Natalie Hanson

  • Episode 64
  • Brave UX

Design Leadership: Practice, Patience and Pride

In this episode of Brave UX, Natalie Hanson encourages design leaders to play the long-game, challenges designers to be less myopic, and shares the struggle of stepping back from work to focus on health.

Highlights include:

  • Why is it important for design leaders to be patient and persistent?
  • How do you tell someone they’re not ready for what they’ve asked for?
  • Should other people in our organisations care about users?
  • How did Christian Madsbjerg, founder of ReD Associates, help you?
  • When and how do you make the case for user research?

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March 15, 202201:18:25
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Who is Natalie Hanson, PhD?

Natalie is a Principal at ZS, a 12,000 strong global professional services firm with more than 35 years of experience delivering products that create customer and company value.

At ZS, Natalie leads a global human-centred design, research and engineering team of over 250 people. Out and proud since 1986, she is also the executive sponsor of ZS’ global LGBTQ+ community.

Before joining ZS, Natalie was the Senior Director of Strategic Programs & UX Consulting at SAP, where she oversaw a portfolio of programs within the Knowledge Management function.

Natalie is also the founder of AnthroDesign, a community of people working in UX and using ethnographic methods, Natalie has worked tirelessly for the past 20 years to bring people from across design and anthropology together.

Her efforts have helped to spawn the EPIC conference, which aims to advance the value of ethnography in industry, as well and a number of books.

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 Dr. Natalie Hanson. Natalie is a Principal at ZS, a 12,000 strong global professional services firm with more than 35 years of experience delivering products that create customer and company value. There Natalie leads a globally distributed human-centered design, research, and engineering team of over 250 people, all working to make design a strategic differentiator for clients.
  • Out and proud since 1986, Natalie is also the executive sponsor of ZS' global LGBTQ community. Before ZS, Natalie was the Senior Director of Strategic Programs and UX consulting at SAP, where she oversaw a portfolio of programs and improvement efforts within the knowledge management function. She was also responsible for the delivery of UX early and often into strategic programs. Founding Anthro Design in 2002, a community of people working in UX and using ethnographic methods, Natalie has worked tirelessly for the past 20 years to bring people from across design and anthropology together. Her efforts have helped to spawn the EPIC conference, which aims to advance the value of ethnography in industry as well as a number of books. Natalie holds a PhD and a Master of Arts in Anthropology from Temple University, as well as a Master of Arts and Whole System Design from Antioch University in Seattle. And now she's holding the line to join me for a conversation on Brave UX today. Natalie, welcome to the show.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Brendan, it's so great to be here. Thanks.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • It was great to have you here too, Natalie, and thank you for letting me do this a second time cuz of that frog in my throat. We've cut that from the edit people, but needless to say it didn't go to plan first time round. So Natalie, when I was preparing for today, I discovered something a about you and your background and that's that your father's American, but your mother is from France in particular. She's from the region in France called Provence. And why I thought this was interesting is cuz I also discovered that your mother is an excellent chef. In fact, there's a bit of a story there which hopefully will get to soon. But I did wonder, I was curious, how did growing up in a bicultural household help to shape the way you think about people and culture?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Yeah, so my mom would be horrified to hear you call her a chef. I think she thinks of herself as a cook. Okay. No, not really as a chef though. She,
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • My apologies Natalies mom.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • No, no [laugh] Monique, no, she studied at BLE and I, so of course I think of her as a chef also. But for her it was so important to cook food that was accessible. Okay. And so I think that for her, the distinguishing between a cook where you cook at home and a chef where you're cooking fancy things in a restaurant, I think she always thought of herself as a cook. But I think a lot of anthropologists have that story of somehow having those cultural differences be central to their upbringing or their early experiences. For me that was for sure true to be spend my early childhood in New England and in Connecticut and then to go spend summers in the south of France. And it's just a world away from where my every day. And I really loved it. I still feel there's a certain part of me that still feels my home is part of my home, is there coming into southern France with all the stucco houses in the red tiled grooves and everything.
  • But I think, think especially for me about what is it from my childhood that I remember, I just realized that something like food which is so integral to just how we move through the world, we need to feed ourselves has its own, is a carry. It carries the culture, it carries our culture. And so for me, learning about a lot of what I learned about France was through my mom's cooking. What kinds of foods were typical there? How are they prepared? What flavor profiles are typical for that region? And a funny story about that too, my mom, she really only likes her own food. And I mean she eats, eats other people's food. But when you go to a potluck and my mom brings her food, she always likes her food the best. And she has this weird, almost an ethnocentric way of thinking about food where other flavors just, she doesn't enjoy them and it's just so deeply embedded in who she is and how she moves to her daily life. The cooking.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Do you share that same sort of ethnocentric view in terms of your
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Taste of food? I love everything. No, I love everything. I've lived all over the country and so I love anything with curry in it. Especially I love spicy things and not that I don't love the food that I grew up with cuz of course I love that too. But now with all the chronic health issues I've had over the past two years, I've really had to change my diet and it's pretty hard if you have to avoid nightshades or pepper peppery the pepper family basically, it's pretty hard to make a good curry. So I still do my best to try to find ways to get those other flavors in my diet. But it's harder now than it was before.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • And that's something actually that has been topical for myself as well. Cause we've had to cut a lot of things out of my son's diet due to mm-hmm his condition that he has and including a lot of salts, which as you can probably know, salt adds a lot of flavor to food. And of course we're sort of trying to share that journey a little bit with him as well which means sometimes we are going without some of the tasty food that we would normally have. And you mentioned that you've been battling chronic health recently and know this has come at a time where you are at the, and I don't wanna suggest that you haven't got further achievements to achieve, cuz undoubtedly you do. But you've reached quite a senior leadership position. I mentioned the team that you have been leading that 250 plus strong team H. How have you reconciled this challenge that you've had this battle that's been a surprise I imagine for you in terms of your health with your professional career with being a UX and design leader?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • It's really hard. I don't think it sounds funny when you look at my vita and my website and everything, but I never thought of myself as being particularly ambitious. I told that to my mom the other day and she actually laughed in my face
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Even though she said, she knows you better than you know yourself. Yeah,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • She knows that's right. But for me it was never about making a certain amount of money or having a fancy car. I'm driving a 12 year old piece of junk. It's not what I care about. But the reason that I have been so driven is I realize the more people I lead, the more change I can make. So for me, when I thought about how to grow what I was doing beyond UX in product and UX in consulting, I just realized that as my team grew, I could influence more of our portfolio, of our experience with clients. I could just have better control of the outcomes of the things that we did research and design for. So it was never about reaching a certain number of people or a certain dollar amount or something like that, but just wanting to make more change, more human-centered change.
  • And that drove me really far. But the health stuff started actually right at the time I joined Zs and I didn't know it at the time. I had relocated halfway across the country and I was diagnosed with my first autoimmune disease 11 years ago, something like that. And it's a full-time job for people. Your son's dealing with stuff too. It is literally a full-time job. The medical research, the dietary adjustments, the chasing down doctors and diagnoses and all that kind of stuff. This is, it's a, yeah. And also it's very isolating. I don't know if you experienced that, but for me, the fact that I can't now of course we're in Covid this, I'm going to say pre covid times that I can't really, it's very hard to go out to eat in a restaurant because my ability to control my food and my situation is so constrained.
