Katie Swindler
The High Stakes of Life and Death Design
In this episode of Brave UX, Katie Swindler shares her insights into designing for the human stress response, agency vs. in-house work-life balance, and how the NASA space suits came to be.
Highlights include:
- How has your experience in theatre management served you in design?
- What does good design feedback look like?
- What is the story of the design of the NASA space suits?
- Why is it important for our products to be designed for humans under stress?
- What are the four main ways we can design for the human stress response?
Who is Katie Swindler?
Katie is an Innovation Design Strategist and Senior Manager at Allstate, the insurance company that has protected American’s from life’s uncertainties, for more than 85 years.
At Allstate, Katie is responsible for the design strategy of the Innovation Department, including the hiring, development and design of the consumer research practice. She is also the bridge between her department and Allstate’s internal design, creative and consumer research teams.
Prior to joining Allstate, Katie was a User Experience Director at FCB in Chicago, where she was the UX lead for the redesign of the global Jack Daniels website, amongst many other projects.
In late 2021, Katie’s first book - Life and Death Design - was published by Rosenfeld Media. In the book, Katie takes a deep dive into the human stress response and how everyday designers can learn to help their users think clearly and act safely.
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 Katie Swindler. Katie is an Innovation Design Strategist and Senior Manager at Allstate, the insurance company that for more than 85 years has protected Americans from life's uncertainties, of which there are sure a few. At Allstate, Katie is responsible for the design strategy of the innovation department including hiring, development and design of the consumer research practice.
- She's also the bridge between her department and Allstate's internal design, creative and consumer research teams, which coincidentally was the department that Katie was previously working in. Prior to joining Allstate, Katie was a User Experience Director at FCB in Chicago, where she was the UX lead for the redesign of the global Jack Daniels website, amongst many other projects. In late 2021, Katie's first book, Life and Death Design, was published by Rosenfeld Media. In the book, Katie takes a deep dive into the human stress response and how everyday designers can learn to help their users think clearly and act safely and will definitely be talking a lot about that today. An experienced and compelling communicator, Katie has been invited to speak at many industry events including at South by Southwest Interactive (multiple times), UX Lisbon, the IxDA's Interaction and the PUSH Conference in Germany. And now, that's right, she's here with me for a conversation on Brave UX today. Katie, welcome to the show.
- Katie Swindler:
- Thank you so much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's great to have you here. And I just wanna come back to something in your introduction, and this might not be the thing that you might first think of that I might come back to, but Jack Daniels, bit of a whiskey fan.
- Katie Swindler:
- A bit of a whiskey fan. Yes. I became a whiskey fan while on that account for sure. I, I'm more of a gin girl myself, but it was a fascinating process. As part of being on that account, I actually got to go down to the distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee where Jack Daniels is made, see the limestone cave where all the water came from. See every step of the process, I even got to taste the whiskey before it was filtered, before it went into the barrel and after it went into the barrel. It was a really fascinating to learn all the art and science that goes into the process of making whiskey and I definitely became a fan by the end a hundred percent.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I had these sort of images of Mad Men and FCB's offices of these whiskey decanters with full of Jack Daniels. Is that anywhere close to what it was working on the account?
- Katie Swindler:
- It was not too far up, definitely. They had just launched Jack Honey, the honey flavored whiskey at the time when I was on the account and we definitely had several bottles of that quilled away in people's desk drawers, [laugh] that you want Friday, Friday at four, those who would often make an appearance. Yeah, no agency land. Yeah, you have a beer fridge. It's a very different culture than more traditional corporate office situations. Now I'm at Allstate we can't even have alcohol on the premises. It's just a very different corporate culture. But it was fun. We were downtown, I was working out of the Hancock building downtown Chicago and it was wild. It, I'm really glad I got a chance to do that in my career. It was a really fun experience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean it's a big network agency and they do sort of come with their own kind of, I suppose they're got a fun and exciting culture. Every agency that I've been into anyway, they always have a bit of energy to them. But I heard you describe your move to Allstate and you framed it up as a move because you felt that you wanted your work to have more impact on the brand and also on the customers or the clients of that brand. I got the sense was something that you felt from what you said, that you weren't getting necessarily at the agency or to the depth to which you were seeking, are agencies capable of doing lasting and impactful design work?
- Katie Swindler:
- Absolutely, they are. I was specifically at a advertising agency that had a UX team. Even while I was there I saw their practice deepen. There are lots of consultancies and agencies that are UX agencies that are embedded in product teams and especially when you are working in that way, you can have a real impact. And I certainly, if I had found a job at a place like that, that probably would, could have been my next step forward on that path. But I'll tell you I've seen a real trend in bringing these sorts of roles in house because corporations are realizing that these digital products and these digital experiences are a core part of their business and they want to have full control over it. It's not something that you want outsourced, it's something that you don't want a team to get ripped off and put on some more exciting new client business.
- You want to foster your team, you want to grow them, you want to keep them around for years and years. So you've got anchors that the whole history, I'm working, one of the POS I work with, he has been on the same product team for over 15 years. He knows that inside and out. I know at least few people within Allstate one on the UX side, one on the PO side that have been on the same product for over 15 years and you can't get that level and depth of expertise from an outside agency. Not to say that there's not value in those outside agencies sometimes coming in with a fresh perspective, especially if the team is really empowered you can do a lot of good in those roles. But I think more it's on the corporation side of just realizing how essential it is and pulling those in-house because of
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That. Yeah, it's definitely an observable trend and it's been going on. I mean I would say at least for a decade now, that drift of talent to in-house. I've also heard you talk about the way in which agencies approach their hiring and the development of their people. And again, I'll paraphrase here, so if I'm putting words in your mouth, please just let me know. Sure. I've heard you describe it in terms of regularly, hi regularly hiring young people not paying them very well and then expecting that they'll work all day and night. And I was curious from your own experience working in an agency and then having gone, what weight did you place on, I suppose the work life balance or the respect of people's time that agencies don't generally appear to have for their people and what role that played at all in your decision?
- Katie Swindler:
- So it probably wasn't as much of a determining factor as it should have been. I kind of lucked out by going to a company like Allstate where work-life balance is so prized and they put such an emphasis on it. They even give trainings on how to maintain good work-life balance and make sure that what you're doing is mission driven and they call it energy for life, that you're managing your energy throughout the day that you're doing work that gives you energy. It's an incredible program and an incredible commitment that Allstate gives. But yeah, I mean do have a child she's 11 now and at the time that I was doing agency life, she was I think 2, 3, 4 around that age. She was in a daycare just down the street from me. It's almost easier to do it when they're young cuz they don't remember much
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And the guilt can wash off, the parental guilt can wash off.
