Indi Young
Listening Deeply to Understand the Problem Space
In this episode of Brave UX, Indi Young challenges us to unlock the potential of the problem space, to be business-wise when engaging with stakeholders, and to listen deeply to learn peoples’ purposes.
Highlights include:
- Why are we so obsessed with solutions in software?
- What do we need to ask ourselves before running research?
- Can we expect business stakeholders to trust qualitative data?
- What does it mean to listen deeply and why is it important?
- Is Big Tech morally bankrupt?
Who is Indi Young?
Indi is an independent qualitative data scientist, problem space researcher, coach and consultant. She’s also a globally recognised leader in inclusive product strategy and author, and if you’ve used opportunity maps and mental model diagrams - you can thank Indi.
Her books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models, have helped design and product people around the world to create more human-centred experiences and to understand - in practical terms - what it means to put people before technology.
Before becoming an independent consultant, Indi was a founding partner of Adaptive Path, one of North America’s most well known user experience agencies.
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 Indi Young. Indi is an independent qualitative data scientist problem space researcher, coach, and consultant. She's also a globally recognized leader in inclusive product strategy and the author of two, soon to be three groundbreaking design books, A true UX pioneer Indi invented several of the tools that designers around the world use to make sense of themselves, their products, and the people they're designing for.
- If you've used opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and more recently thinking styles, you can thank, you can thank Indi for those. Her books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models have helped design and product people around the world to create more human-centered experiences and to understand in practical terms, what it means to put people before technology. Her new book, Time to Listen comes out soon and you can find out more about the book on Indi's website, which is indiyoung.com/books. Before becoming an independent consultant, Indi was a founding partner of Adaptive Path, one of North America's most well-known user experience agencies, a leading advocate of starting with a problem space, listening deeply and properly handling qualitative data analysis. Indi is a titan in the field of UX research. She is also vibrant, eloquent, and clearly a generous contributor to the global design community. And it's my pleasure to be speaking with her on Brave UX today. Indi, welcome to the show.
- Indi Young:
- Thank you so much, Brendan. That was an awesome intro. And I have to say that title that I use, qualitative data scientist, oh my gosh, the whole keyword, search engine twigs to data scientists. They think I'm a totally different thing and people will reach out to me, oh, please come be a data scientist for us. And I'm like, this is my chance to set this story straight.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's not that kind.
- Indi Young:
- And remind you, yeah, yeah. And remind you that like keyword searches don't work. Come on. Hello. Why do we trust them?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, that's a very good question. And why you consider yourself to be a qualitative data scientist these days, amongst other things. You started your professional life out as a software enj engineer at the Hughes Aircraft Corporation. Now that's a Well was cuz I think it closed in 1997. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't exist anymore. It was an aerospace and defense contractor, which was founded by the infamous Howard Hughes. I was curious about your time there and what that was like as a first job. What comes to mind when you think back to that sort of first job out of university about the company and the sort of things that you were working on?
- Indi Young:
- I was one of the first female mountain bikers on campus. Mountain biking had just been, but born while I was in college. And so I loved mountain biking. I didn't wanna take a job. I had gotten a job offer at this place where I had interned, which was around the block from where my parents lived. So I wanna go somewhere new, somewhere where I don't know the names of the streets. And I'd gotten a job offer from the supercomputer center down in San Diego and I thought, oh, that'd be really cool. But then I looked at the apartment prices and I would've had to rent an apartment way far away. And I thought, well that's fine. I can windsurf to work
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Down the coast. Love it.
- Indi Young:
- Right. Well it turns out the other one that I got was in Denver, Colorado, which is a place of mountain or half the state is actually quite flat and full of antelope running around. And the other half the state is full of mountains. And so I thought, oh, mountain biking. Yeah, I, I'll take that job. I ended up on a team that was very interesting. Our first day of work we kind of came in, there were I think about six of us and five of us were female.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow.
- Indi Young:
- Software engineers. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is back in the late eighties. So this is mm-hmm. [affirmative] there. So this is some time ago.
- Indi Young:
- This is a,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Without trying to date you, sorry. Indeed.
- Indi Young:
- That was actually the peak of females graduating with degrees in computer science. No way since then it has gone down. But we're standing there looking at each other and we're like, what do they purposely recruit all the females, [laugh], computer science graduates. This is weird. So anyway, we had great fun. We were put to work, I guess you call it now, refactoring for tran program. And we got to do that by taking over the auditorium in some great big building. I don't really have clear memories of this, but we did have an auditorium with a bunch of computers set up. You had to be careful stepping over all the wiring and we got to bring in our tunes and play them on the auditorium sound system. So it was a rocking
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Play. It sounds like heck of the movie a Hecker is the movie [laugh].
- Indi Young:
- Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I understand you are working on some pretty intense stuff there. I mean, there's a note in your LinkedIn bio that there were some fairly impressed generals at one of the things that you'd done during your time there. What we did. What was that moment about? Tell us about that.
- Indi Young:
- We ended up working at a place with a whole bunch of cubes. So this is past the auditorium stage and we were working on this defense system and it's such a small piece of it and I had such a small peak into it. They called it Star Wars.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh really?
