52. Rethinking Users as Ecosystems (feat. authors Mike Youngblood and Ben Chesluk)

This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX podcast. I'm Tari's Fessenden. In the experience design industry, we talk a lot about designing for the user. But have we ever stopped to really think about who that includes or more importantly, who it leaves out? In our efforts to simplify and focus, we often default to a very narrow view of the user. One person, one need, and one product or interaction. But real world experiences are rarely that simple and are far more interconnected than you might think. In this episode, we dig into what it means to expand our understanding, not just of users, but the complex ecosystems that they're part of. Today, I'm joined by two brilliant PhDs in cultural anthropology, Mike Youngblood and Ben Chesluk. They are the co-authors of rethinking users, a book and a toolkit that challenges the narrow lens that we often use when defining users in research and design. Mike has spent his career focusing on social impact design and systems thinking. His work explores how complex user ecosystems intersect with climate, justice, and large scale social systems. Ben has a background spanning lots of different industries, including the research of healthcare systems, redeveloping Times Square, and he's taught alongside Mike at the Stanford D School. In this chat with Mike and Ben, you'll hear us discuss how anthropology and systems thinking enhance UX work, what user ecosystem thinking really entails, and how teams can use a mindset of curiosity and inquiry to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with the people that they're designing for. Whether you're early in your career or well-seasoned, this conversation will challenge how you think about the user, and why that matters now more than ever. With that, here are Mike and Ben. Well, Mike and Ben, welcome to our show. I'm absolutely thrilled to have you here for a couple of reasons. One, I am a long time fan of your book, rethinking users, which we will definitely dive into and unpack. But before we do, I would love to have you share a bit about how you joined this journey into UX. And all of us, I know have very interesting paths. Every time I talk to someone on the show, I'm always fascinated by their origin story, if you will. So Mike, let's start with you. How did you get into this amazing field? Sure. I stumbled into it. Like many people do. As a practicing anthropologist, I was all my work was in studying social movements in South Asia. So I'm in India, and I'm kind of on the side. I realize I'm taking sort of a strong interest in design because India is such an innovative place. When I was back in the US looking for an academic job to teach, I got a call from a big technology company that was hiring anthropologists. And I thought that was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard of that they wanted people to study how people used things. I was vaguely aware of like human computer interaction and things like that, but not really. And I thought I'd just go work in a corporation for six months, write a paper about it and go back to the academy, but I got stuck. I just loved this sort of short sprint way of approaching anthropological research, which is how I still look at it as anthropological research. And looking at new products and services all the time. And so I just got I stayed I stayed in the field. Amazing. Yeah. Ben, I would love to hear your story as well. You know, what brought you to the field of research and design? Oh, absolutely. So like Mike, even when I was in kind of academic cultural anthropology, research was drawing me to design my focus at that time was focusing on urban spaces and the official and unofficial ways people have to interact with space or change it around them. And I was lucky to get an opportunity to join a design research consulting firm that specialized actually in medical device design, especially, especially surgical tools. So for me personally, my experience with learning about kind of how to apply anthropology practically came from standing around and operating rooms around the world, kind of peering over surgeons, shoulders, interviewing them under trying to understand what was going on in their surgeries, their tools, their patients, the other people involved all with the goal of trying to figure out how to make their tools better. And like Mike, I was really drawn to immediately to the kind of the collaborative and fast paced aspects of the work that were just and the interdisciplinary aspects, the chance that all of these projects would involve collaborating with industrial designers and graphic designers and learning from them. I just got hooked. That's incredible. I can just like picture like standing and watching a surgery happening like that's you've got to have a strong stomach for that. You know, not to go too deep into it, but you I do not have a strong stomach. I even had trouble watching the video that we would record. But when you're there in the room, nobody's reacting. So it's actually easy to be kind of quite blasey about it, although every once in a while, you'd kind of like, Oh, right, this is somebody's knee. I'm watching getting replaced or something like that. I think the other trick is you've got to have a breeze drawing bladder. That's more true than the stomach part of the standing right because these are hours at a time. You can't. You can't be. They can't be. Yeah. So okay, we have two anthropological backgrounds. How did you two meet each other? How did your world collide? I can dive in on that. We met via a professional connection and we started teaching together doing these kind of collaborative workshops and pop up classes at the D school at Stanford. And actually that the whole rethinking users project, the user ecosystem thinking idea and that project emerged organically from things that we were experimenting with. In those early classes and those conversations we were having. