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Leah Buley and Joe NatoliBoth UX and content professionals routinely find themselves on teams where they are the sole practitioner of their craft.
Leah Buley and Joe Natoli recently revised “The UX Team of One” (use code ELLESS15 at checkout to get 15% off through then end of February) to share their pragmatic take on solo UX practice, deftly balancing the application of human-centered research insights with the need to show the business value of UX work.
We talked about:
- the origins of their book, “The UX Team of One,” in Leah’s early UX work at Adaptive Path
- the crucial role of content in UX
- Joe’s take on the importance of balancing user needs and business needs in UX practice
- Leah’s approach to showing the value of UX and research work
- the challenges of practicing UX in organizations populated with complicated and complex human beings
- their pragmatic approach that emphasizes methods over frameworks and that can adapt to different organizational approaches to UX
- the power of sharing design artifacts with stakeholders who have differents points of view
- their take on the benefits of collaborative teams over silo-ed functional organization
- Leah’s take on the importance of always talking to customers and getting real experiences in front of real people
- Joe’s take on the importance of figuring out what actually needs to be done over trying to be an omnipotent UX expert
Leah’s bio
In her 20+ years in the user experience field, Leah Buley has held just about every role in the stack: front end engineer, user interface designer, information architect, researcher, strategist, and market analyst covering the UX field itself. Her #1 takeaway from all those experiences is that all great products start from great human-centered insights.
Leah’s experience spans agencies, startups, and Fortune 100 companies. She is currently a Sr. Director of Consumer Insights and User Research at Lovevery. She has previously held roles in user experience research, strategy, and design at Intuit, Invision, Adaptive Path, and Forrester.
She is a co-author of the book The User Experience Team of One, now in its second edition. While at Invision, Leah developed a body of research on design maturity that is widely used by organizations to benchmark and evolve their UX practices. Her research has been published in HBR, Forbes, Communication Arts, Tech.eu, and Information Age. Her talks and workshops at venues like SXSW, UX Week, and UX London have a reputation for being high-energy, hands on, and just a little bit quirky.
Connect with Leah online
Joe’s bio
Joe Natoli is a UX consultant, author and speaker — and a household name in UX and product design. For three decades, he’s advised, trained and empowered the UX, design and product development teams of some of the world’s largest organizations, from Fortune 100 companies to U.S. Government agencies and startups. He has published ten books — the most recent being the second edition of the bestselling The User Experience Team of One with Leah Buley for Rosenfeld Media — and is a regular keynote speaker and lecturer at industry conferences and corporate events across the globe.
Joe has also taught more than 350,000 students through his online courses and his own UX 365 Academy, at ux365academy.com, in addition to a private coaching practice.
Joe’s approach to improving product UX and design focuses on addressing systemic, personal dynamics issues across individuals, teams and organizations: combating impostor syndrome and increasing self-confidence, improving communication and collaboration, addressing fear and dysfunction driving poor management practices and redesigning inappropriate, counterproductive processes.
His experience has been that when these root causes are improved and solved, the output of the work—and the experience people have with it—improves dramatically.
Joe lives in Washington DC with his wife Eli and three kids, and he strives to be the person his dog Rosie thinks he is. You can find Joe (as well as a voluminous collection of free UX + product design resources) online at givegoodux.com.
Connect with Joe online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 208. Creating digital products is a team sport. Some of those teams are bigger than others. And some are just one person. Both content and UX practitioners often find themselves in roles where they are the lone practitioner of their craft. Leah Buley and Joe Natoli have both been there. They’ve recently revised their book, “The UX Team of One,” which emphasizes pragmatic methods and shows how human-centered UX insights can create the most value for an organization.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 208 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Leah Buley and Joe Natoli. They’re the co-authors of the second edition of the book, The UX Team of One, published by Rosenfeld Media. So welcome Leah and Joe. You’re the co-authors of the book, but I know you do other things as well. So Leah, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Leah:
Will be happy to and thanks so much for having us here today, Larry. So let’s see. I am … Yeah. I’m a UX industry veteran, I would say. I’ve been around making websites, actually, believe it or not, since the last century. And I started out a long time ago as a front end engineer and then a self-taught UX designer, which is how the book came to be, the first edition. More recently and for about the last decade, I’ve been focusing pretty intensely on research. So I currently lead a consumer insights and UX research practice at a startup called Lovevery.
