Today people can order their Uber through Alexa, get all their medical updates via Wechat, or get stylish vintage sneakers from eBay via shopbot.

So how is the landscape changing from a user’s perspective?
1. Users bring their context, and they choose their ecosystem of apps.
2. The app platform decides the interaction, look and feel.
3. The virtual assistant and the AI directs the conversation flow.

So the real question is, what are you and I really designing?

Let’s look at another long-term perspective about how the role of the “user” has changed. About ten years ago, Dr. Liz Sanders articulated this trend well. In the 90s users were called consumers. In the 2000s they had transformed into users. Now and in the future they become co-creators. Obviously, this change is not new. UGC (User-generated content) took off, and companies like Facebook are built on UGC. From a business perspective, this creates a barrier to entry for any newcomers.

So again what is the role of the designers in this new ecosystem?

1. Designers will understand the ecosystem, the needs, dreams and the fears of people. UX professions coming from the social sciences background will continue to observe individuals and their environments and build mental models for creating the interaction platforms.

2. Designers will lay the groundwork for the mindset and the rules ( and not try to design the experience). They will setup interaction guidelines that allow the learning platform to improve and feel authentic in the moment of a conversation.

3. Designers will, as Ivan Illich calls it “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.” We will build tools for active creativity, not just consumption. These tools will transform companies to become better faster, reduce wasteful and irrelevant products.

So let’s get ready to let go of control. How can we understand our users’ behaviors and aspirations to articulate design criteria? How can we quickly move to creating user experience scaffolds and components?

Thanks to Lindsay Kenzig and Chris Avery for reading drafts. If you liked this, please click the heart and follow buttons below.

image credits: giffy

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• Charlotte Perriand designed several chairs with Le Corbusier including the B301 sling chair and B306 chaise lounge chair.
• Satoshi Yasui leads the team at Muji and is responsible for their ultimate simplification of daily household products.
• Susan Kare designed the icons on the Mac in the early eighties including the happy/sad mac.
• MP Ranjan was an Indian innovator in bamboo and other indigenous products. He also was one of the first people to write about a process called “design thinking.”
• Lella Vignelli is responsible for most of the products coming out of Vignelli studio from Knoll.
• Paulo Mendes da Rocha is a Brazilian architect known for his Paulistano chair and several buildings famous for its brutalist architecture.
• Ray Eames, accomplished graphic designer and textile artist, was overshadowed by her husband Charles. I also realized recently that many people don’t even know that Ray was a woman.

And then are countless others, women and men who have made an impact on our lives through their contributions to design. However, we do not know, remember or acknowledge their impact.

When someone mentions a designer, what image comes to mind?

It’s a white guy who wears colored pants and has a funky haircut. Sadly, your image is unlikely to include anyone who is brown, black or female. Why this archetype? Are the little sensibilities of design only a job that is defined by race or privilege? I watched the move hidden figures a few days back and was amazed by how little life has changed in 50 or so years. I would like to believe that we are learning and growing as a society. As Mahatma Gandhi puts it, we have to become the change we would like to see in this world.

There are several patterns in UX and design industry that we all need to change.

1. Implicit bias.
Search Linkedin.com for design leaders in ten companies that you admire. What do you see? Perhaps nine Caucasian guys and a lone woman? This is not uncommon in other areas where women and people of color have not received recognition for their work. Design suffers from the same implicit or unconscious bias.

2. Lack of an archetype to mimic.
Young designers starting in school are left with no examples they can relate to. No pathways to identify with. No entry points and finally no sponsors. In recent years the path has become a bit easier. But it gets hard for anyone who is a bit introverted. We have Indian CEOs running some of the top companies in the USA. We also have had a black president in the USA. Who do we have in design that is a woman, brown or black?

