[MUSIC] 0:00 [APPLAUSE] >> Hello everybody. 0:15 How are you doing? 0:19 So today I'm gonna be talking about how to design with science (and not 0:21 destroy the magic). 0:24 So a little bit about me. 0:26 So hands up, show of hands. 0:28 Hands up if you've ever booked a hotel room online. 0:30 Oh, look at this. Hands 0:34 up if you've ever bought a train ticket in the UK. 0:35 Yeah, hands up if you've ever anything on a large online auction site at 0:38 some point, yeah, okay. 0:44 So you've all used something that I've designed over the years. 0:46 So I've worked with people like Mariott Hotels, Expedia, 0:48 the Train9 in the UK, eBay, people like that as well. 0:52 And my background is user experience, I'm an user experience consultant. 0:56 And what that means is typically I do three activities in UX. 1:00 I do, a third of my time I spend researching, 1:03 a third of my time I spend talking about digital strategy and 1:06 getting stuff done and a third of my time rolling my sleeves up and 1:10 actually designing and I tend to get involved in all three parts of. 1:14 Use you experience well. 1:19 And today, what we're gonna talk to you about is effectively design and designs. 1:21 And it is really talking about how these three things interrelate. 1:26 How to get the evidence from things like research, to define the strategy so 1:30 the company and organization you work for knows what to do and then the easy bit, 1:34 which is the execution of the design at the end. 1:38 I say easy you know what I mean. 1:41 Design, what is design? 1:44 Here is a quote from The UK Design council. 1:46 I added one word in, I added the word code in because I figured oh, 1:49 there are some developers out there. 1:51 And the coding side of it is incredibly important. 1:53 One of the things with design is often In design, and often with a project 1:58 that we were working on, something gets in the way of it happening. 2:03 Something makes our job harder, 2:07 something stops us from doing the greater work that we want to do. 2:09 So, hands up if this ever happened to you, a product goes live, and 2:12 it's lost the magic, the original design and vision that you've already worked on. 2:16 Hands up if that's ever happened to you. 2:19 Few of you. 2:21 Good stuff. 2:21 The team or client you work with continually questions your choices, 2:24 your judgement, effectively everything you do. 2:27 You're constantly questioned in terms of the design work, the product work, 2:30 the code work that you do. 2:34 Hands up if you've had this one. 2:35 Constant questioning, yeah, you've all been there. 2:36 Haven't you? 2:39 This one, an awful one, being micromanaged by your boss and your client. 2:40 Stood behind you, moving pixels this way, moving stuff that way, 2:43 can you make the logo bigger, no bigger, has this happened to you, 2:47 being micromanaged by you, yeah, we've all been there, haven't we. 2:50 What about this one, Schlimmbesserung, perhaps this has ever happened to you? 2:53 [LAUGH] Just checking you're paying attention and 2:58 not just putting your hands up. 3:03 This is a German word and what I love about the German language is it's 3:04 incredibly expressive in terms of what it means. 3:09 They have words for things like this. 3:11 [FOREIGN] is the action of trying to improve something and 3:15 actually ending up making it worse than it was before you started. 3:20 So hands up if you've ever been involved in that, 3:24 where you tried to improve something, and 3:25 you've ended up making it worse [LAUGH] than what it originally started. 3:27 Yes. 3:30 There's a word for it, it's schlimmbesserung. 3:31 So if you remember one thing from this talk, you've learned a new word in German. 3:33 And it happened to me, it happened to me so much, especially early on in my career. 3:38 And I want to talk to you today about how I got over that hump of all of those four 3:42 particular problems I found in my design and project work that I was working on. 3:47 And it started with an article I wrote in 2009, 3:52 this has been read by around about three quarters of a million people, 3:56 well it has been read through three quarters of a million times. 4:01 How many of you have read this article or come across this before, yeah? 4:04 Good for you, that's good to hear. 4:07 So I wrote this and this article just went nuts cause I had this problem, 4:09 I had this real problem in a design meeting. 4:13 Where my client was like, well we just need to cram everything on top of 4:15 the page, everything needs to be above the fold and 4:19 I'd be like [SOUND] come on seriously you can't do that. 4:21 And I knew all the evidence for why you shouldn't that, had it all there but 4:24 I'd never quite put it together into a reasoned argument, so 4:28 I did I published a blog post. 4:31 And within that, I use some evidence, I use some evidence. 4:34 This is from an eye tracker. 4:36 So what an eye tracker does is it allows you to understand and see what a user is 4:38 looking at on the page of a website or design you are looking at. 4:42 I tested two designs, 4:47 this is from my local airport an airport called Bristol Airport. 4:48 In the UK and what I did is I tested two versions of the design. 4:52 One of which we crammed loads of stuff above the fold, the one on the right, 4:55 your left and the one on the far side is where we didn't cram stuff above the fold, 5:01 and look at what happened, 5:05 the page was explored more, stuff was engaged with further down the fold. 5:07 This evidence, and this sign, showed that by cramming stuff above the fold, 5:12 uses a less likely to explore the rest of the page that's there. 