 One thing to ask to keep you away from food coma after that lunch. Challenge accepted. Thank you all for being here with me. Much appreciated. And thank you all for your attention. There's nothing quite like being in a room full of people like this, even the ones that are still walking in and getting attention. It's a very powerful feeling. And I'd like to share a bit of that. So could I ask that you turn to the people around you in front of you, behind you, and tell each other that you're happy that they're here with you as well? Could you go ahead and do that, please? Lovely. Right, and as this talk progresses, as this talk progresses, kindly give a twit. Our handles are here. That would make me very happy. It's more of your attention I want to get. I'm well aware. But here we go. Right. I am a rare breed. You need to know this about me. I am a graphic designersaurus. I graduated before computers ruled the world. There was once that time. But today, I work as a principal designer for an experienced design company. I use creativity and insights that are evidence-based and all geared towards delivering outcomes that improve the lives of people. So as I was saying, as a speaker, I'm very fortunate to get a lot of attention. And I'm truly grateful for that. I'm also grateful for experiencing a different kind of attention as a designer. And it doesn't come from getting attention. It comes from paying attention. And my concern is that as practitioners, we are not always paying enough attention. So my talk will elaborate on that. I was saying I'm a UXer, like most of us in the room, right? Who's a UXer? Ah, a few hands. We're shy. So what we do as UXers looks a little bit like this. Yeah, it's not very exciting, is it? But here he is. Here's the user experiencing what we have designed for them. If I ask any one of you here now who our most important stakeholder is, we will dutifully answer the user, right? It's been drilled into us. Their concerns, their needs are at the center of our decision-making. It's our job to represent them. Now, if we're honest, the term experience design, well, we label that on something that has become usable, transactional, and in best of circumstances, maybe even frictionless. But it's kinda lazy, huh? If it's that easy, I want us to pay more attention on that keyword, experience. What exactly is that? Is it a transaction? Well, an experience is more like a series of moments that go beyond just a click that have a resonance. And it's a resonance that connects with how we sense and how we feel. Because experiences for humans, they are sensations, physical sensations, what we touch, what we hear, what we taste. The most obvious aspect of our self is our self, our bodies. It's just that we are only aware of our bodies when they are in distress, when they are in pain, rarely otherwise. And as we experience through emotions, which is the second part, well, then we're confronted with a culture where reason and logic overrules emotion. Whenever we get emotional, we are quite often told to calm the fuck down. Don't be irrational, right? We are seen as being out of control and as such it's sort of a pattern for us not to be emotional, not to show our emotions. And what's important to understand is that it is our senses and our emotions that tell us what it is that we embrace and avoid in the environments that we are in. Typically when we speak of emotions and of sensations, we speak of things that happen to us, right? Something impacts us and we react. It gives us the impression that things like sensations and emotions that they are passive, we can't control these. Well, there's an actual construct taking place. So this is the road outside my condo, it's West Coast Road, Clementi, far away in the West, I know. For Singapore, this is a bit of a high-risk crossing. I'm reminded that last month I was presenting this in India and it took me five minutes to explain why this is a high-risk crossing because for India, this is a quiet country road. But here's what happens. The drivers that go up and down this road, they miss the pedestrian crossing, they miss the traffic light. And so on a daily basis, cars just blow right through it. I see this happening all the time. I had to hold my own son back to avoid having him hit by a car. I know this. I anticipate this. So every time I approach this crossing, which is twice a day, my body is preparing itself. There's a visceral construct going on. My senses are going into overdrive. I get cortisol in my body, which is a stress hormone. I get adrenaline. Those are all these extra little substances to help me make quick decisions. But there's another construct going on. An emotion is being prepared. Anger. I need not explain to you that it's really bad for you if someone driving a couple of tons of metal hits you. Not the best of circumstances. And what I want you to understand is that your body, by default, does not like to waste energy. It takes the shortest route. Conserving energy is good. And it's within that container that we need to understand how our senses and our emotions are made, because you are not reacting to events. You are preparing for the events that you anticipate will happen. I prepare to be emotional here, because this situation demands it. I need the clarity of thought. I need the directness of communication to avoid being hit by a car, to live a little longer. And so this construction, this construction that we do of senses and emotions, this is something that we do throughout the day. This is an innate process that we do. We predict what could happen and emotionally prepare for that. And we do that because when things are predictable, we have no surprise. Everything