A transcript of Episode 252 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom discuss articles about the challenges and problems with the design industry, and the value of “Stories”.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Bradley Gregory.
Transcript
Per Axbom
Thank you to everyone who is helping us with our transcripts. You’re doing a great job helping us make sure they’re published together with the podcast. If you’d also like to help out with publishing the podcast, just email us, hej@uxpodcast.com hey, or hej.
Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 252. [music]
James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody, welcome to us podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
And Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
Balancing business, technology, people and society. With our listeners in 197 countries and territories in the world, from Azerbaijan to Switzerland.
Per Axbom
I always do wonder now if people have noticed the small little tweaks we have done in the intro. I hope some of them do.
James Royal-Lawson
I’d like to think that people collect them.
Per Axbom
[laughter]
We have for you today a link show, which means that we have gone out on digital travels and we have collected two articles for you. And that we will be discussing and the first one out is, James…
James Royal-Lawson
Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design, by Lisa Angela.
Per Axbom
And the second one is, Spotify adds Stories, but is there any value to them? by Michael Beausoleil.
James Royal-Lawson
And we got really wet and damp while doing our digital travels for these ones. It’s disgusting weather out there.
Per Axbom
[laughter] I had no idea where you’re going with that.
Per and James
[both laughing]
James Royal-Lawson
Well, the thing is, when we’re recording this, it’s the 11th of December. Yeah. And so far in Stockholm, we have had zero hours of sunlight during December.
Per Axbom
It is crazy.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s so dark. And just so everyone knows sunrise is at 08:33 [8:33 AM] today, and sunset was at 14:48 [2:48 PM]. So we’re almost down to six hours of daylight.
Per Axbom
Yeah,
James Royal-Lawson
There we are. Merry Christmas to you.
Per Axbom
There we are.
[music transition]
And on that dystopian note, [laughter] moving on. So this is an article that I’m so happy that Lisa wrote and put out there. So at Lisa Angela she’s a design evangelist for better process and education. She’s a hardcore tricky, and she’s a science and public health nerd. And she’s also extremely well articulated in critiquing our design world. And her article, Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design. I think it resonated so much with the both of us, because it really calls out many of the different things that we’ve talked about over the years. But she started in one post…
James Royal-Lawson
both privately and on the podcast, it’s a lot of things that we’ve been fighting with in our, you know, our careers in our, what we’re observing in the design industry, and… and I guess Per, a little bit of what some of the things that we’ve tried to fight with correct or help correct over the years as well.
Per Axbom
Yeah, I agree. And so in the subtitle, she sort of describes the article as an effort to dismantle and rebuild a system that disempowers and excludes by design. And I mean, she’s not doing this in the article, she’s calling it out. She’s, she’s calling for the conversations to happen to help us all deal with these issues. And so what Lisa is saying is that the design practice is flawed. Design, education is flawed. There’s this paradox. I’m glad you mentioned that, that there’s all these fantastic good people with so much good intent.
James Royal-Lawson
And talent.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. But the output, of course, sometimes just isn’t quite up to par with what we say that we are putting out into the world. And so self awareness, perhaps is not our strong suit is one of her many points as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I think we’re going to end up quoting a lot of bits from the article. I don’t think I’ve… when I’ve been making notes for link shows previously, I don’t think I’ve ever quoted this many bits from the article, when I’ve been making my notes. There’s a lot of good things to say. One thing she says in the introduction about our profession as designers, “Name any other profession that could continually get away with the incredible inconsistences in quality that we collectively generate”.
Per Axbom
Yeah. [light laughter}
James Royal-Lawson
High and Low. Up and down.
Per Axbom
[light laughter continued] I quoted the same one in my notes. So I completely agree. I made a huge mind map here. And I think, she also quotes Will McAvoy from Newsroom. “The first step in solving a problem is recognising there is one”. And i think, I mean over the past years, a lot of us are in agreement that there is a problem or many problems in the design industry. And, and she summarised them so well, in these seven points.
