Taking a Systems Thinking Approach to UX (feat. Jen Briselli)

Jen Briselli, our first guest from outside the book, discusses how to bring systems thinking to UX.

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Transcript

Dan Berlin: 0:14

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the 97 UX Things podcast. Dan Berlin here, your host and book editor. As I mentioned in the first episode of the season, I'll be interviewing people from outside the book. This week, I'm joined by Jen Briselli, who will be talking about taking a systems thinking approach to UX. Welcome, Jen.

Jen Briselli: 0:33

Thank you. My pleasure to be here.

Dan Berlin: 0:35

Thanks for joining the podcast. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jen Briselli: 0:40

You got it. So I am the Co-founder and Principal Experience Strategist is the title I'm using right now at a an experience strategy agency called Topology. And prior to that I was most recently the Chief Design Strategy Officer at Mad*Pow. And I'll pause there because I'm sure we'll get into my origin story shortly. But that's what I do today.

Dan Berlin: 1:02

Nice. Yeah. Thanks for that. And yeah exactly... tell us about your origin story and how you wound up where you are today, please.

Jen Briselli: 1:10

Yeah, so I think like a lot of folks in this world, I came via a winding path. I almost said people of my generation, but I'm not gonna make it sound like it's such an ageist thing. Though, I do know more and more folks these days are aware of UX and related fields and move into that world straight out of school. So it's an interesting dynamic to think about how the domain will continue to change because of that. But I actually, I had no idea that UX was a thing, I'd never heard of UX or information design or human factors or anything. Growing up. I was like many of us, really, just a very curious kid. I loved learning, wanted to understand everything, how everything works, people, objects, etc. And I ultimately decided to major in physics as an undergrad because physics represented to young Jen, the most fundamental study of everything. So I majored in physics as an undergrad. But during my years in school, I quickly realized I did not want to go to grad school and fight for grant money to do graduate level physics research. I would have loved that, but it's nowhere near as romantic as I think young people and most people outside of science think that it might be. So I also got involved in things like peer tutoring, and really enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to teach other people complex concepts like physics. So I thought, hey, that's teaching, isn't it? So I minored in education while I was doing that, which was a giant pain in the you know what, because it wasn't part of the program. So then I moved into education and I actually taught high school physics for almost a decade. And I loved it at first, those listeners who have friends or family who are teachers can probably relate that most teachers struggle their first few years and then fall into a rhythm. And it was the opposite for me. I really loved the first few years, when I was really working hard to figure out how people's brains were wired and kids mental models about physics, and other science and math topics. So once I started to get sort of into a rhythm, I actually fell out of love with it, I sort of felt like I was being handed the same design brief every Fall and being asked to solve the same design challenge again and again. I wouldn't have had that language for it at the time. But just serendipitously, I happened to come across the field of information design, and had a friend who had shared a blog with me or a magazine or something, slowly started reading more about it. And then eventually, and I'm very much shortening the story but decided to leave teaching, go back to grad school, studied information and interaction design, service design, systems thinking; these were all part of the program, where I went to school, and then out of grad school, moved into a UX role. I've always enjoyed the more strategic fuzzy front end of the work. So over the years, since grad school, I've basically been more and more involved in the strategic service and systems level thinking for design and experience. And over time, taking on more and more leadership as well. So ultimately, helping lead Mad*Pow, a small agency here in New England, and then striking out on my own to do it my own way. So like, that's me. That's my story.

Dan Berlin: 4:29

Cool. Well, thanks for that story. And it's an interesting progression going from education to UX. And the way you described it, it makes perfect sense because it sounds like the challenge of conveying complex topics went away each year. And now you just get to do it on a regular basis.

Jen Briselli: 4:49

That's really almost what, at the time, that's what I figured out for myself, even though, I would not have had that language. But I said, you know, I really like designing learning experiences. But I wanted to apply that same kind of thinking to other types of experiences. And that's exactly what I did. And there are a lot of people who will look at that resume... And maybe this is for like, especially younger folks that are listening or or folks making career switches into UX, people will look at a resume like that, and some of them will go, well, that's a crazy path. Wow. What? But it's a really nice filter, because the people that look at that trajectory, and they say, Wow, I get it, I can see that progression, it makes a lot of sense; to me, it makes total sense. Those are your people, you know, those are your employers that get it, they're gonna see value. I want folks that I collaborate with to see my physics background and my teaching background as bonus, because those both inform my practice deeply. And sometimes people bring up the education piece, and they ask, if I miss teaching, and I don't miss teaching, because I actually still teach in a lot of ways, not just literally, because I do still teach now, I teach design and leadership in post secondary institutions. But even just from the professional services angle, teaching clients, teaching collaborators, teaching peers, that's really critical to what we do as UX professionals. So it's all there.