feels under control. It stops us to question ourselves or the things around us. We know what is expected from us and what to expect from those around us. That's the power of predictability. And we, UXers, our practice is to look for those patterns, to look for them and then use these patterns of predictability to promote feelings like trust, familiarity, ease of use. And by extension, we design affordances and layouts and interactions that are predictable as well. So differently, what we're aiming to do is design experiences to be standardized, routinized, repeatable. And then I'm confronted with the fact that experiences do not happen in a straight line. Those best practices that we want to give to our clients, they don't happen in the real world. They never have. What we defend as the best practice does not actually exist. And increasingly, what we design as patterns is shorter and shorter lived. For humans, there's absolutely nothing that's more easy and effortless than change. Change is happening all the time. And we, UXers, we like to condition change. We like to minimize it. We like to stabilize and structure it as much as possible. That feels like that's our job. And then I'm reminded of this quote. When we design increasingly more and more by pattern and by prediction, we are conditioning our users to stop questioning, to stop being curious. We dictate the routine. We dictate the experience. That's what is in our hands. And as predictability, precision, and efficiency of these patterns become the standard norm of what we say is successful UX, then our own human contributions, they're beginning to appear unreliable, clumsy, wasteful. User-centric design is surprisingly difficult. And I think one of the reasons why is that we have a lack of appreciation how people truly feel, how they think, and what they do. People are the hardest design problem you will ever face. And there will be no pattern for fixing them. Don't even try. Don't try and teach how people should live and work and think in patterns. Patterns do not care. Patterns are not user-centric. Because how can a process that gravitates around empathizing with people, how can that process deliver us rampant data abuse? Predatory dark patterns. Features that hijack human psychology. Well, the answer is it cannot. And that means only one thing. We are not actually doing user-centered design. As companies scale up their digital efforts, their incentives and their success criteria are less and less aligned with the people that they are actually asking to use a product of. It was earlier shared by one of my peers that technology can divide. That what divides people or leaves them behind, it should not be called user-centered design. So here's the fact of life. And it's your terms and conditions if you're a UX practitioner. UX has decided that if I swipe one way, I rate this person. I judge this person as unsuitable, as unwanted. And I never have to face the consequences. UX has decided that I can order food wherever, however, by whoever, and I don't have to say please, and I don't have to say thank you. And those are the patterns that we design. Technology and these practices, they are released on a day-to-day basis. And it's quite easy to lose track of what it is that we do. But my concern is that we are eroding the humanity out of the practice, out of what we deliver as a designed outcome. And I want to avoid that. I want our discipline to remain human. In fact, I want it to become more meaningfully human. Because as machines and codes and algorithms are more and more capable to do what we do, which is pattern work, that's what they were built for, while soon the only thing that's left for us to do is the stuff that has to be done meaningfully. And if we are to avoid becoming predictable, we need to change some of our practices. And I believe that starts with us, with you, with me. That starts at making our work and how we do our work more human, more meaningfully human. If we are to give our users the gift of human meaning, it starts with us. If we don't have that in our work processes, it will not be in the end deliverable. So bear with me as I am going to share four admittedly very subjective principles on how to design with more meaning as a UX practitioner. Principle one. So in this age of artificial intelligence, of data, of automation, what is the future act of design going to look like and what exactly will make it more human? Well, I'm proposing that it's perhaps by doing more of what's not necessary. A while ago, we all witnessed something that was seemingly out of control and very unpredictable, the Thailand cave rescue. That's probably still very fresh on your minds. Those were three weeks where all of us were glued on social media and on TV sets to keep track of what was going on. We were reminded, if not shown, that things that are seemingly out of control can surface a lot of meaning. We saw dozens of selfless acts by people who gave up what they controlled, the rice paddy farmers who gave up their fields so that the floodwater could be pumped out and they lost a year's worth of crops, not a problem. A makeshift town that emerged at the entry of the cave, people were washing each other's clothes, cooking food, cleaning the toilets, free of charge. In other words, all these little acts of people wanting to be meaningful. And some, perhaps not as successful, Elon Musk, Submarine, anyone, but they were distinctively human. Our profession is geared towards us being in control, being able to predict what is going to happen, but we can also choose to be less in control. We prioritize to act only on the things that are deemed necessary, but we could also consider that which