Lisa Maria Marquis
The Harm Hiding in Our Information Architectures
In this episode of Brave UX, Lisa Maria Marquis encourages us to be better designers by thinking more deeply about the decisions we’re making and their potential for harm.
Highlights include:
- What are some harmful IA decisions that we're making?
- Why is Information Architecture undervalued and under-practiced?
- How do we actively build a safe and trusting relationship with users?
- Why do gender categories cause some people to lose their minds?
- Is it possible for us to completely avoid our work causing harm?
Who is Lisa Maria Marquis?
Lisa is the Principal of The Future is Like Pie, an independent Information Architecture and Content Strategy consultancy that’s on a mission to make it easier for people to find, understand, and act on information on the web.
Through her consultancy, Lisa regularly works with well-known agencies, such as Happy Cog and Brain Traffic. She also works directly with organisations such as Autodesk, the University of California, and Egghead.io.
Lisa is also the author of “Everyday Information Architecture”, an amazing book that shows you how to leverage the principles and practices of IA, and the Managing Editor of A Book Apart, a highly respected publisher of books for designers, developers and content creators.
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 Lisa Maria Marque. Lisa is the principal of The Future is Like Pie, an independent information architecture and content strategy consultancy that's on a mission to make it easier for people to find, understand, and act on information on the web. And while that's an admirable mission, it doesn't really tell the full story.
- Lisa's underlying goal is a bit bolder. She is in fact hell bent on helping others to build digital experiences that empower users to make informed decisions, advocate for themselves and their communities, and change the world. Now that is a goal. And to achieve that goal, Lisa regularly works with well-known agency such as Happy Cog and Brain Traffic. She also works directly with organizations such as Autodesk, the University of California, and egghead.io to name a few. Lisa is the author of Everyday Information Architecture, an amazing book that shows you how to leverage the principles and practices of IA in order to craft more thoughtful, intentional, and effective digital spaces. On the topic of books, when Lisa's not helping her clients to create more empowering user experiences, she's the managing editor of A Book Apart, a highly respected publisher of professional books for designers, developers, and content creators full of energy, big ideas and purpose. It's my great pleasure to have Lisa here with me on Brave UX. Lisa, welcome to the show.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Thank you so much for having me on, and I apologize for sneezing in the middle of that amazing introduction. You sounded so professional and polished and then I'm sitting there sneezing into the microphone. [laugh], well done. Off to a great start. Thank you. Seriously, thank you so much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here. And I'll toss up when I'm speaking to my editor afterwards, whether or not we leave the sneeze in there or not.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- You have to, cuz now I've mentioned it. Now I've put a lampshade on it. We have to keep it
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Lisa, there's something, when I was doing my research for today that I was incredibly curious about, you might even thick me slightly nosy. And that is the story behind your LinkedIn and Twitter handle, which is Red Sesame. What's the story there?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Actually surprisingly pretty straightforward story, which is it is the official color of a Sheba enu dog. That's it. It End of story. I have a Sheba Enu. I had a Sheba Enu before as well. This is my second Shiba. My first Sheba. His name was Nomad. And I got him in 2005. And at the time, this was before Doge, this was before Shebas had taken over the internet. No one knew what that dog was. I'd never heard of the breed and I absolutely fell in love with it. And I particularly was taken with the fact that the coloring pattern according to the American Kennel Club, was red sesame. I thought it was just a really clever way of describing a sort of orange, red, brown black mix in this particular breed patterning. And I just thought it was cool and I loved my dog and I was like, this is going to be my name. And so it is my handle. Anywhere I can get it on any social platform, it is how you can find me on Instagram. It's on Twitter. I don't know, [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's not very
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Exciting.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it's fairly exciting and if you wanna find Lisa where we are and how to find her now, red sesame. Don't think red
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Sesame.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now there's another interesting, well I suppose this is a phrase rather than a word that I discovered in researching for today, and that was the name of your personal website and consultancy, which is The Future is Pie, future
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Is Pie.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I was thinking about this, I was like, is this some sort of math joke that I'm just not smart enough to understand? What's the story there?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- You know, I almost wish it was cuz I also feel like it's some sort of math joke that I'm not smart enough to understand which is partially why I chose it. So the story behind that [laugh] is the story behind that is that actually my career's been creative like most. And before I was an information architect and content strategist I actually started my career in academia. So I started out teaching. I particularly love to teach introductory writing courses in university settings, which is a course that a lot of instructors hate because students hate them. [laugh] students hate showing up and their first year of school they're being told, okay, now go take this very basic intro to writing class. But frankly, a lot of students need a class like that because there's a lot they're trying to pack into the first 12 years of their education. So how to write a college paper is not necessarily included in that education.
- So they sort of show up and need to get a crash course in using university libraries and making citations and writing words good. So I loved teaching that course because this actually dovetails, I think with my interests now. It really was about helping people improve their communication skills. It really was about giving students the tools to write, write better college papers, but really think better, think more critically, think more clearly and communicate their thoughts more clearly. So I loved that course. At any rate one of the semesters that I was teaching, one of my students wrote that sentence in a paper. Literally the sentence they wrote in the paper was, the future is like pie. It just keeps getting better and better. I don't know what it means. I dunno, what does it mean? It blew my mind cuz it was so funny and it was so meaningless.
- It was nonsensical and it just tickled me. And the student did not get a good grade because it was pretty reflective of the rest of the paper. It was sort of a nonsense paper. I don't even remember what it was about or what the assignment was, but the phrase stuck to me. I just could not get it out of my head. And I thought sometimes you need to see a funny phrase. Sometimes you need to see language used in a way that's very unexpected and that is what sticks with you more than the pages. Pages of papers I graded that were excellent. I don't remember those, but boy do I remember that one student's one sentence. So why not adopt it for my entire business? Why not?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hopefully that student never tracks you down and requests some royalties for [laugh]. For
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now you've got a master of fine arts and English from Cornell and I'm about to make a terrible pun. And that's not a university to be sneezed at, right? Oh no, that's a very serious, I know, I know. Oh, I thought about that
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Hanging up right now. I'm leaving
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Okay, we've got Lisa back. I managed to you to return. So we'll pick up from where we left off before I Sure,
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Sure. Before you slow down angrily. Yeah. [laugh],
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Clearly the written word, something that's important to you. I mean, you were just explaining how you used to teach, used to be a lecturer and teach people how to write, which is something that is a bit of a shame that people didn't know how to do when they arrived at university. But you're also an author and you're a poet. What is it that you enjoy most when it comes to the written word? Is it editing? Is it writing? Is it speaking your poetry aloud? What is it?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, not that last one for sure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So we won't be doing that.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- So we're not doing that [laugh] not this time. Maybe next time. That's such a great question. I mean there's this knee jerk reaction to say, oh, but I love writing. I love every aspect of it. And then there's simultaneously the other knee, knee jerk reaction is I hate writing. Oh God, everything about it is awful. And somehow both of those exist in me at the same time, which is probably true of a lot of folks. I came to love writing through poetry. That is what I was always drawn to throughout my childhood, throughout my teen years, throughout my twenties. I loved finding ways to use language to convey an emotion and to convey an emotion in a way that surprised people and yet resonated with them at the same time. I really loved finding turns of phrase and ways of juxtaposing words that we don't normally see in everyday language.
