Episode 2: Deep Dive - Design & Governance

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this first Surfacing deep dive, hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale talk about design and governance. Why do designers feel that they don't have a seat at the table when making decisions about creating the customer experience? And what happens when they do? What is the conflict between the designers role and those that make the rules for the organization? And how can the disciplines of governance and design work together to improve the customer experience and the experience of being on the digital team?

Lisa Welchman:

So, I thought it would be good for us to talk about the differences of what we do for a living, because we really interact with the same people but in really different ways.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

But not really in really different ways. Right? Sort of in different ways, but not... I think we have the same intent, which is basically to get shit organized so that we can make better stuff that we put online, but we do attack it in different ways. So, I thought it'd be really cool to talk about that a little bit. So, what do you think?

Andy Vitale:

I think that's awesome. I think the timing is right. It's funny, when one of our main stakeholders is our legal team, and I think the design team has this feeling that legal applies constraints and doesn't care how they affect the end experience. And I think this is a perfect example of a good disconnect between the people who make the policies and some of the designers that happens in organizations. I've worked in places where we had attorneys and design patents and they understood the design process and the experience, and I've worked in other places where they didn't, it was new to them. So, it's an educational process. It touches more than just the products, though. It's even how we use internal tools and where we can store files and what that looks like. So, I'm hoping that this conversation we have can shed more light on that subject.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean, all ready, I'm moderately annoyed at what you're saying. Well, just because I think when we talked about doing this episode, I wanted to call it Design Versus Governance: The Ultimate Smackdown. Right? Which is really aggressive and not right, but funny. Right? Or at least I thought it was funny. It's a cute name. But when people think about governance, they immediately go to this legalistic policy aspect, which honestly is a component of it, so that's not wrong. But what they often ignore is... All that I'm trying to do when I do governance work with digital teams, which include designers, includes everyone, including those attorneys, is to get them organized so that they can create things intentionally instead of accidentally. Which is an extreme thing to say, but honestly, a lot of what is online is accidental stuff or experimental stuff that people put online without really a thought for the implications of it.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, I think that everybody wants that same thing, but they oftentimes are just like, "Wow, compliance and regulatory won't let me do this." I mean, I've worked a lot with pharma and in healthcare, and there's actually... and financial sector. You've got that background, as well. There are some things that you just can't do, and it's interesting because designers, from my perspective, will accept a certain set of constraints.

Andy Vitale:

Yes. For sure.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? But there's just some limit where you get the feeling that they think you're trying to infringe on like a human rights issue, like a designer rights issue. And so, I'm really curious, where is that line? Why is it okay for the bank to say, "We can't blend credit card and checking account information online," and so those two have to be completely different systems, but when you start to push on other areas... I can't even think of a good example. You can probably tell me an example. That there's a lot of pushback, other types of functionality or the experience of what is going on with a particular customer or the flow through a particular app. I mean, what did designers want? I guess that's what I'm asking. What do they want?

Andy Vitale:

Sometimes I don't know that they know what they want. Right? So, because I know you and your background and understand governance better than I've ever before, from our conversations, what I think happens is there's this disconnect in understanding and knowledge, and that's what I think you mean by governance, a lot of times, is get everybody on the same page, understand who makes the decisions. But that doesn't happen, and blame is...

Andy Vitale:

You can't point fingers at anyone but yourself in an organization. If you're a designer and you don't understand the policies or the rules of that organization or the constraints that we have in an industry, that's on you to have had those conversations. I mean, it's also on the people that you work with. Right? There should be actual sharing of these things on a regular basis. When we do have some sort of learning opportunity, it's hidden under something called compliance courses that everybody dreads, but they're important. Right? I think they dread more of the delivery of that information than actually having a collaborative conversation and being able to ask questions about it.

Andy Vitale:

So, to me, designers are looking to create a great experience for anyone that uses our product or service for a desired outcome, and I think that that's not different from anyone else in the organization. I think that the marketing team wants a great experience and outcome, our legal team wants a great experience... The legal team doesn't want to be the team that's like, "Hey, we just want a bunch of constraints. That's our job." No, they want the best experience for our clients too. And sometimes we forget that because there are priorities for each department that kind of overlap and in ways that there's a lack of understanding why.