- Indi Young:
- It was supposed to, yeah, it was supposed to be a defense system from missile Isles coming in. I think that's what they told us. We might not be actually on it. And so we were writing, I was in charge of some data storage or something, that piece of it we were writing in, what were we write? We were either writing in ADA or we were writing in c, I don't remember. We did have a Cray super computer, which as lowly software engineers, we could only get time on at 1:00 AM so we would have to go in at 1:00 AM The internet was much different then you couldn't do it from home. And we had, oh, just for fun. We were writing Ba Mandel bro sets. And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what as a Mandel bro set.
- Indi Young:
- Oh, you gotta go look that up. Okay. It's a mathematical equation that repeats itself and you can make it graph itself out. So it looks like a certain graphic image where if you zoom in on some tiny piece of the graphic image, you get it all again it's like Brownian music in a way. It just keeps repeating. So we would set that running and the PCs of the era, it took probably about 12 to 16 hours for the program to run. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You could take the rest of the day off?
- Indi Young:
- No, no. We'd run it overnight. Go, yeah, check it out, go after work, come back. So it was, yeah, the general thing though, we were in our cubicle, I remember this particular one, this is actually near the time that I got to meet and hang out with Grady Boch. And so that was very fun and he actually still remembers that too. So that was hilarious that we actually remember that. But there was one general that came in and he's walking around the cube farm and we're in our cube. We have four people in our cube and he just wanted to meet the software engineers. And I don't know if he'd heard that they were female and that's why he wanted to meet them or what, but we had our very first Macintosh, this little aquarium, I mean they make 'em into aquariums now, but they're little beige things.
- And we would use that to write up documents with fancy fonts because we were tired of using word perfect, I think it was called. Anyway, he came into our little cube and he sat on the edge of our little desk and asked us to run through the software that we were writing. And I have no idea, I have no ate background. I'm like, oh, in general, that's somebody important. And one of the women on our team grew up in the military and she was like, she is usually the most vocal of us. And she couldn't speak
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just an awe of this person.
- Indi Young:
- And I'm like looking, cuz you'd have the little lept things and I'm like, are there actually how stars up? There aren't stars up there? I should count the stars
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh], the more stars the more important, right?
- Indi Young:
- I think so. Yeah. I don't remember how many stars.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you think about that, your first couple of jobs, which were both software engineering, how do you feel that early informative part of your career has informed or shaped the way that you think and feel about design?
- Indi Young:
- And he's asking interesting questions. I've always felt like I was on the same trajectory from the beginning. Taking me that far back though. I mean the point at which I left there was the point at which I decided I didn't wanna have anything to do with the military industrial complex. And there you'd go to the cafeteria and we were on a base and there were people with their, I don't know, what do you call those guns? Slung over their shoulder, getting salad out. And I'm like, dude, you're getting salad dressing on your big fancy gun [laugh]
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Classic.
- Indi Young:
- And I'm like, this is wrong. I do not wanna be in line with a gun at the cafeteria. Especially with somebody with such little consciousness of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, totally normalized, right?
- Indi Young:
- Yeah, totally normalized. It was. And so while the mountain biking was good, I actually got a call from the people that I interned with and they said, Hey, come back. We're doing a startup to compete with Craig Computer [laugh] and we want you. And I'm like little, oh me, okay. So I come back and that is where I started. They decided that I needed to be in charge of the front end of it. And that's where I started this whole idea that at that point in time, I mean that was the point in time where we started using the internet a little bit more. We were sharing beer recipes on forums, whatever
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] really meaningful content back then.
- Indi Young:
- Some of it must have been [laugh], but that was the point at which we were writing software for other engineers. I was writing the front end for an edit, compiled, debug environment. It was basically looking at how a process was done. And not only that, it was a process I did. So it was one of my own processes. That's the beginning. That was the place where I kind of realized that I'm making software for myself or I'm making software for a process. And it wasn't until I moved out of that and into God, it was called Pinpoint. It was the very first, it kind of had a touchscreen, it was the first tablet, it had a pen and the whole thing behind it was handwriting recognition. You could scribble your notes on it and it would turn it into a document that would then go into a database.
- And that was the point at which I was working with doctors, I was working with people trying to set up events, event organizers. I was working with all sorts of people who are even somebody who runs a moving truck company, stop by my office and want, this is going to be really cool for us to be able to use. I want some software around it. And so I was writing various pieces of software for people on that thing. And that's where I realized, holy cow, I'm looking at them and trying to figure out their process. But sometimes there isn't a process like with a moving company, there was a process, but with the doctor, there were hospital processes. But as a doctor, you know what, it was really interesting. There were actually several doctors who were really interested in this that I got to work with.
- So that was kind of the beginning of where I realized, hey, there's this world where we write software to represent processes and we then invested a lot of our time and effort understanding what the edge cases to those processes were so that our software could handle it. When that context came up, because it as an edge case to the process, it's a certain combination of context that would happen and then this other outcome would be needed or something. So we actually were quite proud of spending a lot of time figuring out what the process edge cases were with respect to then doing it for other people. It was like I began to realize I need to understand, I need to spend more time understanding these people. And so there was a project I was doing for Visa, the credit card company where they were wanting to upgrade their call center.
