When most people hear the term user experience or its acronym, UX, they think about apps and digital interfaces, maybe even fonts and button placements. But UX thinking isn't just about digital design. It's about people. It's about crafting experiences that are intuitive, seamless, and most importantly, human.

What if I told you that the same principles that make a product easy to use could also make a company easier to work for, or turn a manager into a better leader? In this episode, we're flipping the script on UX. It's not just a design discipline, it's a leadership framework, one that belongs not just in tech teams, but in boardrooms, team meetings, and yes, even the C suite. Whether you're leading a company or managing a team, UX thinking might just be the leadership mindset you've been missing. Let me share a quick example of what I mean about an effectively designed product or effective UX.

So from time to time I need to do some video editing. Now, I have people in my world who do video editing for me for the big projects, for the stuff like putting the podcast on YouTube. But every once in a while I'll have a file that needs to be converted from, let's say, a mov file into a file that's a little bit more usable for uploading to YouTube or putting on social media. Now, I have a subscription to the Adobe suite of products, and so I would often go to Adobe Premiere. Now, Adobe Premiere Pro. That specific software has so many bells and whistles and so many features, and for a novice user like myself, it is quite frankly very, very, very hard to use. Now, from a usability standpoint, it's not designed for me. I am not its ideal user.

So by contrast, once I discovered that there was another product in their suite called Adobe Media Encoder, well, I could make the quick switch and use Adobe Media Encoder, which has a very few number of features and in fact the exact features that I need to do the work that I need to do when I need to do some light video editing. Now, the difference here is that one product is designed for someone just like me, and another product is completely not designed for someone like me. It's designed for an advanced level producer type who can really get down into the weeds into video editing and do very precise and targeted things. That's not me. The other product, Media Encoder, it's designed exactly for me. I just need to get some video files converted to that other format and it is simple to do that. Now, the dizzying number of controls and options in Adobe Premiere Pro? Well, it's like walking into an airplane and looking in the cockpit.

That dizzying number of controls and an airplane cockpit versus let's say all you needed to do was get from point A to point B through the air and maybe a hang glider would do the job. And of course, hang glider doesn't have all those controls. So that's the analogy here. One product is designed exactly for one certain type of user, and the other product is designed for a very, very different type of user. Now, the big idea here is to know who your user is and to design something that is exactly right for them. And this type of UX thinking isn't just for product designers. It isn't just for user experience engineers. It's for leaders.

When leaders keep in mind their users, that would be who they are leading. And when they communicate with them in a way that meets them where they are and resonates with them, well, it makes all the difference. So UX thinking. So not UX design, but UX thinking deserves a seat at the table. From frontline supervisors all the way to the C suite and even individual contributors who, when you can come at something with UX thinking and thinking about your coworkers, thinking about your supervisor or your manager, thinking about the clients that you serve, and filtering what you're sharing with them through UX thinking, it's going to make a world of difference. So it absolutely needs a seat at the table. Not just on the tech side, really everywhere throughout the organization. Now let's compare and contrast a little bit what I'm talking about when I talk about UX thinking.

So UX thinking is about designing with that end user in mind. But it's more than that. It's a mindset that values empathy, clarity, multiple iterations of things, and really usability in every interaction. So let's look at where UX thinking and UX design came from, just to give you a background in the discipline. And then we'll move it forward into using design thinking into other interactions. So UX and user experience design has its roots in the early days of personal computing, when technology started to reach everyday users who didn't have those engineering backgrounds. Again, think like hands on a keyboard instead of doing things with punch cards. So the term user experience was popularized in the early 1990s by Don Norman, who at the time was then at Apple Computers.

So he argued that it wasn't just enough to design something that worked technically, but it also had to feel good to use. Now this is one of the hallmarks of Apple products still to this day. They are easy and intuitive to use. And we frankly have Don Norman to thank for an awful lot of that. Now, Don Norman first and foremost was an academic. And his academic experience in human factors and usability and so forth translated out of academia and very much into the tech sector. And so his career spanned and still does continue to span technology companies and academia. And he's a speaker and author and so forth these days.

Now what's really fun to think about is that at the same time that Don Norman was at Apple Computers, so say circa in 1993, 94, that's when I was working for a tech startup company where, and if you've heard me talk about my career path before, which many of you have, you know that I was out in the field training end users on our product. And I was on almost accidentally doing user experience design work and bringing those product suggestions and product improvements back to the home office for implementation into the product. So very much contemporaries in doing that work in the early days of doing that work.

