 stereo. This one is muted. Okay. Good morning everybody. Happy Sunday. Okay. So yes, I've traveled all the way from Ohio. This is my second time in Singapore and I just love coming here and I wish I could make it a habit. I hope I can make it a habit. So again, thank you, Cole Deep and thank you volunteers for putting together just a fantastic, intimate and yet really exciting workshop day and conference day. So the objectives, what I'd like to talk about today is define and then destroy the myth of the UX unicorn, then identify some critical soft skills for us UXers, discuss how we can incorporate them in our industry and in our practice. And along the way, we'll get to marvel at unicorns that poop rainbows. So a little bit about me. I trained as an aviation human factors researcher. My lab studied how aviation system in as a whole in general could be made safer through a combination of interventions at the organizational team and individual levels. I've built small and large UX teams in different organizations. I teach and lead the UX master of science program at Kent State University and I also provide consulting as well. I'm pretty busy. I also am aware that I am a plot device in a certain Pixar movie. So many people just kind of think it. So I figured I'd use it as my intro. Okay. So that's enough of an introduction. I went into the detail about aviation for a very particular reason and we'll come back to that soon. Let's get started by talking about the current user experience landscape. Now I know that we probably all look at the salary surveys in our respective countries and this is a US one and it seems like everything is awesome. Everything is great. Right. We see year over year growth in salaries and salaries are very, very attractive for all types of UX contributors. No matter what your job description is, you'll probably have noticed that there are very, very financially attractive opportunities and I just did a check. I pulled this about 10 minutes ago and look at that. Over 125,000 UX related jobs worldwide according to LinkedIn search engines. But you had to know there was a butt coming. Right. Otherwise I wouldn't be standing up here giving a talk. What is the catch? Why do so many of us feel like we don't have a seat at the grown up table? Meaning why do we feel like we have to constantly push and struggle to get UX properly positioned into our development, design, ideation, release, life cycles. It seems like it's a never ending, especially for people who are inside a company. But even for those of us who provide resources and services from outside, well, I am willing to bet that many of you are familiar with certain situations we find ourselves in. Organizations hire us. Why? Because they quote unquote need UX. But all too often they really don't know what that means or what it takes in terms of resources, in terms of time, which is a resource. So many of you have probably heard these kind of statements at one time or another. We need better UX. But wait, how long will it take to fix the product by the next release? No, there's no time to do that much. Or do we really need a UX researcher? We understand the product. We should use that head count for another developer. Are these familiar? Have you heard these at one time or another in one version or another? Yeah, me too. I've been internal. And sometimes we're blocked from accessing our users. Just talk to sales. They know what the customer wants. No, they know what the loudest customer wants. Who really isn't even a user. Just someone who signs the checks or is the gatekeeper and makes the decisions. So let me show you something that helps explain that it's part of the difficulty, not all of it, but part of the difficulty we have getting UX positioned and resourced correctly. So this is a job posting, a real job posting I received in email a few months ago. I don't expect you to read this because we're going to deconstruct this and discuss it. So the position title is Senior UX Consultant. Let's break down what this company is looking for. Well, they want someone who can conduct UX research. Okay, fair enough. Experience with usability user feedback test design and execution for mock-ups, prototypes, pre-release functionality and production systems. Fair enough. They also want someone who can design. Experience completing mock-ups and wire framing. Ability to create logos and graphics for websites, proposals and marketing materials. Build and test complex multi-tiered web apps, and this is their random capitalization, not mine. And UI framework components, actually that last one. Okay, maybe. Look at this. The candidate should also maintain a high level of unit and integration test coverage across projects to catch and prevent feature regressions. They aren't even finished yet. They want someone who can both drive UX consistency. Oh, and by the way, also write tight, maintainable code? What's happening here? And of course, this person should be creative and collaborative. So does this sound like a recruiter just smashed together four different job positions? Yeah, I think it's fair to say that this isn't just a UX unicorn. This unicorn actually poops rainbows, puppies and sunshine and probably brings about world peace and can cure cancer in its spare time. So let's not forget the obvious here, which is that unicorns are a myth. There aren't any. It's no coincidence that we call this mythical practitioner a UX unicorn. It's because I've never really met one. And if we do, we should probably be committed to an insane asylum because we probably imagined it. Okay, let's change gears now and talk a little bit about the different competency areas that our industry has defined for itself. Because this will help us understand, really, what a true UX effective practitioner can do. So let's do that. So the term competency area is just shorthand for the things that we do. Grouped into buckets that roughly, but not completely mirror the ideation, design, development, test, life cycle. Okay. So first there's user research and I'm pretty sure that we don't have to go through all of the definitions of these because we all have a good understanding of what these things are. But the important takeaway is that oftentimes