Susan Weinschenk
Harnessing Perfectionism and Changing Your Story
In this episode of Brave UX, Susan Weinschenk shares a deeply personal account of why she’s a behavioural scientist, the role of ethics in design, and how deciding her self-story helped her while battling cancer.
Highlights include:
- How critical is skepticism for making effective design decisions?
- Why hasn’t ethics always been part of the big tech design conversation?
- How do you help people to become comfortable with finding truth?
- Do designers understand what’s ethical and what’s not?
- What story are we telling ourselves that we should change?
Who is Susan Weinschenk, PhD?
Susan is the Founder, CEO and Chief Behavioural Scientist at The Team W, a behavioural science and user experience consultancy and training company, with clients including a few companies you may have heard of before, such as Amazon, Disney and Target.
With her deep knowledge of behavioural science, underpinned by a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, and developed over 35 years in the field, Susan has shared her knowledge with audiences across the globe, at events such as UX Brighton, the USI conference, and Convey UX.
Susan is also the author of several widely respected books, that are at the intersection of behavioural science and UX design, including: Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, and How To Get People to Do Stuff.
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, unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Dr. Susan Weinschenk. Susan is the Founder, CEO and Chief Behavioral Scientist at The Team W, a behavioral science and user experience consultancy with clients including a few companies you may have heard of before, such as Amazon, Disney, and Target. The Team W is much more than a design consultancy though, it also provides practical workshops on the human brain and behavioral science, comprehensive certification and behavioral design, and customized UX mentoring with her deep knowledge of behavioral science and user experience.
- Underpinned by a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and developed over 35 years in the field, Susan has shared her knowledge with audiences across the globe, speaking at events such as UX Brighton, the Unexpected Sources of Inspiration Conference and Convey UX. Susan is also the author of several widely respected books that are at the intersection of behavioral science and UX design, including Neuro Web Design, What Makes Them Click, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, and How to Get People to do Stuff. If that wasn't enough of a contribution to the field, Susan is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin, a columnist for Psychology Today Online and the Co-Host of the Human Tech podcast. And while I could say many more wonderful things about Susan, it'll be much better if you hear from her directly. So I had better get this conversation on Brave UX started. Susan, welcome to the show.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Well, Brendan, that was really great. Could you introduce me all the time for anything I? I was impressed with me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it was all you and really, really, I just strung together all the wonderful things you've done.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- It was really, yeah, but a lot of times people say, oh, send an intro and I send them an intro and they say the intro I sent them. But you pieced that one together on your own and it really sounded impressive. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks for that. Well, I'm pleased you're happy with it, Susan. And you know, are someone, you are a very highly regarded person in this field, the field of UX and design. And as I mentioned in your introduction, you have a PhD in cognitive psychology. You've published several well-known books and you've been in the field for more than 35 years as far as I can tell.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- A long time, yep.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, right. So some experience there, but you are not an information architect, you are not a UX designer or a research leader, you know, are someone who is considered a behavioral scientist. What is a behavioral scientist?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Well, I feel like I've, you're right, I'm not an information architect, I'm not a designer, although I have done all those things throughout the years. But I've always been mainly interested in people and why they do the things they do and why they behave the way they behave and how their brains work and how you can or perhaps should apply that to technology, to design, to research. So to me, a behavioral scientist is someone who is always looking at what do we know about people and how should that affect the decisions we're making about a particular product or service. That's what I think a behavioral scientist is in my definition of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And y you've said in something else that I heard you speak on, you've said that, and I'll quote you now, from a really early age, humans have always fascinated me. And you also suggested when I was listening to that, that you had some experiences when you were growing up that made you an observer of human behavior, but you didn't go into any detail when you were describing what those experiences were. You kind of just moved on past that. So I was curious to get into this with you because this is clearly something that you've made a career in, it's a deep interest of yours. What is the most memorable of those early experiences when you were observing human behavior or of becoming an observer? What can you tell us about those?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Yeah, sometimes it's hard to know. How much is things that happened to you that then obviously had a lasting impact versus your own personality that made you pay attention to something at an early age that maybe other people didn't? But I can tell you, I remember probably one of my first experiments in human behavior. I was about seven years old and we moved around a lot when I was growing up. I mean I moved at least once a year for the first 35 years of my life and sometimes more than once a year. So we moved a lot. And I didn't know that was unusual cuz that's what we did. So I thought that was normal, but it meant that I was constantly meeting new people, always new, always the new kid, always trying to make friends and a lot of times being on the outside looking in.
- So that observation. But I also, because I was the new kid and because I'll be honest, I was a little chubby and rolly poy as a kid and not particularly athletic kids can be cruel to each other and make fun of you and so on. And that happened to me a lot. And I remember one time after somebody said something mean or shoved me into the bushes or something like that and I came home crying. I was very sensitive and I remember my mother said something to me, if you don't show them that it bothers you, they'll do it less. Which was probably in the run a really bad piece of advice because it means that as a young child you're learning to hide how you really feel. That's not particularly good. But I thought really, is that really true? So I decided to experiment.
- So a situation would come up and I would tell myself, okay, this time react like you usually do. And I would. And then another time I would say, this time don't react. Pretend it doesn't even bother you. And then I would see as far, I was running psychology experiments with as a seven year old and it was like, you know what? My mom's right about this one. And so I think just again, I don't know if it's because I was trying to deal with this fact that I was being picked on a lot or maybe it's just that I was overly sensitive and over overly observant. But that was one of my early recollections. And there are many, many others. I remember a little older at the age of 10, again moving to a new school and realizing that there were a number of kids who were not part of any in group, they were on the outside.
