Aurelius Podcast – Episode 59 highlights with Joe Natoli:
- The importance of getting personal to influence decisions
- Getting buy in for UX Research from stakeholders and other teams
- Soft skills for making a bigger impact with research and insights
- How new UX Researchers can bridge the gap in the disconnect between the learning environment and real world situations at big companies
Hey folks! In this episode, we have Joe Natoli, a veteran with many many years of experience in the field in helping companies refine their products to also founding the UX 365 Academy where he educates new UX professionals to enter the industry.
We’ll unravel the challenges newcomers face when entering the field of UX research, where the gap between textbook taught theories and the complicated corporate landscape can be extremely challenging. We talked about the disconnect between education and reality, where politics, differing agendas, and layers of leadership can be obstacles to making an impact as a UX professional.
Joe also shares unique insights into decision-making and communication strategies. He shares how understanding personal motivations, addressing fears, and embracing collaboration can lead to successful UX outcomes, even when met with opposition.
Navigating fear, aligning teams, and achieving greater impact that drive business success are all part of this episode and I think you’re gonna love Joe’s wisdom.
Just a quick warning, there is a fair amount of cursing and coarse language in this episode. As you know if you’ve listened to our show in the past, we like to keep things real and do as little editing as possible. So, if you’re listening to this around sensitive ears or that offends you, this is your heads up.
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Episode Transcript
(this transcript was automatically created using our very own transcription feature in Aurelius and has been minimally edited, please excuse any typos or weirdness 😀 )
Zack
All right. I’m here with Joe Natoli. Joe, how’s it going?
Joe Natoli
It’s going very well. How’s it going with you?
Joe Natoli
Awesome.
Zack
Yeah, I’m okay. I’m definitely okay. Like I said, kind of before we started recording, really getting back into the podcast recording, we did this for a number of years. People seem to enjoy it. So we’re back, reached out to you, and you were kind enough to join us.
Joe Natoli
Absolutely honored. Honored is the word. I’m honored to be here.
Zack
When somebody says that, that means a lot. When they mean it, it means a lot.
Joe Natoli
And I mean it. I always mean it. And that’s a word that I use often.
Joe Natoli
Okay.
Joe Natoli
But I really do mean it. There’s very little in this life I take for granted. Okay. So I mean, that awesome.
Zack
Well, I definitely appreciate it. So, look, we like to kick things off for anybody who’s listening that maybe doesn’t follow you, doesn’t know who you are. Tell us a little bit about what you do, what you’re passionate about, and kind of your background.
Joe Natoli
Well, for the last 30 years of my life, one way or another, I’ve been helping companies improve products, product teams. I’ve been teaching for about the same amount of time, university and online. Once this little thing called the Internet came along and enabled all these wonderful innovations. I had my own firm for about six years, way, way back when in the late 90s. Sold it to an It firm, hung out with them for a while, remembered why I didn’t want to work for anybody else. Went back to being a consultant, which I love. And right now, I spend my time between consulting with companies, teaching online. We just passed 300,000 students at this point, which is one of those things you say it out loud and your brain goes, Wait, what?
Zack
Crazy number.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
But at the same time, I’m pretty proud of that, so I feel compelled to mention it. I just started something called the UX 365 Academy to do that, which is what I consider to be an alternative to boot camps that cost way too much and deliver way too little. I coach people individually. I’m working on two books right now. I take on probably too many things, but as my father likes to remind me, it keeps me off the streets.
Zack
Even now.
Joe Natoli
Keeps you off the streets? That’s his favorite phrase. Well, it keeps you off the street.
Zack
I love it.
Joe Natoli
As, if I didn’t do UX, I would be working the streets, I guess. I don’t know.
Zack
As a dad, I really appreciate his consistency on that.
Joe Natoli
I really appreciate right.
Joe Natoli
Same.
Zack
Awesome. Okay, cool. Okay. Thanks for the background. For anybody who, again, hasn’t heard of your stuff, kind of get an idea where you’re coming from as we’re talking about this. Reached out to you, wanted to have a chat, obviously, about UX Research and that world which we both live in. You had a lot of experience as you’re talking with new folks coming to the field.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
What are some of the things that you feel like are the biggest challenges these folks are seeing as they’re joining, starting to do UX, UX research?
