Think BIG, go small

Lee Summerfield at UXDX Community: EMEA Series. Video: https://youtu.be/gtYusJxHzH4

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.

AJ Bell, and where I came from

[00:00:00] I'm going to talk about this topic of think big, go small, and how that's worked for us over at AJ Bell, how we've grown UX. Just a little bit about AJ Bell: we're a FTSE 250 company and we basically help people invest. We've got two very distinct distribution channels. We have a D2C market, where we have two products, and we also have an advised channel, so we work with financial advisors and we provide investment platforms for these guys. It's a really interesting area, two very distinct channels in terms of our users.

[00:00:38] Let's get cracking, because we've not got long and you guys have been here for a while already, so we're going to skip the first trilogy, sort of thing. This was really more a case of, I spent 25 years in design, nearly 14 years now in UX, and I've really seen our profession change. I've been very lucky. UX as a discipline has radically changed, the landscape has changed, the perception of what we do has changed. I feel very lucky to have been a real part of that, and so it's great to be able to share my experiences with other people and other designers as well.

[00:01:16] So let's jump into episode four, I guess. Nearly four and a half years ago, a little bit more than that now, I joined AJ Bell as their first UX designer in Manchester. Just for a bit of context, I'd just taken redundancy. I'd worked in a UX team for a company that created patient administration systems for the NHS, and to be honest I'd had a rotten four years. I'd literally banged my head against the wall. We worked with 22 siloed teams that had no real understanding of what UX was. I was in a pretty despondent place, I must admit.

[00:02:03] If anything I was sort of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, because back in 2018 AJ Bell were very much in the Dark Ages. I was actually, as I say, the first UX designer in our head office. There was no resource. The perception of UX was that I was just going to come in and make everything look pretty, which obviously is not the case.

[00:02:27] I was pretty determined not to make the same mistakes. I had a real belief in the function of design and how we could go about changing mindsets and the understanding of what UX could deliver. Around this time I attended a Playbook course by Jared Spool. That was a bit of a seminal moment for me actually, because as I say I was coming off the back of a job where I'd failed, and that course provided me with almost the proof of my design beliefs. Everything that I'm going to talk about, I actually tried to apply it at that other place, but it didn't work. But it really allowed me to establish a framework and foundation.

[00:03:14] And now, this is where we stand with UX at AJ Bell. We are embedded, we are a centralized, recognized function within the business. We have specific design resources across both distribution channels, across all four products that we have, plus an additional area of the business in terms of our operational and regulatory needs, so that's servicing designs for our own staff within the building. So we're going to talk a little bit about how we've gone from that Dark Ages all the way through to that embedded design, and we've done it by this idea of thinking big and then going small.

Think big: design as the rendering of intent

[00:03:55] So what do I mean by think big? For me, going back to one of Jared Spool's thoughts, he argued a while ago, and it sort of hit the internet with designers depending on what side of the fence you're on, he talked about how design was simply the rendering of intent. I actually love this. I think it's simple and I think it's powerful. I've been a designer for virtually all my life and it's the first time, when I heard it a few years ago, that it really resonated with me.

[00:04:30] That idea of the rendering of intent, it alludes to the fact that everyone's a designer, and I do believe that. This is the cornerstone of everything, the big foundation block on which we've built everything from. My team, if you wish, are the official designers, we've got designer in our job titles and all that, but we see everyone else in the business — and we're now over 1200 staff — as unofficial designers. Everyone is welcoming our design process and what we're getting involved in.

[00:05:00] I've come to believe that it's a myth that it's always the designers that come up with the good ideas. I think actually everyone's capable of getting involved in the design process and coming up with ideas. It's actually for us as designers to foster and create environments in which these little ideas can come to light.

[00:05:24] So this belief, if you wish, is my foundation. This is how I frame my big idea around, and then in order to define success — we need to define success, because that's critical to how we know when we're successful.

The big vision: centralize UX

[00:05:42] So taking that foundation step, what was the vision? My think big idea was this. I was four or five months into my role, I was a solo designer, there were 800 people in the business at the time, and I come along and think to myself, I'm going to centralize UX across the business. This idea scared me and excited me in equal measure, and that's how I knew it was big enough.

[00:06:09] At the time there were multiple dev teams and one designer servicing three or four different dev teams. There were really established ways of working. So this idea of centralizing UX not only was a big idea, but it was out of my reach, it was out of my control, it wasn't even my remit. It was a real outrageous ambition. You might say too ambitious, but looking back on the success that we've had, I'm a firm believer in that you've really got to push it out there and almost scare yourself a little bit in terms of that thinking big idea.

