Choose The Human First: Rethinking Innovation, Power, And Accessibility

What if the way your team talks is the blueprint for every product you ship? We sit down with Erica Hall—co‑founder of Mule Design and author of Just Enough Research and Conversational Design—to connect the dots between internal communication, ethical practice, and the systems that end up in people’s hands. From AI hype to accessibility debt, Erica challenges the default settings that turn “innovation” into convenience theater and shows how small, human choices reshape outcomes.

We unpack Conway’s Law and why so many “conversational” tools are really shields that prevent actual conversation. Erica explains why accessibility must be the foundation of value delivery, not an add‑on, and how multimodal design—voice, text, GUI—honors real life context switching. We talk about the political economy behind today’s platforms: funding fads, LLM bandwagons, and the quiet scaling of bias through automated decision making. Along the way, we explore the power dynamics of in‑house design teams, why external partners once provided crucial leverage, and how fear erodes the point of view needed to build responsible products.

Most importantly, we get practical. Erica shares tactics to rebuild trust at work through private, human conversations that aren’t mediated or recorded; ways to move beyond AI theater by naming goals before choosing tools; and advice for new graduates navigating a volatile market without losing themselves. If you’re wrestling with inclusion, ethics, or the pressure to “ship a chatbot,” this conversation offers clear language, real examples, and a path to designing with dignity.

Listen, share with a colleague who needs a sanity check, and leave a review so more builders can find this conversation. Subscribe for future episodes focused on ethical design, accessibility, and the real work of making technology serve people.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage With Erica Hall
• 2:55 From Strategy To Organizational Design
• 5:20 AI Hype Meets Accessibility Reality
• 8:20 Conway’s Law And Broken Interfaces
• 12:30 Multimodal Design And Real Choice
• 17:05 Funding Fads And LLM Bandwagons
• 20:30 Power Dynamics Of In‑House Design
• 24:30 Rebuilding Workplace Conversation
• 29:00 Fear, Loneliness, And Culture Drift

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. I am delighted that we're joined today by Erica Hall. Erica is the co-founder of Mule Design and author of Just Enough Design and a book that I've really enjoyed and gave me think and gave me pause to think about how we design systems and interact with people. Right, which was it's available for free, right? And it's about conversational design. We're in an age where everyone's talking about conversational computing and large language models and having AI thrown at us left, right, and center. And I thought it would be a really timely opportunity to come and talk with Erica. So, Erica, thank you for joining us. Um hope I've described that right. Please tell us sort of what you're working right on and yeah, you know, what the sort of work you do for Mule design.

Erica Hall: 0:51

Uh yeah, it's so uh lovely to be joining you today. So uh my partner and I co-founded Mule back in 2001, which is a shocking uh number of years ago now. And uh we've always been a strategic design consultancy. And in the past uh few years, when uh a lot of organizations grew their in-house teams, we've uh turned a lot more towards organizational consulting, like helping, because these organizations are not set up to necessarily do work functionally and effectively with their internal teams, having an outside perspective is good. So communication strategy and a lot of practice developments. A lot of, I've been doing a lot more, you know, training on how to do design research because that is so misunderstood. So that's been quite quite a lot of it is like the practice development side and the wrestling with the organizational issues. And then we still do, you know, the odd um brand strategy project or the more traditional design here and there.

Neil Milliken: 1:55

So um and yes, organizations are complex things and grappling with them is is an art in its in itself. I think that, you know, uh when you when you wrote your book, you were talking about how you have these conversational processes. And I don't think that often organizations don't converse and they don't communicate well. And then when we translate that into systems and uh we're we're flat bang in the middle of a period of revolutionary tech where people are just applying systems without too much thought about the implications of those systems and they're not communicating. We're opening ourselves up to things breaking down a little bit. And from the perspective of Access Chat, for example, yeah, where we are thinking about inclusive design and disability inclusion, that can have really profound impact. Now, we've talked a lot about AI over the last year or two because uh there's a lot of stuff there that is really helpful to people with disabilities. So speech recognition tools, transcription, image recognition, object recognition, these are the foundational pieces of new assistive technologies that can uh transform people's lives. But at the same time, decision-making systems and stuff like that can also rapidly um uh you know uh amplify biases and and inequities. So so we want to be mindful about that, and that's why we we really like to have conversations with people that think deeply about it. So, are these the kind of questions that are coming up from your clients, or are they the kind of things that you have to try and raise awareness with when you're going out and doing a consulting?

