Books-and-links-note for end of July 2023

For years I’ve been signing up to work-related newsletters and sharing links. At the start of 2023, a long trip and a house move meant that I got behind on my reading list for the worst that I’d possibly got since I’d had email: at the start of July my inbox was over 1000 emails, some going back to late February. After a final push this weekend, my inbox is now a blissful 0 (though there are a still a few open tabs). Rather than shoehorn this into a weeknote, this is a standalone list of things I’ve read about.

Books

I’ve got back to spending a lot of money on books. The newly released second edition of David Travis and Philip Hodgson’s Think Like a UX Researcher has some important reminders about bad research (preferences not needs) and intriguing reminders to researcher that they may prefer qual or quant research and to not let this bias their choices!

I also just got through Sludge by Cass R. Sundstein. Sludge is a shorthand for barriers to getting a thing, especially related to government. It’s based on examples from the US government, and has an illuminating research study which showed people with greater financial worries lose the equivalent of 10 IQ points when it comes to making decisions and so need as few unnecessary barriers as possible.

Links

Getting to the end of the newsletter links backlog…

• TIL the phrase ‘Jootsing’. It means ‘jumping outside of the system’-ing. It’s a creativity technique that requires deep learning of a system, getting out of it for other ideas, and then bringing those ideas back as creative fuel.
• Tom Dolan wrote up his notes from attending Marty Cagan’s ‘Transformed’ product management workshop. Love the note about separating mission and vision. I’ve also been listening to the audiobook of Cagan’s Inspired which validates a lot of the good product work I’ve seen in government but also has a few new tips such as pushing for change in more established organisations
• My colleague is looking at creating a user insights library, so this post on how the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) is prototyping a user insights library is pertinent. (See also: Growing research in product organisations and the Department for Education’s Learnings from a year of ResOps)
• The Open Data Institute (ODI) User-centric data publishing alpha looks helpful for teams—particularly useful that it calls out understanding a user’s data publishing journey as I saw this skipped somewhat with data related GOV.UK service standard Alpha assessments that I’ve done
• some researchers ran some tests on the 3 most common UX questionnaires (SUS, UMUX-LITE, and UEQ-S) using 4 common systems (Netflix, Zoom, Powerpoint and Big Blue Button—whatever that is). They found that for ranking different products and general task completion the questionnaire type doesn’t matter, but if you care about how fun it is to use as well then UEQ-S is the better questionnaire. (SUS and UMUX-LITE for government services then?)
• A product coach has noticed that their successful coachees (is that a word?) look beyond the product world for learning
• Also on product, I liked this product leadership model with the acronym SCALE (Strategy, Customer centricity, Agility, Leadership, and Execution)
• It’s taken me a while to get to this article by Hanzi Freinacht on how to design future governance but it’s great: suggesting that we need to allow for collective intelligence, create lattices of decision making (a lot of things aren’t entirely local decisions, but also don’t need top-down decision making either) and allow for deep network thinking (though getting this to happen in a 5 year electoral cycle is… interesting)
• And from a few months ago but particularly relevant for me right now, Peter Merholz on how design leadership is change management. I’ve also been catching up on his Rosenfeld Media talk about UX Directors and he makes good points: 1) that design managers mostly manage down, whereas levels up do a lot more sideways and up; 2) being successful requires getting people to trust you; 3) traction with an org means being just ahead of the organisation but not too far ahead and find ways to show the team’s worth in ways that the organisation will understand.

Peter Merholz showing how the direction of communication changes dependent on the level of design

Peter Merholz saying that designers have to understand politics

• For those who are UX teams of one, Clara Kuo has tips on managing strategy as well as doing.
• How do we make bets? Economist Richard Zeckhauser has a great model for translating the famous Eisenhower ‘unknown unknowns’ into 2x2 of probabilities vs states of the world: splitting into risk, uncertainty, ignorance and not applicable. Related: design is de-risking
• …… but actually I found a more designerly version of the 2x2 from The Flux Collective measuring ambiguity and stakes, with quadrants of gambling, true experiments, quality assurance, and play. (Speaking of gambling, most new tech starts off as a toy, and some then become something more useful)

