Peter Morville
Are We Misusing our UX Design Skills?
In this episode of Brave UX, Peter Morville thoughtfully unpacks the lessons he’s learned in his 25 years in the field, and calls for the design community to unite and make the world a better place.
Highlights include:
- Is there no longer a place for absolutes in IA?
- How do we get stakeholders onboard with our work?
- Are we misusing our gifts as UX and product people?
- What's your advice for those of us trying to be perfect practitioners?
- Can we fix the systems that have been used to classify and divide us?
Who is Peter Morville?
Peter is a pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience, and is the author of five best-selling books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, Ambient Findability and Planning for Everything.
Before establishing Semantic Studios in 2001, Peter was the CEO of Argus Associates. There, along with Louis Rosenfeld, he led Argus to be the foremost IA consulting firm in North America.
Peter is also the Co-Founder and previous President of the IA Institute, and has worked as a strategic advisor for many other organisations over the years.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice, and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Peter Morville. Peter is one of those people who probably needs no introduction. He's a pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience, and the author of five bestselling books, information Architecture for the Worldwide Web, also known as the Polar Bear Book and the IA Bible, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, Ambient Findability and Planning for Everything.
- Since 1994, Peter has helped people to make sense of information, and as the founder and president of Symantec Studios, his clients have included at and t, Cisco, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Macy's, the National Cancer Institute and Vodafone. Before setting up Semantic Studios in 2001, Peter was the CEO of Argus Associates, where along with Lou Rosenfeld, whom he also co-authored the Polar Bear book with, he led to be the foremost IA consulting firm in North America. Peter is also the co-founder and past president of the IA Institute and has worked as a strategic advisor for many other organizations over the years. He's the creator of the popular UX Honeycomb, a model for understanding the facets of user experience, and his work has been covered in Business Week, NPR, The Economist, the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few. He regularly blogs at intertwingled.org, and Peter has delivered conference keynotes and workshops all over the world when that was a thing. And now you guessed it, he's here with me on Brave UX. Peter, welcome to the show.
- Peter Morville:
- Thanks, Brendan. I'm so happy to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it's great to have you here, Peter. This is unsurprisingly one of the conversations that I have very much looked forward to having, and I have to ask you before we get into the depths of IA and UX and all the interesting things we can talk about there. Your Wikipedia bio says that you were born in Manchester and the uk, but you don't sport a very manian accent. What's the story there?
- Peter Morville:
- Yeah, so I was born in Manchester. We then moved down to Canterbury and then Margate which is near Dover in the southeast near the ocean or the sea. So actually there was a point in time when I was about seven or eight years old where I not only had an English accent, but I had the Southern English accent. So I would talk about the boss and the cloths room, but we moved to United States when I was eight years old and I hated being the center of attention. People would crowd around me and say something, we wanna hear you speak. And so I learned to speak American very quickly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh], it reminds me when I was 14, I did a student exchange to Australia. And being from New Zealand, we actually have slightly different accents, believe it or not. And yes, I was also the center of attention and tried to pick up an Aussie twang as fast as I possibly could as a result. So Peter, you are in your early fifties. I really hope you don't mind the reminder. I understand that you're a bit of a runner and that when you turn 50, you did something that would frankly scare most people. What is Dances with Dirt and why did you do
- Peter Morville:
- It? Yeah, so it was almost two years ago now. I turned 50. I've been doing various running events, really started in my late thirties, was most intense during my forties, and I hadn't done so much for a while. And as I was turning 50, I just wanted to do something to push myself. And so I decided to do a 50 K ultramarathon. And it terrified me. I mean, I did not know if I could do it. And the training was hard. The event itself was actually way more fun than I expected, and that's because it was a Dances With Dirt is a trail marathon through woods and swamps and rivers. And so it becomes more of a game and an obstacle course than a race. And so about halfway through I sort of shifted mindsets and realized you can't worry about your time, you just have to try to stay alive and have fun. And once that shift happened, it was really fun. I mean, I was tired at the end, but it wasn't necessarily worse than a standard marathon. If I had done that as a road, as a road race, it would've killed me
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. And why is that? Why would that have been different if it was on the road?
- Peter Morville:
- Because that would've been straight pounding on your legs, just the same thing over and over for 31 miles, and it just wouldn't have been a fun game [laugh] I, and I don't think my body could have handled it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. Yeah, there's something about being out in nature and the variety of the scenery, and I imagine having to watch out for snakes or bes or whatever it was that you had to avoid to stay alive, which would probably keep you on your toes a bit more.
- Peter Morville:
- I mean, the most fun parts were there was one stretch through the woods where you had to find the next ribbon and it was hard. So it was like a treasure hunt. I mean, we were working, were collaborating, working together, helping each other find the next flag, otherwise we'd get completely lost in the woods. And then not long after that, we hit a swamp where every step you'd go, at least to up to your knee and mud and trying to get through the swamp without losing your shoes was the challenge.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. So how many other people were you with when you were doing this event?
- Peter Morville:
- I would guess something along the lines of about 50 people did
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That, right? Yeah. So it sounds like there was a lot of camaraderie and no one was of putting the flag in the wrong place to misdirect people.
