James Royal-Lawson
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Computer voice
UX Podcast episode 267.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per.

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

Per Axbom
And this is UX Podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening in 199 countries and territories in the world, from Cameroon to Italy.

James Royal-Lawson
Sometimes when you emphasise it like that Per, it sounds like you’re surprised their all in this world.

Per Axbom
But I always make an effort to not get caught on territory, because I know it’s coming in as sort of hesitant.

James Royal-Lawson
And you’re listening in 199 countries and territories in the world, from Cameroon to Italy. Am I showing off now?

Per Axbom
You are. You’ve been practicing in the shower.

James Royal-Lawson
I have. It’s what I do every day. We came across the phrase UX theatre and me and Per weren’t completely sure what that meant. And we definitely didn’t know where it came from. So we thought we’d find out

Per Axbom
And we found Tanya Snook. She’s a user experience designer, founder and co-chair of CanUX, co-host of the Government of Canada UX network, and you’ll find her on Twitter as spydergrrl. We’ve been following each other for years. And on her very active blog, spydergrrl.com.

James Royal-Lawson
You’re showing a fuss, and you’ve been following her for years.

Per Axbom
I know.

James Royal-Lawson
And it’s spydergrrl. I don’t know how you pronounce it. But it’s not girl.

Per Axbom
You say girl, but it’s spelled girl with a “grrl”. And spider with “spy”; you gotta be really clear about that.

James Royal-Lawson
For a podcast, I think you’re right, Per. But, it was in January 2018. That Tanya started a Twitter thread about how some user experience projects tend to pay lip service to user-centred design; rather than being actual user-centred design. She coined the phrase “UX theatre”, to try and summarise this and capture this. Then she expanded on that tweet in a blog post. And then she expanded on the blog post with a poster, which you can download from her website.

Per Axbom
And the very thorough poster states that it seems there are almost more projects branding themselves as being founded in UX, than there are projects actually founded in UX. And that’s really what we wanted to know more about, 10 years thinking around this issue, and how we can address it.

James Royal-Lawson
And stay tuned for our post-interview reflections. So we might as well just dive straight in and ask the question. What is UX theatre?

Tanya Snook
It is a great question. UX theatre is the application of any sort of design methodology without actually including a single user in the process. It’s becoming a lot more prevalent as executives are learning the term user experience, but their teams aren’t really empowered to do all the work that UX entails.

Per Axbom
Right. And in some ways, it feels so obvious when you say it like that, because we all know it. But it’s like, a lot of people seem to have been afraid to call it out. And as soon as you started talking about it, it was like, “Oh, I know exactly what you mean”. I see this all the time. But people weren’t talking about and you put a label on it. And I think it started with a tweet storm that you wrote or something like that. Tell us the backstory.

Tanya Snook
So, it started, because I think there’s a lot that we can do about it as designers and I was seeing it more and more. I’ve been half my career in the tech sector and half in government. And we’ve gone through a couple of waves of UX prominence, I’ll say in the government, and it was sort of heading on a downswing again, a few years ago, and I was seeing a lot of projects that were touting themselves as being user-centred because it was a very big buzzword at the time. And they were not doing UX. They were doing theatrics and it was driving me insane. And I was having a lot of conversations with folks about how their projects were heading off the rails and I decided to put up the tweet storm.

I have a pretty long commute downtown and that’s where most of my Twitter threads happen when in normal circumstances. So I was sitting on the bus and I was writing this whole Twitter thread. And when I put it up, it was it was quite surprising actually how much response there was initially. And that’s why eventually I turned it into a blog post where I could get into more of the details and then the poster. But yeah, it was just becoming so obvious to me that at the executive level, there was a lot of push for user-centred design, it was becoming part of policy in the government in particular, but it was being misinterpreted, and it was not being implemented properly. So we were kind of perpetuating this design, theatrics instead of actual design, and it was breaking my heart.

