Break the rules

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 PHIL DELALANDE: I don't really like is too much, that because I'm French. For us, there is really only one way to handle rules. If things get serious, we go on strike, and if things get even more serious, we go on hunger strike. But we never take it to that extreme. By the way, I'm Phil, this is my team. A clever Photoshop hack because it is impossible to get everyone on a photo. I work for Readify. Let's talk about breaking the rules. It's 1903 and a researcher joins Thomas Edison's team and asks him about the rules in the laboratory. Thomas Edison famously replies, "There are no rules here, we're trying to accomplish something." Beautiful, right? Of course, there are a lot of rules. There are the official rules and your implicit rules. I'm going to try and find my mouse, just bear with me. It's not like coding but it's the same level of difficulty for me. Happy face. So what does it look like when you are trying to make a living as a provider. It's good to know what sort of rules apply there. You may be working in healthcare or finance or education – that comes with a set of rules. You might be working with the state, or a country. There is probably a few lines you don't want a cross. Like you might decide you don't want to eat but Vegemite. You might wake up one morning and decide that designing is too hard, but really we need to face them. But you need to ask yourself why you need to be challenged by these things. Some things up with why, a great book. Another question that usually follows this is, "Who came up with that rule?" Which is usually a synonym of how much trouble I going to into once I start pushing against it? And we are often not designers but implementers. But I want to be a designer. By the way, a quick disclaimer, I am fine with the rules. I drive on the right side of the road, which is the left side in Australia, I learned that progressively and I know it. I pay my taxes. And we agree that usually rules are here to provide a safe environment for us to live in harmony. But sometimes you need to push back against certain rules. Maybe sometimes break them. But what I want to do is consider five areas of design and consider what rules can apply and how we might approach them. We have 20 minutes. We good? Let's go. Let's up with product strategy. There is no innovation without breaking the rules. Of course am going to bring up the Uber, BnBs, all of the products that have changed our minds that have broken the rules in certain industries. We didn't use them a few years ago.
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 2 of 5 The funny thing is that new rules had to be put in place to control the new territories that these have revealed. For example, if you rent an apartment there is probably going to be an AirBnB place. And in France at the moment the riders are on strike because of the Uber. And there are more industries to disrupt. But I will give you an example. This car insurance company have said, "Why should we pay the same premium for our cars throughout the years when the car but it goes down progressively? Every month my car is worth less money so let's start an insurance model where premiums decrease throughout time because car values decreased throughout time." A great idea, right? Why did nobody think of this before? First let's ask why we don't ask why more often? Secondly, for establish businesses whose business model relies on that, and milking that, they obviously don't want to challenge that and be a disruption. So, breaking the rules and an industry level is massive, and people are trying to do that. You don't need to be at that level, you can be at the interaction level. Let's look at product designers. I would like to say in product design, they are nonnegotiable. When you look at accessibility, it has been hard enough to get some kind of order in there that we don't want to challenge those rules. You might say that this or that is not, but it is something we want to change for legal and also moral reasons. When you look at standards of accessibility, you think of standards and best practice, usually you use air quotes around those. It can be conflicting, your iOS guidelines compared to other platform guidelines, tabs will be in different places, consistency is everything. You probably know about Jacob's law, it is more of a self-proclaimed law, like a law of physics, which is that people spend a lot of time on other people's products, but how important your product is when it gets to your product, they would rather it works like everybody else's. Think about the indicator in your car, does it piss you off when it is on the left side when it is normally on the right? And you accidentally turn on your wipers, it is horrible. Consistently, it needs to drive learnability. And when people start using your product more and more, the learnability will increase more and more with sensibility. And a few months ago, you might have seen it on Twitter, but also in the article, it said it was OK to be cognisant with the rest of the world as long as you rely on the user's current knowledge. It is a bit abstract, so let's look at an example. In most applications at the top of the screen you have a search bar on mobile applications and also on just applications. It is not a rule, but it is a standard imagine that you break at your own risk. But they moved the search bar to the bottom of the screen.