- Peter Morville:
- No, it was, there were stories of people in years previous, not necessarily runners, but people who went out before the runners got to various sections and changed the sign, right, the arrow, Ooh,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's nasty. Sent
- Peter Morville:
- The wrong way. So yeah, that was something we were worried about,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Well, I'm glad you survived, Peter, that and that you could be here with us two years, two years on Brave UX. It's a really good thing, especially for this podcast, [laugh]. So look, I listened Peter to your talk recently, tomorrow's architects, and in that talk you described why you got involved in ia. You said I wanted to organize information so that people could find what they need. Where did that desire to help people in that way come from?
- Peter Morville:
- That's an interesting question. Yeah. I think that we all have our strengths and weaknesses. If I sort think about the contrast between my wife and I, we both like to help people and to help animals just to be helpful in general, but we express it in really different ways. So she enjoys more directly helping people. She's been a actual librarian and worked at the reference desk and helped people find what they need that way. At the moment, she's working at a non-profit organization called Meals on Wheels that delivers food to homebound people, mostly older folks who can't leave their home. And so she loves helping people directly in that way. I don't engaging with people directly all that much. I'm an introvert by nature. So I think that information architecture and findability are some of the ways that I've been able to take my strengths and interests and use them to help people.
- And definitely, it was so interesting to hear you read my bio just now because my head has been so much in farming and goats and cows recently that I, I've sort of forgotten all that stuff as you were kind of saying Peter did this, so Peter did that and wrote this book. I'm like, wow, I've done a lot [laugh]. I kinda forgot about all that. But yeah, I mean do remember as the internet was taking off becoming a bigger thing than it had been, as cuz it was around for quite a while as a quiet academic kind of endeavor. But in the early nineties when the internet really started to grow and the worldwide web kind of was invented and took off, I just remember feeling this incredible sense of excitement about this potential for us to create and share information globally to, I mean, back then stories of someone in Russia posting a recipe on the internet and somebody in the United States getting the recipe and making the food and then them making a connection and talking with each other. I mean those stories that had never happened before in that kind of way. Nowadays it doesn't sound so such a big deal. But that period of sort 19 93, 94, 95, there was just such a sense of potential and excitement and we're changing the world. And so information architecture as an extension of librarianship was kind of my way of trying to be part of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it really was such an exciting time. And I'm not gonna lie around that time I was eight, nine, and 10 years old, but I definitely remember my grandparents getting that first computer. And the sound that the motor made when I was dialing up to the internet and what you could find and learn was just an incredibly exciting time. And it's often easy Peter to look back at the past with rose tinted glasses and fondly and connect the dots. But if you were to transport yourself momentarily back there, did you have any idea at the time that what you were doing in the field of IA and evangelizing that would change at least the digital world and the way that it has and impact as many people as it has?
- Peter Morville:
- No [laugh]? We, Lou and I started growing our, right after I got out of grad school and library science. The first year was very hard. I was mostly working in isolation without a real office. Lou was in the doctoral program at the School of Information and Library Studies
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Which he never completed by the way,
- Peter Morville:
- Right? [laugh]. And so I felt very isolated and I was on a pretty basic salary just making enough to pay my bills for crappy little apartment. And we were just bringing in enough money to pay me each month. So every month it was like, are we gonna make enough? So it was really after the first year that I was ready to just quit. I didn't know if I could continue. And I told Lou, if something doesn't change, I'm gonna have to go get a regular job. This is not working. And that actually forced him to do some soul searching. And he quit the doctoral program and came on board with me. And once the two of us were working together, that was the point at which it got fun. So year one was hellish, year two and beyond was really fun and exciting as Lou is a kind of very entrepreneurial, outgoing kind of high energy person.
- And so we were a great team and we had a lot of fun growing Argo and we were evangelizing information architecture from fairly early on, but we had no idea how well the Polar Bear book would do. We wrote that book, it was incredibly hard. We were working long hours consulting and growing a business and writing a book so that I couldn't even work it that hard nowadays. That was that youthful energy. We wrote the book and published it and actually felt kind of depressed. We worked so hard and then we didn't really have any expectations. The big adventure of writing the book was over. We were kind of running our company and it was going well, but we almost sort forgot about the book for several months, maybe even as much as six months where it was just kind of out there. But we didn't have a sense of what was building.
- And then it, I forget all of the signs. It was like we started to see it rising on the charts at Amazon and getting into the top hundred books selling on Amazon nowadays that would be incredible. But back then there weren't as many books for sale. It wasn't quite the same scale, but still getting into the top 100 books on Amazon's global bookstore, it was pretty incredible. And we started to get this sense that something was happening, that this book had hit a nerve and that people were not only reading it but sharing it. And so there were a few years there that were extremely exciting because we started getting invited to speak at conferences all over the world. And I would show up at some fairly remote place in Denmark and some guy would come up to me and practically hug me and just say, I love the book. And [laugh], it means a lot to me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're like, yeah, I'm famous, I'm internet famous. I've made
- Peter Morville:
- It. Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I mean that still exists, Peter. I mean, when people think of you and what you've done, I mean that book is only part of what you've done, but it surely is an incredibly important and foundational part of what you've done. How glad are you that you pushed through that first year and Lou made the decision that he did?
