 check. So if you're listening or watching this, please let me know if we are live by just putting something in the comments, a hey, hi, a wave, an emoji, whatever it is. So whenever you are wherever you are, thank you for joining. I want to make this session as interactive as possible. So first it would be lovely for you to say you've heard me and also drop an emoji from where you're tuning in from. Okay. So welcome to today. This LinkedIn live is about question you should ask when designing with me, Chris and Emily, I'll bring her on in a second. I'll just first go for quick introductions. So I'm Chris. I'm a product designer. I quit my head of design job in 2020. And since then I've done numerous things like consulting, running design sprints. I joined a startup incubator and raised some money, but that didn't really work out in the journey of trying to build my own thing. I started a UX education company called UX Playbook. We help designers of all levels, whether it's building your portfolio to managing your first design team. And today's conversation I am joined by with Emily, a really thoughtful, senior product designer. So I want to bring her out from backstage to say hi with you guys. So let's get her out. How are you doing, Emily? Tell the audience about yourself. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Chris. I'm so excited to be here. I am a little nervous as well. But yeah, as Chris mentioned, I'm Emily Anderson. I'm a senior product designer. I've got a background actually in physical product design. So I am sorry. So I my degree was in half design, half engineering. And what I did as part of that was I looked across multiple touch points, but it was all it was all on physical products. And what I wanted to do was instead of just looking at physical products, I wanted to be able to design across multiple touch points. So I decided to give you X ago. Shortly after my degree, I went into the online gaming space, which for those of you who don't know is in gambling. And there I became super obsessed with understanding people's behaviors, understanding things like behavioral psychology, why people do things the way they do, what drives people, what motivates people. And it was really, to be honest, it was quite a big learning curve to balance both the business needs, but also the user needs from a ethical perspective. From there, I've also done a mixture of different things in terms of agencies, consultancies across healthcare, across financial services, through to where I am today, which is a B2B SaaS startup in the social care space. So yeah, it's been a real journey from the physical space to the digital space, taking a lot of those different learnings to where I am today. Yeah, it sounds really interesting. And I think this is like the perfect topic for us to dive into. But let's just tell the audience what we're going to be discussing about today. So when designing, sometimes we follow the same process as we always have. Sometimes we're tired of going in loops, and sometimes we just want to ship features, right? But how do we know if our process is good enough? Are we asking the right questions? And how do we really improve those solutions that we deliver? So today, we're diving into all of those questions, things to ask ourselves when we were designing, right? And hopefully by the end of this session, we'll have more thoughtful considerations and approach to designing our next solution. Well, at least hopefully we can trigger something new so you can ask these more conscious questions that we ask ourselves as well. So just some housekeeping from my side. Today is broken down into two segments. First, we'll discuss the topic I just mentioned. And then second, we'll address any questions from the audience. So be sure to type your questions in as they come up so we can go back to that at the end of the session. So yeah, let's make it interactive as possible, folks. So have a discussion below and we will try our best to answer them. So let's bring Emily back on. Let's go into our first topic, designing the unhappy path. Do you want to dive into that a little bit, Emily? Yeah, so I think part of my experience, well, majority of my experience has been across kind of very highly regulated industries. So as I mentioned, I worked in gambling for a little while, I've worked in healthcare, I've worked in financial services. And I've always had to think about essentially what can go wrong. And that can be a micro UI level through to a bigger systems thing. And unhappy paths is something that's really, really part of it. That it's always will deliver the happy past first, and then we'll get the unhappy path later. But for me, it's something really, really personal. And I want to share that with everybody. So unfortunately, a few years ago, my granddad passed away. And as part of that, my self and my grandma had to unsubscribe from all of his subscription services, which is something really difficult to offboard anyway, you know, sometimes it's it's too expensive. But for our case, you know, he passed away unfortunately. And it was like clockwork. So we got in touch with customer support. And every single time we received automated emails saying things like, we're sorry to see you go Mr. Clark addressing him. We hope you come back again in the future. We're sad to see you go. And it sounds silly, but a small piece of copy and an email had such a big impact. And I had to kind of talk to my grandma and say things like, nobody's doing it to upset you. Nobody's doing it to make fun or anything like that. And my designer brain was just going and thinking, oh, why couldn't customer support? I've had a drop down to say reason for leaving deceased. And then we could have made, you know, something that's not exactly a great experience, slightly less bad, and use that as an opportunity to personalize from the copy. And I thought, from my perspective, I was like, Well, what can I do? Something that I do day to day is really look at unhappy paths. And we'll talk about that in a bit more. But but also I was thinking, well, how can I try and maybe help other designers, other PMs, anyone, whoever it is, to think about the impact that technology can really have on people, regardless of whether it's a bit of copy or some, you know, you've been blocked from using the product or service, something like that. So I took to LinkedIn. And I wanted to start sharing experiences in terms of how can we think about people's behaviors? So a lot of behavioral science psychology, how can we think about designing for real people, real people situations and scenarios, but also drawing that back to the business and showing that unhappy paths aren't just something that we should be designing for, that actually can have such an impact business. And happy paths, if we block people from using them, or anything like that can really affect everything from acquisition, retention, churn, brand loyalty, retention, brand loyalty, retention twice, you know, it can affect everything. So I wanted to start thinking about designing for people, bringing that back into the entire user experience process across multiple touch points, whether it's research through to service