Product Management Webinar: UX Design in Product Development

[00:00:00] Janna Bastow: Hello everybody and welcome. You are here at this series of webinars, which is the product expert series the fireside series that we run here at ProdPad.

And today we’re gonna be talking about how to integrate UX design into your product development process. And we’re joined here by Laura Klein. I’m gonna do a full introduction to Laura in just a short while. But I look forward to talking to you today about this topic.

 A quick note from us here at ProdPad. ProdPad is a tool that we built ourselves. Myself and my co-founder Simon needed a tool to do our own job and it didn’t exist. So we built something to help us keep track of the outcomes you’re trying to track and the experiments and the feedback from our customers.

So we built ProdPad, it gives you added control and organization and transparency. It helps you create a single source of truth for all your product decisions. And it’s now used by thousands of teams around the world. So you can try it for free and you can even see how it works with example data including lean roadmaps and OKRs.

We’ve got a Sandbox version at prodpad.com, so you can just see how everything fits together and our team is made up of product people. Give it a try. Let us know what you think. We’d love to get your feedback. And we were talking about GPT just a moment earlier. So a little shout out for something that we built just moments ago because we got the API week one and week two we built this out, which is an AI Idea Generator.

When you have that blank page syndrome, you’ve come up with an idea, it’s a post-it note stuck to your monitor and you go, oh god, I’ve gotta write the whole spec for this. And you know what it is in your mind, but you’ve gotta think about what’s the problem it solves. What are the risks?

What are the target outcomes? ProdPad now just generates it for you, which you can then scan and change and adjust as you go before you send it on to development. Didn’t make anything of it. So give it a try. You can even try it in the sandbox itself to see how it works out, but it is pure magic. So I’d love to get your feedback.

And on that note, I would love to introduce you to Laura. I know Laura through I guess it’s the Mind The Product community that we got to know each other. You’ve been involved and you’ve shared your knowledge there in a bunch of ways, and I’m thrilled that you’re sharing it here with the product community here today.

We’ve also worked together on a video that Laura interviewed before was the Interaction Design Foundation that you did some work with Laura if you remember that. So I’m really excited that the tables are turned and today that I’m getting to interview you. Laura is an author, a consultant, a speaker, and a director of design.

And you can find our work at usersknow.com. But Laura, do you wanna jump in with some more background about who you are and where you come from. 

[00:02:45] Laura Klein: Oh that’s pretty much it. That’s the whole thing. I’ve been around we were talking be before this about how long we’ve been in tech and so I’ve been around tech since I’m gonna, oh God, ‘95, ‘96.

And I’ve done most jobs. I’ve been an engineer, I’ve been a researcher, designer, had a product. So seen it from all the different angles. I get bored very easily and to move on. The course that you talked about was an agile course that I did a ton of research for and put together about incorporating design and research into agile teams specifically, which was very fun.

And I was very excited actually to include your thoughts on roadmaps because oh man, roadmap and agile is kind of a peeve of mine. And I really like that, that now next later model. Yeah. Because, I think anything beyond that is maybe a little less agile. We don’t have to talk about that.

[00:03:41] Janna Bastow: A Lot of people think that road mapping and agile are opposites, but honestly, what we try to do is find a blend a way that they can work together. So yeah, it’s great to be able to share that and and talk more about that. 

[00:03:51] Laura Klein: Yeah, I mean I would say that the way most people do roadmaps is anti agile, but yeah that one.

I’m like, you know what? I will accept this. That is fine. 

[00:04:02] Janna Bastow: Alright. Excellent. Excellent. So tell us about your journey into UX design. How did you, what drew you into that particular field? Cause you said that you were in engineering before. 

[00:04:12] Laura Klein: Yeah. Everything that I’ve done has been a result of accident luck and privilege.

So I was in the Bay Area and I was a front end engineer in the late nineties. And Then the two thousands happened and everything exploded, which may feel very familiar to some of you. And I’m, I am here from the past to tell you that it does get better, just sometimes takes a little while.

So yeah. And I was a front end engineer at the time. I had been doing before I became an engineer, I had been doing ethnographic research with a sort a think tank. And I joined a small design consultancy to help them. They did a lot of research and they did a lot of prototyping and they also did the design part in the middle, but I didn’t know that yet.

I didn’t know how to do that yet. And so they taught me the middle part because I could help with the research and I could build the prototypes cause I was a front engineer. So that was my path into it. My understanding is that there are now paths into UX design that involve like actual education and UX design and not just.

Apprenticing over and over in various different fields. Yes. But, hey, it was the late nineties, early two thousands yes, that’s what we had. 

[00:05:25] Janna Bastow: It’s absolutely changing as a field. Nowadays people are actually growing up and saying, I wanna become a UX designer.

They’re seeing what this previous generation has done and realizing that, hey, this is something I can train to do. This is something I can learn to do, as opposed to being thrown into it. And trying to figure it out as we go. I’m betting a lot of people here, product people, UX people.

How many here put your hands up or say something in the chat if you were just lobbed into your role and had to figure it out as you went. I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one. You certainly weren’t the only one. I’m seeing a few people raising their hands here. 4, 5, 7, 9. Yeah. Thousands of people raising their hands here.

[00:05:57] Laura Klein: Yeah. There, there wasn’t a real clear path. It’s always funny whenever people come to me, and I love it. It’s so sweet because I used to do the podcast with Kate Rudder, the What Is Wrong With UX Podcast, which I, we used to get all of these comments from early designers saying that it was really helpful to like, hear, two old people talk about different things about UX and it was really great.

