Kelly Goto
Designing for Emotional Connection
In this brand new episode of Brave UX, Kelly Goto reflects on her Japanese-American heritage 🇯🇵, shares the unexpected connections between shoes, Hawaii, and Yoyu 🏝️, and shares why a pragmatic approach to design is more important than ever 🔍.
Highlights include:
- How do shoes, Hawaii, and Yoyu connect?
- How have client attitudes toward research changed?
- How did Japanese-American incarceration impact your family?
- How have you handled criticism throughout your career?
- Why is fostering deep product-user connections so difficult?
Who is Kelly Goto?
Kelly is the CEO and founder of gotomedia and gotoresearch, where she and her team have spent nearly 25 years using human-centred ethnographic research to understand how people think, act, and feel 💡, to design innovative product experiences.
Over the years, gotomedia has partnered with an impressive array of global companies, including Sony, Samsung, Netflix, Walmart, and Symantec 🦠.
Before founding gotomedia, Kelly was a partner and creative director at Red Eye Digital Media, the full-service design and development agency behind the creation of the early online presences for Food.com, Webvan 🚙, Pets.com, and more.
She is also the author of ‘Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works,’ 📘 a book I first got my hands on back in 2001 or 2002, when I was just a pimply teenager.
A respected advocate for design and design research, Kelly’s insights have been sought after on stages around the world 🎤, including at the Design Management Institute, Sofaconf, Fluxible, and UXPA International.
Transcript
- Kelly Goto:
- I am dedicated to doing authentic research one-on-one research, understanding people. But I will say that if there are ways of getting a better understanding of who the end users really are and getting that in front of product owners and C-suite, helping them understand the value of user-centered design as a supplement, I believe that it could be groundbreaking and changing.
- 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 want an independent perspective to align hearts and minds. 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 our 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 Kelly Goto. Kelly is a pioneering leader in the fields of web design, UX design, and design research. She's the CEO and founder of gotomedia and gotoresearch where she and her team have spent nearly 25 years using human-centered ethnographic research to understand how people think, act, and feel to design innovative product experiences.
- Over the years, gotomedia has partnered with an impressive array of global companies, including Sony, Samsung, Netflix, Walmart, and Symantec.
- Before founding gotomedia, Kelly was a partner and creative director at Red Eye Digital Media, the full service design and development agency behind the creation of the early online presences for food.com, webvan.com, pets.com and more.
- She's also the author of Web Redesign 2.0 Workflow that Works, a book I first got my hands on back in 2001 or maybe 2002 when I was just a pimply teenager.
- A respected advocate for design and design research, Kelly's insights have been sought after on stages around the world, including at the Design Management Institute, sofa Comp Flexible and UXPA international, and now she's here to share those and more with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Kelly, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Kelly Goto:
- Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm very excited to have you here, and I really enjoyed hearing before we hit record about your connection to New Zealand. It was an interesting one because what Kelly shared with me is that she almost, I dunno if I can share this with people, Kelly, you Oh, sure. Yeah. Almost bought land in the very town in New Zealand that I was born, which is not a very well-known town. So anyway, there's always these crazy connections, which is what I love. But Kelly, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about and where I would love to start with you today is that you are a fourth generation Japanese American, and it's been quite a few years now since anyone in your family was born in Japan. I mean, you're an American. I think you've phrased this before, is that you're a fourth generation American. How connected do you feel to the Japanese culture?
- Kelly Goto:
- That's a very good question. I grew up in a really white community here in Seattle. It's Mercer Island, and I was one of a handful of Asian people and maybe just one of two Japanese really great friend of mine that I still know grew up with me. And she's kind of the one that I ask over and over, what was it like how Japanese were we? And I have realised over the past four decades or so that I grew up trying not to be Japanese, even being surprised sometimes looking in the mirror because everything around me was very Caucasian and I just wanted to fit in. And as the years have gone by, I've gotten more and more educated prouder. I understand more, and certainly we'll probably talk about this, but the book that I've just written is about Japanese history and sort of how we came to be. So I think it's been a coming home, maybe just I needed to grow up and be an older adult to really understand how the values and the culture have affected me and my whole life and how I hope it translates to positive things for the next generation, including my kids.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What can you tell us about what is the book titled, and you mentioned that it was about the culture, about Japanese culture. What are you trying to achieve through this book?
- Kelly Goto:
- It's a legacy book. It's a tribute to my dad's art. It's called Seattle Samurai, A cartoonist perspective of the Japanese-American experience. And it's really the story of everyday American. And it starts off with this story of the first Nise, which is the second generation born here in the Seattle area. And this character who my dad translated into a cartoon character and wrote and drew about for five years in the local paper here. So if you think of it, it's like Charles Schultz meets Shogun, and it's a little bit like a story of a boy who strives to become an American, but he has all these samurai principles and this idea of doing things right and being true to who you are and having very strong integrity and then facing a world where there's soon to be depression and there's soon to be war and there's incarceration, and how do you make it through that and still be who you are and live the American dream.
- And so it ties culture and history and it has a lot of my dad's story in it, but my dad was an everyday American growing up in a farming town. He grew up in a chicken coop. He had six brothers and sisters. He comes from a mother that has 13 children. They grew up in farms. And so it's not an extraordinary story in itself, it's just the story of how that generation made its way through living independent lives, starting their own businesses, having families and living here. And I think that in the end, it's something that can be translated to multiple cultures and everyone's sort of searching for how much is the culture that I was born into, how much is living here in America, my friends, the social media culture, everything like what affects me and helps me become who I am and what do I stand for. And so that's really what this book ends up being about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And where have you arrived with that? Where have you arrived about the role of Japanese culture and shaping who you are, who find yourself today?
