Welcome to the Nielsen Norman Group UX podcast.
I'm your host, Therese Fessenden.
On this monthly show, you'll hear interviews with UX thought leaders about fundamental
UX topics, pressing industry questions, and discussions about how great UX can truly transform
the world.
Last month on our first episode, I spoke with one of NNG's co-founders, Dr. Jacob Nielsen,
about UX, usability, vocabulary sprawl, and the future.
Our guest today is NNG's chief designer, Sarah Gibbons.
Sarah is a close colleague of mine who has published research on design thinking, service
design, and mapping frameworks, all of which have become the authority for working designers
across industries.
And she advises and teaches industry leaders from all around the world on how to apply
her methodologies to business needs.
In this episode, we talk about how essential empathy is in our work, what design means
to us, and the critical skills you need to be a design thinker and a service designer.
This episode has a lot of thought-provoking topics.
So with that, it's my pleasure to welcome Sarah Gibbons.
Welcome Sarah.
Thank you for joining me on the show today.
I'm super stoked to interview you because personally, I love talking to you both as
a coworker and as a friend, and I think our audience is going to learn a lot from you.
So on that note, how are you doing?
I realize that's kind of a loaded question these days, but how are you?
Well first off, I'm so excited that we now have a podcast, so that's exciting.
I think I and so many of us at NNG find so much value in talking and having conversations
with each other and readers and other researchers and practitioners that I think it's really
exciting while this may not be two ways in the sense of including audience members and
readers, it's really exciting to be able to at least involve them and kind of let them
listen in on the conversations that we have so often, usually at conferences.
So I miss the travel aspect of life, but it's good.
I think it's such an interesting time for everyone.
I was talking to a friend the other day, and I think empathy is such a hot topic word right
now.
Yes.
The empathy I'm having the hardest time applying right now is empathy for myself, where I want
to complete more and do more and achieve more and be more productive and be perfect at all
of these things, and I think it's really interesting.
I'm nostalgic for the early days of quarantine, where we all were okay with hunkering down
and being cozy and not overachieving at everything, and I kind of miss those days where we had
a lot more self-grace.
No, but I'm good, how are you, Therese?
I think you pretty much nailed it when you said nostalgic for the early days of quarantine.
I say back then as if it was years ago, but it was months ago.
It was a lot easier to rationalize the amount of work I was doing, being like, this is great,
we can make things really awesome if we just put in all this work right now.
I think we did an awesome job, at least if I do say so myself, the work that we put into
making everything virtual, but I remember there was, I think it was the podcast you
recommended me, the Brene Brown podcast, where she was talking about how it's not sustainable
to keep working at that pace, and I think you're absolutely right.
Having that empathy for yourself when you are really tired or also having that empathy
for yourself that, yeah, maybe you don't do as much work as you used to do, but being
able to give yourself that grace in order to continue being productive, and I'm very
much an all or nothing type of worker, so it's been a bit challenging, but at the same
time I've learned a lot, I think, from a lot of my coworkers and getting to know how using
that same principle that we apply for our users, applying it to ourselves, understanding
that there's greater things happening, other than just what we're immediately doing for
work.
There's entire lives being lived outside of that.
Yeah, it's so contextual, and there's actually a word that I think of often, and it's called
sonder, and it's the concept that anyone you pass on the street or even in the digital
world has a life as complex as your own, and I think that that's really interesting to
just think about.
Anyone that you come in contact with at work or in person, they have and carry with them
all the same or different worries and thoughts and questions, and if anything, I've actually
found that comforting because I think all of us are asking ourselves a lot of questions
during this crazy time in the world, and it's nice to know that whatever emotion you're
feeling, you're not alone.
While it may be different, there's someone else feeling the same thing, so I'm happy
to be here, though, and life goes on, so I'm still kind of chugging away at my day-to-day
stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I want to kind of pick your brain on that day-to-day stuff for both the benefit
of our users and also because I get to see snippets.
We get to work together on things like our design thinking class.
We get to work together on service blueprinting, but I guess I would love to know more.
What is it like, the day-to-day life of a chief designer?
You know, Therese, it's funny.
I've been doing user interviews for the past few weeks, so I'm developing a new course
on roadmapping, which is really an interesting concept because a lot of people think of roadmaps
as an artifact, but what I'm really learning is that there's roadmapping as a verb, so
the idea of strategizing and creating a plan and vision for your product and then the roadmap
being the noun that captures that verb, so it's been really interesting, but whenever
I introduce myself, and I'm interviewing a lot of industry practitioners right now, and
I always ask them, you know, have you heard of NNG, and the answer is usually oh, of course,
and I talk a little bit about my day-to-day, and the huge shock for everyone is just how
small NNG is.
