Full episode transcript below
Geoff and Guy discuss their inspiration for this podcast, how their career paths influnced this mutual curiosity for observational design, and real life examples of what happens "when usability falls off a cliff".
Originally recorded on 30 Nov 2020.
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Episode Transcript
Geoff Wilson [00:00:05] Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Experiences podcast, where we uncover potential design improvements in the world around us by exploring one frustrating experience at a time. I'm your host and Chief Observer, Geoff Wilson based out of Auckland. And joining me today is Guy Thompson, a Kiwi based in Melbourne.
Guy Thompson [00:00:21] Hello, everyone. Nice to see you again.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:25] haha what energy already.
Guy Thompson [00:00:25] I can't see you, though, it's a podcast. I'm just a voice in your head right now.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:29] Oh, yeah, ohhh that's what that sound is. Anyway, we thought we'd do a little quick thing on episode number two here and just give a little brief background on just who we are, how this came to be, and what we hope people can get out of it. You know, we covered a little bit of that in the pilot, but just have a quick snippet here. So, Guy, why don't you tell me about yourself first, because I don't like going first.
Guy Thompson [00:00:49] Personally, OK? I'm going to do, like, my really quick elevator pitch. Right. I'm OK. Go at it. Started out doing graphic design, computer animation, visual effects, video post-production work, all that kind of great fun creative services work. And the more that I worked on advertising, I was really excited about how big international brands could have a really big impact around the world that was selling products to millions of consumers. And so I wanted to learn a lot more about business and how they worked at scale. So I ended up joining a corporation, a bank, so I could learn about how businesses were operating and working in a corporate communications capacity. And then I ended up joining a international business team in Australia. And now I get to work with lots of businesses in Australia and New Zealand who are exporters that are importing products, that are manufacturing products. And so I get to understand a lot of the supply chain challenges, materials, the consumer journey, the value chain, all of these complex parts of that business. And I really like to take that kind of design thinking and design background about projects and initiatives and I get to apply that to my work now. So that's where kind of my background journey has happened and why I'm still really curious about how things work and noticing these little things every day. What are they, the small improvements that you can make that can actually have a really significant impact at scale.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:08] Yeah. And I guess for myself then, I originally started out in computer science because I didn't know what better to do out of high school. And in there I quickly realised it wasn't right for me because nobody ever told me why I was making the things we were making. Professors would just say, go make this game, make this sorting algorithm, but they didn't tell you why. It just frustrated me to no end. And so finally I found my calling in industrial and systems engineering where basically we started being able to ask Why? So, like, why would we move five planes from these airports and how to get the most money out of it? How do we, you know, arrange a manufacturing line? How do parts flow through the systems? What kind of improvements can we make? And so it's a lot of that. How might we. Why is something a problem? How might we fix it? And given the software background, it led me into basically user experience, some more of the digital kind of stuff. But since then, I've turned into more of a, I mean title wise, a customer experience manager. But I do more than just talk to customers and look at that because I'm trying to improve the business side. It's still that service design as well. So I just call it human centred design. It's the thing, the glue that holds all of these different disciplines together and I know that I approached you because I was like as that human centre designer, I often want to just fix every little pain point out there, all these little things we noticed. I'm like, let's go fix that, let's go fix that, let's go fix that. But there's not there's realistically just not enough time. There's not enough budget. We still have business value. We need to deliver if we want anybody to take us seriously. And I knew for you that's what I was going out of our conversations. As you help kind of limit that bubbling energy, this aggressiveness, you'll hear and go, hey, hold on. Have you actually thought about what's actually the business case for this thing and why it might have been that way?
Guy Thompson [00:03:52] Absolutely. That's one of the most exciting parts about this process, right, is that we can take our skills and our kind of, I guess, our talent for being really observant and kind of detail oriented and kind of being annoyed about these everyday experiences that other people might not pick up on. But then that becomes part of the interactive and collaborative process of trying to work out what is this thing? How does that work? How can we change it? How can we improve it? And you kind of get a consensus around, OK, here's what a potential solution looks like. And here's the process we're going to have to do to make that an improvement or implement that thing. But of course, not all of those things are going to be possible based on how much it might cost to actually do and how long it will actually take, because that's the cost as well.