Andy Vitale:

So, I hear a lot of times like, "Oh, the terms and conditions needs to be so long," and that's not at my current role, but I've heard it for many years at many places. Like, "Why does it need to be so big? Can we hide it? Can we expand it?" And it's like, "Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the situation." But also, there's this, I think it feels like risk aversion at times without clarity. It's like, what if we wanted to provide this information to our clients in a particular instance like, "Here's a list of companies. Here's maybe the languages they speak. Here's..." whatever? It's a directory, per se. And sometimes it's an automatic like, "No, you can't do that," without explanation, and it turns out that if we pushed the right people hard enough that we actually could have done it. And we uncover that a lot of times.

Andy Vitale:

And I think that's where designers get frustrated because the people that we sometimes interface with are making decisions because that's their role, but I think the decisions are being made with the assumption that that is the direction from the top down, as opposed to it actually having the conversation around each specific instance. Again, like I hear that all the time from designers, I hear that all the time from all of our partners, though. Right? Who makes the final decision? That's the bigger issue.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. And that's what governance is all about for me. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that every organization that I've... Well, almost. Every organization that I've worked with in the last 20 years has a digital team or a group of people collaborating around what they want to put online that's competent enough to do a good job. So, it's not a knowledge gap in terms of how do you execute well on digital and what do you do. I think it's, a lot of times, and governance for me is all about decision-making and the clarity of decision-making. Not only who makes the decision, but how do they make the decision?

Lisa Welchman:

So, for instance, if compliance and regulatory is making a decision, that's going to heavily impact the experience, the online design that's offered, that's able to be implemented, then they should have gotten input from designers before they wrote that policy. And so, that hardly ever happens, but it hardly ever happens for a couple of reasons. One is you've... We're like 25, 30 years into the commercial web now, almost. Right? So, this is less and less true. I start to run into attorneys who are, I hate to use the word, digital natives, or attorneys who have educated themselves. Maybe they didn't grow up digital natives, but they understand the technologies. So, that's lessening. In fact, one of the best projects we ever worked on was with an organization that had a completely literate attorney, a digitally literate attorney, who was really a great advisor. They were like, "Yeah [inaudible 00:09:51]," and they could dance back and forth and tweak it so they could get the maximum experience, while not getting themselves into legalistic trouble or just out now violating the law.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, there's this, and people use this word all the time but it's true, there are these silos inside of an organization, most of which existed prior to the advent of the worldwide web. Right? Which they were bad then, but they're worse now, because a website or an online experience is basically the reflection of an organization online, whether it's their social channels and their mobile apps and their websites, or their email marketing campaigns, all of that stuff is literally the organization itself instantiating itself online in full. Right? Which means you're going to need the participation of everybody in the organization to create that experience, just like you need everyone in the organization to create the offline experience, to the extent that that's even a thing anymore offline versus online experience.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, I think I see, all of this is to say, I see a reluctance in designers to have that collaborative conversation. I see a strong message that says, "We know best. We are the designers. And basically, we're not really interested in negotiating with legal. We're not really interested in negotiating with IT." There's the everlasting, "I don't want to learn how to code argument," and I don't think designers need how to code. Coders don't need to learn how to design it either, but they certainly should understand what the other one does. Right?

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

That's both sides of the fence. Right? And so, I see this reluctance, and I'm picking on designers, but we can pick on IT as well, or a reluctance for... Well, I can't pick on IT because it loves policy. Right? They come out of a cultural policy. Right? And so, IT is more than happy to have policy on the table. But I just see this reluctance, and I'm wondering, what is that about? Right? So, you see this reluctance to come to the table and then a lot of complaining about, "How come we don't have a seat at the table?" Right? So, I'm like, "Well, what do you want?"