Erica Hall: 3:40

It's a bit of both, but more the latter. I mean, you know, something I mentioned in conversational design that you're probably familiar with is Conway's Law, which is from I should at this point remember what year. He is still a living software engineer, Mel Conway. And back in the 1970s, I think he came up with a principle that the way an organization communicates internally constrains the systems it can design. And I think that was a pretty profound observation that we've known about for decades, but no one remembers in practice, right? It's like the way you talk to each other determines what you put out into the world. And we saw this at the early part of the commercial web when, oh, the website mirrors the organization's org chart, and so nobody from outside can figure it out. Like that in retrospect is the simplest and most benign example of that. But now we are, we have these systems that purport to be conversational made by organizations that are trying to get in, like use the tools to either avoid or prevent humans talking to each other. And that is this enormous, I don't even know if you call it a paradox, but it's a really pernicious situation, right? Because ideally, if you want to design systems, and this is what you know, the reason I wrote the book, is if you want to design systems that interact with other people sort of on behalf of your organization or to help them out, or that kind of stand in as a proxy for a person, and you don't need these to be like intelligent or agentive or whatever, they're programmatic systems that have been able to embody these principles for a really long time. You need to want to talk to people. You need to, it's like I talked to a friend of mine who's a comedy writer and a screenwriter, and he's like, to write humor, you have to like people. And I think to design interactive systems that are involved in our most important and often intimate relationships, you have to value people and love people. And so I think what's going on right now is there are systems that are supplanting human interaction designed by people who don't like or value people. And like we've been working like sort of in and around accessibility for a very uh long time. Um and it I hate the way it's still this bolt-on, this add-on, this like we have this like normal person, and oh, we have to go design something to add accessibility. And it's like, why is that not from the beginning? Right? Why are you not, and especially now that we have the opportunity to design multimodally, which is how people should be thinking about these things. It's not like now there's such an everything mindset with the way these products and companies are developed, which is like, now, you know, now we're all doing voice interfaces. Oh, now we're all doing texting interfaces, like chatbots. Yeah. And it's like, no, what you should be doing is whatever you offer, if it's truly valuable to people, then you should make that value accessible. Like, does the person, is it more possible or more convenient to text with the system? Great. Is it more possible or more convenient or to you know have a voice interaction or to to work with a GUI? Because the same person, like the thing that like really, you don't even have to care about people with abilities uh or preferences different from your own. It's just like you as a person. Sometimes you're in a loud room, sometimes you're in a dark room, sometimes you're alone, sometimes you're around people, or you're switching devices. Like as a person who often you know uses the most common and conventional ways to interact with my devices, I don't want to like be forced to talk or forced to type. I want to choose because that's how we are with each other. Like humans are amazing mode switchers, right? Like, you know, like you'll be in the same room with somebody, like in a meeting with a colleague, and then you're like, oh, we're having a voice conversation, but I'm gonna like secretly text them because we're coordinating our communication during a meeting. Like we do that all the time, unthinking. Like I've worked on so many research projects about like how people switch devices and switch modes. And so, yeah, so that's a long-winded way of saying, like, come on, you know, this is still an issue. And so when when we go in, your question was about us and the organizations we work with and their perspective, everybody is gets so, especially in America, right, so short-term thinking and so like follow the money focused, where it's like, what are people funding? Because that's what's happening now. The only thing getting funded is AI. So we're all gonna like, it's all a LLM-based chat bot. And it's like, if you're a designer or if you're an organization that's like we're we involve design in our processes, you need to step back and say, like, okay, what's our goal? What's the best way of getting there? But no, it's just like react, react, react, react. So, yeah. So a lot of times I just go in and my whole job, the whole value that we provide as consultants is we go in and we're like, hey, why don't you talk to each other? Like, I literally have consulting engagements that are like just getting people to get over their fear of talking to their colleagues or stakeholders or somebody in a different part of the hierarchy or a different department in the organization. So, yeah, I have no fear about my job being taken by taken by AI because like everybody's just getting more afraid of talking to each other.

