A transcript of Episode 274 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss designers becoming better privacy practitioners and the use of causal loop diagrams as part of system thinking.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Dave Trendall.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 274.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I’m James.
Per Axbom
And I’m Per.
James Royal-Lawson
And I’m stuck in my chair, my cables got caught, damn. Sorry, bit of a panic moment. I’m still James. And this is UX podcast, balancing Business, Technology, people and society every other Friday for a decade, with listeners in 200 countries and territories from UK to Albania.
Per Axbom
And today, we have for you a link show, which means that we, during our digital travels, we pick two articles. It doesn’t always have to be articles though, does it, I mean, it’s blog posts, it’s sometimes, we haven’t had another podcast though, but we each pick one. And we talk about it for 15 minutes. And we always say, ‘Do we have anything to say for 15 minutes?’ It turns out, we always do.
James Royal-Lawson
Strange that. And last time we had a link show we ended up having just one article.
Per Axbom
Yeah, we had too much to say.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah, awesome. Steven had too many things to inspire us about.
James Royal-Lawson
So today’s articles, we have two for you, as said. And one of them is ‘System Thinking for Design Systems’, which is by Buddy Tamaryn. Who is…
Per Axbom
He is head of design in Indonesia, Education and Civic Tech.
James Royal-Lawson
Correct. You found your notes quicker than I found my notes. And the other one is ‘It’s High Time for Product Designers to Become Privacy Practitioners’ by Stephanie Lucas.
Per Axbom
Yep. And she’s a UX professional, the likes of us, but also very much a responsible design champion and advocate who does a lot of writing and thinking and teaching on how to decide more ethically. We haven’t decided which one to go first. So I’m gonna say privacy over systems. Let’s go for privacy. P because people come to for S.
James Royal-Lawson
Alphabetical.
Per Axbom
So Stephanie’s written this article, actually urging us as designers, as product designers, to understand privacy implications more and more proactively addressing these issues with design. And to be clear upfront, she’s not saying we need to know the legal stuff. And she’s not saying we need to be the expert, she is saying we need to be paying more attention. Because there are things going on in the world, where people are becoming so much more aware of privacy issues when it comes to data collection, and consent given that means that there are always these aspects to websites, where we should be putting more effort.
Per Axbom
Because sometimes we just say, well, the legal team can deal with that or get a sign off from the lawyers or we put that aside and somebody else decides what the text should look like because it has to look a certain way with at least we think that way. And sometimes just with companies, I think use these standard cookie banners. And we just say okay, we will use that because it’s the simple decision. But, given that there are all these problems and issues coming to light and have been over the past decade, I guess, she’s urging us to put this into our work processes to actually spend time doing the work. And I think the best part of the article, what I liked most about it, is urging us to collaborate and cooperate more with legal teams, because that’s again, acknowledging how much designers can do in the way of helping others within our companies communicate in a better way with regards to the important issues that we all have to address, really.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, as designers, we are designing the contact points with the users. Or we’re enabling the moments where privacy issues are communicated or breached or potentially breached or need consent and so on. We are designing those so we do need to have some of the understanding.
Per Axbom
Right. And I think when I first saw the title of this article, I realised that well, so many people are going to be going, ‘Well, what don’t we as designer have to care about’ there’s so much always, it’s like we’re always adding to this bag of tricks that designers need and the competence that designers need and it’s sort of never ending.
James Royal-Lawson
As we talk about Jared psool, as we’ve mentioned multiple times, he talks about the broken comb profile of skills, you need to be aware of a multitude of different things to be a good designer, not a specialist or expert in all of them, but aware of many.
Per Axbom
Okay, exactly, exactly, that’s such a good way of putting it that not be an expert in all of them, which is also Stephanie saying, but actually be aware of it so that you can contact and collaborate with the right people to make the right decision. And in the article, she is actually put forward three categories – personal data collection, something that most websites do, if you have a contact form, you’re collecting data about people. Start thinking about what should you even be collecting. But as she’s pointing out, as well, does information have to come in a certain order.
Per Axbom
That’s something that we may not be aware of, but something that we can check off with legal – in collaboration with them and not just ask them, that’s what tends to happen, I think, is just ask legal and tell them how it’s supposed to be done. Instead of having a conversation with them, and proposing alternative ways that we as designers are so proficient in helping them realise that there could be several pathways forward that help people understand these legaleesed texts in a better way.
James Royal-Lawson
And here’s also a moment where you get to use your design skills and try to sometimes, I guess, we’ll be forced to add something, or it needs to be phrased in a certain way or place in certain place. Because it says so.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So here is, I guess, part of the collaboration, the dialogue of understanding what is actually trying to be achieved, and if we still achievable, maybe we’re less kind of brutally legal.
