Well, time to dust off the cobwebs here and announce that I have a new speaking engagement. If you happen to be in the north east, come see me Friday May 10th at the Boston UXPA Conference where I will be the keynote speaker.
I’ll be talking about how a gamer’s mindset has helped me throughout my 27 year career to get me to where I am today as the Head of Design for Battle.net at Blizzard Entertainment.
And don’t worry, if you can’t make it there, I’ll make it publicly available here on my site after my presentation.
This presentation was originally given at DFW Beyond 2018 (October). I was the last of the speakers on the main stage for the morning (meaning: there were a lot of people in the crowd!). I’m going to add my script here as I originally wrote it along with the screen shots from the Prezi presentation. If you want to see the original presentation as it was presented, you can find it here.
Team Building in Azeroth: What product teams can learn from successful mythic raid teams in World of Warcraft
Intro Hello everyone! We’ve heard a lot of great talks this morning and now all that’s standing between you and lunch is me! It’s like an epic boss fight. If you survive this then you’ll be on your way to victory. So, with that, let’s take a left turn here and have a little fun.
Gaming Team Anyone here play video games? Anyone here play video games with other people? How about large groups of people?
Work Team Now let’s think about the people you work with.
How many of you work with 4 other people? 9 other people? 19 other people? How many of you work with 19 other people for an intense non-stop three to four hours at a time multiple times a week? Could you do that? Would do you do you that?
What kind of skills do you think would be required to be able to do that calmly, collectively, and collaboratively even in the face of failure after failure after failure until you finally succeed?
Do you think we can learn from groups who are able to do this and do it successfully and do so repeatedly on purpose? I am here because yes, I think we can.
About Me
Who am I My name is Dr. Diana Hubbard. I am currently a design consultant for SAP specializing in Blockchain (I’m now a Director of Research for Hilton). In my previous role, I was the head of strategic research and insights for IBM Public Cloud. You can also tell I’m also an academic by the length of my title and my strategically placed colon.
For the past 11 years, I have had the opportunity to pull together successful research, design, and development teams in multiple organizations ranging from Software as a Service to Infrastructure and Cloud Services to now with Edge Technologies.
I contribute the success of these teams to lessons learned from World of Warcraft.
Academically I am an anthropologist and information scientist who has studied gamers, gaming, developers, and open source development communities for the last 12 years.
Druid I am also a max level Resto Druid (I main a horde druid these days) in a newly built high-end raiding guild (I’ve changed guilds since then) in World of Warcraft.
Though I’ve played for the last 14 years and been a part of many raid teams, this one was put together specifically for the expansion that just came out in August.
I raid with up to 19 other people 3 to 4 nights a week for 3 to 4 hours at a time. This is on top of my job and taking care of my family of 5 including 3 children, as well as our 3 dogs, and our home.
Learning Today I am going to highlight a few things I think people like us, who build and manage teams, can take away from these organically grown communities of practice who come together both inside and outside the game to voluntarily put in a lot of time and effort to successfully collaborate in highly intense situations toward a common goal.
And they do this in the face of failure and defeat and the possibility of getting nothing but a virtual repair bill for their hard earned broken digital armor.
Since my time is so short (I only had 20 minutes) I will only be able to go into these at a high level but I will provide a link at the end of to my blog where I will talk about it in detail and link to this presentation. (<– this is just now happening)
Culture: Shared ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors connected with a common language and a shared vocabulary
Culture Let’s start with Culture.
What is culture anyway. Is it where we live? What we do? The clothes we wear?
As an anthropologist, especially one who studies geographically dispersed online communities, I obviously have an opinion on this. I define it as shared ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors with a common language and shared vocabulary.
This is an important distinction because raid teams do not normally all hail from the same countries or even speak the same first language, but they all know, understand, and have a passion for Warcraft. The same can be said for many of our product teams in relation to our businesses.
Being a cultural anthropologist, it is no surprise I have found culture to be an essential element of successful teams. There are many ways it is important, but for the purposes of this talk I’ve distilled it down to 3. Culture of Research, of Knowledge Sharing, and of Failure.
Culture of Research
Research Considering research, the most essential part is that everyone does it. And this isn’t necessarily user research activities, though as a UXR I do highly recommend all members of product teams participate in at least some user research activities.
In this case, research is a bit more high level including topics such as the problem space. Everyone conducting some sort of research at this level not only helps individual knowledge, but it also improves the overall interaction of the team as it helps level the playing field and gets everyone on the same page.
