes to the word “user” is sort of that it’s reductive, it’s limiting, and it has all these bad connotations of which the most common one I think that is brought up is the drugs trade. And you’re a drug user.

James Royal-Lawson
And there was definitely a phase there as an English-speaking country that you did use the word user to specifically mean someone who used drugs.

Per Axbom
Right. And it’s interesting that he’s actually done his research in here, and noticed that the word “user” has been more common in connection with the technology industry than in drug contexts since 1959.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, there’s a graph on the blog post. Yeah, he used Google’s Ngram Viewer to do a comparison with “user” plus “fun”, “user” plus “computer” and “user” plus “drugs” to see the incidence of the words in books since 1959, I think is when that resource starts.

Per Axbom
Exactly. So I found that interesting, I hadn’t actually expected that. But as he goes on in the article, he’s also, of course, trying to figure out quite honestly and with nuance – “Is there a problem?” “How do we get at it?” And there have been lots of solutions proposed. And no other person or no less than Don Norman, actually, he’s called this one of the horrible words that we use in the industry. And he’s actually the one who actually promoted it in the beginning when we started using it. And there have been all these different words proposed, and one that he says in that quote that is in the article is that we should be using the word “people.” And what Lawton says about that is that, well, this people doesn’t really suggest anything at all about the context in which we study them as UXers, which is interactions with end systems. And there’s all these other terms as well, a lot of these terms actually make it harder to understand what we’re talking about. But they also have come with these problems, that they can be reductive and limiting, and we don’t really understand how they pertain to the stuff we’re building.

James Royal-Lawson
Interesting. But I mean, if you think about it, what did we have in our intro back in the day? We had “Balancing business, technology and users.” Yeah, and we changed it. It’s what we used to say. And we changed it to “Balancing business, technology and people.” So we actually made that change to people from users.

Per Axbom
That’s a really excellent point, because that actually goes on to allude to what is the bigger picture that yes, we are talking about people. And it’s fair for us to use that in the interlude of our show, because we are talking about people who both use the systems and who are affected by systems, even when they’re not using them. But in the context, that we’re actually building something for a person and we’re looking at them as they’re using the system we’re building, they are in fact users. And it’s hard to avoid using that term in that specific context.

James Royal-Lawson
Absolutely. It’s the same thing as, this morning, I took the train into town. So I used public transport, I am a user of public transport. I can even say I’m drinking a cup of tea now, so I’m using a tea cup to hold my tea to drink from – I’m a user of a cup. I suppose we can’t get too far away from the fact that we use things.

Per Axbom
I think so, it’s such a common word. That made me reflect on also, as soon as you bring this concept into other languages, because you and I often work in Swedish as well, and if you translate the word user to what the Swedish word is “användare” – that has nothing to do with drug use. So it becomes complex if we find that in English we need to shift the word but that would mean that we would necessarily shift things in other languages as well, perhaps, because English is so influential.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, exactly. And that’s an important point to remember that some of these debates we have around the language, and the terms that we use for things are deeply rooted in English-speaking cultures, and because of the dominance of American culture in our design world, or our English-speaking design world, then a lot of these debates are very much rooted in American History or English-speaking countries’ history, which, of course, doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t impact the others, like you said that the phrases we have in Swedish, for like usability testing, is translated – it has its roots in the English phrase. But Swedish didn’t have the same use of “user” to mean a drug user adopted into its language. So that particular aspect of it isn’t an issue. And there must be examples about this in all different cultures around the world, and we’re just using a couple of them as examples. But some of these debates and arguments, there’ll be different ones in different countries with different problems related to the phrases they’re using, and different contexts around it.

Per Axbom
And you have to think about when there are suggestions like using the word actor, or agent, those things have completely different connotations to people as well, especially for people with English as a second language – it’s hard for them to understand that’s part of a systems language, when you draw systems, than perhaps actor or agent is actually used in those contexts, more, but not in the user experience space. Yet.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, very good point when it comes to the language you use internally in our industry to deal with the concepts that we are working with, and even to educate and to learn to explore those concepts, more related to the academia side of it. I know from talking to, we talked to in the past, people who work in academia and agent is something that gets used at university level and so on to describe agents in a system. But outside of that, we know how long it took to get user experience adopted inside many businesses, and we’re still not there in many of the businesses. And the understanding of these phrases to those that aren’t deeply embedded in our industry is shallow, and they don’t have the nuances and, like you said, actor would be quite difficult to understand. And regarding translating that to Swedish as well, that would be quite a mouthful if we were using that word. Even more of a mouthful than “skådespelare.”

