A transcript of Episode 279 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Steve Portigal to talk about the benefits of sharing our stories – good and bad – and the ethically challenging situations that field research can place you in..
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Dave Trendall.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 279.
Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
And this is UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden. And you’re listening in 200 countries and territories in the world from Angola to the Netherlands.
James Royal-Lawson
From time to time, we bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue, resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts from the past that we believe are still relevant, and well worth revisiting.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Steve, welcome to UX podcast.
Steve Portigal
Thank you.
Per Axbom
You’ve done so much. And what we want to talk to you about today is your most recent creation, Doorbells, Danger and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. And I have to say, I finished this book, actually today, and I usually don’t have time to finish the books prior to these interviews, because we don’t get the books that much ahead of time –
James Royal-Lawson
Just to make you feel better, Per, I didn’t finish it in time. I’m halfway through.
Per Axbom
But I loved it. I loved it. And it gave me so many different emotions, reading it, and I actually, when I was thinking about it, I was starting to compare it to that documentary ‘Humans’, I don’t know if you know about it. But since all these stories encompass the world, from Afghanistan, they’re from Japan, they’re from Uganda, whatever. And you get so many insights into these, what these people have experienced. But now I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. So, explain to us, because it’s not like your regular’s kind of book. It’s a war story. So what is a war story then?
Steve Portigal
Yeah, a war story is a story about, in this case, these are stories about user research. So a user research war story is a story about a researcher trying to accomplish something, facing some challenge. And I think what makes these stories, in this specific type of stories, the storyteller doesn’t always overcome their challenge. Sometimes I think when we look at sort of stories as a pedagogical tool, or whatever, however we find stories being used, they’re often stories of overcoming and succeeding.
And these are stories that are a little more grittier, a little more grounded, where, sometimes you lose out, you don’t win, or you don’t end up where you think you’re gonna end up. And I think what makes these stories powerful is that difference, like what happens when things go wrong, and wrong of course is on a continuum. I think I say in the book wrong or different from what was expected. So you know, what the book encompasses is many different categories or patterns or themes of ways in which things can go wrong. And so there’s kind of a deep dive into each of these different areas where things don’t go the way that we expected and what do we get out of that?
James Royal-Lawson
I actually think, when I was reading the book, it struck me about how the book can be quite a good, I suppose not therapy tool, but maybe a good therapy tool, for overcoming imposter syndrome? Because when you when you’re reading these stories, and you know, we’ve discussed before, we’ve talked before about how how reluctant our industry seems to be at times to share the bad days. You know, we’re first up on stage to talk about the good days, but the bad days get swept under the carpet. And and I think that feeds the imposter syndrome that a lot of people suffer from, but by reading the stories, you realise that a lot of people out there, they have bad days, too.
Steve Portigal
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned the therapeutic benefit as well, I think in the introduction. So I’m with you, I think, hearing a story of how somebody else has messed up, and it’s not that we’re saying like, Oh, well don’t just only do sort of a second rate effort. I mean, in these stories you see people that to the best of their abilities at the time that the story is kind of happening for them, are absolutely doing their best. But they are, they’re human beings. They’re flawed. They’re imperfect. Their judgement is as best as it can be, but it’s flawed. And so you see things go wrong.
I see people reading these stories or reading this book and having a couple reactions, and one is to feel very critical of the storytellers. And I found this a lot when I was kind of going through drafts of the book, people would say, well, the story is interesting but I would never have done that, or, doesn’t this person realise? And that’s okay. I kind of encourage people not to be judgmental. Just because it’s a different way to go through life, I guess, especially if we think about research. But if you do find yourself being judgmental, then reflecting on what’s the difference between your view of the world and what this researcher did, helps you see what some of the takeaways for you might be – I would never do that, but I would never do what so and so did but in articulating that, I realised, oh, one of my best practices is x.
