Donna Spencer

Episode 5
Brave UX

Presenting Design Work Successfully

In this fun and serious dive into UX, IA and design culture, Donna Spencer shares some invaluable advice in how to build influence, avoid design theatre, and work well with categories.

Highlights include:

How can we present our work more effectively?
Why should we think critically about categories?
How does a lack of diversity lead to poor design decisions?

November 28, 202001:09:24

Listen on:

Who is Donna Spencer?

Donna is an author, mentor, international speaker and independent consultant, with over 20 years of experience in UX design, information architecture and user research.

A generous contributor to the field, Donna has written three books - Presenting Design Work, Card Sorting, and A Practical Guide to Information Architecture. She is also the Founder of UX Australia and ran the event for 9 years. It continues to this day.

Donna has been described as “the Joker - the card that can slot in for any other card in the deck, and is therefore incredibly valuable.” She’s in her element, solving complex problems.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you unpack the pieces of the product puzzle. I do that by interviewing world class UX research and product management professionals, and they share with us their stories, learnings, and expert advice. My guest today is Donna Spencer. Donna is a design leader, facilitator, speaker, mentor, author, and independent consultant currently residing in Melbourne, Australia. She has over 20 years of experience in making the internet a better place. Donna specializes in helping organizations such as the Australian and the New Zealand government's, Australian Broadcasting Company, Vodafone, Westpac, and Oxfam to improve the effectiveness of their information architecture, UX design and research practices. The founder of UX Australia, a million dollar event that she ran for over nine years and continues to this day. She's a frequently sought after speaker at conferences such as UX New Zealand, which has just happened.
SD Now and World IA Day. An expert in facilitation and communication, Donna has a real passion for helping designers to more effectively communicate their work and to manage stakeholders. In fact, she's recently launched an invaluable little book, which I have just ordered, on the topic called Presenting Design Work, which we'll speak a little bit about today. Donna has also offered three other books, believe it or not, A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, Card Sorting: designing usable categories, and How to Write Great Copy for the Web. She's been described as the joker the card that can slot in for any other card in the deck and is therefore incredibly valuable. She's not afraid to roll her sleeves up and get stuck into the details. And my sense from hearing her speak is that she's a straight talker, so we should be in for a good conversation today. She's most at home riding motorcycles and solving complex and messy problems. Donna, welcome to the show.
Donna Spencer:
Thank you. That sounded awfully impressive. I was like, who is that person? [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, you have done a fair amount of stuff.
Donna Spencer:
Well, it's all struck together [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, it's really great to have you here today to talk to us and I just wanted to check before we got into anything too serious that you could understand my New Zealand accent.
Donna Spencer:
I can understand your New Zealand accent given I talk with Kiwis all day and had a Kiwi boyfriend and have been to Kiwiland one, two, maybe 15 times.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, wonderful. You're pretty, you're like a near cousin then. That's
Donna Spencer:
A very yes, very, very. I used to come for Webstock every year when Webstock was still running and given I ran UX New Zealand the first time, there was a lot of planning for that and yep I've motorcycled on the south island. I've driven on the north. Couldn't get a motorcycle in the north.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, but did we only have one motorcycle in the whole country or something?
Donna Spencer:
It's really hard to rent motorcycles on the north island. It may have changed, but there was no rental. Oh, believe it or not,
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Well, when you're allowed to travel back here, we're allowed to solve that when you come here.
Donna Spencer:
Yes, yes. Sounds good.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey look, I also understand that you like to both play and organize D&D games dungeon.
Donna Spencer:
Oh I do. Gosh, you did your research. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. What is it for people that dunno what that is, what is Dungeons and Dragons and what is it about it that you enjoy?
Donna Spencer:
So Dungeons and Dragons is collaborative storytelling. I think there's stuff in the media that communicates to us that it's something nerdy that nerdy people do and yes, we can all be nerds in our own way, but what it really is getting a bunch of people together to tell a story as the story go goes with structure of rules to give it boundaries and direction and take it from there. So I've got, tonight is my favorite group. We we'll play for three or four hours tonight, we're in the middle of a dungeon and it involves four hours of laugh, laughing and jokes.
Brendan Jarvis:
And has it got anything to do with what sort has drawn you to your professional field? Is there any crossover there?
Donna Spencer:
Well there is in that rules and structure are something that work very well for me and that I am naturally quite comfortable with. So understanding the nitty gritty of the rules of in this situation I can do these things with this equipment like that. And this sequence is something that my brain for detailed information architecture of figuring out really complex detailed stuff and really understanding. So those things go together and then there's this big storytelling aspect that also goes with being a designer. So I wouldn't say that it's a natural stretch for everyone, but those things for me are all kind of part of what I like doing and how I work. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Cool. So something else that I discovered when I was doing a bit of digging was something at the very bottom of your LinkedIn profile, which doesn't get a lot of attention, but it was that you did a bachelor of economics. Yeah. And I suppose I got to thinking about that. What does a leap look like from economics into information architecture in UX? How does that
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, look, my economics degree itself was poor because I put myself through university and when you put yourself through university and work three jobs and have to pay your own way doesn't mean you get great outcomes. So I went from an economics degree with really poor marks, which is not me my but to pay to buy groceries. And I was working in Canberra. So one of the things that's super easy to do when you graduate universities go work in the public service. So I joined the public service kind of did that for probably 10 years and through that process of different kinds of work fell into usability information architecture. The thing where it wraps back though is what I do a lot of now is work with data scientists and working with data scientists often on the categorization, classification language labeling. But also as I know we're gonna talk about bias and categorization and how that all works in ai, machine learning, data science things and all that's about models and economics is all about models, models and assumptions and trying to represent the world in a way that can be understood. So because of my education, when somebody talks to me about making a model and algorithms and making assumptions, all of that, I'm like, yeah, okay. And it makes sense to me where I've talked to a lot of other designers who don't understand the idea of modeling and and they come from different backgrounds.