  • So I never really felt like there was a choice to be made. I felt like I could do both. I managed to get the health stuff into a certain level of stability, but then as with any chronic thing, it comes and goes in waves. And I think the past 18 months have been very, very difficult. And it has forced me to, for the first time really, truly for the first time in my life, say I actually can't do all of this anymore. I can't reasonably do all these things. I have a son starting in high school, he's in high school now. I have a so 14 and a 12 year old. And I can't be a manager of a team that size, a leader of a team that size, manage all my health issues and be a parent. And it's the first time that I've ever realized I have to choose. And the choices for me were to as much as I love everything that I did at work, that you are absolutely right, that I'm privileged, that I'm at a point in my career that I could say I'm going to do less at work because I don't wanna do less at home and I can't do less for my health. So that's the only thing left to give. And so that's had to give and some changes in terms of my focus and my priorities. That's
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Still, with those changes obvious to you. W was it an easy decision? Was it, once you had that realization, was it a very easy decision for you to make or was it still something that you deliberated on and found difficult to come to terms with?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Well I think the first thing is the whole process was very difficult. I was very lucky that I had a coach who pushed me really hard. We have, the way that we operate at the partner level is we coach each other. So I have a partner who's been a longer than I have that I just really and trust and respect. And he was the one that first told me he thought I needed to work less. And I was like, no, no, no, I don't
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Wanna do that. How'd that go down?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Well it was, yeah cuz you think here we bill by the hour so nobody wants to work less. Right? And he just challenged me to say, why won't you do that? And he said, I want you to go and think about that. And it's like, in a way it can be, if you've got a good coach, it can be like therapy. And he said, I want you to go think about that and come back in a month and tell me what conclusion you came to. And it took me a month. It really did. And when I came back I said, I realized I don't wanna be sick. And so acknowledging that I need time off or that I need to work less means acknowledging that I'm sick and I don't wanna do that. And
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • How has the partnership mean? Obviously you mentioned the pressure if you bill by the hour, I mean this is how consultancies make their money and there is that pressure within a consultancy to be seen to be pulling your weight. How did you know z s and the culture there, how did the company respond to you needing something different at this point?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • It was extraordinary. I mean, I realized that it was my own, I was in my own way that the company was more than happy to support me. That I was the one that was truly afraid of working lesson, of acknowledging house. Cause I kind of felt like also if I slow down, I might just come to a complete stop. Yeah.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • At least momentum, right?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Yeah, exactly. And so no, the company's been extraordinary. In fact, I did an interview, I wanna say it was last year, it might have been the year before with this organization called Fairy God Boss. It's a company that focuses on women placing women into workplaces that support us. And that was something that I talked about a lot. I just feel really blessed that the company said, we'd rather have part of you, whatever part you can spare than not have you at all and do what you need to do and we'll support you. And they have every step of the way. It's been kind of unbelievable. It's one of those things where now I put my time in on, I just had my 10 year anniversary, so I've put my time in. I've proven myself. I'm not green, not So maybe it would've
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Been You can cut it.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Yeah, yeah. I've shown that I'm not a slacker and that I'm not asking for special treatment because I don't wanna work. I'm asking for special treatment cuz that's what I need. And it's been amazing and I, I've thought other people reach out to me too that I've been through similar things that said, I went through periods where I couldn't work or I had to work and the company supported me. And when I was ready to be back and they welcomed that too, I had actually reached out to the managing director where we're doing our planning cycle right now. I reached out to the managing directors, I have this idea for this new thing that I wanna do. And he said, I think you should just focus on taking care of yourself this year. We'll see where you are down the road. So managing director said to me, you're not allowed to take on anything else. So there's this level of, I don't know, it's amazing. Honestly, I feel really blessed
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Really
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Sounds like not a true, it's a corp, it's a company that I was there when they were less than 2000 people. And so obviously the partner level was a lot smaller and we all knew each other well. And so I don't know if it would be the same in a big corporation that was focused on, I mean it's not that we don't care about the bottom line or whatever, but we don't have to report to analysts. We have nothing to prove cuz we're privately held. And I think that is part of what contributes to that kind of culture and that kind of support. But it really is a commitment to taking care of our people that I think I'm really lucky that I'm on the receiving end of that right now.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • I, well, look, I would say you're fortunate but I have no doubt that there's been some deliberate action that you've taken to arrive at a company like this that seems to be looking out for you and for one another. And I hope that people listening, a lot of what we do in our lives is tied to our profession and we can tie a lot of our self worth to our work ethic and sometimes that can work against us. So I think it's a really refreshing message to hear from you, Natalie, that we need to, sometimes we need to take a break, press pause and reassess and reevaluate what's actually most important. And that can change over time as well.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • For sure. I mean, before kids, I was making quite different choices than I make now. And I think it's sometimes it's hard to remember to push in the clutch and remember I'm at a different stage of my life with a different set of circumstances, a different set of priorities. And to have the wherewithal to make sure that you're in an environment that supports those priorities, it's not always obvious either, right?
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Yeah. I mean there are enough challenges in the job of a UX or a design leader or someone who's seen you in product, let alone what we all have going on in our personal lives. So that's great. It's really, really important to look after yourselves. So speaking of the challenges that one has in UX and design, one of these challenges, particularly when it comes to enterprise, is that UX can still be a little bit new and seem a little bit foreign to people. And you are someone who's advocated for people who are designers, design leaders in enterprise, if they are lower on that maturity scale to slow things down and build trust over time rather than trying to go straight for the perfect straightaway. How has that approach worked for you personally? Has this come from an earlier experience where pet Sure. Try rush things? So is this a place that you've been burned personally and you've had to reassess?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Yeah, I mean I'm inherently super impatient. I, and so that's been a hard thing about being in any kind of UX role, whether it's in product or consulting. I just feel like, in fact, I had a moment when I was at my sickest last year where I just thought, I don't know if I can be in this field anymore. Just so tired of advocating for humanity and business. I mean it's so obvious [laugh], right? Yeah. Why am I still saying the same things now as I was saying 20 years ago, it's so frustrating, right? And so it can be hard and especially for someone who is from, I think we all are a little idealistic if we're in UX in the first place, a little bit of a save the world sort of desire to save the world. And so it's kind of hard to reconcile that with the realities of getting a good product to market. But I have a very specific example. I mean I've known this for many years and I've known as we mellow, as we get more mature that our patients and our stamina and our perspective changes. But I have a very specific example that I come to over and over again, especially for people earlier in their career, just maybe three to five years in their career that maybe don't see change happening fast enough or switching companies to try to get to the most exciting Nevada.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Yeah,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Yeah, exactly. That doesn't exist. It exists only in somebody's medium post cuz that's not reality. But I'll give you a really specific example. So when I joined Zs 10 years ago now, I was hired by the CTO to build out UX for product. I was not in consulting at the time who was really there to be part of a product team. And the team was comprised at that period of only engineers. The guy that was brought in was to make it a fully fledged software business. We didn't have product management, we didn't have UX, we didn't have product marketing, we didn't have qa, we didn't have technical support. All of that needed to be built and we built it all together. It was really fun to get to be in at the ground level really building all these teams and how they work together. And one of the things that the C T O asked me is he's like, well can you at least just start by making all these products look the same?