Per Axbom
Yeah, but that is really extra for like a Hollywood actor. But I guess you have “aktör”, I guess there is probably an academic word that is more translatable as well.

James Royal-Lawson
Which I suppose in itself is showing the problem of this. If direct translation, again, doesn’t really work out in another culture and, oh, this problem’s endless.

Per Axbom
And then you have people arguing that we, well, the CX space, so its customers, not users. But we all know the issues with that because all people aren’t customers. The people buying the system may not be the one using it. And some actually don’t pay – are they customers?

James Royal-Lawson
And then we have citizens. Yeah. Some places, some services, like that the public sector provides will be for citizens.

Per Axbom
And sometimes you would argue, well, you call people for what they are, depending on the context of what you’re building. So, for example, if I’m building software for composing music, I may call the users musicians. But still the word musician in that case, and in that example, does not really differentiate between any musician or the musicians who use the software.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And then we’re getting very close to the whole thing. Where like, oh, this website is used by men. Because you end up pigeonholing and stereotyping, making too narrow personas that aren’t really kind of useful to us or reflective to what we want to achieve.

Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, that’s a really good point as well, that actually by choosing the wrong word, we can actually limit who we actually include and think about.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Which is kind of connected to users, humans, people and so on. You’re creating boundaries around things. But what is the fundamental problem? What is it that we have a problem with?

Per Axbom
I think there is, I mean, there is a fundamental problem in that we have had this problem in design that oftentimes designers actually do a poor job of seeing users as humans in all their beauty and complexity. But more often, I believe that this is due to like culture and design practice constraints, rather than them using the word “user.” I’m not saying that there may be actual problems with the word “user.” But here’s what’s interesting, and I think where he actually tells us to draw from other professions and industries that have had similar issues. He talks about research psychology, where you have guidelines where actually you’re okay to use the word “subject,” which may also again appear, and that’s also been debated within that realm, where it seems reductive as well. But it says the guidelines say, also they emphasise, “write about the people who participated in your work in a way that acknowledges their contributions and their agency.” So it’s back to actually just treat the people you are working with, the people you are working for, the people you’re working to help – treat them as people. So if you treat them as people, the words you use can be a combination of many different things. But the important point is that you get across the message that “we care.”

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, get across the message you care. And also, I think there’s a degree of shared language to this, when you’re working in a group or in a team, then everyone has to be comfortable with the language you’re using, and what that means. And if you notice, or it becomes apparent that the term “user” isn’t something that your group feels comfortable with, then they don’t feel comfortable with it. Exactly. So it becomes academic that we’re talking about whether users is kind of good or bad, or if we should do something else. If you’re a group of humans who are working together and someone doesn’t feel happy or safe or pleased about the fact you’re using this phrase, then that’s something you need to discuss and need to feel comfortable with discussing.

Per Axbom
Exactly. I think that’s the main takeaway that I want to communicate is really that you need to communicate with your team, with the people in your workforce, and make sure that you agree on language and that everybody is on board with the language. And as you’re saying, James, that there is a safe space for discussing this. So really, what I’m saying is, because at the top of the article he was saying that we keep having these endless discussions. But that does not mean that we don’t have discussions, they just don’t have to be endless. But they have to be planned out. And you have to accept and acknowledge that people will have problems with words. And that’s why we sit down and talk about them. Make sure that when we work that we use the words that everybody feels comfortable with.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s our empathy skills that we need to be on top of, of the fact that there are others out there and take note of them. [Music] So the second article in today’s link show is “The Struggle of Using Native Emoji on the Web” by Nolan Lawson. As we said in the beginning, he’s a web developer from Seattle in America. And the whole thing with emojis – it’s really interesting. Now, one of the reasons why I picked this article to talk about is, we, as designers, a lot of the time, we’re very quick to, you know, be creative, throw things into designs, and include stuff in designs. And it’s not always that we’re so aware of the implications of some of the things that we try to include in our designs.

I mean, you, Per, have talked about this a lot during the years about wanting designers to have more of an understanding about like HTML5, and CSS and so on work, so they have better conversations with developers and designers, and, you know, getting into accessibility and usability that there are certain things that, well, it might be easy to do, but maybe you shouldn’t do. So there’s a lot of aspects of design, that’s, as we know, isn’t just pretty interfaces. And emojis are one of those things that, you know, it comes off, it gets included, it’s, you know, I can think back to workshops we’ve done, or been part of over the years, various conferences where you’d be doing a breakout session, and be designing something and it’s not unusual that maybe an emoji would appear somewhere, anyone can draw a smiley face kind of thing. So it’s kind of sketched on something and put on a Post-it Note, or whatever. But anyway, this article, what it’s talking about, is the problems, the complexities of emojis.