James Royal-Lawson
That thing about the awareness Per, yes there’s there’s a great amount of awareness, but maybe we can all put our finger on it.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Or, maybe you don’t always want to admit, I say the whole thing about admiting what, you know, we know there’s a problem, but maybe don’t want to admit what the problem is.
Per Axbom
And of course, also, there are powerful people out there who want to defend them. Defend the status quo, which is something that Lisa also addresses in her post.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and the bulk of Lisa’s post is actually a series of well, Top-of-Mind areas where she thinks that things are just obviously not working, as they should be in the world of digital design.
Per Axbom
So let’s jump on to the first one. “Design educators and industry leaders have never reached a consensus about what comprises a ‘good enough’ foundational education for digital design”. So what happens then, and I mean, I can attest to this as well, because I actually teach at a design school as you do. And when you talk to people after they’ve graduated and come out into the world, it is exactly as she puts it. They’re not as prepared as they thought, because we’re not, we don’t have consensus around what we’re supposed to be able to do. And of course, the people who hire us and employers also don’t exactly know what we’re supposed to do for them.
James Royal-Lawson
No, and that gap, Lisa mentioned about imposter syndrome is perhaps down mainly to the fact that there’s this mismatch between what we’re educating the tools and processes we’re giving students, and what the industry, how the industry works and how companies behave. It’s a logistical nightmare. And I think, a lot of organisations, I still don’t think they know what they want or need. You know, we, we see all these adverts for various level positions.
And when it boils down to it, especially in UX, I think we’re all, we’re all individuals, we’re all I think Jared Spool, and we’ve put it like this as well, broken, comb people. We have different competency levels in different areas, some of is very broad, some of it is quite narrow, but we’re all at different levels. And, you know, you can’t throw out one comb, or lose one come expect to find an identical broken comb to fit, you know, the slot.
Per Axbom
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
But they asked for the same comb every time to fill their old comb slot.
Per Axbom
And that’s a good point. But it also I mean, for me, it feels like then that we are completely failing as an industry to explain what we are about and the value that we bring. From a meeting I had recently with students, it seems like they were so concerned with learning the right tools, as in software tools for making interaction design, because that is what people are asking of them when they come out to the workplaces. But we haven’t taught them how to articulate what they really bring to the table, which is of course, understanding what value you can create to help people out there. Such important business.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s a good point Per, and it brings us on to number two, “We do not properly retire methods or ways of conducting them, which have been shown to be ineffective”. As in that section, Lisa talks about things that we’ve learnt or taught ourselves over the years, she mentioned journey maps and personas. And you know, you can have your own opinions of whether they’re useful or not, and add new ones to the list. That’s not the point here. The thing is that it’s not the deliverables that really is what you’re you’re working with. I wrote my notes “Death to the UX factory”. The whole thing about just producing.
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
But an issue here is that we’ve got, you mentioned this in the intro, there’s I think, there’s too many people out there whose job or career or book sales or whatever you want to call it, relies on some of these methods surviving.
Per Axbom
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
Or even from a teaching perspective, when you yourself know how many hours go into preparing some of these courses. It’s infeasible to redo them every three months when we throw one two out and bring a new one in.
Per Axbom
Exactly. So then it really comes down to what am I teaching, and how do I articulate that in a way that helps them understand the real skills and not the hard skills of software.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And we need to be more open and honest about what is working what isn’t. And coming to consensus as an industry is like, look, we’re gonna stop doing that. But it’s a, it really is a challenge.
Per Axbom
And I’m so happy she called out the journey map. She joked about maybe calling out personas but the journey map for me has also become a symbol because so many of us have been selling journey maps as a deliverable that I’ve talked to clients that, it’s not that they’re asking for a designer anymore, some of them are actually asking you for journey maps. They’re not asking for value, they’re asking for an artefact that doesn’t necessarily actually produce any value. In the end.
