Abby Covert

Episode 146
Brave UX

Making Sense & Getting Unstuck

In this episode of Brave UX, Abby Covert shares her journey into and through IA 🔺, how we can get the most out of diagramming ✏️, and why she redefined her relationship with work 🌱.

Highlights include:

Did you really buy your home because of a pencil sharpener?
What prompted you to reevaluate your relationship with work?
What’s the connection between Craig’s List, Bermuda, and icons?
How does IA need to evolve to address today’s global challenges?
Why isn’t it always helpful to ‘show your thinking’?

October 29, 202401:10:46

Listen on:

Who is Abby Covert?

Abby is an information architect, author, teacher and community leader whose work is geared around getting people un-stuck 🚜 and in a position to make sense of any mess!

Before going solo, Abby was a Senior Staff Information Architect at Etsy, where among solving some thorny, large-scale IA issues, she was the primary change agent behind the company’s first Voice of the Customer programme 📣.

She is the author of two books. Her first, “How to Make Sense of Any Mess”, demystifies information architecture into a practical skillset that anyone can apply to any context. 📚 Her second, “Stuck? Diagrams Help.”, takes you from diagram novice to diagram nerd.

A committed community organiser, Abby is the founder of The Sensemakers Club, the Inventor of World Information Architecture Day 💡, and was the president of the Information Architecture Institute from 2014 to 2016.

