 Now that everybody's settled into their chairs, I'm going to ask you to all stand up. Everybody stand up, put your hands on your hips. And if you're feeling super sassy, you can stick one hip out like this. So Amy Cutty, who is a professor at Harvard, did a study where she suggested that if you stand with your hands on your hips for about two minutes, the level of testosterone will increase in your body, and the cortisol will go down. Cortisol is a stress drug. It makes you feel stressed. And testosterone makes you feel more confident and a little bit more alive. So basically what I'm doing is tricking you out of your sleepiness. Now you've just said, yeah, you can all sit down now. What's interesting about that study, even though it's one of the most watched studies of all time on TED, where TED talks, nobody can replicate those results. So what you just did may or may not work. We don't know for sure. And the lesson here is that just because something is really popular, something is well understood as a general idea, that doesn't mean it's the right idea or that it's the idea for you and the context in which you're designing or creating for. And as a scientist who became a designer, I find this concept really, really important because we take for granted the general knowledge about design and about UX that's out there, and we really question that. So today I want to talk about biology and I want to talk about questioning things. I want to talk about how we can look to the human form, the human behavior, the human psychology, and see that as a crystal ball to the future of what product design, product creation looks like. I used to live in the Islamic Republic of the Khmerz, which is a small archipelago of islands in the Indian Ocean, and I was paid to scuba dive. It was really an amazing job. I didn't think I was going to do anything else, but while I was there, I started working on a marine reserve and started working with an institute where we were going to preserve the fish and the coral reefs on this particular archipelago, and it suddenly occurred to me, oh my God, I can be a marine biologist. I can have shark week in my life every single day. So I went to university and I started studying biology, and the unfortunate thing about biology is it kind of looks like this. You're in a subterranean lab for six, seven, eight hours a day. You can tell this is stock imagery because I don't know what those colors are, but I never saw anything like that in my life. And everybody's happy and smiling. The idea of being a biologist started to fade, but what I really was attracted to was that biology is, in fact, an amazing designer. It's probably the best designer that we've ever observed or can take lessons from. Biology uses the same things that we use as designers to produce product. It's an amazing user-tested. There's billions and billions of user-testing all the time. It works within the constraints of physics and chemistry, just like we work within the constraints of our jobs. And this idea that biology can be an exquisite designer really appealed to me and drove me towards using those concepts in the design that I've been doing for the last 20-something years. And in that time, I've been part of projects which number now above 700. So 700 different products that I've been involved in or my team has been involved in. With this idea that human beings and human biology and the general biology around it actually drives a lot of what we do and not necessarily the technology. So what's the problem that we face as designers? The problem is that we are asked by our companies, by our clients to design for a future that we don't have a good idea of what it looks like. It's very ambiguous. We can't predict the future with any kind of clarity. And it's very difficult for us to think that far ahead when something like a device can just appear on a market and blow us out of the water. I mean, we were all around when smartphones arrived and that changed everything. And that happens pretty damn quickly. So I get asked this question a lot which is how will or how does UX look like in the future? And I think that's the wrong question. I think the right question is what do we know about ourselves, about biology, about human beings that allows us to project into the future and predict what that user experience should be? Because the nice thing about doing or putting biology first as a way of thinking about design is this researched fact. All of your customers are human beings, all of them. I'm guaranteeing you that. You don't need to check my research. All of your customers are human beings. So understanding humans and understanding how they operate makes you a better designer. So I'm going to go through five lessons. Five lessons today that will help you both practically and or strategically with the design work that you do. The first one is that product innovation is evolutionary. But it's not the evolution that you were taught at school. It's slightly different. So when I was at school, evolution looked something like this. It looked like a tree and it started somewhere and then slowly and gradually grew to create different things. And these trees would fit perfectly into a product evolution tree as well. You can imagine how products evolve, these nice smooth lines, everything's just dandy. Well, it turns out that that's actually not how evolution works at all. Evolution is much more dramatic. There are periods where nothing happens. That's called stasis. And then there are periods where everything changes. And that's called punctuated equilibrium, if you care. But these bands of change are the same things that we experience in our design and product and business environments. These dramatic changes that suddenly give us new ways to think or new problems to solve. So even if you think about that radiating out from the center, these bands of change or disruption keep happening in these very, very specific ways, in these dramatic ways. So we're not going to experience