design through DUI, whatever it is, and how to make people think slightly differently about who they're designing for. And like I said, the impact it can have on people. So yeah, it was kind of a something I generally do in my process, but it was really my kind of personal experience, which I know other people have probably experienced much worse from technology. But got me trying to help other people a bit more. And you said that started your LinkedIn journey. And did you have success in terms of other folks feeling like the same and being like, Oh, I like completely get you. And was there some interesting conversations you had since then kind of sharing your journey and the things you're thinking about? So I think it was very strange for me really, because I didn't haven't really spoken about it vocally, in terms of like my why of LinkedIn. I think I post I did post something about a year and a half ago when it first sort of happened. But I didn't really have much traction in terms of actually, that was, you know, many people, particularly the following I have have now, what I have noticed is how I frame things in terms of making people believe that actually, we sometimes are users, although we've been told not to believe we're users because of obviously introducing biases when we're when we're designing. But actually, a lot of people were resonating to it. And they were thinking, Oh, I'd never thought about it this way. I'd never thought about the overall experience or the like, from a service design perspective. A lot of people see you access quite subjective in terms of how you can get into it. It's not like at school, where you're an A in prototyping versus like a B in information architecture. It was something that I thought, well, let's maybe try and frame this slightly differently. And people did start opening up a lot more and saying, Oh, yeah, I've reframed my workshop or I've reframed how I ask interview questions. And that's, that's pretty cool. So I'm enjoying it. Um, did you run like, since you've been writing and since you've been thinking about unhappy paths, have you run into any more examples of unhappy paths that slightly like also, like, was just like, Ah, why do they do this? Or like, especially in the in the work you do now, right? I'm sure there's some unhappy paths there. I mean, there's unhappy paths everywhere when I'm designing. I regularly design like medication schedules and things. I'm always trying to think about what what's what goes wrong. What I try and do is, particularly in my content is try and think about things that other people might experience. So it might be banking. Everybody generally uses online banking. There's been quite a few things actually, though. So it's it's quite a sort of an happy path. It's more of like an inclusive design. But a little while ago, I did a post around in post, which is like Amazon lockers, if that's more familiar. When I was taking my parcel back, because I do far too much online shopping, there was a little, a little checkbox on the screen to say, I need a lower compartment to put my part of my parcel into. I was like, Oh, this is a great piece of inclusive design, because not only does it help people potentially in wheelchairs that might not be able to reach the higher compartments, it also helps with things like situational impairments or temporary impairments. So the box might be too heavy to lift over your head. So you might need a lower locker in that instance. Or, I mean, they could have gone one step further. And in the app, you might be able to see before that what's the availability of high and low spaces before you can get there. That was a nice tiny thing. Although it was a small checkbox, like that can really change whether when you're selecting who to drop your parcel off with, you're like, Okay, I know that in post is suits my needs versus Amazon, and then they'll get the commission kind of thing. And one other little example I'll just give is I was designing an application a few years ago. It was for online mortgage application. And before we'd even started the project, we had these metrics to have less than 100 clicks across the whole application and for the user to be done in five minutes. And I was like, Okay, where are these coming from? I didn't look I zoomed out and looked at a very, very high level and looked at okay, well, one of the steps is people need to go and gather their documents. So already five minutes is not going to be that if you're anything like me going to be rooting through emails through the folder under the stairs, like trying to find the documentation you need. There was also things like at the front, the API only accepted male or female input. So already we were blocking people that don't identify as male or female to be able to do that application. And things like if, you know, you had to give your, your current job status and we didn't allow for if you're on maternity leave, which would then have an impact on underwriters and things. So all of these things we were able to get up front and say, well, if you want to have a success rate of X amount of people going through it, then we need to have an API that accepts more than just male or female. We need to consider what people are actually doing because otherwise we're setting ourselves up to fail by our five minute metric. And a bunch of other different things. So there's less about an unhappy path that one, but more around contextual awareness of what people are actually doing. Sure. Yeah, I wonder, yeah, exactly who came up with that metric. And in that case, it's, it was hard to argue that, hey, if you want more people to go through this funnel, then you better fix whatever's wrong. But I could imagine that in some maybe grayer areas where you're kind of pushing for unhappy paths, but the PM or the business being like, hmm, are you sure? Like, how do we know that to be true? And how much complexity does that add given we have two weeks to ship? Like, how, what's that conversation? I know we're like hopping around, but I kind of want to ask you about that. Yeah, I think, I mean, this is super freestyle anyway, so we're going to be jumping back and forth quite a lot. But yeah, so I think that's that's the thing, isn't it? So a lot of the time that's just natural in product world, and that could be a much bigger conversation than we've probably got time for today. But you'll define kind of the timelines and a lot of the time it will be the features that we're going to deliver by set amount of date and the scope a lot of the time. And a lot of it will be, okay, we're going to deliver the happy path first and see how that goes. And I think it really depends. So firstly, it depends from from a UX perspective, it's are as much as it's hard sometimes, it's our responsibility to be that voice of the user. The user can't be in the room for for themselves. So we're the ones to say, okay, actually, what could go wrong in this scenario? And is that something where they're either not represented from an inclusive design perspective? Is it something that is just they could misunderstand what that button says, and they might go somewhere else? Or is it that we're blocking them from