- And I decided, well maybe I can gather all the outside people and we'll be our own little group and will that work? And then if we do that, what happens to our relationship with the other groups? So again, always kind of experimenting and curious about what other people are doing. And I'll tell you one more story. As an adolescent when I moved again I realized, I can't believe it took me this long to realize it. No one here knows who you are or what your history is. You can just pretend that you were the cool kid in your past school. How would they know? They'd never know. This is before social media. It's not like they can look me up on Facebook or something. So I did that. I came in as though I was a true gift to them and they pretty much believed it and it was like so I always kind of playing with the situation, the social situation and my self story in the situation. So that I've always been doing that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And how has those early experiences, which from the outside looking in, at least listening to you describe those Susan? I mean they seem to be quite formative, quite challenging. And you mentioned the cruelty of children to other children, which is evident throughout many people's childhood, including my own, I remember being bullied at preschool and then also in early primary school, which is called grade school in the us. And those memories do stick with you. Do you feel, you also touched on there that you're not sure if it's those experiences that shaped you or the personality that you already had, but do you feel that there's a certain type of person that is drawn to, or at least best suited to the type of work that we do in design in particular in the more research or behavioral science areas of this field?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- I do think in terms of, it's interesting, I think a lot sometimes about the kind of people that are drawn to our field. And I do see some patterns. So first of all, people who seem to real, and this is not going to sound surprising, but who really research are typically the people who are the observers who just really enjoy sitting back and watching what people do or listening carefully to what people say. And some people like that and some people don't. And the people that are the people who are going to veer towards the research because what are you doing except asking questions and then listening and watching what people do. And I also find for people who end, I think people who end up as designers UX designers, I see a lot of people who have the idea that there actually is a right way to do things.
- And it's so interesting cuz one of the things I talk about when I'm mentoring designers is there isn't any one right way to do this, but some ways are better than others. But I think people that in UX design often really do have a strong sense. It's almost like that idea of that you'll hear the stories about an artist and it, it's about chipping away the stone until the statue appears. And anybody who's ever created anything, whether it be an app or a painting, you have that feeling when you're looking at it, working on it of, oh, not quite, not quite, it's not quite there, we don't have it quite right. You really have that feeling, even if you're not sure what needs to change, you're not there. Oh, you're a little closer. No, now you're a little further away. So I think there is this idea of getting it right and getting it perfect, which is good and also can be extremely frustrating and is something, I think as a designer you have to try to mitigate because it will make you crazy and you'll be miserable doing the work if you insist on perfection.
- Because as we all know, we don't have total control over these products. We have to collaborate with others and they have different goals and they have constraints. And if you insist on perfection, you know, probably will leave the field cuz you'll be so frustrated. But I do think that people who are designers tend to be perfectionists.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How did you get a handle on that voice, that perfectionism? How did you confront that in your own career? Was this something that used to show up for you and frustrate you to the point where you needed to do something about it? Or have you always had a good sort of handle on that voice and being able to put that in check when you needed to?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Oh, it's always a problem. It's still a problem. It is still a problem. So my business partner, who's also my son by the way he wrote this wonderful post a couple years ago about, oh, I can't remember the exact name, but basically he was saying, don't do a plus work, don't try to do a plus work. It's like it's a bad idea, a minus work, that's what you wanna do. And he's constantly telling me, Hey, this doesn't have to be perfect. Hey, let it go. You're obsessing about this. Cuz that's what I do. I always want things to be perfect. So it's always a struggle for me and I just have to take a deep breath and decide, okay, for this right now, this is good enough. But I struggle with it. I want everything to be perfect.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a very difficult voice to come to terms with. And I think there's some definite wisdom in there. And your son's name's Guthrie, if I'm correct? Yeah, that Guthrie was sharing there with not doing a plus work, we're very much conditioned to want to do that. The incentives in our educational system are very much aligned with doing a plus work. But what we fail to acknowledge in that mindset that we hold of being a perfectionist is that there's a role in enterprise design or in any collaborative design for feedback. And quite often when I felt like I've done a plus work and then the feedback comes, if I've been holding onto that too tightly I can become way too fragile when it comes to
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Receiving that tax. Yeah, and he even says in the piece he wrote, it's okay to decide to do a plus work, but you've gotta decide that this particular thing requires a plus work or not. But I do think a lot of it, my own drive to perfection comes, it basically comes from insecurity. It comes from a feeling of, oh, it's not going to be good enough. I'm not going to be good enough. People won't like me, people, I'm taking some courses in music theory right now and I'm not taking them for credit, but if I don't get an A on the assignment, I get all upset. And again, my son is like, okay, I think you gotta let that go. And he'll say to me, there's that need for approval.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean, I wanna get too sort of Freud, Freudian on you. And I know that you're a PhD in psychology and I'm well outta my depth here, but given the story that you open with there about people bullying you when you're child Yes. And how that led to your early experimentation with what happens if I just ignore it versus what happens if I react the way that I did. Is this something, and again, this is a leading question, but is this something that this feeling, this perfectionism that you feel in retrospect has been driven by those early experiences as a child?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Oh definitely. Yeah, it is. It's all kind of tied up in the, it's like a number of different constellations. One would be the need for approval, wanting to be accepted, not wanting, nobody wants to be an outcast. And then you start, of course a small trial is going to do this and then we carry it with us our whole life. If only I were better smarter, better looking, cooler, whatever than this wouldn't happen to me and they would accept me and they would love me and all of that. And I think people react to it differently. Some people react by getting aggressive or very competitive, others by want needing approval others by being perfectionists. I think there's a number of different ways we react to it. I think, I guess, and I'm not a therapist even though I do have that degree in psychology, but I think basically it's about recognizing some of these patterns and the things that you do that a, and often it's a double-edged sword. I mean there are wonderful things about being a perfectionist. It made me go the extra mile on my books for instance. And that was a good thing. So how do you deal with that? How do you mitigate, how do you take what is useful about that? But then also try not to have your life be miserable around that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's a really important point is that coming to terms and being able to see it for what it is. I always remember the story of, I'm not sure if you're familiar with David Beckham, he used to be the captain of the English football team and he was a phenomenal set piece kicker. So he would be able to hit goal from a set piece kick from a long way away. And he attributed that to his struggle with, I believe it was some sort of neurological condition where he liked to organize all the shoes in his wardrobe in a certain way and all his shirts. So he had this perfectionism that manifested in some of the particular things that he did and he learned to come to terms with it by recognizing that that was actually what flowed through into his prowess on the football field and gave him his amazing ability to strike gold from such a distance and use it to a recognize that's what made him great or one part of it, but also that he was able to get control over that and use it in the way that he seemed fit.