- This was a point in time when if you lost your visas and a lot of people didn't have credit cards at that point in time, they were still using travelers' checks when they were going to other countries. And if you lost your travelers' checks, you lost, you know, can call in and have them canceled but you've lost them. And the bank would try to send some more travelers texts to another bank or I don't know what, same thing started happening with credit cards as they were getting more and more used. And it was just so I needed to understand the call center. I needed to understand how they were working. The management's all like, oh we've got all these old green screens and these keyboards and people are tab, tab tapping between these data fields that are going directly into the database. We should upgrade that.
- And I went in and I spent a couple of days living and working basically in that call center, realized people loved tab, tab tapping. It was fast. The software didn't require your attention. You could then put your attention on, well gosh, I need to get up from my cube and walk to the end of the cube corridor [laugh] where they had atlas in various places all around this giant room. And I can look up the atlas for that city where this caller is calling in who's lost their card and say like, ah, you know what? You're staying there and I know that the bank is over here that's too far for you. Could you maybe get me in touch with the person running the hotel or something? Maybe we can do a courier drop to the hotel or something. Or I would stand up and look across my cubicle wall and go to some of the other reps and Hey, didn't anybody deliver something in Leon just recently?
- Oh yeah it was me. Well where did you, she put it. And so there was this communication going on and there was this sort of having to figure out a puzzle on behalf of the traveler who lost the card. And the traveler was usually quite distraught. And so you did a lot of calming as a rep. I mean I was never a rep, but I am speaking a rep because I spent time inside their heads. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I was just like, I need to understand the whole process and I needed to understand all this humanity side to it. So it was interesting cause I was working in a really big group where we had some business analysts, we had some data base people and we had some software engineers and we had me to do the front end and I came back from that trip and I actually made a state machine of what the reps were doing in the call center and a state machine is not supposed to represent people, but I didn't have any other tools.
- So I tried to it, it is a way to run the process by going through a series of steps that's basically all state machine is. And so what I did was I ran the process and all the edge cases to the process and the humans talking to each other through the process and tried to capture it all in that description, in all those steps, in the ways that those steps worked. As I was doing that, I was also sort of mapping out what it was a relational early relational database and how that had to come together. And so in the end I gave a presentation about all of this and people are coming up to me like, oh my god, you solved all the database stuff. We don't have anything to do except to implement it. Oh, I'm like, oh, I mean maybe they had to do some backend stuff and the software architects are all like, oh, we know what to do now. This is exactly what we, oh my god, you solved it all. Somebody came to me after that project a few years after that project, but I like we couldn't have done it if you hadn't done that, we truly couldn't have done it. That was kind of just a step in the whole trajectory. It's the awakening of Indi.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you sort of realized the power of that curiosity and actually spending time with the people that were responsible for the process. And I know that people are really important to you. They're certainly important to themselves and to design and the products and experiences we put out there. And I recently watched a talk that you gave called People Purpose patterns and Problem Space. And that was a really challenging talk and a positive sense for me. It certainly made me think a lot. And you took us back to the dawn of software and you've touched on it just in your previous story about how we shape software experiences to try and make software to represent a process or make a process more efficient to do something that humans were already doing and that there are a lot of gray areas in that you touched on there with that call center that exist outside of the software. But what is it that's led us to an industry? So a software engineering or development design industry that's so obsessed with solutions?
- Indi Young:
- Oh, I don't think it's just us that's obsessed with solutions. Humans, we grew up in a culture, I would say most of western culture is about solving things. When we were a little told to have the right answer for the teacher to do your homework, when we got to university and started writing thesises and things like that were, we're trying to prove that we had something that we had learned something, we got our first job, we wanted to contribute to the team, we wanted to prove our worth. And the way we do that is to have answers or ideas and both answers or solutions and ideas, they both fall into the solution space. You're in both of these cases, you're solving things. So it's not just software, it's business, it's architecture, it's working in the cafeteria, it's cooking, it cooking's starting to shade more into the art and the art side is slightly different cuz you're not necessarily solving a problem there that's different.
- You're expressing a concept. And so there's cooking and even news writing news and stuff is slightly is shading into art. So with respect to the solutions though, I think that we're very much primed throughout our lives to step off a mark, to leap into the air with the first direction being, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's another idea. All of these ideas are solutions. We forget that we are making those ideas based on assumed understanding of other people. Things that we've read, things that people have told us, we haven't been those people. And some of the time that's fine, some of the time the risk is really low and we don't need to go be those people or build empathy with them. We can work based on the existing understanding that's already out there of these people. But I think that's a really important question.
