 I'd like to start with a little story. It's a personal story, so just bear with me for a few moments here, about 10 minutes. I will make a point that is relevant to us. I promise you. So allow me to digress before I begin. They say that it's good practice when you're doing interviews with people. They say it's good practice to ask them about themselves, get them comfortable. Start to build a rapport with them. That's good advice. I give that advice. I take that advice. But I wasn't ready for the answer that I got back in this particular interview. Even though I knew who my interview partner was, I was shocked and stunned when in a deep, low, scratchy voice, my interview partner began to tell me how he was the leader of a white supremacy group and how he practiced hate. And hurt people who were different from him. And when I heard those words, again, I knew who I was talking to. I kind of froze. I had my interview script in front of me. Think, Jim, think, Jim. My heart was pounding a little bit. And I don't think my fear wasn't unjust, unfounded, because this is who I was talking to. This is him about 25 or 30 years ago, Arno McAless. And he began to tell me how he was in a death metal band, a white power band, and he sung about hate and preached hate and incited violence through his music. Tall, lean, powerful. He had long arms that he used to hurt people. This is how my conversation began with him. I calmed down a little bit and I moved on to my next questions. And I started to become at ease because Arno then began to tell me about how he changed, how he moved from a life of hate to a life of inclusion and practicing peace. And there were many factors that went into his transformation, not the least of which was the birth of his daughter, because he realized that if he continued down the path that he was going on, a violent path, that he would either end up in jail or dead, which is what he saw his friends happening to his friends. There were lots of other little moments as well too. It wasn't just one event that got him out of the movement, as they say. There were lots of other little events. For instance, he had a swastika tattooed on his middle finger. You have to ask yourself, what kind of asshole tattooed his swastika on the middle finger intentionally designed to evoke the most reaction from the person across from him. But he went into McDonald's and the woman at the McDonald's counter saw the tattoo and she was a woman of color and she reached out to him and said, that's not who you really are. You're better than that, seeing his tattoo. And in that moment, she actually robbed him of his hate of her. He couldn't hate her anymore. But that stuck in his mind. Lots of little events like that stuck in his mind. So sometimes those small moments matter. And I think as UX designers, we know that. Small moments matter. You guys should fight for those small moments because they can have a big impact. He recounts his transition, from violent extremism to peace. In his book, My Life After Hate. And our conversation then lightened up a little bit when he started talking about all the good work that he's trying to do now in kind of the second half of his life. His life after hate. So now he actually helps people in hate groups get out of hate groups. People in violent extreme groups get out of violent extreme groups of all kinds. In the United States, we have the Ku Klux Klan, for instance. This is a picture of him embracing someone who wants to try to get out of the Ku Klux Klan. You'll notice his tattoo is removed as well too. So now he uses his long arms to take a lot of selfies. He likes to take a lot of selfies, but not just of him, of the teams and the school kids and the groups that he goes around and talks to to keep them from going down a path that he went down. To help people avoid the mistake that he made. People of all color, races, religions. A lot of selfies. And he likes ice cream too. So he's older and wiser and fatter. But if you go to his Facebook page, this is his thing to take. Get the ice cream and take the selfie with the ice cream, right? So here we are. He came out and visited me in New York and we went to Big Gay Ice Cream. Anybody know Big Gay in New York City? Right, white supremacists don't go to a shop called Big Gay. First of all, there we are. And they also don't go to Korean food places. Oh, I'm sorry. Is anybody in an extremist group? Is anybody in a hate group here? I don't wanna offend you. But just know this, they're missing out on a lot of good food, right? Because they're not gonna go to those ethnic food. He loves ramen now. Ramen is a big thing. Slurping down ramen, right? So you're gonna miss out on a lot of good food if you get on this path. So, you know, Arner starts telling me, I'm interviewing him about his life of change. He founded a group or co-founded a group called Serve to Unite that is explicitly set up to fight racism. And they're doing it in the very, very front end. They're working with kids to give them opportunities to not be on the street, give them opportunities that keeps them away from other groups trying to attract them in there as well, too. So he helps people who are in get out. He tries to prevent kids from getting in. And he goes around the world speaking against hate. He partnered with Pardip Kaleika, the gentleman there on the left, whom I also know now, too. And it's an interesting story. This is kind of an aside to my digression here, but Pardip has a really interesting story as well, too. On that date, in