Trip O’Dell

Episode 60
Brave UX

The Benefits of Neurodiversity in Design

In this episode of Brave UX, Trip O’Dell discusses the secret advantages of neurodiversity in design teams, and why it’s an essential ingredient for healthy, effective, and progressive design cultures.

Highlights include:

Why do you feel connected to Captain Kirk?
What do we lose when we pressure our children to conform?
How important is language in normalising neurodiversity?
What role did accessibility play in Amazon Flex’s Driver Experience?
How does design storyboarding help to achieve alignment?

February 8, 202201:23:33

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Who is Trip O’Dell?

Trip is a Senior Director of Product Design at Pearson, a 176 year old world-leading education company that helps people to achieve their potential through learning and assessment experiences.

Before joining Pearson, Trip was the Chief Experience Officer at Habitat Logistics, a Y-Combinator backed startup, where he led people, process, and product.

Trip has also worked as a UX designer and design leader for some of the biggest names in tech, including Adobe, Microsoft and Amazon.

During his time at Amazon, Trip was a UX Lead for Audible, a Design Manager for Alexa, and the Head of Design for Amazon’s Flex & Driver Experience.

He is a named inventor on five design and technology related patents, including automated messaging, synchronous presentation of content with braille translation, and dynamically guided user reviews.

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 Trip O’Dell. Trip is a Senior Director of Product Design at Pearson, a 176 year old world-leading education company that helps people to achieve their potential through the physical and digital learning and assessment experiences it provides. Before joining Pearson, Trip was the Chief Experience Officer at Habitat Logistics, a YCombinator back startup where he led people process and product.
Trip also spent several years helping companies to solve complex design problems and to build world-class product design teams through his consultancy Dark Matter. If you are wondering what gave Trip the right to do such work, it might be his six years at Amazon where he worked as a UX Lead for Audible, a Design Manager for Alexa and Head of Design for Amazon’s Flex and driver experiences critical last mile delivery. Or, perhaps it was his time at Microsoft as a Senior UX Designer on their cross-product cloud services like Outlook.com, or as a Lead UX Designer for Adobe where he worked on the Elements line of desktop and consumer cloud products. Trip is a named inventor on five design and technology related patents, including automated messaging, synchronous presentation of content with braille translation and dynamically guided user interviews. A generous contributor to the field of UX, Trip has given talks for Accenture’s Global Design Community, the World Usability Congress and UX Australia, to name a few. And now Trip’s here with me to have the first recorded Brave UX conversation of 2022. Trip, a very warm welcome and a very happy new year. Welcome to the show.
Trip O’Dell:
Thank you Brendan. I’m really pleased and flattered to be here. I sound pretty impressive based on what you’ve said. It’s been a longer conversa or longer journey than that those highlights would suggest. But thank you so much for having me.
Brendan Jarvis:
It’s my distinct pleasure and there’s much that I did leave out of your intro trip and I hope to come to some of that soon. So if you’re interested in a really interesting career journey, people then keep listening Cuz Trip has certainly had one in the words of, as we were talking about before offline, your spirit animal is Captain Kirk and in his famous words, let’s boldly go where no man has gone before today with this conversation, well at least I hope we will cover some things that have not come up before. So speaking of Captain Kirk, what is it about Captain Kirk? Why is he someone that you feel so connected to?
Trip O’Dell:
I think he’s such an audacious, ridiculous character so implausible in so many different situations. And I think what I admire is just a degree of self-awareness on how ridiculous he actually is and a bit of a rascal basically. I mean basically somebody who’s willing to do things in a different way or to lead a team in a way that you’re building around your weaknesses and achieve really interesting outside the box results, which has very much been the story of my life and something that I’ve admired. I’ve never had this sort of straight path forward. It’s always been, as you said, an interesting career. I’ve sometimes described it as the Forest Gump of design because I’ve bounced around to a lot of very implausible situations that are all true and that’s been stressful, but it’s also been incredibly rewarding. I always never run outta stories, which is fun. Sometimes other people may not think it’s as fun, but I do like to tell stories. Yeah, well
Brendan Jarvis:
We like stories on this podcast in the safe space with stories.
Trip O’Dell:
But yeah, I think that’s the sort of damn the torpedoes phasers on go full at it. That’s kind of the story of my life.
Brendan Jarvis:
And part of that, the story of your life and something that you’ve spoken about a number of times publicly in the past has been dyslexia, which is something that you have, it’s part of who you are. It’s not only dyslexia though I understand it’s also dysgraphia dyscalculia and also I believe as an adult you were diagnosed with A D H D. Yeah. What do those labels mean to you and how do they show up?
Trip O’Dell:
Yeah, labels. Labels are really tricky. [laugh], when I was first identified and I was identified and don’t say diagnosed, it was identified first grade or kindergarten back in like 1979, which A, most people didn’t even know what dyslexia was. B, most teachers didn’t recognize it and C, they didn’t screen it for it in first grade. And for me it was almost like the way that they would treat it was almost like a terminal illness. Like oh, he’s never be lucky to graduate high school. He’s just not, school isn’t going to be for him. Find a good trade. Don’t set expectations too high is sort of the don’t set him up for failure and which actually, actually were as dyslexic often experts at failure. It actually makes us incredibly resilient and it’s a characteristic and whether that’s nature or nurture, we don’t know. But that outsider having to do it in a different way is sort of the Captain Kirk reference.
And I think there’s a lot of things, lot of labels that go with it. And fortunately some of my work in graduate school, take that first grade teacher, it was around the cognitive science of how people process information and they say that people study psychology to figure themselves out, but a lot of the things that go with this, they can’t put a pin on exactly what dyslexia is or what part of the brain is responsible for it. And increasingly it’s a systems difference. It’s a systemically different type of brain that has some advantages to it. And what those things do is they describe symptoms. So for example, with A D H D, they describe, there’s more evidence supporting that D H D might actually be part of the autism spectrum and that it’s coincident with dyslexia about 50% of the time. And there’s other things like other differences like depression and everything else that go with that. Now whether that’s the system or it’s just part of the brain that goes with, there’s a difference in the neurodiversity of someone like myself. So I think when you look at that boldly going, I wasn’t going to get there on the game plan in the brochure, I had to find my own path and find my own experiences and tack those together to make what I found to be a pretty interesting career.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I suspect given from what you’ve said in the past that start particularly when it comes to the formal education system back in the, I think seventies or early eighties that you’d mentioned was a pretty rocky one. You know, you’ve mentioned in the past that you didn’t learn to read until you were in the fourth grade. And I’ll just now you said the pain of learning to read is even worse when you’re stuck with GoDog Go and Dick and Jane. Now I understand that your mum played quite an important role as assist, I suppose, to help you to learn to read. And that was by buying you the Chronicles of naia, not just the physical printed books but also I suppose they were, in this case they were the physical audio cassettes that accompany accompanied them. Now there’s something special about that combination of the written word and also the spoken word there isn’t there? How did that combination help you to learn how to read?
Trip O’Dell:
So a lot of the way that people learn how to read, there’s been a lot of research in this, unfortunately most of it hasn’t been well applied to how we, at least in the United States instruct children in reading. But we tend to take a one size, there’s a normal way to learn how to read and then there’s other things. And as we know within design, the brain is actually a very complex organ. There’s not one part of the brain that deals with language or how we read or process information. It’s a bunch of different systems and when you can reinforce and we’re not actually we, we’ve learned how to do reading is a technology, but what we actually learn through is through language and story. And so reinforcing that human voice with the words on the page, it’s almost like the training wheels is that you’re, even when you read to yourself, you’re still reading, you’re still hearing your own voice in your head.
That’s what a lot of the research suggests. And so whenever you can inject multiple modalities of processing information, you get better reinforcement and retention. And that’s really what my mom stumbled into. I mean I strongly supe suspect my mom was, had the same similar type of neurodiversity, sometimes had a reputation for being very direct and tough to deal with, but they never met my mother. She was a force of nature in an I E P meeting and a very, very strong advocate which is I think and also willing to throw a wrench in the gear. I think a lot of my success from first grade through eighth grade I was by eighth grade I was highly at risk of, I was truant. I missed 30 days of school in the first year of eighth, the first semester of eighth grade cuz I couldn’t faith going into school in the morning.