Joe Natoli
I think the biggest thing, quite honestly, is that there is a very serious disconnect between what they are taught and how they are taught things are going to go and how they actually go. When you step into the walls of an organization, a corporation, right? And the larger that company is, the wider that gap is. When you have distributed layers of leadership and teams and departments and global companies, for example, it’s a tall order. So I think that the problem with UX education in general, okay? And this is from universities to boot camps, it’s all perfect world idealistic stuff. Here are the methods, here are the processes, and if the universe is completely aligned, you get to do all this shit. The problem is you go into a company where there are people and politics and power plays and differing intent by design, quite frankly, okay? Everybody’s responsible for different outcomes, different things, different departments, right? So there’s an element of this and there’s never enough time to do anything. There’s never sort of the approval to do all the stuff you would like. A lot of times people don’t even understand what the hell it is that you do all day. They just know that they needed to get some of this UX thing. And so here you are, everybody’s fighting something, and you’re sort of impinging on their world to say, well, we have to do this work now. And they’re going, well, okay, when yeah. But my point is people, young folks in particular, even people who are transitioning, you get your first job, you finally land your first job. And I think the first thing that happens is you run headlong into a wall because the way you thought this was going to go, where everybody’s going to be on board with, yes, we’re here to serve users and customers. We’re here to make their lives better. That’s what it’s about. That’s our core focus. We are user centric. It’s not really true. And I want to say this. The important part for me, especially the older I get, is that what bothers me about it most is the way it makes people feel. It makes them feel incapable of doing the work, okay? When that happens, they feel like there’s something wrong with them. Plus you’ve got all these people online going, well, it’s not real UX if you don’t do this, this and this. Yeah, which I think is that’s a whole other topic. But I think those are kind of the issues. I think the way it actually works in the real world where the rubber hits the road, is very different even than the way people talk about it every day on social media. Okay?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
It’s just not that way in my experience.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
Can you give a specific example of somebody learning about UX, maybe, and then an example of one of those walls, maybe the one you hear most often?
Joe Natoli
Oh, sure. The biggest one is doing user research of any kind, okay. Someone lands on a project and they sit down with their very first meeting with the product manager or the product team as a whole, and they line it out and they say, okay, so either they ask, are we going to do some user research? Or they say, okay, what I’d like to do is I have a proposal, right? Let’s conduct this research, and I need a couple of weeks, two weeks of time, whatever. And everyone goes, well, no, wait a minute, we’re not doing that.
Joe Natoli
Sure.
Joe Natoli
And they’re like, well, what do you mean we’re not doing that? We need to know what users actually want. And people in the room go, we already know what users actually want, which they don’t, but that’s beside the point, right, okay. And for whatever reason, you’re not allowed to talk to users. Like I said, I’ve been consulting with companies for the last three decades of my life. And I’m here to tell you that there are a lot of organizations, large and small, even the ones who claim otherwise online, because I’ve been inside their walls, who literally will not allow anyone on the product team to talk to actual users, especially in b. Two b situations. And there are any number of reasons for that, the largest of which is fear, okay? They don’t want to hear what they already know is happening. They want to hear confirmation. Because they hear confirmation, then they have to do something about it. So here’s this person, they’re thinking, well, my job is to interview users and they’re telling me no. Well, shit, what do I do now?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
How can I possibly propose or design anything that’s going to be appropriate for these people when I don’t know who they are?
Joe Natoli
Yeah, what do you do then?
Zack
What happens then when somebody says, we already know? Especially when you get the sense that, no, you don’t.
Joe Natoli
You lean on other things, okay? You start looking in other areas in particular, you start saying, okay, how quickly can we or what ability do we have to put something out there where we take a shot, a low risk shot, where you make some decisions based on the information you have. You talk to subject matter experts, you talk to sales, you talk to marketing, you talk to customer support. Whoever is within your orbit that is willing to give you five minutes of their time or 15 minutes or whatever, you start asking questions. What do people complain about?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
You know what I mean? Talk to the folks who deal with contract logistics all day long in some cases, all right? It’s any number of things and you make some guesses and you take some shots that are low risk. In other words, if I’m wrong about this, nothing blows up. We’re not massively changing any workflows or any functionality or anything like this, but we’re making small incremental changes to try and make things better, get it out there, see what happens. Did anything change or not? Now, that’s a hard way to work, obviously, because it takes a lot longer to get to something that’s meaningful. But sometimes that’s all you got. For instance, I’ve shown lots of teams over the years empathy and situation mapping, simple exercise, but they go a long way in simply getting every person who’s doing the work, at least in the habit of thinking like the person that’s using this because otherwise your head’s down and you’re just focused on checking these boxes. I got to get this done. I got a two week deadline. So the only thing that anybody really has time for is just sort of a way of working. That’s a constant reminder of like, oh yeah, someone has to use this.
Joe Natoli
Sometimes.
Joe Natoli
That’S all you got. And people don’t like that answer and I don’t care. It’s reality. You have to deal in the confines of reality. The game is played this way. These are the rules. Fine.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
How you just described that, you say a lot of people don’t like that answer, but you don’t care because it’s the reality. Reminds me of this comic where there’s two boobs with people lined up. One is inconvenient truths, nobody in the line, and then the other one is feel good lies and the line is just right. And that is how the world operates.
Joe Natoli
And.
Zack
You don’t want to eat your vegetables, so to speak.