3. Not enough sponsorships.
Leaders who have been in the design industry for a while tend to mentor and sponsor people like them for opportunities. Sponsorships are different from mentorships that mentors advice and show you a path v/s sponsors pave the way and are there as invisible support. This lack of possibilities results in long-term disparity. This starts with pay disparity. The 2016 O’reilly salary survey for designers shows a significant gap in median pay between male and female respondents ; $99K and $85K, respectively. Additionally, there is level inequality specifically for women. This is caused very early in the career due to the level at entry. The gap continues to widen as the experience level grows.

Several people in the design industry, including me, firmly believe that diversity improves the quality of the end product. Ultimately design teams should be reflective of the customer we design for. We can all do our part in creating a design industry of tomorrow.

Here is what you can do today!

• Learn about and minimize unconscious bias: Here is a link to conscious bias training. These Facebook training videos help recognize and reduce bias for the whole team.
  https://managingbias.fb.com/
• Bring more awareness: Google has done some amazing work in this area is available for anyone to use. You can use structure and data to measure impact and outputs of a design.
  https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/identify-and-define-your-metrics-gap-inc/steps/introduction/
• Fix Job Descriptions: Write our job description so people from various backgrounds apply. The guys at Textio have an app that you can use.
  https://textio.ai/
• Inclusive sponsorship: Go the extra mile to trust a young designer that does not look like you. Let them surprise you with what they can do.
• If you already have a diverse team, celebrate the diversity. Become the model team that others aspire to be.

Let’s do all this not because it’s better for diversity and inclusion. Let us do it because we can make better products by including a variety of perspectives.

Thanks to Michelle Fulcher, Dan Makoski, Annette Boyer, Dave Lippman, Lindsay Kenzig, Maya Bisineer and a few other long time friends for reading early drafts and providing feedback.

If you liked this please share and like. I would really appreciate it. Thank you! You are also free to copy and paste this content any way you like without permission.

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This document outlines how I lead and manage the people working with me. I will never be perfect, but will strive to meet these philosophies and principles to the best of my abilities. Feel free to give me feedback about this doc or its content. Discussions about this doc with co-workers have helped improve both this doc and my philosophy over a period of 10+years that I have used it. Below is my document. Feel free to copy some of the text and edit as it suits you. Please pay it forward.

Shameless Plug: My team is hiring!

My Management Style
My intent is to make you a better employee, to achieve your career goals, and to give you an environment where you can succeed.

• I believe in letting the best person do the job. I strive to empower you to do what you need to do and stay out of your way.
• I am a rather simple person, I don’t like corporate politicking and am always looking to take the most efficient and productive path.
• I do not shout at people but will drive and push my team to succeed.
• I see myself more as team captain than a team owner. I like to get my hands dirty. Think of me as a co-worker, team member not a manager.
  You will see me ask questions about purpose, impact and end goals. My intent is always to improve focus
• I also aim for an attitude of “doing the right thing for our users.” Leadership will always support this. Hence you should never let processes get in the way of good work.
• I do not plan on taking credit for work you do, and I will do my best to defend you and take blows for the team as needed.
• As I believe feedback plays a significant role in assessing my performance, your performance, as well as our team’s overall performance, I frequently solicit feedback from others.
• I believe in hiring only the best. If any of us has any doubt about a candidate, we would rather pass.
• I will be as transparent as I can, but sometimes that will mean you will hear how “I cannot tell you some things”.
• I am extremely passionate about the work we do as a team, so you will see me disagree, and challenge. My intent is to get the best out of you and deliver the best experience for our end users.

Family comes first. Period — For me, my family is a top priority. Same goes for you. If you have family issues or personal issues that you need to attend to, please do so. Just make sure to put things on a shared calendar or let me know through e-mail.

Work/Life Balance is a Priority — I have seen many people burn-out as well as sacrifice their lives by working too much. I am not a believer in the 24/7 work schedule, so you will rarely hear me ask anyone in the group to work weekends, nor will I expect you to be on email at night. You will sometimes see me on mail end of the day. However, I do not have expectations of you to respond or deal with Action Items during non-business hours.

