You are now tuning in to discover your potential. So listen, participate, be inspired, know that you can discover your potential. User experience is something I like to use the term moniker to describe it because UX is not one thing contrary to popular beliefs. Some people think that UX, just the people who do that work just make things pretty. Some people think that UX is nothing but visual design. And really, UX is, it's an umbrella term. It's an acronym that's referring to someone finally count it an illustration that I've created that people use all over the world. 250 different methods, methodologies, techniques, deliverables, all of these things, picture them as being in a toolbox. And the person who is the UX professional, it is their job. It is our job. It's my job. As we are provided with some type of a design problem to solve or some type of an initiative, throughout the course of working on that problem or that solution, it's our job to try to identify which tools are best to use at which time. And the goal of that is to find a sweet spot between user needs, business needs, and any constraints that we have to deal with, whether it's a time constraint, a budgetary constraints, a resource constraint. We find the sweet spot between the three. We want wins for the users, win for the business, wins for everybody that's involved at once. It is not just come in and make things pretty. It's not just come in and we're not order takers. Also, we are very, very heavy critical thinkers. If someone comes to us with a problem or a solution that they want us to address, it's our job to then first verify, is this ask legitimate? Is this something we should actually be doing? I think we all hate. I know, Dan, you'll remember this, working on something only for somebody to pull the plug on an initiative two or three months later. We need to make sure that we should be doing this thing upfront because UXers, we are leaders, even if we don't have leadership roles, it is a leadership function. In fact, we are thought leaders. We lead the charge. We let people know what should be done. I'm a big movie person. And I always like when I describe UX, I don't know if either of you have ever seen a movie. Christian Bale was in, it was called Equilibrium. And it was a classic sci-fi movie. Wasn't that a great movie? Yes, it was a great movie. And he was basically an emotion policeman. It was there. They thought that emotions was the bane of our existence and it was creating all these problems. So everybody in the world was put on this, on these meds that suppressed emotion. And if they protected emotion, then it was their job to go and collect these people. Art was not allowed. Any type of global expression was not allowed. And I said all that to say this, in that movie, Dan, there's one thing he said in that movie. And when I saw that movie, I went UX. I went totally UX. And I've adopted it ever since. The line in the movie was, and Christian Bale said, it's my job to know what you're thinking. And that is the job of a true UX professional. And there's pure UX. And then there's the cult of UX. The cult of UX just wants to make things look good. Pure UX wants to actually meet the user needs, the business needs hit the sweet spot. And we live inside the heads of our stakeholders. We live inside the heads of our clients. We live inside the heads of our users. That's our secret sauce. That's our superpower. And that's what makes us different in having us in place in a business initiative. And the business that's trying to operate without us is doing themselves a gross disservice. Yeah. And it's also understanding, as you mentioned, the user, right? So there's a lot of people or a lot of good, strong UX designers that try to, you can't, you can never be that person, right? So that's what people don't understand. Superpower. You can be that person. You can try to definitely understand them. And there's tools that UX designers use to, when UX professionals use, that help understand them. I'd love to learn more about, there's a lot of companies out there that, and this is something that also I find interesting. Separate what UX and UI is. And sometimes companies meld them together, which? Yes, they do. OK, sounds like you hit something. Go ahead. Help me get that to promote my t-shirt. Exactly. UX is not equal to UI. OK, break it down. Break it down. And I was going to say, I wanted to get one of those t-shirts. Figure that out later. But go ahead. I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about something. I've done talks on this before. And those who are interested, you can find my talks, a lot of my talks on YouTube. And I did a talk entitled The Four Pillars of UX. And as I learned about UX over the years, and when I was working at Bosch back in 2015, I was asked to deliver a talk for the 380,000-plus organization to help people understand what UX was. And I created the first draft of this illustration that I called The Landscape of UX. Or, and it's also called The Four Pillars of UX. And I learned that there are four areas that, no matter what you're doing in UX, everything comes back to these four areas I call them pillars. It was usability and heuristics was the first. I grouped them together because you can't separate them. The second