Ruth Brown

Episode 48
Brave UX

Seeing Our Blindspots, Bad Habits and Bullshit

In this episode of Brave UX, Ruth Brown dives deep into group polarisation, challenging us to get out of our echo chambers and to practice the empathy that we preach.

Highlights include:

Do we still need insiders to call out uninclusive behaviour?
How does our need to be perfect reinforce unhelpful binary perspectives?
How do designers suffer from group polarisation?
Why do companies find it difficult to be truly human-centred?
Is it the job of designers to make the world a better place?

November 9, 202101:04:49

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Who is Ruth Brown?

Ruth is currently a Senior Design Strategist at ANZ, Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest bank. The bank is so large that it employs a fifth of all people who work in finance and holds roughly a third of the country’s home loans on its books.

Before joining ANZ, Ruth was the General Manager of Design Research at Xero, makers of beautiful online accounting software, and arguably New Zealand’s most successful product company, with nearly 3 million subscribers and revenues of over $600M US.

Ruth also invested 8 years at Trade Me, New Zealand’s equivalent of eBay, where she was the Head of User Experience, and later the Head of People Research.

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 Ruth Brown. Ruth is currently a Senior Design Strategist at ANZ, Aotearoa New Zealand's largest bank. The bank is so large that it employs a fifth of all people who work in finance and holds roughly a third of the country's home loans on its books. Before joining ANZ, Ruth was General Manager of Design Research at Xero makers of beautiful online accounting software and arguably New Zealand's most successful product company with nearly 3 million subscribers and revenues of over 600 million us.
But it was the eight years that Ruth invested at TradeMe, New Zealand's equivalent of eBay. Where I first heard about her and her great work at TradeMe Ruth was the Head of User Experience and later the Head of People Research where she led a talented team of UX professionals that helped the business to better understand and serve the millions of Kiwis that use its platform regularly. An accomplished and humble design leader and someone who has been a great and generous contributor to the New Zealand design community. It's my great pleasure to have Ruth here with me on Brave UX today. Ruth, nau mai, haere mai, welcome to the show.
Ruth Brown:
Thank you, Brendan. Kia ora.
Brendan Jarvis:
Ruth, I have done a bit of research, as I may have shared with you before we hit record and in my research. Yes, it is something that I like to do. Funny that I discovered that when you were a child, your great-grandfather, a man by the name of George Mo Head, used to send you a check from England for three pounds every Christmas. And in New Zealand back in the day when you were a child, that would've been a small fortune. What did you use to buy with the money that your great grandfather sent you?
Ruth Brown:
I used to buy maths books. Maths exercise books. So my cousins and my brother and sister would be buying kind of transformers or horses for Barbies or whatever it might be. And yeah, I used to get those kind of maths workbooks, which I think probably quite new at that point and work my way through them, which was kind of a step up from when I was littler than that. I used to get my mum to kind of write me lists of pluses and minuses that I'd sort of do myself. So I got the printed version, which was a lot flasher.
Brendan Jarvis:
Look, I hope you don't mind me saying, but that is both completely adorable and totally respectable. But it seems to me to be something that is somewhat unusual for a child to spend their money on, their heart, their [laugh], their hard-earned money. Well, in this case, the gift that your great-grandfather gave you. What do you put that down to inside yourself that you felt compelled to spend it on maths books?
Ruth Brown:
I think I just lived in a very sort of, as a child and then even right through to uni, I just lived in a very kind of scientific and mathematical world. And I know that sound kind of sounds weird, but that discovery and that kind of getting the right answer, which is ironic because now I've spent most of my career getting there being no right answer. But yeah, kind of just that thought process. And my son is very similar and I kind of see it in my son. We were at Christmas a couple of years ago up in Maia and my son kind of grabbed the cereal box and turned it inside out to have the back of it and he was like, I've just thought of something that I've kind of gotta work my way through. And his aunties and uncles were just like, oh my gosh, this is very strange. But yeah, I think just the, that thinking through process and then getting to an answer at the end was, was so satisfying for me.
Brendan Jarvis:
So your son's obviously been able to see you exhibit that behavior and may have picked that up from you. Was this also something that ran in the family as far as your parents were concerned or the people that you were close to growing up?
Ruth Brown:
My dad was terrible at maths and my mom was very good at maths, but probably many women in her sort of generation was ducks of maths at school and then went on to do a teaching degree and then had her babies during that. And so then actually focused most of her energy on raising us as kids, which is I'm extremely thankful for. But also probably meant that I didn't see what she could do in those other realms
Brendan Jarvis:
And that wouldn't have been something that was too dissimilar back in New Zealand during those times. It would've been, I suppose, a decision that many women would've made. Well, I was just going to say, so thinking about the generational shift in your generation coming into the workforce and you think you studied engineering while you were at university, was there a change in New Zealand where it was more for women to participate fully in their careers?