Transcript

Abby Covert:
I think that if you are not looking at your customer's negative feedback, I don't know what kind of user experience professional you are. So yeah, I have to look at it. I have to know what's the problem so that next time I know what the problem is.
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 Abby Covert. Abby is an information architect, author, teacher, and community leader whose work is geared around getting you unstuck and in a position to make sense of any mess before going solo.
Abby was a senior staff information architect at Etsy, where among solving some thorny large scale IA issues, she was the primary change agent behind the company's first voice of customer programme.
She's the author of two books, her first How to Make Sense of Any Mess, demystifies Information Architecture into a practical skillset that anyone can Apply to Any context. Her second Stuck Diagrams help takes you from diagram novice to diagram nerd.
A committed community organiser. Abby is the founder of The Sense Makers Club, the inventor of World Information Architecture Day, and was the president of the Information Architecture Institute from 2014 through to 2016. Rumour has it, she also hosts an annual celebration of sensemaking called Make Sense Mess on the first Friday of November, every year.
Abby has delivered over 75 talks, keynotes and workshops at a variety of design technology, advertising and marketing events. And her style has been described as a shot of espresso and nerdy, but approachable. Let's hope that's the case because she's now here with me for this conversation on Brave UX Abby, a very warm welcome to the show.
Abby Covert:
Thank you for having me.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is a pleasure. Thank you for bearing with me as I made my way through that introduction. It's a wonderful introduction and I'm really, really looking forward to speaking with you today, Abby, and I understand where I wanted to start with this conversation is that I understand that you bought your current home I because of a pencil sharpener,
Abby Covert:
This man does his research people. It's true. Yeah. You won't be able to see that because my webcams sit, but yeah, the room that I'm sitting in was built in the nineties by an author and he wrote textbooks. So he was working from home before any of us were working from home, right. Textbooks and yeah, his estate was putting this property up and there was a bunch of offers and in the offer letter that we wrote, I mentioned that I really wanted to write my next book there and I asked if they could leave the pencil sharpener, and we were told that that was the thing that put it over the edge in terms of who got the house. So we were not the top offer, but we did have the pencil sharpener request. So yeah, I think that encapsulates author magic if you have to.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really interesting insight into who the people that were selling the property as well and what they valued, isn't it? It wasn't just about the money.
Abby Covert:
Oh, no, no, was definitely, she was very clear that she really wanted him to be happy with who lived here. I mean, he built this whole room and it's surrounded by oak bookcases, so the entire room, it's very obviously the place of an author and you could also see how somebody could really wreck this place, just rip all the bookcases out and turn it into a condo. So I've been up here for eight years now, so yeah, I did. I wrote my second book here and done a lot more than that. So very happy
Brendan Jarvis:
Authors do tend to, at least this is the romantic notion of authors. They do tend to place emphasis on the physical surroundings that they find themselves in when they're writing. What bearing, if any, I mean, how could it not have some bearing, but what bearing has the environment of your home being amongst those wonderful bookcases had on your ability to write what you've written?
Abby Covert:
I think to answer that, I would have to juxtapose how I wrote my first book, which was in a very loud coffee shop in Manhattan. So when I wrote my first book, I was living in a 400 square foot studio with my husband. We had just gotten married and he was working from home, so, so that was not going to work for long to try to get writing done. And at that point I really liked to write to noise, but when it came time to write my second book, I had to write in silence, and that was really interesting. It was just a big change for me. The same thing happened in the editing process. My first book, when I was taking in the edits from my editor, I listened to classical music for whatever reason, and I'm not a classical music listener. It's not like a genre that I find myself going to, but for whatever reason at that time of my life, that's the kind I listened to. But then in the second book, could not listen to anything, had to be totally in silence. So I dunno, I feel like maybe it's maturity, I don't know, maybe I'm easily distractible enough in silence. I'm not sure it could be either or both.
Brendan Jarvis:
I was wondering, was it the content of the book that kind of necessitated the change in that environment or was it that you had changed? And I suppose that's a difficult question to answer because you can't run two things in parallel. There are more than one variable at play here, but it's interesting to hear that distinct change in the environment that you needed to support the work you were doing. I
Abby Covert:
Mean, I've changed so much as a person between those two books. So I mean, that first book changed me as a person. So by the time I wrote the second one, I was a much different individual, so I'm not surprised that it was very different. Yeah, everything about writing that book was different.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned that How to make Sense of Any Mess changed you as a person. How would you describe that change? Well, to me now, what was that change?
Abby Covert:
I think honestly, it wasn't writing the book that showed it to me. It was working with students after the book was written and then rereading it myself. I noted that that book was me working out, recovering from my perfectionism. That book was me telling. I know that it says how to make sense of any mess, but it's also telling you that you can't make sense of every mess. It's like you have to pick. And I think that that was something that when I was a young information architect, I didn't believe, I thought that if I worked hard enough, if I put in the hours, if I put in the grit that I could get it done. And that wasn't true. That in reality, a lot of it has to do with things lining up just so, and working within the nuance of people and relationships.
And I think that book was me teaching myself that stuff because the reason I wrote that book was because all of a sudden I was in the position of having to teach undergraduate art students about information architecture. And their questions were not about how to put boxes and lines on pieces of paper. Their questions were about, well, how do you get people to agree on it and well, how do you know what words to use? And all these things were much, much harder than the basics of take words and move them into hierarchies and then test those hierarchies with users. It's like that is the method, but that is not the art that's behind information architecture. So yeah, I think that book was, it started as a collection of note cards and each note card had a headline on it, and each headline was something that I learned.
I wrote that book in my early thirties, and at that point I'd been practising for a little less than a decade, and teaching will really force you to understand what you don't understand. So yeah, my first students at Parsons got the first version of that book, and it was not one headline and a paragraph for each. It was long form. It was more like a textbook, and it was so boring that there was no way that's ever going to make anybody else read that. So yeah, I feel like they were the inspiration for writing the book, but then since I've definitely found that I think I was a big part of the audience for the book and I didn't know that.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's interesting reading some of the reviews, which most of them are really positive. There's the odd outlying one there.
Abby Covert:
I actually, I love my one star reviews. I think my one star reviews are wonderful. I actually show them in a talk that I get about intention.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, that's good to hear, because I was going to touch on one of them, which I found particularly, particularly interesting. So the book, just so that people have the full context, it's done really well. I mean, objectively really well, it's got an average of 4.3 stars at a five on Amazon from 548 ratings. So it's a really impressive strike rate in terms of how people have responded to it, but not everyone has loved it. And there was this one person, John w Ely, who titled their one Star Review. You're familiar with this one?
Abby Covert:
No, but I can't wait to see which one you picked.
Brendan Jarvis:
They titled their one star review, a cartoon take on a Serious Problem.
Abby Covert:
Oh yeah, I do
Brendan Jarvis:
Remember this one. That's one of my favourite favourites. And they said, if you like cartoons rather than text, this book is for you. Otherwise it is a waste of time and money. And I was like, some people write some harsh stuff on the internet, and I always knew that was true, but I put myself in your shoes there. And of course, I don't actually know how you feel about this feedback. So first of all, my question was what meaning does feedback like that hold for you?
Abby Covert:
I'm going to start by quoting my husband when I am upset about bad feedback from basically anyone about anything. He says, Abby, some people don't like the Beatles. And then I'm just like, you're so right. And honestly, I think that a big part to do with how I feel about my reviews for the book have to do with the decisions that I made in writing the book. I did not write that book for folks that wanted to get deep on information architecture. I didn't, I'm sorry. I know you really want that from me. I know I can feel it, but it's not the book that I wrote, and as clear as I feel like it is when you're seeing the marketing for the book or looking at flipping through it, I just think that people are kind of like, no, but really, because why are all these good high star reviews?