James Royal-Lawson
I also dislike the whole brainstorming workshops. You know, you’ve been in over the years you, you have these massive projects, maybe to do whole new services or websites or whatever. And you end up with like a three hour workshop with key stakeholders, where everyone just writes nonsense on post it notes. [Per laughs] And that’s what we build. Because, you know we don’t do proper research, we don’t have time for all this kind of stuff. You know, we do token gesture stuff. But ultimately, you know, you, you just do what’s on the 5 post it notes that get pulled up…
Per Axbom
Exactly! And that’s what goes into the journey map is stuff that you came up in a workshop and not the actual research that you’re supposed to be doing. And because it looks pretty, it looks like there’s been effort put into it.
James Royal-Lawson
But we sell workshops we sell this process with, we have books that are written about it, and encourage you to do it. And it all kind of flows into it. It just keeps on going.
Per Axbom
And speaking of books and senior people, point number three, “design team seniority levels, are meaningless”. I love this because I’ve seen so many people come into their first job and being called Sr. within a year, for some reason, I don’t know what the… of course I know why this happens. It’s because then they can charge more for them.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, I’ve also got a quote here. So, “In practice, companies hire mostly senior because they don’t understand what we do, and don’t want to have to train anyone”. So this is, this to me is a bit, this is just, again, supply and demand. I mean, we’ve the right, there’s a genuine shortage of senior designers. We’ve expanded super fast in the last decade or so. So when you do need a senior position, you can’t fill it. So you have to then, and you don’t understand what you’re doing anyway as an organisation, so you have to fill it. And you fill it with someone younger and younger, more and more junior, because there’s less and less senior wants to fill the slot.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So that’s to me why we end up with that situation.
Per Axbom
But it’s also the case, I mean that I mean, we don’t have any seniors, I mean, we haven’t even defined what senior means. So of course, you can call anyone a senior, there’s no law that says you can’t. So as we basically destroyed our industry, based on the previous point as well, that there’s no education that tells anyone that this is what a designer needs to know. Because it’s all different.
James Royal-Lawson
And broken comes again. So definition of education broken comes trying to replace things you don’t understand and don’t understand the value of, lying to ourselves about methods and what works. I mean, God, we’re doomed to fail aren’t we. [both laugh] we’re only on point 4.
Per Axbom
I’m so enjoying this, though.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Per Axbom
Oh, point four, “We’ve collectively lost the safety and subsequently the desire to explore and fail”. And what I take from this is what I’m seeing as well in the workplace, that we talk a lot about the importance of failing, in order to learn. But we work in all these agile projects, we work in sprints, and we’re supposed to deliver something at the end of three weeks of what, however you work in your company.
And failing is usually not an option, because you have to get on with it. Because we are still in a world of waterfall systems, we actually have to be done by a specific deadline. And people do all these usability tests, and not because they actually want to learn but because they want to verify, is it good enough to release when we actually said it’s going to be released? Because we’ve already set the release date?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, arguably, it doesn’t make any difference. You don’t have time to change stuff, based on the findings from… and how many times have you been in a project Per, where you’ve managed to get usability testing in it, you’ve then done the usability testing with enough time left and enough resources left, to actually act on the findings from your usability testing before launch?
Per Axbom
Well, I actually have been in projects where I’ve had, there’s been well, in theory, there has been time.
James Royal-Lawson
Aha! You see?!
Per Axbom
But nobody’s been interested in changing. Because it’s like, okay, we can do that in the next release.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s even when you’ve manage to get the testing in, it still doesn’t really go. And then I think we’ve all… there’s the, you know, we’re going so fast, and we’re curious to cut corners to go faster. And also, I think we’ve seen a lot of pushing for methods like AB testing, where, you know, it’s seen as easy way out that, “well, if we just do if we just kind of produce two designs”, you know, “whatever, two designs, push them out there”, we know which one wins. “We don’t need to do anything else”. Yeah. So I have become almost an industry standard process, even though it’s flawed in so many ways.