I was just set up for failure. I had the tyranny of low expectations is that it was like, well you know you’re have to work that hard cuz you’re a dyslexic and this you’re just not going to be able to do this. She put me into one of the most competitive prep schools in Washington DC with minimal supports. And I mean I didn’t graduate top of my class but it was definitely like I wasn’t solidly in the middle and it was something where they were able to meet me where I was at and challenge me but not accept excuses. And that was the game changer for me. That was more, there are things that I’m good at, there are things that I have interest in and the work ethic involved, I’m going to have to do it differently but that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible for me to do it.
And that’s been somewhat of the guiding light of how do I break through And it’s been about knowing more about myself and how I learn and how I process information and the tools that I use. And technology’s been a big part of that. That’s actually the impetus for me to move into tech for my prior career in teaching, I actually studied special education in undergraduate and wasn’t allowed to graduate with a special education certificate because my handwritten field notes were too messy. Now that’s illegal now today, but it was something where it wasn’t the path forward. So I ended up switching to political science because I wanted to advocate and I helped write the Ada Americans with Disability Act compliance plan at my university in the mid nineties ironically. And I’d been involved in the disability movement going back to childhood cuz it was a big, my mom came from a big family, I had an aunt with Down syndrome who lived with us. We were involved with Special Olympics and the Paralympics as a kid. So it’s been something that is, being an underdog and having to find different ways and work within a system that’s broken and not suited to you has been part of my life experience from the very beginning and that’s what makes user experience. Yeah, important.
Brendan Jarvis:
Just coming back to that formative experience with the Chronicles of Narnia, I just wanna dig into that just briefly because I understand that not that long ago while you’re at Amazon, you had the opportunity to work on a audible product that was doing very much or very in my mind of look at my way of looking at it, very similar way of assisting people to learn how to read by pairing the audio version of the book with the Kindle version of the book. Was that just an uncanny moment for you when you were working on this product? Did that sort of resonate or come to mind for you as you were engaging in that design challenge?
Trip O’Dell:
Well working at Audible all Up was a sort of an uncanny moment of this. It almost seemed faded given my experience. And I still have a heavy audiobook listener, not because I can’t read but because I, it’s my preferred method for processing information and I can do so much more with it. My frustration, you’re referring to whisper sync for voice, which was underway when I got there. Some of my patents are actually related to the things that we didn’t think were commercially viable or would’ve been too hard technically or not on the roadmap. And it was for me, one you talked about the time transcription to braille of voice. Well if you could take the audiobook and immediately transcribe it to braille or have that bidirectional transcription, it’s about breaking through the notion of what we think an audio medium is versus a textual medium and the computers and what we can do with cloud services eliminate.
It’s a false distinction. Similarly, there were a lot of things around Synchron, the synchronicity of content. There are things within the Kindle edition of a book like character sketches or references to historical events, what they call X-ray that weren’t available in the audiobook thing. And there’s things about an audiobook that aren’t great, which is losing your place, not being able to set a bookmark that’s easy to navigate back to creating notes or highlights or engaging in the shared information around what a Kindle edition enables you to do. Why wouldn’t that be in an audiobook, especially if you want people to pay for the book twice or to upgrade it to the audio version as well. There’s a major commercial opportunity there. And so a lot of that patent work was around frustrations on, well okay so I’m going to prototype you and show you what better would look like and at least we can get it in the patent library and on the agenda and the roadmap for something to do so.
And I was looking at productizing that for K-12, cuz I think there’s a lot of, one of the things that’s always interesting about working in education products is the people that are running those companies and setting those roadmaps are often the least qualified people to do be anywhere near education cuz they have business degrees, they don’t understand how schools actually work or teachers educate or how people learn. They look at it purely from a commercial opportunity and I think it’s out outside of their understanding. There’s a bias around it around, well serious business doesn’t happen at schools and it’s a trillion dollar industry globally. Probably multi-trillion dollars by this point when you talk about things like workforce education. So there’s a bunch of things going on there where it’s more about how do you get the business and the technology out of its own way using artifact driven design to show what better could look like. And that was I think, somewhat of the serendipity there.
Brendan Jarvis:
And these personal, we talked about the, the experience of growing up, learning to read the spanner and the works that your mom was willing to throw in into the system that wasn’t really serving you terribly well. The expectations that were then placed upon you. You’ve talked about your journey through graduate school or through college as well and what your intentions were there. And you’ve sort of touched briefly on be being a teacher, which I do want to come to in more detail soon. But these experiences have clearly given what you’ve done with your life have clearly had a huge impact on who you are and the value that you’ve contributed to the world. And you’ve said in the past, and I’m going to paraphrase here, that for most of your life felt invisible cause the world isn’t designed very well to meet the needs of people like you. Now off air, we were talking, and I know you’ve spoken about this publicly so I feel it’s safe to mention, but you’ve, you’ve got three children as far as I understand each of them has dyslexia. How does your lived experience of realizing that the world isn’t very well designed for people that sort of fall outside the median if you like, how does that weigh on you as a father with of children that have a similar system and internal system of brain to that you have to the one that you have?
Trip O’Dell:
So I think part of it, it’s an interesting question, right? Because any other parent, my kids don’t listen to me, especially as they get closer to teenagers. My oldest is 15 now, they don’t want to stand out, they don’t want to be identified. I didn’t really have an option. My youngest is similar in that in an elementary school that’s tailored to his needs in a way that the public schools couldn’t serve. And that’s been a bone of contention. But they want to do it the way everyone else does it. They don’t want to stand out, they don’t want to use voice dictation to get their ideas out even though, or they want to hand write it when they could type it because they don’t want to be different. And I understand that I didn’t have the choice not to be different cuz there weren’t the similar protections in place.
But I think if I had, it had been easier to go the traditional path, I would’ve done that. It just wasn’t a path that was open to me. So seeing them struggle and not wanting to take, hey there’s an easier way, it’s not cheating you just, your brain works differently. The teachers are on board with this, just do it this way. And they’re like, well no and you’ve had a few breakthrough moments where my daughter was freaking out around an assignment that was doing was like, okay, so let’s break this down dyslexic style, do a conbon on the things that you need to get done. It’s becoming, let’s visualize it, put it up on post-its. And I think we were going through the history of modern history of Afghanistan and the social justice. My daughter’s at a girls prep school and so they’re looking at this intersections of history and that sort of thing.
And so breaking this out in this article that she had to read, she had all the information but breaking it down and being able to explain the points chunking that down is not something that they would normally do in a classroom. And it’s much more of an interactive thing. And I think that’s the way I’ve had to learn. I’ve had to learn that process and those tools and not be precious about the way I get it done where they are trying to conform to expectations of this is the way it’s supposed to be done because that’s the way the teacher told me to do it. When as we know within design there can be any number of right solutions. And so trying to get them to accept that. And I see that a lot of that is because of the shame and stigma that goes with being different and it takes a life of experience and pushing the boundaries and captain curing the hell outta your life to get the confidence to say, yeah, that’s broken. I’m not going to do it that way. Appre, I’ll give you the outcome you want. Don’t tell me how to do it. That’s a lot to put on a 12 year old.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I’m a parent also only of one child at the moment who’s only about three and a half. So I’m yet to go through some of that pushback potentially. Although there has been quite a bit of pushback in the last couple of years, as you probably know from having three from yourself
