Mikkel Michelsen
Designing for Mission Critical Systems
In this episode of Brave UX, Mikkel Michelsen takes us into the world of UX design for mission critical systems (including the F-35), where users’ lives are quite literally in the hands of the designer.
Highlights include:
- Did you get to fly in an F-35?
- How did it feel to design systems that had direct impact on human life?
- How did you involve users in the design of mission critical systems?
- How do design for the unpredictability of people in high-stress situations?
- How do you manage being both a PM and a Lead UX designer?
Who is Mikkel Michelsen?
Mikkel is a Product Manager and Lead UX Designer at Systime Solutions, a division of Gyldendal, Scandinavia’s largest publisher.
Before Systime, Mikkel was the Chief UX Designer at Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark. He has also held other senior design roles, such as the Head of UX at WhiteAway Group, and Lead UX Designer at eBay Scandinavia.
But, it was Mikkel’s work at Systematic, a provider of mission critical technology solutions, that really caught my attention. During nearly 8 years there, Mikkel designed some of the critical systems within the F-35 fighter jet, as well as other defence and healthcare experiences.
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 Mikkel Michelsen. Mikkel is a Product Manager and Lead UX Designer at Systime Solutions, a division of Gyldendal, Scandinavia's largest publisher. At Systime Solutions, Mikkel is helping the company to design and launch a next generation handheld interactive platform called the Internet Book. The product aims to revolutionize the way that secondary school students in Denmark interact with learning materials.
- Before this time, Mikkel was the Chief UX Designer at Danska Bank, the largest bank in Denmark with assets totaling 600 billion. The bank employs 23,000 people and also has 3.3 million customers there. Mikkel was instrumental in the design of customer facing solutions, including e-banking, mobile banking, and Danska ID. Mikkel has also held other senior design roles such as the Head of UX at Rightaway Group, one of the largest e-commerce businesses in Denmark, as well as the Lead UX Designer at eBay, Scandinavia.
- But it was Mikkel's work at Systematic, a provider of mission critical technology solutions, that really caught my attention. During his nearly eight years at Systematic, Mikkel designed some of the critical systems within Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet, as well as other defense and healthcare based experiences. Needless to say, there is plenty to explore there. So on that note, it is my pleasure to welcome Mikkel here to speak with me on Brave UX today. Mikkel, godaften, welcome to the show.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Thank you Brendan. Nice to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Very nice to have you here. And as we were discussing Michell before we hit record, we are literally on the opposite side of the globe from one another and that's reflected in my time and the time zone as well. So it's quite late there for you and quite relatively early here for me. So we will see how we go. Hopefully we can all stay awake for this conversation. I'm sure we will. Now I understand you live in a area of Denmark in a city called Hus, which is the second largest city in Denmark behind Copenhagen, and it's also a sea-based city, a seaside city like Auckland where I live. Can you just paint us a little bit of a picture of what life is like? How does it compare to say, some of the other large European cities that listeners may be familiar with London or Paris or an American city like San Francisco?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, I would say that OS is a pretty small city compared to the large one you just mentioned, but Scandinavia is a small country. We are about 6 million inhabitants here and part of a group of Scandinavian countries in the Nordic. So yeah, it's just the social welfare states here and a lot of nice benefits of living in this part of the world. I feel very blessed and privileged to live in Denmark, but also to have traveled and lived abroad. I lived in France for three years and worked on banking systems there and I also worked in US on various projects. So yeah, I love traveling and I can tell you that if you drill a hole through the entire center of the earth from ahu, you'll actually end up 400 kilometers from the coast of New Zealand. So I'm actually on the very opposite side of the globe from you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well I, I'd say start digging, but I'm not sure that wouldn't would be very good for the planet. And it sounds like you are in a beautiful place. I did have a look at some of the photos of ahu when I was preparing for today and it does look like a wonderful place to visit and like you say, a lot smaller than some of those bigger cities that I mentioned. Now thinking about travel as well, I noticed in your bio, and it's not uncommon for people in Scandinavia as far as I can tell, to have excellent English and to travel. I think you have also six languages that you have some proficiency in now. How has the traveling aspect of what you've done in your career and your ability to interact with people in their language, how has that helped you to develop as a designer?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, I would say that it was mostly a personal interest of mine to move to France. So that was a learning experience that I just had to do. I loved the language when I was in high school and I had to go there to to really learn it. It was a great experience, but learning English is very natural. It comes very natural to Scandinavians. When I was 19, I was in San Francisco for a year and I just got the taste of the expat life. So yeah, I would say that it's pretty normal US for us here to speak in English terms and especially in IT in technology space to speak in English terms. So I think most people are just comfortable speaking about technology in those terms. I might come to too short in some terms of the language, but yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was just going to say, I think your English is faster period to my Danish, so I don't think we're going to have any troubles there. In fact, I'm mildly jealous that I can only have command of one language. So I think it's wonderful that you're able to have such a good engagement with so many people around the world. Obviously it's served you really well.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- No, I just wanted to say that it's pretty typical for smaller countries to be more proficient in other languages. They just simply have to due to the fact that they trade with other countries and stuff like that, whereas the bigger countries don't need it as much. They're more self containing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, that's a very good point. I just wanna come back to your entry into the field of UX. Now I understand that you actually became a UX before we even called the field UX. You studied a master of HCI I human computer interaction in the mid nineties at Huss University. I think you graduated in 97. What was it about the field at the time that originally attracted you and what has kept you practicing 25 years later?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, when you went through my bio there, I think you answered the question yourself. When you have a career in technology, and especially in design, an interaction design in the space of UX, you just have so many possibilities to work in different domains. And when I was recommended the studies of information science and interaction design studies, I just was recommended it because of that. With that, it provides this field that you can practically do anything. You can work on your own, you can work as a consultant, you can work for many, all industrial areas of life, all entrepreneurial areas of life you can engage in with technology as a program, as a developer, but also as a designer you can go almost anywhere. And that was what attracted me to this area. And also what, what's kept me there, I guess this you're never stuck.