using it? It's our job to understand what could go wrong. And then from there, as a team, we can look at the impact that can have the likelihood and the risk. So say, for example, something an unhappy unhappy path is super high risk, super high impact. You think, right, well, we absolutely can't just ship this and see, we probably need to cater for that whilst we're whilst we're here. It's really hard to give blanket advice, because every single business is different. But I think what we try and do as well is to look at, is there any when you're when you're kind of scoping a feature? How much time do you have around it? Because sometimes when you're shipping things all the time, you think, right, we'll we'll do the MVP now, we'll come back, we'll do the happy path later. But we don't, we don't do that. Like we don't do that happy path. And I'm not saying we have to cater for every single person and every single scenario. That's that's not what I'm saying or because that's not feasible. But what we can do is as designers, we can understand what could go wrong, whether that's having access to the people who might give us those insights through research. If you can't, then it's it's our jobs to literally think about what could go wrong. And that might be, as I mentioned, it could be is somebody using it outside, they might have low signal. That's an unhappy path is somebody not even looking at their phone. I mean, that's again, more contextual awareness, but it's somebody like cooking and they can't press it or something like that. And then from there, we can look at, like I said, prioritization of, OK, how important is it or how many people do we affect? And even from how many people it's what does the impact those people have? Because there might not affect many people. But if it's incredibly detrimental to quite a few and has the potential to really affect like your brand reputation, then that's really something that we should also be prioritizing. That makes sense. So it's almost baked into when you're approaching like right at the beginning of your design process. And as you mentioned, if there's not that much time for research, then what does your process look like there? Like get a bunch of folks who are close to the customers in a room and just like kind of war room brainstorm, like what are the risks? How do we rate them on a scale of like what does that look like? Yeah, so no one size fits all, unfortunately. But I think if I don't have access to research, so there's a few things that I always do. And that is firstly, even up. Do we know what problem we're solving when you come to any problem? And that is, are we are we doing something that is a feature request? Or is it an actual problem? Are we designing an output or an outcome? Like what are we doing? And more importantly, who are we doing it for? So are we designing it for? Is it a decision maker? Is it a user? Like who is it? Within that, I'll then if I don't have access to users, I'll maybe try and make some assumptions but always calling out clearly that they are assumption based. So I'll dig into if you've got a user type, you might start to try and dig into behaviors. So you might have something like, okay, the one that never has time to check this or the one that is rushed or whatever it is. And then you can start thinking about, okay, well, what implications might that have on this part of the process? So there's some of the initial thinking of like, who are we actually designing it for? What environment are they in? Are there any contextual environmental things that could cause an issue with our product or service? Then when I'm actually starting to look at the design, so whether it's on a UI micro level, or it's a journey level, it really depends what I'm doing. But if I'm journey mapping, then all doing like a service blueprint or something like that, I'll always add in like a risk row, which it sounded better than that, but it's as simple as that. A risk row, which essentially makes me question at every single step, what could go wrong? And literally like, because I find a lot of the time in businesses, people make assumptions where they, if we don't document it, it's either not thought about or somebody's thought about it, but we've decided it's not getting in there. So always add in a risk row so that that way everyone is on the same page and everybody knows what I'm thinking, you know, I know what you're thinking, all that kind of stuff. And we can brainstorm from an engineering perspective, from a product perspective, we might, you know, for example, if we don't prioritize something, we might say, just let you know, we think this is going to have an impact on more customer support requests. And you can see what areas of the business it can then affect as well internally. So not just from a user perspective. So definitely having a risk row. And then what else I'll do is if it's at a, I feel like I'm going to give the same answer. But if I'm doing it from a UI level as well, again, it's just constantly pulling, pulling out and thinking what can go wrong. So if you're looking at your designing a screen in static, obviously you can see there's five screens in a row, but really the user can only see one screen at a time. If you see it as something like next, well, are they going to click next? Do they know where we're going? Are they going to abandon the flow because they're too scared and they think you're going to charge the card when you're not like all of these things. So that goes for copy. It goes for, um, the copy is incredibly important. It goes for interaction design patterns. So does somebody know how to actually interact with it? And it can also as well go from like a, even just like a design quality perspective. So are they going to, you know, if we're not using consistent design, does that mean they're going to lose trust in the product? That could be, again, something that it's not, it's not an unhappy path, but it's generally like a sentiment of like what could go wrong. Um, so there's a few things, but I think, I think, especially if the thing I found the most important thing is documentation. I think that it's, it's, it's not great to say like, yes, if we can't do anything like that. But the biggest thing is documentation in terms of if we've agreed that we're shipping MVP or version one or whatever it is, write down in JIRA or wherever you document things to say, this is the risk of what we think might happen. So at least that, like I said, it's out of your head. Um, because if it's out of your head, like at least everybody knows, otherwise it's not going to get fixed. It's not going to be shout about. Um, it's not easy. I think sometimes as designers, it's, it's quite like an emotional burden sometimes to, to, to fight for the user and to feel like sometimes you're going against the grain because we do have such a big responsibility to try and protect people, I guess. Um, but it's definitely something that's like super fundamental to our jobs. Mm hmm. Yeah. So perform a pre-mortem in whatever activity we're doing and also get other folks to contribute to their expertise as well. So if the product manager, they could think about risks. If the engineering