Joe Natoli
Right?
Zack
That’s the way it goes sometimes.
Joe Natoli
One of the biggest lies that we tell ourselves in this profession is that everybody cares as much about UX as we do. Is that everybody cares as much about good design as we do. I’m here to tell you they don’t.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
What they do care about, however, that’s not to suggest that these people are barbarians who don’t give a shit about anything. That’s not my point. What they care about are very specific outcomes, very specific results. Why? Because that’s their job. Their entire system of incentive and reward and responsibility is based around certain outcomes. So in some ways they kind of don’t have a choice, right? They got hired to achieve these things, so of course that’s what they care most about. Companies are set up. There’s diametric opposition set up across departments in every type of organization you can think of because of that dynamic. It’s normal. It comes to the territory. And my problem is we don’t spend enough time talking about that.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
So folks who listen to the show are not at all going to be surprised to hear how strongly I agree with you on that because when I was still doing conference talks and stuff like that. A lot of the topics I was very passionate about is exactly what you just touched on. And just to share with you mostly to get your reaction and hear from because it sounds like this is top of mind is one of the things I’ve always said is that UX and UX research people will rising tide lifts all ships. Ultimately all become better and more successful when they start to understand how businesses work and focus less on their own craft.
Joe Natoli
Yes and yes. If I could jump up and dance around this room screaming yes at the top of my lungs, I would.
Zack
We got video. Go for it.
Joe Natoli
We’ll get yes. Absolute Truth.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Absolute truth. One of the projects I’m working on right now is essentially a business education for UXers and designers for that reason.
Joe Natoli
Awesome.
Zack
I love that. And I think that that’s super important. It sounds to me like what you’re saying, really is that going all the way back to the original question. People are coming into the field, maybe they’ve even still got three to five years experience, might call them mid level, and they’re still banging their head against the wall on this stuff.
Joe Natoli
Senior people missing their head against the wall.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
And they’re missing that piece specifically because they are expecting a certain reality which doesn’t exist inside the organizations that they operate in.
Joe Natoli
Right.
Joe Natoli
That’s right. Here’s the other thing to talk about, inconvenient Truth. I say this all the time. Some of this is us. Some of it is very much us. There is only so much that you can gain from saying out loud, this is a problem. This is going to hurt us, or we can’t continue this way. As a team, as a company, as a profession, you can complain. Complaining does serve a purpose. Right. When you’re raising an alarm, the idea is to raise the alarm so other people see the consequence. At the same time, there’s a point of diminishing return. If those people don’t care about the consequence, about the alarm you’re raising, you have to ask yourself, why is that? What is it about the way I’m communicating that isn’t landing? All right. I can’t tell you how many situations I’ve been in with product teams or individual coaching sessions right. Which is kind of the same thing. I’m sort of always a psychiatrist. No matter what I do, there’s almost always some component of, okay, well, what did you say to them? And they’ll line out the things, or they’ll show me the research report or the deck or the presentation or the whatever, and I’ll say, okay, so where in all this stuff is the thing that they care about?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Researchers in particular, all that person on the receiving end, they’re not interested in the details and the formality and the rigor of your research. They don’t give a shit. What they care about is what does this mean for us? What should we do? What does it suggest that we do? How does it change our level of risk? Okay? How does it inform our efforts going? That’s the only part they care about. How is this going to help me make better decisions? Every executive in every position, and from managers on up, right? Not just executives, managers, they’re making calculated risks all the time. That’s the job. Developers and engineers are as well. At the end of the day, almost everything you’re doing is about mitigating that risk. And the only way someone’s going to care about your research is if you say to them in a very clear way, look, I know you’re placing this bet anyway.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
I’ve got some information that I think will help you make a more informed decision and maybe minimize some of that risk. And here’s what it is.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
That’s your position, not the UX sucks, and we need to do a better job for users and customers. Is that statement true?
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Joe Natoli
Is that the way you present?
Joe Natoli
Yeah. Yeah.
Zack
Very wise response. There’s a couple things that you’re talking about. The first thing is fear.
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Zack
The other thing is risk. I think those are two inextricably linked, right?
Joe Natoli
Yes, sir.
Zack
And what I hear you saying, really, is people have a fear of having to address this stuff head on, but they’re taking these risks anyway. So the reality is that fear is linked, whether they recognize that or not. And you can come in and play a role to say, look, this risk exists. I have a way to reduce or maybe even remove it in some cases. Let’s talk about what that is.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
And that’s the gig.
Joe Natoli
Okay?
