Nick Fine, PhD
The Future of UX in an AI World
In this episode of Brave UX, Dr Nick Fine shares his experience with ADHD 🎶, his thoughts on the state and future of UX 🤖, and some insight into his practice 🦉.
Highlights include:
- What is wrong with the UX?
- How does evaluative research keep you ‘safe’?
- Why are you fighting the rise of AI in our field?
- Who are the ‘chorus of bastards’ that follow you around?
- What do you say to those who feel you’re being overly dogmatic?
Who is Nick Fine, PhD?
Nick is a principal UX research consultant and strategist at The Adaptavist Group, a global family of companies that deliver enterprise software and tailored solutions 🪡, across the world’s most trusted technology ecosystems.
In recent years, Nick has also held a number of notable UX research contract roles, including as lead user researcher in the UK Government’s Cabinet Office 🇬🇧, Lead User Researcher for NHS Blood and Transplant, and Head of Research at Emergn.
He holds a PhD in Human Computer Interaction from Brunel University of London 🎓, an MSc in Human Computer Interaction with Ergonomics from University College London, and a BSc in Psychology from Portsmouth University.
Known for his outspoken and passionate advocacy for UX, Nick has spoken on stages - virtual and real - across the globe 💡, including as a guest of UXPA UK, the Experience Designed Podcast, UX Brighton, Delta CX, and Tech Circus.
Transcript
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- People like or respond to me because I'm me. I'm not anybody else. I'm me. I'm straightforward, honest, authentic, and I don't always get it right and I'm warts and all, and I think people just appreciate that because they don't want carely curated beautiful optics. They want the truth.
- 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 Dr. Nick Fine. Nick is a principal UX research consultant and strategist at The Adaptavist Group, a global family of companies that deliver enterprise software and tailored solutions across the world's most trusted technology ecosystems.
- In recent years, Nick has also held a number of notable UX research contract roles, including as lead user researcher in the UK government's cabinet office lead user researcher for NHS, Blood and Transplant and head of research at Emergent.
- During the past 20 years, Nick has worked on several complex mission critical projects including air traffic control, financial systems, and pharmaceutical R&D. He's also worked on a broad array of businesses including Coca-Cola, Bentley, Virgin Media, and GSK.
- He holds a PhD in human computer interaction from Brune, university of London and MSC in human computer interaction with ergonomics from University College London, and A BSC in psychology from Portsmouth University.
- Known for his outspoken and passionate advocacy for UX. Nick has spoken on stages virtual and real across the globe, including as a guest of UX PA uk, the Experience Design podcast, UX Brighton, Delta CX and Tech Circus. And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Nick, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Thank you for that amazing intro. I mean, I dunno if you wrote it or the ai, but it came out great. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can a hundred percent swear hand on heart that I wrote it, but it was all you. That was all you, all your highlights.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- It sounds good when you kind of string it all together. That's great. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're welcome. It's good to have you here, Nick. And I have to say researching for today was an absolute delight. One of the things that I learned about you was that you may have hacked into a UK car manufacturer back in 1985.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- How the hell did you get that one?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It may have been on the background of one of your slides in a conference presentation.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Oh, sugar lumps. Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about that. What is the story there?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Wow. Okay. The year is 1985. I'm 15 years old. We've just got our first modem and anybody who doesn't know what a modem is, it's how you connect the telephone to the internet, but it's not, it's how you get your phone, it's how you get online. Basically. It's so that you can make verbally acoustic noises down the telephone line to another computer at the other end. It's got the other thing that gets the verbally acoustic, the verbally noises. Anyway, my first online experience basically in 1985 in the pre-internet world of bulletin board, systems of packet, switch stream, if that means anything to anybody. CompuServe was around in these days. But to keep it relevant to the question, hacking was not the same thing as it is today. I think we should get that straight out on the table right. Today, you pretty much need to be an engineer, or in the very least an advanced script kitty.
- Back then it was password guessing of two characters. Brute force was aa, A BAC. It was completely not the same thing. My friend's dad was the something director of, I want to say it actually, they're no longer around. It was British Leland. They went bust many 20, 30 years ago, but his dad was some big deal and it turns out of the two character password. His initials was the password, and that's how we got it. Back in the day. You had to have an ID and a password and the whole thing was you went enclosed user groups on bulletin boards, trading IDs for passwords and back again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You weren't to blame for them going out of business, were you?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No, no. Hell no. But I used to send flowers, oh, this is embarrassing and I can't say the name. There was a community college for whom I had a hacked press PRESSEL account and back in the day into Flora, the flower, sending people, they were right in the early days of this stuff. So I was able to send flowers, but I couldn't from this hacked account, so I didn't pay for them. But also I couldn't put any details in or anything or else I'd get nicked, arrested or found out. So I do this random acts of kindness thing where I just send people flowers from this account. But then 20, 30 years later, I'm working in 90 or whenever it was in 1997 for an ISP and this community college called up looking for a two meg leased line.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Really?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah. And he was like, oh, I haven't heard that name for many years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's a small world. It is a small world. I believe there may have also been a bank in the mix somewhere in your hacking days.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah, there's been a few things. I mean, if you look up phone, freaking P-H-R-E-A-K, we did some great stuff I did in my whole university halls. I'm glad I can say this stuff now or maybe I'm just incriminating myself. Well, I was
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wondering, are we outside of the statute of limitations here? I'm not sure how
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Long. I dunno. But come at me, bro. I mean, I grew up with 2,600 a hacker, 2,600, which is an a five size magazine that you would subscribe to. There were black boxes, red boxes, all kinds of different boxes back in the day. But the box that I had was this brown box, which was a radio shack acoustic tone dialer that you had to use to get your answer phone messages when you were out. Right. You held it up the phone and dialled the number. But the clever thing was that somebody way smarter than me worked out on 2,600 was that if you went up to a public payphone, the order was something like you dialled the number on the keypad on the phone, pushed your money in, and then pressed nine. Nine because there were two long pulse sequences rather than tone. And that delay did something and you basically got a free call from there from there. So it cost you 10 P to get the call going, but the call could last forever. And my friend Rob would sit on the phone to his brother in Colorado for hours just sitting there on the steps, just chatting. And the next thing I know, CID, the British kind of special investigations were in because BT had found that there was 1500 pounds discrepancy from the coin box to the bill.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh no.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah, so we all disappeared that day, but it was good times, man. Good times. Good times.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Funny. That's so funny. I want to take a different tack now and talk about something that you've, to my knowledge, had recently confirmed something that you'd suspected about yourself for a long time and something that ties into what you've also talked about and described as a chorus of bastards that follow you everywhere you go. What was it that was confirmed for you and who are these bastards?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Okay, so yeah, I'll try to be brief, but effectively I was diagnosed with a DHD 20 odd years ago. The chorus of bastards is my characterization of the self beating that we give ourselves Now. I'm pretty sure that everybody's got a level of chorus about them, whether you are neurotypical or neurodiverse. It's my belief through observation and discussion with other diagnosed A DHD people that it's really maxed out in the A DHD person, the chaos, the loss of executive function, whatever you want to call that means that it's not schizophrenia, it's not not external voices. I think it's important to say that it's your own voice, your inside, it's you. It's your voice telling you what a piece of rubbish you are, right? How you are no good, no one likes you, everyone hates you. It's having the devil on your shoulder all the time from even when you're asleep.
