DHABA
Inspired by the punjabi roadside resting place, DHABA is a podcast that invites pause, perspective, and peppered wisdom. Each episode brings together cooks, caretakers, bridge-builders and makers whose craft speaks louder than credentials. DHABA is a resting place for restless minds, where experience is the spice and conversation the fuel.
DHABA
Debbie Levitt “The Mary Poppins of CX and UX"
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Design expert Debbie Levitt shares her perspective on how UX and CX professionals are being systematically disempowered despite their critical role in creating successful products and services. She explores how the "fail fast" culture and AI hype are undermining accountability and quality in design.
• Debbie has 30 years of experience in CX, UX, product, and business strategy
• The return-to-office movement is harming remote workers and creating inefficient work environments
• AI development lacks proper governance and respect for intellectual property rights
• Companies claim to be customer-centric while rarely engaging with actual users
• The democratization of design has led to acceptance of mediocre work as the standard
• Organizations need to involve researchers and service designers from the beginning of projects
• The "fail fast, fail often" mentality has become an excuse for poor quality work
• Senior design voices are being ignored even as companies face increasingly complex challenges
• AI is unlikely to create a renaissance for UX unless organizations fundamentally change their approach to design
• Companies should establish clear quality standards and accountability measures
If you enjoyed this conversation, check out Debbie's books including "Customers Know You Suck" and "Life After Tech" – find them wherever books are sold.
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Brewed slowly. served warmly. crafted with care
Introduction to Debbie Levitt
Speaker 1Hello, hello. I know we've known of one another for some time.
Speaker 2And we spoke many years ago mostly about music.
Speaker 1How are you?
Speaker 2Mostly good.
Speaker 1Excellent Thanks for wanting to do this. So for those who aren't familiar with the amazing Debbie Leavitt, do you want to just give a brief kind of? This is who I am, this is what I do, this is where I'm from.
Speaker 2Sure, sure. Hi everybody. I'm Debbie Levitt. I am an American living in Italy.
Speaker 2For the last seven plus years, I've been working in CX and UX and product and business strategy in one form or another for officially now 30 years. I just had my anniversary, didn't bother announcing it on LinkedIn, but yeah, 30 years for this stuff I'm 53 years old, so you don't have to do the math. I'm completely in love with and obsessed with anything that falls into problem finding and problem solving from all of the early generative research and understanding people, context, systems, tasks, ecosystems and things like that, through feeding that through problem statements and insights and actionable suggestions into looking at different solutions and possibilities, whether those are digital solutions or non-digital service design, interaction, design. So to me, I feel like my world are all of these areas of business, product service experience strategy. But that's kind of where I've been living for a zillion years. My company is called Delta CX and we do all of the above, including coaching and training and consulting with companies to try to fix their messes and improve their customer experiences so that they can accomplish their business goals better, faster, easier. So I would say that's a medium sized version of me.
Speaker 2Did I miss anything? Books, books, right.
Speaker 1Books.
Speaker 2So I've got four of them on my desk. So yeah, so I've written some books. We're currently working on my seventh, but I would probably point people to some of my last few, which I'm still very proud and excited about. Customers Know you Suck, which is about why businesses need to be more customer-centric.
Thirty Years of Experience
Speaker 1Go read it, borrow it, buy it preferably, but get hold of it. It is insanely good. It's not as just a fantastic title for a book. It's got depth, it's got articulation, it's just knowledge oozing out of every single paragraph. So if you haven't, go and try and do that.
Speaker 2Thank you. After that, I ghost wrote Larry Marine's Disruptive Research book, which is about task analysis, and my 2024 book, which came out in September 2024, is called Life After Tech, and, for anybody who is concerned about the job market and tech jobs in general or specifically, it's got frameworks and exercises so you can figure out what your future might look like, because I hope to work in tech forever, and I'm sure you and a lot of your listeners do as well. But I think there's a possibility that it won't carry us to retirement, and so I'm trying to come up with what else I can do in case tech gives up on me or I give up on it.
Speaker 1Always be planning.
Speaker 2That's it. Be ready for the what if you know? That's why we buy insurance.
Speaker 1Or create your own insurance, because the job market right now sucks, yeah, big time. It's horrible, but one of the things that I was able to do at the last place I was at was actually curate a pipeline from seats of learning so that there is a a route to a job where you can produce real work and get paid for it and learn from better people through experience or expertise or whatever, not just from your discipline, but from multiple disciplines, and it was just one of the things that I had be in my particular bonnet about to get done. What's your take on that?
Job Market Challenges in Tech
Speaker 2Yeah, I do get asked this a lot. A funny thing is that I find that the average person wants to learn from the very experienced person the average person especially a lower level person or someone trying to career transition and they recognize the value of a you, me, bob, larry, maureen, whoever it might be and say, oh wow, I really wish I could learn from these people who've seen it all, done it, all you know, know how to approach it from all different angles and techniques, and then when we apply for those jobs, we're not considered and so there's a disconnect there. I think it's something like 90% 95% of jobs that are out there are hybrid or onsite or remote. Only if you live up our ass in this county you know like remote, but we have to be able to smell you from here. So I think the return to office is hurting me more, but that's just a hypothesis and I can't prove it. But it's the return to office that even stops me from applying.
Speaker 1I don't think organizations have got a grasp on what an office experience is. I think organizations are kind of yeah, we're paying you, we need your asses in here. Thank you very much. I don't care how long it takes you to get in here and genuinely, as long as you are visible and you're perfecting the art of looking busy, then I'm happy, which is the most BS I can even begin to think about in terms of the ability to make yourself available to do good work.