Dan Berlin: 6:09

And you bring up a great point about UX as that second career. It's often a second career for folks, and people shouldn't get hung up in on the fact that, hey, my entire career wasn't in design, how can I get a job in design? Really rely upon and learn from and bring forward the knowledge that you have from your previous career.

Jen Briselli: 6:31

Yeah, absolutely. And again, this dynamic is probably shifting as more and more people move into this world straight out of school. But I've always felt strongly that having exposure to and time spent in other fields is just 100% always a good thing. It's actually probably my number one piece of advice, I guess, we'll come back to the end of the end of the episode, but use it to your advantage and really be able to highlight what your career experience is, regardless of what the title or the field is called.

Dan Berlin: 7:00

Yeah, absolutely. Well, great. Thanks for all of that. Let's turn to your topic at hand, Taking a Systems Thinking Approach to UX. Tell us about that, please.

Jen Briselli: 7:11

Yeah, so Systems Thinking is historically a field that is much more focused on frameworks and models and tools that are descriptive. They help us understand what is happening in a complex system, and what may be occurring even in intangible and invisible ways between the components of a system. When I say components, I mean people or objects or data. But where I think design really enriches and these things marry beautifully is that designers are the ones who are good about figuring what do we do? How do we intervene? What can we actually take from our knowledge, and actually make a decision or design a thing, an intervention, a product that can make a shift or change an outcome. So all of that is like fairly esoteric, and abstract. But what systems thinking really is, there isn't really one great definition. You can do your Googling, but I like to think of it as: it's a way of making sense of the complexity of the world, by looking at wholes and relationships between things, instead of breaking it into individual pieces, and analyzing separate pieces. And I sometimes sense there's this tension between folks who are really gung ho about systems thinking and a systems view. And folks who are more analytical and want to break things down into their components. I think they work together very nicely. This is not an either or, but so much of our world and so many of our practices, especially in business and innovation, are driven by more of an engineering and optimization mindset that tends to break things into components and then want to analyze them as these like distinct separate bits, which can tell us a whole lot about them in isolation, but really result in us missing the context of how they relate to each other. And the other part of it is that if you're only looking at the bits separately from each other, you're only looking at things that are actually... I say visible, maybe not literally, but tangible, that are... stuff. And what's usually gonna go missing from that analysis are the things that are invisible, like the flow of perceived value, or the influence of things on each other. But what I like to say to people who are like, Why should I care about systems thinking? There's this common saying among different authors that write on this topic that the cause and effect that we see in the world are often not as close to each other in space and time as we think they are. And so taking a systems thinking view helps us understand that solutions we're designing today could become problems in the future that we're then trying to handle down the road. So if you can learn to adopt some of the perspectives of systems thinking, you can mitigate some of that and you can make better products and services and experiences.

Dan Berlin: 10:00

Yep, I really liked the point that you've made about how in design and research, we often get caught up in the bits, we often get caught up in the smallest piece of data and how it affects other things. And you mentioned looking at the relationships between the whole. That was really interesting what you said about looking at the whole. My question there is, how do you know what the whole is? What are the different wholes that we should be looking at? Is there a way to be looking at that?

Jen Briselli: 10:29

There's entire communities, academic and non, that debate that exact topic. And I think the way that I like to think about it, and I think that is at least most effective for folks like us who are in experience design roles, is that any system is a system because somebody somewhere has defined it as a system and drawn a boundary around it. So to your point, what's the whole? There's no hard and fast rule. In fact, this is one of the things about systems thinking that makes it hard sometimes for people to get their brain around. Because there are very few things that are black and white in systems thinking and systems science. By the way, there's like a million sub categories of system science that I won't rattle off. But it's that lack of black and white thinking that can make it tough for some folks, but to your point, even the act of drawing a boundary around a system and saying this is the whole that we're going to consider. That's an act, a choice, a conscious decision that you make as a designer. Maybe I should back up, maybe it's not always conscious. And part of what I'm advocating for is that we take a more deliberate conscious look at where we draw the boundaries of our system. And if we're going to say that we can consider, I'm making like a hand motion here, this tiny little system, but we want to maybe expand out a little bit, we're not going to argue that we've somehow encompassed literally everything, because you could expand that out to be the universe. But just knowing that if you are drawing the boundaries around something to analyze something, no matter what, you've drawn a boundary, and therefore you've made it so something's being excluded from your analysis. So having the ability to move those boundaries out to zoom in and out is the key. So there is no such thing as a whole. It's just where you decide to mark it. And that's part of the problem that makes this tough.

Dan Berlin: 12:14

Yeah. And how about us tacticians. I'm a usability specialist, I'm a researcher who has his head in the weeds often enough. How do we bring our heads up out of that and think about it that way.

