Jon Fukuda
Creating a Design-Integrated Organisation
In this episode of Brave UX, Jon Fukuda illuminates the dark corners of enterprise DesignOps 🔦, reinforces the importance of connecting design to value 💰, and shares what’s kept him consulting for nearly 20 years 💪.
Highlights include:
- What is the big lie of enterprises’ adoption of DesignOps?
- Why has IT largely left Design to implement its own systems?
- How do you frame the value of DesignOps to your customers?
- What does it mean to be culturally ready to embrace DesignOps?
- Are designers being laid off because their orgs. don’t value design?
Who is Jon Fukuda?
Jon is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Limina, a professional design services firm that specialises in design operations and that’s on a mission to unleash human potential at the nexus of information, technology and people 🚀.
At Limina, Jon focuses on leading the company’s human-centred design practice, including aspects such as design strategy, design systems 🛠️, and interaction design.
Jon’s contributions to advancing the field of design operations led to his recent appointment as the Curator for Rosenfeld Media’s 2022 DesignOps Summit 🐘, the premier annual conference for the discipline.
Before going full-time with Limina, Jon was the Director of User Experience at AddThis ➕, where he was responsible for the website and product experience of what was one of the world’s most popular social sharing tools.
Jon has also generously shared his insights on platforms provided by organisations like NoVA UX, Rosenfeld Media, Friends of Figma and 24 Minutes of UX 🎙️.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Jon Fukuda. Jon is the co-founder and chief experience officer of Limina, a professional design services firm that specializes in design operations and that's on a mission to unleash human potential at the nexus of information technology and people.
- At Limina, Jon focuses on leading the company's human-centered design practice, including aspects of design such as design strategy, design systems and interaction design.
- Jon's contributions to furthering the practice of design ops and its community saw him recently take on the role of curator of Rosenfeld Media's 2022 Design Ops Summit, the premier annual conference for the discipline. He's also the local chapter lead for the Denver Boulder area of design ops assembly.
- Jon's prior career experience includes time as the director of user experience at AddThis, where he was responsible for the website and product experience of what was then one of the world's most popular social sharing tools. He has also been a senior user experience consultant at Nerve Wire and a UX consultant and visual designer at Cambridge Technology Partners.
- Jon has generously shared his insights on stages provided by organizations like Nova UX, Rosenfeld Media, Friends of Figma, and 24 Minutes of UX, and he has also recently launched Lamina's very own podcast, the Limina podcast, where he has conversations with a range of guests about human-centered digital transformation.
- And now he's here with me, for this conversation on Brave UX. Jon. Hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Thank you so much. That was a, that's the best intro I've ever gotten.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, it's all you Jon. It's all you. Jon, one of the things, as you know, I like to do my research and one of the things that I really found interesting about your life when I was doing that for this conversation is that I learned that you grew up in and you were schooled at the Tokyo American School in Japan, and I felt like there was a story here and I was curious how did this come to be?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah, so I'm mixed. My father's Japanese national, my mother's from the United States and they met here in the us. He was studying for business and learning English. They met married and started to have children in Japan. So I have three siblings who were born there and then they moved to New York and had three more. And I'm the last, I was born in New York.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are the baby
- Jon Fukuda:
- New Jersey. When I was one, he got an assignment in Japan and we moved there. And so my five siblings and I, we all went to the American school in Japan. Their decision was that I could still get the culture of being living in Japan, but pay homage to my American heritage by staying with expatriate community over there and learning as an American would in a foreign country. So he figured, I think it was my dad and my mom's decision that I'd get the best of both worlds that way
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that school, the American School of Japan, it's quite an old school. It's got quite a history. I think it dates back to somewhere around the turn of the 20th century.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah, I was actually just back there last month for a reunion. About 15 of us from my graduating class showed up there and they did some renovations, but one of the things they kept were all the stones from the graduating classes and the stones go all the way back to some of the earliest classes. They're just inscriptions carvings into the stone of the date of the graduating class. And yeah, there's a lot of history there. Whenever missionaries were coming over to build community in Japan, that sort of was the impetus of the school and it was always mixed Japanese students and American students sort of trying to build that bridge of the two cultures.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And when you finished school in Japan, how long was it before you made your way back to the States?
- Jon Fukuda:
- It was immediate. I graduated in 92 and I was, that fall I was in the US and I went to Rhode Island school design. And so it was here on the East coast and New England and spent four years there. I did go back to Japan to see if maybe there was a fit for a life for me over there, but I think too much of the English speaking culture and Japanese I think was really kind of a second language to me. Even though I grew up in the country, I was English first. And it's language and culture that build barriers between your capacity to be a professional in Japan. And I think the US is a lot more forgiving that way. You kind of make your own relationships and build your own way. So yeah, I think it felt more natural to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's interesting. Yeah, really interesting. I have heard that Japan is very, has a very rich and obviously very old culture and that it's not particularly open hasn't been particularly open to change. And I know that's been changing recently or I believe I've read that it's been changing recently with the decline in population. So perhaps it may become more welcoming professionally for people.
