Debbie Levitt

Episode 65
Brave UX

Strengthening and Protecting the Practice of UX

In this episode of Brave UX, Debbie Levitt pulls no punches as she dismantles bizarre UX job descriptions, over-promising UX boot camps, and UX practices that she believes are unknowingly sabotaging the discipline.

Highlights include:

Is the practice of UX at odds with the process of Agile?
How do you grow appreciation for UX without evangelising?
What important things are students not getting from most UX bootcamps?
How should UX professionals work with other specialists without ceding status?
What do “unreasonable and bizarre” UX job descriptions represent?

March 22, 202201:22:17

Listen on:

Who is Debbie Levitt?

Debbie is the CXO of Delta CX, the business transformation, CX and UX consulting firm through which she helps organisations to improve customer satisfaction, predict and mitigate business risk. It’s also the name of the channel that Debbie hosts on YouTube, where she helps CX and UX leaders to better understand and contend with some of the day-to-day challenges they face

Debbie’s book, “DevOps ICU”, and its associated training teaches non-CX people about CX, why it’s done by specialists, and how to integrate it into their teams and processes. And in late 2019 - that’s pre-pandemic - Debbie also published the appropriately titled “Delta CX: The Truth About How Valuing Customer Experience Can Transform Your Business”.

As a consulting UXer, Debbie has worked for Fortune 500 businesses, such as Sony and Wells Fargo, as well as a range software companies, startups, and digital agencies, including Constant Contact, ROI DNA, and Razorfish.