- Peter Morville:
- Oh, really, really glad. None of us can know what our lives would be like if we went down other paths. So far, this path's been a good one. So I have no regrets. It is a good example of perseverance. Don't, not a believer in always persevering. Sometimes it's good to change course and to say, okay, the world's telling me stop
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh].
- Peter Morville:
- But that was a good a case where perseverance paid off.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've also now got the benefit of 25 years of hindsight. And as far as I know, at least up until a couple of years ago, you have been still active in the fields of IA and UX. Have there been any lessons learned in the past in IA and UX that are still relevant to the field today that you believe have been forgotten or overlooked?
- Peter Morville:
- Probably most of them. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like an ax to grind. Let's go there, [laugh].
- Peter Morville:
- Well, so first of all, it's really funny. I, I've been aware of the potential for this. I came up with this vision for creating an animal sanctuary, some buying property, a farm where we can have animals and have people visit us. And so I've been doing a lot of sharing about that journey and I knew this would happen. People have decided I've retired [laugh], which is not actually true. I actually just finished a really interesting consulting project two weeks ago, still consulting. And I do hope to get back to some conference travel and speaking, maybe not this fall, but maybe next winter get out and about a little more. I'm hoping to continue working and consulting and writing while I kind of grow this whole farm and sanctuary and animal thing. But yeah, I think so to put it in context, kind of going back to our earlier part of our conversation after the information architecture book was published and became very popular and that excitement of the internet continued, right?
- I mean even with 2001 and the.com collapse and we had to close our company and yet still the internet and there was Google and Facebook and Mobile and the iPhone and I mean there was still so much going on in the early two thousands. And so I was still very positive and enthusiastic. And that kind of led me into writing my first solo book, ambient Findability, which I think of now not completely in a positive way, as my most utopian book, [laugh], ambient Findability was that term I used to describe a world where we could find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. And setting that up as a bit of a goal. And that was before you could find yourself on your own iPhone [laugh], right? The books book opens where I'm on the beach with a trio, one of those old mobile devices. So this was really before the iPhone took off. And I was just sort of seeing the potential future of findability of way finding. And I was just in a very positive mindset around what technology could do for us. And in hindsight, I feel a little sheepish about that because since 2005 we've seen more of the dark side of the internet and I don't feel great about being one of the early cheerleaders who is naive enough to lead people on without really critically thinking about what are some of the negatives, and I guess what people call externalities, [laugh] of the whole thing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is something that I've also been thinking about. And there has been a growing chorus of insiders in the industry suggesting that UX is being misused by companies and that as designers or whatever you wanna call us, information architects, we we're setting traps for our users and leading them into systems that might have interesting short term incentives. But ultimately the long term outcome for the user is poor. Are we misusing our gifts?
- Peter Morville:
- Yes, [laugh] and think it's a very hard problem. Back in the late nineties and early two thousands when the internet was still of an add-on to business we were given a lot of freedom to just do cool stuff and we could design things for users because the stakeholders, the executives didn't really pay that much attention. And it's funny cuz I remember within our community, everyone would always be talking about, we need to get a seat at the table, [laugh], we need to get the attention at the C level. And I always felt like, oh, be careful what you ask for. Well we, we've got the seat at the table now and UX has been fully integrated into the enterprise. But what that has done is that now UX is just business. I wanna make the world a better place by doing UX part of this business enterprise that has a profit motive.
- And it's extremely hard to do true user centered work with it when the broader context is what we might call late stage capitalism [laugh], right? And so it's not so simple as saying, well I'm just gonna change things at my organization. I mean, you're fighting your culture, you're fighting the way that human civilization is working right now. And so we can all do our bit to try to make things a little better. But I do think that the bigger, I go back to Henry David Thoreau, I think was the one who talked about the notion of striking at the root. And it's like for a thousand people hacking at the branches, one strikes at the root the idea, and it was Larry Lessig who popularized this in our community after working with Creative Commons and sort fighting for better things in copyright, he finally realized copyright the problems with copyright are just one of a thousand symptoms of a corrupt Congress in the United States.
- Unless we fix Congress, unless we fix corruption at the highest levels of government will never fix any of these thousand specific things. And so he dedicated the next 10 years of his life to trying to change Congress. He was not very successful, but he did give it a good try. So that's where I go. And when we talk about dark patterns in UX, I think that, you know can talk about specific patterns and how we might fight them, but unless you're looking at it in the context that it's sitting within, you're not gonna get anywhere.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can't help but wonder if we are being either too naive or too insular in our thinking. Insofar is suggesting that we have a cure for dark patterns when it seems that the dark pattern is actually the symptom of a more symptomatic, systemic, systemic issue that possibly lies outside of our direct control and sphere of influence.
- Peter Morville:
- And the little bit of hope that I kind of bring into this, cuz I can get kind of pessimistic.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, we're getting pretty dark here, everybody
- Peter Morville:
- [laugh]. But the little bit of hope that I bring in is what we're talking about here are complex adaptive systems where I was think in terms of when I go in and work with an organization, I look for the levers. Where are the special points of leverage, where a modest amount of effort has the chance of making a big impact? And that extends all the way up to the highest levels of government and how our societies function. It's impossible to know or predict in advance which change, which nudge will have a ripple effect and really change the system. So if we all keep doing our part to try to make things better and to kind of call out injustice or kind of bad behavior, one of us is going to hit that lever at some point and bigger changes may happen.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you believe that UX is compatible with capitalism?