I believe in a Prioritization based planning. List all the things our team could be doing in order of priority & importance. Then add a line somewhere on the list to indicate what we are staffed and resourced to do. My expectations are then set relative to that line.

We will work hard and drive to solve big challenges, but I encourage all managers and employees in the group to think ahead and ensure workloads are manageable on a regular basis. We should be scheduling to a 40 hour week, not a 60 hour week.

Use your Vacation days. It’s there for a reason. The only thing I ever ask about PTO/vacation is that you give me/your manager enough notice so that we can plan for your absence.

Focus “Less but better”
It is all about getting the right things done. It does not mean doing less for the sake of doing less either. I am big proponent of Pareto’s Principle (80/20 rule). With a clear purpose and direction, we can focus on meaningful work. I ask questions to force you to think about the purpose.

Open Communications
We have a lot of passion, and we have some hard challenges. Communication is fundamental to get the things done. I encourage open and constructive dialogues. You should feel comfortable pushing back if you disagree with something. You should feel comfortable coming and talking to me about anything.

Decision Making
I am very much against HIPO. Decision making is not a single individual’s activity. Get involved, speak up. We are driving the business together and making the best decision with all the available data.

Disagree and Commit
There may be times that I will disagree with my boss and/or you will disagree with me. This is natural, but I take that further and then agree to commit to the decision made and move fwd as the team. It would be great to have the same of you.

Learn From Your Mistakes
Mistakes happen. Learn from them. Repeated mistakes are the ones to avoid. Try, fail fast and win!

Cross-Group Collaboration
Due to the nature of our work, successful cross-group collaboration is essential. For every project that requires cross-group collaboration with an internal group or another team, you will be measured not only on the outcome of the project, but also in the way you communicated, negotiated, and interacted with dependent teams.

Weekly updates
I take weekly updates seriously and you should too. There are two kinds of weekly updates that I require. One is a team deck, and another is an individual text document. The purpose of the deck is to bring exec attention and get maximum impact on projects. The purpose of text updates to keep me and the core team posted on what is the highest priority for you. I will share templates, and it should take less than 15 minutes per week to complete.

Career growth
Part of my job satisfaction comes from seeing my team members grow their career. Career development is a partnership between you and me. I need you to help me focus on things that are important to you so we can create an individualized plan. Here is a list to help you think through career growth:

• Money: base salary, bonus, stocks etc.
• Levels and promotions
• Visibility, personal brand, influence (inside and outside the org)
• Building a portfolio of work
• Design skills, research methods, presentation skills, storytelling, creativity
• Leadership, communication, confidence, thought-leadership
• Horizontal development, switching to parallel careers
• Building deep expertise in a specific area

Also If you prefer (don’t prefer) a particular type of recognition let me know. I am here to help you get where you want to go but expect you to be the driver.

Recognition
I believe in recognizing everyone for a job well done (this includes peers and reports). Sometimes this is a blind spot for me. Hence feel free to prompt me.

Performance Feedback
I also believe that all managers should give consistent and on-going feedback throughout the review period. This feedback should have a good balance between positive and constructive feedback. We should schedule weekly 1:1s where we talk about status. Once every month we will talk about your career so that we can document small wins and progress. We will also use this time to course correct. This is also time to give me feedback. Again, if you have a preference on the type or frequency of feedback, please discuss this with me.

Connecting on social networks
In the past, I only connected with people on my team on professional networks (LinkedIn) and Facebook connection was for friends. However, I have changed my position on this and now friend people at work. I have come to realize that the more data we mutually have about each other, we build more empathy and respect. If you like to send me a friend request on any of the social networks, I’d be more than happy to add you.

• Facebook
• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Instagram

How to Reach Me
The best way to reach me is through e-mail for most communication. I am on Slack, hangouts etc but not all the time. Use text/phone for urgent communications 408-xxx-xxxx.

