Episode 12: Laura Klein on What’s Wrong With UX
In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to user experience design expert Laura Klein. Laura is the author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups.
Laura spoke about how a lack of reflection and consideration during the product development life cycle contributes to some of the low quality experiences we have online. She also reveals how her engineering background and love of logic impact the way she approaches user experience design.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to user experience design expert Laura Klein. Laura is the author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups. Laura spoke about how a lack of reflection and consideration during the product development life cycle contributes to some of the low quality experiences we have online. She also reveals how her engineering background and love of logic impact the way she approaches user experience design.
Lisa Welchman:
Laura, you are one of those people that I think I know because you and I are always in the same spaces. But I am looking at your face now, other people can see your beautiful picture, I'm sure on our podcast website and realizing, I don't think we've actually ever met in person. Am I wrong about that?
Laura Klein:
I had that same conversation with myself earlier where I was like, "Have I met her?" And it's going to be really embarrassing because I'm going to be like, "I don't remember." And she's going to be like, "Oh, no. We met in..." because I have the memory of a goldfish.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. We shoe shop together.
Laura Klein:
Yeah, exactly. But I have a memory of a goldfish, so I don't remember things or people. And it's been a year since I've seen anyone. No, I don't think so. But I agree. I see you online and we interact online and I think that's like knowing each other but just not quite as good.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, that's it. So I think that means we get to start with the basics, which is tell us about yourself. Who are you? What do you do?
Laura Klein:
That's a great question.
Lisa Welchman:
Are you different than how you appear to be online?
Laura Klein:
Oh god, yes. I mean, for one I don't drink. I'm an absolute lush online. No. I am an ex-engineer, current UX designer, but I've also been a product manager. I wrote a couple of books about product and UX sort of generally. I always kind of think of myself as like a product and UX generalist because when I learned, I learned back when dinosaurs roam the earth. I started with user research and that's kind of... I actually started from user research and engineering, which is odd and then I put those together and I would do use research and I would make prototypes, and then some very kind folks taught me how to do the middle bit which is the design bit.
Laura Klein:
I've always kind of done all of the things with the exception of visual design. I've just been doing it for a really long time. I jump back and forth between all of those things. I'm either a PM or a designer or I'm not going back to engineering. I've promised myself. And I won't write another book. I swear, I promise.
Lisa Welchman:
We'll touch on that later because I think that's not true. Part of the reason why you're on this podcast is you reached out to us or we reached out to you, or we bumped into each other online because Andy and I are threatening to write a book about safety and you're thinking about doing something very similar, and we were like, "Let's talk about it." And I was like, "Let's get on the podcast to talk about it," or whatever. So you may well write another book.
Laura Klein:
I was just thrilled that you two were going to do it because I was like, "Well, now, it's in good hands and I can forget about it." I always want to write the book and then just have it and then be able to... If anybody asks me about something I've written about, I want to be able to say, "Here, I already addressed that here." I do a podcast called What is Wrong with UX And there's, I don't know, 120 of those. So there's often something I can point people to with me ranting about... Kate Rutter and I do it together. Kate and I are ranting about stuff.
Laura Klein:
So I can kind of point, "Oh, you want to know about X. Here you go. I don't have to say the same thing over and over." It's even better when somebody else does it because then I don't have to do any work at all. I can just be super lazy, which is great.
Andy Vitale:
That makes me think, it's probably the question that you are used to getting or don't even want to answer, but having seen UX grow up from nothing, essentially become a thing that we've labeled even though we've been practicing human-centered design for years just maybe not. It was screens and then it became applications and ecosystems. Now, it's entire organizations and whatever else it can be. What do you notice that's wrong with UX?
Laura Klein:
Business models is wrong with UX, largely. I mean, to a large extent the problems that I see are with companies in general are business model related. I do feel like the last few years I've been on a bit of what I like to call sort of an apology tour because I was around in the '90s. I helped make this mess happen in my tiny, tiny way. But I see people designing more sort of bad patterns and supporting business models that nothing is spotless. Nothing is perfect.
Laura Klein:
Everything has trade-offs and there's always some things, cause, benefits and some harm. But I'm just seeing a lot of stuff where the harm seems to outweigh the benefits and often that just comes down to we're designing... It's not that we're designing badly, it's that we're designing bad products for bad people in some cases. And in other cases, we're just not thinking through what could go wrong with this thing. How could this be misused?
Laura Klein:
I do think that is to a large extent on designers. I think the business model stuff, we have a say in whether... But often that say is, "Do we work for this person or not?" I don't want a lot of fights about the actual business model of company sadly and I don't think a lot of designers do. But I do think that the not thinking through how could this be used to harm people? How has this sort of thing been used to harm people in the past? Just how could this just hurt somebody unintentionally, not intentional, not through a dark pattern or anything, but just because it just went badly like I screwed something up.