- One of the things that product owners push back on, they're like, oh, researchers just always wanna research. I'm like, well good research [laugh]. Good researchers don't just always wanna research. They would much rather sit down and read a nice book. But the question about how much risk is involved in not knowing, in using existing knowledge in not exploring those assumptions, ask that question. If we don't ask that question, then yeah, I see a lot of teams leaping into research that isn't really necessary or worse. I see teams leaping into research based on a tool, not based on the knowledge needed. They're like, oh, this worked really well last time, let's do it again. And that that's like first you've gotta figure out what your goal is. Second, you've gotta figure out what knowledge is going to support that org's goal and does that knowledge already exist? Do we have to go make new knowledge? Okay, what's the risk? Maybe it's high. So yeah, we'll go make new knowledge. A lot of if statements in the branching tree there. Okay, so now we're going to go make knowledge to make this knowledge, which tool should we use?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That sounds like a lot of hard work for people to do. And you mentioned the sort of modern education complex, at least in the west that we have that inherently gives us a fear of being wrong. And again, I'm sort of making some assumptions here or reflecting on my own behavior makes people reach for the first thing that feels comfortable to them. So that could be a tool or a process that they've used before. You are asking people to take a breath and to think critically about what the next step should be. And a lot of your work revolves around the problem space, which again is more uncomfortable for people than the solution space. What are the ways or the techniques that you have used or the beliefs or practices that you'd encourage to help people become more comfortable suspending their need to be right or be seen to be right, to really get in under the hood and explore some of these challenges that their organizations are facing?
- Indi Young:
- I think the first answer is to have a yes and mindset. What we're doing with the solutions and all of the ways that we come up with solutions have matured a lot. They're not completely mature but they've matured a lot over the last three decades. It's not wrong to do them, it's a yes. And let's think critically about it. Before we go leaping off over there, whether it's to make a solution or whether it's to get, create some research, some knowledge, let's create some knowledge with research tools before we go leaping off, just ask ourselves some questions about it. Is this the right thing to do now? Exactly. Who are we going to look at? Why are we doing it? How does it connect to the orgs goal? It has to connect to an org school. If it doesn't connect to the orgs goal, there's no reason to do it.
- And I think that's a lot of the problem that practitioners face is if our product owners and their stakeholders are all just do it, just quick go. We need this answer and so we're left, but we see this greater, greater understanding that's possible and they're like understanding we don't need it. Just go. One of the things that I try to do with the problem space is it's just a little bit more balance into that what you're calling just a pause, a a little bit more understanding of what is the risk. Let's try to ask ourselves that. What's the risk of not knowing? And I think ahead of that is that most people have gotten into software design or digital design or web design or even service design. They have gotten there from other careers and they have not been taught to like, okay, there's a business goal. What do we need to know? What are our blind spots? What are our assumptions? Where are we harming people?
- So there's two things that fall out of that. So the first answer is yes, and it's just a little bit more balance. It's just a little bit more, a little bit more. You don't do this all the time. The other part of it is that you're going to narrow it down going to basically, if you've ever seen a perspective drawing as somebody was drawing it and they grid things out and they have these lines to converge and stuff. What we're trying to do is grid things out and go like, let's focus here. Let's not focus there yet. Let's focus here so that we can do what is possible with the resources we have and have a really good outcome that will help us sustainably get to that next square. So many people just like, oh, I wanna know it all and you have to give me the answer to everything in three weeks.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there's, there's always the pressing deadline. And you touched on their designers coming from varied backgrounds and not necessarily having the business sort of context to look at organizational goals and understand what's driving those pressures on other stakeholders within the business management. And also shareholders, if it's a for-profit enterprise often are really comfortable with numbers, hard data, things that they consider facts, but they're far less comfortable with qualitative data. Things that they consider to be thoughts and feelings and not necessarily as reliable as the numbers. Is it really enough for us to expect that business stakeholders are going to take qualitative data seriously enough to feel comfortable making big decisions that have far-reaching consequences?
- Indi Young:
- So don't talk about it as qualitative data.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] sneaky trick,
- Indi Young:
- Right? There's two things. One is to build relationships. So many of us are very introverted and building relationships, especially with those stakeholders who give us stupid deadlines, does not feel comfortable. However, that is the direction that is most reliable for developing a trust relationship. We're not here to develop qualitative data. We are here to help those stakeholders achieve the goals or at least tear the blindfolds off their eyes to see the goals better, to define the goals better. We need to define those goals better because we're doing a lot of harm. And harm is the second part, relationships and harm. And I think if we can start to uncover the stories of harm within completely areas where the stakeholders would be like, well, how we're not harming anybody. We're not an insurance company that's charging people based on their zip code or postal code. And it turns out that we don't charge people in expensive postal codes that much.
- We're doing, I don't know, helpdesk software. What could go wrong with that? So you bring the stories of harm, you bring the story of the female voice helpdesk person who literally a quarter of the time has the people interacting with her doubt what she says, Nope, the internet must be down. She's like, Nope, it's up. Nope, you're wrong. So it's these little stories of harm that I think if we can bring them up as we are developing year over year trust relationships with those very stakeholders that we don't want to, there is a way to develop trust relationships with them. And that is through listening sessions to try to understand, okay, first of all, are we speaking at surface to one another? Are we giving each other commands or opinions or explanations that's all at surface or are we getting to depth? Well, what actually went through your mind there and where did that come from?
