Ben Sauer

Episode 136
Brave UX

Presenting High-Stakes Design Work

In this episode of Brave UX, Ben Sauer shares why designers need to be better presenters ☠️, how to keep stakeholders awake and engaged 😲, and what to do when disaster inevitably strikes ⚡️.

Highlights include:

Is how design is presented more important than the design itself?
How do you help stakeholders to relate more powerfully to design work?
What is the Goldilocks Zone and how can designer’s find it quickly?
Why can it be useful to show stakeholders design work bit-by-bit?
How do you deal with difficult people when presenting design work?

June 11, 202401:04:08

Listen on:

Who is Ben Sauer?

Ben is an independent product and design strategist, coach, and trainer 🦉, helping companies to craft the vision for their products, and to inspire better internal processes and practices.

Drawing on over 20 years of experience, he has written and spoken about strategic storytelling, voice UI design, and how slowing down can help organisations to speed up 💡. And his insights have been put to use at organisations such as NASA, Amazon and the BBC.

Ben’s most recent mission is helping designers to become more influential by becoming more confident communicators of their work. That’s why he’s recently published a book called “Death by Screens” 📙, a practical how-to guide for presenting high stakes design work.

Before becoming an independent consultant, Ben worked at Babylon Health, where he was first a Director of Design and then a Director of Product ⚕️. There, he led a large team of over 100 designers, clinicians, data scientists and engineers.

He has also been a Senior UX Designer at Clearleft, the world-renowned and perhaps first UX design consultancy in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧.

