In this episode of If U Seek, Joe Natoli sits down with Nikol Fotaki for a refreshingly honest conversation about the state of UX today. Going over what’s working, what isn’t, and what teams keep getting wrong. With over 30 years of experience helping Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, and startups, Joe is known for his practical, and direct take on the UX industry.
He talks about why so many UX teams get trapped by rigid frameworks and over-engineered processes, and how real progress only happens when you adapt to the messy, unpredictable nature of people and business. From balancing user and business goals to letting go of “the right way” to do things, Joe shares the mindset shifts that turn good designers into effective problem-solvers.
You can find If U Seek on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube Music
Preview
In this episode:
- Formal UX frameworks are useful starting points, but they collapse fast when reality enters the room.
- The tension between business goals and user needs isn’t a trade-off, it’s a partnership to be managed.
- Teams that adapt and iterate quickly avoid the paralysis of process.
- The surest way to earn influence is to speak the language of business outcomes, not design terminology.
- Success isn’t always measured in pixels! It’s in the clarity, confidence, and results people feel.
For more Joe Natoli wisdom, check out Give Good UX and UX 365 Academy!
Transcript
0:00: Joe: If I have one thing to impart to people before I leave this world, it’s gonna be, there is no right way to do any of this. Let that go, all right? Again, if you’re banging your head against the wall, stop doing it. Like there’s an old joke where a guy goes to the doctor and he says, my shoulder hurts every time I go like this, and the doctor goes, Well, stop going like that, stop doing it.
0:22: It’s that kind of thing, right? We always go through this and it keeps like, OK, stop what you’re doing. Let go of whatever that is. And they said, well, I don’t know what we’re gonna do instead, that’s OK. That’s all right. I mean, that’s the other big thing, right? We feel like we have to have all the answers. There’s no such thing. This is hard.
0:40: Nikol: What we seek shapes what we build. This is If U Seek by Useberry.
0:47: Hi there. Welcome back to If U Seek by Useberry.
0:50: This is Nikol Fotaki, and with us today is Joe Natoli, who has spent 3 decades advising, training, and empowering UX design and product development teams at some of the world’s largest and biggest organizations, from Fortune 100 to US government agencies and startups. His work helps teams cut through jargon, focus on what matters, and deliver real impact for both users and businesses.
1:18: Along the way, he’s written 10 books, most recently the second edition of the user experience team of one, and he’s reached more than 300,000 students, through his courses and UX 365 Academy. Joe doesn’t just preach frameworks, he pushes back on the formal overblown methods and says, what works in theory often fails in practice.
1:45: He challenges people to be less about processes and more about clarity value and execution. I’m excited to dig into a no nonsense result oriented view of UX with you today, Joe. Welcome to If U Seek.
2:01: Joe: Thank you for having me. what an introduction that was.
2:04: Nikol: Yeah, yeah, there’s so much to tell, very in all, let’s say.
2:09: Joe: That’s the benefit of being around for a long time, right? The, the longer you exist, the more that you, more that you achieve. That more impressive the resume gets, I guess.
2:18: Nikol So much to learn today, very excited. So, to get into this no nonsense, UX approach, what do you mean by that? Beyond the jargon, what is the core of that mindset?
2:34: Joe: Well, I don’t believe in formality. I don’t believe I am not a believer in rigid structure, rules, dogma. There’s a lot of stuff, what again, this is something that time teaches you.
2:47: A lot of what looks great on paper, OK, it looks great in the diagram, looks great in the process, sounds great in a book, from a conference talk, on YouTube videos, social media posts. All this sort of rigid constraints around process and has to be done this way and, you know, if you don’t do it like this, it’s not real UX or it’s not real product designer, it’s not.. All those rules and ideas and processes and dogmas and diagrams, they’re helpful starting points. OK, but they’re nothing more than that because the minute you involve other human beings of any kind, things get complicated.
3:27: There’s just the nature of, it’s the nature of humans, it’s the nature of business, it’s the nature of everything, and inside a corporation in particular,, you have a structure of how a company is built, right, with there’s a million different departments, and all those departments are essentially set up for opposition.
3:48: They naturally have competing priorities, not because people want to be combative or they want to be argumentative or whatever, it’s literally the way it is. They’re all responsible for different things. So in that kind of environment, again, with humans, we’re all very messy and complicated, enslaved to our emotions and all sorts of things. In that environment, all the recipes in the world will not save you. You can start with the format, you can start with the process, but you’re gonna have to adapt.
4:16: You’re gonna have to flex, you’re gonna have to constantly take stock of what’s happening in front of you, and be willing to pivot. And what I see a lot of, and what I have seen a lot of in my career is that people get attached to the rules, people get attached to the process, it has to be this way and they paint themselves into corners, right? Difficult things happen and they’re not getting anywhere, they’re not making progress, and people are frustrated, and people are fighting and It’s largely because of this refusal to just accept what’s in front of you and roll with it and deal with it, right?
4:51: I tell people all the time, if you got concrete evidence of what you’re doing is not working, stop doing it. For the love of all things, you know, stop doing it. So that’s what it is, no nonsense, you know, means I, I just, I don’t have time for anybody’s ideas about how something is supposed to be.
5:12: I don’t care how it’s supposed to be, I care how it is. The only way I can do anything, the only way I can help people make things better, is if we accept the situation that we’re in, if we accept The good, the bad, the ugly. The constraints we have to work under, it doesn’t matter whether we like them or not.
5:29: Like there’s a saying that goes, you know, the truth doesn’t care what you think of it. It’s that kind of thing.
5:35: Nikol: Oh, yeah, that, that, kind of highlights how much of UX is about stripping things back to what really matters.