But then on the flip side, I think this is kind of what you were getting at. Seeing somebody else mess up and realising that the world didn’t end, that it’s natural, it’s going to occur, you know, facilitates I think, our own sense of empathy for all these different participants. And for ourselves – back to your point about imposter syndrome. Maybe one of the ways to overcome imposter syndrome is to have empathy for ourselves. And if we realise, oh, yeah, other people are gonna mess up – they are, here’s a whole book of them. And we know this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Then we can have empathy for them, and empathy for ourselves and feel okay with what we do know what we don’t know, as we’re all on our paths to get better at everything. But obviously, research here being the focus, and research is this very personal thing, so having empathy for ourselves as we make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes and improve. It’s so much better than saying, Well, I suck, and I’m no good at this. It’s just not a great way to be. And I think the value for the practice, and for the community, is having people take care of themselves and do their best to get better, but be realistic about it.
Per Axbom
Yeah. So it’s really a book, not about how to do user research. It’s not even a book about how not to do user research. It’s about helping people feel more comfortable with the concept of being unprepared or anything can happen. And when you said just now, when you end the every chapter with, you’ve divided these into different chapters with different learnings that you end each chapter with, and one of the learnings was what you said just now – learn from mistakes.
But you’re saying that it’s not learning from mistakes so that you can stop making that mistake, but learn how to handle them and how your research even could benefit from them. Some of the ideas I take from it like the sore thumb story, the burned thumbs story, where a woman burned her thumb before going into the session and it made her be more vulnerable, which may have may, well, everbody had something to talk about. And it probably made that session even better. So sure, learn from your mistakes, but maybe not in the sense that you should not make them again is what I’m what I’m thinking.
Steve Portigal
Right. And so it’s not a how to book the way that my previous book, Interviewing Users is maybe more kind of a text, that might be what you’d look at, if you were just learning the craft. And here, it’s not a how-to and yet, there’s lots to be learned, I think, from reading the book, but it’s more in the flavour of what you kind of talked about. Yeah, so So Jen Downs burns her thumb, and, you know, sort of laughs about her own clumsiness, and then tries to deal with it this way, and tries to deal with it that way, and then tries to deal with it this way, and then ends up in the interview.
And then the receptionist gives her a glass of ice water. And she’s sitting there looking like a dork with her thumb in a glass of ice water. And then she spills the ice water all over the conference, the beautiful conference room table. Like it’s not even just the burned thumb, it’s that all these things kind of go wrong and you can read the story and you can see a little bit about how Jen is in the world. And how she’s sort of comfortable with her own sequence of screwing up and how she’s a little light hearted about it, at least in retrospect she is, and as you say, it changed the dynamics of the room.
I think, in this context, she comes from this slightly more hip company and she’s at this very conservative workplace and the thumb, creates something to talk about, it creates a way to make her vulnerable and more accessible to people. So she finds a way to deal with it. And then she articulates all these different lessons. Like, how vulnerability is a way to connect with people and build rapport so that’s not sort of a how-to thing, but it does surface these interesting principles that we can think about for ourselves as we go out in the world and interact with people in a research context or in others, you know, how do we want to conduct ourselves?
Jen’s example is really, I don’t know, it’s very inspiring. She kind of makes it funny and very sort of earnest and personal as opposed to – you can imagine telling that story with a lot of curse words, right? Like, oh, then I burned my thumb. And then this happened, I was so mad, and I had to do the interview. And I didn’t want to do it, because my thumb hurt. And I couldn’t focus on what the person was saying. She turns it all around, and kind of, it’s just very kind of connected and present with what she’s trying to do. Her story is a really lovely one.
Because of that, the personal truth, I mean, not to be so hand-wavy, woowoo, but she does kind of have this personal truth, finds one for herself. In this experience, which is, you know, it’s an everyday banal thing, oh I burned my thumb, blah, blah, blah. But she finds a way to talk about it in a way that’s pretty inspiring. It’s funny and inspiring, and just makes you think about makes me think about myself and how I move through the world.
