Day 2-Turning UX Passion into Real Product Influence

— Awesome and thank you for the amazing intro and the incredible two days of learning about data, AI, systems thinking, and how that relates to enterprise UX

 

— Great conference and am sure you are ready to apply background knowledge
  • Next stop you think application, with lives changed and customers happy
— But wait, will that happen?

 

— Reality will reflect likely reflect the above quote from Tony Moura, on UX not being an easy road
  • One way or another UX doesn’t let up
— Quote may seem familiar what you do in day-to-day job compared to when you were learning skills of UX
  • Fighting was not on the list of UX skills and I learned in my UX career that fighting was not what I wanted to get up to do in the morning
  • I wanted to help build HCD progress for people’s livves
— I’ve been blessed to fight less and deep collaboration with product and engineering partners in design parity
  • Every place I work at, I try to achieve this parity with peers to get HCD into products

 

 

— Over next few minutes will give tips on UX guide to influence and getting HCD into products with minimal fighting

 

— We’ll talk about goal of HCD products that was marathon not a sprint
  • Tactics to advance UXD in org
  • Winning without fighting
  • And Key Takeaways

 

 

— Who am I though?

 

— I spent 30 years in design communication with a BA in Journalism and MS in comp-sci and my jam is end-to-end design and focus on ML design
  • Responsible AI and interest in design equity and inclusive design and operationalizing AI

 

— I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and spent 20 years in journalism before getting a comp-sci degree and started as a  Senior Design Reaseasrch Lead at IDEO
  • I’ve seen been a principal at Microsoft with AR/VR, and worked at CapitalOne
— Now I’m at Google as a Director of UX for Core ML

 

 

— This list of logos is kind of  a humblebrag, but is the just amount of product design done in last few years
  • They are my bonafides
— My words come from my experiences as product designer and product leader to create HCD solutions

 

 

— Another point is about team ROI I had and leading teams in Fin-Tech, Healthcare, and adoption of new technologies
  • It can be done

 

— How did we do it?
  • It’s a marathon not a sprint, but the phrase puts you into right paradign
— You typically start with big career goals or with teams, and a desire to change the way the org looked at HCD,
  • If anyone like me had those goals as well, as most orgs had low design maturity (either < 5 years old, or did not integrated into product development process)
— My job was thinking how to convince people to adopt HCD
  • Magical answer to create something that didn’t exist or not discovered
    • A very hard job to do
— Our job to transform chaos into order, and need to engage stakeholders with different mental models
  • Moreover our work as UXers isn’t always respected
— We shouldn’t get exhausted though, but there are ways to do this

 

— I’ll take recent example of my career to build a design team at CapitalOne
  • First chance to lead enterprise ML team, and I had audacious ideas
— But the vision wqs too big for what was given

 

— Take a look at this vision, and look at mistakes and what first year goals would be
  • I get exhausted just talking about them
  • Wanted to single-handedly improve everything and establish responsible AI

 

— What do you think happened?
  • I crashed and burned and didn’t accomplish half of what I wanted to and felt under so much internal pressure
  • I felt I had so many things to do that I left without accomplishing anything
— I learned a lot from the experience though

 

— My goal became to break up vision into quarterly milestones
  • Play long-game step by step and brand visions, and want to change paradigms and be change agent for organization
— I couldn’t put holistic vision into people figuring out value of HCD and research
  • Quarterly milestones will help you go a long way to preserve your own sanity and bring stakeholders to participate in vision
  • Time-boxed milestones in next six months
— I created whisper campaigns around what to accomplish for things like customer intelligence

 

— Our product team is now more aligned with  the vision for customer intelligence

 

— Adoption of stakeholder language helped a lot as well to craft to their understanding
  • Focusing on viability as opposed to desirability
  • Accelerated alignment exercises and that helped
  • Created artifacts to explain that vision
— I’d like to hear to break that vision up for digestible pieces
  • Need to deconstruct what’s your in brain so people can learn it and not feel frustrated by your explanation

 

— Another of my favorite sayings is to move from thoughts to things
  • Came from IDEO where I was frustrated that my insights were not being articulated
— Working with designers and engineers , which helped me develop communication muscle
  • Faster you can create an artifact, the faster people talk about that thing rather than debating each other’s opinion

 

— Above is a drawing Albert Einstein did when 16 years old, and he was working through contradictions he had with other scientists about how light is formulated

 

— Light previously thought of as wave or particle, which oscillated through items

 

— Einstein was trying to reason through idea that light couldn’t just be a particle as it was sometimes solid
  • Trying to reconcile idea of light as particle
— This image became the foundation for his Special Relativity paper
  • Picture image of man trying to outrun light
    • Used thought experiments to nail down what he was communicating to others
      • Moving from thoughts to things is better to create an idea that isn’t quite catching on
— Key tool for UX influence

 