Laura Klein:
I think a lot of that is on designers. I just don't see designers paying attention to that as much as they pay attention to sprinkling some UX on it or making it pretty or making it easy to use most of the time. But then some of the time making it impossible or making it clever or delightful instead of making it usable and useful. So a lot of that. All of the things, yeah.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. So that's interesting because Lisa has a very similar perspective and I've seen a shift over time of designers.
Lisa Welchman:
We're geniuses.
Andy Vitale:
I see designers really want to do the right thing. And I try to figure out what is broken that's causing them to lose these battles or not notice these things or make the same mistakes. I really did a deep thought around like is it tools? Have the tools made it too easy that you don't have to think you're just building something in the moment? I don't think it's tools. Tools change over time. Is it the way that we're being taught in schools? Are schools not teaching the way to really understand design and the capabilities of design and go through a process?
Andy Vitale:
Are they just jumping in to follow this recipe and we're getting a bunch of Pinterest fails? Or is it the speed of agility? Is it the fact that that the companies and the people we work with are like, "We need this done now." We're going to go back and we're going to make it better the next time around, which never seems to happen. Does that become the... We almost lose sight of the bigger picture because we're so in the weeds of such a small subset of a feature that we don't put the whole thing together and everyone's saying, "Don't worry about it. Just keep moving fast because we have to get this out the door."
Andy Vitale:
I'm thinking as I'm speaking way longer than I usually do about this, I'm thinking that there's a mix of all of that playing some part. But the biggest thing I see is that these companies are not wanting to hire newer designers, emerging designers. When I broke into design, I wasn't good at it I was okay. I was okay enough to get a job. I probably should have gotten fired from my first job or two, but the people I worked with were like, "Hey, wait a minute. Let me show you this."
Andy Vitale:
Now, we're just so busy running in circles that it's like, "We need you to have five years experience and hit the ground running because nobody has time to show you how to learn how to teach you." So there's so many things that are oddly contributing factors, but I still can't put my finger on one in particular and say, "This is it. This is where we went wrong."
Laura Klein:
Do we need one though?
Andy Vitale:
True.
Laura Klein:
Everything that I see in life and I've felt this way... So I studied political science in college. I've gone somewhere with this, I promise. We were always sort of encouraged to pick one paradigm to look at the world through like, "Oh, is it because of balance of power? Is it because of statism? Is it because of great men? What caused this thing to happen?" And the answer is, it's the world that we're talking about and the world is a messy, messy place. And all of those things contributed to all of that.
Andy Vitale:
Right.
Laura Klein:
I think that there's also the fact that demand for UX designers has skyrocketed, which in a way is great, but in another way means that you have this giant open space for maybe... Education I think hasn't kept up with that and so you get people into positions maybe in some places that they shouldn't be in, or where they can't be successful and they don't have that kind of support. And maybe the very senior designers don't want to be in there training all the youngans. That's not what everybody wants to do. Yeah, all of it. It's all hard and it's all contributing, I think. There's probably more stuff.
Lisa Welchman:
I want to throw another one into that list that you didn't list, Laura and see, Andy's probably heard me, maybe not say it this clearly, but Andy and I recently recorded a deep dive on that horrible topic should designers learn how to code. We just wanted to spend like half an hour, 45 minutes picking that apart, and it actually ended up being a pretty good episode because we answered the question pretty early, which was, they don't really need to, and started to explore why are we even asking that question? What's going on around that? So I'm kind of touching a little bit in that ballpark as well. But I think it might have to do with the culture of design, in the mix of all of the other things.
Laura Klein:
Tell me a little bit about that.
Lisa Welchman:
I say I don't design things and then design people say, "Yes, you define design people systems." It's like, "Okay, if we want to go on a technicality, I design people's systems." But the reality is I'm not a trained designer. I haven't learned how to do the research. I don't know what the methodologies are as well. I mean, the fact that I know that there are methodologies and methods for getting that done means that I know probably more than your average person. But that's not what I do for a living.
Lisa Welchman:
But I'm around designers all the time. There is a, in that culture, is this sense even when I'm online say on Twitter or something and something bad happens in a social media channel. Something gets exploited. Somebody's private information is used in a way that they didn't ever intend it to be as well. Designers, some of them like you might say, "Oh, we've messed up." But the vast majority of it is, "Oh my goodness. Those dot-com business nuts." Right?
Lisa Welchman:
So there's this sense in the culture of if it's a good thing and it's genius, we're going to claim it, right? And if it's a bad thing, it's the bad business people trying to make a bunch of money to pay our six-figure salaries, right? I know that sounds really cynical and harsh, but I really would like to get to the nub of this because you can't have it both ways. One can't have it both ways.
Laura Klein:
I agree.
Lisa Welchman:
Either you are responsible for creating that experience and the reality is you didn't stand up for the right things when you designed it, right? I mean, these aren't people who are getting... These are not people working at Amazon having to relieve themselves in a bag, right? These are people who work at... Well, I mean these are-
Laura Klein:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, you're right.