Now, around the same time, Jacob Nielsen developed a set of usability heuristics, essentially design principles or rules of thumb that made interfaces more intuitive and user friendly. Now these ideas, these design heuristics, helped shape the way we think about how humans interact with machines. So what began in the world of software design quickly became a mindset for simplifying complexity and reducing friction in all kinds of products, digital and otherwise. Now when we start to think about what's the difference between UX design and UX thinking, well, I want to just tease these two things apart for you.

So UX design is a practice, it's a methodology, it's a job that you can get and you can go to work for a technology company. Mostly technology companies, but there are other types of companies as well. Automobile manufacturers as well have user experience folks, airplane manufacturers, basically anybody who's making a complex product would have somebody on staff who is doing that UX design work. Now UX thinking, on the other hand, is really more of a mindset. It's a way of approaching any experience, whether it's a digital experience, a product experience, or a human experience with empathy and clarity and usability in mind. So a UX designer might prototype a new feature in an app, but a UX leader, a leader using UX thinking might redesign their whole team's onboarding process to make it clearer, less overwhelming and more human centered. So UX thinking expands the idea of user experience beyond products to include systems, policies, meetings, communication, really any kind of interaction that a people, really any kind of interaction that people might experience inside a company.

Now, again, you've heard different bits and pieces of my career story. I was doing UX when I didn't even know what it was. And again, in that startup culture where we were fixing things and designing products on the fly, well, then when I went to grad school, I took my first actual human factors classes. And that's where I learned the discipline. That's where I learned about Jacob Nielsen's design heuristics. That's where I learned about doing well. In fact, the methodology that you use with those design heuristics is called a heuristic evaluation. So I learned the actual structure and discipline of UX design when I was in grad school, even though I had already been doing it on the fly in that startup company. Now then after finishing grad school, I went to the University of Minnesota where I was on the faculty, and I was teaching a usability class there at the college level.

And then after I left academia and I went back into the corporate sector, I was leading a global UX team at a large multinational company. And in that role, get this, when things come full circle, this is so much fun, I got to meet and have dinner with none other than Don Norman, the same Don Norman who was working at Apple Computers at the same time I was working at this startup. So it was a very fun evening. And it came about because the large global multinational company that I was working for was wanted to get UX design and thinking more deeply rooted into its systems. Instead of having it be something that was tacked on, they wanted it to be more baked into the whole product development process. Because what would often happen is a development team would be almost ready to launch a product and then my team would get a hold of it and my team would pick it apart and say, oh no, you need to change all these different things about it. And so there was kind of this running joke of like, well, have you run that past Janel's team yet? Because my team again, would find the usability issues in it and make it a much more intuitive product.

Now this has repercussions all throughout the business because if it's an easier to use product, guess what? That's going to reduce customer service calls. So service time, call time goes down in the call centers of the people who are servicing the product. Customer satisfaction goes up. You can charge a higher price for you know, a premium product that's easy to use. So there were lots of reasons that the company wanted to have a more disciplined approach to user experience.

And so they brought a whole bunch of the top leaders in the company to New York for this like just fabulous two day retreat where Don Norman was brought in as the one of the guest speakers. And so he was there for the two days with all of us. And so we have this, I have this great picture of me at that, literally at the dinner table and I'm arguing with Don Norman about something because we had a few different things that we sparred on. And you know, he is the most humble and approachable human being and he likes it when people tell him that he's wrong about something and he likes to get in there, you know, get down in the weeds and have a good discussion slash argument, you know. And I mean it wasn't, there was no animosity or anger or anything like that and when I call it an argument. But we were just, you know, arguing about some of the finer points in fact about how to get UX design work and thinking more deeply integrated into the company.

You see, I worked there and so I knew that we still needed to take a bit of a guerrilla approach and Don was advocating for more of a disciplined process approach. And I knew that a lot of these product developers and a lot of the like heads of different product lines weren't going to agree to the additional time, research, effort, money, everything it was going to take to do that. So I said we need to take more of a guerrilla with the business units that haven't already worked with my team to show them the value in something that was sort of like grabbing the low hanging fruit and showing them the value of it so that then they would be more inclined to involve us earlier in the process and, and get it more baked in. So it wasn't that I totally disagreed with him, but it was just more I was boots on the ground in that company. I knew the company's culture and I knew what it was going to take to get that, to get things implemented.

Anyway, back to UX thingy. Oh, we'll put a picture, we'll put that picture in the show notes. So if you want to see me. And of course I was fairly junior in the company at that time. I was surrounded by people who were vice presidents of divisions because it was a whole bunch of VPs and me and Don Norman. So anyway, it was fun. I wasn't a VP level, I reported to a VP. So I was close, but not quite. I was definitely outranked at that meeting.