Brendan Jarvis:
There is a bit more of that in IA specifically. There is a bit more of a quant lens that can be applied to how you interpret what is best for the ia. Yeah, that's interesting. I wondered if that there was some sort of leverage that you had experience from the education and economics forward into what you've ended up doing for the last 20 years.
Donna Spencer:
And again, there's no direct thread there, but there are a bunch of things that I am good at and that fall together and work well. And then when I'm tackling a project, my history and experience leads me to a way of approaching something that if I'd gone to art school my way of approaching problems would be different.
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. So looking also through your LinkedIn profile and obviously your business as well, Maadmob it seems like you've been self-employed for most of your career in the field. How much of that has to do with your refreshing ability to call a spade a spade
Donna Spencer:
[laugh]? It has more to do with my inability to be told what to do. [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
That was what I was trying to get at, but I thought you just called it.
Donna Spencer:
It's those things, those things are different. Calling a spade a spade can be done in a very respectful friendly way that people about me my inability, look, I can absolutely, when I'm doing client work, I absolutely, it's easy for me to take instruction and fulfill what a client wants me to do. I'm not so good at it when it's a boss. I try and ultimately
Brendan Jarvis:
Recently didn't
Donna Spencer:
You? Yeah. Ultimately we all get in trouble.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Yep. Yeah. Tell us if I mentioned in your introduction, you've just released a book called Presenting Design Work. Who is that for? I mean the clue might be slightly in the title, but who is it really for and what made you want to write it?
Donna Spencer:
It's really for designers in a situation where they're presenting and presenting often, which should be most designers. Here comes the cat.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh here
Donna Spencer:
There's a
Brendan Jarvis:
Tail, there's a tail of a cat [laugh]. We will promise that viewers [laugh] here.
Donna Spencer:
So it's for designers who present work and that is gonna be all of us, but who are not getting the feedback they need, who are getting I'm just gonna put him down cause he thinks he's gonna walk across backwards and forwards for half an hour. [laugh] who are getting odd feedback and odd questions who are getting asked about and things that they don't seem relevant and who are getting the same kinds of feedback over and over. Can we change the color? Can we make the buttons more round? I have this particular bent and thing that I care about and I'm gonna say it forever. So it's for those kind of situations which is really, really, really common. I mean you look at anything, you look at design Twitter one day and people are complaining that their clients didn't understand them and gave dumb feedback.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it often seems like there's this sort of teenage attitude that we can have in design where it's like, oh, they just don't understand me, they just need to work harder.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, well guess whose job it is. The job of communication is all on the communicator. It is not on the recipient at all. Is
Brendan Jarvis:
That what you meant when you said that presenting isn't about you?
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, yeah. Well and like you just said, why don't they understand me? I told them this thing and they didn't listen. Well, if your message isn't getting through, then you haven't constructed the message and thought about how it is gonna land in somebody's head. Something that design and look, I don't wanna criticize but
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh],
Donna Spencer:
I am gonna make a statement. Something that I see a fair bit is designers being exceptionally good at listening to users at listening and empathizing and understanding users and bringing that back to the product, but not listening to stakeholders, not doing the same thing. Not going, okay, I'm gonna present this thing to these people. What do they already know? What are their experiences? Have they done this before? Do they know how to do it? Do they know the jargon? I'm about to say to them where are they coming from? Why do they care? Why are they here? There's all kinds of stuff we need to be able to do to understand the people on the other side of our communications to make sure that we do that effectively. And if as designers we're meant to be good at research, understanding and empathy, we should be applying that to our colleagues and stakeholders and clients as well. And then if we've thought through all that and understood it we won't get odd feedback and won't get huffy about not understanding. We will go, I need to do these things in order to help these people understand that think the thing that I'm trying to help them understand so they can make great decisions.
Brendan Jarvis:
And one of the ways that I think about designers, I think about it as being change. It changes uncomfortable for people if they don't understand it, there's gonna be more resistance to it. Yeah, really it's the job leadership job of a designer is actually to manage that change. And it sounds like this book is something that you've written to help with that.
Donna Spencer:
Well, if you're doing work that isn't going anywhere because it's not managing to be communicated well and people aren't understanding it and then they're not making the decisions that the work itself should lead to, then the work is not doing anything. And that change won't happen if people can't make a decision. Like people who make decisions are and should be risk averse. It's often their money, reputation business. They need to understand really well the consequences of a decision that they're making that is quite often quite scary and unknown. And it's our job as designers to help them get there in a way that they get to the end and their like, yes, I understand what we're doing here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Okay, so talk us through it then. So we've got a designer going into a presentation [affirmative], we all know that moments matter and the opening moment is often quite an important time in presenting work. What should that look like? What sort of things should the designer be doing?
Donna Spencer:
The opening moment is the second moment. The pre moment is doing the work of who is gonna be in the room, whether it's a digital or physical room, why are they there? What do they care about? What's their expertise? What can they contribute? So that pre-work means that when you then stand up to actually present the thing, you've done a ton of work. That doesn't have to be hard, it doesn't have to be mountains of effort, but it should be like okay, it's gonna be these people, they're good at this. They always ask about these things. That person cares about this. We've got marketing tech subject matter, blah blah blah blah blah. I know what I'm gonna get them to do. So then moment one in the room is today we're gonna talk about such a whatever, we're gonna do this. Here's some scope today I would like you to look out for something related to your expertise today.