Ruth Brown:
Oh, great question. I remember the most common response I got when I said I was doing engineering was, apart from one of my friends, was like, why would you wanna drive trains? Was like, oh, well they do say that girls can do anything. So it was very much sort of assumed that, yeah, it, it felt like an exception rather than just, it was worth commenting on that it was a girl doing engineering and I think when I did engineering there was either 13% of people or of graduates were women. So yeah, it was a small time. I don't think there's a shift because I think that I probably spent the first decade or so of my career not even thinking about gender. And then I went into a workplace that was relatively sexist, unintentionally, but was sexist and that kind of had to get dealt with in the moment, which was kind of, oh, okay. I'll sort of say it was at TradeMe and kind of when we first went into TradeMe it was a bit kind of boys clubby it was and good people wanting to do the right thing. But that's the problem with unconscious bias is it's unconscious. And there was
Brendan Jarvis:
What were some of the tells? Yeah, what did you notice? Because it obviously, it sounded like it was quite a stark sort of realization when you started there.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, and it's kind of interesting because you start to doubt yourself and you start to think that if you're used to just, just solving like, okay, well what can I do differently in this situation? And so yeah, that's a really good question. You just felt it. You felt like who was on the in and who was on the out. And then there was a survey that went round every year and every year there would be feedback saying that the culture was sexist and it kind of got ignored until Trent, who you will know from optimal use started at TradeMe and we were at our end of year all company where people do presentations, lots of two hours of 15 minute presentations. And he got up, he was second to talk or something like that, and the agenda was still on the board and he said, has anyone noticed anything wrong with this gender, with this agenda?
And I was like, no, I don't get what you're talking about. And he said, too many dicks on the dance floor. And he said, every person on this list is a male and I know that there are unbelievable amounts of talented females in this talented woman in this organization. And so next all company, I wanna see the talented woman in this organization up here talking. And it was a shift change in the organization where actually it couldn't be, it was actually someone probably on calling it out. And then they did really great stuff. So the leadership at that time actually got shoulder tapped a few people, including myself, to actually just write a letter or just to answer these four questions about what we see and how we see it and what the answers are to that. And I could get quite involved in that and sort of use my research skills to do surveys to understand what was driving that.
And yeah, it was fantastic to see, it was actually really nice to see this kind of deliberate change and it was a bunch of really nice well-meaning people who would hate to think that that was what was happening. But that was the sort of ultimate end result. And then it was kind of interesting going to Xero because I realized how much internalized kind of sexes in my head of, cuz at Xero half the border woman, all of the kind of amazing c c-suite are all women and that powerhouses. And I kind of didn't quite realize how much I'd thought, oh well maybe men do those jobs cause they're actually better at them. So to see these women being amazing at being given all of this responsibility and smashing it was actually, yeah, it made me realize how much I'd internalized some of those messages that I'd got. Yeah, it does. Yeah, I think that kind of representation matters. I saw myself even within the change within myself.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what was that change that you saw?
Ruth Brown:
I think it was just realizing the internalized bias that I howled and once you see that you can't unsee it. And I think that's what happened at in that trade me situation. And so then to move on and have some distance from that but also be able to see that, oh, actually seeing all these really powerful women and powerful situations has changed how I perceive it was like, oh, okay, well that means that before that I obviously had kind of different, it was hitting me differently.
Brendan Jarvis:
Let me put words in your mouth here, but I got the sense that you were underlying what you were saying was that you didn't even, after all that time it trade me and the change that you saw happen there that you still didn't feel like you had permission to occupy that space.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right.
Brendan Jarvis:
You know mentioned Trenton, how he kind of called it out a few years back at TradeMe and that was a catalyst for this sort of change and the realization that while we might have a gender diverse workforce where being very inclusive and not all voices are being heard in particular women's voices in this instance, do you need people like Trent still in organizations to call this out? Or have you observed through your conversations with other people, your peers and your experiences in organizations since that this is now starting to become part of just how we do business and that it's just the right thing to do and it's happening organically? Or do we still need the trends amongst us?
Ruth Brown:
I think we do, but I think we still have a way to go in gender, but I think it's probably other reasons to call it out, sexuality, gender, race. I think that those are the times that those are the kind of places that there's probably a whole lot of microaggressions still happening and still going that need to be called out. So no, I think it's absolutely still needed. And I think part of my journey when I got to trade me and I kind of was like, oh this, this feels really unfair, was actually kind of a journey for myself to check kind of, okay, I may not have this privilege but I have a whole lot of other privileges and what am I doing my version of the Trent kind of call out that I'm doing for other people? Because unfortunately I think that it still does somehow get listened to more and we ask a lot of people's energies in those kind of minority groups to have to call it out to have to be the person who kind of rocks the boat. And so I think the more that it can be other people in an organization who hold that privilege, then that's only gotta be really gotta be better. So yeah, job's still not done.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I get the sense that unfortunately it's going to need to be a work in progress. And what you were saying there, you recognize your privilege and while it might not have been the same as some of the, I'll just say it, I suppose it would be the senior males around you you had more than some other people. And I was talking with Lisa Marie Marquee I think last week on the podcast and she said something that I'd never really thought about and she's a white American woman to my way of looking at her has been very brave around calling out this sort of behavior and driving for better amongst our community. But she said something to me that, like I said, I hadn't thought about, which was that from her position she was relatively safe. Yet we seem to have this expectation that the people that are in comparatively unsafe positions, whether they be a minority gen gender or a minority ethnicity we kind of looked to them to tell us what to do.
And that's something that I actually put posed to Sachi tole on the podcast a couple of few weeks back as well. And I felt quite uncomfortable asking that question and that wasn't a problem for me, but it felt like it wasn't the right question for me to be asking. So I suppose in a roundabout way, what I'm getting to here is a question which is given what you've seen and what you believe, what is the best way for the majority or whoever that may be, but the majority that has most of the privilege to behave, to do what is the best thing, what should they be thinking and doing?