one was information architecture. The nomenclature, the taxonomies that drive and trigger information sent because it was found that humans look for information the same exact way that animals look for food. So if you provide a scent through that nomenclature, through the taxonomies, then you optimize findability, which is the product of information architecture. That's pillar number two. Pillar number three, the one that a lot of people are trying to segment and make it its own thing, which does damage to the discipline at large. And that's UX research. And there's a book entitled the universal, I can't remember the exact title, but it's like the universal patterns of research. And there's 125 methods, methodologies, techniques and deliverables. So a lot of people today, they think that research is just go do a survey. They think that research is, oh, ask somebody which one of these they like. Oh, you like the red one? Okay, I'll go with that. That's not research. It's all of these things. And we don't use more than 15 to 20 of them, really, consistently, but it's still good to be aware of them. They have a broad toolbox, because you can always hybrid something that is not popular if it's gonna bring value. But again, 125 methods, methodologies, techniques and deliverables. That's pillar number three. Pillar number four, and that's where this comes into play again, is people think that UI, UI is just user interface. It is the presentation layer. It is the part that people interact with. And then there's all of these sinews and tendons and bones and things that under that, which is where UX spends most of its time. But UI is not by itself. And so pillar number four is interaction design slash interface design, because to design an interface without being aware of interaction design principles, that interface is never gonna do the right job. So these are the four pillars, and that's where UI separates all that to say this. UI is separated from UX in that it's really a subset of UX. So UX is all of these things. And if you ever see the illustration, I don't know Dan, if you've seen the illustration that I've produced, there are 250 items on this thing to illustrate what UX really is. And UI is one of them. And if you don't engage from a perspective of heuristics and usability, if you don't work on the information architecture, which has been abandoned for the most part since about 2011, 2012, a lot of new UXers have no idea what IA, which what we call it for short, is if you don't do the right research to validate design direction and work on it from a formative and assumative perspective, and you don't apply the right interaction design principle, your UI is going to stink. Here we are in February and New Year's Eve seems like a distant memory. If you're like me, you're not even thinking about the goals, you may or may not have said this year. Last year, Save More Money was the most popular New Year's resolution in America. And yet how many people actually saw their money grow? Maybe it's all the little things that get subtracted, bank fees, subscriptions you forgot about and then automatically renewed. That's why I love things that move the needle in the opposite direction. You've heard me talk about this before, but I love the way that acorns sets up a habit that is automatic. And yes, today's episode is brought to you by acorns, because I love recommending things that are simple and that just makes sense. Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing, so your money has a chance to grow for you, your kids, and your retirement. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that fits you and your money goals. You don't need to be rich. Acorns lets you invest with the spare money you've got right now. You can start with $5 or even just your spare change. Create your Acorns account and start investing in just five minutes. Don't throw in the towel on financial wellness. Acorns gives you small, simple steps to get you and your money back on track. Give yourself a break and stick to something small. And before you know it, the savings add up to something big. It's one more way to feel yourself winning in life instead of losing. Head to acorns.com slash dyp or download the Acorns app to start saving and investing for your future today. Paid non-client endorsement. Commencement provides incentive to positively promote Acorns. Tier one compensation provided. Investing involves risk. Acorns advisors, LLC, and SEC registered investment advisor. Important disclosures at acorns.com slash dyp. So I mean, not to bring this up, but I mean, I'm a designer of words. And I remember, when I remember, when I started having conversations about AI, emerging technologies like virtual reality, is you see that as a threat or a, how is that affecting UX? I see it, it's just another tool. There you go. It's just a tool. And you remind me of people always ask me, Darren, which do you think is the best tool? Which is the most critical tool for UX? I get this question all the time for about at least the last 10 years. Somebody always asks me that question and I always give them the same answer. It's the human brain. Here you go. That's the limitless side, right? There's a discovery potential moment right there. I'll do it. If what you're