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I totally see your point, but also, I feel like it depends really on the maturity of the industry, the maturity of the organization, the types of products that they put out. So, in healthcare and finance and industries that I've worked in, it's a little bit tougher to have, like you talked about, the digital native attorneys. They're not always there. Some companies there are, some companies there aren't. And also, designers in some of these organizations, the maturity level is low, and literally they feel like they're order takers from time to time and they don't have any input. That's why there has been that fight for the seat at the table. But I feel like designers that are still complaining about that seat at the table really need to look at where they're at, because we've evolved as an industry so far in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, definitely the last five, than I've ever seen before growing up in design for 20 years.

Andy Vitale:

So, I think I'm seeing a lot more collaboration, a lot more, "Let's bring people to the table," and that turns into another internal debate that I'm seeing as like, "Is design best served to bring people together because they see what's happening across different silos or parts of the organization, bring everybody in, collaborate, lead some sessions and really..." Is that the value of design, or is the value of design to just create the thing? Take your requirements, run off in a corner, go build a thing, bring it back, we'll develop it in an agile way and we'll call it agile. But that's really still waterfall.

Andy Vitale:

I think the designers that are still working that way are not having the best outcomes and the best inputs and organizations, because, really, design should be leveraged as a storytelling tool, as a collaboration model. Yes, we have an expertise, but our expertise is being human-centered and involving people and the process and the building and the decision-making and testing and validating. I feel like if that's not happening and you're not bringing in legal at a kickoff or having that open collaboration of like, "I have this question," or marketing compliance, like whoever it is, then you're not really doing design in 2021.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, I couldn't agree with you more fully on this one, because one of the things that I often say to folks, particularly UX folks, when I'm internally, which is, "What do you think the experience is that your colleagues are having working with you?" Right? And so, you're very, very customer centered. I want to create this sticky, juicy, delightful experience for our customer base so they buy our products and services or give us money, or whatever it is. And I'm not saying that with judgment. Organizations exist for a purpose. Right? And so, you're trying to engineer that purpose. But then they turn their back to their colleagues in the organization and they don't consider how they're impacting the work that other people may do. They're not considering how they're changing the job of someone internally by changing the content. Right? Or how those other things get impacted.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, I think that is a broader, more serious and interesting digital maturity question, which is something I've really thought about over the years and is my personal, real geeky interest in the web and the internet, is how it impacts the enterprise. Right? How the existing of digital displaces, not your vertical market space and what products and services you sell, but the way that people must work inside of an organization. And you are always going to work in silos because seven plus or minus three, or whatever that number is, people work better in smaller groups. Right? It's not going to be one big mash of people. But those things have to be connected. Right? And so, I think that's what I'm trying to do, is to get people to work better together. And I lost my train of thought. You mentioned something about... Can't remember what it was that I was trying to answer. What were you talking about before? Because I had a point.

Andy Vitale:

Design being a way to bring people together to solve a problem rather than running off in a corner and doing work and bringing it back.

Lisa Welchman:

Right, right, right. So, the first thing that you said when you were talking about this was, is it the design team's job to basically be on the top of the pile, be the conductor of the orchestra? And I don't see it that way, and I'm not rejecting designers. I see it this way. I feel like when you're creating an online experience for someone, there's the experience that you're creating that can be very multifaceted. To speak simplistically, let's say there's a website component to it, there's a social component, there's a mobile component, and there's a huge, underlying data component. I'm just making up just a set of things that you... all that have interface and all of that other stuff that's going on.

Lisa Welchman:

Depending on who you are in the organization, and if you attach those channels, like a network array and think about it three-dimensionally, if you're in IT, the IT part's the most important. None of it can work if any of the supporting team that supports those channels fails. It just can't. Because designers create interfaces, they oftentimes are like, "We're the most important," and then content people are like, "It's all about us." The icing on the cake and the candles on the cake get the most visibility in terms of, "We're the most important." And it's like, well, if the tech wasn't there, you couldn't serve the shit up. Right? So, it wouldn't make any difference.

