Full episode transcript below
Kate Rutter joins Geoff to tackle (i.e. mutually complain about) the most complex everyday experience covered on this show thus far: The Postal Service. Listen in to this extra special episode where we, in Kate's fitting words, continue to "bring and highlight the specialness and interestingness of what might be perceived as mundane design."
Highlights include:
💡 How is the postal service like a country with its own currency?
💡 How do you design for the little touches people never forget?
💡 What business value do postal service improvements bring and who's footing the bill?
💡 How does voting by mail compare between the United States and New Zealand?
💡 What is mail art?
Originally recorded on 9 Jan 2021.
Who is Kate Rutter?
Kate is an adjunct interaction design professor at California College of the Arts and co-host of the brilliant "What Is Wrong With UX" podcast.
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Subscribe and support the show by leaving us a rating or review on Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favourite shows.
And as always, just remember, you don't have to have a fancy job title to start noticing and improving the everyday experiences wherever you work...
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 an extra special guest that I'm beyond thrilled to have on, Kate Rutter based out of San Francisco. It is seriously wonderful to talk to you today. See? I'm already stuttering haha.
Kate Rutter [00:00:29] Aw, that's very sweet. Well, it is an absolute pleasure to be here. I love the the framing of the podcast. I think we all have good experiences and bad ones that we can share. And, you know, there's something really special about what you're doing, which is to bring and highlight the specialness and the interestingness of what might be perceived as mundane. I'm a big believer that there's nothing that's mundane if you put time and attention and care into it. It's an absolute pleasure to be here.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:54] And I love the fact that you use the word mundane, because that's how I have often described it - it's, yes, making the boring hopefully a little less boring. OK, also, just to get us started, there's a good chance that not all the people listening have any idea of your background. So would you mind giving us a quick recap of what you do and what you've got going on?
Kate Rutter [00:01:12] Sure. So my current efforts are in three different places. I have a personal consultancy that I do, projects that are interesting and very blessed with the network and with some past experiences I've had. So I get to work with teams. I often do workshops with them related to words and numbers and pictures. So sketching or metrics. I'm writing a book with Rosenfeld; the working title is "Practical Metrics for Designers". It's an area I've been passionate about for the last decade. And in my other, the third pursuit is, I am a Professor of Interaction Design at California College of the Arts. So usually have two, sometimes three, one, two, three courses a semester and in both undergrad and the graduate program. And I just love being a part of the the community of early stage designers because so many of the issues that, you know, are well known won't be well known by the time they hit the midpoint of their career. So it's wonderful and fascinating to learn and to learn with them and to kind of share what I've learned so far. But in the Wayback Machine, I got involved with the Internet in the mid 90s. I was a Director of Technology Services for a nonprofit that worked with career development in San Francisco. And, you know, Monster was still just brand new. And so we had to figure out what this work life was going to look like for people in the future. And that was going to be placed on the Internet and we knew that. So that was when I started that path. Since then, I think most most of my learning really happened either on my own or through a startup that got really big and then was acquired during the dotcom boom. I joined Adaptive Path, which was a very pioneering consultancy with some amazing colleagues, taught me so much. And then after that, co-founded a startup with my colleague and beloved friend Janice Frazier and Jason Frazier to help early stage entrepreneurs really blend and user experience and customer centric thinking into their startups. At the earliest stage, I was kind of the rise of the lean startup. So that was really what built a different community of entrepreneurship in my path. You know, I've been, I guess, lucky that the the career path has not really been career as a noun, which is if you look it up, it means like a, you know, kind of a series of steps towards greater responsibility and authority in one's work life. But career is also a verb, which means to move at great speed towards an unknown future, an unknown thing. And so my career has been much more verb than noun. It's been moving around quite a bit, but always centered on technology and human experience.
Geoff Wilson [00:04:04] I think that's a good segue way because I help run UX Auckland, we've got to Meetup group down here in New Zealand. And I've been asked many times over the years like, how did I get onto this design career path? And often I've been trying to answer that by first telling these people just how to start looking at the world around them, how to start noticing all the different opportunities that aren't necessarily digital. And so often these conversations took place at bars because that's where meetings are being held. And that's why the first pilot episode was on bars. But, today I was asking you, well, what kind of other everyday experience might we be interested in that might help people start seeing new avenues for design, new career paths, things they can go with that speed no matter where they are, and potentially become a designer through not that traditional channel, right? So you were eager to talk about the Postal Service when I gave you a list of episodes. What made you interested about that?
Kate Rutter [00:04:53] I love the Postal Service. Well, let me rephrase that. I love and hate the Postal Service.
Geoff Wilson [00:04:58] Don't we all haha
Kate Rutter [00:04:59] I think with all mail delivery is a miracle. I really do. I can't believe I mean, if we tried to design the system as it is now to, you know, deliver at home and I'm in the United States, I'm speaking about the US Postal Service, that's where I have my experience. But if we had tried to design a system that said, you know, we are going to move physical objects from one household or one home or one location to another location within a pretty short period of time, a couple of days, you know, with almost any kind of size or weight or material. There are limitations, but they're pretty... they're not as stringent as they could be. Like, if we were going to do that, it would be A) radical and B) it would probably be perceived as so crazy and expensive, it's impossible. And so what I love about the Postal Service is it's taken this, you know, it's evolved over 200 years. And and each time it's trying to reflect the needs of society as that's changing, I think of the Postal Service as its own country. It has citizens which are us as mail recipients and centers. It has businesses. It has front of house, back of house with all of the processing. I mean, you put something in a box right here. You put a letter in a box and then, quote, magic happens and then it appears somewhere else. It also has its own currency with stamps. I mean, it is directly related to government policy because it's a government owned institution. So it's this very weird and beautiful microcosm that does one thing well. So hopefully its purpose is to do one thing well, which is to get a physical thing from one place to another place. How much... like that is not complicated, but it's complicated in doing so, I get very swoony about about all of the cultural weirdness and technological invention and systemic problems that happen with a big country like the US.
Geoff Wilson [00:06:55] And also on that note, you know, I am by no means an expert in postal service. I haven't studied them for more than about an hour preparing for this. But the point of what we do in this is just kind of explore what we see, what kind of experiences we have going through it, and kind of the business side as well. So, like, what might have made these decisions happen? What might have led to this? And I'm even liking a little point that you made right there of it should do it well - that's their one job, is to get a thing from one place to another place, from one person to another person. But I'm wondering already, how how do you think they're measuring that? Like what do you think their criteria is and what's their error tolerance? Because I know as a recipient, plenty of times I get more mail than a letter addressed to somebody else that's not me in my mailbox than I do mail for myself. So already to me, if I were to look at the metrics of it, I'd go, wow, I'm getting like 80 percent somebody else's, is this is not good. They're not doing something right.
