(Re)Defining What Design Means For You, Your Team & Company

, Catherine Madden at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/-xmVB9tsVvg

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions

[00:00:00] Catherine: Hi everybody. I've got a great session to start off today. For a bit of context, Chris Grant spoke with us previously while he was at King Games, and we've invited him back here because we felt his story was very interesting from the perspective of designers and people within any team, and growth, and what redesigning means on a personal basis, on a team basis and at a company level as well. Chris, how are you doing?

[00:00:30] Chris: Good, how are you, Catherine?

[00:00:31] Catherine: I'm great. This is exciting.

[00:00:33] Chris: Yeah, this is a lot of pressure to kick off this day, just you and I talking. I hope we live up to it.

[00:00:41] Catherine: Absolutely. Well, I'm not going to do much talking. I'm actually going to let you do the talking, because you're the person who's got something interesting to say. But no, I'm excited, because we've had a good conversation, and what you have to share is really great. You've recently started your role at Preply, and I want to talk about that, but before that, let's get stuck into King Games. You worked there for quite a long time, for six years, and you've seen a number of growth periods, Candy Crush and everything. Could you tell us what was your biggest lesson from your time there?

The biggest lesson from King

[00:01:21] Chris: That's a great question. First off, thank you for not asking me how you can get extra lives or how you can get free gold bars. That tends to be what people ask me when they find out that I worked at Candy Crush. By the way, to all my fellow King alumni and people still at King, I still play Candy Crush every day. I'm on level 1733 now, so that's a testament to a good product if I ever did see one.

[00:01:45] Biggest lesson. It was quite an interesting time over the six years, and I shared a little bit of what I learned last year at UXDX. Check the archives if you want to see what it was like to try to build research up from scratch, a different kind of player testing model. I'd have to say the biggest idea for me was, there's this song, they say "the hardest to learn was the least complicated." I went in thinking I knew what games were. I thought I knew what gamification was, and I thought I knew the role that games played and how hard it was to make games. Over six years, what I learned was I didn't know very much when I walked in the door.

[00:02:24] By the time I left, I had discovered a couple of really important things. One, entertainment products play a very, very important role in people's lives, and we ignore the lessons that we can learn from those entertainment products and from the importance that they play. I think most of the people out there watching right now aren't working in games. We're working on what we would affectionately call task-based design. I have to do something: I have to send money from my bank account, I have to drive somewhere, like Miguel was talking about with Volkswagen. You have a tendency maybe to think of games as something people just do for fun. Fun's a pretty important thing, and we all learned that a lot over the last couple of years. Without a certain distraction, without a certain amount of fun, life can be pretty hard, when speakeasies are happening through Zoom as opposed to the previous twenties, when they were happening in a bar somewhere behind a closed door. We need digital things to keep us going.

[00:03:24] First thing: games are really, really important in people's lives. The second thing is, we all tend to think about games and gamification the wrong way. We think about it as "I can just copy specific features from there." I've seen a lot, especially in the language world: "Let's do streaks, let's do counters." Honestly, gamification is a lot more profound. The definition is a lot simpler, but it's a lot harder to achieve. What gamification really is, is how do you make somebody enjoy something that they're doing, and that they're doing over and over again, without the pleasure of the payoff in the real world.

[00:04:05] A minute ago I talked about task-based apps and services and products. Well, when you have to send money somewhere, the pleasure comes when you send the money. When you have to drive somewhere, the pleasure comes when you arrive at your destination. Games don't have that. All games really have is the game itself. There's a power and a beauty and a deep creativity in what the folks in games do, at King or any other games company, especially casual games, so that they can create something that can give you the payoff in that world itself. It's one of the things that I look most forward to exploring now that I've moved out of games for a while and I'm in ed tech. How can we take that idea of giving that really big emotional payoff from the world of games and apply it outside of games, without just doing the cheap thing of copying, having dashboards and streaks and stuff like that?

[00:04:58] Catherine: Yeah, and I think it comes down to also doing what you love. An article popped up recently on Elon Musk's famous 120 hours a week, but the key piece there is that it doesn't feel like that, because if you're doing something you love, it's not work, and time and perception are very different.

Redefining what design means

[00:05:17] Catherine: Okay, could you explain for the audience a little bit more about what we discussed on this topic of redefining what design means for you? Could you explain more on that?