team, they can think about risk. The copywriter, the same or whoever is in that team working on that specific thing. Um, and document that, that makes so much sense. Um, maybe a curve or if I, if I may and so, um, let's just say, okay, so, uh, I think that makes a lot of sense or like we know the user more if we are a relatively niche product in like an industry, right? So a certain type of people, well, we can assume that there are as many types as something like, um, a Facebook, for example, if you're, uh, how, how does one, is the pre-mortem potentially the same? Or is it just a crazy, rigorous testing process in different markets? How, like, have you thought about, like, products that just scale across, like, you know, billions of people? Like, how does, how does that work? And does that kind of intimidate you, like, immediately when you're thinking about pre-mortems? That question does. It just came over my head, like, it's scary. It's a little appropriate about designing the entire world. Well, um, so obviously yeah, that's very different. And it's, and it's a lot easier if you're in a startup, for example, where you're super tight with your, your delivery team and you're very close to users potentially, and you might not be close to users, even if you're in, if you're in a startup. Um, but I think it's a, it's a slightly, it's a bit of a different question because things like cultural differences become more prevalent. Um, and that's why, like, things like localization teams are also really, really important, um, if, if you can, because sometimes even just the difference of meanings of words and how people expect to interact with things are very, very different. And we're all, we're also limited by our own, um, not our own biases, but our own knowledge sometimes. Um, and you need sometimes more of a, okay, what does that mean in that culture? Um, you can definitely learn things through research. Um, but I think sometimes as well, it's about bringing in those expertise from those different teams, um, spanned across. I think that, so great question. And there's lots of research going into generally speaking statement, but the bigger the organization, you think there's more people doing more research and things like that. Um, but when you have more users in terms of user type, user segments, markets and all that kind of stuff, that's when it's really important to maybe look at the behaviors of people rather than maybe even the individual roles. So like I said, look more on like a behavioral archetypes lens or even categorizing by like the jobs to be done and things like that rather than this is my job role, this is my job role. It's like what goals those people trying to do. And then that's when you can start catching commonalities between the different things that people are trying to cater for the things that maybe there are unique scenarios. Um, as you mentioned, we can't design for everyone, unfortunately. And there will be an element sometimes where we are excluding people and that might be intentionally or unintentionally. We might decide that, okay, we are not catering for this market or we're not catering for this type of person, but we need to be honest with ourselves about that. I think sometimes businesses don't like to say explicitly internally if they're not catering for they want to try and cater for everyone. Um, so it's about knowing where to stop. It's about knowing firstly having like a super clear strategy of who we're going for what what problems do our products and services solve. And then it's like, okay, how do we take all of that into what's the most what's the most important problems that we should be solving? What's the most what's the likelihood? And like I said, what's what's the impact? I feel like it's a really hard question. Sorry, just came to my mind. I'm sorry. I get a record. Okay, put a good segue, though, with when you're talking about like sometimes the business could be like what they don't want to say that. Sorry, that's not important to us. But they say it through the actions, right? They're like, okay, it's deprioritized. So I guess communicating that value of this is potentially like really impactful for a certain number of people or type of people or behavior patterns. Like how how do you sort of navigate that with what you do at the moment? Yeah. So I think definitely is things that designers are and not just designers, researchers, things as well are trying to do more so is actually showing the impact of you know, design in terms of onto the business. I think so what I'll always try and do at the beginning of a project or wherever we land, it might not be an official project, I might just be designing something small is understanding. Okay, so what's the business outcome? And then how might who we're designing for affect those business outcomes? So if we're looking at things like onboarding or acquit say acquisition, for example, then understanding those unhappy paths might become a lot more important. So say, for example, you even at a UI level, you don't have like a forgotten my password link. Well, that's blocking people from if they forgot their password and they like they can't get back in again, then they're not going to use your product or service and therefore they're going to then involve involuntarily churn. Or they might create another account and then it looks like you've got more users than you do, who knows. Similarly with things like grossing, you know, being allowing people to have what they identify as. So whether it's more so than just male or female. And even just things like, should we be asking those questions? Sometimes, sometimes we ask things that we shouldn't actually be asking people and that can also block block it too. So really understanding, okay, what's what's the business trying to what we're trying to do is a business with the thing that we're designing, like, and has it does it does it have any immediate direct business impact? Sometimes it's not as easy with UX, because sometimes it's like sentiment or loyalty or reputation and things. And it's not as easy as saying, you know, we will improve efficiency by X minutes, like you can with engineering sometimes. But I think it's like I said, it's definitely understanding. Okay, right, we've got these unhappy pasts. Here's the risk. And a lot of the time you can kind of put them into big buckets in terms of retention, churn, acquisition, loyalty, and things like that. At a very kind of abstracted level, there's obviously a lot between the UI bit that you might be designing and then this huge big, like business outcome. But like I said, that's where you start to think of. And a lot of it is, it's difficult because we want to be as objective as possible. But some of it is subjective in terms of what impact do we think it might have? Like so how many people is it our main target group? Do we think it's likely? And how certain are we that that thing is going to happen? If we're not very certain it's going to happen, if it's not very likely to happen, if it's going to be very, very low impact, then we might say, okay, we'll we'll just measure and see how we go. We can definitely flag up, especially whether