[00:06:48] So how do we take this and work it through? This was a plan that I put together around three and a half, four years ago now. This is the inside of my head, it's like a working Pixar movie, all these things are moving about all over the place. This was me coming into AJ Bell, dropping UX wisdom bombs on all our senior stakeholders, getting them to understand actually what UX was. There was a map of me introducing a community of practice within the business, design thinking workshops, how we could work with development, how we could think about building design systems across the business and across the products, even me talking in conferences and what we do in the outside world, and indeed how I'd build a team.

[00:07:41] What I was after here was getting to this point, the end game if you wish. This was where we would have that centralized feel across products. Now at the time, four years ago, we only had two products, we've now got four, and obviously we've got the ops and regs one, so this has expanded over time. And the big thing about all this as well is that no one was expecting COVID to come along. So sometimes making plans, they don't always go the way that you want them to go, but I think if you push yourself and put it out there, at least you've got some sort of road map which you can follow and push yourself towards.

[00:08:19] So that was our vision. We got some buy-in from our senior stakeholders in terms of how we were going to push this and really crack on with it.

The three jobs of design

[00:08:28] So how did we put this into play? I'm a firm believer in that there are three basic jobs of design. Again, if we take that really big idea of the rendering of intent, and then the big vision of centralizing UX, I know that I can break that down into these three big jobs. First job, to integrate, then to transform, and to evolve. You really need to build upon these things, you can't just jump into number two or number three. It takes a lot of patience and effort to work your way through all these, and if you do it right then really great things can happen.

[00:09:14] The interesting thing about all these jobs is that my team — which we've now got six designers, from just me on my own, it's now six of us — everyone understands what these mean and why. And part of my job is challenging my team to create their own blueprints within each of these jobs. So this is where the big starts getting broken down into the small.

Blueprints: integrate, and transform

[00:09:38] What I'm going to share with you now is a couple of slides that members of my team have created for themselves. So this one's from a member of my team, Amy, who's a UX apprentice. She's doing a degree at Manchester Met alongside working for us at AJ Bell, and she works in the ops and regs space. This was her little blueprint for how she was going to integrate into the teams.

[00:10:07] She's got three big bubbles of activity around showcasing, education and networking, and then within those bubbles she started breaking it down into smaller pieces of things that she wants to get better at and focus on. By doing that she understands the bigger picture, she understands why she needs to integrate and how that will work into the big picture, but this obviously gives her the scope then to really explore different areas.

[00:10:37] If we just take workshops as an area, well, there's a whole host of things that we could get involved in in that, different ways of doing things. We're always trying to mix up our design thinking workshops. One of my team recently has been implementing the idea of SCAMPER as we go through and we talk with our product teams. So all these little things are stuff that can be broken down even further, and then it's up to myself and each member of the team to get better at these things as they go.

[00:11:08] Another example, this is for the second job of design, transform. How do we transform an experience? Again this is from one of my guys who's been with me four years now, and she's put research at the very heart of how we transform an experience. I really like this, this idea that we need to constantly identify, understand and improve. By looking at these, again three bubbles of activity that she's got going on in terms of insights, in terms of mapping, and then prioritizing opportunities, she can break these down.

[00:11:47] So we could go into our insights and use Usabilla, that's our feedback tool. We can look at the very small, specific things that go into making a campaign better. How are we asking the questions that we're asking? How can we get more engagement with people on that front? Or within mapping, one of my big things that I'm really interested in is Kano modeling, and understanding basic expectations of users and how we can start identifying those things. But by putting them in bubbles of activity we're able to break it all down.

[00:12:21] So we've gone from really solid foundations and big ideas to our three jobs of design, and now we're breaking those jobs down into smaller chunks, which cover an awful lot. I want my team to create their own blueprints for this and get attracted to the things that really interest them, so that if we get better at the small stuff we can constantly improve.

Small is beautiful, and small is powerful

[00:12:54] Because I honestly believe that small is beautiful. I think fantastic things happen when we concentrate on the small things. It's very easy for me to say about trusting the process, because I've been doing this a long time, but a lot of my team are made up of junior designers, so it's great to see how they focus. And we do a lot of reflection in terms of the seemingly small steps that we're taking, what a big change that can impact, little by little.