5:17 There was some science, suddenly, things started to get easier. 5:20 Every time I showed this image to my client, fantastic. 5:25 They got what I was trying to say. 5:28 Handy, really really handy stuff. 5:30 So useful, 5:32 as I have said, almost three quarters of a million times this article has been read. 5:33 I still get so much email about this. 5:36 I am still the flipping page fold guy who still follows me around. 5:39 And design is a difficult and challenging process. 5:45 This is from Alan Cooper. 5:51 Alan Cooper is one of the guys behind visual basic, 5:51 a famous developer, he also wrote lots of good books on user experience. 5:55 Design is not so much a design issue, it's a power struggle and 5:59 that's often what's true. 6:03 Even the most fantastically beautiful deigns, the most engaging code, the most 6:04 fantastic work, vision, and wire frames and stuff, you've created, is no good. 6:09 Unless you can communicate the value of that design 6:14 to the wider team that you're working with, because we don't work in isolation. 6:17 Maybe we did ten years ago, one man web teams used to happen, but 6:21 now we're a team. 6:25 We're a much wider team of men and women working together for a cause, so 6:26 we have to better communicate to our team, and 6:30 to our clients, why you have made the design decisions that we have. 6:32 And that's what I'm talking about today. 6:37 How to communicate using science to advocate your designs, 6:38 you make the right design and choices the stuff that you design and code and 6:42 build and plan and envision and search gets built. 6:47 Sees the light of day is out there in the real world. 6:52 So, first tactic I use when I'm doing this stuff is to talk stories. 6:58 And user research is a wonderful place to go and gather stories, and 7:03 as humans we respond so well to a story. 7:07 So let me tell you a story. 7:10 This is a lady called Jane. 7:13 And Jane is here, and 7:15 she's using an automated ticket machine at a train station in the UK. 7:16 So when you buy a train ticket in UK and Europe, buy it online, you have to collect 7:20 it at a station from an automatic machine, and then you can go and get on the train. 7:26 This photograph alone saved It's probably saved around about 150,000 7:29 hours of people's time in the UK and saved huge amounts of dollar in pound value 7:35 in the UK from this one photo alone I used to tell stories of what was going on. 7:41 This woman is collecting a train ticket and on this. 7:46 From this picture, you can spot a couple of things. 7:49 The first thing, when people are traveling, 7:52 they carry lots of bags with them when they travel. 7:54 Okay. Not revolutionary story, but 7:59 a story in itself. 8:00 What this told us, is that when people are carrying bags with them, 8:04 they don't got many hands to do stuff. 8:07 It's just really really hard to type stuff into a small screen 8:09 if you're carrying stuff, okay? 8:13 Number one, it was a story that people could engage with. 8:15 They're like yeah, completely, that makes a lot of sense. 8:17 Number two, if you're carrying a mobile phone, everybody carries a mobile phone. 8:20 What this company assumed, and what the British transport 8:26 system assumed is that everybody would print out the email confirmation, 8:29 would come along to the machine and would type the number in. 8:32 No, people have mobile phones generally in their hands. 8:35 They basically got no hands free to be able to do stuff. 8:38 So number one design change that we made based on this photograph 8:41 Is the credit card that you used to purchase your online train ticket. 8:45 All you have to do is push the credit card into the machine and 8:49 it will automatically give you your ticket, 8:53 don't have to punch a code in, do anything like that that you used to do. 8:55 And, that one change alone cut the queuing and 8:58 line times in the stations by 20 to 25 minutes of rush hour every morning. 9:01 So it's a huge amount of time and effort, 9:07 reduce amount of people not being to get that ticket some time and refunds. 9:10 This one photograph alone, with these two stories, 9:13 save millions of pounds and huge amount of time all from one photograph. 9:17 It was telling stories. 9:22 There's no technical specifications, there's no designs here, nothing. 9:23 All I used this photograph to do was to tell a story. 9:27 Another story this is a lady called Sally, and 9:32 Sally here is completing an insurance form online, okay. 9:36 Not the most exciting of things to do, what was interesting about this particular 9:41 story is what Sally said when she was completing the form. 9:46 And I have heard this a number of times since. 9:48 So what Sally said then was, I didn't see then the asterisk. 9:51 There is nothing there that was explains what they mean. 9:54 Now we all know exactly what those asterisks mean. 9:57 Those asterisks mean Mandatory fields. 10:00 You've got to complete this particular form field. 10:02 Now what this story showed us, and I've seen it a number of times since, 10:06 is that not everybody understands what's going on. 10:11 They don't know what this asterisk means. 10:14 Most people, a lot of the time when they're completing a form, and 10:16 like I said I've probably done maybe 5, 600 user tests in my career. 10:19 Every time I see somebody using a form, 10:24 what they do is complete a form until you tell them to stop completing that form. 10:25 This whole mandatory field stuff 10:30 is created by developers early on because it's a nice easy thing to code. 10:32 It's much easier to code things that people 10:36 shouldn't do rather than things that people should do. 10:39 It's a bad design choice. 