Trip O’Dell:
It comes in waves.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah. I think we’re in a good happy space at the moment, but that’s going to come for me too, cuz my son is also different. He has a congenital kidney disease and we found out about that maybe about 18 months ago. So eventually he’s probably going to go deaf and will also need kidney replacement at some point. So I suppose I’ll be on the chopping block for that. Hopefully I’ll be able to give him one. So I’m kind of thinking ahead about some of those conversations that I’ll have to have with my son and think about what you’re saying there about the conversations that you are having with your children who you are trying to obviously encourage them to I use this word loosely, but hack the system in a way that works for them. Making use of some of the technology and the advancements that you yourself have personally contributed to. Is that a little frustrating that society, the systems in which they’re operating in force them to feel the need to conform so much that they don’t feel open enough to embrace some of the advancements that we’ve been afforded in the last 10, 20, 30 years?
Trip O’Dell:
It’s hard to watch. I think I understand it. So I mean it’s monkey brain. I think we like to believe that we’re very evolved and we actually haven’t evolved much in about 300,000 years. And our social benefits are things that have helped us survive and thrive. But part of that means that you have to kind of conform to the crowd. So I understand that that pressure. I think one of the things that is hard is that we stigmatize failure in a way where it’s, or we try to do individual attribution to success or failure. I think part of that goes to certain notions around hard work versus luck and it’s often a combination of the two in terms of success or that when somebody gets Steve Jobs, the inventor of the iPhone, no there were many, the hundreds and hundreds of people went into the design and the development of that product.
It was somebody that was often mercurial in his point of view on what it should be and what it shouldn’t be. And it’s a team effort. But a lot of that too is it has to be informed by failure. And I think oftentimes we’re afraid, we’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid personally of failure, we won’t let people fail on our teams, which leads to micromanagement. We don’t want children to fail because that could affect their long-term outcomes for getting into college or grades or what have you. When failure gives you that confidence and rebuilding from the failure, the resilience of it, that growth mindset is what allows somebody like myself to go full kohi Maru and work around the test to get command of a Starship.
But it takes that confidence and know knowledge of what failure looks like. It doesn’t hurt that much. It certainly has a lot more to teach than success, but we deprive our children of that. So I think that’s more concerning them being accepted for their differences because I think if given the opportunity to work differently and learn differently and that we had a more nuanced approach to how we teach the outcomes would be far more obvious. It wouldn’t have to be it, you wouldn’t be brave to be different, it would just be you’re different everyone else.
Brendan Jarvis:
What was that conversation like for you then as you were a child at home? You’ve obviously spoken about your mom being a huge supporter of you and some of the actions she took, but how was dyslexia talked about or received your experience of that while you were still under their roof, under your parents’ roof?
Trip O’Dell:
It’s funny. I think a lot of that it’s just my, I, I mean I don’t know if my mom was dyslexic or not, but there is evidence of it in her face. She was one of 12 kids. So there’s plenty of data points and it’s highly heritable about 50% chance if you have one parent with dyslexia as it goes to about 75% if you have a sibling with it. My father, I think I’m convinced is dyslexic. Now the shame of that and wanting to protect your children from that I think often makes it sort of hushed. One of my 11 aunts and uncles on my mom’s side had down syndrome and she grew up with us and she was among the first generation that wasn’t sent off to an institution. And my grandparents advocated for schools for her and fully socialized. But I mean this is an environment in the seventies and eighties where the R word was thrown around indiscriminately.
It’s just sort of a passing way of talking about it. And so any sort of difference in how you process or learn was sort of conflated with the struggles that anyone had. So I think there was the stigma but then there was the support. But I think there was just the cut yourself, cut your nose off, spite your face, Irish just you said I couldn’t do it, now I’m going to go do it right. I come from very, very strong, tough military Irish Catholic. The worst thing you can do if you don’t want me to do it is tell me I can’t do it. And so it was a weird mix.
Brendan Jarvis:
You’ve mentioned a few words there. You’ve mentioned shame you also mentioned the word stigma and I’ve heard you talk about in the past and I wholeheartedly agree with you about the importance of language and we’ve also mentioned the word labels in our conversation so far today. And I think in my opening question or close to, I mentioned the word diagnosis, so the attributing of a different neurosystem as a pathology as opposed to just a different system. When I understand that dyslexia is something that 15 to 20% of the world’s population is likely to have. So it’s not like it’s, it’s a complete edge case here. But cuz coming back to language, how important is language in, and again I don’t know if I’m using the right language, but in normalizing the conversations that our children are going to encounter in the school system and also that we encounter in the workforce around these forms of neurodiversity. Because I’ve heard you describe yourself in the past as someone who’s different but not disabled. So again, you’re drawing a distinction there and the way in which you are thinking about your neurodiversity. So how important and what role should language play or need does it need to play in helping to remove some of that shame and that stigma that is still clearly associated with people who are different to the majority?
Trip O’Dell:
So this is a bit of a non-sequitur but I’m assuming that you might connect it to some of future stories. But when I got outta school, I worked for a couple years and then I decided I did want to teach. And so I joined the Jesuit volunteers in, became a teacher on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, which is home of the Alala Lakota or the Sioux. It’s if you’ve seen dances with wolves, that was the tribe I was working with. And it was a nearly 200 year old mission or actually more like 150. And those Indian mission schools were set up for, and I mean Indian is also a tricky word those Indian mission schools were set up as a tool, a genocide really. I mean there was a mix of motivations but they would take the children out of the home, they would punish them, cut their hair, they’d punish them for speaking Lakota and is in English.
And because there was an understanding that language is culture language, language is a cultural artifact. So even the aphorisms that you as a New Zealander and I as an American use sound odd to one another’s ears, it’s shaped by the culture that we’re in. And so I think partially the connection is that how we talk about ourselves, and this gets into the storytelling as well, is that we are the stories that we tell ourselves and our stories are made up of our words which reflect the concepts as we understand them. I think a couple of funny anecdotes is in the Lakota language there are things like the word for horses, which is holy dog because they hadn’t seen horses before the Spanish and they have a long dog-like face or the English, the word translate for the word for English, people translates as to they get red and if they’re Irish it’s translates to they get red. Red because they get sunburned and [laugh] out on the plains. And the word for white sort of privileged Americans is chu, which is taker of the fat, the person that would shoot the buffalo and only take the best parts. So those that cultural lived experience in the way that manifests in words and we construct our understanding of the world and find words to fit that understanding, that’s how it shapes and why language is important.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, huge, hugely important. And I wanna dive into this time that you spent at Pine Ridge as well. And I don’t think you mentioned specifically, but I understand the prep school that your mom put you in was a Jesuit school and that you then, as you’ve just spoken about there after a couple of years in the workforce I believe as a speech writer, which is, there’s some interesting territory to cover there as well potentially if we have time, you decided to go and volunteer here as a teacher now, just so that people have some idea of the, I suppose the socioeconomic reality of the reservation. I understand it’s the second poorest place in the western hemisphere only surpassed by Haiti and that your father, who you’ve mentioned was in the military, described it after visiting as, and I’ll quote him now and unaccompanied tour of Afghanistan. So just to put that in perspective, he’s not a happy place.
Trip O’Dell:
Well yeah, it was more the unaccompanied tour from hell is I think how he put it. It’s not quite the same as a war zone, but it was definitely, it’s a very, it’s beautiful place and it’s got a beautiful culture but it’s three cultures in conflict there. And the Jesuits, I went high school, university part of graduate school and the volunteers, I almost became a Jesuit but celibacy was a deal breaker for me. But I think there’s a piece of that around they have this notion of finding your vocation and making this notion of what they call magis, which is the greater, which means that making, not working to perfection but making things better and doing that through service. And so this Jesuit mission, it goes back to 1888 was very, had turned the corner from being sort of an Indian school to being a Catholic and Lakota school where we had both types of spirituality and we taught Lakota, I taught photography and stayed a few weeks ahead of the kids in flash and dream we were in Photoshop and that’s the beginnings of my design career was I found that I had a knack for it.
