Move fast and DON'T break things - Vonny Laing (UX Lead, Student Loans Company)

Vonny Laing is a user-centred design lead at the Student Loans Company, part of the UK government, where she oversees a service used by millions of people at every stage of their higher education journey. She has held roles spanning UX design, content design, and head of design across both public and private sectors, and completed an MBA specifically to earn the language of business — and with it, a seat at the table where design decisions get made.

We discuss why designing from the majority inward produces invisible failures, how flipping to an underserved-first model creates a halo effect for all users, and why government service assessments make the happy-path approach structurally untenable. Vonny shares how a single day of guerrilla research at a further education college surfaced a critical gap between student loan payments and universal credit eligibility that years of data had never revealed — and why synthetic users can never replicate that. We also get into her "eat your greens" principle for designing across a user's whole life; the case for disaster thinking over happy-path optimism; how stories and verbatims move executives more reliably than dashboards; and why designers who learn to speak business become a secret weapon in any organisation.

Chapters:
(00:53) Welcome and introductions
(01:23) Vonny background
(02:10) Moving fast in the civil service
(04:02) The UK government digital community
(05:05) The pyramid model
(07:03) Underserved versus edge case users
(08:09) Designing at population scale
(09:43) Service assessments and design accountability
(11:01) Discovery research methodology
(13:25) Finding users invisible in the data
(16:22) Bridging gaps you cannot fix
(18:42) Eat your greens: needs versus wants
(20:07) Designing for users over time
(21:04) Worst-case scenario thinking
(22:11) Mining complaint logs and prioritising
(25:47) Why synthetic users fall short
(28:12) Where automated testing has a role
(29:19) Leave the building: guerrilla research
(33:03) Communicating research through storytelling
(36:29) Why Vonnie did an MBA
(39:03) Design's ceiling in organisations
(42:04) Wrap-up

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You need to know that your product has to work in a low data environment, be able to be used by one hand, and be interruptible. And if it doesn't do that, it doesn't work in the real world. Trying to design for a particular niche or those core users or a happy path that would never survive a service assessment. Human beings aren't represented in the data, especially not in an LLM. They can do incredible facsimile of a person. They can never give you the full life, the complexity, things that would never show up in your data.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

How do you approach the idea of the person evolving and the service evolving?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Here's the situation, here's the complication, here's the result, here's the recommendation. And you don't need an agency to go away and do that. If a designer can talk business, they're a secret weapon in your organization. They're bringing that business knowledge into the design process as well.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Vonnie, welcome. We're live backstage at Mind the Product Conference here in London.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

How are you doing today? Yeah, I'm doing good. Very excited to talk later. I've been practicing in uh hotel room overnight. And uh yeah, it's lovely to be here. So thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Fantastic. And we're very excited to talk about this. You've got a really great story, some really interesting stuff to talk about. But people who are listening probably don't know you yet. So quick intros first. Do you mind? Uh just what do you do now and how did you get into this world?

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Yeah, so I'm Bonnie Lang. Uh, right now my job title is uh user-centered design lead. I work for the Student Loans Company, which is part of the UK government, looking after that loan service, right, from the point that a person is thinking about going to university to when they have either repaid their loan or it's been written off at the end of the term, uh, and making sure that service works really well for every user. Um I've had many job titles over the year. Uh, I've been head of design looking after things like UX, content design, service design. Um, I've been a UX designer proper, I've been a content designer, I've also been a web manager, digital manager, all of those things. But they have all involved looking after a digital product or service, whether that is a website, an app, or as I said, a government service as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