Kate Rutter [00:07:47] Yeah. So like you, I don't have any secret source of the internal mechanisms of the Postal Service, which is why it's fun to take this bystander walk through based on our perception as users. And I'm a pretty aggressive user of postal service. I have a mail art practice as well. So I try and mail things that sometimes are not really awesome for the Postal Service and uhh
Geoff Wilson [00:08:11] Give em a challenge there haha.
Kate Rutter [00:08:11] Yeah, exactly. You know, what we're talking about is, is 142.6 billion pieces of mail a year. That is for the Postal Service the US covers. And that's actually down and dropping significantly because of digital delivery, because of how information is transformed based on the Internet. But, you know, that's still a shit ton of physical things to get from point A to point B. And so I think that the... I mean, to me, the metric to measure is successfully delivered items. Right? And now if you have unsuccessfully delivered items like you get something for a neighbor or it goes into the dead letter office or it gets returned, all of those are failures of it. But then there's also like maybe non-critical failures like damage. Right? Or, you know, loss where you have no idea who it is. So I think there's those. Those, I mean, in my experience as a customer, I don't get those as much. Where are the struggles and the tolerances and what I think it's interesting to measure from an experiential standpoint is much more of the smoothness or really the usability. And when I think about metrics, I kind of think about three major categories. There's especially around experiential metrics. There's usability, you know, can someone use it? Can someone use it well? Which are actually two different questions.
Geoff Wilson [00:09:31] Or are you satisfied with it?
Kate Rutter [00:09:32] And if you can't use it, then it's a nonstarter. If you can use it, but you don't use it well or it's not easy to use well, then there's definitely area of improvement. And then the second category that we often talk about is sentiment. Right? Do I like it or does it feel effective or does it feel good or do I like what it's trying to do or am I, quote, delighted by it? You know, I sometimes struggle with designers' focus on delight when I'm like, sometimes you don't necessarily need to be delighted by something? It just needs to do a job. So the third category and the one that I don't think we talk about explicitly, I think it's always there hidden in plain sight is usage. And what I'm curious about is of the percentage of American citizens, what percentage have mailed a letter or an object within the last week or within the month. And I suspect that those numbers are low and dropping because there's so many alternative ways of sending things. But that would be interesting because it means that's the coverage of service for the citizenship that for whom the system is designed.
Geoff Wilson [00:10:39] So I think what could be good to this is I like to walk through things from end to end. Right? So in this case, maybe we'll take our own use cases. We won't hypothesize on what other people might be doing. I've got: most of the time it's either mailing stuff back to my family in the US so I'm doing international now, or I've sold something on TradeMe, our equivalent of eBay, and I'm trying to ship a little parcel out to somebody else that I sold varying different sizes. And the only last thing I ever personally mail is my voter ballot back to the US again. So I've kind of got like two parcels, one letter internationally, although I don't use it that much. But you said you're a frequent user. So starting with that experience, what is that first thing you need to do when you're trying to mail out one of these items?
Kate Rutter [00:11:22] So if I'm going to walk through it, it's like there's someone I want to get in contact with, a friend, a family member. We have a culture of letter writing in my family. So that's very common. And, you know, I write the thing, but then the mail process really starts at the envelope because the envelope is going to tell me how much this thing is going to cost. Not only the thing in it, but how thick is the envelope, how heavy is it? So the envelope choice is kind of a big deal.
Geoff Wilson [00:11:46] And where did you get it?
Kate Rutter [00:11:47] I have a variety of envelopes from my past. I collect them, but sometimes I'll make an envelope out of a magazine page that I think is particularly interesting or cute. And then the next question is the address. So looking up and finding out somebody's address. Thank you, Google Maps. That's actually pretty helpful. And I love the zip codes. I think the zip codes are a miracle as well, that there's... you can kind of, in some areas, put a name and a zip code and it will get to that person. Now, it's not reliable and it's not recommended, but it is possible, which is a fucking miracle anyway. And then we have in my... I live in a community that has multiple residences in it. So we have a shared mailbox system. So I go out and I'll stick it in the mailbox or I'll go to my local post office, which is also something that probably wouldn't fly if we were inventing the post office today is every rural community, every and multiple places in urban communities, have a physical place that is staffed where you go and you can mail things. And that's often where the challenges begin. So I have a series of postcards that I can mail. They're wooden postcards. They were designed as malleable objects called wooden postcard. And when I take them to the post office and I say, I would like to mail this, they tell me I can't, that I must put it in an envelope because it is non automatable mail and it won't go through the mail. And yet when I stick a stamp on it, first class or forever stamp, and I put it in a box, it arrives just fine. So that's already kind of interesting. Like, what is it... Like going to the post office actually creates more anxiety because I want to trust them, but I don't always know why things are costing the way they are. Sometimes I'll just put a shit ton of stamps on something and mail it off. But that also considers delay too. Anything in that that's interesting? I just think that, so far as a miracle, is just fraught with strange, unexpected things around pricing. I think that's it.
Geoff Wilson [00:13:49] And I guess that's one thing I always come up with, especially trying to mail stuff back to the U.S., is I have no idea what things are going to cost. I don't even know what things are going to cost if I try to mail it like a mile down the street here or a kilometer down the street... my Americanisms coming out haha. Most of the time I just take my letter straight to the post office branch just because, to me, it's less hassle. And also I don't have stamps at the ready because I have no idea what things are going to cost. And I just make that trip, which means luckily, you know, I've got to pick a day to do it, but it's not that often; it's not that frequent for me. But I've also, you know, tried to use, I say, postage calculators online. So we've got the kind of digital side of that, too. But then I don't think I've ever gotten it right, because I think every time I've ever tried to use the postage calculator online, it's estimating it well above what it actually will be, which actually kind of puts me off and makes me start wondering, is this even worth mailing it? Should I just buy the thing? I want to send somebody at their local place and have it shipped directly to them instead of me? And yes, if I go into the bridge, I feel like I can actually get the kind of service which I feel is kind of like as an analogy when people say like, oh, we'll just use a Web chat or just use some kind of secure mail or form online versus calling us because we don't really want to take calls and they try to give you that impression. But there's some people like myself I want to talk to somebody because I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I feel like if I was left to my own devices, I wouldn't get it right. And so I'm going to go stand in a long queue just because I don't know what I actually need to get this thing done.