Where's this coming from? And I think that what they are missing is the people that get it, I think are reading it philosophically, and the people that don't get it are reading it really methodologically. And the methods are just not that deep. Doesn't have to be, we don't need to start there. So yeah, there's other books for them, and I learned from a lot of those other books. I've got a whole shelf of 'em up here, but I'll tell you this right now, my art school students we're not going to read any of those books. And if they did, if I made them, if I peeled their eyes open and made them do it, they wouldn't do anything with that information that was going to change their design. It's a long road from there to there. And I feel like there needed to be a book for that road. So that's the one I wrote, and 10 years later, I'm really glad I did.
Brendan Jarvis:
The vast majority of people that took the time to leave reviews found value in the book. Yeah. It's interesting to hear though, because some I understand don't read the reviews on purpose. They kind of resist the urge to look at their reviews, I suppose, to avoid the potential distress of reading something like that. But it sounds like you've really taken it as confirmation that what you did was exactly what you had sought to achieve with the book.
Abby Covert:
I'm not going to say that it doesn't hurt when people say things on the internet that are not kind, and some of the reviews are not kind. So I wish that sometimes the way that they were written was a little bit kinder. But I think that if you are not looking at your customer's negative feedback, I don't know what kind of user experience professional you are. So yeah, I have to look at it. I have to know what's the problem so that next time I know what the problem is. So yeah, I think that my second book, I actually really invested heavily in thinking about the first one and what would I do differently. And one of the things that I decided to do differently was I really wanted to make sure that I had an academic lens on diagramming as much as I wanted to write a very practical book.
So I partnered with a librarian, I was like, Hey, I want to know where all these things came from, but I'm not a skilled enough researcher, and I'm honestly not an interested enough researcher to go and find all of the truth. And so yeah, Jenny Benevento was a real, just like an invaluable resource in making sure that in the reviews for stuck, yeah, no one's saying that we didn't go deep enough. We definitely did. And Stuck is also kind of a deeper dive on the first book. So the pizza diagrams from the first book were one of the things that people talk to me about the most, but honestly, the feedback is, oh gosh, I love those pizza diagrams, but how do you make that about not pizza, I get that you made it about pizza, that's awesome. Or a simple concept, but how do you make one of those for something really complex? How do you actually diagram things? And so I think that was a big inspiration for why the second book is what it's,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, and it seems far more practical perhaps than how to make sense of any mess. You've even got, I think you call them recipe cards in there for diagrams, sort of giving people a bit of a leg up as to how to get started with doing some of the practical aspects of diagramming.
Abby Covert:
Yeah, I think that how to make sense of NMS is a mindset book and Stuck Diagrams Help is a skillset book.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Now from what I gather, you good friends with a Curious Human, a founder of Boxes and Arrows, a product leader, design leader, educator and notable tech author, and also previous guest on Brave UX, Christina Waca. What role has Christina played in your journey as an author? And I suppose more broadly, if you want to touch on anything more broadly as well?
Abby Covert:
Yeah, Christina is such an important person, especially in my first 10 years in the IA field. I felt like when I met her, it was sort of like I saw, I hate to say this, but oh, women can do this in this field and people will actually listen. And this was a long time ago, so I feel like it's a little strange to say that, but as a woman in her mid twenties when I started in this industry, that was hard to find. That was a really tough model to find and to believe in. And Christina was not only that, but she was also very giving of that spirit to other women. So yeah, I felt like I felt very held by her pretty immediately. One of my favourite memories of Christina is when I was the incoming president of the Information Architecture Institute, she offered to drive me from San Francisco to San Diego.
I don't know if anybody's done that drive, but it's a beautiful drive, but it's also a very long drive. And so she and I did that drive over three days in a yellow Mini Cooper. Yeah, it was like a life-changing event. We went to Smar, which is where the Information Architecture Institute was founded. She showed me the part of history that I had missed in the field that I had joined right after that had happened. I got to really dig inside the brain of a woman that had been there for a lot longer than I had been. And then as a writer, I feel like she and I are very similar in that. We just don't think it has to be that complicated. We both just want it to be joyful and clear, and we both love drawing our ideas. Yeah, I feel like, thank you for asking me about that. Christina and I have a lot of really fond memories.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm just really thrilled to learn that she had a yellow mini Cooper. That's such quick
Abby Covert:
Cars. I wonder if she still does, honestly, she might still have that little yellow mini. Christina, do you still have the yellow mini Cooper? The people want to know, find
Brendan Jarvis:
Out.
Abby Covert:
Yeah, please do find out. Report back.
Brendan Jarvis:
People may be familiar who are listening
Abby Covert:
To this. I have a picture, by the way. I'm going to send it in show notes. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Definitely. I got sending
Abby Covert:
Pages.
Brendan Jarvis:
Send it in for sure. People are probably familiar with Christina's books who are listening today. One of them, I think the one that, well, I have to say she's written a number, but this one definitely put her on the map, which is called Radical Focus, which is about OKRs. And I heard you previously say something about OKRs, and I'm going to quote you now. You said I write KPIs for everything. My KPIs, I write OKRs for everything. My personal life is driven by OKRs. Actually. I dunno if that's quite true. Maybe it was KPIs and not OKRs. But anyway, I wanted to ask you, what's the funniest or perhaps most outrageous KPI or KR that you've set for yourself?
Abby Covert:
Well, I would say that mine are all anti-business KPIs in the traditional sense. So for example, one of my most proud ones is that from 2011 to 2020, I reduced my working hours by about 30% every single year. And so it was like this lovely graph of whoosh, and that was me recovering from workaholism. And so I feel like one of the things that I used to measure back in that day was nights away from home, there's a certain number of nights away from home that just made my mental health not the picture of health. And so that was one of the KPIs that I remember tracking pretty closely. Another one was the number of weekends that I ended up working anyways, and that used to be a real problem. Not so much anymore. Now I'm a really good weekend is a weekend person, but back then, not so much. The boundaries were not quite there. So a lot of my measurement of myself is about showing myself that I am healing from the things as opposed to tracking things to, I don't know, punish myself that I didn't get there or something.
Brendan Jarvis:
That sort of self-flagellation for not having achieved the impossible list of things you set yourself to achieve in the week. The people listening probably pays to remind everyone listening that weekends are not for work people, weekends are for not
Abby Covert:
Work. I mean, at least a few days of your week should be for not work. That's what days those are is up to you. What times of days, those are up to you. But if none of that time is allocated for not work and not domestic labour tasks, then yeah, I think you might not like what happens a couple years from now.
Brendan Jarvis:
What made you realise you needed to reevaluate your relationship with work?
Abby Covert:
I will tell you this very clearly. On the eve of world, in 2012, I was admitted to the University of Michigan hospital system for burnout. And that was that. And my very best friend and fellow ia, Dan Klein, drove me to that hospital. And we were sitting in the waiting room and we were going to the er. And it just so happened that that ER and the mental health ward of the hospital were right next to each other. And so it was just like a, Hey, next time we might be going over there and we don't want to go over there. And so yeah, the next day, instead of speaking at an event that I helped to create, I sat in my business partner's basement and ate soup that his wife made me. And I watched. I watched it on a crappy live stream circa of 2012. It was pretty rough. Yeah, somebody took my speaking slot, thank you to whoever did that. I don't actually remember who it was, I'm sorry. But yeah, that was the moment. That was the one where I was just like, oh, not invincible. Turns out
Brendan Jarvis:
It's a hard lesson to learn, isn't it? And I wish that more people, myself included, could have learned it vicariously rather than firsthand. So it's really refreshing.
Abby Covert:
You can, yeah. I dunno if you, I think it sucks. It's one of those, can you not hit rock bottom if you've never hit rock bottom? I dunno if I would've. I think I needed plenty of people had told me I wasn't listening, but then I had to listen.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is making a lot of sense. Actually. I listened to your interview with Andy Mullan on the Power of 10 podcast. Oh, I love him. Yeah, he's wonderful. He is really wonderful. He's a person. And he asked you right at the end, I think one of his questions, he regularly asks people, and I'll paraphrase now, he asked you about your thoughts on something that's either overlooked or should be redesigned that would have an outsized impact on the world. And you simply said, and it was very candid, you've just been with me now. You said take a break.