- Peter Morville:
- It all depends on how you define or frame or understand UX. It's absolutely possible to practice great design on behalf of a business. And depending on how competitive your business is in the marketplace, that design might be good for the user or the customer. Or you might say, we don't really, you've got nowhere else to go [laugh], so we're gonna make this hard for you or we're going to make it really easy for you to accidentally spend more with us. So it gets back to how competitive is the business. Businesses that truly are competing for customers tend to practice much better UX. Whereas in the US if you work for a health insurer, [laugh] like they're not very competitive, their interests are not aligned with their customers, probably not gonna do great UX. So you could do great design on behalf of a business, but to practice user centered design or design that's really good for people or design that's great for the world, that requires a different sense of mission and kind of a bus different business model.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I believe in the past you've referred to it as a sort of business culture that's compassionate to users. What is a business culture? What does a business culture look like that is compassionate to users?
- Peter Morville:
- I'll tell you one thing that if you wanna find a business that's compassionate to users, find a business compassionate to its employees because that's where it starts. If you're treating each other well, then you have the capacity to treat people outside the organization. And I guess it kind of goes all the way back to also self care. Are people in the organization treating themselves well? I mean, think that there are some examples of organizations that have, so Amazon for instance, I think for a long time practiced very good user experience design, but was known for not being particularly nice to its employees, really pushed them hard. There's stories of people crying every day and then going back to work, but I don't think that's sustainable for some period of years with some level of excitement and potential. You can really push people to go the extra mile, but Amazon's customer experience has totally fallen apart now. I mean, it's trying to sell you ads in search results. It's like it's the equivalent of going into a bookstore and having people just shoving merchandise in your face. You're just like, I just wanna buy a book [laugh]. So Amazon's user experience is totally fallen apart and I think that's because the culture didn't have a sustainable, let's treat each other well and treat our customers well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't know how else to ask this other than just to ask it to you straight. Do you get a sense, and this is a bit of a loaded question, but do you get a sense that in UX we've maybe drank too much of our own Kool-aid and we hold ourselves in too high regard? And that has made us a little bit naive or a little bit asleep at the wheel when it comes to actually making the world a better place, which seems to have been the original intent of many, many of the people in the fields 25, 30 years ago.
- Peter Morville:
- I think that I was actually thinking about this earlier today. So as I mentioned to you before, we have adopted three baby goats and a mama goat just last weekend. They're gonna be arriving [laugh] within two weeks. I have learned that in order to look after goats, I have to build a house for goats, I have to build fencing. And so I've been doing manual labor in a way that I've mostly managed to not, I've made it to my fifties doing very little kind of home improvement and certainly not a lot of fence building.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I hope you're ready for the callouses on your hands that are about to happen.
- Peter Morville:
- And I was thinking earlier today, how privileged I've been to be able to practice information architecture in these clean air conditioned environments with other people to chit chat with and getting paid well and interesting intellectual challenges compared to some of the stuff I've been through the last few days, which is just hard. And I don't really know what I'm doing [laugh], I don't have a lot of people to ask for help. I'm just like, okay, let me see if I can build this fence. I'm spending money, I'm investing time. Yeah, I think that within IA and UX, a lot of us have had varying degrees of privilege and we've sort of felt, I don't know, I if I wanna beat it, beat up on ourselves too much, but right with that sense of mission and purpose that we wanna make the world a better place that can kind of clash with folks in sales or marketing who might have come up the hard way.
- They're like, I don't wanna screw around with your vague abstract mission. I need to make sure that we make payroll next month [laugh], and I know what we have to do to achieve that. And it's not all pretty. So yeah, I think it's it. The world is to, I guess to a degree, many of us, certainly in the world that I've kind of inhabited of in the United States, more kind of like well educated liberal college towns, this privilege is quite pervasive and we have managed to live pretty nice lives without getting our hands dirty. And I don't even mean that so much as physically as ethically, but a lot of folks haven't, right? They've had to do stuff that they regret or that's been hard for them morally, but they've had to push through to feed their families. We have to have some level of empathy and compassion and understanding for those folks may not have had some of the same advantages or just luck that we've had moving here down here to farm country. I've, I guess I've become a little bit more aware [laugh], I'm working with farmers [laugh] and so I'm trying to empathize with and understand them a little more.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you've raised some really interesting points there. And the systems that we have helped to create the Facebooks and the YouTubes and the Googles and all the other amazing technological advancements that have connected us, there's also been a dark side to those. And I think that dark side has been somewhat informed by the thinking on ia. And I'm not putting you in this box as the person who has [laugh] been the architect of the darker side of the internet, [laugh]. But when you think about things like classification, which you know mean you come from a library studies background and classification and IA is clearly quite an important concept. That idea of being able to classify people or objects or content into certain buckets as being used fairly effectively in recent years to pigeonhole and divide us. And no place is more evident than politics for that type of behavior. In particular American politics, which I suspect many of us and the other parts of the world that are listening sort of look at America with a bit of marvel and wonder and sometimes a bit of horror and disgust particularly over the last few years, thankfully it seems like the tide, the tide is changing. Is this a whole that as practitioners of UX and information architecture or just people in this world that we can dig ourselves out of?
