• The Transcript

Jon:
Welcome to episode 67 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I’m your host Jon Follett and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.


Dirk:
Hello, hello.


Jon:
Today, we’re going to kick off with a little discussion about the UX industry and at least the perception on my side of the table that is becoming a real hot commodity right now whether you talk about it in a business sense, everybody wants to have strong design in UX or if you’re talking about the consumerization of enterprise IT, the bring your own device to work movement or if you’re looking for a UX job, there seems to be a lot of open requisitions both in Silicon Valley and the Boston area where we’re at least nominally familiar with the job markets. Dirk, what do you think are some of the contributing factors why user experience has become so popular?


Dirk:
Well, there’s a lot of them Jon. One is as apps have emerged, so did mobile, as apps became more of a big thing, those needed to be created and the skills that went in to creating those mobile and lightweight tablety apps are user experience in nature yet they were being done by people who weren’t necessarily doing user experience before. Another reason is that a long time ago and still today there were a bazillion people doing web design. My cousin was doing web design. Your cousin was doing web design. Our cousin’s cousins were doing web design. Everybody was doing web design and it became a total commodity even at the beginning people didn’t want to pay much.

As you got bigger and bigger companies, bigger and bigger projects, the margins got lower, the projects got lower. People were looking for higher ground and they’re running to user experience. Some of them in name only. They’re still doing they’re web design chunking but they’re wrapping it in the flag of user experience. Others are moving up into more of software designs and things that really are more central to what I would consider a complex and meaningful user experience which is similar to the work we’ve been doing here since 2004.

Jon:
Yeah, that’s right. I think there’s, at least, my perception of it is that, this has been going on for quite a long time. There are a lot of businesses that want to be the next Apple. We here that all the time when we’re pitching work or when we’re discovering what work our client wants us to do. I think that is nominally one of the drivers is that the biggest company of the world has placed a premium on the user experience. Additionally, you have the digitization of all kinds of aspects of our lives that are going into software. We may still get out network but we can also network with LinkedIn which means that networking in the technology industry has all of the sudden become amplified.

Networking with your personal friends is done on Facebook. We’ve got numerous other types of software automation that, as you said, all require this some knowledge to make the user experience at least tolerable which would add to the open job requisitions that we’re seeing. At the same time, we’re also seeing a, I wouldn’t say it a disturbing trend but this idea that you can come and take a 10-week UX-intensive course and then you can go out and fill one of those job reqs. That I think is we’re bordering on dangerous ground there from a both from a buzzword standpoint, okay, now, you know user experience. Then also just from a seriousness standpoint, right? Because if everybody can do it just like everyone could do web design if you pick up a book on HTML, then it devalues the whole profession doesn’t it in some way?

Dirk:
There’s a problem with user experience and user experience means different things to different people. It has a whole bunch of different disciplines that fall into it. Let’s parking lot that for a second because there’s something wild about that I wanted to comment on and I didn’t get the chance. Apple, in the context of user experience of people wanting to be like Apple, there’s two things about Apple and user experience. One, for all the young whippersnappers in our audience, the first time user experience was ever used as a title in a company was at Apple. Don Norman called himself a User Experience Architect in the early 1990’s.

That’s just an interesting trivia maybe for those of you young folks not familiar with it. The second thing, as you pointed out is that, at least 50% of our clients or prospects at one point or another say, we want to be like Apple. Apple is this aspirational thing. You know what? Apple is not Apple anymore. Steve died and nothing exciting has come out of that company for years. There is no Apple. It’s an open spot to fill now. When people are saying, we want to be like Apple, what they’re articulating is that they want to be the company that is the paragon of design and user experience in all of business, in all of technology. There isn’t such a company right now.

It’s totally fragmented. It’s totally broken ever since Steve died. That’s in the side getting with the Apple thing. Yeah, with user experience, the challenge is that to craft an excellent user experience, it takes a whole bunch of different skills. If somebody is going and getting a certificate in user experience or taking some fly-by-night course or whatever that looks like, what does that mean? Are they just slightly trained in 12 different things or are they trained in research? Are they trained in interaction design? Are they trained in graphic design? Are they trained in programming? They sure as hell aren’t aces in all of them after a short course.