Jen Briselli: 12:29

I like to think about it as altitudes. It's a metaphor that works for me. To say that there are different altitudes that you can be practicing at. In the weeds, we

say it literally: 12:39

on the ground, in the weeds, right? Versus like getting a bird's eye view, or a 10,000 foot view. And so some of it really comes down to building up the ability and a comfort with working at different altitudes. If you're a person that really likes to be in the weeds, it means sometimes you do just want to challenge yourself to zoom out a little bit if you're planning a research study, and you're going to focus on a particular user group or a segment of people. Sure, of course, you're going to need to be focused on those details. But if you're not somebody that's already in a place to ask questions about who are we excluding? And what is the context of the use or the experience that you're studying? That's the place to start. And that's kind of like baby steps, systems thinking 101, which I would probably think most people listening to this podcast may already be doing. But then take that logic and extend it out a little further, and ask yourself, what else am I excluding, what other context is out there. And then, in addition to thinking about widening the aperture, also start looking for the connections between things that isn't visible. And actually, this is where research is really helpful, because research tells us what some of those things usually are, when people start to reveal what the influences on their choices are. So if you think about, I like to use mapping as a good way to talk about this, because people will ask What does this look like? How does it manifest? What are the tools? The maybe disappointing answer is, you're actually not really going to find a list of systems thinking artifacts. If you do systems thinking it looks like this. What it really is, is that you use your tools you already are using, but with a different mindset. So something like a map, a journey map, an ecosystem map, a blueprint, whatever you're mapping. You're going to still be creating a similar artifact, but it's more generative. And you're using it in the process of understanding and making connections between things rather than just creating that map as an output to show this is how this works. And in doing so, you can identify, for example, these two things in an ecosystem, this human with this role and this tool that they use. Why does that person use that tool? Is it because the company established that was the workflow? Did that person make a choice to have that tool in hand? Those aren't visible things that you would see written out somewhere, but those are influences on that person's experience, the level of choice and autonomy they had even using that tool. And you uncover that in research. But if you aren't already thinking about uncovering those intangibles and invisibles, you're not going to learn those things. And that's where that systems view becomes relevant because you want to be asking yourself, not just what the bits or the nodes in this network are, what are the things that connect them to each other? I don't know if that... does that even make sense? You tell me.

Dan Berlin: 15:23

It does make sense, it does. And all too often the artifacts that we make jump too quickly to how are we solving this? And what are the screens going to look like, but to your point, by having this visualization of the journey, or the service, whatever it may be, it allows us to examine it and ask allow ourselves to ask why. And that seems to be a big part, allow ourselves to ask, why is it this way, so that we can remove friction, or whatever the goal is.

Jen Briselli: 15:54

I also want to say, I've hinted at this, I don't think this is novel to most UX designers. What I think we're ready for as a profession is to just take it up a level really. I think a lot of people who already know what systems thinking is are like, Yeah, I've been doing that for years. And there are people who maybe haven't heard the term, but when they hear it described, they say, Well, I think that way, that's just what I would call being strategic. And those are all valid points. I wouldn't argue with that. But I think really what I'm excited about and what I'm seeing happen, and I'm seeing signals of this in our work, is that there's more openness and appetite for this among business leaders among the folks we work with. Whether it's our clients if we're in professional services, or our leaders in our in house teams and positions. In addition to quote, unquote, giving design a seat at the table, what I'm hearing is an openness to the fact that these things are all interconnected. So instead of just giving design a seat at the table, but still saying you have to stay in your lane, there's more openness to the fact that transdisciplinary collaboration helps us also see things that are separate from each other and realize that they are influencing each other. So there's a moment happening right now that I think puts designers in a really important place to say, I can take a systems oriented view of experience that people have or product that people use. And in the past, a designer would have gotten told stay in your lane, stay in your lane, you're here to figure out if that screen is intuitive, you're here to figure out if that IA works. And now it's, okay, I can see how this is relevant if you can make the case for why taking that view illuminates connections and illuminates influence and illuminates value flow and shows us where there are leverage points. It's one of those terms that bubbles out of conversations about systems thinking pretty frequently. It's if a system has got something wrong with it, then fixing a product in one part of that system may not do anything to actually improve someone's experience, because the bigger system in which it's taking place is actually the thing that's broken. And so looking for those leverage points in the system might mean that one leverage point could be fix that product, but another one could be completely different somewhere else further upstream in the experience, or further away in time or space that would be missed if you're not given the ability to look a little bit broader. So for all the designers out there who are like, yeah, Jen, okay, I've been doing this my whole career, what I'm seeing right now is a really big opportunity to do it even more at a higher level of strategy in business and innovation. And I think designers have the exact right skill set to take it from just making sense of things, to making actual choices and decisions and action with it. I talk a lot about it sense making, and then decision making, like you make something with it. And that's where design is going to actually like supercharged systems thinking. So that's my commercial for it anyway.