- You can always go somewhere else and explore other domains. And as you've mentioned yourself, I transitioned from banking to publishing, which is not a problem because the UX is basically the same. It's not all the same, but the core part of UX is the same no matter the domain. And that's what I like about it. You can transfer to a new domain, of course you have a learning curve to understand the domain. You need experts in the field to help you out. But the UX stays basically the same, the toolbox, it's the same when you go in the door.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned when you were explaining how you came to study HCI that it was recommended to you. Was there someone in particular that recommended it that stands out as that person that introduced you to the field?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah, there was a lady called Carolina [inaudible] actually become a founder of a couple of IT projects and one of the first interactive agencies in Denmark. So I met her by chance and she commended it to me. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, well we have her to thank for you being on the show today, which is great. Now, I also was looking as, as I go back and sort of get a sense for my guess where you'd worked, and I mentioned in your introduction that you had worked at systematic for the better part of a decade designing mission critical systems in part for that F 30, F 35 fighter jet, which is an amazing piece of technology. And I understand you were also designing mission planning systems for land-based military vehicles as well as some systems for national intelligence services. Yeah. First question, and it's a very important one, did you get to fly in an F 35?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- No, I didn't.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, do you regret not getting to fly in an F 35? But
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- I have some funny war stories about the F 35, but I didn't have a seed one. But I sat next to when I was in the introductory program at Lockheed Martin, which is production plant with about 20, 30,000 P employees, you sat next to other people in the plant and I sat next to a guy who was designing the, no, he was a purchaser for no cone technology. And that's a funny story because normally you say that it cost the tip of a, it'll cost the tip of a jet fighter because it's very expensive. The stuff in the tip of a jet fighter, he actually knew he was in the purchasing department for tips of jet fighters. So he knows the course of the type of jet fighter.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- He's one of the ones that originated that joke. And it literally is not a joke. It's quite literal
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- [laugh], true story. But yeah, no, but I work with pilots on the program. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I mean, thinking about working at systematic, when you first started there, we talked about your introduction to the field doing your masters. Was this always part of the plan? Was this a place or a area of the field that you had always wanted to work in?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- You mean military?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah,
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- I, when I was a kid, I had dreams about aviation becoming air traffic controller sitting in front of the screens and stuff like that. But I decided for information technology cause you have much, much more possibilities. But no, I didn't plan for it, but when I heard about the contract for the F 35, I actually pursued the job because of that. So I went on a mission to get a job within that company to get to work for that particular piece of technology.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, that sounds like there's a story there. How did you go about pursuing that opportunity? Was it sort of like a I'll pitch a tent outside the company's office until they give me a job or how did it go?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- No, I was living in France and this was in I think 2004. And I read a newspaper article that systematic had acquired the contract for the F 35 for software, some part of the contract, not all. And I said, okay, if something I should ever work on something cool, it would be to work on UX for the F 35. So I thought, okay, I'll do everything I can to get that on my top one of new companies to get out to. And then I knew a guy who knew, a guy who knew the CEO through kindergarten, they delivered kits to the same kindergarten. So I got a note delivered there if he needed a skilled designer for his teams [laugh] real funny, but actually it worked. I got called in for meet and greet and it developed into a job eventually.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So Mikkel, we've spoken a little bit about the term mission critical and a mission critical system, but we haven't actually really clarified or defined what that is for the people that are listening. What does that really mean? What is a mission critical system?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, it's actually hard to define. You can, you cannot really look it up in the web's dictionary and get a clear definition, especially when it comes to technology, because people will say that I have mission critical apps on my phone. So it is the mission critical to what mission, but typically I define it in areas where the safety of human life is somehow directly or indirectly involved. That would be mission critical to me. So I would say that it's a matter of definition, but it is, at least it has to do with somehow the security and safety of human life is somehow involved within that system. So that of course also goes for systems and healthcare and stuff like that, but also in vehicles and transportation and stuff like that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I watched the talk that you'd given a little while back at one of the I X D A conferences where you were discussing the design of mission critical systems. And in that talk you remarked that major incidents often occur through a series of interrelated failures. And I'm just going to quote something that you said in that talk now you said that's where the responsibility of the interaction designer comes in. We can either be that person who starts the bad chain of events or we can break that chain with a good design. So given the nature of your work systematic, did you wake up in the morning and have a real sense of the gravity of the work that you were doing and the impact both for good and for ill if there was a design problem in there that you were working on?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yes, of course you are instantly aware that it has a high impact if you work on something that has relations to human life as you would, if you, for instance, designed an interface for medical purposes of administering drugs, for instance, if you administer 10 times the allowed amount, you might create a disaster. So yeah, so of course you are instantly aware that this is something of high importance. But yeah, it's just an interesting field to be in and I really enjoyed working in that part of UX design. It's something I did for about six, seven years working in military systems. And it's just it's also gives you a high sense of reward. It, it's very rewarding to know that these systems helped save lives in the field. And I have been directly told by soldiers that the wade was designed directly had an impact on saving lives. And that's maybe one of the most rewarding things you can hear as a designer. So I feel very privileged to be part of designing systems and making a difference there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What was it like to receive that feedback? How did you feel when someone's sitting there telling you that you literally saved lives as a result of the work that you'd done?