And the talk you're going to be doing today is about moving fast and breaking things, or or probably moving fast and not breaking things. So yeah, so I'm curious about this because civil service, moving fast is hard enough, and breaking things obviously a really, really bad idea when you're a utility when people depend on you rather than just have a consumer choice in it. And it's I mean, the whole ethos has been problematic from day one. Where do you even start with this?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Oh gosh, yeah. Where do you start? Well, everything in the civil service is a wicked problem. So there isn't like a neat start and a neat end. And I think a lot of what we're trying to do is uh interventions to make sure that we are making things for better for people at the point that it really, really matters. And I think, you know, the civil service has this reputation about being this large, beymouth, slow-moving. It is those things too, but within it you have these like real pockets of brilliance. And, you know, I I think anyone who's been aware of design in the UK has known over the last uh 15 years about government digital service, really world-class leaders in terms of working in a multidisciplinary way, working in a user-centered way, and um working fast and doing deep research and really transforming services. And I think it's about finding what you can do and then putting your best efforts towards that. And these organizations are changing and they're learning from one another as well, which um, you know, doesn't really happen in the private sector. So we'll have the Ministry of Justice sharing how they do things with us, or you know, um DEFRA or HMRC. So we have this giant community of uh sort of digital experts and a real focus on those digital skills, and we're all uplifting each other together. So we have that benefit um as well.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Yeah, I've been really impressed. There's the whole one team gov thing here in the UK that I've seen. Uh I've done some work with a couple areas of the civil service, and I'm in communities with people in the product and delivery uh practices, and I've seen people move around from ministry to ministry and service to service, and just the the amount of openness and sharing that people have is is really fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yeah, it's wonderful. It's really um collegiate is probably the word that I would describe. So I have my you know direct colleagues in the department that I work for, but I know that if I have a problem, I can hop on the UK government's lack, throw a question out there, and then I will immediately get a whole raft of responses, uh, and you know, people willing to share. Here's a thing I tried, here's what I've used, here's the pattern for this, here's what the research supports. So it's really like having, you know, tens of thousands of colleagues rather than just the ones that are sitting uh in the room beside me.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

That's fantastic. It's always nice to hear that. Um, one of the things that I really liked in the presentation that you're gonna be doing today is you have a pyramid.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Oh, the pyramid.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Pyramid's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Um so let's talk a little bit about what's in the pyramid, but what do you, before we talk about the specific layers, what's the idea? You have a uh a bottom-up and a top-down version of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Yeah, yeah. So um obviously I've worked between both the public sector and the private sector. So I, you know, kind of had a foot in both worlds for a long time. I've worked in companies where it's really you need to ship something really fast and you know, deliver that value for stakeholders, make that money. Um, we we need to get it out quickly. And so you again, it's best efforts, people doing their best um job, but you often don't have that time to do the deep research, and you are thinking about the happy path. So, how do we get most people through this? What does that sort of golden thread through the product look like? And so you design around those, those core users, what are the things that we expect them to be doing? What are they going to need from us? And especially if you're working in a sort of an MVP type environment, that thinnest slice you're often serving, you know, your happy path customers and then building around from that. So you're starting with your core users, your typical users, your average users. These are the words that I use in my presentation again. And then the rest of the experience kind of trickles down, cascades. Um what I found with that is that people um they either cope, they adapt, or they leave. And a lot of the time that's invisible from you, especially if you don't have good feedback loops with your research. And so I am talking about uh, you know, really flipping that on its head, which you know is a practice that's come from inclusive design, designing for accessibility, whereas if you actually go out to the edges and you look at the people who are struggling the most, the people that are having to really fight tooth and nail to make your product or your service work for them, if you get it right for them, everyone else gets those benefits as well. So it has that lovely halo effect.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

And so you've got the uh the the four levels of the pyramid. You start with the core, and then it goes out to the typical user, the underserved user, and then the edge case. Yeah. What's the difference between underserved and edge?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah, so I I think it's it's about how difficult things are for them. And what I often talk about and what I'm talking about in my talk today as well is it's not just about how difficult things are for them within your product, for example. It's about um all the other things that are going on in their life as well. Because people are complex and lives are really complex as well. So, you know, underserve might be this is a user group that we know that we could serve, but we've never really reached them before, whereas your most disenfranchised, most disadvantaged, might have never even considered that your product or your service could be for them. Or they might be using it when they, yeah, you know, they they they don't want to use it. An example I always like to give as well is like the you know, the prison service. That's something that um families have to use as well. They don't, you know, necessarily want to have to do that, but they have to engage with it. So um, if you're thinking about what that experience looks like for them, designing with them in mind, then it it makes it better for everyone because that clarity that they benefit from, clear next actions, good support, everybody else gets that as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