— From my time at Microsoft working with Chipotle to upgrade their kitchen
  • What our team did after salespeople talked about technology is that we asked group what was the real problem that kept them up
— The CDO said “We don’t know how much chicken to cook each day”
  • Simple but complex problem

 

— We started a workshop to figure out what they wanted AI for or not

 

— This translated to concepts or animations and users to figure out how to solve th problem

 

— We could accelerate building of what to do to solve the problem

 

— So we a digital dashboard in Chipotle’s kitchen, which proved to be successful.
  • We moved form thoughts to things to solve the problem
  • Practice helped team align as to whether problem was being solved or not
— It was always about artifacts rather than emails or decks people were arguing over

 

— Another case study from IDEO, working with St. Jude’s, which famous for having children who have serious medical needs
  • Children who come to Saint Jude stayed there for up to months and years
  • Even so appointment scheduled had to be done in advance
— People showed up for chemo-therapy and had to wait five hours for appointment and we  tried to get across to the chief medical officer of St. Jude, and how the wait time impacted patients

 

— Interviewed people and showed quotes and picture
  • But the CMO was still resistant
— How could we communicate the need to fix the variance problem to the CMO

 

 

— Created exploratory explanation to make abstract more concrete and designed a demo that showed how waiting impacted people over time
  • Demo showed weight grooves people got backed up in
— We showed this to CMO, and he understood

 

— If we are just using words and expertise that is talk or things that aren’t tangible, hard for people to change their minds about something
  • Show UX influence

 

— Moving from thoughts to things lets you steer conversation toward production rather than debate

 

— Artifacts are ideal way to influence and can create visualizations to turn turf battles into collaborative sprints and have people start encouraging each other

 

— Lastly, I’ll talk about how to win without fighting

 

— This is a picture of a  place in West at turn of century

 

— This place became Las Vegas
  • And I’m fascinated by people who started Las Vegas

 

— One of things I say as researcher is to shift paradigms and get people to see Vegas, when there seems to be only desert

 

— We need to understand the assignment
  • Often we come in with chip on shoulder as UX, and take stance to get battled to get listened to
— Our assignment is though to get HCD into products and get it shipped and we can’t do it by ourselves
  • Got good advice on treating stakeholders like research participants (no judgment, open listening and better to collaborate with them, and bringing people onto research
— Adopting language and POV of stakeholders
  • Building confidence and not being right
— We can then predict and anticipate what should be built
  • Goal is to make people less wrong and give them confidence in design’s direction
  • UX influence is risk management for these stakeholders
— Risk mitigation not zero and accelerating alignment to ensure engineering and design are on the same page
  • Technical governance alignment is also important to help guide research and design as soon as possible
  • Once part of design sprints, own it from beginning
    •  You are collaborator instead of  the hand-off point

 

— Goal to get HCD into products that ship, to do this you need to shift people’s paradigms

 

— It’s okay to be Superman, but maybe you want to be part of Justice League, to collaborate together into products that ship

 

— Hope this helped you think about your role in org

 

— To summarize:
  1. Share your vision piecemeal and celebrate milestones
  2. Move from thoughts and things to create artifacts and alignment right way
  3. Don’t be lone hero, and think Justice League, not Wolverine
— That will minimize fighting and maximize collaboration

 

— That’s it. Thank you so much, I hope this helped!

 

Q&A
  1. Talked about creating whisper campaigns. How does storytelling drive influence?
— I think when I say whisper campaign, mean repeating myself in different ways fort those with different mental models to catch the vision
  • Think of different ways to tell a story as people won’t absorb story in  just narrative form and visual form
  • Will tell story to many actors from engineers, to peers, and executives—who all have their own mental model to get people on board
— Otherwise you are Sisyphus shoving the boulder up the hill

 

— You need to adopt language and taxonomy of your audience
  • Clearly tell story with right words and imagery
  1. Leadership ramp-up seems like something well designed AI could enrich. Do you agree?
— I say yes, in order to learn executive speak
  • One things with generative AI is that you can get it to adopt personalities you don’t understand it
    • This will get you started with adopting stakeholder taxonomy and lexicon
  1. You are unique positioned to sway stakeholders, due to amazing energy. How do you stay motivated?
— When asked about doom and gloom and AI and staying motivated, I say that  I’m in the room
  • So long as I’m there, there is a defender for equity and justice with these tools
— I’m not objective and had mission as journalist to socialize, and normalize Black people as being real people doing normal things

 

— When I understand my assignment, I can deal with push back from SVPs, and educate with kindness
  • Motivated by goal to ship HCD into people’s hands
  • So I stay motivated by keeping my eyes on the prize.
— We all have a point of view and I ask my students design ethics statement and make all students write one, where someone asks you to do something that goes against your purpose
  • Design ethics statement to amplify beauty and humanity, and fight anything that exploits fragility
  • Create own design ethics statement to explain why you are in this profession