[MUSIC]

[APPLAUSE] >> Hello everybody.

How are you doing?

So today I'm gonna be talking about how to design with science (and not

destroy the magic).

So a little bit about me.

So hands up, show of hands.

Hands up if you've ever booked a hotel room online.

Oh, look at this. Hands

up if you've ever bought a train ticket in the UK.

Yeah, hands up if you've ever anything on a large online auction site at

some point, yeah, okay.

So you've all used something that I've designed over the years.

So I've worked with people like Mariott Hotels, Expedia,

the Train9 in the UK, eBay, people like that as well.

And my background is user experience, I'm an user experience consultant.

And what that means is typically I do three activities in UX.

I do, a third of my time I spend researching,

a third of my time I spend talking about digital strategy and

getting stuff done and a third of my time rolling my sleeves up and

actually designing and I tend to get involved in all three parts of.

Use you experience well.

And today, what we're gonna talk to you about is effectively design and designs.

And it is really talking about how these three things interrelate.

How to get the evidence from things like research, to define the strategy so

the company and organization you work for knows what to do and then the easy bit,

which is the execution of the design at the end.

I say easy you know what I mean.

Design, what is design?

Here is a quote from The UK Design council.

I added one word in, I added the word code in because I figured oh,

there are some developers out there.

And the coding side of it is incredibly important.

One of the things with design is often In design, and often with a project

that we were working on, something gets in the way of it happening.

Something makes our job harder,

something stops us from doing the greater work that we want to do.

So, hands up if this ever happened to you, a product goes live, and

it's lost the magic, the original design and vision that you've already worked on.

Hands up if that's ever happened to you.

Few of you.

Good stuff.

The team or client you work with continually questions your choices,

your judgement, effectively everything you do.

You're constantly questioned in terms of the design work, the product work,

the code work that you do.

Hands up if you've had this one.

Constant questioning, yeah, you've all been there.

Haven't you?

This one, an awful one, being micromanaged by your boss and your client.

Stood behind you, moving pixels this way, moving stuff that way,

can you make the logo bigger, no bigger, has this happened to you,

being micromanaged by you, yeah, we've all been there, haven't we.

What about this one, Schlimmbesserung, perhaps this has ever happened to you?

[LAUGH] Just checking you're paying attention and

not just putting your hands up.

This is a German word and what I love about the German language is it's

incredibly expressive in terms of what it means.

They have words for things like this.

[FOREIGN] is the action of trying to improve something and

actually ending up making it worse than it was before you started.

So hands up if you've ever been involved in that,

where you tried to improve something, and

you've ended up making it worse [LAUGH] than what it originally started.

Yes.

There's a word for it, it's schlimmbesserung.

So if you remember one thing from this talk, you've learned a new word in German.

And it happened to me, it happened to me so much, especially early on in my career.

And I want to talk to you today about how I got over that hump of all of those four

particular problems I found in my design and project work that I was working on.

And it started with an article I wrote in 2009,

this has been read by around about three quarters of a million people,

well it has been read through three quarters of a million times.

How many of you have read this article or come across this before, yeah?

Good for you, that's good to hear.

So I wrote this and this article just went nuts cause I had this problem,

I had this real problem in a design meeting.

Where my client was like, well we just need to cram everything on top of

the page, everything needs to be above the fold and

I'd be like [SOUND] come on seriously you can't do that.

And I knew all the evidence for why you shouldn't that, had it all there but

I'd never quite put it together into a reasoned argument, so

I did I published a blog post.

And within that, I use some evidence, I use some evidence.

This is from an eye tracker.

So what an eye tracker does is it allows you to understand and see what a user is

looking at on the page of a website or design you are looking at.

I tested two designs,

this is from my local airport an airport called Bristol Airport.

In the UK and what I did is I tested two versions of the design.

One of which we crammed loads of stuff above the fold, the one on the right,

your left and the one on the far side is where we didn't cram stuff above the fold,

and look at what happened,

the page was explored more, stuff was engaged with further down the fold.