  • He, he said, I know that's not usability, but can we at least just make everything look better in the meantime? And I went and looked into it and at the time we had 44 products and we've simplified the product suite significantly since then. But we had 44 kind of standalone best of breed solutions and they were all on slightly different code bases. And in the arrow before there was a real separation of front end and back end code. And so a lot of the front end was called from the service side. So I had to go back to 'em and I said, until we separate the front end and the backend code, I actually can't change how the software looks. So that was 10 years ago and when we looked into what was involved, everybody was like, oh god no we can't take that on.
  • It's too big technical debt, but too much technical debt. But as we started to build new products at the time the front end developers reported to me in addition to research and design and I just said, look you guys, when you build this, the first few products we shipped, I was like, just do it the right way. Cuz by the way, that leads to all kinds of other problems. Not just terrible ability to know the concept of the design systems didn't exist back then. Yeah. So we built those first couple products with a really nice front end. But the real, and the other challenge is this can't all the software that instruments, if you wanna track the behavior users through your solutions and stuff like that, you have to have a clean kind of modern front end in order to do that. So in addition to not really being able to give the software the facelift that it needed, we actually couldn't instrument it either to track user behavior that was just so hard to do that.
  • And so it was the set of compounding problems. And so we tried making some shared components at least. And at least because the team was so small, all the designers and engineers reported to me we could reach some shared agreements about what we were going to do to the best of our ability to manage that situation. And then three or four years later, the company decided to rebrand and all of a sudden this force from the outside that I could have never anticipated and everyone was like, well the software has to keep up. And so all of a sudden there was all this energy and momentum and commitment to doing the work of separating the front end and the back end and allowing us to show the new brand in the software. And it was a turning point. It was something I could have never done.
  • I couldn't have made that happen on my own. And yet, and it was something kind of caught me sideways because I just also didn't have anticipated that that was going to be the thing that finally made it happen. But then we did everything very, we built a design system. We were still using accure at the time. This was pre Figma and there weren't a lot of other tools, but we built the design system out in Accure. We had a front end team that built it out in code. The two, it wasn't integrated, it was a separate code base and a separate design system. We're on the second or third generation of the design system. Now it's fully integrated, but at the time it wasn't. And then that allowed us the process of starting to look at solutions to instrument the front end so we could start to look at user behavior too. But that's just happening now. So the design, we're in the second generation of our design system. We started a couple years ago and now we're instrumenting the software and that is a 10 year journey. And a lot of the very senior design executives that I talk to, they really don't stay in their jobs more than three or four years. People tend to hop around a lot. And I've chosen to stay for a variety of reasons. But seeing that through takes a certain kind of fortitude and patience and perspective that maybe has the patience for,
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • There's also there in that story of seeing things through. But there's also the recognition you had of, well it seemed that you had of, there's things that I can control and there are things that I can't control. That's, and I think that's also really important thing for people to think about, particularly if they're struggling with change within a big organization, is that there are going to be things that are just well outside your ability to control.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • And some of them I, one of the things that I've talked about in the past is the importance of building those relationships in positions that are lateral to yours. Having a great relationship with product management, with qa, with engineering of course. And then there's things that you could have never imagined did I really need to become friends with the branding group and my corporate marketing function I couldn't have imagined. Now we ended up with a really nice working relationship, but that's not one of the ones that I would've sort of anticipated at the outset.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • They have been a parties than us anyway, don't they?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • [laugh]. But what's interesting is they didn't know how to bring the brand into software. So they knew a lot about what they wanted the brand to look like and feel like. And then getting it to the point where it was software digital ready was a different thing entirely.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • So this experience of sticking it out for 10 years, and it sounds like you've had a great time. Obviously there have been frustrated frustrations. Yeah, it's been a great run. But you've got things done and you've got things done that you wouldn't have been able to if you'd only been around for three or four years. So just thinking about that though, what else was in place, do you believe at the organization that if you reflect on the last 10 years were the ingredients that enabled you to want to stick it out and enabled the company to make that change? Of course that change of brand was one of the catalysts, but what can people who are wondering at the moment whether or not I should continue to commit some time of my life to this organization, what kind of things can they be looking at or thinking about in terms of those ingredients that might enable change to happen if they just stay a little bit longer?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • I mean, for me, the number one thing of is the mutual respect. So even if the understanding isn't there that the respect is right. So the way that we're organized, we sit in a sort of shared service function and center of excellence, if you will. And the people that recognize us as experts and ask us for help and defer to us, I think are hugely important. And the places where we run into where that's not the case where people think they're capable of doing the design work and stuff, I think if I encountered a lot of that, I think I would lose patience. But I think the recognition, our placement in this shared service model as experts, I think and in general, I think one of the things I really love about cs, it's been a good fit for me personally, is that it was founded by two professors from Northwestern who so they're both coming from an academic background and then moved into, they built this company, it was just the two of them at the beginning.
  • And in fact the first office that I was in was on the campus, Northwestern campus. There were two Kellogg professors. And so the other thing I really appreciate is this sort of intellectual curiosity that I think characterizes so many employees and just willingness to learn and humility that maybe they don't know everything. And so that I think makes a fertile, fertile soil. I think again, it depends on where you are in your life and your career, right? Too. I think your willingness to do that kind of education and awareness raising and so on, people have different degrees of patience for that. I mean, I was brought in by the cto, so I was already pretty well-placed and I was interviewed by members of our shareholder council so they knew what we were trying to build, what we were trying to do. And so I sort of had that the ground was paved for me at least at the most basic level before I arrived. And then it was up to me to do something with that.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • You mentioned the shared service model and how people have deferred to you and the team as the experts when it comes to UX and design. But I've also heard you talk about designers falling a little bit in love with themselves. And I'll just, you now you've said, I do feel like we are so enamored with our prophecies of our artifacts of how we deliver. We are a little bit precious about our own stuff. And I wanted to ask you about that because as far as I can tell in UX, there's no generally accepted principles of how it should be practiced. There is in accounting, are we or law or any of the other professions that have been long established, are we guilty in this field of canonizing? What isn't canon?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • I mean on one hand I think we should have more of that. Some of what Jared spool is trying to do with the center center and places like that where we develop standards for UX education, I think some of that is needed, is missing. But part of the joy for me in UX right now is what an amazing array of experiences we bring to the field and how that shapes our perceptions of humans and human behavior and how to build better software. So I have a guy on my team that's a PhD in human factors. I have someone on my team with an MFA in fine arts, another one with a multimedia degree, another one with an HCI I degree, right? Me with an anthropology background. I think the, it's that variety in those perspectives that we bring to UX that makes the field so vibrant in the first place.