Larry:
Oh, nice. Well, welcome. And Joe, what are you up to these days?
Joe:
Thanks for having me first of all. Greatly appreciated. I’m a UX consultant. I’ve been working in product design and UX for the last … I don’t know. 34, 35 years of my life. Spent a majority of the last, I don’t know, maybe decade teaching online as well as consulting and having an opportunity to write wonderful books like this. 350,000 students at this point. I have to say that out loud because I’ve decided I’m going to start celebrating my successes finally at this age. And that’s where I spend a lot of my time. UX 365 Academy is my own training site, but there’s a lot that comes my way that excites me and this is a perfect example. When Rosenfeld approached me and said, “Hey, would you like to be involved?” And when I found out what book it is, I was like, “Yes. I don’t even want to hear the rest of the sentence. The answer is yes, and I’ll figure out how to make it happen.” So I’m an ungodly fortunate human being.
Larry:
I listened to your podcast with Lou and the story, was that he didn’t even finish asking the question. Well, yes, of course. But I’d love to back up. Leah, can you tell us a little bit about the origins of the book? The first edition that was what, 2013 it was published, I believe?
Leah:
Yep. Launched or published I should say, in 2013. The book came about actually from a conference talk that I did a few years before that of the same name. And it was really just my reflections on my personal experience as somebody working in-house in small organizations who understood this idea of user experience but worked with a bunch of people who didn’t. The backstory for me is, as I mentioned, I was self-taught as a user interface designer really. I think I had some successes, but the experience was very … It was stressful in a way too because I felt like I spent a lot of time in my own little space making pictures of screens and drawing boxes and arrows and in a way working out the arguments that I was going to make when I presented these things to my colleagues. Building up a defense.
Leah:
And sometimes they liked what I created and sometimes they didn’t. But that feeling of I have to convince them though why this is the right thing didn’t necessarily always feel great. Move along a few years into my career and I had the opportunity to join a consultancy. One of the really first user experience consultancies called Adaptive Path, which was in San Francisco and started in the early 2000s. I just saw there that they were doing a different user experience than the one that I was doing on my own. And it was so much less about making the best design and convincing everybody that it was the best design and so much more about a participatory process that got clients and team members looking at and thinking critically about the user experience together and then put customers into the mix so people could really see how it played out. And there was just better outcomes that came from that.
Leah:
And once I saw what that looked like, I realized, my gosh, if I had known any of these things when I was in-house on my own, I think I could have been a lot more satisfied in my work, but also more successful on behalf of the companies that I was working for. So this book was really my attempt to turn what I was doing and seeing an Adaptive Path into these micro practices that somebody in a small place without a lot of resources, without a lot of allies could do successfully on their own. And that was what the book was about.
Larry:
Yeah. No. And for folks who don’t know because, well, I go back to that era as well, Adaptive Path was one of the premier UX agency. In fact, Jesse James Garret-
Joe:
They spear headed that whole movement.
Larry:
Yeah. I’m sorry, go ahead Joe.
Joe:
No. I’m sorry. They spear headed that whole movement. I can’t overestimate the importance of that firm and everybody who worked there. It’s impossible.
Leah:
I feel the same way. I was just a fan girl who had the opportunity to get to join the party, which was spectacular and so educational. I really feel like that was a really singular special experience to get to be a part of that.
Larry:
That story you shared … And we talked a tiny bit about this before we went on the air. This is a content strategy focused podcast, but I don’t know the exact demographics of my audience, but I think there’s probably equal numbers of people who are firmly in your field who do content design or that practice. But a lot of people are still more in publishing-esque content practices. So I wonder for those folks, maybe Joe, you could ground us in how you all define … The two of you, because I think everybody defines it their own way. But how the two of you define and use in the book the idea of the field of UX. How you would describe it.
