Paul Woods (00:00):

In my experience, the shortest distance to get things in front of people is the path to success. I mean, you put something in front of a user like, yeah, I don't like it, and you'll never know that until you test it and put it in front of someone.

Kate Atkins, host (00:14):

That was award-winning designer and author Paul Woods speaking at UMSI. And this is information changes everything where we put the spotlight on news and research from the world of information science. You're going to hear from experts, students, researchers, and other people making a real difference. As always, we're presented by the University of Michigan School of Information UMSI For short, learn more about us at si.umich.edu. I’m your host, Kate Atkins. Today we'll hear more from Paul Woods. He's an award-winning designer, author, the CEO of a global design agency and the current president of A IGA Los Angeles. Throughout his career, he's led projects for companies like Volkswagen, lucid Motors, Google, and many more. He's also the author of the bestselling book on creative culture titled How to Do Great Work Without Being an Asshole. Paul Woods was invited to speak to automotive user experience students at UMSI. During this 2023 talk, he shared why automotive UX is one of the most exciting areas a designer can be working in today.

(01:27):

Before we jump in, a few other people and projects that you should know about. First congratulations to UMSI assistant professor Robin Brewer, who's been recognized by Popular Science as one of 10 scientists on the cusp of changing the world. Brewer specializes in accessible computing and advocates for designs that prioritize the elderly and disabled. Qiaozhu Mei, A professor at the School of Information and College of Engineering shared surprising findings with us about artificial intelligence. He found that platforms like chat, GPT were capable of mimicking human behaviors and it may turn out that AI is even better suited than your average human at pursuing concepts like cooperation, altruism, and trust. Finally, check out Associate Dean Cliff Lampe's video on the UMSI website where he explains just how valuable an information science degree can be. with an explosion of data in the world UMSI students are uniquely prepared to help find, interpret, and measure information in whichever field they're passionate about. For more on all of these stories, check out si.umich.edu or click the link in our show notes. Now back to Paul Woods.

Paul Woods (02:47):

A few words about myself and a company with a very funny name. This is Edenspiekermann, of which I'm the CEO and it's, well, I mean it's not really a surprise. This is a German company with a name like Edenspiekermann, and we're a global design firm. Before you ask, there is a Mr. Spiekermann, he's very nice. He's a little bit angry on Twitter sometimes, but he's very nice and he's still alive and Eric's been around for a very long time. Just as an anecdote, he designed the Volkswagen logo and the Audi logo way back in the, it was the late seventies, early eighties or thereabouts. Today, what are we focusing on? Well, I want to show a little bit just to give you context on what sort of automotive work we do before we actually kick off the talk proper. So we've been around for a long time.

(03:32):

This company's been around for almost 50 years, Edenspiekermann. And over the last 10 to 15 years we've built up quite a niche in automotive tech and a lot of firms that come in and say, Hey, there's this big transition happening right now. What the fuck do we do? I mean, tech and cars is pretty new actually, especially good tech and cars. So we've been kind of carrying out a niche there. And some of the work you may or may not be familiar with, we worked with Lucid on the Lucid Air Lovely Car can be yours for about a hundred thousand dollars if you wish to purchase it. We work with them for about a year and a half on the whole HMI inside of that, and it's a really fucking cool HMI. Super cool, very talented in-house team and we're very lucky to work with them.

(04:13):

We work on crazy cars like this one, the FF 91, which is Faraday Futures car. This is an all digitized controls car. This is pretty cool. It's 11 screens inside and outside the car. This is probably the craziest car we've worked on, but it's really fucking cool. This one is much more expensive, so I will never drive this car no matter how many car projects I sell. Pretty fucking cool though. Alright, why are we here today? Well, we're here today because I'm going to talk to you about this space and I think this is the coolest space to be working in. If you are a designer, strategist, a researcher, I'm not trying to sell Jim's course, I don't get any free tickets for anything, but this is the coolest space to be in. And you might think I'm biased because I'm a car guy and I love cars.

(05:00):

I actually don't because, and the proof point is, spoiler alert, I actually got my driver's license just five years ago. So up until 35, I didn't know how to fucking drive, let alone design it. Although actually I did at this stage have designed two cars. So I have a different perspective coming into cars because I'm not a hardcore car nerd. I used public transport, if you can't tell by my funny accents. I'm from Europe originally I lived in Ireland, London, Berlin, New York, and then I moved to Los Angeles and bar one all of those cities. You have one thing, what's it called? Public transport. And for a long time I thought cars kind of suck. This is not a cool thing, it's not a cool thing. They kind of suck for, I mean, cities, they take a lot of space on the roads. It's not great for urban planning.

