 My name is Brad Nunley. I want to talk a little bit about body language and why it's so important for designers to understand what this soft scale is and how it actually makes you a better designer in the long run. When was my epiphany moment about why body language is so important to me professionally? I was taking these photos of my son. This is my son Tristan. And I've got this brilliant idea of I'll just sit down with him and have him act out emotions and take a series of photos with him. And my son is very expressive. I always know what's going on with my son just by looking at him. And over the course of doing this and then editing the photos themselves, I learned that, wow, as adults, we've lost something. Kids are so expressive. Like I said, with my son, you know what's going on with him. But as adults, as we grow up, we start to reserve a lot of that. We start to put it inside and not show it. And it makes communication more difficult because it's kind of hard sometimes to see if someone's upset or happy. I started a life experiment a couple years ago that anytime someone would ask me how it's going, I'd always tell them the truth. And that's made for some awkward conversations over the years. Ooh, I'm gonna move this down. Is that better? Yes. So it makes for some pretty awkward conversations. But it's more honest, it's more truthful. Hollywood has taken this concept of body language and turned it into a really successful trope. You know, it's one of these things that were a lot of movies and TV shows hinge on the ability of the main actor to read the language. In my opinion, it's best showcased by Sherlock Holmes in the new BBC show. Like without body language, he'd be almost powerless. This is one of my favorite scenes from it. Big problem with the disguise, Mr. Holmes. Whoever hard you try, it's always a self-portrait. I love this scene because it's embodiment of body language reading for me. And he's powerless because of his nemesis. But what is body language, really? Is it what Hollywood wants us to believe it is? Which is a glimpse into our soul. You can see like as a small child, we had this trauma and it has impacted us all the way through life. Or is it really just like a reflection of our state of mind? You know, what's going on currently? What's going on in these little synapses in our head? This gentleman, Mr. Albert, he did this interesting study that sometimes gets some controversy because it's misrepresented, but I think there's some important lessons that we can learn from it where he wanted to find out what is communication and how does it work? It's a very controlled study, but this is some of the findings that he released. So 7% of what we consider communication is verbal, the words that we use. 38% is how we use those words, our tone, our inflection, the pacing of those words. And then 55% of it is all nonverbal. It's what our bodies and our facial expressions are doing and showing to another person. Here's what I think body language is. It's a reflection of what's going on right now. You know, maybe with some recent events, you know, the stuff that happened this morning, maybe last night, but for the most part, it's a good reflection of what's happening right now and what's impacting that person and their view of reality and how they are reacting to your presence in that reality. Another interesting thing about body language is it's a mirror of our subconscious. So science shows that we make decisions, sometimes up to seven seconds, before we consciously make that decision. They've done this with people where they've connected the wires to the brain and showed them some magazines and through science stuff. They figured out which synapses mapped to which magazine. And they would see synapses fire up to seven seconds before someone said that one. So the better we get as designers or as professional, reading body language in this meat soft scale, we can then predict a little bit about what people are going to do or what people are going to say or what they're feeling, especially if you're doing research and you want to dive into those feelings. You want to understand contextually why are they feeling upset or why are they feeling happy. But why should designers care about this? I mean, this is all good, whatever you're up, networking in our bar, making new friends, but why as professional designers should we care about body language? We deal with a lot of people nowadays. We deal with clients, we deal with stakeholders, we deal with coworkers, we deal with users, and the risk of failure is pretty high if we don't understand how to take in all the communication that's being thrown at us. We need to be able to interpret a lot of that so that we can make better design, make better products, and make these very interesting experiences that people expect out of us. But how do you see the signals and why does it matter? It allows you to ask smarter questions. So for me, if I'm doing research and I see someone gets visibly upset because they looked at something that was in their apartment, I want to know why they were upset. And nothing was said that gave me the insight that they were upset, but it was there. And now I can have this more interesting conversation. It makes us aware of sensitive topics. So that same example, okay, they're upset. Something has reminded them of this emotional event. Should I dive into it or should I wait? Should I build some more trust and rapport with this person before I approach that topic? And it also allows you to know when you're about to break trust. Research, in my opinion, especially contextual, like one-on-one research, is all about banking on trust, how much trust