Rosenfeld Review Podcast

Bringing Voices to the Table for DesignOps with Jay Bustamante

Jay Bustamante has always been about conserving time and resources by building tight processes to create efficiencies in his life and work. In all the jobs and positions he’s held, he would notice gaps, consult with stakeholders, find solutions, and fill those gaps. Eventually he learned there is a name for this type of work: DesignOps. Today Jay is a DesignOps leader and an experienced strategist at VMware. And he’ll be a speaker at the October 2023 DesignOps Summit. 
When it comes to streamlining and building efficiencies, AI seems like a no-brainer, right? Not so fast. AI brings big expectations and can result in a lot of frustration if proper groundwork isn’t laid. DesignOps teams that proactively facilitate collaboration between engineers, business teams, end users, and other stakeholders can save time, money, and greatly increase the likelihood of a successful product that will reflect the company’s values. 
In this episode, Jay and Lou explore the following concerning AI:
Good data makes all the difference
Why AI can easily reinforce existing biases 
Why case studies and knowing the most impactful need are crucial
Setting proper expectations
Why Design’s role is to slow things down and to make sure that the right people are invited to the conversation, that the right questions are asked, and that all voices are heard early in the process. 
 
What you’ll learn from this episode:
How Jay got where he is today
How to slow down the development of AI solutions to avoid ethical and technical snafus
Which voices need to be at the planning table
How DesignOps can steer the design boat and keep everyone on the same page with the same goals
How companies (even big ones like Amazon) can get tripped up when AI reinforces biases
  
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:25] Introduction of Jay and the October 2-4 Design Ops Summit
[0:02:11] Jay’s professional journey into design ops
[0:05:36] Jay joined VMware to do strategy work and ended up doing design ops work  
[0:07:35] AI in a design ops context
[0:10:32] An example from Amazon of AI-aided hiring gone wrong
[0:15:39] Design Ops Summit – October 2-4, 2023
[0:17:01] On being proactive with use cases and identifying red flags and slowing down
[0:22:13] On being careful with data
[0:25:43] On bringing voices together and being a facilitator 
[0:28:09] Jay’s gift to listeners
 
Resources and links from today’s episode:
DesignOps Assembly - https://www.designopsassembly.com/ 
AI Fairness 360 by IBM - https://www.ibm.com/opensource/open/projects/ai-fairness-360/ 
Fairkit-Learn (Python)- https://pypi.org/project/fairkit-learn/
DesignOps Summit 2023 - https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2023 
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“I’ve always been passionate about not wasting my time on things. I think that’s how my side door into ops happened.”
“There needs to be a strategist that is also part of this process who is in there also advocating for the users. We all want to arrive at the same place.”
“I like to think of us design ops folks as a lot more integrated into the whole team as facilitators and making sure that the right people are at the table.”
“We all need to hear each other, and we all need to understand what we need together. If not, we’re going to run into tech debt later.”

Jenae Cohn on Designing for Learning

Jenae Cohn is executive director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley and, along with Michael Greer, author of the new book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. Jenae and Michael’s book helps designers create compelling educational content. Think of it as required reading for anyone designing an online course, webinar, training, or workshop. 
Designing a platform intended to educate goes beyond traditional UX design. Jenae’s book does the following:
Looks at the science behind learning and articulates how to help someone be a learner
Helps designers understand the complex array of needs that learners have and create more purposeful learning experiences 
Learning is motivated by social interactions and emotions. In fact, the learning process is typically social, and most are motivated knowing that they’re not learning in isolation but in or for community. Designers should capitalize on these motivations. 
Tips for making online learning more social:
Take “temperature” checks throughout the course – for example, a poll or quiz 
Allow comments on shared artifacts and shared annotation
Prompt discussions and assign roles if needed 
Remember that a webinar will not necessarily create a social experience
As designers get started on creating online instructional material, Jenae reminds them to be kind to themselves. After all, designing for learners is an iterative learning process. Also, it’s critical to create checkpoints and opportunities along the way to garner feedback. With the aid of Jenae and Michael’s book, we can depart from the days of dull online courses and make them truly vibrant spaces of growth.
What you’ll learn from this episode
Why typical online learning platforms are so dull and what can be done differently to make them more engaging and compelling
How instructional designers and UX designers can learn from one another
How designers can make online learning more social 
How designers can know if they’re meeting their goals
  