- So hearing you talk about that and how you've recognized it, where it came from, but you've actually used it to shape such a wonderful career in this field is I think a really encouraging story for other people to hear as well. Now I did just wanna come to your decision after postgraduate your postgraduate years where you did your PhD. Yeah. And I was curious about when was it that you realized that you might be able to build a career at this intersection between what you were doing in psychology, which you've now come to core behavioral science and this space or this emerging space of design and technology and computing that was arising at that time?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- That's such an interesting, because of the timeframe, I think I hit some of these things at interesting points. The first decision was that I wanted to combine these two fields of psychology and behavioral science and technology. So I had an experience in grad school. I mean actually had, I don't know if you've heard the story, but I had a very specific moment. I can remember the moment and where I was when I knew what I wanted to do for my career. Tell us please [laugh], which was not what I was planning on doing. So I was a graduate student. I had started graduate school in psychology, Penn State University, and my plan was to teach college. I was going to be a psychology professor somewhere, and I think it was probably my second semester at school. And Penn State had a requirement that you had to take a foreign language to get your graduate degree, but they had this weird twist where instead of a actual foreign language, you could take a computer programming language.
- I don't know how they thought that was equal, but I thought, oh, that's interesting. I don't really know that much about computers in programming, so I'll do that. So I signed up not knowing anything about programming for this programming class. Now, this was a really long time ago, so this was before there was ux and this was before there was usability and there wasn't any of that stuff. So I was running my little program, which was supposed to just add up some numbers and spit out the answer. And I ran my program. Now this is Brenda, and I think you're too young to remember this, but you might have seen it in a movie or something. You had a stack of cards and you would r program the C type and make holes in the cards and hand the cards to someone who would then run the program for you.
- So I did that and then you'd wait for a piece of paper to show up and see if your program ran. So I went over and there was the piece of paper with my name on it and I looked and there instead of my nice numbers, it just said Job aborted. And I looked at the piece of paper and I said, that's it. I ran this program, I spent all this time running this, creating this program, and now I was just going to say job aborted. And that I just had this epiphany standing right there. I said, this isn't going to work. You can't have regular people trying to do something with a computer and that's the way it talks to you. That's not going to work. And I instantly, it was like right at that moment it's like, well, I'm going to have to study this mean that was just, I'm going to have to study this.
- Now at the school I was at, that was not a thing. And in fact, this predates, there's so many master's degrees in human computer interaction. No, there were no master's degrees in human computer interaction. So I didn't even know it was a thing. Actually, it was a thing. There were people doing this work. It was called Human Factors and Human Factors in Computer systems. But I didn't know that. So I decided right then and there that I was going to continue with my psychology degree, but I was going to combine it with this, whatever I could learn about technology and that was the work I was going to do and that I wasn't going to be a psychology professor. I was going to do this thing that I didn't even know. Now I thought at the time that it wasn't a thing. So I actually committed to having a career that I didn't know existed.
- And I was so thrilled when I found out it existed and I didn't have to invent it, that there were people doing this. I mean, I cannot tell you the sense of relief when I found out it actually was a thing and it had a name and I could get a job doing it. And there were not very many people doing it back then, but that's how I first made that connection. But it was really an unusual thing back then we were teaching programmers and developers how to design. I used to teach a class called How to Design Effective C R T screens because that's what it was. And there weren't any UX people. You didn't, so you would teach programmers, but it was all basically it was about usability and then the term usability came out and then the term user experience came out.
- But then a number of years later, in some ways that was very focused on design and UX and usability, but not really broad and big on behavioral science. I don't think I felt like I was always wanting to bring in psychology and behavioral science, but the pressure from the field was to make it very tactical. Here's what a button should look like. And sure, we could talk about the cognitive psychology or visual design reason why the button should look like that. But it was just very tactical. And about 15, 20 years ago, I started reading more about the new research on the unconscious mental processing and decision making and the relationship between emotions and decisions. And I feel like about 15, 20 years ago, I went back to my deep psychology roots and I kind of took myself out of that tactical, practical cause I was doing a lot of working with large corporations on setting up their interface design guidelines, what I call traditional UX stuff.