The purpose is not necessarily to get all of the answers, but to know what questions to ask. Lastly, it should be noted that research never stops. The game is always changing, as projects do, so research is always ongoing and evolving which is why knowledge sharing is important.
Culture of Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge Sharing Knowledge sharing is fundamental to the progress of the team because not everyone can know everything at all times. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a mythic raid boss fight, so imagine your favorite sports game and add earth quakes, volcanos, lava, tornados, hurricanes, and tidal waves all happening while your team is trying to score a goal and that might give you some idea of how much is going on any one time that everyone needs to have some knowledge of.
Though knowledge sharing may seem like a small thing, it creates an environment where team members come to rely upon each other and learn how to be relied upon, which is important when it comes to progress through failure – something that is a given for a mythic raid team.
Culture of Failure
Failure It is nearly impossible for a team to walk into an encounter or a problem space for the first time and be successful.
We should all know this going in as it’s what we signed up for. Those with egos do not make it very far in mythic raiding because you have to be ok with giving up your invulnerability. You have to be willing to fail with the team if you’re going to ever succeed with them.
There have been nights where we have died an upwards of 30 times, half of them trying to get past a single boss.
However, every time we died we got a little further and learned a little more and all those little failures are what helped us succeed in the end. The important part was we kept going and kept each other’s spirits up as we did, which is a very important skill to have.
Skills: Expertise gained from experience
Skills Skills can mean many things, but for this talk I’m going to keep it simple. I love the straightforwardness of this definition – expertise gained from experience. It plays very well into the three skills I consider essential for raid and product teams, which are getting things done, playing multiple roles, and leading at all levels.
Skill: Getting Things Done
GTD We’ve all heard of GTD or getting things done, but how many of us practice it? How many of us have meetings about meetings or walk out of a meeting having accomplished absolutely nothing?
For a raid team, time is precious. Not only does our chance to progress reset every week, but we all also have lives and jobs and even children fighting for our time and attention. So, when we meet in game it is always with a purpose and a goal and a timeline.
We all want to see our guild name move up the rankings and we all know we have the power to make that happen but it takes commitment and dedication. We will progress only if we show up together and get things done. And to get things done we sometimes have to step into someone else’s role.
Skill: Playing multiple roles
MultiRoles Having people play multiple roles is not the same thing has having a team of unicorns. Rather, it is about having a team of people who can pick up the slack when someone is sick or on vacation or the deadline has just been moved up.
It’s about team members who have empathy for each other and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Building a team of people who have both breadth and depth creates an environment that is both adaptable and versatile making it an exceptional place for leaders to grow.
Skill: Leadership at all levels
Leaders Leaders who strive for adaptability and versatility need other people who are willing to take on leadership positions within their teams in order to lead successfully. This is more than delegation. It is about creating a supporting atmosphere for team members to own their contributions and to mentor others.
It’s about creating a space where they feel empowered enough to do new things and take risks to improve the team’s chances for success. Encouraging leadership at all levels provides ample opportunities for motivational and inspirational interactions.
Interactions: Reciprocal actions or influences
Interactions Interactions are simply reciprocal actions or influences. It’s the reciprocity that makes a difference for collaboration, communication, and critique.
Interaction: Organic Collaboration
Collaboration Organic collaboration may seem a bit strange, but we’ve all had those scheduled collaborative sessions that weren’t really collaborative at all.
The idea here is that people get better at what they do and they produce better work when they are able to spontaneously collaborate as needed, work together in smaller groups on smaller problems, and work with people outside of their team for additional or missing expertise.
In WoW we call this pugging or creating a Pick up Group. Doing these things increases team relationships both internally and externally, which improves the success of the team overall especially in communication.
Interaction: Free and open communication
Communication Free and open communication is essential to the success of every team because it helps build relationships through trust which is needed when the situation gets intense.
The key here is to establish a method of communication everyone can participate in and to make sure it is kept active and relevant. That said, though we may want to try to keep everything on topic, I always recommend a time and place for off-topic chatter because people matter and this is where you really learn what matters to them.
And knowing people is really important when it comes to critiques.
Interaction: Actionable Critique
Critique Critiquing can be difficult to do well and even more difficult to take, but when it is simply a part of the team’s regular interactions it becomes normalized and accepted and even sought after. Giving and accepting critiques is only the first step.
The step that really counts is immediately testing or applying the feedback. This should be done even if the feedback seems silly or counter intuitive because if nothing else it gives you a different way of looking at your problem, which may be what you need to make a difference and that may be all it takes to get a ding.