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, it was just awesome. It's just awesome to hear that you make that kind of a difference. I'll never forget it, but because the soldiers that give, they allow some the feel down there to, so that just feel, felt pretty awesome to be part of that. I don't know how to put it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, I think I can hear it and see it in your answer there that it made quite an impact. Now there's also another side of design for military design for defense, and not everyone listening to this episode would be comfortable, I suppose, deploying their design skills in that way. There are different views out there about the impact that design in that field can lead to. When you were applying for work at systematic, did you have any reservations at all about the impact of your work as a designer?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- No, not in that sense. Of course, you are aware that you are transitioning into a field where the safety of human life is involved and it's a matter of taking it very seriously. But I didn't have any reservations. On the contrary, I actually wanted to bring my design skills to work in an area where design is highly needed. Design is highly needed in military to help save lives in law enforcement, in national intelligence in healthcare which is typically understaffed in terms of UX. And you will see systems that actually have a higher degree of flaws and faults because of a lack of good design. So I think design is even more needed in those areas and I felt inspired to go and make a difference there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And for those people that might look at the other side of saving lives in a conflict situation, which is unfortunate, but they do happen and is a reality of life on this planet as humans. What do you say to those people that look at the other impact of that work in that field and the ethical, if any sort of considerations that come came up or might come up for you, do you have a way of framing that for them that might help them to better understand why you felt so called to this particular field of UX?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- I can understand if people, they wouldn't choose that particular domain, I can totally respect that. As long as they can respect that, I would actually want to make a difference there for the better. So I think it's fine to have preferences within design. It's not an issue of either or black and white. I think it's fine to have preference there, but it is very rewarding. It's very needed. Design is very needed in those areas and I just hope I can inspire more to go there and join it. It's really very interesting. It's a high reward. And I met many, many interesting HCI protection and usability professionals also at Look at Martin who worked in those fields and yeah, I think they were there for a reason to make a difference. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think I mentioned to you that I was talking with Dr. Laura Faulkner who was on the show couple of months back, and she had also had worked in the UX of defense this time stateside and in Texas. And she had sort of similar views about the real realness, I suppose, the tangible realness of the outcome of hearing from your users, in this case people that work in the military on the front lines, just how much of a difference, the design of the systems that you'd created made for them and did save lives. And we often talk about making the world a better place. And I suppose this is a bit of a, what's the right way to frame this? Is there a right way? This is a area of design where you've touched on, there are different views as to how people feel about it and people feel particularly strongly about it, usually one way or another. But it is one of the areas of design that you can see an immediate impact of the work that you're doing. I was curious, Mikkel, how did your friends and family feel about the nature of your work on the F 35 and on these systems? Did it lead to any interesting dinnertime conversations?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, I guess when you work on stuff like that, does classified people just wanna know what it's about. So that type of conversation, I think my family were proud that I was able to join such a special program. Actually what I worked on wasn't that secret as such. I can share what I worked on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, please.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- But you might also go to my website, niels mickel.com/f 35 and read an article that did in length about working there and what specifically I worked on. But it has of course to do with onboard and offboard systems on the plane and of course the digital interfaces for that. For instance, I worked on a portable device that plucked into the future arch on upon landing, doing diagnostics.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What were you scanning for?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Four scenarios during flight. Okay. And such a diagnostic tool would help ensure the safety of the next flight, for
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Instance. So they're always that feedback loop sounds like it's really important and there are so many different interrelated systems from what it sounds like that you need to really make sure you are reporting the health or the sort of status of the fighter jet before it goes up again. Yep. What's it like when you are trying to learn about the effectiveness of your design and a mission critical system? And I don't imagine it's easy just to get aircraft technicians to come in for a day at day at the lab somewhere. What did it look like? How did you involve the user, for lack of a better term, the people that you were trying to design for? How did you involve, evolve, involve them in the design process?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah, well as you know better than anybody else, I guess, is that we as UX designers have a wide toolbox of things we can use depending on the closeness to the users. We can employ different tools. Actually was in the military context, I was actually able to work very closely with domain experts that would be the end users of the technology. And that allowed me to actually get direct feedback on design from particular target users. But it, it's actually tip pretty difficult to get a hold of the end users in enormous scenario. You would have different layers of stakeholders between you and the users and you couldn't just reach out and say, Hey, come in for a day at the lab. So of course you need to be careful with the design you do and how you verify it through different methods. And of course there's also less, it's not exactly an agile process such where you just do quick iterations over the table in a design sprint.