- Jon Fukuda:
- I think what it is and being in the profession that we are, this might make sense, but there are cultures that are high context and cultures that are low context. So for instance, here in the US, people don't make ready assumptions of what they're seeing and the exchanges they're having. They take everything sort of at face value for whatever it is that's going on. But in Japan it's more high context. You should know by whom you're speaking with and the context you're in, the things that are appropriate to say and inappropriate to say. And it plays a huge role in the relationship dynamics. Unfortunately, as a professional, you take too many missteps in that arena and you can insult the wrong people and that's the end of your game. So that's sort of the level of pins and needles. I didn't really want to live my life on having to be that contextually aware all the time. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a really interesting and unique, maybe not unique, but quite an academic and quite accurate. I imagine framing of that more generally speaking now, people in the west, in particular in America, there's a stereotype of maybe a bit of brashness, a little of resistance to status. There's the focus on individualism, and I imagine that some of those things rub up a very hierarchical, and I think you called it a high context culture would rub them up the wrong way, but perhaps not intentionally. It's just a different way of being in the world. That's right. You mentioned risd, which is a pretty prestigious design school, and while it's not uncommon for people that I've spoken to on this podcast to come to design through design and art schools, what I thought was unique and interesting about your background is that you've studied sculpture, you majored in sculpture. So how was the shift from doing something that's incredibly tactile and tangible? How has that shift for you moving into something that's really ephemeral and temporary length? The digital world that we inhabit as designers?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I used to think when you're in the arts and you're faced with either a blank canvas or a lump of clay, your mission is to form it into something that others can build a relationship to and have their own relationship to. And even if it's three-dimensional, it's quite representational and it is what it is. People can still have their own perceptions of it and build their own sort of dynamics with it. When I was in school at risd, it was really just like the internet was firing up. So we had gone moved from just using the web as academic communities to have dialogue with each other, to commerce starting to come online email. It was my freshman year as my first email account, and really every anybody's right there was 1992. Not everybody in the world had one yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It had a special time, a very exciting
- Jon Fukuda:
- Time. It definitely was. And I wasn't shy of it. I had done some basic programming back in high school, and so I was looking at html, I was like, wow, this is not that complex. Built some tables, throw some graphics in. And so I was having fun with that at school in parallel. And the same method of having a concept shaping that concept into something and putting it out in the world. It was just so much easier digitally than it was all the process intensity around building a sculpture of some kind. So I saw my affinity for it growing in parallel, but I knew when I got to my graduation that I had not really built a vision for myself as a gallery artist. I just knew that that's not where I was going to go. My passion wasn't there. And there was a certain theater about the gallery life of an artist and the relationships you have to cultivate and sort of build a mythology of yourself as an artist. I just wasn't ready for that. But I was really intrigued with what was happening in the digital space. And it just so happened everybody was, and if you had the skills, everyone was hiring. So eventually it was a few years after graduating, doing a couple of odd jobs here and there, but then I found my way to Cambridge technology partners.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I spoke a few weeks ago with Jeff Gothel, and he has a joke that around the same time when he was leaving college that if you could spell H tml, you could get hired in the industry. And I suspect he's not wrong there. Yeah,
- Jon Fukuda:
- It's pretty close.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But you've still maintained your art practice, and I know that these days you are painting as well as sculpting. Now, what is it that you feel that this practice, this art practice gives you that your design practice perhaps does not?
- Jon Fukuda:
- One thing is that it's just for me, a lot of the things I put into my professional life involve the strategy. Where does it fit in the business context? How does it match to the map to the user's needs to all the parts that go into the production? All of it in art, it's just a meditative space. I would say that I get to delve into something that's just uniquely interesting to me. It sucks me in completely and I lose myself and there's not a lot of places in the world that I can take that space and hold it. So for me, these days when I decide to take on another painting where I want to be,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you say take on, I believe your work is you're available on commission,
- Jon Fukuda:
- I do that. I've offered, and friends and family take me up at I've, I've had a couple of people who reached out to me for pieces and I followed through on that, but I found that when I'm just doing it for a friend or a family member, the gravity of will this have the monetary value someone's looking for in a commission, all of that goes away and the freedom to just make something come, comes up. And I think I prefer it that way. For me, I know that art has monetary value and it should for art, for those who have created a life for themselves as an artist, I want that for them. But for me and my journey with the arts, I just think that's not where, I'm not looking at it as currency and I don't want to treat it that way or it'll ruin it for me. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think you said something to the effect of you lose yourself in it when you're working on a piece, and it sounded to me like that flow state that Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. So you, you're able to actually just, I suppose, completely disconnect from the noise of the outside world when you're doing it.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Absolutely.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Jon, I noticed on your website there's a Japanese character on your art website, the logo type if you like. What, tell me about that character. What's that
- Jon Fukuda:
- About? That is, that's the character for luck, and it's actually in Japanese. It's red, which is the first part of my last name. So Fukuda is my last name, and the full name Fukuda is Lucky Harvest or Bountiful Harvest or something like that. But yeah, it's just a character. I mean, if you go to any Chinese merchant, they usually have a placard of it in their shop. It's just meant to be good fortune.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow. Hopefully it has brought you and continues to bring you good fortune. Thank you, Jon. Let's cha change gears a little and talk about something that actually was quite close to me, not in any really deep and meaningful sense, but it was a platform, a product that I used a lot here at the space in between when we used to design and build websites. And you could probably see where this is going now that is your time at Add this as director of user experience. Just for people who may not be familiar with add this, what was the product and how did you come to work there?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Okay. That product actually has a really cool history because as it started out when the initial pitch was made for Venture, it was up against the ideas such as page flakes and the like, and I'm sure if you remember those, but they were widgets that you could compile onto a screen that would have different things that like the news and the weather and along those things. And really what those were, they were little wrappers for web portraits or apples or whatever you want to call it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's weird. I haven't heard from a while. Apple. Yeah, yeah, I remember.
- Jon Fukuda:
- And so the founding members came up with a really cool idea that the web should be semantic, and in being semantic, it should be semantically aware. So if you have those widgets and they're compiled onto a page and a news story comes up, well, let's say you have a news widget and you have a stocks widget at the same time that your stock widget would change to reflect the reporting of how that stock ticker is doing. For that piece of news that just dropped, they just believed that there was this vision of the future of the web where those types of semantic relationships could play a role in how we consume information. Now, the investors were a little less interested in that, but more interested in how you could wrap content, especially with the advent of Facebook. And at that time MySpace was still around and a couple of other social networks that you could wrap a piece of web content and get it into those social spaces.