Per Axbom
No, yeah, exactly. And sometimes, but the feeling I get from a lot of projects I’m in or the types of discussions I hear is that somebody will say, we can’t do it that way, because of legal. And that’s just accepted, without even talking to legal. It’s something that somebody may have misheard during a meeting with something that was the case five years ago, and not isn’t the case today. So again, just that conversation – so so important.
James Royal-Lawson
Or perhaps you’ve seen it during a kind of morning seminar or something, and someone said if you put this there, then then it’s going to fulfil this particular thing.
Per Axbom
It’s like, legal is hard to talk to, and it’s like legal is someone else. If I listened to them too much, I wouldn’t be able to do things the way I want. And I think that’s something that she pushes so well, is that we’re on the same team, we’re playing for the same side.
James Royal-Lawson
Although it does Per, make me think back to when another link show when we talked about Heather burns article about checking your privacy privilege,
Per Axbom
Right,
James Royal-Lawson
And how she pointed out that, you know, the disadvantage we’re at, because our industry is so unstructured, and, you know, legal people and so on, they’ve had they’ve gone through career paths with like multiple years of formal education through various educational systems, career paths, taking them through certain points, has to be very streamlined. Whereas we as designers, as UX designers, it’s not really that structured.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And sometimes there seems to be that expectancy, that we’re supposed to be structured around this. But it’s all moving so fast. And when responsible again, for so many things, it’s really hard to feel confident that you’ve made the right decisions in all these cases. But it does feel spinning, spinning back to what I was saying about so many things that we have to think about that our whole profession is like sort of taking two paths. Either you’re really focused on just the interaction design, and the UI design. And whereas what we’re talking about is not expanding our profession, keep expanding it to understand more areas of expertise within web development. I remember when you and I first met you were using webmanager, sometimes as a phrase to to talk about yourself.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Per Axbom
It’s something I’m circling back to, that I want to use more and more these days because it captures in a better way, what we’re actually talking about – somebody needs to have that holistic picture.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Now it’s interesting this because we do see a lot of focus on the UI, the UI aspects of UX and Figma and design systems and production. And you know, Product Management is an area where some of the more, ‘what should we do’, aspects are landing in many organisations when it comes to product. But yeah, maybe there’s a bit of a split between researching and understanding the problem space and actually designing screens to solve the thing that we want to do. So I guess that’s kind of three hours, I guess, spontaneously summarising all of that.
Per Axbom
But that, so then when you were talking about the comb, it made me think about how I really also appreciate what Stephanie is writing about – how she’s calling for a certification process, tailored for product designers. So you and I have previously talked also on the show about certification for designers, as a whole. But now I’m thinking more that this is a way forward where we we pick smaller, more niche areas of certification, so that I can pick my own goodie bag of certificates that help people understand what type of designer I am.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, back in Episode 184, with Zoe Rose, where we talked about adequate accreditation within the design industry. It’s something that, that that was three years ago. We keep coming back to this accreditation and, and things are bubbling up. But it’s a very difficult one to solve. And I think it’s a good point around, well, privacy of education, that is brought up by Stephanie, and I think that – me and you Per have experienced the whole tick box exercise in privacy education in many organisations, especially when we do all the GDPR stuff a few years ago, when we had to watch a certain video, and the organisation demanded that you watch a certain video, once you’d done it, then you could go off and claim that all our workforce are GDPR ready, because they’ve watched a seven minute video that was telling them all the points about GDPR. And that’s very silo based, or Stephanie says an article. And it’s not it’s not embedding privacy first, or thinking into your, your way of working with design.
Per Axbom
Yeah. Which makes me feel that there’s so many good points in this article is you you need the baseline, the baseline would be the certification, so that you know that you have a common language and vocabulary to talk about these issues. But then you actually do also need to talk about them, you need to have those regular meetings, not just once a year, but over time, create an environment where you’re actually involving the people with the right expertise in your work, so that they feel that they are part of it, which allows you to learn from each other. And not just one delivering a piece of ‘this is how it should be written’ kind of material to the other.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I think I’m jumping down, if I’m allowed to, jumping down to consent dialogues, that was the third of the three sections that Stephanie holds herself to in the article. And that’s interesting as well, for the collaboration side of things, and from a UX writing point of view, how you can work on these, this is also something we’ve visited over the years, how can you make a ‘too lazy, didn’t read’ version of some of these privacy, or some of these consent dialogues with huge amounts of text on things and legalese. And really hard to understand stuff that no one reads.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, you and I are probably amongst the people that read slightly more and spend the time on checking, consent boxes and various things, but I mean, if I spend any time watching anyone else, visit a website and definitely my kids, then you know, it’s almost like a reflex test – where these consent dialogues, how quickly can you find the right button to press to make it go away, there’s no consideration about which button to press half the time, it just get rid of the thing so you can carry on doing what you want.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Which is also failure of consent. And actually, it’s not even arguably even legal, because you’ve got to have informed consent.