- And when I was a younger guy, the chorus can really take hold of you and you start listening to the chorus and you can believe the chorus and the chorus becomes your narrative or even leads the narrative. And that's the tail wagging the dog. And I went through a bunch of antidepressants and psychiatry and all of that garbage before I learned the truth, which is to recognise what's happening and deal with it through a cognitive behaviour therapy style, D-I-Y-C-B-T as I call it, which is catching those frames of thought and tell 'em to shut the heck up. It is kind of knowing better and saying, no, no, no, no, I know you're on at me. Whereas when you're younger, you think that's normal. You think you don't know that the chorus is there. It took me 30, 40 years to even kind of begin to recognise that chorus because you just grow up thinking things are normal.
- Like everybody has this. You think that everybody lives in the fog, in the chaos, in this madness, and you also believe that other people have got the same abilities or perceptions that you have got, which they clearly don't, which ends up in asymmetrical feeling relationships. I feel the same way I do about roommates and girlfriends that I did 30, 40, 50 years ago. I do today. You know what I'm saying? Whereas I'm just some guy from their history, right? There's a hypersensitivity and hyper empathy involved with A DHD, which is that kind of next level emotional intelligence in my humbled opinion in some of us. I dunno if it characterised by A DHD, but I've met lots of people who completely identify.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really interesting, and I had wondered how that played into your, I dunno if it's causal, that's probably too strong a framing, but just how your A DHD has played into and perhaps in a positive sense for you in terms of your role as a researcher. I mean, you mentioned empathy there. That's possibly the greatest skill a researcher can bring to bear when they're working with participants. So how do you think about those two facets of yourself, your professional self and also your A DHD self?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah, I think I'm in the right trade. I think I'm working to my strengths. If I had different parenting, and that's a whole big if, right? I would've been a creative in a creative world, but I'm not. And I was forced into a business kind of a route. So I'm doing the best that I can with what I've got. Having empathy and extended feelings and all of that stuff when used positively and harnessed is, yeah, you're right. It's fantastic. It means I can identify, I can feel as a psychologist, it unquestionably helps me read people better. Unquestionably, nonverbal, whole bunch of it's an extra sense. It's a sixth sense for interpersonal interaction, shall we say.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is that the hyperfocus that I've heard you talk about previously? Not all. Is that the same thing? That's different?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No, no. Hyperfocus is actually very common and it's pretty much a hallmark of A DHD. I think it's almost a defining factor. It isn't, but the difference between hyperfocus and anything else that I've mentioned, hyperfocus is the ultimate flow state. It's the state you only ever would dream of, and it's a state that frankly, a lot of neurotypicals wish they could get into it. A state that I wish I could get into and stay into and
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My without taking ayahuasca and some Peruvian jungle,
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Again, that's a whole different thing. That's perspective. We're not talking perspective here. There are people for which a psychedelic treatment brings perspective or a let going of control because control freaks is obviously a big deal and that causes a lot of sadness. But no, that's not that Hyperfocus is that ultimate state of focus. It's like saying we as a DHD people have no attention except from when we've got hyperfocus, when we've got all the attention plus a lot more, it's the compensation. It's like saying you are utterly useless until you're brilliant.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Can you turn it on when you want to?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Now, this is the real trick, and I dunno how spicy or controversial you want me to get or how kind of, this is not family friendly, but I am able to trigger my hyperfocus and that's my secret. Now, how I trigger my hyperfocus is controversial. People don't agree with me or they'll say You are mad or that sounds crazy, or whatever. But I frankly don't care because they're not in my shoes, they're not living my life and they're not getting my achievements with my limitations or my makeup. I call it the holy trinity, which is really rude if you're a religious person. So I'm hugely apologetic. It is the Holy Trinity of for me is brace yourself, ladies and gentlemen. And if there are children in the room cover their ears. The three elements to this are nicotine, which is a dopamine agonist, frankly. And we do know that dopamine either too much or too little or the regulation of dopamine is most likely a big factor in A DHD. I happen to be a smoker since the age I was 16 years old. My mom was a smoker. I kind of learned it, but I think I probably once I would've tried it once you go, oh, wow, dopamine, love, love at first sight, so dopamine, that's one of my dopaminergic agents. The second is caffeine, good strong Turkish, not your Nest cafe catering pack stuff, which proper loaded coffee, not so loaded that you blow your heart out, but something that's got some legs to it. Now here's the controversial part.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I thought we were there already.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No, we're not even close to it. This is medical cannabis in the uk. Sorry, I've been looking at the wrong camera. Sorry. This is prescribed to me. There are certain, I learned this a long time ago before I was prescribed cannabis. In fact, Brendan, this is not quite a world exclusive, but the truth of the matter is in the acknowledgement section of my PhD thesis, I actually acknowledged a Amsterdam coffee shop because I wrote a couple of chapters and did some analysis in that coffee shop because my supervisor moved back to Holland. So there was that. I needed to be near Eindhoven and Delft, but to be in a country where it has legalised cannabis and I could sit there with a laptop at a bar ordering more is Hyperfocus Central. The owner was incredibly gracious. They don't like laptops in coffee shops there. It looks like a student like Starbucks or something. But I did a tremendous amount of work in a very compressed amount of time. My PhD is very quantitative. I had a number of different too many hypotheses, lots and lots of SPSS analysis, and when you're churning SPSS analysis and you're doing big data before big data existed like I was, that's literally soul crushing amounts of repetition, soul crushing, and A DHD people don't do repetition well at all. We do novelty brilliantly. We suck at repetition. So in order for me to get over that hump, cannabis, nicotine, caffeine,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Do you kind of wish that you had AI when you were sitting in that coffee shop?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No. God, no. God no. And you know what? I can say that quickly, and that's a good response because the amount of grief that AI is causing me today, I wouldn't have had time for back then. It would've consumed too much time. I would've spent even longer doing that bugger than I should have done. You know what I'm saying? I would've got lazy, I would've cut corners. I know my supervisor and my external investigator examiner certainly would've taken the time and would've called me out on all the BS that I couldn't be asked to check in my own thesis. I'm so glad I didn't have any of that crap.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We'll come back to AI soon, but I want to just stay on A DHD for a little longer. I listened to one of your previous interviews where you spoke with Tim Hutchinson of fierce about your A DHD and your public disclosure on LinkedIn of your A DHD status, and there's something that you said there that I want to quote you again on here, which was, I've got a thick skin. I've never disclosed my A DHD status until I did it on LinkedIn. I've never disclosed it to anybody at work and said, can I have special considerations or reasonable adjustments, or whatever those things are called. I've always hidden it and it means I'm prepared for the world. That last bit is the bit that I'm interested in. How do you feel that hiding your neurodiversity prepared you for the world