- So the initial idea for the company that wasn't at that time yet add this, it was clear springing, was to take web parts or blobs and wrap them in a widget and be able to inject them into social media websites. Really big consumers at that time, n nbc N l, they wanted their content into those social networks. So they were using the service to do that. And then your average web content producer WA wanted to also get their stuff all over the social web. So they were using the service. It just so happened that alongside of that, there were a number of other competitors including this, that were taking a little less fussy approach to getting content onto social media. And they weren't wrapping or containing it. They were just sharing either a link or a little blurb of it and then the users would use that, they'd see it on social media, but then they'd end up at those destinations and it was smarter, it was leaner.
- They ended up buying add this. So that's how we merged and became add this. My job was sort of taking these new concepts because I was still working with the old technology, the wrapper and the blob wrapper type thing, and trying to onboard content creators into what's the workflow for wrapping my stuff and injecting it into, and then what are the analytics from that? What can I learn on social engagement with the content that's everywhere? So we were building interfaces for that kind of stuff. It got a little bit different when add this came online and actually there was a bit of redundancy, so that's when I made my exit, but they were largely successful in Oracle, I think owned the Sun now. So that was a good exit for somebody there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- On that note, I got all nost nostalgia and I checked out the ad, this website, and I found that unfortunately Cisco, who as you mentioned now owns ad this is shutting it down on May 31, which is complete end of an error.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah, I mean everything matures. So these things which were, they were novel services at the time, are now just part of our every everyday experience with the web. People can share whatever they want and it comes in exactly the form factor. You want it because everyone's ready for it. But it took, I think a little bit of that leadership, the minds of those engineers and designers to push that into what's now the new normal. And yeah, I guess it makes it so that we don't need a company to do that anymore. That's just part of the web experience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- As one chapter ends, another begins. And I actually think that you founded Lumina before you started at Add this, so there was some crossover. You've been running Limina for nearly 20 years now and running my own business for coming up 13. It isn't always easy, if ever, and you have to wear many hats and the buck always stops with you. What is it that keeps you going? What's kept you going for nearly 20 years?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Well, when we started, we were three independent contractors at the time. We each had our specialties. Maria's still a partner at Limina. Jake Burghart, who is one of the third founder, his specialty was in research. Now he's moved on and doing great things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- He's just signed a book with Rosenfeld, I believe that's
- Jon Fukuda:
- Right. Yep. Yeah. And he talks a little bit about what's going to go in that book in the podcast I did with him. So we each had our own special expertise that we brought to that trilogy of us. And I think the customers we were working with at the time, they were tired of three invoices every time, every month. So they asked us to just make things simpler and form a company. So as you imagine, we started a business as senior practitioners in our field, and we didn't really come at it from the N B A business angle, so we didn't have business operations as our core expertise. A lot of those things that we've done to shore up and create the company that it is today as come through a school of heart knocks and there were ups and downs and definitely some mistakes in how, you know, deal with the ebbs and flows in business.
- I think learning the ropes on what is lead generation and sales cycle and how do you maintain those that cog while you're also in service delivery on a almost 24 7, how do you actually work those cogs so that they're not stepping on each other's toes and ruining each other's lives, especially when you're small and young and agile. Right. And a lot of that just was a lot of hard learning, and I wish I had taken time to get an M B A and figure that all out, but I wouldn't trade in what I have today. And the way that I came to it for an mba, I think we've been able to really build the culture we wanted at Limina without taking somebody else's sort of outside perspective on what a business ours should be and really just grow it into what we have. And I'll just start all the way back at the beginning when we said, okay, let's make this a company, what would our mission be?
- And we said it would be to enable and enhance and expand human potential. And we said it then really in those early days and we tried to say, Hey, let's have a rebrand and what's our mission? Has it changed? It hasn't changed. I mean, we want to continue to unleash human potential. So that's what gets me out of bed. I mean, that's what excites me. I still feel like there's a lot to be done there. Technology is not out of the way in terms of making our lives easier all the time. Sometimes it's completely in the way and sometimes it's making a mess of our lives. I mean, even with social media, we might think we've made great leaps and bounds in communication, but I think we've really made a mess. And so the human work is really yet to be done. I mean, the real hard thinking and strategic implementation of technology in a way that's meaningful to us all, not just for commerce and for people to buy things easier, but what are the things that we're doing?
- What's the knowledge work we're all trying to do in our given vocations and how can we improve those things? How many more meetings do designers have to have with engineers before we fully understand each other? Or is there just a missing platform where we have a shared understanding and shared components and shared things that make us more better collaborators and better partners to each other? So I think back to your question, what keeps me going and why? What's driving me is that I don't feel like we're done yet. I feel like the mission hasn't been served, that there's so much history behind us and great thinking in the world of user experience work and not just what we've created and as a practice, but what has yet to be created as a practice. And that's what excites me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, the future potential. And what is it about the area of focus design ops that you've turned your attention to? And I'm not sure how recently, but what is it about this particular area of design practice that you feel is worth dedicating so much energy and effort to?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah, we had been thinking broader. So I'll just back up to before I went to the 2019 summit on the run up to that, my team had been thinking about what are the missing pieces in design that are making things more challenging for us? So as a consultant and someone who runs that at design problems from an agency perspective, every time we're coming into a new project or a new customer, we're having to explain some of the basics. What are the merits of user research or usability testing? Why would you do workflows and wire framing before visual mockups? And just some of the things that if we look to look at each other and we talk to each other, they just seem like basics. There's a reason why we still have to have those conversations. And what we came to is that there was no standards practice.
- So if you look at engineering and ISO standards, there's something that baselines a level of, this is good, this is not best practice. When you talk to designers, we have this sense about us that what we're doing is craft and it's fine. I don't begrudge any designer for wanting to dig deep into the craft a aspect and the graphic design angle. They want to push into the work that they do. It's great, but there are still needs to be standards around what's usable, what's challenging for users, just basic usability heuristics. For whatever reason, there's no standards body for design. So just like U P A was there, then it became the UX p a, but even then, even with a hf, H F I has a C u, you can become a C U A or something like that. Some kind of that you get a certificate or whatever, but that's still not baking standards into our community of practice.