Per Axbom
I love how nerdy and technical it gets. One of our pet peeves is how many designers actually don’t like to get into this nerdy tech stuff. But I think it’s important to at least be aware of it and be aware of these types of challenges, as you were saying, we come across these every year, something that we think is simple as a designer, it’s extremely complex to actually implement in the backend.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. And this is the underlying point of why I want to talk about this article. It’s fun that it’s going to be about emojis, but sometimes we don’t go below the surface and we have developers who are going grey and pulling their hair out trying to fix stuff that we’ve designed, because we haven’t really understood the security implications, the complexity, the incompatibility, you know, how it works on different devices, and emojis are basically a fantastic example of what a complete mess something actually is. Which is surprising to see when you think about how commonplace emojis are now and how they seem to be everywhere. So emojis are a standard overseen by the unicorn [laughs]. Emojis are a standard overseen by the Unicode Consortium, and they upgrade the emoji package, I guess, quite regularly and they have debates on what to include and then you get times where there’s more inclusive ones appeared like I think at the end of last year… there’s always new emojis that are coming out and included. I think we’re up to is it Emoji 14.0 or something like that?

Per Axbom
I think it’s 14 right now, yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Now, because there’s versions and releases of emojis, not everything works straight away. Now, I remember years ago, that me and you, Per, we’ve always had Android and Apple as our devices in the 10 years or so we’ve been doing this and when iPhones first came about, you just got squares. Every time someone sent you an SMS or anything with an emoji from an iPhone, just loads of squares. So you end up being kind of really frustrated that you had no idea what people were saying. It was literally like you could have been speaking a different language. They were it was emoji language instead of English or Swedish. A complete blank. And there was no way of working out what it was really. And then things move on. So now generally, on the mobiles anyway, most of the time you see most of the emojis. But not all the time. Even on telephones,

Per Axbom
Yeah because all telephones don’t update automatically.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. And in the article, Nolan does actually go through in wonderful detail, and with lots of examples, and when you open up the link, if you click on it, then you’ll be able to test, he’s done it so that you can actually see and test and he’s used a combination of images, and real emojis and text descriptions of the emoji. So you do get a really good feel of the problem when you open it up and test it in different places. But just to go into some of the problems, not only are there different releases and versions of emojis, which might be supported to different extents, at different times. Different web browsers support different releases, depending on how far they’ve come in implementing stuff. Some web browsers don’t natively support them at all. So they’re completely reliant on the webpage, including a font that includes emojis, or you’re hoping that the OS of the device you’re using now actually supports emojis. So to give you an example, Windows, the default emoji package that comes with Windows doesn’t include flags. So to make a flag display as anything else, other than if we take Swedish flag on Windows, it will come out as SE. Because the native OS doesn’t support anything more than just displaying SE. So you have to kind of polyfill that with something else to make it appear as a Swedish flag. Sometimes, emojis will turn out as the black and white ones, what you would consider to be old emojis. Where they’re just the kind of black outlines of things.

Per Axbom
Because that’s the thing, because he’s really, he’s going through it all, and I keep thinking that, well, at least there must be some subset. So, if you go back far enough, you can actually start using the emojis because then there would be at least like 10 or 20 of them that you could use. And he’s really well no.

James Royal-Lawson
Possibly, no, because like, Linux, for example, doesn’t natively support any of them, I don’t think.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, when it boils down to it, the kind of font packages we used to have didn’t really include any of these little characters whatsoever. They’re all additions. So when you peel it back far enough, there are going to be devices that don’t display them. But the bigger point here is that a lot of the common situations we find ourselves in still don’t support them. I looked at this article on my tablet last night, when we were talking about what we’re going to discuss, and all the emojis basically displayed correctly, but I’ve got a newly updated version of Android or whatever, and the browser’s up to date on it, and so on, so everything worked fine. I’ve opened up the same article now in Chrome on my Windows machine. And so many of them are broken compared to what they were last night. The one with the… you know the very first one that he’s used as the first test in the article, it should be a lotus flower that’s seen in the opening paragraphs. It’s just a square for me, just now.