10:43 It doesn't work all the time for all of the people. 10:45 So we may once more change which instead of making things marking the mandatory 10:51 fields we mark the optional fields with the word optional, simple stuff. 10:55 People understood it, 11:00 people got it, people knew they didn't have to complete those form fields. 11:01 It works for everybody. 11:04 People who understand the asterisks, and people who don't understand the asterisks. 11:06 It works for everybody. 11:09 Rather than this one, which only works for people who understand the short hand of 11:10 what's going on, or can be bothered to scroll to the top of the screen to find 11:15 out what the asterisk actually applies to, which nobody, let's face it, does. 11:18 Again, a story that made one change that meant more people completed the forms on 11:22 this insurance company's site than not and then telling that story made it easier for 11:27 me to make this change rather than say, people don't understand the asterisk. 11:32 So I had the story of Sally behind it and 11:35 a piece of video which helped prove and change it. 11:38 A bit of science helped Make this design and this project work. 11:41 And this is the most important thing that I learned earlier in my career is you 11:49 need to have strong ideas, like the one I've just shown you and 11:53 I can see a few of few shaking your heads going what, this is crazy. 11:55 You've got to have this stuff, you've got to be able to. 11:58 Talk about having a strong will to discuss what's going on. 12:01 You've gotta have the evidence to back up what's going on. 12:04 You shouldn't let those stories take over your life, 12:08 because a good example of how this has affected me and my career, and 12:11 the stuff that I've worked on, is I get very enthusiastic about ideas. 12:14 I get so excited about ideas, is that people don't choose, 12:19 or go with the ideas that I select, it makes me upset. 12:22 It makes me angry. 12:24 It makes me not want to be working what I'm doing. 12:25 It makes me feel very frustrated. 12:28 So one of the key things that I learned early on in my career, 12:29 is have evidence for what's going on, but 12:32 be prepared to be proved wrong, like the asterisks example there. 12:34 The more years that people start using the websites, 12:39 the more years that people start using the internet, 12:41 those asterisks are going to become more and more known by people. 12:43 The same is true of the hamburger menu, 12:46 and all these new design inventions that are coming in. 12:48 Yeah, this stuff holds up, but is it gonna hold up in the future? 12:51 Maybe, maybe not. 12:53 All right, strategy number two, talk business. 12:56 I'll tell you a story. 13:02 This gentleman called Mel Collison. 13:03 He's a Viacom executive. 13:06 As you know, Viacom was a huge adverting company. 13:08 In 2003, he went for a meeting at a little new start up in California called Google. 13:10 Mel being an advertising executive, 13:20 the guys at Google really wanted to show how the Internet and the Google, and 13:23 tracking, and the ability to know who was click on the link, how many people saw 13:28 an advertisement, how effective that advertisement was, it was a real interest 13:31 to Google and Google though this would be a real interesting advertising community. 13:36 Finally, you can stop measuring and understanding how effective adverts are. 13:41 And what was Mel Collison's reaction for Viacom? 13:46 What did this advertising mega company say when Google unveiled 13:54 this fantastic new way of tracking advertising had one comment? 13:59 You're fucking with the magic, guys. 14:04 Which is interesting cause again the guys at Google felt well he's gonna love this. 14:07 Finally he can understand how effective advertising's gonna be and Viacom's number 14:11 one reaction was, holy crap this is the end of our business because again. 14:15 Talking about business means you need to talk about how 14:22 effective the work is that you do. 14:27 You need to be able to understand and 14:30 talk about data to prove how effective a change is gonna be in what you're doing. 14:32 But what was interesting about this whole advertising model is the problem with 14:37 advertising, the problem with advertising certainly as a business model is 14:42 advertising as a business model is completely broken. 14:46 A paper from 2013 on the near impossibility 14:50 measuring the returns to advertising. 14:56 Incredible, okay? 15:01 Look who this paper is written by. 15:02 So Randal A Lewis, Google Inc. 15:04 Justine M Rao, Microsoft research. 15:07 It's the two researchers, one from Google and one from Microsoft, published a paper 15:11 in 2013 to use almost impossible to measure the returns from advertising. 15:16 This is from the same people we're very proud to show their stuff to Viacom 15:22 in 2003, fast forward ten years they're saying advertising isn't very effective. 15:26 Advertising as a business model sucks, is dreadful and here's 15:31 more scientific evidence why you shouldn't base your business around advertising. 15:38 And this is the kind of stuff that we need to know design is. 15:42 We need to know how business works to make sure that we get other designs done. 15:45 We understand how business world work. 15:51 Be the broken business full of advertising to better advocate why company should 15:53 choose and make the designs and use the designs that we've visioned. 15:58 Why we should use the code that we have envisioned. 