- You really need to work through requirement specifications and stuff like that and slowly get designed to be part of the agenda. And actually I did that at the F 35. I worked to enhance the value of the user interface specifications on the program. So I introduced some document artifacts that help the entire artifact structure for requirements to be more design centered. So it's a slow long haul. It's not just a quick iterative process when you work in a big company like that, but it's very interesting. I really enjoyed that part to be part of a big machine in terms of the role you can play,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get the sense that the Silicon Valley move fast and break things which has somewhat fallen from favor recently and potentially for very, very good reason doesn't really apply in a military context.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- No, it doesn't really work like that. It's a bit different there. You have typically big contracts with a high degree of specification of what exactly is to be built. And you need of course to imply work design into that agenda.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And isn't that fascinating though, cuz if you think about that this machine as a machine that is going to be piloted by a person, and while I very generally get the sense that there's a lot of automation, automation sitting in behind that to enable that person to function effectively under pressure it's interesting that design is something that still needs to fight really hard to become more of a center stage in the design decisions that are going into that piece of hardware.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- But I can tell that many of the aviation companies, they have pretty large design teams, for instance, on cockpit design. So it's pretty normal to have interaction design and usability experts work on these systems. Now, I think over the last 10 or 15 years it's been, you wouldn't ever think of designing a cockpit or an automated interface without having interaction and UX designers and digital designers on board such a project. Whereas 20 years ago you would typically have mostly analog controls in a car. Today you have so many digital systems, touchscreens, audio interfaces, many more things where UX and design skills are simply required for successful experience. So there's a positive development in that sense is that in many of these, because it's also mission critical to design for vehicles and designing even Apple CarPlay or Spotify for a car is actually somehow mission critical because you take away from the attention of the driver to keep their eyes on the road. So this part of being mission critical really applies to a lot of areas and we can make a difference there. So I think wouldn't in your good mind design the system for a vehicle today without having good designers on board such a
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Team? Yeah, I was looking at some of the videos of the F 35 and flight and there's obviously some very advanced technology in there, but what you were saying Mikkel there about the different modes of interaction with the system, you know, touched on there. You've got your touchscreens, which have become mainstream now, but you also look like there was gastrol or gestural interface built in. There was the ability, I believe, through the visor to see through the hard surfaces of around the cockpit. So the pilot doesn't just look out the glass for people that are listening, you can actually look straight down below you and the cameras on the jet will actually feed back to your helmet what it is that you can see. So you've got real almost 360 degree ability to see what's going on.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- And also audio commands like,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- So called D V I, direct voice input systems in the cockpit to allow you to imply voice commands to execute stuff during
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Flight. So when you are going through the process of designing a mission critical system for this kind of context, whether it's the F 35 or whether it's healthcare or whether it's a land-based vehicle, I understand from what you've said that there is often a load of specification in terms of engineering specification and the outcome's pretty clear what you need to deliver. But it sounds like you've got a number of different ways that the person can interact with the system to achieve whatever that outcome is. How do you go about navigating what mode to use and the different constraints that may sit around the design of that system? Like what's factoring into your decisions here? Your design decisions? Well,
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- What do you mean
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mode? So whether or not like you are designing that system to be an auditory system or whether it's so an alarm or whether it's something that's going to be touchscreen. What are the decisions that go into determining what mode the interaction should be?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, I would say the projects I've been on hasn't been that unclear. You typically know more or less specifically what you're going to be working on. Let's say you're going to be working on a fixed touchscreen display inside a vehicle that does so-and-so, so
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Typical. So the constraint is known. Yeah,
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah. The constraint is pretty much known what information flows into that system. And then you just do what any UX designer does. You try to understand the use cases, the user stories around those use cases which are more important, which conflict with which, what are the priorities and needs and goals of the user. Try to empathize with the user in that respect. In that respect the forester triangle with designing a system with both engagement and usability and usefulness and employ all three areas of the design to meet those use cases for the optimal design. So I think it's not that actually that much different. And I was the difference when transitioning into a domain like that is understanding the domain. You don't know anything about aviation. Actually, I took classes in cockpit design and I try to fly flight simulators to just get a feel for the domain, but you still need domain experts around you.
- If you design for medical context, you need a doctor around you who does the actual surgery, you can never become the surgeon. But if you're designing a system for him or her, you really need to understand the context and the use case. And for that, you need the expert that has many years of experience in the field to help you out. So typically in those high knowledge areas, also in banking and finance, you need the domain experts next to you to help you understand the use case. But besides that, you just employ the normal toolbox of UX design to better the design through iterative design prototypes and all that stuff to show to stakeholders and improve the communication around the final solution. When you do these iterative design processes, sometimes you're lucky you can actually improve the requirement, set a bit and say, okay, but you have so-and-so use case, couldn't you do it this way, couldn't you?