- Kelly Goto:
- I'm really proud. I am a hundred percent Japanese, which it's kind of amazing. My dad actually thinks he's part annu, which is kind of the native culture in Japan, the indigenous culture. We have a little bit of that we've done the DNA testing I've done is super boring. It just comes back and says, I'm from Japan. I'm no surprises. And from my generation, you have to remember, I'm fourth generation. I have parents that were a bit avant guard. They were not like their other peers because they were third generation. And so I grew up with most of my cousins being half Asian. And then this new generation is certainly all mixed, but I find that my family is close and we keep our ties close and we keep our culture close. We still make rice all the time. We have our, I don't really know how to use chopsticks. That's maybe part of my fourth generation is I learned the wrong way. I hold my chopsticks wrong, but I'm finding that, and maybe this will translate into work, but my work ethic is distinctly Japanese, this integrity that I've learned from my family. I operate with complete authenticity. I am transparent to a T default. Maybe it's not always great, but I really believe in doing business in a certain way. And I think that's translated into everything I do. And I think that's because of my Japanese background.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I've heard you previously talk about how your parents instilled in you the importance of keeping your word. And I think you've previously described yourself as that being your trademark. You put that to use from a very early age. I understand somewhere in the seventh grade
- Kelly Goto:
- I would say I started freelancing, I mean so far before you were even born, but I was in fifth grade and my uncle came home and brought me this pile of note cards and said, if you can do calligraphy on these, I can bring these every month. And it's why I did name cards for the Lice Institute, and that was a sort of a speaking lecture series here in Seattle. And so every month I would get these cards and these name tags and I would hand lit everyone's names on it, and I taught myself calligraphy and I created a business out of it and I started thinking about how to save and how to invest, and I was making kind of a lot of money for a fifth grader. And so that really started me thinking about business and how to translate some of these skills into business.
- So that was fifth grade. And then in seventh grade, well, in sixth grade, I printed my first business card and I remember laying it out and rubbing down the letters and doing the calligraphy and then reducing it on a big machine down and picking out the colour of the thermography and picking out the paper, which was linen paper at the time, and then starting my business. And I also learned the power of affirmations because sometimes I would make a business card that was something I wasn't quite feeling like I was ready for, and I would make that business card and that would be my next step. And so I consider those really important affirmations in my life that I've had.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And if memory serves me right, they are pictured on your website somewhere in a timeline
- Kelly Goto:
- I did. I kept them. There's one that's missing, maybe two that are missing that I can't find. But I really think that, and it's sad for me that everything's so virtual because I really enjoy handing out business cards. And one of the things I brought back when I moved back to Seattle that my team members kept saying, you have to throw these away. But I have books and books and books, business cards that I've kept from every conference I've ever been to. I can remember almost every single person that I've met. I just really cherish those cards. And maybe that's Japanese in me, I don't know, but I sort of miss that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of cherishing, let's come back to your father. Now I understand his name was Sam and he was a bit of a workaholic. In fact, so much so that I think he was 82 when he retired. He ran a dental technician practise as a business owner for many, many years. And you mentioned earlier when you were describing your latest book that he had written for the North American Post, the comic strip called Seattle Toci. What can you tell me about your dad's motivation after retiring to have actually invested or in his later years to have invested so much in trying to communicate with the general public through Seattle Tochi?
- Kelly Goto:
- That's a multilayered question. The first thing is I don't think he ever would've really retired unless the dentist that he worked with for years and years and years. Finally, one died, another one retired, and he had maybe four main clients over the years. And the last one, Dr. David Branch, who was his best friend also, they decided to go to four days a week, and then they decided to go to three days a week. And then I think they went to two days a week. And then they both said, okay, how about next month we're going to retire? And so they said, okay. And my dad drove his 49 Chevy from Mercer Island through a tunnel into Seattle to pick up his things. And the truck shut down in the middle of the tunnel, the tyres fell off, and that was the day that he retired. But yeah, I don't think he would've ever stopped.
- His work was his art and his office was his man cave. And he could think and create and listen to that generation's version of podcasts, which were cassette tapes of which we have just tonnes of cassette tapes about the beginnings of the world and all the things that he was curious about. He just listened and learned and did his work, and he was always either at his office or at home. So yes, he was a workaholic, but he was never anywhere else. We could always reach him. He was always there to do projects with us, to be home when we needed him. I think when I was two years old, there's a picture of me standing up dialling his phone number and on the rotary phone with the big windy cord, and that was the first number that I memorised when I was little. So yeah, so my dad taught us so much about the work ethic and always doing what he said he was going to do, delivering on time even if it was late work. And so I do think that I sort of picked up that from him,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about your parents being third generation, Japanese Americans. America hasn't always been kind Japanese Americans. In fact, there was a pretty appalling period in American history during World War II where over 120,000 Japanese Americans were put in effectively they called them internment camps. But I think that was probably a kind label. What impact, if any, did that period in American history have on your family directly?
- Kelly Goto:
- Well, that is also a loaded question because here's, and I'll try and keep this really simple, but my dad's family and my mom's family, it turned out that their grandparents were best friends. So they had gotten sort of kicked out of the Seattle area. Cattle had been taken away, discrimination hit. And so they moved a little bit inland to the Oregon, Idaho area, which is a couple of states in to start new lives in 1937. And so the war was a few years later in 1942. And so they were right at the border where you could decide if they were going to be put into camps. And we now say incarceration to more properly term what happened instead of internment. But what had happened in that moment is that all of my grandmothers brothers and sisters who were younger, they all got put into camps and there was lots of stories about how that went and how they got put into first a staging area.
- Then they got put into camp. My dad's family got put into Tulle Lake Camp, which was a very high security camp. It was very tough being there. My parents, however, where they moved was next to another camp where it was lower security. And so there's stories of my mom's family in particular going to visit people in camp, getting to go in, getting a pass to leave, having a week long retreat at Hot Springs with the elders people. It wasn't a happy time, but there was a little more freedom in some of the camps than there were at the high security camps. And I think for the younger generation, they knew that their rights had been taken away, but it was hard for everyone during post-depression. People were struggling. You could leave the camp if you wanted to. So there's a lot of information that's coming out about that time now that is so interesting because if you had a place to go, you could leave the camp.
- For instance, a great aunt of mine wanted to go to college, so she was sent away to college. People just didn't have anywhere else to go, and they didn't know how long it was going to last. And so coming out of that time, especially the college age and the people whose businesses had been ripped away, they especially understood how devastating this was what had been taken from them. But my mom and dad are trying to and tried to focus in their writings, and my mom's a writer also and has written a lot of books about this topic. She is now concentrating on the stories of resilience and how we got past that time. And all of the people, she's on her seventh book of a series called Amide, which is living memory about all the people in the community that helped the Japanese during those times.