James Royal-Lawson
I’m wondering, I mean, is it the case that, the normal state, is that we’re performing theatre? And the exception is, when we’re doing good design? Was that too depressing a question?

Per Axbom
That was actually one of my takeaways from your poster. Because I think even at the top, it says, it seems there are almost more projects branding themselves as being founded in UX and user-centered design, than there are projects actually founded in it.

Tanya Snook
And it’s somewhat true, because UX is still really nascent, right? I mean, how long has user experience design been around as a formal practice. It’s only been a couple of decades, you know, we’re not accounting, we’re not, we’re not lawyers. There’s no certification. There’s no structure. There’s no real definition, every diagram that shows what encompasses UX is a little bit different. And it’s so hard to explain to non-designers what user experience design is, and I think the biggest challenge is explaining that it’s the outcome and not the methodology. We get bolted on at the end of development, or, you know, at the end of other practices, or we’re a very very tiny part of the overall process in many, many organizations. And I think trying to explain that there’s a whole set of tools and resources and methodologies and processes, you have to follow in order to generate the user experience, I think that’s something that is lost outside of our industry. And I think we don’t necessarily have the right elevator pitches to explain it to people. So it makes it really hard to build it in in organisations that are immature in UX already.

James Royal-Lawson
I think, in this case, as well, that the way in which design works or digital design works. It’s kind of the easy route out to not involve the user. And I think there’s probably a whole lot of proxies you can use instead of the user. And it looks convincing.

Tanya Snook
Absolutely. And that concept of role play is very attractive, because it doesn’t cost a lot. And people think that they already know their users. I joined one organization where I asked if I could see all of their previous research. I was doing a service design blueprint, and I wanted to see all the research that they had done on their website. And they told us that that wasn’t necessary because they know their users very very well. And we hear that a lot. I had a client that I did a workshop for where we ran through personas, and I was very clear that they should bring research into the workshop so that we could use it. And at the end, they told me that they had access to users. But they thought that maybe they should just keep going with these personas that they had created in the room because it would be easier and I lost my mind and was very adamant that no, if you have access to real people, please, please, please incorporate those real people into your process. But it’s that, you know, the return on investment, it’s how quickly they can expedite the project.

We’re always working without enough money and enough time to actually do things properly. And so where we can cut corners, it’s very, very attractive to do so. Especially if the leadership isn’t fully bought into the concept of user experience design and user-centred methodologies. And also that focus on digital. We go far beyond digital. I currently run a program. And, digital is only one channel that we use to actually deliver this whole program. And so even just trying to educate folks on the fact that user-centred design extends beyond just the digital sphere and that it can be used for things such as programmes and services that are delivered omnichannel. That’s something that people still don’t quite seem to grasp either. So there’s this default where UX is digital and thinking about it broader than that and thinking about it to serve, whether its employees or to serve external users across other channels is also something that just doesn’t seem to be really top of mind because the push is so much for digital in the UX sphere right now. And that conversation of confusion about UX/UI. That especially waters it down where if you think it’s UI, then you’re not really thinking about broader than digital.

Per Axbom
As you’re saying this, I’m realizing. Because I read a lot of your blog post and on the poster, you use the term “usability testing”. And I realized that before, UX was even a term that I used, I was a usability engineer. I did usability testing and research. And those were the terms we used. And now that we talk about UX, we don’t even use the term usability testing much anymore. We talk about design thinking, so we’re thinking more than we’re testing. So it’s weird to me that actually, the terminology has made it more confusing over time, because it’s trying to encompass so much, and nobody really knows. And that actually, I think that contributes to the availability of turning to UX theater, because you can always say that, well, I do it a different way than they do.

Tanya Snook
Design Thinking, and everyone is a designer have been incredibly difficult to work with in this context as well, right? You know, design thinking has become a substitute for actual user-centred design. And that in itself leads to UX theatre. And it’s not necessarily because design thinking is bad, it’s because it gets misused. You know, it really was about helping the management level, take a more deliberate approach to innovating. But it’s applied as a design methodology. And especially in organizations that have low UX maturity, but then claimed to be user-centred design.