- Peter Morville:
- So I wrote an article last year called Emancipated Information Architecture, and in it I propose a new definition of information architecture. I argue that we, while information architecture is still, well actually I would say it's more important and more difficult in the context of business and technology than it's ever been. And yet I think we have to go beyond business, beyond technology. And so I propose a new definition that information architecture is the design of language and classification systems to change the world. And so I use those words language and classification very purposefully for the exact reasons that you just brought up. We've tended to focus on a classification system or taxonomy for an e-commerce website, but language and classification is used to talk about people and animals all the time. And those words and categories have tremendous amount of power. And our community, because we're good at this stuff, has an opportunity to affect positive change in how people use words and categories. And so there are all sorts of contexts that might not pay so well, they might not be the best business opportunities, but where we can maybe help to change the direction of where human civilization is going. Cause things are definitely better here in the US right now. But I see what happened in the past four years as a symptom of an underlying problem, not just an isolated crazy four years. That underlying problem has not gone away here. So I've personally,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What is that problem, Peter? What is that problem?
- Peter Morville:
- I mean, one term that's being used is white supremacy and it's hard to separate what the politics of the United States from that term right now. Another is just a sense of human kind of power, the right to power over other people and certainly over all of animals and all of nature. And so that one is, mother nature is starting to warn us in a big way that if we don't start coexisting with our fellow creatures in our environment, we may not exist for much longer. So there's some really, really big challenges and trends that my mental model for what's happening, and I think it's still happening, is we are all on a bus headed for a cliff. And every once in a while someone screams, there's a cliff gonna, and everyone's like, no, whatever, be quiet. And nobody has actually figured out how to get hold of that steering wheel and turn yet. But again, this is a weird source of hope, but the closer you get to the cliff, the more people see where we're headed and there's some critical moment where enough people are terrified, we don't wanna go off that cliff, that there's a potential for mass collective action and an actual real change of trajectory. So unfortunately, I think it's gonna have to get scarier [laugh] before we change our ways
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Before people realize that we are not on the magic school bus [laugh].
- Peter Morville:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now let's bring this idea that we've been talking about down to some sort of tangible level for people listening now, I was listening to another podcast that you'd been interviewed on in the last couple of years and you said, I don't really categorizing people, which was in response to someone asking you about being vegan. And I thought that was a highly curious thing for an information architect, a found a founding father of information architecture to say, is there no longer a place in IA for es?
- Peter Morville:
- I love, that's a great question. I think that information architects have always been wary of being categorized because we understand the power of labels and categories, especially when we talk about people because there's so much power going on in the language and classification around people. I strongly prefer spectrums over categories. So if you of ask me, Peter, are you a vegan? I have to ask you what are the rules for that? How, you know, could get down to really specific details of whether or not I actually count as a pure vegan. And so I prefer to say I'm vegan ish [laugh], right? I'm fairly high on the vegan spectrum, but every once in a while, like our daughters might order a pepperoni pizza and I just can't resist having a piece. And so it's from a pure purist perspective, I would prefer not to eat animal products.
- And as I said, again, I just moved down to farm country. I'm living amongst farmers. We have the cows that are live, we have five baby calves that are living right next to me, [laugh], they're living in our field and I feed them grain every morning. And yet they are owned by a beef farmer and they're not gonna get to stay here forever. And I have to reconcile myself with the role that I'm playing in this system. And ultimately I'm not a hundred percent against people eating animals. I am a hundred percent against factory farming the large scale. There's so much cruelty to people and animals in those systems. I think they're just pure evil and we need to abolish them one way or another. But a small scale farmer where your cows are mostly living happy lives, I can't necessarily say that's wrong,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But there would be some people out there to your point that would go, Peter, you're not vegan enough. [laugh].
- Peter Morville:
- Right, exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- They live in the world of the absolute, which strikes me as being the danger that the sort of trends around gender identity and sexual orientation and all the other things that we've seen, this rejection of the pigeon hole seems to be fighting against, for lack of a better word.
- Peter Morville:
- The funny thing is, I haven't actually bumped into any vegans who would criticize me for being vegan ish. There's plenty of my friends and relatives who are full on omnivores and love to eat steak and who love to pick holes. Peter, I heard you had a slice of pepperoni pizza last week, [laugh]. And I think that that actually is a sign that of people who are struggling with their own place and their own morality, it's messy that I don't believe in striving for purity. I think that's dangerous. And I think mean, there's a funny term I heard from a guy who is defending hunting. He, he lives in rural, the rural kind of, I guess western part of the country. And he hunts elk and feeds himself and his dog during the winters on elk. And he's arguing that his way of living is more sustainable than most vegans.
