Celebrating the 10-Year anniversary of our book, Communicating the UX Vision

It’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since my co-author James O’Brien and I published our book, Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas. In honour of this occasion, I recently sat down with James to reflect on what led us to write the book, what the writing process was like, and how it’s continued to influence our work in the years since it was published. 

My blog editor Melissa Suzuno conducted and edited this interview. 

James and Martina celebrating 10 years of Communicating the UX Vision.

Can you provide a quick overview of your book? What inspired you to write it and what were you hoping to achieve with it?

James O'Brien: Martina and I first met at UXCampLondon, which was an unconference for UXers. And then, we ended up in a group of UXers who started hanging out together, and that formed a sort of support group for designers who were struggling with stakeholders, teams, clients—all the things that a designer will be challenged with in their lives at that point.

At the time, there was this theme of “If you want to do your job badly, here's the perfect guidance for it,” like anti-guides. And I decided I would do one of those for presenting design. I'd seen a lot of good ideas presented poorly and teams being forced into bad design solutions because they hadn't stuck the landing on the actual work that was being done.

I’d seen research being thrown out, hostile clients completely trample all over presentations, and I thought, I've been doing this for 15 years and I really want to identify what leads us to get into these situations where good design doesn't win because the organisation pushes against it.

Martina Hodges-Schell: It's a lot easier to speak about your work when you’re in your own tribe, in your own bubble. The level of conversation, the quality, the additive environment where you're really pushing the boundaries to create something better. That’s what it felt like when you were working with people who were quite aligned with you—most often with other designers. 

And once you were collaborating outside of that space, it started getting incredibly difficult to get your point across. Good work or good ideas that would solve a business problem or serve a user need—or that even identified a user need that was worth solving—got cut in favour of someone else's opinion.

We were trying to figure out cross-functional collaboration: How do we all work better together when coming from different practices? I really enjoyed trying to figure out how to make this more accessible for other people.

If you can invite people into the design process, how much more awesome can it be? We bring a lot of different perspectives together in this productive, positive way. 

James O'Brien: To build on that, this was around the time in the industry that Agile was moving from being this quite niche process to being everywhere.

Suddenly a lot of designers who had previously worked in a silo, produced a specification, and sort of handed it over, were now in this position where they were in the day-to-day conversations.

And the developers, because of the structure of Agile, were a lot more empowered to just make decisions. They were much more used to pushing back and saying, ‘It's easier to do it this way’—often at the cost of the quality of the user experience.

I had observed so many of those conversations where the designer would fall back on this argument of, ‘Look, I've been a designer for X number of years, and this is the best solution,’ and I'd seen how many times that just completely failed.

And I was like, well, hang on, if that's all you've got in the moment, then the relationships in that team haven't been set up properly. You haven't taken the role that you need to take in order to have that argument well. 

But also you haven't thought through your own work enough, because you should be able to come back with a meaningful representation of why you've done that work that way. And if not, then the other piece is maybe the developer had a really good idea and you're rejecting it out of hand. So the other big question is:

How can we make design, which is a slow, thoughtful process, work with Agile, which is a rapid iterative process?

The more I thought about it, and the more I talked about it with Martina, it came down to those relationships. How do we set up good, positive relationships within teams?

Around this time, there was this big theme that design will save the world, and designers are the heroes, and everyone else is trying to ruin your design. The business doesn't know what it needs, and designers are the only people that can tell it what it needs. There was this huge narrative of designers at the top of the ivory tower, and if the developers are lucky, you'll give them some wonderful specifications, and it's their job to implement them perfectly.

The situation on the ground wasn't like that, and I don't think there was a toolkit—there was no book, there was no training course, there was nothing to tell designers along the lines of: Here's how you work in a multidisciplinary team. And a lot of us were kind of groping around and feeling our way in the dark, and obviously failing very badly at it.

Martina Hodges-Schell: I also felt like a lot of designers were just pushing back against that collaboration because it felt a lot more productive to be surrounded by other designers. 