Speaker 2And then what I hear from people who are going into offices is that they're mostly on Zoom Teams, google Meet calls with people in other places. It might have been just before the pandemic, or it was definitely a few years ago and I had applied to their job. I was already living in Italy. It was a job in America. They had claimed they were open to remote people and I applied and they said well, are you going to move to Portland or Denver? And I said neither, I'm going to stay here. And they said well, you've got to be in Portland or Denver. And I said once Portland and Denver have figured out how to work with each other from afar, you can also work with me yeah, well, 100%.
Speaker 1There's a lot to be said, I think, for the culture right and the physical being somewhere in the same space. You know, having that face-to-face interaction right, particularly within design, I think that's incredibly important.
Speaker 2I don't miss it.
Speaker 1I just like people, right, You've done so much though.
Speaker 2Oh, thanks.
Speaker 1I hope.
Speaker 1No, no, no, you have. It was one of the things when I started considering okay, what else do I want to do, you know, life after tech or design or digital or something, and I've always been very people-focused. I like humans as much as I love technology. I used to be an avionics engineer for crying out loud, so I have to love technology. But people, man, people are just epic. It has to always be, always be. People process technology, in that order. And with the whole AI gig, right, right, which is now so embedded with zero governance, anyone can do anything and everything. If you have any kind of digital content, it's fair game, I can take that, I can. It can get sucked up in some kind of you know neural network model, whatever, and repurposed, reproduced, but nobody is getting any kind of credit, right, it'll go I know source information and all of the above, and everyone's like shitting bricks right now, particularly not just design, but anything in tech.
Speaker 1Yeah, because they're doing this technology first. No one's really thinking about, well, what's the impact of the people? Right, and that's no big surprise, because everyone's done that. They did it when I was at school and with the advent of 8-bit computing, but even then people were having conversations around. Jobs are going to be gone and they were to a degree they, yeah, they were.
Speaker 1But what happened to design? I was doing weird shit in Windows on an RM Nimbus machine in paint, I kid you not because I thought that was super cool, but it was an introduction to a new paradigm and then I could exploit that right. And this, for me, is exactly the same. Yes, the velocity of change is increasing and it has got a. It's not just with one direction, right, the velocity is not just speed, it's like speed in which direction is that? This has got multiple directions, and the lack of oversight and governance is actually freaking me out. I'm just very, very uncomfortable, and I put this up on LinkedIn the other day. Why haven't the lawyers come out of their little closet and gone? Litigation, litigation, litigation. Because there's a pile of cash to be made just from copyright. Forget about, you know, digital integrity and equity and all of that kind of stuff, but no one's doing it, nobody. It's the Wild West. That's nuts. It's exciting, but it's nuts. What's your take on that?
Speaker 2As for AI and copyrights, copyrights exist for a very specific reason and to me, ai or obviously this isn't AI this is the people behind AI they want to selectively believe in intellectual property. I'm sure if they have a patent or they have a copyright, they're going to want to see that protected. But as soon as they see the, it's like a cartoon character sees shimmering gold off in the distance and their eyes bug out and dollar signs explode over their head, or pound signs and then they go oh wow, we've got to have that and it doesn't matter how we're going to have that. And you know there's certainly plenty of that through technology, through history. Somebody says I see what's going to make me rich and I just have to have it, whether it's right or wrong, whether it's legal or illegal, and it's just another grab at the expense of the people being grabbed. And especially for meta to say we should be able to have access to every book because the books really don't have that much value. You know that's there's a lot of. I always know that someone has a weak argument when they have to go to gaslighting manipulation, you know, like when you see people using the uglier techniques or the malignant narcissist playbook, then I know they don't have a very strong argument, because I grew up in a family of lawyers. You can tell when someone has a strong argument and when they're basically trying to kick you in the knees on the schoolyard. Like well, debbie, we should have all of your books because they're not very valuable now, are they Prove to us that they are? They're just a speck in the cosmos, and so once you have those arguments, that should be a moment of self-reflection. But it's not going to be for malignant narcissists and that's really who we're dealing with. And so that's where regulation is supposed to be involved. That's where the law is supposed to protect people. But I'm not sure we're going to see that happen. I don't think.
Return to Office Problems
Speaker 2I think people are too excited about the technology to want to see it restricted by proper regulation and proper interpretation of the law. People are not ready for the end game, even though they've been watching the end game in every dystopian movie of the last 40 years. It's the same thing I say about ageism the ageist. People are not prepared for the future they're helping to create by being ageist. And so the people who are using AI to take other people's works and hide behind.
Speaker 2Well, it's a fair use, or well, it's a parody. You wouldn't have to hide behind something if you were doing the right thing. So I find that these are very easy arguments when you are not a rights holder, but as someone with many copyrighted things, multiple trademarks and, as of last month, a patent. So as someone with intellectual property, I care about that, and especially as someone with intellectual property but no job and it might be possible that I could stay alive and eat food through licensing my intellectual property If that gets taken away from me, I run the risk that I cannot eat food and I cannot stay alive. So it's a very bizarre ecosystem. That, I think, is just, unfortunately, a negative and depressing topic.
Speaker 1What do you think we should be doing about it?
Speaker 2That's hard because it's a much bigger question. What do you do about a world of malignant narcissists who want to be rich at the expense of others? As has been for how long?
Speaker 1Let's just try and UX this, break it into smaller pieces.
Speaker 2Well, it's really easy. If we broke it into small pieces and I could have one thing, then the value of my copyright should stand, my copyright should not be diminished or diluted, my trademark should not be overlooked, my patent should not be circumvented or infringed. I mean, the simple answer here is don't break the law. But I don't think we're going to get that.