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Because the world is raw and unfiltered. I've also grown up in a world where neurodiversity wasn't even recognised or named. Right? So you were just a freak or a weirdo, whereas now you're like a weirdo with privileges type stuff or that's the way I try to characterise it. I'm trying to bring my children up who are both diagnosed A DHD. One is 15, one is 11, trying to bring them up in the same way. It's not a cold love. What I'm trying to say is the world isn't going to change for you. If you expect the world to change for you, you're going to be disappointed and sad, and I don't want that for you. I want you to develop the coping strategies to handle the neurotypicals or just the neuro nasties or just the horrible people in the world who take advantage of gaslight, control neuros badly.
- I've been controlled and taken advantage of until recently because I'm a, not, gullible is the wrong word because I'm a scientist and I'm the most cynical person you've ever met, but I've got a really big heart in terms of helping people, and I can't say no. And people take massive advantage of that. I've done huge amounts of unpaid work and helped other people in their careers and got nothing for it or made millions for their businesses and not had any uplift. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, I'm preparing my kids for the reality of a neurodiverse life in a neurotypical world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's really interesting, and especially the part where you are encouraging them to think about their internal world rather than trying to change the external world. And why that's interesting is if I think about what I have observed in your advocacy for the field, you are one of the more outspoken people in our field. So I'm wondering how do you reconcile those two beliefs? One that you need to focus on what you can control and the other, which is your definite perceived efforts to try and change the field of UX. Yeah,
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah, yeah. Okay. So newsflash, I'm me. As much as I, sometimes I do say it's like, oh yeah, it is an online persona. It isn't. It's me. And that's why people like or respond to me because I'm me. I'm not anybody else. I'm me. I'm straightforward, honest, authentic, and I don't always get it right, and I'm warts and all, and I think people just appreciate that. They don't want care for the curated beautiful optics. They want the truth or they just, you know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying, right? They want to hear good stuff, not pretty bullshit. Then there's an awful lot of that around, unfortunately, with regards to the UX stuff and this stuff, firstly, I'm the most reluctant influencer in the world, right? Because I didn't aim for any of this stuff. It just happened because I'm trying to change the UX world and I cannot tolerate the amount of BS and misinformation that's surround. I've worked way too hard and made too many sacrifices to watch some kid come along and just make it up and ruin it all. And that's really what's happening at scale.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's get into that. Let's get into some specifics or A-T-L-D-R if you like, of the specifics. What is wrong with the current world of UX?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Okay, we can skin out lots of ways. The headline is UX is no Longer a User-Centric Practise User-centric Design, UCD user-centered design was a hallmark, a characteristic, a defining feature of UX and the way it was practised and the character of the practitioners who did it. Now that UX is not a dedicated role so much, it's more as a service role. We've got away from user-centric design, and we've got much more into previously in UX/UI Designer Centric Design, and now in product world, we're in product manager centric design. And the reason why UX and UCD were created in the first place was because engineers and other folk were trying to guess what users wanted and what featured to build next, and it never worked. It turned out bad. So we created UX and what we've done is undo all of that brilliance and replaced it with nothing. And so I'm here to say either replace it with something better or go back to what worked.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What do you say to those out there that say to you that you're being overly dogmatic in your perspective of what UX is? Tough
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Shit. Quite simply shut up and listen. That's what I'm saying, because the people that I've been accused of dogma by a certain recruiter person out there, recruiter, joker, comedian type person, if it was such dogma, I wouldn't have the following that I have. It's quite that simple. What I'm doing is characterising or social commentary, fact or reality or stuff that's happening. There are lots of people, there are more people who weren't there who don't have the experience than there are people who were there who know. And there's lots of people who want to call it dogma and want to poo poo us and put us down and look at the old folk talking about the old days, do a better job put up or shut up is what it's about. Because I'll take the Pepsi challenge with anybody, anywhere at any company, and I mean big four, big tech. I mean, anybody, I throw the gauntlet down, my UX FU is more powerful than yours, let's go. You know what I'm saying? People can't do it because they're still working to this top down stupid mentality or using their empathy instead of user research or design thinking or getting stuck in double diamonds and just overthinking this thing
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You said last year, something that it was frankly quite a provocative statement, or at least one that provoked a lot of thinking in me, which was, and I'll paraphrase you now, that you wouldn't recommend the field of UX to people who are considering it as a field to enter. Tell me about that.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- I actually have a draught post I was writing this evening in between research sessions saying pretty much that, and then I deleted it, but it's spot on, right? I still agree, and I agree even more in the face of ai. So the post I was writing was all about AI agents, which is the big, big hot topic that's just emerging at the moment. An AI agent is effectively, if you dunno what an AI agent is, it's exactly as it sounds. It's that next step from chatbot. It's the chatbot that does stuff that can do outcomes or do actions, which is effectively what the researcher could become, the designer, the engineer, the service designer, the content manager, the engineer, and then ultimately, I'm writing my whole post for you right here, and then the product manager, so you've got product team in a box. So if you're a junior, the world is bleak, and I'll tell you why this is controversial, but it's one way of looking at the potential.