But it is, it’s got about an 85% alcoholism rate, about 80% unemployment rate. It’s got a lower g D per capita G D P than China. And I had kids that went, were accepted at Dartmouth in Yale and also spent 20 plus years in federal penitentiary for running drugs, some of them being the same kids. So it’s a very, very tricky place and I look at that as a crucible moment. Everything that had prepared me for that experience was then challenged by that experience to boil me down to what I actually was about and that’s what drove me to design. I never like design, I like the craft of design. I’m not all that and not always great at it. But what has motivated me to stay in it is the impact that intentionally well designed systems that consider how we’re trying to amplify human potential is what’s kept me in design and focused on the work that I do is that I’ve got a very short number of decades, small handful of decades on this planet.
Would I rather be rich or would I rather be known for having made a difference for some people? And I’ve chosen the latter and that’s always, I’ve been fortunate in the nature of the work that I do to also get some of the former but [laugh] just the nature of the beast in tech. But I think if I won the lottery or became a billionaire startup founder or something like that, I’d probably leave and go back to teaching everything that I know about design actually started in the classroom, not cuz it’s ultimately about people and how they process information and experience the world and that’s really what you’re trying to convey in a classroom
Brendan Jarvis:
Set. So Pine Ridge, you’ve spoken about how everything that you had learned or preparing for up until that point was to make you ready for that experience. And I was curious to ask you about if you recall the first night that you went to sleep on the reservation, what was going through your mind, do you remember what that was like on end of that first day? What assumptions had you entered with and what were you then thinking about as you just experienced your first there?
Trip O’Dell:
My first day there was, what the hell have I gotten myself into? It was, if you don’t like the weather in South Dakota, wait a minute. But I got there at the end of the summer and it was I’d driven, I’d driven out there in this beat up old Jeep and had taken the wrong term and I ended up taking a secondary road all the way across the state of South Dakota. Never having spent any time in the west not realizing that I just added another seven hours to my car trip because it’s that it’s very, very long. And so I got there, I was kind of exhausted as dusty. There was all these volunteers that were on their way out after two or three years of work and then there were people that were inbound and I was one of the first ones there. And in my first couple of hours there I met a couple of the volunteer one had was going to the local powwow to the rodeo and he was going to be a B, he was going to ride a bull.
He studied up on becoming a bull rider in addition to being a volunteer and another guy we’re all trying to get to know another guy who’s local, a John Cross dog. He was wearing a cowboy hat and spurs. John always ran around with spurs and somebody was burning sage which smell if you’re not unfamiliar very sounds very, smells very much like marijuana. And so this is the late nineties, I’m a kid from the suburbs, I’m like wow, I’ve got a bunch of hot smoking cowboy Indians with a bunch of people that are in the middle of nowhere and I’m living in a trailer apparently. Cuz you live in collective poverty, see
Brendan Jarvis:
Intentional. You didn’t turn out wearing a blazer did you?
Trip O’Dell:
No, no I left that at home but good. But there were a lot of things where you like it didn’t take much to stand out and rumors in a very small community you get rumors going really quickly. So you had to be very intentional about how you present and everybody hates you for the first six months, all the kids and the local people cuz they see you as this entitled outsider that comes in to kind of fix them and the first thing.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that would kind of be true, right? Yeah, there’s some element of truth behind that,
Trip O’Dell:
Especially people that are freshly, most of the people there come right outta college. So you’re this wide-eyed, obviously accomplished going to a good school and things and you’re coming out here and these poor people, it’s an easy thing trapped to fall into cuz that’s what. But once you learn in the first six months is you’re there to learn and understand that you’re operating. In order to influence them, you have to understand them first. And it’s much research is that you don’t want to come in and I say this is the right solution and be nodding your head no. You actually wanna learn what are the unmet needs and where can you meet people and what not to do. And I also met my wife that first night. I didn’t remember what she does cuz I made chicken Alfredo, which her mom still talks about. She and her mom were there that night. So it was a very, I guess you’ve picked up, it was a very momentous night. I don’t remember it being that momentous, but apparently a lot of things were happening. It was a very crazy entry into a very crazy two years.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned you were there to learn and research here, have to understand where people are at so you can meet them there. After that time had passed and you you’d sort of figured out where people were at, what was it that you realized and what action or what did that enable you to do once you’d figured that out?
Trip O’Dell:
Well, so I was there from 98 to 2000. So the end of the first Clinton administration and we were talking our second Clinton administration, we were talking there was a lot of talk around digital divide and Pine Ridge was one of those areas where they were looking at, we went from my first year where we had one dial up connection in the entire school system. And it was at the high school in the library, two actually full broadband networked across campus. And that was amazing. And some of the things that I was investing in when I started out there, I had a leaky dark room with 30 year old, or actually some of ’em were older cameras and an old Mac Quadra. And then I raised a bunch of money from family and friends and put it in a state-of-the-art media lab where we were doing video editing, editing with iMovie and a bunch of other stuff that was cutting edge at the time.
And I was looking at the opportunity for technology, I started to sort of pattern recognize like, wow, I’m pretty good at this computer stuff and you can do a lot of stuff with it. And I’m pretty good at it and I bet there’s a lot of opportunity here for things like remote work or for people to find avenues that aren’t sort of the typical Jesuit school, English, math and science and you become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever. And it could be actually a creative expression. The kids could actually have something where they’re making media and story telling stories of their own and doing things that they enjoy. And that set off a light bulb for me, which is like, well that’s the kind of stuff I like to do too. And technology helped me. So it was really the beginnings of this, how do we use technology to scale human capability? How do we use technology to augment the talents that are already there but allow them to shine through regardless of where you’re coming from? And that that’s been sort of the path forward throughout. I mean it’s learned a lot more since then, but I like if I’m revising history or looking backwards, that’s I think where it really started.
Brendan Jarvis:
And as a designer and the things that you’ve spoken about as a design leader, you’ve drawn this distinction between good design and bad design and what’s been going on for me as I’ve listened to you tell the story of Pine Ridge and of your life frankly has been, the dots have been joining for me as to the language that you’ve used to describe good design. And I’ll just you again now you’ve said that good design solves problems in ways that reinforce our values and how we expect the world to work. And that’s the end of the quote. And I’ll also then paraphrase something else you’ve said, which is that that focuses on good design, focuses on meeting the basic human needs of being included, valued and connected. That’s quite a powerful framing for good design and it’s not that much of a stretch of an imagination to think about what bad design is. But is this touching on what you see as your mission to further how core is this definition of good design and the products and companies in which you’ve worked at to pursue that? How closely aligned with the value that you want to contribute to the world is this working definition of good design?
Trip O’Dell:
Well, I mean I’ve probably not putting that part on the table, but I mean it’s often driven choices from companies I’ve chosen to leave are companies that I’ve been fired from or what have you is not necessarily being able to work on the right things, solve the right problem. Is this something like that? I wanna spend money’s easy money with enough hard work or enough influence or what have you. It’s fairly, it’s not that complicated to secure money if it’s a good idea, which you don’t have a lot as time and frustration. And I’ve never been somebody that can, to my wife’s chagrin, not, I’m not a clock puncher. I work way too much. And part of it is because I really care deeply about the problem, the nature of the problems that I’m solving. And I’ve always been able to tie, even when it’s things like fairly mundane like logistics, I’ve always been able to tie what I’m doing to a human outcome that is about someone advocating for their own autonomy or their own freedom or their own creativity or their ability to express themselves.