Speaker 1Maybe I mean when I look at it from a music perspective, right. So Bob James Jazz, fusion, 1970s, 80s did the theme tune to Taxi. If nobody knows Bob James, look him up. Brilliant, he's now living off of Rotties Because I saw a documentary about it, like X number of months ago and very, very grateful, apparently, for the software that can pick out all of the hip hop, the new kind of whatever genre, that people have sampled pieces of his intellectual property, right, and he is getting paid and he's very, very happy about it, um, and I'm sure it's the same for lots of other musicians. So could it be, could it be, that this is just a maturity play? But, yes, the ai is here and it's doing this kind of stuff right now. But, but the lawyers will wake up, they will see that there is a, a monetization that can occur, and then these processes and governance can be applied and then, therefore, your copyrights et cetera will be seeing some value from a commercial perspective.
AI Governance and Copyright Issues
Speaker 2This is something that I've been asking for for years, because there are let's just say there's at least one well-known person who has the word UX associated with them out there who has stolen a lot from me. I've been dreaming for years of a tool or system that's able to go through all of this person's content articles, webinars, conference talks, PowerPoint decks. I dream of the tool that that pulls all that out, because then I just hand that to my lawyer and I say fix this, that's something that benefits the artist and creator without taking something away from me if meta is just going to suck up all my books.
Speaker 2You've taken something away from me without giving me something without any acknowledgement.
Speaker 1I think the key thing there or money.
Speaker 1I think that comes afterwards, but first of all you need to have the acknowledgement right, right, yeah, so so something like that, or you technical boffins out there in the world, go do that, because it's much needed. There's also an aspect to this where folks don't realize the importance of curators of original content yeah, and the damage that it can do to professions Right, and furthermore, the damage that it can do potentially to people's careers. I mean, there was a very, very senior presentation that was going on. Lots of nice people were there listening to person X and, thankfully, thankfully, part of the audience went.
Speaker 2That's joel shit well, we've seen that one remix, 12 inch dance remix you know, and a dub version and blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever, whatever.
Speaker 1Right, sorry audience, you may be dumb in the 80s and yeah the joy, but anyway, that was lucky, that was lucky.
Speaker 2It was lucky that they recognized it and it was lucky that they said something, because otherwise you run the risk that you have a bunch of compliant people in the room who say, well, we know that's somebody else's, but I shouldn't say anything and I feel like we have to say more things.
Speaker 1That's where I'm going.
Speaker 2Yes, thank you. Sorry, I beat you there.
Speaker 1No, well, again, I'm not proud. It's fine, it's okay, because I adore your work. Thank you. I adore what you stand for. Thank you, I adore what you stand for. Thank you, even though that's been from afar, yeah, but now I've got the opportunity to actually make it public, because you are shit hot. You don't need me to tell you that, but you are shit hot.
Speaker 2Then where's my job?
Speaker 1There's a group of us oldies folks and pretty much we all know each other. We don't send each other to quote or pal Christmas cards per se, but we will read each other's contributions. We will then maybe message one another and all the rest of it, and within this very, very small circle no one and nobody has ever said anything derogatory, derisory about debbie. Oh thank you no, gosh right uh simple thank you for those who like to steal content and plagiarize it. Right, it's quite simple, yeah it yeah.
Speaker 1Credit where it is required? Yes, and that's always.
Speaker 2That's what I've said for many years now, especially when I got wind that this person was stealing from me. And I think this person could still have their popularity, still have their cult following, still sell their courses and webinars and speak at conferences. I think this person could still have everything they still have. I don't think they would have lost anything if they had said you know, I agreed with Debbie Levitt when I heard her say this.
Speaker 1So we've kind of gone from the awesome stuff that is representative of you. Some bits of it, not all of that right, because you've done so much and you've been doing it for such a long time and it is all meaningful. Thank you, right. How that's going to get number one reaffirmed, because it needs to be, I think voices like yourselves need to have. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this whole kind of podcast thing. You know, I was sitting there I was thinking to myself do we need another podcast? And then I thought, well, where are the senior folks in my circle, at the very least the people whom I respect, the people who I can have a conversation with and actually not necessarily raise their profile? That's not what it's about.
Speaker 1But these messages, these instructions, right. This level of clarity, right. What is the right thing to do at the right time and how those behaviors can then manifest themselves and get ingested, relearned, and if transposition is required, fair enough. But things matter. Good work matters, accomplishments, even if it's like, recognition matters. Ageism comes into it, sexism comes into it. Experienced voices haven't? I don't see enough of us.
Speaker 2I just don't see enough of us, I just don't right, yeah, well, remember a lot, of, a lot of the people who got the power. You know, they say they, some people say they failed up. I think that's being a little too harsh, but I think that the people who played the game better than I do are the people who got promoted, because I'm the person who's going to come in and say okay, I've taken a look at what you're doing. I think the strategy's off. I think we've there's bad warning signs we're missing here. There's a bunch of stuff that's going ignored. There's no accountability. Hey, why don't we try to make some changes here?
Speaker 2And I find that the person who tends to get the job is often a man, often a little bit younger than I am, usually ex-fangs Facebook, apple, amazon, netflix, google, and so I find that a lot of the people who got the promotions and those jobs are the people who were going to do a leader's bidding or say yes to the product manager or the product VP.
Speaker 2I think that companies don't want the change agents. People say to me oh, isn't it ageist that you're not finding a job? And I say honestly I think it's more the return to office because I live out in the middle of nowhere, and I think it's more that I have a reputation for making changes and making improvements, and I think it's more that I have a reputation for making changes and making improvements and you've got to really want that to call me Otherwise if you really want to just keep playing the game and keep following all the shitty books out there that say just fail and fail, more and more cycles of failure and fail again and have another guess and fail some more, then you don't need me.