you've built up with that person. And you spend that trust over the course of the conversation. But once you break that trust, you've, like, easily withdrawn too much, it's really hard to get it back and get back on track. Reading body language also comes in handy when you're collaborating with people. It can give you insight into when you're on the same page, when you're sharing ideas, when you're making progress towards this new vision that you weren't all aware of yet. It's also really important when you present yourself declines. Think back to a speaker or someone that you saw on TV and you just had almost an emotional connection with them. Even though you weren't having a direct conversation with them, it was part of their body presence that allowed you to have that connection with them. Also, it's really helpful whenever you're delivering bad news. It shows a broader sense of empathy because you can react to any of those negative signals that are being shown to you. And it also allows you to dive in deeper, like, well, what were you expecting? All the signs pointed to this, but you weren't expecting the bad news. What kind of misled you along the way? It's also helped when you're moderating disagreement. I mean, disagreement pops up all the time during the design process, within your peers, your clients, your stakeholders. Critique sessions are built on the sense of disagreement. It's productive disagreement. It's constructive, but it's still at the end of the day. Like, I didn't like this or I didn't understand that. And so being able to connect with someone at a deeper level allows you to get through that moment. This is my favorite use of this skill of reading the body. It allows me to connect with my voiceless participants. These are the people that you know in your boardrooms or in your conference rooms that sit in the back and they never speak up. They never talk. And that's because they're more introverted. That's their natural state of being. But their body is still telling you a lot of signals. They're still telling you a lot of information about what they think is going on and how they feel about the conversation. And if I see some of these like key signals, it allows me to maybe ask them a direct question and engage them in the conversation. Or I can just know that this person is not really comfortable being in the center of things. And I can wait until after the meeting. I can say, hey, Sue, you didn't seem to dig the conversation that was going on. Can we talk a little bit about what was going on? And so then I can understand why those body signals were coming up. It could be she was just having a bad day. I mean, that's what it is. Or she really didn't like what was going on. And I need to understand that so I can do my job. So what are the signs? What are these like intrinsic things that we do with our bodies that tell people more than just what our words are saying? They fall into several categories. The first one I want to cover is about openness and how we carry our body in a very open manner. When someone's being very open with their body, their arms are open, their legs are kind of spread out. I'm presenting what I call my core, which is my chest. It's showing a level of trust and acceptance. It shows acceptance of an idea of a person. If you see someone in a room that all of a sudden, maybe their arms crossed or legs crossed and then something was said and now they're open. Something in them potentially agreed with what you were saying or agreed with what the group was saying. And so now you know that, oh, this person, while they weren't on board, now they might be. It also shows that they're trusting you. This is really important again in research. Whatever you're trying to figure out, when you've built up enough trust with someone to ask them sensitive questions like about the death of a loved one, about the state of their bank account, if they're showing and being really closed off, might not want to ask that yet. And then also it could show that they're offering up something. They didn't have anything to say yet and now they do and so they're trying to let them let you know that their presence is there. Which dovetails into presenting your core. In body language, they describe the core as this in your chest. And the reason why it's called the core is because this is where all your vital organs are. Really the important ones, heart, lung, stomach, those type of things. When you present it, you're feeling safe and secure. The way they describe it is that you're basically showing that you're not going to stab me. So here is my core. It also makes your presence feel known. People will spread out their arms. You know, say like, nope, hey, pay attention to me, I'm here. And then also it shows excitement. Think about it, concerts or any type of like positive emotions. You start to use those body ligaments to show that emotion. It also can show a sense of confidence in yourself. Which can be a positive or negative thing sometimes. Just saying, hey, nope, this is my space. You can't touch my space. Standing one's ground. This is really interesting in conversations because someone, they don't want to agree with you. They want to just keep their idea because their idea is sacred to them and they will just, you know, you can't go and you shall not pass kind of thing. And again, there's this other thing of like increasing your personal space. You'll find this is true for people that might be insecure about themselves. And so this is one way of almost like reassuring themselves. Like no, no, no, it's okay because this is my space. The opposite is closed off. And like I said, none of these are necessarily positive