Erika Hall

Episode 94
Brave UX

Moving Past Design’s Pleasant Platitudes

In this episode of Brave UX, Erika Hall reinforces the importance of being willing to be wrong, discusses how good user experiences can be bad, and calls on designers to be honest with themselves.

Highlights include:

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to go in-house?
What’s the truth about designers becoming more influential in business?
Have designers made the world a worst place over the past 30 years?
What organisational conditions support a culture of ‘just enough research’?
Who benefits from design not having agreed standards and ethics?

October 11, 202201:10:01

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Who is Erika Hall?

Erika is the Director of Strategy at Mule Design, the infamous design consultancy that she Co-Founded with Mike Monteiro, almost 21 years ago to the day.

And they certainly have pulled no punches in presenting their perspectives.

Erika’s ability to take challenging subjects and to wrap them in her own signature kooky, cohesive, and compelling style has given many designers plenty of practical ‘in-the-trenches’ training, as well as insightful 30,000 foot mind-food to chow down on.

She is the author of “Just Enough Research” (now in it’s second edition), a distillation of her extensive experience in design research, into an easy-to-follow guidebook that helps designers to think more critically about research and to wield it more expertly.

Erika is also the author of “Conversational Design”, a book that helps designers and technologists to make their systems and products feel less robotic and more human.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace 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. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. 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 Erika Hall. Erika is the Director of Strategy at Mule Design, the infamous design consultancy that she co-founded with Mike Monteiro almost 21 years ago to the day. In that time and in its own words, Mule has solved business problems, wrestled with ethical questions, seen technology trends come and go, made mistakes, made better mistakes, fought the fight it hopes is good, stayed curious, and remained stubborn.
And they certainly have pulled no punches in presenting their perspectives. Erika's ability to take challenging subjects and to wrap them in her own signature, kooky, cohesive, and compelling style has given many designers plenty of practical in the trenches training, as well as insightful 30,000 foot mind food to chow down on. She is the author of Just Enough Research (now in its second edition), a distillation of her extensive experience in design research into an easy to follow guidebook that helps designers to think more critically about research and to weld it more expertly. Erika is also the author of Conversational Design, a book that helps designers and technologists to make their systems and products feel less robotic and more human. A sought after intellect, Erika has spoken at many conferences and events across the world, including Word Camp, PopTech, UX Salon, beyond tellerand, and Creative Mornings, and now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Erika, welcome to the show.
Erika Hall:
Thank you so much, Brendan. It's, it's fantastic to be here with you in virtual space.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, we are together, but not together such as the way of the world. Now as I do, I do a bit of research for these conversations and I discovered, and something that I was watching of yours, I heard you say something that I thought, oh no, I need to ask you about this and I'll just quote you. Now what you said was that you are someone who likes to talk but hates to talk on the phone. So I hope that this doesn't count as on the phone.
Erika Hall:
No, no, not at all. And a funny thing is that I've come around to talking on the phone a little bit more, especially now in our Zoom and Microsoft teams times. I've come to appreciate being able to just have voice conversations and walk around doing whatever else and focusing on other things. So I say that's maybe not as true as it used to be.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's good to hear. That's good to hear. I remember being a teenager and being really fond of the phone and talking to your friends, your girlfriend, whatever it was at the time. But then distinctly, I think maybe around my mid twenties, I can't think of anything worse now of actually having phone calls. I get this feeling when people call me, I just don't want to be there. But video calls for me are different, you know, were saying it's a little bit different.
Erika Hall:
I think receiving a spontaneous phone call remains terrible, and especially now that it's coming up on Halloween time, spooky season here, we're watching a lot of old horror movies and often the most horrifying phenomenon in the movie is the phone rings. If you watch a 1960s, seventies, eighties movie, the phone just rings and you have no way of telling who it is, and if you don't pick it up, you'll never know. And to me, that's the real horror.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, there's a scene in the original Scream movie where she's inside and then the phone rings and it kind of passes. Passes the night. Yeah, it's so true. There is a bit of that anxiety that builds when that phone rings. I have another really important question to ask you, and that is will Rupert be joining us at any point for today's conversation?
Erika Hall:
He is asleep on the floor right now, so he might get up on the sofa behind me at some point, but he's having a bit of a post lunch news there.
Brendan Jarvis:
We had a couple of dogs recently on the show. Join us. We had Christina Vodka's dog join us at the end of our episode, and also Matt Young, who's the CEO of User Voice, his dog made an appearance about the same time actually. So just wanna let you know that this is totally doll friendly, this show.
Erika Hall:
Maybe it's up to
Brendan Jarvis:
Him. Something that I found I would say quite intriguing about what you've done and the work that you and Mike have been doing with Mule. I think I mentioned in your introduction, 21 years, right? It's literally 21 years last month I believe. Mm-hmm. That you started the business. So this is significant. That is, wow, that is totally impressive. And it seems to me that if I look at some of your contemporaries, particularly some of your friends actually that were founders of, I'm just going to use the term design agency here as broadly as I can, that there was this trend that maybe started around about a decade ago where they sold their agencies and made this move in house. And I noticed that the very bottom of the Mule website, there's a statement there which says, last of the independence, is this somewhat a badge of pride for you and Mike?
Erika Hall:
Oh yes, definitely because, and no shade on anyone who's sold their company and moved in house because running an independent agency, it is a tremendous amount of work and various ups and downs, but we really feel that it's our position standing outside of the client organization that allows us to do the kind of work we do, which is the kind of work we do. And the reason that we started an agency and we needle our friends who sold their agencies to banks because of course
Brendan Jarvis:
I would imagine that made for some fairly awkward dinner conversations.
Erika Hall:
Oh, wasn't awkward at all. No, we like mocked up Capital One cards for every, here's a credit card. Yeah, yeah. We're all friends. Fine. But