I am in meetings a good part of the day, but do block my calendar to read and respond to e-mail once during the day. I am very conscientious about e-mail Inbox clutter free and respond to e-mail promptly.

Any questions or comments feel free to let me know.
-pree (Last updated Jan 18, 2017)

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What I have observed is that there are three approaches to design; emotion driven, data driven, and principle driven. Most of the times it is a combination of the three methods. Design is a systematic activity that takes skill and time. There is nothing called design from intuition.

Emotion in design has two parts, ego, and empathy. Ego driven design tends to be luck and very hard to replicate or scale success. Ego does help designers get through when team confidence is waning. My belief is that empathy not ego is the key to good, sustainable design. Empathy comes from listening to the stories and motivations of real people.

Data-driven design is excellent for optimization. Data is also useful when you have all your hypothesis and resulting variables in place. Furthermore, data-driven generative design is very hard because inherently data is “insurance” and focused on why the idea would fail, rather than recognizing the opportunity.

Principles are the fundamentals that help design the right things and ignore the noise. Principles are the team’s articulated collective intuitions. They based on the user, the situation and the moment. Hence it needs to evolve with time. It is hard to end with simple principles that resonate and help ship the right products.

So, next time, think of a bag of shit when you hear intuition driven design. Ask questions to externalize the stories, the data and the collective wisdom behind the design. Ask the “why” and the “who” questions. Without that, all you have is a bag of shit that will stink up the room at some point, even if it does not now 

Thanks to Maya Bisineer, Chris Avery and Lindsay Kenzig for reading drafts of this post. Thank you for reading! If you liked this, please click the heart and follow buttons below.

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Practice “Be here now” by putting off non-urgent apps on ice for a few hours every day.

A lot of us are addicted to our phones and the hundreds of apps that notify us or distract us from being present. If your new year resolution is to spend more time with people and less with your phone, I suggest you use the multiple users feature on your Android phone (sorry iPhone guys) to create and switch to I-am-in-a-zen mode.

You can do this for a few days over the weekend or a few hours every day. You will notice that you are getting bored. You will pick up the phone and realize that you have nothing to do with it. You will also think more, be more creative and feel more connected to the world around you.

• Under “Device” tap Users>Add user>OK
• Once you add user, add your accounts so that you can sync contacts etc. Then you can go in and disable apps that you do not use.
• You can be extreme and disable your mail app or just keep it and put off notifications. I disable it.
• Your app tray could look clean and clutter free after you have purged a whole bunch of apps  and add just a few that you really need.

Read more from google about multiple users at:https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2865483?hl=en

If you liked this please heart this article to share with friends. Thanks and have a great new year ahead!

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1. Is it the right product
Early in the cycle, the goal of product and design is to get to a value proposition that resonates with the end user. We have to answer some of these fundamental questions. Who are the core users? What are their needs, pain points, and motivation? Why do they care? Would they pay to satisfy the need? Who is the competition? Will we make money? The first stage is to know with very high confidence that we have a value proposition that satisfies our core user while being a source of income.

2. Is it the right experience
Later the goal is to design for the right contexts. We would all agree that Uber would have been a terrible experience if you had to open up the laptop for everything. In this stage, we have to answer some more questions about the scenario. What are the use cases? What is the users’ context? Do we have the data to prioritize the use cases and the context? What expectations do the users have? What data or input can the users give, what can we automatically collect? What feedback do we need to give the users? This second stage is about multiple iterations and having a constant feedback loop with the user.

3. Is it the right interaction
The last part of delivering a high-quality product is to have the right interaction. The goal of Design is to make our product usable and delightful. What is the users’ state of mind? What were they doing before and what will they do next? Is there enough information for them to proceed. Is there too much information? How can we make it faster, simpler and effortless.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this, please click the heart and follow buttons below.