- And so that's what they wanted to concentrate is not the woe is me, how awful is this? But how did we survive and not just survive but thrive? What was the resilience that our community had to show? How did we band together to get past this time? A lot of Es the first generation and they have chosen in fact not to speak of it. So it's a little bit interesting now more and more is coming out both the horrificness of what happens so that we can learn from it, which we do need to understand this is not okay, but also how do we get through it? How do we get past it and what does this mean to us today as Americans or as the Japanese community member? So it's very two-sided, and I say it very carefully because there was nothing good about what happened, but my family in particular has chosen to try and understand how it's helped us be the people we are today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is probably my projection, in fact, it can only be my projection here, but having engaged with the Japanese culture and to some degree over the years and hearing you describe what you've described there about how Japanese Americans, or at least the ones in your orbit are feeling about what happened then the Japanese culture have always come across to me as a culture that has many aspects to of it, but one of them is a lot of grace. And it sounded like while it was horrific that there wasn't pervading sense of bitterness in the community about what had happened, is that just me hearing things that aren't there or is there that present in the way that the Japanese community in America now feel about where from that horrible time?
- Kelly Goto:
- It's a two-sided coin. So this bitterness exists and it's being learned by a new generation who understand and are being trained and taught. And there's something called the resistance that I think many people both who lived through that experience and are passing on this generation that we're losing right now, I think that their understanding that there is a great importance in educating this new generation as to what happened, how we don't repeat it, how the rights were taken away. This is not okay. And then I think there's, and again I can't speak for everyone, but in my family there's kind of this, don't talk about it. She and I, which is just move on. Let's not live in the past. So there's a great feeling of just move on and don't dwell in the past and don't let this take you down. So I don't think anyone is okay with what happened, but I think for many people that I know, not everybody, but many people that I know of this generation of the older generation, they brush it off, they tend to laugh about it.
- I tried to interview as many people as I could that were in their nineties about their experiences in camp, and it's very hard to get anything but kind of an awkward laughter. People of that generation don't tend to think about or want to think about sad things. I do think that it was really hard where the camps were and the dust and trying to keep it clean. That's the one comic book that my dad had actually in the magazine, first in the newspaper, and then I put it in the book, it's a story of a little girl and they're leaving camp and her mother finds a hole behind the little girl's bed going across to another room where her friend was living. So they used to pass notes through that hole and the mom scolds her and says, we always leave everything better than when we came. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. It's a true story of a woman named Dolly Toda, and I think that's how you pronounce her name, but this idea that this parent who had been in camp for three or four years who had living in tar paper barracks with wind coming through and sand and everything is actually doing her best to clean and leave the place nicer than when she got there because the Japanese way and scolding her daughter for damaging other people's property. So that's kind of a really big deal.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost like you can take the things that are external away from us, but you can't take away from us how we choose to live.
- Kelly Goto:
- Yes, very much that way. So the resilience that was brought out and the way that this next generation and the generation after chooses both to educate themselves and learn, hopefully this new generation knows a little bit more about what happened and then how they choose to take those learnings and create a more authentic life to be true to their word, to not live in the past. I think that's extraordinary.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of being true to your word and not living in the past, maybe this will work as a segue here, but you are someone throughout your career who hasn't been afraid to ruffle a few feathers. And for example, I've heard you describe how your early use of the term ethnography in the commercial context was something that got you in trouble with some academics as well as your advocacy and use of surveys and focus groups got you in trouble with the group of people in the usability community. On a scale of one to seven where one is not bothered at all and seven is extremely bothered by that criticism, how much did it bother you?
- Kelly Goto:
- Oh gosh. I hate to say this, but it doesn't bother me at all. I think that data is really important that we gather it and the way that we choose to use terms and language needs to resonate with the business that we're in. And so I could dive into each of those stories. It did bother me that the academic community felt like I was misusing the term ethnographer. So I did change my title to an advocate of design ethnography. I changed my bio that was important to me. I really honour the work that the academic community has done. And that story was a little bit weird because I had been meeting with someone, Fromkin research, and I dunno if you remember Kin Research, but they were a big product food research company in the Bay Area. And so Davis Maston was the CEO and I was meeting with somebody else, and so I didn't think I was meeting with the CEO EO.
- It turns out there were two CEOs. So I met with Daryl Ray, who I did not know, he was the ceo, EO, and it turns out he's the CEO of kin. And I walk in, shake his hand, I said, my name's Kelly Godo. And he goes, oh, I know who you are. And I said, oh, really? And he goes, yeah, I was just at a Forbes Harvard conference and they brought your name up saying You're, what's wrong with the industry using the term ethnography? And that was my introduction to this CEO of this company that I was just held in such high regard. And I was truly horrified, truly horrified in that moment. After that, I changed my bio, I changed anything that came out publicly about how in what I said, I didn't know that design ethnographer, I've looked it up and I feel like I can say with some confidence that I'm one of the first people to use that term. It was used in a paper 14 years prior to when I started using it. I found it in a paper and I found a reference to it. And I don't lay claim on the term itself, but I do think I was one of the earliest people to use that term design iconographer as a title.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- People can be very precious when it comes to the use of language like that, but you don't seem to be someone who's a particularly dogmatic person.
- Kelly Goto:
- It depends, and again, I say this with such respect to my friends and colleagues who have methodologies that they stick to. I could go on and on about this actually. I'm a mixed methods research person and I believe in mixed methods usage for reasons. The terminology behind it is another story completely. We've had debates in office about the term NPS score, if you know what I'm talking about. Huge arguments. So from a language perspective and from Lean startup or agile, whatever terms, connect the designers and the product teams to the C-level in an organisation that we can all communicate about what our goals are and it's all user-centered, then I have been okay in my world using different terms to describe what I'm doing now. Does that change the methodology behind it and does it change the principles behind how we're doing research and how we're conducting interviews, finding patterns, bringing those patterns back, figuring out where the pain points are, where we can improve. No, it actually doesn't change the way that we're doing the work that we do, but sometimes the overlaying language and the terminology used can be both problematic to some teams and also helpful in other situations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've found looking at some of your conference talks and some of the things that you've written are quite refreshing in the way that you frame some of the methods or the ways in which you've been thinking about over the years, the research that you've done for clients. And one of those ways of framing it was you once labelled a state where a product becomes positively integrated with someone's lifestyle as becoming part of their, and I'll quote here, inner consciousness and you encourage designers to tap into that. And I know that's going back few years now, but is this state of inner consciousness that designers should tap into? Is this what firms like the social media firms did when they released features like the newsfeed?