Per Axbom
I have a dangerous quote from her article that summarises this point so well. So, “We are dissuaded from generating multiple ideas, working through and testing concepts and then throwing away what doesn’t work, which is essentially the most fundamental parts of design ideation”. So we’re not even doing our work that we’re supposed to be saying that we are doing it. The way… that…they’re supposed to…Yeah, I’m just yeah, it’s frustrating. [laughs]
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. That is. Number five. “We afford well known design leaders, too much power to dictate how design is discussed and conducted”.
Per Axbom
This is something that you and I probably talk more about in private. What comes to my mind is, because you mentioned books before, and people write books, they go out on UX conferences, or big tech conferences. They do their talks, and when you approach them afterwards, you just talk to them for a while, and you realise, well, are you actually doing any design work these days? Well, most of them actually aren’t. Some of them, sit in meetings and give advice around the things that they’ve written in their book, but they don’t actually get down getting dirty and do the work.
James Royal-Lawson
But there is a there’s a lot of good knowledge and a lot of good inspiration and ideas that comes from these talks and books and the rest of it Per. I, mean, make sure we don’t give the wrong impression that these aren’t useful things. But you know, the following week, fandom, or kind of ideologising people and focusing too much on the person, everything they say is not healthy in any aspect of, of life, I guess.
Per Axbom
I think that’s a good point, yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
And we also open up…this is not about us. But I know, I know that me and you do actually put some effort into finding people who are not always the mainstream people, to bring them on the show on and get them to share their knowledge, and ideas and passion.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. And also, don’t get me wrong. I mean, that’s why I enjoy talking to people as they put the effort into writing a book, which also means that they have thought deeply about an issue. And that makes them experts on it. But as you were mentioning before, when we were talking about education as well, once you cement it into a book, and the book has some years, been around the market for a couple of years, some of the ideas tend to become outdated, and sometimes they become more of a mantra than a one-of-the-tools in the toolbox. It’s, like you’re selling this idea, and not as part of… because you haven’t decided on the problem yet, have you. So it’s not the solution to everything.
James Royal-Lawson
And also things, things have a very long life. An example there is maybe even like Steve Cruz, Don’t Make Me Think. And I even saw that I think yesterday being used as a quote again, to, as a defence of a certain way of working design, design pattern.
Per Axbom
Right?
James Royal-Lawson
That shouldn’t make me think. Whereas we’ve discussed, and we talked about the fact that there are clear scenarios and situations where you really, really, really do need to make the person at the other side of whatever you’re designing think
Per Axbom
That’s a really good point. Because sometimes these ideas that we have, I mean, even I even hear people quote, like the old Jacob Nielsen tenets of you can’t have more than three clicks for people to achieve their goal and stuff like that, because people quote things that they’ve heard over the years and you think, still our truths. And you hear these from clients, not just designers.
James Royal-Lawson
Usability testing with five people…
Per Axbom
Yes
James Royal-Lawson
I got this week as well.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
So they stick with people. And don’t make me think since it was the title of the book, it really sticks with people. And it sounds so sensible. But once you get down into understanding the importance of friction, you realise that that can be very misleading.
James Royal-Lawson
And this ties into number one, about, you know, the consensus about what is good enough. And what’s the fundamentals that we need to know and understand. And keeping that body of expectations and knowledge up to date. So we make sure people understand what is right now. Especially like building standards, you know, when a certain way of building a building isn’t deemed safe anymore. You know, that information is propagated and said, Look, that’s not how architects work anymore.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
This is the current standard.
Per Axbom
Oh, that’s such a good segue, James to the next one. Because I mean, that’s building architecture and safety. Number six, at least his points is, “We have no ethical standards”. And you need the standards, you need these blocks, the pillars to stand on, to actually feel comfortable with the work you’re doing. And that also helps you to articulate and speak up when you think that we are going in the wrong direction.
James Royal-Lawson
Just, I would say it again though Per…We…have…no…ethical…standards.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s actually a shocking five word sentence to read out.
