Brain Specialization: Science and My Story

My Academic bias

With my academic background in Cognitive Science and Clinical Psychology, I’ve always focused more on observed behavior, lived experience, and psychological explanations and interventions. In fact, my PhD supervisor actively discouraged physiological or brain-based explanations, often invoking what he called the “nominal fallacy”—the mistake of thinking that simply naming a phenomenon explains it. He applied this critique especially to treatments for depression. I remember sitting in on sessions where a psychiatrist would tell a patient that their medication was effective because of some specific change in the brain—when, in fact, there was no direct evidence to support that claim. Understandably, I became somewhat jaded. At the time, neuroscience was still in its early stages compared to what we know today. That’s why I’ve recently begun diving deeply into current brain research and applying it to the real world. I did that in my last post, exploring differences in brain structure and political leanings. In this post, I’ll look at emerging insights on hemispheric differences—and relate them to my own personal experience, which I’ll get to shortly.

A Great conversation

On a Zoom call with a wonderful Habits for a Better World colleague, Nazli Eve Usta, we got onto the topic of hemispheric specialization and cultural differences. I shared a story about a conference I attended in Nanjing, China in 2010. I delivered a keynote (as did Don Norman) and served on a panel exploring cultural differences that designers should be aware of in their work. One of the other panelists shared research by Takashi Masuda and Richard Nisbett.

Participants were shown images featuring a central figure in front of a group. American (Western) participants tended to make judgments—such as whether the person was happy or sad—based on the central figure alone, largely ignoring the background. Japanese (Eastern) participants were more influenced by context—they considered the expressions or behavior of the group in the background before deciding on the emotional state of the person in front.

Nazli then mentioned that she was reading a fascinating book that discussed exactly this kind of brain hemisphere specialization: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist. I immediately bought and read it.

Key insights from the book

The book begins by pointing out how, for decades, popular culture has oversimplified brain hemisphere specialization into simple stereotypes: left-brained people are logical and analytical, right-brained people are creative and emotional. This reductive dichotomy became so widespread that it nearly discredited the entire field.

McGilchrist makes the case that the body of research from the past twenty years not only deserves renewed legitimacy—it may hold the key to understanding how we perceive, think, and live.

As both a psychiatrist and a literary scholar, McGilchrist synthesizes decades of neuroscience to show just how differently the left and right hemispheres engage with the world. The left hemisphere favors abstraction, categorization, and control. It isolates and defines. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is focused on context, nuance, connection, and the living whole. It doesn’t just process information—it experiences it.

What’s particularly eye-opening is McGilchrist’s argument that we now live in a civilization dominated by left-hemisphere thinking—prioritizing efficiency over empathy, predictability over depth, and systems over relationships. In doing so, we may be sidelining the very capacities that make life meaningful and sustainable. And yet, he argues, it’s the right hemisphere that should be leading, with the left as its capable “emissary”—not the other way around. There’s much more to the book—it can be a dense read at times—but I highly recommend it.

My story and experience

While reading the book, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own recent neurological journey. I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor—a vestibular schwannoma or acoustic neuroma—on the right side of my brain, affecting the auditory nerve. This tumor has gradually diminished the hearing in my right ear. But what’s fascinating is that I’ve recently noticed significantly increased acuity in my left ear. At first, I thought I might be imagining it. But upon further reflection—and with the insights from McGilchrist’s work—I began to see it as another example of the brain’s remarkable plasticity.

Neuroscience has shown that when one sense or function is compromised, the brain doesn’t simply accept the loss. It adapts, amplifying other capacities to maintain equilibrium. In my case, it seems likely that the right hemisphere (which processes input from the left ear) has increased its auditory sensitivity to compensate. The signals coming from the ear haven’t improved—it’s the brain’s processing of information from my left ear that has.

The tumor also affects the vestibular nerve, which controls balance. I’ve been experiencing some slight instability, but vestibular rehabilitation exercises are helping. Again, the brain’s plasticity is at work—strengthening my left vestibular system to reduce the imbalance. It’s a powerful, personal reminder of the brain’s adaptability—and of the intricate interplay between biology, experience, and perception.

To further support my brain’s neuroplastic response to the hearing loss in my right ear, I’ve been consciously engaging both hemispheres through a variety of activities. I focus on language, reading aloud, planning, and problem-solving to stimulate left-hemisphere functions, and I engage my right hemisphere through listening to music, walking in nature, and practicing mindfulness. I also incorporate cross-body movement—such as balance exercises and VR workouts using Supernatural on my Meta Quest—which helps strengthen coordination between hemispheres. I regularly switch between focusing on details and stepping back to see the big picture. These small but intentional practices are helping me optimize how my brain adapts and maintains overall balance.

a broadened view of the brain including my own

The Master and His Emissary has opened up a far more nuanced and inspiring view of the brain than I’d imagined. It’s not just a book about neuroscience—it’s a call to rethink how we live, learn, lead, and relate. And for those of us navigating unexpected neurological challenges, it offers something even more valuable: insight into the deeply intelligent systems that support us, often without our awareness.

Are Conservatives & Liberals Wired Differently?

Have you ever listened to someone whose political views differ sharply from your own and felt stunned, wondering how they could possibly believe what they’re saying? Even when looking at exactly the same information, people often interpret it in radically different ways. This has puzzled me for a long time and I’ve tried to find answers in the scientific literature.

We all like to think our political beliefs are shaped purely by reason, personal experiences, and deeply-held values. But have you ever considered that biological and psychological differences might also play a role? Over the years, I’ve come across research hinting at these kinds of influences on political views. Intrigued, I decided to take a deeper dive to explore this fascinating topic further, especially given the extent of political polarization we’re witnessing at the moment.

It turns out that over the past two decades researchers have uncovered striking neurological, genetic, physiological, and psychological differences between people who lean conservative compared with those who lean liberal. While our environments shape our views, science suggests that how we process information in our world—how we handle uncertainty, respond to threats, and weigh moral choices in particular—may be influenced by the way we’re built.

Brain Structure and Political Orientation

Brain imaging research by Kanai et al. (2011) found evidence of structural differences between conservatives and liberals. The research found that conservatives typically have a larger and more active amygdala, a region responsible for processing fear and threats, which could possibly explaining their strong emphasis on security, law enforcement, and national defense. Liberals, on the other hand, were found to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region involved in managing uncertainty and adapting to change, which could explain their greater openness to new ideas and social change.

The Genetics of Political Beliefs

Genetics also appears to play a role. Twin studies suggest that about 30-60% of political ideology may be inherited (Hatemi & McDermott, 2012). For example, individuals with a specific variant of the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene, related to dopamine regulation and novelty-seeking behavior, are more likely to identify as liberal and this was particularly true if they've had diverse social experiences. So clearly, genetics sets the stage, but environment appears to influence the expression in behavior.

Physiological Responses to Threat

Beyond brain structure and genetics, conservatives and liberals also appear to differ in how their bodies react to the world.

An interesting 2008 study by Oxley et al. found that conservatives exhibited stronger physiological responses to sudden loud noises and disturbing images. Their heightened sensitivity to threat correlates with a preference for policies that emphasize stability and protection.

Moral Foundations and Political Differences

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory proposes that political beliefs are deeply intertwined with fundamental moral instincts. Research conducted to examine this theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009) found that Liberals prioritize care/harm and fairness/reciprocity, strongly aligning with social justice, while conservatives value these foundations too, but they also emphasize loyalty, authority, and sanctity, supporting patriotism, tradition, and religious values. These differences in moral orientations, shaped by both biology and experience, provide additional insight into why political disagreements often feel more like deep moral divides than purely policy debates.

affective polarization and cognitive biases

Recent research has expanded these insights considerably. Dannagal Young and colleagues (2024) highlight how "epistemological identity"—our sense of belonging to groups based on shared ways of understanding truth—drives political polarization. This concept of expressive epistemology suggests people adopt beliefs aligned with their group's values, further entrenching divisions. Druckman and Levy (2021) emphasize that affective polarization, the growing emotional hostility between opposing political groups, profoundly impacts how facts are interpreted, causing individuals to dismiss or distort information that challenges their group's identity or values.

Studies exploring biases toward specific groups provide additional insights. Jones et al. (2018) found that ideological predispositions significantly influence public attitudes toward transgender individuals, with conservatives often less supportive due to underlying psychological factors like traditionalism and discomfort with ambiguity. Stern et al. (2013) revealed ideological differences even in subconscious processes, showing conservatives rely more heavily on traditional gender cues when categorizing sexual orientation, highlighting deep-rooted cognitive differences tied to ideological beliefs.

Research on cognitive style also underscores these divisions. Ostrofsky and Shobe (2015) discovered that individuals with a higher "need for cognitive closure"—a desire for certainty and aversion to ambiguity—tend to prefer realism in art, hinting that this psychological trait may similarly affect political orientation, with conservatives often exhibiting a greater need for certainty and clear structure. Cacioppo and Petty’s classic work (1982) on the "need for cognition"—an individual’s enjoyment of thinking and problem-solving—suggests liberals may enjoy more complex, nuanced analyses, whereas conservatives might prefer clear, straightforward solutions.

What This Means

It’s important to point out that none of this suggests that political beliefs are biologically predetermined. Clearly, your upbringing, the people you associate with, the news sources you rely on all make some contribution too. In fact, the direction of causality could even be reversed. However created, it is clear that biology influences the processing of information so differently. If our brains, genes, and bodies influence to a certain degree how we see the world, recognizing these differences can foster better dialogue and understanding.

Next time you’re in a political debate, consider that the other person might not just think differently—they might actually be wired differently. Keeping this in mind can help you communicate more effectively by framing your arguments and understanding their perspective through the insights offered by the fascinating research summarized in this post. Approaching discussions with empathy and awareness of these underlying differences can lead to more meaningful and productive exchanges.

references

Given that this blog post relies so heavily on research findings, I’ve decided to include references to the sources that it is based on.

Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology, 21(8), 677-680.

Oxley, D. R., Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, M. V., Miller, J. L., Scalora, M., … & Hibbing, J. R. (2008). Political attitudes vary with physiological traits. Science, 321(5896), 1667-1670.

Hatemi, P. K., & McDermott, R. (2012). The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. Trends in Genetics, 28(10), 525-533.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98-116.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029-1046.

Young, D. G., Molokach, B., & Oittinen, E. M. (2024). Lay epistemology and the populist’s playbook: The roles of epistemological identity and expressive epistemology. Current Opinion in Psychology.

Druckman, J. N., & Levy, J. (2021). Affective polarization in the American public. Northwestern Institute for Policy Research.

Jones, P. E., Brewer, P. R., Young, D. G., Lambe, J. L., & Hoffman, L. H. (2018). Explaining public opinion toward transgender people, rights, and candidates. Public Opinion Quarterly, 82(2), 252-278.

Stern, C., West, T. V., Jost, J. T., & Rule, N. O. (2013). The politics of gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(3), 520-541.

Ostrofsky, J., & Shobe, E. R. (2015). The relationship between need for cognitive closure and the appreciation, understanding, and viewing times of realistic and nonrealistic figurative paintings. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 33(1), 106-113.

Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 116-131.

Globalization and the U.S. Defection

I see the world through a psychological lens. Politics, economics, and global trade are no exceptions. Over the past 43 days, I’ve been reflecting on the shifts unfolding on the world stage, trying to make sense of them. The best framework I’ve found is game theory—specifically, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Globalization, at its core, has long been a delicate game of trust and cooperation, where nations weigh the risks of working together against the temptation to put their own interests first. But when one player defects, the entire system begins to unravel. And in my view, that’s exactly what we’re witnessing now.

The Prisoner’s dilemma explained

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, first developed in the 1950s, illustrates a fundamental challenge in cooperation. Two individuals, when acting in their own self-interest, often make decisions that leave both worse off. In its classic form, two prisoners are interrogated separately and must decide whether to betray the other or stay silent. If both cooperate, they receive a lighter sentence. But if the fear of betrayal pushes them toward defection—it results in an outcome that ultimately harms them both.

Globalization has functioned much like an iterated version of Prisoner’s Dilemma, where repeated interactions built trust and reinforced long-term cooperation. Countries engaged in trade agreements, built integrated supply chains, and relied on global institutions to ensure stability. Defection—through protectionism, tariffs, or isolationism—was costly and avoided at all costs because it would invite retaliation and economic instability.

The defection of Donald J. Trump

The current U.S. President Donald J. Trump disrupted that equilibrium by defecting from the globalization game. His administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during his first term, imposed tariffs that set off trade wars, undermined trust in institutions like the WTO, and weakened alliances that underpinned global economic stability. It was a shift toward short-term, zero-sum thinking in a game where long-term mutual benefit had been the dominant strategy.

Now, we’re seeing an even more aggressive and dangerous iteration of this approach. Early this morning, March 4, 2025, the U.S. government implemented sweeping new tariffs—25% on imports from Canada and Mexico and an increased 20% tariff on Chinese goods—under the bizarre pretense of pressuring these countries to take a harder stance against fentanyl production which they had already done. The impact was immediate. Markets have reacted sharply—the S&P 500, the Dow, and the Nasdaq tumbled—while global partners moved swiftly to retaliate. Canada announced a counter-tariff of 25% on $30 billion worth of U.S. goods, with more to come, and Mexico is expected to announce its response soon too. China has imposed new tariffs of 10-15% on U.S. agricultural products, a move that will severely impact American farmers who are already struggling from Trump’s previous trade disruptions.

Many argue that the U.S. President should have learned from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 and the economic devastation it caused, leading to a reduction of about 60% of world trade and a deepening of the Great Depression.

Economists from around the world have unanimously warned about the dangerous consequences of these actions and even Warren Buffett finally broke his silence to say that all of this will be disastrous for the U.S. because tariffs are a tax on goods which will raise the price for consumers. And to quote him, "The Tooth Fairy doesn’t pay ‘em!” And this isn’t all about country leaders taking action, the U.S. President’s belittling, name-calling, and insulting countries like Canada has had a direct effect on its citizens. I’ve written previously about the power that the individual has, especially when done at scale across a whole country. A boycott of American products within Canada and in fact around the world is having an impact beyond tariffs, and these actions will live on.

The lingering effects

In game theory, trust and stability are essential for cooperation. Once that trust is broken which has just happened, the game shifts from cooperation to retaliation. Countries are planning for a world where the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. Global supply chains adopt new routes, new trade alliances are formed, and businesses and investors avoid the volatility by putting their money elsewhere. It’s important to note that these shifts don’t just happen overnight—they create long-term structural changes that make cooperation in the future harder, and even if a new administration tries to restore the cooperation.

What we’re witnessing right now isn’t just another round of tariffs or tough trade negotiations—it’s a fundamental breakdown of the rules that once governed global economic stability. While Trump’s approach may score short-term political points, it has thrown globalization into a game-theory spiral of defection and retaliation, with consequences that will outlast any one administration. The world is adapting to a new reality—one where globalization, as we knew it, may never fully be realized again. Unless, as we’re seeing happening now, that the rest of the world continues to cooperate and collaborate globally but explicitly excludes the U.S. The diversification of the world economy, especially with an unreliable actor like the U.S., is best for the countries of the world even it isn’t best for the U.S. itself, the country that started all of this.

the psychology of the perpetrator

So why is all this happening? And why now? To answer that question we need to look for a moment at the psychology of the perpetrator, Donald J. Trump. All the books written about him and everyone who has worked with him say that he is incapable of seeing any situation as other than a win-lose one. He has to win and someone else has to lose. And he even attempts to degrade the other party with childish name-calling, and even threatening them (as in taking over your country). He’s done that his entire life and it brought disaster to his business ventures (declaring bankruptcy six times!).