Speaker 2I'm the wrong person for your company because I'm going to point at that and go why are we failing so much? Wouldn't we like to succeed more? And someone's going to be upset by that, and so it's kind of the apple cart thing, as the British would say. And so I think that the main reasons I'm not getting a job ageism, I think, is in there, but not the main reason. Sexism could be in there, but not the main reason I think it's that I'm not coming into your office and I'm probably going to want to make improvements and I think people don't want that.
Speaker 1So, broadly speaking, right, I'm trying to do some kind of mental taxonomy in my brain at the same time whilst we're speaking. So we've got recognition, which is hugely important. We've now, I think, enveloped the whole in part integrity accountability accountability and those things.
Speaker 1They are fundamentally missing in our world, and not just in design perspective, just everywhere. Absolutely agree, big ask. But you know, I mean when folks say to me, what did you do, you know? And why the bejesus did you actually go to that great, big, horrible energy company? Because they're just interested in killing the planet slowly, right? They're not even doing it quickly, right? They're that comfortable with it. They're just killing the planet. And yeah, where does that come from? I guess, with regards to recognition and then integrity, and my perspective is you've got to be in it. You can throw stones at something from the outside, but if you're actually inside of it and try to affect change from within, I think that's incredibly powerful.
Speaker 2But they have to want to change. But a lot of these organizations I have found don't want to make that change because they've been so successful and so profitable by doing let's just say other things. And it goes right back to what you just said integrity and accountability and I think companies are trying so hard to stay away from those that they've invented these little false candy lands of keep failing. More failure, high AB test failure rates that's good. That's good. Product management, that's good strategy. We're really learning from our failures. We are wrapped in so much cotton wool and we are not able to look more honestly at what's really going on and what our experience ecosystem is experiencing.
Design Leadership's Missing Voice
Speaker 2And I think that the voices like yours, mine, potentially, bob, some of these other people we could name they see us coming.
Speaker 2I'm making air quotes because we are strong people who are not going to kiss the ass of the most toxic narcissist at the company and we are going to point out a thing and say why has this been going on like this and shouldn't we be trying something fresh? And I think a lot of companies don't want that right now. They want the least expensive yes, people they can find and they want to gaslight them into overworking, being hamsters on a wheel and just working and say, well, you're not involved, you're not strategic enough, but then disempower them from being strategic, ux, not strategic, not allowed to be in many places. Even product managers used to be strategic, not allowed to be in many places. They take orders from people above them. And so I think we have to notice that the job market shift is not just ooh, there's fewer jobs, ooh, they pay less, ooh, they let you go with the blink of an eye. It's also that there's a huge wave of disempowerment that I think we're not saying out loud enough.
Speaker 1That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. No, don don't. It's all good shit. I mean nothing that you have literally just put out there. I can't think of anything to challenge.
Speaker 1Thanks, right, uh, and I've been trying to challenge during the course, yeah rip it up, please right, but I'm listening to that and I'm thinking okay, I genuinely feel sorry for CEOs, genuinely Right, because I've seen when CEOs get appointed and how their demeanor is, what their physical appearance is blah, blah, blah. Physical appearances, blah, blah, blah. Within months, these people are losing weight, going gray, getting stressed out to the max, yeah, and you always kind of think, well, you're on the big bucks, yes, and yes, you have, and the buck's supposed to be stopping with you. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you've got one job to do, but it is the most important job, right? You need to steer this great big monstrosity in whatever is the right direction. But who have you got to actually help you? Instead of having you know generals and lieutenants, you have a bunch of cabin boys, right, or?
Speaker 2toxic narcissists.
Speaker 1Exactly Folks who are more interested in their own survival as opposed to respecting the chain of command and actually doing the right things, and I'm seeing that too often. Now, if you put that into the context of design and everyone's been yapping about this get a seat at a table, blah, blah, blah, blah- blah oh boy and Bob Powell, like very graciously, said, well, joel. He said screw that. And he built his own damn table. Yeah, it was further away from the big one, but at least we had it.
Speaker 2The kids' table.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, whatever right now. Why isn't there more design folk actually as chief design officers, whatever nomenclature you want to give to it, and for me, the opportunity, particularly with this new paradigm of artificial intelligence yeah, it's so stupidly uncomplicated, right? You need someone like a Debbie, like a Thomas, maybe like a Bob, to actually be that person who's accountable for experience plus the AI, because the AI it's an enabling thing, and it's not enabling things for anything other than human beings. So if you're not combining human-centered design and everyone's yapping and have been yapping about for the last 15 years, at the very least, oh, we're customer-centric. You don't even talk to users.
Speaker 2Right, and now you're trying to avoid them even more by having robots pretend to be them.
Speaker 1Exactly, exactly. Think of your organizations as a product and who are the people genuinely who are supposed to be them? Exactly exactly. Think of your organizations as a product and who are the people genuinely who are supposed to be putting your products together? The successful ones, they're the ones that have strong design leadership and that's going out of style, I think.
Speaker 2I think people just don't want that. They don't want to give up that power. They don't want to give up that control. Everybody wants to be the to give up that control. Everybody wants to be the person who had the cool idea, and so you get all of these product manager ego projects and stakeholder ego projects, and it's a big problem that I've been unraveling for many years across my multiple books.
Speaker 2But we have a lot of problems in this area where we've been disempowered, and then we further disempower ourselves by some of the things we do and some of the things we say to each other, and so we're now in an incredibly disempowered state where I feel like people understand and value UX less than they ever have before, as hypothetically evidenced by our lowering salaries and fewer jobs, and the people who get the jobs are told exactly what to do and how to do it, because you're just production designers and so on.