This evidence, and this sign, showed that by cramming stuff above the fold,

uses a less likely to explore the rest of the page that's there.

There was some science, suddenly, things started to get easier.

Every time I showed this image to my client, fantastic.

They got what I was trying to say.

Handy, really really handy stuff.

So useful,

as I have said, almost three quarters of a million times this article has been read.

I still get so much email about this.

I am still the flipping page fold guy who still follows me around.

And design is a difficult and challenging process.

This is from Alan Cooper.

Alan Cooper is one of the guys behind visual basic,

a famous developer, he also wrote lots of good books on user experience.

Design is not so much a design issue, it's a power struggle and

that's often what's true.

Even the most fantastically beautiful deigns, the most engaging code, the most

fantastic work, vision, and wire frames and stuff, you've created, is no good.

Unless you can communicate the value of that design

to the wider team that you're working with, because we don't work in isolation.

Maybe we did ten years ago, one man web teams used to happen, but

now we're a team.

We're a much wider team of men and women working together for a cause, so

we have to better communicate to our team, and

to our clients, why you have made the design decisions that we have.

And that's what I'm talking about today.

How to communicate using science to advocate your designs,

you make the right design and choices the stuff that you design and code and

build and plan and envision and search gets built.

Sees the light of day is out there in the real world.

So, first tactic I use when I'm doing this stuff is to talk stories.

And user research is a wonderful place to go and gather stories, and

as humans we respond so well to a story.

So let me tell you a story.

This is a lady called Jane.

And Jane is here, and

she's using an automated ticket machine at a train station in the UK.

So when you buy a train ticket in UK and Europe, buy it online, you have to collect

it at a station from an automatic machine, and then you can go and get on the train.

This photograph alone saved It's probably saved around about 150,000

hours of people's time in the UK and saved huge amounts of dollar in pound value

in the UK from this one photo alone I used to tell stories of what was going on.

This woman is collecting a train ticket and on this.

From this picture, you can spot a couple of things.

The first thing, when people are traveling,

they carry lots of bags with them when they travel.

Okay. Not revolutionary story, but

a story in itself.

What this told us, is that when people are carrying bags with them,

they don't got many hands to do stuff.

It's just really really hard to type stuff into a small screen

if you're carrying stuff, okay?

Number one, it was a story that people could engage with.

They're like yeah, completely, that makes a lot of sense.

Number two, if you're carrying a mobile phone, everybody carries a mobile phone.

What this company assumed, and what the British transport

system assumed is that everybody would print out the email confirmation,

would come along to the machine and would type the number in.

No, people have mobile phones generally in their hands.

They basically got no hands free to be able to do stuff.

So number one design change that we made based on this photograph

Is the credit card that you used to purchase your online train ticket.

All you have to do is push the credit card into the machine and

it will automatically give you your ticket,

don't have to punch a code in, do anything like that that you used to do.

And, that one change alone cut the queuing and

line times in the stations by 20 to 25 minutes of rush hour every morning.

So it's a huge amount of time and effort,

reduce amount of people not being to get that ticket some time and refunds.

This one photograph alone, with these two stories,

save millions of pounds and huge amount of time all from one photograph.

It was telling stories.

There's no technical specifications, there's no designs here, nothing.

All I used this photograph to do was to tell a story.

Another story this is a lady called Sally, and

Sally here is completing an insurance form online, okay.

Not the most exciting of things to do, what was interesting about this particular

story is what Sally said when she was completing the form.

And I have heard this a number of times since.

So what Sally said then was, I didn't see then the asterisk.

There is nothing there that was explains what they mean.

Now we all know exactly what those asterisks mean.

Those asterisks mean Mandatory fields.

You've got to complete this particular form field.

Now what this story showed us, and I've seen it a number of times since,

is that not everybody understands what's going on.

They don't know what this asterisk means.

Most people, a lot of the time when they're completing a form, and

like I said I've probably done maybe 5, 600 user tests in my career.