And it's an easy argument to make for all the the there's the typical things of things like curb cuts and uh uh closed captioning and things like that as things that were originally done for an underserved or uh or edge case audience, but the benefits have been incredible for everyone and definitely gone up. But when you're doing working in a commercial space, especially when you're trying to do something new, best practice that we talk about in products is usually start with a niche and as big a niche as you possibly can get to, but start with them, try and get some penetration there, and then you can expand out towards the the edges. But when you work in civil service, when you work in gov, it doesn't work that way as much. You did it's you need to get to everybody.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Yeah, um I literally cannot do that in my job. So uh we we often talk about in civil service you are you know you're designing for everyone for the for the public, and it's often a population level, right? So it's not a niche. So uh, you know, where where I work, we are dealing with you know millions and millions and millions of people, like the user numbers are insane. And they have to use the service if they want to access higher education, they you know they have to go through uh student loans to do that. And also we we've we've built in safeguards as well because it's um it's also the public's money as well. So, you know, everyone who pays taxes, that service has to work for them. And when we design a service, a product, um, when we launch something or when we're improving something, we have to go to service assessment. And that's something that I I think a lot of people don't really understand if they, you know, they're outside of the public sector. So we basically have to go and represent the design decisions that we've made, the research that we we've um we've undertaken with a panel of our peers who are trained to poke holes, assess, follow the threads backwards. That sounds like we're just designing to tick a box. But what it does is knowing that that's there and knowing that you're gonna have to defend your design decisions essentially to someone who represents the the public, really engineers some of that good practice and that bigger picture of thinking. And, you know, for us, um trying to design for for a particular niche or those core users or a happy path that would never survive uh service assessment because they would say, Well, what about all of these other people here that you've made a deliberate decision to not serve right now and to address in the future? It just it would never pass muster.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Well, there's the deliberate decision and then there's the oops, we just missed them because we didn't realize that this population wanted to use the service or this circumstance existed. So let's talk about the type of research you do in the beginning to establish what is the totality of the service, what is the all the different circumstances that people might be in that you need to address. How do you even get started with that?

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Oh, yeah, that's that is the most difficult question, and that is the biggest part in any uh any discovery. So we we will often do uh, you know, if if I'm talking about a service, for example, which is what I work on right now, we will look at the as-is service. So we'll map out here's what we think we know in terms of how that works. And then we'll go and we try and find signals in our data. And then from the signals in the data, we will kind of develop a research plan. We we will have a version of what are to be we would like that to look like. We'll often use things like experience principles or service outcomes. So, what are the things that we we know that um we want a user to achieve, our shareholders to achieve, and our colleagues who are running everything backstage to achieve if a person moves through the system um correctly in the way that we like. And then we just have to get out there and we have to go and see people. And that is something that we like to do regularly, so short, sharp, and often, I would say, rather than you know, a giant six-month ethnography, etc. Like if we have a hypothesis that's brewing, we like to get out there and do a sniff test like really quickly. So that's some of the stuff that I am talking about today as well. But as uh as a civil service, and particularly in my organization, we are moving towards uh continuous discovery as well. So rather than it being, you know, we're gonna go and do a little bit of discovery up front, we're gonna design a thing, then we'll maybe get back to doing some iteration when things are live. We are moving to more of that kind of tri-track agile model where you literally have a team who are just off discovering the whole time and then feeding that back to your multidisciplinary teams as well. So we're it's uh it's hard to turn a big ship, and that's what we're trying to do right now. But having that constant curiosity of is this working? And getting out there regularly and challenging our assumptions. And and you know, I like to make sure that everyone is is you know spending a bit of time with our users. We like to make sure our executive team are doing things like call listening, for example, or actually getting out there and to do doing a um, you know, shadowing a research session with some user researchers, UX designers as well. So that that that curiosity is is there. Is this working for everyone, you know, top to bottom, from the person on the phone to the person answering to the minister?

SPEAKER_01 13:25

You said you're looking initially for signals in the data, but one of the key things in this sometimes is the people who aren't represented in the data at all. There is no signal because they're not being served at all. Is there anything you can tell us? Is there ever been a time when you found a population of users that you or potential users that weren't being served at all and you needed to to uh bring them into the fold?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, um absolutely. So I can I can maybe give you an example of some research that we did recently, and it was a single-day ethnography, it was two people, and we went out to do a bit of research in uh in a college in a an area of um sounds really technical, like multiple deprivation. But what I mean by that is it was a place where you know employment was low, people were struggling with lots of different things, and oftentimes when you're thinking about higher education in the UK, you're thinking about universities, you're thinking about Russell Group universities, well resourced, but lots and lots of further education college colleges there are supposed to be. Yeah, for tree schools, exactly. And this was one of those places. So we went out to talk to them about um the pre-apply phase. So the point that you decided, okay, I'm gonna study, um, you know, we assume a sort of linearity that I'm gonna go study, then I'm gonna get my finance, then I'm gonna go to you know, university, it was so much messier than we had ever really understood. And what we found here as well was many of the students relied on universal credit. They had started off in doing a little bit of further education, but because they had been successful in that, they had rolled on to doing degrees and they were often using uh needed to use things like disabled students' allowance and other things they had with all of this patchwork and complexity. But what we found when we spoke to people was that there was a gap between their student loan landing and their universal credit being ineligible. So the government has this target to get more and more people into jobs, better opportunities, enabling opportunity. But there's gaps, there's scenes between these different services. So we never would have seen that in our data at all. We would have seen a person rolls on, they take out a student loan, they um, you know, they're successful, and then they enter repayment, or perhaps we might see a signal around, you know, someone has, you know, dropped out of their course, and we would never know why. And it was only by going and speaking to people that it's actually because there's a number of different government services that don't talk to one another, there's no data sharing around that, and the person is kind of picking up the burden. And that was we only found that out by going and talking to people, and it wasn't even what we were going to try and ask about in the in the first place. So hopefully that's uh uh a good example. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