- My lean into design operations is that I felt like it might be our one chance to stand. If you look at a business very simplistically, like those business operations dev operations and design operations, there'd be three pillars, three legs to stand on, and if you had a de design ops manager, they would be the one to organize and orchestrate design's position in an organization. I didn't really know that yet. And those were just ideas we were playing with and trying to come up with a way to frame and build the message around that. When I heard of the design summit, and by the time I had heard of it, it was already the fifth year of it, and that was 2019, we were still in pre covid. So I went to Brooklyn and I sat in the audience and I had goosebumps and all the things I think I had perrine on my face at every speaker's presentation.
- And I just knew at that point basically that I had found my tribe, that these were the people that were speaking the language, the gap that I felt was happening in our market between design delivery and business innovation, just where was that gap being filled and this was it. And it's been that way for me since 2019. I, I've really leaned in that 2020, the design integration report. I had started before attending the design summit, so we didn't call it design operations, we were calling it design integration because we were struggling to find the right language for it. But yeah, I believe that if design operations takes its rightful place in organizational leadership, that we might have a better chance at actually advancing the field in a way that's meaningful. And it's not just to serve designers and researchers to be better contributors, but to be really well integrated as a business of the future. That's my hope.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You recently wrote a blog post called Design Ops Zeitgeist 2023, and in there you suggested that integrating design ops into the enterprise, there's been some significant progress made there. So thinking back to what you were describing there in the 2019 design summit, sitting in the audience and finding that you found your people, you know, were hearing stories of how these people were re-imagining the design operations within their organizations and forums. Conferences are a really good symbol and signal that there's a community forming around something like design ops, but you've also suggested that there is a big lie when it comes to enterprise's adoption of design ops. What is that big lie?
- Jon Fukuda:
- The big lie, the big lie is that they actually understand design's value and well, they value it themselves in a way that they're going to make it a part of their mission to integrate design in a way that drives business value. And I call that out as a lie because they will put out a job, recommend request for, we need a design ops manager, or we're going to build design leadership and they may even give design a seat at the leadership table. But then I think when the chips are down and we're seeing this today, those biggest cuts that are coming from the industry are amongst designers and researchers. And I'm just seeing that and among my peers, and it's all the talk at the water cooler for all design house managers is like, Hey, they're just shedding the talent pools. So I didn't see the evidence in the claim that we value design and they can read the McKinsey design report and they can say, this is what we're going to do, but I'm just not seeing it.
- And it's hard to really have the argument because some organizations are going to say, well look at what everything we've done to train our teams on design thinking and do all these things. And it's just not good enough to really say we're going to take design as a practice, not just for serving our customers better, but also for thinking of new ways to actually engage the marketplace and how do we actually continuously disrupt ourselves out of our preconceived notions of what the market needs into new ways of thinking and modeling ourselves for new business opportunities or new ways of serving and using technology. The evidence just isn't there yet in a way that's in way that we can all look collectively at or at businesses today and say, Hey, they're really getting design. You can say that for the ones that we always talk about for Airbnb or Apple or Google, the ones that take design seriously, but they're three out of a sea of millions of businesses.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I guess what I'm hearing is that actions tend to speak louder than words. And I absolutely, and probably the majority of people that are listening to this conversation, we have a vested and subjective self-interest in the preservation of design and making sure that the value of design is clear. We are the people that are losing jobs here, losing livelihoods and facing the hard challenge of finding a new job in a tough economy, maybe not you and me specifically being self-employed, but needless to say, that does affect our businesses as well. Now I've heard you say, and I'll quote you now, if organizations truly understood and valued human-centered research and design, not only would researchers and designers be the last ones laid off during tough economic headwinds, but all leaders would consider how to better support their efficiency of delivery at scale. So there you're talking about investment in design ops. Is it that the company leadership, the people that are making the decisions to restructure their organizations and lay people off, and you've raised the point that it may be negatively impacting designers more than the rest. Is it that they don't value human-centered design or is it that they just place a higher value on other things?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I wish I knew. The reason I make that argument is because I want somebody to challenge me. I want somebody to come out from the industry and say, actually this is the reason. But I would say that when I wrote that there, there were a lot of layoffs happening at that time and a
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Lot of green badges on LinkedIn, right?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah. And so I was seeing that and I was hearing from other design op managers that now I'm getting told to do more with less. And so they're telling me to scale design. They're telling me I have to achieve more and get more value out of these more limited resources. It's not the goal of design operations that you have so much efficiency that you can let designers go. It's actually you're freeing up their capacity to do all the things. So if you look at design as two to halves, so the same brain, one half of the brain has to be focused on what aren't we doing? What are the innovation opportunities ahead of us? And then the second half of the brain is, well, let's continue to maintain and deliver with excellence against the things that people are using of ours right now, the things that are in the hands of users this moment.
- Let's make sure that continues to be excellent while we look to the future of what are the things that aren't do we aren't doing? What are the things our compute competitors are beating us on? Or what are the unmet needs of users that are out there that we still need to serve? And if you start cutting designers and telling design ops managers to do more with less, you're asking the same designer to sit there and innovate the world of the future while they're still clearing the backlog of all the products that they have on hand. And that's a terrible like n no designer wants that life no matter how much of a unicorn they are, it's not scalable and it'll break us as humans.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think you're right. I spoke with Saam Kini last week who runs UX reactor and he has an interesting perspective on this. He was once asked a question by a researcher why they were having difficulty getting the business across the line with a proposal to basically put in place some operations that would save some money, as it was was just not landing with the executives and such and framed it up as understanding what the core driver for the business was, whether it was cost efficiency or whether it was the pursuit of new revenues. And hearing you talk about that a little earlier when you were speaking about Apple and Airbnb, those companies strike me as businesses that fall more into the pursuit of new revenues, of new opportunities of reinventing markets. And I suspect sadly so that many businesses are led by people who are perhaps more conservatively minded and that drives this focus, this heavy focus on cost out, cost reduction and efficiency, which rubs up quite poorly against how we as designers tend to see and articulate the value that we bring.
