 Principles to calculate their strategies and you know calculate and evaluate their opponent's strategy so they're in a winning position so that they make decisions that you know can be leveraged for their benefit. So the thing with game traditional game theory is that it assumes that human beings are rational but are human beings rational? No right? We're emotional beings which gave way to behavioral game theory which basically all the research around behavioral game theory centers around or is based on the assumption that human beings are irrational beings and they make decisions based on BPC right? Beliefs preferences and constraints so it's like an additional thing that's evolved over time. So we're going to be talking about three different types of games here There are many many different types of games we play right? All these emotional decisions which Mario missed but I'm going to update him later about is cooperative equilibrium, ultimatum bargaining and how both of these we're going to tie both of these games into the design advocacy game which is an interesting example and Jeff will take you through that. Quicker is a bit buggy. Yeah yeah yeah I think you could stand there just in case. First game is a prisoner's dilemma right? So assume that you and your friend you want to rob a bank because for whatever reasons like for your tired of being a corporate slave and you want to go to Bali for the rest of your life and never come back like for whatever reasons you rob a bank you're successful you're making a run for it but today is not your lucky day because you get caught by the cops so now you find you and your friend in two separate rooms being interrogated by the cops. Now they have a fair idea that you're in it together but they have no way to like they don't have enough evidence what do they do they give you four options. Option number one you can either remain silent and get a year of jail which is great right but they also give you option number two which is if you remain silent and your friend confesses what happens is you get ten years you get ten years of jail and your friend goes caught free which you don't want and you would want to remain silent because that gives you the least amount of jail time but you don't know how your friend is gonna you know act and panic he might give you up right so the best case for you would be to confess right and so even if you look at this matrix this game matrix the best case scenario for the cops is also for you to confess for both of you to confess which is why they give you the exact same strategies to choose from right so the best case option for the cops and for you is to confess right so that's your Nash equilibrium which brings us to our first heuristic which is pure strategy so you have a game right now in this the last game you had two strategies but if you have n number of strategies but you you've decided that this one pure strategy is your best strategy because it's going to give you success the best chance for success if I take prisoner's dilemma as an example you you are getting jail time but not ten but one right it's the optimized optimized success that's pure strategy Nash equilibrium again there's no reason for me to deviate from my strategy because it's the best case scenario for me right so that's Nash equilibrium like even if you've considered your opponent's choices you know this is your best case or best chance for success now what if you if you've had like consider a game where you've you have more than two strategies like three strategies who's played rock-paper-scissors here in this like everyone amazing right so when you play this game what happens in your head is first you're like randomly picking choices like yeah rock rock rock paper rock whatever and your opponent immediately starts optimizing and checking for strategy oh rock rock rock so I'm gonna do like paper paper paper right so what we're doing here is like building a reputation with our strategies that's great right so we have the power to build a reputation with our strategies that's what happens this is an example of a zero-sum game my game is Jeff's laws that kind of explains the numbers here and it's a mixed strategy game you can keep mixing it up depending on the chance amount of times you get to play it so basically mixed strategies can be used in games where there are multiple rounds of play one the second thing to remember is that you have the opportunity to build a reputation which brings us to our second game reputation building so the second game we're gonna be talking about okay you are more loves you guys and want Jeff and me to give you a bunch of money but the conditions right so we get to keep a part of the money if we get a part of that to you guys so suppose if it's a one lakh pot we're giving you 20% right so if you accept it you get to keep 20 we get to keep the rest if you reject it none of us gets anything so how many of you here would accept that offer okay all right so that's interesting a lot of people would a few people would Jeff four of our audience here would accept it the rest would reject it so think about let's like dig deeper right not important I covered it in the so yeah so let's go a bit dig deeper into like who are the players here right now we're offering the money because we're getting something out of it right the people who rejected it rejected it because they thought they were being treated unfairly now Jeff's a greedy person he wants me out of the equation and he wants to keep the money so if Jeff the American is offering you the money would you take it I don't like greedy people I'm taking out of the equation me the Indian is offering you the money would you take the money like you see or what's happening in your head now right what if it's a page 3 personality like an like an arm whatever movie star or rich person would you take the money from them what if it's a governing body like yeah relief fund you know 20% out of the relief fund is gonna go to this flood to the flood victims would you think that that's enough that's a good enough compensation what if you know everything that you loved and treasured in your life like your people and everything got lost in that would you think 20s enough no you'd want more money right you'd think like 40 50 maybe 70 would be yeah okay I can I think it's okay 70s fair what if Jeff and I are in deep trouble and you can see it and then we are offering you this one you know lack pot I mean 20% whatever you immediately feel like you're in a position of power to negotiate so you see it depending on the opponents and depending on this situation you're constantly optimizing and changing your strategy there's a lot of interesting things to say about this catches up after the talk for that but what we really want to say with these scenarios in games is that you see sometimes where we see our self you know being generous sometimes we hold back