Every time I see somebody using a form,

what they do is complete a form until you tell them to stop completing that form.

This whole mandatory field stuff

is created by developers early on because it's a nice easy thing to code.

It's much easier to code things that people

shouldn't do rather than things that people should do.

It's a bad design choice.

It doesn't work all the time for all of the people.

So we may once more change which instead of making things marking the mandatory

fields we mark the optional fields with the word optional, simple stuff.

People understood it,

people got it, people knew they didn't have to complete those form fields.

It works for everybody.

People who understand the asterisks, and people who don't understand the asterisks.

It works for everybody.

Rather than this one, which only works for people who understand the short hand of

what's going on, or can be bothered to scroll to the top of the screen to find

out what the asterisk actually applies to, which nobody, let's face it, does.

Again, a story that made one change that meant more people completed the forms on

this insurance company's site than not and then telling that story made it easier for

me to make this change rather than say, people don't understand the asterisk.

So I had the story of Sally behind it and

a piece of video which helped prove and change it.

A bit of science helped Make this design and this project work.

And this is the most important thing that I learned earlier in my career is you

need to have strong ideas, like the one I've just shown you and

I can see a few of few shaking your heads going what, this is crazy.

You've got to have this stuff, you've got to be able to.

Talk about having a strong will to discuss what's going on.

You've gotta have the evidence to back up what's going on.

You shouldn't let those stories take over your life,

because a good example of how this has affected me and my career, and

the stuff that I've worked on, is I get very enthusiastic about ideas.

I get so excited about ideas, is that people don't choose,

or go with the ideas that I select, it makes me upset.

It makes me angry.

It makes me not want to be working what I'm doing.

It makes me feel very frustrated.

So one of the key things that I learned early on in my career,

is have evidence for what's going on, but

be prepared to be proved wrong, like the asterisks example there.

The more years that people start using the websites,

the more years that people start using the internet,

those asterisks are going to become more and more known by people.

The same is true of the hamburger menu,

and all these new design inventions that are coming in.

Yeah, this stuff holds up, but is it gonna hold up in the future?

Maybe, maybe not.

All right, strategy number two, talk business.

I'll tell you a story.

This gentleman called Mel Collison.

He's a Viacom executive.

As you know, Viacom was a huge adverting company.

In 2003, he went for a meeting at a little new start up in California called Google.

Mel being an advertising executive,

the guys at Google really wanted to show how the Internet and the Google, and

tracking, and the ability to know who was click on the link, how many people saw

an advertisement, how effective that advertisement was, it was a real interest

to Google and Google though this would be a real interesting advertising community.

Finally, you can stop measuring and understanding how effective adverts are.

And what was Mel Collison's reaction for Viacom?

What did this advertising mega company say when Google unveiled

this fantastic new way of tracking advertising had one comment?

You're fucking with the magic, guys.

Which is interesting cause again the guys at Google felt well he's gonna love this.

Finally he can understand how effective advertising's gonna be and Viacom's number

one reaction was, holy crap this is the end of our business because again.

Talking about business means you need to talk about how

effective the work is that you do.

You need to be able to understand and

talk about data to prove how effective a change is gonna be in what you're doing.

But what was interesting about this whole advertising model is the problem with

advertising, the problem with advertising certainly as a business model is

advertising as a business model is completely broken.

A paper from 2013 on the near impossibility

measuring the returns to advertising.

Incredible, okay?

Look who this paper is written by.

So Randal A Lewis, Google Inc.

Justine M Rao, Microsoft research.

It's the two researchers, one from Google and one from Microsoft, published a paper

in 2013 to use almost impossible to measure the returns from advertising.

This is from the same people we're very proud to show their stuff to Viacom

in 2003, fast forward ten years they're saying advertising isn't very effective.

Advertising as a business model sucks, is dreadful and here's

more scientific evidence why you shouldn't base your business around advertising.

And this is the kind of stuff that we need to know design is.

We need to know how business works to make sure that we get other designs done.

We understand how business world work.