Joe Natoli
I had a gig years ago with a very large financial services organization. It was kind of like the top of their industry, okay? They were it. They were the only game in town for many years. It’s a multibillion dollar organization, so they’re about to spend a ridiculous amount of money on an overhaul, on a redesign. And there was one product manager in particular who was one of the most fearful human beings I’ve ever met and was playing everything very close to his chest, and he was insistent that these changes that they wanted to make, which were his, were the right thing to do. Now, for me, there were red flags everywhere. We’d be here for a month if I explained all the reasons why, but there were some serious red flags for everybody involved. And I said, So, how did you come to these decisions? Tell me about the outcome you want and why you think this is the right way to get it. And he goes, well, we tested it. And I say, okay, cool, tell me about that. He goes, well, we tested it with six people.
Joe Natoli
Six? Sure.
Joe Natoli
Again, they own the US market. They own 98% of all financial communications in terms of stocks and investing that go out to every investor in the United States through every agency in the United States. And they tested this with six people.
Joe Natoli
Right.
Joe Natoli
So that was a public conversation. After that particular meeting, I said, if you got 15 minutes, I’d just like to ask you some additional questions for Clarification and just lay out a few things that I think are important. And he was easy to talk to, right. So I sat with him in his office and I said, look, I know that you want to be right about this, but I don’t think you are. And the reason I’m telling you that is because you and I have been working together for three weeks now. I like you. I think you’re a good guy, and I think that you are going to get fucked if you go ahead with this. And I laid out how.
Joe Natoli
Yeah, okay.
Joe Natoli
I said, do you understand? You’re holding the bag here? So if you do this and it goes the way I think it’s going to go, not because I’m the smartest person in the room, but because I’ve been doing this a long time sure. Right. You see the same movies over and over and over again.
Joe Natoli
Totally.
Joe Natoli
You know the dialogue, you know the plot. I said, so understand, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s not going to affect my life in any way, shape or form. I’m going to get paid, and I’m going to be gone. Yeah, but this is going to hurt you. I’m telling you. So all I’m asking you is let me help you get some certainty here before you pull this trigger, okay? Because I think it’s going to be really bad for you. And that worked because he was afraid. He was scared shitless because he’s being forced to make a decision. There are people above him who are pounding on him and saying, look, this has to get done, and it’s got to get done now. And they weren’t willing to give him any time to think about it as well, which is fine, but you always have the power to say no in any number of ways to say no. I am absolutely not placing this bet with this level of risk based on hearsay. I’m just not doing it. And that’s been my rule my entire life as a consultant, is I’m always going to tell you the truth, and I don’t care whether that lands well or it lands badly. It’s going to suck either way. Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard to have those conversations. It’s difficult. You want people to like you. Everybody wants people to like them, myself included. But I don’t ever want to be hung on that hook. And part of the reason I don’t ever want to be hung on that hook is because I learned that lesson in a very expensive way very early on in my career when I started my own company. Okay. You only have to go through that once to realize that there’s nothing to be gained for pretending things don’t exist.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
So that last part, that expensive lesson you learned is I want to table that for a second, because I would love to hear about that if you’re willing to share with but I want to go all the way back and just kind of recap as it’s kind of my job as the host of this. What I heard that you did here pretty successfully a couple of things. Number one, you actually tried to figure out what success looks like for that person individually.
Joe Natoli
That’s right.
Zack
And for the project.
Joe Natoli
That’s right.
Zack
And then what you tried to do is you tried to present a case simply to help on each front. Now, what was interesting for me to hear about that is, again, something that I have done in my background as well, is I don’t just play the business card like they say in poker. Not that I’m a card player at all, but they say you play the person across from you, not the hand. And that’s what you did as you understood that person, you understood what their motivations and their needs and their goals were to say, well, here’s how I can help you do that. That’s all I’m trying to do.
Joe Natoli
That’s right.
Joe Natoli
It has to be personal. Here’s the other part that everybody misses, and they say, well, what does the business need? What does the business need? This is really by extrapolation is it about the business? Sure. What it really is about, if you want to get any traction, if you want to make any forward progress, it is about people. It’s about human beings. It’s about what they’re struggling with. It’s about what they’re on the hook for. It’s about what they’re afraid of. And until you know what that is or until you start working toward that, it kind of doesn’t matter what the larger goal is, because you are not moving past this little plateau that you’re on right now. It’s not happening, especially to your point earlier, okay? If there’s fear involved, fear is the most powerful force I know of that stops progress in its tracks. Anytime you get in opposition, there is almost always fear behind it coming from somewhere, and you got to find out what it is. Yeah, but to my point, it has to be personal. So the questions I ask are personal questions. What do you need to happen here? What are you afraid is going to occur if we don’t do this this way? What are you afraid is going to occur if we take the extra time to do A, B, and C, what happens? What do you think is going to take place? Tell me. You got to tell me. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me. Yeah, it’s that kind of thing, okay? And that’s the only way I know to move the needle, because this work is just fraught with opposition. And I think it’s almost never for the reasons we think it is.
Zack
Never for the reasons we think it is.