- Kelly Goto:
- You do. Bring me back and I'll tell you it touches on a couple of topics. One is that I had started to write a book called Emotional UX, and my designer Will Callaway actually did a gorgeous cover, which was a touch screen that was just touched with fingerprints all over it. I had envisioned that Don Norman would write the forward. I submitted this concept, this book to my publisher, of which they quickly translated it into about 20 languages and posted it all over. So you'll see this cover if you look on the web, but the book never written. I got through several chapters of it and the book was based on a premise called Why Finding that I did come up with. It was following a project we had done with a client looking at something called love marks, which was a process that was written about maybe in the eighties or nineties where you really have to understand the underlying attachment that people have with the products and services and mostly the love that you have over a cup and how the handle's shaped, and it gets into some of the design of things and Don Norman's work.
- And I tried to take that principle and translate it into digital experiences. And so I was really into patterns. This is something that I've been into since fifth grade, again, trying to understand the meaning behind these patterns and why when someone has a pen and they click it, why that click of the pen is so satisfying? What is that about that feeling that you have or the home button on a phone when you could click on it? And that feeling both of satisfaction that it touched and you felt it being touched and also it brought you back to a familiar place home. And so I was really determined to understand these patterns. And so I created a methodology and a process that we went through, which was very intense. And it gets back into conse engineering. And this is probably way too deep and I can't believe I'm remembering all this, but if you think back to Japanese engineering, and again, it gets back to my Japanese roots, there's all these methodologies, the Kano methodology, the conse engineering methodology.
- And what that is is understanding what it is about this product. And in this case, Toyota was implementing this that they could bring people back to having an emotional appeal. And so I became part of the KCI engineering Club. I started getting materials from them from Japan. It was all in Japanese. I had no idea what was happening. And I was so determined to figure out the patterning and this. So if we dove down and I were to pull up materials, I could show you all of the papers that were laying all over the loft at the time where we were taking transcripts and using highlighter at the time, we didn't have dovetail and everything to pull out utterances, I call them utterances and understand how to create a framework where it just works. I love it and it's maybe should be down here because subconscious, but how do we get to that with a product experience and how do we understand what the factors are to get there and how do you create a methodology where you can understand where you are on that spectrum and where you want to be.
- And so not every experience needs to be an emotional, deeply emotional love experience. You could have a cup that's filled with water and just because it doesn't leak, it doesn't mean that it's an exceptional experience. It's an expectation. There's some very practical experiences that you just want to work and you don't have to have an underlying emotional connection with it. But as we move forward with a lot of products and services that we use, and especially work is so tied to our personal lives, you want things to evoke a sense of peace and flow. And it also led me into a direction of Miha Hai, which is the whole research on flow which led me to happiness. And so if I were to write another book, I would go back to that book and try and understand it. That'd probably be the rest of my life to really understand it. It's a hard problem to solve.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was curious, what was it that led you to putting it down back?
- Kelly Goto:
- That is a sad story. The story goes, and this is maybe something that I've learned from, and I actually just told someone about this and I think I broke down into tears explaining it. But I had been working on this book and I had been writing chapter after chapter and I still have all the chapters and I think some of them are really good, but because of so much client work that we were doing, I couldn't find examples to really highlight how to make this work. So I organised a team of people that I knew and trusted from across the industry. One of my friends that was from New Orleans, one of my friends from la, a coworker of mine, and I said, okay, we're going to have this super intense weekend where we are going to jam through and I'm going to create an app and I'm going to create some way of getting, and this is before Substack or little tiny, you could just publish little tiny things.
- That's what the idea was. And I had blogged of course, but there's something I wanted to create and I said, we're going to meet for this weekend. We're going to put this thing together. And after the first day I was just drawing things out and I was explaining what I was trying to do. The second day I walked in and everyone was just silent and kind of looking at me. I said, okay, we're ready to get going. Let's get going. We only have one more day and we're going to get somewhere and we're going to do this. And one of my friends stopped me and said, we don't think you should continue. We think you need to stop this. And I'm like, what do you mean? Of course I don't have everything together, which is why I brought you here. So we could do basically co-creation before it had a name. And I said, I know there's something here, and that's why I brought you guys here for support and everything. And it was one of the worst and most horrific interventions that I've ever gone through work level, like a professional level.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What made it so
- Kelly Goto:
- To just have three people that you've paid to fly in, it wasn't really the paying part, but you've flown in that you trusted, look you in the face and tell you that you've got nothing that you should stop, just cut bait and die. And I felt it and I cried all the way home. And a year later, one of my friends who was there said, I apologise that I didn't stand up for you. And I mean, it was really a sad and experience. And after that, I abandoned the project and it was too painful to pick back up, but I kind of know why it happened. And I had also just had two children. So I think that when you're a young mother, and I don't even know if I was breastfeeding at the time or whatever, but I was also travelling around the world and speaking and trying to fit these things in while raising these two toddlers infant, I think maybe at some point you got to say, okay, enough's enough.
- I can't do this right now. And that would've been better to just say, I think you're too busy to really put the time in to make this work for you right now. But the way that it was done was hurtful, and I actually have never spoken of it. So this is the first time, and I think now I can look at it in a retrospective way and realise that they were trying to help me out, but it was probably not the best choice. I think I could have taken really honest feedback and it didn't have to be done in that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The intention may have been pure, but the delivery was not.
- Kelly Goto:
- And I'm looking back, and I even now just recently looked back at some of the chapters and they're good. They're actually really interesting. And maybe it wasn't a methodology, maybe it was just a series of stories of why emotional connection to product experiences is so important. And here's examples I don't know, but I'd be willing to readdress it and think about it again. I still think it's so important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, you've just finished your last book, Kelly, and it seems like you've got some time now for your weekends and your holidays, your vacation time. So timing might be right when you think about it. It's interesting because physical product design, I mean, Kantai came out in Japan I think in the 1970s, and this is part of the broader sensory engineering field that I learned of through listening and reading some of the things that you'd written. So this isn't new, but it still seems like we are not quite there yet when it comes to the design of digital experiences. We've been very good in tapping into the addictive patterns that can hook the brain and develop it in a certain way. But this isn't really about those kind of base psychological hooks, is it? It's more, and by base I don't mean foundational. I mean the ones that can lead to behaviour that's not necessarily in the best interest of the user.