so the thing with behavioral game theory studies of research is that they've discovered that people when the rules are set and the game is set and the strategy is set and everything is clear to us human beings predictably behave in a certain manner but when it's not set there they show demonstrate traits like altruism cooperation negative reciprocity right and of course all of these games give you the you know leverage to build a reputation all right so good how many remember ever seen the movie Age of Ultron and you look to Tony Stark and you know he's a playboy he's Iron Man everyone liked him and he started to build an ego and then ego caused him to create Ultron at the you know dissadvice of all his friends and colleagues and so he was you know and he kind of went ahead with that and one of the famous parts was his argument with Mark Ruffalo so for the point of this designers everyone in the room you guys are Tony Stark and I'm going to be Mark Ruffalo or David Banner so you know we as professionals you guys turned up at the conference that's great there's a lot of good talks workshops and you understand through your education and experimentation that we always focus on human certain design right and human design thinking doing the right kind of research and applying all these environmental and psychological dimensions the thing is though is that we build these designs we take them to our colleagues we take them into a boardroom we take them to customers clients and a lot of times it's not well received so many people have ever had a time we put a lot of heart and soul in the design and it was rejected for some reason yeah pretty much ever in the room so that's why the subject of this talk was to talk about ways that used designers can use game theory strategies to help mitigate that so often the problem is we end up like this right and so after our pitch or failed pitch so the problem is is that you know we're because we're just designers we went to school for design but we never went to school to do human and human interaction like we never went to school to be able to sell now maybe some of you you know have but how many of you ever like gotten either a street education or formal education and hustling and sales yeah and so the problem is because you're always talking about design because that's what you know best you become an easy target to ignore to non-designers because you're repetitive and the reason you're an easy target is it because of a couple things when you may or may not have a reputation and to you know it just could be circumstances out of your control so and the other thing the problem with this is that you'll always be explained in design because that's what we do right that's our discipline so we're gonna look at is like we're gonna look at other people's motivations and so the other people being you know the people you work with so how many of you do research or consider the customer and the user every time you do a design yeah everyone how many of you ever think about man what's the dev gonna have to do to implement this is he gonna have to work a 12 hour day a 16 hour days you're gonna lose it you never see his family again they're like oh where'd he go he disappeared so the point is is that these are the things that we're trying to get out of this for you today is to think about how you can look at other people's motivations because a lot of times we question are the rational because a lot of people in different organizations they may not act in the company's best interest right they're acting in their own best interest and you know it's human nature we're all like that as much as we try to be altruistic sometimes you know we go the route that best benefits us so the point to that I want you to take away from this part is that no one even though we're designers and we're good with customers and users we're not arbiters of logic no one is to other people's behaviors and emotions and the way they see the world so what we so what what we did to kind of formulate this talk is over the last year so we've been researching two things I went around to my company and a bunch of other organizations and asked developers and PMs in QA what they felt about designers and those answers were pretty astonishing it was a pretty picture the other thing we did is we started observing you know interactions of people in rooms so we even our own company like when someone in my team would pitch a design we would view the reactions of everyone in the room towards that you know those physical tells or personal tells and things like that and so I'm happy to talk more about the actual research points but you know the what we did here though is this is a like a five by five game that was some of the games that Lubna talked about and the top level assuming this is you know a non- designer entity in your organization these are five common themes we heard from people an observation or this telling us and then we'll look at the five or six strategies we as designers can use to overcome those so the first thing was you're easy to ignore and that's tough if you're always just talking about design the second thing is how many people have seen this one oh your design was great but we don't have the time and money to do this yeah how many think that's kind of BS it's like why'd you hire me in the first place right if you're not gonna make my design and the reason for some of this has to do with this one this is the most important one I want everyone to take out of here is that non-designers don't care about you don't care about you at all you don't change their lives at all you know they want their bonus their salary their social and professional standing so think of a PM PM might be a nice person but what do they care about they care about completing a sprint or some kind of other marker and whether your design was good or not doesn't change that outcome right or a developer developer may or may not care as well and so and this one's also pretty bad as well and how many of you have ever worked at a place for somebody said this well we don't care it's a business a business application or it's an airline they have to use our product we don't really need design it's not gonna change an outcome right because I imagine everyone here if you're not from Hyderabad flew here unless you're close I suppose but anyone like done fly and drove like four or ten hours you're awesome road trips sure and so this one is the other one that kicks us right so how many people have ever heard this one oh you know the designs yeah so this is my problem I work with a couple great people I really like personally but they always are constantly trying to design and now design me their devs to make it easier so here's some things we can do so how many of you ever tell your colleagues you know best because you're the the ux specialist good I'm glad nobody raised their hand oh all right that's