The human side of UX design (video)

In this talk, James Archer discusses the emotional side of design, and how empathy applies not just to users but to clients as well.

YouTube Transcript (auto-generated):

okay I want to start by telling a

story about remote controls so I went on amazon and i tried to find the best

rated remote control just just just see what it was if they had a hunch it was the best rated one who's gonna have to

be pretty pretty sharply designed and it didn't disappoint so this is a amazingly designed remote control so think of

things permitted about the context that you're in as you're using a remote control so you're probably in a dark

room you're probably holding it like this and not even looking at what you're doing and if you do the wrong thing it's

just going to ruin your whole evening you know you're trying to turn up the volume and you change the channel and you can't rewind because you like it's

just going to mess everything up so this one when they designed it they kind of took all that stuff in the context so

what they what they've done if you look at the buttons using different areas of buttons their shape different ways they're oriented different ways you know

even the volume and channel buttons are kind of pointed different directions so just by feeling you kind of know which one you're on so you can really quickly

learn to use this remote control and figure out how to do it in the dark without looking and and kind of know

what you're doing and not not make the mistakes that are going to ruin your evening so I don't have one of those but

I do have one of these so this is the cyber home DVD remote be

probably the cheapest remote possible for the cheapest DVD player ever made and it is infuriatingly difficult to use

because even if you have all the lights on even if you're staring at it you can still barely figure out how to use it

and you almost certainly hit the wrong button so this was designed without a lot of empathy for the situation that

people are in and so from my perspective design really is empathy you know if you think about what designers do it's

fundamentally to empathize with the user that is going to be dealing with whatever the solution is and actually

doing something with and creating something that's going to work for them so when people fail to empathize with

the user as we saw with that last remote it's it's always going to fail and when you succeed in empathizing with the user

you will succeed with the design so those two are inextricably correlated they're basically the same thing I've

been I think you could if designers have the job title of empathize ER it would still basically is be the same thing so

I want to give you another example so a few months ago I worked on a project with a software company in atlanta and

they have this huge enterprise level software solution essentially for running supply chain this particular

piece was for running a warehouse and this isn't the actual screen this whole thing was under NDA it was all top

secret stuff so I can't really show you too much but it's a screen that looked a whole lot like that one so use your imagination and the context for this was

picture a picture warehouse so you know where has the order for something from Amazon you've got runners they run over

here and they get this privately run over here and get that product name1 over here get that product and then put them all together in a box for you and

then they ship it down to the conveyor line and some guy you know toward the the loading dock has to check that box

make sure everything's the way it's supposed to be and do what's called closing the box it may not be physically

closing the box but the sort of symbolically closing the box and says yes this is the box put it on the truck

so that transaction of course after record in the software so what they have to do is he's got it he's got an RF gun

scanner and so he scans the label on the box and then he has to this computer and kind of check and make

sure this is the right one so when they asked me to come in and start start working on this you know being the

empathizing kind of guy that I am I started asking all kinds of questions they thought were really doe be like who's usually doing this job you know

how do they feel who's there boss what kind of what kind of situation at the inn are they standing are they sitting

how much are they moving around you know what's their day like how many hours are they working things like that and you

know the whole time you know and that conversation probably wasn't more than 15 minutes or so because we were just

trying to blast through some stuff but that whole time they're kind of thing like that this is this is a great can you just design the screen can you make

this screen better and then they're trying to convert it over to a web format they're like can you just web fi the screen and I'm kind of something

like no we got we got to go through this process just trust so one of the things that came out of that interview was we found out that you know they're over

here and say this is the conveyor belt in over here scanning and then their computers like three feet away typically and so they have to walk over here check

the number on the computer okay it's right walk back over here scan the next

one so the thing that had never occurred to them and I can't I can't show the whole redesign just but just a relevant

piece of it was to make the print bigger they never thought of it because that's not how you design software you just

have fields and all the fields are the same size and you just stack the fields up in a way that make sense and so I