is deemed unnecessary and see what happens, see what emerges there. Years ago, I worked on this rebrand of a merger of two companies. We were going to merge, a company of engineers with creative types. Good luck, right? And to bring these two together, we were introducing a new brand. The brand color was going to be yellow. For anyone with a print design history here, the color was P135C. And as part of the rollouts, we wanted to distribute 10,000 yellow rubber duckies to all staff worldwide. And last minute, we canceled that. We just didn't see the relevancy of it. There was no real connection with the brand and ducks. It was complicated to send that out. We had no guarantee this would work. The easier option was to just quite simply abandon this. And it seems to me now that this marked the end of the, at the beginning of the end for this merger. This merger never succeeded. The companies never became one. Nah, was that because I didn't give them any yellow rubber ducks? No, of course not. But the decision to kill the rubber ducks permeated everything else. By prioritizing that, which was seemingly the easiest to do, this brand forgot to do what actually really was meaningful and impactful. So I learned my lesson with this project. Do not kill your rubber ducks. People at the back, can I hear me? Is that right, people at the back? Is this done better? Here we go. And now we remove that for no feedback. Still better? Right, I'll just keep this here. All right, sorry. Meanwhile you were reading how rock and roll is saving the world, again. Dave is reminding us that it's time to learn again. It's time to give again. We must give time and learn from that what we feel is unnecessary or uncontrollable. We can't just go with what we think we know. If we only make surface level judgements on what we deem unnecessary, we miss the opportunity to find something that could factually be meaningful. Now, that feels like more effort and that feels like unnecessary work and a bit out of control. And yes, I guess what I'm saying is that to activate your curiosity, you actually have to work at it. All right, second principle. There are studies that show that how we feel about the work that we do, it very much depends on the relationships that we have with our coworkers and with our clients. And what our relationships, other than a series of micro interactions, there are dozens of these each day and each have that potential to be a little bit more meaningful. There was this Gallup survey where 27% of bosses proclaimed that they believe that their employees are inspiring and engaging with one another. In that same survey, the employees and the replied that their engagement and inspiration was about 4%. Now, that might be better in our own industry, in our creative circles, but it does make you wonder if these are then the people that we work with or work for, what are our chances of doing anything meaningful with them? When you have no sense of belonging, you feel lonely. When you feel lonely at your work, you're less engaged. You're less inspired, you're less creative. And the majority of your day is spent at work. And I know for some of us, it feels like all of our day is spent at work. But the price of not connecting with those around you and with those you work with is costing you. It's threatening the possibility for you to do something meaningful, something that you feel proud of. Now, the secret of a healthy relationship, it's not the grand gesture or the lofty promise, it's small moments of affinity. And creating these is a fun design challenge that I invite you all to take up. Today, design leaders, they're faced with the need to facilitate creatively different. And so I believe that if you facilitate by creating small moments of affinity, then what you do is you connect with others through improbable connections and evoke something that is yes, a little unpredictable and yes, feels a little unnecessary. But instead of a forced loyalty, you create playfully loyalty at will. I ran my own design studio in Shanghai for a couple of years and there I had a tradition called Freaky Friday. Once or twice a quarter at a day's notice, I demanded that everyone in the office would wear a mask the whole day, start to finish. To be worn during meetings, brainstorms, conference calls with clients. If clients came to the office, I gave them a mask. They were asked to participate. Every Friday when this happened, we left with an abundance of energy, enthusiasm, and a close knittedness, even with our clients. My message, do not underestimate the power of a ridiculous mask. Now, again, don't rush to the store and get masks. That's not what I'm saying. My lesson here is this. Hierarchy kills attachment and masks erase the hierarchy. Masks allow you to use the disguise of the false to show something true about yourself. And when you show something true about yourself, you create a moment of affinity. Even with those people that you work with or the people that you work for, because guess what? Your ideas, your work, they're an immediate reflection of how deep that relationship is. So yeah, a lack of connection, it's costing you. It's costing your colleagues. It's costing your clients. It's costing your users. If you do not connect with the people that you work with, it's only a matter of time before your sense of belonging dissipates and you're gonna look for a change in your circumstances. How many of your unspoken ideas will then disappear? It's not easy. I know this because relationships with our coworkers, well, they might have grown apart, suffered betrayals, be strained, and they're now in need to be more meaningful to each other again. And that requires us to do a