Joe:
Well, I want to connect this to content first because I think that point is important and it gets overlooked a lot. Ever since I was a graphic designer way back in the ’80s, content is the linchpin of everything. Otherwise, you’re just coming to look at things that are nice to look at. Content is what makes something useful and usable and valuable and desirable in a lot of cases. I’m not going to come to a website or open an app or use an enterprise system to look at it. I’m going to use it to access content and data. To absorb things or do things or edit or create or one of those things. It just gets left out of the conversation a lot I think. So I wanted to make sure that I said that because I think it’s a critical part of everything. User experience as a whole is all those things.
Joe:
I’ve never seen this as a narrow definition. There are lots of people you’ll find online who believe UX is like, “Well, can you work in Figma?” That’s an infinitesimal part of … User experience is everything. I used to tell clients all the time, I still tell clients this, it’s how you answer the phone, it’s how you answer support calls. It’s how well your chatbot responds to input. It’s your website, it’s your demeanor, it’s how you interact with … It’s everything. It’s never just the stuff on the screen. All right. It’s everything. My thing in the book obviously is I always say it’s a value loop. You have users on one side and business on the other side, and both parties have to get value out of whatever happens with that product for the user to use it and the business to care about it.
Larry:
And Joe, I’d love it if you could elaborate just a bit on that UX value loop that you talk about because I think that’s a good way to … It balances nicely, consumers, customers, and users and the business prerogatives.
Joe:
Well, I always say that one of the problems with user experiences that the term user in the title because it skews our focus. And a lot of what you read and see in here, in courses, in conferences, in whatever, talk about the user side. We’re here to fight for the users. Of course we are. But there’s a business who’s investing money and time and effort and paying a bunch of people’s salaries to develop this product and put it out into the world. The only way a business cares about good UX, cares about improving that product is if some real bottom line or top line residual value comes to them through use. So people use the thing and a business gets value, now they have a vested reason, vested interest in saying, “Yeah, we’re going to throw some more money and more effort at this to make it better.”
Joe:
If that part of the loop isn’t satisfied, the business side, that improvement doesn’t happen. The product languishes, good enough is good enough for a long time until people just get fed up and leave. All sorts of things happen as a result of that, and that’s been true my entire life. I think that we leave out the business part of the equation at our peril. And one of the amazing things about Leah’s first edition of this book is that it hit that squarely on the head. And I say that as someone who read the book when it came out. And again, that’s why one of the reasons it was so important to be involved in this because to me, this is the full picture and it’s what a lot of things I see miss.
Larry:
Leah, I’d love to go back to that. You were at Adaptive Path back then. I love Jesse James Garrett’s five-layers model and Joe’s value loop. Did you have an underlying schema or organization idea about UX when you came into this?
Leah:
Yeah. To be honest, I think my goal with this was to simplify it. I think as a field we love frameworks and I love frameworks as much as anybody, and it’s really tempting to create new models for helping people see things. But what I wanted to do was give people something really simple to work with. And so the book itself actually has this four-part model where it’s like you come in, you can assess what you have, you can move into seeing how people are really using that. You then move into a iterative exploration of how to make that better. And then you launch and you reassess. And there’s so many versions of that same model that other people have created too. So you find that in the book as well. But I have to say … And this is maybe a controversial take. But after doing this so many years, I feel like I’ve gone through my model’s phase.
Leah:
And at this point the most impacts I find that I have is really by getting in deep with the work itself and figuring out what are we trying to accomplish as a business? What are the real legitimate KPIs that someone’s going to pay attention to that we think we can change? And then backing our way in from that, what are we trying to accomplish and how do we get that done?
Leah:
And so even in my research practice now actually … And I lead a small team of researchers and we’re always trying to communicate our insights into the company. When we feel like we need to start with a framework I think my inclination sometimes is like, we need to make this more concrete. We need to get this more grounded on the actual business goals and what specific steps are actually impeding specific KPIs. And I find that has in a way made us more credible partners to people at every level of the business.