said well why don't we just make that bigger so they don't have to walk over there and that's that's a little thing but by empathizing with the person

actually doing the job and thinking through the context think of how that person's job just got exponentially

better and if this is just one design feature in this huge enterprise suite and they have other design features of

that level of thinking think of how much easier it's going to be for them to sell that software you know that that reduces

you know injuries of walking back and forth and you know workers comp claims and like all kinds of things and all we

did was make the text bigger so that those are the kind of design solutions you can come up with if you're actually empathizing with the user which is a

step that surprisingly many designers forget it just gets left out of the process so one of the things i want to

emphasize it design is a process it's not a skill set and this sounds kind of contradictory

save but designs not about the people it's not about the designers it's about the design process what makes a good

designer is someone who understands that process and rigorously follows it not necessarily someone who knows all the

tips and knows all the Photoshop shortcuts and knows all those things is that you understand the process and you

rigorously follow it so we'll talk a little bit about what that process is the first step is the one that usually

gets cut out the first which is actually studying the situation that you're in and figuring out what needs to happen so

ideally this is user research you can do an ethnographic research and actually watch users in their natural context

using the software there you know digital metrics that you can you can observe you can track things there's a

mountains of data that you can use for this but you guys know sometimes you don't get that right sometimes you don't

you don't even get access to any users and you have to just kind of make your best guess based on a situation well in

that case you know i'm designing enterprise level software for a publicly traded software company and all I had

for that solution was 15 minutes of talking to the people within the company who were subject matter experts but that

was better than skipping it even that you can extract a whole lot of insight if you if you're sort of rigorously

follow the processing you know what kind of information you're going after and you just dig into it so the next step

then is to actually empathize and to figure out what is it what is it like to be the user you know it's one thing to

know that your user is you know has has 2.5 kids and they this and they that you

have data about their we have to translate that into what does it actually like and so what I was thinking through that design I made myself walk

back and forth just as that person would and think about what it would take to make their lives better and the solution

was a simple one but it took that empathizing I mean getting inside their head and understanding what it was like

to be that person to come up with that solution and then prototype you start coming up with solutions and test them

to see if they weren't you know that that particular design went through a couple of iterations before we settled

on the one that we like but those iterations all took place in a period of about one hour so I would design

something up and say is it is as close as this kind of meet the needs I'd walk the client through it they say well there's this problem with it and

really they're going to be this so I move things around so that prototyping again we don't always get all the time

for prototyping that we wish we had I mean in a perfect world we've got six months of user testing and we can we can

make all these revisions stuff that doesn't always happen but even a little bit of prototyping can get help out a lot and then of course you guys can

probably guess the last part of this which is complete the cycle and do it again and again and again so once you

have something study it again you know test the prototype see what happens and maybe that's not phase one maybe that's

phase two maybe that's five years out that you actually don't come back and have enough data to say here's how we

should revise this but it should always be cyclical like that design is a cyclical process it's not a one-time

launching you're done kind of thing so here I'm going to tell you another story so this is a client of ours Bromwell

housewares and so when they came to us it was it was a yahoo store you know and

their their basic request was can you make this look better it was kind of news under it was under some new

management they said hey you got it you got to help us out sales are really low can you make this look better and you

know my response is it typically is this that's not actually your problem so if you look at here and you start to start

reading through this you realize this company was founded in 1819 that's a long time ago this is this company's

almost 200 years old that it's been a business was one of the oldest still surviving american companies and they've

got this incredible story behind the fiendish I mean the founder was born the United States look like this this is

still Spain I think Andy and his father was in the wire weaving business so why

are weaving we go time this is pre plastics pre manufacturing the head make things out of what they could and a lot

of things were made out of wire they take wire and create things out of it but they could use for for different purposes so he came from an

entrepreneurial family you know just after the nation was formed I mean this is a great American entrepreneurial

story he found in the war of 1812 which is basically the continuation of the revolutionary work and in 1819 he floated down the