5:48: Joe: Yes.
5:49: Nikol: and I think this also connects to another kind of tension in UX, the balance between business needs and user needs, so UX is often like pulled between serving the business and serving the user, you’ve argued that they are inseparable. yeah, but why do so many teams still treat them like a trade-off?
6:19: Joe: Again, because that’s the party line, that’s the myth, that’s the hero complex that we have, you know, you’re, you’re supposed to fight for the users. Your job is to advocate for the use, which it is, don’t get me wrong. But we take that as dogma, we take that as we have to do what’s right for users at the expense of everything else.
6:38: Now, in a world where there’s no business, that makes all the sense in the world but and this dovetails on what I said a minute ago, the truth doesn’t care what you think of it. Users aren’t paying your salary. OK, users didn’t hire you. Users aren’t, didn’t bring you into their organization to further their own goals, and that’s what a business is.
7:01: At its core, the job of a business is to make money. Charity organizations exist. To do good in the world, but even then, there are functional expenses, there are things that they have to deal with. Money is a reality for every organization, one way or another.
7:18: And unless you solve that problem first, you don’t have anything to give to users or customers, or your constituents, or whoever. Government has the same problem. OK, so we ignore this part of the equation for reasons I have never understood. Under the misguided idea that there is purity in operating that way.
7:39: I think it’s a fool’s errand. I think you’re going to get hurt in any number of ways over and over and over again. You’re banging your head and your heart in some cases against the wall that’s not going to move. The money part of the equation is never going away, ever. It’s not.
7:56: Now, are there things done in the name of money that I don’t agree with? Absolutely. Absolutely, I greed a thing? Yes it is. Does it motivate far too many people? Yes it does.
8:09: But you can’t ignore that, it’s still a thing, OK? I walked in this situation once where I could not figure out, for about a month, OK, why there was so much pushback on, I mean literally everything, OK? Everything that we proposed, so well we can’t do that, we don’t but that’s that’s just too, I said, look, I’m asking you for 8 hours.
8:30: Take a step back, you’re about to place a very large bet. There’s a ton of risk here for you as an organization.
8:36: Let’s take 8 hours and iterate and test some stuff just to make sure. That were somewhat on the right track, you know. And I could not figure out what the resistance was. Eventually it came out that the issue was pure numbers on a spreadsheet.
8:52: There was an executive in a corner office who I had never met, whose quarterly bonus was dependent on hitting very specific numbers, not just about financial return, OK, not just about profit margin, but about Like sequential releases, number of feature releases over a period of time.
9:11: So the only thing that this person cared about was hitting that number. Now, is that a shitty reason to do anything? Yes, it is. But it’s still reality. If my hands are being tied by that issue, I have, if I know about it, I can find a way to work with it. Right, I can adjust what I’m doing to make sure that person gets what they need, and at the same time, we’re being smarter about, OK, how can we make sure that what we do delivers value to people?
9:40: And that’s what we did. My feeling is there’s always a way. I don’t think you ever have to sacrifice one for the other. So when I tell people, business first, user second. I don’t mean that you sacrifice users at the altar of business. I mean that you have to work to find a way to satisfy both, and I am living proof that it can be done.
10:01: I’m not smarter or more talented or anything, you know, more than anybody else but I’m living proof it can be done. What happened was I was very early on in my career, I got really tired, like I said, a banging my head against the wall.
10:18: Why is this not working? Why can we not convince people to do the right thing and that was why.
10:25: They have to see their own interests reflected. You cannot sacrifice one for the other. It does not work.
10:29: It’s a recipe for heartbreak.
10:32: Nikol: Well, you would say that they, the people are often pushed towards optimizing for one side, like the revenue, the retention, and the human side gets lost or vice versa. So,
10:45: Joe: Right, but here’s the thing, that may be true, but what I have found is that when you optimize for the business side, when you satisfy those people, They stopped pushing back. They stop saying no to things.
10:59: They’re getting what they want, and because they’re getting what they want, they equate that with You doing what you’re doing.
11:07: All right, so if you want to take that pressure off, you gotta solve that problem first, in order to get more green lights, in order to get more agreement, in order to get more support.
11:16: Mhm.
11:17: They don’t, we labor under this illusion that everybody understands and cares about good UX and design the way that we do. They don’t, on both cases. People will nod their heads at UX stuff all day long.
11:29: They don’t get it. They don’t have to get it, is my thing, OK? I’m not here to educate anybody. All they need to know that it is that it’s working and it’s getting them the things that they already want. That gives us some freedom, some leeway, some support, some financial backing to go and do things that we know are good for human beings on the other end of this equation.
11:51: But that you got to get that support first. If you don’t have it, you’re gonna be fighting forever.
11:56: And to me, especially the older I get, man, life is far too short to spend it arguing with people about stuff.
12:05: Yeah, you can do both.
12:08: Nikol: And I guess when the dots, these dots, let’s say, aren’t connected, the response, I’ve heard of, I’ve seen, is teams adding more layers to the process, as if more rigor will solve the gap, which, yeah, which brings me to complexity. So whenever complexity creeps into UX, where do you see it showing up the most in tools, processes, even culture?
12:43: Have you seen any red flags that tell you this team is making things harder than they need to be?
12:50: Joe: Yeah, I mean, The biggest place it shows up in tools, I, well, that’s a that’s if I had to think about it, it’s a tossup.
13:00: That shows up between tools and process, and by process I mean a large organisation as a whole, right?
13:07: So, tools, there’s obviously certain things design systems, there’s Figma, there’s, I’ve seen both things sort of get very overengineered.