But then they would come and they would ask us things like, how do we get into UX? And I’m like build a time machine. Like I am the wrong person to ask. Cause like my path does not exist anymore. There are new paths into it and talk to somebody who got into it three years ago.

[00:06:32] Janna Bastow: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think are the, some of the most common misconceptions about UX design amongst developers, amongst product people? What do you wish your team knew? 

[00:06:41] Laura Klein: Oh God. The funniest thing is that like I do remember like in the mid two thousands we had to start all of our presentations with, okay, let me explain.

There’s this thing called user research and here’s how it works and why we do it and why it’s important to actually understand things from your users. And that they, we often had to sell that as an extra that we would like, come on, let’s all go out and do contextual inquiry and understand how people actually use your product and, interview your, the people who are gonna use it.

That was not something that was baked in most organizations. Some organizations had it and we were always so excited to work with companies that just were like yeah, we get it. We already do that. We’re like, oh, thank God. Good. You understand? But that whole, not just have an idea, build it right.

Like that was very much. Less or that, sorry, just having the idea and just building it was even more common back then. It’s still more common than I’d like to see. At least people now talk about it and understand user research. They don’t always do it well or enough but they do get it. Like they, they know that it’s a thing and that it’s important and they should do it, so that’s great.

And then also I still see people bring UX design in very late into the process. And they treat it very much as UI design or like marketing and brand design. And those are important things that matter and are not UX design. And especially now with things, that are multi-platform, right?

You’ve got, or things that are service design, I started out, working on oh, I work on the, the screen part. So there was still a lot of experience design, but now the experience design is, oh, it’s across mobile and web and voice and everything else.

And oh, it’s gotta be, in all these different places. And it’s used collaboratively by dozens of different people. And it’s, you can’t add the user experience on at the end. You can’t sprinkle some UX dust on it and all of a sudden make it usable and useful. Yeah. So just slap quality on Yeah.

The funny thing is other Exactly. Other than the things I’m actually excited about is I see way more integration of things like accessibility inclusive design. I think those are wonderful. I’m excited about you. Bringing content design in earlier so that we’re actually thinking about what the content of what we’re showing is gonna be.

We’re not making everything just weird empty boxes and, Laura Mimso text. So that’s all great. Those things are definite moves forward. But again, I’m gonna say this, it’s widely variable. Like some places I see that and it’s just baked into the culture. And some places I see it and it’s oh yeah, no we haven’t brought UX in.

Because we haven’t figured out exactly what the feature needs to do yet. And I’m like, have you thought about maybe the fact that we. Help with that. We might have some insights into, I don’t know, the people that we talk to constantly and learn from. I dunno. 

[00:09:49] Janna Bastow: So what’s, what do you think is going on at these companies though?

The ones that have it baked in versus I guess the ones that don’t have it baked in? 

[00:09:57] Laura Klein: I think that the ones that don’t have it baked in, lose a lot of time to building. Look. I wrote a book called UX for Lean Startups. Yeah. I’m a big fan of testing and getting things out there. I’m actually a fan of designing an agile, like I like experimenting and trying things, but I like experimenting and trying things that are based in good research and good ideas.

I like having a solid hypothesis that comes from somewhere, but I just, I see somebody and it’s I have an idea, and then they’re like, oh, we should code it up. And it’s okay, maybe not. I’ve also heard people say weird things, and I don’t know, maybe some of y’all have said it like that.

Oh, when you’re doing experiments, one in 10 of your experiments will go well, or like only, two thirds of your experiments fail or whatever. Let me tell you right now two thirds of my experiments do not fail because my experiments are not based on oh, I have a cool idea.

Why don’t we try this? My experiments are based in, so what’s the problem that we’re solving? And what evidence do we have that the way that we’re thinking of solving it might work? And okay, now what’s the best way to implement that in a small way so that we can experiment with it and see if it’s right?

Like it’s a different way of thinking when you’ve got good. And I’ll say right now, like good UX design thinking incorporated. Product managers can think this way. UX researchers can think this way. UX anything, anybody can think this way. I just find that UX designers tend to be a little bit more trained to do it this way.

I will also say I have some sympathy for folks who have only ever worked with UX designers who didn’t do that stuff. Who just made it pretty or talked a lot about typography, which again, important part of the user experience. Yeah. But also not the person that you would necessarily have thinking about these things in the same way that you would not have me thinking about typography.

Because I have no opinions. Other than somebody else should think about it and pick good ones. 

[00:12:01] Janna Bastow: That age old fight of UX versus UI, which shouldn’t be a fight. They’re different things and they have different purposes. But, UX design is about making sure that the that the thing is providing value the typeface does not provide value.

[00:12:17] Laura Klein: You know what? It can, and it can be part of accessibility and it can be part of, your, rebrand. So I like, I never want to, I never want to denigrate other, groups that are providing great value. It’s just, it’s a d it is different. It’s the way I always look at it is, if you got a problem with your feet, you go to a podiatrist and they’re gonna help you a lot.

And if you got a problem with your heart, you go to a cardiologist and they’re gonna help you a lot. And you probably don’t wanna mix those up. Yeah, that’s a really good point. 