[00:05:31] Chris: Sure. I started as a web designer so long ago, honestly, I'm not going to say it on a call in front of hundreds of people, it's embarrassing. But let's say it was pre dot-com boom of the 2000s, so it was a long time ago.

[00:05:47] Yeah, exactly. I personally have been on a journey that I think in a lot of ways reflects the journey that design has been on. We've all seen it. It started famously, once upon a time, with Don Norman as the first user experience designer, and slowly but surely what we've seen is, as these digital products have become a bigger part of our lives, people have started to figure out that design isn't just window dressing. It's not just putting the screens together. It's actually fitting all the pieces together. We like to use the quote a lot: you can design things the right way, but first you've got to make sure you're designing the right thing.

[00:06:33] To me, it's still, what's this, 2021 now? I've been doing this for a long time, and yet I still feel people defaulting back to seeing design as this tactical arm. There's a cool thing when you start to see design as asking bigger questions. Design and research, when you partner them together, might be able to ask the big questions, but it comes down to everybody in the organization, everybody in the company, answering those big questions.

[00:07:09] When we were prepping for this, I mentioned to you that I always get the question, whether it's in my classes or in things like this: what is user experience, and what is a good user experience? I default to a quote I read a long time ago, that a good user experience is useful: it does something that I need done, I find it useful. It's usable: I'm able to use this thing, and I'm able to use it from the beginning, but as I use it more and more, I get better at it. And then it's desirable: it makes me feel good doing that.

[00:07:41] It starts with something very, very basic, which is: do people actually want this product? That very first thing doesn't have a lot to do with how it looks or how it feels. It's more about what it actually does. In a lot of ways, I feel like that's the goal right now for design, to redefine itself as the group that, when partnered with research, asks those questions, and then to set everybody's brain in the organization on the task of trying to answer those questions together.

Why Preply

[00:08:18] Catherine: Yeah, and that's a tall ask, to get all of the organization aligned to do that. In consideration of that, and there are such big shoes to fill in terms of your expectations, why did you join Preply?

[00:08:37] Chris: Well, first off, from a really personal standpoint, I have a real soft spot when it comes to ed tech. The years are starting to add up, so 10 years ago I worked in a startup. We were way ahead of our time. It was called "Sklipo" [?], and we built an online classroom. We built it in Flash, which was really cool back in the day, and we built a course management system. Everyone that used the product liked it a lot, but we weren't able to get the kind of traction we needed to grow, and then the massive online courses started to emerge and I changed industries. But there was always a part of me that wanted to go back.

[00:09:10] I really liked this idea of leveraging all the cool things that happened with digital. Our ability to connect millions, now it's billions, of people with certain social networks out there. The ability to connect people can create these amazing digital economies of scale, and it can allow us to create these amazing digital leverages. That's hard to say, digital leverages. Somebody can be in one place and they can perform a task, they can help you do something somewhere else. We've seen it used for a lot of different things. I can press a button and a car can come. I can write a post and everybody can read it. To me, the final frontier is I can talk to anybody anywhere and I can learn from them.

[00:09:51] One of the coolest things, and this is why Preply is focused on languages right now, is it sounds magic, the way it did when you pressed a button and a car would come, to say you can learn Spanish from somebody who's sitting in downtown Distrito Federal, Mexico, right now. That's pretty cool. I love the idea of being able to solve these big problems. What does it take to make learning online as good as, hopefully better than, learning offline? And to do it in a place where, in the end, it's like a superpower. When you teach someone something, you're both better for it. I used to be a teacher for a long time, and I still do it occasionally. I learned almost as much as my students by being forced to think about all the stuff I had done over the course of my career. And I hope, at least that's what the reviews say at the end, that they were able to learn something as well. For me it's a really powerful place.

[00:10:45] Also, Preply was one of these companies, like a lot of companies, King had a certain bump as well, with all the stuff that's happened in the world and us being forced to communicate more online. It probably was one of the places that was able to benefit from that. It's a company that's been around for almost a decade now, so there have been a lot of people that put a lot of time in to create the boat and the sail, so that when the breeze came of everyone being online, it took advantage of that. But one thing that happens in these hypergrowth scenarios is it can become very easy to focus on just scaling and building more things, and not really reflecting as much as we need to on why people are doing this and what this means in the world that we're in right now.