- Jon Fukuda:
- I think you're right there, and I also think that when I say we have more work to do, I mean that across the entire design community, not just design ops managers or design leaders, I feel like every designer's job should not only to be solving problems or making products better, but to be able to articulate why. So if you have a hard time tying the great things that you do as a designer to the outcomes you might be giving that are downstream from your great designs and to business revenues, if you have a hard time an articulating those things, see that as a challenge and something that you should take on and try to draw those connections to because the more you can connect yourself and the craft that you have and the talent that you bring to every day to those positive business outcomes and customer satisfaction outcomes, whatever they are those things that make businesses successful, that's helping the whole community really do our job better and actually positions the idea of what a designer could do for a business when the time comes where they're faced with economic hardship. Well, maybe I'll throw my chips down on the design team, maybe they can find a new market or break into new markets. It's a failing on our part to help define ourselves as those that are bringing new markets and new disruptions to new ways of leveraging technology. I just feel like we haven't entered that conversation at the right level yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just want to put in a little plug here, and there's no financial relationship between me and Ryan Ramsey of second Wave dive, but you were talking about our need to better connect the dots between our activities and the value, the business value it creates. Now Ryan runs Chief Design Officer School and I've been hearing some really good things about that. And his whole mission is to help elevate the business now that we may lack more, generally speaking now as designers, so that we can more effectively articulate what that value is and I suppose strengthen our design organizations, not just from the perspective of avoiding future layoff decisions because people are clear about our value, but also just round out our understanding of the context, the business context that we we're operating in. Jon, I want to come to something that you observed or you've made a really interesting observation in, and that is that while IT departments in enterprise have been really studious in optimizing business operations for efficiency through technology, they've largely taken a hands off approach when it comes to supporting the design organization to implement the same sorts of systems or similar sorts of systems that would enable design operations to achieve efficiency at scale.
- What is it that you suspect is behind this disconnect or this apparent disconnect here?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I think it might be a language barrier. So some designers who have been leaning this way have about object-oriented UX or O O U X, that there may be a set of taxonomies that would lend themselves well to building better systems for design integration through to component libraries and more, if we look or lean into that a little bit more, that could go further upstream even to how researchers, ad researchers are atomizing their work and their findings and their insights. If we started to build more common language around these are the use cases, these are the tasks within that use case, these are the components that we've designed to support that use case or the workflows, all of that could be tied together through some kind of a system that U is unified and has traceability. We just don't have that right because we haven't taken the time.
- I think it to support engineers and engineers themselves have looked at really critically at here's my code base, what a repository can do for me, here's what a get could do and can even look for specific SNPs of codes and do the quick swap out. Designers and researchers don't have that kind of s engineering behind the tools that we're using. Figma is getting really good at getting us to collaborate as designers with each other and even bringing the prototyping aspects and design commentary, the feedback and the comments that's all coming together, but still they're, unless it's contextually in line the comment and placed on the right component, it could be completely disconnected. So if they just misplaced where that comment was, you wouldn't know who it was for. And it's not exportable that doesn't live anywhere outside of Figma unless you build a plugin to generate a ticket for that, for instance, that targets the right designer or researcher to conduct some studies around how that component can be better designed. So the point being, because the framework isn't there for researchers, designers, and engineers to really fully have workflow or like a workbench that supports this person's work as it feeds into this, we can't really have track continuous integration, continuous design. We can talk about it, but what it means is a lot of rituals, a lot of meetings, and a lot of us having the human work to manually enforce what's coming up in the tri track.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do the people that aren't aware of Tri Track, what's the T L D R of what you're talking about there?
- Jon Fukuda:
- So track is a method that you can use to upstream of engineering or dep, a deployed sprint. You can have a little discovery work and then slightly downstream of that, but still upstream from engineering. You can have some design cycles and then you have your engineering cycles and they're were staggered in a way that you can not have to bottleneck each other so that the research is continuously feeding into the design planning and cycling. And then the design cycles are continuously feeding into your engineering and you're not, it's getting, you're, there're
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're not trying to jam everything into a two week sprint cycle.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Correct? Yeah. You've staggered out and you've given yourselves optimal value at those different touchpoints and we're, I feel like the momentum will take us there. I think people will discover that they want and need more and we will build and create more, but call me impatient I guess, because I think we have just a lot more work to do. And one of the things that I do think gets in the way is that there's just resistance within, I think researchers are getting better. I think when they talk about their insight repositories and the way they're building them to atomize their studies and build them up into great insights for whatever reason. Yes, we have design systems, but we're not really reaching out to say, well, how can we better integrate insights into our design system workflow or how can we run tests and use the tests to build governance into what's going in and coming out of the design system? And then I think there's better work that is actually happening with Storybook to integrate into the component UI component libraries in the code base. So we're getting there incrementally, but I'm still not seeing anyone say, Hey, let's take this on as an industry and let's really harness this. Maybe it's because it needs a key player, it needs someone like Fig Figma to say, okay, we're not only going to give space to designers, branch out now and let's make this bigger, or could it have been Atlassian or whomever, it just needed somebody
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Swim upstream or downstream and that's right. And connect the dots for people. That's
- Jon Fukuda:
- Right. Or they just need to sit down and have a good conversation with each other and talk about the future.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I know that someone that we both know Lou Rosenfeld would probably agree with. What I'm about to say is what it sounds like to me that you are saying is that we are still very much even within design and research siloed in the scope of our products, and those products aren't even really talking that well to each other, let alone a downstream to engineering. And that, and why I say this, Lou would agree with this is because as the Rosenfeld media logo of the elephant is all about the blind people and the elephant and everyone is touching the elephant and trying to describe what they are feeling, but no one's talking to each other about what that whole picture looks like.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah. I've wondered how do we get them in the room? Whoever cares about this topic and whoever's got resources to do something about it, how do we get them in the room? I mean, I'm an open invitation because I'd love to talk about this with whoever runs those products. I just feel like us as a community of designers and design leaders, we need to lean into that more and we need to ask and demand more, whether it's submitting tickets or making feature requests or whatever it is, we need to identify what those gaps are and we need to be loud about
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It. Jon, you mentioned before we started recording about the limited podcast, and I touched on that in your introduction and I've heard you say, and I'll quote you now, and this will all make sense in a second. I promise. I've heard you say at this point, and you were reflecting on the poor economic circumstances in terms of the layoffs on design and research. You said at this point the conversation should be aimed at business managers charged with digital transformation initiatives. And why I'm trying to connect this to your podcast here very quickly is I believe the scope of the Limina podcast is actually to broaden the conversation about design ops outside of the design community and engage with people that are in different areas of expertise.