All right, but let's get back to some of the key elements of UX thinking as a framework for leadership. So empathy for the user, okay, Whether that's an internal user. So internal user would be employee, coworker, your boss, or external. External would be your customer. But empathy for the user, well, this is the ability to understand their emotional state, the feelings of someone else. So think about different types of feelings that different types of people inside the organization might have. Maybe you've got a new employee versus an employee who's been there for many years. They're going to have different, different emotional reactions to the same announcements, different ways of being in meetings. So really taking UX thinking is thinking about, well, what's their emotional state at any given time.

We could also think about, just like different generations, we could think about somebody who might be struggling with something outside of work. Maybe they're a new parent, or maybe they're caring for an aging parent. Again, a manager or a supervisor, a leader who has empathy for the user, empathy for those internal folks are going to think about and approach conversations, decision makings, announcements and so forth, very, very differently, keeping the different types of users in mind. Another hallmark of UX thinking is clarity of purpose and process. So this is about being really clear about what you're doing and why. So from a UX design standpoint, a designer knows the exact goal of what their user is trying to achieve. Let's say they purchase pro. Let's say they're, you know, purchasing a product on a retail website and you're the UX team designing a more intentional purchasing process.

So we want less friction, we want fewer user errors. We want them to be able to complete the transaction and not leave the product abandoned in the shopping cart. So we know that the goal is to get all the way through the checkout process seamlessly. Okay? In the same way, a leader using UX thinking needs to have absolute clarity on their purpose and process. Not just of what they're doing themselves, but they also need to have that clarity of purpose and process on their employees, on their clients, on their peers, on their own boss, whomever they're leading. So they need to be really, really clear, again, not only on what they're doing, but on what their end users are doing. Because again, then they're going to be able to much more seamlessly meet them where they're at and, and facilitate a better interaction. Another hallmark would be iterative problem solving and feedback loops.

So things are never done, never completely finished. From a UX mindset think, in UX thinking standpoint, things can always be improved. And so we have to be watching for data from our real world experiences and feeding those back into our cognitive processes to look for those improvements. We need to be fine tuning and refining our systems. And the way we do that is we take data from our real world experiences. So let's say I have to have a one on one with an employee and coach them back up to performance level on something. Well, as I'm coaching them, not only am I in the moment coaching them, but I also want to be watching my own performance, not and not getting so hooked on watching my own performance that I don't perform well in that conversation. But I want to be getting the feedback from the employee about like, is this going well? How is this working? So if you've heard me talk about adapting of listening before, that's what I'm talking about.

Like in real time, in the moment, you're taking the user feedback and you're feeding it back into the own, your own system in that conversation and fine tuning and making those adjustments. Another aspect of this is simplification and decluttering. So as we think about this from a UX design perspective, we're thinking about minimalist design. We don't want any extraneous things in the design that are going to distract the user. So likewise in leadership, we don't want to have extra things involved in a specific interaction that are going to detract people from the real point that we're trying to get across. I'll be talking more about these ideas and unpacking them over the next weeks and months because as you can tell, I just get really excited about this stuff. So if you heard last week's episode when I was talking about like really coming full circle, I'm bringing this back into my work. I'm sure you can hear the excitement in my voice now so that you know that anyway, there's just a lot, a lot more to come.

And one final thing I just want to mention before we leave this topic of what some of these major hallmarks are that go into UX thinking. And that last one that I want to talk about is visibility of the system state. And this is transparency about where you're at in systems. And my favorite example to use on this is the battery icon on your phone that gives you visibility into the system state that is the battery on your mobile phone. Now none of us want a dead battery on our Mobile phone. In fact, as you're listening to this, you probably know exactly or very close to exactly how much battery you have left in your phone and that visibility into the system state. And in fact, just for a moment, imagine if you didn't have that battery icon and you never knew how much juice you had left in your mobile phone battery. That would be really unnerving.

Now, as we think about visibility into the system state, and I'm going to unpack this example in just a few minutes, a little bit, in a little bit greater detail so you'll get a better idea of what I'm talking about. But people want to know how they're doing. Just like that, that battery icon, you want to know how your phone is doing. Well, if it's me and I'm your employee, I want to know how I'm doing. So I'll come back to this example in just a little bit and unpack that more. So as we think about user experience in the UX discipline and how we translate to that, to UX thinking from a leadership perspective, we're just going to replace user with whatever type of person it is. So it's employee, it's your peer, it's your customer, it's your boss, your partner, your team member. And, and, and we're thinking about then designing an experience for them.