I always joke that just because everyone can do math doesn’t mean they’re an accountant. And, you know, the whole concept of everyone is a designer has really lessened the value of UX in organizations. Just because you can bring other people in to participate and collaborate doesn’t mean that they should then be considered designers, officially. And where I’ve seen this go bad is on projects where instead of bringing in actual UX practitioners to do the work, they’ll take somebody who’s experienced in the subject matter, and make them a designer. And so they’ll say, well, who better to redesign the service, than the person who’s been delivering the service. At which I always say service designers are always better at designing the service than the person who is delivering the service. So yeah, we’ve seen where these concepts of design thinking and everyone is the designer have actually reduced the focus on actual user-centred design, hiring actual practitioners and taking these corner-cutting measures to deliver services and products.

James Royal-Lawson
That thing, then you said about the demand specialists; it’s actually a really fascinating thing, because it almost always happens. You need to bring in the people who are domain specialists, because you want to be aware of that world that you’re going to be designing for. But I hadn’t really, probably, thought about the consequences of that, that you end up increasing the risk of design theatre, UX theatre, because you brought in that person with so much domain knowledge, that it spills over and colours the work that you’re trying to do and the real research you want to do with real users.

Tanya Snook
Especially if those people are then assigned design roles. Yeah, so in this one project, in particular, rather than go out and hire a bunch of UXers, they hired the practitioners to be the design team. And it you know, it really brings so much bias and so much assumptions about their users, that it really colours, the solutions that they were proposing even in early days. And it’s unfortunate, because there was a really great opportunity to have those as key stakeholders and key collaborators in the design, rather than making them the design team. And I think a lot of the ability to move the solution forward in a user-centred way, was what actually evaporated by giving the practitioners these roles, because they did have all this experience and all this bias. And when they actually went to do research, it was just a series of workshops. It was 16 weeks of workshops internally with internal users, no actual users were harmed, not internal users, sorry, internal staff. So no actual users were harmed in the nature of their user experience design.

And it was unfortunate because when I called them on it, they asked me to advise on the project and, it wasn’t mine or anything, but they just brought me in because I knew the folks running it. And I asked when does the research happen and they said these 16 weeks and I was like, that’s not user research. No, no, no, no, no. But they didn’t understand the difference, because it was practitioners who were running the show instead of actual designers and researchers. So that’s where this ended up being. It’s sort of perpetuated the issues throughout the whole lifecycle of the project. And it was a rather large project as well. So, you know, it’s something that had a pretty significant impact and quite a large breadth. And unfortunately, these decisions made up front by the executives who were staffing the project, then trickled down into what the final solution looks like, and how well it serves users. So you can imagine that there were quite a few shortcomings in the final design.

Per Axbom
So interesting. I’ve been working on a project, last year, where I actually had to also talk to the specialists, because they are the people who educate the users who are in the thousands. But I also talked to the users and have workshops with them and interview them. And I go back to the experts. And I say, well, this is what they’re saying. And the experts say, well, that’s not the way they’re supposed to do it. And, well, that may be the case, but this is how they’re doing it. So, they won’t accept reality, even when I tell them what’s happening and what’s going on out there. Which is really interesting as well.

Tanya Snook
Absolutely, I had an executive that; so there was a push in the government at one point to test your thing with the executive, which I thought was kind of weird. I mean, I understand walking them through it and making sure that they understand what it does. But actually testing it with them seemed kind of weird, because they’re not the core audience for the things that we’re necessarily building. So we had presented to an executive a few times and had walked him through the entire process of what we were doing and the progress and everything to make sure that we had buy in. And when we got to our third round, where we were really, really close to actually launching. We explained all the usability testing and all the feedback, and he started disputing the text on the screens. And he said, You know, I don’t like that text, no. And he got very angry. We were quite taken aback. And we told him this had been iterative. And we’d gone through three rounds of testing, and we tweaked the language in between now is testing very, very well. And he told us that users don’t know what they want. Right. 