Per Axbom
Exactly. It’s not legal, but it’s so common and prevalent within the whole industry within the whole world of websites, that it’s impossible to enforce the law.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. I mean, because you know, if I can I can see in the Data like maybe you clicked on that concern form, like nought-point-three seconds after arriving on the web page or something, you haven’t considered consent about that?
Per Axbom
Well unless I’ve visited before, which I can I appreciate that it’s a response that a company could have to visit, you can’t be expected to read it every time you visit.
James Royal-Lawson
How do I know it’s asking the same consents?
Per Axbom
Exactly. Without tracking that person.
James Royal-Lawson
Does the company know that my opinions about consent haven’t changed since last time?
Per Axbom
Yeah. It’s a mess.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Per Axbom
But again, a reason for us to be talking about it so much more.
James Royal-Lawson
There was one there was a third one, which was the second one in the article.
Per Axbom
Yes, dark patterns. And as she says, and acknowledges that’s not especially related to privacy, it’s a larger problem than that. But there are regulatory trends to keep track of. And that’s the interesting part here that we as designers can keep track of these trends, because they actually affect how we should be designing things. Because laws are being I mean, we talk about GDPR a lot, but there are lots of laws in California, which actually need to be thought about as well. When it comes to what you’re allowed to do when it comes to asking for me for extra information, when you’re asking people to subscribe to newsletters and stuff like that.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the whole kind of opt-in opt-out thing, I mean, it’s really very pleasing that Harry’s Brignole’s, his dark patterns has become something that is actually included in laws. So it’s a good thing that the concept, the thing, the idea that we can have, where you can do things digitally, that effectively tricked people into doing something they weren’t aware of, is a really important milestone, I guess, on our digital progression over the years.
Per Axbom
And I love that because that makes me think that there’s sort of a solution, well, it’s not a solution, there’s never a solution. But to what Stephanie said after is that we need to become more competent within this area within this area. What Harry Brignole has done with dark patterns, it’s actually he’s created a design pattern library for dark patterns, which makes it easy to find and categorise and understand what we’re talking about, again, with that common vocabulary so that we can decide what we’re talking about, we can go through it systematically, check have we done any of these. So it’s a really good way of applying design to a design problem.
James Royal-Lawson
And I know that Harris talks about the dark side of dark patterns, and his website is used as a playbook.
Per Axbom
Oh, of course, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Because it’s the ultimate sourcing deal to find how you can do stuff that tricks people, because highlights are the ones showing you how to do it. But, no, no, I think the positive aspects of it are where – it enables us to understand the situations where it is a dark pattern, and how maybe discuss the legal aspects and also, I guess, the moral aspects am I okay to use moral there? That we should be doing certain things. So as you said, it’s not just privacy. I mean, that’s, that’s going a bit further than just privacy and dark patterns. But there are specific dark patterns that we use to get consent and get approval, get the count of people to go forward and tick legislatively, that is good to meet legislative legislative requirements without actually properly meeting them.
Per Axbom
Right and I think that’s where if you’re thinking, well, how can I keep track of all of this? Well, that’s why you’ve started this collaboration process with your legal team is that you actually talk with them and ask them for help and keeping track of these things that keep coming out these changes to legislation that covers what you can and cannot do on the web. I think that was a good summary. I think so too. Let’s see what we can talk about when it comes to systems.
James Royal-Lawson
So article two for today, system thinking for design systems.
Per Axbom
So meta.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I know. It’s almost symmetrical. It’s kind of like system design you want for design systems. But anyway, it’s system thinking for design systems. This is by Buddy Tamaryn, who, as we said at the beginning of the show is senior principal designer in public sector education in Indonesia. He writes on his website that he’s currently on a mission to improve student learning outcomes in Indonesia.
James Royal-Lawson
But in this article, well he’s basically using a system lens to explore participation and contribution to the design system that’s in place where he works. And he uses uses a causal loop diagram, to map out the elements that affect the contribution and to the design system, according to his own mental model of how things work. He says himself, it helps me to see how things are interconnected.