13:16: And the problem, An inadvertent problem that happens with design systems, for example, is that everybody assumes that, OK, we’ve got a system, we can just set it and forget and rinse and repeat and just keep slapping these items on everything that we do.
13:30: Not really true.
13:32: You know, a design system is a living organism. You start with it, and then you change it, and you adapt it based on the context, based on the product, based on the audience, based on what you’re trying to get out of users or customers, what you’re, what they need from it.
13:45: It it has to be able to change. So this is not a set it and forget it proposition. I think a lot of people think of it that way. Organizations, not so much designers, but organizations tend to think of it that way, and it gets them into trouble.
13:59: The bigger thing It’s definitely a process, and that is, it happens on two sides. It happens with researchers and designers in that they insist they have to have this much time over the target when in reality, you can do a hell of a lot of good work with only this much.
14:17: It requires changing your approach. You know, I’ve had teams that were when I came in, the first thing I do is I ask a team I’m working with, sort of covert. I said, what have you been asking them to do or pushing them to do that they’ve been saying no to?
14:32: Nikol: Yeah.
14:33: joe: Because if I propose it, I’m an outside consultant, right? I don’t have any of the baggage of an internal employee. If I ask it, there’s a good chance that they’ll go for it. So I always ask those things because a lot of times the teams know exactly what needs to be done, it’s just that nobody’s listening.
14:49: So I always ask them like what’s what’s your, what’s your fight here?
14:53: Tell me, and it’s always one of those things, but what I find out a lot of times is that they’re asking for too much, and remember you’re asking for too much from people who don’t understand its value in the first place.
15:04: When you say I need 2 weeks of research, the only thing those people on the business side of the house here is time and expense.
15:12: That’s it. Business is short-term thinking. But they’re not thinking about the long term, how it’s gonna help them make better decisions with less risk, right? They’re thinking like, it’s too much time, too much money, like we got to get this out.
15:29: So I ask for less. I tell people that all the time, ask for less, number one. Ask for a week, ask for if the answer is still no, ask for a couple days. People say that’s not enough. No, it’s reality. What you’re gonna get is what you’re gonna get.
15:45: It’s a question of what you do with it. You can pack a lot of interviews into an eight hour day.
15:51: All right, you really can. 15 minute increments. If you’re smart about the questions you ask, you can gain a lot of ground. 88 hours, right, again, not because I say so, cause I’ve seen it over and over and over again.
16:03: Design iteration, same thing. OK, so they’re not gonna give you a full 2 week sprint for iteration.
16:15: Fine.
16:17: Do the best you can with what you’ve got and make a commitment to test it along the way. If you can only spend one of your two weeks iterating. Try and find a way to cram in some testing in that 2nd week. So that you can tweak and change and modify what you’ve done in the first week.
16:34: You know, is it perfect?
16:35: No.
16:35: Is it better than nothing?
16:37: Yes.
16:37: Agile is the other part of this. I’ve had a problem with Agile in its iterations for a long time. The principles of Agile are brilliant. The original way this was supposed to happen.
16:52: It’s genius. It was an acknowledgment. That you can’t predict the future, OK?
16:57: It’s impossible, stupid. Estimating is idiotic. It’s never correct ever, not ever.
17:04: I’ve never been in an organization in the last 30 years of my life where estimating was correct, ever. I’ve never been in a company where budgets for like, you know, right, what everybody expects them to beat.
17:15: Software development is rife with surprise, it’s rife with complexity, it’s rife with unexpected stuff.
17:22: What’s compounds it Is that you have design operating on this track and development operating on this track.
17:29: And then every 2 weeks they come together to share stuff.
17:32: Here’s what I designed, here’s what I built. Both sides are completely surprised at what they see.
17:38: Right? Designers surprised development built it that way, and development is like, how do you expect me to build that? That’s gonna take 6 weeks.
17:46: It’s too complex, it’s too, because there’s no communication. Now I’ve had limited success with this, honestly, because people are willing to let go of unwilling to let go of their stuff, but I’ve had a handful of teams Who I said to, look, instead of doing what you’re doing.
18:04: Either sit people side by side if they’re in the same office, Designers and developers, or have them check in with each other twice a day. So whether they’re in person or remote.
18:14: Here’s what I’m doing. What do you think? Any problems? Do you see any problems this paint you in any corners, and anything that’s difficult to do here, easy to do here? Designers or developer.
18:23: Here’s what I’m thinking. Do you think we can do this?
18:26: Developers say, here’s what I built, is this kind of what you had in mind? Constant communication, constant check-ins. You know, the, the two people sort of helping each other. Avoid all those snags.
18:39: Later, and this is the way that I like to work. If I’m in a company for a couple months.
18:46: We spend the majority of our time in a room with the white board and if they’re designers on staff, they’re in the room, and if they’re Developers available, I want at least 2, a lead, and, you know, maybe someone right below them in the room.
18:59: And I literally want them rough prototyping stuff as we talk about it, as we dig through it on the whiteboard, boxes and arrows, rough interfaces, whatever. We’re trying to prove stuff out, and inevitably what happens is you eliminate weeks and sometimes months of work.
19:16: By testing it out right there because developer will say, I can’t do that in the time we have, but I can do this, and it’ll show me their laptop and say, so what if it worked like this, and I could probably modify this other piece.
19:32: What do you think of that? And we talk about it and we go, you know what, that’s good enough. It’s not where we started, but it’s good enough. Done, let’s move on. It’s actually, yeah, it’s actually giving a focus and giving the time to actually collaborate and it’s given us our time back to think.
19:53: You know what I mean, you’re not spending weeks just trying to make the thing real and make it work.