He also has to always be the smartest person in the room. This leads him to not read and not rely on or even consult experts. All branches of the U.S. government—the executive, legislative, and judicial—are seemingly powerless to stop him, thus giving him virtual dictatorial power. All of this spells disaster for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

final thoughts

I had thought, or perhaps wished, that the world would move toward being more cooperative and collaborative, something we badly need in order to tackle our actual existential challenges together like climate change, economic disparity, and geopolitical conflicts. I worry that the world is going in the opposite direction, all thanks to just one man and the people who voted for him, admittedly not knowing what they were actually voting for thanks to his lies, in my view. I truly hope that this can be turned around because if not, this is a sad day for the world.

You Have More Power Than You Think

I’ve always been fascinated by the tendency for people to discount their individual power and agency and for being followers rather than leaders. People often express the view that “somebody should do something about that”, or “what I say or do doesn’t matter” thus lacking any appreciation of their own power and efficacy.

My Experience

The idea of not feeling like I don’t have agency is completely foreign to me when I think through my approach to things and what I’ve done throughout my life. My mother always told me to not be an audience member but instead to be on stage and she also expected me to take action and to make a difference in whatever I chose to do.

Those lessons inspired me my whole life. There are many examples of how my mother’s inspiration gave me the power of agency to taken action: Dealing with being bullied as a foreigner when I was eight but learning the English language fluently and then excelling academically and socially; working hard to realize my musical talent and then being on stage throughout my high school years playing the lead in musicals and concerts; realizing that a musical career wouldn’t be optimal for me and then pivoting my education to cognitive science and clinical psychology with academic distinction; seizing the opportunity to transforming IBM globally with User-Centered Design and then again with Enterprise Design Thinking working with each division of the company with significant financial impact; noticing that Apple introduced podcasts in iTunes and then being among the very first to start a podcast and seeing it rise to Number 1; and wanting to make a major impact on key global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and human illness and then co-founding the Habits for a Better World project with Carly Williams after I retired from IBM. I wouldn’t have done any of these things had I not known the power of agency and taking action.

Political Power

I’d like to make the case for people to appreciate and use the power that they have in their lives.

Think about this for a moment. More people did not vote in the recent U.S. election than did vote for the current President. They thought their vote wouldn’t count. If only 2.3 percent of them realized that they had power and used it, the outcome for the country and the world would have been totally different. While many now complain about the President and what he’d doing, which is often having a personal negative impact on their lives, they probably still don’t appreciate that their non-action contributed to the current situation in the U.S. These non-voters didn’t believe that they had agency in their lives.

Power to Improve the World

The same goes for having an impact on other things in the world, like climate change, biodiversity loss, and even your health. Most people say that governments, companies, and institutions need to address these challenges. They don’t believe that they have any agency in making an impact on these challenges themselves.

Yet the amazing volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers on Carly Williams and my Habits for a Better World project reviewed the existing scientific and medical research literature and learned that individual action is able to have upwards of 73% impact on climate change, upwards of 94% on biodiversity loss, and upwards of 80% on avoiding chronic illnesses. So why are people not doing it? They don’t believe they have the agency to do so.

Interestingly, even the volunteers on our project themselves often don’t believe they have the agency to do what we’re aiming to do on the project. Cary and I have said from the very start of the project that we want to use research to inform the deliverables from the project. We’ve mentioned one of the deliverables we plan to produce is a documentary film but we’ve constantly said that everyone on the team should also look beyond the film to identify whatever will work best to inspire people to adopt habits that will make for a better world. We’re open to anything the teams may propose. I’m concerned that researchers and designers have learned in their day jobs that research and design often don’t have the influence and impact that they should and this has made them question their agency for having impact even on this project where they actually have full agency.

Reasons for a lack of agency

Recent studies report significant mental health issues among young adults aged 18 to 25 with about 36% experiencing anxiety and 29% depression. Mental health issues often result in a perceived lack of agency. Also, factors like financial stress, lack of meaningful work, and social isolation may also contribute to a reduced sense of control over people’s lives. However, there are ways to improve this situation to increase an individual’s appreciation of and taking action on their power of agency.  

The seven Key Skills for Agency

I recently came across and read the book “The Power of Agency: The 7 principles to conquer obstacles, make effective decisions, and create a life on your own terms”.

The following are the seven skills the authors suggest are key to activating your power of agency:

1. Control Stimuli – Be careful about what you allow into your life (media, people, information). Manage distractions and reduce noise will improve focus and decision-making.

2. Associate Selectively – Surround yourself with supportive, positive, and growth-oriented people. Relationships strongly influence agency and mental clarity.

3. Move – Physical movement (exercise, walking, stretching) has been shown to boost cognitive function, reduces stress, and enhance self-control.

4. Position Yourself as a Learner – Adopt a growth mindset. Be open to learning and curiosity because these fosters adaptability and better decision-making.

5. Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs – Self-awareness and emotional regulation help you to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively.

6. Check Your Intuition – Trust your instincts, but verify them with facts and rational analysis. Balanced decision-making involves both logic and intuition.

7. Deliberate, Then Act – Take thoughtful action after assessing options. Avoid overthinking or impulsiveness; agency requires both reflection and decisive action.

These skills collectively enhance mental clarity, confidence, and resilience, allowing people to take control of their circumstances rather than feeling overwhelmed by them.

Final reflection

Even though we’re living in a turbulent world at the moment that may make you feel like you can’t do anything to have impact on it, you can. As an example, at the time I’m writing this many Canadians are individually boycotting U.S. products, services, and companies in response to the words and actions of the current U.S. President. Americans are also scheduling boycotts of particular companies and protesting. When individuals, together with other individuals take an action like this, they amplify their impact at scale. As I just heard U.S. Senator Cory Booker say, “the power of the people is stronger than the people in power”.

So, I recommend you read the book and/or decide to take action on something important to you, encourage others to do the same, and you’ll be exercising your power of agency and thereby having impact on the world.

Creating a Great MRI Experience

I’ve taught what I call a patient-centered design mindset to pre-med students, medical students, early career physicians, and leaders of healthcare systems. I’ve often used this photograph when discussing what true patient-centeredness is all about in focusing on the patient experience.

The GE Doug Dietz Story

The story I would tell about this picture is all about Doug Dietz, a designer at GE Healthcare, who was deeply moved after witnessing a young child’s fear and distress when preparing for an MRI scan. He learned first hand seeing a young girl being so intimidated by the machine. Children would often need to be sedated in order to have the test. Dietz though decided to do what he could do to solve the problem at the source.

He partnered with the Stanford d.school and used user research and design thinking to reimagine the MRI environment. He visited daycare centers and kindergartens—places that are designed specifically for children. Instead of redesigning the very expensive machine itself, he and his team created immersive decals and a storytelling approach that turned the MRI scan into an adventure. One adventure, the one in the picture, involved transforming the MRI room into a pirate ship, where children were told they were on an exciting journey and had to stay still to avoid “rocking the boat” and if they were really still they would be able to get some of the pirate treasure. Hospital staff also dressed up and played along, making the experience fun and engaging. Patient satisfaction scores skyrocketed, sedation rates dropped, and children who once feared the MRI machine were now eager for their “adventure.”

I told that story as an inspirational example of what could be possible in transforming what is often an intimidating and sometimes outright scary experience into a positive one. The students in my classes, inspired by this and similar stories and learning to think like a designer, subsequently redesigned doctors office waiting rooms, emergency rooms, clinics, and more to make the patient experience as good as they could make it.

My own story

I needed to have an MRI done last year and it was an absolutely horrendous experience even as an adult. I needed to have my head imaged which required me to have a cage of sorts placed over my head. However, the cage was too small and my head could only fit by moving my nose into one of the holes in the cage. That itself caused me some serious claustrophobia and that was worsened when I was moved into the MRI machine itself with it’s deafening sounds. I had no idea how long it would last, nor when it was finished. At one point, it seemed to stop and I was partially moved out of the machine but my hopes that the procedure was over were dashed when I realized that they simply needed to inject a contrast dye, and I was moved back into the machine. When it was finally finished, I was exhausted but so relieved that it was over.

So you can imagine my concern about needing to have an other MRI done this year. I was dreading the day. However, this time, I had a Radiologic Technologist who was amazing. I told him about my previous experience with the cage so he adjusted the setup so that my nose wasn’t right up against the cage. He also told me how long the procedure would take and, over the headphones that I had on, he talked me through the entire thing, telling me that the next “picture” as he called it would take ten seconds, then the next one would take two minutes, and that I had three more pictures to go and I’d be done. He also frequently asked me how it was going and that I was going great.

I honestly got so relaxed that I truly enjoyed the experience—the fascinating wildly different frequencies of sound, the vibration, etc. I was in a rock band when I was young and I used to love the sound and feeling of loud sound on my body. This MRI reminded me of that. That fact that I could even entertain that thought was due to me being in such relaxed state entirely thanks to the wonderful support I received from that amazing healthcare professional who made the patient experience a major focus.

It’s so rare in healthcare to have a positive experience like that so I wanted to share it here to celebrate it and encourage healthcare professionals to double-down on creating a supportive and engaging patient experience.

Imagine that—a great MRI experience. While I didn’t get to go into a pirate ship, I did get to experience the adult version thanks so the stellar work of a healthcare professional.

Transitions, Imagining, & Making a Better World

This is my 2024 year-end post reflecting on the major events that had significance to me, my perspective on them, and the things for which I am most grateful.

End of an era

I spent the first part of this year traveling to each of our IBM design studios globally, at least most of the big ones that I could fit in, for me to personally say goodbye prior to retiring from the company after 36 years and to share my insights, advice, and recommendations. I’d like to thank Justin Youngblood for allowing me to take the farewell tour, Lauren Swanson and Renee Albert for arranging it and traveling with me on these last trips together, and all of my former staff and colleagues for making it a fitting end to a wonderful IBM career. I thank you, miss you, and appreciate you all!

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Imagining

John Lennon playing Imagine with Yoko Ono who co-wrote the song sitting next to him.

This was also another hard year of dealing with devastating happenings in the world and I frequently had to rely on a coping mechanism I’ve used for decades which involves my singing a very special song.

I remember hearing John Lennon singing “Imagine” in the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate. I was blown away by the song and loved it. It’s the soundtrack of my life in a way. I just recently learned that the lyrics to the song were written collaboratively by John and Yono. And whenever the world gets too crazy, I sing Imagine to myself as my personal anthem.

It’s 2024, soon to be 2025, and it seems to me that we’re going backwards rather than forwards regarding each of the themes mentioned in the song. We have wars inspired by religions and traditions, we have the obscene acquisition of wealth by a few, and we have leaders working to close or extend borders of countries who espouse extreme nationalistic and isolationist beliefs, and who have myopic, short-term, and regressive views regarding women’s rights and so many other critical challenges like climate change, human illness, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, and biodiversity loss.

I ask you to do a thought exercise for a moment—read through the lyrics of Imagine and actually visualize the world moving in this direction rather than the opposite as is happening today. Just imagine the world without wars, the reasons for wars, the negative effects of extreme religious adherence, out of control nationalism, massive income disparity, and the total lack of caring about women’s rights, human rights, animal rights, climate change, and making this world better for everyone. Just imagine.

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin' for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

I truly believe that if our species is to evolve and our planet is to survive we can’t only be dreamers, we need to make a real difference by working together to counter the current trends and to take positive steps to address the problems of the world.

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Making a better World

Some will despair but I’m a firm believer in our individual power to effect change and I subscribe to this re-written version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s words:

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

Too many of us “accept the things I cannot change.” I think that is at heart of many of the problems we see in the world, that we just unquestioningly accept things as being out of our control.

I did my small part this past year to make a positive change with my podcast and with the nonprofit that I co-founded.

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Life Habits Podcast episodes

I recorded several episodes this year on my Life Habits Podcast that provide practical advice for making change and dealing with a changing world. These include the following:

LH156 — Reconnecting in a Polarized World: Better Questions for Fostering our Shared Humanity.

LH154 — Future Proofing Your Career

LH149 — Feeding Your Soul with Purpose and Meaning

LH143 — Dealing with Divisiveness and Polarization

LH137 — Hungry for Action: Food, Climate, and our Food

LH130 — Harnessing the Power of AI

LH128 — Cracking the Cortisol Code: From Stress Response to Stress Management

LH127 — Disconnect to Reconnect: A Guide to Digital Detox

LH120 — Be Kind, Age Well

LH116 — Resilience with Mandy Kloppers

You can access the podcast on any of the podcast apps but also conveniently on my Linktree.

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Habits for a better world

Carly Williams, Filmmaker and Producer

I think the best thing I did this year was to team up with my friend and co-founder, filmmaker Carly Williams. We’re kindred spirits in believing that individuals at scale can make huge improvements in the world by combining research, design, and filmmaking to help mitigate global challenges like climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, biodiversity loss, and more.

We launched our Habits for a Better World initiative, now nonprofit, with an announcement on LinkedIn that had more than 55K impressions which led to 450 people applying to join us as volunteers on the project. We ended up with 300 researchers, designers, and filmmakers and they’re not only talented but also so committed to our cause that they contribute their craft and time so freely. They too have adopted Carly and my tagline, when people say “someone should do something about that… we say why not us!” I’m so incredibly thankful to each and every one of our incredible volunteers.

We hosted a couple of kickoff calls involving some workshopping to get organized and then the teams got to work to read the existing scientific literature to explore what individual behaviors could mitigate the challenges mentioned above, to introspect in order to determine their personal alignment with those behaviors, which they then did in small groups, and following that they carried out extensive new research to understand where people are at in order to meet them where they are in order to inspire the requisite behavior changes.

That generative research was recently completed and we held an all-day online Habits for a Better World Conference featuring some insightful guest speakers and each of our teams presenting the results of their research.

Carly and I have given our teams the month of December off except for a handful of Enablement Team members who are still working with us to carry out the cross-team synthesis of insights from the research so that we can kick off in January with the exciting workshopping, design, and filmmaking phase.

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Gratitude

I’d also like to express my gratitude for several of the other things I continued to do or did for the first time this year. I enjoyed continuing to work with Michael Hartmann in my role of Industry Professor in the EMBA, Directors College, and National Health Fellows programs. It was wonderful to work with Paige Heron this year on my Life Habits Podcast and interview so many interesting and inspiring guests. I’d like to thank the many people who I had the honor of coaching this year and I think it’s pretty cool that our Guys Night Out group of friends will be celebrating 20 years together this coming year. It was also great to reconnect with Don Norman at his Design for a Better World Summit in San Diego.

Last but certainly not least the most important to me are the members of my family — Erin, Elliot, Emma, Rowan, Noah, Val, Xeena, and Ares. In fact, I’ll be with them in Los Angeles over the holidays celebrating our 10-year anniversary of being totally plant-based, and 40+ years of being meat free for Erin and me.

Books

Lastly, I’d like share some of the books that I read this year in case you haven’t read some of them but would like to. Some of them I read the pre-release galley copies of in order to interview the authors, others I thought I should read, a couple I re-read, and yet others, I just read out of sheer interest. I thank the authors and especially those who were kind enough to be on my podcast.

I hope to share at this time next year the second book I’m currently writing, and maybe even a third too in collaboration with some friends.

Here’s to making 2025 the best that it can be through collective passion, innovation, and love.

Thanks so all of you who I had the honor of spending time with this year and have a wonderful holiday.

Elon Musk — What Happened?

My personal experience

I first saw a Tesla (the Roadster) at the 2013 Toronto Auto Show (top left pic) and later that year in a parking garage (the Model S to the right of the Roadster pic) when I was in LA with my eldest son when he was starting graduate school there. I remember being so impressed that Tesla was leading with design when all other cars and anything else for that matter that was leaning into environmentalism was incredibly ugly.