Abby Covert:
That was what you said. I'm proud of myself. I'm break proud of myself. Yes. Take a break. Take a break.
Brendan Jarvis:
What was the last break you took and why?
Abby Covert:
The last break I took was on Tuesday. I needed a day, so I took it. I did have a few meetings in the afternoon that I decided that I would take. They were with people that I didn't have to put on a human suit for. But yeah, I've been trying to do that more consistently. My weekends, I have a small child. The weekends are not all that relaxing. Let's be real. And so yeah, I've been trying to kind of work this short day Tuesday where I put my short day in the afternoon so I can kind of take some time for myself. And so yeah, that was the last mini break I would say. And I guess the last big break was this weekend. I didn't think about anything, which was great.
Brendan Jarvis:
Being a parent as well, I can totally relate to that. My wife and I have this sort of running joke that when we go on vacation that it's not really a vacation, it's just parenting in different contexts somewhere else, which is a lot without
Abby Covert:
Childproofing. Without childproofing in all of the comforts of home. Yeah, it's really great. My kid really wants to go on a vacation and I'm just like, I don't know. We did go to Legoland and that was fabulous. But yeah, only kids style vacations right now for us,
Brendan Jarvis:
Speaking of taking a break, one of the things that I gathered about you is that you don't hang out online terribly much anymore. And I'm being tongue in cheek here, right? But it seems like you've become a bit of a digital recluse, which seems silly to say, considering that we are talking to each other digitally and we are making content together. If I'm being accurate, what is the reason for taking a step back from being online?
Abby Covert:
It's not a very kind place to be. So that's the first thing I found that I had a lot of performance anxiety about being online. It was making my healing journey pretty much impossible, if I'm honest. I think that that's probably the most honest way to put it, is I could not heal from a lot of the things that I needed to if I was going to stick around in that soup. Specifically, the downfall of Twitter was just, yeah, I came up on Twitter, that was my platform. That was where I found my people. So to watch that go, and I'm not even talking about the Elon stuff, that's a more recent, but no, I'm just talking about the sea change of the tone online changed, and I don't know when it happened. I also had benefit of a fairly lengthy parental leave where I didn't do any social media.
And so that sort of gave me the taste of the only thing I did on social media was post a cute picture of my kid every once in a while. It was great. I didn't have to think about anything from a professional standpoint, but then when I decided that I wanted to go back out independently, especially as an author, I knew that I needed to take social media back up as a little hobby. And so that's what I've kind of tried to look at it. It's like a little hobby and yeah, I don't love it. I don't love it in there. But yeah, I dunno. I think what the problem is that I don't understand people's motivations. In the early days of Twitter, I felt like I did, and I'm not sure that I did. Honestly, let's be clear. I think that I got a lot of that wrong too, but now I'm just not really sure what we're doing on there.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I hear you. I've got rose tinted glasses here, I think perhaps as well. But it felt like there has been a sea change for sure, but it felt like originally, now we sound, I'm making us sound like Dory old internet people.
Abby Covert:
Yeah. Are you going to tell them to get off your lawn next or
Brendan Jarvis:
Probably originally though, it felt like people were just happy to be there, right? There was this kind of naive enthusiasm about participating community online and where did the cats go? It used to be all about cats and funny memes, and now it's turned into the opposite things that are quite negative. And yeah, it's just not coming from perhaps the same place. But anyway, I won't get on this preachy soapbox for too long, but I was curious to understand when you finished up at Etsy, this is going back about four years ago or so, I think you decided very deliberately to put some distance between yourself as a person, ab covert, and you know who you are. And people listening to this now know who you are too. And the persona that you developed for blogging, ab, the ia. It sounds like we've been sort of dancing around this topic, but what was it that specifically changed for you in that decision?
Abby Covert:
Well, there was a very funny period of time where people thought that my last name was Thea, and that got very confusing very quickly. So there was something about my reliance on underscores in Twitter that was always sort of like the original sin of my handle was that I never dropped my underscores. Still to this day, I've got those underscores. It's a bad be move, and I know it. Yeah, I feel like Abby, the IA was a cartoon that I developed to hide behind. There's also people in my life that refer to her as the clipboard. You know who you are. And yes, she was the persona that I put on so that I could do all the hard things while I was deeply in need of healing. So yeah, I feel like when I decided to take authorship as my serious business, the thing I was doing as opposed to a side hustle that was on top of all the other things, I decided to go really deep on me as opposed to that character.
And during that time, I started to think about what would it mean to actually step into my actual name, which seems weird, but at that point it was very common for people to not know my last name at a conference. It was very awkward a few times. So yeah, I feel like dropping that brand just a little bit. I mean, I still have Abby, the I is my Etsy and Abby, the I is my Twitter and my Instagram. I still have it as a handle, but she's not my business anymore. She's a 28-year-old girl that lives in my head and occasionally tells me what to do, but I tell her to sit down. It's not her turn anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're coming back to something you said a little earlier around rejoining social media, at least in the capacity of an author and someone who has something to say and contribute, but I suppose in a different way than you were doing when you were a 28-year-old woman. You said, I think it was recently, I think it was last year, you said, and I'll quote you again. I'm currently battling a mental monster of feeling like I'm not allowed to market my own work. How is your battle going with that monster?
Abby Covert:
I think it's going really well. I made a lot of changes to my process, and I've actually found myself talking to other authors about this process, and I find that it's helping them to hear this. So if you're out there, this is what I'm doing. I am not writing for social media in real time anymore. I just don't do it. I don't like it. I don't like the anxiety of getting something done in the moment and then hitting post, and so I just don't do it. So my social media is all pre-scheduled. I write it in a document, not in the box on the site, which relieves a tonne of anxiety. And then I have a production assistant who moves all that into a scheduling thing that makes it all send out. So I only go on there a couple of times a week to answer comments or questions, look at my dms, that kind of thing, which has helped a lot. So I find that and getting myself on a writing schedule about it, I used to look at it like it wasn't writing, and now I look at it as writing. I spend a lot of time writing for social media, and I want it to be something that's worth reading. So yeah, I feel like I'm battling the monster. I feel like the monster and I are starting to be friends, but it's still a little weird. It's still a little weird. I'm not quite sure I can trust him. We'll see.
Brendan Jarvis:
You recently also gave another interview that I watched, which was with Woman Talk Design. And you shared in that interview in the context of you were speaking about speaking at conferences, but it's kind of relevant I feel to communicating anything to anyone else in any medium here, or at least to me. So take it where you will, you let the person who was interviewing, and I suppose it was a live audience too, that you have a DHD. And I was curious to understand how has finding that you had a DHD, if that's the right way to describe that influence, the way that you communicate or that you've decided to communicate your professional thinking to other people?
Abby Covert:
Well, I feel like my brain makes a whole lot more sense. That's the biggest thing. I really felt like there was something wrong with me. I was in the gifted programme starting from pre-K, and that was always like a, you're really smart, but that was always met with, you're not living up to your potential. That those two things were very much in contrast, but too much, not enough of it all. And I feel like knowing not only that I have it, but that lots of really smart, capable, productive, creative people also have. This has just been mind blowing, straight, mind blowing. And it's given me a lot of relief from the anxiety of managing myself, just that I can say that on a podcast instead of admitting that I forgot the question and I don't have a good reason for that. That is helpful. It's helpful for people to know that about me. It's helpful for me to know that about myself. And to be honest, I feel a little duped. If I hadn that knowledge earlier, I think things would've been different for me. I wouldn't want to change it now, but it is an interesting thing to dwell on.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is possibly not accurate, so if you know better than let me know. But I had heard that women often either not diagnosed or misdiagnosed or diagnosed much later in life with things like a DHD than men are, for example.
Abby Covert:
Absolutely. That is 100% the case. That's my understanding as well. Actually, I've had the experience of on my way to getting a diagnosis, having several male doctors tell me that I didn't need one.
Brendan Jarvis:
What was that about?
