Nam-ho Park: People-First Digital Experience Design – Episode 68

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Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last.

Nam-ho first designed experiences for people as an architecture student at Columbia University. The appreciation he developed then for the importance of genuinely human-centered design practice serves him well today.

In fact, he hopes that we’ll someday drop the word “digital” and return to genuinely human-centered strategy and design practices.

Nam-ho and I talked about:

• the giant spider that crawled across his desk as we began the interview
• his role as a teacher at the University of Washington’s iSchool
• his work with Carina, a startup that connects Medicaid patients with home health care aides
• his consulting work, helping clients navigate the technology landscape
• the importance of resolving people issues before settling on a technical solution to a business problem
• his comparison of content strategy and digital strategy practices
• his original background as an architect – and insights he learned then about the importance of experience design
• how his architecture background helps him visualize design complexity, appreciate standards, and properly contextualize tech platforms
• how quickly the digital landscape is changing and the ensuing tension that that creates between established principles and new ways of doing things
• David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous and its insights about the benefits of being able to categorize bodies of knowledge in different user-focused ways
• the “leakiness” of the logic around some kinds of knowledge
• the challenges of truly understanding user intent, especially in the era of AI and machine learning
• the implications for technology designers of the rapid change brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic
• his hope that we’ll drop the word “digital” at some point, and return to genuinely human-centered practices
• dark design patterns that serve businesses more than their customers and users

Nam-ho’s Bio

Nam-ho Park has been active in crafting compelling digital experiences for over 20 years. He is faculty at the University of Washington’s Information School and Senior Product Designer at Carina, a nonprofit platform that connects qualified caregivers with those seeking in-home care. He is also the principal of PLAIN Strategies, providing outcome-focused digital strategies for nonprofits and impact-driven organizations.

Having lived and worked in London, Seoul, Hanoi, New York, Washington D.C. and presently in Seattle for the past 9 years, he draws his experience from a lifetime of learning and exploring how we relate to technology and harness it for good. He has worked with the Washington Health Benefit Exchange, USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been a speaker at conferences including the Nonprofit Technology Conference, WebVisions and Drupalcon. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

When you think about digital strategy, you might picture someone orchestrating the bits of information that zip across the networks that connect computers and other technological gadgets. In fact, technology is just a small part of the story. Nam-ho Park and his fellow digital strategists actually spend most of their time focused on the human beings who plan, design, and use websites, apps, and other products. I really enjoyed talking with Nam-ho about his people-first, technology-last approach to digital experience design.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 68 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Nam-ho Park. Nam-ho is a digital strategist and a consultant in that field in Seattle, Washington. He also does a lot of other stuff, including he teaches in the I School, the Information School at the University of Washington there. So welcome to the show, Nam-ho, and I’d love it if you could tell the folks a little bit more about yourself and what you do there in Seattle.

Nam-ho:
Yeah, sure. So I just … There was a big spider crawling across my desk. I just need to squash it.

Larry:
I love that.

Nam-ho:
Okay.

Larry:
Usually, it’s a cat on the Internet, but we’ll take a spider.

Nam-ho:
Yeah. Great. So there’s a lot of things I do, like Larry mentioned. I mean, in terms of what I like doing the most in that order, I think teaching by far is the most gratifying. I teach at the Information School for the undergrads, and, specifically, I teach two classes. One is the capstone project class, which is the culmination of the four-year journey that informatics students in the Information School go through. Then I also teach design methods.

Nam-ho:
So, in terms of their major, the informatics major, I kind of bookend that experience. Design methods is one of the first classes that the majors take, and capstone is the last class that they take before they graduate, working in teams of four on projects that are sponsored or that they come up with by themselves. It’s really gratifying to see that full journey before they launch themselves into a career.

Nam-ho:
So that’s one thing that I do. Second thing that I do is I also work at an organization called Carina, which is a nonprofit startup that connects Medicaid-funded clients with validated, verified, unionized home care aides, because, in Washington state, people are allowed to encouraged to age in place. So when you get old, rather than going to a nursing home, you stay at home and have a home care aide come to you. There’s funding for that through Medicaid. So I’m the product designer there, going through our user experience and design and user research and usability testing.