- For instance, I came up with a design for these military land vehicles where they could, I knew you could transmit information. I said, well, they draw drawings to each other because they're typically in the desert. They don't have any maps there with roads. So they draw up their own roads and say, okay, let's go this way and that way and submit those drawings instead of textual messages and other stuff that goes through such a system. And I was actually able to add features to the design within the constraints of the system. So you can sometimes be lucky and hit a gem and actually make something new that they didn't think of. So it depends a little bit, but it's typically a high constrainted environment where you need exactly what you need to do. And then within those constraints you have some liberties of course
- Brendan Jarvis:
- To do. And I think any designer that's operated in an environment where there's literally a blank canvas that can actually be more restrictive and less helpful to furthering design than actually having a really clearly defined set of constraints and outcomes that you can innovate within. I just wanna come back to what you were talking there, mackel, about the role of the domain expert, understanding the use case and the human side of the systems that you were designing. I think you sort of used a great illustration there of being able to evolve the way in which the people in the land-based vehicles communicated where they wanted to go through drawing as opposed through text. Yeah. Now you've said in the past that, and I'm going to quote you now, users can be highly unpredictable when subjected to high stress environments. And I imagine in a military context that high stress environments are under fire situations and the cost of making a mistake in those situations can be extremely high. It's never a high price to pay then loss of life. How do you accommodate for that unpredictability during the design of a mission critical system? And how do you get a real feel for or know for certain that you've covered off the range of responses that might come up in a highly intense situation like an under fire situation?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- That's a good question. The accurateness of design, it needs to be there. Whatever you design, of course you need to make sure that the error margins are less in terms of bad things that are able to happen. If the user doesn't perform what they're supposed to do, like you would with the GPS system, you would want to direct the user and not have them drive off the road at some point. So of course you need to know what are the limits within the user, which in which the user can act safely and not cause harm to themselves or others. So these are some constraints you need to know. You need lay down these constraints and say, okay, I need to make absolutely sure that the user cannot go into these areas of insecurity where the safety is concerned. And so what those constraints might be, depends of course, entirely on the sign you're making.
- You need to draw up those limitations and say, okay, I need to make sure that the user cannot wander off into these. That doesn't mean that the user cannot, cannot make an error with your design or the system in such, it's not your design, it's a system itself. Any system that allows for human input can somehow be misused by the person using it. And that is what is so exciting about designing for these safety critical system, these mission critical system. And they come in all shapes or forms. You can be designing industrial interfaces for electricity or who knows what elevators, vehicles, aviation, military, law enforcement, and all of this, the safety of human life is involved. And I think many times in these systems is actually the designer's responsibility to add safety to a system that is inherently dangerous. So again, I think, so that's why I'm saying that I'm pretty unapologetic about working in the military context because we are pushing something that actually has an inherently dangerous nature and pushing it in a more human and safe direction because of this error handling capacity of good design. Whereas the lack of the same thing would actually make a system more dangerous. If you didn't have a good designer for a car or you didn't have so and so for this interface, it would actually be more dangerous, less
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Effective for the operators.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- For the operators, exactly. So I think it's just it's an important challenge. It's a good challenge to be in that safe of actually enhancing the safety of a system.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to say, I've heard you speak before about, I believe about the role of redundant systems within these designs and also the role of alarms and other things that are not necessarily part of mainstream UX design as a way of, I suppose, ensuring greater safety in the operation of the primary system. What's an example that you can give us of how you've deployed alarms or supplementary redundant systems in order to bring that user back on to the safer track?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, the first I will say is that some of the interaction design basics really come into play when you design safety critical systems. You need to go back to the basics of all the good heuristics you learned back in school about X law, Fitz law, gelle principles, all those sorts of holistics. You really need to know them by heart because they will be there to in ensure a better core usability of the system. And I just think that those are some of the basics that needs to be employed there. Of course, there are some things you would do that are maybe different in some of these mission critical context with redundant systems, really ensuring that the user doesn't make errors, that there's a high degree of forgiveness within the system. Another thing that you
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Will tell me about that you say a high degree of forgiveness, what does that mean?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- It means that you can undo action or forgiveness is one of the key UX principles, one of the golden principles I think of Schneiderman. And that you are able to return from an undue actions that you've performed and actually retrieved from that and go to do something else. And to answer your previous question about high stress environments, it's also of course needed there. That needs to be forgiveness in the system that allows you to retract actions and do them otherwise in a new way if you didn't perform it correctly on the first take.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand Mikkel, it's been a decade or more since you left systematic. How do you feel about that work that you did now and why did you move on from the work in mission critical systems there?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, actually, one of the things I missed when I worked in these more classified areas of national intelligence and military was closer relationship with the users. So when I got to work on, you know, could say public systems, I worked for eBay after that, that was the desire to move very close to the user and work in a more agile environment because this domain is a bit it is not the most agile environment in the world, and I really missed that close contact with the end users and maybe also to be able to speak to end users without having to know their entire roster of education and understanding their domain. As such, be one of the users myself, when you are at eBay, you just inherently understand what the technology is about and you can actually employ people around you for understanding good design instead of having to have a expert per se next to you.