I was fascinated by the company and the person of Elon Musk and I read everything I could about him (most notably the book shown at right in the pic). I was intrigued. I first experienced riding in a Tesla Model S (pic below the Roadster) in an Uber while in Madrid with IBM colleagues running a large design activation session with our top European sales leaders there. Then in 2019 I actually drove a Model 3 and was hooked and when they made it all vegan (pic below the Model S), I bought one (bottom left pic).

maintenance

I’ve absolutely loved the car and have never had a problem with it. Oh wait, there was a little piece of rubber on the passenger seat adjustment that I needed to replace. But, that was it. Four years of no visits to the dealer or anywhere else for maintenance. Because I live in Canada, all I do is have my summer wheels replaced by winters around now and then the opposite in the late Spring. That’s absolutely it! I’ve never owned a vehicle that was this reliable and maintenance free. I also haven’t had to buy gas for four years. All I do is plug the car into the charger in my garage, a financial savings of 86% compared with paying for gas for my previous BMW 5 Series. And that’s just financial savings. The Tesla Model 3 also provides carbon savings compared with my BMW 5 Series, 97% carbon savings in fact!

unlocking and starting

I used to have to carry a key to unlock my BMW. With my Tesla, I just have to walk up to the car and it unlocks the doors automatically and turns on sufficient lights to see what I’m doing to get in the car. I also don’t need to carry a key, in fact, there isn’t one. There’s only a credit car piece of plastic that I keep permanently in my wallet in case my iPhone is stolen because my phone is the key. You can buy a fob but I don’t see why you would.

I used to have to push a button to start my BMW but I don’t have to in order to start the Tesla. I just need to indicate by moving a stalk on the steering column whether i want to go forward or backward and the motors are engaged automatically.

power

Of course, there was a massive difference in the two vehicles when comes to power and acceleration. The BMW had a pretty powerful engine but because it was an internal combustion engine, there was a delay in using its full power. And even then, the power paled in comparison to the Tesla.

Self-Driving

It probably goes without saying but let me mention it nonetheless that I often don’t actually have to drive the Tesla. It drives itself and does a pretty good job of it, about 98% of the time. With the latest software update, I also don’t need to hold onto the steering wheel. As long as I’m attentive and looking at the road, the car drives itself. I particularly appreciate it in rush hour traffic, driving boring repetitive routes, and long highway trips. The car is so fun to drive though that despite its self-driving prowess, I often prefer to drive myself especially given its acceleration and handling.

Locking & Walking Away

When I get to my destination with the Tesla, I just stop the car and get out and walk away. When I’m in another country and driving a rental car, I often forget that I have to turn the car off and lock it when I get out. Its not uncommon for someone to point out to me that my rental car is still running when I’m walking into a building.

frustrations

The car isn’t without its frustrations though mostly caused by frivolous and gratuitous design changes on the screen. It’s one thing when designers at Meta move the buttons around on the Instagram mobile app to try to trick you into using a part of the product or one of their other products. I think that’s company-driven design that I’ve talked about previously. Those design changes aren’t dangerous. When designers make frivolous and gratuitous changes to a car interface, it can be dangerous.

Tesla is impressive

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’ve been pretty impressed with my Tesla Model 3, the fact that I get a new car of sorts too when regular over the air operating system updates, and my dealings with the company itself.

what happened to elon

I was impressed with the car, the company, and the amazing charging infrastructure they put in place that is the envy of every other car company going electric. So much so that they’re now partnering with Tesla. I’m impressed too by SpaceX revolutionizing travel to space and the amazing reusable rocket technology, SolarCity like the Tesla, making solar roofs and electric storage beautiful.

I initially viewed Musk as an visionary leading groundbreaking companies like Tesla and SpaceX. However, his image has been irreversibly tarnished the last few years in my mind and also I think in most people’s minds. Things like the following sadly took him down and continue to do so:

• A post calling a British cave diver involved in the Thai cave rescue mission in 2018 a "pedo guy”.

• The circumstances of his acquisition of Twitter which he renamed to X, his bizarre management actions involving mass layoffs including getting rid of the community standards assessment team, and his own erratic posts on the platform.

• His increasing involvement in politics and use of his platform irresponsibly including his engagement in culture wars and inappropriate public statements about his own children online.

• His handling of labor relations, safety issues, and dismissive attitude regarding his staff and shareholders.

• I could go on but his promises off the top of his head about when certain technologies would be available and his over ambitious timelines for Mars colonization have made him unbelievable, unreliable, and even laughable.

I don’t know if he experienced some psychological trauma, whether all those billions of dollars just got to his head, or that he was always a jerk but he now has a larger platform to share his every bizarre thought, but I now find him annoying and embarrassing rather than being an admired visionary. That doesn’t take away what he’s accomplished. It just takes away my respect for him as a person.

ChatGPT: Wonder & Dread

I first wrote about being impressed by and also concerned about ChatGPT in January 2023. I also shared my shock in December that ChatGPT 3.0 reported that my brother had died. It was a response to a prompt to tell me about my brother and while it got most of his bio pretty well right, the entire text was in the past tense indicating that he had passed away. However, my brother was and still is very much alive, healthy, and running major races.

While I had seen inaccuracies before, it was this egregious error that made me very cautious about relying too readily on output from Generative AI tools and especially ChatGPT. This of course is called a hallucination and can be expected when you understand how Generative AI actually works.

wonder

A lot of time has passed and Generative AI tools have improved drastically. I rely on the them several times a day now and am truly in awe of and full of wonder when using them most of the time. It’s truly impressive what they can do. The confidence with which they provide responses engenders confidence in the user, even trusting reliance which of course makes the errors it makes even more troublesome because we don’t expect them. As a result, I’m also vigilant about checking sources.

I even take ChatGPT along with me on my phone in my pocket on daily run/walks during which I have a lengthy verbal conversation with what I consider to be a highly intelligent friend.

dread

I was having a verbal conversation the other evening and asked ChatGPT 4o to tell me about the initiative called Habits for a Better World that Carly Williams and I co-founded. I wanted to see what it would say when someone asked it a question about our project. The image shows what it came back with.

View fullsize

ChatGPT 4o verbal conversation. Click/tap to enlarge.

Step 1

It’s basically saying that I had nothing to do with the initiative and that it was Lauren Swanson and not me who co-founded it with Carly Williams. Lauren Swanson is amazing and was my Chief of Staff when I was at IBM. However, she’s had nothing to do with the Habits for a Better World project and has never met Carly Williams.

Step 2

I tried to correct ChatGPT but it doubles-down on insisting that it was Lauren that co-led the project and if I had anything to do with Carly Williams, it must have been on an unrelated project.

Step 3

I provided the link to our organization’s website and, finally, ChatGPT was convinced to honor me with my rightful position as a co-founder alongside Carly.

In a subsequent conversation, it referred to me as Lauren Swanson and conflated our bios. I again had to correct it in this case using the web browser version to indicate that it was incorrect and to then correct it.

persistence

I had assumed that all was good but I just asked ChatGPT to tell me about Lauren Swanson and this is what it said.

ChatGPT response to the prompt, "tell me about Lauren Swanson", which conflates Lauren and my bio information.

reflection

Lauren and I had a chuckle about it and this was a bit of fun for us but there’s a more serious issue here. I had assumed that ChatGPT getting the information about my brother being alive or dead wrong was due to it being version 3.0. However, the fail I’m sharing here came from the latest 4o version.

When I’m prompting ChatGPT for information, it’s usually things that I don’t know which is of course is why I’m asking. When it gets things this wrong when I’m asking it about something I know a lot about, I’m now more concerned about how much of what I’m getting from it is seriously wrong and a hallucination which of course I wouldn’t know. My usual practice is to ask for sources and when it says that it is generalizing across many sources, I simply don’t believe what it just gave me. When it gives me sources, I go and check them.

Interestingly, when I just asked it to give me the source of information it gave me about Lauren Swanson, it said that it was based on details I had shared with it in previous conversations. That of course makes me wonder about what other information I’ve given it that it is now conflating into other conversations I’m having with it. The bottom line on all of this is—user beware!

Co-Lab: UXR Insights & Trends

I just got back from the Co-Lab Conference held in Chicago this week. It was my second year attending and speaking at the conference. And I honestly think that it’s the very best in the field because the attendees are practitioners who are doing the actual work and leaders who are truly driving innovation in research, design, and technology. It’s sponsored and put on by dscout, the research platform company. The conference is the brainchild of Michael Winneck, dscout’s CEO. I’ve been impressed by Michael from the time I met him as a professor at Northwestern University as we co-led a capstone project during my year working with design schools and universities. He's a creative thinker and a major force in the UX research field.

Organization

The organization of the conference was refreshingly different with only few insightful keynotes and mostly thought-provoking three to five eight-minute lightening talks in the main conference space followed by moderated table-group discussions in another space.

I was asked to do the final keynote summarizing and wrapping up the conference together with the amazing Katie Johnson. Like we did in that keynote, I’ll reflect on and share the key insights and trends that we heard as well as share my own perspectives on them as well.

Business focus

I had presented at last year’s conference my view that we as researchers should “open the aperture” to focus on the entire client experience, to “follow the money” to understand how our research could contribute optimally to the businesses we work for, and to be laser-focused on making sure that our research measurably adds value to the business. I was absolutely delighted to hear these themes during the conference so much so that they appear to now be going mainstream. I of course wasn’t the only one advocating for these changes early on but it was heartening nonetheless to see how central they were in this conference.

Julie Norvaisas kicked off the keynotes in a segment titled “Owning (Y)our Future”. She talked about focussing on yourself, your team, your organization, our discipline, and on humankind. She also encouraged attendees to own leadership possibilities, to be an emergent leader if you're not an official one and to be successful by focusing on doing what’s needed to make the organization successful. You don’t need permission. She argued against taking an “us vs them” mentality and victim attitude.

Judd Antin gave a captivating talk encouraging attendees to own their business’s success and in doing that stop focusing on what our discipline has been focussed on for the past 15 years including user-centered empathy, including user's voices in the design space, methodological rigor, etc. Those are necessary but they’re “inside baseball”, to use an American phrase. Our discipline experienced a reckoning, a change brought about by macro-level sifts, technological changes, and our own mistakes. The ideas from the past won't work for the next phase. We need to be driving successful businesses. A particularly salient part of his talk involved the showing of a visual that initially showed looking through a keyhole and seeing two people but when you open the door, we see a burning city. He advocated for getting out of the building, literally, to see the full picture. He also advised that researchers should use their research methods to understand their colleagues, especially in meetings, to determine who sits with whom, what their body language is, in order to know how to best integrate research work into the company. User and business goals need to be one and the same with everyone aligned.

I’ve used the phrase “the entire client experience” as the focus for my teams for years and I reiterated at this conference that I used to tell the researchers on my team to consider our organization inside IBM to be like a startup with funding from an investor, our SVP, and that we needed to show impact before I could ask for next year’s funding. I also told my staff that their purpose was to make the lives of our users more enjoyable and productive and simply completing a study barely did half the job. They needed to see the insights through to the implementation and delivery. For the Habits for a Better World project that I’m running right now with Carly Williams, we regularly remind our researchers to keep our nonprofit’s end objective in mind which is a documentary inspiring behavior change to make the world a better place. We also need to conduct responsible research, be conscious of how much the research costs, and what outcome for the business it will yield.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher talked about owning our power (even if it feels like we don't have any). She shared a case study of a person who worked all the time and felt powerless. And that person isn’t alone with 50% of design managers struggling mentally. Many are pessimistic about the state of the field. They believe that we're in turmoil and that businesses don't know if they want or need us. Sara took a refleshingly positive view that I’m completely aligned with that we can't afford to lead with fear. She shared the Karpman Drama Triangle with the villain, the hero, and the victim and made the case that our teams need us to break this cycle. We got into UX to do good but we’re over-rely on UX to affirm that we're good. Sara made the case that we are good and that we are powerful. And our teams need us to own that power. She also made the case that having strong identities outside work makes stronger leaders inside. As many know, I've done that my entire career with my keynoting, teaching, writing, and change making. It built my confidence and ego even if my day job didn’t.

redesigning our UXR Product

I also found it heartening to hear several presenters mentioning the need to consider our research deliverables as products that need to be designed, something I too have been a broken record on for some time. I told the story of watching playback recordings of research presentations when I took on the role of VP of Global UX Research at IBM. I had to sit through most of the presentation talking about methods, participants, etc. before I got to hearing the key findings and recommendations right at the end of the presentation. We researchers admonish teams that adopt a “build it and they will come” approach to product development but that’s exactly the approach we often take to our own work. I mentioned that we changed that at IBM by starting with the most important takeaways from the work and then optimizing and even technically facilitating getting recommendations directly into the product roadmap and into the product. A couple of visuals to keep in mind about focusing on what you did versus what you found out. We’re not in grade-school math class; you don’t have to show your work. And underwear is important but you don’t have to show it.

Several presenters made the point that researchers aren't asking good questions and that they’re not considering whether the learning objectives are understood and in alignment. What hypothesis/assumptions are already on the table? What decisions are we influencing? Turning our skills on our selves. Set the stage, gain a baseline understanding, and future-state ideation. We collect rich information but distill it into slides and expect the people watching them to have the same empathy as we observed. Translate insights to product outcomes together with our partners. They're bought in and understand the value of research better. Partners have to be more hands-on because it makes research accessible and inclusive.

generalist vs specialist

Another major theme was that of the generalist versus specialist. It was argued that we are the catalysts and that specialists should be moving to resourcefull generalists. The argument for this was the trends that human-centered culture is no longer owned by UX. Largely due to design thinking and powerful playbooks that will only get better. Generalists use these and with even newer new tools like GenAI, anyone will able to be do this work. And roles and duties will continue to consolidate. The argument is that UXers need to support and cultivate these resourceful generalist professionals through teaching, supporting, and reinforcing adaptation. This is an example of leaning in, understanding how an organization is working, and adapting to it. Another is broadening our view that the customer isn’t always king, they’re one of several stakeholders all of whom are important.

I thought that this was an interesting discussion and it made me reflect back to a keynote that I gave to a cross-discipline meeting at a university. When I talked about design thinking, one of the business faculty members asked me, “with everyone doing design thinking, do we still need designers and researchers?”. I answered emphatically “yes!”. Everyone thinking like a designer doesn’t mean they’re doing design and the same goes for research. I use the T-shaped person to explain this. I characterize design thinking as one of the key skills to acquire that is representative of the horizontal stroke of the T but you still need to have a long vertical stroke for your superpower or main discipline whether design or research. While I totally agree that it is designers and researchers who are the catalysts for change and should be doing the teaching and supporting, I don’t believe this at all minimizes the need for design and research specialists. I do encourage designers and researchers to widen the vertical stroke of their T to include business, engineering, etc. skills as well. I do believe that we need to democratize UX research skills across disciplines but also, very importantly, within UX reseachers themselves. The wide range of educational backgrounds of researchers leads to some professing to only be qual researchers and others quant. I believe that any researcher should have both sets of skills.

Gen Ai

We had some incredibly insightful presentations and discussions on building Generative AI technology itself, evaluating it, and where it may go in the future. We got a glimpse into how dscout is building GenAI into it’s tooling and how they’re using research foundationally in that process. Others made the point that we need to develop metrics for evaluating GenAI tools and it was suggested that we should move from the focus on the human to the equivalent measurement of the computer. And an example of building a healthcare GenAI app reinforced the importance of the framework I presented at the IxDC Conference in Beijing.

final thoughts

I can’t do justice to capturing everything important that was discussed in a two-day conference like this. I also decided to not call out each presenter and what they presented, other than the keynote presenters. If I had, it would have been a book and not a blog post. So if I failed to mention great work you shared at the conference or acknowledge your work, I do apologize.