Ruth Brown:
I guess I would point to doing so I feel uncomfortable asking this because there's so many good people in those minorities who are telling people. And so I guess my thing is to shut up and listen for a long, long time, do lots of my own reading. Cuz I think what I've learned is that sort of you can stomp into a ground, but if you haven't done your own kind of internal work, then a woman I follow has a good kind of analogy that if you've got a cup of coffee and you get bumped, coffee is going to spill out. If you have a cup of tea and you get bumped, tea will spill out. So if ever you get bumped, whatever's inside you will spill out a accidentally or not. So yeah, I think it's kind of doing your own work and listening to a whole lot of people.
So I try not to have any reckons if I'm around anyone who is holds that kind of holds sort of those minorities or understands the lived experience of those. And so the only talking I will do is to other, or the only time I will have opinions or reckons is around other white people because yeah, I feel like it is too. And I think the other thing to realize is that and I know for lots of people, this might be seem like an extreme thing to say, but for the worlds I live in, I think it's accepting that I still have racism in me and I will be doing my entire life work to get rid of that racism. And while if I do something that is racist or if something leaks out of me, I could spend my energy trying to convince someone that wasn't a racist thing and I'm actually a really good person, or I could go, shit that happened, how do I make it one, how do I make it right and how do I learn from it so that I kind of change and my husband and my son really struggle when I say that I'm racist and I have racism inside me because they don't like to think that they're racist.
But I think it's, for me it's been the easiest way to keep learning is to go, we've all been swimming in this water, there's no getting away from the water we've been swimming in. And to think that, oh no, I'm actually the person in the world that wouldn't have affected is very wrong, very sort of egotistical.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, it seems to me that part of the challenge is in challenging yourself to realize the water that you've been swimming in. And you gave a talk at UX New Zealand in 2020 called bipartisan UX, UX A call for the middle ground where you addressed the ease of which we become polarized. And it was in the context actually what triggered this talk for you was in the context outside of UX in design and it was I believe a behavior you were seeing exhibited in your brother-in-law and your sister-in-law. What was it that you were seeing in them and the waters that they were swimming in?
Ruth Brown:
And I hope that story came out as in what I wanted to tell in that story, and I hope it did, was not actually the water they were swimming in, but the water that I was swimming in that I didn't realize I was swimming in until I went and swimming in their water, if you know what I mean. So I think they are farmers and they in New Zealand at the moment with the labor government, there's a lot of changes happening in farming and a lot of policy and a lot of that feels unfair. It feels unworkable for farmers and farming can be isolating anyway. And then quite naturally they were on Facebook groups about farmers and those struggles and it was starting to feel overwhelming and feeling like the whole world was against them. And I sort of say in the talk, I'm in groups where we are talking about in is veganism and essential part of intersectional feminism. And so I, I don't understand that experience. So part
Brendan Jarvis:
Of my, well we were just talking about before also you are in groups which are really conscious of the bias that they hold in terms of race and gender and other things and are willing to explore that. But there are many people around the world and in New Zealand that for them their echo chamber is that's so foreign and scary I would imagine for them to even consider that they might have something wrong in the way in which they view the world.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah and I think probably people probably have parts of their world where they're in parts where they're minded and it's probably the difficulty with that group polarization is exposure. If you just don't get that exposure then you continue down those paths of just having it reaffirmed. Well, to be honest, what we know about those algorithms is that you don't just get it reaffirmed, you get it reaffirmed plus kind of fries with that. And let's go deeper into those what you were thinking. So yeah, it's actually probably worse than if in a village you've got a whole lot of people with different opinions and you know, hang out at the pub with people with similar views, but you overhear the kind of conversations that are happening in other parts of the pub where you're kind of interacting with them where the online and the kind of social media analogy is that you actually don't cross paths with those people apart from to parachute into each other's worlds and yell a bit and then parachute back out into get angry into your safe space. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
I understand that you ended up pulling some sentiment data for your brother and sister-in-law to try and make them feel a little bit better about the actual reality or their experience of reality through what was actually going on and how New Zealanders felt about farmers and in particular sheep and beef. And it was five times, five times more. New Zealanders felt more felt positively about them than negatively, but it didn't seem to make a difference to them. Why wasn't data enough in this instance?
Ruth Brown:
I think that as humans we all think that we make rational decisions but we make emotional decisions and then we use rationality to post justify those decisions. So evidence seldom kind of by itself actually actually solves it. So me [laugh] ram quoting some and I'm as I'm very numbers focused, so I'm like what the numbers and so look
Brendan Jarvis:
At these numbers.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, exactly. So a better conversation would've actually been to understand, try and understand them and try and which is what we do all of our life is actually sit down with someone. If you sit down with someone, you don't tell them what's right or wrong about their opinions, you just understand where they're coming from and where they're listening to. So yeah, I think that's why it didn't work was because I did it wrong.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you touched on this earlier that recognize that realization when you recognized that it wasn't working, it was something in yourself, your own bias that you were holding that was kind of driving the frustration that you were feeling about them not getting it. What was that bias that you recognized in yourself?