[00:11:27] That's where the second part of the answer to the question "why Preply" comes in. I saw this as a great place to go and apply this work that I've been trying to do for the last, wow, almost 10 years now, which is: take design, take research, unite them, get them to ask the questions, and then focus the entire org on answering those questions. I've actually affectionately redubbed product design and research as "product detectives," because I think it's so important that we spend our time asking and answering those questions.

[00:12:00] In fact, I'm going to go ahead and do a shout-out to "Sanji Villa" [?], who gave me this quote back in the day. He told me, and I love this, all of user-centered design really comes down to The Karate Kid. I'll pause for effect here, because there's no audience. The Karate Kid and user-centered design, what does that mean? Well, you have to gather insights and apply insights. Gather insights and apply insights. If you're doing it the wrong way, if you're just building things because you think you should, or because the competitors are doing it, and then you're going out to find insights, "Hey, what do people think about it?", you're not doing it right. You've got to start with gathering: learn from people that are using your product or could be using it, and then apply them. There's going to be a GIF on you after this on social. Gather and apply [?].

[00:12:45] Catherine: I really love all of that. I'm just thinking through what you said there on educating and teaching people. It can be applied to almost anything that you're doing. If you can understand how to teach somebody who doesn't know what you're talking about, and you think about how you are going to actually teach this to a person who doesn't understand, and what you need to change in your approach, and then put it into context, I think that can be applied in every kind of scenario, whether it be trying to get stakeholder buy-in or team engagement. It's a really good point.

[00:13:24] I'll just pause for a moment to say to the audience, now is your time to come in with questions. I'll be listening here on chat, so please do ask them.

Putting the user at the center

[00:13:35] Catherine: I'll move on now to how do you put design truly at the heart of the company? You talked earlier about teams, and that usability, desirability and alignment. How do you do that company-wide?

[00:13:52] Chris: I was lucky enough in 2018 to go to BJ Fogg's boot camp in California. He's the author of the Fogg Behavior Model. I won't beat the pandemic drum too much, but it just seems like a lifetime ago that you could just get on a plane and easily fly somewhere and spend three days with people talking about these topics. But it was very cool, and one of the things that he told us was: when you want to change something, first start with prompts. Are people getting the message that they should do this new behavior? Then you can focus on ability, making it easier. And finally you can focus on motivation.

[00:14:24] Last year when I was at UXDX, I talked a lot about prompts and about ability. I talked about how you can make it easier for people to get their stuff tested and learn from the insights, how you can remind them, how you can make it more exciting. I didn't really get into motivation. Your question leads me to the final stage in that. If you want to get an org really user-centered, you've got to start focusing on motivation at some point. There's only so much you can get from prompts, reminding people, and ability, making it easier. Eventually you've got to get here.

[00:14:57] And this is the funny thing. You said, how do you put design in the center? It's actually not design that you put in the center. It's going to sound very zen here, I hate to be the guy who took a mindfulness course, but the center is hollow. What you're really trying to do is not put design in the center. You're trying to put the user at the center. And the thing is, design is in a special place in order to do that, because, again, when we talk about design plus research combined, we spend more of our time thinking about and talking to the users directly than almost anybody else. What we need to do is take all of the emotional salience, all the power of the empathy that designers and researchers tend to have.

[00:15:35] I'm not saying that people don't have it naturally inside a platform [?], but if you're spending all your days thinking about code or thinking about the bottom line, it's hard to take a break and do that. In design we're constantly thinking. We literally look at the screen and say, how is someone going to understand this? Someone just arrived, what are they going to think? We are set up to actually affect that. And the cool thing is, when you put the user at the center, suddenly this really great thing happens. It stops being about me, it stops being about us, and it starts being about them. If you want to stop an argument very fast, or at least make it more positive, make the argument about how we help that other person, and not me versus you. Because when our agendas collide, that's when we see the kind of world that we have today. But when we think about someone else and how we can serve them, that's how we really get to the core of this deeper motivation, I would say.

[00:16:33] I'm lucky enough, and we talked about this a minute ago, that I work in education right now, so I can say, "Oh, I'm helping all these people learn and all these people teach." But in the end, almost any product you work on, if it's successful, almost any company, if it's successful, is doing something good for somebody. Intranets are giving people the information they need to do their job better. The tool that you use to book your travel for work, the tool that you use to write down how many hours you worked this month: just making that experience a little bit better. You might not bring a huge smile to somebody's face, but you'll definitely make it better for them.