Be the broken business full of advertising to better advocate why company should

choose and make the designs and use the designs that we've visioned.

Why we should use the code that we have envisioned.

Why we should use the product that we have all spent a long time designing.

We would understand business to get there.

Are there is huge, there are other business models out there.

I have written about them on my blog, my website.

You can go there and it will talk you through the designer and

UX approaches to each of the business models out there.

There are five of them and

not particularly difficult to get your head around.

If you understand business and you can talk business fairly comfortably,

you're gonna do well in design world.

If you can combine that with stories,

you're gonna do even better in the design world.

Third thing I wanna talk to you about then, is designing and talking about data.

[COUGH] So I'll tell you another story.

So in 2011, I've been single for a number of years now I thought

about time I found myself a girlfriend and got on with life a bit more.

So a friend of mine suggested I should try internet dating and I thought fantastic.

I do user experience.

I can do this stuff.

I could use all of my user experience skills to get better at dating.

It was great.

So I went out there.

okcupid have a fantastic blog, which talks all about data.

Okay? It talks about tracking.

Here's a poster about what is the perfect profile picture for somebody on nine.

A clue guys, it is not a picture of you stripped to the waist okay?

I have so

many pictures of men on internet dating sites that are stripped to the waist.

It doesn't work.

But what this blog told me, what this blog gave me was the data to go out there and

choose a better profile picture.

I've got so obsessed with okcupid,

that I've found an email, where I've written to okcupid,

asking if I could drop a bit of Google analytics code onto my profile [LAUGH].

Surprised to say, I didn't get a reply on that one, but I did the same thing.

I researched it I use as much data as I possibly could just so

I knew that I can be better at this and hopefully I would meet somebody.

Guess what?

I got married 18 months ago.

This is my wife I met on okcupid.

>> [APPLAUSE] >> And what that taught me,

what that experience taught me was the importance of data in design.

If you've got the data to know what's gonna be effective.

You've got a lot more confidence a design is gonna work when it goes live.

I used to add my profile picture which is the way I started with this stuff but what

it taught me about my UX career in moving forward within UX was data is really,

really, really important.

And so I thought right, I jumped head on into data,

I need get my head around this stuff, so what I did.

For the couple of years after I got into okcupid,

is I made a list of every single item of data that clients

that I was working with measured, in terms of their business effectiveness online.

I've published on there, you can go and find it if you like.

God knows why you'd want to.

But I heard almost 350 different data items that companies for

measuring, and for a while, it's fantastic, 350 different ways of measuring

how effective a design is or a website is, something like that.

But the problem comes when you start designing with data.

There's so much data out there,

it's really almost impossible to know how to start with data.

And it took, and it means that certain business can jump further into

the data world and say they're ruled by data and nothing else.

So this is a story of a guy called Doug Bowmen, so

Doug Bowmen was the first, one of the very first designers of Google.

Google hired him as a creative force to better improve the Google design and

user experience, but Doug left.

And this was the quite damning blog post that he wrote after

the day he left Google.

And it's crazy and it's quite damning way, and to that, I think Google has changed

a lot since this was published, but it show how dangerous data can be.

When you're getting into a debate how many pixels a border should be,

and looking for the data to prove that, you can't.

There's nothing in there that's gonna tell you

how many pixels wide a particular data border should be.

And a designer shouldn't have to justify absolutely everything that they do with

data, but certain organizations when they start measuring this stuff

end up being a bit like Google.

When you're judging your designs, your products,

your vision purely on data alone you're not gonna to be very successful.

You need to judge it on other types of stuff as you move through as well.

So I learnt and I had to go through and understand well what is an effective way

to measure this stuff, I have got to embrace the nature of the business world.

How do I go out there and do that?

It is quite simple.

I just basically cut it down to a number of very small rules.

So measure two or three things, you don't have to measure much more than that.

Commerce, things like conversion, average auto value

If we're in the university sector it's page views, it's average time on page.

It's bounce rate.

But whatever your industry is, you know what the three metrics are,

two to three metrics is you should be measuring.

