Daniel Szuc interviews Gerry Gaffney on UX Hong Kong and UX trends

This is a transcript of a Radio Johnny interview. Listen (MP3, file size: 32.8 MB)

Daniel Szuc:

I'm speaking to Gerry. Gerry's going to be one of the speakers at User Experience Hong Kong 2011. That will be on the 18th February, 2011. We're really pleased to have Gerry sharing his knowledge with us. Gerry will be speaking on the topic "The Essential UX Toolkit" and running a workshop on the same topic as well.

So Gerry, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about what you'll be speaking to us about when you're in Hong Kong, and I guess why you want to share that with the community and why you think it's important.

Gerry Gaffney:

Well I guess I've been thinking about, if you like, how I would theme the talk and the workshop and there were two words that I sort of put together, and that was "inspiration" and "perspiration." So what I'm hoping is that I can talk to people in a way that will provide some… I think one of the things about going to a conference is you want to get fired up, you want to come away with more enthusiasm for the topic than you had when you went in there, so I'm hoping that we can both inspire people and provide some… the perspiration aspect is to provide some hands-on exercises. I'm hoping during the afternoon session to run people through a fairly fast-paced approach to the essentials of user experience and one of the things I really want to do is help people to, if you like, refocus to some extent on the fundamentals.

What I'll probably do is start off by having people think a little bit about why they're in UX in the first place, a little bit of a "know thyself" type of thing. What is it I'm doing as a user experience consultant, and then from that lead on to how to communicate that UX mission, if you like, in all the work that you do, and then focus in on the tools themselves in doing, for example, the user needs analysis. As you know Dano, one of my favorite quotations is from the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who said, "time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted," so it'll be about really understanding users and reminding ourselves that we are not our users. I know that this is something that people tend to go on about a little bit, but I think, as designers, we tend to fall into the, very frequently fall into the error of thinking that we know our users better than we do and I think we have to constantly remind ourselves and realign ourselves with who are users really are.

So we'll talk about, and do some practical user experience type of work and then we'll think about how to communicate the findings from your user experience research; how to, if you like, operationalise and to make them something that you can use throughout the design process, and do a little bit of design and then towards the end of the session a little bit on evaluation.

So very much hands-on and I hope very much aligned with what some of the other speakers are going to be talking about. Steve Portigal's topic on, you know, getting into more detail on analysing your findings from user research and applying them sounds really, really interesting and to some extent I'll be touching a little bit on that, and I know that Steve Baty and Janna, no doubt, when they talk about experience strategy will be covering some similar topics as well.

So what I'm hoping to do is provide, if you like, a little bit of glue for those things, but a little bit of a dip into some very practical hands-on exercises as well so that people, by the end of the session, can come away having actually carried out some activities. But also hopefully been reinspired and had a little bit of an opportunity to rethink why they're doing particular things because I think in many ways even though we have a toolkit of methods and practices that we carry out, what is more important is the fundamental philosophical underpinning of those things. Why are we doing it as individuals? Why are we doing it from our client's perspective and why are we doing it from a user's experience? And I think refocusing on them and looking at them as being the important things to learn and take away. I guess, obviously Daniel, I could talk about this rather endlessly but… I'm trying to get at the core of what I'm hoping to help people get out of the session.

Daniel:

Yeah, I think you've touched on some really great points and I just want to mention a few. The first one is, I think it's very easy for us to focus on tools first. I was at a prospective client meeting yesterday, it was actually a lunch, and I think one of the easiest things to do is to put the brochure on the table and just to run through services or to just start from a position of just running through tools. But I don't necessarily know that's the right starting point. I think the first thing you have to do is really understand the person or the business that you're working with and then determine the tools.

I think it's a little bit of a trap in a way to start with tools first or just throw solutions at a client situation or a client context without taking a step back and understanding it a little bit more deeply. And the second thing I thought was interesting and perhaps the one I want you to expand on a little is the one on communication.

We were at a conference in 2010 in Nanjing for the User Friendly Conference which was the UPA China conference. Don Norman was one of the keynotes and he stood up at one stage and started to talk about the importance of clear communication. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that or to expand on that a little bit in terms of, you know, we've done all of this great research, we've come out with findings and hopefully we've come out with some insights. Why is communication, why is clear communication important? What are some ways in which we can, I guess, report that back to our client or to the business?