16:02 Why we should use the product that we have all spent a long time designing. 16:04 We would understand business to get there. 16:07 Are there is huge, there are other business models out there. 16:09 I have written about them on my blog, my website. 16:12 You can go there and it will talk you through the designer and 16:15 UX approaches to each of the business models out there. 16:18 There are five of them and 16:21 not particularly difficult to get your head around. 16:21 If you understand business and you can talk business fairly comfortably, 16:25 you're gonna do well in design world. 16:28 If you can combine that with stories, 16:30 you're gonna do even better in the design world. 16:32 Third thing I wanna talk to you about then, is designing and talking about data. 16:35 [COUGH] So I'll tell you another story. 16:42 So in 2011, I've been single for a number of years now I thought 16:45 about time I found myself a girlfriend and got on with life a bit more. 16:50 So a friend of mine suggested I should try internet dating and I thought fantastic. 16:56 I do user experience. 17:01 I can do this stuff. 17:03 I could use all of my user experience skills to get better at dating. 17:04 It was great. 17:09 So I went out there. 17:10 okcupid have a fantastic blog, which talks all about data. 17:12 Okay? It talks about tracking. 17:16 Here's a poster about what is the perfect profile picture for somebody on nine. 17:19 A clue guys, it is not a picture of you stripped to the waist okay? 17:26 I have so 17:29 many pictures of men on internet dating sites that are stripped to the waist. 17:30 It doesn't work. 17:34 But what this blog told me, what this blog gave me was the data to go out there and 17:35 choose a better profile picture. 17:40 I've got so obsessed with okcupid, 17:42 that I've found an email, where I've written to okcupid, 17:45 asking if I could drop a bit of Google analytics code onto my profile [LAUGH]. 17:49 Surprised to say, I didn't get a reply on that one, but I did the same thing. 17:53 I researched it I use as much data as I possibly could just so 17:58 I knew that I can be better at this and hopefully I would meet somebody. 18:02 Guess what? 18:07 I got married 18 months ago. 18:09 This is my wife I met on okcupid. 18:10 >> [APPLAUSE] >> And what that taught me, 18:12 what that experience taught me was the importance of data in design. 18:17 If you've got the data to know what's gonna be effective. 18:20 You've got a lot more confidence a design is gonna work when it goes live. 18:24 I used to add my profile picture which is the way I started with this stuff but what 18:27 it taught me about my UX career in moving forward within UX was data is really, 18:32 really, really important. 18:37 And so I thought right, I jumped head on into data, 18:39 I need get my head around this stuff, so what I did. 18:41 For the couple of years after I got into okcupid, 18:44 is I made a list of every single item of data that clients 18:47 that I was working with measured, in terms of their business effectiveness online. 18:51 I've published on there, you can go and find it if you like. 18:55 God knows why you'd want to. 18:59 But I heard almost 350 different data items that companies for 19:01 measuring, and for a while, it's fantastic, 350 different ways of measuring 19:07 how effective a design is or a website is, something like that. 19:11 But the problem comes when you start designing with data. 19:15 There's so much data out there, 19:19 it's really almost impossible to know how to start with data. 19:20 And it took, and it means that certain business can jump further into 19:26 the data world and say they're ruled by data and nothing else. 19:30 So this is a story of a guy called Doug Bowmen, so 19:35 Doug Bowmen was the first, one of the very first designers of Google. 19:38 Google hired him as a creative force to better improve the Google design and 19:44 user experience, but Doug left. 19:48 And this was the quite damning blog post that he wrote after 19:49 the day he left Google. 19:54 And it's crazy and it's quite damning way, and to that, I think Google has changed 19:56 a lot since this was published, but it show how dangerous data can be. 20:00 When you're getting into a debate how many pixels a border should be, 20:04 and looking for the data to prove that, you can't. 20:07 There's nothing in there that's gonna tell you 20:10 how many pixels wide a particular data border should be. 20:13 And a designer shouldn't have to justify absolutely everything that they do with 20:15 data, but certain organizations when they start measuring this stuff 20:20 end up being a bit like Google. 20:24 When you're judging your designs, your products, 20:27 your vision purely on data alone you're not gonna to be very successful. 20:30 You need to judge it on other types of stuff as you move through as well. 20:34 So I learnt and I had to go through and understand well what is an effective way 20:39 to measure this stuff, I have got to embrace the nature of the business world. 20:43 How do I go out there and do that? 20:46 It is quite simple. 20:47 I just basically cut it down to a number of very small rules. 20:48 So measure two or three things, you don't have to measure much more than that. 20:53 Commerce, things like conversion, average auto value 20:56 If we're in the university sector it's page views, it's average time on page. 21:01 It's bounce rate. 21:06 But whatever your industry is, you know what the three metrics are, 21:09 two to three metrics is you should be measuring. 