Kate Rutter [00:15:13] I think that you just hit the nail on the head and how I agree with that too that you I go because I don't know. Right? And and like you, that's so funny that you mentioned the postal calculators online because it's kind of challenging to find out how much a first class stamp is. But what's tricky is the sizes of envelopes, because the size the form factor, like the length, the height, the thickness and the lumpiness of it all make a difference in the rate. And it seems to make much more of a difference than I can ever calculate online. So I too have tried. I mean, I've got a postal scale tells me how heavy something, but it won't give me things that a postal worker will understand, which is like how lumpy or how thick something is can. And the big question seems to be, can it go through the automatic sorting machine? If it can't, then there's going to be additional postage. But I'm a terrible judge of that. And apparently the wooden postcards, I don't know how they deal with them, but they get delivered. So it's kind of like I want to trust the online and doing the self-service because that's so much more convenient for me. But on the other hand, I don't. But I get very different information when I go to the post office. It's like there's these two different systems and there's the online pricing system and the in-person pricing system. And they don't seem to I can't ever figure out how they relate to each other.
Geoff Wilson [00:16:34] Now, do you think that trust actually affects the business from their point of view? And do you think it's something that they might care about?
Kate Rutter [00:16:40] Yeah, one of the things that is interesting about the system is do people have other options? And if there were other options that were better, I absolutely think people would use them. But there's not a lot of other options. So this is the classic enterprise software conundrum. We don't always have users, sometimes we have hostages. Because, people in an enterprise can't choose whether or not to use a productivity tool. Now, it's getting a little bit more diverse and there's a little bit more consumer software that's useful around the edges. But if you have Salesforce within your company, that is what you're going to be using to track deals, to track customer relationships. You know, if you're using any of those larger footprint tools, that is the tool. That's the system. And so in the same way, with the Postal Service in the US, like if you want to mail a regular letter and you don't need it to come overnight or any of the special services that like FedEx or UPS might provide, then your postal service is your monopoly. It's you've got one place. And so honestly, they don't have to care how great that is because they have a user base that has no choice. I think one would like to think that they do care. I like to think that the individual system, people within the system care, but I don't think the system itself cares.
Geoff Wilson [00:18:03] That's very true. OK, yeah, so they don't really need to care. We hope they do at the local level. And maybe it's we can make them care if we start... If people within the Postal Service or designers that might come in can start showing them reasons why they might care. So maybe it's down to a branch level. So let's start, I guess, walking into that branch and start seeing the kind of things that are within that that may or may not help move that faster. Because I'm just going to assume that one of the metrics might be, well, we want throughput, so we want to get as many people into the store as possible. Luckily, most of the ones I've seen don't really have that much of a decision. It's just one queue that everybody lines up in, but there's some desks on the side to write some stuff beforehand. And I know sometimes I don't know what I don't know. So I go up to the counter because, like I said, I don't know how much stamps are going to cost. I don't know what envelope I need. I kind of want help, like, "Hey, I've got this item and I want to ship this thing. What's the best way to do it?" But more often than not, I just get kind of turned around and get, "Oh, well, sir, you need to go over to the wall over there and you need to grab that then go to this other table and grab that pen and write this thing and then come back." So that's a customer of this postal service, I'm now dreading this entire experience because I've got to get out of my line that I waited and I've got to go around, do all these things myself again, because they don't often have the staff to go assist you. There is nobody there that can help you kind of like your personal assistant walking you through that. Do you have anything... you ever have issues like that, or is that just me? Haha
Kate Rutter [00:19:26] Not just you. There's kind of three modes whenever I walk in. And the first, my first impression on most branch offices is, oh my God, all of the stuff up on the walls, like all of the announcements and the legals and the what you can mail and each one individually is probably well-designed piece. But all together is this cacophony. And so, you know, many students, many design teams have probably done speculative design on redesign the postal service, and they often focus on navigation and signage. I've seen grad projects that do that. And I think that that would be a big improvement as well. Worth the investment? Don't know, because maybe it's not helping all that much. Maybe that would be increased pleasantness, but not necessarily make much of moving a needle for a... Honestly a service that's losing customers. So probably not their best financial investment. As far as a social investment, I think it would be important. But the three modes of going into a postal location or a post office, one, the self serve. So there used to be better self-service boxes where you could actually way calculate mail stamps, pay and then put it in a box and it would allow you to do it. They were higher... they were better featured than you might get in a public location. So it was kind of like an interim; like it was self-service, but it was still on site. I love those. They started removing them because I think they were harder to manage. And also there were some things there was just risk of mail, you know, bad things being mailed and dangerous mail happening through those. So that's been unfortunate that we haven't been able to support those. That's kind of the self-service on site model. The second is, you know, what you're there for and you just need to wait in the queue. In which case you're hoping that that is a pleasant experience. You know, they have... they certainly haven't taken the lead from Disneyland on making the queue interesting and fun.
Geoff Wilson [00:21:19] No TV's like entertaining you haha.
Kate Rutter [00:21:22] Which is Disneyland's design perspective is that the ride begins, the attraction begins when you get in line, not when you get on a little moving, whatever. So some lines are boring, but at least you feel confident if you know why you're there. There's not a lot of anxiety with it. It's just time. But the third is you don't know what you don't know. And that's where online services aren't going to help you because you obviously don't know where really the service of having a postal clerk there to advise or tell you it's possible is so key. And what's funky is this seems to be standard operating procedure is, you know, you pull out one of their envelopes or whatever. All the different forms, which are still bizarre to me, who carries a ballpoint pen nowadays, I don't know. Anyway, so you go up to the window and you're like, "I need to mail this thing in this way within this time period to this location." And they're like, "OK, here's the thing you need. Go over and get that, fill it all out, and then come back." And they explicitly tell you that when you come back, like, don't wait in line again, so you go off to this little desk or whatever, you try and pick up the right forms, you fill them all out and then you come back. And then there's this very weird cultural tension about like, you cutting in line because they told you to come back! But by that time, all the people who've seen you already waiting line are gone and the new people are there and they just give you the stink eye. And it's so weird. You have to go through that process a couple times before you get comfortable with it. It's like the way that Southwest Airlines changed the queuing for waiting for seats because they don't do preassigned seats and how they've had to evolve that over time so that people didn't just feel freaked out and cheated about where they were in line. Americans are very weird about the line hierarchy and not stepping in or out of line. It's very bizarre. So I think that there's... even if there was a sign that was like, "If you get out of line for a special service, then you're at the front of the line when you come back!"
