Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service Podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience.
Table Service is presented by Tableau Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker.
Nick Cawthon is a veteran UX and product design strategist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, co leading the consultancy Gauge and working with clients like Adobe, Airbnb and the Gates Foundation.
He's a professor of Data literacy and Visualization in the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts where he shapes the next generation of strategic thinkers. Nick is also deeply engaged in exploring how generative AI is redefining enterprise design, showing why polished AI demos often fail in real world systems without human in the loop oversight. I'm thrilled to have him on the show to talk about designing thoughtfully in the age of AI, Bringing the bridging.
Try that sentence again. My word, I'm thrilled to have him on the show to talk about designing thoughtfully in the age of AI, bridging the gap between product and UX and using visual storytelling to drive alignment across teams. Nick, welcome to the table.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Jordan, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time. For our listeners who may not be familiar with you or just want to know a little bit more, I'd love to take a few minutes to have you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Yeah, the story goes way back. For those of you listening live, we are in the end of the summer and I was fortunate enough to have parents who saw an interest in visual arts amongst their young child and sent me to a lot of camps. And I think looking back now that you asked, it was a first sense of a flow state where I would find myself at a table with my peers drawing a picture of airplane dog bites. And I remember pulling my head up and looking around after what couldn't have been more than 15, 20 minutes and thinking, wow, I really invested myself in that scribble and this doesn't suck. I wouldn't mind doing this more often. It was, you know, looking back now, it's probably the first time I ever felt a flow state and I hope that all of you listening have had that opportunity in their life to think about where it was, where you could be doing it forever and you wouldn't have mind because time tends to shift when you're in that state. And so I kind of follow that instinct through university as visual arts became graphic design. And then when I came out of school back to the San Francisco Bay Area around the turn of the century, visual design or graphic design was being re appropriated into this thing called interaction design because an Internet was being born all around us. And it was a very pivotal time of which I'm sure we'll refer back to later in this discussion because I see it happening again. There was a sea change at hand and I was lucky to have that in my backyard and was able to ride that or am still able to ride that ever since. And so that was the journey. But in terms of UX and customer experience, it wasn't until maybe 2010 or so did this notion of it's not about the visual as much as it is about the experience.
Apple products just work. It's not like the design is that much better than the Android, but there's some notion of that they've done their homework and they understand the touch points involved with making a good experience, a digital experience, as well as the way you open the box, the way you go into the store, the way support treats you. Apple had that all figured out very early on.
And so a lot of us designers begin to become versed in qualitative and quantitative methods, whether it be data visualization or ethnographic research, to be able to make better design decisions. And that I think has been now made more holistic in how does this not just deal with digital devices and interfaces, but how does this deal with a greater surface design of a customer experience as well? And I know, Jordan, that's the world you play in, but that's a little bit of my origin story.
Awesome.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Well, thanks for sharing that with us. So just kind of thinking into, into that. Let's talk a little bit about what has been different between, let's say 20 years ago to today in terms of design. You hit on that a little bit. But what are the differences that you see in the experience as we think about designing those from again, let's say 20 years ago to today?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah, back then it was a diaspora all coming in to figure out what this thing called the Internet was. And there were two journalists and artists and designers and fabricators and people that really had very little technical experience but knew enough about computers that they could figure out how to design for the web, as we called it back then. And it was subjective and it wasn't standard and sometimes it was ugly and sometimes it was beautiful, but it was very unique.
Whereas today I think the standards are as such, where there are pattern libraries, where you don't really need to know what a tab row looks like. That's been done. Or a button row or a slider. These patterns are established. We figured that out as a society. I'll even say that it's gotten to a point now that there will be agents fulfilling requests on your website instead of human beings. And so we're not really designing for interpretation anymore. We're designing for efficiency.