Brendan Jarvis:
Do you ever catch yourself staring out the window and wondering what it would be like to go in-house?
Erika Hall:
Only in the same way I think about the phone ringing, the reason why Mike and I started an agency is that we are ungovernable, we we're terrible employees. Horrible. And so that's the thing that makes everything else okay, is you think you're in a tough situation. It's only, you know, in dealing with some business reality, dealing with some client situation, employee stress, whatever, and you think, would I rather have a boss? No, no. And that's the price of not having a boss is you have to deal with those things. But the great thing about having been an independent agency for as long as we have is that the things do get much easier and the work has changed, but the conversations that were tremendously difficult at the beginning when we first started Mule are, and everything's still got its own challenges, but experience, you have the sense of, oh, I, I've been in this situation before, I know how to handle it. If I have to have an uncomfortable conversation, I know what the other side of that looks like. It's not, oh, I'm having this kind of uncomfortable conversation for the first time ever.
Brendan Jarvis:
And part of that ability to have those uncomfortable conversations, or at least I get the sense from looking at the work that you've both done through Mule and the work that you've put out there to encourage other designers that are independent or other agency owners has been that you've been quite reflexive and you've learned from the things that haven't worked, sometimes hard lessons. And one of the things that I really appreciate that you'd both put out there is this conversation around money with clients. And I think this has some applicability too for people that are coming to negotiate their salary or whatever it may be. But what is it about money that, not necessarily specific to designers, but maybe if you have some insight into designers specifically, but why do we get so icky about being paid a fair price? And I know that's a charged term, but a fair price for the value that we create.
Erika Hall:
I mean, that's a difficult question I think because there can be a lot of, and I don't wanna get into arguments about what is design, et cetera, et cetera, but design is a commercial function, right? Before we had UX design or interactive design or UI design, graphic design was called commercial art. Commercial was in the name. And there was no shame in that. And if you look at the work of early industrial designers, they knew, they were like, I would like to make a product that makes a lot of money and sometimes that was bad. That's how we got planned obsolescence. That can be taken too far. But I, Mike's book, it's a job. But I think the problem is that there's this lack of clarity particularly that comes through design education, because design is often taught in art, the art school, it gets mixed up with what part of it is personal expression.
And it's the same with writing, I think because it, there's an idea that it's some glamor to it. There's some competitiveness to it in terms of this idea that especially if you come from the graphic design side, you have the portfolio and you compete and you want the quote good jobs. But one of the reasons we ran an indepe, we've run an independent agency is that the good jobs aren't necessarily the good jobs. The high profile stuff isn't necessarily the most rewarding or meaningful or even launches. And I think that it's perceived that conversation is, I don't know beneath or that if you are a designer, you're not actually your whole role to achieve some business or organizational goals. And frankly, I think it works in the favor of the employers or the clients to have designers feel that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Tell me about that.
Erika Hall:
Well, because if there's a designer, and this happens, we've seen this happen a lot, there's this idea in the, say the client services relationship. You provide a service and there's a sense of a little bit of what it means to be in service. There can be sort of obsequiousness or I'm lucky to get the job and are often the bids are competitive and price is a factor. But I think designers don't understand how much power they can have in that relationship, or they don't set up the relationships to allow themselves to have that power. And it's because nobody ever taught them that. So I think it's those things. It's the general, most people have a bad relationship with money just in general. At no point in our education we learn algebra and calculus, but we don't learn the basics of, not even personal finance, but just the connection of money to value. It's like everything that ripped David Graber, everything he talked about was trying to unpack what value and money and debt mean. And I encourage all designers to read his work and to read bullshit jobs and debt and all those books. Cuz he talks about exactly that money's just a fiction, it's a tool, it's all of these things. But most people have dysfunction around it because it was never taught as just a thing you deal with or how to deal with it dispassionately. It's such an emotionally charged topic that it makes people uncomfortable to
Brendan Jarvis:
Deal with. You spoke a little earlier about how it actually serves the employer for designers not to have a respect for command over the topic of money, whether that's through an internal conversation or bidding for work. As an external agency, do you think that this is something that's been intentionally left off the curriculum for our educations?
Erika Hall:
Whew. I would be really, that's a good question that I haven't really looked into. Why is it the case that certain more pragmatic or vocational topics are part of primary education and others aren't? Like why isn't it? And I don't know if it's nefarious. I mean I'm currently working on a design curriculum advisory project, so I am really seeing how the sausage is made and school is complicated and bureaucratic. But yeah, I, but curriculum design is always political, so I think that's a good topic to look into. I haven't looked into that myself like, oh, we want financially illiterate people so we can give them credit cards. Maybe that's totally plausible when you look at some of the things that have happened, especially AmErikan public education like oh yeah, maybe we want people to graduate and get credit cards and not be good at negotiating salary.
Because the honest truth is that designers talk about wanting to have more influence in business and as though there's some magic that happens that isn't you at in whatever situation you're in, advocating for yourself and inserting yourself into those conversations. I think sometimes the way designers talk about talking to business leaders or stakeholders, it's as though there's a v I P section and at some point somebody waves you behind the velvet rope and that's not how it is. It's just like, Hey, what are you talking about? Hey, I'm going to come talk about that with you. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
I love, I love this, I love this. It's reminding me of, I'm a big fan of Seth Godden. People that listen to the podcast are probably mention, he heard me mention him a couple of times. He's got this notion of don't sit around waiting to be picked. The gatekeepers have left the building. And so when you are talking about this notion of the V I p and sometimes some point someone's going to pick you and usher you behind that velvet rope I think there's some real power and people understanding that don't wait around for that. Just because you have design in your title doesn't mean that you have to be chosen by someone that doesn't have design in their title. Don't wait around.