- And I got out of that and went back into the psychology piece. That was when I wrote web design. And when I made that not switch, but I made that turn harder turn to the behavioral science piece that was unusual. So I used to speak at conferences and I would be the speaker that would be talking about behavioral science and decision making and how the brain works. And I would be the only one doing that. And now of course it's like many of the UX conferences and the product design conferences are going to have somebody talking about behavioral design, whether they call it that or not. But when I've really got into that in a big way, that was kind of weird. So I'm always doing the weird one. I'm always doing the weird stuff.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're always on the outside looking in and
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Then it kind of grows, which is good, which is good. But yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hearing you talk about that, hearing you talk about the experience of being at high school and then arriving in a new town and recognizing that there were a bunch of people on the outside and then getting them together and wondering what was possible if you became the leader of that group. Then hearing you describe how you were finishing your PhD or you had, and then you discovered this thing called the computer which just gave you this really unfriendly message and that you were so pleased when you discovered that there were other people in this field. Another I'm going to use the term misfit here, like a group of misfit,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- But are you seeing not many of them pattern here, Brendan?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think so. I think so. And now obviously what you were saying there with behavioral science and bringing that more into the design practice, it seems to me at least Susan, that you have you've been a wonderful misfit [laugh] in this field,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Master misfit
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And helped a master misfit. Right? And it's great to hear, it's great to hear those stories because it's very much was the case. And I think the human HCI UX, whatever we want to call it, the evolution and the accessibility, now we take it for granted of these experiences that we can have through these devices that wasn't around really in any mainstream way 40 years ago, 30, 40 years ago. Now it's just as assumed. But there is something magical in that. And in those hearing those stories of when it all started, when
- Susan Weinschenk:
- It all began, I did.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But I mean it's something that you've stayed current with. I mean, your career is still unfolding. And I wanted to ask you from touched on my age, I think I was born the year you first started working in the field, so I'm 30, 37 now. So that was 85. But I wanted to ask you about this because you've seen several decades go by and contributed to the field in that time. I wanted to ask, what positions did you hold initially that over time you may have moved away from or what interesting changes? We talk a lot about vision and motion and how humans are conditioned to notice things like for example, in peripheral vision versus central vision and things like that. So if you zoom out and think about this last 35 years, what things did you hold to be true then that now you're not so sure about as you've unfolded your career?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Ooh, that's a tricky question. Well, there are some things that are some things that for whatever reason I just took to be true. I was taught them and I just assumed they were true. And then when I was writing the a hundred things every designer needs to know about people, I remember writing, oh, and then this is how episodic memory works or whatever, something about memory. And I was like, huh, did I read that original research paper? And I just decided to go back and find it and read it. And then it was like that this is something I thought was true. And now that I've read the original research and some of the newer research, that's actually a myth, that's an urban legend. Then I got fascinated and then I just started checking everything and it was like, oh boy. So there were a number of things that I discovered that I had believed and I had been taught and I had been teaching other people, which is embarrassing.
- That just was not true. So one of those, for instance, is information texts on a screen that's an all capital letters is harder for people to read because all capital letters doesn't have a senders and D senders, the parts of the letter that go above and below. And we read by recognizing the shape that words make because of ascenders and D senders. So if you put it in all caps, you get rid of all the ascenders and therefore it's harder to read. And that is just not true. And I was like, what do you mean? I mean it's not true. That comes from research from the 1880s, not research even, but just somebody's idea. It sounds great, it seems to make a lot of sense, but that is not how we read. We don't read with a centers and I had to go back the whole thing about seven plus or minus two, we remember five to nine things.
- That's not true. There's just been lots of things, these old beliefs that are just not true. So I think it has made me skeptical and I do go and try and read the research for myself. I think one of the toughest things in our field is overgeneralizing and in that's just true of any research, any research. The research study covered this narrow little thing. Can you generalize that to everybody or all situations? So I think it's a bush pull constantly. I'd rather us base our decisions and our beliefs on research than not use research at all. But then we have to try and be careful and about the research that we're using and make sure that it's really true.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you say, speaking of truth, I've heard you say how in your consulting engagements, one of the first things that you try to do is to establish what's true and what's
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Not true. [laugh] so hard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I like quite a dangerous thing to suggest, especially for some organizations. Let's actually have a little look underneath this rock and see if there was any kernel of truth to be found there. How critical is this though? This willingness to be wrong or this ability at least to cast an I on what it is that we believe to be true with some skepticism to really driving effective design
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Decisions? It's so interesting, especially as an outside consultant, because you're hired, you're brought in. And on the one hand, as a consultant, you bring me in, my goal is to help you tell me what you wanna achieve. As long as it doesn't, as long as I don't think it's either illegal or unethical, then I'm going to try and help you achieve that. But there doubt there are times when you wanna achieve this thing over here. And I don't think that is truth or that is reality, but my job is to help you. So what do I do with that? Right? And I will usually gently fairly gently try and get the client to see that certainly we can work towards that goal you have, but is that really what you want? Because that's not what's really going on. And basically what I try and do is help my clients to see that the more clear they can be about reality, the more the better decision they will make.