The complexity of elements that go into the practice of user experience make it super confusing when people are running around calling themselves user experience designers or user experience anything. It’s almost a meaningless title and doubly for people who have certificates. I don’t know. The whole thing is just a little janky.

Jon:
I think, I was considering all the different elements that can go into a good user experience and into the design skill sets required to make that experience happen. On a simple way to break that down and look at that is there’s a lot of discussion about what are the core skill sets. I don’t even know if we have agreement across the industry of what those are. When you’re looking at something like sporting events or the area of sport, if you’re a baseball player, you need to hit, you need to catch and you need to be able to field. All those things come together and if you can’t do one of those thing, you’re probably an incomplete baseball player.

At the same time, with user experience, you can have a lot of different people doing a lot of different things. I don’t know at this point if there’s a lot of agreement as to what those core things are that make you a good user experience designer but you can sure as heck tell when you’ve got, you were working with someone and they’ve got an incomplete skill set.

Dirk:
That’s definitely true.


Jon:
For better or worse.


Dirk:
Yeah, that’s definitely true. It’s easier to hide in user experience. In baseball, I remember in the 1990’s, there’s a player named Dante Bichette. He’s a pretty good right-handed hitter. He have fearsome power but plays terrible in the field. He was just as bad as bad as he can get in left field. That weakness of his couldn’t be hidden. Anytime the ball went in left field, it was like cover your eyes and hold your breath. If you’re really great as a coder in user experience but you’re not a good designer, somebody else could come in and do that design. It’s not like the ball is just falling into your zone and you’re the only one who can catch it.

Where it becomes a problem is where you have the one-person user experience team approach. That’s when you can have the chicanery as the ball bounces around in the left field so to speak.

Jon:
Yeah, even though we’ve been digging at this topic for a while, I’m still puzzled as to what makes the user experience areas so popular right now. I think there might be a little bit of the gold rush mentality happening especially, rightly or wrongly with applications or rather apps, there’s this idea that if you have the next great idea, you can put that together with a small team and become a multi-millionaire or even a billionaire if you’re the founders of Instagram or at least some chunk of that money that they got from Facebook. It may very well be that as a means to an end. UX has a way to become this very powerful product designer that maybe contributing to this popularity right now. I don’t know.


Dirk:
Gold rush is definitely a part of that. People who have been doing web design for a long time have been suffering because it’s been so commodified and there’s so many people trying to do it. Calling it user experience is a way to get money. Clients perceive user experience as being more sophisticated and high level but it’s on a buzzword level. They don’t even understand what they’re buying. They don’t even understand the distinctions there a lot of times. Gold rush is a really good way to put it. People are racing for what the market is rewarding right now and also for what they perceive as being a high-level thing.

It’s similar to the maturity level in advertising where marketing was the term then marketing strategy then branding then experience. It kept off shifting. When branding was the big deal, if you run around saying you’re a marketing firm, you are in trouble. The whole landscape shifted. User experience has always been the thing in software design where we live but there weren’t many people living with us in the past. Now, more people are coming into software design, user experience is getting bigger there but web design is also co-opting user experience.

Web design, legitimately user experience is part of web design but the sophistication, the complexity that the user experience discipline when practiced at the higher levels are hallmarks of are not present in most web design things. Those people are pounding their chest and screaming user experience just as much as we are. We’re designing the very forward bleeding edge of software design and development.

Jon:
I think that’s true. I think there are a lot of other factors that play here. Those were just the ones that we can come up with off the top of our heads. Listeners, if you have an answer to the question, why is user experience such a hot commodity right now? I’d love to hear it from you @jonfollett, J-O-N-F-O-L-L-E-T-T or at Goinvo, G-O-I-N-V-O and get some of your feedback. I was just puzzled by this on Friday and I sent out a tweet and got some answers back from folks on Twitter. I got one answer back from the guy who said, wasn’t that 2010? Isn’t the internet of things the big, red, hot item now? That could be true as well.


Dirk:
The internet of things, it’s all, we perceive something to be hot and mainstream earlier than it really is, right?


Jon:
Mm-hmm.