Erika Hall:
And I was just going to say, as a consultant, you really get to see behind a lot of curtains and really I can't emphasize enough the extent to which people just don't know what they're doing and are making it up all along. They are. And for whatever reason people go into design and I think Mike talks a lot about designers wanting to be liked and that creates this vulnerability. I, yeah, I guess I think there's power in being kind of aggressively unlikable on a certain level or not caring, not being rude or mean, but just saying, I'm not here to be liked. I'm here to do a job. And I think those things get conflated. It's nice to be told your work is good, but who cares? What are you really trying to do?
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk about not caring about whether you are liked or not. And I understand that you studied philosophy at Dartmouth, which you've described, and I'll quote you now, you've described as the study of how to construct an airtight argument. And you went on to say, this weaponized my tendency to be right. I got a degree in it. How did that need to be right at that point in your life? How did that present how show up?
Erika Hall:
Really wanting to be? Right? I was the first person in my family to go to university and so that was my scrappy, that was my way up and out. There are a lot of people who are in this situation and it's like my path is education and it's fun. It's fun to be right. And if you're playground bullies, you're just like, well, you can bully me but I'm going to go to a better school. There's that sense of there's power through knowledge and power through having the right answer. Because in school, talk a lot about this in my talks, in my workshops is that's what we're, we are rewarded for in education is being right. And especially having the right answer. There's an idea that there is a right answer and if you match the right answer, you will get approval from the institutional body.
So then you get into an environment where you're in university and it's everybody got there cuz they were that person and then you're like, oh woo, we're in it now. Yeah. So I mean that's what you do. And then at a certain point it's important to realize, wait a second, there are more questions than there are answers in the teacher's edition. Thinking about the world in terms of those dichotomies, right answer, wrong answer, all of that is really limiting. But of course that's how people think because that's what we've been rewarded for our whole lives.
Brendan Jarvis:
A hundred percent. We spend what, 20 odd years or so by the time that you've done your undergraduate in well near enough in that environment that does reward that. What were some was the social price that you realized that you'd started to pay as a result of taking this need to be bringing your rightness out into the world? What was it that made you realize maybe this isn't the best way of operating with other people?
Erika Hall:
Oh, just being annoying. Just realizing like, oh, I'm annoying and seeing other people. Cuz you look at people around you and you notice that often when somebody asks a question, somebody might rush in to try to guess the answer before the person even finishes the question. And it's like, no, you guessed and you guessed wrong. And that really made me think, where does that, what you don't win, there's no prize. You don't get a stuffed animal if you guess the person's question,
Brendan Jarvis:
I did this to you, I did this to you when we first started talking and I asked you about whether or not you knew what you're in for today and I didn't let you and I feel terrible about this because I hate doing this. I interrupted you and said so that you could get a feel for it or something like that. And you were like, yeah, right. But that you might have just been being nice to me to move the conversation along by saying that I was right. But I will never know. I mean you could tell me now, but this is the kind of bad behavior that presents, right, like where I did that is exactly what you're talking about here.
Erika Hall:
And that's so common for reasons. And then the other thing that I started thinking about and especially once I started doing design work is how much more you learn when you keep your mouth shut and then observing the people in the room and you look around and you're like, oh, that person is just, they're paying attention and they're keeping their mouth shut. And then you realize, oh, that's how you learn things and you get the other person talking. And that's also, I mean there's so many people talk about this now that all the dating is through apps. If you go on a date with somebody, sometimes you'll end up having a drink with somebody who will just talk about themselves and never ask a question or just talk, talk. And that's no fun for anybody. And I feel like there's mean, it's fun for the person I guess who just really likes to hear themselves talk. But it takes a while to understand the power of creating space for the other person. Cause I think there's just this sense of we're going to run out of attention or run out of credit or something. And it's so powerful to ask questions and listen,
Brendan Jarvis:
You are a celebrated expert. Do you find you have to fight this tendency still? Is this something that you've put to bed completely and it's no longer an issue or your expertness mean that you find that you have this tendency to want to do exactly what we've just been talking about?
Erika Hall:
I hope that I adjust to context better than in my earlier days because if I have a venue where my job is to talk for whatever reason, I could talk for hours, really hours,
Brendan Jarvis:
This is the right venue to do that
Erika Hall:
[laugh]. Like maybe I should go into politics because I would be a plus at the filibuster. If I'm doing a q and a and people have questions, I'll answer questions, I'll talk. But if I'm in a situation where I, it's a research situation or a quasi research situation like getting understanding the requirements for potential consulting engagement or something where I'm just trying to learn and my goal, it all depends on my goal. If my goal is to learn something or if my goal is to make somebody feel comfortable or feel included, like hosting parties is a really important life skill. And that's a case where you look out for other people. So I hope I do that a little better than at my literal worst.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's this feeling of, and I'm generalizing here, so not everyone experiences this, but there's this feeling at least I get that when you don't have the answer, and sometimes I get this on these interviews where I don't feel like I've got a good bridging question or a follow up and it gives me this, I wouldn't say it's a deep sense of anxiety, but it does give me some anxiety. This I don't have this answer, I don't have this next question. Why do we feel, or maybe why do I feel, that's probably a good question for me to ask myself, but why do we feel this anxiety when we don't know? Instead of what I get looking at my four year old son, and this is cliche, but it's definitely true, it's cliche for a reason when he doesn't know something or is looking at something, there's this sense of wonder and curiosity and at some point it's being flipped and it becomes the sense a source of anxiety instead what's that all