Geoff Wilson [00:04:36] And you say that, you know, noticing all these little mundane things, umm for me, it started out when I moved to New Zealand. So I moved here three years ago. Obviously, I don't sound like a Kiwi, you some way more because you are - just a Kiwi based in Melbourne. But I've moved here from the States as my accent easily gives away with the loudness and rapid pace talking. But I started noticing like the dual flush toilets. Something so simple. It's something you use every day. Nobody ever talks about it. Nobody leaves the bathroom going, "Oh, how was that experience pressing that button on the toilet today?" I'm the only one who does that - I'm a little bit weird like that. But that's what I find fascinating, is that.
Guy Thompson [00:05:12] I'm sure there's seven billion people on the planet. And of course, not all of them have flush toilets, but the ones who are flushing the toilet, I'm sure a few of them have thought about these challenges. But it's nice to kind of go through and say, hey, look, this is a thing that you're interacting with on a daily basis and just thinking about it in a different way. And absolutely, we're both kind of like a fish out of water. I grew up in New Zealand, worked in London, and now I'm living in Melbourne. And so a lot of the things that are traditional kind of very, not quaint, but just experiences that Australians are very used to that are different to anywhere in the world, I'm kind of noticing these things and that's a bit different. That's a bit interesting. And I kind of that's part of what I bring to my work, because I've got a different point of view and a different kind of set of baggage to bring with me about design and experience and objectivity and subjectivity around what we're doing on a project or an initiative. And that's where I really enjoy doing what I do, is that there are still design elements to it. And I get I get kind of jealous about some of the past that you've been through around that systems engineering process is that I think if I'd have spent a bit of time going more closely towards industrial design and manufacturing, I could have been much closer to that process of where you actually get to make an improvement in the real world for a product that's or a system that's actually being implemented. This is a lot of the time I spent on aesthetics rather than implementation for something that's a physical product in the real world.
Geoff Wilson [00:06:35] Yeah, and I think I've kind of mentioned this in episode one. Primarily, we're just looking at what are those things we're using every day? How might they be different? What kind of decisions might or might not have gone into those so that potentially somebody's out there listening will actually be able to take that and turn it into a million dollar idea? And I mean, that's the business value, again, is money. But as I said 'humans centred design', I do have that core belief that it's about making our human lives better, but also just making the world better. Because, you know, you could argue that humans are destroying the world in certain ways. There's waste and a lot of places. So how might we better design our world so that we can waste less stuff so we can impact the environment less, so we can do this kind of true world ecosystem together. And sometimes it comes down to this little design decisions and what we make. And too often than not, people just make things without really considering all this different angles. And that's what I really wanted to get in this. So it's a little bit of humanity, a little bit of environmentalism is my background. That kind of inspires me with all this. And we'll just see where it comes out.
Guy Thompson [00:07:37] Absolutely. I think that's a great combination. It's a good way to look at it, that it's not just about, you know, a button on an app that might frustrate you. You know, it's how these things are connected together. And a point you're making there around, you know, improving the world when you make these little improvements, can they scale up? I mean, one of the things we've certainly seen in the last few years is around making recycling easier to do, making it more intuitive, understanding how to do it. And I know that when we travel internationally, you'll notice that there's countries that just aren't even, and different areas, that just aren't even bothering. It's too difficult. There's too many people. And that's a long way off versus I know New Zealand, Australia, that's a much bigger focus. Now, Australia is still getting there. I think New Zealand is much further along the curve. But little things like that, the way the signage works, the way the systems function, if you can make it easier for people to do the right thing and do the sensible thing, then you are having a greater impact. I think that's a really interesting sort of line of curiosity to go down.
