Erika Hall, Design consultant & Co-founder of Mule Design Studio, talks to Maze about the complicated relationship between design and business, the importance of asking questions, and how research plays a critical role in influencing decision-making.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
You can follow Erika on Twitter (@mulegirl) or check out her articles on Medium.
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Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today I'm joined by veteran design consultant, co-founder of Mule Design Studio, and author of the books Conversational Design and Just Enough Research, Erika Hall. I'm honored to have you and have been super looking forward to this conversation. Thank you so much for being here.
Erika Hall:
Hi Ash. It's fantastic to be here with you in cyber podcast space.
Ash Oliver:
Yes. Those of you that don't know, Erika has an amazing starship background here, so she's coming to us live from outer space. So we're going to be talking about the complicated relationship between design and business and how research plays a critical role in not just design, but in influencing the decision-making of the business. So I thought a great place to start would be to have you speak to a quote that you've said before. "The business model is the new grid." What do you mean by that?
Erika Hall:
Maybe the one thing I'd change is to say it's really not that new. So to designers who come from graphic design, from the graphic design tradition, which really heavily influences still a lot of the culture of interactive digital system design, the grid is the underlying geometry that allows you to arrange the elements so that you create whatever effect you're going for. The harmony, the contrast, the essential organization of the graphical elements in graphic design. So then when we are moving to interactive digital system design, in a lot of cases, designers who come from that graphic design tradition still refer to the grid and to the fold and to visually privileged aspects of the system like that, but really the underlying structure that all of the design snaps to—if you're familiar with when you're working with like a digital layout tool, you snap to the grid, you automatically align to it— all of the design ultimately aligns with the underlying business model.
Erika Hall:
And I don't think we talk about this enough because often designers are confused because there's this maxim that is just all wishful thinking that good design, user centered design, design that adheres to design values, essentially, is automatically good for the business and good for the the customer, the user, what have you. But the real truth is, and I think a lot of designers live this as their careers advance, is you go in with the best of intentions and you try to be really human centered, however you conceptualize that. And then you see that your work is used and that your goals shift to fall in line with the underlying business model. And this can be a real source of confusion, because you're like, "Hey, I was told that good design is good business, but that's not actually true." And it's a bummer. It's a bummer for a lot of designers. So it's important to acknowledge that when you start living the reality of how design is often used to support business goals. It can be a disillusionment.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I mean I've firsthand had that experience. I believe all design schooling or education really centers around this practice. So it can be a little bit of a wake up call when you get into the real world, and I think maybe education doesn't do us a good service in the sense of taking that pie in the sky approach and then trying to operate within business constraints. Can you speak more on why we're not getting this realization earlier? Is it because we want to disillusion ourselves and ignore that, or is there really a too wide of a gap between design and business to begin with?
Erika Hall:
That's a good question. I don't think there's a gap because design is a really broad umbrella term, and I think arguing about what is design is pointless. It's like you have a job and your job is making choices to bring some intended vision of the future, large or small, into reality, in a variety of fields and mediums and whatever. So I think what happens is that there's a lot of unexamined practice and tradition and culture and values brought over from graphic design. Just talking about the web, the web is built on a page metaphor. So immediately you think, "Oh, I'm designing for a page," but what appears on the page is the least important part of designing a system. It used to be more important when what made the web exciting was the linkages, it sort of didn't matter. And I use the example of Craigslist, which still exists. It is still useful. Even though it's gotten fraudy and dangerous and all these things in many ways, it's persisted this whole time. And what you look at when you see the graphic design is a page of links.
Erika Hall:
But that page of links has immense utility and has often been really fun to interact with because of the underlying business rules and because of the interactions among people and stuff that it entails. So one part of it is just misapplying... the horseless carriage, right? Treating a webpage like a print page that you're designing is a real horseless carriage kind of deal. And then a related issue is that you look at design school and you either have people who come from, again, a graphic design background who teach graphic design and then adapt it for like, "Oh, now it's interactive graphic design," and who don't work in industry. Or the other thing that's happening in school is design schools are... Their curriculum is mirroring design thinking. And the issue with that is design thinking is a tool set for doing a certain kind of work, but it's not deep. It's really shallow, and it's a useful set of tools. But just using the tools doesn't necessarily give you the full grasp of the issues you're dealing with.