  • So on one hand I would hate us to lose that because I believe, and I've talked about this before, that it's a diversity of opinions that lead to the best possible outcomes and diversity of experiences, outcome experiences, life experiences, academic learnings, all those things influence how we look at the problems we are solving at work. And so if we expect everybody to go through some kind of cookie cutter process to become a UX person, there's the risk that to me, what made the field so lovely in the first place maybe gets lost along the way.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • So it sounds like you think we need to be careful about willing a box to define us. We have to be careful about how we go about that and what gotta be careful what we asked for.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • And on the other hand, as the demand for UX continues to grow, when I was working with the Rosenfeld media team on the advancing research conference for 20 20, 1 of the things when we interviewed a bunch of very senior design leaders about what they're worried about and what they were seeing, one of the big concerns they had was the de-skilling of UX labor that oh, we can train anyone to become a researcher. We can train anyone to become a designer, get them some degree, run 'em through a 12 week bootcamp and they can be a designer. And there's some truth in that, right? It's okay to have a team of maybe people that just do AB testing. So they're not doing deep formative ethnographic research, but they're learned some basics. They can run an AB test and write up the results and the findings from that. So yeah, I think there's not sure what the right answer is. The path forward is some standardization I think is necessary because otherwise the quality of what we produce will deteriorate and not have the value it should. And on the other hand, there's gotta be some ability to keep the field as vibrant and varied as it's been up until now that's made it such a great place to be. I'm not sure what the right, how to tow that line.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Yeah, I think it's in motion. Right. I understand Don Norman's also working with a group to try and define a little bit more the standards that may need to sit behind design education. I'm not sure his views are shared by everyone, but I know there are different people looking at this. I hear what you're saying though about not wanting to define the field too tightly because it's actually the diversity of backgrounds and this is almost endemic. If you look at any design team, you've just described yours. You've got people from a variety of different backgrounds, which actually is really useful when it comes to shaping design, understanding problems and shaping solutions.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • For sure.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Yeah. One of the other challenges that we face currently in design, and that has probably been talked about almost to death, so possibly we don't need to labor about this for too long. But this idea of designers of which you are one, needing to have a seat at the proverbial table, this is clearly something that you've managed to achieve. You were very senior at S a P as well before you moved to z s. How important is it for designers to understand the business that they're in, the industry that they're in, the sorts of things that people who have MBAs would think about or learn about as they go through their programs of study. How important is this for designers to tap into in order to have more influence in the organizations that they work for?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • I mean, I think it's critical. I mean just finished, I'm in the process of doing skip level meetings with all of the most junior people in my organization right now. And that's one of the things that I talk about with them is that they wanna know what courses should I take? And it's always a question of what other UX skills do I need to learn? Should I become an information architect? Should I become a content expert? Should I become a really good at the iconography or whatever? I mean, at least for us in the consulting world, you're a consultant first and a designer second. And the way that you advance and advanced your career at ZS is by being an excellent consultant. And because your UX leadership team, we can evaluate your design skills, your design chops and all that. But you're evaluations that come from your project team, they are evaluating, are you a good communicator?
  • Do you manage your client effectively? Do you understand the business problem the client is bringing to you so you can help to solve it? Do you deliver your materials on time and with high quality, all these sort of really basic consulting skills that you have to learn. And I think it's hard for designers early in their career, they're so hungry to learn the design work that they don't understand that all these other skills have to be developed as well in order to be effective. And it's those conversations that allow you to talk to more and more senior people in the business world so that you can solve more and more meaningful problems in the end if your only problems are how to build your journey map or how to build a better persona or a better prototype. That's not anything you can have a conversation with a business person about. They wanna talk about their business problems and ultimately you have to understand what they're solving, the environment that they're in, the industry, they're in our case healthcare and the problem that they're trying to solve. And maybe you're also helping them make sure they're asking the right question. And how can you do that if you don't understand the domain they're in and the business that they're driving
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Towards. Yeah. This is context what does require it's context, right? It's basic context. It's understanding the context. Yeah.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Now the MBA part of it, how far do you get into that? For example for me it's important. I teach the people that work for me. What are our metrics? How are those metrics collected? Why are they important? Who looks at them? All that kind of stuff. To me, understanding the business of running our own business or we are our own consulting business, we have to be profitable inherently or profitable. And I want my leaders to understand what it means to run a profitable business. So when they ask for 10 more headcount, I can say, how are you going to keep them busy? Are we going to get the return on that and so on and make them leaders in their own. I honestly, I feel like that is the job at this point in my career is to build the next generation of UX leaders. And it's not that the work itself isn't important, of course it's always there, but in the end, for me that time invested in coaching and grooming UX talent into UX leaders is significant part of the job. And that means understanding the business for sure.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Yeah. UX leaders are business leaders. It's almost as if the othering that we do, there's design and then there's everything else is actually not really serving us. Design is business. And I think if we can break down that barrier or that delineation that we make between the two, it'll actually allow us, once we get to that point in our careers where we can have influence across an organization or as in a consultant working with an organization that's actually a maturing of our design practice in some way.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • And yet I come back to this, how much do you standardize versus how much do you stand apart? Right? Because having a little bit of that outsider perspective, as uncomfortable as it can be at moments, I'm a was in a sea of engineers and MBAs where I work, but I know that when I speak up I have got a perspective that nobody else has and that's part of what makes me valuable and special. So what's that line between fitting in understanding and so on and sticking to your It doesn't do it doesn't the company any good If I behave every other engineer and MBA that they've already hired, they hired me cuz I'm different. And so I need to not lose that perspective. Also.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Speaking of perspective, I understand that you interviewed Christian Maj, I believe this is how you say his name, Christian Berg? Yeah. Am I completely munging that? I probably
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Am. No. Got
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • More or less. Okay, good. [laugh], my apologies. Christian if I, you're listening and he's one of the co-founders of a very successful consultancy called Red Associates and he recently released a book called The Moment of Clarity. And in that book he said something that really stuck with you particularly about and the way in which consultancies engage with clients. What was it that really resonated with you from his book?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • So by the way, he's written a book since then that's also terrific. That's about the role of the liberal arts in the era of the algorithm, basically talking about the importance of liberal arts thinking. It's a really super interesting book. But the moment of clarity, first of all, hi, the work of Red Associates is F for me is phenomenal. They're behind the transformation of Lego, Adidas, all these other phenomenal brands. So I have a tremendous admiration for that team and the work that they do. But the thing that Christian, I had, I had spoken to him one time and I was at the moment struggling a little bit to make sense of things that were going on at Zs and I needed a kind of sounding board or a thought partner. And he was the one that said to me, you need to treat this an ethnographic exercise.