Lisa Welchman:
These are people who are working in a great environment, so there's something about that culture. And so that's the super negative. And to go a little bit more neutral or maybe lean in the positive, there's a mystique around design. There's the superstar designer. As it spins its way up into this wonderful fluffy cloud of like they're doing this magical thing that creates this experience. So you see a little bit of that flavor sometimes in IT, right? Less so now where you get like these hardcore people who really know how to do the hard stuff, the stuff that really makes it work.
Lisa Welchman:
There's all these developers around, but then there's like this genius person in a corner who's just really got the whole thing hopping. And they're kind of a mystique. But it's not the same as in the design community. And I think because design community has design skills, the way they're able to exploit that mystique is very beautiful, right? It's visually beautiful to see. It's just whatever. So that's me talking for a long time in a podcast where we're supposed to be talking to you. But I think both Andy and I will sit back. What do you think about all of that? I think there's just something... I think designers like themselves a lot. Am I wrong? Am I off?
Laura Klein:
Some of us, others of us hate ourselves.
Lisa Welchman:
Not all designers.
Laura Klein:
Sometimes both at the same time. I will yes, and that... No. I agree with you. 100%. I will say this. I see a lot of times that it gets set up in this... The PM is in charge of the business and the designer defends the users. I think that's poisonous, personally. I try not to get into these semantic arguments about these kind of like general, but that bothers me and I'll tell you why. I think we all need to be responsible for both things. We all need to care about the users and we all need to care about the business and by the business, I mean, the ethical business model where user needs and business needs are somehow aligned in a way that doesn't destroy the rest of the planet ideally.
Laura Klein:
Again, nothing's perfect and nothing is completely clean, but the more we can get everybody's incentives aligned, I think the better off we are. I agree. We own some of that responsibility. Now, I will say a lot of designers get overruled by PMs and that's just the business environment that a lot of us are working.
Lisa Welchman:
Define PM for folks who don't maybe know what you're talking about.
Laura Klein:
Yeah. Product manager or product owner in an agile environment. Or startup founder who is generally the product person. The product often gets to overrule design. And I think some of that is us not standing up and saying, "No, this is important and we need to do it this way." Some of it is some designers standing up and saying, "This is important about things that I personally wouldn't spend all of my capital on."
Lisa Welchman:
What's an example of something like that where you think they're just going for something that's maybe not...
Laura Klein:
Yeah. I see a lot of designers spend a lot of time on craft and making things beautiful, which are great things to do once you've made them useful, usable and safe, right? I think that if you're fighting to spend a lot of your time doing all of the the crafty bits and the visual design bits, that's... Again, I'm not saying it's not important. I'm not saying it can't really contribute to a great product experience, I'm just saying that there are other things that you also should care about.
Laura Klein:
Does the system work? Is anybody thinking about how if I do one thing over here and then it's going to have an effect over here. Oh, we're in a multi-modal environment where we've got people on different platforms, or we've got people... I have to interact with you as a human and also I have to interact with a computer and also they're interacting with a computer. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff that could go wrong there and somebody has to think through that experience too. And the fact that the corners are perfectly rounded on the buttons, maybe isn't the most important thing that we need to spend a lot of time arguing about, in some environments to focus.
Andy Vitale:
That makes sense. I want to double click on the relationship with product and design because-
Laura Klein:
Double click on. Wow.
Andy Vitale:
Double click, basic corporate word.
Laura Klein:
Double click. I was like, wow. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that before. I'm going to double click on that. I like that.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. That was literally the first... I've heard people say it a lot and it was the first time it came out of my mouth.
Laura Klein:
Oh, you've been assimilated.
Andy Vitale:
It felt weird. But what I would really want to just understand so in a lot of successful companies, there's that triad of product design and engineering and having equal weight and decisions, but what I'm seeing in some other companies and hearing about a lot from designers that are just looking for mentorship is when there's another layer that is the true business and where product isn't considered the business, they're considered the translation of business requirements to digital.
Andy Vitale:
In this situation, you can either become a shit umbrella or a shit funnel. And they're literally becoming the shit funnel and it's business saying, "We need this product reacting," and saying, "Yes, we do. Everybody run. This is what we're going to do." And no pushback. I'm just wondering as we talk about that other layer that sometimes exists, what have you seen especially in your book, Build Better Products? What is a good way for people in that situation to realistically have a solid argument when that situation arises?
Laura Klein:
Yeah. You asked what I've seen. The answer is nothing good. What ends up happening... It's funny because I do I do a workshop on complexity and prioritization. And one of the things that I talk about is that a lot of times what we get is product managers turn into sort of stakeholder interviewers or collectors of stakeholder requirements. So that means the product manager as you said will be sort of the translator of the business. But they take that to mean, "Oh, I'm going to go around all the stakeholders and I'm going to get a list of all the stakeholder needs and I'm going to make a list. I'm going to put that in the backlog and I'm going to file tickets on it in Jira."