20:00: You’re just eliminating a lot of that time where you’re like, oh shit, this isn’t gonna work. You know, I just think that the more designers and developers, UXers and developers work like this.
20:12: They’re better off everybody is. There’s a lot less headache. But it’s a hard sell because people are attached to this, no, no, no, our process has to be this. Is that working?
20:22: I mean, if it’s working for you, fine, keep doing it, but if it’s not, it might be trying to try something different and, and tools often play into this dynamic, they can either make things clear or give a sense of, let’s say false progress, and, and you’ve warned against this over reliance on tools and templates, that they can become crutches.
20:50: They are, yeah.
20:51: Yeah, so what actually helps a designer decide if a framework, is clarifying the work or just creating noise?
21:01: I, I think that it’s, again, it’s, it’s thinking, and I think you have to be very, very disciplined.
21:08: And experienced in a way, in order to start your work in a tool.
21:14: The problem with any tool, inherently.
21:17: Is that there’s all this stuff at your fingertips.
21:19: And because you’re using the thing actively, right, with your hands and your eyes and your brain, it’s natural for some part of your thinking to be split on the execution that you’re doing.
21:31: Now some of that’s muscle memory and some of that becomes unconscious, and you get really fast at certain things, but again, that’s the illusion of good.
21:39: Fast and simple and inefficient isn’t necessarily good.
21:43: The problem that gets the thing that gets skipped.
21:46: When you’re over relying on tools, is the thinking part gets skipped, because you’re spending most of your time just trying to make the thing work.
21:53: You know, and sigma in whatever.
21:57: There’s a lot of effort that goes into that, so it’s dangerous because Your thinking is tilted toward actually implementing the thing.
22:06: And you’re not spending enough time, what I’ve seen a lot of is you’re not spending enough time thinking about it.
22:10: Now, there are people.
22:13: Who don’t treat anything as done on the screen.
22:16: I mean, I’ve worked with people on teams who are just brilliant, and they’re willing to start and completely throw everything away and start over really, really fast, you know, iterate, try that.
22:28: Start again.
22:29: As opposed to finessing it and finessing it, and finessing it, and sort of forcing it to work on screen or make it look perfect and pretty and whatever.
22:36: You have to be willing to work loose and fast, and your focus has to be on, is this a good idea in the first place, right?
22:43: Is this collection of things make sense?
22:45: Does this interaction, is it gonna be obvious to somebody?
22:49: If there’s, you know, 3 stages of tiered information, is exposing it in this way gonna make sense, you know, or is it obscuring what they really need to do, in this moment?
23:01: Does simplifying this form make sense?
23:05: Sometimes you think, well, we should keep it simple.
23:07: We’ll have 44 steps and less information on each screen.
23:13: Sometimes that’s actually not best.
23:15: But you’re thinking about design, you’re thinking about the tool, as opposed to how somebody’s gonna use this.
23:21: I just think there’s a certain amount of inherent blindness that comes when you just dive into the tool.
23:27: Not for everybody.
23:28: But I think especially when you’re new to this.
23:31: I don’t know, I, it’s this is gonna sound like an old man thing, all right.
23:37: But You know, taking the time to sketch it out on a piece of paper.
23:43: Or on a tablet, on, I have an iPad that I use religiously, that I sketch things on, It’s just you’re thinking.
23:52: You’re not focused on any tool whatsoever, you’re just thinking, does this make sense?
23:56: And can I walk through it and say, yes, no, maybe.
24:00: Does it make sense?
24:02: That’s the hard part of the job.
24:04: Figuring out what’s appropriate, what’s gonna work, and having a conversation with technical people say, and I show people my iPad sketches all the time, developers.
24:13: And I’ll be like, here’s what I’m thinking about, it’s just a sketch of a sequence.
24:17: And I walk them through it, and they go, that makes sense except for this.
24:21: This would have to be different, OK, so erase it, drop it like this, yes.
24:27: All right, we just eliminated like 4 hours of screwing around.
24:31: So, I think there’s tremendous value in that, and I think that it’s not, it’s not talked about, it’s not taught, it’s seen as an old way of thinking, but the reason we were taught to do that in graphic design school because our professors used to say all the time.
24:48: The first things that come out of your brain are inevitably gonna be things that you’ve seen.
24:52: They are not necessarily appropriate things.
24:55: There whatever comes first, their patterns that you’ve seen and appropriated from other places.
25:02: And they may not be appropriate, they may not be relevant, they may not be the right decisions at all.
25:07: So you kind of got to get past all that stuff.
25:11: To get to something better.
25:12: So I learned to do to do everything that way, and I have a father who’s a process engineer, was a process engineer for General Motors, and he’s the same way.
25:22: Spend a lot of time thinking and very little time executing.
25:26: So that’s my long winded answer to.
25:30: You’re very simple question.
25:32: I, I just think you gotta spend more time up here.
25:36: I guess sometimes the real value of a tool is the conversation it sparks, not just the output.
25:47: Definitely the output is the output is the simplest part.
25:52: You know, I, I, I explain this to clients all the time.
25:56: That hi me from a strategic point of view, what I tell them is, look, the implementation is easy.
26:01: Design.
26:02: It’s kind of easy, right?
26:04: You have people on your team who are excellent at what they do.
26:08: They don’t, they don’t need help designing, you know, I mean, your people in general are excellent at what they do, so it’s not a question of The execution, that’s easy, that’s the easy part.
26:20: The hard part is thinking through, is this the right thing to do?
26:24: Is it appropriate?
26:25: Are people gonna be able to use it?
26:27: Are they gonna want to use it?
26:28: Are they be able to understand what they see?
