Jon Plummer

The lady is out of town, but

• I’m mostly eating right anyhow, in contrast with other such times
• Chauffeuring to and from ballet and other events has not been a problem (and I have people to help next week)
• The girl was interested in seeing Snarky Puppy with me on Tuesday, and it was a good show. No opener, right to the good stuff
• Nothing blew up while the one PM director was away, a credit to the team. Yay

I had a medical…thing…to do on Monday so this was another shortish week, the sort where all the meetings get slid atop one another to occupy available space so you can pretend that it was not a short week. Even so,

• The medical thing went fine. I remember nothing.
• Friday was meeting-light so I got a little bit of non-meeting work done.
• I realized that for a handful of the initiatives I’m on I needn’t toil in obscurity but would do better to send async questions to a handful of people, so I did.
• A team-wide message from the CEO mentioned “The transition to a multi-product company, the importance of AI, and strengthening the role of UX and front end engineering have emerged more clearly for me as priorities.” – It’s sinking in!

During a discussion of accessibility and the level of attention a company ought to pay to it, someone said

I have always worked in complex enterprise software where the user is a specialized individual and not the general public so accessibility has never been stressed or pushed beyond considering the impact of colors and contrast.

I seek only to take down what they said, so I’ll not name them here.

This position is entirely understandable, and I suspect that most designers working in a B2B environment receive this excuse from their organizations when asking about those organizations’ lack of attention to accessibility. Though it is understandable is also wrong-headed; a close reading reveals where.

“not the general public”

Note that

• many of the impairments that make poor attention to accessibility a problem are noth less prevalent in enterprises than in the general population, and
• where there are differences in prevalence (for example, there are far fewer blind people in knowledge work jobs than in the general population) it’s due in part to lack of attention to accessibility in the tools used or the jobs themselves, making it hard for those people to take jobs that rely on those tools.

In essence, companies discriminate against their employees and potential employees by not providing accessible tools, and companies that provide such tools but ignore accessibility are complicit, perhaps even participatory, in that harmful practice.

“specialized individual”

“Specialized” does not mean “without impairment.” Just as it is wrong to assume that an unnamed doctor is a man, it is wrong to assume that a librarian won’t have difficulty carrying books or a software developer won’t have difficulty typing or reading a screen. But even folks without long-term disabilities may have, situationally or temporarily, impairments where they too would benefit from attention to accessibility and inclusive design. Witness the very nice graphic from the Microsoft Inclusive Design Manual that demonstrates that people may need accommodation for a permanent issue, due to temporary illness or injury, or due to seemingly unrelated life circumstances. Inclusive design helps all of these.

In this case, I’m not sure “specialized” is correct, even; typically, enterprise software is used by normal people with a normal level of specialness. We’re not dealing with thousands and thousands of Top Gun pilots here. The one way in which these users differ reliably from the general population is in domain knowledge relevant to their work, and even that domain knowledge is not evenly distributed. For example, I work with several systems in my job, and my level of expertise in each of them and the domain they operate in varies widely. I’m just not that special or specialized except in re a few of the many tools I use.

And don’t forget

Many of the interventions we’d entertain to improve accessibility also improve usability for all users. So the sadly common thought that folks with impairments are special cases that require extraordinary effort for little return is also incorrect.

We heroically snuck up to Seattle by car late at night and then back the following night, thoroughly wearing ourselves out in the process. The traveling was exhausting and not fun, but…

• …the event itself, a surprise party for my mother’s 80th birthday, was a smashing success, thanks mainly to my sister-in-law, and…
• …I spoke well at the party.
• Apple announced the 15” version of the M2 MacBook Air I just bought, and it’s about the same price. Return, purchase, new new machine! (That’s why this post is late – the new machine needed to arrive so I could fire up LocalWP and export the site. Yes, you’re looking at a WordPress-powered site, but just a static export of it, no actual WP running on the server, ‘cause that’d be slow and hackable. One day I’ll replace this canned theme with my own simplified one, maybe.)
• A coworker suffering from burnout opened up to me and I was able to help somewhat.
• Another coworker, this one skeptical of my department, brought me a project. We were able to quickly negotiate the scope and I have it in the hands of a capable designer who I’m sure will do a good job without gilding it or underdelivering out of an excess of hurry. I love it when a plan comes together.
• My chats about quality are starting to resonate, here and there. Plenty more to do, but it’s maybe sinking in.

