In this episode of Writers in Tech, we're thrilled to have UX legend Jared Spool back on the show. Here's what you can expect to learn: The critical role of strategic UX research and why skipping it is like guessing directions in an unfamiliar city. The potential financial losses that can result from poor UX, illustrated by a real-life example of a company that lost significant revenue due to a poorly worded button. The importance of making organizations human-centered and how every decision within an organization impacts the user's experience. Insights on when to hire full-time UX professionals versus contractors, depending on whether UX is at the core of the business. Don't miss out on this insightful conversation with Jared, who is passionate about influencing organizations to be more human-centered.
Join our free UX writing course:
https://course.uxwritinghub.com/free_course
Follow Jared Spool
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/
Your host, as always, is me, Yuval Keshtcher.
00:00
Speaker 1
Once you remove quality as a requirement, you can make everything really cheap. So if the goal is to do this as cheaply as possible, then get rid of quality. If you want quality well, now you're talking about, well, what does quality mean? And if quality means making sure you use the right words, you got to do the research so you have the quality you this is Writers Intact, a podcast where today's top content strategists, UX writers and content designers share their well kept industry secrets.
00:40
Speaker 2
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Writers in Tech. Today I'm very excited because we have here a guest for the second time. We had him in 2019, and he's back on the pod. It's a very exciting time for me. I'm always excited to have Jared's Pool here with me. In my opinion, a legend in the field of user experience. I've been following his work since I started. This person was in charge of designing the keyboard, right? Like part of the keyboard?
01:12
Speaker 1
Part of the keyboard, part of the keyboard. The page up, page down, home end, insert, delete. If you have those keys on your keyboard, I was in charge of them. Someone had to do it. I was the kid in the room. Nobody else wanted to work on it.
01:30
Speaker 2
And I'm very happy to have you in the podcast. How are you?
01:33
Speaker 1
I'm fine. This is my first time as a second time guest on your podcast.
01:38
Speaker 2
Oh, on my podcast?
01:40
Speaker 1
Yes.
01:40
Speaker 2
Have you been a second time guest on another podcast?
01:43
Speaker 1
I have, but I'm honored to be to have my first time at being your second time.
01:49
Speaker 2
Thank you. I'm honored as well. I'm honored as well. What's on your plate these days, by the way?
01:53
Speaker 1
These days I'm focused on UX strategy, how we influence organizations to make them human centered. I'm focused on strategic UX research and on crafting UX metrics. So this is all my work. I don't do day to day UX work anymore. I don't figure out where buttons go or what the flow of an app should be. My work is, how do we show everybody in the organization that pretty much every decision they make affects the user's experience? And because it all affects the user's experience, they're basically designing the UX. So how do we help them understand that maybe they should do some research just like the rest of us, to figure out whether the UX they're creating is a good UX, that sort of thing.
02:52
Speaker 2
That's interesting, because for me, lately, it's really difficult to convince clients, people, companies to invest in the UX research. And we know that the most important thing that you need to do is to invest in your research. That most of the work, at least for the UX writer, in order for me to know which kind of word should I use, most of my work would be research to understand. Wait, do I going to call it right now. We had this discussion today in our team. Are we going to call this specific tab a marketplace or are we going to call it Explore? And we just need to do massive research to our customer base, to our customer success team, talk to people, online research and so on. And a lot of times companies do not agree with this. So how do you convince them to do so?
03:40
Speaker 1
Well, sometimes you can't. And sometimes I wonder why we're giving them the choice, right? There are other things that we don't give them the choice. If they hire developers, the developers don't say, hey, do you also want us to do QA or do you want to skip that this time? Right? The developers just say no. If you hire us, part of what you hire us to do is also to make sure that the code that we write actually works. So that's just in the budget. I mean, that's just it. And it's not something we can take out. One way to talk about it is that the absence of research has a technical name. When we don't do research, there's a technical name for that, and the technical name is guessing. So if we're not doing research, we're guessing. If the tab says marketplace, that's a guess.
04:37
Speaker 1
Could be a good guess, could be a bad guess. The problem is we don't know. And it's sort of like, let's say one night you fly into a city you've never been into before. The next day you have to go to a really important meeting, and it's really important you get there on time. Let's say it's a wedding, and let's say it's your wedding, right? So it's really important that you're there on time. So one way to get from the hotel to the place the wedding is at when you don't know the city at all, is to just get in a car and drive in a direction because it just feels like the right direction. And you just drive for a while and then you realize this isn't feeling right anymore. So you take a turn, you go to the left, and you drive in that direction for a while until it doesn't feel right anymore.