Geoff Wilson [00:08:36] Yeah, because it's one of those things that I'm like, take a drink, I might have already talked about this before. You mentioned one little button. So, yes, it's a little button, whether it's digital or physical, interacting with that frustration that leaves, how does that impact the next interaction you go into - your frustrations going to the next person? So let's say you're at a cafe and something doesn't go right. Well, how does that potentially delay your day? And if that delayed your day, how is that delaying other people's days? Like maybe you're now late for a meeting and in that meeting, you kind of discuss or design this new thing, but that meeting doesn't happen or that's five minutes late. So they ran the projector for five minutes longer. There's all of these little elements that just keep it like like a butterfly effect into the world, whether it's wasting people's time, impacting just our emotions or environment. Yeah, like leaving the light on for an extra five minutes just because something else delayed you.
Guy Thompson [00:09:28] Yeah, there's like a real sort of domino effect that happens when you can see there's experiences, all kind of, there's one thing that just sets off this whole chain of events that that happens. And one of the little elements in a chain that I noticed yesterday was going to a cafe that I just noticed open up. And they were using the little Square payment terminal on the disk. And usually it's only in two places. Right. It's sitting in its recharging dock or it's sitting on the bench. And I went to pay for the coffee and the lady behind the counter just literally suddenly ran in a panic going, it's it's not here! And she's like, did someone take it? Like, have I just placed it somewhere? And so you have this awkward dance. I mean, I can come back later. I can stand here and drink my takeaway coffee until you find it. And she eventually sort of found it and it was fine. But I just realised there's this really interesting conversation around when usability falls off a cliff; a system works and then if it's not there and it doesn't function, you just can't even complete the transaction. And that's an interest... And then we know that happens all the time with a Web browser just won't work and you can't complete what you're doing. But saying when those things happen in the real world as well, I think is an interesting comparison.
Geoff Wilson [00:10:36] And you even right there that made me think of like, you know, you've got to find my iPhone app, but for her it's like the find my terminal. Yeah. Yeah. OK, where's my payment terminal. Can somebody make it beep for me?
Guy Thompson [00:10:46] Yeah. Because even on like cordless phones at home, way back in the 90s when we had cordless phones, there was a little button on the base where it'd be like, I want the phone to ring so I can know where it is. So having that little beeper effectively on the base station so the Square makes a noise so you can find it if you happen to have misplaced it or you can invoke that on the app. These are little improvements over time that you can add that stop thousands of people being frustrated because they keep losing the square.
Geoff Wilson [00:11:12] So are you telling me that we didn't grow up with mobile phones from the get go? What was that world like, huh?
Guy Thompson [00:11:18] I'm like, what do we call them? Like a cordless phone in the house, like, whatever those things were? Yeah.
Geoff Wilson [00:11:23] I mean, I'm still picturing the long cord phone that like we used to walk around of the kitchen, you know, walk around people.
Guy Thompson [00:11:28] Is was a very quick jump, right, to the five gigahertz home phone haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:11:34] Yeah, happened in no time. And I think out of that too, it reminded me of just comedians and the fact that, like you mentioned, you're picking these little things up. And I think that's the comedian's job. And I wish we could be comics on this = maybe in time we will develop that skill in real time as you listen...
Guy Thompson [00:11:50] Hopefully we can be more funny at the time.
Geoff Wilson [00:11:54] Well, or at least laugh a lot. It's one of those you know, it's like a sitcom. If you laugh a lot, then maybe everybody else will start laughing, too, as compared to that movie when you're watching it with somebody and nobody is really laughing. So you're like, I think this is funny, but I don't really know if I can laugh or not. Anyway, the point being, as again, comedians just noticing things that happen in the world, that's their job. But they try to figure out what's the absurd element they can bring to that. So what's that crazy interaction that's, like your payment terminal thing, a good comedian could probably take that interaction, notice this little thing that happens to any of us at any given day, but then turn it into some crazy story, something that doesn't go right. And that's at least what draws me to comedy. And I feel like there's a ton of parallels and that and maybe one day if I ever get off the couch and actually make a stand up routine like I've been trying to do for a while, then maybe I can actually incorporate that into an act at some point. But absolutely, I digress.