So, okay, so there's the gap between student loan and universal credit. This is not in your gift to fix in your agency. This is much bigger, this is you know big enterprise, multi-enterprise type stuff. It's almost Conway's law type stuff. Yeah, yeah, really uh at the countrywide scale. Is that something that that we're set up to to work on? Or is that something we should Yeah?

SPEAKER_00 16:44

So can I go and fix that gap? I can't, but what I can do is handhold and support the user better. So thinking about what they need when they're dealing with that, they probably need clearer information and guidance. They probably need, you know, a better response from our virtual assistant, they probably need someone on the phone who can understand that context and give them the right information as well. So what we we can do, we can't go and fix the seam, but we we can be aware of that context. And then, as I was saying earlier as well, if we've we've done those things, other people benefit from that as well. Because that is a user who is fighting tooth and nail to get through the service, fighting for their their education, you know, really trying hard to better their lives. And they're exactly the people that we want to be able to support to do this because I think it's a myth. It's coming back to that idea of you know the average user that you know everyone is just gonna float through a service because life happens to people. It just happens that a lot of life is happening to those people right now. So if we can solve that for them, we'll we'll extend those benefits to others.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Okay, so if I'm understanding right, it's you can design with empathy in this case. So it's exactly highlight the problem, understand that it's not in your gift to solve, but don't uh deny the problem to the to the uh user. Give them enough information to say this is where you can go, or this is a known issue. Here are some resources to try and do it. And I'm sorry, this is not uh this I've definitely had this with with uh bots gaslighting me about uh no, you're not seeing this, or they're only programmed to respond to specific patterns.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Yeah, exactly. And um I I often talk about like designing for the conversation, right? So especially when you have a big service like that that people have like a lifelong relationship with, they're gonna be talking about it with other people, or they're gonna be talking about it with like their universal credit advisor as well. So helping them to have a really clear understanding of here's my picture, here's what I need to know from you so that I can move through this service better. That's empowering them as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Okay, so you had two big approaches that you talk about in your and I love the title of that. The first one, eat your greens.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Eat your greens.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

What is eat your greens?

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Eat your greens is about the difference between user wants and user needs. And I I heard this phrase from uh my wonderful service designer friend Vic. Uh, and I just thought it was so perfect because you know, again, in in the public sector, we can't just design for what a person wants. You know, I find I'm thinking about other things in financial services as well, like uh, you know, pensions, right? For example, you when you're 25, you don't want to think about being old and being skimmed. So, you know, auto-enrollment exists because we know that that person is gonna need that buffer in in the future. So for us, it's about trying to see around the corner for the user and kind of seeing underneath the the things that they tell you that they they want right now. So we we talk about a user being a person moving through time. So there's the user right now and what what you need today, but who are you in two years' time? Who are you in five years' time, and what are you gonna need from the service or the product then? So it's trying to get under the skin of that as well, um, and really making sure that there's a little bit of okay, so these are these are definitely the things that they need and want right now, but these are probably the things they don't want to think about yet. So we're gonna have to think about a way to manage that, to surface these things and help them to think about them because that's a responsible thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

In this case, people change over time, yeah. And but we are usually starting with a hypothesis, uh research told us yes, we want to fix this specific problem. But you're trying to design for uh as people evolve, and so the service isn't just one path, it is an evolving path. Yeah, um, it is dealing with for me as I am now, you are as you are now, us as we get older, yeah, people who are younger than us do and and all that. So trying to design for all these different use cases at once. As a designer, where where do you start with principle-wise? And how do you have the conversations with people to say, right, this flow seemed really obvious, and yes, it fixes age from, but let's think about through multiple lenses. Yeah. So that's kind of where I want to start with just a couple of getting started principles, yeah. Any examples you might have.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