Geoff Wilson [00:23:18] Like a pass you wear around your neck haha.
Kate Rutter [00:23:20] Yeah! But that's again, that's nothing that the Postal Service has really explicitly designed. It's just this break an expectation for how queues work and how lines were that makes people... it makes it really awkward. I've seen people get back in line and I'm like, you don't need to get back in line. You can just go to the front of the line. They're like, no, no, I'll just get back in line. I'm like, that is awful. Now you're waiting in line twice, that's so sad.
Geoff Wilson [00:23:44] And something of the things I've seen, you could, let's say, have a second queue that is just for those people who did step out. So maybe there's like one person there. However, what's going to happen likely with that option is that person is going to be not busy half the time for people who didn't have to leave line and they're eventually going to open that line up for anybody else. And so they kind of split off the queues. But now you've still got that problem of now you've got to queue to choose which one you want to cut back in front of because they can't just go, "Oh, well, let me pull you back in," because now everybody in that line. So it's that also too of trying to work through what other design opportunities could there be and how quickly can we nix those and go, "Nope! Actually, that's probably a bad idea." There's probably something else out there that people can try to think about based on this.
Kate Rutter [00:24:22] Yeah, well, there are people who've done a lot of research on queuing behaviors and how they map to cultural expectations and social behaviors. You know, this is one of those opportunities where I'd like to tie back to, for people entering the design field now, that there is a level of craft and skill set and tools that will be helpful. But the biggest help, I think, is to be noticing these types of behaviors and thinking about and hypothesising what kinds of interventions or shifts could improve that experience. I think that mindset and that attentiveness and that thoughtfulness and care is the most important criteria for anyone in a design world. I would so much rather work with someone who hasn't yet learned the tools, but who has that observational noticing, thoughtful, empathetic kind of problem solving mindset than someone who is a wizard with the tools but can't see the possibility and can't see the problems and doesn't really spend the time and attention to to really think about them in a considered way. Now you don't have to have, obviously it's a false dichotomy, you don't have to have either one or both of those. You don't have to choose. But I do think that when early stage designers are like, "Should I learn more Sketch?" And I'm like, "Well, you know, that's not really the question. Also, Figma" haha. But, not really the question. The real question is, what have you noticed lately that's not working in your everyday routines in life? And what do you what are some simple things that you think you could do about it? And as soon as someone picks something simple, like redesign the line system, I'm like, OK, let's let's talk through that, because it's never simple. Changing human behavior and shifting human behavior is a design consideration. It's never going to be simple. So I think it's that kind of looking at a system like that is what really enchants me and fascinates me about the whole design craft.
Geoff Wilson [00:26:19] Because like what you talked about the line in the social aspect, that social unease, that's one thing you wouldn't get by just observing alone. You've got to start talking to people. You've got to actually sit there with them, walk through the line with them and kind of see, well, how do you feel at each step of the way? Because, again, if you were just looking at the numbers of, oh, there's ten people in the queue right now. Now there's five. Now this one person needs to reenter. You're missing all of that empathetic side, as you just mentioned. So that's that... that's the benefit of field studies, that ethnography side of things, of actually going with people and watching them go through that into an activity. So are they able to actually mail out that wooden postcard? And what kind of... what kind of moments of just anxiety like arose during that? These kind of moments of pressure where you start debating whether or not this is all worth it? Like, "Does that person really need to receive this postcard or do I just want to go back to my couch to watch TV?"
Kate Rutter [00:27:05] Exactly, exactly. I mean, you had kind of alluded to, I think I overheard you alluding to, some of the callback back to your bar experience. Maybe there should be a big screen TV. Like, I actually could be pretty excited by watching a dynamic visualization of mail service within the United States. Like I'd love to see that visual happening. It helped me feel in line as if I'm really part of something bigger than myself, like I'm part of the system.
Geoff Wilson [00:27:30] Like how sorting lines work, yeah! Like, I love being taught stuff. So actually. Wow. Yeah. If I got to see kind of like, here's how your post is... here's how your parcel is going to go through. It might not be... it's not like a TV show, but I could still go, oh I understand what's going to happen after I drop this off. I understand the process and by also understanding that, I might actually get less frustrated in the end by why is it not there yet, you know? I might call you and go, "Hey, did you receive my letter yet? Weird. I mailed it like ten days ago. What's happening?" But maybe there's ways to enter... to teach me as that customer to understand what to expect. And so my expectations of my mental model, of how long I think things should take to get to you, it can actually be altered a little bit. I can actually be educated some. For example, New Zealand Post only comes once every other day right here. You know, we're not the biggest country, but it only delivers either for your house - also, I don't know which one I'm in, either Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, I think, or Saturday - so they actually do it three out of four days a week. But they say for your house, you might be one or two of these groups. And it's been three years and I still have no idea which one I'm at. But it really doesn't matter in the end because I'm not often eagerly waiting for that one little thing. If I have to wait an extra day, it's not the end of the world, but the countless times that my parents have mailed me something from the US to here or I've mail a letter back, you know, if we want it to arrive by Christmas, it's just a crapshoot to see how long ahead of time do we think we need to do this just to kind of reduce the error that it's not going to get there until much, much later. Til way past the event or whatever it might be has passed.
Kate Rutter [00:29:03] Yeah, you know, that's, I think, the time of delivery. So the pricing and the time of delivery are the two areas that I notice the most profoundly as part of the postal experience. So the thing that breaks the miracle for me, because those are where the anxiety happens and that's where the system really shows its ugly head is. It's complex. It can't hide its own complexity with the pricing and it can't hide its own prediction and complexity with the delivery estimates. So it used to be first class and take a couple of days, a day, couple of days, whatever. And now there's there's really no guarantee. It'll give you an estimate when you, maybe two to three days? But as one experience, my sister, who lives in Arizona and I live in California, she had a special day coming up and I wanted something to get there. And it was oversize. It was 8.5 by 11. It was just an envelope, but it was a big envelope and, you know, kind of a weirdly decorated envelope. But I needed it to get there. But I also wasn't quite willing to pay for it to ensure it was going to get there, because it was a big, pretty big price point. So, you know, I gave it like three days to get there and between two and three days and it took five days to get there, which meant it's missed her day, which meant I needed to text her and tell her what was in it because it was something that she was supposed to have on her special day. So that was a fail of delivery and she'll eventually get it. I'm pretty confident with that. But I was also disappointed in wondering then if I should have had some kind of guarantee.