Larry:
Joe.
Joe:
I’m in violent agreement with all that seriously, because the value loop is an overarching, it’s a general principle. It’s not a framework to follow by any stretch. I have said multiple times over I don’t know how many years, if I never see another UX process diagram again as long as I live, I will be tremendously happy. To believe that you can narrow down this process to this wonderfully pristine diagram that makes everything look very ordered and very simple and try to apply it inside an organization where human beings are involved, messy, emotional, idiosyncratic, politically motivated, financially motivated human beings. All sorts of things. Okay. It’s messy. It’s a hell of a lot more messy than that.
Joe:
I am fully in agreement with Leah, and I’m reiterating this because I think it’s tremendously important. Young folks, especially coming into this profession, get very hung up on the fact that I have to learn these processes and I have to be able to execute these frameworks. Wrong. Every day, wrong. Every project is different, every situation is different. Every scenario from client to client, from project to project, from product to product, from place to place where you work, it’s always going to be different. There’s no one right way. Like Leah just said the smartest thing to do is to start with what is and evaluate what’s the reality of this right now?
Larry:
Yeah. I wonder as you both talk, is there still a value in those artifacts as onboarding materials for people who are new to the profession? Because you’re methods-
Joe:
The book is full of methods. But those methods … Again, I know I’m sounding like a fanboy myself, but this is why I signed on. Every single one of those things is practical and does not rely on any perfect conditions to be used, which is why they’ve stood the test of time a decade plus on. Now we’ve adapted some things of course. But this is the bottom line. You can always do these things and get insight and get answers and be put on the right strategic path. These things transcend trends or frameworks or change even in my opinion.
Larry:
Leah, you look like you wanted to say something.
Leah:
I just think Joe’s being really profound and I’m shaking my head along with it. Yeah. I like Joe’s emphasis on methods versus frameworks in this instance, because I think a lot of times it’s like you come in with an idea of, okay, we need to do the double diamond from start to finish. You could advocate for that strongly with your engineering partners and your product partners and your business partners. It sounds like you’re trying to lay a lot of work onto a team that needs move fast. Whereas I think methods are a little bit different because they’re about what’s the situation we find ourselves in right now and what’s the best tool to unblock this situation? And it’s a slightly more flexible way of working and better aligned with the reality I think of a lot of businesses.
Joe:
You mix and match. And even these processes, and I’m pretty sure that Leah would agree, even these processes are flexible.
Leah:
Yeah. For sure.
Joe:
There are pieces and parts to everything. It doesn’t mean you have to do the thing start to finish. It means you take the pieces that deliver value. You’re going to be over the target for X amount of time anyway. What you do with it, I think is a matter of constantly evaluating and reevaluating. You try something, you get some insight, you go forward and you learn from that. Even if you made a left turn, you should have made a right.
Larry:
And that gets into the craft of UX. I hear what you’re saying, that that focus on methods makes a lot of sense. I’m wondering though how that manifests in collaboration. Because none of this happens in isolation. And those methods … And I think in particular UX research, and you talk about this in the book, like, oh, that’s too expensive. That takes too much time. In those situations … And there’s many other examples like that. And I’ll just point out that there’s many analogous situations for content people as well that we face similar things. But especially to that point of it’s too expensive, it takes too much time. Are we still at the point where you have to rationalize and justify the time and expense, or are we a little better established at this point?
Leah:
I think we’ll always be at that point honestly, I think there are just different levels of resourcing that organizations find themselves in. And if you’re in a place where it’s like you’re under the gun and you don’t have a lot of extra room or time, people will feel that and I think they’ll be less inclined to have a leap of faith on some of this stuff. That’s part of the reason for the approach of the book, honestly. A lot of the methods are themselves designed to be things that can be done either big or little. So even guerrilla user research or in-house testing with your real coworkers as opposed to trying to go out and do a big recruit, those are all baked into the philosophy of the UX team of one. I tend to, as a general approach, feel like it’s better to do something quick and dirty and scrappy and without asking for a lot of permission upfront, and then bring what you found rather than try to make the case and spend all your effort in getting everyone on board for the bigger thing.