But the most important thing you associate with the metrics when you're measuring

them is you need to do some certain things around them.

Each metric needs to have a time scale, so how often do you measure it?

Do you do it weekly?

Do you do it daily?

Do you do it minute by minute?

How often do you do it?

At least have a benchmark.

What happens if it goes below 50?

What happens if it goes above 50?

50 is your benchmark, for whatever that piece of data might be.

But you need to know what that benchmark is, so

you know when you're measuring it, weekly, what happened to that piece of data.

There needs to be a reason to be reported.

I've worked with so many organization, on every Monday morning,

the head of Insights emails out a massive PDF document of all the stats from

the website of the week before, and it's soundly ignored by everybody.

It's dense, it's boring, is there any real effect to what's going on?

So it needs to have a reason to be reported.

What happens when your average order value goes under 50,

what is the reason to be reported?

Who's responsible for that?

What happens to that piece of data?

You're not, if nobody's responsible for it or it has a reason to be reported there's

no point in measuring it, there's no point in whatsoever.

And the most importantly of all it needs to have an associated action, so

when that piece of data.

Drops below 50, what do you do about it?

And let me tell you ladies and gentlemen let's associate action,

panic is not an associated action and I've seen that.

Burying your head in the sand is not an associated action.

You need to know what to do about that when you're doing it.

And this, this simple rule just taught me a lot as a designer.

about how to talk about data, what to measure.

As a user experience consultant I need to know this stuff because most organizations

I go into, they’re either measuring too much, like Google were or

they’re not measuring enough and so don’t know what to do about it.

In here somewhere is the balance, so again go ahead, use this stuff.

There's a little Euro which I'll share at the end of this,

which is a whole another talk about me talking about how to measure with data,

and it's specifically for designers and for not for anybody else.

And what data gives you is confidence in the design that you're working on.

So if you're making a design change, data can back up what's going on.

The three metrics we talked about that your company's measuring?

If you're making a design change, and you're advocating that to your client or

the wider team, you need to talk about those three matrix.

This design will increase average order value, page dwell time,

decrease bounce rate.

You need to discuss it and get okay with talking about data.

Okay.

It's not like Shark Tank or Dragon's Den.

You're not gonna get called up on this stuff.

But you do need to know and speak about this confidently.

Because this is how organizations measure success.

And your design, because the way the Internet is right now and

the stuff we're working on, it's one of the, if not the most important channel.

For every single organization and

business that's out there, you need to talk about this stuff more confidently.

You need to have this and discuss then when you're doing your design work.

You need to be able to confidently talk about those three metrics and

say how the design will meet the need of those three metrics.

If you can't do that, you're not gonna succeed, and

your design certainly is not going to get built.

So again, talk about design.

But the problem we have design and the very

thing that's often going wrong with design is that design loses that magic.

The magic is lost when you start talking about some of these things

I've just discussed here.

Now this little critter here, amazing isn't it?

This is a flying squirrel.

Who knew such things existed.

And what's happened with the flying squirrel?

The flying squirrel has learned to fly from a really interesting place.

It basically throws itself off a tree and

kind of glides to the next tree that's over there.

And often what can happen in a particular organization

is the organization can end up being a flying squirrel.

It ends up getting to a point within its design, and within its product lifecycle,

where it's a flying squirrel.

It gets to a point where it can't get any better.

That flying squirrel I just showed you there, it's never going to get feathers.

It's never going to do anything better than jump from one tree and

glide gracefully to the next one.

And what design gives us, and the magic of a great design process It's research.

It's got fantastic user experience.

It's got strong, creative, caring, emotionally-enhanced strong people.

Is it means you get there in a different way.

You get to design in a different place.

Suddenly design means you're a soaring eagle.

Because you've got to a higher point within that.

And this is called within the data world, this is called maxims.

So the lower one there that's associated with the flying squirrel

is called a local maxim.

There's no way to get from a flying squirrel local maxim in your design.

And this is what can happen if you're heavily relying on multivarying testing or

AB testing.