Ruth Brown:
Well I think I probably have a bias towards us, the climate change and what we have to do in that way. I have a bias towards the government that's in place at the moment. I live in a world where all of those things are, and I probably live in a world I grew up with farmers around me who were wealthy. And that probably also goes into that. I think what's interesting is that actually who's doing more for the climate? Me or my brother-in-law farmer and my sister-in-law and hands down it's my sister-in-law. So there's this other, it's my brother and sister-in-law who are actually planting around their rivers and thinking about all of this stuff because it's their land. They actually really care about that land for their kids and their kids and their kids. And so I think it's also easy for me to have a slightly academic view on it rather than the sort of, okay, what are you actually contributing? What's your boots on the ground actions to these things that you care about?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. There's also this, and you touched on this in your talk as well, this sort of notion of, I think you called it social comparison theory. Social
Ruth Brown:
Comparison theory,
Brendan Jarvis:
Which is this need to be seen to be the perfect. And it seemed to me anyway that sort of leads towards quite binary thinking about and wrong in certain situations like this and farming and the environment.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, and I see myself slipping into this all the time that actually if you are in a group and everyone is trying to outdo themselves with how much they're doing X, whether that's, and any example in any direction, you are always sort of trying to outdo yourself and to actually pull a middle ground almost makes you go, well what are you going to the other side are? And what we know about those algorithms and all of that is that actually that more extreme stuff gets up voted. I think that most recent Facebook whistleblower stuff is kind of fascinating that actually it's when Facebook changed the algorithm to give more family content and less advertising, the measure was in engagement and I think she put it really well that basically it's really, it's way easier to get people angry and engaged than it is happy and engaged. And so the algorithm was totally kind of pushing towards that, towards the anger engagement, which then just makes for a horrible place and not a very enjoyable place to be.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it's certainly good to see people calling that out and hopefully we'll see some change as far as those algorithms go and those algorithms have probably got some responsibility for something else. That group polarization at the moment is really relevant to, and I call it a debate, don't really, personally, this is my own bias, I don't really feel like it should be a debate, but the conversation that's going on around vaccination at the moment with Covid 19, and I know this is happening all over the world, but in New Zealand in particular, it's been quite interesting to observe. It's quite a volatile social situation that I've seen. And there are a lot of people, and you sort of touched on this, Ruth, about people dropping in and yelling at each other and then parachuting out again at the moment, particularly on social platforms. But this is actually a conversation that comes with some really real public health risks. People can literally live or die depending on the choices that we make as a society and as individuals within that society. What can we do? People listening to this podcast to better understand people that are vaccines skeptic or hesitant, what are we able to do without getting into those yelling matches that clearly don't really lead to anyone changing their perspective on anything.
Ruth Brown:
And again, incredible experts in this area. So this is reckons, but I think Ministry of Health did a survey in it ran at the end of August, which was drilling down into how many are hesitant, how many are completely, definitely would never do it, and what some of those reasons are, like what might change people's mind and what those reasons are. So I think, again, I'm talking from a kind of provax point of view here. So if anyone anti-vax is listening to this, it will kind of sound completely biased because it is, but I think it's also identifying who you're talking to. So are they vaccine hesitant and unsure or are they very, very sort of anti-vax? And actually h because I don't think that we should spend very much time on that group because I think all we've gotta do for that group is actually love them because they are feeling pretty average in our society at the moment.
And I think what we can sometimes do is we can group that entire group together and go, anyone who hasn't got the vaccine now is in that group of extremes that kind of jump into Facebook and blow things up. And I just don't think that that is true. I think that this can't be taken in isolation either actually is well-founded historical mistrust in New Zealand and medicine and there is still racism in our medical system. So to go well I totaled off and got my vaccine and because I had the opportunity too. So anyone who isn't now it's kind of their fault I think is not going to be helpful. But I think from what I understand is it safe, the long-term effects, the side effects are the key worries that people have. So I think it's kind of addressing those. But again, I think it's just actually listening and understanding where they are coming from and then supporting them to do that, supporting them to get there.
And I hope that the more people see people around them who have had the vaccine and it's fine. And I've got a good friend who is anti-vaccine, I actually went out for dinner with her and our husband's on Saturday night and I felt really sad for her. She's a very community minded person, she's in that natural health kind of world, she's spent her life kind of volunteering at her kids' schools and doing things like that. She is extremely community minded and her community has said to her, you are in the wrong, you don't care about your community because you have are making this decision. And it's almost like it's so deep to her belief that it would seem weird for her to get, if she ever got the vaccine, that would feel kind of weirder. So yeah, I dunno where I'm going with that, but I think that I've, in that talk about joining the Facebook, the farming Facebook group to understanding what's going on, I haven't joined any Facebook groups, but I do jump out of my world and into those worlds and to understand what actually is what's being talked about.
And I share, well I don't actually share much on Facebook at all, but I quote science that I don't go and do the research of. I don't go back and go, okay, well now actually let me look at this study. So I don't do the deep research when it comes to deciding to get the vaccine. I go, I outsource flying a plane to the pilot, I outsource the decision on whether this is kind of good to me to the people who know what it is. But when you drill into those Facebook worlds, they're getting scientific YouTube clips and they're getting so for them they feel like they're building up evidence that feels like evidence to them. And so yeah, I am.
Brendan Jarvis:
But coming back to what you were saying about the echo chambers that the social algorithms have created and how they effectively wore you off from each other, I get the sense that, and bias has been a key sort of topic in this talk that you gave as well. I get the sense that really they're just collecting evidence and inverted comments that confirms the bias that they already hold around mistrust around the vaccine.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, they do do. And I think that's the hard thing is that those echo chambers, do they do it for everyone? They do it. Mike, my husband's really into kayaking and he's like, if you use Facebook for your non-controversial hobbies, it's great because he loves kayaking and they keep giving him kayaking videos and sometimes they give him the odd surfing video and he's like, yeah, I also like surfing. And so it's actually the perfect algorithm if you like kayaking or you knitting or you know, something like that. It's actually just when it gets to these difficult contentious issues that it gets difficult. And I think, I think the hard thing about vaccines is that it does actually make a huge difference to our society how many people get vaccinated. So yeah, it's not like a okay, well you can exist in this part of the world and it has no, it's limited impact. It does actually. And that misinformation really it's that misinformation getting to those vaccine unsure people rather than that's the real high risk.