[00:17:13] This idea of putting the user at the center, getting everybody to rally around that idea, and then using that to help soften some of the bumps in the road. Because we're a hypergrowth startup right now, it's tough out there. We're pushing our team really hard right now. Shout-out to all the Preply designers that did take the time to join today, and those that talked to me this morning and said, "Look, we're shipping something on Monday, I'm not going to have time to watch your interview, maybe I can catch it on the flip side." It's tough out there, and the best thing to iron out those bumps in the road and keep a team motivated is to make it about somebody else, and remind them that we're trying to do good in the world, even if it's one step or one product at a time.

Tiny habits and focusing on success

[00:17:55] Catherine: Yeah, I really like that, and your BJ Fogg analogy stood out to me. He spoke at a conference I organized about a decade ago, and he handed out floss to the entire audience. There was an audience of about two thousand people, and he handed out dental floss to the entire audience. The analogy he was trying to get across was daily habits: how do you change behavior, whether it be within your team or with user behavior? You do it bit by bit, by creating those daily habits so that they become a norm. Is there anything you do, either for your users or in that instance, that applies to that?

[00:18:33] Chris: What Fogg was doing with the dental floss was making it much easier to do. He even has a great book out now, shout-out to BJ, called Tiny Habits. It's a really great read; it summarizes a lot of his work. The idea is, if something is hard to do, don't make it hard to do. Start really, really small. If you want to get in shape, do one push-up a day. If you want to have cleaner teeth, floss one tooth. And then you can build on that success.

[00:19:04] In a lot of ways, and this is one of my favorite parts of it, the idea of making things easier and reminding is very powerful, but one of the things that I loved is he talked a lot at the boot camp about how habits are rooted in success and then feeling good. When you have a very easy habit to do, one push-up, one tooth, it's easy to feel good. It's easy to feel like you did it, because it's not hard to do. One thing I focus on a lot at Preply, and I focused on at King, is: don't look at the downside, look at the upside. Again, this can sound very mindful, very new age, but if we hadn't taken this time to talk to these users, we might not have done this thing slightly better. Don't think about all the distance to where we want to get. Think about the distance from where we were. It can be very powerful.

[00:19:54] Especially when, let's have some straight talk here for a minute, when you talk to a lot of your users, when you have live town halls like we've organized at Preply this year, you'll get tough questions. You'll get questions about things that you don't have time to fix right now, because you're relatively short-staffed and you can't do everything at once. It can become very easy for the team to think, "I don't want to talk to the users. I don't want to hear more people complain about stuff." Well, guess what: mixed in with the requests that you can't satisfy right now are a lot of wonderful stories about how you're actually doing good in the world, how things are looking up, and how you made somebody's life slightly better. If you can focus on those things as well, then you can create the powerful loop.

[00:20:38] Going back to your first question, this is what games get really well. There's a wonderful TED talk, I can't remember the exact name, but it explains how excellent Mario Brothers is for learning, and how it doesn't focus on telling you you did wrong. It just lets you keep playing until you get that first level right. That's an old trick from video game onboarding. First, you just dive in. There's not a lot of tutorials, and if there are too many tutorials, they're not doing a good job. They let you play, they let you fail, but guess what, you get another life, you get to try again. That's how habits are created, when we focus on success.

[00:21:16] Last thing on this. If you're an ambitious person, like I try to be, you may focus on where you fail, and it's easy to get down, especially when you fail at a habit. The thing is, if you focus on that failure, you create these narratives that make it really hard for you to even want to go back into that space and try it again. When we're talking about the future of our companies and our products, we can't afford to let that kind of demotivation kick in. We have to focus on the positive, even if it starts off with small doses.

[00:21:46] I talked last time about how we started to do user tests at King, literally one test at a time. We would bring in users. We didn't ask anybody's permission. We focused on making it easy. We would just grab game designers: "Hey, look, somebody's here this morning, do you want to do a test?" It would have been very easy for me to go, "Oh, all the features we did not test this week, all of the things that are going out that didn't go through this process." How frustrating would that be? No, it's okay. We got one. Great, we've flossed one tooth. That's a better bedrock to build success, successful habits and successful products.