05:36
Speaker 1
And then you take another turn that feels more right. Maybe I should turn right this time. And you go in that direction for a while until it doesn't feel right anymore. What are the chances you're going to get to the wedding on time, right? You're just going the whole way on gut feel without knowing anything about the city, right? A smart person would get a map or they'd do a practice run the night before, or they'd use a tool that gave them turn by turn directions. They wouldn't just drive based on feel. They would actually use research to get there. And so you're taking a bet that marketplace is the right term. What if it's the wrong term? What are all the things that could go wrong if marketplace was the wrong term? And what should we do to prevent that? And the answer always comes back to, well, we should probably do some research, we should probably get some upfront information.
06:39
Speaker 1
And frankly, if you want to hire me to do your UX writing and you don't want to make sure that the writing that I'm doing is the right writing, then maybe I'm the wrong person to hire. Just go use chat GPT. I mean, it's going to be wrong as much as I will be, so go for it. Maybe that's the purpose of Chat GPT, right, is be the thing for clients who don't want to pay for research.
07:14
Speaker 2
I know some people that try to use this tool to amplify their research methodology. Like maybe they could say draft my personas for this specific tool.
07:27
Speaker 1
Why not? Again, just go into your phone and press the middle suggestion on every word and draft your personas. That way it's the same tool. You can charge a lot of money for that. I mean, people write poetry that way and then they sell them as NFTs, which is last year's Chat GPT.
07:49
Speaker 2
That's true. At least we're not in the crypto coins s*** coins phase anymore.
07:56
Speaker 1
Well, I think that's the thing, right, is to get AI based crypto coins. I think that's the ultimate of where we're going in this universe, in the virtual reality. We have to do this in the metaverse. So we have metaverse crypto coins that are AI based.
08:13
Speaker 2
You did said something. Okay, so you just don't leave them choice because we need to invest in research. Just like they don't doubt the fact that developers need to do their QA. And I like that.
08:27
Speaker 1
I mean, if they're trying to save money, they should cut out all the QA. It's really expensive and once you remove quality as a requirement, everything gets cheaper. I mean, why are they hiring a writer? Writers are expensive, right? They should just pick any random person who will work for almost no money and get them to write it. Once you remove quality as a requirement, you can make everything really cheap. So if the goal is to do this as cheaply as possible, then get rid of quality. If you want quality. Well, now you're talking about well, what does quality mean? And if quality means making sure you use the right words, you got to do the research so you have the quality. There's no escaping this. I can buy a poor quality car much cheaper than I can buy a good quality car. But the question is, where is the line where the car goes from usable to unusable?
09:31
Speaker 1
Because I can get really cheap but not have a usable car if it only starts one time out of every five times I try to start it. If I can only take one trip out of five and four trips out of five, it just sits dead in my driveway then. Is that worth it? I mean, it only cost a small amount of money. It was a really good deal. Every so often it bursts into flames. Okay. But it was really a good price.
09:59
Speaker 2
Is there some tactic to like, for me, I have my own personal tactic, which is just I charge more for the design aspect, and the client almost don't know about how much time was invested, in fact, in research. I don't know if it's a smart tactic, by the way. It might be a stupid tactic.
10:17
Speaker 1
I think it's a great tactic. I don't think it should be unbundled. It's like saying you're not allowed to use any verbs. I want to pay you to write. But is it cheaper if we don't use verbs? I guess, much less words I have to write. But it's like the car bursting into flames. It's not going to do the job. Sometimes you need a verb. Do you charge different for verbs than you charge for nouns? I mean, they're all in the same thing. You're going to pay one price, you're going to get all the words, and you're going to pay one price, you're going to get all the right words because we're going to do the research. I think that's how it should be done. I think the problem is that there are people out there who are willing to lower their price to get the job and skip the research.
11:10
Speaker 1
And basically you're paying them to gamble, right? You're paying them to maybe they're right. Maybe they're as good as doing the research, but maybe they're not. And how will you tell?
11:22
Speaker 2
So now I have this client, and they're interested working with me for my Eurek services. We have many different people in the audience right now. There were a lot of layoffs lately, a lot of people that are looking for different clients, working with different clients, looking for a job. And how can I prove the value of the return of investment for my future clients, for example, of my UX work, or of any UX work? Basically, this one is, and it's take me back to one of your articles from almost 15 years ago now, a change of a button. And this is one of the articles that I refer to almost all the time when people talk to me about the business of UX writing, how this small change in the button increased this revenue for this business by 6%. I think it was $300 million in that post.