Leah:
So yeah. That’s just a philosophical approach of the book. But I think it will always be the case that you’ll have some places where it’s going to be harder to get a buy-on for the big things so you’re going to have to figure out how to do a lean.
Joe:
And that varies from project to project as well. For larger companies, for example, let’s say they have six different products. Not all the profit margins on each one of those products is the same. So if one of them has a very small margin, you’re only going to get so much time over the target to improve it because the investment company has to make it isn’t worth it. It doesn’t make sense on paper and it wouldn’t make sense for any of us if we knew the math behind it. So yeah, you’re always going to have to speak to that to some degree. But again, we’re obviously in agreement we did this thing together, but I think that you can always go small and I think you’re almost always to Leah’s point, you’re almost always better off going small first and seeing what that gets you.
Leah:
Yeah. Sorry to cut you off, Joe. But I think to your question, Larry, it’s interesting that you mentioned user research as an example of that. And this may just be my bias because this is where I focus. But I do feel like when you’re in a situation where the team feels really uncertain about the direction, it is always the case that getting something in front of somebody real is an un-blocker in an important way. So yeah. There’s different places in the process where I think it’s like things start to feel a little more optional, but I feel like it always comes back again and again to talking to real people is the most powerful tool in your arsenal in that situation.
Larry:
That’s the thing I’ve learned-
Joe:
Fastest way out of the gate always.
Larry:
And Leah, you were reminding me of … I’ve had probably 20 different UX researchers teach me this lesson over and over again that the most powerful thing you can do is just one good quote from 30 interviews you did or something, and you plopped that down in front of the CEO and all of a sudden, oh crap, they don’t … That holds up into your practice as well?
Leah:
Oh, fully. Yeah. And honestly, even actually after Adaptive Path, I spent some time at Intuit, which Intuit’s really interesting. They had a big investment in design thinking, in partnership with Stanford D School or really early on. So it’s a really interesting place to be doing a lot of this work. One of the things that we had executives do actually while I was there, was make them sit down and dog food their own software. It wasn’t even a matter of go watch a customer do this. It was like sit down and actually you follow and try to do it. And they didn’t even have to hear the quote. It was just like, “Oh, I’m a real person who actually did this myself and now I understand.” So there’s so many different variations of this that can be much lighter, but you just sit in meetings for so long and you circle in these theoretical arguments with each other for so long, and the actual thing you’re creating starts to develop this level of abstraction that you can’t see it clearly anymore.
Leah:
So whether that’s watching somebody who’s new to it use it, or if you’re an executive who hasn’t touched your product in a really long time, using it yourself. Anything you can do to break the spell and just see a thing fresh, it’s really hard to accomplish actually as a business sometimes. But it is the most powerful thing you can do. Actually … Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Larry:
That’s delightfully diabolical too, to get them. Joe, do you have any tricks like that? I was just talking to a friend yesterday about research jujitsu.
Joe:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Same thing, what Leah had just described. I’ve asked people point-blank, “Well, when’s the last time you actually used this as a user?” And they’re like, “Well, I haven’t.” “You should and I think we should do that right now.” And also the other thing that I do religiously is I’m a big boxes and arrows guy. Especially when I can tell that there are problems, redundancies, obstacles, whatever in our process. I sit people … And it’s usually managers, product folks, leads, CEOs, people with strong opinions who aren’t necessarily present. I say walk me through how somebody uses this. And I usually do it with team people in the room.
Joe:
And I start drawing boxes, arrows. It looks real ordered at first. Nice linear process. Everything makes sense. And then people start volunteering opinions. Well, actually what happens there is that that information goes here and then this person has to do this with it. And as I draw, this wonderful diagram gets so completely convoluted and ugly and we’re running out of room and we’re constantly going back to other parts to draw in additional parts. And now what’s happening in the room is that everybody fully realizes just how messy and unordered and undisciplined in some cases, this entire process is for anyone who has to use it and how much wasted effort there is and work, and how many people are involved in the process internally that probably don’t need to be. All sorts of things start to show themselves in that diagram. And that’s the reason I do it.