So, fortunately, my leadership pushed back very hard on that. And we sort of went ahead anyway, with the direction that we had gotten, and we did a lot of documentation to reinforce that this was user driven everything else. But I mean, that person could have actually cancelled our project. And so it was quite a big risk for my my leaders to go in and fight this. But you know, at some points at the executive level, even though the words are coming out of their mouths, right, like the actual understanding of the importance of user feedback can can be diminished, again, if the organization’s not very mature. And so that’s where having the right people in in the right roles, doing the right processes, having the documentation, having the proof, but also having very strong leadership, who is willing to stand up to the executives and push back is key. And, especially in a government context, where I’m currently working, it’s not always something you’re going to encounter, because of the way that the hierarchy works. So I was incredibly fortunate on that particular project. But in another project where you know, the hierarchy might have been a little bit more brittle, it might not have been an opportunity for a push back and the entire user experience could have been compromised, because this one executive didn’t actually understand what we were doing and why it was significant.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, it’s almost like, you need to need to counter UX theatre, with a bit of UX theatre yourself. I’m thinking about that, ultimately it’s down to maturity, isn’t it? The UX maturity, and both of your stories are talking about how they, the one who’s immature, is unaware of their immaturity. So to get to guide them in the nicest way possible, or the organisation in the nicest way possible, you perhaps have to indulge in a degree of theatre of your own to lead the house, maybe in a theatre, but you’re carving a path aren’t you? You’ve got to lead them to the right place. The straight route might not be the nicest, easiest, simplest routes.

Tanya Snook
It’s true. I wouldn’t want to advocate for doing theatre to block theatre but the role of the UXer seems to be changing and evolving a little bit. And maybe that’s because we are still somewhat an immature practice. But there’s certainly a level of advocacy and evangelism built into our jobs. And I know that as an individual contributor for the longest time I found that so frustrating. Why do I have to beg to do my job, right? Why can’t I just do my job, but you have to explain UX while doing UX. And you have to teach UX while doing UX. That is just part of it, because it is so new and people are applying it in all sorts of different ways that aren’t necessarily how we intend them to be applied. So sometimes you might have to step back and make sure that those around, you actually do understand the value of UX. So you might have to consider how you build UX into your everyday work for your own delivery, using UX methods and tools to perform the work internally, in addition to using them to do the UX projects per se.

The organisation that I’m in right now, didn’t have a lot of UX maturity when I joined. And so you know, we’ve been going through a process for the last three and a half years of encouraging them to participate a lot more in design. My team used to be more of an oversight team for the program, and I rebranded it as a service design team. So we design the products and services that are used to deliver outreach. And I include the regional outreach teams in our processes. So they’re a part of working groups, they participate in workshops, we go and ask them for data and we show them; we bring them into the room to actually work the data and help us advance design. So it’s been really nice, because when we delivered the service blueprint, which is end to end, it’s everything from the policies that apply to us all the way through to the service delivery. They started using it in their own planning sessions in region to figure out how to do outreach to different audiences. And so, when we were physically in the office, they were asking us, can you send us a physical copy of a poster of the service blueprint, we want to put it in our meeting rooms, so that we can use it and apply it and look through the journey and actually use it to do our planning. That’s something they never had talked about before. So we’ve been able to change the culture, change the language.

Everyone talks about the journey. Now they talk about the blueprint, they come to the workshops, and we’ve created really tactical approaches to doing workshops, so that they come in, they’re 60 minutes, they do things, they know exactly what the outcomes are going to be, we post them on our internal wiki. And so there’s a lot of feedback loop of how their contributions actually move the design forward for the program. And that has met with a lot of openness. And they’ve been really, like the the regional directors, are really adamant about giving us their people when we want to do work. And you know, there’s no blocking, there’s no, this is a waste of our time, they contribute right in. And so it’s been great, because we’ve been able to do a lot of work. And when we did the service evaluation, we had 275 recommendations for improving the service. And we’ve been able, over the last two and a half years, to deliver on almost 200 of those, which is ridiculous.