- So I really wanted to move into our other areas of design after having worked on the notice stuff for so many years. And that's why I moved into e-commerce, which was just great and I loved being there too. So of course it's an interesting part of my bio that I was in the military and worked on those system, but I also enjoyed working on other stuff that is more public. And now I worked on learning system actually going back and pick to my master's degree with what's quite academic. So now I work on didactic stuff in the schools and how interactive technologies can help children learn. So that's just another part of the UX toolbox that I'm happy to use now. So getting close to the users I think was one of the reasons I moved on to get more normal use of so to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speak. Makes a lot of sense. I get a real sense from listening to you talk about your work as well, and also where you're currently working in terms of the internet book that you're working on in the education context, that impact of your work is quite important to you.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah, I think it matters to most designers that they feel they make a difference somehow. One of the things we know in learning in schools is that the pupils are starting to more and more transition into digital books. And it's really important that these digital books are able to transmit the material in a just as good way as would a paper book. And there is this trend and this tendency for pupils to lose concentration when they're using digital media. And it's a very, very exciting challenge to design a media that keeps the user attention and the user learning to the content for as long as possible without having them to flicker off into other areas of their
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Computer. I was going to say that's a really interesting area of UX to work in and I want to come to internet book and some of the constraints around that, and we've talked about with pupil's students losing concentration. I think that's a really fascinating area of design. Just before we move off the subject of mission critical systems, I wanted to, I suppose, get a sense from you that while most of the people that are going to be listening to this episode won't and probably will not in their career work in a organization that focuses on the design of those mission critical systems, we are seeing more and more now that a lot of the work that we, or products that we do work on do have a impact on the quality of life and lives of our users. So there's still an ability for our work to have unintended consequences, and I think we've seen some of this play out in the media recently, particularly around social platforms. What responsibility, if any, do you believe that we have as UX practitioners to our users as far as quality of life goes, as far as our impact that we have on their ability to live a successful and happy life?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- I don't think we are the good makers as designers. I don't think we have responsibility as such to be the saviors of the world. I think we are part of whatever company we are part of improving the conditions of the humans that use the systems. I totally agree with that, but I don't kid myself saying that we as designers are the ones that save everything from falling apart. So I'm not in that boat at all. I think we should go work in a soup kitchen if we really wanted to make a difference. We shouldn't be pretentious and think that design is really the change of the world. I was just blessed and privileged to work on something such as special as that, which was my dream and I tried it out. But I think many of us designers, we have different dreams and aspirations and wanna make a difference in those areas.
- In our way, the best we can through a team, people have to build the stuff that we are designing. They perform the same role, the same responsibility as us. The product managers that set up the requirements, the businesses that funded, the users that use it have the responsibility for first and foremost. So I think we are just a part of the ecosystem of people that share that ability to, you could say, make a difference with digital systems that are just become such a natural part of life. What I am excited about though is that I think that UX design in that ecosystem is a force for good. It really does make a difference. If you make good design, things will work better, they will work more accurately, they will be more safe, they will be more content users, it will improve the quality of life.
- The human condition will actually be bettered if you know are actually at least pushing it in a good direction with what you do as a designer. So I'm pretty content about that, but I'm not fooling myself telling me that we are saviors of the world in that sense. But it's still, I think it's, it is, it's good to be in UX Design is an interesting field. I think that's why many practitioners stay in the field. It's because we can actually, we feel that when we enter a project and we look at things and we try to understand the users, we can see, okay, there's actually areas of improvement here. I I am able to push some of these bricks in a good direction if I do some stuff here and work with other people to make these things slightly different.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is that you believe that design can have a positive impact in the world, but that the context and the degree of that impact is somewhat limited by our sphere of influence within the organizations in which we work.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah, of course.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, so let's come back to Dale and you'll work there at assist Time solutions on the internet book before I segued us there to get into some, I suppose a bigger sort of meta level conversation. You are a product manager and a lead UX. And to me, thinking about those two roles, they're both large roles. What does that look like in practice? Do you have to wear different hats on different days or during the same day? Just to reframe the role that you are trying to play across those two very different roles, but related roles?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah. Well, I work in a very small team now and actually do have two hats that I wear. I actually also have a very skilled UX designer working next to me to take part of the UX work away from my shoulders. But as you might know, it's very natural for UX designers, especially senior UX designers, to gravitate toward product management because you start to interest yourself in, okay, how can I shape the overall requirements to make this product fit, the use case, the business case, the best possible way and not be too nitty gritty about aligning boxes anymore. So I think I also transitioned towards product management because I wanted to make that difference to actually shape the product from that user experience point of view. And then I was just asked to take on that hat within the project, which I did, which was to basically manage the roadmap and especially the initial design process of gathering requirements and understanding the user needs and then starting a design iterative design process of the next generation of this platform that we are currently building.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand that the platform, it already exists in a sort of a web-based interface, but you're actually taking it into a form factor, a physical form factor. What I think you kind of touched on it as well before I segued us earlier, but what is special about internet book? What is the value that you're trying to unlock for students through this product?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, as opposed to when you read a typical ebook, you are basically just browsing pages in a pdf. The product that we are building has the interactive element to it that allows you to build in components to make that book more interactive, not just a reading experience, but also a learning experience. That could be interactive exercises, quizzes, those type of elements that integrate together with the content. Other parts of the interactive content could be interactive diagrams, it could be videos, sound files, all multimedia elements that you will not find in the PDF typically, at least you have to link to it to go. But this is a contained, it's actually still a web app. We are building a web app for it and not a native app. We're building a web app for it and just employing all the possibility of HTML to build the next generation of that reading and learning experience that has so many possibilities. When you move outside of that static reading that's in a Kindle, that's in an ebook. So that's basically what we do. We try to enhance the interactive element of that reading experience to better learning of high school subjects such as math and physics and chemistry and languages and all that stuff