Abby Covert:
Not that I don't qualify for one, but just that I don't need one because what was I going to do with it? What will you do with it? Well, I can do whatever I want with it, sir, is the answer. So yeah, I did finally find a doctor that was kind enough to relieve me of that anxiety. And to be honest with you, one of the best things about that is the relief of misdiagnosis that comes along with that, which I don't think that people talk about as much with the lack of diagnosis. They don't talk about the misdiagnosis that comes along with that because a lot of divergent women are misdiagnosed with things like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, bipolar is very common. I've had two bipolar diagnoses, both of which I was told, now we think this, but your manic episodes don't seem to be destructive. And I'm like, so you're saying that I don't meet the criteria? That's what you're saying, but that's a more female diagnosis than a DHD. So yeah, that's been my experience.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is a crude metaphor, but it sounds like you felt like you were a, I'm going to mix this up now. I'm terrible at doing these mixed metaphors, but it sounds like you felt you were a square in a round hole when it came to trying to figure out what was going on. But having had the clarity of the A DHD diagnosis, you now feel like you're that square peg in the square hole. Things make more sense.
Abby Covert:
But yeah, I know why I am the way that I am now, and that is really, really valuable.
Brendan Jarvis:
Something people may or may not know about you is that you were a theatre kid, I think is the right way to frame it.
Abby Covert:
Yes, I was a big theatre kid. Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I understand that kind of made a lot of sense for you when you started getting into IA initially, you were able to sort of bridge some of the things you learned in theatre into the way in which you were engaging in IA and then communicating IA to people. I want to talk about something that you said about talking actually, which is, and I'll quote you again now, you said I had a period early in my speaking career where I really forced myself to take theatrical standards to it. But honestly, I found that the effort you'd put into that stuff wasn't really rewarded by more reception from the audience. Were you surprised by that?
Abby Covert:
I want to make sure that your audience knows what I'm talking about because I feel like it's sort of not clear. So what I'm talking about specifically is going off book. And when I say off book, I mean having your speech memorised. There are a lot of very talented thought leaders out there that go off book with every single talk. They also generally tend to do one keynote at a time, and they do that for the period of a year to 18 months so that they get really, really good at that one thing. As an A DHD person, I can't do that. Doing the same thing over and over again in the exact same way is death to me. So what I would do instead was I was very novel and off the cuff at the beginning of my speaking career, and what ended up happening was I was not a very respectful speaker at times.
My mood that morning could take the talk in a completely different direction than where it was supposed to go. That wasn't necessarily my intent. Also, I just blew past a couple of really important time box things. One of the biggest conferences that I got invited to it was in front of about 1500 people, and I went over by 10 minutes on a main stage, and they were like, you were great and we didn't want to pull you off. But also I knew all these people were waiting for lunch and it was my fault. So I started probably about maybe six or seven years ago, I started to write my talks long form and I started to read them. I started to deliver them off the page as opposed to off book. And they're not as theatrical. I am not as off the cuff and bubbly.
I'm not as much of an edutainer. I'm not as much of a standup comedian, but my talks are better by and large. And I feel that in terms of the reception to them, I also always get at least one person that tells me that they wish I hadn't read and I don't care. That's fine. I'm sorry. It bothers that one person. But yeah, it will always bother someone. And that's one of the reasons that I choose to talk about it openly because I think that it's something a lot of people would like to do, and they think that we're not supposed to. They think that that's cheating. But the thing about it is that my whole job is not public speaking. I'm not an actor. That is not what I am paid for. So memorising lines is a hobby in my life and not a very lucrative one if I'm being honest.
So it's not something that I want to spend my time doing. And like I said in that quote, it doesn't actually give me enough results that I want to invest in it. If my goal was to be an edutainer, if my goal was to be a professional keynote, my tact would not be that. But then those are not my goals. Those are very not my goals. So for me, when somebody wants to hear what I have to say, I know that the best way for them to get my message is for me to craft that message just for them and then deliver it as I intended to. And that's what I like to do.
Brendan Jarvis:
And when you say reading, do you mean reading from a printed page of paper, or do you mean you have your talk up on the monitors and you've got every word that you want to say that's there?
Abby Covert:
Yeah, teleprompter. And I'm pretty good with the teleprompter, honestly. I mean, I more often get the, I didn't know you were reading than the I wish you wouldn't read because I think you can read badly. Let me be clear. It is a theatrical skill to read with intention and clarity and in a voice that people want to listen to. And there's a lot of people that are really good at that. There's also people that are very, very bad at that. So either one is a skill, and I just would rather put my skills into the writing and the delivery and not into the memorising and the writing and the delivery, and then probably going off book because I can't actually stay on the thing unless I'm on the thing.
Brendan Jarvis:
Let's talk about something else and go back roughly 20, I think roughly 20 years now. What do Craigslist, Bermuda and icons have to do with each other?
Abby Covert:
Oh my goodness, that's such a fun story. I think about that all the time. I wish that I still had the email account that I had back then, just so I could find the email where I pitched myself to the person with that Craigslist ad. But yeah, it was a Craigslist ad that said, we need icons for banking software for a company in Bermuda. And it just was all of the words that were not what you wanted to read on the internet. As a young person that's looking for a job. But I was a graphic design graduate. It was not a great market, and that was a great opportunity for me to just be at home and doing graphic design work that I could actually put in my portfolio. But what ended up happening was quite different. What ended up happening was that I gave them those icons and they put them in the software, which I had never seen shame on me.
And it was horrible, really bad. And that's a great lesson for a designer, right? Because on the PDF that I had my icons delivered in, they looked great. They were to the spec, they were perfect, but they did not make sense in that interface. And so it was this kind of flippant moment where I said to the project manager, I don't think you should do that. I kind of want my icons back. I think I even offered to not be paid just I was like, I think I messed this up very badly. And he and I ended up having this conversation about, well, what would you do instead? And we started talking about nested menus, which I didn't know anything about nested menus. I just knew about them. I use software. That was it. And he was like, do you know what information architecture is?
I was like, yeah, graphic design student. Of course I know what information architecture is. I took a whole year of it. Information architecture one, we designed a CD box set information architecture two, we designed a poster for voting, and he was just like, no, for software, it's a thing. It's like a real thing. And he had the Polar Bear book information architecture for the worldwide web. He had it in the office that we were in, and he handed it to me and he was like, you should read this, and then you should let us know if you want to do this because we're looking for people to do this job. And nobody had that job at that point, at that company. It was just like they were building software and they had heard they needed that. So all their developers were reading that book and trying to figure it out. And then all of a sudden, this graphic design recent graduate comes into this office park in New Hampshire, and it was like those icons are terrible and people aren't going to be able to use that thing at all. So yeah, about three weeks later, I started full-time as the first time as a junior information architect. 20 years later, here we are.
Brendan Jarvis:
Here we are right here in this moment.
Abby Covert:
Yeah, it's wild.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thinking about that first job, that story you've just told, what was it in your brain that clicked with information architecture when you discovered it was an actual thing, a practise, something you could get stuck into?
Abby Covert:
Yeah, no, I know exactly what it was. It was that it wasn't about the aesthetics. It was everything about design that I liked without over-reliance on other people's opinions about aesthetics. I loved that because I liked my own aesthetics, but I did not like the aesthetics of most of the other people that I ran into in the world. So it was just like being a designer, you have to adopt the aesthetics of the work that you are doing in information architecture, not about aesthetics. It's about understanding, it's about clarity, it's about, in some cases, efficiency or effectiveness. So those things just made a lot more sense to me. And so yeah, I was thrilled when I found out that there was not only a job, but a job that was with salaries as opposed to graphic designer. I came out fully expecting that I was going to freelance my way through probably my whole career, because that's just what you expect as a creative person back then. And to find out instead that there was this multidisciplinary, nobody had gone to school for it, but now we're making a field for it. That was just like, sign me up, man. Sign me up. So that was the beginning.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is it wild that over the past 20 years you discovered the field became notable in the field and now there are people in the wider field of UX, let's call it that for the umbrella term that are practising ia, but have no idea that there is a field specific to what they're doing?