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 Debbie Levitt. Debbie is the CXO of Delta CX, the business transformation CX and UX consulting firm, through which she helps organizations to improve customer satisfaction, predict and mitigate business risk and increase ROI by investing in great customer experiences. It's also the name of the channel that Debbie hosts on YouTube, where she helps CX and UX leaders to better understand and contend with some of the day-to-day challenges they face while trying to improve their organization's processes and culture.
Debbie's book, DevOps ICU, and its associated training teaches non-CX people about CX, why it's done by specialists and how to integrate it into their teams and processes. And in late 2019 (that's pre-pandemic) Debbie also published the appropriately titled Delta CX: The Truth About How Valuing Customer Experience can Transform Your Business. Entering the field in 1995, Debbie was the Founder and CEO of as was a specialist design agency that for 15 years helped sellers on eBay to improve their store's effectiveness and internal processes. The business even got a mention by Seth Godin in his 2002 book, Purple Cow. As a consulting UXer, Debbie has worked for Fortune 500 businesses, such as Sony and Wells Fargo, as well as a range of software companies, startups, and digital agencies, including Constant Contact, ROI DNA and Razorfish. Described by her colleagues and her clients as charismatic, high energy, engaging and insightful, a "UX version of Mary Poppins", this is a conversation that I've been looking forward to for some time. Debbie, welcome to the show.
Debbie Levitt:
Thank you so much. I'm sorry that by the time you read my bio, the show is now over.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes. Well, you have done a few things and you have been in the field for some time, so I did wanna cover some of the highlights there and I'm sure I've missed a number of things and one of the things I didn't mention in your show. Oh, you're most welcome. Very welcome. And one of the things I didn't mention in the intro though, that I was curious to ask you about is that your website mentions that you enjoy singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and new wave. Now I'm not even going to try and pretend I know what symphonic prog goth metal is. So can you please enlighten me and the rest of our audience as to what it is?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, I guess so. Through Bizarre Old School pre Spotify types of systems, I got introduced to a band called Stream of Passion, and I thought the singer was just perfection in human skin. And I started trying to figure out who are these people and what is this genre and what is going on here and what else has she sang on? And this whole world started unraveling and I discovered a band called Ayreon, which is A-Y-R-E-O-N. You're nodding, do you know them?
Brendan Jarvis:
I did. Well, I did end up having a little listen and I think I read a Wikipedia page, but not in any great deal.
Debbie Levitt:
Right, okay. Just checking. So that was the polite nod. Yeah, so I've just stumbled into this whole world that is all of these projects related to this one guy, and I've just become a super wacky fan of all of it in some of the related projects. So yeah, that's kind of my world. I have a degree in music and I was an opera singer in college and also got an b a, but no singing was involved in that degree, unfortunately. And I have a secret YouTube channel that I think I have 15 subscribers where I put up what I call one take karaoke, where I go into my vocal booth. This is not my vocal booth, this is my desk. I go into my vocal booth and I do a karaoke song. And the idea is to sing it once. And the first time is the time that I go with, if you were at karaoke, you don't get to redo it, you're not going to autotune it, you can't edit it. And so I sing it through once, and even if I mess up a word or it's a little out of tune, I just put it up on YouTube anyway to combat perfectionism. So lots of people will know the Delta CX YouTube channel, but there's also the Secret karaoke YouTube channel.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, Debbie, in the spirit of combating perfectionism, is there any chance of singing a few notes to set the tone for today's show?
Debbie Levitt:
I don't want you to get a copy strike. I don't want you to get a copy strike. And also it is like oh nine something at night here, and I've been talking the entire day, so I am not sure I, fair enough, I'm in my best voice. And we didn't prepare this ahead of time, so if you'd said to me like,
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, IPR
Debbie Levitt:
That on you song, you could you do? And I'm like yeah, I'm not ready. I would've gotten a background track. I would've been ready for everything. And now I'm just like, [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
No
Debbie Levitt:
Good. So sorry, I would've to pick something classical so you don't get a copy strike. So I don't know, you might have,
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's avoid the copy strike.
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, no,
Brendan Jarvis:
I did wanna ask you about music. Oh, you, because you mentioned that you have a, will you have a degree in music from Tufts As far as I could, could tell. I do. It's true. You started out working in the early nineties in the music industry before you got into the field of, I suppose, the web and UX at the time. So how did you go from music, which is clearly something that you love and still do you have a passion for if you sing opera? I had a girlfriend when I was in college who sung opera as well. And that's a big investment of time to just get to the point where you can sing to that level. So what's the story of the journey from music into the field of UX?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, I would say the journey starts before then because I was that geeky little kid who always was interested in technology. I was the little kid with the chemistry sets and the electronic wiring sets. And so I was always into that stuff. And when I was seven in 1979, yes, everybody do the math. I'm 50 this year. My parents put me in a local class for second graders to learn how to program basic as in computer programming. A local university was holding CL weekend classes for second graders to learn basic on a commodore pet. And I went and did this and I was just in love. I was just in love with computers. And it was like, wow, when can we possibly get one of these? And they were just too expensive. But in 1985 dad brought home an Apple two plus an apple, two plus.
Oh, I just cried and cried. So I was just always the kid with techy geeky interests. So after university, and I was working in the music business one day I rang up a friend who was still at university and he was like, Hey, you have to see this thing called the web and you can build pages on this thing. And I was like, what? And so he's like, yeah. And I checked out the web and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And I kind of stayed awake for most of a week, reverse engineering every webpage I could find at the time, which weren't even that many. Cause it was April, 1995 and taught myself H T M L and then said, oh, I bet people would pay people who know how to make these pages. And so I opened up a little company called As was, and it was at the time me and one other guy.
And basically I did everything and he did the art and the C G I scripting hands up, who remembers cgi I scripting. And so between the two, and I'd never met him and he lived a half hour away and I didn't meet him for seven years or some crazy thing. And so the two of us for a long time were this little company until it grew some years later, no, I guess it was five years, but we, until it grew and evolved. And what happened was by 1998 or 2000, everybody who had front page thought they made websites. And that's what I was competing with. So I had to reinvent myself and I said, oh, I think I'm going to work with eBay sellers. And I had had a website client who asked me to help him with his eBay store. And I came up with a whole strategy and templates and all and trained his staff and all this stuff. And he went from never selling on eBay to selling a million dollars a year of stuff, a million dollars of stuff in his first year. And I said,
Brendan Jarvis:
I hope you had a percentage deal with him before that happened.
Debbie Levitt:
I was charging by the hour and continued to, so I was like, hold on, I think I'm good at this. And so I shifted towards that for some years, which is how I ended up in Seth Godin's book. And with a lot of
Brendan Jarvis:
Knowledge. Did he call you? How did that go down? Did he call you up and say, Hey, I wanna do something on you in my book? How
Debbie Levitt:
Did this start? It was so long. Gosh, that's 20 years ago. I don't even totally remember how it happened, but I ran into him at an event and I knew who he was and I'd read one or two of his books and I said, I wanna tell you about something I'm doing. And I said, my company is designing these templates for eBay sellers, and we're deliberately overdesigning them because eBay has data that shows that people don't eBay listings don't hold attention. eBay knows that many people get to an eBay listing, glance at it for literally two seconds was the data and then they leave the listing. So we are deliberately over designing the listing to be this huge long page of graphics and action. And we didn't have anything animated, but we basically designed it to tell a story from top to bottom where you wanted to keep scrolling to see what happened.
And it was just all visual design and wild concepts. And he looked at it and he goes, this should fail. He's like, this shouldn't work at all. This is over designed. It's weird. Some of these examples are tacky, this doesn't make sense. I said, my average client grows six 30 to 600% after working with us. And he's like, okay, I wanna know more. And that's what happened. I ran into him and I had either had our printed book of examples, or I don't even know if I had my laptop with me. I think I might have had, because I used to do trade shows with a printed book of examples. And he added a chapter to the book just for me and only put my company in it. And it was said like, cuz Purple Cow was companies who will make your company remarkable. And so he added a chapter on online auctions and put in, as was it. It's a really bizarre story, but he was like, this shouldn't work.
Brendan Jarvis:
It seems like you seized the day though. You know, saw him, went up to him, told him about it, and now you are published in one of his books. And if people don't know about Seth Godin, I recommend checking him out. One of the more provocative thinkers in the, I would say he's a marketer, but he's recently Bre branched out into other spaces through his podcast to Kimbo, which is also worth a listen. He's an alternate thinker and he's very provocative. So worth a listen. Yeah,
Debbie Levitt:
Nige. Yep. I'm