doing, oh, sorry, dad, if what you're doing isn't happening in the brain, if it doesn't start until you pick up a Figma, pick up an Adobe XD, pick up an Aksure, something's wrong. Because you're already doing it in the brain. And so the tool is just an extension of, it doesn't matter what the tool is, whether it's AI, Figma, whether it's this new Apple vision thing, it doesn't matter what it is. It's all an extension of what's happening in the human brain. We're gonna formulate, we're gonna incubate, we're gonna impregnate. It's gonna happen in the brain and then it proceeds from there. I was gonna break up actually the Apple Vision Pro. And interestingly enough, there's been some roles that they list. I wanted to go into jobs, but roles that are listed in that say, oh, you need to have experience now doing Apple Vision Pro. It's like, just came out. It's like, you need special permission to work on augmented reality and VR. This is still a very human conversation. And I will point out that anytime there is a disruptive technology, you can go back to the railroad. There were people that didn't wanna get on the railroad because they thought their soul was gonna fly out. For women, they thought the uterus was gonna fly out of their bodies. They said, don't get on the railroad ladies. Now this is true. So I feel like we're at that point. So while I make the argument that I could lose my job to chat, GVT, I'm still like, you is a tool and we're still having a conversation. But all three of us have seen changes that are disruptive. I know our audience is in fluctuation with job. It's serious guys. And I still feel like, getting a grip. So help us get a grip a little bit, Darren. What is good about the world? And we could talk about the good, bad and ugly, but I'm saying what brings you hope about where your job field is heading. Yeah. Well, when it comes to my field, we always pivoted. When the iPhone came up, we were all shocked. We didn't know what to do in general. But then we realized, because back then there wasn't no misinformation. Back then we were all grounded in the fundamentals, the four pillars, if you will. We were grounded in those things. There were no specializations in UX at that time. So each one of us did all the things. Yeah. So we just realized, you know what? This stuff that we were doing with the website, it actually, I know how to apply it to this new app that we're designing for Bosch. I've worked on an award winning app for Bosch back in 2008. Or so it's this stuff that we were doing for interactive TV. We started to see, because we never thought about it that much before until we had to respond to this major pivot that was thrust upon us. We saw, you know what? This is pervasive. And there was a book that came out about the pervasiveness of UX. And I have a humongous library that you would not believe. And I dove into that book and I realized, you know what? It's simply a matter of understanding the mental models as they apply to this new form factor, to this new experience and taking the principles that we had embraced before and apply. The same thing is gonna happen. AI is not gonna take our jobs. It can help us do our jobs. And it's gonna be a while before it does it well. Because if I'm doing UX research, and I always hear people say, I can use AI, some of the companies that have these research repository tools are boasting about how their AI can help you get through the data faster to add things to it and to bring up the key findings and things of that nature. But the truth of the matter is, artificial intelligence, I view it as an oxymoron. It is artificial. And it would do nothing more than what the programmers have allowed it to do. So the ceiling of AI is going to be the mindset of the people who did the programming. And they are human and they are limited. And they are biased. A lot of times they are full of isms. Racism, the sexism, the ageism, the ongoing list of isms. These things are gonna be reflected in how that thing parrots back at you what it finds. So no matter what AI does and looking at my research data and helping me to get through it quickly, it's not as cut and dry and it certainly is not a blue sky moment because I have to go back and proofread it. My wife and I have five cats. This is relevant. You understand why in a moment. We have five cats. One reason we don't have dogs is because we live in a condo and I'm not home a lot and so that'd be too much of a burden on my wife. The other reason why we have cats is because they clean up their own poop. I'm not interested. I love this conversation. I am not interested in the cleanup. I don't need a crutch. I'm not handicapped. Don't sum up me. So I'm not as thrilled as some people are about what AI can do. And I don't think it's ready for prime time yet because the error rate is high as 85% I've heard. I've seen AI, somebody went to chat BT and said, tell me something about Daren Hood. Does this actually happen? What can you tell me about Daren Hood and what chat, the BT, GPT said was incorrect. Yeah. But she was a dog person. No, they said that I was a professional researcher and some other goofy stuff. Where are they getting that from? Right. So, that BT doesn't know who I am. No. And you know, it's another way I try to define