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess this is kind of a good transition now to like as we're talking about the book, like what inspired you to take this from pop up workshops to being a book that you two decided to publish together? So, you know, I had been tinkering with some, some of these ideas of sort of like reframing the way we think about users and user experience. I tried it out in a couple of workshops at some conferences and with some clients. And I just happened to mention it to Ben at one point and he's like, oh yeah, I've been thinking about that too. Yeah, I just immediately. And you think about an operating theater, right? I mean, there's so many users in that space who are all sort of organically and collaboratively sort of moving toward an outcome with a patient. And so Ben had been looking at these things to his own lens for a long time. And we thought, well, let's see if we can refine these ideas a little bit based on our collective experience and try putting it in front of some graduate students and let's make a class out of it and get some feedback. And we did and it worked really well. We got some great feedback. And I think we ran the course about four times. And in the course of doing that, we were systematically refining a little bit and a little bit more. And one day we were looking at the deck of slides that we were using as the main body of the course. And we thought, you know, I mean, there's really sort of the outline of a book here. And then we thought, well, maybe it's not long enough for a book, but we didn't want to read an article. So then we started thinking about, what if we just created a whole toolkit that's kind of like the class in a box. And we'll refine these cards we've been using in the class and we'll make a nice book. And people can dive in either sort of visually and tactically or they can dive into the ideas first and then and mix and match the different tools in the kit. And that was it. So we just sat down and started doing it. And then COVID came along and we had a little little more time on our hands and we kept working on it. And then we brought the Dean Hadry our fantastic design collaborator in on the project. And he just went to town on you, you know, applying a visual language to the to the to the ideas we were working on and the theoretical, theoretical framework and just made everything fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And so for listeners who haven't encountered this book slash toolkit and I think the word toolkits actually much more appropriate one. This book rethinking users is a book which talks, first of all, one of the core aspects about this book is that you kind of challenge the whole idea. And that's why the title rethinking users is so apt, right? Because we're basically challenging, hey, this traditional idea of system versus user is a bit outdated and is missing a lot of the key nuances that happen. In real life usage of a product or a service. And so there's the book side of that, but then you also have coupled with it a series of cards and activities that designers teams researcher. anybody who's interested in the creation of a user experience, right? Anybody can use these tools and these visuals as a way to think about their own respective offerings. But before we get into like that, let's kind of take the first bit, right? The rethinking, even the term the user. Ben, could you elaborate a little bit and then Mike, obviously we'd love your thoughts too. What makes the idea of the user kind of an inappropriate or outdated notion? Yeah, it's a really good question. So for us, I mean, and as we try to say in the book, you know, the idea of the user focus and design, the idea of user centered design and, you know, meeting people where they're at, understanding their values and their experiences, is just monumentally important. It's incredibly important. And along with that, the field as it's evolved and as we experience it as practitioners and talking with other people and research and design, has a kind of a default mode, somewhat understandably, that people that we gravitate to focusing on only one particular kind of user, and one particular kind of relationship that a user can have with design. And the book on one of these cards is this idea of the direct user, the person who's picking up and using something directly themselves intentionally consciously to accomplish a goal. I mean, in the case of that surgery research I mentioned, you know, that direct user was the surgeon for sure. And we drove towards this incredible understanding of these individuals. And it's important, but it's only a starting point because there's all of these other kinds of relationships that people can have with each other and with design that are all really important to understand. And not just because the products and services that we're designing need to be able to support these relationships, but if only because a lot of the times all of these different relationships need to work successfully for that direct user, that we're kind of designing for, even if that's our default, to be successful. And, you know, the biggest example of this, the thing that I immediately thought of when Mike, you know, kind of asked me when we were talking in early days, like, never thought about this idea of like not users, but user ecosystems were those surgical suites where, you know, they're along with the surgeon. There's just all of these people who had to be able to kind of hand the tools in and out of the surgical field. They had to calibrate them and prepare them and get them in the room and then take them away and clean them later or, you know, get rid of them. And it wasn't that frequent, but surgeries would break down. They would