Abby Covert:
That's pretty wild. Yeah, I've now lived through the cycle a couple times. The IA is the new black cycle, as I like to call it. It'll come back around. It's just one big pendulum that swings. But yeah, it has been a really interesting progression. I would say I was on the ground floor when the elevator door opened, and I was really privileged to be standing at that door at that moment. I think a lot of people could have been standing there. So I was very privileged to be there. But I also think that I did some rabble rousing during my time in the last 20 years. So I think I've really pushed the IA field to consider the practical part of the field as opposed to just the academic part. And so if I was going to say what is my contribution of the last 20 years? It would be that I'm trying to democratise the thing that in a lot of ways, a lot of people are trying to gate keep
Brendan Jarvis:
Given where we find ourselves with the state of technology. And I suppose the state of our broader field of UX can take, put some context around it as you see fit. But where do you feel IA needs to be if different from where it currently is to contend with the challenges that we face as a field and that technology is bringing to bear on humanity more broadly?
Abby Covert:
In answering this, I want to be really clear that I don't think that anywhere in the world or any problem in the world needs to know the words information architecture to implement the foundational principles of it. So I just want to be really clear about that. But with that said, I feel like a lot of the problems in the tech world come down to a lack of prioritisation of systematic design. And I think that information architecture tends to be the field that is pushing for that the most in the user experience layer. And so yeah, I think during the first wave of the loss of ia, it was kind of like the suburbanization of the web. Everything starts to look like the same. Now we're just in full fucking chaos now. It's just Armageddon out there and it's very clear that folks are not learning about information architecture by name.
But what's more clear is that they're also not being taught about the impact of structure and language on human behaviour. And that's the more concerning thing. I could give a crap. If anybody ever says the words information architecture again, I think it would be sad if we lost the shorthand for it. I think that the shorthand is ultimately really useful if you want to get better at something. But ultimately, if I needed to put all of my eggs in the basket, it's like teach the people how language and structure changes human behaviour, and I think we could get a lot done. When I look at what's happening with ai, how bad the metadata layer on the internet is. The disasters that API collisions have created, it's all things that when you go to a first year information architecture class in a master's capacity, you're going to learn how to prevent a lot of those things. So I'm just sort of like, it's not hard. It just takes time and thoughtfulness. And unfortunately, those are the things that we're willing to trade in. Capitalism is time and thoughtfulness for profit.
Brendan Jarvis:
This role that designers more broadly, so when I'm talking about designers, I'm talking about design people, so people that are information architects, UX designers, people that are researchers, so people in the orbit of what I would consider design. We are often quite hard on ourselves. We seem to cast ourselves in the role of providing the sort of ethical responsibility and guidance for our companies to create products that don't create aberrations that are in tune with humanity and bring forward our best values and making them real into software and other experiences. And I've been thinking about this lately, and I wonder if we are just being too hard on ourselves and if the people that actually who are making the decisions, which let's face it, it's often not design people if it's more those people that we need to reach with some of those fundamental concepts in ia, for example. It's not actually us that we need to convince. It's other people that would benefit who are making bigger decisions than we currently are tasked with.
Abby Covert:
Yeah, I feel like that's absolutely right on, and I think education is the first piece, but I also think that we don't want to make the mistake of thinking that education is enough at that layer. Actually not. I've seen a lot of instances where the executive team is very well aware of information architecture and the problems that are currently in place, and still nothing is happening to solve those things or nothing's being prioritised. And in the last few years, one of the things I've come around to talking a lot about with people is the role of incentives and how if I look at every single IA assignment that I was ever brought in, especially as an external consultant, every single one of those was hinged on the fact that that mess was there for a long time. The only reason they called me is because their incentives changed.
At one point, it was a startup that had a language problem and they were going to translate into a whole lot of other languages. Another one, it was, oh, we hired an agency, but actually we need to figure out our language because they don't understand what we're talking about. So there's all of these little incentive shifts that if I had gone in six months one year earlier and tried to sell those engagements, it wouldn't have been successful. That has nothing to do with education on information architecture. They already knew that part. In those cases, it was whether or not they had the incentive to fix the problem. So I think that things can be a mess for a really long time until somebody's like, oh, now I have an incentive to fix it and now I'm going to make sense of it. And that's the same as every mess in your personal life as much as it is in mine, right?
Your sock drawer is a mess. That's not really a problem until it's a problem, and that's when you're incentivized to fix it. When are you incentivized to fix it when you can't find the sock that you're looking for, and it starts to become a problem and it starts to be a pattern of, oh, I'm wasting so many minutes looking for my socks in the morning. What am I going to do? Eventually that incentive is going to shift and you're going to be like, you know what? Screw it, dump the socks, reorganise the drawer all better. Same thing with basically any closet in your house or anything else. Your file organisation pick anything really, and you're going to find that there's a mess in there. You just haven't been incentivized to fix it yet. And that's okay. I think the part that I really liked that you said was that we should not be so hard on ourselves.
I think that in a lot of cases, I meet a lot of information architects who think that they just haven't sold it, and I have to tell them that I don't have some magical fairy dust that I'm sprinkling during my sales process. I just only get called when the incentives have already shifted because my bill rate is high enough. They work there. They don't have that same luxury. They have to play within the incentives that are current. And if you are in an organisation and you are trying to play outside of the incentives that are current, you will be disgruntled and you might be dismissed at some point.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's tying back to what we were talking about earlier. You are recounting that story of hitting rock bottom, turning up at the hospital, realising that the next ward to cross was the mental health ward. We didn't want to see yourself, so perhaps not quite at rock bottom, but you were pretty close, right? It sounds like what you're saying is that we have to buckle up because in order for things to meaningfully change, we might have to experience them getting much worse than they currently are.
Abby Covert:
Well, unless incentives are looked at in a different way, because if urgency and loudness is always going to be the way that things are prioritised, then yeah, you got to wait until things are urgent and loud to fix 'em. I think that organisations don't have to be set up that way. I think that there is something that education can do in terms of foresight, but it does. Speaking back on OKRs, that's the key. How you are measured is the key. If you are only measured on low downtime and profit, what is your incentive to change your language that touches every single layer and is probably going to take some major effort and have absolutely no positive effect on all those things. They'll just stay the same. That's not something that you get prioritised. So yeah, I feel like that's sort of the rub of capitalism is you have to work within the incentive structure, otherwise you can't get anything done.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that's deeply ingrained, at least from the outside looking in. I mean, I live in a western democracy as well. That largely bends towards capitalism too, so I've got some exposure to this, but I feel like it's perhaps a more unbridled form US capitalism than perhaps what we have here in New Zealand. Are you really striking quite close to a lot of the narrative as a nation that sits behind what people feel is the right thing to do as individuals in a country like America? When you start asking for them to reconsider things like profit, not to just have a myopic lens as to what matters. I just don't know how you make sense of that mess. That seems like a huge mess to try and make sense of.
Abby Covert:
Yeah, no, and I mean what we're talking about is not just information architecture, it's about change. Incentives have to line up for change to be possible, and yeah, you're completely right on that. As long as capitalism keeps on capitalising. We're just going to keep on going around on this little, yeah, this little carousel that we're on of deciding that, oh, humans can matter. Nope, wait. That is very costly for humans to matter. So let's think of ways that we could make it seem like humans matter, but not spend so much money. And I think that that's basically where we're at right now. We have performative UX happening in a lot of organisations. I think a few people have described it as UX theatre, design theatre. It's really prevalent to just see people kind of check in the box like, yep, we did that design thinking, check thinking about people check in reality in organisations have to really change quite dramatically to have a user-centered lens and that comes with change of everyone in the executive layer as well as everyone else. So it takes time as well, which we already talked about. People don't like spending time.
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke of carousels and change.
Abby Covert:
Oh god carousels.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, thankfully they seem to be on the way out. I could still see the odd one out there.
Abby Covert:
Nah, they're still around.
Brendan Jarvis:
You also spoke about design theatre and I mean our conversations are coming into it's final chapter here, and I was keen to talk to you about stuck diagrams help a little before we finish. Now, I was curious about at what point in your mind does a diagram crossover from the territory of design theatre into the land of effective communication?
Abby Covert:
Yeah. Oh goodness. So much. Design theatre through diagrams. Yeah, they're like a prime offender. But it's interesting. I think it's actually there's this special type of abuse on diagrams that I would like to highlight here, which is we can make a diagram that's super helpful for us. The sense maker us the information architect us, the content strategist, whatever we are doing, we can make something that's very important and useful in guiding to us. But if we make the mistake of taking that same thing and showing it to other people and going, let me explain to you what I have learned that almost never works, but that is like 80% of what I see people trying to do in terms of stakeholder management. I'm just like, you are not managing your stakeholders. You are, I don't know, abusing them with diagrammatic insecurity. It's just showing them diagrams that they're not meant to understand.
That's just proof that a lot more than them. That's the sort of off fall of I think that sort of vibe. The best diagrams are the ones that are made for the audience and intention that you have at hand. And what that sometimes means, and I think people get kind of bummed out about this. It's not an easy button, but that means is that diagram that you made for yourself, put it away. Start a new one. Now here's the trick, you can't make that second one until you've made the first one because you didn't know what you didn't know didn't enough about the complex subject matter that you've now become an expert in and you have a wonderful high level visualisation to see all of the different connection points. Now you are prepared to make a very simple diagram for a multitude of audiences. And so yeah, it's like the diagram that makes diagrams is the better approach. But yeah, I do feel like we are constantly trying to point at it. It's a zoo animal or something. Look at that. Do you see the giraffe over there? It's so crazy and that's not what people want. Honestly. People shut down, especially if you start asking them for feedback on that diagram. What do you want me to feed back on? I like the squares.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're guilty of being an offender here as well. I heard you talk about how you often will create those, almost like that zodiac killer style walls of things going on and you've been guilty of showing people all your thinking in the past and clearly this is thing.
Abby Covert:
That's how I learned this lesson.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is how you learned it
Abby Covert:
Back when I was consulting especially, I love to take a picture of the wall and being like, this is what I'm doing back here. You don't need to get into that, but just so you know, this is what I'm doing back here. That also shows them I'm trying to learn this thing so that I can make this thing more useful for you. This is the thinking that went into the thing. The trick is you don't actually have to walk them through all that thinking. That tends to be too much.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, people want the outcome, not the process necessarily what they're paying for. Yeah, it is my
Abby Covert:
Job. Yeah, my job to go into the rabbit hole, they just want to have the rabbit. That's
Brendan Jarvis:
It. So how do you know when you've got the rabbit? How do you know you've got a diagram that's worth putting in front of other people?
Abby Covert:
Well, you show other people and then you hear what they have to say about it and sometimes it won't go well just like interfaces or art or writing or anything else that you're making for other human beings. If you show it to other people and they were the people that you intended to get it and to think that it was useful and they don't, then it is not effective and you need to go back to the drawing board. And if it is cool, now go do something else.
Brendan Jarvis:
How do you tease that out though, right? So you've got your diagram, you go, oh hey Abby, I've got this diagram, and do I then just start explaining it? How do you set
Abby Covert:
That up? Yeah, don't do that. That is what people tend to do though. They're like, I got this diagram and I use the blue to represent this and I use the pink to represent this and these lines here connect these things because they're not full connections. They're kind of tangential and it's like you have your whole language versus hand them the diagram and say, Hey, I've been working on this thing and it's meant to make sense to somebody like you. Could you take a couple minutes and look at it and then we can talk about what you see and then have them tell you what they see and then stop talking. Don't correct them. Don't jump into save them just like a usability test. We test it for usability and that's the outcome is you find out that, oh, that blue and pink, that doesn't actually make sense. This person's colorblind. Those colours look exactly the same to them or yeah, you thought that it was clear with the dotted lines. People don't see that as being different than the straight lines or the full lines. All of those details are things that when you're alone with the diagram aren't going to be necessarily clear to you and then they will jump out like ghosts when other people are looking at it. So yeah, you'll find them all.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's the hardest and most valuable skill to master when you are testing something with someone else as to just shut up just to not say anything.
Abby Covert:
Just shut up. And honestly, a lot of that has to do with the scripting upfront. One of the things that I learned from being involved in usability testing for as many years as I did is that the way that you set up the test matters a lot because you have to let people know that they're not the problem, that the interface is the problem. I use a very similar script when I'm setting up a diagram to be critiqued by a person. It's sort of like, hey, this is something that I've been trying to work out. I don't think that it's there yet. I actually really need feedback from somebody like you to make this good. But just so you know, while we're going through this, I'm not going to say a lot, I just want to stay as quiet as I can. I want to see what you think and then at the end of it, I'm happy to answer all the questions that you have about anything that you ask.
So if I don't answer a question, I'm probably going to answer with what do you think? And that's not me being a jerk, that's me trying to be good at my job, but I feel like people once similar to in usability studies, when people are given that message, it sort of gives them the opportunity to actually give feedback as opposed to does she want me to stroke her ego right now or does she really want me to give her feedback on this diagram? Not everyone wants feedback on their diagrams, Brendan, some people do want you to just stroke their ego about how great it is and how proud you are that they made that thing.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now this one I couldn't resist because you're an information architect amongst many other things, but can diagrams be neatly categorised or are there various shades of grey?
Abby Covert:
I will say I think that there is ways that you can categorise them that are useful. For example, in my book, I do categorise them by what they're centred on and it's time arrangement or context. And I do find that was a useful sorting mechanism for me to sort of break down the immensity of diagrams into some more palatable groups for folks to get introduced. But I also find that a lot of the distinctions that I see people making don't feel quite right or fair of diagrams. One that's really, really common is quantitative versus qualitative diagrams and that one breaks almost immediately. For me. I've seen a lot of diagrams that are qualitative in nature but are taking on the look of a more quantitative data expression. And I think that those have been some of my favourite diagrams. So I feel like those kinds of distinctions worry me.
Templates in general worry me. I would say one of the reasons that I provided recipes in the book is because people need them, but I also do a lot of upfront moving towards that cookbook section of talking about the language of diagramming and sort of the visual skills that go into deciding how to represent things without deciding the template that you're filling in. So my hope is that people pick up the types of lines and the way that you can arrange boxes next to each other versus on top of each other and how those things are different that those will be perceived differently. Those skills I feel like allow you to take any template and make it your own, but it also allows you to go completely off template and just make whatever type of diagram you want. So yeah, I think that that makes it generally hard to categorise them. It's like what are you categorising them by? But yeah, a lot of people have tried and a lot of people do very useful ways of categorising them for whatever their intention is. I mean that's information architecture in a nutshell. My spice cabinet might be arranged by alphabetical, yours might be by cuisine. Those could both be right.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, and it's interesting to hear you talk about how in the book you give people that sort of warmup to the templates if you like or the recipes, but with the intention, they will be able to take those tools and recombine them and reconfigure in ways that make sense for a particular situation or context they're trying to communicate. Because I suppose the danger is of all you have is a Venn diagram, then everything looks like an intersection. So you do need both the tools and the permission to be able to create something that's specifically useful for each context.