Transcript

Ben Sauer:
Hey, if I just present it and I talk through it, bam, everything will just make sense to everybody else. But what I'm really trying to do with the book is get people to understand that the story around the design is equally and sometimes if not more important than the design itself.
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. You can find out more about me and 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 field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
My guest today is Ben Sauer. Ben is an independent product and design strategist, coach and trainer, helping companies to craft the vision for their products and to inspire better internal processes and practises.
Drawing on over 20 years of experience, he has written and spoken about strategic storytelling, voice UI design, and how slowing down can help organisations to speed up. And his insights have been put to use at organisations such as nasa, Amazon, and the BBC.
Ben's most recent mission is helping designers to become influential by becoming more confident communicators of their design work. This is why he's recently published a book called "Death by Screens", a practical how-to guide for presenting high stakes design work, supported by a complementary in-person or remote workshop called "Presenting Beyond the Product Team".
Before becoming an independent consultant, Ben worked at Babylon Health where he was first a director of design and then a director of products. There, he led a large team of over 100 designers, clinicians, data scientists, and engineers.
He's also been a senior UX designer at Clearleft, the world renowned and perhaps first UX design consultancy in the United Kingdom.
A thoughtful and committed contributor to the field, Ben has delivered talks at events such as the NEXT Conference, UX London, UX Scotland, and the Smart Voice Summit.
And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Ben, a very warm welcome to the show.
Ben Sauer:
Hi. Thanks Brendan. It's lovely to be with you.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's lovely to have you here as well. And Ben, I am someone that, as you may know, likes to do a little bit of research before we jump on these conversations. And one thing that I learned about you is that you have a Bachelor of Arts and English literature. So it seemed to me that you actually went to university to get an education. Is this the case?
Ben Sauer:
Yes, I did. And I guess learning about literature is one of those things that was not something that paid off at the time, right? Didn't lead directly to employment, but actually turned out to be one of the most important things that I ever did. And I think it's had a huge influence on who I am as a designer and a thinker. I really do feel like that learning the humanities in the way that I did allowed me to address problems in a kind of multidimensional way that STEM often ignores.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it does make sense and it certainly, it came through quite strongly to me as I looked at some of your other source material. Obviously there's Death by Screens, which is your most recent work, but you've also given a number of conference talks, slowing down to speed up these thoughts, sorts of themes, one on metaphors, which I hope to cover some content with you as well. I have some questions there. Yeah, it certainly seemed to me you have quite a few strings that you can draw on. How did you eventually find your way from the humanities into the field of UX design? Well,
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, I mean it's an interesting story. I think that at the same time I was getting really good at learning how to analyse a text and interpret Shakespeare, which was the latter part of my teens. I was also just obsessed with playing around with machines. My father's an engineer and I even started building websites I think before I went to university. This is going to be 94, 95 really early on. So it was just a mix of things that I did. And coming out of university, I started to code and I was building EHP and Pearl websites way back in the day. Then as I slowly realised that I wasn't terribly good at the engineering and I ran an agency, I came to the realisation that the human input side of it was the thing that interested me the most. And at the time, I didn't really want to be running an agency in the way that I was and I didn't want to be writing code. I actually wanted to be making things better for people. And I think that was, although I didn't know it at the time, that was like, that's the purpose. That's the thing you want to do in life. And it just happened to be design, I guess it was just a very indirect way into design realising that I just wanted to make things better for humans and that design happened to be the canvas of where to do that.
Brendan Jarvis:
So I've run an agency that designed and made things in the past. This is going back, I think five years since I made quite a intentional shift to reposition the work we do into UX research. And it certainly sounds very similar what you were describing there. Of course, I'm projecting a lot of my own experience onto your experience, but you mentioned that you didn't want to be running an agency in the way that you were running. It sounded to me like there was perhaps a moment of realisation at some point in there. Was that the case or was it more of a gradual feeling that you had that things weren't progressing professionally in the way that you were feeling the most fulfilled?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, absolutely. So this would be around 2005 to 2008 running an agency, a web agency that was doing really well and I loved the people that I was working with, but I realised that fixing the human interface part was the bit that I loved and that I wanted to make things in that way and that being a leader of an agency wasn't the way to do that for me at the time. And I wanted to go and practise and learn the craft in the very, I guess early days of UX or information architecture as it was then. And yeah, so quit. The agency started freelancing and then a few years later joined Clear Left to really accelerate what we're doing.
Brendan Jarvis:
Tell me about joining Clear Left. How did you come to get on their radar or vice versa?
Ben Sauer:
So we all knew each other. Brighton where I live is a fairly small place and possibly the best known agency in town. Brighton is an interesting city. It has about 200,000 people I believe, but it has a very, very creative scene here. Lots and lots of digital businesses, startups, and so we all knew each other from community events. And I sort of realised that I wanted to work in a place where a, I could learn from others more easily. I was a little bit bored of doing it on my own. And also a place where the brand buys you some authority to be honest. And had this funny realisation a few weeks into working at Clear Left, which was that somebody could have paid me a third for the same advice a few weeks beforehand, but they wouldn't have listened to me. But because I was working at Clear Left, it's this stamp of approval. And so I realised that I was going to be able to have a much bigger impact, even giving the same sort of advice.
Brendan Jarvis:
Speaking of bigger impact or a big impact, and perhaps I've taken quite a segue here, but you mentioned your father was an engineer a little earlier on, and something that I learned about your father and subsequently about you is that when you were a young person, I'm not quite sure how young your father and perhaps your mother as well encouraged you to take on quite a adrenaline filled hobby. And you actually behind your calm intelligence, there's this ferocious competitor it would seem, and you once beat a Formula One driver on the racetrack. So perhaps I'm giving people a bit of a clue as to what this hobby may have been, but what is the story there?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, sure. So I was born in London, but my father is from Amsterdam and my mom is Welsh. And my father came to this country in 1969 because he wanted to do motor sport and it was a very small thing in the Netherlands, and he wanted to come to the heart of Motorsport, which he did. He ran successful teams. He raced himself. He ran a very big series here called British Drawing Cars. And so it was very natural for me to learn how to drive well from a very, very early age. And I was carting nationally for a few years. And yes, one of my competitors was Jensen Button, who, I don't really remember this, but my dad tells me that I used to beat him. Although I don't have the same love for motorsport now in life. I do love doing it to get me behind the wheel, and I absolutely love it. As you say, it's a sort of deeply ingrained adrenaline fueled skill that I learned from age six. I'm going to say,
Brendan Jarvis:
How long did you drive for?
Ben Sauer:
I think I stopped age 10 or 11. And it's a funny thing in the way because most of the people at the top of that sport or indeed any sport are often as we know, being driven by usually one parent. And there's a sense I've gotten that people are living vicariously through their children often in that scenario. And because my father had done it a lot, he wasn't living through me by doing it with me. And it involves a really high level of commitment, getting up at five in the morning to drive to Scotland to race or wherever it was. And when I told my dad, I don't think I enjoy this as much anymore. I mean I enjoyed the driving, but not the scene and the kind of pressure that was in place. He was cool with it. He let me stop and choose my own life. And people sometimes ask me, well, you could have been a great driver or you could have been famous in that way. And I'm like, well, yeah, but I also got to choose my life. And I think that's a beautiful thing in itself.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is a beautiful thing. You mentioned that your humanities, your training in the humanities, what you studied English literature influenced the way in which you came to practise design. What influenced, if any, do you feel that your carting or perhaps more broadly speaking, thinking about what you were touching on there, your father's, I suppose Grace May be one word to describe that, but his just willingness to let you do what you wanted to do, what influence do you feel that that has had on your development as a person?
Ben Sauer:
That's a great question, and I've only mused on one half of this personally, but I think you've made me muse on the second half a bit more. So the first thing, the obvious thing is that I got used to high pressure situations and very, very forced improvised decision making, split second life-threatening decision making from a really early age. And so in my slowdown to speed up talk, I talk about this, right? The fact that there is this ability to move and think quickly that I learned very early on. But that second part that you've just made me really muse on and really appreciate my parents in a new way, in a way, is that it was a high degree of autonomy in what I was doing, right? My parents believed that I got to choose my own destiny, and I think that the values that I bring as a design leader and a designer are about that, right? Being inclusive. Being autonomous. I wouldn't say like I'm an anarchist, but that sense of giving people choice and freedom is definitely a strong value.
Brendan Jarvis:
Just how far does that extend? So if we think about the practicalities of that choice and freedom in the context of a product team, so perhaps cast your mind back to your time at Babylon Health, obviously quite a large team of people you were responsible for there. What's an example of how far you were willing to let someone or a team perhaps go with something without feeling the need or perhaps without acting on the feeling to intervene or to direct, as was in your title, right? You were a director of products. Can you give me some idea of what that might've been like?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, I think what I've learned in some environments is that there is a shadow side to autonomy and freedom, which is that you can sometimes feel lost and without guidance. And so I'm not going to say I've always been successful at this, but I think it's really about trying to give people the highest quality guidance and clarity on what the intention is and then let them go for it and only intervene as a last resort really, unless things are going really, really wrong. And then also using the practise of coaching in a quite formal way sometimes to help people discover their own barriers and problems so that you are not the one telling them unless it's really readiness. And I think that's what drew me to coaching that idea that the answers are within people, it's only rarely your job is to kind of tell them what really it's about alignment, alignment on purpose and goals and shared vision, and then helping them discover the answers.
Brendan Jarvis:
You talked about coaching, and I know that one of the things that you've come to practise, and I believe it's in recent times, but feel free to correct me, is nonviolent communication. And about this you've said, and I'll quote you now, you've said in my own life, nothing has forced me to slow down more than the practise of nonviolent communication. What is nonviolent communication and how exactly did that help you to slow down?
Ben Sauer:
A great question. Do I start with that? I think so the reason I started reading about it and doing it, and it's a little bit of a scene here in Brighton that practises, so nonviolent communication is a book slash philosophy by a guy named Marshall Rosenberg, and his idea was that a lot of the way we communicate is implicitly violent or judgement . In examining the way that you communicate, you can much more successfully connect with and understand and express your own need. And just to give people an idea of what that means in practise, every couple of weeks I meet with a small group of people and we discuss relationship and communication challenges in our lives, and we kind of diagnose, analyse them through the lens of nonviolent communication, like some of the ideas within the book in order to rethink, okay, well how could I have understood that person better?
How could I have expressed my needs more successfully and taken a lot of the judgement and pain out of what we're doing with each other every day? And I guess it affected my work deeply because one of the first things you do is you just spend hours really connecting with how somebody is feeling by listening to them. And I cannot really stress enough how much it changed the way I listen in research. I got to experience a kind of new dimension in listening to you. I won't say it applies every time and it doesn't always go that deep, but yeah, it started to make me listen in a completely different way. I could start to identify things that were happening for users and feelings and needs that were just way under the surface of what I was thinking most of the time.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sounds like this is a very deliberate practise and a group of you getting together. Did you say it was weekly,
Ben Sauer:
Biweekly now? Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Biweekly. Yeah. It's a real commitment initially. I dunno if you can recall how you felt initially. Did you have any internal resistance to intentionally slowing down in this way? Was there an internal monologue that was a railing against this type of considered effort to slow down?
Ben Sauer:
There's still a monologue against the concerted effort to slow down, which is why I still do it. The way in which modern life has sort of been set up for us is that we do race, we're impatient, we're encouraged to be more efficient, and I do embody that and I value those things. And so nonviolent communication challenges you to really notice that part of yourself and to then understand, okay, what is that need that I am trying to address? What is it that I value in that moment where I just want somebody to stop talking? You've said enough, let's move on those kind of moments and observe it in yourself. Express what values and needs are coming up for you when that happens. And then also, I guess to really critique for yourself, well, how is that stopping me meeting my needs? If I'm not able to slow down and listen to somebody deeply, then how is that affecting my relationship?
Brendan Jarvis:
There's an implicit value judgement in the name nonviolent communication where there's an assumption, right? If you're not practising nonviolent communication, then our communication should be by definition violent. If you're approaching it in a binary sense, is that the case? Is this an ability to pause, to really listen without thinking about what comes next to quiet, that voice of let's just get onto the next thing. Come on, come on, come on. Is that violence? Is that a form of violence?
Ben Sauer:
I think you could debate this one for hours. I think the first thing you need to know is that Marshall Rosenberg eventually disowned the title. He thought he had titled it the wrong way. So that implicit value judgement , you've heard, he kind of understood it later on and said, maybe I titled this way. And I think that it's similar to the Buddhist way of thinking about it in the sense that the words are just the signpost, the same word, the same implication can be read in two different ways, judgmental, non-judgmental. And it's a highly subjective thing as to whether you interpret what somebody is saying in a, I would say though that just having that lens of being forced to think about it is where the value is. And I would say for anybody who's curious about nonviolent communication, I would encourage them not to think about it so much as a literal practise. I mean, although that can be useful, and instead just think of it as a philosophy and just see if the philosophy changes the way you think about your relationship, relationship with yourself rather than, Hey, I'm going to read this book and magically all my relationships and communication will be better. I think that's a really not, I'm struggling to find a non-judgmental word, but it's not necessarily the most useful way to approach the book.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like you did this as much for yourself, and I mean this in terms of an inward sense as much as you did it for your practise as a researcher, and I'm assuming also that it had some benefit to your practise as a leader of people as well. And one of the things that I learned about you, something else that you do, you seem to be someone who is very much invested in understanding yourself, challenging yourself, and probably like most of the people listening to this podcast can relate to this notion of wanting to be better. And one of the things that you've become fond of doing is reading things from people who you strongly disagree with.