Laura Klein:
The Jira tickets are all going to say things like, "As a user I want to use more AI," which is A, useless and B, not true. And that ends up showing up. Then designers get things at that level in that state where they've already decided what the next feature is that's going to be built. If it's not you know we want to add more AI to it, it's, "Oh, we need to add comments." And then the designers automatically kind of go, "Okay. Well, my job is to add more comments. Okay. How do we do that? How might we add comments to this?" And then would they do a lot of ideation? But you've skipped this really important part of, is that the right thing to do? Is that is that a good idea? Where did that idea come from? So I do this whole-
Lisa Welchman:
Whose job is it? Whose job is that?
Laura Klein:
Yeah. Great question.
Lisa Welchman:
Because designers act like it's their job, right? When they criticize bad experiences, that's a lot of what I see, which is who let this happen, right?
Laura Klein:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
So to hear you say that that they're actually... Andy's calling it shit funnel. So when he said that, at first I thought, well, there used to be these things called analysts that would pull this information... I'm old, right? That would pull this information together and analyze from a business perspective or whatever perspective. And it could be from a user perspective or from a safety perspective or quality or whatever consistency with the brand whether or not this was a good thing to do and what type of return might it provide and what can we expect? I think those people got washed out with agile.
Laura Klein:
Potentially.
Lisa Welchman:
Or maybe I'm wrong. So I'm curious, what do you think? I mean, is that just too simplistic?
Laura Klein:
No. There were things... There were analysts and they absolutely... And there still are at a lot of companies. One of the things that I found is that I... Often the ones that I have seen also are not great at actual coming up with the right feature. They might be very good at identifying problems. So when you ask whose job is it to come up with sort of the right thing to make, "Hey, guess what? It's everybody's job." Especially if you are on an agile team where you're actually cross-functional and collaborative and semi-autonomous.
Laura Klein:
That's the whole point is that we're all supposed to make these decisions together and that the designers are supposed to have input into the research on the actual users and what we can actually do there and the engineers have their input. We might get input also from analysts or from marketing or from sales. Those are all really important things. But the thing that I always teach people to do is when somebody comes to you with a feature and says, "Build this feature or sprinkle some AI on it. The most important question that designers don't ask is what are we trying to achieve here? Why are we building this? What is the goal of this feature both for the business and for the user?"
Laura Klein:
What user behavior are you trying to change and why? What business improvement are you seeking? And once we've gotten to that point, great. What are some other ways we could possibly do that? It's not just about going out and finding user needs and ideating until we come up with solutions to a really important user need, although it is some of that, it's what do we want? The thing that makes me a little anxious is that that's the strategy part that people are always saying, "Oh, we need more strategy. We need to see the table."
Laura Klein:
Great. Let's do strategy. Let's figure out what the hell the business needs, right? Let's figure out what the users need. Okay. Now, we know that. Let's figure out the right way to deliver those things for everybody.
Lisa Welchman:
Well, it seems like by the time it's a Jira ticket, it's too late.
Laura Klein:
Oh, wildly too late.
Lisa Welchman:
It's just super too late by that time. So that's really interesting. You're validating a lot of random thoughts in my head. I don't know what they are. I won't say them out loud now, but it's just true. There's something in there. And maybe with time and talking to more people, we can work it out because it's not go back to waterfall.
Laura Klein:
No.
Lisa Welchman:
Right? It's not that but there's something about the way the speed works that is missing something. So there's got to be a way to sort of pull those things together in a better system so that people who are tasked to actually do work and execute on work aren't being asked to do things that whatever. So it might be a leveling out of different types of roles. But anyhow, that's interesting.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. Laura, you wrote a blog post probably a year ago about building a task flow. And it was such a deep dive on what at times feels like a lost art to me. I think one of the things I didn't mention before as I was thinking about what's wrong with UX, I feel like the psychology around decision-making and UX as a craft and doing it right, and taking time to build the artifacts that communicate the intent are missing. I feel like that's a step that's skipped quite often and I'd love for you to just dive into how important that is for a couple...
Laura Klein:
I'm going to warn you, I can and have talked about task flows for hours at a time. You do not know what you are getting yourself into. I was absolutely destroyed by two things in my life. One was a discreet math class that I took, where I realized, "Oh, if I had just taken..." I actually took it when I was like 30, when I'm trying to decide if I wanted to go back and get a CS degree, a master's in CS. And I realized, "Oh, if I had taken this before I took all of that other math, all of that other math would have made sense.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah.
Laura Klein:
So if you haven't taken a discrete math class, go check it out, especially if you're a giant nerd like me. So I was ruined by that and then I was also ruined by working eight million years ago on contracts at Tellme which did voice interfaces, but specifically voice trees which were just pure logic. It's just--].
Lisa Welchman:
No. I'm a symbolic logic girl.
Laura Klein:
To me that was heaven.
Lisa Welchman:
You and I need to have a meal together.
Laura Klein:
Love it. So much fun.
Lisa Welchman:
When you were talking about that class and I was like, "Ugh." Yeah, the logic saves everything.