[00:12:44] Janna Bastow: Yeah. Yeah. So Raymond, ask a que good question here. So how have you overcome engineer te team resistance to UX being involved early in the process?

[00:12:57] Laura Klein: It depends. I have to say that at least once I’m contractually obligated because I’m a designer it. 

[00:13:02] Janna Bastow: It wouldn’t be a good product management talk if it depends and not come up at least once. 

[00:13:06] Laura Klein: It’ll come up again. So I have been lucky on many of my teams that the engineers were excited actually about working with good UX designers because it makes, it can’t make engineering jobs much easier.

 Okay, so engineer. I generally find that when engineers are resistant to work, bringing UX in early, it’s because they have worked with designers who tend to spend a lot of time on the pixel part of it and who haven’t spent a lot of time on things, for example, of figuring out how to deliver value or figuring out the smallest possible thing.

There are designers who feel very strongly that everything has to be designed perfectly and before we can even give it to engineering, before we can show it to engineering. And that’s also not a real healthy environment. So that said, once they’ve worked with good ones, if they’re open to this, they will often find and this actually goes more for product managers than engineer, actually had more pushback from product managers frankly, than engineers.

Just, yeah, personally, maybe that’s, because I used to be an engineer so I get it. 

From product managers have this issue too. Once they start doing it, and they see the kinds of things that we bring into the process earlier and they see that we, when they’re saying like, ah, I wish we knew X.

And the researchers go, oh actually we do know x. We did a research study about that. And they’re like oh, okay, fantastic. Or oh man I wish there were an easy way to do this. And the designers can kinda go, oh, you know what? We’re doing that on the front end over here, and this is the pattern we’re using.

And, or oh, hey, what, have we thought about, the actual, the service design of this whole process? Have we thought beyond sort of the surfaces of this? And if we thought about how that experience is gonna carry through to other parts of the product, once they start to see that it does help.

The trick is that des it’s sometimes on designers to educate people about this. And not all of us are great at that, and not all of us are great at doing the sorts of things that would make us welcome in the process. But I think it’s just about becoming a team and learning what we bring to the table, both of us.

I it’s also important. Yeah. Somebody said to the host of panelists, a design thinking can help developers save time. Yeah, absolutely. Just remember if we think through all of those error cases and edge cases and if we’re really like designing that correctly and if we’re thinking through oh yeah, but if you do this, then this other thing’s gonna happen over in the, in the experience later on.

And that’s gonna be bad. You know what is great? Is that you then end up not having to rebuild the whole goddamn thing because you got it wrong the first time. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, if you’re build like that, you don’t, if you don’t have to launch 10 different experiments that all come out even because they were just ideas.

If they’re actually based in research, maybe in the first one you’re like, oh yeah, no, that was good. That worked, 

[00:16:01] Janna Bastow: And I think one thing that really helps is helping to define what an experiment is. Because, I think some people think an experiment is a launched feature that you test with people and you’re ab testing it with a whole bunch of people.

And I personally hate AB testing. Like I see the value if you are a high traffic company and you can ab test, you’ve got the types of numbers to be able to do but AB testing, I’ve heard this quote before, it’s a very expensive way to disagree and effect effectively end up building two things, multiple things just to see which one comes true. And in reality, like a, an experiment can be let’s just do a little bit pe couple pieces of copy and show it to, 10 users each and see what they, which ones they react to the most. Those are the experiments you’re doing way upfront before you’re even getting the point of even telling the developers that you’re thinking about building something.

[00:16:52] Laura Klein: So I wanna say, first off, I love Eric Reese. I worked for him back before he wrote The Lean Startup. And I think he’s a really great guy. I’ve always really enjoyed talking to him, and I swear to God, someday I’m going to punch him in the face for the concept of the mvp. Not because it’s a bad idea, but because it has been so badly interpreted and is used.

So horribly in all companies. And the whole idea is that like an M V P was originally meant to be, like, what is the smallest possible thing that we can do to get feedback on this? And you are, the funny thing is, I may be more pro ab testing than you are because I think it absolutely has its place in these like single variable changes or in the we really don’t know which of these different options is gonna work better.

Sometimes you really do wanna see that if it’s like big changes. I don’t like this. Let’s ab test every little like widget that we do. No. Like it’s, that’s noise. And you’re a hundred percent right. You’re a thousand percent right. On the math, if I can say that it doesn’t work in most of the environments I work in, cause I tend to work in, B2B.

You just don’t have those people. But you’re right, you can show people copy. You can do good user research, you can do fake door tests. You can do concierge tests. You can use your sales team to go out and get feedback on things if they’re well supervised. You can do, concierge tests are so great, which is just like doing stuff by hand for people.

There are so many options that aren’t, build a shitty first draft and then just keep adding features onto it until it’s bad. Which is what I see. Yeah. That’s what I see. If your MVP is like, what’s the smallest possible thing that we could get out in two weeks or a quarter? You’re doing it wrong.

Like it’s not, does it? Is it a product? Does it save a does. Serve a purpose. Do you learn something from it? Somebody asked about paper prototyping and I actually have a rant in my first book called Why I Hate Paper Prototyping. 

[00:18:52] Janna Bastow: Tell us. Why do you hate paper? I don’t, 

[00:18:54] Laura Klein: I don’t really hate it.

It’s as with absolutely everything else. It has its place. I find paper prototypes personally very hard to iterate on and keep up to date. They’re very fast to create sometimes, but like to get them to the level that you would need to like, to get actual interaction feedback on them they can actually end up taking longer now than some of the tools.