there's kind of a fuzzy line between user research and then defining a high level structure and then there's a fuzzy line between these different areas and then these different areas and these. And what we typically see is that in my and others' experiences, when we see candidates come to us, they typically have these skills in common. You may see a user researcher who is just devoted to user research and ideation phase work. And content strategists and information architecture practitioners can tend to be kind of together. You'll find people with both of those skill sets. Visual design and interaction design tend to be lumped together typically. And oftentimes you'll see interaction design and front end development grouped together. With the advent of frameworks that are easy to use, you'll see that more and more. There's other structures. You may have seen this variation where user research again is alone. Content strategy is its own little practice area, competency area. And then information architecture and interaction design are together. And then maybe you'll see this group and that same kind of interaction design front end development mix. You could see, and I have seen and hired people who are fairly good in user research, information architecture and interaction design. And then still content strategy tends to be kind of on its own and then visual design can be grouped into the interaction design bucket. What's missing? What's missing here? Well, I gave it away in the title of the talk. What's missing is soft skills. I'm going to define the term soft skills in a minute, but first let me make this claim. The skills that people generally identify as soft, quote unquote soft, are actually critical to our success as UX practitioners. They're so critical in fact that I'm going to make the claim that they and not our research and design capabilities are what actually let us get the work of UX done. Okay. As I was working on this talk, I went back to the management research literature. And of course I found many, many different definitions of soft skills. The most complete yet concise description of soft skills I found came from a research team in the UK who described soft skills as consisting of these capabilities. Effective communication, a focus on problem solving, learning and personal improvement, which is key. The ability to work effectively in teams, self-motivation, having initiative and good judgment. One of my colleagues and co-authors actually defines the natural liaison as someone who can bridge gaps between functional areas and groups in a business. Adam Polenski says businesses have always needed people who can bridge the gaps between functional areas. There are these people, I call them natural liaisons who have always existed between camps and they bridge the gulf between groups. They enable communication between them and understand the frustrations they feel. Empathy. It takes soft skills to identify people's emotions and aspirations. It takes soft skills to communicate the information to product and development and to design solutions that successfully engage emotional needs and aspirations. And yet we just think of user research as the ability to create a moderator's guide, identify critical questions, run the research, synthesize the research. But really what it comes down to is empathy and understanding of another's point of view and pain and delight. So I believe all good talks actually bring data to the table so I have some evidence to share with you. In addition to working as a UX researcher and designer and teaching, I also, like many of you, take part in lots of formal and informal UX communities. And I had the opportunity to ask a question of a group of about 200 practitioners worldwide. It was not necessarily U.S. centric or U.S. and Western Europe centric. What I asked them was a question that came to me from one of my, well, from many of my students. They asked me, what should I be learning? What tools and applications should I learn? And what really do I need to know to be successful? And so I put that question to this group of practitioners around the world and I received answers from about 75. The question was simple. What should UX practitioners be learning to be successful? I intentionally designed it that way because I wanted to see where the respondents went. Would people concentrate on hard skills, on tools, would they concentrate on things I wasn't even thinking about? And I wasn't thinking soft skills at this point. The responses were interesting because when I did a bit of light coding, it was all soft skills and they grouped into these buckets. Am I missing one? Communication and influence, collaboration, judgment and initiative and empathy. It was interesting. And what I'd like to do now is share with you some of the most interesting, inspiring and representative quotes. So here's the data. Here's one that touches on both communication and influence. Researchers and designers need to work on how they present their research findings and designs in a compelling way that inspires the rest of the team to act on them. So if you think of the user experience of user experience deliverables, it's important for us to communicate effectively. We can't just hand in sloppy deliverables and it's not just to put polish on it, but to make sure that we're delivering our deliverables in a manner that helps the people who take the hand off. Ruth Ellison's take is that we as UX practitioners should be driving a shared understanding of the problem to be solved and how to solve it with design, which may seem like it's colliding a bit with the product owner's job, but ideally we are in lock step and together with a product owner, a product manager, depending on your terminology. And here's yet more evidence for the importance of communication and influence, this time from Rebecca Distello. She says that that 40 page usability study report that you got a 4-0 on at school won't be useful for or read by most companies. I have learned this on my own with much pain in the early part of my career and I have moved from writing long reports to holding in-person debriefs. Your work must always have something that can be acted upon by your client or team. Okay, what