Based on a career in interaction design of over 30 years, this talk describes how the discipline of user experience design has developed over that time. It also explores some of the potential pathways that practitioners might follow in the next phase beyond “Peak Web” UX design. This will be presented through the lens of creative leadership in a large-scale interdisciplinary team at the world’s biggest public service media organisation.
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Build Product Turing Fest 2018
"Peak Web" UX Design: What to do next...?
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Hello everyone, my name is Colin Burns. I work for the BBC. I am the Chief Design Officer. I run a team of about two hundred UX designers. I'm based here in Glasgow, but my team extend all the way around the country. Five different locations that I wander about.
I'm no stranger to a British rail buddy. So I'm from Scotland. This conference for me is my first Turing festival, so it feels like we're also at homecoming. This is my favorite hill, down in Dumfries. It's called Crefel. I've been doing a bit of prototyping with some of my colleagues about what I might call this talk.
A few of them told me this sounds a bit like my career epitaph, and maybe I shouldn't really go with this one, so I modified it a little bit to that. I think that we are at this point where there's a lot of us in UX doing a whole bunch of low value work, and I think that we really, as an industry, could maybe sort of refocus our efforts a bit.
So that's the kind of provocative thing I'd like to talk about in the next half hour. Essentially, what I want to talk about is when I spoke to Brian Cochrane when I was putting this talk together, he asked me to do something that was a bit of a sort of reflection on thirty years being a user experience designer.
But really I want to talk about where we're at, but most importantly what we might do now. I'm also going to just show you some lovely pictures of some of the nice people that I've met the way. So where'd I come from? Well actually more than thirty years ago, almost forty years ago I was suite sixteen and at that point I had no ambition to be a user experience designer let alone the chief design officer of the BBC.
But over in MIT Media Lab this was happening. It's a slow start. Create a yellow circle there. Create a cyan triangle there. Put a magenta square there. Create a blue diamond there. Move that. There. Put that. There. Move that below that. Move that west of the diamond.
Create a large green circle there. Oh, ****. Doing demos doesn't get any better. Restart. Obviously, I had no awareness of this whatsoever. But I think the thing that's fascinating to me is that we've spent the last forty years sorting out the graphics on that demo, and that system is still more advanced than ninety nine percent of the systems that we're working on.
So if you like, I entered Defray in nineteen eighty seven. I was lucky enough to study at the Royal College of Art and I met this man, Bill Mogridge, who unfortunately passed away six years ago. So much of what I know, so many of the opportunities I have came from working for Bill at his company Ideal over in California.
It was a huge career break for me, a huge life break. I actually was recruited as an industrial designer and I designed all sorts of extraordinary devices like telephones. The thing that was great about Ideo was that we actually turned what was a sort of contracting jobbing industrial design business into something that was really able to take the power of design, design thinking if you like, and turn it into a consulting business that could work with almost any sort of business sector or any sort of business.
And we eventually managed to sort of create a practice that underpinned all of that that was based on good human centered design. Now the thing that really changed me was when nineteen eighty eight, so the second year I was there, I worked on this product here, another telephone.
My claim to fame, my lame to fame is that this is the world's first mobile GUI, okay? Now it was just about a GUI because you could address every one of the one bit pixels in 8x6 blocks, and we were actually able to roughly fashion what I would now know to call a tab based interface with a six button input set.
And that was a kind of interesting thing to do. The reason I got to work in that project was because I was working with this guy here, Bilver Plank. Bilver was one of the inventors of the modern computer. He worked at Xerox and he was part of the team that invented the graphical user interface, the whole window icon menu and pointer paradigm.
And a lot of the features that we still use today in computers in the workplace was work that Bill had done. This was a real sort of collision in my career. I'd never worked with anyone like Bill. And he came essentially he was a user requirements based software systems engineer.
But the thing that I learned from Bill that has actually been enduring throughout my entire career is that it's all based on the same action research philosophy from the '60s as a lot people have been talking about. So as far as I'm concerned, agile, design thinking, lean manufacturing, all that sort of great stuff is essentially based on that same philosophy.