- You just told me, Hey, at my last job we did jobs to be done and it worked great. So we're going to do it here. You just told me a command at surface to use the tool without regard of what knowledge we need. So I'm going to say, well, let's go back to that other job and I'm going to try to uncover why it worked well and why it was chosen and illuminate for that person, what kind of knowledge it was that was needed and illuminate for that person. Whether that knowledge that's needed now for us in this org is the same kind of knowledge help. Just to help
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You said that that technique is listening deeply and that sounds easy to do, right? That sounds, I'm just going to listen to you. We all know how to listen, we, but I suspect that there's a little bit more to it than those two words suggest. What does it really mean to listen deeply and how do we do that to understand someone's inner thinking in such a way that we learn something that can be useful for a business decision?
- Indi Young:
- Well, in the context of a podcast, I cannot tell you the entire answer.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We haven't got time people.
- Indi Young:
- We have a book coming out and I have a course that's available right now online. But you're right, I alluded to the most important part, which is recognizing whether you're speaking at surface or depth. The reason why that's important is that what we're trying to do is understand what went through somebody's head. If we had a telepathy server and we could record everything that went through their mind as they were trying to accomplish their purpose, we wouldn't have to talk to them. We wouldn't have to do a listening session. I don't know anybody who has a telepathy server yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm sure Elon Musk's working on one
- Indi Young:
- Nor anybody who would want to sign away their privacy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, we do that every day,
- Indi Young:
- But not on our mind. True. Thank God any the last frontier. So I mentioned something right in there that's also very important, which is the word purpose. When we go to understand somebody business especially, they'll be like, people are really complex and complicated and they change their minds. And that's part of the reason I don't trust qualitative data. And one of the problems is I think a lot of people still come outta university thinking that quantitative data is one end of the spectrum and qualitative data is the other end. And they're like, this is trustable. And whereas their completely different spectrums and they both have an empirical trustable end and they both have a sort of wishy-washy end, which is more anecdotal. So the idea with qualitative data is that we're looking for patterns. We're not looking for anecdotes, we're not looking for the one-off stories.
- The one-off stories are how we may communicate some of the patterns that we find, but that's not what we're looking for. We're looking for patterns. What kind of patterns are we looking for? We have to look for patterns in a way that give us the chance for patterns to form. We have to look at them framed by some sort of context and framed by whether they're speaking at surface or depth. So what I do is I frame by the context of purpose and I look for people speaking at depth. The three things at depth are people's inner thinking, emotional reactions and guiding principles. And the inner thinking, oh my god, it's that little voice inside your head. It's the one that's going, I don't know about this, or God, how can I work around this? Or I really wanna do that, but is just maybe right not now. And the motivations and all of the stuff that's going through your head as you're trying to address a purpose. That purpose might be something that you get done in an hour. It might be a purpose that you do over the course of a year or over the course of your lifetime.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And for the purposes of people listening, what is it that you define a purpose to be? What is a purpose in this context?
- Indi Young:
- Yeah, so it is the one thing that I have the most fun teaching. I teach a course on framing your study and it's a four week course. And in week three, people are suddenly holding the side of their heads going all along. I've been looking at this through the lens of the solution, [laugh] still, now I see it. So the purpose is not easy to see because we've all been trained to look at solutions. So a person's purpose could be, let's say I was doing a study for an airline and we did a whole bunch of different studies. One, I mean the airline's all like, oh, let's just understand passengers. I'm like, you can't do it that way. Let's understand what goes through a person's mind when they decide to take a trip. That's a purpose. Let's go through someone's mind when they decide. And taking a trip could be by train, it doesn't have to be by plane, could be by car, right?
- May we need to further ratchet it down to a certain context, like a trip to meet with somebody or a trip to a attend an event that happens at a certain time like a wedding or a trip to a last minute trip that you didn't plan on. So there's a whole bunch of different contexts. So we did a bunch of studies where we were looking at deciding to go on a trip in different contexts and finding patterns in there. The purpose could though be much larger. There was this one where we wanted, the business goal was to help people build self-confidence. Sure, there's a lot of literature out there about how you build self-confidence, but they had a very specific group they were interested in. So within that specific group, we wanted to understand how people had built confidence. A purpose is not something that you want, it is something that you did.
- Okay. So I was just talking to Per Abom and the UX podcast last week or the week before, and he's all like, okay, so when I'm coaching people, half the time they get partway through the coaching, they're like, that's not what I actually wanted to do. After all, it's really this, that's where I should be headed. And I'm like, that's not a purpose in terms of something that you, did I study what went through someone's mind that is in the past tense on purpose cuz we don't have telepathy servers, nor do we have any way to predict what our thinking's going to be in the future.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like a purpose is the pursuit of an outcome.
- Indi Young:
- Sure. You can call it by, that's the other part of the yes. And [laugh], use whatever words you want sometimes. Sometimes your purpose could be a goal where you maybe paint stars around it and put a date on it or something. Sometimes it's not right. R raising good kids, that's a purpose. That's a very broad purpose. So we would want to narrow it down in various ways. The purpose of gaining self-confidence. We actually talked to people who had gone through a personal identity change and that took a lot of self-confidence. So we learned what the pieces of it were that way. So we are finding the patterns that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about not referring to qualitative research to business stakeholders as qualitative research and thinking about the work that you are doing and trying to understand people's purposes and their thinking styles and what they're trying to achieve. So you can see patterns makes a lot of sense how once you've conducted your research and you've done your deep listening and you feel like you've gathered that information, that data, how do you actually show and tell that story back to the business in a way that compels them to act differently?