Laura Klein:
The best. So I mean I have this deep love affair with UML, which is what? Universal markup language, something like that. Anyway, I don't know. It's just boxes and diagrams. It's boxes and arrows, right? That's the thing that we're supposed to care about. The reason that they're so important is because they are a way to model what we expect and don't expect an actual interaction to be without starting to worry about how it's going to look.
Lisa Welchman:
And the conditional state around it. The conditions that surround a particular event. That's the part that honestly, I think just doesn't get like what are the conditions around this event? Because once you understand that, then you understand what are the possibilities of what could happen? Positive and negative. Expected outcomes, unexpected outcomes.
Laura Klein:
How could this start? Where could this go? What if there is an error here? What kinds of errors could there be? If it's this kind of an error, what do we show the user? If it's that kind of error, do we do something different? If we need more information from them, how do we handle that? What if? It's just a whole big long line of what if and then what's next? It's so great because you find things like you find dead ends in all of your flows. Oh, is that a place at which somebody just ends up going, "I don't know what to do next."
Lisa Welchman:
Right.
Laura Klein:
Yeah, right. Is there a part where the whole thing just explodes? I don't know, maybe. The funny thing is that I tend to see this a lot with ex-engineers or with engineers, because engineers are that last line of defense for the user to a certain extent where they're the ones who have to say, "If everything goes to hell, this is what we're going to do. Either the whole thing's going to fall over, we are going to have a terrible experience or we're going to give you a nice experience and you're going to recover from that error.
Laura Klein:
They're the ones putting in all of those things into code. As designers, we can't just hand wave that away. We can't just kind of go, "Well, it's got to look like this." I mean what I see a lot is I see a lot of people doing what I call drawing a picture of a design, where they kind of draw a picture of one state in the whole thing, where everything is perfect and everybody is named the same thing and everybody's got a perfect headshot on a white background. And nobody is trying to attack anybody.
Laura Klein:
And everything is already filled in. There's no zero data states. There's no errors. Everything went great. The happy path. That's where we are. We all went down the happy path and we got to Nirvana and here we are. I'm like, "How the hell did we get here and what could have gone wrong on our way?" And that's what task flows help you figure out.
Lisa Welchman:
I mean, you're shocking me. I'm shocked. I'm completely shocked because honestly, I mean the last time I hands-on built anything other than my own WordPress website was a very long time ago. But when I did that work, we did that. And it could be that I did that. I mean, we're talking about the late 1990s. So this is very early on, right? I do come out of a background of symbolic logic and philosophy and I can code. Not very well, but I get it, right? I'm actually a little bit breath taken away because I assumed that someone in the development path was doing that, right? I'm around these teams all of the time.
Laura Klein:
I mean, I am.
Lisa Welchman:
Everybody's fronting really well. I assumed somebody must be doing that because to not do that feels super irresponsible.
Laura Klein:
Doesn't it?
Lisa Welchman:
I mean, I just like why would you put an experience on the world wide web when you haven't considered at least fundamentally what could go right and what could go wrong in all sorts of possibilities. So that's a little stunning.
Andy Vitale:
I see these flows most often today in a lot of voice applications. And when we're mapping out conversations and figuring out the flow of a conversation, but I see it less and less in just updating certain pages on a website or making... Which is weird. You would think as you're improving the workflow you're looking at this flow diagram and figuring out, "What are we getting rid of? What are we working around? What are different paths that we're creating for users or people to navigate through?"
Andy Vitale:
I see it from time to time. I see it on more complex things, but we started to touch on like this is a good way to prevent what could go wrong. And I just wanted to take it back to safety because it was one of the things we said we just wanted to talk about. For you, Laura, you mentioned a few times like make sure that something is usable, useful, and safe. And what does that mean to you?
Laura Klein:
I mean, the useful part is just that it's actually doing something that somebody wants it to do, right? Somebody wants to perform the task that you are letting them perform. And we'll hopefully pay you to allow them to do it. The usable is that they can do that with just a minimum of fuss, and that they can just... It makes sense to most people. I'm actually not one of these people who believes that absolutely everything should be able to be done by absolutely everybody on the first try. I shouldn't fly a plane. I don't have the skills.
Lisa Welchman:
I'll remember not to go on Laura's airline.
Laura Klein:
Yeah, keep that in mind. Oh, there's all sorts of things I should not be allowed to do, but somebody delivered a desk to me in several parts and was just like, "Well, I guess you're going to put it together." I was like, "Wow, you have overestimated your audience." So I'm just saying that I don't think that absolutely everything needs to be done without any... Not everything is simple, but we should be able to do things that we want to be able to do with as little trouble as realistically possible and as little training as realistically possible, while still achieving the outcomes that we want to achieve.
Laura Klein:
The safe part is something that honestly, I mean... Like I said, "I was here in the '90s. I take this partially on myself. I was not responsible for most of the web, but I was there and there weren't very many of us." We didn't. I didn't think enough about the impacts on the world and everybody in it, and that's important and something that I would very much like to correct. I'm very thankful for the people who are doing a much better job of it now, who are correcting some of that.