America, there was a shooting. A guy named Wade Michael Page went into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and shot six people as they were praying. I don't know if anybody remembers this, like perhaps my American friends do, but it was a heinous and a violent crime, right? So Pardip and his family were trying to make sense of this violent crime that happened to them. And he reached out to Arno to understand what was going through this person's mind. So Arno has some really interesting insight that can help other people. And he wants to leverage that insight that he has to do good in the world. I just wanna play a quick video clip. I'm gonna cut this off kind of in the middle there, too. But I want you to hear them in their own voices, tell the story of how the two of them came together, how Arno, a former white supremacist, is now a business partner with someone who practices the Sikh faith, who lost his father in a shooting by a white supremacist. We're gonna go to the video and we know it works. We're back with former white power leader Arno McHales. Back in 2012, a member of the group Arno started opened fire in a Milwaukee Sikh temple, the video you just saw, killing six people before turning the gun on himself. One of those killed was the father of Pardip Khalika, who joins us now. Welcome. You reached out to Arno shortly after the tragedy. Why do that? Just to understand the why. It was, you know, we understood the how, until you make meaning of the how, you know, we can't do anything about it. And a lot of it was, you know, in the aftermath of it, we were sort of going through our own grieving process, but this was kind of different. It was on national TV. It was one of the worst race-based hate incidents that had happened in 50 years since the Birmingham bombing. And, you know, we really thought at the time, we're like, okay, let's do our best to put on a brave face for the world. But we really need to understand the why, and that's why I reached out to Arno. Arno, now you say that Ardeep's father's killer was a mirror image of you. You said that before in the first segment. And I'm just wondering, do you have feelings of guilt? Do you feel like you're responsible in some way? Because the person was like you? Absolutely, I feel like I helped to create the environment that that came from. And in that sense, I certainly have responsibility for what he ended up doing. It could be argued that had I never existed, you know, things still may have unfolded, but the fact that I was party to that, and that I did help organize that group and put that narrative out into the world through the music of my band, it would be ignorant of me, I think, to not feel responsibility. So from inside, help us understand the possibility of forgiveness. Forgiveness is definitely not about forgetting, because we definitely have not forgotten. Forgiveness is not simply about just getting over something, but forgiveness is trying to make a mission out of it. And when it is your pain, you can draw strength from it. What is it like between you now? What does the relationship look like? Well, originally when I told people that I was going to meet a former white supremacist out for dinner and talk to him, everybody was like, you've lost your mind. You must be going through something. Are you okay? Are you? So I'm like, man, am I okay? What are you? And I'm gonna cut it there short, that interview goes on. I just wanted to hear a little bit, in their own words, Arno's voice and Parteeb's voice. It's an absolutely fascinating journey and a story how the two of them came together. They wrote a book together called Gift of Our Wounds, Gift of Our Wounds, where they recount this. They tell their individual stories that then eventually come together into this horrific shooting, but then what happens afterwards and how they've now teamed up to try to prevent this from happening through their organization called Serve to Unite. So this was a journey, this was an experience that I was trying to understand from Arno, his life after he got out of the hate group that he helped found and how he then interacted with other people around him and what the possibilities are, then the potential possibilities are. And it has to do with the book that I wrote. So why am I talking to Arno and why do I know this? I wrote a book in 2016 called Mapping Experiences. And because of this title actually, if you wanna get right down to it, I was discovered by an NGO in Abu Dhabi, an NGO that works in countering violent extremism. And I got contacted through the wonders of SEO because my stakeholder was looking for somebody to map the experience of former violent extremists. I don't know when or how or who whispered into Talal's ear, my stakeholder on the left, but he had this idea that if he wanted to understand former violent extremists, he should map their experience and he found me. So I get this email in my inbox that I think is spam, right? Hey, come to Abu Dhabi, send $10 to Nigeria, whatever was one of those things, right? But I checked it out, it was legit. Hidayah is the name of the organization. Again, it's an NGO and they're involved in countering violent extremism or CVE for short. That's different than counterterrorism. Counterterrorism is guys with guns fighting guys with guns. This is more on the message side. It's sometimes people call it the softer side. They're trying to get people out. They're trying to prevent people from going in with counter-messaging, right? Violent extremist groups, and