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I could have done with this product when I was going through high school, particularly when it came to math. Anything to have made that more interactive for me would've probably served me much better than what I ended, how I ended up performing.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- And just to be just an example, if you had been able to read your high school books in a multimedia format, maybe seeing some parts of it explain on video, maybe be being able to hear accents in a language in a sound file as opposed to hearing your teacher pronounce everything. Just the simplicity of multimedia elements, which is of course a very simple thing actually helps enhance that learning experience. So it doesn't need to be interactive, just multimedia itself actually enhances the material.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think. Look, anything that can spark learning as opposed to conformity and education is a positive thing. And it sounds like this product is going somewhere to making that a possibility for more students. And you touched on a few different aspects of the product. There's the web app which enables the content. There's the content itself and there's also the physical device that I assume that you are, you've got industrial designers working on. In terms of your role, what is the breadth of your product management and design expertise? How is that being applied across those three contexts of content, the physical device and the actual inter interface that you're designing to house that content content?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, what we did was we started by looking at all the pain points and all the current wishes and ideas of the users during many, many years of use. We have a five digit number of emails from users feeding back about the quality of the product. And we took that and shaped it into a, you could say a picture of the requirements. We needed to fulfill a picture of the use cases, the overall use cases we needed to fulfill. And from that we started to shape clusters of functionality that needed to be designed and grouped together. And then on top of that, we needed to build a design system for that content. And that was actually the biggest challenges that we needed to build a highly flexible design system on top of all that content that allowed the different publishing houses to customize the individual books in a way that made each publication unique while at the same time having one product that always feels the same product when you're moving from book to book.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So the user doesn't have to learn a new interface for every different title that they're trying to interact with.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Exactly. You know, move off a learning curve using this web app. And it's very important that when you jump from your chemistry book to your biology book that you are not on a new learning curve, but you actually just seamlessly jump to another publications and that web app by heart and the basic haven't changed, maybe just the content and parts of the design system has changed. So this was kind of a layered approach to the design system where we needed to have recognizability always present in the product itself, but also the uniqueness of the product. And actually what we also wanted to build on top of that uniqueness was a personality aspect to it where the user could customize this publication to their own needs and adding content and drawing on the content itself like you would in a physical book to add that personal aspect to the digital publication. And that's actually one of the most exciting experts of that aspects of that technology was that we wanted to imply that a personal aspect to the technology on top of the, so that I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mentioned, I feel like it's a fairly universal behavior for teenagers to want to draw on top of their textbooks. So it's good to see that you're trying to accommodate some of that self-expression within the product and teenagers
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- And stuff like that. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And look, teenagers let's be honest, they're tricky. I don't think if I reflect back on my teenage years, definitely there were some tricky periods there for my mum. How do you design for this very tricky group of people and what does success look like? Do you have a north star for the product that you'll know for certain you're achieving when it's in the hands of these students?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well actually what was interesting in designing this product, it was the first product that I ever designed where the users were forced to use the product. When you go into a high school class, you are not given the selection between this and that. You are told that the chemist, this is your chemistry book, you're supposed to read it. So within that context, we knew that the users just had to use our product, they had to finish their exams, they had to perform well through our product no matter how well we designed it or not. That was a pretty special requirement to be really respectful of the fact that the users didn't choose that interface themselves. They were kind of told to use it. So that made it more sort of the teachers product than the pupils product in that sense that the teachers were the ones recommended it in the business context of selling this product. They would be the teachers that recommended it to other teachers saying, okay, you should check this out. And that's what actually makes it which special, it's the end users that has the pain or the gain of using it, but it's the teachers that will recommend the product to others. So that's why the teaching aspect of the book really has to perform well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So there's also a resource or a material in the product that enables the teacher to teach the classes through the product.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- There are some teacher functions as well. Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I see. I wonder what are the incentives at play within the Danish secondary school system for teachers? Are they incentivized on the basis of standardized tests and trying to increase the scores and performance of their students in that way?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- It depends a little bit on the school, but of course they typically, classes are required to go through a certain teaching programs. They have a certain agenda they need to move through, for instance, to cover chemistry at a certain level, at a certain age in high school they need to cover these books. So actually these books are pretty clearly laid out in terms of what they need to communicate in terms of the reading agenda. But then comes the learning aspect. That's why it's much more flexible. Will the users actually pick up on those different items in the agenda that they need to learn on. But it's pretty fixed what the needs users need, at least at a high school level. The materials is pretty and nicely laid out in terms of what they need to learn. Of course there are some metrics. We have golf, so we have grading, if that's what you mean of students and stuff like that.