it, to make it realistic, is that it is an emerging technology. It is not ready for prime time and it is limited to excelling when it comes to finite science and not infinite science. So anything that requires a cognitive pivot, it cannot do. It cannot do. And for that reason, it will always be limited. I know someone who frequently mentions, matter of fact, in their call name, they have their name on LinkedIn and the description under it, it says, I can still do research better than AI. And the person is right. Right, you can't. It's the people, and the UX- New shirt idea. Yeah, I'm just kidding. I wanted a T-shirt when I learned about what blockchain is, but I wanted a T-shirt said that, I am not an algorithm, man. I am not an algorithm. I like that. I like that. I'm fighting for it. It's, this is the age of laziness. Mm-hmm. That people are trying to shortcut their way into UX, which is always the battle cry of the lazy person. Mm-hmm. And when you have a lazy UX person, that's not a winning proposition. They're always gonna fall short. They're always gonna cut corners. And this is a field, we're paid to be anal. And some people are afraid of that term. And I tell people, anytime I say anal, and then people draw back, and I'll say, it's just the root word of analysis, stop. Mm-hmm. That's great. The root word of analysis is interesting. I see another T-shirt in the future. Yeah. We analyze to the nth degree. I was working on a project some time ago, Dan, a book that I sort of shelved, but it was called The Benefits of Being Positively Anal. I love it. You gotta do that one. I mean, people have to risk their different types of being anal. And when you're anal, I mean, I can make some statements here that might rubble some feathers, but I'm known for that. If people had been, I'm gonna say it. If people had been, the people in the process have been anal. I mean, there's so many profits, so many ways of profiting being anal. If people along the road say what I was about to say, we're anal, 9-11 wouldn't have happened. I think there's lots of examples, but that one hits home. There you go. I mean, because people, how many times do you see something and say nothing? Yeah. How many times do we see something and don't pay attention? These pieces of the airplanes that are flying off of these Boeing jets now, if somebody was anal, that doesn't happen. It wouldn't happen 100%. And then there's positively anal, and then there's what my old law school teacher, I was gonna be a lawyer once, by the way, the old law school teacher or my business law teacher, to be more specific, said there's anal retinous. So there are some people that are anal, and it doesn't benefit anyone. They're anal and nobody profits from it. They're anal, and it really does involve a conversation or an initiative forward. That's when anal is not good, but when anal is good, see something, say something, let's take everybody forward. Let's care enough about people to be anal. Right. Can we go back and redo the emotional piece? Yeah. We need to say that. Well, speaking of which though, Apple is a perfect example of, well, before when Steve Jobs was helping to run, and so was Johnny Ives. They were really anal. I mean, they just, their product, you're buying a Porsche. Yep, and that's how Apple got where it was. Exactly. Now it's less so. That's what I'm telling you for saying that. Now it's UX theater, the equivalent there of, now it's be present, now it's butts in seats. Yeah. It's not a cry. And as long as we get some butts in the seats, Well, look at other manufacturing cars now. It's a piece of plastic. They shot it down. The Apple car? No, I don't mean the Apple car. I'm talking about cars in general. Yeah. Because that's UX and UX is every experience, like anything you think of. Right. It's not limited to digital. No, it's not. I've been fortunate enough to work on some actual hardware from a UX perspective. We designed a, it was a handheld diagnostic tool for vehicles and I help, I help, it was, there was a nightmare associated with this that I probably won't get into. But I wanted, I said, if this person is going around the auto repair area working on vehicles, he shouldn't have to worry about the charge running out. There should be some type of a docking station that can be positioned in a way where this person can see that's enough to do their job or keep that charge going so they don't have to be concerned about that. Let's, let's offset the anxiety associated with using this project, this product. And so I came up with the initial design for a docking station for this handheld design tool. And it was a, it was a huge win. And it ended up getting patented. The nightmare is that somebody stole the patent from me and my name's not on it. But it's my, who my baby. No, it's warfare out there. Well, I was just, yeah. And I don't want to say anything negative about Apple. I love Apple. I'm an Apple fan. I'm on Mac computers all the time, but. Well, times change. I kind of want to point out something though that I think our superpower, I'm just going to group us together right now. I think our superpower is that we are adaptable. He's laughing at me. You know we're the same age. Come on now. No, I know we are. Adaptability is our superpower. I'm going to stand by