- Katie Swindler:
- I'll call you out on it. But I am really glad that I've got a much better, healthier balance for my family. Now, I also was mid-career by the time I was in the agency land, I did not go into that environment as an entry level position and I knew my worth and I said no in a way that a lot of people in the agency land did not feel that they could. I coached as much as I could around that, but it also probably would prevent me from going as high as I feel like my skillset would allow me to go in an environment like that because I do maintain boundaries. I wasn't working weekends. Every once in a while I would work late into the evening, but it was a rare thing because I just got my work, I buckled down, I got my work done and I was strategic about the things that I committed to in order to make sure I was doing my job and doing my job well. But also being able to be there for my family.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think that's really important. There's certain systems out there of which I would say advertise an advertising agency is an example of a hospital is another, which is an environment that my work, my wife works in where the machine will just continue to eat if you continue to feed it. And what you described there about having boundaries is so critical to actually achieving impact and having some satisfaction I feel at the end of the day when you do get home. And sounds like you've managed to find that at Allstate, which is really great. Just before we get on to sort of more design focus conversation, I was curious to ask you about your journey to design. Now I understand that you are a self-described theater nerd and that you have a bachelor of fine arts and directing and theater management. I also learned that you appeared in over 40 musicals, so this is clearly something that you take quite seriously or you have done in the past. And that up until about a decade ago, you were directing on a contract basis for various theaters, I believe in Chicago area. Yeah. Have you closed the book on theater or is this still an active interest of yours?
- Katie Swindler:
- I have taken a hiatus primarily. I couldn't figure out how to do that work and raise a child especially since theater, especially the sort of storefront theater that I was doing, which is not equity theater and meaning that I would be paid as a union member that it, it's done on the weekends and evenings and that's the time that I need to be spending with my child, [laugh] with my husband. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That essential for a happy life, right? Yeah. Spend some time with the family.
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah, exactly. So that's where I wanted to spend that energy. And so I definitely could see once I'm an empty nester going back and playing Ursula in The Little Mermaid or Ms. Hannigan and Annie, some of those sort of older character female roles that are just so fun. You get to chew the scenery all day long and sing the big belter songs and those would be a lot of fun to go back and play some of those roles or to direct shows. But it's definitely something I probably won't return to until my daughter either gets into theater herself, maybe we do some things together though she doesn't really seem to be going that direction or until she's off to college in life and doing her own thing though soon after, I don't know, you never know what life will send you, but I definitely haven't closed the book [laugh] just
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Put Oh, that's
- Katie Swindler:
- Good. The bookmark in slightly over.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. And it's interesting actually learning this about you and hearing you talk about that because there's been a number of previous guests, I don't know if Amy Jimenez, Marquez and Whitney Quisenberry on the show and both of those people came from a background or a love, have a love for theater and I imagine it's something that, given the nature of theater that served you fairly well in design.
- Katie Swindler:
- Oh absolutely. The creative process is the creative process and getting a bunch of people together with varying backgrounds and expertise in order to create something bigger than themselves, create an experience that others go through. Those that is, I could be describing theater, I could be describing a web experience or an app. The, it's same sort of group of people I don't like long for the stage right now because of honestly my itch is being scratched that for creative process. I also do quite a bit of speaking, which kind of fulfills my only child, extrovert me to be the center of attention.
- But the part of theater that I really always loved was figuring the show out, putting all the pieces together, creating an experience that is transformative and takes people to new places. And we do a lot of that in our work as UX professionals. It, we have to really think and put ourselves in the shoes of other people, think about how they would react, think about motivation and all of these. That was the fun part of the theater work back when I was doing it more regularly. And I get to do all that fun stuff in my day-to-day work. So it definitely, it doesn't feel like a deficit in my life, but especially as I become an empty nester or as I retire, I could see going back to theater to fill that role within the creative process again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's good to know that I'm speaking with another only child,
- Bear that in mind as I go through. Yeah, I was curious though, there's a couple of areas of tension that I can see in, and I don't mean bad tension but tension that I can see between how you saw your role in theater and how you appear to see your role in design. You've talked there about I think going back and being the Little Mermaid and being the actor but you've also, your degree is in theater management and directing. And when I look at your current role at Allstate, you've got a, what looks like an IC role in terms of strategy, but then you are also being playing the design manager and the bridge role between the two departments. And my question that I'm going to get to really quickly, I promise, is what is your favorite role to play? Is it the dancer on the dance floor or is it the observer on the balcony?
- Katie Swindler:
- Why not both? Right. I mean I'm definitely drawn to roles where I don't have to exclusively do one thing and I really love being a design manager. I know not everybody can say that. Sometimes people move into design because they see it as a way to progress their career. But I really love that part of it. I love developing people. I love being part of figuring out the structure and of a larger organization, figuring out how we create organizations that support designers throughout their career that grow them and engage them continuously. I love those sorts of problems to solve, but it's also really satisfying to be able to contribute directly to the work. That being said, there's many ways to contribute to the work. If we're talking the double diamond, you know, wanna make sure you're doing the right thing and then doing the thing right, you get the strategy diamond and the execution diamond.
- I definitely see myself living most half fully and contributing the most in that first half of the diamond. I don't consider myself a high fidelity designer I'm not the one that's going to make your pixel perfect design, though I will certainly sketch for days and try to lay out the architecture, but I really enjoy helping people get their designs to the next level. I feel like my background in theater really helped me learn how to give good design feedback. In theater, they have a saying, don't give line readings. So I [laugh], okay, so in my freshman year of college I had done all this performing, I love to be on stage, but my freshman year of college I realized that what professional success looks like for an actor is to do the same show seven times a week. And that just sounded like factory work to me.
- And the part I always loved about theater was getting the show up was solving all the problems that you needed to solve in order to get a show on its feet. And so it really made a lot of sense to shift into directing because that was where that was. If I pursued it professionally, that was the role in which I would get to solve those problems. And I really found a home in that bringing the teams together and through training as a director you get told never give a line reading. And what that means to those of you who don't have the theater background. So if you're giving an actor a note, let's say they're saying a line in a way that's kind of not getting the point across, you don't ever give them the line reading. A line reading would be say the line this way where you actually say the line that they're supposed to say. If they're like the dog goes to the store, the dog goes to the store, you don't do that. You direct them through words to say what you're trying to convey here is the dog is not from the store but rather to the store. So that then they come to their own conclusion that what they need to do is hit the word two, you don't
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Give them a mini vision. Right,
- Katie Swindler:
- Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're not telling them, you're kind of painting it for them a little bit so they can go to it.
- Katie Swindler:
- Exactly. You talk a lot more about the intention, about the motivation about what's behind it and then you let them figure out how to say the words that are coming out of their own mouth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why is that important? Why should we do this?