it's on like a micro UI level or bigger systems, like service design level of impact you can directly have back on the business. That's interesting. And I guess how how do you currently kind of train this mindset of like looking for unhappy paths and risk to other team members, maybe more like sort of junior folks or folks that just had a couple of years experience? Is this something that you actively train other people in kind of thinking about? Or like, how have you thought about that? Yeah, I think my team of fed up of me talking about risk, do you want to? What if this person is doing this is this thing or what if it's, you know, like, I'm always talking about risk. And I mean, I say risk, it's an umbrella term, really, it's like loss to the business a lot of the time. Or risk is I'm trying to need I need to find a better way to describe it to be honest, but risk is generally thinking about like what can go wrong. And that might be from an inclusive design perspective, as I mentioned. So designing something that will benefit a lot of people. Or from an emotional design perspective, I love talking about emotional design. I don't think it's talked about enough. In terms of we talk about delight, but not everything is delightful. As I mentioned with like my granddad, a lot of the time it's trying to make bad experiences less bad. Neutral experiences good and good experiences great. Like it's something like that. And then other times as well, it's thinking about risk from a performance perspective or like from an engineering and things like that. So it's I do try and get particularly the rest of the in house in my design team. I'm not sure if any of them are on the call or not, but they always they always hear me banging on about risks in every in everything. It will be right. It'll it'll just be right. Think about what can go wrong, literally what can go wrong. And that might be how you frame your research questions. So really understand are we digging into people's contacts, people's behaviors? And are we are we like, using patterns that are unfamiliar to people? Are we going into an environment where they might somebody might go from Wi Fi to signal and lose access to things? A lot of the time it's it becomes easier, I guess, as it's not the what I'm saying isn't like revel like a big revolution revelation, not revelation, that is a completely different thing. It's not a big revelation. And what I'm saying is, it's more like being conscious about our design process and being more transparent around talking about what could go wrong a lot of the time. I think someone from your team might have jumped off. That's awesome. Okay. So I think we touched on happy paths, designing for real people and communicating that value to the business. Are there any more things you want to add? Or should we jump into questions? Let's see if we've got some questions from the audience. Yeah, this might be unrelated, but yeah, this, this are related. Sorry, I'm just talking to the question. I'm like, hmm. Okay, well, let's let's switch gears and and wait for some questions. And hopefully, some folks are tuning in when they wake up. So you said something like because I'm I love frameworks, like, like, you know, journey mapping. I really like frameworks. And do you would you ever coin your own like risk framework? Like how to think about risk, like kind of taking inspiration from other things and kind of putting your own process together? Or have you done that already? Because that would be really cool. It's something I'm in the process of doing, actually. No, it's no, no, it's something that I'm trying to couple together. And it's like I said, it's there's a lot of things that go into it. And like I said, design a lot of the time is subjective. And it goes off of things we way we uncover different the way we uncover different problems, the way that we like even who we recruit, making sure that we consciously bring in different types of people, the way that we have thought about design, the way we view the world, everything is is quite subjective. What I really do want to try and do, I guess, is put together some prompts that people can kind of use throughout different parts of the process. Whereas it's whether it's how they ask research questions to try and get the most out of observational observational research. I've done it. I've done a lot of LinkedIn posts recently around what are people actually doing versus what do they say they're doing. So a suit behavior versus actual behavior. I think sometimes what we do is in research will ask somebody, well, how do you think you might interact with that thing in the future or show me how you click through that on your phone or something. But it's not the same as how they actually use it in their context. So to give you an example, I use quite a lot of apps in the gym. And when you use the app on your phone, it looks fine. But then when it's on the floor and, you know, sweats going in your eyes and your hands are blurry and everything like suddenly you can't use it anymore, because it becomes so much harder. So trying to understand in people's context how they actually use something is really, really beneficial. So lots of different nuggets of different things we can think about. To be honest, it's a lot of what I talk about on LinkedIn, pull that into one place so that if people don't aren't active on LinkedIn, they can have something to potentially help them as much as they can. But it's it's a work in progress. Like with everything, it's a work in progress. But it's, like I said, I just want to try I just want to try and help people think slightly differently. Yeah, I think that'll be really, really useful. And I think that's an interesting approach where it's like a toolkit for different parts of the process, maybe even different activities. Like that's how I'm not sure if this is true. Me and Emily didn't speak and talk about this, I just kind of asked that question and followed my nose. But that would be really cool because yeah, if a certain part of the process or a certain activity you wanted to inject this premortem, or the you know, the what if brainstorm, that would be interesting if you had like framing prompts around it, as you said. That's cool. I think the one of my posts that it got the most amount of traction, I felt like I was having a real oh my gosh moment is this real, is a post I did around around Uber, and which people on the call may or may not have seen. If you haven't it's like pinned at the top of my my page. But it was essentially around, like I said, perceived behavior versus actual behavior. And it was, if you ask me how to use an Uber, it would be like, yeah, I open my phone, I click on it, I request a ride and off I go. But if you were to watch me how how I use one, or if you were to ask me about the last time, you'd see me running around the flat trying to put my shoes on, finishing my makeup, going to the toilet one last time. And even like not rating the driver. And that's huge discrepancies between what our ideal journey is versus our actual journey. And as people doing research, and it might not be designers, it might be specific researchers, it completely depends on, obviously