did people have to say about collaboration? John Atheid from Cargo Sense makes the case that effective UX practitioners should cross organizational and functional boundaries when necessary. And I don't know if you're familiar with this meme, but his direct quote was, the concept of that's not my job, I don't do that, deserves a Batman slapping Robin kind of reply. And so I didn't, I hadn't seen that in a while, so I had to go look it up and put, put it, put it together just for this presentation. Trying to get the right level means don't move this arm. Patrick Neiman, who is director of design in Seattle at a company called iCertis, says that you should dive in to understand the business needs as well as user needs, which always leads me to this question when I talk to people about this. How many of you feel like you know enough about your business's goals? Raise your hand if you feel like you actually have a good enough understanding of your business's goals. Okay, so if you, how many of you want to have a better understanding of your business's goals? Okay, yeah. Okay, so here's a take on collaboration. It actually touches on several points. To be effective, people need to step beyond design, look into change management, fostering leadership skills, learning to negotiate and raising your emotional intelligence. Now, you could say that that has elements of empathy as well, but I ended up coding it into the collaboration bucket because it was my data. No, but it actually does cross lines. And a lot of these quotes do. And you've got to make a choice when you code things. Let's go back to Kelly Goto for an observation about judgment and initiative. And she says, learn that synthesis of data and analysis are not the same thing. They're actually the opposite. Rigorous analysis involves taking apart or deconstructing your data. And this is specific to user research and value exploration. And then synthesis is the putting back together of that information and making sense of it. And this can make or break a good researcher. I've included these two responses because in Haas case, she touches on the importance of continuity in research. Do you have a feeling that your company actually reinvents the wheel every time you do a new research project? Yes? No? Let me ask it more specifically. How many of you have a research program where you actually build upon the findings of past work that you've done and you scaffold your research program? Anyone? That you are very lucky where you are. Don't leave those jobs. And just for everyone, that was two hands I saw. Was there anyone else who feels like you have a consistent and comprehensive research program? Okay. Yeah. You're lucky. Rachel's point about taking criticism. This deserves an entire presentation in itself. I think there should be more presentations and conferences that talk about the art of giving and receiving critique. And it's so important for us. It's so hard to design alone. For that matter, it's so hard to interpret research alone. Giles Colborne of CX Partners, a UK based firm, recommends that UX practitioners learn to have that quote, unquote hard conversation. I support this as well in the context of advocating for your user's needs and your design solutions. But it certainly applies to how we deal with our teammates and our colleagues as well. In our neighboring disciplines, that is, as well as within UX itself. And finally, here's a quote about empathy from Christian Krumlesh. I take this one to mean that everyone's doing their part in the way they know how best. And it's usually best to attribute good intentions to everyone, no matter what discipline they're doing their work from. And then a final one, didn't want to be identified. Learn the technologies and constraints that your designs will be implemented within. You should have a conceptual understanding of the technology stack that the development team is using, as well as a deep understanding of the organization. It seems like we don't have the time to do all that and also do the work, right? It seems like a lot. So again, survey 200 people, it wasn't a perfectly structured survey. I wouldn't publish this in a journal. I received 75 responses from around the world. The interesting takeaways are that no one, no one said they need to learn to write production HTML CSS and JavaScript. No one said learn sketch or flint or envision. The most important things consistently were learning how to develop your soft skills, which begs the question, can soft skills be taught? Answers yes or I wouldn't be standing up here. The other important thing is that soft skill interventions work. They actually work. You can teach soft skills and soft skill interventions if planned within an organization can work. This is my favorite slide in the entire world. I know that there's a couple of good diagrams from Edward Tufty. It's a tough call, but this one is my favorite because what it shows is the effect of a soft skill intervention that has affected all of our lives literally. So I'll let you look at this for a second. This is a chart showing the rate or number of aviation accidents in commercial aviation starting from all the way back in the 50s to the last time I pulled this data was 2014. Where is that green regression line going? Down. What does that mean? Flight is safer now. In 2014, there were only nine accidents. It's actually less if you take out the effects of sabotage, terrorism and things like that. So what changed? What caused this or what was correlated with this? It's a really fascinating story. There have been many books written about it and I'm just gratified to have been able to play a small role in this effect when I was in graduate school. So as you saw in that graph, the number of aviation accidents had spiked in the mid to late 80s. And an analysis of aviation accidents in that time revealed that over two thirds of crashes were usually attributed to what's called pilot error. That is, in most cases, pilots flew perfectly functioning aircraft into the ground. But this begs the question, what is pilot error? What does that actually mean? Well, you've probably heard of the black box. It's not actually black, it's orange, high visibility so you can find it if it's