- Katie Swindler:
- So it's the same thing when we're giving notes in a design critique, you don't say make the logo bigger [laugh], you say, I don't see the logo. Right? Because there's lots of ways to fix that problem or nobody's clicking the contact button. You don't just say don't make the contact button bigger or make the contact button red. You say the nobody's clicking the contact button or we don't think people are doing it and let the designer solve the problem, figure out what's the root cause and then do iterations until they figure out how to solve it. And it, it's just such a better way to engage your design team. Cuz if you're giving line readings to your team, they stop thinking for themselves. They just do it exact and then it just sounds like the dog went to the story, they sound robotic. And the same thing happens in a design team. They just do what they're told. They don't think it through. And you look at it and you're like, oh well yeah, okay, well they made the button bigger but now it's caused three other problems because they weren't really thinking about it, they were just doing what they're told. So I think that's probably one of the most valuable skills I developed as a directing major that I apply as a design director in my everyday roles.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, don't give line readings [laugh] a sense of proximity that I get that's important to you. A certain closeness, not necessarily needing to be the person pushing the pixels on the screen yourself, but there's a certain proximity to the work that you certainly convey as important to you. Any ambitions to be VP or eventually in the C-Suite in terms of a design role that you hold?
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah, I would love to run a larger design team before the end of my career, mostly because I've developed all of these opinions about how to develop talent and I would like a chance to execute it. But that's a design challenge too, that it's a, it's design ops, basically the designing the design organization, there's a book on that. I think I badly paraphrase the title of there, but that is a whole challenge of itself that I find extremely appealing and that I think doesn't always get, people sometimes fall into things backwards or they get promoted up until they're out of their range of whether they're actually comfortable doing. And I think if we can be mindful and purposeful in how that we're approaching some of these challenges I think we can do good. Not just for whatever company that we're working for, but for the industry as a whole.
- I constantly am seeing things on Twitter and LinkedIn where people are talking about this chronic problem of people posting junior design roles that require five years of experience and they're called entry level roles. And we are creating our own problem here. And especially when we think about how do we increase the diversity within our field, how do we ensure that the design teams that we are building reflect the diverse and varied people that we are designing for? How do you develop that talent, especially for groups that have been chronically pushed out of a job market and you've got to create those opportunities and take responsibility for doing so. Those are the sorts of interesting design challenges that in a way I still feel like an individual contributor if I would be get a chance to sink my teeth into a design problem that those are the sorts of things that I find really appealing about moving further up a career ladder.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just touching on that notion of diversity there and the way in which we recruit. If we have a barrier of five years experience for a junior role, then really we are only able to recruit people that entered the field five years ago, which by definition is going to be less diverse than it currently could be in the current moment. So I think that is a huge problem and it would be great to have more people actively working on that. I just wanna come to the book now, life and death design. So that's a fairly heavy topic. When I saw the title of this book, it was immediately captivated by the subject matter that you were tackling there. And it seemed to me also that this is another way that you're expressing yourself in terms of trying to deepen the meaningfulness and the impact of the work that you're having in the design community. Where does the search for depth come from within you, if that's the right way to characterize it?
- Katie Swindler:
- Oh wow. Oh, that's a deep question. Mean where does it come from? And we all wanna save the world. I don't know, maybe I grew up reading too much tolkin, but I've always been a fan of the what is it called, the heroic arc, right? Where you're just trying to do what's right. And I am also an eternal optimist and have seen the power of optimism over and over to tackle big problems. Also something that I feel an immense responsibility for. Looking at the enormous amount of privilege that I have in my own life. I have been given so many blessings and it calls to me to return those blessings in the form of doing good in this world as much as I possibly can before I kick it right. And I don't think that there's one way to make the world a better place and I think that I have to be aware of my own, what is that called?
- Heroic complex. Hero complex. It's something that I'm constantly watching and keeping an eye on because that can lead you to bad places as well. But I think wrangled and watched, I think it can be a force for good and the world needs some right now, [laugh], right? We need people who are more willing to stepped up and do the work. And that's something I'm very interested in doing. And I didn't know that the things that I had did, designing jack daniels.com, it's cool, it looks great on my resume, but has it prepared me to make the world a better place? I don't know that it did. So I wanted to be prepared to actually do good in my work, to learn the things so that even that my outcomes can match my intentions. And so the writing the book is a byproduct of the research I needed to do in order to get myself where I wanted to be.
- It was a way to organize my thoughts, build upon them, put everything I had learned in my 15 year career to work to interpret the different things that I had researched around the human stress response how all the amazing design work that is done in high stakes, high stakes, high stress fields like aviation and healthcare. There's amazing work being done by amazing designers who are changing the freaking world. And I just wanted to capture that and write it down and figure out how I can learn from it and how I can help others learn from it. Because I don't know, I just kind of feel like that's our responsibility as designers, [laugh] is to just to keep putting it down, keep passing it on and sharing what we learn as we learn it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's quite a substantial topic. We will get into it. We get into this at depth in terms of looking at life and death design cuz there's a lot in there and you've learned a lot of things and you are helping to raise awareness of this amongst the design community and the ways in which everyday designers can build this into their practice. But writing a book about, there's one thing to write a blog post, it's another thing to write a book. And often authors the ones that I've spoken to anyway, there's a lot of resistance, internal resistance they face in that journey of going from a germ of an idea through to getting something published. Were there any moments while you were writing this book that you just found yourself staring at the screen wondering what on earth you were doing?
- Katie Swindler:
- I didn't even get to the screen some days for me, once I was at the screen that I had crossed the biggest barrier for myself. For me it was getting to the computer, it was all the things that I would do and say were more important in that moment up to and including, oh, I just need to relax. It's important that I rest. Which is true, A little voice. Yeah, it's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- True. The Allstate work-life balance, voice coming true, exactly.
- Katie Swindler:
- But in all things moderation, including rest. So luckily I have an amazingly supportive family and that support sometimes came in the way of tough love, get go do it, pushing me out of bed, doing what I needed to do or really just showing up with love. My husband was so amazingly supportive, just picking up whatever needed to be done to make sure that I didn't have an excuse to not write. And when he's doing so much to make space for that, that really helped me get off my duff and get the work done. It also is incredibly important to have accountability. The amazing team at Rosenfeld Lou and Marta especially really helped keep me on track. Marta was my managing editor and she was continually supportive and telling me what a great job I was doing, but also there were also deadlines and I knew I would have to answer to Marta if I missed any but I'll tell you, I wrote this during the pandemic the first month that I was set to sit down and write the book.
