 Today we're going to have Katherine Robson speak about how to handle a usability PR crisis. I'm very excited about this. Thank you, Beverly. Hi, everybody. I'm Katherine Robson. I'm going to share my slides, and we're going to hope that works well. Really just do an entire screen share. Okay. Can we just confirm that we see the slides? Beverly? Yes, we can see you. Okay. Thank you. All right. So today we're going to be talking about how to handle a usability PR crisis. I have oriented this talk in a way that is speaking to sort of a UX leader or UX designer, but I think it can apply to anybody that's handling one of these situations. So if you just kind of take a kind of UX person out of that and think of it from a lead developer's perspective or anybody else that is trying to handle this situation, I think it can apply well across the board. My name is Katherine Robson. I am a user experience design manager at Red Hat. I have over 15 years of experience in user experience design. I started as a designer, became a lead, and have managed teams for quite a while now. Right now, I'm managing a team of 33 designers, developers, and researchers on developer experiences for Red Hat. So really enjoy that job and that position. And I've had the opportunity to have a lot of great projects, but I've also had the opportunity to deal with a type of PR crisis during my time. And so we'll talk about that as part of this discussion. Alright, so first of all, what is a usability PR crisis? Let's define what this looks like. There are many different types of crises that can happen. I think probably what most people go to immediately is like the full meltdown, which nobody wants to be in the full meltdown emergency PR crisis situation. And you know, one that comes to mind is Facebook privacy. You know, this obviously was very much in the public eye. It was a huge PR crisis. There's a lot of attention on Facebook overall about how they were handling this and how they needed to improve users' ability to control their own data and their own privacy. So this is sort of a worst case scenario of a PR crisis. And hopefully nobody ever has to go through one of these. I can't imagine the pressure that is involved if you're going through one of these. But there are a lot of other PR crises that might be a little bit more subtle that occur regularly. So one of them is a social media emergency. This one could be that you have a user that is talking about your product or service, and they're talking about a negative experience with that product or service. And if this gets a lot of attention, a lot of likes, that can be pretty damaging to your brand. The other thing that can happen is with social media influencers, you know, if you have an influencer that is talking negatively about your brand, that can really be quite damaging pretty quickly. Another type of PR crisis that can happen is a bad release crisis. And Target had one of these a few years ago. They released a new version of their website right before the primary shopping season of the year. And they also did it right as they were launching a new brand onto the Target platform. And so there were a lot of eyes on their experience at that point in time. And they put out a new release with a new look and feel that wasn't stable. And so users immediately were having negative reactions because they couldn't get anything done. They were failing their tasks and they were posting about it. So you don't, you know, this is a kind of the release caused this is what happened. And then another release mistake that I've seen happen pretty often is that teams get excited about, you know, taking their, their product or service from what it's running on today and adopting modern technology moving it forward into the future. But as part of doing that, you're, you're taking a legacy system with a lot of different capabilities. And often you can't release it again on a new technology with all the same capabilities. So you've kind of brought down the amount of capability that your product has and you're, you're expecting to expand that back to what it used to be over time. The problem here can be that in that first MVP release, you didn't actually meet the primary use cases that your users really needed. And so they're now not really happy with the end result because you are not meeting their core needs in the offering that you gave them, even though it's now on better and newer technology. And last but not least, the internal emergency. I would say this is the most common kind of crisis that I have experienced as a user experience professional. And you know, this, this happens more often than I like to say, and it has happened at Red Hat. It's happened at other companies that I've worked at. And thankfully it's internal. So you're not in the public eye dealing with this. It's just, you know, kind of internally, there's a little bit of chaos maybe and you're trying to like get things moving faster because there's a lot of attention on it. So this, what does this look like? Usually this looks like a CEO or other high level executive tries to use your product. Something isn't working the way they expect. And they kind of raised that red flag across the company and say, Hey, I just tried this, what's happening? Why is this not working? And this happened at Red Hat. We had several different products that should have worked together quite seamlessly. Unfortunately, they were not working together as seamlessly as they should have because of some architectural differences that were underlying them. And because of that, you know, our executive tried them, couldn't get them working together, and came back to, you know, us as a company engineering team and UX team and said, what's going on? Like this is not working and this is not what we should be sending out to our customers. So this is probably the best kind of crisis because it's generated internally. It's going to make a difference, but you don't have to worry about what's going on outside of the company at the same time. So the next thing I'm going to move on to is talking about how do you actually handle this