just come to a halt. And one of those people hadn't been able to have that an effective relationship with that tool, even though it wasn't designed for them and the people designing it might not have ever really even thought about that role. So that's why we kind of started to evolve this argument that you really need to look at the total range of user relationships that are possible and that do exist around the things that we're creating. In order to really understand how design is really working in the real world, if only to make mindful choices about who we're focusing on when we think about, you know, who we're designing for. Yeah. And I'll add to that. You know, I mean, so this notion of the user, whether we feel it to be correct or not, the notion that's really sort of lodged in our heads as designers and design researchers is this sort of one to one very intentional relationship, almost a hermetically sealed relationship. It exists in isolation of everything else around it between an acting subject, a human being and an inert object, you know, a thing, a design. And it just didn't fit with what we were seeing in the world around us. And there's an example I use in the, the we use in the book. And I think it's maybe worth repeating. And that is, I was writing on a train one time sort of a commuter train. And everybody was, you know, doing a little work to get ready, laptop work to get ready for work or there was taking a snooze or they were, you know, enjoying your thermos of coffee or whatever. And there was one guy on the train just yammering away on his phone, you're having an argument with somebody. And it occurred to me that that phone decades of research had gone into making that phone sort of a user experience for that guy. But we were all having an experience with that product. Everybody on the train. And we were all uncomfortable with the experience. And so I, it's sort of occurred to me that if that phone is the outcome of human centered design, and it's failing all but one of the humans on this train. What is then human centered design? And how do we, how else can we think about user experience and who users are and what it means to use. Right. And so Ben and I sort of opened up that concept of use and sort of thinking about use just in terms of engagement. I'm having an experience of, of this thing. Let's call that use also. And now let's see if we open up the aperture a little bit wider to see more kinds of experience. What does that help us to see and how does that help us to imagine differently and think about the possibilities of design in different ways. Yeah, and I'll say just to kind of follow up on that. I wouldn't know. I know when Mike was kind of we were, you know, sharing that story. I was coming off of saying that I had just worked on a bunch of cell phone related projects and kind of none of them had ever focused on that kind of relationship. And similarly, you know, coming out of those operating rooms. I had really struggled to find a way to articulate why observing these all these different relationships was important. You know, articulating it kind of coherently to myself or definitely to colleagues and clients just using the kind of language of these kind of frameworks of user center design. And so it was really sort of striving. I think both of us striving for a way to make concrete and practical something that we found ourselves observing, but not not done enough with. Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate both of these different examples right on the one hand you've got your primary user being a surgeon, but then all of these other sort of supplementary or auxiliary users who are essentially engaging with that particular tool, right. Maybe they're not the primary user, but inevitably this success of our failure that they encounter will affect everyone else's success and failure, right. And then Mike, your example of, you know, maybe there's an intended user and then there's all these other people who suddenly find themselves like thrust into an interaction. They didn't even want to be part of. And it's funny how there's so many different types of users and interactions that inevitably will happen. And your book essentially proposes the shift toward ecosystem thinking, but before we go into that, there was one other example I thought I'd share here. And what kind of triggered this whole me reaching out to you was someone posted on LinkedIn a while back reflecting on interactions that people have with say it could be familial relationships managing bank accounts or insurance where there might be, you know, two interested parties, maybe one is a policy holder, one is a benefits recipient, right. And there are these interconnected relationships that often we don't plan for in most, at least for most digital experiences. And there was this basically this plea like, hey finance, banking, healthcare, like there are so many examples where the relationships that people have with each other, you know, play more than just some sort of, oh well, that's sort of their life outside of this application in many cases, the relationship is precisely why they have access to a particular tool or a particular benefit or particular piece of value. So to see a book really explore this and explore all of the different ways relationships play a role in experiences, you know, was really, really deeply refreshing. So yeah, with that, let's talk a bit about, you know, user ecosystem thinking, what is that? Like, can you describe like what that approach is about our like and how is it different. I mean, obviously there's, you know, reflecting on more than one person, but could you share a little bit more about that approach. We were very deliberate about the name we gave it. So we, you know, we wanted to keep this word user because we thought it was useful. We just wanted to retool a little bit. I know