or negative. It all kind of depends on the context you're seeing them in. But one key aspect of being closed off, especially in the sense of the hands, is aggressiveness. Think about how we fight. We got our fists up, we got our dupes up. So if something's going on in a situation, someone's trying to seek dominance or control. You know, think about it whenever you're in a situation that you don't really like what's going on. You might clinch your fists, you know, that by your side. Because you're holding that kind of like anger or frustration in a little bit. You're seeking resolution. Sometimes these little like hands of ours are showing internal battles that are going on in our head. You're fighting with an idea, or you're fighting your idea against someone else's and trying to figure out really who should win. Also can like I said, show that sense of a discomfort. The opposite of like opening your core is like this is defensiveness. You know, people have their arms crossed or legs crossed. They're protecting that core. They're basically saying, you might stab me. Please don't. But it can also mean that they're trying to reassure themselves. Like no, no, no, it's okay. It's almost like that self-hug. Like ah, it'll be fine. They'll realize in a week it's a bad idea. It's fine. They can also feel threatened. I've experienced this with stakeholders when, you know, I'm having to tell them that their idea is bad. You know, we've got the testing. We've got the results that show that this is not the direction that we want to go. They immediately, you know, take this post. And also, again, disagreeable. Like no, no, it's fine. My idea is the better one. And this tense and closed-offness, which is dovetails into being anxious or just closed-off in the whole situation. You're basically reducing your personal space and kind of living in your own world or your own space. You're also trying to desire for privacy. This gets awkward because it talks about legs for the most part. And when people cross their legs, they're kind of like, you know, covering up the most private part of our body. So you're trying to get some distance from each other. You're trying to separate, again, yourself, not just from the people that are in the room, but also potentially from the situation that's going on. It's showing that sense of insecurity. But more importantly to me, I think it shows that, you know, that person is now closed-minded. They're not gonna be necessarily open to any suggestions or these new concepts that I want to try to push them towards. One of my favorite comments that I make whenever I start new projects with clients is I'm not here to make you happy. I want you to be happy. I'm gonna work really hard in the hopes that you'll be happy. But there's gonna come a time where I'm gonna say something or ask you to do something that you're not gonna like. Those are great opportunities for us to have a conversation, to figure out what's going on and how we can just come together and figure out the next steps. That has worked okay so far. So I'm gonna keep trying it. There's also handshakes. I love handshakes because they differ, you know, across borders and different, and across cultures. We all know different people that, you know, they maybe, they squeeze your hand a little too rough. They crush their hands. There's also the people that are more like the lint fish hands and for me, those go, mm-hmm. My father was in the Air Force and that was one of the things that he always taught me. It's like, anytime you shake someone's hand, no matter what, just, you know, just good firm squeeze and then that's it. Don't try to crush someone's hand, don't be limp. It's a show of respect. And that's a true for a lot of cultures especially when it comes to handshakes. Next I wanna talk about the face. The face is wonderful because it is a portrait of micro expressions. Micro expressions is a subset of by language of all the involuntary, like muscle reactions that your face will do based on your emotional state. So I wanna stress that word involuntary. In most cases, you don't have control over these things. It's a pure instinct. There are some people that do have some control over them. They tend to be really good deceivers. Not in a negative way. It's just they're kind of like the way that they're wired. And then there's a lot of interesting study about deceit and how they can control micro expressions and that how that helps them with their level of deceit. So let's talk about your eyes, the windows to the soul. Pupils are signals for honesty and deceit. This is one of those things that we talk about like we see on TV show, like I know you're lying because your pupils dilated. Sure. Direction is interesting to me especially when I'm talking to someone in a research setting and I'm trying to understand their life experiences. Direction kind of tells you whether or not they're using their memory or their imagination. And there's a metaphor to this. If you look up, it's like you're dreaming. And so you're accessing the more imagination aspects of your brain. And so what they're telling you might not necessarily be reality. When you look down, it's almost as if you're reading and you're accessing all your different memory banks. And so you're trying to recall something that might be a little more real or based on actual experience. Corners will show authenticity. There's a tons of muscles that happen right here that you have no control over. And I'll talk about this a little bit when I talk about smiles, but how you can tell if someone is smiling for real is they'll have crow's feet. Someone can't normally can't control this. And you really pick this up