Brendan Jarvis:
It has an impact on others
Ruth Brown:
In the ministry of health thing as well the survey, it had a section on have you seen misinformation on Facebook? And what was interesting was that the definite, I'm definitely getting the vaccine and I'm definitely not getting the vaccine. We're like, yeah, I've seen misinformation on Facebook, but the people in the middle were way less likely to say that probably because they don't actually misinformation. There is misinformation as perceived by the person is in the eye of the beholder. So the people who are definitely not getting the vaccine, they would've seen what is considered misinformation. And so yeah, I think it's again on those extremes, you kind of see it, but it's the ones in the middle that can probably still be swayed. And I think that's sort of where we should be focusing.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you obviously tried data with your brother and that didn't work well and then you changed T and you didn't really go into what you did afterwards, which would be interesting to know later. But I really liked what you said here about listening and as a researcher that is one of the key skills that we have as UXs and researchers is listening and developing that skill. And my observation, and again this is my reckon, it's not any sort of widely researched experience or data, but that what doesn't work is data with people that are skeptical. What has worked more effectively in the conversations that I've had is actually just listening and asking questions that aren't serving any other purpose. Then to help that person further explore the beliefs that they hold. Because if people aren't going to trust the data coming from the authorities that they already don't trust, they may be more likely to trust somebody that's their friend or their family member that they already have a degree of trust or love for or respect. And having those one-on-one conversations is really important.
Ruth Brown:
And I think that's sort of why people are pointing people to their family GPS as well. Cause it's sort of like you've trusted me with all of your other medical decisions and advice and so I'm a good person to get advice from in this for one as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, 100%. Now it would be easy to suggest that it's just some of the outcomes from our work, like social networks that lead to group polarization and the sort of dark echo chambers that are tearing unfortunately at some of the fabric of our society at the moment, particularly in western democracies. I don't wanna get too sort of dystopian on things [laugh] here, but we don't have to look too hard to see it show up in our own organizations and design community do we? Mm-hmm.
Ruth Brown:
No,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, you raised us and I thought you were really brave, you raised this publicly and it's not often that you get a design leader raising the mirror on the design community without I suppose some fear of repercussion. And I know that sounds a bit scary, but let's be honest, design Twitter can be a bit of a toxic place from time to time. How do we as designers sometimes get it wrong about what we feel about the people that are outside of design, whether that be inside our own organizations or just people that don't think like us. What are some of the ways in which that shows up?
Ruth Brown:
And I tell a story in that talk about, I was kind of at a sort of offsite with lots of designers and UX people and maybe it needed to be a little bit cathartic, but there was lots of complaining about the product owners and the decision makers and how they were that they didn't care about the users and that they were the researchers and designers were the only peoples that actually cared about the users. And yeah, I say in the talk I sort of called, I said it was hypocritical, which was not a good thing to do because that's actually doing exactly all of these things that I'm trying not to, which is not actually listening. Yeah, I know [laugh] that hoisted by my own batard or whatever. Whatever they're saying is, yeah. But
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I think he quoted a really interesting quote by Peter Levine who I didn't know before, but he seems to be a psychotherapist or some form of therapist. And the quote that you gave, which I think sums up what you're saying here is you can't be curious and defensive at the same time.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, and I think that's in what all of those things we've talked about at TradeMe, they couldn't be defensive about we don't have a sexism problem and be curious about what they might have. I can't be defensive about how no racism in me and be curious about how kind of what I might be doing might be affecting other people. And it was the same with this. So I think that kind of what I said at that time was that actually we might have these end users, but the people who are building the product are actually our users as well. And if we are asking the sort of product people or decision makers to really care about their users but we are not caring about those people, then that was where the hypocritical bit dropped out. But yeah, and I think that in any group it's really easy to other another group and say that they don't understand.
But I think that if you first go, okay, well what am I doing and what am I bringing to this and seek to understand, then you're going to get a hell of a lot further along than actually just continuing to ram down what you are thinking or your own perspective. So one of the things that we did at Xero was actually we all went and interviewed a product manager and actually asked them a whole lot of questions about what their life was like and it was so enlightening and so helpful to actually understand what the world looked like from their point of view and that they actually really did wanna be user-centered and that they often were having to make really big decisions without full information, which is a BLM and hard thing to have to do. So if our report is going to be another two weeks later and then we say, oh, they ignored our report, it's probably because they had to make a decision in that kind of sprint that actually they kind of needed that information straight away. So yeah, I think it was just, I think what we ask of other people to be empathetic about their users, we have to do for ourselves as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
We have to embody it and not just in one direction. And that was the research that Catherine Harper ran at Xero, right? She led that. I mean, I don't know if you're involved in any of the direct conversations with the POS or the PMs, but what sort of feedback did you get back from them afterwards, after you'd actually run these sessions with them and sat down and talked to them?