Joe Natoli
The opposition is never there’s this tendency to paint businessmen well. They’re just barbarians. All they care about is the bottom line and money, and they’re greedy. Or developers, like, developers just don’t give a shit. They just want to move forward and code everything, and they don’t care how it looks. Not true in my experience. Not true at all.
Joe Natoli
Agreed.
Joe Natoli
I have never worked with a team of engineers or developers, for example, to this day, who didn’t give a shit about whether their work was usable or valuable to people. In fact, they cared a hell of a lot.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
They were dealing with the same constraints everyone else was.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that they have priorities. They have marching orders. They have a cascading list of things of varying importance, and they’re constantly reshuffling the list because they don’t have enough time to deal with all of it. That’s reality. You got to work in reality. So that’s my problem with Process as well. I know. I’m all over the place. My problem with Process, we do these great diagrams when we post them online, everybody goes, yeah, that’s the way that should work.
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Joe Natoli
In what world? Come on. Nothing works that cleanly ever. Not ever.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
One of the things that I often tell people, because I have had very similar experience, to say, these people definitely care. And I usually ask someone when they kind of get in that mode, I say, do you know anybody at your work or even any past jobs that was there to do anything less than their best work? Like, if you ask them, would you think that they would say, like, yeah, I’m here to do some average work.
Joe Natoli
Nobody I’m here to half asset.
Zack
Right. Nobody’s there with that intention. It’s often projecting.
Joe Natoli
Right.
Zack
So I want to take this all the way back. You’re talking about this. You got to overcome fear on a personal level. There are people. These are people.
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Zack
Businesses are big businesses.
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Zack
But guess what? They’re run by people. They’re operated by people, they’re designed by people, all of that. So work on that level. We’re talking about UX research.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
How do you get people to a want or care about or remove their fear of learning? Other than just testing six people? We’re talking about good qualitative research. And then how do you get people to give a shit about what you learned and act on those things?
Joe Natoli
Yeah, well, again, it’s about cutting to the chase in both cases. My favorite phrase in the world is probably let’s get real. And I use it often, and the reason I use it often is because to me, it’s the key to everything. If you’re trying to get somebody to do some real research. You have to make sure that they understand how not doing it pretty much guarantees that they’re not going to get the thing that they want. That’s the conversation. Right. So when I’m fighting, quote unquote, because it’s not really like a fight, it’s more like a conversation. I’m not ever saying you have to do these things for these reasons because it’s the right thing to do and it’s best practice or this rigor is required because industry norms, I mean, legal compliance do those things hold water?
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Joe Natoli
Are they going to move the needle? Probably not. What’s going to move the needle is that it’s me saying you’ve told me over and over and over again in the time we’ve been interfacing that this is the outcome you want.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
I don’t think you’re going to get it unless you have answers to these questions because by that point it usually is obvious what is unknown and what is unanswered.
Joe Natoli
Right.
Joe Natoli
So then we don’t know how people use this thing. We’ve got evidence that nobody ever touches this repository, which you’re talking about, completely overhauling over a period of three and a half months at massive expense, and we have zero evidence that it’s worth doing in the first place. So your signature essentially is going to be the person that says, yeah, we should do this. If I’m you and I’ve said this verbatim to people and I’ll look somebody in the eye and say, look, if I’m you, there’s no way in hell I’m placing that bet.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
No way. Absolutely not. It’s a wild ass guess and there’s a really good chance from where I’m standing that this could turn around and bite me in the ass. There’s going to be a lot of people in a lot of departments going, why the fuck did you agree to do this?
Joe Natoli
Yeah. All right. Yeah.
Joe Natoli
So the essential question is do you want to be that person?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
And that a lot of times will get someone to say, well, all right, so I guess it’s worth it. Or you say, look, you’re about to spend four and a half million dollars doing this. Isn’t it smart to take 10% of.
Joe Natoli
That.
Joe Natoli
And validate some of these decisions before you decide it’s directly worth spending that money and that expense and that time? I mean, isn’t that a worthwhile investment just to make sure that this pays off in some way? Yeah, it’s those kinds of things. Now to your second question. How do you get them to give a shit about the results? That has everything to do with how you present it again to a person? Almost every researcher I’ve ever worked with on a team or as a coach or even anecdotally we care about what we do.
Joe Natoli
Right?
Joe Natoli
I mean, I’m not a researcher, but I am a UX person. I’m a designer. We care a lot about it, so we tend to present things. In a way that makes sense to us. And researchers in particular are very as they should be. I can’t think of the word. The only word I can think of is enamored, but that kind of cheapens it. But all that rigor and all that detail that’s involved and look, here’s how we went about doing this. We were really careful about making sure that we had a good cross section representation. We were really, really careful about the types of questions we asked and the sample size and the way we analyze the results, because they know all that matters. Nobody else cares about it.
Joe Natoli
Right.
