UX Australia Podcast: Synthetic Intimacy + the State of Design
Transcript:
This is UX Australia 2019 Trip O'Dell is one of the keynote speakers at UX Australia. 2019 welcome…
Anthony. Thank you very much for having me. it's been a great week. I think that the, the speakers that I'm here with. This week and the audience and so forth are on par with any conference I've been to. It's been phenomenally well-run. The, the attendees are very thoughtful. They're working on very interesting things and things that I haven't seen in a lot of other places in the world. Like service design is a much bigger thing here. And the government is, seems to be investing heavily in design approaches to solving big problems, which. I personally find very exciting because, being part of the West coast American design culture, that's something that we're hungry for there. You know, we, we, we get a lot of press about big innovation, but I think like you're solving bigger problems in some ways, which is exciting to see.
How did you fall into the whole user design experience?
How long is the interview?
(Anthony laughs) As long as you want it to be!…
Because I described myself as the Forrest Gump of UX. I grew up with severe dyslexia. and, in the 80s.
I was seen as broken and I had to use technology.
I learned how to read in fourth grade using audio books and, and following along in the book, the first time I ever used a word processor in high school, I was accused of plagiarism. and, because my writing had improved that much because, writing reflects your thinking. So technology has always been a part of how I've adapted. And I, I. Went and I became a teacher. Ironically, I was not able to graduate in special ed because my handwritten field notes weren't clean enough.
So I ended up, eventually ending up as a volunteer teacher in the poorest place in the United States on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation with the Jesuit volunteers. I was teaching, photography, and I raised a bunch of money to get some computers. We were doing multimedia and video design, this is like… 1998 and 2000…and I discovered this ability to not just like meet my own needs and empower myself with technology, but, my students were able to tell their own stories in ways that they'd never been able to. … these are people that are indigenous.
They are either very negatively or never represented media. And they were able to tell their own stories in their own way. And I saw that power in technology, and that put me on a path to graduate school and a bunch of other things. And it all kinda came together where, somebody gave me a chance at Adobe.
Steve Johnson, who is a wonderful person in Silicon Valley. he runs design for, Netflix now, but, Steve gave me a shot and, I've been an overnight success 20 years in the making, so I've been able to do a lot of really cool things, and like Forrest Gump, end up at the right place at the right time and on big products.
Having worked in product design leadership roles with Adobe and Microsoft and Amazon, how have you seen the field of user experience develop over the past decade, for example?
It's been very interesting, because I've seen it ebb and flow. If you read a lot of “Design Twitter”, or you follow different communities, its really easy to believe that design is a monoculture.
There was a phase where design thinking was the next big thing, and everybody was design thinking and the “strategy of design” and “designers are going to be leading business from now on”. And for me, I've not seen that materialize.
In fact, I've seen us backslide a little bit, but I think there is an “everybody is a designer”, designer, designer, designer….But we (design) don't actually do a great job of being inclusive around the many fields (in design).
I think last time I checked, there was 15 unique disciplines within what we would call “design”. There are designers that are very craft oriented and organizations that are very craft oriented and they tend to come from the, the traditional design school background. And then there are people that are more, cognition oriented, like I am. We look at big problems and sort of, it's, it's like the beautiful mind. We're making connections that other people don't. And that's where our specialty is and you're seeing people that are linguists and so forth.
But I think, that's the challenge, we keep trying to put it (design) in one box. And I almost, sometimes I wish I didn't have to call myself a designer anymore because I get lumped in with UX, UI or that kind of problem. …So I've seen it change a lot. And I think design is valued in a way that it wasn't or understood slightly better than when I started, but, where I'd love to see it go is … Design falls more into the background and we are emerging as leaders in human centered problem solving organizations and some of those disciplines involved (such as) Product managers and (and developers and engineers), and I think that's, that's where design really kicks it into overdrive, It's not a specialty (anymore) It's becomes a core cultural competency within a company
I see that you'll using artificial intelligence or AI and other emerging technologies to augment and evaluate human potential. Can you give us some examples of that work?