Geoff Wilson [00:30:29] Yeah because I guess there's, there's extra ways that the business makes money as they might sell you insurance for, like, your parcel arriving or they'll sell you, you know, a signature. So let's sign it, whenever they receive it. And whether or not people actually, uhh, if that actually works or if people just forge it. Or, I've had a myriad of things that have happened with that; half the time, though, it's when I'm actually trying to receive something. That's actually when I miss that package because it came to me, I'm not home. I'm at work. And they go, "Oh, well, signature was required." I had no idea it was required because maybe you did tell me. Maybe you didn't tell me, "Hey, you need to be at home this day. Did you know there's something on the way to you that you're going to actually have to sign for because it's valuable?" And I paid extra money to have it. But then you get the great little sticker on your window that says, "Hey, you weren't home." Half the time I was home, it's just they didn't even knock. They just looked and go, nope, and just walked away haha. But yeah, then it's this whole...
Kate Rutter [00:31:22] And now take a day off to go to a physical location and pick up up your shit. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, there's a lot of people right now that are spending time at home. So it's, I think that the aggravation of having to go to the post office to do certain things has shifted. In general, that timing of having to go to a location that's only open during business hours because they are a business and they hire people and employ people during business standard business hours. But of course, like during early in the morning and noon and late in the day are the times when it's most busy, because that's when people are able to find that time to go in on site. So that's another one of those considerations of, you know, maybe it'd be cheaper to mail things if you're off, if you're off the peak hours. Right. I mean, we have peak usage and sometimes there's a pricing relationship to that. So it'd be interesting.
Geoff Wilson [00:32:13] Do you think you would ever pay extra to use a service that you actually... like it had after hours, like specifically just being able to drop it off after hours, but it cost you an extra, however many cents or dollars? Would that actually be a thing for you, that you that would even be a consideration or not?
Kate Rutter [00:32:30] Probably not. Although I'd be, you know, I'm be pretty financially like money conscious. So I work with the system to try and get the most out of it for the least amount of pay or money. But one of the things is, so when I dream, you know, I do dream of redesigning systems. And one of the things that I've done that intrigues me is a thought experiment is what if we just got rid of stamps completely and everything was kind of on a digital account? So I just put something in a box, it appears, and then I'm charged for it or not based on that. Now you really have to have some standardized pricing, at least so that people don't get totally screwed. But I think there's more opportunity to do that as a government system rather than, or as a public system, rather than as a private system where the incentive for profit is different. So I think that would be really kind of intriguing. I mean, we have that with things like computer cards and fare based tools for public transit, etc. If you have a card with a balance on it or even not a card anymore, now it's just a digital account with a balance in it and then that gets broken down or burned down as you use the service. And I think there's a good model for that that potentially could work with the Postal Service as well. I know businesses do it because I used to work a lot with direct mail services for bulk mail. And I mean, there's a variety of business behaviors and business services that the Postal Service makes possible. The individual consumers just really have no access to because we don't have the volume.
Geoff Wilson [00:34:02] And then taking that one step further. So now if it is all digital, you already, you don't need to go buy stamps and like, keep track of what is changing. There's that idea of how can you make it even less of a hassle to leave your house? You're in quarantine potentially, or you're just working from home now and you want to mail something out? Well, here's another fun note out about New Zealand is, as far as I know, in three years, we don't have outgoing mail. So you have to go to a dropbox, you have to go to a post office. There is no little red flag you raise like I used to have back in the States. So, yeah, it is always that journey now to the post office. You've got to make time. You've got to do this thing if you want to actually get anything out of there. And also on that note I mentioned earlier, you know, receiving mail that wasn't actually mine. So I want to return something to sender. But now I've got to once again go, "Well, I can't just put it back in my mailbox and go return to sender right on the envelope, flip a flag up and go." I've now got to go out of my way to help somebody else in the world. So I'm trying to be a good human, trying to help somebody else get their thing. But I still keep going, "Do they really need this parking ticket?" I can tell it's a parking ticket. What would happen to them if I never went back to the store? Because that's on the other side of town. They won't know. It's, they won't even know that if I got it, they will have no idea until one day collections comes to them and says, "Hey, by the way, you've got massive amount of bills that are unpaid, did you know that?" It's really interesting not having outgoing mail here just from a human side, you feel kind of guilty about it.
Kate Rutter [00:35:27] Yeah, I had no idea that was a thing. And I was already kind of intrigued with the every other mail delivery, which I honestly suspect we will hit with the Postal Service as well, because things, you know, less than 50 percent of our bills, which are mostly timely, are sent via email now. Like that was a huge cut. So a lot of the the legal day to day kind of things that we relied on for the mail system earlier are now happening through other means are all digital. So I think the timeliness has really shifted as far as expectation. So I actually believe that for cutting costs, et cetera, that there's a likelihood that we'll go to an every other day mail delivery system in the States at some point. I think there will be a huge hue and cry. And then you look back historically and realise at the very beginning of the Postal Service, they didn't even have local delivery. You only went to the post office, get your stuff like that was you paid to go from one post office to another post office. It didn't have that last mile. So we might be moving more towards back towards something like that. But you were talking about no, no pickup. Are there no boxes that you can put things in? I find that kind of terrifying. I mean, I'm worried.
Geoff Wilson [00:36:38] I mean, there are drop boxes, but those are like, you know... like for me, I can walk 20 minutes down the hill to like the local, like, the kind of local not really a town center, but the suburb's center, if you will, you know, a bunch of little shops and shopping centers. So there's, I guarantee there's probably a post box down there now. I don't know where it is right off. So I will probably have to go look on the website again and go, "Where is the like the nearest post office shop." But otherwise, yeah, I'd basically throw my mail in my bag, I take it to work and go, "I'm working in the city. Surely somewhere hopefully near me is a box." But then again I go there to work and I look at it and I start also going, I work in an office, I work at a corporate office. And because of that we have outgoing mail. So more often than not, I'm actually thinking, "Can I just drop it in our work slot?" Like, eehhh will they really know that this is a personal thing going out? I don't know if the office managers will get mad at that or not; I don't know what the rules are, but it's trying to make my life easier to help somebody else potentially because there's no easier way that I've found yet to return stuff to sender. Which actually on that note, that's a new direction to go. What about changing your address when you move? There's a lot of rules around that. I've moved quite a bit over the past few years. I've moved multiple times in the US in the years leading up to me moving to New Zealand. And the post office in the US at least I know, you can only update your address every six months. So if you were in a situation like... there's millions and millions of people in the US that I guarantee move around quite a bit. So those people, those extreme use case users, there are people who might be put out by these business rules. You can only change it once every six months. So if they are people that maybe need to have those things delivered more frequently because maybe it's more of a paycheck by paycheck life, maybe, maybe it's whatever else you're doing, you need to have that coming to you. But what do you do now? Do you have to go back to your old apartment that you just moved out of three months ago and go knock on their door or raid their mailbox and do it under the cover of nights like you wear all black, you've got to let go sneak in haha.