I have run a team of five people. And you know, because we’ve been using the extended team in-region, and they’ve been an active part of this. And we’ve been evangelising it the whole time. Our team is really 50-something people. And so that’s been really incredible to make sure that, this isn’t considered the matrix. It’s very practical. They’re involved in the whole process. So explaining UX while you’re doing UX, , delivering UX while you’re delivering UX. That is definitely a way to incorporate change management in the organisation and prevent people from doing theatre and correcting them when they propose things that are theatre. And you say no, remember when we did it this way.

James Royal-Lawson
I was gonna say, you mentioned showing the value of UX. And now you’ve talked about delivering on 200 or 250. You’ve shown the value but here now, I guess you’ve shown the value of the service. Rather than kind of show the value of UX in itself.

Per Axbom
You show it in context.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. So then, how do you connect it to the actual UX? You know what I mean? Showing the value of UX, but you’re showing the value of the service you’ve produced using UX methods. So can you make sure they do the connection back to the work, good work, you did? Is it just the evangelists or is there another way that you succeed or have succeeded?

Tanya Snook
Great question. So when we deliver different components; when we deliver different pieces, we will show them. We’ll actually take quotes and things or outputs from the various design sessions and highlight them so that they can see how their work and their involvement in the design process has moved this forward. We tie it back to data that they’re bringing us about the users as well so that they can see how we’ve incorporated that feedback into service design improvements. And then in terms of moving the actual service forward, we do keep track of how the service is evolving, so that they can see where we originally started from and where we’re heading. So we try to do it both internally and externally. So that they can see the value of UX on both sides. And that helps us convince the executives to give us a space to do things.

There’s a service that we’ll be launching later this year, which I’ve been working on for two years. And even just trying to explain why we were doing a service test, before we did a pilot with a full size cohort was difficult to get buy-in for but we just, we just went ahead and we kept railroading. And we just did it because it was very small, it was very low risk. And then eventually, by just kind of repeating ourselves over and over again, we were able to finally explain why we were doing it in two sections, what the value of each test was going to give us what we were testing, producing reports with, basically report cards in them that showed this test well, this tested well, these are the areas that need improvement.

So even how we’re packaging the results of the work that we’re doing helps us to inform everyone around us of what the value is of taking these steps and actually doing the work. So, I refer to packaging a lot with my team. How are we going to package this so that it gets seen, it gets read, it gets understood, especially because I don’t have the access to people far above me to be able to go and present these things and explain them to them. So packaging for us is one way that we evangelize as well, and documentation is your friend, right? It’s whatever is gonna get seen and read with enough context to be able to show value. That’s something we think about a lot as well. So we don’t just think about doing the work and delivering the work. We also think about a bit of the legacy of the work, how do we document this? How do we educate the people above us to make sure they will provide us with the space to do this again in the future because it is so valuable.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so you’re being clear about what you’re trying to achieve. You’re also being clear about how you’re going to know you’ve achieved it. And then you’re actually creating a story from the artefacts you’ve collected on the way to evangelise and to push your longer term goals with design, and UX and service design.

Tanya Snook
Yeah, this is a long game. And story is a big piece, we do think a lot, we do a lot of empathy mapping for internal work. So we actually will sit down and think about, you know, what have we heard in the past? And what are the messages that they’re hearing now? And where do we need to bring them and then what’s the best way for us to deliver that story. We will spend a lot of time even designing workshops, because we want to make sure that the people who are coming into those sessions internally feel valued, and that they will focus on the right things, and we can move it forward. So we do a lot of forward thinking. What is it that we want to do the day after the workshop? What outputs will we need? How would we get there?