- Indi Young:
- So I'm not a believer in just going to tell stories. Business loves a good graph.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, it
- Indi Young:
- Does. So yes it does. [laugh], you make any graph you want, they all will love it. So I make a couple of graphs. One of these graphs is called the opportunity map. And it is different than a journey map. A journey map is the interaction of a person with your solution. Oftentimes journey maps fail to specify a purpose. So it's really vague. And they also fail to specify a thinking style, or another word for it is a persona a philosophical approach to this purpose. And so journey maps are completely 100% in the solution space. They're only looking through the little aperture of the solution. And in those two ways that I just said, they don't state a purpose and they don't state which persona or which thinking style you're after. So an opportunity map turns things on the head. I don't care what the solution is, I care what the person is thinking as they're trying to accomplish their purpose.
- So it's all the thinking that a person has done and decisions that they've made and the philosophies that they've applied and the emotions that they've encountered. And all of that turns out to be a graph that looks like a city skyline and layered on top of that graph are, it is like a bunch of skyscrapers, towers, all, they have a bunch of windows in there. Those windows actually have little summaries of each thing. That person was sinking or feeling or deciding grouped based on focus of mental attention. So there's our patterns. It's also layered over with which thinking style is apparent in each window. So it looks like a bunch of apartment windows and a little person inside each apartment window or a couple people inside of an apartment window. And then beneath these towers are all the things that our org and maybe our competition does in support of these towers. So I'm flipping it. Instead of us saying, well, here's our whole journey that we did. No, there's the person's journey accomplishing their purpose. Which parts of it are we supporting? And that's where you get to do your gap analysis. That's where you get to go like, oh my gosh, we thought we were supporting this area and we're only doing a weak job of it. [laugh] or worse.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you can see it, right? You can see that.
- Indi Young:
- You can see it, you can see it on top of this. Now what I do is I'm, what I'm trying to do is give product owners a way of looking over the past 5, 10, 20 years how much better we're getting. So for each one of these towers, I've got a graph so that the tower itself disappears and you've got just the towers that this particular product owner is interested in, not the whole thing just there, what they're working on. The towers fade out and you still have that vertical, but when you get above the line, you're actually supporting somebody. The higher above the line, the stronger. And when you're below the line, you're actually harming them close to the line. It's mild harm, farther away from the line. It's systemic harm. And I have an example where it's an agency, a government agency that's trying to support employers who are trying to hire people with disabilities. And there's a law in the US about hiring people with disabilities. So it's connected to the government and there's systemic harm in there. There is systemic harm in there. And if I can then show them that part, that little block of the city that product owner is interested in, fade that out and show them where the harms are and who's being harmed in what area. They can suddenly suck in their breath and go like, oh, well that's important. Or they can go, that's actually not important to us right now, but this is
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And is this, when you start to shift into, well, what do we do about that? We start to shift into solutions. You've sort of narrowed the focus for that person and put forward that platform for the solutions to be generated.
- Indi Young:
- Yes, exactly that. What I do with the thinking styles is also create discrimination lenses at lenses, sorry. And also physiology lenses. So that we're asking, we actually include that in our research, or at least in the framing of our research so that we're showing more clearly what the harms are. Most organizations out there only think of harms in terms of mild frustrations. They don't think of harms in terms of, oh, say productivity lost. I had a really good example of this about 45 minutes ago.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, we did. We had some technical difficulties. We indeed getting on the podcast
- Indi Young:
- We did. And so that harm, poof, it's just a little puff cloud that nobody in that organization pays attention to. It's not even on their map. Whereas in my opportunity map, it shows, it's like, okay, yeah, we're not ready to handle that particular context yet, but it's there and it's going to haunt us until we figure it out. And yeah, we're going to figure it out in two years, but we'll get there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I hope they figure it out sooner. So just to give some context to people that are watching or listening to this episode, it took us 30 minutes to resolve those technical difficulties, which is actually robbed you, the listener of 30 minutes of Indi, telling you about her practices and her thinking. So that has harmed us in some way because we may never know where else we may have gone.
- Indi Young:
- And do you want to know the vendor that did the harm
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Called? I'm sure everybody does. They're called Riverside.
- Indi Young:
- They're called, no, they're not called Riverside.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, okay.
- Indi Young:
- They're called McAfee now. Secondarily they're called Riverside, but McAfee is that security system or whatever. So Riverside starts off going, we don't support any browsers except Chrome. I'm all like, okay, I'm going to go unearth my old laptop, which has Chrome on it. That old laptop wakes up and its old McAfee system goes, oh, you have to resubscribe and I'm going to take over your whole computer.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm going to extort you and your credit card and then I'll let you go when you pay me.