Brendan Jarvis:
Not sure I understand. Oh, apparently Siri says she's not sure I understand, but I think that's because my Siri is a Australian Siri and I'm a New Zealander, so that's probably why. Hey, speaking of different
Debbie Levitt:
Countries, regionalized better. Yes,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes. Yeah, different countries. So you live in Italy and something else, just before we get onto some of the, I suppose the more serious stuff of the topics of UX and CX that we can talk about, I noticed that your website, you say on there, and I'll quote you now, I travel on a clean American passport and have a work visa and EU residence permit for Italy. I pass background checks and have never been arrested and should be able to get in and out of any country. And for me, I found that quite funny. I'm not sure if that was the intent, cuz I know pre pandemic you did a lot of travel, but you said in there should be able to, and I thought that's not very definitive. Why aren't you sure that you can and will get in and out of different countries?
Debbie Levitt:
Do I answer this? I think I'm just going to, oh here we go. No, no, I think I'll just answer this. My ancestors were Jewish and I have a very traditionally Jewish name even though I am personally and it was advised that I not enter certain countries that are not necessarily friendly to Jewish people and that even though I don't necessarily identify as Jewish, they would see my name or my heritage and I was advised that I might not be safe. And so you are right. That is not written as straightforwardly as it could be, but that is why that is there because sometimes people say
Brendan Jarvis:
It's still a thing. Wow.
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, sometimes people will say Hey, why don't you come speak in country? Like I say a Middle Eastern enemy of Israel. And I'll go, oh, I've heard I shouldn't go there.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you won't be taking any conference speaking opportunities in Tehran.
Debbie Levitt:
I don't even know if that's the enemy. I'm sometimes worried about other places that are less tolerant and I don't want to pick on any country in particular cuz maybe it's a false rumor. But yes, I should be allowed into most countries. But some might look at my name and say, we don't want you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Isn't that a sad state of affairs that we still have to worry about that in this day and age still
Debbie Levitt:
First had actually world problems for me compared to so many other people.
Brendan Jarvis:
Mm-hmm a hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. I did wonder if there was a story there. You mentioned also that you've never been arrested, but I did wonder if you'd ever been close to
Debbie Levitt:
No, no. I am the most law abiding people. It's so funny. I think because of my bold personality, people imagine things about me that aren't true. People imagine that I'm very tall because I'm just big, but I'm not tall. I'm 163 centimeters. I'm not tall. And people imagine gosh, I used to get all kinds of things but no, I've never been anywhere close to being arrested. The few times I've been pulled over for speeding, they've been like, Hey, you've been speeding. And I'm like, yes, I was absolutely speeding. And they're like, oh, you knew? And I'm like, yeah, I knew. And they're like, okay, we'll stop it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh
Debbie Levitt:
Damn. So yeah, yeah, I once got, I was once driving a moving truck across the country and it was really windy in this weird valley and I was kind of swerving all over the place in the cop pulls me over and he looks in the window and he goes having trouble keeping it on the road. And I said, yeah, actually I am. Do you have any advice on how to drive a moving truck in this wind? And he goes, oh damn it. And I said, what did I say? He goes, you're not drunk. And I said, oh. I said,
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, was I supposed to
Debbie Levitt:
Be? He said, I was sure I was pulling over a drunk driver with the way you were driving that. And I said, oh my gosh, no I'm not drunk. I'm so sorry that I appear to be drunk. I said, I'm just outta
Brendan Jarvis:
My dick,
Debbie Levitt:
I'm having trouble in this wind. And he goes, well really you were doing the right thing, you were keeping it slow and have a nice day. So no. So the clean passport and some of that stuff is left over for my time in the music business because we used to have trouble in the music business. Cause at one point I was a tour manager and there you have to be somewhat familiar with some of the laws of the places where you're going into. Cuz for example, one tour that I worked on, we got to the Canadian border and our tour bus driver was like, I probably should have told you that I have a drug conviction on my record and won't be allowed into Canada.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, probably should have.
Debbie Levitt:
Right? And our bus stopped at the border and couldn't go into Canada and we had to figure out how we were going to get everybody into Canada cuz everybody else could get into Canada. And so that's just a weird frame of mine that's left over from my music business days is like I have a clean passport, I've never been deported from anywhere, I've never been arrested. I'm going to get into everywhere. I'm going to pass a background check. I think I put that on there to be silly, but obviously for anyone doing a little bit of Googling it, it's like these could be good stories. Let's find out more.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well I'm glad that I did find out a little bit more and I was interested in talking to you about some UX related topics and the first thing that I wanted to talk to you about was the boom that's been happening in UX in terms of new talent coming into the field. There's obviously been a huge influx, particularly in the last decade. It's really, really taken off. And I've heard you suggest that the education that people are receiving who are new to the field is not necessarily doing them a service in terms of preparing them for the realities that they will face when they start their jobs. Is that a fair summary of how you feel about the state of UX education?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, it's kind of a combination of things. And I am very worried that there are talented people who really want to get into UX and there aren't a lot of good education options right now. There's university degrees, but that's time and money that not everybody have. There's boot camps and in some cases that's not time and money everybody has. But more importantly, a lot of these educational options are unfortunately quite low quality. I don't know if you've dug around them at all, but for the most part they seem to be. And of course so far it's all the ones that I've found. So if there's a good one out there, I haven't found it yet, but they seem to be the wrong things taught the wrong way by in some cases completely unqualified people. Like you go to LinkedIn and you're like Holy cats, they've never worked in UX before.
How were they hired? Or sometimes the bootcamp is taught by the people who graduated last year's bootcamp because they couldn't find a job and the bootcamp's trying to make their numbers look like wow, people get jobs. And so I'm just telling people that it's hard to get into UX right now. I don't have all the answers on how to do that. I'm trying to help redefine education, but they need to do the critical thinking and do a little extra digging, find out who your instructor is or your professor or your coach or your mentor. Look them up on LinkedIn. How often do you see the word UX versus UI or creative director or front end developer or art director? How many years of specialized work is someone who is a visual designer going to be teaching you UX research when they've never done it? So I'm super concerned about this. And then you see that there's like what 260,000 people have enrolled in Google's Coursera course online, which is an extremely low quality course, mostly teaching design thinking, which isn't even a UX process. So I'm very concerned about the next generation and I haven't yet found the solution, but I can certainly point at the problem and warn people
Brendan Jarvis:
In terms of the gap. So you've mentioned a couple of things there. You've mentioned potentially calling in the quality of the instruction into question on the basis that some of the people that are teaching UX may not have a depth of experience in the field that some of the people that have just recently gone through the same course themselves also instructing. And you've also talked, talked about the curriculum themselves, but not in any specifics. So I'm interested in understanding when you look at say, and I don't want you to necessarily name names here, but when you look at your average bootcamp, whoever it may be, and you look at the curriculum, what is it that is missing that needs to be there? Or maybe if it's not missing, what is it that is not being delivered to future UXers that you believe is really important for them to get to really set them up for success in this field?
Debbie Levitt:
To me there's kind of two key things. One of them, and this is more about maybe the setup of the program or the pedagogy or something like that. But I find that very few of these schools are looking at people's work critically. So very often when people are planning research or interviewing or doing a persona or whatever, for the most part they're just getting the cheerleading version. They're told, hooray, your work looks great, this is good. Oh wow, yes, keep going. And then when I look at their portfolio project I'm thinking, unfortunately this work does not look very strong there. This work is quite flawed, your research is strange or it didn't set you up for success or it wasn't done correctly. Didn't anybody look at this? And sometimes people tell me, no, nobody looked at it. They saw my project at the end and gave it a check mark or yeah, they looked at it in the middle and they said, this is great, keep going. And it really came to a point for me about two years ago when I did a portfolio review for someone which I do for free. And she had come from a bootcamp and was having trouble finding her first job and I thought her work did not look job ready. And I found some way to tell her that there were a number of negative red flags that I could see going on in her portfolio. And her response to me was everything that you called out as a negative, my bootcamp praised me for
Brendan Jarvis:
What were those things? Do you recall?
Debbie Levitt:
No, this was two years ago, but I've seen so many things like it. So again, it's usually research planned incorrectly, research done incorrectly, research analyzed incorrectly are artifacts created that are kind of meaningless. And so I can sometimes guess what bootcamp people have gone to by what artifacts they're creating bad interaction design that shows that nobody taught them mobile paradigms in attention to accessibility. They're creating things on a, it's almost always a mobile site or app and the fonts are too small, the colors aren't colorblind friendly, they don't understand a lot of key mobile paradigms there. There's a lot of things that I can tell make me feel like this person could eventually be quite good at this, but they're just not job ready now. So one is that they didn't get good tough love coaching in my hypothesis is that schools want you to have fun.
They want you to love going to the school and tell friends how great it was. And if your teacher says, you know what? I'm not sure you're really getting this concept or that research plan you made had some weaknesses, let's take another look at it. Maybe you won't like school so much, maybe you won't give them 10 stars outta five or whatever. And so that's my hypothesis. Can't prove it. But that's what I'm thinking. Also, some schools have told me buying the scenes, well we that's that requires scaling that we can't do, we don't have enough UX experts on staff to look at people's projects and give them the feedback that they need. And my thought is that's not acceptable, especially if you're taking 8, 10, 15, whatever thousand dollars, you go find a Brendan, a Debbie, you go find somebody and you throw a few dollars at them and you get people the help that they're here to get.
So thing one is this kind of pedagogical style where there is just no review of people's work. It would be like taking piano lessons but never playing something for the teacher. And then the other thing is when I look at a lot of the curricula, and I won't name names very often it seems to be the surfaces. Surfaces, which I know isn't a word surfaces, level of UX, possibly imaginable. And usually it's very tool focused. You're going to learn Figma really I can learn to Figma in two hours. Don't you have to spend $6,000? You're going to learn figma and sketch and design principles. And then typically they're teaching design thinking, whatever that is this week. But it's certainly not
Brendan Jarvis:
And we'll get to that. We'll come to design thinking.
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, it's certainly not user-centered design. So people are then I see their portfolios and it says, first I empathize with users, I talked to my mom and my brother and now I made, and my favorite was the time that I saw someone who had done two interviews and made three personas. I'm just going to stop there for a moment so you can react.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thank you. My reaction is [laugh]. So thinking about all these challenges that we see in the graduates that come out of these programs, what is it that is reasonable for practitioners currently in the field or people hiring these graduates to expect of them? What level of capability, where is that bar? What's fair for us to expect of those younger and sometimes career transitioning people that are coming into the field to have, how much mastery do they if at all, do they need of anything at that stage?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, fantastic question because to me the answer is minimal because I believe in apprenticeships and if companies believed in apprenticeships then we could take the person who did some self-study, went through a bootcamp, has foundational knowledge, but hasn't really been able to put it into practice yet, especially in a corporate environment. And we could take someone who has intelligence and a good heart and a good personality and is a low ego action hero and we can say, okay, they've got all the makings of someone who's likely to be successful. Now let's put them in an environment where we're going to support them and they are going to get the one-to-one feedback that their bootcamp didn't get them, give them, we are going to review their work, we're going to set them up for success and we're going to wanna make them stay at this company and build a career here cuz we cared for them.
But we're not seeing that. We're seeing if you wanna be a junior at our company, you need 1, 2, 3 years of experience and you need to be a medical doctor and you need to code in six languages and you're going to be researching and you're going to be writing content, you're going to be an information architect, you're going to be an interaction designer, you're going to be a prototype or you're going to do the testing, you're going to do the coding, you're going to do the visual design, make a design system and help marketing with their banners. What
Brendan Jarvis:
Does this say though, and you've described these job descriptions out there in the past as sometimes unreason quoting now unreasonable and bizarre. What is the way in which these job ads are crafted say about the understanding that the organization and the person who's writing those ads has about the role of design within the organization?
Debbie Levitt:
Where we're going with that question, it's a clear misunderstanding of what UX is and that's what led me last year to post an eight hour video course completely free delta cx.link/hr-training a case. It's totally free, there's no catch. You don't have to join a mailing list. And I put out an eight hour course on what the heck is UX and how do you hire us and keep us? And that was really aimed at people who are trying to hire people but really don't understand what we do and then we end up in crabby jobs that are unreasonable. And to me, the funniest thing is what's the number one thing that I hear in corporate worlds when with UX people is you are not agile. And I always go, well yeah, you hired one person to do eight jobs and they're going to have to do that in series.
They can't do that in parallel. There aren't streams of work here. And of course we're not agile. You just put eight engineers on a team so you have eight people doing something at the same time running in parallel and you've got one person who you expect to do 500 hours of work in the next sprint. Yeah, we're not agile, but give me a team of five seven, you won't believe what you can get out of a UX team that is properly staffed up. So yes, people don't understand what we do, they don't understand its foundations in psychology and behavior and they just think, ah, these are people who make things pretty. They use Figma, look for someone who uses Figma. I can't tell you how many job jobs I've been turned down from in the last few years because even though I've been doing this 400,000 years the dinosaurs taught me and I've been told, well your resume didn't say Figma.
Brendan Jarvis:
You like your pref total preferences. It
Debbie Levitt:
Yes it is. I'm even wearing my Actha shirt. Yeah, I'm super into accure. Hashtag not sponsored, I pay them. But yeah, I work solely in Accure and I guess hypothetically I could learn Figma in a short amount of time, but it it's mistaken as a skill instead of a tool. Nobody's assessing us for our ability to understand and do information architecture, which is sad that we've gotta bring that back. What about interaction design? What about planning research? Holy cats, sure anybody can talk to another human, but badly planned research is going to set us up for disaster. And I see so many companies misunderstanding what UX does and they say, well we don't see Figma so you're really not a fit. And I go, well that's just fine. I'm happily not working there next.
Brendan Jarvis:
So let's dig into this a little then. So how much of the way in which those experience have played out for you in terms of applying for jobs at companies and getting that pushback around tooling as opposed to actually expertise and really digging into that, how much of that ties back to, and I know this will be anecdotal in terms of your own experience, but how much does that tie back to the executive leadership of that company and how that leadership looks at and frames its relationships with its customers?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, obviously that's like 12 questions in one. So I think that when companies care more about customer centricity more then they have to invest more in doing research upfront. To me that's really the key. We can't be a feature factory and be customer centric because so often the feature factories are guessing at what to build or Hey, I have an idea, let's make this thing. And what do we really know about our users or customers and their needs, tasks, priorities, preferences, habits, whatever it might be. So I think that when you get towards customer centricity, you have to look at the importance of research. But if we take a look at companies, especially over the last 10 years, so many of them seem to have fired their r and D teams because r and d teams seemed slow and they weren't as cool as the Lean startup.
They weren't as cool as let's just run a design sprint and be innovators. And the amazing thing is, meanwhile, while everybody fired their r and D teams, all the companies people admire most kept or grew their r and d teams. I read somewhere that Apple spends something like 1 billion a year on r and d and meanwhile most companies fired their r and d teams but looked to Apple as gods. And so I think that whether or not you're bringing back your r and D team, and maybe you should at least you've gotta get the UX research world fired up early in these processes and projects from discovery to prop during the design and things like that. So I think a lot of companies read something like Lean Startup and thought, oh I have had a 300 something billion oil and gas company tell me we think like a startup. And I was like, in what way are you going to go outta business tomorrow cuz you didn't get seed capital? This doesn't make any sense. You're nothing like a startup, this is ridiculous. But if people read the Lean Startup and they go, oh we want to be this cool and I go, you are not a 2011 tech bro in Silicon Valley.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's talk about that because I know you have strong views when it pertains to Lean and also Agile, which we've kind of skirted around, but I feel like we're getting to now and my look at this has been that the books like Lean Startup and the Rise of Agile have in some way sought to normalize the practice of UX when it relates to software development. So it's very, very much through an engineering lens and there's that call in the Agile manifesto towards customer collaboration. But how is it that the reality of how lean or Agile is being applied currently when it relates to enterprise, so not startups, so enterprise with a different set of operating conditions on them, a different way of working and pace normally, what is it about the way in which those principles or that practice has been applied that has negatively impacted or not served UX in the best way that it could have for those enterprise level organizations?
Debbie Levitt:
So I like the concept of Agile and I like the concept of traditional Lean, which came before Lean Startup. So Lean Startup kind of skewed what Lean was supposed to be. And I think Lean Startup is kind of the opposite of original traditional lean. So I'm kind of that lean purist. So I like these ideas, but we have to remember that Agile and Lean were both inspired by factory manufacturing and then they were brought into software engineering so they really weren't meant for UX. And you can tell because most of the books and the processes and the models don't have UX on them at all. There's a slide I tend to show in my toxic engineering conferences and it says Scrum and it's got the big swirly graphic and it shows agile and it starts with rack log and sprints and all that stuff. And I go and how did everything get in the backlog?
The start of your infographic is backlog, you get stuff in the backlog. Well either your product managers guessed it and wireframed something themselves or you let proper UX people do a proper job or somewhere in between. But the backlog is not the start of the process. But I find that so many flavors of agile and agile approaches seem to just act like whoa, stuff's in the backlog, let's go. And I think that in order for many companies to improve their customer centricity and really to be real lean they have to start looking at how to integrate UX correctly. And it's something I speak at a lot of conferences currently. It used to be called DevOps, I C U and now I call it improving agility by using customers definitions of quality and done because in agile a lot of times the definition of done is well we built it seems to work, got it done.
And it's like, well did you build the right thing and did we really solve people's problems or is this a giant bucket of garbage? And so I think that agile and lean in concept are excellent, agile and lean in implementations in businesses are a mess. And most of their books and training and things either leave UX out fairly completely or in a giant wave of confusion, just try to dominate and control UX. Like safe, agile is like yeah, centricity and design thinking is our domain and we've got safe principle number nine which says that UX is decentralized and we can control it and engineers can do UX cuz UX is easy to do. And I'm just looking at these things and I read some of safe's articles and they're all written by agile coaches who've never done a day of UX work who have no UX education and you can tell by the article they Googled it and then tried to glue something together. So I think that if we want to see agile and lean be more successful in organizations, they've got to partner with UX and UX strategists and UX leaders so that we can create the good three voice model where product, UX and engineering are equal voices working together to prioritize, to plan to estimate time. I'm so tired of UX getting the time that is left over after engineers decide how long they would like to spend. Everybody's work is equally important and we have to be able to estimate our own time and get that time
Brendan Jarvis:
Is the practice of UX at odds with the process of agile
Debbie Levitt:
Only when we're understaffed. Again, if you're going to put a jack of all unicorns on stuff and expect that person to do all of research and all of design and all of visuals and all of coding, there's no way that's going to be agile. There's nothing lean about that. So because lean is about identifying and cutting waste and part one of the eight types of waste that Toyota identified was underutilized or un-utilized talent. And so I think when you don't staff up a UX team and department correctly, that's a lean sin. So ultimately I think engineering has to drop trying to control us and I think we have to just look at more ways to look at things like dual track agile and track agile, which basically say we can pretend we're working in sprints if you want engineering, if it makes you happy. But we are on a totally separate track.
We have our own separate work stream that we plan and it feeds into engineering. And so I recommend that kind of a modified tri track model which so again, I think UX can be agile if we say the word sprints a lot and we hire a mountain of UXers so that we are not a bottleneck, as soon as we're a bottleneck, somebody says UX isn't agile, oh let's get everybody to do it. Let's democratize it. Well this is crap, we're a specialized profession. It shouldn't be democratized if you didn't have enough engineers on your team, we wouldn't pull in marketing people and give them O'Reilly books and tell them to learn coding. So to people need to understand that our work is time consuming when done well and we want it to be done well. So step up. I'm suggesting at least five UX people per team or domain or feature or project, however you look at it and people go, five, we can't even get one on a team. Okay, it's a future dream, I get that. But if you really wanna be agile and if you want to see a UX team get a lot of work done efficiently, I'm suggesting three researchers and two architects,
Brendan Jarvis:
Just taking that analogy you gave or the origins of lean coming from manufacturing and specific sense the manufacturing of say cars. It sounds like what you're saying is that the practice of lean applies to the manufacturing of the engineering part of that value creation process. But there's another and a whole lot of extra work that goes into the design of that car before it even gets to the factory to be built and that there really are different applications and cadences at which design work should and can be applied. But at the moment we are overly focused on the relentlessness of the two week sprint in that very engineering mindset that is currently dominating the way in which we approach design.
Debbie Levitt:
To add to that I would say, isn't it amazing that we wanna give eight engineers four weeks of work to do something, but when one UX person wants to do three weeks of research, oh my god, what you are bloated your waterfall. So I think that there's definitely a weird double standard. There's games and manipulation, there's negative framing and all kinds of cognitive biases.
Brendan Jarvis:
What what's to be game by this though? So I do wanna understand this a bit better from your experience. So for the stuff's going on and it does go on, what are people seeking to gain from this? What are the big benefits that you've spoken about and others have in the field of design is the ability to de-risk decisions, to avoid wasted investments, to actually shape products that deliver customer satisfaction and business value. But what's to be gained by this pursuit of momentum over outcome that seems to be going on when it comes to how designers I get the sense you feel it's mishandled. Again, I'm putting words in your mouth so correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah sure. What are engineering leaders or is this something that's unconscious that's going on? What are people seeking to gain from it?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, I think it's a speed over quality world and I usually semi blame the Lean Startup book because people have taken things from that that I don't think should have ended up in the corporate world. This idea of let's give users the minimally viable thing we can give them. Is there a user out there who wants the minimally viable thing we could have come up with? People want their problems understood and their needs met or exceeded. So we've taken these things that were popular for startups and two guys in a garage who are hoping to get $70,000 and we've said, yeah, let's bring them into our company. And that came with a lot of the BS that came with that. If you're not embarrassed, you release too fast. And I go, I can't think of a single company I've worked for that was proud of some of the embarrassments that they've had to deal with.
So I think that it comes down to an accidental mindset where people are so stuck in thinking the Lean startup and some of these other things are just so damn cool that they must be right for everybody to do and they're not thinking critically. And I've asked people to think critically about the Lean Startup. I wrote a medium article about it and I cannot tell you how many white men showed up to tell me that. I obviously didn't understand the book. So I think that the issue is that it's a hub and spoke problem when you don't understand UX, when you think anybody can do UX, when you think UX isn't that important cuz it's just making it pretty when you think that we just have to go as fast as we can because if we go really fast, we'll win and customers will be happy and we can tell our leaders how fast and efficient we were, we must be saving them money cuz look how fast we were.
And then you have pile all these things on top of it and it's really a house of cards. And whenever I talk at engineering conferences, I always say, and I'm usually speaking to a C of engineers and some product people and stuff and I say, hands up, how many of you have coded something? And while you were building it, you knew it was garbage for the customer. And everyone's hand goes up and I say, yet we have agile that says we're flexible, we're nimble, we're willing to shift and learn late in the game that we need to go in another direction and look at this, the whole room is not even empowered to say, I don't think we should be doing this. And so now it's like this weird culture of fear and then the mistakes get swept under the rug. And so there's no accountability.
And so that's the number one thing I'm been calling for is accountability. Because if we have accountability, then the people who create and continue disaster projects that are wasteful to the company, crappy for the customer, bad customer outcomes, money lost time spent, they should be held accountable. The people who crap on UX people and try to do their work and do it badly and there's bad outcomes. Where's the accountability? The people who try to design everything by workshops and design sprints and let's vote for our favorite thing no matter what the user needs, where's the accountability? And I think as soon as we start holding people accountable for how these projects go, I think we're going to start to see some shifts in process and people,
Brendan Jarvis:
How much of this current state of affairs do we as UX, as and designers have to put our hands up for and be accountable too?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, it's a super question and my answer to that is considered fantastic by some and controversial by others. And so I expect your audience to be split on this one. But I think that where we have made our own bed or accidentally made our own bed is one of the main things I hear from UX people is that they wanna be understood. We want our job to be understood, we want our work to be understood, we want our importance and effect and outcomes to be understood. And I think what's happened is that over the years, the continued misunderstanding and our crappy jobs has made us get desperate. And when people get desperate, they do weird things. And so we started doing all this evangelism. And the evangelism for the most part doesn't seem to work. In fact, when I go to engineering conferences, people pull me aside after my talk and they go, I hate when people like you pull me into meetings to tell me how important you are and show me a slide thing.