Ohio River to Cincinnati to set up shop for his own he left his dad's business took some supplies and some machinery

went down to set up his own thing on the frontier because at the time Cincinnati was the frontier so you know this this

is like the most classic all-american story you can think of it in terms of entrepreneurship and the American dream

he got there just in time for the panic of 1819 which was you know at the time the nation's first and worst financial

crisis so he's basically trying to start this business in the middle of a depression and he managed us to do it he

managed to create a really successful business grows the company you know crazy things like hand crank flower

sifters and tin cups that were you know they're used by the US military and and

he really succeeded I mean he grew this business to the point where there are thousands of employees a catalog thousands of products they were known

they were respected they were trusted this is a great company have you guys ever heard of it nobody's ever heard of

this because when they came to us all they had was this Yahoo store like that's what the whole thing had devolved

down into was it was it was a skeleton crew staff you know a handful of

products that they were still making on the original equipment which is which is great but you know if you just try and

sell the products themselves I mean we're talking about a thirty dollar cheese grater you know it's not a robot

cheese grater it's just a regular cheese grater now there's story behind it and what they were trying to convey was

these products have story behind them they great piece of Americana but this

website is not selling that so we kind of dug in and said that your actual problem is that nobody cares it's not

really website doesn't look good it's not that it's confusing because you if you really wanted to buy that tea straight of you to figure this out but

it was that there wasn't any reason for you to care so that's what we dug in that was the actual design problem we started to solve so we started doing

some research into you know companies of a simpler age to kind of see how they had evolved and also what the what the

design look like at the time they're kind of create that that sense of realism behind you know we research the typography and

we found modern equivalents for the typefaces that they used at the time and you know this was a time when people use

lots of typefaces it wasn't just you know headline typeface body type face like we do now which is kind of boring but they would have posters that would

have 10 different typefaces on it so we kind of kept kept that spear and pulled that forward we started looking at different ways that we can we can pull

out visual elements that evoke that time and really convey the stuff that's going on and so as a result we're able to

basically build a brand around it you know the company was renamed after the founder jacob bromwell and we created

this user experience this customer experience that's actually relevant so when you see that and you see that

that's his actual signature we managed to dig up the founders original signature and use that for the logo it

creates a little more sense of relevance for what's going on you know we designed the website now this website's a few years ago doesn't have the cool parallax

and background videos and stuff that it would now but it was a nice eyes it actually conveys what the company's

about and conveys the spirit of it most importantly and tells the story it gives people a reason to care so that was the

design process we weren't solving the aesthetic problem we were solving the actual problem which was relevance and

that stuff works man so I talked to him two years later we had lunch together and I said hey how's business going and

he said that their their business had essentially quintupled and he attributed that pretty much directly to the

experience that we had created around the brain all we had done was given people through design a reason to care about what it was and actually

communicate the real story that was going on there now there are a lot of different layers to design and the

problem is a lot of people never make it through the bottom few layers so the bottom few layers are things like functionality intuitive pneus these are

all good things and when people talk about UX they tend to think about things like you know Liz how do we make it

functional how do we make it intuitive and those become the goals well those are best you're just scratching the surface those are table stakes if you're

if you're not doing at least those you shouldn't even call yourself a designer then you get into you know efficiency so

it's nice as mom to listen to ative how do we make it so the people can get through the process quickly and easily so that's kind of we're getting into the

middle zone let me get into things like comfort so that can be physical comfort like we talked about walking back and

forth to a computer or there can be psychological comfort you know if you're if you're on amazon and you're going through the checkout

process and you have to hit continue you know there's a little note there that says you know your order will not be

placed until you have a chance to confirm and things like that they give you psychological comfort now you can't do that unless you're putting yourself

into the head to the person using it and really thinking through what are their concerns and frustrations and kind of digging into that stuff and then we get

to delight and that's that's really what we were trying to do because that was what was missing from the Yahoo store