Dan Berlin: 18:58

Sounds like buy in is going to be a huge part of this to go out of the lane, as it were. Any tips on getting stakeholder buy in and executive buy in for more strategic thinking?

Jen Briselli: 19:12

The age old question. I think it's not dissimilar to most other forms of our work, which is if someone's not already on board, being able to make small wins or get a little bit of that work done in a lightweight way that demonstrates its value and then like an avalanche, you know, it'll grow and roll into something bigger. Research is the obvious comparison, an organization that's not research driven or doesn't want to invest in research, if you can demonstrate with some lightweight research, how valuable it was to inform a decision, usually you can earn the right to do more of it. And I find the same to be true with systems thinking. You don't have to come in and implement some hugely disruptive way of working. But even just to say, hey, stakeholder or client, you were very interested in us producing a journey map or a roadmap or a playbook or whatever your artifact outputs might be, what if instead of making that the final output, we actually built that together in the middle of the project, and we messed it up on purpose, and we used it to generate places in the system where we think there needs to be a little bit more attention or so on. So sometimes it's just little lightweight shifts to show that that can be more valuable, and then you earn the right to do more of it. Designers already have those skills. Everyone's out there busy trying to do that.

Dan Berlin: 20:28

So was there anything else you were hoping to convey here about systems thinking?

Jen Briselli: 20:33

I think that's the headline, is that I think we already have these instincts. And what's happening is people are building a language for this. And when people start to build a language for something, it means you've now got a tool you can use in your practice. And so if you're not really familiar with systems thinking, I really encourage people to look into the actual field. For those who don't know much about it. It's a storied discipline with many sub disciplines. And I'm seeing more and more writing on it. So there are some great books. If you've not read anything, I would start with Donella Meadows, book Thinking in Systems, it's a really great primer. And I actually just saw that there's a newer book that just came out, called Closing the Loop, Systems Thinking for Designers, by Sheryl, I'm not sure how to say her last name, because I don't know her. Cababa or Sababa. I have not read this yet. It just came out in February, Rosenfeld. But I imagine it's going to be a nice foundational piece specifically for design practitioners as well. So there's a few others I would recommend, but really, that's the headline is, learn this language, guys, because it's going to be something that works in your favor. If you're already doing it, you're going to have more, I would say, credibility in your work. And if you're not already thinking about it this way, at least get familiar with this way of talking about the work you do. Because there are two benefits, one, from an ethical standpoint, understanding the downstream impacts of what you design is part of your imperative. As a practitioner, you have an ethical obligation to be thinking about what you're actually creating and putting into the world, and how it's going to affect people far away in the future, or far away physically, right. And systems thinking is how you do that. And then put the ethics part aside. The other benefit is you're going to design better products and services, because you're also thinking about those impacts. And you're anticipating them. So there's no reason not to.

Dan Berlin: 22:21

Yep. Well Jen, that's really, really interesting. I really appreciate you bringing all this to the podcast. First time we're talking about systems thinking on the podcast. In the final segment, we like getting a career tip, is there a career tip about folks either breaking into UX or who are continuing their career in UX that you'd like to provide?

Jen Briselli: 22:41

Yeah, and I hinted at this earlier, my favorite piece of advice to anybody is, well, part one or part two, part one, don't over index on the advice you get from other practitioners. And then the second is, I really, really, really encourage folks to read and learn as much as they can, about things that have nothing to do with your field. This is a little bit in danger of repeating I think Adam Connor gave similar advice. He was saying, you know, to get yourself exposed to and immersed in other creative fields, you can learn so much from illustration, or animation. I take it even beyond like any field, literally anything. If you are kind of interested in rhetoric, if you're interested in biology, fields that might feel like they're completely separate. And nothing builds, I think chops as a designer, especially if you want to be an AI researcher, too. I use designer in the broadest sense, as a UX professional, right? If you want to have perspective that is going to make you really good at your job, being able to find connections between disparate things that seem like they're not connected at all is really key. And you do that by following your curiosity across those disparate domains. So for every young UX professional out there who feels like they've got to read the like top 10 list about UX things. After you've read the 97 UX Things book, put that down and go read 10 more books that have nothing to do with UX design. That's my advice.

Dan Berlin: 24:10

That's great advice, Jen. Well, thank you so much for this. It's been a wonderful episode here with systems thinking and your career tips. So thank you so much for joining me here today.

Jen Briselli: 24:18

My pleasure.

Dan Berlin: 24:19

My guest today has been Jen Briselli, who was talking about Taking a Systems Thinking Approach to UX. Thanks for listening, everyone. You've been listening to the 97 UX Things podcast companion to the book 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know, published by O'Reilly and available at your local bookshop. All book royalties go to UX nonprofits as well any funds raised by this podcast. The theme music is Moisturize the Situation by Consider the Source, and I'm your host and book editor Dan Berlin. Please remember to find the needs in your community and fill them with your best work. Thanks for listening