Going out of your comfort zone

[00:22:22] Catherine: I really love that focus, because you can get bogged down with what you didn't do. It's those incremental gains. If you don't look back in six months' time at what you actually achieved, you can almost feel like you're going nowhere. What's the biggest example for you of doing something that was out of your comfort zone, that was too much of a risk, and it paid off for you?

[00:22:51] Chris: Well, that's a great question. I'm really tempted to give the example of building the research, but I've already talked about that to a certain extent, so I'll talk about something a lot more personal, which was the first times that I started to actually work with the game teams directly inside King. Originally I was brought into King to help work on social features. I would float above the game; that was a lot more my bread and butter. Actually going into the games was pretty tough. It was a new world for me. I mentioned all the cool things about game design.

[00:23:21] When I started to actually work with some of the amazing game designers, like Carlos or Carmen, who are still at King right now, it was weird for me. It's a nice thing to have a little bit of gray in your beard. You feel like you understand how to design features. But when you move to a brand new industry, it can be pretty scary, and I have to admit it took me a little bit of time to overcome that initial hesitance. What I did was focus on how many pieces of good feedback I gave when we started to talk about the actual interaction, the actual game design of features, as opposed to focusing on "Oh, I was wrong about most of these things," or "I didn't focus on this."

[00:24:02] Actually, that's a great tip when it comes to predicting as well. In the end, everything we do, even if we say that we're doing experiments and we're A/B testing, there's still an implicit prediction there, which is that we're going to be right most of the time. Right? We're going to be wrong most of the time, or we're going to be wrong probably at least half the time. If we focus on the fact that at the end of the rainbow there's always a learning that we're going to bring from the experiments that we're doing, and those insights and those failures from today might be something that powers us and inspires the next great feature, then again, that can create the positive feedback loop.

[00:24:40] Not to belabor this point, but I think BJ's really right. I find that so much of what keeps us from trying new things, from creating habits, from listening to our users, talking to our users, comes down to the fear of failure and the fear of feeling bad. The fear of hearing something you didn't want to hear about your product, or hearing something that you're not going to be able to solve. It's just a nice little hack, this thing of "Well, if I can change one out of the 10 things I hear, at least it's something." It all comes down to overcoming that initial thing. You can do it in a lot of ways. You can make it easier, but you have to also focus on success.

Q&A

[00:25:20] Catherine: Yeah, I love that. I have a question here from Jonathan. Thanks, Jonathan. How do you encourage everyone in the organization to care about the user?

[00:25:32] Chris: Great question. I think there's an overarching answer to this, which is you need to connect with the natural empathy that everybody has. It's one of the things they say a lot when it comes to online interaction. If we were forced to talk to the same people that we were interacting with on social networks, we wouldn't talk in the way that we do. People have this natural, innate civility. We have this ability to sync up when we see each other in person. It's one of the tough things about doing all these things over video right now. Everybody has a certain amount of natural empathy. Maybe some people score a little bit higher, some people score a little bit lower. It's easier for some people to engage it than for other people. What you need to do is find a way to activate that.

[00:26:21] Going back to my earlier answer, first things first, make it really easy. We organized live town halls at Preply, and we're still a scrappy startup, we're about 300 people right now, but I deliberately didn't ask for anybody's help in organizing the first ones. I used Eventbrite for the tickets. I did ask one person from our awesome CRM squad to send an email to learners on our platform to get them to attend, but everything else I did myself, because if I asked people for help, it would have taken a lot more time. Then when we had people sign up, it was really easy: "Hey, guess what, everybody, tonight at eight o'clock we're going to be talking to learners live. It's just a click away." Making it easy to interact with your users is really powerful.

[00:27:06] The other thing is, and this is really, really important and it sounds really obvious, and I'm sorry, Jonathan, that it sounds so obvious, but again, the hardest to learn was the least complicated: there's a reason why the news isn't just a bunch of graphics. There's a reason why we use photos for things. I don't want to get political here, but if you saw the video on YouTube recently of a certain whistleblower explaining the documents that she took from a certain very prominent social network, hearing someone say it and seeing the emotion when she was talking about her experience as a whistleblower was very different from a tweet that you saw with 140 characters.