Ben Sauer:
Who
Brendan Jarvis:
Is Dominic Cummings and what did you learn from him?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, so for those who dunno, Dominic Cummings is one of the principal architects of Brexit behind the scenes if you don't know who he's, and as a son of an immigrant from a European family, I became somewhat obsessed with where the idea of Brexit came from. And Dominic Cummings himself has been very, very detailed and explicit on his blog about why he was doing this. And I became really super interested in what the motivations were behind the scenes as to why this was happening politically. And I discovered, frankly, a lot of alignment with him on a lot of things, those who are not aware, he struck a deal with Boris Johnson to create essentially the British equivalent of darpa, the darnet in the US that gave us some of the most amazing innovations in tech history that his idea was that we need to accelerate innovation in Britain and the way to do that is to create an innovation agency or fund things, and that's what he did. So it is a strange thing to read somebody like that and disagree with them so deeply and agree with them at the same time. But is it
Brendan Jarvis:
Strange though, or is it something that we've somewhat forgotten is quite normal, that it's okay not to be wholly for something or wholly against something?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, I think you're right, and I do acknowledge that, and I've said it in the past, that it's important to be able to hold those two things without losing your shit over it the way that Twitter does and social media does now. It's a funny thing to read that stuff. He has sort of commented on my Twitter threads in the past, and I had that strong, it was actually me, him and Brett Victor in conversation, and I had all those instincts for Why did you do this horrible thing to my country? Came up in that moment, but at the same time, okay, let's stick on the topic, which was how we can make more interesting innovation happen.
Brendan Jarvis:
Have you ever considered reaching out to him and having an offline conversation about why he did what he did?
Ben Sauer:
Not really, principally because I just have no faith that I would get a particularly honest answer. It's a fascinating thing to muse upon.
Brendan Jarvis:
We don't have to muse upon this next question too long because it's something that has played out now. I think Brexit's been in effect for at least, is it three or four years now? Well,
Ben Sauer:
The vote was 2016, and we've progressively been legally separating ourself in stages Europe, which has had a whole series of knock-on effects at different points in.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what knock-on effects, I mean, you've got family in the continent and obviously you've got a life in Brighton. What impact, what effect does it had on your family?
Ben Sauer:
Well, I guess top of the list is coming a couple of things, right? My children have lost the automatic right to live where they want to in Europe. My father got put through an awful bureaucratic process in order to prove that he was okay to live in the UK even though he'd been granted the right to live here in 19 nine, I'm going to say. And lots of people are being caught out by these rules now. So those are, I mean, a few of the sort of legal rights. One of my uncles owns a trucking transport business, and they had to stop trading with the UK because it became too expensive to sit in trucking queue days and days on end, which contributed to the rising cost of goods.
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke a little earlier about thinking or believing it was important to be able to hold the whole two opposing views and one on each hand at the same time, and that you believe it's important to avoid the binary. Throwing yourself wholeheartedly into one side of a conversation and ignoring all the opposing or dissenting views, it would be very easy, I feel for you to do that. I mean, clearly you've talked about suppressing that need and Twitter when dealing with Dominic, you're personally affected by some of the things that this person had been responsible for. What do you tell yourself or how do you remind yourself to try and be more balanced? Not necessarily believe or agree with what the opposition is saying, but how does this play out in your day-to-Day? Because Dominic will only be one potential aggravator that you encounter, right? There's the day-to-Day, people that you come across, there's podcast hosts, there's all these points of friction or people that believe different things. How does this play out for you? How do you ensure that you try and maintain that view?
Ben Sauer:
Oh, that is a deep one. I don't believe in free will. I think it is an incoherent, nonsensical idea that came along before we really understood some possibly fundamental things about the universe. And therefore, as a materialist, nobody is really in control. And therefore, it's just our job to try to make the world a slightly kinder place at any moment and try to understand where people are coming from, what's motivating them, what's behind the scenes of whatever behaviour that you object to or opinion that you object to that you are faced with. I mean, that doesn't mean I don't get irritated. I'm not a zen person, but on reflection, that's where I come from, which is that we're not really in control and everyone is on a journey that other people don't understand. I'm paraphrasing.
Brendan Jarvis:
I think I can hear the chorus of people listening going, well, what does it mean if no one's really in control? And I realise we are somewhat constrained by time here, but if you were going to provide A-T-L-D-R of that particular aspect of what you've said, what do you mean by that? What do you mean that no one is really in control?
Ben Sauer:
Well, so if the universe is a series of physics, chemical reactions, then that's what's happening in our brains. And there is no magical thing that's in control. It's just a series of reactions. And so there is an illusion playing played back to us that we are in control when actually it's just different parts of our brain reacting and telling us to behave or say certain things, and therefore you can't really judge anything, if that makes sense.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is this a form of nihilism?
Ben Sauer:
I don't know if it would be called that. I certainly don't act in a nihilistic way. Maybe it is at its root, but I think for me, it's just a very humane way of thinking about the world that if you were to ask me a challenging question, that's okay, that there's a series of reactions in your brain that's playing out and that I'm having an emotional reaction to it myself and that you are not fundamentally at fault. And we might say,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it does make sense. I think we probably should record a separate episode specifically on this topic, but I really do want to come to death by screens with you, and this is obviously your latest labour of love. It's something that you've invested a lot in. You've produced book clearly, you've written this and you've also designed a workshop to support it. And I know you've been speaking a lot about it, and I'll quote you now. You've said previously that great design is not necessarily obviously great. So given that you've gone to all this effort, is it safe to say that you feel that there's a lot of designers out there still who don't understand that their work doesn't speak for itself?
Ben Sauer:
Yes. And I'm going to use an analogy that I only recently heard, which is that I was listening to something about law recently, I think it was a podcast, and they said that most people labour under the belief when they're in trouble with the law, that if they go into the court system and tell the truth that the truth will act as a kind of cleansing agent, that it will just resolve everything. And I guess the same thing is happening for designers in the sense that, hey, if I just present it and I talk through it, bam, everything will just make sense to everybody else. But what I'm really trying to do with the book is get people to understand that the story around the design is equally and sometimes if not more important than the design itself, if that makes sense.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it does make sense. You've argued, and I'm paraphrase you here, that becoming a better communicator, which is what presenting design is about, is an imperative for designers to both earn and keep. And I'm going to use one of these terms that we love in design circles here, we'll probably love to hate by now, which is that coveted seat at the table. Is this presentation skill, this communication skill, is this something that is even more important than the quality of the underlying work?