Like I feel like paper prototyping was better back when our tools were worse. Like Paper Pro mean for me came out of the Photoshop days when it just was a pain in the ass to make a Photoshop prototype or dream weaver, so paper was really quick, but like now it’s something like balsamic.

I just, yeah, it’s easy. But it’s a similar thing, right? And I also don’t like printing things out if they’re gonna be shown on a screen. Although with touch interfaces now printed out, things are fine. 

[00:19:43] Janna Bastow: And somebody did just ask in the the private chat mi versus balsamic versus author options like that, I’m guessing digital prototyping tools are taking the place of paper and other tools like that.

[00:19:54] Laura Klein: Yeah. And by the way the answer to what tools should I use is always what are you trying to do? The answer to what deliverable should I create is always to whom are you trying to communicate and what are you trying to communicate, right? Is this a, an interactive thing? Is this a is, am I communicating to engineers?

Am I communicating to users? Am I gonna test it? Am I gonna test for usability? Am I gonna test for usefulness? Treat everything? Like a design process. Yes. What is it for? What is it trying to do? I need to make oh, you’re making a prototype. Great. Why? Why will tell you how interactive it should be?

How high fidelity it should be? What kind of information, oh, do you wanna test the content? Wow. You better have some actual content in there. Do you wanna test the understandability again? You better have some content in there. You wanna test the usability of a real complicated thing might need to be pretty interactive.

Yeah. Yeah. And the tools like mirrors good for some of those things and bad for others. And same with balsamic, and same with Figma, and same with paper. 

[00:21:05] Janna Bastow: Yeah. Yeah. Probably good to have a whole suite of tools at your disposal. Know how to use them so that you can make, use them as when needed.

[00:21:12] Laura Klein: Yeah. And tools are easy to learn. Generally speaking I don’t want to, they’re hard to master, but often they are easy to get good enough that you can do a thing or you can hire, or you can hire somebody who has, gotten really good at it. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:21:29] Janna Bastow: And do you have any cards of your sleeve, any tips for anybody who’s in a business who’s trying to balance the need for speed in product development with the more time consumer process of this research prototyping, all this testing that needs to happen upfront?

[00:21:41] Laura Klein: Yeah I’m gonna challenge, I’m gonna challenge you. Good user research makes it faster. Sorry. Like it just does, I’m sorry. Look, I’ve been doing this longer than you. Almost certainly. I feel like I know most of the people in the industry who’ve been doing it for longer than I have. And I didn’t say any of your names I’m gonna pull the, I’m old card and say yeah, I’ve seen this a lot over and over.

Multiple, yeah. Understanding your users, which you can really only do with research, and coming up with good hypotheses and testing them well gets you to the correct answer or a there is no correct answer, gets you to a correct answer more quickly. If you do it right, then just let’s just build it and see what happens, because every once in a while, let’s just build it and see what happens, does work, and it always pisses me off when it does once in a great while it’ll work.

But here’s the thing, it doesn’t work over and over. It just doesn’t. It will stop working. It was luck. It’s like going and sitting down at the blackjack table and getting blackjack on your first hand and being like that’s amazing. 

Great. This four hours later pulling credit card, come on, my God, we can do this again.

Yeah. 

That’s somebody who’s lost a lot of money at blackjack. Let me tell you, house always wins. 

[00:23:02] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:23:03] Laura Klein: Yeah. Yeah. Your your instincts about what’s gonna be a great product are not as good as you think they are if you’re not constantly Yeah. Checking in with users. 

[00:23:12] Janna Bastow: So my question was largely on behalf of so many product people who I know, ask me the same question.

How do I convince my boss that we’ve gotta invest in this stuff? Are there any case studies, any proof points, any stories, any examples that we can point people to? Because, where do we, how do we prove this to our bosses? How do we, take them from their grip of, Hey, just launch it, get it out there, their shipping, our competitors are shipping.

[00:23:36] Laura Klein: There are infinite examples of this online. Yeah. I don’t keep them in a Rolodex. I told you I was old. Yeah. I don’t keep, them in a notes file. I don’t know, whatever. Because I get really annoyed at this question. I’m not mad. I ain’t mad at you.

Just disappointed. It’s so frustrating because you know how you teach them. Is you have to get them to look at their process that they’re doing and seeing how often it’s failing and it is failing. The problem is that most people are bad at admitting that, right? Or they’re in a company that is the company is successful probably because of something that somebody 10 years ago did, or five years ago, or two years ago did.

There are a lot of product managers and UX designers and engineers working in companies that are successful in spite of them. I’ll just say that right now. Yeah. And they’re doing some stuff and they’re like, yeah, we shipped a thing and look, we shipped it and now we’re gonna move on to the next thing.

But they’re not doing that hard work of saying, okay, what did we expect this to do? And for whom did it meet our expectations? What were the success metrics a ahead of time? Did we and did we set up good success metrics? Good success metrics are not more people clicked on the button. I can design you a deceptive pattern that will make people click on that button all goddamn day.

Do not contact me for that. But that service, by the way, is extremely expensive. So it’s so frustrating because there people are putting things out into the world that they’re like, no, but we got it out. We shipped it. We made a thing. And people are then looking at it and going this is bad.