Our everyday conversations with them are experiences. We are designing experiences. Okay, so let's just talk for a moment about why I think this belongs all the way up into the C suite, the upper echelons of leadership in your organizations. So great leaders are designing experiences whether they know it or not. Now, my company, which is incidentally called Working Conversations, the name of this podcast as well. But when I first incorporated my company over 15 years ago, I first incorporated it under the name Create Experience. Create Experience LLC was the name of my company. That's how deeply this work is embedded in me.

I, and I came at it from the perspective then, and I still do today, that we are creating experiences for our co workers, for our cl, for our boss, all day long when we're at work. Now why does it belong in the C suite? Well, again, leaders are designers. So UX thinking drives better decisions if we want to get down to the brass tacks. So empathy as a decision making tool helps us understand real world, use pain points and context that people are experiencing so that we can create, we can craft better decisions. And leaders often assume. But UX thinking helps validate assumptions through observation and iteration and just an extra layer of cognition. Another thing that UX thinking does is it reduces friction across the organization. So when you've got processes that are unclear, or you've got people who are overloaded or overwhelmed with things, that there's friction there.

And most of that friction can be designed out of the system with intentional work and intentional thinking. So you can apply the same UX heuristics, those same design principles and rules of thumb to culture, systems, communication, everything about your leadership, not just to products. So again, these are some of the things we'll be unpacking over the next weeks and months. And then UX thinking also aligns with key executive goals. When you think about things like retention, innovation, scalability, digital transformation, all of these things are better served by UX thinking.

Now, if your organization is investing in customer experience and employee experience, you're already doing some of that UX thinking work. Now it's time to take it deeper and drive it into all the interactions across the organization, especially those leadership and management conversations and interactions, because it's going to make a world of difference as it relates to these key executive goals. I was just mentioning retention, innovation, scalability, digital transformation.

Now again, this isn't just for designers, it's for everyone. UX thinking scales across roles because we're all designing something. Human resource folks are designing onboarding experiences and recruiting experiences. Managers are designing meeting flows and communication channels. IT folks are designing help desk experiences for when people need, whether that's internal help desk support or external help desk support. And executives are designing performance management systems and designing systems that help manage their shareholders and their boards of directors and all of that. So it really is throughout the entire organization. So I want you to really start to think about this as a democratizing design thinking process.

So UX thinking gives people tools to think in systems and to center the human in those systems. So let me just give you a real world example. I told you I was going to come back to this UX thinking in action on visibility of the system state or system status. Again, go back to that battery icon on your phone and how much comfort we take in knowing how much battery we have left in our phone. Now again, it's a little unnerving to think if we didn't have that battery icon and our phone could go dead at any time. And we don't want to have that uncertainty. We want to know with a reasonable degree of certainty that our phone is going, you know, has, has enough juice to get us until the next time we're going to charge it. Now let's take that Same idea of visibility into the system state and look at it at the individual, team and organizational level.

And in fact, let me just start in the middle with team. So if your team does a regular stand up meeting or a regular, sometimes they're also called a team huddle. And most technical organizations do this really, really well. In fact, people who are working on an agile development process will often have a stand up or a team huddle very first thing in the morning where everybody says, here's how much I got done yesterday and these are the specific priorities I'm working on today. And then everybody can see how their work intersects with other people and how the progress project is staying on track and so forth. So it's really helpful insight into the team level. Everybody knows kind of where everything's at in the team. And again, most tech teams do this really well.

A lot of other non tech teams have taken on doing team huddles or daily standups, even if they're not in the technology sector. So again, this transforms or cascades across the organization. It's not just for tech teams. Now let's take it down to the individual level. And the question here is if I report to you, my question is, how am I doing? Am I doing okay now, especially if I'm a newer employee, especially if I'm a younger employee, I want to know am I doing okay? How am I doing? And if I'm not getting that feedback from you, my manager, that's going to be like me not knowing my battery indicator, that unsteadiness, that uncertainty is not going to serve me well and it's not going to serve you well or the rest of our team if I am in this, this uncertainty state all the time. So we want to find the right cadence for giving feedback, both the positive feedback as well as the critical feedback. And if you've heard me talk about hybrid teams and remote work culture, you know that I'm a big advocate of giving more positive feedback than you think you might need to, because we don't get those little tiny micro affirmations, those atta boy, atta girl out of thems that come when we are working face to face with one another or you know, seated in the, in the same physical work area or around an actual conference table instead of, you know, teams. And by teams I mean the software teams.