Per Axbom
Yes. And I think she articulate so well. Is that recognising that we have this huge, huge power as designers. We affect so many people? And we still haven’t incorporated ethics as required coursework for foundational design education.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. It’s, it’s worrying.
Per Axbom
It is worrying. And again, we are talking about it more but, and of course, as usual, when you when you see these things and they become apparent too, you become frustrated that things are moving so slowly. And I think that is, that is this conversation, the conversation that Lisa wants us to be having and having it more often. And I’m so happy, she’s encouraging that.
James Royal-Lawson
On the positive side of things, you know, in the last five years, we’ve we’ve, we’ve seen an explosion in the amount of conversations around ethics and design. But as we know, from our conversations on the podcast, and from your work that you’re doing with ethics, as well, and teaching you’re doing Per, that we’re still in the beginning. And I think the more the more you dig into problems with design ethics, you realise, and learn about the problems with business ethics. With, you know, some of the ethical questions in society as a whole, rather than just our practices, how we work as designers.
Per Axbom
Right. And it’s, it can be a word that becomes problematic as well, because to cope with this attention to ethics now, a lot of the big tech companies are employing people who are said to be working with ethics. A.i. ethics people, and they put up ethics boards, and then they close the ethics boards. And then they hire people. And then they fire people like the, what’s going on with right now with Timnit Gebru, who was fired from Google.
And it’s just that, it’s ethics washing is what’s happening as well, because if a topic becomes interesting to people, the company will say, Yes, we are paying attention to this. But of course, we need more more, much more transparency around what’s happening. And back to basics, we need the education to include this, of course, as well, so that there’s something that we can all pull from collectively and reach consensus on, that this is what we stand for.
James Royal-Lawson
Point seven, the final point in the article, “Inclusive design and accessibility are afterthoughts, both in design education and in practice”. Now, and she goes on to say that we’ve, we’ve normalised this. Another whole thing where businesses, everyone outside the primary set of personas, [light chuckle] personas huh, is an edge case. And, you know, the whole thing of edge cases is something that has frustrated both me and you in many occasions, I think Per, that edge cases are still people. And when you ignore or down-prioritise edge cases, you’re deliberately excluding groups. You’re deliberately potentially causing harm for certain groups, and knowingly accepting that.
Per Axbom
And as Lisa puts it as well that these people that we are shortchanging, or putting down and not including in our efforts, they are already being shortchanged daily, by the design of everyday things, but also by society, of course. So it’s the people who we aren’t listening to, are never listened to. And so we’re increasing the gap between the people who are always helped and benefited by the things we build.
James Royal-Lawson
There’s the phrase kicking someone when they’re down. It’s that kind of thing, that you’re disadvantaging the people that are already disadvantaged, potentially, in many of these situations.
Per Axbom
Yeah, this is the one that I mean, this is the point that brings tears to my eyes, because it’s so obvious. It’s, it’s not what design is supposed to be about. But it’s one that EVERY designer I talk to agrees about. We’re, we’re just not paying attention to helping the people that matter.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And I’ve seen this over the years with, especially when comes to design maturity in organisations, that when you have those initial conversations about accessibility, then it’s almost always the first thing you get back as a response is, well, you know, most of our users aren’t blind, or don’t have accessibility issues. So you know, it’s an edge case, it’s, you know, we’ll deal with it later. We’ll, we’ll fix that in the next release. So, you know, we’ll focus on the 80% and we’ll leave the 20% for another day. And that’s, that’s almost you can you can script that you go to meetings, and you know, this is how it’s going to be.
Per Axbom
But also, later never comes.
James Royal-Lawson
Yep
Per Axbom
That’s what hurts even more, later never comes. We can do it later, but later never comes.