And so nobody wants to hear an evangelism pitch. I say in one of my talks, there are three things nobody wants to hear. You should go vegan, what religion you should be and the importance of UX. So I think that's some of our evangelism has made us seem weird. I think our overfocus on empathy, we're going to create empathy, we're going to focus on feelings. We're really the only people in the company saying that. Everyone else is saying, let's make money, let's save money, let's have customer satisfaction. They're all speaking the business' language. And then people say, UX, you're not speaking the business' language. And then some people go, wow, wow. And I say, you speak the business' language, they don't care about empathy and you may never get empathy. I'll settle for sympathy. I'm, I'm a fan of sympathy, I'll settle for sympathy and action based on good knowledge.
So then we start talking about empathy and we look fluffy and weird and we hold crystals. And so that didn't help us all this attention to empathy because now there's a big backlash in America where rightfully so people in marginalized groups, people of color, black people, people of certain religions, people of certain L G B T Q designation are saying, really you think you empathize with me? You really think you see my world through my eyes because you talked to me for 30 minutes. You know what ego bs is that? So the empathy thing to me has to go, we have to speak the businesses language and speak business intelligence, risk mitigation as you also say, and making money, saving money, things like that. And then we added on top of it and then we still wanted people to like us and sit with us at lunch like it's primary school.
And so we thought, well maybe we should just have everybody do our work with us. Maybe if we just opened this up and made it for everybody, then they'll like us and they'll see that we're important. And so we'll bring them into workshops, we'll teach them to do our work we'll democratize. And I say, congratulations, you just taught everybody that there's nothing special about our work at all. You don't have to go to school, you don't have to have done this before you. It's you actu lowered the bar so much that you are saying that anyone with any level of or no knowledge, no talent, no ability, no nothing can do our specialized work. And then you're surprised that your company doesn't wanna hire more specialists and grow the team. You just taught them you don't need that. You can have a product manager do some research and I keep telling people, you have to stand up for this stuff if no one who wouldn't qualify for our entry level job should do our work.
And that's it. If the product manager doesn't qualify to get an entry level job in UX, I don't want them doing UX. And if we're in the mood to train people and oversee their work, then for the love of the God of your choice, get some of these juniors in get build an apprenticeship program. If you are training, stop training product and BAS and engineers freaking train the people who are going to be our seniors in five years. Cuz in five years your product manager buddy is going to be a product director. They're going to have nothing to do with UX. Where is all of this training and care for our own peeps. And so I think that the things that we've done to ourself are semi accidental and out of desperation that maybe if I just let everybody do my work with me, they'll see how important it is.
And I keep saying, but they've seen the opposite. You made it look Fisher Price. Do they have Fisher Price in New Zealand? They, they've made it. Look, you've made it look Fisher Price, you dumbed it down, you boiled it down to five easy steps and the first one is cuddly. So that's where I think we've done it to ourself. And I think when things went bad in our companies, when Agile went to dominate us and when product managers went to dominate us, we were so desperate to be involved in a project, we were like, okay, what do you need? And we want to be critical thinkers. We want to be problem finders and problem solvers. All of us in our hearts and our souls and our blood, and too many of us, not all of us, but too many of us just got desperate and we're like, okay, maybe if I give them what they need now, next time they'll let me do the research I want. Well, why should they let you do the research you want? You just showed them they can get what they want in two days with some wire frames. So congratulations. Critical thinking means you have to look at the possible outcomes of your own actions and choices in how you might have accidentally been training your coworkers, leaders, executives in your company. That UX isn't specialized, it's not hard to do and anyone can do it and just put together a workshop and put some sticky notes on walls.
Brendan Jarvis:
Debbie, there is a lot to unpack there and we'll definitely come to workshopping in terms of design thinking and sprints. I want come back to where we started here, which was regarding evangelism of the field and how sure the way in which we've been doing that may not have been serving us the best way possible. So it's pretty clear that you are not a fan of how that's been currently done, and you feel that it's led to some undesirable outcomes in terms of how the organization looks at the role of UX and where the respect sits for the expertise that we have. I've also heard you call for strong UX leaders, and I'll quote you now to check that every cross-functional team, a UX practitioner is being assigned to knows what UX is. So as in the team knows what UX is. So if the traditional way that we've been evangelizing the field isn't working and is actually working against us, how do we do that? How do we ensure that other people throughout the business actually know what it is that we do, if that's important at all, and the outcomes or the value that we create through that work.
Debbie Levitt:
Thanks for pulling that slide. That's like slide 20 something from stop evangelizing UX and what to do instead. And that's a slide a couple of slides in a row where I've got this long list of things that I wish leaders and managers were doing and, and one of them is to make sure that that other teams understand what we do. And to me that is the role of management and leadership who have the power and authority to affect change. So often you see a job description for an individual contributor and it's like you'll evangelize a thing. And I'm like, okay, but that just tells me nobody here understands what I do. So I think that it's important for managers and leaders who know that there is a lack of knowledge or understanding either broadly across the organization or uncertain teams or in certain roles. Sometimes product gets it, engineering doesn't, sometimes engineering gets it, product doesn't.
Sometimes bas don't get it. Sometimes marketing doesn't get it. So wherever, if you are a manager or leader, you need to figure out wh where's the problem? And then the problem to me isn't evangelism. It's to gather the managers and leaders from those domains and say, hi, we're the UX team and this is how you can partner with us. This is what we're going to do for you marketing. We're going to help you meet those KPIs and OKRs because we take some of your ideas and we bring them into our world. And we have a process where we make sure that by the end these things are tested and vetted so that even if you wanna ab test them, your AB testing something that we already know works well, Hey, business analysts, you know how we're going to help you hate having to rewrite requirements because they just didn't seem to make sense for what was real for users.
We're going to help give you the knowledge and information you need so that your requirements don't need rewriting. They're going to be business centered and user centered the first time. And so I think that really there needs to be something that doesn't feel like evangelism. Because remember the image that goes with evangelism? Evangelism is please pray with me to the God that I've chosen. And so I think that we need those managers, directors, VPs, leaders, all the way up the chain for whoever's in your UX world to be going to these other teams and saying these things and saying, Hey, you know, probably thought that we make things pretty and we're all about CSS and the design systems and design thinking. Let me tell you a little bit about what we really do and how it's going to make your job better and easier. How you are going to be set up for more success. And I think that we have to be those types of partners.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you get the sense that other functions within the organization or other areas of expertise do the same thing that you've just spoken about? And I know you've changed the framing there and I think that's a really important distinction between come and pray to my God with me, versus here's what I'm here to do to help you to be more successful and here's some examples of the outcomes that we've driven in the past. That's quite an important distinction. But do you get the sense that engineering, for example, goes around to design or marketing or whatever and shops itself around in some sort of way with the sort of need to project quite overtly the value that it represents? Or is this still symptomatic of design not really being understood and there's still a cause for us to actually frame our value and openly and overtly and regularly communicate that to others in our organizations.
Debbie Levitt:
I always compare it to very few people go, oh, you're a lawyer, what does a lawyer do? There are just things that we know a, and when someone says engineer, okay, we might not know exactly what their engineering job is, we don't know if it's DevOps or QA or backend or front end. We need a little bit more information, but we generally know what an engineer does. And so no, the other ones don't have to go on goodwill tours to explain what they do. And that's because to me, part of the problem, and even though Don Norman loves the word design, I don't love the word design because I think for most humans on the planet, when you say design, they're going to think of something artsy. And so I'm exceedingly not artsy. And so I always feel like design doesn't fit me even though I technically am a designer or interaction designer.
And that's why for that side of my world, for many years I've been calling myself an architect, a UX architect or CX architect or strategist and architect or also researcher. And so I think that I'm also saying, suggesting that people don't use the word designer because as soon as people hear designer, they hear you make things pretty. And I think design is great for our visual designers, our graphic designers, our brand designers, maybe some marketing designers. It's not that the word itself is so terrible or that it's a bad title to have, but I think that for those of us who are not doing the art or don't want to do the art side of UX, who want to be more on that psychology, behavior, interaction information architecture side, I think we should be called architects. And it