Lisa Welchman:

So, the way I see it, and I think because I work with a super broad team, is that everything, including the budgeting that goes to support all of it, is super important and none of it can be weak. Which is why, from my perspective, governing issues are management and leadership issues. Right? Have you enabled your full team to work in a way that's sensible where they're not fighting with each other? Right? As opposed to, who's in charge? Well, if you're actually looking and designing the interface or the experience, then designers are in charge for that moment. Right? But then, if you're talking about making sure that your... how data and personally identifiable information marries with that experience and mitigating what you should and should not do, that's probably not designers. And they should sit back at that moment and listen. Right? And not go like, "Oh, you're trying to ruin my experience." It's like, "No, we actually don't want to get sued." Right?

Lisa Welchman:

So, I think it's just a shame because I think everybody wants the same thing, but somehow the way that the organization has historically been organized, it's us against them, designers versus IT, or marketing versus IT. And now it's UX against the world. All of this. Well, no. It's just, it's insane. So, I don't know if you agree with me or not, but it's frustrating because I think all the tools are there to do it the right way.

Andy Vitale:

I definitely see your point. You go on design Twitter and you see these designers arguing over things that are not super important, not affecting bottom line or business strategy. It is that internal fighting over things that the business doesn't care about, colors and pixels, radius and like, "Is it four pixel rounded corners or five?" I think that that conversation happens, and it's great that it happens amongst designers. That's where it should happen. Right? But go make each other better and do that.

Lisa Welchman:

That's the job. Yeah.

Andy Vitale:

Right. But the thing that you did talk about about silos earlier, the silos still exist because what happens are teams, whether they're agile or not, in most cases now they are, they're so focused on their problem space or their sliver of the product that they don't realize what's happening four screens away from them or on a different product. And what happens there is it causes us to create duplicate work. Right? How many times do we uncover developers are building four different log-in screens and the designers got three different versions of that? And we're to fix that with like, we call it a design system. Right? And it is a thing. It's reusable components that we actually do have some code in because of front end development.

Andy Vitale:

But ultimately, these silos exist in problems, and the ecosystem isn't always looked at in certain organizations. I don't know... I mean, for us, we have people that take this holistic approach and understand different touch points and service designers can do that work and see where physical and digital intersect and where data crosses and what that looks like, and partner with data intelligence and technology to figure things out. But I'm almost positive that that doesn't happen in a lot of places.

Lisa Welchman:

It doesn't. It almost never happens, and it's interesting because there's this new increased focus on design ops. Right? And it kind of makes me cringe and kind of makes me laugh and kind of makes me happy. I have mixed feelings about it because it's designers talking about design ops, and from my experience designers aren't good at ops. Ops is a competency. Right? Governance is a competency. Ops is a competency. And so, it's almost like, why do you think you can do a good job at that? Right? And just expressing a pattern library is not operations. Right? Operations has to do with budgeting in a way that makes sense so that the right things get paid for, staffing in a way that makes sense. It has to do with making sure that once you've decided who's going to write policies and standards about things, actually making sure that the stuff's written and implemented.

Lisa Welchman:

So, we haven't talked a lot about social media and the mess of Twitter and Facebook and particularly in the US around the election, but one of the things that really sticks out to me about that is, so whatever you think about Twitter and Facebook and how they work from an interface and a design perspective, for the vast American public, shit works fine. Right? It works well enough, and you can talk about it, and from a design perspective as well. But when I see that, I see a governance problem where probably both of those organizations had policy that was expressing that they shouldn't behave the way they were behaving. Right? Or that they should have shut down certain folks years ago. And I'm not just talking about the US presidential stuff, all kinds of badgering, bullying behavior, just all kinds of stuff going on on those two platforms. But somehow, that policy never trickled down into the actual way that people worked. Right?

