Writing About Writing: Steve Krug returns to the Rosenfeld Review Podcast

Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, and Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is back for a third appearance on the Rosenfeld Review Podcast! Here, he shares some details with Lou about his book in the works, Writing Made Slightly Easier, and his perspective on the process of writing in general (and why he might advise against it!).

Steve’s wise words for writers:
Don’t be afraid to always start at the beginning. Always assume that your reader knows less rather than more.

Breaking through the empathy gap: a conversation with Indi Young

Empathy is a hot conversation topic these days but much as we try, we’re not quite using our empathy muscles to their fullest extent when solving design problems for real people. Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy talks about how our assumptions can lead us astray.

A Designer Fighting Climate Change with Brandon Schauer

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What keeps you up at night? For Brandon Schauer, it was climate change. In a stroke of genius, the former CEO of Adaptive Path decided to look for a role that would help him address his concerns about our planet. He ultimately transitioned to his current role as Senior Vice President of Climate Culture at Rare.

Brandon has a big heart, and it can be felt in his conversation with Lou. They discuss his education and career path, highlighting his leadership role at Adaptive Path where the agency thrived by sharing knowledge and empowering new talent. As CEO, Brandon navigated business challenges and focused on building lasting client relationships and expanding the agency’s impact. This experience eventually led to Adaptive Path’s acquisition by Capital One, which marked a significant turning point in Brandon’s career.

His transition to climate work was driven by a growing concern for the environment. After struggling to find a direct path connecting design and climate change, Brandon discovered a role at Rare, an organization focused on behavioral change to reduce U.S. carbon emissions. His team at Rare works to identify and promote lifestyle changes, such as how people eat, travel, and power their homes.

Brandon also shares how his design background continues to influence his work at Rare, particularly in “behavior placement”—a method of subtly integrating eco-friendly choices into entertainment to normalize sustainable behaviors. He emphasizes the soft power designers hold, noting how they can integrate sustainability into their work, even if their roles aren’t explicitly focused on climate. By doing so, designers can influence corporate decisions and consumer behaviors, helping to create a shift toward more sustainable norms in everyday life.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• About Brandon’s career path
• The ideas behind Adaptive Path that propelled its success
• How Brandon transitioned his focus to climate change
• How designers can help the planet without changing careers

Quick Reference Guide:
0:21 – Introduction of Brandon
5:12 – Adaptive Path and how they attracted talent
10:09 – The founders of Adaptive Path receded, and the team became the focus
13:55 – Reflections on being the CEO
18:26 – 5 reasons to use the Rosenverse
21:04 – Brandon’s path to senior vice president of Climate Culture at Rare
27:09 – Using concepts from design to solve problems
29:59 – Designers impacting climate change
34:50 – Dynamic norms
37:38 – Brandon’s gift for listeners

Middleware in Medicine with Carol Massa

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Imagine being the service design lead of a healthcare network of 88,000 patients. Your team consists of five people. Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? This is the work that Carol Massa does every day at Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare network. She brings her wisdom and experience not only to this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, but to the inaugural Advancing Service Design Conference on December 3-4, 2024.

Starting as a design student at SCAD, Carol’s career path has taken her to management consulting and now to her pivotal position at Northwell’s Enterprise Digital Service division.

Carol discusses her team’s unique approach to service design, acting as translators of human insights for digital services. Her team’s work involves transforming research and data into actionable insights, creating playbooks, and facilitating collaboration across various departments. The focus is on enhancing patient and clinician experiences by streamlining administrative tasks through innovative digital tools.

Throughout the conversation, Carol highlights the importance of building relationships and humanizing interactions. She shares insights on using familiar frameworks to engage clinicians and bridge gaps in communication, ensuring that all stakeholders understand the shared goals of improving patient care.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The Role of Service Design in Healthcare: Understanding how service design can improve patient and clinician experiences within large healthcare systems like Northwell Health
• Collaboration Across Disciplines: How a small service design team collaborates with various departments and stakeholders, including clinicians, engineers, and business strategists, to enhance service delivery
• Translating Insights into Action: Techniques for translating complex data and human insights into actionable strategies and digital tools that address specific needs
• Humanizing Interactions: The importance of building personal relationships and fostering open communication to bridge gaps
• Prototyping and Testing Ideas: How rapid prototyping and testing can be used to validate ideas and improve processes, ensuring that new tools and services effectively meet user needs.
• Adapting Existing Frameworks: Creative approaches to leveraging existing frameworks (like problems, goals, and tasks) in a way that resonates with different audiences, particularly in translating technical language for clinicians.