(05:49):

These are not things that are great on the streets. They take a lot of space, parking lots, eat up so much square footage of every city. And I also thought as a software designer, the tech in these cars kind of sucks too, right? So you're probably thinking at this stage, well hold on, this guy is here. He is designing cars, but he doesn't mean he like cars. Why is he here? Why are we talking about this? And the thing is, this space is all about to change. In fact, it's already changing right now. This change is happening quicker than we can all imagine for various different reasons. It's messy. It's in progress. You know what that why it fucking rocks to be a designer right now. Because this change is when design is needed the most. Your careers in this space, you can literally shape the future of many things.

(06:41):

We have trends that we all know about. We've got autonomous cars, which are, I mean they're not coming quite as quickly as Elon Musk will tell you or promise you. We've got other more serious topics that we need to think about when we talk about cars. We've got climate change, we've got a whole energy transition right now. And then outside of all of this, we've got some crazy stuff going on. When we think about the future, we've got things like privatized cities. What does all of this mean for us? Well, it means that suddenly when we think about designing cars, it becomes more than just a car. The tech that you designed for car, it will affect change much further than that. So what do I mean by that? When we think about designing for cars, we got to think about the whole ecosystem around that.

(07:28):

What does that look like? Is it designing the service experience? This is something we worked on a while ago around a whole new service experience about transitional fuel. What does that look like? And then thinking about mobility at large. How do we even design cities for the car of the future when cars are parking themselves or driving around, maybe not parking at all. What do we do with all that space? All those parking lots that I showed you earlier. I mean, what do we do with that space? We get to design that ship. We're not designing little buttons inside a car. We might start designing buttons inside a car, but we're designing cities, we're designing how people get from A to B, and I think that's a pretty cool space to be in. I want to share a few different things, a few different anecdotes.

(08:11):

We've been working in this space for a while. I should caveat this by saying this is only my opinion, so you can take it or leave it. These five learnings. The first one, figure out what the user really needs. So what do I mean by user-centric design? Well, a lot of you may be going into your first job soon and important people in suits are going to tell you it should be done this way. You should build an app or you should build this feature and they're going to sound and look really important, but they're probably making that up and that's across the board. My experience, I'll show you guys a case study, actually, I think it's pretty cool around assumptions and how assumptions are wrong. So this is not a car case study, it's a mobility one, but I think it's pretty cool. So we worked for Dutch railways, very sophisticated railway network in the Netherlands and in a nutshell, the Netherlands, as you guys know or may know, it's a very small country, a lot of people, a lot of density, great rail infrastructure.

(09:09):

And they came to us and said, Hey, we don't want to invest more money in buying more trains, rolling stock as they call it. We want to find a way to make our trains more efficient. How can we get people on and off trains quicker? How can we shave time off that so we don't have to buy more trains simply? So there was a lot of ideas kicked around and for some reason someone was hell bent on an app of course, which is the app as a solution for everything. And we said, let's prototype some different solutions. Let's think about what we can come up with. The whole point of this was to get people onto the right spot on the platform before the train came. So it would simply, the brief was the sensors on the train, they know how busy each carriage is.

(09:55):

How do we get people to line up at the right spot? They don't line up at a red carriage that's full of people, they line up with carriages that are empty, right? Pretty simple. We have that information, we just need the information to get from the train that's coming in to the passenger that's on the platform. An app was not the solution, although we did prototype an app and it was a very ugly app that used comic sans and we did prototype it and we tested it and we listened to the user and then we prototyped a second solution, which was a giant sign that ran the length of the platform and it was very simple, just LEDs along the platform that matched perfectly up with the carriages. If it was red, the carriage is full, don't line up there. If it was green, it was empty line up there.

(10:37):

Which one do you think won? Obviously the sign, right? Because when you walk up the stairs out of a train station, you're not looking down, you're looking up. And this solution was again, very, very simple, but we shaved off with this about 30 seconds, almost 30 seconds of boarding time, going back and forth as you can imagine across train stations. That was pretty cool. So don't make assumptions. Get stuff in front of users quickly validate those assumptions and make decisions based on that. Alright, I always say you're north star of whatever you're building needs to be defined first because in theory we're talking about car tech, you pretty much design anything, right? And what we always say, what is the North Star? What are these ingredients that make up the vision for your car company? If you're working for Mercedes, those features are going to be different.

(11:28):

If you're working for Rivian, it's probably going to be all features that are related to outdoorsy stuff, the kitchen, all those sort of things, versus a lucid, which is going to be maybe more about wellness and health. So how do we do that? Well, we need to set that North star first and then we need to think, well, that helps us answer questions in the future. What features should go in the new model? What are the marketable brand moments for this? How will external factors influence the UX decisions that we make today and much will it cost? And that's a very simplified, I'm going to show a very simplified chart of the three things and then something a bit more scientific after that. So we always say in a nutshell, there's three pieces. One user need. Does anyone even want this thing? Will this thing make money?