- I had signed a contract in January that said I would start writing the book in March, 2020. And we all know what happened in March, 2020. And so those first six months, everybody was just kind of running on adrenaline. I read some articles around the six month mark around the six month slump and how it's actually very common for people in wars and other long-term stressful situations to that six month mark is a very regular time for people to just hit walls. And it makes sense. Our bodies give us the boost of energy for emergency situations by stealing it from other places. But I can only do that for so long. And even in a chronic stress situation, you're just going to run up against times when your body's just like, no, I'm just done. And I definitely felt that I lost a dear friend, a mentor, pretty deep Nair, who is just a powerhouse in the UX scene in Chicago.
- My book is actually dedicated to him because he was such a influential and wonderful impact on my life. And we lost him I think in June or August of that year and June or July of that year. And so by August I just was out of juice. I was just done. And my editorial team was wonderful about letting me just take a few months off. Also, my family was struggling with, especially my daughter was struggling with everything to do with the pandemic and I needed to focus on her and be there for her and help her through that. So they were wonderfully supportive about allowing me to take some time, but also gave me the push I needed to say by. But when I said, okay, I'm going to come back in and it was October, November or something, I was like, okay, I'm going to restart by this date. And when that came, it took a little doing, but it was like, well okay, you can take more time, but then I'm not sure if the book will happen. And sometimes you need that, you know, need real deadlines and you need those deadlines to be real sometimes in order to do it. So they gave me just enough, just enough space and just enough push. It was really just what I needed to get the book out and they were a wonderful support team for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like they gave you that space, like you said when you were experiencing that chronic stress, but then you had to acutely press your stress response in order to kickstart the book back up again, which great. Which I suppose is a brilliant perspective that Rosenfeld was able to bring to what was going on for you and what was best in terms of that creative outcome, which has been the book. And I just wanna come to some of the specifics now sort of within this design area of life and death design. And I'm just going to quote you and you've said, to get the most out of human performance we have to build systems that accentuate our strengths and shore up our weaknesses. And you've got a great story that I believe illustrates this fairly well. And that's about the NASA astronauts and the suits that they first came to wear. What is the story of those suits?
- Katie Swindler:
- So it's one of my favorite stories, and I have it in my talk, but I don't actually know that it's in the book. But yeah, so at the beginning of the space race to get to the moon there were two different suit designs that were being considered by nasa. There was this hard suit design and a soft suit design in which the soft suit of course is the sort of Michelin man, the marshmallow suit that we're also familiar with. But they had this hard suit and it was actually the hard suit that the engineers were really excited about and they wanted to build. But when they tested the hard suit, the astronauts were incredibly clumsy When they were doing test runs in zero simulated zero G using airplanes, the astronauts would often fall on their back and couldn't get up. They were stuck there like a turtle. And so they were really afraid that if they sent these guys to the moon, they would literally get stuck there. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Can you imagine Neil Armstrong lying on his back on the moon? It's still
- Katie Swindler:
- There. You can actually find video footage of these suits being tested and it's quite hilarious. I'm not
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Going to lie, it's in your talk. Yeah, I will have to link to it in the show notes. It is quite hilarious
- Katie Swindler:
- Watching them real. It's really funny. And so the other suit design was being put forward by a company called International Latex Corporation. There's a fascinating book that I got all this from called Fashioning Apollo and it was all about the spacesuit design process, which if you really wanna nerd out for 20 odd chapters on spacesuit design that that's your money right there. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'll have to send that to actually, I don't know if Bob Baxley, but I'll have to send that to Bob because Bob's a big fan of Nasser and the space program. Yeah,
- Katie Swindler:
- It's a good one and lots of great pictures in it and everything. So anyway, so International Latex Corporation, they're the ones who are putting forward the soft suit designs and they made this amazing video showing one of their engineers wearing the suit and playing American football while wearing the suit as opposed, put it juxtapose to the turtle suit [laugh] that the other guys are wearing. And it was such a hit, I mean it was pure propaganda. It's not like it was in a laboratory setting or anything like that, but it was so it such an effective piece of video and propaganda that they handily won the contract from NASA and what they actually ended up doing. So International Latex Corporation was a spinoff of another company, which is a much more well-known home home brand name Playtex, the women's bra and girdle manufacturer. And so what they actually ended up doing is pulling the women who made the bras and girdles, they pulled them off the production line to sew the Apollo suits because those were the women who had the expertise necessary.
- They knew the human body, they knew how to design and build clothing for the human body curves and those suits. They played well with the strengths of humanity. They kept that safe, they kept all the pressure in our enclosed space, but they allowed us to move. They allowed the human body to move it, allowed it to the dexterity necessary. We've evolved over millions of years, have fingers and arms and they work in a certain way. And those suits gave just enough protection but still allowed for that flexibility and responsiveness that really makes the human creature unique. So yeah, I love that story and I love that it was makers that actually sewed those Apollo suits. I think that's a fabulous little factoid.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what is the main lesson in here for everyday designers when we think about what we are doing?
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah, it was really brought home to me when I spoke with a woman who designs for analysts, intelligence analysts, she may or may not work for the cia. She told me one of the most important things to do is to assign the work to the computers that the computers are good at and sign the work to the humans that the humans are good at. And to understand well where are the biases that need to be checked by a system? But where are the intuitions and the pattern seeking that is unique to a human to be able to draw certain conclusions and make those necessary intuitive leaps. When you're working with incomplete and often rocky data sets, sometimes you need that human intuition to fill in the gaps and the computers do that still. So whenever we're creating systems, whether it's a physical object or a space suit or a data display on a monitor, we have to think about are we giving the right work to the human and are we giving the right work to the system? Because when we understand that we understand the strengths of each, then we can really build powerful systems that point everything in the right direction and get the best outcomes for everyone.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I really like that lens. It's a simple lens to place upon a design challenge. Just that question or those, those two questions that you can ask yourself. And I also just want to come to something else that you've said, which I believe this may relate to. And I'll quote you again. You've said if a stressed person can use your product, anyone can. And where I got to with this anyway is this made me think of something, one of my previous guests on the podcast, sir Ivanka had said and he'd said, when we designed for extreme cases, we actually end up serving everybody. There is no such thing as a normal human. And we were talking in that context about inclusive design. Am I seeing something that isn't there a link between life and death design and inclusive design? Oh
- Katie Swindler:
- A hundred percent it's all linked because in some ways when you're designing for life and death situations or high stress situations, you're designing for the human stress response. We are still unpredictable creatures. There are some things that we can predict better when we understand the human stress response, but there's still a wide range of things that can happen. And having a clear understanding of what that range includes us to capture the most people and funnel them back to the most desirable path, the path that's going to be the best possible outcome for that human. Because our instincts don't align very well with modern life. So many of the things that we build require us to think logically in the moment or to read or to. There's so many skills that or to click tiny buttons to type. These things get incredibly difficult to do when we are in a panicked mindset or even a high stress mindset because our stress responses have evolved to help us with gross motor improvements, not fine motor improvements.