  • You're an ethnographer. Look at the company you're trying to change as an ethnographer and see. And it was a really helpful reminder that I could kind of distance myself a little bit and look at it that way. And he was basically giving the advice that he gives in that book, which is that when you're helping a company make this kind of massive transformation, yes they're asking you to understand their market, who's their competition? Who are their customers? Like to invest that time to understand the environment that they wanna bring their product into. But if you don't understand just as deeply understand the company culture, then you can't help them make that pivot because you don't know what drives them, what drives their choices, what drives their decision making, sort of the foundational aspects of their culture. And if you don't understand that, you're not going to be able to help them make that change. And so it's the same thing for the same advice that he gave to me basically was make sure you're really, and for me it was learning about how decisions get made. So the work, if you ask yes, it's changed mean how we were prototyping 10, 15 years ago and how we prototype now has obviously changed radically, but something, so they're not all that different.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • He was also touching on the need to understand how the company sees itself to work out whether or not it's able to actually achieve the design outcomes that it's going for. And I thought that was a really interesting way of framing ambition versus the actual ability to deliver on the ambition. How do you tell a client I'm not sure if you can draw on firsthand experience here, or maybe this is hypothetical, but how do you tell a client that comes to you with a problem that they want you to solve that you then subsequently realize once you've looked at their culture and how they see themselves that they're not actually going to be able to achieve?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Well, I mean if you're a good consultant, you're going to help them make those steps. And ideally you've established trust and you can do that in increments. A Gartner in their work recommends 15% of every project should be change management budget for change management. So we talk with clients a lot about that. I think 15% seems really low depending on the kind of change that you wanna make. The way that we do that is that we talk about the UX activities as part of the change management. So when you go talk to users, you're seating these ideas that things could be better. Or you're sharing concept art or prototypes and you're sharing a vision of what the future could look like and you're bringing some of those users along the change journey with you and you're using them to help you tell the story to the broader population.
  • On the product side, it's also really fun because you go from that kind of early stage research to actually telling the story to the market, to actually giving that material, putting it in the hands of marketing and letting them tell the story that you've heard through your user research and that having a chance to, one of the things about Zs being smaller than say SAP for example, is getting to be a part of that journey from beginning to end for multiple products, which I think is really, really neat. And I think in UX at least, we're uniquely placed to talk about it as an, it's not a failing of leadership or a failing of a culture, whatever. It's about what's needed to change human behavior. And so there's no finger pointing, there's no blame, no. I always come back, had a very dear friend when I was at S A P who talked about she was at one point, she was the dean of the s a p university we call it at the time.
  • And she always said seven times for an adult learner, she would always say for kids, you know, give 'em something once or twice and they retain it. But at a certain age you need to be told something over and over again. And so then it's not a blame issue, it's not, your culture can't do it, your leadership can't drive it, you don't have the prowess or the leadership required to make this kind of change. It just becomes a question of human behavior. It sort of makes it it's like a it a demilitarize its zone. That's the best word that I can think. It depersonalizes it. So it's not about anybody's failure, but it's just about the reality of what it gets to take people to do things differently
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • And what do we wanna do about it. How often do you get pushback when it comes to user research? How often a client So much. It's so hard. Yeah, you still getting it? Yeah,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • It's so hard. And I think when I do get on the dark days, cuz we all have them. I think if you're at all, if have aspirations and you kind of looking to the future and trying to be a change maker, I think we all have those moments that are dark. And for me those are the most frustrating moments is when we're asked to do design without any meaningful research. And in some cases, actually you had mentioned Don Norman earlier he had this one super provocative article that he wrote about if you are being asked to build a product, you shouldn't do the research first. It was sort of the premise of the article. I forget what it was, it was, but if you really read, so sorry. No, no, it's actually it really, people got so pissed off about it and of course he does that.
  • I feel like he does that just to get to people. But no, actually what he was saying and look, if you're worth yourself as a product leader, you already know your users. You already know your, and you shouldn't have to go start doing research once you get invited to the conversation about a new product you already know. So for Zs, our history has always been in sales and later in marketing. So someone comes now to ask me to do a tool, some kind of tool that enables salespeople. I actually, I know this is going to be super provocative, I don't need to go and do a bunch of research first. I've been studying salespeople since 2005. If I can't tell you now how they behave, somebody should fire me [laugh]. Like seriously 17 years of studying salespeople on and off right now when you get into some of our newer areas, for example, now deeply embedded in the clinical trials space, a lot of the work that Zs has historically done with data and analytics and process transformation we're bringing into the clinical trials part of healthcare because that is the thing that's slowing down how the drugs to quickly the drugs get to market and why they cost so much is cuz that time delay in proper testing.
  • Now if you ask me to produce a tool now for somebody working in the clinical trials space, like a site operator, someone that's managing a clinical trial site, I can't go in and just start that. I have to go to I to do the research. We would have to do the research so that we develop a good product. Cause I don't have that same deep understanding of those types of users as I do of salespeople. But sometimes we say, look, well that's not UX, it's ui. And if you want UI then we have a team in India that can do that. But we can't guarantee the usability you'll get you, it's not going to be of the same quality. And if that's what you want or that's what you're willing to pay for, you'll do that. But if your client comes back and they're unhappy, it's because they got what they paid for or they got what you sold them and you need to let us help you tell a different story about why the access to users is important.
  • I think the thing is we do everything. We do everything from two screen dashboards to multi-million dollar clinical trial systems. And so we also pick our battles. Now we're not going to let a client spend 7 million on a clinical trial solution without user research. But if they're going to do two page dashboard for an audience we already know without user research, then okay that's fine. We can do that. And we could do probably do a pretty darn good job because it's an audience we already know and technology we're familiar with and we know all the data. It's not new space for us.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • So you've gotta be smart enough to know when to compromise and when to hold the line.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Absolutely. And some of it is about our reputation, making sure that things don't go out that reflect badly on us. But it's also about making sure that at some level that the client understands and look, they've just spent small amount of their operational budget on a few slides of a dashboard. This is not something that's not their new product that they're shipping to patients. It's not an emergency room solution, it's not some lifesaving medical device. It's a couple of screens for use on an enterprise user. And so it's also for me, I think we talked earlier about having perspective and that's another place where I say, look, are we enabling patients? Are we enabling doctors to save patient lives? Are we enabling emergency room staff or are we enabling an analyst to do a better job with sales reporting? And I'm not saying that that work is any less valuable, but it's also not life threatening if the dashboard takes a few minutes longer to read or it's the data's not as beautiful or the color palette isn't. Just so you know, we've done thousands of projects now in my career. I've done thousands of projects. And so I can look at them and have a perspective that I didn't have when I was early in my career where I wanted every single thing we produced to be just perfect. My perspective's changed a lot since
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Then. One of the things that we do when we are working on projects and design and that we can sometimes be guilty of is this belief that everyone in the business needs to collaborate with us and to get involved that you've suggested, and I'll quote you in a second, that not everybody is interested in human behavior. And you've said specifically, and I'll quote you now, people don't all love to play with Post-its and Sharpies and do affinity mapping and journey mapping and all the things we love so much about our jobs. So we just have to recognize that not everyone's going to want to come and participate with us in the way that we want them to participate. Now that didn't so much floor me like I understand what you're saying and that's definitely been my experience as well. And sometimes it feels like you are senselessly dragging people along who really don't want to be there. But isn't this a problem? Don't businesses seek to serve people, customers, the people we're actually designing products for. And isn't it a, is not a fair expectation of us in design that people elsewhere in our organizations should care about those people and what that experience is like.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • But no, I mean think that's where we're just so blind. They care about the outcome, they care about the business outcome. They honestly could care less about how we get there. And I remember a woman I used to work with. Now for me as a researcher, my very favorite part of research, research projects are still the ones that I enjoy participating in the most. And my favorite thing is when you have those 80 hours or 120 hours of transcription or whatever it is and you're trying to make sense of the data when it's at its messiest, that's the part I enjoy the most. Look looking for the patterns and all that. That's my favorite point. And I remember bringing a colleague into one of our war rooms runs and we had all the walls wallpapered with like eight point font and the transcripts everywhere. And I was going at it looking for patterns and everything and she walked in and she looked at it and she said, oh my God, come back to me. What's when it's in a spreadsheet?