Laura Klein:
I think that safe means that I can use something without physical or emotional trauma, without being attacked. And just without losing a bunch of my data. I mean, safety isn't just psychological safety, it's, "I trusted you with my data. Please be careful with it. This is important to me. These photos are important to me. Please do not lose them or sell them. This thing is private. Please keep it so." There are all of these things that we just kind of expect from technology that I... I mean, I think a good example is all the delivery apps, right?
Laura Klein:
We're in the middle of a pandemic. Hopefully, we're near the end of a pandemic, fingers crossed. Let's go vaccination. So we just experienced over a year of just absolute nightmare and a lot of people who could not safely go places and go to the store and buy things relied a lot on delivery services. I get it. I think that in many cases the folks who were actually doing that work were treated very, very, very poorly. I don't think that the people who were using the delivery services, myself included wanted that to be true. That was not a thing that we wanted. We did not want to take advantage of other people.
Laura Klein:
We wanted to use the services that were sold to us and we trusted that they would be safe for everybody and they were not, and they are not. And that is a thing that I think that I would rather that the companies address.
Lisa Welchman:
This obviously, because Andy and I are thinking about safety a lot and that's originally what drove us together to talk and led to this podcast ultimately, was a way to not write a book, was to have a podcast. The way that you're describing this is very evocative to me because one of the things that I'm always trying to pull things back to is the comparison to our actual physical world, right?
Lisa Welchman:
So we live in a physical world that is not 100% safe, right? That system of being alive in the world, just it doesn't offer that. Depending on who you are and where you're born, you get more or less of that. And sometimes a whole lot more or a whole lot less, depending on where you arrive into that system. So I'm not trying to minimize that fact. But let's just get a little philosophical for a second, which usually philosophy tends to push those things aside and just sort of try to talk about things in a purest form. How safe can we be?
Lisa Welchman:
When we're talking about safety, and is it right? And this is just a very broad question, is it right to compare online safety, even though most experiences cross the chasm of online and physical world, right? But let's just say, let's just go there, online safety is that in a similar parallel or maybe do we need to be more safety conscious online particularly with the web and the internet because of the speed and pervasiveness and how fast data flows?
Lisa Welchman:
I mean, I can see a tiger coming at me and it might be fast, but it's in this moment at this time versus, I've put my data in a system and all of these processes are happening and it's flowing places that I can't even see. Right? So do you think there's... I guess, it's not really a question. What are your thoughts about that when you reflect about those two types of things?
Laura Klein:
Yeah. I don't think we'll ever get to complete safety physically or online. I do think that online and physical, I agree with you. I think that they are bleeding into one another more and more, and more. I do think that online is a real place. Even if it is exclusively online, I think that's a real place and I think that we expect people to be in places online and doing things. The fact that some folks who are online and the places that we are have wildly different experiences, and some of them are really legitimately terrible. I think we could do better. Let's put it that way.
Laura Klein:
Do I think it's perfect? No. Like I said with business models, I don't think anything's completely clean. We're living in a capitalist society. That's going to bleed into stuff. That is where we are now. The world in which we live is not perfectly safe. It is not perfectly equitable. I totally agree. Do I think that we could do just so much better on all of it? Yes, but it's going to be super hard and I think we all have to care. I think that there are lots and lots and lots of ways that we... As you pointed out like a lot of designers, we're fairly well paid. We're making these big decisions. We have influence with people who we're building things.
Laura Klein:
I'm not, but people are building things for millions or billions of people. You can't pretend you don't have any impact there. You do. I mean, do I think you always have to be perfect? Do I think you always have to die on every hill or fight every battle or tilt every windmill? No, that's exhausting. Come on. Sometimes you just got to go and have a margarita. Sit on the beach. I get it. But I think we could all be doing a hell of a lot better if we all thought more about how could this go badly, and is there anything that I can do to prevent it? A lot of times, the thing that drives me... Again, makes me very, very angry is that doing the right thing wouldn't be any harder than doing the wrong thing.
Lisa Welchman:
That's fascinating. What you're saying makes it just sort of begs a question in my mind at least, which is what role do you think policy is going to play in this and regulation? I mean, I have a talk that I give around technology maturation process. Things get regulated every time. There's going to be regulation that comes into play. The question is what's the quality and who's going to make it and when, and how, and what will it look like? If you could just put on your future eyes on that, what do you think might come into place or would you want to come into place to sort of help keep these systems in check?
Laura Klein:
I mean, I think we're going to see a lot more privacy laws and a lot more data retention and giving up data and those kinds of things. I think those will then be gamed by all of the big players or written by all of the big players. And that will be unfortunate, but I think they will improve things. I think that some of the European privacy laws have improved things. Some, again. I think the worst job we do about all this stuff and the worse we make ourselves look as tech. I mean, I'm sort of including us all in tech. I know that not everybody's in the same part of tech. But I think the worst that the worst of us do is going to have a real big impact on how much the rest of us did.