Ben Sauer:
I think you could argue that in terms of being able to have a future impact, maybe the communication is more important sometimes, and then other times maybe you're in a team or an organisation where it's purely meritocratic and the results speak for themselves, and you don't have to go and sell things to other people, and that's fine. So I think it's context dependent to use another overused design concept. But certainly if you want to grow your career, there's probably nothing else I would put first other than the crafts themselves. Just being a great communicator will get you very, very far indeed.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's not surprising to me that we struggle with this as a profession, yet you could look at it and say, well, design is a profession that's entirely about communication, so why is this an area that we're struggling in? Is this something, and I know I'm putting a whole bunch of close questions to you, but is this something that you feel has always been the case? Have designers always struggled with the ability to clearly communicate, to keep their audience's attention, to really truly make sure that people understanding the value of the work? Has this always been something that we've struggled with, or is this a symptom of our modern age?
Ben Sauer:
That's a great question. I think I'm going to come at this in a tangential way. I did some user research before I wrote the book, and I interviewed people who were transitioning into UX, so new to UX design, and I happened to interview somebody who had studied architecture at the Bauhaus as it is today. And he told me that on day one studying architecture, they said, you have to get up and pitch yourself and your portfolio like why you are here and why that's important. And if you can't do it, you've got to leave. Now, I don't particularly like that approach to education, but I think it's really interesting that historically more traditional design practises have valued communication, I guess verbally and presentation for want of a better word, from the get go. And we certainly in digital design have slightly lost it. In one particular sense, and I don't think this was intentional at all, but one of the things that I noticed and that maybe inspired me to write the book is that I'm a kind of designer.
So I did old school UX when we didn't even necessarily always use that term, and it was mostly practised in agencies. And what that meant was that you had to get up and sell and communicate your work in a particular kind of way. And we don't necessarily want all that kind of design to be practised by agencies anymore. There is value in that, but not all the time. We want to be in these close-knit product teams where everything is informal. We're not answerable to a client, for example. But what I noticed was that people who've gone straight from transitioning or straight from a design education in recent years straight into an internal product team have had no exposure to high stakes communication. And so there's a lot of lessons that they haven't necessarily picked up. That doesn't mean that they're no good as a designer, but then when they're asked to communicate to a broader audience or to really sell something, it is much, much harder to do. So
Brendan Jarvis:
You likened the approach that you feel isn't serving us particularly well to a wonderful Monty Python sketch, the spam sketch where, and I'll quote you now. You've said we often have a tendency to just show the work. I liken it to the Monty Python spam sketch. You can very easily and accidentally bore your audience to death. You lose the audience because you bore them to death and you die on stage as a result. What is the promised land that you're articulating in the book if that way of presenting is leading to death, to board audiences and to perhaps careers that are being hampered? Let's not put too fine a point on it. What is the antithesis, how should people be approaching these presentations that perhaps is more inspired by what you experienced in agency land at that point in time?
Ben Sauer:
Well, I suppose what we want, if you are presenting, and I mean also in other contexts, if you're just showing your work very casually to your colleagues in a day-to-day fashion, is that you want to be really clear so that they understand the problem and that they themselves become invested and engaged in that problem. And that also it's not so boring and dull that they just kind of switch off. Again, coming back to engagement, that you want to involve them in that conversation. So it's easy to assume that as a presenter, you are making yourself the centre of attention. And my book certainly would help people do that. But ultimately what you really want is for them to be empathising with the user, to be invested in finding the right answer to the challenges that you're facing and to understand why you chose what you have and that there are solid reasons behind that and that they should understand those before giving shallow critique or suggestions that haven't necessarily been as considered as your choices. Does that make sense?
Brendan Jarvis:
It does. And one of the ways in the book that you talk about how people can bring the audience, I want to avoid the along for the journey platitude. It's more like involve them in the story is actually by telling the story of the design through the lens of a person, a user, someone who you're actually trying to reach. And you've said about this that, and I'll quote you again. You've said it can feel a little awkward at first to show design this way, but if people understand why they will go along with you. And then later on you went on to say, this is the most important part of your presentation. So given that this is it, this is the most important part, how do you approach this challenge? How do you help people to understand the why and what you're trying to achieve through the design by using a story of a user that's going through the design?
Ben Sauer:
So I think the important thing there is that generally when you are showing a design to colleagues or stakeholders, they are applying a lens of judgement that is completely different to the way that your user is seeing things and behaving. Your user is making these microsecond judgments about what to tap on or what to do or what something is saying to them. And when you're showing it to your colleagues, the lens is just completely different. And for a start, you are seeing it slowed down or frozen in time often. And so the storytelling method that I teach in the book is you load it up with a lot of context, right? You're giving a lot of context before you show any of the work. And then during showing the work, you are telling a story about its use, why the design facilitates helping the user and how what they're seeing will give them the capabilities and the choices that they need, but also that you are slowing down time.
That's something I talk about in the book a lot, right? Which is that you slow down. Imagine we were watching the user do slow motion. That's effectively what I recommend people simulate so that you can talk through their thoughts and their reactions to a design and kind of curate the way colleague or a stakeholder is thinking about the design so that they can empathise in that moment rather than going, why is the button over there or why is that blue that they're actually simulating, empathising the use in the moment that you're talking through the design.
Brendan Jarvis:
You said in the quote of yours that I quoted you that it can feel a little awkward at first to present design this way. What is that source of awkwardness? Why can it feel awkward to present design like this?
Ben Sauer:
I think it's habit. You've gotten used to presenting and accepting conversation and feedback about a design in a certain way, and there's an artificiality in doing it in a story fashion. One of the exercises that I do in my workshop is I get people to tell stories about themselves, and people find this very easy. This is where my mother's from, or here's an interesting fact about my family, me carting, whatever. And I get them to try to realise that actually in our wider lives, we do story tell all the time in the pubs socially, it's just really, really common, but we don't think of it as storytelling. And so I'm getting them in the workshops to realise like, no, you are totally capable as a storyteller. You're probably doing it all the time and not even realising it. And that that's one of the ways to get comfortable with talking about design as though it is a story,