Ruth Brown:
So just to say it, we ran researchers a little bit is sort of overstating it. So we did something called, well it was called lockdown learning, which was once a fortnight. We did an hour and a half together on a different topic and it was led internally and so all sorts of things we did stakeholder management or journey maps or fast analysis or whatever those things are that so you know, can get through quite a few if you're doing it once a fortnight. So it was just one of those. So we actually just went and asked, we interviewed every product manager or no, we all interviewed a product manager. And so that was also cool because it was, some of them were people who we had really good relationships with. Some of them were people who we didn't have any relationship with. And so I think it's probably, I didn't actually explore that afterwards, but I think I imagine that if you have that type of conversation, it became a bit of a template that we actually used for other stakeholder conversations because it did actually make those stakeholders initially feel really listened to and we could constantly go back to it.
I think Toby, who you, Toby Delmore, who you've had on this before I interviewed him and one of my favorite quotes that he said was, being a product manager is playing Texas Holdem Poker, have to put your chips out before you've turned over all the cards. And yeah, I thought that was a very perfect kind of analogy for product management.
Brendan Jarvis:
I mean they're often out there on the limb, like you said, making decisions without full information. And anyone that's had to do that in a leadership capacity would know that that can be something that's quite uncomfortable. What can we do if we catch ourselves or we hear one of our UX or design colleagues bagging a stakeholder?
Ruth Brown:
So I think what we can do ourselves is just try and deeply understand what's driving them, what their needs are. When we first went to Agile at TradeMe, we had a philosophy in our team, we had two actually. One was make other people the heroes, which is kind of in this, because if you're doing research you can often want to be the person going, oh look, here's what I found out and it's really going to change this. But it's like actually if you just stay slightly in the background and give that information to the product owner or the designer to have and to own, then they're becoming the person who is user-centered and really, really sort of heroic in that. So yeah, I think that's kind of one of them. And then the other thing we used to say lots of TradeMe is that we worked in the rhythm of the sprints and so we really needed to understand what the teams needed and at what time and it was easy, it trade me as well because we could do gorilla testing so easily because everyone on the street is pretty much a TradeMe user.
So we could start with, okay, well let's go out on Friday morning with what you've built in the last two sprints by that Friday afternoon we've actually deciding what direction we'll take in the next sprint because we've got the answers that we need. A little bit trickier if you've kind of got a bit harder to access group. But the thing is still the same is when do you need what by? And we might not do the perfect research to get you there, but we will get you what we need. And I think that's the other nice thing about working internally is that I kind of use a bit of a train station analogy that if a train's already left the first station, everyone's going to be so no one's going to love it if you say, okay, pull the train back, we've gotta go in a different direction.
So what you can do is go, okay, train, you are already in this direction, what do you need to keep the momentum? And then if you can get something else for when they come to the next train station and they can actually decide their direction, if you can at that point come with more information or better information, then they can make that decision there. And I think that's kind of really key is to understand where those decisions points will be and almost never feel like, I think in good product companies you never have one shot at getting the right answers. And so actually iterating and doing just enough and building up that picture is a lot better than, no sorry train. You have to stay at the station while we get you all the answers cuz also the answers
Brendan Jarvis:
And then everyone gets annoyed at you while you're busy trying to get everything perfect, right? Yeah.
Ruth Brown:
And I think we can never get anything perfect in our world. It is our job is to kind of de-risk projects and if we do research at the start down the track, we will have iterated those findings. And so I think there's also sometimes a thing of our research is fact and it's, it's really good clues. And so I think that's kind of it as well as, and that sort of probably comes to that polarization of well I have to give the kind of strongest fact. And it's like, well no you don't actually, cuz it can only be as sure it's sort of the scientific process, you know can only be as sure as the information you have now. And the entire point is that it will change down the track when we have more information.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned when you're at TradeMe you did a lot of gorilla usability testing cuz the user was pretty much anyone in everyone in New Zealand you could find someone that represented your user. How much of the work that you were doing there was in the more foundational or generative space?
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, lots. Yeah. So we did a fantastic combination and because there was a lot of trust and it trade me, the leadership gave us a lot of trust. So we did
Brendan Jarvis:
Things. Was that trust always there? Sorry to interrupt, but was that or level of trust to permit the foundational work to go ahead? Was that from the get-go or was that something that was earned over time?
Ruth Brown:
I think there was probably a bit of suspicion. I remember doing my first user group persona project when I first got in and there was a kind of like, okay, so you're going to travel around New Zealand to talk to users. And there probably was a kind of, okay, well she's new and let's let's give her this one. So yeah, I kind of joked that I went to live in which I actually love my parents live and live in and I really love livin, but I'm like, if you go to Levine you can't call it a junket. So that was [laugh] how I got around that. And so I think the other thing we did really early on was we always did the, so we never did those foundational pieces for like, oh well I have this question that I want to answer. It was always the so what for trade me.
And so it always had to kind of have a reason or have a deliverable. But yeah, we were doing really cool projects. I remember doing one about how mobile phones have changed New Zealander's lives and doing really Jamie was cool because you got to go into quite a few of people's big live life moments kind of buying or selling a house, buying or selling a car, getting a job. They were all kind of these quite big moments and you got to really deeply understand the dynamics of all of those. So yeah, I stayed at TRA for eight years and I often joked that I was going to leave when I'd done a piece of research on every user group we had and I kind of never got there because even early on we were doing internet dating and kind of different mindsets for internet dating and
Brendan Jarvis:
Was it find someone Yeah,
Ruth Brown:
Yeah it was find someone.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I didn't find anyone using find someone. Oh didn't you? Maybe that's why it doesn't exist anymore now happily now. Happily married though.