usability crisis. But before I move on, I'll take a break here to see if there's any questions about the types of crises that I talked about. We don't have any questions so far. All right. Okay. So you're here. There's usability crisis. What do you do? The first thing you should do is to reframe. As usability professionals, often we are already identifying a lot of the problems in the product usability and product releases that we are working on. So we might have, you know, a list of situations where we feel like, hey, you know, we already knew that this wasn't stable. We already knew that this user journey was a little risky or not ideal. We already knew that the design was a little disjoint between one system to another. So we might have a list of things that we feel like we have maybe already raised the flag about to the company. We've already tried to speak our two cents about and say that we weren't comfortable with as part of a release. And so it's very easy at this point in time to go into victim mode and to feel like, you know, I told you so. I told you so. We knew there was problems and now here we are. But that's not the right place to be. That's not where you want to be to handle this PR crisis. So as quickly as possible, you want to let the past go and move from being that victim to being a leader. This is your opportunity to really think about how does the user experience practice in your company advance and how can you show what your team can do right now in this crisis and what it can do in the future to prevent future ones. Once you've been able to change your own mindset and really understand that this is a great opportunity, you also need to pass that new mindset onto your team. You need to invigorate your team and make sure that they understand that this is a great opportunity for us to bring user experience practices into the company, really showcase what our teams can do and what design impact can have on product development when we're doing it the right way. At the same time, we are in a crisis. So it's going to be hard to work right now. So you need to prepare your team for the fact that we're going to go, you know, nose to the groundstone. We're really going to be working hard for a little bit of time here to get through this crisis. But on the other side of it, this is going to be a huge opportunity and open doors for us in a new way. So once you have your mindset and you've reframed your ability to look at the situation, you then want to move on to evaluating. As you evaluate, you really want to identify what the core issue is. It's so easy. Like I said, we all have this list of things in our mind. We might have a whole list of Jira's or whatever of abusability issues that we know about on the product. But we need to step away from all of that data that we have for a moment and really look at this from the PR crisis point of view. What was that user experiencing? What was their core issue? And how do we address that problem? And so identifying the core issue could look like a lot of different things. If your user, if you're looking from the user's viewpoint, it might be that you actually have the capability that they're complaining about or that they've raised as a problem. But they weren't able to find it. So you have a discoverability issue. It might be that it's not something that the UX team or the designers can fix alone. It might be that there's a performance issue or a stability issue with the product. And you need to assemble really a whole team of people with different expertise around the company to address what core issue is. The first thing is making sure you really know what is going to fix this PR crisis and what's at the core of what created this problem. Once you understand what that core piece is, then you can say, okay, how do I take this company out of the immediate crisis they are in and move them into a better place as quickly as possible? You need to recognize that executives, especially in an external PR crisis, executives, product donors, they're having a big spotlight shown on them right now. And it's not a pleasant one. And so you want to be their ally and get them out of that spotlight as quickly as possible. But also recognize that this is your opportunity to really stand up for the right thing as far as user experience goes. So help them identify how they're going to get out of that spotlight as quickly as possible. And then how are you going to help them into the future continue to have great usability so they don't run into this problem again? And how are you going to do that? Well, we want to build a plan. The first part of your plan should be your immediate response plan. Like we're just talking about, there's a spotlight. And that spotlight is bright and not very pleasant. So your immediate response plan is all about how to get out of that spotlight and how to be able to have a very stable, reliable response to the current situation. You don't want a band-aid response because the worst possible thing that you could do at this point in time is band-aid the problem and it comes back a week later. That is going to be worse on your brand than if it takes you a little bit longer to get a fix done. But you fix it the right way. So you really want to say what is the medium viable product of what we need to do to have an immediate response plan that fixes the core problem in the right way for moving forward. But fixing the core problem might mean that you're fixing just one piece of a larger puzzle. And so you also want to recognize that once we get out of that spotlight and we fix that one little piece, all of these other problems potentially that are kind of around the parameter of this PR crisis that could lead to your next one. And so you want to build a roadmap that's going to allow you to make sure that you start fixing all of those other areas so that we don't fall into the situation again. The last thing you're going to want to do is to communicate very clearly during this process. The first question is should we release anything publicly? And answering this question is not simple and it's situational. So it's