James Royal-Lawson
Now, he goes on in the article to give a couple of specific examples of how the causal loop diagrams help him. One of the examples was to surface or anticipate intangible barriers. So they say, well, what he means I think, by intangible barriers is to, to find the things that aren’t immediately obvious things that could impact the participation in using or maintaining or developing the design system. So the the reason for me, including the article today, is not just because of design systems, and how he’s seeing kinds of issues with our design system, how it’s developing, how it’s maturing. For me, the real point of including this article today was his use of causal loop diagrams as a tool for system mapping as part of system thinking,
Per Axbom
Right
Per Axbom
Which really, really interested in me, and and really, really set me going. And I know, Per, that at least during the last couple of days, or the last couple years of pandemic, you’ve been making a fair bit of use of causal loop diagrams.
Per Axbom
Yeah, and as you mentioned, the pandemic, that’s especially one that I’ve been using, as an example, actually, when teaching over the past few months, early in the pandemic. So it’s actually from March of last year, I made a system app describing all the different factors that either increase or decrease the spread of the virus. And I did this based on news articles I was reading and research I was reading. And it was really interesting. And I didn’t, I don’t say it’s complete in any way because that’s the interesting thing about system apps, it’s never done, it’s never complete.
Per Axbom
But you can always start, you can always keep adding to a system map, and start figuring out so if I’m adding this – if I’m adding a ‘washing my hands’, to the system, what what happens? Well, I can decrease the spread of the virus. What’s interesting then is that well, that also decreases the spread of other types of viruses. So that the, we decrease the spread of more diseases than just COVID.
Per Axbom
So that was an interesting like, so when I started seeing that circle, I saw other things out there that was decreasing those other aspects of it. And so, but then you were you were having lockdowns, and that was affecting mental health, and that was affecting social unrest, and the social unrest was affecting adherence to following the guidelines. And that actually meant an increase in the spread of the virus. So all these calls are loops. So what’s interesting about looking at them, when you introduce one thing, to increase another factor or a decrease in other factors, such as the spread of virus, that same thing can do exactly the opposite, if you follow another path.
Per Axbom
So becoming aware of these things, is so so valuable, when understanding risks, and negative impact and positive impact of everything we’re doing and understanding the complexity of it all. So as I just said, anything can be added to it, it’s never done. But you can always learn from it.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. And what we see there is you may see positive contributions or positive things, and that, that maybe leads to directly to other positive increase, yes, but there might be negative effects, or implications from doing that thing. Or the secondary thing might lead to a negative thing. So you see how this rolls out into mapping an entire system of how everything becomes interconnected? And how you you can’t keep all that in your brain at all times? Well, you can’t don’t pick the what are the joy of these causal maps, I think is that the it really does become visual. And I think it’s more easy for the brain to understand, Especially when you’re dealing with more and more complex systems.
James Royal-Lawson
And, I mean, what you’ve done there with the pandemic there, or the COVID example, is that you made quite, quite boundary to your system.
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
You started in quite a defined space, and then built or mapped out within that space, which as far as I understood was a very, is almost essential to do when you start working with systems thinking and causal mapping – causal loop mapping, but you don’t dry map the world, you’re going to fail if you try and map the entire planet. But if you stick to a certain system, and it’s bounded system, then you’ve got more chance of achieving something that you can build on, as you say, interconnected systems.
Per Axbom
But also acknowledging that I mean, you could I mean, since the ultimate system map, of course, maps the entire world and realising that your system map always maps just a tiny, tiny part of it – that makes you a lot more humble when it comes to what you’re trying to achieve. And realising, but also more acknowledging and realising, ‘Well, I think this is going to happen’. But there are so many factors in play that I have not been able to map. But I have no idea about that I have to keep an eye on what’s happening. Because if I don’t, my assumption may be proved to be very wrong.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. And this goes to that everything is interconnected. So we have a lot of the time, a lot of work we’ve done I think, even historically, we worked in a very linear fashion. I think in web design, or digital design, we’ve had a very much a factory production thinking process. Maybe we used to call it waterfall or whatever. But we still got a very production based way of working, yes, we call stuff iterative, and we have agile or the rest of it but ultimately, we’re often talking about linear flows with linear achievements. Whereas everything is interconnected.
James Royal-Lawson
And it’s all it’s all circular, it’s loops, it’s integrated feedback loops. Buddy himself, in the article, he encourages us to see things or systems or, obviously, but not as snapshots. And I think the thing about the point about snapshots is really good, relevant as well is we all too often, we we just research or we do an audit, or analysis or current state analysis where we we see where we are, we create a static thing – a snapshot of something that is intrinsically transient and changing all the time.