And when I talk about good design reinforces our values and our understanding of the world quite literally, when you look at, I mean I’m a big constructivist Jean pge, we construct our understanding of the world through schema and mental models. Good design creates illusions around how something works and the design is actually there to fool us. And that’s not actually how it works. Alexa doesn’t work by just talking to it. The talking to it is an interface technology that we’ve done to make it easier to pass information to a cloud service and get a response back. It’s not that complicated at its most basic level what we value, how we see ourselves. Apple’s brand is about mean. Whether it started out with the digital hub, with the iMac and the iPod and everything else, it’s all of your stuff in one place. And if you look at the lifestyle branding around the freedom and the creativity and the living your best life, and that’s the picture that everybody kind of wants.
Maybe not on a beach in Santa Cruz, but that’s the power and the freedom that people want. And so that reinforces the story that we tell about ourselves as human, as humans. It solves a problem, it removes a pain and it tells us a better story of the version of ourselves we aspire to be. And that is somewhat reflected in the products we use and in the systems that we prefer. I mean somebody designed airport security that certainly was not designed with human needs in mind per se. So I think the contrast of good and bad design is that it leans in and conforms to the humans in the system. And I think that’s what I mean by that.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned the word mundane and terms of some of the endeavors that you’ve applied your skills to. And I wanna focus on that because for most of us working in design, we’ll be working on what you could consider to be mundane products and experiences. And I, I’m just going to call a spade a spade here. Here. We’re not all working on the latest and greatest cutting edge things. And I believe you have a really good illustration. You mentioned logistics of how even if you are working on something that you might consider to be mundane or others may consider to be mundane, that you can still make that experience for the people who are going to be using it a good experience in a truest sense of the phrase as we just discovered before. And that’s when you’re at Amazon. I think I mentioned in your introduction you were head of design and you’re in charge of prime’s last mile delivery experience. I won’t go into too much detail cause I obviously would love for you to fill in some blanks here, but just to give some context to people that started as a two city pilot grew to over 11 and a half billion US dollars within 18 months of that crucial
Trip O’Dell:
Our part of it. Our part of it, it was 21 billion.
Brendan Jarvis:
Your part of it, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. So it’s a hugely significant service as far as Amazon’s value proposition is concerned. But when you first started, you discovered something, you discovered the experience that was shaping up for those, I believe their drivers was disjointed and even dangerous. So what was going on for you when you first stepped into that role, into that project? What did you observe and then how did you transform that experience for those drivers into something that was a truly good example of design?
Trip O’Dell:
Yeah, so let me give a little bit extra flavor. So in many things with Amazon, people hold Amazon up as this hugely technologically advanced company. They, they didn’t start that way. And the way that they operate is very much duct tape and bailing wire and a lot of things that are manual. And so when you’re running that as a two city pilot, really what that started out with the app that was used and I was hired to run the app team, what I did is I expanded the scope to be more of a service design challenge cuz that’s actually where the stuff was falling apart. Logistics is entirely invisible to most people. And so that had been one designer, one product manager, both of whom were sort of mid senior in their career and one engineering team. And a lot of thing corners had been cut and it was iOS only.
And as things go at Amazon, it’s ready fire, aim. It was something that had Bezos really felt was the most strategically important thing we were working on at the company cuz it allowed us to keep costs. And it was about customer obsession. It was like how do we enable free shipping with Prime if we’re getting soaked by these third party dependencies? So owning our own systems and connecting what we called flywheels to other parts of the business like fulfillment by Amazon and a bunch of other things, it’s a very complex system and we were the tip of the spear. So you’ve got something that was built on M V MVP and duct tape and lots of technical debt, lots of choices that didn’t make a ton of sense. And when they had set up, this was for the crowdsource drivers only running for Prime Now, which was one in two hour delivery from these delivery stations and it was iOS only.
And so when they decided to expand it, they said, well we’re going to do Android two and we’re going to add AMZ L, which is the regular smile box type stuff. The regular logistics, which works entirely differently because they’re these long four to eight hour routes versus a one to two hour route with a driver in their car. And it hadn’t been designed for that and the way that the pricing worked and people, they would, so one example of that was the way that they had done the economy where it took forever to onboard and train people, there was all of this money that they were spending to attract drivers. They would not communicate with drivers because of the nature of a 10 99 tax relationship cuz they’re not direct employees, they’re like independent contractors and they would put their availability hours in the onboarding and then it would be deep in the app and they would never revisit it.
So when they would send out these work notifications, also they didn’t have a way to automate the work availability. And so they would drop everything at midnight on a Wednesday and you’d have this immediate race condition where people were building aino bots to sort of tap, tap, tap, tap on the app to get work whether or not they were available at that time or not. And so you would have a 30% no-show rate with these drivers and people figuring out like, oh well I’m going to take half the packages and they can’t prove that I didn’t deliver them all. So you’d have to pay people twice to deliver ’em. So there’s a lot of fraud and abuse and people were looking at the drivers and I was like, this is actually a systems problem. Most people are not intended. They kind of go to the lowest common denominator and they’re getting off boarded and we’re spending a lot of money onboarding them.
And so it was a broken system. And so we pushed and pushed and pushed for the redesign of this economy and it was our top priority, but we pushed from, it’s more than just offering. They wanna be able to see, we were looking at problems. They didn’t have complete visibility into what they were earning or when things would get deposited into their bank or when things were paid out. They also had two very different economic models where one was tip supported, which was prime now and the other one was a flat rate and how do you make the distinction and where do you go? And they couldn’t cross driver pools and a lot of this was just technical debt and they went big very quickly and we were catching up. There was another thing. So when we were able to make the case for this better design, in the first release we improved driver attendance. We went from 70% attendance rate to something like 98%, which is a massive improvement. It’s billions of dollars. What
Brendan Jarvis:
Did you change?
Trip O’Dell:
We changed the way that offers worked. We changed the visibility of like, okay so you got an offer and it was accept or decline and it was targeted to you and if you declined it, it went to the next person. So we avoided that race condition or we knew what their availability was, but we didn’t require them to be proactive about it. It was just like, are you available at this time? Sure, okay, we’ll sign you. That was the first change. The other one was showing when it took 48 hours for tips to settle on the tips supported routes. So from the transition from accepting the work to the state before you work and how do I get there to when I check in to when I’ve done the work and it’s done to when it deposits in my account. We had this card that changed and gave you updates on status so that people had more clarity and trust in the system that they weren’t getting ripped off. And then that changed things substantially because we were actually asking people when they were available and we weren’t offboarding them for not showing up when they didn’t even know, cause there wasn’t even a notifications system in place, which was another thing that we pushed on.
Brendan Jarvis:
So this is kind of tying back into this idea of meeting people where they’re at rather than expecting them to come to where the system’s at,
Trip O’Dell:
Right? Yeah, exactly. I mean think in technology we focus on, we don’t recognize our own privilege and bias around, these are people that if you go back far enough had very high autonomy in these systems, they could command line script in Unix and they can code and they understand how computers and cloud services work. And if you go to someplace like slash dot or something, there’s R T F M, read the instructions or figure this out and somebody’s like, I just wanna figure out how to do this macro and excel or I wanna figure out, I don’t know where I can’t get this thing to work in the way that I want. Is there other solutions that other people have tried? And there’s a lot of trolling that goes on with that. Now with design, if you can make it more obvious and simple, there’s trade offs between the simplicity and power of a system.