The conference was a positive, uplifting, discipline affirming event. Attendees reinforced the value of the feeling that “we’re not alone”, that there are some great things happening to the discipline and the field that are becoming mainstream, and that the best way to navigate the future is together with our colleagues.

A huge thanks to Michael and the dscout team for putting on such an amazing conference and research platform, for inviting me, and thanks to the presenters, attendees, and most of all my keynote partner, Katie Johnson.

Company-Centered Design

No User-Centered Design

I've written previously about how some companies are not focused enough on making sure that the designs of their products are user-centered. They're simply not paying attention to the user and as a result end up creating bad designs. Users then suffer through confusing, unintuitive, and frustrating experiences. For companies like these the solution is pretty simple — hire UX researchers and designers — and support them in doing their work using well-known user-centered design practices. I’ve spent my entire career and my writing focussed on getting companies to adopt user-centered design practices.

Company-centered design

Somewhat shockingly, there are other companies that appear to intentionally do the opposite of user-centered design and instead practice what I’m calling company-centered design. Please don’t take from the image on the right that I’ve revised my book and endorse this practice. I didn’t and I don’t. I abhor it.

These companies purposely make designs more difficult to use to trick or otherwise force users to do what the company wants them to do.

I’m sure you experience the results of company-centered design everyday because the products the companies that practice it develop are used by pretty well everyone everyday. You may just consider these annoyances but when you look at the motivation that the company has to design things the way they do, you’ll realize that it isn’t simply bad design, its insidiously intentional company-centered design to further the strategic intent and bottom line corporate objectives.

Intentional bad designs are often called dark patterns. However, these are typically applied during the purchase, upgrade, or cancellation parts of the user experience. However, company-centered design is more pervasive, intentionally focussed on the day-to-day use of the product.

Motivation

Let’s explore some examples of company-centered design. The company that takes company-centered design to olympic levels is Meta with their Facebook and Instagram properties. Meta is so afraid of TikTok that it has been doing everything it can to change the platform to be just like TikTok with short-form video content. Meta has also tried to take advantage of Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter, now X, that it launched Threads and have been doing everything they can to get users on Instagram and Facebook to use it.

User experiences

What do users want from social media companies? Simply to connect with their friends and to reach other connections to broaden their network of friends. So, people don’t come to social media apps for the apps; they come for the people on them. You would naturally think that social media companies would want to satisfy those users’ desires but they often do the opposite.

Post Analytics

Instagram started out as just a photo sharing service and Facebook a way to update friends on what you’re up to with text and the occasional photo. However, with Meta wanting it’s two properties to compete with TikTok, it forces users to move from text and photos to videos.

Reel Analytics

How does it influence users to change what they want to do on their platforms? They limit the reach of what a user posts if the user just does what they themselves want to do, which is usually posting photos. They encourage users to post reels by providing greater reach to their followers and beyond. See the post analytics versus the reel analytics to the right showing that the reel leads to 56% more views and a dramatic increase in reach to non-followers.

A post as a reel with Instagram's advertisement "Watch more reels" obscuring the post.  

This encouragement to use reels leads users to do unnatural things just to satisfy the company’s desire to have users use reels including simply sharing posts and photos as reels. However, that also makes some of the resulting reels unusable and unreadable, as shown in this image with Instagram’s encouragement to watch more reels obscuring the actual post.

Threads injected into the Instagram feed

Meta also encourages the use of Threads by intentionally embedding Thread posts in the Instagram and Facebook feeds. I’ve tried Threads but don’t want Threads yet Meta insists on subjecting me to Threads posts in my Instagram feed. This is of course Meta’s own advertising but they add that to the rest of the ads that earn them money. A random sampling of my Instagram feed shows that out of 10 posts, 4 are ads. The frequency of ads in the feed has also been going up steadily. A similar random sampling of my Facebook feed indicates that fully 6 out of 10 posts are either external advertisers’s ads or Meta’s own Threads, reels, and connecting with other people ads. Only 4 out of the 10 are actually what I want to see. Meta only allows you to reach a small proportion of your followers unless you pay them for you to reach more by boosting a post which is in essence turning them into a sponsored ad. And of course, ads are another example of company-centered design.

Feedback from other users

I mentioned to my followers on Instagram that I was writing this blog post and asked them for their examples of Meta/Instagram not being user-centered.

Here’s a sampling of their comments:

Constant ads, reels are out of hand, no customer support for bugs n issues with the app - ive sent reports so many times nothing happens .. also they take down silly posts for provocative content but when actual provocative content is reported they do nothing. It's so longer a personal space anymore also, all business and it’s no longer a personal space.

The top issue should be the censorship and suspending accounts without reason and having no one to dispute it with. They need to knock off censorship of all kinds…..especially ones they claim are misinformation which has since come out as truth.

Also urls should be clickable links.

Not being able to see who unfollows you.

I miss the photos only days - could live without reels/videos.

I follow accounts that I interact with….like, comment, save etc but then they just disappear from my feed. Sometimes something will make me remember them and I’ll look up their account and they’ll have been posting regularly!

My complaint is always one that I share with a lot of people, I think - it’s that you can’t rearrange your posts.

I can go on for a whole month.

ADS. SO OVER ALL THE DAMN ADS.

Too many ads. No way to filter so I am sure to see posts by my actual friends. Almost no engagement anymore (I have 1700 followers and get less than 20 interactions usually)

It’s annoying that when you write a URL it doesn’t become a live link.

My complaint is that when I try to tag animal rescues to save a dog from euthanasia or pledge money to save that animal they flag my account for tagging others and frequently remove comments with pledges in them. All of this hurts the animals we are trying to save.

If you’ve got a problem with your account there’s no one to talk to!!

I also gave up on increasing followers. Years ago. Followed all the “tips” and never increased enough to notice. The little guy is just a cog in this big wheel now, of “influencers”, ads, and click bait.

They allow accounts that want followers and views by showing severe animal torture. Even if it is in the rules that animal cruelty is forbidden, they do nothing when you report them. They even temporarily block the whistle blower's account.

I would like to know “fact checkers” credentials and evidence. It’s all so vague.

Too much stuff in my feed from pages I don’t follow, and especially I feel like the mysterious algorithm is not showing my posts to my actual followers…ie lack of engagement even though I’ve tried some new things to try and improve this.

The only recent complaint is their lack of community standards when it comes to antisemitic posts, or posts deemed deliberately offensive to the Jewish race. I made a recent complaint, and they twice said it didn't go against their community standards. The post involved a very poor use of the swastika on an Israeli flag.

Honestly, I haven't got any complaints. Which is weird, as I am a natural born cynic!

Concluding thoughts

I thought we should end on a positive note with someone who is actually happy. All these comments reinforce to me that Instagram is listening more to their Meta bosses than it’s users. I didn’t ask a similar question on Facebook because I’m now rarely on it but I am on Instagram a lot. And I acknowledge that it’s a business but I truly believe that they’ve gone overboard on company-centered versus user-centered design.

Just a quick comparison before we finish up with LinkedIn, my preferred social media platform. Out of 10 posts, only one was an ad, my followers regularly grow with whatever content I post, and they don’t force me to do anything unnatural in order to connect with and grow my followers.

We continue to use these platforms because we want to connect with our friends despite the company-centered design practices which of course further encourages the company to do even more of it.

Let me point out that Meta isn’t the only company practicing company-centered design. They’re just in my view that the most pervasive users of it.

I Now Just Laugh at Bad Design

I’m reading a book right now, The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain to Stress Less, Laugh More, and Achieve More'er, because I’ll be interviewing the author for next week’s Life Habits Podcast episode. I’m loving the book and it made me look at the situation I’m in at the moment in a totally different, and humorous, light.

My reframing inspiration

The Context

As many of you know, Carly Williams and I are working with 300 volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers on the Habits for a Better World project. I’ve spent my entire career in design and research trying to make products that are well-designed so that users will minimally be able to use them and optimally love using them. That’s why I’ve found it fascinating to be on the other side, evaluating, buying, and rolling out products to our 300 person team. I’ve mentioned previously on LinkedIn the challenges we’ve been having with a number of products. However, there is one that is laughably badly designed—both the ux design and the service design. That product is Google Workspace. I get the sense that while it is in Google’s product portfolio, it appears to have received very little research and design attention.

Our Use Cases

We’d like to use it to schedule meetings with our 300 volunteers and our various leadership, enablement, fundraising, marketing, and filmmaking teams and to store our documents and other artifacts. The latter capability is fine but the former is not. Let me explain.

Our Laughable Experience #1

I bought Google Workspace because I initially used my personal free Gmail account to send meeting invites but most were blocked and I was told that the problem was the free email account. The remedy I was told would be to pay for a Google Workspace account. However, I had the same experience with the paid account. Then I was told that you can’t use distribution lists in Google Contacts, you need to use Google Groups. The only way to access Google Groups is through the administrator dashboard and even then Groups is way down the page with a small link. So I put the lists in Groups but now I was blocked from sending any calendar invites. One of the perks of the paid Google Workspace account though is support. So I asked the support chatbot, which turned out to be entirely useless. I then asked to be connected with a human. This window then appeared. OK, I suppose that I should contact them by email as they suggest, right? Well, do you see a link or an email address? This is an incredibly bad user experience.

Laughable fail #1

Our Laughable Experience #2

I then kept trying to get a human on chat and finally did. However, things got even worse and, in retrospect, even funnier. I was told that my “account reputation” was too low. The reason given for this was that I hadn’t paid enough money yet, either for the particularly license or cumulatively over time.

Laughable fail #2

Our Laughable Experience #3

In case it was the former, I upped my paid account to a higher level one so that it was above the threshold mentioned. However, that didn’t help. I was next told that I would need to wait for 60 days to be able to use it!!!

Laughable fail #3

Our Laughable Experience #4

Because I bought the Google Workspace account through the website hosting company we use for our website, Squarespace, I was redirected to them to further resolve the issue by increasing the “reputation of the account”. I’ve been with Squarespace for all of my websites for more than ten years and have been extremely pleased with their product and their support. However, support regarding this issue has been laughably nonexistent. I’ve tried to get a human on the Squarespace support site for nine days now and I get the following message each time and hitting the “View Queue Status” simply returns to this view.

Laughable fail #4

I did initially take the option of sending the support team an email and I’ve followed up several times in email asking for a resolution but no response.

A Reflection

I have to see the humor in this situation given how amazingly each company has failed our Habits for a Better World project. We’re 300 volunteers trying to make the world a better place and I’ve been paying for these various products out of my own pocket. Right now, there is no way for me to send a meeting invite to the 300 members of our team. I’m expected to wait 60 days to do that!!! Who in their right mind would design systems like this? Imagine a for-profit startup that has their first 300 clients but Google prevents that startup from contacting their own clients for 60 days! They’d go broke! I would expect better ux design and service design by first year undergraduate design students.

What allows me to see levity in the situation is the book I mentioned and the fact that Carly Williams and I get to work with our amazing 300 volunteer team of researchers, designers, and filmmakers focused on inspiring habits for a better world. It’s unfortunate that the companies that we’re using to do the most basic tasks are laughably inept.

People, Practices, & Impact on the World

My whole professional career has been about three things: people, practices, and impact to make the world a better place. These are the themes that inspired me to work with people at IBM for 36 years to develop and use new practices to make the work lives of our users and clients more enjoyable and productive. It's what guided the work I did in collaboration with Srini Srinivasan of the World Design Organization and our 225 global volunteers to drive behavior change in the Covid19 Design Challenge project and the same for working with Don Norman and the volunteers on the Future of Design Education project to improve how designers are taught so that they include the impact of their design on all people and the planet. It also guides my teaching, coaching, mentoring, and board work.

Origins

When I knew that I would be leaving IBM, I got together with someone I had only met a year previous to that who was truly a kindred spirit, someone who held the same worldview as me, and also had a passion to use our skills and practices to make the world a better place. We both had a dream to create the missing documentary, one that would meet people where they are and inspire individual behavior change that when carried out at scale would generate systems change. It was fortunate that our skills complemented each others perfectly for this project with mine in research and design and hers in filmmaking and production. That amazing person is Carly Williams. You know, people often say, “somebody should”. Carly and I say, “why not us!”.

Founding

We founded the Habits for a Better World project just two months ago. I announced it in a post on LinkedIn that received 55K impressions, almost 600 reactions, more than 100 comments, and greater than 50 reposts! It clearly struck a chord. We’re focused on addressing climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, and biodiversity loss with a foundational focus on adopting more plant-based practices given the predominance of scientific evidence for their outsized efficacy in ameliorating these challenges. We also realize that Generative AI, as a new technology that is rapidly emerging, is drastically compromising most climate goals given its much heavier use of energy so we’re focused on it too. Inspiring people to go more plant-based will offset some of the increased climate risk of Generative AI but we are also examining additional ways of improving various aspects of Generative AI itself for a better world, including promoting behaviors that will reduce its energy consumption, make it more inclusive, mitigate bias, increase transparency, and more.

We were absolutely overwhelmed by and so appreciative of the strong response to our request for volunteers to work on the project. We now have some 300 researchers, designers, and filmmakers from all over the world working in multiple teams focused on those challenges. We formed an Enablement Team that has gone well beyond my expectations. They helped in the selection, education, and rollout of tools for teams to use, creating processes and guidelines, and will focus soon on fundraising too.

Execution

We’re now in execution mode with teams familiarizing themselves with the prior scientific research literature and will next be carrying out our own research. That research will lead to ideation on how best to inspire the desired behavior changes and those ideas will then form the content of the documentary film and mini-documentaries in the form of social media reels. We’re also open to whatever other communication deliverable will lead to the desired behavior change.

Experiences

While we’re just getting started, I’ve been absolutely blown away by the passion, enthusiasm, commitment, hard work, and teamwork I’ve seen already from the phenomenal volunteers who are part of this project. And I’d like to acknowledge and celebrate that. When so much of what we see, hear, and read is negative, this project and the amazing people in it are incredibly positive. And I love it.

I asked them what they would like to share about why they joined this project and what their experience on it has been like thus far. As with anything on this project, I received an incredible number of contributions. Here’s a sampling.