- And he used the term fossil fuel vegans. So it's like if you're going to the grocery store and buying your lettuce and your tomatoes from some big chain, I mean, where did those things come from? Hundreds, thousands of miles away on trucks or airplanes or who knows what boats, how many fossil fuels were burned in order for you to have your tomato? And so there's very few people who are living [laugh] this pure life not causing damage to the planet and its creatures. So we can all try to do our part, we can all try to do better, but I really try to judge people less and less over time. [laugh],
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We're all living in glasshouse while throwing stones, not realizing that we are living in a glasshouse. So bringing this back to fundamentals of ia, have we effectively killed the checkbox?
- Peter Morville:
- We're not gonna get rid of categories. And there's a lot of value. I mean color as a good example. The colors in a crayon box, the lines between one color and another color are arbitrary. There really are no colors. [laugh] just the spectrum. And there's no, there's not wine between this color and that color. But it's really helpful for us to pretend that there are and to say, well that's red and that's blue and that's green. There's value in check boxes and categories. We just have to be aware of the danger. And again, when we're talking about something where power comes into play, categorizing people, are you male or female? Just only providing those two options that causes harm,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative], it's not enough. This part of our conversation has been reminding me of something else that I believe I've picked up on in our community over recent times, which is this personal frustration that many practitioners have with their reading of the ideal of how IA and UX should be practiced. And then returning to what the seeming seemingly sort of dark and drudgery of their day to day where they're not able to actually live up to those sort of purest ideals. In your 25 plus years in the field, have you got any advice or any words of wisdom or reassurance that you can share with the community about holding themselves to such high standards?
- Peter Morville:
- Yeah, there was actually some advice that I heard back in library school. So it would be about 1993. And that advice was to embrace your constraints. Actually being given a much higher level of freedom can be terrifying and paralyzing. And I've had experiences, I had one project that I got to design the future of mobile search and to think five to 10 years out blue sky. And I thought this was gonna be the best project ever. And I hated it because I realized I'm just making stuff up. We can't test this, we don't have any users. And it was awful. So I would say that over, one of the things that's changed for me over that sort of 25 year period of consulting is in the early days I thought I knew the right way to do things. We had a method and we would to would be very bullheaded about trying to follow these steps, [laugh].
- And then our clients would say, but that's not gonna work here. And we were like, no, it has to. And so I was a lot more forceful about trying to follow a particular methodology and it really upset me when we couldn't do something. Whereas now often the parts of a project that I enjoy the most are the unexpected or unique constraints. I worked on a project up until about a year ago, it was about two years, years working with this one client where there was a big chunk, a big project where the CEO had said that he wanted us to try to solve this findability problem with more of a kind of question and answer, choose your own adventure approach rather than faceted search. Now I was convinced that faceted search was the simplest way to solve the problem, probably the most effective way to solve the problem.
- I tried to convince our clients at the beginning and they said, we, you're probably right, but our CEO wants us to do this [laugh]. And so I was like, okay, let's try it. And it was so much fun because we got to try to design an information system that worked a really different way than the 20 other systems I've worked on that do faceted search. At the end of it all, I think we probably found the end result of that project probably is going to be that they're going to use both question and answer approach and faceted search. So they did realize the limits of this q and a approach, but it was so much fun and so refreshing to have this totally new constraint imposed on us. And I think that that is the mark of someone who, when you get to a certain level of experience, then you start to enjoy the stuff that's hard [laugh].
- So now when my clients say, well we can't do it that way, it's like, oh, okay, I mean, why is that? But then well, what can we do? And we end up doing something new that is really fun. So the danger of reading a book on particularly UX methodology is it makes you want to do it just that way. And it is helpful to have some experience doing it in that particular way. But the fun creative stuff is understanding why that way works in some contexts and then figuring out how to adapt it to something new.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's almost like you need to not try and white knuckle your way through everything in a bit of water under the bridge and dealing with people enables you to see that that's not always the most effective approach. You mentioned the hard stuff and I wanted to ask in your consulting career has the hard stuff more often than not being the soft stuff, the people stuff.
- Peter Morville:
- In the beginning for several years as we were doing information architecture, we were, and I think this applies to the UX community as a whole, cuz I saw this with the rise of adaptive path in UX, we were sort of pioneering these methods and trying to figure out what's the best information architecture in this context and what's the best user experience and what methods and tools and tests can help us get there. As I mentioned, we had more freedom back then because the stuff wasn't so central to the business. Now I feel that the methodology space has kind of been stagnant. I think Peter Mehol said something like, he loves to say things in a somewhat provocative way. He said UX methodology hasn't advanced in a decade, nothing. It's just the same as it was 10 years ago. I think he's mostly right because most of our attention has shifted to how do we convince people, how do we get stakeholders on board? How do we satisfy their goals? Not so much the technical questions of what would be the best journey for the customer, but what journey can we design that's sort of a compromise between what the user needs and what the business wants.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So let's talk about that. How do we most effectively get stakeholders on board?
- Peter Morville:
- I think there's a passive, I have a passive and an active answer. The passive answer is, there's only so much you can do when you have a critical massive executives who came of age before the internet and before technology was a thing. And we still have a bunch of folks running organizations who don't really get the internet,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Bless them,
- Peter Morville:
- [laugh]. And so that's the passive piece where it's like, just wait, [laugh], wait, [laugh],
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Very morbid Peter. But yes, there is truth in there.