- Trying to find really unusual and interesting ways of expressing universal feelings. Things that we all knew. No one writes new things really ever. We write the same stories, we love the same stories, we like to read the same stories. We are often writing the same plots over and over in novels. We are often writing many of the same observations, but we're always doing it in different ways. We're always coming up with new ways of saying something old. And I think that is a really interesting challenge when it comes to writing. I love that aspect of it. So poetry was a really good way to really drill down on those particular aspects while also still paying attention to how you communicate to a reader, how you take other people's interests into consideration as you're writing poetry is, a lot of people dislike poetry because it's art, because it's arm's length.
- We don't know. Oh, we don't always know how to approach it because sometimes it is written in ways that do seem kind of inscrutable or are confusing or feel like they keep the reader out. I think there's many different kinds of poetry. I think there is a kind of poetry for every reader out there. I think it is silly, I will say to dismiss poetry as a genre to say it's not for me. Don't like saying I don't like music or I don't like, there are certain kinds of music everyone hates. There are certain kinds of music. Everyone has their thing and it's the same with poetry. So I think there are poems that definitely keep readers out and I don't like those as much. I like poems that invite the reader in and think about how to communicate these ideas or these feelings to a reader.
- So that's what I like about poetry. Now, somehow through that I found my way to writing prose and nonfiction and writing a book about information architecture. I don't quite know how that happens. It seems accidental in some ways, like I tripped and fell into this manuscript. But when it comes to writing pros, I will say I do hate that. I do. I do dislike it. I don't like writing in the sense that it's hard. I am working on another book right now, so clearly I don't actually hate it or I wouldn't still be doing it. I'm just saying that I hate it cuz it's sort of a slog. But I really love editing. That's my favorite thing because
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to ask you about that actually. Yeah, please. Well, tell me. Finish your thoughts. Sorry, please. What is it that you love about it?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Well, editing to me is much easier than writing because writing, you have to generate something from the blank page. Editing, there's already something there to work with. And I like having something to work with cuz if I've got the words there, I know how to rearrange them. I know how to replace them, I know how to strengthen them. I know how to reorder them. But if you're looking at the blank page that's just like, oh, now I gotta generate something from scratch, from nothingness, from thin air. That's again, a lot of pressure. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Editing. Yeah, that's a bit
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Intimidating. Editing where it's at.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about editing. What is it like editing books of other practitioners in the field that you respect, like Erica Hall and Dan Brown?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, it's delightful. It's intimidating. Sure was. Dan Brown was one of the first books I edited when I started editing with A Book Apart many years ago. And it was very intimidating to be like, but Dan Brown, but Dan Brown [laugh] and Erica Hall also, that's a great person to call out. I love working with all of our authors. They are all just really fantastic people. And I particularly love that A Book Apart works with such a range of types of authors. Sometimes it is these big impressive, fancy, intimidating people like Eric Hall and other times it's someone you've never heard of before and this is their first book. This is their first time doing, putting their ideas out publicly and everyone in between. So it's really wonderful to experience that kind of range and to see that different people bring such different things to their books.
- Different authors have different strengths and they have different weaknesses. And so sometimes it's surprising to see what one person struggles with that the next author has absolutely no problem with, but they struggle with something else that the previous author didn't. So every author's a little bit different and it's really fun to figure out what is it that this person is particularly good at and how can we lean into that? How can I help make them even better at that thing? And how can I help them improve at the things they are and as strong in How can we make this book into this is what I always tell people. We are trying to make the book into the best possible version of itself that it can be. We're not trying to take someone's book and turn it into a different book. We're not trying to take an idea and fit it into viA Book Apart mold.
- Sure, we have a way of doing things every publisher does, but we wanna start with a book where the core idea already kind of aligns with our values and the way we're moving as a publisher. So that's one of the exciting things to me with editing other people, is getting to see this kind of variety. Getting to see these different skills and ideas, getting to help people shape ideas that become so important to the industry. Putting out, for instance, conversational design by Erica Hall. That book broke some ground and no one else has written a book that touches on this subject in quite the same way since then. And so to see these books start from bad first drafts, everyone writes a bad first draft, everyone writes a bad first draft to see it in that bad first draft and then later realized, my God, people are quoting. This is the book. The tone on this particular topic is really cool. I love editing. Fantastic.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you play an active role in that as the editor. Before we move on to ia, I wanted to ask you, how do you know when a book is ready to send to the printer? How do you know When is it ready to press that button? When are you ready? Gosh, I phrased that terribly. Let me start again. When do you know if an author is ready to send their book to be published?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- That's such a great question because surprisingly sooner than you would expect I think is the answer. There are so many people don't realize this necessarily unless they've been through the book writing process before. There are so many phases in the editing process that by the time we actually send that manuscript to the publisher, it's been ready to go for weeks. So there's never this moment of decision where it's like, is it ready or not? We gotta decide and we gotta clip the button. We gotta do this. It's being polished. So at an increasingly granular level so many times that it doesn't, no switch there, it's not a hard line. It's more of a gradual shaping as it comes into itself. That said, I think the question you're really asking is what does that transition look like? How do you get from that bad first draft into something where you're like, ah, this is becoming a book?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Or is there a feeling that you get as an editor or an northy do you'd reach this sort of nirvana of calm and wonder at your own amazingness and then you're like, now we're ready.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- I can't speak for other authors and editors, but yeah, there's like this moment I would say there's definitely a feeling where I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, this feels good. This feels right. But it happens frequently. It's not like this one moment on one book. It's like there's a moment during the developmental edit process during the first round where I'm like, ah, okay, yeah, we have been through the first round of dev edits and it is ready to go back to the author or this author has finally made this piece of the book fit correctly and it feels right to me. So there is a sort of gut feeling that happens. A question a lot of authors tend to ask, especially if it's their first time writing a book, is they ask, how do I know when it's ready to turn in [laugh]? Like when is that first draft ready?