• “Coming from a small town in Pakistan, problem-solving has always been a passion of mine, but opportunities to work on projects with a significant impact have been hard to come by. When I first heard Don Norman say that designers are here to solve real-world problems, it really resonated with me. So when I discovered UXR for Good, I instantly knew I wanted to be part of this diverse and talented group of people who are going to change the world. I am so happy to be part of it!” — Ahsan Abbas

• “I am really excited to be part of this project with the optimism of a designer—by understanding the unique challenges of different communities, we can make a real difference. It's incredibly inspiring to know I'm not alone in this journey.” — Banu Akman

• “No way could I let an opportunity pass by to work with an amazing leader in design thinking who shares a passion for improving life for all life on the only planet we have. The caliber of volunteers is inspiring. It has been great navigating initial setup and planning and seeing how well everyone collaborates. The vision is clear, and success appears to be the only possible outcome for this dedicated group of individuals.” — Drew Givens

• “Change doesn’t always need to come from big organizations. It starts with us. I see 'Habits for a Better World' as a milestone in my climate journey. I believe that small, intentional habits can significantly reduce the impact. Every individual has the power to make a difference.” — Jay

• “Transitioning from Aeronautical Engineering to UX Design self-explains my passion for problem-solving, design and human interaction. Yet, applying UX Research methods to change the world one behavior at a time is just too much, sounds like avarice. I truly believe that those indifferent to our planet are disconnected from their own humanity. Combining UXD/R with a meaningful purpose like this is a dream job for me.” — Marcela

• “I volunteered because I’m deeply committed to addressing the environmental challenges our world faces. I believe that by combining our expertise in research, design, and storytelling, we can inspire real, sustainable change. This project is a powerful opportunity to not only raise awareness but to drive action that will protect our planet for future generations.” — Meri Shahzadeyan

• “A small stick cut from its tree to be planted again makes the world greener! This is the time we spend making small changes to build a better world. This is the first habit to adopt work for yourself and for those who come after you.” — Nashwa Nassar

• “Looking at the way nature is falling down each and every day in bits, one day when it reaches its saturation it will be really disheartening to see and think of everything we could have done as designers and still decided not to……I just don’t want to feel that way”. — Nidhi Kothari

• “I believe we are all here on this Earth for a reason beyond just living. For me, that reason is the opportunity to help, to impact, and to make a difference. Over the years, I’ve volunteered for various smaller initiatives and programs, many of which didn’t require my professional skills, but each one has deepened my desire to contribute in a meaningful way. When this opportunity came my way, the very thought of being part of something on this scale was exhilarating. The chance to apply my research skills, to work alongside and learn from others, and to step out of my daily bubble truly excited me. The journey so far has been incredible. Meeting Karel and Carly, seeing them set up the infrastructure to bring everyone together, and witnessing the ease with which everyone collaborates has been both inspiring and humbling. I’m grateful for this opportunity to be a part of something that aligns so closely with my values and aspirations. It reaffirms my belief that we can all make a difference -'make a dent in the universe' when we come together with a shared purpose.” — Panna

• “I believe in the power of collective effort to create meaningful change. This project is a unique opportunity to merge creativity with purpose, and I’m thrilled to be part of a team so dedicated to making a difference. Collaborating with such incredible impact-makers, all driven by a shared vision for global change, is truly inspiring. Together, we’re not just working on a project—we’re building a better future.” — Shakshi Shah

• “I am right now in the path of finding better of myself and shift my life and career to what is my calling in the life journey. And I was lucky enough that LinkedIn shared your project and , well, when you ask the universe, the path will be lightened up.Thank you for this great opportunity to learn, do something that means a lot to me and find fantastic people ( including you) that without this project I may never had a chance to meet.” — Shiva Farzanepour

• “My dream is using my UX skills for the benefit of humanity, to work on meaningful projects that have a social impact, and that help people. It gives me hope that so many of us designers, researchers, filmmakers have gathered to look into these “wicked problems”, driven by the same goal towards a better world. Looking forward to seeing our end results and learning from everyone involved.” — Simina Harla

• “I see problems in the world but don't always feel confident to go on the journey to solve them alone. That's why a collective effort like this motivates and inspires me. By combining our diverse skills and perspectives, we can tackle complex challenges that seem daunting individually."I’m excited about the impact we’re making with this project!” — Swapnil Raj

• “To be completely candid, I volunteered because I feel disillusioned about the role of the designer in my recent work experiences and wanted to be a part of something that tackled complex social problems that had meaning and purpose to renew my sense of purpose as a designer. I didn't know when I volunteered that the project would have a focus on plant-based benefits and I'm excited by that. In my own life, I've had to be aggressively plant-based to heal my autoimmune condition, so I know first hand the tradeoffs and issues people need to sort out on a personal level. I also know about the social pressures, challenges brought about by the food industry, lifestyle mindsets, food addiction and how food choices can alienate people or cause people to judge one another. I'm excited to work with people all over the world on this project; it gives me the opportunity to learn on a monumental scale and see what we can do together to create positive change. We have the opportunity to be very creative, empathetic and impactful.” — Tracee Vetting Wolf

• “To move on in life, change is obvious. To continue the journey one should focus on changing himself to leave a positive footprint on earth rather than expecting the shift to happen automatically. That's where research plays the pivotal role.” — Susmita Chakrabarty

• “Let's design our environment the way we envision and deserve it. United, we can harness our collective power and knowledge to create meaningful change.” — Meri Shahzadeyan

• “Together to use their skills and experience in research, design, and filmmaking" with the intention to leverage existing AI opportunities as we think about ways to influence behaviour change.” — Eno Oduor

• “We've known for decades about the existential threat from climate change but carried on as usual. We've waited for system change from the top down for long enough. It's time we all take action to push through the changes to create a better world for everyone.” — Chris

• “If not now, when? If what we are doing isn't working, we need to try again, not continue to pursue the trodden path.” — Christine Chastain

• “When this opportunity arose—to join other like-minded individuals in applying human-centered practices to create a better world, something that aligns with my values and desire to give back—I knew I didn’t want to miss out.” — Dawn Ta

• “I joined this project because I believe in the power of passionate people working together to inspire change. As a designer and digital citizen, I know how storytelling through film can touch hearts and inspire minds. Our mission to encourage sustainable habits, as good habits leads to long-term positive impact which resonates with me deeply. It’s a privilege to be part of something that has the potential to create lasting, positive impact.” — Val p

Final Thoughts

I’m absolutely thrilled to be working with Carly and so many passionate, committed, hardworking, and collaborative volunteers. The fact that many of them share their enthusiasm with this project on LinkedIn is also heartwarming. But now it’s time to get doing the hard work. I’ll give periodic updates on the Habits for a Better World website but I wanted in this post to share my deep appreciation for the amazing people I’m working with. Truly a dream team! Thank you!

My Career Q & A

I shared on LinkedIn that I was interviewed during the my last week in Austin prior to my retirement from IBM by the amazing Eleanor Bartosh during the Design Studio's "Happy trails, Karel" campfire. Several of you have asked if I could share the questions and answers from that interview. We didn't record it but let me reconstruct the key points.

Eleanor: Reflecting on your career, what accomplishment are you most proud of?

Karel: I'm most proud of helping to make design, research, and design thinking pervasive in all business units of the company and establishing UX Research as a distinct discipline, creating a strong cross-company team of researchers, and optimizing the impact that UX Research has on our products. I'm also proud of the work my team and I did to make the IBM Thinkpad number one in customer satisfaction, the work we did in making WebSphere and DB2 industry leading, the early AI work we did on Watson Oncology Advisor, and the work we did with business consulting, technology consulting, and sales that led to impressive business outcomes and significant success for IBM.

Eleanor: What will you miss the most about your job?

Karel: All of you, honestly, the designers, researchers, VPs, etc. You are IBM and you're my friends and colleagues. I will miss you dearly, especially the staff I worked with the most closely. Retiring from IBM is really bittersweet. On the one hand I won't be able to enjoy working with you but I'm also so looking forward to all the things that I'll now have the time to do.

It's like what my friend Don Norman said when I posted my plans to retire on LinkedIn. "Now the news of your retirement is public. And you probably think you will have more time for ...? Nope, you won't. You will simply add to the number of things you are already doing and pretty soon you will be just as busy. The difference, however, is that then, everything you will be doing will be things you want to do, things you care about. And that makes a huge difference. This is not to say that IBM was the problem. It is simply that when you work for a company, or for someone else, there are many things you have to do, that are good for the company, but not necessarily what you like to or wish to do. Now you have more control over your life, so life will be different.”

Eleanor: Who has been the biggest influence on your career and why?

Karel: A lot of people have had a big influence on my career but I'd say that Phil Gilbert had the greatest. He trusted me implicitly and empowered me to do what I thought was the right thing to do for the design program and for the company. He respected my work-life balance and only texted me on a weekend once when Ginie our CEO wanted something urgently. We spoke more as colleagues and he never gave me direct coaching but he modelled attributes like audacity, strong opinions loosely held, knowing how to sell a product or an idea, prioritizing, etc. Go to my website, karelvredenburg.com and read my tribute to Phil for more details.

Don Norman has more recently been a big influence, modelling productive and fulfilling retirement. He has retired five times, still writes great books, speaks at industry conferences, co-led the Future of Design Education with me, and continues to have an impact on the world.

I’m also very appreciative of the support my boss Justin Youngblood has provided for my slow exit from IBM and my Farewell Tour so that I could meet with my staff, colleagues, and friends in-person one last time and to provide my reflections and lessons for a successful and fulfilling career and life.

Eleanor: How has Design at IBM evolved over the period of your career?

Karel: We had 230 designers and researchers across all of IBM when I led the organization before Phil did. We had one Design Director, me. We now have 3,000 designers and researchers and many, many design executives including VPs.

Outside of IBM some 15-20 years ago, I would run workshops at professional conferences and ask, “show of hands, how many of you are the only designer in your company?” and about 80-90% of the audience hands would go up. That wouldn’t be the case today with the large teams of designers at most companies. Although somewhat delayed, the same is now true of UX researchers too. We’ve come a long way.

However, the growth of design and research staff has slowed in most companies and for some even drastically reduced. Over my career, I’ve observed that things like this are cyclical and I fully expect design and research to grow again in the future. However, that growth has to be based on the demonstrated proven value-add of design and research.

As a result, many companies are now more rigorous in what they have designers and researchers work on, how they work with other disciplines, and tracking their impact. I think that this trend is a good thing for design and research. It will not only drive growth again of staffing levels but it will also make our disciplines more effective, and in turn, companies more successful too.

Eleanor: What’s your favorite memory from the IBM Austin Studio?

Karel: The day we opened the studio and I was walking our CEO Ginie Rometty around it. She asked me whether designers simply put on a suit jacket to be more formal and still wear jeans and running shoes. I said "yup". And she said, "I like that". She also commented that all of IBM should look like and operate like the studio and of course that's now happened in many places in what they call Agile spaces.

I also loved coming to the Austin studio every few weeks and seeing that the studio was completely different and I would leave myself free time in my calendar to sit on one of the sofas which was in clear view of passers by. I would have the most wonderful conversations. The studio is slowly getting that culture back again after the studio was rebuilt after the flood and after studio members are coming back after the pandemic.

Eleanor: What are some lessons learned you’d you give to current IBMers to be successful in their careers?

Karel: I've shared my lessons in a hourlong talk that I give at studios on my Farewell Tour. Given that we don’t have an hour, I've just written them up on my blog. But, I’ll just touch on a couple. I learned to, and I think you should too, understand the company, how it works, what value it brings customers, how it makes money, who the competitors are, etc. and then focus on how you can improve your skills and experience to even better carry out your role in serving our clients. The other lesson is to future proof your career, write an aspirational resume, and do weekly career workouts.

Eleanor: What are you looking forward to the most in retirement?

Karel: My creating a better world UX/R for Good project, writing my second book, continuing my teaching and my podcast, doing keynote addresses at major conferences, and spending more time on my music, running, and spending time with family and friends. Plus, like Don pointed out, doing all of this according to my own schedules and most of it with the new computer that I bought and sitting beside my pool. 

I'd like to thank Eleanor for conducting an excellent interview, Lauren Swanson for help in coming up with the questions, and Jessica Tremblay for MCing the event. You all three are absolutely awesome!

Lessons & Advice from my IBM career

I’m just finishing up my Farewell Tour of nine of our global design studios en route to my retirement at the end of next week. I’m just in Austin, Texas this week and will finish up next week in Toronto. During these studio visits, I hold 1:1 meetings, roundtable meetings, lunches and dinners, and I also do a presentation reflecting on my career and providing key lessons and advice. Many of you have asked if I could share that information so I’ve summarized it in this blog post. I also plan to share a version of it on my Life Habits Podcast soon.

Overview

I was recruited into IBM directly from my PhD program after I had presented at a conference about research that I conducted that I developed into a new paradigm for design. Someone from IBM called to ask, “have you ever considered working for IBM?” I answered honestly, “no, but I’m willing to consider it”. I agreed to consider it because I had recently read about Thomas J Watson Sr, the founder of IBM, and the values he espoused for the company like respect for the individual and the importance of community. Those values led me to go for the meeting and to agree to join IBM. 

I initially intended to stay for a year but that turned into 36 because I thoroughly enjoyed both the challenges I was given or I chose and the support I was provided to apply my knowledge and craft in addressing them. I was headhunted many times for prestigious positions at other top companies but I stayed at IBM given the company’s values and also because I believed that my job wasn’t done. That job was to transform all parts of the company to be user- and client-centered in creating industry-lead products and services and in inspiring clients to purchase them. I believe that job is now largely done and I’ve decided to retire from IBM. You can read more about my career on my website.

I’ve been so fortunate in my career and I’ve always believed in giving back. I’ve mentored many hundreds of employees, and have hosted my Life Habits Podcast for 16 years. I’d now like to share with you the life and career lessons I learned and I hope will be helpful to you too. I’ve included links that you can pursue if you’re particularly interested digging deeper into a topic. 

Understand the business

Whether you’re a developer, product manager, designer, researcher, or any other specialist, I believe that it’s important to understand the company you’re joining. Learn about what value your company provides to its users and clients, who the competitors are and how your company stacks up, what the challenges are, and how the company makes money and how much. You need to learn how to read earnings reports, how the company is organized and how your team fits into the whole, what values your company espouses, and how you can improve your skills and experience to even better serve the company in its mission. Doing all of that will enable you to have maximum impact on the success of the company.  

Find purpose in your role

Most people feel better about the work they do if they’re doing it for a higher purpose than simply making money for the company. I believe that every role has such a purpose and it’s important to recognize yours and keep it in focus when doing your work. If you’re a UX researcher, designer, developer, or product manager in a company like IBM that serves the enterprise market, your purpose should be to make the work lives of the users you serve more productive and enjoyable. If you do that, those users will be more effective which in turn makes their companies more successful, all leading to the company wanting to do more business with IBM. If you’re in a sales role, your purpose is to help decision-makers in client companies be successful in purchasing the right products and services to make them successful, which in turn leads to not just the one sale but building trust for future sales as well. If you’re in an internal function whether human resources, finance, technology support, your purpose is to improve the work lives of the employees in your company that you support.

Amp up how you show up on video

We all learned out of necessity to use video conferencing systems during the pandemic. With most companies now adopting a hybrid work approach, typically with three days in the office and two at home, most of us still use these systems regularly. However, I suggest that many people aren’t using this medium effectively. I think you should amp up how you show up on video including your room setup, the equipment you use, and how you interact. Check out a couple of the blog posts I’ve written that give more details, video calls: amp up how you show up and unlock your influence in a hybrid world.  

Practice authentic listening 

Stephen R. Covey said, “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply”. Your relationships with family, friends, and colleagues will be dramatically improved if you listen authentically and listen more than you talk. This is also a key ingredient to further develop your Emotional Intelligence or EQ which I think is at least as important to career success and happiness in life as your IQ.  

Champion diversity and inclusion

Teams are more creative and typically better represent the audience they are serving when they are more diverse in every way and actively strive to be inclusive. Diversity is about bringing people with different life experiences together, while inclusion ensures everyone feels valued and can fully participate. A great resource for this is the Advancing Racial Equity in Design: A Field Guide for Managers and Leaders that was created by IBM’s Racial Equity in Design group. While it’s focused on managers and leaders, the advice is appropriate for everyone. 

Be a lifelong learner, learn from others, and share what you learned

It’s incredibly important to be aware of what’s going on in the world more generally as well as regarding developments in your field. Be curious. And be a lifelong learner. I listen to a news podcast twice a day about world events and design and technology podcasts too to keep up on developments in my field, and I read about two books a week on a wide variety of topics (I actually listen to them at twice the speed). I also learn so much from my colleagues and I believe that we should share our ideas openly inside your own organization as well as publicly external to your organization as well in blogs, on podcasts, at conferences, etc. Collaborating with others on ideas is the best way to hone and further develop them and it’s also key to you developing your own eminence or digital brand which is often key to more senior promotions. 