12:19
Speaker 2
I don't want to dive into the numbers, but there are a lot of famous examples like that. But most of the time, it's not as clear as, okay, you just change this button and voila, you have increasing conversions. Most of the time, it's more than that. It's, like, changed years of flow and improved onboarding to reduce churn and to increase retention. And this is stuff that you can figure out only like one year after the product was actually delivered. So any tactics, tips to measure the return of investment of good UX work?
12:52
Speaker 1
Sure. So here's the thing about that article that people get wrong, right? So I wrote that article back in 2009. The research behind it was done a few years earlier. So it's 15 years old now, and people read that article and say, oh, one word changed. And suddenly the company made 300 million more dollars, which for them was a 25% increase in revenue from that one word. So it seems like a good deal, right? But when you read the article, what you find out that it was about was that they had the wrong word in the first place. And the $300 million that they earned by changing that button was where customers were from, customers who were trying to buy from them. And because they didn't have the right words on the button, the customers couldn't complete their transaction, so they went someplace else or they didn't buy at all.
13:55
Speaker 1
So it was already money that they were supposed to be getting, and the button, the wrong button was costing them that money. And that's the real secret here, which is the money is already there. You just have to know where to look. And where we looked were all the failed transactions because people couldn't remember their password. And once we figured it out that, well, if you just had a button that said guest checkout, people who can't remember their password can still buy from you, then suddenly all that money that was supposed to come to the company started coming to the company, and that was the $300 million. It was not. There was a brand new market out there that they suddenly opened up. It was the company's. UX was literally preventing 25% of their revenue. All right, if you do the math, it's actually 20%.
14:57
Speaker 1
It was preventing it's. They increased and do the nature of how percentages work. One fifth of their income was being blocked because they had the wrong button or they didn't have the right button, depending on how you look at it. And does a doughnut have a hole? I mean, that's the question, right? You look at a doughnut, there's a hole in the middle. Does it have a hole? No, the hole is missing. That's the whole point of a hole. So that's the problem, is that the money was already there, they were just turning it away. So the return on investment for UX often is, how do we stop these expenses that are caused by poor UX? Everything we put out has a user experience. So we start there. You go to a client and they ask you, can you help me with the user experience?
15:57
Speaker 1
You say, you already have a user experience. It already exists. What we want to do is make a better user experience. And so the user experience that you have is potentially costing you money because people can't do what you want them to do. You spend all this money bringing leads to your website and then you turn them away because you don't let them actually finish the transaction and that's the place to start. You spend all this money trying to get people to use your product and then you make it so complicated that you have to pay another team of people to support it. I have a client that has, that makes this software that helps really large companies, the Fortune 1000 companies, the thousand biggest companies in the world. That's who their customers are. And it's a tool for public relations and market monitoring. It basically monitors everything said about your company.
17:09
Speaker 1
And so these big companies pay a lot of money to collect up and analyze what people are saying about their company. And people love the product. They love what it tells them. They spend a tremendous amount of money. I mean, annual license for this product is often in the mid six digits. So it's a really expensive product that people pay for. And when you buy the highest tier product and you pay the most money for the license, they give you an on staff Customer Success Team Member. And that Customer Success Team Member is dedicated to your Fortune Five 1500 company because that's who's paying for the top tier. It's dedicated to your company to basically make sure that the product is working perfectly to help you analyze the reports to get when you have a new question about is our CEO's relationship with Elon Musk hurting the company?
18:15
Speaker 1
They can run that report really quickly, right? So it has all this capability. But in order to use all that capability, you need this dedicated person. And the company has 300 Customer Success people that they basically give to these high end clients. And these people work on the client site. They work only for that client. They're basically a contract employee for that client. But that contract is included in the price of this contract. And that's fine because these people are paying a lot of money to get access to this software. But those people's job, that Customer Success Team, they exist only because the product's not usable enough for the customer to use it themselves. Customer can't install it themselves. If they try to install it, they'll get it wrong. The customer can't create the reports. If they try to create the reports, they'll get it wrong.
19:11
Speaker 1
The customer can't read the reports. If they try to read the reports without a Customer Success Person, they'll get it wrong. So this person is there purely because the UX of the product is really bad. Now let's think about that for a second. The average salary, because it's an American company, the average salary when you add in all the benefits and the equipment and the cost of living near the customer, which the company pays for. You're paying them about $200,000 a year, and there's 300 of these people. So that's $60 million that you are spending on poor UX. So you're already spending $60 million on UX. All we're suggesting you do is to take a couple of million dollars of those and make it easier to install, make it easier to create the reports, make it easier to run the report. How much would that cost?