21:11 But the most important thing you associate with the metrics when you're measuring 21:14 them is you need to do some certain things around them. 21:17 Each metric needs to have a time scale, so how often do you measure it? 21:20 Do you do it weekly? 21:25 Do you do it daily? 21:25 Do you do it minute by minute? 21:26 How often do you do it? 21:28 At least have a benchmark. 21:29 What happens if it goes below 50? 21:31 What happens if it goes above 50? 21:34 50 is your benchmark, for whatever that piece of data might be. 21:36 But you need to know what that benchmark is, so 21:39 you know when you're measuring it, weekly, what happened to that piece of data. 21:42 There needs to be a reason to be reported. 21:46 I've worked with so many organization, on every Monday morning, 21:48 the head of Insights emails out a massive PDF document of all the stats from 21:52 the website of the week before, and it's soundly ignored by everybody. 21:55 It's dense, it's boring, is there any real effect to what's going on? 22:01 So it needs to have a reason to be reported. 22:06 What happens when your average order value goes under 50, 22:08 what is the reason to be reported? 22:10 Who's responsible for that? 22:12 What happens to that piece of data? 22:14 You're not, if nobody's responsible for it or it has a reason to be reported there's 22:16 no point in measuring it, there's no point in whatsoever. 22:19 And the most importantly of all it needs to have an associated action, so 22:22 when that piece of data. 22:26 Drops below 50, what do you do about it? 22:28 And let me tell you ladies and gentlemen let's associate action, 22:30 panic is not an associated action and I've seen that. 22:33 Burying your head in the sand is not an associated action. 22:38 You need to know what to do about that when you're doing it. 22:41 And this, this simple rule just taught me a lot as a designer. 22:44 about how to talk about data, what to measure. 22:49 As a user experience consultant I need to know this stuff because most organizations 22:52 I go into, they’re either measuring too much, like Google were or 22:56 they’re not measuring enough and so don’t know what to do about it. 23:01 In here somewhere is the balance, so again go ahead, use this stuff. 23:04 There's a little Euro which I'll share at the end of this, 23:09 which is a whole another talk about me talking about how to measure with data, 23:11 and it's specifically for designers and for not for anybody else. 23:15 And what data gives you is confidence in the design that you're working on. 23:22 So if you're making a design change, data can back up what's going on. 23:25 The three metrics we talked about that your company's measuring? 23:29 If you're making a design change, and you're advocating that to your client or 23:32 the wider team, you need to talk about those three matrix. 23:35 This design will increase average order value, page dwell time, 23:38 decrease bounce rate. 23:43 You need to discuss it and get okay with talking about data. 23:45 Okay. 23:49 It's not like Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. 23:50 You're not gonna get called up on this stuff. 23:51 But you do need to know and speak about this confidently. 23:53 Because this is how organizations measure success. 23:56 And your design, because the way the Internet is right now and 24:00 the stuff we're working on, it's one of the, if not the most important channel. 24:03 For every single organization and 24:08 business that's out there, you need to talk about this stuff more confidently. 24:09 You need to have this and discuss then when you're doing your design work. 24:13 You need to be able to confidently talk about those three metrics and 24:16 say how the design will meet the need of those three metrics. 24:19 If you can't do that, you're not gonna succeed, and 24:22 your design certainly is not going to get built. 24:24 So again, talk about design. 24:28 But the problem we have design and the very 24:29 thing that's often going wrong with design is that design loses that magic. 24:34 The magic is lost when you start talking about some of these things 24:38 I've just discussed here. 24:41 Now this little critter here, amazing isn't it? 24:44 This is a flying squirrel. 24:46 Who knew such things existed. 24:48 And what's happened with the flying squirrel? 24:51 The flying squirrel has learned to fly from a really interesting place. 24:53 It basically throws itself off a tree and 24:56 kind of glides to the next tree that's over there. 24:58 And often what can happen in a particular organization 25:02 is the organization can end up being a flying squirrel. 25:04 It ends up getting to a point within its design, and within its product lifecycle, 25:09 where it's a flying squirrel. 25:13 It gets to a point where it can't get any better. 25:16 That flying squirrel I just showed you there, it's never going to get feathers. 25:18 It's never going to do anything better than jump from one tree and 25:21 glide gracefully to the next one. 25:25 And what design gives us, and the magic of a great design process It's research. 25:26 It's got fantastic user experience. 25:32 It's got strong, creative, caring, emotionally-enhanced strong people. 25:33 Is it means you get there in a different way. 25:39 You get to design in a different place. 25:42 Suddenly design means you're a soaring eagle. 25:45 Because you've got to a higher point within that. 25:47 And this is called within the data world, this is called maxims. 25:49 So the lower one there that's associated with the flying squirrel 25:53 is called a local maxim. 