Gerry:

Yeah, that's a really interesting topic and of course it's potentially a very deep one but let me take, I guess, a step back from it. You reminded me, when you were talking there, one of the things when I was lecturing at university, I used to say to my students: "How many people here are interested in setting up their own agency at some point?" And usually there was a significant number of people in the group who would say that they were interested in doing it and I would say if you do set up your own UX consulting or web design or web design agency, what's the single most important thing that you have to do? And people would come up with all sorts of ideas and I would usually say, well actually the most important thing you can do is send out invoices, because if you're not sending out invoices every month or every so often then your business will no longer exist because that's the bottom line for most organisations.

To lead on from that; what I'm saying there is that we need to please our clients. So we need to be able to make sure that our clients are getting something out of the work that we do. Now I know that for many people in user experience their passion, and certainly my passion, is in thinking about the users' needs and how we can serve the users. But in order to have the luxury to do that we have to convince our clients and the businesses that this is a useful thing to do from a bottom line. So in order to do that we need to understand our clients and when we talk about understanding our clients, it may be our management or the project management or the product owner that we're working for, or in a commercial setting it may be the client who's paying our cheque at the end of the day. We need to say, how are we servicing the client? What is it that we're doing for our client? And a large part of that is communicating to the client what it is that we could do for them. Now you've spoken about this before and so has John Rhodes and when I interviewed Morgan McKeagney on the User Experience podcast he was saying the same things, so it's not an unusual message but I think it's one that still, we need to reiterate and get across as frequently as possible. We need to be speaking the language of business. We need to be selling our clients something that is of use to them. We need to be saying at the end of the day you're going to have a measurably better outcome than if you didn't engage with this user experience.

And in order to communicate most effectively we have to do the very simple thing, which is our client or our audience analysis. We have to understand that if we're talking to businesses the sort of language we need to talk about is, you know, increased traffic, is increased conversion, is return on investment, is reduced costs; all the things that a business or a product team gains out of the work that we're doing, so we need to be able to, if you like, realign our thinking or realign our message in order to convince the people that need to be convinced that we need to take a particular course of action. So we need to talk business talk to business people, and street talk to street people, and user talk to user people and so on. So we need to be very, very good communicators. I think it's an absolutely key requirement for people in the profession.

Daniel:

Yeah, I think that's a great point and for me, I'm not sure whether it is actually business speak. I think that's important. But that's probably a discussion we can have in Hong Kong. I think there's certainly something to be said about finding a shared language and I think sometimes what tends to happen is, and I'm certainly guilty of it when I started in the profession, is you at times you come into a situation as very much a purist and you try and force fit people into your language, into your framework, into your toolset which to me seems, on reflection, a little bit unfair. And I think what we should be doing at least is meeting half way to determine how we create great products together.

So communication's important, as you said, and perhaps finding that shared language. You mentioned, I'm really pleased that you mentioned the UX podcast that you do which I think is, and please correct me Gerry, I think it's uxpod.com?

Gerry:

That's right. Yeah.

Daniel:

Yeah, and I'm a big fan and follower of the interviews that you do. I'm right up to date except the last one you did, sorry the last one you did was? You just mentioned it.

Gerry:

That's with Morgan McKeagney who we both know from IQ Content in Dublin.

Daniel:

Right, that's right. In fact I've got two I still need to catch up on, with him and also with Caroline, which I think was the one you did before.

Gerry:

Yeah, Caroline's, that's right, Caroline [Jarrett] and I worked on the Forms That Work book and she's doing a new book on survey designs. So we talked about surveys. I always love chatting to Caroline.

Daniel:

Fantastic. Yeah, Caroline's very, very smart. So I wanted to, that sort of lends or bridges nicely into the next question is… you do have the privilege of speaking to a lot of smart people via uxpod.com and I guess that gives you a little bit of time perhaps to reflect on some UX trends or patterns that you're seeing from the interviews that you do. … And of course I know that you're, you do a lot of reading both industry and personal reading… are there any particular UX trends that you see that have come out of the interviews or in your own readings or speaking with people or in the client work that you do? Are there any particular trends that you've been following or that you think are particularly hot as it pertains to user experience or user experience design?