And that's a huge difference, is that when you take out the subjectivity of, oh, that's a Jordan Hooker design, I can tell that his agency made this because there's a certain aesthetic and feel to it to now, though, they're all going to look alike. They're all going to be generated from pattern libraries. And there may be humans in the loop or not. And that is a huge change. And where does it put us as designers if we've now become so standard that are we just orchestrators of different patterns or are we thinking about things from an experiential level of how does this relate to this other service or this touch point? Or do we start to all become service designers because the artifacts now are so much smoother than they used to be?
[00:05:45] Speaker A: What do you think's the difference of, as you refer to a human in the loop, what do you think the outcome of that is in terms of a difference between, let's say we're just using one of those design libraries versus having somebody in the room in the loop that is helping, as you think, through that design?
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
If I may make a sports analogy, that's the curveball.
If you go, this is a very often used metaphor, but I'll use it one more time.
You know that first time that you opened up an Uber app where you saw these little taxi cabs crawling around the screen? And if you think about the first time you opened up the app, the peer to peer economy wasn't something that was very commonplace. You were raised from a very young age not to get into the cars of strangers. And here you were opening up this app to say, find me a stranger that I can jump into. And so there was this element of fear, of, is everybody doing this? Like, my neighbor told me about this or my friend, but I've never done it. And so, like, how common is this? And the fake animation of cars all around you with people inside of them gave you some sense of comfort, of, no, this is the wisdom of crowds. This is commonplace. I shouldn't be afraid of that. And it was also designed to alleviate the most embarrassing part of hailing a standard taxi, which was standing on the curb with your arm in the air, or even worse, calling dispatch and having a horrible conversation with false promises of expected time. And that was one of the worst, most humiliating things.
And this application by that fake animation said, they're not only everywhere, they're very close to you, and it can get here in the blink of an eye. Now, when you actually book the Uber, those taxicabs went away, but I don't think you're ever going to get an algorithm to understand the vulnerability and the fear of somebody on the curb with their arm in the air hoping that there's a taxicab that sees them. I think that's where the human in the loop comes in, because they've been through that experience out in the rain, on the streets of Manhattan late at night, trying to get to where they want to go to. And no computers ever had that context. So that's where designers, service designers, customer experience experts come in through research and understanding and recommendations, through design teams to build in these kinds of touch points into our app.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Sure.
Now, thinking about the topic of research here, so let's say we're thinking about building a new app, new service, and we want to dig in and understand better that experience. So as we design it, it is not the computer generated that's never had the experience. Excuse me, Instead, it is the design that is made in such a way that it, that it accounts for that human experience. How do you go about doing that type of research?
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah, ethnographic research. I've been fortunate enough to have some very engaging clients in my career. One was the best project I never did. It was during COVID and Electronic Arts. The video game was actually coming out pretty soon. Skate. It's a sequel to a very popular skating game in the 90s. And they wanted to know what the different subcultures of skating communities were all around the world.
And their research team, because of COVID had a no fly mandate and they reached out to us to do, in seven different countries, ethnographic research around skate culture.
And I couldn't fly to go with them. I had to stay here because normally you would go and you would conduct these studies and you'd have a fixer in each town.
So it'd be working with a photographer and understanding the interview scripts that the ethnographer would do. You know, that was something I all had to orchestrate from my desk. And so that was a great way to recommend to Electronic Arts. Here are some premises about how skaters think about their hobby, their life, and I'll give you one takeaway, and I hope it made it into the game was this notion of wear and tear. If you think about a virtual world, maybe some racing games, as you're driving along the track and you hit against the wall and a fender or bumper starts flapping like. There's this notion of wear and distress that is commonplace in skating culture because it separates them from streetwear, which is flashy and Gucci, and tries to assimilate what looks like a hardcore skater that has put the time in to learn and understand their tricks and think about the friction of grip tape or asphalt. And that's really sort of a degrading experience. And skaters wear that as a batch of on honor, a badge of pride. And so as we saw these different cultures and how they treated these concepts, making recommendations of in game experiences that can make skaters feel at home. And so again, that's not something that you'll get from an algorithm. That's something that you'll get from qualitative research, from embedding yourself with skaters and from being observational about seeing some of those rough edges to the human experience.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: In terms of a digital experience versus say an in person experience, what would the difference be in terms of how you would go about researching, understanding that? Would there be a difference or would it basically be the same?