Joe Natoli
And the more you put that stuff out there to people who not only don’t care about it but don’t understand it, what’s happening is that the longer you go on, their wheels are turning. They’re like, what the fuck did we spend all this money on? I’ve been sitting here for a half hour. I still don’t know anything.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
I hate to say that out loud, okay. Because I’m telling you, it visibly upsets people when I say these things because they feel put upon. It does not cheapen the value of your research in any way. It simply means that you need to present it very differently. You have to come out of the gate with, here’s what we were trying to accomplish, here’s what we felt like we needed to know, here’s why we needed to know it. We needed confidence in this decision, or we needed to make sure we could go ahead and increase the likelihood of getting this result that we wanted. Right. This increase in sales or this decrease in internal cost or whatever it is. High level. What we learned is that these three initiatives are highly likely to deliver that. We can get into the why. I can explain all the details of why, but the bottom line is everything points toward this is probably the right direction to go in. And with these second two initiatives, there’s one big question that I think we have to answer before we’re going to know for sure. That’s your pitch?
Joe Natoli
Yeah. All right.
Joe Natoli
Whatever you come out of the gate with first, which essentially has to be the ending of the story, dictates whether anyone is going to stick around to hear why or whether they’re going to care.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
If you do that dance that I just described, where they’re sitting there and they’re going, people do that thing where they pretend they’re interested and they nod their heads, they have no idea what you’re saying.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Or they’re checked idea what it means. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve walked out of where an executive or a manager, someone has grabbed you by a sleeve and go, do you understand what the fuck is going on here?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Squeeze a Saturday for an hour. I still don’t know what we’re doing. Do you know what we’re doing?
Zack
And then you got to have the hallway meeting just to get the meat and potatoes, as they say.
Joe Natoli
Yeah. And it’s not anybody’s fault, in a way. I don’t fault people for presenting the way they do. I fault the ways that they’ve been taught to do this, which completely ignore the reality of how companies operate. It’s an ignorant approach. It’s why I have a problem with boot camps. Anyone who knows me knows my problem with boot camps.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
There’s a component missing, and the component missing is the reality and a context of operating in a business environment.
Joe Natoli
Yeah, that’s fair.
Zack
One of the things I thought of as you were describing this is.
Joe Natoli
You.
Zack
And I are I don’t know that I would call myself a gray beard in the industry, but I’ve certainly been doing it for a little more than 15 years. I know you’ve got a ton of experience. The whole point here is we’ve seen a lot of older movies.
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Zack
The 90s made in the if you remember, they used to run all of the credits at the beginning of the movie, and they don’t do that anymore. Do you think there’s a reason why that happens? Because people want to get to the story.
Joe Natoli
That’s right.
Zack
What I heard you describing is basically we’re still showing the credits.
Joe Natoli
Yes.
Zack
And who made the movie before we tell anybody what the story is about.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
The 15 production companies that were involved, because now movies now are even worse. There’s 45 players that finance this thing, and they all have to get their 2 seconds of credit up there.
Zack
Yeah. The name’s got to be on the thing.
Joe Natoli
It’s a great metaphor. You’re absolutely right.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
So get to the story. If somebody cares or wants to know how you got there, be prepared for that. I agree. I mean, I think that I’ve had as a UX as a research person, I have had the same criticism of those things where I said, nobody cares about your craft and how rigorous you were you got there. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
You should care. Absolutely.
Zack
You should care, and that’s it. You should care.
Joe Natoli
You shouldn’t get good results.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
You shouldn’t try to make anybody else care about that, because that’s not what they care about. They want answers to questions.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
I mean, look, this phrase that people still say to this day, like, well, we need to educate them. You need to strike that phrase from your vocabulary right now. Nobody is asking you to educate them.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
All right. That was never a request. Nobody wants to be educated.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
You don’t know anything, so sit down and I’ll educate you.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
Again, we go back to this idea where you’re working and you’re talking with people, you’re managing their feelings, their emotions, their egos, no matter how big or how small, and you say, well, sit down here on that stump, and let me tell you something you don’t know about. Isn’t the best way to open the door of that conversation.
Joe Natoli
So no, because you brought it up.
Zack
I do want to ask this. We don’t see this kind of thing with engineering and development. We don’t see engineers saying we need to educate the business on why development and good technology practices are important.
Joe Natoli
Not to the same degree, no.
Zack
Why do you think that is?