- This is more about how to create a deep connection through a product, digital product experience with the people that are using it. And for whatever reason, we seem to still be scratching at the very base level of usability in many of the product experiences that we're still creating. So why is it that our field isn't terribly new? I mean, you could argue the modern incarnation of UX maybe started around the birth of the worldwide web, but it's been going for a while now, right? That's mid nineties. Why have we struggled to get to a deeper level of connection with our users
- Kelly Goto:
- To start out with, I now have two teenagers and watching the connection of one who decides to keep her phone down. And so I'm panicking always because she never gets back to me and she really doesn't want to pick up that phone. She sees her other sister who she just turned 17 on her phone all the time. It's in my face. What's happening to this generation? That is something that again, we could have a whole conversation about. But if you go back to 2012 or 2009, actually, I started speaking on a topic which didn't help me from a career standpoint, but I felt was very important. And it was the fact that Korea had decided to get rid of all textbooks by 2015, and there was a de-evolution that was happening in the brains of this generation. We were so excited. Oh my gosh, look how smart our kids are.
- They can all use the iPhone. My oldest daughter was born the year the iPhone came out 2007. And quickly you could see this addiction cycle happening and the loss of privacy. No one cared. And I started lecturing about the de-evolution of our brains and our society and the checking habit that had started. And yes, it was a dopamine hit, but that we couldn't not pick up our phones. We had to pick up our phones 10 times in an hour, and probably it's even more now. And people said, oh, Kelly, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Isn't this your work? And I said, I don't care. And they were watching Zinga stock, which do you remember Zinga? So Zinga was the gaming company, right? Christina Woodkey was there and it just went up and then it crashed and they closed, and they were right down the street from where I was working and living at the time.
- And I slowly started getting, again, not positive feedback, but I tried to differentiate this idea of addiction to something that was really useful and helpful. And it's why I believe in user experience so much in the field. And it's not that I don't understand or support CX and where CX has gone, but I really believe that coming from a user-centered standpoint and understanding those needs and those behaviours and try and simplify people's lives and make their lives better in some way through products and services is really what my calling is what we try and do for our clients and customers as opposed to creating an addiction cycle. And I have colleagues, one of them wrote a book on addiction and talks a lot about that and now understands why maybe we don't want to stay addicted. I kept my kids off of phones this whole time.
- I have not tweeted, I think I never was on Twitter, which again, doesn't help me professionally at all. I've stayed under the radar once in a while. Maybe there's one thing that will go out. I've stayed off Facebook until the launch of this book. Someone said, you have to put a Facebook page on. I said, are you kidding me? I have been anti certain things that I have to stick to my principles on. That has definitely not helped me in my professional career, but it speaks to maybe who I am and what I believe in, and that's how I've had to live my life. So maybe I'm not going to promote the company, but I built relationships. And those relationships are what has kept our company going for 25 years. And these relationships don't exist for one project. They exist for 200 projects over time. We have deep relationships with our clients, and that is how we do our business.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Kelly, tell me, what does shoes Hawaii and the Japanese concept of VOU have to do with each other?
- Kelly Goto:
- So I'm going to Hawaii, and this is like one time I'm not going out of the country. The same thing happened, the same story repeated as I went out of the country where I didn't have my passport and I'm running around looking for my passport. So in this case, I'm running around packing. I get to Hawaii and I only have one shoe with me besides the shoes that I travelled with. And I just thought, oh my God. And my mom says, you do not have yoou time and that's the time to prepare. That's having extra abundance. I didn't really understand because a lot of times growing up you just hear like stop. You kind of hear these Japanese terms and you don't really know exactly what they mean, but you know the meaning behind it. And so in this case, my mom says, you do not have yo U time.
- So I just, okay, I get that. So I get to Hawaii and I am teaching a course there based on my book, and there's this one student named Tomo Sto who has taken a year off of Japan. He's an artist and a musician, and he's travelled all over the world, even at one point staying with Native American tribes to understand about the generations and how they impacted each other. So the last week of his trip, he takes my class in Hawaii before he goes back to Japan, and he doesn't speak great English, but I asked him during lunch, I said, what is Yoou? And so he draws it out on a napkin and he says, extra abundance, and it means that you have to give yourself time in between and you have to provide a little bit of space and get somewhere a little bit early.
- My daughter always, always my older daughter, especially not my younger daughter, gives herself Yo you time so that she arrives early. My mom always got places early when she was picking us up and she would study her Japanese and learn. My mom had to teach herself Japanese. She did not grow up speaking Japanese, so she learned Japanese as an adult. So yeah, I learned the concept of that by failing miserably multiple times and running with my head cut off and understanding what I don't have. And it's a word that doesn't exist in American language that we just start and we go here and then we go here. We don't have this in-between space between to think about things and to have extra abundant time. And so I think it's really quite telling that it's a word that doesn't exist and it's something that I've learned over time.
- And there's another word that I was telling you about earlier called ma and ma is actually the literal word for the space in between. And it means different things depending on architecture or design or the reason why Japanese bow to each other. They give each other space in between. It's showing respect. And there's all of these concepts about not the lines itself, but the space in between and what it means, especially like in a zen garden. And it's really about thinking about the balance and that the way that we just run as Americans, especially from one thing to the next, to the next to the next, and the end of the epilogue to that whole story is tomo ended up coming back to United States, going to design school, getting his master's. I had sponsored him for a visa. He worked with me for years and he helped create the kanji that is on the front cover of the Seattle Samurai book. And we're still in touch. And what a blessing he is. He's amazing human. So I met him that week that you mentioned, and we're still in touch.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a story is the mantra for Gato Media still exceed expectations and take vacations?