26:30: Are they gonna be able to step through it?
26:31: Is it gonna get rid of the inefficiencies that we’re trying to solve for, you know?
26:36: Is it gonna save them time, is gonna help them make less mistakes, whatever it is.
26:43: You spend the majority of your time thinking through those things, because you’ve got a lot of really talented people around you.
26:50: Who can do the other?
26:52: I mean that’s easy.
26:54: Right, I’ve met a lot of amazing UX, amazing designers, amazing developers.
27:00: They don’t need help doing what they’re doing.
27:01: They’re awesome at it.
27:03: The hard part is figuring out what to do and what is the right thing to do, and what the complexity is around trying to do it.
27:09: All right, real quick before we jump back in, you know how product teams are always trying to move faster and research teams are trying to move smarter.
27:20: Well, Uberry actually helps you do both.
27:23: It lets you run quick remote user tests, and honestly, they’re just as easy to run as they are to share.
27:30: No bottlenecks, no endless waiting around, and definitely no more guessing.
27:34: It’s just research that moves at the speed of product.
27:38: Check it out at Useberry.com.
27:41: Joe, you’ve said QX is only meaningful if it produces results people can feel.
27:49: Yes.
27:50: What does results mean to you?
27:54: how can teams measure them without failing into vanity metrics?
28:01: I think results, number one, results aren’t necessarily yours.
28:06: It can be, but only by Sort of boomerang effect.
28:12: I mean, results are, if anybody benefits.
28:15: From what you’ve done In any way, those are results, right?
28:20: If, if Something is easier for people to use if they get through it faster, if they get through it with less friction, if they understand it better, if they have to call support less often, or, you know, get on a chat less often.
28:36: That’s a win if If there are fewer mistakes, if there are fewer complaints, if, I mean, money made money saved is an easy metric, right?
28:47: That’s easy to track and easy to easy to gauge, but there are lots of little ways that things make big improvements.
28:54: You know, and a lot of times you see it the way that things happen inside an organisation where there’s all these backend processes, and I don’t just mean software.
29:02: I mean, there’s all this infrastructure support that goes around a certain set of tasks and a certain product.
29:10: And when sort of everybody’s workload comes down in internal facing stuff, for example.
29:16: That’s a win.
29:17: I mean, no matter what’s on the screen, no matter how you feel about how it looks.
29:22: Or how it behaves, or whether it’s at a certain standard of visual design or whatever.
29:27: If people’s lives become easier, a little more sane, a little less stressful.
29:32: You know, a little easier.
29:34: There’s lots of ways that manifests, If clients get what they want, I mean, That’s fantastic.
29:42: There are things that I knew Could probably be done better, could probably be done infinitely, in a different way.
29:53: But the problem at hand was big and it needed to be solved.
29:56: I had a client who was losing a tonne of money, for example, on a self-service product, and this is at corporate level, so it’s, it’s big money.
30:04: They issue purchase orders, OK, for the service.
30:06: , And what eventually came out after 3 days of talking to these folks, what eventually came out was, People do all this custom configuration, customers for about 45 minutes to an hour.
30:22: And when they get to checkout, they suddenly bail out, right?
30:26: They’re ready to pull the trigger and say, yes, let’s You know, do this, it triggers a purchase order, there’s a system involved, and they would just quit at that point.
30:35: Somebody brought this up casually 3 days in and I said, what?
30:42: How often does that happen?
30:44: And it was a staggering number of occurrences.
30:48: I said, OK, we’re calling time out and all this stuff right now, you need to show this to me, like, walk me through this, this sequence of screens.
30:56: And I saw it and my heart sank a little bit because As a consultant, you’re like, OK, this is like 6 months of work for me.
31:03: And you’re And what I saw was, they need to fix this checkout, so it’s like a normal checkout process, so that people can see all the stuff that they just spent time configuring for the last 45 minutes, instead of it disappearing.
31:19: And even having the title of the package be something other than what they started with.
31:24: It was little things like that, right?
31:25: And I said, look.
31:28: Spend 2 days, fix this list of things.
31:31: And let’s sit on it for a couple months.
31:35: Right, let’s put everything else on hold, which is killing me to say.
31:39: I said I think that’s the right thing to do.
31:41: So, I think it was like 6 weeks or something went by, I can’t remember.
31:48: I got a phone call.
31:49: And the guy that hired me said, are you sitting?
31:52: I said, actually I am.
31:54: Why?
31:55: And he goes, 200% conversion increase in the last six weeks.
32:03: And I went, all right, that’s a win.
32:06: That’s a win.
32:07: Did I get to do all the work I thought I was gonna be able to do?
32:09: No.
32:11: But that was a double win.
32:12: Not only did that happen.
32:14: But that company became my client.
32:16: For the next 10 years.
32:18: .
32:20: OK, on a, on a retainer basis where they were paying me monthly, and I still do projects a couple times with them a year sitting with their teams.
32:29: So That’s the value.
32:32: It made a difference.
32:34: Yeah, doing the right thing, OK, of, of, even though it’s not the most beautiful solution, it’s not the most impressive solution, it was still the right solution, right?
32:43: It was the right thing to do for the right reasons.
32:46: There’s a lot to be said for that.
32:47: And again this doesn’t get much air time.
32:49: You have people posting on LinkedIn every day, you know, these amazing interface designs that they’ve done in FIMA.
32:55: They’re posting 3D stuff in FIMA or and it’s impressive.
32:58: You look at it, you’re like, wow, that’s incredible.
33:02: Where is it gonna be used?
33:05: I mean, if you have the chance to do that stuff, good for you, I think that’s awesome.