- Jon Fukuda:
- I think there's a real great function to community that you can organize and be self organizing, and everybody's sort of come to some agreements on what things are and what they aren't. But the negative unintended consequence of that is communities do at some point build a walled garden for themselves and they're not doing a good enough outbound communication. So it's almost like the design ops community needs a marketing leader to say, Hey, these are the key messages, this is the intention, the objective, these are the relationships we need to make and who we need to make them with, and these are the conversations we should be having. And yeah, I think it's our job to find the right audience and to have some of those harder conversations. And even if it's a conversation that puts design operations in, its its place that says, Hey, you guys are trying to do too much here.
- This is maybe try focusing on this even if it's that it's better than what we have today, which is everyone in design operations thinking that it should be something more than it is and not having traction and not knowing why or having small success stories or failures and then having to reconcile all those things and say, well, it's just different at my organization because at a certain point, it shouldn't be at a certain point if we're going to talk about advancing the future of business in general. So how do we best utilize the technologies that are coming at us to build business opportunities and how do we use design as a method for building products and services to best implement those technologies? If we really want to have that conversation, then it can't just be held by designers, it has to be technologists. Business leaders and design leaders, I think need to be cyclically looking at that problem and coming up with collective ways to fold each other into a collective understanding.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So Jon, can we expect on the limited podcast soon, a conversation between yourself, the C P O at Figma and the C P O at Atlassian?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I, I'll make an attempt. I'll say that I'm send out invitations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you were talking earlier on about how you came up with the 2020 design integration report entitled it as such because it was beginning to be written before you'd actually discovered, I suppose, or found your people in the design ops community in the report. There are a number of really interesting things in the report, and I just want to call one of those out now, and I realize it's from three years ago, so you might have some more current data here, but you were talking about the majority of companies, they hadn't actually fully realized the potential of design ops and about this, you said for most of us, roughly 80% of businesses, there are far lower levels of maturity, not cause of the intention of design ops managers, but cause of the cultural readiness for their organizations to embrace the value that design integration can deliver. So when you say cultural readiness, what do you mean? What are you touching on there?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Oh, I mean that's what I think we've been discussing just over the past few minutes here is just that, and it's got two parts of it, and the design community has to own their ground here, but it's getting the message clear. So it's one thing for McKinzie to come out with a report and even prior to them for there to be the design index or whatever that was showing that s and p on the s and p, they were outperforming companies by 200 x or something like that. That's one thing. But then for actual designers on the ground with the boots on the ground, people within the organizations to deliver on that promise, if that's the expectation that a business leader has because they've read the McKinsey report or they've seen those reports and they don't have the right acumen to marshal their design talent into becoming that we're not seeing there's a mismatch.
- So deliver the designers themselves may not be delivering on the promise. So that's one part. And then business owners or business managers aren't taking the time to learn a little bit more about, well, what is the disconnect and why can't we harness that power that they claim they have? It's just the best way I could phrase that is that it's a level of maturity. Our relationship hasn't hit that point yet. So I think that's why I champion design operations so much is that it can sit at the level of, well, let's look at what's operationally inefficient or the things that are not representative of operational excellence when it comes to the value that design can deliver and let's get those things going and then let's champion the innovation cycles that designers are earned once they're not doing all the other things like administrating, which tools their team's using and all those other parts that come with having to be a designer without a design ops manager.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now the devils in the detail, the devils in the detail here, but it sounds to me like that shouldn't be an impossible task. This should be very much tapping into, you used the term zeitgeist in your latest blog post, but the business zeitgeist around the language, the binary language if you like, of business, the zeros and ones of dollar in dollar out, this shouldn't be impossible for us to do.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Yeah, you mentioned Jeff Gothel. I mean, his book sense and Respond is a real great business book. And I don't know who in the business community looks at that book and says, that's a great business book. It's an amazing business book. It's huge in the design community. I mean, we all look at it because it's got new models for continuous design, continuous integration for us. But I think a business manager or business owner needs to look at that book and say, what are the opportunities that lie in reshaping the way I build my business in this new model? And that's the kind of, I think two-way street maturity of our relationship that I don't think is there yet, that we're not trying to speak each other's language enough to connect at that level. And this might be one of those conversations you see on Twitter.