James Royal-Lawson
Unless legislation comes, and then they’re forced to have later now, reluctantly. Let’s deal without actually really caring about…
Per Axbom
Or they write an accessibility statement where they actually say “we’re doing this later”.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
They point out, “inclusive design should just be design”.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And this is something to, I mean yeah, we far too often we’re bringing words before words, when we actually should just bring this to its core, and embrace it as what we do.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
So there’s all this kind of, I mean, if those are the seven things that are top of Lisa’s mind, then whoa, I’d hate to see the next seven or twenty that are less scandolous, because it’s, it’s a hard slog, but it’s a really excellent read and really makes you feel… I don’t know what, I actually I think I wrote to you Per when we, when we first read this. I kind of don’t really know how how it makes me feel. It makes me feel good that Lisa’s written this.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
But then it kind of brings back so many memories of things over the years. And some of that stuff makes me feel less good.
Per Axbom
Right. And it makes you feel responsible, which I think is, is a good thing. We need to feel more responsible, because that is what will hopefully give us the energy to actually change things. To start taking the next steps.
James Royal-Lawson
And start having conversations. Lisa says herself, “Start by being brave and open to having these challenging conversations”. We’re not going to feel great about some of these things that we have to discuss. But we need to do it and to get to the next step next place next point in our journey.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And as she puts it, as well, “We have to stop being apologists for the dysfunctional way we work”. We need to be open about it, we need to talk about it. And I think it’s something to talk with, if you teach at schools, talk about it. It’s really, really important.
James Royal-Lawson
And amplify the people who are saying the things that are right and true. Yeah. And that is, I think one of the reasons we’re bringing up Lisa’s article and spending so much time talking about it. Because it needs to be amplified.
Per Axbom
It needs to be amplified. You should be reading it, you should be talking about it. And you should also, of course she’s starting a podcast,
James Royal-Lawson
Far From the Valley, is the name of the podcast when it is meant to be launching at the end of 2020.
Per Axbom
And I think on the post, you can actually sign up to to get to know when it’s released.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
[transition music]
The second article for today. “Spotify, adds stories, but is there any value to them?” by Michael Beausoleil, and, now this basically, there’s been, it seems like there’s been a test court of Spotify users who’ve been exposed to stories. So I, you know, we can’t presume that everyone knows what stories are. So stories are those often little circles, on social media platforms, usually social media platforms that appear at the top of the app or the page with small snippets of content. Snippets is a word. Small, small bits of content, whether it’s a video or a picture, or something. And they’re usually time limited, that they aren’t there forever, they’re there for a certain amount of time, before they vanish. And they’re often in chronological order.
Per Axbom
It’s usually 24 hours or something like that stories, right?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, seems to be 24 hours,
Per Axbom
depending on platform, I guess.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Now they originated on Snapchat, I think back in 2013.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
But it was Spotify… yeah, sorry, it was Instagram that really made them known and understood. Well understood by a lot of people, recognised by a lot of people and, and loved, I guess, by a lot of people. Now, Spotify isn’t merely the first app or product that you would write up as being the next one to get stories.
Per Axbom
So how do stories on Spotify work? Does it mean I mean, to read, when I read it, it’s like the artists can post stories, but at me as a user, do I also post stories on on a on a song on an album, or how does that work?
James Royal-Lawson
The test, the test appears to be mainly it’s just artists effect. It’s kind of like a random playlist, it seems to be. So it’s kind of like stories of artists promoting their songs. So it to be honest, it seems like a really bad idea. But this is what’s, you know, if we [Per laughs] just can actually ignore the fact it’s about Spotify, because I think the biggest thing about this article isn’t the details of the Spotify test.
Because I’m really not convinced that it will go beyond the test and Spotify trying all kinds of different things. And they’ve said, I think in another article that this was just a bit of a test, and there’s no guarantee you’ll make it to the product. But if you look at what’s happened, because it started with Snapchat, went to Instagram. Instagram, of course, then goes over to Facebook, Facebook’s has stories as well. And now we’ve also seen LinkedIn have got stories. Recently, and I know you’d love them Per, Twitter has added their own version of stories called, fleets? If I remember that right?
Per Axbom
Yep, that’s, that’s it.