Erika Hall:
About? Yeah, that's school. That's school. And that's work because it goes back to we are rewarded for having answers. We're not rewarded for asking questions. And there's a sense of if you don't have an answer, you'll look incompetent. There's so much fear when I go into organizations, I see people who are just afraid of each other and afraid of looking. They don't know enough to do their job. And that's what I try to help people with. I'm like, stop being afraid of each other. So I try to go in and model, look, I'm just trying to have a nice time here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Do people freak out? Do they? And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is just so different to these crazy unspoken rules that we've been operating by. What's the sort of I suppose the spectrum of response to Erika Hall turning up and being like, right, I'm going to flip this. I'm flipping this table, this is how it's going to be from now on.
Erika Hall:
Well the way the table flipping happened is creating situations in which people have to have more candid conversations and they do in fact freak out sometimes. And it's learning, but it's creating, setting up explicit guidelines really helps. But getting people to ask questions is, I mean that's really what I do. Cuz everybody, all of the more specific research methods, techniques, et cetera, everybody has those handles. But if you don't have the right question, it doesn't matter. And nobody, people in their daily lives can think of questions. I always use the vacation planning example cuz you always know what you need to know, but you get into a work context and people freeze up. Cause I say, well what questions do you have? And they're like, cause nobody wants to admit that they don't know. But if you don't admit that you don't know something you can't learn.
And so you factor this by the size of an organization and if everybody in an organization is too afraid to admit they don't know something that organization can't learn. And this is why companies have problems, right? Cuz it's modeled from the top down. Yeah, the higher up you rise in a hierarchy, the more perceived risk there is. And admitting you don't know something and everybody takes their cue down the chain, nobody, it's like the emperor's new clothes. That's a really handy fable because everybody's looking around the emperor's naked and only the child will say, Hey, that dude's naked. But everybody else is looking like does, everybody else knows nobody else has questions. I guess I'll shut up. And so some terrible assumption or terrible product, bad decision will just go on by and everybody is like, well nobody else is saying anything so I'm not going to stick my neck out. So getting people to collaborate is the most important thing first.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is something that I feel is salient because you recently posted on LinkedIn about something that you'd observed out in job descriptions recently. And what I'll do is I'll just quote you again now, you said doing just enough research is not an individual skill, it's an organizational capability, A very scarce organizational capability based on my observations. So we've been talking about, well you've been talking about this notion of the emperor's clothes and people just realizing what's going on, but not feeling like they I'm putting words in your mouth here, but safe enough or for whatever reason they're not speaking up about it and calling it out. What are some of the conditions that you've observed in organizations that have got this right that don't treat just enough research? Research is something that just exists on a researcher's job description and doesn't apply to the wider organization. What are those conditions? What makes for a successful approach?
Erika Hall:
It all starts with having very clear goals and a clear sense of mission and then having very clear roles. Because if those things aren't explicit, then everyone is continually negotiating for what those are. And that creates this sense of territoriality and competitiveness because it's like, oh, is that your job? Is that my job? How do we succeed? But if the organization says here are our most important priorities and for each of you knows very clearly what your role is and the incentives are aligned and appropriate because what happens in a lot of organizations is that they say team, they say collaborate, but then the way the incentives are structured puts people in competition with each other. And in that environment you can't learn because again, nobody, if you feel that you're in competition with your colleagues, everybody is going to want to give the appearance of confidence and the appearance of expertise. And that's what happens. And I mean that's a lot of startups who just go out there with like, oh, we just have an idea and we're not going to check our assumptions. We're just going to sell our idea and see how far we can get.
Brendan Jarvis:
This seems like such a simple and self-evident thing. It's almost shocking that it's more rare for an organization to have people working in concert and aligned around incentives that don't compete. Now is is this is obviously this is a fight against a predominant culture in business. Why does it make sense to operate in a way where you're pitching everyone against everyone else who stands to benefit here? Is this why we created organizations?
Erika Hall:
I think there are a few reasons. One is that there a peer to be incentives for that kind of behavior because we can talk about wanting equitable, inclusive, sustainable organizations, but yet there are billionaires. And if you look at who gets to be a billionaire, you're like, oh, it wasn't those people. It wasn't equitable sustainable. The Patagonia guy I guess isn't bad. He basically, he and his family just made a high quality outdoor wear. And so that's okay. But you see all of these instances in which you have this cycle of that sort of behavior being rewarded and people winning in that system and then replicating that system. It's like when you look at the whole venture business, what they call pattern matching is total confirmation bias. And they'll say, oh, this entrepreneur looks like a younger me, so I'm going to based on no criteria, fund that company. And then you get again, everybody kind of sustaining the illusion. And we've seen look at WeWork which I think that's my favorite of the recent shows about terrible startups going terribly. That was a total, the guy became a billionaire and now he's getting funding for a crypto startup. Why?
Brendan Jarvis:
People are slow to learn.
Erika Hall:
It's not that people are slow to learn that people are likely, cuz all you've gotta do is keep passing the bag to the bag holder. And so if you're in that echelon where all of human activity is just chips on a table, then it works in your benefit. And that's hard to deal with because it creates this ambient anxiety of, oh, if I don't play this game, I'm not going to have a home. So that's genuine real anxiety because of material condition and everybody sort of feels isolated and we're starting to get collective action and unionization more and more. So that's happening. But that's the, the only way is to start creating more collaborative collective structures
Brendan Jarvis:
In your talk, designing for the triple storyline, which I feel is relevant. Now you referenced Dara Cora Shahi, who's the CEO of Uber on his quote about possible futures. And you suggested, and I feel like as I said, this is relevant because you suggested that designers, and I'm going to extrapolate this out to people that work in tech, but feel free to challenge me on that if you feel like you need to, that we needed to broaden our perspectives. And specifically you said there are many possible futures and some are going to be better than others and we really have to look for what and for whom. So given what you've been saying about examples like WeWork and the way in which our enterprises are structured and in people are incentivized within those structures, what kind of future do you feel that we are currently optimizing more for?
Erika Hall:
We're optimizing for the financialization of everything and all things crypto web three, all of that is even more extreme in that direction. And when you just financialize all the things you ignore human experience and ethics and sustainability and all of these things. And what you end up with is what we're getting, which is just these extractive business models that are accumulating and concentrating wealth and without concern for anything else. And the planet's melting
Brendan Jarvis:
And your talk, you emitted the polarized caps from your images and you were making light of it, but it's actually a really dark humor. There's a significant issue there if we don't have polarized caps. And that talk which is excellent by the way, and I really encourage people to go and watch that and I will link to it in the show notes. You in fact, so excellent, you just delivered that talk perfectly. You were just on point the whole way through. You extended the challenge further to designers and quite frankly made me uncomfortable. So I imagine it made other people uncomfortable. You said for all the efforts of smart and well-meaning designers, thinking about people, it seems like the relationships that we've helped to create between individual humans, between these economic and business entities haven't gone so well and are maybe trending worse. So I was thinking about this and my question is, have we really made the world a worse place? And we being designers, have we really made it a worse place than it was 20 to 30 years ago?
Erika Hall:
I wouldn't put the sole responsibility on designers are there. I mean there's not, everything's terrible, but I think it's about the promise of design and the humanist values. And I know that Peter Merritts talks about this a lot and I talk about this a lot, that the idea is that the role of design is not just to make business or the organization successful, but to do so in a way that values certain things. And that seems to have gone right out the window because I think it's hard. It's hard to prove a counterfactual and say like, oh, are we in a worse place than we would've been if UX wasn't a thing? That's hard. But I can say that if you look at the things that so many designers are working on, they're not good things and they're not turning out well, even the experience of using the most basic things, just the experience of using websites, which is the simplest example of interactive design.
It's like have we just tried to use the web lately? It's all popups and dark patterns. And it seems for all, we know the principles of good design. However, because, and this is what that talk is about, because designers aren't thinking about the business value at the same time they're thinking about the customer journey, what happens is just leading people into exploitation and doing things that aren't good. It's like you look at Instagram for example, inst, I love Instagram, but Instagram is like, how do they make money? They don't make money. By me enjoying my friends' photos and enjoying the work of independent artists, Instagram is trying to, and has at some point successfully encouraging me to just buy random stuff at three in the morning. So many designers are, if we go back to the melting ice caps and the fact that we are buying too much stuff, like those of us who are in these affluent areas with fancy jobs are just, we're buying too much stuff and everything.
And this is what designers are participating in this, the metrics that you're trying to hit as a designer in a lot of these organizations are, it's not sell enough stuff, it's get people to purchase and consume. It's surveillance capitalism. It's finding ways to extract people's data and compile people's data and then track people. And if you look at that, you're like, wait a second, what are you as a designer doing? Are you making choices? Are you making choices or are you just carrying out the directives of the organization you work for? So what does it mean to be a designer? So I'd say in many cases designers are saying that they're following certain values, but they're not. And if you push them, you get a lot of like, well but I've gotta stay competitive. I've gotta make rent. I don't know any other thing to do. It's my organization. I'm fixing things from the inside, et cetera, et cetera.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's lots of things in there. And what you've just said, including I get the sense that you are compelling designers to think more broadly about how they define design. And maybe we can come back to that. But the thing that I wanted to tackle with you now is whether or not your independence, and you said before when we first started talking that you would make a terrible employee or something to that effect, but this ability for you to be outside of the tent, does this make it easier for you to say these kind of things and live in a certain way? I know that for example, you only drive several times a year. Your preferred mode of transport is the bike of which Rupert looks fantastic on the back of when you're riding around. But is this something that you haven't, are more easily afforded? You can poke this beer more directly and more painfully because you're on the outside
Erika Hall:
1000%. And I think because so much of design has gone now, we've lost that voice in a lot of ways. We don't really have, even when there were a lot of agencies and agencies would take on whatever clients, there was still this agency voice, which was maybe aspirational, but was at least talking more about the aspirations of design. And I feel like now people are just speaking from within, their organization can't, they're not talking about design, they're talking about on behalf of Apple or Meta or whatever. And I think we've lost that sense of the voice of strategic design agencies saying, well, even if the reality isn't totally there, here's what we should be doing. And we're having a conversation outside of the context of the project or the context of the employer. And I feel like that's really gone away. I feel like universities are, universities are all making programs around design thinking, which is not design, it's a tool set for making business decisions that sort of takes the goals for granted and doesn't interrogate the fuller context in which this little engine is running.
So that's, so universities aren't leading the conversation. There are individual academics and intellectuals out there, here and there who are definitely writing and thinking, but there's not a sense of there's the creation and there's not a sense of a coherent critique. I look at architecture, right? Because in architecture, architects work in architecture firms and sure they build bad buildings, they work for bad people. But there's a whole body of architecture, scholarship and criticism that at least from outside and thinking about things and thinking about the practice, that feels more coherent. And I know that it feels like with designers, designers just argue about whether you can still use personas. And I feel like there's this deeper level of discourse that just gets, it turns into sniping and isn't really well thought out because everybody's so busy making figma to hand to the engineers.