James Royal-Lawson
I think one of the things for me when I’m reading it is that sometimes what was interesting for me, was not what was said in the story as such, but what wasn’t said. At times I was finding myself on that boundary of being judgmental, but even that was the kind of the interesting aspect of some of the stories was your reaction to it. With the example, there’ll be the story, I think it was Melissa, and Mike, there was the crazy guy that came into the interview, barged into the into the room unannounced and demanded that Melissa leave the interview now and goes to this telephone conference that they arranged in the next room.
And I started reflecting about kind of the culture of that organisation that they’re doing the interview at, and how that must be to allow those kinds of situations to exist. So you see, your mind starts tumbling into a sort of, yeah, some judgmental things, but also some reflective things about how you would be in that situation, as we mentioned earlier.
Steve Portigal
That’s the great thing about stories, isn’t it a sort of a mode of reflection is, you know, you’re really connected with these other people that are having this experience. But I do that as well. I project myself into the story, and think about what I would do or how I would feel. I think that’s what makes it entertaining to read stories, because we participate with them in a certain way. And as you say, we reflect on them in this other way. That was one of the things I wanted to try to do here was convey some of the things we think about in talking about research, but in this really different way. I think it’s such a different experience to read this. Now, I feel like I’m just like, pitching the book to you guys.
James Royal-Lawson
We would absolutely agree. Thank you, I think I’ve heard you say elsewhere about the power of, I mean, there’s a power in them just being stories. We’re in a world full of clickbait articles with the seven things you need to do when you do this, or three mistakes you have to avoid when doing that. And everything is bulleted lists, and everything’s prescriptions. So it’s nice to just share things that have happened, you know. Shit happens, we share it, and we talk about it. And we can, learn things from it.
Per Axbom
But also, I think, coming into the industry and coming into becoming a user researcher reading this book, can prepare you in ways that other books cannot prepare you in. I’m now thinking of the emotional rollercoaster I went through when I just reading the chapter, I don’t know what you called it, but where they enter people’s homes, and there’s pungent smell and everything’s dirty, and you sort of want to get out of there. And the reasoning you do with yourself, to stay put and actually stay with your intent to learn something from this person and realise that you are learning something on this person, perhaps that was the best person from from all the interviews.
And just getting over those obstacles of judging. There was this woman who lived with her cats and the dog was vomiting and then they realised that she had been a peace negotiator I think it was. And you realise, oh, man, this woman has a backstory and as soon as I read that, and I realised, oh my god, I have so much judgement. All people have a backstory that you need to learn about to actually build up that empathy. And there there was so much in there that made me think about how would I react to a situation by just reading it? I realised I probably could handle that situation. Better now that I have read about it, that have read about someone else’s experience.
Steve Portigal
You know what I’m so proud of all these people that contributed, there’s more than 60 contributors here. And you know what I really am proud of is that these are not anecdotes, they’re stories. The anecdote is, we went into this woman’s house, and it just smelled disgusting. And the dog was vomiting. And like, oh, she was some kind of peace negotiator. That anecdote just kind of makes you go, whoa. But it doesn’t induce the reaction that you had that kind of reflection and so all these folks that have contributed, have, I think, dug deep personally to bring out the details and make it come alive and take you on their journey of what happened and how they were feeling. I think the craft of telling stories, as well as they need to be told, to do what these stories are doing, is something that people can work on.
You know, ideally, we can move past sort of anecdotes where we go, huh, that’s cool. And have people do more storytelling: beginning, middle, end. Surfacing all that detail and I think that detail is hard if you’re not sort of a natural storyteller. It takes a little bit of work to do, but I think that’s what gets us to have these kinds of reactions like you’re describing, where you start to reflect as a reader. It’s like, like, the iceberg model – the shallow story is that, now I’m mixing metaphors, the shallow story has sort of a certain amount of value but the deeper story does bring us to reflect on these deeper truths. And it takes more work to produce those stories. But I think that’s where we can just get so much more out of them.
Per Axbom
Yeah, a well written story can actually help you feel those emotions so it triggers those emotions in your brain – it’s actually like you have experienced it. I’ve been in story reading mode, this is my fourth book I’ve read this year, and the previous three were nonfiction. And I realised that I’m really triggered, that’s probably why I loved it so much, I’m really triggered by these stories that I realised by reading them I’m living them, which means that I’ve already experienced them, which helps me in my job, so it’s a better way of learning – as I see it right now, than reading, do this, and do that in a bullet bullet point format.