- Indi Young:
- Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. It wasn't helpful. Oh my God. So when we think about harm and the harm that our work can cause, that can mean many different things. And there are various levels as we've just talked about with our technical difficulties that we've had. When we think about the things that have been in the media recently around big tech and the path that we may be on as it relates to big data algorithms and how they use to make decisions, what does that destination look like to you? Where are we heading?
- Indi Young:
- I could be a doom and gloom person, or I could be a cheerleader if we actually are alive in another 10 years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh dear
- Indi Young:
- [laugh]. Right? Okay. So we won't go that way,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Honestly. We can go where you want to go.
- Indi Young:
- Seriously, we're in this situation where I just saw the other day, what was it? Was it YouTube? Yeah, it was YouTube. Finally. Okay, this is around the Coronavirus. They're finally in October of 2021 saying, oh, you know what? We're going to ban the production of misinformation in these videos and we're going to ban a couple of these big antivirus proponents on YouTube. And I'm like, I'm going to try to say this without swearing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, we can just put an explicit warning on the episode.
- Indi Young:
- It's like, where you guys, 18 months ago, you knew this was wrong. You knew that people were spreading misinformation. I mean, maybe the vaccine thing didn't come along 18 months ago, but people were spreading misinformation. Now people are spreading in misinformation about the vaccine. It's going to make you infertile or whatever. And I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Know there's some crazy theories. Yes,
- Indi Young:
- And I know my best friend's sister believes this, and she's even past childbearing age. Right? Okay, so where were they?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is big tech back in? Is big tech morally bankrupt?
- Indi Young:
- Big tech has no brain part. It doesn't have the synapses for morality. Ah, I'm saying that because there was, okay big tech is not to say software engineers. Software engineers tend to be people who really, truly want to make a solution, fix things, and they think of themselves as [laugh] the hero, I was going to say as the swashbuckler and the princess bride. But that may be putting too fine a point on it. [laugh] also there, there's purist like that. What that pride that we had in figuring out what the process edge cases were there's this purest bent to a software engineer. It's like, I gotta figure it out. And there's got, there's like all these ways. I wanna understand what all the branches of the tree are and explore them. That's not big tech. Big tech is powerful people with a lot of money. They saw the potential to make even more money out of that, and they took the reins.
- Software engineers couldn't do anything about it because they weren't the ones with all the money. Now, sure, there are still a lot of software engineers who believe in meritocracy. I believed it when I was young. I was like, oh yeah, if you are able to produce and come up with solutions, then you know, have merit. But not everybody is given the same starting point. Not everybody is given the same resources. So not everybody can be measured by that same meritocracy, kind of a yardstick. It doesn't work that way. And then how are you going to measure art? So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Should you measure art
- Indi Young:
- [laugh], right? It is very narrow aperture view of what a true community and society is which is a much bigger thing. Big tech meaning big money who came in because they are running based on free market economy because they are believe of themselves that they are required by their state, their shareholders, to just keep making money year over year. Which belief, I think you can question but they're not going to question it. That's just their mode. They're like a virus themselves. Eating, eating, growing bigger, making different variants of themselves. They don't behave or have a mindset to behave in a holistic or an ecology kind of a system. It, it's very similar and could have roots in colonialism, but it doesn't pay attention to history. It doesn't pay attention to harm. It doesn't pay attention to anything except the, I would say the money. Right? That's putting it saying it too.
- It is very much the end goals for each year over year and how much they're making. So you find companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, all of these places that measure their success by having more people see more content. Not quite sure, I would wanna even call it content like beer recipes. That's better content than half the stuff that's on Facebook. But what happens is that people learn what the algorithms are and game the algorithms to put their misinformation out there. That's what humans do. We love puzzles. We undo the puzzles and we've won, and then we can do what we want with the new keys that we have to the puzzle.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about puzzles then. Mm-hmm. A lot of your work centers around understanding the problem space, and we've just been talking about the moral bankruptcy of big tech, which in essence is big business run amuck. Are you at all worried that giving organizations a greater understanding of people's problem space may be exploited in a way that leads to even greater harm?
- Indi Young:
- That's a really good question that you came up with there, Brendan. I believe that the way that I've built it is all built toward the word support. There's no reason to use what I've built. If you're not interested in supporting people this is very much not behavioral science or behavioral, whatever they wanna call it. They're all like, oh, well, it has the dark patterns and the bright patterns so it can be used for good and evil. I might be putting my foot in my mouth by saying, I don't think you would ever reach for the opportunity map if you were aiming for evil. Maybe you could, but let's take an example maybe with the airline, let's say with respect to the airline, the passengers, they were interested in there. There's also at that same airline, now they're looking at the employees as well. How do we support our employees better? How do we support the passengers better? The reason that question came up was because of these really odd behaviors that come up out of loyalty programs. People who were just making, they had enough money that they would make flights and sit on the plane and bounce around the nation. They didn't care where they were going into their
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Work. No way. Work way. You're kidding me.
- Indi Young:
- Wow. I am not,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I love it.