- You know, can live in a little fantasy world and believe that by doing this design, you're going to increase your revenue by 500%. If that's what you wanna believe, that's great and we can all work towards that. But the chance of that really resulting in what you want is if that's very low, we be better off [laugh] really improving things by 20%. And it would be real and it would be measurable and you could show it. Or do we wanna go for the 500% and achieve nothing? Which way do you wanna wanna go? Yeah, I'll go whenever way you wanna go. But really, and I think a lot of this has to do, I mean I think I'm very lucky. I think I'm very lucky. I think that the people that bring me in often are people who do wanna deal with the truth. I think that I'm very lucky in that we have so much work, which is a wonderful thing that if I feel like someone is asking for something that is going to be pretty much impossible to achieve, I just don't engage. I don't take on that work. I have the luxury of that cuz I'm an external consultant. I think sometimes when we work inside an organization and it's our job and then we're on this project, we're stuck on this project, it's like, oh, how do I get out of this one? Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's talk about that then, because you do have that luxury and you've earned that luxury. But there will be people who are listening today that don't have it, have chosen different, yeah, don't have it, right, they haven't chosen the same or walked the same path. You mentioned that you gently help people to see what it is that they believe or to understand what their assumptions are. What are some of the ways, or what is the main way that you approach that conversation with them? Is it even a conversation? How do you help them to see what it is that they're holding to be true, which may not be true?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- I think that whether you're an external consultant or you work internally, I think you still are a consultant, basically you have a body of knowledge and skills to apply and that's what a consultant does. And so I think it's really important to, I do a lot of mentoring with people in their work and we talk a lot about certain things. There's secrets of successful consulting that apply whether you're inside or outside. So one is to really know who is your main key person, your main stakeholder for any particular project or product that you're working on. And that is sometimes very tricky cuz sometimes that's your boss, sometimes it's not your boss. Sometimes you think it's that person over there, but actually it's that person over there. If you don't know who your stakeholder is and if the whole team doesn't agree on it, the project is going to blow up.
- It's just going to blow up. You have to know who is the person who I need to do good work for and help and make them look good. And once you know that, then the next thing that you can do is really work on establishing that relationship. If you can get to the point where they trust you and what you're saying, where they believe that you have their best interests, their products, interests at heart, that you are with them collaborating with them on their side, wanting the same thing they want, they'll be much more likely to listen to you. So when you say, I'm not sure that's the best way to go on this, they know you're not saying that because you think you're the expert or you want it to go a certain way or you're really working on with so-and-so and their point of view, they know you're saying that because you care about the project and you care about them being successful.
- So I think sometimes it's those soft skill things about building relationships, building trust, having a reason for when I say to someone, no, we don't want to, I just had this conversation the other day, we should not use a hover on this webpage. When someone moves, moves their mouse or their finger across this card in the image, it should not switch to something else. And then instead of just saying that it's not just my opinion, now I can tell you why that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea in this situation because we are trying to get people to concentrate on making a decision between this card and that card. And if things are flopping around all the time, they're just going to not be able to make a decision and they're just going to leave. So being able to state your ideas, not as your opinion, but either with science behind it or the particular situation of these users doing this thing and tying that to the goal, we all have collaboratively decided on those are the things that, they're little things, but they're huge things. They're huge things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And having that clarity of what that goal is established, you know, just mentioned that they're just before. And also having earned the right to have that opinion and then back it up. I think those are some really important points and not easy things to achieve. This isn't something that you can just go and necessarily say to someone, I'm with you,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- I'm not
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Going to believe anything else is,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Here are the ground rules. You have to trust me. But I think it's design, right? I mean, when you're designing a product, you have in mind who the user is and what they're trying to do with the product. When I do that same thing, when I'm approaching a project or a new relationship with a client, who's my user here? What is the goal of the user? And then oh, let's ask them a question and listen to what they say. I mean it's all the things. Sometimes it amazes me where you have a good researcher or a good designer and then they don't apply that to their relationship with the team.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a blind spot. Susan, you mentioned earlier on ethics that you wouldn't work on engagements that were either illegal, which is good to know. [laugh] or unethical ethics and design and technology in recent years has been getting more attention, I think for good reason. We've seen some of the unforeseen consequences of some commercial and design decisions that were made on large swathes of population who are using particular platforms. But why haven't ethics been more part of this conversation, particularly in the realm of commercial design and research before? Why hasn't it always been part of this conversation?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- I mean, I'll actually like to ask this question of my son Guthrie, cuz that he specializes in ethics. And I've actually not asked him that question, but my answer is, I think unfortunately we live in a culture where being unethical often means making a lot of money, [laugh] making a lot of money, having a lot of power. And so if you go the extra mile to make sure something is ethical, might not make as much money or be as powerful as quickly as you would if you turned a blind eye to it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think there's some definite truth in that. And there's no secret that companies are interested in behavioral science and what it is that you do because they perceive there to be greater profit that could result from applying that to their products and their experiences. So how do you and Guthrie think about the ethical responsibility, if any, that you have as practitioners in this space, in your line of
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Business? And we do think about this and Guthrie I think has come up with some interesting ways to think about ethics. And we use that in our decisions as well. So basically you have to ask, what is the most harm that this product or this particular version or design aspect of this product, what is the most harm that this could bring to someone, even if it's a tiny, tiny percentage of people? I think we tend to think about ethics sometimes with product design where, well, most of the people, this won't cause any harm, so therefore it's okay, but okay, let you know. Turn that around, even if it's just to a small number of people. How big is the potential harm? And if there is the potential for causing harm, whether in whatever way that is to even a small percentage of people, that's too much that that's not worth it.