Lisa Welchman:

And so, there's a lot of organizations that have great pattern libraries, great policies, and a pattern library is just a standard set. Right? But they don't implement it because it's a job. So, you got a bunch of designers who off the side of their desk writing pattern library shit, and then they go back to designing stuff. And nobody's thinking about how are we going to actually install this inside of an organization? And so, that's a management and operational problem, and it's the maturity problem in the digital space. Everybody wants to work like it's a project. Right? But it's not, it's actually like a whole program in a department. But the way it is, you've got like hundreds, sometimes thousands of people working in the digital space and it's project after project after project. They're just reinventing stuff. It's no wonder people are designing the same interfaces all over and over again or they can't achieve single sign-on, or the experience is disintegrated, because nobody's thinking of this really systemically.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, it really is this weakness of what's... You're trying to create this cohesive online experience, but refusing to create a cohesive online, operational experience inside of the organization. This is not just about design ops. It's about all of it.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. That makes sense. There's two things I want to touch upon, the first one being design ops, because it's a competency that we are at the point in maturity where I am now that we need it. We need a competency that's not made of designers, but people who understand how designers work, to be able to help us just do things that our team spends a lot of time doing that we could be freed up actually solving problems and doing design work. So, like rewriting our job descriptions, figuring out all of our talent acquisition strategies, our social posting strategies, those exist in the organization, but how we attract designers is different than how engineers attract engineers. So, we have to have a strategy for that.

Andy Vitale:

It's figuring out how to optimize our process, but also get it built into the larger process within the organization. It's understanding how to build competencies and level up designers on the team and set up those learning and development opportunities. There's ways to help us mature and evangelize what we do and help us tell that story to the wider organization. So, ops to me, onboarding, these are all important things that someone needs to be focused on.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Vendor management.

Andy Vitale:

Right. Exactly. But what you were saying about what's happening in these tech companies, and a lot of these tech companies started truly as engineers building what people interface with, not designers, not... That happens often, and they've added design as we went along. But when you're working in an agile manner, I mean, the designers and the developers that are working in that sprint, they're working on such a small thing. It's not even a feature sometimes, it's a user story of a feature that's tied to a larger epic of a problem, and it's like, "What's happening here? Where did we get disconnected that someone might be working on the initial epic, breaking it into features, and then someone else is working on one or two of those features, breaking them into user stories and there might be two or three other teams building those?"

Andy Vitale:

And what happens, through lack of governance or lack of a process for reviewing and communicating what's happening, is the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and to me, that is so bad. That's how things get broken. And also, I'm all for a culture of experimentation. Right? We have to build and test and learn. But going back to these companies that don't have policies around security and just privacy, what happens is we test something, what we would consider a small subset of users, which at scale happens to be a million people or more, and it causes harm and then there's nothing... How do we roll that back? Who knows that it even went out? We're getting pieces of data left and right, but who's actually taking that, what we learned and those analytics, and tying it together and flagging it as a problem and seeing what happens? We've broken down the work into too many small pieces that nobody sees the big picture until it's too late.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I don't disagree with you at all. I agree with you 100%. when you said the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, honestly, the first thing that went through my mind was, "And they never did." Right? So, when I first started consulting 20 some odd years ago, more, more than 20 years ago, coming out of Cisco systems, understanding big, messed up websites and what could happen, I thought that I was looking at like 10 years before everybody figured it out and went like, "We have to get this organized." And it's just not happened. Right?

Lisa Welchman:

And so, what I think is true is that in any large enterprise, in any large group of people, unless you are intentional about how you're going to work, and unless you have shared values, the left hand's not going to know what the right's doing, and in spite of that, some organizations will succeed, either through dumb luck, pointed leadership, good timing. There's a variety of luck factors that come into the pile of like why some people just succeed. I mean, social media, a lot of that's timing. Right? Timing and first out of the gate and a willingness to just keep going and going and going, despite things that happen. Good and bad things that happen.

Lisa Welchman:

So, I think it's important to know that, that it's not like it was good before. Right? It was just that you couldn't see it, just like there were bigots and racists before, but now they're all online. Right? So, you can see them. So, organizations were really disorganized silos, in-fighting, power-tripping amongst departments, power-tripping amongst geographies. Right? I work with a lot of global multinationals, and the way that countries talk about each other is just almost amusing. I mean, it's not evil, but there's competition. Right? Internal competition. And now all of that's just surfaced and put online, so much like that dynamic of all of these social human things that we see put online that are making a lot of people globally cringe about the way that human beings can be, they were always like that.