- And what I always tell them in that case is it's ready. It's done being it's first draft, it's ready to turn into your editor when you can't take it any further on your own. Because writing a book is a collaborative process. It is very much about the author and their ideas, but that editing is about a conversation between the editor and the author. And you don't wanna give that book over to the editor if you are still trying to work through something. If you're still trying to think through a concept and work it out on the page, it's ready to go to that editor. When you reach that point, maybe that nirvana point you're talking about when you're like, ah, okay, there's nothing else I can give to this book. Someone else needs to carry it a few more steps. And of course as soon as you do that, the moment you send it to the editor, you're going to realize, oh shoot, there were all these other things I wanted to do. There was this other problem I never resolved and there was this paragraph I forgot to add and et cetera. But you look for that moment where you're ready to get feedback, where you're ready to take someone else's perspective and add it to your own and sort of co-mingle with those ideas.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Writing strikes me in, editing strikes me as a process of a lot of critical thinking that goes into it. And you're an information architect as well, and content strategist. And as I mentioned in your introdu introduction that you've worked for some quite amazing organizations, a couple that I didn't mention, for example, at Car Carnegie Mellon University and the Associated Press. When you are engaged by these organizations to come and help them with their information architecture and content strategy, generally speaking, how sure are they about the problem that they have the perceived problem by the time that you arrive?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, good question. With a varying answer. I think I have definitely worked with some clients who definitely knew the problem that they were facing and absolutely understood what they needed and they just needed more hands on deck or they just needed someone else from outside the organization to come in and say exactly what they were saying. But I would say the majority of folks I work with don't necessarily know the problem they are dealing with. And part of the engagement is helping them to articulate what it is that they are trying to solve for. And it's very different depending on if I'm hired to work on a website redesign project, that's a pretty clear [laugh] like what the problem is, we need a new website, great cut and dry, but the stuff that comes up while you're working on it, those are the problems they weren't necessarily articulating or those are the problems that they didn't necessarily know were going to be problems. So when you run into issues like, well, we need this website redesign but we don't have anyone to write the content, well that's a different problem. That's a completely different problem. Or we know we need this website redesign, but X stakeholder over on team Y is insisting on this thing happening and it's really not part of our thing. And it becomes when you get those problems that kind of spiral out into organizational messes, that happens sometimes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And as the consultant in that relationship, how do you do that dance with your client and the rest of the organization to help them to see what it is that needs to be done without them feeling threatened or getting people offsite that you actually need to collaborate with?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Yeah, great question. It depends in some cases to speak generally it is about collaboration and bringing people along for that process of diagnosis and making sure that making, you're not as a consultant, you're not swooping in to be like, well here's wrong with you. That doesn't go over well. Pointing out here are all the things that are wrong with your website. God, I wish that were my job. Honestly, I wish I could just show up and be like, you did this wrong, you did that wrong, you did this other thing wrong. Here are the 40 things you did wrong in this spot, because that's so fun to just feel right all the time. Who doesn't wanna do that? To just be like, Ugh, I know better than you and I am so smart. That would feel great, but that is not realistic. It is not sustainable, it is not fair, it is not kind.
- So in terms of how do we bring people along for that, it's less about pointing out what's wrong and a lot more about helping the people who are doing the work to articulate what they need and really trying to get conversations going and try to get people there to talk to each other. Cuz a whole lot of the time that's part of the problem is there's like some kind of internal dysfunction somewhere. Certain teams don't talk to each other or they do, but it's hostile or whatever. So trying to figure out how to get conversations to happen and try to figure out how to get folks to understand where we can make improvements to their process or to their tools that will make their jobs easier and still make them feel valued. This stuff's complicated because people have so many different ways of tying their personal value and their identity up in their work and in their jobs.
- And so there are certainly times when you think you're making someone's job easier and what they're hearing is, you're trying to make me redundant. You're trying to take my job away or you're trying to make me less important. And that's tricky. How do we accommodate that? I don't have an answer, right? It's just you gotta watch out for those things because things that you might see as an outsider being, oh, this is so simple, we can just solve it this. It's not always going to feel that way internally. So much of being a consultant is shutting up and listening and then being very careful about when you speak. That's part of it. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So when you are brought in directly to an organization, what is the type of client that goes, Hey, I want to work with Lisa. Is this the head of design? Is it a chapter area lead? Who is it that you are generally engaging with?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, it varies widely. Yeah, for sure. One of my recent clients, I was working with a sort of product marketing team recently. I was working with some heads of content a couple years ago. I worked with a developer that was the point person who brought me in. So it does vary a lot depending on what it is that they're looking for and the makeup of the organization and how digitally mature they are, where they are in their content journey. Everyone's different these days.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that relationship between IA and content that you've just touched on there, these things seem like their success is so mutually dependent. How do you think about the distinction, if any, between what's content strategy and what's information architecture?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, the question of the century yes, we found it. There is so much value to being able to define things and have shared understandings across the industry of what these things are and where they start and stop and let's get some nice clear boundaries. And at the same time, it's so varied and it changes so much from organization to organization and context to context that in some ways is it even useful to answer this question I it's worth discussing. It's just that there's not like, ah, this is the definition of where content strategy stops in IA starts. I sort of did the weird thing of getting to IA through content strategy, which is not common only because IA was sort of brought up as a discipline before content strategy was. And so a lot of folks either dabble in both as they came up or definitely went one way or definitely went the other way.
- I got really into content strategy and then I was like, oh, what's this over here? Wait, you mean I can just tell people how to make better site maps? Great, I'm going to do that because I ultimately, I love content strategy, but I am ultimately not someone who really wants to help you [laugh] figure out what kind of content you should be writing or the role that the content plays in the overall business like that. And that that's really what content strategy is focusing on is sort of the intersection between what's being published and how the business operates, which I can do, but it's not my favorite. I am much more interested in the experiential side of things and how people are navigating information spaces, which content is very much a part of content is why we go to websites. So I care a lot about the content and I care about the strategy behind the content and how that intersects with the constructed environment of the information.