20:03
Speaker 1
Would it cost $60 million? Oh, here's what I want to tell you about this, right? So I'm talking to the company, I'm talking to my contacts of the company, and they're telling me, well, it's 300 people this year, but next year, the Customer Success Team is creating budget to hire another 20%. They want another 60 people, right? So that's an extra $12 million. So next year, it's going to cost $72 million. So this year and next year, they're going to pay $132,000,000 to keep the UX really poor. How much would it cost to make the UX better? I guarantee you it won't cost $132,000,000. So that's how I talk about UX.
20:44
Speaker 2
That's a very good way to tackle that. Your percentage game is good also. Like, you're very sharp on the numbers.
20:51
Speaker 1
Well, it's practice. You just practice math. It's a learned skill. Nobody's born knowing how to do math. You just learn it, and when you practice it, you get better at it. Here's the thing. There's something called the law of large numbers, and the law of large numbers says that a small percentage of large numbers is still a large number. I think we talked about this last time I was on the show, and so if you're spending a lot of money on poor UX, for a small percentage, you can make a lot of money back.
21:28
Speaker 2
That's a very great point of view. I love that.
21:31
Speaker 1
So the sum of all of this is that companies are already spending money on UX. You don't have to convince them to do that. You have to convince them to spend money on better UX. And that's a different discussion. So first you have to point out all the things they're spending money on that get them to the poor UX that they have, and then ask the question, is that really where you want to spend your money?
21:57
Speaker 2
A lot of times, they don't even know. Okay, so should I hire, like, junior UX designer right now? Should I have a consultancy? What would be the best way to go here if they're not sure right now what exactly they should do?
22:12
Speaker 1
So I don't have a plumber living in my house, right? But the thing is that when I need a plumber, it's really expensive to hire an outside plumber. If I had one here, I wouldn't have to pay them to actually fix the plumbing. They'd already be here, and they just fix it. But I don't have plumbing issues very often. So it would be more expensive for me to just build a room and ask a plumber to live there than it would be to just hire a plumber when I need one. But down the street from me is this giant building where they process all the water for the town that I live in. And every time they have a plumbing issue, they don't hire an outside plumber. They have a staff of people whose job it is to know how to do plumbing, who fix all the plumbing that the town needs in order to do the work.
23:14
Speaker 1
I will tell you this. So the town I live in is 300 years old and some of the plumbing is hundreds of years old. And the pipes in the street, the water mains when they were put in were eight inch water mains. That means that from the diameter of the pipe is eight inches. And you can only get so much water to go through an eight inch water main. Plus they're made out of iron. And one of the things that have been happening over the last hundred years is that the water has been getting more and more red. So people have in their house brown water and they don't like it. So the town has been spending millions of dollars to hire people to change the iron, eight inch mains to steel or brass, I'm not 100% sure, but some other material and two foot mains, 24 inches, two thirds of a meter, basically, right?
24:19
Speaker 1
So it's a dramatic increase of the amount of water and it cleans it up. And they only need to do that once every hundred years. So they don't have those people on staff to do that. They hire contractors to change that out. And then as soon as all the mains have been changed, the contractors are going to go work somewhere else. They're not going to work for the town anymore. So you have to look at it that way. Is this the core of your business? Is this the thing? Right? And so for so many companies, they used to make things. They used to make things. One of my clients makes hardware. They make mass spectrometers which are just scientific equipments that looks at a sample and tells you what chemicals are in the sample. And the company used to just be electronics engineers, people who built the electronics to go into a box that would do this analysis.
25:19
Speaker 1
But over the years, the electronics became computers and they needed people to program the computers. And the computers started to need a user interface. So they needed people to program a user interface. And then the devices started to get more and more capabilities. And as they got more and more capabilities, they had to switch from just thinking about a user interface to actually thinking about a user experience. And now the devices all talk to each other so they need network engineers and people who understand network user experiences. And the thing is, that's not going away. So the first time they did that, they hired contractors. But when they realized, that's our future. We're going to be working on user experiences and networks for the rest of our forever, we're never taking that out of our machines. Maybe we should just hire full time people. That's the equation, right?
26:17
Speaker 1
Is this going to be the core of your business? If it's going to be the core of your business, then yeah, you should probably hire somebody. If it's a one time thing, you're replacing all the pipes and once you replace them, you won't need people to do that anymore. You hire contractors.