- They have evolved to help us think fast and intuitively, not clearly and logically. So all of the things that the modern world is built to take advantage of, all of our human evolution, our prefrontal cortex, our logic and reason are amazing fingers and hands. We have incredible power in our fingers. But all of that, when I mentioned earlier when we're stressed, our body pulls energy from one place and puts it into another and our fight or flight response, it's super powering our arms and our legs for running and punching, but it pulls that energy from our fingers, it pulls that energy, the blood actually flows differently in our brains and bodies and it pulls back from our fingers and that's why we get cold, clammy stiff fingers when we're under stress. But the exact same thing is happening on our brains. The blood literally moves away from our prefrontal cortex and into the core center of our brains where things like our hippocampus and our experiential memories are located basically the center and the home of our intuition. So our intuition gets that megaphone effect and it's just like, what's the first thought that comes into my head? Fast, fast decision making. And it's really hard the more stressed we get to remember things that we learned by reading a book or in a classroom setting. All of that is learned very differently than things that we've learned more intuitively and through experiences. So we just really fall back on it a completely different skill set and it, it's not necessarily what the modern world is designed for if we're not careful about how we design.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like stress is, well, it can enable other things like some of those less fine motor movements. It disables certain other areas of us in terms of our physical self, but also of some of the higher functions that we could otherwise use if we weren't stressed to process and understand what it is that we are looking at or trying to experience.
- Katie Swindler:
- Daniel Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. He's an award-winning economist who's made his life's work studying bias, human bias. And he has a whole thing framework in his book about system one and system two. And system one is that fast intuitive system in system two is the more slower logical thinking system. System one the human brain is very efficient, which means we always fall back to the system that takes the least amount of effort. And that system one is very fast and efficient. You literally burn more calories when you think hard about something. When you engage that system too and you start thinking [laugh], thinking hard and doing math, that's where all your analysis lies. That system one can't do math, it can instantly tell you, is this string longer than that string? But the second you say, okay, how much longer you have to engage system two. And because the system one can't do that, it can't analyze, it just compares and categorizes and puts things into categories and associations. Whereas if you want an actual measurement or a number, you've gotta flip over to that system too. And so yeah, we're programmed to be as efficient as possible and so our brains are lazy and we rely on that system one as a fallback as often as we can. And we rely on it, especially when we need to make fast decisions in an emergency situation or when we're stressed.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've written about the human stress response and how we can, I wouldn't say interrupt it, but design for it. And there are four main ways that we can mitigate that. What are those four main ways? Yeah,
- Katie Swindler:
- So I think of it as the first thing I always try to do is think about can we harness it? An adrenaline rush is a really powerful force of nature. Can we take advantage of that? And sometimes the answer is yes, when you're making more intuitive decisions, sometimes that's exactly the right thing, especially if you've got an expert who's well trained in their area, just making sure that they can respond as fast as possible. So harnessing it is that first one. The second is obviously reducing, you said interrupting. I think that's fair. Avoiding it all together. Can we eliminate something? Just not even pop an air message. Can we do air prevention instead? Can we sidestep around it? And then the third would be protect. So oftentimes when the human stress, somebody's got that fight or flight response and especially if they're all the way to panic, a lot of times all you can really do in that moment is protect them.
- Put up guardrails do full system takeovers and get them as quickly as possible back to a state where they can engage their logic and reason and help them. And then the fourth and final is thinking about calming. Two in most situations, the actual pure moment of an emergency, something falls on somebody else. That isn't something that an app or a designed system can often help with unless you're building the building. So oftentimes people are turning into technologies in the wake of a terrible thing, you had a car crash. Well what do you do after your car crash? Well, you pick up your phone and you call your boss and tell 'em you're going to be late for work. You call the police and tell them to come out. You call your insurance company, you call a tow truck, you call a car rental agency. Or you get online and you use the apps or whatever it is to handle all these things.
- So it's really technology. There's usually a huge rush to use technology in the wake of a high stress experience or an emergency. And so lots of times you wanna think, as a designer, you wanna think about how can I make that experience as calm as possible so that we can get people back to thinking rationally and not rushing through decision making, help them. It's really hard to think about complex things when you're stressed and sometimes dealing with the fallout of an emergency. You actually need to deal with complexities. So calming people down, creating aesthetics or giving them human support is also a really big way that you can calm people down. Those are definitely ways that somebody can calm somebody in after an emergency.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This was one of the light bulb moments for me when I was preparing for today's conversation was exactly what you've been talking about, where you were describing the power that we have in that moment to prioritize when or where human support is available. And I actually ended up sending this to a client of mine who's a New Zealand bank, the design team there cuz it was so relevant to one of the journeys that I just helped them to evaluate at a prototype stage. And you basically said that there are two sort of main areas where you can think about this. One is where a mistake will cost the person or I suppose, and or the business a lot of money. And the other is where it's a low confidence activity where someone might be coming to this for the first time or might be failing outside of their depth.
- And it was just such a, like I said, a light real light bulb moment. And it was such a pleasure to receive as part of preparing for today. I just wanna come back up to this notion of calming though, because you, in your talk that I had watched gave a really, which I thought was a fascinating example and so relevant given the pandemic that we've all lived through of how other humans have a, and this is why we're talking about human support here and where this is engaged. Other humans can have a hugely calming effect after a stressful experience. And you actually used a story, which unfortunately comes back to that awful day of September 11th and 2001 of how this played out for people who seemingly were under a lot of pressure clearly, but actually behaved in ways that didn't really make sense. But when you zoom out, you can understand why they were doing it. What was going on for people on September 11th near ground zero, and how was this playing out for them?