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As a nerd and geek, I grew up with comics. Superman, Spiderman, and Phantom were very common in India around that time. So inspired by my past, I asked a question about superpower and kryptonite during one of my interviews. Then I asked it again to a co-worker and once again during a performance review. It slowly morphed into a go-to discussion. It leads us not to strengths and weakness but to how we can leverage each other and help each other out. This question also avoids the very canned answers from an interviewee.

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Ever since I started keeping honey bees, I am very intrigued by hives and how they are similar to organizations. You probably know that bees work together as a swarm, but what does it mean? They have a queen bee. However, they do not wait for orders from the queen. Her primary job is to lay eggs. Every colony has a few scout bees that find food sources or a new place to move into. Based on signals from the scouts and some simple triggers, the group decides on actions that follow. They are smarter, more powerful and can get more done when there are more of them.

We know from strong teams at Google, Facebook, Microsoft & eBay that the best teams work autonomously. The organization establishes the purpose and the principles that let smart, intelligent teams innovate. As I was checking my hive, I was intrigued by how much we can learn about teamwork and shipping complex products by thinking like a bee.

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Last year, I was part of a team working on mobile lifestyles. We had very long research sessions around the San Francisco area and were talking to a very religious family. Both the mom and dad were active at their church. They mentored and taught many kids about the Bible. Hence we talked about their various activities, community service, and bringing up kids. At dinner time, I decided to accompany their teenage daughter to pick up pizza. The moment I sat in her car, she shows me a medical marijuana card. This a complete u-turn from all that I had learned for the 6 hours prior. My first reaction was to think about how I might have to deal with something like this as a parent. Then the researcher within me started asking ‘why’ questions. She explained how she and her friends would go to a particular spot to smoke, and how the pot is so good in California. I also learned that every one of her friends smoked pot and that it is easier to get than a cigarette. The discussion fertilized my mind, and I had even more questions and thoughts.

When and Why do people open up to strangers?
What are the circumstances in which they talk about their dreams and fears? How can you have a genuine connection with people? How can you connect emotionally with users?

During conversations you want people to not only have short answers, but tell you stories. Over the 15 plus years of talking to people for a living, I have learned a few things about meaningful conversations. The most important learning is that you cannot fake genuine interest in people. It is an intentional shift in mindset that benefits everyone involved.

Here are a top 3 things that I do:

• The first 5 minutes of any conversation is critical. I think that there is nothing beyond the person you are speaking in that moment. Practice active listening. Turn off your phone. How would you talk to an individual if you knew that they were the only person left in this world, and that you will have to spend the rest of your life with them?
• Nervousness comes in the way of being natural. I practice the first fewquestions I ask. It helps me set the tone and gets past the uncomfortable first few minutes. “Tell me a bit about you” is a bit too generic for me. I always tend to ask people I meet questions that make them pause and think; Where do you come from? What are you passionate about? What made you who you are today?
• Curiosity is essential. You do not need any common ground. You just have to be human. I believe that it is OK just to be curious without putting yourself in the person’s shoes. I might never experience what another person has, and hence can never empathize entirely. However, my curiosity is authentic, and it will show.

Thanks to Chris Avery and Maya Bisineer for feedback on early drafts.

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Of course, EPIC has always been a ‘community of praxis’ (as much as practice) helping attendees put what they learn into action. For us at Motorola Mobility, 2013 was no exception. The company had reduced its phone portfolio to a handful of products; and knew the only way to grow market share was expanding sales outside the US. But we had not done ‘front end’ research outside American shores since 2009. Likewise, most of our newly hired designers, product managers, and software engineers had never created phones for any geography but North America.

So how could we “sensitize” whole teams to the differing desires & needs of people in Brazil or India? And how could we flush out those devilish details which we didn’t yet know we did not know…the ones that make the difference between a product being “just right” vs. “totally wrong” in a new environment?

Read more of the post by Stokes and Pree @ http://epicpeople.org/pblog2/#ixzz3ACZs5q6r

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