Could you please watch out and make sure this is going to be technically possible? Could you please make sure this fits well within the brand? Could you please make sure this is going to achieve and fit in with the marketing campaign that's happening next week? Could you CEO please make sure and keep an eye out that this is gonna solve the business problem that we're trying to solve. So once you've given people jobs that relate to their expertise, they can be applying their expertise to watching. If you don't give them jobs related to their expertise people generally will want to contribute something and they'll contribute something and that it could be anything. So if you're like, do the thing that you're best at please, then they're like, cool. She knows that I'm good at something, she knows what I'm good at, she knows why I'm here and and they're like ready to listen.
Then part two is showing the result that you came up with and that sounds really obvious until I give you the counter of what I see most people doing is, so we did this thing and then we tried that and then we scribbled, they did this one and then we tried a different version of it and then that didn't work very well and blah blah blah blah blah. And by the time you actually show them the thing that solves a problem, they're lost. Cuz you ask 'em to do a thing and they're like, okay, well that one's not gonna work. Oh no, what? We're not doing that. Okay, well yep. No, that one's, oh hang on. Which one are we doing? [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like you're suggesting to designers that they shouldn't talk about process.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah. No, not at all. Not
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay. Mines have just been blown.
Donna Spencer:
You can talk about process. No, you can't talk. No, not about process. You can talk about factors that went into your decision making after you've shown the end result. So we we're trying to solve this problem, here's what we came up with
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]
Donna Spencer:
I'll come back to that bit as well. And then only once they've shown them what you came up with, then if there are things that need to be factored into that, you can explain them. You can say, we did actually last week we talked about this thing you asked me to try that we dug into it and it didn't work because or somebody will say, Hey, have you thought about doing it that way? And you can say, yeah, we actually did think about that. We tried it out and it didn't work because, or we can't go that direction. But only in response to questions. Otherwise it's just a sea of information and they don't care about process. I don't care about anyone's process.
Brendan Jarvis:
I feel confidence Then cuz they obviously want to believe and buy into what it is that you are telling them. What is it that gives them the confidence to do that?
Donna Spencer:
The end result the thing we came the we were tackling was this business problem, this is what we've come up with and sometimes this is why. So this why this thing works. We tested this with users and it worked really well. We tested this part and it didn't work so well. So you can get your process in like that. Yeah, yeah as well because it all should be contributing to the outcomes. Not like the work we do contributes to something. It isn't like the work itself isn't the important thing. The fact that we did things is less relevant than what we came up with out of those things.
Brendan Jarvis:
David Hamel, who I spoke to last week, he phrased something very similar to what you've just said. He suggested that he was worried that UX research was becoming more about the research than it was about the UX. It's
Donna Spencer:
It's actually always been like that. Yeah, it's always been because people love doing research. They love going out and talking to people and listening to them and unpacking it and understanding and figuring out, we love research so we talk more about the research than we do about what the research contributed to. So in 20 years I've always seen that particular one happen.
Brendan Jarvis:
And this is a bit of a problem for researchers and designers when it comes to working inside organizations that often think and talk about things in very different terms. You spoke a little bit earlier about the importance of I suppose giving people jobs to do in the presentation, which sounded like a really clever technique of focusing their efforts. You don't get that obtuse feedback that just comes from a place that I just need to say something,
Donna Spencer:
I need to say something. I'm here and I, I'm here for a reason. I need to say something.
Brendan Jarvis:
So what does good feedback look like then?
Donna Spencer:
Good feedback is concrete specific and comes with examples. [affirmative] and is delivered with expertise, not opinion or based on expertise, not opinion. We're all allowed to have opinions, but our expertise is more valuable to take our product service, whatever we're designing to a result. So if you show me something and I'm lending my expertise and my, I can then say, okay, thanks. I understand this. I can see that part will work really well in this situation because I have examples of it working this bit. I'm worried about my experience is that the people using this or me or whatever don't have that something level, don't have the understanding of terminology, don't actually do the task in this way and here are some examples of why it won't work or this content, this data won't work like that. Because here are some examples of what the data really looks like. As a designer you can do something with that because you can go, okay, I've learned something that I didn't know. We collectively as a team have dug into it a bit more. I can understand why that thing now won't quite work and I can do something with it. And as a team we can go, okay, we can do something about that or we can't do something about that because it was specific. You can't do anything with, I don't like it or can you make it more blue?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, nothing infuriates designers more. But I think this is a really critical point that you're making here about how it often is easier for us to feel empathy for our users and yet that's often not reflected back into the organization. So I think this is a really key point for people to take on board here that to really get effective work done inside the company or the organization, you really do need to be thinking more about that.
Donna Spencer:
You really need to understand your organization, how as an entity thinks, how the pieces of it work and think how decisions get made, who makes the decisions, who influences the decisions. Sometimes it can be really hard to figure out because a lot of it can be invisible but as I said, it's meant to be about making change. You can't make change if you can't figure out how the change gets decided.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Now I know workshops are a different setting to a presentation of work. [affirmative], this is something that you've also written and spoken about quite a lot. And you've described yourself, I believe, in various terms as a design thinker. But you've also suggested that design thinking more specifically what you've called design theater. Oh yeah, [laugh] doing more harm for us as designers and researchers. What is the distinction? What is the difference between design thinking and design theater?