And that was a really, really extraordinary sort of learning for someone who'd gone to the Royal College of Art, which is essentially was kind of like applied poetry a bit of a sort of jubilee peg. Bill then went on to join Interval Research Corporation, which was a sort of think tank in Palo Alto.
I'll pick that story back up in two or three slides from now. I first left IDO in nineteen ninety three. I went back a bit later on. I actually went back to Royal College of Art, and I was lucky enough to work with this person, Gillian Crampton Smith.
And we were setting up a course together that was essentially around this new discipline that Bilver Plank and Bill Mogeridge had named interaction design. And as part of that, Gillian and I did some research work back at Interval with Bilver Plank. The thing that's come out of that collaboration I still use today is Verplanque's interaction design framework.
And what Bill was saying is that design projects or design initiatives can start in any one of these eight boxes. I think that there's a kind of sort of presupposition or sort of common sense that maybe there's a problem to be solved and therefore we need to start going in that.
But people have ideas and that's a legitimate place to start a project. There are tasks that we need to make happen. There are jobs to be done. But also I think most particularly and particularly relevant to where we are right now in the evolution of UX a discipline, UX design as a discipline, is that the way that you map things to displays, whatever the output of the computer system and whatever constraints that the inputs are available to you also really, really drive that interaction design sort of work.
So let's fast forward again to nineteen ninety seven. I found myself working with the Design Council, working with this woman, Hilary Cotton. Hilary was the UK Designer of the Year that year, and there was a huge Ferrari in the design press about that because she wasn't a trained designer.
She's actually for me, she's a social activist who interested in using design to figure out intractable public service problems. But during that piece of work I began to realize that what I'd learned as a product designer, what I'd sort of polished a little bit working with Bilver Plank in interaction design and what I was now doing working on service design was actually the same process.
There really was the same sort of patterns again and again and again. But it's really about having lots of ideas, trying as quickly as possible to figure out what the best idea that you've come up with is and then just iterating. The Design Council calls it a double diamond process.
There's a whole bunch of people who have got different variations of that. But essentially that divergence, convergence and iteration are at the heart of, I believe, every design sort of process that we employ. I teach a bit at the University of Dundee and Glasgow School of Art, and the things that I get my students to sort of do essentially are about three things.
I think what design does it helps us look at the world in a different way. It makes ideas as visible and tangible as possible, And then we prototype. We try things out in a sort of low risk way. And I think that's pretty much it.
I think that really is the design process boiled down to its bare essence. And it doesn't matter if you're doing industrial design or user experience design or graphic design. As far as I'm concerned, it's very much the same sort of thing. So if we then sort of think about where we're at the moment, what I want to do is sort of go back again to sort of nineteen eighty four.
And we've been doing some work at the BBC recently. Some of my colleagues in the room have been doing this with me and where we've been really sort of taking a long hard look at our own estate and trying to figure out how we could do better.
And what we've discovered I rediscovered a model from my early training as a product designer. This is I've never met Professor Kano, but he has this model that's been incredibly useful to us in the last couple of months. What states is that every feature is adopted in different ways, and it's a dynamic process.
And so I want to use a sort of analogy of cars, car design, as a way to explain Kano's model. So one might imagine something like fuel economy would be what Kano calls a performance feature. If you do that really well, then you're going to make your users and customers dead happy.
If you don't do that so well, then customers won't buy your car. So one hundred miles per gallon, that's going do well in the market. Twenty miles per gallon, that might not be quite the same. You might imagine that's a performance feature. I think that no one really buys a posh car like this because of the steering wheel.
Yeah, I think there's other elements to it. It might be the brand, it might be this nice interior, there's a whole bunch of other things. But steering wheels are what Kano calls an expected feature that even if you do a really brilliant steering wheel, then in twenty eighteen, that's actually not really going to excite the marketplace or excite users.
Now interestingly, steering wheels back in the early 1900s were what Kano calls an excitement feature because this is what steering this is what cars look like and this is how you navigated them. So at some point, a steering wheel was a really exciting thing that made a difference in the marketplace.
But over the last sort of one hundred years, essentially, it's become something that everyone expects. Now many of you that work with, shall we say, product stakeholders will know that every now and then we still get asked to tackle projects a bit like this.