Future proof your career, create an aspirational resume, and do career workouts

Don’t rely exclusively on educational institutions preparing you for the world of today and especially not tomorrow. (see an initiative I co-led to address this). People often jump on the latest hot discipline or career not realizing that it may not be around in a few years. Use the Strategic Foresight techniques of horizon scanning to think about the trends you’re seeing and the demographic and technological signals too in order to see the importance of the discipline and career you’re considering or are in and whether it will still be around in the future. You need to take responsibility for future-proofing your career yourself as much as you can. Strategic Foresight is a great way to do that. The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz will get you started on this. Another great practice is what I call writing your aspirational resume. Write into your existing resume in a different color what you would like it to include within the next year and write it as if it has been completed. That will then motivate you to make it real. And you can stay focussed on your career directions and on what you need to do to achieve them by doing what I call Career Workouts. Most people either go to the gym or workout regularly or if they don’t, they know that they should regarding their physical fitness and health. However, we don’t do the same regarding our career fitness and health. I think we should borrow from the physical health field and use those same techniques to strengthen our careers. 

Feed your soul, be a change agent, and unplug

I think it’s important to focus on your mental health. In my experience, while I feed my wallet with my job, I’ve always tried to also feed my soul through my involvement in activities and organizations outside of the company. I’m passionate about addressing climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, and biodiversity loss. I also lean into the statement that many people utter, “someone should do something about that”. I say, “why not me”? I co-founded the Covid19 Design Challenge and the Future of Design Education. I also created our family web site on plant-based living, advocate for it on social media, served as a VP of the board of directors of a nonprofit, and just recently launched the UX/R for Good project with Carly Williams.

In order to do all of that, I also recommend that you to take breaks, unplug from technology, and have a digital detox. We’re now so wedded to our digital devices and much of that is great in my view. However, I believe that it’s also important to find times during the day or at least the week when you totally unplug from technology. Engage in mindfulness and meditation, long walks or runs, or other ways of recharging your body and mind. My recommendation is to schedule these breaks and then actually take them. Your body and mind will thank you. 

I hope these lessons are as helpful to you as they were and are to me. I wish you all the best in your careers and life. Feel free to share this post with anyone who may find it helpful.

Lauren & Renee: A Huge Thank you!

As I start to wrap things up en route to my retirement at the end of the month, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge two very special people — Lauren Swanson and Renee Albert. 

I've been fortunate to have an amazing management team and stellar staff who led and carried out the substantive research of my organization so expertly. I’m so proud of and thankful for them.

I'm also particularly thankful for my almost daily collaborations with Lauren and Renee in my last two organizations for leading key cross-company projects and programs with deep expertise, efficiency, effectiveness, and emotional intelligence and for fostering a supportive, collaborative, inclusive, empowering, skill-building, well-informed, and fun team culture.

We were initially a team of two, Lauren and me, and we made that three when we were so fortunate to be able to convince Renee to join us in the IBM Design Program Office (DPO) a few years ago. We innovated on and led organizational transformation, the design community, the design leaders, design careers, design education, and external design eminence. We founded the Design Executive Team (DET), ran and redesigned the Design Principal and Distinguished Designer programs, introduced novel design education like Design Mavens and the Accelerate Program Design track, and even created TV shows focused on our Racial Equity in Design initiative and our iX design work for clients. My staff in the DPO did grow over time, but Lauren and Renee continued to be central to my programs. 

When I was offered the role of VP of UX Research, I made my acceptance conditional on Lauren joining me as my Chief of Staff. We visited our studios to share my perspective on UX research, and Lauren workshopped with staff to listen to theirs — which we then used to formulate our strategy. And over time, we again arranged for Renee to join us in the new organization. While I led a direct UX research organization of about 120 employees and the broader community of about 300 together with an amazing management team, it was Lauren and Renee whom I worked with most closely. 

Lauren was a confidant, my strategy partner, the person who provided me honest feedback, and trusted by the rest of the staff to express any concerns. She's an amazing strategic thinker, as well as an incredibly talented writer with a degree in Journalism who drafted most of our organizational communications. Together we would brainstorm strategic directions, responses to challenges, and required pivots on an almost daily basis.

Renee brought her undergraduate design education, her graduate school focus on business and project management, her prior client deal experience, and our work together in the DPO to the Head of UX Research Transformation role. Renee's remit was broad, including internal UX research digital and in-person events. She took a fresh approach in having interviews with members of the community, conducting surveys, and then making changes which again could be assessed in the same manner. Renee's passion for her role, her commitment to our organization and company, and her sheer productivity are exemplary. Above all, Renee remains committed to advancing members of our design and research communities, and is dedicated to continuing to connect designers and researchers across IBM. She comes up with innovative ideas unsolicited, exudes an infectious enthusiasm for our mission, and when I ask her to do something, it's typically minutes before it is done and with attention to quality.

All three of us collaborated closely almost daily. We introduced and hosted weekly video updates from me, AMA-style VP Office Hours, UX Research Town Halls, monthly impact reviews, UXR Talks, and more to ensure that the staff and community was up-to-date, engaged, had a voice, and so that we brought together people from across the company to work as One IBM team. 

I'm so grateful to both Lauren and Renee for our amazing partnership, collaboration, and friendship. I considered that they didn’t report to me but rather worked with me. I know they’re going to do even greater things in the future, and I wish them well with it.

Lauren and Renee, I so appreciate you!

I'm Retiring from IBM

I've decided to retire from IBM after 36 amazing years because my job is finally done. Let me share how I got that job, the moments I’m the most proud of in carrying it out over the years, why I now consider that job to be finally done, and what I’m planning next.

Being Recruited

I was recruited out of my PhD program based on some design and research work I did on a new evidence-based design paradigm that I presented at a conference which struck a cord with the press and led to several interviews. Those interviews led to a call from IBM asking “have you ever considered working for IBM?” I answered honestly “no, but I’m willing to consider it”. The reason I was willing to consider IBM is a book that I had read a year earlier called “A business and its beliefs: The ideas that helped build IBM”. I was so impressed by the beliefs and values that the founders of IBM, TJ Watson Sr. and TJ Watson Jr., espoused and practiced like respect for the individual, the importance of community, etc. that it led me to agree to come in and then to take the job I was offered, thinking to myself that I would try it for a year. Still to this day, I have no idea what inspired me to read that book but I’m glad that I did because it inspired me to start my 36 year journey at IBM.

My Job

I was hired by IBM Canada to develop a world-class design and UX research program because IBM was going to split up and the Toronto lab would need to survive and thrive on its own as an independent software company. And to do that it would need to improve the design of its products.

IBM User-Centered Design

The company didn't break up but I continued the work on the new design and research program now for the benefit of IBM outside of the Toronto Lab as well. I had asked for six staff members and six months to ideate, develop, and pilot test my new program. I met with design and research leaders at all the top companies in our industry, read widely (including Don Norman’s book User-Centered Systems Design), and innovated on what I learned in order to develop an approach for IBM. I included several innovations, such as:

1. Involving users and decision-makers in studies together throughout the discovery to delivery phases given that both roles are important to the use and purchase-decision of enterprise software and then asking satisfaction of the former and purchase-intent questions to the latter,

2. having users of competitor products provide input to and evaluation of our evolving products (that’s the way you learn how to win over a competitor) and carrying out direct head-to-head competitor benchmark studies of the user experience of both products,

3. focusing on the total user experience, from discovery to upgrade,

4. working together as a multidisciplinary team led by a Total User Experience Leader and including UX design, visual design, content design, UX research, PM, and dev,

5. and setting business goals with metrics, being rigorous with data, carrying out statistical analyses, and meticulously tracking impact with an executive dashboard.

All of that work led to the development of the IBM User-Centered Design (UCD) program. Well before the six months were up, the results of the pilots were so promising that I was asked to present them to the head of the Software unit, Steve Mills.

Steve was so impressed that he asked me to lead the deployment of UCD across all of Software. Shortly after that, CEO Lou Gerstner wanted to have IBM UCD imbedded into the Integrated Product Development (IPD) process he had asked to be created so that every part of IBM would use the same process to develop their products. I did the work to integrate it. Before a team could have the money to develop a product with the IPD process, they had to exit a “Concept Checkpoint” which involved the requirement I specified—showing the results of generative research with users and specifying how the insights from that research would be incorporated into the product’s conceptual design.

My team and I developed a three day education/activation bootcamp for product teams and a half-day version for executives. We also developed a UCD Toolkit for recruiting users, doing surveys, running user studies, testing accessibility, etc.

UCD had many successes, like taking the IBM Thinkpad to number one in customer satisfaction and making dramatic improvements to products like Websphere and DB2 making them industry-leading. We redesigned the systems IBM provided to run the Olympics too with great success. I also wrote a book, together with two colleagues, entitled “User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach” which described the program, our experience with it at IBM, and what we advised everyone to do. Some years later, I learned the book was used as a textbook in design schools and universities.

IBM One UI

Beyond UCD integrated into IPD, the company needed a visual signature, a set of design patterns, and a toolkit for developers to use in order to implement them. After the acquired company Lotus had some success with a system they called One UI (developed by Charlie Hill), I led a new IBM One UI project for all of IBM which was the predecessor to IBM Carbon. I hired and led a design and research team in North America and the UK as well as a development team in Shanghai, China. IBM One UI included a full set of design patterns, a distinctive IBM brand visual signature, and a developer toolkit.

My project was the first to provide a unified and consistent user experience across all of our products and the toolkit ensured that every product was fully globalized and accessible, a first in the industry. The IBM Carbon system continues this tradition.

Becoming a Design Director

My boss at the time, Bob Biamonte, said that he wanted to promote me to the position of Design Director. However, there was no such title or code in the IBM HR system. So, I worked with HR and created one. I filled out the requisite forms, had them approved, and then my manager promoted me into the position I created. So, I have the distinction of being the first IBM Design Director.

I also led the company-wide design and research team for many years, hosting design community calls, heading up the company’s design managers, and putting on major internal conferences.

Naming IBM Design

My organization over the years had titles like Ease of Use, Consumability, UCD, and UX Design. I thought it was time to realize that design was mature enough to be called “design” without any descriptors or qualifiers. Against objections that developers also do design and that we should therefore preface the term, I persisted and called our organization IBM Design. And, that name stuck for the past 20 years.

Rebooting IBM Design

When Ginni Rometty became IBM’s CEO, she came to Toronto on her second day. I was in the front row during her presentation that day and was thrilled to hear that she intended to make the client experience the North Star during her tenure. I immediately worked with my team of IBM Design Managers to assess our staffing numbers, our product coverage, and our various design systems. I presented the results of that research together with my colleague VP Sal Vella to Robert LeBlanc (SVP, IBM Software) which showed that we had only 234 designers and researchers with 56% of them working on more than one product (with an average of three). I recommended that we hire many more designers and researchers, that we adopt design thinking, and that Phil Gilbert should lead IBM Design instead of me. Robert called Ginni Rometty after that meeting as he was already also talking with Phil and that launched our big IBM Design reboot. Our current 3,000 designers and researchers and design practices now have significant impact on IBM’s success.

Enterprise Design Thinking

Products

When I started working with Phil, he mentioned that he’d only been with the company for about three years and he knew that I had been leading design, knew the company so well, and had a pretty significant network due to my long tenure. He therefore asked me to evangelize our new IBM Design system including EDT by flying to each of our product labs all around the world giving town hall talks, having meetings with local design teams, and the location executive teams (see the picture below of my “New Era of IBM Design” town hall presentations in Littleton, Massachusetts, USA and in Boëblingen, Germany). I also talked separately with leaders, typically senior architects or senior dev managers, who had questions about our program. To even my surprise, I didn’t run into any resistance to the “New Era of IBM Design” that we were ushering in. It was heartening to hear years after this from people who attended my town halls that it had such an impact on them and aligned them and their colleagues with our mission.

While my worldwide tour of the laboratories introduced the new design program and EDT, it was the rest of our amazing Design Program Office team that worked with the product divisions to imbed EDT, hire and staff product teams, and review progress. This led to significant improvements in our products and in the case of IBM Z, a 70% increase in sales (see the Harvard Business Review case IBM: Design Thinking). 

Consulting Services

During my performance review the next year, Phil and I only spent about five minutes on the assessment when I said, “I think we should be using EDT in our consulting practice with clients”. Phil said, “I agree, do you want to do it?” to which I answered, “yes'‘. I loved Phil’s decisiveness and his support of my ideas. I immediately sent an email to Paul Pappas who was the head of IBM Consulting’s iX design practice. I got his reply in minutes, saying “YES! HOW SOON CAN YOU GET TO NEW YORK?” That led to another world tour starting the first few months in Europe given Matt Candy’s enthusiastic support. Matt led the Consulting iX design practice in Europe at that time. I would teach the consulting staff EDT for four days in a location and then on the fifth day I would work with the Partners and Associate Parters, to teach them and to focus on how to sell EDT for Consulting. I would have two to three apprentices with me learning how to teach or what we preferred to call it, activate EDT (see the picture above of my co-facilitators and one of the first sessions held in the rather unusual design studio in Groningen, The Netherlands with artificial grass and two tree houses). Phil challenged me to scale faster and said that two to three apprentice teachers wouldn’t get us the scale of deployment that we needed. In response, I started running large train-the-trainer sessions to further scale my activation of the whole organization.

My introduction and activation of teams in IBM Consulting and their resulting work led to IBM being able to help clients bring products to market twice as fast, with a 300% return on investment, and with a 50% reduction in design defects according to Forrester.

Technology Services

As was now customary, I next suggested to Phil that our Global Technology Services organization could potentially benefit significantly from using EDT especially for our outsourcing business which involves us taking over and running a client’s IT systems. Communication, collaboration, and trust are key in this business. The interdependency between the client and our teams is like what is required of a successful marriage. I believed that I could use EDT during the crucially important negotiations to renew these multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts. I ran my education and activation play again but this time I also personally facilitated strategy workshops with our most important clients (the picture above was taken in what was one of my favorite locations, our old Spadina Design Studio in Toronto). I was told that the deals I provided EDT workshopping to support yielded an increase of $5B in revenue in a year compared with the deals that we didn’t use EDT to support. That business unit was later spun off from IBM and is now Kyndryl. I’m absolutely delighted that they are still continuing with the program and in fact have further enhanced it.

Sales

I spent a lot of time with the sales teams that worked with our biggest clients. While I was using EDT with the business consulting and technology consulting teams on engagements with clients, I realized that there was one other really important group that I hadn’t yet touched—the sales staff themselves. Consistent with each of the other initiatives, I again had a conversation with Phil about my idea of teaching the sales teams on our largest and most important accounts how to use EDT for on sales pursuits. Phil didn’t just agree, this time he also assigned me an incredibly talented dedicated team of six or so designers including co-lead in the person of Nigel Prentice. Everything I’d done thus far with the product, consulting, and technology services teams I did solo and had to rely entirely on my leadership and persuasion skills in order to have those business units provide me staff.

We chose four of our top accounts and used EDT on their sales pursuits. Our work led to a 76% increase in sales opportunities, a 54% higher NPS, and a 40% higher win rate. These results were outstanding but we subsequently wanted to see if we could run a version of the approach without dedicated staff and simply teaching the sales teams but that was far less successful. In fact, it was the success we had with hands-on dedicated staff, and not just teaching, that was one of the inspirations for the establishment of an entirely new organization—IBM Client Engineering—that hired a couple of hundred designers and researchers to work with the sales teams much like we did with EDT. (the picture below shows our facilitation team in the top left and working with European sales teams in Madrid, Spain in the top right and the bottom picture is of an activation session I ran with 500 or so of our technical sellers in a hotel ballroom in Dallas, Texas).

Clients

During this time, I personally ran EDT workshops with the senior team at hundreds of our clients, often with members of the c-suite, in virtually every industry and in many countries around the world (the picture is of a session I ran in our Austin studio with a large healthcare organization). I absolutely loved working with our clients and it developed in me a laser-focus on how IBM could better serve clients with everything I subsequently did. My lens was on helping to make the customer successful in what they did and in doing so, also make money for IBM as opposed to simply trying to sell customers whatever “we had on the truck” so to speak.