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you feel about personas? I'm just kidding. What I am more interested in though is this lack of standardization professional ethics, whatever you call it. The things that industrial design and architecture have, the more established design professions that in digital experience, predominantly where we're talking here we don't who benefits from us not having those things?
Erika Hall:
All of the organizations that are doing the capitalism without restrictions. Yeah, it benefits to have people who have this mindset that, oh, because I'm a designer, my work is inherently beneficial to humanity. But oh, it turns out that I'm in service of some really terrible goals and all I'm doing is helping them be more successful, being terrible faster. So I think all those organizations benefit from designers not talking to each other and not supporting each other. And they benefit from having people be more loyal to a brand or a particular corporation than they are to the practice. It's like, oh, the practice comes first. And again, that's an idealized view, but the doctors have the hippocratic oath, the lawyers have the bar, people have this standard where it's like, well yeah, I work for my client, but I am accountable to my profession first and foremost.
And we don't have that in the same way. And if you start talking about that, designers still get really itchy about that. And I think part of it is the paychecks are quite good if you work in-house in some of these organizations and you get the cognitive dissonance because, so we have this whole cycle where the student loans in AmErika are very high and you need to pay those off. So you need to go work and the health insurance comes with your job. If you're an immigrant on an H1B visa, you have to have the work sponsor. And so all of these things are very understandable. And so I don't wanna make any individual who's just trying to keep body and soul together feel bad. That's like, I need to work for money. And this goes back to your previous question about the discomfort with money. I think if we could have that be, and I think it's starting to be talk about salaries and things like that, I think if we could have that conversation more openly of, Hey, this is a thing we're doing for money and we could also be more honest about, oh, how do we create the conditions where you can both earn a sufficient living and not have to do unethical work or work on behalf of an extractive or otherwise harmful organization.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk about some definitions Now. I know being a philosophy, a student of philosophy, hopefully this will be appreciated when we talk about things that are unethical, business models that are extractive. I mean, these are clearly strong statements and it's a particular view on what an entity is doing in the world and it's not necessarily a view that everyone will share, but I feel like we need to define what some of those terms are so that people understand what it is that we're talking about. And in particular, I wanted to come to the first of the myths that you touched on in this talk. The myths about UX, which was a good user experience, is good for the user. And we've, we've been dancing around this and about this in particular. You said, just because something is pleasant to use doesn't mean it's healthful anymore than pleasant to eat does. And that's so true. I love pancakes but I know that I shouldn't eat them as much as I do. So does this though, this term good, is one of those terms ethical where unless we define good, it's very difficult to understand what it actually means. So what is good? What is it that you mean when you say a good user experience?
Erika Hall:
I mean an experience that follows the UX heuristics of, oh, we could say delightful cuz that word people use. It's like, oh, I use this and I have a good feeling and I'm my happiness on the customer journey, et cetera. And I think a way to think about this is that eating pancakes is a good experience. Nothing wrong with pancakes, it's just like don't always eat pancakes. But the problem is when you have a business model that says we have to maximize pancake intake. And so instead of saying, oh, the person from the individual, they're optimal for their health and happiness, pancakes once a week would really be if you were actually honest about what meets all this person's goals. And then if the business is like, no, we have to maximize the pancakes, this person's eating, we have to get it so that they get all their friends to eat pancakes too.
We have to hide foods that aren't pancakes. I mean, I don't even food shaming here, we could talk about anything else. It's like it's say fast fashion or something like that where it's like, oh really? I need two new shirts a year. But they're like, Hey, but you don't have this shirt. We've cut a different part of the sleeve off. You don't wanna be the person with the cold elbow shirt. Now we're doing the high sleeve shirt, whatever. So it's like that where it's really what if in a cool moment, cuz this is what we talked about a lot actually in philosophy class is cool moment choice. If you stepped away and really thought, what are my higher order aspirations? And you might think, I want some nice clothes for these occasions. I don't want too many clothes, but I wanna feel like I have choices for my outfits. I wanna look cute. All of that. That's all great. But you have businesses because they're set up to scale and they're set up to profit maximize where they're like, okay, our goal is to get you to buy way more clothes than you need. Buy and not care about the quality of the clothing, not care about how they're produced, not care about the impact on the environment, and just continually buy a lot of really cheap clothes that fall apart. So you get that business and if you're in that business, that's not good. That's not good.
Brendan Jarvis:
You are tapping into here your second myth of UX, which is a good user experience is good for business. And you're suggesting here, the distinction you're drawing here is that the experience for the user is actually bad if you add up the cost that the user is incurring over the long term, not just the short term satisfaction of that first set of pancakes, this is what you're getting at. Yeah.
Erika Hall:
And so if you had a good user experience, if you had a genuinely a good user experience, it wouldn't be good for the business because you'd say, oh, the person bought had their pancakes for the week and they bought their shirt for the month and great, but there's no sense of enough. My book's just enough research. But I feel like the thing people focus on is the just part, some sort of minimum, but it's like we don't lost the sense of enough of something, right? Because it's all of these organizations just wanna maximize, maximize, extract, extract, extract. We have too many choices. Everybody's really short circuiting and all the pricing signals are hidden because of all of the investment. So if you look at Uber, nobody knows what a cab should cost anymore because they subsidized the price of a private taxi ride essentially. And they shifted all of the demand from public transit to cabs, got people really hooked on the convenience of just having a car show up using your phone.