Memorial Day made for a short week. Some folks can do about four day’s effort in four days, others (managers especially) try to do all the things and pack five days of meetings into the four days, resulting in less space to get other things done, then wonder why they are un happy with the week’s results.

• I didn’t do that, this time. I did many of the meetings, but skipped some in favor of actually making stuff. Highly recommended.
• Huaraches for men for summer. They’re fab.
• I went for a 400lb deadlift and didn’t get it, so 375 max. That’s fine…for now.
• We heard of a problem we inadvertently introduced, proposed a fix, investigated the effect of the fix, and deployed the fix in the same day. That’s definitely a step forward in customer-centricity.

I was talking with a mentee today when the topic of authenticity came up – if we are thinking so much about how we should behave, how do we know what is authentic? It seems like authenticity should be effortless – why is it so hard? (The below comments are only lightly specific to the mentee’s situation.)

Authenticity does not mean being unfiltered, unmodulated, completely ego-expressive. Instead, we are behaving authentically when our actions and our motivations and our sense of self are aligned with one another.

Your physical posture is how you hold your body, arrange your limbs and whatnot, and that posture affects your comfort and your behavior. For example, slouching leads to back fatigue, reduced lung capacity, and feelings of “being down,” and the behavioral effects flowing from these physical effects. We remind ourselves to sit up comfortably straight in part because we genuinely want the positive effects that this posture will bring, therefore the posture is authentic – even though we had to remember to do it, taking that posture matches our motivations.

What are the intellectual and social/emotional analogs of physical posture?

Intellectual posture – how you hold your mind/thought: What is an intellectual posture that makes you ready to consider the current tactical need, the comments of others, and the strategic situation without causing internal conflict? What is the intellectual frame you can put around what’s happening to recognize the problem to be solved and your place in the solution? This is useful for your own well-being and effectiveness, and becomes visible to others through your behavior. Your behavior is authentic if it matches your actual intellectual posture, and inauthentic if these don’t match. You change your intellectual posture in response to your motivations; if your motivations and posture match, the posture is (and your behavior will thus be) authentic.

Social posture – how you hold your heart: when entering a situation at work or socially, what are you hoping will happen? What sort of interactions would you like to have? These wishes motivate your social posture. What is your role to play in achieving interactions of the sort you would like to have? What attitude do you portray as part of playing that role? This is your social posture. Your social posture and the behavior it fosters can be authentic or inauthentic; if the wishes and the posture and the behavior are all in alignment, then they are authentic.

You may not be able to be perfectly authentic all the time. It takes practice. It gets easier if you can bring your goals and posture to consciousness (e.g., if you can think about them, observe them, reflect on their effect on the recent past) and behave in a way that is congruent with them. Sometimes it’s hard to get all three at once – but even struggling with these is authentic. Is it easier (even just a little) to model what you want at work or at home? Or even with just one friend? Practice where it is easier for a while.

Much of the week was spent on-site, meeting with my R&D leadership peers (and the thin layer of execs above us) to figure out what behavior should to change to change our results. Strangely enough, this group not met since well before I started, and much of the contact I’ve had with these people has been in 1:1s, small meetings, or in some cases not at all.

• Naturally this was the first time at this job I’ve had that “first team” feeling, which has been long overdue. It’s great that we were able to get from a little icy to working together openly in less than a day, the first day.
• Since the agenda was less agenda-like that I typically feel comfortable with, my main goals were to represent myself and my team well and to genuinely engage with the topics as a knowledgeable and connected member of the team. I think I did that, and so do several people I’ve checked with.
• Last week I mentioned that a deadline helped me, “having written and received helpful comments on many pages of pre-read material.” It turns out that several months ago our CEO encouraged pre-reads as a way to accelerate meetings. Little did I know. But with this group it works; the discussion that happened in these documents meant that when we sat down together we had a basis of agreement and a pretty good understanding of where controversy remained, and could get into the substance quickly and without too much preamble. (This isn’t the same as the Amazon method of bringing a document and reading it quietly together to start a meeting.)
• I had my first “quarterly coaching” conversation with my boss, and it went better than I expected.