underwater or under wreckage. NASA and the FAA, Federal Aviation Administration as well as some international aviation organizations commissioned research to study how pilots were communicating both within the flight tech pilot to first officer and flight engineer if they had a third pilot, as well as pilot to air traffic control and even pilot to cabin. They analyzed the content and the quality and the quantity of the communication that was occurring. And what they found was that people, pilots who communicated often and communicated status and communicated their mental models showed better safety behaviors and that when they looked at the accidents, a lot of those accidents showed the opposite. There was less communication overall. There was less critique, criticism, constructive criticism and questioning. So what happened was around 1990, pilots were then given new types of training. First in, I believe it was United Airlines was the first one and then it spread rapidly within the US and then around the world. They were given training that was all about soft skills. They were told that human error is inevitable and the captain is not always right. So shifting the model of the captain is always right to the captain is not always right. And the captain should be cross checked and critiqued. And not just that junior officers should speak up, junior officers have a duty to speak up if they see something wrong or if they think the captain may be committing an error, cross checking each other and making sure that each has an understanding, a shared understanding of where the airplane is, where it's going and whether flight is safe. And then this is something actually new. Crews should debrief and critique after each flight. And I flew, I didn't personally fly. I sat behind the pilots during my graduate school time 146 legs. And I was surprised how much I saw this. And so how much, how effective this new type of training was. What were the results? They speak for themselves. Airplane maintenance and overall airplane quality in terms of build and longevity did increase along with this. So this is not completely soft skills based, but it is in large part soft skills based. Again, this chart should make you very happy, especially those of us who flew in. I always knock on wood when I show this. Okay, these same techniques of soft skill training have also been used in medicine. So there are different groups within the operating room. You've probably seen a lot of medical procedurals on TV where you've got the surgeons, the surgical nurses, the anesthesiologists and other technicians. So I don't know if this idea of cross checking each other for errors and impossible miscommunication has come to Singapore and other East Asian countries. But I believe it has. Have you noticed has this has been a thing where every step of the way, especially if you're in a hospital, maybe for a day visit or if you've had surgery, you get asked your name consistently. Is this happening where you are? Where you're constantly asked for your name and why you're there? Okay. Yeah, so what's happening is that medicine has adopted this idea of cross checking and using checklists and ensuring that errors don't occur in the field of medicine. So how do we evolve UX to focus on soft skills? And now we'll go into some detail about some of the difficulties that the aviation field experienced in bringing about soft skill training. I made it sound like it was easy. It wasn't. It's an interpersonal intervention, but it's also an organizational intervention. So what you're looking at here is that there are many, many different cultures within aviation. There's the professional culture of pilots. There's the training culture. There's a different set of pilots that only do training. There's organizational subcultures. Actually, 757, 767 pilots have somewhat different views and attitudes than Airbus pilots or maybe the short haul regional jet pilots. So these are organizational subcultures. There's formal processes, the things that are written down called standard operating procedures, but there's also a lot of informal processes. We're all familiar with this where we've got our process model and then how things actually get done. So it's the same idea. So what did the researchers do? They actually ran into a brick wall the first few times they tried to provide soft skill training to pilots because none of these other groups, these cultures had an awareness and a burning desire for change as did the researchers and the pilots. And so what they found is that they had to uncover the right keys to influencing these subcultures, these organizational components. So for the professional culture, it was teach pilots the safety value of communication, coordination, cross checking and questioning. That was the base intervention. For the training organization, the trainers needed training in why this was important and modify the curriculum that they taught as well as the evaluations they gave for the subcultures they needed to standardize the soft skill training, which meant reviewing lots of manuals and formal processes and making sure that they incorporated the soft skill training that no matter what airplane you were flying, still applied. Checking with your pilot as to whether you're ascending or descending at 3,000 feet per minute is the same on a 757 as it is on an A320. So it was a matter of doing a lot of subculture reorganization. And as well, reinforce safety behaviors through norms and informal conversations. So guess what? Your UX researcher, your UX designer, that's only half your job. This is my pitch to you. You are actually a change agent. And I would challenge you all to think about what subcultures exist in your organizations that affect how things get done. Where are the leverage points where you can bring about a change in values and a focus on soft skills? Who are the leverage points? Who can you talk to within your organization and not just and convince them not just to be UX boosters, UX champions but soft skill champions? So what I would say to you is say no to the unicorn. If you see a job posting like that, just put it in the spam folder, delete it. That myth is busted. This is not to say that if you are a