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:21] Introduction of Jenae Cohn
[0:01:41] Design for Learning – Why we need a UX book for learning/teaching products
[0:05:17] Why UX designers may be surprised by what they didn’t know about designing with learning in mind
[0:08:58] What instructional designers can learn from UX designers
[0:12:14] Hybrid environments in learning products 
[0:15:07] DesignOps Summit – Oct 2-6, 2023 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2023/
[0:16:13] Learning is social – how to help online learners stay engaged 
[0:24:58] How a designer can determine if their learners have had a good outcome
[0:30:40] Advice for designers moving into the learning design space
[0:33:29] Janae’s gift to listeners
Resources and links from today’s episode:
Design for Learning: User Experience inOnline Teaching and Learning by Jenae Cohen and Michael Greer  https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/design-for-learning/
The UX of Educational Technology Community  https://www.uxedtech.com
Quotes from today’s episode:
“Learning is really hard to do, and I think it’s easy for us to take that for granted.” 
“Learning is social.” 
“Most people’s motivations to learn are geared towards what they want to do with other people.”
“Never underestimate the power of a good prompt to get people talking.” 
“A lot of our learning has lost its humanity because we’re so focused on getting the boxes checked and dragging people through these boring experiences.”

Donna Lichaw on Leadership Superpowers and Kryptonite

Not too long ago, Donna Lichaw, author of The User’s Journey, was helping companies solve product problems by organizing the experience of a product or service into a narrative arc where the user is the hero. 
Then she ran into a question that she couldn’t shake — a question that, once answered, would morph her business from product development to leadership development. The question unveiled a people problem rather than a product problem. 
“We don’t have problems bringing products into the world. We have problems getting along with everyone, feeling good about our work, building team morale, dealing with internal fighting. We’ve been helping our customers be heroes. How can I be a hero?”
Over seven years of researching how to help leaders be heroes, she found inspiration in a variety of places, including Gestalt therapy, narrative therapy, and executive and somatic coaching.
Her conclusion can be found in her new book, The Leaders Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary. Think of the book as a map for people to become the natural leaders they already are and can be through a process of radical acceptance that leads to real, lasting change. People grow into superhero leaders when they fully embrace themselves — strengths and weaknesses.  
Donna’s approach to leadership is a refreshing departure from the typical advice of talk louder, take up more space, and listen more. This is a different — a journey that is unique to each individual. 
Discover your superpowers. When you’re not leveraging your superpowers at work, you’re not as powerful as you could be. When you contain your superpowers, you’ll feel sad, depressed, and restricted. 
Know your kryptonite too. When you understand the “why” behind your weaknesses, you’ll often find a superpower underneath. By embracing your quirks and appreciating how they serve you, you’ll open yourself to insights about how to move forward. 
 
What you’ll learn from this episode:
Why Donna felt compelled to transition her business into leadership coaching
About the two books Donna has written for Rosenfeld Media
Why one-size-fits-all leadership programs are a dead end
How appreciating your weaknesses can lead to self-discovery and growth
 