- But it's an intersection and there are many points of intersection there and people can work at those different points of intersection or they can completely avoid them. I think it's better when we those different teams talk, but a lot of organizations don't have dedicated content people or dedicated ias or even one of those things. Sometimes they have neither. Some teams only have UX people, some PE teams only have content designers, some of whom do ias. There's just a lot of variety. I think what matters is that do you have people who are thinking through, thinking critically through the experience of interacting with that information, interacting with that content, what does that feel like to your audience and to your users? And as long as you are trying to solve for that experience, as long as you are trying to improve that experience, you can call yourself whatever you want. You can be an ia, you can be a content strategist, you can be a content designer, you can be Joe Schmo. I don't care [laugh], just make the website good. Please make the words good on the website.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well I get the sense though that a lot of UX designers, which is a very broad term, which could encompass product design with visual, the visual aspects of that as well as sort of the underlying architectural aspects of design. But I get the sense that we are far more comfortable putting together prototypes and wire frames than we are thinking critically about the structure of the information and the labeling of our categories and whether or not those things contain bias, how findable our content is. All of these big questions that have been part of the field for a long time, that seems to me at least, that they have somewhat been glossed over in recent years. And there isn't really the same emphasis that there used to be on the importance of these things. Why is it that as a broad field of design at the moment, we seem to struggle with IA so much and realizing just how strategic it can be and useful for our products.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Gosh, why wouldn't we do the hard thing? That's a weird, weird that that's happened that we're all picking.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are you going to say that people are lazy? Yeah. Yeah. [laugh] people.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- It's not even that they're lazy, honestly, that people are scared. I think people are tired. People are just trying to get through the day, man. And that is really what it comes down to. So yeah, I don't say that as a personal recrimination of anyone. It's not about, oh, we're all just doing a bad job. We are all doing a bad job. We're all doing a super bad job. [laugh] every single one of us because that's how humans are, right? Humans are just not actually very good at things. And so it's really no surprise to me that it's much easier for us to go to conferences and listen to these talks and rally around these big ideas about how we're going to make things better for users and then we go back to our jobs and we just keep doing what we're doing because we don't feel empowered to make the change.
- Or we could make the change. But it's really hard, not a logistically hard, it's hard to make a wire frame. It's not hard to make a wire frame. That's why we keep making wire frames cuz it's easy to make wire frames, but it might be hard to call out your boss or it might be hard to e experience a conflict with someone on another team or it might be hard to push back against a company policy that's making something difficult. So the problem is that we are individuals and we are embedded in systems that are so much bigger and more powerful than we are that it is very easy to, easy to talk a big game and then find it very difficult to actually push for change or make change happen. So I think that's why I don't know, I get down about this, I get down about this topic a lot as I write another conference talk to talk about how we need to improve things and go to bat for users and make the internet a better place.
- And I'm like, well, I've been giving the same theme of a talk now for how many years have I been working and what's changed? I still have to keep going to conferences and I still have to keep delivering these talks. And I'm relatively new to the industry when you think about it. There are people who have been giving these talks for 30 years or 40 years how long has the internet been around? And boy, we just keep needing to hear the same things over and over and we keep not changing. So it can get me down. It can get me down. I'm sure it gets other people down too. So the question is what do we do? Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- How do we avoid despair?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, well if we, let's hold that despair there. That's a very real thing. Let's not gloss over that. I definitely get that sense and I get that sense from people that have been in the industry for longer than we have as well. I spoke with Peter Marvel a few weeks back on the podcast and he's feeling pretty down as well. And he sort of laid down the challenge to designers that we need to realize that we have power and that we are activists and we need to do something. Yes. With that. So it's definitely echoed elsewhere. Sure. But you are someone that's quite comfortable in, at least outwardly in your own shoes, having a voice, being brave and not just saying things but acting on that. What is it that's given you that confidence, that courage to have the voice that you do in this industry?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh wow. I'm really honored by you saying that. Thank you. That's that's sort of taken me by surprise a bit cuz I don't feel confident and I don't feel particularly brave. I think what little bravery you're witnessing is actually just privilege. I think that I am in a position where I've suffered no repercussions for saying whatever I want because I don't have an employer [laugh] a consultant, so I don't have to worry about getting fired because I'm trying to unionize. I don't have to worry about getting fired because I said the wrong thing on Twitter. I don't have to worry about having something taken away from me because of what I'm saying on social media. And a lot of folks do. A lot of folks have that challenge or maybe they're not worried about getting fired, but works just become harder for them. They're not getting as much, they don't have as much leeway in what they're doing or whatever. So there are a lot of challenges that go into speaking up that I just don't have to encounter. So I'm lucky, I'm privileged. And that is let's not mistake privilege for bravery. Bravery would be if I am sacrificing something to speak up and I'm not sure that I am. So I don't know. That's something to think about too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, most definitely is. That's given me a lot to think about actually. Well, I mean let's actually, this will bring us to something that I know that from listening to your current conference talk that what I perceive to be your bravery shun through really strongly. And this is to do with categorization and we are going, we're going to go deep here people. So settle in, get comfortable.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Buckle up buttercup.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Here we go. What I am trying to find here is this reference to this gentleman's name and it's Walter Ashby er, just in case anyone was under any illusions that the choices that we make on a daily basis in design about the categories and the labels that we use in our information, in our information architecture can have wide ranging conference consequences. Lisa, tell us, who was Walter Ashby and what choices about categories did he make and what were the impacts of those choices?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, dude sucks. [laugh] Walter Plucker. Walter Plucker is a dead racist, dead American racist. And he was around in the early half of the 20th century. He was a bureaucrat and he was responsible in the state of Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia, sorry, it's not a state, it's commonwealth. I grew up in Virginia, so I know this. He was responsible for changing the state's census categories for race. So whatever categories for race existed before he flattened them. There were only two racial categories on the Virginia census after Walter Plucker got ahold of it, white and black. That was it. That was it. Those were the only options you could possibly be. And in order to qualify as white in that category it had to be, it was really a very specific kind of basically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. You were basically a British descendant and that was it. And literally everything else got thrown into the other bucket. And so this had so many effects on just absolutely upended lives really, really hurt people for a long, long time. As a result of this decision, a couple of things that came out of this. One, anyone who was in the black category could not access most public services. All of a sudden, this was in the 1920s just to clarify, 1920s. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not that long ago.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Not that long
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Ago. Years
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Ago, a hundred years ago. And continued for several decades, so less than a hundred years ago. And so they couldn't access certain social services, could not go to the same schools that they were going to before. People could not get married to someone from another race. So all of a sudden, people who were married if they fell into different categories, their marriage was a nulled. The state was just kidding. You're not actually married. Just kidding. You can't actually live together. Just kidding. You can't parent your children anymore. People who were of other ethnic backgrounds no longer could even claim those ethnic backgrounds. So if you were an indigenous person in Virginia, you weren't indigenous anymore. All of a sudden you were labeled black. That was it. That was the category you got. And so as a result, another result was people who were part of the first families of Virginia, the original inhabitants of Virginia, just no longer had any kind of indigenous claims, no longer had any kind of tribal rights.