  • She just couldn't cope with that level of complexity in that level of raw insight. It was just too much. And it's not that she didn't care. I, I think where we mistake, this is where I think we get so emotionally caught up in how we do the work. People wanna know what to do. Our clients wanna know what to do, what do I produce? What does the dashboard need to say? How does the tool need to behave? How do I need to talk about it to the market? They just don't care about how the sausage is made and asking everybody to care as much as we care about the process is just woefully naive that just they've got their own parts, their own jobs to deal with. And the way that we go about it, this sort of bottoms up sort of making sense, making and tactile sort of kinesthetic thing that we love, that I love so much about the job. It's not everybody's jam and stop thinking that they don't appreciate what you're doing. Cause they don't wanna do participatory design. So it's just not true. That's just a sort of gross oversimplification. They've got their own jobs, they've got their own worries, they've got their own things they need to achieve. They don't wanna spend two days with post-its cause They want you to come out of that telling them what they need to do to move their business forward or what their business, they
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Wanna make decisions,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • They wanna make decisions. And how are
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • You suggesting that a bit myopic? Are you suggesting that we are lacking a little bit of empathy for our colleagues?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • I mean it's a little bit strongly put. I would say to me it feels more like a naivete or a don't no ill intent on anybody's side or anything. I just think this is one of those places where we get so caught up in how we solve problems that we sometimes forget that not everybody wants to solve them the same way or that never not everybody's interested in being along for the process. That the joy that I have walking into a room full of transcripts and affinity mapping, to me that is so much fun. That's my favorite part of my job. All that sort of finding of the themes and the patterns and all that most people could care less and want. I remember the first time I ever got to talk to the chief process officer at S A p and I spent weeks slavery over this presentation.
  • I was so nervous to talk to this guy. He sat on the board and everything and he was, he's a little bit scary. I don't think he's still there so I can say that now. But it was a real privilege to get to meet him. He, cuz he was driving change. He was moving the whole company a whole 11, 12,000 developers to an agile methodology. And he was trying to bring in lean practices into how the company operated. So it's very intense, fast moving guy. And you had to catch his attention and if you didn't catch his attention, that was it. It was a real wake up call to be dealing with somebody at that level, sea level of a company that size. And so I had prepared this whole deck and I had this whole storyline ready and two minutes in, I could tell I was going to lose him if I didn't even, and I had, it was only five or six slides, but he just
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Didn't, what was the giveaway? What did you see? Well,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • We were in a room and it was, there weren't even any chairs. It was these cocktail high top tables and there was all these, oh gosh, different artifacts and stuff on the wall. So he wasn't even sitting and I could tell he was just, I don't know in retrospect, I wonder if he's like D h D or something, but just super, super high energy, very restless, not totally present for the conversation. I was like, if I don't do something quick, I'm going to lose his attention. I'm going to lose this opportunity. And I had taken one of, with the help of a researcher who by the way works for me now again, he worked for me back then. But we had taken all this, it was usability testing. We had done 60 usability testing sessions on our own CR RM software to help inform the product and help us tell the story to the market.
  • We use our own serum, here's how it works, here's what, but this guy he was the champion for Lean at the company. And I had had, me and my whole team got certified in Lean, so we kind of understood what it was about. And in Lean there's very specific tools, methodologies it's like a whole other world if you don't know it. But they have their own kind of diagrams, they have their own frameworks and all that. And there's certain words and ways that you talk when you're talking to someone who's lean focused. And so we, it's
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Like a secret society,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • But you have to and to know the lingo, right? So we took this usability testing sessions and we put them into a lean diagram format. So the lean it shows process and it shows waste and it shows to how often somebody has to repeat a task before they can complete it. And we took all of our usability testing and we put it in this lean diagram and I was like, if I only get one slide with Scott, with this guy, this has to be the slide. And I showed him that slide and that was it. I got his attention and all of a sudden we got signed up to do all this ethnographic work for the board at sap. But it was because I wasn't so caught up in how, if I had tried to present the guy a journey map instead of a lean process diagram, if I had tried to use my lingo instead of his lingo, forget it, I would've completely missed that opportunity. So I recognized obviously his body language and his impatience and everything, and I was smart enough to have an artifact ready that was in the language that made sense to him and what he cared about.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • There's also a bit of humility in that there's also this recognition that your way or the way that you might wanna do things isn't going to work to achieve the outcome that you're seeking. So you have to be willing to be able to bend in order to get the outcome. I mean,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Here's the thing. If we are so good at getting in the shoes of our users, of our customers or patients or whatever, why can't we do that with our executive team or wi with our product management counterparts or with our engineering counterparts? So I think something I said in one of the things that you, you've been quoting from is we have this empathy for the people that we're serving with our design, but not for our colleagues. Don't expect an engineer to get joy out of sitting in a day of usability testing.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • And this makes me r reminds me actually of someone who I believe was quite important to you and that I really did wanna ask you about on the podcast. And that is someone who sadly has passed away. And that's Giddy Jordan. Gitty Jordan, yeah. What was it? Because specifically what you are touching on here, I believe is something that she had quite an impact on you and she showed you the light, so to speak, with this particular problem that we have.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • She was just such an amazing woman and she influenced so many generations of anthropologists, not just me. She had this just way of reaching out and staying connected and asking about people in a completely non-judgmental, curious way. And she
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Was, who was she? Lady tell us who she was.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Giddy Jordan. She's a PhD level anthropologist. She was on the faculty I think at the University of Michigan. And she for many years studied pregnancy and childbirth and so on, cross-culturally and shows. She's written, I think one of the books she's both well known for was related to those maternity practices, cross culture, cross culturally. And she somehow made her way into Silicon Valley. And I don't remember the details now. I think people that were in that area at the time would probably be able to tell the story better, but she ended up at Xerox Park. And I think for me, Xerox Park has always been this sort of idealistic place. When I was, before I left the West coast to do my PhD, I was living in the Bay Area and I said, when I left, I'm going to come back and work at Xerox Park.
  • That was my aspiration as an anthropologist to get to be in that kind of lab setting with engineers and anthropologists and so on to try to make change. And she was a member of that team and in the institute for Research on Learning later. But she was one of those people that really brought, now of course that lab environment is very different than a corporate kind of consulting environment. The pace is different, the duration of projects is quite different. For me, our team at typical project might be 12 weeks or maybe 24 weeks where a project in the lab might go on for years. But one of the things that she did that I found so interesting was that she would sit the engineers down and they would watch footage together, video footage together, and they would talk about what they saw in the footage.