there was no delight there there was no magic there was no excitement so you know to me that's kind of the hierarchy

that you should go through you have to have the stuff on the bottom but you should be really working toward and pushing through to get get to the things

on the top so here's another project we worked on this is caps research so this is a supply chain research Clearinghouse

they basically give you know distribute research and organize research for you know fortune 500 retail companies to be

able to better run their supply chain so Walmart can get their boxes 15 minutes earlier than they normally stuff like

that the most boring stuff you can imagine and the most boring site to a

company but the thing a lot of people don't realize is supply chains is what makes the world go round like the reason

we have anything that we have is because of supply chain and if the world is going to be made better if our standard

of living is going to be made better its supply chain that's going to make that happen and these little incremental

differences I mean the fact that Walmart becomes more efficient at doing something or a local bookstore becomes more efficient doing something so they

can compete with Walmart things like that all those things are related to supply chain and these guys were at the center of that gathering the research

that in putting it out there to these these you know c-suite officers to explain to them how to do this but you

don't get that from here do you I mean this is this presents it as the most boring thing you have no need at all to

pay attention to so we needed to help help change it and help make them relevant again so we actually started

doing user research we started calling chief procurement officers at these fortune 500 retail companies and they're

surprisingly difficult to get a hold of but we did we kept at it until we had enough information that we were really starting to get inside their head and we

could build a profile around it and then you know based on the the things we started hearing

metaphors they were using as describing what they were working on and so on you know we would we started to build you

know a concept around this brand so we'd start using cultural archetypes you'll be intellectual or the Explorer and so

based on these archetypes we then pull out visual elements and kind of tying all these metaphors together our brains work on metaphor I mean metaphors the

foundational language of the brain so we started pulling things out so when these cpos are talking about yeah we're

blazing new paths we're going into uncharted waters and so on we're pulling out all those metaphors so we can use

them back with them and make sure that when we launch this website it's literally speaking their own language it's using the same metaphors that they

themselves use so based on those metaphors you start pulling out possible visual elements we start working on you

know even even the logo we start figuring out ways that we can you know let's get those metaphors across in the

logo itself start coming up with different concepts working on the verbal strategy i mean the presentation for

this one name was talking about how you know copywriting is designed he absolutely is it's verbal desire and we

follow that same approach we do a whole verbal strategy of this is the kind of voice and tone you should be using these

are the kinds of keywords you should be using these are the kinds of keywords you should be avoiding because the content of the website the copywriting

is a fundamental part of the design process and so going through a process like that that's how we turn something

like this into a site that looks more like this now this is an aesthetically pretty sight it's all right but the more

important part is the the subconscious stuff that's happening those are the right colors for this target audience

those are the right words for this target audience and it just reaches out and grabs them and pulls them in and they suddenly see this organization in a

totally different light than they were seeing them before and they you know they said even internally within the

organization it transformed how they thought about themselves it changed their internal culture just going

through this branding and website process and and they you know in working with the people that are working with I

mean they said their pitches have never gone better as soon as they were in there people were making decisions almost before they got through the pitch

so it just kind of goes to show I mean when you empathize me get inside the head of the people that you're talking

to that's what enables you to get really effective really powerful design not just about aesthetics it's about

understanding the psychological Pete's designs fundamentally working with the psychology and people not just their

office so this is a kind of a simple one so this is atlanta com is the world's

largest database of endurance race results so if you've ever run in a marathon or anything like that you're almost certainly in this database so

it's one of those things where you can go and you can find your race results and you can see your whole profile will show your whole history in there the

founder himself was was an endurance runner he was pretty pretty diligent one kind of a tough tough macho kind of guy

and he you kind of see that character come out in this website so it's kind of a you know it's kind of a masculine

dominating and derives tough guy kind of kind of color scheme and the way it's laid out but the problem is the target

audience for runners isn't isn't him the CEO was not representative of the

overall target audience which includes a lot of women lose a lot of people doing it for social reasons and includes oh we