Leah:
This actually ties in nicely to one of the methods that’s in the book actually, which is the black hat session. Which the idea of this is essentially, you put the experience up on the wall and you invite everybody who works on it in a collaborative fashion to just note any single thing about the experience that they think is confusing or unclear or they’ve been wondering about. It’s inspired by Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats actually, where it’s a technique where you can actually adopt a number of deliberate points of view to help spur a creative process.
Leah:
But there’s something particularly for the context of trying to make a product better, that’s really powerful about inviting everybody to just express all these secret reservations or doubts they’ve had. And it doesn’t mean that they all have to be handled because then that connects to, I think Joe’s really important point about what’s ultimately most valuable for the business to be addressing. But at least it … I don’t know. It creates a safe space for people to talk about what could be better and what we’re just barely tolerating. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Joe:
And that’s the right word. Safe is the right word. Plenty of times one of my favorite things is when someone says, “That really doesn’t work that way.” And my favorite thing to do is to hand them the marker and say, “Okay. Walk us through it. Let’s do it. All right. Tell me what happens here. What’s wrong?” When someone makes a face … I’ve had people make a face when I get to a point in the process, people go … And I’ll stop. “Okay, what’s the face about? You need to tell me.” And everybody laughs. It’s like, “Well, at that point you might as well go make a sandwich because the system’s going to be churning for at least 60 seconds before it shows you anything.” I’m like, “Uh-huh. Circle this in red. We’ll come back to it.” Yeah. There’s nothing better.
Larry:
I’m going to try to figure out how to add your facial expression to the transcript Joe.
Leah:
Eye roll. I would add what Joe’s talking about is so valuable because it’s helping a team understand how an existing system really works. But if you are a user experience designer or you are a content designer, to actually open up your own work product to that process is such a trust building thing. Because it says, “I’m not here to poke holes in what we already have, but I have a proposed design. I have a proposed content system or structure or hierarchy. Now, colleagues, help me pick this apart and make it better.” And that’s just inspired from classic design critique, basically a crit session. But it tells your colleagues, I’m not precious about what I created. I’m invested in making this better too, and I need your input to do that. So that’s again, very representative of the spirit of the UX.
Larry:
Let me ask a little bit more about that because creating that trust and safety within a UX team or even within a tight product team and so there’s that scenario, and then earlier we were talking about if you’re lucky enough to have the ear of the executives and getting them to actually use the product, somewhere in between those conceptually, maybe is this more broad cross-functional collaboration that’s going on. Are you both successful in creating that trust and safety when you’re working with product and engineering and marketing and other folks?
Leah:
Yeah. I think it depends a lot actually on the context of the organization structure. The goal is to build that trust and safety with all those colleagues. But it happens a lot faster if you’re in an organization that has squad structure, I would say, where there’s mutual accountability among those colleagues. It gets harder when it feels more functional and siloed and you have to first build even the relationships to than build the working practices to then have that trust and safety. I guess I want to be realistic that org structure has an impact here too. But I’ve seen these methods be successful in both places, and really it’s about creating moments to come together, whether that’s a workshop or your morning standup and to invite the input of your cross-functional colleagues into this process. Can be effective in either structure.
Joe:
And I’ll agree with all that. Silos are the most difficult obstacle without question because what really needs to be happening … And again, for three decades I’ve been doing this. I’ve never seen it any other way. What needs to happen in every situation is that all those people from all those different disciplines, even if you’re just talking about let’s say product content, there’s UX, there’s development, there’s IT, whatever. All those people really need to be in the room and they really do need to be working side by side. And quite frankly, let’s just take design and development for a second. I hate the whole dual track agile thing where design is ahead of development. And every two weeks we get together and share what we’ve got. And both parties are completely surprised at what they see. It doesn’t solve anything. You need people working side by side checking in with each other multiple times a day to say, “Look, here’s what I’m thinking. I feel like if we do this and try this, this might be our answer. What do you think?” And the developer goes, “Maybe. I’ve got a module that works very similar to that. It’s not quite that, but I could show it to you and maybe we could customize a little bit and that might get us there in a week and a half instead of six weeks.”