Speaker 2And I think we have to take a moment to reconcile that against so I'm interested in your opinion as well to reconcile that against some of the things we're hearing and you and I are recording this in April 2025 of people saying, oh, ai is going to mean a resurgence for UX. Companies are going to want UXers to be strategic about AI. They're going to want UX to design the AI. Now I have very strong opinions that that is a false future and setting people up for a big disappointment. But before I say more or why, what is your opinion about? Will AI cause a renaissance and resurgence for UX work and roles?
Speaker 1Okay, concisely, yes, it will, but is that going to be?
Speaker 2Disagree no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1Go ahead, hear me out.
Speaker 2I am.
Speaker 1It will, but that's not going to be in the short game, as per usual. It's going to be post some catastrophic, traumatic series of events disagree. That's fine, perfectly cool with that, because I used to be quite a senior avionics test systems engineer, so there's an awful lot of left brain and right brain within me going on. And if I'm looking at the data, if I'm looking at historical statistical trends, we have these paradigms of, yeah, some new tech, some new gizmo, some new, whatever it is, and then everyone falls in love with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, because the iphone wasn't the iphone, the iphone wasn't the first device that was released in telco, right, of that nature. It wasn't the first device that was looking at consolidating a whole bunch of features and functions, right?
Speaker 1yeah, I had a palm i705 right, we all had whatever variant of blah blah. But then what happened? Designers stepped in. Okay, dita ram stepped in, influenced john Ives, thank you very much. The rest is history. The iPhone was there. It made things intuitive, usable, that's it. And it buried some very, very famous people and also some very, very famous companies. All of a sudden, they had their Kodak moments or their Blockbuster moments or whatever.
Speaker 2Blackberry.
Speaker 1Right moments, or they blockbuster moments, or whatever. Is blackberry right? So I'm I'm presently and I'm more than happy to be, have you know, influenced otherwise. Right, because that's why people need to talk, which is something else that I don't think there's enough of going on in the world. Your view is x presently. In my view is y. Maybe that's going to change. For either one of us, it gives a shit. The fact that it's important that we're talking and we're being polite and respectful. Thank you very much. It's not hard people, right?
Speaker 2so well, this is an easy topic.
Speaker 1There are some topics where x and y really don't overlap maybe that's another conversation, maybe for another thing, but where I'm going with this is so, yes, the new shiny is on the horizon and it's already screwing things up. It's already shitting the bed. Thank you very much. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm looking at that journey of evolution. It needs to get fixed. It'll get fixed. And who are they going to call?
Speaker 2Not us.
Speaker 1Tell me, tell me.
The Resurgence of UX in AI Era?
Speaker 2Sure, if we are hypothetically, if we are one of the least understood roles and jobs, and if we are one of the most disempowered, and if there is very little integrity, accountability or ethics, why would anybody think of asking UX to fix these things? If a company truly understands UX, hcd, service, design, then hypothetically you would think they already have them working with AI and the AI is not having some of the typical problems because we care about HCD and we're not going to let our AI go in these bad or evil directions. We're seeing a lot of excitement for the technology and they have no reason to call us. They don't even understand what we do. Human-centered design is absolutely sure they can do our research, content and design jobs as well as or better than me or you or anybody else, so they have no reason to call us. They don't see us as strategic. In fact, they've spent the last three years gaslighting us that we're not strategic enough. We're not strategic. We don't show our value. Why would you call the role who you see as non-strategic tactical grunt workers who are easily replaceable and interchangeable especially if you listen to Safe, agile, interchangeable? Why would you ask them to come in and fix your problems?
Speaker 2I'm only asked to come in and fix problems, not because I have a history of UX designer, ux research, but because I somehow got into fixing problems. And so the average UXer is unlikely. It's unlikely that someone is going to turn to mid-level product designer Sam and say, sammy, our AI is shit in the bed. Millions of dollars are going straight to hell. Customers are angry. Sam, you're a UXer, you fix it.
Speaker 2And so I think we're at the point where we're so misunderstood that we're not go-to people for anything. And at some companies we are, but at very few in the scheme of the world. We are not the go-to people for problem finding or problem solving. And we've had so many books and authors and trainers and loud people who have kept hitting nails into that coffin, from lean startup to lean UX, to continuous discovery habits, to anything that Marty Kagan says to all of these things. Keep teaching our teammates and companies Just go workshop it. You don't really need these people.
Speaker 2Figma, who we thought was for us? Figma's last two conferences were completely for product managers and were pejorative towards UX, and designers made fun of them, told them they're perfectionists you hate working with and you don't need anymore and our AI is going to replace them. Think that we don't want to admit that. Some people are comfortable talking about how disempowered we are, but they're uncomfortable building that bridge too, and we're not going to be the ones they call on when the AI crashes the plane. When the AI crashes the plane, someone will apologize for the plane crash and promise the AI will be better next week, and they're not going to call up you, me or Bob. They should, but they're not going to. Why should they? Because we also have all of the culture.
Speaker 2We have enough Lenny's podcasts and whatever telling us failure is great, fail fast, fail often. Fail a lot, fail publicly, fail privately. Fail your AB tests, fail your product launches, fail everything everywhere. 90% failure, totally normal. Just do what you're doing. There's nothing in place that speaks to quality or accountability anymore, and that's why that's been the flag I've been waving for the last year. Is that that's the only flag I'm going to wave? I'm going to stop complaining about design thinking. I'm going to stop complaining about what are our titles. I'm just going to talk about quality and accountability. Who wants to talk about that with me? So far, not many.