It doesn’t solve my problems. It’s actually harmful to the world in some cases. It’s harmful to, underrepresented folks. It’s un it’s harmful to, our product as harmful to our brand. How many companies here had people on their executive staff talking about shipping NFTs a couple of years ago?

Was, was that great for your brand? Probably not. So that was a real example of no, everybody else is doing it. We just gotta ship it. It’s okay, what business do you wanna be in? I wanna be in the business and making things better for users so that they wanna give me money.

[00:25:52] Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this just goes back to the fundamental thing that product people, and whoever it is, who’s building in these businesses, when you’re getting these pressures to do things that aren’t in a way that’s gonna help the business, you’ve sometimes gotta speak up and reflect back to the bosses and say, Hey, you know what?

You’re asking us to do something that isn’t going to lead us to success. And here’s what I’m seeing on my side, right? We can spend, we can talk to users and understand their problems until their cow, until the cows come home. But oftentimes, like we, we don’t spend the time understanding what they’re trying to do and then go, oh, hold on.

If that’s what you’re trying to. Then what you’re, how you’re asking us to do it is not the way it’s gonna work. Here’s a way that we can actually make it work. And sometimes, co-creating that process with them can be more healthy and, pointing to these examples of other companies saying, here’s how successful companies are doing it.

What got you here to not get you there is not gonna get you there. 

[00:26:45] Laura Klein: Yeah. The one thing that I always like to caution people about, looking at other companies and just doing follows, is that their users are not your users. If they are and they’re doing things faster and better than you, I don’t know, maybe you’re in the wrong business.

Like maybe you don’t have a, maybe you don’t have a defensible business law. Maybe you should be figuring out what your users need and what kind of special thing you could offer them so that it doesn’t just turn into a price war. I, so that’s actually a really important.

Part of it is understanding not just, what you’re building, but who are you building it for and why are you the right people to build it and what’s, so somebody asked in the chat what are good success metrics? And once again the answer is it depends. But it, the things that it depends on are what you need more of as a company.

And also I think it’s extremely important. I was talking the other day to a friend of mine about the idea of measurable, like measured metrics or tracking metrics versus goal metrics. And some of the tracking metrics might be like, are people using a particular feature? I wanna know if they’re using a particular feature because, we spent time building it.

Was that a good idea? But having people use the, that product more or for more time or clicking on that button isn’t necessarily a goal. It might be the kind of thing where I don’t want them using it all the time because what they want is to come in, use it for a few minutes a day, and then get on with their damn laws.

So is that a goal metric? Is it a good goal metric to say, oh, they’re coming in and they’re running more reports. I don’t know how many reports do they want? How many reports do they need? Maybe a better metric in that case would be they’re convincing other people in the company to also run reports.

Maybe, I don’t know. Again, should multiple people in the company be running reports or should this be a thing that just one person can do by themselves? So you can figure out those things. What is your user’s work process? I, again, I work in b2b, so this is very sort of B2B focused.

It’s a little easier actually for consumer stuff, right? What you want people to do is to buy more things from your store. Or sometimes it is spend more time, scrolling the infinite scroll doom scrolling as we say. That’s what you actually want. On the B2B side, it’s much harder cause you have to kinda what is their process like?

Oh now multiple people are using the product. Oh, that, that’s interesting. Slack really grew early on because, a team would start using it and then they would be like, ah, you gotta use this. And then other teams in the company would start using it and then suddenly it had to support it.

So that was like this metric of, is it spreading virally within companies? An interesting one, like not necessarily what you want for all companies. So again, think about what your company is, you need more. Net new users. Do you need less churn? Do you need more? Do you need more revenue?

We all need more revenue. What does that look like? And also thinking about those things long term, even though we’re working in, a week, two week, quarter long, measurements. That’s great. Am I sacrificing future revenue or future churn for today’s panic revenue? You have to be able to balance that.

And it’s hard. And I wish I could just be like, oh, good. Success metrics are X, Y, and Z. And I would be way richer if I could do that because I would be a consultant still. But I can’t. And I wish I could, but it, you gotta look at what your company needs and what your users. 

[00:30:13] Janna Bastow: Yeah, it was actually interesting that you mentioned Slack in there as cause I remember one particular measurement that they had, which was around what made a successful onboarding for a new customer.

And I remember it being something like 1500 messages and it didn’t matter as to whether that was a hundred people having sent 1500 messages, like between them or two people having, 700 messages each sort of thing. When they hit the seven, the 1500 it just showed that it, once you hit that point, that’s when the users became really successful.

And there’s also something similar. Facebook had something once you made 10 friends, that was your tipping point. And once I think tweets, there’s once you sent a certain number of tweets or something like this if you had any experience like setting up or figuring out these particular interesting points and designing around those, 

[00:30:58] Laura Klein: Yeah, those are super good examples because they are all so first of all, those are all examples that those companies found after they’d already been somewhat successful.

Like they had some successful users and so they did that. They did the, like fire a rifle at it, the side of a barn, and then draw a circle around draw a target around where it’s clustered to be like, I hit the bullseye. That’s how rifles work. 

[00:31:22] Janna Bastow: That’s such a good point. 

[00:31:23] Laura Klein: Yeah. But it’s not bad. It’s not a bad way of doing it. It is a really good thing to look at and understand because you can start to form some hypotheses around that. Let me give you an example of where that kind of thing can go horribly wrong. Let’s take the let’s take the 10 friends example cause that’s one that I’ve used before and is a really good example.