Guy Thompson [00:12:43] I feel like most of the time you're a sit down comedian, not a stand up comedian. But we say, see if you can get that. I think a really good point. You mentioned there was something we've talked about before of like really well written comedy shows where there's a team of writers coming up with ideas, thinking about these everyday experiences. And I think you mentioned something about Seinfeld; was there an episode that you'd thought of that had something like an observation that was really key to one of your experiences?
Geoff Wilson [00:13:08] Well Seinfield was all observations. That's all he ever did. He would just sit there and just watch things. I mean, that's even the shows. They all started out with him going, do you ever notice this thing about blah, whatever it was. And for me, the one that I was thinking about recently again was around, they had an entire episode of getting lost in a parking lot. And, you know, thinking about that then, that was easily twenty five years ago probably, and in a thirty minute episode all about parking lots of getting lost. Now we might do an episode on parking in time or, wait, what do you call them real quick? I say parking garages, if it's like a multistorey, we're in a language thinking
Guy Thompson [00:13:42] building parking lot. Yeah, car park.
Geoff Wilson [00:13:44] The car park. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody told me recently that as an American, they kept asking me, what the hell's a parking garage? Also I'm saying garage, not 'garage' [New Zealand pronunciation], so I think that also throws people off
Guy Thompson [00:13:54] Hey, usability of language. That's a whole different episode right there as well. Right. Anyway, back to back to Seinfeld. Right. So everyone's getting lost in the carpark.
Geoff Wilson [00:14:03] Yeah. And, you know, even noticing today, then it's like, well, how have things changed in that time? Kind of like how have things changed in the past year of covid? Well, now some parking garages and parking lots, they've actually got like red and green indicators on the top to tell you where empty spaces are. So they've at least helped you figure out where to park. But has anything figured out how to help you find where you parked again after that journey? So, it's not just the journey of finding a space and then skipping down to paying, you know, paying when you're trying to leave. There's a lot of things that happen in between, and that's the kind of stuff that we'll end up taking and really diving into the nuances of those. So on that note, to tease it out a little bit, do you have any topics that you are very curious to get into in the full episodes?
Guy Thompson [00:14:49] Yeah, I think one of the key things I want to look at is it's part of what I sort of just mentioned there when that usability stops. So that's things like having to use a swipe card or being able to use an elevator like it doesn't have buttons inside it. And suddenly you're stuck inside the elevator and you can't get out and locked out of your apartment. There's all these systems and things that we interact with on a daily basis, which are great. But as soon as you can't complete that, it's a horrible experience and that can be quite traumatic. We'll have stories of when something just completely stopped working or we got stuck in the wrong Uber or, you know, and there's a lot of things we can explore there about how we had a really dramatic experience because suddenly it just veered off. We thought things were going fine and it completely went in a different direction. So that's one of the things I want to talk about as well. Something that fascinates me is the decisions that are made in public spaces. So that's including things like wayfinding and signage and car parks or shopping malls or airports. These mass environments where potentially millions of people need to pass through the logic around how is that place being designed for someone who's visiting for the first time versus people who visit on a regular basis? Are they there as a group? is someone else showing them around? Are they just exploring on their own? Did they go to the opening day? Like, how do people navigate a space and find their way around? And also, you know, how do people act in an emergency as well? Like we all see those green emergency signs all the time, you know, are they big enough? Do we know how to look for them when we're really under stress? So that, I think is really interesting: the usability when things are normal versus usability in an emergency. That's a really interesting thing to explore around, you know, how passengers get off the plane in emergency, all those sorts of usability functions that are part engineering, part communication and part kind of just experience design. I think there's a there's a lot of interesting overlaps on that. And I suppose that a key thing to comment on that is that I'm not an experienced designer in terms of environments or an architect or signage. These are just things I'm experiencing. And I think I'm coming at it with my level of sort of curiosity and observing nature and going, oh, that's an interesting thing. And I've kind of noticed it. And and we both kind of take these things away in the back of our mind. And it's nice to be able to explore these and in a real environment, I guess, and talk about them like this. And hopefully if other people are listening and they can think of some ways to solve those problems or if that it inspires them, that's a really great outcome for us - because I haven't had to design six shopping malls and solve problems like someone else goes, oh, that's great. I can just use that one thing.