good you go I like that Tony Stark okay so then this one what about exploring with questions and so the idea here is these are the your strategies that you can use and I'll explain the numbers briefly just assume zeroes no never gonna no chance and snowball in the desert to work and then obviously a higher the number means a more profitable chance and you know we can talk about the numbers a little more too but you want to build your reputation you want people to get to know you because what you know if people know you as a person and they know you more professionally you're a lot harder to ignore right you start to get credibility and so one of the best ways to start out doing that is explore quite with questions and these can be anything from social like how was your day and you know Nick talked about guessing his keynote about making connections and so that's what we're trying to say here is use questions both professionally and socially to start to get to know people and start to know what problems they face because then when you do your design you can explain the benefits of design to them not what the customer is going to get out of it or the user is going to get out of it but maybe it's something like hey here's something can help you solve your problem or hey I know your boss is giving you a hard time because you're you haven't solved this developer bugs or something maybe I can make a design that causes those bugs to go away so things like this you explain why your designs are important to the individual so you can get by and right and with that the way to do that is use their language you know we just designed as wave lingoes we have acronyms everyone has acronyms seems like acronyms are free but the more you talk to them in their language in a way they understand that language you can start to communicate better you know if then one of the quick example is if like me really love Marvel comics and you can make that connection even if you hate comic books which I would imagine anyone would and you know hopefully no one does but you can kind of start to relate to people right and the reason for this is you want to build a social reputation first so that people are comfortable with you and so they trust you because in that way when you start to do your professional like design pitches you're not an unknown quantity and managers and devs and QA and everyone else in the organization finance whoever marketing will take a risk on you and they'll be far easier for you to do those you know things and so when you do that though you can find champions and you can find a way to build a coalition and so for me I have two people I work with Ovi and Pallavi who are web developers and they believe in the designs we have a great reputation together and you know we're pretty social and the idea is that with that they can help me convince a dev manager so the idea is that once you do this you can really much remove this problem because if you have people you know instead it's just Jeff or Lubin explain design and you get Ovi or Pallavi or Joe Bob whatever to explain design you become much more credible because now if you have devs explain your design to other devs or QA you have a higher chance of implementing your vision into products and then that'll help the customers and the users right so with that let's just simplify the table a little bit and say we're gonna tell you don't ever tell me no best that never works and so when you look at these strategies and you think about the way things you do to try to sell your designs to an organization just always have that in the back of your head that their irrational motivation is going to be this and this never lines with the company's best interest or in orgs it's personal right because at the end of the day you're only working because you're taking a vacation from poverty right you don't want yes you don't care where you work I mean maybe you really like the organization you work for and that's great but most of us if a better more interesting project came along better salary we're not gonna be loyal to our organization right and again that's just human nature so with that what I want you to take away is that don't say it in a while don't be a Tony Stark you know because all you're gonna do is turn people off you know if you just evangelize and evangelize is very bad word and if you're just going to tell everyone that you know best that the customer comes first yeah people know that but they don't really care you know in your organization and so try to work of being more human and more we say human by design right and try to do that kind of stuff and just think about human-to-human interaction because you'll have a much better chance in selling your designs and advocating what you want to get out of the world and what you want to put into the world and you know and you'll have a stronger time combing dark patterns and ethics and all the things we talk about and people talk about in conferences or you know maybe in just cafes to make it a better place for designers so with that here's some books that we think are really good about strategy and how to interact with people especially irrational people self-motivated people there's a whole lot more most of these have to do with game theory you know and the reason we start out with these other two games that prisoners dilemma and reputation building was because prisoners dilemma is a real-life scenario that can be applied across many different ways it's not just getting stuffed up by the cops because you robbed a bank that off the Bali wasn't Bali sounds good and then the other thing of course reputation building you know as you start to do experiments and studies around that that you you know can do to see what the optimal what you have to get to give and compromise so thank you for that and any questions oh and anything else if you don't get a question answered here you go to that slack channel and ask a question there and we'll answer it thank you I usually feel that you know sometimes certain new concepts or whatever right it takes some time when you go back home and reflect on it and think about it your questions come maybe after a week a month or a year whatever right so at any point of time if you have any questions about this please be free to reach out to us slack channel LinkedIn and let's keep talking about this yeah no immediate questions from the audience it's a very good question so that's funny yeah sneak one in under the no because that'd be manipulation right but I like your idea you know the point of this is to get this everyone to think about this in your organization because these strategies aren't evil they're just ways to build human-to-human interaction and connections with your colleagues you know and if you all go out for beers or tea after work fine but you know there's a lot of times right we want to just work on ways that convince people of our