Joe:
So now the outcome of that conversation is, all right, let’s try it. Instead of screwing around for five weeks and then finding out, okay, this is not going to work, and then everybody’s frustrated. I think that silos are a recipe for opposition in general. So the more people you can get to play in the sandbox with you, you still need to facilitate. I think the outcome is just infinitely better. So Leah’s right, the structure of the organization has everything to do with how easy or how difficult that is. Because you’ve got to make people feel safe. You got to make them feel like their voice needs to be heard. Because the fact is it does, but people often feel like that’s not the case because they’re left out of all these conversations.
Larry:
Yeah. I love both of your approaches to that collaboration and building that trust and safety and then how you actually do it. And also you both expressed a lot of pragmatism, which I love too. And you just opened a whole other conversation there, Joe. But we’re running close to time. I like to keep these around a half hour. I literally could talk to you two forever. But I would like to wrap up, but before we wrap, is there anything last? Now I’ll give each of you a chance. If there’s anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just something you really want to make sure we share before we wrap up. Whichever one of you wants to go first.
Leah:
Yeah. I’ll start us off. My favorite part of the conversation is the one where we talked about the importance of talking to customers. And I think the book itself has a structure where at the end of every chapter, which they’re packed with methods. We say, if you only do one thing, and that’s just to say, if you can’t do all this, start here first. And I think at the highest level, even the book itself is the philosophy of the book. If you only do one thing from this book, it’s think about how to get real experiences in front of real people as efficiently and quickly as you can. And that will be your secret weapon. Whether you’re a content person or a product person or UX person, or just someone in the business who wants to make things better. So that’s my philosophy.
Larry:
That was the last question I had on my list. So thanks for anticipating that Leah. Joe.
Joe:
Nice. For me I think they’re two parts, but to me they’re the same thing. This conversation, that run through the entire book. Okay. Number one is your job as a UXer, as a product designer, if you’re a content designer of any sort, content strategist, you don’t have to be, right. That’s not the job. The job is not to just pull correct answers out of your head. The job is to figure out what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. Just like in terms of UX. It’s not necessarily about what people want, it’s more about finding out why they want it in the first place. And because of all that, all the more reason to say that there’s never one way to arrive at those answers.
Joe:
So I’ll go back to the approach in these pages, which is here are a bunch of ways to get at the truth, to get at reality, to get at what’s going on here, where is the problem really? Or where is it that we’re under serving people or what could we be giving people that we’re not? And there’s any number of ways to go about getting it. None of them are necessarily the right way, but they all work. They’re all things you have in your toolbox to try. What I hope is that it takes a lot of the pressure off of practitioners that they feel, quite frankly, to be right and to be right really fast. You can still move really fast and you can still learn really fast, and you can still arrive at the correct answer very fast, but none of that has anything to do with you being omnipotent, right?
Larry:
Yeah. I think if you just watched LinkedIn all day, you would think that there’s a perfect way to do everything. So thanks for setting the record straight, Joe. Hey, one very last thing. If folks want to connect with you or follow you online, what’s the best way to connect?
Leah:
For me, the best place is LinkedIn, so hit me up if you want to chat.
Joe:
Excellent. I would say LinkedIn. And quite honestly, I’m not always on there, so if you go to givegoodux.com you’ll find links to all my socials. There’s email, there’s everything. So there’s always a way to find me.
Larry:
Excellent. Yeah. I’ll link to all that and the book link as well. And I’ll check in with Lou about a discount code too, but I’ll definitely, we will list the book in there. Well, thank you both so much. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Joe:
Thank you, Larry.
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