Erika Hall:
And because of the reasons why design thinking itself was designed as a tool set, it creates a barrier between thinking deeply because it's like, whatever your business model is—this is the underlying theory of design thinking—whatever your business model is, you can use these tools to be more successful. And it doesn't say, "Let's examine what's going on underneath that business model." So it's different from critical thinking. So I think it's not great that design schools are just taking design thinking and treating that as though it's a discipline and a field. It's a tool set. Then the other thing that happens is that design school comes out of the art school. It's so interesting, and I actually... We have done this as part of our work and our writing is do a survey of every design program in America that we can find.
Erika Hall:
It's really interesting to say, where is design located in the institution? So there's still this idea that what you're doing is a version of art. And then you get super misled because you think, "Well, one of the goals of the work I'm doing is personal expression," which is not true at all. And then you're in this environment and that extra sets you up for confusion if you think what you're doing is art. So if you go into other design disciplines, industrial design gets this. Industrial design is more aware of the issues. Industrial design for sure understands ethics, industrial design has, I think, a much clearer idea of its relationship to industry and a much more nuanced grasp of aesthetics.
Erika Hall:
The other thing that is a barrier to really wrestling with these issues is like pure 100% elitism. Because it's elitism, it's colonialism, it's all these things. It's white supremacy, it's all in there. And the reason is that when you talk about something being "designed," something is designed when you make a set of intentional choices, but what a lot of designers think of as design is something that on the surface reflects a set of values that are upscale and pretty much white European stuff. And it's unexamined. You're like, "Oh, that's good design." But there's a lot of design. Going back to Craigslist as my example, Craigslist really was some super good design and it outlasted a lot of other stuff and it gave people a lot of utility and pleasure, but it doesn't fit those aesthetics.
Erika Hall:
But I think when you're talking about system design, you have to let the surface go a little bit. And that's rough. That's rough to tell somebody who went into design because they like a certain kind of elegance and airiness and these modernist values that are still clinging to it. And you say you know what, the most important design that you can work on is invisible. This is why it's even a problem when some designers talk about delight. Oh, we're delighting people. But what that is is that's still you, it's your ego, because a lot of times the best interactive design is something that people don't even see. It's what's happening under the surface that you don't have to pay attention to. And now that attention is really our most scarce and exploited resource, designing something that goes without notice could be the greatest service you do.
Erika Hall:
But again, that's a bummer. How do you put that in your portfolio? Why are we still using portfolios to evaluate and hire digital system designers? It's not graphic design, it's not one person. You're not Paul Rand being cool. Sometimes if you're doing brand design, I think the folks, especially the folks at Pentagram are still practicing graphic design, they're practicing brand design. They're super good at that. I think Michael Bierut's a great guy and a great designer, but they're doing that type of design. And that is not the same as the kind of design that's very collaborative, very participatory, and so many people are involved in decisions. I think it's such an ego blow and it requires such a different set of skills and attitudes that there's a certain amount of just misapplication of certain values from certain fields of design, and then there's a certain amount of willful ignorance where it's like, "I want to work on things." It's totally understandable. People want to work on things that are impactful and noticeable and beautiful and meaningful, but that part of the design is 5%.
Ash Oliver:
I couldn't agree with you more, and it's so refreshing. I wish I could have had this five years ago when I first embarked on moving my career from sales and marketing land into design. And any of the things that I was working on was seen absolutely as not design. Although now looking back, I can see why a portfolio was difficult for me because all of the things that I applied design to were more of these system level things and not the graphic design, and I thought for the longest time there would be no way I would make it in design unless I went that approach. But there's still that prevailing belief that design is the more virtuous side of business. I believe you've said that yourself. In many cases design doesn't even end up having enough influence to carry out more of these empathy driven human-centered practices, where it may really count in the business. Is there a way that you've seen designers try to move more or communicate more closely in the business context that's successful?
Erika Hall:
The first thing you can do to be more influential is take a hard look at the business that you're engaging with, whether as an employee or as an outside consultant and say, what is their business model? And business models are not actually hard to understand, and they're pretty easy to to diagram. It's an interaction model. Any designer has the ability. If they can diagram an interaction, they can figure out a business model. They're usually pretty simple. But the problem is, complexity often hides shenanigans. If you say, who are all the parties, who's getting what, and say, is this mutually beneficial? This is my other message to designers. There's nothing inherently wrong with commerce. Commerce is what brings people together. But if you look at the system that you're participating in and you're like, "Wait a second, for one party to succeed, to be profitable, do they need to exploit the other party? Or do they need to extract resources or pollute the environment? Or is it the case that success of people is tied together?"