that because, you know, back in my day, I started out as an actor, right? And look at where I'm now. It seems like a, you know, it's a big broad journey, but I'm telling people out there listening to us, have faith. I'm going to suggest we all listen to your podcast, by the way, because you're talking about, I'm sure you're getting into really niche areas, but I'm interested and I know I might not end up in your classroom, but let's just say that it is analogous to the media world, right? We're all fighting the good fight. We're all taking education to a different place, but if there aren't people like us holding accountable this conversation, because we all got our war stories, don't we? We all know. The frustrations of what we're talking about are deep, but we're fighting the good fight because we're here. And I want to just, you know, again, encourage the audience. Don't let the ageism fight. Don't let the whatever fight. Don't let that fight come to your door. That's a big issue right now, as you mentioned, Dana. Huge. Yeah. Huge. And it's funny you mentioned on my podcast, I say this a lot, I take time on the show, some time to mention what the show was about, because I think that people need a primer, sometimes because whether it's a UX conference, whether it's an article that they read on the web, whether it's a podcast, it's you people think, oh, I'm just going to learn more ways to do my job. Or there's a top 10 list of things that people want to know about UX, and NIMGENZ is always gravitating toward it. And I even recently said, I just did a series that had 25 parts to it. Wow. And the whole thing was dedicated to sinister traits at work and UX today, because I explained people in the primer, I'm not here to tell you how to do the job. Would I do it sometime? I will. But there's this whole set of topics that nobody's touching, because they're afraid to touch it, because we have so many codlers, we have so many people who are, they're eating the polyan, drinking the polyanakool-aid, and they're drunk off of toxic positivity, and they're just trying to help people to feel good and feel welcome and not guiding them. There are pitfalls here. There are got holes here. There are problems here. There's a whole ton of them. We have the ditches in this discipline that nobody wants, they want to pretend they're not there, and they don't want to tell people how to avoid them or how to get out of them. So my podcast is called The World of UX because there are no topics that are off, that are off limits. All of that. Obviously. Everything, and you can get up to that and turn it off if you want. It's just gonna come and bite you in the rear, and then you're gonna come back to me for help, and I can't tell you how many times that has happened. Your voice is much needed in the industry, because especially with the shift and the change that's happening, people need you. And I'm so glad that your podcast exists, especially for, I mean, even people like myself who practice UX, and well, sadly, you I designed you, but UX design, don't poo poo me. But I know I know I'm kidding. But so it's, we appreciate your voice. It's so needed. Ah, wild stuff. Wild stuff. No, your voice matters, man. And I hope the audience feels the same. Yeah, and I will say too, to Dan's point, again, UI is a subset. There are times, I've created a lot of UI's. I think I excel more when it comes to things like software as a service, more business oriented things, as opposed to the things where people wanna see the knockdown drag out, oh my God, that is beautiful. Kinda think my stuff is very regimented and very straightforward and very boring. And it gets the job done. But a UI is a UI. I just want people to stop saying UI, UX. Yes. It selects UI because it does the discipline a gross disservice. And most of the people coming into the discipline, they think that it's a thing, so they come in saying it. And then when the C-suite person and the person who you need to champion UX in your organization, they see that they're smart. They know what a slash means. And they think that you know what you're talking about. So when you say UX slash UI, they think they're interchangeable. Right, and then why? Because the slash is there. So there's a communication faux pas. Right. Because people are not, they don't realize, we are all ambassadors of this discipline. It is gonna go where we represent it and it's going to benefit or it's going to thrive based on how we represent it. So when we tell people whether it's passive, whether it is intentional, it doesn't matter whether it's intentional or not. When a person says UX slash UI, they don't know how many hundreds or how many thousands of people and companies like Adobe are at fault because they say it. Apple's saying UX UI now. Right. Companies that are saying UX UI and they need to stop because every time they say it, the other disciplines are not suffering like we're suffering. The other disciplines are not, we're only 20 years old roughly. We're roughly 20 years in the mainstream. UX didn't, it wasn't known as UX until about 2007, 2008. But it's still, ironically, they tried to call it experience design and nobody wanted any part of that. That is ironic, right? We started, this is experience. I remember that. And they just