by that, I'm not just talking about white supremacy. It could also be Al Qaeda or ISIS or FARC or any of the extremist groups that are out there. They're really good at recruiting. They can smell opportunity in somebody if they're young and dejected or have a lost sense of purpose. And they'll go up to them with a perfect message, hey, come join our group. We'll give you a purpose again, right? So countering violent extremism is trying to counter some of those dynamics as well, too. And it turns out that former violent extremists, former violent extremists called formers for short have some interesting perspectives, right? Because they have gotten out and they can hear dog whistles, right? So I was invited to conduct a workshop in Abu Dhabi with Arno on the left and six other former violent extremists called formers for short. And I was supposed to be conducting a mapping workshop with this group of people. Angelo is also a white supremist group. Mubin was in Al Qaeda online for a while. Angela was a gang member in Chicago. So various groups represented there. And I'm supposed to come up with some exercise and some deliverable that sums up their experience. We wanted to know their experience after they got out. We wanted to know what happens after they got out. There's a lot been written about radicalization. How do people get into violent extremist groups? How do people get out of them, right? A lot been written there as well, too. We were actually looking at how do they then integrate into society, but in particular, why do some people decide to get involved and other people don't? Because as I said, they have a very interesting perspective. So there was an incident not too long ago in the US if you might not have heard about it where a white supremist drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, North Carolina and killed somebody, right? If you wanna understand what was going through that person's mind or the potentially going through that driver's mind, you call up somebody like Arnaud. Here he is on the news, right? They have very, very, very valuable insight. If you wanna know about the gangs in Chicago, call up Angela because she was involved in the gangs of Chicago for decades, right? She knows from the inside out what's going on there. If you wanna know about Al-Qaeda, right? You can call up Mubin Sheikh. In fact, that's what the UN Security Council did, right? So this is very valuable information that they have, right? He's advising the UN Security Council. And there he is right next to the United Kingdom. I love the labels there, Mubin. They drink a lot of water at the UN apparently too. Everybody's got a whole picture for themselves. So the idea was if we can understand why people like Mubin and why people like Angela and why people like Arnaud decide to get involved and speak out and help fight the cause that they sometimes created, right? This is a valuable insight for groups like Hedaya who are in CVE, who are encountering violent extremism. So they wanted to learn how do we track more of these people? Because by the way, a lot of people who get de-radicalized and then get out of the movement, they don't wanna talk about it again. They go into hiding, they might change their name, that kind of thing. But we wanted to understand why some people feel obligated, compelled to do something against what they had done previously. So I flew to Abu Dhabi. I flew to Abu Dhabi and I conducted a workshop, right? And you can see in the back of the wall there, it looks a lot like our workshops, right? They also drink a lot of water in Abu Dhabi. But that's okay, it's a desert. I got to the room and I think they were planning for a UN Security Council meeting because I had this U-formed room. I don't know if anybody facilitates workshops. The U-formed room is like the worst, right? The first thing I wanted to do was move the tables and they wouldn't let me move the tables. But I told them, I said, we're not gonna be sitting down taking notes. We're gonna be up on our feet, we're gonna be talking to each other, we're gonna be engaged in activities, activities that you all know. Activities that I learned from going to conferences like this that I put down in my book. So there's one of the breakout group walls that we were working on. Came up with this journey based on a little bit of research at the top, an experience that I was, it was a hypothesis. And then we started workshopping that. Using the formers in the room as a little bit of a research, what we were doing, thinking, feeling at each one of these steps. What we were doing, thinking, feeling. There were also nine other people in the room from different groups, from other NGOs, from government agencies that wanted this insight as well too. So we had 16 people in the room, plus a couple of stakeholders from the organization, and we were using techniques in my book to facilitate a broader conversation about this very, very complex emotional topic. And it worked, I didn't know if it was gonna work. I was scared shitless the whole flight over to Abu Dhabi. What do I know about countering violent extremism? Nothing. That's not why they called me up though. They called me up because I can facilitate a conversation. They called me up because I know how to map an experience. So to some degree I had to have a little bit of faith in myself, a little bit of faith in what we do to get us through that. We also did some other exercises. It wasn't just the mapping, from the mapping, then it says how might we here