Erika Hall:
I'll give you a modern example of this. I worked with a client that designs point of sale systems for restaurants, and they provide a tool that legitimately helps restaurants run their businesses more efficiently. And I'm a huge fan of restaurants. I think restaurants are a pillar of the community, independent restaurants. They're an avenue to employment for a lot of people. They can be a real stepping stone. It's a rough business, too. If you go in that business because you're like, "I want to make food for people," which is very intimate and very lovely, and you end up really involved in the community. So this organization that makes hardware and software, when a restaurant succeeds and makes money, they do well. So their business and the restaurant's business are very much in alignment.
Erika Hall:
And you could say, "Oh, if fewer restaurants fail, we're more successful." And you contrast that with delivery companies where they're like, "Restaurants are really thin margin business as it is." And they come in and they're like, "Okay, we're going to charge you 30% of your order, and you have to participate because if you don't your competitor's going to be up there and people aren't going to know you exist, especially in these times." So then in that case, they're essentially getting between the restaurant and their customer and they're rent seeking and extracting value, because who's making the food? The restaurant's making the food, but they're getting 30%. And then they're also deceiving and extracting value from the drivers who are going all over town for a dollar.
Erika Hall:
So that's a case where people are providing software to restaurants, but one is a much more aligned and equitable exchange of value than the other. So you have to start, as a designer, saying like, "I'm going to work with this business." And if you're in a business that has an extractive model and you're making the interfaces nicer, all you're doing is getting more people to participate in exploitation.
Ash Oliver:
I was just going to ask what disrupts some of this? Does it come from within the organization? Because I assume within a business model like that, no one within that environment is going to rip it out. Is there something else that can penetrate that and disrupt it or is that broader than our discussion today?
Erika Hall:
The hard truth is that having an exploitive business model is often more profitable. That's just something that I think a lot of designers have to sit with, with this idea that "Oh, if the business is human centered, it's going to be more profitable. No, a lot of times, no. So it's all tied up with how a company is funded, too. Because that's the issue. Short term profit maximization. This doesn't come up in design school a lot, I don't think, which is like, "Look at where the funding comes from." Do they discuss that? I don't think so, unless there's an entrepreneurship course that's like, "Get funding and grow and then go public." So I'd say if it's a privately owned company, they can say, "Well, we want to be profitable, but we're not going to maximize at the expense of everything else."
Erika Hall:
But if you're in a profit maximizing organization, what they're going to want to do is drive labor costs down. So the thing that disrupts it actually is having different funding sources that aren't just taking venture and going public. It's anything where you're able to finance in a way that doesn't provide that pressure for massive growth. The whole thing about design is it's context. What works in a context. And it all depends on what your goal is. The organization and the business model that you want to participate in or facilitate or design to meet that goal is going to be really different depending on the goal. So it's not like social entrepreneurship where we get to get rich, but also feel good. That's going to work for everything. Or micro loans are going to work for everything. No, things are going to work for things.
Ash Oliver:
I don't feel like many designers are talking about their role in designing a business model. It's always about, like you were talking about before, the aesthetic, the visual aspect, look at the interrogation that's inherent to design, the inquiry that's involved there. You've said that the quality of the question determines the utility of the results, and I think this is a place where a lot of teams struggle in building that muscle of constant inquiry. It might be risky or unsafe in certain environments to do that. It may be something that you're personally not very endeavored or skilled in. And you've talked a lot about how we are rewarded for not having good questions, but instead having answers. So how do we go about shifting this mindset and maybe lean into more of the fundamental practice of design, which is in interrogation and in discovery?
Erika Hall:
The most important message I have for designers is this is something we all do every day. We are asking questions and gathering information to make decisions all day, every day. I talk about this a lot. We all rely on a search engine, typically Google, to get through life. And we know, if somebody said to you, "Oh, you can't use Google anymore for anything," that would be really upsetting. If they said, "Okay, you just have to make decisions without looking anything up online ever." You'd say, "I can't live my life as a person on the internet." But somehow in business you'd say, "Okay, we're going to create a product or service or work on a problem, and we're just going to make stuff, and we're going to invest in the making of stuff without thinking is this the right thing? Are other people already doing this? The people we're making this for, is this going to fit into their lives? What are their lives like?"
Erika Hall:
And for our own decision-making, would you spend a couple thousand dollars on a vacation without doing research? No. Oh yeah, just go to this place. Just go and see and iterate. Iterate and test your vacation. You've saved up your PTO and you've saved up some money and just have minimum viable vacation, which means go to the closest place you can go. I mean, that's how product design works. It's exactly like that. What's our closest destination? Let's go there. And then we'll see. And by that point, by the time you've gone to that destination, well, you've spent that time and you've spent that money and you can't do any online research. You can't talk to people who've gone on vacations. You can only learn from investing in a bad vacation. No one would do that.