Quick Reference Guide:
0:00 – Meet Carol
2:02 – Service design at Northwell
7:25 – The makeup of the service design team
9:49 – The operational tools and documentation the team uses
13:46 – An example of incorporating and automating a new operational process
17:36 – Why you need the Rosenverse
20:04 – Action-driven problems, goals, and tasks
24:35 – Breaking into established systems
29:02 – Carol’s gift for listeners

[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library

In this session, I will explore the groundbreaking approach taken by the Austin Public Library’s Innovation Lab in integrating AI with GitHub for UX enhancement. Our primary challenge was to streamline and enrich the documentation process, adhering to the complex guidelines of the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) while ensuring the content was accessible and user-friendly.

Leveraging AI, we developed a system that not only automates the creation of diverse documentation formats like Markdown, but also ensures alignment with USWDS standards. This innovative method significantly improved the efficiency of our documentation process, making it more coherent and navigable. A key highlight is our recent revamp of the Breadcrumbs navigation strategy, demonstrating AI’s role in enhancing user experience and interface design. The session showcases how AI can transform UX practices, offering practical insights for UX professionals looking to leverage AI in their work.

Takeaways

• Insight into the innovative use of AI for streamlining documentation processes, adhering to USWDS guidelines in a public library setting
• Practical examples of how AI can transform UX practices, with a focus on creating efficient, user-friendly, and standards-compliant documentation
• Demonstration of the AI-assisted update of the Breadcrumbs navigation strategy, demonstrating tangible improvements in UX design and user navigation
• Strategies for leveraging AI to enhance collaboration among UX designers, developers, and content creators, fostering a more integrated and effective workflow
• Tips for utilizing tools like GitHub Pages for rapid deployment and continuous integration, highlighting the role of AI in accelerating project development

Meet Ariel Kennan, Civic Design Co-curator

Ariel Kennan is a service design and product development leader who has worked across the public, private, academic, and nonprofit sectors. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University. We are pleased to announce that she has joined the curation team of our new Civic Design conference and community, which will be launching soon with our first monthly videoconference.

In this Rosenfeld Review episode, Ariel discusses the myriad of public service projects she’s had a hand in, and particularly the ways in which Civic Design can improve peoples’ lives, especially those who are underprivileged (for example, the application for unemployment benefits during the covid-19 pandemic.)

Boon Yew Chew on Systems Thinking as a Relational Tool

Boon Yew Chew is senior principal UX designer at Elsevier and an IxDA local leader and board alumn. He will be a speaker at the upcoming 2023 Enterprise UX Conference on June 6th and 7th, delivering a session on “Making Sense of Systems – and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise.”

Systems thinking can seem abstract and theoretical, but Boon reveals some unexpected ways that systems thinking can have a profound impact on individuals and relationships within organizations. Who knew that systems thinking could be an emotional intelligence tool?

Lou and Boon begin today’s episode by discussing the history of systems thinking and how it developed in the ‘40s and ‘50s, mostly within scientific communities, and grew into other fields and disciplines. It offered a new way of thinking about how things develop and change over time.

Boon goes on to describe his path into systems thinking and how, with its holistic, big-picture perspective, there is little room for blaming individuals when problems are viewed through a systems thinking lens. A system can give context to the behavior or clashes within an organization and alleviate frustration. Believe it or not, systems thinking can be a relationally lubricating tool.

Systems thinking can help us answer the following:
• Where do I fit?
• Where do the people I’m serving, working with, developing with, and creating for fit within the system?
• How is the organization I’m part of itself part of a bigger system?

A summary of Boon’s insights:
• Systems thinking helps us understand context, empathize, and understand other people and the context they work in
• Systems thinking provides a visual language that other people can learn from
• Language can help reveal not just problems, but how problems relate to each other even when they may not seem connected
• Systems thinking is a tool that can help with prioritization

What you’ll learn from this episode
The history of systems thinking, especially how it first developed within scientific communities
The differences between systems and design thinking
How systems thinking can reduce finger-pointing and relational conflict
Why it’s best to embrace messy differences as part of the process
How to bring systems thinking into the workplace without confusing or alienating others

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:12] Introduction of Boon Yew Chew
[0:02:31] System thinking versus design thinking
[0:04:44] The history of systems thinking
[0:08:51] Being trained in one framework and finding it incomplete in the real world
[0:10:32] Boon explains how he navigated towards systems thinking
[0:16:12] When you feel like your goals are clashing with those of others in the organization
[0:19:08] On labels, understanding, reducing friction, and acceptance
[0:22:16] Enterprise UX 2023 is back!
[0:24:19] Boon’s Enterprise UX talk is titled “Making Sense of Systems and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise.” Applied aspects of how UX people are using systems thinking in enterprises
[0:27:17] Boon “eats his own dog food” and does “double work”
[0:27:52] An example of what success might look like
[0:31:45] A summary of how Boon uses systems thinking
[0:35:29] Boon’s gift for listeners

Harry Max on Managing Priorities

Harry Max is an executive coach, consultant, and hands-on product design and development leader. He’s also the author of the forthcoming Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions.