- Peter Morville:
- I know the active answer is, I've been surprised by how often, and this is something, a lesson I have to learn over and over again. I hear that somebody, somebody's putting up a roadblock to something we want to do that we think would be good for the user. I have this tendency to assume they fully understand the situation and have decided this for business or political reasons or personal preferences. And yet almost always that's wrong actually that they are missing a piece of the puzzle. And if I actually take the time to explain to them why I think this might work better, it's not necessarily, I'll be completely right, they might then explain their perspective and we'll actually find a happy compromise. Not some just tortured middle ground, but actually more of an insight like, oh, you were reluctant cuz of this, I'm trying to do this and there's a better idea that comes out of the two of us talking.
- And so there's actually a tremendous amount of opportunity just in this space that is basically misunderstandings, miscommunication, misunderstandings. I like to think about mental models and we all operate with these various mental models of how does a light bulb work? And we apply it to people too. Why is this person doing what they're doing? And mental models are super useful and wrong, an awful lot [laugh], right? Maybe mostly wrong. And so if we're able to, this is where mindfulness meditation comes in, being able to be calm and in the moment and be like, right before I charge ahead with my preconceptions, are there some more open-ended questions I could ask that maybe I could actually learn? No, my mental model's wrong about this person. I mean, I've had just some really amazing experiences where we realize we're actually on the same, we wanna achieve the same goals. We just had different mental models.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And sometimes I believe comes from the fact that, well, this is an assumption in terms of my own experience, that words are limited in their ability to convey true the true meaning of something. And in business we are often dealing with a lot of abstractions, a lot of intangibles. What impact have you seen in helping to shift people's mindsets or helping them to understand something that you are trying to convey to them has come by actually introducing them to a user, a customer, a person that is trying to use their software or you are trying to better understand their worldview?
- Peter Morville:
- So a few different answers to that. One is because words and language can lead to so much easy misunderstanding, that's one of the great values of sketches and wire frames to sort of the pictures. So you can all talk about a web strategy or a digital strategy, and everyone's nodding their heads and everyone has a different idea in their head about what it means. And so you gotta sketch things and then be like, okay, is this what you were thinking? And I love it that Abby Covert is what working on a book about diagrams and diagramming, right? Because that is a visual language that can help move us towards shared understanding that most of us never learned in school how to make a good diagram, how can you go wrong? So I think that that's a really good subject to try to help people with.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, we were just talking about removing the abstraction and what impact you may have observed by actually introducing these stakeholders, these executives to their customers in a literal sense. In a real sense.
- Peter Morville:
- Yeah. So one of the most basic early lessons for us was the power of user research, usability testing. The funny thing is that coming out of library school, we were taught in library school that we're now, we're librarians, we know how to organize information, we know the right ways to organize. And it was the first couple of years of growing our company, Argos, where Lou and I were both really interested in information architecture as an interdisciplinary practice, not just library science, but we recognized lots of disciplines had value for information architecture, and we started learning a lot about human computer interaction. There's a guy, Keith in stone, who kind of joined our company and helped bring that into the organization. And we started realizing we don't know how to organize stuff for people. We need to talk to those people and do card sorting and do usability testing and ethnography when possible.
- And the more that you can bring stakeholders into that journey, the better. So having them in the room, you know, gotta balance that with the intimidation factor of some vice president looking over your shoulders, you're doing a card sort, but sometimes actually having them physically there other times recording the session and getting them to watch the videos. So maybe watching them together so that you can comment on them and make it more of a fun social experience. But getting folks to see the pain of the user, the customer, there is no substitute. And that goes for me too, as a consultant or an information architect, one of the reasons I almost always insist on doing user research as part of my project, and it's a fight I still have to fight over and over and over again. They're like, we've already done that. We did some user research last year,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]
- Peter Morville:
- Like
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We've done. We tick that box
- Peter Morville:
- And it's like, okay, number one, you probably haven't done it the way I wanna do it, and you haven't asked the kinds of questions. My user research is based on hypotheses that I form about what I think might be wrong and where I think the opportunities may lie. So I can't even do my user research until I've talked with stakeholders and looked at content and understood the domain better. So you probably haven't done it the way I'm gonna do it anyway, but I need to do it because I wanna get motivated. It's when I see people struggling that I get excited and more intellectually and emotionally engaged in the project. And that helps power me through the heart, the hard messy stuff of trying to figure out what's a new model for this environment. And so I think the motivational piece of user research of inspiring people and bringing passion into the work, it's so important. It's not just the intellectual thing of how does somebody organize something.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like that's almost one of the keys to changing the business culture and building that design practice.
- Peter Morville:
- Yep, absolutely. I mean, I've heard stories of folks who have got, I mean, there was one story in particular I remember where this woman was leading the UX group within her organization and she realized that the biggest blocker in the enterprise we're middle managers and they were basically, they were trying to preserve the status quo. And so they kept pushing back on UX. And so she really got them engaged in design education. She started getting I, she sent a bunch of 'em to the Stanford D school to actually spend several weeks learning about all these UX methods and design thinking. And she sort of enlisted them as allies, as people who were like, oh, now I see the light and I wanna be part of the solution. And so yeah, there's the more folks that you can engage and inspire in really seeing the possibilities of making things better for their customers, the better.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's huge. I mean, I see that here at our lab. It's designed with people, not designed to people, and it makes a huge difference to the outcomes. Yeah. Peter, I understand in recent years you've undergone a bit of a transformation as far as your own perspective on the world and how you view your connection to it. What has that transformation been and what did inspire you to go down this different path?