26:32
Speaker 2
But how do you know? I'm from Israel, right? So in Israel you have a lot of people in companies, like with ego, and they know everything, obviously. And they have their CPO. Or like, the Lady League. I know the best. I'm never going to hire someone from outside of my organization to tell me what to do about the user experience of my product. That's a very Israeli thing to do.
26:57
Speaker 1
The nice thing about Israelis is how confident they are that they know everything. It's one of my favorite things about Israelis is that they're just born with extra confidence.
27:12
Speaker 2
What can you do? Yes.
27:16
Speaker 1
I mean, they learn, right? I mean, all you have to do is start adding up how much you're spending on contractors. And keep in mind, there's a difference between contractors and consultants. And the way I like to think of it is are you hiring somebody for their hands? Are you hiring somebody for their brains? Right. So let's go back to my town's problem, where they're replacing all the water pipes. They don't need someone to figure out what's the right pipe and where's the right place to put it and what's the right way to connect these pipes up. That's already been figured out. They know all that stuff. They only had to figure it out once. And maybe their internal people already knew. Maybe they had to hire a special type of consultant to come in and say, here's the best way to put these pipes in the ground.
28:09
Speaker 1
But once they've figured that out, they hire different people to actually put the pipes in the ground. Because those people are just going to do the same thing over and over again for every meter of pipe they put in. So those people who put the pipes in the ground, they're hiring for their hands. They have 20 pipe to put in the ground and they're going to put it in 1 meter at a time. And they're just going to hire an army of people who are basically doing the same thing, 1 meter at a time until all 20 km are done. That's hiring for hands. But the person who figured out what pipe how to do it, what the process should be, what the best price should be, what the best route should be, what order to do it in. That's a consultant. They hired that person for their brains.
28:58
Speaker 1
And so you need to first ask, is someone hiring you for your hands or for your brains? When you talk about UX writing, is someone doing the content strategy? Is someone figuring out, what should we write? What are the best words to use that you're hiring for brains? If someone is there saying, okay, we know what words to use. We just have 20,000 help pages. We have to write that you're hiring for hands.
29:25
Speaker 2
Do you have some kind of process that you could share? And that once you start a discussion with these type of clients, what will be the best way to onboard them? Let's say that they hired me for the brains.
29:41
Speaker 1
Yeah. I start with research.
29:44
Speaker 2
Research about them. Yeah.
29:47
Speaker 1
What do they need? They're my user. Right. So who are they? Why are we having a conversation? What's going on? One of the tricks that I use and if you hire me to come in or actually just call me up and say, hey, we might want you to come do this thing, can you come explain to us what you would do? I'll get on the phone, and we'll have a conversation. Actually, I never get on the phone. It's all zoom, but I'll get on the zoom, and we'll have a conversation. And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, I'll say something like, talking to you here, it's pretty clear you know what you're trying to do, so why do you need me? I'm not sure I'm going to be hopeful. Right? You've got this far. You figured this out. You have done these projects, and they seem to have worked out okay.
30:36
Speaker 1
Things are not completely a disaster. Just keep going. What do you need me for? And it's at that moment that practically everybody says, oh, no. And this is true even of Israelis. It's at that moment that everybody says, oh, no, we need you. I said, well, what do you need me for? And then they start listing out all the things they feel like they don't have enough confidence to do themselves. And then I can make an assessment. Is it that I just need to give them the confidence so they can do it themselves, or do I need to do it for them? That's the conversation, right? The conversation is really about how do we decide whether this is something that they should just make part of their staff, right. If they're going to be creating an application so that people can use their products better.
31:30
Speaker 1
I'm thinking of my Mass Spectrometer client, right? That they're building some apps that run on the web that connect all these devices to all this data collection tools and all this analysis tools, and they're giving people all of these tools. To do all this analysis, but it's all web based, right? So you run this device, it's an Internet of Things device, and it uploads the data to the web, adds it to all the data you've ever uploaded before, and it does all this analysis. And if you're doing that and that's a big part of your selling, that's a big part of what makes your product special. You're in the software business, you're not in the device business. I mean, you're still in the device business, but you're also in the software business. You want to keep paying a consultant ten times your normal rate, ten times what it would cost you to hire your own software engineers.
32:25
Speaker 1
You go do that. But it's going to be a very expensive way to maintain this thing that's core to your business for the rest of your career there. So maybe you ought to think about how to build a team internally that can just do all the things so that you don't have to train a consultant in mass spectromety. And how it works every time you decide you want someone different or your consultant goes off and joins one of their other clients company or retires or whatever.