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 3 of 5 It is the main functionality, you are looking for a car, you just want to find your destination. But with the rule of thumb, it is where your thumbs go right? If you are calling a taxi, you are probably going to use one hand. I was calling one when I realised I was half an hour late for sound check this morning. The other hand might be holding your bag or umbrella or something else. So what is the golden rule for product design? You want to take it back to the user, evaluate and test with them. Because a standard is nothing outside the context of use. Do we agree? Now, we have talked about designing products, now we will talk about how we deliver products. Well, the first rule that comes to my mind is "requirements". And I love how in his book (inaudible) talks about requirement meaning "shut up and do what you are told, top asking questions." It is interesting because requirements can be designed way too precisely and too early in the project which is a real risk. But also we are all aware that sometimes requirements could be something that someone came up with in a room next door two hours ago. It is interesting. Again, as a designer it is your duty to challenge requirements, especially if you look at this, when they may work against the user's best interest. I think a lot of progress is being made in the last years in terms of customisation. Are what do you do when it is outside your control? When they were not made in a room next door, but in an office far, far away and you don't really have a say. For example, I was working with a beta of a product and we had to integrate with the government. And with the integration am a whole bunch of requirements. One of them was we had to serve our customers, our users with a pop-up every time there was a change in the network status of that service we were integrating. I'm just going to say that again. A pop-up. OK? Now you had to be aware that it was a very important tool that people would use, eight or sometimes 10 hours a day sitting in front of their own customers. There was a lot of red tape already, and it was sometimes disrupt their workflow without any particular value. It was also not consistent with our other product and functionality. So what would you do? Would you go and break the rules? Of course we had to pass validation, the validation process with that very same organisation giving us those requirements. So the question you probably ask yourself every now and then as well. Do I fight? Or do I flutter and influence, persuade maybe? In that case, after a few fruitless meetings and conversations, we thought we were not really going anywhere, but what we decided to do is actually demonstrate a few examples of what the
4. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 4 of 5 art of the possible is, if you like. So this looks nothing like the product, really for illustration purposes, but we designed an alternative, and something that was consistent with the rest of the product that would not disrupt our user's workflow. And I would like to say that we won, but I will be super corny and say, "Everybody won." that I was in another organisation of the month later and did an app that did the same thing. Another example is organisations taking on legislation. You are fighting for the right thing, and you have ethics in mind, so you can sometimes be bold and take on bigger things. It just needs to be based at the right level, and have the right people in your team. Nothing is impossible, just regards to how you do things, but let's look at ways of working. And when I say ways of working, I immediately think about Agile. Let me tell you another little story. It is more of a fable, actually. This is a siloed organisation. It is hierarchical, common and controlled. Nobody would want to work there, it would be horrible. Enter Agile. Oh, my God. Transparency, efficiency, a beautiful picture people working together, delivering value, something useful and beautiful. Beautiful, right? It is so beautiful, what do we want to do? Capture it, lock it in and then we can include it in other organisations because it is working so well. OK, enough of your cynicism. Where are the rules to break? I would argue the rules to break everywhere in the way it is working. Agile in inspecting continuously and adapting, that meant she and breaking rules. Not just setting another layer of processes and control. Why, because we're never there. We are talking about transparency. And we're human. We are never there. We always have to fight, we work together to achieve the right balance that applies in our organisation on our projects. But sometimes challenging the rules that apply to us is the hardest thing. And that takes me to the fifth part. I would like to tell you about the rules that I apply to myself. I don't do focus groups. And you might think I am an open-minded person, but I don't do focus groups for things like product validation. It people tell you what you want to hear, "Where is my 50 bucks?" And there is the group effect. One of our clients was going through a valuable transition and were losing customers. We would work with them through discovery and were hanging on a board decision to move forward. At the same time, they came back from a conference with the organisation and had hundreds of their core users going, "We want to help, we want to provide you with feedback," and I thought,
5. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 5 of 5 "Wait a minute, somebody did mention focus groups," and my normal reaction would be, "Merde!" And in this case I thought maybe we should do it. What I thought is let's get many users involved in once. It's not only about their feedback but also communicating something to them, they were at the core and centre of what we were doing. So I went and broke my rule, and we went around and met with thousands of users at once. We had a bit of a biased activity there. Those focus groups had great impact on the next steps for that company and their relationship. In a nutshell, I would say it is always worth thinking of challenging and challenging the rules. Maybe the rules weren't me to be there in the first place. You have to find a balance between being a good person and being a jerk who is challenging everything all the time. When I'm on that side, I do challenge if I am in the right environment. There are a lot of decisions and questions to ask. I'd like to leave you with a question, are you making a difference in your workplace? Argue going against the flow or other areas where you could be doing more in the user's interest? Thank you.