So even just putting a lot of thought into designing the interactions that we have internally, and making sure that we’re following a process that they will also follow. But also we’re not letting them go off too far, you know, outside where we want them to go. So kind of controlling the experience a little bit through the way that we design the activities to make sure that the discussions are focused, because we don’t have much time with them. But also so that they can actually feel like they did something when they leave the session, which will entice them to come back and participate in the next session. So we do a lot of that work. And we spend a lot of time designing internal interactions, so that we can push the culture change. And that’s something that I’m not sure happens on a regular basis with other teams, I haven’t seen that I haven’t had that luxury of time in all my projects. I’ve had it for the last few years. But that’s because I’ve been hired by people who’ve come to get me and asked me to participate in things.

So they already know what my method is, before they hire me. I think when I was hired, you know a little bit more traditionally, you don’t necessarily have that trust relationship with the people who are hiring you. So I’ve had, I’ve had a really great experience for the last, I would say, five to seven years, where I’ve had the space to do this because people understand this as my methodology and they’re specifically hiring me to be able to do this. And they understand their organizations need this push towards UX maturity. So it gives me more space to be able to do it. It is a lot harder when you’re a practitioner and you’re that lonely little person who’s trying to push these things along. But there are things you can do individually as an individual contributor to move your organization forward, even if you don’t have this level of support. And, I guess power is the wrong word, but influence.

Per Axbom
It’s power. But that’s such a great example of doing things the right way. And really spending time on planning and evaluating your own work, which is fantastic. But sometimes things will break down and you’ll be looking around. Well, all we’re doing is UX Theater and I don’t know what to do about it. And I think you have some great tips. And one of my favorite is to document the lack of user involvement. Because this I don’t see a lot of UXers doing. I have done it once, actually, but mostly around accessibility. And I wanted to write a document. We haven’t done this. And I’m sad about not having done this, but I wanted it in writing. But tell us a bit more about that. How do we document doing the wrong thing.

Tanya Snook
So, obviously I’m sure it’s not surprising. I’m, pretty hard-headed and have a lot of opinions. And so even when I was younger, when I was really starting out early in my career, and I was working in high tech, if I thought we should do something, I would put it in writing, and I would put it in a plan. And I figured, you know, it’s an Easter egg, like maybe it’ll slip through, or maybe somebody will like it, and they’ll approve it, and then we’ll get to do it. And if not, okay, cool, I still have a copy of that, it’s kind of like writing a portfolio, right? Like, I still have a copy of what I intended to do. And if it didn’t happen, I still have that draft that I sent up where I planted the seed. And I would keep doing that, keep doing that. And then eventually, sometimes they would actually get approved. And I realize you can do that on the other side too where you can say, we really should be doing X, Y, Z, right? So you put it in your plan, it gets taken out. And so then from that point on, you can put it in your risk register, you can put it in your lessons learned document. So your risk register, if you have a little risk section, in all of your documents and in all of your project plans where you’re identifying what your current risks are, you can identify that not doing usability testing with actual users is a risk because and it doesn’t have to be a rant, it can just be a bullet point, but it will get carried through your whole project.

The other thing is in government, especially where we have a lot of turnover, there’s a huge lack of corporate memory. And so a lot of previous documentation becomes that corporate memory. So being able to record in something, I wanted to do this, or the team wanted to do this, and we were unable to and it became a risk. And then in your lessons learned being able to say, you know, we were unable to do this. And these were the outcomes, that becomes corporate memory for the people who are coming after you. And that makes for a great starting point for the next project where the next person coming up behind, you can ask the questions of hey, I noticed that there was this risk, why was testing not done? And is that something we’re going to be able to do this time.

So I find that, especially in areas where you have a lot of turnover, or in areas where you have a lot of a lot of hierarchy and decision making, the more you document, the more you have a paper trail for what you tried to do. And we always encourage UXers in their design portfolios to include, the intended concepts, even if that’s not what actually happened. And it can show that you actually understand the design process, right? Here’s the plan that I had proposed. This is the approach that I wanted to take. And even if it’s not what the organisation did, it shows that you personally actually understand how the design methodology works. And I think it’s really beneficial for people to to insist on putting it in and creating those lessons, but also demonstrating, I do have the skills and knowledge just because I don’t have the capacity to implement them doesn’t mean that I don’t personally have the skills and knowledge.