Right? This is nuts. Why would you ever think about creating a different way of navigating a car? Absolutely ridiculous. We won't talk about autonomous vehicles at this point. And so I think that so I think in the current car marketplace, you might argue that an exciter feature might be a connected car, that might be the sort of thing.
And what that sort of feature is that even if you don't do it that well, that that novelty is still something that the marketplace might respond to. And so from Kano's perspective, there's this whole there's a range of different adoption models, But what's more, it's dynamic and there's a tendency for features to move from being excitement to something that is expected.
And that's something that in digital product design, I think that Kano's model still holds true, and that's been very interesting for me over the last three months. So fast forward and apply this to what we're doing in our business, and we begin to sort of realize some interesting things.
Honestly, how many of you are working on a webpage that looks a bit like our one, where there's a navigation bar at the top, you've got a sort of hero slot in the top left, there's a right rail? How many of you to be honest, how many of you are doing that?
You're all lying. There's a lot more than that. So if you then sort of look at it on a sort of mobile viewport, how many of you are designing web pages that look like this? There should be more of you doing that, okay?
I'm going to argue there's something wrong with that. And I think if I look at we managed to get at six forty pixels, we managed to get three slots and a compressed nav onto people's phones, yeah? I know they scroll. I know they do that, but let's just take that.
The Guardian manages to get four point five. HuffPost managed to get one on a tiny wee bit. The Feet get a few adverts for the subscription service, aren't they? But essentially it's all the same design, isn't it? So I think that's what's really fascinating is that we've concluded that actually we are spending a great deal of time designing things and things that point at things.
And they all kind of look the same, and there's something not quite right with that. And so my argument is that UX design for responsive web is actually a done deal and that we're all polishing steering wheels at this point. Maybe it's no surprise.
You know, we're all using the same methodologies. We're all using the same sort of tools and supply chains. We even go to the same conferences. So maybe no surprise that our designs turn out to be, you know, somewhat more aligned than maybe we would have expected.
So what should we do with this? I think that's the main thing that we're curious about. And there's four things that I want to talk a bit about. And most of this is based on practice that me and my colleagues at the BBC are doing, but I think that these are sort of four really sort of interesting topics.
The first one is pretty straightforward. This is Kai N. Ong, who is one of my heads of design based down in London. And about fifteen percent of all of my team are now working on workflow and colleague experiences. And so we've really shifted in the last couple of years our sort of investment in user experience design teams away from audience products and much more into experiences for colleagues' tools and systems.
And that's been a really sort of fascinating change, seeing that user experience skill base move over to be more of a service design skill base. And the sort of two dimensions that Kai and her team are working on essentially is this sort of understanding that backstage is actually a much bigger and more interesting place than front of house.
And I think that that's been a really sort of a profound thing for us. I think the other thing that we're starting to do is that we're realizing that creating awareness, and that means working with our marketing and audiences teams in ways that we've never done before, as well as then sort of trying to build audience advocacy through things like social, has become a sort of part of the design process.
And I think that one of the places where I feel that we've made the most progress in this area is what we're doing with our sports service. I think really for the first time since I've been at the BBC, we've actually got a service that is really starting to properly join up.
And oddly, one of the most interesting sort of vehicles or sort of Trojan horses for that organizational change was the introduction into our global experience language of a new custom font set. We, like so many other large scale organizations, figured out that all that money we were giving to monotype and for web fonts that we could cut our own font set, create a whole bunch of distinctiveness and accessibility benefits as well as a cost saving.
But that implementation of BBC Reef into sport has galvanized a whole series of relationships and new conversations that we probably weren't having before that. So now there's a proper design system that works not just online, not just in our sort of native mobile offer, but also on the telly.
And so we've been working with all of the guys that build all of the non IP based systems. And I think we had a good World Cup on the back of it. We had something like forty nine million people on iPlayer watching football.
That's pretty cool. The thing I'm really pleased about is the way that we've got on air talent actually doing shout outs to the audience to get them to go and use some of our participation features online. We wouldn't have got that to happen two or three years ago, I promise you that.