this, hopefully, as evolution has to sometimes deal with. But we are going to experience this. We're going to see new technologies arrive on the scene, a new device, a new protocol, a new market, a new competitor. That's going to suddenly disrupt everything. If you're in the car market and Uber comes along, suddenly everything is disrupted. If you're in the device market and suddenly a smaller, lighter device comes onto the market, suddenly you've got to design for that. You've got to create for that. So these dramatic changes are what you've got to prepare yourself for. And because adaptation happens in response to these pressures, you have to put yourself ahead of that curve and create an environment in which you are the one creating the pressure. So instead of waiting for the meteor to fall out of the sky or the new device to be released, you have to project yourself with the knowledge that that's going to happen and say, how are we getting negative or stressful feedback on our product so that we can be a better prepared future? So this is an example of a company that does product interviews on a regular basis called PluralSight run by a friend of ours, Nate Walkenshaw. They put themselves in a situation where essentially they're reading the comments. They're getting negative feedback every single day. They're asking tough questions. They are creating the stresses that demand them to adapt versus waiting for the changes to happen so that they have to then respond to it. And this is really critical. It may seem to you that user testing is something that you would do after the fact, but you have to do it inside of your process, inside of your organization, in a way that absorbs all the negative feedback first and then starts to give you the indications of where to evolve. So if you think about it, as designers, this is what we're doing every day. It's a cycle of near wins, right? We're never quite there. We never quite get to the point where we've satisfied ourselves or where we have the perfect product or the perfect design. So we keep on going through the cycle over and over and over again. And the best way for us to prepare for that is to accept that there's gonna be negative feedback or feedback from our clients that's gonna help us, or customers that's gonna help us adapt to that. So the big lesson that we have to start with is that you need to foster that adaptational environment. And the only way to do that is to get out of the building and go and talk to your customers. You have to go and meet them where they are. Most of us are not old enough to remember that doctors used to actually come to our houses. So if your parents were sick, they'd call the doctor and the doctor would come and make a house call. And if you were coughing and you had tight chest and you were struggling with breathing, the doctor could say, yeah, the reason why you have this problem is because you're the crazy cat lady and you have 16 cats, right? There's too much hair and dander and all this kind of stuff. They could see the environment in which that person lived and they could make an environmental or contextual choice about what to do. Nowadays, we leave the house, we go to the doctor and we say, we've got a tight chest and the doctor gives us medicine. And it hasn't sold anything. So we have to get out of the building, we have to go and talk to them. And we have to create the disruption before it happens to us. Disruption is really not the right word, but the stresses of adaptation so that we can be prepared for that. The second thing is that we think of ourselves being influenced by technology. But in fact, it's the technology that's being influenced by us. Daniel Walpert is a neurophysiologist and he has discovered that if you don't need to move, you don't need a brain. Our brains initially evolved, not our frontal cortex, but the original small brains initially evolved so that we could move. So that we could influence the world around us. This movement, this ability for us to go places, to change our location, to manipulate the world around us is what makes us human. Everything that we do is around movement, around mobility. And yet, we call this thing a mobile. This is not the mobile. We are the mobile, this thing comes along for the ride. And that is true of many, many different human states. We are describing our humanness by the technology, where in fact, we are that technology, we are that mobility, we are that insight, and the technology is trying to keep up with us. This disgusting looking thing is a C-squirt, and it swims through the ocean with its brain, and it finds a coral reef and it lands on the coral reef and puts its feet down. And the first thing it does when it stops swimming, and now sedentary on the coral reef is that it starts to digest its brain. Right? It doesn't need its brain anymore. Does that maybe look familiar to you? We are the mobile state, right? We think about technology as being the descriptor, but it's not the describer, it's not the prescriber of what we are. Yes, technology is sometimes too big to be mobile, but it quickly changes, it quickly adapts to who we are. We are the thing through which technology is ultimately going to be delivered to the rest of the world. So think about your customers, the way that they operate in life. Not so much as which technology are they gonna use, which platform are they gonna use, but what are they doing as a human being? What is their natural human state and how can we deliver to that value? So, like I said, biology, I mean, mobile is not the biological, or is the biological set, not the technology itself. And I think that this is not gonna change much at all, right? We are, as humans, still gonna be interested in mobility. Whether we're flying to Mars or having a self-driving car, it's still mobility. It's still getting from one place to another. It's still manipulating the world around us. The next thing is that all of the innovations that really matter, the things that we connect to as human beings, make