[00:27:48] You have to go for emotional salience. Make your users real. It's much better to have a small number of qualitative insights from a small number of users that you can put a face to, that you can put an actual quote to, than a fabulous graph. The graphs are great when you actually have to figure out what you need to do. But if you want to create the drumbeat, if you want to start the fire and you need to be in the woods and just create some sparks, there's nothing like actual emotional salience. Again, going back to the town halls, that's why we did it, because we heard stories from people live. It's much more powerful than reading about it, or, the worst, just seeing a graphic. Data scientists out there, I am not throwing any shade at what you do. We could not possibly solve these problems without you. I'm talking about when we get hyped up enough, when we get motivated enough to actually solve the problems. We need some human interaction there.

[00:28:41] Catherine: Yeah. I had an interesting panel debate in prep for the event, for the next one, around UX methodologies and work. There's a very big difference, obviously, between data and UX and the roles, and they can sometimes be perceived as too similar when in fact they're incredibly different.

[00:29:01] I have another question in here from Alan. I really love this one. What's the best thing that you've taken from King Games, in terms of how your team has worked, and brought over into Preply?

[00:29:15] Chris: Wow, Alan, that's a great question. Well, first off, the first thing I did was a series of hires...

[00:29:23] Catherine: Huh, sorry? You poached people?

[00:29:25] Chris: No, no, no, no. Oh my god, I'm sure there's some folks from King watching this right now. I have not poached. No, I did a series of what I called, I think they're called lightning talks [?]. I brought in a bunch of people, and one of the people that I brought in was "Carmen Heavy" [?], our amazing associate game UX director at King, to come in and actually talk about gamification. The things that I was covering very briefly, she went into a lot of detail on. The first thing was just getting people to come in and talk about that.

[00:29:59] The biggest thing that I saw, well, this is my favorite lesson of all from King. I mentioned this earlier, but I'll go into a little bit deeper detail now, Alan. When it comes to gamification, you have to start with one big idea, and then you can come up with a lot of smaller things to reinforce that. There's a reason why there's a map on Candy Crush with numbers. And there's a reason why, every time I would fly back and forth, in the old days when we did this, between the King studios, I would go through customs and talk to the people. They'd say, "Where do you work?" I'd say, "I work at King Games." The person would lean in and they'd say, "I actually play Candy Crush a lot." I always thought it was interesting that they would lean in to say it, so that's something that Candy needs to work on, making people proud of it. But they'd always say, "And I'm on level blank."

[00:30:51] That's a really powerful thing. I'm not saying that every game and every feature has to have this innate sense of progression, or has to be tied to a number. But if that's the first thing that people say about their experience, it's pretty interesting. Then all of the stuff that you do after that can reinforce it. When people work on gamification, they tend to start the opposite way, which probably matches our normal way of working on features. We think, okay, what are 10 things I can do to improve onboarding? What are 10 things I can do to improve retention? Games don't get to do that. They have to think about big ideas.

[00:31:27] I didn't mention this earlier, but that was also a big learning for me. I used to think, "Oh, creative visions, that sounds like the old days," before we had user-centered design, when everyone just wanted to do the thing they wanted. When I joined games, people talked about a vision for the game and this big idea for the game, and I thought that was nuts, because I came from software. They're right. You do need that. I'm not saying you have to have a big vision for everything, but if you want to gamify something, you definitely have to have it. I won't go into detail now, because we haven't all signed an NDA, but there's some really cool things that we're cooking up when it comes to how you leverage that big idea, and having a big idea at Preply. Thanks a lot for your question. That was a great one.

[00:32:08] Catherine: And just a follow-up to that: can you over-gamify? Should you use it in every product development? Should you try and look at the gamification of, let's say, events?

[00:32:21] Chris: It's a great question. I don't consider myself to be enough of an expert to have a definitive opinion on whether you can over-gamify. I think if you use the partial definition that I've alluded to a bunch of times, you can definitely do that too much. There's a funny thing. I'd never even heard these terms before I joined King, but mid-core games, casual gaming, hyper-casual. It's the segments that players for games fit into, and hardcore gaming, obviously. One of the most important things to understand when it comes to hardcore, mid-core, casual and hyper-casual is the amount of time that the players are willing to dedicate, but also the amount of effort they're willing to spend in order to understand what the hell is going on in these games.