You get to a point and you just don't get any better.

You become a flying squirrel and nothing more.

To get to the point of being an eagle, you need to rip up the rulebook and

start again.

You need to redesign, be recreative, recreating the experiences that you're

working on, going back to first principles,

going back to research, going back to the very start of your design.

Cuz you can't evolve from a flying squirrel to a soaring eagle.

Now I know I have to be careful talking about evolution and

design in the United States of America, so

I apologize if I've offended anybody with that particular comment.

Probably just have with the gag at the end, didn't I?

Again, design gets you from a local maxim to a higher maxim.

Data alone is not gonna get you there.

So sore like an eagle, don't like a squirrel.

Yeah, I love the way that my style has been cut off there.

I wonder what that word [INAUDIBLE] might be?

Okay, so I said data shows confidence in the design, but

don't let it dictate the design.

Data should never get to a point where it's dictating everything that you do.

Do not let your organization get there.

If your organization has an MVT department,

if it has multivariate testing, AB testing, make friends with that team.

Because before you know it, those guys are going to get promoted ahead of you,

because they're getting results, because they're data driven.

You need to work together with those teams to get there.

You need to learn from what they're doing, so that your designs are better.

But do not let those teams dictate the design.

You're the creatives, you hold the vision for what's going on.

You do the front-end code for it, you do the user experience for it, you're

the product managers for it, don't let the MVT team be the rulers of your design

because you'll end up being like a flying squirrel you will not soar like an eagle.

Finally we talk theory.

How am I doing for time, guys?

My clock's done.

It's not working.

20 minutes, oh, okay great.

I can have a little drink.

Okay.

So my fourth approach is to talk theory.

So my background's in psychology so, hands up if you were in my workshop yesterday.

Were you there? Oh yeah,

you're good people aren't you it was good fun yesterday, it was good time.

I'd run a workshop yesterday called psychology for

designers where I talked about how to use theory to make your designs better.

And what's interesting about psychology theory is there's lots of myths, and

there's lots of charlatans out there who'll give you theories that maybe don't

necessarily make any sense.

Here's a good example of one.

In 1957, a gentleman

called James Vicary In the movie theatre, he's an advertising executive.

A little inside secret, never trust an advertising executive.

Hands up if there's any advertising executives here.

Thank God, good.

Don't ever trust an advertising executive.

So James Vickery, he ran an experiment in a movie theater.

So what he did is in the middle of this film,

he flashed up a couple of frames of the film with graphics overlaid.

One of which said, hungry,

eat popcorn, another one which said, thirsty, drink Coca-Cola.

Now what James Vickery Showed was that in putting up hungry pop corn,

thirsty drink Coca-Cola, pop corn sales went up by 48%,

Coca-Cola sales went up by 20%, amazing isn't it, wow fantastic,

sounds almost too good to be true isn't it, yeah he made it up.

So shortly before he died in the 70's.

James Vickery came clean and

said yeah do you know why I did that actually make that up.

He built a whole advertising career on the back of this.

And this is subliminal messaging, this is called.

And so my tip to you in terms of psychology theory, if it seems or

sounds too good to be true Is probably not true.

And so what happened with this is it's still there.

The myth is still out there that subliminal advertising works.

Here's some examples of subliminal advertising from different organizations.

So this is from the Lion King, apparently it says SFX,

or insects some people say in the thoughts from the Lion King's head.

Over down the top right hand side, it's a recent one from KFC,

can you see the dollar bill in the letters?

Up there? Apparently,

that was supposed to subliminally tell you to spend money, I don't know.

Bottom right had corner, Is from the Lord of the Rings.

Can you see Coca Cola written in there?

Yeah, all examples of some of that.

My favorite is the Burger King one,

there's something subliminal about that is there ladies and gentlemen?

There is nothing subliminal about that but this stuff refuses to go away.

It's a really compelling story is that the theory of psychology,

through use of advertising is really effective.

All we have to do is hide something in there, and

people will buy more of your stuff.