us feel like we have superpowers. We already have amazing powers. Our senses are pretty damn amazing. We've got this huge brain for processing. But when we start to add value to that, things start to look like they are superpowers. So, tools are really a superpower. Whether it's the first tool or the last tool, that tool is a way to extend our powers. Today, I can take up my phone and open up an app. And through my app, I can see the cameras that are set up in my house, my security cameras. I can see what my family is doing in the state of my house, and whether it's safe and secure or not. I'm Superman. I can literally see across the world. I can see through walls. Just like you do when you do a video conference. You have a superpower because that happened. What's interesting for designers though, is that as we design these things, we can't forget our desire to remain attractive to one another as human beings. So even our most visionary ideas of what a bionic or a change or an advanced form of what we look like might be, still looks very human. The silhouettes of this woman would look like a human. The shape of the things that we create tend to be around our identity as humans and the way that we connect with that idea as we interact with our social groups. Even the most advanced orthopedics and bionics look human. This is the most advanced human prosthetic on the market right now. And they've taken the trouble to actually design muscle striations into the plastic that wraps around it. Why? Why isn't there a Swiss army knife or a corkscrew at the end of each finger? Because it's weird. And you walk into a room with a corkscrew at the end of your finger. You're probably gonna freak people out. We like being human. We like the shape of the human form, the behavior of the human interactions. We're attracted to humanness and that allows us as designers to think about what kind of experiences we can design for that. We don't have to think what's it gonna be like when AI takes over the world because it will be in a human looking, human sounding, human acting form. This is weird. It might be cool technology, but it makes you feel awkward. And in some cases people told us, well actually not as, but Tom Chi who worked on this design. They told him and his team that they felt unsafe wearing that. Unsafe, they're unsafe because they're wearing technology. It also makes them look awkward and socially awkward means I don't wanna do it. The social awkwardness is way more important than the ability to have the internet strapped to your face. You can have the internet on your face, but you won't do it because it's awkward and weird. So don't do that. Lowe's is currently giving their team members, Lowe's is a big box hardware store in the States. They're currently giving them these suits that they can wear so they can lift up heavy devices or heavy boxes and other things. Even these things are designed to fit around their bodies. So these are things that are adding to their superpowers and improving on their humaneness as opposed to substituting their humaneness. In cases where we have robots taking the jobs of humans, this is one of our clients, a company called Rethink Robotics in Boston. One of the big breakthroughs for them was anthropomorphizing the robots. So that face that you see on the robot was an afterthought. The designer who came up with that was responding to feedback from customers saying, I don't like these things. They don't make me feel safe. They're too weird. So what did the UX designer do? Made an emoji kind of face and put that on the robot and suddenly the robot became less scary. Rethink Robotics is now one of the most successful robotic companies in the world. They cannot make enough of these things. This is disruptive, right? When this is a low cost, low performance version of big robots. But it's a lot more attractive to the people that use them. The engineers that use these robots like them. What's more is this robot isn't something that you code. You don't program this robot. You show it what to do, and then it responds to that by mimicking you. You basically just take its hands and say, I'm gonna show you what to do, just like you would with a child, and then it does that. That human interaction that you're having with a robot builds a rapport between robot and human, and creates a stronger bond. A more caring relationship between something that could ordinarily be perceived as a threat. Another way to think about this is that as people who design digital products mostly, most of us are digital designers. We are creating user interfaces with this idea that these are pieces of content, or pieces of information that we're sharing with our audience. But in fact, what we're doing is we're designing a conversation. Every single interaction on an interface is just a conversation. So here's the Uber app, which most of us have used or something like this. And this is what the conversation sounds like. I take out my phone, I open the app. The app says, I need you, not actually need you. There's not real words coming out of it, but that's what it's saying. The rideshare app then says, I need information about where you are. So it gathers that information from your GPS. It then finds out where you are, you say, I'm over here. My GPS says I'm over here. And then it sends you a notification that it's on its way. Once that ride has happened, there's another conversation. How did I do? And you respond by either giving it five stars or less. This is a conversation. This is a human thing, not a technology thing. The technology is advancing or amplifying what we normally do as human beings. The top five apps of 2016 were all social or messaging apps. That's not a mistake. That's not some weird thing that just happened. We want apps that allow us to do the things that we do every single day better or in an amplified way. Why are you at this conference and not watching this through some virtual platform? Because you want to be here to meet the other people