- But one of the things that you really wanted to do with this technology was to make something that was very accessible for a wide range of students because we know that they read differently, they have different intention spans. And we really wanted to make something that covers all the students in the class. Not just the well performing students that are comfortable with technology, but also those with reading disabilities or simply those with concentration issues that we were able to design a piece of technology that cover the entire class. And that's also an advantage of an interactive web app like that you can really cover with different types of materials and different reading modes and stuff like that. Reading settings, you can really accommodate for more users that you could with a normal book. So you are actually expanding the reach of the material with a good interactive design in that sense.
- I think that's also what triggered me to become product manager here because you could shape the product and the requirements set in a way that this product could, will it become a more powerful tool than it was today. The previous generation just had 10 years anniversary and it was starting to become a little bit rusty around the edges, so it really needed a good redesign as well. I think 10 years is a bit too long if you ask me. So it was really needed to have a next generation of that product in the hands of the users because so much has happened in 10 years in web browsing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When is the next version of the internet book going to be available for students?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- We are aiming for a release for next summer, the summer of 22.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's coming very soon. Macal look. Very mindful of time. I know it's getting late for you there, but I also know that you have a heart for education, in particular, the education of UX and the introduction of people to the field. So I'd like to ask you briefly about that before we bring the show down to a close. You know, are particularly passionate, as I mentioned about introducing UX as a career path to high school student, high school students. Why is this something that you feel compelled to do?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, it is just become my impression that when we talk about information technology to younger kids, we are really sharing design with them. We are, at least in Scandinavia, where I'm from, we are taught stuff in high school about information technology. We even call it information technology. And we are basically told that there are two paths. You can either become kind of like a project manager or you can become a developer. Those are the two roles you can have in it. And you are not told about the area of user experience, design of experience, design, interaction design, digital design, graphical skills, design skills in terms of digital technology. And I think it's just a pity, I think we should inspire that curiosity to make people move into design at a much earlier age than just having them be introduced to programming and project management in their IT classes at a young age.
- So yes, I'm very passionate about telling people about what a UX designer actually does at a very young age as opposed to, I learned it when I was out of high school and starting to explore myself. And UX is something that you're introduced to when you are in technology already, maybe transitioning into the soft side of technology from the aspect of programming. Or maybe you are a graphic designer who wants to move into UX. So typically UX is an area that you kind of move into, you transition into from another area of interest within it, but you are not blankly introduced to it when you learn about technology. And I think it's too bad because it's just one of the pillars of technology is it's good to sign. So yeah, that's on my heart to maybe one day write a book for high school students or who
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Knows. That sounds like a good thing to put on your list of things to do. Maybe once you've shipped the internet book, you'll have a moment to plan that out and start putting some meat around those bones. Mikkel, reflecting back on your time as a practitioner in the field of UX over the last 25 years, part of which was spent, as we spoke about earlier in mission critical systems design, is there anything from your time spent in that context with that sort of gravity of outcome that human life literally in the hands of the designer, that you have taken and applied in your career and you think would be relevant for people working outside of mission critical systems to consider and apply in theirs?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Yeah, I think that I have learned that design is needed almost anywhere in digital solution. Well, anywhere there is a human interface of some sorts with the technology, we could be mindful of that. There's really a great need for good design skills in all areas of technology and we have so far, at least we are maybe not there as much anymore. We are moving into good design in marri areas now, fortunately, but there is just a vast need for good design in these areas and it would be a pity if we as designers didn't cover that and just skipped around it because of the specificity of the alienness of some of these areas that we wouldn't move into them because they're not so mainstream. So humans in all sorts of specialized professions are using digital systems. They all need to have UX designers on those teams.
- But I will say that I do actually see quite a bit of companies that actually are moving into having strong design teams in many areas. It's normal in banking now, it's normal in many industrial companies have it that make components for pumps and gadgets and electrical components. And all of these actually have some sort of design skill employed, maybe not intensely, but they are starting to do so. That's one of area that I really learned is that design can really be used and applied anywhere within technology and we can make a difference in all of those areas.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think there's some great thinking there and some challenge there perhaps for people that are considering where to take their UX career into areas that they may not have considered where design is very, very much needed. Michell, it's been fascinating exploring with you today some of the unique UX related challenges in mission critical design and also hearing about your work on the internet book. Thank you for so generously sharing those stories and your experiences with me today.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Thank you Brendan, and I hope it makes a difference to your listeners and good luck with your podcast.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome and I have no doubt that people will learn something from our time together here. Mikkel, if people wanna find out more about you and your work as a practitioner, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- Well, I would go through my website, NielsMikkel.com. Maybe you can put it in your
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Absolutely.
- Mikkel Michelsen:
- So that would be a good way to get in touch. Also, if you want to read about my mission critical cases there, you can find more info. That would be the way to go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Mikkel. I'll make sure that we link to those in the show notes and to everyone that has tuned in, it's been great having you listen as well. Everything that we've covered, as I've mentioned, will be in the show notes, including any of the resources that we've spoken about. If you have enjoyed the conversation and you wanna hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, of which Mikkel is a leader of both product management and design. So you got both there in one episode, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe and also tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value from these episodes. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn on under Brendan Jarvis. There should be no trouble finding me there. There's also a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes too. Or you can visit me at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.