[00:33:11] My 14-year-old, when he's playing Call of Duty, will spend a lot of time understanding how to play better. He's very patient when it comes to onboarding. He's very patient when it comes to understanding his performance and improving. Me, when I play Candy Crush in the morning when I'm having my coffee, not so much. I just want to get to the good stuff. I think you have to be really aware of where your users, I'm getting confused now, because between users, learners and players, I've had to change three times. When you understand where your users fall and how they're using your products, that's probably a pretty good guide to how much you can gamify it, and how much time you can spend actually reporting back on the performance to people. Because a big part of gamification is not only achieving something, but actually allowing me to celebrate and allowing me to feel like I did this right.

[00:34:07] Catherine: Yeah. There's another person who is inspired by your conversation so far. Alexi asks, should the designer be a T-shaped person?

[00:34:18] Chris: Interesting question. I would say yes, if the T is... I've been watching RuPaul's Drag Race a lot, so when I hear "the T" it makes me think about a bunch of drag queens. Anyway. When you talk about the T for designers, if it comes to being able to explain the value to users, to be able to evangelize for users, to be able to contextualize the decisions you've made, basically being strong at communication, then yes. I don't think anybody that's in research or design has the luxury of not being able to explain their thinking and what they're doing.

[00:34:59] In fact, going back to my earlier comment about how many times we're afraid to do new things, I've worked with a lot of designers, in classes and in the orgs I've worked in, where I've needed to pull them away from their screens and say, "Look, your designs aren't going to speak for themselves. If they're based on specific insights, on things that you learned about the users, you're going to need to be able to explain that to people." If we're going to empathize with the people we're designing for, we're going to have to be able to do it. And the cool thing is, in all the classes I've given and all the designers that I've been able to work with, I've never found a designer who, once they changed that mindset and unlocked their superpower, wasn't great at it. Designers are really good at visualizing things and contextualizing and anchoring them. They all tend to be amazing at it. So I wouldn't say it's a T that they necessarily have to go out and find. It's more that they have to find it within themselves.

Advice for people struggling with this approach

[00:35:49] Catherine: Yeah, really lovely answer there. I'll ask this now for people out there that are bought into this but might struggle with this approach. What's your advice on habits and everything that we discussed?

[00:36:08] Chris: Wow, I could give more advice on this topic than we could possibly cover. All right, long story short, because I know that we're running out of time. First things first: be very careful when announcing what you're trying to do. I don't mean that you need to be secretive, but if your goal is to make people empathize with the users more, don't start off by saying to people, "Hey, you're not empathizing with the users enough, let me help you empathize," or even telling them what your plan is. There's a reason why there's a great book called Undercover UX. When people come at you and say, "I'm going to sell you this thing, I'm going to convert you to my way of thinking, my Jedi UX thing," people's barriers go up. When you just say, "Hey, look, I talked to this user," or "Did you see what people are saying in customer support about that feature we announced?", then people tend to be much more open. One of the things that I try to do, and I even did this at Preply to a certain extent: I didn't talk a lot about what I was trying to do when I first joined and wanted to bring the users more front and center. I just did it. That's the first thing.

[00:37:15] The second thing, and I feel like this has become the theme, is start small. Feel very comfortable starting small. Look for little wins. A long time ago I gave a talk at a conference, and somebody asked me what's the best way to start something like this at a company. I had to say you have to be like a surfer, in the sense that you have to feel very comfortable letting certain waves go by. Not every feature, not every thing that users are complaining about, is going to be the thing that lets you start to create this empathy, start that empathy fire. Not every wave is the right one, so you can let some go by. But also, there's always going to be more waves, so you don't have to feel like you have to do it right now.

[00:38:01] It was one of the hardest things for me to learn at King. I spent the last three years really trying to lead this player-centric revolution, and I started off so motivated and so excited, and then I would be upset at the end of the day: "Wow, I haven't done very much." Only when that switch flipped and I said, "No, no, not how far do I have to go, but how far have I come," that's when you start to get excited and you can really start to add. So start small, and above all, don't tell people. Don't scare them away. People don't like folks that are evangelizing, but they definitely like listening to good words.

[00:38:36] Catherine: Chris, I had five questions for you based on our prep call, and I've had two major conversations with you, and they've both been inspiring. I wish I'd recorded the other one, and this one has been equally amazing. You're wonderful. I know that the audience has got a lot out of this, so thank you. We'll have to ask you another time about your passion, about what drives you and motivates you for the next stage and the next piece, but we'll save that for another day.