So the the one that I reach for most often is what's what's the absolute worst thing that could happen. And it's almost like disaster thinking. So it's like flip your happy path on its head. Like, what is the absolute worst situation that a person could find themselves in here? You know, and I you look at things like the social media situation right now. I don't feel like any of this was inevitable. I think, you know, we we could have seen the difficulties and the you know, the problems and the things that were were coming that way. The other thing I would say as well is like your users are probably screaming out and trying to tell you stuff and it's just not made its way to you as well. You know, one of my favorite things to do is go mining through the complaint logs, look at your chat logs, get your call listening done. Uh, because people will be telling your organization all the time about the things that aren't working. And, you know, underneath some of those things as well, you'll you can start to follow some of those threads forward and start to swap those patterns um as well. So I think it's um it's about not assuming the best. You know, you hope for the best in your service, but really actually. Think about well, what is the worst possible thing that could happen to a user in this service or as a result of the service? What are the mistakes if we get it wrong? And then working back from that.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

So um I want to ask you a little bit more about prioritization in that space. Because one of my favorite tricks in the past has been hiring people from the support desk.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Because they are brilliant, they are the most empathy, they know how the service actually works, but they want to prioritize every single problem super high. And they want to fix every single customer problem. And sometimes that's not the case. That's not necessarily the right thing to do. Maybe sometimes you want to tackle tackle root causes. Maybe sometimes there are compliance problems that are bigger and do take priority. So how do you deal with when you mine the complaint logs or talk to support and spend your time on there? And all of a sudden, you know, it's the same thing as sales just coming out of the last meeting and saying, This customer said this. This is the most important. I just experienced this with somebody, then therefore it's the most important. How do you keep make sure to keep it in perspective?

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Um, yeah, so I would love to come back to that point about hiring people from the service desk as well, because I feel like a colleague panel as well as a customer panel is a wonderful, wonderful thing because they will tell you the experience because they hear it, you know, uh first hand. Um, but that's you that's your job, I think, as a service designer, as a product manager as well, is to uh and we also have things like lean practitioners and other things that we can uh rely on at work, which is wonderful. Um your job is to interrogate that and to look for the bigger themes that are coming out of that. And then again, it's about the stakes, especially for me in that public sector context. In some ways it's somewhat easier because if you know, if someone like literally cannot get through the service or is falling out of the service or might be getting 72 different items of mail, you know, they might they might still be getting through the service, but that doesn't really work for them. So I think it's our job to take what's really hot and understand that experience from our you know our colleagues who are you know having to pick up the phone and do that really hard work. I do not envy them at all and hear that, but then set that against the data. And then I think it's about what's the what's the path forward? It it's you know, if this if not this now, we need to get to this next and give yourself almost like a service level agreement. We're gonna get to this in three months' time. And you start to really sort of plan that into your your backlog as well. But you're you have to be a pattern seeker in this job, and what you will often find, you know, is between everything that's urgent and important, there's this that stakes piece as well. So is this mild inconvenience or is this someone's absolutely screaming out for help um over here? And that's your job to really look at that regularly and try and understand what that means in your service and if that's changing over time.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

And you said you want to come back to recruiting from support and success team.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Yeah, I love that. You know, it's especially you know, being more in a service design space than just sort of a UX space right now as well. They are like you're they're a great proxy user a lot of the time as well. Um, you know, not to say that you should just rely on your proxy users as well, but I again if I'm thinking about, you know, it's it's sometimes very difficult to get you know user research moving in an organization, get a couple of you know, your your colleagues in and show them some things. Is it like here here's what we're thinking? For example, we're gonna redesign the screen. What problems do you what's the phone call that you're gonna get off the back of that? Because they can tell you, like they hear things all of the time, and um, you know, they get the emotion with that as well, and that emotion is often really kind of missing in you know in your data. So you you get that nuance as well. And I think it's really important to have a good relationship with your support colleagues as well, because the problems that you create or don't fix in your problem uh in your product, sorry, ends up being their problem.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