25:56 There's no way to get from a flying squirrel local maxim in your design. 25:58 And this is what can happen if you're heavily relying on multivarying testing or 26:01 AB testing. 26:06 You get to a point and you just don't get any better. 26:07 You become a flying squirrel and nothing more. 26:09 To get to the point of being an eagle, you need to rip up the rulebook and 26:13 start again. 26:17 You need to redesign, be recreative, recreating the experiences that you're 26:18 working on, going back to first principles, 26:22 going back to research, going back to the very start of your design. 26:24 Cuz you can't evolve from a flying squirrel to a soaring eagle. 26:29 Now I know I have to be careful talking about evolution and 26:35 design in the United States of America, so 26:38 I apologize if I've offended anybody with that particular comment. 26:39 Probably just have with the gag at the end, didn't I? 26:43 Again, design gets you from a local maxim to a higher maxim. 26:46 Data alone is not gonna get you there. 26:51 So sore like an eagle, don't like a squirrel. 26:55 Yeah, I love the way that my style has been cut off there. 26:59 I wonder what that word [INAUDIBLE] might be? 27:01 Okay, so I said data shows confidence in the design, but 27:03 don't let it dictate the design. 27:06 Data should never get to a point where it's dictating everything that you do. 27:08 Do not let your organization get there. 27:12 If your organization has an MVT department, 27:15 if it has multivariate testing, AB testing, make friends with that team. 27:17 Because before you know it, those guys are going to get promoted ahead of you, 27:22 because they're getting results, because they're data driven. 27:24 You need to work together with those teams to get there. 27:28 You need to learn from what they're doing, so that your designs are better. 27:31 But do not let those teams dictate the design. 27:35 You're the creatives, you hold the vision for what's going on. 27:39 You do the front-end code for it, you do the user experience for it, you're 27:42 the product managers for it, don't let the MVT team be the rulers of your design 27:45 because you'll end up being like a flying squirrel you will not soar like an eagle. 27:51 Finally we talk theory. 27:56 How am I doing for time, guys? 28:03 My clock's done. 28:04 It's not working. 28:05 20 minutes, oh, okay great. 28:06 I can have a little drink. 28:08 Okay. 28:13 So my fourth approach is to talk theory. 28:16 So my background's in psychology so, hands up if you were in my workshop yesterday. 28:21 Were you there? Oh yeah, 28:26 you're good people aren't you it was good fun yesterday, it was good time. 28:27 I'd run a workshop yesterday called psychology for 28:29 designers where I talked about how to use theory to make your designs better. 28:31 And what's interesting about psychology theory is there's lots of myths, and 28:37 there's lots of charlatans out there who'll give you theories that maybe don't 28:41 necessarily make any sense. 28:45 Here's a good example of one. 28:49 In 1957, a gentleman 28:50 called James Vicary In the movie theatre, he's an advertising executive. 28:53 A little inside secret, never trust an advertising executive. 28:59 Hands up if there's any advertising executives here. 29:04 Thank God, good. 29:06 Don't ever trust an advertising executive. 29:08 So James Vickery, he ran an experiment in a movie theater. 29:10 So what he did is in the middle of this film, 29:14 he flashed up a couple of frames of the film with graphics overlaid. 29:17 One of which said, hungry, 29:20 eat popcorn, another one which said, thirsty, drink Coca-Cola. 29:21 Now what James Vickery Showed was that in putting up hungry pop corn, 29:25 thirsty drink Coca-Cola, pop corn sales went up by 48%, 29:32 Coca-Cola sales went up by 20%, amazing isn't it, wow fantastic, 29:36 sounds almost too good to be true isn't it, yeah he made it up. 29:41 So shortly before he died in the 70's. 29:47 James Vickery came clean and 29:48 said yeah do you know why I did that actually make that up. 29:49 He built a whole advertising career on the back of this. 29:52 And this is subliminal messaging, this is called. 29:55 And so my tip to you in terms of psychology theory, if it seems or 29:58 sounds too good to be true Is probably not true. 30:01 And so what happened with this is it's still there. 30:06 The myth is still out there that subliminal advertising works. 30:08 Here's some examples of subliminal advertising from different organizations. 30:14 So this is from the Lion King, apparently it says SFX, 30:18 or insects some people say in the thoughts from the Lion King's head. 30:24 Over down the top right hand side, it's a recent one from KFC, 30:30 can you see the dollar bill in the letters? 30:32 Up there? Apparently, 30:34 that was supposed to subliminally tell you to spend money, I don't know. 30:36 Bottom right had corner, Is from the Lord of the Rings. 30:39 Can you see Coca Cola written in there? 30:44 Yeah, all examples of some of that. 30:46 My favorite is the Burger King one, 30:49 there's something subliminal about that is there ladies and gentlemen? 30:50 There is nothing subliminal about that but this stuff refuses to go away. 30:53 It's a really compelling story is that the theory of psychology, 30:58 through use of advertising is really effective. 31:03 All we have to do is hide something in there, and 31:06 people will buy more of your stuff. 31:08 Really compelling story, 31:09 and there's huge amount of this stuff out there, so much so, that, 31:14 in fact the BBC fairly did a whole documentary on subliminal advertising. 