  • So there's this great thing called a ladder of inference, and I reference it on my vlog and I've spoken about it in keynote addresses before, this idea that we so very quickly look at something and start to build layers of assumptions on what we see. And that's based on who we are, how we were raised how we see the world, and of course our education and our work and how we work. And what she realized was that if you don't go through the exercise of teaching people how to see differently and build up that ladder of inference together, then they're never going to see what you would want them to see. And so you can't just stick 'em in front of a video and expect them to come to the same conclusions as you do an engineer or a business person or whomever it is that you have to work from those observations, those most base observations about what the person does or what their facial expression says or whatever, and unpack that and then work up the ladder of inference together. And if you don't do that, you'll come to wildly different conclusions.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • So this is critical for designers, working with stakeholders and having influence, isn't it, to understand this ladder of influence, to have influence.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • And I think that's why the idea of getting people to participate in usability testing or ethnographic research is so powerful because if you can get them to the place where they're observing and you're talking about if you come out of a day in the field and you sit down and talk about your observations together,
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Together,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • You're building that understanding in a way that's kind of irreplaceable. If you come back with a report and a summary, but you haven't been on that journey together, people don't feel it and experience it in the same way as if they've observed it with you. It's a super public. I'm not trying to take anything away from that. I think it's the most powerful thing. There's so many people doing exciting work in this place. If Simon Gizzard in Europe and of course companies like Red Associates and others over the years, whether it was eLab and Sapien and Dublin and all these companies who basically just do ethnographic research, the power of bringing your stakeholders with you to that kind of fieldwork, of course it's fantastic. And I don't wanna take anything away from that. And I think it's a dream to have those kinds of opportunities, but it's not for many of us, it's just not the reality most of the time. Ethnographic research for us it doesn't happen as often as I would like.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • So people shouldn't be surprised if people don't want to participate. And if you are going to get people to participate, you need to design that session in such a way that when they walk away from it, that you've built some sort of shared understanding and made it worth their while.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • And I think taking that sort of time is that's a part of building a good process, is making sure after the field work that you're talking through it and working through it and capturing insights and inference together as opposed to assuming that just cause you've watched the same thing that you've arrived at the same conclusions you likely haven't. Right. If they wouldn't need to be in the field with you.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Natalie, I'm just conscious of time and I really did want to come to something else that I know that you are very involved in and that's quite an important part of your life. I mentioned in your introduction that you are the executive sponsor at ZS of the L G B T Q community and I also found out that in 2021, ZS was recognized as one of the best places to work for L G B T Q equality by an organization called the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. What does that recognition mean to you?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Well, one of the interesting things with CS being privately held is that we're private about a lot of things and including I think sometimes how we treat our people, which is, as I mentioned earlier, I think we treat our employees really well. And for me that recognition was a reflection of things that Zs had already been doing for years. So am I glad we have the recognition of course. And we're in very good company with some amazing other corporations that have received that recognition also. But to me it's a testament to things that we've been doing for years and years. We had domestic partnership benefits 15 years ago, for example, things like that. So do we need to continue to evolve for sure, dealing with people that are with gender transitioning, for example, with degenerating, the bathrooms, there's always more work to be done but I feel like we have a platform, we've made a real commitment over the past few years, not just pride, but in general to inclusion and diversity.
  • There's a council now across the company where we're looking at these problems and making the changes that we need to make to continue to be better and better in this space. But the recognition to me is just the beginning. It's showing that you have the policies and the practices that provide that environment, but then there's still the work to make sure that that environment continues to be welcoming and that it's not just a place where people go to work, but where they truly feel like they belong and they can be themselves. And there's a great quote, if you gimme a second, I'll put my hands on it. That really resonated with me. One of my colleagues gave it to me by someone named Arthur Chan, and it says, diversity is a fact, equity is a choice, inclusion is an action, and belonging is an outcome. And when I think about what are we trying to do, we're trying to get to the belonging that I can come to work and just as freely talk about my wife as somebody who's hetero her asexual or that somebody who's dating someone of the same gender can just as comfortably come in and talk about that, what happened over their weekend as somebody who's straight.
  • But getting to belonging is really hard. And so the rrc piece of it is really just establishing the beginnings of diversity and equity, but that step to get to the point where everybody feels like they belong, that's the long road, not something that just happens overnight. And I think for the lgbtq plus community in particular, because we have a choice, unlike our black colleagues that don't have a choice if they're out or not at work, there's lots of research that shows that 50% of people just aren't out at work and that needs to be just fine. Also, they have their reasons, they don't wanna be out, they think it's something they need to talk about at work, but the challenge is to make everybody feel like they belong even if they don't wanna be out. And so half of what I'm doing is serving a community that I don't know. And that's a really incredibly difficult job as a sponsor to try to do the best for people but not really know who they are. Especially as a researcher, everything in me wants to just know who are you, how can I help you? Why? What's holding you back? Not that I want people to feel any pressure to be out, but how do I create an environment where you feel comfortable? And if I can't talk to them, I can't sort that out. It's
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • A challenge. It is a challenge. I actually wanna wind the clock back a little bit further and talk about your story in particular. I mentioned that you are out and proud in your introduction and you are quite open about this. I read on your blog that you came out in 1986 and you told me before we started recording that you were 17 at the time. That was a very different time. I found out through preparing for today that up until, I think it was July 86 in New Zealand, that homosexuality as it was called, and the law, there was a crime, it was a
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Criminal offense,
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • It was a criminal offense. In New Zealand, we still have men who were prosecuted underneath that law who are still carrying criminal convictions for being who they are. And so it's a very different time. We also had H I V had turned up on the scene and was really causing devastation within the gay community. And there was no open effort as far as I can tell. And I'm not that old. I was only one in 1986 in terms of my historical perspective. But I don't believe there was any open effort to support the rights of people in the l lgbtq plus community within the workplaces. It was probably something that was very, very far down the list of priorities as far as enterprise was concerned. So you came out at 17 at this time, which is very, very different to what we've just been talking about in terms of what people can expect, rightly so from their work environment now, although there's still a lot of work to be done.
  • But you came out, and this is something else that I wanted to ask you about, which is you went to study religion and biblical literature at Smith College, and I don't know why for me that sort of popped out as something that was quite interesting. But what was it like for you when you came out at this time, Taino ta, take us back to that point in time. What was it? What was like being someone, and I don't know if this is a term you used to identify with, so apologies if I get this wrong, but being a gay person at that time in 1986,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • I mean there's so much in all that to talk about. It's true. I think about that a lot. It's 30, so it's 35 years. So the times have changed quite a lot. And you're right that the backdrop of AIDS was so significant at the time. I mean it was one of the many things that it caused. So I w Smith is an all women's college. I did not know that I was gay when I went to Smith though. Now using modern language, I would probably say I'm pan right, because that's not language that existed when I came out. But one of the many things that happened in that environment was it sort of pitted people in the community against each other. So women who I just identified as lesbians did not wanna date women who were bisexual because they were worried that those bisexual women would bring aids into the community, for example.
  • And so it was just all that fear, it just created all this ugliness. And on the other hand, I also remember amazing moments mean one of the things that I loved about Smith was it was very politically aware and engaged young community. And I kind of feel like what I'm doing now at Zs comes full circle to that. We marched for gay rights, we were Massachusetts I think pass gay rights in 1991 or something like that, one of the first states to do so. And it was amazing to be on the front lines of that and to get to be a part of that. And then you think, God, that was 35 years ago and we're still having these same conversations. So that part of it I think can be frustrating. I talked to colleagues in India for example, and they're like, oh, it's so much better for you in the US than it is for us here.
