Ryan Shafer - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Making Sausage

Well, hello Design Matters, and thank you for that lovely, lovely intro. So what I'd like to talk to you about today is evolving design, or as I like to call it, how I learned to stop worrying and embrace making sausage. I have to be honest with you guys, I'm getting over a cold, so I'll probably cough a little bit, but I'll drink a lot of water. So let's dive in. So I would like to start by taking a survey. By round of applause, clap if you've ever parsed or disseminated in the UX design versus product design versus any other label debate. Okay? Let's start clapping. Okay, so it looks like a lot of us have done that. I've done it many times, too many times, because I believe that my time can be better spent doing something else. Now, I can hear probably some of you thinking right now, but Ryan, isn't our label important to us as designers and to our peers? Well, to answer that, I turn to a wise sage for answers. It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me. God, Batman is so smart. It's what we do that defines us. Okay? So let's talk about that for a second. Now, during my time improving design at MTV, I witnessed a gap, a gap in understanding between what we do and what the others in the organization think we do. And I think fixing this is a better use of my time, and I hope you guys agree. Now, fellow designers, we must not allow an understanding gap. Sorry, I had to figure out how to incorporate Dr. Strangelove somehow. So we all seek to have design be better valued, better respected in our organization. But what I believe is that this gap holds us back. Now, before I dig into how I narrow this gap, I'm required by international design law to include one quote from Steve Jobs or Apple. So I'm going to get mine out of the way up front. Good art is copy. Great art is steal. Steve Jobs believed in this quote. How do I know? He stole it. He stole it from Pablo Picasso. But it didn't belong to Pablo either. He got it from William Faulkner. Who took it from T.S. Eliot? Who stole it from W.H. Davenport Adams? So my point is, if these guys can steal a quote about the greatness of stealing ideas, follow their lead. Steal from other coworkers' experiences. Steal from articles that you read. And definitely steal from this presentation. And adapt any of this to your own needs. So, back to figuring out how to narrow this gap. Now a lot of people talk about culture change. But there's something that's always sort of bothered me about it. Like, they always expect someone to just jump right in and start making changes really quickly. But we all know that making massive changes quickly, it's a great way to create resistance. I also think there's a problem with the word change. It lacks any sort of specifics. How? How fast? But if I say the word evolve, we not only understand how change occurs, but we also get some sort of sense of time-scale. Change over the longer term. That's why I like evolve better than change. It's clearer. Now, I'll be honest. Just because I'm saying evolve instead of change, it doesn't make anything any easier. There's bound to be bumps along this way. I think it helps me get through the bumps in the way. And I still use it today. Growing up in Vermont, I wanted to learn how to snowboard. So I got my board, I went to the mountain, and I fell down this part of the mountain all day long. Now, my older brother who had learned the year before me, he saw my falls and he offered to help. He offered to teach me the way he was taught. You go to the top of the mountain for a longer run for more practice. So I jumped at it. Now, on the ride up, I was so happy that my big brother was taking time for his baby brother. We got to the top, we strapped in, and that's when my big brother said these words to me. Time to learn how I was taught. I'll see you at the bottom. Good luck. And he left me. I mean, do you believe it? Now, I could tell you this amazing story about me facing these immense challenges and rising above it. But no, I didn't learn how to snowboard that day, but I did learn from it. I learned that trust is easy to lose. But I also learned that my uneasiness made me tense up. And when I hit an unforeseen bump, I fell every time. But when I got more comfortable, I relaxed, and I stopped falling. My body was able to absorb the bumps. So that's my trick. Stay flexible and adapt to the bumps to carry on. This is what helped me stick with it, to manage the long journey that an evolution takes. Now, there is one other thing that helped me along this journey. I remembered that I was a designer. And that this was nothing more than a design challenge. We've all seen a slide like this before, right? Now, once you see it through this lens, it all becomes familiar. It becomes less daunting. The environment and the output may be a little bit less familiar. But lean on your skills as a designer, and you'll work through that unfamiliar. Start by understanding the context to why things aren't working and go from there. Now, my journey began by interviewing peers and teammates. I observed methodologies, processes, communication, and so on. But I made a mistake. I didn't make it clear to my peers. I didn't make it clear to my boss and to the others what exactly what I was doing. My boss was expecting culture change. So she started getting worried that I wasn't jumping and just solving all the problems really quickly. I had to remember that she and my other peers, they didn't have a really good understanding of design methodology. So, make your approach clear to all involved. Open your door to anybody who has concerns. And make learning an opportunity to teach some fundamentals about how design works. Now, what I learned was that there was a top-down culture, copied from the executive producer mindset of television, that led to long, water-filled projects that ran through siloed departments that, you know, excuse me, that, you know, rarely led to collaboration. All of this was negatively affecting the health of my team and most other teams as well. So, realizing that my team was sick, I need to understand it better. So, I ran a session with my team and I asked them to bring examples of tasks that they commonly