poo pooed it off. But we have to represent ourselves the right way. We have to, when we don't, then that's why they come to us and say, they think we're order takers. Hey, Darren, can you just make this? Can you make this work? Why don't you do this? Darren, why don't you just come up with a design? One company I work for. Why don't you just come up with a design where we wanna make this one page better because we just don't think we're getting the engagement on this page. So can you come up with a way to change this page where we can impact that? And you know what, as a matter of fact, we were looking at this other place and they did it like this. Oh God, here come the non-designers trying to tell us how to design. I think that's okay. All for collaboration, but I don't see anybody collaborating when they're doing my hernia surgery. I don't see any collaboration. Right. I don't see, when I do see collaboration, they're working on my vehicle and the people that have, they wanna add their two cents, actually know what they're talking about. And so when people are collaborating on design, that has to be taken with a grain of salt. Long story short, when I came and realized, okay, here's my recommendations for what we can do on this page. And I'm keeping in mind that, I know you gave me these other examples that you want me to take a look at, but you'll end up with what we call a Frankenstein if we're not careful. We'll end up with a head from this and the neck of that and the ankle from this and the arm from that. And those don't play well together, which is people who are not designers don't understand that. They don't even know what the concept of a Frankenstein even is. But they suffer from what we call Ikea effect bias, that people are more, they like something because they contributed to it and they ascribe more value to it. Those of us over here, we understand, especially the more, well, verse we are in the discipline. We know these things, they don't. I come forth with my design, you know what? And I even said, you know, I'll do a wireframe for it and a wireframe, the purpose of that is to communicate architecture. So we can align on architecture. It's black and white, it's boxes and arrows. It looks, it's ugly, it's nothing, it's a blueprint. People are so stuck on high fidelity that if you don't bring them high fidelity, they freak out. What can I do to put my boss on a pedestal? What can I do to help the people I impact to get their bonuses? I'm not even thinking about me, which reminds me that I always see UX as a selfless discipline. And the more selfless you can be, the better you can function. Isn't it all about the users and the business and the constraints anyway? It's not about me. It's not about what I think, it's not about what I want. It's not about my personal goals when it comes to the work. It's about driving success for others. That's what UX is. People say it revolves around empathy and then they talk in a way they don't even recognize it. So that's just a buzzword, it's a cliche. But I actually do it only to be punished for doing it now in 24. It's really sad. And that's- I was always like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird that it's become so doggy dog, but man, you have me at wireframe. I know you, I get you. You're the bones. And you're not just the man in the bushes, you're the man at the mic. I wanna just encourage you, Darren. I would, not knowing half of what you just talked about on this segment, I would listen to you and I applaud you. You are an educator supreme. And you are fighting the good fight. And tell us how we can listen to you more. I'm fascinated by what you're talking about. Okay, I'm sorta everywhere. I'll tell my age too, if anybody remembers Savoy Fair. There was a little mouth. Savoy Fair. Savoy Fair. Yeah. That's sorta me. Most people connect with me on LinkedIn. I've got over 30 people, or approximately 30,000 people. Follow me on LinkedIn. An app called Metricool says, and my social media reach is 15 million. Okay. So that's LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm on Instagram as UX uncensored. If you're interested in photography, you can find me out there as good photo works as well. Oh, the link? Yeah, I'm gonna work winning photographer as well. Nice. Okay. You can find me on YouTube under UX uncensored. And UX uncensored and Not Too Distant Future is gonna be rebranded as Kaizen UX, but it's currently UX uncensored. I've got a ton of my old talks out there. My podcast actually publishes to YouTube. You can actually listen to it there. The world of UX podcast is available pretty much everywhere where podcasts can be found today. I have a blog on UX uncensored.medium.com. You can find me there. And so again, I'm pretty much everywhere. I also am responsible for Kaizen teas. I'm always speaking and people will say, man, if you put that on a T-shirt, I would buy it. And then they'll come in and hit me. How's that even doing it? So now you got UI. Gotta get some of those. Yeah. Coffee cups, T-shirts, hoodies, bento lunch boxes. Bento lunch boxes, you name it. It's all out there. This is Cindy Gilman and you're listening to Discover Your Potentials. So until next time, do something nice for yourself, but do something nice for someone else.