Erika Hall:
And yet in businesses they're like, "Okay, we're going to go camp here, and then we'll go." There's this idea that doing research right is this huge lift and this huge investment of time and money. But no, it's just asking the right questions. People could learn a lot of stuff. People could figure it out. They could solve that problem because everybody's got those skills from their own life. And it's just a matter of when you're using those skills professionally, it's making sure that you're sufficiently rigorous and ethical and it's having that extra professional attention to doing it because the stakes are higher, but treat it like the stakes are higher than you going on vacation. Don't do less research than if you're planning your vacation.
Ash Oliver:
So why is it that research has this big, huge audacious endeavor as a connotation? Is it because it's covering up for something else? There are these excuses or what is it? Because in actuality, we have all these examples and reasons why we should be doing it. And yet it has this pervasive thought that it's going to take way too much time and it's going to be this enormous effort that's going to steer us in the wrong direction. Where do you think that comes from?
Erika Hall:
That comes from two places. One, nobody wants to look they don't have the answer in professional life in front of their colleagues, and especially as you move up the hierarchy, the stakes of looking like you know everything get higher and higher. So people have very rarely been rewarded for admitting they don't know something, so it's really scary to say, "Oh, I don't know." But you can't learn unless you admit you don't know something. So a big part of it is not wanting to admit you don't know something in front of other people. I mean, the emperor's new clothes is really a foundational business story. And the other part of it is that people want to do what they want to do, and referring to reality is super inconvenient. People want to have the idea.
Erika Hall:
We have this myth in design and business about the big idea. Like it's the idea that sets you apart and it's being creative and having a high value idea. No, ideas are cheap. Yes, there are exciting insights. But a lot of times we have so many stories about really important discoveries that were made by accident, because people are looking around, paying attention. We still have this idea of the individual creative genius person who came up with this idea on their own, and people want to be that person. So they want to be "I have an idea", and it's like, who cares? I think brainstorming ideas is the most destructive anti-collaborative process, because once you go through that process of everybody toss their ideas out, it doesn't matter how much you say you want to collaborate. Everybody wants their idea to win.
Erika Hall:
And then once your idea wins, like a little baby sea turtle, you want that idea like, "Oh, my little sea turtle idea hatched," and then you want that sea turtle to live and make it to the ocean so you're just protecting your little sea turtle. That's the way people think about ideas, as opposed to, "Who cares? Let's work through ideas." I think writers' rooms are a much better model for this sort of thing, about we're going to toss out ideas and try to shoot them down, but you can only do that if you have a really strong collaboration, really strong roles already. So a great thing to brainstorm instead is question. Get all your questions out there. What are the highest priority questions? Where are the unknowns? And then prioritize questions. That will really bring people together a lot more. And that's a much more collaborative practice.
Erika Hall:
But the other thing is that asking questions and inquiry is intangible. It's invisible. People think I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm not producing. So it's much better to look like you're designing and making stuff than it is to say, "Well, what am I doing?" "Oh, I'm talking with my colleagues and I'm asking questions of people out in the world, and I'm doing some Google searches." That doesn't look like work, but that can be the most important design. At Mule, we've always had a saying that design doesn't happen in front of your laptop. The insights can happen from talking to people, from going on a walk, from all these things. And then you document it. But we've confused documentation with actual design. And I think now especially, because the tools are so sophisticated, it's really easy to make something that looks designed, but it's been graphic designed, again. Great graphic design, but it's not graphic design.
Erika Hall:
If you're doing a set of interaction flows, who cares what they look. I mean, it matters if you want to use some polish to sell an idea to some people in a boardroom. Great. But it's really easy to confuse the polish of documentation or the polish of a prototype with the quality of the idea. And this is something Alan Cooper has talked about a lot, which is a lot of the problem with software. And he'd say the problem is it's conceptually wrong, but then it looks good on the surface, and you can't fix a bad concept at the surface level. And how do you figure out concepts? By thinking and talking and maybe doing some sketching and being willing to say that's a bad idea and tear it up, or to learn about the world before you come up with the concept.
Erika Hall:
Because once you're already testing a prototype, that's already an answer and you're just looking to get validated. I hate the word validation. That just means wanting to be proven right. So people should talk about, if they're at that stage, evaluating, because then, if your stuff fails, that's still a win. You have to want to be proven wrong and you have to want your stuff to fail quickly. You have to not want it to appear to be good or right or appropriate or desirable to the people you're designing for. But that's so much what folks are optimizing for is the appearance of good design as opposed to really doing the thing.