Dings: Make it a point to celebrate all success big, small, and in between
Dings What’s a ding? Traditionally a ding is what players in WoW would refer to when they completed a character level. I’ve taken it a step further to use it as a way to celebrate progress. Many of us have likely been on teams working on a project that seems like it never ends, much like an MMO. Dings are useful break up the monotony and to keep people motivated as they mark movement forward. So, I recommend building in dings to give something to look forward to and to look back on.
Note:All images are owned by their owners including Blizzard Activision and are used here in Fair Use for scholarly purposes. This talk was given pro-bono and this information is being shared for free.You can find a portfolio of all of the slides here.
Better late than never right? I suppose a furlough is a perfect opportunity to catch up on posting some of my presentations here. To that end, I’ll start with the latest I gave twice in the fall of last year. Thank you to all who came and for those who didn’t, I’m happy to share the slide deck. Unfortunately it is very large due to the videos I have within it, so I am not able to post it to any slide share sites and you may have to download it to view it. I’ve captured what I feel are the most important points below for those who simply want the highlight reel.
Beyond Accessibility – Dr. Diana Hubbard, 2019
This is a presentation I gave twice last year on inclusive design. Why did I choose this topic? Well, it’s become quite the buzzword that people often use without truly understanding what it is. The most common notion I’ve seen is that it is simply designing something with accessibility in mind. Unfortunately, that just gets to the end result and doesn’t necessarily do it well.
The simple condensed message of this presentation is that inclusive design is about the process of design. It is about INCLUDING people from diverse backgrounds as well as those with diverse abilities in the designing activities and not just as a potential user for which the product or service is designed.
A few of key points:
Innovation starts with people and there is no better place to look for ways to innovate than to consider people who are differently abled
People often start from a problem solving mindset and solutionizing right from the beginning when they would be better off if they went problem finding first. When you think you already know the problem and already have a way to solve it, you end up with tunnel vision which does nothing but exclude all of the other possibilities where you could truly innovate.
The best way to describe inclusion is that it is the opposite of exclusion.
Go problem finding with people who are used to finding problems (hint: those who are differently abled or come from traditionally marginalized backgrounds)
Being differently abled can be permanent, temporary, or situational – if you design for it, you help EVERYONE.
Our most precious resource is attention and it is very hard to PAY that when you already start with a smaller amount of it due to attention divestors including but not limited to differing experiences with:
Mobility
Hearing
Sight
Touch & Fine Motor
Speech
Langauge
Cognition
Finances
Economics
Emotions
Environment
Attention Investors include but are not limited to:
Accessibility: Attribute, Goal, Result
Inclusivity: Mindset, Method, Approach
Universal Design: Attribute – making something usable with no adaptations
Open Design: Process, Method, Approach
Everything comes back to starting with PEOPLE
Key take aways
It’s a mindset not an attribute
It’s not just about the what, but also the who and the how
Going problem finding is essential to better understand problem solving
You can start right now
Start right now by:
Thinking creatively – as Papanek said, try designing for “the poor, the sick, the elderly, [&] the disabled.” (Design for the Real World, 1984)
Working in interdisciplinary teams (include designers, engineers, product owners, researchers, and the people for whom you’re creating the product or service)
Looking beyond your particular product or service (the problem you’ve found has likely been approached by others in unique ways you can learn from if you simply look beyond your own market)
Learn from the current environment (ecological, social, economic, and political)
Integrate your designs (how does this product or service fit within the user’s entire experience, not just what your particular focus does but what the user needs it to do along with everything else they have going on in their lives)
Review your designs after release (both quantitatively and qualitatively – watch people actually use it in the field in real situations, you’d be amazed at what you will learn)
Lastly, and this is very important to me – there are some people in the world who suggest Designers with a big D (those who hold that title) should be Gatekeepers to keep out bad design that is proposed by designers with a little d (everyone else in the world as we are ALL designers).
I suggest that it is our job, instead, to be Gardeners (thank you to Jorge Arango). It is up to us to help cultivate all design ideas into ones that will grow and evolve into something great for everyone and to keep tending to them as design is never a one and done event. In the end we should be open to new ideas, even if we didn’t come up with them ourselves. Let’s mix our new inclusivity mindset with a growth mindset. Designers do not corner the market on good ideas, rather, we are good at bringing them to life.
Though we may not be able to change the world for everyone, we can always change it for someone — especially when we include them in as a major player in seeing that change through.
End Note: If you can download and view the deck, I highly recommend it. It has great examples, and videos, and firsthand accounts. I may separate it all out as its own portfolio piece at a later date for easier review. I’ll post an update here if I do.