Yes. I mean, I've been very fortunate to work very early on with different machine learning applications. Everything from computer vision and voice. I was working on Alexa for awhile, and backend applications and so forth.
But, My differences with as a dyslexic, that's something that I, I, that's part of my daily life. my, my, the way my brain works is… it's how I experienced the world, And there's challenges that other people don't seem to have that. I do. And, there's tremendous advantages to the way that I think, but one of the ways, that I've continued to use technology to make up for those gaps is, in my writing.
I have a very unique writing process, where I use two forms of machine learning, to actually develop my content. So, as you can tell, I don't have a problem talking. and telling stories. And if I can get in front of a microphone, I can just let it go and I take that clip, I throw it through a product called descript, which is designed for a video editing for little like video podcasts. And what descript does is it takes in the language or it takes in the video. It does a machine learning run over the audio pulls out. …And then you can use the text to edit the video, which is super cool, but that's not how I use it.
I use it just as a way for me to drag and drop an audio clip in, get all of the text out of it. Because I speak pretty well. pretty good….(laughter)
No. I, and then I copy it and I paste that into Grammarly. And Grammarly, is not really just a word processor. It is a language processor and it's what allows me to take pretty good writing with a lot of misspellings or tense problems or capitalization issues and so forth. And make my language more impactful. By saying, well, that's actually, this would be better with it's written in passive voice, it's going to be more confusing. And you know, it gives me some gamification in scoring and you know, I get it up to like the 99th percentile in terms of quality.
And I get metrics. back and I'm in the fifth percentile for accuracy when I write with Grammarly. Right into it. But I am in the 99th percentile for a diversity of words and complexity of language and a bunch of other stuff, which is like, …in the data. A perfect example of like how my brain works differently.
But I had my first article published, in Fast Company two weeks ago… for somebody that in school, they said, “find him a good trade school” or, you know, “keep him out of prison” that's a great example of technology scaling human capability.
And how does that feel?
Yeah. How does it make me feel that that I’m published? I mean, I'm proud, but dyslexia is also a… it's a genetic difference, right? 20% of the population, has it. most people never get identified. They'd never get help. And 50% of the population in the prisons are dyslexic. 40% of the self made millionaires are also dyslexic. And a significant portion of the self made billionaires like Richard Branson and Steve jobs. and I think bill Gates too. But, there's some, some neurodiversity there. That's an interesting metric. but because it's genetic. All three of my children. The force is strong in my family. Right? And I see that they're still, not valued for their talents.
They're seen for what they're perceived as broken or as disabled or as, disordered. those are the terms that are used, and there's a lot of room to go. and technology and design can actually not just solve those problems if you solve problems in education. Well. it lifts all the boats. Right? And that's, that's, it's so it's overwhelming and exciting and invigorating, but also, stressful.
And what for you confirms, a designer has got the user experience just right?
I usually start believing that I'm right. but that's just me. (laughter)…No. I, I think it's, it's often, good designers have a strong point of view and they have a strong sense of their own thinking. They’re, they're rigorous. We tend to be our own worst critics and incredibly abusive of our, of our own thinking. and I think that's oftentimes where like people want, they're, they're seeking praise because they want, they're so hard on themselves. They just want something, somebody say something good, right. cause they want to get better. But, because I, I tend to be more, I'm thinking all the time, it's just get boiling it down. I think I've got the glimmer of a good idea and then I spend most of my time trying to prove myself wrong. and that's where some of the things that I've learned, using data, using qualitative insights, using sort of like, I think there's a triangulation of gut instinct and judgment that needs to be informed by. Other people's experience and research and questioned in those ways, and then gut tested against data and, and oftentimes controlling or collaborating somebody who's better at math than I am to say, I think this is the problem. How would we gather the data to triangulate this? Right?