in the background, I don't know if you can tell, might we, right? So now we're into, okay, we identified the problem points. Now what are we gonna do about it? How can we come up with solutions about this, right? Together. Let me just show you a little bit backstage. I just wanna switch gears a little bit here. I actually have my worksheet because I wanna kind of address the question a little bit. That's not gonna show up, is it? Oh, it's over here. I don't know if this'll work. But I wanted to address the question, you know, what special preparation, what special preparation did I do? And the answer is to some degree I didn't do anything special, right? I basically used what you guys all know and what we do all the time, oh, that's not gonna work, sorry. I should have done this in rehearsal. Let me get this off of there. I'll just talk through that. That was just a cue to me to go switch over. I wanted to show you a little bit of backstage. We can do that in a break if anybody wants to see how I approached this. But guess what I did? I did a little bit of research in the topic, just so I knew who I was talking about. Then I did a stakeholder map. I don't know anything about violin extremism formers, but I did a stakeholder map. And then I started to create a journey map as well too, an experience map, I was calling it. But I was mapping the wrong experience because I was talking to my stakeholder and he didn't really know what he was asking from me. He just said, hey, mapping experiences, you, that guy, stuff, come. That was about the brief that I got. But you guys ever get a bad brief before? Never, right? Is that why you're laughing? So I had a bad brief. It was actually so bad that it was actually a blessing because I was able to then steer the brief a little bit because he kept saying, what should I be asking you, Jim? And I said, you should be asking me this. So he trusted me a little bit, which was great. But I started mapping radicalization, de-radicalization, integration. I started mapping the whole violin extremist journey that got overwhelmed really, really quickly. And I called up my stakeholder and I said, you don't want me to talk about all of this, do you? And he said, no, no, no. We just want to talk about the aftermath. What happens afterwards? In particular, why do some people get involved and other people don't? So I scoped my project wrong, right? So I write in my book, scope your project right. I did it wrong. So we make mistakes too here up on the stage. It's not all good. So I just wanted to show you a little bit of that backstage and how I put this together, but I didn't do anything different than what you guys already know. I threw design and UX and mapping experiences. I threw it at that problem and I was hoping that it would stick and it did. So here's a group of people standing up. Yeah, it was interesting because my stakeholder said, oh, don't take too many pictures during it. The formers might be a little sensitive to have their picture taken. Yeah. Right. Not quite. You know, this went up on Facebook, right? That's Arno Selfie again. Arno's doing the Selfie there. That was the group of formers. But we got together for three and a half days or two and a half days, three days, something like that. And we, again, used the tools of our trade to help them solve their problem. I'm way out of my comfort zone here on this, right? And I was nervous until I started talking. Soon as I started talking, I saw people nodding. I said, oh, this might work. And then we got into a couple of the activities and I said, oh, I actually think this is gonna work. So for the most part, it did as well too. And some people even said it was one of the best workshops they've ever been to, right? Because they're used to going to UN meetings where everybody sits with a pad, a paper. They yield their time to the person across the table and stuff like that. But that's not what I did. So in retrospect, I'm thinking what got me through this, right? And I think it's a design sensibility, right? It's the experience that I've had and the knowledge that I've gained from coming to conferences like this. And the first one is about empathy. Not in the sense of feeling sorry for people or understanding their emotions, but rather putting yourself in their shoes. Just stopping and listening to them. Okay, you're a former violin extremist. As soon as your heart calms down after hearing that sentence, you wanna just understand that experience, right? So I think as designers, we have a unique skill to be able to do that, right? On a human level, that we understand human beings. And we're good at observing the world, observing the human condition. And I rested my approach to solving this particular challenge on the fact that I believe that I know how to observe human beings because I've been to conferences like this and I've done a lot of that in my work, right? And it doesn't matter if it's people trying to put stuff in a shopping cart for an e-commerce site or violin extremists, I know how to listen to people and empathize with them. So empathy, and I think Pamela is gonna be talking about empathy later on. But that was one of the, I think, sensibilities that helped me get through this. The other one is an ability to identify patterns. I actually have a degree in library and information science. So I'm a hyper-pattern guy. I like to categorize things, right? We find patterns, and that's what a lot of people who are in the software field, I guess most of you are kind of in software of