some, you know, some organizations and some designers are sort of dispensing with that idea of the user, but it's out there, it works. So I just wanted to open it up a bit. Ecosystem was something we really needed because we wanted to look at collections of experiences, as well as sort of the meta experience that's being created at a systemic level, right? Because you think about that train car or the operating theater. There is an emergent experience at a systemic level that's sort of the whole, as well as individual experiences. We wouldn't keep that have that idea of an ecosystem like a. like the Brazilian rainforest or something, where everything has its role and creates the total. And then thinking, I suppose we were thinking about like systems thinking and design thinking. We just, we wanted to have an idea built into this that suggested that it was a way of seeing, a way of approaching, a way of analyzing that was fresh and different, or maybe enhanced in some way. So we started calling it user ecosystem thinking, it's a little clunky, but we think it sort of gets at the, at the idea. And we were borrowing a lot of ideas, both consciously and unconsciously from, from systems theory. So that idea of everything being interconnected, that idea of, of there being sort of a synthesis of the parts and the parts work together and every part has a role and plays into the, the final total. And that idea of emergence, that idea of it, that together all of these aspects of the systems are collaborating to create an outcome, to create a systemic outcome, or to maintain a systemic outcome. And yeah, I mean to stop there, because I don't want to wander too much, but you look like you want to add something. - I do, I do. And so what I would add to what Mike was saying is that the way we tried to, user ecosystem thinking is about kind of operationalizing that concept in the form of a concrete framework of what we call user archetypes, but the concrete ways that people can have a relationship with design and with each other, that start with the direct user, but that go beyond into relationships that are, you know, indirect, unconscious, happening all at the same time, all the different combinations that can exist. And so in the book and in the cards, we map out the kind of the framework of the kind of diversity of user types and then have created a series of exercises. And these are a lot of what we were building on in those early workshops that put that framework into action, where it kind of can start with going out into the environment and discovering what archetypes in action you can find and then thinking about what, you know, when you take a certain piece of design, a certain thing or a space or what have you, who's this been designed for and what user types are best or least supported by this? And then what would it look like to reframe that and, you know, have this focus on a user type that's currently being neglected? So it's the system theories concepts combined with a concrete framework for defining the different kinds of user experiences that exist and then activities for putting all that into practice really concretely in research and design. - Yeah, yeah, and actually, again, big reason I appreciate this book so much is the toolkit that accompanies. And so on that note too, and this is back to the term you used archetype, often when I talk to folks who attend our workshops and clients of our various consulting projects, a common thing that comes up is the idea of personas. And in some cases, personas are great. They can really help to define user needs and goals and motivations. Other times people have trouble with them, right? Because it feels more like, oh, I'm looking for weird, I don't know, personality traits or just odd criteria that seem a bit arbitrary. And archetypes are, you know, something I've started using too when I start describing different types of user segments. Because sometimes it's a lot more productive and constructive to think through relationships or think through, well, what role does this person play in this particular dynamic, right? And I feel like sometimes those conversations are much more meaningful. Again, not to bash personas, I'm still a big advocate for them. But in environments where personas don't feel appropriate, I still think there are ways to be a bit intentional and deliberate about how we're narrowing down our definition of users, right? So again, like just everything about what you've put together and how intentional your language is about this ecosystem and how you define these relationships. I found particularly, like I use the term refreshing a lot, but really it is because there is such a common theme around this very traditional approach to design that to flip it on its head of it is really, I think productive for our field. So on that note actually, how did you envision teams kind of using these cards? 'Cause for me, I don't know, I just love tangible cards. So it was very easy for me to pick them up and leaf through them and at least for me, I found myself like reading the book, flipping through the cards, reading the book and like going back and forth because in some ways it's almost like I needed a break from the really deep and challenging thoughts I was reading in the book and then I thought, oh, well, let me leaf through some more of these examples so I can bring them to life a little bit and I don't know, I'm just curious what your original intentions were with this toolkit that you essentially put together. - I will say with that, just to kind of loop back to something that you were just mentioning about that archetype concept, it was actually a big part of our early conversations was thinking about being rigorous about defining things that were really different than personas and that we always kind of saw as complementary to that approach, but kind of stepping really