Design Schools & Universities

I met with one of our design teams early on in our IBM Design reboot at our Hursley, UK studio during one of my trips there. They told me that they had been interviewing candidates all day but that none of the eight candidates that they had interviewed managed to meet our stringent hiring criteria and they asked me what they should do. They were worried that they would lose the hiring tickets so they were considering making an exception and lowering our bar. I said that they should keep the bar high and I would work to ensure that they could keep their hiring tickets until they found candidates that that met or exceeded the bar.

After that conversation in Hursley, I traveled to London to meet with the President of the UK Design Council. I discussed my concerns about designer education with him, not just about UK schools but more generally. He shared my view and said that he would follow up with the UK schools. He and I were then interviewed by the press. I shared my concerns with the journalist interviewing me and the resulting article (see below) embellished what I said somewhat but the headline read, “IBM’s design director: UK universities need to create better designers and more of them”. I was also quoted as saying that our IBM Design three month bootcamp was the missing semester of design school and university. The article led to several requests from education institutions mostly in the UK for me to share with them what I believed their curricula were missing.

I was also approached by McMaster, a university local to me, and asked to meet for lunch with the Dean, Len Waverman, and Associate Dean, Michael Hartmann, at a prestigious exclusive club in downtown Toronto. They said that they had a large amount of money from a benefactor and asked whether I would help them develop a design-based curriculum for the business school, the medical school, and for a pan-university program. I agreed and after a review of my academic credentials, I was appointed Industry Professor. I continue to teach variations of those programs today.

During one of my many visits to our Austin studio, Phil said that he knew that I’d been creating curricula and teaching for a few years on weekends and he asked me to share what I’d been doing. After that conversation, he asked me to work with the top design schools and design programs within universities and develop an IBM Design Academic Programs initiative. We were still needing to hire many more designers and researchers and we wanted to hire them from the top schools. So Phil and I assigned each of our most senior designers and executives to a particular school, often to their alma matter. They and I then visited with the presidents of design schools and university deans to introduce my program which included a variety of things we could do with and for them, including workshopping with the faculty to improve their curricula, doing guest lectures, giving a campus-wide talk, hosting an IBM Day, having our designers who graduated from the school provide a career panel discussion, and running capstone projects with IBM product teams working with the students (see picture above of our IBM Day at the University of Pennsylvania).

During one of those capstone projects at the University of California, San Diego I met with the then head of the program, Don Norman. He and I had met previously a few years prior to that when we were keynote speakers together at a design conference in Nanjing, China. We discovered that we both felt that design education needed to be significantly improved. Don then asked me, “do you want to do something about it?” I said, “yeah, let’s do it”. Phil, Don, and I had a call and all agreed to the plan. That’s how the Future of Design Education initiative started. After Don and I had a vegan dinner together in Toronto during which we selected whom we wanted to form the Steering Committee with, the initiative was launched. Working groups were formed from the more than 700 volunteers and thanks to the final heroic editorial efforts of Meredith Davis, the curricular guidance was published in a special issue of the She Ji Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. My IBM volunteer team of designers and researchers also contributed to the initiative in many ways including the building of the Future of Design Education website.

My work with the top design schools globally and our team’s recruiting efforts doubled our hiring from those schools and many of IBM's 3,000 highly talented designers were hired from them. My co-founding and leading with Don Norman of the Future of Design Education initiative has led to curricular guidance for design schools globally and recognition for IBM as well.

Outreach

Keynotes, Panels, & Workshops

I’ve been asked to give keynote presentations, panel sessions, and workshops at professional conferences over the entire time I’ve been with IBM. I particularly enjoyed introducing novel ideas and approaches.

Its interesting to reflect back on the maturity of our discipline over the course of my career presenting at these conferences. I used to ask “raise your hand if you’re the only designer in your company” and most of the hands would go up. Today of course that’s totally different. More recently, I’ve asked the same question regarding researchers. While IBM has had researchers from Day 1, after all I was one, many other companies are still maturing and developing their research capability.

I continue to get asked to give guest lectures at design schools and universities and I’ve done those throughout my IBM tenure too. While I do virtual sessions, I particularly enjoy being on campus and lecturing in person. There’s something about university campuses that I find invigorating.

Websites & Socials

I hand-coded our first design websites, secured the www.ibm.com/design and w3.ibm.com/design domains, created the /ibmdesign Twitter and Facebook accounts, personally grew followers to 60K, and provided guidance to the team that was first developing the fledgling IBM social media accounts.

TV Shows

After George Floyd’s murder, Phil brought our team together to ideate on what we could and should do. That resulted in the formation of our amazing Racial Equity in Design initiative led by Nigel Prentice. Check out the awesome work this team has done.

When we were ideating on ways that we could make a difference in the world outside IBM, we came up with the idea of doing a TV segment about our racial equity work. I had the honor of starting and guiding that project to fruition, a segment on the TV show America by Design. It prominently featured Shani Sandy and Nigel Prentice as well as many members of our Racial Equity in Design leaders. It was broadcast at prime time on all the major networks in the US. Our goal was to inspire young Black kids who have an interest in design by seeing successful IBM designers on TV talking about how they’re helping to make the company more diverse and inclusive. The show was viewed by more than 4.5 million people. I was proud to play my part as what Nigel calls a “second pillar” otherwise known as an ally in producing this TV segment.

I led the production of another TV segment the following year showcasing the work our IBM Consulting iX team had done on an app for the US Open tennis tournament.

Design Challenge

I had presented a keynote at the Design for America conference in Chicago toward the end of 2019 at which I made the case for designers and researchers to not only use their skills for improving their companies but also to make a positive impact on the world. Little did I know that just a few months later the world was immersed in the Covid 19 pandemic. I decided to make real the proposal I was making at the conference by contacting the Rebecca Breuer, the Executive Director of Design for America (DFA) and through a call with Bertrand Jerome, the Managing Director of the World Design Organization (WDO), learning that WDO’s President, Srini Srinivasan, had been wanting to do something similar. Rebecca also confirmed that DFA’s co-founder, Liz Gerber, was all in too. We brought together our communities with a total of 225 people, half of whom were from IBM, to workshop what designers and researchers could do to make a positive difference in dealing with the pandemic. We formulated 7 challenges, formed 21 teams from 33 countries across 17 timezones, and in three weeks, led by IBM EDT Coaches came up with practical and impactful projects. Check out the website the team of volunteers put together after the event.

One of the IBMers who took part in the event, Felix Portnoy, was so moved by the experience and how it brought people together working on a common cause that he said to me afterwards, “we should do this with the design community at IBM”. I agreed and helped Felix found the IBM Spark Design Festival.

Leadership, Careers, & Community

Phil next asked me to take on design careers and community as well as leading the Design Leadership Review Board which has the responsibility for reviewing and appointing Design Principals and Distinguished Designers. I teamed up on this with Lauren Swanson whom I’ve worked closely with ever since. We workshopped improvements to the board, its processes, and forms.

I also thought that we needed a board to govern everything else beyond careers, given that IBM doesn’t have a Chief Design Officer, so I created the Design Executive Team, again with Phil’s approval, with representation from all business units of the company. Lauren helped me run that board too. We created dedicated workstreams including one that focused on tooling. We did a competitive evaluation of design tools and chose Figma as the winner and that’s what all designers at IBM still work with today.

We also put on monthly leadership calls to provide updates to everyone, workshopped solutions to problems, and simply provided a forum for leaders from across the company to connect. Once a year, we put on a Design Leadership Conference which was hugely popular.

We also hired Renee Albert onto the team and she handled our events. We regularly innovated together and came up with programs like the Design Mavens series where we interviewed top designers at IBM, like visual and typeface designer Mike Abbink, had them share nuggets of insights from their careers and to come up with one actionable idea that everyone listening to the show could do differently the next day to be more effective and successful as designers (the picture above shows Renee, Lauren, and me recently when we were in California together).

IBM Toronto Studio

During almost all of my tenure at IBM, I’ve had responsibility for the executive leadership of the IBM Canada Design Studios and more recently just our consolidated IBM Design studio in Toronto/Markham along with head of studio Gord Davison. While my core role has always been global and cross business unit, it is my local studio and the designers and researchers in it who have kept me grounded.

We’ve had a lot of fun together and learned a lot too. We put on an annual conference with largely local keynote speakers and panelists, studio meetups where new hires provide an introduction to themselves and their prior work, studio members share vacation pictures, we celebrated studio members who had a birthday that month, workshopped ways to improve the studio, held Halloween parties where everyone got dressed up, held potluck lunches, hosted presentations by visiting executives, had meetings and tours with key clients and government dignitaries, and much more.

UX Research    

During the last two years as Vice President of Global UX Research, I've established and grown a user experience research specialization across the company as a distinct discipline that provides the crucially important client and user insights to develop winning products, ensured that the importance and use of UX research is understood by PMs and product teams, that my researchers have a laser-focus on ensuring that the insights they derive from clients get into product roadmaps and then into the products that clients then use, that the discover, learn, try, and buy funnel prospect experience is optimized to enable the acquisition of new logo clients, and that tools are available to provide access to users and ready access to user insights (the picture below shows some of my Austin staff on the top left, some of our Red Hat colleagues on the top right, my direct report leadership team on the bottom left, and some of my Dublin staff on the bottom right). 

My taking the role was conditional on Lauren Swanson moving with me and we later arranged for Renee Albert to join us as well. The programming for staff that we put together included workshopping to understand the staff and their concerns and desires, a weekly video update from me to my staff, regular VP Office Hours with the IBM research community, town hall calls, studio visits, regular blog posts, quarterly mental health days, and much more.

Being Headhunted

I’ve been headhunted numerous times over my career and while I was flattered by the companies, the jobs, and the salaries, I said each time that my job at IBM wasn’t done. My job that is to do my part in the various roles that I’ve had to make design, research, and design thinking activated and practiced in all parts of the company. While further improvements can always be made and are as I write this, I believe that my job is truly done now.

Post IBM

It's time for me to step down and take retirement from IBM to pursue my many other interests outside of the company. Those who follow me on LinkedIn know that I have a passion for going beyond feeding my wallet and making IBM successful to feeding my soul through my board director roles with animal and climate non-profits, my Life Habits podcast, my teaching as an Industry Professor in a business and medical school, and my keynoting, workshopping, and documentary projects focused on improving the world. I'm also creating a UXR Leadership Council of research leaders from the top companies across the industry initially working on the Future of UX Research Education and generative AI for UX Research initiatives. I’ll be naming an IBM UXR representative for the council when I leave. I’ll continue to mentor individuals and consult with companies. I’m also working on a documentary and my second book. While I've been doing all these things in my spare time, I'll now be able to devote myself fully to them as well as to my music, health, family, and friends.

Thank You!

I'd like to thank IBM for 36 amazing years and all of you for the part you played. I particularly want to acknowledge the special role that Lauren Swanson and Renee Albert have played in closely collaborating with me during my last two roles and the amazing work they’ve done. Phil Gilbert and Katrina Alcorn played pivotal roles in enabling much of what I’ve accomplished over the past eleven years. I’m particularly thankful to Phil for his collaboration on and support of my activations of the key divisions of the company and to Katrina for promoting me to Vice President and providing deep support for my UX Research mission. I’ve appreciated Justin Youngblood, my current and last manager, for his support of my retirement planning and ways I’d like to wrap up my IBM tenure. My fellow VP of Product Design colleagues are special for the collaborations we’ve had and the fact that they will now lead my UX research staff. I appreciate Ellen Kolsto, my now UX Research DD, for her technical leadership to further hone our UXR craft and impact metrics.

I appreciate and want to acknowledge the members of the Design Executive Team and Research Leadership Team for what we’ve accomplished together and Gord Davison and the members of the Toronto Studio for my wonderful home studio. And it goes without saying, but let me say it explicitly, that I’ve absolutely loved working with my global UX research staff and community, the IBM Design organization, and all the thousands of other IBMers I’ve had the opportunity to connect with over the years.

It's often said that the term "family" shouldn't be used when talking about a company. While a company is rarely a family, I believe particular teams can be and I consider all the teams I’ve had over the years to be my work family. I will dearly miss you all, though I hope that many of you will stay in touch outside of work (please connect with me on LinkedIn). I’m also planning to do a version of my VP Office Hours, essentially an external AMA-style Zoom call, on particular topics chosen by LinkedIn followers. So look out for more details in time on LinkedIn.

Unlike when someone resigns and wants to quickly leave for their next company, I care deeply about IBM and the design and research organization, so I'm planning to spend the time necessary to ensure all the details of the new organization are all set, that the transition goes smoothly, and that I leave some time to visit some of the key studios one last time to share my career insights and to say goodbye in person before I leave which will likely be sometime before the middle of the year.

2023: A Year of Transformation, Engagement, & Impact

As 2023 comes to a close and 2024 has almost loaded, I’d like to reflect on the year.

Many people have a tradition of sending letters or emails outlining what they and their family accomplished. I departed from that tradition last year and instead focussed a blog post on the people who made a significant difference in my life. I’d like to do that again this year focusing on what we achieved together.

I’m so fortunate to work with so many amazing people in my job at IBM and also in my various other interest areas, including the Future of Design Education, McMaster University, and the vegan non-profit VegTO.

I continue to consider myself fortunate to have the honor of working with people I truly enjoy spending time with. I’ve always felt that we spend so much of our lives at work that we should spend that time with people we choose to work with both because they have the best skills and experience but also because they’re amazing people in their own right. It’s a benefit of being a senior executive that I often get to choose and I have chosen. Of course, whether they want to continue to work for (I prefer with) me is their choice. And I’m truly grateful that they do continue to want to work with me.

Leading

I continue to be deeply grateful to Lauren Swanson for our almost daily working together on everything from key strategic projects to blog posts to being a sounding board for each others’ ideas. Lauren’s work on our Experience Zone booth at IBM’s inaugural TechXchange Conference in Las Vegas was particularly noteworthy.

IBM Techxchange Conference

I was also fortunate to be able to have Renee Albert, who Lauren and I worked with in our previous organization, join us again. And Renee hit the ground running handling our events and now leading our UX Research Transformation team. Ellen Kolstø and her team delivered some amazing UXR education for PMs and Carlos Rosemberg delivered our first Generative AI tool, AskUXR.

AskUXR Generative AI Tool built on watsonx

Gord Davison’s team delivered our external website for the User Engagement Hub, used for recruiting users for our studies and enhanced our User Insights Hub too which is used for sharing the insights from our research.

Last but of course not least, I deeply appreciated the awesome research work of my researchers from across the company and the leaders like John Bailey and the other managers who work with them.

Co-Leading

I truly appreciate the Vice Presidents of Design I have the honor of working with — Ana Manrique, Sandra Tipton, Craig Moser, and Haidy Francis (plus Joan Haggarty, my Research DP who’s also in the pic with us; and Joni Saylor and Charlie Hill who aren’t in the pic). I also loved working with Katrina Alcorn earlier in the year and now with Justin Youngblood. Also in the pic are the members of my Toronto design studio who I also get to hang out with in my home studio.

Meeting

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting more of the researchers around IBM, including Red Hat, during my visits to our Dublin, Ireland studio (with Katrina Alcorn), Raleigh studio and Red Hat offices (with Lauren Swanson and Renee Albert), and our Austin studio.

Dublin with Katrina

Raleigh with Lauren and Renee

Austin during halloween

Teaching

I continue to enjoy teaching my EMBA, Directors College, National Health Fellows programs typically on Saturdays both in person and remotely. Given the talent and experience of these students, I learn as much from them as they do from me. Thanks Michael Hartmann for our continued collaboration on this.