Donna Spencer:
So design theater, I didn't come up with this, I don't know where I picked it up from. So it isn't mine. I, I've stolen it from somebody. Have you ever been in a situation where you've ended up as a participant in a workshop and you have maybe a day or a half day and the post-its come out and the things to make come out and you do things on flip charts on the wall and there's high energy and good snacks and a really nice lunch and you chat to each other and you have this great day of somebody facilitating through a process to get to the end of it and it feels great and nothing happens
Brendan Jarvis:
Maybe once or twice [laugh]
Donna Spencer:
Design theater
Brendan Jarvis:
But I had a good day. Yeah.
Donna Spencer:
What's the problem? If you were a stakeholder, would you do it twice?
Brendan Jarvis:
No, I'd probably feel like I've wasted some time, to be honest.
Donna Spencer:
Pretty much. So if we're going to run a design thinking workshop for example, and clearly many of us haven't been doing that this year because a lot of us have been working remotely from our tiny little office spaces. Look, I know people are still doing design work thinking workshops online, but they're not the same as being in
Brendan Jarvis:
A room. It's way different a mirror than it is in person.
Donna Spencer:
It can be done, but I'm sure we're not doing as many. But if you would like to get people together to have them all contribute their expertise to work towards an outcome you need to be committed to actually doing that together and taking it forward and not just looking, you ask them to contribute because you felt like they needed to be involved. So workshops are a really amazing way of getting a lot of effective work done collaboratively and getting people's genuine involvement and also really about getting, helping people get aligned on an idea so that everybody has had that experience and they're like, okay, we're all going this way, but they have to be real and otherwise it's a large waste of people's time and they won't do it twice. I I'm be a participant very often. I will not spend my whole day using a lot of energy cuz they're participants are contributing a lot. I'm not personally not gonna do that if I think it's not gonna turn into anything. And if it's just for looks
Brendan Jarvis:
And what is it that's distinguishes a design thinking workshop against a design theater workshop? Is it the problem? Does the problem have anything to do with it? The scale or the complexity? How do you know whether you're doing one or the other?
Donna Spencer:
Because if there's no actual outcome and it doesn't get followed up and you don't take away the thing that you came up with collectively and figure out the next steps of implementation. [affirmative] look, it's not really, nobody intends to run a design theater workshop, but sometimes people run workshops that have no outputs
Brendan Jarvis:
Outcomes. So it sounds like it's more about the intent with the outcome as opposed to the content or the subject that you might be workshopping. Yeah, right. We said that, well I said earlier that workshops are different to presentations. What tips or differences might exist between how you'd start or run a workshop than how you might start or run a presentation.
Donna Spencer:
They're not even on the same planet. They're apples and bananas and people who are good at presenting may not be good at facilitating and some facilitators may not be good presenters as well. They're quite different skills. Explaining the rationale behind the design that you've come up with to a group to help 'em understand is not the same as wrangling a room of people to get to an outcome. I just happen to be okay at both, but that's just my peculiar set.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well we embrace peculiar on brave UX [laugh], the things that some people might consider peculiar, not because it's weird but maybe it's something that they haven't heard of before, categorization. So I know that your big on this has had a big influence in your thinking. What is the difference between classical category theory and modern category theory?
Donna Spencer:
Oh, you asked me my favorite question.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], excellent.
Donna Spencer:
I manage to talk about Aristotle in every single talk I give if I can. So Aristotelian category theory is the way that western thought is. The way we think about how we think is largely influenced from a Aristotle's works and in Aristotelian ideas of categorization is it's very neat. You have categories and things are either in or out of them and that there is a logic to them. So there might be a logic to a hierarchy or there's a logic to how categories and things relate. And the way God, the way it comes out in the way that we behave is that we kind of think this is how the world works. We think that there's in and out, we think that people are male or female like binary. Yeah.
Which side are you on? You're on one of those sides. We think that you are in business or in you're running a personal hobby, in or out. We have this idea of being in or out of a category, pervades our thinking and the idea that our boundaries are quite definable. That you can actually describe and define the edges of a category. That's what our legal system is all about. It's about writing down those rules in the edges. Modern category theory is acknowledges that we are embodied creatures in this world and the way that we think relates to both our physicality and our experiences here, [affirmative], [affirmative] and the way we are in the world and our experiences is not always kind of in and out of categories categories overlap and a messy. It's really hard to come up with those hard edges and just define them but just look, Aristotle's thinking wasn't bad.
It just didn't how we really think. So when we are doing projects around trying to define and define things and put them in buckets because we need to break the world down so it's not an overwhelming mess. We need to acknowledge that those buckets are fluid, that they change over time, that they cross over a lot, that they're actually kind of not real. I'm working with some stuff at the moment where people keep trying to tell me that we should do stuff by industry like that we should categorize by industry. I'm like you no, no, that's not real. There is no such thing as an industry
Brendan Jarvis:
And that when you go to fill in a form on a government website or something and it asks you to select your industry and you can't find anything that really reflects what it is that you do. It's kind of like when you try and explain to your parents what it is that you do and they just don't get it. It's the same experience you get when you go to a form like that.
Donna Spencer:
Industry classifies businesses. But even then it's a wobbly concept used so that we can do trend reporting on what, what's happening. That's an artificial construct. And the edges of any of those categories blur, crossover, and aren't real. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Harris had seen a penguin. He might have redefined how he thought about birds. Right?