did. Now, everyone took these tasks and they wrote them on stickies and, you know, they put up up on the wall with little to no order. We reviewed them and we added missing tasks and then we, you know, removed some when we thought they were duplicates. Silently, we then organized them into a single line with simple tasks on one side and complex tasks on the other. Now, once an agreement, I gave everyone two dot stickers, and I asked them to choose two tasks that they hated to do the most. We tallied the votes and then discussed what was the most frustrating and why. Collectively, we were deciding on what was a priority. Now, it would have been so much easier if I just did that on my own. But, I'm not alone in the order. organization, there's others to consider. And excluding them in this approach to making change is another great way to create resistance. So now, let's talk about resistance. This is a sample taken from an organ transplant. In it, it depicts the body rejecting foreign cells, specifically the donated organ. That's our immune system's job, attack what isn't normal. To manage this, doctors give patients immunosuppressants, drugs that relax the immune system just enough to allow the organ to take hold. Collaborative exercises like the ones that I ran with my team can be the designer's immunosuppressants in adopting change. Now, Erica Hall from Mule Design explains my point quite elegantly. Only after you've won someone's trust and demonstrated empathy do you have a hope of conveying that your position is in their best interests. So I felt my team's frustrations. I could see where it impacted their day-to-day and how they were collectively feeling. And they could see me get it too. This is empathy at work, building up trust. Efforts like this lowered their natural defense against change, allowing them to be open to any that I might suggest. And I've done any number of these type of exercises with your peers to relax their fear of change as well, all while creating a shared understanding of the overall problem. Both set you up to narrow this gap. So, okay, if exercises like these demonstrate empathy and build up trust, let's identify a couple that destroy it. Here's a few examples that I've witnessed. Not having a voice, be it in product, or process, is a surefire way to feel alone at a big company. Now, usually connected to the lack of voice is a misunderstanding of your role and its responsibility. The highest paid person in the room making all the decisions, the executive model. This usually undermines both voice and respect for everyone else in the room. The fallacy of efficiency. Siloed waterfall work from this field of battle, they don't understand why their output is so bad. Now, questions like, why am I doing this? Why did they make this decision? A lack of transparency and clarity is an effective means to undermine trust. But there's one, one that bothers me the most, treating your teammates like children. Okay. Thank you. stuff. She was a designer on my team, and in the time that I worked with her, she got married, bought a house, started a family, got promoted. She did all of this, planning a wedding, negotiating a mortgage, choosing to be responsible for another human being, all while succeeding at her job. Being fearful about her ability to do her job says more about me than it does about her. However, showing trust goes a long way to establishing trust. Now, in the design profession, I fear that we see this problem so frequently, I'm not sure if we recognize it anymore. Here are some examples. The design leader who presents their work instead of the designer who did the work. Now, leaders who do this rob the designer of a much-needed experience, selling an idea. And the design leader who is missing the role of the design leader, adding clarity when needed, or supporting the designer should the meeting go awry. You know, building trust. Here's another. These images are from a Tumblr called Hovering Art Director. It's so common, designers are joking about it. This, this is my team joking about it. Now, and I think this to be the design version of the executive swoop and poop. I don't like it. And I believe we need to think about how these type of interactions impact our designers. Now, to be clear, I don't think every interaction like this is bad. So to help everyone, I made this handy chart. Now, if you find it useful, you know, you can take a photo now or find me on Twitter for a PDF. But I encourage designers to use this to make helpful suggestions or design leaders as a reminder. If you see a missing scenario, talk to me afterwards. Now, remember, the people on your team are adults living adult lives. The more you treat them like children, the more they're going to act like it. So if you're seeing childish behavior on your team, maybe step back and analyze your own actions as a leader first. Now, this is one of my most favorite quotes on leadership. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and the women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. But how do you teach something like yearning for the endless sea? This is Seymour Papert. He was a researcher and professor at MIT Media Lab whose focus was on learning theory. Now, among his many accomplishments, he partnered with Lego to produce Lego Mindstorms, a kit of Legos and software that enable kids to make programmatic robots. So fucking awesome. Here's how he described the role of the teacher. Okay, I'm just kidding. I mean, he did say this, but I'm just checking to see if you're paying attention. The role of the teacher is to create the conditions of invention rather than provide ready-made instruction. Now, if we change teacher to leader, I think it still works. And I believe it to be a critical idea that can strengthen design within an organization. Without the proper conditions, design can struggle to function. I actually just spent the last few minutes talking about one condition of invention, strong empathy and trust, which helps us yearn for something better by embracing change. Now, we in design need to consider what other conditions that we need to pay attention to at our workplace. Here's a couple more that I think about. Fail often. We see this, commonly embraced by startups, and they