Per Axbom
And that will make yourself feel better, of course as well. Fantastic. So much good advice, and so many good insights. Thank you for joining us. Tanya.

[Music]

There are so many artefacts in our profession and in our industry like personas and journey maps. And we keep doing all these workshops and we have all these post it notes and it it always looks like we’re producing a lot of stuff and we’re being very active, even though we may not actually be producing something that is of value but more in our assumptions and guesswork. It’s almost like our profession is built to actually fall into this trap all the time.

James Royal-Lawson
I think I love the way Tonya used role playing. To describe what it is we do. I mean, UX Theatre is one thing, but many of the situations that you just said now. That we hold workshops with stakeholders, not actual users. And that workshop then becomes an asset proxy when we’re talking about in the interview. But we’re effectively role playing users in those workshops to decide what to do instead of actually doing the real stuff.

Per Axbom
Things we think about users and then our interpretation of what people think about that is then becoming the basis for design, which is just crazy, but it’s happening all the time.

James Royal-Lawson
Every time you pull out a component in your Figma design library and put it into a design, you’re role playing the user, you’re presuming that control is gonna be successful. Unless you then test it.

Per Axbom
Yeah. I think, in retrospect now I think we should actually be really concerned about trying to gauge and ask people, how much actually true UX work are we doing? So actually ask people how they feel about their own work, to always have some numbers some indicator of what we perceive ourselves doing. So we can talk about it openly.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s a good point. In some teams I’ve worked with, especially when trying to mature them, I’ve written on the wall on the whiteboard, or even brought up at daily meetings, how many days it’s been since we last talked to a user. Because if it’s in a mature organisation, it’s gonna be zero all the time. But it’s often not. It’s gonna be ticking up. It’s getting to like 10 days, and then you’re producing all this stuff. You’re doing all this work. Everyone’s working like crazy. Now, it’s got to 20 days, it’s got to 30 days. That’s a real good visualisation for me that it shows you here.

Per Axbom
I want something physical. I’m thinking ping pong balls now. So I add a ping pong ball somewhere. And that builds up and you have this massive space in the room being taken up by ping pong balls, because that’s the number of days since you talked to a user.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, yeah, exactly. You could

Per Axbom
You can’t just avoid it. You cannot avoid it.

James Royal-Lawson
Even when choosing, it’s like a negative metric, but it’s still some kind of metric or visual reminder or visual indication of how in touch with your users you are.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And I think even if you do the work, I always make an effort. Like if I do a usability test, I did that usability test, but be honest about it. Reason around your confidence levels? How confident are you that the findings that you have are representative across a larger population? And what people aren’t we talking to and bring that into the report as well. So always be honest about what you’re doing?

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, I know, you are getting into the whole kind of like self reflection, and metacognition, which that is an episode in itself. I think what Tonya said at the very end to us about teaching UX while doing UX. Is also a very worthwhile sentence and important thing to take with you. That we’re spending a lot of time doing UX theatre and role playing and and not talking to users. But as Tonya indicated, part of the solution or an important part of that solution, is to almost secretly teach UX while seeming to be doing UX. And being true, and being transparent about the the value that you’ve delivered as she was in her work.

Per Axbom
Yeah. Show notes, including the links mentioned in this episode. And a full transcript can be found on uxpodcast.com. And perhaps even where you’re listening right now.

James Royal-Lawson
So click follow, subscribe, or add. If you aren’t already doing so. Add like mathematics. Just do some mathematics. If you weren’t already doing so. Join us again for our next episode.

Per Axbom
And if you’d like to contribute to funding UX podcast, visit uxpodcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving,

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

I know two people who both claim to live in the building where Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.

Per Axbom
Okay, that’s cool.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, their planning to put a plaque on both their houses.