intentionally saying like we're going to have no personality, it's not about whether their use is good or bad or whether they're liking or disliking this or each other or anything like that and really just trying to distill down what are the kinds of relationships that we envision. I would say the kind of interplay between the cards and the ideas, it really became apparent as we started trying to kind of teach and work these things out in those D-School workshops that having this card deck of being able to go from ideas to concrete visualizations and activities was kind of crucial for us and for the learners and that we've kind of envisioned this working, I mean, we've heard that it can work in a couple different ways. People can kind of steep themselves in the book and then pick up and use the cards based on that, but also people can have that experience more like you're talking about where it's really more of a back and forth or even just sort of throw yourself into following the instructions for the activities that are on the cards themselves and kind of working backwards to that, working backwards from there. You and other readers can give us feedback on how successful we were with this, but we really worked hard to de-academicize the text so that it's hopefully engaging and interesting to people with a background in anthropology or design, but it's really not necessary and then you could pick it up and read it and use it even if you're just somebody who's got a great idea for a education nonprofit startup. And that for teams, I mean, if everybody wants to buy a copy of the book and read it, great. But if you've got a team and you're interested in these ideas that you can pick up and use the cards and the activities and bring people along really without worrying about whether everybody's done the required reading or anything like that, where it's really ideas with a framework to make that a practice. - Got it, got it. Yeah, that's really helpful to know as well. And I would agree, everything about what you've put together feels very accessible and very approachable and perhaps that's why even just the notion of flipping users on a TED felt so much easier to do because it was so easy to visualize and credit to Nadine Hydery too for putting together that excellent visual language for all of it. Now, I'm gonna kind of pivot just a little bit here away from the book and a little bit more toward just how we can apply user ecosystem thinking. And what comes to mind is the thought about AI agents now and how that plays into this ecosystem thinking to either of you have any thoughts on that. - Yes, I mean, this is something that we see coming in. Even four years ago when we were writing this book that we saw coming around the bend, everything is getting so richly complex now. I mean, you think of a smart home, right? It's just, there are no doorbells anymore. There are richly connected devices that tap into all other kinds of systems in your home and outside of your home and in big corporations and when somebody presses a doorbell, now there's multiple users involved. There, and a lot of these things also sort of flip that as you said, sort of flipping the idea of the user on its head, a lot of these new devices, AI enabled devices, robotics, some of these sort of smart products are actually sort of changing the role between who is the subject and who is the object. The devices now sort of use us in multiple ways. And we thought that was kind of a fascinating reversal and another way to sort of just sort of break apart this old model of the user and the used. It's not so clean anymore. So we think that's going to get more and more complicated. And we have tried to anticipate some of that additional complication with some of the users that we've-- some of the archetypes that we've introduced. So for example, there is one called the autonomic user. And this is a user who is-- the technology and tools that the user supposedly uses are so bad that it's holding up the card for that one right now are so deeply sort of intermingled with the very being of the user that it's hard to differentiate sort of user and object or subject and object. They're just a single hole. And we think that sort of cyborgization of the user experience is going to be more and more common as time goes. And just to follow up on that, it's funny to think that we were even trying to think about this when we were creating all of this. It thinks of advanced so fast and so far even since then. But on a few of the exercises, I'll hold up the card for really-- whoops, the last one, if I can actually find it-- that we ended up creating this exercise we call active artifacts, which is really in trying to envision ways that the things that we're designing become themselves-- things that have active relationships that are users in themselves. And this is progressed also with the work that, again, our colleague Nadim is doing in his work as an industrial designer and he's kind of ubiquitous AI assistance built into everything around us. So I would say it's nothing that we're ourselves kind of particular expert in. But it's a perspective we really tried to take into account when we were creating this. That's only accelerated sense. Yeah, what does user-centered design look like when the thing you design is actually the user? Yeah. Right, exactly. And there's certainly a lot of buzz right now about AI agents. And well, half of the people you talk to say, AGI's on the horizon are advanced general intelligences on the horizon. Many people don't think it's quite there. But that doesn't change the fact that people may still have these agents act on their behalf either that's on smaller scale or larger scale. So credit to you both for thinking about these sorts of relationships, even in the infancy of these sorts of technologies. So I guess one last question I have for you is at least