have a very diverse group of people not just you know kind of tough endurance oriented macho sort of God and so when

we redesign it we kind of took that into account and and we had to we had to kind of coach it through this process a little bit and talk them through you

know hey I know that you need to like this website but we're not designing this website for you we're designing for these people over here so whether you

like it or not it's not that relevant to your business this is what actually matters over here and that you know that

takes a little coaching it's uppie he got there he's super smart guy and and so we steered the website a little bit

so it's me you know it's a little more on the feminine type it's a little less intimidating it's a little less

performance-oriented a little more social oriented you see that through the photography you see that through the color schemes and even even just a

language is used throughout the site and and this can be done even on a low budget so this this was a client that

came with so we've had a kind of a home security and commercial security client locally for a long time and we love

those guys we've worked with him for so long and we have to just have a close trusting relationship and one day the fire chief came to the CEO and said you

know I wish I had something like this and he described this thing where you you tape this because what happens

during a fire after a fire is you know the firemen put it out well it can relight you there could still be a mercenary could

still catch so they have to leave someone behind to sit around and watch the fire and maker watch the you know

the burning rubble or the hood I wrote it just make sure it doesn't catch again and that's not a great use of resources

so he started asking around turns out police have the same thing so I mean if you're if you're doing a stakeout or you

know if you even on construction sites they have to have remote security things and so people are trespassing on the

site it until we put together this package it's just a single case that you open it up it has everything you need in

it and it's all tied online and you can you know go online we can see the cameras and everything so it's a kind of a quick deployment security system so

what we had to do they didn't have a big budget for this this was kind of a stunt works project of theirs and they said well just help help us however you can

so we came up with this website but you know we really put extra emphasis not into you know coming up with cool

scrolling effects not into ultra fast web hosting everything was rudimentary but we went through the empathy process

and we started doing a lot of research into what are what our fire chiefs dealing with in this situation what are the the police chiefs dealing with in

this situation and very carefully choosing copy and imagery that speaks directly to them so this is these pages

was just stupid simple from a design perspective but they were highly effective they resonated with the people who needed to see him and it got the

point across so you can do this stuff on a really tight budget this is another

project were done I love this design this is great so this is a TST scom the

the founders started this while he was still in college and you know he started making up some shirts for himself his

friends liked they wanted to get some and next thing he knows he's got a t-shirt business well by the time they

came to us they were doing about 10 million dollars a year and t-shirts with this website

but the catch was nobody knew who they were because all their business was coming through PPC and and you know

online marketing campaigns and so you'd see an ad you're like oh that's interesting you click on it you go over here maybe you buy the product maybe you

don't but then you forget about it and meanwhile they were getting you know beat up by companies like threadless and

bus cities they have communities and have people who remember who they are inherent they've actually built a break so they wanted this kind of help do that

it helped steer the language a little bit more to appeal to people because people don't buy these t-shirts because they need a t-shirt they buy these

t-shirts because of memories and nostalgia and you know it's like a tribe of people that they want to affiliate

with and say oh you you watch airwolf i watch airwolf too so it so we kind of we

reshape the brand based around that kind of experience or so we've just put a ton of work into the copywriting and to make

sure that we were revoking the right things using the right kind of language and this has definitely been one of the most fun projects we've ever had to work

on because the kind of research would have to do is I'll walk in and find our copy writer like sitting watching old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoons

like looking for the right language to use and making sure he understands everything now this one was a kiosk at

the mall so these are in walmart store at Home Depot so this is a you know way you have to get your key copy there's a

like a vending machine where you can go and get that done if you walk into Walmart if I see one right in the entryway are pretty nearly so they had

built this and was working pretty well but they were having a lot of user interface issues with the actual system the touchscreen system that you interact

with and so you know we kind of went in did an audit with it and you know the thing is if you think about the context

that you're in there you know you're in the entryway for a Walmart there's other vending machines beeping and looping

around you and there's you know there's that air blower thing that happens every time someone opens the door it's loud