Dirk:
The internet of things isn’t there yet. It’s growing. It’s becoming bigger. It still is relatively small whereas user experience, pretty much every CEO out there, the word user experience have come through their lips, the words internet of things have not. It’s really the CEO test. When you get the, I don’t want to besmirch all CEO’s out there but when you get the stuff shirt, MBA type who doesn’t have a creative bone in their body, using language that pertains on the things we’re doing on the leading edges, that’s when you know something has really hit the mainstream and internet of things has not yet.


Jon:
Yeah, please let us know your thoughts on that as well. For the next part of the show, I wanted to dig a little bit to what may be a controversial topic that came out of a McKinsey Report that I really enjoyed reading. Yes, that’s a geeky thing to do.


Dirk:
We’re geeks. Damn it. It’s all …


Jon:
Loud and proud, right? From last year, May 2013, McKinsey had a report called Disruptive Technologies, Advances That Will Transform Life, Business and the Global Economy. When talking about these disruptive technologies, they talk about robotics, genomics, a lot of the emerging tech that you would expect. There was an item on that list which, at least for us as software designers might raise our eyebrows, that was the automation of knowledge work. We all know that software design and other kinds of technical automation have eliminated certain types of manufacturing jobs over time as well as some basic jobs that were associated with business such as, you don’t have a typist anymore.

There are certain types of accounting tasks which have been automated as well. It’s an interesting question for us to consider when that user experience field that we were all taking about is being such a hot commodity now becomes automated, what does that mean? What does it mean when there are healthcare tasks which were being handled by learning machines? If you consider that 40% of the jobs that were present in the economy have been automated over the past 40 or 50 years …

Dirk:
Was that true? Forty percent over the past 40, 50 years?


Jon:
Yeah. I think, I’ll double check that on the McKinsey Report but it’s a significant number of jobs that have been automated. I think we can probably expect the same thing on a faster timeline for knowledge work. I guess, what are your thoughts on that and how does that strike you being in the software industry?


Dirk:
Your statistic gave data support for whatever I was going to say anyway which is it doesn’t matter at all, doesn’t matter at all. I don’t know what the unemployment rate is today but if we compare the unemployment rate today over the last 100 years, 150 years, it’s going to look pretty good. It’s going to look, it might be a little above average or below average or I don’t know but if we knew that 40 to 50 percent of jobs in the next 50 or 60 years is going to vanish because robots and computers and machines are going to take them over, we would say the sky is falling but the sky hasn’t fallen because things are going okay.

Unemployment is eight percent or whatever it is. It was eight percent. I don’t know what it was when that was said. I don’t want to say something that contradicts myself and undermines the point but if we look over the history of US employment, eight percent isn’t bad. It’s okay. Yeah, we’d love to have zero. We’d love everybody to have food and shelter and all those good things. However, in the context of the thought experiment of what is the impact going to be? I think all evidence is the impact is going to be almost nothing. I think the question from an employment standpoint, the interesting question shifts to how do we spend our time?

Because the reality is there’s still going to be more people. I think, right now there’s eight billion people in the world. That’s going to grow. If there’s less things to do, if there’s less flips to switch and levers to pull, we’re going to have to do something. What is that going to be? Are we just going to consume? Are we going to go back to menial labor, the script is flipped and the machines take over the thinking jobs and we just do lower level things? I think the trends have been towards a service economy. I’d like to see a future where everybody gets a massage every day.

I’d like to see a future where maybe some of us wouldn’t be on a family program. I’d like to see a future where we just enjoyed ourselves a hell of a lot more and we did the kind of things that bring out the most of the human spirit that maximize human pleasure and experiential enjoyment. Why not? If there’s nothing that needs to be done because machines can do it, let’s rethink how we spend our time. Let’s think what our requirements are in order to be fed and be housed and then go from there. In terms of just being scary or doom and gloom, fuck it man. The sky is not falling. Forty to 50 percent of the jobs go away and be automated. I don’t care.

What I’m doing now and what you’re doing now and what our people are still doing now go away. I don’t care. Almost all of them are going to find something else to do and they’re going to shift with it. Of course there will be specific people and specific stories who, I know people specifically who have lost their job due to the kind of automation you talked about. Somebody who used to be a CPA, he can’t get a job now. There’s way too many people in the kind of tasks that are very low level where he can’t find work. That’s very tragic. He’s a friend of mine. I feel very sorry for him in the micro but in the macro, it’s completely irrelevant. It’s just not relevant.