Really compelling story,

and there's huge amount of this stuff out there, so much so, that,

in fact the BBC fairly did a whole documentary on subliminal advertising.

Within an hour TV program, and what do they prove?

Strikingly, there's no significant effect.

Well I could have told them that.

It's all rubbish.

That's garbage, sorry it's the way we say it in the UK.

I feel like I should have some sort of translation, subtitles underneath it.

But it is true, it keeps popping up.

This stuff will not die.

Is absolute garbage.

But ladies and gentlemen there is hope out there.

So this is a website called cognitive lode and

this was put together by my very first psychology for designs workshop,

a couple of the people who came to the workshop built this site.

What cognitive lode is, is a whole list of psychology theories,

loads of them with the design implication.

You do this, this will happen.

A whole list of psychology theories that will make your designs better.

That will allow you to talk about psychology when you're doing your design,

when you're putting your design together.

And again as I told you, good design does not sell itself.

Good design will not drive you forward in this world.

You need to better advocate it and better have the stories, the data, the business

and the theory behind it to advocate that design or that design is going nowhere.

It would get watered down by management, you'd get micro-managed.

You end up making something worse when you decided to make it better.

Great stuff, and they do an email and use that.

You can sign up for it and get this new mailbox.

Fantastic stuff.

That's my book.

In my book, I tell you how to go and

find psychology theory to solve a particular design problem you've got.

In my book I tell you how to advocate design, product and

UX decision based on psychology.

How you can explain to your project team and your client, why the psychology and

how the psychologies working at this point in your design and

how your design is better than your previous one because of psychology.

Helps you maintain the vision for your design, for your product, for

your code using psychology, 35 bucks ladies and gentleman, it's an ebook,

please buy it, thank you.

Because again you need to know this stuff.

You need to know as a designer, about psychology, because psychology is gonna be

that differentiator from you being an okay designer to being a fantastic designer.

From being a great designer to being an amazing designer.

The psychology will help you make that next leap into the next stage of

your career where you can better talk about your designs.

You may have the craft right, you may be amazing at producing designs but

if you can't advocate those to the wider team you're working with, your design is

not gonna get built you gonna micromanage and it won't get out there.

You need to know this stuff to be able to do that.

In the future, so

another I think Mike's spoken at Future Insights before, I believe.

Yeah, and he, this is fantastic and this, this is true.

Mike has written a book called, Design As A Job, and it isn't a job.

We are all out there creating, design.

But we're not creating design for art's sake.

We're creating design because that's our job.

We're working for it.

Universities, for companies, for charities, whatever we're doing.

We're paid to do this stuff because that design has got to have an effect

in the real world.

If you're not doing that, you're kidding yourself and

you're probably in the wrong profession.

Our design needs to sell itself, and we need to get better at doing this stuff.

We need to talk about data, we need to talk about business,

we need to talk about stories, and we need to talk about theory,

because that will help us design better, and make our designs more effective.

Mike's discovered this.

He's 25 years into his design career.

Some of you who are further on in your design career also know this stuff.

You need to be confident in telling stories and

doing these other things as well to make your designs better.

Finally then,

the last tactic I wanna talk to you about is you need to talk objectively.

And this is really hard if you are a very strong emotional creative person, and

let's face it, if you're in design, or product [INAUDIBLE] in development,

you've got a strong creative emotion aspect to your personality.

And it's very hard, because business trains us not to be like that,

science trains us not to be like that.

I need to help that, and it's pretty simple how it works.

Let me tell you a story about how I saw this happening in my career early on.

So I was working for a designer on a web site that was selling greetings cards.

And this is what the designer said, I feel the design, minimalist in style,

reflects a modern design aesthetic.

So there we are in the design meeting.

He's presenting his mocks, and says this.

I cringe every so slightly in the corner when I hear this.

Really?

So what does the product manager say?

What's her response to this particular way this designer's talking about it?

What's the big mistake that the designer is using in doing this stuff?

The biggest mistake this designer is making is the first two words.