- It's one of the potential futures in a world of intelligent agents, you need somebody of experience, of human intelligence to control that thing, to check it, to make sure you know what I mean. You cannot take hands off the machine, you just can't, right? We need a human hand on it somewhere. Everyone will agree that that's irrefutable, at least at this stage of the technology and for the foreseeable future, A junior is indistinguishable from an a i from an AI agent. An AI agent is cheaper, faster, better frankly, than a junior. So the future for juniors in a world of agents isn't good. The future for seniors, which currently sucks because juniors are cheaper, faster, better is good, but sorry, it sucks right now for seniors, but one potential future is they need us, if nothing else, for a fixed period time before we retire, to train the bots in the ways of what works, but to at least check validity, check to get the outcomes from the tooling that is necessary, whereas a junior will let the tooling decide the outcome.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So why fight it, Nick?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Why fight it? I'll tell you why. Because I believe, I come from generation X and generation X in the old world, believes in good, doing good work, making money, making good healthy margins, profits, being good capitalists or brilliant, but doing good, doing good with that. The latter world is about a kind of really greedy, unhealthy capitalism at the cost of the planet and everybody else's mental health. The modern world is all about making kind of cheap, fast, dirty money. And that was the point. The North star has been good, and the North star now is easy and fast and cheap, and that's the problem now, and that's why I'm very argumentative. If AI comes in and helps us build good, faster, cheaper, better, great a thousand percent, I'm all over it. And that's why I've been so deep into AI from the beginning because it's a potential way of doing good work better.
- That's the Glass's half full version. That's the Star Trek version. But the more cyberpunk or the more blade runner, the less sexy, dirtier future is extended greedy capitalism bots replacing us at scale, and we lose 80% of the workforce because we've either hybridised or bot ized roles or agent roles, which I mean, that's going to happen in 20, 30, 40 years time. I mean, in the science fiction future that's game on assuming this AI stuff trajectory stays good or they fix the problems and all of that, which I think we have to assume that that does happen one way or another. So yeah, again, I talk to my kids about going to university these days. Is there any point?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is that coming from a nihilistic point of view?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No, no, no. Practically careers are changing if you are setting yourself up right now for the future, and we kind of got an idea that the careers and the way of work and effort and learning and knowledge transfer is changing fundamentally, not just with the generation, but with the technology. That's so many moving parts that it's frankly unrecognisable. The older you get. It's so foreign and it's not necessarily good because it's all corporate driven for money. It's not an orchestrated societal good. Look at social networks. Social media, the unregulated harm that they have caused will, there will be war crime tribunals in 30, 50 years. Like all the retrospective stuff you see today when they be going back and getting people for doing dodgy stuff on the island, that shit's going to happen to meta executives and others. I have no doubt, and I'll put my name to that, you cannot do what you've done to my children and get away with it and make that much money. Nah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, speaking of big tech and thinking about the economics or the cycle that we're in, economic cycle that we're in currently, we seem to be at the bottom of a cycle, not necessarily of a dystopian AI cycle just yet, but definitely in terms of the job losses that we've seen in UX and tech more widely, what should UXs learn from this, whether it's been from firsthand experience having lost a job or whether it's just been seeing their colleagues virtually or physically if they're in the office, have to pack their cardboard boxes and leave?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- I think resilience, and that's not a good answer. I think the market is just showing its true colours. When the redundancy started happening about a year ago or a couple whenever that was, lots of other people commented quite rightly. This is, don't let us never forget that we're in a commercial world. It's about profits and corporation stuff. They might talk nicely about we're a family and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but push come to shove, you are a number on a sheet and it's about profits and delivering to the market, et cetera, and the bigger the company you're at or the more beholden to the market you are, I think there's just been a big reality check in that regard. I think we all got a little bit lost and a bit like loved up maybe, and this is just a reality check because the market does move in bulls and bears, you know what I mean?
- It goes up and down, it's cyclical. I think we've just come out of a time period including a pandemic, which obviously had fundamental changes and yeah, everyone's heads are spinning, so it's about resilience. I think what we're saying is these cycles are going to happen. I've seen, I was part of the.com boom, which again, I only went into academia because the world fell apart after that bubble burst. There wasn't a project to be seen. All the VC money disappeared. There was no way if you worked in tech, it sucked for a good few years. So I did a master's degree and then did the PhD, but I've seen this before, right? I'm old enough and ugly enough, so I'm like, okay, it'll pass. It sucks. Let's just get through it. But there are people, this is their first big, big boom kind of, or bounce or break or whatever you call it, bubble burst. It's okay, we'll pick ourselves up and we'll carry on. It just sucks, especially on a field for those people with families who have been either made homeless or had downgrade or make really massive life changing changes. It's crappy. Yeah, sorry. And that's why I don't mean to be flippant when I talk about resilience. I'm just saying when you look back on this, it's building you as a person. When the next stuff happens, it won't hit you. It is hard, it sucks. It's a learning experience, and that sounds cliche, but it's character building.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You were once to ask in a conference talk, I believe in the questions afterwards how UX people could make themselves indispensable. And I feel like this is relevant now given what we've just been discussing, particularly if people are thinking about the near term future of their career. And your response was, and I'll quote you again, make the company money. In the old school, we used to say, if you're washing your own face, if you are cash positive for your business, even in an indirect way, you are valuable. You don't fire people who are making you money. Now, that's something that UX people often struggle with, right? Tying their activity, their output to financial outcomes. I'm curious to understand how maybe you've been doing that in your career, how you've come to wash your own face and let other people in the company know that that's your contribution, that that's what you've been doing for the business.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- There's been lots of attempts to quantify UX, let's get to that. And there are people like Craig Sullivan and others who's doing really, really interesting great work in that area. I'm not part of it, but I'm just pointing people in that direction to his work. There are people who are specialising in this stuff and who have done decades worth of work in this area for me too, it doesn't work for me. I'm a much more pragmatic kind of guy. I have much more daily practitioner kind of problems. Those are kind of leadership questions and answers. I'm a practitioner guy and I influence upwards and sideways mostly. You know what I'm saying? And so that doesn't really help me much in solving those problems. This is hard to characterise without being super fluffy, but when you get a really good nugget of information of insight, people will know the value because they feel it not just in the knowledge that comes from, oh wow, I didn't know that or something, but it's the effect that that insight has Now, that might be on the engineering team, it might be on the designer, it might be on the conversion rate.