- Designers need to learn to code or I don't know if you've seen that, it's kind of a cliche and a joke, but I do think to your point about the chief design, the school you were just talking to about the business end of design, it's true we do have an impact on business and how business can or succeed through outcomes that we bring through better design. And so we need to understand that language and where we we're connecting with those threads. And so the responsibilities a little bit on us, but at the same time as we're making those impacts, business leaders should be looking at that and really be begin being given the design community, their due at successes that they're having in driving better traction with their customers. So it's a two-way street, and I don't expect a design, a business leader to be a design leader. I don't think anybody wants that, but the recognition of where they need to collaborate and where they can serve each other best, that has to be a discussion that they want to have. I just don't think it's there yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking about two-way streets. Now, I might be in danger here of flogging a dead horse, so feel free to pull me up on this if you feel that I am. But you spoke earlier on about championing design or design operations, and I'll quote you now again from the report you said, implementing a design communication plan that teaches the company about the benefits of working with design designs, role in building products with a superior user experience and how design can work collaboratively with the business and technology. So this to me sounds like championing, it sounds like evangelizing. It sounds like the sort of rattling of the design saber and stepping back from this, and I've asked this question before of other guests, and I think I'm asking it again today because I feel like I've never really had a satisfactory answer to it. And my question is, what is it about us in design that we feel the need to do this kind of outward evangelizing of the value that we believe that we bring? It seems to me that other fields, product and engineering specifically in this context, they don't feel that same need or they don't demonstrate that they feel that same need to try and justify the value that they bring. It's almost as if it's assumed by their very nature of being there that they represent value. So what is it about us that we feel like we have to do this?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I wish, that's another question you've asked that I wish I knew. Some things have worked really hard against us. A lot of it's might be our own fault. So I'll just start by saying, when I got into user experience work, this is like 19 98, 1 of my mentors used to bring up some of the old great, the work had already started to get done. Xerox had a, I don't know how many page usability heuristics check checklist out there. And so human factors work in human computer interaction has been done, had been done at that point. And that's the school we were coming from looking at applied research and how design impacts the usability that those things were quantifiable and had impact, and that ultimately in a consumer context that would impact how many consumers you have. And that's a revenue conversation. Those were simpler days. I feel like what happened almost in parallel to that was you had the advertising world who was looking at magazines being taken over by the internet and saying, okay, we need to understand digital. And they had a huge workforce of designers and people and writers and people who really understood the psychology of design from a buyer mindset or I want this ad in front of people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's like Alan Trout, like the psychology of positioning, that sort of stuff.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Correct. And so that massive talent pool of ad designers coming into digital adopted the word user experience or UX and started, we started mingling these two spaces, H H C I, sort of human factors, workers who are already there in computing even in the early nineties and even maybe in the late eighties, were running up against these new sort of digital designers from the ad world. I think we made a mess of things a little bit and talking about design. This is the intent of design, and it was for consumers. No, it's for users and CX UX. And so over the years, that sort of churning conversation hasn't helped us much because we're unable to be crisp or clear on the real value or we're trying to bring it's to sell things. No, it's to make the user experience better so that people's lives are easier. So they continue to use our products. And so we challenge ourselves on being able to express clearly what the value is, and then I think we make it harder for others to hear and understand it. Yeah, I don't think it's an overt turf war. Whenever you see conversations about user experience versus customer experience, it's not like anyone saying, Hey, but there is an undercurrent of we're confusing the people who we need to serve most. And sometimes that's the business owners who we're building products for and service designs for. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the things that really annoys me is the level of binary framing and the attention that's played to the binary framing of the US versus them, the UX versus CX, that it's either this or it's that. And I feel like we lack a will because potentially of a result of identity based corporate career type politics that gets played out in echo chambers in various industries. But I feel like we are missing the and the conversation and that we probably need to reframe some of our views or be at least open to reframing some of our views about what it is that we do and the value that we create and whether or not we can expand the scope of how we frame that value so that we can actually get out of this spinning of our wheels. It feels like that we're in, even you and I were talking offline, the design community, and this is the design podcast mainly aimed at designers, let's be frank and researchers. I'm putting in that category. We can get very insular and very internally focused, and it can start to get a little bit samey, I suppose, over time. Do you have any insights or hopes or glimmers, glimmers of things that you've seen out there that you feel are refreshing in terms of the way that the conversation could unfold in that we should potentially nudge it towards?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I'd like to think, and it's going back to one of your first questions of what drives you or what keeps you going? Anyone who's willing to challenge the status quo and say, okay, yes, make some acknowledgements. So yes, we've achieved a lot, but also be willing to say, we're not done yet. And if there's a call to action, what might that be and how can I contribute to it? I think you know about disruption just as a behavior pattern to go out there and be provocative and give space to challenge and come up with something new. It's part of our remit, I think, as experienced designers to continuously question, are we actually doing this? Could there be a better way? And it just serves us better to behave that way because it builds pattern and it builds opportunity for something new, and I'm always looking like chat, G d P, it scares the hell out of me and AI and everything that is doing, even as fearful as you might get as someone who's a professional who's looking at how might this ruin my career.
- You also have to look at how might it just completely explode new opportunities for you as a professional to just look at everything that way and say, Hey, there's likely a thousand opportunities here that we're just not thinking of. And to give your space, that self space that day every day to say, okay, what's the one thing I'm going to look at that's new? Or what's the one thing that I hate that I'm going to try and come up with a solution for? I'm inspired every day by the people that you bring onto your podcast. Those people, they're not ready to quit. We're all sort of leaning into the problem space and saying, let's keep doing this. So yeah, if I'm trying to give someone an inspirational message, maybe keep digging. Yeah. Because there's just more to be done, more to be known.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a really refreshing and positive perspective. And I think it's also quite deeply in tune with our value as designers in that we are, if we embrace, embrace the better qualities of our field, curiosity is right there. Well close, very close to the core, if not at the core of what it is that we do. And I want to just come before we bring the show down to a close, I just want to come back to this conversation about the value of design. And you had spoken earlier on about how there were ISO standards and there was quantification, or at least some sort of attempted objective measurement of value or the usability of a system, that sort of thing. Now, in the report you said, and I'll quote you again now, demonstrating return on investment is foundational to illustrating the importance of design integration, especially to leadership.