Lisa Welchman:

And so, the question is, what are we going to do about it? Right? So, it's not going like, "Oh my God, look how we are now because of the internet and the web." I'm like, "No. No. Organizations were always like that. We were always having these challenges. There was always silo design." This physical marketing brochure that was at this conference over here didn't have the same branding as the one over here that was in Japan versus Australia, and it didn't matter so much. Right? Because nobody saw both of those things. You had to be in Japan and Australia and speak both of those languages in order to go, "Oh, this messaging isn't right." So, the opportunity to see those conflicts is a lot higher now.

Lisa Welchman:

So, I guess my question is, given that dynamic, what do you think designers can do to alleviate that? What is the next step to... Because whether or not they're in charge or not, it's a moot point. It doesn't matter. Designers are participating in a heavy way in resolving this. And what do you think the strongest value designers can bring to the table in sorting this out?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, that's a great question. I love, obviously, as a designer, design leader, I love design and I see the strategic value that it brings, but I also know there's this underlying ego of like, "Hey, we're the designers, we're here to solve your problem." And really, the value that design brings is this level of curiosity, to ask questions, to understand details, to figure things out, to try to find a better way, which a lot of other functions within an organization are also asking questions, trying to figure out what's next. But I think from a design perspective, we have this ability to look at a system level and also the human empathetic level of we're designing for, and start to understand desired outcomes and really test those; build those, test those, and learn from people, and share those learnings.

Andy Vitale:

So, to mem design really, it's the experimentation, it's the pushing people to think in a slightly different way, it's gathering people through collaboration and getting them aligned to understand a problem space and understand the customer better than most. And then it's working together to solve those problems and make sure that once this solution is created or... Solution's an interesting word because of iteration, but once this hypothesis exists, it's how do we test that and learn from that and continue to evolve the product by doing right by the customer? And sometimes that means convincing an organization that you don't have to be first. Right? Sometimes it's better to be second and get it right than be first and lose all of your customers and ruin that relationship.

Andy Vitale:

So, I think designers know what to do, but I think design leadership is so focused on things like delight and satisfying the business that they don't just throw the flag and say, "Wait a minute, slow down. This doesn't make sense. I think that's where the weakness is. I think there's a lot of leaders that just go with the flow because it's safe.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, I think so. I'm listening to you talk, and I sometimes sound like I'm dissing digital teams or design teams or whatever, but I actually have a lot of compassion, the stress that those folks have to work under. And I think for me, governance is really about making sure that there's an environment where this good, safe, fun work can happen. Right? Making sure that that environment exists. That same delightful experience that you want your customers to have, it should feel like that at work. You should be enjoying working with your colleagues. Designers should be enjoying talking to content people and to IT, or to the program in the business about what it is that we're trying to create and do together. And there shouldn't be all of this backbiting and competition internally. So, that would be my hope of what this next generation of teams that create digital experiences would be like. Right? But it remains to be seen what'll happen, but hopefully, we'll get all of that together.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. I think the conversation is happening, and it's getting stronger and stronger and people are having the right conversations. I mean, we can't not. Right? We've seen what has happened by not having the right conversations, by not collaborating, by not putting plans in place, what if something goes wrong. We can't repeat the same mistakes that we've made, and I'm pretty sure as an industry we're aware of that. And I think best practices are starting to emerge. And I'm optimistic that as we continue to evolve the way we create digital products, services, and experiences, that even seeing designers, or not just designers but product people and engineers and content folks and, really, everyone that that's coming through this generation, they've got this desire to really do right by people and solve problems for humans.

Andy Vitale:

There's the clear understanding that we need to make sure that everyone is involved in the process and has a seat at the table, and equity and inclusion are huge things. And we realize that by not having the people in the room or in the process that are using the products and being part of building it, that that's where a lot of things have gone wrong.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Well, that sounds like a really good place to end this particular topic and conversation, and hopefully we can talk about all of those things that you're talking about, and the collaboration models, the intentional collaboration models that I'm talking about, with a lot of our guests in the future.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. Awesome.

Lisa Welchman:

Groovy. Well, have a good one.

Andy Vitale:

You too.