Nam-ho:
I also have my own consulting practice, as Larry mentioned, PLAIN Strategies, that helps clients look at technology and to … It’s just me, and it’s just a conversation, helping them negotiate this technology landscape to make the right decisions around technology. Having been a consultant for over 15 years around technology, I find that clients usually come to technology companies with a very clear idea of what they want to do, but without having done the due diligence around how they got there. So a lot of times, they say, “We want to a WordPress site,” without really understanding why or if that’s actually the best solution.

Nam-ho:
So it’s to help people, clients have a conversation around why, the why around what they want to do so that they have a clear idea as to the goals that they want to achieve and also a good perspective around what it is that they need to know in order to make that right decision.

Larry:
I love that. That why is kind of the critical core question for every strategist I’ve ever talked to, and focusing on that … and what you just said, also, there’s … I think most strategists would take a tools last approach, that you figure out what you want to do and then figure out, “Okay, WordPress or Drupal or Salesforce,” or whatever the solution is, tthe technical implementation. So do you explicitly try to back people away from … Not from those decisions, but try to get them away from the tools and more into their intent about why they want to do something with technology?

Nam-ho:
Right, and this kind of comes out of my frustration when I was working in consulting, and we did technology consulting. We build platforms. By the time they came to us, they wanted a platform, and, to a platform company, it’s the platform, right? So to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? So we have to build them a platform, rather than asking them, “Is this the right thing to do?” So I really wanted to kind of move upstream further and to help clients kind of ask the questions why.

Nam-ho:
Sometimes I find that it’s not the technology. It’s actually the people. So there’s the governance. There’s how you work with each other, and there are a lot of things that you need to actually resolve before you even get to the technology. Once you’ve resolved that, you might actually end up not even needing the technology or working with the technology you already have or opting to do a different type of technology.

Larry:
Right. The lingo, the language that you’re using is going to be very familiar to my content strategy listeners. You’re using all the same terms that we use about governance and this observation that … I’ve had more than one guests say, “Yeah, this business is … The content strategy is about 93% people, 6% technology, and 1% magic dust,” or something like that.

Nam-ho:
Yeah.

Larry:
So that approach, that it’s mostly about people and then a governance framework to help them do what it is they want to do, and I guess so I see a lot of similarities between what we do in the content strategy world and what you, as articulating yourself as a digital strategist. Have you thought about how to contrast and compare those two disciplines or those two approaches to strategy, digital versus specifically content?

Nam-ho:
Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things that kind of encompass both, and there’s an overlap of both. The thing that I usually kind of tell my clients on day one is it’s never about the technology, right? It’s about people, right? It’s people, process, and then technology, right? So, in terms of the way that the two overlap, it’s about the people, and content is about the people, the way that they want to express themselves. It happens to be through a medium, through the technology, and there’s very specific things that content strategy needs to think about, in terms of how you communicate that through the various methods that you do, the communication.

Nam-ho:
But, ultimately, it’s about the people and how they want to communicate. Is the technology the right technology to bring them the right kind of voice or to connect them to the right kind of audience? How is the content delivered within that kind of context is always going to be important. So I think there’s significant overlap, and not just in the vocabulary, but in the way that we think about things between those two kinds of areas.

Larry:
Back to that, what you just said about how you approach things, when you were talking at the start, if I just cut it off at three minutes in, people would have just assumed that you were a UX designer, focused on product. I mean, that’s kind of how it started. Does that mesh with your background and approach?

Nam-ho:
Well, my original background is in architecture, right?

Larry:
Oh, right.

Nam-ho:
So I have a master’s in architecture, so-

Nam-ho:
Yeah, architecture with a capital A, right?

Larry:
Yeah.

Nam-ho:
What architecture kind of school taught me in terms of the foundational thing is it’s always about … In architecture, it’s not about the building, really. I mean, a building without the inhabitants is not a building. It’s sculpture, right? So it’s the mood of people through the building. It’s how it accommodates gatherings, how it accommodates meeting, how it accommodates life. That’s the essence, one of the key things that architecture school taught me.