33:09: And that and on consumer side of stuff especially it does exist, but it’s rare.
33:14: OK, the majority of this work is not nearly as glamorous.
33:17: As what social media would have you believe, you know.
33:21: It’s it’s a lot of it is.
33:24: It’s a lot smaller and it’s a lot less glamorous, but has massive potential, and those things make me happy.
33:30: When people’s lives get easier in some meaningful way.
33:34: Makes me tremendously happy.
33:36: Some reason I get up in the morning.
33:38: , yeah, but, but of course results don’t happen, if UX doesn’t have a seat at the table, which brings me to another challenge designers and researchers often face is, so for those who feel unheard in strategy conversations, they know their craft, but can’t get a seat at the table.
34:07: , what’s one practical way they can reframe their work or I don’t know, do something that will actually make decision makers listen.
34:18: Yeah, my, my mantra on this, and I just said it, I’ve said it from probably every stage I’ve spoken on in the last couple of years.
34:26: , and podcast episodes and I was just, I was in Prague earlier this year, and I gave the same mantra from the stage.
34:35: This idea of We need to get a seat at the table, or we need to fight for a seat at the table or.
34:41: , no.
34:44: What you need to do is you need to do your work and operate and speak to people in a way.
34:49: That makes them realise that you need to be there.
34:53: So in other words, you act like you’re already at the table.
34:56: .
34:57: Is the way that I put it, you know, I volunteer lots of things to clients that they didn’t ask me for.
35:03: I volunteer strategic opinions on things that I see that nobody asked me to weigh in on.
35:08: And the reason I do that is because I want people to understand what my role is.
35:13: I want them to understand where my value is, I want them to understand that.
35:17: What I can do is a lot bigger than what they think it is in a lot of cases, right?
35:24: Mature companies, you don’t have that problem because people fully understand the strategic sizes of UX and design and they get it.
35:30: But most companies, not really the case.
35:33: So you’re gonna be arguing about stuff, you know.
35:37: So it’s, it’s a lot of things, it’s reframing.
35:40: What you want to do and why you wanna do it.
35:44: Outside the lens of UX, I tell people, you have to take your UX badge off.
35:49: And you have to have those conversations.
35:52: About product improvement, period.
35:56: About the business results that these people are after is to find out what it is that they want, and what they care about, and what they’re willing to spend money on.
36:04: And you have to frame every conversation around those things.
36:08: You, you don’t ever talk about UX best practises, design best practises, well.
36:13: You know, this, this is We should be doing UX research.
36:17: Nobody gives a shit if you should be doing UX research.
36:21: The only way you’re gonna sell that.
36:24: If if you take a totally different tack and you don’t even mention those words, you say, look, I feel like we’re placing a pretty large bet here, and I know that we’re gonna place the bet regardless.
36:35: I think there’s some ways we could minimise our risk of being wrong, right, or at risk of, you know, this not getting us the improvements that we hope.
36:44: And it’s basically just, I’d like to try some things and test them, and let’s see what performs best, you know what I mean, what, what gets the best response, what looks most likely to get us that result.
36:55: When I talk to clients, I am not ever talking about design principles, or UX principles or best practises.
37:01: I don’t even use those words.
37:03: I’ve said many times, I don’t even use the term UX if I can help it.
37:08: Ever It changes the way people relate to you, and it also, the thing that I want with every client, especially new clients.
37:16: What I’m after.
37:18: At the outset, even if it’s a conversation with a prospect, right, hour long Zoom call or whatever.
37:25: I want them to say to me either out loud or to themselves.
37:29: Scott gets it OK, I want them to see me as someone who will move heaven and earth.
37:37: To get them what they need.
37:39: That has nothing to do with UX design.
37:41: Now, the things that I’m talking about, the things I’m advocating for are all in fact principles behind good user experience and good product design and all sorts of things.
37:51: Well I don’t name it that way.
37:53: I don’t talk about it that way.
37:55: I reflect their own concerns and their own terms and their own language back to them.
38:00: We, our biggest problem is that we talk our own language.
38:05: As if everybody else understands it, like I said before, as if everybody else understands it, and as if everybody else cares about it as much as we do.
38:14: They don’t, it’s not there, it’s not why they wake up in the morning, it’s not what they get paid to do.
38:18: It’s not the pressure that they’re under.
38:21: You know, from, take your product manager and go up the chain.
38:27: There are a bunch of concerns weighing on that person, and then that person below them, and that person below them, and finally to your product manager.
38:34: None of those things have anything to do with UX design.
38:40: UX and design can solve all those things.
38:44: But they don’t know that.
38:46: They they see you as this narrow little Roll, right?
38:51: UX does this, design does this.
38:53: The only way you get to be seen is more.
38:56: is by reframing everything that you say, everything that you present, and how you present it.
39:01: Researchers tell me all the time, I’ve been asked to do research and I’m asked to give these reports.
39:08: Nobody reads them, or I’m presenting my findings, and I can tell people are tuned out 3 minutes in, you know, BP is sitting there on his phone like screwing around, not even paying attention to what I’m saying.
39:21: There’s a reason for that.
39:23: Look at most presentations.
39:26: You’re gonna see a whole lot about it.
39:27: Here’s how we did the research, here’s the rigour behind it.
39:30: Here’s our sample size, and here’s our nobody cares.
39:35: The thing they need to hear from you first is, Here are the potential issues we uncovered.
39:41: Here’s why we think they’re worth solving, and here’s what the research suggests that we do next.
39:48: Everything else is irrelevant.
39:52: If they ask for the backstory, if they ask for the proof, if they ask for the rigour behind those numbers, you’ve got it, and you can’t speak to it, right?