Lisa Welchman:
Regulated, yeah.
Laura Klein:
Policy, regulated, yeah. That's going to make a real big difference. Boy, I do not want Zuckerberg and Musk speaking for me. I did not elect them kings of tech.
Lisa Welchman:
It's the way the money flows, man. That's just how it's going to roll. And that's a pattern that we see over and over again in sort of technology policy arena. There are a few very large bad actors or a few very, but large bad outcomes that occur and you have to regulate against them to protect the majority. That's interesting, interesting.
Laura Klein:
I hope that we see more regular... Part of the problem is that I do, I am also... Again, I was an engineer in the '90s. I also have this very strong feeling that politicians are not great at understanding technology and they're probably not going to write great regulations about it. And that is also a problem. So that's why I kind of feel like we also need to have some internal regulation, which of course is much harder because again, a few bad actors can screw everything up.
Andy Vitale:
That's true. I wanted to also, I'm going to say double click again because it's funny to me now. I want to double click on regulations a little bit because as you mentioned, starting early and having made some mistakes, we've learned from that. But we're in tech, and a lot of things around tech are innovation. And you've taught a course on product innovation through design thinking. So I'm just curious when we talk safety, there's a level of innovation that needs to happen that in the beginning maybe regulation hurts or prevents.
Andy Vitale:
And even the thought of safety, like we need to be... Yes, don't kill anyone. Yes, don't cause major emotional, psychological, economic physical harm. But how do we innovate in a world that requires us to make mistakes? Sometimes, we need to make bad mistakes that have... Or make mistakes that have bad outcomes to really learn how to innovate in that space.
Laura Klein:
Yeah. It's a great question, and I don't have the right answer for that. One of the things I will say is that I think that most of the things that we talk about as innovation and tech are bullshit. Let's just get that out of the way. I think most of the time, that's not innovation. You have just reinvented-
Andy Vitale:
Laundry delivery.
Laura Klein:
Servants. Laundry delivery service. You have reinvented servants. All right, fine. If you're willing to pay for it and somebody's willing to do it, all right. We should address that in other ways. There's a lot of stuff that we call innovative that isn't real innovative. Let's just say that. That said, there are some bigger actual tech breakthroughs that I agree there. You're going to need to be a little bit... We won't be able to regulate those because we won't even know what they are yet. I actually think that the big tech breakthroughs are the least likely to be regulated early on because again, they're brand new things, right?
Laura Klein:
You come up with something wildly new, nobody's got any regulations or nobody's ever seen it. That's actually part of that. That may actually be part of the problem, but a lot of what we're seeing... And this is, I think, what makes me so angry is that we're seeing the same mistakes over and over again. We're seeing data breaches. We're seeing people mishandling other people's information.
Laura Klein:
We're seeing bias coded into algorithms over and over and over. We're seeing people losing out on job opportunities or being advertised, housing because they're white. And these are all things that we have dealt with in other formats before. Not perfectly, not well. Can we just not make the same mistakes again and again? Let's make new mistakes. Let's make interesting mistakes.
Lisa Welchman:
Whenever there's a new technology and particularly with the world wide web, which is the thing that happened that didn't get regulated. The rest of it's like noise and dust. It's huge. Social media, all of it is huge. But the web is the thing that happened where I was like, "Never seen anything like it. Let's just let it rip." And we did and here we are almost 30 years into-
Laura Klein:
Sorry.
Lisa Welchman:
... the commercial web and this is what we got. But I think that any technology, and in this instance the world wide web, can only manifest who we are as a community and as people. It can't be better than the people making it. So as long as we have biases in our real world, in our minds, in our hearts, we have difficulty getting along, we have war. We have people who exploit each other financially. We have sexual misconduct. There's a list of things that exist in the real world. To expect that, anything that we invent is going to be beyond that is just kind of crazy.
Lisa Welchman:
We have to get better as people in order to create a better experience. I think just going back to UX, my starry eyed vision of UX is that people who are designers are trying to get to a better experience, to be American, a more perfect experience for human beings. And what's so disappointing is they just got sucked into the machine like everybody else, right? So I think that's what's really sort of a challenge for me. I'm hoping that UX folks can use the skills that they have to turn that machine. Because not everyone in this system... It's not the sales people. It's not the chief executives. It's not the board. That's not part of their remit to actually do that work, right?
Lisa Welchman:
If you're on the board or you're have a C in front of your name, you're supposed to be hitting that bottom line in a for-profit company. But user experience, people are actually that's part of their remit. So my hope is that, that is what can happen. I don't know what your thoughts are about what the possibilities are around that. What do you think could change in the UX community to help them be less of a victim, right and more of a leader in helping to correct this issue?
Laura Klein:
Well, I mean as you point out, the problem is people. The problem with the web is that humans use it.
Lisa Welchman:
And make it.