- Katie Swindler:
- So prior to nine 11 and a lot of the research that was done in the wake of how people moved around after that event, sociologists and scientists, if they were going to sit down and model how the city would move, how people would move throughout the city, that there was this general accepted wisdom that people would just run straight away from ground zero. They would just seize bomb explode or whatever happened and they would just run out straight away as fast as they possible it could. But that in fact is not what they found when they were actually looking at how people actually behaved in the wake of that event. Much more what they saw is that people did run, but they didn't necessarily run away as much as they ran toward people that they cared about. So parents would run to get their kids from school, even if that meant going closer to ground zero, if somebody was lying, bleeding on the ground, somebody would move forward and to help them and pull them back away from safety. And there's all sorts of stories about coworkers gathering everybody and making sure everybody was together before exiting the building as a group. And once they started looking for this, this is human behavior that is seen in literally every culture around the world. This is some really basic human humans being human being humans, human Inc. Because it happens in floods and fires and hurricanes and literally never, yeah, wars. Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm sure we're saying this in Ukraine currently
- Katie Swindler:
- A hundred percent people just want to be with their families. They want to be with, I think the sociologists call them attachment figures. So for soldiers that might be the other soldiers in their unit and being with people in times of high stress has a very protective effect on our brains. And if when they study people who have gone through traumatic experiences, there are significantly lower rates and less severe rates of P T S D and let's say soldiers who experience something with their unit as opposed to alone when they experience something all by themselves that's traumatic, much higher rates of P T S D than if they are with or fellow soldiers in that time of trauma.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is one of those areas of humanity that unfortunately we see the best of us come out at the worst of times. And I think it's a really nice reminder for people because we are still going through this pandemic and there are many things going on in the world that Ukraine is only one example of at the moment. So don't forget, I suppose the calming effect that human connection can have. If there's someone that needs a phone call, then don't wait, give them a phone call, hop on a zoom and have a chat with them. There's another story that I want to come to and I want to come to this not because of its I wouldn't say it's provocative, but it's definitely an emotive story but it illustrates really well just the practical effect that design of everyday items can have on someone who's in an extremely stressful situation.
- And this is coming back up to this ability for designers to help people to harness the stress response or not as it would be in this particular example. And I understand that the story came to be because you were having a conversation with one of your colleagues, Daniela at Allstate, about big red emergency buttons and why they're designed the way they're designed Now, I'll let you g go into this where you'd like whether or not you wanna touch on big red buttons or you just want to get into this story, but what was it that Daniella could relate to when you were talking about big red emergency buttons?
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah, so a lot of what I do in my book is I look at the emergency design systems and what works about them to really dissect why they work. Emergency buttons work because they are big. They protrude up off the panel and they are made to be slapped. You're on a game show it. They are not something that you press with the top of your forefinger, right? That's not how you execute an emergency button. You slap it, right? Yeah. And the research shows why that works and it's it, we talked about it, the fingers get clumsy in those times of stress and because it's borrowing power to power those other parts of those gross motor movements. And so I was sharing this research with Danielle and saying, oh, it's so crazy that it gets hard to press. Tiny buttons are we're designers of things that are used on phones or with keyboards, but I, we are constrained to designing within these things.
- But all the research says these things get incredibly difficult to use when the more stressed out people get. And she was like, yes, I know exactly what you were talking about. And she told me she had been home one day with her two sons. It was just them at the house at that time. It was a nice summer day. She was upstairs cleaning and her little four-year-old son was just following her around from room to room, like boys. He loved their mother's deal and she had left the bedroom for just a second to get something. And when she came back in the screen was no longer in the open window. And she said, I knew exactly what happened. And she goes over to the window and she looks down and her four-year-old is lying still on the pavement below. So she starts yelling his name, she runs down the stairs, she goes through the kitchen, she grabs a cordless phone on her way out and she goes to his side and he is breathing, but he is otherwise not responding to her.
- And I mean, she is losing her mind. And she looks down at the phone in her hand and her fingers are so stiff she can barely hold it. And she looks at the phone and I will never forget this, she said, Katie, I couldn't find the nine. She couldn't even see it. And luckily her older son had heard her yelling. And so he came over to find out what was wrong and she holds out the phone to him and she says, you have to do it. You have to call 9 1 1. So it was her eight-year-old son who called the ambulance and saved his brother's life that day. Now I was like, to reassure everybody, the kid is fine, [laugh] spent a couple days in the hospital, but it was a full recovery. And that was actually, gosh, like 12 years ago now. And there's, there's definitely no lasting damage.
- The kid had a full recovery. But that story is just so powerful to me. Just demonstrate how very differently our brains work and how much we lose in the skills that we rely on. When I say the modern world is not designed for us in those moments, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Like a designer who picked the font or laid out those buttons, they are not thinking of a use case of somebody who is so panicked. They literally can't read characters anymore. That is, and it's so extreme. So there are new designs that are being tested for doing be this better. If anybody has an iPhone, you can actually push the biggest button depending on which iPhone you have. If you've still got an iPhone with a button at the bottom, you can push that one. Otherwise it's the big button on the side. And if you push it rapidly five times it'll make this woo sound. And within three seconds, if you don't stop, if you stop it from there, it will call 9 1 1 on your behalf and connect you to emergency services. And then
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just wanna just, yeah, I'm so glad you've brought this up. Yeah. Cause this was something I was going to touch on as well. And if you are outside of the United States, it does work as well. At least it does work in New Zealand here. I actually tried this after you enlightened me about this feature. I had no idea. No idea that it exists. And I think that's part of the issue, I suppose with the device is that it's a great feature. Yeah, it's so useful in this situation, but not very many people know that it exists.
- Katie Swindler:
- And that's the biggest problem with it. One thing that the emerge, the emergency stop button that big red button has going for is it is standardized. That is the aim in every country that you go to. And in fact, you as a designer, if you are designing for a global audience, you can count on the color red having a strong association with Stop. And you can thank the emergency stop button for that. It's because it is in, basically, if country has factories, then that culture has an association that red means stop
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's or trained any trained carriage you're in. It's available generally to any member of the public press if they feel they need to.
- Katie Swindler:
- So that standardization is what makes it work. And the lack of standardization between mobile devices even in the iPhone, I was just trying to explain how it worked and there's differences in it. So in order for this to really be an intuitive pattern, you have to have consistency and repetition. And so that that's something that the device makers, the manufacturers are going to, if they ever want to really solve the problem, they're going to have to work together to standardize it across all mobile devices and have Oh,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even I looked into this, I don't use Android device, but I looked at it just out of curiosity. Android is a minefield. It is impossible to understand how you would ever educate a populace about how to do this. Because every device type has a different way in which it happens, at least with Apple. I suppose there's some somewhat a step closer to universality as to how it actually is engaged. But Android is just a mess.
- Katie Swindler:
- And what I always tell people is, no matter what phone you have, cuz Android has apps that you can download and install that will give you a very similar feature. Whatever phone that you have, I always tell people to practice it. Usually you can trigger it and then you have three seconds to prevent it from actually calling the emergency services but to practice it because it's actually getting it into your muscle memory that allows you to remember it in the moment that you actually need it. Just hearing about it, it really doesn't get logged into the right part of your brain that's getting only into your prefrontal cortex. I'm not into your hippocampus and your experiential memory. So actually do it a couple of times just to get that muscle memory going so that if you are someplace where you need it, and I actually, I witnessed a car accident about a year ago after I had written that part of the book and had rehearsed it.