Gerry:

Well you know, Dano, it's such an exciting time to be in the field because there's just so much going on. One of the great explosions of course has been the whole mobile/internet thing so mobiles, location-based services of various sorts, and I think we've only scratched the surface of what these things will mean for us as a society, you know, both locally and globally. For example, Adam Greenfield talks about ubiquitous design and what he calls "everyware;" the fact that we'll have software that, software devices all around us and the problem of designing user experiences that are, you know, entities within themselves, make sense within themselves even though they're part of a bigger picture that as individual designers we don't have any control over. So we've got this thing of us being surrounded by immediate, non-stop constant access to online content. You know, everywhere that we go, every device that we use, every mode of transport that we engage in, everything we purchase, every social interaction is mediated by technology. And all that technology is beginning to talk to the other bits of technology as well.

So that whole thing of mobile, just our mobile access to data and I guess the mobile internet's access to us via those devices is quite, you know, is a huge thing.

Another big trend is the need to start designing for an ageing population. If you look at, and I spent a little bit of time doing this, look at older people using devices such as mobile phones, laptop computers, devices in general they have a really, really hard time. You know until recently… people knew that older people had problems, sometimes for example opening devices, the physical devices that were difficult if they had some kind of degenerative condition, but that was kind of as far as people had thought about it. But we have to think about, as we try to serve the largest possible community, we have to build devices and interactions that support older people and at the moment we're not doing that well.

I've had the privilege over the last year of spending a lot of time at the other end of the spectrum with little kids using computers from sort of kindergarten age upwards to tertiary level. I've spent a lot of time sitting down observing these kids and talking to them about their usage of technology. That's a really, really interesting area; technology and education. Kids are really badly served by technology and we often think that, oh, you know, kids can use any device and they've got some sort of innate ability to do this, and it's just wrong. I mean, they've got more time to play with things and they do become expert in things that they do but when you sit down and watch kids repeatedly try to exit from Microsoft Word, for example, as I've done over the past several months; repeatedly try to shut down dialog boxes with messages in them that mean nothing to them, repeatedly try to access websites that have things that look to be clickable but aren't clickable, repeatedly fall into visiting a site that's not the site they wanted to go to because the message on the primary site is not designed for them.

So designing for those two extremes, if you like, for the older population, the younger population… you're going to have to stop me, Daniel, because there's so many exciting things. One of the areas that's really interesting is gaming, the whole, I think, the fact that games and game design and game design philosophy is starting to impact on user experience design and we're starting to see people think about how can we make things more playful in a way that's effective, in a way that supports better interactions. I think some of the attempts to do that have in fact been very poor. I mean, sometimes you see things, "Oh, what we'll do to teach you this is we'll make it into a game," but then when you look at it it's actually a really boring game. But when you look at what's happening with the gaming devices, I think, as you know I've always felt that the Nintendo Wii was a completely revolutionary device when it came out, I don't know, a couple of years ago now, where Nintendo said let's open up the gaming audience and no longer would it be the 18 to 35 year olds but it would be everybody and you now have the Nintendo Wii, you know, being used by little kids and used by people who would not usually consider themselves gamers, being used by older people, being used across the spectrum, a whole new audience of people getting into games. We've seen the Xbox with the Kinect move into the same market recently. Personally, I mean I've got a Connect, but I don't think it's as smooth a thing that they've done or as revolutionary as the Wii in many ways. I know from a technological point of view it's more revolutionary but it's a little bit clunky in some ways.

But that whole area I think is absolutely fascinating. Another area is urban experience. I think we really have to start talking about designing cities from a user experience perspective. We're not doing that. We're nibbling away at the edges of that. There's a huge market there and a huge opportunity and a huge need, I think, for a user experience design to be applied to urban living. If you look at a city like Hong Kong it's got elements that are very, very well oiled and organised and well designed and then you've got other elements that are chaotic and to the detriment to the people living in the cities. I think that's a really important area.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Gerry:

That's just a couple of things on my mind. We've got other things like the emergence of HTML 5 which is going to make a big difference, I think, to the way that the internet works for us.