time, budget, makeup of your team. But the real gold for designing for people, not just users, actual people, is so beneficial to businesses, because we can then understand, okay, what features are helpful to people, what's not, how do people expect to interact with something? Where are we letting them down? Where are they getting really frustrated? All of these things. So it's a lot, it's hopefully going to be a lot around, like I said, I'm pretty obsessed with understanding behavioral science, psychology, and I can maybe put some resources together, just share some of I found helpful over the last couple years. But I'm hopefully going to bring all of this stuff together for different parts of the design process. Dude, that sounds really, really exciting. We have someone that says, love your recent posts, how you're trying to figure out the deep truth. Emily, so that's cool. So I'm sure a lot of people have read that really popular post that you mentioned about Uber. So there's one, there's one camp of designers that say, hey, everything in like a tested simulated environment is just what the user wants you to see or it's not true, because like you're showing them some prototype, you're looking at them, there's cameras on whatever, bright lights. And and that camp of designers would prefer to release and then watch afterwards. What do you think about that approach? Like they're like, OK, all the research and sort of asking users is just more educated guesses, but we prefer to release and then see what the data tells us and then watch them actually interact with it in real life when they when they need to order an Uber, for example. Where do you stand on that? And is it this kind of? Yeah, where do you stand on that? So it depends. Thank you. Thank you for calling that out. Yeah, of course, it depends. Everything depends. You know, like I said, it's it it all depends. So I think there's a lot of it on the project. It depends on what you're actually doing. So if you're doing something that is in like financial services that's going to have a real impact to if it's like a one stop application that somebody needs to get through and they're only going to do it once, then kind of experimenting and then learning afterwards might not be ideal. If it's something like, for example, Uber, where people most likely are continually coming back again and again to interact with something that's when you can understand people's habits and behaviors because they will start to create their own shortcuts and mental models for how they expect to interact with something. And you never know. I mean, to be honest, it's like I said, it depends what it is because somebody might use it once, realize they hate it and then never use it again and install the app. See you later. So it depends on firstly, I think when we're doing research, we don't always have the luxury of doing upfront, you know, that's part of it. Unfortunately, like I said, it's a huge question in the industry about about research. Huge advocate for it, by the way. But I think that firstly, if you can kind of understand from a framing perspective upfront, so instead of saying like how do you expect to use this thing? Be like, OK, time of the last time, let's talk about the last time you used it. And you might start to get more of that contextual inquiry as to how it in how it fits into their lives or what they might how they might be interacting it or what they might be doing. So you can kind of understand a little bit there. In terms of test learning afterwards, obviously data is really important to be able to show you what people are doing. It doesn't show you why they do it. That's the problem with one. You can kind of see where they might be clicking around. But it doesn't really show you the why as to what they're what they're doing. Depending on what your product or services that might be enough, you might see in the journey, the entry points might be fine to say, OK, well, we think that they jump from there to there because of that reason. But if you're really trying to understand from a qualitative perspective, you really need to be kind of speaking to people rather than trying to make your own assumptions, because we will all make our own assumptions otherwise and we will all inject our own biases around what we think needs to be improved. Yeah, that makes sense. OK, we have some questions that have come in. So let me just rattle off a few. What are some of the most effective methodologies used in generating unhappy paths and regarding what ifs? How do we know when it's enough? That's quite a lot there. How what are some methodologies in generating unhappy parts? I believe we spoke about some. Are there any more or should we move on to the next question? I wish I could say, you know, it's enough when you've done three unhappy paths, like I wish there was a blanket rule. But unfortunately, there isn't. I think that again, like I said, it depends on what you're doing. So sometimes an unhappy path might be on a micro UI level and it might literally just be the unhappy path is if they click this thing, then they're blocked because they can't go any further. Otherwise, it might be when if you're really zoomed out and looking from a kind of like a service design or ecosystem perspective, it might be loads more unhappy paths because of how people where people have entered where people are exiting where they're dropping off or that kind of stuff. You'll start generally generating a lot more there. So as I mentioned, I think some of the methodologies are particularly from your own perspective as you get into the rhythm of it is please if you're doing journey mapping or service blueprinting just add in a risk row to consciously make yourself think about it. Then if you can, as I mentioned, think about who you're designing for in terms of the user types. So what might they be doing? What might be they be distracted by? What environment are they using it in? What's the context? Have they got, you know, screaming child in the back of the car? Are they driving? Are they going to be distracted? All of these things you can start thinking of in terms of even just yourself like brainstorming. As I mentioned, I'm going to hopefully try and bring out some tools over the next few months to try and help generate some of these. Because I know at the moment a lot of it is me just continually saying just think about what can go wrong. And it's not as easy for everyone to be able to do that. I completely appreciate that people's brains work in different ways. And we want to try and make sure, OK, if I've gone through this checklist, then it's done. I've covered it. I've covered enough. But a lot of it is, like I said, trying to tune yourself to always think about what can go wrong. And we might not cover all the cases. And that is fine up front. You might not think about, oh, well, we didn't realize that somebody would be using that thing with that hand or whatever. Those types of things you will probably be uncovering once the thing is out in the world and being actually used. We can't mitigate every single risk before we release something we absolutely can't. But we can have a high confidence that what we are