Nam-ho:
The other thing that architecture school taught me was architecture is about layering of complex systems, right, whether that be understanding the cultural context, whether that be understanding the program, whether it’s understanding the site and the way that the light and the seasons change. Then you think about how the structure needs to be, how the HVAC system needs to be, how the enclosure needs to be. Then you think about how the programming of the space within that needs to be and then the interior decoration and all of those things. Each of those things are complex, and how do you layer those things into a pleasurable experience that people find deep joy in inhabiting is what architecture school teaches you. That’s the same thing.

Larry:
I was just going to say, the way you described that, it sounds like the perfect background for a user experience person.

Nam-ho:
Exactly.

Larry:
Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.

Nam-ho:
Yeah. Ever since I graduated architecture school and then left architecture, I’ve been struggling about what architecture taught me in terms of the way that I think about user experience and technology and what I do. That’s actually what it taught me. It’s like user experience and web design and working with users is the layering of complex systems, whether that be from the database layer, how the data needs to be structured, to how it needs to be accessed and to what is the platform, and then how’s the interface configured? How’s the usability configured? How is the user’s needs met? Each layer is pretty complex, and how you kind of understand those things and layer them into a pleasurable, meaningful experience is ultimately the goal.

Larry:
Right. Hey, I want to go back to … You said earlier … You’ve used the term platform a couple times, and I think, in some cases in the consulting world, the platform is like … That’s like the technology solution that you’re selling. That’s one way that term is used. But there’s also the way you just used it in that prior example, was more about the platform like the front end, the view of that complex system that the user is taking of it. I guess can you unpack for me a little bit your use of the word platform and maybe part of the frustration that drove you from your prior world and how the word platform manifests now for you?

Nam-ho:
Yeah. So, I mean, I draw a lot from my architecture background, and, in architecture, there’s a couple of things that enable modern architecture to actually be. One of them is standardization, right? Previously, way back when, everybody cut their own wood and made their own nails and put everything together their own way, right?

Larry:
Yeah.

Nam-ho:
Nothing was standardized, and then things started to become standardized. The two by four was standardized. Nail sizes and screw sizes, standardized. Container sizes, standardized. The beams, the metal kind of framing became standardized, right? So, in the larger sense, that’s the platform, right? That’s the foundation upon which we enable architecture, whether that be a 100-story skyscraper or a small home, to be created in an efficient way.

Nam-ho:
So, to me, platform, whether that be … In technology, WordPress is a platform. Drupal is a platform. We consider these platforms, but I tend to think of it, from my kind of user experience point of view, platform is that technology which enables us to build on top of, right? That creates that efficiency.

Nam-ho:
So, I mean, to me, that’s the way that I define platform, and that way, I’ve become agnostic to whether it’s this platform or that platform, as we talk about in technology. Rather than thinking of it in those terms, I see whether something, technology, framework, all those things kind of meet the needs and provides the flexibility and the affordance in order to achieve the purpose that we’re trying to deliver, in terms of the goal that the user is trying to achieve.

Larry:
Right, and the way you just said … There’s so much in there. Again, the architecture analogy is perfect, but there’s also … Like you were talking, the examples you use of the nails and the lumber and the beam thickness and whatever being … But there’s also practices that are kind of maybe not standardized, but there are sort of acknowledged and understood, if not … I think best practices is kind of an overused term, but, in any one profession, there’s better ways to write JavaScript or to write HTML or CSS or to design a relational database and those kinds of things. Would you put that right alongside those sort of … and I think the analogy to the nails and the hammers would be standards, like HTTP and HTML and the W3C stuff and all that. Is that accurate?

Nam-ho:
Yeah. I mean, all analogies aren’t really tight, and there’s always kind of gaps. When it serves a purpose of illustrating a point, I use architectural analogy to talk about platform. It’s helpful, but once you start going into the details, it tends to break down.

Larry:
No, exactly. Yeah.

Nam-ho:
There are a lot of specific things to each profession that is different.

Larry:
Yeah.

Nam-ho:
One of the really interesting things, I think, is how fast this landscape is changing, right? What we used five years ago or ten years ago isn’t what we use now. There’s legacy systems, and that’s the same. I think that’s always a tension in any profession, whether that be in technology, whether that be in digital strategy or content strategy. We’re constantly slaving away to establish the principles. But, at the same time, we’re constantly striving to break those principles, because new things come up and new innovations come up.