Laura Klein:
Yes, this is all extremely depressing and you're right of course. But that said, I actually do think that we can make... I don't know that we can make people better. I think we can make people behave better. I don't think we can make everybody behave perfectly. I don't think we can even agree on what perfect is for everybody to behave, but I think that as a general rule, we can create an environment where most people can at least be, and get their things done and be effective and maybe have a good time and we can protect each other from each other to a certain extent.
Laura Klein:
Yes, I agree that that is the remit of designers. I think it's also the remit of product people. And I would love it to be the remit of C level people. I actually want them to care about this. I think that the way that we make them care about it is that we make a big deal about it on social media and then suddenly they care about it, which it's a little reactive, but I'll take it. Fine. I'd rather they know that it's happening and actually care about it because if they care about it, it's more the people who work for them will care about it.
Laura Klein:
So I do think that that is one of the ways that we do make things a little bit better. But I think that we need to be more aware of all the kinds of people who are using the thing that we are using. One of the ways that we do that of course is to build the thing with people who are more like all of our users. Surprise. Right? Teams that have diverse backgrounds actually turns out have these conversations sometimes, not 100% of the time. You still have to listen to all of them. It doesn't work if you just have one person in the room going, "Excuse me. I think that's going to be really bad." "Oh, shut up. We never listen to you."
Laura Klein:
That turns out, that goes very poorly for everybody involved especially for that one poor person who ends up in a lot of therapy ask me help. Anyway, moving on. All I'm saying is teams that have lots of different kinds of people and who look more like the users of the product tend to be able to represent the perspectives of the user of their product more effectively, where you can't do that or where you don't have that 100%. Nobody's going to have 100% doing more user research, sharing that user research out with other people, making sure that everybody in the company is actually exposed to what is going on, makes a huge difference.
Laura Klein:
It turns out a lot of times people make decisions about things because they really don't know, because they're just ignorant. Remember, everybody is new once, right? Everybody encounters something for the first time every day. And they're going to be surprised by it. And those of us who've seen it a thousand times have to deal with that. So let's figure out a safe way to get everybody exposed to all of the things so that they don't make the same stupid mistakes that I made when I was 25.
Andy Vitale:
Exactly. And they're making the same mistakes but this time it's technology. I didn't make that mistake, the technology did it. It's not me. Don't look at me even though I coded it or came up with the algorithm or decided what it was going to do. I didn't know that was going to happen.
Laura Klein:
How could we possibly have known such a thing? Whom among us? Literally everybody. Ask anybody, seriously.
Andy Vitale:
Yup, exactly. Awesome. I think we're right at time. How do people find you, Laura. How do they get in touch with you? How do they continue on this journey with you?
Laura Klein:
Oh, I'm impossible to avoid. I'm everywhere. You can follow me on Twitter if you're not sensitive to things. I'm Laura Klein on Twitter. I have a podcast, What is Wrong with UX with Kate Rutter who is my delightful co-host. At the moment, it's sort of an occasional podcast because she silly thing is writing a book.
Lisa Welchman:
There you go. And you're going to write another one too. I know it.
Laura Klein:
No, you can't make me.
Lisa Welchman:
I've cast it on you.
Laura Klein:
Curse you. I have two books. I have UX for Lean Startups and Build Better Products. I have a website at usersknow.com. That's usersknow.com. Someday, I will buy users no.
Lisa Welchman:
That's been the whole problem though.
Laura Klein:
Yeah, exactly. I just want to do the anti-one just like never listen to users. They're terrible.
Lisa Welchman:
Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a really fun conversation and I hope we actually do get to meet in person sometime.
Laura Klein:
I would love that. There's so many reasons.
Lisa Welchman:
I think we should about logic.
Laura Klein:
We should absolutely talk about logic. We could just have a big old nerd fest where we just diagram stuff.
Lisa Welchman:
We can totally do it. Andy will be like, whatever.
Andy Vitale:
You know what, I have a logic story. So my first playing of like figuring out logic at an early stage of my career, one of when I was teaching at a university in Florida, one of our criminal justice instructors was writing a book or writing an accompaniment to a book on how to determine whether you charge crimes. It was like a yes or no matrix based on certain situations, the difference between robbery and burglary and all different crimes.
Andy Vitale:
I created it in director and I had to build the logic out entirely myself. If this is the thing, then it's this statute. And the statute book was like three feet thick, but he's like, "We just need to figure out how to make this in an application." It was on a CD-ROM. So just going through that and then making the stakes.
Lisa Welchman:
You killed someone.
Andy Vitale:
I don't know. I'm lost.
Laura Klein:
I mean, we're not saying it's entirely your fault, Andy.
Andy Vitale:
So I'm in on the logic thinking out session.
Lisa Welchman:
Okay. For sure. Well, that's good to know.
Andy Vitale:
All right.
Lisa Welchman:
Laura, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
Laura Klein:
Thanks so much for having me. This was great.
Andy Vitale:
Thanks, Laura.
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