Update: Here is the portfolio so you can view all of the slides without downloading the presentation. Of note, there are videos in the full presentation that are only located there. I feel they are very powerful and add a lot to it. Links to all but one of the videos are provided in the slide descriptions if you want to try to view them that way.
P.S. I used a lot of Papanek quotes throughout this presentation. If you haven’t read Design for the Real World, I highly recommend it. It’s over 30 years old and thus some of it may be read in a harsh light given today’s enlightened view on many things, however, it is still relevant.
As we go into the new year, I wanted to give a heads up as to a hiatus on any future speaking engagements. Given that I do all of these pro bono (completely unpaid) and they take a lot of time and effort, I am unable to do any more at this time. I have just changed positions and my new one is much more demanding than my last, which leaves me no free time at the moment to engage in any extra work. Thus, I will have to forgo any new ones for the foreseeable future while I focus on getting settled at the new gig.
That said, I will hopefully be updating this blog with all of my presentations from the last 18 months so that the content (including commentary) is accessible to everyone. Since I give all of these talks for free and I do all of the work myself, this will be me giving back to the design and research community. Once they are posted, feel free to share! Side note: I can’t guarantee when they will be posted as this is always a hectic time of year for a family of 5. If there is something specific you’re looking for before I post it, please reach out to me.
Considering blog updates, I’ll continue to post about research including part two of the Breakdown of a User Research Project as I have time. Beyond that, the posts may be few and far between. If you are a college student/new to industry person looking for mentorship, please feel free to use my contact form (don’t email me directly as it will likely end up in junk). I am always happy to help people out and of course there is no cost to that. We only excel as a community by lifting each other up and helping others along the way. I am happy to do what I can to promote design and research as much as possible and there is never any charge to do so.
If we don’t chat before the end of the year, here’s to a great 2020!
So, a lot has happened since my last post. The most important of which is that I have changed jobs and have moved out of the tech space and into the hospitality one as a Director of Experience Design Research. I am looking forward to lots of new, beautiful, and exciting challenges ahead working in a space I’ve never been a part of before.
That said, if you want to see something I worked on while I worked in the blockchain space, check out this Business Insider article on the work my team and I did for Coca-Cola. I was the design consultant that led the research/design thinking portions of the project and I did the designs and prototyping for the application we created that pulled data directly from the ledger for reporting insights.
DFW Beyond: November 18th 2019 in Plano, Texas
In addition to that, if you missed my talk on Inclusive Design at Big Design I will be giving it again at DFW Beyond this coming Monday November 18th at 1:45 pm.
If you can’t attend, or you attended in September and are still waiting, my slides will be posted either late next week or just after Thanksgiving. I appreciate your patience!
I am a presenter at the Big Design conference next month in Dallas where I will be doing a presentation on Inclusive Design beyond Accessibility. There just so happens to be another talk on Inclusive design at the same conference, so I am changing my tactics a bit from presenting research I’ve done on my own to reaching out to the masses to gather stories of people affected by exclusive design that the general public has no knowledge of, is not affected by, or completely ignores either out of ignorance or inconvenience.
Inclusive Design Presentation, Saturday, September 21st at 4pm at Gilley’s in Dallas, Texas
As an anthropologist and a designer, I feel this particular intersection of people and design is a perfect fit for anthropological work. I am interested in learning more about people’s experiences around exclusive design concerning cognitive, emotional, mental, physical, environmental, economic and financial, as well as gender and race (and any combination). The exclusion can be either physical or digital (or a combination). All exclusive design is important to me. I am also interested in learning about inclusive design that has greatly affected people or even design that came close or tried to be inclusive but missed the mark.
To that end, I am currently recruiting people to share their stories. If you would like to share your story, please contact me. At the moment, I am doing email interviews but I am open to communicating in what ever way is easiest for you. Please note that any information you share with me will be data I will potentially share in my presentation. You can choose to remain anonymous or attach your name and image, what ever is most comfortable for you. As a note, there is no compensation associated with this research. However, if I use your stories, I will attribute you in anyway you see fit and you will receive access to my presentation to share as you wish.
All of my research needs to be completed by September 14th. So please reach out to me as soon as possible. I look forward to hearing from you!
I have been selected to present next month at Sapphire Now for SAP in Orlando, where I will be talking about design-led innovation and inclusion in design. I will also be present to talk with attendees about SAP’s SmartCities. So if you’ll be attending Sapphire, please come find me! I’d love to chat.