Joe Natoli
I think a couple of reasons. I think, number one, in general, okay, I always default back to this. It’s a theory. I don’t know that I have any hard proof other than experience. I think that tech was here before us. Okay? It’s just like engineering. Mechanical engineering is the same thing. If you’re producing a car, let’s say the engineering part of that equation had to be there first. The thing has got to work, okay? That’s the critical inch of putting a thing out into the world. It has to work. It has to run. The code has to work. The databases have to talk to the logic, have to talk to the front end. That all has to happen. It has to happen flawlessly. So on the management and executive side of the equation, kind of a given, all right? And that’s an even bigger black box, I think, for a lot of people than UX or design is, all right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but to me, engineers of any kind are on an entirely different level of intellect, in my opinion. Like, I’m just constantly floored and impressed by these people, which is why I love working with them. Whenever I work with a client, I want engineers or developers in the room at all times. At all times. I want their contributions from word go, okay? And that doesn’t happen either, for reasons I don’t understand. But I think the reason they don’t have to defend themselves as often is largely because of that, all right? They have the keys to the universe, essentially. They do. At the same time, I will tell you that I’ve talked to a lot of developers and development teams who are just like UX folks left out of crucial conversations, decisions that are made without them, and then they’re expected to okay, well, here’s this set of bullshit user stories that don’t mean anything code to this. And they’re like, what is this?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Stupid statements that don’t tell anybody, give anybody any practical actionable information as to how to go about building this thing or why it needs to be built that way or what the outcome is or how people need to be able to use it. So I think there is a lot of that, and I also think there’s a lot of push for time. Speed is always emphasis. I’ve lost count of many teams I’ve talked to, but they’re like, our backlog is growing exponentially every week, and we’re sounding the alarm, and no one gives a shit.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
Something that I thought of here it’s crossed my mind in the past is almost aligning yourself with technology in many ways. And now I’m not suggesting that UX lives within technology. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s an organizational thing. But I mean, when you’re trying to make the case for why understanding your customers is going to end up at a happier place at the end of this road for everybody, aligning yourself with technology and development has a very high potential for success in that for those reasons you just described is because those people working in those roles oftentimes have a lot of the same questions that we do from a UX perspective, but they’re focused on technology, so they don’t have the means of getting the answers to those questions. And so that’s where we can come in and say, well, look, you want technology to run efficiently. We can get answers to questions so that they’re not left feeling around in the dark without a flashlight.
Joe Natoli
Right.
Joe Natoli
Just like we want to be involved upstream, they should be involved upstream. I am absolutely, completely, thoroughly opposed to the idea of handoffs. I hate it. I think it should die. I think it is just one of the dumbest practices that people continue to hang on to. This idea of hand is fucking stupid. Okay. I can’t explain to you how many times I’ve been a room. You’re in a room with stakeholders. And like I said, I want one or two engineers in the room at all times. Because when the stakeholder is going down a path and he’s digging in his heels because he’s afraid and his ego is on the line. One of the greatest things in the world for me is to turn around and look at the engineer and go, okay, what he’s talking about? How much time are we talking about? Adding to the schedule based on that? And he’ll go anywhere from four months to a year and a half. Conversation is over right there?
Joe Natoli
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Based on it. And that allows me to say, based on information, do you want to go down this path?
Joe Natoli
Yeah. Right.
Joe Natoli
And if he’s not in that room, they’re going to do everything they can to force that through without ever considering what the impact of that decision is or whether it’s even possible. It’s asinine. Literally, before I talked to you, I had a meeting with a client who I’ve worked with for 15 years. We’re talking through what’s going to happen, and it’s the same conversation because some of these people on this team haven’t worked with me before. So I’m just explaining to them how I work. I said, Look, I don’t want to be painted into a corner. I don’t want you to be painted into a corner. I don’t want your development team to be painted into a corner. So I want everybody in that room at all times. We’re going to put our heads together. We’re going to work through this together so that at any given moment, we can say, do we think this will work? Can we pull it off? Any o shits. That’s kind of what I say. Whenever we hit upon a decision, that’s my last line of defense. Like, any O shits, anybody thinking it?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Speak now or forever hold your piece, because we’re going forward.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Zack
The interesting thing about that is when you’re working with a cross functional team, as you should be, and even if there are handoffs, you’re still doing it. You’re just not talking to each other, which is a tragedy. If any one individual group wins, everybody loses.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
That’s right. Amen.
Zack
And I firmly believe that UX research actually helps alleviate a lot of that pressure.
Joe Natoli
It does.
Zack
So that there doesn’t have to feel like a fight or that one group has to win this battle or another one wins that battle. It actually ought to, if done well, align everybody towards the same goal and then figure out the right ways in which to get there from their own unique experience and perspectives right at any given moment.
Joe Natoli
It’s like, okay, what do we know? What do we know? What do we not know? What do we need to find out all along the way? And that shouldn’t stop. That shouldn’t be relegated to one piece of a project, a one week period up front that should happen for the life of I mean, even a Sprint, okay? For companies that do sprints in that two weeks, that’s an ongoing conversation every single day. What do we know based on what we did in the last 8 hours? What have we answered? What are we sure of? What are we worried about?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
And collectively, those questions have to get answered by all those disciplines, and they should. It’s just a much better way to work. I’ve had product teams who are resistant to this idea because I’m, like, put everybody everywhere, all right? Design shouldn’t be over here, and development shouldn’t be over here. Get together and check in. At the very least, check in with each other twice a day and say, look, here’s what I did. What do you think?