For individuals, teams, and organizations, from managing things, people, places, rules, activities, and projects, Harry’s new book Managing Priorities gets to the heart of how we prioritize and make and implement decisions, whether one-off or events that happen on a regular basis.

Harry uses DEGAP, a design-thinking framework that he says he didn’t invent but discovered, to explain how successful organizations and leaders set, implement, and execute priorities. DEGAP closes the gap between a current state and a desired state:
D – decide
E – Engage (commit to the process)
G – gather (collect information and items to prioritize)
A – arrange (sort and create frameworks)
P – prioritize

Harry and Lou also discuss the importance of flexible thinking (a superpower of designers) when it comes to prioritization, communication, and implementation.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– How Harry went from technical writer to designer to executive coach to SXSW speaker to author
– What DEGAP is, why it makes a difference when dealing with prioritization, and how Harry discovered it
– Why DEGAP is like a design-thinking framework
– The unique prioritization challenges designers face
– The unique gifts designers bring to addressing prioritization

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:26] Introduction of Harry
[0:01:59] A discussion on prioritization
[0:04:27] Orders of prioritization
[0:07:39] Distinguishing priorities of the individual, team, and organization – DEGAP
[0:12:26] More about DEGAP at the individual and organizational levels
[0:15:39] Advancing Research 2024, March 25-27
[0:17:13] Review of Harry’s career path
[0:23:47] Unique prioritization challenges for designers
[0:26:25] Harry’s gift for the listeners

Bringing Voices to the Table for DesignOps with Jay Bustamante

Jay Bustamante has always been about conserving time and resources by building tight processes to create efficiencies in his life and work. In all the jobs and positions he’s held, he would notice gaps, consult with stakeholders, find solutions, and fill those gaps. Eventually he learned there is a name for this type of work: DesignOps. Today Jay is a DesignOps leader and an experienced strategist at VMware. And he’ll be a speaker at the October 2023 DesignOps Summit.

When it comes to streamlining and building efficiencies, AI seems like a no-brainer, right? Not so fast. AI brings big expectations and can result in a lot of frustration if proper groundwork isn’t laid. DesignOps teams that proactively facilitate collaboration between engineers, business teams, end users, and other stakeholders can save time, money, and greatly increase the likelihood of a successful product that will reflect the company’s values.

In this episode, Jay and Lou explore the following concerning AI:
• Good data makes all the difference
• Why AI can easily reinforce existing biases
• Why case studies and knowing the most impactful need are crucial
• Setting proper expectations
• Why Design’s role is to slow things down and to make sure that the right people are invited to the conversation, that the right questions are asked, and that all voices are heard early in the process.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• How Jay got where he is today
• How to slow down the development of AI solutions to avoid ethical and technical snafus
• Which voices need to be at the planning table
• How DesignOps can steer the design boat and keep everyone on the same page with the same goals
• How companies (even big ones like Amazon) can get tripped up when AI reinforces biases

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:25] Introduction of Jay and the October 2-4 Design Ops Summit
[0:02:11] Jay’s professional journey into design ops
[0:05:36] Jay joined VMware to do strategy work and ended up doing design ops work
[0:07:35] AI in a design ops context
[0:10:32] An example from Amazon of AI-aided hiring gone wrong
[0:15:39] Design Ops Summit – October 2-4, 2023
[0:17:01] On being proactive with use cases and identifying red flags and slowing down
[0:22:13] On being careful with data
[0:25:43] On bringing voices together and being a facilitator
[0:28:09] Jay’s gift to listeners

Elementary, My Dear Watson: AI Essentials and Ethics with Chris Noessel

Why has artificial intelligence (AI) captivated the attention of everyday consumers now? Lou chats with Chris Noessel, Global Practice Design Lead for Transportation at IBM to explore how “smart” technology is shaking up many industries. His new book, “Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People,” explores solutions, implications and ethics of design “smart” products for customers.