I think everyone thinks that, you know, behind our website we have, you know, teams and teams
of people and like over a hundred people and a marketing team and, you know, teams that
do all of our research and then teams that write articles, and I always joke and it's
like a one-woman show here because my day-to-day involves about at least five to ten different
tasks and responsibilities, which is something I love about the job, and I feel extremely
thankful that I get to still do some visual design and do research and then do the analysis
and then do the public speaking, and in a lot of ways I think it keeps me on my toes
and keeps me practicing and fulfilled in my areas of interest, but it's pretty interesting
because I feel like no one really knows or realizes just how small.
So I would say in terms of every day, I am creating from scratch best practices and frameworks
for teams to roadmap, so that's really exciting, and that is exactly, you know, a research
plan, so from planning, recruiting, conducting the research all the way through, creating
and designing that framework and then delivering that framework to practitioners, whether it
be through our conferences or clients, articles, etc.
I also, my fun pet project recently has been our NNG Instagram.
Yes, yes, and for our listeners, I just, I have to stress how excited I am because for
the longest time I was like, this, this is a perfect medium for us to express so many
of our very visual concepts, and I think this Instagram is, it's awesome.
If you haven't looked at it, please check it out.
I'm not ashamed to plug it, it is at NNGUX, and I think it's just a fun way to be a part
of our audience's everyday lives, and I think we take for granted, at least I still take
for granted, just how much content we have published over the past 20 years.
It is remarkable.
It is absolutely crazy and mind-boggling every single time I go back and look at an article
that Jacob or someone else wrote back in the 90s, and it still is applicable today, and
I've been thinking, and I don't know who our audience will be that's listening to this,
but UX is such an interesting field because it's just so diverse, and so my thinking with
this Instagram is that there's a lot of people in different contexts and different industries
and different countries especially that are practicing and wanting to get into UX, and
why not meet them on a platform that they are already using with a little bit of UX
knowledge every day?
So that's kind of my latest.
So to summarize, I guess my everyday is a mix of my expertise, so design, system thinking,
interacting and collaborating with others, and so forth.
Nice.
Yes, that is a very nice, concise way, but you're definitely a jack of all trades, or
Jackie of all trades doing everything, and of course design being all at the heart of
it.
I guess I want to know a little bit more about you.
Is design something that you've always wanted to do?
Like if you were asked Sarah Gibbons, like what she wanted to be when she grew up, young
Sarah Gibbons, has she always wanted to do some type of design?
Oh my gosh, yes.
I think from age two or three, I was creating.
I was building forts, and I was playing with Legos or connects.
I was always in this building mindset, and they weren't just buildings.
They were thoughtful buildings, and I think that was a really interesting piece of it
that I don't really ever think I had a choice.
I think if you ask my parents, I went through this newspaper contest phase of my life where
I would apply and compete in these different design competitions, and not just limited
to children.
I would literally go and compete, and so while my specific design interests I think kind
of ebbed and flowed with what I was interested in in the moment from industrial design to
architecture to maybe interior fashion, it makes sense that I landed where I did.
I love to solve complex problems ecosystem wide and design things that are received and
bring joy and happiness and make people's lives better.
So is design something I've always wanted to do, or did I fall into it by accident?
I definitely was born a designer.
That sounds so cliche, but it's true.
Which I think is also kind of awesome, and I'm always kind of jealous of the people who
are naturally born designers, although now I wonder because you were talking about how
you like to build things, and that's something I loved doing too as a kid.
I loved Legos, and there was even a brief, I forget, it was a limited edition version
of Legos that had robotics embedded into it, and I would love just programming these little
... I basically would make a little car, like a little rover, and it would drive around.
I think that that is design, and I am such a big believer and firm in my idea that everyone
is a designer in life, and they all just have different mediums.
So I think if you look at the top people in any field, that could be business, that could
be marketing, that could be a trade business, that could be a specific skill set, and you
look at the top 10%, my guess is they are designers, and they've picked the medium of
that industry.
If you are thinking intentionally about how you're deciding to solve a problem, then that
is design.
I think that we oftentimes limit our understanding of design and thus limit our perceived impact
of design, but I think that I get asked all the time, how did you transition from graphic
design to UX?