They’re saying, okay, so people come onto the site and they naturally find 10 friends here. They naturally find their 10 friends and they connect with them, and that means that they come back because they’re finding value from this product. That is exactly what we want to happen. Now imagine that you give that to a product manager who is being incentivized with a bonus based on how many people get to 10 friends.

And let’s say that person goes when they come in, we can just assign them 10 friends. And I will get my bonus. And you have just broken your leading metric. Yeah. That is what we call a leading metric. Facebook doesn’t actually care if you find 10 friends. Facebook cares if you stick around, right?

But finding 10 friends leads to sticking around, but finding 10 friends. Naturally who are actually your friends or more to the point showing up at a party where you already have friends, there is more likely to make you stay longer. Showing up and being randomly assigned friends. Work might work for some people and you might actually improve that.

Some that’s fine. Speed dating. Sure. Whatever. But for a lot of people, they’re gonna come in, they’re gonna be randomly assigned friends and they’re gonna be like, yeah, no, this is not what I was looking for. Thank you. And it depends, are they coming there to connect with their existing friends or are they coming there to meet being friends?

It’s all, it all depends. This is, it’s a really important thing to think through. Why does finding 10 friends mean people six around? Because they just walked into a party and all of their friends are already there, so of course they’re gonna stay. Great. Don’t break that. Yeah.

[00:33:28] Janna Bastow: Actually, William had a really good comment about that in the in the chat. When the metric becomes the target, it’s no longer a good metric. 

[00:33:35] Laura Klein: That is a much shorter and pithy way of saying it. So thank you William. Thank you William. 

[00:33:41] Janna Bastow: And yeah, I think that’s really important. It’s not to break it, you, I think that speaks to misaligned incentives and I think that’s something that happened so much in ux, in product.

Is that something you’ve experienced and seen much in in your career? 

[00:33:56] Laura Klein: Yes. Having been in all of them, I will say that product managers tend to be incentivized at companies more on those short-term metrics. UX design, at least we have the sort of nod to, and we’re supposed to, fight for the user.

We’re supposed like, that’s built into our whole thing. It doesn’t mean that we won’t fall for it. If you offer me more money to hit a short term metric, I won’t do it, but, a lot of people will because, hey, it’s money. I like money. If you tell me that I’m only gonna get a promotion if I could hit the short term metric, even if it ruins things for people long term, a lot of people are gonna take that.

And I think that the ins, and I’m not saying that product managers are greedier than UX designers, I’m saying that they’re, the incentives in companies tend to be set up to be more tempting for them to do that. And that’s a problem. Same thing with engineers, but for engineers it’s generally how many tickets can you close?

And boy, have I seen that one go wrong. If you’re measuring like velocity points, it’s like suddenly everything is 18 points. It’s okay, no, that’s changing a typo. So that’s really not, but suddenly there’s point inflation and there’s people splitting things into multiple tickets so that they look like, there’s people introducing bugs so that they can find more bugs and get the bug bounty.

Just so many good examples of that going terribly. 

[00:35:23] Janna Bastow: Yeah, it’s so difficult to introduce any sort of monetary incentives in companies. It’s, yeah as you say, people end up gaming it. Anything that can be measured and incentivized on can be gamed in some way. Yeah, so really difficult to deal.

Yeah. Somebody said that. Or how many lines of code you can write. 

[00:35:42] Laura Klein: Okay. I used to be a pearl programmer. I can write so many lines of code or I can write it all in one line. That’s, it will be completely upgradable if I write it all in one line, but I, that’s the beauty of it.

 Yeah. What are you, yeah. What are you paying me for? You paying me by the semicolon. Let’s go.

[00:36:01] Janna Bastow: That’s great. 

[00:36:01] Laura Klein: Yeah. I actually had this this fun business idea. I’m gonna run it past you. I thought it would be fun to have a a UX red team. If anybody’s familiar with red teaming and security I want somebody to pay me to just come in and tell them how people are going to misuse their features, break their site.

I am like the Cassandra of terrible product decisions. I wanna tell you how this metric is going to be gamed. Because I don’t know why I think I was meant to be a super villain. Like I just, every time I look at a metric I’m like, oh, I could really juice that metric. Like by doing these terrible things and then I won’t do them part probably because I’m really lazy.

But also because of ethics, but it’s, but I love figuring out how you would. 

[00:36:58] Janna Bastow: That’s interesting. Actually, there was a something populated by it is Emily Tate from mine. The product as part of a, an ethics question, which is put it this way, if you had this feature or this product, or you launched this to the world, if four chan got their hand on it, what would four chan do?

Just think of that, what would the worst people in the internet do if they got their hands on it? And you’re like, okay ours is a B2B collaboration app, probably not much, right? They’re gonna leave the alone. This is a photo sharing app. Okay. Oh, we’re gonna do here, right? You know what? You could change democracy.

Okay. 

[00:37:33] Laura Klein: Yeah. And I’m gonna, and I’m gonna tell you something. Here’s the fun thing. You don’t even really need to ask yourself, what would four chan do? You can talk to the kind, or you can hire, I’m gonna throw that out there. You can hire the types of people who get targeted by four chan, right? If you actually have a diverse team, yeah. All the different genders, all the different races, all the, all the different sexual orientations. If you hire people from different areas, if you test with them, if you re, if you have those people in the room, and here’s the thing, if you listen to them, it’s not enough. Just to, have a lady in the room with you gotta listen to her.