and there's people going back and forth and your kids running out the door while you're trying to get this thing done but you know more importantly think about

the situations where you might need your keys copied you just bought a new house you just kick your boyfriend out

and change the locks like they're like any situation where you're getting your keys copied you're already stressed out

you're already in a high anxiety situation and the system just wasn't accounting for that I mean if you look

we're here you know even even just their use of the color red you know they were frustrating this is the interface but even just their color usage they're

using the most frustrating anxiety-inducing color to do that and then you know kind of classic engineer

fashion you know if there's a situation that doesn't work out what do you do you throw an error and you tell the user

they did something wrong you know if it was a key that the kiosk couldn't produce they throw this big red screen

down on the bottom and just have this huge error message that looks like you're just a horrible person because you even tried to do this and meanwhile

you're in this stressful situation you've probably got a kid on your arm and one kid running out the door and all these things happening around you and so

we tried to really get inside the head of that person figure out how can we just take this down a notch how do we just kill the anxiety in this situation

so we basically redesigned the interface to have almost no error messages at all so there's almost nothing you can do

that makes you feel like you've done something wrong all the language all the imagery everything is kind of steered around just nudging them back on to the

path that they need to be on being a little more understanding a little more apologetic and helping that person through that process so you know that's

that's a simple thing but to do that you have to get out of that mindset of well these variables didn't line up there for

throw an error you know it's not the users fault you know whatever the system does it's not the users fault they've

got a key they want a copy of it the rest of it's up to the kiosk so you know we kind of took that approach in that

philosophy while going through and doing this and you know it's really because like I said design is empathy that's the

that's the core of everything about design is empathy for the user and a lot of people forget this empathy for the

client because this is how we talk about our clients you guys like this is this is horrible this this

disgusts me so but these are the kind of things that here you know I'll go to I'll go to a design of it I'll go to a

developer event and it's just people like like just griping about their horrible clients guys the clients are

not horrible they're an awesome they pay us to do what we love to do and it is a privilege for us to be able to do that

and you know the thing is to do that you have to have everything for the clients to not just the users you don't you

don't love your users and hate your clients you love your users and you love your clients and you're trying to make the whole system work because your

clients are dealing with a whole lot of stuff and the fact that you want the logo a little bit smaller and they think maybe it should be a little bit bigger

that's just one of 10 million things that they're dealing with right now and they don't necessarily want to hear your whole lecture on the whole thing doesn't

mean you should came into them but have a little empathy for the situation that they're they're dealing with a lot of stuff you're one small piece of it and

they've got their trying to sort it out as best they can with little information and little knowledge and you know how do

you feel that your doctor treated you the way we as an industry treat our clients and have that kind of attitude you know you do want to leave your

doctor's office feeling like your doctor is just turning over and that patient was so stupid I can't believe they

thought that you know obviously they did that and you know meanwhile you when you go to a doctor I mean you're in a super

vulnerable position you're afraid you're worried tums going wrong with you you don't know what it is you're taking your

best guess you went on WebMD you look something up and now you think you have lupus and you know you saw something on house

and you're pretty sure that's you and you know but really you don't want you

don't want your doctor to treat you like crap because of that right you're doing the best you can so you want the doctor

who actually has some empathy for the situation you're in and says listen okay it's not lupus I know what you read on

WebMD and to really understand and appreciate that and to kind of calm you

down give you the information you need help you make an intelligent decision and move on and ultimately the decision

still yours is the patient but you know that doctors got to kind of coach you through it and help you fill in the gaps

that you don't have that's the situation we're in with with our clients and that doesn't mean be two-faced about it it

doesn't mean smile to your clients say oh I understand and then go out to the bar with your friends later and just say

man my clients are so stupid because if you if you feel that way you're failing to have empathy for the situation that

they're in and the problem that you're even trying to solve and if you don't have empathy for the situation they're in you can't really be an effective