I’ve shared this verbatim with my team and pointed out how it will affect our work in the coming quarter.

Jon has done a great job ramping up on all things Invoca and focusing on building out the UX discipline and helping push us to be more customer centric.

Jon has balanced time improving processes/personnel within the UX group (for ex: instituting the weekly design critique meeting) and helping create the right conditions for UX to succeed with key stakeholders (primarily PM & ENG leadership). I believe this overall area should continue to be Jon’s Q2 focus while begining to take steps to evangelize and show off results of UX output to stakeholders. We discussed a few ideas such as Trios sharing/demoing their work in settings like Invocation, CKO, Company Connect. Jon & team have also started using Lattice to publicly praise good work in Slack.

Other candidates for UX growth discussed:
* Building out UX personas/profiles under ‘business centers’ – to be used both in product development and by the organization to be more customer-centric and raise the visibility of UX.
* Building muscles as a trio and working projects in scoped iterations en route to GA vs. larger chunks shipped.
* Removing barriers or reliance on PM/others for UX to get more direct interaction with customers; having UX lead respective customer sessions (and bringing insights back to the teams) vs. being in the passenger seat.
* Jon & team potentially spending more time learning the product in conjunction with projects and their focus areas in the platform.

I also want to call out the good work Jon has done building trust and goodwill with the ‘First Team’ in R&D. I hope we can continue to focus on problems and improvement areas collectively (being open to sharing in the leadership Slack channel, etc) and use 1:1 discussions as warranted vs. the way to solve problems.

Pretty good?

It’s common for non-design folks to assume that research and design rigor will slow the overall process down. (I’ve heard epithets such as “constipate” – unpleasant and rude.) How might the UX team contribute to speed of value delivery?

• Improving our understanding of our customers (and especially of our users) so that we can make better decisions about direction, scope, interactive details, etc. and especially things not to build. The fastest feature is one you don’t build.
• Ensuring that every design intervention is a response to a user or customer problem or a benefit that we are sure our customers will value. This is a subset of the above, but deserves special mention because a cool idea is not actually cool unless the person we hope to serve will appreciate the benefit it delivers enough to pay for it.
• Answering business questions through small doses (in pharmacology the minimum effective dose) of research, concept evaluation, and usability testing.
• Helping to manage scope by offering simpler alternatives that users can use to possibly meet seemingly more complicated needs. This is sometimes the opposite of what UX is tempted to do.
• Uncovering opportunities to improve usefulness and usability to improve adoption, retention, and time-to-value, which make the business itself faster and more efficient.
• Delivering detailed designs, business roles, states, labels, etc. at an appropriate level of fidelity and no fancier, incorporating many elements only by reference to the design system.
• Continuously improving the design system so interfaces can be built faster and with greater consistency, and to steadily improve the usability, familiarity, and accessibility of capabilities delivered on the front-end.

And everyone should practice active self-management within the project.

I was fielding complaints about slowness in the UX team’s contribution to projects until I started talking to the people I support about this concept. Turns out it is good for anyone who works on a team, anyone who works with others.

When starting on or working on a project, I expect everyone to:

• come to a project with a plan,
• share and negotiate that plan, and
• be conspicuous in fulfilling that plan, by
  • regularly offering work-in-progress for discussion (there’s no such thing as “not ready to look at yet”),
  • regularly offering the status of current work,
  • regularly predicting when the current activity will be done,
  • allowing for the renegotiation of the plan, and
  • offering modifications to the plan as project or business conditions change (active renegotiation).

You’ll note that the default mode here is active – actively planning, actively sharing, actively predicting, actively responding to change.