40:00: But you don’t ever lead with it.
40:02: You leave with the ending of the story first at all times.
40:05: Here’s what this means.
40:07: Here’s, you know, or, or here’s, I know we’re going down this path, and from what we’ve seen in the last 3 weeks, this is gonna hurt us, and here’s how.
40:16: You lead with that.
40:17: You put yourself in that person’s position and say if I’m them.
40:21: What am I thinking about?
40:22: What’s weighing on my mind?
40:23: What am I worried about?
40:25: And if you don’t know, you ask.
40:28: So my big thing is in order to get your seat at the table or whatever.
40:33: You gotta be speaking the language of business.
40:36: Before you speak the language of designer UX.
40:40: You know, and, and you have to learn about how business operates.
40:43: I’ve had people, I know I’m all over the place, but I’ve had people be upset because they’re like, you know, I’m constantly told there’s no budget, but I know that, you know, they spend money in all these other places, I say, well, How many product lines does your company have?
41:00: And they’ll say, where are those 6.
41:01: And so, what’s the profit margin of each product?
41:05: I don’t know.
41:07: You need to find out, and the reason and the reason you need to find out is because of the product that you happen to work on.
41:14: Ha, let’s say, a 2% margin.
41:17: 2% profit margin, and those other ones have like a 13 or 14 or 25% profit margin.
41:23: Guess where the money is going.
41:25: It’s going where the money is.
41:27: Yeah.
41:27: Yeah.
41:28: Nobody’s ever gonna fund, you know, 6 weeks of UX improvement or design improvement.
41:34: It doesn’t make financial sense.
41:37: You know what I mean?
41:38: So, but if you know those things, if you’re aware of that, you can react differently.
41:43: It allows you to have a conversation to say, look, I know our margin here is only like 2%.
41:48: I really believe that we could probably get it to 6%.
41:52: And here’s how.
41:55: Now you’ve got somebody’s attention.
41:56: .
41:57: You see what I mean, it’s a very different conversation.
42:00: Exactly.
42:01: That’s how I operate.
42:02: Yeah, this is, this is kind of also the same on my side on the marketing side.
42:09: We always try to talk about the benefits so like if we launch a feature.
42:15: We won’t just say what this feature does.
42:17: We want to talk about the benefit, what like, how does it help you with X amount of time, we, we speak, we try to speak the business side, what, what the benefit is for the business.
42:34: And part of that, I mean, let’s face it, part of that is human nature, OK?
42:40: Self-interest.
42:41: Is human nature.
42:43: It’s not, people see that as selfishness.
42:46: It’s not, it’s reality, OK?
42:49: It’s normal for people to be focused on what they need out of the out of the situation.
42:54: And again, if you have pressure from a boss, To do certain things, that’s what it is.
42:59: So what the approach you just described, makes all the sense in the world.
43:03: I don’t think you have a prayer.
43:05: If convincing anybody to do anything.
43:09: Unless there’s that kind of argument behind it.
43:11: Here’s what this gets us.
43:13: Here’s how it makes life better for everybody, you know.
43:17: , but even, even with the right framing, the reality is that methods don’t always survive real world pressures.
43:29: So there are a lot of UX methodologies out there that look great in books, but actually collapse in real organisations.
43:39: What separates the teams that make methods work from the ones that get stuck?
43:46: Flexibility.
43:46: .
43:48: Flexibility and a willingness to throw away anything doesn’t work on the spot.
43:53: And adapt and flex and say, you know what, not working, not doing it anymore.
43:58: And you change tack, and you don’t, but it’s it’s flexibility and it’s an absolute unwillingness.
44:05: To be precious about anything.
44:08: doesn’t matter how you’re doing it.
44:10: This is the, if I have one.
44:12: Thing to impart to people before I leave this world.
44:16: It’s gonna be, there is no right way to do any of this.
44:21: Let that go.
44:23: All right, if you’re Again, if you’re banging your head against the wall.
44:29: Stop doing it.
44:29: Like, there’s an old joke where a guy goes to the doctor and he says, He says, well, you know, my, my shoulder hurts every time I go like this, and the doctor goes, Well, stop going like that, stop doing it.
44:41: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s that kind of thing, right?
44:45: It’s like this, we always go through this and it keeps, OK, stop what you’re doing.
44:50: Let go of whatever that is.
44:52: And they said, well, I don’t know what we’re gonna do instead, that’s OK.
44:56: It’s all right.
44:57: I mean, That’s the other big thing, right?
44:59: We feel like we have to have all the answers.
45:00: There’s no such thing.
45:02: This is hard.
45:02: I mean, this is all hard.
45:04: It really is.
45:05: And I think we act like it’s easy sometimes.
45:08: It’s challenging, all right, and it’s, there’s a moment in every product, every project I’ve ever walked into where I have a moment with his voice in my head going, oh my, like, what did you get yourself into here?
45:20: Like this is, I don’t know how we’re gonna tackle this.
45:23: I and there’s a lot of that and enterprise stuff, especially in government stuff, especially the challenges are massive.
45:30: And after you calm down, you think, right, well, just take it one piece at a time.
45:34: What can we do here?
45:35: What’s been done, what hasn’t worked?
45:38: You know, you have conversations, so.
45:40: Success on a team basis is literally flexibility.
45:44: Some of the best product teams I’ve ever worked with.
45:47: We’re just relentless about.
45:50: Checking in constantly, like at the end of every week.
45:55: Simple, quick conversations, just no structure and no artifice or it’s like.
46:00: What works, what sucked, and what we need to change, you know, I worked for the team, and it was only for one day, but these guys impressed the hell out of me at.