Debra Ruh: 9:35

Erica, let me come in. Mm-hmm. I I hear what you're saying, and I so, so agree with you. I really agree with everything you're saying. I do not understand why we're doing it so the way we're doing it so ridiculous. Why are we not designing so that all humans at any aspect of their life, any time of the can actually have choices? I also, though, think I I want to ask you a question that came up with one of the clients that I was working with. I was working with a very large telecommunications client. So I know you're uh I know a little bit about your work, and I know you also were talking about the ethics of this and the responsibilities of the designers. How do we balance the innovation? And let me f finish this with protecting human human dignity and inclusion, okay? But at the same time, I want to bring up this one uh point from this uh training that I was doing for a very large American telecommunications company. And I we were training them how to do accessibility, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, pretty much these designers, they seem to almost know better or as certainly as good as we did. And so I on on break, I was like, well, tell me about this because you seem to know you do you know ARIA, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, oh yeah, we've been following this, we love it, we think it's the right thing to do. And I said, okay, well, then why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you telling them this company, which I'm not going to name, about it? And they're like, Are you kidding? There's no way we can do this. We are you kidding me? No matter what I can't do what they've already asked me to do. And by the way, they've told me do A, B, C, D, E. And they did not tell me to go and do that. And so it sort of made me so sad to know that these designers already knew how to do it, but they did not feel empowered at all to talk to this. Of course, we were training about accessibility, so now there was the opportunity. But I just thought I would bring that in as well. So over to you.

Erica Hall: 11:31

Yeah, absolutely. And this has happened to us so many times, like throughout the entire history of Mule, where we we'd bring our team in, we'd meet the internal designers. And our perspective was always, always like we knew that if you come in and there's a design team in-house, you have to go to them, like make friends with them, understand them, and support them. Because having like being an internal designer and then having somebody brought in from the outside to do your job, like that's rude. That's like baseline rude. And a lot of times we talk to them and they exactly that situation where it's like, here's our recommendations, here's our schematics, here's our, and they won't listen to us. And I think one of the things that's happened to say the field of design construed broadly is that when companies bring teams in-house more, and and like agencies have sort of disappeared, like really around like 2015, a lot got acquired, or just like there wasn't a as much of a role for the strategic partner agency because organizations are like, oh, we have to do this, we're gonna bring it in-house. When you bring design in-house, it is different. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but it's different because you don't have that same um contractual power. And so you really do have to like be careful of the questions you ask and be careful of the recommendations, and you can't get access to the information you need, right? And I think we haven't talked about that as practitioners enough to say when you bring it in-house, the practice fundamentally changes. And so, because when you can get fired, you're not gonna have as strong a point of view. And so we've lacked this point of view, or people to say, oh, that's not ethical, we're not gonna do that. Because you do have power as an external designer to say, here's our contractual parameters, and we can walk if something just goes awry. And that changes how you can design. And so I think an internal external partnership can be really powerful, but it's stupid. It's it's stupid that because of the way people and power and structures are, that you know, organizations talk about efficiency. I have yet, I have yet to interact with an organization that's actually efficient. And that's fine. We should be talking about effectiveness, we should be talking about good use of resources, but it's it's exactly that. And so, uh, yeah, like I said, a lot of times we might be hired to do one thing, but actually what we're doing is creating a safe place for people to have an open, honest conversation about like, oh, this isn't gonna work. This is what we should do. Like, we don't have clear goals, stuff like that.

Antonio Santos: 14:16

We know that AI is also being started to be embedded more and more in our workplaces in the way how we interact. At the same time, employee engagement has been dropping over the years. So now we have AI. Some of these tools that we use to collaborate have been built by engineers who sometimes build them for themselves, not for other people. How can we turn this around and try and design and find ways to bring back people to the conversation within the collaborative space at work, knowing that all these challenges and all these noises around us, how can we go back to the conversation?

Erica Hall: 14:53

That's a great question. It's both, I think, simple, it's simple and very challenging. And it really is like talk to people. Like I, you know, I'm on LinkedIn a lot and talking to people about these challenges. And the fundamental issue is that people in their workplace rightly feel they have a lot of fear, they feel very unsafe, right? Especially now. Like it feels like no organization is doing anything that makes sense in a way that is intelligible to an employee. Like they can have tremendous profits, they're laying people off, like they're spinning up new projects, they're shutting them down. Like everybody overhired during the pandemic, and then they they shut all those employees. And because it's financialized capitalism, right? I think doing things that are useful and doing things that are telling a story to investors, telling a story to the stock market, have gone like this, right? And so we're in the world of pure fantasy, because that's like every time every time a CEO says something, like it gets reported as news, right? They just say things about like, oh, this is what we're gonna be doing in 10 years, and everything shifts. And so that's the environment people are working in. And so within that, it's like recognize that, don't take it on. Because I feel like a lot of designers and people who come from ethics, who come from accessibility are like, I have to take this on. It's like it's like recognize the environment you're in and do what you can. So it's like there is a lot you can do in terms of building relationships with your colleagues, but you have to recognize that like maybe the organization doesn't want that, or maybe they're just like you're just gonna be randomly fired. There's been a lot of conversation. What can you do to avoid being laid off? And the answer is not a thing, not a darn thing. And I think that's you have to accept that.