And so we were lucky enough to get over three hundred thousand people, two hundred thousand uniques coming to our player rater feature, and that's a level of participation that we've not really seen. We've also been doing some really experimental stuff. Our World Cup VR trial yielded nearly three hundred and fifty thousand people who downloaded and tried that app.
And so there's some kind of interesting things happening for us when we all pool together. The next thing that I want to talk about is that if we sort of go back to Chris Schmant and his demo that you all chuckled at from nineteen seventy nine, I think that starting to fill out all of the other modalities beyond the visual channel I think is what's really, really sort of interesting.
Now I think arguably, I'm maybe being a little bit unfair on my discipline and us as an industry, I think in two thousand and seven, we did go a long way towards gesture when Apple launched this. I want to make a little bit of a shout out to an old pal of mine who is such a shy man but such a brilliant man.
This is the best picture I can find of him on the web. Duncan Kerr is one of the lead interaction designers at Apple in Johnny Ives' team. And Duncan invented multi touch. And I think that that invention of a gesture gesture system, albeit sort of tied to a single two dimensional surface, clearly moved the paradigm of interaction design along.
So arguably we've done some work on gesture, but certainly nothing like what Chris Schmant and his team had done at MIT. So if I then sort of fast forward a little bit into what some of the things that we are doing is essentially we're placing considered bets on the future.
I think it's important that these are considered. We're using public service money to do this. There's an interesting line you've got to trade at the BBC that you want to be ready when a new technology emerges at scale, but you don't want to invest too much time on something that license fee payers will think as being potentially irrelevant.
I'm really pleased to say that Ali Shah and his team from the BBC Blue Room, which is part of our R and D team, and what they do is essentially they look at advanced technologies and they bring real demos and real technology into BBC Workplaces for everyone in the team, not just those of us in design and engineering to play with and learn more about.
And Ali, I'd really encourage you to go and see the stuff that they've got. We've spent some time, not an awful lot, we've got a small team, three or four people working on three sixty and VR experiences. This one is you'll get a sneak preview of this.
This is an extraordinary piece where it takes material from our archive and reconstructs what it's like to be in a World War II bomber and all of the sort of jeopardy and sort of fear that comes with that. It's a really extraordinary piece of work, I think.
Now I don't think we know, and I don't think anyone else in this room knows, if we're all going to walk around looking like this. Yeah? I'm a betting man, so I might have a personal view on that, but I think there's something incredibly interesting happening in the world of XR, be it VR or augmented reality or mixed reality, And I think that the Magic Leap technology is definitely leading the pack.
I'm not completely convinced that we all want to walk around looking like high-tech spiders, but let's you know, we can maybe differ on that. What I think is interesting is some of the work happening with Leap Motion. I think that Keiichi Matsuda in London is running a team where they really are sort of starting to push the edge of what it might be to have an embodied interface in three d space.
I think there's some interesting work happening there that might have sort of broader implications. And I think that what's interesting for me is if you sort of go all the way back to Verplanck's paradigm where he says that input and output devices actually shape the interactions or the interaction design approaches, I think this is a really sort of a stunning example of that.
And so no surprise, we have screens that are roughly the same proportion as pieces of paper for a desktop publishing system, no surprise. I think that when essentially there are no boundaries to a screen, there's some really sort of extraordinary things that we might be able to do, maybe even thinking without those boundaries.
And then the component that actually we made some small initial bets on about eighteen months ago and is really starting to pay off for us, in fact there's a number of the BBC voice team here, is voice. And our Alexa skill launched in December of last year.
It's the fastest growing BBC online product of all time. We reached over one million users in something like forty odd days, wasn't it, Andy? It was quite good. And so I think there is a real kind of scale and energy. And so us as an organization being able to sort of tool up for that has been a really interesting challenge for us.
And one of the exciting things for me personally is that we're actually sort of locating a lot of that voice and voice AI technology here in Scotland because we think that there is a terrific sort of skill base and resource that we can build here.
So unashamed plug for I know everyone's recruiting here, but we're recruiting. Come and see Fiona MacReedy sat right here. So I think the third area that I'm really sort of curious about right now, and this is definitely more on the kind of bleeding edge for us as a discipline, is I'm incredibly interested in neuroscience and its relationship to creativity.