That's why my, my, my consultancy is dark matter because 85% of the universe, if, if physics makes sense, dark matter has to be there, but it's completely unobserved. You can't, you can't detect it. Good design design is the dark matter of product. Nobody complains. when the app just works the way you think it should be. You don't hear about that. Nobody complains when the, rocket doesn't blow up on the launch pad. That's good design. Right? So, so I think in order to do good design or to be right, you have to look. Into the places. No one else is looking and find data that can kind of triangulate or coordinate, to, to bring other lenses or insights into the problem you're solving.
Do you think sometimes that innovation gets a head of user experience?
I would argue it's not innovation if it hasn't thought about like all problems are people problems, right? Tell me, why would computers even exist if people weren't here? So I think my talk focused a lot on sort of the evolutionary characteristics, how we think in our social aspects ….I'm not like some sort of dystopian evolutionist and we're all just monkeys, but we are kind of monkeys. and, and we seek, we seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that's actually the essential user needs is like, how can I make my life a little bit better or a little less painful, by doing X or Y…and technologists, they like to. Fiddle with things they like to play. They, they, they like to see if they can make something, do things.
It's like a kid who's really loves to play with Lego blocks and they get, they, they just are lost in the flow of playing with Lego blocks. And they think that the, the process of playing with Lego blocks is going to change the world. It's sort of a colonialism in and of itself.
So I think like in the last year, focused on what's the human problem you're trying to solve and you can back any problem out. Into, it's a human problem. you've, unless you've identified that you're not innovating in 10 years time, when you look back to where we are today, what user experience changes do you think are likely to prove the most important and perhaps the most enduring? So I think where we've expanded, what. The, the range of problems that user experience... Or the "discipline" of design or the "disciplines" of design can be applied to.
I think Australia is ahead of the curve in types in the types of people in the companies and how they're engaging with design here, ahead of the United States. We still look at everything as a hammer because we've made billions and trillions of dollars making nails with technology. When you're looking at hard systems problems, like, okay, so automation is going to be a thing, right?
We can't suspend the rules of capitalism or, or, or sort of motivations for, for growth and change, without disrupting a lot of other things. but we worry about things like, okay, so what happens when we fully automate an economy or we eliminate entire categories of jobs? And when you're talking about universal basic income. I think what will be exciting to see, and I think where we can have thoughtful change there that actually improves life, is…. the automobile changed things for horse breeders, It doesn't mean that we still don't have horse breeders. And, do we have more people involved in the automotive industry? Then we did in horse breeding and animal husbandry. You know, at, at the time when horses were the motor transport. I think that's what automation can do. We just don't, we're having a hard time anticipating what that change is going to be like. The people are incredibly innovative when they need to be. Right? And so I think there's motivations on how economies are going to change and shift. I've been thinking a lot about big, being small, being the next big, right now you have massive scale Amazon yet massive scale. Google. What does commerce look like when it's actually, you could, it's almost like, social media influencers. what if they were actually making their own products like they do on Kickstarter? What if they were not just shilling for brands, but they were making products that they put their name behind and that they and, and they didn't need to go through distribution channels. They could go direct to consumer. You can reduce waste. You can actually bring the whole dynamics of offshoring and putting jobs out in other parts of the world is because of. The old ways of making things and industrializing things and reaching markets or whatever. You had to mass produce. You don't have to do that anymore, right? You can actually find a relatively, you know, say a, an audience of several million customers, right? That are buying your thing. And if you're an individual business owner with maybe a few people working for you, doing a good product that people love and people keep buying your products, that is a brisk. And stock and trade. And that's a great, great opportunity to have a really comfortable life, right? People want that autonomy, I think, where we can automate parts of the world. and we can look at those behaviors and those opportunities and those economics. I think design can be part of that conversation. I think we should be part of that conversation. I think we should be thinking beyond UIs and voice. Like what's the meaning of voice? The meaning is that we can actually talk instead of type. And it can respond to us, right? Not that important in the grand scheme of things. I think if we could shift to much more important problems and work backwards from start thinking about 10 years out and then work backwards in the Amazon parlance, I think that would be a really exciting thing to look back on.
Trip O'Dell, enjoy the rest of your time in Australia. And thank you for being part of UX Australia 2019
Oh, thank you for having me. This has been a wonderful experience.
End