Traditionally we’ve designed for the power features, or at least that was at some companies, it’s like working on Photoshop. You’re going to do the, you’re not going to simplify it. You’re going to in inject a killer feature that nobody else can do. And that’s a power feature versus something where it’s just simpler for everyone to do and they’ve had to default to rather to make Photoshop simpler shipping versions of it that are easier to use or just the basics for what somebody is actually going to want to accomplish. And that’s I think the balance of product design or any sort of design is, how do I simplify it? There’s not one set of rules. It’s like what’s the person trying to accomplish? How do I know that? It’s more about people. Design think is a perfect example of that, which is it just takes like, hey, here’s a good process or here’s a good way of thinking about the problem and how do you break it down. So if I’m stumbling into that, I apologize it’s not my intention. But yeah, I guess I suppose it is. I’ll take your word for it.
Brendan Jarvis:
And how accessible was this driver experience, the actual interface here? You spoke about how you were actually, initially it was about the app which you then expanded to become a service design challenge and there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes and also a much broader scope with that challenge. But just put us behind the wheel of one of these delivery vehicles as the person. Yeah, what was it like initially and then what were some of the changes that you made to make it easier?
Trip O’Dell:
So I’ll speak about this cuz it, I’ve gone on the record on it in Brad Stone’s new book Amazon Unbound. Talk a little bit about this is it was terrifyingly unsafe in my estimation, doing ride alongs, part of this is because everything was v MVP design, sort of duct tape and bailing wire. And that’s fine if you’re trying to do a new social networking app, putting somebody behind a 3000 pound vehicle and loaded with packages and it’s under a tight deadline and they could get in trouble if they’re not delivering on time and it’s thought through. Do all notifications need to happen in the same way and distractions and a lot of things that little logistics companies know like, don’t take a left turn, always take a right turn and keep coming around if you miss a crossing. So we actually looked at some of the things like ergonomics, like Fitz Law and Hicks Law, and we used accessibility W C A G standards and we used aaa and that was May Merkin who was on my team.
She was the original designer of Flex and really wanted to improve it and may use triple A W C A G to address some of the contrast and readability issues. Now, we weren’t designing for people who are blind or low vision or low mobility, but in that context everyone has a shorter attention span, less precise reaching and touching of buttons. They have the visibility at night and during the day. And the contrast for ratios and readability of buttons are the priority of should I be getting job offers at the same time that I’m actually getting turned by turn directions in an unfamiliar neighborhood? Those types of notifications, those are the things that we were really pushing our business and technical partners on addressing because
Brendan Jarvis:
How was that received? Yeah, because a lot of, you know, spoke about MBAs before and I don’t wanna slam them too much because they’re inevitably, there will be some that listen to this and there’s probably some very nice MBAs, very nice analytical thinkers. Most of them are designers, right? Accessibility is often viewed as an expense on the p and l. It’s often looked at as a feature or something that’s a nice to have. What was that conversation like with the business? I mean, I don’t know if you can comment on this, maybe you wanna speak in general terms, whatever you’re comfortable with, but what was that conversation? How was it received? And you were like, we actually wanna do W C A G 3.0 aaa, which is that we’re that, yeah, that’s an extreme level of that’s the highest you can go, right? That’s not mandatory that’s the right thing to do, but that’s going to come at some time and expense. How did that conversation go?
Trip O’Dell:
Well, I mean it was refactoring the app. I mean there was a bunch of things going on where Android and iOS are trying to ship the same feature at the same time, but working on different roadmaps and different sprint schedules. So there was a lot of things where Amazon being the company that it is, it’s a very contentious place. I affectionately call it fight club. So they were contentious
Brendan Jarvis:
Conversations. You lasted six years right in fight Club. So you did some serious rounds.
Trip O’Dell:
It’s the resilience, right? It’s the failing. It can take a beating, but I think anything that strikes of a dependency or what have you is hard and you just don’t give up because you, you’re told no. They have other pressures on them that weren’t necessarily on their agenda in the same way that they were on ours. One of the benefits or curses of working in design is that you can see you’re responsible for end-to-end. And so you can see problems that are outside of a particular product manager or particular team silo and you’re saying, yeah, we need to consider this and you don’t necessarily have control over what they do. So there was a little bit of how do we diplomatically approach this but then also pick the right fights. And part of it was we can show them, we don’t have to tell them.
So if we, we’d probably still be there debating it if we had to just use our words. But May did a wonderful job mocking up all the states of this screen and showing the before and after states. And we put this on foam core in our space and engineers and product managers have walked down and walk through and we’d say, oh well this is just something we’re working on. They’d get really interested and they’d see how much better it looked and why and how we could get there in a transitional state. And that took on, eventually took on a life of its own because they saw the benefits across logistics. So it didn’t actually get built for flex, it got built for the entire logistics division. And after I got there, but I mean after I left, but it was one of these things where I didn’t sell it on the right thing to do, never do things for the right reasons, but sell on greed or sell on self-interest. So if we can say that, look, we can make this safer, we can make people more productive, we can reduce
Brendan Jarvis:
So less risk in terms of legal risk to the company. So you started framing things in terms of bottom the bottom line
Trip O’Dell:
Or business opportunity. And I think one of the big, cuz that’s the other thing is that selling on greed is like look, your addressable market expand. I mean in some cases your addressable market expands. If you look at this, going back to the audible example, if we were productizing, if we started with the mistake that I made there was talking about people with dyslexia and the costs to school systems. They cost twice as much people in special education cost twice as much as the typical student. How can you reduce those costs and without necessarily having to involve a reading specialist? Well if you had a product that was designed for that and it also helps the other students, but they heard that it was a niche product. I think with design we’re so obsessed with speed and we’re so obsessed with V mvp. MVP is great for a product.
It’s not great for thinking like m MVP is often used as a analog for lazy thinking, in my mind, a pill I’ll die on because they think with a design it works very differently than say an engineering team which has to work in a linear fashion and iterative and they work in sprints and cycles and that sort of thing. And design teams can work in that way too. They want to design sort of Gantt chart timelines in that there’s a linear amount of work that needs to be done. Design is more like a roller coaster where the fastest path between two points is actually a curve, not a straight line. So there’s a heavy lift in the beginning where you have more and more certainty, whether it’s through research or prototyping and iteration and clarifying your vision and what you’re doing, what you’re not doing.
And then you ride the roller coaster down because the rest of the stuff is easy. UI is easy, you can build it well, it’s easy when you have component systems. And that’s an argument to actually build a component system is that when you have software that people can use off a product for engineering teams, you can use that right off the shelf. It’s easier. Why would they build it themselves? Reduce the friction to be able to adopt it. The same thing goes to products, but that’s where you have to actually front load your design efforts and it’s slow and it seems like it takes way more time than it should, but then the speed of execution is much, much faster and the results are better. Versus trying to just throw stuff against the wall and iterate and iterate and iterate when if you started with an idea you didn’t understand the problem, you’re just trying to hope the data will tell you something that you don’t know why you don’t have a point of view on why it’s better. That’s just bad design. It’s bad product.
Brendan Jarvis:
That rollercoaster, you know, spoke about how there’s not a straight line from point A to point B and design, it’s often a rollercoaster that really bothers people that have a need to control and a need to be sure of what’s going to happen. And generalizing here, those people tend to live more so outside of design and the more businessy functions of, I say businessy as a throwaway term, good design is good business and vice versa, I wholly believe. But how do you make people, how have you made people more who are uncomfortable with that rollercoaster ride more comfortable or at least comfortable enough to get on the rollercoaster? So by that point it’s almost too late to get off it mid ride. How have you done that? Yeah,