Geoff Wilson [00:17:17] The great part about this kind of conversation is, I guess out of the two of us, I am an experienced designer, more or less what the title says, but then I'm still I've still got a ton to learn. Right. You have these kind of conversations. You read articles, you read books, you listen to other podcasts. You talk to friends, like you, and you start realising, like all of these new ways that you could do stuff. So like you mentioned, the public spaces and travellers. Well, I started thinking: how often, when we test our products and services and systems, how often are we thinking about people like that? Where it's not just, I guess I mean, like recruiting, right. Because you've got to recruit people to test unless you're just doing it literally on the street, which I do occasionally. I'm actually going to go onto the street tomorrow and do some of that. But like, how often am I trying to, let's say if I was designing the public space and I'm going to recruit people, I'll probably recruit people in the local area and whatnot. But how might you recruit tourists and people that aren't familiar with that area, people who just moved there? Because in recruitment, you have to find them somehow. You have to actually get them. You have to find, hopefully they have time because if they're travelling, they're not going to have much. So it's trying to think of these other kinds of people. And that kind of gets in that inclusive design area. Just it's not just an 80/20 easy rule of, oh, people that are like me and they live here and they have this amount of money and whatnot, these are the people that we're solving for - it's trying to remember all of these other people that interact with you thing, that use your thing, and remembering to test with them and seeing what's satisfactory enough to provide value to the most people without really leaving out anyone. And I guess on that note, I do want to call out for a second that again, the experiences we're talking about, we are fairly lucky. I mean, in New Zealand, for myself, we've been back to normal, quote unquote, for quite a while now and multiple months out of the year for 2020. So there's a lot of things that I know other people might not be able to experience right now. Hopefully in time everywhere in the world can get back to some sense of normality. But, you know, it's even if you can't be doing the kind of things we're talking about right now, hopefully it at least provides you in a mental escape for 30 minutes of at least imagining what it was like when you got to ride the bus and stuff. I don't want to be teasing anybody with that.
Guy Thompson [00:19:32] But yeah, I think that's a really good point. Both in New Zealand and Australia, we've sort of gone through initial lockdowns, very, very harsh and very quick to really try and get on top of the virus. And we've had an advantage that we've got relatively small populations that are pretty widely dispersed. You know, you've got different states across Australia, but they've got no more than about five million people in different locations. So that's been a lot easier to manage. So we're in a really wonderful position really, with and with very few infections now, almost zero in many places and very few deaths compared to a lot of what's been happening in the rest of the world. So I'm very grateful for that particular situation and from my point of view, and I know that we both are. So, yeah, I think it's really about just having time to think about the way that these systems work. And also if we're talking about things like taking a flight or going to a shopping mall or going to a bar or restaurant or going to a cinema or going to a concert, it's more about the fact that we we do have to think about redesigning these systems now, these experiences. So there is an opportunity to take that time and say, hey, look, there's a thing that used to not work very well. And this is the first time anyone's really had a pause where that whole thing shut down for a while. We can sort of think about retooling it and reengineering it. Is there a better way to do this thing? Is there a better way to experience this thing? Is there a more cost effective way to run it? And so I think that's that's a really interesting thing to explore. But we certainly aren't trying to just make light of the situation or kind of poke fun at the fact that you can't do things right now. But I think we're we're living through a really exciting and interesting time and that a lot of the things that we've experienced for a long time are going to transform completely. And without the pandemic happening, we wouldn't have seen those transitions and that transformation happening. So, changes like this are hard and sometimes they're tragic and I think the loss of life is terrible. But I think one of the things we'll see is people thinking a lot deeper about the processes and systems and the impacts that things have on people, because that's really what we've seen over the last years - how people have been affected by decisions that others make.