Brendan Jarvis:
This story or this narrative that you build into the presentation of design work. It strikes me that writing or at least the ability to tell a story across an arc is a skill that's useful or important for a designer to have some ability in to be not just your average, to actually have refined the way in which they communicate in writing so that they can translate that through to presentation. Of course. Just my view, is that something that obviously being from an English literature background, you probably have quite a strong view on this, but what role, if any, does writing play in your ability to present design work effectively?
Ben Sauer:
So I think it's enormously important, especially in modern times where we are working more remotely, asynchronously, being really clear with words is just gold for collaboration. In modern times, I was quite deliberate in the book in trying to give people the best shortcuts. So one of the things that I recommend is not writing writing, but actually just transcribing your rationale. So record yourself talking about it, and then get a tool to transcribe and just have a look at the words and analyse how clear or concise you are being so that you can approach writing. I think I've worked with enough designers to realise that for a lot of people it is around something else. What they want to be spending their time on is the visual cortex, something else. They want to be exploiting a different part of their brain and not necessarily that logical wordy self. So whilst I consider it to be an absolutely critical skill, I try to give people in the book ways to approach that there are relatively easy to implement and not too scary, not staring at a blank word doc and trying to explain yourself.
Brendan Jarvis:
And they're really helpful because writing is for a lot of people, quite a painful process. There's an internal struggle that goes on, at least for me, when you're trying to refine your thinking on anything. And I think it's a well-known benefit of taking the time to write that you can get clearer on what it is that you're trying to say, but often it's not where designers want to be spending their time. In the book, you talk about this concept of the Goldilocks zone. What is the Goldilocks zone as it relates to writing, and how do designers find it and how do they find it quickly, I suppose is the real question here?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, so the Goldilock zone is a concept from astrophysics and inspired by fairytales, Goldilocks, and the Three Bears. So the idea of within astrophysics is that in any solar system, there is a Goldilock zone in the middle where planets are not too hot, not too cold, just that nice warm spot where earth is in the middle of the solar system. And generally when we communicate about our work, either verbally or in written form, there is a sweet spot that you're trying to find between not too much detail and not too little that people don't really understand the concept. And so in the book, I'm trying to give people ways of finding that goldilock zone of detail. What is too much? Well, the way to explore that is by trying to do too much or too little and actually making those explicit. So if you transcribe yourself, it's much easier to go, wait, hang on a minute.
I'm going into way too much detail about this one point. And I've observed that designers find it very difficult to catch themselves doing that. They'll very quickly go down a rabbit hole, the audience, the people listening kind of glaze over. No one says anything. No one wants to break the silence and go, Hey, that's too much stop. And so getting into that habit of going, hang on a minute, what is the right level of detail that I want to communicate? That's a really tough thing to practise. But I've tried to give people some really useful quick ways to get there in the book.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, just on that moment in a meeting where it seems like everyone's feeling it, like this person's just talking too long. Sometimes I get this when I'm asking questions, I get this little voice like, oh, wrap it up, get to the point. Maybe I'm feeling it a little bit. Now, when that happens is at a different level. So not everyone is going to feel the same way as I'm about to, about to describe, but sometimes I get that feeling myself. And I just wonder if you've encountered that feeling yourself when you are presenting and if you have, is this a feeling that once you've recognised that you've been able to catch it and pivot in the moment and change what you're doing, is this something that you can develop an ear for and learn to adjust your approach as you are presenting your work?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of cultural stuff that plays into this. Dutch people, as in my family background, tend to be fairly blunt and short and concise and don't try not to go on too long. They get to the point very, very quickly. Whereas there's a British side to me that can beat around the bush. I think that intensely, I think it, weirdly, it does play into the efficiency thing that I was talking about earlier, that lens of how do we get to the point quickly? There's this very strong value there for me, and being self-aware enough to go, wait, is what I'm doing right now? Do I need to say this? That's something that I came to fairly slowly. But of course, being immersed in the words, the world of words, that ambient awareness of what is too much was probably a bit easier for me to find, having spent so much time drafting words in an education setting.
So I think you're right though. It's that first step of self-awareness. Can you catch yourself going on in too much detail? And also, not to go on too much about it, but what are the cultural factors that allow you to give that awareness to other people? I'll give you a small example. Some languages have a word for a polite word for you said enough, thank you, that's enough. So Hindi, for example, has a word bus, which can mean in the right context. Hey, no, no, thanks. So I've got it. I understand now you can stop talking. And I'm not going to pretend I understand all the cultural nuances of using that word or when it's polite and when it isn't. But it's funny to think that there even is a word for, Hey, you said enough. In other cultures,
Brendan Jarvis:
We don't do that well in English.
Ben Sauer:
Definitely not, definitely not. It is considered pretty impolite to stop somebody. Yeah, absolutely.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, thinking about the practicalities of striking that goldilock zone, the pressures that are on people to prepare presentations quickly, sometimes there's not a lot of time to put these things together. People don't want to be necessarily doing these all night until the early hours of the morning. What are your thoughts on the role of tools like chat GPT in helping designers to formulate, perhaps refine their presentations?
Ben Sauer:
I think they're immensely useful. What is the risk is avoiding the thinking part. So there's a lovely little tool, which I've been promoting recently, called ramble fix.com, and you literally hit a record button and ramble something, and then it just spits back via check GPT in the background, a really concise version of what you're trying to say. And I think in a lot of contexts that's super useful. It gives you a little feedback loop on whether you're going on too much and if you've just got something quick to get out. However, there are many contexts where you don't really want to skip the deeper thinking, and you certainly don't want the tool to do it for you. And I think for me, I recently did a workshop on headlines how to craft really simple, concise, memorable headlines that people take away from the presentation going, I fully understood the top five issues, and some of the feedback I got was kind of negative.
Why would we think about the structure of a headline when we could just punch it into chat GPT? And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't dispute. You could get some ideas out of an AI for this, but you're skipping a lot of the deeper thinking that might be useful in how you frame a problem. And let's be honest, a lot of what it spits out is pretty generic and pretty anodyne. And so I think I do use it myself as a thinking partner, but I would really caution against, well, I would ask that people notice when it stops them doing the real thinking. I think that's important moment to recognise.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I used it late last year to give me some ideas for podcast episode titles because believe it or not, just coming up with five words to describe the breadth of an hour plus long conversation is actually, I found quite a challenging task. And I was not impressed by what came back. In fact, I tried to craft the conditions of the query more keenly, and I still didn't get anything that was typically terribly useful back. So I hear you, what you're saying, you can't necessarily forsake the thinking part. There are just some things that it's not designed yet perhaps to do. I want to circle back a little bit here and come back to something that we touched on very briefly, Matt, perhaps we just alluded to, or you alluded to it, which was this way of presenting design work that's tied into the way that the narrative or the story develops.