very uncomfortable step. It's to dare to be a little ugly. Third principle for today. When I say this, I'm talking about authenticity. But today, when I present to you the word authenticity, you're thinking of showing the most interesting side of yourself, your beautiful self. And I'm here to argue that it's actually your ugly side that I wanna see. For me, it's ironic, right? We know that being authentic is a differentiator from anything artificial. So what have we done? We have prescribed the patterns on how to be authentic. And this is the stuff you could see on social media. This is the InstaRepeat account where they look for that stuff. People just taking the same picture all the time and then saying, this is me, this is my life, this is how I live, this is my authentic self. Well, that just means that authenticity is being recontextualized to superficialness. It's the collateral that we pay for documenting our lives online the way that we do. When we only share that what we think we need to share. And with the attention algorithms always watching that human presence of doubt and fear and nervousness, it's disappearing from our identities. That's a problem. So this brand wanted our help to transform them digitally, in other words, culturally. On the outside looking in, this was a great looking company. Their people were very talented, their products pretty solid. You go to their office space, it looked like an urban hipster resort. Everything about them was attractive, but it was surface level. They were very uncomfortable within their own skins. They had huge obstacles to better performance. So as part of sort of the ritual and the approach that we took, we identified and named and labeled all of the issues that they could surface. And there were dozens of them, right, dozens. We put them all on boards. We moved the boards into the largest conference room they had. We renamed it the ugly room. And the ugly room was a social space where anyone could see the issues. Management, staff, the cleaning crew, people that came for job interviews, partners, vendors, they all saw the rawness of this company, the obstacles that they had identified towards better performance. So celebrate your ugly room. Find your personal ugly room and embrace it. These are your obstacles for better performance and these are the things that make you human. To be authentic is to dare and be a little ugly. It's not adhering to a pattern or an expectation, it's adhering to who you are regardless of the pattern, regardless of the expectation. But so many of us are afraid to do that, right? I'm aware of what I'm saying and what I'm asking. We are thinking of the ridicule and the questioning and the judgment that we may get from being ourselves on purpose all the time. But here's the thing, if you dare to be that person, if you dare to show that you're comfortable in your skin, you're inviting someone else to be comfortable in theirs. Another great moment of affinity. It's a big ask, I am aware. It becomes easier if you embrace this principle. Remain incomplete. Do not aim to complete yourself. This is not a race. It will never be done. Good. Realize that today's design solution is tomorrow's design problem. The work will not be done. Don't aim for final solutions. Remain incomplete. Perhaps some of you are familiar with this music genre called Fado. It's a Portuguese music style that cannot be replicated by machines. Why? Because in this style, there are no drums. It's the singer that dictates the rhythm, which in music is a really bad idea, right? It makes the beat volatile, unstable, trembling, but it gives this music a very distinct aura of heartache, of suffering, all the beautiful stuff about humanity. It's these minor mistakes that make it unique, that make it creative. And it's the stuff that normally we are asked to kind of iron out of journeys. Mistakes make Fado human in its imperfection. Maybe you recognize the brand I play here. This is Kit Kat. It deliberately stages a mistake to bring alive the core meaning of its slogan. I'm not always a big fan of advertising, but this one, well done. If you browse the books about our industry and about our practice, all you hear are the arguments that are heralding flawless delivery, perfect journeys, striker perfection, iterate, iterate, iterate. And those are then promised to be the key tenants of customer success and of business success. But why is it that as a society, we're so obsessed with all the things that are deemed perfect? What are we learning from the failures of others? For me, it's no wonder that we are all resistant to failure. We don't read about it. It's being hidden. We should not talk about it. And here we are. We are applying methodologies where the core idea is, let's fail. Let's try something. If it doesn't stick, me, let's try something else. Not to a degree, it's obvious. We, of course, you want to applaud success, but it's also very limiting in your thinking and it's misleading. So consider that if you want to humanize and if you want to change and get the attention of people and a higher emotional involvement from them, consider adding a bit of friction. Consider adding a bit of human touches in your journey. We're in this time of pervasive automation. What we call personalized journeys, but ultimately, they're anonymous. An Amazonization of the whole online world. Increasingly brands that seek a deeper and higher engagement from their users, they turn to more humanizing aspects in their journey. A bit of friction, an error here and there. They've stopped measuring the success of their work by perfection. They look for different tenants. That's good news. You're not supposed to put something