Transcript of Interview With Darren Hood

Interview With Darren Hood

This interview features Darren Hood, senior UX and CRO strategist at Education Dynamics. You can watch it on Darren’s profile page.

Transcript

– Hello again. I’m Joe Welinske, conference director for Convey UX, and our event is coming up the last three days in February, both in Seattle and also online. And one of the fun things I get to do is talk to our many speakers. Right now I am visiting with Darren Hood. Hello, Darren. How are you today?

– Hi, Joe. I am fantastic, and thanks for having me. Excited about the conference.

– Well, we’re excited to have you involved as well. I’m speaking from my home office in Bellingham, Washington, which is just north of Blinks Seattle headquarters. Where are you talking to us from?

– I am in Southfield, Michigan, which is a bordering suburb of Detroit, separate rated by the famous eight mile Road.

– Well, I, I’m familiar with your work and things you’re involved in, but why don’t you start by talking a little bit about your background and the nature of your work.

– Yes. Well, I am a 28 plus year practitioner in what we now call ux. I got my start in 1995. It was just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everybody was rushing to get on the internet and a nonprofit that I was doing some work for. They wanted to get on the internet too, and I thought I’m, I was always the guy that everybody would come to when something technical would come up. And so I threw my hat in the ring, got involved, started doing things that, to me, just, they just seemed to be common sense to check the usability, to look at the information architecture. And of course, I didn’t use any of these, any of these terms. I wanted to make sure that people weren’t working too hard. I wanted to make sure that the navigation was intuitive, things of that nature. I was looking at the cognitive load. I started doing these things, just fell in love with it to the extent that I started a freelance web design business immediately where I was doing, again, all the things that we refer to as ux and fast forward fell in love with the discipline, let go of my then passion, which was instructional design, and just decided to, as I put it, then mortgage my future on what then we were just stressing was information architecture. And now, today, I’ve been doing it again now for 28 years, and also teaching at five universities where I teach in some cases the entire curriculum. Sometime I specialize in certain courses, but I just love it. I, I love the discipline. I love mentoring people. I, I mentor people all over the world. I, I share as much as I can to help people vault themselves forward in the discipline. So just, I just love it.

– Well, with me having t taught the University of Washington for many years, I, I’ve also enjoyed it as well, you know, mentoring new people to the field. Well, let’s talk about your topic. The title is The Purpose, importance and Potential Impact of UX Maturity. So tell us a little bit about how you came around to developing this talk and, and what we can learn from it.

– Sure. For this topic, as many have, we’ve been paying attention to UX maturity for many, many years. I used to even work at a company the first time in my career in 2015, it was my job was documented to help to manage the UX maturity level for the organization where I was functioning as a manager. And I was already, I’ll call it, dabbling a little bit. At that time, I was reading things, studying things, paying attention to things, but to try to put together strategies to manage. It was the first time in my career I had ever done anything like that. And of course, a as is the case and folks who hear the talk will, will see this, this, we’re usually paying attention to the organization when we’re talking about UX maturity and, and vaulting forward from that time, just sort of maturing myself from that time, I started to notice that UX maturity is actually applicable beyond the organization. And as I continued to look at the other areas where UX maturity would be applicable and paying attention to it, examining it, evaluating, testing some things, some of the little hypotheses I had over the course of, of that time, that’s where the talk was born. I began to see it’s not just the organization. We have personal UX maturity levels. When I was at that organization that I just mentioned, I started to manage the UX maturity. I began to notice that, hey, the different stakeholders that I’m working with, they have different mindsets. I have to approach them a different way. And I started ascribing UX maturity levels to my stakeholders. We were held responsible by the organization to apply UX maturity level to each project. They called ’em lighthouse projects at that time. And, and that really helped to spark my thinking about this. So without giving too much away in association with the talk, that’s where the, the topic came from. And, and I continue to examine this, it’s, it will have evolved since I first delivered this talk once at University of Michigan. I was a keynote there and we talked about this. It, it’s something that’s near and dear to my heart. It, it’s definitely a passion project and it’s something I hope a lot of people will, will start to, to embrace and adopt and, and implement some of the different things that we share in the course of the talk, because it is at the core of what we do. UX maturity does not manage itself. And then again, it does. So if somebody doesn’t grab that bull by the horns and do what’s necessary from a strategic perspective, it could have dire consequences if somebody’s not keeping their eye on this thing and trying to, trying to herd the cats, so to speak.