James Royal-Lawson
I think as well, when you bring together a body of stories across the blog, and in the book as well, that from some different parts of the world, cultures, even points in time, it surfaces the complexity of our cultures. And also, how our biases play on them and our presumptions that we go in to these these situations with. A lot of these stories highlight that kind of clashing of worlds, which is really good to get across in story format.
Steve Portigal
Totally agree.
Per Axbom
So I want to spend some time on my pet subject these days, because you have a chapter on that, is ethics and trust. It’s something that I haven’t come across myself in my user research, but the stories were so good, in describing them, this is what can happen. What would you do, I would even want to read a book where you actually choose what would you do go to page 10 if you do this, go to page 12 if you do that. Choose Your Own Adventure I read a lot when I was a kid. So, if a participant that you’re interviewing is engaging in unlawful activity, what do you do? And you wrote something about ethics being a conversation rather than a set of principles. And I liked that, how you wrote that. Could you just describe how you think about how user researchers should approach this idea of ethics?
Steve Portigal
I think what you said, you’re sort of headline for this, this part of the discussion was, if you see somebody engaging, or one of your participants engaging in unethical behaviour or unlawful behaviour, what do you do? And you know, not to be sort of smug, but I feel like the response to that is, yes. Right? The question is the thing. Yes. What do you do? So that’s the conversation, right? What do you do? So you, you’ve asked it as a question and the question sort of wants to be answered, but I feel like by asking the question, you then have to go down a path yourself and with somebody else to try to figure that out.
Because there doesn’t seem to be – there are certain areas I think where you can throw in some ethical rules and I mention I think in the footnotes, I can’t remember where it is, but I mention IDEO has a, I’m gonna botch the title, my apologies, but it’s like ‘the tiny book of design research ethics’, or something. It has a sort of an appealing title, which is a free PDF from IDEO’s website somewhere.
James Royal-Lawson
And it’s the Little Book of Design Research Ethics.
Steve Portigal
Thank you. Yeah. Okay. I knew whatever I said, I knew it was gonna be wrong, sorry.
James Royal-Lawson
I used the internet, I didn’t know I just pressed buttons.
Steve Portigal
I’m not apologising to you – the IDEO people who created this little book. And they’re an organisation, they can create policies. So they have policies around data retention, and so on. Those are sort of things you can have some governance around that your clients don’t get access to the contact info of the participants. But it’s still kind of a baseline, right? I don’t think IDEO says, if you see someone stealing a banana while you’re doing a shop-along, what do you do?
I think with all these stories, and certainly with the ethical ones, for sure, with the chapter around ethics, you can’t create kind of a set of rules that would be sufficient to, I guess I shouldn’t say you couldn’t because some theoretician will tell me I’m wrong, you could. It’s not reasonable to create a set of rules that would allow for all these things. So the kinds of stories that come up – in the history of social science literature you have people witnessing a murder, you know, sort of more explicit kind of 10 commandments, types of crimes.
And still they are sort of struggling, the social scientists, that have a history of dealing with this and writing about it, reflecting about it, face these ethical conflicts. If your research brings you into contact with something that could harm the person that you’re studying, what is your obligation? If that person commits a crime, what’s your obligation to protect that person? I think the trend is to lean towards protecting that person. But then that might expose risk to ourselves, to our employers, to our clients. It’s not black and whites. And you don’t even have to be fantastical to come up with a scenario that if you say, well, it’s always going to be this, we can easily come up with a variation of that scenario, that puts them into a different category.
And so that’s the conversation. You don’t know. I don’t think you can go out into the world with this sense of, you know, ethical certitude that I always do this, or I always do that. It’s really really messy. And I think what you see in some of these stories is people grappling with that set of set of ethics. And you know, what their values are, who they’re trying to protect, who they might expose, what – they’re stuck between delivering good research that can help their client take action, and protecting the person who gave them the insights, that helped them understand how to help their clients.