- The state did not recognize them being who they were. And so that meant [laugh], we just have these domino effects here. Because of that decades went by where they had no records, there was nothing on there, no government documentation that could tie them back to who they were. And here's the best part, we didn't undo this until 2016 or whatever year it was. I forget, it's in my book. I think it was 2016 pretty recently, pretty frigging recently, a couple of years ago, Congress, the actual Congress of the United States had to undo this. And everyone who's a descendant of the folks who this originally happened to, now they have to do all this extra bureaucratic work to try and prove their identities. So it just fucked up a lot of shit that is really [laugh] like. And on a massive scale, yes, we're only talking about one state, but I'm positive this is not the only place where this happened.
- We're talking about one state, we're talking about one law, we're talking about one census. We're talking about one dude in one position, in one government. And yet millions of people's lives completely changed in terms of their day-to-day quality of living, in terms of what their descendants have to deal with in terms of who they are and how they prove that. I mean, maybe we don't think that that's that big of a deal if we are a part of the majority population. And we've never really had to worry about using government documentation to prove who we are. But if you don't have government documentation to prove who you are, you are nothing. You are no one from the government's perspective, from how you can move through the world because our identities, our bodies are political entities. These are things that the government and society uses to manage [laugh] our lives. And so you have to have something that expresses that. So it sucks. It sucks. This one dude just shows up and he is like, I'm just going to change some categories on a piece of paper. And this is what happens for decades and decades and decades afterwards. Yeah. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When we talk about, we throw this phrase away quite lightly in making the world a better place as designers. Walter cca was an information architect and he was a designer, and he objectively made the world a terrible place for a lot of people by robbing them of their identity. So we should really think about even the smallest decisions that we are making. And I suppose try and be mindful of things that we are doing and what the downstream effects might be. It seems that he did that with great intention. But there are a lot of other things. I don't know if you are seeing this still, but I mean, I was on a bank website recently, I think it was an insurance website, and I was signing up for a policy and they still only had two gender options. So when you think about that in particular, and I wanted to ask you about this, there's also this sort of rejection of the binary mm-hmm. Gender at the moment that's going on. And historically we've just had male and female, this has caused a lot of people to lose their minds about extending gender categories past the two that people have been familiar with. A lot of conservatively minded people have just completely lost their shit on this [laugh]. Why has it caused such a fuss? What is it about people, maybe politics aside, why is it causing so many people to lose their minds?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Why are conservatives? I can't answer that man. I don't know. I mean, kind of the same answer I gave before, which is again, fear. People are afraid of change. This is a very textbook answer, but probably is sort of what it is. It's threatening to some people to have the world presented differently to them than they thought it was to have something that they think of as so static and unchanging. Suddenly have people who you don't know, who you don't like, who don't look like you, who don't sound like you, who might be decades younger than you suddenly saying, actually you are wrong. That's difficult to hear. Sure. And the thing is too, I think that it's very tempting, again, to look at people like that, to look at people who are very conservative and very afraid of change. And to look at them derisively, which, and I do, it's very easy to do and I have no sympathy or pity for racists or transphobes or anything, so fuck 'em.
- But also these multiple truths can be true at the same time here. But also it is hard to hear that things are different than you expect. And it is hard to hear that you are wrong about something. It is hard to hear that you have fucked something up that you have. It is easier to push the whole thing away than it is to try and accept that you've made a mistake and accept that you have to change the way you are moving through the world. If you understand gender to be one of two things, and it's been like that for 60 years that you've been on the planet and you get told, well this person isn't a boy, this person is like, what?
- Mind? This is not a thing. You can really, in order to understand that you have to be someone who is always actively trying to change or always open to change and most people aren't. So I just try to, while I don't have sympathy or love for, for people who are reactionary that way, I also do try to understand where they're coming from and try to figure out how can we maybe change the way we approach the, and that's not for everyone to do, that's for someone like me to do because I have privilege and I am safe and I can do that. So I am comfortable trying to think about it. But here's another thing I wanna say about it. Here's another thing I wanna say. I'm going to try to make a connection here. I think we all do this a little bit. We are all conservative in something.
- We all have a reaction to something. But no, that's not how I understand the world. We might think we are very progressive and liberal and open to change in all of this, but there's always going to be something. And I'm going to give you an example that literally just happened to be this past week, which is I saw an article fairly recent, I forget when it came out fairly recent. I think it was on Vox. I saw an article that was talking about the suburban family tradition of apple picking. I as assume, I assume people Apple pick in New Zealand. I don't know, but you go apple
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Picking, I assume so, yeah, I've not done it. But I assume there's someone here that does
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- [laugh] in the fall. You and your family get in your minivan and you drive out to a farm and you pick some apples and you buy them and you take them home and now you have a bunch of apples. And it's like a fun fall tradition. And it is a tradition that I grew up with. My family went to the apple orchard every fall. I fricking loved it. It was one of my favorite things to do to this day. I love fall, I love autumn. It is one of my favorite seasons, and that is one of my favorite activities. This article was talking about how actually apple picking is ag agritourism and that it erases the labor of immigrants and that it is sort of, it's class warfare basically. And I had a very strong reaction to that [laugh], right? I had a very uhuh [laugh], like, you tell me that, but I like it.