on kids. Kids are showing you that fake smile. You just know it's fake because there's no wrinkles here. And even kids have crow's feet, so it's okay. Blinking will show a sense of just levels of comfort. We see this on TV when people are interviewing politicians and they're approached with a question that they didn't really want to answer. They start blinking a lot. They're just not very comfortable with what's going on. The nose, think about how you smell things. You know, when something smells good, it kind of has a calming effect. When something smells bad, you're like, no. Our brain kind of reacts that way, same way with ideas and concepts or things of conversation. If your nostrils flare, you're potentially showing discomfort or displeasure. Just like you smell that thing that is rotten. No, no. Coloring can indicate emotional state. So when people get nervous or excited, your blood does a lot of interesting things and your blood vessels in your nose are very close to the surface. So if you see someone's nose, blush, they potentially are excited. Pinching or rubbing might be signs of doubt, like, mm-hmm, I don't know. Or it could just mean that they need to sneeze. This is an interesting thing with body languages. It's not about the individual signals that are going on. It's about the whole picture and considering what everything is going on with someone's body. And then wrinkling can again convey that sense of distaste, just as if you've smelled something rotten. The mouth mimics the nose in a lot of ways. So perched lips will show displeasure or frustration. Think of when you taste something sour. Same way of like you've seen sense of sour idea or sour topic that you don't want to talk about. Your mouth reacts. Biting your lips and cheeks are anxious. Those are those nervous ticks that we do. I do this. If I'm kind of in a nervous situation, I will chew the crap out of my cheeks and my wife hates it when I do that. Twitching can indicate citizen or disbelief. And so again, again, think back to those moments where you can relate to this. Think about what your mouth is doing. It's almost like you're keeping your mouth shut so you won't tell that other person that you don't believe them. And then I guess a smile is a mixed bag of feelings. Let's skip too far. Smiles can mean like a full smile, a half smile, like a smirk, all these different things, especially with what's going on with the broader conversation, imply and mean just different emotions and feelings. It could be that you don't trust that other person, so it's a half smirk, like nah. Or you could be genuine. Or you're just trying to show that you might agree by doing a fake smile, and that's where the wrinkles in the eyes come in. And there's the whole body. There's certain stances that you will do that indicate your overall sense of being right now. I've got two examples I wanna go over with you. The first one is called the cowboy. And men and women do this, but they actually mean two different things based on the gender because of wiring and stuff. But in general, you're sizing up another person. Think about those cowboy movies you may have seen where you're like, can I take this person up? Hi. It's generally an aggressive stance. You're looking to again establish your physical presence because your elbows are out, your legs are spread out, and so your normal bubble is much wider. As I mentioned, it is different between men and women. In men, it tends to be a little bit more aggressive, which is probably why we see it in the cowboy movies a lot. With women, it's more about making their presence known. Unfortunately, in a lot of societies, women aren't seen very often in boardrooms and meetings. I had a colleague of mine who, even though she was having a conversation at stakeholder, would always look to the guy sitting next to her and talk, it would always frustrate me. But women will do this to actually try to show their presence, make themselves be seen. There's also this one, which is the edge of the seat. Hollywood likes to use this one again and when they're describing movies, you will be at the edge of your seat the whole time because you're excited or you're passionate about what's going on. You wanna jump up and just participate in whatever's happening. This is great to keep an eye on in collaboration meetings. If you see someone who's literally on the edge of the seat, stop talking. See what they wanna say, see what they wanna do and bring them up. So they're ready to take action and participate. There are cultural differences. As I mentioned, certain things mean something in the West that don't mean the same thing necessarily in the East. I learned this sometimes in the hard way working with a lot of colleagues that came from India. And I love this video because it helped me understand some of those things. An Indian shakes his head in different ways when you speak to him. It could be like this, this or this. What do they mean? And I've taken it upon myself to be the natural, curious person that I am and ask my colleagues, what do they mean whenever they're doing these different things? A story that kind of shows where I went a little, I did a bad thing was when I get nervous or what I'm thinking, I walk around and do this and then Harish stopped me one day and said, please don't do that. So why? I'm just thinking. He goes, yeah, but where I'm from in my culture, it means that you might stab me in the back. I was like, oh, okay, I won't. My colleagues also know that I'm a bit of a jerk sometimes and Harish and I became really good friends and so I would do it intentionally for him sometimes and he'd be like, mm. There are some universal signs though