Brendan Jarvis:
Used to
Debbie Levitt:
Be right, I think
Brendan Jarvis:
As soon as the labels in our industry have shifted over time and have become fewer, there's generally you've got, yeah, right, you've got UX designers, UX researchers, and I'm sure there's a few other variations out there. But those are the main two buckets now that people in UX fall into. And you, you've mentioned a number of things there. You've mentioned the word architect, we've talked about information architecture, interaction design, and all the other things that used to be a reasonably important part of the field as it's evolved. And I don't wanna pine for the path too hard, but I am interested in your thoughts on how much of the ambiguity that exists around the value of and I'll use the word design, but UX, how much of that ambiguity is actually attributable to the language that we use to describe who we are and what we do?
Debbie Levitt:
I like to say this is best summed up by something that's just under my desk. Let me grab this quickly and I apologize. I keep looking off camera because we have a sick dog in the house and he's now decided to just stand under my desk and stare at my computer and he dears weird dear. Okay, so let's talk about titles. I like to hold this up. This was my license plate in California in 2001.
Brendan Jarvis:
For people that are listening, it says UX ui
Debbie Levitt:
Sure does. And now if you say UX UI to your average UX veteran, they will set you on fire and yell at you and tell you, UX is not ui and UI is not UX. And how dare you don't, you know what I do? Et cetera. But I remember when I put that license plate on my card 10 years ago, that meant something different because I've never been an artist. So our current idea of UI design never fit me. It meant I do UX and I do user interfaces and it meant something. And then all of a sudden UX UI meant I'm a visual designer and I like wire framing. So then I started calling myself a product designer and then a product designer meant I'm a visual designer and I like to do wire framing. And so I think we've done ourselves a disservice by again, at maybe out of desperation, not standing up for what titles in our world should mean and not standardizing the people of the power to standardize.
These are the UX leaders. If we could gather UX leaders around the world and we all said, you know what? Let's call visual designer that let's call what we call UX designer, product designer, UX, UX architect or CX architect, and let's call this, there is no standardization and we can only blame ourselves because every other, so many other industries have standardizations. And people will say to me, well, we need an authority. We need a governing body. And I go, well, I don't know about that because I don't know who I would want. There's so many people in this industry who I don't like, as Brendan knows, we're not all friends and there are some people who hate me. They wouldn't want me to pick what these titles are. I don't want them to pick what
Brendan Jarvis:
The titles are. It's just lack of alignment though. And this friction that exists within the industry actually an opportunity waiting to be harnessed these dissenting voices if we could encourage people to collaborate. And I seem to see that the associations that people in the field used to gather around, such as say the I X D A for example, seem to have fallen by the wayside. So there's not even a forum other than pod podcasts and YouTube channels like you and I both have for bringing these conversations to the field. There's no formalized way that we can as a field actually discuss these anymore. At least it doesn't seem to me. I know that Lou Rosenfeld and Rosenfeld Media, and there's a few other really seasoned and experienced practitioners and leaders out there that are trying to create these conversations at scale, but what is it that we we're actually missing out on now by not having a really well subscribed to representative body or bodies?
Debbie Levitt:
I think that we're missing that standardization. And I think a lot of things could come with that. Okay, what does it mean to be a junior? What does it mean to be a mid-level? What does it mean to be certified? Who should you be certified by? What does that mean? Because I don't believe that there should be a UX certification that comes with passing a multiple choice test because my dog could pass a multiple choice test on a good day. So I would want to see standards, standards, standards. These are our titles. This is a senior, is five years not two and blah, blah blah. But again, the problem is whose hands do we put that in? Because there's people out there who I don't like and I don't want them to have control over this. And there's people out there who don't like me and they don't wouldn't want me to have control over this.
And then there's people who think UX is human factors and we must go by the is o regulations. And I'm going, no one did any of my jobs in the last 25 years has asked me to do ISO stuff. So we're all on different planets right now and I think that that's one of the many things working against us is just this internal discord. And I'm going to try to push to solve that this year. And some people might not like my methods, but I am going to push to solve that this year because I do see this as a bit of a civil war with two sides. And I see one side as act actively though sometimes accidentally working against our profession and one side trying so hard to save it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay, well let's go into that then. So what are the symptoms of decisions or actions that people are taking out there that might not be in your view, working in the favor of the field?
Debbie Levitt:
Well, I think that with critical thinking and looking at the outcomes we've been experiencing and the possible outcomes of some of the things people do, I think we can see what's truly working and what isn't. Cuz I've had people say to me, Hey, I've been trying to evangelize at my company for six years now and they still don't get UX. And I go, okay. And someone else will say to me, Hey, I tried design sprints cuz they were so hot and blah blah blah. And that didn't make people understand UX more. Now when I tell them I wanna hire UX people, they tell me let's run a design sprint. And so I think that we have these things that someone can pretend are working just enough for them to keep going, but I think that they're working against us badly. And so what I do is I tell people, take a look at your UX team at your company.
Has it been growing? Are people getting promoted? Are quality people coming in? Are you hiring good talent or are you hiring poor workers? Or are you hiring qualified people? Is the team growing? Is the hierarchy growing? Are you getting more managers and directors and growing it out? Are you going to be your own organization branch are, forget about, do you have a seat at the table? Are you the table? I always say hashtag CX is the table and everybody's sitting at it and people go, oh, we don't have a seat at the table. That's all I hear. We don't have a seat at the table. Then whatever you're doing doesn't seem to be working. And with critical thinking, you should wonder thing one, this isn't working. Thing two, could it be backfiring? Could it be working against me? And I think that the people who are doing these things are accidentally or on purpose hurting our profession. I think people that push fake UX are hurting those of us trying to do real UX. I like to joke, we're the children of Don Norman. We're trying to do the right things the right way. And the more that people are pushing what I'm calling fake UX or I sometimes call aspir.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is the design thinking, right? Design thinking and design sprints.
Debbie Levitt:
For me, the key main method, the main anthropologies are design thinking, design sprints, lean UX, which is neither lean nor UX and democratization. And in fact, if you listen to Susan Wkk, if you listen to Don Norman, they say These aren't UX processes. And if you ever read the history of design thinking it's banana pants waggy. Because evidently I D O saw a huge dip in their business I think after the.com burst of like 2000 and it was early two thousands and their business had severely dropped and they were trying to figure out what they can sell. And they came up with design thinking as kind of a reduction in commoditization of UX and user center design. And there you go. The start of all of this was a famous agency just trying to reduce and commoditize something. So they had a training you wanted to sign up for and they had a cool, interesting new thing you could hire them to do.
And it was des at the time, it was user-centered design wearing a new hat and a lot of makeup and too many bracelets. But now design thinking is something unrecognizable in many cases. It's not user-centered design. It's a bunch of people get in a room. In some cases there hasn't been good research. They're guessing at the problem, they're guessing at the why's. Everybody sketches an idea. We American Idol vote for it. And that's what we're giving the customer like that is so far from user-centered design, e, e especially when it's not done well. And so these are some of the reasons that I blast these things because you can't just say that, oh, design thinking in 2003 was pretty neat, we're not doing that. Even ideas not doing that. So I think that design thinking definitely hurts us because when we should be telling people about user-centered design and the fantastic process that we have that could solve any problem, wicked or non wicked, we have a process in place and we have specialists who can do it well because doing things well should still matter. We should be telling people about H C D and U C D, not some weird derivative.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, the design thinking and design sprint, the genie are out of their respective bottles there. And I don't see them going back in at any time soon at least. I mean they may be fads and they may eventually pass by the wayside, but what is it that we should be doing? And you mentioned earlier on in terms of we tend to overly impose ourselves and our ways of working through sprints or design thinking on other people in the business. And that has led to a lack of respect that they have because they feel like anybody can do what we are doing with sticky notes and sharpies. But what is a more refined or mature or beneficial way for UX practitioners or method to apply for UX PR practitioners to actually collaborate with those other key parts of the organization? So in particular, digital products would be engineering and product management. And how should we lead and involve these other disciplines in our work without seating all of the respect and responsibility to them to make decisions without us?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, fantastic question. And in the way that I normally describe it is I say, Hey, here's two ways that we can measure this. Number one, who's doing your job? Are only you doing your job if you're a designer or just UX designers designing or our engineers designing our product managers wire framing. So number one, who's doing the UX work? Just qualified people or kinda unqualified people even if they're interested in it and passionate and excited about it and wanna be design thinkers. So thing one, who's doing the UX work? Because you could be damn sure only product managers are doing product work. They're not letting us do that. Engineers doesn't want, they don't want us to code. So thing one, check who's doing your work? Number two, when you are utilizing collaboration, well everybody is looking through their own domains lens. So for example, if I wanna collaborate with a product manager, let's say I'm the researcher on a project, I'm going to come to that person early and I'm going to say, here's some research we did that shows some things we need to work on.