James Royal-Lawson
See, I keep wanting to call them Twits. I don’t know why?
Per Axbom
Oh, that makes so much more sense to me.
James Royal-Lawson
I don’t know why that comes up. I just kind of like, Oh, we’ve got tweets, and then there are Twits. I don’t know. But anyway, they’ve got them too now,
Per Axbom
because, because they’re fleeting. That’s why.
James Royal-Lawson
I think you’re right. I’m mixing, I’m mixing tweets and fleets and getting twits. Yeah, we should let them know.
Per Axbom
Yes. [Per laughs] Oh, I can’t, I’m so unbelievably frustrated with all this because one of one of the things I did this year was actually, I went, I left Facebook, deleted Facebook. I left Instagram. And I got away from stories. And then on Twitter, which I’m still on, they introduced stories, just they call them fleets, but it’s exactly the same thing. And I, I don’t use them, but they take up space, of course in my app. So now I’m on my phone, I’ve had to move to tweet bot to actually avoid them, because they’re [James snickers] not implemented in third party apps anymore. Or yet, I mean. So I’m trying my hardest to avoid them, because I just don’t understand what they’re doing there.
James Royal-Lawson
I do think that, so this is really fascinating, because we used to joke and we still do joke about in product development, and how you get feature creep in products, always to the point where the product adds a chat function. That’s kind of like it’s a joke that we’ve had for years that you know, you keep on adding features, and eventually, you’ll have a chat function. Now, what seems to have happened is that we’ve, we’ve trumped the chat feature, and that we get now, once you’ve already got the chat feature, you then move on to adding stories. That seems to be [Per laughs] the thing that every product adds.
Now, if you’ve got something that, you’ve got a product, and then stories are then added to that. And stories are going generic, and added to all these different products. What are you doing now? What is… what’s the point of the products if now stories are so important that they need to be there as well? This this, I’m really unsure about, you know, the mutual value creation and what’s going on with this thing when we’ve got stories absolutely everywhere. And people post the same stories to multiple platforms, they don’t create different stories. So this is, this is [inaudible] this is just something it’s the same thing. You’re just pushing it in different places. So —
Per Axbom
Did you mention LinkedIn? I mean, LinkedIn has stories.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes. Yeah. LinkedIn. Yeah.
Per Axbom
And it’s ack, eww. I’m just…
James Royal-Lawson
but the product, so the product is stories. So where’s the stories app?
Per Axbom
Right.
James Royal-Lawson
And then…
Per Axbom
Something that was actually brought up when when Twitter was introducing fleets when I’m top of mind with what we talked about with Lisa’s article as well, is that people became afraid, okay, so there’s one more channel now for people to abuse me. And, and that also disappears. So we actually have to be there and make a screen dump, if you want to have it actually documented. If there’s something that’s going on, then there’s that abusive behaviour.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And, and also, yeah, you, you have to preview such really, so you can get some, you can be hit by shocking content too, because…
Per Axbom
yes, exactly
James Royal-Lawson
and that’s what I’ve seen in, in Twitch, as well, and some of the other video platforms that you can have something starting off looking innocent, and then it quickly switches to something nasty.
Per Axbom
You can have something flashing that creates epilepsy attacks as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah. But then you’ve also got a fascinating thing with a lot of these ones like, like Twitter that, you start off with a very simple product with, you know, a chronological series of tweets, you know updates, sharing content. Facebook, as well. You start off with things coming chronological order. And then over time, they start adding adverts, they start introducing algorithms, the algorithm then is choosing what what order things go in.
And we’ve all fought with, you know, had those fights with the kind of top stories or recent and it keeps going back to top every single time in all these platforms. And, you know, you keep getting more and more frustrated that your content isn’t coming in the right order anymore. So what do they do? They introduce something [Per laughs] at the top that kind of does what the original thing did all those years ago, but they messed it up.
Per Axbom
Yeah, we screwed up the first part, because we wanted to make more money, or whatever the effort, the reason for the effort. And so they have to introduce something else that actually adheres more to the actual needs of the users.