Ash Oliver:
Wow. Well that has led us astray in a lot of places for sure. Do you have a heuristic, maybe, for assessing design maturity in an organization, but maybe more specifically research maturity in an organization?
Erika Hall:
Oh yeah, I've got a big one.
Ash Oliver:
What is it?
Erika Hall:
Who gets to ask questions? That's the number one. Do people with designer in their title, are they allowed to just ask any question without repercussions? Because one of our hugest advantages in consulting from the outside is we can walk in and say, "Hey, why are you doing it this? Who are those people?" And that's our job. That's in our statement of work that we're going to do that. But if you're working in house, a lot of times if you're just like, "Hey, vice president of product, why are we doing it like this?" Not cool. So that's a big one. If people can actually admit they don't know in front of each other and have that be a like, "Yes, that's so great that you admit you didn't know instead of pretending you don't know." If people can actually critique ideas. Because the criticism is the other half. The criticism of the inquiry, not just the creating stuff. It's half. It's not 10%, it's half. It's a dialogue. Yeah, people's ability to actually ask questions and have time for reflection.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. Well, this is a great place to end on our series of hat trick questions here. These are more personal questions that we ask every podcast guest. And the first one is what is one thing that you've done in your career that you feel has helped you succeed that few other people do?
Erika Hall:
Not care about looking smart in front of other people. Not trying to prove I'm smart. That's been a journey too, because of course initially you're like, "Oh I want to use the big words." There's all this jargon. And you're like, "I'm cool. I also have a black turtle neck." And then over time I realized that wanting to find the right answer and having curiosity and not caring to prove my expertise to other people, but just always being curious was a huge advantage.
Ash Oliver:
That's enormous. I think that would help break down a lot of what we talked about if we could just get that thing.
Erika Hall:
And it's more fun. It's more fun to say we're going to go to journey of discovery together because I think there's so much fear. And I think just letting go of that fear and saying, "If work isn't fun, something's wrong."
Ash Oliver:
That's very true. Okay, the next one is in regards to books. Obviously you've written too. What is an industry book that you've either given or recommended the most beyond your own?
Erika Hall:
Can I say two?
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, of course.
Erika Hall:
Okay, I'll say two. Because one is much more an industry book and it's Kim Goodwin's Designing the Digital Experience. And then the other one is—Robert Sapolsky is a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford and he wrote a book called Behave. It's 800 pages, it's big. But he writes like your favorite professor and it's about human behavior. And I want every designer and every policymaker to read this book. I think there's so much that if people just understood what he's talking about in terms of the roots of human behavior, then when you think about, "Oh, what do I need to learn about people to design for them," you'd be way far ahead because the actual specific stuff, just the specific to your product, your service, your message, whatever, is such a small part of it once you understand, "Oh, this is why people are like they are." So that's definitely one that I have recommended a lot.
Ash Oliver:
I love it. I'm going to get that. I hadn't heard of it. Tremendous.
Erika Hall:
It's super fun. It's super fun. And he's got appendix in the back where he explains when he gets into like, "Oh, you've got to understand a certain thing about neuroscience," you know?
Ash Oliver:
Oh, I'm super into neuroscience. My very last question for you, Erika, is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Erika Hall:
Probably the most obvious one's my dog. I mean, I bike around with my dog in a sack.
Ash Oliver:
I have seen many pictures. I believe their name is Rupert, right?
Erika Hall:
Rupert, yeah. His name is Rupert. And I mean, that's pretty absurd. He's got pink doggles, so sure, I guess it's a habit. If I'm not riding the bus, that's how I get to the studio and stuff, and just go around.
Ash Oliver:
We might feature a picture then in the show notes.
Erika Hall:
Bringing joy in his little pink sunglasses.
Ash Oliver:
It's the most wholesome thing ever. I'm also surprised that he lets you keep those glasses on him.
Erika Hall:
Actually, because when it gets windy and stuff, I think he really likes them. I mean, they're designed for dogs, they're cushioned with foam, and once I figured out how to fit the straps right, I think he's into it, because he can keep his eyes open even if it's really sunny or windy. It brings joy. People burst out laughing. That's what I try. That's what I'm going for when I get on the street is are people just openly laughing? That's success.
Ash Oliver:
I love it. It speaks paramount to the kind of person that you are, and you can see that in your books as well, and I just greatly appreciate you sharing time and knowledge with us. It's really appreciated. Thank you so much for being here.
Erika Hall:
Oh thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a product research platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening. And until next time.