software developer and you enjoy and you actually are skilled in doing user experience research and design that you shouldn't. I'm not saying there's no person who can do everything effectively. It's just the more you concentrate on the tightness of your code and the efficiency of your code, it's just natural that the less you're going to strive for that solution to the user's problem, there's a natural built-in tension. And then when you factor in the need to deliver, it becomes difficult. It's hard to go up and down the stack all the way from user needs and business needs all the way down to efficiency of code. You should start or join if it's already happening, soft skills training conversations in your organization. It may already be happening in your organization. How many people are actually in a position to who are management? How many of you are managers? Okay, a good chunk. So I've made the case that you can define soft skills. So it becomes incumbent upon you, upon you who are hiring managers to hire people who can communicate, collaborate, influence and show good judgment. These can be operationalized. And then finally set goals and measure demonstration of these soft skills for your hires. And then last but not least, this is my mission as a teacher and a leader of a master's program. We should be teaching soft skills to UX students at the beginning of their careers. This is something that I suspect most of us, unless you have a natural inclination to empathy and soft skills, I'd be willing to bet again that most of us have had to learn this through some lessons of various levels of pain and struggle on the job. Why don't we do this in the beginning? We should. So we're at the very beginning of this journey of incorporating soft skills into UX. We're not a mature field yet. We're a very exciting young field. And the skills we have and the our ability to affect how product and services are designed is fantastic. I love it. But to be more effective, we have to take essentially a page and lessons from management literature and business literature and safety and medicine literature and incorporate soft skills into what we do. So that's all I have for you this morning. What I'd like to do is I think I've got a few minutes time for questions. And my question to you is how do some of you actually incorporate or use soft skills in your work? And do we have a microphone for the audience? So does anyone have an example of how they have employed some type of soft skill to further user experience in your organization? Please. Thank you. Our company invests in that each of our employees get a conversation training. So that we are not just skilled in doing the research part, but also the communication part internally, externally and beyond. Fantastic. It's good. Anybody else? And it doesn't have to be a large overarching accomplishment. Have you been in a meeting and listened to your developer or your product owner and realized, oh, here's what they're dealing with. And here's how I can bridge that gap. Got one in the back. So for that we pass something to the developer and it's not getting implemented. So what we did was we came up with the design system. And so it has a library standard to bridge the gap. Okay, so you bridge that gap by providing what they needed. Yeah, it seems so trivial, but yet this is something we often find ourselves doing. And that's that's a fantastic example. Does anyone else have an example of implementing or employing a soft skill? Maybe not even realizing it was a soft skill up here. So my developers and stakeholders have different opinions and differences. And so I'm trying to give you some advice in the background, but my question for you is how do we actually push across our own activities across the digital cross. The developers and our stakeholders at times may not have the same approach that we come from. And yes, most of our time, stakeholders are used to what they want to do. Anybody else want to share a story? In the middle? I can't believe I didn't get my laptop off the table. I would say I'm a research researcher. And we have come up to the policy where we require a stakeholder to be a part of these areas. So there's always the need to use research involved as well as either PM or signer, even a developer who's going to be part of that solution. Excellent. Good. Anybody else? I've got about five minutes before I wrap up so we can do a few more stories. So one of the key things that we do at my company is that whenever we finish some user research or some usability test, we synthesize data. And whenever we have a key find it, we always share the entire thing, which is product analysis, stakeholders, and utility. We start out there to empathize with the user as well. And it's just not the US designers who are empathizing with the user. We just share the cross with the team so that everybody's on the same page and we're really good at interacting. Excellent. That's an excellent way to accomplish collaboration. Anybody else? Okay. So that's about all I have for you. First, I want to thank you for your time and share another unicorn picture that I found out on the internet. You can reach me at these coordinates. And just to the moving on to the quick marketing portion, I've got a little table there for the program I teach for and lead. It's a fully online asynchronous master of science program. We have been pushing to recruit a more international student body, because there are so many skilled practitioners out there who are looking for more education. We actually are built for the working professional. So it's anywhere between five and 20 hours per week. And it's asynchronous, and we make sure everything's due Sunday night so you can work on the assignments on the weekend. We've been filling out our offerings. And we've actually I'm really proud because we finally sorry, I don't want to laser you in the eye, Goldie. We've finally incorporated we built out a class in UX leadership, which we'll be going live with in the fall. So that's all I have for you. If you want a webcam cover, if you're worried about Trump or Putin watching you, I've got lots of webcam covers to give out. And that's it. Thank you. And thank you for sharing your stories.