Many formative experiences led me to UX design.
My best education came from being a laborer for my dad, my mentor on out-of-the-box thinking and a peerless manager. Good design and amazing results always starts with asking good questions.
Weekend manual laborer
I found design as my calling as a kid working for my father. As a retail turnaround expert, he was a pro at improving things. I thought he had the worst, soul-destroying job. I was wrong. His job was to to manage the worst stores in a huge food store chain. Instead of resenting it, he loved the challenge of turning around the lowest-performers before head office closed them. It seemed like an impossible task, but he loved it. He was fearless.
My initial perspective was just that he used me and my brothers as forced laborers on some nights and most weekends. We would tear apart and rebuild the shelves and signs, as well as change the layout. He had us face up and restock products. Rebuilding dumpy little stores was boring, sweaty and seemingly pointless. I was the only one who asked ‘why are we doing this? what’s it all about?‘ As he gradually taught me, he expounded endlessly on “service,” “strategy,” and “profit margins.”
Turning losers into winners
Asking good questions transformed how I felt about the hard labor. For one thing, I started to understand what we were doing and why all this grunt work mattered. The turning point was when he explained the purpose. I was energized to help him accomplish the mission: saving stores and jobs. It was way more interesting than what I was learning in school. Labor isn’t a burden when you find purpose.
He told me that the first time he did this, he was simply assigned to manage the process of shutting down a losing store. Firing everyone didn’t sit right, so instead, he found a way to turn the store into a high performer and hire more people. Turnarounds became his specialty. These deathbed stores were always similar: They were too small and too old to compete with bigger, shiny, new stores that a competitor built nearby with more selection.
He believed that better service, understanding customers, and frequent small adjustments (aka pivots) would always trump bigger selection.
My Out-of-box Mentor
My father taught me original out-of-the-box thinking. In applying it himself, he repeatedly achieved startling and unprecedented results as a manager in business, as a sports team coach and as the nexus of positive experiences for thousands in his community. My father overcame seemingly intractable problems by changing the problems before trying to solve them. George Bernard Shaw said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one adapts the world to himself.” My father’s first step was to research the environment and inventory what he had to work with. In a funny twist, my father was a world-class out-of-the-box thinker who was also a world class boxer. He taught me to first understand the box (problem-space) before you can break out of the box.
His unique insight was that it was possible to achieve superior results with non-ideal resources.
Prepare Correctly for Optimal Results
His first step in doing anything was studying the problem. What’s the environment? What’s the goal? What are the obstacles? What have I got to work with? Most managers think you need ideal staff and resources for ideal results. While it certainly helps, the genius of my father was that he could do it with highly non-ideal staff. He did a SWOT analysis of each staff member to assess what he had to work with. Then he formulated a plan to maximize each person’s strengths and minimize their weaknesses. I witnessed him achieve incredible success with this same process over and over in his work, as well as coaching sports teams. In sports, he turned unmotivated motley crews of losers into teams that were unbeatable, even when competing way beyond their level. A saying I’ve never forgot is “Proper preparation lets you punch above your weight. Anything is possible. There is only one standard.” He showed me that excellence was a lifestyle choice and it proved true.
The designed retail experience
When parachuted into a new store, my father followed a process that he had developed. He started by getting to know the staff and studying how the store worked: how staff got along with each other and customers, how customers traveled through the store, and anything he could figure out about the customers in the neighborhood. He used friendly chat to gain insight on the customers’ met and unmet needs.
His next step was decisive action. He wanted the staff to know that he was a personally invested leader and agent of change. He would work with my brothers and I late Saturday and all day Sunday when the store was closed to rebuild, restock and clean the store. On Monday, the staff was shocked to see the mountain of work he’d done because a) they’d never seen a manager do anything but bark orders and b) a few key changes enabled them to look at the store with fresh eyes.
Sometimes he needed to fire someone. His research phase showed who had a good attitude, worked hard, and was nice to customers and fellow staff. If he found a bad attitude energy vampire that dragged everyone down, they had to go.
Then he rallied the troops and laid out his mission. He told them the truth. He was expected to fire everyone, but he knew that he could save all their jobs, if they pulled together and worked hard alongside him. The loser store was dead, but they could help him create this new, amazing store. He involved the staff in charting a positive course forward. He started with some easy wins, like refreshing the signs, fixing obvious layout problems and placing high-margin products along the path to daily essentials that he moved to the back of the store.
Managing people; Little things matter
The biggest thing he did was to energize and empower the staff around the mission. Instead of waiting to be fired, they believed: in him, the mission, in themselves. He taught me that you can’t manage people if you don’t like them and empower them to want to do great work. Fear, aggression and bossiness shuts people down; bad results follow. As he gradually taught me, I helped more. I used my artistic bent to redo signage and store layout to lead customers on journeys that he calculated would yield higher sales. His understanding of his customer base, including age, race, religion, size of families and other factors allowed him to customize the stock he carried. Small stores can’t have more of everything, but they can be more perfectly tuned to their local community. He draw customers in with more of locally-desired products. He knew if they cared more about halal and falafel vs beef and potatoes. As he figured it out, he sent flyers out into the neighborhood with coupons on specialties and created positive word of mouth. He trained his staff to be proactively helpful, not just polite. If a customer at the checkout wasn’t using a coupon, the clerk would offer one to help them and let them know about other offers.