And it was tied into something that you said recently in an interview which was, and I'll quote you again. One of the things I recommend in the book is that you don't show the design. If you're going to show a screen, don't show it all at once, right? Break it down. That's how a magician operates. So I feel like this is an important point for us to cover. How is it that this progressive revelation of a design is actually more useful to a designer in conveying what they're trying to convey than it is to show the whole screen or the page all at once?
Ben Sauer:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I should say, I don't think you need to do that every time. It depends on the context, but I guess it goes back to what I was saying about simulation. If you want somebody to empathise with the way in which a user is thinking, or if you want them to focus on particular design details while you are giving your rationale, then like a magician, what you're doing is curating attention. You want to get people's attention who are looking at the design in the right place at the right time. And I mean, our presentation tools sort of encourage us to do this on their own. When you have, I dunno, let's take keynote or PowerPoint. When you set up your bullets to be revealed one at a time, right? You're making sure people don't read ahead. We should do that with design when we're discussing it and it's less distracting for people and they'll stop thinking about all the other critique that they've got on their mind when they are jumping ahead and going, what's that for? What's that for? What's that for? You can actually control that and get them to talk about the thing that you want them to talk about.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's probably a bit crude, but what was going on for me there was thinking about the power dynamic that's involved in a presentation of design. And again, I'm stereotyping here, but typically designers, if we had the ability to sign off on our own work, we wouldn't need to present it. Often it's to stakeholders. Maybe it's across functions, maybe it's execs, people that need to have input in the design process because it has impact in other areas of the business. So there's often this, it seems to me this sort of power imbalance that it's almost like the designer or designers show up and they need to kind of prove or sell, perhaps that framing's not helpful, but they have to convey with credibility whatever it is that they're trying to achieve in the design work, and that requires other people to buy or believe in what it is that they're seeing. How do you think about the power dynamic that's at play in design presentations and are tools that you've talked about in the book, like revealing certain aspects using the hero's journey, if you like to tell the story of the design through a user, are these an attempt at changing the dynamic of that power within that context of a presentation?
Ben Sauer:
Yes, absolutely. I'm going to use a music analogy. There are bands that try to shift the power dynamic when they're playing on stage. So they'll have lights on in the audience, or there's a band called Lightning Bolt that I used to love. I still love them, and they would only ever play at the same level as the audience, and that was kind of chaotic because the audience would kind of crowd around them and no one could see what was going on. But I do think that there's a weird political thing that those bands are doing, which is that they're trying to disrupt the sort of artificial power that comes by setting up an audience and a presenter or a performer. And a lot of what I'm trying to do in the book is also to interrupt that power dynamic in small ways. So for example, having a bit of fun at the beginning if you're doing a formal presentation facilitates a slightly more informal conversation, and so they become collaborators, commenters on the design rather than judges or a panel as we traditionally think it.
So yes, I definitely do want to interrupt that power dynamic in some of what I'm advising. And because I think that ultimately some of what we do when we do it well, it's counterintuitive. If you are confident, you might feel like you're trying to be in control, but actually people will really respond to that confidence and that they want you to be confident, and that fact, they feel more reassured when you are confident. And so that helps even out that power dynamic, and it makes it less likely that somebody will challenge you on the pointless stuff. For example,
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the things that can affect the confidence of a presenter is pretty much everything else that's outside of their control. And I'll quote you again. You've said you cannot and you should not try to control a meeting too much problems will occasionally arise outside of your control. Confidence means rolling with the punches, adapting when things don't work out the way you imagined they would. I understand that you experienced a situation that was outside of your control a few years ago while you were on stage at a conference in Brussels.
Ben Sauer:
Yes. That's a funny story. Yeah, so I was at a conference in Brussels, this is 2017 I'm going to say, and I was teaching people about how voice interfaces are going to change, how we craft interactions and what the technology of things like Alexa and the Google Home were going to do for people. And I had this whole presentation lined up and it was very, very last minute set up. There wasn't a lot of room for rehearsals or anything like that, and I suddenly realised right before I worked on stage that the sound was not working. Now I was talking about voice interfaces. It was absolutely crushing moment to realise that all of the craft and care that I'd put into this presentation around sound and playing people examples and trying to explain what good design is in this medium, I just had to throw all of that out the window and instead I just acted out Alexa and the user, and I would sort of jump from one side being the user and Alexa, and it became one of my best presentations because I had to kind of just roll with it and I had to make it a comic part of my performance and they loved it.
And I think that's an example of, again, I could have just lost it. I could have had a panic attack. And I think that going right back to the start of our conversation, sometimes I'm really, really good in those situations because I can just in microseconds, figure out what are my options here go. That's when you're trying to overtake somebody at 60 miles an hour on a circuit, right? Microsecond decisions, that is a really, really useful approach sometimes. And not being too stressed, being that flexible self when things go wrong, it's super important because they will go wrong. And so it's all about how you choose to respond.
Brendan Jarvis:
I remember having a difficult time probably with a business maybe about eight years ago, and a friend of mine printed out a got a print and framed it, which was when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and hearing your story and seeing the way that you were beaming there, as you were describing that presentation, it is a really good reminder that we can make the best of a bad situation and things can and will go wrong when it comes to presenting. One of the last areas about presenting design work that I wanted to cover with you kind of follows on from this notion of when things don't go quite to plan, there's another part to presentations that's outside of the presenter's control, at least wholly you can try and influence it. Your book speaks a lot to how you can do that as a presenter, and what I'm speaking about here is the people that are in the room, the people that you're presenting to perhaps cast your mind back to a situation where you were presenting and it wasn't going well, someone just wasn't really understanding what it was that you needed from them, or whatever it may be.
How do you deal with difficult people situations and presentations where you're finding that perhaps your presentation's being pulled off course by a particular individual.
Ben Sauer:
So I think let's just acknowledge just how difficult it is to roll with the punches, either technically or with difficult people. That is really, really hard. So I'm going to give advice here, but I'm not going to pretend for a moment that any of this is easy to put into practise, really not my methods for dealing with, let's say somebody who is kind of getting upset or I can think of a specific individual who I was saying a few things that they got caught on. They felt judged by, insulted by in some way. Of course, that was not the intention. I was just giving research facts back to them, but it was inherently critical of sort their department, for example, and it kind of derailed the whole show, right? With the state they in. And when that happens, if you can overcome your own emotional state, right?