- There's a lot of things that thing can do, and it's really important that you kind of make sure that people know that it was your insight that move that needle. And once you do that once or twice, people are like, holy shit, Nick's doing good work. And it's basically that that's what it is in a nutshell. To compound matters. There's a lot of what Jared spool calls the over intellectualization of research or user research or of UX, and I don't agree with some of the things that Jared says, but he's on the money with this one. There have been too many PhDs like myself who have come directly out of academia and straight into a big tech role or somewhere either lasted a year or done a contract and then just traded off of that the rest of their careers and they dunno what they're doing and their reliability and they end up with this bizarre form of market research, which is not user research.
- It's just really bad. And if the market hadn't turned, I feel quite certain that a lot of these teams would've been made redundant anyway because they weren't showing value. They were over intellectualising doing stuff that just doesn't move the needle. Now how can you characterise this now? How can you identify it? It's overworking. It's boiling the ocean. I can see this stuff at a thousand yards, if you know what I mean. It stands out a mile when people don't know what they're doing and they've developed a house style, they stick to it rigidly. It's not right. It doesn't move the needle. It doesn't prove value. People can't connect the nugget to action, a needle moving. It's just a bunch of discovery work that got done and it's this kind of colourful stuff that just is in the picture, but it's not contributing to anything. It's not moving needles. It's not getting any kind of traction. And I was actually talking to somebody about another research about this early today.
- There's research. I want to buy a new car, so I need to do some research. And then there's research investigating stuff. Too many people treat research like that lower case research, and as such, they boil the ocean. They don't direct their inquiry. So they'll cast their net and they'll catch the fish that they were after, but they'll also catch sharks and sea lions and all kinds of other stuff and start reporting on them or even following them as lines of inquiry. And it's like, okay, that's great, but you were tasked with finding out about fish, not everything else that swims in the sea and this is what happens. So people are really bored with these kind of aquarium reports. Frankly,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are a evaluative behavioural based researcher and you've previously said about this, and that's what I am as well. You've previously said evaluative is what keeps me safe. I will pick the tyres on anything and I will learn stuff. Now, I feel like this ties into what you were talking about there, but how is it that evaluative research keeps you safe?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Your eyes and ears? Discovery isn't eyes and ears in the same way. It's at a completely different level. Discovery often is much more kind of market research or market needs or it's a higher up the stack or more macro, less micro, and that's what you feel is the boiling the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Ocean type research.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No, boiling the ocean is, I mean that can happen all over the place, but yeah, it's where you just get too crazy, too wide, don't have any limits on it, kind of no filter research type stuff. So what I'm saying is evaluative as a BAU activity is what keeps everybody safe. Not just me, the product manager, everybody. If you're not doing any kind of evaluative, you literally have a live product that you've got no idea about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Does it annoy you? That evaluative is often, I'd say that's not unfair, often characterised as a bit lowbrow, a bit of the realm of the junior, like something that
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Those guys are total morons. That's total mischaracterization, that's completely mischaracterization. It's the other way around. Anybody junior can fire up. Yeah, survey construction, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or iterative, blah, blah, blah. Great, okay. AI is going to be able to do that much faster, much quicker, much better, frankly. And interviews. Okay. Yeah, interviews math is a skillful thing for sure. When you are watching people doing things, you are seeing a much truer representation of things. They're not aspiring to something, they're not trying to acquiesce to what the investigator wants them to say because they want to be a great Guinea pig. Good test participant behaviour is much more honest. It's not always honest, but it's significantly more honest than self-reporting, which there's a whole bunch of fallacies biases, stuff that means that what comes out of your mouth isn't intentionally or unintentionally true. If we're building products, if we're investing all this money and time and resource into making products, that should be on knowledge, not on aspiration or acquiescence or fairytales.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, this is why if you ask a participant at the end of the session how they felt their experience was with the software, right? Nine times out of 10, they're going to give it a glowing, their own performance, a glowing, a glowing rate, a growing score.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- I'm loving talking to you because number one, you've just done your homework better than anybody ever, and you come up with all my favourite quotes type stuff, but you're so on the money asking the right sorts of questions and following the right sorts of inquiry people. It should be more about psychologists and behavioural work because that's the work that AI won't be able to do for a longest of times. And there's real value in that. That's how you build good products. We need market research and we need user research, but the two of them need to be separated back out again. For me personally, I would give discovery to market research and say, you have it. You're doing it anyway. Just do it. Great. Everyone's happy. No nomad changes, just kind of a name change. May not be happy with it because it's not cool user, but I would love to see people needing to have a psychology B, s, C, just some basic training in human behaviour. But in time I like to see it become a whole different specialisation where people can get into UX, get into behavioural science one, the behavioural sciences in whichever specialisation they were fancy, and then start applying it in the UX or HCI commercial context because that's the good stuff. And that's where we beat the machines. That's where we win it. We are so much better than ai.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How do you key yourself into the behaviour of a participant in session? Do you have some sort of ritual or something that you do so that you are picking up on what it is that you're there to see? I've
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Been reading people since the age I was six or seven years old since I can remember the day lying in bed where there was my thought was like, wait a minute, I dunno what other people are thinking. I remember that day, I remember it, it was yesterday kind of thing. And it was like that was the moment I decided I had to try to understand what other people were thinking. Probably through neurosis as a driver, it wasn't then through intellectual or academic or I was six years old and just a scared young 6-year-old. So I've been reading people for a long time. So in order to get into a mindset, it's nothing because reading people all the time, every time you
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Spend a lot of time with people, I mean we are spending time together now. Right now, right after you've run a couple of research sessions just prior and something that you've said about yourself, which I don't know should have made me laugh. I dunno if that's the right reaction, but it did, and that was, and I'll quote you again, that you are the most antisocial people person you've ever met. And how do those two things work together given what it is that you've chosen for a profession?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- The best way I can characterise that is I'm interested in the humans as a species, but individually they disgust me kind of thing. It's something in that ballpark. It is like, wow, these creatures are mental and they do all these things and they're fascinating to read and to understand, but that one called Bob's a real bastard to the one called Mary or whatever. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like we do horrible things to each other and people are horrible to me and neuros and all kinds of stuff. So like I say, at a macro level, at a micro level, I'm sociable as an interest and antisocial by practise. You know what I mean by reality. Got it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I was also fascinated to learn about your research practise that you favour short sessions, 15 to 20 minute sessions, right over the long one hour sessions. And you talked before about how this is elsewhere. You've talked about the pain of analysis of actually having to go through an hour long interview or a recorded usability test or something and painstakingly makes sense of what's going on. You've also said before that sometimes you'll go back a second or a third time if you find that there's more that you need to learn about a particular subject from a participant. I was curious, how often do you find yourself needing to go back a second or a third time?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- That so much depends upon, there's so many factors to that, Brendan. It's a hard one to answer that usually I don't, okay. The headline is you don't want to go back to participants and you want to just get new samples. So let's just get that on the open so that the audience aren't screaming and throwing things at the screen. I get that. Okay. But when you're working with, let's get an example. Accessible needs users, and we're talking about, let's say screen reader users because they are very visually impaired and they use jaws. Those people don't grow on trees and they're not easy to get hold of. And if you are developing a specific software, I was somewhere, it was supply chain software. It's really specialist stuff for a very specialist persona, and now I've got to find an 80% plus visually impaired person that's going to hold development back.