Okay? So at the individual level, you as my manager might need to dial it up a little bit and give me more feedback, both positive and critical. And again, what the research says on this is that when people are newer in their role, they need more feedback both critical and positive. And the better, the more seasoned they get in their role, the less they need the positive. I mean, they still need it, but they just don't need as much of it and the more easily they can take on hearing that critical feedback. Okay, so now we've covered it at the team level and we've covered it at the individual level. Well, let's talk about the organizational level again. We need insight into the system state that is the company that we're working for or the broader division or whatever unit is most salient for you. Now, you've heard me talk about this before again in the hybrid and work from home type situations complicates this.

It makes what's happening in the office, it makes what's happening at the company less visible. So you may have heard episode 190 of this podcast where I talked about the subtle benefits of office hive mentality. So when you return to office, when you're in the building and you're hearing little snippets of conversation and you're getting a vibe of the culture and all those different things, that is visibility into the system state at the organizational level. And that is so, so important. So again, think about and you might want to go back and listen to episode 190. We'll link that one up in the show notes to re listen to that to get some ideas about how you can get give that visibility into the system state at the organization level. Okay, so that's just one quick example of how that one heuristic visibility into the system state can work at all of those three levels, individual, team and organizational. And again, at lots of other different levels in between.

You can tell I get jazzed and juiced about this stuff. All right, so UX thinking isn't just about wireframing and designing and button placement on screens and what color a piece of software should be. UX Thinking is about asking, how does this interaction, whatever that interaction is, whether it's a team meeting, a passing glance in the hallway, or an email, how does this feel to the person on the other side of the interaction? Action. So let me just give you a couple of quick ideas about how you can start using UX Thinking today. Because if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you know I always like to give you actionable takeaways. So here are practical takeaways for anyone at any level of the organization. Again, it goes all the way up to the C suite, but an Individual contributor can take this on just as much as anybody else. So the first thing, picture the human on the other end, whether that's the other end of a policy you're writing.

Another at the other end of an email, a process, the people who are participating in the meeting. Even if you're not leading the meeting, you can have a profound impact on how that meeting goes by leading from the side and again, you're taking into account the humans that you're working with. Okay, so that's one, picture the human on the other, on the other side. Number two, look for ways to reduce friction, look for pain points in your workflows, look for pain points in processes, look for pain points anywhere there might be friction and tackle that. So reducing friction is going to help not only you, but it's going to help all the other folks that you interact with and that that those systems touch. And then number three, build in testing. What's your version of a usability test? So if you're not familiar with the usability test, that's where we put the software to use with the actual use cases that users would be using. And we see where there's friction, we see where they get lost, we see where they make errors, we see where the software crashes sometimes.

But build in your own usability testing. So when you're trying something new, watch for data, watch for things that can clarify and that you can iterate the next time. Number four, default to clarity. So going back to that idea of minimal minimalism. So minimize jargon, create visibility into the system state and take away anything extraneous that is going to detract from the experience instead of add to it. And just overall, I want you to treat leadership like experience. Design every single choice that you make as the designer and that is every time you open your mouth or type something on the keyboard at work. Any communication act that you engage in shapes how people feel and how they feel, shapes how they act and how they perform in their job and how they treat your customers and how they treat their co workers and everything else.

So UX thinking, well, it is leadership. It's the intentional design of experiences with empathy and clarity and iteration at the core. If you're shaping culture, building teams or creating anything, anything people will use, you are in the UX business. So let's do it on purpose, my friends. So I want you to start small. Pick one email that you're going to pay closer attention to, how it's going to land one policy and you're going to think through where's the friction in this policy. How could we make this smoother? One meeting that you participate in, or maybe that you facilitate and work it through a UX lens this week. Now, again, as I talked about in future episodes, we're going to break down how to apply a whole host of different UX heuristics to leadership one by one.

So as we close out this episode, if there was an idea in this episode that sparked something for you, please do me this one favor right now. As the episode closes and as soon as I'm done talking, I want you to text this episode or email whichever one works best for you. Text this episode to one friend, your manager, somebody in your organization who could really use this. It would mean the absolute world to me. Now you'll find links to my social media over on the show notes page @ janelanderson.com 224 for episode 224 as always, stay curious, stay informed, and stay ahead of the curve. And until next time, keep thriving and keep working your UX thinking into the future of work that we all so want. Take good care, my friends.