  • And yes it is for sure, but they also don't understand, look sure now we can get married. Though I think with the current Supreme Court, that may be in question again. In fact some states are going so far as to create state level laws. New Jersey is one of them to protect gay marriage so that even if it unravels at the federal level that at the state level people will still be protected. But in 35 out of the 50 states, you can still be fired for being gay. So great, now we can get married, but we can still be fired. So it's really like, I'm just crazy and legislative. It's crazy. Landscape is still a mess. It's still a mess. And I think a lot of it really just depends on the current administration and the current social climate about what's okay and what's safe and you know, have to trust that we're not going to backslide so far that the degree to which I'm out somehow becomes a huge liability.
  • But other noticed other things too. And they're small changes, but they're important. So for example, my 12 year old, when my 12 year old talks about kids in his classroom, he uses the pronoun, he doesn't talk about he and she, and he has a transgender friend. So I think he knows the difference, but whether it's a female teacher or a male teacher or classmate, he's using the pronoun. And I just think here's a it. And it doesn't occur to him to do otherwise, it's just normal. And for us, we still think of they as a plural if you grew up, if you're older. And so I think there's all these little changes and that at the same time give me hope. But I think my favorite thing about being the sponsor for Pride is the reverse mentoring I think went from, obviously I came out a long time ago, I was in college, I dated, had all those relationships.
  • I finally met the woman who I'm with now, and we've been together 22 years. And so we've been busy raising kids, having our careers, all that kind of stuff. And I don't wanna say we've been out of touch with the gay scene, but when you're not out clubbing and you're not out meeting people and you're voting in your local elections on local topics, maybe you're not so tuned into things. And being getting pulled into the sponsor role for the lgbtq plus community at work has really forced me to tune in again in a way that I was when I was 17 that I'm really actually enjoying. I'm enjoying getting to know people. There's all this language. Look, nobody talked about gender fluidity [laugh] in 1986. It's not that it didn't happen, but we didn't have that language the way that we do now. Words like pan romantic or pansexual and things like that.
  • We just didn't transmit transvestite back then. So all the language sort of the openness, the way that those words are, especially for young people are just so much more normalized. My older son was just complaining the other day, he's like, ah, we always have to use our pronouns when we introduce ourselves at school. And he's a freshman in high school and I think, God, that's so amazing. Now he finds it annoying. He's like, everybody knows I'm a cis man. I was like, well, that's not true for everyone. That's why you do it. But the fact that they're even doing things like that, like using pronouns, they're de gendering his advisory. So the way that the advisory is organized at this high school, there's boys have one advisory and girls have another. Well, what happens to intersex kids or trans kids in this environment that's completely bifurcated.
  • And so the parents petitioned and they've committed to allowing the kids to choose which advisory they wanna be in. And they'll be a gender neutral one or a one where that's a crossover basically. People can be wherever they want. They don't wanna be, if guys don't wanna be in a guy's advisory and girls don't wanna be in a girls' advisory and then we'll mix with people that are maybe don't have a gender, maybe are exploring their gender identity or not are envy. So it's, that's one of those things that I didn't really think would come around the way it has. And it's forced me to be more political, more vocal, more in tune in a way that I've really, I've actually really enjoyed. It's actually one of the highlights of my work right now is that part of the job. And it's kind of an unexpected thing. And again, it's just one more way that we're connecting to each other as humans in the workplace and bringing as much of ourselves as complete a part of ourselves to our work as we can. Just one of the many ways that we do that. And so it seems a pretty natural thing for me to be doing as an anthropologist and as a UX professional.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Well, I heard you say when you were talking there about the feeling that you get where you wonder whether or not being who you are will come back to bite you in the future given the climate. And I just really sincerely hope that we can get to a place as a species where people are no longer persecuted for just being who they are. I think the work that you're doing is really important.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Thank you so much. Yeah, I hope that with you it's that perspective now of having been through the Trump administration here, it's been sobering to realize the democracy is not to be taken for granted.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • It's very fragile,
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • A different perspective than I did eight years ago,
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Natalie. The ability for designers to collaborate with their peers is such an important part of design, making a meaningful difference to an organization or not. Given that collaboration's so critical, I couldn't help but ask you for my final question, what is the most important action that designers listening today can take that will improve their chances of having meaningful impact?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • So building awareness and understanding and empathy for not just for the users that they're designing for. So that empathy for what it's like to be an engineer that's not interested in usability testing for a product manager who's worried about when the product's going to ship and not whether it's pixel perfect for an executive who wants to know if the product's going to sell not what color, size the font is or whatever. So that awareness of taking all that work that we put into empathizing and understanding of the users we're serving with our designs and making sure that we're turning that inwards as well to ourselves and in our cross-functional team that we work with and even the executives. I think sometimes our frustration when things get handed on down on high from an executive is not really taking the time to understand the pressures that they're facing and what they're on the hook for.
  • And so I think turning all that, it's hard work. I've said it before, it's emotional labor. All of this is emotional labor. Taking the time to get to know your team and the same way that you get to know patients that you're enabling with a piece of software. It's hard work, not pretending that it's easy, but that those, the relationships and that trust and that understanding that you build will in the end allow you to move much more faster and with less friction than if you just try to barrel through, assuming everybody wants to play with Post-its
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Because not everybody does. Natalie, this has been a really enjoyable and meaningful conversation and it's really given me, and I'm sure it's given the people listening to it a lot to think about. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories today, being so open and so brave and what it is that you do and what you've done for this community.
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Yeah, it's my pleasure. It was really enjoyable to get to know you and to have this conversation. I look forward to continuing to follow along with your subsequent discussions.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Most definitely. Natalie, if people wanna find out more about you and all the wonderful things that you do, what's the best way for them to do that?
  • Natalie Hanson:
  • Well, as I mentioned earlier, with the health issues I'm facing, I'm not super active on the blog right now, but that's the main place NatalieHansen.com is the main place where I post goings on. I'm not doing so much on Twitter these days and my Instagram account has turned into a place where I showcase my jewelry making skills now. So I'd say the blog is the main place to track me down.
  • Brendan Jarvis:
  • Okay, sounds good. Thank you Natalie, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here to listen or watch depending on how you are consuming today's episode. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes on YouTube and also on the podcast platforms, including where you can find Natalie and all the resources or anything that we've mentioned that's specific and interesting that I think that you would benefit from finding. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in product, UX and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are super helpful. Subscribe and also share the conversation with someone else that you feel would get some value from this type of dialogue around UX and design and product. If you want to reach out to me, you can find my profile link on the bottom of the show notes at the bottom of the show notes, and you can also head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.
Episode 63
Sam Ladner
  • Senior Principal Researcher
  • Workday
View Better Insights Through Mixed Methods Research with Sam Ladner
Episode 65
Debbie Levitt
  • Chief Experience Officer
  • Delta CX
View Strengthening and Protecting the Practice of UX with Debbie Levitt