- We've got to keep moving. You've got to hustle, you've got to make some compromises, and that's one of the compromises that you make is I have to revisit certain personas because that's what I've got at hand, and is it really destroying my validity? They're familiar with it. No, they're not. They're seeing new functionality, they're seeing iterated staff, and to be fair, we're improving the quality for blind people across the board by involving a blind person in the development. So that's the high water marker. It's the best I can do given all the limitations, and you can apply that to all kinds of different areas. There's a particular type of admin that I'm recruiting for right now that is kind of unicorny or obscured by other job titles, which means finding them is really, really hard. Which means you sometimes at the end of the last few sessions I've said, Hey, would you mind coming back? I'll get in contact at the next iteration point in the next couple of weeks after a couple of sprints. I'd like you to see what the improvement is like after we've taken incorporate this insight into account. Sometimes that's the way it has to be. It's not what they teach you. It's not what you would be mentored in, but it's the practical world, the pragmatic world of actual practise.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's interesting to consider that from the point of view, not only of the researcher getting in and out quickly, having less analysis to do and leaving the door open to return if need be, but also from the perspective of the participant, there's a less of a time commitment. Maybe you end up speaking three times in 20 minute blocks over six weeks. I wonder, I mean this is all hypothetical, but I wonder how receptive more participants might be to that kind of lower touch, lower commitment dive and dive out type research. But coming back to your own practise as a researcher, this fascinated me from the perspective of as a researcher, I feel a need even in these conversations, I feel a need like we're having right now. I feel a need to get to depth with people. And I'm curious to understand, you obviously have done a lot of research sessions in your career, and if you are doing ones that are shorter than most people would consider their norm, how do you feel that you get to depth sooner than maybe you would've earlier on in your career? How do you get to depth sooner in a short research session, like 20, 20 minutes?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- So the concept of depth is absolutely market research speak, right? A depth interview. It is not necessarily UX or user research parlance. I've never used it. And whilst keep me honest and bring me back on track because I'm going to go tangential. The qu quant distinction has not been a UX or user research distinction either. That's also language and practise that's come from market research. So let's just say that right now. Where were we?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We were talking about how you, and I'm going to use the market research term here.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah, depth. How do I get to depth debt,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right quickly.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yes, yes, yes. So I don't need to get the depth. I need to get to insight. I've never needed to get to depth at all. There are times I did work for the passport office, which when I'm doing discovery work, you're doing highly technical, highly subject matter focused stuff around procedure law stuff, checks, all of that. That is depth, but it's depth of a factual nature, shall we say. But for me, it's all the same. I'm getting to the insight that I need to, I've got a research plan, a research objective research goal. I've got a research plan to execute it, and I've got a methodology to support that. So I'm just getting, this is why I tell people the phrase theology I use is get in, get the gold, get out. What people do is they get in, they get the gold and they go, right, let's get some copper and some zinc and some other aluminium whilst we're here.
- And it's like, well, great. Well, I'm gone and I'm down the street whilst you are shopping around. And we talked about earlier about catching different fish in the aquarium analogy, and it's exactly the same thing. Now, the reason why people have got this, you watch Ghostbusters, right? This getter mentality, right, is it's like when you have research that is infrequent and not BAU, it's like a bus that doesn't come around very often and everybody just wants to pile on because the next one's not coming around for ages. So the PM gives you a script that's this not script of research questions that are this long and you're going to get to an hour and 45 minutes, two hours, whatever, doing your depth interview to cover all this stuff. Meanwhile, the participant tapped out at 20 minutes. It's all bullshit. From there, they're wishing they were dead or thinking about what they've got to do for tea or whatever's going on, and you watch them, you watch them visually check out, you watch the eyes, the light fades.
- You know what I mean? They're just like, unless they're really super into it and they're passionate about it, fine, fair enough. All bets are off and they'll talk the legs off a donkey for 10 hours. But that's a separate circumstance. You are there to do regular research to keep everybody honest and on track and to give them the eyes and ears to keep the product manager wholesome and healthy and informing the roadmap. You can't do that infrequently. You can't do that on demand. You need it all the time. It's like I can't have my eyes and ears off every now and then and just turn them on, have a quick look and then turn 'em back off. Again, same thing. You need your senses. So your senses are your user research. And so that happens, should happen every sprint all the time. It just doesn't have to be 20 people, two hours each time.