Geoff Wilson [00:21:40] And I think what I'm hoping out of anything, if anything gets redesigned, to me it goes back to what also inspired me from the beginning. One of the first design books I read, which is Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, and that first chapter on Norman Doors, which, as you know, if you look at the podcast artwork right now, I've kind of taken inspiration from that because that talked about push versus pull, like the signifiers versus affordance - the door affords opening, but there's signifiers in the kind of interfaces like a handle or a push bar that kind of give you clues as to what you can do with it, whether or not you can see or not see - like if you can't see, but you can feel a handle, you probably think, "Oh, I should pull that." But if the thing above it says Push, you would have never known that if you can't really read it, if there's no Braille or anything else or people that just don't look at things. We just go across the world. We just interact with the ways we're used to interacting based on our mental models, based on how we've used other systems previously. And if anything, in this post pandemic world, that's the one thing that could be redesigned. Like you're saying, people currently have this pause, this time to redo things... start with doors! Start with door handles! And just like, because I don't know about you, but opening doors now, especially during the middle of it, like when we were in lockdown, like level three, when we're a little bit allowed back out in the public, I'm like grabbing door handles with like my pinky, like my pinky only, so like minimising the amount of surface contact and wiping that, sanitise that. So it's like, well, was there another way to open a door? So how might we be able to go through these places we need with the same efficiency. So like, you know, revolving door. So we've got a new one in our office. It's one of those big, you know, circular revolving doors, but it takes forever to walk through. So funny enough, every day on the way into the office, as I walk into it, and kind of watch other people, we're using the manual doors on either side because opening a door handle and walking through it is a lot easier for us than to actually stand there and just slowly taking baby steps through this big revolving door. There's a usability fail in itself right there. It was a brand new building, but they've just invested however many millions designing this place. It's a 'How Might They' have tested that before they even built it as well. And, at least again, the hope is if people listen to things like this, if you're designing and building right now and you've got a big revolving door, you might start questioning that, "Hmm, Maybe we should figure out how to test whether people will want to use that thing versus using their-easier-to-access door to the right of it. That door to the right, it's got a handle you've gotta touchstone so in covid times, it's not sanitary; you might lock it down. But, people will weigh those trade offs. People are always 'satisficing' "What's going to give me the satisfactory thing I want and in the easy enough way - it might cause some losses to me, but that's just the one that I want to go with."
Guy Thompson [00:24:21] Absolutely. I think there's a lot around how doors function and those little everyday things we come into contact with. Just quickly on that one, I did see a story during probably the middle of the pandemic where I think somewhere in Europe, a company was 3D printing these extension handles that they were joining onto supermarket freezer doors so that you could basically be shopping and kind of pull open the freezer door with your elbow and then kind of like pull your food out and then kind of just shove it shut with your arm. So instead of touching with a hand, you were sort of touching it with your jacket or whatever you were wearing and little kind of tweaks and adjustments like that. Because I know within a hospital environment, if you ever watched a TV show that's space in the hospital, you'll see them using elbows and arms and different ways to interact with doors and these gigantic tap handles and just, you know, these extensions of the things that we usually interact with that are usually quite small or flat, are kind of extruded and elongated and and oversized. So make it easy if you're wearing gloves. So you have to use your your arms and an operating theatre, you can actually interact with them. So it's like, yeah, just different ways to make those things function.