some kind, right? We wanna scale pattern. Well, we wanna scale software. How do you scale software? Well, you have to find patterns, right? You're not gonna create a solution for everybody in the market. You wanna create a solution that scales. You do that by finding patterns. So designers are expert pattern recognition experts, right? We find patterns, and that's effectively what I was doing. And I was thrown different violent extremists from different groups and said map one experience across that. The map of the experience is essentially a map of patterns that I identified. And I didn't know if I was gonna find any. And if I didn't, then what then? But we did actually find a lot of patterns. There is well too. So as designers, we're great at observing the outside world and listening. And to some degree, that's all I was doing. I was directing traffic, listening to the conversations in the room. But I also had the sensibility from my design experience to say, oh, that's an insight that might be important for later. Let me take that out, put that over here for later. Somebody else would be talking, so let me put that next to it. Because I knew that I'd be able to find patterns from that, right? Not everybody can do that. But I think the third skill that we have, the skill type that we have, is being able to tell stories. If you think about how many people in your organization never get to meet a customer, never get to meet a user, it's your responsibility. Because you're lucky, you get to go out and talk to users and customers. But it's your responsibility to take that outside world to find the patterns that matter and then retell that story to people who don't have that benefit, right? So we listen to the outside world, we find patterns, create models that we can reflect on and talk about, and then bring those stories back into our organization so that people can act on those. And again, these were the underlying sensibilities that this is where I was going with this. And this is what got me through it. Yasmeen Green is a researcher with Google and they have a program called Jigsaw, which is looking at how can they use Google technology to fight counter violent extremism. She gave a TED talk and in her TED talk, like you listen to a TED talk and I said wait, that's the thing and then I went back five times to get this exact sentence out of it. If we wanna have a shot of building meaningful technology that's going to counter radicalization, we have to start with the human journey at its core. Right, and that's what my stakeholder was doing as well too. I've since been in contact with Yasmeen Green and I did a project with Jigsaw as well too. We did a design sprint working on this problem. We threw a design sprint at that and they loved it, right? So that's really good. Here's my deliverable. This is my deliverable, I created a map because that's what we were doing. Obviously, highly reduced. I found the patterns in the patterns in the patterns and I reduced the journey down to the experience down to a couple of key words. It's highly reductive. But if you get into a hate group into a violent extremist group and then get out, you're not feeling good about yourself because you just admitted you made the worst mistake that any human being can make. You hurt people on purpose and now you realize that is wrong. How can you live with yourself? You feel guilty, right? You feel depressed. You might even have suicidal tendencies. There's alcohol involved. There's hopelessness involved, lots of those things. But you're at a low point in your life. So how do they, how do people like Arno and Angela and Mubin, how do they discover that they could do something that they could help out? And in all, here's a pattern that we found. In all cases, somebody else suggested it to them, right? Because when you're depressed and feeling guilty, the last thing you wanna do is get up on stage or write a book or volunteer to help others, right? But that triggered something in all of them. Wait, maybe, just maybe, I can put more good back into the world than I did harm, which is different than forgiveness. They don't want your forgiveness. Don't feel sorry for any of them, right? But we can still understand them without feeling sorry for them. But they need to, they need to go on with their lives. They need to function somehow, right? And they saw getting involved, so the name of the map is a former's journey to involvement in CVE. They felt that getting involved might help them be able to function and live with themselves moving forward. But if you speak out, if you act and speak out, you're gonna get shot down. The press is gonna dig up your past. People are gonna be pointing to your friends and family and digging up their pasts as well, too. It's very, very difficult. So then you have to cope with that backlash and you might feel overwhelmed. And the story that I told in the beginning has a lot to do with Arno's journey. It mirrors this to a large part as well, too. But if you stay with it, you feel proud and then eventually atoned for yourself. Again, not forgiveness, but atoned. And now, Arno in part, somebody like Pardeep can reach out to Arno and he's able to provide that assistance that he and his family needed at the time. He's able to found a company with Pardeep called Serve to Unite to help other people stay out of that. So how do you get there? It was kind of this curve with some of these steps and actions. And then the lower half of this are some opportunities. So my stakeholder, Hedaya, they