Trip O’Dell:
We have to. So not everything. Yeah, it’s a reformed crusader from this standpoint of design vision. It actually, if you want to own it, you need to let it go. You need to involve other people and have it moved to a shared vision. And that means that you need to use the right artifact for the right purpose. So a lot of times that means getting outta wire frames or stomping the brakes and saying you’re not ready for wire frames. We’re going to do some research kind of owning your process or even prototyping, doing vision proto you’re saying, I have no data or I have just this limited amount of data and a little bit of insight and it like we’re going to, but what do you think of this prototype on a way we could do it? And getting people to a plausible fiction, not science fiction, but a plausible fiction of what it could look like, how it could feel. Most people I would say, I’d argue even some designers are terrible at understanding and experience just by looking at mockups and wire frames because it doesn’t seem real. That’s the power of prototyping.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you’ve used another, I believe this is relatively unique to you too. You’ve used a almost graphic novel comic strip type artifact or a way of communicating design mean Amazon has got such a polarizing culture and you’ve described it in the past as the most ethical company that you’ve worked at. You just might not like their ethics, but they’re true to them. And one of the methods that they use to think through what an experience is going to be like I believe is a press release. But you seem to have seen you.
Trip O’Dell:
Yeah, the pr prf EQ process. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. I mean tell us about that and what you amended, you sort of hacked that, you kind of augmented that with, like I said, the sort of comic strip way of communicating what an experience could be that I believe worked pretty well for you. Yeah,
Trip O’Dell:
So this actually tying back even the dyslexia, one of the things with dyslexia is that our brains work differently. And the right hemisphere is the visualization. And the spatial awareness is much stronger than the left hemisphere, which is more sort of facts and figures or our processes. And so I’ve heard many dyslexia talk about, it’s a movie in my head, I can see it, I can understand it, I can see what that shape looks like or what that final form is going to look like. I wish I could just explain it to you. And I think very early in my design career, even prior to Adobe, I was using 3D software because it had little basic people models that I could put in context cuz we were designing exhibits in museums to show how people might interact with this system that doesn’t have a direct interface.
It’s a very mockup or a wire frame is increasingly a very ineffective tool for the type of design that we’re doing where we’re talking about ubiquitous computing and voice interfaces and that sort of thing. But one of the things that I’ve refined over the years is this notion of what I call a strategy storyboard, which plays well with in a number of ways especially with the Amazon working backwards process, which is different than the fq, the working Backwards process is telling the story of what the product is going to be on day one, buzzword on day one, and it’s plausible, grounded, achievable. And you’ve got data. And that’s what the frequently asked questions are for, is to actually have the really critical questions and data points. And then the press release is really to paint that narrative. Now people equate P R F AQ with working backwards and it is a tool for working backwards, but it’s not the only tool for working backwards.
And many times it’s not even the right tool, especially as you get more in incre, it’s not the same as saying the buy now button versus Alexa, which is incredibly complex. And so being able to show something that has more cinematic aspects to it where there’s more cues and information that can be put into every panel, whether it’s what’s in the person’s head, what’s the story they’re telling themselves and about their goal, what’s their emotional state, what’s the context that they’re in physically, what are they saying, what are they doing? What is the system doing? And how do you get those interactive moments between people and systems and environments? And they’re very good for that. I think the other thing is that the way that I refined the process, I use a tool called Comic Life. I didn’t always use that, but that’s really easy to use is that when you can get people together, you don’t need a ton of design skills to be able to tell that kind of a story using comic life because you can take photographs that somebody shoots on a smartphone, you have to worry about continuity and that sort of thing.
But you just drop ’em in there and people can write scripts and what are they thinking, what are they doing? So you can involve your engineering and product partners in that process. And like I’ve had people go from zero to solid storyboards within two hours with having no prior context. We did that at UX Australia. There’s a lot of fun. I’ve done that on products around last mile. It’s actually a very engaged process that doesn’t require that it’s really, it’s been hard during the pandemic, I’ve found a hack around that. But when you can get people together, you can actually involve them in the solution and in the storytelling, then it becomes our story regardless of your role. So it’s not, it’s design led, but it’s not design driven. It is design led product experience where we’re asking questions, we’re mapping the journey, we’re trying to illustrate that with storyboards. And that’s another form of prototyping. I mean I, I’m of the opinion that you can prototype with a mud puddle and a stick as long as you’re actually communicating clearly. That’s the point is to be able to communicate clearly
Brendan Jarvis:
There’s something in that collaborative exercise that ability to do that together to have created something with somebody else that seems to be really powerful and important and getting clear on what it is that your solution actually is, which is over and above what you can communicate in the written word and what people might interpret from that. Now have you found that doing this strategic form of I of story storyboarding almost has
Trip O’Dell:
Sounds better than comic
Brendan Jarvis:
Strips your solution to comic strips, right?
Trip O’Dell:
Right. Yeah. Strategic executives
Brendan Jarvis:
Has that meant that you’ve managed to stay aligned or reach clarity and alignment earlier and stay aligned longer using visual artifact like this a visual process?
Trip O’Dell:
I think it’s been often been a clarify clarifier or at least gets people on the same page. I mean I’ve seen in meetings where it was actually at Amazon where a 38 page working backwards document with dozens and dozens of people involved. A very, very senior people where the SVP just shot it down outta hand. And I had brought four storyboards in that were sort of an alternate approach and he said build that. He’d finished the thing and he’s like, we’re not going to do this that you need, guys need to go back to the drawing, drawing board. And he had taken a look at the storyboards while everyone else was finishing reading cuz that’s what you do in an Amazon meeting. He spent the first 20 minutes reading and he said, this is what I want. I want it to work like this. And and it was actually that economy thing, there was a lot of contention around that.
So it’s good at sort of clarifying what it is and what it isn’t and the best cases you’re starting there from the problem definition and the journey basis to get to a point. But a lot of this comes from filmmaking and media and storytelling where you’re talking about the willing suspension of disbelief is part of that is the marketing people. It’s not a movie, it’s cinema, it’s not a comic strip, it’s a strategy storyboard. Part of that is how you characterize it, but part of it is also the more that you can get them engaged and bought in on this is a worthwhile use of time because it seems too much fun to actually be work is that it’s serious play in a way that most MBAs, I think that’s one of the reasons where you get I should pick on the poor MBAs that many people that are not designers in the business context are.
They have to work in spreadsheets and word documents and sit through meetings and it seems like we get to do all the fun cool stuff and then they wanna sort of direct us and it’s a way to engage them while not seating our expertise and our sense of craft and capabilities. And so I think the more you can involve them, but the first part is getting them bought in and then when you’ve got an executive or a stakeholder looking at these and they work best in person in my experience, the ones that I have up on my website. But because people can walk the wall and you can’t use your head while you’re sitting on your butt a lot of times getting people up and walking the wall with you, they’re engaged in this story they’re reading, they want to see what happens next. They wanna see what happens.
They wanna see the expression on somebody’s face. They want to use all the parts of their brain in the same way that it’s a more effective way to read. It’s a better way to understand if I can see it, if I can read it, if I can hear it, if I can sense it and get that broader context that makes sense. It gets you to the right conversations faster versus where we devolve into well brand colors and which tech stack are we going to use and is this MVP or vision or blah blah blah. So you get humans involved in the storytelling of how we’re going to solve a problem together. That’s really powerful. It’s hard work to build that up, but once you do it once and it’s successful, it builds on itself.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let’s pick up on that notion of storytelling to close. I am mindful that I’ve done a terrible job of [laugh] keeping track of our time together today, Trip. So just to bring us down to the close of the show, captain Kirk once said, the prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other. And we’ve spoken about for some of our conversation today, the first half, about how our systems and our institutions aren’t set up terribly well to recognize and to support people that are neurodiverse. So what is one thing that neurotypical people working in product and design can do to help break down those prejudices?