- And I remember being like, oh, I can know what to do. There was no question. And I used the feature and I remember thinking, oh, this is actually really easy to perform because my hand is shaking already. And so just rapidly click a button. It was really easy to do in that moment because I had practiced it. I knew exactly what I needed to do and my hand already wanted to do that anyway, so I was happy to have that knowledge. But you do, it requires an immense education campaign on the part of civil service and it requires a lot of cooperation amongst all these different manufacturers and carriers. It's something that as we are entering autonomous vehicle design and more and more self-driving features are getting added to vehicles, it is definitely something that for public safety we need to be thinking about. I mean, think about 10, 15 years in the future where you've got multiple autonomous cab companies and each cab company has an emergency stop someplace in the vehicle.
- Some of them are a big red stop button, some of them are located discretely in the ceiling, some of them are in the door. And it's the sort of thing that if we don't, as a design community, we don't come together and standardize these critical safety features early, then we are at risk of creating kind of a dystopian future where sure, the emergency button exists someplace in the vehicle, but never going to be able to get to it in the three seconds. You have to prevent an accident. So thinking about design associations and cooperative design it, I often think that we need to think about a lot of this stuff the same way that the scientific community does. Yes, there's IP and we need to protect some of our designs in order to protect the businesses that we work for, but there are certain public safety moments where we need to work collectively across the industry with our competitors in order to create a truly safe experience for our
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Customers. And if you've ever hopped into a vehicle like a European vehicle versus say Japanese vehicle, you'll realize that even on very simple systems within the car, if they're reversed in the case of the windscreen wipers and the indicators, oh man, they're on, they sit on different sides. And I mean, that's clearly not a life or death system. It doesn't really matter if you indicate when you meant to turn the windscreen wipers on but when you're talking about something as essential as the ability to stop a moving vehicle, if it's heading to crash into somebody else, then yes, I completely agree. There shouldn't really be any room for higher functions to kick in at that point. You just want the instinct to play out and for people to know where it is. And you touched on an example there when you'd witnessed that car crash and you were able to, we'll come to suppress which is one of the areas you looked at with the human res stress response in terms of engaging the iPhone feature at that moment. And I understand that there is also a really great example that you've given in the past of heart attacks and the way in which people train, because training is one of those things that helps us, like you trained with your iPhone feature helps us to rise above the stress response in the moment. But that when it comes to heart attacks there is a certain type of training that is delivered that doesn't necessarily prepare people for all the types of situations they might encounter.
- Katie Swindler:
- So there was a study done I wanna say four or five years ago that showed that women are significantly less likely to receive C P R from a bystander. And if a man falls to the ground showing all the classic symptoms of a heart attack, about 40 some percent of the time, somebody will step forward and give that man's c p r. But if you look at the public records, they determined that it was just 30 some percent of the time that women would receive the same C P R from a bystander. And when they started looking into what are the root causes of this, part of it is there's a belief that women don't have heart attacks, only men have heart attacks. And then some of it is fear of hurting a woman. But a large percentage of it was attributed to the fact that in order to properly administer CPR to a woman, you are supposed to rip open her shirt and put your hand directly over her left breast. And this was seen, people are afraid to be seen to be doing something inappropriate. Speaking of something inappropriate,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Had the dog making
- Katie Swindler:
- Appear my dogs, that was my dog. I dunno if you can see him. That's Mr. Rocket. Is it time for you to go outside? So Mr. Rocket, all right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] this process, this again comes back to training or at least social conditioning. This isn't something we're not taught when there's a woman in distress that the right thing to do is to rip their top off and apply CPR in that way. There's a social discomfort about doing that, and I suppose a fear of potential repercussions as a result of that. But clearly when it's in a situation like this, it's essential that we are able to override that conditioning of what's appropriate and actually perform the necessary aid that that person is in need of.
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah, and I mean C P R training is very specific and it, it's always hands-on training, right? You don't get C P R training by reading a pamphlet and filling out a test, right? C P R training is always in person and it's always hands on. Usually you're using some sort of mannequin or dummy to perform this on. And that's because it gets the lessons learned in that experiential memory so that when you're in a panicked situation, you remember what the right thing to do is. And so yeah, you have to address the problem at the point of training when you're telling somebody, this is what you do in this situation. In order to address that particular bias, I'll call it a bias, in order to address that particular bias, you need to do it just as you do any kind of training through repetition and hands-on experience.
- And so there was actually a group called the United State of Women who worked with a creative agency called Joan, and they came up with this fabulous product, they called it mannequin, and it was just this low-cost wrap that had boobs built into it that they put onto the C P R dummy to give the c p r dummy boobs. And it's so that people can practice in the classroom setting, be able to ask questions, it's going to prompt the conversation so that they can think it through in the moment and know what to do. They can practice doing it and know that that is actually the right thing to do so that they can be prepared for that moment. Just as I was prepared to use my phone in a new way, I had the muscle memory, they'll have the muscle memory. They'll know it's the right thing to do. And that sort of approach to addressing bias, I think is a fascinating window into, because there's lots of different types of bias that we as a society are trying to address right now. Every
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Try ourselves out of it.
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah, exactly. And so to know that one of the best ways to address bias and to create new intuition and more reliable, less harmful intuition is through that repetition and that hands-on training. And I don't know that it is listening to a HR pre-recording, though. Certainly we do need to approach it intellectually as well, but as it is, it's also like what can we do? How can we repeatedly expose people to different ideas in ways that will actually change people's minds?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You're actually making me recall part of my conversation with David Dylan Thomas, who's the author of Design for Cognitive Bias, and also ran the cognitive bias podcast. Sounds like you might know David.
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah. You wrote for a book apart. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, he did. He did. And I talked about this notion of teams doing an assumption audit, and that is basically a methodical process for making clear what your biases are, who's not on the room, and the impacts of those, and just surfacing that so that it's not something that's happening behind the scenes. And I asked him something about that to the effect of, do you worry that that just becomes a box sticking exercise? And his response was, and I'll just paraphrase him, was no. And even if it does, through pure repetition i e practice what we are talking about here, that actually becomes a really positive force for helping to change some of those biases and assumptions that we hold that might not necessarily be serving us particularly well. So I just made that little link there between those conversations. It's so interesting. It just made so much sense.
- Katie Swindler:
- Yeah. It's so interesting you said checking boxes because there is a practice in operating rooms that's called the checklist, and it is an essential safety procedure in order to prevent mistakes and save lives. And it really is as simple as they have a checklist of things they need to check for things. Is the surgery, let's say you're doing a surgery to remove an arm or a leg. Are you doing it on the left arm or the right arm? Let's double check. Hundred percent. Right? Because it is the number of wrong arms that have been amputated is not zero, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My wife's an eye surgeon and she tells me they have to mark the eye, they have to mark it, it has to be marked, and it has to be checked because yes, people's eyes have been removed, and it's the wrong eye. It's wrong eye. And that's not a great outcome.