Donna Spencer:
Absolutely. [laugh] or even a chicken, chickens aren't as birdy as robins like chickens are at least birdie birds and yes penguins. Penguins are so birdie that often I'm like, hang on, is penguin bird? Yeah, yeah, yeah it is isn't it? Yeah, it's got wings, beak. Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
I mean his thinking, it wasn't just the fact that it's reflect our lived reality, it was also ignorant to some degree of the actual physical reality of the world. Cuz a penguin is a bird. It just falls outside how they would've originally categorized the bird. Look
Donna Spencer:
It probably a penguin would've been categorized as a bird because it has wings and a beacon, you can define it. But one of the other characteristics of classical category theory is that everything inside a container is equal. Where really as a shorted this a penguin is a less birdy bird than a robin or for us, something like a cockatoo in Australia. Sorry [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Yep.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah. Or either for Americans probably an eagle
Brendan Jarvis:
Or actually if you're from New Zealand, yeah
Donna Spencer:
I did. Wasn't going to make the New Zealand birdies, bird [laugh], but you would have something that when you say bird birds that sit central to your mind where historic category theory was that everything in a bucket was equal. And so this is called prototypical theory where a prototype can then represent that category as well. And it affects our work be when we try to define really tightly and place things inside a category and bus stop against the real world. And honestly, gender is a bloody perfect example because we've spent many years saying that you are male or female and I am super glad that we're starting to acknowledge that gender is a spectrum and people are somewhere on it. And for God's sake it doesn't matter anyway.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah. It really shouldn't matter. It's one of those things that we spend far too much time talking about. But it shouldn't matter, shouldn't matter. Make this back to the practice of ia, which of course does have real world application to gender and how people experience the things that we are creating. It almost sounds like from the modern theory that if the boundaries are far more gray than the classical theory, why do we even bother trying to categorize, how do we know what if what we are doing is going to be effective?
Donna Spencer:
We still do need to categorize, cause we need to simplify. We need to simplify the world in a way that we can deal with situations at scale. So let's think about this for something like insurance. When you go to ensure a car [affirmative] we could take every single thing that you individually have done all the training that you've done, the kinds of driving that you've done, the exact maintenance of the car and the wear on your tires. And we could do a whole lot of detail in order to assess the risk of something happening and you needing to be short or we could lump a whole lot of stuff together and shortcut all of that insanely detailed work in a way that allows us to actually achieve the ability to deliver an insurance product to people. [affirmative], which will often then mean making decisions based on where people live, how old they are what gender they are some of their previous driving history, their criminal history. So we use those as proxies for all of the detail that is actually you just couldn't do it it's just too hard to do that level of detail. So we still do need to categorize and lump things together so that we can simplify the world and work with it.
Brendan Jarvis:
And in the act of doing that of simplification, what are the risks that we run? By simplifying what is inherently a very complex and messy world,
Donna Spencer:
We risk a lot of things. We risk excluding people from things that they should have. So for example, I called my bank recently, I needed to do something, I wanted my loans for an investment property I own. And they said, they asked me some questions about my income and expenses, some basic ones. And they said you can't afford that. And I said, well clearly I can't afford it because I've been paying for these loans for a long time now. So by their models, and this is a very privileged example of course, but it's still one that, it's a good concrete example to illustrate the point. Yes they excluded me from a loan that would actually save me money because their model said that people spend this kind of amount on these kind of things. So because I don't need out much I take public transport, there's a whole lot of ways in which I just generally don't spend a lot of money. I, I know that I can afford it cause they're affording it. But their model said that I couldn't. So I was excluded from something that would've been cheaper for me I believe. And
Brendan Jarvis:
That's computer says no,
Donna Spencer:
Computer said no. But it's all based on categories and models and assumptions. And that's a tiny example. It is still fine, I'm still paying off my loans. But there are much clearly much more extreme examples where by making decisions about making assumptions about the world and assumptions about how people live and assumptions about where they live and assumptions about the color of their skin and where they've come from and what they do. And then the computer says no. Well where we can, if we haven't thought it through, worked it through and understood the consequences of all of those really easily could be excluding people from things that could help them from things that society takes for granted that other people are just allowed to do. [affirmative]
Brendan Jarvis:
About the recidivist justice practice in the USA as an example of that. Tell people what that is and how that works.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, so look this comes from Kathy O'Neil's book called Weapons of Math Destruction. So if anybody's interested in how kind of modeling categorization, algorithms can be used in ways that [laugh] are poor that's a great book. And so clearly I don't have firsthand examples of the US justice system, but the classical example here is that when people are incarcerated, whether they are allowed out depends on some modeling. And that modeling is about what other people do. So it's about where they live, where they lived, who they are, what color their skin is. And as a result people can be kept in the justice system because the computer says that they are likely to re-offend because that's what the model said would happen. So people are interested in that book is amazing.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that's just something I was really looking forward to talking with you about because it seems to me that the way that we structure our information architectures and we build our systems and the way in which the models and the decision making that goes on behind the scenes in those is fairly fixed. Which at face value seems quite different to the experience you might have if few with say for example sitting down in front of another human and reliving or retelling your story to them so that they could then make a decision. And we explored this recently in a workshop that I ran about applying usability testing to the real world. And one of the bits of feedback that came back was often in the real world in a service, the interface is the human, not necessarily just the system. So what is it that we can do in the design of our information architecture or the models or the algorithms that go into making these decisions? What can we practically do to try and make them more fair?