– Well, I think a lot of people at the conference are gonna be very interested in this, and it should provide for a lot of great discussion. The area of customer experience is one of the major themes of the event. And, and I know you had some thoughts that you wanted to share about your experience with that.

– Absolutely. At that same organization where I was charged with managing UX maturity levels, I also had the responsibility of, and, and this was my introduction to cx, my my first official introduction to cx because we had a CX team at that organization. I began to practice, I was dabbling already a little bit, but this is the first formal time where I was practicing UX from a CX perspective. It was no longer just looking at the websites, just looking at the, at the mobile apps, just looking at our handheld diagnostic tools in that organization. It was, now we’re going all the way to the beginning of the, of the customer lifecycle. We’re looking at when the customer is first being exposed to the brand, to, to everything that we’re doing as an organization to everything that we’re offering to them, all the way through to the, the touchpoints for the digital, the touchpoints for all of our different products, services, solutions, things of that nature. And even going all the way to the end where we’re looking at customer service and trying to funnel people back into the purchasing part. That, that, that initial part of, of the purchasing lifecycle. This was something that I saw as the more I saw it, I should say, the more I recognized how important it was. And I even grew to understand that UX is really a subset of cx. CX is so big. There should be people over there practicing. That UX is so big, there should be people over here practicing the UX side of things. But we’re cousins essentially. We’re, we’re interrelated, we’re we’re interdependent. And to the extent that I have a talk that I’ve delivered before called the experience landscape, where I show cx, it’s a big Venn diagram. There’s CX and then there’s ux, and then there’s BX and I, I start talking about an equation that I shared that CX plus UX equals bx. If the bx, which is an automatically generated perception of an organization, is dependent upon what you put into your CX and what you put into your ux. If the cx, if nobody’s concentrating on that, managing it, but you’re concentrating on the ux, which a lot of companies are doing, then the BX is going to be the result of that concentration application or non concentration and non application. And I fell in love with CX to the point, I’m a former member of the CXPA, that, that organization, and through my practicing of UX from a CX perspective, which never stopped after I left, that organization just continued to grow. I actually ended up being part of the team that put together the first CX master’s program in the world at Michigan State University. We’re going through our second cohort, I believe now I’m gonna be teaching the digital Customer Experience course through our second cohort in January, the month before, before the conference. So I’m embedded in cx. I love cx, I love it the same way I do ux and I know that without cx, UX is essentially going to fail or the company’s going to fail. Again, thinking about that, that equation, if if you don’t have a strong, a viable UX practice, your BX is gonna fail. So CX is nothing without focusing on BX and neither is ux. So we’re all intertwined, and, and I try to communicate that and share that with as many people as I can. And I try to stress PE for those who are, they run out and they get an MBA well, is the MBA really going to help you? Are you a, are you an experienced professional? If so, think about the, the program at Michigan State University. It’s, it, it’s the kind of thing where we’re trying to help put UX on a lot of people’s maps or radars, which it, it’s not fully. So I’m hoping that we can, we can grow by leaps and bounds from that perspective as well.