do so because they want to enable their team to ditch any fears of trying new ideas. But I have a problem with it. The goal isn't to fail. The goal is to learn. Now, we could just change fail to learn, but I think the most powerful lessons are those learned from failure. So I think it's better to have both. That's why I prefer this Japanese proverb, stumble seven times, recover eight. Embracing failure, and learning through recovery is a more powerful condition than just embracing failure alone. This idea can help create a culture of learning within your team. Now, here's another one that I touched on earlier. Evolution is a series of small progressive changes within an environment over a period of time. Small progressive changes. It's a simple but powerful idea. You don't have to look any further than Mother Nature to be amazed by this condition. A small change can have a big impact. So look around for any small day-to-day changes that you can make. Another condition is where to make the change. Now, I recommend to start somewhere where you have more influence and least potential for damage, and then work outwards. Because remember, trust is hard to earn back. So let me give you some real-life examples of this. I heard frequently that they all felt like the other designers were getting all the cool work. This wasn't true. But it was an issue of transparency, really. But since it was affecting the trust on my team, I needed to address it. Now, my first thought was to do a stand-up, you know, not unlike this. Let's show what everyone was actually working on every day. So we booked a room, sent out invites, and we tried it. And we failed. So we stumbled. But, you know, on to recovery. Let's understand why. The room was too large. It had this gigantic conference room table in it. So everyone just sort of spread out, sat down, opened up their notebooks, and started doodling, and just didn't pay attention to what anyone else was saying. And I think the format didn't help either. It was just talking. There wasn't any visual feedback to facilitate a conversation amongst designers. So my next change, my next attempt, I made the following changes. We ditched this room. gigantic conference table. And instead, we did it in a hallway. Now, a team room might have been more ideal, but we didn't have it. But the new space did two things. It meant no sitting, and it was really public, so people just really wanted to get the moving going quickly. Now, the wall in the hallway had whiteboard paint. So each designer had a box, and with their name in it. And at the beginning of each meeting, each designer would write what they were creatively working on, and then what was in their queue. This flurry of activity added energy to what once was a really boring meeting. The board became a visual object for, you know, everyone to reference when it was their turn to talk. It kept everyone's focus tuned. Now, those who missed the meeting, well, they could just look at the board whenever they had a chance. And this public board had some unintended effects. Transparency with other teams. We would hear I had this thing that I need you to ask you to do, but wow, I can see you guys are super busy. I'll come back later. Now, the coolest thing was when I stepped back and let other members of the team run the meeting. The team made their own changes, like color coding to indicate who was busy and who was free, or what was an active task. We added vacation dates so they can help reassign work. These are conditions of invention taking shape. Small progressive changes in my team's day-to-day trying to solve problems, and then improved under their own inventions with new solutions. Now, the hard part is doing this outside of your own area of influence. So for that, I would test the conditions before I tried to advocate a change. Think about a canary in a coal mine. It tests the air for all the sea. This isn't that much different. You're testing your company's conditions to see what's possible. So let me share an example. The day after Adam Yonk of the Beastie Boys died, my mom called me at work. Now, growing up, I listened to the Beastie Boys, but there really was only one album that my mom enjoyed. She'd called me to let me know that she was on Google News, and she was browsing, and she unknowingly clicked on MTV's news article, to read about his passing. My mom's call made me wonder how much of our traffic is coming from people outside of MTV's demo. And was search really the best strategy to reach our audience? Now, normally it's research that raises these questions, but this time it started with her. I shared this with my boss, and while she was interested, we just had other priorities to focus on. So I decided to use my own people to try to create a canary, for everyone else to see. This is Michaela Maroney. She's an American gymnast who competed at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Now, during these games, she barely missed gold in the vault. At the awards ceremony, in a moment of disappointment, she made this face. Meet Gavin, another designer from my team. He saw her expression and its irony, Olympian not impressed with being second best in the world. So he photoshopped her into impressive cultural moments, and then posted it on Tumblr. He called it, Michaela's not impressed. And it blew up. It blew up on the internet. Now, if you don't recognize these, let me give you a sense of scale about how big it got. Do you recognize him? Gavin might have done this on his own. I don't really know. But after that meeting with my boss, I encouraged my designers to use any of their downtime to create content that they themselves would like and share and to let me know if anything popped. Now, Michaela was one, but there were others, like celebs with no eyebrows. Or histograms, history captured through Instagram. Now, things like this boosted their creative freedom while allowing me to test an idea and gauge the reaction of the company. And that reaction? Amazement that quickly turned to questions about, why aren't we doing this on MTV? Now, this is the canary in the coal mine testing for a condition of invention. Change didn't happen overnight. It rarely does. But it started a conversation. It helped create something