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:51] Introduction of Donna Lichaw and a brief summary of her book The User’s Journey
[0:02:23] About the origins of The Leader’s Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary, Donna’s new book
[0:03:10] Donna recalls leading a workshop that raised an important question
[0:07:44] Looking for inspiration and resources to answer the question, “How can I be a hero?”
[0:11:24] Finding value in everything, yet recognizing what is less helpful
[0:13:57] Dealing with leadership stereotypes and churn
[0:19:10] Enterprise UX 2023
[0:21:15] All leaders have superpowers and kryptonite
[0:26:06] Leaning into your personal kryptonite 
[0:30:25] How the adult film industry and literary smut fit into all of this
[0:35:06] Donna’s gift for listeners – access to her work!
Resources and links from today’s episode:
Enterprise UX 2023 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/enterprise-ux-2023/
Donna’s amazing toolkit https://www.donnalichaw.com/toolkit
The Leader’s Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary by Donna Lichaw  https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/leaders-journey/
The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products that People Love by Donna Lichaw https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/storymapping/
 
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“Life is an experience, and we use certain architectures to make sense of that experience.” 
“We’re most successful when we can be the heroes of our story.” 
“If you’re not feeling like a hero as a leader, you cannot do your job or make an impact.”
“When you can fully appreciate what is, rather than judge, you can get meaning and value out of anything.” 
“When you can appreciate things as they are, that’s when you can fully leverage everything in life to move forward.” 
“When you’re in a leadership position, it’s almost like you are the product. If you’re just listening to what everyone says, you’re never going to make anyone happy, and you’re never going to have an impact.”

Boon Yew Chew on Systems Thinking as a Relational Tool

Boon Yew Chew is senior principal UX designer at Elsevier and an IxDA local leader and board alumn. He will be a speaker at the upcoming 2023 Enterprise UX  Conference on June 6th and 7th, delivering a session on “Making Sense of Systems – and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise.”
Systems thinking can seem abstract and theoretical, but Boon reveals some unexpected ways that systems thinking can have a profound impact on individuals and relationships within organizations. Who knew that systems thinking could be an emotional intelligence tool?
Lou and Boon begin today’s episode by discussing the history of systems thinking and how it developed in the ‘40s and ‘50s, mostly within scientific communities, and grew into other fields and disciplines.  It offered a new way of thinking about how things develop and change over time. 
Boon goes on to describe his path into systems thinking and how, with its holistic, big-picture perspective, there is little room for blaming individuals when problems are viewed through a systems thinking lens. A system can give context to the behavior or clashes within an organization and alleviate frustration. Believe it or not, systems thinking can be a relationally lubricating tool.
Systems thinking can help us answer the following:  
Where do I fit?
Where do the people I’m serving, working with, developing with, and creating for fit within the system? 
How is the organization I’m part of itself part of a bigger system?  
A summary of Boon’s insights:
Systems thinking helps us understand context, empathize, and understand other people and the context they work in
Systems thinking provides a visual language that other people can learn from
Language can help reveal not just problems, but how problems relate to each other even when they may not seem connected
Systems thinking is a tool that can help with prioritization
 
What you’ll learn from this episode
The history of systems thinking, especially how it first developed within scientific communities 
The differences between systems and design thinking
How systems thinking can reduce finger-pointing and relational conflict
Why it’s best to embrace messy differences as part of the process
How to bring systems thinking into the workplace without confusing or alienating others
 
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:12] Introduction of Boon Yew Chew
[0:02:31] System thinking versus design thinking
[0:04:44] The history of systems thinking
[0:08:51] Being trained in one framework and finding it incomplete in the real world
[0:10:32] Boon explains how he navigated towards systems thinking
[0:16:12] When you feel like your goals are clashing with those of others in the organization
[0:19:08] On labels, understanding, reducing friction, and acceptance
[0:22:16] Enterprise UX 2023 is back!
[0:24:19] Boon’s Enterprise UX talk is titled “Making Sense of Systems and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise.” Applied aspects of how UX people are using systems thinking in enterprises
[0:27:17] Boon “eats his own dog food” and does “double work” 
[0:27:52] An example of what success might look like
[0:31:45] A summary of how Boon uses systems thinking
[0:35:29] Boon’s gift for listeners
 
Resources and links from today’s episode:
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge
Enterprise UX 2023 
Systems Innovation Network, a community of systems practitioners run by systems practitioners
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“Some of our work draws from that trajectory. We just don’t call it systems thinking. It comes to us by way of organizational or management science or management thinking.” 
“Most people struggle with the enormity of trying to understand all these things all at once and still have to do their job.” 
“Maybe the ultimate goal of user research is to detect systems that we didn’t see before.” 
“It’s like applying user research or design inward on our own organizations and on our own selves within the context of our organizations.” 
“When you apply [a systems spin? 0:17:58] on things, there is no blame.”