that are here, to see the speakers in person, to know that this is real. Why have you spent so much money to be here? It's because you're a human being and you can't help yourself. You can't help yourself being human. You want to be in contact with other humans. You want to have conversations with them. You want to socialize with them. This is something you can't overcome. It is part of who we are. It's part of our most primitive selves. All of these new technologies are just superpowers. The ability for me to speak to my echo and ask it questions has led to the most weird thing. I have a one year old and the one year old now walks up to the echo and starts going like this because he wants to dance. He knows this is the thing that he can interact with and as he learns language, versions of dance are starting to come out of his mouth. He's now having a conversation with the machine so that he can do something human. So the lesson here is that the best products enhance, amplify or extend what we already have as senses. Identify those senses. Think about it in your product groups or your design groups. What are the senses that you're amplifying? What are you enhancing for your customers? The next one is specialized to exploit niches. This doesn't sound like a big deal but let me show you something that might be somewhat surprising to you. We know that we're always on a device, right? We've all got our phones, our laptops, our tablets. We've all got these things all the time. We wake up with these things, we go to bed with them. They're kind of like our best friends in some way. But we're not always on the same device, right? We use them in different contexts even if it's the same person, even if it's the same content, even in situations like this. So 70% of people say that they take their telephones into the toilet with them and the rest are just plain liars, right? We know that that's what they're doing. When the Guardian did some research, they found out that within or over the period of a week, you're using the same content but across different devices. You're accessing it using different browsers, different devices. The contents are the same, even when you look at it throughout the day. So this is intraday data. And during those different times when you're operating in different environments, the context means everything. You choose a different interaction medium so that you can access the same information. So what's really cool is that when we start to see people buying these new devices as they come out, they don't throw away the old ones. When you bought your first tablet, you didn't throw away your smartphone. When you got your Apple Watch, you didn't throw away your smartphone. You're just adding to the collection of things. So as designers, especially as UX designers, it's gonna become more complex. We have to design not just for these things, but for all the things that we can't possibly imagine are coming down the line. They're gonna get smaller. They're gonna get more, there's gonna be a higher quantity of them. People are gonna have on average about five devices by 2020, on average. That's the worldwide number. You have to design for a minimum of five devices. But they all have to be context specific depending on how the usage happens. So different context means different solutions. If you're in nature, you can solve the problem of flying, but you can do it in many different ways. This is the same for us. Just because Google, actually this is not fair, it's Marissa Mayer said that testing a blue button 45 different ways is the way to understand whether it's the right blue or not. That doesn't mean it's right for you. That's not the right blue for you. You have to solve the blue button problem, whatever that might be, in your own way, in the way that's relevant to your context. If you're coming to these conferences and you're listening to what we have to say as speakers and then going home and doing exactly that, shame on you. You should question everything that we say. You should go and research it. You should be the researchers behind the Amy Cuddy study. You should say, why is that true? Why is it true for you or is it true for all things? Shopping online isn't the same for all apps. Neither is notifications or navigation or anything else. It's going to be different for every different situation. Experiences and technology are becoming more specific and more divided. We're going to see more of these things, but we're not going to see a substitution effect. You're not going to see people leaving their old devices behind. They're just going to keep adding to them. Which means your job is about to get much harder. So the lesson is, as we've seen in nature where each of these funny little specializations and niches gets filled by different animals and organisms, we're going to see a much bigger array of contextually relevant experiences. And you're going to have to be better researchers, better scientists, about how it works for you. Don't just take the research or what we say for granted. All the books that we've written upstairs, read them and burn them and write your own book, or maybe don't burn them back. The other thing that we know from human biology is that we're pretty much a big emotional mess. And why is that interesting? Because for many, many decades, scientists thought that human beings were these rational animals that had developed the capacity for emotional thinking or emotional behavior. But turns out it's exactly the opposite. Turns out that we are this flurry of emotions. And if we're able to put some control around that, we might get some rational thinking about it. Now, women have known this for years and been telling them in, but they just wouldn't listen. But this is true, right? We are essentially living on drugs. And those drugs are very specific to design. Because they matter in how we interact with the products and with the screens that we operate with every day. So I'm gonna give you one example. I ride a bike a lot. I use