Ruth Brown:
Oh nice. I think Tinder is why I find someone doesn't exist anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah, you're quite right. You're quite right. I just wanna come back to the notion of trust with executive leadership that we touched on there and also this topic of echo chambers and our design community. Cuz there was something else in one of the talks that I had watched of yours that I thought was really interesting and it's that you suggested as a design community that's not just the polarization that we're at risk of between ourselves and people that might work in product or engineering or other aspects of the business that we work in, but we're often, often polarized and amongst ourselves and in particular taking extreme positions when it comes to methods. And an example of which you gave in that talk was n p s net promoter score. People tend to either love NPS s or they tend to hate it. And you actually quoted a wonderful design leader here in New Zealand as well, who's a friend of yours, Roland, and she said, is NPSs perfect? No NPSs the only human metric in the boardroom. Yes. What were you trying to illustrate with that quote?
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, I think I was trying to illustrate that when we live in those extremes, we don't very hard to make progress because you're always sort of trying to just dig your toes in deeper rather than, back to that train analogy, it's like, okay, we're on this MPS train, how do we use it the best we can or how do we get what we can from it? So yeah, I think it's, and it also kind of destroys the nuance of like, oh it didn't work in, it's a methodology may fail in one situation and then you use it again and it succeeds or vice versa. And so if you're in those extremes of it is always a terrible idea or it's always going to work perfectly, then I think that we lose what we are good at in our sort of area, which is to keep learning and keep going, oh okay, cool.
Well now we've tried it here and it didn't work for these reasons, so how do we apply it differently? And I do genuinely believe that we get sucked in by those same algorithms and those same kind of hits of if people are angry about mps or angry about personas or angry about what agile or whatever it might be, it's going to get more reactions than if you're like, Hey guys, there's some good things about Agile and there's some not so good things for you and let's try to work out how we make that kind of work the best. So yeah, I think you've talked about design Twitter before, it's probably exactly the same. It's the extreme things that are getting kind of bubbled up.
Brendan Jarvis:
You've been a design leader now for a decade or over and you've held senior leadership positions both at TradeMe, which we've talked about and also Xero as well, two pretty serious product companies over here in New Zealand. How has your view, what's important as a design leader changed during that time
Ruth Brown:
As a design leader?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Do you see anything like that you do that differently if you had your time over?
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, I think that's a great question. Let me ponder that one for a while. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Sure.
Ruth Brown:
I think that I probably didn't, when I first started, I kind of didn't. I was sort of like, I'm so sure on that the stuff we do is amazing and really valuable and I probably didn't do enough kind of actually bringing other people on the journey. And I think back to one of my first projects that trade me, which was kind of redesigning the homepage and the navigation, which if you know anything about trade me, that's kind of a huge change for millions of people. And I think I probably in that situation thought, oh yeah, well we'll just keep going and we'll kind of do our thing. I didn't bring enough kind of people or stakeholders around the organization on the journey. And I think that probably what I do now is I think more deliberately about that culture change and what all those elements of the culture change need to be.
So I think of my job as much about doing the research, so it's kind of get the good insights that people need to make the decisions they need to do to build good product, but actually kind of champion a youth centered culture so that we aren't needed in quite the same way, or that everyone is thinking in this way. And that's a good, that becomes usually half of my job, is actually thinking about where do I want this organization to be culturally from a user center point of view in five years time? And what am I doing in the next six months a year? What's our team doing and how are we implementing things to actually get there?
Brendan Jarvis:
When you were saying that, I couldn't help but think of your train analogy and what I was thinking was the train, the user center train has left the station, but it sounded like you saw your job as to realize that it's okay to take stops every now and then down the line rather than just never stop on that train and never be able to get other people on board.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. If you think about it more as a and I think this is probably, we talked at the start about me being very kind of mathematical and probably quite rational thinking. And I think probably that's been my journey to go from, okay, if I'm rationally doing all the steps, then I'm going to get the outcome to actually, there's a whole lot of people and personalities and I think, and those rational steps don't necessarily get you there. So how do we actually think about the hearts and minds and the kind of other things rather than just the steps or the processes that you need to do to get somewhere.
Brendan Jarvis:
Have you ever had to pull the emergency break on that train to get someone on board?
Ruth Brown:
No, I still don't think it's an emergency break. I think, I think I'll slow it down to a point that people are comfortable with and I'll probably, you know, do do some checking before you start that. So I guess that's part of the learning is it trained me. I was like, oh well I have all the building blocks in place and so therefore out the end we'll become a user-centered culture. But I think it's kind of like, okay, let's do a do a bit of a regroup and work. Maybe a regroup is kind of pulling the emergency break, but at every stop it's like what direction are we going in next? And I think even if I have empathy for senior leaders, it's often, so what would worry them about a user-centered culture and how can I allay those fears for them? And so again, it's kind of back to that curio curiosity and listening and actually understanding what their drivers are and what we can do will support that rather than make them feel worried or detract from that
Brendan Jarvis:
For them to feel confident in that culture that you're trying to establish. I watched your Sex Collective talk that happened not that long ago, I don't think. And I got the sense from that, even though product companies talk a lot about the importance of their customers, that you felt that product companies still had quite a hard time being human-centered. Was that a fair reflection of how you felt at that time?