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Not much. I would always want to be in person. I'd rather do over the shoulder than user interviews because oftentimes it's not necessarily what they're going through on the screen that dictates. Decision making is everything that leads up to it. If we're looking at support. I had another client that was on warranties and insurance and we would do some shopping, shopping research with them to see how they made the decision of which item to buy. And then as they got home, the decision making process within the household. Are you, Jordan, head of household, and you're going to make all the tech purchases? If the printer breaks, who gets the call? Is it you? Is it the teenage kid who now knows more about the printer than dad? Certainly the case in our household where that sort of hierarchy of experience was all the build up to going to an online portal and asking for help or clicking that button at the point of purchase to say, yes, I'll pay for the extra warranty. Those perceptions coming into the experience, as I mentioned, the Uber, where the peer to peer economy was still very questionable in.
And that wasn't human factors research, that was sort of more sort of behavioral psychology. And so I find that with the license and the ability, you always want to understand what the context is before the use of the device. And then you can understand bottlenecks and friction points and barriers of why can't I click this? Or why is this worded that? And that's much more on the interface side than it is on the experiential.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: So thinking about the realm of support. So we're talking about the experience has broken down in some manner. There's been some che challenge, there's some friction that's resulting in a customer needing to reach out and engage and get some assistance. How do you think about going in and designing that type of experience in such a way that in my view, as I work in this world, like my goal is always to rebuild trust. That's my number one goal. When a customer reaches out to rebuild that trust, how do you go about thinking about that and even starting on that process?
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah. What are the elements of trust?
I'm going to start with the horror story because any good answer starts with the story.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: DocuSign. I had a duplicate billing on my statement and I couldn't get into the account of which this bill was coming from. I couldn't get in to see and cancel this. This line item.
And I could, while being in their support portal wasn't getting a human being wasn't even able to do a chat window to alleviate the problem. And then it ultimately just led to stop all charges, call the bank because I can't turn this off, ask for reimbursement to say that I was charged unfairly and you know, that trust breakdown was so severe that not only have I gone in the direction of never ever going to use them again that I'm talking about them on podcasts as so fundamentally broken that I could never advocate for them.
So that notion of trust AI was one of the first enterprise applications were in support chats were the intercoms of the world that had a knowledge base of documentation. And you could alleviate the need for human beings by typing in your question. And it's always been that way as well. These support teams are often beholden to enterprise products purchased or agreed upon by the cto, who maybe doesn't have the same kind of insight with how they're being used. We've had an experienced audit of a team for an enterprise software company that the notion of how they were working versus the reality was completely different. They were swarming and copying and pasting and going into unlicensed applications and really finding ways around some of the.
Some of the barriers that that CRM was putting upon them.
And so what does that mean from the customer perspective, if that notion of availability and weight and how many steps or times do I need to ask before a human being does get involved? I think that a lot of these companies have a sense of efficiency because again, the more that the robots can answer the questions, the less expensive human beings have to do so. But without an accommodation to say this is the biggest pain point is that I just have to, in the telephone world, have to go to a phone tree before I hit operator. If I hit operator, it's. It's a pretty big signal that I don't have patience and. Or I'm. I'm on fire and I need to get out of this loop. And so that, that's a, that's an element of trust. I was pleased that the IRS had a we'll call you back function Yesterday, where after 15 minutes, human being called me from the IRS and answered my questions about a nonprofit. That was, that was a nice connection there. So that was a long way of saying there's a vulnerability in being stuck or needing help. And whereas I admire the efficiency of tools to help me address those things, there should always be transparency of what it will take to talk to somebody that can help me with my vulnerability, my problem.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. As we think about companies that have the challenge of just significant volumes. So for instance, in my role, I've got a small team, but we can handle the volume that comes through our portal right now. That may change one day. You reach a tipping point where you can no longer design the experience to just always have that human on the other side simply because of volume. What do you think companies could do in that situation to ensure that even if maybe there's extra steps or maybe if there is AI in the process, that that experience is a quality experience that doesn't create more friction?