- Kelly Goto:
- It is because Sean, who we worked with, he used to be a client of ours. He [email protected] that you mentioned. Redeye became idea.com, and we became 1800 person company and all this stuff happened. And so Sean was actually a [email protected], and then we hired him at Idea integration. And this morning I was working with him on a session. We had this collaborative work session on Miro, and he's recently just come back from a trip to Hawaii and he's just in the best mood. I don't even understand it. And I said, you know what? We've decided to just send you back to Hawaii and you can work from there. Whatever happened, you need more of it. So I really believe because we were remote workers before there was remote work, and I knew that most of the team that I worked with in particular wanted to travel around the world and do all kinds of things.
- So when I was down in New Zealand for four months, I was working from there, made my host family instal internet, all that. And it wasn't that I didn't ever want to fully disconnect. Of course, we think disconnecting is great, but having the freedom and the autonomy to work where you work best, and as long as my team is self-running and they take care of their own stuff, they're all senior level. There's not a lot of micromanagement. You can go wherever you want and work as long as you get stuff done. So I do believe in that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just coming back to Yoou, just being ruminating on this since hearing you describe what it means and also how it translates, not just through time, it's also through space. I think you mentioned the way in which a zengar is designed. It's like, and the space of between two Japanese people bowing to each other. And I think you talked about respect. So by describing it that way, is it suggesting that the way in which we live when we are too busy, when we're too hectic, when we are not leaving any time in our calendar, that we're showing a lack of respect for ourselves and also for those around us?
- Kelly Goto:
- I think you just nailed it. And you have to remember that these terms are my translations as a fourth generation Japanese American. Hearing it over time, I didn't understand the literal meaning. I just understood the feeling behind it when my mom would use it. So my mom in particular, and my mom and dad have always used yoyo to say, give yourself more space. Don't just run and with your head cut off. And that's how I interpreted it. And I've since learned as an adult that MA is maybe more accurate towards what I was thinking that meant, but it still has that same kind of meaning, I think is, and again, I'm talking without knowing exactly what it means. And here if someone listens to it and they're a white person that lived in Japan, they can correct me later. But I think what you just said is true for both terms.
- I think one of them is more learned from the design side, I believe. And yo, I mean honestly, I just learned it from my parents. So I don't know how prevalent that is. I know I've spoken about it a lot because it's something that we don't think about in our daily lives, in our daily practise. So yes, having respect for yourself and giving yourself, an ex-boyfriend used to call it Yo-yo time, and he says, you need to give yourself more yo-yo time. And I said, okay. But it's just that time in between and that's why I love the space in between. I had love to find out how you came up with that term.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a story for another day. I think that as I approach middle age, I'm middle aged. I'm 14 in January, right?
- Kelly Goto:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I've got two young kids, and this is, maybe it's my midlife crisis kicking off, I'm not sure. But this idea that we've been talking about, this concept, it's starting to make more sense to me. There's other obviously concepts that I've grasped onto recently. It's about the sort of temporal nature of our time here. I'm literally halfway through my life if I'm lucky. We've all experienced loss, and I think it becomes more real to people when they start to realise that, hang on, all this running around with my head chopped off. I'm missing the thing that I can never get back. And of course I'm talking in cliched terms here in terms of time spent with loved ones. You start to wonder what is it all for? And is this the best way to live? And I think it's just a particular timing of researching for our conversation and where I'm currently at. And hearing you describe in the past where you've been at probably around a similar age. There's definitely something that's top of mind for me right now about that.
- Kelly Goto:
- Well, I mean, I don't know if it's called a midlife crisis or a great awakening, and I think I was just talking to my mom about this. I said, I didn't have this great ambition to do things or be known, or I think Steve Krug said it that we're just like this. Well, he said, big fish, but I feel like I'm a tiny fish in a tiny pond that the UX field is kind of a small pond that I'm privileged to be a part of, but we only have a certain amount of time to exist and to be present. And my constantly fighting to keep the kids off social media or keep technology out of their hands. I mean, maybe that fight isn't the right one. Maybe it's about constantly educating and understanding when we do put our phone down or how, or keeping it off our bed nightstand at night or thinking about sleep more even.
- It's just a matter of rebalancing ourselves. Because I think there's people in this world that don't always know exactly what motivates them. And I think that in the end, especially through this happiness project that I mentioned about doing all the research on flow and understanding that flow is challenge plus accomplishment over time, and that you have to have a certain amount of challenge to keep you going each stage of the way, but that it has to be able to get you there. And over time you're feeling like you're accomplishing something, right? And so you have this flow, and I think that's what it's like to be a parent. And you try and do your best every single day, but in the end, how often do you have your phone down and are you spending time playing cards and drawing? My kids love to draw and they have all their papers and pens and it just warms my heart whenever they get their art projects out and start doing anything that's analogue, which was probably why working on this book was so amazing over the past four years is yes, I was on the computer working on it, but it was an analogue output.
- I was looking at paper again, I was trying to understand the thickness and the weight and how it would feel in my hands. And I just think in the end, with all the work that we do and the focus that we have, we just have to create balance. It's hard. There's no magic bullet, but you take the time that you have and you figure out how to take care of yourself. And that's really important, especially for your kids. And then how you look at your community and the true happiness that I was referring to ends up being people that have community and relationships and connections. And that's, like I said, what's kept our company going all these years. So we're not very public, but we are relationship based, and that's important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You once asserted that, and I'll quote you now, people don't advance as quickly as technology. And we are living through right now, the rollout of generative AI and things, at least from my way of looking at it from down here at the bottom of the world, seem to be changing both quickly. And also this is a big shift that's going on. Now, you've worked throughout a few big shifts that have occurred in our field. There was, I suppose, the birth of the web, the bursting of the bubble web 2.0, and now we've had most recently what people have been calling Web3. I kind of say that I'm an expert in it, but this is crypto and blockchain, and now we've got generative ai. How does generative AI and what you've observed out there in your sphere, how does that compare in terms of a shift to the ones, the other ones that I've just mentioned?
- Kelly Goto:
- You really nailed it. I can't even believe that you brought this up because I've been thinking about that graph, that chart, and how to apply it to what's happening now. And the question that I have is, are people adapting to the technology as fast as it's coming out? And I have looked even last week when I had covid, I was looking for that chart because I want to understand how people are adapting and adopting to this new technology. The way that I've been envisioning it, and I'm sure someone will come up with this, and I'm trying to come up with it now, but whoever does it, I think it's a great graphic, is the idea of shoots and ladders. Do you know that game,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think we call it might be the same or it could be different. We call it snakes and ladders. Is it the same?