Daniel:

That's great, Gerry, and I was very deliberate in letting you expand…

Gerry:

Ramble onwards. [Laughs]

Daniel:

Well, yeah, expand on all those because I think, number one it's rare, it's rare to get opportunities for, you know practitioners, I mean independent of this recording, it's rare for practitioners, I think, to have opportunities to speak and to share like this so it's lovely. And I think it's also nice to be able to identify trends and you know it is hard to look into the crystal ball and be able to predict the future but I think it's good to be able to expand on those and talk about them because it tells us a little bit about the type of work that we're doing now and perhaps the type of work that we'll be doing. I think what's interesting for me and what you were saying is that… you know, for me there are new technologies now but just as it was ten, perhaps even ten plus years ago, they're all choices, and one thing I like to do is within a particular project context if there are particular technology choices now that we have, it's not just desktop and it's not just browser based, it's now, you know, moving into mobility, is that it's still a choice to be able to say, well, we may still be dealing with the same information problem or the same task based problem, now it's a question of where we fulfil that task; is it via, is it web based, is it via the browser, is it via mobile, is it both? So…

Gerry:

Yeah, I know that Steve, Steve Baty and Janna and Rachel will be talking about this too, and Steve's big on service design and trying to have that holistic approach and say we're not just designing a user interface on a mobile phone, we're designing something that's part of an integrated whole and if we're not addressing that integration and that whole then we're failing, we're not doing an adequate job.

Daniel:

That's right, that's exactly right. And it's nice because as I'm speaking with you, I'm feeling great about the program actually and how it's fitting together. The other thing I wanted to mention too just briefly too is the idea of immersing oneself in new technology. I just signed up, as you know, Gerry, I am a gadget boy.

Gerry:

Yes, I do. [Laughter.]

Daniel:

So I signed up with a service by a provider, a mobile provider called PCCW, actually a telco, and they've got a service called Netvigator Anywhere. It's a little device that you carry around with you which is effectively a personal wifi device, but it allows you to connect up to five devices to it and they packaged a Samsung Galaxy to it with it now this is my first time playing with Android, but the amazing thing about it, the reason I mention it is not the technology as such but the ability to have always on, the ability to have unlimited data anywhere, anywhere you go and the thing that's changed with me is I no longer have to look for wifi spots and it also changes the use in terms of how you use content, how you use maps etc.

So I think the thing for me was being able to say to yourself, well you know, try out these new technologies, don't be afraid of them, and see what impact it has in the way that you think about use.

You also mention Hong Kong briefly in terms of urban planning and I wanted to ask you as a last question just a little bit about Hong Kong, just what are you looking forward to when you come to Hong Kong? I know you've been a couple of times before. But are there particular things that you're looking forward to in Hong Kong, looking forward to seeing?

Gerry:

Well I'm looking forward to catching up with you and with Jo and Hok, of course, and with the other speakers at the conference, but in particular looking forward to interacting with the other people at the conference. I think you've got big numbers there now. It's looking like it'll be a fantastically vibrant setting so I'm looking forward to that aspect. One of the things that I love about Hong Kong, and I think Steve Baty mentioned this at one of his things too, is the ferry. I just love going on the ferries across the harbour. I never think a trip to Hong Kong is complete without doing that because it just, it's so timeless in many ways. You're right in the middle of this, you know, relatively ancient shipping centre and shipping route and you're surrounded by the latest and the most modern city imaginable, in many ways. And one of the things that I guess we won't get time to do this time, I'm only there for a short time, is you've taken me at least once to the old, to the big Buddha on Lantau Island and I always think that's an amazing experience to go up there and, you know, in the midst of this frenetic activity to be on a hilltop with the Buddha there and then sit down and have a vegetarian meal prepared by the Buddhist monastery, it's just a fantastic experience. So those sorts of contrasts are really amazing.

I also love using the Octopus card because it's, to me, the ultimate example of a technology that's so good it's become zero effort to use, almost invisible. Everyone's got one and it's just so simple, and you look at other cities who have tried to implement similar schemes, often with varying degrees of success. You think, just look to Hong Kong as a city that's done it and achieved it. So that's always interesting. If we get the chance, going up to the Peak. I remember, I think the first time I was in Hong Kong, you took me up to The Peak and it must have been, I don't know, maybe September time when you get the typhoons there, because I remember coming down from [The Peak], the whole city was sort of swathed in thunderstorms and mist. It was like a scene out of Blade Runner, and then coming down from The Peak on the bus with the water pouring down the hillsides next to us. It was one of those, you know, really elemental experiences.