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll go in a different direction, Jordan, as let's hope that your volume increases exponentially, that your business is so good that you've just got more customers and more customers have more problems. And that with that, you, your understanding of the experience that the customers are going through likely gets less and less because now you've got more people reporting under you and more managerial directorial decisions to make. And that connection of what are they going through becomes less and less. And so it mandates that there's a voice of the customer program that is not sales.
There may be relationships that are empowered by sales or have sales adjacent activities, but from a design standpoint, I loved the fact that I had a community of customers that cared enough about the product that would be able to give me candid feedback about in my case, design decisions that how does this product change if I design it like that? Or how does intended use versus actual use.
Those are things that are extremely valuable, never mind a sale or conversation. Conversion is candid feedback, honest from customers. And I would imagine that support has a huge part of that too where there's a voice of the customer's community under the organization that is nurtured and listening and maintained so that as volume increases and assuming the experience degrades, you have a better fidelity of understanding of what they're going through.
And so that's where support and UX can come together to have a positive customer experience.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: If you have a support organization, most of our listeners are support success leaders or practitioners who are in the trenches doing this work every day. If you're a leader in one of those spaces, what do you think it looks like to best partner with somebody? Like in terms of the work you do as a UX designer, what makes for a good partner partner from somebody on our side to somebody on your side of the organization?
[00:18:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it's hopefully we're dealing with a indecipherable amount of data. We've got so many tickets coming in, so many reviews being written, so many stories being told about what's working, what's not. It's not, we're not able to parse it, there's so much noise. Somebody like me helps me understand signal where we typify a customer base, we start to understand, understand the human stories that pulled out from that from a quantitative perspective to be able to visualize and understand the volumes of data, associations of words or tickets or issues and be able to sort of make those strategic recommendations based upon what we're seeing from, from a quant standpoint. And so it's the going back to the introduction, it's the human in the loop. And if that loop is this really it's again a high definition data centric cycle is like how do we make these stories resonate and these needs of more investment, more support, different process, different changes, generative AI tools to help us with this because we're not able to parse at a fast enough rate to be responsive. That's where somebody from the outside support adjacent coming in would be able to help illustrate or tell that story at a much higher fidelity.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: So thinking in terms of organizations that are, let's say have started, I mean we, we, we're, we're in the age of the startup. You start this company you build, some of them grow very quickly, some of them grow probably too quickly for their ability to support in the way they want to. Let's say that occurs, you get far down the line and you realize, my gosh, we have, we have not built up what we needed foundationally to accomplish what we need to and we're in a mess. Let's just not even say a little bit of trouble. We're in a mess. What would be the first steps for a company that's in a situation like that? We're live, we're running our business, but we need to go back and do something different. What are the first steps you think they should take?
[00:20:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been every time I see one of these generative startups that have a link to the CEO's calendar and these are some that are a billion in run rate. They're, they're doing well.
But the CEO offers time in their calendar to connect with a new customer. It's a part of their onboarding process.
I click on that link every time because A, I want to compliment them on their process, becoming customer centric regardless of their rapid growth and that it is a way to build into the ethos of the organization.