going to really depend on exactly what's happening for you. My best advice is to involve your marketing and PR teams because they're experts at this domain. So involve them, have the conversation, think through thoroughly what is happening and whether it's something that you can address publicly in the right way or if making a public statement is just going to add fuel to the fire, there might be still be doubt in the company or doubt in the brand and that's just going to create more negative attention and kind of like draw out the negative attention cycle. So we don't want to do that if that's the path that your team is thinking it's going to go. Alternatively, if you have something that you can really definitively say you're going to do in response to this PR crisis and you can show good merit on the way to that path already, then it might be viable to release something publicly to talk about what you're doing, what you've already done, what you're going to do and what's your full plan in the future and really put users' minds at ease that you're listening to them and that you're taking real action from the situation. Regardless of whether you release something publicly, an internal communication plan is going to be key. Talking internally, you're going to want to capture a couple of different internal stakeholders. The first set of stakeholders, if you are in an external PR crisis, are people that do have connection external from the company. So they are speaking with customers, they're speaking, you know, maybe on social media or other platforms, they have external communication paths. You want to make sure that they all have a common message and they all know how to address the problem because especially in a public PR crisis, other people are going to be asking questions about it. So you need to have a consistent internal response plan in place so that everybody has the same messaging to use when they're meeting with customers or in these situations. The second group of people is your stakeholders who are in the spotlight, your executives, your leaders, your product owners, anybody else that is responsible at the end of the day for the product, the company, the brand, the platform. This set of stakeholders, you want to make sure that you are communicating very clearly with them what that immediate response plan is that you're putting into place and then what that roadmap is that's going to help in the long run. This is the absolute best time to make big UX requests. It doesn't initially feel like that because you feel like I just have to address their immediate problem. We'll worry about how to fix the fact that we had these UX mistakes in the product process later once we're out of the situation. But the reality is right now they are feeling the pain of the decisions that were made in those product development processes up to this point and it's fresh. It's something that they're thinking about. So this is the best time to make those big asks about how to change UX processes, UX resourcing, future UX planning, et cetera. And you don't need all the answers to that but you need to make it clear that you have that roadmap and you have expectations around what you need in order to make this better in the future. And then the last group that you want to make sure you're communicating internally to is the teams that are going to help you execute on this immediate response plan and also the roadmap overall. Everybody should understand how their role fits into this roadmap and what they can do to support the current problem. So we want to make sure that we bring all the teams together that are going to be part of that immediate response plan and communicate what they should be doing and how they should be executing and what their deadlines are to meet that plan. And then we should be also giving them a glimpse into the roadmap and an idea of where we're headed in the future so that they understand the longer-term plan and how to proceed in the future to make sure that we are executing in a new way and building out all of those extra pieces we talked about that might need to be fixed around that core problem. Once the PR crisis is over, you've gotten out of it, everybody's out of the spotlight, people are breathing a big sigh of relief, we've made it. You're not done. You now have that continued execution on that roadmap and you have the opportunity now to continue a line of communication with those high-level stakeholders that you might not have talked to you on a regular basis before. And this is, I think, one of the biggest opportunities that these PR crises bring for UX professionals. Often it can be hard for UX professionals to make inroads and having time with executives and making sure that their point of view in the product development process is heard. And this is a door opening for you. This is an opportunity to say, hey, we're here. We're here to support this crisis. We're doing everything we can to make sure that we get you out of the spotlight. But we want to continue the conversation long term. We want to talk about how UX can play a big part of your future in a new way so that we don't do this again. And so as you execute on that roadmap, you want to make sure that you're setting up milestones where you can come back to those executives, show progress, and continue the conversation about how UX improvement happens at your company. So in summary, if you're in a usability emergency, you should reframe. You want to change that mindset as quickly as possible from victim to leader and bring your team with you. Then you want to move on to evaluate and understand that core problem, really know how you're going to get those stakeholders out of that spotlight as quickly as possible. What is the thing that's going to really make that happen? And how are we going to do it in a way that ensures it's done right and the same problem won't occur again and cause damage to your brand? Then we're going to build that immediate response plan and start executing as quickly as possible on that plan to get those stakeholders out of that spotlight. And also make sure that we're