The world will change. It will change in ways that we can’t really predict today. Again, I’d like to see it going more of a Bacchanalian direction but we’ll see what happens. That’s my take. What’s yours?

Jon:
Yeah, I feel like I’m probably more on the scale of being slightly frightened by that. Okay, what do I, if the job I do today was gone, what would I do? I’m sure I could think of other things. I think it probably takes the unique outlook to have the perspective that you do that the world will continue to move along even if we’re not doing these specific things that we’re doing right now. Now, to be fair, are there lots of other things that I could do besides software design? Sure there are. I think that with the idea of jobs being automated also comes that the feeling of economic uncertainty, right?

I’m not perhaps reacting especially to the job going away but rather am I going to be able to feed my family, put a roof over our heads, that kind of thing. That’s where that fear comes from especially now that we’ve seen the devastation in a place like Detroit where a lot of and not all due to automation of course but due to a decaying car industry. They’re having all kinds of problems and extrapolating out what would that look like with lots of knowledge workers? Would that work, right? Those are the things that pop into my head when I think things are going to be automated in that way.

The flip side to that is perhaps I’m getting better medical advice now because instead of only going to my primary care physician or even the CVS walk-in clinic when I’m feeling sick, I might be talking to a Watson-like computer and say, have that computer say, hey how do you feel today? It’s ragweed season, so I don’t feel that great. You should probably be careful because that could turn into a longer-term sinus infection or whatever. You should go and do this and this Mr. Follett to head off the stuff at the pass. I’m sure there are elements of this automated future that will be much to my benefit. Strangely enough, I also have a certain amount of fear and trepidation about that coming whether or not that’s reasonable.

Dirk:
Here’s another take on it, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a one or two percenter because people in our industry make a lot of money. You’re at least a 10 percenter. You’re in the top 10% of earners and financially secured people in the world. Congratulations if you didn’t realize that but you are. We’re going to be okay. Even if the whole system goes away, we’re going to be fine because if it all goes to hell and there’s, how many people in the United States? If there’s 300 million mortgages out there that are all in default and nobody can pay for, they’re not going to put everybody out and have a lot of empty homes, right?

Destruct the whole system, will restructure itself to sort out how to work in that context. It’s all going to be fine. It only doesn’t work if one place like Toronto, Detroit blows up. You got short with all this problems but the whole rest of the system is working pretty well. There’s not going to be any big bail out for the people in Detroit that the way the economics works, the way that government works won’t be reconfigured to make that better but if it happens to the whole country, if everybody is out of work and there’s nothing to do because the machines are doing everything, it’s not going to be the very narrow chaos that we imagine in our deepest fears because nobody would benefit.

If it’s a whole nation of empty homes and everybody is out starving on the side of the road, it just will never happen. I have certainly felt those fears more so when I was younger but I have certainly felt those fears before about, crap, what if? If it’s something happening on a systemic level like that where machines and technology are fundamentally changing the structure of work and the structure of how we change our time, it won’t result in our worst fears. In the worst fears we keep today, imagine being realized. Maybe other things that happened that are really bad but they probably aren’t on the path where you think about now.

Jon:
Right. I’d encourage you to check out this McKinsey Global Institute Report. It is about a year old but it does talk about some really interesting changes in emerging technology. Of course, that automation of knowledge work which got us started on this conversation. Listeners, remember that when you’re listening to the show, you can follow along with the things that we’re mentioning here in real time. Just head over to thedigitalife.com, that’s just one L on the digital life and go to the page for this episode. We’ve include links to pretty much everything mentioned by everybody.

It’s a rich information resource to take advantage of while you’re listening or afterward if you’re trying to remember something that you liked. If you want to follow us outside of the show, you can follow me on Twitter @jonfollett. That’s J-O-N-F-O-L-L-E-T-T. Of course the whole show is brought to you by Involution Studios which you can check out at Goinvo.com. That’s G-O-I-N-V-O dot com. Dirk?

Dirk:
You could follow me on Twitter @dknemeyer. That’s at D-K-N-E-M-E-Y-E-R. Email me Dirk@knemeyer.com or read me Dirk.Knemeyer.com.


Jon:
That’s it for episode 67 of The Digital Life. For Dirk Knemeyer, I’m Jon Follett and we’ll see you next time.