- I like doing it. You can't tell me that it's a bad thing to do when I like doing it. Oh no. That is the reaction I had. Now, I also can recognize that that article is probably absolutely right. I can read that article and I can be like, I see exactly what they mean. I see exactly where they're coming from and there are some issues. I am going to have to dig into deeper on that. And I wanna read more about it and I wanna learn more about it. But I also recognize, hey, I had this reaction, I had this very conservative, I don't like change. This is my habit and my part of my identity and part of my culture. This is something I've done my entire life. So why would I readily accept that maybe it's actually bad. So I just thought this is a good example of here's something that's, it's not the same thing as maybe being transphobic, but I had a very conservative reaction. And we all do. And so I think it's important to notice when we have those moments and figure out, well, what do I need to do to hear things differently? And can I apply that lesson to reaching out to other people who have their reaction in other ways?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there's almost this need. And as I assume this exists on both sides of the political spectrum, whether you are liberal or conservative, this need to be seen or to feel like you are the perfect liberal or the perfect conservative. And of course, if we know have heard or have seen anything in this conversation so far, is that there are many shades of gray [laugh]. And that having a binary approach to life in itself can cause people a lot of frustration and angst. Yes. So something like Walter Cher's choice that he made around white and black as categories, very binary, putting humans in very binary, right? And it's easy to, with the benefit of hindsight, look back on that decision and that person and say, terrible fucking decision what we're thinking of. Clearly it's not right and it should never have happened. But as we think about that and reflect on our daily practices, information architects and the choices we have to make around categorization and labels on the information that we are presenting to the world, to our users, is it completely, is it possible to avoid harm completely in the work that we do?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- No [laugh] your answer. I think what we are aiming for is not perfection. Again, that's binary thinking, right? E, either the decision you've made is good or bad, and that's not true. What we are aiming for is iteratively better continual improvement. The arc of the universe bending toward justice, what we're going for. So I don't think we should be aiming for perfection in our daily habits. I think aiming for perfection is too much pressure. And I think that is a good way to give up quickly and to get derailed and to fall into despair. I think we need to be working on, have I made this better than it was before? Have I improved life for someone? Have I made the experience of this product or this website a little bit better for a vulnerable group? That's what we can do, that every single one of us can do that, even if we are stuck in a difficult, overwhelming system. Even if we are just one person in an organization that feels really entrenched in reactionary ways of thinking, or really entrenched in not thinking we can do something, we can all make one tiny, tiny indent. And that's great. Cuz if we can all make one tiny indent, that's a pretty big change. So that's my hope not to aim for perfection, but to aim for improvement.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if we are not aiming for perfection and we find ourselves making decisions about categories and labels, what is it that you do or that you would like others to do more of that can help them think through what the intended and unintended consequences of some of those trade-offs making in terms of the labels that they're applying to, the information they're trying to describe?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Mm-hmm. See, the thing about Walter Plucker is that he thought he was doing something good for his definition of good. Wasn't saying, he's not a cartoon villain. He is not sitting there like, I'm going to do the bad thing. Now he's saying, I want the world to look like this is a design choice I'm going to make in order to achieve that. So for his bullshit racist definition of good, he did good. That's a problem because when we realize that, we realize we are all capable of that. We are all capable of building harm into our products even when we're not wanting to, or even when we think we're doing absolutely the best thing. So it's a complicated thing, and we have to really take active steps to ensure that we are doing the best we can. It is not something that will ever happen by accident or just as a byproduct.
- It has to be something we actively build into our processes. I think everyone, when they are making any decision when it comes to design, should be thinking of the most vulnerable person they can imagine. The person who has the most to lose in this interaction and figure out what is the way that this is going to harm them? How is this going to hurt them? How can someone use this against them? A good first step. I also think this is a great moment to plug someone's book. I would like to plug Design for Safety, designed for safety by ease. Eva Panzi mog. We just released that from A Book Apart a couple of months ago, and it is phenomenal in terms of providing instruction for exactly this for really thinking through what are the unintended negative consequences? How is this going to harm a vulnerable user? She's got some really important practical advice in there about making that a part of everyone's practice.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, I haven't read the book, but I've just been joining a few dots in my head from this conversation. Lisa, you're an editor. We've talked about the importance of critical thinking. We've talked about your career in academia before you came to the field of IA and UX and content. What role, if any, should or is editing playing in the design decisions that we are making on a daily basis?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, well, I've always said that editing is just information architecture and vice versa. The same [laugh], from my perspective, they're sort of the same thing. It's how I justify being both a managing editor and an IA practitioner. Mm-hmm. Because in both cases, what you are doing is you are looking at a concept and then you are looking at how that concept is being translated into written language. And then you are looking at the effect of that written language on an external user or reader. So it's the exact same process in both cases. It's just that one of them is working with one individual author through the process of writing a book, and the other is working with teams of people through the process of building a website or building an experience or a product. But while the contexts are a little different, the critical thinking is kind of the same, the steps we take to work through that. So there's a lot in common there. There's a lot in common there. The tactics are different. The recommendations end up being the actual, we're not really, we're both are going to involve word choice. Both are going to involve tone and voice, but making a is very different than making a book outline. So there are some differences, but it's very much the same way of thinking.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it seems that that critical thinking that's inherent in both of those tasks is the consideration, not just of the immediate decision, but of the impact of that decision on the people that we're creating things for. I wanna play devil's advocate here, which could be dangerous.
- Yeah, I know. I kind of pretty warned you that I might do this before we hit record. Go for it. So this is kind of just an interesting intellectual exercise I feel. Anyway, you'd be the judge of that. So if we take this notion of doing no harm through our workers, designers, and we apply that to the context of creating information architecture and we take a liberal lens to whatever that may mean, I know I'm using big terms here and throwing 'em around, but say we take a liberally minded lens to how our IA should be framed, but our audience is predominantly conservatively minded. Are we doing our user's harm?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- But if we're intolerant about intolerance, then we're really no better than the intolerant. Sorry.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So maybe this wasn't a good exercise. [laugh],
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- What I'm meaning you intellectually here. Okay. No, I think that's a good question. Right to the question you're really asking is if we are really respecting our users, does that include respecting our users' politics? But I think that that is sort of a mental exercise. I would be interested to hear about a real world application of that scenario. Have
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You run into that? Run into that sort of tension?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Yeah, I haven't. And so that's why I'm very interested. Is there a situation where the organization creating the website would want one set of values and the users of that website would want competing sets of values? And I don't know how often that would happen. You might have an organization that, I'm trying to think, maybe there's a nonprofit that has an overtly political aim and they want to reach people of opposite political persuasions in order to convince them otherwise. But in that case, I don't think that's an IA problem. I think there's a larger mission driven strategy problem there to figure out is that even, how do you do that [laugh]? How does that even work? Is that even something you should be doing? So I don't think there's such a thing as my users are conservative, but I'm going to sneak in some pro-abortion stuff into the site map.
- I don't think that happens. I'm not trying to undermine your question. I'm just curious about can we think of a real world application where that would be the case? I think there are maybe situations where maybe if you're dealing with something that's not overtly political on a website, you're dealing with some information that maybe is, okay, let me try to think here. How about this? Government websites, government websites. Cuz government governments have to serve everyone. They have to serve everyone. They cannot serve just liberals or just conservatives. So your website there has to include everyone. And yet everything we do is political. So your choices of labels, your categories, your site map, your navigation, all of this is going to somehow come out politically. I can imagine there being some tension there. Maybe you're making a website for, Ugh, I don't wanna stick my foot in my mouth because I haven't worked on any government websites before, but I'm trying to think if you're making a website for food stamps or something where maybe some conservative users would be upset with phrasing things a certain way or writing about things a certain way.