wanted to know what are the triggers? What are the leverage points that we can leverage? Well, formers aren't gonna think about this themselves. You need to proactively go out and recruit them, formers, that kind of thing. That's just an example. So then we had this summary and a discussion on this as well, too. But in a very short period, so visualizations are really, really powerful. We create a lot of models of the world. We observe the outside world and we create a persona. A persona is not a real person. It's a model of a person, but you can have very focused and facilitated conversations. I was able to kind of rip through an incredibly complex and emotional experience in about two and a half minutes for you to understand. So there's a compact and compelling understanding that things like mapping give to us. And that's super, super powerful. I think my stakeholder knew that and he wanted one of these things. The disappointing part of the story is that that all went into a report because we know what happens when you create a 10-page or a 20-page report and send it around. Do people read that? Maybe. In this case, it might not have been as bad as I kind of assumed because Hedaya is in the report writing business. That's what they do. They collect research and gather information, research it and then publish it. So to some degree, they're a publisher of this type of information. So our outcomes went back into a report. The map is in there as well too. But you can see here, they're talking about, they were looking at the seven stages, correlating them to what people were doing, thinking and feeling. There was so much of my language that was in this report. I thought that was a win on a small level. And by the way, that's a measure of success that I've always had in my job is that if your stakeholders are using your words, six months later, suddenly the product manager has your persona in their PowerPoint deck. Don't be offended. Even if they don't give you credit for it, don't be offended. You win. That's a measure of success when people started adopting your language. So we had a report. I kind of wanted some more. There are some of the concepts and things that came out of the talk that are kind of there in the background. We're also talking again to do some more mapping as well too. They want to start mapping more of the journey and do more of the sessions that we talked about. I'm speaking with Yasmin Green about doing design sprints and things like that as well too. Going the wrong way. So here's a message from Arno to you all. And you know, Steven was talking about humanity-centered design, love that, can I steal it? About going, thinking beyond our product experience, let's think about beyond it. And I think we have the sensibility to do that. Our tool set might be changing, but I think the sensibilities that we have are stable as well too. So I was speaking with Arno and he talks about, we were actually talking about, yeah, it's more than just optimizing conversion rates. Which is not a bad thing if anybody's on an optimization project right now. That's good for your business. But the skills that we have are so much bigger than that. And that's what I was talking to Arno about and he has a message for you guys. Hey, what's up everybody? I really respect the work you guys do. Not only am I a former white supremacist, I'm also a former IT consultant. So I feel your pain as you're dealing with end users and trying to make them happy. I had an amazing time working with Jim in Abu Dhabi at the Hadaia conference. The value that experience mapping brought to our efforts to, first of all, better understand formers. And once we understand them, draw them into counter-violin extremism efforts, really changed the way that I look at counter-violin extremism. And I think the point of cultivating empathy by mapping a user experience really takes it beyond just putting stuff in shopping carts and really elevates what you guys are doing to become an asset to build a more peaceful world. My personal mission statement is to bring about a society where all people are valued and included. And I think the work that you are all doing is a big important step in that direction. So thanks so much for doing that and thanks for listening to my guy, Jim. Thanks, Arnaud. So what are we talking about when we say the word experience? Does anybody have a good definition of the word experience? Right, UX, LX, people probably have experience in their job title, UX designer. What is an experience, right? From the outside, very often people think that UX is about making screens, right? And we heard some talks today that I don't know, it's beyond that too, right? But I would say it's about understanding humanity. It's about understanding the human condition, right? The experience, what we do and the sensibilities and skills that we have can understand, we're able to understand experience at a much broader and higher level. It's not just about pixels on a screen. One last photo here. This is from the workshop. Arnaud doing another selfie. And he posted this on Facebook and I thought, wow, that's actually just kind of amazing, kind of summed up my own personal experience as well too. The sticky note, the innocent sticky note, which is kind of a metaphor for our work, right? Individual thoughts that come together and create models and then eventually turn into products, right? Being used for peaceful purposes, for much larger purposes. So pieces waged with post-it notes. Thank you very much.