And she says in my experience what they do is these 17 horrible things. Oh, you can’t be like that’s never happened to me. You gotta be like oh, okay, let’s figure out ways that we can mitigate that. So just throwing that out there that like, if you actually in, you don’t have to imagine, you don’t have to use your imagination.

Somebody’s already experienced the horrible things that Fortune will do, and you could just talk to them. 

[00:38:38] Janna Bastow: Yeah. I love that. And Red Team as a service I think is a brilliant idea. Ship hire to get it out there. 

Yep. Excellent. Matt, you’ll not like what I have to say, by the way. Yeah, 

That’s the real part.

That’s what they’re paying you the big bucks for. Absolutely. Yeah. You’re gonna get that report. They don’t do that uncomfortableness themselves. That’s exactly the service. This is actually jumping back a little bit because a question came into the q and a section earlier, and thank you for using the Q and A area.

Thank you. Somebody said how can we health engineers feel more empowered to make decisions when they don’t have per pixel perfect designs? 

[00:39:10] Laura Klein: Yeah. Okay. So this is a great one. One thing that I do actually love is I do love design systems and components so that every single design doesn’t have to be a specially hand curated artisanal widget Come on, espe.

And again, especially if you do, but really anywhere. Let’s just have a consistent design language and a consistent visual language. And dare I see it, typography where, so everything just looks and feels like I actually got to the point with design systems often where I could ex, I could sit down with the engineer and explain what it needed to do in words and they could build it.

Because, if I’m saying, oh, this is what, this is the kind of widget we’re gonna use. We’ve used this before. We’re gonna reuse this. This is the, he, this is the title, this is the interaction model, this is what’s gonna happen. So then I can focus on things like task flows, which.

What’s the actual flow of the user through the product? I can focus on things like handling edge cases and error cases. So that I can say if they do this, but they haven’t, if they try to create an account and they already have one, what happens? I don’t have to like hand design every single error message necessarily.

Hopefully I have a really good content person who can go in and explain, think through how to communicate those errors so it’s not, error message X one three B five, Google this to see what it means. But you know that, but that’s a very different thing than trying to, make every single thing by the pixel.

So that would be my answer. Design system. Reusable visual language. Having people who actually revisit that constantly and work things back in when something comes up that is different, having a process for making that more universal that can, it can slow things down a teeny bit, but also it speeds things up so much that you won’t notice it, if that makes sense.

Like the oh, I’ve gotta build a new thing. Takes a little bit longer, but the Oh, I’m reusing an old thing is so much faster. 

[00:41:18] Janna Bastow: Absolutely. And I’ve actually got a funny story about that cause we’ve got we’ve got a design system of thing in in broad padd and years ago when we were putting it together the dev team was having a conversation about, about this thing.

And somebody had a misspeak about it. Instead of calling it the pattern library, they called it the pattern garden and it stuck. Oh. And it.

Garden grow, you can things out it. 

[00:41:44] Laura Klein: They spawn new things. And you have like new. 

[00:41:48] Janna Bastow: So we have a pattern garden. It’s a design system. Yeah. It’s 

[00:41:51] Laura Klein: It’s like there was a really old site back when CSS first started. Again, old css, Zen Gardens. Absolute magic. That, that 

[00:41:57] Janna Bastow: I’d love, I love that place. 

[00:41:59] Laura Klein: Yeah. Loved it. I’m sorry. The rest, the next 10 minutes will just be nostalgia. Back in the day. Oh, you know what? I don’t have my pets.com puppet in here. That’s unfortunate. 

[00:42:09] Janna Bastow: I’m gonna age myself. I dropped off at being good at coding back when, like XHTML was my thing.

Yeah. I had the little CSS three and the XHTML. And then the developers took away my GitHub and took over from there. So that was back in my hayday. 

[00:42:23] Laura Klein: There was a language that I learned at one point for mobile phones called Wireless Access Protocol. And it was commonly, referred to as w a P or W and then a song came out a couple years ago and yeah, I didn’t put it on my resume previously cause we don’t really use it anymore, but I’m just saying you especially can’t put it on your resume now.

[00:42:44] Janna Bastow: No. Absolutely not. 

So we’ve got time for couple more questions here. Somebody asked about whether, should you have a UX researcher and a UI designer or could you have a product designer that plays both roles? 

[00:42:59] Laura Klein: If they’re a unicorn, sure.

Here’s the deal. There are a bunch of roles that you need to have. Let’s talk about your product team. Let’s not talk about product managers and UX designers and UI designers and visual designers and engineers and, okay, I’ve done all of them. Not visual design. I’m terrible at that.

I’ve never been a visual designer. Can’t do it Deeply. Respect and fear, those who can’t. But I’ve done a lot of these jobs. There are a bunch of parts to them. Different people do different things. I don’t think this is surprising to anybody. There are product managers who are marvelous user researchers.

There are product managers who are literally afraid of users. There are UX designers who care deeply about complicated service design and task flows. And there are UX designers who care more about. The sort of look and feel and the, and or who think about design systems and who, think about what’s the best way to get a person to do a specific thing or to understand something, right?

There are content specialists in some cases, and then there are people who are just good at content and also something else or, so who do you need on your team? Like all of those roles, who does them, who’s good at them, right? That’s what I like, that’s what I prefer. Now at larger companies, much harder to do that because people tend to be treated as interchangeable cogs, which is a totally different webinar where I will for hours.