Let's work with engineering and you on prioritizing these. Or hey, is there other research you need me to spin up? Do you have something coming way down the line in some epic I don't even know about? Or some planned or roadmap thing. Are you going to need research in the next quarter? Don't we know, let's have a little meeting and talk about some of our assumptions and things we don't know about the user or Hey Deb, we got this data analytics gave us some data and it shows people are doing this but we don't know why and we wanna build something around it, but we don't know what Great, let's plan for that. Now that's product, doing products work, but we're collaborators because we're involving them early. We're making sure that our work incorporates the things that they're going to need from us. And then as a designer, we circle back with them later, Hey product, we did some designs.
They seem to be going well. They seem to fit the needs of how we've all defined the project. Whether that's requirements or stories or other documentation. Hey, product, take a look at this from the product perspective, just be another pair of eyes for me. Does this match the vision? Did I miss a story? Now that's product. Looking at our work from the product perspective, what you don't want is I don't like that move that button. That's not product. Looking at that from the product perspective, that's product. Trying to say what they like or be a designer. And so I believe, and we can tell the same story about engineering. Engineering is our work feasible? You should be able to tell me if it's feasible. You should be able to tell me if we have the technologies or the stack in place to build this. Or if there's a limitation where my design has to change because we don't have the technology in place and we're not going to in time.
That's engineering. Looking through engineering's lens at my work, not approving my work, not saying whether they like it or not. So I think that we have to take a look at who's doing our work and when we come together as collaborators, is everybody staying in their swim lane of expertise. Because as much as I love working with product and engineering, I don't want them to tell me what the best UX is. Now I'm happy for them to share ideas. I'm not close to other people's ideas. Many times they have great ideas. I don't want to learn their ideas through a design sprint. But you can always talk to people about some of their ideas in some of the early planning and prioritization. And sometimes their ideas are good. And sometimes I say, sorry, we're not going to do that. Or sometimes I say neutral and say, we'll think about that. But so I'm not close to other people's ideas, but I think we have to be careful to stay away from design by committee and work by committee and giving up our power to say Hey product, what do you think this should look like? They might never trust me again. They might think that Debbie, she really doesn't even know how to do her job. She keeps pulling me into these meetings and brainstorms. Does she even know how to design a thing?
Brendan Jarvis:
So the framing, framing that collaboration, the lens at which we are asking others for input is actually really important in terms of determining the nature of that collaboration and the way in which they perceive our expertise. We're not just opening it up for any and all feedback, it's actually being very deliberate in the type of feedback that we're seeking or the type of collaboration that we're seeking from others.
Debbie Levitt:
I would say so. And I think it's going to be our boundary to create and defend because especially at a lot of workplaces the other domains have already crossed those lines and we let them, when product said, I don't like the button there, move it over there. We said, okay, maybe if I make them happy they won't bug me again. But instead we taught them please make suggestions every time I show you a thing. And so I think for some people it's going to be fresh and new to have to establish healthy boundaries and make sure we we're in our swim lanes. And some of that might mean team charters where we document what are people doing on each project, what is product going to do, what does the UX person do, what does a researcher do? Or team of researchers. And sometimes we just need those team charters to help us stay in our lanes. They're very common in big corporations, so we can do them too.
Brendan Jarvis:
I reckon that's an excellent piece of insight and something for people to think about is how do we better define and defend for the benefit of our companies and of our users and customers, the boundary that exists or should exist between us and other disciplines. Debbie, you've put an enormous amount of energy and time into sharing your perspectives and your knowledge with the community as well as directly helping. And I think you mentioned earlier that you do portfolio reviews and you do other direct coaching work with UXers and other practitioners in cx. What is it that keeps this engine of yours burning so intensely? Why do you contribute so much to this field?
Debbie Levitt:
That is just my nature. I've always seen myself as a catalyst and a teacher. I'm very rewarded by feeling like I've pushed someone else's boat out. That's just been my nature my whole life. And to me, when I get the private messages or a LinkedIn post or something that says, I did something amazing at my job today because I saw it on Debbie's channel, or I got that job today because Debbie did this or whatever, it's not that I want the accolades that can be totally private for all I care and it often is, but to me, knowing that I've helped someone and made a difference in their life or their work sometimes I once coached the guy and he goes, yeah, I need to really hire two people, so how do you think I should ask for it? I said, ask for four and they'll give you two [laugh].
And he's like, he was like, really? I said, ask for four and you'll get two and cuz you want two, right? He goes, yeah, I only need two. I said, ask for four. And he came back to me a month later, he goes, oh my God, I can't believe it. You were right. I showed them a plan of what I needed and I asked for four people and they gave me two. And that person just got something great done and hired the amount of people he needed because I gave him some advice on a video call. And so to me, a lot of the work I do is free. Some of it I do is paid coaching, but I, I'm really trying to improve the profession, the industry, the plight of the junior and the people who can't get the jobs and the struggles of everybody This year 2022 I'm going to be very focused on are leadership cuz I just feel like they're let us down and they haven't done enough.
And they said yes to a lot of things they shouldn't have hoping it would work out. And it hasn't going to be working on how to support those people better, not how to poop on them louder, but how to support those people better and see why are they in the situations they're in and is there anything I can do or write or create that would help them change the situations where they are leaders. So I think that that's it. I'm just driven by helping people and I try to do as much of it for free as possible.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well Debbie, this has been such an enjoyable conversation and really meaningful as well. I feel like we've gotten to some of the and under the hood of some of the more important issues that are facing the field. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your insights with me today and also for your generous contribution to the field as well.
Debbie Levitt:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. Hope we'll do it again someday.
Brendan Jarvis:
No doubt. You are most welcome as well. Debbie, if people wanna follow you and all the great work and resources that you've put out there for the community to find out more about Delta CX and coaching and all the other great things you do, what's the best way for them to do that?
Debbie Levitt:
Yeah, I think the best way is I've got a page on my website where I put a lot of links to the things people ask me the most about. So it's DeltaCX.com/links because people say, Hey, how do I get your YouTube show schedule? It's there, Hey, how do I ask you a question for Tuesday office hours? How do I get coaching with you? How do I get a free portfolio review? Pretty much all the questions I get the most are answered on DeltaCx.com/links, and that would be a great way to go. Of course, please subscribe to the Delta CX YouTube channel. You will see some ads on the channel, but we're donating all the ad money to charity because I did that to help me in the algorithm not to make money. And if you find me on LinkedIn, please please give a follow and comment on posts even if you disagree. Let's hear what you think.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Debbie, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here too. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, all the different questions that we've talked about. All the answers will be chaptered in there, including where you can find Debbie and Delta CX, including the YouTube channel and the website, and anything else that we've mentioned today. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to subscribe to the show leave a review as well. Those are really helpful. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and also if you feel that this conversation or these types of conversations would be beneficial to other people that in your circle of influence, and please pass the show along to them as well. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just type in Brendan Jarvis. There's a link to my profile also at the very bottom of the show notes on all of the episodes. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Debbie Levitt

Strengthening and Protecting the Practice of UX

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Who is Debbie Levitt?

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