31:17 Within an hour TV program, and what do they prove? 31:23 Strikingly, there's no significant effect. 31:25 Well I could have told them that. 31:28 It's all rubbish. 31:30 That's garbage, sorry it's the way we say it in the UK. 31:32 I feel like I should have some sort of translation, subtitles underneath it. 31:36 But it is true, it keeps popping up. 31:40 This stuff will not die. 31:41 Is absolute garbage. 31:43 But ladies and gentlemen there is hope out there. 31:48 So this is a website called cognitive lode and 31:54 this was put together by my very first psychology for designs workshop, 31:57 a couple of the people who came to the workshop built this site. 32:02 What cognitive lode is, is a whole list of psychology theories, 32:06 loads of them with the design implication. 32:11 You do this, this will happen. 32:16 A whole list of psychology theories that will make your designs better. 32:17 That will allow you to talk about psychology when you're doing your design, 32:23 when you're putting your design together. 32:26 And again as I told you, good design does not sell itself. 32:28 Good design will not drive you forward in this world. 32:31 You need to better advocate it and better have the stories, the data, the business 32:34 and the theory behind it to advocate that design or that design is going nowhere. 32:39 It would get watered down by management, you'd get micro-managed. 32:45 You end up making something worse when you decided to make it better. 32:50 Great stuff, and they do an email and use that. 32:55 You can sign up for it and get this new mailbox. 32:57 Fantastic stuff. 33:00 That's my book. 33:03 In my book, I tell you how to go and 33:04 find psychology theory to solve a particular design problem you've got. 33:06 In my book I tell you how to advocate design, product and 33:12 UX decision based on psychology. 33:16 How you can explain to your project team and your client, why the psychology and 33:18 how the psychologies working at this point in your design and 33:23 how your design is better than your previous one because of psychology. 33:26 Helps you maintain the vision for your design, for your product, for 33:31 your code using psychology, 35 bucks ladies and gentleman, it's an ebook, 33:35 please buy it, thank you. 33:40 Because again you need to know this stuff. 33:47 You need to know as a designer, about psychology, because psychology is gonna be 33:49 that differentiator from you being an okay designer to being a fantastic designer. 33:54 From being a great designer to being an amazing designer. 33:59 The psychology will help you make that next leap into the next stage of 34:02 your career where you can better talk about your designs. 34:06 You may have the craft right, you may be amazing at producing designs but 34:10 if you can't advocate those to the wider team you're working with, your design is 34:14 not gonna get built you gonna micromanage and it won't get out there. 34:18 You need to know this stuff to be able to do that. 34:21 In the future, so 34:23 another I think Mike's spoken at Future Insights before, I believe. 34:28 Yeah, and he, this is fantastic and this, this is true. 34:32 Mike has written a book called, Design As A Job, and it isn't a job. 34:35 We are all out there creating, design. 34:39 But we're not creating design for art's sake. 34:43 We're creating design because that's our job. 34:45 We're working for it. 34:47 Universities, for companies, for charities, whatever we're doing. 34:48 We're paid to do this stuff because that design has got to have an effect 34:53 in the real world. 34:56 If you're not doing that, you're kidding yourself and 34:57 you're probably in the wrong profession. 34:59 Our design needs to sell itself, and we need to get better at doing this stuff. 35:02 We need to talk about data, we need to talk about business, 35:07 we need to talk about stories, and we need to talk about theory, 35:10 because that will help us design better, and make our designs more effective. 35:15 Mike's discovered this. 35:19 He's 25 years into his design career. 35:20 Some of you who are further on in your design career also know this stuff. 35:22 You need to be confident in telling stories and 35:25 doing these other things as well to make your designs better. 35:27 Finally then, 35:34 the last tactic I wanna talk to you about is you need to talk objectively. 35:35 And this is really hard if you are a very strong emotional creative person, and 35:40 let's face it, if you're in design, or product [INAUDIBLE] in development, 35:45 you've got a strong creative emotion aspect to your personality. 35:49 And it's very hard, because business trains us not to be like that, 35:52 science trains us not to be like that. 35:58 I need to help that, and it's pretty simple how it works. 36:01 Let me tell you a story about how I saw this happening in my career early on. 36:03 So I was working for a designer on a web site that was selling greetings cards. 36:08 And this is what the designer said, I feel the design, minimalist in style, 36:15 reflects a modern design aesthetic. 36:19 So there we are in the design meeting. 36:21 He's presenting his mocks, and says this. 36:25 I cringe every so slightly in the corner when I hear this. 36:31 Really? 36:35 So what does the product manager say? 36:37 What's her response to this particular way this designer's talking about it? 36:39 What's the big mistake that the designer is using in doing this stuff? 36:43 The biggest mistake this designer is making is the first two words. 36:47 I feel. And there's nothing wrong with feeling, 36:52 there's nothing with emotions, 36:56 there's nothing wrong with the creativity that's there. 