So getting up to The Peak is always nice, and just seeing the crowds of people, seeing this city of several million people scrunched into this very, very small space and just the whole vibe I always think is pretty amazing. And seeing a city where, I think you'd recall from work that we've done together in Hong Kong, that, you know, online in many ways is a poor medium… you know, we saw people who were really, really technically sophisticated who didn't buy stuff online because they could get better deals down at their local shop. I always thought that was very impressive. It was kind of an inversion of the situation that we see here in Australia, for example, where people buy online because the deals are better than the physical shops. Hong Kong has sort of inverted that.

Daniel:

That's great. And I'm very deliberate in asking this question to all of the visiting speakers because a big part of the planning for this event was the idea of, on the second day, on the 19th of February 2011 being able to go out and actually experience Hong Kong together. Not necessarily as a formal tour or having to follow a flag, like you see sometimes on the tours in mainland China, but just to be able to actually go out and just be with the city and for also some of the participants, if they wish, to come and join us because I've found that one of the things that goes missing at times when you visit other cities for conferences, is that you often miss the opportunity to just enjoy the city itself. You get very, you get sort of very trapped into the conference setting or perhaps into a hotel setting and soon forget that you're actually in another place.

And I think Hong Kong, as you've very nicely described, is a place that is a lovely city to get lost in. It's so vibrant, there's so much to see, there's so much to do. That's all I'm going to say on it because I really want people to experience it themselves. So hopefully the weather will hold up for us on the 19th otherwise we'll have to go into a plan B.

Gerry:

But you know what, Daniel, somebody said there's no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing. I mean it's unlikely the weather's going to be so bad that we can't put on a raincoat and still get out there. And I think it's an absolutely fantastic idea to get out and I hope that many of the participants of the conference take advantage of it because I think that you're absolutely right; getting out and socialising and going around the city and I think it's a really nice idea to see some of the busier parts of the city and then some quieter parts of Hong Kong which is not what most people, certainly not what I associate with Hong Kong, but I know before from being on the outlying islands that it's quite astonishing how peaceful and tranquil it can be. Seeing those two contrasts is interesting but it's great for people to get together outside of and in particular after the immediate business of the conference and just socialise and hang out together and I think, that's not going to be a high expense thing, is it? I mean people are going to be able to do that for presumably a few Hong Kong dollars for the various things that we'll be doing. It's just going to be getting on ferries and stuff, right?

Daniel:

That's right. It's not an expensive day out and effectively if people are coming and certainly if they're locals and I'm expecting the international visitors to also have Octopus cards. It's effectively just like a normal, a normal day out so it'll be great. And the other thing too, Gerry, is that this is very much, it's very much about doing this for the local as well because I think you very easily forget the city that you're living in as well. So the ability just to have a conscious effort to go and see your own city is a good thing because it sometimes, because it reminds you of certain things which is…

Gerry:

That's right. We take, absolutely, we take it for granted, don't we? We live somewhere and we you know visitors come and they say, oh I'm going to do this, this, this and this and you think, oh, gosh I haven't done any of those things.

Daniel:

That's right. That's absolutely right.

Gerry:

That's absolutely fantastic. Look it should be a really good conference. I'm really looking forward to it. I think there's a great line-up of speakers and it's a nice format; the presentations in the morning and then the tutorials in the afternoon. Makes for a fairly long day but I think it's sufficiently broken up that it'll be, you know people can still be vibrant by the end of the day. So it should be very exciting and I'm certainly looking forward to it.

Daniel:

Well, we're really looking forward to having you, Gerry. It's always nice to have you independent of the event and just to remind, for the listeners that Gerry will be speaking on the topic of The Essential UX Toolkit and Gerry, Gerry Gaffney, thank you very much for joining me this morning and sharing a little bit about UX Hong Kong 2011.

Gerry:

An absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Published: January 2011

A note on the transcripts

This is a transcript of a Radio Johnny interview.