Makes sense. Okay, so we we're gonna talk more about interviewing real users in a moment, but I'm curious one of the trends that's going on, or one of the trends that's being promoted, is uh using the data more and creating synthetic users. Oh god, yeah, and just want to get you, I can tell already, but expand a little bit more about how you feel about this.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Uh okay. So uh I think the whole premise of a synthetic user is awful. And the reason being is that um you human beings aren't represented in the data, especially not in an LLM. Biases are designed into all of our technology all the time. And they can do, you know, a credible facsimile of a person, but they can never give you the full life, the full lived experience, the complexity, things that would never show up in your data, that they would never even tell you in a survey, that you only get when you build rapport with a real user and they've warmed up and they, you know, you've spent a little bit of time probing and listening and responding. Um that stuff just isn't in the data to begin with. And if and if it did, I you know, ethically as well, the idea of a synthetic user telling you a sob story about, you know, you know, growing up poor or having you know a disability or some other protected characteristic, I think, you know, it's like it's ethically really, really chonky. And I I feel like in a world where more and more of our work is getting automated, it hopefully frees up a bit more time to actually go and spend time with real people. And I feel like the idea of synthetic users and sort of synthetic research, it's gonna give you the warm fuzzies that you've done the job that you really need to do. You know, we've done a bit of research, we've tested that you haven't, unless you've you've you've been out and you've spoken to real people, you've watched people actually using your products. Like, I mean, they don't have arms or body. Like, so how can you actually see how a synthetic user is um is is using your your products? So I um, you know, I think the robots were supposed to do the the menial tasks so that we could do the really important stuff. I know that's massively reductive, but I would love um I would love it if the space that we're creating, uh, because we're using more of these tools, would allow us to actually go and do the really important high-value stuff.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

So my theory has been that it's they're really useful for things that are already known. So in the same way we do test-driven design uh when we're developing code, you can use synthetic approaches to crawl through the experience and say, are any of the problems we already know about are they showing up? So it's a it's a they we can use them to for testing purposes.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

But just because you've scored that test, it's only showing you that you haven't committed the problems uh that you already know about. You're not finding out anything new.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Exactly. And we, you know, we would call that judgment and gut feel, right? And that's the that's the stuff that you know when you're close to a product and or a service and you've worked on it for a long time. And you know, we'll do stuff as well, like, you know, I'll run an eye tracking bat bot over a page to see if I can understand where a person is gonna go. It's great for just like a quick indicator, but do not allow it to become the sum total of what you do and think about okay, what are we still missing here? What are the assumptions we're making that we have to go and challenge? And you can really only do that when you go out and speak to real people. So speaking of giving out and speaking, okay, so eat your greens was what you first leave the building is the same.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

So let's talk about where do you even start? Because especially now where people are trying to go incredibly fast. Yeah, the idea of leaving the building, but also a lot of people are scared of other people.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

They are scared of other people. Um, but if you're scared of other people, like you probably shouldn't be in this job. That's probably like a really uh, you know, that's probably an ungenerous thing to say. So uh maybe I'll just talk about where where I think we've gotten to now, right? I have uh I've been doing user research for a really long time. Back when I would literally make a paper prototype and I'd go out with a you know a red and a green marker and I would ask people to mark stuff up. Um that was just how we did things and we would do that regularly. And what has happened now is this whole cottage industry and bureaucracy is like spun up around user research. And what that has continued to do is create the perception that it's expensive, that it's lengthy, that you need your fancy research repository, you need your user Zoom licenses, no offense to user Zoom or you know, anyone like that, or user testing or something else. You know, you need your uh and you have to have incentive programs that yes, you do, for you know, your your your sort of bigger studies, but that doesn't preclude you from getting out there and doing stuff. And I I I often talk about like short, sharp research, like we used to call it gorilla research once upon a time. I very much take an Erica Hall Just Enough research approach to get out there, get out there often. And so what we will often do in in my world is like we'll just say, all right, we're gonna cancel our meetings for the day, and we're gonna go to this university, and we're gonna set up a trestle table, and we're gonna take a box of quality streets or celebrations, and we're just gonna grab people and we're gonna talk to them, and we're gonna note down the things that we hear. And then in that day, we we might speak to 10 years, 15, 30 people. We've got insights that we never would have had before. It hasn't cost us any money to do that, that's just part of the design process. You know, it costs us a train fair and suites essentially. What you will often find is if you ask people about things, they're really willing to talk to you about it and to tell you why it's awful. So you can do that like really quickly, really easily. And I just feel like every organization that I've ever been in, there is this real perception that, oh, there's no budget for research, there's no budget for that. It's like, well, just go and do it anyway, and just don't tell them. It's just part of the design process. That's what you have to go and do. So short, sharp, no frills, research. Is it going to be statistically robust? No, it's not, but it is gonna give you that sniff test and it is gonna give you uh, you know, the this is the direction we really have to probe in and probably do need to put a bit of money at this. Or here's the thing that's absolutely on fire. Here's this really egregious thing that we've missed. And you can only get that by going outside and doing that, and you can get that in a day. A day, like like I said, what the you know, the point I came back to before around different government services not working and people falling down through the gaps, that that came from an hour's research at uh at college. So you can get enormous value from just getting out there and even just watching people, you know. Uh, for example, um, and and I talk about this in my my uh talk later today as well. If you're you know watching someone use your product at a bus stop and they have, you know, a child in their arm, you need to know that your product has to work in a low data environment, be able to be used by one hand, and be interruptible. And if it doesn't do that, it doesn't work in the real world. Again, you only get that when you actually go out and see people, the context that people are actually using your product in. You don't even have to talk to them, just take notes.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Okay, there's one thing I'm gonna translate that you said, which is quality streets and celebrations. So for people not in the UK, cheap chocolate. Cheap chocolates. That's all it is. Yeah, right. Um when you've done this research, how do you then communicate it? Because there's this whole thing about people hiring expensive agencies to go out and do research and give people insights. And my my take on this is insight is an emergent quality. It's something that comes from you, it's it's a quality of understanding. I can give you a report, I can give you data points, but I can't create the insight or the feeling of empathy and understanding in you. I can just give you information. How do you communicate that what you've learned effectively so that other people are taking it on, the people who weren't on the research trip with you?