- It can be five people for 20 minutes, half an hour each time, but you're doing another five the following week, and in a month you've done 20. And guess what? Instead of having everybody read one fat report that no one cares about, you've got constant insight being reported back to the team every week. That's course correction. That's gold. If people aren't doing it, they're crazy. They're irresponsible and stupid. I'll go out on a limb, stop being stupid, do the good stuff and do rapid short effective research. My book, I didn't want to do this right now, but I just said it. My book is called Rapid Research, and it's all the stuff we're talking about here in the book characterised. My problem is this. I don't have the time or the inclination to write a book that no one really wants to read, but I have to write a book in order to get the kudos and the status in the wider world for people to listen to me. Stupid. That isn't it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't think any product teams would close their ears off to the tune of rapid research. And speaking of product teams, and you've mentioned product managers a couple of times now, there's a trend that I've observed. I'm not sure if you've seen it as well, that more and more product people, generally product managers are seeing and potentially product designers are seeing this type of rapid research this quick get and get out.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Aligned with sprints,
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Super careful. Yeah, no. If they are doing it and they're doing it as a user researcher, that's great. And that's what rapid research is all about. This is not about initially product managers cutting user researchers out the loop and doing their DIY research. I don't want to cross those streams, right? There is definitely an angle where the product manager uses rapid research as a methodology for sure. I'm not ruling anybody out, this is for everybody. But it comes with some caveats and some cautions. We've got essentially into a real pickle because of the lack of the validity of the research that we're doing. It's too much checkbox work. And a lot of this market research is unfortunately over intellectualised, overworked and kind, checkboxy checkboxy attractive fairytales. The world will come around it to, it really has to because it's just not sustainable. And it's not sustainable. It won't make the money. That's what it's all about is money. So in order to make money, there's a validity of information throughout our lives. Professional personally, everything is critically important. So we all have to become more critical thinkers and more importantly, get in, get the goal, get what you need and get out so that you get that validity, the good stuff, which builds the good product, which makes them
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Money. What do you think the short-term job prospects will look like for UX researchers given the current state of product more broadly and also the trends that we're seeing with ai?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- I think it's kind of binary. There are enlightened organisations who are user research friendly and kind of get it, and those who don't get it but are going through the motions. Those people that don't get it who are going through the motions or who are bullshitting, are losing people right now, unfortunately. And usually it's not the team's fault. I want to say that absolutely explicitly. It's upstairs, it's shenanigans. It's either boardroom bullshit or budget shenanigans, or there's this tax stuff in America which has been causing heck. You know what I mean? So there's often good or reasons out of control that this stuff is happening, but as you led off with my quote, if they were really washing their faces, they wouldn't be under such scrutiny. That's the truth. So we all need to learn how to make money through valid information, not just people who look and sound good or who are doing this checkbox activity.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the checkbox activities that people can fall into in their careers is racking up the job titles and getting themselves into senior positions. You've previously spoken about this and you've said, this is a very short quote, don't be in a rush to be a senior. Why not?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- And you know what? I was in rush to be a senior because you want to be a senior, and when somebody told me to be a senior, you need at least eight years is what they said to me. I bolted it. I was like, really? On the other side of that eight years, you deeply understand why that person said that. But anytime before that, even up to five years, you don't get it. You just don't ask any true senior in any practise. It's not a UX or research thing. You ask a executive creative director, they'll all tell you the same things. You just have to live it. You have to overcome the adversity. You have to have the different context and different projects, and your brain puts it all together. If you try to become a senior after 2, 3, 4 years or even five years, you're going to be faced with situations that you haven't faced before that are really unique and you're going to have a shit tonne of pressure on you with optics and everything, and that's a very uncomfortable place to be. Now, you, all of us have watched fake seniors and leaders squirming quite publicly trying to do a thing that they're clearly not experienced in doing. I don't think that behaviour is going to float moving forwards, or it shouldn't be allowed to float. A lot of the stuff that we are seeing in our digital industry is only happened because it's allowed to happen. Go back 20 years where we had management with a capital M, none of this would've happened. You wouldn't need transformation programmes begging people to be productive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Clarify that distinction with management with a capital M. What do you mean by that?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Okay, gen X perspective here, there was a chain of command when I grew up, right? You did as you were told. If somebody more senior said something to you, you did what you were told otherwise there was a disciplinary, I mean, that's a pretty harsh way of looking at it, but that was pretty much the way of the world. There was a chain of command from the board level downwards and management was the art and science of getting people to do the things you needed them to do. When I got my first leadership job as a pre-sales manager, I was sent on courses. They made me go on a Dale Carnegie course and quadrant training partnership to learn this stuff because the mentality then was you can't be a leader of people without any leadership skills. It's like, we're not going to put you in the car to drive if you've never driven before, so you need to go on some driving lessons.
- And I had driving lessons nowadays, there's no driving lessons. Everyone's driving the car for the first time and it's really messy and younger generations learn and are influenced in a completely different way. They take instruction or guidance in a completely different way. They want to reinvent everything. They don't want to stand on anyone's shoulders or no knowledge. They want to try everything for the first novel the first time because they've got a better way, which they many cases don't and are learning the hard way. And mental health is off the scale in many, many cases of that generation or those generations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In many ways though, what I believe we're talking about here is risk and the risk for people becoming senior too soon. The risk, I suppose what you're talking there about managers not being great people leaders is that ultimately the work that we do in UX becomes of a lower quality and our users, the people that we're supposed to be centred around suffer as a result. I know you've spoken about before that the research part of UX is somewhat of a risky business in the sense that the decisions that get made off the back of the gold that we come back with often consequential if they do indeed see the light of day. I was wondering how do you personally manage the risk or the risk of blowback? Should there be a decision made on an insight that you've provided that didn't pan out particularly well or has the risk of not panning out particularly well?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- So that's never happened and I wish it had, I wish Debbie Levitt is really strong on this and I support her a bazillion percent and I completely see the same. There is no accountability in our world. If you come in and say, I've been out, I've done the research, and customers want blue bottles and we stick 'em on the market, it turns out everybody wanted red bottles. Nothing ever comes back to me because it's the marketing. People have got reasons why bottles a bad year for bottles or you know what I mean? There's stuff competitor, somebody died in the headlines and took my PR moment or all of that good stuff, right? There's never any accountability and so there's never any blowback there should be, and I want to believe in this version of the future that we've previously talked about, that there is more accountability and therefore that changes the behaviour of the researcher, the value of the researcher and the kind of researcher that you hire, you see, because the quality of the insight then becomes much more important and much more valued instead of this kind of fluffy researchy thing that we do because dunno, a lot of PMs ignore the insight.