Abby Covert:
And you need to be able to look at an example and instead of looking at it, how do I strip all the content out of it and put my content into it, look at it instead in terms of what principles of diagramming is it using to be successful? A much better way to critique diagrams for your own use later than like, Ooh, let me just take that so that I can strip all this stuff and put my stuff in it. It's like, oh, well I really like the way that they used a visual metaphor for getting across this. Or Oh, I really like how they use this cool zoom thing where we're really showing two different levels of information. All of those can be really useful patterns to observe, but if we convince ourselves that all of the templates have already been figured out and we just have to find the right one, we waste a lot of time and a lot of people do that.
I get a lot of emails from folks that are like, I've been looking for the right type of diagram to represent this thing I'm trying to do. And they'll send me what looks like a diagram to me, but they're like, it doesn't look like any of the ones I'm seeing on the internet. And I'm like, did it help you? Yeah, alright, go. You right, what are you trying to get at? But I do think that people want to know that they're doing it right and I think that that's the same thing as why I want to talk about the incentive thing is I want people to know that it's not always not doing it. Sometimes it is about the environment and the context and knowing that you can go off of the script and you can with diagrams, you can, I give you permission. You hear that listener, I give you permission,
Brendan Jarvis:
The P word, right? Permission. There's like an undercurrent here right behind this whole discussion we've been having. And I imagine you as someone who is viewed as an expert, for example, in diagramming and an information architecture, people come to you and do want that kind of validation almost. That's almost like you've said there. They need the permission to feel like what they've done is okay. Is that weird for you? How does that sit with you? People coming to you? It's almost like a guru thing, right? Almost like to pat them on the head, yes, yes, you're doing the right thing. You're okay. Go back and keep going with what you're doing.
Abby Covert:
I feel like I used to have a lot more imposter syndrome about it, so it's at least become more comfortable as it's gone on because it definitely is a very common thing in my life, but I get a lot of value from it myself. There are times where I also start to forget based on my own incentives, how important the basics are. And I am constantly thrilled by conversations with people that don't know that much about information architecture and they don't even know that they're reminding me of something super freaking important that's going to change everything for the next days, weeks, months, years of how I practise. And it happens all the time. I mean, people ask me why I take so many one-on-ones with randos on the internet. That's why that's there's a waiting list and if you can wait through it, I will definitely spend a half hour with you and listen to you talk about your mess.
And the thing that I really love about those talks is that I do spend a lot of time telling people that, yeah, I've seen this before. People don't want to be unique when it comes to information drama. They want to know that somebody has been there before and that this is a solvable thing. And I think that I can give them reassurance that it's something that happens. I can also call out a couple of, Hey, gotcha, this might happen or that might happen. And usually they're like, that did happen. I'm like, I know. Yeah, there's a lot of patterns that come out and when you talk to enough people, because this all started before I started doing these online, this was the line at the end of the conference talk of, and it was just everybody just waiting to basically just vomit a mess at me to see if they could scare me out of thinking that the word any applied sort of like, well, let me tell you about this one. Hold on, lemme tell you about this one. And I'm like, Nope. Still believe in that word any, but I think that that word, how to make sense of any mess, I think we started here, but it's not every mess. Any mess, which means you picked. And I do think that if we pick and we have the incentives in alignment that we can make sense of any mess.
Brendan Jarvis:
How glad are you that you didn't title the book what you were originally thinking, which was make sense information architecture for beginners?
Abby Covert:
Well, to wrap this up in a nice little bow, let me tell you on that drive from San Francisco to San Diego with Ms. Christina Woodkey, I told her the name of that book and she said, that's a terrible name for the book. Go back to the drawing board. She was so right and I was not happy about it, not happy about it at all, but she was right and I'm thankful for it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Abby, I've got one final question for you today, and that is that it seems like there's more pressure than ever for design people to do more with less currently. How should we broadly speaking, respond to situations where we believe that an important step in our process, for lack of a better word, is being skipped or not given the time and care that it deserves?
Abby Covert:
I think that we need to say something but be willing to move forward with nothing changing. I think that if I had done more of that, I think I would've been a happier employee. I don't think it would've changed much about what I got done during my corporate time, but I think that my mental health would've been better if I could just have said the thing and been okay that nobody does anything about it. And I think that's a really hard skill to develop. It's sort of Buddhist, I guess, in terms of the letting go. But yeah, that idea that I have documented that I think this is a problem I have illustrated that I am a person that can help you solve this problem. You know where to find me. I'm going to go back to my job now and then figuring out what your job actually is. If it's not that, I do have a lot of experience in this. Like you are starting a project in one incentive landscape and then the incentive dramatically shift in the middle and then you end up in this no man's land of no ownership and lack of understanding of value. And to be honest, those are the times where you need to say something the most. And generally that means standing up for yourself and not letting the lack of support lead you to believe that you have a lack of skill.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it's very easy to conflate those two things and listening to you talk about that. The thing that was going on for me is almost like in those thorny work situations where you feel like something's not being tended to or the incentives have changed. If you have a clear if understanding before you encounter those situations of what is enough for me to bring to the situation before it happens, that can be quite calming, that can help make things clearer for you.
Abby Covert:
And when in doubt, take a break.
Brendan Jarvis:
Abby, this has been such a great way to spend my morning with you, making sense of some of the mess that's out there. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
Abby Covert:
Thank you for being such a thoughtful interviewer. I feel like you really went deep on all my backstory and everything. Very impressed. So thank you for being so thoughtful.
Brendan Jarvis:
My pleasure. Abby, if people want to connect with you, bearing in mind that I know that social media is not like your full on, let's be on here all the time kind of thing. What is the best way for them to do that?
Abby Covert:
The best way for you to do that is to come over and see what we're doing at the Sense Makers Club. So one of my antidotes to social media is I started a community and I've recently trained 40 people to run peer led discussion groups every month, and we launch in June. So we're currently trying to combat that. The internet has not been a very kind place by making one hour of the day each weekday a kind place on the internet. So yeah, if anybody's interested in that and wants to check out more, I would love to see you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Fantastic, thank you Abby. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you with us here as well. Everything we've covered, including where you can find the Sense Makers Club will be in the show notes. You can also find a link through to Abby's LinkedIn profile, if that's all right with you, Abby.
Abby Covert:
Sure. And a picture of me and Christina Woodkey in a tiny yellow car.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes, please send that to me.
Abby Covert:
I have to get permission from her, but yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Cool. We'll make that happen. We'll make that happen.
Abby Covert:
I'm sure she'll be fine with it. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Alright, back to you listeners. So 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, and of course information architecture, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe also so that it turns up every two weeks in your feed. And if there's one other person that you feel would get value from these kinds of conversations at depth, then please pass the podcast along to them.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes, so you can get to me there. And lastly, you may want to head over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Abby Covert

Making Sense & Getting Unstuck

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