that tie back to those micro expressions. So let's look at this one right here. So which face would you say best describes a scenario where his child just died? Probably this one. He stepped on a smelly dead pig. He's about to get into a fight. Maybe that one. And then finally, his friends came by for a visit. So you can go to this website and this gentleman is actually a Bushman. He's probably the most isolated person in our world but these are emotions and facial expressions that we can all connect to and they're universal to everything. And so when you learn the different general patterns, you can apply these to whenever you're talking to people. So what? Why does all this matter? This weird thing called body language and why does it matter to me as a professional designer? So one of the key takeaways I hope to leave you with is this is a necessary soft skill for designers and researchers. There's tons of conversations going on about how can designers impact design strategy? How can we get a seat at the table? Communication and being able to connect with someone is key to that goal. We can't all just sit behind the computer screen and design our pretty wireframes and comps and stuff like that. We have to get in front of people and make a connection with them. Context does matter. So I showed you a lot of different signals and patterns that can exist but if someone has their arms crossed, they might not be defensive, they might just be cold. Myself, I have lower back pain and this is a comfortable position for me to stand in sometimes and so I have to think about that though. So I purposely will now put my arms down because I don't want that other person to think that I'm closed off. So your body language is just as important as the other person that you're talking to. This was taught to me in a really hard way when I was a fresh researcher. You're doing some contextual interviews in people's homes. Our seating arrangements were always kind of awkward. In one, it was a really worn down futon bed with a metal bar which was just very uncomfortable and I had this stretch because I was in pain and my lead on the project said you have to stop doing that. You're telling people bad things whenever you're doing that. I'm like, but I'm in pain, I need to stretch. She goes, just suck it up, you'll be okay. But it did teach me an important lesson about what I'm doing, even if I am in pain, can potentially impact the situation that we're in trying to research and collect information from people. How do you practice this though? How do you put this into your everyday work? Watch yourself as uncomfortable as it might be. Set up a camera of you talking to your loved one or your friends and then go back and watch it. It's gonna be rough. But you'll learn a lot of very interesting things that you're like, oh, I do that? For me, this is watching my son. My son does all the things that I do and it infuriates me. I'm like, how do people put up with me? But I'm now learning that the hard way in trying to be better. You can watch others as designers, especially like researchers, we're notorious for people watching. I, airports are my favorite place just to sit and watch people. But what's nice though is turn that into an exercise. Try to figure out what's going on when two people are talking to each other. You know, is it a good conversation? Is it a bad conversation? Is someone imparting some bad news to the other and what are the signals that might be telling you that? You can also mimic. One of my favorite classes from college was ethics, specifically like soccer teams and Play-Doh. And that established this thing called virtue ethics. And one of the tenets of virtue ethics is if you pretend to be something long enough, you will be that thing. So if you wanna be a good person, act like a good person, fake it, just fake it. But eventually you will turn into a good person because you start exercising these muscles. Everyone's heard the saying, if you're feeling down about yourself, smile, you will feel better. Majority of the time, this is true because your brain and your body wanna be in sync. So if you force your body to be positive and happy, your brain will kind of chudgingly follow along. But if you wanna learn more about how to read these different signals, you know, fake them out, pretend to be them so that you can get better at recognizing them. And then also, it's a lot of reading too. There's a lot of good literature out there of which these are some of my favorite books that kinda teach you these things. And these are the people that teach the, and in the States, like the FBI and the CIA, how to read body language whenever they're trying to go out and in the field and stuff. They have a lot of good exercises for you to do and for you to kinda put into place. This is the one that tells you to record yourself and just watch it and then find the things that you wanna change about that and then put that into motion. But if I had to say one more thing, I wanna go back to the mimicking and just start acting. If you really wanna get better at this, if you really wanna get better at communicating with your colleagues, your clients, and your coworkers, just start acting these different things out, learn what the different things are, and then try to put them in practice. One thing that you'll learn pretty quickly is it's actually really easy to see once you install those filters into your brain and then you're ruined for life because then you're only seeing it. So I'm sorry for that, but it will make you a better person. So thank you once more. I'm Brad Nunley, I'm a UX designer. I wrote a thing, I'm writing a thing, and thank you. Thank you.