Ren Pope on Ontology in the Digital Age

Ren Pope has a passion for all things data, information, and knowledge, and he strives to make them more accessible, organized, and enduring. You may be surprised that this conversation about information architecture takes us back to classic Greek philosophy, specifically ontology, which is concerned with the nature of being—that is, what is real and not real. 
What is inside a computer cannot be seen, yet it is real in the sense that it has value and can impact reality. And as a modern ontologist, Ren wants to make information accessible and useful. That often starts with assigning names to things—nouns and verbs to label the functions of an organization so that things can be indexed, searched, retrieved, crosslinked, and so that relationships can be defined through metadata.
It’s a complicated process for small businesses and consultants, and the challenges rise exponentially for enterprises with multiple departments and silos. 
With 60 years of shared experience, Ren and Lou remember when companies were dependent on Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint to manage the complexities of a living and evolving organization (many still are!). Today there are multiple options for organizing both structured and unstructured data, and thanks to ontologists like Ren, the tools are getting better.    
Lou and Ren’s discussion spans from the philosophical to the practical. Ren shares some concrete ways to use ontological thinking in your everyday work: 
Find all the nouns and verbs your organization uses to describe its functions.
Define what you are trying to accomplish. 
Focus your scope. The narrower the domain, or the more specific the task, the easier your task will be. If you don’t have a narrow, well-defined scope, you will probably over-collect data. 
Find how the nouns and verbs interact. 
Have a method for maintaining your data.
Ren will be presenting at the upcoming 2023 Enterprise UX conference June 6th-7th. 
 
What you’ll learn from this episode:
About classic ontology and how it relates to the digital age
How information architecture has evolved over the last 30 years
What is ontological thinking and how to incorporate it into your work
The relationship between information architects, engineers, and the end user
About the upcoming Enterprise UX Conference in June
 
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:58] Introduction of Ren Pope
[0:02:17] Ontologist vs information architect vs interactive designer vs knowledge manager
[0:06:00] Ontology within organizations and particular challenges for enterprises
[0:09:50] Metadata for structured and unstructured data
[0:14:01] LLM summaries, single metadata terms, abstracts, summaries – they all have their place and all can work together
[0:18:50] How normal people can benefit from ontology or better IA at an enterprise level
[0:23:28] Data needs to be captured, managed, and represented 
[0:27:41] A glimpse of the back-in-the-day solutions, like Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint, and how far we’ve come
[0:29:40] The scale of volume and complexity of the enterprise environment keeps growing. Is technology keeping up?
[0:35:08] Ren’s gift to the audience – Mettle Health
 
Resources and links from today’s episode:
Enterprise UX 2023 Conference
Managing Chaos by Lisa Welchman
A Beginner’s Guide to the End: A Practical Guide for Living Life and Facing Death by Dr. BJ Miller 
Dr. BJ Miller: What Really Matters at the End of Life TED Talk
Mettle Health
CMap
MindMapper
Synaptica’s Graphite
Semaphore by MarkLogic
PoolParty
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“You can’t touch what’s in a computer, but you have to be able to describe it.” 
“Those big documents aren’t getting the love and attention that they need in figuring out how to extract that information in a way that makes it easily searchable and findable and understand the context.” 
“As AI is more effective in narrower domains where there is less ambiguity in the semantics, the same is true in your job. In a narrower domain, your job will be easier.” 
“We will always be employed as people. We will always have challenges, and the systems become more and more technical.”