So for all of our listeners who did a traditional graphic design curriculum or went to university
or took some classes for graphic design, a lot of people like to frame it, well, how
are you going to make the transition?
And my answer to them is always, what transition?
I've always been doing this.
I've always been, in graphic design, your goal is to take a message and communicate
it in an impactful way, to better understand an ecosystem and create an artifact that can
communicate that more simply.
And so that's exactly what we do in UX, right?
And the medium may be more interface-based or customer support-based or service-based,
but it's still design.
And I think that by a lot of people calling themselves only designers and not thinking
about the impact that they could bring to strategy or communications or marketing, you
limit the impact that you're able to bring.
Right.
I think everyone's a designer.
We all just have slightly different mediums.
I really like that philosophy too.
And folks in our industry will often associate design with being something inherently visual,
but I really like the concept, not just like, but see the value of the concept of design
being something that can be applied in many contexts.
So I guess I want to pick your brain a bit about service design.
So how did you translate the idea of design is something everyone can do into something
like service design?
I know that you're not the creator of service design, but that you took a lot of inspiration
from some thought leaders and put this basically into the courses that we have now.
So how did you learn about this?
How did you get inspired to do this?
So it's really interesting.
I think service design is such...
It is definitely where a lot of my interests lie these days, especially as you see most
companies and really interesting companies bring their models into what we would classically
call a service industry.
But service design as a formal practice is actually young, but in the methodology and
ideals, it's been around the civilizations, right?
That if you think back, every single person in ancient communities had a role to play
and they had processes for gathering food and they had processes for rituals and they
had processes when new community members and traditions when new community members were
born.
And I think what's so fascinating about that is that is at its core service design.
It's the idea that the behaviors and practices that individuals take together and as they're
related to each other, create an output.
And that is incredible.
So if you take that baseline and you say, all right, how has that evolved over the years?
Well, if you look at any company, you have people who are creating that product that
is sold.
So that could be an actual good or it could be a service.
So an instantaneous exchange and wow, that's so fascinating that if we can help those people
do that better, then the output will be stronger.
And for a lot of people, this is mind boggling, right?
But it's so fascinating.
I think where we are today, competitive advantage, there are a lot of really great products and
people and replicable products and services out there.
So what is going to distinguish between them and that is how they're created.
Personally though, I have always been a systems thinker.
I always liked the harder problems.
If something has an easy answer, I tend to lose interest.
All the way back to when I was at university, I redesigned, which is extremely applicable
if you're in the United States heading up to November and our election.
Designing small community and minority community voting systems and this was in person.
So of course with COVID, this is not as practical, but this was essentially a kit of parts that
a community that has very little funding for poll centers can actually create an incredible
voting and poll volunteer experience.
So all the way down to the ballots and then upward to how any person of the community
could design a polling center to be efficient and comfortable, all the way up to signage
and how you would train volunteers.
And that's when I really kind of plugged into this idea of like, wow, like the world of
opportunity is so big once you expand it to this concept of service design.
So wait, this project that you did with the elections and designing essentially that polling
center experience.
When did you do that?
I'm curious.
I was like, I don't remember hearing this before.
I did this back in 2011, which is incredible.
And it's actually what I would say got me my job at IBM actually.
And you know, to be honest, if I do say so myself and I guess relatively egotistically,
you could still use it today, right?
Because good systems aren't about how they look, they're about how they work and human
behavior doesn't change that fast.
So a lot of the research I had done that kind of created the outputs was how people move
through spaces with goals, how to quickly train.
And part of that was giving each person a very specific role rather than making each
volunteer know everything.
And a lot of those principles are still applicable.
So yeah, I'll have to think that up potentially and maybe put it on LinkedIn for everyone
I think it's very timely to put that out now.
This is so fascinating.
And thank you for sharing all that you have so far.
I know that there are probably some other folks listening that might be interested in
design thinking and service design.
What would you say the most important skill or focus area, you know, what would you say
is the most important thing that people should have when they're trying to do design thinking
or service design?
Great question.
It's hard to narrow down just one.
I would have to say and I say this often.
So if you've taken a class with me or read an article, there's a high probability that
I've mentioned this, but I would have to say adaptability.
And the reason being is we are called practitioners for a reason.
It is a practice.
So just like the practice of yoga, you will never quite perfect it because the more you
learn, the more you realize there is to learn.
And I think a lot of people think about design thinking and service design as answers instead
of methods towards answers.
And if you think about it like that, as not an end state, but more as a way to get towards
an end state, then that path, that highway, whatever that road is, should only be used
if it's going to lead you to your end state.