- Kelly Goto:
- Yeah, maybe something like that where you have little game pieces and let's just say this is making a UX wire frame in a flow chart, and then you could go like this, and then all of a sudden there's a slide going down to another level. And I feel like in terms of adaptation and usage, and again, I'll try and frame this in a simple way, just the way I'm looking at it is we have our personal purview about our work and our lives and our communications and what we can do to use Gen AI and LLMs and everything else to make our lives better, flow easier. And then there's kind of over here, there's our clients and enterprise and big business. That's a whole different ballgame. So I think on a personal level, we're adapting and we're figuring out what works and what doesn't work.
- And we understand that it's not perfect yet, but it's helping us think it's helping us frame. It's taking a collection of information that we already have and simplifying it, consolidating, taking out redundancies, proofing it. It's like having a smart assistant that is actually helping us rethink what we already know. And I think in that regard, people are okay with it and they're accepting of the technology and they're figuring out different ways to use it in their daily lives. I think here there's an ethics part, not an ethics in terms of are you reusing someone's art or are you stealing or where's the content generating? That's for legislation and for a lot of advocacy, which we're not going to talk about right now, but it's very important. But from a personal level, how am I using this at work? Am I going to disclose that I'm using this to build a research plan?
- Am I going to highlight the fact that I'm using this for a proposal? And so I think that on an individual level, getting to an organisational level, there needs to be some processes in place for understanding how people individually are using this in their lives to improve their workflow. And then what's, okay, for instance, is it okay to dump a lot of your client data into a language model that will then be used publicly in the future? I mean, there's questions that I have about the way that we're using this technology, but on a personal level, I do think that we're adapting fairly quickly because it's written in ways where it's using our own language and the prompts that we're learning to use and everything that we're doing on a daily basis. I mean, I'm using it daily. I do say, oh, I GP PTD this, or this is the start of something that we then need to sort out. It is never a finished product, it's just something in a entity that's helping you maybe brainstorm and shape what you're already thinking.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've certainly found it useful from my perspective to help refine thinking. And I think a lot of people you've just described there, it sounds like you're using it in a similar way. It seems to be very much like having that sounding board right next to you for some of the things that you're not quite sure on or that you need something to get started with, it's quite useful for that. One of the topics in our industry that's caused a bit of a stir, it's been quite a polarising one, has been the use of synthetic users, for lack of a better term. People either tend to get quite horrified when this topic comes up and are very anti it, or they believe that eventually it's going to enable and I'll using voted comm here almost as valid insights at a fraction of the price that we're currently needing to pay for. I'm loaded term here, a real research or with real humans, the kind of thing that we've been doing up to now, right? So there's a strong cost argument and that seems to be something that's quite attractive to enterprise and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why that might be. What's your take on the appropriate role for AI in research?
- Kelly Goto:
- I'm going to word this carefully because this is my own thought process and I support anyone that's streamlining research and trying to put it into the hands of companies that aren't currently doing that type of work. Customer journey work persona work, building behavioural personas, doing the segmentation work that's needed, especially on a quant level is so cost prohibitive that most companies, many companies will not invest and do that even if we believe in it wholeheartedly. So I say this so carefully because I am dedicated to doing authentic research one-on-one research, understanding people, but I will say that if there are ways of getting a better understanding of who the end users really are and getting that in front of product owners and getting it in front of C-suite and helping them understand the value of user-centered design as a supplement, I believe that it could be groundbreaking and changing, but that means that it has to really work and that usually means that it's grounded in real data.
- And so all the work that we're doing now with the one-on-one interviews, again, I'm into mixed methods, and so maybe there would be diary studies or maybe there would be an analysis of customer service inquiries and open and comments and things like that. If you could synthesise that and help build a hypothesis, then we could test in smaller segments and it could be cost effective. That's how I think it would be the most beneficial. So I'm a real advocate of what I call rapid UX research where you take a hypothesis, this is quick story, but I worked for as a EIR for entrepreneur in residence for a couple of think tanks, right? And they're usually think tanks within a larger organisation. So let's just say that one of these is one of the top retailers in the country and they have $20 million that they're going to invest in this idea.
- So they would come to me and say, what do you think about this idea? And I'd say, oh, tell me about it. And so they have this idea that they can take this business line and they can reframe it for a new customer set. And I say, Hey, why don't we do some rapid research to find out if that hypothesis is true before you write that $20 million check? And so with 12 people, and I say this carefully, there was a paper that I found that said you can reach saturation with H 12 people per segment. Not scientifically validated, but I've always been trying to understand saturation and how many people we need to get to make something happen. And it's when you start actually getting redundant patterns over time. So maybe 24 people for sure, you're going to have enough people if they're the right segment.
- So with 12 to 16, I'll just say if there's one or two segments, we find those people, the right people, we them, we can find out what the answer is to that $20 million question. You could get to that $20 million concept through ai. You could use it generative ai. You could have concepts, you could have co-creation sessions, you could put together a business plan, you could Mackenzie it and Accenture it, and you could build it out over time and see that there's a huge market size for that. And if everyone spends $1, they're going to make this amount of money. Or you could ask 12 people what they really think. And I will tell you over and over and over again, I've gotten an answer with those 12 people that can make you either write the check or not.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have you managed to get past to want to spend the money though
- Kelly Goto:
- It depends on who's bringing me in. Am I being brought in by the person that's going, wait a minute, I don't think that's true, but I can't say anything. They won't listen to me. Or I want to spend the money and let's make sure this is a good use of our spending. Either way, they're going to be happy with having some kind of answer. And I may put it into an indie young mental model to show that their idea of what they're trying to do is quite different from the perception of the actual end user or in the healthcare field. They may think, oh, look at all these doctors are using this and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And we're saying, well, actually it's all of the nurse practitioners slash admin intake people that are doing the work and using the product. So maybe there's just a complete disconnect over who they think are actually using your product. Now, finding those 12 people sometimes is nearly impossible. It really depends on who they think that their audience is and who the audience really is. But I will tell you, a few cycles of hypothesis driven research has yielded some fantastic results.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't think you'll find it hard to convince many people listening to this. That would be the case. I thinking about the work that you've done with clients over the last 25 years through gotoresearch and gotomedia, how would you describe the changes you've observed in clients' attitudes towards research? So if you think about when you first started to the kinds of conversations that you are having today, how have they changed, if at all?