- So we were working on a project for a company and actually kind of stumbled upon this. We were evaluating this design of this app and they wanted us to help them improve it and including behavioral design. And at one point, I didn't even catch it, Guthrie caught it probably because he's an economics major and this had to do with finance and stuff. And he s and he said, wait a minute, wait a minute right here. I think if someone signs up for this service, I don't think that's what I think they're signing up for something else. And we kind of dug into it with our client and found out that that Guthrie was right and it was like there would be a small number of people that could do a lot of financial harm to, they would be signing up for something that is not what they thought and then they could get in trouble with it financially with their personal finances. And we started with let's, let's assume that they didn't know, the client didn't know [laugh], that this was going to happen
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Based intention.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Let's bring this to them and just assume that it was an error. And there was a lot of silence when we brought it to their attention. And then basically we just said, we're not going to work on that and we're not, cuz they wanted us to amplify that and make it more likely that people would sign up for that. And we said we didn't wanna do that, and shortly thereafter they didn't have any more work for us.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You drew the red line and they made their choice, which is to resolve which of the choice which
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Is you made, which I think we've been very fortunate in. This has happened. Very rarely, rarely that we've come across
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That this idea of ethics as far as I can tell, and not being an academic, I can't speak from this as in my own experience. I've never had to have a paper reviewed by an ethics board or a committee. But I do listen to a number of academics. My wife has a PhD in neuroscience and she's, oh my goodness, a doctor. So there's obviously, yeah, I have had some secondhand experience listening to people talk about the rigors that they need to go through when they're doing yes science effectively and involving people in that research. But this isn't the same in the commercial right context. And this vexes me in some ways because I feel like at least in academia or in medicine, there are established bodies that look at these issues and get to make a judgment or a decision on things because this isn't black and white stuff. No.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Yeah, sometimes
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's not clear tab tablet. Yeah, yeah, it's not clear. And so I wonder there's this growing expectation on designers in particular to seem to be the canaries and the coal mine here when it comes to raising red flags about ethics in the products and experiences they're making. But I wonder if we have any real deep appreciation of or basis for making those judgements if we don't have some experience at that academic level as to what ethics are about and how we can decide what's ethical and what's
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Unable. Yeah, yeah, no great questions. And I guess I'm kind of sad and that now the designers are supposed to be [laugh] the ethicists in this situation. It's like really? Why is that? And anyway, the designers often don't have the authority to say, we're not doing that, so why are they the ones that are supposed to be the watch guards for it? So I think it's only cuz no other is not being done. I mean it's being done somewhat. I've done some work for the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC in the US and as an expert witness and they are looking out for things and they'll prosecute someone who's doing things that are unethical enough to be illegal, but they're not able to catch everything either. They're only a one agency in the government. So I think it's a continuing problem and issue. But one thing I would say, and I don't say this to necessarily try and get business but Guthrie does have an entire series of courses on ethics and that the first one, which is fun, a fundamentals cl courses free. And so if someone is interested in how do we do this and how do we decide what's ethical and especially in a design and business environment and what can we do about it if we're not the c e O of the company, I really highly recommend checking that out. I think he's done some really good reading and thinking and consolidating of information.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think that's a great idea be because I think it's often difficult for designers to have that foundation to really understand what ethics are and how do we actually apply them. And I do wonder sometimes whether or not businesses really do care about ethics. I know they care about the law. I know they care enough about the law,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- They care a fair amount about the law. Although look at the accessibility issues and there are laws around that aren't and they're not always on top of that. But yes, they'll care about the law. But yeah, I don't know. And I'm not saying that companies don't care about ethics because they just wanna make a lot of money or they're bad people. I just think it's not built into, like you said, it's built into medicine, it's built into academics and it's not built into business. And maybe that will change. There've been these recent conversations among some of the tech companies and so on about needing to address it and maybe it will change.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I hope so because there's definite strength in the commercial sector or one of its strengths comes from its ability to experiment with marketplaces in order to find things that actually help people enough that they're willing to pay a company, a profitable amount to produce whatever that is. So that's clearly been a positive driver in the economy and we definitely don't want to stamp that out. But I think you're right, just with some of the big tech decisions that have happened in the last 20 years or so, there's a growing recognition that we need at least a framework for assessing. And you spoke about harm, what the harm might be what might we not have thought about when we initially conceptualize this and what are those sort of second and third order effects that our design decisions are having. Susan, I want to come now just to the future of this wonderful industry that we have created with all of its [laugh] problems and all of its benefits as well.
- And I've heard you talk about this at the SI conference and I was fascinated by this talk because you spoke about some of the interesting challenges that were evolving as a result of changes in the ways in which we interact with computers. We used to have punch cuts as you told the story of when you first met a computer you used to give them to a computer scientist. Actually, just a aside on that, I had never really truly understood the term computer scientist in the way that I did. When I heard you describe that, and what I mean by that is that literally there's a person who was in a white coat that you would give your program too. There was a go between
- Susan Weinschenk:
- You and the machine machine and that was the computer scientist.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thanks to companies like IBM and Apple and the others and Microsoft, I suppose we have to say thanks to them too, to actually remove the expert barrier that existed between us and actually these machines. But anyway, coming back to the question, you were speaking about the evolution of the gooey and now we have voice user interfaces and things like that. But I was curious, what are the exciting, or at least the interesting challenges that designers now face when it comes to human computer interaction? And this is a double question. Are there any universal principles from the eras of computing that have come before that you feel are as applicable to this current challenge that we face or those current interesting challenges that we face?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Well, I think in general we, and I know and personally are not particularly good at predicting [laugh] what's going to happen. And I can't tell you how many times I've had ideas about what things might happen in the future, but they were a little bit vague and I couldn't articulate them. And then they ended up happening like cloud computing. I remember thinking that up but I didn't even know how to des, I was trying to describe it to someone and they kind of looked at me like I was a crazy person and I'm not an in computer engineer, so I didn't never did anything with it. And internet's the same way. So I don't know how good we are at predicting. I guess I would say the things that I am, I'm most interested in and I'm watching are things like the intersection between the digital and the physical.