James Royal-Lawson
But buddy, it gives us a personal example in the article. We often see things in a snapshot. For example, when I was in elementary school, I assumed my friend, Tony, was someone that was not motivated. And I labelled him as lazy. In reality, Tony had an issue in his family and didn’t have the mental space or energy for school. The thought of his parents fighting and arguing was exhausting him. So seeing Tony’s state, mental state as part of a bigger system, rather than a fixed snapshot, allowed Buddy to understand the situation better, and be more empathetic and adjust his thinking, and his attitude towards the situation as part of a bigger system,
Per Axbom
Right? It’s such a lovely story as well. And it’s so good at illustrating the boundaries of systems because I think, historically, if you look at someone having problems at school, you look at the school system, you look at what’s happening there. And you don’t look at the family system, because that’s always seen as a separate entity. And that’s obviously changed a lot over the past decades. But I think, by expanding our understanding of the system and how we draw boundaries, and understanding that the system over there also affects the system over here. As I said, it makes us more humble, but also so it makes people understand more, and it actually changes the way people think. I love how we got that forward.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And we see this time and time again, that what you what you meet on the surface is like someone’s kind of angry in a meeting and you’re wondering why are they angry in my meeting. The reason they’re angry in the meeting might not be because of the topic of the meeting.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And it may not be about you and a lot of people assume well, was it something I did? Was it something I said? And again, it’s all these assumptions that we make in all different contexts that cause poor decision making as well in that we assume that this thing over here is the problem, once we fix that, instead of again, now I’m coming back to Stephanie’s article about communicating – and talking to people to understand, and listening, primarily and foremost, listening to people to understand and to give them space. And not always attacking them with questions. That’s not what I’m saying. But actually giving space and understanding and acknowledging that I’m not seeing the whole picture here.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, if we’re gonna if we’re gonna get slightly into the whole mental health side of things as well, as an example of how this kind of bigger broader thinking is useful. Thinking back to our interview with Jennifer Akullian about mental health, but yeah, it’s so much bigger than we are and so to wrap up this I really like the use of causal loop diagrams as part of system thinking. It’s not the only way of mapping complex systems. There are plenty of different ones. I mean, I’m not, we’re not going to attempt to go through them all because there are too many. But you do a lot of mind mapping, which isn’t really mapping systems, so mind-mapping, as always collecting thoughts,
Per Axbom
But it’s a good example because I mean –
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s a really good example Per, but I think cluster maps is what you call the one that’s related to systems thinking where rather than have, because in a mind map, you have a thing, a middle, your starting node, and you build everything out from that, whereas
Per Axbom
– with different arms that contain sort of different topic areas, sometimes you do realise, well, actually, this arm up here, that’s like the third arm of 101 topic is actually related to something down here, which is the fifth arm of another topic. And then you can draw an arrow between those. And that’s sort of your starting sort of a system map, actually.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah, when you’re there, you’re closer to a cluster map where a cluster map is just you put down everything, and you start connecting the boxes, and you embrace the chaos. And just keep on connecting the boxes. So you don’t you don’t worry about it being like focused or structured, like a mind map. This is all about mapping the connections, yes. Which you can redraw, or revise or produce other formats later, I guess, if you want, but more the point is, you get down to chaos, get it out there.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And I have to say, this is also a really good article on actually understanding more. So have a look at that at that system app, because it actually explains a lot about the things that you can consider when you have a design system within their organisation and you’re trying to get people to use it in the right way.
James Royal-Lawson
Use it the right way, developing the right way, embrace it in the right way. Yeah, absolutely.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you for joining us for this lecture today. And as usual, you can help us produce us podcast by signing up for our volunteer lists. There is one for transcripts, there’s one for publishing, there is one for helping us produce the show notes. If all of that sounds too much effort for you, then you can also give us a little bit of money, which helps pay for things like hosting various services we use to help us produce the show. And of course, Remy our producer.
Per Axbom
Yes. I have to say about the show notes. I mean, they are now shock-full of interesting links that I almost not do not think about as we’re doing the show, but there’s so much stuff there to actually dive deeper into.
James Royal-Lawson
I’m actually always blown away by the help we get from our volunteers. It’s wonderful.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
James,
James Royal-Lawson
Per,
Per Axbom
Do you know what happens when it rains cats and dogs?
James Royal-Lawson
No, I don’t know, what does happen when it rains, cats and dogs?
Per Axbom
You have to be careful not to step in a poodle.
James Royal-Lawson
Because that would be a catastrophe.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom recorded in October 2021 and published as episode 274 of UX Podcast.