Antonio Santos: 16:57

A conversation that we had with uh with past guests on this topic is many people working as a group, they've they have a sense of loneliness. They feel pretty much alone. And that leads to people depression, mental health issues, uh, and and sometimes people end up using social networks and all like LinkedIn as a to connect with other with their peers as an escape to all that.

Erica Hall: 17:22

Yeah, it's it's really unfortunate.

Neil Milliken: 17:26

Yeah. I I think that you know the it's it's it's quite a recent shift along with it, like so the shift in in the way that businesses are behaving is coming in parallel with some of the shifts in politics, right? And um that that has enabled some of the it's enabled people to be the worst versions of themselves in terms of like how we manage and how we create or destroy organizational cultures. And I think that that if you're saying, you know what, there's nothing you can do about being fired, then maybe we should uh not give too much of a talk about the fear and be braver. So I think there is uh you know there is actually an opportunity in some of this to have some of the more challenging conversations as well.

Erica Hall: 18:20

Yeah.

Neil Milliken: 18:21

Um you know, we uh within my own organization it it's public knowledge that we've been through massive restructuring and management changes and stuff like that. And that's had to change the way that we interact and and communicate. And um you know I've really tried to maintain the human side of of what we're doing as an organization. But it's it's a pattern that we're seeing, right? We're through going, you know, we've we've had some particular circumstances within our organization. But there's a pattern of dehumanization and financialization that you're talking about, which is also really short term, because actually uh we know from looking at business for a long term that businesses are more effective. I'm not going to say efficient, big businesses aren't really that efficient as you've already alluded to, but they're more effective when people are engaged and they feel that they're bought into the ethics of the, you know, and the ethos of the company. And when they have the cognitive dissonance, which I think a lot of people, employees are feeling right now, right? Because there was this message, you know, we're we're family, we care about the environment, we care about people, we care about community. And then it's like actually, you know what, your past doesn't work anymore because you're you know, you're surplus to requirements because you know what, we've automated your job. Nice. So so I think that that sort of that cognitive uh dissonance is is really at large now and it's impacting how organizations function. And no matter how much CEOs would like AI to replace a lot of their workforce, the fact is that it's it's not ready. It's not capable of doing the things that humans do in the complex context-switching ways that we we operate in uncertain environments, it falls off the rails all of the time. Do you think that the pendulum is going to shift back, or do you think there's going to be still more sort of kind of creative destruction before we come out the other side? Because all of these things, to a certain extent, are cyclical.

Erica Hall: 20:33

Yeah. And there's been a lot of conversation about a bubble bursting. And because everybody's talking about these speculative futures and the amount of information, especially with our current administration, um, the amount of real information about what's really going on is we're just that we're in a fog right now. We're in a complete fog about like glorious future. Everybody's lying, right? Everybody at the top of these organizations is lying. Some universities are doing studies, like things are coming out of Stanford and MIT and Oxford about what's really going on with these so-called tools. And it's like none of them, they're making work, right? There was just that study, I think, published in the Harvard Business Review about work sloth that I thought was really good. None of them are actually doing anything. And I think what people aren't realizing when people do interact with these tools at work is how much of their own expertise they're bringing. The tools are not bringing capabilities to people. People are imbuing, like if you're doing prompt engineering or anything, that's coming from your own expertise. And I think the more senior people are saying, like, oh, these tools are actually helpful because they have a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise that they're underrating. And so I don't know, like the issue with the pendulum is that what we're still seeing, like that was just Elon Musk's pay package was reported. What we're seeing is all of this money and power going to this echelon of people. And the only way to counterbalance that is through worker power, right? And we're starting to see some of that. Because it's not inherently gonna go back because we're seeing it in America, like private equity is just like going through and rapaciously destroying businesses that like they just got Denny's, the diner chain, you know, it's like there's craft stores that are going under. Like that's what happened to Toys Arrest. Like businesses that do things that people love and enjoy and appreciate just get consumed by capital. And the only counter to that is by warfare's building relationships. And sometimes, yes, it's formal like unionization, but going back to the question about getting conversation back in, it really is like setting aside time to prioritize building relationships with your colleagues in your organization and outside your organization, but not using organizational channels, like not using things that are recorded or mediated, like seriously, like if you're an accessibility person and you're feeling lonely, build relationships with other people in your organization that aren't about your specialty, that aren't about accessibility. Just talk to people about movies, about music, about food, like have time. Like if you're in person, like let's get a coffee and just chat. If you're all virtual, say, you know what? Let's just have a voice call on my personal phone. And you can ask people, like, because this feels so awkward at this point. You're just like, how do we do this? How do we make adult friends? And if you're just like, hey, as a favor to me, could we just like chat for 15 minutes, like just on the phone? Because we do so much video now, and that's really draining, and that's become the default for for a lot of people when you don't need it, like when you're meeting people for the first time, it's great. But a lot of times do a voice call, but do something that's not being tracked or recorded by your by your employer. And I think this makes a real difference. And just say, hey, I just want to get to know you and understand like you and your work so that we can work better together. And you go from a place of curiosity. You know, I do this in my research workshops too. Just like once you ask people, like, tell me about your job, tell me about your life, just a little bit, all of a sudden you're like, oh, we have so much in common. We're both people. And that little simple thing, making time for that conversation means you have a relationship outside of how you're being told to relate by the structures and the tools that are being imposed upon you by your employer. And that is a way of getting power back over your life. And it's also cool to like know people.