- I think we have not paid enough attention, for instance, to ar everyone's paying attention to vr. That's nice. But I think that AR is that intersection between what's physical and what's digital and having that become more seamless. I think that's big and will affect us. I definitely think the whole machine learning ai, all of that is going to be huge because as I've said in some of my talks, I think a lot of the things that we do as designers and UX people, the machines will be doing, we won't do them at all. And that's going to be, for us, that's going to be a big shift. And I often say if unless you're planning on retiring in the next five years, you better realize that a lot of what we do in design we won't be doing anymore. It'll all be done by the machines. So I think that's a huge change.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are you suggesting that computer scientists are actually our arch enemies here? Are they trying to work us out of a job so
- Susan Weinschenk:
- They're also working themselves out of a job? Yes. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- I do believe that. Yes, I do believe that. I think a lot of what we do and we're not there yet. I get it. I get it. In terms of machine learning, the rule is if a human can do it in five seconds or less, then the machine can do it. And so a lot of the stuff we do takes more than five seconds, but I think that five second rule will change. And so yeah, I think we need to all think about really what is the crux, what is the real difference between the machine and the human? What are the things that we as humans really do that are going to be very hard for a machine to do? True emotion? That's going to be a long time. Yeah, you're, if you're 20 years old, don't worry that by the time you end your career, the machines will be able to deal with human emotion.
- They won't be, I don't think so what are the things that have to do with emotion, with value, with human to human interaction? If I were new in the field, that's what I would focus on if I wanted to make sure that I would have a job in the next 15, 20 years. So I think there'll be a lot of changes, but I don't know. The only thing that I think, yeah, your second part of the question, what have we learned that's going to repeat? Just to realize that every couple years there's a brand new thing and everyone's enamored with the technology part of it and the human factors part of it lags behind. This has been true over and over and over in my career. When we went from character user interfaces to graphical user interfaces, they came out with the graphical user interface and then realized, oh wait a minute, we don't know how to design this thing.
- And then when we went from graphic user interfaces to speech user interfaces, same thing. Then when we went from to the internet, same thing. So it's just constant, the technology pushes ahead and then a couple years later we realized we need to bring that human factor, that behavioral science piece into it. So I think that will repeat. I think that always repeats. I mean think that's unfortunate. I wish the human factors part could drive it, but it doesn't. The technology I think will continue to drive it. But just look for, where's that technology going and then what's that human factor part that you can add to it? Once it's really rolling
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We can come and clean up the mess that are
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Much of That's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right. Computer scientists carry away. Yeah.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Hey, it's job security.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I think there's a recognition in there that while the technology might be evolving, and I know we've spoken in the terms of several decades, but I just don't think we really truly appreciate just how rapid that evolution has been because we only live 80 years or so as people. We don't truly appreciate the scale of the shift and that while the technology's changing, we are not evolving at
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Not evolving that fast. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right. Exactly. So the same principles that you speak about still applying. Yes. I also was really captivated by a story that you told in that same talk at U S I, which was a very personal story. And you had touched on some difficulties or challenging events that you had faced in your life, both during and after graduate school. What were those difficult and challenging events and how did they lead to a shift in your own thinking? Yeah, thinking about yourself and how you were in the world around you.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- There are these and you can tell me if there's a particular thing I was talking about in that talk, cuz I don't know if I remember exactly what it was, but there are these, we all have moments in our life where things change and our viewpoint on the world and our place in it changes and we all have them. I've had mine, one of the ones I might have mentioned in that talk if it's talking about things that happened graduate school and right after graduate school, my parents both passed away within a year and a half of each other when I was in my early twenties. And suddenly it was just interesting because it was fair. It was a year and a half time period and they had been ill before, but you're in your twenties and whatever they're gone through, you know, just don't realize there's going to be this big shift in your life.
- And so suddenly I was on my own and suddenly the things I chose to do I had to do for me. I wasn't doing them anymore for someone else. And what I really want to do, what was going to be my movement forward and the there've been there've these moments. I had a time w years ago when I had my own business and it wasn't doing well. It was during one of the recessions and all of a sudden it got worried. Maybe the whole thing will fall apart. And what, I live in this little town in rural Wisconsin and this was pre-internet, so people didn't work remotely if I was trying to work remotely. But what if I couldn't sustain this consulting business and I had to go work for someone else and there's no one around here that would want what I do. What would I do?
- And I had a very dear friend of mine say, well let's think it through. What would you do? Let's say the business fails tomorrow, what would you do? And I said, oh, I just started up again. It was like this. Oh, this is who I am, this is what I do. I'll just have to figure out a different way to do it and keep doing it cuz it's who I am and it's what I do. And just recently, Brenda, a couple in the middle of the whole covid pandemic thing, I found out I had breast cancer and went through a year and a half of treatment and I'm cancer free now. But that was one of those moments where you go, wait a minute, what am I doing? Who am I? How long does this life last? What can I count on? And it's like, okay, maybe you can't count on anything. And one of the things that was so interesting, and I'm not saying anyone else would've made this decision, but you're possibly facing death. I mean, I didn't know, maybe I was facing death. And it's like, how do I wanna spend my time and what I wanted to do? I wanted to work I wanted to do my music cuz I'm really, I'm a composer and I said I gotta really work. And then I just wanted to work because work reminded me of who I am.