- Peter Morville:
- Yeah, yeah. It's funny because I think there's probably a number of different paths that I'm going down at the moment. I'm not certain if they're all totally connected or not. One has been this movement towards being in a bigger kind of farm like property or an animal sanctuary or whatever we wanna call it. And being more actively engaged with animals. And that actually came from reflecting. I was kind of thinking back what was it that I really liked and cared about when I was a kid? And I remembered how much I loved animals and loved reading animal books. And I feel like in order to thrive in this world of business I kind of repressed a lot of that for quite a long time and just fully engaged in information architecture and the internet and business. And that's fine. But now I have an opportunity to reconnect with my childhood and actually kind of bring more animals into my life.
- But I've also been thinking more about feeling, so lots of folks have different attitude towards the Meyers Briggs test and the personality types and so forth. And the reading of the type that I am, there was kind of a lot of truth to it, and certainly that I'm more of a thinker than a feeler, much more intellectual than emotional. And I don't think that's all good at all. [laugh]. And I sort of joke with our younger daughter that I'm dead inside and I don't think it's quite that extreme, but I don't cry very often. And I cried more when I was a kid. And again, I don't think that's all good. So I've been trying to reconnect more with feeling. And of course [laugh], I've been gone about this by reading books [laugh], which is probably the wrong way to do it. But I got pretty interested in grief in trauma, in death, in some of those very emotional topics that we can all relate to that affect us all, but that in our culture, we tend to not talk about so much and to sort of repress to a degree, and particularly for men.
- Oh yeah, absolutely. And I guess partly this is me getting older and death becomes a more real thing. And I feel that this is an area where I think indigenous cultures are much better than we are, where death is really just viewed as a part of life. It's all part of the natural kind of circle of life. And it's not bad. It's not something you shouldn't talk about. I've written and talked about this trip last year to go outta Lahara Mexico where I had this wonderful just car trip with this guy who just was telling me about the day of the dead and the celebrations and the costumes and the dancing, and the whole idea of the day of the dead is that day in particular, you're dead are with you, your ancestors are with you, and you talk to them and you remember them and you put photographs of them up.
- And I was really inspired by that. And so last year, for the first time, we celebrated Dia de Martos as a family. And I hope that we continue that and it becomes a tradition because it's a really wonderful thing to recognize that the dead are still with us and that they're not lost. I think it can help us feel less fear of our own deaths and of the deaths of others. And for me, it all goes back to nature. We are animals. We are still part of nature even though we don't always classify ourselves that way. And we're still subject to the laws of nature and the cycles of birth and death and rebirth, and it can be a beautiful thing rather than this ugly, dark thing, just depending on how we think about it and feel about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thank you for sharing that, Peter. I think it's a really good reminder, particularly after such a trying 18 months for everyone that I'm sure that's listening to remind ourselves to connect with ourselves and with people around us, and also with the people that have since passed. Yes. Peter, I'm gonna bring us down to the close of the show now. You've said in the past, and I'm gonna quote you, if you really want to make a lasting impact in an organization, change the people. Help them to understand what do you want the people working in UX today to understand? What change do you wish for them?
- Peter Morville:
- I guess to recognize that before they're technicians, they are activists, [laugh], the fight that they need to fight is to make the world a better place. I would broaden it from, I don't even like the term user centered design so much, or human centered design because whenever you center something, you move other things or beings to the periphery. Let's think about uncentered design, right? Who's missing from our focus, from our circle of care, trying to expand our perspective on what is it that we're doing? Who are we doing it for? Who are we helping? Who are we hurting? But really we are activists. We need to learn from other activists what works in affecting change. There's a long history of activism, of fighting for positive change. There's a lot of folks who don't know so much about information architecture that know a lot about activism. And so I think we need to learn from the folks who've done this. And there's an exciting part to that, right? That we do have power within large, wealthy organizations that have very broad impacts. We have some power to affect positive change and we should use that as best we can.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a great note to end on. Peter, this has been a truly deep and meaningful conversation. We've covered a lot of ground and you've shared some really fantastic stories and insights with us today. Thank you for so generously sharing them.
- Peter Morville:
- Well, thanks, Brendan. It's been wonderful talking with you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thank you, Peter, for your incredible contributions to the field of IA and UX over the past 27 years.
- Peter Morville:
- [laugh]. Oh, thank you for reminding me of them. I'd forgotten.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sorry to remind you that you're in your fifties as well, more than once during this conversation, [laugh], if people wanna find out more about you and Semantic Studios and also the books that you've written, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Peter Morville:
- Semanticstudios.com, intertwingled.org, and I am @Morville on Twitter.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Peter. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here too. Everything that Peter and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Peter plus all of the resources that we've discussed. Peter's books included. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design and product management, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe, and until next time, keep being brave.