You see people struggling to make sense when they have these different forces pulling them in different directions and different obligations and different commitments. And that is the conversation. That is the thing they’re trying to navigate. And there may be no satisfactory answer if you’re going to let someone down, or not sort of satisfy everybody or not be able to live up to your principles in every direction. And so I guess that’s the conversation. That’s the journey.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And as you’re saying, it’s a conversation as well. And you said in the beginning, it’s something you need to have a conversation about with yourself, but with someone else as well. It’s very hard to come up with the answer for yourself, to have people around you that you feel that you can trust and talk to.
Steve Portigal
I was definitely inspired, I copied some of this from from the IDEO book They they talk about who they list out in their organisation, you as an IDEO staffer can go to and so that’s this person in this role, it’s your boss, it’s the head of your team.
Per Axbom
I think that means it’s time for heptascale questions.
Steve Portigal
Good.
Per Axbom
So heptascale questions are when we ask you one question each, and we ask you to rate something on a scale of one to seven.
James Royal-Lawson
You answer the question with a number from one to seven.
Per Axbom
And the scale will become apparent by the way the question is asked, but you are not allowed to expand on your answer, at this point in time. Do you want to start James?
James Royal-Lawson
How much is user research a continual fight against your biases – your biases?
Steve Portigal
What’s the how does the scale work? Seven is a lot.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
Steve Portigal
Six.
Per Axbom
And my question is, on a scale of one to seven, how important is it for user researchers to regularly practice being non judgmental?
Steve Portigal
Three
James Royal-Lawson
One of the downsides when we have the heptascales challenge is that the questions at times, kind of make you want to go, Oh my God, that’s an entire podcast episode itself working out why you gave that number.
Per Axbom
That will be part two.
James Royal-Lawson
But you can, Steve, we’ll let you give one minute. You can choose one of the two questions, just give one minute explanation of why you chose the number you did.
Steve Portigal
The first question. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I’ve said it a few times. I think unpacking one’s own biases or sort of just assembling them is actually my favourite thing about doing research. And I have this happen to me all the time, where I’m kind of being efficient. I’ve got somebody figured out pretty quickly based on some cues, and I’m very proud of myself for the environments, what we learned from recruiting them, how old they are, some demographic things, their race, their gender, whatever. I’ve got kind of a story for them and then I’m going to kind of platform my inquiry on top of what I’ve already learned. So I’m being very efficient, and I feel really good about that.
And then the more the conversation goes on, the more I realise, oh, their view of the world is not what I thought it was. There’s so much more to be learned here. Once I let go of what I’ve already decided. And that’s like a joyful discovery. I’m not sad that, that I’m wrong. I’m really happy. And so I think it’s okay to bring that judgement in as long as you know how to hear the signals that say, Oh, you’re wrong, and there’s more here and hooray for us, because we get to do this new thing and, discover and kind of connect in a fresh way.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons why I put that question in and I put the emphasis on your biases is it feels like we’re, we get taught or get told a lot about how to, to look after the biases when we’re interviewing or the biases of the subject matter in the participant in the interview. But, whereas to reflect on how much your own biases really do derive all this, sometimes I think is underplayed.
Per Axbom
Thank you so much for being on the show, Steve. It was great having you again. I’m looking forward to hearing James when he’s finished your book and we’ll talk about more about it.
James Royal-Lawson
I will finish it, I promise.
Steve Portigal
It’s always great to talk to you guys, I really enjoy it thank you for including me.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
One thing I’ve been realising, when I was reading the book, is once what I’ve said in the interview, about what was said in the story itself, but what wasn’t said and that kind of comes into reminiscing as well. I’ve read half the book, 30 stories or something, and I’ve already probably generated about 12 stories of my own because of the reminiscing that you just naturally do. I mean for me and you, we’ve been around for quite a while, we’re not new to the profession so we do have our own war stories. So by reading through it, you reminisce. It bubbles up another story while you read someone else’s story and I’ve enjoyed that so far.