32:56
Speaker 2
And I wanted to ask if do you see right now 2023, there are a lot of discussions, different technologies, we already talked about the different technologies that exist, but let's talk practically. Do you see any common trends among your clients and their needs when they talk to you and they have their lack of confidence in different areas. So is there like a common trend? I could say on myself that I see specifically in the UX writing field a very common trend when it comes to localization. So clients that want to penetrate into different markets and they need to localize their experiences to different languages, basically, which is a challenge, and also accessibility, which is creating accessible user experience, writing for screen readers, alt text and all of those. Obviously AI is something, but it's not like a trend. It's just like a tool that many people are talking about right now.
33:58
Speaker 2
So is there any trend that you see on your end?
34:01
Speaker 1
Well, I could definitely see that the globalization thing is a big deal, right. I'm not convinced that localizing is the best long term strategy.
34:11
Speaker 2
Why?
34:12
Speaker 1
So we're going to make this podcast really long because I have to tell another story. The years ago, I was working with a team, a software team, and I was working with the writers. Part of the team were the writers on the team. So they were in charge of everything that was written. And this was a big enterprise app that people paid. They paid millions of dollars for the license for the app and it ran their whole company, everything about their company, from payroll to inventory to customer sales, ran the whole thing. So they paid millions of dollars for the app and then they paid millions of dollars to have a different company come in and customize the app for their organization. And it took years to launch this product. And if there was an upgrade, it took years to do the upgrades. And because there was so much customization, that would have to be upgraded.
35:13
Speaker 1
And so were working with the teams to try and figure out how could we speed that up. And the company was based in Europe and all the software developers were German. And went to one of their customers who had just launched. They'd been working on this thing for a year and they have a term called Go Live. Go Live is the day you basically reboot your company. And now the whole company is running on this operating system, which is this app. And they had just gone live like three months before our visit. And we spent all day at this company, a major electronics manufacturer.
35:55
Speaker 2
What year are we talking about? Was it like a long time ago?
35:58
Speaker 1
Or like I want to say this was 2010 somewhere in there.
36:04
Speaker 2
Okay?
36:04
Speaker 1
But because it takes years to implement an upgrade, this product hasn't changed a lot since then. So they're only on version eight, and I think were looking at version four. So that industry moves very slowly. But went to visit these folks. So this was before the days of UX writers. This was technical writers, where the people who but they're doing the same work, it's the same thing. They're creating all the text on the screen, they're creating all the manuals, they're creating all the online documents, the knowledge bases, everything. So we go to this electronics manufacturer and we meet with the team who's been part of the Go Live thing. So this is the team at the manufacturer whose job it is to get the rest of the company to use this thing. And while we're talking to them, they're all in a conference room, we're in a conference room, so there's like 20 of us in this room and we're talking and somebody makes a joke.
37:08
Speaker 1
And the joke is when you get to German you get too far, you've gone too far. When you get to German you've gone too far. And everybody in their company laughs and I had no idea what they meant by that. But then we break up into small research groups, teams, and all of the folks from the company that makes the software, all the folks and me go off in different directions in the company and we sit with people and we watch them do their work for the day. And one of the people that I got to sit and watch do their work is a guy whose job it is. He works in the accounting department and his job is to create new reports for just all the things that the product doesn't do automatically out of the box. He's the one who creates reports. So when they want to, for instance, track all the electronics that have been returned, he was writing a report that day to track all the electronics that have been returned so they can keep track of how much money of the things they sold are getting returned and they have to refund the money, right?
38:18
Speaker 1
So they're tracking that, and he's showing us how he writes reports. And one of the things that he's showing us is that the report writer that he has to uses internal variables to figure out what to put into the reports. He uses internal variables from the database that this product has underlying it. And all those variables are German words. They're not English words. Even though this company has a large American presence, the original code is all written in Germany. So the database, the fields for the database are all German field names. So he has to learn the German for all of the business things that this thing tracks. But then he's looking something up, and he goes into the knowledge base, and it's basically a wiki. And he clicks on a link and he reads a page, and he gets a third of the way into the page.