out there that is done. It will change. That's a good thing. Put something out there that isn't even supposed to be done so that the future can remain a little bit more unpredictable. So those were principles that I wanted to share with you and I know, I've shared this a few times on different conferences, there's usually a lot of, oh my God, how do I even start? Geez Christ, all four of them. My message here to you is don't do nothing just because you cannot do everything. I believe that we're in a unique position to design a future that looks more human by-tech and not less because of it. It's our role to do that. I believe that we can design more meaningfully for humans. If we aren't willing to embrace change in our own processes, in our own methodology, in our own ways of thinking, this whole user-centered design thing, it'll grind to a halt. Now, I know that your first reaction might be, what can I do? I'm one person. Society, company is too big. Well, it's individuals that actually change the future and they do it together by imagining how things can be done differently. So what I ask you all to consider is that it is your own tendency to work on gut, to work on what you can intuitively anticipate that paradoxically sits in the way of doing things that are meaningful and innovative. If you only iterate on things that you know, we run the risk of running our society down a very narrow path to a future where we only seek operational efficiency. It'd be a culture of predictability. Now, consider that we did not come up with the electric light by continuously improving on candles. That was done differently. And our job as practitioners is to explore a future that by definition is uncertain. If we're only thinking about short-term, if we're only thinking about the repeatable, the known, the familiar, well, then we're not asking questions about our future. And then we will fall short of our own potential, which is inspiring the world to move to a culture of possibilities. So let's save UX, let's do that. Let's save it from becoming overly predictable, overly rationalized, because if we don't, we might end up living in societies that have no longer any appreciation whatsoever for the unnecessary, the authentic, the incomplete. So do the unnecessary, create moments of affinity, be authentically ugly, remain unfinished. These are not only the characteristics of designing meaningfully. They are inherently human characteristics. They're also what I would like to call a sense of home. And as we disrupt and are being disrupted, the least we could do is feel at home in the practice that we have so that we can use our talents to kind of share that feeling with everybody else. You're a wonderful audience, thank you. I would, thank you. Yes, yes. That meant you read the slide. Good, so I can do a shameless plug next. What I shared is in book format. So I have nine of these principles that are in book format. There's three of them that are free on the website that's listed here. That's as far as I'm gonna do my marketing. But thank you for taking note of that. And thank you for the applause. Much appreciate it. Okay, thanks Mario. Okay, so we're just gonna have a quick Q and A. Here's the book. There's the book. First. So according to Kahneman, remembering self is stronger than experiencing self. Are we designing for expectations, future experiences or memories, past experiences? Yes, we do both. I'm not necessarily advocating that either technology is bad or that we shouldn't work with intuition. We should work with both. So what we've learned, what we've experienced from our past is going to set us up to imagine possibilities of what could be. So for me it's both. I hope I don't come across as a cop out on this answer, but it's a bit of a polarity that you manage. Did I help? Yes. Okay. Next, speaking about affinity, how can you recognize and measure it? You can't improve something if you can't measure it. Ah yes, we want efficiency, we want data. Affinity is a human connection. Please do not tell me that you are not aware whether you are connecting with a person or not. This could be a question in terms of, hey boss, I'm spending all this effort in one-on-ones and sitting down with people to improve our relationship and the work is going to get better. There will be ways of measuring that. I am personally less interested in that. What I want to know is my trust, is my comfort with this person, is that growing, is that getting deeper? Can I be a little ugly with them? Can they be ugly to me? Is that fine? I measure it as such, but I can also imagine that measurements could be how many of these meetings do you need to have and how many more and how long do these connects require for all of you to kind of move forward? That could be a metric you could use as well. And one last question, how do we innovate as designers in the crux of design predictability? Can you say again? How do we innovate as designers in the crux of design predictability? Design predictability. Can I take from that that it is by using these patterns that we're asked to ask and that we ask to use and then how do we innovate there? You can ask my co-workers, I'm the guy who turns everything upside down like constantly. Find angles, find new perspectives. Do not assume anything of what you can predict. What you predict is your bias. Or a lot of your bias will be made visible in what you assume you already can predict. Now approach that with, what if I'm wrong? What if this is not the way I think it is? Just be curious. Feed your curiosity. Without curiosity, longevity in this industry is going to be tough. Okay, thank you so much. And now we'd like to give you a token of appreciation.