producing hopefully shouldn't be giving anybody a negative impact. And people will always people will always use things in ways that we don't expect. They will always cut shortcuts. They will always misread something. And, you know, you will only learn that sometimes post release because as much as you can frame research questions, as much as you can test with as many people as you can, the real goal is then doing that evaluation and then trying to go back and alter your product and maybe see, okay, there's an happy path here that we didn't cater for. I don't feel like I really answered that fully. I kind of just said, I'll bring out some tools in a few months. I wanted to throw in something here. With the heuristic evaluations, they have a severity rating. So it will be interesting if you could kind of like categorize or give a risk, a rating, right? So in the heuristic evaluation, this is how they've done it. Frequency, which the problem occurs. Impact, is it easy or difficult to overcome and then persistence? Like is it one time? So that I think, you know, rating that would make a lot of sense because then you basically formulated it and you're like, okay, it's a zero or a five and you can kind of, you know, plot or, you know, dot vote however you want and agree on a number. And that means it's right, we definitely do that, especially in where I'm at the moment, we have a lot to do around clinical safety. As I mentioned, I do a lot with medications and we do work for a clinical safety officer to look at things like what's the likelihood? And then we have this lovely kind of co-coordinated table thing that we go through and to be able to quantify it a little bit more. I think as much as we can take the subjectivity out of decisions, the better, the better, to be honest. That's slightly different to obviously initial ideation where you're trying to come up with some of these unhappy paths. That's right. What kind of techniques do you use to share your discovery work into user behaviors with the wider product team or internal stakeholders and get people on board with your initial assumptions? Ooh, I do lots of different things. So yeah, lots of different things. And I have done lots of different things across different types of jobs I've been in. So as I mentioned, I've been in kind of agencies and consultancies where you're like embedding into clients. Whereas at the moment, I'm more kind of in house. So the processes are slightly different. If I'm doing a big discovery project in house or something where it's more at the moment, it's like generative research. It'll be very much looking at, you know, kind of standard process of here's all of our assumptions. Here's our hypotheses. Here's our riskiest assumptions. And are they kind of correct or not? Are they proved or disproved? And then what I'll do is generally I love a notion document and my team love a notion document. So what we'll do is a lot of the time if we're on a specific focus area, it'll be what's the user outcome we're trying to achieve? What's the business outcome we're trying to achieve? And then what's the risk associated to that? Both risks to the user and risks to the business. So I'll always highlight it. And then I'll put things like if it's a research project, it'll be high or low. Is this a high severity where people have interacted with it? Or it's come up frequently? Is it low severity? Or is it high frequency, low impact, all that kind of stuff? What I'll also do then is before we actually do a discovery project, when we when we gather a lot of our assumptions, is I've got this matrix, which isn't my own. I'm not going to remember the lady's name who came up with it. But it's generally a likelihood of us impact matrix and it can help you define what type of research you can do based on your assumptions. So if it's like low impact, low likelihood, low risk, it might be a case of, do you know what, we can shift measure and learn versus high impact, high risk, something like that is, okay, we really need to do some qualitative research. So before we even do the research projects, discovery projects and things like that, regardless of whether it's evaluative or genitive research, we'll kind of have an approach and understanding between all of us before we go, before we go in terms of, okay, what type of research we need to do, based on these assumptions. So I'm not just going off into my own, like, research hole for for a week or so, and get everyone on board for beforehand. And then when I'm presenting all of that stuff back, it's, okay, here's the things that actually we cannot, we cannot ship this feature without addressing this problem because of X, Y, Z, or this one, highly, fairly confident that it's going to be fine, or actually we need to do some more research. So a lot of it is, again, as part of, maybe I'll do a research report, I don't know, maybe I'm just signing up to do more things now. But maybe I'll try and show some of the ways that I present risk across the whole kind of process over the next coming months, which might be helpful to people. Yeah, that'd be really cool. What methods have been successful for you in getting user input from a range of stakeholders considering risks on HappyPass, Workshop, Async, Miro, something else? Yeah, so definitely, including lots of different people because design is only, you know, I'm not like an engineer, I'm not as much as I love to think I'm technical, I'm really not technical compared to engineers. So it's definitely understanding getting input from everyone else. And that be like, that might be, like said, a pre-mortem of getting different members of the team in. It might even also be talking to across other people, across the organization. So people like support is really great to talk to and customer success are really good to talk to as well, because they capture what people, what concerns people are having frequently. So getting all those different insights across the business is really, really beneficial because you're there's only so much we can know, right? There's only so many signals that we can latch on to. So if it's a, again, it depends what type of project we're doing. But if it's something where we're doing specifically on an area of the product, it might be putting out a message onto Slack and saying, I'm looking at this thing, customer support, support, sales, everyone has anybody heard anything about this and can you pull in any of your insights around the segments that we're looking at, the types of users, any problems they're experiencing or the types of questions that they're asking, because that can give you a bit of an insight into how people expect to interact with something. So what we've done is we spent a little bit of time working with customer support and with customer success and sales to really almost like train them to ask why. So if people are giving feature requests, they really dig into the why for us, which is really great. I've actually included a risk into their feedback. So they'll say, I've spoken to this partner, this is the request they want. This is the problem they're trying to solve. This is the risk to the user if we don't solve it and this is the risk to the