Kate Rutter [00:38:33] It's a federal offense. So, yeah haha, probably not recommended.
Geoff Wilson [00:38:37] "But I swear, Officer, I'm just getting my mail, I swear! I swear!"
Kate Rutter [00:38:40] Yeah. The the address change I've often wondered about that; it's that we have... I work with quite a few folks who are... they don't have permanent housing, they don't have a permanent address, and that keeps them from being part of this distribution system completely. They can mail things, but they can't receive them. And that gets very hard when you're trying to do things like register to vote or show a bill or have some type of a legal address. And my sister is in Taiwan. And so our childhood home in Arizona is their official address. So they have a US based address that they use for banking, et cetera. It kind of reduces the complexity of being a global citizen and having to kind of have your banking, your financial relationship different from your citizenship, which is kind of given a very skewed I right now and scrutinized quite carefully. So the sense of like, I'm curious about our need as we move more towards a global society. To have a universal address that is not related to a physical location in the same way it is related to something else, more like email or more like a domain that might be a little more valuable than a physical location. And it concerns me when I make some assumptions around mail delivery and I'm talking to folks who are either un-housed or they are not, they don't have a permanent residence, that they're very aware that they're not part of that system and that there's other relationships that they have about the United States and citizenship that they are then feeling not a part of. And I think that is a bigger risk societally and a concern. I mean, that's I think when we talk about the design opportunities, when we think about how these big culturally dependent systems need to shift, it's that type of trend that I think is really important to be attentive to.
Geoff Wilson [00:40:27] Yeah. And who do you think would be the main stakeholders, if you will? The people, the shareholders, the stakeholders - who would improve, who would benefit the most from doing that? And what would make them actually want to do that, though? Because is it now above the Postal Service? Is it now more at a government level?
Kate Rutter [00:40:42] I think it is. I think, you know, we've... who would benefit? Well, it depends on whether or not you're trying to get people to vote or getting people not to vote. I actually think that things are going to be pretty pivotal in that. I mean, I think looking at the the combination of now civic engagement and some great people in the network who've worked on ballot design, who've worked on voting rights, who've worked on polling, polling experiences, et cetera, this is the civic engagement that happens and that overlaid with the postal system and mail-in ballots and all of that. I mean, as you experienced as an expat, I think there's something really important and meaningful about that. And it could be that minor policy changes in the post office could tip off really significant civic involvement challenges for the broader government. And so it's something worth watching, you know.
Geoff Wilson [00:41:35] Yeah, so maybe I'll save that one for another episode and maybe I can bring you back some day. We can, we can go into the big, big, complex things of government and all haha.
Kate Rutter [00:41:44] Honestly, I'd love to have to hear your on your podcast talking about, have someone talk through some of the voting practices and what design is because ballot design and polling design. I mean, Dana Chisnell has done amazing things with that. There have been some incredible thoughts that are happening about the implications of design and accuracy and civic engagement. And that is not, I mean, I don't know, I'm a customer of that. I am not a designer in that. But thank heavens people are really giving it the attention that it needs.
Geoff Wilson [00:42:12] For a little sidebar just to tease that out, I'm now able to vote as a permanent resident here in New Zealand. And funny enough, this year we had our New Zealand elections, we had the U.S. elections. I voted for the U.S. elections from New Zealand. However, I then had to take an emergency trip back home, and then I ended up voting for my New Zealand elections from the US because the New Zealand elections actually allowed you to vote online. So I didn't have to send in a piece of paper or anything. I actually just went on a website. I did print something off, but I scanned it and emailed it basically back to New Zealand. So this year, I voted for both countries from the opposite country. It was quite the experience. Yeah, I'll save that for another one haha. There's a little teaser of ways it can be done.
Kate Rutter [00:42:51] Wow. I can't wait to hear that. That'll be interesting.
Geoff Wilson [00:42:55] So, yeah, we'll go back to the post office kind of around some of these. So I'm realising recently in New Zealand that I don't know if the US has changed this way. If I receive a product, let's say, from Amazon or MightyApe, our equivalent of Amazon, and it's got the lithium ion battery in it, right? If I wanted to return to sender, I've had issues already where the post office employees here are going, "Does this have batteries in it?" And I go, "Well, yes, it's a Bluetooth headset, of course it has batteries." And they go, "Oh, you said the keyword: battery. That'll be an extra 150 dollars to mail." And I'm like, "Umm what, excuse me? Sorry?" And they're like, "Yeah, it's got batteries." You know, it's that black or white, "You said batteries. I heard batteries. It's now going to cost you this huge expense for the safety of mailing lithium ion back." You know, which never cost, it only cost me 10 dollars to actually get that item. And so, just to return an item or if I were to sell my headset, let's say, or sell something else to somebody else in New Zealand, I've got to... I would have to pay this crazy fee! So it just kind of stops me from also using their service completely. I have to go find other means. Maybe I just throw it away and I'm an environmental person, I don't like just throwing things away. I want to do something with it. But I guess maybe that gets in the human-centred design aspect of, "What little decisions like that impact the way that we live our lives in the world that we have around us too?"