Donna Spencer:
We can be really deliberate about our decision making and about our categorization and we can be really deliberate about understanding the consequences of the ways that we are going to eventually categorize people. I use the line of how would that look if it turned up on the front page of the paper if we said we decided this and this for these reasons, how would that be? We decided that if somebody works less than 20 hours a week, they don't get such and such. How would that look on the front page of the newspaper? How defensible is it? What happens when we put that boundary line in? What are the unintended consequences of saying here's a line what are people gonna do to cross that line? One of the things that happened here in one of our lockdown periods is they were trying to lock down suburb by suburb because clearly there were clusters in a geographical area. [laugh] I dunno first had experience of this, but I heard it anecdotally the moment they said this suburb is in lockdown a large number of people had went to the driver's license Vic Roads and changed their address
[laugh]. What are the unintended consequences of saying this suburb is locked down people are going to do whatever they can to get their address out of there. Whether that means putting their mom's address on their driver's license. But if we look, this is hard, it's hard to think of unintended consequences cause they're unintended, they're the things that happen as a result of the things that you do. But you can do activities on this. You can do run activities around what are the worst results that could happen from these decisions. What happens when we say you are in the boundary and you are out of the boundary? What happens to that person who's out? Is that okay, are we happy to live with those decisions and consequences? And sometimes it'll be yes, be we made that decision, we know why we made it, how we made it and what the consequences are and that is fine and valid. But if we haven't explored it, then when we find out that there has been something happened that we didn't anticipate you know, then on the back foot going, oh crap, I should have thought about that. I dunno if you heard, do you remember the hearing about the story about Amazon introducing AI to read resumes?
Brendan Jarvis:
No. Tell me about that.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, well the [laugh], the resume AI recommended a whole bunch of white men. White men.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm not, I'm not surprised. Why
Donna Spencer:
Would that happen? Because they trained it on historical data. Yeah, clearly I wasn't there. I dunno. And I dunno what they did to mitigate it in the first place. I dunno what steps happened, who put their hand up and said, Hey, why are we training this on historical data? But there probably is a way of thinking through that. What if we run resumes through this? What's going to happen might have been predictable. I just a clear, I dunno the story but it's a good story as an example,
Brendan Jarvis:
There's another one that I can share with you on this topic and it was the UK passport office recently. In fact David Travis, who I spoke to a few weeks ago, he had tweeted about, this is how I saw it. So what they've done is designed this online system where you upload your photo and it basically says yes or no as to whether it's acceptable for use on a passport [affirmative]. But what they found is that darker skinned woman were twice as, twice more likely to be denied based on the photos that they were uploading than I believe white males. And so there's this inherent bias that seems to come up time and time again in the algorithms. We ran
Donna Spencer:
A bunch of photos through
Brendan Jarvis:
It, but they probably were predominantly white photos. Probably no doubt the designers. And I don't think anyone sets out and design to make the world a better, worse place. I'm sorry.
Donna Spencer:
I think some people
Brendan Jarvis:
Definitely do because they do terrible design. But on the whole, most designers are
Donna Spencer:
Most, no I don't. Most designers are there to do good.
Brendan Jarvis:
But I think what this potentially highlights, and it's ironic that too white people are talking about this, but maybe it's needed, is that there's still not strong diversity represented at senior levels even in design circles when it comes to the design and development of these systems. I mean you talk about categorization and what you've implied is that there is a bias because how we define the world through our observed and lived experience determines the words and the way that we look at things. So I really don't see this problem being sorted out until we actually have more representation and decision making level
Donna Spencer:
Of all kinds of experiences. It doesn't have to be skin color, but just different experiences. The company that I did actually get a job with for a year when, which is a great company, had really had probably the most diverse team that I'd ever seen. There were people from all over the world, from all kinds of different backgrounds. Not just locations and skin but people who'd grown up in all kinds of different situations. And it was really like we were consultants. So mostly we didn't work on a lot together. The consultants went out on projects. But even just being together and sharing cultural festivals and food festivals and religious events was great cuz there's a ton of stuff that I just have never experienced and clearly cause I do this kind of work, I am aware that there's a world outside my experience and actively go to learn about it. But it was still really cool to listen to the way people think and why they think it and how their grown experience and their cultures and their religions contribute to it. And I'll just learn. I learn lots of just little weird stuff.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I mean it sounds like you're talking about it's good to get outside of the echo chamber [affirmative], and this is something that I heard you speak about a couple of years ago to an audience in Sydney and you were basically talking about how we like to group ourselves, define ourselves, whether you're a UX designer or a CX designer or a service designer, how it goes because there's some comfort we feel or find in doing that. We get self-esteem from it. Yep. Do you feel that our need to define ourselves so strongly is working for or against us when it comes to the broader culture that exists within the organization and the influence that we say we seek at the top table?
Donna Spencer:
I think that our human need to find our tribe and to find the people who are like us because they're the people who understand us and who we can bond with, communicate with talk about the detailed things that affect us if we don't take active steps to break outta that bubble you know, can damage us. And I've certainly seen design teams, you in large organizations stick together glue as a design team. What they would be better doing is sticking together like glue with the customer experience team or the finance team or whatever team. They don't need to stick together like glue, but they certainly need to experience that. The hang on. You said there was a second part of your question though that I'm not sure I agree with, but do you remember what it
Brendan Jarvis:
Was? Was that, was it putting a lot of bias into it? There
Donna Spencer:
Are two questions there
Brendan Jarvis:
Really. I was asking whether or not that clickiness that we tend to have is working for or against us when it comes to getting more influence at the decision making level.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, I wonder about that actually. So yes, I think that the clickiness and the gluing, sticking yourself to people who are like you can stop you from paying attention to the wider environment and understanding an organization. Well I dunno about its effect on influence as we got the tree it pause. I would say it's probably organizationally specific because again, that group of people up the tree, their own tribe as well. And if you're always on the out because you've bonded with a group it, it's possibly one of the reasons that it's hard to bust in. But those people must bust in at some point as well. So I'm unsure.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah,
Donna Spencer:
There's lots of reasons why it's hard to bust up the tree.