Sharing

I’m so fortunate to be asked to share my perspectives, insights, and experience at industry conferences. I love the interactions I’ve had this year especially at the Blend Conference in Stratford, the Change Leaders Conference in Toronto and the Co-Lab Conference in Chicago. The latter involved working with other leaders of UX research organizations at other companies. Thanks Markus Grupp, Yvonne Ruke Akpoveta, and Michael Winnick for inviting me.

Collaborating

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with Don Norman and Meredith Davis on the Future of Design Education project that Don and I founded some four years ago. We worked with a Steering Committee of leaders in design education and practice. Thanks largely to the masterful work of Meredith Davis, we published the final curricular guidance as a special issue of the She Ji Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation this year. Thanks Don and Meredith, plus everyone else who was involved in this amazing project!

Inspiring

The VegTO vegan non-profit that I’m VP Board of Directors for had an awesome year having brought back our VegTO Fest held in a new location in the heart of Toronto with more than 100 vendors and 35K visitors. Thanks Kimberly D’Oliveira, Nital Jethalal, and the rest of my fellow board members.

Recharging

Last but certainly not least is my family. I’m so grateful for each and every one of my family members and the fact that they still love having all of us get together for vacations. They’re all around me here in a lake house on Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island as I write this blog post. Thanks Elliot, Val, Emma, Ares, Rowan, Xeena, Noah, Erin, and Bambi.

While I’m saddened by the horrible state of the world and wish it wasn’t so but I’m so appreciative of the wonderful people I get to hang out with in my world. Thanks to all of you!

Applying for a Job: An Employer's Recommendations

I’ve written several LinkedIn posts this year telling my followers about the positions that I’m hiring for in my organization at IBM. I acknowledge how tough it is right now for so many people, especially in tech, who are out of a job. In fact, it deeply saddens me to see so many of the people reacting to my posts and DMing me who have the “Open to Work” tag on their profile pic.

In addition to doing my part in hiring a good number of UX researchers and designers, I’d also like to provide some advice to job seekers and job changers from an employer’s perspective.

Number of Applications & DMs

We’ve received hundreds of applications for each position and into the thousands of applications in total. I regularly get 25-30 DMs per day, mostly about the job openings and I take the time to answer each one thoughtfully because I know how much many of you are struggling to find work.

Reflections & Observations

My hiring managers and I have noticed excellent approaches and ways of communicating about the openings plus some outstanding applications. In fact, the successful candidates in proceeding to interview and beyond let their resumes and portfolios speak for them.

However, we’ve also observed many anti-patterns too. Many of the anti-patterns are often identical from one person to the next which leads me to suspect that people may have received or misinterpreted advice that they have been given.

As well, given that we’ve received thousands of applications making it difficult to provide detailed feedback on each individual application, I would also like to provide generally observed patterns of unsuccessful applications.

I’d like to provide my perspective as one senior executive to share my recommendations and those of my hiring managers regarding best practices when applying for a job. I would assume that these would be generally applicable too but they’re at least directly applicable to applying for jobs in my organization.

Recommendations

Here are my recommendations:

1. Read the LinkedIn post and job requirements carefully — When it says that the job requires that you need to be physically in the city specified and be able to work in that country, don’t apply if you’re looking for a remote position. You’re wasting your time and ours. Similarly, when it says that the only way to apply is to use the links to submit your application, just do that and don’t send your resume and portfolio in a DM. It’s worth noting that the type of person we’re looking for, a UX researcher, should have an attention to detail and not having read the details of the job posting is an automatic red flag.

2. Make sure you satisfy the basic requirements of the job — Most of the jobs I post are for UX researchers and I explicitly point out, “Please note that a lot of designers have applied for the UX research roles. If you've read any of my posts, you know that we consider UX research to be a distinct discipline separate from design so we only hire researchers who have the requisite UX research dedicated skills and experience.” And yet, we continue to receive many applications from designers.

3. Make sure your application clearly demonstrates your suitability — If you actually have the education, skills, and experience specified, make sure that your application clearly communicates and demonstrates that you do. That may require making changes to be specific to the particular role that you’re applying for.

4. Take the perspective of the hiring manager and organization executive — Read the job posting extremely carefully, think about what the organization is looking for, and even do some additional reading about the company and, if possible, the people posting the job. I’m sure you’re all aware that there are a lot of people looking for work right now and that it is likely that we would receive hundreds of applications and that I would likely get many DMs per day. What you write to us should be carefully thought out, succinct, and to the point. I get DMs, for example, that have many paragraphs of text when one short sentence would have sufficed. People often ask for a 20 minute call with me to learn more about the job. During normal times, that may have been appropriate or at least with a hiring manager. However, given the volume of requests, if I spent 20 minutes talking with everyone who asked, I would be doing nothing else and wouldn’t have time to do the rest of my job.

5. Don’t unquestioningly follow advice being given (including this advice) — Much of the communication I see follows a familiar pattern and I suspect that its due to many people having read some advice on how to increase your chances of getting a job. However, at least for me and my organization, most of that advice is exactly wrong or more likely, the advice has been misunderstood. For example, many people DM me and ask me to be a reference for them and to refer them for the job. They’ve heard that having someone inside the company refer them increases their likelihood of getting the job. However, that person referring you needs to personally know you and your work before they’re able to be a reference. Asking me, the hiring senior executive, to refer you is also somewhat strange because it’s my jobs that you’re applying for.

6. Continue to improve your skills and experience — The most effective way to improve your chances of getting a job is to focus on what the company is actually looking for. The pieces of advice in 1-5 above are table stakes. The way to truly differentiate yourself is to focus on what you’ll contribute to the company and the ways that you’ll be able to further develop your career as well. If you don’t have that today for the particular job you’re looking at, then focus on the ways you may be able to get additional education and/or experience so that you will be ideally suited to jobs like that.

Having written all of that, I still want to come back to the reality that many of you are struggling to find work. I get the sense that many of you are so frustrated with not finding work and when you see a job opportunity, that you just immediately apply to give it a shot and to do whatever you can to get the attention of anyone at that company. The fact that I’m posting about these open positions in my organization personally is perceived by many as providing that human connection. I do hope that you will consider the advice I’ve provided in this blog post and that you find an appropriate position in my organization or with another company. I wish you all the best!

Generalists vs Specialists

I love the professional collaborations I have on LinkedIn. There was a healthy debate in the comment section in response to my "UX Researchers are not Designers" post from a few weeks ago. Many of the comments were insightful and thought-provoking and one particularly stood out for me. It was a comment by Noah Ratzan, championing the generalist rather than the specialist. He highly recommended the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein. I immediately bought the book and read it. I totally agree that its an awesome book.

A Case for Research within Design?

Noah was using the lessons in the book to make the case for UX research to be considered to be part of the design discipline. While I agree that designers should have a broader perspective, and that they should learn about other disciplines like UX research, I don’t see anything special about UX research being the only other discipline that designers should learn about. They should probably also learn about product management, development, and so on. And, designers broadening their skills, in my view, isn’t relevant to UX researcher being a member of their own discipline.

Relevance to UX Research

I found it fascinating that the book actually validates the more generalist typical circuitous route people who end up doing UX research go through in education and often in their early career as well. They are therefore more generalists than designers typically are simply due to there being very few dedicated programs in university for UX research.

Relevance to Design

In contrast, visual designers, for example, can and often do take education in a design school or a university design department directly applicable to a job as a visual designer. So, Noah is likely right that designers in particular should venture to broaden their skill and experience base to be more of a generalist.

Broadening the Vertical Stroke of the T

Although I’m not entirely aligned with Noah’s central assertion, I’m hugely thankful to him for recommending David Epstein’s book. What I took away from the book is that every team that wants to be innovative should look to include people who are different from the rest of the team and that every professional should strive for more generalist qualities.

This brings me back to the concept of the T-shaped person where the horizontal stroke of the T represents knowledge and skills like presentation skills, negotiation skills, and something I often add, design thinking skills that everyone should have. The vertical stroke of the T represents specialist knowledge and skills, often what we call superpower skills, like being a designer, being a developer, being a product manager, being a UX researcher, etc.

I think Epstein would advocate for everyone to broaden the width of the vertical stroke of the T. I would suggest that you can still have your superpower as a designer but also know enough about development too in order to know what is possible in code. I think UX researchers in addition to their primary superpower as researchers, may consider adding knowledge of data science to improve their research with broadened quantitative skills or product management to know how to better tailor their research recommendations in the form that a product manager could use in building their outcome-focused roadmap. And in additional to these very specific benefits of broadening the skill base, these professionals will also just bring an entirely new focus or lens to a problem, something that is at the heart of Epstein’s thesis and research.

And everyone would benefit from opening their skills aperture in order to see a problem from entirely different perspectives. The book does an excellent job of providing many examples of the benefits of having people completely different on a team as well as people broadening their own skillset.

Thank You!

I’d like to thank Noah for his engagement on my LinkedIn post and recommending this awesome book. I’d also like to thank all of you who I engage with regularly professionally on LinkedIn. You broaden my perspective and I appreciate you!

UX Researchers are not Designers

I published a poll on LinkedIn that asked, “Is a UX researcher a type of designer or a member of their own UX research discipline?” The results indicated that 65% of respondents believed UX research to be it’s own discipline but fully 35% still consider UX research to be a sub-discipline of design. A total of 921 people voted so it’s a reasonable enough sample.

Several people commented on the survey outcome suggesting that most of the people indicating that they believe UX researchers are a type of designer may be designers themselves and that the alternative that UX research is its own discipline likely mostly came from UX researchers. LinkedIn does give the poll author the ability to see who voted for which alternative but it doesn’t provide any further analytical tools. I did a random spot sampling of 60 responses (checking their response and their LinkedIn profile role identification) and found that the suspicion was largely confirmed, that designers believe that researchers are designers whereas researchers considered themselves to be a member of the UX research discipline separate from design.

Why would designers think that UX research should be a sub-discipline of design you might ask? I think a quick look at design school curricula shows that while most don’t cover research methods at all or barely, some schools do touch on them typically in one course, albeit superficially. Designers may think that the brief introduction they were given to research in their programs is sufficient to be considered a UX researcher when carrying out research activities. However, that level of knowledge is insufficient given the sophistication of today’s UX research methods and analyses.

I was talking to a designer the other day who had this view and used to assume that doing what she understood to be research as a designer was equivalent to what a UX researcher would do. However, she then started working with a dedicated UX research team and was absolutely blown away by the wide range and rigor of research methods when practiced by trained researchers. This may be similar to the education of physicians who typically get one class on nutrition and then confidently provide what is often uninformed and quite frankly bad nutritional advice.

Design as a sub-discipline of computer science

It’s interesting to look into the history of Human-Computer Interaction as a discipline. It started as a sub-discipline of computer science in the 1980s. When I started my career some 35 years go, design was considered to be something that developers did in addition to coding a product. However, few today would think that design is a sub-discipline of computer science and the purview of developers. Design has come into its own as a discipline. We now commonly refer to “three-in-a-box” when thinking about the disciplines key to product development—that is design, product management, and development. So times have changed.

UX Research as its own discipline

I’d like to posit that it is time that UX research be recognized as a distinct discipline separate from design and that we should be referring to “four-in-a-box” when referring to the core disciplines.

Let’s explore how UX research is different from design.

Designers are creators, UX Researchers are not

People often say that UX Researchers are just like the other sub-disciplines of design such as visual design, UX design, content design, motion design, etc. However, all of those sub-disciplines of design are creators, they create part of the solution that users end up seeing and using. That’s why they’re designers. UX Researchers though aren’t creators nor designers because nothing that they do is seen or used by the user directly.

Researchers use a toolkit of rigorous methods more similar to what you would see in a scientific research lab at a university than anything you’ll see in a design school. Researchers typically have a degree, often a PhD, in UX Research from one of the iSchools or they have a high level degree in an adjacent discipline like Psychology, Anthropology, or Sociology. Those disciplines have virtually nothing to do with design and have everything to do with structured observation, conducting experiments, collecting data, synthesizing data, statistically analyzing data, visualizing data, and making recommendations on the basis of data.

Dangers of UX Researchers being seen as Designers

An example which may seem frivolous but is quite real is the situation where a UX researcher is asked to make a presentation look good because they’re considered to be a designer. There is nothing in a typical UX researcher’s education that would provide them with the skills to make a beautiful presentation deck. They’re not creators of visuals, user experience flow, or content or words. Requesters are often sadly disappointed.

Another more serious example involves a team that I’m aware of which was formed to create a new product. The product managers organized a strategy workshopping meeting and invited representatives from design, product management, and development, essentially the 3-in-a-box set of disciplines. The researchers weren’t invited. When the product managers realized that UX research wasn’t the same as design and in fact that UX researchers were the discipline that they most needed to carry out the generative research critical to and a prerequisite of even conceptualizing the product, the whole situation changed. But it was an erroneous assumption that research was part of the design discipline that caused the misstep that could have been disastrous if it wasn’t corrected.

Other dangers of researchers being considered to be designers include that they likely won’t be in their own organization, won’t have discipline specific managers, and/or won’t have a career path respecting their unique skills and career development needs. The outcome of this could be researchers leaving an organization in search of ones who acknowledge the distinction of UX research as it’s own discipline.

The lack of recognition of UX research as it’s own discipline has also resulted in very few degree programs in universities devoted to it. There are programs in what are called iSchools which came about during the .com boom out of Library Science programs (the “i” in iSchool is information). The heavy lifting is left to companies to hire graduates of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology programs and then provide the additional requisite education to level up the knowledge and skills required to develop exemplary UX researchers. Compare that to companies hiring visual designers. They typically have virtually all of the knowledge and skills they need directly from their design school education.

Should UX Research be the sole purview of researchers?

Emphatically no. All disciplines on a team have to have a UX research mindset and know the basics of UX research so that they don’t do things like asking leading questions during conversations with clients/users, not be aware of needing to guard against biases especially when talking about their product or project, and they don’t only work with one client/user and think that is sufficient. Those are a bit extreme but I’ve witnessed non-researchers making those errors.

So, everyone should have a basic grounding in a research mindset and some knowledge of basic practices but a team needs a sufficient number of trained researchers as well to do the well-planned, rigorous, and impactful research. It’s like when we talk about design thinking. Everyone on the team should know how to do the basics of design thinking but that doesn’t make them a designer. You need designers to do the design and researchers to do the core research. Everyone on the team needs to have an appreciation and some skills that other members of the team have (the horizontal stroke of the T) but every team member needs to have a deep specialization or superpower too (the vertical stroke of the T).

I was talking to a product manager the other day who thought that UX research was simply doing usability studies. However, when he saw the work of some real researchers who had done a Kano study, a Conjoint analysis, and all the histograms in their presentation indicated which bars were statistically significant, he was taken aback with what this discipline can do and what impact researchers can have that nobody else on the team has the expertise to do.

The assumption of UX research being a sub-discipline of design often leads people to assume that research equates to doing usability studies which do require a close collaboration with design but are often the least powerful types of research. Generative research is often the most powerful, valuable, and impactful type of research which also requires close collaboration with product management and less so design but people don’t think of it being within the purview of UX research because they make the erroneous assumption that UX researchers are just a type of designer.

Where do we go from here?

I don’t think we researchers should just shout “UX researchers are not designers” from the roof tops. A little of that will help, like I hope that this blog post will. However, the real change will happen by educating teams on the contribution of research, how to work with researchers, and then doing awesome, rigorous, and impactful UX research and sharing it widely. In other words, I think researchers should set the context and then earn the right to have our discipline be recognized as a distinct discipline.

Am I annoyed when only design and designers are referred to and the assumption is, “oh, but we mean researchers too”? I sure am. It’s like being annoyed when only male pronouns are used and being told, “oh, but we mean women too”. But the exclusion of mentioning UX research and UX researchers strengthens my resolve to make UX research the most central and essential discipline to make products, services, and companies successful. And, to not be quiet about the contributions we make.