Nam-ho:
If you take a look at architecture, right, architecture has transformed over the years, right? Just take a look at Seattle in the last ten years. All the houses are boxy now, right? It’s really interesting, and that has to do with the technology. That has to do with the efficiency. That has to do with marketability and all of those things. So what we define as being foundational and elemental, all that serves a purpose, but if that purpose isn’t adapting to the new changes, then we have to understand enough to know when to break those.

Larry:
Yeah. I think what you just said, that dynamic of the ever-evolving, ever-changing landscape, that’s really coming to a head right now. We’re recording this kind of what, about two months into the whole coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic? I think, for example, a lot of state unemployment systems are scrambling to find COBOL programmers to fix their systems, to get them up to speed to handle the new stuff.

Nam-ho:
Right.

Larry:
That’s kind of like having a house with 1920s plumbing that, all of a sudden, you have to fix, because you’re having a big party or something.

Nam-ho:
Right.

Larry:
I guess as part of the platform thing you were talking about earlier and the principles that underlie that, it seems like we’re getting to an age now where some of the platforms, I think of big monolithic CMSs that are kind of end-to-end, authoring, storage, delivery, presentation, layer stuff, in some areas, now we’re seeing a disarticulation of that in things like the Jamstack, where you have a separate, headless CMS and an intermediate layer of APIs that connect together and then an independent front end that’s stitching that back together. That seems like a general kind of principle that could help maybe …

Larry:
I don’t know. Again, the architecture analogy might fall apart here, but it seems like there’s … and among the new practices, it seems like there’s, built in, a way to cope with this change. Is that true to you?

Nam-ho:
Yeah. I mean, that’s hard to kind of articulate or see in the future. Actually, let’s go back in the past, to the past.

Larry:
Okay.

Nam-ho:
There was this wonderful book that I think David Weinberger wrote called Everything is Miscellaneous. I mean, he wrote this book. I can’t remember. It’s like maybe in the early 2000s, right, where he talks about how knowledge … Previously, we had the Dewey decimal system, and everything needed to fit within the Dewey decimal system. Sometimes it broke down, right? He illustrates a couple of points where it breaks down, when you have a monolithic kind of classification system.

Nam-ho:
With the advent of the Internet, I think he very, very insightfully said everything is going to be miscellaneous, categorized as miscellaneous, except you pull it out and you group it in different ways. That becomes incredibly dynamic, right? So I think technology is finally catching up to that idea that everything is miscellaneous. It’s out there, and it really depends on how you reap it or how you kind of package it and how you kind of distribute it, right? That becomes meaningful. Different groups will see things different ways, and different cultures will categorize things in different ways, right? So now we’re, I think, finally catching up to that idea, where we have the flexibility to be able to do that without having to rely on monolithic systems.

Larry:
Right. You just said there one of the foundations of I think both of our works, is that notion of taxonomy. I’ve never built a taxonomy that didn’t end up with a couple of miscellaneous categories. It’s frustrating. But, for the most part, you can, once you’re operating within a constrained domain. It’s usually not too hard to sort things out. But I’m curious about that Everything is Miscellaneous, and what you said, it sounds like a more user-centered approach to this. It depends on the context of the person who’s coming to look at whatever it is you have, that they’re kind of building their own taxonomy, and they have their own way of thinking about it. Is that what you’re getting at?

Nam-ho:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think a lot of the technology, whether that be folksonomy or that be taxonomy, whether that be categorization of various other things have enabled us to really take advantage of what we want to see and what we’re really interested in. I think it needs to be balanced, because there is a serendipitous discovery that happens when you go to a library and browse the stacks, right, that you would never experience.

Nam-ho:
I think with YouTube or Facebook and social media, you just get fed stuff that you like or they’ve deemed as something that they think you like, right? So that becomes problematic, right, because there isn’t that kind of leakiness, should I say, of knowledge, right? Knowledge isn’t tight, and it’s not defined by things that you think you like. It’s defined by, “Oh, that’s interesting,” right? “I never thought of it that way.” There’s a kind of leakiness to that kind of logic and imperfection to that logic. I think that’s something that I think, as technologists, we struggle with, right?

Larry:
Yeah. I’m thinking of … I had Sara Wachter-Boettcher on this show a couple years ago, and her book, Technically Wrong, have you read that?