design and so it's social if you let you fancy somebody and you want to ask him on a date you try to be funny try to be charming you know you try to do all these things and there was a really interesting Ted talk I was finished real quick called the Art of Seduction by now I forgot his name but it wasn't seduction about erotic seduction it was more like how to seduce each other in a sort of semi social professional way as people and just understand each other and talk to people so yeah thank you yeah and that's an interesting question right because you have to be the one who decides what you want to communicate to people and the takeaway is that try and work on your empathy try and understand everybody's you know issues or you know constraints right BPC what are they beliefs what are their preferences what are the constraints because when you help them it's mirror neurons you help them the person likes you that person helps you back more often than not because it's really difficult to abstract human behavior is extremely difficult the only you know that machines are you know taking most of your jobs the only way we can get an upper hand over that situation is you know that human side of things right machines cannot be human so be human like you've never been human in your life before because that is what is going to you know help bring connectedness in a remote world in another five ten years your work situations are going to change right you can see that the resources are being drained and you're not going to be having probably conferences in five-star hotels who knows right so we have to build on that connectedness and again think about it right in another five six years you're going to be working with people who've millennials or you know post millennials or whatever right so they're not going to be they're going to grow up in a world where they're not seeing the connectedness that we have seen just like how our parents haven't grown up in a world where they've seen technology like we have seen so try to project into the future and inform your decisions and your strategies currently right because that is a responsibility you know as a human which is what is wonderful about human-centered design because you know there's really no replacement that's that's all what we're saying so to answer your question build your relationship with people and build your instincts and you know learn how to evaluate it and learn how to critique it you know and I think a lot of speakers that I've met and a lot of workshops which I unfortunately unfortunately didn't get the opportunity to go and attend I think more or less is saying the same things you know don't it's good to be confident but really question like go back a few steps take a few moments to reflect so these are these are main takeaways right Jeff if you would like to add something at that it is and I'll keep breathing our thoughts too is you have to make sure that when you do this you're not you need to show us the benefit to them you know and if they're a non-designer and that's what we're really talking about what's the benefit to non-designer about anything it's whatever they're interested in so yes if you could share with design as I said you know like a you know QA bugs reduces bugs or maybe reduces a work time like if you can compromise the design it still beats you know it allows the user to do what they need to do and it saves the devs maybe 20 work hours during the week so they can go off and do whatever else yeah I mean that's that's kind of the idea to this is that we're trying to trying to not talk about design all the time we're trying to talk about other people all the time and you know it helps with the ego right if you talk yeah yeah and there's a bit about a bit of compromise also that you do when you do some when you're in a situation that as a designer you're you're you want ABCD you know everything to be implemented but then you have this conversation I have this I'm gonna be I'm gonna like let me bring like a personal experience to this whole you know a response so there was this one time that I wanted this design I spent a lot of time like researching and working with the SMEs the SMEs were not available so I had to do all the you know digging in so what happens is when we invest all that time in making this amazingly beautiful design you want everything implemented right you don't want to and you don't mind staying back that extra hour to make sure that but what happened is that there was this one dev and he was amazing at his work like he can code things like that but he'd always like you know stop he's practical about his time he's he cares about he doesn't want to spend more than nine hours or ten hours in office so he's like yes that's a great idea love now but I do not want to stay in office for more than da da da but as I started to build relationships like you know get to know the person a bit so you know you obviously feel a little bit of a you know defense like you feel like why wouldn't this person understand what I want and how can I make him convince him forget about that so when I started getting to know about this person and his aspirations I started understanding that oh he wants to get from point A to B so then I could present the exact same thing in a way that hey you know what you want to go from A to B maybe this is your chance for getting that done and that is a genuine want I think I would genuinely want this person to reach from A to B right so automatically when that started happening we started working like again when I when he did that once for me the next time I did a design I would think oh I do not want to put this person in this position because I know he doesn't like to stay enough so what I do is before I design I have a conversation with him a hey I want to do ABC to do so then he'd you know probably respond with let's not do this and this because of so-and-so so you take a step back in compromise and that so it's just like a lot of things here right it's a it's another strategy so don't be you need directional in your approach be multi-directional like use different strategies and build that instinct like what is the room feeling right now how do I help this person and it always comes back this is what I've seen it always comes back with great rewards even if you get out of that office and you're working in different corporates you're in your own startup or whatever whatever situation it is that you're in the future you always have that connection which again tying back to the keynote these connections matter a lot not because we're making a connection with because we want something out of it is because it's beautiful right if the payoff is something that you can't and I don't think you can quantify it or you can you know put a number to it it's invaluable connections are invaluable so we need to learn to really see the value of building those connections