When I think about my philosophy for how to bring people together as a cross-functional team, I will always try to create the space that a design studio would create—a safe place for collaboration and exploration that gives you the safety to try things out.

James O'Brien: The book starts with an anecdote from early in my career when I had a conversation with an agency designer who would not listen to anything I said. And eventually he said to me, ‘If you were a designer, I would listen to you.’

That is something I've taken with me through the rest of my career—the idea that only designers can understand this or only designers can make this is so ridiculous, because as designers we're reliant on developers to build things for us, we're reliant on businesses to fund this stuff for us, and they will not do that on trust.

As designers we're reliant on developers to build things for us, we're reliant on businesses to fund this stuff for us, and they will not do that on trust.

We have to be able to communicate to get our work in the hands of users. I think a message that we've tried to put across through the book again and again is that all of the beautifully polished work that you've done is completely valueless if the developers build something else.

Your work only becomes an experience, it only becomes something a user interacts with once it's been built. And if you can't get it to that point, then you're wasting the business’s money.

Martina Hodges-Schell: It feels so much like we're trying to perfect the output, our deliverables because that's the design craft, rather than actually having that experience in the hand of the user, or having something shipped.

And only then will we know whether it's working or not.

James O'Brien: To finish out the origin story, we were both thinking in this same direction. One day while we were out socially, Martina just said to me, ‘We should do a talk together.’ I pulled up my drafts folder and we sort of spitballed on that for a while. 

We realized that what we were doing was looking at the level of individual behaviours, but each of those behaviours represented a bigger disconnect with other people.

And it just suddenly clicked for us that what we were talking about, this individual thing, annoys clients, but actually it's an example of this whole anti-pattern. The moment we started looking at it through that lens, it just flowed. The whole thing came together really quickly.

Your book outlines 13 anti-patterns that block good ideas. How have those anti-patterns changed since the book was published—or have they stayed mostly the same?

Martina Hodges-Schell: On the one hand, they're very durable. I find them very evergreen. 

I think the major change since the book came out is the mass shift to working remotely. We have an anti-pattern about being in the room and not present—that typical sitting with your headphones in because you don’t want to be disturbed by all these other people. It was more an invitation into collaboration and being present and actually hearing other people. 

To me, it really culminated in having the cross-functional team sit around a table together—just hearing what your engineering or your product counterpart is noodling through at the moment and being there and being able to jump in.

Some of the teams I've been working with were incredibly intentional about being remote teams, even before the pandemic. But you can also do it incredibly badly. I think the core premise is that being together for collaboration is super fruitful and super rich. Facilitating that and making it available was really critical for me.

Now I would really try and figure out how I can help teams bridge that gap when you're all actually distributed. We’re all having a lot less social interaction now, and I know that's extending the past the goal of the book, but I see a lot of people struggling with that today.

James O'Brien: Over the last few years I've been in an organisation where we had a lot of juniors. It’s struck me how people who started their career—either in 2020 or in the few years before—really haven't developed a lot of the same communication or office business social skills that we have. In a lot of cases, they've missed out on some of the stuff we talk about.

I think all of the antipatterns still exist, but a lot of the expressions have changed. A lot of the stuff we do around meetings is predicated on the idea that you're all in the room for the meeting.

The way we talk about presenting is very much predicated on this idea that you're at the front of a room standing in front of a big screen and you're showing what you do.

But now I've got software that lets me composite myself over my slides. I've got proper professional lighting, a proper professional microphone, etc. In the same way that if you showed up looking shabby and tripped over your own feet in the room, people would go, ‘Well what does this person know? They're not prepared.’ If your audio is bad and you're fumbling between screen share to screen share in a really important presentation, it has that same sort of effect today. 

One of the things that hasn't really come through to designers so far is how do you present your work really effectively in the remote context. If we were to do a new edition of the book today, the remote context is probably the thing that we would hammer on hardest.