36:57 We've all got that within ourselves. 37:00 The danger we have in talking about it this way is it opens up us 37:02 to the next response and the automatic response to something when you say, 37:09 I feel is what does somebody else's critiquing or design say to you. 37:13 Well I feel more that it's a website and not a f#cking coffee table. 37:18 Was what the product manager said to that response. 37:23 And again, if you go into that world where you start talking about feelings and 37:26 creativity in that way, you open yourself up to somebody disagreeing with you on 37:30 the very terms you're presenting the design in. 37:35 And that's really hard to get that across. 37:37 It's really hard if you're a designer to come across this stuff. 37:41 Because again, 37:43 it's all about your creative juices that are producing this thing. 37:44 And there's nothing wrong with that, 37:47 you just need to be talking about it in a slighty, subtly different way. 37:48 Cuz you talk about feelings, feelings can come back and kick you. 37:52 Like, which is exactly what happened here. 37:57 And this can be quite disheartening if you're designer. 38:03 So this is a quote from John Keats, so John Keats was an English poet. 38:05 And he was around during the Renaissance of science when Newton was around and 38:10 Newton was doing his greatest work. 38:14 This was Keats common around Newton. 38:16 You just destroyed all the poetries of rainbow 38:19 by reducing it to the prismatic colors. 38:23 It's the very essence of what the rainbow, this magical thing, that was out there. 38:26 Keats somehow felt that Newton had destroyed 38:31 be taken with the magic explaining what was going on. 38:35 And this can happen if you follow these first four routes that I have talked about 38:39 there you are going to destroy the magic, you will completely destroy the magic. 38:44 Which is a real shame because that is the very point in the creative world that we 38:47 want to be in when we are designing. 38:51 We don't want our magic to be there. 38:52 We want magic, we want emotion, we want creativity in there. 38:54 Never forget how important that is in your design but you need to talk about and 38:57 think about it in a slightly and subtly different way. 39:01 So a story. 39:05 So there I was with with my wife we've gone on a honeymoon to the Lake District 39:07 in the UK Lake District is a beautiful, beautiful place. 39:12 There we are so the top of the mountain staring out onto this incredible view. 39:15 There I am, looking down at the information display, saying, God, 39:23 why have they chosen Helvetica as the font on this information display? 39:28 It's unbelievable. 39:32 What the information densities, what's wrong over here? 39:33 and my wife, she put her arm around me, she said, honey, just enjoy the view. 39:35 Don't sweat those details all of the time. 39:42 Enjoy the majesty of the view of the stuff that you're taking in. 39:44 And the same's true of the design stuff when we produce as well. 39:47 Don't focus on the boring details. 39:52 Don't criticize it based on what I've told you here. 39:53 Let the designs speak for themselves. 39:57 But what those designs need to be able to do at the same time, 40:01 is to have a strong backer, and you strongly behind them, telling your client, 40:02 your project team, why those designs are going to succeed. 40:09 The design themselves will have that magic in them. 40:13 You need to talk about that magic, but most importantly you need to talk about 40:16 how that magic is going to have an affect on the problem you are trying 40:20 to solve which is design because let's face it, design is so important. 40:27 What is interesting about this is that is comes back 40:34 full circle to where I studied where I started from. 40:37 So I want you to experience this and I am obsessed with usability. 40:39 And what's really interesting is this paper came out in, I think it was 1999. 40:44 And the title of this paper is What is Beautiful is Usable. 40:49 And it's true. And this is a fantastic advocate for 40:54 beauty and creativity in design. 40:58 If something is more beautiful, if something is more creative, 41:02 if it's got the finesse of a wonderful design associated with it, users and 41:05 people will make and perceive that design to be easier to use. 41:10 There is a space for creativity. 41:14 There is a space for beautiful design. 41:16 There's science behind it. 41:19 If something is more beautiful, people will perceive it to be easier to use. 41:20 Even the usability isn't particularly good, they'll make it, 41:24 they'll perceive it to be a lot more usable than it is. 41:27 There is absolutely a huge space for creativity and 41:30 emotion and design and beauty in the work that we produce. 41:34 Because it makes our stuff easier to use, because it is beautiful. 41:38 So it is worth going the extra mile to create that beautiful design. 41:41 Because that beautiful design, inherently, will be better. 41:44 And here's some science to prove why that's the case. 41:49 So ladies and gentleman If you give these five things: talk stories, 41:56 talk business, talk data, talk theory, and 42:01 talk objectively, your designs will be better. 42:05 Your designs will get build, your decisions will be upheld. 42:10 The stuff that you create will get out there in the real world. 42:13 If you don't do these things you're going to suffer, 42:16 and keep suffering from the same four problems that we saw before we started. 42:19 Thank you ladies and gentlemen >> [APPLAUSE] 42:23