an app called Strava to track my rides. And what's interesting about something like Strava, there's obviously, anybody who exercises probably has something like this, is that it's really not about the tracking of the ride. That's a kind of a nice feature. But I don't track the ride for my benefit entirely. I also track that ride because in the app are these cool little things that give me my drugs. The things that I'm addicted to, that you're all addicted to as well, are coming out of this app. So for example, dopamine, every time a notification that somebody's liked my ride or I get a comment, I get a little rush of dopamine. And if you think, that's not me, is your phone buzzing? Is your notification going off? And you're looking at your phone? Are you carrying your phone from one room to another? You're addicted, right? You are addicted to dopamine. And if you've seen teenagers walking around snapping all the time, every single time they snap and they get a response, that's dopamine. Dopamine is what's released in your brain when you're addicted to something, it doesn't matter whether it's alcohol or anything else. This is the drug that connects us to the devices and to the experiences. There are others, oxytocin gives us social behavior or it connects us to our social behavior. So when I see somebody commenting and saying, hey, you did a great job on your ride, suddenly I feel like I'm part of something. You might think, well, that's not such a big deal. Well, the biggest company on the web right now is based entirely on this business model. Are you inside the circle or are you outside of the circle? Facebook is entirely about belonging. They are an oxytocin type business. The other one is serotonin. This is actually produced not just in the brain but in your entire body. About 40 or 50% of serotonin is produced in your body. The sense of belonging that you've created something that's worth being excited about, you are on drugs. And if you're a designer, you need to know about this stuff because you need to know whether this stuff can be turned on or off and in what way. What is an ethically good way to do it and what is an ethically bad way to do it? You have a moral responsibility to understand what's going on and how to adapt your product and your experience to those inputs. Also get serotonin from achievement goals, so this is if you've got any kind of gamification built into your app. This is the serotonin thing as well. One thing that you should be aware of is that it can work both ways. So they recently released a feature that would allow me to send a text with my location to the people that I love. So if I was going on a long ride, I can say, hey, this is where I'm gonna be, my phone will let you know where I am. And it would automatically send a little location link in a text to my wife, for example. And I thought, this is fantastic. Now I can put my mind at risk because I know that she is not worried about me, what happened? She started worrying more because every time I stopped for coffee she's like, my God, he had an accident, he's dead, it's terrible. And the phone would ring, right? So when you're designing these things, you can't just be thinking about the person who's experiencing that emotional input, but the person who's connected to that emotional input on the other end of this picture. So we are social animals, we share these experiences now. You can't just think about us in isolation. So we know that brain and body chemistry drive emotions, and those emotions drive behavior. In fact, we now know that unless your amygdala can receive these inputs, and then send them to the neocortex, which is the part of your brain that does all the big thinking, you will not even be able to make a decision. So your brain can't make decisions unless those inputs go through the amygdala. That means that you are an emotional animal, whether you like it or not. And as designers, we need to design for emotional animals. You need to stop thinking like a scientist for once and think, how can I think like a messy emotional person, and then go back to the science and figure that stuff out? So if you are not helping your users feel something, get emotional about something, make a connection, an addiction to something, you're not really helping them. You're not doing your job as a designer. You have to make them feel something, and more importantly, not just make them feel good, but you have to make them feel good with the people in their lives, the people that matter. Because when you do that, you crush it. Then you are really doing your job as a designer. Don't just make the person who's tracking their ride on Strava feel good about that, but make them feel good in front of their friends, in front of the people that are tracking them as well. It's a win-win situation for all of you. I'm gonna give you an example of how this works, this emotional stuff. A friend of mine owns the BMW dealership in Boston, and when this particular three series came out in Boston, it was targeted to what they called soccer moms, which is kind of a disparaging term, but they were like, this is the perfect car for moms that are rushing their kids back and forth. And what made it useful to them, at least, was that this car ticked all the boxes that initial interviews suggested it should. It said, hey, this is a safe car. This car's got lots of space. It is engineered to protect your family. And so the engineers who are mostly male created this car for their mostly female audience. Well, what happened? They didn't sell any cars. People were coming in, or women were coming in, test driving the car and saying, these numbers look great. Thanks for all the five star ratings, awesome. They would leave and they'd go across the street and they'd buy this car, or something like this. Why? Because this car feels safe. Even if it doesn't have exactly the same rankings or the same number of user safety elements, it feels safer. It feels like if you had an accident in this car with your family.