kind of thorny one would be thinking about cultural anthropology in modern design environments. Because I think when people hear the term anthropology, there are often these associations with either people going to remote cultures in different parts of the world to study them. But naturally, your roles in anthropology were varied. Like Ben, you spent quite a bit of time looking at medical technologies. And that was where your anthropological experiences primarily lied. So I'm curious what your thoughts are as we look at some of these modern design environments, how might these change over time? I'm imagining too that the role of anthropology is sort of changing. Just in particular, I know there's a lot of concern in the industry at the moment, a lot of contracting of budgets and operationalizing and efficiency. I think there's still some questions up in the air about what does anthropology look like? When there are even tighter timelines than ever before. So I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that. I think we have a lot of thoughts on that. I'll start with a couple of thoughts. And I'll let Ben then jump in with some more, because we don't want to overdo it. But the first thing I'll say is that as an anthropologist, working in this UX research, design, research space, I'm really aware that even when people who don't come from that sort of a social science background are doing some of this research, the way they observe the environments they're in, the idea of studying how people interact with things in their own context, in their own environment, the idea of the long form interview. And all these things that are sort of basic to design research, these are really anthropological methods. And they're very sort of richly endowed with anthropological theory, even if the people practicing those methods don't realize that there's theory there. And I'll give you an example of what I mean by that theory. One of the core ideas of cultural anthropology is making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange. So what we attempt to do is if we're going out into an environment or a human context where people are having experiences that we don't really understand, we try to understand them through that person's eyes, get ourselves into that person's shoes and try to understand that sort of with their own frameworks and their own sort of values and all those things. Likewise, if we're studying an environment that seems familiar because we've been in it so much ourselves and that could be a modern design studio or a corporate assembly line or whatever anything of an operating theater, we try to create some remoteness from that. We try to alienate ourselves from that environment and forget that we have deeply sort of rooted thoughts and opinions about it and try to make it strange to us so that we can see it with an analytical eye. And that's what a lot of these methodologies that are being used into the design world are actually trying to do even if not everybody would articulate it that way. - And just to jump in on that, I think that's really well put that, we see that there's kind of even potential and it's something we were, this whole project is kind of an experiment in anthropologies very much associated with the method of ethnographic field work, which is crucial to the field but it also comes from this like knowledge base of the diversity of human behavior and evolution in history and out of that comes a perspective on understanding individuals through history, context and relationships. And we think that there's a lot of potential for anthropology to kind of keep promoting the methods of ethnographic field work that we're focused on and keep arguing for the value of those even though it takes time and like you said, people can be challenged, budget wise, it's certainly a reality but also to find ways to bring those insights about kind of systems in history to bear and make them practical, to show that they're not just academic concerns but that there really ways that are really concrete and helpful for understanding the problems that a design team is facing for example. - Yeah, and I love that phrase making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange because I do think that skill set is essential to, I mean, not just avoid bias in like the, oh, we're doing what's ethically right but avoid bias that actually risks, you know, making bad decisions like what comes to mind is we just assume that everyone like, oh, all surgeons obviously know this because they're surgeons and they're well educated. I talk to so many people both in healthcare and academic contexts and not trying to, you know, say anything bad about people working in these spaces but because you're kind of surrounded by these very academic perspectives all the time it's easy to sort of make assumptions that this must be the kind of information people want or oh, I better avoid like making these people feel, you know, like I'm dumbing things down or that I don't think they're smart because these are the smartest people I know. Like there's so many insecurities and biases that often impact the decisions we make or the type of information we decide to put out there or even who we decide a user is, right? Just even that core decision itself that it's, it is such an important skill to be able to create the appropriate level of distance and I say appropriate level 'cause in some ways it's distance yourself from what is familiar but also bring yourself closer to what might be strange, right? so that you can bridge any potential gaps. of disregarding an entire group of people altogether. So that statement, I think, really hits home for me. And I think it's something that really speaks to if we're trying to protect budgets. And if we're trying to be mindful of the time we're spending on certain projects, then the best way to do that is to have