designer you just can't do it and because design is everything that's fundamentally what it's about so if you

are going to be an effective designer you have to have empathy for your clients you have to understand and appreciate the situation that they are

in and the constraints that they are up against and the budgets that they're dealing with and their boss that's yelling at them for something and find

the best solution you can and maybe you don't get to use the font you want to use and maybe you don't get to use the cool feature that only cost ten thousand

dollars more and you think that's totally reasonable but they can't come up with the ten thousand dollars because stupid clients well guess what that's

the constraint you have a box designed within the box do the absolute best you can with in that box and maybe you know

maybe sometime later they come back for revisions maybe some time later to some other thing because they remember you is the person who solved their problem who

understood their needs who got it done within the constraints they had to happen and so when those constraints

expand they could do more you're the one back to you for that so again it kind of

comes down to this process I mean study the situation empathize with the users and flies with the client and prototype

things out and go through and if you stick to this process guys the process works you don't have to be an expert designer like I was saying earlier i

mean the the you don't have to have the job title of designer to be an effective

designer you just have to follow this process if you do this you will come out with effective design it may not be

stuff that wins you know aesthetic awards but it's going to work and I've seen that over and over and over again I

think you know we can take students and put them through this process and they start coming up with brilliant work so i can take developers who put them through

this process and i start coming up with brilliant design work so the process work so i want to give you one one last example of that so this is Ferdinand

Porsche I mean 1931 he started a car company in Germany they didn't start

manufacturing cars when he was a designer he was sort of a consultant would be brought in to kind of help out with with designing cars it was still a

relatively new industry at the time now at this time period in Germany this was a really rough economic period I mean

they were going through a you know bad recession there was like 30 percent unemployment everyone's struggling all

the families are trying to figure out how to get by not a lot of people with money going out buying new cars you know

most most families didn't even have enough money to buy a motorcycle let alone a car so in the middle of all this

economic turmoil and all these things that are going on general election new chancellor you might know him and so one

of his directives was okay we've got to come up with a car because Americans are driving cars all over the place and our

you know our lives are awesome over there because we got cars in freeways and all this kind of stuff and he's got to get Germany to catch up and so he

puts out this challenge basically and says we need to design a car that can go you know more than 60 65 miles an hour

it's got to be able to take two parents and three kids and get them up to that speed and the whole thing has to cost

less than a motorcycle that's a pretty difficult challenge for a car designer you know you're not used to dealing with

those kind of constraints and I'm guessing you know a lot of people started participating in and trying to

come up designs Ferdinand Porsche among them and I'm guessing he was feeling like man this is impossible like these

constraints are ridiculous I can't do this nobody can do this but he kept at it and he followed the design process

and he empathized with the users and tried to figure out what they need what the situation was going to be how is

this going to work started prototyping prototypes didn't work you learn from them you come up with new prototypes and

eventually comes up with this working prototype for a vehicle that would cost less than a motorcycle or costs about the same as a motorcycle and be highly

effective and it would would meet those constraints and the thing was he did such a good job of this that this car

was in production for 65 years so picture a picture you know say a Honda

Civic today still being in production in what 2079 in basically the same form

that it is today that's how well he solved that problem and you know he did this under just amazing constraints that

he was dealing with so you know he he built the world's most successful automobile made it the price of a

motorcycle and in his client was literally at all Hitler so the design

process works and i know you guys you you guys all have frustrations with your

clients and you all have budget constraints we all do that's just the job but we can

work it out if we remember that you know design is fundamentally about empathy and we you know if you sink to that core

principle everything else will start to fall into place and then we'll all magically work out i'm james archer i'd

love to talk to you guys feel free to email me or tweet me up i'm happy to respond i love talking about this stuff I worked for 40 which is a design firm

based in Phoenix we been around for about 11 years now we do primarily user

experience design and customer experiences I like we've been talking about and we are very proud to now be part of the unstoppable juggernaut that

is crowd favorite and I'm happy to answer any questions you guys might have