39:12
Speaker 1
And he clicks on a link, and he goes to another page and he reads that. He goes two thirds in the page. He clicks on a link, another page. And then, like the fifth time he clicked to find out what he needed to know to create this report, he gets a page in the wiki that's all German. And he turns to me and he says, see, when you get to German, you've gone too far. He hits the back button, and he tries to figure it out another way. And that was the first time I had ever seen localization from the user side. I had always experienced localization of American companies being the typical sort of American colonialist that we are sending our code everywhere else, instead of being on the receiving end of a German company sending their code to us. And they had gotten four layers localized, but the fifth layer, they didn't get localized.
40:11
Speaker 1
And that's where it started to run into problems. And so my question then is about localization is versus globalization, which is what if that German company actually had the American company build the thing from scratch? It's the same thing, but it's now an American thing. And so it's all in English. So all the variable names are in English, all the knowledge bases in English. Would that produce a better experience than if they try to translate and they don't get the whole thing translated? Would it be cheaper? Right? So you can get 80% translated, but that last 20% means that one out of every five pages is German and not English. How much would it cost to get that last 20% translated versus just doing it in English from the beginning? And that's the big question I have. Sometimes you can get away with just a thin veneer of translation and you're good.
41:23
Speaker 1
But in this case, they didn't get away with that, and it was a constant hurdle, so much so that they made a joke out of it and everybody laughed because jokes are true.
41:35
Speaker 2
That's an interesting take.
41:39
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, we have to question what we do to ask the question, are we doing it because it's the way we always did it, or are we doing it because it's the right thing to do? And of course, without the research, they would have never known.
41:54
Speaker 2
So following up on that, I will say, though, that the cost of creating this app from scratch in English would be tremendous. Right?
42:05
Speaker 1
I don't know. They already built it in German, so it's not like they have to invent it again. Right. So a lot of the work has already been done. Most of what they paid for the first time was figuring out what the app should do to begin with. There is no inexpensive way to do it. The question is which one is more expensive? Is it more expensive to try to translate 100%, or is it more expensive to build that 20% in English to begin with? And not just English, right. You got to build it in Hebrew, you got to build it in Thai. You got to build it in Japanese. But at that point, are you basically just rebuilding a thing you've already proven to work versus trying to translate something that was never really meant to be translated 100%? I don't have the answer to that question.
42:59
Speaker 1
Yeah.
43:00
Speaker 2
And I guess that the answer is also changing between different operations and companies. And it's one thing to see Netflix in different languages, and it's another thing to work in this very complicated dashboard in German only on its fifth layer. So, like, there are so many different.
43:17
Speaker 1
Use cases, but, you know, other industries deal with this. Right. Toyota has factories in the US because it was cheaper to make the car from scratch in the US than it was to build it in Japan and ship it to the US. So companies have dealt with this question before, and so the question is from our industry, what can we learn from that? Because there's something to that. Maybe you localize if you're supporting 140 languages, which these days is not uncommon. One of the teams that I've done a lot of hanging out with is the folks in US immigration, and we have immigrants come from 140 countries speaking more than 140 languages, because some countries have multiple dialects. If you're going to build an app to help immigrants come across the border, you've got to have it in a whole bunch of different languages. Then the question becomes, if you're going to support 140 different languages, maybe the top ten languages, they're your biggest markets.
44:26
Speaker 1
You build from scratch just like Toyota has factories in the US. And in Brazil, but maybe the smaller markets. You localize, right? And this is strategic user experience thinking because every decision the business makes is a user experience question. It affects the experience users have. The company decided to localize a product where every license is millions of dollars and they created a user experience problem. Would it be cheaper? How big is the US. Market for them? And would it be cheaper for them to just rebuild an existing app? In English there were a lot of.
45:16
Speaker 2
Layoffs for UX people lately. Do you think that it's because we just hired more than we needed and that's the reason for that? I don't expect you to know the answer, I just ask for your opinion.
45:30
Speaker 1
Well, I don't think there's more UX people than any other discipline. I think that there's been a lot of layoffs of developers and there have been a lot of layoffs of managers and there have been a lot of layoffs of product people. I think there's just been a lot of layoffs. And frankly, while there have been a lot of layoffs, there are way more people still working than layoffs in the United States. The unemployment rate is going down, right? So there are more people working today than ever. So it's not that the entire industry is weighing off, it's that some companies are weighing off. And when they're weighing off a lot of people. And that gets headlines. So they're weighing off 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people. And it's not 10,000 UX people. Those companies don't have 10,000 UX people. But when they're laying off 10,000 people, some large number of that because remember, small percentages of large numbers are still large numbers, right?