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
Yes, no, maybe. And they’re like, we don’t typically do that. Look, do it for two weeks. Just do it for two weeks. Pick some small project. Do it for two weeks and just try it, okay? If it sucks, if it’s a disaster, never do it again. I mean, who cares, right? But just try it and come back to me and tell me what happened. And inevitably, for any team that’s ever tried working differently like this, instead of the typical dual track, agile bullshit everybody talks about, they come back and they’re like, that was amazing.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
We headed off, like, so much potential wasted time, like, you don’t even know. And I’m like, I do know.
Zack
That’s why I suggested it to begin.
Joe Natoli
With again, not because I know everything.
Joe Natoli
Yeah.
Joe Natoli
I tell clients all the time. I am not omnipotent by any stretch of the imagination. My greatest gift in life is time. Lot of time over the target. Lot of time witnessing firsthand being involved in what works and what doesn’t. And when things blow up, they blow up for the same reasons over and over and over again.
Joe Natoli
All right?
Joe Natoli
So you get good at spotting it. What happens with time, if you’re paying attention as you get older and you do it more, is that you can spot it from a much further distance. Yeah, right. It’s kind of how my dog can smell people coming around the corner in the block. You know it’s coming. All right, here’s where we are. Yes.
Zack
You’ve seen that story start a number of times, and you start to see the ending enough times where you’re able to connect the dots right at the it.
Joe Natoli
I swear to God. I mean, that sounds know, but you.
Zack
Can feel it totally say, Listen, Joe, I realize we’re getting to the end of our time with you. Always got to be respectful of that. One of the things that I like to do when I have a conversation with somebody is, you know, if I got hit on the head, temporary amnesia, and somebody came to you and was just like, well, what did you talk about? How would you summarize that for somebody?
Joe Natoli
What do we talk about? We talked about the importance of getting personal, of looking past organizations and businesses and users and all this stuff. It’s like, look, what do you want? What do you want to happen here? And are we all collectively working to make that happen now? At the same time, what I don’t want to get lost is that it doesn’t mean you can’t do good things for users and customers as well. But you have to solve this hurdle first. You don’t have a hope in making users lives better unless you can convince the internal obstacles that exist to sort of let down their guards and say, all right, let’s try this. I’m hearing you. I’m hearing you. So I always say business first, user second. Because if you don’t climb the first hurdle, it doesn’t matter. It’s like an episode of The Walking Dead. Okay if you don’t survive, you don’t avoid getting eaten by zombies. Nothing else you do really matters too much, okay? It’s the same kind of thing. So you got to get personal. You got to get real, and you got to be honest. Sometimes those are hard conversations, but everybody is dealing with fear. Everybody’s dealing with uncertainty.
Joe Natoli
Right?
Joe Natoli
So it’s always personal, and it needs to be real. It needs to be honest. You got to get to what’s really going on here.
Joe Natoli
Awesome.
Zack
Be real.
Joe Natoli
Absolutely.
Zack
Work with people, because there are people who run these things.
Joe Natoli
That’s right.
Zack
Awesome. If folks want to hear more what you have to say, check out your courses, hire any of that stuff. How do people find you? How should they get yeah.
Joe Natoli
So my public website is Givegoodux.com. Lots of free stuff there, particularly in the resources section. There’s information on my consulting and coaching services there for courses. It’s the UX 365 Academy, which is at learn givegoodux.com. And that is, like I said, it’s an alternative to boot camps. It’s a fraction of the cost. Okay. It’s a full year for either $168 or $228 for the 228 package. You get a monthly group VIP session with me where we work through whatever it is that you got going on.
Joe Natoli
Okay.
Joe Natoli
The entire point of this was to make education affordable, practical, meaningful for people who can’t afford 3000 or 5000 or 15,000 or 20,000. All right. I felt like there had to be an alternative, and we beta for a year, and I was like, if we could do this and not take a bath, then I want to keep doing it. So, thankfully it worked, and that’s going strong. So I encourage people to check that out. I’m always on LinkedIn. I’m always on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called. I have a hard time saying that out loud. So stupid. But I’m always sharing things whether anyone wants to hear them or not on social media. And folks are more than welcome to contact me. I can’t promise you you’ll get a timely response, but I am one of those people who reads and responds to every single message they get, because you get real.
Joe Natoli
I try. Awesome.
Zack
Joe, really appreciate you taking the time, having the conversation. I enjoyed it. Same folks are going to get a lot out of it. I hope they did. Just want to say thank you again for jumping on and having a chat.
Joe Natoli
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Zack
Absolutely. All right, everybody, we’ll see you next time.