Antonio Santos: 24:51

So uh I've been asking this question to some of our guests uh in our past uh podcasts, taking advantage that we have we are talking with people who have a long experience of work. And I would like to ask if someone you know is finishing their studies today, we end up in this kind of a messy, complicated situation we are in. How do you advise young professionals to navigate in the professional today?

Erica Hall: 25:20

It is so difficult, right? I graduated in a recession with a philosophy degree, right? So I had a little struggle time. And the most important thing I would say to somebody just graduating is uh you're really early. It's really early. Because I remember that feeling of like, oh no, I'm 22, my life is over, you know? What do I do with myself? It's too late to do anything. Like when you just graduate university, you're just at the beginning. So don't react, like, take care of yourself and just get oriented in the world because it's so different. Leaving like all of the ways that you succeed in education are very different. And I think, especially in like design education, wow, they are doing a disservice. Design schools are preparing people for a world that does not exist, like this idealized world. And I think the first step is like just don't worry about getting on a career path right away. Just think about what do I need to just take care of myself? Where do I want to be in the world? What do I want to experience? Like, of course, you you might have like if you're in the US, enormous student loans, things like that. But start by taking care of yourself. Because I think this happens and there's been work done on this because of the Olympic system we have, we kind of assume mutuality with organizations, like, oh, if I really care about them, they really care about me, and it's easy to fall in that trap. So the first step is really taking care of yourself and not being like, oh, I have to fit myself in one of these boxes out there, or else I'll never have a career in this field. It doesn't matter. If you take a job, like to just get your bearings in the working world and it's not exactly what you thought you'd be doing, like don't get really bummed out. Don't say, Oh, I've got to, I've got to join one of these big corporations. I've got to, you know, it's like take a beat, recognize it's gonna feel like, oh, especially if you were really like driven in your education, you're like, no, if I don't immediately get an amazing job, I can brag to you about my friends or make my parents proud. I'm a failure, right? There's all these feelings that can potentially come out. And it's like, you know, everything's changing really fast. Yes. And there might be an amazing, like what happened with me is like when I graduated, everything was crappy. And then a couple years later, because I was just like too early for some things that were in the cycle. And and so recognize that it's like waves, right? I used to have a friend and a colleague and a mentor who would always say, like, ride the wave, you know, he was a surfer. And it and I used to laugh about that. And I'm like, oh, it's so true. Like sometimes you're like, I need to paddle, I'm just paddling right now. And then the then I'll see something and be like, that's what I want to work on, that's what's happening. But it's like relationships. It's all like make relationships with people, but take care of yourself and your mental health and your physical health. Do what you need and like be like a good friend and a good family member and all of that, and the and you'll figure out the job stuff.

Neil Milliken: 28:42

And I think, you know, the fact that you're getting experience then informs you and puts you in a better place when you do get the job anyway. So thank you so much for being our guest today. Remind people where we can find your books.

Erica Hall: 28:57

Mulebooks.com. Yeah, we're we're a publisher now since our our publisher went out of business. So we have a we have a lot of people.

Neil Milliken: 29:04

Mulebooks.com, great. And and we we need to thank our friends at Amazon for keeping helping keep us on air and supporting the show. And thank everyone for listening. Um, it's been a great pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.

Erica Hall: 29:20

Yeah. Thank you. Lovely talking to you as well.