beyond my area of influence. And after a year's time of exploring and developing this previously impossible direction, we had almost tripled MTV's traffic. But why did I have to do this? Why didn't my boss just, you know, listen to me? Here's why. Sell me this pen. It's an amazing pen. For professionals. Sell me this pen. It's a nice pen. You can use the pen to write down thoughts from your life so you can remember. Poor guys. I like these guys. I like these guys failing to try and sell the pen. I didn't effectively sell the value of it to my boss. I mean, clearly there was value. I just needed a way to tell people so that they would pay attention and understand. Efforts like Michaela's Not Impressed told that story. So remember, if done properly, storytelling can be a designer's best friend in creating clarity. Now, the art of telling a good story isn't the only way to create clarity. I think it's something, something larger that we designers need to focus on. And that's language. Now, to help explain what I mean, let me start by telling you a story. This is the Tower of Babel. Now, for those of you who don't know this story, let me set it up for you. The story takes place right after the great flood with Noah's Ark where he saved two of every animal and his family. Noah was asked by God to do two things. One, have many children and to fill all the earth. Now, they did the first part, but not so much the second part. They built a city where everyone had the same language. God saw this and chose to mix up everybody's language and then scatter them across the earth. This is the Bible's explanation for the origin of the diversity of language. But there's another meaning. And the Lord said, Indeed, the people are one, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now, nothing that they do, what they propose to do will be withheld from them. This underscores the power of a common language among people. Language is vital to how a team works together. But when it comes to the language of design, I think we need to take a more active role in defining it and teaching it to our peers for the sake of clarity. Now, here are five things to consider when establishing your design language. Now, before you start, recognize that the language of design might sound like Klingon to your coworkers. You and your team will have to act as translators until everyone's up to speed. Be consistent, be patient, and above all, be honest. Don't use their lack of language against them. Now, do you know that in the United States, there's not one, but there's three names for this fizzy beverage? Soda, pop, and Coke. But not the brand Coke. Each use exists in regional pockets, across the United States. Now, why is Florida more of a soda state than the rest of the South? Over two-thirds of Florida's population comes from another state, and the majority comes from the Northeast, a heavily soda area. What I want you to take away from this is language is rooted in culture. The words you choose should meet the needs of your company's culture first. By all means, please start with an industry, standard, but don't get hung up on it. For example, if your company's culture is rooted in industrial design, using the word product design instead of UX design or any of the other labels, it might add confusion. The goal is to add clarity, not be dogmatic. Not all language is verbal. So don't forget about the other way that a team communicates. How can you add clarity there? For example, a style guide helps designers talk with other designers. A pattern library can help designers talk with product and content managers. And if you document both in code, well, then everyone will be able to talk with the developers. And while you're at it, you know, add a design language dictionary. Okay, so we've all received really vague meeting invites like this, and they're usually the beginning of a really crappy, confusing meeting. Now, clarifying something like this can manage the expectations, expectations of those who participate with the design team. So identify patterns of confusion and provide definitions to add clarity. Now, beyond types of meetings, I can think of things like titles and responsibilities, methodologies, phases in the process, and so on. Openness and consistency are all key to reducing any confusion. Now, as I said, I've lived the last year of my life in Italy, and I moved there without knowing any Italian. So I can tell you that immersion is one of the fastest ways to learn a language. Any design-centered meeting is an opportunity to immerse peers and practice the language. In these teaching moments, be kind by correcting misuses of the language, because I can tell you, I've learned so much more Italian from the friend that corrects my mistakes than the ones that ignore it. So like these people who built their great tower, a common language can help unite everyone to accomplish things never imagined possible. A common language can add clarity, and it can narrow this gap. So by now, you can probably tell how much I hate this gap. It creates so much confusion. It harms the people within our organization and limits what they're capable of doing. Yes, fixing these problems can be daunting. And yes, sometimes it can be about as enjoyable as watching sausage being made. And yeah, that's real. But we cannot allow this gap in understanding to exist where we work. This is the type of design that we designers say we enjoy, solving the hard problems. So I encourage all of you to rise up to this design challenge like you would to any other. Now, at the beginning of my talk, I asked you to steal. If any of you are trying to make these type of changes at your own workplace, I hope that you'll steal from my experiences, because I care about design, and those that practice it. So I'm going to make it super easy for you. Here's the too-long-didn't-read version of my presentation. One, stay flexible and design your way through. Two, build trust so that others may embrace change. Three, empower design with conditions of invention. And four, create clarity with a team design language. I believe if we practice these four concepts where we work, we can narrow that gap of understanding and improve design for all involved. Thank you very much. Thank you.