- Actually never stopped working really for more than a few hours or a week or two after a surgery. But it was interesting to me because it was like, wait a minute, that's what I wanna do. I wanna keep working. But it was like, yeah actually, cuz that's what I enjoy and that's who I am. And again, I feel really, really fortunate and really blessed to my work so much that's work helped me get through the tough times. The relationships I had with my clients helped me. The distraction from feeling tired or not feeling well, it helped me to, it's like, no, I'm still me. I can still do this work. So I think it's at these moments of crisis when you kind of find out who you really are and what's really important to you. And I'm just very grateful to have always had at least one or two people around me and sometimes many more than that, who I can turn to and for support and therapy. Yeah, when
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You need it, you need a good few good friends, Susan, thinking about those experiences, the loss of your parents, the cancer that you've beaten most recently, this idea of choosing work because work is something that it is who you are and clearly you wouldn't have walked this career path that you've walked and continued to walk unless you loved it, you know, wouldn't have given so much to the field. We have this ability, and I think this is what's so refreshing for me anyway, preparing for today and getting some insight today on this call now into how you see the world, you know, seem to have this remarkable ability to see things for as they are, and to choose what it is that you want to tell yourself about the events that are happening to you, some of which are outside of your control. And we feel like at the moment, it feels to me at least that as a discipline and definitely as a world, there are some significant events that have played out in recent years. You mentioned the pandemic. There's clearly an unfolding situation in Europe and many other things going on. What is the story that we are telling ourselves at the moment though as a field of design of human factors that we could be telling ourselves a different story or that may be not serving us as well as it currently is?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Yeah, so love the way you put that. I've talked in some of the talks I've given in interviews I've given about a book called Redirect by Timothy Wilson on, and it's all about the science of self stories. And I just have seen so many times in the sciences there that the stories we tell ourselves have a profound impact on what happens. The stories drive our behavior. And so it's important I think on an individual level and then also like asked, what about on an industry level, the whole field we're in. It's so important to step back sometimes and look at what is the story, what is the story? If we're telling ourselves a story that UX designers and researchers, we don't have influence, we don't have authority, we have to do what the rest of the team wants, the product managers control everything, or whatever the story is, whatever the story we're telling ourselves that will be w react to that and our behavior will reflect that.
- And I'm not saying that it's like a magical thing, oh, just believe. But you need to sometimes stop and rewrite the story. And the research shows very clearly that when you rewrite the story, when you write the story to be, yeah, I'm in this field of UX and I don't always have all the authority and accountability, but I do have influence and the knowledge I have and the skills I have can really be helpful and I can learn to work as effectively as possible in whatever situation I'm in. When you rewrite the story, it changes your behavior and when your behavior changes, that can not always, but that can change the behavior of the people around you. So I would definitely, in your personal life, in your work life, I would definitely take time to I, and the technique is very simple that Timothy Wilson talks about you first write the story as you seem to be believing it now, you know, write the version that says, I'm just a cognitive wheel and there's nothing I can do that influences it.
- They never listen to me. You write that story and then you say, I'm going to take the same situation, but I'm just going to write a different story. I'm going to take a different viewpoint. I did that with the cancer. One story is I have breast cancer and I don't know what's going to happen and this could recur and I should just assume that this is the beginning of the end and that whole thing. And then I wrote the story again, which is, hey, I have good, I'm very fortunate I have good medical care. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm going to live my life to the fullest and I'm going to take every means I can to see if I can beat this. I just wrote it from a different point of view. And I'm not saying it changed the cancer, I'm not saying that's what made me cancer free, but I can tell you that's what made me enjoy my life, even in the midst of having cancer or at least enjoying it a little bit and appreciating what I did have. So I think you gotta look at the story and if there's something you're not happy about in your life, go rewrite that story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Susan, what a great point, great meaningful point to end our conversation on today. And speaking of which, what a wonderful conversation, what a meaningful conversation. I really appreciate you being so brave and going to such depth with me today on some quite personal and confronting, but definitely inspirational and much needed stories that you've been able to share with me. I really also wanna say thank you on behalf of myself and I'm sure of our listeners as well, for your sustained and outstanding contribution to this field of design, you've made such a huge impact.
- Susan Weinschenk:
- Thanks Brendan, and I hope one of these days will I, maybe I can come visit you guys. I've never been to your part of the world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well come on over. I think we are almost back open for business. Our borders have been closed for a little while,
- Susan Weinschenk:
- But, and you please eventually you will be fully open.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I hope so. I hope so. Yeah, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Susan. Thanks. If people wanna find out more about you, about the team w what the business has to offer, what you and Guthrie are trying to create, what you have created, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Susan Weinschenk:
- I think just come to our website, which is TheTeamW.com. It's probably the best way. And then of course you can follow me, Susan Weinschenk on LinkedIn or Twitter is @TheBrainLady.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thank you Susan, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've spoken about will be in the show notes, including where you can find Susan, her books, and all of the great stuff that we've spoken about. If you have 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 share the podcast with someone else that you feel would get value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just find me under Brendan Jarvis or you can find a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes. There is also a way you can reach to me, which is on my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.