Brendan Jarvis:
So coming back to this need for us to label ourselves as one thing or another, we can't seem to decide amongst ourselves what we are and what we represent. And I wonder if our inability to get really clear on what those things are that are common prevents us from understanding and truly delivering on the value that we're trying to create.
Donna Spencer:
It shouldn't affect our value creation. We should still be able to do our jobs of working with a team to produce great things with the team. The titles shouldn't affect our skills. The time when is we let those titles to define what we do and don't do. So you introduce me by saying that I dive in and that's on my LinkedIn profile. It is what a lot of people value about me being on a team is I'm like, yeah, sure, sure, I'll do the thing. I've never said I'm sorry, I won't do that. I'm an information architect or I'm sorry, I won't do that. I am a researcher. But if we say that is not my job because I am this and this is my title that can get in the way of a team working effectively. And I've certainly worked with teams where we needed to dive in, get stuff done where there's a couple of people like, no, no, I don't do that [affirmative].
But then it also does and it can make it difficult in an organization to understand what services to ask for or what kind of person to request comes onto a project if the titles are always slipping and if they're obscure. So if you know that you need a writer because you are working on something and there's writing to be done on it and you're a product donor and you're like, I know that I need things, you shouldn't need to know what that's called right now. You shouldn't need to know that so and so just changed their thing from content strategist to content designer to content something else. There's a revolution happening in content right now. You shouldn't need to know that. But you should be able to say, I need these skills. I need somebody who can write long content. I need somebody who can make labels amazing, who will just do a thing that everybody clicks on that thing. I need somebody who can describe what to do here. You should be able to describe the skills without having to worry about what the title happens to be today. And that can get in the way if you don't know what to ask for. And this I think comes back to why we don't see information architecture work and information architecture jobs. People don't both know what to ask for but don't even know that it's a thing to ask for anymore. It disappeared.
Brendan Jarvis:
I can see it's a hint of sadness there.
Donna Spencer:
[laugh] look, I'm doing a talk on this soon. I have the weekend to puzzle out what happened and what we can do about it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well hopefully this conversation will help with the puzzling mean, look what you're talking about. It sounds like jargon. It's our yeah, jargon modification. I just made that up. You heard it here first of what it is that what we do, and I also remember you talking about in particular the medical industry as an example that, and I know this is quite dead in my heart cause my wife's a doctor and she explains what goes on at work and half of it goes over my head. And you said that I'm quoting you now that no one thinks about themselves how the medical industry thinks of them. When is it okay to use jargon and when is it not? Okay?
Donna Spencer:
Jargon's purpose is to allow you to communicate effectively with people who are already in your field or in your profession or people who already understand the topic that you are talking about. So jargon is fabulous because it lets us shortcut and not have to explain everything from first principles. Of course when you then need to communicate with somebody who doesn't have that background experience, professional doesn't understand exactly what the terms mean or different things across groups, then that's where jargon falls apart. So I can't remember why what that example was with the doctors, but I've no doubt that I said it. Kim Goodwin, I reckon has probably said a bunch of that one as well in her work with patients like me. Yeah, so well, anytime you're talking about people who don't have the same amount of background knowledge and terminology as you and are using jargon, you've lost
Brendan Jarvis:
Them. Yeah, we need to be really mindful of that and check them, right? Cause language is so important and
Donna Spencer:
It's hard. It's hard to know. It's know what people don't know and especially once it's embedded like you and I have, there's a whole ton of stuff you and I have just talked about there that is quite jargony, including Aristotelian category theory, which is probably about the nerdiest jargons thing I could ever say. But I then went, okay, we've just said a really jargony thing, let's explain what that's about
Brendan Jarvis:
On D and D. So I think we stick [laugh].
Donna Spencer:
Yeah, it's hard to know what people don't know and we have to do that. We have to then go out and understand that deliberately again, we can wrap this right back to the communication that we talked about at the beginning. If you can go out and do that deliberately and understand what people don't know, here comes Cat two,
Brendan Jarvis:
Hello cat two, and he
Donna Spencer:
Caught the end of the foy tail there. Then we can make sure that we do communicate in a way that works for both sides.
Brendan Jarvis:
Donna, what has kept you trying to make sense of all the complexity that we have created in this world over the last 20 years?
Donna Spencer:
I just doing things that I've never done before. So I like tackling new problems and I like figuring out really hard stuff. And that is, I don't mind that feeling where you're really uncomfortable in the middle of it because you don't understand what's going on. I really like that because then I know that we're eventually gonna figure it out and come to a kind of tidy, understood outcome. And I have not ever not liked that. I love learning new things and being a consultant is great because I learn new things all the time.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that is one of the wonderful parts about it. What is not being said in our fragmented field at the moment that you feel needs to be said or that people need to hear?
Donna Spencer:
I do. What's interesting about that and having been around the user experience, whatever we call ourself community for 20 years, is I used to have a really good grip on who we were as a community and what we were talking about and what we collectively knew and what we were collectively strong at and what we were collectively tackling. And I have just watched that four part. I don't have a good grip on what we are doing these days. Even running UX Australia, I would at least kind of see people come back together and I'd be able to keep my head around it. But even then I started just, I don't know what's going on. I
Brendan Jarvis:
What do you suspect?