[00:13:28] It's also beautiful because we are going to hit bumps in the road, without a shadow of a doubt. The challenges that we face today as a team are not the challenges that we faced six months ago, but that shouldn't mean that a bad day should put us off. Small's okay if we do have a bad day, because you can look back, you can take stock. A lot of what we do with the team and my guys is looking at the challenge that we're faced with today, and then look at the challenges we were faced with six months, 12, 18 months ago, when it would seem that we were perhaps down here, and look what we've achieved. So by focusing on small things it feels better as well when things don't go according to plan, because they won't go according to plan.

[00:14:21] I think there's also a counter argument that sometimes it can feel like you're going in circles when you keep things small, but actually I think you can change the lens on this. This is what's actually happening: we're constantly making progress. If you're keeping things small you are always making progress. And this is where, for me, as a head of a team, small's not only beautiful but small is actually really powerful. Because if each member of my team is focusing upon the small aspects of their blueprint that lay into a larger job, then small becomes really powerful, and we can really make changes that are, well, almost superpowered.

[00:15:07] And we can be the heroes. As designers we can absolutely be the heroes, and the change that we've made at AJ Bell in the last four and a half years is testament to that. If we focus on the small, we can affect powerful change.

Superpower one: patience

[00:15:26] I'm going to share with you now what I think are my three superpowers, except they're not superpowers at all, these are learned skills. But I think that each one of them, if you can apply some time and understand each one of them and how it impacts the small things that you do, that you can make absolutely massive change.

[00:15:51] So the first one is patience, and I know this might sound a little bit boring. I am not a naturally patient person, or I never thought of myself as one. I'm a little bit like the weather, I come breezing in, I want to affect change, I want to get the passion up. But it was a post on LinkedIn actually that really interested me, and it was a very eloquent post from a guy who was arguing that patience was a weakness, and I found myself really disagreeing with him.

[00:16:25] One of the comments in the post was actually this, it was the definition of patience: the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, problems or suffering without becoming annoyed and anxious. I thought this was really interesting, because that's absolutely what I do. When we speak to our product owners and our product managers, we're trying to get them to plant the flag in the sand, and then we will patiently move towards that flag.

[00:16:57] What the guy was actually arguing about in his post was that being passive was a weakness, that waiting was a weakness. Actually, if you passively wait for something, that's just laziness, that's not patience. So patience actually is a mindset. And if you can sow the seeds and you can have this capacity, then it will[?]. I've had to practice this, like I say it is a learned skill. I used to get frustrated when we hit bumps in the road, but now I've come to not go any less in terms of passion but certainly in terms of emotion. So it's definitely something that you can practice, and also it falls into this idea of focusing on the small, because if you focus on what you can control rather than what you can't control, then you will deliver yourself more patience.

Superpower two: flipping the coin

[00:17:58] My second superpower is this idea of flipping the coin, and we talk about this a lot across my team. Really it's a posh way of saying, how do we reframe something, and any challenges that we might have. I loved this quote, it's a great book, another one there to have a look at or put on your Christmas list. I honestly believe that any challenge is an opportunity. That can go back to the idea of job one of design, integration, engaging with people, the ability to be able to practice empathy. This really is a way of taking a situation that's in front of you and just turning the lens a little bit. And if you can do that — and again this is a skill that you can practice, and it's become something that we really focus on and become good at — because the opportunities are there.

Superpower three: making mistakes

[00:19:02] My final superpower is this idea around making mistakes. I've got a little search term down there that you can do, around Ken Robinson, a great TED talk on do schools kill creativity. I'm only going to touch a little bit upon it, but it's a really fabulous video to watch. In it he talks about a little girl at primary school. The teacher goes to her — this little girl's never really been engaged in any lessons before, but they've got a drawing class and the teacher wants to know why she's so engaged. So she goes up to the little girl and she says, what are you drawing? And the little girl tells her that she's drawing a picture of God. And the teacher says to her, well, nobody knows what God looks like. And the little girl replied to her, well, they will in a minute.

[00:19:59] The great thing about that beautiful story is that kids are not frightened of making mistakes. There's another fabulous artist, Picasso, who said that every child is an artist, the problem is that they then grow up. This idea of mistakes and us as designers I think is really interesting, because then as we go through school and as we start our working life, we're actually taught that mistakes are bad. If you fail an exam, you've made a mistake.