All these little actions added up to word of mouth buzz in the neighborhood that this store that didn’t just say it wanted their business, it showed that it cared about their needs.
Designed behavioral triggers
The changes created a virtuous cycle for the staff. The customers were nicer when the staff was proactively helpful. As the staff felt more like heroes and winners, they worked better and the store started performing like a winner. My father explained his strategies to deal with loss leaders, markdowns, dead inventory, and aisle design. Aisle-ends are a key location. At the end of aisles, we combined discounted products (as a draw) with related premium products at higher margins. When customers find a bargain, they often reward themselves by buying a premium product. He didn’t call these design elements or behavioral triggers, but that’s what they were. He had me use my artistic side to create novel end of aisle displays (castles, towers, cityscapes) and we tested all sorts of configurations to lead the customer journeys in the best way. Everything he did aligned “superior service” with “better profit margins”.
Iterating results – learning from a master
Saving the store and jobs wasn’t enough for my dad. He kept improving everything until the little store was the #1 performer in the chain. Then he hired a few more staff. My father never shied away from mistakes. He analyzed mistakes to fine tune the store’s success. He held himself to very high standards and always triumphed in the end. As the son who asked what he was doing and tried to help the most, I screwed up and got criticized the most. He was blunt, but clear. “You screwed up son. The customers can’t find the produce, so fix what you did to the signs.” “You know that castle you created out of soup cans? It looks nice, but it’s useless when people keep tripping over it.” He never gave unqualified praise or criticism. His feedback always contained enough detail to help me correct and succeed. He inspired the best out of everyone around him. He taught me to aim high and believe in mastery. That’s why he kept iterating until the worst store became the best and he kept pushing me beyond becoming #1. Excellence is a lifestyle choice, not a status.
Setting my work patterns for UX design
In the end, the customers were satisfied, the store was a money machine, and the staff were more than happy and loyal; he’d given them a mission and purpose to work for. His staff never wanted him to leave, but then he was assigned the NEXT worst store in the chain, and off we went to do it all over again. I learned a lot by helping him do this about a dozen times. I thought that what he did was the coolest thing ever, but that it had nothing to do with me. It’s funny that I thought that delving deep into art, design, technology and psychology would take me far away from my father’s work, but it’s just not true.
How would you feel if your first job fresh out of school was to prevent nuclear meltdowns?
Inspiration towards Tech Management
Many years later, my father’s training helped me as a designer. Working at a government think tank, I was tasked with brainstorming a radically improved way to prevent nuclear meltdowns. Imagine that as your first, job, straight from college at age 21? I went on an intensive training to learn how to design advanced interfaces for Apple Macs. I heeded my father’s advice to “prepare to succeed”, so I read and experimented ahead of time. Nevertheless, upon arriving, I was daunted at the blistering pace of material and that my fellow students were some of the brightest people from NASA, Rockwell, MIT, and the Jet Propulsion Lab. I immediately gelled with a smart grad student from MIT’s Media Lab. Her name was Megan Smith. The bootcamp was intensive, but Megan and I worked together to race ahead of the others.
Since we were ahead, we didn’t mind helping others figure stuff out. However, many of the guys would only address me to me questions, even when I told them that Megan knew more about a topic. Two guys from NASA insisted “But I want the answer from you.” Very irksome. Megan and I figured that we could help everyone succeed if everyone divided up the work and mentored each other instead of trying to do everything individually. It worked out extremely well.
These experiences shape my approach to UX Design Management
In Megan, I recognized the makings of a superior manager with a similar process as my father. In turn, she recognized something in me because she invited me to join her team inventing the future at MIT’s Media Lab. She liked the creativity I brought to solving problems like preventing nuclear meltdowns. It’s a drag that I didn’t end up going to MIT, I was kind of busy leading the UX and product teams to build and market a little thing that became the most successful app in the world. I never got back to joining Megan’s group, but she went on to be a founding member of Google Ventures, kicking off the innovation of Google Maps, Earth, and Photos before founding the Google X moonshot think tank. She went on to become the CTO of the United States for President Barrack Obama.
As someone who directs UX Design across organizations, I mentor and empower teams to use good process, behavioral triggers and rapid iteration to improve customer outcomes and build business value. In short, I am doing my father’s work. It’s just in a different context. Like him, I have an attraction to achieving the seemingly impossible, like redesigning the worst messes into the most refined experiences. I also research problems like my father in planning, preparing and taking actions to overcome any obstacles to success. He is gone, but his words and actions still help me. For example, good feedback isn’t telling you what you want to hear. Good feedback is any information that helps you move in the direction of higher value.
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