Per Axbom
Yeah, you really start thinking about, Yeah, I’ve been through something similar. But just getting lost at a client’s office is – many of us have have been through that as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, that was a story when a guy had gone to the toilet I think it was. He was in a Network Operation Centre and he’d not taken his temporary pass or his guide –
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
His phone or even his telephone with him, and got kind of trapped in a different part of the building.
Per Axbom
He needed a keycard for three doors, that he had passed. So he was locked in and he didn’t remember the name of the person he was going to meet.
James Royal-Lawson
So what’s your story?
Per Axbom
I’ve just I’ve just been lost in corridors in places. When I’ve been asked to leave, or can you find your way out? And I’m like, Yeah, sure I can. And then I walk around for like, five minutes trying to find the exit. That has happened to me like 10 times.
James Royal-Lawson
But, do you know, when you say that, I remember a time when I’ve done that too. And you end up meeting the people you’ve had the meeting with, because you’ve taken so long to get out. Are you still here? There was a story in the book about when they brought a product manager called Bob to a coffee-with-customers session. And this reminded me of a time when I was I was sat observing together with a programmer.
Following the principle that we preach a lot of the time, with kind of exposure hours, that you get as many people as you can to see real people using the things you make, because it gives them so much empathy and so much more understanding. So I was doing this with a programmer, so it was me and the programmer, observing someone do their work. And it was a real problem because every single time this person we were observing, started to struggle, the programmer who’d made the software they were struggling with, jumped in and fixed the problem. Why didn’t you do this? You click there, you do that.
Per Axbom
Oh, it isn’t actually helping the person do it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So, every single time we got to that point with, ah, there’s something really interesting coming now – look, they’re gonna show us how that is actually quite difficult to work with, or they’re going to show us – now there’s a chance for me to ask them why. Ask them kind of like, why do you want to do that? Get some kind of like background information – diving in, diving in, and kind of fixing things.
Per Axbom
So what did you do?
James Royal-Lawson
I had to step in. I actually had to say, look, you have to just leave it be now. And then you end up in that really awkward situation where you don’t want to kill the enthusiasm of the programmer who’s so enlightened now, they’re suddenly passionately kind of wanting to fix things now, when they see someone really using their software. You don’t want to kill that off. But at the same time, you don’t want to destroy the user research and the moments of being able to find out what’s driving someone. So that’s just one of the examples of the stories that you know, the reminiscing of the stories that you think of yourself when you’re going through the book.
Per Axbom
That’s a great story.
James Royal-Lawson
That’s a journey in itself.
Per Axbom
I just loved the human aspect of the whole book, that everybody’s just human with their emotions and fallacies, and you can’t really predict anything that’s going to happen, because we don’t know what people do because they aren’t predictable because you’re controlled by emotions. And that’s the fun of it all as well. I think he says in the book as well, we’re all just participants, it’s not that somebody is controlling it. We’re all just participants in this game.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we are. It’s just a big game. Well, you can find show notes for today’s show at uxpodcast.com. You can follow us anywhere at uxpodcast, and I mean absolutely anywhere, I mean, if you can’t find us then just tell us where we aren’t and we’ll probably be there in a few days. If you aren’t already a subscriber then remember to add our show to your podcast client.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
Did you almost forget you had to say that at the end?
Per Axbom
No, that was a dramatic pause.
James Royal-Lawson
That wasn’t a dramatic pause.
Per Axbom
It was a dramatic pause.
Apparently it worked because even you wondered –
James Royal-Lawson
It wasn’t dramatic. It’s like in The Big Bang Theory, you know, when they have those pause bits. And if the pause is slightly too long before you get the kind of swirly atom thing, and it’s long enough you think, good God has the streaming crashed? See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Why is the elevator always sick?
Per Axbom
I don’t know, James. Why is the elevator always sick?
James Royal-Lawson
It keeps coming down with something.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and [GUEST NAME AND TWITTER LINK] recorded in [MONTH YEAR] and published as episode 149 and 279 of UX Podcast.