Geoff Wilson [00:25:36] And even that, like the way you're saying it, that also becomes more inclusively designed for other people because people have different handicaps and stuff - people with missing arms and all that - they have a way to use this thing that they couldn't use previously. And sometimes, unfortunately, it took a pandemic to figure that stuff out, similar to, you know, anybody can use a wheelchair ramp. You just have to think about those kind of people first and then design something that is accessible by everybody.
Guy Thompson [00:25:58] Yeah, there's a huge amount in there, and we're certainly not experts on usability for accessibility, but I think it's just, we're kind of noticing those things. And I think they're really important things to work on and to try and solve and are worth paying attention to. So hopefully it's this collaborative process to try and sort of get through it, to hopefully make a few improvements over time. I've got a really quick thing to add here. I know we've got a lot of topics involved and we might cut this part out anyway, but I'm going to go into real speed round, Geoff, and you made a whole bunch of notes on what what we're going to cover. And I've put a few, like a few of them there that I've put in there as well. So we've got buses, public transport, utensils, pool tables, sitting down at a diner, a restaurant versus takeaway, showers, sinks, toilets, bathrooms, driving cars.
Geoff Wilson [00:26:47] Haha yeah there's the theme of about bathrooms for some reason
Guy Thompson [00:26:48] going to the bathroom, process of getting a haircut, parking garage / car park, international flights, in-flight entertainment, microwaves, ovens, hobs, TV remotes, car door handles, you know, all these different things, radios. You've got taps in here, payment terminals, tissue... Tissue boxes?.
Geoff Wilson [00:27:08] Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There's a thing, there's I use tissue boxes every day. There's a usability of tissue boxes that just irritates me to no end. So yes, that will be at least a ten minute segment at some point.
Guy Thompson [00:27:19] Very good. We've got blinds, Venetian blinds, all the different kinds of blinds. You have packaging. That's one that I loved and have done a lot of work in fast moving consumer goods and products. And the way that we use packaging and how it functions is really important to me. Customising fast food always orders calibrating the brightness on your TV, ultrasound controls, power plugs, different model things, escalators versus elevators versus travelators, movies where things could have been better if it was totally changed.
Geoff Wilson [00:27:50] But don't give out all the good ideas I’ve got…
Guy Thompson [00:27:52] exactly like we get we're not going to go into all of these, but hopefully we can cover all of these in time. So it'll be interesting to see how many of those we've cut out. We might have just had five in there, but there's a lot of material to cover. And I'm really excited to kind of go through this process to sort of delve into them and investigate these, because, yeah, we kind of... I think it's great to look at the strengths that you have. We both have a really high level of sort of observancy and detail, and those things kind of just annoy us, so hopefully by sharing some of these, we can arrive at some solutions and ideas that maybe have been thought about before or just bring some really obvious things back to the surface that people can use. So, yeah, it's going to be a really interesting project.
Geoff Wilson [00:28:32] Yeah, and with that, you know, if you guys listening have any kind of suggestions of your own things that annoy you, don't just let them pass, don't just save them for the dinner table or the water cooler and tell your friends like, because that's what most people talk about. Most of our conversations are just complaining about something that happened, but we never really talk about, well, how could that be better?
Guy Thompson [00:28:50] We're on to a really interesting line of sort of discussion here and absolutely agree with the idea that we want this to be really interactive process. You have lots of other people that you can have on the show and talk to and investigate. Hopefully there'll be some some interactive designers and industrial design and you can talk to and kind of really explore these topics, not only from our point of view as just sort of users and designers, but also people who are responsible for these really big projects that they're actually working on as well. So that be a really interesting journey.
Geoff Wilson [00:29:19] And with that, folks, thank you for listening to this episode, and I hope that made you think of a few new things. If you'd like to continue this conversation or see examples of what we were talking about today, you can find and follow us on social media @EverydayExpPod or myself @geoffwilsonHCD. Please consider subscribing on your favourite podcasting app and leaving us a rating so we can keep this going. And just remember, you don't have to have a fancy job title to start noticing and improving the everyday experiences wherever you work. Thanks. And we'll be on the air again soon.