• Should we be thinking more about the underpinning ideologies about being ‘efficient’ tech workers?
• Mandy Brown suggests some reframing of language for coaching: don’t talk about ‘the drivers seat’ (too many drivers for a single seat just doesn’t work) and just aim for ‘scaffolding change’ (with the reminder that scaffolding always comes down).
• When I get UCD folk working in agile, I normally advise them to keep a lot of their more unordered ideas away from the JIRA backlog and in something a bit more loose like a document. Turns out Johanna Rothman agrees: she suggests that product planning should have pillars of a ranked kanban board, an unordered list and then a parking lot.
• A couple of related car software posts: Ford acknowledges that most car companies can’t complete with Tesla on software innovation as they’ve outsourced too much, and longtime tech commentator Mark Hurst suggests that car manufacturers ignore complaints about touchscreen UIs as it’s not worth them investing in physical interfaces, as much as consumers prefer them.
• I’ve loved exploring metaphors since discovering Lackoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By when doing my Masters, so loved this piece from the Verge on metaphors of the internet (and the underlying politics behind them)
• MVPs are greatly misunderstood—I enjoyed this as a reminder of how Dropbox’s MVP was actually an explainer video.
• Speaking of MVPs, wow this explainer about the start of Google Maps from the perspective of one of its original designers is an amazing blog post in a tweet (or post or whatever).
• I don’t think I’ve shared this before, but this is a great intro compilation of the cynefin systems thinking framework. (Interestingly some quadrants have recently been renamed — ‘obvious’ is now ‘clear’ and ‘disorder’ is now ‘confused’). Cynefin also shows up in Jen Briselli’s Best Practices are Useless in Complex Systems. And this piece in the Harvard Business Review on ‘radical optionality’ basically says that we need sometimes to learn while doing (i.e. a cynefin model)
• Cynefin also shows up in this PDF on systems thinking and how it was used in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). The systems thinking toolbox is a reminder that there are many methods to get the right outcome, and the ‘Chilcott Checklist’ is a nice sense check of the change and something of a business canvas model made policy.
• Your favourite information architect Abby Covert (aka Abby the IA) has been knocking it out of the park with blogposts. How to argue for a structure proposal combines industry language with good old argument theory, and the return of investment on information architecture brings together various techniques including the overlooked-but-highly-important controlled vocabulary.
• Fiona Armstrong reflected on designing services in sensitive areas for 20 years Australia. I appreciated her recommendation to go beyond empathy and understand why people’s worldview may mean they struggle with a particular service (for example, why people who have grown up in refugee camps may not relate to the strict time expectations of doing a 9–5 job)
• Many may be familiar with ‘the wisdom of crowds’ (and in fact this is why agile ceremonies encourage team estimation of tasks) but even thinking from another person’s perspective can help make better decisions. (I think that my childhood debating experience often helps with this as we sometimes had to swap sides on debating topics!)
• I hadn’t heard of the 5 levels of delegation (do as I say, research and report, research and recommend, decide and inform, act independently) but am going to try it out.
• Also on the topic of being thoughtful when managing ideas, if you need a strategy, why not create a strategy table to explore alternate strategies before choosing the best one?
• Erin Megan Miller’s Levels of Zoom on Service Design cannily split out Business Strategy, Service Strategy and Service Experience before moving down further to User Experience and User Interface. I’ve noticed that people can get fuzzy and conflate the first 3.
• I love a good build on an idea. John Cutler takes Joshua Arnold’s Understanding Value model and its 4 benefits types (increase revenue, protect revenue, reduce costs, and avoid costs) and then adds leverage points.
• Design of services or designing for service? Researchers looked at Scottish social security and UK council services. They recommended that public managers allow for service design to be pragmatic, embrace complexity and for the service design work to have time and space to be adaptive.
• Intriguing work in Scotland about participation (PR)requests—a process that lets communities co-create outcomes—and a related participation request toolbox created Social Studios (associated with the Glasgow School of Art). The materials are promising—even if ‘sketchy look’ is becoming a vibe—though I did find the rest of the framework a bit hard to get into.
• “most shadow IT is typically not the result of intentional rule-breaking, rather the result of staff trying to ‘get their job done’ where corporately-provided equipment and services are not adequate”. New National Cyber Security (NCSC) guidance on shadow IT
• Dan Saffer gives some to-the-point advice about design portfolios.
• Who remembers internet cafes? I had to use them as recently as 2020, since as a then non-UK national, return flights on budget airlines meant a visa check stamped with a physical boarding card that I had to print out beforehand. The excellent Rest of World website showcases internet cafes that still exist in Nepal.
• Speaking of remembering, I can remember the dot-com crash of the early-00s (at the time I was well onto the way of being an adult, but had barely used the internet so it was somewhat abstract). The History of the Web series makes it clear that for every astute Jeff Bezos decision, there were many many other founders making terrible ones.
• Another thing I found, the Feyman learning technique

(phew! yay inbox 0!)

Other things

• my local cinema is doing a Greta Gerwig retrospective. Lady Bird still holds up (I love that it shows the details of school). I also loved Letterboxd’s interview with Gerwig about the 32 films that inspired Barbie .
• Since seeing Kate Briggs talk about being a translator, I’ve been reading around that profession. To this end, I loved this NYT piece on the art of translation, and the call to action in the related PEN America 2023 manifesto of literary translation.
• I don’t really know Robin Ince’s work as a comedian but somehow ended up with the audiobook of his science book The Importance of Being Interested. It’s a broadranging book, going from biology to the stars to even death. What is constant is Ince’s curious but reassuraning presence. The book is worth it if only to understand how to talk about complicated things in a way that brings people along with the topic.
• Finally, when I’m in a gap between books, I go back to Mary Carr’s The Art of Memoir. Read by the author, I use it to remind me that writing should never preen: as a longtime lecturer, she has noticed that writers often rail against their natural talents or try to hide the parts of their personality that they are ashamed of. For Carr, it’s descending into highfalutin’ language and trying to act smart about topics she knows next to nothing about.

2023 Weeknotes

• July: 3, 10, 17, 24
• June: 26, 19, 12, 5
• May: 29