The thing to know about the origin of Uber is that San Francisco's a tiny city. It's hard to get around despite being seven by seven miles and taxis in San Francisco before Uber were abysmal, you'd call a dispatcher, they might curse you out, they'd tell you maybe a taxi was coming, maybe it would show up, maybe it wouldn't. You'd be like in a part of the city that they didn't wanna send a cab to. You'd be stranded at night, you'd be trying to get to a job interview, all this stuff could happen. And then magically, you have your phone, you have an app, you see here's a car, A car will be here in five minutes. That is an amazing experience. Oh, the car's only going to be $4 to take me all the way across the city. That is a fantastic user experience. But when you multiply that, that's unsustainable.
Like that's not mass transit. And then you have all these, in order to have that short time between hitting the button, the car's showing up, you have to have a tremendous number of cars just circling with no passengers. You need to not pay the drivers very much. You need to obscure how much the drivers are getting paid and obscure the expenses and keeping up the car. And then it just becomes harder to get around the city. And because there's been fewer people taking transit, that means that transit has to cut back the lines and transit service gets worse and everything gets more terrible. Even though that individual experience of summoning a car, especially if you're in a remote place and it's 3:00 AM and you need to get home safely, all of that great experience.
Brendan Jarvis:
I recently spoke with Dan Hill, who is currently the director of design at the Melbourne School of Design, which I think is part of Melbourne University. He's a urban design strategist and has worked in Sweden and Finland and in the UK where he is from. And Uber came up in that conversation as well. And the question that I post him is around the sort of locus of control or responsibility. So if you think about the individual designer working inside a company like Uber and their responsibility you think about the leadership of that company, the company itself, and their responsibility and the widert system of which these negative externalities are created through their activities that they're all contributing to. My question to him, and I suppose I'll put this question to you as well, is in all those layers of complexity and different levels of responsibility, who ultimately should be the entity, the person, the organization that controls the sort of heat that's in the system and goes, whoa, whoa, whoa. We haven't got this calibrated in a way that makes sense for all of us. We need to make some changes here because companies have proven time and time again and maybe it's inherent to their design that they by and large will not do that on their own. So how do we this better?
Erika Hall:
Well, government regulation is like that's when taxes were regulated. I'm not saying it was right or perfect, but this is the history of all of business is business pushes, pushes, pushes. Oh there's arsenic in the milk. Oh, we're using child labor. Oh the triangle shirt, waste factory caught on fire and a lot of people died. Any industry, oh the bridge collapsed. So now we need absolutely every industry does this where it's like some innovator pushes forward and it would be ideal if they said, oh, we're going to be super careful. But they push and then hopefully at some point you get the, Hey, why don't we have food inspectors to make sure you're not poisoning people? Why don't we have regulations to say that the ingredients have to be what you say they are. The country of origin has to be the country of origin. You can't put lead in the gasoline anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
So your snake oil has to be snake oil. Your
Erika Hall:
Snake oil has to be made out of snakes, actual water, snakes. So I think that if you look at the store of Uber and read Mike Isaac's bike book, you see that was it's regulatory capture where they use their money. So that's why I don't even calling so many of these companies, tech companies, cuz their competitive advantage is not their technology. The technology that Uber had was the iPhone. That's the technology. What they really did was the lobbying that was their innovation. And because how was it possible that they were running? If you look at the service, you're like, that's a taxi service. How was it possible that all these cities had two sets of regulations that was not right and not fair by any definition to say that, oh there's taxis where they have to have commercial insurance, they have to have these meters. They can't do surge pricing like you get in a taxi and the taxis have those regulations because of previous taxi industry abuses. But how was it that some company could just come in and be like we're just random people driving around private cars that you summon with an app. We're not a taxi. That was nonsense. But that was the power of Uber's lobbying.
Brendan Jarvis:
They redefined the terms of the industry and clearly they were well funded and able to do that. Some people listening may be wondering, what does all this have to do with me? I'm running a design team inside of, I don't know a B2B enterprise and how does any of what we're talking about relate to my day-to-day? So what is it that everyday designers who now predominantly work in site of enterprises have the constraints applied or that are bought into around how they're remune remunerated the realities of paying down college debt and paying the bills, the mortgage, all of that stuff, including we've just all lived through a massive asset price inflation particularly when it comes to homes. How can we look at the situation and in our day-to-day make decisions that help to create a, I'm going to use the term better. Maybe we need to define that, but a world that is better than the one that we are currently optimizing for.
Erika Hall:
That's a great question. Step one is be honest with yourself. Stop buying the hype. And that's why I wrote that piece and gave that talk about the triple storyline, which is stop living on the other side of that wall where there's business, snakes, butcher shop, whatever of there design, yay, human empathy. Realize that you're the same like a designer, a salesperson, a marketer, customer service person, somebody who works in the factory. You all work for the business and please stop saying you work for the brand. That's one thing that designers can do because that means you work for the story, you work for the myth, you don't work for the myth, you work for the business. So the most important thing is just to be super honest because I, I'm respected. If you say, you know what? I'm working for this business and I'm supporting this business through my efforts, but right now I got a family student loans, I just like, this is my job.
But you probably have more choices than you think. Again, going back to designers have power, but I think sometimes it's like, oh, I don't wanna really look too hard at the fact that I do have a choice to work for maybe a little less money for another type of organization or maybe I do need to work on unionization or something like that. So first of all, take a good hard look at how does the business you work for make money? Make sure you understand that. And it's a lot a sense of, oh, business is so complicated. Not business is just interaction design, right? It's like what? There's a tension and there's money and design converts attention to money sort of things. You could sketch it out. That's why I said, you know, just do a simple line graph and you're like customer journey, business journey up until the right.