Speaker 1You, we're doing it.
Speaker 2Sold. Yes, but that's why I think when the AI goes to hell or continues going to hell, they should go to Larry Marine. And they're not going to go to Larry Marine. I mean, that's the number one person they should go to. The rest of us are a distant second. They're not going to. Why should they? They would only go to him if they actually wanted something diagnosed and fixed. We're pretending that companies want to be better than they want to be.
Speaker 1Okay, I get it Now. Do you think that your observations are based upon a hierarchy of a design, ecosystem and network, or is it across the board? Because is it?
Speaker 2just, I don't understand the question.
Speaker 1Is it just bog standard practitioners who aren't going to get asked, or is it bog standard practitioners but also the senior folks like you and me and whoever else that are not going to get asked?
Speaker 2We're not going to get asked.
Speaker 1Across the board. So it's not to get asked Across the board, so it's not a hierarchy thing.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, I don't think it's a hierarchy thing. I get private messages on LinkedIn, debbie. Why are you out of work, debbie? Why can't you find a job? I look up to you so much, debbie. I've learned everything from you. Why don't you have a job, debbie? You would help my company so much.
Speaker 2I live in a surreal universe in which there are a squillion companies I could be helping with a squillion small and large things and I can't get an interview. And this is the surreal universe that I'm in, because your phone should be ringing off the hook, senor Joel. Larry Marine's email should be ringing off the hook. My email should be blowing up. My calendar should be full of potential client calls from people who want my help with something. I got a bunch of those a year or so ago from famous companies I shouldn't name who said we loved your customers know you suck book and we want you to come talk to our leadership Fortune 100 companies. And I said great, what's your budget for that? Oh, we don't have any budget. We just thought you'd come talk about your book. You're a Fortune 100 company and you have zero dollars for me to try to help you fix all of your problems.
Speaker 1So that boils into the whole integrity thing, right? Would they have done that with a different discipline?
Speaker 2Or would they have done it with an old fat bald man? Would they do it with old fat bald white guy?
Speaker 1Whatever demograph you want to go for, right, I don't think that we, as senior practitioners, have done anywhere close to what we needed to do and should be doing to actually protect what it is that we do on a day to day basis, without even freaking, thinking about it.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's what my 2019 book was about. But the horses are out of the barn. They're stampeding the sheep. The sheep are dying. I mean like we're so many steps past that.
Speaker 1Do we give up then?
Speaker 2In some ways, yes, and so basically, I'm at the point where I'm telling people like, if you want to give up, I understand you and I support you. We've spent a lot of years fighting and we've gotten very old very fast and for some people it's affected mental health and for some people it's affected physical health. And I say, if you want to shift that passion into something that's going to be more rewarding and healthy for you, I support you. I don't have a lot of the things that most people struggle with, so I've got extra headspace.
Speaker 2But to anybody who feels like they're done fighting, that they're burnt out, they're depressed, they're wondering what tomorrow looks like, the bank account is draining, the jobs are unrewarding, I say it's okay. It's okay to move to something else. There are other things we could do and that's what Life After Tech is about. But I want people to feel like I don't want them to feel bullied to stay in UX or gaslit to stay in UX, or why aren't you fighting more? If anyone feels done or like they need to ramp it down, I support you.
Speaker 1Cool message.
Speaker 2How can I tell someone something else? Everyone has to find their own path and the best thing I can do is raise you up and push your boat out and not gaslight you or bully you or say oh well, you're not a true Scotsman if or you're. That doesn't make sense anymore. We've done that to each other and it made things worse because we bullied each other into using design, thinking and democratizing and and workshopping everything and telling everybody, everybody could do ux just don't even get me started on democratizing yeah, I just did a youtube show about it, episode 264 I think it was.
Speaker 2But if someone wants give up, and if you have to give up on UX, on tech, on leadership, on whatever it is, I want to support you.
Speaker 1Cool, cool, cool cool. We are in a crazy, crazy, crazy ecosystem right now, um, and not just from a design perspective, so she normally put like, whatever, whatever bad you want to put on it is. It's going through some major upheavals, right. Um, I still think that design's got a massive role to play and the whole empathy which you've spoken about so eloquently is yeah, we need to bring that to the fore for everything. We need to listen more, we need to have more conversations. I mean, you and I, I wouldn wouldn't say disagree, but you've got a different perspective on certain things. To me, it's like fucking, what right I'm not poking your eyes out and vice versa. Thanks, we're having a pretty you can't reach me.
Speaker 1Well, you know I have my ways, but you know, yeah it's.
Speaker 2Come on over, write it off as a business trip yeah, that ain't happening anytime but?
Speaker 2but I'm gonna disagree with you there too, because we've done. We've done too much listening. We've done too much listening and too much yesing, and too much. What do you need from me? And too much. Oh, you want to do my job? Sure, Give it a try. And too much, oh, you want that to be a workshop? Sure, I'll stop doing my work. I live in this weird world where a lot of people who ask me for help and coaching on the tactical work have only ever heard of design thinking. And when I ask them why'd you workshop that? They're like what are you talking about? That's what we do. And when I say why'd you make this empathy map or why'd you go into a solution workshop without understanding the problem, and they go what are you talking about?
Speaker 1This is this is how we do it Right, knowledge is very dangerous and that's why conversations like this, for me, are incredibly important, because I get to speak with stupidly intelligent, stupidly experienced individuals. You want to share anything from your perspective because, yes, I'm here to kind of corral and coax and cajole and cover a whole bunch of different topics, hopefully in some kind of remnants of a process.
Speaker 2But you know, the floor is yours, yeah.