objective decision-making that calculates risk. And the best way to calculate risk is to not have that bias to begin with, right? Or to have that level-headed approach to all the projects we make. So I agree. I think there's a role for it, whether someone decides, oh, do we need anthropology? I don't think people necessarily need to take like a, you know, oh, we must have a replicable study that is, you know, this ginormous academic study. Like, we don't have to do that in a lot of cases, but if we are better about defining target users, right? And when we'd say target users, being really mindful and intentional about those users and the interactions and relationships between people, right? Then we can say, well, out of money, right? We can have better studies. Like, we're not just saying, oh, we're looking for all of the, you know, 22 to 25 year old, you know, females in the world and trying to cater to them. Like that's sometimes those segmentation criteria are meaningless compared to, hey, maybe we want to target someone who is a new parent, right? And that's going to be much more, not only inclusive, but we're thinking of relationships, we're thinking about representatives of users, right? Or someone who is acting on behalf of a user agents in that sort of regard too. So anyway, all this to say, I agree. (laughing) - Well, and I hope everybody's take away from what you just eloquently said is that everybody in design can save lots of money by hiring lots of anthropologists. That's definitely what I heard also. (laughing) - You're remarkable that we have consensus on that. - Yes, yes. (laughing) Well, Ben, Mike, it has been so fun having you here, sharing your experiences, sharing, you know, the origins of this book and the message ultimately of thinking about user relationships and thinking bigger than just the user system, you know, model. It's been so fun talking through these things and not just fun, but hopefully our audience, you know, got something out of that and maybe are able to reflect on their own, you know, respective offerings. So I guess if listeners were to take, you know, one core message from our conversation today, other than hire more anthropologists, what would you say your takeaway would be, Mike, if we'll start with you to put you on the spot? (laughing) - I guess what we, the main takeaway is I think it's helpful for people working in a design context. It just be constantly checking in with themselves about whose experience are we foregrounding here, whose experience are we centering? Who's, you know, we talk about delight and satisfaction, whose delight are we working on, whose satisfaction, and why? It doesn't mean we have to design for everybody, but let's be deliberate about who we're designing for and know why we're doing it, rather than just allowing ourselves to be sort of blind to all the other experiences that are out there. - And the one thing I would add to Mike is that if that sounds intimidating, it can be easy and fun to do with the right framework, which we've tried to provide. - Yeah, and I think that approach of being intentional and also thinking of both of unintentional users and unintentional users as well, and again, having archetypes, having names, like sometimes it can be intimidating to not have a name or to not have a category to put someone, and not saying people need to be in categories, but what I'm getting at is sometimes, it's almost like analysis paralysis, like there are just millions of people, how do I go about doing this? And I think by starting with archetypes, and thinking about types of relationships that can certainly help make what is otherwise overwhelming, much more approachable, and you can always start small. And I would say that was maybe my takeaway from reading the book was there are small ways to build empathy and to think about the relationships people have, and not only does that make better products, that makes happier designers, because we kind of have a better sense of, not just who we're designing for, but who benefits, and who matters to the people who are benefiting as well. So to close here, if people would like to follow you or your work, where could you direct people to? If people want your book, where could you direct them? Mike, let's start with you. - You have a minimal social media presence. We do have a website for the book. It's rethinkingusers.com. There's more information about the book there. There's some tips and tricks for using the exercises and the cards, especially for distanced teams, because we see that so much more now, rather than teams that are all huddled in the same space. So that would be a good place to take a look. And there are links to some other work there as well, I think. - Yeah, rethinkingusers.com and BIS publishers is our amazing publishing organization that puts the book out and makes it available. - Amazing. Well, Mike and Ben, thank you so much for your time today. It's been so much fun chatting with you today. - Thank you. Thank you, we've had both as well. - That was Mike, Youngblood, and Ben Chesluk. Authors of the book, rethinkingusers. If you want to learn more about where to get the book, or maybe you want to incorporate some user ecosystem thinking into your own work, go to their website rethinkingusers.com. Also, remember that NNG has thousands of free articles and videos on things like user research, ethnography, archetypes, and broader topics like Experience Design Strategy and UX careers. You can find all of that at www.NNGroup.com. That's N-N-G-R-O-U-P. com. Finally, if you like this show, please leave a rating and hit subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice. It helps us out a lot. This show is hosted and produced by me to Reese Fessenden. All editing and production is by the very talented Chrissy Richardson. That's it for today's show. Until next time, remember, keep it simple.