[00:20:34] I want to encourage people to make mistakes, especially designers. We've got to make mistakes to be creative. They say good decisions come from great experience, and that is true, but I myself have made lots of mistakes. In fact I understand that I am successful because of the mistakes that I have made. A little bit like this guy, although obviously completely different sorts of subject matter, but I get what he's getting at here, this idea that he's failed over and over again and that is why he succeeds. I really buy into that. In a lot of my career in UX, and trying to push understanding of UX into different areas, I have without a doubt made more mistakes and had more failures, but they are why I succeed.

Takeaways

[00:21:30] So some takeaways for you. If your big doesn't scare you, it's not big enough. I absolutely believe that. You don't need to know how you're going to get there. What you need to do is set yourself your own foundations of truth, things that are unmovable and that you truly believe in. And then you break all that down into bubbles of activity, and then you break it down into even further bubbles, and if you can concentrate on those small things, the bigger thing will take care of itself.

[00:22:05] And then the final one, hone your superpowers. Those three things that I've shared with you are three learned skills that have absolutely helped me in my career, and certainly in the last four and a half years, take UX from the Dark Ages through to embedded design. Thank you very much.

Q&A

[00:22:32] Host: Thank you, that was a really interesting example there and food for thought with a lot of the comments. Karen is agreeing here, saying he loved your journey and storytelling skills. He's entering a similar work environment soon and you've empowered him with your words.

[00:22:51] Lee: That's great, that's great to hear, some great feedback.

[00:22:55] Host: I really loved it, and if anybody has any questions, as always please do send them in, we're monitoring the different chat platforms. One thing that just jumped out to me: did you share that initial big vision picture with people? Because if somebody shared that with me I'd be very scared.

[00:23:16] Lee: I did, absolutely. I went to the MD with it. I went straight to the MD with it, because I'd come from, like I said — that's why I provided that context about where I'd come from, about having failed. Part of that failure was that there was almost a glass ceiling, if you wish, we couldn't get to the right people. So when I joined AJ Bell I made a beeline for the managing director, basically, and I wanted to have an open chat with him, because I knew he was of the opinion that I was there to, you know, make things look good almost, and I wanted to make sure that he knew that's not the only thing I was going to do.

[00:24:01] So yes, I did go to him with that, and to all the senior stakeholders. They might have thought I was a little bit crazy and I completely get that. It's just the way that I was able to express what I was thinking in my head. And as I say, it may not have gone completely to plan as you sort of saw it, but the big objectives behind it we've absolutely succeeded with.

[00:24:27] Host: That's great experience, and great that people bought into it as well. You mentioned about, like, don't let a bad day get you down. Do you have any examples that can hammer that home, of where you started, where you thought things might have been going bad, but then what you've actually achieved? What outcomes have you achieved in all of these changes?

[00:24:52] Lee: A real great one at the moment would be, on the advice side of things, we now do an awful lot of what we call advisor sessions. We work with product through a design process, and when we're at a point where we're starting to prototype stuff and really put some things together, we'll have what we call advisor sessions, where we invite advisor firms to come on and click about and comment and all things like that.

[00:25:17] Now, two years ago I asked that question to that very same MD that I shared my vision with, and he sort of laughed me out of his office and said, but Lee, we know what they want, sort of thing. And I said to him, well, let me prove that you perhaps don't. And he was quite honest, he didn't think that they would work. Now two years down the line we're doing these things on a weekly basis. But the challenge is now — so that's a massive change in mindset. We've now got the head of product for our Investcentre, it's part and parcel of what he says to his team: have we done an advisor session on that yet, what do we know from the advisors? Now that's a complete mindset change.

[00:26:05] So some of the problems perhaps some of the guys have got at the moment is how do we get better at those sessions. One of the big ones that we have is we obviously invite the product team, we invite the BAs, and we do invite developers to come along and sit and watch these sessions, because there's nothing so enlightening as really understanding the context behind stuff. I think the big challenge that we've got at the moment is really getting the buy-in from the devs to come along with that. So that shows you the shift, I guess. Two years ago, didn't do anything like this, now yeah we do a lot of it, but there are still challenges within that, to keep getting better.

[00:26:49] Host: I'd say keep going. One of the things that we've experienced, because at UXDX we have product, UX design and dev, and all the devs I talk to, I'm kind of asking them about how they're enjoying the dev sessions we do, and they're like, no, no, not interested, I want to know about the UX stuff. So I think there is a shift happening in the industry.

[00:27:10] Lee: Definitely.

[00:27:12] Host: I think that's all the questions that we've had come through, so I'll just finish up by thanking you for sharing. I really enjoyed that session, and thank you for sharing.

[00:27:21] Lee: Brilliant, thank you very much indeed.