Speaker 2I want to tell you a story about a conference I spoke at a few months ago. The closing speaker was from an AI company, so not a UX guy, and that's fine UX conference. A few hundred people there, researchers and designers, and this was an AI guy and he came out with a. His talk was something about UX intersection with AI and it was basically. It was going to be the resurgence of UX because there's going to be so much work in building AI tools and that UX is going to be the resurgence of UX because there's going to be so much work in building AI tools and that UX is going to be needed to go there.
Speaker 2This guy had an obvious pre-made deck that almost seemed to be his company's pitch deck. Whenever he talked about UX, he called it UI, UX, and he looked down at his notes and he read word for word. Now I'm an observational researcher and so I'm watching this guy and I'm thinking, okay, this was definitely plugged in after the fact. Ux was just kind of glued on to this PowerPoint, because he would say these things that were almost like someone reading a cue card, like and UI UX will be very important for the design of ai agents in the future, and then you'd go go back to telling us about all the ai agents this company's been making. Well, I'm exploding inside. Finally, the he was finished and they're. They're passing the microphone around to the audience for questions and the first question was like but is AI safe?
Speaker 2And I'm like fuck, here we go. And then the second question was what about old people and AI tools? And I said, holy shit, I'm going to be the only person who says this out loud. It's going to have to fucking be me, I'm going to have to be the person that everybody thinks I am, and I'm going to do this, and my heart was pounding and.
The Need for Service Designers
Speaker 2I got the microphone and I and I did what I do best, which is I brought out the worst side of myself, which is the manipulative New Yorker, and I set this guy up for a big fall and I said I said thank you so much for sharing. This is recorded somewhere, but I haven't seen it. I said thank you so much for sharing all of the very interesting information about your company. You're doing so many very interesting AI projects, especially for municipalities. You're here at a UX conference speaking to hundreds of people who are UX researchers and UX designers, and you're carrying a message that UX is going to be so important when it comes to building AI agents, like the ones you've been working on. Thinking about any of the projects that you've been working on the past few years, how many UX researchers or designers have you worked with? And before I could finish my sentence, he said zero. We're a tech company.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Now, at that point I blacked out and I have no memory of what happened next. I don't remember what this man said. It was just like those TV shows where just like silence kind of closes in on me and I'm just looking around the room because I'm at the back of the room and I'm looking around the room and people are looking at me and mouthing holy shit. And they're mouthing thank you for asking that. And they're mouthing. I was wondering that and I don't remember anything. That guy said after none, we're a tech company. But when he stopped talking, I picked up my backpack and walked out and to me, we're getting a lot of lip service around. Oh, ai agents. Ai agents have to be designed and built and we're really going to need UX people to make all these AI agents, or we're really going to need all these UX people to fix the broken AI things? I haven't. I'm finding that to just be not true.
Speaker 1How.
Speaker 2I'm not seeing UX involved. I'm not saying there's zero of it or it's not happening or it'll never happen. I'm saying I'm not seeing enough of it for me to think that this is a trend we're all going to ride and we're all going to keep our jobs, or they're going to newly appreciate and understand us and we have greater job stability. I think our jobs are still very in trouble and I think a lot of people believe AI agents can absolutely be built, deployed and iterated upon without UX professionals.
Speaker 1So everything pretty much stays the same.
Speaker 2No, I think it gets worse Because, hypothetically, if they start building AI agents that do UX work, the Trojan horse is we've built you this to make your work faster. It's usually faster. It's usually not better or more accurate, because sometimes it's not better or more accurate, it's usually we built you this to make your work faster. You adopt it. That shit's probably training on you and how you use it and what you do with it, and so there is a potential slippery slope there that if the AI agent becomes good enough at certain tasks, it can hypothetically replace us.
Speaker 2I went through this a year ago in an article that I published, saying that once you have fake democratization, once you have, anybody can do UX work. Everybody's a designer, let everybody do interviews. Once you have some sort of fake democratization or some sort of, anybody can do UX work. And people are doing UX work and it's mediocre or poor. Then what's the problem with AI doing our work, mediocre or poor? Which comes back to the quality question we covered earlier. If we don't have strong standards for the quality and outcomes of UX work, then a product manager doing it badly is okay, and AI doing it mediocrely or badly is okay, and nobody seems to care.
Speaker 1No, no, no, no, what I was saying like. So nothing changes, right? Just to go back on that bit, I agree with you, right, by the way. Thanks, it's the same. Yeah, we're accumulating technical debt. We might get someone to fix it whenever we realize that, yeah, it needs fixing, but the right people are not being brought in at the right time. Design is not something that you bolt on at the end. If you are thinking about enhancing an existing product or service, you need researchers, you need service designers, because they're the right people who are going to do your heuristic evaluation. Yeah, and we have frameworks and standards for those. If you're thinking of something brand new, something greenfield, you are still going to need researchers and service designers. They should always, always, be your first point of call.
Speaker 2Now they are and you have to empower them and let them do their thing how they need to do it I'm gonna tell them to just run a survey I'm getting.
Speaker 1Oh god, running a survey is like somebody stopping you in the street right on a sunday morning. Maybe you've been to your religious thing of choice, maybe you've just been out for a stroll and you've got that college kid, or whoever it is, with a clipboard. I'm terribly sorry. Can I stop you? Can I get you a beer?
Speaker 2Are you happy with your washing?
Speaker 1I'm going to give them a little bullshit and just get rid of them damn quick. You need your researchers and you need your service designers. Now, if you're thinking, oh, I'm just going to get a UX person, a UX person is not going to be as detailed or as experienced as those two disciplines, because they are specialisms. All they're probably going to be at a mid-level, otherwise they're not doing ux. Then they're either old-school graphic designers or visual designers yeah, but they haven't had the experience enough to actually develop these other disciplines that I'm referring to.