If you can deal with your immediate reaction, which is defensiveness, you can switch into a mode of almost pure curiosity and be asking that person questions back that are really trying hard, as I say in the book, to kind of translate what's really going on for them. Because their judgments, the things they're saying about your work or in response to what you're doing, there's often just something behind that that they're not able to say in a clear, kind way. And it's your job in those moments to investigate with curiosity with the right questions. And again, I give a few pointers in the book, but I'm not going to pretend it's easy to put into play.
Brendan Jarvis:
What role, if any, do you feel that, and I'm not sure specifically if you cover this in the book, I can't recall, but what role does role playing, or perhaps you can call it practise. I know you speak about practise in the book, but is there a role for role playing tricky situations or is that just taking things a little bit too far?
Ben Sauer:
I think there is, I don't really include that advice in the book, but for example, in my nonviolent communication groups, that's a huge part of it. I guess the challenge of role play is that the first barrier is your emotional response. And it's hard to get that response when you are roleplaying. And I don't necessarily have a good answer for how to simulate having a huge emotional reaction to a stakeholder or a piece of feedback that's unwanted. But roleplay will certainly enlighten ways you could respond. And this is something I do in the book. I put this concept of the sixties of design discussion. So what I realised about these moments is that we can, after the fact, always think of good answers, right? The French have a name for this, actually they call it ri, right? Which is the spirit of the staircase, right?
Walking away from a difficult interaction walking down the stairs, you suddenly go, ah, I should have said this. And we've all had those moments, right? With everyone, with our family, and with people we're arguing with. And so what I realised and the advice I put into the book is, what you really need are a few stock kind of responses. So I didn't get too far into dealing with design discussion. There are other books for that. But what I wanted to do is kind of give these little tools. There's sixties, there's defer, right? Always kind of accept someone's idea for what it is, right? Oh, okay, interesting. Tell me more about that. Or delay, right? If there's a piece of feedback you think would be best discussed afterwards or you just can't answer right now, there are polite ways of saying, let me think about that. Can I come back to you on it? For example. And so the sixties, I won't go into all of them now, but they are just ways that you can remember quickly in the moment if you don't have a fully formed response. And I put those into the book,
Brendan Jarvis:
I like defer because you were speaking about that French saying about going down the staircase and then you think about what you should have said, there's a converse to that which is not acting on your initial value judgement and saying something that later, once you've gone down the stairs, you wish you'd not said. And I feel like the way that you frame the sixties and the book is really useful. It does give you those mental jumping off two points, if you can recall in the moment. They're quite useful. I'm mindful of time, Ben, and I understand that it's getting quite late the for you now. So I wanted to just ask you one final question for today. And this is based around your dedication that you wrote in your book, death by Screens. And it was to your parents and you also, so you dedicated the book to your parents.
But in the acknowledgements, which I also read, you said, and I want to quote you now for one last time you said, my parents have always provided me with the freedom to find my destiny. I'm grateful to them for the limitless support and stimulation in my childhood. They're smart people who never tried to mould me into a particular career. And this is tying back into where we started our conversation now. And what I wanted to ask you was if you had to hazard a guess, why do you think they raised you the way that they did?
Ben Sauer:
Oh, that is a good question. I can tell you that quite explicitly. That was a reaction for one parent against an unwanted way of being raised. My Dutch grandfather in Amsterdam had an enormously difficult upbringing. He became the head of the family far too young, and he had very, very high strict expectations of my father and my father. Being a kind of child of the fifties and sixties, his reaction was to leave the country, didn't want to be in a highly conformist society. He wanted to be in Britain and he wanted to experience the joy of motor racing, and he wanted to be away from the sort of constricting values of his father. So, well, certainly for my father, it was very much a reaction. Well, I suppose it is a boomer thing, right? It is a boomer thing. Post-war. To be granted this unusual level of freedom and to think that you are reshaping society and to give your children a level of freedom and autonomy that was not necessarily granted to you before that time, or granted to people rather before that time. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
You are a parent. How are you borrowing or modifying your own experience growing up, the parental practises of your parents to how you are raising your children?
Ben Sauer:
The most important thing is the acknowledgement of what you are unconsciously trying to mimic without realising it. So I think a lot of parents think about the ways in which their children should be raised by doing certain habits that were very important to them and shape them, and then suddenly realising, well, is that right? Is that an important thing? And it's that navigation of which values you are choosing to honour and which values you are choosing to progress or change. And it's a difficult road to navigate. Wrighton, where I live is a very hippie town, and so one of the ways in which that has, I would certainly say it's changed since that post-war generation is an emphasis on self-development. We all in across the West, we're all more comfortable with the idea of talking about mental health in a way that our parents weren't necessarily, I mean, they knew what it was.
Some of them were going to therapy in that generation, but it wasn't the same degree of acceptance. Still a little bit of shame attached. And so there are things that I find I'm clinging to as values, like, hey, let's all eat together once a day. Not every family does that, but my family did. And I feel strongly about that one. And then there are other things where I'm like, no, I want the freedom for my kids to express their emotional lives in ways that weren't necessarily talked about in my family when I was growing up. You're just navigating, I guess, the human arc of progress. This is how society's changed through parenting in a way to a large degree. I dunno if I've answered your question, but yeah, that's where I'm at.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, that's a wonderful place for us to finish. Thank you, Ben. It's been a great in-depth conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
Ben Sauer:
It's been a pleasure, Brendan.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're welcome. My pleasure, Ben. And if people want to connect with you, they want to follow along the great work that you've been doing with Death by Screens and all the other things that you're contributing to the field, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ben Sauer:
Sure. So just to show everybody this who's watching on video, this is my book, "Death by Screens". You can find it on major booksellers online. My website, BenSauer.net has a lot of links to my training, my book, my mailing list. I'll just spell my name just briefly. It's Ben Sauer, SAUER.net. That's me. Most people follow me on LinkedIn. So yeah, have a look there. You find me there.
Brendan Jarvis:
Wonderful. Thanks Ben. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Ben, where you can find "Death by Screens". And everything else that we've been spoken about will be fully detailed in chapters on the YouTube video.
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, subscribe and also tell someone else, maybe just one other person about the show. And if they would find conversations at depth of value, then please pass it along to them.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to our website, my website, thespaceinbetween.co.nz, that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Ben Sauer

Presenting High-Stakes Design Work

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