Donna Spencer:
Well, so I suspect, so again, in the early days when we were figuring out a lot of this stuff there was a lot less in-house work. There were a lot more kind of consulting independent freelance agency folks, [affirmative]. And we were then kind of collaborating with each other, going to conferences, talking about ourselves and what we are learning. I feel that with more work going, people get locked into their in-house bubble. And I don't know, I think I suspect that across this lovely city that I really like that I don't see, I suspect that most design teams work in entirely different ways and that they're not actually no, I suspect there's little coherence anymore about ways of working and ways of learning and ways of behaving a team I worked with a little earlier this year I was kind of alongside them and there was all this jargon and I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. But they kind of rolled their eyes at me for not knowing the latest things.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well they did the judge Judy.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah but they'd invented a whole bunch of stuff in their team and were behaving as if that was how design is done in the world. I don't know. I think that there's a consequence to that in that when that field of user experience design particularly is not any, has little coherence anymore listen to lots of podcasts. And I hear people talking about design and sometimes they're talking about making high fidelity prototype screens. It's like sometimes that is design and sometimes they're talking about problem solving for super strategic problems that have large effects on the world. And the words used are exactly the same. And people who are making high-fidelity prototype screens on a product team are not solving super strategic problems that have large effects on the world. But we talk about it as if it's one thing. And I know what I mean. These things evolve. So you can't actually do anything about them. You can observe them, you can try to keep an eye out on what is moving and what has run away from you and what you don't know that other people will take for granted. [affirmative]
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like what you're saying, Donna is there. We need to apply some classical category theory to our field so that people know what it is and what it isn't. But
Donna Spencer:
Who's gonna do that? There's no master of this. Everybody invents our own stuff.
Brendan Jarvis:
So that sounds like a bigger problem that we can solve together today. Are you up for playing a quick little game?
Donna Spencer:
Yes, absolutely.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay, cool. This is one of my favorite parts. Okay, we call this game, what's the first word that comes to mind? Okay, so I'm gonna say
Donna Spencer:
This is called free listing.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's called what? Sorry?
Donna Spencer:
Free listing.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay. Alright. We'll call it that for today. So I'm gonna say a word and you're gonna think of something and tell me what that word is that comes to you.
Donna Spencer:
Okay.
Brendan Jarvis:
First word personas.
Donna Spencer:
Oh fuck. [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes, I gotcha.
Donna Spencer:
[laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Moving on. Next word. Icebreaker.
Donna Spencer:
Icebreaker. I don't have a word. Let's string something together. Amazing. If you think about their purpose in your workshop.
Brendan Jarvis:
Very good. Very good. And last word that's more of an acronym. FAQs.
Donna Spencer:
Never [laugh] Ever.
Brendan Jarvis:
And why is that done?
Donna Spencer:
Because an FAQ is a lazy way of saying, I don't know how to organize this content [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
So thinking about the next 20 years, what is your greatest hope for our difficult categorize field?
Donna Spencer:
My greatest hope is that we learn how to, that we learn how to learn, that we learn how to return to first principles and solve problems from first principles instead of trying to solve problems from things that other people have taught us. That we collectively apply ourselves to solving problems in a disciplined, reasoned and understandable way. So I'm not going to say that word ethical because it has too many meanings, but to always be mindful of how we're making decisions and why we're making decisions and why we're recommending other people make decisions and what the consequences are. And that can then encapsulate all of the ways that technology is gonna change and all of the ways that our jobs are gonna change. We can still be grounded in human cognitive principles and grounded in kind of logical structured thinking.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, so important and really definitely something that we need to think about some more. Thanks Donna. Today's conversation has been really, really awesome. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for so generously sharing your insights and for the contribution that you've made to ia UX service, design and design over the years. Did I forget any categories?
Donna Spencer:
No, no. But I wanted to say thank you for so thoroughly researching and planning such amazingly excellent questions. Cause it was truly a wonderful interview to
Brendan Jarvis:
Do. It's been a lot of fun and the practical knowledge and perspectives that you've shared with us. And of course your book that's come out, which we'll be linked to in the show notes will gonna help us be more effective as designers and create better products. And that's really what this is about. Tell us what is the best way, if someone's interested in talking to you about this has a project that they'd like to work with you on, how can they connect with you?
Donna Spencer:
So I'm fairly easy to find on the internet. You should be able to find me as Donna Spencer on LinkedIn. Somebody told me the other day that was hard to do and I was surprised. No, I found
Brendan Jarvis:
You pretty.
Donna Spencer:
Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise I'm Maad Donna. So Maadonna with two a's everywhere and my company name is Maadmob with two a's all those ways should be able to get to me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, wonderful. We'll put all those links for everyone to find you easily and the show notes on YouTube as well. So before we go though, I understand that you've got another book coming out next year. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?
Donna Spencer:
So I have drafted a book called Facilitating Design Thinking Workshops. We put it on hold this year. I actually do need to check in and we need to collectively make some plans cause it's again, 10,000 words, skinny little thing, but the guts of it is written clearly don't, as we all know, we dunno how we got to the end of this year. I don't know how it's November. I know I will revisit that plan.
Brendan Jarvis:
Cool. Well, we'll look forward to seeing that hopefully next year. Thanks again, Donna, and to everyone else that's tuned in. It's been great having you here. Everything that we've covered, as I've mentioned, will be in the show notes, including where you can find Donna, her websites, her books, and LinkedIn plus all the other resources that we may have mentioned today. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more of these great conversations, don't forget to the video. Leave us a comment and please subscribe to the channel. Until next time, keep being brave everyone.

Donna Spencer

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Who is Donna Spencer?

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