Trip O’Dell:
That’s a hard question to answer because the question somewhat assumes that they’re in charge of making sure that the thing is broken down. And I think understanding starts with some degree of self-criticism and understand and recognizing what you may not understand or may not be expert at. And so when you assume that there’s a right way of doing things and that we’re going to do it, we’re going to hire this person because they’re different, but then you want them to work everyone else, it’s hiring, paying for a top flight design team and then prescribing how they work rather than being influenced what they bring. So I think there’s a challenge there of if you wanna be competitive, you’ll hire for neurodiversity because if you want outside the box thinking, you need people that literally think outside the box or they think differently. I mean, it’s not a mistake that Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein and Elon Musk and all these people are neurodiverse, the Thomas Edison Henry Ford, these people that have been massive disruptors.
If that’s what you want your organization, then you seek this. It’s not your competitive advantage, but then you need to let them off the leash and be influenced and allow the way you work to change prioritized hiring neurodiverse. And I’ve been very, I mean it’s probably not the wrong way to put it, but I have almost like the special education version of or radar I can pick up on when somebody’s had that kind of a different experience. And you can sort it out with a couple of experiences and then I’ll talk this, one of the reasons I talk so much about it is that it makes it safer for other people to talk about it too and to own it and get beyond the shame and then find, meet them where they’re at and get them the right resources and ways of working. I use those ADA skills when I helped write that and all the things that I know about the laws and to advocate for accommodations within the corporation and had some really knockdown, drag out flights with it and procurement and a bunch of other things to make sure there’s like, no, this is what my person needs.
And the law says that it’s a reasonable accommodation. So that’s what we’re going to do. I appreciate you have an opinion on it, but your opinion doesn’t matter, right? I’m going to set them up for success because if they’re successful, it makes me look great, it helps me with my career. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the self-interested thing to do, which is the source of selling a good product story is how can we make this better together? And I think whether you’re talking about diverse, radically inclusive environments are going to outperform your typical 9 0 5 industrial era office environment that I’d say 99% of companies still operate under. They’re going to, it’s an excess, especially after the pandemic. That’s going to be an existential question cuz they have to innovate. Cuz the way a lot of people say working from home is miserable is because we’ve been doing it wrong, because we’ve been trying to operate under an old model in a completely different way.
And that’s a transformation that needs to happen. And I think we might have 15 to 20% in the general population with dyslexia or some sort of neurodiversity. I would argue that we’re probably 40 to 50% in design because it’s considered the venture capitalist disease or the architect’s disease or the astrophysicist disease because it is massively, and designers and innovators, and these are things that are, the science is beginning to explain why, but these are industries that are heavily over indexed with people that think differently and that’s a good thing and it’s a beneficial thing. So I think that’s how you make the argument is if we don’t change, we are going to get lapped by the newest startup or by our competition, Microsoft that is investing in that kind of diversity because they see the value in
Brendan Jarvis:
It. Trip. You’ve got your radar on so to speak, you’ve got your eyes open, you are actively hiring for people like you that are neurodiverse
Trip O’Dell:
Actually not people like me. I’m trying to find people that augment my strengths or mitigate my weaknesses and that we’re not all the same. So it’s really sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, let you finish your question, but I I’ve got a hot take on it.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, that’s important. That’s important. Yeah. Happy to be interrupted. My question was, who saw you? It’s
Trip O’Dell:
A series of people, whether it was teachers or early bosses or whomever, somebody take a risk. How do you take a risk on somebody regardless of where they’re coming from, whether that was Father McKee my freshman year of at Gonzaga that I told him, well, I’m dyslexic. I can’t, I don’t care. But he would do anything to make sure that I could. He kept the standard high, right? Steve Johnson, who’s now VP at Netflix was my first, he took a risk on me. Now he’s an African American man, knows what it’s like and doesn’t come from a design background originally, but knows what it’s like to be an outsider and could see talent and a different kind of talent than what they had. And I think that that’s kind of where I was going is that they talk about T-shaped individuals and in special education circles they talk about broken combs, highly gifted and talented people that also have learning differences and that it sort of characterizes it as a broken a comb that has missing teeth, right?
Well, if you flip that around, it’s a T shape and how do you build broken comb teams? How do I fill out somebody that has better research skills or better organizational skills or can double up as a UX designer and content strategist that could also bridge into voice design? Those are things where we’ve gotta look at rapidly evolving. We tend to look at design heterogeneously. I’m a UX designer, I’m a visual designer, I’m a voice designer and you’re not. Right. And actually the power of design is that they are, it is not a mut, it is a synthesis of skillsets and expertise that the nature of the problems that we’re solving are diverse. And so the teams that are solving them need to similarly have that branch of skillsets. And I think that’s where a lot of things around planning and building teams, they allocate in headcount a certain dollar amount and you need this level five and a UX designer can do this and this, right?
That’s an industrial revolution area notion of like, well, I need this kind of a person on the assembly line in this spot. We need people that actually can envision what a better alternative to an assembly line would be, right? Or, and sometimes that takes more of a skillset or more, or a mix of skillsets or bigger design teams than you might normally have in order to expand into those skillsets. But just because you have 10 people doesn’t mean that you have 10 units of design or 10 units of research you like. You don’t wanna necessarily break up your teams that way. I like those multidisciplinary, broken comb teams. And part of it is being able to see what are the power sets? If I’m building the Avengers, what are the power sets that are going to compliment and offset one another? And the way that I approach hiring is not like me because there’s a lot of me to go around on a team. I’ve got strong opinions and I talk a lot, but how do I find people that are going to flesh out the gaps? And that’s typically the approach that I take. And a lot of times that means looking at the non-obvious candidates.
Brendan Jarvis:
I think that’s a great point to end our conversation today on Trip. I’ve really appreciated the depth that you’ve brought to this conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories, your experiences, and your insights with me today.
Trip O’Dell:
Absolutely. I loved it. Thank you so much for having me. It was very flattering and thanks for giving me an opportunity to tell my story.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, Trip, it’s an important story to tell. You’re very, very, very welcome. And if people want to keep in touch with you to follow along, to find out about all the great things that you’re doing, your previous talks and really get into what it is that you’ve contributed to the design field, what’s the best way for them to do that
Trip O’Dell:
So they can check out my portfolio site, which is pretty easy. It’s just TripOdell.com. That’s a nice thing about having a weird name and I’ve got the portfolio there and some of the talks I have a Twitter account, it’s @TripOdell, but it’s not very active. I try to, is given the length of the interview you can say is might hard to keep me a 256 characters and I’m probably most active on LinkedIn, so that’s a place to follow me or try to connect. Just engage with me where you can find me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Trip. I’ll make sure that I link to where people can find you in the show notes, including all of the great topics that we’ve discussed today to everyone that’s been tuning into this episode. It’s been great to have you here as well. 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 on the podcast, subscribe as well, and also tell someone else about the show. If you feel like there’s someone you know that would get value from these conversations, pass it along to them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn just under Brendan Jarvis. Just type that into the search. There’s also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That’s thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Trip O’Dell

The Benefits of Neurodiversity in Design

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Who is Trip O’Dell?

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