Per Axbom
I also think it’s important to cover, because I don’t think everybody’s aware who’s listening, how the Unicode characters work and how some emojis are created, because, at one point, you’re actually combining Unicode characters to create new emojis. And he has this great example of the polar bear. So there is a polar bear emoji. But to create the polar bear emoji, the code behind that is that actually, first, the code for bear, and then the code for snowflake. And that is displayed as a polar bear. If you have updated. If you have not updated, it’s a brown bear and a snowflake, and you don’t understand why. And actually, what happened to me was I copied from the article, the polar bear, pasted it into my notes, and it became a bear and a snowflake.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, god, yeah. And this is really quite common with all these kind of combination ones that have come more recently. Like the other example in the article is a man with red hair, which actually breaks down to a man plus a floating kind of wig with red hair on it. And the same thing with all the skin tone emojis that came. They’re the classic yellow emojis, plus some kind of skin tone indication. So, if you don’t support that, then it comes out as two things as well. So, it’s wonderfully complex and even in addition to this, it’s incredibly problematic to detect if an emoji is broken.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Because that’s one of the things you say, “okay, it’s alright, we’ll just deal with this, we’ll make this better for the user” [laughs] ‘user’. “We’ll make it better for the person at the other side of the webpage, by detecting whether or not they can support it. And we’ll put something in its place, like alt text, I guess, that we use for images. But detecting whether an emoji works or not, it’s really not that straightforward. And it’s quite complicated and demanding, even if you want to be partly sure it’s going to work. So you’re not going to do it, basically.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And so, now people are thinking, so how come it works on Facebook, for example, why does it work there? Well, the answer is that because it’s a huge platform, and it has lots of money to invest to it, they have actually designed their own emoji font. And this brings a whole load of different issues or new issues, because lots of big platforms have designed their own emoji fonts, which means that your emoji, when you create it in one platform and send it to another, it may not look the same. So, if you see it on an iPhone, copy and paste it to Twitter, it will look differently.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. If anyone’s ever, and they probably have done, looked at emojipedia, which is a good website to give descriptions of what emojis are supposed to mean, or what they might be interpreted as, because there’s some ones that are a bit kind of… you don’t always realise how kind of dodgy some of them are, or how they’re interpreted in certain cultures. It also tells you when they were introduced. But what’s also nice with that page is they also show how it looks in all these custom emoji sets that the big platforms have produced. So they will show how it looks in Apple, Google, maybe on Samsung telephones on Windows or Microsoft, how it looks in WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, you know, all these variations. They display how it looks. And you can see it’s a huge variation about how this looks.

Per Axbom
One I know I looked at is actually a couple kissing, or a couple with a heart. So, that’s actually a single Unicode emoji, but on different platforms, it will be more clearly a man and a woman where on others that’s more ambiguous. So there’s actually a decision made about how do we actually signify a couple? Does it always have to be a man and woman? And there’s been decisions made on some platforms that we don’t always want to assume.

James Royal-Lawson
I want to actually read a little bit from towards the end of it, because the article itself doesn’t give you any answers. What he does is just point out, I guess, the complexity and problems of this, which is also what I wanted to do with it is highlight to everyone out there is that stuff isn’t always as straightforward as it looks. And what he writes is: “At a time when web browsers have gained a staggering array of new capabilities – including Bluetooth, USB, and access to the filesystem – it’s still a struggle to render a smiley face. It feels a bit odd to argue in 2022, that ‘the web should have emoji support,’ and yet here I stand, cap in hand, making my case.” And I think that’s actually quite a good summary of a lot of where we are in many aspects of what we do. We’ve come so far, yet, we’re only really at the beginning. It’s all so complex still, even though we’ve achieved so much.

Per Axbom
Because it’s interesting, actually, at the beginning of the article, he argues that there are potential benefits to this. So, what Nolan says is that, if it actually worked as you would like it to work, and the emojis worked, when you put them into the page, then you wouldn’t have to have a spritesheet, you wouldn’t have to have your own heavy emoji font, which a lot of these big platforms do. And you wouldn’t have any image processing, which actually takes a lot of power from the computer and for loading these images. So if it worked, as it should, or as you would hope it should, then it would work. So, that solution of well, “can’t we just do it like Facebook?” And I think you have to just imagine how much work it is to maintain your own emoji font, designing them all, and keeping it updated as new versions of the Unicode emojis are released.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Is it twice a year they update it?