I feel. And there's nothing wrong with feeling,

there's nothing with emotions,

there's nothing wrong with the creativity that's there.

We've all got that within ourselves.

The danger we have in talking about it this way is it opens up us

to the next response and the automatic response to something when you say,

I feel is what does somebody else's critiquing or design say to you.

Well I feel more that it's a website and not a f#cking coffee table.

Was what the product manager said to that response.

And again, if you go into that world where you start talking about feelings and

creativity in that way, you open yourself up to somebody disagreeing with you on

the very terms you're presenting the design in.

And that's really hard to get that across.

It's really hard if you're a designer to come across this stuff.

Because again,

it's all about your creative juices that are producing this thing.

And there's nothing wrong with that,

you just need to be talking about it in a slighty, subtly different way.

Cuz you talk about feelings, feelings can come back and kick you.

Like, which is exactly what happened here.

And this can be quite disheartening if you're designer.

So this is a quote from John Keats, so John Keats was an English poet.

And he was around during the Renaissance of science when Newton was around and

Newton was doing his greatest work.

This was Keats common around Newton.

You just destroyed all the poetries of rainbow

by reducing it to the prismatic colors.

It's the very essence of what the rainbow, this magical thing, that was out there.

Keats somehow felt that Newton had destroyed

be taken with the magic explaining what was going on.

And this can happen if you follow these first four routes that I have talked about

there you are going to destroy the magic, you will completely destroy the magic.

Which is a real shame because that is the very point in the creative world that we

want to be in when we are designing.

We don't want our magic to be there.

We want magic, we want emotion, we want creativity in there.

Never forget how important that is in your design but you need to talk about and

think about it in a slightly and subtly different way.

So a story.

So there I was with with my wife we've gone on a honeymoon to the Lake District

in the UK Lake District is a beautiful, beautiful place.

There we are so the top of the mountain staring out onto this incredible view.

There I am, looking down at the information display, saying, God,

why have they chosen Helvetica as the font on this information display?

It's unbelievable.

What the information densities, what's wrong over here?

and my wife, she put her arm around me, she said, honey, just enjoy the view.

Don't sweat those details all of the time.

Enjoy the majesty of the view of the stuff that you're taking in.

And the same's true of the design stuff when we produce as well.

Don't focus on the boring details.

Don't criticize it based on what I've told you here.

Let the designs speak for themselves.

But what those designs need to be able to do at the same time,

is to have a strong backer, and you strongly behind them, telling your client,

your project team, why those designs are going to succeed.

The design themselves will have that magic in them.

You need to talk about that magic, but most importantly you need to talk about

how that magic is going to have an affect on the problem you are trying

to solve which is design because let's face it, design is so important.

What is interesting about this is that is comes back

full circle to where I studied where I started from.

So I want you to experience this and I am obsessed with usability.

And what's really interesting is this paper came out in, I think it was 1999.

And the title of this paper is What is Beautiful is Usable.

And it's true. And this is a fantastic advocate for

beauty and creativity in design.

If something is more beautiful, if something is more creative,

if it's got the finesse of a wonderful design associated with it, users and

people will make and perceive that design to be easier to use.

There is a space for creativity.

There is a space for beautiful design.

There's science behind it.

If something is more beautiful, people will perceive it to be easier to use.

Even the usability isn't particularly good, they'll make it,

they'll perceive it to be a lot more usable than it is.

There is absolutely a huge space for creativity and

emotion and design and beauty in the work that we produce.

Because it makes our stuff easier to use, because it is beautiful.

So it is worth going the extra mile to create that beautiful design.

Because that beautiful design, inherently, will be better.

And here's some science to prove why that's the case.

So ladies and gentleman If you give these five things: talk stories,

talk business, talk data, talk theory, and

talk objectively, your designs will be better.

Your designs will get build, your decisions will be upheld.

The stuff that you create will get out there in the real world.

If you don't do these things you're going to suffer,

and keep suffering from the same four problems that we saw before we started.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen >> [APPLAUSE]