Speaker 1Okay, so researchers super important service designers, absolutely critical to your ecosystems, particularly now where you have this wonderful thing called the AI. Because service designers are going to not just look at your happy past and your negative past. They're going to look at your back office, they're looking at your front of house, they're going to be developing your service blueprints blueprints, If you have products who are turning around and saying I'm making a design decision because I'm the product owner. You are going to do one thing, and one thing only, and that is contribute to the landmass soon to be the landfill of technical debt. And good luck spending the next two to five years digging up that mess in order to fix your product proposition.
Speaker 1Next two to five years digging up that mess in order to fix your product proposition am I clear, sorry.
Speaker 2No, you said good luck spending the next two to five years and I said if you still work there, exactly, or even if that organization exists.
Speaker 1so standard stuff. We don't get involved soon enough. And I'm calling out these disciplines to all of your non-design folk who don't know this Researchers, service designers, absolute, without question. You need them and they're not going to eat up all of your budget because if you listen to Dr Nick Fine, he's got a million and one ways to actually expedite, accelerate and deliver value propositions from a research quality and quantitative perspective in no time at all, and they will do that collaboratively, okay.
Speaker 2Yeah, we did a project a few years ago for a startup that couldn't find product market fit and couldn't figure out what to do. We met 35 people fit and couldn't figure out what to do. We met 35 people. We did the entire project, from first meeting to last meeting, where we had given them a value proposition, their entire business model, their entire ecosystem map, a high-level product roadmap. We had basically invented what their startup would do. So, from the first meeting to all of the research, to all of the reporting and synthesis, to telling this startup what we thought was the right path for them was six weeks and people who think that research has to take months or quarters it doesn't have to. It's not going to take days. If you want qual research done right, it's not a day's thing and, depending upon how many people you're meeting, it might not be a week's thing, but it also depends on how many people you throw at it. When I do these projects, I work with at least one other person and we share these responsibilities and it's not a.
Speaker 2Debbie team of one. Imagine that. Remember when we had teams of people doing things. You know we have six to 12 engineers working on something, so you can make something go faster by throwing more qualified humans at it. My work doesn't go faster when you give me a product manager who likes the idea of research. My work goes faster when you give me a qualified researcher to partner with.
Quality, Accountability and Final Thoughts
Speaker 1Yeah, and that has to be coordinated by the likes of Debbie, by the likes of Robert Powell, by the likes of maybe me, even right and a whole bunch of other people we ain't got time to name drop. All of them 're going to start thinking about what you do since time began create and accumulate this technical debt, wait until something to completely screw up, and there will be multiple screw ups. And that's on you, because you have not benefited from the luxury of people who know how this shit works, of people who know how this shit works, and does that meet your quality standards?
Speaker 2Do all of those screw-ups meet your quality standards? They shouldn't. You can't change without change, and if you have the same people, then expect the same things.
Speaker 2So I'm saying start strategically with cool AI exists. What are the good, helpful, high-value, ethical things we can do with it? What makes sense to do with it internally? What makes sense to do with it externally for our product, services, experience, ecosystem? Then from there, of course, you need your researchers and your service designers.
Speaker 2And I would also say reverse the order of what I just said. Maybe you just say we have AI, we don't know where the hell to put it. You know what you figure it out. Hey researchers, hey service designers, is doing or should be doing that you believe would be improved by AI tools or automations or whatever it might be. You don't have to have the. I don't want you to have the solution first. I would rather you just go to the researchers and say find problems that need to be solved, and maybe they're solved by AI, but maybe they're not. And we just have to remember that, like chatbots, we shouldn't be shoehorning it into everything because it's a shiny object. I still, I know we're saying some similar things and the way that I try to put it is look, I think ultimately, companies win more through customer centricity.
Speaker 2You can try to avoid customer centricity. You can try to say it's not important. We can live without it. You can live without it. You can win more through customer centricity, by understanding people and their needs, tasks, behaviors, etc. To me, the companies will do better when they are solving real problems. Well, it sounds so simple.
Speaker 1And organizations out there. Who's orchestrating these tasks? Because you all claim to be customer-centric. You all claim to be user-first. 90% of you, in my humble experience, don't even talk to users, and the other bunch just guess. Yeah, it's mostly guessing. You need to experience. The framework and for me it starts at the top is flawed.
Speaker 2Yes, but I'm doing a catch flies with honey version because I could take a scorched earth version. I don't disagree with you. I would say, blow it all up and start with a chief experience officer and then figure out who else you need. But because what isn't an experience? But I think that I'm less likely to see that happen when I act like 92 billion people have to lose their jobs so that we can put in a CXO. So my thought is at least freaking install the CXO and an experience large experience department under that empowered, funded experienced department under that empowered funded.
Speaker 1If you haven't got the right people by qualification and or experience at a senior level, you're leaving millions of dollars on the table. That is what you're doing.
Speaker 2I'm going to take you in a totally different direction, just so we have a fun way to wrap up. This is Roy, and Roy should be at my house in about a half hour. We can't, we can't keep him. We're going to foster him until he can find a home. We already have five dogs. We are dog family, so we love dogs. But a cousin found roy in the road and brought him home and, um, we are, we'll give him whatever stick and ball that he likes, but hopefully we can find him a home and uh, where he will be loved and appreciated and understood and hashtag empathy and cared for. And what I want for roy is what I want for every tech worker what a good boy to have this session, thank you.
Speaker 1Promise to be in touch more often. I hope so.