- Katie Swindler:
- No. So the processes that get put in place to prevent those types of errors are checklists. I, there is a real and important distinction for performative allyship and those sorts of things but at the same time, to actually change outcomes, sometimes it is as simple as a checkbox and a checklist.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm. Wash your hands. Yes. We've all heard about surgery, perform before, they wash hands. Simple things. And
- Katie Swindler:
- We talk about intention over outcomes, intention over impact, and how it's important to not overemphasize intention and focus also on the impact and the outcomes of the behaviors that we talk about that a lot in inclusive diversity and equity spaces. Just because somebody didn't mean to say something harmful that if the outcome was the actual harm was done, that's still something we should be prioritizing the outcome over the original intent. I mean, honestly, the reverse can be true, right? Even if their intent isn't to make real change, as long as the outcome is that change is made, at the end of the day, it's like, okay, well next generation comes along and we got a fresh start. But if the outcome has been done and the changes is being made in the right direction, and I certainly am not advocating for skipping the hard work that needs to be done in that space. But I think the important thing at the end of the day is that both is what we need. It is not an either or. You both need the checklist and you need the hard conversations and the thought work and the work to be done that at the end of the day, that's where we wanna end up
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent. When it comes to situations or design challenges where the stakes are high, like C P R being able to dial 9 1 1 when someone's having an emergency that needs attention, it's quite easy or relatively easy to make the case for us to design for those specific scenarios in the industries and the situations where it's more readily apparent that it's needed. But how do we make this a real part of the everyday design of digital products and experiences that most of us who are listening to this podcast will be employed to do?
- Katie Swindler:
- Sure. So the first thing that I would take if I were approaching this would simply be to think about all the things that can go wrong. Where are the moments where somebody can find out that something went wrong or that somebody's stress response is triggered? What are the moments they find out? They find out their account has been hacked, they find out their bank account has been cleared out, they find out that their bill that they thought was paid was not actually paid. Where are they when they find out that out? And then what do they need to do next? What is their instinct going to do next? Which I, I'll tell you, 99% of the time is to pick up the phone and try to talk to somebody. What is the actual best way to get the problem solved? Because lots of times it's not to call.
- Lots of times you can actually resolve things faster and better through a digital interface, but you have to understand where they're going to be and what their instincts are and where they're going to go next to find that in order to put something along their path to sort of catch them and then to give them real clear directions. When we are in panic mode, we don't want to think about complexity. We just want black and white choices. We want clear direction. My c p r coach told me, if you're ever in a situation where somebody falls to the ground, you don't just yell out somebody called 9 1 1. You point to somebody and you say, you call 9 1 1. Right? It's very directive. You tell them to do one thing, right? It's a very singular path. And the same is true in a design setting. You figure out where they're going to be and what they're going to be looking for, and then you make a very singular path and then just take them down it with as few branches and complexities as possible to get them where they need to go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds to me like instead of designing the happy path, we need to be designing the unhappy path.
- Katie Swindler:
- Yes, absolutely. That's a really good way to put it. The other thing that you may have spoke about with Ava designing safety design she talks a lot about thinking about how might somebody abuse the system, right? Because that's the other big stressor that could come out of a system that you designed. How might somebody use the system that you designed to abuse someone else? Cuz that's a very stressful situation, and how can you capture that and get them the help that they need in order to stop that line of abuse? And it's a very similar sort of path, that unhappy path. Yeah, you gotta think about it. It's not pleasant to think about, but it's very important and it gives you an opportunity to really be there for people in the moments that matter most. So it might not be fun to think about, but it can be very rewarding work and definitely worth the time and effort to do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Katie, you have put clearly an enormous amount of energy into exploring this topic at depth. I mean, you don't give the kind of talks that you give and you don't write a book about something unless you've done that. What impact are you hoping that the book in your work in this area will have on the design community? What do you really want people to do as a result of reading your book or listening to this e episode? For example?
- Katie Swindler:
- One thing that I hope that comes out of this is a connection between different areas of design. I looked a lot to areas like healthcare, design avionics, the military, places where stress is incredibly well studied. Stress and design is incredibly well studied and found so many lessons in those areas that can be applied other places. I think there's incredible value with designers sharing between each other and connecting those dots. I also noticed that we are missing many voices in this area of study. This is a rough number just from my own research, but I would guess that 90% of the studies that are done on stress are done by militaries and especially a lot of our basics of what we understand about stress were done in between the 1920s and 1970s or eighties when the vast majority of science was being done by western largely white male.
- And the participants in those study were largely white men, usually young because they are studying for, they're doing the studies paid for by the military, and so they are using a typical social sample for at least of that era, was a young man. And it's very difficult because they don't really tell you in, when they publish these studies, they don't tell you what the demographic or even gender makeup of these participants are. I am not saying that the science isn't good or that there isn't things valuable information in there. It's just that we don't know. We don't what's different. There is a growing area of study around the differences between male and female reactions to stress, but it is so controversial, [laugh] that I didn't even put any of it in my book because I didn't have the expertise necessary to be able to tell what was good science and what was propaganda.
- And so I couldn't even do, we just need more, need more voices. We need diverse voices. We need people of all ages and abilities, voices. We need them doing the research. We need them participating in the research. So just if more research is done in this area there's so much more to discover in this area. And I really hope that in order to really be creating human-centered products, we need research and knowledge about how humans behave. And we need to be really careful about who are the humans that we are designing for, and make sure that that group is as large and inclusive and a diverse as possible.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Katie, what a great point to finish our conversation on what a great conversation. I really do appreciate you going to such depth with me today about life and death design and how we as everyday designers can make that more of a part of our practice. So thank you for so generously sharing your insights with me,
- Katie Swindler:
- And this has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks for giving me a chance to dig in.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome. Anytime, Katie, if people wanna find out more about you and about the book Life and Death Design, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Katie Swindler:
- Sure. I have a website, LifeAndDeathDesign.com. That's got my contact information. Information about the book. You can just buy the book Life and Death Design by Katie Swindler on Amazon, so it's easy to get. And I also tweet @KatieSwindlerUX.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Awesome. Thank you Katie, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Katie and get a copy of her wonderful book and everything else that we've spoken about. 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 leave a review on the podcast, subscribe, and also pass this conversation along to someone else in your network that you feel would get value from the depth that we've got to today. If you wanna reach out to me, you can do that on LinkedIn. You can find me under Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes as well. Or visit me on thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.