46:30
Speaker 1
So a small percentage of that is UX people, but it's still a large number of UX people. So we're seeing the headlines and we're seeing all these people saying, I was just laid off. And so there's a lot of noise about people being laid off, but most people are still working. Most people listening to this podcast are probably still working. And I'm sorry for the people who were laid off, but some of it I think, is companies were just hiring based on where they thought they were going and then they realized they weren't going there. I think the pandemic changed the direction for a lot of companies. I have several clients who had incredible business during the pandemic because people were at home and they were ordering food online and all these things were happening when people were locked in their houses that aren't happening anymore.
47:25
Speaker 1
And so they had these two banner year and they said, and look, oh, that's the future we're going to hire to accommodate this going forward, right? The decision of is this something we're going to do once and we should just use a contractor, or is this something that's going to be the core of our business for the rest of forever. So they went with the business rest of forever and then everybody went back to work and people aren't doing those things anymore, people aren't watching TV 10 hours a day anymore. And so now suddenly I was talking to somebody who's in the streaming business yesterday and it's like, yeah, nobody's streaming like they were two years ago, right? They're not constantly running kids movies all day long to babysit the kids because they're home with their kids. Now they're sending the kids to daycare and they don't have to run those movies all day long, so they're not paying for the subscriptions.
48:17
Speaker 1
Suddenly, boom, markets falling apart, right? So I think that's a lot of it. We've just had this sort of four years of Whiplash where went from working away from home to working at home to working away from home again. And that Whiplash is causing all of these changes. And I think if you look closely at the companies that are laying off, there are things that had banner days, their best business ever when everybody was at home. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And I think that Whiplash is causing this to happen. And then I also think that layoffs are viral. A big company lays people off. Companies are afraid to have layoffs because you get bad press, right? Oh my God, the company's not doing well, stock price goes down, maybe I should stop investing in this company. But once some other company does it's like, yeah, we see the same economic trends, we're going to lay off too.
49:17
Speaker 1
And then it becomes smart management. And now all these companies are doing smart management, right? Oh, we're laying off because the economics and so now the stock price is going up because of the layoffs, it's not going down. So they actually have incentive to lay people off that they didn't want to lay off before, but probably should have. So I think there's a virus that spreads in business where the stock markets are actually thinking it's a smart move to be conservative because we have inflation, we have a recession, yada, yada. Nobody wants to be the first one, but Elon Musk solved that. He was the first one and then everybody else was like and he was the first one not because it was good business, but because he's crazy. And so then everybody else decided that, okay, well if Elon's doing it, we're going to do it too.
50:10
Speaker 1
And now it's just noise, right? No one criticizes a big company for laying off 5000 people because some other big company just laid off 15,000 people. 5000 doesn't seem that big, it's just good.
50:23
Speaker 2
Very interesting take and very reassuring too. There's a lot of anxieties and concerns about where we're heading and there's a lot of layoffs. But looking at the numbers that you just said, 3D reassuring and just a.
50:38
Speaker 1
Numbers game every day, I go into LinkedIn, and I look at my feed, and as I read my feed, I look at all the job posts, and if they're UX related, I repost them. And here's the thing that I noticed. There are way more UX writer and content posts than I've ever seen before. The number of open jobs for writers and content specialists of different types content strategists, content designers is huge. Right. Percentage wise, much bigger percentage than it's ever been. Compared to researchers, compared to designers, compared to design management. Right. I've never seen this many writer or content posts before, and I'm reposting all of them. So you can go and you can look at my activity, and you can see them all, and I see that as really good. I mean, that, to me, feels like there are a lot of companies who really value the writing part of their business, and they're hiring.
51:40
Speaker 2
It's good, because we did work very hard in the past few years to promote the idea, and we talked in.
51:47
Speaker 1
Our last four buying it. I think you've done a good job. Thank you. And you know what? Your name is at the top of the list of people who know about this stuff. So I think you personally have done you should be recognized for having done a good job of making the market aware of this. There is a large UX writer community, and I see other people participating. But you have played an essential role in this. I think if no one is saying thank you, I will say it on their behalf, because you personally have really sort of flown this flag, and people are seeing it. People are realizing this is important.
52:23
Speaker 2
Thank you, Jared.
52:25
Speaker 1
Will that get me back for a third interview?
52:28
Speaker 2
You got it before.
52:30
Speaker 1
That okay, sir. I got to go actually do work. I'm sure you do, too.
52:37
Speaker 2
Thank you so much, Jared, and see you in the next episode. And thank you, everyone, for joining us for an episode of Renters in Tech. Thank you, Jared.
52:45
Speaker 1
You're welcome. It was fun. Thank you.