Ruth Brown:
I think so. It's been really interesting kind of thinking about the whistleblower stuff with Facebook and thinking about, so my conversations at TradeMe where we were talking about how do we make finding a house easier or how do we make selling a jug easier, amazing conversations. Cause we all wanted the same thing out of that. The hardest conversations I had at Trade TradeMe were about our ads and where ads should go on the platform and how ads should work. Because what you've got there, which is what I think I heard Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower talk about as well, is you can have all the good intentions and you can have all the kind of can say the right things, but when it comes down to the decision of we are going to leave this much money on the table, which is measurable for this kind of less measurable thing of the world's health, the world's mental health in a Facebook point of view, or it might slightly degrade the experience of buying something over time on, those are the hard decisions to make.
And I think it was really interesting kind of going to Xero because again, their whole goal was to make the product as good as possible for users so that more people used it. And so it's really easy because everyone is pointing in the same direction. So I think probably that has bit less to do with being a product company and more to do with potentially whether you are in that kind of attention economy of are you paying for people's attention or are you paying to get them to do the same thing? Because when you're both wanting them to, if we make it easier to buy things on TradeMe, that is actually a win for everyone If you make it easier to stay on Facebook forever, not a win for both groups. So yeah, I think that difficulty comes more when you're having to make that decision between money today or something that is less tangible that will should be better for society or for our users
Brendan Jarvis:
That navigating those trade-offs, that tension between the sounds like the underlying business or revenue model for the business and what's better for the user. But also I think you've touched on there the sort of stakeholders at large in the community and the world and the case of a platform with scale that there's a kind of popular catch crime design and it's been around for a long time and it's one of the reasons why I believe I got involved in design and why a number of, probably most of the people I know who are in design are in it. And that's the sort of idea that as designers, we have the ability to make the world a better place. Do you hold that same belief? And if you do, or even if you don't, do you believe it's our responsibility in design as a broad field to ensure that that happens?
Ruth Brown:
I'm a little bit so I think that designers absolutely have the ability to change the world and that's, and that comes down to where we are focusing our attention. And that's part of it for me is what you were talking about before in terms of if we are worrying, if we are fighting with each other, then that's not using that precious, precious energy. I think that, and this probably sometimes bites me in the butt, but I hate the talk of who deserves a seat at the table and that sort of stuff, because I think that's actually then about us and our own egos. And I think a more interesting thing is how can we have the most influence in an organization to, so I put less focus on the reputation of design or UX or research and more on what's actually happening in that organization for our users and for the end result.
And if that is going well and we are part of a really well formed team, then awesome. But I think that if we want to just for the sake of it and to feel good about our profession and where we are, then that doesn't sort of hold any appeal to me. I think it's about where what we can do actually ends up in the real world, which is part of, for me, it's like if we write a good report, who cares? It's only if those insights from those that report end up in a customer's hand that it's worth an organization paying for my time. So if I spend more focus on that side of it, then that actually makes me feel like I'm kind of having impact.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying shift your shift the focus as to what success actually is for design.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the world needs also the designers who are the opposite to that. So I think that it's like, you know, don't need everyone going. We don't need a kind of presence. But so yeah, I think that any good ecosystem is made up of all of the people who are out the front, kind of people from behind. So yeah, it's not to say that the other way is wrong, it's just not how I see the world
Brendan Jarvis:
Not really moving the field forward. It's sort of combative competitiveness with ourselves.
Ruth Brown:
Yeah, definitely competitiveness with ourselves. I think intellectual debate is a good thing to have and but it does feel like a different thing to me than pile piled piled on or whatever they might be.
Brendan Jarvis:
Ruth, a big part of our conversation, today's been about echo chambers that we all inhabit and also the social networks that have played a role in reinforcing some of the unhelpful beliefs that we may hold and approaches to conversations that we may take. What do you want people that are listening to this episode to this conversation to consider when they find themselves getting hot under the collar, angry with someone that hel holds a different point of view from them?
Ruth Brown:
I think it's just step away and what is it? I think when lots of those social networks went down the other week, I think there was pun a collective breathe out and that was sort of only for six hours or whatever it might be. So I guess just step away, just think, is this the best use of my energy? And I'm saying this, I do this all the time. I don't as kind of guilty as anyone of getting there and then having to step back and realize. But yeah, and I think we learn as researchers, we are kind of always curious and we know that if you're in a room of eight smart people in a meeting don't have a kind of capital on the good ideas or the right way to go here. And I think it's the same in those social networks as well as are a nature of we are all a result of who we are and what we've been through. And so either stop and try and understand or actually just step away and go play with the cat or something like that. Something a bit more fulfilling.
Brendan Jarvis:
Both are really good things to consider in those situations, but I really love the sort of notion of seeking to understand others better. I really think that's an important thing for people to think about and a great place to leave the conversation today, which has been a great conversation. Ruth, thank you. Plenty important things for people to think about and I really wanna say thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your insights with us today.
Ruth Brown:
Pleasure. Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, you're most welcome. Ruth, if people wanna find out more about you and your career and the great things that you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ruth Brown:
I'm pretty average at all of the socials, so yeah, probably LinkedIn is about as good as I get.
Brendan Jarvis:
Wonderful. Thanks Ruth. I'll make sure that I post a link to your profile on the show notes and to everyone else that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, including detailed chapters of our conversation will be in the show notes on YouTube. If you've 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 also subscribe and tell someone else about the podcast if you feel that they'd get value out of these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can also find my LinkedIn profile in the show notes on YouTube and also you could hit over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz if you wanna reach me that way. And until next time, keep being brave.

Ruth Brown

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