- It feels like why are we actually doing this stuff?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- People listening to this or watching this will hear and some of them will see the concern, the passion in what it is that you're saying. Do you find that there's a subtext running in the background for you? Now, of course feel free to say no, but do you find that you worry less about the implications or outcomes of your work today than you did in the past even though outwardly you care more and wish things were run a different way?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- We need to build good products and make money and preserve mental health and have careers and all of this good stuff. So all I'm doing is forcing my way through with something that I know works that is a known good. So it doesn't matter if people are stumbling around in the dark. I want to be a beacon in this dark and hopefully other people join this beacon and this light gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it outshines the dark. Does that answer it or have I just gone off on a wild tangent?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I feel like I asked you quite an opaque question possibly. I was trying to come up with it on the fly and I hadn't fully set itself in my mind as to what it was. I suppose what my observation is, and this could be wildly off base, is that you clearly care a lot about what you're saying about the field, about wanting us to actually do human-centered design in the way that it was intended. Yet I also sense this rather relaxed side of you, which is possibly the product of age and experience in the sense that while you would like it to be different and you are working for it to be different internally, there's a sense of acceptance of the way in which things currently are. And it's a really interesting, I wouldn't call it a tension that I see, but it's a really interesting double set of states that you seem to be able to hold and it's just something that I picked up on. I'm not sure if it's a real thing though.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Well, I dunno if it's I or we old school UX as are problem solvers ultimately, right? A lot of this is all about problem solving and all I'm doing is kind of problem solving. I'm just trying to put it all together. It's a very pragmatic mindset that I have because maybe I'm A DHD that I'm not married to certain concepts in my head. It's very fluid, too fluid, but that probably has some benefits in that I maybe I'm able to swap mode or see things in a different perspective, which allows me to accept the way of the world, but also try to change it at the same time, which is weirdly contradictory. That seems to work. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Nick, I'm just mindful of time. I know it's very late for you over.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- No, I'm loving this man. We can talk as long as you want. I'll sit up all night. You are my favourite podcast guy so far.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I better bring things down to a close. And I have one final question for you, and that is if you could encourage UX people who are listening to this today to take just one action, something that would help them build a healthier, better field, what would that be?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Well, I've posted on LinkedIn just now in between research sessions, evaluate your golden journeys. I mean that that's the best advice I can give you because that's going to give you the most return for not the least effort. But also you don't have to be an expert or the least clue. Yes, you can do a much better job with clue and experience. There's no question at all. But if we're staring down the barrel of a gun and we've got our job security and other stuff at risk, it's time to hustle. It's time to wiggle it. So get out there. I say, when I say get out there, I said this on my little recording, don't get out there, but get users in. Get them in front of your important golden journeys, the one that makes you money. The thing that has to work, it might be onboarding, it might be signup, it might be buying a thing, it might be retention information, finding, whatever that stuff is, make sure they can do it.
- You get five people in a week or do 10 people, but do five people do half an hour sessions, get them in. Don't tell 'em anything. Don't have a big script, don't do any of the stuff. Just be like, hi, I'm Nick, I'm a user researcher. You are not being tested. We're testing the system. Do you mind if I record it? Get your other caveats out the way and Bosch you go, if they don't work out what it is, you've got a propositional problem, right? So that's step one. Number two, they should work out what it is. They should work out how to use it from there. And if they don't, you need help systems and help contextual help and stuff. Let them go through it, let them fail. There's a pregnant silence where they're visibly struggling. Let them let that happen for a bit and then let them off the hook quite quickly. This isn't about letting them become mentally anguished or nervous or anything, but you need to be sure that they're struggling before you jump in. And one of the best pieces of advice I can give is STFU when you're doing this. Believe me, I'm a very loquacious, talkative kind of guy, but when it comes to user research, I've actually become a ninja at shutting the hell up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to say, some people might have to Google their acronym.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Yeah, yeah, shut the hell up. STFU used to be as common as lll in my world. But anyway, yeah, shutting the hell up, being quiet in a user research station, especially an evaluative one, not because when you are talkie talkie in a discovery generative, you are expecting to cut each other off and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, different. Those rules do not apply in evaluative. You need to shut up, but you also need to know when to cut them off and to move them along and you know what I mean? Get, stop them going off down other roads better that you do this and make all kinds of newbie errors and have your senior or lead help you, support you. Keep you honest. Don't do this rogue on your own because you can go absolutely mental and wrong, but test your golden journey. You'll learn within 10 users where the major problems are, and I'm not doing Norman Nielsen, just factual stuff. If it's a really big problem, you'll see it after three, but just hang on a bit, you'll see it repeated.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a good point to finish on. Nick, this has been a really energising and thought provoking discussion. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Brendan, thanks for having me. I've been looking at the wrong camera the whole time, so if I'm looking there, I'm looking at Brendan, but this has been fantastic, really, thank you so much for inviting me. I've genuinely enjoyed it. I've loved the homework and what you know about me, and especially the stuff with the hacking. You know me better than me and my wife probably, which is a bit bizarre. So thank you very much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's been my pleasure. My pleasure, Nick. And if people want to connect with you, they want to follow all of your contributions to the field, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- Two ways on YouTube. I wrote, I made a video in 2018 called An Introduction to UX Psychology. Please go and watch that. That's my heart on a plate that's coming back. It won't be coming back as UX psychology because it got stolen by people. I've got a new thing that's coming out shortly that I'm working on right now, which is going to bring behaviour right back. Again. I've had to allow all the misinformation junkies to fail, frankly. And by the way, you can tell who they are because they haven't mentioned user centricity to date. So if you're being mentored by somebody who hasn't mentioned user centricity, they're a fraud. They're not a UX person. Secondly, LinkedIn, I'm pretty much regular on there and I'm noisy as hell. I can't respond to PMs as much as I'd like to because my PM box is just like a wrap. It is like a ticket tape, scroller. It's not even funny, but I try to go through it. Every now and then I'll try to get in contact, so there we go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thank you, Nick. And
- Nick Fine, PhD:
- To everyone, thanks everyone. Thanks again, Brendan. Really great.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. To everyone else that's been listening to us today, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Nick and all of the things that we've spoken about.
- 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, subscribe so it turns up every two weeks, and also pass it along to maybe just one other person who you feel would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me also on LinkedIn, just Google, just put into the LinkedIn search bar, Brendan Jarvis, and you'll find me. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz, and until next time, keep being brave.