business if we don't solve it. So it gives designers really, really good insight into what are they, what are they coming up against. But generally, I think the more interactive, the better, right? So if you get everything into a mirror, depends on people. I'm very aware of when I work with different people, not everyone loves to jump into a workshop. It might be someone's worst nightmare. Depending on, you know, some people just like to be heads down working and that's fine. So let's try and make sure that we account for people that prefer to do async, but still want to contribute, but might want to in a slightly different way. Like I said, in house is slightly different because you get a gauge of your team members pretty easily. If you're a consultant or an agency, it's slightly different because you might be going in not really knowing who you're working with. But still, those are slightly different scenarios to prepare for in terms of making sure people have got expectations and can submit things beforehand. But ideally, it's not just it's not just on the designer. It's a whole team thing to be able to try and identify the impact that we can have to people really. Yeah, I've worked with a client where they are they don't really like meetings and I'm also OK being completely async. So I just set up the workshop board and send them be like, hey, can you, you know, buy the end of tomorrow? Can you just put some ideas down and then we can reconvene and work like that just back and forth. I think which is quite nice, I think. I I had a question selfishly and then now it's completely out of my head. So it's a bit late for me. So let's go. Let's move on. We'll users really share deeply what they do instead of saying how do you know or how do you approach knowing this? I guess. I guess it's we don't know if they're lying. I mean, unless we hook them up to a lie detector. But as I think you mentioned earlier, Emily, which is you have to see them in action and then kind of benchmark what they've said and what they do and and get more data points on that. Would you concur or anything to add there? Yes, I think that obviously I'm not an expert in like behavioral research. There's probably a lot more smart people that are able to to alludes to more than how to get those those proper nuggets. And I think that a lot of it is. It's difficult, OK, so it depends on the type of research you're doing, how you ask it. So if you're doing like a survey, then you're not going to pick up on those like emotional triggers of how somebody is describing something, the words are using their body language, all that kind of stuff. So surveys, for example, might be harder to gauge, OK, what what do people actually doing? Again, qualitative qualitative research of being on a call with somebody, if it's like a one to one and it's not like an unmoderated user interview, but if it's a one to one, sometimes obviously it can be harder. You can dig have to dig a little bit more. Some participants are more difficult to speak to than others. And you can really start to try and think, OK, how do we get them to? How do we get to the source of the insights that we want to get to here? I think, if I'm honest, it's really hard to describe, but a lot of it comes with experience with being able to understand, OK, are we going down a path here? Are they just telling me like what they think I want to hear? Are they actually opening up? Are they? And you might have to come from slightly different angles. Like I said, it might be around, OK, this isn't working. So that in your head, not actually on an interview. But, you know, this might be working. Let's try a different approach. Can you tell me about how you do this? Or have you ever thought about this? Like it's less about, you know, showing me where you would click or even, you know, sometimes people might prefer to do that. You might people feel pressured and they are worried about doing something wrong. People are worried about doing something wrong. They don't want to break things. They don't want to insult you if they think you're the designer. But it's a lot of how can you make the in terms of research? How can you make the participant as comfortable as possible to be able to share kind of the truth with how they expect to interact with something? And like I said, some of it isn't if you're doing research before people have used it before. That's very a first time user research is very different to somebody that's like an existing continuous user. And both are good, right? People that are first time users are really good because they don't know what's behind that menu. They don't know where to click. They don't know how to use a thing versus existing users. You might show them ask you how to do something. And you might see, oh, they're doing some really weird paths here. Okay. And it's very, very different. I feel like we're going very heavy into research now. I'm really fine. Sorry, I'll try to I'll try to put it out. Fine. I think Rob has a question. You spoke about getting your why from others. How can you discover? Wait, how you discover you are working on the legitimate why versus an influenced one? You understand that, Emily? Or shall I read it again? I you just spoke about getting your why from others. Did I say how can you discover your work on a legitimate why versus an influenced why? I don't know if that means I don't know when that question came in. I can't see when that question came in to know which bit we were talking about. So I don't know if it's don't if Rob, if you're still there and might be able to rephrase the question a little bit in terms of what the why is. Is it the why of the problem? Is it the why of like why somebody is using things versus an influenced why? Yeah, we might need some clarification here, Rob. Or happy to speak afterwards. Yeah, sure. Yeah. That makes sense. We are running out of time and I don't think we have any more questions for Emily. You've been dropping some major bombs and it's been absolutely amazing picking your brain. I'm sure there's a lot of people looking forward to the things that you're also bringing out soon. But no no pressure and no rush, please in your own time. And I'm pretty sure that folks will be really excited to see that. So yeah, I just want to thank you again. It's been lovely. What would you like to plug before we go? Yeah, so firstly, thank you everyone so much for actually coming. First of all, LinkedIn Live probably could tell. But yeah, first of all, LinkedIn Live, so thank you so much for sticking around. And you can just find me on LinkedIn. That's all where I am at the moment. Potentially trying another platform at some point, but yeah, all in on LinkedIn for the moment. So so feel free to send me a DM and thank you again so much for coming. Awesome. Thank you, Emily. And from me, just some housekeeping. So next, LinkedIn Live is March the 6th. And I'll also drop a link down below so you guys can get notified if you are interested in joining us for this by monthly LinkedIn Live. And and thank you again to Emily and thank you all to the audience. And I will see you very, very soon. Bye. Let's bring Emily out here for one final. Bye. Thanks, everyone.