Checks and balances. And at times the CEO is like, we're going to do this with the product and this is going to be an awesome feature and we're, you know, got all this momentum and Runway and we're going to take it in this direction. And I've had to say like, look, this is not how I use your product. I use it in this manner at the intended versus actual use metaphor of just to let me show you A where it's failing and B, how I'm actually using it. So I think it starts at the top and it also mandates that as you're growing, when people churn, when you lose customers, it's on the CEO to reach back out and say, hey, why did we lose you? We care enough about our customers that we want to be able not to just provide you a link, but provide you a 15 minute conversation to get an understanding of where did we fail in that trust.
So if you're on fire, it starts at the top that we're all having to be seen as customer centric to create these four feedback cycles. Conferences are a great place to begin to do that. This voice of the customer program, the CEO getting up and offering part of their schedule so that these feedback cycles are beginning to come together and then organizationally making sure that support is taking the lead in collating and understanding the different feeds of feedback as they've been coming in.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Absolutely. In terms of building that kind of culture, obviously it starts at the top. What do you think it looks like, let's say, for middle managers to help build that type of a culture as well?
[00:22:53] Speaker B: Yeah, for middle managers to make sure that everything is indexed and tagged correctly.
That with your support software, with your company knowledge base, that when you're dealing with these issues, that it's something that be a part of the process, that data integration and that data, again, being the customer and the support data.
One of these aspects of AI maturity is how well organized and integrated are your data sets. So that if you want to create a knowledge base or a custom model based upon your company's ticket log, that everything is done in a manner that is portable. And if processes are skipped because the volume is too large, then that's something that's not going to be extensible. So I think the first thing that we do is when we get overwhelmed is that we start cutting corners.
So for the middle manager is to raise their hand and say, how can we systematize this so that we can take advantage of some of these tools that are so efficient at processing and completing these steps? And so it's the opposite direction is to really make sure that your operations are tight versus that you're just trying to move your hands as fast as possible.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Last question before we wrap up our conversation here. I'd be curious what you think is somebody who's teaching the next generation of folks coming into this space, what are the challenges that they're going to experience that you did not have to experience or encounter in your career.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: I want to say that it's the same challenges is that this loss, loss of tools, this notion of like every time you think you learn something on how to do it, it changes that. That is very rapid. That's happening at a pace now that is really unforeseen, that you're coming out of university or your MBA program thinking one thing, going in and then seeing 18 to 24 months later, the workplace in the industry changed. And they sort of gave gave you that example of if you're a hiring manager, you should be asking, what kind of generative tools or AI do you use in your workload process? And the expectation is that the candidate probably should have some competency in would be like 20 years ago, if saying, how do you use the Internet in your work?
The applicant should have some sense of, yeah, this is how the Internet affects our business or our career. I think the use of these generative tools is a core competency like email or Microsoft Office. Like if you don't have an understanding of where that assistance can be made, it's going to be now a barrier rather than there's been a perception of a lot of the use of these tools is like cheating at work where you're, you know, taking shortcuts that you aren't supposed to, maybe because your company has a purchase, a license for a specific product or tool. That notion needs to be dispelled. There needs to be some sense of amnesty given to those who are are trying to upskill their lives and their jobs and their careers.
So I think that's different. I don't think anybody looked at the Internet and said, oh, that's cheating. If you googled something, you googled it versus went to the library and looked it up yourself, which was the two ways to get information back at the turn of the century. And so now there's a little bit different of notion of how we use technology.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, as we wrap up our conversation, any last thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners about these topics or anything you think, anything you missed?
[00:26:17] Speaker B: No, Jordan, I think that support and the way that we help build that trust up is extremely important in customer experience and user experience, and I'm delighted to be a part of the conversation.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. If our listeners wanted to hear more from you, get in touch with you, what would be the best way for them to do that?
[00:26:36] Speaker B: You can find me at Gage G A U G E I O and both Jordan and I are on LinkedIn and love to have the conversation with you anytime soon.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Awesome. Well Nick, thanks so much for joining us here at the Table. You've been listening to the Table Service podcast. You can find out more about today's guest in the show notes below.
The Table Service podcast is presented by Tableau Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