SPEAKER_00 33:34

So it's stories. I would say it's building your storytelling muscle, whether you're a product person, a designer, like that is the number one most important thing to do. Um, executives are super busy. They're, you know, you we have this perception that they want, you know, the fancy dashboards and the numbers. Stories are the things we remember. Human beings are built for that. So, you know, me going and telling them this is what happened with this particular user, they will remember that. So making sure that you spend a bit of time with the storytelling around that, also your verbatims. I find hearing things directly from your users, whether that's from your colleagues, whether that's from going outside, like actually putting some of the kind of key quotes in front of them. The other one that I always come back to is the um Barbara Minto's like pyramid principle as well. So, like, here's the situation, here's the complication, here's the result, here's the recommendation. And you don't need an agency to go away and do that. If you can structure your information like that, front load it with a here's the story, here's the thing that's really on fire, here's exactly what they told us, here's what's happening, and then here's what we recommend. And that is that that is that is a three-page deck.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

And there's a couple of poll quotes that are doing that storyboard or illustrating the pain point. Uh, it's even better if it's got audio or something, exactly. Or even a photo.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Exactly. And again, you know, there's that is a different job, uh, you know, to turn it into something that uh a designer can use, a product manager can use. But if you're just trying to get that buy-in and to get people to really understand that things need to change, that's just what you need is let them tell it themselves. Get that video, get that audio, get those verbettings in there, and they'll rem they will remember that far more than they remember their number.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Yeah, and it's a nicer way of doing it. I think it's the same principle people have had for years of let's leave an empty chair at the table to represent the customer and things like that. Yep. But this is an actual person that people really want to.

SPEAKER_00 35:15

Exactly, exactly. And we have, you know, we have a customer panel at work as well. So we we actually get people in every couple of months and we make sure the executives come to that as well so that they can actually hear directly from our customers. So, you know, a little bit of that, you know, bring them into your research. Like that you will often find that that's the thing that changes hearts and minds more than uh than a fancy deck that uh an agency have produced on your behalf.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

And when you go out to do these things, do you learn something every single time? Something abuse every time?

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Every single time, every single time. You know, you you learn people will say things that completely surprise you, you'll understand a level of complexity that they're dealing with that you've never heard before, or a completely different mental model. And that's another really important thing as well, is you know, we we think about our products and services in a very particular way because we design them, but someone else might have something, uh a different way of thinking about it that you know you never would have even considered before. I've been doing you know user research sessions for decades now at this point. Every single time I've done one, I learned something. I'm surprised, and I go back energized to go back into the design process.