- But I think in those cases you have to do your best to write. Your users in that case should be the people you're trying to help. Your users need to be the vulnerable group, the people who are trying to get the food stamps or whatever it is. You can't be worrying about the critics from the other side of the political aisle who are going to be upset with the way you phrase something. If that is who you are trying to support and trying to reach. What I guess that I would love to hear from someone who's dealt with that. If they have experienced that tension, I would really like to hear about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, if anybody has experienced that tension, please leave a comment on the video, please. We would be interested to hear what that was like. I would
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Really suppose to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because if we talk about our role, well a potential role for designers, a as agitating and being an activist for things that are, again, this is highly skewed, but things that have a positive impact for most people in the world. Then there is that sort of question that I think we all have to ask ourselves, which is it could be even a really small thing. What's the smallest thing I can do here to to help to make that happen and bring that to bear. Now you've said, and I'm going to quote you now, that categorization has political and financial impacts because it has social impacts. When we label something, when we categorize something, when we group things together, we are making a statement on how we see those concepts. It also tells your users how you see them. And that was from your talk categories and consequences. And you gave an example in that talk that I thought was appropriate to bring up now because it sort of seemed to me to be unintentional, but it was of a bike website that had made a questionable choice about its use of categories. What was that choice?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- So I don't have that example in front of me, so I don't wanna misquote it, but I believe there was a division of types of bikes and we had things like off-road bikes and dirt bikes and women's bikes. So that clearly this company, the implication being that this company feels that bikes are for men except when they're not [laugh] bikes. Regular bikes are for men, but only a certain kind of bike is for women. Women are a kind of bike essentially in this hierarchy of terms.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And they don't go offroad,
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- They do not go offroad. They do not have any other purpose. They are only for women to ride. That is it, I mean, which is insulting and offensive and weird honestly, that you would think of your product that way, that you would think of having this range of types of products and then just limiting it to this one, limiting 50% of the population in the world to one category and the other 50% to these 10 categories. Why would you, that just seems like a bad business decision.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it just seems that they weren't thinking really were they [laugh]? I mean, well was it intentional? I mean supposed we don't know, but it just seemed to be,
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- They probably weren't thinking, they probably did not sit down and say, how can we alienate 50% of the population? That is probably not the design decision they made. They weren't thinking. But this goes back to what I said a few minutes ago about how we do need to make sure that this kind of critical thinking is built into our process. We cannot just assume that because we are well-intentioned or we are good people, that the goodness is going to come out in the design. The goodness is going to come out in the IA cuz it's not. We're going to make women's bikes a category and that's how that's going to go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And how much of this is going to persist to this decision making that we see evident in the experiences companies and organizations put out there like this? How much of this is going to persist until we have greater diversity represented at the leadership level and all throughout the organizations that we all work for And
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Yeah, I think that diversity within these organizations is incredibly important and absolutely is one of the many things that need to happen. Of course, it's never just one thing, never just one cause there's never just one problem, there's never just one solution. It's always multiple of everything. So diversity is absolutely sorely needed. Inclusion is a larger effort that goes into that as well because certainly we have seen products come out of teams that were perfectly diverse but not inclusive. So if your team has lots of representation but that representation isn't being listened to or isn't being empowered or is being talked over or interrupted or talked down to or dismissed, then that's not inclusive. And those voices, those perspectives, that diversity isn't actually going to make it to the final product. So diversity is part of it. Inclusion is part of it. Changing some systems, [laugh] like some larger systems getting stronger leadership, making sure people aren't afraid to speak up, empowering people to protect themselves and to therefore be able to work.
- Because part of it is if you, going back to the very beginning of our conversation, if you are worried for your job, if you have insecurity around your role and your job, you can't empower users because you yourself are not empowered. If you are afraid that speaking up or making a change is going to impact you negatively at work, that's it. You can only look out for yourself, you cannot look out for a larger community. You cannot look out for your users. So part of making people feel more secure in their jobs means dismantling capitalism, it means unionizing, it means changing some of our social systems so that we have more security outside of our jobs. So there are larger systems that also have to be incorporated into this. We need more stronger leadership in governments. We need stronger leadership locally, we need, it's all connected, which I hope comes across as hopeful and not overwhelming because it's like, oh God, I have to start thinking about government and mayoral elections. Yeah, sure. But it also means that there are many, many pieces. And so that's why again, if you can make one change, if you can move one tiny piece that is contributing to this larger upflow that we need to see,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think that's a really important thing for people to have a think about. I want to segue slightly into something that's quite topical given what happened yesterday with one of the world's largest social media platforms. I don't wanna necessarily address that directly, but happy to see where things go. It was based off something else that I heard you say, and I'm just going to paraphrase now, which was that as people, most of us are fairly reluctant to self-identify in a group setting, especially when it comes to things like citizen status, citizenship status, religious beliefs, marital status, health conditions, things like that. Yet we seem to face no discomfort when handing over that sort of information online and repeatedly to corporations and to government departments that we know very little about and about their intentions for that information that we're giving them. Why are we so uncomfortable in a public setting where we can eyeball other humans yet seemingly so comfortable with the same thing and anonymous digital experience,
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- [laugh] for the exact same reason that we are perfectly fine having road rage when stuck in traffic, but we would never shove someone over in line face to face.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well you say that, but someone in New Zealand just a few days ago sure was something happened. It was a road rage incident and that the person was murdered with an ax.
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh my god, what an
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Ax. I know in New Zealand and with an ax, two gang members got out and murdered that person and it's kind of shocked the country to be honest. Okay. So anyway, I dunno why I brought that up, but you think that you think, there you go. Just be careful people. This was
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Not the metaphor I meant to bring up then, but no, I mean it's anonymity, right? Versus known contexts. So it is just shockingly easy to throw ourselves into the void of the internet where no one knows who we are. No one knows if we're a dog versus face-to-face in a room full of people who you can see, who can see you. Suddenly we become a lot more guarded with our information. We don't even think about really the information that is out there about ourselves. Full disclosure, you did a bunch of research on me before we started this call and said things back to me about myself that I knowingly put out on the internet that I forgot, I guess not forgot, but just it wasn't top of mind for these are things people can find easily about me because I put them there on purpose for people to find out about me.