James Royal-Lawson
We have basically, we’re touching on the fact that it’s engagement again, isn’t it? It’s a lot of these products are pushed by engagement levels, not actually useful features for the people that are there, and said, if every product has stories, what are the products?
Per Axbom
Right, and if they cared about what I as a user, how I experienced this, they would actually allow me to turn it off. But there’s no such thing,
James Royal-Lawson
Especially if it’s not the core essence of why your product exists.
Per Axbom
Right,
James Royal-Lawson
For example, it’s really really not something that’s core to Spotify.
Per Axbom
Same for Twitter. Twitter’s always been very streamlined. This is what it is. And, and this adds to the complexity, but even more Spotify I agree. I mean, Spotify for me is listening to music.
James Royal-Lawson
LinkedIn. Stories on LinkedIn.
Per Axbom
Hmm, well I’m sure they’re,
James Royal-Lawson
I’d love to, you see, I think this is, I’ve said, this is really fascinating. I’d love to see research behind it, I’d love to be part of the decision process to see, you know, this is why we need more openness and kind of hypotheses and why we’re working on stuff. You know, in some ways, I’d be happy if they just came out and said, look, we’ve added this because everyone else has got it, and we need to be keeping engagement up. All right,
Per Axbom
yeah, exactly. I would love that transparency,
James Royal-Lawson
because we understand where they’re coming from.
Per Axbom
Because the thing is, if they’ve done a really, really poor job of communicating to us why they added it, haven’t they? It would be interesting for somebody
James Royal-Lawson
They don’t at all.
Per Axbom
If someone launched a stories app that is just stories, would people rush over there to sign up and get it? That would be really interesting for me. That would be a fantastic experiment. Because if stories are only interesting, if you already have something, and you’re, it’s forced upon you, then that’s just abusive.
James Royal-Lawson
[James excitedly inhales] Oh, can you have a stories app that connects to all these other services and pulls the stories in from there? It’s like reverse buffer. So you actually can just see all the stories in one place. You don’t need to use any of the others.
Per Axbom
I’m sure someone’s building it,
James Royal-Lawson
yeah. They are now. [Per laughs]
[transition music]
Well, recommended listening after all that.
Per Axbom
Let me see if I can find the tab. I’m supposed to be on to see what the recommended listening [laughs] is. Oh, yeah. And recommend listening. You’ve you put down Episode 138, which is education and leadership with Evgenia Grinblo and Melissa Perri,
James Royal-Lawson
it’s actually a two parter. It’s 138 and 139
Per Axbom
Oh yes, one of our first two parters. Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
It was an excellent conversation. It was a conversation based on a conversation. So we recorded it in Lisbon UXLx, and we’d, we’d been chatting to Evgenia, and Melissa the night before on a boat if I remember correctly,
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
And, and then we pulled them in to have a chat with them, while recording. And we had a great conversation about, and some of these points that Lisa brings up we talked about them with the journey from junior to senior and the importance of good leadership and so on. It was,
Per Axbom
exactly
James Royal-Lawson
the to two wonderful women in design, who I’m not gonna… I’m gonna lift them because they, they do really good stuff.
Per Axbom
And remember, those were the days when we actually went to conferences, and were there physically and we went together on boat trips and to restaurants. I mean, just that memory is is bringing me back. [Laughs]
James Royal-Lawson
We should play out with Vera Lynn. “We’ll Meet Again”.
Per Axbom
[Laughing] Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
And if you have a little bit of time to spare, then you can join our community of volunteers. Just send us an email. We’re always looking for more help.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Outro music plays]
So Per. Did you hear that production was down at Santa’s workshop?
Per Axbom
No James, I didn’t hear. Why is production down at Santa’s workshop?
James Royal-Lawson
Because many of his workers had to elf-isolate.
Per and James
[snickers]
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and recorded in December 2020 and published as episode 252 of UX Podcast.