Erica Jorgensen on Tools and Techniques for Testing your Content

Erica Jorgensen is one of Rosenfeld Media’s newest authors with the publication of her book, Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. With a background in journalism, her book draws on her experiences as a content designer with  the likes of Chewy, Microsoft, Slack, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and Expedia. 
Erica’s book is a toolkit of research techniques for anyone struggling to create content that makes an impact. Not all companies have dedicated research budgets or teams, yet research can save us from redos and yield more targeted, effective content. 
Without research, you may be flying blind without even realizing it. We assume the words and phrases on our websites and apps are effective, and a little due diligence can confirm those assumptions or enlighten us about something that was previously completely outside our awareness. 
Erica warns us to be prepared because content research will open proverbial cans of worms. False assumptions will be exposed, and what you learn may take your work in unexpected directions. Oftentimes, the whole company will need to get on board when language has to be changed or cleaned up. 
In a nutshell, content research will expose problems. But it will help you make progress, and the payoff is worth it.  
 
What you’ll learn from this episode:
About Erica’s career journey in content design
Case study: The impact of one company’s confusing language, and how content research came to the rescue
How to incorporate content research into non-research roles
How to prioritize and strategize content research
How to harness content audits to highlight what needs attention
Why it’s important to present your team’s work in the most flattering light possible
 
Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:22] Introduction of Erica Jorgensen
[0:03:03] About Erica’s new Rosenfeld Media book
[0:05:08] Search logs, content research, and cans of worms
[0:07:28] An example of how content research caused a drone company to replace a pervasive word with something that resonated more with their clients 
[0:12:48] When no tools get used, nothing happens
[0:14:30] Enterprise UX 2023 Conference — for enterprise-level challenges
[0:16:03] Strategies for where to start your research and how to narrow your focus
[0:19:28] The role of audits in prioritizing content research
[0:23:50] On the impact of the whole team getting involved and pushing for content research
[0:25:07] Erica’s book recommendation for listeners, The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer by Yellowlees Douglas, Ph.D.
 
Resources and links from today’s episode:
The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer by Yellowlees Douglas, Ph.D.
Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX by Erica Jorgensen
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“The complicated part of content research is that it will open many cans of worms.”
“I’m sure, as a content professional, you’re savvy about writing, you think about voice and tone, but it’s great to validate your most important content through content research.” 
“The beauty of content research is you can get insights in minutes.” 
“The world would be a better place if there were more content designers. That’s why I wrote the book.”

Lisanne Norman on Why She Left UX Research

Lisanne Norman  entered the tech field as a UX researcher in 2015 and quickly advanced to lead researcher at Dell, then Visa. She founded Black UX Austin and was the UX lead researcher at Gusto. 
And then she left in 2022. Because she had had enough. And because she wanted to make a difference. She is now co-director of DEI at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
In today’s interview, Lisanne shares her career journey and the tools she acquired in various positions along the way. We get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Black woman in tech. We also get a hint at what it might take to keep a Black woman (or other individuals from marginalized groups) in the space. We hear of the microaggressions that can and do occur in the workplace, and Lisanne helps us imagine the exhaustion of functioning in such an environment day after day. She has worked in established, entrenched cultures and in young, seemingly flexible startups, and she found that both environments are lacking in their efforts to bring marginalized people groups to the table.     
Lisanne will be sharing more at Advancing Research 2023, March 27-29. Her talk is “Why I Left Research.” 
 