Kate Rutter [00:44:14] Well, it's going to get worse. I think a lot of people just end up lying or not noticing. They don't say that word. But once you've said that word, it's kind of like if you've ever gone into a florist, if you say the word wedding the everything seems to be triple the cost, it's so weird. I once went and asked for just a small cluster of flowers, and they're like, "Is this for a wedding?" I'm not going to lie. I have my integrity. But I was trying to avoid that word because that triggers all kinds of other things. So I think that there are those, you know, one could look at that as a design opportunity: what does it take to make something safely? And is that a service that can be built on top of the postal service? Many different businesses have been built on top of the postal service. And I don't know where we're going to go with that. But what I... what saddens me and intrigues me about your story is that it's something that is currently common. It's going to get more common and the alternatives are really damaging, right? Throwing something out, not using it. They're costly. They're environmentally not helpful. So that's one of those possibilities of when, when and how will we be able to mail some of these things or move some of these physical things that are perceived as threats? How can we move those around? But, yeah, that's... I hadn't thought about that. I haven't encountered that? Most of the time, I'm mailing messages, you know, instead. But I will say, so, it's funny because you were talking about mailing that weird thing. Our family for many years, about 12 years, had something called a round robin, which is, as you know, Round-Robin is a little bit like a... you might have found that in collaborative workshops or something where everybody goes around and says a little something. But in round robin, in the mail sense is we had this denim package that we had sewn and it had a changeable address label in the front. It was about the size of maybe a VHS videotape because it was designed to be the size of the videotape. And what would happen is there were five different addresses and someone would pick the first person would put in a letter and mail it, and then the second person would read that letter, put in their letter and mail it. And it went all the way around the circuit to the five. And then when they came back to the original first sender, they had the other four letters. They took their old letter out, put a new letter in and sent it on. And so every time you got it, you had a letter from every member of the family. You took your old letter out, put a new one in, and they had about, a good maybe, I think it was like a 12 year run on that, which was pretty fascinating. And you could put in photos. I mean, it was like a little package, but it finally got really problematic to mail it because the Postal Service was very, was very concerned about what was in this little bag. And we had increasing challenges trying to get somebody to realise it wasn't something crazy, you know, dangerous? It was really looked at with great skepticism, like it is a family letter. And one time it was like, well, if it's five letters, then you should be paying for five letters instead of for one package. I'm like, huh? I just never understood that. So we still have the denim package. We haven't reinstituted that. But it was a great way of communicating as a family before email really hit stride.
Geoff Wilson [00:47:18] And if you put you know, if you printed on the denim, "This is not dangerous." That would just raise the skepticism even more like I don't really know if I believe you haha.
Kate Rutter [00:47:26] Right, it's like saying "battery", you know, it's just one of those words that calls attention to itself.
Geoff Wilson [00:47:30] So I guess... So let's say they received the letter. One last little point. I noticed a new product the other day. I think I saw an ad or somebody put it on Twitter. There's a now a Ring sensor for your mailbox. So maybe they've received that letter. There's apparently a sensor people are making and maybe they've made a lot more. This is just the first one I've seen that basically lets you know when your mail arrives, this kind of this Internet of Things... Internet of Things of your mailbox. Now it's a smart mailbox, if you will, it tells you when your packages arrive. But I've started to - I'm trying to wonder and haven't gone that far into it. - who might need that service and what is that helping that person? Like, why would people potentially buy this thing? Because I know for myself, most of what I get is bills or return to sender items. I'm not that invested in like waiting for that one thing. However, I do realize I do have another camera. And what I do use it for is actually parcels. So not necessarily my mailbox because it's more of a letter box, specifically only for letters, but I get parcels dropped off at my door all the time. And those I do think are worth paying for paint to have a system so that I can see it because that item might be of particular value and I don't want people to steal off my porch. So when I see the person come, if I wasn't already aware of what might be coming, I can start making decisions about my life of, "Well, do I leave work early today to go home and get that before it's too late?" Because it's a security system, I could scream at whoever might walk on my porch and yell at them. But yeah, it's just a new little product that I started wondering about. Yeah. Who is this for and and who might need that the most?
Kate Rutter [00:49:02] I think that's fascinating. And we have a course called Creative Entrepreneur which is for designers that are juniors or seniors in the undergrad program. They form teams and through the first, through a semester, they identify a real significant human need and then they experiment and try and validate their way using lean startup principles to solving that problem in a way that could scale. And they do this not hypothetically, like you might do many design projects in a learning situation. They do this with actual customer development interviews and actual experiments in the world and trying to get people to sign up and adopt a product in a very, very early stage, and it's a transformative learning experience, but I'm always so enchanted and amazed with the sophistication with which the the learners identify a real need. And this past fall, we had a team who was working on package delivery and reducing package theft. So 'package insecurity' is the official name for that category. And there's a lot of different interesting technological inventions trying to solve that. But what's interesting and what I hope, you know, it solves one piece, it might solve the technical piece of identifying when a package arrives and where it is. But what I really was intrigued with and where they were really struggling and trying to solve it as a team was what you mentioned, which is, "I know there's a package there. I know it's been delivered, but I am not there and I cannot go get it without interrupting other parts of my life. So what I do about that?" I mean, notification does not mean successful delivery, successful completion of that process. And so the more they did mapping into this, all of the different things that happen around package insecurity, the more they realise this is an incredibly complicated problem. And so how do you bite off one little part that you can start to solve? So we'll see. I mean, I've also seen ads for Amazon, you know, where they give you... they have something that'll open your garage door if you happen to be in a single family home and they just stuff your package underneath there and close it back up again. And I'm like, that's interesting. And yet I'm not sure about that. Right? I'm not sure if I want somebody opening a garage door, if that's something I have access to. So, yeah, it is a very weird time for technology. It's a beautiful time, but it's a weird time. And hopefully we'll get a time where we can think about the inclusive issues, the ethical issues, the access issues, all of those things that really good design needs to address. Not just does it tick a box on some set of requirements.
Geoff Wilson [00:51:33] Yeah, because at that point you can almost have, instead of opening your garage, you could have a little box outside that RFID with a postal service comes and automatically unlocks it, kind of like a Bluetooth key. And you've got the other key at home so you can unlock it. But again, it's the question, would you actually pay for that? There's an entire complex system. this is going way back for fans of What Is Wrong With UX way, way back. And I forgot exactly which episode it was... Actually, I did write an article based on it. But, you were talking about complex ideas of how like adding one little flag for things like a notification isn't just that one little simple act. It's this huge, complex system of how did that even get implemented? So in this case, if it was some tech thing like Amazon being able to open whatever it is, how do they supply all of their delivery drivers with this thing? How do they keep track of which house has which what? What service and database holds all the information? Who maintains the database? So this one little idea is never that simple. And so we're always encouraging people listening to think a little bit further into that, to not just look at the surface. "Oh, I see a problem. Let me try to fix it. Done." What kind of other problems might you have created in the background that you might not have been privy to or notice to start with?