- Indi Young:
- I don't,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, well, apart from the carbon cost. Yeah,
- Indi Young:
- Exactly. I hate the carbon footprint, I hate all of that. And I think the airline was starting to realize that their resources were being used improperly as well. They're very, very thin margins. They're very dependent on the cost of fuel. They're very dependent on weather. And we're like, Hey, how can we take our understanding of weather based on not forecast, but past and make different predictions to say to a passenger, oh, you know what? You probably don't wanna connect in the Chicago airport if you could instead connect in, I don't know, Denver or something that particular time of year. So there's routing and stuff, decisions that we could possibly do to help a person not get stuck in an airport to help that person, not rail against that airline. Also, to help these loyalty programs. People are gaming them. What we do, we game things. And so they're gaming them so that they can always get first class just by constantly being on planes and doing their work on planes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And sometimes things game us.
- Indi Young:
- Right? Exactly. I think that's what came back and hit them in the face. And I think that if I were using that example to ask, can it be used for evil? Can it be used to say, how do we cram more people into a plane? You wouldn't use that tool to figure out how to cram more people into a plane. How do we delay people more? You wouldn't use that tool to figure out how to delay people. In fact, they don't want to delay people. I mean, it's not a thing that they often have control over, but with the knowledge we've got, I think we can have more control than we do. I was going to say the idea of having a particular flight at a particular time between particular airports, the airline is forcing us as passengers to understand their business model. But if they're instead understanding the passenger's business model, there's a lot more leeway. A passenger may not care if their flight's going to leave at 10:00 AM or 11:30 AM They just need to know in enough advance to get to the airport on time. Mm-hmm. Right. And so you can do some movement with schedules with routing based on more up-to-date data,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking about routing edge schedules and not delaying people. I am conscious that you've been very generous with your time today. Andy and I really need to bring the show down to a close to respect that time. The vast majority of people working in product or service design and technology more generally, really feel like they're actually working on things that make a meaningful difference in other people's lives that make their lives feel better or be better. You have even gone so far to, you've even gone so far to say that people feel trapped in endless cycles of releases. How can they escape those traps? What's your message for those designers?
- Indi Young:
- That is the same message that I said before, which is develop those trust relationships. If it is impossible, if you are in a situation, and I've heard people say these situations are toxic, then understand what your options are. You may need a different job, or maybe you have other options to talk with other stakeholders who may be able to talk with the toxic St stakeholder. Or maybe you yourself can talk with them, find out where it comes from. Where does that toxicity come from? I'm not asking you to be a therapist, but [laugh] asking you to be a little bit more accommodating of the humanity of other people. When we get into a business situation, it's like we all pretend to be robots, like we're going to be robots and let the Amazon robot algorithm make us do our thing and have no emotions and no relationship to one another. And I don't think we have to be that. Every business, every team is a community, and if we don't do the work it takes to form the connections of that community, then going to just like the arc of the community will bend toward toxicity if we don't work on
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It. That's a really important challenge or a thing for people to think about is bringing more humanity to those situations and using our powers as designers to enable that to happen. Do some deep listening people.
- Indi Young:
- And indeed, and I've seen it myself, right? It's not easy, but I am not in a situation as a consultant. Mm-hmm. Where I can have month over month, year over year conversations with the same person. But listening and finding out where things came come from and understanding deeper what their inner thinking is, pin that back in time. One of the things that I love to do is talk about people as Chinese dragons and the face of a Chinese dragon. That's the big interesting part. And in a Chinese New Year's parade that if you get to be the dragon's head, you're a chosen one. Because that's the big interesting part. And it's got the really long serpentine body behind it. When we are interacting with people in work, in our communities, what we're talking about in the now is just with the face of the dragon. And if we don't ask about the rest of its body, we're not giving it. It's humanity, right? It's dragon this,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We're just bumping up our bumping our bubbles together, I think is another analogy that you've used. Yeah. We're not really getting into the real reasons why, Andy, what a wonderful and truly deep conversation. It's certainly pulled my mind in very different directions which has been really great way actually to start my morning here. On behalf of people listening to the episode, thank you for so bravely encouraging us to think bigger and more broadly about the roles that we play as designers in the world.
- Indi Young:
- Yeah, my pleasure. I think that we can, the cheerleader part of me, I think if we can build these communities from the bottom up, we can really influence the way that our organizations think about the people we're trying to support.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hugely important. Andy, I also wanted to say thank you for your massive contribution to the field of UX and design and technology over the past 30 years.
- Indi Young:
- Yay. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thanks for going back to your very first job with me in the Hughes Corporation. Much, much appreciated. Andy, if people wanna find out more about you, and I know you've got a new book coming out that I mentioned in your intro, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Indi Young:
- My website has a bunch of stuff. It's always the sort of a little bit behind where my talks are, and so I've got a bunch of talks and podcast links up on the website. You can look at those. I used to write a lot of essays on Medium under inclusive software design. That's also linked there. And you can follow me on LinkedIn and on Twitter via Indi Young.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks, Indi. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, including where you can find Indi and all of her wonderful books and talks and previous podcast episodes, 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 and subscribe to the podcast. And also, if you feel like the podcast might be useful for someone else that's a designer or a technologist in your sphere, then pass the link along and share it with them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just type Brandon Jarvis. Or you can find a link to my profile on the show notes on YouTube as well. Or you can visit the space in between, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.