What you’ll learn from this episode:
What the UX research world looks like from a Black woman’s point of view
The types of microaggressions Lisanne endured in the workplace and public places like airports
Why being a marginalized voice at work – even in a young, flexible culture – can be exhausting
The difference between culture-fit and culture-add
What companies need to do to attract and retain BIPOC employees – and why it’s worth the effort to do so
 
Quick Reference Guide
[00:15] Introduction of Lisanne
[01:38] Lisanne explains how she stumbled upon research as a possible career and found herself working for Dell
[05:19] Lisanne’s time working directly with Dell as part of their design team and her later transition to Visa 
[12:40] Lisanne explains the frustrations she endured at Visa and her switch to a young e-commerce company 
[19:13] Feeling weighed down by microaggressions, keeping notes, and educating those who should know better
[21:13] Covid, taking a break, Black UX Austin, Gusto, and George Floyd 
[27:55] BREAK: Books recently published by Rosenfeld Media  
[30:08] On what it would take for Lisanne to get back into UX research
[35:01] On the potential of learning from past modules of successful “adding” 
[37:41] Lisanne’s gift to our listeners: POCIT (People of Color in Tech) 
Resources and links from today’s episode:
POCIT (People of Color in Tech) 
Changemakers: How Leaders Can Inspire Change in an Insanely Complex World by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland 
Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers by Sheryl Cababa 
Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX by Erica Jorgensen
Advancing Research 2023
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“If we design for the most marginalized, everybody benefits.” 
“It’s one thing to talk about it, and it’s another thing to actually do it.” 
“Are we confronting our own privilege and biases before we even start to think about creating a product?” 
“This is the world we live in, but this is the world that we can change.” 
“Do you have a porous enough culture and you’re thinking of people as culture adds and not culture fit?” 
“We all know the research. A company is just more productive and better when there is a diverse group of folks working there at the table and making decisions.”

Insights and Interventions with Jill Fruchter

Jill has been listening to customers and clients for over 20 years. She has worked for organizations like Etsy and Blue Apron, and has since started Field Notes Consulting, a research and strategic planning practice serving both public and private sectors. She is method-agnostic, harnesses full-stack research, and interrogates all data to get to the real data or the root cause.
While hard data and numbers are important, data alone does not equal insight. Making sense of the data often requires listening to customers, human-scale frameworks of things like journeys and experience mapping, and, of course, minimizing researchers’ biases.  It’s often the outside-in perspective that brings it all together to give us insight that will highlight consequences and implications. 
Jill is a champion of what she calls “interventions” and doing interventions across silos. She shares an example from her time at Blue Apron that beautifully illustrates how one research silo can lose direction without insight from other silos. Some interventions  Jill recommends include:
Remember that everyone in the organization is on the same team and after the same goal
Encourage observation
Bring cross-functional teams together 
Fit KPIs and OKRs in the story of the user
Jill will be leading a session, “Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher’s Role is to Stay Curious,” and a workshop, “Holistic Insights: Collapsing Functional Silos for Maximum Impact” at the Advancing Research Conference March 27-29, 2023.
 
What you’ll learn from this episode:
How Jill defines insight and why it won’t be uncovered from hard data alone
How “interventions” across silos can help everyone in the organization win
A taste of what Jill will cover in her talk and workshop at Advancing Research 2023 
 
Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction of Jill
[01:50] Jill’s role at Advancing Research Conference March 27-29th, 2023
[02:27] Jill’s love-hate relationship with data
[07:25] How we get insights from data
[09:36] Lessons from Blue Apron 
[14:13] How to perform or support interventions
[21:54] On interventions outside your area of expertise and considering the interconnectivity of the entire organization
[30:43] Looking back on information and library science school 
[34:52] Jill’s book recommendation
[36:49] Jill’s session and workshop at the upcoming Advancing Research Conference in March 
 
Resources and links from today’s episode:
Jane Jacobs
The Power Broker by Robert Moses
FieldNotes Consulting
Advancing Research Conference 2023
 
Quotes from today’s episode:
“As researchers, we have to be hunters and gatherers.”
“I think I got into research because I’m not good at arguing and confrontation. How do we get to the truth without arguing?” 
“An insight truly frames the problem. The data is supporting evidence.”
“I don’t believe there are separate lanes. I think there are separate technical competencies and hard skills and whatnot, but I do think it’s one goal.” 
“We get to the truth by questioning, combining, joining, being wrong in order to figure out how to be right.”