We have a tiny team, two people, step forward, Lina and Sean. And what these guys are doing initially we brought them in because we were conscious that navigating the BBC and we're doing this both navigating the physical building spaces that we have, but also our online estate for people who are on a sort of neurodiverse scale, that's people who are living with autism or ADHD or Asperger's or things like that it's like we make things extraordinarily difficult for that type of user.
So the work that these guys are doing is not just helping us with that audience, but helping us to create a universal accessibility, and that's a really important principle for me and my team. Lina has made this really amazing sort of three sixty video that you can go find on our website where essentially it gives you a sense as a neurotypical person about what it's like to be in a workplace meeting if you're neurodiverse.
It really does sort of make the hair stand in the back of your head about exactly how much of a trial that sort of thing really is for that type of user. But I think where this work has gone over the last couple of years, I'm really excited about, is that people who are neurodiverse essentially think different, and how can we turn that from being a kind of medicalized thing into something that is actually part of how we better understand our creativity as a design team?
And I think that I could go on at some length, but I won't, about how all of our sort of methods, all of the design methods that have been popularized from the sort of IDO days, from the design thinking days, they're all largely behavioral.
And I think that some of that stuff has largely played out now. There's a great many people understand how to use those types of behavioural design methods, and that's really fantastic. It's an amazing thing to see those methods proliferate in that way. But I think at the next level, it's really trying to underside really trying to understand the neuroscience of creativity.
And Sean and Lina, we're actually just recruiting at the moment a PhD who's going to come and work with us and try and understand that world because that's not a place that many teams on the planet seem to be working in. So I'm really excited about that.
Now the last thing is the naughtiest thing. I'm not sure if he's here today, but one of my colleagues one of our lead technical architects here in Glasgow actually, Mohamed Roberts, he's really sort of helped bring a lot of this into sort of high relief for me.
And if I go back to sort of nineteen ninety five, I think that the kind of seeds of this current kind of you could even call it a crisis, I think, actually in UX and D. I didn't realize that they were being sown when I was working at Interval.
But one of my fellow researchers was this guy here, BJ Fogg. BJ is a really, really nice guy. And I think that when I began to talk to him, he was really interested in design, design methodology. And he kept saying, Colin, do you think design persuades people?
Do you think it changes their behavior? And we talked for a long time about that. And BJ is now a professor of persuasive design at Stanford University. And I'll talk in a minute about how that's kind of done. But I mean BJ has got this model where essentially if you want to persuade someone, then they have to be motivated, they have to have an ability, and there has to be some kind of trigger that pushes them to, you know, sort of agree with your argument or proposition.
I've got to be honest with you, that to me looks like sort of ready, willing and able. So when BJ first started talking to me, was some kind of grand theory, I'm going a bit, yeah, and? Because I think that, you know, someone who'd come from a sort of royal college applied poetry kind of sort of world, you know, really, really did believe that design was making things desirable and sort of creating that sort of tangible desire was this kind of interesting sort of pursuit that is then sort of
layered on top of a more of a kind of functional deterministic approach, if you like, about how design makes things useful and usable. And I think what we're seeing in our discipline is this kind of balancing of those two kind of perspectives or philosophy, and that's fascinating to me.
And I've been both sides of that line in my career on many occasions, a couple where I think that behavior I was trying to design behavior change, yeah? How do I feel about that now? I'm not sure actually. I'm really, really not sure.
It's a really sort of fascinating question. But when I was at the Design Council, we did a major Hillary and I did a major project with the NHS on diabetes care, one of the things that we did was we literally took voices from people living with diabetes and created a little sort of set of playing cards that both people living with diabetes and their health care workers could use to set the agenda for their twenty minute consultation that they had every three months.
And we were trying to sort of disrupt and give control back to the patient rather than sort of handing it to the health care worker. When we first did this work, our initial observations, of the twenty minute sort of consultations that happened, eighteen minutes were spent filling in a whole bunch of forms on an NHS computer system and two minutes about, So how are you doing with that stopping eating sugar thing?