I’d also add that today I certainly have more awareness of the fact that we looked at some of our examples and some of our positive patterns through a very white Western—and in my case male—lens. I think today we have a greater awareness of the need for solutions that recognize the individual a little bit more and the desire to be a little less paternalistic in our advice.

Martina Hodges-Schell: There is not one silver bullet solution to any of these. Essentially we're talking about interpersonal challenges, the human element of working together. There is no binary way you can solve that. There are different archetypes and personalities that respond differently and have different triggers.

James O'Brien: Sometimes you might have to have two or three answers in your pocket, because the first one isn't going to land.

Martina Hodges-Schell: Things have changed in a really positive way. I love that. At that time, it was still very much a ‘fit in and get on with it’ kind of environment. Even thinking about neurodiversity and all of those different expressions of how we're all different human beings.

What lessons did you learn from or while writing this book? 

James O'Brien: I thought all the work of writing a book was in writing the book. Both of us ended up in very busy parts of our career about the same time as the book was published and neither of us had time to focus on promoting it.

I think if I had known then what would happen, I would have taken a career break for six months to just really push it everywhere I could, to do every conference that I could, probably even to develop it into something like a two-day workshop.

What I learned during the writing is that you need a really robust friendship. You need to be ready to show up for each other and you need to protect your boundaries quite well.

Martina Hodges-Schell: I'm really glad that we wrote it together, because we were also coming from different experiences.

Writing about this topic from only one point of view and with one voice would have just not done it justice.

Also, having a co-author is really freaking awesome because if you do it by yourself, it's a lot easier to put it on one side because life takes over and it’s hard to find the time.

James O'Brien: We were good at holding each other to account. I will add that it is true what they say—co-authoring a book feels like it should be writing half the book, but really it's almost as much work as each of you writing a whole book on your own.

But I still think it wouldn't have happened if either of us had done the whole book on our own—and also it wouldn't have been the book it now is. It's a far stronger book because of having both of our viewpoints in it. And the viewpoints of all of our wonderful case study contributors.

Martina Hodges-Schell: At the time, I remember feeling really uncomfortable about putting things in that felt a bit esoteric, like how to self-regulate with things like meditation or yoga. And these days, people freely speak about all these things—this is part of and parcel of what you do.

James O'Brien: It's funny though, because even that philosophy of how we wrote the book, recognizing that you're a human being, goes all the way back to pattern zero. This is something we talk about in our preamble, which basically is: Always talk to the person.

Often we think we can talk to the role or we can talk to the technology, but you've always got to remember that the person there has an ego, a personality, hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties. And you talk to that first, because otherwise, the message of what needs to be said about the system or the technology or the business will be lost.

Really, it loops all the way back round at the start of the book to say, ‘You're a person too.’

Martina Hodges-Schell: To me it really segues into, as a leader doing a lot of coaching, you're developing the individual. You're not just developing their work skills or their technical skills. It's a lot of these interpersonal skills that actually need to be developed.

James O'Brien: And that’s something that has served me to this day. I can’t help identifying the antipatterns when I hear them. And the examples and answers provide blameless ways of explaining this to designers—and it really lands with them. It’s really powerful. As a leader, I almost never say anything about people’s design work. I trust them. All I will ever really coach them on is: Here's how you get that design work over the line.

That makes the book a really great tool for design leaders as well because they might have seen these things happening again and again with their teams and tried to put out those individual fires. Being able to put the anti-patterns model on top of it could really help them get to the root cause and solve this whole class of problems in one go.

Any closing thoughts to share?

Martina Hodges-Schell: This topic continues to be central to our work. Scott Berkun enjoyed and quoted our book recently as he was researching his latest book ”Why design is hard” and he shared this quote with me: “Every design leader who reads this will transform their ability to get good things done. It amplifies explaining what makes design in organizations hard and ways to make it easier.”

Huge thanks to my co-author James O’Brien for reminiscing with me—it was great to discuss how the anti-patterns and principles are still as applicable as ever! Today James is an Experience Design Principal at AND Digital. He still lives on a boat and still smells faintly of diesel, but these days it’s biodiesel.