SPEAKER_01 36:22

So, Val, a little bit more on storytelling. And this is there's a book that came out recently that I'm a huge fan of, uh, that Rich Miranoff wrote called Money Stories.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Which is brilliant and taught me a lot about just how to succinctly tell things and tell stories in a way that my stakeholders understand rather than using the terminology of product people. You went and did an MBA a couple years ago. I did. I did.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Why? Uh so the reason I went to do that is because um how do I how do I say this? Um I think there's a perception sometimes that designers sit in the corner and play with their crayons. And you know, I find that I'd gotten to, you know, a head of design job where you're in that like senior leadership, like executive leadership team, having conversations, and there is almost a perception that yeah, but you just do with you deal with the stuff that's touchy-feely, you make things look nice, and we talk about the numbers and the hard things in this room. So, you know, thank you very much. But we're gonna go and do this over there. Um, I did it so that I had a currency of conversations, so that when someone asked me about something relating to design or research, I could defend it in business terms and I could talk really honestly about you know the strategy and what it was we were trying to do as an organization, so that um, yeah, so that I had the language where I could do that, so that I could help make the right conditions for design and research in uh in an organization. And it has absolutely paid dividends. And it also surprises people sometimes when you when you go into a room and you can actually talk credibly about business uh as well. And I think it's we it actually really helped me to be able to communicate well with our product managers as well, because it it had all these extra benefits of just giving me a deeper insight into that world as well. And I think if a designer can talk business, like they are they're a secret weapon in your organization because it puts them in a position where they can um, you know, they're they're bringing that business knowledge into the design process as well. So they are um, you know, it's not something they then have to go and learn and defend afterward. They're thinking about it kind of the whole way through. Uh, and for me it was yeah, it was really interesting as well because there was nobody else in my MBA cohort who was a designer who decided to go and do a business degree. But uh, you know, then I I focused doing my sort of dissertation research around creating the right conditions within Agile to make sure that design flourishes uh in a in an organization as well. And yeah, it just continues to yeah, you know, pay pay those dividends every day. Didn't love doing stats, didn't love doing advanced maths, it's it's been a while. Um, but uh it's great because it does uh means that I can I can produce some really excellent charts and graphs now, which also really helped with the storytelling part.

SPEAKER_01 39:03

Other design, senior design people I've talked to have faced into this frustration, and it's a common frustration. You get to a certain point in your career and product people or tech people get into the next level of decision making and discussions, but design seems to hit a ceiling in the organization. Would you ever be tempted to go into just fundamentally a designer with your level of understanding of business? I don't understand the difference between what you do and what product does.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Yeah, I think it's really uh so I I think those things are like a really kind of uh like hand in glove. So some of the best relationships I I've ever had was with uh, you know, when I was head of design, was our head of product as well. Like we did everything together, like we were kind of like two halves of the same coin. Uh but it's really interesting, like you're often not represented at the highest level. You know, you'll have a uh, you know, a CTO or a CPO or a CTPO. I had one of those in our organization as well. But design often the chair doesn't exist there to begin with, you know. And uh I did um before I decided to come into the public sector, I did go for a chief design officer role uh and then had a little bit of a change of heart about whether that was the right thing for me to do right now. But again, I I think there's a real important role for sort of like a chief experience officer in there. But I think that that pulls all of those things together, and I think it can very credibly be a position that's held by a designer as much as a product person, but I often think it's because we're not taught to speak that language of business. And if you can do that, then I think you can sit in that chair.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

The only time I've seen it done well at a corporate level was uh many years ago I went to the uh the UK opening of uh Gary Huswood's film uh Objectified, and Johnny Ive was there. And this was bad, this is a long time ago now. This this was back when uh Mac monitors uh first went from CRT to flat screen, and he was being criticized by someone in the crowd because of the the specific chemicals that were being used in the flat screens as not being environmentally friendly. And he was able to talk about well, the laptops themselves are cut from a single sheet of uh aluminum aluminium here uh and the way they're designed minimizes waste. And these monitors, now a truck can carry thousands of them instead of dozens of them, essentially. So we are not no, we are not being environmentally friendly here, but the business decision around doing it in these other bits, and it was specifically relating design decisions to business outcomes.

SPEAKER_00 41:28

Yeah, it was a fantastic it's a superpower, and it honestly like people do not expect it. And it's almost like you you can watch yourself go up in a person's esteem if you can speak their language a little bit, and it makes them feel more at ease in your company um as well. So, yeah, designers studying business. I think I think it should just be part of uh design education. I could talk about that, but I won't. But um design education for for uh what's needed for today's design challenges and yeah, being able to speak business is um it's a really important skill.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Uh I couldn't say any more about that, so I think we've got to let you go in prep for your talk. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Oh, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

It's been uh it's been a pleasure. So thank you for having me. The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

And me, Randy Silver, also host by night. And I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

Luron Pratt is our producer, and Luke Smith is our editor.