But if you’re designing your team do you need a UX designer and a UI designer? I don’t know. Do you have somebody to do both. Great. Do you have a great design system? That’s already being handled by another team. You don’t need somebody who like, just focuses on layout or visual design. Maybe those people are on the design team.

That’s fantastic. Do you need a content person? Yeah, probably, but maybe not. Maybe you’ve got somebody who can do that. I don’t know. Like I used to do user research and UX design and I just did the whole thing and I liked doing that. And I would still do that in some cases. And for smaller teams, that’s what you want.

Or hell, most of the teams I’m on, what we desperately need is either a data scientist or somebody who can act as a data. Like I don’t need a data scientist. I need numbers and I need them to be good. And I need the person who is looking them up to understand math and to understand what they’re looking for.

I don’t care what you’re called, I don’t. Care who’s doing it. I just, I need the numbers, I need a good user experience. I need good user research. Find me, people, find me a team of people who together can do that. Probably not one person they’d die. I love that answer. 

[00:45:44] Janna Bastow: That’s great. Thank you. And we probably have time for just a few little quick fire questions here if you’re ready.

Which company, in your opinion, has great UX in their product and why? 

[00:45:59] Laura Klein: I think they are all good and bad. I think different ones do different things extremely well, and there’s always something that I find in almost any product that makes me completely homicidal. 

[00:46:14] Janna Bastow: It’s cursive being a builder, isn’t it? As soon as you know this stuff, you start seeing it and you’re going, oh, but why have they done that?

[00:46:20] Laura Klein: Oh. I do have a good one though. Yeah. This is not what anybody’s thinking about. I don’t cook anymore, but I used to cook a lot. Oxo good grips. Look up ‘OXO good grips’. Yep. 90% of their cooking jewels are just more usable, designed, ah, than other ones. Nice. Like they’re can opener openers.

Like they think about, is it soft on your hands? Does it work well? It’s actually, they were designed, many of them were designed, I think for folks who have various different disabilities. And what they ended up doing was just making a bunch of shit that’s like really easy to use and just really well thought out and well-tested.

And like 90% of the time, if you’re looking for oh, I need a vegetable peeler, like ‘OXO good grips’ is fine and it’s in the grocery store and it’s great. 

[00:47:04] Janna Bastow: So there’s good design everywhere and I actually love it. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s bad design everywhere 

[00:47:09] Laura Klein: Bad design everywhere, there’s like teapots that splash water aza.

[00:47:14] Janna Bastow: Which means there’s jobs for us everywhere. Now if you could give a piece of advice to your younger self about UX design, what might it be? 

[00:47:21] Laura Klein: Hey, Laura, this is what UX design is. It’s a thing that’s gonna us, you probably don’t wanna be a veterinarian like you think you do because you faint at the site of blood and are allergic to absolutely everything.

That’s what I, that’s the advice I would give that UX design is a thing and you should go study it. And yeah, it’s, that’s validating. I would’ve gone into it faster. Yeah. 

[00:47:41] Janna Bastow: That, validating honestly. I probably do the same thing with myself. By the way, this product thing, you should probably look it up.

Yeah. Excellent. And any recent trends in UX that are exciting? 

[00:47:54] Laura Klein: I don’t follow the trends because I just, it’s I’m ha like I said, I’m happy to see the sort of longer term trends of understanding that like, user research is like a really important skill and content is a really important skill and, visual design and UX design are not the same thing.

So I say that. I I see those things. But generally speaking it’s a lot of the same stuff over and over, oh no, are we gonna be get replaced by X? Are we gonna get replaced? I don’t know. Probably. Hopefully. I’m almost ready to retire. 

[00:48:24] Janna Bastow: It’s fine. Yeah. Alright, final question.

Can you tell us about these books that you’ve written and the stuff that you’re working on that people should know about? 

[00:48:33] Laura Klein: Oh yeah. On usersknow.com you can go there. I’m not on Twitter anymore, sadly. I am on Mastodon if anybody’s on Mastodon. I am lauraKlein@hacker.io.

So enjoy. But also I’m on users know. And I I wrote two books. One is called UX for Lean Startups. I wrote that back in like 2013, so maybe not entirely up to date. I also wrote a book called Build Better Products, which is more aimed at teams and building in teams. And they’re both fun and I think you will enjoy them.

They’re enjoyable. If you like listening to me talk, you will listening to me scream at you in your head. And oh, I am restarting my a UX design podcast. Not sadly, the one, not What is Wrong with UX, with Kate, because my co-host abandoned me to go be a horticulturist. 

[00:49:16] Janna Bastow: It happens to the best of us.

[00:49:18] Laura Klein: Yeah. But I am start, I am restarting a new one. What is wrong with hiring? Where we are going to talk about why getting a job in tech is so goddamn hard and how we could possibly make it easier. We, I did a few episodes last summer where I interviewed a bunch of hiring managers. So check out. 

[00:49:35] Janna Bastow: That’s fantastic. Everyone check out Laura’s books, check out her work there. And Laura, thank you so much for joining me here today. It’s been a great, fun conversation. I’ve had a blast and I think everybody else in the chat has as well. Everyone say thank you. And good to have you here. So thank you again. Thank you, Laura. Thank you everybody for being here and we’ll see you again here next time. 

[00:49:57] Laura Klein: Bye for now. Thank you.