Once you look at it, of course there's complicated financial shenanigans a lot, but it's like what Warren Buffet says when he is like, I won't invest in a business, I don't understand. Don't work for an organization if you can't figure out how they make money. And so be really clear. Say, am I just baiting the hook to draw people in, to lure people into this bad business model? Or can I really, really stand up and say I take ownership? Cuz you have to say, I take ownership of everything about this business I work for and understand it. So step one is be out of ignorance. So do what you do in being honest to say, yes, I totally support, or I support enough the business I work for. That to me is the most important part. And stop thinking that somehow your work is more special cuz you do the design part of the business. It's not more special, it's just a different part of it. It's a different, it's like the accountant. Businesses need designers, they need accountants.
Brendan Jarvis:
You just blew up our echo chamber. How are we going to put the pieces back together now?
Erika Hall:
I know. So once you take a good look at what you're doing, be really clear on what do you wanna accomplish with your time on earth? That's the other kind of clarity. Don't just get out of this feeling of like, oh no, I'm not going to be able to find a job. Because there are people who are in places where they can't find work and they have to work in the only store in town. If you're a UX designer, that's not you. Right? That is a layer of privilege. And again, individuals, individuals know their own circumstances and if somebody needs to take a job for reasons of being alive and with a house and all of that, that comes first and foremost. Your survival, the survival of your family, taking care of older parents, whatever. If you gotta do that, you gotta do it. But be super honest if you have to do it or it's just like, oh, this is convenient and I like doing it.
But then once you're clear on what problem you wanna work on, what's the project? Everything is a group project. What group project do you wanna be a part of the most? Is the group project building the metaverse? Like is it really? But once you have that clarity about, okay, here's what I need to survive and take care of myself and my obligations, here's what I really want to contribute to. Then when you have that clarity, you can find a way to contribute like that. You can. But I think it's that. It's the first exercise, and that's the most important part is just to be, do your soul searching and be really clear about what you wanna do and be a little more focused and build apps that's not wanting to do a thing, that's not a project to contribute to. That's a way of doing something.
And then once you have a sense of what sort of project you wanna contribute to, then you find the organization that's doing that or the people who are doing that and realize that it's not just you have to work, you have to think of yourself as part of society, and you have to do that first. Even if for whatever reason you feel cut off from other people, you have to think, okay, I live in a society like the cliche. And you say, okay, how can I be more a part of something that I think has good aims, but just really look at what's going on and what you're contributing to. But recognize, I mean, yeah, we're all human. We're all going to buy pants on Instagram at 3:00 AM We're all going to eat pancakes. Sometimes, and pancakes are fine. Being just doing things for fun is fine.
Working in games is fine as long as you're not, it's not a game that exploits people or steals their data or something. But once you ask these basic questions, it's not hard to figure out. I think everybody kind of knows and then they justify to themselves, oh, here's why. It's okay, I'm doing this. But it's, just be honest. That's the most important part. And then advocate for government regulation. Cause I think a big part of it is that you have to be know what's actually in your power to affect in your organization and what's not. Like there's a tool from community organizing called the Power Map, where you go and you actually, you think about what decision you wanna help get made, and you literally make a map of all of the people, like a little org chart and say like, okay, which of these people has the power to affect the situation?
I wanna affect who has influence over that person. And you can do this in an organization. If you're like, I want the organization to change in a particular way, you might do that mapping and say, okay, the only way that's going to change is if I'm a whistleblower, if this organization gets bad pr or if something else happens. Because it's really rare that somebody just rises within the ranks in an organization and can change it. Because if you've risen in the ranks of the organization, you've benefited from how it works currently. And so you really have to look at where the power is and where the influence is, and whether that's inside or outside or in some different body. And then work on the places that seem likely to have influence on the things you wanna have influence on.
Brendan Jarvis:
What a huge point to end on [laugh]. This notion of opening your eyes and not being able to confront some potentially uncomfortable truths and then actually doing something about it. So only have deep things for people to think about. Erika, thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me today. And thank you also for continuing to bring your unique flavor of well conceived and provocative activism to our field of design. It's greatly appreciated.
Erika Hall:
Oh, thank you. That's very kind of you to say, but really I'm just trying to encourage people to have a nice time too while they're doing the work. So yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Eating a few pancakes.
Erika Hall:
Eat, pancakes are great. Curly fries are great. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, Erika. If people wanna find out more about you and the work that you're doing, your books about Mule Design, what's the best way for them to do that?
Erika Hall:
Well, you can go to muledesign.com that has our stuff and our books. I'm on Twitter too much. I'm on LinkedIn now, so yeah, I'm online a lot.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh good. Erika, I'll link to those in the show notes and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been really great to have you here listening to this conversation. As I've said, everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Erika and all of the things 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 about conversations that might be a little bit outside of the regular design conversation, then please subscribe to the podcast and also leave a review. If you've enjoyed the conversations that you've been listening to, and if there's just one other person that you feel would get some value or would have some moments of light bulb, light bulb moments from listening to these episodes, then please pass the podcast along to them. Share it with them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes. Just type in Brendan Jarvis, you'll find me that way as well. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being.

Erika Hall

Moving Past Design’s Pleasant Platitudes

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Who is Erika Hall?

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