- Kelly Goto:
- I think that product owners and marketing folks from all different areas need to come together and understand again what those goals are. And I think that they have, so I'm not saying that there's not a holistic discipline and user experience, and there's not a holistic discipline in CX customer experience and that service design doesn't have its own background and its reason for being, but it is a combination of looking at this triad and I did end up writing an article about it. I couldn't stand it about what the differences were, what the similarities were, what people are really trying to do, what the goals are, what some of these terms are, because it just dawns on me that people are doing similar things and calling it different things in organisations. And so there's been big reframing, especially working with development, working, marketing and product. And product has typically been centre working closely with their own dev and sort of insular and hiring in.
- And marketing has typically not been as close to the dev side and mostly been reaching and just trying to get lead gen, lead gen, lead gen, lead gen. I feel that marketing and product are maybe working a little bit more symbiotically that people are understanding that whole experience needs to be taken into consideration. There is more of an eye on service design and understanding, again, what these terms are. If you really look at service design, and I love the book, this is service design, and then there's other books that follow and you flip through it, you go, oh, I'm kind of already doing that. But are you thinking about it holistically and having a discipline following it all the way through to prototyping or during doing a current state and a future state blueprint, for example, it could be a big journey map, but with service design, you're looking at it from top to bottom outside like here's these C levels that have a meetup every Thursday and they're meeting for drinks and talking, and that's not part of the journey map.
- And down here, here's customer service that interacts with people at some level for renewal that isn't part of the customer journey map. Maybe all these pieces need to be put together so people understand what's really happening. I believe that a map, if people are going to take the time and build something and create something, it has to communicate and what it communicates needs to change what's happening current state to future state. And so if you can use the language that is the best served within your organisation, I know I'm going to get in trouble for this, but that's really how you make progress.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is the pragmatic Kelly that I was teasing into a little bit earlier in terms of you not being overly dogmatic about a thing. If you can think about it in terms that people will better connect with and communicate to them in those terms, but you're still achieving the same outcome, why on earth wouldn't you do that?
- Kelly Goto:
- And I want to be careful about it because I am UX born and bred, and I think I was doing it before it had a name. I maybe was part of the group that helped create it. I don't know because I'm that old, but I don't disbelieve in all the work that we're doing and what we're doing. But I also understand that in the field that I've been in that we have only a certain ability to affect C-level thinking or get to sales or understand. And really that is the world we live in where you have to see how all those pieces fit together. And it's very hard in enterprise organisation to do so. So it's just piece by piece by piece. But you've got to stay dogmatic about the methodology and the approach and how you're recruiting and the types of questions you're asking and not leading.
- I mean, I do believe in the process itself of research and how to do it properly and how to code data and how to understand and synthesise that into findings. If you need to quantify it, how to then not do it at the same time, but do it before to create a pattern and then validate that pattern or after to then take those findings and then find out numerically, statistically, how does it resonate. So there is a process that you don't just ask questions. And I don't believe the MPS score gives you all the answers. So don't hear me wrong. I don't know that they're getting as deep information as they can get by doing the work that we do every day, but if we don't understand the language that's being used and why it's important, then we're not able to consult at that level that we need to.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No argument from me there. Kelly. I'm just mindful of time. I want to ask one last question now, and I want to take you back to March, 2011, and I'll quote you one last time. You said then in the design world, especially within the field of innovation and technology, it seems there would never be a time when the dues were paid in full, but the rewards don't stop either. And that is the seductive draw of being in a field where change is imminent and inspiration comes from constant exposure, learning and experience. Do you still feel the same way?
- Kelly Goto:
- I think that was called paying your dues or something like that, or the fact that your dues are never paid. It was written for an A IGA article. I don't know where you found that because I had a hard time finding it because they had archived it at one point. I a hundred percent believe it's never done that. I will never stop paying my dues. I do believe that, and I believe that because I will never stop wanting to learn. And as long as I'm curious and I'm out there to learn about new things, I mean, I could just stop and be like, I'm old now. I'm done. I don't want to look at this newfangled stuff. But yet I find myself listening to podcasts like yours, constantly educating myself, trying to understand how it fits in. And I do believe in the other side of that article is that I am a designer by trade.
- So that article is about using rubylith and using exacto knife and cutting myself once in a while and rubbing down letters and understanding typography. And my background is calligraphy is how we started. And so my aesthetic ability, and I'm not the best designer, which is why I didn't stay in the field as a pure designer, but the ability to take the principles behind why we became designers in the first place, which is part of your intro, we are designers. User experience is a piece of almost a three-dimensional model of an experience that we've designed. So what does design mean? And for us to be in this field is to be curious. It's to, it's have these conversations and I will never stop wanting to have these conversations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a wonderful point to finish on. Kelly, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today and also with the broader UX community throughout your career.
- Kelly Goto:
- Thank you so much. Don't shoot me if I said anything that takes down any validity of the community that we're in. But I speak what I think of, and I do think that we need to be able to look at other people's perspectives, and that's what makes me curious. And as a designer and a researcher, I think why it's important that we do is we have to look at things from different perspectives. So thank you for doing what you do, and I really appreciate this conversation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome, Kelly. Very welcome. If people want to connect with you, aside from complaints, I'll come up with some fictitious email address they can send those to if they want to keep up to date with the type of work that you're still contributing to the field, you're still actively engaged in our field. What's the best way for them to do that?
- Kelly Goto:
- I mean, going to kelly goto.com, that's my personal site. I blog once in a while. I very rarely also go to media.com. G-O-T-O-M-E-D-I-A. You can still reach out there and ping me anytime. I think LinkedIn is really actually a good way to reach me. I am on LinkedIn and I'm easy to respond to if you want to reach out to me there. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thank you, Kelly, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything that Kelly and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find her. And all of the things that we've spoken about will be detailed in chapters so you can hop around to the parts of the conversation that you want to hear.
- Again, if you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe, the podcast is published every two weeks, and tell someone else, maybe just one other person that you feel would get value out of these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes. And lastly, you could check out my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.