- Now that is a big challenge, and I think we've touched on that in the conversation so far. So getting to grips with the commercial outcomes of the activities that we perform is undoubtedly a bit of a challenge. You've got a unique perspective on this though, because your agency lives or dies, I would imagine, on its basis, on its ability to be able to articulate value of the things that your clients are investing in. So I wanted to ask you about this because of that unique perspective that you bring, what is it, are the kind of conversations around value that you have with clients that perhaps enterprise internal design leaders can borrow from to better articulate inwardly and smooth the road, if you like that? Sure. A company like yours might be having with their other leadership pairs. What are the sorts of things, the low hanging fruit that they can touch on or the words that they can drop that help people to understand what it is that you're doing? Sure.
- Jon Fukuda:
- So one of the more costly aspects of design is the time it takes the labor intensity around research strategy, design planning, design execution, and also the salaries you pay to those people who play those roles for you. So the time then is a commodity. It's a cost center. One of the things we try to do with our customers is really well articulate the cost of running a research program or running a design sprint around a specific feature set. And we do that through working up from the ground up to ground up estimate on this is the number of things we're going to try to achieve in this statement of work. Here's the hours and time that come into it, times the rate of our hourly expenditure. And so in that way, they sort of looking at the numerics and saying, okay, you're talking about a time duration of x, a dollar value of x.
- And in line with that, as we're delivering, we're also giving them the tools and the templates and the techniques to do it themselves. We try to onboard them. They're sort of sating alongside us as we deliver, and we're giving them the tools that they can do this and say, these are the components you're going to be able to reuse and this will save you time. And if you've studied as we're delivering, you have a sense of what it's going to take from you effort wise. And so we do that in the research cycles. We do that in our strategy and requirements, prioritization cycles, as well as the design planning and execution cycles. And each part of that has its own framework, its own set of tools, templates, and we don't just execute and say, here's the thing we delivered. Good luck. We give them all those things that we've generated, generated along the way, and we give them the tooling to do it themselves
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Because like an IP transfer of sorts
- Jon Fukuda:
- A little bit because it's in line with our mission that we want to not just deliver the design outcome, but we want to actually improve the excellence that within which research and design is happening. And we want to enrich that environment at our customers as well. So when they look at a research initiative that's coming up, they have a framework or a way to think about it both on the cost side, but then they'll have seen potentially what the yield was downstream of that. And then they can say, yeah, the outcome will justify the expense. And that's the best way you can build that common understanding of the value of design is by not just explaining it in writing it up in a study or giving you them a report, but actually showing them firsthand and bringing them through the journey. And then any feedback we're getting along the way is only going to make it a more improved process for us. We take every piece of feedback we get from our customers to heart, and we're all about reinventing and continuously improving. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like you sit alongside your clients as opposed to play, not the adversarial role, that's not the right way of framing the agency client relationship, but you, you're not keeping a partnership arms length. Yeah,
- Jon Fukuda:
- It's a partnership for sure. I mean, if we don't care enough about their success, then the wholeheartedness that you need to actually take on the problem and solve it in a way that's meaningful, it has to be there. So that comes through taking that partnership stance and really caring about their problems.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Jon, as we bring this show down to a close, now I'm going to quote you one final time in the conclusion of the design integration report, you said, and here's the quote, our research found that while 52% of designers feel they have a seat at the table, they have no voice. Now that's a bit sad. When I read that there was almost a little tear in my eye. It made me feel like those designers were merely observing the change that's happening in their organizations rather than actively contributing to it now without knowing every single design leaders situation. So generally speaking, what do you feel is important for design leaders to believe or perhaps to do to find their voices?
- Jon Fukuda:
- I think it's a lot of what we've been talking about today. So really finding those meaningful connection points at an organizational strategy level. So where's the company going? Where do we see our market heading? What are some of the innovations on the road ahead and taking the conversation there. But I think at the same time, continuously trying to bring top of mind the value that the practice of human, human-centered design can bring to an organization. Not just that making your products and services better, but also leading to new innovations. It's not just taking the seat at the table and saying, well, my designers want to leave because they don't have enough. I don't know, whatever the problem that they're being hammered, there's no priorities. They're being overloaded, there's burnout. Those are all really valid conversations to be having, and there's ways to solve them, but that's not the conversation that I think they're invited you to the table for.
- I think those are the problems they expect you'll be solving. So level up, I guess, and look at the potential partnerships that you're going to build at that leadership table, both upstream, downstream, horizontally, and maximize and amplify the value that design's going to bring to every one of those situations. Look for those opportunities and then if it's not clear, do your best to, I don't make it clear. If you have to become that evangelist in the voice, then play the role and be willing to step aside. If you recognize that you're not doing that well be willing to say, Hey, there is someone that should be here, not the right fit. And that's a really hard thing to say, but you need to recognize when you're, you might be doing a disservice, and if you feel too much, the imposter syndrome and the moments are too critical where what you say really does matter you, you need to be honest both with yourself and the people who are expecting from you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, there's a fresh take. I can almost hear a pin drop in our listeners wherever they're listening to this. I think it's a really important and refreshing note to finish on. So thank you, Jon. This has been a really great conversation you've given me, and I'm sure the people that are listening to this, plenty of really challenging and practical things to think about and to help them to better articulate that value of design and move design integration forward in their organizations. So thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Jon Fukuda:
- Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, totally. My pleasure. Jon and Jon, if people want to connect with you and find out more about what you're doing, of course you've got the new limita podcast out there. What's the best way for them to do that?
- Jon Fukuda:
- Well, we've hosted a landing page for the podcast on our website at Limina.co, but I'm always posting on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me there. Open invitation to connect.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, great. Thanks Jon. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that Jon and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Jon the Limina podcast and all the other things that we've spoken about. They'll be fully chaptered.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast or even just give it a rating. Subscribe and it will turn up every two weeks. And also, there may be just one other person that that would get value from these conversations about design at depth. Pass it along to them.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find my profile on LinkedIn, just type in Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co..nz. And until next time, keep being brave.