building that full roadmap so that we're not just, you know, responding to this situation, but we're building a better platform for our future. And last but not least, we're going to communicate about all of these pieces as much as possible. We might choose to communicate externally, we might not depending on the situation, but we're definitely going to communicate internally and make sure that we continue that communication with our internal stakeholders over time after this crisis ends. And that's what I had to share today. So thank you for your time. And I'm happy to take any questions. I'm going to stop sharing the slide deck so that I can actually see the other tool here. All right, let's see. Sally, so refreshing to see the outdoors. Yes, I'm in a beautiful spot here looking over a lake and can be happier. And Radick, how often do you deal with a big crisis? You know, Facebook's scale full meltdown I have never dealt with. And I hope in my career I never have to deal with that. Like I said, I can't even imagine the amount of pressure that that would put on a person on a team. That's really tough. So I don't think we have those like full meltdown crises often, but they happen, obviously. I think what's more common is, like I said, definitely the internal crisis. And those can be rather big depending on the company and the culture and how that comes down. Here at Red Hat, I think we have a very positive good culture. So the crisis we went through was not targeted at a person or a team. It was much more of a, whoa, we got to this place. This isn't great. Let's fix it. Let's put some focus on this and build a plan and see if we can really fix it. And that's, I think, the best case scenario where everybody's coming at the problem as a combined effort and really trying to solve it together and recognizing that we're in a place, this isn't the greatest, but we found it. We found our issues. Let's fix them. Social media problems are becoming more and more common. And so I think we do see those. Those can, again, depending on the culture, the company culture, I think those can arrange from glitches or actually just opportunities to reach out to users and build a relationship and then those fences. And it's not a big crisis at all, too serious crisis because there's no real way of handling it in the company. And there's no good communication mechanisms to address users' problems at the small scale before they turn into big-scale problems. I hope that answers that question. If I went around your question, feel free to ask it a new way and I'll try again. And how do you best communicate when you truly can't give a good answer with the information you presently have? Beverly, do you mean communicate externally to users? Okay. Yeah, so this gets back to that, like, when do we speak externally? And how do we speak externally? The tone can mean a lot as well. And recognizing what your brand value and stances already can make a big influence on this as well. So Facebook is an easy example, so I'm going to take them for a minute. Let's say Facebook had a privacy crisis. They then post to their users on feeds, hey, we're going to make some updates to our privacy. We've heard you. Well, unfortunately, some people might take that in a positive light and some people might really not take that in a very positive light because the brand reputation for protecting my data has already been so destroyed at that point that it just sounds like lip service. And so, without telling me something real about how you're going to change my privacy settings, I don't feel like I trust anything that you're telling me in the first place. So I think that really gets into, like, understanding when to communicate to your users. Do you need to just take the heat for a little while and go get some stuff done while that heat comes in, and then come back when you have something to show for it and you really have information on the real answers? Or should you, you know, do you have a brand reputation that's good enough that you can respond to that user without any real kind of data or good information behind it and just say, hey, we've heard you, we're so sorry this happened to you. We're going to, we're looking at it right now and we'll come back soon with some answers. And so that's really going to depend on, on your brand reputation. And Rod, do you help with communication for the big security issues? Meltdown, help bleed, et cetera. I guess the way we talk about Red Hat customers about this is important and we need some consistency in the messaging. That's a great question. No, I have not, the UX team has not been involved in security issues and the PR communication for those. I would absolutely be interested in talking with the, the marketing and PR teams about how that is handled and how we talk about those. So I actually might follow up after this, this talk and see if I can find the right context to have that conversation because I think that would be a really interesting use case of, yeah, we had a security issue at the end of the day. That is, you know, security is part of your experience with our products. How do we handle those and how do we make sure that users are getting what they need? I think the good news is that open source and Red Hat, you know, in general is well known for being very open and transparent with these security issues. And so, like I was just talking about brand reputation, Red Hat has built a brand reputation where we can go out and talk about these very openly and honestly and transparently and give users tools as quickly as possible to do something about those security issues. And we make it through those crisis crises pretty smoothly because of how we handle those situations. So I think that's actually a really great example of company reputation tied into crises and how we handle them. All right. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you everybody for coming to my session. Really enjoyed putting together the information for this. If you want to reach out to me anytime afterwards, feel free to. My contact information is crobsonatredhat.com. Thanks, Catherine.