Nam-ho:
No, I haven’t.

Larry:
That’s great. You’d love it, just based on what you just said, but there’s many other people who have written about this as well, but that notion that people are coming with their way of they want to look at things. Yet, the systems, the digital systems that we build come from … and, classically, it’s like a privileged techno perspective that often misses what the user is actually looking for. I guess this kind of gets back into methods of UX design and just digital design. To what extent do you think we as a profession are recognizing those dynamics and getting better at kind of meeting the user on their own ground and actually meeting that user intent?

Nam-ho:
That’s a really hard question. Honestly, I don’t know, because user intent is something that is really hard to understand and measure, and what people express as intent might not actually be it, right? I think that’s … I mean, if you can understand that, that’s gold, right? I think, as a UX professional, “What is the intent of my user?” is the one most vexing question that we’re constantly using all of these different methods to try to understand, but never actually ultimately understand it, because I don’t think, a lot of the times, that users understand what intent truly is.

Nam-ho:
I think with algorithms, with AI, with machine learning, we’re getting into kind of an interesting territory around the fact that maybe AIs understand our intent better than we do, which is this really scary. They recommend things that we might have a propensity to want even before seeing it or wanting it. So I don’t know. I tend to think that we will have free will, but in terms of the way that things are being analyzed and the way the technology is going, when we start to mine the intent of the user, it can get into very, very kind of ethically murky territory.

Larry:
Yeah. As you were just talking about that, I was like, “Oh, yeah, the whole field of ethics and design ethics and how we operate and the arrival of AI and machine and all these new technologies that are just going to” … Well, there’s that famous … What was that bot that Microsoft released a couple years ago that just immediately learned to be a racist troll? It’s like, “Oh, crap.” We’re releasing a lot of less than noble creations into the world. But yeah.

Larry:
I noticed we’re we’re getting close to time. I always want to make sure before we get to the end that I give you a last chance. Is there anything that we’ve talked about that inspired additional thought or just anything last that’s on your mind that you want to make sure we share with folks before we wrap up?

Nam-ho:
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that COVID-19, March went incredibly slow. April went incredibly fast, and I think everybody is coming to terms with, well, what this means, right, and what role does technology play, right? I think technology plays a pretty big role, albeit not the best role, right? I think you’ve heard of Zoom fatigue. That is real. You’ve heard of technology’s failing huge parts of our population, the whole equity issue.

Nam-ho:
So technology is never a silver bullet, right? That’s something that, as a person who works with technology all the time, and it’s something that I need to remind my students constantly, because they think that an app . . . problems, how much does it solve? How much does it create new problems? How much does it prevent us from connecting in ways that we find more valuable and prudent, right? So, as a digital strategist, let’s go back to that term digital strategy.

Larry:
Exactly.

Nam-ho:
Yeah. What is at the heart of digital strategy? It’s people – and there’s that word digital, and I’m hoping that, at some point, we’ll lose the word digital, because what’s not digital these days? You don’t say digital photography. You say just photography. There’s no film. You can’t buy film anymore. You have to go out of your way to buy film, right?

Larry:
That’s right.

Nam-ho:
So because everything has become digital. I have to constantly remind myself to come back to what is important, which is human centeredness, right, whether I am increasing somebody’s access, whether I’m increasing equity, whether I’m increasing, on the whole, making things better for people, rather than making things better for a small group of people, or, even worse, making things worse for people, right? I have to remind my students, especially around user experience, that there are what’s called “dark patterns,” right, of UX, where …

Nam-ho:
Netflix, great example. They’ll make you binge watch stuff, right, and really lose track of time, right, because they have that next episode button right there when you finish it. They know exactly how to get people’s attention and keep people hanging on, right? In part, we recognize that there’s free will. In part, we recognize we give in to our certain desires in a certain way.

Nam-ho:
So, again, what does it mean to provide meaningful, valuable ways of thinking about technology and strategies around providing for that, I think, is at the heart of what I’ve learned, these many years, consulting around technology.

Larry:
Great. Well, I love that a guy who identifies as a digital strategist is a people person and not a technophile. So thanks for being that way. Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Nam-ho. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Nam-ho:
Great. Thanks for inviting me. This is great.