Kate Rutter [00:52:43] And, you know, one of the... I love that you're talking about that because it's true. It's a talk that Laura Klein, who's my co-host on What Is Wrong With UX often talks about is, you know, you can put something on the interface. And for some designers, when they might believe that is addressing the situation or the problem, because now there's a picture on a wireframe of a word that would say, you know, "Flag this comment" or remove or whatever. That's kind of the poster child for that. But ultimately, it's everything is going to be involved with the system, or at least you need to consider everything as if it's involved in a system. And then what are the consequences and implications of that? And it's thinking through that. That creates, I think, effective design and effective designers. You know, you'd mentioned earlier that you were reading How Design Makes the World by Scott Berkun, which is a book I really admire. I really like. And on page 160, it's the last page of the book, he has a series of questions about what to ask for things around you. And it's a learning experience. And the coursework that I did, I actually made a visual model of that with Scott's permission. And every learner in the foundation's course went out and found three things. One was a digital product, one was a physical product, and one was an environment. And they prompted and answered this set of questions. But the set of questions that's so amazing is not... it's rarely about how this thing looks or exactly what how it appears in an interactive way. It's much more about how did it come to be. So things like what message is the style sending you or who's included or excluded from participating in this in this design? As we talked about, people without a permanent address are excluded from mail delivery service. And so I think, you know, who paid for it? And what is the power structure behind that that investment and what do they expect to get out of it? I think all those questions really tap into the systemic understanding and as designers, it's more important than ever that we consider those because we might find ourselves, you know, ruining free economies or our democracies or other kinds of much bigger systems with seemingly thoughtless things that we do. It's a pretty, pretty exciting time to be a designer. But there's more consequence to it than I think ever before,
Geoff Wilson [00:55:04] Because in this case of the Postal Service is definitely the biggest one out of the shows I've done so far. Because a bar, it's an individual owner. Right? Patrons pay for that bar to keep it alive. Grocery stores, customers pay for that grocery store to keep existing. But this Postal Service, as we've got into a little bit before, it is a government run thing, at least in our two countries. And that is paid for a lot of by taxes and keeping that running. And then also you have stamps and packages and things like that is more the operational costs that are, I'm assuming, that are covered by a lot of the stamps and package costs and insurance and signatures and stuff. It's one of those you mentioned in that in Scott's list. Who's going to pay for it in this case? If you were to go ask a person, "Hey, would you mind an increase in your taxes to pay for this this nifty thing that the mail will do or this, 'We're going to make our branches better.' Are you going to pay for this?" By and large, nobody's going to say, "Yes! I can't wait to pay for the branches to be better!" Despite, as we talked about kind of tracking this all up, you mentioned trust, I think is the biggest theme that I got out of this. It's just this lack of trust and knowing how it's going to go like mailing something out, will it actually go through? Trust in how long you might spend at a branch? And so that is one of the trickiest probably questions is who is going to pay for this and how do you get people on board with actually wanting to go through with these changes. I think it's a good challenge.
Kate Rutter [00:56:24] Yeah, I think any of us that are working in really big systems, whether that's a system of education or system of government or, you know, companies or systems, economies or systems as well, that thinking about how the money flows. I've actually started an activity now when I work with products and when I use products, I think about how the money flows. How many actors are there and who's paying for what and who's... what is that lifeblood of the money? And I, you know, I'm not super fascinated with wealth and money. I think it's a means to an end. It's not the end in of itself. That said, it's what keeps companies sustainable. It's what keeps economies going. It's what keeps livelihoods healthy. And so knowing how the money flows tells you a lot about how that system is structured and why.
Geoff Wilson [00:57:09] And with that, I think we've gone up on such a broad level that I love. Do you have any final, nit picky things about postal service you've always wanted to complain about by any chance?
Kate Rutter [00:57:20] I am going to complain about one thing. There was a mail carrier named Ed who delivered my mail when I was growing up, and he was our mail carrier for 35 years and our family loved him and he loved us. And it was great. Like he knew everybody in the neighborhood. Like he was a real connector of people. And last year the mail services in Arizona did a rebalancing and they swapped his route with someone else's route. So he now delivers mail in the next like sector over which is literally three miles away. And the person who used to deliver mail there now delivers in the other sector. And there is nothing - I mean, so there was a hue and cry because communities - and the thing about that is there wasn't enough other change to make it feel like it was fucking doing anything! It just felt mean spirited. And the communities, both communities like we want our original mail carrier back and the Postal Service refused to even look at it or do it like that. Just seems like it's not helping. Like there was something that was working and it got fucked up. And then there was a refusal to look at it. And I think what I'd like to close with is in any system, as it grows, there is a point when the system stops serving the people and the people start serving the system. And when that happens, you can feel it and you can smell it and you can taste it. And when that happens, you've got to recognise that that system probably can't deliver the kind of human value that you would hope. So that's, you know, a little bit of a warning sign for you, as evidenced by the loss of Ed, who was also like a year within retirement anyway. It just felt like it was mean. I don't know what's going on with that, but I'm pissed at them. I'm still pissed at them.
Geoff Wilson [00:59:12] And like you said, there's... for them, it's like, well, do they care? Do they even care about your feedback? Do they go like, "Oh, well, we wanted it for X reason," that they might have wanted it. Maybe it's because he had more experience. I'm always trying to like look at what might have made that decision happen; try to give people the benefit of the doubt to some degree. And maybe they're like, "Well, we need a more experienced driver on this because there's more complicated things." Maybe there's things we don't know about it. But in the end, it's that total ambivalence. It's like you said, it's now people serving the system. It doesn't matter what metrics you might have had, complaints they might have just fallen flat of, "Well, we don't really care." It's not serving the business model because they're a service that's kind of essential. That is essential. They need it. And so people stop caring. And I guess I hope anybody listening, if you see that happening, do what you're going to do to try to start changing people's minds about that. So with that, with kind of a downer, but, hey, why not? Hahaha we love you, Ed!
Kate Rutter [01:00:08] On the other hand, overall, mail is still a miracle, you know. Love you, Ed, right?
Geoff Wilson [01:00:14] So, Kate, how many people find you? You said you've got a book coming out. When is the coming out so they can have a rough idea?
Kate Rutter [01:00:19] I'm going to say end of the year. You can look Q3, Q4 ish and, yeah, and they can find, people can find me on Twitter @katerutter. We love folks that listen to the podcast so... which we laughingly call "podclash" because we fight, two old ladies drinking and fighting about your UX. That is called What Is Wrong With UX. And you can find that on all the places for podcasts are listed. But probably the best main link is to go to usersknow.com, which is Laura Klein's site. She's my co-host and there's a section there that you can both see it and listen to it and find it. So those are the best places to find me. I have a personal site, intelleto.com, to visit that, too. It's kind of a hodgepodge of my digital life. So probably Twitter or What Is Wrong With UX are the best places to contact me.
Geoff Wilson [01:01:10] Well thank you, Kate! 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 would 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.
POST-CREDITS
Kate Rutter [01:02:05] I have high respect for the postal workers, it feels like a thankless job because it's a system everybody seems almost that they have to use