(12:14):

Is it viable from a business perspective and does it have potential for this particular brand? Something again, that's on brand for Rivian, it's going to be very different for what's on brand for Mercedes or Lucid or something like that. We do have some more scientific ways of looking at this because of course there's a little oversimplification for the purposes of a presentation, but a lot of the work that we do when we think about this north star is really looking ahead maybe to 2030, 2050. So what we look at is different signals that might be happening around the world trends, we'll identify those trends and then from there we can define future scenarios. So different worlds that our product could live in the future. So maybe it's mega cities or private cities, whatever these different things might be. Maybe it's a world affected so badly by climate change that we need to rethink how we even engineer our cars.

(13:07):

And then from there we do what we call backcasting. So we take these different scenarios and then for manufacturer or brand X, we say these are the five different scenarios that are very possible for your brand to exist in. Now what steps do we need to take? What technologies do we need to put into our cars now to accommodate for these different futures? Alright, number three, inclusive design is better design. This is not inclusivity and accessibility is not a buzzword, it's not a box that has to be checked because inclusive design is better design. And when we think about accessibility and design, just remember that almost all of us are going to encounter disability at some point in our life. Maybe we're older. So when we think about disabilities, we have permanent disabilities, temporary disabilities, maybe injury, and then we have situational disabilities. Alright, number four, think with the end in mind.

(14:07):

So when you're building things for cars, designing things for cars, it's a very complex product, a car. In fact, it's not one product. It's maybe teams that are distributed across the us. A lot of our clients have teams in China, for example, that are working on one specific piece and orchestrating all of that, as you can imagine is a total cluster fuck. So starting with the end in mind is something that we always say when we go into our clients and they say, Hey, we need to ship something. I mean the Lucid Air had to ship, I think it was in one and a half years or something crazy like that. We need to say, how do we get this stuff to engineers quickly? So what we always say is think with the end in mind. So that FF 91 is a great example of this.

(14:50):

This is a car 11 screens they all have, or a lot of the screens have their own product teams. The whole backseat experience was being done in China. It was a pretty elaborate setup. So what we've done was we set this all up in what we call an atomic design system. Getting a little bit nerdy, but it's pretty cool thinking of the design and little pieces that were shippable to engineers very quickly. And I knew in design, this is old hat now, atomic design, back in the day, this was pretty innovative, but thinking of the design, these are all the different pieces. How do we take that apart and how do we make that shippable From day one to engineers. I always say, remember, someone has to build this. So the last point I want to talk about, and this is always a contentious point, but it's an important one, which I will drill again and again and again to everyone.

(15:38):

Don't overthink things too much and start making things as quickly as possible. Theory is, and research is important, but more important than that is getting early steps in front of human beings as quickly as possible. Validate them. I always say prototypes are always better than PowerPoints. It's also a lot of the time why we win pitches against consulting firms. Cause we’re The ones that say, Hey, we're going to develop your future strategy, but before we go too far, we're going to make you a prototype so we can all feel what that might look and feel like. Yeah, just enough research is probably enough. Like Tesla, I mean you guys have probably seen this or you've probably heard of this, the dog mode that keeps your, not supposed to leave the dog in the car, but if you do, it's a dog mode and it'll sit in the backseat of your dog or in the front seat wherever you put it, and it'll keep the AC on and blah, blah, blah.

(16:27):

And you can see the camera. This was not a scientific idea. This was an idea someone had on social media and Elon Musk decided just to build it. Of course, Tesla could take those big risks. It's that type of a brand. It's not every brand can do that, but I do think when we think about research and theory and how we get from that to products, in my experience, the shortest distance to get things in front of people is the path to success. Getting stuff in front. And we've had all sorts of experiences where things weren't put in front of people for a very, very long time, and there was hundreds of presentations and decks and it looked very important and there was a lot of small font on it, but there was, I mean, you put something in front of you user like, yeah, I don't like it. Then you'll never know that until you test it and put it in front of someone.

Kate Atkins, host (17:17):

You can watch the full talk by clicking the link in our show notes. To learn more about upcoming events like this, visit us at umsi.info/events and tune in next time to hear from UMSI, assistant professor Florian Schaub, he'll touch on privacy issues from the invention of the first camera to life in a digital era.

Florian Schaub (17:39):

I start with this question, is technology killing privacy? I would say only if we let it, right? There's a lot we can do and there's a lot we can do both in terms of how we design technology as well as what public policy requires from companies to make sure privacy and technology can coexist.

Kate Atkins, host (17:57):

That's in our next episode. Before we go, did you know that UMSI offers a fully online master's degree in applied data science? Join the leaders and the best by earning a University of Michigan Masters from anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit umsi.info/mads. That's MADS. You can find the link in our show notes. The University of Michigan School of Information creates and shares knowledge so that people like you will use information with technology to build a better world. Don't forget to subscribe to information changes everything on your favorite podcasting platform, and if you've got questions, comments, or episode ideas, send us an email at [email protected]. From all of us at the University of Michigan School of Information, thanks for listening.