Yeah? So that was a really sort of interesting sort of intervention where, you know, as a designer, as a service designer, we're trying to get to create some different behaviors in that room. I worked for a while at Elmwood, leads based sort of brand consultancy, and worked on this.
I sold Bogg Roll. Yes, so it's really, really sort of different to other projects that I've been involved in. And we did it really well. The big change was that we did this with the puppy. The brand rules up until this project was the puppy never looks at you.
We changed that and got the puppy to look at you. Yeah? Sales rose seventeen percent. Take me home. Oh, I've just realized that's a bit weird, isn't it? Don't quite know what's going on here. Anyway, so, you know, BJ really kind of helped me out there.
And, you know, even this fella, you know, he talks about emotion and how his products make people feel as one of the drivers for his practice. And so I think that the thing that's uncomfortable for us is that we've got this kind of functional technological determinism and this kind of, you know, applied behavioral and emotional economics kind of in contention now.
And it's amazing for me that almost on a weekly basis how I'm having conversations with my team about this, and that's something that we need to sort out because it's just too uncomfortable. And so for us, this is Jane Murison. She's one of my Salford based.
And Edinburgh Lass, one of my sort of heads of design. She runs the global experience language team, and she's really, really sort of on top of this. It's something we have to make better. Jane and I have been sort of working about is there some kind of, if you like, some manifesto for us.
And so for us, this is really emergent thinking. It's the first time we've shown it outside of the organisation where there's three things, there's three pillars we maybe need to pay paying attention to. It's really clear that we've got to fulfil the BBC's public service promises.
We have to be accessible. We have to be universal. There's a whole bunch of things that potentially in the digital world make that harder to do than it was back in the days of just the telly. We also have to be exploring other design patterns.
That sort of diversity beyond so called dark patterns is really, really important, but very, very hard to do when I'm working in embedded in product teams that have got real growth metrics that they're trying to meet. And I think the third pillar of this is how do we as an organisation promote digital well-being?
How do we help the citizens of the UK make informed choices about their sort of media use? And I think that these sort of three kind of pillars all require quite different approaches to them. This report was published just a few weeks ago, and it actually calls out my old colleague, BJ Fogg, as, you know, a sense, well, I think there's a real danger that poor old BJ is getting demonized actually, and I think that there's some sort of discomforted by that.
But I think that your persuasive design is a really sort of fascinating and difficult sort of phenomenon. And we're right there. Any of you who are iPlayer users will know that we're currently sitting with an autoplay with a countdown sort of experience on it.
And that makes us uncomfortable. But we've deployed it. And guess what? We're getting a pretty significant uplift in time spent, right? So that's making some of my colleagues happy. I'm a bit less happy about that, and I'm trying to sort of figure out how I can create equivalent data that shows that this is making people really uncomfortable.
I've had two different goals at trying to get proper data back on why this is just comfortable for users. And I'm still struggling. So if anyone in this conference can help me with that, then I'm all ears because I think it's really, really hard at times to really make this sort of happen, we all know how that data makes a big difference.
In terms of digital well-being, I think we're doing better. Jane has got a very clear set of missions that we're working to, and so we're working across all of these. The other good thing is we've got some really interesting and powerful sort of collaborators.
We've been working with this photograph looks like I've been stalking him in some meeting. This is on his website. It's on his charity's website. But we're working with some interesting people on how we might do some different things here. Lucy McLean, who spoke at Turing a couple of years ago, is the head of product that's working on that, and then she's here sat in the audience today.
And then the other thing that Jane and I are doing is that we're actually going to employ our second principle and we really want to get someone who so this is a recruitment that we're currently sort of doing right now. So it's all very sort of difficult stuff.
But you know what? My colleagues in telly tell us that we've been here before. And this next I'm gonna finish off with a short twenty second video. Anyone who is under thirty will not understand this, and I apologize to you, but I'm a man of a certain age and it's gonna be funny for me and people who are similar age.
Back in nineteen seventy three, this was my favorite television program. It's the volume guys. So why don't you turn off that telephone set and go out and do something else more interesting instead? Thank you very much.