- So it's not top of mind for people what you put out in your profiles on LinkedIn, on Facebook or whatever. You forget my Twitter handle right now. Yes, my Twitter handle is at Red Sesame, but my screen name is Ham crystals in all caps. Why? Because it was a joke I saw somewhere and thought it was very funny and it amused me, it made me laugh. But the other day someone was like, why is your name Ham Crystal? And I was like, what? My name is what I'd forgotten. Cause I just don't look, I'm not looking at my Twitter screen all the time. So it just didn't occur to me. We forget what we put out on the internet. We forget what's publicly available. We don't know how much these companies know about us. We don't know how much the government knows about us. We don't know how much Facebook is selling to someone else about us, but how much do I want my neighbor to know when I'm actually talking to them face-to-face all of a sudden It's very, I would never introduce myself as ham crystal to someone in real life. So I don't know, again, human nature we're just funny about places where we feel like we're anonymous or safe somehow. And is
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It safety though? This is the thing that I'm wondering about as we are talking is this trust. Cause I saw your lens today episode with Dan Brown and you pitched trust as the lens for looking at ia. Yeah, and it was a great conversation. I recommend people check that out. And that got me thinking about, okay, so in design and ia, we are really trying to build trust with our users to feel comfortable and safe participating in whatever experience it is or product we're creating. But when it comes to the sort of mindless, mindlessly handing over our data, is it really trust that's underlying that? And if it's not, what do we do as ias or designers to actually really make that a trusting or trustful relationship?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- I don't think it's trust when it comes to just share oversharing on the internet. I think it's hubris, maybe [laugh], a combination of hubris and laziness. I think it's that we just feel protected in an anonymous setting, whether it's deserved or not, whether it's it's rational or not. The way that when we are in traffic, it's, it's easier to honk our horn because we don't think people know who we are. Like this has not happened to me, but I've heard of it happening to other people. Have you ever cut someone off or honked your horn and then at the next traffic light you realize that it's someone and you feel bad about, I've heard of this happening and it's like all of a sudden we feel shame because we Oh, I didn't know it was someone I knew. I would never have done that. Because when we think it's someone we don't know and they don't know us, we react differently. It's the same thing with online trolls. If you're anonymous, if there is no identification there, it's very easy to sort of lash out because there are no repercussions. If no one knows who you are, there's no
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Repercussions. Yeah, the social cost isn't there. Yeah,
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Social cost. So there was a second part to this statement. I had a second part to the answer and it's gone now. So yeah, I was just curious to you,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Curious as and designers, how do we go about actively building a safe and trusting relationship through the experiences we're creating with the people that we are creating them for?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Yeah, I think that's the million dollar question really. And I think it does vary case by case in terms of who your users are, what kind of marginalization they experience, what kind of company you are, what their browsing context is going to be like what your goals are. So there's going to be a lot of variety there, but I think that being respectful, really treating users with respect, respect for their time, respect for their identities, it's everything from little things like providing more than two gender options in a form to using language that is inclusive. Those are little signs that people look for to know, okay, do I feel like this is a website I can trust? Do I feel like this is an organization I can trust? Not everyone looks for those signs, but the people who need them do. And so that's again important to think about who are the most vulnerable users you have and what can you do to make them feel safe? Because if they feel safe, the next level up that is slightly less vulnerable, they will feel safe. And the next level up until your safest users are, they're not even going to notice. So work for the work for most vulnerable denominator there. I don't know. That seems like common sense to me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I hadn't actually thought about that before you said that, so I really appreciate you bringing that to the conversation and sharing that with the people that are listening. Lisa, thinking about the people who are listening, the people in this field that we love and their potential to affect positive change, what is it that you want them to realize about themselves and that power that they have and that they possess? What is it you want them to know?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- That's a really good question. A few things I think, and some of them we've said already, so I'll just reiterate, but one, they're more powerful than they realize. Particularly if they maybe spend some time looking at what kind of power you do have. Really interrogate that. Interrogate your power, interrogate your privilege. If you feel secure in your job, if you are already in a union at your job, if you feel like you're in a position where there aren't going to be a lot of personal repercussions for speaking up, if you feel like if you're in a management position and you have direct reports just examine that stuff. I'm not saying that means everyone in those positions has ultimate power. I'm just saying look for what is where you are protected so that you can operate within those circles a little more effectively. So realize that you might have more power than you maybe realize it first and that it is worth doing what you can.
- Even if it feels like nothing, even if it feels too small, do something because that one little thing might really matter to someone one day in a way you might not even know or ever hear about, but do it anyway. And then I think the final thing is, especially when we're feeling alone, or especially when we're feeling like we don't have enough power, collaboration is really where this has to take us next. We have to band together, right? It is, we are all these individuals in this system. It's collective action that's going to make the furthest push and the biggest change. So if you are a designer in an organization that doesn't have a union, think about that. How do we start making that happen? If you are in an organization that doesn't actually align with your values, can you move to a different organization?
- Not everyone can, but if you can maybe try putting, you are valuable, okay? Is the thing. You are good at your job and you are valuable and you have talents and skills and those talents and skills deserve to go to a company who deserves them. So if you are working for a less than great tech company right now, just know that there are a lot of other companies that also want to give you money for your work and maybe go work for them instead. That's my suggestion. If you can, golden handcuffs are a thing, and I understand that. So do what you can. Try some other places. Put your talents towards folks who deserve it and try to just see what changes you can make to your internal workplace policies. See what changes you can make to your processes, your workflows, how can you improve things both for your colleagues and coworkers as well as for your users. So that was way more than one thing. I just gave like four or five things, but they're all connected. They're all connected. They're all about increasing your power in ways that will benefit the larger whole, I think. So good luck folks. I hope everyone spends little time reflecting on that and reaches some new insights.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I really like how you started that with a call to reflect on the power that you do have. I think that's a wonderful thing to give people to think about and for people to have some time to look at what they can do with whatever that power may be. Lisa, this has been a great conversation. It's certainly given me many, many, many things to think about, and I'm sure it's blowing some minds in our audience as well. In a good way. Thanks for so generously sharing those stories and insights with us today. Thank
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- You so much for having me and giving me the opportunity to have this conversation. I really hope people take something positive from it and I hope that we all go on to do some good. So thank you for the airtime.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you're most welcome, Lisa, it was my pleasure. If people wanna find out more about you and what you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Lisa Maria Marquis:
- Oh, I would usually tell folks to follow me on Twitter, but I honestly am not looking in there too much these days. It's kind of a shit show. I am on Instagram at RedSesame. That's good way to look at my personal life. I guess professionally speaking the best way to pay attention there is to check out A Book Apart at abookapart.com. I'm the managing editor and we are just trying really hard these days to put out books that are speaking to all of these values. And hey, if you're thinking about writing a book, please get in touch. We've got a new proposal system set up, so we'd love to hear from you, especially if you come from an underrepresented, marginalized group at tech. And I've got a new book coming out next year called You Should Write a Book about that topic itself, so that as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, wonderful. Yeah, we'll have to get you back on when that's released. That'd be fantastic. Thanks Lisa. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, including where you can find Lisa, find A Book Apart and all the wonderful things that we've mentioned will be in the show notes on YouTube. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe to the podcast, and also tell someone else about it if you feel that they would get value from these wonderful conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, my LinkedIn profile will be in the show notes as well, or you can just find me on LinkedIn by typing Brendan Jarvis in the search. There's also a link to The Space InBetween on the YouTube notes, so that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.