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s an investment. And yeah, I worked on a project where we tried to include emojis, it was a chat system. And we thought, “yeah, of course.” Everyone was asking for it and it seemed a kind of real obvious thing to include. And then we started to look at it. And this is when I first realised kind of how emojis hadn’t really come as far as I expected them to have at that point. Every time I lifted a little stone, it was like problem, problem, and then I tried to get a developer involved to help me see if it was as big a problem as it looked like. It was impossible. Because we had a platform that was not just web based, it also had an application – Windows application. And databases involved and god knows what else and it was just… we buried it. We said, “No, we can’t do this.” It was just too big an investment.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
So it got buried in Jira, somewhere.

Per Axbom
I was really actually intrigued by this point that he made or this realisation that he had, I wasn’t aware of that the Unicode Consortium, speaking of flags, like you were doing before that the flag emoji on Windows doesn’t really exist on 10 or 11. But the Unicode Consortium have themselves come out against the flag emoji, so they won’t be making any more flag emojis. Their argument is, they don’t want to be in this business of adjudicating geopolitical boundaries. Already today, you have Wales and Scotland having their own flags in Unicode, but a lot of other similar territories do not. So there’s already this unfairness, sort of, around this flag issue. And I know that there was lots of discussion around the Taiwanese flag, of course, so if you think about it, it’s just a small, tiny image that we use on our phones, but it quickly becomes very, very political.

James Royal-Lawson
And very, very sensitive. Yeah, we’ve mentioned as well the skin tone thing.

Per Axbom
Skin tone, accessibility.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, there’s been a lot of issues and problems with emojis over the years and flags and countries, the politics to do with it – when a country changes flag, they demand that Unicode updates its emoji sets, but you can’t demand that everyone implements the newest set. So you end up with it being broken for a long time.

Per Axbom
You know what this reminded me of when I started reading it was, you remember when you and I started designing web pages? And how many colours we were allowed to use? 216. I’m hoping this will blow a lot of listeners’ minds. We were allowed 216 colours because they were called the web safe, because monitors back then allowed for 256 colours, and some were actually dedicated for the operating system. So, one way of ensuring that colours would display similarly, was using one of these 216 colours, which didn’t really work across the board, which meant there was actually also a list of 20 colours, the 20 web safest colours, so I was sort of hoping that he would end up with the 20 web safe emojis. But we’re not there yet even.

James Royal-Lawson
No, no, exactly, yeah. Because even the old school ones, you still, at some point, need to have a font somewhere.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
You know, and there are going to be platforms that don’t have that underlying font. So yeah, most of us will have a fallback system font includes quite a few of them. But yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot of interesting aspects to this. And I think hopefully people will pick up on that and be inspired by it that where emojis themselves encapsulate the complexity of the web, the challenges of inclusive design, maintenance, backwards compatibility, the importance of testing.

Per Axbom
Politics.

James Royal-Lawson
Politics! And there’s so many things involved in this. It’s absolutely wonderful. And it can be quite nerdy when you get into the details of it as well, which appeals. [Music]

Per Axbom
What to listen to next, James?

James Royal-Lawson
That’s a very good question. And given we spent now half the show talking about emojis, why not give episode 244 a listen? Now, that’s a topic show where me and you, Per, spend the entire show talking about icons and pictograms.

Per Axbom
Yes, another nerdy show.

James Royal-Lawson
Another nerdy show, another one highlighting the complexity of universally understood icons. The clue is, there aren’t any. That’s a spoiler isn’t it. I shouldn’t give out spoilers, no.

Per Axbom
So this has been one of those shows where we nerd out together, just the two of us. In a few days, we’ll actually be recording an interview again with a guest who we will not disclose at this moment. But again, that will be actually recorded in front of a live audience, which we keep doing these days in cooperation with Ambition Empower. So if you want to check out and learn more about that and actually understand how you also can not just listen to us live but also learn from people like Kim Goodwin, Chris Noessel, Susan Weinschenk and I think Christian Crumlish has now come on board as well as a tutor and myself as well. And so do check that out on uxpodcast.com/empower. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Do you know whatever happened to the fried shrimp emoji?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, whatever happened to the fried shrimp emoji?

James Royal-Lawson
It was temporary. [Laughs]

Per Axbom
Oh, that took me a while!

James Royal-Lawson
Do you know tempura? Tempura. Temporary. Fried shrimp. No? I thought it was quite good that one, I thought it was good! [Laughs]

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom recorded in April 2022 and published as episode 288 of UX Podcast.