46:12: Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
46:14: And they were just all about improvement.
46:18: Nobody was married to anything, and everybody I talked to during that, it was a workshop and then a consult sort of combined into one thing.
46:27: And even the product managers who showed up, told me the same thing, like there’s a culture of improvisation almost here.
46:36: Where it’s we’re not, if we have the slightest bit of evidence that this is the wrong alley to go down, we’re turning around right now.
46:43: You know, and they were, they were totally willing.
46:46: To just do what works and abandon the rulebook at any given moment.
46:51: And I think that’s the best way to be.
46:53: Time again has taught me.
46:56: It’s the best way to be.
46:57: I’m not attached to anything.
47:00: And if there’s a single thing, there’s no hill that I’ll die on, OK, not one.
47:06: Is it like starting from the beginning though?
47:09: Like starting over.
47:11: Yeah, there’s a there’s a Zen Buddhist thing that’s called, you know, beginner’s mind.
47:17: I believe in that.
47:18: I have a I have a print that hangs on my wall over there that literally is representation of beginner’s mind.
47:26: For that reason, I sort of, I go through life assuming I don’t know anything in a way, right?
47:33: I mean, I obviously, you see patterns and there’s some part of you goes, seen this movie before, I know where this is going.
47:41: There’s value in that, but you don’t ever start with those things, right?
47:44: And I never start out of the gate of like, here’s how we’re gonna do this.
47:47: When clients ask me for agendas, for example.
47:51: This always gets me sideways looks.
47:53: I sort of politely decline and I say, well, here’s what I’m gonna do.
47:57: I’m gonna tell you loosely what we’re gonna talk about on day one.
48:03: And this is as far as it’s gonna go, and this could be like a 3 month engagement, and which makes them nervous, so like.
48:08: What do you mean?
48:09: What are we gonna do for the next 3 months?
48:11: We’re gonna have a conversation on day one.
48:14: And day one is gonna tell us what we’re gonna do on day 2, and day 2 is gonna tell us what we’re gonna do on day 3, and day 3 is gonna tell us what we’re gonna do on day 4, and we’re gonna continue like that.
48:24: With an overall sense of what we want to achieve by the end of the 3 months, don’t get me wrong.
48:29: But we’re not planning out all that time, it’s not possible, and we’re gonna be wrong.
48:34: It’s gonna change on the first day, I promise you that.
48:37: So I would rather deal in reality, cause a lot of times something will come up on the first day.
48:43: That nobody thought was a thing, or nobody thought was even relevant to what we were doing, and the whole room goes.
48:51: Wow, we need to solve that.
48:54: You know.
48:55: Yeah.
48:57: So It’s the same kind of thing.
48:59: If you’re not attached to anything.
49:03: You can be flexible, you know, you can, you can move faster.
49:06: I think you can get more done if you constantly have an open mind about how things are supposed to work and how they’re supposed to happen and how it’s supposed to be done.
49:14: If you can’t flex, you will get yourself into trouble really quickly, right?
49:18: You’ll be stressed.
49:21: It’s a skill in itself.
49:24: Yeah, yeah, the ability to scale a method up or down depending on the situation, yeah.
49:29: It takes practise.
49:31: Yep, yep.
49:32: And it’s and that practise is never done, by the way, you don’t.
49:36: You don’t, just some, you know, you don’t master it one day and then for the rest of your life you’re fine.
49:41: It’s, it’s constant practise.
49:43: It’s constant reminding yourself, taking a breath, saying, all right.
49:48: Calm down, take stock, what’s happening here.
49:51: What’s not working?
49:52: What do we need to stop doing, even if you don’t know what you should be doing, at the very least take stock of what’s going on and say, right, what do we know what should we just quit doing right now?
50:02: Sometimes that’s enough, you know, to give you a clue as to as to what needs to happen.
50:07: But we all need to stop pretending that this is easy or that it’s simple, or that there’s a recipe that can be followed.
50:14: There’s no such thing.
50:16: Yeah, people tend to hold on to stuff.
50:18: They, they don’t want to let go easily.
50:20: It’s human nature.
50:21: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
50:23: It’s fear, as people, we’re not good with the unknown in general, we’re not.
50:27: I mean, you learn to be comfortable with it over time, but it’s not in our nature, so I get it.
50:34: Yeah.
50:34: , Joe, thanks so much for this conversation.
50:41: you’ve given us a powerful lens on keeping you clear, focused, and impactful.
50:49: thanks so much.
50:51: You’re very welcome.
50:52: Thank you for having me.
50:53: I appreciate it.
50:54: And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that people can find me and you can always kind to you’re willing to hit me up with questions.
51:02: I, I don’t always have the time to answer that I would like, but I do answer every message I get on LinkedIn, for example, or via my website givegoUX.com.
51:12: There’s lots of free resources, books people can download, lots of videos, right, lots of videos to watch, interviews, whatever, and of course there’s the UX 365 academy.
51:24: Which is every course I’ve ever done, every book I’ve ever written.
51:27: We do live workshops every couple months.
51:29: , there’s a VIP option where you can get group coaching.
51:33: Every month, all for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the cost of a boot camp, and that is at www.UX365 academy.com.
51:47: How to get my picture.
51:48: We’ll also drop them in the show notes so that they can access them.
51:52: It’s, it’s really impressive and so much, so much knowledge to Joe.
51:56: Thanks so much.
51:58: I am honored, honored, honored to share it, and nothing makes me happier than to just help people.
52:04: Have just go about doing what they do with more joy and less stress, you know.
52:09: Thanks to everyone for listening to If You Seek, see you next time.
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