– Well, it sounds like another big area that people will be able to ask you questions about and have absolutely further discussions about. Most of our audience tends to be fairly senior experienced practitioners, but we also always have a lot of new people entering the field that attend the conference. Do you have any, you have a tip or a thought for people that are relatively new getting started in their career,

– For people who are new in, in the experience design or the UX world, there’s something that I’ve also put together. I’m gonna talk about it a little bit in, in my talk. I call it the UX cycle of excellence. And it’s basically a seven step process that helps a person to get started the right way. And then after you get to step three, you can actually just cycle from steps three to seven, the remainder of your career. It doesn’t matter whether you are experienced or you’re brand new. The UX cycle of excellence does indeed help. But I’m gonna stress that first, that first step. And the first step is that it is critical that people properly define the discipline. And I remember struggling to define UX when I first got started. I don’t struggle now. And I, I, again, I mentor people all over the world, and a lot of people have expressed the same concern that they have. They have trouble trying to define the discipline. And in an age, considering the fact that there was no misinformation in UX pretty much prior to 2011, we could pick up any book, we could go to any conference, and everything was just great. And then that, that has changed. The landscape has changed since 2011, where a lot of people now, they don’t define the discipline properly. And, and when they don’t define the discipline properly, and they don’t, step two, understand the foundational tenets of the discipline. Your use as I call them, the usability and heuristics, information architecture, UX research and interaction and interface design. When those things are not, people don’t learn those things. And instead they’re looking for what I call these microwavable components associated with the discipline. Everybody ends up suffering. And we’ll talk about that in the talk as well, because there is a discipline wide UX maturity level, which is not doing very well these days. So that, that, that’s something, if you’re brand new, you gotta define the discipline, and you really need to immerse yourself in the foundational, the fundamentals of UX goes along. Well, thanks for,

– Thanks for that piece of advice. Yeah. I don’t want to forget mentioning that you have a podcast that may be of interest to a lot of people. You wanna tell us a little bit about that?

– Sure. My podcast is called The World of ux. I tend to just call it that. It’s technically, it’s called the World of UX with Darren Hood. I leave my name out of it, but it, the world of UX has been airing now for just shy of three years. We’ll have our three year anniversary here coming up in March of 2024. We’re on episode 180 is about to be produced at the time that we’re recording this, this interview. So I talk about any and everything associated with the discipline. There’s enough people talking about how to do the work. But interestingly, the work only makes up probably only 35% of what we do. A lot of what we do is sales. A lot of what we do is customer service. A lot of what we do is relationship management. A lot of what we do is mediation. There’s a lot of things that we do that have nothing to do with putting a design together necessarily. And, and there’s a lot of things that need to be navigated in order to, to be successful in ux. And so that’s why it’s called the World of ux because I talk about everything hiring, how to hire, how to go through the interview, job challenges, building relationships with stakeholders, managing relationships with stakeholders. Just I talk about any and everything associated with the discipline. So there’s a really broad audience, half of which I’m, I’m very proud of the fact that half of my audience is actually outside the USA. I think that’s, that’s pretty interesting. And it is aired, it is produced through Michigan State University, the CX FM radio network there. So all thanks for the, the opportunity that they gave me there. And we’ve been having the ball doing the podcast.

– Well, thanks for talking about that. I have it on my own podcast app. Another area I wanted to ask about was whether you happen to have a book that you’d like to recommend for our conference bookstore?

– Well, the one book I will recommend for the conference bookstore is 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know, published by O’Reilly. I wrote the, I’m one of 97 contributors to that book, and I wrote the chapter explaining the difference between experience mapping and journey mapping and the importance of each. So I highly recommend that one. I also have a ton of books. I have several published book recommendation lists. You can find those on ux uncensored.medium.com amongst a lot of other topics that I write about there. But I tend, I have one large, I call it the living breathing list that has everything on it. It’s purposely, purposely not organized. So just to tell you that upfront. And then there’s other lists that are structured. They are an information architecture and, and, and information design list. There’s a critical thinking book list there. There’s a few of them out there. But for now, for the, for the bookstore, just the 97 things is my recommendation there.

– Well, thanks for that recommendation and your thoughts about customer experience and telling us about your podcast and, and of course about your topic. So Darren, thanks so much for taking this time to chat with me. And we look, look forward to seeing you in, in just over two months in Seattle.

– Absolutely. Thank you, Joe. Thanks again for the opportunity to share.

– All right. Thanks a lot. Bye-Bye. Yep.