And so when people apply, and I'm in the midst of publishing all of this design thinking
research, but when people are applying, especially in the early stage of learning this practice
of design thinking and they're applying it, they think so rigidly that they're limiting
themselves and they're somewhat undercutting the whole reason of using the approach.
And I think it's due to this fear or wanting to do it right.
And of course I also blame a lot of the prescribed methods and bad marketing out there, but they
kind of forget that they have to trust their intuition and adapt the process because every
context is different, goals are different, experience is different, and that goes for
service design too.
And as with any practice, I think that you always have to take this re-learning approach
that you may have done this before and you may have practiced it before, but if the context
changes then your behaviors and practices will have to change.
And so not being scared to kind of abandon or trust your gut and try something different
– I always have this metaphor, I don't know, Therese, you probably heard me say it.
You have to think about mastering design thinking and or service design kind of like learning
the kitchen.
So when at least when I first learned to cook, I started really kind of like with the basics.
Okay, I have these basic ingredients and I'm going to follow the recipe perfectly.
And then maybe I'm going to have the same ingredients in a recipe, but now I'm going
to include some kind of crazy stuff like some peppers or some extra cheese on top, who cares,
right?
And that's kind of like that intermediate level where you're still relying on the
recipe aka the process, but you're adding some flair to it.
And where we're really all trying to get is to this like mastery level where you're
not even using a recipe, you have a loose recipe in mind and you have the confidence
to kind of trust your instincts and start to flex it based on your ingredients, based
on who's going to be consuming that meal, right?
And that's kind of that level that we all should be working towards.
But that level is hard because it's uncomfortable and it takes time.
But we're aiming to be the Michelin star chef of design thinking.
Right, totally agree.
And I love that metaphor.
Even though if I were to talk about actual cooking skills, I'm definitely more at that
like intermediate level of actual cooking.
So I'm always thinking like, yes, I do.
I do want to be that Michelin chef.
And I can attest to that same feeling.
I mean, if I were to reflect on it from like the cooking side of things, like it is uncomfortable
to be willing to throw away the cookbook and like rely on the skills that you've learned
and then rely on them as taking you through to what you ultimately want to achieve.
And I think like being okay with a bad dish, like it won't always be perfect.
But like it's one bad dish and tomorrow you also have three more meals to try again.
Right.
I love that.
Yeah, that's that's I need you to be my motivational like coach when I'm actually cooking.
I don't know how I don't know how the metaphor works out.
I was thinking recently because for those listening, I've gotten really into gardening.
As Teresa knows, I've shown pictures.
And so now I'm kind of like, well, what does it mean to grow your own ingredients?
Does that like put me in this like ultimate mass mastery level?
I don't know.
I think so.
I think that's what sets apart the Michelin chefs.
I know we're like really stretching this metaphor, but really, I hope everyone's here for it.
Yeah.
Like those chefs cook with the seasons like they cook right in season, they they will
only use minimal ingredients of what's not in season.
And like because of that, because they're leveraging what is strong in that moment.
That's what really takes their dishes to the next level.
So I think the metaphor still stands, Sarah.
Yes, that's perfect.
I love it.
Well, this has been awesome, Sarah.
I guess the last thing I want to ask you before we go today is what's next?
What lies ahead for you or anything?
Any cool projects you're working on that or that you're soon going to be working on?
Good.
Great questions.
Almost too much.
No, I have two very exciting things that are lying ahead.
The first being that I am quite finally coming up on publishing about three years worth of
design thinking research.
So that is really exciting.
That will manifest through multiple articles that will be coming up around the journey
of learning design thinking, its values and benefits, everything down to best practices.
So that's really exciting.
And then as I mentioned earlier, I'm really learning about how teams roadmap and strategize
and create their future problems to solve and how they're communicating that to others.
So I'm really excited to kind of dive deeper and we'll also be publishing articles and
creating a new course on everything roadmapping and roadmaps.
Awesome.
That is so cool.
And if others want to follow you on, I guess we already know where to follow you on Instagram,
but for...
That's right.
NNGUX.
Oh yeah.
So say that again.
So that's...
At NNGUX and you can find me on LinkedIn, Sarah Gibbons and Twitter at SEGIB, where
I post all things, qualitative frameworks, design thinking, service design, et cetera.
So I will certainly be excited to see what happens next on all of those channels.
Thank you, Sarah, for your time.
And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.
Thank you, Therese.
Miss you.
Miss you too.
See you soon.
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